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

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

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

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

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

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

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

To which Antonio answers:

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

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

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

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

There is no other cave for some two miles.

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

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

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

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

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

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

RUDYARD KIPLING.

AS there is only one man in charge of a steamer, so there is but one man in charge of a newspaper, and he is the Editor. My Chief taught me this on an Indian journal, and he further explained that an order was an order, to be obeyed at a run, not a walk, and that any notion or notions as to the fitness or unfitness of any particular kind of work for the young had better be held over till the last page was locked up to press. He was breaking me into harness, and I owe him a deep debt of gratitude, which I did not discharge at the time. The path of virtue was very steep, whereas the writing of verses allowed a certain play to the mind, and, unlike the filling-in of reading-matter, could be done as the spirit served. Now a sub-editor is not hired to write verses. He is paid to sub-edit. At the time, this discovery shocked me greatly; but, some years later, when, for a few weeks I came to be an editor- in-charge, Providence dealt me for my sub-ordinate one saturated with Elia. He wrote very pretty, Lamb-like essays, but he wrote them when he should have been sub-editing. Then I saw a little what my Chief must have suffered on my account. There is a moral here for the ambitious and aspiring who are oppressed by their superiors.

This is a digression, as all my verses were digressions from office work. They came without invitation, unmanneredly, in the nature of things; but they had to come, and the writing out of them kept me healthy and amused. To the best of my remembrance, no one then discovered their grievous cynicism, or their pessimistic tendency, and I was far too busy, and too happy, to take thought about these things.

So they arrived merrily, being born out of the life about me, and they were very bad indeed; but the joy of doing them was pay a thousand times their worth. Some, of course, came and ran away again, and the dear sorrow of going in search of these (out of office hours) and catching them, was almost better than writing them clear. Bad as they were, I burned twice as many as were published, and of the survivors at least two-thirds were cut down at the last moment. Nothing can be wholly beautiful that is not useful, and therefore my verses were made to ease off the perpetual strife between the manager extending his advertisements, and my Chief fighting for his reading-matter. They were born to be sacrificed. Rukn-Din, the foreman of our side, approved of them immensely, for he was a Muslim of culture. He would say: ‘Your potery very good, sir; just coming proper length today. You giving more soon? One-third column just proper. Always can take on third page.’

Mahmoud, who set them up, had an unpleasant way of referring to a new lyric as ‘Ek aur chiz ‘— ‘one more thing ‘—which I never liked. The job side, too, were unsympathetic, because I used to raid into their type for private proofs with Old English and Gothic headlines. Even a Hindu does not like to find the serifs of his f’s cut away to make long s’s.

And in this manner, week by week, my verses came to be printed in the paper. I was in very good company, for there is always an undercurrent of song, a little bitter for the most part, running through the Indian papers. The bulk of it is much better than mine, being more graceful, and is done by those less than Sir Alfred Lyall — to whom I would apologise for mentioning his name in this gallery — ‘Pekin’, ‘Latakia’, ‘Cigarette,’ ‘ O,’ ‘ T.W.,’ ‘ Foresight,’ and others, whose names came up with the stars out of the Indian Ocean going eastward.

Sometimes a man in Bangalore would be moved to song, and a man on the Bombay side would answer him, and a man in Bengal would echo back, till at last we would all be crowing together, like cocks before daybreak, when it is too dark to see your fellow. And, occasionally, some unhappy Chaaszee, away in the China Ports, would lift up his voice among the tea-chests, and the queer-smelling yellow papers of the Far East brought us his sorrows. The newspaper files showed that, forty years ago, the men sang of just the same subjects as we did — of heat, loneliness, love, lack of promotion, poverty, sport, and war. Further back still, at the end of the eighteenth century, Hickey’s Bengal Gazette, a very wicked little sheet in Calcutta, published the songs of the young factors, ensigns, and writers to the East India Company. They, too, wrote of the same things, but in those days men were strong enough to buy a bullock’s heart for dinner, cook it with their own hands because they could not afford a servant, and make a rhymed jest of all the squalor and poverty. Lives were not worth two monsoons’ purchase, and perhaps a knowledge of this a little coloured the rhymes when they sang:

‘In a very short time you’re released from all cares —
If the Padre’s asleep, Mr. Oldham reads prayers!’

The note of physical discomfort that runs through so much Anglo- Indian poetry had been struck then. You will find it most fully suggested in ‘ The Long, Long Indian Day’, a comparatively modern affair; but there is a set of verses called ‘Scanty Ninety-five’, dated about Warren Hastings’s time, which gives a lively idea of what our seniors in the service had to put up with. One of the most interesting poems I ever found was written at Meerut, three or four days before the Mutiny broke out there. The author complained that he could not get his clothes washed nicely that week, and was very facetious over his worries!

My verses had the good fortune to last a little longer than some others, which were more true to facts, and certainly better workmanship. Men in the Army and the Civil Service and the Railway wrote to me saying that the rhymes might be made into a book. Some of them had been sung to the banjoes round the camp-fires, and some had run as far down coast as Rangoon and Moulmein, and up to Mandalay. A real book was out of the question, but I knew that Rukn-Din and the office plant were at my disposal at a price, if I did not use the office time. Also, I had handled in the previous year a couple of small books, of which I was part owner, and had lost nothing. So there was built a sort of book, a lean oblong docket, wire-stitched, to imitate a D.O. Government envelope, printed on one side only, bound in brown paper, and secured with red tape. It was addressed to all Heads of Departments, and all Government Officials, and among a pile of papers would have deceived a clerk of twenty years’ service. Of these ‘books’ we made some hundreds, and as there was no necessity for advertising, my public being to my hand, I took reply – postcards, printed the news of the birth of the book on one side, the blank order-form on the other, and posted them up and down the Empire from Aden to Singapore and from Quetta to Colombo. There was no trade discount, no reckoning twelves as thirteens, no commission, and no credit of any kind whatever. The money came back in poor but honest rupees, and was transferred from the publisher, my left-hand pocket, direct to the author, my right-hand pocket. Every copy sold in a few weeks, and the ratio of expenses to profits, as I remember it, has since prevented my injuring my health by sympathising with publishers who talk of their risks and advertisements. The down-country papers complained of the form of the thing. The wire-binding cut the pages, and the red tape tore the covers. This was not intentional, but Heaven helps those who help themselves. Consequently, there arose a demand for a new edition, and this time I exchanged the pleasure of taking in money over the counter for that of seeing a real publisher’s imprint on the title-page. More verses were taken out and put in, and some of that edition travelled as far as Hong Kong on the map, and each edition grew a little fatter, and, at last, the book came to London with a gilt top and a stiff back, and was advertised in a publisher’s poetry department.

But I loved it best when it was a little brown baby, with a pink string round its stomach; a child’s child ignorant that it was afflicted with all the most modern ailments; and before people had learned beyond doubt how its author lay awake of nights in India, plotting and scheming to write something that should take with the English public.

