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THEY were playing hide-and-seek with bicycle lamps after tea. Dan had hung his lamp on the apple tree at the end of the hellebore bed in the walled garden, and was crouched by the gooseberry bushes ready to dash off when Una should spy him. He saw her lamp come into the garden and disappear as she hid it under her cloak. While he listened for her footsteps, somebody (they both thought it was Phillips the gardener) coughed in the corner of the herb-beds. ‘All right,’ Una shouted across the asparagus; ‘we aren’t hurting your old beds, Phippsey!’

She flashed her lantern towards the spot, and in its circle of light they saw a Guy Fawkes-looking man in a black cloak and a steeple-crowned hat, walking down the path beside Puck. They ran to meet him, and the man said something to them about rooms in their head. After a time they understood he was warning them not to catch colds.

‘You’ve a bit of a cold yourself, haven’t you?’ said Una, for he ended all his sentences with a consequential cough. Puck laughed.

‘Child,’ the man answered, ‘if it hath pleased Heaven to afflict me with an infirmity—’

‘Nay, nay,’ Puck struck In, ‘the maid spoke out of kindness. I know that half your cough is but a catch to trick the vulgar; and that’s a pity. There’s honesty enough in you, Nick, without rasping and hawking.’

‘Good people’—the man shrugged his lean shoulders—‘the vulgar crowd love not truth unadorned. Wherefore we philosophers must needs dress her to catch their eye or—ahem! —their ear.’

‘And what d’you think of that?’ said Puck solemnly to Dan.

‘I don’t know,’ he answered. ‘It sounds like lessons.’

‘Ah—well! There have been worse men than Nick Culpeper to take lessons from. Now, where can we sit that’s not indoors?’

‘In the hay-mow, next to old Middenboro,’ Dan suggested. ‘He doesn’t mind.’

‘Eh?’ Mr Culpeper was stooping over the pale hellebore blooms by the light of Una’s lamp. ‘Does Master Middenboro need my poor services, then?’

‘Save him, no!’ said Puck. ‘He is but a horse—next door to an ass, as you’ll see presently. Come!’

Their shadows jumped and slid on the fruit-tree walls. They filed out of the garden by the snoring pig-pound and the crooning hen-house, to the shed where Middenboro the old lawn-mower pony lives. His friendly eyes showed green in the light as they set their lamps down on the chickens’ drinking-trough outside, and pushed past to the hay-mow. Mr Culpeper stooped at the door.

‘Mind where you lie,’ said Dan. ‘This hay’s full of hedge-brishings.

‘In! in!’ said Puck. ‘You’ve lain in fouler places than this, Nick. Ah! Let us keep touch with the stars!’ He kicked open the top of the half-door, and pointed to the clear sky. ‘There be the planets you conjure with! What does your wisdom make of that wandering and variable star behind those apple boughs?’

The children smiled. A bicycle that they knew well was being walked down the steep lane. ‘Where?’ Mr Culpeper leaned forward quickly. ‘That? Some countryman’s lantern.’

‘Wrong, Nick,’ said Puck. ‘’Tis a singular bright star in Virgo, declining towards the house of Aquarius the water-carrier, who hath lately been afflicted by Gemini. Aren’t I right, Una?’ Mr Culpeper snorted contemptuously.

‘No. It’s the village nurse going down to the Mill about some fresh twins that came there last week. Nurse,’ Una called, as the light stopped on the flat, ‘when can I see the Morris twins? And how are they?’

‘Next Sunday, perhaps. Doing beautifully,’ the Nurse called back, and with a ping-ping-ping of the bell brushed round the corner.

‘Her uncle’s a vetinary surgeon near Banbury,’ Una explained, and if you ring her bell at night, it rings right beside her bed—not downstairs at all. Then she ’umps up—she always keeps a pair of dry boots in the fender, you know—and goes anywhere she’s wanted. We help her bicycle through gaps sometimes. Most of her babies do beautifully. She told us so herself.’

‘I doubt not, then, that she reads in my books,’ said Mr Culpeper quietly. ‘Twins at the Mill!’ he muttered half aloud. “And again He sayeth, Return, ye children of men.” ‘

‘Are you a doctor or a rector?’ Una asked, and Puck with a shout turned head over heels in the hay. But Mr Culpeper was quite serious. He told them that he was a physician-astrologer—a doctor who knew all about the stars as well as all about herbs for medicine. He said that the sun, the moon, and five Planets, called Jupiter, Mars, Mercury, Saturn, and Venus, governed everybody and everything in the world. They all lived in Houses—he mapped out some of them against the dark with a busy forefinger—and they moved from House to House like pieces at draughts; and they went loving and hating each other all over the skies. If you knew their likes and dislikes, he said, you could make them cure your patient and hurt your enemy, and find out the secret causes of things. He talked of these five Planets as though they belonged to him, or as though he were playing long games against them. The children burrowed in the hay up to their chins, and looked out over the half-door at the solemn, star-powdered sky till they seemed to be falling upside down into it, while Mr Culpeper talked about ‘trines’ and ‘oppositions’ and ‘conjunctions’ and ‘sympathies’ and ‘antipathies’ in a tone that just matched things.

A rat ran between Middenboro’s feet, and the old pony stamped.

‘Mid hates rats,’ said Dan, and passed him over a lock of hay. ‘I wonder why.’

‘Divine Astrology tells us,’ said Mr Culpeper. ‘The horse, being a martial beast that beareth man to battle, belongs naturally to the red planet Mars—the Lord of War. I would show you him, but he’s too near his setting. Rats and mice, doing their businesses by night, come under the dominion of our Lady the Moon. Now between Mars and Luna, the one red, t’other white, the one hot t’other cold and so forth, stands, as I have told you, a natural antipathy, or, as you say, hatred. Which antipathy their creatures do inherit. Whence, good people, you may both see and hear your cattle stamp in their stalls for the self-same causes as decree the passages of the stars across the unalterable face of Heaven! Ahem!’ Puck lay along chewing a leaf. They felt him shake with laughter, and Mr Culpeper sat up stiffly.

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‘I myself” said he, ‘have saved men’s lives, and not a few neither, by observing at the proper time—there is a time, mark you, for all things under the sun—by observing, I say, so small a beast as a rat in conjunction with so great a matter as this dread arch above us.’ He swept his hand across the sky. ‘Yet there are those,’ he went on sourly, ‘who have years without knowledge.’

‘Right,’ said Puck. ‘No fool like an old fool.’

Mr Culpeper wrapped his cloak round him and sat still while the children stared at the Great Bear on the hilltop.

‘Give him time,’ Puck whispered behind his hand. ‘He turns like a timber-tug—all of a piece.’

‘Ahem!’ Mr Culpeper said suddenly. ‘I’ll prove it to you. When I was physician to Saye’s Horse, and fought the King—or rather the man Charles Stuart—in Oxfordshire (I had my learning at Cambridge), the plague was very hot all around us. I saw it at close hands. He who says I am ignorant of the plague, for example, is altogether beside the bridge.’

‘We grant it,’ said Puck solemnly. ‘But why talk of the plague this rare night?’

‘To prove my argument. This Oxfordshire plague, good people, being generated among rivers and ditches, was of a werish, watery nature. Therefore it was curable by drenching the patient in cold water, and laying him in wet cloths; or at least, so I cured some of them. Mark this. It bears on what shall come after.’

‘Mark also, Nick,’ said Puck, ‘that we are not your College of Physicians, but only a lad and a lass and a poor lubberkin. Therefore be plain, old Hyssop on the Wall!’

‘To be plain and in order with you, I was shot in the chest while gathering of betony from a brookside near Thame, and was took by the King’s men before their Colonel, one Blagg or Bragge, whom I warned honestly that I had spent the week past among our plague-stricken. He flung me off into a cowshed, much like this here, to die, as I supposed; but one of their priests crept in by night and dressed my wound. He was a Sussex man like myself.’

‘Who was that?’ said Puck suddenly. ‘Zack Tutshom?’

‘No, Jack Marget,’ said Mr Culpeper.

‘Jack Marget of New College? The little merry man that stammered so? Why a plague was stuttering Jack at Oxford then?’ said Puck.

‘He had come out of Sussex in hope of being made a Bishop when the King should have conquered the rebels, as he styled us Parliament men. His College had lent the King some monies too, which they never got again, no more than simple Jack got his bishopric. When we met he had had a bitter bellyful of King’s promises, and wished to return to his wife and babes. This came about beyond expectation, for, so soon as I could stand of my wound, the man Blagge made excuse that I had been among the plague, and Jack had been tending me, to thrust us both out from their camp. The King had done with Jack now that Jack’s College had lent the money, and Blagge’s physician could not abide me because I would not sit silent and see him butcher the sick. (He was a College of Physicians man!) So Blagge, I say, thrust us both out, with many vile words, for a pair of pestilent, prating, pragmatical rascals.’

‘Ha! Called you pragmatical, Nick?’ Puck started up. ‘High time Oliver came to purge the land! How did you and honest Jack fare next?’

‘We were in some sort constrained to each other’s company. I was for going to my house in Spitalfields, he would go to his parish in Sussex; but the plague was broke out and spreading through Wiltshire, Berkshire, and Hampshire, and he was so mad distracted to think that it might even then be among his folk at home that I bore him company. He had comforted me in my distress. I could not have done less; and I remembered that I had a cousin at Great Wigsell, near by Jack’s parish. Thus we footed it from Oxford, cassock and buff coat together, resolute to leave wars on the left side henceforth; and either through our mean appearances, or the plague making men less cruel, we were not hindered. To be sure, they put us in the stocks one half-day for rogues and vagabonds at a village under St Leonard’s forest, where, as I have heard, nightingales never sing; but the constable very honestly gave me back my Astrological Almanac, which I carry with me.’ Mr Culpeper tapped his thin chest. ‘I dressed a whitlow on his thumb. So we went forward.

‘Not to trouble you with impertinences, we fetched over against Jack Marget’s parish in a storm of rain about the day’s end. Here our roads divided, for I would have gone on to my cousin at Great Wigsell, but while Jack was pointing me out his steeple, we saw a man lying drunk, as he conceived, athwart the road. He said it would be one Hebden, a parishioner, and till then a man of good life; and he accused himself bitterly for an unfaithful shepherd, that had left his flock to follow princes. But I saw it was the plague, and not the beginnings of it neither. They had set out the plague-stone, and the man’s head lay on it.’

‘What’s a plague-stone?’ Dan whispered.

‘When the plague is so hot in a village that the neighbours shut the roads against ’em, people set a hollowed stone, pot, or pan, where such as would purchase victual from outside may lay money and the paper of their wants, and depart. Those that would sell come later—what will a man not do for gain? —snatch the money forth, and leave in exchange such goods as their conscience reckons fair value. I saw a silver groat in the water, and the man’s list of what he would buy was rain-pulped in his wet hand.

‘“My wife! Oh, my wife and babes!” says Jack of a sudden, and makes uphill—I with him.

‘A woman peers out from behind a barn, crying out that the village is stricken with the plague, and that for our lives’ sake we must avoid it.

‘“Sweetheart!” says Jack. “Must I avoid thee?” and she leaps at him and says the babes are safe. She was his wife.

‘When he had thanked God, even to tears, he tells me this was not the welcome he had intended, and presses me to flee the place while I was clean.

‘“Nay! The Lord do so to me and more also if I desert thee now,” I said. “These affairs are, under God’s leave, in some fashion my strength.”

‘“Oh, sir,” she says, “are you a physician? We have none.”

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‘“Then, good people,” said I, “I must e’en justify myself to you by my works.”

‘“Look—look ye,” stammers Jack, “I took you all this time for a crazy Roundhead preacher.” He laughs, and she, and then I—all three together in the rain are overtook by an unreasonable gust or clap of laughter, which none the less eased us. We call it in medicine the Hysterical Passion. So I went home with ’em.’

‘Why did you not go on to your cousin at Great Wigsell, Nick?’ Puck suggested. ‘’tis barely seven mile up the road.’

‘But the plague was here,’ Mr Culpeper answered, and pointed up the hill. ‘What else could I have done?’

‘What were the parson’s children called?’ said Una.

‘Elizabeth, Alison, Stephen, and Charles—a babe. I scarce saw them at first, for I separated to live with their father in a cart-lodge. The mother we put—forced—into the house with her babes. She had done enough.

‘And now, good people, give me leave to be particular in this case. The plague was worst on the north side of the street, for lack, as I showed ’em, of sunshine; which, proceeding from the Prime Mobile, or source of life (I speak astrologically), is cleansing and purifying in the highest degree. The plague was hot too by the corn-chandler’s, where they sell forage to the carters, extreme hot in both Mills, along the river, and scatteringly in other places, except, mark you, at the smithy. Mark here, that all forges and smith shops belong to Mars, even as corn and meat and wine shops acknowledge Venus for their mistress. There was no plague in the smithy at Munday’s Lane—’

‘Munday’s Lane? You mean our village? I thought so when you talked about the two Mills,’ cried Dan. ‘Where did we put the plague-stone? I’d like to have seen it.’

‘Then look at it now,’ said Puck, and pointed to the chickens’ drinking-trough where they had set their bicycle lamps. It was a rough, oblong stone pan, rather like a small kitchen sink, which Phillips, who never wastes anything, had found in a ditch and had used for his precious hens.

‘That?’ said Dan and Una, and stared, and stared, and stared. Mr Culpeper made impatient noises in his throat and went on.

‘I am at these pains to be particular, good people, because I would have you follow, so far as you may, the operations of my mind. That plague which I told you I had handled outside Wallingford in Oxfordshire was of a watery nature, conformable to the brookish riverine country it bred in, and curable, as I have said, by drenching in water. This plague of ours here, for all that it flourished along watercourses—every soul at both Mills died of it,—could not be so handled. Which brought me to a stand. Ahem!’

‘And your sick people in the meantime?’ Puck demanded.

‘We persuaded them on the north side of the street to lie out in Hitheram’s field. Where the plague had taken one, or at most two, in a house, folk would not shift for fear of thieves in their absence. They cast away their lives to die among their goods.’

‘Human nature,’ said Puck. ‘I’ve seen it time and again. How did your sick do in the fields?’

‘They died not near so thick as those that kept within doors, and even then they died more out of distraction and melancholy than plague. But I confess, good people, I could not in any sort master the sickness, or come at a glimmer of its nature or governance. To be brief, I was flat bewildered at the brute malignity of the disease, and so—did what I should have done before—dismissed all conjectures and apprehensions that had grown up within me, chose a good hour by my Almanac, clapped my vinegar-cloth to my face, and entered some empty houses, resigned to wait upon the stars for guidance.’

‘At night? Were you not horribly frightened?’ said Puck.

‘I dared to hope that the God who hath made man so nobly curious to search out His mysteries might not destroy a devout seeker. In due time—there’s a time, as I have said, for everything under the sun—I spied a whitish rat, very puffed and scabby, which sat beneath the dormer of an attic through which shined our Lady the Moon. Whilst I looked on him—and her—she was moving towards old cold Saturn, her ancient ally—the rat creeped languishingly into her light, and there, before my eyes, died. Presently his mate or companion came out, laid him down beside there, and in like fashion died too. Later—an hour or less to midnight—a third rat did e’en the same; always choosing the moonlight to die in. This threw me into an amaze, since, as we know, the moonlight is favourable, not hurtful, to the creatures of the Moon; and Saturn, being friends with her, as you would say, was hourly strengthening her evil influence. Yet these three rats had been stricken dead in very moonlight. I leaned out of the window to see which of Heaven’s host might be on our side, and there beheld I good trusty Mars, very red and heated, bustling about his setting. I straddled the roof to see better.

‘Jack Marget came up street going to comfort our sick in Hitheram’s field. A tile slipped under my foot.

Says he, heavily enough, “Watchman, what of the night?”

‘“Heart up, Jack,” says I. “Methinks there’s one fighting for us that, like a fool, I’ve forgot all this summer.” My meaning was naturally the planet Mars.

‘“Pray to Him then,” says he. “I forgot Him too this summer.”

‘He meant God, whom he always bitterly accused himself of having forgotten up in Oxfordshire, among the King’s men. I called down that he had made amends enough for his sin by his work among the sick, but he said he would not believe so till the plague was lifted from ’em. He was at his strength’s end—more from melancholy than any just cause. I have seen this before among priests and overcheerful men. I drenched him then and there with a half-cup of waters, which I do not say cure the plague, but are excellent against heaviness of the spirits.’

‘What were they?’ said Dan.

‘White brandy rectified, camphor, cardamoms, ginger, two sorts of pepper, and aniseed.’

‘Whew!’ said Puck. ‘Waters you call ’em!’

‘Jack coughed on it valiantly, and went downhill with me. I was for the Lower Mill in the valley, to note the aspect of the Heavens. My mind had already shadowed forth the reason, if not the remedy, for our troubles, but I would not impart it to the vulgar till I was satisfied. That practice may be perfect, judgment ought to be sound, and to make judgment sound is required an exquisite knowledge. Ahem! I left Jack and his lantern among the sick in Hitheram’s field. He still maintained the prayers of the so-called Church, which were rightly forbidden by Cromwell.’

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‘You should have told your cousin at Wigsell,’ said Puck, ’and Jack would have been fined for it, and you’d have had half the money. How did you come so to fail in your duty, Nick?’

Mr Culpeper laughed—his only laugh that evening—and the children jumped at the loud neigh of it.

‘We were not fearful of men’s judgment in those days,’ he answered. ‘Now mark me closely, good people, for what follows will be to you, though not to me, remarkable. When I reached the empty Mill, old Saturn, low down in the House of the Fishes, threatened the Sun’s rising-place. Our Lady the Moon was moving towards the help of him (understand, I speak astrologically). I looked abroad upon the high Heavens, and I prayed the Maker of ’em for guidance. Now Mars sparkingly withdrew himself below the sky. On the instant of his departure, which I noted, a bright star or vapour leaped forth above his head (as though he had heaved up his sword), and broke all about in fire. The cocks crowed midnight through the valley, and I sat me down by the mill-wheel, chewing spearmint (though that’s an herb of Venus), and calling myself all the asses’ heads in the world! ’Twas plain enough now!’

‘What was plain?’ said Una.

‘The true cause and cure of the plague. Mars, good fellow, had fought for us to the uttermost. Faint though he had been in the Heavens, and this had made me overlook him in my computations, he more than any of the other planets had kept the Heavens—which is to say, had been visible some part of each night wellnigh throughout the year. Therefore his fierce and cleansing influence, warring against the Moon, had stretched out to kill those three rats under my nose, and under the nose of their natural mistress, the Moon. I had known Mars lean half across Heaven to deal our Lady the Moon some shrewd blow from under his shield, but I had never before seen his strength displayed so effectual.’

‘I don’t understand a bit. Do you mean Mars killed the rats because he hated the Moon?’ said Una.

‘That is as plain as the pikestaff with which Blagge’s men pushed me forth,’ Mr Culpeper answered. ‘I’ll prove it. Why had the plague not broken out at the blacksmith’s shop in Munday’s Lane? Because, as I’ve shown you, forges and smithies belong naturally to Mars, and, for his honour’s sake, Mars ’ud keep ’em clean from the creatures of the Moon. But was it like, think you, that he’d come down and rat-catch in general for lazy, ungrateful mankind? That were working a willing horse to death. So, then, you can see that the meaning of the blazing star above him when he set was simply this: “Destroy and burn the creatures of the moon, for they are the root of your trouble. And thus, having shown you a taste of my power, good people, adieu.”’

‘Did Mars really say all that?’ Una whispered.

‘Yes, and twice so much as that to any one who had ears to hear. Briefly, he enlightened me that the plague was spread by the creatures of the Moon. The Moon, our Lady of ill-aspect, was the offender. My own poor wits showed me that I, Nick Culpeper, had the people in my charge, God’s good providence aiding me, and no time to lose neither.

‘I posted up the hill, and broke into Hitheram’s field amongst ’em all at prayers.

‘“Eureka, good people!” I cried, and cast down a dead mill-rat which I’d found. “Here’s your true enemy, revealed at last by the stars.”

‘“Nay, but I’m praying,” says Jack. His face was as white as washed silver.

‘“There’s a time for everything under the sun,” says I. “If you would stay the plague, take and kill your rats.”

‘“Oh, mad, stark mad!” says he, and wrings his hands.

‘A fellow lay in the ditch beside him, who bellows that he’d as soon die mad hunting rats as be preached to death on a cold fallow. They laughed round him at this, but Jack Marget falls on his knees, and very presumptuously petitions that he may be appointed to die to save the rest of his people. This was enough to thrust ’em back into their melancholy.

‘“You are an unfaithful shepherd, jack,” I says. “Take a bat” (which we call a stick in Sussex) “and kill a rat if you die before sunrise. ’Twill save your people.”

‘“Aye, aye. Take a bat and kill a rat,” he says ten times over, like a child, which moved ’em to ungovernable motions of that hysterical passion before mentioned, so that they laughed all, and at least warmed their chill bloods at that very hour—one o’clock or a little after—when the fires of life burn lowest. Truly there is a time for everything; and the physician must work with it—ahem!—or miss his cure. To be brief with you, I persuaded ’em, sick or sound, to have at the whole generation of rats throughout the village. And there’s a reason for all things too, though the wise physician need not blab ’em all. Imprimis, or firstly, the mere sport of it, which lasted ten days, drew ’em most markedly out of their melancholy. I’d defy sorrowful job himself to lament or scratch while he’s routing rats from a rick. Secundo, or secondly, the vehement act and operation of this chase or war opened their skins to generous transpiration—more vulgarly, sweated ’em handsomely; and this further drew off their black bile—the mother of sickness. Thirdly, when we came to burn the bodies of the rats, I sprinkled sulphur on the faggots, whereby the onlookers were as handsomely suffumigated. This I could not have compassed if I had made it a mere physician’s business; they’d have thought it some conjuration. Yet more, we cleansed, limed, and burned out a hundred foul poke-holes, sinks, slews, and corners of unvisited filth in and about the houses in the village, and by good fortune (mark here that Mars was in opposition to Venus) burned the corn-handler’s shop to the ground. Mars loves not Venus. Will Noakes the saddler dropped his lantern on a truss of straw while he was rat-hunting there.’

‘Had ye given Will any of that gentle cordial of yours, Nick, by any chance?’ said Puck.

‘A glass—or two glasses—not more. But as I would say, in fine, when we had killed the rats, I took ash, slag, and charcoal from the smithy, and burnt earth from the brickyard (I reason that a brickyard belongs to Mars), and rammed it with iron crowbars into the rat-runs and buries, and beneath all the house floors. The Creatures of the Moon hate all that Mars hath used for his own clean ends. For example—rats bite not iron.’

‘And how did poor stuttering Jack endure it?’ said Puck.

‘He sweated out his melancholy through his skin, and catched a loose cough, which I cured with electuaries, according to art. It is noteworthy, were I speaking among my equals, that the venom of the plague translated, or turned itself into, and evaporated, or went away as, a very heavy hoarseness and thickness of the head, throat, and chest. (Observe from my books which planets govern these portions of man’s body, and your darkness, good people, shall be illuminated—ahem!) None the less, the plague, qua plague, ceased and took off (for we only lost three more, and two of ’em had it already on ’em) from the morning of the day that Mars enlightened me by the Lower Mill.’ He coughed—almost trumpeted—triumphantly.

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‘It is proved,’ he jerked out. ‘I say I have proved my contention, which is, that by Divine Astrology and humble search into the veritable causes of things—at the proper time—the sons of wisdom may combat even the plague.’

‘H’m!’ Puck replied. ‘For my own part I hold that a simple soul —’

‘Mine? Simple, forsooth?’ said Mr Culpeper.

‘A very simple soul, a high courage tempered with sound and stubborn conceit, is stronger than all the stars in their courses. So I confess truly that you saved the village, Nick.’

‘I stubborn? I stiff-necked? I ascribed all my poor success, under God’s good providence, to Divine Astrology. Not to me the glory! You talk as that dear weeping ass Jack Marget preached before I went back to my work in Red Lion House, Spitalfields.’

‘Oh! Stammering Jack preached, did he? They say he loses his stammer in the pulpit.’

‘And his wits with it. He delivered a most idolatrous discourse when the plague was stayed. He took for his text: “The wise man that delivered the city.” I could have given him a better, such as: “There is a time for—” ‘

‘But what made you go to church to hear him?’ Puck interrupted. ‘Wail Attersole was your lawfully appointed preacher, and a dull dog he was!’

Mr Culpeper wriggled uneasily.

‘The vulgar,’ said he, ‘the old crones and—ahem! —the children, Alison and the others, they dragged me to the House of Rimmon by the hand. I was in two minds to inform on Jack for maintaining the mummeries of the falsely-called Church, which, I’ll prove to you, are founded merely on ancient fables—’

‘Stick to your herbs and planets,’ said Puck, laughing. ‘You should have told the magistrates, Nick, and had Jack fined. Again, why did you neglect your plain duty?’

‘Because—because I was kneeling, and praying, and weeping with the rest of ’em at the Altar-rails. In medicine this is called the Hysterical Passion. It may be—it may be.’

‘That’s as may be,’ said Puck. They heard him turn the hay. ‘Why, your hay is half hedge-brishings,’ he said. ‘You don’t expect a horse to thrive on oak and ash and thorn leaves, do you?’

Ping-ping-ping went the bicycle bell round the corner. Nurse was coming back from the mill.

‘Is it all right?’ Una called.

‘All quite right,’ Nurse called back. ‘They’re to be christened next Sunday.’

‘What? What?’ They both leaned forward across the half-door. it could not have been properly fastened, for it opened, and tilted them out with hay and leaves sticking all over them.

‘Come on! We must get those two twins’ names,’ said Una, and they charged uphill shouting over the hedge, till Nurse slowed up and told them. When they returned, old Middenboro had got out of his stall, and they spent a lively ten minutes chasing him in again by starlight.

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

[a short tale]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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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.’

(a short tale)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Where?’ said Dumoise.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Where is the Sahib going?’ he asked.

‘To Nuddea,’ said Dumoise softly.

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

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

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

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IN the days beyond compare and before the Judgments, a genius called Graydon foresaw that the advance of education and the standard of living would submerge all mind-marks in one mudrush of standardised reading-matter, and so created the Fictional Supply Syndicate to meet the demand.Since a few days’ work for him brought them more money than a week’s elsewhere, he drew many young men—some now eminent—into his employ. He bade them keep their eyes on the Sixpenny Dream Book, the Army and Navy Stores Catalogue (this for backgrounds and furniture as they changed), and The Hearthstone Friend, a weekly publication which specialised unrivalledly in the domestic emotions. Yet, even so, youth would not be denied, and some of the collaborated love-talk in ‘Passion Hath Peril,’ and ‘Ena’s Lost Lovers,’ and the account of the murder of the Earl in ‘The Wickwire Tragedies’—to name but a few masterpieces now never mentioned for fear of blackmail—was as good as anything to which their authors signed their real names in more distinguished years.

Among the young ravens driven to roost awhile on Graydon’s ark was James Andrew Manallace—a darkish, slow northerner of the type that does not ignite, but must be detonated. Given written or verbal outlines of a plot, he was useless; but, with a half-dozen pictures round which to write his tale, he could astonish.

