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Our Lord Who did the Ox command
To kneel to Judah’s King,
He binds His frost upon the land,
To ripen it for spring;
To ripen it for spring, good sirs,
According to His Word-
Which well must be, as you can see
And who shall judge the Lord?

When we poor fenners skate the ice,
Or shiver on the wold,
We hear the cry of a single tree
That breaks her heart in the cold
That breaks her heart in the cold, good sirs,
And rendeth by the board-
Which well must be, as you can see
And who shall judge the Lord?

Her wood is craized and little worth
Excepting as to burn,
So we may warm and make our mirth
Until the Spring return;
Until the Spring return, good sirs,
With marish all abroad
Which well must be, as you can see:
And who shall judge the Lord?

God bless the master of this house
And all that sleep therein
And guard the fens from pyrat folk
And save us from all sin!
To walk in charity, good sirs,
As well we may afford
Which shall befriend our later end,
Accounting to the Lord.

–Old Lincolnshire (?) Carol

FROM the little hill near Bloemfontein Old Fort you command ninety miles of country towards Kimberley; and when Kimberley besieged uses her searchlight you can see the wheeling beam as clearly as Israel saw the Pillar of Flame. If you are loyal you ascend the hill singing with your friends, and gloat over the ringed city. If you are disloyal you creep up without music, lie down among the boulders, hidden from the police, and whisper to fellow-disloyalists: ‘Kimberley’s all right.’

Allen, of the Bloemfontein Banner, though he did not gloat, was loyal. He had sailed to Cape Town from Edinburgh forty years ago, a master-printer moved suddenly to take up the missionary work which in those days was Scotland’s special field. There he met the Kaffir; saw through him with keen eyes, and, it is to be suspected, saw through the missionary; for he backslid to the stick and the case on an early upcountry paper. Then he married a Dutch girl — a connection of President Brand, and well-to-do. She led him across the Orange to a fat, lazy land full of cattle, slaves, and game; for the Free State ‘farmers’ had not yet discovered the European skin-market.

He farmed a little on his wife’s property; shot many a head of buck; went to Kimberley when De Beers was ‘Colesberg Kopje’; lost money in diamond mining, but made it helping to print the first paper on the fields; lost his wife of typhoid, refused more matrimony, and rediscovered his old love in the office of the young Bloemfontein Banner.

He was convinced that unless you treated Kaffirs much as the Dutch treated them, they were worthless; but he could not bring himself to the treatment which came so easily even to his adored Katie. Wherefore, he exchanged his farm for a little tin-roofed house on the outskirts of Bloemfontein, grew the roses of that favoured land, and for a few languid hours daily condescended to the Banner press-room.

It was an idyllic life, that began — after he had looked to his roses — with the little stroll through the broad streets where all Bloemfontein nodded friendlily; that led, with many street-corner conversations, across the market-square to his worn stool in the long, low Banner office. Here he crooned over the stick till lunch-time, locked up the page with old-fashioned wooden quoins, told the Kaffirs to pull a proof, corrected it, tolerant of many misprints (forty years in the Free State wear down Edinburgh standards), told another Kaffir to start the rheumatic old engine that temperately revolved the big press, and loafed out into the market-square.

The linen suit, long yellow beard streaked with white, the brown eyes behind the brass spectacles, the black velvet smoking-cap, and the green carpet-slippers were as well known in the square as the market building itself. When men saw the corner of Allen’s shoulder prop the corner of the chemist’s shop, where they sell Dutch and English medicines, they knew the Banner would be selling on the streets in ten minutes. When he shuffled between the ox-wagons, the bentwood pipe purring in his beard, Bloemfontein knew that Allen went to his roses and his evening’s levee in the veranda. His wife’s relations were many, and of exceeding friendliness. A few, nieces chiefly, were good-looking, and Allen’s home offered an excellent base for large young women from small villages, who came to shop in the capital. One or other of them would house-keep for him the year round, and all Katie’s kin were superb cooks.

As head of the Banner’s press-room, Allen was supposed to be well-informed politically, and on occasion would speak a good word for a backward advertiser. His levees were attended by English shopkeepers, farmers who, at their wives’ bidding, had stayed over to shop, and the small fry of casual stationmasters, guards, telegraphists, and subordinate civil servants. Then he would spread his slippered feet on the veranda rail, drink coffee, and, as a burgher of forty years’ standing, would expound the whole duty of the Free State, which was to keep itself to itself, and ‘chastise the Hollander.

In later years the Banner troubled him a little. He had seen it change from a leisurely medium for meditations on cattle-raising, reports of sermons, rifle meetings, and the sins of local officials, all padded with easy clippings out of English and Cape Town papers, to a purposeful, malignant daily under control of a German whose eyes, Allen said, were too close together, and whose aim in life seemed to be ridicule of the English.

Now Allen had no special love for the English, of whom there were many in Bloemfontein. He had seen them beaten in ’81, and though at the time he tried to explain what the resources of England were, had seen them stay beaten before all his world. They irritated him in some of their manifestations as an over-pernickety breed who would not when they first arrived think at the standard ox-wagon pace of two and a half miles an hour. But the sun and the soft airs, the lazy black labour, and the much talk by the wayside soon wheeled them into line.

What need, then, to worry and taunt them as did Bergmann? — for none, having once drunk of the Orange River, would return to stoepless, umbrellaed, unhallowed, competitive days in dirt at elbow-push of hungry equals.

English folk might be strangers in the land, but who, if you came to that, were the Bergmanns, the Enselins, the Hoffmanns, the Badenhorsts, the Sauers, and a hundred others? Moreover, Bergmann, when he was not prying into folk’s ancestry, had helped to found a thing called the Bond, and, by the same token, had been publicly rapped over the knuckles for it by none other than Allen’s uncle-in-law, the great Sir John Brand, who had written a letter that made Bergmann furious.

Allen agreed with his uncle-in-law. His vision did not extend much farther than a ford across the Orange River and a Dutch girl’s face under her cap, smiling at him as he clumsily whacked the oxen till they came up panting and wet-flanked into this, the land of his peace. For years Allen felt that Bergmann of the narrow eyes and the inveterate hate would trouble their large quiet, but — but he was accustomed to his seat in the Banner office, and his hands, itching for the type, drew him there daily. His tongue alone was unshackled by custom, and here the Scot in him died hard.

‘I’m a student o’ political economy myself,’ he said one evening, in the face of a most wonderful sunset. ‘An’ I’ve obsairved from my visits to Pretoria that the Hollander is a swine. He’s like the teredo in the Encyclopaedia Britannica. (There ought to be a copy of it in the office. Chambers is out of date.) Aye, Elsie’ — this to his wife’s second cousin, a lady with Pretoria graces —’I know ye marrit one, an’ ye can e’en tell him when ye go home my opeenion of his nationality. The Hollander’s the curse of the Transvaal. What for? Because the Transvaal’s eegnorant. The Hollander edges in, an’ edges in, an’ takes the tickets an’ runs the machinery o’ State. My word, if I trusted your Gert, Elsie, that’s the most eegnorant job—composer ever foaled, tho’ I took him for the sake o’ the family, an’ he’s some kin to Mrs. Bergmann too—I say, if I let your Gert order the new type, whaur’d I be? Preceesely whaur the Transvaal’ll be before many years.’

He emptied his cup and went on.

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‘We must keep the Hollander out o’ here. With our system o’ education—an’ for that we must thank old Brand, my Katie’s uncle—they’ve precious little chance at our public offices. But they’ll try, an’ what they cannot wreck, they’ll ruin. There’s over-much runnin’ to and fro o’ Hollanders these days between Pretoria an’ here.’

No one cared to speak out in Aunt Elsie’s presence but three or four women of old Free State stock murmured assent. Time was when the Free State; better born and better educated, had been roughly looked up to by the unshorn Transvaal. Now the Transvaalers had grown rich beyond the wildest hopes of the Free State, and, if possible, ruder. In a hundred ways—principally by the Hollanders—it was borne in upon the Free State that she must take the second place in a new order. The Pretoria women, too, shopped at Johannesburg; and when one visited them they flaunted their crockery and their curtains in their sisters’ faces. Husbands grew rich in Pretoria. ‘Hollanders go away when they have made the money,’ one of the company hinted. ‘They are not good sons of the soil. Now, if we had not been cheated out of our diamond mines we should have been rich in the Free State too.’

‘Yes, but we know how to spend it when it is made,’ said Aunt Elsie, flushing angrily. ‘We do not count each lump of sugar in the coffee. And our funerals! You should just see! I had four new black silk dresses this year when the typhoid was so bad. At the back of our house’ — she leaned forward impressively, bulging in her French corsets — ‘there is a heap this high’ — she lifted an arm — ‘of empty tins. All tinned things. Our English servant is so wasteful.’

‘Ye’ve just hit it, Elsie. It’s the tins do the mischief. Ye’ve never had more than the rudiments of airth-scratchin’ — I’ll not call it farmin’—up yonder, but ye’re bywith that even. Last time I went to Groblaars after the buck, the whole deestrict was livin’ on options fra’ the minin’ companies—options an’ State grants. They’d done with the last pretence o’ farmin’ tobacco, mealies an’ all. They’d not put their hand to a single leevin’ thing, as I set here, except to order tinned goods fra’ Johannesburg — tinned things an’ sweeties. Ah, the tins!’

‘That is why you have so much typhoid,’ said the wife of a Bloemfontein saddler — an Old Colony girl, and shook her fingers daintily above the bowl of peach conserve.

‘They’ll pay for their tinned things. They’ll have Hollanders. Bergmann’s gone to his account, and I’ve naught to say of him. Mrs. Bergmann owns the Banner an’ his picture’s in the press-room. I asked him once if he wished to make the Free State a warld power. Almighty! The man was angry!’ ‘He only wrote the truth about the English. Bergmann was a verree great man. He started the Bond. He was a true patriot,’ said Aunt Elsie.

‘Ay. Verra like your husband in Pretoria, Elsie.’ ‘It is because you’re English in your heart. All you Uitlanders are alike.’

‘Take notice here, Elsie.’ Allen wagged a type-blackened forefinger across the table. ‘Bergmann picked up that talk about Uitlanders when he helped make the Bond that’s the curse of Africa; though Brand, my Katie’s uncle, told him he was sowin’ seeds o’ dissension where none should exist. He’s talked Uitlander, an’ I’ve set it up for him in Dutch an’ English. Pretoria picked Uitlander up from Bergmann, because you’re no’ clever enough in Pretoria to do more than steal — you Hollanders. Pour you another cup o’ coffee an’ stop fiddlin’ with your bonnet-strings, Elsie. Twenty year now — I mind the time there was none of it — you’ve been crying “Uitlander this, Uitlander that,” till you’re fair poisoned with it. There were no Uitlanders till Bergmann and the Bond that was his master, as he was mine, an’ Pretoria created them an’ stirred ’em up. Ye’ve heard o’ Frankenstein’s monster? It’s a common slip ye’re warned against in Edinburgh, not to let a contributor call him Frankenstein, an’ was a shillin’ fine in Blackwood’s. Well, we’ll let that pass. Ye’ve been at great pains to make a Frankenstein’s -‘

‘Ah, you always talk so sillee, uncle. I do not understand.’ ‘Ye will, Elsie — ye will. I’m foreman o’ the Banner press-room, an’ Mrs. Bergmann’s employee, because I just love the sound o’ the type, an’ I’m a burgher o’ forty years to boot — that’s more than most o’ them are. An’ I love my country. Wait a while, Elsie. Ye’ll see the end o’ what I’ve set up the beginning of.’

Young Dessauer, Mrs. Bergmann’s second cousin, now editor of the Banner, was doing his best to out-Herod his deceased uncle, whose portrait, in grievous oils, adorned the press-room. He had all the old man’s fluency, and none of his power.

Allen remembered — he had a long memory — the first time he had set up the phrases, ‘our Nation’ (upper case N), ‘the Afrikander Nationality,’ and the necessity for closer union.’ Now, it seemed, he composed little else.

Young Dessauer spent half his time in company of Hollanders from Pretoria — smooth-faced Continentals in black Albert coats and white linen—who spoke all tongues except honest Taal, and visited the President eternally. The compositors of the Banner talked much of the import of the leading articles that appeared after these interviews.

‘I’ve only one opeenion,’ said Allen, correcting proofs by the window: ‘if we go on as we’re gaun, we cut our own throats, neither more nor less. We need no dealin’s wi’ the Transvaal.’ This, of course, was duly reported to Dessauer, who spoke to Allen before the men. Said Allen, pushing up his spectacles: ‘It’s no odds to me if you dismiss me this day – except I’m thinkin’ you’ll find very few duplicates of Allen on the premises when ye want to make up the paper.’

‘That is not thee point,’ said young Dessauer, pulling up his collar. ‘You are no true son of the soil if you talk treason in this way. And in this office!’

‘And when did your father trek across the Orange?’ said Allen. ‘Fifteen years after me! He outspanned at my Katie’s door in the big drouth, an’ she took you from your mother’s arms an’ ye puked over the front of her frock. They’d gi’en you a bit o’ biltong to chew, because your mother had no milk, and it wrenched your prood stomach, Dessauer. Well, I’m waitin’ on ye. I was a burgher before ye were breeched. Maybe I’m too old to understand this talk o’ treason ye’re so dooms free with.’

‘I was only saying you have no right to talk so – unpatriotically in this office.’

‘If my country, that I’ve never set foot out of since the ‘Sixties, is to be jockeyed into a war by you an’ the likes o’ you, an’ that old fool that runs about writin’ his name in the girls’ plush autograph albums, I must not talk, eh? ‘Fore God, man, don’t I set up the mischief ye do? I helped Bergmann build his Uitlander bogey that served him so well. What more d’ye want? Ye’ll stop my talkin’ – me, a burgher o’ the Free State that was married to Brand’s niece, and out in Moshesh’s war, and a Blackwood’s man, before your mother met your father! Ye go too fast, Dessauer. This is the Free State—yet. We’ll wait till the Transvaal have annexed us before we shut our mouths. Lock up the telegraph page!’

Said Mrs. Bergmann of the placid face and the white hair when this rebellion was reported: ‘Yes — yes, nephew, he is no good in the politick, but he knows more about the paper than even I do. You know nothing, nephew, and he is cheap. Later on, when when things are different, we can teach him.’

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The summer of that year was a sad time for the stranger in Bloemfontein. Thicker and thicker grew the press of agitated Hollanders at the President house; wilder and wilder grew Dessauer’s lead and blacker grew Allen’s face. Through many weeks he had heard nothing but appeals to God the Mauser — had set up fathoms of it — had seen advertisements give place to Government proclamations, and had wondered who paid for them.

Strangers from the North accused him of Uitlander sympathies in the market-square; his compositors were insubordinate, and old friends cut him in the street with ostentation. To be fair, these same friends would come by twilight among the roses, and in whispers ask what the Free State expected to gain from the war, and why — this in the smallest of whispers — the burghers had not been more freely consulted in the matter.

‘It’s too late to ask now. Ye’ve never read Carlyle’s French Revolution. I have. You’d not understand if I explained, but we’ve been denouncin’ each other for lack o’ patriotism till we’re just afraid to speak our own minds,’ he answered. ‘So, ye’ll note, the State has been sold for a handful of Transvaal tobacco — and we’ll not get the tobacco. We’ve asked the Hollander to put foot on our neck an’ he’s done it. He’ll bring in the Transvaaler that’s been livin’ on other people these past ten years. He’ll not reform now. Did ye note that Transvaal commando that’s camped behind the station? So long as they can lift cattle on the border they’ll leave us alone. If they come back they’ll take our stock. Mark my word! If we win we’ll be annexed by the Transvaal. If we lose—’

‘But you must not say that England will win, uncle,’ said the second Pretoria niece in charge, with a coquettish flirt of the head. ‘That would be traitorous. Look how we beat England in the last war!’

‘I’m saying nothing but that we’ll be annexed by the Transvaal. We’re annexed already, an’ not a man of us lifted his voice. They’ll strip us hoof, horn, an’ hide. Here endeth the Free State!’ He turned up the empty coffee-cup with a chuckle.

‘I’ll have to pay for this, but the truth’s never economical.’

In default of pony, horse, and bridle, they commandeered Allen to the tune of 450 sterling, and a field-cornet of old acquaintance tried to improve the occasion by a few remarks on treason. ‘Ye’re a fool,’ said Allen. ‘I know how much of a fool ye are, an’ that’s more even than your mother knows. Ye’re not a fool on your own account, which would be sense of a sort. Ye’re a Hollander’s fool sold like a Kaffir. An’ ye may tell whom ye please. Now, if ye’ll pack awa’ wi’ your folly on Niekirk’s best pony, which I see ye’ve stole for your own ends, I’ll e’en go to office an’ set up young Dessauer’s notion o’ the Free State as a Warld-Power.’

A few days later, Aunt Elsie came down from Pretoria on a visit, and explained how a field-cornet, her own nephew, had taken from her farm near Bloemfontein three yoke of bullocks after, for due consideration, he had promised to spare them.

‘That’s the beginnin’ o’t,’ said Allen grimly. ‘Hoof, horn, an’ hide, I think I said, Elsie?’ ‘How do I know what you said?’ she answered pettishly. ‘He gave me no commando—note. He drove them off the farm. He should have taken old Kok’s who is rich.’

‘But he’s gaun to marry Annette Kok after the war,’ Allen grinned.

‘Oh, that is it—is it? — the rascal! But what should I do? My husband is so busy — so busy at Pretoria—’ ‘No? He’ll not have gone on commando then?’ ‘And my brother, he is with Cronje. And my other brother, he is with Botha, and they will not write to me. They are so busy shooting rooineks— ‘and I want my oxen back. Here am I — an official’s wife — and they take my oxen, look you!’

‘Why don’t ye write to Botha or Cronje? — maybe they’ll listen. You’re the third woman o’ our kin that’s come to me to-day complainin’ o’ just this kind o’ trouble. An’ we’re only at the beginnin’!

‘Oh, but the war will be over in a few weeks. You think! Look how we have shot them everywhere. There are not enough more men in England to come. My husband says so.’

‘Elsie, woman, ye don’t know what war means nor I either. But we’ll know before the end. And,’ he added irrelevantly, ‘ye’ve not even seen Edinburgh.’

The commandos went southward in trains — Free Staters and Transvaalers together, each boasting against the other what they would do with the rooineks. It was rumoured that the Old Colony had risen even to the sea; that the Bond had thrown off the mask and established a Federal Government in Cape Town, and that the Queen of England had refused to sign the declaration of war.

Men returned by scores from Colesberg and the South on the easily granted furlough of those early days, and, laughing, said there was no need to fight — their friends across the border were doing it all for them. Here and there a man had been wounded, but the game went beyond all expectation.

Kimberley was cut off from help; Mafeking hung like a ripe plum ready to drop at a touch; Ladysmith was, incidentally, surrounded while the commandos swept towards the sea. Molteno, Middleburg, Aliwal North, Burghersdorp, Hopetown, Barkly West — they gave the well-known tale of the districts — were up and out; and the others behind them only waited till the Federal commandos should come through.

‘An’ I’m no’ fond o’ the word Federal,’ said Allen, as he set it up. ‘It’s the last step after annexation, instead o’ the first to it.’

The wounded arrived from Belmont (a few of them — the rest were placed in outlying hospitals) and Graspan and Modder. Allen did not quite understand the drift of the telegrams describing these events. Many, who till then had written regularly to their wives, ceased, and though the authorities explained that they were busy, the women felt uneasy. Moreover, there was a rumour — they learned it from a Transvaal commando going South and forgetting to pay for chickens — that the Free Staters had not done so well at Modder.

Then came the week of joy — Colenso, Stormberg, and Magersfontein in three blinding flashes. The Federals could hardly believe their luck — seventeen guns (it was thirty by the time the news reached Bloemfontein), 4000 killed, wounded, and prisoners! Surely the English would now see the error of the cruel war that they had forced upon a God-fearing race. The Banner said so, demanding indemnities and annexations by the irreducible minimum.

‘We’re lyin’ too much,’ thought Allen, toying with the tweezers ‘I’ve no supersteetious reverence for truth, but this is sheer waste. H’m! The English are fightin’ us wi’ native troops. Are they? It’s no’ likely.

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‘They’re floggin’ prisoners an’ burnin’ an’ ravishin’ broadcast? No. That’s no’ likely either. Conteenuous black type tires the eye.’

He went on with his copy. ‘We’ve blown the guts out of a Highland Brigade; wiped up half a regiment o’ North Countrymen; an’ got all the guns o’ Buller’s brigade. I’m thinkin’ it’s no good policy to offend Scotland.’ He paused for a moment, penetrated with a new idea.

‘Fore God, it’s war! If we lose we’ll not get what the Transvaal got in ’61. It’s either us or Scotland — an’ that means all England. I wish we had some news o’ what they’re sendin’ by way of an army. They’re a dour folk, the Englishry, when they’re wrought to it.’

But that information was denied to the Bloemfontein Banner — whatever they might have known at Pretoria. Now and again a rumour broke through of a bay crowded with ships, of lines congested with troops, of a horrible silence of preparation, broken by words of caution from more far-seeing Bond friends in Cape Town. But no harm, so far, had befallen the Free State.

The men at the Front were all well – the field-cornets said so. They wrote little, but they fought with magnificent skill; never losing more than a score at the outside, and those, curiously, men of few kin. For visible sign of their success Bloemfontein could see the prisoners, and, better still, Kimberley searchlight whirling, whisking, and appealing. They made good jokes, men and maidens together, after dark, on the hill by the Old Fort, and the police, always armed, grinned tolerantly.

Thither, as was his custom in these later days, Allen with a lantern to guide his old feet among the rocks. The rumours troubled him. Young Dessauer’s face when he filled out the telegrams did not accord with their joyful news. Officials talked fluently and uneasily, but their eyes had not the inward light of victory, and, above all, people were forbidden to go down to the railway-station and speak to the English prisoners.

The Stormberg captives, the men taken round Colesberg, the two companies forgotten in a retirement, and neatly caught while waiting to entrain, were entirely sullen and uncommunicative, or uttered foolish threats of vengeance; but the later varieties, gathered here and there to the westward, and sent under escort of a northern commando to wait their turn for the up-country trains, spoke in another key. They were not grateful for small attentions. They asked for accommodation as by right, and begged their guards to be civil while yet chance offered.

The effect of this loose talk was counteracted by over-much official explanation, and it disturbed Allen’s mind. Telegrams came and went, commandos passed by day and night, firing out of the carriage windows in honour of Bloemfontein, and closed ambulance trains went northward. Nothing was constant except the flare from Kimberley—sometimes lifted like appealing arm, sometimes falling like a column, often broken as with horrible mirth.

‘See! See!’ said a girl, sitting on a camp-stool or hill. ‘Now Rhodes is hungry! He shakes his finger’

‘Oh, no,’ said the boy with her. ‘He is asking Cronje to stop firing while he eats his horse.’

‘I wish we could hear the guns.’