A LOCOMOTIVE is, next to a marine engine, the most sensitive thing man ever made; and No. ·007, besides being sensitive, was new. The red paint was hardly dry on his spotless bumper-bar, his headlight shone like a fireman’s helmet, and his cab might have been a hardwood-finish parlour. They had run him into the round-house after his trial—he had said good-bye to his best friend in the shops, the overhead travelling-crane—the big world was just outside; and the other locos were taking stock of him. He looked at the semicircle of bold, unwinking headlights, heard the low purr and mutter of the steam mounting in the gauges—scornful hisses of contempt as a slack valve lifted a little—and would have given a month’s oil for leave to crawl through his own driving-wheels into the brick ash-pit beneath him. ·007 was an eight-wheeled ‘American’ loco, slightly different from others of his type, and as he stood he was worth ten thousand dollars on the Company’s books. But if you had bought him at his own valuation, after half an hour’s waiting in the darkish, echoing round-house, you would have saved exactly nine thousand nine hundred and ninety-nine dollars and ninety-eight cents. A heavy Mogul freight, with a short cowcatcher and a fire-box that came down within three inches of the rail, began the impolite game, speaking to a Pittsburgh Consolidation, who was visiting.

‘Where did this thing blow in from?’ he asked, with a dreamy puff of light steam.

‘It’s all I can do to keep track of our makes,’ was the answer, ‘without lookin’ after your back-numbers. ‘Guess it’s something Peter Cooper left over when he died.’

·007 quivered; his steam was getting up, but he held his tongue. Even a hand-car knows what sort of locomotive it was that Peter Cooper experimented upon in the far-away Thirties. It carried its coal and water in two apple-barrels, and was not much bigger than a bicycle.

Then up and spoke a small, newish switching-engine, with a little step in front of his bumper-timber, and his wheels so close together that he looked like a broncho getting ready to buck.

‘Something’s wrong with the road when a Pennsylvania gravel-pusher tells us anything about our stock, I think. That kid’s all right. Eustis designed him, and Eustis designed me. Ain’t that good enough?’

·007 could have carried the switching-loco round the yard in his tender, but he felt grateful for even this little word of consolation.

‘We don’t use hand-cars on the Pennsylvania,’ said the Consolidation. ‘That—er—peanut-stand’s old enough and ugly enough to speak for himself.’

‘He hasn’t bin spoken to yet. He’s bin spoken at. Hain’t ye any manners on the Pennsylvania?’ said the switching-loco.

‘You ought to be in the yard, Pony,’ said the Mogul, severely. ‘We’re all long-haulers here.’

‘That’s what you think,’ the little fellow replied. ‘You’ll know more ’fore the night’s out. I’ve bin down to Track 17, and the freight there—oh, Christmas!’

‘I’ve trouble enough in my own division,’ said a lean, light suburban loco with very shiny brake-shoes. My commuters wouldn’t rest till they got a parlour-car. They’ve hitched her back of all, and she hauls worse’n a snow-plough. I’ll snap her off some day sure, and then they’ll blame every one except their foolselves. They’ll be askin’ me to haul a vestibuled next!’

‘They made you in New Jersey, didn’t they?’ said Pony. ‘Thought so. Commuters and truck-waggons ain’t any sweet haulin’, but I tell you they’re a heap better’n cuttin’ out refrigerator-cars or oil-tanks. Why, I’ve hauled——’

‘Haul! You?’ said the Mogul contemptuously. ‘It’s all you can do to bunt a cold-storage car up the yard. Now, I—’ he paused a little to let the words sink in—‘I handle the Flying Freight—e-leven cars worth just anything you please to mention. On the stroke of eleven I pull out; and I’m timed for thirty-five an hour. Costly—perishable—fragile—immediate—that’s me! Suburban traffic’s only but one degree better than switching. Express freight’s what pays.’

‘Well, I ain’t given to blowing, as a rule,’ began the Pittsburgh Consolidation.

‘No? You was sent in here because you grunted on the grade,’ Pony interrupted.

‘Where I grunt, you’d lie down, Pony; but, as I was saying, I don’t blow much. Notwithstandin’, if you want to see freight that is freight moved lively, you should see me warbling through the Alleghanies with thirty-seven ore-cars behind me, and my brake-men fightin’ tramps so’s they can’t attend to my tooter. I have to do all the holdin’ back then, and, though I say it, I’ve never had a load get away from me yet. No, sir. Haulin’ ’s one thing, but judgment and discretion’s another. You want judgment in my business.’

‘Ah! But—but are you not paralysed by a sense of your overwhelming responsibilities?’ said a curious, husky voice from a corner.

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‘Who’s that?’ ·007 whispered to the Jersey commuter.

‘Compound—experiment—N.G. She’s bin switchin’ in the B. & A. yards for six months, when she wasn’t in the shops. She’s economical (I call it mean) in her coal, but she takes it out in repairs. Ahem! I presume you found Boston somewhat isolated, madam, after your New York season?’

‘I am never so well occupied as when I am alone.’ The Compound seemed to be talking from halfway up her smoke-stack.

‘Sure,’ said the irreverent Pony, under his breath. ‘They don’t hanker after her any in the yard.’

‘But, with my constitution and temperament—my work lies in Boston—I find your outrecuidance——’

‘Outer which?’ said the Mogul freight.

‘Simple cylinders are good enough for me.’

‘Perhaps I should have, said faroucherie,’ hissed the Compound.

‘I don’t hold with any make of papier-mâché wheel,’ the Mogul insisted.

The Compound sighed pityingly, and said no more.

‘Git ’em all shapes in this world, don’t ye?’ said Pony. ‘That’s Mass’chusetts all over. They half start, an’ then they stick on a dead-centre, an’ blame it all on other folk’s ways o’ treatin’ them. Talkin’ o’ Boston, Comanche told me, last night, he had a hot-box just beyond the Newtons, Friday. That was why, he says, the Accommodation was held up. Made out no end of a tale, Comanche did.’

‘If I’d heard that in the shops, with my boiler out for repairs, I’d know ’t was one o’ Comanche’s lies,’ the New Jersey commuter snapped. ‘Hot-box! Him! What happened was they’d put an extra car on, and he just lay down on the grade and squealed. They had to send 127 to help him through. Made it out a hot-box, did he? Time before that he said he was ditched! Looked me square in the headlight and told me that as cool as—as a water-tank in a cold wave. Hot-box! You ask 127 about Comanche’s hot-box. Why, Comanche he was side-tracked, and 127 (he was just about as mad as they make ’em on account o’ being called out at ten o’clock at night) took hold and whirled her into Boston in seventeen minutes. Hot-box! Hot fraud! That’s what Comanche is.’

Then ·007 put both drivers and his pilot into it, as the saying is, for he asked what sort of thing a hot-box might be?