And he adored that woman who afterwards became the mother of Vidal Benzaquen, and who suffered and died because she loved one unworthy. There was, also, among the company a mannered, bellied person called Alured Castorley, who talked and wrote about ‘Bohemia,’ but was always afraid of being ‘compromised’ by the weekly suppers at Neminaka’s Cafes in Hestern Square, where the Syndicate work was apportioned, and where everyone looked out for himself. He, too, for a time, had loved Vidal’s mother, in his own way.

Now, one Saturday at Neminaka’s, Graydon, who had given Manallace a sheaf of prints—torn from an extinct children’s book called Philippa’s Queen—on which to improvise, asked for results. Manallace went down into his ulster-pocket, hesitated a moment, and said the stuff had turned into poetry on his hands.

‘Bosh!’

‘That’s what it isn’t,’ the boy retorted. ‘It’s rather good.’

‘Then it’s no use to us.’ Graydon laughed. ‘Have you brought back the cuts?’

Manallace handed them over. There was a castle in the series; a knight or so in armour; an old lady in a horned head-dress; a young ditto; a very obvious Hebrew; a clerk, with pen and inkhorn, checking wine-barrels on a wharf; and a Crusader. On the back of one of the prints was a note, ‘If he doesn’t want to go, why can’t he be captured and held to ransom?’ Graydon asked what it all meant.

‘I don’t know yet. A comic opera, perhaps,’ said Manallace.

Graydon, who seldom wasted time, passed the cuts on to someone else, and advanced Manallace a couple of sovereigns to carry on with, as usual; at which Castorley was angry and would have said something unpleasant but was suppressed. Half-way through supper, Castorley told the company that a relative had died and left him an independence; and that he now withdrew from ‘hackwork’ to follow ‘Literature.’ Generally, the Syndicate rejoiced in a comrade’s good fortune, but Castorley had gifts of waking dislike. So the news was received with a vote of thanks, and he went out before the end, and, it was said, proposed to ’Dal Benzaquen’s mother, who refused him. He did not come back. Manallace, who had arrived a little exalted, got so drunk before midnight that a man had to stay and see him home. But liquor never touched him above the belt, and when he had slept awhile, he recited to the gas-chandelier the poetry he had made out of the pictures; said that, on second thoughts, he would convert it into comic opera; deplored the Upas-tree influence of Gilbert and Sullivan; sang somewhat to illustrate his point; and—after words, by the way, with a negress in yellow satin—was steered to his rooms.

In the course of a few years, Graydon’s foresight and genius were rewarded. The public began to read and reason upon higher planes, and the Syndicate grew rich. Later still, people demanded of their printed matter what they expected in their clothing and furniture. So, precisely as the three guinea hand-bag is followed in three weeks by its thirteen and sevenpence ha’penny, indistinguishable sister, they enjoyed perfect synthetic substitutes for Plot, Sentiment, and Emotion. Graydon died before the Cinemacaption school came in, but he left his widow twenty-seven thousand pounds.

Manallace made a reputation, and, more important, money for Vidal’s mother when her husband ran away and the first symptoms of her paralysis showed. His line was the jocundly-sentimental Wardour Street brand of adventure, told in a style that exactly met, but never exceeded, every expectation.

As he once said when urged to ‘write a real book’: ‘I’ve got my label, and I’m not going to chew it off. If you save people thinking, you can do anything with ’em.’ His output apart, he was genuinely a man of letters. He rented a small cottage in the country and economised on everything, except the care and charges of Vidal’s mother.

Castorley flew higher. When his legacy freed him from ‘hackwork,’ he became first a critic—in which calling he loyally scalped all his old associates as they came up—and then looked for some speciality. Having found it (Chaucer was the prey), he consolidated his position before he occupied it, by his careful speech, his cultivated bearing, and the whispered words of his friends whom he, too, had saved the trouble of thinking. It followed that, when he published his first serious articles on Chaucer, all the world which is interested in Chaucer said: ‘This is an authority.’ But he was no impostor. He learned and knew his poet and his age; and in a month-long dogfight in an austere literary weekly, met and mangled a recognised Chaucer expert of the day. He also, ‘for old sake’s sake,’ as he wrote to a friend, went out of his way to review one of Manallace’s books with an intimacy of unclean deduction (this was before the days of Freud) which long stood as a record. Some member of the extinct Syndicate took occasion to ask him if he would—for old sake’s sake—help Vidal’s mother to a new treatment. He answered that he had ‘known the lady very slightly and the calls on his purse were so heavy that,’ etc. The writer showed the letter to Manallace, who said he was glad Castorley hadn’t interfered. Vidal’s mother was then wholly paralysed. Only her eyes could move, and those always looked for the husband who had left her. She died thus in Manallace’s arms in April of the first year of the War.

During the War he and Castorley worked as some sort of departmental dishwashers in the Office of Co-ordinated Supervisals. Here Manallace came to know Castorley again. Castorley, having a sweet tooth, cadged lumps of sugar for his tea from a typist, and when she took to giving them to a younger man, arranged that she should be reported for smoking in unauthorised apartments. Manallace possessed himself of every detail of the affair, as compensation for the review of his book. Then there came a night when, waiting for a big air-raid, the two men had talked humanly, and Manallace spoke of Vidal’s mother. Castorley said something in reply, and from that hour—as was learned several years later—Manallace’s real life-work and interests began.

page 2

The War over, Castorley set about to make himself Supreme Pontiff on Chaucer by methods not far removed from the employment of poison-gas. The English Pope was silent, through private griefs, and influenza had carried off the learned Hun who claimed continental allegiance. Thus Castorley crowed unchallenged from Upsala to Seville, while Manallace went back to his cottage with the photo of Vidal’s mother over the mantelpiece. She seemed to have emptied out his life, and left him only fleeting interests in trifles. His private diversions were experiments of uncertain outcome, which, he said, rested him after a day’s gadzooking and vitalstapping. I found him, for instance, one week-end, in his toolshed-scullery, boiling a brew of slimy barks which were, if mixed with oak-galls, vitriol and wine, to become an ink-powder. We boiled it till the Monday, and it turned into an adhesive stronger than birdlime, and entangled us both.

At other times, he would carry me off, once in a few weeks, to sit at Castorley’s feet, and hear him talk about Chaucer. Castorley’s voice, bad enough in youth, when it could be shouted down, had, with culture and tact, grown almost insupportable. His mannerisms, too, had multiplied and set. He minced and mouthed, postured and chewed his words throughout those terrible evenings; and poisoned not only Chaucer, but every shred of English literature which he used to embellish him. He was shameless, too, as regarded self-advertisement and ‘recognition’—weaving elaborate intrigues; forming petty friendships and confederacies, to be dissolved next week in favour of more promising alliances; fawning, snubbing, lecturing, organising and lying as unrestingly as a politician, in chase of the Knighthood due not to him (he always called on his Maker to forbid such a thought) but as tribute to Chaucer. Yet, sometimes, he could break from his obsession and prove how a man’s work will try to save the soul of him. He would tell us charmingly of copyists of the fifteenth century in England and the Low Countries, who had multiplied the Chaucer MSS., of which there remained—he gave us the exact number—and how each scribe could by him (and, he implied, by him alone) be distinguished from every other by some peculiarity of letter-formation, spacing or like trick of pen-work; and how he could fix the dates of their work within five years. Sometimes he would give us an hour of really interesting stuff and then return to his overdue ‘recognition.’ The changes sickened me, but Manallace defended him, as a master in his own line who had revealed Chaucer to at least one grateful soul.

This, as far as I remembered, was the autumn when Manallace holidayed in the Shetlands or the Faroes, and came back with a stone ‘quern’—a hand corn-grinder. He said it interested him from the ethnological standpoint. His whim lasted till next harvest, and was followed by a religious spasm which, naturally, translated itself into literature. He showed me a battered and mutilated Vulgate of 1485, patched up the back with bits of legal parchments, which he had bought for thirty-five shillings. Some monk’s attempt to rubricate chapter-initials had caught, it seemed, his forlorn fancy, and he dabbled in shells of gold and silver paint for weeks.

That also faded out, and he went to the Continent to get local colour for a love-story, about Alva and the Dutch, and the next year I saw practically nothing of him. This released me from seeing much of Castorley, but, at intervals, I would go there to dine with him, when his wife—an unappetising, ash-coloured woman—made no secret that his friends wearied her almost as much as he did. But at a later meeting, not long after Manallace had finished his Low Countries’ novel, I found Castorley charged to bursting-point with triumph and high information hardly withheld. He confided to me that a time was at hand when great matters would be made plain, and ‘recognition’ would be inevitable. I assumed, naturally, that there was fresh scandal or heresy afoot in Chaucer circles, and kept my curiosity within bounds.

In time, New York cabled that a fragment of a hitherto unknown Canterbury Tale lay safe in the steel-walled vaults of the seven-million-dollar Sunnapia Collection. It was news on an international scale—the New World exultant—the Old deploring the ‘burden of British taxation which drove such treasures, etc.,’ and the lighterminded journals disporting themselves according to their publics; for ‘our Dan,’ as one earnest Sunday editor observed, ‘lies closer to the national heart than we wot of.’ Common decency made me call on Castorley, who, to my surprise, had not yet descended into the arena. I found him, made young again by joy, deep in just-passed proofs.

Yes, he said, it was all true. He had, of course, been in it from the first. There had been found one hundred and seven new lines of Chaucer tacked on to an abridged end of The Persone’s Tale, the whole the work of Abraham Mentzius, better known as Mentzel of Antwerp (1388 – 1438/9)—I might remember he had talked about him—whose distinguishing peculiarities were a certain Byzantine formation of his g’s, the use of a ‘sickle-slanted’ reed-pen, which cut into the vellum at certain letters; and, above all, a tendency to spell English words on Dutch lines, whereof the manuscript carried one convincing proof. For instance (he wrote it out for me), a girl praying against an undesired marriage, says:—

‘Ah Jesu-Moder, pitie my oe peyne.
Daiespringe mishandeelt cometh nat agayne.’

Would I, please, note the spelling of ‘mishandeelt’? Stark Dutch and Mentzel’s besetting sin! But in his position one took nothing for granted. The page had been part of the stiffening of the side of an old Bible, bought in a parcel by Dredd, the big dealer, because it had some rubricated chapter-initials, and by Dredd shipped, with a consignment of similar odds and ends, to the Sunnapia Collection, where they were making a glass-cased exhibit of the whole history of illumination and did not care how many books they gutted for that purpose. There, someone who noticed a crack in the back of the volume had unearthed it. He went on: ‘They didn’t know what to make of the thing at first. But they knew about me! They kept quiet till I’d been consulted. You might have noticed I was out of England for three months.

‘ I was over there, of course. It was what is called a “spoil”—a page Mentzel had spoiled with his Dutch spelling—I expect he had had the English dictated to him—then had evidently used the vellum for trying out his reeds; and then, I suppose, had put it away. The “spoil” had been doubled, pasted together, and slipped in as stiffening to the old book-cover. I had it steamed open, and analysed the wash. It gave the flour-grains in the paste-coarse, because of the old millstone—and there were traces of the grit itself. What? Oh, possibly a handmill of Mentzel’s own time. He may have doubled the spoilt page and used it for part of a pad to steady wood-cuts on. It may have knocked about his workshop for years. That, indeed, is practically certain because a beginner from the Low Countries has tried his reed on a few lines of some monkish hymn—not a bad lilt tho’—which must have been common form. Oh yes, the page may have been used in other books before it was used for the Vulgate. That doesn’t matter, but this does. Listen! I took a wash, for analysis, from a blot in one corner—that would be after Mentzel had given up trying to make a possible page of it, and had grown careless—and I got the actual ink of the period! It’s a practically eternal stuff compounded on—I’ve forgotten his name for the minute—the scribe at Bury St. Edmunds, of course—hawthorn bark and wine. Anyhow, on his formula. That wouldn’t interest you either, but, taken with all the other testimony, it clinches the thing. (You’ll see it all in my Statement to the Press on Monday.) Overwhelming, isn’t it?’

‘Overwhelming,’ I said, with sincerity. ‘Tell me what the tale was about, though. That’s more in my line.’

page 3

‘I know it; but I have to be equipped on all sides. The verses are relatively easy for one to pronounce on. The freshness, the fun, the humanity, the fragrance of it all, cries—no, shouts—itself as Dan’s work. Why “Daiespringe mishandled” alone stamps it from Dan’s mint. Plangent as doom, my dear boy—plangent as doom! It’s all in my Statement. Well, substantially, the fragment deals with a girl whose parents wish her to marry an elderly suitor. The mother isn’t so keen on it, but the father, an old Knight, is. The girl, of course, is in love with a younger and a poorer man. Common form? Granted. Then the father, who doesn’t in the least want to, is ordered off to a Crusade and, by way of passing on the kick, as we used to say during the War, orders the girl to be kept in duresse till his return or her consent to the old suitor. Common form, again? Quite so. That’s too much for her mother. She reminds the old Knight of his age and infirmities, and the discomforts of Crusading. Are you sure I’m not boring you?’

‘Not at all,’ I said, though time had begun to whirl backward through my brain to a red-velvet, pomatum-scented side-room at Neminaka’s and Manallace’s set face intoning to the gas.

‘You’ll read it all in my Statement next week. The sum is that the old lady tells him of a certain Knight-adventurer on the French coast, who, for a consideration, waylays Knights who don’t relish crusading and holds them to impossible ransoms till the trooping-season is over, or they are returned sick. He keeps a ship in the Channel to pick ’em up and transfers his birds to his castle ashore, where he has a reputation for doing ’em well. As the old lady points out:

‘And if perchance thou fall into his honde
By God how canstow ride to Holilonde?’

‘You see? Modern in essence as Gilbert and Sullivan, but handled as only Dan could! And she reminds him that “Honour and olde bones” parted company long ago. He makes one splendid appeal for the spirit of chivalry:

Lat all men change as Fortune may send,
But Knighthood beareth service to the end,

and then, of course, he gives in

For what his woman willeth to be don
Her manne must or wauken Hell anon.

‘Then she hints that the daughter’s young lover, who is in the Bordeaux wine-trade, could open negotiations for a kidnapping without compromising him. And then that careless brute Mentzel spoils his page and chucks it! But there’s enough to show what’s going to happen. You’ll see it all in my Statement. Was there ever anything in literary finds to hold a candle to it? .. . And they give grocers Knighthoods for selling cheese!’

I went away before he could get into his stride on that course. I wanted to think, and to see Manallace. But I waited till Castorley’s Statement came out. He had left himself no loophole. And when, a little later, his (nominally the Sunnapia people’s) ‘scientific’ account of their analyses and tests appeared, criticism ceased, and some journals began to demand ‘public recognition.’ Manallace wrote me on this subject, and I went down to his cottage, where he at once asked me to sign a Memorial on Castorley’s behalf. With luck, he said, we might get him a K.B.E. in the next Honours List. Had I read the Statement?

‘I have,’ I replied. ‘But I want to ask you something first. Do you remember the night you got drunk at Neminaka’s, and I stayed behind to look after you?’

‘Oh, that time,’ said he, pondering. ‘Wait a minute! I remember Graydon advancing me two quid. He was a generous paymaster. And I remember—now, who the devil rolled me under the sofa—and what for?’

‘We all did,’ I replied. ‘You wanted to read us what you’d written to those Chaucer cuts.’

‘I don’t remember that. No! I don’t remember anything after the sofa-episode…. You always said that you took me home—didn’t you?’

‘I did, and you told Kentucky Kate outside the old Empire that you had been faithful, Cynara, in your fashion.’

‘Did I?’ said he. ‘My God! Well, I suppose I have.’ He stared into the fire. ‘What else?’

‘Before we left Neminaka’s you recited me what you had made out of the cuts—the whole tale! So—you see?’

‘Ye-es.’ He nodded. ‘What are you going to do about it?’

‘What are you?’

‘I’m going to help him get his Knighthood—first.’

‘Why?’

‘I’ll tell you what he said about ’Dal’s mother—the night there was that air-raid on the offices.’

He told it.

‘That’s why,’ he said. ‘Am I justified?’

He seemed to me entirely so.

‘But after he gets his Knighthood?’ I went on.

‘That depends. There are several things I can think of. It interests me.’

‘Good Heavens! I’ve always imagined you a man without interests.’

‘So I was. I owe my interests to Castorley. He gave me every one of ’em except the tale itself.’

‘How did that come?’

page 4

‘Something in those ghastly cuts touched off something in me—a sort of possession, I suppose. I was in love too. No wonder I got drunk that night. I’d been Chaucer for a week! Then I thought the notion might make a comic opera. But Gilbert and Sullivan were too strong.’

‘So I remember you told me at the time.’

‘I kept it by me, and it made me interested in Chaucer—philologically and so on. I worked on it on those lines for years. There wasn’t a flaw in the wording even in ’14. I hardly had to touch it after that.’

‘Did you ever tell it to anyone except me?’

‘No, only ’Dal’s mother—when she could listen to anything—to put her to sleep. But when Castorley said—what he did about her, I thought I might use it. ’Twasn’t difficult. He taught me. D’you remember my birdlime experiments, and the stuff on our hands? I’d been trying to get that ink for more than a year. Castorley told me where I’d find the formula. And your falling over the quern, too?’

‘That accounted for the stone-dust under the microscope?’

‘Yes. I grew the wheat in the garden here, and ground it myself. Castorley gave me Mentzel complete. He put me on to an MS. in the British Museum which he said was the finest sample of his work. I copied his “Byzantine g’s” for months.’

‘And what’s a “sickle-slanted” pen?’ I asked.

‘You nick one edge of your reed till it drags and scratches on the curves of the letters. Castorley told me about Mentzel’s spacing and margining. I only had to get the hang of his script.’

‘How long did that take you?’

‘On and off—some years. I was too ambitious at first—I wanted to give the whole poem. That would have been risky. Then Castorley told me about spoiled pages and I took the hint. I spelt “Dayspring mishandeelt” Mentzel’s way—to make sure of him. It’s not a bad couplet in itself. Did you see how he admires the “plangency” of it?’

‘Never mind him. Go on!’ I said.

He did. Castorley had been his unfailing guide throughout, specifying in minutest detail every trap to be set later for his own feet. The actual vellum was an Antwerp find, and its introduction into the cover of the Vulgate was begun after a long course of amateur bookbinding. At last, he bedded it under pieces of an old deed, and a printed page (1686) of Horace’s Odes, legitimately used for repairs by different owners in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; and at the last moment, to meet Castorley’s theory that spoiled pages were used in workshops by beginners, he had written a few Latin words in fifteenth century script the Statement gave the exact date—across an open part of the fragment. The thing ran: ‘Illa alma Mater ecca, secum afferens me acceptum. Nicolaus Atrib.’ The disposal of the thing was easiest of all. He had merely hung about Dredd’s dark bookshop of fifteen rooms, where he was well known, occasionally buying but generally browsing, till, one day, Dredd Senior showed him a case of cheap black-letter stuff, English and Continental—being packed for the Sunnapia people—into which Manallace tucked his contribution, taking care to wrench the back enough to give a lead to an earnest seeker.

‘And then?’ I demanded.

‘After six months or so Castorley sent for me. Sunnapia had found it, and as Dredd had missed it, and there was no money-motive sticking out, they were half convinced it was genuine from the start. But they invited him over. He conferred with their experts, and suggested the scientific tests. I put that into his head, before he sailed. That’s all. And now, will you sign our Memorial?’

I signed. Before we had finished hawking it round there was a host of influential names to help us, as well as the impetus of all the literary discussion which arose over every detail of the glorious trove. The upshot was a K.B.E. for Castorley in the next Honours List; and Lady Castorley, her cards duly printed, called on friends that same afternoon.

Manallace invited me to come with him, a day or so later, to convey our pleasure and satisfaction to them both. We were rewarded by the sight of a man relaxed and ungirt—not to say wallowing naked—on the crest of Success. He assured us that ‘The Title’ should not make any difference to our future relations, seeing it was in no sense personal, but, as he had often said, a tribute to Chaucer; ‘and, after all,’ he pointed out, with a glance at the mirror over the mantelpiece, ‘Chaucer was the prototype of the “veray parfit gentil Knight” of the British Empire so far as that then existed.’

On the way back, Manallace told me he was considering either an unheralded revelation in the baser Press which should bring Castorley’s reputation about his own ears some breakfast-time, or a private conversation, when he would make clear to Castorley that he must now back the forgery as long as he lived, under threat of Manallace’s betraying it if he flinched.

He favoured the second plan. ‘If I pull the string of the shower-bath in the papers,’ he said, ‘Castorley might go off his veray parfit gentil nut. I want to keep his intellect.’

‘What about your own position? The forgery doesn’t matter so much. But if you tell this you’ll kill him,’ I said.

‘I intend that. Oh—my position? I’ve been dead since—April, Fourteen, it was. But there’s no hurry. What was it she was saying to you just as we left?’

‘She told me how much your sympathy and understanding had meant to him. She said she thought that even Sir Alured did not realise the full extent of his obligations to you.’

‘She’s right, but I don’t like her putting it that way.’

‘It’s only common form—as Castorley’s always saying.’

‘Not with her. She can hear a man think.’

‘She never struck me in that light.’

‘You aren’t playing against her.’

‘’Guilty conscience, Manallace?’

page 5

‘H’m! I wonder. Mine or hers? I wish she hadn’t said that. “More even than he realises it.” I won’t call again for awhile.’

He kept away till we read that Sir Alured, owing to slight indisposition, had been unable to attend a dinner given in his honour.

Inquiries brought word that it was but natural reaction, after strain, which, for the moment, took the form of nervous dyspepsia, and he would be glad to see Manallace at any time. Manallace reported him as rather pulled and drawn, but full of his new life and position, and proud that his efforts should have martyred him so much. He was going to collect, collate, and expand all his pronouncements and inferences into one authoritative volume.

‘I must make an effort of my own,’ said Manallace. ‘I’ve collected nearly all his stuff about the Find that has appeared in the papers, and he’s promised me everything that’s missing. I’m going to help him. It will be a new interest.’

‘How will you treat it?’ I asked.

‘I expect I shall quote his deductions on the evidence, and parallel ’em with my experiments—the ink and the paste and the rest of it. It ought to be rather interesting.’

‘But even then there will only be your word. It’s hard to catch up with an established lie,’ I said. ‘Especially when you’ve started it yourself.’

He laughed. ‘I’ve arranged for that—in case anything happens to me. Do you remember the “Monkish Hymn”?’

‘Oh yes! There’s quite a literature about it already.’

‘Well, you write those ten words above each other, and read down the first and second letters of ’em; and see what you get. My Bank has the formula.’

              Illa
              alma
              Mater
              ecca
              secum
              afferens
              me
              acceptum
              Nicolaus
              Atrub.

He wrapped himself lovingly and leisurely round his new task, and Castorley was as good as his word in giving him help. The two practically collaborated, for Manallace suggested that all Castorley’s strictly scientific evidence should be in one place, with his deductions and dithyrambs as appendices. He assured him that the public would prefer this arrangement, and, after grave consideration, Castorley agreed.

‘That’s better,’ said Manallace to me. ‘Now I sha’n’t have so many hiatuses in my extracts. Dots always give the reader the idea you aren’t dealing fairly with your man. I shall merely quote him solid, and rip him up, proof for proof, and date for date, in parallel columns. His book’s taking more out of him than I like, though. He’s been doubled up twice with tummy attacks since I’ve worked with him. And he’s just the sort of flatulent beast who may go down with appendicitis.’

We learned before long that the attacks were due to gall-stones, which would necessitate an operation. Castorley bore the blow very well. He had full confidence in his surgeon, an old friend of theirs; great faith in his own constitution; a strong conviction that nothing would happen to him till the book was finished, and, above all, the Will to Live.

He dwelt on these assets with a voice at times a little out of pitch and eyes brighter than usual beside a slightly-sharpening nose.

I had only met Gleeag, the surgeon, once or twice at Castorley’s house, but had always heard him spoken of as a most capable man. He told Castorley that his trouble was the price exacted, in some shape or other, from all who had served their country; and that, measured in units of strain, Castorley had practically been at the front through those three years he had served in the Office of Co-ordinated Supervisals. However, the thing had been taken betimes, and in a few weeks he would worry no more about it.

‘But suppose he dies?’ I suggested to Manallace.

‘He won’t. I’ve been talking to Gleeag. He says he’s all right.’

‘Wouldn’t Gleeag’s talk be common form?’

‘I wish you hadn’t said that. But, surely, Gleeag wouldn’t have the face to play with me—or her.’

‘Why not? I expect it’s been done before.’ But Manallace insisted that, in this case, it would be impossible.

The operation was a success and, some weeks later, Castorley began to recast the arrangement and most of the material of his book. ‘Let me have my way,’ he said, when Manallace protested. ‘They are making too much of a baby of me. I really don’t need Gleeag looking in every day now.’ But Lady Castorley told us that he required careful watching. His heart had felt the strain, and fret or disappointment of any kind must be avoided. ‘Even,’ she turned to Manallace, ‘though you know ever so much better how his book should be arranged than he does himself.’

‘But really,’ Manallace began. ‘I’m very careful not to fuss——’

She shook her finger at him playfully. ‘You don’t think you do; but, remember, he tells me everything that you tell him, just the same as he told me everything that he used to tell you. Oh, I don’t mean the things that men talk about. I mean about his Chaucer.’

‘I didn’t realise that,’ said Manallace, weakly.

‘I thought you didn’t. He never spares me anything; but I don’t mind,’ she replied with a laugh, and went off to Gleeag, who was paying his daily visit. Gleeag said he had no objection to Manallace working with Castorley on the book for a given time—say, twice a week—but supported Lady Castorley’s demand that he should not be over-taxed in what she called ‘the sacred hours.’ The man grew more and more difficult to work with, and the little check he had heretofore set on his self-praise went altogether.

‘He says there has never been anything in the History of Letters to compare with it,’ Manallace groaned. ‘He wants now to inscribe—he never dedicates, you know—inscribe it to me, as his “most valued assistant.” The devil of it is that she backs him up in getting it out soon. Why? How much do you think she knows?’

‘Why should she know anything at all?’

‘You heard her say he had told her everything that he had told me about Chaucer? (I wish she hadn’t said that!) If she puts two and two together, she can’t help seeing that every one of his notions and theories has been played up to. But then—but then . . . Why is she trying to hurry publication? She talks about me fretting him. She’s at him, all the time, to be quick.’

Castorley must have over-worked, for, after a couple of months, he complained of a stitch in his right side, which Gleeag said was a slight sequel, a little incident of the operation. It threw him back awhile, but he returned to his work undefeated.

The book was due in the autumn. Summer was passing, and his publisher urgent, and—he said to me, when after a longish interval I called—Manallace had chosen this time, of all, to take a holiday. He was not pleased with Manallace, once his indefatigable aide, but now dilatory, and full of time-wasting objections. Lady Castorley had noticed it, too.

