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+The Project Gutenberg eBook, A Diversity of Creatures, by Rudyard Kipling
+
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+
+
+
+Title: A Diversity of Creatures
+
+Author: Rudyard Kipling
+
+Release Date: August 2, 2004  [eBook #13085]
+Most recently updated: December 10, 2012
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+
+***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK A DIVERSITY OF CREATURES***
+
+
+E-text prepared by Charles Aldarondo, Charlie Kirschner, and the Project
+Gutenberg Online Distributed Proofreading Team
+
+
+
+A DIVERSITY OF CREATURES
+
+By
+
+RUDYARD KIPLING
+
+1917
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+PREFACE
+
+
+With two exceptions, the dates at the head of these stories show when
+they were published in magazine form. 'The Village that Voted the Earth
+was Flat,' and 'My Son's Wife' carry the dates when they were written.
+
+RUDYARD KIPLING.
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+As Easy as ABC
+
+ _MacDonough's Song_
+
+Friendly Brook
+
+ _The Land_
+
+In the Same Boat
+
+ '_Helen all Alone_'
+
+The Honours of War
+
+ _The Children_
+
+The Dog Hervey
+
+ _The Comforters_
+
+The Village that Voted the Earth was Flat
+
+ _The Press_
+
+In the Presence
+
+ _Jobson's Amen_
+
+Regulus
+
+ _A Translation_
+
+The Edge of the Evening
+
+ _Rebirth_
+
+The Horse Marines
+
+ _The Legend of Mirth_
+
+'My Son's Wife'
+
+ _The Floods_
+
+ _The Fabulists_
+
+The Vortex
+
+ _The Song of Seven Cities_
+
+'Swept and Garnished'
+
+Mary Postgate
+
+ _The Beginnings_
+
+
+
+
+A DIVERSITY OF CREATURES
+
+
+
+
+As Easy as A.B.C.
+
+(1912)
+
+_The A.B.C., that semi-elected, semi-nominated body of a few score
+persons, controls the Planet. Transportation is Civilisation, our motto
+runs. Theoretically we do what we please, so long as we do not interfere
+with the traffic_ and all it implies. _Practically, the A.B.C. confirms
+or annuls all international arrangements, and, to judge from its last
+report, finds our tolerant, humorous, lazy little Planet only too ready
+to shift the whole burden of public administration on its shoulders_.
+
+'With the Night Mail[1].'
+
+[Footnote 1: _Actions and Reactions_.]
+
+Isn't it almost time that our Planet took some interest in the
+proceedings of the Aërial Board of Control? One knows that easy
+communications nowadays, and lack of privacy in the past, have killed
+all curiosity among mankind, but as the Board's Official Reporter I am
+bound to tell my tale.
+
+At 9.30 A.M., August 26, A.D. 2065, the Board, sitting in London, was
+informed by De Forest that the District of Northern Illinois had
+riotously cut itself out of all systems and would remain disconnected
+till the Board should take over and administer it direct.
+
+Every Northern Illinois freight and passenger tower was, he reported,
+out of action; all District main, local, and guiding lights had been
+extinguished; all General Communications were dumb, and through traffic
+had been diverted. No reason had been given, but he gathered
+unofficially from the Mayor of Chicago that the District complained of
+'crowd-making and invasion of privacy.'
+
+As a matter of fact, it is of no importance whether Northern Illinois
+stay in or out of planetary circuit; as a matter of policy, any
+complaint of invasion of privacy needs immediate investigation, lest
+worse follow.
+
+By 9-45 A.M. De Forest, Dragomiroff (Russia), Takahira (Japan), and
+Pirolo (Italy) were empowered to visit Illinois and 'to take such steps
+as might be necessary for the resumption of traffic and _all that that
+implies.'_ By 10 A.M. the Hall was empty, and the four Members and I
+were aboard what Pirolo insisted on calling 'my leetle godchild'--that
+is to say, the new _Victor Pirolo_. Our Planet prefers to know Victor
+Pirolo as a gentle, grey-haired enthusiast who spends his time near
+Foggia, inventing or creating new breeds of Spanish-Italian olive-trees;
+but there is another side to his nature--the manufacture of quaint
+inventions, of which the _Victor Pirolo_ is, perhaps, not the least
+surprising. She and a few score sister-craft of the same type embody his
+latest ideas. But she is not comfortable. An A.B.C. boat does not take
+the air with the level-keeled lift of a liner, but shoots up
+rocket-fashion like the 'aeroplane' of our ancestors, and makes her
+height at top-speed from the first. That is why I found myself sitting
+suddenly on the large lap of Eustace Arnott, who commands the A.B.C.
+Fleet. One knows vaguely that there is such a thing as a Fleet somewhere
+on the Planet, and that, theoretically, it exists for the purposes of
+what used to be known as 'war.' Only a week before, while visiting a
+glacier sanatorium behind Gothaven, I had seen some squadrons making
+false auroras far to the north while they manoeuvred round the Pole;
+but, naturally, it had never occurred to me that the things could be
+used in earnest.
+
+Said Arnott to De Forest as I staggered to a seat on the chart-room
+divan: 'We're tremendously grateful to 'em in Illinois. We've never had
+a chance of exercising all the Fleet together. I've turned in a General
+Call, and I expect we'll have at least two hundred keels aloft
+this evening.'
+
+'Well aloft?' De Forest asked.
+
+'Of course, sir. Out of sight till they're called for.'
+
+Arnott laughed as he lolled over the transparent chart-table where the
+map of the summer-blue Atlantic slid along, degree by degree, in exact
+answer to our progress. Our dial already showed 320 m.p.h. and we were
+two thousand feet above the uppermost traffic lines.
+
+'Now, where is this Illinois District of yours?' said Dragomiroff. 'One
+travels so much, one sees so little. Oh, I remember! It is in
+North America.'
+
+De Forest, whose business it is to know the out districts, told us that
+it lay at the foot of Lake Michigan, on a road to nowhere in particular,
+was about half an hour's run from end to end, and, except in one corner,
+as flat as the sea. Like most flat countries nowadays, it was heavily
+guarded against invasion of privacy by forced timber--fifty-foot spruce
+and tamarack, grown in five years. The population was close on two
+millions, largely migratory between Florida and California, with a
+backbone of small farms (they call a thousand acres a farm in Illinois)
+whose owners come into Chicago for amusements and society during the
+winter. They were, he said, noticeably kind, quiet folk, but a little
+exacting, as all flat countries must be, in their notions of privacy.
+There had, for instance, been no printed news-sheet in Illinois for
+twenty-seven years. Chicago argued that engines for printed news sooner
+or later developed into engines for invasion of privacy, which in turn
+might bring the old terror of Crowds and blackmail back to the Planet.
+So news-sheets were not.
+
+'And that's Illinois,' De Forest concluded. 'You see, in the Old Days,
+she was in the forefront of what they used to call "progress," and
+Chicago--'
+
+'Chicago?' said Takahira. 'That's the little place where there is
+Salati's Statue of the Nigger in Flames? A fine bit of old work.'
+
+'When did you see it?' asked De Forest quickly. 'They only unveil it
+once a year.'
+
+'I know. At Thanksgiving. It was then,' said Takahira, with a shudder.
+'And they sang MacDonough's Song, too.'
+
+'Whew!' De Forest whistled. 'I did not know that! I wish you'd told me
+before. MacDonough's Song may have had its uses when it was composed,
+but it was an infernal legacy for any man to leave behind.'
+
+'It's protective instinct, my dear fellows,' said Pirolo, rolling a
+cigarette. 'The Planet, she has had her dose of popular government. She
+suffers from inherited agoraphobia. She has no--ah--use for Crowds.'
+
+Dragomiroff leaned forward to give him a light. 'Certainly,' said the
+white-bearded Russian, 'the Planet has taken all precautions against
+Crowds for the past hundred years. What is our total population to-day?
+Six hundred million, we hope; five hundred, we think; but--but if next
+year's census shows more than four hundred and fifty, I myself will eat
+all the extra little babies. We have cut the birth-rate out--right out!
+For a long time we have said to Almighty God, "Thank You, Sir, but we do
+not much like Your game of life, so we will not play."'
+
+'Anyhow,' said Arnott defiantly, 'men live a century apiece on the
+average now.'
+
+'Oh, that is quite well! I am rich--you are rich--we are all rich and
+happy because we are so few and we live so long. Only _I_ think Almighty
+God He will remember what the Planet was like in the time of Crowds and
+the Plague. Perhaps He will send us nerves. Eh, Pirolo?'
+
+The Italian blinked into space. 'Perhaps,' he said, 'He has sent them
+already. Anyhow, you cannot argue with the Planet. She does not forget
+the Old Days, and--what can you do?'
+
+'For sure we can't remake the world.' De Forest glanced at the map
+flowing smoothly across the table from west to east. 'We ought to be
+over our ground by nine to-night. There won't be much sleep afterwards.'
+
+On which hint we dispersed, and I slept till Takahira waked me for
+dinner. Our ancestors thought nine hours' sleep ample for their little
+lives. We, living thirty years longer, feel ourselves defrauded with
+less than eleven out of the twenty-four.
+
+By ten o'clock we were over Lake Michigan. The west shore was lightless,
+except for a dull ground-glare at Chicago, and a single
+traffic-directing light--its leading beam pointing north--at Waukegan on
+our starboard bow. None of the Lake villages gave any sign of life; and
+inland, westward, so far as we could see, blackness lay unbroken on the
+level earth. We swooped down and skimmed low across the dark, throwing
+calls county by county. Now and again we picked up the faint glimmer of
+a house-light, or heard the rasp and rend of a cultivator being played
+across the fields, but Northern Illinois as a whole was one inky,
+apparently uninhabited, waste of high, forced woods. Only our
+illuminated map, with its little pointer switching from county to county
+as we wheeled and twisted, gave us any idea of our position. Our calls,
+urgent, pleading, coaxing or commanding, through the General
+Communicator brought no answer. Illinois strictly maintained her own
+privacy in the timber which she grew for that purpose.
+
+'Oh, this is absurd!' said De Forest. 'We're like an owl trying to work
+a wheat-field. Is this Bureau Creek? Let's land, Arnott, and get hold of
+some one.'
+
+We brushed over a belt of forced woodland--fifteen-year-old maple sixty
+feet high--grounded on a private meadow-dock, none too big, where we
+moored to our own grapnels, and hurried out through the warm dark night
+towards a light in a verandah. As we neared the garden gate I could have
+sworn we had stepped knee-deep in quicksand, for we could scarcely drag
+our feet against the prickling currents that clogged them. After five
+paces we stopped, wiping our foreheads, as hopelessly stuck on dry
+smooth turf as so many cows in a bog.
+
+'Pest!' cried Pirolo angrily. 'We are ground-circuited. And it is my own
+system of ground-circuits too! I know the pull.'
+
+'Good evening,' said a girl's voice from the verandah. 'Oh, I'm sorry!
+We've locked up. Wait a minute.'
+
+We heard the click of a switch, and almost fell forward as the currents
+round our knees were withdrawn.
+
+The girl laughed, and laid aside her knitting. An old-fashioned
+Controller stood at her elbow, which she reversed from time to time, and
+we could hear the snort and clank of the obedient cultivator half a mile
+away, behind the guardian woods.
+
+'Come in and sit down,' she said. 'I'm only playing a plough. Dad's
+gone to Chicago to--Ah! Then it was _your_ call I heard just now!'
+
+She had caught sight of Arnott's Board uniform, leaped to the switch,
+and turned it full on.
+
+We were checked, gasping, waist-deep in current this time, three yards
+from the verandah.
+
+'We only want to know what's the matter with Illinois,' said De Forest
+placidly.
+
+'Then hadn't you better go to Chicago and find out?' she answered.
+'There's nothing wrong here. We own ourselves.'
+
+'How can we go anywhere if you won't loose us?' De Forest went on, while
+Arnott scowled. Admirals of Fleets are still quite human when their
+dignity is touched.
+
+'Stop a minute--you don't know how funny you look!' She put her hands on
+her hips and laughed mercilessly.
+
+'Don't worry about that,' said Arnott, and whistled. A voice answered
+from the _Victor Pirolo_ in the meadow.
+
+'Only a single-fuse ground-circuit!' Arnott called. 'Sort it out gently,
+please.'
+
+We heard the ping of a breaking lamp; a fuse blew out somewhere in the
+verandah roof, frightening a nestful of birds. The ground-circuit was
+open. We stooped and rubbed our tingling ankles.
+
+'How rude--how very rude of you!' the maiden cried.
+
+''Sorry, but we haven't time to look funny,' said Arnott. 'We've got to
+go to Chicago; and if I were you, young lady, I'd go into the cellars
+for the next two hours, and take mother with me.'
+
+Off he strode, with us at his heels, muttering indignantly, till the
+humour of the thing struck and doubled him up with laughter at the foot
+of the gang-way ladder.
+
+'The Board hasn't shown what you might call a fat spark on this
+occasion,' said De Forest, wiping his eyes. 'I hope I didn't look as big
+a fool as you did, Arnott! Hullo! What on earth is that? Dad coming home
+from Chicago?'
+
+There was a rattle and a rush, and a five-plough cultivator, blades in
+air like so many teeth, trundled itself at us round the edge of the
+timber, fuming and sparking furiously.
+
+'Jump!' said Arnott, as we bundled ourselves through the none-too-wide
+door. 'Never mind about shutting it. Up!'
+
+The _Victor Pirolo_ lifted like a bubble, and the vicious machine shot
+just underneath us, clawing high as it passed.
+
+'There's a nice little spit-kitten for you!' said Arnott, dusting his
+knees. 'We ask her a civil question. First she circuits us and then she
+plays a cultivator at us!'
+
+'And then we fly,' said Dragomiroff. 'If I were forty years more young,
+I would go back and kiss her. Ho! Ho!'
+
+'I,' said Pirolo, 'would smack her! My pet ship has been chased by a
+dirty plough; a--how do you say?--agricultural implement.'
+
+'Oh, that is Illinois all over,' said De Forest. 'They don't content
+themselves with talking about privacy. They arrange to have it. And now,
+where's your alleged fleet, Arnott? We must assert ourselves against
+this wench.'
+
+Arnott pointed to the black heavens.
+
+'Waiting on--up there,' said he. 'Shall I give them the whole
+installation, sir?'
+
+'Oh, I don't think the young lady is quite worth that,' said De Forest.
+'Get over Chicago, and perhaps we'll see something.'
+
+In a few minutes we were hanging at two thousand feet over an oblong
+block of incandescence in the centre of the little town.
+
+'That looks like the old City Hall. Yes, there's Salati's Statue in
+front of it,' said Takahira. 'But what on earth are they doing to the
+place? I thought they used it for a market nowadays! Drop a
+little, please.'
+
+We could hear the sputter and crackle of road-surfacing machines--the
+cheap Western type which fuse stone and rubbish into lava-like ribbed
+glass for their rough country roads. Three or four surfacers worked on
+each side of a square of ruins. The brick and stone wreckage crumbled,
+slid forward, and presently spread out into white-hot pools of sticky
+slag, which the levelling-rods smoothed more or less flat. Already a
+third of the big block had been so treated, and was cooling to dull red
+before our astonished eyes.
+
+'It is the Old Market,' said De Forest. 'Well, there's nothing to
+prevent Illinois from making a road through a market. It doesn't
+interfere with traffic, that I can see.'
+
+'Hsh!' said Arnott, gripping me by the shoulder. 'Listen! They're
+singing. Why on the earth are they singing?'
+
+We dropped again till we could see the black fringe of people at the
+edge of that glowing square.
+
+At first they only roared against the roar of the surfacers and
+levellers. Then the words came up clearly--the words of the Forbidden
+Song that all men knew, and none let pass their lips--poor Pat
+MacDonough's Song, made in the days of the Crowds and the Plague--every
+silly word of it loaded to sparking-point with the Planet's inherited
+memories of horror, panic, fear and cruelty. And Chicago--innocent,
+contented little Chicago--was singing it aloud to the infernal tune that
+carried riot, pestilence and lunacy round our Planet a few
+generations ago!
+
+     'Once there was The People--Terror gave it birth;
+     Once there was The People, and it made a hell of earth!'
+
+(Then the stamp and pause):
+
+     'Earth arose and crushed it. Listen, oh, ye slain!
+     Once there was The People--it shall never be again!'
+
+The levellers thrust in savagely against the ruins as the song renewed
+itself again, again and again, louder than the crash of the
+melting walls.
+
+De Forest frowned.
+
+'I don't like that,' he said. 'They've broken back to the Old Days!
+They'll be killing somebody soon. I think we'd better divert
+'em, Arnott.'
+
+'Ay, ay, sir.' Arnott's hand went to his cap, and we heard the hull of
+the _Victor Pirolo_ ring to the command: 'Lamps! Both watches stand by!
+Lamps! Lamps! Lamps!'
+
+'Keep still!' Takahira whispered to me. 'Blinkers, please,
+quartermaster.'
+
+'It's all right--all right!' said Pirolo from behind, and to my horror
+slipped over my head some sort of rubber helmet that locked with a snap.
+I could feel thick colloid bosses before my eyes, but I stood in
+absolute darkness.
+
+'To save the sight,' he explained, and pushed me on to the chart-room
+divan. 'You will see in a minute.'
+
+As he spoke I became aware of a thin thread of almost intolerable light,
+let down from heaven at an immense distance--one vertical hairsbreadth
+of frozen lightning.
+
+'Those are our flanking ships,' said Arnott at my elbow. 'That one is
+over Galena. Look south--that other one's over Keithburg. Vincennes is
+behind us, and north yonder is Winthrop Woods. The Fleet's in position,
+sir'--this to De Forest. 'As soon as you give the word.'
+
+'Ah no! No!' cried Dragomiroff at my side. I could feel the old man
+tremble. 'I do not know all that you can do, but be kind! I ask you to
+be a little kind to them below! This is horrible--horrible!'
+
+     'When a Woman kills a Chicken,
+     Dynasties and Empires sicken,'
+
+Takahira quoted. 'It is too late to be gentle now.'
+
+'Then take off my helmet! Take off my helmet!' Dragomiroff began
+hysterically.
+
+Pirolo must have put his arm round him.
+
+'Hush,' he said, 'I am here. It is all right, Ivan, my dear fellow.'
+
+'I'll just send our little girl in Bureau County a warning,' said
+Arnott. 'She don't deserve it, but we'll allow her a minute or two to
+take mamma to the cellar.'
+
+In the utter hush that followed the growling spark after Arnott had
+linked up his Service Communicator with the invisible Fleet, we heard
+MacDonough's Song from the city beneath us grow fainter as we rose to
+position. Then I clapped my hand before my mask lenses, for it was as
+though the floor of Heaven had been riddled and all the inconceivable
+blaze of suns in the making was poured through the manholes.
+
+'You needn't count,' said Arnott. I had had no thought of such a thing.
+'There are two hundred and fifty keels up there, five miles apart. Full
+power, please, for another twelve seconds.'
+
+The firmament, as far as eye could reach, stood on pillars of white
+fire. One fell on the glowing square at Chicago, and turned it black.
+
+'Oh! Oh! Oh! Can men be allowed to do such things?' Dragomiroff cried,
+and fell across our knees.
+
+'Glass of water, please,' said Takahira to a helmeted shape that leaped
+forward. 'He is a little faint.'
+
+The lights switched off, and the darkness stunned like an avalanche. We
+could hear Dragomiroff's teeth on the glass edge.
+
+Pirolo was comforting him.
+
+'All right, all ra-ight,' he repeated. 'Come and lie down. Come below
+and take off your mask. I give you my word, old friend, it is all right.
+They are my siege-lights. Little Victor Pirolo's leetle lights. You know
+_me_! I do not hurt people.'
+
+'Pardon!' Dragomiroff moaned. 'I have never seen Death. I have never
+seen the Board take action. Shall we go down and burn them alive, or is
+that already done?'
+
+'Oh, hush,' said Pirolo, and I think he rocked him in his arms.
+
+'Do we repeat, sir?' Arnott asked De Forest.
+
+'Give 'em a minute's break,' De Forest replied. 'They may need it.'
+
+We waited a minute, and then MacDonough's Song, broken but defiant, rose
+from undefeated Chicago.
+
+'They seem fond of that tune,' said De Forest. 'I should let 'em have
+it, Arnott.'
+
+'Very good, sir,' said Arnott, and felt his way to the Communicator
+keys.
+
+No lights broke forth, but the hollow of the skies made herself the
+mouth for one note that touched the raw fibre of the brain. Men hear
+such sounds in delirium, advancing like tides from horizons beyond the
+ruled foreshores of space.
+
+'That's our pitch-pipe,' said Arnott. 'We may be a bit ragged. I've
+never conducted two hundred and fifty performers before.' He pulled out
+the couplers, and struck a full chord on the Service Communicators.
+
+The beams of light leaped down again, and danced, solemnly and awfully,
+a stilt-dance, sweeping thirty or forty miles left and right at each
+stiff-legged kick, while the darkness delivered itself--there is no
+scale to measure against that utterance--of the tune to which they kept
+time. Certain notes--one learnt to expect them with terror--cut through
+one's marrow, but, after three minutes, thought and emotion passed in
+indescribable agony.
+
+We saw, we heard, but I think we were in some sort swooning. The two
+hundred and fifty beams shifted, re-formed, straddled and split,
+narrowed, widened, rippled in ribbons, broke into a thousand white-hot
+parallel lines, melted and revolved in interwoven rings like
+old-fashioned engine-turning, flung up to the zenith, made as if to
+descend and renew the torment, halted at the last instant, twizzled
+insanely round the horizon, and vanished, to bring back for the
+hundredth time darkness more shattering than their instantly renewed
+light over all Illinois. Then the tune and lights ceased together, and
+we heard one single devastating wail that shook all the horizon as a
+rubbed wet finger shakes the rim of a bowl.
+
+'Ah, that is my new siren,' said Pirolo. 'You can break an iceberg in
+half, if you find the proper pitch. They will whistle by squadrons now.
+It is the wind through pierced shutters in the bows.'
+
+I had collapsed beside Dragomiroff, broken and snivelling feebly,
+because I had been delivered before my time to all the terrors of
+Judgment Day, and the Archangels of the Resurrection were hailing me
+naked across the Universe to the sound of the music of the spheres.
+
+Then I saw De Forest smacking Arnott's helmet with his open hand. The
+wailing died down in a long shriek as a black shadow swooped past us,
+and returned to her place above the lower clouds.
+
+'I hate to interrupt a specialist when he's enjoying himself,' said De
+Forest. 'But, as a matter of fact, all Illinois has been asking us to
+stop for these last fifteen seconds.'
+
+'What a pity.' Arnott slipped off his mask. 'I wanted you to hear us
+really hum. Our lower C can lift street-paving.'
+
+'It is Hell--Hell!' cried Dragomiroff, and sobbed aloud.
+
+Arnott looked away as he answered:
+
+'It's a few thousand volts ahead of the old shoot-'em-and-sink-'em game,
+but I should scarcely call it _that_. What shall I tell the Fleet, sir?'
+
+'Tell 'em we're very pleased and impressed. I don't think they need wait
+on any longer. There isn't a spark left down there.' De Forest pointed.
+'They'll be deaf and blind.'
+
+'Oh, I think not, sir. The demonstration lasted less than ten minutes.'
+
+'Marvellous!' Takahira sighed. 'I should have said it was half a night.
+Now, shall we go down and pick up the pieces?'
+
+'But first a small drink,' said Pirolo. 'The Board must not arrive
+weeping at its own works.'
+
+'I am an old fool--an old fool!' Dragomiroff began piteously. 'I did not
+know what would happen. It is all new to me. We reason with them in
+Little Russia.'
+
+Chicago North landing-tower was unlighted, and Arnott worked his ship
+into the clips by her own lights. As soon as these broke out we heard
+groanings of horror and appeal from many people below.
+
+'All right,' shouted Arnott into the darkness. 'We aren't beginning
+again!' We descended by the stairs, to find ourselves knee-deep in a
+grovelling crowd, some crying that they were blind, others beseeching us
+not to make any more noises, but the greater part writhing face
+downward, their hands or their caps before their eyes.
+
+It was Pirolo who came to our rescue. He climbed the side of a
+surfacing-machine, and there, gesticulating as though they could see,
+made oration to those afflicted people of Illinois.
+
+'You stchewpids!' he began. 'There is nothing to fuss for. Of course,
+your eyes will smart and be red to-morrow. You will look as if you and
+your wives had drunk too much, but in a little while you will see again
+as well as before. I tell you this, and I--I am Pirolo. Victor Pirolo!'
+
+The crowd with one accord shuddered, for many legends attach to Victor
+Pirolo of Foggia, deep in the secrets of God.
+
+'Pirolo?' An unsteady voice lifted itself. 'Then tell us was there
+anything except light in those lights of yours just now?'
+
+The question was repeated from every corner of the darkness.
+
+Pirolo laughed.
+
+'No!' he thundered. (Why have small men such large voices?) 'I give you
+my word and the Board's word that there was nothing except light--just
+light! You stchewpids! Your birth-rate is too low already as it is. Some
+day I must invent something to send it up, but send it down--never!'
+
+'Is that true?--We thought--somebody said--'
+
+One could feel the tension relax all round.
+
+'You too big fools,' Pirolo cried. 'You could have sent us a call and we
+would have told you.'
+
+'Send you a call!' a deep voice shouted. 'I wish you had been at our end
+of the wire.'
+
+'I'm glad I wasn't,' said De Forest. 'It was bad enough from behind the
+lamps. Never mind! It's over now. Is there any one here I can talk
+business with? I'm De Forest--for the Board.'
+
+'You might begin with me, for one--I'm Mayor,' the bass voice replied.
+
+A big man rose unsteadily from the street, and staggered towards us
+where we sat on the broad turf-edging, in front of the garden fences.
+
+'I ought to be the first on my feet. Am I?' said he.
+
+'Yes,' said De Forest, and steadied him as he dropped down beside us.
+
+'Hello, Andy. Is that you?' a voice called.
+
+'Excuse me,' said the Mayor; 'that sounds like my Chief of Police,
+Bluthner!'
+
+'Bluthner it is; and here's Mulligan and Keefe--on their feet.'
+
+'Bring 'em up please, Blut. We're supposed to be the Four in charge of
+this hamlet. What we says, goes. And, De Forest, what do you say?'
+
+'Nothing--yet,' De Forest answered, as we made room for the panting,
+reeling men. '_You've_ cut out of system. Well?'
+
+'Tell the steward to send down drinks, please,' Arnott whispered to an
+orderly at his side.
+
+'Good!' said the Mayor, smacking his dry lips. 'Now I suppose we can
+take it, De Forest, that henceforward the Board will administer
+us direct?'
+
+'Not if the Board can avoid it,' De Forest laughed. 'The A.B.C. is
+responsible for the planetary traffic only.'
+
+'_And all that that implies_.' The big Four who ran Chicago chanted
+their Magna Charta like children at school.
+
+'Well, get on,' said De Forest wearily. 'What is your silly trouble
+anyway?'
+
+'Too much dam' Democracy,' said the Mayor, laying his hand on De
+Forest's knee.
+
+'So? I thought Illinois had had her dose of that.'
+
+'She has. That's why. Blut, what did you do with our prisoners last
+night?'
+
+'Locked 'em in the water-tower to prevent the women killing 'em,' the
+Chief of Police replied. 'I'm too blind to move just yet, but--'
+
+'Arnott, send some of your people, please, and fetch 'em along,' said De
+Forest.
+
+'They're triple-circuited,' the Mayor called. 'You'll have to blow out
+three fuses.' He turned to De Forest, his large outline just visible in
+the paling darkness. 'I hate to throw any more work on the Board. I'm an
+administrator myself, but we've had a little fuss with our Serviles.
+What? In a big city there's bound to be a few men and women who can't
+live without listening to themselves, and who prefer drinking out of
+pipes they don't own both ends of. They inhabit flats and hotels all the
+year round. They say it saves 'em trouble. Anyway, it gives 'em more
+time to make trouble for their neighbours. We call 'em Serviles locally.
+And they are apt to be tuberculous.'
+
+'Just so!' said the man called Mulligan. Transportation is Civilisation.
+Democracy is Disease. I've proved it by the blood-test, every time.'
+
+'Mulligan's our Health Officer, and a one-idea man,' said the Mayor,
+laughing. 'But it's true that most Serviles haven't much control. They
+_will_ talk; and when people take to talking as a business, anything may
+arrive--mayn't it, De Forest?'
+
+'Anything--except the facts of the case,' said De Forest, laughing.
+
+'I'll give you those in a minute,' said the Mayor. 'Our Serviles got to
+talking--first in their houses and then on the streets, telling men and
+women how to manage their own affairs. (You can't teach a Servile not to
+finger his neighbour's soul.) That's invasion of privacy, of course, but
+in Chicago we'll suffer anything sooner than make Crowds. Nobody took
+much notice, and so I let 'em alone. My fault! I was warned there would
+be trouble, but there hasn't been a Crowd or murder in Illinois for
+nineteen years.'
+
+'Twenty-two,' said his Chief of Police.
+
+'Likely. Anyway, we'd forgot such things. So, from talking in the houses
+and on the streets, our Serviles go to calling a meeting at the Old
+Market yonder.' He nodded across the square where the wrecked buildings
+heaved up grey in the dawn-glimmer behind the square-cased statue of The
+Negro in Flames. 'There's nothing to prevent any one calling meetings
+except that it's against human nature to stand in a Crowd, besides being
+bad for the health. I ought to have known by the way our men and women
+attended that first meeting that trouble was brewing. There were as many
+as a thousand in the market-place, touching each other. Touching! Then
+the Serviles turned in all tongue-switches and talked, and we--'
+
+'What did they talk about?' said Takahira.
+
+'First, how badly things were managed in the city. That pleased us
+Four--we were on the platform--because we hoped to catch one or two
+good men for City work. You know how rare executive capacity is. Even if
+we didn't it's--it's refreshing to find any one interested enough in our
+job to damn our eyes. You don't know what it means to work, year in,
+year out, without a spark of difference with a living soul.'
+
+'Oh, don't we!' said De Forest. 'There are times on the Board when we'd
+give our positions if any one would kick us out and take hold of things
+themselves.'
+
+'But they won't,' said the Mayor ruefully. 'I assure you, sir, we Four
+have done things in Chicago, in the hope of rousing people, that would
+have discredited Nero. But what do they say? "Very good, Andy. Have it
+your own way. Anything's better than a Crowd. I'll go back to my land."