‘Paint my bell sky blue!’ said Pony, the switcher. ‘Make me a surface-railroad loco with a hardwood skirtin’-board round my wheels! Break me up and cast me into five-cent sidewalk-fakirs’ mechanical toys! Here’s an eight-wheel coupled “American” don’t know what a hot-box is! Never heard of an emergency-stop either, did ye? Don’t know what ye carry jack-screws for? You’re too innocent to be left alone with your own tender. Oh, you—you flat-car!’

There was a roar of escaping steam before any one could answer, and ·007 nearly blistered his paint off with pure mortification.

‘A hot-box,’ began the Compound, picking and choosing the words as though they were coal, ‘a hot-box is the penalty exacted from inexperience by haste. Ahem!’

‘Hot-box!’ said the Jersey Suburban. ‘It’s the price you pay for going on the tear. It’s years since I’ve had one. It’s a disease that don’t attack short-haulers, as a rule.’

‘We never have hot-boxes on the Pennsylvania,’ said the Consolidation. ‘They get ’em in New York—same as nervous prostration.’

‘Ah, go home on a ferry-boat,’ said the Mogul. ‘You think because you use worse grades than our road ’ud allow, you’re a kind of Alleghany angel. Now, I’ll tell you what you . . . Here’s my folk. Well, I can’t stop. See you later, perhaps.’

He rolled forward majestically to the turntable, and swung like a man-of-war in a tideway, till he picked up his track. ‘But as for you, you pea-green swivellin’ coffee-pot [this to ·007], you go out and learn something before you associate with those who’ve made more mileage in a week than you’ll roll up in a year. Costly—perishable—fragile—immediate—that’s me! S’long.’

‘Split my tubes if that’s actin’ polite to a new member o’ the Brotherhood,’ said Pony. ‘There wasn’t any call to trample on ye like that. But manners was left out when Moguls was made. Keep up your fire, kid, an’ burn you own smoke. ’Guess we’ll all be wanted in a minute.’

Men were talking rather excitedly in the roundhouse. One man, in a dingy jersey, said that he hadn’t any locomotives to waste on the yard. Another man, with a piece of crumpled paper in his hand, said that the yard-master said that he was to say that if the other man said anything, he (the other man) was to shut his head. Then the other man waved his arms, and wanted to know if he was expected to keep locomotives in his hip-pocket. Then a man in a black Prince Albert, without a collar, came up dripping, for it was a hot August night, and said that what he said went; and between the three of them the locomotives began to go, too—first the Compound, then the Consolidation, then ·007.

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Now, deep down in his fire-box, ·007 had cherished a hope that as soon as his trial was done, he would be led forth with songs and shoutings, and attached to a green-and-chocolate vestibuled flyer, under charge of a bold and noble engineer, who would pat him on his back, and weep over him and call him his Arab steed. (The boys in the shops where he was built used to read wonderful stories of railroad life, and ·007 expected things to happen as he had heard.) But there did not seem to be many vestibuled flyers in the roaring, rumbling, electric-lighted yards, and his engineer only said:

‘Now, what sort of a fool-sort of an injector has Eustis loaded on to this rig this time?’ And he put the lever over with an angry snap, crying ‘Am I supposed to switch with this thing, hey?’

The collarless man mopped his head, and replied that, in the present state of the yard and freight and a few other things, the engineer would switch and keep on switching till the cows came home. ·007 pushed out gingerly, his heart in his headlight, so nervous that the clang of his own bell almost made him jump the track. Lanterns waved, or danced up and down, before and behind him; and on every side, six tracks deep, sliding backward and forward, with clashings of couplers and squeals of hand-brakes, were cars—more cars than ·007 had dreamed of. There were oil-cars, and hay-cars, and stock-cars full of lowing beasts, and ore-cars, and potato-cars with stovepipe-ends sticking out in the middle; cold-storage and refrigerator cars dripping ice-water on the tracks; ventilated fruit—and milk-cars; flat-cars with truck-waggons full of market-stuff; flat-cars loaded with reapers and binders, all red and green and gilt under the sizzling electric lights; flat cars piled high with strong-scented hides, pleasant hemlock-plank, or bundles of shingles; flat-cars creaking to the weight of thirty-ton castings, angle-irons, and rivet-boxes for some new bridge; and hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of box-cars loaded, locked and chalked. Men—hot and angry—crawled among and between and under the thousand wheels; men took flying jumps through his cab, when he halted for a moment; men sat on his pilot as he went forward, and on his tender as he returned; and regiments of men ran along the tops of the box-cars beside him, screwing down brakes, waving their arms, and crying curious things.

He was pushed forward a foot at a time, whirled backwards, his rear drivers clinking and clanking, a quarter of a mile; jerked into a switch (yard-switches are very stubby and unaccommodating), bunted into a Red D, or Merchants’ Transport car, and, with no hint or knowledge of the weight behind him, started up anew. When his load was fairly on the move, three or four cars would be cut off, and ·007 would bound forward, only to be held hiccupping on the brake. Then he would wait a few minutes, watching the whirled lanterns, deafened with the clang of the bells, giddy with the vision of the sliding cars, his brake pump panting forty to the minute, his front coupler lying sideways on his cow-catcher, like a tired dog’s tongue in his mouth, and the whole of him covered with half-burnt coal-dust.

‘’Tisn’t so easy switching with a straight-backed tender,’ said his little friend of the round-house, bustling by at a trot. ‘But you’re cumin’ on pretty fair. Ever seen a flyin’ switch? No? Then watch me.’

Pony was in charge of a dozen heavy flat-cars. Suddenly he shot away from them with a sharp ‘Whutt!’ A switch opened in the shadows ahead; he turned up it like a rabbit, it snapped behind him, and the long line of twelve-foot-high lumber jolted on into the arms of a full-sized road-loco, who acknowledged receipt with a dry howl.

‘My man’s reckoned the smartest in the yard at that trick,’ he said, returning. ‘Gives me cold shivers when another fool tries it, though. That’s where my short wheel-base comes in. Like as not you’d have your tender scraped off if you tried it.’

·007 had no ambitions that way, and said so.

‘No? Of course this ain’t your regular business, but say, don’t you think it’s interestin’? Have you seen the yard-master? Well, he’s the greatest man on earth, an’ don’t you forget it. When are we through? Why, kid, it’s always like this, day an’ night—Sundays and week-days. See that thirty-car freight slidin’ in four, no, five tracks off? She’s all mixed freight, sent here to be sorted out into straight trains. That’s why we’re cuttin’ out the cars one by one.’ He gave a vigorous push to a west-bound car as he spoke, and started back with a little snort of surprise, for the car was an old friend—an M.T.K. box-car.

‘Jack my drivers, but it’s Homeless Kate. Why, Kate, ain’t there no gettin’ you back to your friends? There’s forty chasers out for you from your road, if there’s one. Who’s holdin’ you now?’