Meantime, with Lady Castorley’s help, he himself was doing the best he could to expedite the book; but Manallace had mislaid (did I think through jealousy?) some essential stuff which had been dictated to him. And Lady Castorley wrote Manallace, who had been delayed by a slight motor accident abroad, that the fret of waiting was prejudicial to her husband’s health. Manallace, on his return from the Continent, showed me that letter.

‘He has fretted a little, I believe,’ I said.

Manallace shuddered. ‘If I stay abroad, I’m helping to kill him. If I help him to hurry up the book, I’m expected to kill him. She knows,’ he said.

page 6

‘You’re mad. You’ve got this thing on the brain.’

‘I have not! Look here! You remember that Gleeag gave me from four to six, twice a week, to work with him. She called them the “sacred hours.” You heard her? Well, they are! They are Gleeag’s and hers. But she’s so infernally plain, and I’m such a fool, it took me weeks to find it out.’

‘That’s their affair,’ I answered. ‘It doesn’t prove she knows anything about the Chaucer.’

‘She does! He told her everything that he had told me when I was pumping him, all those years. She put two and two together when the thing came out. She saw exactly how I had set my traps. I know it! She’s been trying to make me admit it.’

‘What did you do?’

‘’Didn’t understand what she was driving at, of course. And then she asked Gleeag, before me, if he didn’t think the delay over the book was fretting Sir Alured. He didn’t think so. He said getting it out might deprive him of an interest. He had that much decency. She’s the devil!’

‘What do you suppose is her game, then?’

‘If Castorley knows he’s been had, it’ll kill him. She’s at me all the time, indirectly, to let it out. I’ve told you she wants to make it a sort of joke between us. Gleeag’s willing to wait. He knows Castorley’s a dead man. It slips out when they talk. They say “He was,” not “He is.” Both of ’em know it. But she wants him finished sooner.’

‘I don’t believe it. What are you going to do?’

‘What can I? I’m not going to have him killed, though.’

Manlike, he invented compromises whereby Castorley might be lured up by-paths of interest, to delay publication. This was not a success. As autumn advanced Castorley fretted more, and suffered from returns of his distressing colics. At last, Gleeag told him that he thought they might be due to an overlooked gallstone working down. A second comparatively trivial operation would eliminate the bother once and for all. If Castorley cared for another opinion, Gleeag named a surgeon of eminence. ‘And then,’ said he, cheerily, ‘the two of us can talk you over.’ Castorley did not want to be talked over. He was oppressed by pains in his side, which, at first, had yielded to the liver-tonics Gleeag prescribed; but now they stayed—like a toothache—behind everything. He felt most at ease in his bedroom-study, with his proofs round him. If he had more pain than he could stand, he would consider the second operation. Meantime Manallace—‘the meticulous Manallace,’ he called him—agreed with him in thinking that the Mentzel page-facsimile, done by the Sunnapia Library, was not quite good enough for the great book, and the Sunnapia people were, very decently, having it re-processed. This would hold things back till early spring, which had its advantages, for he could run a fresh eye over all in the interval.

One gathered these news in the course of stray visits as the days shortened. He insisted on Manallace keeping to the ‘sacred hours,’ and Manallace insisted on my accompanying him when possible. On these occasions he and Castorley would confer apart for half an hour or so, while I listened to an unendurable clock in the drawing-room. Then I would join them and help wear out the rest of the time, while Castorley rambled. His speech, now, was often clouded and uncertain—the result of the ‘liver-tonics’; and his face came to look like old vellum.

It was a few days after Christmas—the operation had been postponed till the following Friday—that we called together. She met us with word that Sir Alured had picked up an irritating little winter cough, due to a cold wave, but we were not, therefore, to abridge our visit. We found him in steam perfumed with Friar’s Balsam. He waved the old Sunnapia facsimile at us. We agreed that it ought to have been more worthy. He took a dose of his mixture, lay back and asked us to lock the door. There was, he whispered, something wrong somewhere. He could not lay his finger on it, but it was in the air. He felt he was being played with. He did not like it. There was something wrong all round him. Had we noticed it? Manallace and I severally and slowly denied that we had noticed anything of the sort.

With no longer break than a light fit of coughing, he fell into the hideous, helpless panic of the sick—those worse than captives who lie at the judgment and mercy of the hale for every office and hope. He wanted to go away. Would we help him to pack his Gladstone? Or, if that would attract too much attention in certain quarters, help him to dress and go out? There was an urgent matter to be set right, and now that he had The Title and knew his own mind it would all end happily and he would be well again. Please would we let him go out, just to speak to—he named her; he named her by her ‘little’ name out of the old Neminaka days? Manallace quite agreed, and recommended a pull at the ‘liver-tonic’ to brace him after so long in the house. He took it, and Manallace suggested that it would be better if, after his walk, he came down to the cottage for a week-end and brought the revise with him. They could then re-touch the last chapter. He answered to that drug and to some praise of his work, and presently simpered drowsily. Yes, it was good—though he said it who should not. He praised himself awhile till, with a puzzled forehead and shut eyes, he told us that she had been saying lately that it was too good—the whole thing, if we understood, was too good. He wished us to get the exact shade of her meaning. She had suggested, or rather implied, this doubt. She had said—he would let us draw our own inferences—that the Chaucer find had ‘anticipated the wants of humanity.’ Johnson, of course. No need to tell him that. But what the hell was her implication? Oh God! Life had always been one long innuendo! And she had said that a man could do anything with anyone if he saved him the trouble of thinking. What did she mean by that? He had never shirked thought. He had thought sustainedly all his life. It wasn’t too good, was it? Manallace didn’t think it was too good—did he? But this pick-pick-picking at a man’s brain and work was too bad, wasn’t it? What did she mean? Why did she always bring in Manallace, who was only a friend—no scholar, but a lover of the game—Eh?—Manallace could confirm this if he were here, instead of loafing on the Continent just when he was most needed.

‘I’ve come back,’ Manallace interrupted, unsteadily. ‘I can confirm every word you’ve said. You’ve nothing to worry about. It’s your find—your credit—your glory and—all the rest of it.’

‘Swear you’ll tell her so then,’ said Castorley. ‘She doesn’t believe a word I say. She told me she never has since before we were married. Promise!’

Manallace promised, and Castorley added that he had named him his literary executor, the proceeds of the book to go to his wife. ‘All profits without deduction,’ he gasped. ‘Big sales if it’s properly handled. You don’t need money . . . . Graydon’ll trust you to any extent. It ’ud be a long . . .’

He coughed, and, as he caught breath, his pain broke through all the drugs, and the outcry filled the room. Manallace rose to fetch Gleeag, when a full, high, affected voice, unheard for a generation, accompanied, as it seemed, the clamour of a beast in agony, saying: ‘I wish to God someone would stop that old swine howling down there! I can’t . . . I was going to tell you fellows that it would be a dam’ long time before Graydon advanced me two quid.’

We escaped together, and found Gleeag waiting, with Lady Castorley, on the landing. He telephoned me, next morning, that Castorley had died of bronchitis, which his weak state made it impossible for him to throw off. ‘Perhaps it’s just as well,’ he added, in reply to the condolences I asked him to convey to the widow. ‘We might have come across something we couldn’t have coped with.’

Distance from that house made me bold.

‘You knew all along, I suppose? What was it, really?’

‘Malignant kidney-trouble—generalised at the end. ‘No use worrying him about it. We let him through as easily as possible. Yes! A happy release. . What? . . . Oh! Cremation. Friday, at eleven.’

There, then, Manallace and I met. He told me that she had asked him whether the book need now be published; and he had told her this was more than ever necessary, in her interests as well as Castorley’s.

‘She is going to be known as his widow—for a while, at any rate. Did I perjure myself much with him?’

‘Not explicitly,’ I answered.

‘Well, I have now—with her—explicitly,’ said he, and took out his black gloves. . . .

As, on the appointed words, the coffin crawled sideways through the noiselessly-closing doorflaps, I saw Lady Castorley’s eyes turn towards Gleeag.

page 1 of 9

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Mine came unstuck too, and he has the physique of a bull,’ said Gilbert. ‘What delusions had yours?’

‘I Faces—faces with mildew on them. In any other walk of life we’d call it the Horrors. She told me, of course, she took the drugs to mask the faces. Post hoc, propter hoc again. All liars!’

‘What’s that?’ said the senior K.C. quickly. ‘Sounds professional.’

‘Go away! Not for you, Sandy.’ Sir John turned a shoulder against him and walked with Gilbert in the chill evening.

‘To Conroy in his chambers came, one week later, this letter:

page 2

‘He knows I’m scarcely fit to look after myself,’ was Conroy’s thought. ‘And he wants me to look after a woman!’

Yet, at the end of half an hour’s irresolution, he accepted.

Now Conroy’s trouble, which had lasted for years, was this:

On a certain night, while he lay between sleep and wake, he would be overtaken by a long shuddering sigh, which he learned to know was the sign that his brain had once more conceived its horror, and in time—in due time—would bring it forth.

Drugs could so well veil that horror that it shuffled along no worse than as a freezing dream in a procession of disorderly dreams; but over the return of the event drugs had no control. Once that sigh had passed his lips the thing was inevitable, and through the days granted before its rebirth he walked in torment. For the first two years he had striven to fend it off by distractions, but neither exercise nor drink availed. Then he had come to the tabloids of the excellent M. Najdol. These guarantee, on the label, ‘Refreshing and absolutely natural sleep to the soul-weary.’ They are carried in a case with a spring which presses one scented tabloid to the end of the tube, whence it can be lipped off in stroking the moustache or adjusting the veil.

Three years of M. Najdol’s preparations do not fit a man for many careers. His friends, who knew he did not drink, assumed that Conroy had strained his heart through valiant outdoor exercises, and Conroy had with some care invented an imaginary doctor, symptoms, and regimen, which he discussed with them and with his mother in Hereford. She maintained that he would grow out of it, and recommended nux vomica.

When at last Conroy faced a real doctor, it was, he hoped, to be saved from suicide by a strait-waistcoat. Yet Dr. Gilbert had but given him more drugs—a tonic, for instance, that would couple railway carriages—and had advised a night in the train. Not alone the horrors of a railway journey (for which a man who dare keep no servant must e’en pack, label, and address his own bag), but the necessity for holding himself in hand before a stranger ‘a little shaken in her nerves.’

He spent a long forenoon packing, because when he assembled and counted things his mind slid off to the hours that remained of the day before his night, and he found himself counting minutes aloud. At such times the injustice of his fate would drive him to revolts which no servant should witness, but on this evening Dr. Gilbert’s tonic held him fairly calm while he put up his patent razors.

Waterloo Station shook him into real life. The change for his ticket needed concentration, if only to prevent shillings and pence turning into minutes at the booking-office; and he spoke quickly to a porter about the disposition of his bag. The old 10.8 from Waterloo to the West was an all-night caravan that halted, in the interests of the milk traffic, at almost every station.

Dr. Gilbert stood by the door of the one composite corridor coach; an older and stouter man behind him. ‘So glad you’re here!’ he cried. ‘Let me get your ticket.’

‘Certainly not,’ Conroy answered. ‘I got it myself—long ago. My bag’s in too,’ he added proudly.

‘I beg your pardon. Miss Henschil’s here. I’ll introduce you.’

‘But—but,’ he stammered—‘think of the state I’m in. If anything happens I shall collapse.’

‘Not you. You’d rise to the occasion like a bird. And as for the self-control you were talking of the other day’—Gilbert swung him round—‘look!’

A young man in an ulster over a silk-faced frock-coat stood by the carriage window, weeping shamelessly.

‘Oh, but that’s only drink,’ Conroy said. ‘I haven’t had one of my—my things since lunch.’

‘Excellent!’ said Gilbert. ‘I knew I could depend on you. Come along. Wait for a minute, Chartres.’

A tall woman, veiled, sat by the far window. She bowed her head as the doctor murmured Conroy knew not what. Then he disappeared and the inspector came for tickets.

‘My maid—next compartment,’ she said slowly.

Conroy showed his ticket, but in returning it to the sleeve-pocket of his ulster the little silver Najdolene case slipped from his glove and fell to the floor. He snatched it up as the moving train flung him into his seat.

‘How nice!’ said the woman. She leisurely lifted her veil, unbuttoned the first button of her left glove, and pressed out from its palm a Najdolene-case.

‘Don’t!’ said Conroy, not realising he had spoken.

‘I beg your pardon.’ The deep voice was measured, even, and low. Conroy knew what made it so.

‘I said “don’t”! He wouldn’t like you to do it!’

‘No, he would not.’ She held the tube with its ever-presented tabloid between finger and thumb. ‘But aren’t you one of the—ah—“soulweary” too?’

‘That’s why. Oh, please don’t! Not at first. I—I haven’t had one since morning. You—you’ll set me off!’

‘You? Are you so far gone as that?’

page 3

He nodded, pressing his palms together. The train jolted through Vauxhall points, and was welcomed with the clang of empty milk-cans for the West.

After long silence she lifted her great eyes, and, with an innocence that would have deceived any sound man, asked Conroy to call her maid to bring her a forgotten book.

‘Conroy shook his head. ‘No. Our sort can’t read. Don’t!’

‘Were you sent to watch me?’ The voice never changed.

‘Me? I need a keeper myself much more—this night of all! ‘

‘This night? Have you a night, then? They disbelieved me when I told them of mine.’ She leaned back and laughed, always slowly. ‘Aren’t doctors stu-upid? They don’t know.’

She leaned her elbow on her knee, lifted her veil that had fallen, and, chin in hand, stared at him. He looked at her—till his eyes were blurred with tears.

‘Have I been there, think you?’ she said.

‘Surely—surely,’ Conroy answered, for he had well seen the fear and the horror that lived behind the heavy-lidded eyes, the fine tracing on the broad forehead, and the guard set about the desirable mouth.

‘Then—suppose we have one—just one apiece? I’ve gone without since this afternoon.’

He put up his hand, and would have shouted, but his voice broke.

‘Don’t! Can’t you see that it helps me to help you to keep it off? Don’t let’s both go down together.’

‘But I want one. It’s a poor heart that never rejoices. Just one. It’s my night.’

‘It’s mine—too. My sixty-fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh.’ He shut his lips firmly against the tide of visualised numbers that threatened to carry him along.

‘Ah, it’s only my thirty-ninth.’ She paused as he had done. ‘I wonder if I shall last into the sixties . . . . Talk to me or I shall go crazy. You’re a man. You’re the stronger vessel. Tell me when you went to pieces.’

‘One, two, three, four, five, six, seven—eight—I beg your pardon.’

‘Not in the least. I always pretend I’ve dropped a stitch of my knitting. I count the days till the last day, then the hours, then the minutes. Do you?’

‘I don’t think I’ve done very much else for the last——’ said Conroy, shivering, for the night was cold, with a chill he recognised.

‘Oh, how comforting to find some one who can talk sense! It’s not always the same date, is it? ’

‘What difference would that make?’ He unbuttoned his ulster with a jerk. ‘You’re a sane woman. Can’t you see the wicked—wicked—wicked’ (dust flew from the padded arm-rest as he struck it) ‘unfairness of it? What have I done?’

She laid her large hand on his shoulder very firmly.

‘If you begin to think over that,’ she said, ‘you’ll go to pieces and be ashamed. Tell me yours, and I’ll tell you mine. Only be quiet—be quiet, lad, or you’ll set me off!’ She made shift to soothe him, though her chin trembled.

‘Well,’ said he at last, picking at the arm-rest between them, ‘mine’s nothing much, of course.’

‘Don’t be a fool! That’s for doctors—and mothers.’

‘It’s Hell,’ Conroy muttered. ‘It begins on a steamer—on a stifling hot night. I come out of my cabin. I pass through the saloon where the stewards have rolled up the carpets, and the boards are bare and hot and soapy.’

‘I’ve travelled too,’ she said.

‘Ah! I come on deck. I walk down a covered alleyway. Butcher’s meat, bananas, oil, that sort of smell.’

Again she nodded.

‘It’s a lead-coloured steamer, and the sea’s lead-coloured. Perfectly smooth sea—perfectly still ship, except for the engines running, and her waves going off in lines and lines and lines—dull grey’. ‘All this time I know something’s going to happen.

‘I know. Something going to happen,’ she whispered.

‘Then I hear a thud in the engine-room. Then the noise of machinery falling down—like fire-irons—and then two most awful yells. They’re more like hoots, and I know—I know while I listen—that it means that two men have died as they hooted. It was their last breath hooting out of them—in most awful pain. Do you understand?’

‘I ought to. Go on.’

‘That’s the first part. Then I hear bare feet running along the alleyway. One of the scalded men comes up behind me and says quite distinctly, “My friend! All is lost!” Then he taps me on the shoulder and I hear him drop down dead.’ He panted and wiped his forehead.

‘So that is your night?’ she said.

‘That is my night. It comes every few weeks—so many days after I get what I call sentence. Then I begin to count.’

‘Get sentence? D’ycu mean this? ‘She half closed her eyes, drew a deep breath, and shuddered. ‘“Notice” I call it. Sir John thought it was all lies.’

She had unpinned her hat and thrown it on the seat opposite, showing the immense mass of her black hair, rolled low in the nape of the columnar neck and looped over the left ear. But Conroy had no eyes except for her grave eyes.

‘Listen now! ‘said she. ‘I walk down a road, a white sandy road near the sea. There are broken fences on either side, and Men come and look at me over them.’

‘Just men? Do they speak?’

page 4

‘They try to. Their faces are all mildewy—eaten away,’ and she hid her face for an instant with her left hand. ‘It’s the Faces—the Faces!’

‘Yes. Like my two hoots. I know.’

‘Ah! But the place itself—the bareness—and the glitter and the salt smells, and the wind blowing the sand! The Men run after me and I run . . . . I know what’s coming too. One of them touches me.’

‘Yes! What comes then? We’ve both shirked that.’

‘One awful shock—not palpitation, but shock, shock, shock!’

‘As though your soul were being stopped—as you’d stop a finger-bowl humming?’ he said.

‘Just that,’ she answered. ‘One’s very soul—the soul that one lives by—stopped. So!’

She drove her thumb deep into the arm-rest. ‘And now,’ she whined to him, ‘now that we’ve stirred each other up this way, mightn’t we have just one?’

‘No,’ said Conroy, shaking. ‘Let’s hold on. We’re past’—he peered out of the black windows—‘Woking. There’s the Necropolis. How long till dawn?’

‘Oh, cruel long yet. If one dozes for a minute, it catches one.’

‘And how d’you find that this’—he tapped the palm of his glove—‘helps you?’

‘It covers up the thing from being too real—if one takes enough—you know. Only—only—one loses everything else. I’ve been no more than a bogie-girl for two years. What would you give to be real again? This lying’s such a nuisance.’

‘One must protect oneself—and there’s one’s mother to think of,’ he answered.

‘True. I hope allowances are made for us somewhere. Our burden—can you hear?—our burden is heavy enough.’

She rose, towering into the roof of the carriage. Conroy’s ungentle grip pulled her back.

‘Now you are foolish. Sit down,’ said he.

‘But the cruelty of it! Can’t you see it? Don’t you feel it? Let’s take one now—before I——’

‘Sit down!’ cried Conroy, and the sweat stood again on his forehead. He had fought through a few nights, and had been defeated on more, and he knew the rebellion that flares beyond control to exhaustion.

She smoothed her hair and dropped back, but for a while her head and throat moved with the sickening motion of a captured wry-neck.

‘Once,’ she said, spreading out her hands, ‘I ripped my counterpane from end to end. That takes strength. I had it then. I’ve little now. “All dorn,” as my little niece says. And you, lad?’

‘“All dorn”! Let me keep your case for you till the morning.’

‘But the cold feeling is beginning.’

‘Lend it me, then.’

‘And the drag down my right side. I shan’t be able to move in a minute.’

‘I can scarcely lift my arm myself,’ said Conroy. ‘We’re in for it.’

‘Then why are you so foolish? You know it’ll be easier if we have only one—only one apiece.’

She was lifting the case to her mouth. With tremendous effort Conroy caught it. The two moved like jointed dolls, and when their hands met it was as wood on wood.

‘You must—not!’ said Conroy. His jaws stiffened, and the cold climbed from his feet up.

‘Why—must—I—not?’ She repeated the words idiotically.

Conroy could only shake his head, while he bore down on the hand and the case in it.

Her speech went from her altogether. The wonderful lips rested half over the even teeth, the breath was in the nostrils only, the eyes dulled, the face set grey, and through the glove the hand struck like ice.

Presently her soul came back and stood behind her eyes—only thing that had life in all that place—stood and looked for Conroy’s soul. He too was fettered in every limb, but somewhere at an immense distance he heard his heart going about its work as the engine-room carries on through and beneath the all but overwhelming wave. His one hope, he knew, was not to lose the eyes that clung to his, because there was an Evil abroad which would possess him if he looked aside by a hairbreadth.

The rest was darkness through which some distant planet spun while cymbals clashed. (Beyond Farnborough the 10.8 rolls out many empty milk-cans at every halt.) Then a body came to life with intolerable pricklings. Limb by limb, after agonies of terror, that body returned to him, steeped in most perfect physical weariness such as follows a long day’s rowing. He saw the heavy lids droop over her eyes—the watcher behind them departed—and, his soul sinking into assured peace, Conroy slept.

Light on his eyes and a salt breath roused him without shock. Her hand still held his. She slept, forehead down upon it, but the movement of his waking waked her too, and she sneezed like a child.

‘I—I think it’s morning,’ said Conroy.

‘And nothing has happened! Did you see your Men? I didn’t see my Faces. Does it mean we’ve escaped? Did—did you take any after I went to sleep? I’ll swear I didn’t,’ she stammered.

‘No, there wasn’t any need. We’ve slept through it.’

‘No need! Thank God! There was no need! Oh, look!’

page 5

The train was running under red cliffs along a sea-wall washed by waves that were colourless in the early light. Southward the sun rose mistily upon the Channel.

She leaned out of the window and breathed to the bottom of her lungs, while the wind wrenched down her dishevelled hair and blew it below her waist.

‘Well!’ she said with splendid eyes. ‘Aren’t you still waiting for something to happen?’

‘No. Not till next time. We’ve been let off,’ Conroy answered, breathing as deeply as she.

‘Then we ought to say our prayers.’

‘What nonsense! Some one will see us.’

‘We needn’t kneel. Stand up and say “Our Father.” We must!’

It was the first time since childhood that Conroy had prayed. They laughed hysterically when a curve threw them against an arm-rest.

‘Now for breakfast!’ she cried. ‘My maid—Nurse Blaber—has the basket and things. It’ll be ready in twenty minutes. Oh! Look at my hair! ‘and she went out laughing.

Conroy’s first discovery, made without fumbling or counting letters on taps, was that the London and South Western’s allowance of washing-water is inadequate. He used every drop, rioting in the cold tingle on neck and arms. To shave in a moving train balked him, but the next halt gave him a chance, which, to his own surprise, he took. As he stared at himself in the mirror he smiled and nodded. There were points about this person with the clear, if sunken, eye and the almost uncompressed mouth. But when he bore his bag back to his compartment, the weight of it on a limp arm humbled that new pride.

‘My friend,’ he said, half aloud, ‘you go into training. Your putty.’

She met him in the spare compartment, where her maid had laid breakfast.

‘By Jove,’ he said, halting at the doorway, ‘I hadn’t realised how beautiful you were!’

‘The same to you, lad. Sit down. I could eat a horse.’

‘I shouldn’t,’ said the maid quietly. ‘The less you eat the better.’ She was a small, freckled woman, with light fluffy hair and pale-blue eyes that looked through all veils.

‘This is Miss Blaber,’said Miss Henschil. ‘He’s one of the soul-weary too, Nursey.’

‘I know it. But when one has just given it up a full meal doesn’t agree. That’s why I’ve only brought you bread and butter.’

She went out quietly, and Conroy reddened.

‘We’re still children, you see,’ said Miss Henschil. ‘But I’m well enough to feel some shame of it. D’you take sugar?’

They starved together heroically, and Nurse Blaber was good enough to signify approval when she came to clear away.

‘Nursey?’ Miss Henschil insinuated, and flushed.

‘Do you smoke?’ said the nurse coolly to Conroy.

‘I haven’t in years. Now you mention it, I think I’d like a cigarette—or something.’

‘I used to. D’you think it would keep me quiet?’ Miss Henschil said.

‘Perhaps. Try these.’ The nurse handed them her cigarette-case.

‘Don’t take anything else,’ she commanded, and went away with the tea-basket.

‘Good!’ grunted Conroy, between mouthfuls of tobacco.

‘Better than nothing,’ said Miss Henschil; but for a while they felt ashamed, yet with the comfort of children punished together.

‘Now,’ she whispered, ‘who were you when you were a man?’

Conroy told her, and in return she gave him her history. It delighted them both to deal once more in worldly concerns—families, names, places, and dates—with a person of understanding.

She came, she said, of Lancashire folk—wealthy cotton-spinners, who still kept the broadened a and slurred aspirate of the old stock. She lived with an old masterful mother in an opulent world north of Lancaster Gate, where people in Society gave parties at a Mecca called the Langham Hotel.

She herself had been launched into Society there, and the flowers at the ball had cost eighty-seven pounds; but, being reckoned peculiar, she had made few friends among her own sex. She had attracted many men, for she was a beauty—the beauty, in fact, of Society, she said.

She spoke utterly without shame or reticence, as a life-prisoner tells his past to a fellow-prisoner; and Conroy nodded across the smoke-rings.

‘Do you remember when you got into the carriage?’ she asked. ‘(Oh, I wish I had some knitting!) Did you notice aught, lad?’

Conroy thought back. It was ages since. ‘Wasn’t there some one outside the door—crying? ‘he asked.

‘He’s—he’s the little man I was engaged to,’ she said. ‘But I made him break it off. I told him ’twas no good. But he won’t, yo’ see.’

‘That fellow? Why, he doesn’t come up to your shoulder.’

‘That’s naught to do with it. I think all the world of him. I’m a foolish wench’—her speech wandered as she settled herself cosily, one elbow on the arm-rest. ‘We’d been engaged—I couldn’t help that—and he worships the ground I tread on. But it’s no use. I’m not responsible, you see. His two sisters are against it, though I’ve the money. They’re right, but they think it’s the dri-ink,’ she drawled. ‘They’re Methody—the Skinners. You see, their grandfather that started the Patton Mills, he died o’ the dri-ink.’

page 6

‘I see,’ said Conroy. The grave face before him under the lifted veil was troubled.

‘George Skinner.’ She breathed it softly. ‘I’d make him a good wife, by God’s gra-ace—if I could. But it’s no use. I’m not responsible. But he’ll not take “No” for an answer. I used to call him “Toots.” He’s of no consequence, yo’ see.’

‘That’s in Dickens,’ said Conroy, quite quickly, ‘I haven’t thought of Toots for years. He was at Doctor Blimber’s.’

‘And so—that’s my trouble,’ she concluded, ever so slightly wringing her hands. ‘But I—don’t you think—there’s hope now?’

‘Eh?’ said Conroy. ‘Oh yes! This is the first time I’ve turned my corner without help. With your help, I should say.’

‘It’ll come back, though.’

‘Then shall we meet it in the same way? Here’s my card. Write me your train, and we’ll go together.’