‘It is too far,’ said the boy. ‘Did you see Cronje’s big gun go across from here? It was a fine rooinek-shooter. My brother’ — he puffed his cigarette proudly — ‘Is in the States Artillery.’ ‘I like the little buk-buk guns best,’ the girl replied. She opened a basket and ate a sandwich, brushing away the crumbs from her Sunday frock.

‘I think I can hear guns,’ she said and clapped her hands.

‘That’s only thunder on the veldt,’ said Allen, coming up behind her. ‘Good evening, Ada Frick.’ ‘Oah ! Is that you, Mister Allen? You have come to see how your friends over there get on? They are having—ah—how do you Uitlanders say it? — a hot time in the town to-night.’

The boy, annoyed at an interrupted flirtation, passed over to a Johannesburg policeman squatted in the shadow. Bloemfontein was then policed in large part from Johannesburg; and Bloemfontein did not like it.

‘There is old Allen,’ he said. ‘You know about him? He is a traitor.’

‘Get out — go down,’ the man shouted. ‘Yes, you with the white beard. You have no business here, you old rebel. Keep with the other Uitlanders!’

‘Are you a Portugee, or a Hollander, or a Dane, or what?’ Allen replied. ‘You can’t talk the Taal.’ As a matter of fact he was a young German, rather in request at certain Bloemfontein tea-parties. He replied: ‘Go away. We know all about you. You’ve come up here to signal to Kimberley with that lantern.’ Allen laughed aloud. ‘Then if you know that much, you may know I marrit President Brand’s niece. I’ve not been reckoned a traitor for some few years. But we’re all traitors now.’

‘Huh!’ said the girl, with a giggle. ‘We all know that the Brand people were not true sons of the soil. That is not a good family to belong to, these times.’

Allen was used to personal insult — who had never known a hard word till six months ago — but the reflection on his Katie’s kin cut him to the bone.

‘At any rate,’ he began, but bit off the sentence. After all, it was no fault of the girl’s that she was tainted with native blood. A Frick — and all the earth that had eyes knew whence the Fricks had drawn their black hair crisping at the temple and the purplish moons at the base of their finger-nails — a Bloemfontein Frick, of too-patent ancestry, had derided Brand, whose statue stands at the head of the town!

He stumbled downward, raging, pursued by the laughter of the little company. ‘Brand no son of the soil — Brand! An’ a Zarp — a Johannesburger — to tell me I’m a traitor! I’ve never hoped the English ‘ud win, but I hope it now — I hope it now! The damned, ungrateful half-breeds.’ There was a light in the Banner press-room as he passed.

‘More proclamations,’ he said bitterly. ‘They keep the job side busy these days. Maybe young Dessauer thinks he’ll be made Secretary o’ State if he does not press for the bill. What’s here, Gert?’ he asked at the door.

‘The proclamation,’ Gert grinned; and Allen watched his hands above the case.

‘That’s no English you’re setting up. What is it?’ ‘Basuto,’ said Gert. ‘The Proclamation.’ Evidently the youngster had private information, denied to his superior.

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Allen’s heart stood still. He had heard wild threats that, before long, the Basutos would be formally invited to rise against the English, but in Bloemfontein that talk was coldly received. They had, of course, employed Kaffirs to hold horses, dig trenches, bring up food and ammunition, in extreme cases to cover an advance, and always to haul guns. But no responsible man contemplated openly putting the war on a direct black and white basis, calling upon the black to rise against the white. Much of the fighting had, of design, been pitched between Zululand and Basutoland, that the two races from their hills might learn which was the power to be feared. That and the raiding of weak tribes was entirely fair, since all the world knew the English were using black troops from India and committing every horror.

But Allen, who set up young Dessauer’s telegrams, and had talked to a few prisoners since October, did his own thinking by the composing-table, while Gert set Basuto in English type — all n’s and m’s. Admitting the charges against the English, the risk to the Federals from their own allies would be … Allen thought of the outlying farms and shuddered. Then the shame of it struck him across the face. He did not believe in the Dutch treatment of the black; but that the black should be called in as an equal in this game — called in by bribes and sweet words — was a matter unbelievable. ‘An’ Brand was no true son o’ the soil, Miss Frick!’

He mopped his forehead. ‘First Bergmann an’ the Bond; then the Transvaal an’ the Hollanders; an’ then the Basutos. We’re doin’ well! We’re comin’ on! We’re gaun beggin’ to the Basutos. If they rise — but why did they not rise before? They canna expect a Magersfontein every week o’ the year. They’ve a bitter score against us. What good ‘ud their help be? … But if the English are usin’ Gurkhas, why haven’t the English used Basutos? ‘Fore God, I’d shoulder rifle to-morrow if they did! They’ve had time enough. What’s holdin’ them? . . . Oh, some one will go to Hell for this.’

Gert pulled a proof on the roller-press. Mechanically Allen pulled another, driving the types almost through the cheap pulpy paper, and stuck it on an old job file. He relit his pipe and turned out to think. A man on horseback, his ankle rudely bandaged, crossed the empty market-square gabbling to a policeman.

‘It stinks, it stinks, it stinks!’ he cried thickly. ‘Everything stinks. I have asked a hundred times for clean water. Get it.’

‘Come back to the hospital! He has got fever. He has just run out from the hospital,’ the policeman explained to Allen in the starlight, overlooking the fact that hospital patients are not, as a rule, booted, spurred, and plastered with dry mud.

‘Hospital !’ The man reined up sharply. ‘That is a lie. I have come from Hell — from Cronje’s head-laager, in Hell. They have all the guns in the world there, big and little — little and big. But they all stink. Cronje led us into Hell! I came out on my belly when the guns stopped.’

‘Yes, yes. It will be all clean in hospital. You are waking the people. Come!’

The fevered wretch’s face puckered with terror. ‘You will only take me into another laager! Let me go. I will run! Tell me where to ride! For God’s sake, where shall I ride? The veldt is alive with them, they are coming out of the ground. They are round the laager! Listen! Buk—buk—buk—buk,’ he quacked horribly, imitating the sound of a pom-pom; then, wrenching his horse free, fled at a gallop across the stale dust.

‘Run! run! run!’ The shouts died away by the railway-station.

‘What is it?’ some one called from a hotel veranda. ‘A typhoid man escaped from the hospital,’ the policeman answered.

‘But what did he say about Cronje ?’ another voice demanded.

‘Oh, he wanted to go and help Cronje shoot rooineks —a true patriot, even when he has fever.’ The policeman mounted and cantered after his patriot.

‘It does not coincide with the telegrams. The man’s right. It all stinks—o’ lies,’ thought Allen. When he reached his roses, the Free State was poorer by the loss of one burgher.

Next day he set up telegrams describing a large capture of mules by Cronje. The wire came from Pretoria. That afternoon Miss Frick complained pettishly that the police would not let people go up the Old Fort Hill to watch Kimberley light.

Then came by, very drunk, and this was remarkable, Andrew Morgan, usually of irreproachable habits, who had wool interests in the town, and till that hour had walked discreetly. His tie was under one ear his hat was battered out of shape, and his merry legs strayed all whither over the pavement. He sat on the steps of the post office, smiling at the police and the women, who expected telegrams from their men.

“Shay, you bloomin’ Dutchmen,’ he hiccupped. ‘Kimberlish relieved! No! You don’t ‘rest me for talkin’ dispeckfully your dam’ oxsh-wag’n Government. Bobbsh comin’ here! Bombard whole boilin’! G’way, you nasty ugly Zarp! Ev’rybody Bloemfontein knowsh me! Given up wool-bushnesh. Housh agent now. Take any man’s housh while he goes temp’rily Pretoria. What offersh? Yah !’

He resigned himself smiling to the embraces of the agitated Zarps; but his words, coming on the heels of many whispers, curdled the crowd as rennet curdles milk, and they drew together discussing and surmising between the ox-carts and the ammunition-wagons.

Forty-eight hours before he would have been a bold man who had dared doubt in public that Kimberley was all their own. Now people more or less faced the notion.

‘What do you think, Mr. Allen?’ said one of the two or three hundred Koopmans of the district. ‘You see all the telegrams.’

‘I think what I thought from the beginnin’. We’ve listened to lies too long to care for truth. But at the same time no one likes bein’ lied to less than a liar.’

‘Allen, you’re an Uitlander at heart.’ It was the old taunt—from a German this time.

‘I’m a Free Stater: but it will be pairfectly surprisin’ the number o’ people that’ll find they’ve always held Uitlander sympathies—before long.’

‘They have not the men—they have not the men! All our predikants say so,’ cried a farmer of a far north-eastern district.

‘And there are all the Powers of Europe, too, France and Russia. They will never allow such things. But I wish my man would write.’ This was the wife of a French photographer. ‘No. All Europe is against them.’

page 6

‘We’ll see,’ said an English bank employee. ‘When they come —’

‘When they come. But they will never come. Be careful!’

The bank clerk laughed. ‘I told you from the beginning that they would come. And they will come. They will come here: and they will go on to Pretoria. We told you from the first.’

‘They will not if you Free Staters fight, instead of running away,’ shouted a wounded man of the Vryheid commando, and his hairy fellows applauded. ‘You have good houses and plenty of cattle — you will not fight for them. You know the English will take them all — all — all!’

‘You showed them the way,’ Allen interrupted in the Taal. Many voices agreed; for the northern commandos had a keen eye for cattle, and did not always distinguish between the disloyal Dutch across the border and the agitatedly loyal Free Stater on the hither side.

‘Then you should fight. If you don’t fight, our President says it will be the worse for you. Almighty! My father did not get his farm by sitting still. No! He shot the black-stuff off it first, then he enjoyed God’s blessing. Go you and do likewise. The northern commandos are taking all the weight of the war.’

‘But it’s all in our country,’ said Allen, as the man swung himself on to his pony. ‘Ye’ve forgotten that little matter—they haven’t forgotten it by Jagersfontein.’

‘You were right, Allen,’ old Van Zoelen, that had been a member of the Raad, growled in his beard. ‘We are much annexed by the Transvaal already. I said it would be so.’

As far as one can find out, this day was the beginning of the Bad Time in Bloemfontein. No two souls agree in any one account of it. It is said that Kruger came down from the North and, with Steyn, went westward, direct to Poplar Grove. It is said he did no such thing: that the first news came in from a broken commando of Transvaalers who had been peppered in the open from three consecutive kopjes by hidden infantry, and, seeing that the rooineks were not fighting fair, had come away. This, again, is denied by the Transvaalers, who assert that Kruger himself attempted to check a fleeing Free State commando after Poplar Grove, and even threatened to order his Johannesburg police to fire upon them. The Free Staters — some of them — admit that they told the President that if he gave such an order they would return the fire.

Then, they say, began systematic cattle-lifting on the part of some Transvaalers who had escaped from Cronje’s laager and headed for the Vaal, driving everything with a hide on it before them. Then, they say, began the trouble with the foreign commandos — a matter now forgotten. And all this while there was no certain knowledge of any one thing under Heaven except that somewhere to the westward lay an Army!

Bloemfontein did not know what an Army was like, but her sons told her. She agreed — it was curious how quickly the crowds decided this — to disregard the wonderful telegrams of the Banner, who said that France, Russia, and Germany were in arms against England. Certainly, no true patriot could fail to believe that France, Russia, and Germany would in the end rescue a poor and pious State. But the question before Bloemfontein, who counted her distance from the Army in miles, was —would the Army bombard the city — as the city had sent men to bombard Kimberley, Mafeking, and Ladysmith? Also — this was not spoken above the breath — how soon could some sort of compromise be patched up which would remove these excellent Transvaal commandos — to fight, of course, fifty or a hundred miles farther on, but to fight and steal elsewhere?

Men poured in from the southern border with word that something very like another Army was forming in those parts. They told tales of a new brand of Englishry from across the water, who lay out all day with a pillow-case full of cartridges, quite happy if they bagged — that was their horrible word — two or three patriots in eight hours. Oh, yes, there were scores of victories to report — but they always fell to the other commando. Of course, the foreign Powers—

‘But the Army is here,’ said Bloemfontein sourly at last, watching President Kruger drive to the railway station. That was the time when Kaffir boys laughed at the Dutch women who tried to give them orders; when men thrust the keys of their houses upon strangers with English names, and begged them to look after their villas while they went North for a little; when young Kennedy, of the Royal Souvenirs, wounded and a prisoner in hospital, kissed the nun in the presence of the Sister-Superior, and all three laughed; when a Dutch predikant came by night to Mallett of the Wesleyan Church, and, weeping with rage, said he would burn his Bible if God forgot the Free State; when Joyce, at the saddler’s shop, made the seventeen-foot Union Jack in a back chamber in ten hours; when the Fricks of all colours sat up in dreary assembly burning papers whose discovery might have damaged the health of Papa Frick; when seats in the Pretoria train sold at a premium, and the English of the town found their advice much sought after.

‘Do — do you think they will bombard us?’ asked Mrs. Zandt humbly of the thirteen-year-old daughter of the bank employee. She had come to borrow a Union Jack from the girl’s mother. ‘I’m afraid we shan’t,’ said the child, remembering many insults from the Zandt brood. ‘I am afraid it is like what my father says.’

‘Oh, what did your dear father say:’ Mrs. Zandt clasped her hands. ‘He says you will take out the keys to Us on a tea-tray when we come for them. I am sorry you will not be shelled—’

‘Hush, dear,’ said her mother, entering, ‘you mustn’t talk like that to Mrs. Zandt.’

‘I don’t care! She laughed when I told her about Uncle Tom being shelled in Kimberley. Now she comes to borrow the Flag.’

‘But they are so close — so verree close! My God! My God! Did all my people die for this, Mrs. Pardrew?’ Mrs. Zandt collapsed weeping on the sofa.

‘I don’t know,’ said Mrs. Pardrew. ‘I don’t know whether my brother is alive, yet. Oh, go away! Don’t cry here! You Dutch are so clumsy. What did you want to interfere in the war at all for, you sillies?’

Little Jenny Pardrew’s father spoke true. They gave up the keys decked with tricolour ribbons at the bidding of a solitary civilian first into Bloemfontein from no higher motive, he says, than to get rooms at the Club. They waved many Union Jacks, and those who could not go North discovered that their hearts had ever beaten for progress and reform.

Somewhere on the veldt ran one President babbling of foreign intervention. Behind him, more to be feared, was another threatening death to all who bowed the knee to the invader. North and East the Transvaal commandos were drawing off with Free State cattle because, their commandant said, the Free Staters were cowards.

Bloemfontein — and now she began to see why — had only a few wounded English prisoners in her. The bulk were at Pretoria — good hostages against evil treatment should that Army… It was impossible that the Army could reach Pretoria. But the Army was here — in the town and outside the town — a vast clay-coloured ring. Bloemfontein rose after a wakeful night, climbed the hill by the Fort, and looked down upon the tentless legions. They were wet, silent, and sulky — sulky even to Papa Frick, more English than the English, smirking across the green veldt, proud if he could catch the eye of the humblest ‘Officier.’

page 7

‘Well, they’ve come,’ said Allen, slipping off his coat in the press-room. He had gone out to watch the entry of the troops and had seen the beginnings of an ugly Kaffir riot put down by the strong hand. This did not look as if the English had employed natives in the war. The press-room was empty; the gas-engine was cold, and the Kaffirs sat impudently on the composing-table. Allen nodded at Bergmann’s portrait.

‘It’s a peety you’re not alive, old man! Ye’ve done well for my country. If there’s knowledge or device beyond the grave ye must be wrigglin’ now…. What’ll we have in hand for today? ‘Fore God, there’s no paper, o’ course. Gone like rats, all of them.’

Said a voice in Dessauer’s room: ‘You see the situation, madam. I’m only a special correspondent, but I have authority to inform you —er— that we, that is the Army, take over the paper. At least, the office, and the type, and the men. The name will not be continued.’

‘I see,’ said Mrs. Bergmann. ‘I suppose it is all right. My editor has, unfortunately, gone away. He will come back when Bloemfontein is reoccupied. But now, of course, you are masters here. I suppose I can take away my private papers. I had come here for that. You see, we did not expect you here so soon.’

Vincent, of the Universal Press Agency, did not say that he had thrashed an exhausted pony down the street for the very purpose of forestalling Bergmann’s widow. This was one of the occasions when the British Army had condescended to act on information received. ‘I am afraid you —ah— cannot. An officer of the Staff will be here in a few minutes to seal everything.’ Mrs. Bergmann turned white, and bit her lip. ‘So there is nothing further. It would only be putting you out to ask you to stay here.’ ‘I see,’ said Mrs. Bergmann, and rose up, her hands saintlily folded, the mirror of affliction. ‘If you will be good enough to send here as many of the compositors and so on as may be in the town I should be very much obliged. We’re anxious to print a little proclamation. The men will be paid their regular wages.’

Vincent entered the press-room, rubbing his hands joyously, and confronted Allen in green carpet-slippers, velvet smoking-cap, faded beard, brass spectacles and all. ‘Hullo! What are you doing here;’ ‘Just waitin’ for orders. I’m foreman.’ Vincent glanced about with suspicion. A large and dusty man dropped from his horse and staggered in stiffly. It was the chief correspondent of the Transatlantic Syndicate. ‘Hullo, Corbett! We’ve commandeered the Banner, lock, stock, and barrel—by order. You’re on the staff, too — by my order.’

‘I’ve got to describe the entry, my son. They’ve cut us down to two hundred and fifty words.’ ‘Nothing but official wires going tonight, Corbett. The Censor told me so. Hold the fort here while I go up to Government House and get the Little Man’s proclamation for Brother Boer. He wants it printed in today’s paper. He told me to organise a newspaper staff. You’re on it.’ ‘Today’s paper? Say, this is history,’ said Corbett, with deep relish. ‘We’re making it. The Syndicate can wait. I’ll hold the fort.’

‘No one is to touch anything till Daubeny comes down. He’ll seal up all the private papers of the office. I’ve broken the news to Mrs. Bergmann, and she don’t like it. Lend me your pony and I’ll appoint you editor.’ Vincent stumbled out and galloped away. Corbett moved over to the file of the Banner as it lay by the window.

‘H’m,’ he said, critically scanning the previous day’s issue. ‘I guess this will be about the sharpest curve any paper’s ever swung. Did you —’ he looked at Allen with a smile — ‘did you believe any of this stuff about our men burning and ravishing and being forced to fight under fire of their own guns?’ ‘My business was to set it up,’ said Allen impassively, though his heart beat hard. ‘Ain’t you English?’

‘I’m a burgher of the Free State since Eighteen Fifty odd. But — I was born in Scotland. You’ll be an American?’

‘Yes, I’m an American. What do you think of your war?’

‘Just about what you’d think if ye’d seen the country ye loved an’ lived in clean thrown away by a fool and a liar. That’s the little an’ the long o’t. Tell me now,’ Allen went on huskily, ‘what truth is there in that’ — he nodded toward the open file —’that the English used native Indian troops against us?’

‘Oh, it’s only a lie just as big as any of the others about the fifteen thousand Russians at Sand River, or the invasion of London, or your three killed and five wounded, or anything else. Have you been fed on that stuff since the war?’ Corbett looked out of window at a widow in black. ‘Poor devils! Poor devils!’

The woman entered — not that pious widow of saintly habit who had gone away ten minutes before, but a virago unchained. Gert and four compositors followed her. In the offing, alert, uneasy, expectant, hung a small crowd of black and half-breed boys who in time of peace hawked the Banner. They watched with open mouths.

‘We have come,’ she shrieked, ‘for some private letters of — of my dead husband. If you are anything like what they call an English gentleman.

Corbett’s smooth face lit with the blandest of smiles. ‘Well, madam, as Eugene Field said of himself, I was livin’ in a tree when I was caught. I’m only a semi-civilised American. If you wish to appeal to my finer instincts, they perished long ago in the stress of this campaign. But if you will indicate in what manner—’

‘Oh, you silly, talking fool. Do you know who I am? I am his widow.’ She pointed to the picture on the wall.

‘Was he killed in this war?’ said Corbett. ‘You have my sincerest—’

‘No! No! No! I want some papers from this office. Gert, go to the office and get them.’

Corbett rolled one eye at the young Dutchman.

‘Mister Gert?’ he said. ‘Happy to make your acquaintance. This places the affair on a different footing. May I ask —umm— where you come in?’

‘Compositor,’ said Gert of the black finger-nails without stirring.

‘Then I’m afraid the lady will be likely to lose a comp if you act on her instructions. Nothing in the office must be touched till the arrival of—’

‘I tell you in three weeks you will be driven out of Bloemfontein and shot to pieces! I tell you there will not be a rooinek left in the country! I tell you I will remember this when you go to prison for the winter! It will be cold in the iron sheds. You will see! Let me take away my private letters. You only want money. You can sell all the rest—’

page 8

‘Hullo!’ said the Honourable Wilfred Daubeny, Captain on the Staff of the Field-Marshal Commanding-in-Chief, torn by Vincent from his first fair meal in three weeks. He was as filthy as the rest of the Army. In one hand he held a stick of aventurine sealing-wax, and in the other a cheap glass seal of French manufacture, representing a dove with an olive-branch over the legend ‘Amour’ — all fished out of a Presidential pen-tray.

‘Thank God!’ said Corbett fervently. ‘This gentleman, madam, will be only too happy to talk to you in the office — over yonder. Have you brought the proclamation, Vincent? We must set it up at once. Go on, Daubeny, you’ll like her.’

He indicated the office at the far end of the press-room and wiped his brow. ‘For undiluted craziness, Vincent, your war lays over our Cuban business. I can’t say more than that.’

Vincent produced a printed sheet and paused, screwing up his short-sighted blue eyes. ‘How the deuce does one commandeer a paper?’ said he.

‘There’s no precedent, if that’s what’s troubling you,’ said Corbett. ‘The English are unhappy without precedents, I know. Let me try. Mister Gert & Co.! In the name of God and the Constitution of the United States — beg pardon, Vincent. I forgot it wasn’t my war. Oh, yes. There’s a foreman — so there is. What’s your name?’

‘Allen.’

‘That’s a good start,’ said Vincent. ‘Now, Mr. Allen, set up this proclamation quick. It’s for today.’ ‘Have you any preferences about type?’ said Vincent. ‘Here have I been a journalist all my life, and I don’t know one type from another, Corbett.’

‘There’s Grady outside,’ said the American. ‘He’s been in the business. Appoint him to the staff at once. Hi, Grady ! You’re appointed sub-editor of the Bloemfontein Despatch. Come in and sub-edit.’

‘I was looking for you,’ said Grady of the Unlimited Wire, dismounting. ‘Did you try to produce a paper without me? You’re a lot of penny-a-liners. Not a bad plant either.’ He sniffed round the office critically.

‘When you’ve quite done your professional antics perhaps you’ll help us bring out this dam’ conciliatory proclamation,’ said Vincent. ‘Bobs wants it thrown broadcast at Brother Boer as soon as possible. It won’t enlighten Brother Boer, but it will please Bobbins.’

‘Leave me alone. I’m thinking.’ Then to Allen, who was sorting the copy into takes, ‘Just use your old advertisements and any standing matter you’ve got.