+You _can't_ do anything with folk who can go where they please, and
+don't want anything on God's earth except their own way. There isn't a
+kick or a kicker left on the Planet.'
+
+'Then I suppose that little shed yonder fell down by itself?' said De
+Forest. We could see the bare and still smoking ruins, and hear the
+slag-pools crackle as they hardened and set.
+
+'Oh, that's only amusement. 'Tell you later. As I was saying, our
+Serviles held the meeting, and pretty soon we had to ground-circuit the
+platform to save 'em from being killed. And that didn't make our people
+any more pacific.'
+
+'How d'you mean?' I ventured to ask.
+
+'If you've ever been ground-circuited,' said the Mayor, 'you'll know it
+don't improve any man's temper to be held up straining against nothing.
+No, sir! Eight or nine hundred folk kept pawing and buzzing like flies
+in treacle for two hours, while a pack of perfectly safe Serviles
+invades their mental and spiritual privacy, may be amusing to watch, but
+they are not pleasant to handle afterwards.'
+
+Pirolo chuckled.
+
+'Our folk own themselves. They were of opinion things were going too far
+and too fiery. I warned the Serviles; but they're born house-dwellers.
+Unless a fact hits 'em on the head they cannot see it. Would you believe
+me, they went on to talk of what they called "popular government"? They
+did! They wanted us to go back to the old Voodoo-business of voting with
+papers and wooden boxes, and word-drunk people and printed formulas, and
+news-sheets! They said they practised it among themselves about what
+they'd have to eat in their flats and hotels. Yes, sir! They stood up
+behind Bluthner's doubled ground-circuits, and they said that, in this
+present year of grace, _to_ self-owning men and women, _on_ that very
+spot! Then they finished'--he lowered his voice cautiously--'by talking
+about "The People." And then Bluthner he had to sit up all night in
+charge of the circuits because he couldn't trust his men to keep
+'em shut.'
+
+'It was trying 'em too high,' the Chief of Police broke in. 'But we
+couldn't hold the Crowd ground-circuited for ever. I gathered in all the
+Serviles on charge of Crowd-making, and put 'em in the water-tower, and
+then I let things cut loose. I had to! The District lit like a sparked
+gas-tank!'
+
+'The news was out over seven degrees of country,' the Mayor continued;
+'and when once it's a question of invasion of privacy, good-bye to right
+and reason in Illinois! They began turning out traffic-lights and
+locking up landing-towers on Thursday night. Friday, they stopped all
+traffic and asked for the Board to take over. Then they wanted to clean
+Chicago off the side of the Lake and rebuild elsewhere--just for a
+souvenir of "The People" that the Serviles talked about. I suggested
+that they should slag the Old Market where the meeting was held, while I
+turned in a call to you all on the Board. That kept 'em quiet till you
+came along. And--and now _you_ can take hold of the situation.'
+
+'Any chance of their quieting down?' De Forest asked.
+
+'You can try,' said the Mayor.
+
+De Forest raised his voice in the face of the reviving Crowd that had
+edged in towards us. Day was come.
+
+'Don't you think this business can be arranged?' he began. But there was
+a roar of angry voices:
+
+'We've finished with Crowds! We aren't going back to the Old Days! Take
+us over! Take the Serviles away! Administer direct or we'll kill 'em!
+Down with The People!'
+
+An attempt was made to begin MacDonough's Song. It got no further than
+the first line, for the _Victor Pirolo_ sent down a warning drone on one
+stopped horn. A wrecked side-wall of the Old Market tottered and fell
+inwards on the slag-pools. None spoke or moved till the last of the dust
+had settled down again, turning the steel case of Salati's Statue
+ashy grey.
+
+'You see you'll just _have_ to take us over,' the Mayor whispered.
+
+De Forest shrugged his shoulders.
+
+'You talk as if executive capacity could be snatched out of the air like
+so much horse-power. Can't you manage yourselves on any terms?' he said.
+
+'We can, if you say so. It will only cost those few lives to begin
+with,'
+
+The Mayor pointed across the square, where Arnott's men guided a
+stumbling group of ten or twelve men and women to the lake front and
+halted them under the Statue.
+
+'Now I think,' said Takahira under his breath, 'there will be trouble.'
+
+The mass in front of us growled like beasts.
+
+At that moment the sun rose clear, and revealed the blinking assembly to
+itself. As soon as it realized that it was a crowd we saw the shiver of
+horror and mutual repulsion shoot across it precisely as the steely
+flaws shot across the lake outside. Nothing was said, and, being half
+blind, of course it moved slowly. Yet in less than fifteen minutes most
+of that vast multitude--three thousand at the lowest count--melted away
+like frost on south eaves. The remnant stretched themselves on the
+grass, where a crowd feels and looks less like a crowd.
+
+'These mean business,' the Mayor whispered to Takahira. 'There are a
+goodish few women there who've borne children. I don't like it.'
+
+The morning draught off the lake stirred the trees round us with promise
+of a hot day; the sun reflected itself dazzlingly on the canister-shaped
+covering of Salati's Statue; cocks crew in the gardens, and we could
+hear gate-latches clicking in the distance as people stumblingly
+resought their homes.
+
+'I'm afraid there won't be any morning deliveries,' said De Forest. 'We
+rather upset things in the country last night.'
+
+'That makes no odds,' the Mayor returned. 'We're all provisioned for six
+months. _We_ take no chances.'
+
+Nor, when you come to think of it, does any one else. It must be
+three-quarters of a generation since any house or city faced a food
+shortage. Yet is there house or city on the Planet to-day that has not
+half a year's provisions laid in? We are like the shipwrecked seamen in
+the old books, who, having once nearly starved to death, ever afterwards
+hide away bits of food and biscuit. Truly we trust no Crowds, nor system
+based on Crowds!
+
+De Forest waited till the last footstep had died away. Meantime the
+prisoners at the base of the Statue shuffled, posed, and fidgeted, with
+the shamelessness of quite little children. None of them were more than
+six feet high, and many of them were as grey-haired as the ravaged,
+harassed heads of old pictures. They huddled together in actual touch,
+while the crowd, spaced at large intervals, looked at them with
+congested eyes.
+
+Suddenly a man among them began to talk. The Mayor had not in the least
+exaggerated. It appeared that our Planet lay sunk in slavery beneath the
+heel of the Aërial Board of Control. The orator urged us to arise in our
+might, burst our prison doors and break our fetters (all his metaphors,
+by the way, were of the most mediæval). Next he demanded that every
+matter of daily life, including most of the physical functions, should
+be submitted for decision at any time of the week, month, or year to, I
+gathered, anybody who happened to be passing by or residing within a
+certain radius, and that everybody should forthwith abandon his concerns
+to settle the matter, first by crowd-making, next by talking to the
+crowds made, and lastly by describing crosses on pieces of paper, which
+rubbish should later be counted with certain mystic ceremonies and
+oaths. Out of this amazing play, he assured us, would automatically
+arise a higher, nobler, and kinder world, based--he demonstrated this
+with the awful lucidity of the insane--based on the sanctity of the
+Crowd and the villainy of the single person. In conclusion, he called
+loudly upon God to testify to his personal merits and integrity. When
+the flow ceased, I turned bewildered to Takahira, who was
+nodding solemnly.
+
+'Quite correct,' said he. 'It is all in the old books. He has left
+nothing out, not even the war-talk.'
+
+'But I don't see how this stuff can upset a child, much less a
+district,' I replied.
+
+'Ah, you are too young,' said Dragomiroff. 'For another thing, you are
+not a mamma. Please look at the mammas.'
+
+Ten or fifteen women who remained had separated themselves from the
+silent men, and were drawing in towards the prisoners. It reminded one
+of the stealthy encircling, before the rush in at the quarry, of wolves
+round musk-oxen in the North. The prisoners saw, and drew together more
+closely. The Mayor covered his face with his hands for an instant. De
+Forest, bareheaded, stepped forward between the prisoners, and the
+slowly, stiffly moving line.
+
+'That's all very interesting,' he said to the dry-lipped orator. 'But
+the point seems that you've been making crowds and invading privacy.'
+
+A woman stepped forward, and would have spoken, but there was a quick
+assenting murmur from the men, who realised that De Forest was trying to
+pull the situation down to ground-line.
+
+'Yes! Yes!' they cried. 'We cut out because they made crowds and invaded
+privacy! Stick to that! Keep on that switch! Lift the Serviles out of
+this! The Board's in charge! Hsh!'
+
+'Yes, the Board's in charge,' said De Forest. 'I'll take formal evidence
+of crowd-making if you like, but the Members of the Board can testify to
+it. Will that do?'
+
+The women had closed in another pace, with hands that clenched and
+unclenched at their sides.
+
+'Good! Good enough!' the men cried. 'We're content. Only take them away
+quickly.'
+
+'Come along up!' said De Forest to the captives, 'Breakfast is quite
+ready.'
+
+It appeared, however, that they did not wish to go. They intended to
+remain in Chicago and make crowds. They pointed out that De Forest's
+proposal was gross invasion of privacy.
+
+'My dear fellow,' said Pirolo to the most voluble of the leaders, 'you
+hurry, or your crowd that can't be wrong will kill you!'
+
+'But that would be murder,' answered the believer in crowds; and there
+was a roar of laughter from all sides that seemed to show the crisis
+had broken.
+
+A woman stepped forward from the line of women, laughing, I protest, as
+merrily as any of the company. One hand, of course, shaded her eyes, the
+other was at her throat.
+
+'Oh, they needn't be afraid of being killed!' she called.
+
+'Not in the least,' said De Forest. 'But don't you think that, now the
+Board's in charge, you might go home while we get these people away?'
+
+'I shall be home long before that. It--it has been rather a trying day.'
+
+She stood up to her full height, dwarfing even De Forest's
+six-foot-eight, and smiled, with eyes closed against the fierce light.
+
+'Yes, rather,' said De Forest. 'I'm afraid you feel the glare a little.
+We'll have the ship down.'
+
+He motioned to the _Pirolo_ to drop between us and the sun, and at the
+same time to loop-circuit the prisoners, who were a trifle unsteady. We
+saw them stiffen to the current where they stood. The woman's voice went
+on, sweet and deep and unshaken:
+
+'I don't suppose you men realise how much this--this sort of thing means
+to a woman. I've borne three. We women don't want our children given to
+Crowds. It must be an inherited instinct. Crowds make trouble. They
+bring back the Old Days. Hate, fear, blackmail, publicity, "The
+People"--_That! That! That_!' She pointed to the Statue, and the crowd
+growled once more.
+
+'Yes, if they are allowed to go on,' said De Forest. 'But this little
+affair--'
+
+'It means so much to us women that this--this little affair should never
+happen again. Of course, never's a big word, but one feels so strongly
+that it is important to stop crowds at the very beginning. Those
+creatures'--she pointed with her left hand at the prisoners swaying like
+seaweed in a tideway as the circuit pulled them--'those people have
+friends and wives and children in the city and elsewhere. One doesn't
+want anything done to _them_, you know. It's terrible to force a human
+being out of fifty or sixty years of good life. I'm only forty myself.
+_I_ know. But, at the same time, one feels that an example should be
+made, because no price is too heavy to pay if--if these people and _all
+that they imply_ can be put an end to. Do you quite understand, or would
+you be kind enough to tell your men to take the casing off the Statue?
+It's worth looking at.'
+
+'I understand perfectly. But I don't think anybody here wants to see
+the Statue on an empty stomach. Excuse me one moment.' De Forest called
+up to the ship, 'A flying loop ready on the port side, if you please.'
+Then to the woman he said with some crispness, 'You might leave us a
+little discretion in the matter.'
+
+'Oh, of course. Thank you for being so patient. I know my arguments are
+silly, but--' She half turned away and went on in a changed voice,
+'Perhaps this will help you to decide.'
+
+She threw out her right arm with a knife in it. Before the blade could
+be returned to her throat or her bosom it was twitched from her grip,
+sparked as it flew out of the shadow of the ship above, and fell
+flashing in the sunshine at the foot of the Statue fifty yards away. The
+outflung arm was arrested, rigid as a bar for an instant, till the
+releasing circuit permitted her to bring it slowly to her side. The
+other women shrank back silent among the men.
+
+Pirolo rubbed his hands, and Takahira nodded.
+
+'That was clever of you, De Forest,' said he.
+
+'What a glorious pose!' Dragomiroff murmured, for the frightened woman
+was on the edge of tears.
+
+'Why did you stop me? I would have done it!' she cried.
+
+'I have no doubt you would,' said De Forest. 'But we can't waste a life
+like yours on these people. I hope the arrest didn't sprain your wrist;
+it's so hard to regulate a flying loop. But I think you are quite right
+about those persons' women and children. We'll take them all away with
+us if you promise not to do anything stupid to yourself.'
+
+'I promise--I promise.' She controlled herself with an effort. 'But it
+is so important to us women. We know what it means; and I thought if you
+saw I was in earnest--'
+
+'I saw you were, and you've gained your point. I shall take all your
+Serviles away with me at once. The Mayor will make lists of their
+friends and families in the city and the district, and he'll ship them
+after us this afternoon.'
+
+'Sure,' said the Mayor, rising to his feet. 'Keefe, if you can see,
+hadn't you better finish levelling off the Old Market? It don't look
+sightly the way it is now, and we shan't use it for crowds any more.'
+
+'I think you had better wipe out that Statue as well, Mr. Mayor,' said
+De Forest. 'I don't question its merits as a work of art, but I believe
+it's a shade morbid.'
+
+'Certainly, sir. Oh, Keefe! Slag the Nigger before you go on to fuse the
+Market. I'll get to the Communicators and tell the District that the
+Board is in charge. Are you making any special appointments, sir?'
+
+'None. We haven't men to waste on these back-woods. Carry on as before,
+but under the Board. Arnott, run your Serviles aboard, please. Ground
+ship and pass them through the bilge-doors. We'll wait till we've
+finished with this work of art.'
+
+The prisoners trailed past him, talking fluently, but unable to
+gesticulate in the drag of the current. Then the surfacers rolled up,
+two on each side of the Statue. With one accord the spectators looked
+elsewhere, but there was no need. Keefe turned on full power, and the
+thing simply melted within its case. All I saw was a surge of white-hot
+metal pouring over the plinth, a glimpse of Salati's inscription, 'To the
+Eternal Memory of the Justice of the People,' ere the stone base itself
+cracked and powdered into finest lime. The crowd cheered.
+
+'Thank you,' said De Forest; 'but we want our break-fasts, and I expect
+you do too. Good-bye, Mr. Mayor! Delighted to see you at any time, but I
+hope I shan't have to, officially, for the next thirty years. Good-bye,
+madam. Yes. We're all given to nerves nowadays. I suffer from them
+myself. Good-bye, gentlemen all! You're under the tyrannous heel of the
+Board from this moment, but if ever you feel like breaking your fetters
+you've only to let us know. This is no treat to us. Good luck!'
+
+We embarked amid shouts, and did not check our lift till they had
+dwindled into whispers. Then De Forest flung himself on the chart-room
+divan and mopped his forehead.
+
+'I don't mind men,' he panted, 'but women are the devil!'
+
+'Still the devil,' said Pirolo cheerfully. 'That one would have
+suicided.'
+
+'I know it. That was why I signalled for the flying loop to be clapped
+on her. I owe you an apology for that, Arnott. I hadn't time to catch
+your eye, and you were busy with our caitiffs. By the way, who actually
+answered my signal? It was a smart piece of work.'
+
+'Ilroy,' said Arnott; 'but he overloaded the wave. It may be pretty
+gallery-work to knock a knife out of a lady's hand, but didn't you
+notice how she rubbed 'em? He scorched her fingers. Slovenly, I
+call it.'
+
+'Far be it from me to interfere with Fleet discipline, but don't be too
+hard on the boy. If that woman had killed herself they would have killed
+every Servile and everything related to a Servile throughout the
+district by nightfall.'
+
+'That was what she was playing for,' Takahira said. 'And with our Fleet
+gone we could have done nothing to hold them.'
+
+'I may be ass enough to walk into a ground-circuit,' said Arnott, 'but I
+don't dismiss my Fleet till I'm reasonably sure that trouble is over.
+They're in position still, and I intend to keep 'em there till the
+Serviles are shipped out of the district. That last little crowd meant
+murder, my friends.'
+
+'Nerves! All nerves!' said Pirolo. 'You cannot argue with agoraphobia.'
+
+'And it is not as if they had seen much dead--or _is_ it?' said
+Takahira.
+
+'In all my ninety years I have never seen Death.' Dragomiroff spoke as
+one who would excuse himself. 'Perhaps that was why--last night--'
+
+Then it came out as we sat over breakfast, that, with the exception of
+Arnott and Pirolo, none of us had ever seen a corpse, or knew in what
+manner the spirit passes.
+
+'We're a nice lot to flap about governing the Planet,' De Forest
+laughed. 'I confess, now it's all over, that my main fear was I mightn't
+be able to pull it off without losing a life.'
+
+'I thought of that too,' said Arnott; 'but there's no death reported,
+and I've inquired everywhere. What are we supposed to do with our
+passengers? I've fed 'em.'
+
+'We're between two switches,' De Forest drawled. 'If we drop them in any
+place that isn't under the Board the natives will make their presence an
+excuse for cutting out, same as Illinois did, and forcing the Board to
+take over. If we drop them in any place under the Board's control
+they'll be killed as soon as our backs are turned.'
+
+'If you say so,' said Pirolo thoughtfully, 'I can guarantee that they
+will become extinct in process of time, quite happily. What is their
+birth-rate now?'
+
+'Go down and ask 'em,' said De Forest.
+
+'I think they might become nervous and tear me to bits,' the philosopher
+of Foggia replied.
+
+'Not really? Well?'
+
+'Open the bilge-doors,' said Takahira with a downward jerk of the thumb.
+
+'Scarcely--after all the trouble we've taken to save 'em,' said De
+Forest.
+
+'Try London,' Arnott suggested. 'You could turn Satan himself loose
+there, and they'd only ask him to dinner.'
+
+'Good man! You've given me an idea. Vincent! Oh, Vincent!' He threw the
+General Communicator open so that we could all hear, and in a few
+minutes the chart-room filled with the rich, fruity voice of Leopold
+Vincent, who has purveyed all London her choicest amusements for the
+last thirty years. We answered with expectant grins, as though we were
+actually in the stalls of, say, the Combination on a first night.
+
+'We've picked up something in your line,' De Forest began.
+
+'That's good, dear man. If it's old enough. There's nothing to beat the
+old things for business purposes. Have you seen _London, Chatham, and
+Dover_ at Earl's Court? No? I thought I missed you there. Immense! I've
+had the real steam locomotive engines built from the old designs and the
+iron rails cast specially by hand. Cloth cushions in the carriages, too!
+Immense! And paper railway tickets. And Polly Milton.'
+
+'Polly Milton back again!' said Arnott rapturously. 'Book me two stalls
+for to-morrow night. What's she singing now, bless her?'
+
+'The old songs. Nothing comes up to the old touch. Listen to this, dear
+men.' Vincent carolled with flourishes:
+
+     Oh, cruel lamps of London,
+     If tears your light could drown,
+     Your victims' eyes would weep them,
+     Oh, lights of London Town!
+
+'Then they weep.'
+
+'You see?' Pirolo waved his hands at us. 'The old world always weeped
+when it saw crowds together. It did not know why, but it weeped. We know
+why, but we do not weep, except when we pay to be made to by fat, wicked
+old Vincent.'
+
+'Old, yourself!' Vincent laughed. 'I'm a public benefactor, I keep the
+world soft and united.'
+
+'And I'm De Forest of the Board,' said De Forest acidly, 'trying to get
+a little business done. As I was saying, I've picked up a few people
+in Chicago.'
+
+'I cut out. Chicago is--'
+
+'Do listen! They're perfectly unique.'
+
+'Do they build houses of baked mudblocks while you wait--eh? That's an
+old contact.'
+
+'They're an untouched primitive community, with all the old ideas.'
+
+'Sewing-machines and maypole-dances? Cooking on coal-gas stoves,
+lighting pipes with matches, and driving horses? Gerolstein tried that
+last year. An absolute blow-out!'
+
+De Forest plugged him wrathfully, and poured out the story of our doings
+for the last twenty-four hours on the top-note.
+
+'And they do it _all_ in public,' he concluded. 'You can't stop 'em. The
+more public, the better they are pleased. They'll talk for hours--like
+you! Now you can come in again!'
+
+'Do you really mean they know how to vote?' said Vincent. 'Can they act
+it?'
+
+'Act? It's their life to 'em! And you never saw such faces! Scarred
+like volcanoes. Envy, hatred, and malice in plain sight. Wonderfully
+flexible voices. They weep, too.'
+
+'Aloud? In public?'
+
+'I guarantee. Not a spark of shame or reticence in the entire
+installation. It's the chance of your career.'
+
+'D'you say you've brought their voting props along--those papers and
+ballot-box things?'
+
+'No, confound you! I'm not a luggage-lifter. Apply direct to the Mayor
+of Chicago. He'll forward you everything. Well?'
+
+'Wait a minute. Did Chicago want to kill 'em? That 'ud look well on the
+Communicators.'
+
+'Yes! They were only rescued with difficulty from a howling mob--if you
+know what that is.'
+
+'But I don't,' answered the Great Vincent simply.
+
+'Well then, they'll tell you themselves. They can make speeches hours
+long.'
+
+'How many are there?'
+
+'By the time we ship 'em all over they'll be perhaps a hundred, counting
+children. An old world in miniature. Can't you see it?'
+
+'M-yes; but I've got to pay for it if it's a blow-out, dear man.'
+
+'They can sing the old war songs in the streets. They can get
+word-drunk, and make crowds, and invade privacy in the genuine
+old-fashioned way; and they'll do the voting trick as often as you ask
+'em a question.'
+
+'Too good!' said Vincent.
+
+'You unbelieving Jew! I've got a dozen head aboard here. I'll put you
+through direct. Sample 'em yourself.'
+
+He lifted the switch and we listened. Our passengers on the lower deck
+at once, but not less than five at a time, explained themselves to
+Vincent. They had been taken from the bosom of their families, stripped
+of their possessions, given food without finger-bowls, and cast into
+captivity in a noisome dungeon.
+
+'But look here,' said Arnott aghast; 'they're saying what isn't true. My
+lower deck isn't noisome, and I saw to the finger-bowls myself.'
+
+'My people talk like that sometimes in Little Russia,' said Dragomiroff.
+'We reason with them. We never kill. No!'
+
+'But it's not true,' Arnott insisted. 'What can you do with people who
+don't tell facts? They're mad!'
+
+'Hsh!' said Pirolo, his hand to his ear. 'It is such a little time since
+all the Planet told lies.'
+
+We heard Vincent silkily sympathetic. Would they, he asked, repeat their
+assertions in public--before a vast public? Only let Vincent give them a
+chance, and the Planet, they vowed, should ring with their wrongs. Their
+aim in life--two women and a man explained it together--was to reform
+the world. Oddly enough, this also had been Vincent's life-dream. He
+offered them an arena in which to explain, and by their living example
+to raise the Planet to loftier levels. He was eloquent on the moral
+uplift of a simple, old-world life presented in its entirety to a
+deboshed civilisation.
+
+Could they--would they--for three months certain, devote themselves
+under his auspices, as missionaries, to the elevation of mankind at a
+place called Earl's Court, which he said, with some truth, was one of
+the intellectual centres of the Planet? They thanked him, and demanded
+(we could hear his chuckle of delight) time to discuss and to vote on
+the matter. The vote, solemnly managed by counting heads--one head, one
+vote--was favourable. His offer, therefore, was accepted, and they moved
+a vote of thanks to him in two speeches--one by what they called the
+'proposer' and the other by the 'seconder.'
+
+Vincent threw over to us, his voice shaking with gratitude:
+
+'I've got 'em! Did you hear those speeches? That's Nature, dear men. Art
+can't teach _that._ And they voted as easily as lying. I've never had a
+troupe of natural liars before. Bless you, dear men! Remember, you're on
+my free lists for ever, anywhere--all of you. Oh, Gerolstein will be
+sick--sick!'
+
+'Then you think they'll do?' said De Forest.
+
+'Do? The Little Village'll go crazy! I'll knock up a series of old-world
+plays for 'em. Their voices will make you laugh and cry. My God, dear
+men, where _do_ you suppose they picked up all their misery from, on
+this sweet earth? I'll have a pageant of the world's beginnings, and
+Mosenthal shall do the music. I'll--'
+
+'Go and knock up a village for 'em by to-night. We'll meet you at No. 15
+West Landing Tower,' said De Forest. 'Remember the rest will be coming
+along to-morrow.'
+
+'Let 'em all come!' said Vincent. 'You don't know how hard it is
+nowadays even for me, to find something that really gets under the
+public's damned iridium-plated hide. But I've got it at last. Good-bye!'
+
+'Well,' said De Forest when we had finished laughing, 'if any one
+understood corruption in London I might have played off Vincent against
+Gerolstein, and sold my captives at enormous prices. As it is, I shall
+have to be their legal adviser to-night when the contracts are signed.
+And they won't exactly press any commission on me, either.'
+
+'Meantime,' said Takahira, 'we cannot, of course, confine members of
+Leopold Vincent's last-engaged company. Chairs for the ladies,
+please, Arnott.'
+
+'Then I go to bed,' said De Forest. 'I can't face any more women!' And
+he vanished.
+
+When our passengers were released and given another meal (finger-bowls
+came first this time) they told us what they thought of us and the
+Board; and, like Vincent, we all marvelled how they had contrived to
+extract and secrete so much bitter poison and unrest out of the good
+life God gives us. They raged, they stormed, they palpitated, flushed
+and exhausted their poor, torn nerves, panted themselves into silence,
+and renewed the senseless, shameless attacks.
+
+'But can't you understand,' said Pirolo pathetically to a shrieking
+woman, 'that if we'd left you in Chicago you'd have been killed?'
+
+'No, we shouldn't. You were bound to save us from being murdered.'
+
+'Then we should have had to kill a lot of other people.'
+
+'That doesn't matter. We were preaching the Truth. You can't stop us. We
+shall go on preaching in London; and _then_ you'll see!'
+
+'You can see now,' said Pirolo, and opened a lower shutter.
+
+We were closing on the Little Village, with her three million people
+spread out at ease inside her ring of girdling Main-Traffic
+lights--those eight fixed beams at Chatham, Tonbridge, Redhill, Dorking,
+Woking, St. Albans, Chipping Ongar, and Southend.
+
+Leopold Vincent's new company looked, with small pale faces, at the
+silence, the size, and the separated houses.
+
+Then some began to weep aloud, shamelessly--always without shame.
+
+
+
+     MACDONOUGH'S SONG
+
+     Whether the State can loose and bind
+       In Heaven as well as on Earth:
+     If it be wiser to kill mankind
+       Before or after the birth--
+     These are matters of high concern
+       Where State-kept schoolmen are;
+     But Holy State (we have lived to learn)
+       Endeth in Holy War.
+
+     Whether The People be led by the Lord,
+       Or lured by the loudest throat:
+     If it be quicker to die by the sword
+       Or cheaper to die by vote--
+     These are the things we have dealt with once,
+       (And they will not rise from their grave)
+     For Holy People, however it runs,
+       Endeth in wholly Slave.
+
+     Whatsoever, for any cause,
+       Seeketh to take or give,
+     Power above or beyond the Laws,
+       Suffer it not to live!
+     Holy State or Holy King--
+       Or Holy People's Will--
+     Have no truck with the senseless thing.
+       Order the guns and kill!
+         _Saying--after--me:--_
+
+     _Once there was The People--Terror gave it birth;
+     Once there was The People and it made a Hell of Earth.
+     Earth arose and crushed it. Listen, O ye slain!
+     Once there was The People--it shall never be again!_
+
+
+
+
+Friendly Brook
+
+(March 1914)
+
+
+The valley was so choked with fog that one could scarcely see a cow's
+length across a field. Every blade, twig, bracken-frond, and hoof-print
+carried water, and the air was filled with the noise of rushing ditches
+and field-drains, all delivering to the brook below. A week's November
+rain on water-logged land had gorged her to full flood, and she
+proclaimed it aloud.
+
+Two men in sackcloth aprons were considering an untrimmed hedge that ran
+down the hillside and disappeared into mist beside those roarings. They
+stood back and took stock of the neglected growth, tapped an elbow of
+hedge-oak here, a mossed beech-stub there, swayed a stooled ash back and
+forth, and looked at each other.
+
+'I reckon she's about two rod thick,' said Jabez the younger, 'an' she
+hasn't felt iron since--when has she, Jesse?'
+
+'Call it twenty-five year, Jabez, an' you won't be far out.'
+
+'Umm!' Jabez rubbed his wet handbill on his wetter coat-sleeve. 'She
+ain't a hedge. She's all manner o' trees. We'll just about have to--' He
+paused, as professional etiquette required.
+
+'Just about have to side her up an' see what she'll bear. But hadn't we
+best--?' Jesse paused in his turn, both men being artists and equals.
+
+'Get some kind o' line to go by.' Jabez ranged up and down till he found
+a thinner place, and with clean snicks of the handbill revealed the
+original face of the fence. Jesse took over the dripping stuff as it
+fell forward, and, with a grasp and a kick, made it to lie orderly on
+the bank till it should be faggoted.
+
+By noon a length of unclean jungle had turned itself into a cattle-proof
+barrier, tufted here and there with little plumes of the sacred holly
+which no woodman touches without orders.
+
+'Now we've a witness-board to go by!' said Jesse at last.
+
+'She won't be as easy as this all along,' Jabez answered. 'She'll need
+plenty stakes and binders when we come to the brook.'
+
+'Well, ain't we plenty?' Jesse pointed to the ragged perspective ahead
+of them that plunged downhill into the fog. 'I lay there's a cord an' a
+half o' firewood, let alone faggots, 'fore we get anywheres anigh
+the brook.'
+
+'The brook's got up a piece since morning,' said Jabez. 'Sounds like's
+if she was over Wickenden's door-stones.'
+
+Jesse listened, too. There was a growl in the brook's roar as though she
+worried something hard.
+
+'Yes. She's over Wickenden's door-stones,' he replied. 'Now she'll flood
+acrost Alder Bay an' that'll ease her.'