‘Yes. We must do that. But between times—when we want—’ She looked at her palm, the four fingers working on it. ‘It’s hard to give ’em up.’

‘I But think what we have gained already, and let me have the case to keep.’

She shook her head, and threw her cigarette out of the window. ‘Not yet.’

‘Then let’s lend our cases to Nurse, and we’ll get through to-day on cigarettes. I’ll call her while we feel strong.’

She hesitated, but yielded at last, and Nurse accepted the offerings with a smile.

‘You’ll be all right,’ she said to Miss Henschil. ‘But if I were you’—to Conroy—, ‘I’d take strong exercise.’

When they reached their destination Conroy set himself to obey Nurse Blaber. He had no remembrance of that day, except one streak of blue sea to his left, gorse-bushes to his right, and, before him, a coast-guard’s track marked with white-washed stones that he counted up to the far thousands. As he returned to the little town he saw Miss Henschil on the beach below the cliffs. She kneeled at Nurse Blaber’s feet, weeping and pleading.

Twenty-five days later a telegram came to Conroy’s rooms: ‘Notice given. Waterloo again. Twenty fourth.’ That same evening he was wakened by the shudder and the sigh that told him his sentence had gone forth. Yet he reflected on his pillow that he had, in spite of lapses, snatched something like three weeks of life, which included several rides on a horse before breakfast—the hour one most craves Najdolene; five consecutive evenings on the river at Hammersmith in a tub where he had well stretched the white arms that passing crews mocked at; a game of rackets at his club; three dinners, one small dance, and one human flirtation with a human woman. More notable still, he had settled his month’s accounts, only once confusing petty cash with the days of grace allowed him. Next morning he rode his hired beast in the park victoriously. He saw Miss Henschil on horseback near Lancaster Gate, talking to a young man at the railings.

She wheeled and cantered toward him.

‘By Jove! How well you look!’ he cried, without salutation. ‘I didn’t know you rode.’

‘I used to once,’ she replied. ‘I’m all soft now.’

They swept off together down the ride.

‘Your beast pulls,’ he said.

‘Wa-ant him to. Gi-gives me something to think of. How’ve you been?’ she panted. ‘I wish chemists’ shops hadn’t red lights.’

‘Have you slipped out and bought some, then?’

‘You don’t know Nursey. Eh, but it’s good to be on a horse again! This chap cost me two hundred.’

‘Then you’ve been swindled,’ said Conroy.

‘I know it, but it’s no odds. I must go back to Toots and send him away. He’s neglecting his work for me.’

She swung her heavy-topped animal on his none too sound hocks. ‘’Sentence come, lad?’

‘Yes. But I’m not minding it so much this time.’

‘Waterloo, then—and God help us!’ She thundered back to the little frock-coated figure that waited faithfully near the gate.

Conroy felt the spring sun on his shoulders and trotted home. That evening he went out with a man in a pair oar, and was rowed to a standstill. But the other man owned he could not have kept the pace five minutes longer.

He carried his bag all down Number 3 platform at Waterloo, and hove it with one hand into the rack.

‘Well done!’ said Nurse Blaber, in the corridor. ‘We’ve improved too.’

Dr. Gilbert and an older man came out of the next compartment.

‘Hallo!’ said Gilbert. ‘Why haven’t you been to see me, Mr. Conroy? Come under the lamp. Take off your hat. No—no. Sit, you young giant. Ve-ry good. Look here a minute, Johnnie.’

A little, round-bellied, hawk-faced person glared at him.

‘Gilbert was right about the beauty of the beast,’ he muttered. ‘D’you keep it in your glove now?’ he went on, and punched Conroy in the short ribs.

‘No,’ said Conroy meekly, but without coughing. ‘Nowhere—on my honour! I’ve chucked it for good.’

‘Wait till you are a sound man before you say that, Mr. Conroy.’ Sir John Chartres stumped out, saying to Gilbert in the corridor, ‘It’s all very fine, but the question is shall I or we “Sir Pandarus of Troy become,” eh? We’re bound to think of the children.’

‘Have you been vetted?’ said Miss Henschil, a few minutes after the train started. ‘May I sit with you? I—I don’t trust myself yet. I can’t give up as easily as you can, seemingly.’

‘Can’t you? I never saw any one so improved in a month.’

page 7

‘Look here!’ She reached across to the rack, single-handed lifted Conroy’s bag, and held it at arm’s length. ‘I counted ten slowly. And I didn’t think of hours or minutes,’ she boasted.

‘Don’t remind me,’ he cried.

‘Ah! Now I’ve reminded myself. I wish I hadn’t. Do you think it’ll be easier for us to-night?’

‘Oh, don’t.’ The smell of the carriage had brought back all his last trip to him, and Conroy moved uneasily.

‘I’m sorry. I’ve brought some games,’ she went on. ‘Draughts and cards—but they all mean counting. I wish I’d brought chess, but I can’t play chess. What can we do? Talk about something.’

‘Well, how’s Toots, to begin with?’ said Conroy.

‘Why? Did you see him on the platform?’

‘No. Was he there? I didn’t notice.’

‘Oh yes. He doesn’t understand. He’s desperately jealous. I told him it doesn’t matter. Will you please let me hold your hand? I believe I’m beginning to get the chill.’

‘Toots ought to envy me,’ said Conroy.

‘He does. He paid you a high compliment the other night. He’s taken to calling again—in spite of all they say.’

Conroy inclined his head. He felt cold, and knew surely he would be colder.

‘He said,’ she yawned. ‘(Beg your pardon.) He said he couldn’t see how I could help falling in love with a man like you; and he called himself a damned little rat, and he beat his head on the piano last night.’

‘The piano? You play, then?’

‘Only to him. He thinks the world of my accomplishments. Then I told him I wouldn’t have you if you were the last man on earth instead of only the best-looking—not with a million in each stocking.’

‘No, not with a million in each stocking,’ said Conroy vehemently. ‘Isn’t that odd?’

‘I suppose so—to any one who doesn’t know. Well, where was I? Oh, George as good as told me I was deceiving him, and he wanted to go away without saying good-night. He hates standing a-tiptoe, but he must if I won’t sit down.’

Conroy would have smiled, but the chill that foreran the coming of the Lier-in-Wait was upon him, and his hand closed warningly on hers.

‘And—and so—’ she was trying to say, when her hour also overtook her, leaving alive only the fear-dilated eyes that turned to Conroy. Hand froze on hand and the body with it as they waited for the horror in the blackness that heralded it. Yet through the worst Conroy saw, at an uncountable distance, one minute glint of light in his night. Thither would he go and escape his fear; and behold, that light was the light in the watchtower of her eyes, where her locked soul signalled to his soul: ‘Look at me!’

In time, from him and from her, the Thing sheered aside, that each soul might step down and resume its own concerns. He thought confusedly of people on the skirts of a thunderstorm, withdrawing from windows where the torn night is, to their known and furnished beds. Then he dozed, till in some drowsy turn his hand fell from her warmed hand.

‘That’s all. The Faces haven’t come,’ he heard her say. ‘All—thank God! I don’t feel even I need what Nursey promised me. Do you?’

‘No.’ He rubbed his eyes. ‘But don’t make too sure.’

‘Certainly not. We shall have to try again next month. I’m afraid it will be an awful nuisance for you.’

‘Not to me, I assure you,’ said Conroy, and they leaned back and laughed at the flatness of the words, after the hells through which they had just risen.

‘And now,’ she said, strict eyes on Conroy, ‘why wouldn’t you take me—not with a million in each stocking? ‘

‘I don’t know. That’s what I’ve been puzzling over.’

‘So have I. We’re as handsome a couple as I’ve ever seen. Are you well off, lad?’

‘They call me so,’ said Conroy, smiling.

‘That’s North country.’ She laughed again. ‘Setting aside my good looks and yours, I’ve four thousand a year of my own, and the rents should make it six. That’s a match some old cats would lap tea all night to fettle up.’

‘It is. Lucky Toots!’ said Conroy.

‘Ay,’ she answered, ‘he’ll be the luckiest lad in London if I win through. Who’s yours?’

‘No—no one, dear. I’ve been in Hell for years. I only want to get out and be alive and—so on. Isn’t that reason enough?’

‘Maybe, for a man. But I never minded things much till George came. I was all stu-upid like.’

‘So was I, but now I think I can live. It ought to be less next month, oughtn’t it?’ he said.

‘I hope so. Ye-es. There’s nothing much for a maid except to be married, and — ask no more. Whoever yours is, when you’ve found her, she shall have a wedding present from Mrs. George Skinner that——’

‘But she wouldn’t understand it any more than Toots.’

‘He doesn’t matter—except to me. I can’t keep my eyes open, thank God! Good-night, lad.’

Conroy followed her with his eyes. Beauty there was, grace there was, strength, and enough of the rest to drive better men than George Skinner to beat their heads on piano-tops—but for the new-found life of him Conroy could not feel one flutter of instinct or emotion that turned to herward. He put up his feet and fell asleep, dreaming of a joyous, normal world recovered—with interest on arrears. There were many things in it, but no one face of any one woman.

page 8

Thrice afterward they took the same train, and each time their trouble shrank and weakened. Miss Henschil talked of Toots, his multiplied calls, the things he had said to his sisters, the much worse things his sisters had replied; of the late (he seemed very dead to them) M. Najdol’s gifts for the soul-weary; of shopping, of house rents, and the cost of really artistic furniture and linen.

Conroy explained the exercises in which he delighted—mighty labours of play undertaken against other mighty men, till he sweated and; having bathed, slept. He had visited his mother, too, in Hereford, and he talked something of her and of the home-life, which his body, cut out of all clean life for five years, innocently and deeply enjoyed. Nurse Blaber was a little interested in Conroy’s mother, but, as a rule, she smoked her cigarette and read her paper-backed novels in her own compartment.

On their last trip she volunteered to sit with them, and buried herself in The Cloister and the Hearth while they whispered together. On that occasion (it was near Salisbury) at two in the morning, when the Lier-in-Wait brushed them with his wing, it meant no more than that they should cease talk for the instant, and for the instant hold hands, as even utter strangers on the deep may do when their ship rolls underfoot.

‘But still,’ said Nurse Blaber, not looking up, ‘I think your Mr. Skinner might feel jealous of all this.’

‘It would be difficult to explain,’ said Conroy.

‘Then you’d better not be at my wedding,’ Miss Henschil laughed.

‘After all we’ve gone through, too. But I suppose you ought to leave me out. Is the day fixed?’ he cried.

‘Twenty-second of September—in spite of both his sisters. I can risk it now.’ Her face was glorious as she flushed.

‘My dear chap!’ He shook hands unreservedly, and she gave back his grip without flinching. ‘I can’t tell you how pleased I am!’

‘Gracious Heavens!’ said Nurse Blaber, in a new voice. ‘Oh, I beg your pardon. I forgot I wasn’t paid to be surprised.’

‘What at? Oh, I see!’ Miss Henschil explained to Conroy. ‘She expected you were going to kiss me, or I was going to kiss you, or something.’

‘After all you’ve gone through, as Mr. Conroy said.’

‘But I couldn’t, could you?’ said Miss Henschil, with a disgust as frank as that on Conroy’s face.

‘It would be horrible—horrible. And yet, of course, you’re wonderfully handsome. How d’you account for it, Nursey?’

Nurse Blaber shook her head. ‘I was hired to cure you of a habit, dear. When you’re cured I shall go on to the next case—that senile-decay one at Bournemouth I told you about.’

‘And I shall be left alone with George! But suppose it isn’t cured,’ said Miss Henschil of a sudden. ‘Suppose it comes back again. What can I do? I can’t send for him in this way when I’m a married woman!’ She pointed like an infant.

‘I’d come, of course,’ Conroy answered. ‘But, seriously, that is a consideration.’

They looked at each other, alarmed and anxious, and then toward Nurse Blaber, who closed her book, marked the place, and turned to face them.

‘Have you ever talked to your mother as you have to me?’ she said.

‘No. I might have spoken to dad—but mother’s different. What d’you mean?’

‘And you’ve never talked to your mother either, Mr. Conroy?’

‘Not till I took Najdolene. Then I told her it was my heart. There’s no need to say anything, now that I’m practically over it, is there?’

‘Not if it doesn’t come back, but——’ She beckoned with a stumpy, triumphant finger that drew their heads close together. ‘You know I always go in and read a chapter to mother at tea, child.’

‘I know you do. You’re an angel.’ Miss Henschil patted the blue shoulder next her. ‘Mother’s Church of England now,’ she explained. ‘But she’ll have her Bible with her pikelets at tea every night like the Skinners.’

‘It was Naaman and Gehazi last Tuesday that gave me a clue. I said I’d never seen a case of leprosy, and your mother said she’d seen too many.’

‘Where? She never told me,’ Miss Henschil began.

‘A few months before you were born—on her trip to Australia—at Mola or Molo something or other. It took me three evenings to get it all out.’

‘Ay—mother’s suspicious of questions,’ said Miss Henschil to Conroy. ‘She’ll lock the door of every room she’s in, if it’s but for five minutes. She was a Tackberry from Jarrow way, yo’ see.’

‘She described your men to the life—men with faces all eaten away, staring at her over the fence of a lepers’ hospital in this Molo Island. They begged from her, and she ran, she told me, all down the street, back to the pier. One touched her and she nearly fainted. She’s ashamed of that still.’

‘My men? The sand and the fences? ‘Miss Henschil muttered.

‘Yes. You know how tidy she is and how she hates wind. She remembered that the fences were broken—she remembered the wind blowing. Sand—sun—salt wind—fences—faces—I got it all out of her, bit by bit. You don’t know what I know! And it all happened three or four months before you were born. There!’ Nurse Blaber slapped her knee with her little hand triumphantly.

‘Would that account for it?’ Miss Henschil shook from head to foot.

‘Absolutely. I don’t care who you ask! You never imagined the thing. It was laid on you. It happened on earth to you! Quick, Mr. Conroy, she’s too heavy for me! I’ll get the flask.’

Miss Henschil leaned forward and collapsed, as Conroy told her afterwards, like a factory chimney. She came out of her swoon with teeth that chartered on the cup.

page 9

‘No—no,’ she said, gulping. ‘It’s not hysterics. Yo’ see I’ve no call to hev ’em any more. No call—no reason whatever. God be praised! Can’t yo’ feel I’m a right woman now?’

‘Stop hugging me!’ said Nurse Blaber. ‘You don’t know your strength. Finish the brandy and water. It’s perfectly reasonable, and I’ll lay long odds Mr. Conroy’s case is something of the same. I’ve been thinking——’

‘I wonder——’ said Conroy, and pushed the girl back as she swayed again.

Nurse Blaber smoothed her pale hair. ‘Yes. Your trouble, or something like it, happened somewhere on earth or sea to the mother who bore you. Ask her, child. Ask her and be done with it once for all.’

‘I will,’ said Conroy . . . . ‘There ought to be——’ He opened his bag and hunted breathlessly.

‘Bless you! Oh, God bless you, Nursey!’ Miss Henschil was sobbing. ‘You don’t know what this means to me. It takes it all off—from the beginning.’

‘But doesn’t it make any difference to you now?’ the nurse asked curiously. ‘Now that you’re rightfully a woman?’

Conroy, busy with his bag, had not heard. Miss Henschil stared across, and her beauty, freed from the shadow of any fear, blazed up within her. ‘I see what you mean,’ she said. ‘But it hasn’t changed anything. I want Toots. He has never been out of his mind in his life—except over silly me.’

‘It’s all right,’ said Conroy, stooping under the lamp, Bradshaw in hand. ‘If I change at Templecombe—for Bristol (Bristol—Hereford—yes)—I can be with mother for breakfast in her room and find out.’

‘Quick, then,’ said Nurse Blaber. ‘We’ve passed Gillingham quite a while. You’d better take some of our sandwiches.’ She went out to get them. Conroy and Miss Henschil would have danced, but there is no room for giants in a South-Western compartment.

‘Good-bye, good luck, lad. Eh, but you’ve changed already—like me. Send a wire to our hotel as soon as you’re sure,’ said Miss Henschil. ‘What should I have done without you?’

‘Or I?’ said Conroy. ‘But it’s Nurse that’s saving us really.’

‘Then thank her,’ said Miss Henschil, looking straight at him. ‘Yes, I would. She’d like it.’

When Nurse Blaber came back after the parting at Templecombe her nose and her eyelids were red, but, for all that, her face reflected a great light even while she sniffed over The Cloister and the Hearth.

Miss Henschil, deep in a house furnisher’s catalogue, did not speak for twenty minutes. Then she said, between adding totals of best, guest, and servants’ sheets, ‘But why should our times have been the same, Nursey?’

‘Because a child is born somewhere every second of the clock,’ Nurse Blaber answered.

‘And besides that, you probably set each other off by talking and thinking about it. You shouldn’t, you know.’

‘Ay, but you’ve never been in Hell,’ said Miss Henschil.

The telegram handed in at Hereford at 12.46 and delivered to Miss Henschil on the beach of a certain village at 2.7 ran thus:

‘“Absolutely confirmed. She says she remembers hearing noise of accident in engine-room returning from India eighty-five.”’

‘He means the year, not the thermometer,’ said Nurse Blaber, throwing pebbles at the cold sea.

‘“And two men scalded thus explaining my hoots.” (The idea of telling me that!) “Subsequently silly clergyman passenger ran up behind her calling for joke, ‘Friend, all is lost,’ thus accounting very words.”

Nurse Blaber purred audibly.

‘“She says only remembers being upset minute or two. Unspeakable relief. Best love Nursey, who is jewel. Get out of her what she would like best.” Oh, I oughtn’t to have read that,’ said Miss Henschil.

‘It doesn’t matter. I don’t want anything,’ said Nurse Blaber, ‘and if I did I shouldn’t get it.’

page 1 of 6

WHEN Dan took up boat-building, Una coaxed Mrs Vincey, the farmer’s wife at Little Lindens, to teach her to milk. Mrs Vincey milks in the pasture in summer, which is different from milking in the shed, because the cows are not tied up, and until they know you they will not stand still. After three weeks Una could milk Red Cow or Kitty Shorthorn quite dry, without her wrists aching, and then she allowed Dan to look. But milking did not amuse him, and it was pleasanter for Una to be alone in the quiet pastures with quiet-spoken Mrs Vincey. So, evening after evening, she slipped across to Little Lindens, took her stool from the fern-clump beside the fallen oak, and went to work, her pail between her knees, and her head pressed hard into the cow’s flank. As often as not, Mrs Vincey would be milking cross Pansy at the other end of the pasture, and would not come near till it was time to strain and pour off.Once, in the middle of a milking, Kitty Shorthorn boxed Una’s ear with her tail.

‘You old pig!’ said Una, nearly crying, for a cow’s tail can hurt.

‘Why didn’t you tie it down, child?’ said a voice behind her.

‘I meant to, but the flies are so bad I let her off—and this is what she’s done!’ Una looked round, expecting Puck, and saw a curly-haired girl, not much taller than herself, but older, dressed in a curious high-waisted, lavender-coloured riding-habit, with a high hunched collar and a deep cape and a belt fastened with a steel clasp. She wore a yellow velvet cap and tan gauntlets, and carried a real hunting-crop. Her cheeks were pale except for two pretty pink patches in the middle, and she talked with little gasps at the end of her sentences, as though she had been running.

‘You don’t milk so badly, child,’ she said, and when she smiled her teeth showed small and even and pearly.

‘Can you milk?’ Una asked, and then flushed, for she heard Puck’s chuckle.

He stepped out of the fern and sat down, holding Kitty Short-horn’s tail. ‘There isn’t much,’ he said, ‘that Miss Philadelphia doesn’t know about milk—or, for that matter, butter and eggs. She’s a great housewife.’

‘Oh,’ said Una. ‘I’m sorry I can’t shake hands. Mine are all milky; but Mrs Vincey is going to teach me butter-making this summer.’

‘Ah! I’m going to London this summer,’ the girl said, ‘to my aunt in Bloomsbury.’ She coughed as she began to hum, ‘“Oh, what a town! What a wonderful metropolis!”

‘You’ve got a cold,’ said Una.

‘No. Only my stupid cough. But it’s vastly better than it was last winter. It will disappear in London air. Every one says so. D’you like doctors, child?’

‘I don’t know any,’ Una replied. ‘But I’m sure I shouldn’t.’

‘Think yourself lucky, child. I beg your pardon,’ the girl laughed, for Una frowned.

‘I’m not a child, and my name’s Una,’she said.

‘Mine’s Philadelphia. But everybody except Rene calls me Phil. I’m Squire Bucksteed’s daughter—over at Marklake yonder.’ She jerked her little round chin towards the south behind Dallington. ‘Sure-ly you know Marklake?’

‘We went a picnic to Marklake Green once,’ said Una. ‘It’s awfully pretty. I like all those funny little roads that don’t lead anywhere.’

‘They lead over our land,’ said Philadelphia stiffly, ’and the coach road is only four miles away. One can go anywhere from the Green. I went to the Assize Ball at Lewes last year.’ She spun round and took a few dancing steps, but stopped with her hand to her side.

‘It gives me a stitch,’ she explained. ‘No odds. ’Twill go away in London air. That’s the latest French step, child. Rene taught it me. D’you hate the French, chi—Una?’

‘Well, I hate French, of course, but I don’t mind Ma’m’selle. She’s rather decent. Is Rene your French governess?’

Philadelphia laughed till she caught her breath again.

‘Oh no! Rene’s a French prisoner—on parole. That means he’s promised not to escape till he has been properly exchanged for an Englishman. He’s only a doctor, so I hope they won’t think him worth exchanging. My uncle captured him last year in the Ferdinand privateer, off Belle Isle, and he cured my uncle of a r-r-raging toothache. Of course, after that we couldn’t let him lie among the common French prisoners at Rye, and so he stays with us. He’s of very old family—a Breton, which is nearly next door to being a true Briton, my father says—and he wears his hair clubbed—not powdered. Much more becoming, don’t you think?’

‘I don’t know what you’re—’ Una began, but Puck, the other side of the pail, winked, and she went on with her milking.

‘He’s going to be a great French physician when the war is over. He makes me bobbins for my lace-pillow now—he’s very clever with his hands; but he’d doctor our people on the Green if they would let him. Only our Doctor—Doctor Break—says he’s an emp—or imp something—worse than imposter. But my Nurse says—’

‘Nurse! You’re ever so old. What have you got a nurse for?’ Una finished milking, and turned round on her stool as Kitty Shorthorn grazed off.

‘Because I can’t get rid of her. Old Cissie nursed my mother, and she says she’ll nurse me till she dies. The idea! She never lets me alone. She thinks I’m delicate. She has grown infirm in her understanding, you know. Mad—quite mad, poor Cissie!’

‘Really mad?’ said Una. ‘Or just silly?’

‘Crazy, I should say—from the things she does. Her devotion to me is terribly embarrassing. You know I have all the keys of the Hall except the brewery and the tenants’ kitchen. I give out all stores and the linen and plate.’

‘How jolly! I love store-rooms and giving out things.’

‘Ah, it’s a great responsibility, you’ll find, when you come to my age. Last year Dad said I was fatiguing myself with my duties, and he actually wanted me to give up the keys to old Amoore, our housekeeper. I wouldn’t. I hate her. I said, “No, sir. I am Mistress of Marklake Hall just as long as I live, because I’m never going to be married, and I shall give out stores and linen till I die!”’

page 2

‘And what did your father say?’

‘Oh, I threatened to pin a dishclout to his coat-tail. He ran away. Every one’s afraid of Dad, except me.’ Philadelphia stamped her foot. ‘The idea! If I can’t make my own father happy in his own house, I’d like to meet the woman that can, and—and—I’d have the living hide off her!’

She cut with her long-thonged whip. It cracked like a pistol- shot across the still pasture. Kitty Shorthorn threw up her head and trotted away.

‘I beg your pardon,’ Philadelphia said; ‘but it makes me furious. Don’t you hate those ridiculous old quizzes with their feathers and fronts, who come to dinner and call you “child” in your own chair at your own table?’

‘I don’t always come to dinner , said Una, ‘but I hate being called “child.” Please tell me about store-rooms and giving out things.’

Ah, it’s a great responsibility—particularly with that old cat Amoore looking at the lists over your shoulder. And such a shocking thing happened last summer! Poor crazy Cissie, my Nurse that I was telling you of, she took three solid silver tablespoons.’

‘Took! But isn’t that stealing?’ Una cried.

‘Hsh!’ said Philadelphia, looking round at Puck. ‘All I say is she took them without my leave. I made it right afterwards. So, as Dad says—and he’s a magistrate—, it wasn’t a legal offence; it was only compounding a felony.

‘It sounds awful,’ said Una.

‘It was. My dear, I was furious! I had had the keys for ten months, and I’d never lost anything before. I said nothing at first, because a big house offers so many chances of things being mislaid, and coming to hand later. “Fetching up in the lee-scuppers,” my uncle calls it. But next week I spoke to old Cissie about it when she was doing my hair at night, and she said I wasn’t to worry my heart for trifles!’

‘Isn’t it like ’em?’ Una burst out. ‘They see you’re worried over something that really matters, and they say, “Don’t worry”; as if that did any good!’

‘I quite agree with you, my dear; quite agree with you! I told Ciss the spoons were solid silver, and worth forty shillings, so if the thief were found, he’d be tried for his life.’

‘Hanged, do you mean?’Una said.

‘They ought to be; but Dad says no jury will hang a man nowadays for a forty-shilling theft. They transport ’em into penal servitude at the uttermost ends of the earth beyond the seas, for the term of their natural life. I told Cissie that, and I saw her tremble in my mirror. Then she cried, and caught hold of my knees, and I couldn’t for my life understand what it was all about,—she cried so. Can you guess, my dear, what that poor crazy thing had done? It was midnight before I pieced it together. She had given the spoons to Jerry Gamm, the Witchmaster on the Green, so that he might put a charm on me! Me!’

‘Put a charm on you? Why?’

‘That’s what I asked; and then I saw how mad poor Cissie was! You know this stupid little cough of mine? It will disappear as soon as I go to London. She was troubled about that, and about my being so thin, and she told me Jerry had promised her, if she would bring him three silver spoons, that he’d charm my cough away and make me plump—“flesh up,” she said. I couldn’t help laughing; but it was a terrible night! I had to put Cissie into my own bed, and stroke her hand till she cried herself to sleep. What else could I have done? When she woke, and I coughed—I suppose I can cough in my own room if I please—she said that she’d killed me, and asked me to have her hanged at Lewes sooner than send her to the uttermost ends of the earth away from me.’

‘How awful! What did you do, Phil?’

‘Do? I rode off at five in the morning to talk to Master Jerry, with a new lash on my whip. Oh, I was furious! Witchmaster or no Witchmaster, I meant to—’

Ah! what’s a Witchmaster?’