‘It’s no’ just likely to suit the present situation. It’s sayin’ that ye used natives fra’ Injia against us.’

‘We didn’t,’ said Grady. ‘Personally, I think it was a great mistake. A few Pathans would have done you a lot of good — but we happen to be a silly people. No, the standing matter is probably useless. Got any old ads. —stereo matter?’

‘There’s the National Museum notice — an’ here’s a Vereeniging coal advertisement,’ said Allen. ‘But they’ve commandeered all the coal there; an’ it’s a far cry to Vereeniging.’ ‘Never mind,’ said Corbett, sitting on the table. ‘We’ll be at Vereeniging soon, and the National Museum’s the one place I’ve always wanted to see. Look among the stereos.’ ‘Good old stereos!’ said Vincent, turning over a pile of plated slabs. “‘The natural food for a babe is mother’s milk.” My God! D’you remember those kids at Kimberley after the relief, Grady, an’ the row of babies’ graves?’

‘Yes,’ Grady answered, with a sudden ferocity. He had been five months in the field. ‘And the refugee trains, too! Here, you’ — to Allen, who jumped at the change of tone. ‘Lord Roberts’s proclamation goes, in English and Dutch, on the front page. Fill in the rest with old advertisements. Bring me a proof when you’ve done. You’re responsible that the thing looks decent, and don’t you try to play any tricks on us.’ ‘I’m not in the habit o’ shirkin’ my work,’ said Allen stoutly.

‘I’m sick of it,’ Grady went on. ‘Kimberley and Ladysmith had to stand it, and Mafeking’s standing it now, but the minute these things get the worst of it they bang up a Union Jack and Bobs fawns on ’em, simply fawns on ’em! Look at this proclamation. He’ll be sorry for it before he’s done. I know the Dutch.’

Here the Honourable Wilfred Daubeny came out of Dessauer’s office sucking a burnt thumb.

‘She’s a lunatic — an absolute ravin’ lunatic,’ he said; ‘an’ this beastly stuff has dropped all over me. Must I seal everything here? There isn’t much wax left, and’ — he looked round the office — ‘what’s the idea of the operations?’

‘Steyn’s forgotten to take away about a ton of most interesting documents from his house,’ said Vincent. ‘I saw the Intelligence Department looking almost intelligent over it this afternoon. Perhaps we shall find something nice here.’

Allen was setting up the sentence: ‘The British Government believes that this act of aggression was not committed with the general approval and freewill of a people with whom it has lived in complete amity for so many years.’ He glanced at the portrait of the late Mr. Bergmann, thought of the Basuto proclamation, and groaned.

‘Any truth in the yarn that they’ve found a lot of cipher telegrams between Cape Town and Pretoria up at Steyn’s place?’ said Vincent.

‘I believe so,’ said Grady, ‘but it was nothing compromising. It never is, worse luck! How’s that proclamation coming on? Be quick there!’

‘I think you’d better seal the door of the office when we’ve done, Daubeny,’ said Vincent. ‘Ritson, of the Intelligence, will be down tomorrow to search the place.’

‘They’d climb in through the windows if they wanted to take anything away,’ said Grady, jerking a thumb at Gert.

‘Then Daubeny will put on a sentry till Ritson has done. One sentry for tonight on toast, Daubeny, Please. What the deuce do all these little nigger-boys want to look in at the windows for?’

‘All right. Must I stay here till you’ve done? I’m awfully hungry.’

‘You’ve no eye for history and the drama. Here we are commandeering the whole plant and outfit of a flourishing daily paper — it’s never happened before — in the heart of a captured city at eight hours’ notice, and you prefer to eat,’ said Corbett.

‘We’ll be merciful. Proof’s almost ready,’ Grady replied, as Allen slid the takes into position. ‘I don’t know Dutch, but if I find out you’ve put any hanky-panky misprints into the Dutch version, friend, you’ll hear about it.’

page 9

‘Man — man,’ said Allen suddenly, his mouth quivering under his beard, ‘I’m a — I’m a Free State burgher.’ ‘Is that any recommendation?’ ‘An’ — an’ I was one o’ Blackwood’s men once. D’ye think I’d cheat in a professional matter?’ Now Grady had been close friend of Hawke, who was crippled for life under cover of the white flag on the southern border. He answered that he had no belief whatever in anything alive within the bounds of the two States.

The forms were locked up; Allen for the first time in years started the gas-engine with his own hand, and the new-christened Bloemfontein Despatch slapped and slid through the presses.

‘No lack of paper,’ said Grady, looking at the huge block of damp sheets. ‘I wonder how many lies they’ve worked off on Brother Boer since the war began. Your men’ — he addressed himself to Allen ‘will come here tomorrow at nine on the usual wages, every man of them. By the way, how d’you sell your dam’ paper?’

‘Oh, they’ve some little native boys that usually cry it. They’ll be waiting outside. Our regular subscribers are most likely on commando.’

‘Splendid! Corbett, old man, run out and stop that buck-wagon. We’ll send a batch of papers up to Government House to please the Little Man. What d’you say to issuing the first number of the new regime gratis to the populace?’

‘No,’ said Vincent. ‘That would look as if we were anxious to obtrude Bobs’ views on ’em. Charge the old rates. Here! I’ll help fold the papers. Come on, Daubeny! Make the comps work too. Shove the papers out on the pavement, and let the nigger-boys fight for ’em. Run, you little devils! A ticky apiece is the price, and no reduction.’

‘It’s History! It’s Drama! And we’re right in the middle of the stage!’ cried Corbett on his knees among the folded papers. ‘Where under the sun did those kids spring from? It’s like New York. Here you are, sonny. Remember, it’s Despatch, not Banner today.’

‘Yes, Baas. Despatch,’ said a half-naked imp, clasping his bundle to his bosom. ‘I know Anglish.’

‘Go ahead then! Six cen—threepence a copy: no reduction. Who says the Kaffir is not in the van of progress? Listen to ’em, boys! Just listen to ’em!’

‘Despaatch! Bloemfontein Bannaar! Paaper ! Paaper ! Bloemfontein Despaatch!’ Then, high and shrill, the voice of a small Dutchling: ‘Lord Rabbat’s Proclamation! Onlee one ticky! Bannaar!’

They cut across the crowd in the market-square like minnows in an aquarium; they yelled before the shuttered shops of those who feared looting; they burst through knots of soldiers; they importuned unhappy burghers on the pavement; they dodged under the wheels of ambulances; lone pickets penetrated dusty side-streets, or invaded the back-gardens of closed houses from the Raadzaal to the railway-station. The English had come, and the day of the Amabuna had ended. Wherefore, they vehemently proclaimed the news of their race’s deliverance, while the Honourable Wilfred Daubeny, with the last of the sealing-wax, sealed the press-room doors.

Allen mechanically sought his corner by the chemist’s shop, but in the roaring come-and-go of khaki there was no peace. He saw the English, and they were many, rejoicing as men rejoice who say ‘I told you so,’ and see their words come true. He saw the extremists sullen in the side-streets, each heartening his fellow with prophecies of the Federals’ return. He heard the new ‘loyalists’ extra—loud tones raised to catch the ear of the passing soldier; and black-clad women weeping in the verandas. But these wept only for their sons and their husbands.

Here and there were the older men known to Allen since the days of Mosheshe’s war, hunters once, farmers and wool-growers now, who had not believed in closer union with the Transvaal — who had seen their words overborne first by the Hollander and next by the Hollander-infected burgher; who had still to watch the ruin of their beloved land—knowing the ruin was irretrievable. Theirs was the greater pain.

‘We’ve done well — we’ve done well,’ said Allen brokenly, to Van Zoelen, whom he found staring through the shut gates of the Raadzaal, at the head of the town.

‘We have done well,’ said the old man. ‘I spoke against it in my place there’ — he pointed to the doors on which the English had not thought it worth while to put a sentry. ‘You heard me?’

‘God help us, Van Zoelen! That was a year ago! Given away for a handful of Boer tobacco, I said…. Think you they’ll ever catch him?’

‘No. He is away. He has done it all — all — all! He will get away. He and that other will get away! Martens was right. It is good to burn our Bibles these days. God has forgotten the Free State. They drove off all my cattle at Wonderhoek before they went North. They called my son a coward. They sjamboked my black-stuff, and then they rode away to—fight on their own border! If ever again I break bread with a Transvaaler—’

He leaned his head against the railings and tugged at his long beard. ‘We owe them more than we can ever pay for sure,’ said Allen, and went on to his roses. Walking with bent head, past the abandoned houses of old-time tea-parties, and the leisurely, shirt-sleeved, sluttish life of forty good years, he cannoned into a uniform.

‘I beg your pardon,’ said he.

‘I’m sure I beg yours.’ Allen glanced at the face. A photograph of it cut from an illustrated paper was pasted in an obscure corner of the press-room.

‘You’re General McKaye?’ he said.

‘They say so. Is there anything I can do for you?’

‘Tell me now, did ye, or did ye not, use native troops fra’ Injia against us?’

‘Of course not, man.’

‘You’ll be a Highlander?’ The tone implied the rest. ‘I’m tellin’ you,’ said the General, with an equal simplicity.

‘Then, in God’s name, who kept the Basutos off us?’

‘Lagden, of course, an’ a dooms hard job it was. Where’ll you be from in the Old Country?’

page 10

‘Me? I’m a burgher of the Free State.’

The houses on either side were empty; hastily barricaded with corrugated iron that could be kicked in by a child. Some bunches of keys lay on his tea-table in the veranda with notes from the late owners. His wife’s niece had gone three days before, leaving a black girl to see to the house.

Across the broad street with its patches of grass, a family of English sat out in their garden, drinking tea — not coffee — under the shadow of the Union Jack. A fat old woman in black walked aimlessly from one side of the way to the other, sobbing and waving black-gloved hands.

For the rest, the street was deserted, but through the hot air came the deep hum of many thousands encamped within rifle-shot. The little breezes were heavy with the smell of men and oxen and horses, and under the red flare of the sunset the veldt for miles and miles heaved and crawled with transport wagons.

A man on a spent horse rounded the corner. He kept the exact centre of the road — his rifle across his arm — sure signs he belonged to a Colonial corps.

‘Will ye drink a cup o’ coffee?’ cried Allen.

‘Will I? Try me.’ He slipped from his beast and pushed through the heavy-scented rose-bushes with a creaking of leather accoutrements. ‘Who are you?’

The soft gentle drawl betrayed the son of the Old Colony, even if the modelling of the forehead and the base of the nose had been overlooked.

‘I’m a burgher of the Free State,’ said Allen.

The boy — he was little older, for all his ten or twelve fights — dropped into the Taal at once, found a chair and stretched his legs on the rail. The muzzle of his rifle canted carelessly towards Allen’s chest, and his hand played with the trigger-guard.

‘Have you been out on commando, uncle?’ he asked deferentially.

‘No, I am a printer here.’

‘So? Let me feel your trigger-finger. That’s right. It is all soft inside. There was an old man at Colesberg very like you. I fired at him for half a day, but he was clever. A good shot, too. So now it is all done — eh? You think your Presidents will come back?’

Allen shook his head as he passed over the full cup.

‘They all say that. I hope they will try again. We have not shot enough of you to make you soft yet.’

‘They said here you used natives from India to fight us.’

‘Almighty! I wish we had. The English stood up too much and got killed. They were fools! We could have managed Stormberg without fifty dead men. And — Paardeberg too.’

‘Then you did not use natives?’

‘Of course not. We are not so stupid as you, to play black against white. Uncle, there is a very bad time coming for the burghers when your Kaffirs get free from the gun-teams. You boasted too much. One should never boast before black-stuff. Either do or not do, but don’t talk and not do.’

‘You did not use natives from India, then;’ Allen repeated heavily.

‘What fools you Dutch are! You believe anything your predikants tell you. Here is our Army. Go and look at it. You were quick enough to kodak our dead on the Natal side, and to sell them in the shops. If there had been natives you could have kodaked them. That is just like you Dutch — at one time so clever with your guns and your pom-poms, and then just Dutch.’

‘I was born a Scotsman,’ Allen half-whispered to himself.

‘Ah, but you are Dutch at heart, though. I believe that black-stuff are only black; and I think the English troops are spoiling them altogether. We shall never get the black-stuff to work for us again till they are well thrashed; but I don’t believe they are only monkies. Yon do, uncle, and you have dealt that way with them. That is why there will be trouble, I think, before we can stop it. Eh?’

‘I never thought that. I did not believe in the way we treat black-stuff. It is wrong.’

‘Oh, that is what you say now the game is up. Go over to Tabanchu and tell it to the Basutos. Tell it to the Swazis. Tell it to the Zulus. There is trouble coming from there for us, uncle — not to count all the black-stuff that the Zarps used to rob on the goldfields.’ He lit his pipe and admired his spurs for a moment. ‘You were friendly with any of the Government men here, uncle? You heard them talk?’ ‘I have heard a great deal of talk.’

‘Of course…. The President has carried off most of his letters with him — eh? It is a pity. The Imperial Staff are searching the house now. If they had let us Colonials in we should have known where to look.’

‘What do you want, then?’ Allen spoke listlessly; he was very tired. ‘Ah, now you talk well, uncle. You speak like an upright burgher.’ The boy laid his hand almost caressingly on Allen’s knee.

‘You see that the game is up. They all lied to you. Now you can speak the truth. Look!’ He fumbled in his belt and drew out half a handful of English gold. ‘I am “Wirt” Trollip’s son. You have heard of him? He is not a poor man, eh? I can give you this. My father sent me on commando — with the corps, I mean — not poor. But he can give you twice as much again and nobody will know.’

‘What for?’

‘For anything that you care to tell me that you know about the ammunition that came up from Kapstaad before the war. Oh, I don’t mean all the stuff that came up to Bloemfontein, but the big load that went up from Cape Town, and was kept at Belmont by our Government’s order at the end of August.’

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‘I know nothing about it.’

The boy laughed and jingled the sovereigns. ‘You have forgotten, uncle. We know now, of course, why you wanted the ammunition kept at Belmont. It was very useful, and you were very slim. But do you know if any letters were sent from our Government at Kapstaad about it — the ammunition at Belmont to your President here? Oh! I do not expect you saw the letters — but there must have been some joke about it in the market-square. It was so very convenient for you — the Belmont ammunition.’

‘Joke?’

‘Oh, not now, of course. The joke is ours now, but — I will give you ten or twenty of these if you can remember any man who talked about that ammunition waiting for you at Belmont. The first we knew about it was when it was said in our Raad at Kapstaad that the ammunition had been stopped at Belmont, by our Government’s order. You must have known much more here … and … they do not let us Colonials look for letters in the proper places. What is the matter, uncle?’

Allen leaned forward with his face in his hands, and rocked to and fro. The boy patted him on the back. ‘It is not the little fish we want to catch,’ said he, ‘it’s the big ones — kabeljous in our own water. If Frick were given a scare he might tell, but he is selling things to the troops. My father knows him. Come, uncle. The game is up. Tell me what you know. Nothing will happen. Why are you crying? I am not going to shoot you.’

‘Hurt me? How could ye? — How?’ Allen recovered himself in English. ‘I can tell ye nothing, but — why should I feel hurt? We’ve earned it fairly. Only — only let me alone, child. Mind the step there, and don’t hurt my roses.’

The newly created staff of the Despatch pranced joyously outside the press-room’s sealed door till such time as Captain Ritson, of the Intelligence Department, should enter upon his search.

They counted sixty-seven pitched battles among the three of them and skirmishes innumerable. It was their business to run without ceasing from strife to strife at a rumour, in constant peril of death, imprisonment, disease, — and the wrath of criticised Brigadiers; seeing all things, foreseeing all things, fording all things, riding all things, proving all things, holding fast to the Wire.

Three continents waited on their words for the truth; and in their hands lay the reputation of every combatant officer. But they took it lightly—from the snubbings of the excited Aide-de-Camp, who does not understand how a newspaperman can be a human being, to the high-pitched blasphemies of a semi-delirious General trying to curse his command out of a trap into which, against all warning, he proudly marches in close order. Refreshed after sleep on a real bed, and meals at a table, they were saying what they thought of the campaign in language no Press Censor would have countersigned.

‘And, by the way, I’ve done a bully leader for today,’ said Corbett. “Tisn’t often an American can lay down the law to a British annexation. Let it go in, Vincent. It’s your war, but it’s my fun.’

‘Never!’ Grady struck an attitude. ‘We don’t conquer States for the Transatlantic Syndicate to slop over.’

‘Did you do a leader, then?’ Vincent asked pointedly. ‘Me? Are you mad or drunk? I went to bed — between sheets — at nine last night,’ the fat Grady replied. ‘Then Corbett gets it. I swear I’m not going to do leaders. They’ve given me about ten columns of camp and brigade orders. I rely on those. Mustn’t spoil the public too early.’

‘There’s my friend from Blackwood’s.’ Corbett spied Allen at the head of his little band of compositors coming round the corner.

‘See here, Mr. Allen, I’ve a most important leader I want you to set up at once. I’m sorry it’s written in pencil, but — ‘Mornin’, Ritson.’ The officer of the Intelligence Department cantered up. ‘Break in Daubeny’s seals and let’s get to work. We want today’s paper to be a beauty.’

‘All right. I’ll do the searching in half an hour, and then you can go on.’ Ritson of the Intelligence passed into Dessauer’s office with Grady and Corbett. Allen, in the unswept press-room, looked forlorn and very old. Vincent, quick to notice, gave him a most human ‘Good morning!’

‘Thank ye. What’ll they be lookin’ for there?’ ‘Oh, documents of sorts,’ Vincent answered. ‘I — I think I could show you one, maybe,’ he whispered by the hand-press under Bergmann’s picture. ‘Which one d’you mean?’ said Vincent quickly. ‘A — well, it’s not in English.’ He had lain awake all night in a chair thinking his way to this end. Gert and the others were scrubbing yesterday’s type before releasing it. ‘It’s here.’ His face worked with an agony hidden from the other.

‘I see. Thank you.’

‘No thanks to me. I’m a burgher of the Free State — I’ve worked here since ‘Seventy-five, but I’m not tryin’ — I’m not tryin’ to justify myself — only it’s all wrong — to me.’

He hung with half-opened mouth on Vincent’s next action. Would the man jingle sovereigns at him as the Colonial had done?

Vincent stepped into the editorial room, where the Intelligence officer was examining Dessauer’s old bills, and gave him the news.

‘He seems rather a decent old chap. I daresay you could make something out of him. He’s horribly scared of something.’

‘Thanks,’ said Captain Ritson. ‘I expected this. I’ll settle it at once.’

He rose, walked down the composing-room to where Allen, surrounded by Gert and the others, dealt copy of Corbett’s leader under a running fire of instructions from the American.

‘Why, I’d ha’ died,’ said Corbett delightedly, ‘sooner than let an Englishman write the first leader of a commandeered Cuba paper. The way you English miss your chances is stupefying! Are you through yet, Ritson?’

‘I hear,’ said Ritson, looking directly at Allen, that you can tell us where there is a copy of the proclamation in Basuto which was set up in this office. You will give it to me at once.’ Allen turned towards Vincent like a hunted dog. This was ten thousand times worse than any offer of money. Gert, Mrs. Bergmann’s pet employee, stood within arm’s reach of him; the others, his subordinates, even closer. One cannot deny a quarter of a century of habit, use, and dear custom easily — in a loud voice before one’s yoke-fellows.

page 12

In less time than the lifting of an eyebrow, Grady and Corbett, trained to the mastery of situations, had comprehended this last — the pity, the horror, and the loneliness of it. Moreover, Corbett had caught a sidelight in Gert’s eye which did not promise well for the old man. Ritson, clean-shaven and precise under his Staff cap, waited for the answer.

‘What are ye talkin’ about?’ said Allen, running a dry tongue over a drier lip. The merciless sun hit full on his face.

‘It’s no use trying to lie. I mean the Basuto proclamation.’

‘Look here, Ritson,’ said Corbett. ‘We don’t mind your searching the whole office, but we do object to your searching our men when we’re trying to make their work. Mister Gert — happy to meet you again. Mister Gert! —looks rather guilty. Besides he’s not a good comp. Take him into the machinery-room and shoot him. Run along, Gert.’

The face of the black-nailed Dutchman turned a cheerful grey-green. He was as ignorant of the etiquette of a conquering army — as that army itself.

‘Of course, he doesn’t know,’ said Vincent. ‘If Dessauer had any sense he’d have taken it with him.

How’s your leader coming on, Mr. Allen?’

‘I’ve just sorted it, sir. We’ll have it set in twenty minutes — if —if I may go on with my work.’ The yellow-veined hand on the justifying-table shook. Bergmann from the wall above the door seemed to be enjoying his woe.

‘Look out for Gert!’ said Grady to Ritson. ‘He’s edging off. A thorough quick search is the only thing, now that they’ve got the alarm. We’ll all help.’ He flung open the doors of a hanging cupboard with a crash, and broke up the little crowd.

‘That’s it,’ said Corbett. ‘Come here, Gert, with me. We’ll investigate the composing-room. Don’t be afraid. You shan’t be shot till you’ve set up my leader.’

Grady, telegraphed to by Corbett, tucked two compositors under his wing, and motioned other two to follow Ritson. Vincent called Allen by eye.

“Fore God,’ said the old man, trembling from head to foot and backing into the machinery-room. ‘How could — how was I to up an’ tell him there before them all? They were my subordinates! Could ye expect me to? He didn’t know what it meant.’

‘Hsh ! It’s all right,’ said Vincent tenderly. Then raising his voice: ‘Mr. Allen, what have we in hand of old matter?’ The others, shepherded by Grady, passed into the composing-room. ‘Get it now,’ said Vincent. Allen motioned to an old file of mixed job and proof-slips in a case-cabinet on the floor-level of the machinery and fouled with dust. ‘The fourth from the bottom, I think,’ he whispered. ‘Ye’ll no mind if—if I sit down for a minute…. I’ve no wish to curry favour — but you needn’t believe that.’

The proof was found, slipped off, and into Vincent’s pocket, and the file kicked back out of sight. Allen sat heavily on the wreck of a bottomless chair, and drummed on the arms with his knuckles.

‘Ye — ye did not use the natives fra’ Injia against us. . . . How could I up an’ tell him there before Gert? … I’m — I’m not as young as I was an’ . . . there’s a power o’ thinkin’ involved … after twenty-five years…. But by all the rules, it’s perfectly damnable. Ye’ll admit that, sir?’

Vincent could not quite see the drift of the last remark, but echoed it at a venture. ‘Don’t think about it. We’ll go on with today’s make-up.’

They entered the composing-room together.

‘I can’t find anything,’ said Ritson, and Allen winced at the voice.

Half an hour later the staff’ of the Bloemfontein Despatch fell to work in Dessauer’s office with much laughter and more zeal.

‘Did Ritson get it after all?’ said Grady of a sudden. ‘He did,’ said Vincent, and told the tale from beginning to end.