+
+'She won't ease Jim Wickenden's hay none if she do,' Jabez grunted. 'I
+told Jim he'd set that liddle hay-stack o' his too low down in the
+medder. I _told_ him so when he was drawin' the bottom for it.'
+
+'I told him so, too,' said Jesse. 'I told him 'fore ever you did. I told
+him when the County Council tarred the roads up along.' He pointed
+uphill, where unseen automobiles and road-engines droned past
+continually. 'A tarred road, she shoots every drop o' water into a
+valley same's a slate roof. 'Tisn't as 'twas in the old days, when the
+waters soaked in and soaked out in the way o' nature. It rooshes off
+they tarred roads all of a lump, and naturally every drop is bound to
+descend into the valley. And there's tar roads both two sides this
+valley for ten mile. That's what I told Jim Wickenden when they tarred
+the roads last year. But he's a valley-man. He don't hardly ever
+journey uphill.'
+
+'What did he say when you told him that?' Jabez demanded, with a little
+change of voice.
+
+'Why? What did he say to you when _you_ told him?' was the answer.
+
+'What he said to you, I reckon, Jesse.'
+
+'Then, you don't need me to say it over again, Jabez.'
+
+'Well, let be how 'twill, what was he gettin' _after_ when he said what
+he said to me?' Jabez insisted.
+
+'I dunno; unless you tell me what manner o' words he said to _you_.'
+
+Jabez drew back from the hedge--all hedges are nests of treachery and
+eavesdropping--and moved to an open cattle-lodge in the centre of
+the field.
+
+'No need to go ferretin' around,' said Jesse. 'None can't see us here
+'fore we see them.'
+
+'What was Jim Wickenden gettin' at when I said he'd set his stack too
+near anigh the brook?' Jabez dropped his voice. 'He was in his mind.'
+
+'He ain't never been out of it yet to my knowledge,' Jesse drawled, and
+uncorked his tea-bottle.
+
+'But then Jim says: "I ain't goin' to shift my stack a yard," he says.
+"The Brook's been good friends to me, and if she be minded," he says,
+"to take a snatch at my hay, I ain't settin' out to withstand her."
+That's what Jim Wickenden says to me last--last June-end 'twas,'
+said Jabez.
+
+'Nor he hasn't shifted his stack, neither,' Jesse replied. 'An' if
+there's more rain, the brook she'll shift it for him.'
+
+'No need tell _me_! But I want to know what Jim was gettin' _at_?'
+
+Jabez opened his clasp-knife very deliberately; Jesse as carefully
+opened his. They unfolded the newspapers that wrapped their dinners,
+coiled away and pocketed the string that bound the packages, and sat
+down on the edge of the lodge manger. The rain began to fall again
+through the fog, and the brook's voice rose.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+'But I always allowed Mary was his lawful child, like,' said Jabez,
+after Jesse had spoken for a while.
+
+''Tain't so.... Jim Wickenden's woman she never made nothing. She come
+out o' Lewes with her stockin's round her heels, an' she never made nor
+mended aught till she died. _He_ had to light fire an' get breakfast
+every mornin' except Sundays, while she sowed it abed. Then she took an'
+died, sixteen, seventeen, year back; but she never had no childern.'
+
+'They was valley-folk,' said Jabez apologetically. 'I'd no call to go in
+among 'em, but I always allowed Mary--'
+
+'No. Mary come out o' one o' those Lunnon Childern Societies. After his
+woman died, Jim got his mother back from his sister over to Peasmarsh,
+which she'd gone to house with when Jim married. His mother kept house
+for Jim after his woman died. They do say 'twas his mother led him on
+toward adoptin' of Mary--to furnish out the house with a child, like,
+and to keep him off of gettin' a noo woman. He mostly done what his
+mother contrived. 'Cardenly, twixt 'em, they asked for a child from one
+o' those Lunnon societies--same as it might ha' been these Barnardo
+children--an' Mary was sent down to 'em, in a candle-box, I've heard.'
+
+'Then Mary is chance-born. I never knowed that,' said Jabez. 'Yet I must
+ha' heard it some time or other ...'
+
+'No. She ain't. 'Twould ha' been better for some folk if she had been.
+She come to Jim in a candle-box with all the proper papers--lawful child
+o' some couple in Lunnon somewheres--mother dead, father drinkin'.
+_And_ there was that Lunnon society's five shillin's a week for her.
+Jim's mother she wouldn't despise week-end money, but I never heard Jim
+was much of a muck-grubber. Let be how 'twill, they two mothered up Mary
+no bounds, till it looked at last like they'd forgot she wasn't their
+own flesh an' blood. Yes, I reckon they forgot Mary wasn't their'n
+by rights.'
+
+'That's no new thing,' said Jabez. 'There's more'n one or two in this
+parish wouldn't surrender back their Bernarders. You ask Mark Copley an'
+his woman an' that Bernarder cripple-babe o' theirs.'
+
+'Maybe they need the five shillin',' Jesse suggested.
+
+'It's handy,' said Jabez. 'But the child's more. "Dada" he says, an'
+"Mumma" he says, with his great rollin' head-piece all hurdled up in
+that iron collar. _He_ won't live long--his backbone's rotten, like. But
+they Copleys do just about set store by him--five bob or no five bob.'
+
+'Same way with Jim an' his mother,' Jesse went on. 'There was talk
+betwixt 'em after a few years o' not takin' any more week-end money for
+Mary; but let alone _she_ never passed a farden in the mire 'thout
+longin's, Jim didn't care, like, to push himself forward into the
+Society's remembrance. So naun came of it. The week-end money would ha'
+made no odds to Jim--not after his uncle willed him they four cottages
+at Eastbourne _an'_ money in the bank.'
+
+'That was true, too, then? I heard something in a scadderin'
+word-o'-mouth way,' said Jabez.
+
+'I'll answer for the house property, because Jim he requested my signed
+name at the foot o' some papers concernin' it. Regardin' the money in
+the bank, he nature-ally wouldn't like such things talked about all
+round the parish, so he took strangers for witnesses.'
+
+'Then 'twill make Mary worth seekin' after?'
+
+'She'll need it. Her Maker ain't done much for her outside nor yet in.'
+
+'That ain't no odds.' Jabez shook his head till the water showered off
+his hat-brim. 'If Mary has money, she'll be wed before any likely pore
+maid. She's cause to be grateful to Jim.'
+
+'She hides it middlin' close, then,' said Jesse. 'It don't sometimes
+look to me as if Mary has her natural rightful feelin's. She don't put
+on an apron o' Mondays 'thout being druv to it--in the kitchen _or_ the
+hen-house. She's studyin' to be a school-teacher. She'll make a beauty!
+I never knowed her show any sort o' kindness to nobody--not even when
+Jim's mother was took dumb. No! 'Twadn't no stroke. It stifled the old
+lady in the throat here. First she couldn't shape her words no shape;
+then she clucked, like, an' lastly she couldn't more than suck down
+spoon-meat an' hold her peace. Jim took her to Doctor Harding, an'
+Harding he bundled her off to Brighton Hospital on a ticket, but they
+couldn't make no stay to her afflictions there; and she was bundled off
+to Lunnon, an' they lit a great old lamp inside her, and Jim told me
+they couldn't make out nothing in no sort there; and, along o' one thing
+an' another, an' all their spyin's and pryin's, she come back a hem
+sight worse than when she started. Jim said he'd have no more
+hospitalizin', so he give her a slate, which she tied to her
+waist-string, and what she was minded to say she writ on it.'
+
+'Now, I never knowed that! But they're valley-folk,' Jabez repeated.
+
+''Twadn't particular noticeable, for she wasn't a talkin' woman any time
+o' her days. Mary had all three's tongue.... Well, then, two years this
+summer, come what I'm tellin' you. Mary's Lunnon father, which they'd
+put clean out o' their minds, arrived down from Lunnon with the law on
+his side, sayin' he'd take his daughter back to Lunnon, after all. I was
+working for Mus' Dockett at Pounds Farm that summer, but I was obligin'
+Jim that evenin' muckin' out his pig-pen. I seed a stranger come
+traipsin' over the bridge agin' Wickenden's door-stones. 'Twadn't the
+new County Council bridge with the handrail. They hadn't given it in for
+a public right o' way then. 'Twas just a bit o' lathy old plank which
+Jim had throwed acrost the brook for his own conveniences. The man
+wasn't drunk--only a little concerned in liquor, like--an' his back was
+a mask where he'd slipped in the muck comin' along. He went up the
+bricks past Jim's mother, which was feedin' the ducks, an' set himself
+down at the table inside--Jim was just changin' his socks--an' the man
+let Jim know all his rights and aims regardin' Mary. Then there just
+about _was_ a hurly-bulloo? Jim's fust mind was to pitch him forth, but
+he'd done that once in his young days, and got six months up to Lewes
+jail along o' the man fallin' on his head. So he swallowed his spittle
+an' let him talk. The law about Mary _was_ on the man's side from fust
+to last, for he showed us all the papers. Then Mary come
+downstairs--she'd been studyin' for an examination--an' the man tells
+her who he was, an' she says he had ought to have took proper care of
+his own flesh and blood while he had it by him, an' not to think he
+could ree-claim it when it suited. He says somethin' or other, but she
+looks him up an' down, front an' backwent, an' she just tongues him
+scadderin' out o' doors, and he went away stuffin' all the papers back
+into his hat, talkin' most abusefully. Then she come back an' freed her
+mind against Jim an' his mother for not havin' warned her of her
+upbringin's, which it come out she hadn't ever been told. They didn't
+say naun to her. They never did. _I'd_ ha' packed her off with any man
+that would ha' took her--an' God's pity on him!'
+
+'Umm!' said Jabez, and sucked his pipe.
+
+'So then, that was the beginnin.' The man come back again next week or
+so, an' he catched Jim alone, 'thout his mother this time, an' he fair
+beazled him with his papers an' his talk--for the law _was_ on his
+side--till Jim went down into his money-purse an' give him ten shillings
+hush-money--he told me--to withdraw away for a bit an' leave Mary
+with 'em.'
+
+'But that's no way to get rid o' man or woman,' Jabez said.
+
+'No more 'tis. I told Jim so. "What can I do?" Jim says. "The law's
+_with_ the man. I walk about daytimes thinkin' o' it till I sweats my
+underclothes wringin', an' I lie abed nights thinkin' o' it till I
+sweats my sheets all of a sop. 'Tisn't as if I was a young man," he
+says, "nor yet as if I was a pore man. Maybe he'll drink hisself to
+death." I e'en a'most told him outright what foolishness he was enterin'
+into, but he knowed it--he knowed it--because he said next time the man
+come 'twould be fifteen shillin's. An' next time 'twas. Just fifteen
+shillin's!'
+
+'An' _was_ the man her father?' asked Jabez.
+
+'He had the proofs an' the papers. Jim showed me what that Lunnon
+Childern's Society had answered when Mary writ up to 'em an' taxed 'em
+with it. I lay she hadn't been proper polite in her letters to 'em, for
+they answered middlin' short. They said the matter was out o' their
+hands, but--let's see if I remember--oh, yes,--they ree-gretted there
+had been an oversight. I reckon they had sent Mary out in the candle-box
+as a orphan instead o' havin' a father. Terrible awkward! Then, when
+he'd drinked up the money, the man come again--in his usuals--an' he
+kept hammerin' on and hammerin' on about his duty to his pore dear wife,
+an' what he'd do for his dear daughter in Lunnon, till the tears runned
+down his two dirty cheeks an' he come away with more money. Jim used to
+slip it into his hand behind the door; but his mother she heard the
+chink. She didn't hold with hush-money. She'd write out all her feelin's
+on the slate, an' Jim 'ud be settin' up half the night answerin' back
+an' showing that the man had the law with him.'
+
+'Hadn't that man no trade nor business, then?'
+
+'He told me he was a printer. I reckon, though, he lived on the rates
+like the rest of 'em up there in Lunnon.'
+
+'An' how did Mary take it?'
+
+'She said she'd sooner go into service than go with the man. I reckon a
+mistress 'ud be middlin' put to it for a maid 'fore she put Mary into
+cap an' gown. She was studyin' to be a schoo-ool-teacher. A beauty
+she'll make!... Well, that was how things went that fall. Mary's Lunnon
+father kep' comin' an' comin' 'carden as he'd drinked out the money Jim
+gave him; an' each time he'd put-up his price for not takin' Mary away.
+Jim's mother, she didn't like partin' with no money, an' bein' obliged
+to write her feelin's on the slate instead o' givin' 'em vent by mouth,
+she was just about mad. Just about she _was_ mad!
+
+'Come November, I lodged with Jim in the outside room over 'gainst his
+hen-house. I paid _her_ my rent. I was workin' for Dockett at
+Pounds--gettin' chestnut-bats out o' Perry Shaw. Just such weather as
+this be--rain atop o' rain after a wet October. (An' I remember it ended
+in dry frostes right away up to Christmas.) Dockett he'd sent up to
+Perry Shaw for me--no, he comes puffin' up to me himself--because a big
+corner-piece o' the bank had slipped into the brook where she makes that
+elber at the bottom o' the Seventeen Acre, an' all the rubbishy alders
+an' sallies which he ought to have cut out when he took the farm,
+they'd slipped with the slip, an' the brook was comin' rooshin' down
+atop of 'em, an' they'd just about back an' spill the waters over his
+winter wheat. The water was lyin' in the flats already. "Gor a-mighty,
+Jesse!" he bellers out at me, "get that rubbish away all manners you
+can. Don't stop for no fagottin', but give the brook play or my wheat's
+past salvation. I can't lend you no help," he says, "but work an'
+I'll pay ye."'
+
+'You had him there,' Jabez chuckled.
+
+'Yes. I reckon I had ought to have drove my bargain, but the brook was
+backin' up on good bread-corn. So 'cardenly, I laid into the mess of it,
+workin' off the bank where the trees was drownin' themselves head-down
+in the roosh--just such weather as this--an' the brook creepin' up on me
+all the time. 'Long toward noon, Jim comes mowchin' along with his
+toppin' axe over his shoulder.
+
+'"Be you minded for an extra hand at your job?" he says.
+
+'"Be you minded to turn to?" I ses, an'--no more talk to it--Jim laid in
+alongside o' me. He's no hunger with a toppin' axe.'
+
+'Maybe, but I've seed him at a job o' throwin' in the woods, an' he
+didn't seem to make out no shape,' said Jabez. 'He haven't got the
+shoulders, nor yet the judgment--_my_ opinion--when he's dealin' with
+full-girt timber. He don't rightly make up his mind where he's goin' to
+throw her.'
+
+'We wasn't throwin' nothin'. We was cuttin' out they soft alders, an'
+haulin' 'em up the bank 'fore they could back the waters on the wheat.
+Jim didn't say much, 'less it was that he'd had a postcard from Mary's
+Lunnon father, night before, sayin' he was comin' down that mornin'.
+Jim, he'd sweated all night, an' he didn't reckon hisself equal to the
+talkin' an' the swearin' an' the cryin', an' his mother blamin' him
+afterwards on the slate. "It spiled my day to think of it," he ses, when
+we was eatin' our pieces. "So I've fair cried dunghill an' run.
+Mother'll have to tackle him by herself. I lay _she_ won't give him no
+hush-money," he ses. "I lay he'll be surprised by the time he's done
+with _her_," he ses. An' that was e'en a'most all the talk we had
+concernin' it. But he's no hunger with the toppin' axe.
+
+'The brook she'd crep' up an' up on us, an' she kep' creepin' upon us
+till we was workin' knee-deep in the shallers, cuttin' an' pookin' an'
+pullin' what we could get to o' the rubbish. There was a middlin' lot
+comin' down-stream, too--cattle-bars, an' hop-poles and odds-ends bats,
+all poltin' down together; but they rooshed round the elber good shape
+by the time we'd backed out they drowned trees. Come four o'clock we
+reckoned we'd done a proper day's work, an' she'd take no harm if we
+left her. We couldn't puddle about there in the dark an' wet to no more
+advantage. Jim he was pourin' the water out of his boots--no, I was
+doin' that. Jim was kneelin' to unlace his'n. "Damn it all, Jesse," he
+ses, standin' up; "the flood must be over my doorsteps at home, for here
+comes my old white-top bee-skep!"'
+
+'Yes. I allus heard he paints his bee-skeps,' Jabez put in. 'I dunno
+paint don't tarrify bees more'n it keeps em' dry.'
+
+'"I'll have a pook at it," he ses, an' he pooks at it as it comes round
+the elber. The roosh nigh jerked the pooker out of his hand-grips, an'
+he calls to me, an' I come runnin' barefoot. Then we pulled on the
+pooker, an' it reared up on eend in the roosh, an' we guessed what
+'twas. 'Cardenly we pulled it in into a shaller, an' it rolled a piece,
+an' a great old stiff man's arm nigh hit me in the face. Then we was
+sure. "'Tis a man," ses Jim. But the face was all a mask. "I reckon it's
+Mary's Lunnon father," he ses presently. "Lend me a match and I'll make
+sure." He never used baccy. We lit three matches one by another, well's
+we could in the rain, an' he cleaned off some o' the slob with a tussick
+o' grass. "Yes," he ses. "It's Mary's Lunnon father. He won't tarrify us
+no more. D'you want him, Jesse?" he ses.
+
+'"No," I ses. "If this was Eastbourne beach like, he'd be half-a-crown
+apiece to us 'fore the coroner; but now we'd only lose a day havin' to
+'tend the inquest. I lay he fell into the brook."
+
+'"I lay he did," ses Jim. "I wonder if he saw mother." He turns him
+over, an' opens his coat and puts his fingers in the waistcoat pocket
+an' starts laughin'. "He's seen mother, right enough," he ses. "An' he's
+got the best of her, too. _She_ won't be able to crow no more over _me_
+'bout givin' him money. _I_ never give him more than a sovereign. She's
+give him two!" an' he trousers 'em, laughin' all the time. "An' now
+we'll pook him back again, for I've done with him," he ses.
+
+'So we pooked him back into the middle of the brook, an' we saw he went
+round the elber 'thout balkin', an' we walked quite a piece beside of
+him to set him on his ways. When we couldn't see no more, we went home
+by the high road, because we knowed the brook 'u'd be out acrost the
+medders, an' we wasn't goin' to hunt for Jim's little rotten old bridge
+in that dark--an' rainin' Heavens' hard, too. I was middlin' pleased to
+see light an' vittles again when we got home. Jim he pressed me to come
+insides for a drink. He don't drink in a generality, but he was rid of
+all his troubles that evenin', d'ye see? "Mother," he ses so soon as the
+door ope'd, "have you seen him?" She whips out her slate an' writes
+down--"No." "Oh, no," ses Jim. "You don't get out of it that way,
+mother. I lay you _have_ seen him, an' I lay he's bested you for all
+your talk, same as he bested me. Make a clean breast of it, mother," he
+ses. "He got round you too." She was goin' for the slate again, but he
+stops her. "It's all right, mother," he ses. "I've seen him sense you
+have, an' he won't trouble us no more." The old lady looks up quick as a
+robin, an' she writes, "Did he say so?" "No," ses Jim, laughin'. "He
+didn't say so. That's how I know. But he bested _you_, mother. You can't
+have it in at _me_ for bein' soft-hearted. You're twice as
+tender-hearted as what I be. Look!" he ses, an' he shows her the two
+sovereigns. "Put 'em away where they belong," he ses. "He won't never
+come for no more; an' now we'll have our drink," he ses, "for we've
+earned it."
+
+'Nature-ally they weren't goin' to let me see where they kep' their
+monies. She went upstairs with it--for the whisky.'
+
+'I never knowed Jim was a drinkin' man--in his own house, like,' said
+Jabez.
+
+'No more he isn't; but what he takes he likes good. He won't tech no
+publican's hogwash acrost the bar. Four shillin's he paid for that
+bottle o' whisky. I know, because when the old lady brought it down
+there wasn't more'n jest a liddle few dreenin's an' dregs in it. Nothin'
+to set before neighbours, I do assure you.'
+
+'"Why, 'twas half full last week, mother," he ses. "You don't mean," he
+ses, "you've given him all that as well? It's two shillin's worth," he
+ses. (That's how I knowed he paid four.) "Well, well, mother, you be too
+tender-'carted to live. But I don't grudge it to him," he ses. "I don't
+grudge him nothin' he can keep." So, 'cardenly, we drinked up what
+little sup was left.'
+
+'An' what come to Mary's Lunnon father?' said Jabez after a full
+minute's silence.
+
+'I be too tired to go readin' papers of evenin's; but Dockett he told
+me, that very week, I think, that they'd inquested on a man down at
+Robertsbridge which had poked and poked up agin' so many bridges an'
+banks, like, they couldn't make naun out of him.'
+
+'An' what did Mary say to all these doin's?'
+
+'The old lady bundled her off to the village 'fore her Lunnon father
+come, to buy week-end stuff (an' she forgot the half o' it). When we
+come in she was upstairs studyin' to be a school-teacher. None told her
+naun about it. 'Twadn't girls' affairs.'
+
+'Reckon _she_ knowed?' Jabez went on.
+
+'She? She must have guessed it middlin' close when she saw her money
+come back. But she never mentioned it in writing so far's I know. She
+were more worritted that night on account of two-three her chickens
+bein' drowned, for the flood had skewed their old hen-house round on her
+postes. I cobbled her up next mornin' when the brook shrinked.'
+
+'An' where did you find the bridge? Some fur down-stream, didn't ye?'
+
+'Just where she allus was. She hadn't shifted but very little. The brook
+had gulled out the bank a piece under one eend o' the plank, so's she
+was liable to tilt ye sideways if you wasn't careful. But I pooked
+three-four bricks under her, an' she was all plumb again.'
+
+'Well, I dunno how it _looks_ like, but let be how 'twill,' said Jabez,
+'he hadn't no business to come down from Lunnon tarrifyin' people, an'
+threatenin' to take away children which they'd hobbed up for their
+lawful own--even if 'twas Mary Wickenden.'
+
+'He had the business right enough, an' he had the law with him--no
+gettin' over that,' said Jesse. 'But he had the drink with him, too, an'
+that was where he failed, like.'
+
+'Well, well! Let be how 'twill, the brook was a good friend to Jim. I
+see it now. I allus _did_ wonder what he was gettin' at when he said
+that, when I talked to him about shiftin' the stack. "You dunno
+everythin'," he ses. "The Brook's been a good friend to me," he ses,
+"an' if she's minded to have a snatch at my hay, _I_ ain't settin' out
+to withstand her."'
+
+'I reckon she's about shifted it, too, by now,' Jesse chuckled. 'Hark!
+That ain't any slip off the bank which she's got hold of.'
+
+The Brook had changed her note again. It sounded as though she were
+mumbling something soft.
+
+
+
+
+     THE LAND
+
+     When Julius Fabricius, Sub-Prefect of the Weald,
+     In the days of Diocletian owned our Lower River-field,
+     He called to him Hobdenius--a Briton of the Clay,
+     Saying: 'What about that River-piece for layin' in to hay?'
+
+     And the aged Hobden answered: 'I remember as a lad
+     My father told your father that she wanted dreenin' bad.
+     An' the more that you neeglect her the less you'll get her clean.
+     Have it jest _as_ you've a mind to, but, if I was you, I'd dreen.'
+
+     So they drained it long and crossways in the lavish Roman style.
+     Still we find among the river-drift their flakes of ancient tile,
+     And in drouthy middle August, when the bones of meadows show,
+     We can trace the lines they followed sixteen hundred years ago.
+
+     Then Julius Fabricius died as even Prefects do,
+     And after certain centuries, Imperial Rome died too.
+     Then did robbers enter Britain from across the Northern main
+     And our Lower River-field was won by Ogier the Dane.
+
+     Well could Ogier work his war-boat--well could Ogier wield
+          his brand--
+     Much he knew of foaming waters--not so much of farming land.
+     So he called to him a Hobden of the old unaltered blood.
+     Saying: 'What about that River-bit, she doesn't look no good?'
+
+     And that aged Hobden answered: ''Tain't for _me_ to interfere,
+     But I've known that bit o' meadow now for five and fifty year.
+     Have it _jest_ as you've a mind to, but I've proved it time
+          on time,
+     If you want to change her nature you have _got_ to give her lime!'
+
+     Ogier sent his wains to Lewes, twenty hours' solemn walk,
+     And drew back great abundance of the cool, grey, healing chalk.
+     And old Hobden spread it broadcast, never heeding what was in't;
+     Which is why in cleaning ditches, now and then we find a flint.
+
+     Ogier died. His sons grew English. Anglo-Saxon was their name,
+     Till out of blossomed Normandy another pirate came;
+     For Duke William conquered England and divided with his men,
+     And our Lower River-field he gave to William of Warenne.
+
+     But the Brook (you know her habit) rose one rainy Autumn night
+     And tore down sodden flitches of the bank to left and right.
+     So, said William to his Bailiff as they rode their dripping rounds:
+     'Hob, what about that River-bit--the Brook's got up no bounds?'
+
+     And that aged Hobden answered: ''Tain't my business to advise,
+     But ye might ha' known 'twould happen from the way the valley lies.
+     When ye can't hold back the water you must try and save the sile.
+     Hev it jest as you've a _mind_ to, but, if I was you, I'd spile!'
+
+     They spiled along the water-course with trunks of willow-trees
+     And planks of elms behind 'em and immortal oaken knees.
+     And when the spates of Autumn whirl the gravel-beds away
+     You can see their faithful fragments iron-hard in iron clay.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+     _Georgii Quinti Anno Sexto_, I, who own the River-field,
+     Am fortified with title-deeds, attested, signed and sealed,
+     Guaranteeing me, my assigns, my executors and heirs
+     All sorts of powers and profits which--are neither mine nor theirs.
+
+     I have rights of chase and warren, as my dignity requires.
+     I can fish--but Hobden tickles. I can shoot--but Hobden wires.
+     I repair, but he reopens, certain gaps which, men allege,
+     Have been used by every Hobden since a Hobden swapped a hedge.
+
+     Shall I dog his morning progress o'er the track-betraying dew?
+     Demand his dinner-basket into which my pheasant flew?
+     Confiscate his evening faggot into which the conies ran,
+     And summons him to judgment? I would sooner summons Pan.
+
+     His dead are in the churchyard--thirty generations laid.
+     Their names went down in Domesday Book when Domesday Book was made.
+     And the passion and the piety and prowess of his line
+     Have seeded, rooted, fruited in some land the Law calls mine.
+
+     Not for any beast that burrows, not for any bird that flies,
+     Would I lose his large sound council, miss his keen amending eyes.
+     He is bailiff, woodman, wheelwright, field-surveyor, engineer,
+     And if flagrantly a poacher--'tain't for me to interfere.
+
+     'Hob, what about that River-bit?' I turn to him again
+     With Fabricius and Ogier and William of Warenne.
+     'Hev it jest as you've a mind to, _but_'--and so he takes command.
+     For whoever pays the taxes old Mus' Hobden owns the land.
+
+
+
+In the Same Boat
+
+(1911)
+
+'A throbbing vein,' said Dr. Gilbert soothingly, 'is the mother of
+delusion.'
+
+'Then how do you account for my knowing when the thing is due?' Conroy's
+voice rose almost to a break.
+
+'Of course, but you should have consulted a doctor before
+using--palliatives.'
+
+'It was driving me mad. And now I can't give them up.'
+
+''Not so bad as that! One doesn't form fatal habits at twenty-five.
+Think again. Were you ever frightened as a child?'
+
+'I don't remember. It began when I was a boy.'
+
+'With or without the spasm? By the way, do you mind describing the spasm
+again?'
+
+'Well,' said Conroy, twisting in the chair, 'I'm no musician, but
+suppose you were a violin-string--vibrating--and some one put his finger
+on you? As if a finger were put on the naked soul! Awful!'
+
+'So's indigestion--so's nightmare--while it lasts.'
+
+'But the horror afterwards knocks me out for days. And the waiting for
+it ... and then this drug habit! It can't go on!' He shook as he spoke,
+and the chair creaked.
+
+'My dear fellow,' said the doctor, 'when you're older you'll know what
+burdens the best of us carry. A fox to every Spartan.'
+
+'That doesn't help _me_. I can't! I can't!' cried Conroy, and burst into
+tears.
+
+'Don't apologise,' said Gilbert, when the paroxysm ended. 'I'm used to
+people coming a little--unstuck in this room.'
+
+'It's those tabloids!' Conroy stamped his foot feebly as he blew his
+nose. 'They've knocked me out. I used to be fit once. Oh, I've tried
+exercise and everything. But--if one sits down for a minute when it's
+due--even at four in the morning--it runs up behind one.'
+
+'Ye-es. Many things come in the quiet of the morning. You always know
+when the visitation is due?'
+
+'What would I give not to be sure!' he sobbed.
+
+'We'll put that aside for the moment. I'm thinking of a case where what
+we'll call anæmia of the brain was masked (I don't say cured) by
+vibration. He couldn't sleep, or thought he couldn't, but a steamer
+voyage and the thump of the screw--'
+
+'A steamer? After what I've told you!' Conroy almost shrieked. 'I'd
+sooner ...'
+
+'Of course _not_ a steamer in your case, but a long railway journey the
+next time you think it will trouble you. It sounds absurd, but--'
+
+'I'd try anything. I nearly have,' Conroy sighed.
+
+'Nonsense! I've given you a tonic that will clear _that_ notion from
+your head. Give the train a chance, and don't begin the journey by
+bucking yourself up with tabloids. Take them along, but hold them in
+reserve--in reserve.'
+
+'D'you think I've self-control enough, after what you've heard?' said
+Conroy.
+
+Dr. Gilbert smiled. 'Yes. After what I've seen,' he glanced round the
+room, 'I have no hesitation in saying you have quite as much
+self-control as many other people. I'll write you later about your
+journey. Meantime, the tonic,' and he gave some general directions
+before Conroy left.
+
+An hour later Dr. Gilbert hurried to the links, where the others of his
+regular week-end game awaited him. It was a rigid round, played as usual
+at the trot, for the tension of the week lay as heavy on the two King's
+Counsels and Sir John Chartres as on Gilbert. The lawyers were old
+enemies of the Admiralty Court, and Sir John of the frosty eyebrows and
+Abernethy manner was bracketed with, but before, Rutherford Gilbert
+among nerve-specialists.
+
+At the Club-house afterwards the lawyers renewed their squabble over a
+tangled collision case, and the doctors as naturally compared
+professional matters.