‘A master of witches, of course. I don’t believe there are witches; but people say every village has a few, and Jerry was the master of all ours at Marklake. He has been a smuggler, and a man-of-war’s man, and now he pretends to be a carpenter and joiner—he can make almost anything—but he really is a white wizard. He cures people by herbs and charms. He can cure them after Doctor Break has given them up, and that’s why Doctor Break hates him so. He used to make me toy carts, and charm off my warts when I was a child.’ Philadelphia spread out her hands with the delicate shiny little nails. ‘It isn’t counted lucky to cross him. He has his ways of getting even with you, they say. But I wasn’t afraid of Jerry! I saw him working in his garden, and I leaned out of my saddle and double-thonged him between the shoulders, over the hedge. Well, my dear, for the first time since Dad gave him to me, my Troubadour (I wish you could see the sweet creature!) shied across the road, and I spilled out into the hedge-top. Most undignified! Jerry pulled me through to his side and brushed the leaves off me. I was horribly pricked, but I didn’t care. “Now, Jerry,” I said, “I’m going to take the hide off you first, and send you to Lewes afterwards. You well know why.”

‘“Oh!” he said, and he sat down among his bee-hives. “Then I reckon you’ve come about old Cissie’s business, my dear.” “I reckon I justabout have,” I said. “Stand away from these hives. I can’t get at you there.” “That’s why I be where I be,” he said. “If you’ll excuse me, Miss Phil, I don’t hold with bein’ flogged before breakfast, at my time o’ life.” He’s a huge big man, but he looked so comical squatting among the hives that—I know I oughtn’t to—I laughed, and he laughed. I always laugh at the wrong time. But I soon recovered my dignity, and I said, “Then give me back what you made poor Cissie steal!”

‘“Your pore Cissie,” he said. “She’s a hatful o’ trouble. But you shall have ’em, Miss Phil. They’re all ready put by for you.” And, would you believe it, the old sinner pulled my three silver spoons out of his dirty pocket, and polished them on his cuff. “Here they be,” he says, and he gave them to me, just as cool as though I’d come to have my warts charmed. That’s the worst of people having known you when you were young. But I preserved my composure. “Jerry,” I said, “what in the world are we to do? If you’d been caught with these things on you, you’d have been hanged.”

‘“I know it,” he said. “But they’re yours now.”

‘“But you made my Cissie steal them,” I said.

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‘“That I didn’t,” he said. “Your Cissie, she was pickin’ at me an’ tarrifyin’ me all the long day an’ every day for weeks, to put a charm on you, Miss Phil, an’ take away your little spitty cough.”

‘“Yes. I knew that, Jerry, and to make me flesh-up!” I said. “I’m much obliged to you, but I’m not one of your pigs!”

‘“Ah! I reckon she’ve been talking to you, then,” he said. “Yes, she give me no peace, and bein’ tarrified—for I don’t hold with old women—I laid a task on her which I thought ’ud silence her. I never reckoned the old scrattle ’ud risk her neckbone at Lewes Assizes for your sake, Miss Phil. But she did. She up an’ stole, I tell ye, as cheerful as a tinker. You might ha’ knocked me down with any one of them liddle spoons when she brung ’em in her apron.”

‘“Do you mean to say, then, that you did it to try my poor Cissie?” I screamed at him.

‘“What else for, dearie?” he said. “I don’t stand in need of hedge-stealings. I’m a freeholder, with money in the bank; and now I won’t trust women no more! Silly old besom! I do beleft she’d ha’ stole the Squire’s big fob-watch, if I’d required her.”

‘“Then you’re a wicked, wicked old man,” I said, and I was so angry that I couldn’t help crying, and of course that made me cough.

‘Jerry was in a fearful taking. He picked me up and carried me into his cottage—it’s full of foreign curiosities—and he got me something to eat and drink, and he said he’d be hanged by the neck any day if it pleased me. He said he’d even tell old Cissie he was sorry. That’s a great comedown for a Witchmaster, you know.

‘I was ashamed of myself for being so silly, and I dabbed my eyes and said, “The least you can do now is to give poor Ciss some sort of a charm for me.”

‘“Yes, that’s only fair dealings,” he said. “You know the names of the Twelve Apostles, dearie? You say them names, one by one, before your open window, rain or storm, wet or shine, five times a day fasting. But mind you, ’twixt every name you draw in your breath through your nose, right down to your pretty liddle toes, as long and as deep as you can, and let it out slow through your pretty liddle mouth. There’s virtue for your cough in those names spoke that way. And I’ll give you something you can see, moreover. Here’s a stick of maple, which is the warmest tree in the wood.”’

‘That’s true,’ Una interrupted. ‘You can feel it almost as warm as yourself when you touch it.’

‘“It’s cut one inch long for your every year,” Jerry said. “That’s sixteen inches. You set it in your window so that it holds up the sash, and thus you keep it, rain or shine, or wet or fine, day and night. I’ve said words over it which will have virtue on your complaints.”

‘“I haven’t any complaints, Jerry,” I said. “It’s only to please Cissie.”

‘“I know that as well as you do, dearie,” he said. And—and that was all that came of my going to give him a flogging. I wonder whether he made poor Troubadour shy when I lashed at him? Jerry has his ways of getting even with people.’

‘I wonder,’ said Una. ‘Well, did you try the charm? Did it work?’

‘What nonsense! I told Rene about it, of course, because he’s a doctor. He’s going to be a most famous doctor. That’s why our doctor hates him. Rene said, “Oho! Your Master Gamm, he is worth knowing,” and he put up his eyebrows—like this. He made joke of it all. He can see my window from the carpenter’s shed, where he works, and if ever the maple stick fell down, he pretended to be in a fearful taking till I propped the window up again. He used to ask me whether I had said my Apostles properly, and how I took my deep breaths. Oh yes, and the next day, though he had been there ever so many times before, he put on his new hat and paid Jerry Gamm a visit of state—as a fellow-physician. Jerry never guessed Rene was making fun of him, and so he told Rene about the sick people in the village, and how he cured them with herbs after Doctor Break had given them up. Jerry could talk smugglers’ French, of course, and I had taught Rene plenty of English, if only he wasn’t so shy. They called each other Monsieur Gamm and Mosheur Lanark, just like gentlemen. I suppose it amused poor Rene. He hasn’t much to do, except to fiddle about in the carpenter’s shop. He’s like all the French prisoners—always making knickknacks; and Jerry had a little lathe at his cottage, and so—and so—Rene took to being with Jerry much more than I approved of. The Hall is so big and empty when Dad’s away, and I will not sit with old Amoore—she talks so horridly about every one—specially about Rene.

‘I was rude to Rene, I’m afraid; but I was properly served out for it. One always is. You see, Dad went down to Hastings to pay his respects to the General who commanded the brigade there, and to bring him to the Hall afterwards. Dad told me he was a very brave soldier from India—he was Colonel of Dad’s Regiment, the Thirty-third Foot, after Dad left the Army, and then he changed his name from Wesley to Wellesley, or else the other way about; and Dad said I was to get out all the silver for him, and I knew that meant a big dinner. So I sent down to the sea for early mackerel, and had such a morning in the kitchen and the store- rooms. Old Amoore nearly cried.

‘However, my dear, I made all my preparations in ample time, but the fish didn’t arrive—it never does—and I wanted Rene to ride to Pevensey and bring it himself. He had gone over to Jerry, of course, as he always used, unless I requested his presence beforehand. I can’t send for Rene every time I want him. He should be there. Now, don’t you ever do what I did, child, because it’s in the highest degree unladylike; but—but one of our Woods runs up to Jerry’s garden, and if you climb—it’s ungenteel, but I can climb like a kitten—there’s an old hollow oak just above the pigsty where you can hear and see everything below. Truthfully, I only went to tell Rene about the mackerel, but I saw him and Jerry sitting on the seat playing with wooden toy trumpets. So I slipped into the hollow, and choked down my cough, and listened. Rene had never shown me any of these trumpets.’

‘Trumpets? Aren’t you too old for trumpets?’ said Una.

‘They weren’t real trumpets, because Jerry opened his short-collar, and Rene put one end of his trumpet against Jerry’s chest, and put his ear to the other. Then Jerry put his trumpet against Rene’s chest, and listened while Rene breathed and coughed. I was afraid I would cough too.

‘“This hollywood one is the best,” said Jerry. “’Tis won’erful like hearin’ a man’s soul whisperin’ in his innards; but unless I’ve a buzzin’ in my ears, Mosheur Lanark, you make much about the same kind o’ noises as old Gaffer Macklin—but not quite so loud as young Copper. It sounds like breakers on a reef—a long way off. Comprenny?”

‘“Perfectly,” said Rene. “I drive on the breakers. But before I strike, I shall save hundreds, thousands, millions perhaps, by my little trumpets. Now tell me what sounds the old Gaffer Macklin have made in his chest, and what the young Copper also.”

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‘Jerry talked for nearly a quarter of an hour about sick people in the village, while Rene asked questions. Then he sighed, and said, “You explain very well, Monsieur Gamm, but if only I had your opportunities to listen for myself! Do you think these poor people would let me listen to them through my trumpet—for a little money? No?”—Rene’s as poor as a church mouse.

‘“They’d kill you, Mosheur. It’s all I can do to coax ’em to abide it, and I’m Jerry Gamm,” said Jerry. He’s very proud of his attainments.

‘“Then these poor people are alarmed—No?” said Rene.

‘“They’ve had it in at me for some time back because o’ my tryin’ your trumpets on their sick; and I reckon by the talk at the alehouse they won’t stand much more. Tom Dunch an’ some of his kidney was drinkin’ themselves riot-ripe when I passed along after noon. Charms an’ mutterin’s an’ bits o’ red wool an’ black hens is in the way o’ nature to these fools, Mosheur; but anything likely to do ’em real service is devil’s work by their estimation. If I was you, I’d go home before they come.” Jerry spoke quite quietly, and Rene shrugged his shoulders.

‘“I am prisoner on parole, Monsieur Gamm,” he said. “I have no home.”

‘Now that was unkind of Rene. He’s often told me that he looked on England as his home. I suppose it’s French politeness.

‘“Then we’ll talk o’ something that matters,” said Jerry. “Not to name no names, Mosheur Lanark, what might be your own opinion o’ some one who ain’t old Gaffer Macklin nor young Copper? Is that person better or worse?”

‘“Better—for time that is,” said Rene. He meant for the time being, but I never could teach him some phrases.

‘“I thought so too,” said Jerry. “But how about time to come?”

Rene shook his head, and then he blew his nose. You don’t know how odd a man looks blowing his nose when you are sitting directly above him.

‘“I’ve thought that too,” said Jerry. He rumbled so deep I could scarcely catch. “It don’t make much odds to me, because I’m old. But you’re young, Mosheur—you’re young,” and he put his hand on Rene’s knee, and Rene covered it with his hand. I didn’t know they were such friends.

‘“Thank you, mon ami,” said Rene. “I am much oblige. Let us return to our trumpet-making. But I forget”—he stood up—“it appears that you receive this afternoon!”

‘You can’t see into Gamm’s Lane from the oak, but the gate opened, and fat little Doctor Break stumped in, mopping his head, and half-a-dozen of our people following him, very drunk.

‘You ought to have seen Rene bow; he does it beautifully.

‘“A word with you, Laennec,” said Doctor Break. “Jerry has been practising some devilry or other on these poor wretches, and they’ve asked me to be arbiter.”

‘“Whatever that means, I reckon it’s safer than asking you to be doctor,” said Jerry, and Tom Dunch, one of our carters, laughed.

‘“That ain’t right feeling of you, Tom,” Jerry said, “seeing how clever Doctor Break put away your thorn in the flesh last winter.” Tom’s wife had died at Christmas, though Doctor Break bled her twice a week. Doctor Break danced with rage.

‘“This is all beside the mark,” he said. “These good people are willing to testify that you’ve been impudently prying into God’s secrets by means of some papistical contrivance which this person”—he pointed to poor Rene—“has furnished you with. Why, here are the things themselves!” Rene was holding a trumpet in his hand.

‘Then all the men talked at once. They said old Gaffer Macklin was dying from stitches in his side where Jerry had put the trumpet—they called it the devil’s ear-piece; and they said it left round red witch-marks on people’s skins, and dried up their lights, and made ’em spit blood, and threw ’em into sweats. Terrible things they said. You never heard such a noise. I took advantage of it to cough.

‘Rene and Jerry were standing with their backs to the pigsty. Jerry fumbled in his big flap pockets and fished up a pair of pistols. You ought to have seen the men give back when he cocked his. He passed one to Rene.

‘“Wait! Wait!” said Rene. “I will explain to the doctor if he permits.” He waved a trumpet at him, and the men at the gate shouted, “Don’t touch it, Doctor! Don’t lay a hand to the thing.”

‘“Come, come!” said Rene. “You are not so big fool as you pretend. No?”

‘Doctor Break backed toward the gate, watching Jerry’s pistol, and Rene followed him with his trumpet, like a nurse trying to amuse a child, and put the ridiculous thing to his ear to show how it was used, and talked of la Gloire, and l’Humanite, and la Science, while Doctor Break watched jerry’s pistol and swore. I nearly laughed aloud.

‘“Now listen! Now listen!” said Rene. “This will be moneys in your pockets, my dear confrere. You will become rich.”

‘Then Doctor Break said something about adventurers who could not earn an honest living in their own country creeping into decent houses and taking advantage of gentlemen’s confidence to enrich themselves by base intrigues.

‘Rene dropped his absurd trumpet and made one of his best bows. I knew he was angry from the way he rolled his “r’s.”

‘“Ver-r-ry good,” said he. “For that I shall have much pleasure to kill you now and here. Monsieur Gamm,”—another bow to Jerry—“you will please lend him your pistol, or he shall have mine. I give you my word I know not which is best; and if he will choose a second from his friends over there”—another bow to our drunken yokels at the gate—“we will commence.”

‘“That’s fair enough,” said Jerry. “Tom Dunch, you owe it to the Doctor to be his second. Place your man.”

‘“No,” said Tom. “No mixin’ in gentry’s quarrels for me.” And he shook his head and went out, and the others followed him.

‘“Hold on,” said Jerry. “You’ve forgot what you set out to do up at the alehouse just now. You was goin’ to search me for witch-marks; you was goin’ to duck me in the pond; you was goin’ to drag all my bits o’ sticks out o’ my little cottage here. What’s the matter with you? Wouldn’t you like to be with your old woman tonight, Tom?”

‘But they didn’t even look back, much less come. They ran to the village alehouse like hares.

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‘“No matter for these canaille,” said Rene, buttoning up his coat so as not to show any linen. All gentlemen do that before a duel, Dad says—and he’s been out five times. “You shall be his second, Monsieur Gamm. Give him the pistol.”

‘Doctor Break took it as if it was red-hot, but he said that if Rene resigned his pretensions in certain quarters he would pass over the matter. Rene bowed deeper than ever.

‘“As for that,” he said, “if you were not the ignorant which you are, you would have known long ago that the subject of your remarks is not for any living man.”

‘I don’t know what the subject of his remarks might have been, but he spoke in a simply dreadful voice, my dear, and Doctor Break turned quite white, and said Rene was a liar; and then Rene caught him by the throat, and choked him black.

‘Well, my dear, as if this wasn’t deliciously exciting enough, just exactly at that minute I heard a strange voice on the other side of the hedge say, “What’s this? What’s this, Bucksteed?” and there was my father and Sir Arthur Wesley on horseback in the lane; and there was Rene kneeling on Doctor Break, and there was I up in the oak, listening with all my ears.

‘I must have leaned forward too much, and the voice gave me such a start that I slipped. I had only time to make one jump on to the pigsty roof—another, before the tiles broke, on to the pigsty wall—and then I bounced down into the garden, just behind Jerry, with my hair full of bark. Imagine the situation!’

‘Oh, I can!’ Una laughed till she nearly fell off the stool.

‘Dad said, “Phil—a—del—phia!” and Sir Arthur Wesley said, “Good Ged” and Jerry put his foot on the pistol Rene had dropped. But Rene was splendid. He never even looked at me. He began to untwist Doctor Break’s neckcloth as fast as he’d twisted it, and asked him if he felt better.

‘“What’s happened? What’s happened?” said Dad.

‘“A fit!” said Rene. “I fear my confrere has had a fit. Do not be alarmed. He recovers himself. Shall I bleed you a little, my dear Doctor?” Doctor Break was very good too. He said, “I am vastly obliged, Monsieur Laennec, but I am restored now.” And as he went out of the gate he told Dad it was a syncope—I think. Then Sir Arthur said, “Quite right, Bucksteed. Not another word! They are both gentlemen.” And he took off his cocked hat to Doctor Break and Rene.

‘But poor Dad wouldn’t let well alone. He kept saying, “Philadelphia, what does all this mean?”

‘“Well, sir,” I said, “I’ve only just come down. As far as I could see, it looked as though Doctor Break had had a sudden seizure.” That was quite true—if you’d seen Rene seize him. Sir Arthur laughed. “Not much change there, Bucksteed,” he said. “She’s a lady—a thorough lady.”

‘“Heaven knows she doesn’t look like one,” said poor Dad. “Go home, Philadelphia.”

‘So I went home, my dear—don’t laugh so!—right under Sir Arthur’s nose—a most enormous nose—feeling as though I were twelve years old, going to be whipped. Oh, I beg your pardon, child!’

‘It’s all right,’ said Una. ‘I’m getting on for thirteen. I’ve never been whipped, but I know how you felt. All the same, it must have been funny!’

‘Funny! If you’d heard Sir Arthur jerking out, “Good Ged, Bucksteed!” every minute as they rode behind me; and poor Dad saying, “’Pon my honour, Arthur, I can’t account for it!” Oh, how my cheeks tingled when I reached my room! But Cissie had laid out my very best evening dress, the white satin one, vandyked at the bottom with spots of morone foil, and the pearl knots, you know, catching up the drapery from the left shoulder. I had poor mother’s lace tucker and her coronet comb.’

‘Oh, you lucky!’ Una murmured. ‘And gloves?’

‘French kid, my dear’—Philadelphia patted her shoulder—‘and morone satin shoes and a morone and gold crape fan. That restored my calm. Nice things always do. I wore my hair banded on my forehead with a little curl over the left ear. And when I descended the stairs, en grande tenue, old Amoore curtsied to me without my having to stop and look at her, which, alas! is too often the case. Sir Arthur highly approved of the dinner, my dear: the mackerel did come in time. We had all the Marklake silver out, and he toasted my health, and he asked me where my little bird’s-nesting sister was. I know he did it to quiz me, so I looked him straight in the face, my dear, and I said, “I always send her to the nursery, Sir Arthur, when I receive guests at Marklake Hall.”’

‘Oh, how chee—clever of you. What did he say?’ Una cried.

‘He said, “Not much change there, Bucksteed. Ged, I deserved it,” and he toasted me again. They talked about the French and what a shame it was that Sir Arthur only commanded a brigade at Hastings, and he told Dad of a battle in India at a place called Assaye. Dad said it was a terrible fight, but Sir Arthur described it as though it had been a whist-party—I suppose because a lady was present.’

‘Of course you were the lady. I wish I’d seen you,’said Una.

‘I wish you had, child. I had such a triumph after dinner. Rene and Doctor Break came in. They had quite made up their quarrel, and they told me they had the highest esteem for each other, and I laughed and said, “I heard every word of it up in the tree.” You never saw two men so frightened in your life, and when I said, “What was ‘the subject of your remarks,’ Rene?” neither of them knew where to look. Oh, I quizzed them unmercifully. They’d seen me jump off the pigsty roof, remember.’

‘But what was the subject of their remarks?’ said Una.

‘Oh, Doctor Break said it was a professional matter, so the laugh was turned on me. I was horribly afraid it might have been something unladylike and indelicate. But that wasn’t my triumph. Dad asked me to play on the harp. Between just you and me, child, I had been practising a new song from London—I don’t always live in trees—for weeks; and I gave it them for a surprise.’

‘What was it?’said Una. ‘Sing it.’

‘“I have given my heart to a flower.” Not very difficult fingering, but r-r-ravishing sentiment.’

Philadelphia coughed and cleared her throat.

‘I’ve a deep voice for my age and size,’ she explained. ‘Contralto, you know, but it ought to be stronger,’ and she began, her face all dark against the last of the soft pink sunset:

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‘I have given my heart to a flower,
Though I know it is fading away,
Though I know it will live but an hour
And leave me to mourn its decay!

‘Isn’t that touchingly sweet? Then the last verse—I wish I had my harp, dear—goes as low as my register will reach. ‘She drew in her chin, and took a deep breath:

‘Ye desolate whirlwinds that rave,
I charge you be good to my dear!
She is all—she is all that I have,
And the time of our parting is near!’

‘Beautiful!’ said Una. ‘And did they like it?’

‘Like it? They were overwhelmed—accablés, as Rene says. My dear, if I hadn’t seen it, I shouldn’t have believed that I could have drawn tears, genuine tears, to the eyes of four grown men. But I did! Rene simply couldn’t endure it! He’s all French sensibility. He hid his face and said, “Assez, Mademoiselle! C’est plus fort que moi! Assez!” And Sir Arthur blew his nose and said, “Good Ged! This is worse than Assaye!” While Dad sat with the tears simply running down his cheeks.’

‘And what did Doctor Break do?’

‘He got up and pretended to look out of the window, but I saw his little fat shoulders jerk as if he had the hiccoughs. That was a triumph. I never suspected him of sensibility.’

‘Oh, I wish I’d seen! I wish I’d been you,’said Una, clasping her hands. Puck rustled and rose from the fern, just as a big blundering cock-chafer flew smack against Una’s cheek.

When she had finished rubbing the place, Mrs Vincey called to her that Pansy had been fractious, or she would have come long before to help her strain and pour off.

‘It didn’t matter,’ said Una; ‘I just waited. Is that old Pansy barging about the lower pasture now?’

‘No,’ said Mrs Vincey, listening. ‘It sounds more like a horse being galloped middlin’ quick through the woods; but there’s no road there. I reckon it’s one of Gleason’s colts loose. Shall I see you up to the house, Miss Una?’

‘Gracious, no! thank you. What’s going to hurt me?’ said Una, and she put her stool away behind the oak, and strolled home through the gaps that old Hobden kept open for her.

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IT was the unreproducible slid r, as he said this was his ‘fy-ist’ visit to England, that told me he was a New Yorker from New York; and when, in the course of our long, lazy journey westward from Waterloo, he enlarged upon the beauties of his city, I, professing ignorance, said no word. He had, amazed and delighted at the man’s civility, given the London porter a shilling for carrying his bag nearly fifty yards; he had thoroughly investigated the first-class lavatory compartment, which the London and South-Western sometimes supply without extra charge; and now, half awed, half contemptuous, but wholly interested, he looked out upon the ordered English landscape wrapped in its Sunday peace, while I watched the wonder grow upon his face. Why were the cars so short and stilted? Why had every other freight-car a tarpaulin drawn over it? What wages would an engineer get now? Where was the swarming population of England he had read so much about. What was the rank of all those men on tricycles along the roads? When were we due at Plymouth?I told him all I knew, and very much that I did not. He was going to Plymouth to assist in a consultation upon a fellow-countryman who had retired to a place called The Hoe—was that up town or down town?—to recover from nervous dyspepsia. Yes, he himself was a doctor by profession, and how any one in England could retain any nervous disorder passed his comprehension. Never had he dreamed of an atmosphere so soothing. Even the deep rumble of London traffic was monastical by comparison with some cities he could name; and the country—why, it was Paradise. A continuance of it, he confessed, would drive him mad; but for a few months it was the most sumptuous rest cure in his knowledge.

‘I’ll come over every year after this,’ he said, in a burst of delight, as we ran between two ten foot hedges of pink and white may. ‘It’s seeing all the things I’ve ever read about. Of course it doesn’t strike you that way. I presume you belong here? What a finished land it is! It’s arrived. Must have been born this way. Now, where I used to live—Hello I what’s up?’

The train stopped in a blaze of sunshine at Framlynghame Admiral, which is made up entirely of the nameboard, two platforms, and an overhead bridge, without even the usual siding. I had never known the slowest of locals stop here before; but on Sunday all things are possible to the London and South-Western. One could hear the drone of conversation along the carriages, and, scarcely less loud, the drone of the bumblebees in the wallflowers up the bank. My companion thrust his head through the window and sniffed luxuriously.

‘Where are we now?’ said he.

‘In Wiltshire,’ said I.

‘Ah! A man ought to be able to write novels with his left hand in a country like this. Well, well! And so this is about Tess’s country, ain’t it? I feel just as if I were in a book. Say, the conduc—the guard has something on his mind. What’s he getting at? ‘

The splendid badged and belted guard was striding up the platform at the regulation official pace, and in the regulation official voice was saying at each door—

‘Has any gentleman here a bottle of medicine? A gentleman. has taken a bottle of poison (laudanum) by mistake.’

Between each five paces he looked at an official telegram in his hand, refreshed his memory, and said his say. The dreamy look on my companion’s face—he had gone far away with Tess—passed with the speed of a snap -shutter. After the manner of his countrymen, he had risen to the situation, jerked his bag down from the overhead rack, opened it, and I heard the click of bottles. ‘Find out where the man is,’ he said briefly. ‘I’ve got something here that will fix him—if he can swallow still.’

Swiftly I fled up the line of carriages in the wake of the guard. There was clamour in a rear compartment—the voice of one bellowing to be let out, and the feet of one who kicked. With the tail of my eye I saw the New York doctor hastening thither, bearing in his hand a blue and brimming glass from the lavatory compartment. The guard I found scratching his head unofficially, by the engine, and murmuring: ‘Well, I put a bottle of medicine off at Andover, I’m sure I did.’

‘Better say it again, any’ow,’ said the driver. ‘Orders is orders. Say it again.’

Once more the guard paced back, I, anxious to attract his attention, trotting at his heels.

‘In a minute—in a minute, sir,’ he said, waving an arm capable of starting all, the traffic on the London and South-Western Railway at a wave. ‘Has any gentleman here got a bottle of medicine? A gentleman has taken a bottle of poison (laudanum) by mistake.’

‘Where’s the man?’ I gasped.

‘Woking. ’Ere’s my orders.’ He showed me the telegram, on which were the words to be said. ‘’E must have left ’is bottle in the train, an’ took another by mistake. ’E’s been wirin’ from Woking awful, an’, now I come to think of it, I’m nearly sure I put a bottle of medicine off at Andover.’

‘Then the man that took the poison isn’t on the train?’

‘Lord, no, sir. No one didn’t take poison that way. ’E took it away with ’im, in ’is ’ands. ’E’s wirin’ from Wokin’. My orders was to ask everybody on the train, and I ’ave, an’ we’re four minutes late now. Are you comin’ on, sir? No? Right be’ind!’

There is nothing, unless, perhaps, the English language, more terrible than the workings of an English railway line. An instant before it seemed as though we were going to spend all eternity at Framlynghame Admiral, and now I was watching the tail of the train disappear round the curve of the cutting.

But I was not alone. On the one bench of the down platform sat the largest navvy I have ever seen in my life, softened and made affable (for he smiled generously) with liquor. In his huge hands he nursed an empty tumbler marked ‘L.S.W.R.’—marked also, internally, with streaks of blue-gray sediment. Before him, a hand on his shoulder, stood the doctor, and as I came within earshot this is what I heard him say: ‘Just you hold on to your patience for a minute or two longer, and you’ll be as right as ever you were in your life. I’ll stay with you till you’re better.’