‘Wish I knew,’ whimpered Homeless Kate. ‘I belong in Topeka, but I’ve bin to Cedar Rapids; I’ve bin to Winnipeg; I’ve bin to Newport News; I’ve bin all down the old Atlanta and West Point; an’ I’ve bin to Buffalo. Maybe I’ll fetch up at Haverstraw. I’ve only bin out ten months, but I’m homesick—I’m just achin’ homesick.’

‘Try Chicago, Katie,’ said the switching-loco; and the battered old car lumbered down the track, jolting; ‘I want to be in Kansas when the sunflowers bloom.’

‘Yard’s full o’ Homeless Kates an’ Wanderin’ Willies,’ he explained to ·007. ‘I knew an old Fitchburg flat-car out seventeen months; an’ one of ours was gone fifteen ’fore ever we got track of her. Dunno quite how our men fix it. Swap around, I guess. Anyway, I’ve done my duty. She’s on her way to Kansas, via Chicago; but I’ll lay my next boilerful she’ll be held there to wait consignee’s convenience, and sent back to us with wheat in the fall.”

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Just then the Pittsburgh Consolidation passed, at the head of a dozen cars.

‘I’m goin’ home,’ he said proudly.

‘Can’t get all them twelve on to the flat. Break ’em in half, Dutchy! ‘cried Pony. But it was ·007 who was backed down to the last six cars, and he nearly blew up with surprise when he found himself pushing them on to a huge ferryboat. He had never seen deep water before, and shivered as the flat drew away and left his bogies within six inches of the black, shiny tide.

After this he was hurried to the freight-house, where he saw the yard-master, a smallish, white-faced man in shirt, trousers, and slippers, looking down upon a sea of trucks, a mob of bawling truckmen, and squadrons of backing, turning, sweating, spark-striking horses.

‘That’s shippers’ carts loadin’ on to the receivin’ trucks,’ said the small engine reverently. ‘But he don’t care. He lets ’em cuss. He’s the Czar—King—Boss! He says “Please,” and then they kneel down an’ pray. There’s three or four strings o’ to-day’s freight to be pulled before he can attend to them. When he waves his hand that way, things happen.’

A string of loaded cars slid out down the track, and a string of empties took their place. Bales, crates, boxes, jars, carboys, frails, cases, and packages; flew into them from the freight-house as though the cars had been magnets and they iron filings.

‘Ki-yah!’ shrieked little Pony. ‘Ain’t it great?’

A purple-faced truckman shouldered his way to the yard-master, and shook his fist under his nose.

The yard-master never looked up from his bundle of freight-receipts. He crooked his forefinger slightly, and a tall young man in a red shirt, lounging carelessly beside him, hit the truckman under the left ear, so that he dropped, quivering and clucking, on a hay-bale.

‘Eleven, seven, ninety-seven, L.Y.S.; fourteen ought ought three; nineteen thirteen; one one four; seventeen ought twenty-one M. B.; and the ten west-bound. All straight except the two last. Cut ’em off at the junction. An’ that’s all right. Pull that string.’ The yard-master, with mild blue eyes, looked out over the howling truckmen at the waters in the moonlight beyond, and hummed:

All things bright and beautiful,
All creatures great and small,
All things wise and wonderful,
The Lawd Gawd made them all!

·007 moved the cars out and delivered them to the regular road-engine. He had never felt quite so limp in his life.

‘Curious, ain’t it?’ said Pony, puffing, on the next track. ‘You an’ me, if we got that man under our bumpers, we’d work him into red waste and not know what we’d done; but—up there—with the steam hummin’ in his boiler that awful quiet way . . .’

‘I know,’ said ·007. ‘Makes me feel as if I’d dropped my fire an’ was getting cold. He is the greatest man on earth.’

They were at the far north end of the yard now, under a switch-tower, looking down on the four-track way of the main traffic. The Boston Compound was to haul ·007’s string to some faraway northern junction over an indifferent road-bed, and she mourned aloud for the ninety-six pound rails of the B.&A.

‘You’re young; you’re young,’ she coughed. ‘You don’t realise your responsibilities.’

‘Yes, he does,’ said Pony sharply; ‘but he don’t lie down under ’em.’ Then, with a sidespurt of steam, exactly like a tough spitting ‘There ain’t more than fifteen thousand dollars’ worth o’ freight behind her anyway, and she carries on as if ’twere a hundred thousand—same as the Mogul’s. Excuse me, madam, but you’ve the track. . . . She’s stuck on a dead-centre again—bein’ specially designed not to.’

The Compound crawled across the tracks on a long slant, groaning horribly at each switch, and moving like a cow in a snow-drift. There was a little pause along the yard after her tail-lights had disappeared; switches locked crisply, and every one seemed to be waiting.

‘Now I’ll show you something worth,’ said Pony. ‘When the Purple Emperor ain’t on time, it’s about time to amend the Constitution. The first stroke of twelve is——’

‘Boom!’ went the clock in the big yard-tower, and far away ·007 heard a full vibrating ‘Yah! Yah! Yah!’ A headlight twinkled on the horizon like a star, grew an overpowering blaze, and whooped up the humming track to the roaring music of a happy giant’s song:

page 5

With a michnai—ghignai—shtingal! Yah! Yah! Yah!
Ein—zwei—drei—Mutter! Yah! Yah! Yah!
She climbed upon der shteeple,
Und she frighten all der people,
Singin’ michnai—ghignai—shtingal! Yah! Yah!

The last defiant ‘yah! yah!’ was delivered a mile and a half beyond the passenger-depôt; but ·007 had caught one glimpse of the superb six-wheel-coupled racing-locomotive, who hauled the pride and glory of the road—the gilt-edged Purple Emperor, the millionaires’ south-bound express, laying the miles over his shoulder as a man peels a shaving from a soft board. The rest was a blur of maroon enamel, a bar of white light from the electrics in the cars, and a flicker of nickel-plated hand-rail on the rear platform.

‘Ooh!’ said ·007.

‘Seventy-five miles an hour these five miles. Baths, I’ve heard; barber’s shop; ticker; and a library and the rest to match. Yes, sir; seventy-five an hour! But he’ll talk to you in the roundhouse just as democratic as I would. And I—cuss—my wheel-base!—I’d kick clean off the track at half his gait. He’s the master of our Lodge. Cleans up at our house. I’ll introdooce you some day. He’s worth knowin’! There ain’t many can sing that song, either.’

·007 was too full of emotions to answer. He did not hear a raging of telephone-bells in the switch-tower, nor the man, as he leaned out and called to ·007’s engineer: ‘Got any steam?’

‘ ’Nough to run her a hundred mile out o’ this, if I could,’ said the engineer, who belonged to the open road and hated switching.