+
+'Lies--all lies,' said Sir John, when Gilbert had told him Conroy's
+trouble. '_Post hoc, propter hoc_. The man or woman who drugs is _ipso
+facto_ a liar. You've no imagination.'
+
+''Pity you haven't a little--occasionally.'
+
+'I have believed a certain type of patient in my time. It's always the
+same. For reasons not given in the consulting-room they take to the
+drug. Certain symptoms follow. They will swear to you, and believe it,
+that they took the drug to mask the symptoms. What does your man use?
+Najdolene? I thought so. I had practically the duplicate of your case
+last Thursday. Same old Najdolene--same old lie.'
+
+'Tell me the symptoms, and I'll draw my own inferences, Johnnie.'
+
+'Symptoms! The girl was rank poisoned with Najdolene. Ramping, stamping
+possession. Gad, I thought she'd have the chandelier down.'
+
+'Mine came unstuck too, and he has the physique of a bull,' said
+Gilbert. 'What delusions had yours?'
+
+'Faces--faces with mildew on them. In any other walk of life we'd call
+it the Horrors. She told me, of course, she took the drugs to mask the
+faces. _Post hoc, propter hoc_ again. All liars!'
+
+'What's that?' said the senior K.C. quickly. 'Sounds professional.'
+
+'Go away! Not for you, Sandy.' Sir John turned a shoulder against him
+and walked with Gilbert in the chill evening.
+
+To Conroy in his chambers came, one week later, this letter:
+
+     DEAR MR. CONROY--If your plan of a night's trip on the 17th
+     still holds good, and you have no particular destination in
+     view, you could do me a kindness. A Miss Henschil, in whom I
+     am interested, goes down to the West by the 10.8 from
+     Waterloo (Number 3 platform) on that night. She is not
+     exactly an invalid, but, like so many of us, a little shaken
+     in her nerves. Her maid, of course, accompanies her, but if I
+     knew you were in the same train it would be an additional
+     source of strength. Will you please write and let me know
+     whether the 10.8 from Waterloo, Number 3 platform, on the
+     17th, suits you, and I will meet you there? Don't forget my
+     caution, and keep up the tonic.--Yours sincerely,
+
+     L. RUTHERFORD GILBERT.
+
+'He knows I'm scarcely fit to look after myself,' was Conroy's thought.
+'And he wants me to look after a woman!'
+
+Yet, at the end of half an hour's irresolution, he accepted.
+
+Now Conroy's trouble, which had lasted for years, was this:
+
+On a certain night, while he lay between sleep and wake, he would be
+overtaken by a long shuddering sigh, which he learned to know was the
+sign that his brain had once more conceived its horror, and in time--in
+due time--would bring it forth.
+
+Drugs could so well veil that horror that it shuffled along no worse
+than as a freezing dream in a procession of disorderly dreams; but over
+the return of the event drugs had no control. Once that sigh had passed
+his lips the thing was inevitable, and through the days granted before
+its rebirth he walked in torment. For the first two years he had striven
+to fend it off by distractions, but neither exercise nor drink availed.
+Then he had come to the tabloids of the excellent M. Najdol. These
+guarantee, on the label, 'Refreshing and absolutely natural sleep to the
+soul-weary.' They are carried in a case with a spring which presses one
+scented tabloid to the end of the tube, whence it can be lipped off in
+stroking the moustache or adjusting the veil.
+
+Three years of M. Najdol's preparations do not fit a man for many
+careers. His friends, who knew he did not drink, assumed that Conroy had
+strained his heart through valiant outdoor exercises, and Conroy had
+with some care invented an imaginary doctor, symptoms, and regimen,
+which he discussed with them and with his mother in Hereford. She
+maintained that he would grow out of it, and recommended nux vomica.
+
+When at last Conroy faced a real doctor, it was, he hoped, to be saved
+from suicide by a strait-waistcoat. Yet Dr. Gilbert had but given him
+more drugs--a tonic, for instance, that would couple railway
+carnages--and had advised a night in the train. Not alone the horrors of
+a railway journey (for which a man who dare keep no servant must e'en
+pack, label, and address his own bag), but the necessity for holding
+himself in hand before a stranger 'a little shaken in her nerves.'
+
+He spent a long forenoon packing, because when he assembled and counted
+things his mind slid off to the hours that remained of the day before
+his night, and he found himself counting minutes aloud. At such times
+the injustice of his fate would drive him to revolts which no servant
+should witness, but on this evening Dr. Gilbert's tonic held him fairly
+calm while he put up his patent razors.
+
+Waterloo Station shook him into real life. The change for his ticket
+needed concentration, if only to prevent shillings and pence turning
+into minutes at the booking-office; and he spoke quickly to a porter
+about the disposition of his bag. The old 10.8 from Waterloo to the West
+was an all-night caravan that halted, in the interests of the milk
+traffic, at almost every station.
+
+Dr. Gilbert stood by the door of the one composite corridor-coach; an
+older and stouter man behind him. 'So glad you're here!' he cried. 'Let
+me get your ticket.'
+
+'Certainly not,' Conroy answered. 'I got it myself--long ago. My bag's
+in too,' he added proudly.
+
+'I beg your pardon. Miss Henschil's here. I'll introduce you.'
+
+'But--but,' he stammered--'think of the state I'm in. If anything
+happens I shall collapse.'
+
+'Not you. You'd rise to the occasion like a bird. And as for the
+self-control you were talking of the other day'--Gilbert swung him
+round--'look!'
+
+A young man in an ulster over a silk-faced frock-coat stood by the
+carriage window, weeping shamelessly.
+
+'Oh, but that's only drink,' Conroy said. 'I haven't had one of my--my
+things since lunch.'
+
+'Excellent!' said Gilbert. 'I knew I could depend on you. Come along.
+Wait for a minute, Chartres.'
+
+A tall woman, veiled, sat by the far window. She bowed her head as the
+doctor murmured Conroy knew not what. Then he disappeared and the
+inspector came for tickets.
+
+'My maid--next compartment,' she said slowly.
+
+Conroy showed his ticket, but in returning it to the sleeve-pocket of
+his ulster the little silver Najdolene case slipped from his glove and
+fell to the floor. He snatched it up as the moving train flung him
+into his seat.
+
+'How nice!' said the woman. She leisurely lifted her veil, unbottoned
+the first button of her left glove, and pressed out from its palm a
+Najdolene-case.
+
+'Don't!' said Conroy, not realising he had spoken.
+
+'I beg your pardon.' The deep voice was measured, even, and low. Conroy
+knew what made it so.
+
+'I said "don't"! He wouldn't like you to do it!'
+
+'No, he would not.' She held the tube with its ever-presented tabloid
+between finger and thumb. 'But aren't you one of the--ah--"soul-weary"
+too?'
+
+'That's why. Oh, please don't! Not at first. I--I haven't had one since
+morning. You--you'll set me off!'
+
+'You? Are you so far gone as that?'
+
+He nodded, pressing his palms together. The train jolted through
+Vauxhall points, and was welcomed with the clang of empty milk-cans
+for the West.
+
+After long silence she lifted her great eyes, and, with an innocence
+that would have deceived any sound man, asked Conroy to call her maid to
+bring her a forgotten book.
+
+Conroy shook his head. 'No. Our sort can't read. Don't!'
+
+'Were you sent to watch me?' The voice never changed.
+
+'Me? I need a keeper myself much more--_this_ night of all!'
+
+'This night? Have you a night, then? They disbelieved _me_ when I told
+them of mine.' She leaned back and laughed, always slowly. 'Aren't
+doctors stu-upid? They don't know.'
+
+She leaned her elbow on her knee, lifted her veil that had fallen, and,
+chin in hand, stared at him. He looked at her--till his eyes were
+blurred with tears.
+
+'Have I been there, think you?' she said.
+
+'Surely--surely,' Conroy answered, for he had well seen the fear and the
+horror that lived behind the heavy-lidded eyes, the fine tracing on the
+broad forehead, and the guard set about the desirable mouth.
+
+'Then--suppose we have one--just one apiece? I've gone without since
+this afternoon.'
+
+He put up his hand, and would have shouted, but his voice broke.
+
+'Don't! Can't you see that it helps me to help you to keep it off? Don't
+let's both go down together.'
+
+'But I want one. It's a poor heart that never rejoices. Just one. It's
+my night.'
+
+'It's mine--too. My sixty-fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh.' He shut his
+lips firmly against the tide of visualised numbers that threatened to
+carry him along.
+
+'Ah, it's only my thirty-ninth.' She paused as he had done. 'I wonder if
+I shall last into the sixties.... Talk to me or I shall go crazy. You're
+a man. You're the stronger vessel. Tell me when you went to pieces.'
+
+'One, two, three, four, five, six, seven--eight--I beg your pardon.'
+
+'Not in the least. I always pretend I've dropped a stitch of my
+knitting. I count the days till the last day, then the hours, then the
+minutes. Do you?'
+
+'I don't think I've done very much else for the last--' said Conroy,
+shivering, for the night was cold, with a chill he recognised.
+
+'Oh, how comforting to find some one who can talk sense! It's not always
+the same date, is it?'
+
+'What difference would that make?' He unbuttoned his ulster with a jerk.
+'You're a sane woman. Can't you see the wicked--wicked--wicked' (dust
+flew from the padded arm-rest as he struck it) unfairness of it? What
+have I done?'
+
+She laid her large hand on his shoulder very firmly.
+
+'If you begin to think over that,' she said, 'you'll go to pieces and be
+ashamed. Tell me yours, and I'll tell you mine. Only be quiet--be quiet,
+lad, or you'll set me off!' She made shift to soothe him, though her
+chin trembled.
+
+'Well,' said he at last, picking at the arm-rest between them, 'mine's
+nothing much, of course.'
+
+'Don't be a fool! That's for doctors--and mothers.'
+
+'It's Hell,' Conroy muttered. 'It begins on a steamer--on a stifling hot
+night. I come out of my cabin. I pass through the saloon where the
+stewards have rolled up the carpets, and the boards are bare and hot
+and soapy.'
+
+'I've travelled too,' she said.
+
+'Ah! I come on deck. I walk down a covered alleyway. Butcher's meat,
+bananas, oil, that sort of smell.'
+
+Again she nodded.
+
+'It's a lead-coloured steamer, and the sea's lead-coloured. Perfectly
+smooth sea--perfectly still ship, except for the engines running, and
+her waves going off in lines and lines and lines--dull grey. All this
+time I know something's going to happen.'
+
+'I know. Something going to happen,' she whispered.
+
+'Then I hear a thud in the engine-room. Then the noise of machinery
+falling down--like fire-irons--and then two most awful yells. They're
+more like hoots, and I know--I know while I listen--that it means that
+two men have died as they hooted. It was their last breath hooting out
+of them--in most awful pain. Do you understand?'
+
+'I ought to. Go on.'
+
+'That's the first part. Then I hear bare feet running along the
+alleyway. One of the scalded men comes up behind me and says quite
+distinctly, "My friend! All is lost!" Then he taps me on the shoulder
+and I hear him drop down dead.' He panted and wiped his forehead.
+
+'So that is your night?' she said.
+
+'That is my night. It comes every few weeks--so many days after I get
+what I call sentence. Then I begin to count.'
+
+'Get sentence? D'you mean _this_?' She half closed her eyes, drew a
+deep breath, and shuddered. '"Notice" I call it. Sir John thought it was
+all lies.'
+
+She had unpinned her hat and thrown it on the seat opposite, showing the
+immense mass of her black hair, rolled low in the nape of the columnar
+neck and looped over the left ear. But Conroy had no eyes except for her
+grave eyes.
+
+'Listen now!' said she. 'I walk down a road, a white sandy road near the
+sea. There are broken fences on either side, and Men come and look at me
+over them.'
+
+'Just men? Do they speak?'
+
+'They try to. Their faces are all mildewy--eaten away,' and she hid her
+face for an instant with her left hand. 'It's the Faces--the Faces!'
+
+'Yes. Like my two hoots. I know.'
+
+'Ah! But the place itself--the bareness--and the glitter and the salt
+smells, and the wind blowing the sand! The Men run after me and I
+run.... I know what's coming too. One of them touches me.'
+
+'Yes! What comes then? We've both shirked that.'
+
+'One awful shock--not palpitation, but shock, shock, shock!'
+
+'As though your soul were being stopped--as you'd stop a finger-bowl
+humming?' he said.
+
+'Just that,' she answered. 'One's very soul--the soul that one lives
+by--stopped. So!'
+
+She drove her thumb deep into the arm-rest. 'And now,' she whined to
+him, 'now that we've stirred each other up this way, mightn't we have
+just one?'
+
+'No,' said Conroy, shaking. 'Let's hold on. We're past'--he peered out
+of the black windows--'Woking. There's the Necropolis. How long
+till dawn?'
+
+'Oh, cruel long yet. If one dozes for a minute, it catches one.'
+
+'And how d'you find that this'--he tapped the palm of his glove--'helps
+you?'
+
+'It covers up the thing from being too real--if one takes enough--you
+know. Only--only--one loses everything else. I've been no more than a
+bogie-girl for two years. What would you give to be real again? This
+lying's such a nuisance.'
+
+'One must protect oneself--and there's one's mother to think of,' he
+answered.
+
+'True. I hope allowances are made for us somewhere. Our burden--can you
+hear?--our burden is heavy enough.'
+
+She rose, towering into the roof of the carriage. Conroy's ungentle grip
+pulled her back.
+
+'Now _you_ are foolish. Sit down,' said he.
+
+'But the cruelty of it! Can't you see it? Don't you feel it? Let's take
+one now--before I--'
+
+'Sit down!' cried Conroy, and the sweat stood again on his forehead. He
+had fought through a few nights, and had been defeated on more, and he
+knew the rebellion that flares beyond control to exhaustion.
+
+She smoothed her hair and dropped back, but for a while her head and
+throat moved with the sickening motion of a captured wry-neck.
+
+'Once,' she said, spreading out her hands, 'I ripped my counterpane
+from end to end. That takes strength. I had it then. I've little now.
+"All dorn," as my little niece says. And you, lad?'
+
+'"All dorn"! Let me keep your case for you till the morning.'
+
+'But the cold feeling is beginning.'
+
+'Lend it me, then.'
+
+'And the drag down my right side. I shan't be able to move in a minute.'
+
+'I can scarcely lift my arm myself,' said Conroy. 'We're in for it.'
+
+'Then why are you so foolish? You know it'll be easier if we have only
+one--only one apiece.'
+
+She was lifting the case to her mouth. With tremendous effort Conroy
+caught it. The two moved like jointed dolls, and when their hands met it
+was as wood on wood.
+
+'You must--not!' said Conroy. His jaws stiffened, and the cold climbed
+from his feet up.
+
+'Why--must--I--not?' She repeated the words idiotically.
+
+Conroy could only shake his head, while he bore down on the hand and the
+case in it.
+
+Her speech went from her altogether. The wonderful lips rested half over
+the even teeth, the breath was in the nostrils only, the eyes dulled,
+the face set grey, and through the glove the hand struck like ice.
+
+Presently her soul came back and stood behind her eyes--only thing that
+had life in all that place--stood and looked for Conroy's soul. He too
+was fettered in every limb, but somewhere at an immense distance he
+heard his heart going about its work as the engine-room carries on
+through and beneath the all but overwhelming wave. His one hope, he
+knew, was not to lose the eyes that clung to his, because there was an
+Evil abroad which would possess him if he looked aside by a
+hair-breadth.
+
+The rest was darkness through which some distant planet spun while
+cymbals clashed. (Beyond Farnborough the 10.8 rolls out many empty
+milk-cans at every halt.) Then a body came to life with intolerable
+pricklings. Limb by limb, after agonies of terror, that body returned to
+him, steeped in most perfect physical weariness such as follows a long
+day's rowing. He saw the heavy lids droop over her eyes--the watcher
+behind them departed--and, his soul sinking into assured peace,
+Conroy slept.
+
+Light on his eyes and a salt breath roused him without shock. Her hand
+still held his. She slept, forehead down upon it, but the movement of
+his waking waked her too, and she sneezed like a child.
+
+'I--I think it's morning,' said Conroy.
+
+'And nothing has happened! Did you see your Men? I didn't see my Faces.
+Does it mean we've escaped? Did--did you take any after I went to sleep?
+I'll swear I didn't,' she stammered.
+
+'No, there wasn't any need. We've slept through it.'
+
+'No need! Thank God! There was no need! Oh, look!'
+
+The train was running under red cliffs along a sea-wall washed by waves
+that were colourless in the early light. Southward the sun rose mistily
+upon the Channel.
+
+She leaned out of the window and breathed to the bottom of her lungs,
+while the wind wrenched down her dishevelled hair and blew it below
+her waist.
+
+'Well!' she said with splendid eyes. 'Aren't you still waiting for
+something to happen?'
+
+'No. Not till next time. We've been let off,' Conroy answered, breathing
+as deeply as she.
+
+'Then we ought to say our prayers.'
+
+'What nonsense! Some one will see us.'
+
+'We needn't kneel. Stand up and say "Our Father." We _must_!'
+
+It was the first time since childhood that Conroy had prayed. They
+laughed hysterically when a curve threw them against an arm-rest.
+
+'Now for breakfast!' she cried. 'My maid--Nurse Blaber--has the basket
+and things. It'll be ready in twenty minutes. Oh! Look at my hair!' and
+she went out laughing.
+
+Conroy's first discovery, made without fumbling or counting letters on
+taps, was that the London and South Western's allowance of washing-water
+is inadequate. He used every drop, rioting in the cold tingle on neck
+and arms. To shave in a moving train balked him, but the next halt gave
+him a chance, which, to his own surprise, he took. As he stared at
+himself in the mirror he smiled and nodded. There were points about this
+person with the clear, if sunken, eye and the almost uncompressed mouth.
+But when he bore his bag back to his compartment, the weight of it on a
+limp arm humbled that new pride.
+
+'My friend,' he said, half aloud, 'you go into training. You're putty.'
+
+She met him in the spare compartment, where her maid had laid breakfast.
+
+'By Jove!' he said, halting at the doorway, 'I hadn't realised how
+beautiful you were!'
+
+'The same to you, lad. Sit down. I could eat a horse.'
+
+'I shouldn't,' said the maid quietly. 'The less you eat the better.' She
+was a small, freckled woman, with light fluffy hair and pale-blue eyes
+that looked through all veils.
+
+'This is Miss Blaber,' said Miss Henschil. 'He's one of the soul-weary
+too, Nursey.'
+
+'I know it. But when one has just given it up a full meal doesn't agree.
+That's why I've only brought you bread and butter.'
+
+She went out quietly, and Conroy reddened.
+
+'We're still children, you see,' said Miss Henschil. 'But I'm well
+enough to feel some shame of it. D'you take sugar?'
+
+They starved together heroically, and Nurse Blaber was good enough to
+signify approval when she came to clear away.
+
+'Nursey?' Miss Henschil insinuated, and flushed.
+
+'Do you smoke?' said the nurse coolly to Conroy.
+
+'I haven't in years. Now you mention it, I think I'd like a
+cigarette--or something.'
+
+'I used to. D'you think it would keep me quiet?' Miss Henschil said.
+
+'Perhaps. Try these.' The nurse handed them her cigarette-case.
+
+'Don't take anything else,' she commanded, and went away with the
+tea-basket.
+
+'Good!' grunted Conroy, between mouthfuls of tobacco.
+
+'Better than nothing,' said Miss Henschil; but for a while they felt
+ashamed, yet with the comfort of children punished together.
+
+'Now,' she whispered, 'who were you when you were a man?'
+
+Conroy told her, and in return she gave him her history. It delighted
+them both to deal once more in worldly concerns--families, names,
+places, and dates--with a person of understanding.
+
+She came, she said, of Lancashire folk--wealthy cotton-spinners, who
+still kept the broadened _a_ and slurred aspirate of the old stock. She
+lived with an old masterful mother in an opulent world north of
+Lancaster Gate, where people in Society gave parties at a Mecca called
+the Langham Hotel.
+
+She herself had been launched into Society there, and the flowers at the
+ball had cost eighty-seven pounds; but, being reckoned peculiar, she had
+made few friends among her own sex. She had attracted many men, for she
+was a beauty--_the_ beauty, in fact, of Society, she said.
+
+She spoke utterly without shame or reticence, as a life-prisoner tells
+his past to a fellow-prisoner; and Conroy nodded across the smoke-rings.
+
+'Do you remember when you got into the carriage?' she asked. '(Oh, I
+wish I had some knitting!) Did you notice aught, lad?'
+
+Conroy thought back. It was ages since. 'Wasn't there some one outside
+the door--crying?' he asked.
+
+'He's--he's the little man I was engaged to,' she said. 'But I made him
+break it off. I told him 'twas no good. But he won't, yo' see.'
+
+'_That_ fellow? Why, he doesn't come up to your shoulder.'
+
+'That's naught to do with it. I think all the world of him. I'm a
+foolish wench'--her speech wandered as she settled herself cosily, one
+elbow on the arm-rest. 'We'd been engaged--I couldn't help that--and he
+worships the ground I tread on. But it's no use. I'm not responsible,
+you see. His two sisters are against it, though I've the money. They're
+right, but they think it's the dri-ink,' she drawled. 'They're
+Methody--the Skinners. You see, their grandfather that started the
+Patton Mills, he died o' the dri-ink.'
+
+'I see,' said Conroy. The grave face before him under the lifted veil
+was troubled.
+
+'George Skinner.' She breathed it softly. 'I'd make him a good wife, by
+God's gra-ace--if I could. But it's no use. I'm not responsible. But
+he'll not take "No" for an answer. I used to call him "Toots." He's of
+no consequence, yo' see.'
+
+'That's in Dickens,' said Conroy, quite quickly. 'I haven't thought of
+Toots for years. He was at Doctor Blimber's.'
+
+'And so--that's my trouble,' she concluded, ever so slightly wringing
+her hands. 'But I--don't you think--there's hope now?'
+
+'Eh?' said Conroy. 'Oh yes! This is the first time I've turned my corner
+without help. With your help, I should say.'
+
+'It'll come back, though.'
+
+'Then shall we meet it in the same way? Here's my card. Write me your
+train, and we'll go together.'
+
+'Yes. We must do that. But between times--when we want--' She looked at
+her palm, the four fingers working on it. 'It's hard to give 'em up.'
+
+'But think what we have gained already, and let me have the case to
+keep.'
+
+She shook her head, and threw her cigarette out of the window. 'Not
+yet.'
+
+'Then let's lend our cases to Nurse, and we'll get through to-day on
+cigarettes. I'll call her while we feel strong.'
+
+She hesitated, but yielded at last, and Nurse accepted the offerings
+with a smile.
+
+'_You'll_ be all right,' she said to Miss Henschil. 'But if I were
+you'--to Conroy--'I'd take strong exercise.'
+
+When they reached their destination Conroy set himself to obey Nurse
+Blaber. He had no remembrance of that day, except one streak of blue sea
+to his left, gorse-bushes to his right, and, before him, a coast-guard's
+track marked with white-washed stones that he counted up to the far
+thousands. As he returned to the little town he saw Miss Henschil on the
+beach below the cliffs. She kneeled at Nurse Blaber's feet, weeping
+and pleading.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Twenty-five days later a telegram came to Conroy's rooms: '_Notice
+given. Waterloo again. Twenty-fourth.'_ That same evening he was wakened
+by the shudder and the sigh that told him his sentence had gone forth.
+Yet he reflected on his pillow that he had, in spite of lapses, snatched
+something like three weeks of life, which included several rides on a
+horse before breakfast--the hour one most craves Najdolene; five
+consecutive evenings on the river at Hammersmith in a tub where he had
+well stretched the white arms that passing crews mocked at; a game of
+rackets at his club; three dinners, one small dance, and one human
+flirtation with a human woman. More notable still, he had settled his
+month's accounts, only once confusing petty cash with the days of grace
+allowed him. Next morning he rode his hired beast in the park
+victoriously. He saw Miss Henschil on horse-back near Lancaster Gate,
+talking to a young man at the railings.
+
+She wheeled and cantered toward him.
+
+'By Jove! How well you look!' he cried, without salutation. 'I didn't
+know you rode.'
+
+'I used to once,' she replied. 'I'm all soft now.'
+
+They swept off together down the ride.
+
+'Your beast pulls,' he said.
+
+'Wa-ant him to. Gi-gives me something to think of. How've you been?'
+she panted. 'I wish chemists' shops hadn't red lights.'
+
+'Have you slipped out and bought some, then?'
+
+'You don't know Nursey. Eh, but it's good to be on a horse again! This
+chap cost me two hundred.'
+
+'Then you've been swindled,' said Conroy.
+
+'I know it, but it's no odds. I must go back to Toots and send him away.
+He's neglecting his work for me.'
+
+She swung her heavy-topped animal on his none too sound hocks.
+''Sentence come, lad?'
+
+'Yes. But I'm not minding it so much this time.'
+
+'Waterloo, then--and God help us!' She thundered back to the little
+frock-coated figure that waited faithfully near the gate.
+
+Conroy felt the spring sun on his shoulders and trotted home. That
+evening he went out with a man in a pair oar, and was rowed to a
+standstill. But the other man owned he could not have kept the pace five
+minutes longer.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+He carried his bag all down Number 3 platform at Waterloo, and hove it
+with one hand into the rack.
+
+'Well done!' said Nurse Blaber, in the corridor. 'We've improved too.'
+
+Dr. Gilbert and an older man came out of the next compartment.
+
+'Hallo!' said Gilbert. 'Why haven't you been to see me, Mr. Conroy? Come
+under the lamp. Take off your hat. No--no. Sit, you young giant. Ve-ry
+good. Look here a minute, Johnnie.'
+
+A little, round-bellied, hawk-faced person glared at him.
+
+'Gilbert was right about the beauty of the beast,' he muttered. 'D'you
+keep it in your glove now?' he went on, and punched Conroy in the
+short ribs.
+
+'No,' said Conroy meekly, but without coughing. 'Nowhere--on my honour!
+I've chucked it for good.'
+
+'Wait till you are a sound man before you say _that_, Mr. Conroy.' Sir
+John Chartres stumped out, saying to Gilbert in the corridor, 'It's all
+very fine, but the question is shall I or we "Sir Pandarus of Troy
+become," eh? We're bound to think of the children.'
+
+'Have you been vetted?' said Miss Henschil, a few minutes after the
+train started. 'May I sit with you? I--I don't trust myself yet. I can't
+give up as easily as you can, seemingly.'
+
+'Can't you? I never saw any one so improved in a month.'
+
+'Look here!' She reached across to the rack, single-handed lifted
+Conroy's bag, and held it at arm's length. 'I counted ten slowly. And I
+didn't think of hours or minutes,' she boasted.
+
+'Don't remind me,' he cried.
+
+'Ah! Now I've reminded myself. I wish I hadn't. Do you think it'll be
+easier for us to-night?'
+
+'Oh, don't.' The smell of the carriage had brought back all his last
+trip to him, and Conroy moved uneasily.
+
+'I'm sorry. I've brought some games,' she went on. 'Draughts and
+cards--but they all mean counting. I wish I'd brought chess, but I can't
+play chess. What can we do? Talk about something.'
+
+'Well, how's Toots, to begin with?' said Conroy.
+
+'Why? Did you see him on the platform?'
+
+'No. Was he there? I didn't notice.'
+
+'Oh yes. He doesn't understand. He's desperately jealous. I told him it
+doesn't matter. Will you please let me hold your hand? I believe I'm
+beginning to get the chill.'
+
+'Toots ought to envy me,' said Conroy.
+
+'He does. He paid you a high compliment the other night. He's taken to
+calling again--in spite of all they say.'
+
+Conroy inclined his head. He felt cold, and knew surely he would be
+colder.
+
+'He said,' she yawned. '(Beg your pardon.) He said he couldn't see how I
+could help falling in love with a man like you; and he called himself a
+damned little rat, and he beat his head on the piano last night.'
+
+'The piano? You play, then?'
+
+'Only to him. He thinks the world of my accomplishments. Then I told him
+I wouldn't have you if you were the last man on earth instead of only
+the best-looking--not with a million in each stocking.'
+
+'No, not with a million in each stocking,' said Conroy vehemently.
+'Isn't that odd?'
+
+'I suppose so--to any one who doesn't know. Well, where was I? Oh,
+George as good as told me I was deceiving him, and he wanted to go away
+without saying good-night. He hates standing a-tiptoe, but he must if I
+won't sit down.'
+
+Conroy would have smiled, but the chill that foreran the coming of the
+Lier-in-Wait was upon him, and his hand closed warningly on hers.
+
+'And--and so--' she was trying to say, when her hour also overtook her,
+leaving alive only the fear-dilated eyes that turned to Conroy. Hand
+froze on hand and the body with it as they waited for the horror in the
+blackness that heralded it. Yet through the worst Conroy saw, at an
+uncountable distance, one minute glint of light in his night. Thither
+would he go and escape his fear; and behold, that light was the light in
+the watch-tower of her eyes, where her locked soul signalled to his
+soul: 'Look at me!'
+
+In time, from him and from her, the Thing sheered aside, that each soul
+might step down and resume its own concerns. He thought confusedly of
+people on the skirts of a thunderstorm, withdrawing from windows where
+the torn night is, to their known and furnished beds. Then he dozed,
+till in some drowsy turn his hand fell from her warmed hand.
+
+'That's all. The Faces haven't come,' he heard her say. 'All--thank God!
+I don't feel even I need what Nursey promised me. Do you?'
+
+'No.' He rubbed his eyes. 'But don't make too sure.'
+
+'Certainly not. We shall have to try again next month. I'm afraid it
+will be an awful nuisance for you.'
+
+'Not to me, I assure you,' said Conroy, and they leaned back and
+laughed at the flatness of the words, after the hells through which they
+had just risen.
+
+'And now,' she said, strict eyes on Conroy, '_why_ wouldn't you take
+me--not with a million in each stocking?'
+
+'I don't know. That's what I've been puzzling over.'
+
+'So have I. We're as handsome a couple as I've ever seen. Are you well
+off, lad?'
+
+'They call me so,' said Conroy, smiling.
+
+'That's North country.' She laughed again. Setting aside my good looks
+and yours, I've four thousand a year of my own, and the rents should
+make it six. That's a match some old cats would lap tea all night to
+fettle up.'
+
+'It is. Lucky Toots!' said Conroy.