‘Lord! I’m comfortable enough,’ said the navvy. ‘Never felt better in my life.’

Turning to me, the doctor lowered his voice. ‘He might have died while that fool conduct—guard was saying his piece. I’ve fixed him, though. The stuff’s due in about five minutes, but there’s a heap to him. I don’t see how we can make him take exercise.’

For the moment I felt as though seven pounds of crushed ice had been neatly applied in the form of a compress to my lower stomach.

‘How—how did you manage it?’ I gasped.

‘I asked him if he’d have a drink. He was knocking spots out of the car—strength of his constitution, I suppose. He said he’d go ’most anywhere for a drink, so I lured him on to the platform, and loaded him up. Cold-blooded people you Britishers are. That train’s gone, and no one seemed to care a cent.’

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‘We’ve missed it,’ I said.

He looked at me curiously.

‘We’ll get another before sundown, if that’s your only trouble. Say, porter, when’s the next train down?’

‘Seven forty-five,’ said the one porter, and passed out through the wicket-gate into the landscape. It was then three-twenty of a hot and sleepy afternoon. The station was absolutely deserted. The navvy had closed his eyes, and now nodded.

‘That’s bad,’ said the doctor. ‘The man, I mean, not the train. We must make him walk somehow—walk up and down:’

Swiftly as might be, I explained the delicacy of the situation, and the doctor from New York turned a full bronze-green. Then he swore comprehensively at the entire fabric of our glorious Constitution, cursing the English language, root, branch, and paradigm, through its most obscure derivatives. His coat and bag lay on the bench next to the sleeper. Thither he edged cautiously, and I saw treachery in his eye.

What devil of delay possessed him to slip on his spring overcoat, I cannot tell. They say a slight noise arouses a sleeper more surely than a heavy one, and scarcely had the doctor settled himself in his sleeves when the giant waked and seized that silkfaced collar in a hot right hand. There was rage in his face—rage and the realisation of new emotions.

‘I’m—I’m not so comfortable as I were,’ he said from the deeps of his interior. ‘You’ll wait along o’ me, you will.’ He breathed heavily through shut lips.

Now, if there was one thing more than another upon which the doctor had dwelt in his conversation with me, it was upon the essential law-abidingness, not to say gentleness, of his much-misrepresented country. And yet (truly, it may have been no more than a button that irked him) I saw his hand travel backwards to his right hip, clutch at something, and come away empty.

‘He won’t kill you,’ I said. ‘He’ll probably sue you in court, if I know my own people. Better give him some money from time to time.’

‘If he keeps quiet till the stuff gets in its work,’ the doctor answered, ‘I’m all right. If he doesn’t . . . my name is Emory—Julian B. Emory—193 ’Steenth Street, corner of Madison and——’

‘I feel worse than I’ve ever felt,’ said the navvy, with suddenness. ‘What—did—you—give—me—the—drink—for?’

The matter seemed to be so purely personal that I withdrew to a strategic position on the overhead bridge, and, abiding in the exact centre, looked on from afar.

I could see the white road that ran across the shoulder of Salisbury Plain, unshaded for mile after mile, and a dot in the middle distance, the back of the one porter returning to Framlynghame Admiral, if such a place existed, till seven forty-five. The bell of a church invisible clanked softly. There was a rustle in the horse-chestnuts to the left of the line, and the sound of sheep cropping close.

The peace of Nirvana lay upon the land, and, brooding in it, my elbow on the warm iron girder of the footbridge (it is a forty-shilling fine to cross by any other means), I perceived, as never before, how the consequences of our acts run eternal through time and through space. If we impinge never so slightly upon the life of a fellow-mortal, the touch of our personality, like the ripple of a stone cast into a pond, widens and widens in unending circles across the aeons, till the far-off gods themselves cannot say where action ceases. Also, it was I who had silently set before the doctor the tumbler of the first-class lavatory compartment now speeding Plymouthward. Yet I was, in spirit at least, a million leagues removed from that unhappy man of another nationality, who had chosen to thrust an inexpert finger into the workings of an alien life. The machinery was dragging him up and down the sunlit platform. The two men seemed to be learning polkamazurkas together, and the burden of their song, borne by one deep voice, was: ‘What did you give me the drink for? ‘

I saw the flash of silver in the doctor’s hand. The navvy took it and pocketed it with his left; but never for an instant did his strong right leave the doctor’s coat-collar, and as the crisis approached louder and louder rose his bull-like roar: ‘What did you give me the drink for?’

They drifted under the great twelve-inch pinned timbers of the footbridge towards the bench, and, I gathered, the time was very near at hand. The stuff was getting in its work. Blue, white, and blue again, rolled over the navvy’s face in waves, till all settled to one rich clay-bank yellow and—that fell which fell.

I thought of the blowing-up of Hell Gate; of the geysers in the Yellowstone Park; of Jonah and his whale; but the lively original, as I watched it foreshortened from above, exceeded all these things. He staggered to the bench, the heavy wooden seat cramped with iron cramps into the enduring stone, and clung there with his left hand. It quivered and shook, as a breakwater-pile quivers to the rush of landward-racing seas; nor was there lacking when he caught his breath, the ‘scream of a maddened beach dragged down by the wave.’ His right hand was upon the doctor’s collar, so that the two shook to one paroxysm, pendulums vibrating together, while I, apart, shook with them.

It was colossal—immense; but of certain manifestations the English language stops short. French only, the caryatid French of Victor Hugo, would have described it; so I mourned while I laughed, hastily shuffling and discarding inadequate adjectives. The vehemence of the shock spent itself, and the sufferer half fell, half knelt, across the bench. He was calling now upon God and his wife, huskily, as the wounded bull calls upon the unscathed herd to stay. Curiously enough, he used no bad language: that had gone from him with the rest. The doctor exhibited gold. It was taken, and retained. So, too, was the grip on the coat-collar.

‘If I could stand,’ boomed the giant despairingly, ‘I’d smash you—you an’ your drinks. I’m dyin’—dyin’—dyin’!’

‘That’s what you think,’ said the doctor. ‘You’ll find it will do you a lot of good’; and, making a virtue of a somewhat imperative necessity, he added: ‘I’ll stay by you. If you’d let go of me a minute I’d give you something that would settle you.’

‘You’ve settled me now, you damned anarchist. Takin’ the bread out of the mouth of an English workin’ man! But I’ll keep ’old of you till I’m well or dead. I never did you no harm. S’pose I were a little full? They pumped me out once at Guy’s with a stummick-pump. I could see that, but I can’t see this ’ere, an’ it’s killin’ of me by slow degrees.’

‘You’ll be all right in half an hour. What do you suppose I’d want to kill you for?’ said the doctor, who came of a logical breed.

“Ow do I know? Tell ’em in court. You’ll get seven years for this, you body-snatcher. That’s what you are—a bloomin’ body-snatcher. There’s justice, I tell you, in England; and my Union’ll prosecute, too. We don’t stand no tricks with people’s insides ’ere. They gave a woman ten years for a sight less than this. An’ you’ll ’ave to pay ’undreds an’ ’undreds o’ pounds, besides a pension to the missus. You’ll see, you physickin’ furriner. Where’s your licence to do such? You’ll catch it, I tell you!’

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Then I observed, what I had frequently observed before, that a man who is but reasonably afraid of an altercation with an alien has a most poignant dread of the operations of foreign law. The doctor’s voice was flute-like in its exquisite politeness, as he answered:

‘But I’ve given you a very great deal of money—fif—three pounds, I think.’

‘An’ what’s three pounds for poisonin’ the likes o’ me? They told me at Guy’s I’d fetch twenty—cold—on the slates. Ouh! It’s comin’ again.’

A second time he was cut down by the foot, as it were, and the straining bench rocked to and fro as I averted my eyes.

It was the very point of perfection in the heart of an English May-day. The unseen tides of the air had turned, and all nature was setting its face with the shadows of the horse-chestnuts towards the peace of the coming night. But there were hours yet, I knew—long, long hours of the eternal English twilight—to the ending of the day. I was well content to be alive—to abandon myself to the drift of Time and Fate; to absorb great peace through my skin, and to love my country with the devotion that three thousand miles of intervening sea bring to fullest flower. And what a garden of Eden it was, this fatted, clipped, and washen land! A man could camp in any open field with more sense of home and security than the stateliest buildings of foreign cities could afford. And the joy was that it was all mine inalienably—groomed hedgerow, spotless road, decent greystone cottage, serried spinney, tasselled copse, apple-bellied hawthorn, and well-grown tree. A light puff of wind—it scattered flakes of may over the gleaming rails—gave me a faint whiff as it might have been of fresh coconut, and I knew that the golden gorse was in bloom somewhere out of sight. Linnæus had thanked God on his bended knees. when he first saw a field of it; and, by the way, the navvy was on his knees too. But he was by no means praying. He was purely disgustful.

The doctor was compelled to bend over him, his face towards the back of the seat, and from what I had seen I supposed the navvy was now dead. If that were the case it would be time for me to go; but I knew that so long as a man trusts himself to the current of Circumstance, reaching out for and rejecting nothing that comes his way, no harm can overtake him. It is the contriver, the schemer, who is caught by the law, and never the philosopher. I knew that when the play was played, Destiny herself would move me on from the corpse; and I felt very sorry for the doctor.

In the-far distance, presumably upon the road that led to Framlynghame Admiral, there appeared a vehicle and a horse—the one ancient fly that almost every village can produce at need. This thing was advancing, unpaid by me, towards the station; would have to pass along the deep-cut lane, below the railway-bridge, and come out on the doctor’s side. I was in the centre of things, so all sides were alike to me. Here, then, was my machine from the machine. When it arrived, something would happen, or something else. For the rest, I owned my deeply interested soul.

The doctor, by the seat, turned so far as his cramped position allowed, his head over his left shoulder, and laid his right hand upon his lips. I threw back my hat and elevated my eyebrows in the form of a question. The doctor shut his eyes and nodded his head slowly twice or thrice, beckoning me to come. I descended cautiously, and it was as the signs had told. The navvy was asleep, empty to the lowest notch; yet his hand clutched still the doctor’s collar, and at the lightest movement (the doctor was really very cramped) tightened mechanically, as the hand of a sick woman tightens on that of the watcher. He had dropped, squatting almost upon his heels, and, falling lower, had dragged the doctor over to the left.

The doctor thrust his right hand, which was free, into his pocket, drew forth some keys, and shook his head. The navvy gurgled in his sleep. Silently I dived into my pocket, took out one sovereign, and held it up between finger and thumb Again the doctor shook his head. Money was not what was lacking to his peace. His bag had fallen from the’ seat to the ground. He looked towards it, and opened his mouth—O-shape. The catch was not a difficult one, and when I had mastered it, the doctor’s right forefinger was sawing the air. With an immense caution, I extracted from the bag such a knife as they use for cutting collops off legs. The doctor frowned, and with his first and second fingers imitated the action of scissors. Again I searched, and found a most diabolical pair of cocknosed shears, capable of vandyking the interiors of elephants. The doctor then slowly lowered his left shoulder till the navvy’s right wrist was supported by the bench, pausing a moment as the spent volcano rumbled anew. Lower and lower the doctor sank, kneeling now by the navvy’s side, till his head was on a level with, and just in front of, the great hairy fist, and—there was no tension on the coat-collar. Then light dawned on me.

Beginning a little to the right of the spinal column, I cut a huge demilune out of his new spring overcoat, bringing it round as far under his left side (which was the right side of the navvy) as I dared. Passing thence swiftly to the back of the seat, and reaching between the splines, I sawed through the silk-faced front on the left-hand side of the coat till the two cuts joined.

Cautiously as the box-turtle of his native heath, the doctor drew away sideways and to the right, with the air of a frustrated burglar coming out from under a bed, and stood up free, one black diagonal shoulder projecting through the gray of his ruined overcoat. I returned the scissors to the bag, snapped the catch, and held all out to him as the wheels of the fly rang hollow under the railway arch.

It came at a foot-pace past the wicket-gate of the station, and the doctor stopped it with a whisper. It was going some five miles across country to bring home from church some one—I could not catch the name—because his own carriage-horses were lame. Its destination happened to be the one place in all the world that the doctor was most burningly anxious to visit, and he promised the driver untold gold to drive to some ancient flame of his—Helen Blazes, she was called.

‘Aren’t you coming, too?’ he said, bundling his overcoat into his bag.

Now the fly had been so obviously sent to the doctor, and to no one else, that I had no concern with it. Our roads, I saw, divided, and there was, further, a need upon me to laugh.

‘I shall stay here,’ I said. ‘It’s a very pretty country.’

‘My God!’ he murmured, as softly as he shut the door, and I felt that it was a prayer.

Then he went out of my life, and I shaped my course for the railway-bridge. It was necessary to pass by the bench once more, but the wicket was between us. The departure of the fly had waked the navvy. He crawled on to the seat, and with malignant eyes watched the driver flog down the road.

‘The man inside o’ that,’ he called, ‘’as poisoned me. ’E’s a body-snatcher. ’E’s comin’ back again when I’m cold. ’Ere’s my evidence!’

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He waved his share of the overcoat, and I went my way, because I was hungry. Framlynghame Admiral village is a good two miles from the station, and I waked the holy calm of the evening every step of that way with shouts and yells, casting myself down in the flank of the good green hedge when I was too weak to stand. There was an inn,—a blessed inn with a thatched roof, and peonies in the garden,—and I ordered myself an upper chamber in which the Foresters held their courts, for the laughter was not all out of me. A bewildered woman brought me ham and eggs, and I leaned out of the mullioned window, and laughed between mouthfuls. I sat long above the beer and the perfect smoke that followed, till the light changed in the quiet street, and I began to think of the seven forty-five down, and all that world of the Arabian Nights I had quitted.

Descending, I passed a giant in moleskins who filled the low-ceiled tap-room. Many empty plates stood before him, and beyond them a fringe of the Framlynghame Admiralty, to whom he was unfolding a wondrous tale of anarchy, of body-snatching, of bribery, and the Valley of the Shadow from the which he was but newly risen. And as he talked he ate, and as he ate he drank, for there was much room in him; and anon he paid royally, speaking of justice and the law, before whom all Englishmen are equal, and all foreigners and anarchists vermin and slime.

On my way to the station he passed me with great strides, his head high among the low-flying bats, his feet firm on the packed road metal, his fists clenched, and his breath coming sharply. There was a beautiful smell in the air—the smell of white dust, bruised nettles, and smoke, that brings tears to the throat of a man who sees his country but seldom—a smell like the echoes of the lost talk of lovers; the infinitely suggestive odour of an immemorial civilisation. It was a perfect walk; and, lingering on every step, I came to the station just as the one porter lighted the last of a truck-load of lamps, and set them back in the lamp-room, while he dealt tickets to four or five of the population, who, not contented with their own peace, thought fit to travel. It was no ticket that the navvy seemed to need. He was sitting on a bench wrathfully grinding a tumbler into fragments with his heel. I abode in obscurity at the end of the platform, interested as ever, thank heaven, in my surroundings. There was a jar of wheels on the road. The navvy rose as they approached, strode through the wicket, and laid a hand upon a horse’s bridle that brought the beast up on his hireling hind-legs. It was the providential fly coming back, and for a moment I wondered whether the doctor had been mad enough to revisit his practice.

‘Get away; you’re drunk,’ said the driver.

‘I’m not,’ said the navvy. ‘I’ve been waitin’ ’ere hours and hours. Come out, you beggar inside there.’

‘Go on, driver,’ said a voice I did not know—a crisp, clear, English voice.

‘All right,’ said the navvy. ‘You wouldn’t ’ear me when I was polite. Now will you come?’

There was a chasm in the side of the fly, for he had wrenched the door bodily off its hinges, and was feeling within purposefully. A well-booted leg rewarded him, and there came out, not with delight, hopping on one foot, a round and grayhaired Englishman, from whose armpits dropped hymn-books, but from his mouth an altogether different service of song.

‘Come on, you bloomin’ body-snatcher! You thought I was dead, did you?’ roared the navvy. And the respectable gentleman came accordingly, inarticulate with rage.

‘’Ere’s a man murderin’ the Squire,’ the driver shouted, and fell from his box upon the navvy’s neck.

To do them justice, the people of Framlynghame Admiral, so many as were on the platform, rallied to the call in the best spirit of feudalism. It was the one porter who beat the navvy on the nose with a ticket-punch, but it was the three third-class tickets who attached themselves to his legs and freed the captive.

‘Send for a constable! lock him up!’ said that man, adjusting his collar; and unitedly they cast him into the lamp-room, and turned the key, while the driver mourned over the wrecked fly.

Till then the navvy, whose only desire was justice, had kept his temper nobly. Then he went Berserk before our amazed eyes. The door of the lamp-room was generously constructed, and would not give an inch, but the window he tore from its fastenings and hurled outwards. The one porter counted the damage in a loud voice, and the others, arming themselves with agricultural implements from the station garden, kept up a ceaseless winnowing before the window, themselves backed close to the wall, and bade the prisoner think of the gaol. He answered little to the point, so far as they could understand; but seeing that his exit was impeded, he took a lamp and hurled it through the wrecked sash. It fell on the metals and went out. With inconceivable velocity, the others, fifteen in all, followed looking like rockets in the gloom, and with the last (he could have had no plan) the Berserk rage left him as the doctor’s deadly brewage waked up, under the stimulus of violent exercise and a very full meal, to one last cataclysmal exhibition, and—we heard the whistle of the seven forty-five down.

They were all acutely interested in as much of the wreck as they could see, for the station smelt to heaven of oil, and the engine skittered over broken glass like a terrier in a cucumber-frame. The guard had to hear of it, and the Squire had his version of the brutal assault, and heads were out all along the carriages as I found me a seat.

‘What is the row?’ said a young man, as I entered. ‘Man drunk?’

‘Well, the symptoms, so far as my observation has gone, more resemble those of Asiatic cholera than anything else,’ I answered, slowly and judicially, that every word might carry weight in the appointed scheme of things. Till then, you will observe, I had taken no part in that war.

He was an Englishman, but he collected his belongings as swiftly as had the American, ages before, and leaped upon the platform, crying, ‘Can I be of any service? I’m a doctor.’

From the lamp-room I heard a wearied voice wailing: ‘Another bloomin’ doctor!’

And the seven forty-five carried me on, a step nearer to Eternity, by the road that is worn and seamed and channelled with the passions, and weaknesses, and warring interests of man who is immortal and master of his fate.

CRICH, THE ORDERLY, sat on a camp-stool cheering Parker, who lay suspiciously quiet. Parker had come from Queensland, via New Jersey, among other cities, and the registered voters of Colesberg had shot him across the spine below the shoulders.

‘My stomach’s a trifle out of order,’ said Parker cheerily. ‘They can’t get it to work. Except for that I don’t feel that there’s anything wrong with me.’

Crich looked at me, to signify that it would b, better for Parker if he had a little more feeling. ‘We’re comin’ on beautifully, ain’t we?’ said Crich, and Parker nodded.

‘I’m the last o’ four—all spinal cases — all in this tent too!’ said Parker. ‘I’ve seen ’em all go, and here am I hangin’ on by my finger-nails. They all went, didn’t they?’

‘Yes,’ said Crich, his braces round his hips; ‘an’ they all called for me ‘fore they went. ‘Member Tommy?

Parker smiled. Sir Philip Sidney smiled very much in that fashion. ‘Oh, yes. I was on special allowance of brandy, but Tommy he always looked for a little of mine in his lemonade.’ Couldn’t speak much, but he used to roll his eyes to my bed. Tommy liked his tot of brandy and lemonade. When did he go, Crich ?’

‘Yes’day afternoon. You was asleep, Parker. He said “Crich, old man, where are you?” he said. “Right here in front o’ you,” I says, and I went up to ‘im, ’cause I knew what was comin’. “I can’t see you, Crich,” he says. Then I laid ‘old of his arms by my two ‘ands. “That’s better,” he says. “If I Can’t see you I can feel you,” he says. “Don’t let go, Crich,” he says, and in a minute or two he was off, as quiet as anything. You was asleep, Parker. Oh, yes, they all asked for old Crich to take ‘old of when they went off Parker’s goin’ to best the lot of ’em.’ Thus to me. ‘Last o’ four spinal cases, he is, an’ he’s goin’ to Netley , an’ he’ll be all right in a few weeks. ‘Ave some more tomatoes, Parker?’

The giant turned his head and raised an arm. He could not quite reach the tomatoes. Crick stepped across the tent, and lavishly douched the cut fruit with oil and vinegar, and exhibited Parker in the act of eating. Then Parker talked of real estate speculations in Orange, New Jersey, and stock-riding in Queensland; Crick supplying an ever-appreciative chorus. I watched the superbly-built body, so all alive to the chest-line, so all dead below, and it seemed to me unfair that nervous anxiety to make Cape Colony a ‘little haven of peace’ had led a ‘neutral Government’ to postpone the ordinary preparations for war till the Colesberg rebels (all registered voters, remember) could conveniently mangle Parker’s spinal cord. I laid it upon Crich, the hairy-chested and adequate, that Parker must not die, and Crich hopefully hopeless said, out of Parker’s hearing, that he would do his damnedest.

That was some weeks ago. I have seen Parker twice or thrice since, but to-day his bed is empty. He has bested the registered voter of Colesberg, all the young doctors who prophesied death, and Crich, who couldn’t see any other way out of it.

He has gone home in a steamer to Netley, with the chance of living, half-dead for a year or two, and the ghost of a chance that he may partially recover. This is a load off my mind. For some absurd reason Parker was my war-fetish. He held on through the black days ere Ladysmith was relieved; he heard of Cronje’s surrender, and now, at Madeira, he will learn that Bloemfontein is his and ours.

The war goes better. With Parker and Bloemfontein disposed of we can attend to the hospitals. Dinniss, the light-moustached Sergeant Major of a Horse battery, has gone away; but not before he saved the lives of three or four depressed and morbid, by his cheerfulness and his yarns.

Dinniss has six-and-twenty years’ service. He refused his majority eleven years ago, because it was not in his beloved battery, and he is an encyclopaedia of military knowledge — the unofficial brand. I heard him tell his tent confidentially that if he had known what sort of a silly sort of war this war was going to turn out, he would have retired on his laurels early in October.

He caught something at Magersfontein, which has kept him in bed for a few weeks, but now he is at the Front again. He was more or less in charge of the Horse battery which, out of pure politeness, stood still to take the Boer fire when our naval gun on the left of the line did not see the flag of truce, went on firing, and brought down a fresh Boer fusillade.

Said Dinniss: ‘Of course, we sat tight to show it was a mistake, but the shells were makin’ our horses skittish, so I said: “Send a driver to their heads. They’re a little shy.” I looked round, an’ there wasn’t any drivers! D’you know what they were doin’ Chasin’ rats round a bush! Yiss! Rat-huntin’ under fire. On my worrud, I don’t believe drivers have sowls. No, not one!’

‘Were they Cockneys, by any chance, Dinniss?’ ‘Ye may say so. We come from St. John’s Wood, London, N.W.’ The tent and the orderlies grieved when Dinniss left, for he had great authority, and most persuasive tact. Now, Derby of the Inniskillings had no authority. He lived on his tongue and his skill in outflanking orderlies. Derby got it badly in the leg, and hopped like a cock robin in scarlet flannel between the tents. He was marked for England, and the day before he sailed all Rondebosch was too small for his transports.

A visitor came by with pipes and tobacco to give the men, and Derby steered him towards a convalescent. ‘D’you want to buy a pipe?’ said Derby with a serious face. ‘They’re only threepence, and the baccy’s one and threepence a stick. It’s dirt cheap.’ The convalescent fingered the stock and demanded cigarettes. ‘I’m sorry,’ said Derby, ‘but we’re sold out of cigarettes. If you’ll give your order, maybe this man will —’ Then the convalescent tumbled to the jest, and Derby had to run for it all between the tent-pegs. There should be lively times on Derby’s boat home, but he is the kindest of souls to an invalid.

The Twins are not on their feet yet. They are both Australians, both have broken legs, they lie side by side, their legs in slings, and the one loyally caps the other’s tallest yarns. A few days back talk turned on what blackfellows could do with a boomerang.

A Fusilier cut to pieces with barbed wire, a 9th Lancer, and a West Yorkshireman told the twins to draw it mild. Sticks could not twist and turn in that way. It was as absurd as the word Woolloomooloo. Entered then from another tent Rae, of Manitoba, hit at Slinger’s or Arundel.

Rae said he did not understand boomerangs, but things could be made to curve in the air, for all the 9th Lancer said. For instance, there was a game called baseball. Rae illustrated with his sound arm how a pitcher sends in a curved ball, and the Twins, applauding, welcomed him as an ally. They had a file of Australian papers with pictures of boomerangs. Would the 9th Lancer please get them out from the shelf, and they would explain. So, under the pines planted in South Africa by men from the North, Welshman,Tyke ,Cockney, and Canadian bent their heads over a Melbourne weekly, while a Queenslander read the letterpress

Johnson, of a Highland regiment — he looked very like Alan Breck had tried to stop a shell-splinter with his stomach, and it cost him eight weeks’ agony. The first time we met he walked crab-fashion, his blue eyes alight with pain. Hear, O Heaven, and bear witness, O Earth, that there would be no more of South Africa for Johnson and his stomach! A fortnight later we sat in the sun with a whispering Guardsman, half of whose larynx had been put out of commission by a down-dropping bullet.

But Johnson was a changed man. He had developed a scheme, and explained it as he sat grasping his ankles and rocking to and fro. They were going to send him to Green Point with other convalescents. The odds were they would send him home, and that did not suit Johnson’s revised book. ‘I’m a saddler by trade. They’ll not overlook the likes of me when they’re repairing collars and harnesses. I’ll not be sent home till the war is over — if I can help it. Surely they’ll need a collar-maker. Then I’ll be able to get back again.’

He went off to draw his kit, walking corkily, and the Guardsman whispered husky congratulations. But there is no spring in McConnell, sergeant of another Highland regiment — nothing but sour disgust. He got it in the hand, round Paardeberg, a rending, shattering bullet, that has marked him for England. And there is what is left of his Company to consider, and there is his unpaid debt to the Boer, drawing interest every day, and there is his right hand throbbing and aching in the night watches. His chief interest is the daily paper and the list of the Boer dead. He lies in his corner, smoking, brooding, and meditating how to escape England. But his hand—his right hand, with the iron-hard forearm — is useless. He always comes back to that.

Not far from him lies Carter, who went downhill by reason of a fractured thigh and some fever.

Then he got bed-sores — two, he told me — and then they got him an air-mattress. Carter came near to losing his life, but the story in the ward is that Neeld, a graceless Cockney Highlander, bucked him up, precisely as Dinniss bucked up the man shot through the lungs.

Anyhow, Carter is spared, which is a sign of grace, and they have taken him out for a small walk in a wheeled chair. ‘He kep’ askin’ us all the way uphill if he was too heavy,’ said one of Carter’s steeds — a convalescent with a head-wound. ‘Well, you see, it’s voluntary, not compulsory, takin’ convalescents out,’ says Carter, rather tremulous about the mouth.

‘You don’t weigh more’n a rat now,’ is the answer, and then, the voice touched with a beautiful tenderness, ‘Did ye like it, ‘Arry?’