‘Fellow-citizens!’ Corbett rose ponderously in his place. ‘I wish to say something right here. I love you all — God bless you! But I want to point out that for comprehensive, consistent, glass-eyed, bottle-bellied, frozen-headed folly, you English beat all God’s suffering earth! Vincent is the King’s Fool — the Imperial Ass. He has a scoop under his hand which — which — why, there isn’t an adjective in the English language—’

‘”Our glorious common heritage”‘; don’t forget that, old man,’ Vincent chuckled.

‘Yes, but you’re the asses who graze on that common! I won’t try to describe Vincent’s scoop. Suffice it to say, as Grady always cables, he chucks that scoop away. Not with both hands merely, but with his teeth and his toe-nails, and the sweat of his brow, he climbs kopjes to thrust the scoop into the hands of the most effete, paralytic, and bung-eyed Government the century has produced! And what will that Government do with it? It will say: “Here is another link in the chain of evidence!” Then it will take and bury that proclamation in a sarcophagus lest anybody should accidentally find it out. It’ll get up in the middle of the night and dig one out of solid granite with its own thick head. That proclamation should have been facsimiled in every paper in the universe. No! Your Government will put it away in a Blue Book, which will come out a year or two after Steyn is a virtuous Amsterdammer or — yes, I accept the amendment, Grady — we’re as big fools as you are almost — a citizen of Hoboken. Nobody will read it. Nobody will know about it, and then the English will wonder why they’re misunderstood! Hullo! Come in !’

‘I’ve a darned good mind to distribute your leader,’ said Vincent. ‘But you’re quite right, Corbett. We are the biggest fools unhung. What is it, Mr. Allen?’

‘I wanted to let you gentlemen understand that I did — what I did just now as an individual. It’s o’ no earthly importance to anyone but myself — anything connected wi’ me. I know that. But ye’ll understand … I’m not for takin’ any oath of allegiance, or sayin’ I’m glad to see you here, or hangin’ out a Union Jack, or any o’ that—like.’

Grady’s eyebrows drew together — the vision of poor Hawke bleeding from the volley under the white flag was always with him. He would have spoken, but Vincent raised his hand. Allen clung to the edge of the thin plank door.

‘Tak’ it or leave it, as you will. God judge me, if He’s not forgotten us — We deserve it…. But I did it as a Burgher of the Free State!’

page 1 of 6

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘There aren’t any,’ said Una.

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

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

page 2

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Was your nurse a—a Romaness too?’

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

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

The young man laughed again—a proper understanding laugh.

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

‘Did you have a governess, then?’

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

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

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

‘What at?’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘What waters?’

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

‘But where? I don’t know,’ said Una.

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

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

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

I‘ thought philosophers were bald,’ said Una.

page 3

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Parnesius looked bewildered, even when Una explained.

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

Dan had climbed into Volaterrae, hot and panting.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘“Born in Britain?” he said.

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

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

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

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

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

‘Who was he?’ said Dan.

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

‘And were you pleased?’ said Una.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘How? How?’ said Dan and Una.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘My men dropped like—like partridges.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘That was what I thought,’ said Parnesius.

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

‘I was silent, but my Father seemed pleased.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘“I follow my destiny,” said Maximus.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘In Volaterrae—waiting for you.’

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

page 1 of 5

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mr. Cleever admitted that he had written the book.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cleever questioned the others with his eyes.

‘I’m twenty-four,’ said Nevin.

‘And I’m twenty-two,’ said Boileau.

‘And you’ve all seen service?’

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

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

‘Explain it, Infant,’ said Nevin.

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

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

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

‘What about? I’ll try.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Who was your C.O.?’ said Boileau.

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Who was he?’ said Boileau.

page 3

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

Cleever looked helplessly at me.

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

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

‘What sort of verses?’ said Cleever.

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘You! Have you shot a man?’

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

‘And have you, too?’

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

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

‘Thirsty. I wanted a smoke, too.’

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

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

‘And you too?’ said Cleever.

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

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

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

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

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

Cleever nodded applause. He knew how to appreciate enthusiasm.

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

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

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

‘Who was he?’ said Nevin.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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THERE had been rather a long sitting at Lodge ‘Faith and Works,’ 5837 E.C., that warm April night. Three initiations and two raisings, each conducted with the spaciousness and particularity that our Lodge prides itself upon, made the Brethren a little silent, and the strains of certain music had not yet lifted from them.‘There are two pieces that ought to be barred for ever,’ said a Brother as we were sitting down to the ‘banquet.’ ‘“Last Post” is the other.’‘I can just stand “Last Post.” It’s “Tipperary” breaks me,’ another replied. ‘But I expect every one carries his own firing-irons inside him.’

I turned to look. It was a sponsor for one of our newly raised Brethren—a fat man with a fish-like and vacant face, but evidently prosperous. We introduced ourselves as we took our places. His name was Bevin, and he had a chicken farm near Chalfont St. Giles, whence he supplied, on yearly contract, two or three high-class London hotels. He was also, he said, on the edge of launching out into herb-growing.

‘There’s a demand for herbs,’ said he; ‘but it all depends upon your connections with the wholesale dealers. We ain’t systematic enough. The French do it much better, especially in those mountains on the Swiss an’ Italian sides. They use more herbal remedies than we do. Our patent-medicine business has killed that with us. But there’s a demand still, if your connections are sound. I’m going in for it.’

A large, well-groomed Brother across the table (his name was Pole, and he seemed some sort of professional man) struck in with a detailed account of a hollow behind a destroyed village near Thiepval, where, for no ascertainable reason, a certain rather scarce herb had sprung up by the acre, he said, out of the overturned earth.

‘Only you’ve got to poke among the weeds to find it, and there’s any quantity of bombs an’ stuff knockin’ about there still. They haven’t cleaned it up yet.’

‘Last time I saw the place,’ said Bevin, ‘I thought it ’ud be that way till Judgment Day. You know how it lay in that dip under that beet-factory. I saw it bombed up level in two days—into brick-dust mainly. They were huntin’ for St. Firmin Dump.’ He took a sandwich and munched slowly, wiping his face, for the night was close.

‘Ye-es,’ said Pole. ‘The trouble is there hasn’t been any judgment taken or executed. That’s why the world is where it is now. We didn’t need anything but justice—afterwards. Not gettin’ that, the bottom fell out of things, naturally.’

‘That’s how I look at it too,’ Bevin replied. ‘We didn’t want all that talk afterwards—we only wanted justice. What I say is, there must be a right and a wrong to things. It can’t all be kiss-an’-make-friends, no matter what you do.’

A thin, dark brother on my left, who had been attending to a cold pork pie (there are no pork pies to equal ours, which are home-made), suddenly lifted his long head, in which a pale blue glass eye swivelled insanely.

‘Well,’ he said slowly. ‘My motto is “Never again.” Ne-ver again for me.’

‘Same here—till next time,’ said Pole, across the table. ‘You’re from Sydney, ain’t you?’

‘How d’you know?’ was the short answer

‘You spoke.’ The other smiled. So did Bevin, who added: ‘I know how your push talk, well enough. Have you started that Republic of yours down under yet?’

‘No. But we’re goin’ to. Then you’ll see.’

‘Carry on. No one’s hindering,’ Bevin pursued.

The Australian scowled. ‘No. We know they ain’t. And—and—that’s what makes us all so crazy angry with you.’ He threw back his head and laughed the spleen out of him. ‘What can you do with an Empire that—that don’t care what you do?’

‘I’ve heard that before,’ Bevin laughed, and his fat sides shook. ‘Oh, I know your push inside-out.’ .

‘When did you come across us? My name’s Orton—no relation to the Tichborne one.’

‘Gallip’li—dead mostly. My battalion began there. We only lost half.’

‘Lucky! They gambled us away in two days. ’Member the hospital on the beach?’ asked asked Orton.

‘Yes. An’ the man without the face—preaching,’ said Bevin, sitting up a little.

‘Till he died,’ said the Australian, his voice lowered.

‘And afterwards,’ Bevin added, lower still.

‘Christ! Were you there that night?’

Bevin nodded. The Australian choked off something he was going to say, as a Brother on his left claimed him. I heard them talk horses, while Bevin developed his herb-growing projects with the well-groomed Brother opposite.

At the end of the banquet, when pipes were drawn, the Australian addressed himself to Bevin, across me, and as the company re-arranged itself, we three came to anchor in the big anteroom where the best prints are hung. Here our Brother across the table joined us, and moored alongside.

The Australian was full of racial grievances, as must be in a young country; alternating between complaints that his people had not been appreciated enough in England, or too fulsomely complimented by an hysterical Press.

‘No-o,’ Pole drawled, after a while. ‘You’re altogether wrong. We hadn’t time to notice anything—we were all too busy fightin’ for our lives. What your crowd down under are suffering from is growing-pains. You’ll get over ’em in three hundred years or so—if you’re allowed to last so long.’

‘Who’s going to stoush us?’ Orton asked fiercely.

This turned the talk again to larger issues and possibilities—delivered on both sides straight from the shoulder without malice or heat, between bursts of song from round the piano at the far end. Bevin and I sat out, watching.

‘Well, I don’t understand these matters,’ said Bevin at last. ‘But I’d hate to have one of your crowd have it in for me for anything.’

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‘Would you? Why?’ Orton pierced him with his pale, artificial eye.

‘Well, you’re a trifle—what’s the word?—vindictive?—spiteful? At least, that’s what I’ve found. I expect it comes from drinking stewed tea with your meat four times a day,’ said Bevin. ‘No! I’d hate to have an Australian after me for anything in particular.’

Out of this came his tale—somewhat in this shape:

It opened with an Australian of the name of Hickmot or Hickmer—Bevin called him both—who, finding his battalion completely expended at Gallipoli, had joined up with what stood of Bevin’s battalion, and had there remained, unrebuked and unnoticed. The point that Bevin laboured was that his man had never seen a table-cloth, a china plate, or a dozen white people together till, in his thirtieth year, he had walked for two months to Brisbane to join up. Pole found this hard to believe.

‘But it’s true,’ Bevin insisted. ‘This chap was born an’ bred among the black fellers, as they call ’em, two hundred miles from the nearest town, four hundred miles from a railway, an’ ten thousand from the grace o’ God—out in Queensland near some desert.’

‘Why, of course. We come out of everywhere,’ said Orton. ‘What’s wrong with that?’

‘Yes—but—— Look here! From the time that this man Hickmot was twelve years old he’d ridden, driven—what’s the word?—conducted sheep for his father for thousands of miles on end, an’ months at a time, alone with these black fellers that you daren’t show the back of your neck to—else they knock your head in. That was all that he’d ever done till he joined up. He—he—didn’t belong to anything m the world, you understand. And he didn’t strike other men as being a—a human being.’

‘Why? He was a Queensland drover. They’re all right,’ Orton explained.

‘I dare say; but—well, a man notices another man, don’t he? You’d notice if there was a man standing or sitting or lyin’ near you, wouldn’t you? So’d any one. But you’d never notice Hickmot. His bein’ anywhere about wouldn’t stay in your mind. He just didn’t draw attention any more than anything else that happened to be about. Have you got it?’

‘Wasn’t he any use at his job?’ Pole inquired.

‘I’ve nothing against him that way, an’ I’m—I was his platoon sergeant. He wouldn’t volunteer specially for any doings, but he’d slip out with the party and he’d slip back with what was left of ’em. No one noticed him, and he never opened his mouth about any doings. You’d think a man who had lived the way he’d lived among black fellers an’ sheep would be noticeable enough in an English battalion, wouldn’t you?’

‘It teaches ’em to lie close; but you seem to have noticed him,’ Orton interposed, with a little suspicion.

‘Not at the time—but afterwards. If he was noticeable it was on account of his unnoticeability—same way you’d notice there not being an extra step at the bottom of the staircase when you thought there was.’

‘Ye-es,’ Pole said suddenly. ‘It’s the eternal mystery of personality. “God before Whom ever lie bare——” Some people can occlude their personality like turning off a tap. I beg your pardon. Carry on!’

‘Granted,’ said Bevin. ‘I think I catch your drift. I used to think I was a student of human nature before I joined up.’

‘What was your job—before?’ Orton asked.

‘Oh, I was the young blood of the village. Goal-keeper in our soccer team, secretary of the local cricket and rifle—oh, lor’!—clubs. Yes, an’ village theatricals. My father was the chemist in the village. How I did talk! What I did know!’ He beamed upon us all.

‘I don’t mind hearing you talk,’ said Orton, lying back in his chair. ‘You’re a little different from some of ’em. What happened to this dam’ drover of yours?’

‘He was with our push for the rest of the war—an’ I don’t think he ever sprung a dozen words at one time. With his upbringing, you see, there wasn’t any subject that any man knew about he could open up on. He kept quiet, and mixed with his backgrounds. If there was a lump of dirt, or a hole in the ground, or what was—was left after anythin’ had happened, it would be Hickmot. That was all he wanted to be.’

‘A camouflager?’ Orton suggested.

‘You have it! He was the complete camouflager all through. That’s him to a dot. Look here! He hadn’t even a nickname in his platoon! And then a friend of mine from our village, of the name of Vigors, came out with a draft. Bert Vigors. As a matter of fact, I was engaged to his sister. And Bert hadn’t been with us a week before they called him “The Grief.” His father was an oldish man, a market-gardener—high-class vegetables, bit o’ glass, an’—an’ all the rest of it. Do you know anything about that particular business?’

‘Not much, I’m afraid,’ said Pole, ‘except that glass is expensive, and one’s man always sells the cut flowers.’

‘Then you do know something about it. It is. Bert was the old man’s only son, an’—I don’t blame him—he’d done his damnedest to get exempted—for the sake of the business, you understand. But he caught it all right. The tribunal wasn’t takin’ any the day he went up. Bert was for it, with a few remarks from the patriotic old was-sers on the bench. Our county paper had ’em all.’

‘That’s the thing that made one really want the Hun in England for a week or two,’ said Pole.

‘Mwor osee! The same tribunal, havin’ copped Bert, gave unconditional exemption to the opposition shop—a man called Margetts, in the market-garden business, which he’d established since the war, with his two sons who, every one in the village knew, had been pushed into the business to save their damned hides. But Margetts had a good lawyer to advise him. The whole case was frank and above-board to a degree—our county paper had it all in, too. Agricultural producevital necessity; the plough mightier than the sword; an’ those ducks on the bench, who had turned down Bert, noddin’ and smilin’ at Margetts, all full of his cabbage and green peas. What happened? The usual. Vigors’ business—he’s sixty-eight, with asthma—goes smash, and Margetts and Co. double theirs. So, then, that was Bert’s grievance, an’ he joined us full of it. That’s why they called him “The Grief.” Knowing the facts, I was with him; but being his sergeant, I had to check him, because grievances are catchin’, and three or four men with ’em make Companies—er—sticky. Luckily Bert wasn’t handy with his pen. He had to cork up his grievance mostly till he came across Hickmot, an’ Gord in Heaven knows what brought those two together. No! As y’were. I’m wrong about God! I always am. It was Sheep. Bert knew’s much about sheep as I do—an’ that’s Canterbury lamb—but he’d let

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Hickmot talk about ’em for hours, in return for Hickmot listenin’ to his grievance. Hickmot ’ud talk sheep—the one created thing he’d ever open up on—an’ Bert ’ud talk his grievance while they was waiting to go over the top. I’ve heard ’em again an’ again, and, of course, I encouraged ’em. Now, look here! Hickmot hadn’t seen an English house or a field or a road or—or anything any civ’lised man is used to in all his life! Sheep an’ blacks! Market-gardens an’ glass an’ exemption-tribunals! An’ the men’s teeth chatterin’ behind their masks between rum-issue an’ zero. Oh, there was fun in Hell those days, wasn’t there, boys?’

‘Sure! Oh, sure!’ Orton chuckled, and Pole echoed him.

‘Look here! When we were lying up somewhere among those forsaken chicken-camps back o’ Doullens, I found Hickmot making mud-pies in a farmyard an’ Bert lookin’ on. He’d made a model of our village according to Bert’s description of it. He’d preserved it in his head through all those weeks an’ weeks o’ Bert’s yap; an’ he’d coughed it all up—Margetts’ house and gardens, old Mr. Vigors’ ditto; both pubs; my father’s shop, everything that he’d been told by Bert done out to scale in mud, with bits o’ brick and stick. Haig ought to have seen it; but as his sergeant I had to check him for misusin’ his winkle-pin on dirt. ‘Come to think of it, a man who runs about uninhabited countries, with sheep, for a livin’ must have gifts for mappin’ and scalin’ things somehow or other, or he’d be dead. I never saw anything like it—all out o’ what Bert had told him by word of mouth. An’ the next time we went up the line Hickmot copped it in the leg just in front of me.’

‘Finish?’ I asked.

‘Oh, no. Only beginnin’. That was in December, somethin’ or other, ’16. In Jan’ry Vigors copped it for keeps. I buried him—snowin’ blind it was—an’ before we’d got him under the whole show was crumped. I wanted to bury him again just to spite ’em (I’m a spiteful man by nature), but the party wasn’t takin’ any more—even if they could have found it. But, you see, we had buried him all right, which is what they want at home, and I wrote the usual trimmin’s about the chaplain an’ the full service, an’ what his captain had said about Bert bein’ recommended for a pip, an’ the irreparable loss an’ so on. That was in Jan’ry ’17. In Feb’ry some time or other I got saved. My speciality had come to be bombin’s and night-doings. Very pleasant for a young free man, but—there’s a limit to what you can stand. It takes all men differently. Noise was what started me, at last. I’d got just up to the edge—wonderin’ when I’d crack an’ how many of our men I’d do in if it came on me while we were busy. I had that nice taste in the mouth and the nice temperature they call trench-fever, an’—I had to feel inside my head for the meanin’ of every order I gave or was responsible for executin’. You know!’

‘We do. Go on!’ said Pole in a tone that made Orton look at him.

‘So, you see, the bettin’ was even on my drawin’ a V.C. or getting Number Umpty rest-camp or—a firing party before breakfast. But Gord saved me. (I made friends with Him the last two years of the war. The others went off too quick.) They wanted a bomb in’-instructor for the training-battalion at home, an’ He put it into their silly hearts to indent for me. It took ’em five minutes to make me understand I was saved. Then I vomited, an’ then I cried. You know!’ The fat face of Bevin had changed and grown drawn, even as he spoke; and his hands tugged as though to tighten an imaginary belt.

‘I was never keen on bombin’ myself,’ said Pole. ‘But bomb in’-instruction’s murder!’

‘I don’t deny it’s a shade risky, specially when they take the pin out an’ start shakin’ it, same as the Chinks used to do in the woods at Beauty, when they were cuttin’ ’em down. But you live like a home defence Brigadier, besides week-end leaf. As a matter o’ fact, I married Bert’s sister soon’s I could after I got the billet, an’ I used to lie in our bed thinkin’ of the old crowd on the Somme an’—feelin’ what a swine I was. Of course, I earned two V.C.’s a week behind the traverse in the exercise of my ord’nary duties, but that isn’t the same thing. An’ yet I’d only joined up because—because I couldn’t dam’ well help it.’

‘An’ what about your Queenslander?’ the Australian asked.

‘Too de sweet! Pronto! We got a letter in May from a Brighton hospital matron, sayin’ that one of the name of Hickmer was anxious for news o’ me, previous to proceedin’ to Roehampton for initiation into his new leg. Of course, we applied for him by return. Bert had written about him to his sister—my missus—every time he wrote at all; an’ any pal o’ Bert’s—well, you know what the ladies are like. I warned her about his peculiarities. She wouldn’t believe till she saw him. He was just the same. You’d ha’ thought he’d show up in England like a fresh stiff on snow—but you never noticed him. You never heard him; and if he didn’t want to be seen he wasn’t there. He just joined up with his background. I knew he could do that with men; but how in Hell, seein’ how curious women are, he could camouflage with the ladies—my wife an’ my mother to wit—beats me! He’d feed the chickens for us; he’d stand on his one leg—it was off above the knee—and saw wood for us. He’d run—I mean he’d hop—errands for Mrs. B, or mother; our dog worshipped him from the start, though I never saw him throw a word to him; and—yet he didn’t take any place anywhere. You’ve seen a rabbit—you’ve seen a pheasant—hidin’ in a ditch? ’Put your hand on it sometimes before it moved, haven’t you? Well, that was Hickmot—with two women in the house crazy to find out—find out—anything about him that made him human. You know what women are! He stayed with us a fortnight. He left us on a Sat’day to go to Roehampton to try his leg. On Friday he came over to the bombin’ ground—not saym’ anything, as usual—to watch me instruct my Suicide Club, which was only half an hour’s run by rail from our village. He had his overcoat on, an’ as soon as he reached the place it was mafeesh with him, as usual. Rabbit-trick again! You never noticed him. He sat in the bomb-proof behind the pit where the duds accumulate till it’s time to explode ’em. Naturally, that’s strictly forbidden to the public. So he went there, an’ no one noticed him. When he’d had enough of watchin’, he hopped off home to feed our chickens for the last time.’

‘Then how did you know all about it?’ Orton said.

‘Because I saw him come into the place just as I was goin’ down into the trench. Then he slipped my memory till my train went back. But it would have made no difference what our arrangements were. If Hickmer didn’t choose to be noticed, he wasn’t noticed. Just for curiosity’s sake I asked some o’ the Staff Sergeants whether they’d seen him on the ground. Not one—not one single one had—or could tell me what he was like. An’, Sat’day noon, he went off to Roehampton. We saw him into the train ourselves, with the lunch Mrs. B. had put up for him—a one-legged man an’ his crutch, in regulation blue, khaki warm an’ kit-bag. Takin’ everything together, per’aps he’d spoken as many as twenty times in the thirteen days he’d been with us. I’m givin’ it you straight as it happened. An’ now—look here!—this is what did happen.

‘Between two and three that Sunday morning—dark an’ blowin’ from the north—I was woke up by an explosion an’ people shoutin’ “Raid!” The first bang fetched ’em out like worms after rain. There was another some minutes afterwards, an’ me an’ a Sergeant in the Shropshires on leaf told ’em all to take cover. They did. There was a devil of a long wait an’ there was a third pop. Everybody, includin’ me, heard aeroplanes. I didn’t notice till afterwards that——’

Bevin paused.

‘What?’ said Orton.

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‘Oh, I noticed a heap of things afterwards. What we noticed first—the Shropshire Sergeant an’ me—was a rick well alight back o’ Margetts’ house, an’, with that north wind, blowin’ straight on to another rick o’ Margetts’. It went up all of a whoosh. The next thing we saw by the light of it was Margetts’ house with a bomb-hole in the roof and the rafters leanin’ sideways like—like they always lean on such occasions. So we ran there, and the first thing we met was Margetts in his split-tailed nightie callin’ on his mother an’ damnin’ his wife. A man always does that when he’s cross. Have you noticed? Mrs. Margetts was in her nightie too, remindin’ Margetts that he hadn’t completed his rick insurance. An’ that’s a woman’s lovin’ care all over. Behind them was their eldest son, in trousers an’ slippers, nursin’ his arm an’ callin’ for the doctor. They went through us howlin’ like flammemwerfer casualties—right up the street to the surgery.