+
+'Ay,' she answered, 'he'll be the luckiest lad in London if I win
+through. Who's yours?'
+
+'No--no one, dear. I've been in Hell for years. I only want to get out
+and be alive and--so on. Isn't that reason enough?'
+
+'Maybe, for a man. But I never minded things much till George came. I
+was all stu-upid like.'
+
+'So was I, but now I think I can live. It ought to be less next month,
+oughtn't it?' he said.
+
+'I hope so. Ye-es. There's nothing much for a maid except to be married,
+and I ask no more. Whoever yours is, when you've found her, she shall
+have a wedding present from Mrs. George Skinner that--'
+
+'But she wouldn't understand it any more than Toots.'
+
+'He doesn't matter--except to me. I can't keep my eyes open, thank God!
+Good-night, lad.'
+
+Conroy followed her with his eyes. Beauty there was, grace there was,
+strength, and enough of the rest to drive better men than George Skinner
+to beat their heads on piano-tops--but for the new-found life of him
+Conroy could not feel one flutter of instinct or emotion that turned to
+herward. He put up his feet and fell asleep, dreaming of a joyous,
+normal world recovered--with interest on arrears. There were many things
+in it, but no one face of any one woman.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Thrice afterward they took the same train, and each time their trouble
+shrank and weakened. Miss Henschil talked of Toots, his multiplied
+calls, the things he had said to his sisters, the much worse things his
+sisters had replied; of the late (he seemed very dead to them) M.
+Najdol's gifts for the soul-weary; of shopping, of house rents, and the
+cost of really artistic furniture and linen.
+
+Conroy explained the exercises in which he delighted--mighty labours of
+play undertaken against other mighty men, till he sweated and, having
+bathed, slept. He had visited his mother, too, in Hereford, and he
+talked something of her and of the home-life, which his body, cut out of
+all clean life for five years, innocently and deeply enjoyed. Nurse
+Blaber was a little interested in Conroy's mother, but, as a rule, she
+smoked her cigarette and read her paper-backed novels in her own
+compartment.
+
+On their last trip she volunteered to sit with them, and buried herself
+in _The Cloister and the Hearth_ while they whispered together. On that
+occasion (it was near Salisbury) at two in the morning, when the
+Lier-in-Wait brushed them with his wing, it meant no more than that they
+should cease talk for the instant, and for the instant hold hands, as
+even utter strangers on the deep may do when their ship rolls underfoot.
+
+'But still,' said Nurse Blaber, not looking up, 'I think your Mr.
+Skinner might feel jealous of all this.'
+
+'It would be difficult to explain,' said Conroy.
+
+'Then you'd better not be at my wedding,' Miss Henschil laughed.
+
+'After all we've gone through, too. But I suppose you ought to leave me
+out. Is the day fixed?' he cried.
+
+'Twenty-second of September--in spite of both his sisters. I can risk it
+now.' Her face was glorious as she flushed.
+
+'My dear chap!' He shook hands unreservedly, and she gave back his grip
+without flinching. 'I can't tell you how pleased I am!'
+
+'Gracious Heavens!' said Nurse Blaber, in a new voice. 'Oh, I beg your
+pardon. I forgot I wasn't paid to be surprised.'
+
+'What at? Oh, I see!' Miss Henschil explained to Conroy. 'She expected
+you were going to kiss me, or I was going to kiss you, or something.'
+
+'After all you've gone through, as Mr. Conroy said,'
+
+'But I couldn't, could you?' said Miss Henschil, with a disgust as frank
+as that on Conroy's face. 'It would be horrible--horrible. And yet, of
+course, you're wonderfully handsome. How d'you account for it, Nursey?'
+
+Nurse Blaber shook her head. 'I was hired to cure you of a habit, dear.
+When you're cured I shall go on to the next case--that senile-decay one
+at Bourne-mouth I told you about.'
+
+'And I shall be left alone with George! But suppose it isn't cured,'
+said Miss Henschil of a sudden. Suppose it comes back again. What can I
+do? I can't send for _him_ in this way when I'm a married woman!' She
+pointed like an infant.
+
+'I'd come, of course,' Conroy answered. 'But, seriously, that is a
+consideration.'
+
+They looked at each other, alarmed and anxious, and then toward Nurse
+Blaber, who closed her book, marked the place, and turned to face them.
+
+'Have you ever talked to your mother as you have to me?' she said.
+
+'No. I might have spoken to dad--but mother's different. What d'you
+mean?'
+
+'And you've never talked to your mother either, Mr. Conroy?'
+
+'Not till I took Najdolene. Then I told her it was my heart. There's no
+need to say anything, now that I'm practically over it, is there?'
+
+'Not if it doesn't come back, but--' She beckoned with a stumpy,
+triumphant linger that drew their heads close together. 'You know I
+always go in and read a chapter to mother at tea, child.'
+
+'I know you do. You're an angel,' Miss Henschil patted the blue
+shoulder next her. 'Mother's Church of England now,' she explained. 'But
+she'll have her Bible with her pikelets at tea every night like the
+Skinners.'
+
+'It was Naaman and Gehazi last Tuesday that gave me a clue. I said I'd
+never seen a case of leprosy, and your mother said she'd seen too many.'
+
+'Where? She never told me,' Miss Henschil began.
+
+'A few months before you were born--on her trip to Australia--at Mola or
+Molo something or other. It took me three evenings to get it all out.'
+
+'Ay--mother's suspicious of questions,' said Miss Henschil to Conroy.
+'She'll lock the door of every room she's in, if it's but for five
+minutes. She was a Tackberry from Jarrow way, yo' see.'
+
+'She described your men to the life--men with faces all eaten away,
+staring at her over the fence of a lepers' hospital in this Molo Island.
+They begged from her, and she ran, she told me, all down the street,
+back to the pier. One touched her and she nearly fainted. She's ashamed
+of that still.'
+
+'My men? The sand and the fences?' Miss Henschil muttered.
+
+'Yes. You know how tidy she is and how she hates wind. She remembered
+that the fences were broken--she remembered the wind blowing.
+Sand--sun--salt wind--fences--faces--I got it all out of her, bit by
+bit. You don't know what I know! And it all happened three or four
+months before you were born. There!' Nurse Blaber slapped her knee with
+her little hand triumphantly.
+
+'Would that account for it?' Miss Henschil shook from head to foot.
+
+'Absolutely. I don't care who you ask! You never imagined the thing. It
+was _laid_ on you. It happened on earth to _you_! Quick, Mr. Conroy,
+she's too heavy for me! I'll get the flask.'
+
+Miss Henschil leaned forward and collapsed, as Conroy told her
+afterwards, like a factory chimney. She came out of her swoon with teeth
+that chattered on the cup.
+
+'No--no,' she said, gulping. 'It's not hysterics. Yo' see I've no call
+to hev 'em any more. No call--no reason whatever. God be praised! Can't
+yo' _feel_ I'm a right woman now?'
+
+'Stop hugging me!' said Nurse Blaber. 'You don't know your strength.
+Finish the brandy and water. It's perfectly reasonable, and I'll lay
+long odds Mr. Conroy's case is something of the same. I've been
+thinking--'
+
+'I wonder--' said Conroy, and pushed the girl back as she swayed again.
+
+Nurse Blaber smoothed her pale hair. 'Yes. Your trouble, or something
+like it, happened somewhere on earth or sea to the mother who bore you.
+Ask her, child. Ask her and be done with it once for all.'
+
+'I will,' said Conroy.... 'There ought to be--' He opened his bag and
+hunted breathlessly.
+
+'Bless you! Oh, God bless you, Nursey!' Miss Henschil was sobbing. 'You
+don't know what this means to me. It takes it all off--from the
+beginning.'
+
+'But doesn't it make any difference to you now?' the nurse asked
+curiously. 'Now that you're rightfully a woman?'
+
+Conroy, busy with his bag, had not heard. Miss Henschil stared across,
+and her beauty, freed from the shadow of any fear, blazed up within her.
+'I see what you mean,' she said. 'But it hasn't changed anything. I want
+Toots. _He_ has never been out of his mind in his life--except over
+silly me.'
+
+'It's all right,' said Conroy, stooping under the lamp,
+Bradshaw in hand. 'If I change at Templecombe--for Bristol
+(Bristol--Hereford--yes)--I can be with mother for breakfast in her room
+and find out.'
+
+'Quick, then,' said Nurse Blaber. 'We've passed Gillingham quite a
+while. You'd better take some of our sandwiches.' She went out to get
+them. Conroy and Miss Henschil would have danced, but there is no room
+for giants in a South-Western compartment.
+
+'Good-bye, good luck, lad. Eh, but you've changed already--like me. Send
+a wire to our hotel as soon as you're sure,' said Miss Henschil. 'What
+should I have done without you?'
+
+'Or I?' said Conroy. 'But it's Nurse that's saving us really.'
+
+'Then thank her,' said Miss Henschil, looking straight at him. 'Yes, I
+would. She'd like it.'
+
+When Nurse Blaber came back after the parting at Templecombe her nose
+and her eyelids were red, but, for all that, her face reflected a great
+light even while she sniffed over _The Cloister and the Hearth_.
+
+Miss Henschil, deep in a house furnisher's catalogue, did not speak for
+twenty minutes. Then she said, between adding totals of best, guest, and
+servants' sheets, 'But why should our times have been the same, Nursey?'
+
+'Because a child is born somewhere every second of the clock,' Nurse
+Blaber answered. 'And besides that, you probably set each other off by
+talking and thinking about it. You shouldn't, you know.'
+
+'Ay, but you've never been in Hell,' said Miss Henschil.
+
+The telegram handed in at Hereford at 12.46 and delivered to Miss
+Henschil on the beach of a certain village at 2.7 ran thus:
+
+'"_Absolutely confirmed. She says she remembers hearing noise of
+accident in engine-room returning from India eighty-five._"'
+
+'He means the year, not the thermometer,' said Nurse Blaber, throwing
+pebbles at the cold sea.
+
+'"_And two men scalded thus explaining my hoots._" (The idea of telling
+me that!) "_Subsequently silly clergyman passenger ran up behind her
+calling for joke, 'Friend, all is lost,' thus accounting very words._"'
+
+Nurse Blaber purred audibly.
+
+'"_She says only remembers being upset minute or two. Unspeakable
+relief. Best love Nursey, who is jewel. Get out of her what she would
+like best._" Oh, I oughtn't to have read that,' said Miss Henschil.
+
+'It doesn't matter. I don't want anything,' said Nurse Blaber, 'and if I
+did I shouldn't get it.'
+
+
+
+
+     'HELEN ALL ALONE'
+
+     There was darkness under Heaven
+       For an hour's space--
+     Darkness that we knew was given
+       Us for special grace.
+     Sun and moon and stars were hid,
+       God had left His Throne,
+     When Helen came to me, she did,
+       Helen all alone!
+
+     Side by side (because our fate
+       Damned us ere our birth)
+     We stole out of Limbo Gate
+       Looking for the Earth.
+     Hand in pulling hand amid
+       Fear no dreams have known,
+     Helen ran with me, she did,
+       Helen all alone!
+
+     When the Horror passing speech
+       Hunted us along,
+     Each laid hold on each, and each
+       Found the other strong.
+     In the teeth of things forbid
+       And Reason overthrown,
+     Helen stood by me, she did,
+       Helen all alone!
+
+     When, at last, we heard the Fires
+       Dull and die away,
+     When, at last, our linked desires
+       Dragged us up to day,
+     When, at last, our souls were rid
+       Of what that Night had shown,
+     Helen passed from me, she did,
+       Helen all alone!
+
+     Let her go and find a mate,
+       As I will find a bride,
+     Knowing naught of Limbo Gate
+       Or Who are penned inside.
+     There is knowledge God forbid
+       More than one should own.
+     So Helen went from me, she did,
+     Oh my soul, be glad she did!
+       Helen all alone!
+
+
+
+The Honours of War
+
+(1911)
+
+A hooded motor had followed mine from the Guildford Road up the drive to
+The Infant's ancestral hall, and had turned off to the stables.
+
+'We're having a quiet evening together. Stalky's upstairs changing.
+Dinner's at 7.15 sharp, because we're hungry. His room's next to yours,'
+said The Infant, nursing a cobwebbed bottle of Burgundy.
+
+Then I found Lieutenant-Colonel A.L. Corkran, I.A., who borrowed a
+collar-stud and told me about the East and his Sikh regiment.
+
+'And are your subalterns as good as ever?' I asked.
+
+'Amazin'--simply amazin'! All I've got to do is to find 'em jobs. They
+keep touchin' their caps to me and askin' for more work. 'Come at me
+with their tongues hangin' out. _I_ used to run the other way at
+their age.'
+
+'And when they err?' said I. 'I suppose they do sometimes?'
+
+'Then they run to me again to weep with remorse over their virgin
+peccadilloes. I never cuddled my Colonel when I was in trouble.
+Lambs--positive lambs!'
+
+'And what do you say to 'em?'
+
+'Talk to 'em like a papa. Tell 'em how I can't understand it, an' how
+shocked I am, and how grieved their parents'll be; and throw in a
+little about the Army Regulations and the Ten Commandments. 'Makes one
+feel rather a sweep when one thinks of what one used to do at their age.
+D'you remember--'
+
+We remembered together till close on seven o'clock. As we went out into
+the gallery that runs round the big hall, we saw The Infant, below,
+talking to two deferential well-set-up lads whom I had known, on and
+off, in the holidays, any time for the last ten years. One of them had a
+bruised cheek, and the other a weeping left eye.
+
+'Yes, that's the style,' said Stalky below his breath. 'They're brought
+up on lemon-squash and mobilisation text-books. I say, the girls we knew
+must have been much better than they pretended they were; for I'll swear
+it isn't the fathers.'
+
+'But why on earth did you do it?' The Infant was shouting. 'You know
+what it means nowadays.'
+
+'Well, sir,' said Bobby Trivett, the taller of the two, 'Wontner talks
+too much, for one thing. He didn't join till he was twenty-three, and,
+besides that, he used to lecture on tactics in the ante-room. He said
+Clausewitz was the only tactician, and he illustrated his theories with
+cigar-ends. He was that sort of chap, sir.'
+
+'And he didn't much care whose cigar-ends they were,' said Eames, who
+was shorter and pinker.
+
+'And then he _would_ talk about the 'Varsity,' said Bobby. 'He got a
+degree there. And he told us we weren't intellectual. He told the
+Adjutant so, sir. He was just that kind of chap, sir, if you
+understand.'
+
+Stalky and I backed behind a tall Japanese jar of chrysanthemums and
+listened more intently.
+
+'Was all the Mess in it, or only you two?' The Infant demanded, chewing
+his moustache.
+
+'The Adjutant went to bed, of course, sir, and the Senior Subaltern said
+he wasn't going to risk his commission--they're awfully down on ragging
+nowadays in the Service--but the rest of us--er--attended to him,'
+said Bobby.
+
+'Much?' The Infant asked. The boys smiled deprecatingly.
+
+'Not in the ante-room, sir,' said Eames. 'Then he called us silly
+children, and went to bed, and we sat up discussin', and I suppose we
+got a bit above ourselves, and we--er--'
+
+'Went to his quarters and drew him?' The Infant suggested.
+
+'Well, we only asked him to get out of bed, and we put his helmet and
+sword-belt on for him, and we sung him bits out of the Blue Fairy
+Book--the cram-book on Army organisation. Oh yes, and then we asked him
+to drink old Clausewitz's health, as a brother-tactician, in milk-punch
+and Worcester sauce, and so on. We had to help him a little there. He
+bites. There wasn't much else that time; but, you know, the War Office
+is severe on ragging these days.' Bobby stopped with a lopsided smile.
+
+'And then,' Eames went on, 'then Wontner said we'd done several pounds'
+worth of damage to his furniture.'
+
+'Oh,' said The Infant, 'he's that kind of man, is he? Does he brush his
+teeth?'
+
+'Oh yes, he's quite clean all over!' said Trivett; 'but his father's a
+wealthy barrister.'
+
+'Solicitor,' Eames corrected, 'and so this Mister Wontner is out for our
+blood. He's going to make a first-class row about it--appeal to the War
+Office--court of inquiry--spicy bits in the papers, and songs in the
+music-halls. He told us so.'
+
+'That's the sort of chap he is,' said Trivett. 'And that means old
+Dhurrah-bags, our Colonel, 'll be put on half-pay, same as that case in
+the Scarifungers' Mess; and our Adjutant'll have to exchange, like it
+was with that fellow in the 73rd Dragoons, and there'll be misery all
+round. He means making it too hot for us, and his papa'll back him.'
+
+'Yes, that's all very fine,' said The Infant; 'but I left the Service
+about the time you were born, Bobby. What's it got to do with me?'
+
+'Father told me I was always to go to you when I was in trouble, and
+you've been awfully good to me since he ...'
+
+'Better stay to dinner.' The Infant mopped his forehead.
+
+'Thank you very much, but the fact is--' Trivett halted.
+
+'This afternoon, about four, to be exact--' Eames broke in.
+
+'We went over to Wontner's quarters to talk things over. The row only
+happened last night, and we found him writing letters as hard as he
+could to his father--getting up his case for the War Office, you know.
+He read us some of 'em, but I'm not a good judge of style. We tried to
+ride him off quietly--apologies and so forth--but it was the milk-punch
+and mayonnaise that defeated us.'
+
+'Yes, he wasn't taking anything except pure revenge,' said Eames.
+
+'He said he'd make an example of the regiment, and he was particularly
+glad that he'd landed our Colonel. He told us so. Old Dhurrah-bags don't
+sympathise with Wontner's tactical lectures. He says Wontner ought to
+learn manners first, but we thought--' Trivett turned to Eames, who was
+less a son of the house than himself, Eames's father being still alive.
+
+'Then,' Eames went on, 'he became rather noisome, and we thought we
+might as well impound the correspondence'--he wrinkled his swelled left
+eye--'and after that, we got him to take a seat in my car.'
+
+'He was in a sack, you know,' Trivett explained. 'He wouldn't go any
+other way. But we didn't hurt him.'
+
+'Oh no! His head's sticking out quite clear, and'--Eames rushed the
+fence--'we've put him in your garage--er _pendente lite_.'
+
+'My garage!' Infant's voice nearly broke with horror.
+
+'Well, father always told me if I was in trouble, Uncle George--'
+
+Bobby's sentence died away as The Infant collapsed on a divan and said
+no more than, 'Your commissions!' There was a long, long silence.
+
+'What price your latter-day lime-juice subaltern?' I whispered to
+Stalky behind my hand. His nostrils expanded, and he drummed on the edge
+of the Japanese jar with his knuckles.
+
+'Confound your father, Bobby!' The Infant groaned. 'Raggin's a criminal
+offence these days. It isn't as if--'
+
+'Come on,' said Stalky. 'That was my old Line battalion in Egypt. They
+nearly slung old Dhurrah-bags and me out of the Service in '85 for
+ragging.' He descended the stairs and The Infant rolled appealing
+eyes at him.
+
+'I heard what you youngsters have confessed,' he began; and in his
+orderly-room voice, which is almost as musical as his singing one, he
+tongue-lashed those lads in such sort as was a privilege and a
+revelation to listen to. Till then they had known him almost as a
+relative--we were all brevet, deputy, or acting uncles to The Infant's
+friends' brood--a sympathetic elder brother, sound on finance. They had
+never met Colonel A.L. Corkran in the Chair of Justice. And while he
+flayed and rent and blistered, and wiped the floor with them, and while
+they looked for hiding-places and found none on that floor, I remembered
+(1) the up-ending of 'Dolly' Macshane at Dalhousie, which came
+perilously near a court-martial on Second-Lieutenant Corkran; (2) the
+burning of Captain Parmilee's mosquito-curtains on a hot Indian dawn,
+when the captain slept in his garden, and Lieutenant Corkran, smoking,
+rode by after a successful whist night at the club; (3) the
+introduction of an ekka pony, with ekka attached, into a brother
+captain's tent on a frosty night in Peshawur, and the removal of tent,
+pole, cot, and captain all wrapped in chilly canvas; (4) the bath that
+was given to Elliot-Hacker on his own verandah--his lady-love saw it and
+broke off the engagement, which was what the Mess intended, she being an
+Eurasian--and the powdering all over of Elliot-Hacker with flour and
+turmeric from the bazaar.
+
+When he took breath I realised how only Satan can rebuke sin. The good
+don't know enough.
+
+'Now,' said Stalky, 'get out! No, not out of the house. Go to your
+rooms.'
+
+'I'll send your dinner, Bobby,' said The Infant. 'Ipps!'
+
+Nothing had ever been known to astonish Ipps, the butler. He entered and
+withdrew with his charges. After all, he had suffered from Bobby since
+Bobby's twelfth year.
+
+'They've done everything they could, short of murder,' said The Infant.
+'You know what this'll mean for the regiment. It isn't as if we were
+dealing with Sahibs nowadays.'
+
+'Quite so.' Stalky turned on me. 'Go and release the bagman,' he said.
+
+''Tisn't my garage,' I pleaded. 'I'm company. Besides, he'll probably
+slay me. He's been in the sack for hours.'
+
+'Look here,' Stalky thundered--the years had fallen from us both--'is
+your--am I commandin' or are you? We've got to pull this thing off
+somehow or other. Cut over to the garage, make much of him, and bring
+him over. He's dining with us. Be quick, you dithering ass!'
+
+I was quick enough; but as I ran through the shrubbery I wondered how
+one extricates the subaltern of the present day from a sack without
+hurting his feelings. Anciently, one slit the end open, taking off his
+boots first, and then fled.
+
+Imagine a sumptuously-equipped garage, half-filled by The Infant's
+cobalt-blue, grey-corded silk limousine and a mud-splashed, cheap,
+hooded four-seater. In the back seat of this last, conceive a fiery
+chestnut head emerging from a long oat-sack; an implacable white face,
+with blazing eyes and jaws that worked ceaselessly at the loop of the
+string that was drawn round its neck. The effect, under the electrics,
+was that of a demon caterpillar wrathfully spinning its own cocoon.
+
+'Good evening!' I said genially. 'Let me help you out of that.' The head
+glared. 'We've got 'em,' I went on. 'They came to quite the wrong shop
+for this sort of game--quite the wrong shop.'
+
+'Game!' said the head. 'We'll see about that. Let me out.'
+
+It was not a promising voice for one so young, and, as usual, I had no
+knife.
+
+'You've chewed the string so I can't find the knot,' I said as I worked
+with trembling fingers at the cater-pillar's throat. Something untied
+itself, and Mr. Wontner wriggled out, collarless, tieless, his coat
+split half down his back, his waistcoat unbuttoned, his watch-chain
+snapped, his trousers rucked well above the knees.
+
+'Where,' he said grimly, as he pulled them down, 'are Master Trivett and
+Master Eames?'
+
+'Both arrested, of course,' I replied. 'Sir George'--I gave The Infant's
+full title as a baronet--'is a Justice of the Peace. He'd be very
+pleased if you dined with us. There's a room ready for you.' I picked
+up the sack.
+
+'D'you know,' said Mr. Wontner through his teeth--but the car's bonnet
+was between us, 'that this looks to me like--I won't say conspiracy
+_yet_, but uncommonly like a confederacy.'
+
+When injured souls begin to distinguish and qualify, danger is over. So
+I grew bold.
+
+''Sorry you take it that way,' I said. 'You come here in trouble--'
+
+'My good fool,' he interrupted, with a half-hysterical snort, 'let me
+assure you that the trouble will recoil on the other men!'
+
+'As you please,' I went on. 'Anyhow, the chaps who got you into trouble
+are arrested, and the magistrate who arrested 'em asks you to dinner.
+Shall I tell him you're walking back to Aldershot?'
+
+He picked some fluff off his waistcoat.
+
+'I'm in no position to dictate terms yet,' he said. 'That will come
+later. I must probe into this a little further. In the meantime, I
+accept your invitation without prejudice--if you understand what
+that means.'
+
+I understood and began to be happy again. Sub-alterns without
+prejudices were quite new to me. 'All right,' I replied; 'if you'll go
+up to the house, I'll turn out the lights.'
+
+He walked off stiffly, while I searched the sack and the car for the
+impounded correspondence that Bobby had talked of. I found nothing
+except, as the police reports say, the trace of a struggle. He had
+kicked half the varnish off the back of the front seat, and had bitten
+the leather padding where he could reach it. Evidently a purposeful and
+hard-mouthed young gentleman.
+
+'Well done!' said Stalky at the door. 'So he didn't slay you. Stop
+laughing. He's talking to The Infant now about depositions. Look here,
+you're nearest his size. Cut up to your rooms and give Ipps your dinner
+things and a clean shirt for him.'
+
+'But I haven't got another suit,' I said.
+
+'You! I'm not thinking of you! We've got to conciliate _him_. He's in
+filthy rags and a filthy temper, and he won't feel decent till he's
+dressed. You're the sacrifice. Be quick! And clean socks, remember!'
+
+Once more I trotted up to my room, changed into unseasonable unbrushed
+grey tweeds, put studs into a clean shirt, dug out fresh socks, handed
+the whole garniture over to Ipps, and returned to the hall just in time
+to hear Stalky say, 'I'm a stockbroker, but I have the honour to hold
+His Majesty's commission in a Territorial battalion.' Then I felt as
+though I might be beginning to be repaid.
+
+'I have a very high opinion of the Territorials myself,' said Mr.
+Wontner above a glass of sherry. (Infant never lets us put bitters into
+anything above twenty years old.) 'But if you had any experience of the
+Service, you would find that the Average Army Man--'
+
+Here The Infant suggested changing, and Ipps, before whom no human
+passion can assert itself, led Mr. Wontner away.
+
+'Why the devil did you tell him I was on the Bench?' said Infant
+wrathfully to me. 'You know I ain't now. Why didn't he stay in his
+father's office? He's a raging blight!'
+
+'Not a bit of it,' said Stalky cheerfully. 'He's a little shaken and
+excited. Probably Beetle annoyed him in the garage, but we must overlook
+that. We've contained him so far, and I'm going to nibble round his
+outposts at dinner. All you've got to do, Infant, is to remember you're
+a gentleman in your own house. Don't hop! You'll find it pretty
+difficult before dinner's over. I don't want to hear anything at all
+from you, Beetle.'
+
+'But I'm just beginning to like him,' I said. 'Do let me play!'
+
+'Not till I ask you. You'll overdo it. Poor old Dhurrah-bags! A scandal
+'ud break him up!'
+
+'But as long as a regiment has no say as to who joins it, it's bound to
+rag,' Infant began. 'Why--why, they varnished me when I joined!' He
+squirmed at the thought of it.
+
+'Don't be owls! We ain't discussing principles! We've got to save the
+court of inquiry if we can,' said Stalky.
+
+Five minutes later--at 7.45 to be precise--we four sat down to such a
+dinner as, I hold, only The Infant's cook can produce, with wines worthy
+of pontifical banquets. A man in the extremity of rage and injured
+dignity is precisely like a typhoid patient. He asks no questions,
+accepts what is put before him, and babbles in one key--very often of
+trifles. But food and drink are the very best of drugs. I think it was
+Heidsieck Dry Monopole '92--Stalky as usual stuck to Burgundy--that
+began to unlock Mr. Wontner's heart behind my shirt-front. Me he snubbed
+throughout, after the Oxford manner, because I had seen him in the sack,
+and he did not intend me to presume; but to Stalky and The Infant, while
+I admired the set of my dinner-jacket across his shoulders, he made his
+plans of revenge very clear indeed. He had even sketched out some of the
+paragraphs that were to appear in the papers, and if Stalky had allowed
+me to speak, I would have told him that they were rather neatly phrased.
+
+'You ought to be able to get whackin' damages out of 'em, into the
+bargain,' said Stalky, after Mr. Wontner had outlined his
+position legally.
+
+'My de-ah sir,' Mr. Wontner applied himself to his glass, 'it isn't a
+matter that gentlemen usually discuss, but, I assure you, we
+Wontners'--he waved a well-kept hand--'do not stand in any need of
+filthy lucre.' In the next three minutes, we learned exactly what his
+father was worth, which, as he pointed out, was a trifle no man of the
+world dwelt on. Stalky envied aloud, and I delivered my first kick at
+The Infant's ankle. Thence we drifted to education, and the Average Army
+Man, and the desolating vacuity--I remember these words--of Army
+Society, notably among its womenkind. It appeared there was some sort of
+narrow convention in the Army against mentioning a woman's name at Mess.
+We were much surprised at this--Stalky would not let me express my
+surprise--but we took it from Mr. Wontner, who said we might, that it
+was so. Next he touched on Colonels of the old school, and their
+cognisance of tactics. Not that he himself pretended to any skill in
+tactics, but after three years at the 'Varsity--none of us had had a
+'Varsity education--a man insensibly contracted the habit of clear
+thinking. At least, he could automatically co-ordinate his ideas, and
+the jealousy of these muddle-headed Colonels was inconceivable. We would
+understand that it was his duty to force on the retirement of his
+Colonel, who had been in the conspiracy against him; to make his
+Adjutant resign or exchange; and to give the half-dozen childish
+subalterns who had vexed his dignity a chance to retrieve themselves in
+other corps--West African ones, he hoped. For himself, after the case
+was decided, he proposed to go on living in the regiment, just to
+prove--for he bore no malice--that times had changed, _nosque mutamur in
+illis_--if we knew what that meant. Infant had curled his legs out of
+reach, so I was quite free to return thanks yet once more to Allah for
+the diversity of His creatures in His adorable world.
+
+And so, by way of an eighty-year-old liqueur brandy, to tactics and the
+great General Clausewitz, unknown to the Average Army Man. Here The
+Infant, at a whisper from Ipps--whose face had darkened like a mulberry
+while he waited--excused himself and went away, but Stalky, Colonel of
+Territorials, wanted some tips on tactics. He got them unbrokenly for
+ten minutes--Wontner and Clausewitz mixed, but Wontner in a film of
+priceless cognac distinctly on top. When The Infant came back, he
+renewed his clear-spoken demand that Infant should take his depositions.
+I supposed this to be a family trait of the Wontners, whom I had been
+visualising for some time past even to the third generation.
+
+'But, hang it all, they're both asleep!' said Infant, scowling at me.
+'Ipps let 'em have the '81 port.'
+
+'Asleep!' said Stalky, rising at once. 'I don't see that makes any
+difference. As a matter of form, you'd better identify them. I'll show
+you the way.'