Did he like it? After three months he has seen trees and sunshine, and felt the big sky above him. He picked up the good dirt of the earth and let it run through his fingers. Now he is going to sleep. In a little while Mylton will be fit to wheel out. He hails from St. John, New Brunswick — the old city of many fires over against the racing Fundy tide. The scent of the Wynberg pine-needles makes him one jelly of home-sickness. Providence sent to his bedside one who knows his city, and street by street and suburb by suburb, ‘from Castor in the Forum to Mars without the wall’—from the fragrant lumber-mills to Loch Lomond. Mylton goes over it all rejoicing. Yes, he knows, moreover, Dalhousie, Gaspe, and Baie Chaleur. And how he longs to see them! Two yards away a Yorkshire Reservist points out to a man who is fashioning a canvas and wool belt that of all places under heaven there is none like to Bradford. He is married, with four children and a damaged shoulder; but all will be well when he returns to Bradford, ‘in t’ steamer.’

Lascelles, Tasmanian Mounted Infantry, holds quite other views. He had come through much rough-and-tumble work, ending with abscess of the liver. That removed, they have put him to light duty at Maitland Camp till he is fit to sit a horse. His eyes are sunk and heavy, but he sees far. He is the son of a Hobart fruitgrower. What about fruit-growing in this country? Is himself an apple man, but understands peaches and plums. Has noticed while in hospital that many apples sent to convalescents were full of codlin-grub, which he considers far more serious than Boers.

What about red-scale and the other fruit-pests? What about packing and freight-rates? In Tasmania the wood for an apple-crate costs threepence halfpenny, and the completed article less than fivepence. On the other hand, South Africa is nearer London than Hobart. Lascelles works out the sum in his head, and emerges to say that he has dug up many samples of soil round Kimberley; has also looked over many farms up-country as he rode through.

Lascelles thinks that Tasmania being a small place — a young man might do worse than settle here and grow up in a new country, eh? It is represented to Lascelles that he is the kind of man we need badly. Yes, Mr. Lascelles, this is the one land for the new man of colonial experience — for open-air men used to large spaces and plain living – thousands of them. Here is everything — horses, cattle, wool, and fruit. Do you know any more young men of the same views Manitoba ranchers, New Zealand sheep-men, fruitgrowers of the South?

If so, bring them along, and we will make such a country as the world has never seen. Lascelles admits that he has talked to several friends about the wisdom of settling here after the war. They think well of it. In twenty minutes I have pledged the honour of the Empire to the hilt on behalf of Lascelles & Co. If they mean business everything shall be made easy for their first start. I will lend them money on mortgage (at least, you will, and we shall get four per cent on it). I will slap down railways along the valleys where the fruit grows, so that no farm need haul her dried prunes more than five miles to the rail. (This is not so mad as it sounds, for such valleys are few.)

I will arrange low freights, if I have to go on my knees to German shipping firms. I will break the Covent Garden fruit-ring into flinders. I will erect coldstorage warehouses by the acre, and chilled fruit-cars at 40° uniform shall be as common as cattle-trucks on all our lines. I will develop under the care of half-a-dozen picked Canal officers from India such a scheme of irrigation (it will not cost more than three millions to begin with) as shall beat the Bara Doab, Colorado, and the Queensland colonies combined.

Mr. Lascelles accepts everything calmly. He is young and has the divine faith. ‘In twenty years’ time!’ he says, and his eye with a budding stye on it glows.

‘Ah, but it’s all a gamble,’ I make haste to qualify. ‘One has to take one’s chances.’

‘I’ll take ’em,’ says Mr. Lascelles; and, when you come to think of it, a man who has been risking his life for a few weeks is not going to be deterred by the prospect of one fruit farm or a score, for that matter failing on Iris hands.

Meantime, will you please take notes of the few schemes I have committed you to? Because in five years you will be lending money on them and they will pay more than trappy gold-reefs or South American tramways. The tents arc full of boys who, with a little steering, would settle here. Nixon, of Vancouver, for instance, is in real estate and life insurance when he is at home. He was also in the Canadian rush on the Paardeberg laager. Being a youth of cheerful and speculative temperament, he would be shrewd enough to pronounce on the chances of a new country if any one brought him the facts and the figures — and the fancies. As it is, lie lies in bed with a bullet through his leg and thinks about a Vancouver girl. Colliss, also a Western man in real estate, would be another splendid recruit. He shed his blood for the country with a vengeance, the bullet narrowly missing an artery. He would stay in the country if properly approached. He is sinful proud of the fact that of eight hundred and fifty Canadians engaged in this business not more than four hundred and sixty are at this date available. And they were not cut down by sickness nor cut off by Boer patrols. We may assume, then, that among the hospitals are three hundred Canadians of the very stamp and breed we require — young, sound, clean, intelligent, well educated, of whom seventy-five per cent hold or have held land. Three hundred possible heads of sane and soaped families. And not a man to show them maps and photos and plans to lure them to stay in South Africa. We shall let all these beautiful men, and hundreds and hundreds more, go back to their own place and never lift finger to stay them. Truly we are the most wasteful as we are the most idle nation under heaven!

Derby, and Dinniss, and Crich, and Neeld, and Johnson, and the young postman at Crieff, and my own postman at Rottingdean (he is here in a bearer company), and the man that drives the big brewery wagon at Newhaven (he is here in the Black Watch, and was hit at Magersfontein), must go home when the war is ended. Blessings and thanks go with them. They are all either Reserve men, their places waiting for them, or men of the Regular Line without a trade.

But we need Mylton when he gets better, and Nixon, and Colliss, and Lascelles, and the Twins, and a few thousand more of their kidney to stay and inherit.

For the land is a good land. It has been wilfully and wickedly starved — starved by policy and craft through many years lest an incompetent race should be found out before the face of the nations.

RUDYARD KIPLING

‘Because half a dozen grasshoppers under a fern make the field ring with their importunate chink while thousands of great cattle, reposed beneath the shadow of the British oak, chew the cud and are silent, pray do not imagine that those who make the noise are the only inhabitants of the field — that, of course, they are many in number or that, after all, they are other than the little, shrivelled, meagre, hopping, though loud and troublesome insects of the hour.’
(Burke: Reflections on the Revolution in France)

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THEY were sitting in the veranda of ‘the splendid palace of an Indian Pro-Consul’; surrounded by all the glory and mystery of the immemorial East. In plain English it was a one-storied, ten-roomed, whitewashed, mud-roofed bungalow, set in a dry garden of dusty tamarisk trees and divided from the road by a low mud wall. The green parrots screamed overhead as they flew in battalions to the river for their morning drink. Beyond the wall, clouds of fine dust showed where the cattle and goats of the city were passing afield to graze. The remorseless white light of the winter sunshine of Northern India lay upon everything and improved nothing, from the whining Persian-wheel by the lawn-tennis court to the long perspective of level road and the blue, domed tombs of Mohammedan saints just visible above the trees.

‘A Happy New Year,’ said Orde to his guest. ‘It’s the first you’ve ever spent out of England, isn’t it?’

‘Yes. “Happy New Year,”‘ said Pagett, smiling at the sunshine. ‘What a divine climate you have here! Just think of the brown cold fog hanging over London now!’ And he rubbed his hands.

It was more than twenty years since he had last seen Orde, his schoolmate, and their paths in the world had divided early. The one had quitted college to become a cog-wheel in the machinery of the great Indian Government; the other more blessed with goods, had been whirled into a similar position in the English scheme. Three successive elections had not affected Pagett’s position with a loyal constituency, and he had grown insensibly to regard himself in some sort as a pillar of the Empire, whose real worth would be known later on. After a few years of conscientious attendance at many divisions, after newspaper battles innumerable and the publication of interminable correspondence, and more hasty oratory than in his calmer moments he cared to think upon, it occurred to him, as it had occurred to many of his fellows in Parliament, that a tour to India would enable him to sweep a larger lyre and address himself to the problems of Imperial administration with a firmer hand. Accepting, therefore, a general invitation extended to him by Orde some years before, Pagett had taken ship to Karachi, and only over-night had been received with joy by the Deputy-Commissioner of Amara. They had sat late, discussing the changes and chances of twenty years, recalling the names of the dead, and weighing the futures of the living, as is the custom of men meeting after intervals of action.

Next morning they smoked the after breakfast pipe in the veranda, still regarding each other curiously, Pagett, in a light grey frock-coat and garments much too thin for the time of the year, and a puggried sun-hat carefully and wonderfully made. Orde in a shooting coat, riding breeches, brown cowhide boots with spurs, and a battered flax helmet. He had ridden some miles in the early morning to inspect a doubtful river dam. The men’s faces differed as much as their attire. Orde’s worn and wrinkled around the eyes, and grizzled at the temples, was the harder and more square of the two, and it was with something like envy that the owner looked at the comfortable outlines of Pagett’s blandly receptive countenance, the clear skin, the untroubled eye, and the mobile, clean-shaved lips.

‘And this is India!’ said Pagett for the twentieth time staring long and intently at the grey feathering of the tamarisks.

‘One portion of India only. It’s very much like this for 300 miles in every direction. By the way, now that you have rested a little — I wouldn’t ask the old question before — what d’you think of the country?’

‘Tis the most pervasive country that ever yet was seen. I acquired several pounds of your country coming up from Karachi. The air is heavy with it, and for miles and miles along that distressful eternity of rail there’s no horizon to show where air and earth separate.’

‘Yes. It isn’t easy to see truly or far in India. But you had a decent passage out, hadn’t you?’

‘Very good on the whole. Your Anglo-Indian may be unsympathetic about one’s political views; but he has reduced ship life to a science.’

‘The Anglo-Indian is a political orphan, and if he’s wise he won’t be in a hurry to be adopted by your party grandmothers. But how were your companions, unsympathetic?’

‘Well, there was a man called Dawlishe, a judge somewhere in this country it seems, and a capital partner at whist by the way, and when I wanted to talk to him about the progress of India in a political sense (Orde hid a grin, which might or might not have been sympathetic), the National Congress movement, and other things in which, as a Member of Parliament, I’m of course interested, he shifted the subject, and when I once cornered him, he looked me calmly in the eye, and said: “That’s all Tommy rot. Come and have a game at Bull. You may laugh; but that isn’t the way to treat a great and important question; and, knowing who I was, well. I thought it rather rude, don’t you know; and yet Dawlishe is a thoroughly good fellow.’

‘Yes; he’s a friend of mine, and one of the straightest men I know. I suppose, like many Anglo-Indians, he felt it was hopeless to give you any just idea of any Indian question without the documents before you, and in this case the documents you want are the country and the people.’

‘Precisely. That was why I came straight to you, bringing an open mind to bear on things. I’m anxious to know what popular feeling in India is really like y’know, now that it has wakened into political life. The National Congress, in spite of Dawlishe, must have caused great excitement among the masses?’

‘On the contrary, nothing could be more tranquil than the state of popular feeling; and as to excitement, the people would as soon be excited over the “Rule of Three” as over the Congress.’

‘Excuse me, Orde, but do you think you are a fair judge? Isn’t the official Anglo-Indian naturally jealous of any external influences that might move the masses, and so much opposed to liberal ideas, truly liberal ideas, that he can scarcely be expected to regard a popular movement with fairness?’

‘What did Dawlishe say about Tommy Rot? Think a moment, old man. You and I were brought up together; taught by the same tutors, read the same books, lived the same life, and thought, as you remember, in parallel lines. I come out here, learn new languages, and work among new races; while you, more fortunate, remain at home. Why should I change my mind our mind — because I change my sky? Why should I and the few hundred Englishmen in my service become unreasonable, prejudiced fossils, while you and your newer friends alone remain bright and open-minded? You surely don’t fancy civilians are members of a Primrose League?’

‘Of course not, but the mere position of an English official gives him a point of view which cannot but bias his mind on this question.’ Pagett moved his knee up and down a little uneasily as he spoke.

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‘That sounds plausible enough, but, like more plausible notions on Indian matters, I believe it’s a mistake. You’ll find when you come to consult the unofficial Briton that our fault, as a class — I speak of the civilian now — is rather to magnify the progress that has been made toward liberal institutions. It is of English origin, such as it is, and the stress of our work since the Mutiny — only thirty years ago — has been in that direction. No, I think you will get no fairer or more dispassionate view of the Congress business than such men as I can give you. But I may as well say at once that those who know most of India, from the inside, are inclined to wonder at the noise our scarcely begun experiment makes in England.’

‘But surely the gathering together of Congress delegates is of itself a new thing.’

‘There’s nothing new under the sun. When Europe was a jungle half Asia flocked to the canonical conferences of Buddhism; and for centuries the people have gathered at Pun, Hurdwar, Trimbak, and Benares in immense numbers. A great meeting, what you call a mass meeting, is really one of the oldest and most popular of Indian institutions In the case of the Congress meetings, the only notable fact is that the priests of the altar are British, not Buddhist, Jain or Brahmanical, and that the whole thing is a British contrivance kept alive by the efforts of Messrs. Hume, Eardley, Norton, and Digby.’

‘You mean to say, then, it’s not a spontaneous movement?’

‘What movement was ever spontaneous in any true sense of the word? This seems to be more factitious than usual. You seem to know a great deal about it; try it by the touchstone of subscriptions, a coarse but fairly trustworthy criterion, and there is scarcely the colour of money in it. The delegates write from England that they are out of pocket for working expenses, railway fares, and stationery — the mere pasteboard and scaffolding of their show. It is, in fact, collapsing from mere financial inanition.’

‘But you cannot deny that the people of India, who are, perhaps, too poor to subscribe, are mentally and morally moved by the agitation,’ Pagett insisted.

‘That is precisely what I do deny. The native side of the movement is the work of a limited class, a microscopic minority, as Lord Dufferin described it, when compared with the people proper, but still a very interesting class, seeing that it is of our own creation. It is composed almost entirely of those of the literary or clerkly castes who have received an English education.’

‘Surely that s a very important class. Its members must be the ordained leaders of popular thought.’

‘Anywhere else they might he leaders, but they have no social weight in this topsy-turvy land, and though they have been employed in clerical work for generations they have no practical knowledge of affairs. A ship’s clerk is a useful person, but he it scarcely the captain; and an orderly-room writer, however smart he may be, is not the colonel. You see, the writer class in India has never till now aspired to anything like command. It wasn’t allowed to. The Indian gentleman, for thousands of years past, has resembled Victor Hugo’s noble:

Un vrai sire
Chatelain
Laisse ecrire
Le vilain.
Sa main digne
Quand il signe
Egratigne
Le velin.

And the little êgratignures he most likes to make have been scored pretty deeply by the sword.’

‘But this is childish and medieval nonsense!’

‘Precisely; and from your, or rather our, point of view the pen is mightier than the sword. In this country it’s otherwise. The fault lies in our Indian balances, not yet adjusted to civilized weights and measures.’

‘Well, at all events, this literary class represent the natural aspirations and wishes of the people at large, though it may not exactly lead them, and, in spite of all you say, Orde, I defy you to find a really sound English Radical who would not sympathize with those aspirations.’

Pagett spoke with some warmth, and he had scarcely ceased when a well appointed dog-cart turned into the compound gates, and Orde rose saying:

‘Here is Edwards, the Master of the Lodge I neglect so diligently, come to talk about accounts, I suppose.’

As the vehicle drove up under the porch Pagett also rose, saying with the trained effusion born of much practice:

‘But this is also my friend, my old and valued friend Edwards. I’m delighted to see you. I knew you were in India, but not exactly where.’

‘Then it isn’t accounts, Mr. Edwards,’ said Orde, cheerily.

‘Why, no, sir; I heard Mr. Pagett was coming, and as our works were closed for the New Year I thought I would drive over and see him.’

‘A very happy thought. Mr. Edwards, you may not know, Orde, was a leading member of our Radical Club at Surbiton when I was beginning political life, and I owe much to his exertions. There’s no pleasure like meeting an old friend, except, perhaps, making a new one. I suppose, Mr. Edwards, you stick to the good old cause?’

‘Well, you see, sir, things are different out here. There’s precious little one can find to say against the Government, which was the main of our talk at home, and them that do say things are not the sort o’ people a man who respects himself would like to be mixed up with. There are no politics, in a manner of speaking, in India. It’s all work.’

‘Surely you are mistaken, my good friend. Why I have come all the way from England just to see the working of this great National movement.’

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‘I don’t know where you’re going to find the nation as moves to begin with, and then you’ll be hard put to it to find what they are moving about. It’s like this, sir,’ said Edwards, who had not quite relished being called ‘my good friend.’ ‘They haven’t got any grievance — nothing to hit with, don’t you see, sir; and then there’s not much to hit against, because the Government is more like a kind of general Providence, directing an old-established state of things, than that at home, where there’s something new thrown down for us to fight about every three months.’

‘You are probably, in your workshops, full of English mechanics, out of the way of learning what the masses think.’

‘I don’t know so much about that. There are four of us English foremen, and between seven and eight hundred native fitters, smiths, carpenters, painters, and such like.’

‘And they are full of the Congress, of course?’

‘Never hear a word of it from year’s end to year’s end, and I speak the talk too. But I wanted to ask how things are going on at home — old Tyler and Brown and the rest?’

‘We will speak of them presently, but your account of the indifference of your men surprises me almost as much as your own. I fear you are a backslider from the good old doctrine, Edwards.’ Pagett spoke as one who mourned the death of a near relative.

‘Not a bit, Sir, but I should be if I took up with a parcel of baboos, pleaders, and schoolboys, as never did a day’s work in their lives, and couldn’t if they tried. And if you was to poll us English railway men, mechanics, tradespeople, and the like of that all up and down the country from Peshawur to Calcutta, you would find us mostly in a tale together. And yet you know we’re the same English you pay some respect to at home at ‘lection time, and we have the pull o’ knowing something about it.’

‘This is very curious, but you will let me come and see you, and perhaps you will kindly show me the railway works, and we will talk things over at leisure. And about all old friends and old times,’ added Pagett, detecting with quick insight a look of disappointment in the mechanic’s face.

Nodding briefly to Orde, Edwards mounted his dog-cart and drove off.

‘It’s very disappointing,’ said the Member to Orde, who, while his friend discoursed with Edwards, had been looking over a bundle of sketches drawn on grey paper in purple ink, brought to him by a Chuprassee.

‘Don’t let it trouble you, old chap,’ said Orde, sympathetically. ‘Look here a moment, here are some sketches by the man who made the carved wood screen you admired so much in the dining-room, and wanted a copy of, and the artist himself is here too.’

‘A native?’ said Pagett.

‘Of course,’ was the reply, ‘Bishen Singh is his name, and he has two brothers to help him. When there is an important job to do, the three go ‘ato partnership, but they spend most of their time and all their money in litigation over an inheritance, and I’m afraid they are getting involved, Thoroughbred Sikhs of the old rock, obstinate, touchy, bigoted, and cunning, but good men for all that. Here is Bishen Singn — shall we ask him about the Congress?’

But Bishen Singh, who approached with a respectful salaam, had never heard of it, and he listened with a puzzled face and obviously feigned interest to Orde’s account of its aims and objects, finally shaking his vast white turban with great significance when he learned that it was promoted by certam pleaders named by Orde, and by educated natives. He began with laboured respect to explain how he was a poor man with no concern in such matters, which were all under the control of God, but presently broke out of Urdu into familiar Punjabi, the mere sound of which had a rustic smack of village smoke-reek and plough-tail, as he denounced the wearers of white coats, the jugglers with words who filched his field from him, the men whose backs were never bowed in honest work; and poured ironical scorn on the Bengali. He and one of his brothers had seen Calcutta, and being at work there had Bengali carpenters given to them as assistants.

‘Those carpenters!’ said Bishen Singh. ‘Black apes were more efficient workmates, and as for the Bengali babu-tchick!’ The guttural click needed no interpretation, but Orde translated the rest, while Pagett gazed with interest at the wood-carver.

‘He seems to have a most illiberal prejudice against the Bengali,’ said the M.P.

‘Yes, it’s very sad that for ages outside Bengal there should he so bitter a prejudice. Pride of race, which also means race-hatred, is the plague and curse of India and it spreads far,’ pointed with his riding-whip to the large map of India on the veranda wall.

‘See! I begin with the North,’ said he. ‘There’s the Afghan, and, as a highlander, he despises all the dwellers in Hindoostan — with the exception of the Sikh, whom he hates as cordially as the Sikh hates him. The Hindu loathes Sikh and Afghan, and the Rajput — that’s a little lower down across this yellow blot of desert — has a strong objection, to put it mildly, to the Maratha who, by the way, poisonously hates the Afghan. Let’s go North a minute. The Sindhi hates everybody I’ve mentioned. Very good, we’ll take less warlike races. The cultivator of Northern India domineers over the man in the next province, and the Behari of the Northwest ridicules the Bengali. They are all at one on that point. I’m giving you merely the roughest possible outlines of the facts, of course.’

Bishen Singh, his clean cut nostrils still quivering, watched the large sweep of the whip as it traveled from the frontier, through Sindh, the Punjab and Rajputana, till it rested by the valley of the Jumna

‘Hate — eternal and inextinguishable hate,’ concluded Orde, flicking the lash of the whip across the large map from East to West as he sat down. ‘Remember Canning’s advice to Lord Granville, “Never write or speak of Indian things without looking at a map.”‘

Pagett opened his eyes, Orde resumed. ‘And the race-hatred is only a part of it. What’s really the matter with Bisben Singh is class-hatred, which, unfortunately, is even more intense and more widely spread. That’s one of the little drawbacks of caste, which some of your recent English writers find an impeccable system.’

The wood-carver was glad to be recalled to the business of his craft, and his eyes shone as he received instructions for a carved wooden doorway for Pagett, which he promised should be splendidly executed and despatched to England in six months. It is an irrelevant detail, but in spite of Orde’s reminders, fourteen months elapsed before the work was finished. Business over, Bishen Singh hung about, reluctant to take his leave, and at last joining his hands and approaching Orde with bated breath and whispering humbleness, said he had a petition to make. Orde’s face suddenly lost all trace of expression. ‘Speak on, Bishen Singh,’ said he, and the carver in a whining tone explained that his case against his brothers was fixed for hearing before a native judge and — here he dropped his voice still lower tid he was summarily stopped by Orde, who sternly pointed to the gate with an emphatic Begone!

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Bishen Singh, showing but little sign of discomposure, salaamed respectfully to the friends and departed.

Pagett looked inquiry; Orde with complete recovery of his usual urbanity, replied: ‘It’s nothing, only the old story, he wants his case to be tried by an English judge — they all do that — but when he began to hint that the other side were in improper relations with the native judge I had to shut him up. Gunga Ram, the man he wanted to make insinuations about, may not be very bright; but he’s as honest as day-light on the bench. But that’s just what one can’t get a native to believe.’

‘Do you really mean to say these people prefer to have their cases tried by English judges?’

‘Why, certainly.’

Pagett drew a long breath. ‘I didn’t know that before.’ At this point a phaeton entered the compound, and Orde rose with ‘Confound it, there’s old Rasul Ali Khan come to pay one of his tiresome duty calls. I’m afraid we shall never get through our little Congress discussion.’

Pagett was an aimost silent spectator of the grave formalities of a visit paid by a punctilious old Mahommedan gentleman to an Indian official; and was much impressed by the distinction of manner and fine appearance of the Mohammedan landholder. When the exchange of polite banalities came to a pause, he expressed a wish to learn the courtly visitor’s opinion of the National Congress.

Orde reluctantly interpreted, and with a smile which even Mohammedan politeness could not save from bitter scorn, Rasul Ah Khan intimated that he knew nothing about it and cared still less. It was a kind of talk encouraged by the Government for some mysterious purpose of its own, and for his own part he wondered and held his peace.

Pagett was far from satisfied with this, and wished to have the old gentleman’s opinion on the propriety of managing all Indian affairs on the basis of an elective system.

Orde did his best to explain, but it was plain the visitor was bored and bewildered. Frankly, he didn’t think much of committees; they had a Municipal Committee at Lahore and had elected a menial servant, an orderly, as a member. He had been informed of this on good authority, and after that, committees had ceased to interest him. But all was according to the rule of Government, and, please God, it was all for the best.

‘What an old fossil it is!’ cried Pagett, as Orde returned from seeing his guest to the door; ‘just like some old blue-blooded hidalgo of Spain. What does he really think of the Congress after all, and of the elective system?’

‘Hates it all like poison. When you are sure of a majority, election is a fine system; but you can scarcely expect the Mahommedans, the most masterful and powerful minority in the country, to contemplate their own extinction with joy. The worst of it is that he and his co-religionists, who are many, and the landed proprietors, also, of Hindu race, are frightened and put out by this election business and by the importance we have bestowed on lawyers, pleaders, writers, and the like, who have, up to now, been in abject submission to them. They say little, but after all they are the most important fagots in the great bundle of communities, and all the glib bunkum in the world would not pay for their estrangement. They have controlled the land.’

‘But I am assured that experience of local self-government in your municipalities has been most satisfactory, and when once the principle is accepted in your centres, don’t you know, it is bound to spread, and these important — ah’m people of yours would learn it like the rest. I see no difficulty at all,’ and the smooth lips closed with the complacent snap habitual to Pagett, M.P., the ‘man of cheerful yesterdays and confident tomorrows.’

Orde looked at him with a dreary smile.

‘The privilege of election has been most reluctantly withdrawn from scores of municipalities, others have had to be summarily suppressed, and, outside the Presidency towns, the actual work done has been badly performed. This is of less moment, perhaps—it only sends up the local death-rates — than the fact that the public interest in municipal elections, never very strong, has waned, and is waning, in spite of careful nursing on the part of Government servants.’

‘Can you explain this lack of interest?’ said Pagett, putting aside the rest of Orde’s remarks.

‘You may find a ward of the key in the fact that only one in every thousand af our population can spell. Then they are infinitely more interested in religion and caste questions than in any sort of politics. When the business of mere existence is over, their minds are occupied by a series of interests, pleasures, rituals, superstitions, and the like, based on centuries of tradition and usage. You, perhaps, find it hard to conceive of people absolutely devoid of curiosity, to whom the book, the daily paper, and the printed speech are unknown, and you would describe their life as blank. That’s a profound mistake. You are in another land, another century, down on the bed-rock of society, where the family merely, and not the community, is all-important. The average Oriental cannot be brought to look beyond his clan. His life, too, is more complete and self-sufficing, and less sordid and low-thoughted than you might imagine. It is bovine and slow in some respects, but it is never empty. You and I are inclined to put the cart before the horse, and to forget that it is the man that is elemental, not the book.

‘The corn and the cattle are all my care, And the rest is the will of God.’

‘Why should such folk look up from their immemorially appointed round of duty and interests to meddle with the unknown and fuss with voting-papers. How would you, atop of all your interests care to conduct even one-tenth of your life according to the manners and customs of the Papuans, let’s say? That’s what it comes to.’

‘But if they won’t take the trouble to vote, why do you anticipate that Mohammedans, proprietors, and the rest would be crushed by majorities of them?’

Again Pagett disregarded the closing sentence.