‘Then get. The Flying Freight’s ditched forty mile out, with fifty rod o’ track ploughed up. No; no one’s hurt, but both tracks are blocked. Lucky the wreckin’-car an’ derrick are this end of the yard. Crew’ll be along in a minute. Hurry! You’ve the track.’

‘Well, I could jest kick my little sawed-off self,’ said Pony, as ·007 was backed, with a bang, on to a grim and grimy car like a caboose, but full of tools—a flat-car and a derrick behind it. ‘Some folks are one thing, and some are another; but you’re in luck, kid. They push a wrecking-car. Now, don’t get rattled. Your wheel-base will keep you on the track, and there ain’t any curves worth mentionin’. Oh, say! Comanche told me there’s one section o’ saw-edged track that’s liable to jounce ye a little. Fifteen an’ a half out, after the grade at Jackson’s crossin’. You’ll know it by a farmhouse an’ a windmill and five maples in the dooryard. Windmill’s west o’ the maples. An’ there’s an eighty-foot iron bridge in the middle o’ that section with no guard-rails. See you later. Luck!’

Before he knew well what had happened, ·007 was flying up the track into the dumb dark world. Then fears of the night beset him. He remembered all he had ever heard of landslides, rain-piled boulders, blown trees, and strayed cattle, all that the Boston Compound had ever said of responsibility, and a great deal more that came out of his own head. With a very quavering voice he whistled for his first grade crossing (an event in the life of a locomotive), and his nerves were in no way restored by the sight of a frantic horse, and a white-faced man in a buggy less than a yard from his right shoulder. Then he was sure he would jump the track; felt his flanges mounting the rail at every curve; knew that his first grade would make him lie down even as Comanche had done at the Newtons. He swept down the grade to Jackson’s crossing, saw the windmill west of the maples, felt the badly-laid rails spring under him, and sweated big drops all over his boiler. At each jarring bump he believed an axle had smashed; and he took the eighty-foot bridge without the guard-rail like a hunted cat on the top of a fence. Then a wet leaf stuck against the glass of his headlight and threw a flying shadow on the track, so that he thought it was some little dancing animal that would feel soft if he ran over it; and anything soft underfoot frightens a locomotive as it does an elephant. But the men behind seemed quite calm. The wrecking-crew were climbing carelessly from the caboose to the tender—even jesting with the engineer, for he heard a shuffling of feet among the coal, and the snatch of a song, something like this:

Oh, the Empire State must learn to wait,
And the Cannon-ball go hang,
When the West-bound’s ditched, and the tool-car’s hitched,
And it’s ’way for the Breakdown Gang (Tara-ra!)
’Way for the Breakdown Gang!

‘Say! Eustis knew what he was doin’ when he designed this rig. She’s a hummer. New, too.’

‘Sniff! Phew! She is new. That ain’t paint. That’s——’

A burning pain shot through ·007’s right rear driver—a crippling, stinging pain.

‘This,’ said ·007, as he flew, ‘is a hot-box. Now I know what it means. I shall go to pieces, I guess. My first road-run, too!’

page 6

‘Het a bit, ain’t she?’ the fireman ventured to suggest to the engineer.

‘She’ll hold for all we want of her. We’re ’most there. ‘Guess you chaps back had better climb into your car,’ said the engineer, his hand on the brake-lever. ‘I’ve seen men snapped off——’

But the crew fled laughing. They had no wish to be jerked on to the track. The engineer half turned his wrist, and ·007 found his drivers pinned firm.

‘Now it’s come!’ said ·007, as he yelled aloud, and slid like a sleigh. For the moment he fancied that he would jerk bodily from off his underpinning.

‘That must be the emergency-stop Pony guyed me about,’ he gasped, as soon as he could think. ‘Hot-box—emergency-stop. They both hurt; but now I can talk back in the round-house.’

He was halted, all hissing hot, a few feet in the rear of what doctors would call a compound-comminuted car. His engineer was kneeling down among his drivers, but he did not call ·007 his ‘Arab steed,’ nor cry over him, as the engineers did in the newspapers. He just bad-worded ·007, and pulled yards of charred cotton-waste from about the axles, and hoped he might some day catch the idiot who had packed it. Nobody else attended to him, for Evans, the Mogul’s engineer, a little cut about the head, but very angry, was exhibiting, by lantern-light, the mangled corpse of a slim blue pig.

‘’T weren’t even a decent-sized hog,’ he said. ‘’T were a shote.’

‘Dangerousest beasts they are,’ said one of the crew. ‘Get under the pilot an’ sort o’ twiddle ye off the track, don’t they?’

‘Don’t they?’ roared Evans, who was a red headed Welshman. ‘You talk as if I was ditched by a hog every fool-day o’ the week. I ain’t friends with all the cussed half-fed shotes in the State o’ New York. No, indeed! Yes, this is him—an’ look what he’s done!’

It was not a bad night’s work for one stray piglet. The Flying Freight seemed to have flown in every direction, for the Mogul had mounted the rails and run diagonally a few hundred feet from right to left, taking with him such cars as cared to follow. Some did not. They broke their couplers and lay down, while rear cars frolicked over them. In that game, they had ploughed up and removed and twisted a good deal of the left-hand track. The Mogul himself had waddled into a corn-field, and there he knelt—fantastic wreaths of green twisted round his crank-pins; his pilot covered with solid clods of field, on which corn nodded drunkenly; his fire put out with dirt (Evans had done that as soon as he recovered his senses); and his broken headlight half full of half-burnt moths. His tender had thrown coal all over him, and he looked like a disreputable buffalo who had tried to wallow in a general store. For there lay, scattered over the landscape, from the burst cars, typewriters, sewing-machines, bicycles in crates, a consignment of silver-plated imported harness, French dresses and gloves, a dozen finely moulded hardwood mantels, a fifteen-foot naphtha-launch, with. a solid brass bedstead crumpled around her bows, a case of telescopes and microscopes, two coffins, a case of very best candies, some gilt-edged dairy produce, butter and eggs in an omelette, a broken box of expensive toys, and a few hundred other luxuries. A camp of tramps hurried up from nowhere, and generously volunteered to help the crew. So the brakemen, armed with coupler-pins, walked up and down on one side, and the freight-conductor and the fireman patrolled the other with their hands in their hip-pockets. A long-bearded man came out of a house beyond the corn-field, and told Evans that if the accident had happened a little later in the year, all his corn would have been burned, and accused Evans of carelessness. Then he ran away, for Evans was at his heels shrieking, ‘’Twas his hog done it—his hog done it! Let me kill him! Let me kill him!’ Then the wrecking-crew laughed; and the farmer put his head out of a window and said that Evans was no gentleman.