‘Well, there wasn’t anything to do except let the show burn out. We hadn’t any means of extinguishing conflagrations. Some of ’em fiddled with buckets, an’ some of ’em tried to get out some o’ Margetts’ sticks, but his younger son kept shoutin’, “Don’t! Don’t! It’ll be stole! It’ll be stole!” So it burned instead, till the roof came down, top of all—a little, cheap, dirty villa, In reel life one whizz-bang would have shifted it; but in our civil village it looked that damned important and particular you wouldn’t believe. We couldn’t get round to Margetts’ stable because of the two ricks alight, but we found some one had opened the door early an’ the horses was in Margetts’ new vegetable piece down the hill which he’d hired off old Vigors to extend his business with. I love the way a horse always looks after his own belly—same as a Gunner. They went to grazin’ down the carrots and onions till young Margetts ran to turn ’em out, an’ then they got in among the glass frames an’ cut themselves. Oh, we had a regular Russian night of it, everybody givin’ advice an’ fallin’ over each other. When it got light we saw the damage. House, two ricks an’ stable mafeesh; the big glasshouse with every pane smashed and the furnace-end of it blown clean out. All the horses an’ about fifteen head o’ cattle—butcher’s stores from the next field—feeding in the new vegetable piece. It was a fair clean-up from end to end—house, furniture, fittin’s, plant, an’ all the early crops.’

‘Was there any other damage in the village?’ I asked.

‘I’m coming to it—the curious part—but I wouldn’t call it damage. I was renting a field then for my chickens off the Merecroft Estate. It’s accommodation-land, an’ there was a wet ditch at the bottom that I had wanted for ever so long to dam up to make a swim-hole for Mrs. Bevin’s ducks.’

‘Ah!’ said Orton, half turning in his chair, all in one piece.

‘S’pose I was allowed? Not me. Their Agent came down on me for tamperin’ with the Estate’s drainage arrangements. An’ all I wanted was to bring the bank down where the ditch narrows—a couple of cartloads of dirt would have held the water back for half-a-dozen yards—not more than that, an’ I could have made a little spill-way over the top with three boards-same as in trenches. Well, the first bomb—the one that woke me up—had done my work for me better than I could. It had dropped just under the hollow of the bank an’ brought it all down in a fair landslide. I’d got my swim-hole for Mrs. Bevin’s ducks, an’ I didn’t see how the Estate could kick at the Act o’ God, d’you?’

‘And Hickmot?’ said Orton, grinning.

‘Hold on! There was a Parish Council meetin’ to demand reprisals, of course, an’ there was the policeman an’ me pokin’ about among the ruins till the Explosives Expert came down in his motor car at three p.m. Monday, an’ he meets all the Margetts off their rockers, howlin’ in the surgery, an’ he sees my swim-hole fillin’ up to the brim.’

‘What did he say?’ Pole inquired.

‘He sized it up at once. (He had to get back to dine in town that evening.) He said all the evidence proved that it was a lucky shot on the part of one isolated Hun ’plane gom’ home, an’ we weren’t to take it to heart. I don’t know that anybody but the Margetts did. He said they must have used incendiary bombs of a new type—which he’d suspected for a long time. I don’t think the man was any worse than God intended him to be. I don’t reelly. But the Shropshire Sergeant said——’

‘And what did you think?’ I interrupted.

‘I didn’t think. I knew by then. I’m not a Sherlock Holmes; but havin’ chucked ’em an’ chucked ’em back and kicked ’em out of the light an’ slept with ’em for two years, an’ makin’ my livin’ out of them at that time, I could recognise the fuse of a Mills bomb when I found it. I found all three of ’em. ’Curious about that second in Margetts’ glasshouse. Hickmot mus’ have raked the ashes out of the furnace, popped it in, an’ shut the furnace door. It operated all right. Not one livin’ pane left in the putty, and all the brickwork spread round the yard in streaks. Just like that St. Firmin village we were talking about.’

‘But how d’you account for young what’s—hisname gettin’ his arm broken?’ said Pole.

‘Crutch!’ said Bevin. ‘If you or me had taken on that night’s doin’s, with one leg, we’d have hopped and sweated from one flank to another an’ been caught half-way between. Hickmot didn’t. I’m as sure as I’m sittin’ here that he did his doings quiet and comfortable at his full height—he was over six feet—and no one noticed him. This is the way I see it. He fixed the swim-hole for Mrs. Bevin’s ducks first. We used to talk over our own affairs in front of him, of course, and he knew just what she wanted in the way of a pond. So he went and made it at his leisure. Then he prob’ly went over to Margetts’ and lit the first rack, knowin’ that the wind ’ud do the rest. When young Margetts saw the light of it an’ came out to look, Hickmot would have taken post at the back-door an’ dropped the young swine with his crutch, same as we used to drop Huns comin’ out of a dug-out. You know how they blink at the light? Then he must have walked off an’ opened Margetts’ stable door to save the horses. They’d be more to him than any man’s life. Then he prob’ly chucked one bomb on top o’ Margetts’ roof, havin’ seen that the first rick had caught the second and that the whole house was bound to go. D’you get me?’

‘Then why did he waste his bomb on the house?’ said Orton. His glass eye seemed as triumphant as his real one.

‘For camouflage, of course. He was camouflagin’ an air-raid. When the Margetts piled out of their place into the street, he prob’ly attended to the glasshouse, because that would be Margetts’ chief means o’ business. After that—I think so, because otherwise I don’t see where all those extra cattle came from that we found in the vegetable piece—he must have walked off an’ rounded up all the butcher’s beasts in the next medder, an’ driven ’em there to help the horses. And when he’d finished everything he’d set out to do, I’ll lay my life an’ kit he curled up like a bloomin’ wombat not fifty yards away from the whole flamin’ show—an’ let us run round him. An’ when he’d had his sleep out, he went up to Roehampton Monday mornin’ by some tram that he’d decided upon in his own mind weeks an’ weeks before.’

‘Did he know all the trains then?’ said Pole.

‘Ask me another. I only know that if he wanted to get from any place to another without bein’ noticed, he did it.’

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‘And the bombs? He got ’em from you, of course,’ Pole went on.

‘What do you think? He was an hour in the park watchin’ me instruct, sittin’, as I remember, in the bomb-proof by the dud-hole, in his overcoat. He got ’em all right. He took neither more nor less than he wanted; an’ I’ve told you what he did with ’em—one—two—an’ three.’

‘’Ever see him afterwards?’ said Orton.

‘Yes. ’Saw him at Brighton when I went down there with the missus, not a month after he’d been broken in to his Roehampton leg. You know how the boys used to sit all along Brighton front in their blues, an’ jump every time the coal was bein’ delivered to the hotels behind them? I barged into him opposite the Old Ship, an’ I told him about our air-raid. I told him how Margetts had gone off his rocker an’ walked about starin’ at the sky an’ holdin’ reprisal-meetin’s all by himself; an’ how old Mr. Vigors had bought in what he’d left—tho’ of course I said what was left—o’ Margetts’ business; an’ how well my swim-hole for the ducks was doin’. It didn’t interest him. He didn’t want to come over to stay with us any more, either. We were a long, long way back in his past. You could see that. He wanted to get back with his new leg, to his own God-forsaken sheep-walk an’ his black fellers in Queensland. I expect he’s done it now, an’ no one has noticed him. But, by Gord! He did leak a little at the end. He did that much! When we was waitin’ for the tram to the station, I said how grateful I was to Fritz for moppin’ up Margetts an’ makin’ our swim-hole all in one night. Mrs. B. seconded the motion. We couldn’t have done less. Well, then Hickmot said, speakin’ in his queer way, as if English words were all new to him: “Ah, go on an’ bail up in Hell,” he says. “Bert was my friend.” That was all. I’ve given it you just as it happened, word for word. I’d hate to have an Australian have it in for me for anything I’d done to his friend. Mark you, I don’t say there’s anything wrong with you Australians, Brother Orton. I only say they ain’t like us or any one else that I know.’

‘Well, do you want us to be?’ said Orton.

‘No, no. It takes all sorts to make a world, as the sayin’ is. And now’—Bevin pulled out his gold watch—‘if I don’t make a move of it I’ll miss my last train.’

‘Let her go,’ said Orton serenely. ‘You’ve done some lorry-hoppin’ in your time, haven’t you—Sergeant?’

‘When I was two an’ a half stone lighter, Digger,’ Bevin smiled in reply.

‘Well, I’ll run you out home before sun-up. I’m a haulage-contractor now—London and Oxford. There’s an empty of mine ordered to Oxford. We can go round by your place as easy as not. She’s lyin’ out Vauxhall-way.’

‘My Gord ! An’ see the sun rise again! ’Haven’t seen him since I can’t remember when,’ said Bevin, chuckling. ‘Oh, there was fun sometimes in Hell, wasn’t there, Australia?’; and again his hands went down to tighten the belt that was missing.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Oh, may’s well, I s’pose.’

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

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

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

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

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

‘Horrid,’ said the sergeant briefly.

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

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

The boys went out into the wet, walking swiftly.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

page 2

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

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

‘Kill him! Kill him!’ gasped Beetle.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Oh, stop jawin’ at me. I want——’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

page 3

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Crandall major—the Gunner?’ Perowne asked.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

page 4

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Dooce he did! When?’

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

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

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

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

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

‘Cheek! You’re only a day-boy.’

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

‘Ugh! ‘Shot if I would!’

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

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

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

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

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

page 5

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Shove a cold cleek down his neck.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Did you kill any one?’

‘Yes. Shouldn’t wonder. Good-night.’

page 6

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

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

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

‘Well, what?’

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

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

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

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

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

‘Then he’s a brave man.’

‘Would you funk it?’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

page 7

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

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

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

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

‘Gummy, what a glutton!’ Stalky whispered.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Good-bye. Thank you, sir. Good-bye.’

They shook hands.

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

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

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

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

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

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

page 1 of 4

WHEN that sloop known to have been in the West Indies trade for a century had been repaired by Mr. Randolph of Stephano’s Island, there arose between him and her owner, Mr. Gladstone Gallop, a deep-draught pilot, Admiral (retired) Lord Heatleigh, and Mr. Winter Vergil, R.N. (also retired), the question how she would best sail. This could only be settled on trial trips of the above Committee, ably assisted by Lil, Mr. Randolph’s mongrel fox-terrier, and, sometimes, the Commander of the H.M.S. Bulleana, who was the Admiral’s nephew.

Lil had been slid into a locker to keep dry till they reached easier water. The others lay aft watching the breadths of the all-coloured seas. Mr. Gallop at the tiller, which had replaced the wheel, said as little as possible, but condescended, before that company, to make his boat show off among the reefs and passages of coral where his business and delight lay.

Mr. Vergil, not for the first time, justified himself to the Commander for his handling of the great Parrot Problem, which has been told elsewhere. The Commander tactfully agreed with the main principle that—man, beast, or bird—discipline must be preserved in the Service; and that, so far, Mr. Vergil had done right in disrating, by cutting off her tail-feathers, Josephine, alias Jemmy Reader, the West African parrot . . . .

He himself had known a dog—his own dog, in fact—almost born, and altogether brought up, in a destroyer, who had not only been rated and disrated, but also re-rated and promoted, completely understanding the while what had happened, and why.

‘Come out and listen,’ said Mr. Randolph, reaching into the locker. ‘This’ll do you good.’ Lil came out, limp over his hand, and braced herself against the snap and jerk of a sudden rip which Mr. Gallop was cutting across. He had stood in to show the Admiral Gallop’s Island whose original grantees had freed their Carib slaves more than a hundred years ago. These had naturally taken their owners’ family name; so that now there were many Gallops—gentle, straight-haired men of substance and ancestry, with manners to match, and instinct, beyond all knowledge, of their home waters—from Panama, that is, to Pernambuco.

The Commander told a tale of an ancient destroyer on the China station which, with three others of equal seniority, had been hurried over to the East Coast of England when the Navy called up her veterans for the War. How Malachi—Michael, Mike, or Mickey—throve aboard the old Makee-do, on whose books he was rated as ‘Pup,’ and learned to climb oily steel ladders by hooking his fore-feet over the rungs. How he was used as a tippet round his master’s neck on the bridge of cold nights. How he had his own special area, on deck by the raft, sacred to his private concerns, and never did anything one hair’s-breadth outside it. How he possessed an officers’ steward of the name of Furze, his devoted champion and trumpeter through the little flotilla which worked together on convoy and escort duties in the North Sea. Then the wastage of war began to tell and . . . The Commander turned to the Admiral.

‘They dished me out a new Volunteer sub for First Lieutenant—a youngster of nineteen—with a hand on him like a ham and a voice like a pneumatic riveter, though he couldn’t pronounce “r” to save himself. I found him sitting on the wardroom table with his cap on, scratching his leg. He said to me, “Well, old top, and what’s the big idea for to-mowwow’s agony?” I told him—and a bit more. He wasn’t upset. He was really grateful for a hint how things were run on “big ships” as he called ’em. (Makee-do was three hundred ton, I think.) He’d served in Coastal Motor Boats retrieving corpses off the Cornish coast. He told me his skipper was a vet who called the swells “fuwwows” and thought he ought to keep between ’em. His name was Eustace Cyril Chidden; and his papa was a sugar-refiner . . . .’

Surprise was here expressed in various quarters; Mr. Winter Vergil adding a few remarks on the decadence of the New Navy.

‘No,’ said the Commander. ‘The “old top” business had nothing to do with it. He just didn’t know—that was all. But Mike took to him at once.

‘Well, we were booted out, one night later, on special duty. No marks or lights of course—raining, and confused seas. As soon as I’d made an offing, I ordered him to take the bridge. Cyril trots up, his boots greased, the complete N.O. Mike and I stood by in the chart-room. Pretty soon, he told off old Shide, our Torpedo Coxswain, for being a quarter-point off his course. (He was, too; but he wasn’t pleased.) A bit later, Cyril ships his steam-riveter voice and tells him he’s all over the card, and if he does it again he’ll be “welieved.” It went on like this the whole trick; Michael and me waiting for Shide to mutiny. When Shide came off, I asked him what he thought we’d drawn. “Either a dud or a diamond,” says Shide. “There’s no middle way with that muster.” That gave me the notion that Cyril might be worth kicking. So we all had a hack at him. He liked it. He did, indeed! He said it was so “intewesting” because Makee-do “steered like a witch,” and no one ever dreamed of trying to steer C.M.B.’s. They must have been bloody pirates in that trade, too. He was used to knocking men about to make ’em attend. He threatened a stay-maker’s apprentice (they were pushing all sorts of shore-muckings at us) for imitating his lisp. It was smoothed over, but the man made the most of it. He was a Bolshie before we knew what to call ’em. He kicked Michael once when he thought no one was looking, but Furze saw, and the blighter got his head cut on a hatch-coaming. That didn’t make him any sweeter.’

A twenty-thousand-ton liner, full of thirsty passengers, passed them on the horizon. Mr. Gallop gave her name and that of the pilot in charge, with some scandal as to her weakness at certain speeds and turns.

‘Not so good a sea-boat as her!’ He pointed at a square-faced tug—or but little larger—punching dazzle-white wedges out of indigo-blue. The Admiral stood up and pronounced her a North Sea mine-sweeper.

‘’Was. ’Ferry-boat now,’ said Mr. Gallop. ‘’Never been stopped by weather since ten years.’

The Commander shuddered aloud, as the old thing shovelled her way along. ‘But she sleeps dry,’ he said. ‘We lived in a foot of water. Our decks leaked like anything. We had to shore our bulkheads with broomsticks practically every other trip. Most of our people weren’t broke to the life, and it made ’em sticky. I had to tighten things up.’

The Admiral and Mr. Vergil nodded.

‘Then, one day, Chidden came to me and said there was some feeling on the lower deck because Mike was still rated as “Pup” after all his sea-time. He thought our people would like him being promoted to Dog. I asked who’d given ’em the notion. “Me,” says Cyril. “I think it’ll help de-louse ’em mowally.” Of course I instructed him to go to Hell and mind his own job. Then I notified that Mike was to be borne on the ship’s books as Able Dog Malachi. I was on the bridge when the watches were told of it. They cheered. Fo’c’sle afloat; galley-fire missing as usual; but they cheered. That’s the Lower Deck.’

Mr. Vergil rubbed hands in assent.

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‘Did Mike know, Mr. Randolph? He did. He used to sniff forrard to see what the men’s dinners were going to be. If he approved, he went and patronised ’em. If he didn’t, he came to the wardroom for sharks and Worcester sauce. He was a great free-fooder. But—the day he was promoted Dog—he trotted round all messes and threw his little weight about like an Admiral’s inspection—Uncle. (He wasn’t larger than Lil, there.) Next time we were in for boiler-clean, I got him a brass collar engraved with his name and rating. I swear it was the only bit of bright work in the North Sea all the War. They fought to polish it. Oh, Malachi was a great Able Dog, those days, but he never forgot his decencies . . . .’

Mr. Randolph here drew Lil’s attention to this.

‘Well, and then our Bolshie-bird oozed about saying that a ship where men were treated like dogs and vice versa was no catch. Quite true, if correct; but it spreads despondency and attracts the baser elements. You see?’

‘Anything’s an excuse when they are hanging in the wind,’ said Mr. Vergil. ‘And what might you have had for the standing-part of your tackle?’

‘You know as well as I do, Vergil. The old crowd—Gunner, Chief Engineer, Cook, Chief Stoker, and Torpedo Cox. But, no denyin’, we were hellish uncomfy. Those old thirty-knotters had no bows or freeboard to speak of, and no officers’ quarters. (Sleep with your Gunner’s socks in your mouth, and so on.) You remember ’em, sir?’ The Admiral did—when the century was young—and some pirate-hunting behind muddy islands. Mr. Gallop drank it in. His war experiences had ranged no further than the Falklands, which he had visited as one of the prize-crew of a German sailing-ship picked up Patagonia-way and sent south under charge of a modern sub-lieutenant who had not the haziest notion how to get the canvas off a barque in full career for vertical cliffs. He told the tale. Mr. Randolph, who had heard it before, brought out a meal sent by Mrs. Vergil. Mr. Gallop laid the sloop on a slant where she could look after herself while they ate. Lil earned her share by showing off her few small tricks.

‘Mongrels are always smartest,’ said Mr. Randolph half defiantly.

‘Don’t call ’em mongrels.’ The Commander tweaked Lil’s impudent little ear. ‘Mike was a bit that way. Call ’em “mixed.” There’s a difference.’

The tiger-lily flush inherited from his ancestors on the mainland flared a little through the brown of Mr. Gallop’s cheek. ‘Right,’ said he. ‘There’s a heap differ ’twixt mongrel and mixed.’

And in due time, so far as Time was on those beryl floors, they came back to the Commander’s tale.

It covered increasing discomforts and disgusts, varied by escapes from being blown out of water by their own side in fog; affairs with submarines; arguments with pig-headed convoy-captains, and endless toil to maintain Makee-do abreast of her work which the growing ignorance and lowering morale of the new drafts made harder.

‘The only one of us who kept his tail up was Able Dog Malachi. He was an asset, let alone being my tippet on watch. I used to button his front and hind legs into my coat, with two turns of my comforter over all. Did he like it? He had to. It was his station in action. But he had his enemies. I’ve told you what a refined person he was. Well, one day, a buzz went round that he had defiled His Majesty’s quarterdeck. Furze reported it to me, and, as he said, “Beggin’ your pardon, it might as well have been any of us, sir, as him.” I asked the little fellow what he had to say for himself; confronting him with the circumstantial evidence of course. He was very offended. I knew it by the way he stiffened next time I took him for tippet. Chidden was sure there had been some dirty work somewhere; but he thought a Court of Inquiry might do good and settle one or two other things that were loose in the ship. One party wanted Mike disrated on the evidence. They were the——’

‘I know ’em,’ sighed Mr. Vergil; his eyes piercing the years behind him. ‘The other lot wanted to find out the man who had tampered with the—the circumstantial evidence and pitch him into the ditch. At that particular time, we were escorting mine-sweepers—every one a bit jumpy. I saw what Chidden was driving at, but I wasn’t sure our crowd here were mariners enough to take the inquiry seriously. Chidden swore they were. He’d been through the Crystal Palace training himself. Then I said, “Make it so. I waive my rights as the dog’s owner. Discipline’s discipline, tell ’em; and it may be a counter-irritant.”

‘The trouble was there had been a fog, on the morning of the crime, that you couldn’t spit through; so no one had seen anything. Naturally, Mike sculled about as he pleased; but his regular routine—he slept with me and Chidden in the wardroom—was to take off from our stomachs about three bells in the morning watch (half-past five) and trot up topside to attend to himself in his own place. But the evidence, you see, was found near the bandstand—the after six-pounder; and accused was incapable of testifying on his own behalf . . . . Well, that Court of Inquiry had it up and down and thort-ships all the time we were covering the minesweepers. It was a foul area; rather too close to Fritz’s coast. We only drew seven feet, so we were more or less safe. Our supporting cruisers lay on the edge of the area. Fritz had messed that up months before, and lots of his warts—mines—had broke loose and were bobbing about; and then our specialists had swept it, and laid down areas of their own, and so on. Any other time all hands would have been looking out for loose mines. (They have horns that nod at you in a sickly-friendly-frisky way when they roll.) But, while Mike’s inquiry was on, all hands were too worked-up over it to spare an eye outboard . . . . Oh, Mike knew, Mr. Randolph. Make no mistake. He knew he was in for trouble. The Prosecution were too crafty for him. They stuck to the evidence—the locus in quo and so on . . . . Sentence? Disrating to Pup again, which carried loss of badge-of-rank—his collar. Furze took it off, and Mickey licked his hand and Furze wept like Peter . . . . Then Mickey hoicked himself up to the bridge to tell me about it, and I made much of him. He was a distressed little dog. You know how they snuffle and snuggle up when they feel hurt.’

Though the question was to Mr. Randolph, all hands answered it.

‘Then our people went to dinner with this crime on their consciences. Those who felt that way had got in on me through Michael.’

‘Why did you make ’em the chance?’ the Admiral demanded keenly.

‘To divide the sheep from the goats, sir. It was time. . . . Well, we were second in the line—How-come and Fan-kwai next astern and Hop-hell, our flagship, leading. Withers was our Senior Officer. We called him “Joss” because he was always so infernally lucky. It was flat calm with patches of fog, and our sweepers finished on time. While we were escorting ’em back to our cruisers, Joss picked up some wireless buzz about a submarine spotted from the air, surfacing over to the north-east-probably recharging. He detached How-come and Fan-kwai to go on with our sweepers, while him and me went-look-see. We dodged in and out of fog-patches—two-mile visibility one minute and blind as a bandage the next-then a bit of zincy sun like a photograph—and so on. Well, breaking out of one of these patches we saw a submarine recharging-hatches open, and a man on deck—not a mile off our port quarter. We swung to ram and, as he came broadside on to us, I saw Hop-hell slip a mouldie—fire a torpedo—at him, and my Gunner naturally followed suit. By the mercy o’ God, they both streaked ahead and astern him,

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because the chap on deck began waving an open brolly at us like an old maid hailing a bus. That fetched us up sliding on our tails, as you might say. Then he said, “What do you silly bastards think you’re doin’?” (He was Conolly, and some of his crowd had told us, ashore, that the brolly was his private code. That’s why we didn’t fire on sight, sir.—“Red” Conolly, not “Black.”) He told us he’d gone pretty close inshore on spec the night before and had been hunted a bit and had to lie doggo, and he’d heard three or four big ships go over him. He told us where that was, and we stood by till he’d finished recharging and we gave him his position and he sculled off. He said it was hellish thick over towards the coast, but there seemed to be something doing there. So we proceeded, on the tip Conolly gave us . . . . Oh, wait a minute! Joss’s Gunner prided himself on carrying all the silhouettes of Fritz’s navy in his fat head, and he had sworn that Conolly’s craft was the duplicate of some dam U-boat. Hence his shot. I believe Joss pretty well skinned him for it, but that didn’t alter the fact we’d only one mouldie apiece left to carry on with . . . .