‘Because, though the landholders would not move a finger on any purely political question, they could be raised in dangerous excitement by religious hatreds. Already the first note of this has been sounded by the people who are trying to get up an agitation on the cow-killing question, and every year there is trouble over the Mohammedan Muharrum processions.

‘But who looks after the popular rights, being thus unrepresented?’

‘The Government of Her Majesty the Queen, Empress of India, in which, if the Congress promoters are to be believed, the people have an implicit trust; for the Congress circular, specially prepared for rustic comprehension, says the movement is ‘for the remission of tax, the advancement of Hindustan, and the strengthening of the British Govemment.’ This paper is headed in large letters –

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‘MAY THE PROSPERITY OF THE EMPIRE OF INDIA ENDURE.’

‘Really!’ said Pagett, ‘that shows some cleverness. But there are things better worth imitation in our English methods of—er—political statement than this sort of amiable fraud.’

‘Anyhow,’ resumed Orde, ‘you perceive that not a word is said about elections and the elective principle, and the reticence of the Congress promoters here shows they are wise in their generation.’

‘But the elective principle must triumph in the end, and the little difficulties you seem to anticipate would give way on the introduction of a well-balanced scheme, capable of indefinite extension.’

‘But is it possible to devise a scheme which, always assuming that the people took any interest in it, without enormous expense, ruinous dislocation of the administration and danger to the public peace, can satisfy the aspirations of Mr. Hume and his following, and yet safeguard the interests of the Mahommedans, the landed and wealthy classes, the Conservative Hindus, the Eurasians, Parsees, Sikhs, Rajputs, native Christians, domiciled Europeans and others, who are each important and powerful in their way?’

Pagett’s attention, however, was diverted to the gate, where a group of cultivators stood in apparent hesitation.

‘Here are the twelve Apostles, by Jove — come straight out of Raffaele’s cartoons,’ said the M.P., with the fresh appreciation of a newcomer.

Orde, loth to be interrupted, turned impatiently toward the villagers, and their leader, handing his long staff to one of his companions, advanced to the house.

‘It is old Jelbo, the Lumherdar, or head-man of Pind Sharkot, and a very intelligent man for a villager.’

The Jat farmer had removed his shoes and stood smiling on the edge of the veranda. His strongly marked features glowed with russet bronze, and his bright eyes gleamed under deeply set brows, contracted by lifelong exposure to sunshine. His beard and moustache streaked with grey swept from bold cliffs of brow and cheek in the large sweeps one sees drawn by Michael Angelo, and strands of long black hair mingled with the irregularly piled wreaths and folds of his turban. The drapery of stout blue cotton cloth thrown over his broad shoulders and girt round his narrow loins, hung from his tall form in broadly sculptured folds, and he would have made a superb model for an artist in search of a patriarch.

Orde greeted him cordially, and after a polite pause the countryman started off with a long story told with impressive earnestness. Orde listened and smiled, interrupting the speaker at times to argue and reason with him in a tone which Pagett could hear was kindly, and finally checking the flux of words was about to dismiss him, when Pagett suggested that he should be asked about the National Congress.

But Jelbo had never heard of it. He was a poor man and such things, by the favour of his honour, did not concern him.

‘What’s the matter with your big friend that he was so terribly in earnest?’ asked Pagett, when he had left.

‘Nothing much. He wants the blood of the people in the next village, who have had smallpox and cattle plague pretty badly, and by the help of a wizard, a currier, and several pigs have passed it on to his own village. ‘Wants to know if they can’t be run in for this awful crime. It seems they made a dreadful charivari at the village boundary, threw a quantity of spell-bearing objects over the border, a buffalo’s skull and other things; then branded a chamur — what you would call a currier — on his hinder parts and drove him and a number of pigs over into Jelbo’s village. Jelbo says he can bring evidence to prove that the wizard directing these proceedings, who is a Sansi, has been guilty of theft, arson, cattle-killing, perjury and murder, but would prefer to have him punished for bewitching them and inflicting small-pox.’

‘And how on earth did you answer such a lunatic?’

‘Lunatic! the old fellow is as sane as you or I; and he has some ground of complaint against those Sansis. I asked if he would like a native superintendent of police with some men to make inquiries, but he objected on the grounds the police were rather worse than smallpox and criminal tribes put together.’

‘Criminal tribes—er—I don’t quite understand,’ said Paget.

‘We have in India many tribes of people who in the slack anti-British days became robbers, in various kind. and prey on the people. They are being restrained and reclaimed little by little, and in time will become useful; citizens, but they still cherish hereditary traditions of crime, and are a difficult lot to deal with. By the way, what about the political rights of these folk under your schemes? The country people call them vermin, but I suppose they would be electors with the rest.’

‘Nonsense – special provision would be made for them in a well-considered electoral scheme, and they would doubtless be treated with fitting severity,’ said Pagett, with a magisterial air.

‘Severity, yes — but whether it would be fitting is doubtful. Even those poor devils have rights, and, after all, they only practice what they have been taught.’

‘But criminals, Orde!’

‘Yes, criminals with codes and rituals of crime, gods and godlings of crime, and a hundred songs and sayings in praise of it. Puzzling, isn’t it?’

‘It’s simply dreadful. They ought to be put down at once. Are there many of them?’

‘Not more than about sixty thousand in this province, for many of the tribes broadly described as criminal are really vagabond and criminal only on occasion, while others are being settled and reclaimed. They are of great antiquity, a legacy from the past, the golden, glorious Aryan past of Max Muller, Birdwood and the rest of your spindrift philosophers.’

An orderly brought a card to Orde who took it with a movement of irritation at the interruption, and banded it to Pagett; a large card with a ruled border in red ink, and in the centre in schoolboy copper plate, Mr. Dina Nath. ‘Give salaam,’ said the civilian, and there entered in haste a slender youth, clad in a closely fitting coat of grey homespun, tight trousers, patent-leather shoes, and a small black velvet cap. His thin cheek twitched, and his eyes wandered restlessly, for the young man was evidently nervous and uncomfortable, though striving to assume a free and easy air.

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‘Your honour may perhaps remember me,’ he said in Englisb, and Orde scanned him keenly.

‘I know your face somehow. You belonged to the Shershah district I think, when I was in charge there?’

‘Yes, Sir, my father is writer at Shershah, and your honour gave me a prize when I was first in the Middle School examination five years ago. Since then I have prosecuted my studies, and I am now second year’s student in the Mission College.’

‘Of course: you are Kedar Nath’s son — the boy who said he liked geography better than play or sugar cakes, and I didn’t believe you. How is your father getting on?’

‘He is well, and he sends his salaam, but his circumstances are depressed, and he also is down on his luck.’

‘You learn English idiom, at the Mission College, it seems.’

‘Yes, sir, they are the best idioms, and my father ordered me to ask your honour to say a word for him to the present incumbent of your honour’s shoes, the latchet of which he is not worthy to open, and who knows not Joseph; for things are different at Shershah now, and my father wants promotion.’

‘Your father is a good man, and I will do what I can for him.’

At this point a telegram was handed to Orde, who, after glancing at it, said he must leave his young friend whom he introduced to Pagett, ‘a member of the English House of Commons who wishes to learn about India.’

Orde bad scarcely retired with his telegram when Pagett began:

‘Perhaps you can tell me something of the National Congress movement?’

‘Sir, it is the greatest movement of modern times, and one in which all educated men like us must join. All our students are for the Congress.’

‘Excepting, I suppose, Mahommedans, and the Christians?’ said Pagett, quick to use his recent instruction.

‘These are some mere exceptions to the universal rule.’

‘But the people outside the College, the working classes, the agriculturists; your father and mother, for instance.’

‘My mother,’ said the young man, with a visible effort to bring himself to pronounce the word, ‘has no ideas, and my father is not agriculturist, nor working class; he is of the Kayeth caste; but he had not the advantage of a collegiate education, and he does not know much of the Congress. It is a movement for the educated young-man’— connecting adjective and noun in a sort of vocal hyphen.

‘Ah, yes,’ said Pagett, feeling he was a little off the rails, ‘and what are the benefits you expect to gain by it?’

‘Oh, sir, everything. England owes its greatness to Parliamentary institutions, and we should at once gain the same high position in scale of nations. Sir, we wish to have the sciences, the arts, the manufactures, the industrial factories, with steam engines, and other motive powers and public meetings, and debates. Already we have a debating club in connection with the college, and elect a Mr. Speaker. Sir, the progress must come. You also are a Member of Parliament and worship the great Lord Ripon,’ said the youth, breathlessly, and his black eyes flashed as he finished his commaless sentences.

‘Well,’ said Pagett, drily, ‘it has not yet occurred to me to worship his Lordship, although I believe he is a very worthy man, and I am not sure that England owes quite all the things you name to the House of Commons. You see, my young friend, the growth of a nation like ours is slow, subject to many influences, and if you have read your history aright’ — ‘Sir. I know it all — all! Norman Conquest, Magna Charta, Runnymede, Reformation, Tudors, Stuarts, Mr. Milton and Mr. Burke, and I have read something of Mr. Herbert Spencer and Gibbon’s “Decline and Fall”, Reynolds’ “Mysteries of the Court”,’ and Pagett felt like one who had pulled the string of a shower-bath unawares, and hastened to stop the torrent with a question as to what particular grievances of the people of India the attention of an elected assembly should be first directed. But young Mr. Dina Nath was slow to particularize. There were many, very many demanding consideration. Mr. Pagett would like to hear of one or two typical examples. The Repeal of the Arms Act was at last named, and the student learned for the first time that a licence was necessary before an Englishman could carry a gun in England. Then natives of India ought to be allowed to become Volunteer Riflemen if they chose, and the absolute equality of the Oriental with his European fellow-subject in civil status should be proclaimed on principle, and the Indian Army should be considerably reduced. The student was not, however, prepared with answers to Mr. Pagett’s mildest questions on these points, and he returned to vague generalities, leaving the M.P. so much impressed with the crudity of his views that he was glad on Orde’s return to say good-bye to his ‘very interesting’ young friend.

‘What do you think of young India?’ asked Orde.

‘Curious, very curious — and callow.’

‘And yet,’ the civilian replied, ‘one can scarcely help sympathizing with him for his mere youth’s sake. The young orators of the Oxford Union arrived at the same conclusions and showed doubtless just the same enthusiasm. If there were any political analogy between India and England, if the thousand races of this Empire were one, if there were any chance even of their learning to speak one language, if, in short, India were a Utopia of the debating-room, and not a real land, this kind of talk might be worth listening to, but it is all based on false analogy and ignorance of the facts.’

‘But he is a native and knows the facts.’

‘He is a sort of English schoolboy, but married three years, and the father of two weaklings, and knows less than most English schoolboys. You saw all he is and knows, and such ideas as he has acquired are directly hostile to the most cherished convictions of the vast majority of the people.’

‘But what does he mean by saying he is a student of a mission college? Is he a Christian?’

‘He meant just what he said, and he is not a Christian, nor ever will he be. Good people in America, Scotland and England, most of whom would never dream of collegiate education for their own sons, are pinching themselves to bestow it in pure waste on Indian youths. Their scheme is an oblique, subterranean attack on heathenism; the theory being that with the jam of secular education, leading to a University degree, the pill of moral or religious instruction may he coaxed down the heathen gullet.’

‘But does it succeed; do they make converts?’

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‘They make no converts, for the subtle Oriental swallows the jam and rejects the pill; but the mere example of the sober, righteous, and godly lives of the principals and professors who are most excellent and devoted men, must have a certain moral value. Yet, as Lord Lansdowne pointed out the other day, the market is dangerously overstocked with graduates of our Universities who look for employment in the administration. An immense number are employed, but year by year the college mills grind out increasing lists of youths foredoomed to failure and disappointment, and meanwhile, trade, manufactures and the industrial arts are neglected, and in fact regarded with contempt by our new literary mandarins in posse.’

‘But our young friend said he wanted steam-engines and factories,’ said Pagett.

‘Yes, he would like to direct such concerns. He wants to begin at the top, for manual labor is held to be discreditable, and he would never defile his hands by the apprenticeship which the architects, engineers, and manufacturers of England cheerfully undergo; and he would be aghast to learn that the leading names of industrial enterprise in England belonged a generation or two since, or now belong, to men who wrought with their own hands. And, though he talks glibly of manufacturers, he refuses to see that the Indian manufacturer of the future will be the despised workman of the present. It was proposed, for example, a few weeks ago, that a certain municipality in this province should establish an elementary technical school for the sons of workmen. The stress of the opposition to the plan came from a pleader who owed all he had to a college education bestowed on him gratis by Government and missions. You would have fancied some fine old crusted Tory squire of the last generation was speaking. ‘These people,’ he said, ‘want no education, for they learn their trades from their fathers, and to teach a workman’s son the elements of mathematics and physical science would give him ideas above his business. They must be kept in their place, and it was idle to imagine that there was any science in wood or iron work.’ And he carried his point. But the Indian workman will rise in the social scale in spite of the new literary caste.’

‘In England we have scarcely begun to realize that there is an industrial class in this country, yet, I suppose, the example of men, like Edwards for instance, must tell,’ said Pagett, thoughtfully.

‘That you shouldn’t know much about it is natural enough, for there are but few sources of information. India in this, as in other respects, is like a badly kept ledger—not written up to date. And men like Edwards are, in reality, missionaries, who by precept and example are teaching more lessons than they know. Only a few, however, of their crowds of subordinates seem to care to try to emulate them, and aim at individual advancement; the rest drop into the ancient Indian caste groove.’

‘How do you mean?’ asked he, ‘Well, it is found that the new railway and factory workmen, the fitter, the smith, the engine-driver, and the rest are already forming separate hereditary castes. You may notice this down at Jamalpur in Bengal, one of the oldest railway centres; and at other places, and in other industries, they are following the same inexorable Indian law.’

‘Which means?’ queried Pagett.

‘It means that the rooted habit of the people is to gather in small self-contained, self-sufficing family groups with no thought or care for any interests but their own — a habit which is scarcely compatible with the right acceptation of the elective principle.’

‘Yet you must admit, Orde, that though our young friend was not able to expound the faith that is in him, your Indian army is too big.’

‘Not nearly big enough for its main purpose. And, as a side issue, there are certain powerful minorities of fighting folk whose interests an Asiatic Government is bound to consider. Arms is as much a means of livelihood as civil employ under Government and law. And it would be a heavy strain on British bayonets to hold down Sikhs, Jats, Bilochis, Rohillas, Rajputs, Bhils, Dogras, Pathans, and Gurkhas to abide by the decisions of a numerical majority opposed to their interests. Leave the ‘numerical majority’ to itself without the British bayonets — a flock of sheep might as reasonably hope to manage a troop of collies.’

‘This complaint about excessive growth of the army is akin to another contention of the Congress party. They protest against the malversation of the whole of the moneys raised by additional taxes as a Famine Insurance Fund to other purposes. You must be aware that this special Famine Fund has all been spent on frontier roads and defences and strategic railway schemes as a protection against Russia.’

‘But there was never a special famine fund raised by special taxation and put by as in a box. No sane administrator would dream of such a thing. In a time of prosperity a finance minister, rejoicing in a margin, proposed to annually apply a million and a half to the construction of railways and canals for the protection of districts liable to scarcity, and to the reduction of the annual loans for public works. But times were not always prosperous, and the finance minister had to choose whether be would bang up the insurance scheme for a year or impose fresh taxation. When a farmer hasn’t got the little surplus he hoped to have for buying a new wagon and draining a low-lying field corner, you don’t accuse him of malversation, if he spends what he has on the necessary work of the rest of his farm.’

A clatter of hoofs was heard, and Orde looked up with vexation, but his brow cleared as a horseman halted under the porch.

‘Hello, Orde! just looked in to ask if you are coming to polo on Tuesday: we want you badly to help to crumple up the Krab Bokhar team.’

Orde explained that he had to go out into the District, and while the visitor complained that though good men wouldn’t play, duffers were always keen, and that his side would probably be beaten, Pagett rose to look at his mount, a red, lathered Biloch mare, with a curious lyre-like incurving of the ears. ‘Quite a little thoroughbred in all other respects,’ said the M.P., and Orde presented Mr. Reginald Burke, Manager of the Siad and Sialkote Bank to his friend.

‘Yes, she’s as good as they make ’em, and she’s all the female I possess and spoiled in consequence, aren’t you, old girl?’ said Burke, patting the mare’s glossy neck as she backed and plunged.

‘Mr. Pagett,’ said Orde, ‘has been asking me about the Congress. What is your opinion?’ Burke turned to the M.P. with a frank smile.

‘Well, if it’s all the same to you, sir, I should say, Damn the Congress, but then I’m no politician, but only a business man.’

‘You find it a tiresome subject?’

‘Yes, it’s all that, and worse than that, for this kind of agitation is anything but wholesome for the country.’

‘How do you mean?’

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‘It would be a long job to explain, and Sara here won’t stand, but you know how sensitive capital is, and how timid investors are. All this sort of rot is likely to frighten them, and we can’t afford to frighten them. The passengers aboard an Ocean steamer don’t feel reassured when the ship’s way is stopped, and they hear the workmen’s hammers tinkering at the engines down below. The old Ark’s going on all right as she is, and only wants quiet and room to move. Them’s my sentiments, and those of some other people who have to do with money and business.’

‘Then you are a thick-and-thin supporter of the Government as it is.’

‘Why, no! The Indian Government is much too timid with its money—like an old maiden aunt of mine — always in a funk about her investments. They don’t spend half enough on railways for instance, and they are slow in a general way, and ought to be made to sit up in all that concerns the encouragement of private enterprise, and coaxing out into use the millions of capital that lie dormant in the country.’

The mare was dancing with impatience, and Burke was evidently anxious to be off, so the men wished him good-bye.

‘Who is your genial friend who condemns both Congress and Government in a breath?’ asked Pagett, with an amused smile.

‘Just now he is Reggie Burke, keener on polo than on anything else, but if you go to the Sind and Sialkote Bank to-morrow you would find Mr. Reginald Burke a very capable man of business, known and liked by an immense constituency North and South of this.’

‘Do you think he is right about the Government’s want of enterpnse?’

‘I should hesitate to say. Better consult the merchants and chambers of commerce in Cawnpore, Madras, Bombay, and Calcutta. But though these bodies would like, as Reggie puts it, to make Government sit up, it is an elementary consideration in governing a country like India, which must be administered for the benefit of the people at large, that the counsels of those who resort to it for the sake of making money should be judiciously weighed and not allowed to overpower the rest. They are welcome guests here, as a matter of course, but it has been found best to restrain their influence. Thus the rights of plantation laborers, factory operatives, and the like, have been protected, and the capitalist, eager to get on, has not always regarded Government action with favour. It is quite conceivable that under an elective system the commercial communities of the great towns might find means to secure majorities on labor questions and on financial matters.’

‘They would act at least with intelligence and consideration.’

‘Intelligence, yes; but as to consideration, who at the present moment most bitterly resents the tender solicitude of Lancashire for the welfare and protection of the Indian factory operative? English and native capitalists running cotton mills and factories.’

‘But is the solicitude of Lancashire in this matter entirely disinterested?’

‘It is no business of mine to say. I merely indicate an example of how a powerful commercial interest might hamper a Government intent in the first place on the larger interests of humanity.’

Orde broke off to listen a moment. ‘There’s Dr. Lathrop talking to my wife in the drawing-room,’ said he.

‘Surely not; that’s a lady’s voice, and if my ears don’t deceive me, an American.’

‘Exactly, Dr. Eva McCreery Lathrop, chief of the new Women’s Hospital here, and a very good fellow forbye. Good-morning, Doctor,’ he said, as a graceful figure came out on the veranda, ‘you seem to be in trouble. I hope Mrs. Orde was able to help you.’

‘Your wife is real kind and good, I always come to her when I’m in a fix but I fear it’s more than comforting I want.’

‘You work too hard and wear yourself out,’ said Orde, kindly. ‘Let me introduce my friend, Mr. Pagett, just fresh from home, and anxious to learn his India. You could tell him something of that more important half of which a mere man knows so little.’

‘Perhaps I could if I’d any heart to do it, but I’m in trouble, I’ve lost a case, a case that was doing well, through nothing in the world but inattention on the part of a nurse I had begun to trust. And when I spoke only a small piece of my mind she collapsed in a whining heap on the floor. It is hopeless.’

The men were silent, for the blue eyes of the lady doctor were dim. Recovering herself she looked up with a smile, half sad, half humorous, ‘And I am in a whining heap, too; but what phase of Indian life are you particularly interested in, sir?’

‘Mr. Pagett intends to study the political aspect of things and the possibility of bestowing electoral institutions on the people.’

‘Wouldn’t it be as much to the purpose to bestow point-lace collars on them? They need many things more urgently than votes. Why it’s like giving a bread-pill for a broken leg.’

‘Er—I don’t quite follow,’ said Pagett, uneasily.

‘Well, what’s the matter with this country is not in the least political, but an all round entanglement of physical, social, and moral evils and corruptions, all more or less due to the unnatural treatment of women. You can’t gather figs from thistles, and so long as the system of infant marriage, the prohibition of the remarriage of widows, the lifelong imprisonment of wives and mothers in a worse than penal confinement, and the withholding from them of any kind of education or treatment as rational beings continues, the country can’t advance a step. Half of it is morally dead, and worse than dead, and that’s just the half from which we have a right to look for the best impulses. It’s right here where the trouble is, and not in any political considerations whatsoever.’

‘But do they marry so early?’ said Pagett, vaguely.

‘The average age is seven, but thousands are married still earlier. One result is that girls of twelve and thirteen have to bear the burden of wifehood and motherhood, and, as might be expected, the rate of mortality both for mothers and children is terrible. Pauperism, domestic unhappiness, and a low state of health are only a few of the consequences of this. Then, when, as frequently happens, the boy-husband dies prematurely, his widow is condemned to worse than death. She may not re-marry, must live a secluded and despised life, a life so unnatural that she sometimes prefers suicide; more often she goes astray. You don’t know in England what such words as ‘infant-marriage, baby-wife, girl-mother, and virgin-widow’ mean; but they mean unspeakable horrors here.’

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‘Well, but the advanced political party here will surely make it their business to advocate social reforms as well as political ones,’ said Pagett.

‘Very surely they will do no such thing,’ said the lady doctor, emphatically. ‘I wish I could make you understand. Why, even of the funds devoted to the Marchioness of Dufferin’s organization for medical aid to the women of India, it was said in print and in speech, that they would be better spent on more college scholarships for men. And in all the advanced parties’ talk — God forgive them — and in all their programmes, they carefully avoid all such subjects. They will talk about the protection of the cow, for that’s an ancient superstition — they can all understand that; but the protection of the women is a new and dangerous idea.’ She turned to Pagett impulsively:

‘You are a member of the English Parliament. Can you do nothing? The foundations of their life are rotten—utterly and bestially rotten. I could tell your wife things that I couldn’t tell you. I know the life—the inner life that belongs to the native, and I know nothing else; and believe me you might as well try to grow golden-rod in a mushroom-pit as to make anything of a people that are born and reared as these—these things’re. The men talk of their rights and privileges. I have seen the women that bear these very men, and again — may God forgive the men!’

Pagett’s eyes opened with a large wonder. Dr. Lathrop rose tempestuously.

‘I must be off to lecture,’ said she, ‘and I’m sorry that I can’t show you my hospitals; but you had better believe, sir, that it’s more necessary for India than all the elections in creation.’

‘That’s a woman with a mission, and no mistake,’ said Pagett, after a pause.

‘Yes; she believes in her work, and so do I,’ said Orde. ‘I’ve a notion that in the end it will be found that the most helpful work done for India in this generation was wrought by Lady Dufferin in drawing attention — what work that was, by the way, even with her husband’s great name to back it — to the needs of women here. In effect, native habits and beliefs are an organized conspiracy against the laws of health and happy life—but there is some dawning of hope now.’

‘How d’you account for the general indifferencc, then?’

‘I suppose it’s due in part to their fatalism and their utter indifference to all human suffering. How much do you imagine the great province of the Punjab with over twenty million people and half a score rich towns has contributed to the maintenance of civil dispensaries last year? About seven thousand rupees.’

‘That’s seven hundred pounds,’ said Pagett, quickly.

‘I wish it was,’ replied Orde; ‘but anyway, it’s an absurdly inadequate sum, and shows one of the blank sides of Oriental character.’

Pagett was silent for a long time. The question of direct and personal pain did not lie within his researches. He preferred to discuss the weightier matters of the law, and contented himself with murmuring: ‘They’ll do better later on.’ Then, with a rush, returning to his first thought:

‘But, my dear Orde, if it’s merely a class movement of a local and temporary character, how d’you account for Bradlaugh, who is at least a man of sense taking it up?’

‘I know nothing of the champion of the New Brahmins but what I see in the papers. I suppose there is something tempting in being hailed by a large assemblage as the representative of the aspirations of two hundred and fifty millions of people. Such a man looks ‘through all the roaring and the wreaths,’ and does not reflect that it is a false perspective, which, as a matter of fact, hides the real complex and manifold India from his gaze. He can scarcely be expected to distinguish between the ambitions of a new oligarchy and the real wants of the people of whom he knows nothing. But it’s strange that a professed Radical should come to be the chosen advocate of a movement which has for its aim the revival of an ancient tyranny. Shows how even Radicalism can fall into academic grooves and miss the essential truths of its own creed. Believe me, Pagett, to deal with India you want first-hand knowledge and experience. I wish he would come and live here for a couple of years or so.’

‘Is not this rather an ad hominem style of argument?’

‘Can’t help it in a case like this. Indeed, I am not sure you ought not to go further and weigh the whole character and quality and upbringing of the man. You must admit that the monumental complacency with which he trotted out his ingenious little Constitution for India showed a strange want of imagination and the sense of humour.’

‘No, I don’t quite admit it,’ said Pagett.

‘Well, you know him and I don’t, but that’s how it strikes a stranger.’ He turned on his heel and paced the veranda thoughtfully. ‘And, after all, the burden of the actual, daily unromantic toil falls on the shoulders of the men out here, and not on his own. He enjoys all the privileges of recommendation without responsibility, and we – well, perhaps, when you’ve seen a little more of India you’ll understand. To begin with, our death rate’s five times higher than yours — I speak now for the brutal bureaucrat — and we work on the refuse of worked-out cities and exhausted civilizations, among the bones of the dead.’

Pagett laughed. ‘That’s an epigrammatic way of putting it, Orde.’

‘Is it? Let’s see,’ said the Deputy Commissioner of Amara, striding into the sunshine toward a half-naked gardener potting roses. He took the man’s hoe, and went to a rain-scarped bank at the bottom of the garden.

‘Come here, Pagett,’ he said, and cut at the sun-baked soil. After three strokes there rolled from under the blade of the hoe the half of a clanking skeleton that settled at Pagett’s feet in an unseemly jumble of bones. The M.P. drew back.

‘Our houses are built on cemeteries,’ said Orde. ‘There are scores of thousands of graves within ten miles.’

Pagett was contemplating the skull with the awed fascination of a man who has but little to do with the dead. ‘India’s a very curious place,’ said he, after a pause.

‘Ah? You’ll know all about it in three months. Come in to lunch,’ said Orde.