But ·007 was very sober. He had never seen a wreck before, and it frightened him. The crew still laughed, but they worked at the same time; and ·007 forgot horror in amazement at the way they handled the Mogul freight. They dug round him with spades; they put ties in front of his wheels, and jack-screws under him; they embraced him with the derrick-chain and tickled him with crowbars; while ·007 was hitched on to wrecked cars and backed away till the knot broke or the cars rolled clear of the track. By dawn thirty or forty men’ were at work, replacing and ramming down the ties, gauging the rails and spiking them. By daylight all cars who could move had gone on in charge of another loco; the track was freed for traffic; and ·007 had hauled the old Mogul over a small pavement of ties, inch by inch, till his flanges bit the rail once more, and he settled down with a clank. But his spirit was broken, and his nerve was gone.

‘’T weren’t even a hog,’ he repeated dolefully; ‘’t were a shote; and you—you of all of ’em—had to help me on.’

‘But how in the whole long road did it happen?’ asked ·007, sizzling with curiosity.

page 7

‘Happen! It didn’t happen! It just come! I sailed right on top of him around that last curve—thought he was a skunk. Yes; he was all as little as that. He hadn’t more’n squealed once ’fore I felt my bogies lift (he’d rolled right under the pilot), and I couldn’t catch the track again to save me. Swivelled clean off, I was. Then I felt him sling himself along, all greasy, under my left leadin’ driver, and, oh, Boilers! that mounted the rail. I heard my flanges zippin’ along the ties, an’ the next I knew I was playin’ “Sally, Sally Waters” in the corn, my tender shuckin’ coal through my cab, an’ old man Evans lying’ still an’ bleedin’ in front o’ me. Shook? There ain’t a stay or a bolt or a rivet in me that ain’t sprung to glory somewhere.’

‘Umm!’ said ·007. ‘What d’ you reckon you weigh?’

‘Without these lumps o’ dirt I’m all of a hundred thousand pound.’

‘And the shote?’

‘Eighty. Call him a hundred pounds at the outside. He’s worth about four’n a half dollars. Ain’t it awful? Ain’t it enough to give you nervous prostration? Ain’t it paralysin’? Why, I come just around that curve——’ and the Mogul told the tale again, for he was very badly shaken.

‘Well, it’s all in the day’s run, I guess,’ said ·007, soothingly; ‘an’—an’ a corn-field’s pretty soft fallin’.’

‘If it had bin a sixty-foot bridge, an’ I could ha’ slid off into deep water, an’ blown up an’ killed both men, same as others have done, I wouldn’t ha’ cared: but to be ditched by a shote—an’ you to help me out—in a corn-field—an’ an old hayseed in his nightgown cussin’ me like as if I was a sick truck-horse! . . . Oh, it’s awful! Don’t call me Mogul! I’m a sewin’-machine. They’ll guy my sand-box off in the yard.’

And ·007, his hot-box cooled and his experience vastly enlarged, hauled the Mogul freight slowly to the round-house.

‘Hello, old man! Bin out all night, hain’t ye?’ said the irrepressible Pony, who had just come off duty. ‘Well, I must say you look it. Costly—perishable—fragile—immediate—that’s you! Go to the shops, take them vine-leaves out o’ your hair, an’ git ’em to play the hose on you.’

‘Leave him alone, Pony,’ said ·007 severely, as he was swung on the turn-table, ’or I’ll——’

‘’Didn’t know the old granger was any special friend o’ yours, kid. He wasn’t over civil to you last time I saw him.’

‘I know it; but I’ve seen a wreck since then, and it has about scared the paint off me. I’m not going to guy any one as long as I steam—not when they’re new to the business an’ anxious to learn. And I’m not goin’ to guy the old Mogul either, though I did find him wreathed around with roastin’-ears. ’Twas a little bit of a shote—not a hog—just a shote, Pony—no bigger’n a lump of anthracite—I saw it—that made all the mess. Anybody can be ditched, I guess.’

‘Found that out already, have you? Well, that’s a good beginnin’.’ It was the Purple Emperor, with his high, tight, plate-glass cab and green velvet cushion, waiting to be cleaned for his next day’s fly.

‘Let me make you two gen’lemen acquainted,’ said Pony. ‘This is our Purple Emperor, kid, whom you were admirin’ and, I may say, envyin’ last night. This is a new brother, worshipful sir, with most of his mileage ahead of him, but, so far as a serving brother can, I’ll answer for him.’

‘’Happy to meet you,’ said the Purple Emperor, with a glance round the crowded round-house. ‘I guess there are enough of us here to form a full meetin’. Ahem! By virtue of the authority vested in me as Head of the Road, I hereby declare and pronounce No. ·007 a full and accepted Brother of the Amalgamated Brotherhood of Locomotives, and as such entitled to all shop, switch, track, tank, and round-house privileges throughout my jurisdiction, in the Degree of Superior Flier, it bein’ well known and credibly reported to me that our Brother has covered forty-one miles in thirty-nine minutes and a half on an errand of mercy to the afflicted. At a convenient time, I myself will communicate to you the ‘Song and Signal of this Degree whereby you may be recognised in the darkest night. Take your stall, newly-entered Brother among Locomotives!’

Now, in the darkest night, even as the Purple Emperor said, if you will stand on the bridge across the freight-yard, looking down upon the four-track way, at 2.30 A.M., neither before nor after, when the White Moth, that takes the overflow from the Purple Emperor, tears south with her seven vestibuled cream-white cars, you will hear, as the yard-clock makes the half-hour, a faraway sound like the bass of a violoncello, and then, a hundred feet to each word:

With a michnai—ghignai—shtingal!  Yah! Yah! Yah
Ein—zwei—drei—Mutter!  Yah! Yah! Yah
She climb upon der shteeple,
Und she frighten all der people,
Singin’ michnai—ghignai—shtingal!  Yah! Yah!

That is ·007 covering his one hundred and fifty six miles in two hundred and twenty-one minutes.

He drank strong waters and his speech was coarse;
He purchased raiment and forbore to pay;
He stuck a trusting junior with a horse,
And won Gymkhanas in a doubtful way.
Then, ’twixt a vice and folly, turned aside
To do good deeds and straight to cloak them, lied.
(The Mess Room)

(a short tale)

IF Reggie Burke were in India now he would resent this tale being told; but as he is in Hongkong and won’t see it, the telling is safe. He was the man who worked the big fraud on the Sind and Sialkote Bank. He was manager of an up-country Branch, and a sound practical man with a large experience of native loan and insurance work. He could combine the frivolities of ordinary life with his work, and yet do well. Reggie Burke rode anything that would let him get up, danced as neatly as he rode, and was wanted for every sort of amusement in the Station.

As he said himself, and as many men found out rather to their surprise, there were two Burkes, both very much at your service. ‘Reggie Burke,’ between four and ten, ready for anything from a hot-weather gymkhana to a riding-picnic, and, between ten and four, ‘Mr. Reginald Burke, Manager of the Sind and Sialkote Branch Bank.’ You might play polo with him one afternoon and hear him express his opinions when a man crossed; and you might call on him next morning to raise a two-thousand rupee loan on a five hundred pound insurance policy, eighty pounds paid in premiums. He would recognise you, but you would have some trouble in recognising him.