‘Presently Joss fetched a sharp sheer to port, and I saw his bow-wave throw off something that looked like the horns of a mine; but they were only three or four hock bottles. We don’t drink hock much at sea.’

Mr. Randolph and Mr. Gallop smiled. There are few liquors that the inhabitants of Stephano’s Island do not know—bottled, barrelled, or quite loose.

The Commander continued.

‘Then Joss told me to come alongside and hold his hand, because he felt nervous.’

The Commander here explained how, with a proper arrangement of fenders, a trusty Torpedo Cox at the wheel, and not too much roll on, destroyers of certain types can run side by side close enough for their captains to talk even confidentially to each other. He ended, ‘We used to slam those old dowagers about like sampans.’

‘You youngsters always think you discovered navigation,’ said the Admiral. ‘Where did you steal your fenders from?’

‘That was Chidden’s pigeon in port, sir. He was the biggest thief bar three in the Service. C.M.B.’s are a bad school . . . . So, then, we proceeded—bridge to bridge—chinning all comfy. Joss said those hock bottles and the big ships walking over Conolly interested him strangely. It was shoaling and we more or less made out the set of the tide. We didn’t chuck anything overboard, though; and just about sunset in a clear patch we passed another covey of hock bottles. Mike spotted them first. He used to poke his little nose up under my chin if he thought I was missing anything. Then it got blind-thick, as Conolly said it would, and there was an ungodly amount of gibber on the wireless. Joss said it sounded like a Fritz tip-and-run raid somewhere and we might come in handy if the fog held. (You couldn’t see the deck from the bridge.) He said I’d better hand him over my surviving mouldie because he was going to slip ’em himself hence-forward, and back his own luck. My tubes were nothing to write home about, anyhow. So we passed the thing over, and proceeded. We cut down to bare steerage-way at last (you couldn’t see your hand before your face by then) and we listened. You listen better in fog.’

‘But it doesn’t give you your bearings,’ said Mr. Gallop earnestly.

‘True. Then you fancy you hear things—like we did. Then Mike began poking up under my chin again. He didn’t imagine things. I passed the word to Joss, and a minute or two after, we heard voices—they sounded miles away. Joss said, “That’s the hock-bottler. He’s hunting his home channel. I hope he’s too bothered to worry about us; but if this stuff lifts we’ll wish we were Conolly.” I buttoned Mike well in to me bosom and took an extra turn of my comforter round him, and those ghastly voices started again—up in the air this time, and all down my neck. Then something big went astern, both screws—then ahead dead slow—then shut off. Joss whispered, “He’s atop of us!” I said, “Not yet. Mike’s winding .. him to starboard!” The little chap had his head out of my comforter again, sniffin’ and poking my chin . . . . And then, by God! the blighter slid up behind us to starboard. We couldn’t see him. We felt him take what wind there was, and we smelt him—hot and sour. He was passing soundings to the bridge, by voice. I suppose he thought he was practically at home. Joss whispered, “Go ahead and cuddle him till you hear me yap. Then amuse him. I shall slip my second by the flare of his batteries while he’s trying to strafe you.” So he faded off to port and I went ahead slow—oh, perishing slow! Shide swore afterwards that he made out the loom of the brute’s stern just in time to save his starboard propeller. That was when my heart stopped working. Then I heard my port fenders squeak like wet cork along his side, and there we were cuddling the hock-bottler! If you lie close enough to anything big he can’t theoretically depress his guns enough to get you.’

Mr. Gallop smiled again. He had known that game played in miniature by a motor-launch off the Bahamas under the flaring bows of a foreign preventive boat.

‘. . . ’Funny to lie up against a big ship eaves-dropping that way. We could hear her fans and engine-room bells going, and some poor devil with a deuce of a cough. I don’t know how long it lasted, but, all that awful while, Fritz went on with his housekeeping overhead. I’d sent Shide aft to the relieving tackles—I had an idea the wheel might go—and put Chidden on the twelve-pounder on the bridge. My Gunner had the forward six-pounders, and I kept Makee-do cuddling our friend. Then I heard Joss yap once, and then the devil of a clang. He’d got his first shot home. We got in three rounds of the twelve, and the sixes cut into her naked skin at-oh, fifteen feet it must have been. Then we all dived aft. (My ewe-torpedo wouldn’t have been any use anyhow. The head would have hit her side before the tail was out of the tube.) She woke up and blazed off all starboard batteries, but she couldn’t depress to hit us. The blast of ’em was enough, though. It knocked us deaf and sick and silly. It pushed my bridge and the twelve-pounder over to starboard in a heap, like a set of fire-irons, and it opened up the top of the forward funnel and flared it out like a tulip. She put another salvo over us that winded us again. Mind you, we couldn’t hear that! We felt it. Then we were jarred sideways—a sort of cow-kick, and I thought it was finish. Then there was a sort of ripping woolly feel—not a noise—in the air, and I saw the haze of a big gun’s flash streaking up overhead at abou’ thirty degrees. It occurred to me that she was rolling away from us and it was time to stand clear. So we went astern a bit. And that haze was the only sight I got of her from first to last! . . . After a while, we felt about to take stock of the trouble. Our bridge-wreckage was listing us a good deal to starboard: the funnel spewed smoke all over the shop and some of the stays were cut; wireless smashed; compasses crazy of course; raft and all loose fittings lifted overboard; hatches and such-like strained or jammed and the deck leaking a shade more than usual. But no casualties. A few ratings cut and bruised by being chucked against things, and, of course, general bleeding from the nose and ears. But—funny thing—we all shook like palsy. That lasted longest. We all went about shouting and shaking. Shock, I suppose.’

‘And Mike?’ Mr. Randolph asked.

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‘Oh, he was all right. He had his teeth well into my comforter throughout. ’First thing after action, he hopped down to the wardroom and lapped up pints. Then he tried to dig the gas taste out of his mouth with his paws. Then he wanted to attend to himself, but he found all his private area gone west with the other unsecured gadgets. He was very indignant and told Furze about it. Furze bellows into my ear, “That’s proof it couldn’t have been him on the quarterdeck, sir, because, if ever any one was justified in being promiscuous, now would be the time. But ’e’s as dainty as a duchess.” . . . Laugh away!—It wasn’t any laughing matter for Don Miguel.’

‘—I beg his pardon! How did you settle his daintiness?’ said the Admiral.

‘I gave him special leave to be promiscuous, and just because I laughed he growled like a young tiger . . . . You mayn’t believe what comes next, but it’s fact. Five minutes later, the whole ship was going over Mike’s court-martial once again. They were digging out like beavers to repair damage, and chinning at the top of their voices. And a year—no—six months before, half of ’em were Crystal Palace naval exhibits!’

‘Same with shanghaied hands,’ said Mr. Gallop, putting her about with a nudge of his shoulder on the tiller and some almost imperceptible touch on a sheet. The wind was rising.

‘. . . I ran out of that fog at last like running out of a tunnel. I worked my way off shore, more or less by soundings, till I picked up a star to go home by. Arguin’ that Joss ’ud do about the same, I waited for him while we went on cutting away what was left of the bridge and restaying the funnel. It was flat calm still; the coast-fog lying all along like cliffs as far as you could see. ’Dramatic, too, because, when the light came, Joss shot out of the fog three or four miles away and hared down to us clearing his hawsers for a tow. We did look rather a dung-barge. I signalled we were all right and good for thirteen knots, which was one dam lie . . . . Well . . . so then we proceeded line-ahead, and Joss sat on his depth-charge-rack aft, semaphoring all about it to me on my fo’c’sle-head. He had landed the hock-bottler to port with his first shot. His second—it touched off her forward magazine—was my borrowed one; but he reported it as “a torpedo from the deck of my Second in Command!” She was showing a blaze through the fog then, so it was a sitting shot—at about a hundred yards, he thought. He never saw any more of her than I did, but he smelt a lot of burnt cork. She might have been some old craft packed with cork like a life-boat for a tip-and-run raid. We never knew.’

Even in that short time the wind and the purpose of the waves had strengthened.

‘All right,’ said Mr. Gallop. ‘Nothin’ due ’fore to-morrow.’ But Mr. Randolph, under sailing-orders from Mrs. Vergil, had the oilskins out ere the sloop lay down to it in earnest. ‘Then—after that?’ said he.

‘Well, then we proceeded; Joss flag-wagging me his news, and all hands busy on our funnel and minor running-repairs, but all arguin’ Mike’s case hotter than ever. And all of us shaking.’

‘Where was Mike?’ Mr. Randolph asked as a cut wave-top slashed across the deck.

‘Doing tippet for me on the fo’c’sle, and telling me about his great deeds. He never barked, but he could chin like a Peke. Then Joss changed course. I thought it might be mines, but having no bridge I had no command of sight. Then we passed a torpedo-bearded man lolling in a life-belt, with his head on his arms, squinting at us—like a drunk at a pub . . . . Dead? Quite. . . . You never can tell how the lower deck’ll take anything. They stared at it and our Cook said it looked saucy. That was all. Then Furze screeched: “But for the grace o’ God that might be bloody-all of us!” And he carried on with that bit of the Marriage Service—“I ree-quire an’ charge you as ye shall answer at the Day of Judgment, which blinkin’ hound of you tampered with the evidence re Malachi. Remember that beggar out in the wet is listenin’.” ’Sounds silly, but it gave me the creeps at the time. I heard the Bolshie say that a joke was a joke if took in the right spirit. Then there was a bit of a mix-up round the funnel, but of course I was busy swapping yarns with Joss. When I went aft—I didn’t hurry—our Chief Stoker was standing over Furze, while Chidden and Shide were fending off a small crowd who were lusting for the Bolshie’s blood. (He had a punch, too, Cywil.) It looked to me—but I couldn’t have sworn to it—that the Chief Stoker scraped up a knife with his foot and hoofed it overboard.’

‘Knife!’ the shocked Admiral interrupted.

‘A wardroom knife, sir, with a ground edge on it. Furze had been a Leicester Square waiter or pimp or something, for ten years, and he’d contracted foreign habits. By the time I took care to reach the working-party, they were carrying on like marionettes, because they hadn’t got over their shakes, you see . . . . I didn’t do anything. I didn’t expect the two men Chidden had biffed ’ud complain of him as long as the Bolshie was alive; and our Chief Stoker had mopped up any awkward evidence against Furze. All things considered, I felt rather sorry for the Bolshie . . . . Chidden came to me in the wardroom afterwards, and said the man had asked to be “segwegated” for his own safety. Oh yes!—he’d owned up to tampering with the evidence. I said I couldn’t well crime the swine for blackening a dog’s character; but I’d reinstate and promote Michael, and the lower deck might draw their own conclusions. “Then they’ll kill the Bolshie,” says the young ’un. “No,” I said, “C.M.B.’s don’t know everything, Cywil. They’ll put the fear of death on him, but they won’t scupper him. What’s he doing now?” “Weconstwucting Mike’s pwivate awea, with Shide and Furze standing over him gwinding their teeth.” “Then he’s safe,” I said. “I’ll send Mike up to see if it suits him. But what about Dawkins and Pratt?” Those were the two men Cyril had laid out while the Chief Stoker was quenching the engine-room ratings. They didn’t love the Bolshie either. “Full of beans and blackmail!” he says. “I told ’em I’d saved ’em fwom being hung, but they want a sardine-supper for all hands when we get in.”’

‘But what’s a Chief Stoker doin’ on the upper deck?’ said Mr. Vergil peevishly, as he humped his back against a solid douche.

‘Preserving discipline. Ours could mend anything from the wardroom clock to the stove, and he’d make a sailor of anything on legs—same as you used to, Mr. Vergil. . . . Well, and so we proceeded, and when Chidden reported the “awea” fit for use I sent Mike up to test it.’

‘Did Mike know?’ said Mr. Randolph.

‘Don’t ask me what he did or didn’t, or you might call me a liar. The Bolshie apologised to Malachi publicly, after Chidden gave out that I’d promoted him to Warrant Dog “for conspicuous gallantwy in action and giving valuable information as to enemy’s whaiwabouts in course of same.” So Furze put his collar on again, and gave the Bolshie his name and rating.’

The Commander quoted it—self-explanatory indeed, but not such as the meanest in His Majesty’s Service would care to answer to even for one day.

‘It went through the whole flotilla.’ The Commander repeated it, while the others laughed those gross laughs women find so incomprehensible.

‘Did he stay on?’ said Mr. Vergil. ‘Because I knew a stoker in the old Minotaur who cut his throat for half as much as that. It takes ’em funny sometimes.’

‘He stayed with us all right; but he experienced a change of heart, Mr. Vergil.’

‘I’ve seen such in my time,’ said the Ancient.

The Admiral nodded to himself. Mr. Gallop at the tiller half rose as he peered under the foresail, preparatory to taking a short-cut where the coral gives no more second chance than a tiger’s paw. In half an hour they were through that channel. In an hour, they had passed the huge liner tied up and discharging her thirsty passengers opposite the liquor-shops that face the quay. Some, who could not suffer the four and a half minutes’ walk to the nearest hotel, had already run in and come out tearing the wrappings off the whisky bottles they had bought. Mr. Gallop held on to the bottom of the harbour and fetched up with a sliding curtsey beneath the mangroves by the boat-shed . . . .

‘I don’t know whether I’ve given you quite the right idea about my people,’ said the Commander at the end. ‘I used to tell ’em they were the foulest collection of sweeps ever forked up on the beach. In some ways they were. But I don’t want you to make any mistake. When it came to a pinch they were the salt of the earth—the very salt of God’s earth—blast ’em and bless ’em. Not that it matters much now. We’ve got no Navy.’

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IT WAS almost the end of their visit to the seaside. They had turned themselves out of doors while their trunks were being packed, and strolled over the Downs towards the dull evening sea. The tide was dead low under the chalk cliffs, and the little wrinkled waves grieved along the sands up the coast to Newhaven and down the coast to long, grey Brighton, whose smoke trailed out across the Channel.

They walked to The Gap, where the cliff is only a few feet high. A windlass for hoisting shingle from the beach below stands at the edge of it. The Coastguard cottages are a little farther on, and an old ship’s figurehead of a Turk in a turban stared at them over the wall.

‘This time tomorrow we shall be at home, thank goodness,’ said Una. ‘I hate the sea!’

‘I believe it’s all right in the middle,’ said Dan. ‘The edges are the sorrowful parts.’

Cordery, the coastguard, came out of the cottage, levelled his telescope at some fishing-boats, shut it with a click and walked away. He grew smaller and smaller along the edge of the cliff, where neat piles of white chalk every few yards show the path even on the darkest night.

‘Where’s Cordery going?’ said Una.

‘Half-way to Newhaven,’ said Dan. ‘Then he’ll meet the Newhaven coastguard and turn back. He says if coastguards were done away with, smuggling would start up at once.’

A voice on the beach under the cliff began to sing:

Feet scrabbled on the flinty path. A dark, thin-faced man in very neat brown clothes and broad-toed shoes came up, followed by Puck.

‘Hssh!’ said Puck. ‘You’ll shock these nice young people.’

‘Oh! Shall I? Mille pardons!’ He shrugged his shoulders almost up to his ears—spread his hands abroad, and jabbered in French. ‘No comprenny?’ he said. ‘I’ll give it you in Low German.’ And he went off in another language, changing his voice and manner so completely that they hardly knew him for the same person. But his dark beady-brown eyes still twinkled merrily in his lean face, and the children felt that they did not suit the straight, plain, snuffy-brown coat, brown knee-breeches, and broad-brimmed hat. His hair was tied in a short pigtail which danced wickedly when he turned his head.

‘Ha’ done!’ said Puck, laughing. ‘Be one thing or t’other, Pharaoh—French or English or German—no great odds which.’

‘Oh, but it is, though,’ said Una quickly. ‘We haven’t begun German yet, and—and we’re going back to our French next week.’

‘Aren’t you English?’ said Dan. ‘We heard you singing just now.’

‘Aha! That was the Sussex side o’ me. Dad he married a French girl out o’ Boulogne, and French she stayed till her dyin’ day. She was an Aurette, of course. We Lees mostly marry Aurettes. Haven’t you ever come across the saying:

‘Then, are you a smuggler?’ Una cried; and, ‘Have you smuggled much?’ said Dan.

Mr Lee nodded solemnly.

‘Mind you,’ said he, ‘I don’t uphold smuggling for the generality o’ mankind—mostly they can’t make a do of it—but I was brought up to the trade, d’ye see, in a lawful line o’ descent on’—he waved across the Channel—‘on both sides the water. ’Twas all in the families, same as fiddling. The Aurettes used mostly to run the stuff across from Boulogne, and we Lees landed it here and ran it up to London Town, by the safest road.’

‘Then where did you live?’ said Una.

‘You mustn’t ever live too close to your business in our trade. We kept our little fishing smack at Shoreham, but otherwise we Lees was all honest cottager folk—at Warminghurst under Washington—Bramber way—on the old Penn estate.’

‘Ah!’ said Puck, squatted by the windlass. ‘I remember a piece about the Lees at Warminghurst, I do:

I reckon that’s truth, Pharaoh.’

Pharaoh laughed. ‘Admettin’ that’s true,’ he said, ‘my gipsy blood must be wore pretty thin, for I’ve made and kept a worldly fortune.’

‘By smuggling?’ Dan asked.

‘No, in the tobacco trade.’

‘You don’t mean to say you gave up smuggling just to go and be a tobacconist!’ Dan looked so disappointed they all had to laugh.

‘I’m sorry; but there’s all sorts of tobacconists,’ Pharaoh replied. ‘How far out, now, would you call that smack with the patch on her foresail?’ He pointed to the fishing-boats.

‘A scant mile,’ said Puck after a quick look.

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‘Just about. It’s seven fathom under her—clean sand. That was where Uncle Aurette used to sink his brandy kegs from Boulogne, and we fished ’em up and rowed ’em into The Gap here for the ponies to run inland. One thickish night in January of ’Ninety-three, Dad and Uncle Lot and me came over from Shoreham in the smack, and we found Uncle Aurette and the L’Estranges, my cousins, waiting for us in their lugger with New Year’s presents from Mother’s folk in Boulogne. I remember Aunt Cecile she’d sent me a fine new red knitted cap, which I put on then and there, for the French was having their Revolution in those days, and red caps was all the fashion. Uncle Aurette tells us that they had cut off their King Louis’ head, and, moreover, the Brest forts had fired on an English man-o’-war. The news wasn’t a week old.

‘“That means war again, when we was only just getting used to the peace,” says Dad. “Why can’t King George’s men and King Louis’ men do on their uniforms and fight it out over our heads?”

‘“Me too, I wish that,” says Uncle Aurette. “But they’ll be pressing better men than themselves to fight for ’em. The press-gangs are out already on our side. You look out for yours.”

‘“I’ll have to bide ashore and grow cabbages for a while, after I’ve run this cargo; but I do wish”—Dad says, going over the lugger’s side with our New Year presents under his arm and young L’Estrange holding the lantern—“I just do wish that those folk which make war so easy had to run one cargo a month all this winter. It ’ud show ’em what honest work means.”

‘“Well, I’ve warned ye,” says Uncle Aurette. “I’ll be slipping off now before your Revenue cutter comes. Give my love to Sister and take care o’ the kegs. It’s thicking to southward.” ‘I remember him waving to us and young Stephen L’Estrange blowing out the lantern. By the time we’d fished up the kegs the fog came down so thick Dad judged it risky for me to row ’em ashore, even though we could hear the ponies stamping on the beach. So he and Uncle Lot took the dinghy and left me in the smack playing on my fiddle to guide ’em back.

‘Presently I heard guns. Two of ’em sounded mighty like Uncle Aurette’s three-pounders. He didn’t go naked about the seas after dark. Then come more, which I reckoned was Captain Giddens in the Revenue cutter. He was open-handed with his compliments, but he would lay his guns himself. I stopped fiddling to listen, and I heard a whole skyful o’ French up in the fog—and a high bow come down on top o’ the smack. I hadn’t time to call or think. I remember the smack heeling over, and me standing on the gunwale pushing against the ship’s side as if I hoped to bear her off. Then the square of an open port, with a lantern in it, slid by in front of my nose. I kicked back on our gunwale as it went under and slipped through that port into the French ship—me and my fiddle.’

‘Gracious!’ said Una. ‘What an adventure!’

‘Didn’t anybody see you come in?’ said Dan.

‘There wasn’t any one there. I’d made use of an orlop-deck port—that’s the next deck below the gun-deck, which by rights should not have been open at all. The crew was standing by their guns up above. I rolled on to a pile of dunnage in the dark and I went to sleep. When I woke, men was talking all round me, telling each other their names and sorrows just like Dad told me pressed men used to talk in the last war. Pretty soon I made out they’d all been hove aboard together by the press-gangs, and left to sort ’emselves. The ship she was the Embuscade, a thirty-six-gun Republican frigate, Captain Jean Baptiste Bompard, two days out of Le Havre, going to the United States with a Republican French Ambassador of the name of Genet. They had been up all night clearing for action on account of hearing guns in the fog. Uncle Aurette and Captain Giddens must have been passing the time o’ day with each other off Newhaven, and the frigate had drifted past ’em. She never knew she’d run down our smack. Seeing so many aboard was total strangers to each other, I thought one more mightn’t be noticed; so I put Aunt Cecile’s red cap on the back of my head, and my hands in my pockets like the rest, and, as we French say, I circulated till I found the galley.

‘“What! Here’s one of ’em that isn’t sick!” says a cook. “Take his breakfast to Citizen Bompard.”

‘I carried the tray to the cabin, but I didn’t call this Bompard “Citizen.” Oh no! “Mon Capitaine” was my little word, same as Uncle Aurette used to answer in King Louis’ Navy. Bompard, he liked it. He took me on for cabin servant, and after that no one asked questions; and thus I got good victuals and light work all the way across to America. He talked a heap of politics, and so did his officers, and when this Ambassador Genet got rid of his land-stomach and laid down the law after dinner, a rooks’ parliament was nothing compared to their cabin. I learned to know most of the men which had worked the French Revolution, through waiting at table and hearing talk about ’em. One of our forecas’le six-pounders was called Danton and t’other Marat. I used to play the fiddle between ’em, sitting on the capstan. Day in and day out Bompard and Monsieur Genet talked o’ what France had done, and how the United States was going to join her to finish off the English in this war. Monsieur Genet said he’d justabout make the United States fight for France. He was a rude common man. But I liked listening. I always helped drink any healths that was proposed—specially Citizen Danton’s who’d cut off King Louis’ head. An all-Englishman might have been shocked—but that’s where my French blood saved me.