+
+We followed up the white stone side-staircase that leads to the
+bachelors' wing. Mr. Wontner seemed surprised that the boys were not in
+the coal-cellar.
+
+'Oh, a chap's assumed to be innocent until he's proved guilty,' said
+Stalky, mounting step by step. 'How did they get you into the sack,
+Mr. Wontner?'
+
+'Jumped on me from behind--two to one,' said Mr. Wontner briefly. 'I
+think I handed each of them something first, but they roped my arms
+and legs.'
+
+'And did they photograph you in the sack?'
+
+'Good Heavens, no!' Mr. Wontner shuddered.
+
+'That's lucky. Awful thing to live down--a photograph, isn't it?' said
+Stalky to me as we reached the landing. 'I'm thinking of the newspapers,
+of course.'
+
+'Oh, but you can easily have sketches in the illustrated papers from
+accounts supplied by eye-witnesses,' I said.
+
+Mr. Wontner turned him round. It was the first time he had honoured me
+by his notice since our talk in the garage.
+
+'Ah,' said he, 'do you pretend to any special knowledge in these
+matters?'
+
+'I'm a journalist by profession,' I answered simply but nobly. 'As soon
+as you're at liberty, I'd like to have your account of the affair.'
+
+Now I thought he would have loved me for this, but he only replied in an
+uncomfortable, uncoming-on voice, 'Oh, you would, would you?'
+
+'Not if it's any trouble, of course,' I said. 'I can always get their
+version from the defendants. Do either of 'em draw or sketch at all, Mr.
+Wontner? Or perhaps your father might--'
+
+Then he said quite hotly, 'I wish you to understand very clearly, my
+good man, that a gentleman's name can't be dragged through the gutter to
+bolster up the circulation of your wretched sheet, whatever it may be.'
+
+'It is ----' I named a journal of enormous sales which specialises in
+scholastic, military, and other scandals. 'I don't know yet what it
+can't do, Mr. Wontner.'
+
+'I didn't know that I was dealing with a reporter' said Mr. Wontner.
+
+We were all halted outside a shut door. Ipps had followed us.
+
+'But surely you want it in the papers, don't you?' I urged. 'With a
+scandal like this, one couldn't, in justice to the democracy, be
+exclusive. We'd syndicate it here and in the United States. I helped you
+out of the sack, if you remember.'
+
+'I wish to goodness you'd stop talking!' he snapped, and sat down on a
+chair. Stalky's hand on my shoulder quietly signalled me out of action,
+but I felt that my fire had not been misdirected.
+
+'I'll answer for him,' said Stalky to Wontner, in an undertone that
+dropped to a whisper. I caught--'Not without my leave--dependent on me
+for market-tips,' and other gratifying tributes to my integrity.
+
+Still Mr. Wontner sat in his chair, and still we waited on him. The
+Infant's face showed worry and heavy grief; Stalky's, a bright and
+bird-like interest; mine was hidden behind his shoulders, but on the
+face of Ipps were written emotions that no butler should cherish towards
+any guest. Contempt and wrath were the least of them. And Mr. Wontner
+was looking full at Ipps, as Ipps was looking at him. Mr. Wontner's
+father, I understood, kept a butler and two footmen.
+
+'D'you suppose they're shamming, in order to get off?' he said at last.
+Ipps shook his head and noiselessly threw the door open. The boys had
+finished their dinner and were fast asleep--one on a sofa, one in a long
+chair--their faces fallen back to the lines of their childhood. They had
+had a wildish night, a hard day, that ended with a telling-off from an
+artist, and the assurance they had wrecked their prospects for life.
+What else should youth do, then, but eat, and drink '81 port, and
+remember their sorrows no more?
+
+Mr. Wontner looked at them severely, Ipps within easy reach, his hands
+quite ready. 'Childish,' said Mr. Wontner at last. 'Childish but
+necessary. Er--have you such a thing as a rope on the premises, and a
+sack--two sacks and two ropes? I'm afraid I can't resist the temptation.
+That man understands, doesn't he, that this is a private matter?'
+
+'That man,' who was me, was off to the basement like one of Infant's own
+fallow-deer. The stables gave me what I wanted, and coming back with it
+through a dark passage, I ran squarely into Ipps. 'Go on!' he grunted.
+'The minute he lays hands on Master Bobby, Master Bobby's saved. But
+that person ought to be told how near he came to being assaulted. It was
+touch-and-go with me all the time from the soup down, I assure you.'
+
+I arrived breathless with the sacks and the ropes. 'They were two to one
+with me,' said Mr. Wontner, as he took them. 'If they wake--'
+
+'We'll stand by,' Stalky replied. 'Two to one is quite fair.'
+
+But the boys hardly grunted as Mr. Wontner roped first one and then the
+other. Even when they were slid into the sacks they only mumbled, with
+rolling heads, through sticky lips, and snored on.
+
+'Port?' said Mr. Wontner virtuously.
+
+'Nervous exhaustion. They aren't much more than kids, after all. What's
+next?' said Stalky.
+
+'I want to take 'em away with me, please.'
+
+Stalky looked at him with respect.
+
+'I'll have my car round in five minutes,' said The Infant. 'Ipps'll help
+carry 'em downstairs,' and he shook Mr. Wontner by the hand.
+
+We were all perfectly serious till the two bundles were dumped on a
+divan in the hall, and the boys waked and began to realise what
+had happened.
+
+'Yah!' said Mr. Wontner, with the simplicity of twelve years old. 'Who's
+scored now?' And he sat upon them. The tension broke in a storm of
+laughter, led, I think, by Ipps.
+
+'Asinine--absolutely asinine!' said Mr. Wontner, with folded arms from
+his lively chair. But he drank in the flattery and the fellowship of it
+all with quite a brainless grin, as we rolled and stamped round him, and
+wiped the tears from our cheeks.
+
+'Hang it!' said Bobby Trivett. 'We're defeated!'
+
+'By tactics, too,' said Eames. 'I didn't think you knew 'em, Clausewitz.
+It's a fair score. What are you going to do with us?'
+
+'Take you back to Mess,' said Mr. Wontner.
+
+'Not like this?'
+
+'Oh no. Worse--much worse! I haven't begun with you yet. And you
+thought you'd scored! Yah!'
+
+They had scored beyond their wildest dream. The man in whose hands it
+lay to shame them, their Colonel, their Adjutant, their Regiment, and
+their Service, had cast away all shadow of his legal rights for the sake
+of a common or bear-garden rag--such a rag as if it came to the ears of
+the authorities, would cost him his commission. They were saved, and
+their saviour was their equal and their brother. So they chaffed and
+reviled him as such till he again squashed the breath out of them, and
+we others laughed louder than they.
+
+'Fall in!' said Stalky when the limousine came round. 'This is the score
+of the century. I wouldn't miss it for a brigade! We shan't be
+long, Infant!'
+
+I hurried into a coat.
+
+'Is there any necessity for that reporter-chap to come too?' said Mr.
+Wontner in an unguarded whisper. 'He isn't dressed for one thing.'
+
+Bobby and Eames wriggled round to look at the reporter, began a joyous
+bellow, and suddenly stopped.
+
+'What's the matter?' said Wontner with suspicion.
+
+'Nothing,' said Bobby. 'I die happy, Clausewitz. Take me up tenderly.'
+
+We packed into the car, bearing our sheaves with us, and for half an
+hour, as the cool night-air fanned his thoughtful brow, Mr. Wontner was
+quite abreast of himself. Though he said nothing unworthy, he triumphed
+and trumpeted a little loudly over the sacks. I sat between them on the
+back seat, and applauded him servilely till he reminded me that what I
+had seen and what he had said was not for publication. I hinted, while
+the boys plunged with joy inside their trappings, that this might be a
+matter for arrangement. 'Then a sovereign shan't part us,' said Mr.
+Wontner cheerily, and both boys fell into lively hysterics. 'I don't see
+where the joke comes in for you,' said Mr. Wontner. 'I thought it was my
+little jokelet to-night.'
+
+'No, Clausewitz,' gasped Bobby. 'Some is, but not all. I'll be good now.
+I'll give you my parole till we get to Mess. I wouldn't be out of this
+for a fiver.'
+
+'Nor me,' said Eames, and he gave his parole to attempt no escape or
+evasion.
+
+'Now, I suppose,' said Mr. Wontner largely to Stalky, as we neared the
+suburbs of Ash, 'you have a good deal of practical joking on the Stock
+Exchange, haven't you?'
+
+'And when were you on the Stock Exchange, Uncle Leonard?' piped Bobby,
+while Eames laid his sobbing head on my shoulder.
+
+'I'm sorry,' said Stalky, 'but the fact is, I command a regiment myself
+when I'm at home. Your Colonel knows me, I think.' He gave his name. Mr.
+Wontner seemed to have heard of it. We had to pick Eames off the floor,
+where he had cast himself from excess of delight.
+
+'Oh, Heavens!' said Mr. Wontner after a long pause. 'What have I done?
+What haven't I done?' We felt the temperature in the car rise as
+he blushed.
+
+'You didn't talk tactics, Clausewitz?' said Bobby. 'Oh, say it wasn't
+tactics, darling!'
+
+'It was,' said Wontner.
+
+Eames was all among our feet again, crying, 'If you don't let me get my
+arms up, I'll be sick. Let's hear what you said. Tell us.'
+
+But Mr. Wontner turned to Stalky. 'It's no good my begging your pardon,
+sir, I suppose,' he said.
+
+'Don't you notice 'em,' said Stalky. 'It was a fair rag all round, and
+anyhow, you two youngsters haven't any right to talk tactics. You've
+been rolled up, horse, foot, and guns.'
+
+'I'll make a treaty. If you'll let us go and change presently,' said
+Bobby, 'I'll promise we won't tell about you, Clausewitz. _You_ talked
+tactics to Uncle Len? Old Dhurrah-bags will like that. He don't love
+you, Claus.'
+
+'If I've made one ass of myself, I shall take extra care to make asses
+of you!' said Wontner. 'I want to stop, please, at the next milliner's
+shop on the right. It ought to be close here.'
+
+He evidently knew the country even in the dark, for the car stopped at a
+brilliantly-lighted millinery establishment, where--it was Saturday
+evening--a young lady was clearing up the counter. I followed him, as a
+good reporter should.
+
+'Have you got--' he began. 'Ah, those'll do!' He pointed to two hairy
+plush beehive bonnets, one magenta, the other a conscientious electric
+blue. 'How much, please? I'll take them both, and that bunch of peacock
+feathers, and that red feather thing.' It was a brilliant crimson-dyed
+pigeon's wing.
+
+'Now I want some yards of muslin with a nice, fierce pattern, please.'
+He got it--yellow with black tulips--and returned heavily laden.
+
+'Sorry to have kept you,' said he. 'Now we'll go to my quarters to
+change and beautify.'
+
+We came to them--opposite a dun waste of parade-ground that might have
+been Mian Mir--and bugles as they blew and drums as they rolled set
+heart-strings echoing.
+
+We hoisted the boys out and arranged them on chairs, while Wontner
+changed into uniform, but stopped when he saw me taking off my jacket.
+
+'What on earth's that for?' said he.
+
+'Because you've been wearing my evening things,' I said. 'I want to get
+into 'em again, if you don't mind.'
+
+'Then you aren't a reporter?' he said.
+
+'No,' I said, 'but that shan't part us.'
+
+'Oh, hurry!' cried Eames in desperate convulsions. 'We can't stand this
+much longer. 'Tisn't fair on the young.'
+
+'I'll attend to you in good time,' said Wontner; and when he had made
+careful toilet, he unwrapped the bonnets, put the peacock's feather into
+the magenta one, pinned the crimson wing on the blue one, set them
+daintily on the boys' heads, and bade them admire the effect in his
+shaving-glass while he ripped the muslin into lengths, bound it first,
+and draped it artistically afterwards a little below their knees. He
+finished off with a gigantic sash-bow, obi fashion. 'Hobble skirts,' he
+explained to Stalky, who nodded approval.
+
+Next he split open the bottom of each sack so that they could walk, but
+with very short steps. 'I ought to have got you white satin slippers,'
+he murmured, 'and I'm sorry there's no rouge.'
+
+'Don't worry on our account, old man--you're doing us proud,' said Bobby
+from under his hat. 'This beats milk-punch and mayonnaise.'
+
+'Oh, why didn't we think of these things when we had him at our mercy?'
+Eames wailed. 'Never mind--we'll try it on the next chap. You've a
+mind, Claus.'
+
+'Now we'll call on 'em at Mess,' said Wontner, as they minced towards
+the door.
+
+'I think I'll call on your Colonel,' said Stalky. 'He oughtn't to miss
+this. Your first attempt? I assure you I couldn't have done it better
+myself. Thank you!' He held out his hand.
+
+'Thank _you_, sir!' said Wontner, shaking it. 'I'm more grateful to you
+than I can say, and--and I'd like you to believe some time that I'm not
+quite as big a--'
+
+'Not in the least,' Stalky interrupted. 'If I were writing a
+confidential report on you, I should put you down as rather adequate.
+Look after your geishas, or they'll fall!'
+
+We watched the three cross the road and disappear into the shadow of the
+Mess verandah. There was a noise. Then telephone bells rang, a sergeant
+and a Mess waiter charged out, and the noise grew, till at last the Mess
+was a little noisy.
+
+We came back, ten minutes later, with Colonel Dalziell, who had been
+taking his sorrows to bed with him. The ante-room was quite full and
+visitors were still arriving, but it was possible to hear oneself speak
+occasionally. Trivett and Eames, in sack and sash, sat side by side on a
+table, their hats at a ravishing angle, coquettishly twiddling their
+tied feet. In the intervals of singing 'Put Me Among the Girls,' they
+sipped whisky-and-soda held to their lips by, I regret to say, a Major.
+Public opinion seemed to be against allowing them to change their
+costume till they should have danced in it. Wontner, lying more or less
+gracefully at the level of the chandelier in the arms of six subalterns,
+was lecturing on tactics and imploring to be let down, which he was with
+a run when they realised that the Colonel was there. Then he picked
+himself up from the sofa and said: 'I want to apologise, sir, to you and
+the Mess for having been such an ass ever since I joined!'
+
+This was when the noise began.
+
+Seeing the night promised to be wet, Stalky and I went home again in The
+Infant's car. It was some time since we had tasted the hot air that lies
+between the cornice and the ceiling of crowded rooms.
+
+After half an hour's silence, Stalky said to me: 'I don't know what
+you've been doing, but I believe I've been weepin'. Would you put that
+down to Burgundy or senile decay?'
+
+
+
+
+THE CHILDREN
+
+     These were our children who died for our lands: they
+         were dear in our sight.
+       We have only the memory left of their home-treasured
+         sayings and laughter.
+       The price of our loss shall be paid to our hands, not
+         another's hereafter.
+     Neither the Alien nor Priest shall decide on it. That is our right.
+           _But who shall return us the children_?
+
+     At the hour the Barbarian chose to disclose his pretences,
+       And raged against Man, they engaged, on the breasts
+         that they bared for us,
+       The first felon-stroke of the sword he had long-time
+         prepared for us--
+     Their bodies were all our defence while we wrought our defences.
+
+     They bought us anew with their blood, forbearing to blame us,
+     Those hours which we had not made good when the Judgment
+          o'ercame us.
+     They believed us and perished for it. Our statecraft, our learning.
+
+     Delivered them bound to the Pit and alive to the burning
+     Whither they mirthfully hastened as jostling for honour.
+     Not since her birth has our Earth seen such worth loosed upon her.
+
+     Nor was their agony brief, or once only imposed on them.
+       The wounded, the war-spent, the sick received no exemption:
+       Being cured they returned and endured and achieved our redemption,
+     Hopeless themselves of relief, till Death, marvelling, closed
+          on them.
+
+     That flesh we had nursed from the first in all cleanness was given
+     To corruption unveiled and assailed by the malice of Heaven--
+     By the heart-shaking jests of Decay where it lolled on the wires--
+     To be blanched or gay-painted by fumes--to be cindered by fires--
+     To be senselessly tossed and retossed in stale mutilation
+     From crater to crater. For this we shall take expiation.
+         _But who shall return us our children_?
+
+
+
+The Dog Hervey
+
+(April 1914)
+
+My friend Attley, who would give away his own head if you told him you
+had lost yours, was giving away a six-months-old litter of Bettina's
+pups, and half-a-dozen women were in raptures at the show on
+Mittleham lawn.
+
+We picked by lot. Mrs. Godfrey drew first choice; her married daughter,
+second. I was third, but waived my right because I was already owned by
+Malachi, Bettina's full brother, whom I had brought over in the car to
+visit his nephews and nieces, and he would have slain them all if I had
+taken home one. Milly, Mrs. Godfrey's younger daughter, pounced on my
+rejection with squeals of delight, and Attley turned to a dark,
+sallow-skinned, slack-mouthed girl, who had come over for tennis, and
+invited her to pick. She put on a pince-nez that made her look like a
+camel, knelt clumsily, for she was long from the hip to the knee,
+breathed hard, and considered the last couple.
+
+'I think I'd like that sandy-pied one,' she said.
+
+'Oh, not him, Miss Sichliffe!' Attley cried. 'He was overlaid or had
+sunstroke or something. They call him The Looney in the kennels.
+Besides, he squints.'
+
+'I think that's rather fetching,' she answered. Neither Malachi nor I
+had ever seen a squinting dog before.
+
+'That's chorea--St. Vitus's dance,' Mrs. Godfrey put in. 'He ought to
+have been drowned.'
+
+'But I like his cast of countenance,' the girl persisted.
+
+'He doesn't look a good life,' I said, 'but perhaps he can be patched
+up.' Miss Sichliffe turned crimson; I saw Mrs. Godfrey exchange a glance
+with her married daughter, and knew I had said something which would
+have to be lived down.
+
+'Yes,' Miss Sichliffe went on, her voice shaking, 'he isn't a good life,
+but perhaps I can--patch him up. Come here, sir.' The misshapen beast
+lurched toward her, squinting down his own nose till he fell over his
+own toes. Then, luckily, Bettina ran across the lawn and reminded
+Malachi of their puppyhood. All that family are as queer as Dick's
+hatband, and fight like man and wife. I had to separate them, and Mrs.
+Godfrey helped me till they retired under the rhododendrons and had it
+out in silence.
+
+'D'you know what that girl's father was?' Mrs. Godfrey asked.
+
+'No,' I replied. 'I loathe her for her own sake. She breathes through
+her mouth.'
+
+'He was a retired doctor,' she explained. 'He used to pick up stormy
+young men in the repentant stage, take them home, and patch them up till
+they were sound enough to be insured. Then he insured them heavily, and
+let them out into the world again--with an appetite. Of course, no one
+knew him while he was alive, but he left pots of money to his daughter.'
+
+'Strictly legitimate--highly respectable,' I said. 'But what a life for
+the daughter!'
+
+'Mustn't it have been! _Now_ d'you realise what you said just now?'
+
+'Perfectly; and now you've made me quite happy, shall we go back to the
+house?'
+
+When we reached it they were all inside, sitting in committee on names.
+
+'What shall you call yours?' I heard Milly ask Miss Sichliffe.
+
+'Harvey,' she replied--'Harvey's Sauce, you know. He's going to be quite
+saucy when I've'--she saw Mrs. Godfrey and me coming through the French
+window--'when he's stronger.'
+
+Attley, the well-meaning man, to make me feel at ease, asked what I
+thought of the name.
+
+'Oh, splendid,' I said at random. 'H with an A, A with an R, R with a--'
+
+'But that's Little Bingo,' some one said, and they all laughed.
+
+Miss Sichliffe, her hands joined across her long knees, drawled, 'You
+ought always to verify your quotations.'
+
+It was not a kindly thrust, but something in the word 'quotation' set
+the automatic side of my brain at work on some shadow of a word or
+phrase that kept itself out of memory's reach as a cat sits just beyond
+a dog's jump. When I was going home, Miss Sichliffe came up to me in the
+twilight, the pup on a leash, swinging her big shoes at the end of her
+tennis-racket.
+
+''Sorry,' she said in her thick schoolboy-like voice. 'I'm sorry for
+what I said to you about verifying quotations. I didn't know you well
+enough and--anyhow, I oughtn't to have.'
+
+'But you were quite right about Little Bingo,' I answered. 'The spelling
+ought to have reminded me.'
+
+'Yes, of course. It's the spelling,' she said, and slouched off with the
+pup sliding after her. Once again my brain began to worry after
+something that would have meant something if it had been properly
+spelled. I confided my trouble to Malachi on the way home, but Bettina
+had bitten him in four places, and he was busy.
+
+Weeks later, Attley came over to see me, and before his car stopped
+Malachi let me know that Bettina was sitting beside the chauffeur. He
+greeted her by the scruff of the neck as she hopped down; and I greeted
+Mrs. Godfrey, Attley, and a big basket.
+
+'You've got to help me,' said Attley tiredly. We took the basket into
+the garden, and there staggered out the angular shadow of a sandy-pied,
+broken-haired terrier, with one imbecile and one delirious ear, and two
+most hideous squints. Bettina and Malachi, already at grips on the lawn,
+saw him, let go, and fled in opposite directions.
+
+'Why have you brought that fetid hound here?' I demanded.
+
+'Harvey? For you to take care of,' said Attley. 'He's had distemper, but
+_I_'m going abroad.'
+
+'Take him with you. I won't have him. He's mentally afflicted.'
+
+'Look here,' Attley almost shouted, 'do I strike you as a fool?'
+
+'Always,' said I.
+
+'Well, then, if you say so, and Ella says so, that proves I ought to go
+abroad.'
+
+'Will's wrong, quite wrong,' Mrs. Godfrey interrupted; 'but you must
+take the pup.'
+
+'My dear boy, my dear boy, don't you ever give anything to a woman,'
+Attley snorted.
+
+Bit by bit I got the story out of them in the quiet garden (never a sign
+from Bettina and Malachi), while Harvey stared me out of countenance,
+first with one cuttlefish eye and then with the other.
+
+It appeared that, a month after Miss Sichliffe took him, the dog Harvey
+developed distemper. Miss Sichliffe had nursed him herself for some
+time; then she carried him in her arms the two miles to Mittleham, and
+wept--actually wept--at Attley's feet, saying that Harvey was all she
+had or expected to have in this world, and Attley must cure him. Attley,
+being by wealth, position, and temperament guardian to all lame dogs,
+had put everything aside for this unsavoury job, and, he asserted, Miss
+Sichliffe had virtually lived with him ever since.
+
+'She went home at night, of course,' he exploded, 'but the rest of the
+time she simply infested the premises. Goodness knows, I'm not
+particular, but it was a scandal. Even the servants!... Three and four
+times a day, and notes in between, to know how the beast was. Hang it
+all, don't laugh! And wanting to send me flowers and goldfish. Do I look
+as if I wanted goldfish? Can't you two stop for a minute?' (Mrs. Godfrey
+and I were clinging to each other for support.) 'And it isn't as if I
+was--was so alluring a personality, is it?'
+
+Attley commands more trust, goodwill, and affection than most men, for
+he is that rare angel, an absolutely unselfish bachelor, content to be
+run by contending syndicates of zealous friends. His situation seemed
+desperate, and I told him so.
+
+'Instant flight is your only remedy,' was my verdict. I'll take care of
+both your cars while you're away, and you can send me over all the
+greenhouse fruit.'
+
+'But why should I be chased out of my house by a she-dromedary?' he
+wailed.
+
+'Oh, stop! Stop!' Mrs. Godfrey sobbed. 'You're both wrong. I admit
+you're right, but I _know_ you're wrong.'
+
+'Three _and_ four times a day,' said Attley, with an awful countenance.
+'I'm not a vain man, but--look here, Ella, I'm not sensitive, I hope,
+but if you persist in making a joke of it--'
+
+'Oh, be quiet!' she almost shrieked. 'D'you imagine for one instant that
+your friends would ever let Mittleham pass out of their hands? I quite
+agree it is unseemly for a grown girl to come to Mittleham at all hours
+of the day and night--'
+
+'I told you she went home o' nights,' Attley growled.
+
+'Specially if she goes home o' nights. Oh, but think of the life she
+must have led, Will!'
+
+'I'm not interfering with it; only she must leave me alone.'
+
+'She may want to patch you up and insure you,' I suggested.
+
+'D'you know what _you_ are?' Mrs. Godfrey turned on me with the smile I
+have feared for the last quarter of a century. 'You're the nice, kind,
+wise, doggy friend. You don't know how wise and nice you are supposed to
+be. Will has sent Harvey to you to complete the poor angel's
+convalescence. You know all about dogs, or Will wouldn't have done it.
+He's written her that. You're too far off for her to make daily calls on
+you. P'r'aps she'll drop in two or three times a week, and write on
+other days. But it doesn't matter what she does, because you don't own
+Mittleham, don't you see?'
+
+I told her I saw most clearly.
+
+'Oh, you'll get over that in a few days,' Mrs. Godfrey countered.
+'You're the sporting, responsible, doggy friend who--'
+
+'He used to look at me like that at first,' said Attley, with a visible
+shudder, 'but he gave it up after a bit. It's only because you're new
+to him.'
+
+'But, confound you! he's a ghoul--' I began.
+
+'And when he gets quite well, you'll send him back to her direct with
+your love, and she'll give you some pretty four-tailed goldfish,' said
+Mrs. Godfrey, rising. 'That's all settled. Car, please. We're going to
+Brighton to lunch together.'
+
+They ran before I could get into my stride, so I told the dog Harvey
+what I thought of them and his mistress. He never shifted his position,
+but stared at me, an intense, lopsided stare, eye after eye. Malachi
+came along when he had seen his sister off, and from a distance
+counselled me to drown the brute and consort with gentlemen again. But
+the dog Harvey never even cocked his cockable ear.
+
+And so it continued as long as he was with me. Where I sat, he sat and
+stared; where I walked, he walked beside, head stiffly slewed over one
+shoulder in single-barrelled contemplation of me. He never gave tongue,
+never closed in for a caress, seldom let me stir a step alone. And, to
+my amazement, Malachi, who suffered no stranger to live within our
+gates, saw this gaunt, growing, green-eyed devil wipe him out of my
+service and company without a whimper. Indeed, one would have said the
+situation interested him, for he would meet us returning from grim walks
+together, and look alternately at Harvey and at me with the same
+quivering interest that he showed at the mouth of a rat-hole. Outside
+these inspections, Malachi withdrew himself as only a dog or a
+woman can.
+
+Miss Sichliffe came over after a few days (luckily I was out) with some
+elaborate story of paying calls in the neighbourhood. She sent me a note
+of thanks next day. I was reading it when Harvey and Malachi entered and
+disposed themselves as usual, Harvey close up to stare at me, Malachi
+half under the sofa, watching us both. Out of curiosity I returned
+Harvey's stare, then pulled his lopsided head on to my knee, and took
+his eye for several minutes. Now, in Malachi's eye I can see at any hour
+all that there is of the normal decent dog, flecked here and there with
+that strained half-soul which man's love and association have added to
+his nature. But with Harvey the eye was perplexed, as a tortured man's.
+Only by looking far into its deeps could one make out the spirit of the
+proper animal, beclouded and cowering beneath some unfair burden.
+
+Leggatt, my chauffeur, came in for orders.
+
+'How d'you think Harvey's coming on?' I said, as I rubbed the brute's
+gulping neck. The vet had warned me of the possibilities of spinal
+trouble following distemper.
+
+'He ain't _my_ fancy,' was the reply. 'But _I_ don't question his
+comings and goings so long as I 'aven't to sit alone in a room
+with him.'
+
+'Why? He's as meek as Moses,' I said.
+
+'He fair gives me the creeps. P'r'aps he'll go out in fits.'
+
+But Harvey, as I wrote his mistress from time to time, throve, and when
+he grew better, would play by himself grisly games of spying, walking
+up, hailing, and chasing another dog. From these he would break off of a
+sudden and return to his normal stiff gait, with the air of one who had
+forgotten some matter of life and death, which could be reached only by
+staring at me. I left him one evening posturing with the unseen on the
+lawn, and went inside to finish some letters for the post. I must have
+been at work nearly an hour, for I was going to turn on the lights,
+when I felt there was somebody in the room whom, the short hairs at the
+back of my neck warned me, I was not in the least anxious to face. There
+was a mirror on the wall. As I lifted my eyes to it I saw the dog Harvey
+reflected near the shadow by the closed door. He had reared himself
+full-length on his hind legs, his head a little one side to clear a sofa
+between us, and he was looking at me. The face, with its knitted brows
+and drawn lips, was the face of a dog, but the look, for the fraction of
+time that I caught it, was human--wholly and horribly human. When the
+blood in my body went forward again he had dropped to the floor, and was
+merely studying me in his usual one-eyed fashion. Next day I returned
+him to Miss Sichliffe. I would not have kept him another day for the
+wealth of Asia, or even Ella Godfrey's approval.
+
+Miss Sichliffe's house I discovered to be a mid-Victorian mansion of
+peculiar villainy even for its period, surrounded by gardens of
+conflicting colours, all dazzling with glass and fresh paint on
+ironwork. Striped blinds, for it was a blazing autumn morning, covered
+most of the windows, and a voice sang to the piano an almost forgotten
+song of Jean Ingelow's--
+
+     Methought that the stars were blinking bright,
+       And the old brig's sails unfurled--
+
+Down came the loud pedal, and the unrestrained cry swelled out across a
+bed of tritomas consuming in their own fires--
+
+     When I said I will sail to my love this night
+       On the other side of the world.
+
+I have no music, but the voice drew. I waited till the end:
+
+     Oh, maid most dear, I am not here
+       I have no place apart--
+     No dwelling more on sea or shore,
+       But only in thy heart.
+
+It seemed to me a poor life that had no more than that to do at eleven
+o'clock of a Tuesday forenoon. Then Miss Sichliffe suddenly lumbered
+through a French window in clumsy haste, her brows contracted against
+the light.
+
+'Well?' she said, delivering the word like a spear-thrust, with the full
+weight of a body behind it.
+
+'I've brought Harvey back at last,' I replied. 'Here he is.'
+
+But it was at me she looked, not at the dog who had cast himself at her
+feet--looked as though she would have fished my soul out of my breast on
+the instant.
+
+'Wha--what did you think of him? What did _you_ make of him?' she
+panted. I was too taken aback for the moment to reply. Her voice broke
+as she stooped to the dog at her knees. 'O Harvey, Harvey! You utterly
+worthless old devil!' she cried, and the dog cringed and abased himself
+in servility that one could scarcely bear to look upon. I made to go.