The Directors of the Bank—it had its headquarters in Calcutta, and its General Manager’s word carried weight with the Government—picked their men well. They had tested Reggie up to a fairly severe breaking-strain. They trusted him just as much as Directors ever trust Managers. You must see for yourself whether their trust was misplaced.

Reggie’s Branch was in a big Station, and worked with the usual staff: one Manager, one Accountant, both English, a Cashier, and a horde of native clerks; besides the Police patrol at nights outside. The bulk of its work, for it was in a thriving district, was hoondi and accommodation of all kinds. A fool has no grip of this sort of business; and a clever man who does not go about among his clients, and know more than a little of their affairs, is worse than a fool. Reggie was young-looking, clean-shaved, with a twinkle in his eye, and a head that nothing short of a gallon of the Gunners’ Madeira could make any impression on.

One day, at a big dinner, he announced casually that the Directors had shifted on to him a Natural Curiosity, from England, in the Accountant line. He was perfectly correct. Mr. Silas Riley, Accountant, was a most curious animal—a long, gawky, rawboned Yorkshireman, full of the savage self-conceit that blossoms only in the best county in England. Arrogance was a mild word for the mental attitude of Mr. S. Riley. He had worked himself up, after seven years, to a Cashier’s position in a Huddersfield Bank; and all his experience lay among the factories of the North. Perhaps he would have done better on the Bombay side, where they are happy with one-half per cent profits, and money is cheap. He was useless for Upper India and a wheat Province, where a man wants a large head and a touch of imagination if he is to turn out a satisfactory balance-sheet.

He was wonderfully narrow-minded in business, and, being new to the country, had no notion that Indian banking is totally distinct from Home work. Like most clever self-made men, he had much simplicity in his nature; and, somehow or other, had construed the ordinarily polite terms of his letter of engagement into a belief that the Directors had chosen him on account of his special and brilliant talents, and that they set great store by him. This notion grew and crystallised; thus adding to his natural North-country conceit. Further, he was delicate, suffered from some trouble in his chest, and was short in his temper.

You will admit that Reggie had reason to call his new Accountant a Natural Curiosity. The two men failed to hit it off at all. Riley considered Reggie a wild, feather-headed idiot, given to Heaven only knew what dissipation in low places called ‘Messes,’ and totally unfit for the serious and solemn vocation of banking. He could never get over Reggie’s look of youth and ‘you-bedamned’ air; and he couldn’t understand Reggie’s friends—clean-built, careless men in the Army—who rode over to big Sunday breakfasts at the Bank, and told sultry stories till Riley got up and left the room. Riley was always showing Reggie how the business ought to be conducted, and Reggie had more than once to remind him that seven years’ limited experience between Huddersfield and Beverley did not qualify a man to steer a big up-country business. Then Riley sulked, and referred to himself as a pillar of the Bank and a cherished friend of the Directors, and Reggie tore his hair. If a man’s English subordinates fail him in India, he comes to a hard time indeed, for native help has strict limitations. In the winter Riley went sick for weeks at a time with his lung complaint, and this threw more work on Reggie. But he preferred it to the everlasting friction when Riley was well.

One of the Travelling Inspectors of the Bank discovered these collapses and reported them to the Directors. Now Riley had been foisted on the Bank by an M.P., who wanted the support of Riley’s father who, again, was anxious to get his son out to a warmer climate because of those lungs. The M.P. had an interest in the Bank; but one of the Directors wanted to advance a nominee of his own; and, after Riley’s father had died, he made the rest of the Board see that an Accountant who was sick for half the year had better give place to a healthy man. If Riley had known the real story of his appointment he might have behaved better; but, knowing nothing, his stretches of sickness alternated with restless, persistent, meddling irritation of Reggie, and all the hundred ways in which conceit in a subordinate situation can find play. Reggie used to call him striking and hair-curling names behind his back as a relief to his own feelings; but he never abused him to his face, because he said, ‘Riley is such a frail beast that half of his loathsome conceit is due to pains in the chest.’

Late one April, Riley went very sick indeed. The Doctor punched him and thumped him, and told him he would be better before long. Then the Doctor went to Reggie and said—‘Do you know how sick your Accountant is?’—‘No!’ said Reggie; ‘the worse the better, confound him! He’s a clacking nuisance when he’s well. I’ll let you take away the Bank Safe if you can drug him silent for this hot weather.’

But the Doctor did not laugh—‘Man, I’m not joking,’ he said. ‘I’ll give him another three months in his bed and a week or so more to die in. On my honour and reputation that’s all the grace he has in this world. Consumption has hold of him to the marrow.’

Reggie’s face changed at once into the face of ‘Mr. Reginald Burke,’ and he answered, ‘What can I do?’-‘Nothing,’ said the Doctor; ‘for all practical purposes the man is dead already. Keep him quiet and cheerful, and tell him he’s going to recover. That’s all. I’ll look after him to the end, of course.’

The Doctor went away, and Reggie sat down to open the evening mail. His first letter was one from the Directors, intimating for his information that Mr. Riley was to resign, under a month’s notice, by the terms of his agreement, telling Reggie that their letter to Riley would follow, and advising Reggie of the coming of a new Accountant, a man whom Reggie knew and liked.

Reggie lit a cheroot, and, before he had finished smoking, he had sketched the outline of a fraud. He put away—burked—the Directors’ letter, and went in to talk to Riley, who was as ungracious as usual, and fretting himself over the way the Bank would run during his illness. He never thought of the extra work on Reggie’s shoulders, but solely of the damage to his own prospects of advancement. Then Reggie assured him that everything would be well, and that he, Reggie, would confer with Riley daily on the management of the Bank. Riley was a little soothed, but he hinted in as many words that he did not think much of Reggie’s business capacity. Reggie was humble. And he had letters in his desk from the Directors that a Gilbarte or a Hardie might have been proud of!

The days passed in the big darkened house, and the Directors’ letter of dismissal to Riley came and was put away by Reggie, who, every evening, brought the books to Riley’s room, and showed him what had been going forward, while Riley snarled. Reggie did his best to make statements pleasing to Riley, but the Accountant was sure that the Bank was going to rack and ruin without him. In June, as the lying in bed told on his spirit, he asked whether his absence had been noted by the Directors, and Reggie said that they had written most sympathetic letters, hoping that he would be able to resume his valuable services before long. He showed Riley the letters; and Riley said that the Directors ought to have written to him direct. A few days later, Reggie opened Riley’s mail in the half-light of the room, and gave him the sheet—not the envelope—of a letter to Riley from the Directors. Riley said he would thank Reggie not to interfere with his private papers, specially as Reggie knew he was too weak to open his own letters. Reggie apologised.