‘It didn’t save me from getting a dose of ship’s fever though, the week before we put Monsieur Genet ashore at Charleston; and what was left of me after bleeding and pills took the dumb horrors from living ’tween decks. The surgeon, Karaguen his name was, kept me down there to help him with his plasters—I was too weak to wait on Bompard. I don’t remember much of any account for the next few weeks, till I smelled lilacs, and I looked out of the port, and we was moored to a wharf-edge and there was a town o’ fine gardens and red-brick houses and all the green leaves o’ God’s world waiting for me outside.

‘“What’s this?” I said to the sick-bay man—Old Pierre Tiphaigne he was. “Philadelphia,” says Pierre. “You’ve missed it all. We’re sailing next week. “

‘I just turned round and cried for longing to be amongst the laylocks.

‘“If that’s your trouble,” says old Pierre, “you go straight ashore. None’ll hinder you. They’re all gone mad on these coasts—French and American together. ’Tisn’t my notion o’ war.” Pierre was an old King Louis man.

‘My legs was pretty tottly, but I made shift to go on deck, which it was like a fair. The frigate was crowded with fine gentlemen and ladies pouring in and out. They sung and they waved French flags, while Captain Bompard and his officers—yes, and some of the men—speechified to all and sundry about war with England. They shouted, “Down with England!”—“Down with Washington!”—“Hurrah for France and the Republic!” I couldn’t make sense of it. I wanted to get out from that crunch of swords and petticoats and sit in a field. One of the gentlemen said to me, “Is that a genuine cap o’ Liberty you’re wearing?” ’Twas Aunt Cecile’s red one, and pretty near wore out. “Oh yes!” I says, “straight from France.” “I’ll give you a shilling for it,” he says, and with that money in my hand and my fiddle under my arm I squeezed past the entry-port and went ashore. It was like a dream—meadows, trees, flowers, birds, houses, and people all different! I sat me down in a meadow and fiddled a bit, and then I went in and out the streets, looking and smelling and touching, like a little dog at a fair. Fine folk was setting on the white stone

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doorsteps of their houses, and a girl threw me a handful of laylock sprays, and when I said “Merci” without thinking, she said she loved the French. They all was the fashion in the city. I saw more tricolour flags in Philadelphia than ever I’d seen in Boulogne, and every one was shouting for war with England. A crowd o’ folk was cheering after our French Ambassador—that same Monsieur Genet which we’d left at Charleston. He was a-horseback behaving as if the place belonged to him—and commanding all and sundry to fight the British. But I’d heard that before. I got into a long straight street as wide as the Broyle, where gentlemen was racing horses. I’m fond o’ horses. Nobody hindered ’em, and a man told me it was called Race Street o’ purpose for that. Then I followed some blacks, which I’d never seen close before; but I left them to run after a great, proud, copper-faced man with feathers in his hair and a red blanket trailing behind him. A man told me he was a real Red Indian called Red Jacket, and I followed him into an alley-way off Race Street by Second Street, where there was a fiddle playing. I’m fond o’ fiddling. The Indian stopped at a baker’s shop—Conrad Gerhard’s it was—and bought some sugary cakes. Hearing what the price was I was going to have some too, but the Indian asked me in English if I was hungry. “Oh yes!” I says. I must have looked a sore scrattel. He opens a door on to a staircase and leads the way up. We walked into a dirty little room full of flutes and fiddles and a fat man fiddling by the window, in a smell of cheese and medicines fit to knock you down. I was knocked down too, for the fat man jumped up and hit me a smack in the face. I fell against an old spinet covered with pill-boxes and the pills rolled about the floor. The Indian never moved an eyelid.

‘“Pick up the pills! Pick up the pills!” the fat man screeches.

‘I started picking ’em up—hundreds of ’em—meaning to run out under the Indian’s arm, but I came on giddy all over and I sat down. The fat man went back to his fiddling.

‘“Toby!” says the Indian after quite a while. “I brought the boy to be fed, not hit.”

‘“What?” says Toby, “I thought it was Gert Schwankfelder.” He put down his fiddle and took a good look at me. “Himmel!” he says. “I have hit the wrong boy. It is not the new boy. Why are you not the new boy? Why are you not Gert Schwankfelder?”

‘“I don’t know,” I said. “The gentleman in the pink blanket brought me.”

‘Says the Indian, “He is hungry, Toby. Christians always feed the hungry. So I bring him.”

‘“You should have said that first,” said Toby. He pushed plates at me and the Indian put bread and pork on them, and a glass of Madeira wine. I told him I was off the French ship, which I had joined on account of my mother being French. That was true enough when you think of it, and besides I saw that the French was all the fashion in Philadelphia. Toby and the Indian whispered and I went on picking up the pills.

‘“You like pills—eh?” says Toby. ‘“No,” I says. “I’ve seen our ship’s doctor roll too many of ’em.”’

‘“Ho!” he says, and he shoves two bottles at me. “What’s those?”

‘“Calomel,” I says. “And t’other’s senna.”’

‘“Right,” he says. “One week have I tried to teach Gert Schwankfelder the difference between them, yet he cannot tell. You like to fiddle?” he says. He’d just seen my kit on the floor.

‘“Oh yes!” says I,

‘“Oho!” he says. “What note is this?” drawing his bow across.

‘He meant it for A, so I told him it was.’

‘“My brother,” he says to the Indian. “I think this is the hand of Providence! I warned that Gert if he went to play upon the wharves any more he would hear from me. Now look at this boy and say what you think.”

‘The Indian looked me over whole minutes—there was a musical clock on the wall and dolls came out and hopped while the hour struck. He looked me over all the while they did it.

‘“Good,” he says at last. “This boy is good.”

‘“Good, then,” says Toby. “Now I shall play my fiddle and you shall sing your hymn, brother. Boy, go down to the bakery and tell them you are young Gert Schwankfelder that was. The horses are in Davy Jones’s locker. If you ask any questions you shall hear from me.”

‘I left ’em singing hymns and I went down to old Conrad Gerhard. He wasn’t at all surprised when I told him I was young Gert Schwankfelder that was. He knew Toby. His wife she walked me into the back-yard without a word, and she washed me and she cut my hair to the edge of a basin, and she put me to bed, and oh! how I slept—how I slept in that little room behind the oven looking on the flower garden! I didn’t know Toby went to the Embuscade that night and bought me off Dr Karaguen for twelve dollars and a dozen bottles of Seneca Oil. Karaguen wanted a new lace to his coat, and he reckoned I hadn’t long to live; so he put me down as “discharged sick.”

‘I like Toby,’ said Una.

‘Who was he?’ said Puck.

‘Apothecary Tobias Hirte,’ Pharaoh replied. ‘One Hundred and Eighteen, Second Street—the famous Seneca Oil man, that lived half of every year among the Indians. But let me tell my tale my own way, same as his brown mare used to go to Lebanon.’

‘Then why did he keep her in Davy Jones’s locker?’ Dan asked.

‘That was his joke. He kept her under David Jones’s hat shop in the “Buck” tavern yard, and his Indian friends kept their ponies there when they visited him. I looked after the horses when I wasn’t rolling pills on top of the old spinet, while he played his fiddle and Red Jacket sang hymns. I liked it. I had good victuals, light work, a suit o’ clean clothes, a plenty music, and quiet, smiling German folk all around that let me sit in their gardens. My first Sunday, Toby took me to his church in Moravian Alley; and that was in a garden too. The women wore long-eared caps and handkerchiefs. They came in at one door and the men at another, and there was a brass chandelier you could see your face in, and a boy to blow the organ bellows. I carried Toby’s fiddle, and he played pretty much as he chose all against the organ and the singing. He was the only one they let do it, for they was a simple-minded folk. They used to wash each other’s feet up in the attic to keep ’emselves humble: which Lord knows they didn’t need.’

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‘How very queer!’ said Una.

Pharaoh’s eyes twinkled. ‘I’ve met many and seen much,’ he said; ‘but I haven’t yet found any better or quieter or forbearinger people than the Brethren and Sistern of the Moravian Church in Philadelphia. Nor will I ever forget my first Sunday—the service was in English that week—with the smell of the flowers coming in from Pastor Meder’s garden where the big peach tree is, and me looking at all the clean strangeness and thinking of ’tween decks on the Embuscade only six days ago. Being a boy, it seemed to me it had lasted for ever, and was going on for ever. But I didn’t know Toby then. As soon as the dancing clock struck midnight that Sunday—I was lying under the spinet—I heard Toby’s fiddle. He’d just done his supper, which he always took late and heavy. “Gert,” says he, “get the horses. Liberty and Independence for Ever! The flowers appear upon the earth, and the time of the singing of birds is come. We are going to my country seat in Lebanon.”

‘I rubbed my eyes, and fetched ’em out of the “Buck” stables. Red Jacket was there saddling his, and when I’d packed the saddle-bags we three rode up Race Street to the Ferry by starlight. So we went travelling. It’s a kindly, softly country there, back of Philadelphia among the German towns, Lancaster way. Little houses and bursting big barns, fat cattle, fat women, and all as peaceful as Heaven might be if they farmed there. Toby sold medicines out of his saddlebags, and gave the French war-news to folk along the roads. Him and his long-hilted umberella was as well known as the stage-coaches. He took orders for that famous Seneca Oil which he had the secret of from Red Jacket’s Indians, and he slept in friends’ farmhouses, but he would shut all the windows; so Red Jacket and me slept outside. There’s nothing to hurt except snakes—and they slip away quick enough if you thrash in the bushes.’

‘I’d have liked that!’ said Dan.

‘I’d no fault to find with those days. In the cool o’ the morning the cat-bird sings. He’s something to listen to. And there’s a smell of wild grape-vine growing in damp hollows which you drop into, after long rides in the heat, which is beyond compare for sweetness. So’s the puffs out of the pine woods of afternoons. Come sundown, the frogs strike up, and later on the fireflies dance in the corn. Oh me, the fireflies in the corn! We were a week or ten days on the road, tacking from one place to another—such as Lancaster, Bethlehem-Ephrata—“thou Bethlehem-Ephrata.” No odds—I loved the going about. And so we jogged into dozy little Lebanon by the Blue Mountains, where Toby had a cottage and a garden of all fruits. He come north every year for this wonderful Seneca Oil the Seneca Indians made for him. They’d never sell to any one else, and he doctored ’em with von Swieten pills, which they valued more than their own oil. He could do what he chose with them, and, of course, he tried to make them Moravians. The Senecas are a seemly, quiet people, and they’d had trouble enough from white men—American and English—during the wars, to keep ’em in that walk. They lived on a Reservation by themselves away off by their lake. Toby took me up there, and they treated me as if I was their own blood brother. Red Jacket said the mark of my bare feet in the dust was just like an Indian’s and my style of walking was similar. I know I took to their ways all over.’

‘Maybe the gipsy drop in your blood helped you?’ said Puck.

‘Sometimes I think it did,’ Pharaoh went on. ‘Anyhow, Red Jacket and Cornplanter, the other Seneca chief, they let me be adopted into the tribe. It’s only a compliment, of course, but Toby was angry when I showed up with my face painted. They gave me a side-name which means “Two Tongues”, because, d’ye see, I talked French and English.

‘They had their own opinions (I’ve heard ’em) about the French and the English, and the Americans. They’d suffered from all of ’em during the wars, and they only wished to be left alone. But they thought a heap of the President of the United States. Cornplanter had had dealings with him in some French wars out West when General Washington was only a lad. His being President afterwards made no odds to ’em. They always called him Big Hand, for he was a large-fisted man, and he was all of their notion of a white chief. Cornplanter ’ud sweep his blanket round him, and after I’d filled his pipe he’d begin—“In the old days, long ago, when braves were many and blankets were few, Big Hand said—” If Red Jacket agreed to the say-so he’d trickle a little smoke out of the corners of his mouth. If he didn’t, he’d blow through his nostrils. Then Cornplanter ’ud stop and Red Jacket ’ud take on. Red Jacket was the better talker of the two. I’ve laid and listened to ’em for hours. Oh! they knew General Washington well. Cornplanter used to meet him at Epply’s—the great dancing-place in the city before District Marshal William Nichols bought it. They told me he was always glad to see ’em, and he’d hear ’em out to the end if they had anything on their minds. They had a good deal in those days. I came at it by degrees, after I was adopted into the tribe. The talk up in Lebanon and everywhere else that summer was about the French war with England and whether the United States ’ud join in with France or make a peace treaty with England. Toby wanted peace so as he could go about the Reservation buying his oils. But most of the white men wished for war, and they was angry because the President wouldn’t give the sign for it. The newspaper said men was burning Guy Fawkes images of General Washington and yelling after him in the streets of Philadelphia. You’d have been astonished what those two fine old chiefs knew of the ins and outs of such matters. The little I’ve learned of politics I picked up from Cornplanter and Red Jacket on the Reservation. Toby used to read the Aurora newspaper. He was what they call a “Democrat,” though our Church is against the Brethren concerning themselves with politics.’

‘I hate politics, too,’ said Una, and Pharaoh laughed.

‘I might ha’ guessed it,’ he said. ‘But here’s something that isn’t politics. One hot evening late in August, Toby was reading the newspaper on the stoop and Red Jacket was smoking under a peach tree and I was fiddling. Of a sudden Toby drops his Aurora.

‘“I am an oldish man, too fond of my own comforts,” he says. “I will go to the Church which is in Philadelphia. My brother, lend me a spare pony. I must be there tomorrow night.”

‘“Good!” says Red Jacket, looking at the sun. “My brother shall be there. I will ride with him and bring back the ponies.

‘I went to pack the saddle-bags. Toby had cured me of asking questions. He stopped my fiddling if I did. Besides, Indians don’t ask questions much and I wanted to be like ’em.

‘When the horses were ready I jumped up.

‘“Get off,” says Toby. “Stay and mind the cottage till I come back. The Lord has laid this on me, not on you. I wish He hadn’t.”

‘He powders off down the Lancaster road, and I sat on the doorstep wondering after him. When I picked up the paper to wrap his fiddle-strings in, I spelled out a piece about the yellow fever being in Philadelphia so dreadful every one was running away. I was scared, for I was fond of Toby. We never said much to each other, but we fiddled together, and music’s as good as talking to them that understand.’

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‘Did Toby die of yellow fever?’ Una asked.

‘Not him! There’s justice left in the world still. He went down to the City and bled ’em well again in heaps. He sent back word by Red Jacket that, if there was war or he died, I was to bring the oils along to the City, but till then I was to go on working in the garden and Red Jacket was to see me do it. Down at heart all Indians reckon digging a squaw’s business, and neither him nor Cornplanter, when he relieved watch, was a hard task-master. We hired a boy to do our work, and a lazy grinning runagate he was. When I found Toby didn’t die the minute he reached town, why, boylike, I took him off my mind and went with my Indians again. Oh! those days up north at Canasedago, running races and gambling with the Senecas, or bee-hunting in the woods, or fishing in the lake.’ Pharaoh sighed and looked across the water. ‘But it’s best,’ he went on suddenly, ‘after the first frosts. You roll out o’ your blanket and find every leaf left green over night turned red and yellow, not by trees at a time, but hundreds and hundreds of miles of ’em, like sunsets splattered upside down. On one of such days—the maples was flaming scarlet and gold, and the sumach bushes were redder—Cornplanter and Red Jacket came out in full war-dress, making the very leaves look silly: feathered war-bonnets, yellow doeskin leggings, fringed and tasselled, red horse-blankets, and their bridles feathered and shelled and beaded no bounds. I thought it was war against the British till I saw their faces weren’t painted, and they only carried wrist-whips. Then I hummed “Yankee Doodle” at ’em. They told me they was going to visit Big Hand and find out for sure whether he meant to join the French in fighting the English or make a peace treaty with England. I reckon those two would ha’ gone out on the war-path at a nod from Big Hand, but they knew well, if there was war ’twixt England and the United States, their tribe ’ud catch it from both parties same as in all the other wars. They asked me to come along and hold the ponies. That puzzled me, because they always put their ponies up at the “Buck” or Epply’s when they went to see General Washington in the city.  Besides, I wasn’t exactly dressed for it.’

‘D’you mean you were dressed like an Indian?’ Dan demanded.

Pharaoh looked a little abashed. ‘This didn’t happen at Lebanon,’ he said, ‘but a bit farther north, on the Reservation; and at that particular moment of time, so far as blanket, hair-band, moccasins, and sunburn went, there wasn’t much odds ’twix’ me and a young Seneca buck. You may laugh’—he smoothed down his long-skirted brown coat—‘but I told you I took to their ways all over. I said nothing, though I was bursting to let out the war-whoop like the young men had taught me.’

‘No, and you don’t let out one here, either,’ said Puck before Dan could ask. ‘Go on, Brother Square-toes.’

‘We went on.’ Pharaoh’s narrow dark eyes gleamed and danced. ‘We went on—forty, fifty miles a day, for days on end—we three braves. And how a great tall Indian a-horse-back can carry his war-bonnet at a canter through thick timber without brushing a feather beats me! My silly head was banged often enough by low branches, but they slipped through like running elk. We had evening hymn-singing every night after they’d blown their pipe-smoke to the quarters of heaven. Where did we go? I’ll tell you, but don’t blame me if you’re no wiser. We took the old war-trail from the end of the Lake along the East Susquehanna through the Nantego country, right down to Fort Shamokin on the Senachse river. We crossed the Juniata by Fort Granville, got into Shippensberg over the hills by the Ochwick trail, and then to Williams Ferry (it’s a bad one). From Williams Ferry, across the Shanedore, over the Blue Mountains, through Ashby’s Gap, and so south-east by south from there, till we found the President at the back of his own plantations. I’d hate to be trailed by Indians in earnest. They caught him like a partridge on a stump. After we’d left our ponies, we scouted forward through a woody piece, and, creeping slower and slower, at last if my moccasins even slipped Red Jacket ’ud turn and frown. I heard voices—Monsieur Genet’s for choice—long before I saw anything, and we pulled up at the edge of a clearing where some in grey-and-red liveries were holding horses, and half-a-dozen gentlemen—but one was Genet—were talking among felled timber. I fancy they’d come to see Genet a piece on his road, for his portmantle was with him. I hid in between two logs as near to the company as I be to that old windlass there. I didn’t need anybody to show me Big Hand. He stood up, very still, his legs a little apart, listening to Genet, that French Ambassador, which never had more manners than a Bosham tinker. Genet was as good as ordering him to declare war on England at once. I had heard that clack before on the Embuscade. He said he’d stir up the whole United States to have war with England, whether Big Hand liked it or not.

‘Big Hand heard him out to the last end. I looked behind me, and my two chiefs had vanished like smoke. Says Big Hand, “That is very forcibly put, Monsieur Genet -”

‘”Citizen—citizen!” the fellow spits in. “I, at least, am a Republican!”

“Citizen Genet,” he says, “you may be sure it will receive my fullest consideration.” This seemed to take Citizen Genet back a piece. He rode off grumbling, and never gave a penny. No gentleman!

‘The others all assembled round Big Hand then, and, in their way, they said pretty much what Genet had said. They put it to him, here was France and England at war, in a manner of speaking, right across the United States’ stomach, and paying no regards to any one. The French was searching American ships on pretence they was helping England, but really for to steal the goods. The English was doing the same, only t’other way round, and besides searching, they was pressing American citizens into their Navy to help them fight France, on pretence that those Americans was lawful British subjects. His gentlemen put this very clear to Big Hand. It didn’t look to them, they said, as though the United States trying to keep out of the fight was any advantage to her, because she only catched it from both French and English. They said that nine out of ten good Americans was crazy to fight the English then and there. They wouldn’t say whether that was right or wrong; they only wanted Big Hand to turn it over in his mind. He did—for a while. I saw Red Jacket and Cornplanter watching him from the far side of the clearing, and how they had slipped round there was another mystery. Then Big Hand drew himself up, and he let his gentlemen have it.’

‘Hit ’em?’ Dan asked.

‘No, nor yet was it what you might call swearing. He—he blasted ’em with his natural speech. He asked them half-a-dozen times over whether the United States had enough armed ships for any shape or sort of war with any one. He asked ’em, if they thought she had those ships, to give him those ships, and they looked on the ground, as if they expected to find ’em there. He put it to ’em whether, setting ships aside, their country—I reckon he gave ’em good reasons—whether the United States was ready or able to face a new big war; she having but so few years back wound up one against England, and being all holds full of her own troubles. As I said, the strong way he laid it all before ’em blasted ’em, and when he’d done it was like a still in the woods after a storm. A little man—but they all looked little—pipes up like a young rook in a blowed-down nest, “Nevertheless, General, it seems you will be compelled to fight England.” Quick Big Hand wheeled on him, “And is there anything in my past which makes you think I am averse to fighting Great Britain?”

‘Everybody laughed except him. “Oh, General, you mistake us entirely!” they says. “I trust so,” he says. “But I know my duty. We must have peace with England.”

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‘“At any price?” says the man with the rook’s voice.

‘“At any price,” says he, word by word. “Our ships will be searched—our citizens will be pressed, but—”

‘“Then what about the Declaration of Independence?” says one.

‘“Deal with facts, not fancies,” says Big Hand. “The United States are in no position to fight England.”

‘“But think of public opinion,” another one starts up. “The feeling in Philadelphia alone is at fever heat.”

‘He held up one of his big hands. “Gentlemen,” he says—slow he spoke, but his voice carried far—“I have to think of our country. Let me assure you that the treaty with Great Britain will be made though every city in the Union burn me in effigy.”

‘“At any price?” the actor-like chap keeps on croaking.

‘“The treaty must be made on Great Britain’s own terms. What else can I do?” He turns his back on ’em and they looked at each other and slinked off to the horses, leaving him alone: and then I saw he was an old man. Then Red Jacket and Cornplanter rode down the clearing from the far end as though they had just chanced along. Back went Big Hand’s shoulders, up went his head, and he stepped forward one single pace with a great deep Hough! so pleased he was. That was a statelified meeting to behold—three big men, and two of ’em looking like jewelled images among the spattle of gay-coloured leaves. I saw my chiefs’ war-bonnets sinking together, down and down. Then they made the sign which no Indian makes outside of the Medicine Lodges—a sweep of the right hand just clear of the dust and an inbend of the left knee at the same time, and those proud eagle feathers almost touched his boot-top.’

‘What did it mean?’ said Dan.

‘Mean!’ Pharaoh cried. ‘Why it’s what you—what we—it’s the Sachems’ way of sprinkling the sacred corn-meal in front of—oh! it’s a piece of Indian compliment really, and it signifies that you are a very big chief.

‘Big Hand looked down on ’em. First he says quite softly, “My brothers know it is not easy to be a chief.” Then his voice grew. “My children,” says he, “what is in your minds?”