+
+'Oh, but please, you mustn't!' She tugged at the car's side. 'Wouldn't
+you like some flowers or some orchids? We've really splendid orchids,
+and'--she clasped her hands--'there are Japanese goldfish--real
+Japanese goldfish, with four tails. If you don't care for 'em, perhaps
+your friends or somebody--oh, please!'
+
+Harvey had recovered himself, and I realised that this woman beyond the
+decencies was fawning on me as the dog had fawned on her.
+
+'Certainly,' I said, ashamed to meet her eye. 'I'm lunching at
+Mittleham, but--'
+
+'There's plenty of time,' she entreated. 'What do _you_ think of
+Harvey?'
+
+'He's a queer beast,' I said, getting out. 'He does nothing but stare at
+me.'
+
+'Does he stare at you all the time he's with you?'
+
+'Always. He's doing it now. Look!'
+
+We had halted. Harvey had sat down, and was staring from one to the
+other with a weaving motion of the head.
+
+'He'll do that all day,' I said. 'What is it, Harvey?'
+
+'Yes, what _is_ it, Harvey?' she echoed. The dog's throat twitched, his
+body stiffened and shook as though he were going to have a fit. Then he
+came back with a visible wrench to his unwinking watch.
+
+'Always so?' she whispered.
+
+'Always,' I replied, and told her something of his life with me. She
+nodded once or twice, and in the end led me into the house.
+
+There were unaging pitch-pine doors of Gothic design in it; there were
+inlaid marble mantel-pieces and cut-steel fenders; there were stupendous
+wall-papers, and octagonal, medallioned Wedgwood what-nots, and
+black-and-gilt Austrian images holding candelabra, with every other
+refinement that Art had achieved or wealth had bought between 1851 and
+1878. And everything reeked of varnish.
+
+'Now!' she opened a baize door, and pointed down a long corridor flanked
+with more Gothic doors. 'This was where we used to--to patch 'em up.
+You've heard of us. Mrs. Godfrey told you in the garden the day I got
+Harvey given me. I'--she drew in her breath--'I live here by myself, and
+I have a very large income. Come back, Harvey.'
+
+He had tiptoed down the corridor, as rigid as ever, and was sitting
+outside one of the shut doors. 'Look here!' she said, and planted
+herself squarely in front of me. 'I tell you this because you--you've
+patched up Harvey, too. Now, I want you to remember that my name is
+Moira. Mother calls me Marjorie because it's more refined; but my real
+name is Moira, and I am in my thirty-fourth year.'
+
+'Very good,' I said. 'I'll remember all that.'
+
+'Thank you.' Then with a sudden swoop into the humility of an abashed
+boy--''Sorry if I haven't said the proper things. You see--there's
+Harvey looking at us again. Oh, I want to say--if ever you want anything
+in the way of orchids or goldfish or--or anything else that would be
+useful to you, you've only to come to me for it. Under the will I'm
+perfectly independent, and we're a long-lived family, worse luck!' She
+looked at me, and her face worked like glass behind driven flame. 'I may
+reasonably expect to live another fifty years,' she said.
+
+'Thank you, Miss Sichliffe,' I replied. 'If I want anything, you may be
+sure I'll come to you for it.' She nodded. 'Now I must get over to
+Mittleham,' I said.
+
+'Mr. Attley will ask you all about this.' For the first time she laughed
+aloud. 'I'm afraid I frightened him nearly out of the county. I didn't
+think, of course. But I dare say he knows by this time he was wrong. Say
+good-bye to Harvey.'
+
+'Good-bye, old man,' I said. 'Give me a farewell stare, so we shall know
+each other when we meet again.'
+
+The dog looked up, then moved slowly toward me, and stood, head bowed to
+the floor, shaking in every muscle as I patted him; and when I turned, I
+saw him crawl back to her feet.
+
+That was not a good preparation for the rampant boy-and-girl-dominated
+lunch at Mittleham, which, as usual, I found in possession of everybody
+except the owner.
+
+'But what did the dromedary say when you brought her beast back?' Attley
+demanded.
+
+'The usual polite things,' I replied. 'I'm posing as the nice doggy
+friend nowadays.'
+
+'I don't envy you. She's never darkened my doors, thank goodness, since
+I left Harvey at your place. I suppose she'll run about the county now
+swearing you cured him. That's a woman's idea of gratitude.' Attley
+seemed rather hurt, and Mrs. Godfrey laughed.
+
+'That proves you were right about Miss Sichliffe, Ella,' I said. 'She
+had no designs on anybody.'
+
+'I'm always right in these matters. But didn't she even offer you a
+goldfish?'
+
+'Not a thing,' said I. 'You know what an old maid's like where her
+precious dog's concerned.' And though I have tried vainly to lie to Ella
+Godfrey for many years, I believe that in this case I succeeded.
+
+When I turned into our drive that evening, Leggatt observed half aloud:
+
+'I'm glad Zvengali's back where he belongs. It's time our Mike had a
+look in.'
+
+Sure enough, there was Malachi back again in spirit as well as flesh,
+but still with that odd air of expectation he had picked up from Harvey.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It was in January that Attley wrote me that Mrs. Godfrey, wintering in
+Madeira with Milly, her unmarried daughter, had been attacked with
+something like enteric; that the hotel, anxious for its good name, had
+thrust them both out into a cottage annexe; that he was off with a
+nurse, and that I was not to leave England till I heard from him again.
+In a week he wired that Milly was down as well, and that I must bring
+out two more nurses, with suitable delicacies.
+
+Within seventeen hours I had got them all aboard the Cape boat, and had
+seen the women safely collapsed into sea-sickness. The next few weeks
+were for me, as for the invalids, a low delirium, clouded with fantastic
+memories of Portuguese officials trying to tax calves'-foot jelly;
+voluble doctors insisting that true typhoid was unknown in the island;
+nurses who had to be exercised, taken out of themselves, and returned on
+the tick of change of guard; night slides down glassy, cobbled streets,
+smelling of sewage and flowers, between walls whose every stone and
+patch Attley and I knew; vigils in stucco verandahs, watching the curve
+and descent of great stars or drawing auguries from the break of dawn;
+insane interludes of gambling at the local Casino, where we won heaps of
+unconsoling silver; blasts of steamers arriving and departing in the
+roads; help offered by total strangers, grabbed at or thrust aside; the
+long nightmare crumbling back into sanity one forenoon under a
+vine-covered trellis, where Attley sat hugging a nurse, while the others
+danced a noiseless, neat-footed breakdown never learned at the Middlesex
+Hospital. At last, as the tension came out all over us in aches and
+tingles that we put down to the country wine, a vision of Mrs. Godfrey,
+her grey hair turned to spun-glass, but her eyes triumphant over the
+shadow of retreating death beneath them, with Milly, enormously grown,
+and clutching life back to her young breast, both stretched out on cane
+chairs, clamouring for food.
+
+In this ungirt hour there imported himself into our life a
+youngish-looking middle-aged man of the name of Shend, with a blurred
+face and deprecating eyes. He said he had gambled with me at the Casino,
+which was no recommendation, and I remember that he twice gave me a
+basket of champagne and liqueur brandy for the invalids, which a sailor
+in a red-tasselled cap carried up to the cottage for me at 3 A.M. He
+turned out to be the son of some merchant prince in the oil and colour
+line, and the owner of a four-hundred-ton steam yacht, into which, at
+his gentle insistence, we later shifted our camp, staff, and equipage,
+Milly weeping with delight to escape from the horrible cottage. There we
+lay off Funchal for weeks, while Shend did miracles of luxury and
+attendance through deputies, and never once asked how his guests were
+enjoying themselves. Indeed, for several days at a time we would see
+nothing of him. He was, he said, subject to malaria. Giving as they do
+with both hands, I knew that Attley and Mrs. Godfrey could take nobly;
+but I never met a man who so nobly gave and so nobly received thanks as
+Shend did.
+
+'Tell us why you have been so unbelievably kind to us gipsies,' Mrs.
+Godfrey said to him one day on deck.
+
+He looked up from a diagram of some Thames-mouth shoals which he was
+explaining to me, and answered with his gentle smile:
+
+'I will. It's because it makes me happy--it makes me more than happy--to
+be with you. It makes me comfortable. You know how selfish men are? If a
+man feels comfortable all over with certain people, he'll bore them to
+death, just like a dog. You always make me feel as if pleasant things
+were going to happen to me.'
+
+'Haven't any ever happened before?' Milly asked.
+
+'This is the most pleasant thing that has happened to me in ever so many
+years,' he replied. 'I feel like the man in the Bible, "It's good for me
+to be here." Generally, I don't feel that it's good for me to be
+anywhere in particular.' Then, as one begging a favour. 'You'll let me
+come home with you--in the same boat, I mean? I'd take you back in this
+thing of mine, and that would save you packing your trunks, but she's
+too lively for spring work across the Bay.'
+
+We booked our berths, and when the time came, he wafted us and ours
+aboard the Southampton mail-boat with the pomp of plenipotentiaries and
+the precision of the Navy. Then he dismissed his yacht, and became an
+inconspicuous passenger in a cabin opposite to mine, on the port side.
+
+We ran at once into early British spring weather, followed by sou'west
+gales. Mrs. Godfrey, Milly, and the nurses disappeared. Attley stood it
+out, visibly yellowing, till the next meal, and followed suit, and Shend
+and I had the little table all to ourselves. I found him even more
+attractive when the women were away. The natural sweetness of the man,
+his voice, and bearing all fascinated me, and his knowledge of practical
+seamanship (he held an extra master's certificate) was a real joy. We
+sat long in the empty saloon and longer in the smoking-room, making
+dashes downstairs over slippery decks at the eleventh hour.
+
+It was on Friday night, just as I was going to bed, that he came into my
+cabin, after cleaning his teeth, which he did half a dozen times a day.
+
+'I say,' he began hurriedly, 'do you mind if I come in here for a
+little? I'm a bit edgy.' I must have shown surprise. 'I'm ever so much
+better about liquor than I used to be, but--it's the whisky in the
+suitcase that throws me. For God's sake, old man, don't go back on me
+to-night! Look at my hands!'
+
+They were fairly jumping at the wrists. He sat down on a trunk that had
+slid out with the roll. We had reduced speed, and were surging in
+confused seas that pounded on the black port-glasses. The night promised
+to be a pleasant one!
+
+'You understand, of course, don't you?' he chattered.
+
+'Oh yes,' I said cheerily; 'but how about--'
+
+'No, no; on no account the doctor. 'Tell a doctor, tell the whole ship.
+Besides, I've only got a touch of 'em. You'd never have guessed it,
+would you? The tooth-wash does the trick. I'll give you the
+prescription.'
+
+I'll send a note to the doctor for a prescription, shall I?' I
+suggested.
+
+'Right! I put myself unreservedly in your hands. 'Fact is, I always did.
+I said to myself--'sure I don't bore you?--the minute I saw you, I said,
+"Thou art the man."' He repeated the phrase as he picked at his knees.
+'All the same, you can take it from me that the ewe-lamb business is a
+rotten bad one. I don't care how unfaithful the shepherd may be. Drunk
+or sober, 'tisn't cricket.'
+
+A surge of the trunk threw him across the cabin as the steward answered
+my bell. I wrote my requisition to the doctor while Shend was struggling
+to his feet.
+
+'What's wrong?' he began. 'Oh, I know. We're slowing for soundings off
+Ushant. It's about time, too. You'd better ship the dead-lights when you
+come back, Matchem. It'll save you waking us later. This sea's going to
+get up when the tide turns. That'll show you,' he said as the man left,
+'that I am to be trusted. You--you'll stop me if I say anything I
+shouldn't, won't you?'
+
+'Talk away,' I replied, 'if it makes you feel better.'
+
+'That's it; you've hit it exactly. You always make me feel better. I can
+rely on you. It's awkward soundings but you'll see me through it. We'll
+defeat him yet.... I may be an utterly worthless devil, but I'm not a
+brawler.... I told him so at breakfast. I said, "Doctor, I detest
+brawling, but if ever you allow that girl to be insulted again as
+Clements insulted her, I will break your neck with my own hands." You
+think I was right?'
+
+'Absolutely,' I agreed.
+
+'Then we needn't discuss the matter any further. That man was a murderer
+in intention--outside the law, you understand, as it was then. They've
+changed it since--but he never deceived _me_. I told him so. I said to
+him at the time, "I don't know what price you're going to put on my
+head, but if ever you allow Clements to insult her again, you'll never
+live to claim it."'
+
+'And what did he do?' I asked, to carry on the conversation, for Matchem
+entered with the bromide.
+
+'Oh, crumpled up at once. 'Lead still going, Matchem?'
+
+'I 'aven't 'eard,' said that faithful servant of the Union-Castle
+Company.
+
+'Quite right. Never alarm the passengers. Ship the dead-light, will
+you?' Matchem shipped it, for we were rolling very heavily. There were
+tramplings and gull-like cries from on deck. Shend looked at me with a
+mariner's eye.
+
+'That's nothing,' he said protectingly.
+
+'Oh, it's all right for you,' I said, jumping at the idea. '_I_ haven't
+an extra master's certificate. I'm only a passenger. I confess it
+funks me.'
+
+Instantly his whole bearing changed to answer the appeal.
+
+'My dear fellow, it's as simple as houses. We're hunting for sixty-five
+fathom water. Anything short of sixty, with a sou'west wind means--but
+I'll get my Channel Pilot out of my cabin and give you the general idea.
+I'm only too grateful to do anything to put your mind at ease.'
+
+And so, perhaps, for another hour--he declined the drink--Channel Pilot
+in hand, he navigated us round Ushant, and at my request up-channel to
+Southampton, light by light, with explanations and reminiscences. I
+professed myself soothed at last, and suggested bed.
+
+'In a second,' said he. 'Now, you wouldn't think, would you'--he glanced
+off the book toward my wildly swaying dressing-gown on the door--'that
+I've been seeing things for the last half-hour? 'Fact is, I'm just on
+the edge of 'em, skating on thin ice round the corner--nor'east as near
+as nothing--where that dog's looking at me.'
+
+'What's the dog like?' I asked.
+
+'Ah, that _is_ comforting of you! Most men walk through 'em to show me
+they aren't real. As if I didn't know! But _you're_ different. Anybody
+could see that with half an eye.' He stiffened and pointed. 'Damn it
+all! The dog sees it too with half an--Why, he knows you! Knows you
+perfectly. D'you know _him_?'
+
+'How can I tell if he isn't real?' I insisted.
+
+'But you can! _You're_ all right. I saw that from the first. Don't go
+back on me now or I shall go to pieces like the _Drummond Castle_. I beg
+your pardon, old man; but, you see, you _do_ know the dog. I'll prove
+it. What's that dog doing? Come on! _You_ know.' A tremor shook him, and
+he put his hand on my knee, and whispered with great meaning: 'I'll
+letter or halve it with you. There! You begin.'
+
+'S,' said I to humour him, for a dog would most likely be standing or
+sitting, or may be scratching or sniffling or staring.
+
+'Q,' he went on, and I could feel the heat of his shaking hand.
+
+'U,' said I. There was no other letter possible; but I was shaking too.
+
+'I.'
+
+'N.'
+
+'T-i-n-g,' he ran out. 'There! That proves it. I knew you knew him. You
+don't know what a relief that is. Between ourselves, old man, he--he's
+been turning up lately a--a damn sight more often than I cared for. And
+a squinting dog--a dog that squints! I mean that's a bit _too_ much.
+Eh? What?' He gulped and half rose, and I thought that the full tide of
+delirium would be on him in another sentence.
+
+'Not a bit of it,' I said as a last chance, with my hand over the
+bellpush. 'Why, you've just proved that I know him; so there are two of
+us in the game, anyhow.'
+
+'By Jove! that _is_ an idea! Of course there are. I knew you'd see me
+through. We'll defeat them yet. Hi, pup!... He's gone. Absolutely
+disappeared!' He sighed with relief, and I caught the lucky moment.
+
+'Good business! I expect he only came to have a look at me,' I said.
+'Now, get this drink down and turn in to the lower bunk.'
+
+He obeyed, protesting that he could not inconvenience me, and in the
+midst of apologies sank into a dead sleep. I expected a wakeful night,
+having a certain amount to think over; but no sooner had I scrambled
+into the top bunk than sleep came on me like a wave from the other side
+of the world.
+
+In the morning there were apologies, which we got over at breakfast
+before our party were about.
+
+'I suppose--after this--well, I don't blame you. I'm rather a lonely
+chap, though.' His eyes lifted dog-like across the table.
+
+'Shend,' I replied, 'I'm not running a Sunday school. You're coming home
+with me in my car as soon as we land.'
+
+'That is kind of you--kinder than you think.'
+
+'That's because you're a little jumpy still. Now, I don't want to mix
+up in your private affairs--'
+
+'But I'd like you to,' he interrupted.
+
+'Then, would you mind telling me the Christian name of a girl who was
+insulted by a man called Clements?'
+
+'Moira,' he whispered; and just then Mrs. Godfrey and Milly came to
+table with their shore-going hats on.
+
+We did not tie up till noon, but the faithful Leggatt had intrigued his
+way down to the dock-edge, and beside him sat Malachi, wearing his
+collar of gold, or Leggatt makes it look so, as eloquent as Demosthenes.
+Shend flinched a little when he saw him. We packed Mrs. Godfrey and
+Milly into Attley's car--they were going with him to Mittleham, of
+course--and drew clear across the railway lines to find England all lit
+and perfumed for spring. Shend sighed with happiness.
+
+'D'you know,' he said, 'if--if you'd chucked me--I should have gone down
+to my cabin after breakfast and cut my throat. And now--it's like a
+dream--a good dream, you know.'
+
+We lunched with the other three at Romsey. Then I sat in front for a
+little while to talk to my Malachi. When I looked back, Shend was
+solidly asleep, and stayed so for the next two hours, while Leggatt
+chased Attley's fat Daimler along the green-speckled hedges. He woke up
+when we said good-bye at Mittleham, with promises to meet again
+very soon.
+
+'And I hope,' said Mrs. Godfrey, 'that everything pleasant will happen
+to you.'
+
+'Heaps and heaps--all at once,' cried long, weak Milly, waving her wet
+handkerchief.
+
+'I've just got to look in at a house near here for a minute to inquire
+about a dog,' I said, 'and then we will go home.'
+
+'I used to know this part of the world,' he replied, and said no more
+till Leggatt shot past the lodge at the Sichliffes's gate. Then I
+heard him gasp.
+
+Miss Sichliffe, in a green waterproof, an orange jersey, and a pinkish
+leather hat, was working on a bulb-border. She straightened herself as
+the car stopped, and breathed hard. Shend got out and walked towards
+her. They shook hands, turned round together, and went into the house.
+Then the dog Harvey pranced out corkily from under the lee of a bench.
+Malachi, with one joyous swoop, fell on him as an enemy and an equal.
+Harvey, for his part, freed from all burden whatsoever except the
+obvious duty of a man-dog on his own ground, met Malachi without reserve
+or remorse, and with six months' additional growth to come and go on.
+
+'Don't check 'em!' cried Leggatt, dancing round the flurry. 'They've
+both been saving up for each other all this time. It'll do 'em worlds
+of good.'
+
+'Leggatt,' I said, 'will you take Mr. Shend's bag and suitcase up to the
+house and put them down just inside the door? Then we will go on.'
+
+So I enjoyed the finish alone. It was a dead heat, and they licked each
+other's jaws in amity till Harvey, one imploring eye on me, leaped into
+the front seat, and Malachi backed his appeal. It was theft, but I took
+him, and we talked all the way home of r-rats and r-rabbits and bones
+and baths and the other basic facts of life. That evening after dinner
+they slept before the fire, with their warm chins across the hollows of
+my ankles--to each chin an ankle--till I kicked them upstairs to bed.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I was not at Mittleham when she came over to announce her engagement,
+but I heard of it when Mrs. Godfrey and Attley came, forty miles an
+hour, over to me, and Mrs. Godfrey called me names of the worst for
+suppression of information.
+
+'As long as it wasn't me, I don't care,' said Attley.
+
+'I believe you knew it all along,' Mrs. Godfrey repeated. 'Else what
+made you drive that man literally into her arms?'
+
+'To ask after the dog Harvey,' I replied.
+
+'Then, what's the beast doing here?' Attley demanded, for Malachi and
+the dog Harvey were deep in a council of the family with Bettina, who
+was being out-argued.
+
+'Oh, Harvey seemed to think himself _de trop_ where he was,' I said.
+'And she hasn't sent after him. You'd better save Bettina before they
+kill her.'
+
+'There's been enough lying about that dog,' said Mrs. Godfrey to me. 'If
+he wasn't born in lies, he was baptized in 'em. D'you know why she
+called him Harvey? It only occurred to me in those dreadful days when I
+was ill, and one can't keep from thinking, and thinks everything. D'you
+know your Boswell? What did Johnson say about Hervey--with an e?'
+
+'Oh, _that's_ it, is it?' I cried incautiously. 'That was why I ought to
+have verified my quotations. The spelling defeated me. Wait a moment,
+and it will come back. Johnson said: "He was a vicious man,"' I began.
+
+'"But very kind to me,"' Mrs. Godfrey prompted. Then, both together,
+'"If you call a dog Hervey, I shall love him."'
+
+'So you _were_ mixed up in it. At any rate, you had your suspicions from
+the first? Tell me,' she said.
+
+'Ella,' I said, 'I don't know anything rational or reasonable about any
+of it. It was all--all woman-work, and it scared me horribly.'
+
+'Why?' she asked.
+
+That was six years ago. I have written this tale to let her
+know--wherever she may be.
+
+
+
+THE COMFORTERS
+
+
+     Until thy feet have trod the Road
+       Advise not wayside folk,
+     Nor till thy back has borne the Load
+       Break in upon the Broke.
+
+     Chase not with undesired largesse
+       Of sympathy the heart
+     Which, knowing her own bitterness,
+       Presumes to dwell apart.
+
+     Employ not that glad hand to raise
+       The God-forgotten head
+     To Heaven, and all the neighbours' gaze--
+       Cover thy mouth instead.
+
+     The quivering chin, the bitten lip,
+       The cold and sweating brow,
+     Later may yearn for fellowship--
+       Not now, you ass, not now!
+
+     Time, not thy ne'er so timely speech,
+       Life, not thy views thereon,
+     Shall furnish or deny to each
+       His consolation.
+
+     Or, if impelled to interfere,
+       Exhort, uplift, advise,
+     Lend not a base, betraying ear
+       To all the victim's cries.
+
+     Only the Lord can understand
+       When those first pangs begin,
+     How much is reflex action and
+       How much is really sin.
+
+     E'en from good words thyself refrain,
+       And tremblingly admit
+     There is no anodyne for pain
+       Except the shock of it.
+
+     So, when thine own dark hour shall fall,
+       Unchallenged canst thou say:
+     'I never worried _you_ at all,
+       For God's sake go away!'
+
+
+
+
+The Village that Voted the Earth was Flat
+
+(1913)
+
+
+Our drive till then had been quite a success. The other men in the car
+were my friend Woodhouse, young Ollyett, a distant connection of his,
+and Pallant, the M.P. Woodhouse's business was the treatment and cure of
+sick journals. He knew by instinct the precise moment in a newspaper's
+life when the impetus of past good management is exhausted and it
+fetches up on the dead-centre between slow and expensive collapse and
+the new start which can be given by gold injections--and genius. He was
+wisely ignorant of journalism; but when he stooped on a carcase there
+was sure to be meat. He had that week added a half-dead, halfpenny
+evening paper to his collection, which consisted of a prosperous London
+daily, one provincial ditto, and a limp-bodied weekly of commercial
+leanings. He had also, that very hour, planted me with a large block of
+the evening paper's common shares, and was explaining the whole art of
+editorship to Ollyett, a young man three years from Oxford, with
+coir-matting-coloured hair and a face harshly modelled by harsh
+experiences, who, I understood, was assisting in the new venture.
+Pallant, the long, wrinkled M.P., whose voice is more like a crane's
+than a peacock's, took no shares, but gave us all advice.
+
+'You'll find it rather a knacker's yard,' Woodhouse was saying. 'Yes, I
+know they call me The Knacker; but it will pay inside a year. All my
+papers do. I've only one motto: Back your luck and back your staff.
+It'll come out all right.'
+
+Then the car stopped, and a policeman asked our names and addresses for
+exceeding the speed-limit. We pointed out that the road ran absolutely
+straight for half a mile ahead without even a side-lane. 'That's just
+what we depend on,' said the policeman unpleasantly.
+
+'The usual swindle,' said Woodhouse under his breath. 'What's the name
+of this place?'
+
+'Huckley,' said the policeman. 'H-u-c-k-l-e-y,' and wrote something in
+his note-book at which young Ollyett protested. A large red man on a
+grey horse who had been watching us from the other side of the hedge
+shouted an order we could not catch. The policeman laid his hand on the
+rim of the right driving-door (Woodhouse carries his spare tyres aft),
+and it closed on the button of the electric horn. The grey horse at once
+bolted, and we could hear the rider swearing all across the landscape.
+
+'Damn it, man, you've got your silly fist on it! Take it off!' Woodhouse
+shouted.
+
+'Ho!' said the constable, looking carefully at his fingers as though we
+had trapped them. 'That won't do you any good either,' and he wrote once
+more in his note-book before he allowed us to go.
+
+This was Woodhouse's first brush with motor law, and since I expected
+no ill consequences to myself, I pointed out that it was very serious. I
+took the same view myself when in due time I found that I, too, was
+summonsed on charges ranging from the use of obscene language to
+endangering traffic.
+
+Judgment was done in a little pale-yellow market-town with a small,
+Jubilee clock-tower and a large corn-exchange. Woodhouse drove us there
+in his car. Pallant, who had not been included in the summons, came with
+us as moral support. While we waited outside, the fat man on the grey
+horse rode up and entered into loud talk with his brother magistrates.
+He said to one of them--for I took the trouble to note it down--'It
+falls away from my lodge-gates, dead straight, three-quarters of a mile.
+I'd defy any one to resist it. We rooked seventy pounds out of 'em last
+month. No car can resist the temptation. You ought to have one your side
+the county, Mike. They simply can't resist it.'
+
+'Whew!' said Woodhouse. 'We're in for trouble. Don't you say a word--or
+Ollyett either! I'll pay the fines and we'll get it over as soon as
+possible. Where's Pallant?'
+
+'At the back of the court somewhere,' said Ollyett. 'I saw him slip in
+just now.'
+
+The fat man then took his seat on the Bench, of which he was chairman,
+and I gathered from a bystander that his name was Sir Thomas Ingell,
+Bart., M.P., of Ingell Park, Huckley. He began with an allocution
+pitched in a tone that would have justified revolt throughout empires.
+Evidence, when the crowded little court did not drown it with applause,
+was given in the pauses of the address. They were all very proud of
+their Sir Thomas, and looked from him to us, wondering why we did not
+applaud too.
+
+Taking its time from the chairman, the Bench rollicked with us for
+seventeen minutes. Sir Thomas explained that he was sick and tired of
+processions of cads of our type, who would be better employed breaking
+stones on the road than in frightening horses worth more than themselves
+or their ancestors. This was after it had been proved that Woodhouse's
+man had turned on the horn purposely to annoy Sir Thomas, who happened
+to be riding by'! There were other remarks too--primitive enough,--but
+it was the unspeakable brutality of the tone, even more than the quality
+of the justice, or the laughter of the audience that stung our souls out
+of all reason. When we were dismissed--to the tune of twenty-three
+pounds, twelve shillings and sixpence--we waited for Pallant to join us,
+while we listened to the next case--one of driving without a licence.
+Ollyett with an eye to his evening paper, had already taken very full
+notes of our own, but we did not wish to seem prejudiced.
+
+'It's all right,' said the reporter of the local paper soothingly. 'We
+never report Sir Thomas _in extenso_. Only the fines and charges.'
+
+'Oh, thank you,' Ollyett replied, and I heard him ask who every one in
+court might be. The local reporter was very communicative.
+
+The new victim, a large, flaxen-haired man in somewhat striking
+clothes, to which Sir Thomas, now thoroughly warmed, drew public
+attention, said that he had left his licence at home. Sir Thomas asked
+him if he expected the police to go to his home address at Jerusalem to
+find it for him; and the court roared. Nor did Sir Thomas approve of the
+man's name, but insisted on calling him 'Mr. Masquerader,' and every
+time he did so, all his people shouted. Evidently this was their
+established _auto-da-fé_.
+
+'He didn't summons me--because I'm in the House, I suppose. I think I
+shall have to ask a Question,' said Pallant, reappearing at the close
+of the case.
+
+'I think _I_ shall have to give it a little publicity too,' said
+Woodhouse. 'We can't have this kind of thing going on, you know.' His
+face was set and quite white. Pallant's, on the other hand, was black,
+and I know that my very stomach had turned with rage. Ollyett was dum.
+
+'Well, let's have lunch,' Woodhouse said at last. 'Then we can get away
+before the show breaks up.'
+
+We drew Ollyett from the arms of the local reporter, crossed the Market
+Square to the Red Lion and found Sir Thomas's 'Mr. Masquerader' just
+sitting down to beer, beef and pickles.
+
+'Ah!' said he, in a large voice. 'Companions in misfortune. Won't you
+gentlemen join me?'
+
+'Delighted,' said Woodhouse. 'What did you get?'
+
+'I haven't decided. It might make a good turn, but--the public aren't
+educated up to it yet. It's beyond 'em. If it wasn't, that red dub on
+the Bench would be worth fifty a week.'
+
+'Where?' said Woodhouse. The man looked at him with unaffected surprise.
+
+'At any one of My places,' he replied. 'But perhaps you live here?'
+
+'Good heavens!' cried young Ollyett suddenly. 'You _are_ Masquerier,
+then? I thought you were!'
+
+'Bat Masquerier.' He let the words fall with the weight of an
+international ultimatum. 'Yes, that's all I am. But you have the
+advantage of me, gentlemen.'
+
+For the moment, while we were introducing ourselves, I was puzzled. Then
+I recalled prismatic music-hall posters--of enormous acreage--that had
+been the unnoticed background of my visits to London for years past.