Then Riley’s mood changed, and he lectured Reggie on his evil ways: his horses and his bad friends. ‘Of course lying here, on my back, Mr. Burke, I can’t keep you straight; but when I’m well, I do hope you’ll pay some heed to my words.’ Reggie, who had dropped polo, and dinners, and tennis and all, to attend to Riley, said that he was penitent, and settled Riley’s head on the pillow, and heard him fret and contradict in hard, dry, hacking whispers, without a sign of impatience. This, at the end of a heavy day’s office work, doing double duty, in the latter half of June.

When the new Accountant came, Reggie told him the facts of the case, and announced to Riley that he had a guest staying with him. Riley said that he might have had more consideration than to entertain his ‘doubtful friends’ at such a time. Reggie made Carron, the new Accountant, sleep at the Club in consequence. Carron’s arrival took some of the heavy work off his shoulders, and he had time to attend to Riley’s exactions—to explain, soothe, invent, and settle and re-settle the poor wretch in bed, and to forge complimentary letters from Calcutta. At the end of the first month Riley wished to send some money home to his mother. Reggie sent the draft. At the end of the second month Riley’s salary came in just the same. Reggie paid it out of his own pocket, and, with it, wrote Riley a beautiful letter from the Directors.

Riley was very ill indeed, but the flame of his life burnt unsteadily. Now and then he would be cheerful and confident about the future, sketching plans for going Home and seeing his mother. Reggie listened patiently when the office-work was over, and encouraged him.

At other times Riley insisted on Reggie reading the Bible and grim ‘Methody’ tracts to him. Out of these tracts he pointed morals directed at his Manager. But he always found time to worry Reggie about the working of the Bank, and to show him where the weak points lay.

This indoor, sickroom life and constant strain wore Reggie down a good deal, and shook his nerves, and lowered his billiard play by forty points. But the business of the Bank, and the business of the sickroom, had to go on, though the glass was 116º in the shade.

At the end of the third month Riley was sinking fast, and had begun to realise that he was very sick. But the conceit that made him worry Reggie kept him from believing the worst. ‘He wants some sort of mental stimulant if he is to drag on,’ said the Doctor. ‘Keep him interested in life if you care about his living.’ So Riley, contrary to all the laws of business and finance, received a 25-per-cent rise of salary from the Directors. The ‘mental stimulant’ succeeded beautifully. Riley was happy and cheerful, and, as is often the case in consumption, healthiest in mind when the body was weakest. He lingered for a full month, snarling and fretting about the Bank, talking of the future, hearing the Bible read, lecturing Reggie on sin, and wondering when he would be able to move abroad.

But at the end of September, one mercilessly hot evening, he rose up in his bed with a little gasp, and said quickly to Reggie—‘Mr. Burke, I am going to die. I know it in myself. My chest is all hollow inside, and there’s nothing to breathe with. To the best of my knowledge I have done nowt’—he was returning to the talk of his boyhood—‘to lie heavy on my conscience. God be thanked, I have been preserved from the grosser forms of sin; and I counsel you, Mr. Burke . . .’

Here his voice died down, and Reggie stooped over him.

‘Send my salary for September to my Mother . . . done great things with the Bank if I had been spared . . . mistaken policy . . . no fault of mine . . . .’

Then he turned his face to the wall and died.

Reggie drew the sheet over Its face, and went out into the verandah, with his last ‘mental stimulant’—a letter of condolence and sympathy from the Directors—unused in his pocket.

‘If I’d been only ten minutes earlier,’ thought Reggie, ‘I might have heartened him up to pull through another day.’

pages 1 of 12

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

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

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

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

–Old Lincolnshire (?) Carol

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He emptied his cup and went on.

page 2

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

page 3

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

page 4

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘I wish we could hear the guns.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

page 5

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

page 6

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

page 7

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Corbett rolled one eye at the young Dutchman.

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

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

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

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

page 8

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

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

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

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

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

‘Allen.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

page 9

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘I beg your pardon,’ said he.

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

‘You’re General McKaye?’ he said.

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

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

‘Of course not, man.’

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

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

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

page 10

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘No, I am a printer here.’

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

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

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

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

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

‘Then you did not use natives?’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘What for?’

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

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‘I know nothing about it.’

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

‘Joke?’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘I see. Thank you.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

page 12

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

They entered the composing-room together.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

page 1 of 6

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘There aren’t any,’ said Una.

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

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

page 2

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Was your nurse a—a Romaness too?’

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

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

The young man laughed again—a proper understanding laugh.

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

‘Did you have a governess, then?’

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

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

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

‘What at?’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘What waters?’

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

‘But where? I don’t know,’ said Una.

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

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

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

I‘ thought philosophers were bald,’ said Una.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Parnesius looked bewildered, even when Una explained.

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

Dan had climbed into Volaterrae, hot and panting.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘“Born in Britain?” he said.

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

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

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

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

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

‘Who was he?’ said Dan.

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

‘And were you pleased?’ said Una.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘How? How?’ said Dan and Una.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘My men dropped like—like partridges.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘That was what I thought,’ said Parnesius.

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

‘I was silent, but my Father seemed pleased.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘“I follow my destiny,” said Maximus.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

page 6

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘In Volaterrae—waiting for you.’

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

page 1 of 5

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mr. Cleever admitted that he had written the book.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

page 2

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

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

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

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

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

Cleever questioned the others with his eyes.

‘I’m twenty-four,’ said Nevin.

‘And I’m twenty-two,’ said Boileau.

‘And you’ve all seen service?’

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

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

‘Explain it, Infant,’ said Nevin.

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

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

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

‘What about? I’ll try.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Who was your C.O.?’ said Boileau.

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Who was he?’ said Boileau.

page 3

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

Cleever looked helplessly at me.

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

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

‘What sort of verses?’ said Cleever.

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘You! Have you shot a man?’

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

‘And have you, too?’

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

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

‘Thirsty. I wanted a smoke, too.’

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

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

‘And you too?’ said Cleever.

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

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

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

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

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

Cleever nodded applause. He knew how to appreciate enthusiasm.

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

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

page 4

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

‘Who was he?’ said Nevin.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

page 5

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[a short tale]

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

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

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

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

“How old was he?” I said.

“Nearly seventy, or maybe a little over.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I smiled a very large smile.

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

“He was an old man,” I said.

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

“And he outlived his reputation?”

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

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

“Yes; but he didn’t live to . . . ”

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

“Yes.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“But you understand, don’t you?’

[a short tale]

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

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

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

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

page 1 of 5

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘And afterwards,’ Bevin added, lower still.

‘Christ! Were you there that night?’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘A camouflager?’ Orton suggested.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Finish?’ I asked.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bevin paused.

‘What?’ said Orton.

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘And Hickmot?’ said Orton, grinning.

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

‘What did he say?’ Pole inquired.

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

‘And what did you think?’ I interrupted.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘’Ever see him afterwards?’ said Orton.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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