‘Says Cornplanter, “We came to ask whether there will be war with King George’s men, but we have heard what our Father has said to his chiefs. We will carry away that talk in our hearts to tell to our people.”

‘“No,” says Big Hand. “Leave all that talk behind—it was between white men only—but take this message from me to your people—‘There will be no war.’”

‘His gentlemen were waiting, so they didn’t delay him—, only Cornplanter says, using his old side-name, “Big Hand, did you see us among the timber just now?”

‘“Surely,” says he. “You taught me to look behind trees when we were both young.” And with that he cantered off.

‘Neither of my chiefs spoke till we were back on our ponies again and a half-hour along the home-trail. Then Cornplanter says to Red Jacket, “We will have the Corn-dance this year. There will be no war.” And that was all there was to it.’

Pharaoh stood up as though he had finished.

‘Yes,’ said Puck, rising too. ‘And what came out of it in the long run?’

‘Let me get at my story my own way,’ was the answer. ‘Look! it’s later than I thought. That Shoreham smack’s thinking of her supper.’ The children looked across the darkening Channel. A smack had hoisted a lantern and slowly moved west where Brighton pier lights ran out in a twinkling line. When they turned round The Gap was empty behind them.

‘I expect they’ve packed our trunks by now,’ said Dan. ‘This time tomorrow we’ll be home.’

THE Boers had wrecked the three centre spans and blown huge pieces out of the stone piers. The wreckage lay adrift in the dirty water, and a section of the British Army was now picking up the pieces. A pontoon bridge had been thrown across the river. You reached it by way of a steep sandy track through the scrub; and on the north bank met a steeper, sandier scarp that climbed out past the haunches of the bridge under the edge of a rocky embankment. Till the temporary railway-trestle was finished, this plunge and that scramble were the only path into the Orange Free State. Hither came McManus, head of the Corporate Equatorial Bank of South Africa, on urgent business. He had been summoned to Bloemfontein by the Field-Marshal Commanding-in-Chief, who, with the High Commissioner, was then striving to disentangle some finances which President Steyn had dropped. In his inner pocket lay a pass calling on all officers, civil and military, to assist and expedite R. L. McManus, Esq., by every means in their power; for the State had need of him. And his time — which meant other people’s money as well as his own — was valuable.

McManus was not used to passes. As a rule of thirty years, few people interfered with his uprisings or downsittings. He was known to remotest Dutch farmers as an institution representing an institution, from the edge of the Kalahari desert to the outskirts of Portuguese territory — from Salisbury, where they lend money on mortgage, to the Cape Flats, where they foreclose on villa property. His grizzled head held most intimate knowledge of South Africa’s finances for the last quarter of a century; and his word, when they importuned him to speak, was law alike to speculative Bond or Progressive Ministries. Cape Town knew that he had been called up to Bloemfontein and flashed the news to Natal and Kimberley; nor need we for an instant doubt that Pretoria knew it within twelve hours of his departure from the coast. The Corporate Equatorial had been chased out of Bloemfontein with bad words early in the war. Its return signified more than an army corps victorious.

McManus, his Secretary, and half-a-dozen fellow-travellers came in a desolate evening to the southern end of Folly Bridge. A simple race of God-fearing herdsmen had been there before them. The platform, after three days’ vehement cleansing, still reeked of putrid onions, stable litter, and the remnants of bloody sheepskins. They had defiled the corners of every room they had lived in, as dirty little boys defile abandoned houses. They had removed everything save the door-locks, and had left in exchange a portrait in crayon on the wall of one ‘Chamerlain at Modder’, which represented an eye-glassed person dangling at a rope’s end.

‘My word! ‘said a New Zealand doctor, hoping to join his countrymen in the big camps to the North, ‘this is a lovely land to fight over! When do you suppose we go on to Bloemfontein?’

‘I’d give something to know why McManus is going up,’ said the Captain of a troop of Colonial Horse, returning from a Karoo hospital.

‘Who’s McManus?’ said the New Zealander.

‘Good Lord!’ the South African replied, aghast at his ignorance. ‘He’s McManus. He’s in the carriage now. You’ll see he won’t get out. He’s got all his skoff with him. He’ll have a decent dinner — soda-water too.’

The Colonial had been picked up out of the tangled Colesberg kopjes, where soda-water was scarce.

‘I’m going up with the Little Man’s private letters.’ This was an officer late of the Bengal Army.’ That ought to be good for a reserved compartment in a cattle-truck. Wonder how long we’ll have to wait.’ He stumbled forth, grasping the Commander-in-Chief’s private mail-bag. The noises of a full camp filled their ears, but the station was void and black.

‘There must be a Railway Staff Officer somewhere,’ a young and brisk Gunner murmured.’ Let’s find him. Isn’t that a light at the end of the platform? Phew! How the place stinks! ‘

They formed an untidy little procession, and, falling over sleeping men and stray baggage, found at last a bare room, lighted with three candles in beer-bottles, and somewhat over-furnished with two men, both in khaki—one of them very angry.

‘But — but — confound it all,’ said the latter. ‘How did it come to be broached, Guard?’

‘I don’t know, sir. My business is to report it to you. One case of whisky with the top smashed in, and a bottle gone between here an’ Arundel. They’re always doin’ it along the line, sir. I think it’s those dam’ Irregular Corps.’

Yes, that’s all very fine, but how did it come to be broached? Well, never mind — never mind. I shall report it, of course.’

‘Report it!’ whispered a Sapper, with documents for the Intelligence Department. ‘They’ve been looting the Staff’s Reserve baggage down the line. A lot they’ll care for one bottle o’ whisky missing.’

‘What can I do for you, gentlemen,’ said the Railway Staff Officer, when the train Guard had withdrawn.

‘We want to know how we can get on to Bloemfontein.’

‘Not another train till to-morrow night. You’ll have to wait till then.’ The R.S.O. drummed merrily on the table.

It meant a check of twenty-four hours, and someone said so.

‘It isn’t my fault,’ said the R.S.O. I assure you it would give me the greatest pleasure personally to shoot rubbish up the line, but I have my orders; and I’ve nothing more to do with it. I’ve noticed that every man who comes up thinks his business is the one thing I’ve got to attend to, and that the whole Army will go to pieces if he isn’t sent to the Front at once, but — Hullo! What do these Kaffirs want? Been out of the camp without a pass?’

Four Kaffirs were thrust into the room, and the company departed, leaving the R.S.O. to execute justice according to his own lights and those in the beer-bottles.

‘My word’ said the New Zealander. ‘But we didn’t make a fuss about not going up, did we Why was he so stuffy? Who is that man?’

‘He has been here precisely nine days,’ said a dry voice in the darkness. ‘Nine whole days in Africa. He has his orders. We’ll hear a lot about those orders before we leave. Now let’s see if we can whack up something to eat.’

‘Get a light first,’ said the Gunner. ‘If we could find some oil, we’d light the lamps in our carriage. Morgan, go an’ unscrew the lamps an’ bring ’em out here. I’ll look for oil. Hi.’ (This to a shadow that passed). ‘Where do you keep your lamp-oil?’

‘In the lamp-room, of course. I’m the Station-master,’ was the fretful reply.

page 2

‘I beg your pardon. You must be awfully hard-worked. Don’t bother. We’ll get it.’

‘Thank you, sir. Yes, we’re working twenty hours a day. There’s the oil. I’ll strike a match, and you can get the cork out of — ‘ ‘No, you won’t! Chuck that match away. I’d sooner waste your oil than set myself alight, Morgan. Bring the lamps here. I’ll fill ’em.’

‘One of the lamps ain’t empty at all.’ Morgan’s voice came across the siding with a rising snarl. ‘It’s full. It’s trickling all down my cuff.’

‘Never mind. Bring what’s left. We must see to eat.’

The lamps were filled and lit rough-handedly; and plate by plate, and tin by tin, with jack-knives for tin-openers, a meal was dragged together.

The Railway Staff Officer suggested that it should be eaten in his room, and there enlarged on the duties and responsibilities of his office. But the company were tired. Moreover, R.S.O.’s were old birds to them. They knew not fewer than eighty of the breed, and some had been R.S.O.s themselves.

‘I think,’ said the New Zealand doctor, skewering cold tinned herring on a pocket-knife, ‘before I talked about shooting rubbish up the line, I’d try to burn a little of the muck that’s lying about the station. Sweeping isn’t any earthly good.’

‘Oh, that department is probably in charge of the Officer Commanding the Royal Engine-eahs,’ said the Colonial Captain, with a short dry laugh. He had served since the outbreak of the war, and counted thirteen engagements to his credit.

‘A little of the lamp-oil we wasted and a match would do wonders,’ the New Zealander insisted.

‘Don’t presume to dictate to the Army,’ an Imperial Officer said, proudly. ‘I’ll back an R.S.O. against anyone except’ — he looked across the table — ‘a Sapper.’

‘We’re learning. I swear we are learning.’ The young Engineer flushed. ‘We aren’t such fools as we were. The Colonials have taught us a lot. Take that Railway Pioneer Corps that’s laying down the new line on the north bank, for instance.’

‘Yes,’ the Colonial Captain grunted. ‘They’re the pick of the Rand — all mine-managers and machinists and engineers and boiler-makers. They’re working double shifts to finish the track, because they want to get home to Johannesburg. Yes, I know about them.’ Again he laughed unpleasantly.

‘What?’ the New Zealander asked.

‘Oh, the usual thing. They worked day and night, and, of course, they wanted more than Service rations, so their commandant, Phil Tenbroek — he’s a big mine-manager when he’s at home — bought a lot of Bovril and pea-meal, and made soup of it, and served it out to ’em at night. You can see their flare-lamps across the river now, if you look. Day and night they work. Well, the authorities found he’d spent five whole pounds Government money, and they told him he wasn’t to do it. Mind you, that’s now — now — now — when every day — what am I talking of? — every hour’s work means several thousands of pounds saved. Yes, they told him the expenditure was unauthorised.’

‘And then?’ said the young Sapper uneasily.

‘Oh, then. You know Phil Tenbroek. At least I do. Phil sent a wire to Port Elizabeth on his own hook for fifty pounds’ worth of Bovril and pea-meal. He paid out of his pocket, of course; but Philly wants to get back to the Rand as soon as possible, and, it seemed to him the sooner the new line was laid the better. And they’d have crippled the whole Corps — the best engineers in the world — for a fiver! Nice tale, isn’t it? True, too. Look at their flare-lamps! They work.’

Far away across the dark to the northward of the formless country ran a line of fire-dots. The Railway Pioneer Corps were at work on the new track that was to connect with the temporary trestle-bridge. A dull boom came up the gorge between the kopjes.

Blasting away the wreckage,’ the Colonial explained. ‘Risky work at night, but Phil told ’em he was in a hurry. Oh, Philly Tenbroek is a man. I bet he hasn’t taken off his clothes for a week.’

Morning, hot and sultry, put out the flare-lamps on the north of the river, and brought in a train-load of troops from the South to be added to the acres of dusty tentage around Folly Bridge. The travellers, including McManus, had seen men and guns and buck-wagons, doctors, dust and wounded — stony hills and scrub-strewn downs — a few hundred times before. It pleased them better to observe the R.S.O. as he faced the tenth day of his official life. The four Kaffirs had been disposed of, but he was still troubled about the broached whisky, and much annoyed by the eccentricities of lunatic civilians, who, solely for the jest of it, wished to know when they could get goods up to Bloemfontein. The big railway junction thirty miles behind him was also a nuisance. It complained of a congested goods-yard, and desired him to take trucks. Now, his desire was to keep his end of the line neat and open, and, so far, he had succeeded. He drew attention with pride to the long empty sidings, which he had ‘saved,’ though he did not exactly specify the purpose of his economies. There were far too many people, he said, anxious to go to Bloemfontein. Officers, of course, if their passes were in perfect order, might be allowed; but these idle civilians, he was free to say, annoyed him. They simply had no conception of military matters, and they never seemed to think a man had orders. However, he had his orders, and he meant to carry them out. What otherwise was the sense of orders? He paused very often for a reply. The station in the warm, close air stank to heaven.

‘Well, that’s all right,’ said the New Zealander, ‘but when I was quite finished with my orders, it seems to me I’d have another shot at the rubbish about here. My word! Look at all that unemployed labour in the camp! ‘

There were not fewer than two thousand men under the dusty hills. Some of them were being drilled.

McManus went for a walk through the mimosa bushes to look at the late bridge. It had cost a hundred thousand pounds, and somebody would have to account for the breakage. That, indirectly, was McManus’s department.

‘Have you seen McManus?’ cried a private of the Railway Pioneer Corps, as he rode up to the Colonial Captain sitting in the window of what had been Folly Bridge refreshment-room. ‘I’ve seen him. He looks as if he’d just come out of Adderley Street.’

‘Did you speak to him?’

‘No, but I wanted to ask him who he expects is going to pay for the bridge.’

page 3

‘You will — on the Rand — after the war,’ the Captain drawled.

‘That’s what I supposed, but I wish to goodness McManus could work out some scheme of compensation that ‘ud hit the Transvaal hard.’

‘So do I — but the war expenses will have to be paid by the Rand just the same.’

‘That’s rather hard on us — working as volunteers to mend what the Boers have broken, and then to have the bill sent in to us at the end. McManus lent me two thousand once on stands I had in Johannesburg. I paid him before the war. Wish I hadn’t now. Well, I must go on. S’long.’

At four in the afternoon, a train was made up at Folly Bridge. Into this marched the passengers and their baggage, and at that hour appeared the R.S.O. to satisfy himself that all passes were in order and to issue a ukase.

‘You will be turned back at the other side of the river by the R.S.O. there if your passes are not countersigned by the Station Commandant here,’ he said, smiling.

‘The deuce! When was that order issued?’ the Colonial Captain demanded.

‘It isn’t my fault. I’ve only got my orders, and —’ ‘Yes, yes, we know all that, but where is the Station Commandant?’

‘I don’t know. He was about here this morning, but he left after lunch.’

‘No, you wouldn’t,’ reflectively from a corner of the carriage.

‘Well, I hope you’ll get across all right, but I tell you now that unless your passes are countersigned by Smith, Station Commandant, you won’t be able to get across even if you were Kitchener himself.’

‘I’d give a month — I’d give three months’ pay to have K. on this platform now — and we’d see,’ said the officer with the Little Man’s letters.

‘I’m only giving you my orders —’

‘And you don’t know where Smith is?’

‘No.’

‘And you expect us to hunt him all around the camp, do you? We’ve been seventeen—twenty-two—hours on this blasted onion-heap, and you and Smith between you have only just discovered —’

‘Well, it isn’t my fault, I’m only —’

‘You ought to keep Smith on the premises then.’

‘That has nothing to do with me. I should recommend you to go out and look for him.’

‘Oh, I’ve no interest in the matter. I’m only going up with the Little Man’s private mail. Here’s the bag. I don’t care. If I’m stopped on the other side, it’s your look-out. I’m sure the Little Man would be quite pleased.’

‘Oh, there’s McManus,’ said the Colonial Captain, looking out of the window. ‘I suppose he’s hunting Smith. D’you think they’ll stop McManus if his pass isn’t countersigned by Smith?’

‘Who’s McManus?’ A giggle of deep delight interrupted the R.S.O. ‘Oh, that civilian! ‘Pon my word, you’d think Bloemfontein was Piccadilly. They’re all wanting to go up there.’

‘Thank you,’ said the Colonial. ‘I’m afraid we’ll have to be turned back on the other side. Perhaps if we say we couldn’t find Smith they’ll forgive us.’

‘Well, I’m only giving you my word —’

The train rolled out nearly half a mile and halted in a deep cutting. The passengers stepped out over-ankles into the sand that slid under their feet, and their baggage followed them. A gaggle of Kaffirs marched away with bags and bedding-rolls, and the company followed depressedly. They expected to be met on the other side by a train from the North, which in God’s good time would go back to Bloemfontein.

‘But—but what do they want to stop in the middle of a cutting for?’ said the New Zealander. ‘I wouldn’t have minded walking a hundred yards on the level back there. They might have made a decent platform. I believe I’ve twisted my ankle climbing up the bank.’

‘Oh, this isn’t a patch to what it is on t’other side,’ said an officer on the bridge works. And they walked and they walked till they reached the pontoon, a hundred feet below. McManus’s face seemed a little set as it were — set, but in no wise greatly troubled.

‘Did McManus find Smith?’ said the Colonial, as they climbed the desperate north bank down which buck-wagons were sliding in billows of dust. Here again fifty men’s labour for two days would have greatly smoothed the road.

‘He said he didn’t,’ his companion replied.

‘Glory!’ said the Colonial, and, hopping over a boulder, fell into a bush. A hundred feet of river-bank through deep sand at the end of a mile walk is not easy to cover ; and it was a dewy-browed detachment that broke through the scrub and landed, panting, among the rocks at the gangers’ hut on the north side of the bridge. But the R.S.O. who received them there was cool and utterly calm. He wished to know whether their passes were in order, and a delicious awe fell on the company.

McManus climbed the slope into the Orange Free State easily and dispassionately, his lower jaw protruding, perhaps, one-sixteenth of an inch beyond its normal clinch. The travellers made a little semicircle about the R.S.O.—the R.S.O. of the North Bank of Folly Bridge- about him and about McManus, of the Corporate Equatorial Bank. It was heavenly weather. There was no accommodation of any sort of description, for the gangers’ hut was occupied by military telegraphers.

‘May I trouble you for your pass, please?’

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McManus produced it clumsily. He was more accustomed to demand than to supply documents of identification.

‘Yes — yes — this seems all right’— the company winked as with one eyelid —’ but I don’t see that it has been countersigned by Smith.’

‘Captain Smith was in his bath, when I went to him at Folly Bridge at three forty-five. He sent a verbal message that it would be all right — so far as I understood through the door at the time.’

‘I am afraid I can’t help that.’ The R.S.O. paused uneasily. McManus in grey tweeds, black bowler, and immaculate white collar, gave him not the slightest help.

‘This pass is no good.’ The sentence came out in a rush.

‘Indeed?’ There was a meekness about McManus and a silence on the little knot of bystanders that would have warned any other than an imported Imperial alien that that kopje was occupied in force.

‘No. You’ll have to go back across the river to get Smith’s signature. I can’t let you up on that pass.’ This very cheerfully.

Whole hierarchies had signed it. Lions and unicorns ramped on the top of it. It appealed, as has been said, to earth, fire, and water — to horseflesh, steam, and steel, and all in command thereof, to forward with speed and courtesy R. L. McManus to Bloemfontein; but it lacked the signature of Smith — that Smith who was then towelling himself two miles away.

‘I must go back?’ McManus’s clear eye travelled down the rocky slope behind him to the far pontoon and the further south bank, where a few soldiery, pink as prawns, and at that distance not much larger, were bathing; climbed the wooded bank beyond, and rested with disfavour on the domino-small houses of Folly Bridge.

‘Yes—go back, of course, and get Smith to sign it.’

A lesser man would have said: ‘I’ll see you damned first,’ but McManus was in no sense small. His face did not even flush. He turned away slowly, as though the matter had no further interest, and the R.S.O. dealt with the other passes. To be precise, not one carried the magic signature of Smith. The officer in charge of the Little Man’s private mail almost implored the R.S.O. to stop him for twenty-four hours because he wished to learn whether there was any truth in the current Army legend that under no circumstances would the Little Man swear. The officer in charge of the Staff’s mail followed suit. He had two bags of official correspondence for the Staff, and there were Generals among them who could swear. He, too, prayed to be turned back. The officer with the new maps for the Intelligence Department joined in his entreaties.

‘After all,’ said one cheerily, as they sat down on their bedding- rolls in the gathering dusk, ‘what does it matter, old man? You’re bound to be Stellenbosched in three days.’

Now Stellenbosch is not a name to use lightly, for there go the men who have not done quite so well; and the R.S.O.’s face clouded as he asked for an explanation.

‘Haven’t you stopped McManus?’ said an officer, who knew his man.

‘Who’s McManus?’

‘Oh, I’m sorry — never mind — you’ll find out before Tuesday.’

‘The only person I’ve stopped was that civilian who hadn’t had his pass signed by Smith. I can’t accept a verbal message across the Orange River.’

‘Quite right. You’ll be getting all your message on the wire from Bloemfontein in a little while. I wouldn’t be in your shoes for a trifle.’

‘I don’t think McManus minds much, though,’ the Colonial Captain struck in soothingly. ‘I spoke to him just now. He says he is going on.’

‘I’ll take dashed good care he doesn’t,’ said the R.S.O., exploding. This was something he could understand.

‘Yes — he’s going on in the train when she comes in — so you’ll have another chance, you see. If you stop him, I suppose he will go back to Cape Town, and he’ll tell the Little Man why. He’s rather busy, and he won’t be able to come up again.’

‘But — confound it all — does he expect the whole blessed Orange Free State to wait on his business?’

‘It would be a bad job if it didn’t — just now. He’s the head of the Corporate Equatorial Banking Corporation, and he has been called up to Bloemfontein rather urgently to put the finances of the place straight. He isn’t going up to start a hotel there, you know.’

Somebody lit a pipe; and in the hush you could hear the great river running through the dry hills. A far-away voice on the construction- engine backed close up to the bridge called to someone under a staging.

‘McManus going up to Bloemfontein to-night?’

‘Ye—es.’

‘That means business — thank God.’

‘Why—y?’

‘Why?’Cause they don’t care one scarlet weir for the whole Army — the Boers don’t. They reckon they can get them withdrawn if they win the game in London, but reopenin’ the Bank at Bloemfontein means business. That’s why. It teaches the Dutch more than twenty battles. Wonder they don’t try to cut the line and nab him to-night.’

The silence by the gangers’ hut continued unbroken for twenty puffs.

‘And he did wait outside Smith’s door, while Smith was washing — because I saw him. I wouldn’t have done it,’ said an Imperial Officer slowly,’ but I suppose he wished to see what sort of fools we can be when we go in for war.’

‘And you’ve told him to walk two miles back and two miles here again,’ said the New Zealander, ‘to get Smith’s signature.’

‘And there’s no guarantee Smith won’t be having a hair-cut and shampoo when he reaches there,’ the Colonial Captain added. We knew in Cape Town a week ago that McManus had been called up. But, of course, if he hasn’t got Smith’s signature, that settles it.’

‘What does it matter? Let the brute frolic round the kopjes till Smith’s dry. He’s only the boss of the biggest Bank in the country. Who cares how much they want him at Bloemfontein ? I’d put a guard on him, and march him back in irons, by Jove,’ said a Cavalry Officer. ‘I say, old man, didn’t it ever occur to you to knock off some of the points of these rocks that we’re supposed to sit on? They’re infernally nubbly.’

One by one the stars came out over the hills, and the flare-lamps of the never-sleeping Pioneer Corps puffed and blazed afresh in the river-bed.

Last of all came the train from the North, and when McManus and his Secretary went up to their labelled compartments reserved for them at Bloemfontein, the R.S.O. took no notice.

No more, for that matter, did McManus.