+Posters of men and women, singers, jongleurs, impersonators and
+audacities of every draped and undraped brand, all moved on and off in
+London and the Provinces by Bat Masquerier--with the long wedge-tailed
+flourish following the final 'r.'
+
+'_I_ knew you at once,' said Pallant, the trained M.P., and I promptly
+backed the lie. Woodhouse mumbled excuses. Bat Masquerier was not moved
+for or against us any more than the frontage of one of his own palaces.
+
+'I always tell My people there's a limit to the size of the lettering,'
+he said. 'Overdo that and the ret'na doesn't take it in. Advertisin' is
+the most delicate of all the sciences.'
+
+'There's one man in the world who is going to get a little of it if I
+live for the next twenty-four hours,' said Woodhouse, and explained how
+this would come about.
+
+Masquerier stared at him lengthily with gunmetal-blue eyes.
+
+'You mean it?' he drawled; the voice was as magnetic as the look.
+
+'_I_ do,' said Ollyett. 'That business of the horn alone ought to have
+him off the Bench in three months.' Masquerier looked at him even longer
+than he had looked at Woodhouse.
+
+'He told _me_,' he said suddenly, 'that my home-address was Jerusalem.
+You heard that?'
+
+'But it was the tone--the tone,' Ollyett cried.
+
+'You noticed that, too, did you?' said Masquerier. 'That's the artistic
+temperament. You can do a lot with it. And I'm Bat Masquerier,' he went
+on. He dropped his chin in his fists and scowled straight in front of
+him.... 'I made the Silhouettes--I made the Trefoil and the Jocunda. I
+made 'Dal Benzaguen.' Here Ollyett sat straight up, for in common with
+the youth of that year he worshipped Miss Vidal Benzaguen of the Trefoil
+immensely and unreservedly. '"_Is_ that a dressing-gown or an ulster
+you're supposed to be wearing?" You heard _that_?... "And I suppose you
+hadn't time to brush your hair either?" You heard _that_?... Now, you
+hear _me_!' His voice filled the coffee-room, then dropped to a whisper
+as dreadful as a surgeon's before an operation. He spoke for several
+minutes. Pallant muttered 'Hear! hear!' I saw Ollyett's eye flash--it
+was to Ollyett that Masquerier addressed himself chiefly,--and
+Woodhouse leaned forward with joined hands.
+
+'Are you _with_ me?' he went on, gathering us all up in one sweep of the
+arm. 'When I begin a thing I see it through, gentlemen. What Bat can't
+break, breaks him! But I haven't struck that thing yet. This is no
+one-turn turn-it-down show. This is business to the dead finish. Are you
+with me, gentlemen? Good! Now, we'll pool our assets. One London
+morning, and one provincial daily, didn't you say? One weekly commercial
+ditto and one M.P.'
+
+'Not much use, I'm afraid,' Pallant smirked.
+
+'But privileged. _But_ privileged,' he returned. 'And we have also my
+little team--London, Blackburn, Liverpool, Leeds--I'll tell you about
+Manchester later--and Me! Bat Masquerier.' He breathed the name
+reverently into his tankard. 'Gentlemen, when our combination has
+finished with Sir Thomas Ingell, Bart., M.P., and everything else that
+is his, Sodom and Gomorrah will be a winsome bit of Merrie England
+beside 'em. I must go back to town now, but I trust you gentlemen will
+give me the pleasure of your company at dinner to-night at the Chop
+Suey--the Red Amber Room--and we'll block out the scenario.' He laid his
+hand on young Ollyett's shoulder and added: 'It's your brains I want.'
+Then he left, in a good deal of astrachan collar and nickel-plated
+limousine, and the place felt less crowded.
+
+We ordered our car a few minutes later. As Woodhouse, Ollyett and I were
+getting in, Sir Thomas Ingell, Bart., M.P., came out of the Hall of
+Justice across the square and mounted his horse. I have sometimes
+thought that if he had gone in silence he might even then have been
+saved, but as he settled himself in the saddle he caught sight of us and
+must needs shout: 'Not off yet? You'd better get away and you'd better
+be careful.' At that moment Pallant, who had been buying
+picture-postcards, came out of the inn, took Sir Thomas's eye and very
+leisurely entered the car. It seemed to me that for one instant there
+was a shade of uneasiness on the baronet's grey-whiskered face.
+
+'I hope,' said Woodhouse after several miles, 'I hope he's a widower.'
+
+'Yes,' said Pallant. 'For his poor, dear wife's sake I hope that, very
+much indeed. I suppose he didn't see me in Court. Oh, here's the parish
+history of Huckley written by the Rector and here's your share of the
+picture-postcards. Are we all dining with this Mr. Masquerier to-night?'
+
+'Yes!' said we all.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+If Woodhouse knew nothing of journalism, young Ollyett, who had
+graduated in a hard school, knew a good deal. Our halfpenny evening
+paper, which we will call _The Bun_ to distinguish her from her
+prosperous morning sister, _The Cake_, was not only diseased but
+corrupt. We found this out when a man brought us the prospectus of a new
+oil-field and demanded sub-leaders on its prosperity. Ollyett talked
+pure Brasenose to him for three minutes. Otherwise he spoke and wrote
+trade-English--a toothsome amalgam of Americanisms and epigrams. But
+though the slang changes the game never alters, and Ollyett and I and,
+in the end, some others enjoyed it immensely. It was weeks ere we could
+see the wood for the trees, but so soon as the staff realised that they
+had proprietors who backed them right or wrong, and specially when they
+were wrong (which is the sole secret of journalism), and that their fate
+did not hang on any passing owner's passing mood, they did miracles.
+
+But we did not neglect Huckley. As Ollyett said our first care was to
+create an 'arresting atmosphere' round it. He used to visit the village
+of week-ends, on a motor-bicycle with a side-car; for which reason I
+left the actual place alone and dealt with it in the abstract. Yet it
+was I who drew first blood. Two inhabitants of Huckley wrote to
+contradict a small, quite solid paragraph in _The Bun_ that a hoopoe had
+been seen at Huckley and had, 'of course, been shot by the local
+sportsmen.' There was some heat in their letters, both of which we
+published. Our version of how the hoopoe got his crest from King Solomon
+was, I grieve to say, so inaccurate that the Rector himself--no
+sportsman as he pointed out, but a lover of accuracy--wrote to us to
+correct it. We gave his letter good space and thanked him.
+
+'This priest is going to be useful,' said Ollyett. 'He has the impartial
+mind. I shall vitalise him.'
+
+Forthwith he created M.L. Sigden, a recluse of refined tastes who in
+_The Bun_ demanded to know whether this Huckley-of-the-Hoopoe was the
+Hugly of his boyhood and whether, by any chance, the fell change of name
+had been wrought by collusion between a local magnate and the railway,
+in the mistaken interests of spurious refinement. 'For I knew it and
+loved it with the maidens of my day--_eheu ab angulo!_--as Hugly,' wrote
+M.L. Sigden from Oxf.
+
+Though other papers scoffed, _The Bun_ was gravely sympathetic. Several
+people wrote to deny that Huckley had been changed at birth. Only the
+Rector--no philosopher as he pointed out, but a lover of accuracy--had
+his doubts, which he laid publicly before Mr. M.L. Sigden who suggested,
+through _The Bun_, that the little place might have begun life in
+Anglo-Saxon days as 'Hogslea' or among the Normans as 'Argilé,' on
+account of its much clay. The Rector had his own ideas too (he said it
+was mostly gravel), and M.L. Sigden had a fund of reminiscences. Oddly
+enough--which is seldom the case with free reading-matter--our
+subscribers rather relished the correspondence, and contemporaries
+quoted freely.
+
+'The secret of power,' said Ollyett, 'is not the big stick. It's the
+liftable stick.' (This means the 'arresting' quotation of six or seven
+lines.) 'Did you see the _Spec._ had a middle on "Rural Tenacities" last
+week. That was all Huckley. I'm doing a "Mobiquity" on Huckley
+next week.'
+
+Our 'Mobiquities' were Friday evening accounts of easy
+motor-bike-_cum_-side-car trips round London, illustrated (we could
+never get that machine to work properly) by smudgy maps. Ollyett wrote
+the stuff with a fervour and a delicacy which I always ascribed to the
+side-car. His account of Epping Forest, for instance, was simply young
+love with its soul at its lips. But his Huckley 'Mobiquity' would have
+sickened a soap-boiler. It chemically combined loathsome familiarity,
+leering suggestion, slimy piety and rancid 'social service' in one
+fuming compost that fairly lifted me off my feet.
+
+'Yes,' said he, after compliments. 'It's the most vital, arresting and
+dynamic bit of tump I've done up to date. _Non nobis gloria!_ I met Sir
+Thomas Ingell in his own park. He talked to me again. He inspired
+most of it.'
+
+'Which? The "glutinous native drawl," or "the neglected adenoids of the
+village children"?' I demanded.
+
+'Oh, no! That's only to bring in the panel doctor. It's the last flight
+we--I'm proudest of.'
+
+This dealt with 'the crepuscular penumbra spreading her dim limbs over
+the boskage'; with 'jolly rabbits'; with a herd of 'gravid polled
+Angus'; and with the 'arresting, gipsy-like face of their swart,
+scholarly owner--as well known at the Royal Agricultural Shows as that
+of our late King-Emperor.'
+
+'"Swart" is good and so's "gravid,"' said I, 'but the panel doctor will
+be annoyed about the adenoids.'
+
+'Not half as much as Sir Thomas will about his face,' said Ollyett. 'And
+if you only knew what I've left out!'
+
+He was right. The panel doctor spent his week-end (this is the
+advantage of Friday articles) in overwhelming us with a professional
+counterblast of no interest whatever to our subscribers. We told him so,
+and he, then and there, battered his way with it into the _Lancet_ where
+they are keen on glands, and forgot us altogether. But Sir Thomas Ingell
+was of sterner stuff. He must have spent a happy week-end too. The
+letter which we received from him on Monday proved him to be a kinless
+loon of upright life, for no woman, however remotely interested in a man
+would have let it pass the home wastepaper-basket. He objected to our
+references to his own herd, to his own labours in his own village, which
+he said was a Model Village, and to our infernal insolence; but he
+objected most to our invoice of his features. We wrote him courtously to
+ask whether the letter was meant for publication. He, remembering, I
+presume, the Duke of Wellington, wrote back, 'publish and be damned.'
+
+'Oh! This is too easy,' Ollyett said as he began heading the letter.
+
+'Stop a minute,' I said. 'The game is getting a little beyond us.
+To-night's the Bat dinner.' (I may have forgotten to tell you that our
+dinner with Bat Masquerier in the Red Amber Room of the Chop Suey had
+come to be a weekly affair.) 'Hold it over till they've all seen it.'
+
+'Perhaps you're right,' he said. 'You might waste it.'
+
+At dinner, then, Sir Thomas's letter was handed round. Bat seemed to be
+thinking of other matters, but Pallant was very interested.
+
+'I've got an idea,' he said presently. 'Could you put something into
+_The Bun_ to-morrow about foot-and-mouth disease in that fellow's herd?'
+
+'Oh, plague if you like,' Ollyett replied. 'They're only five measly
+Shorthorns. I saw one lying down in the park. She'll serve as a
+sub-stratum of fact.'
+
+'Then, do that; and hold the letter over meanwhile. I think _I_ come in
+here,' said Pallant.
+
+'Why?' said I.
+
+'Because there's something coming up in the House about foot-and-mouth,
+and because he wrote me a letter after that little affair when he fined
+you. 'Took ten days to think it over. Here you are,' said Pallant.
+'House of Commons paper, you see.'
+
+We read:
+
+     DEAR PALLANT--Although in the past our paths have not lain
+     much together, I am sure you will agree with me that on the
+     floor of the House all members are on a footing of equality.
+     I make bold, therefore, to approach you in a matter which I
+     think capable of a very different interpretation from that
+     which perhaps was put upon it by your friends. Will you let
+     them know that that was the case and that I was in no way
+     swayed by animus in the exercise of my magisterial duties,
+     which as you, as a brother magistrate, can imagine are
+     frequently very distasteful to--Yours very sincerely,
+
+     T. INGELL.
+
+     _P.S._--I have seen to it that the motor vigilance to which
+     your friends took exception has been considerably relaxed in
+     my district.
+
+'What did you answer?' said Ollyett, when all our opinions had been
+expressed.
+
+'I told him I couldn't do anything in the matter. And I couldn't--then.
+But you'll remember to put in that foot-and-mouth paragraph. I want
+something to work upon.'
+
+'It seems to me _The Bun_ has done all the work up to date,' I
+suggested. 'When does _The Cake_ come in?'
+
+'_The Cake_,' said Woodhouse, and I remembered afterwards that he spoke
+like a Cabinet Minister on the eve of a Budget, 'reserves to itself the
+fullest right to deal with situations as they arise.'
+
+'Ye-eh!' Bat Masquerier shook himself out of his thoughts. '"Situations
+as they arise." I ain't idle either. But there's no use fishing till the
+swim's baited. You'--he turned to Ollyett--'manufacture very good
+ground-bait.... I always tell My people--What the deuce is that?'
+
+There was a burst of song from another private dining-room across the
+landing. 'It ees some ladies from the Trefoil,' the waiter began.
+
+'Oh, I know that. What are they singing, though?'
+
+He rose and went out, to be greeted by shouts of applause from that
+merry company. Then there was silence, such as one hears in the
+form-room after a master's entry. Then a voice that we loved began
+again: 'Here we go gathering nuts in May--nuts in May--nuts in May!'
+
+'It's only 'Dal--and some nuts,' he explained when he returned. 'She
+says she's coming in to dessert.' He sat down, humming the old tune to
+himself, and till Miss Vidal Benzaguen entered, he held us speechless
+with tales of the artistic temperament.
+
+We obeyed Pallant to the extent of slipping into _The Bun_ a wary
+paragraph about cows lying down and dripping at the mouth, which might
+be read either as an unkind libel or, in the hands of a capable lawyer,
+as a piece of faithful nature-study.
+
+'And besides,' said Ollyett, 'we allude to "gravid polled Angus." I am
+advised that no action can lie in respect of virgin Shorthorns. Pallant
+wants us to come to the House to-night. He's got us places for the
+Strangers' Gallery. I'm beginning to like Pallant.'
+
+'Masquerier seems to like you,' I said.
+
+'Yes, but I'm afraid of him,' Ollyett answered with perfect sincerity.
+'I am. He's the Absolutely Amoral Soul. I've never met one yet.'
+
+We went to the House together. It happened to be an Irish afternoon, and
+as soon as I had got the cries and the faces a little sorted out, I
+gathered there were grievances in the air, but how many of them was
+beyond me.
+
+'It's all right,' said Ollyett of the trained ear. 'They've shut their
+ports against--oh yes--export of Irish cattle! Foot-and-mouth disease at
+Ballyhellion. _I_ see Pallant's idea!'
+
+The House was certainly all mouth for the moment, but, as I could feel,
+quite in earnest. A Minister with a piece of typewritten paper seemed to
+be fending off volleys of insults. He reminded me somehow of a nervous
+huntsman breaking up a fox in the face of rabid hounds.
+
+'It's question-time. They're asking questions,' said Ollyett. 'Look!
+Pallant's up.'
+
+There was no mistaking it. His voice, which his enemies said was his one
+parliamentary asset, silenced the hubbub as toothache silences mere
+singing in the ears. He said:
+
+'Arising out of that, may I ask if any special consideration has
+recently been shown in regard to any suspected outbreak of this disease
+on _this_ side of the Channel?'
+
+He raised his hand; it held a noon edition of _The Bun_. We had thought
+it best to drop the paragraph out of the later ones. He would have
+continued, but something in a grey frock-coat roared and bounded on a
+bench opposite, and waved another _Bun_. It was Sir Thomas Ingell.
+
+'As the owner of the herd so dastardly implicated--' His voice was
+drowned in shouts of 'Order!'--the Irish leading.
+
+'What's wrong?' I asked Ollyett. 'He's got his hat on his head, hasn't
+he?'
+
+'Yes, but his wrath should have been put as a question.'
+
+'Arising out of that, Mr. Speaker, Sirrr!' Sir Thomas bellowed through a
+lull, 'are you aware that--that all this is a conspiracy--part of a
+dastardly conspiracy to make Huckley ridiculous--to make _us_
+ridiculous? Part of a deep-laid plot to make _me_ ridiculous, Mr.
+Speaker, Sir!'
+
+The man's face showed almost black against his white whiskers, and he
+struck out swimmingly with his arms. His vehemence puzzled and held the
+House for an instant, and the Speaker took advantage of it to lift his
+pack from Ireland to a new scent. He addressed Sir Thomas Ingell in
+tones of measured rebuke, meant also, I imagine, for the whole House,
+which lowered its hackles at the word. Then Pallant, shocked and pained:
+'I can only express my profound surprise that in response to my simple
+question the honourable member should have thought fit to indulge in a
+personal attack. If I have in any way offended--'
+
+Again the Speaker intervened, for it appeared that he regulated these
+matters.
+
+He, too, expressed surprise, and Sir Thomas sat back in a hush of
+reprobation that seemed to have the chill of the centuries behind it.
+The Empire's work was resumed.
+
+'Beautiful!' said I, and I felt hot and cold up my back.
+
+'And now we'll publish his letter,' said Ollyett.
+
+We did--on the heels of his carefully reported outburst. We made no
+comment. With that rare instinct for grasping the heart of a situation
+which is the mark of the Anglo-Saxon, all our contemporaries and, I
+should say, two-thirds of our correspondents demanded how such a person
+could be made more ridiculous than he had already proved himself to be.
+But beyond spelling his name 'Injle,' we alone refused to hit a man when
+he was down.
+
+'There's no need,' said Ollyett. 'The whole press is on the huckle from
+end to end.'
+
+Even Woodhouse was a little astonished at the ease with which it had
+come about, and said as much.
+
+'Rot!' said Ollyett. 'We haven't really begun. Huckley isn't news yet.'
+
+'What do you mean?' said Woodhouse, who had grown to have great respect
+for his young but by no means distant connection.
+
+'Mean? By the grace of God, Master Ridley, I mean to have it so that
+when Huckley turns over in its sleep, Reuters and the Press Association
+jump out of bed to cable.' Then he went off at score about certain
+restorations in Huckley Church which, he said--and he seemed to spend
+his every week-end there--had been perpetrated by the Rector's
+predecessor, who had abolished a 'leper-window' or a 'squinch-hole'
+(whatever these may be) to institute a lavatory in the vestry. It did
+not strike me as stuff for which Reuters or the Press Association would
+lose much sleep, and I left him declaiming to Woodhouse about a
+fourteenth-century font which, he said, he had unearthed in the sexton's
+tool-shed.
+
+My methods were more on the lines of peaceful penetration. An odd copy,
+in _The Bun's_ rag-and-bone library, of Hone's _Every-Day Book_ had
+revealed to me the existence of a village dance founded, like all
+village dances, on Druidical mysteries connected with the Solar Solstice
+(which is always unchallengeable) and Mid-summer Morning, which is dewy
+and refreshing to the London eye. For this I take no credit--Hone being
+a mine any one can work--but that I rechristened that dance, after I
+had revised it, 'The Gubby' is my title to immortal fame. It was still
+to be witnessed, I wrote, 'in all its poignant purity at Huckley, that
+last home of significant mediæval survivals'; and I fell so in love with
+my creation that I kept it back for days, enamelling and burnishing.
+
+'You's better put it in,' said Ollyett at last. 'It's time we asserted
+ourselves again. The other fellows are beginning to poach. You saw that
+thing in the _Pinnacle_ about Sir Thomas's Model Village? He must have
+got one of their chaps down to do it.'
+
+''Nothing like the wounds of a friend,' I said. 'That account of the
+non-alcoholic pub alone was--'
+
+'I liked the bit best about the white-tiled laundry and the Fallen
+Virgins who wash Sir Thomas's dress shirts. Our side couldn't come
+within a mile of that, you know. We haven't the proper flair for
+sexual slobber.'
+
+'That's what I'm always saying,' I retorted. 'Leave 'em alone. The other
+fellows are doing our work for us now. Besides I want to touch up my
+"Gubby Dance" a little more.'
+
+'No. You'll spoil it. Let's shove it in to-day. For one thing it's
+Literature. I don't go in for compliments as you know, but, etc. etc.'
+
+I had a healthy suspicion of young Ollyett in every aspect, but though I
+knew that I should have to pay for it, I fell to his flattery, and my
+priceless article on the 'Gubby Dance' appeared. Next Saturday he asked
+me to bring out _The Bun_ in his absence, which I naturally assumed
+would be connected with the little maroon side-car. I was wrong.
+
+On the following Monday I glanced at _The Cake_ at breakfast-time to
+make sure, as usual, of her inferiority to my beloved but unremunerative
+_Bun_. I opened on a heading: 'The Village that Voted the Earth was
+Flat.' I read ... I read that the Geoplanarian Society--a society
+devoted to the proposition that the earth is flat--had held its Annual
+Banquet and Exercises at Huckley on Saturday, when after convincing
+addresses, amid scenes of the greatest enthusiasm, Huckley village had
+decided by an unanimous vote of 438 that the earth was flat. I do not
+remember that I breathed again till I had finished the two columns of
+description that followed. Only one man could have written them. They
+were flawless--crisp, nervous, austere yet human, poignant, vital,
+arresting--most distinctly arresting--dynamic enough to shift a
+city--and quotable by whole sticks at a time. And there was a leader, a
+grave and poised leader, which tore me in two with mirth, until I
+remembered that I had been left out--infamously and unjustifiably
+dropped. I went to Ollyett's rooms. He was breakfasting, and, to do him
+justice, looked conscience-stricken.
+
+'It wasn't my fault,' he began. 'It was Bat Masquerier. I swear _I_
+would have asked you to come if--'
+
+'Never mind that,' I said. 'It's the best bit of work you've ever done
+or will do. Did any of it happen?'
+
+'Happen? Heavens! D'you think even _I_ could have invented it?'
+
+'Is it exclusive to _The Cake_?' I cried.
+
+'It cost Bat Masquerier two thousand,' Ollyett replied. 'D'you think
+he'd let any one else in on that? But I give you my sacred word I knew
+nothing about it till he asked me to come down and cover it. He had
+Huckley posted in three colours, "The Geoplanarians' Annual Banquet and
+Exercises." Yes, he invented "Geoplanarians." He wanted Huckley to think
+it meant aeroplanes. Yes, I know that there is a real Society that
+thinks the world's flat--they ought to be grateful for the lift--but Bat
+made his own. He did! He created the whole show, I tell you. He swept
+out half his Halls for the job. Think of that--on a Saturday! They--we
+went down in motor char-à-bancs--three of 'em--one pink, one primrose,
+and one forget-me-not blue--twenty people in each one and "The Earth
+_is_ Flat" on each side and across the back. I went with Teddy Rickets
+and Lafone from the Trefoil, and both the Silhouette Sisters, and--wait
+a minute!--the Crossleigh Trio. You know the Every-Day Dramas Trio at
+the Jocunda--Ada Crossleigh, "Bunt" Crossleigh, and little Victorine?
+Them. And there was Hoke Ramsden, the lightning-change chap in _Morgiana
+and Drexel_--and there was Billy Turpeen. Yes, you know him! The North
+London Star. "I'm the Referee that got himself disliked at Blackheath."
+_That_ chap! And there was Mackaye--that one-eyed Scotch fellow that all
+Glasgow is crazy about. Talk of subordinating yourself for Art's sake!
+Mackaye was the earnest inquirer who got converted at the end of the
+meeting. And there was quite a lot of girls I didn't know, and--oh,
+yes--there was 'Dal! 'Dal Benzaguen herself! We sat together, going and
+coming. She's all the darling there ever was. She sent you her love, and
+she told me to tell you that she won't forget about Nellie Farren. She
+says you've given her an ideal to work for. She? Oh, she was the Lady
+Secretary to the Geoplanarians, of course. I forget who were in the
+other brakes--provincial stars mostly--but they played up gorgeously.
+The art of the music-hall's changed since your day. They didn't overdo
+it a bit. You see, people who believe the earth is flat don't dress
+quite like other people. You may have noticed that I hinted at that in
+my account. It's a rather flat-fronted Ionic style--neo-Victorian,
+except for the bustles, 'Dal told me,--but 'Dal looked heavenly in it!
+So did little Victorine. And there was a girl in the blue brake--she's a
+provincial--but she's coming to town this winter and she'll knock
+'em--Winnie Deans. Remember that! She told Huckley how she had suffered
+for the Cause as a governess in a rich family where they believed that
+the world is round, and how she threw up her job sooner than teach
+immoral geography. That was at the overflow meeting outside the
+Baptist chapel. She knocked 'em to sawdust! We must look out for
+Winnie.... But Lafone! Lafone was beyond everything. Impact,
+personality--conviction--the whole bag o' tricks! He sweated conviction.
+Gad, he convinced _me_ while he was speaking! (Him? He was President of
+the Geoplanarians, of course. Haven't you read my account?) It _is_ an
+infernally plausible theory. After all, no one has actually proved the
+earth is round, have they?'
+
+'Never mind the earth. What about Huckley?'
+
+'Oh, Huckley got tight. That's the worst of these model villages if you
+let 'em smell fire-water. There's one alcoholic pub in the place that
+Sir Thomas can't get rid of. Bat made it his base. He sent down the
+banquet in two motor lorries--dinner for five hundred and drinks for ten
+thousand. Huckley voted all right. Don't you make any mistake about
+that. No vote, no dinner. A unanimous vote--exactly as I've said. At
+least, the Rector and the Doctor were the only dissentients. We didn't
+count them. Oh yes, Sir Thomas was there. He came and grinned at us
+through his park gates. He'll grin worse to-day. There's an aniline dye
+that you rub through a stencil-plate that eats about a foot into any
+stone and wears good to the last. Bat had both the lodge-gates
+stencilled "The Earth _is_ flat!" and all the barns and walls they could
+get at.... Oh Lord, but Huckley was drunk! We had to fill 'em up to make
+'em forgive us for not being aeroplanes. Unthankful yokels! D'you
+realise that Emperors couldn't have commanded the talent Bat decanted on
+'em? Why, 'Dal alone was.... And by eight o'clock not even a bit of
+paper left! The whole show packed up and gone, and Huckley hoo-raying
+for the earth being flat.'
+
+'Very good,' I began. 'I am, as you know, a one-third proprietor of
+_The Bun_.'
+
+'I didn't forget that,' Ollyett interrupted. 'That was uppermost in my
+mind all the time. I've got a special account for _The Bun_ to-day--it's
+an idyll--and just to show how I thought of you, I told 'Dal, coming
+home, about your Gubby Dance, and she told Winnie. Winnie came back in
+our char-à-banc. After a bit we had to get out and dance it in a field.
+It's quite a dance the way we did it--and Lafone invented a sort of
+gorilla lockstep procession at the end. Bat had sent down a film-chap on
+the chance of getting something. He was the son of a clergyman--a most
+dynamic personality. He said there isn't anything for the cinema in
+meetings _qua_ meetings--they lack action. Films are a branch of art by
+themselves. But he went wild over the Gubby. He said it was like Peter's
+vision at Joppa. He took about a million feet of it. Then I photoed it
+exclusive for _The Bun_. I've sent 'em in already, only remember we must
+eliminate Winnie's left leg in the first figure. It's too arresting....
+And there you are! But I tell you I'm afraid of Bat. That man's the
+Personal Devil. He did it all. He didn't even come down himself. He said
+he'd distract his people.'
+
+'Why didn't he ask me to come?' I persisted.
+
+'Because he said you'd distract me. He said he wanted my brains on ice.
+He got 'em. I believe it's the best thing I've ever done.' He reached
+for _The Cake_ and re-read it luxuriously. 'Yes, out and away the
+best--supremely quotable,' he concluded, and--after another survey--'By
+God, what a genius I was yesterday!'
+
+I would have been angry, but I had not the time. That morning, Press
+agencies grovelled to me in _The Bun_ office for leave to use certain
+photos, which, they understood, I controlled, of a certain village
+dance. When I had sent the fifth man away on the edge of tears, my
+self-respect came back a little. Then there was _The Bun's_ poster to
+get out. Art being elimination, I fined it down to two words (one too
+many, as it proved)--'The Gubby!' in red, at which our manager
+protested; but by five o'clock he told me that I was _the_ Napoleon of
+Fleet Street. Ollyett's account in _The Bun_ of the Geoplanarians'
+Exercises and Love Feast lacked the supreme shock of his version in _The
+Cake_, but it bruised more; while the photos of 'The Gubby' (which, with
+Winnie's left leg, was why I had set the doubtful press to work so
+early) were beyond praise and, next day, beyond price. But even then I
+did not understand.
+
+A week later, I think it was, Bat Masquerier telephoned to me to come to
+the Trefoil.
+
+'It's your turn now,' he said. 'I'm not asking Ollyett. Come to the
+stage-box.'
+
+I went, and, as Bat's guest, was received as Royalty is not. We sat well
+back and looked out on the packed thousands. It was _Morgiana and
+Drexel_, that fluid and electric review which Bat--though he gave Lafone
+the credit--really created.
+
+'Ye-es,' said Bat dreamily, after Morgiana had given 'the nasty jar' to
+the Forty Thieves in their forty oil 'combinations.' 'As you say, I've
+got 'em and I can hold 'em. What a man does doesn't matter much; and how
+he does it don't matter either. It's the _when_--the psychological
+moment. 'Press can't make up for it; money can't; brains can't. A lot's
+luck, but all the rest is genius. I'm not speaking about My people now.
+I'm talking of Myself.'
+
+Then 'Dal--she was the only one who dared--knocked at the door and stood
+behind us all alive and panting as Morgiana. Lafone was carrying the
+police-court scene, and the house was ripped up crossways with laughter.
+
+'Ah! Tell a fellow now,' she asked me for the twentieth time, 'did you
+love Nellie Farren when you were young?'
+
+'Did we love her?' I answered. '"If the earth and the sky and the
+sea"--There were three million of us, 'Dal, and we worshipped her.'
+
+'How did she get it across?' Dal went on.
+
+'She was Nellie. The houses used to coo over her when she came on.'
+
+'I've had a good deal, but I've never been cooed over yet,' said 'Dal
+wistfully.
+
+'It isn't the how, it's the when,' Bat repeated. 'Ah!'
+
+He leaned forward as the house began to rock and peal full-throatedly.
+'Dal fled. A sinuous and silent procession was filing into the
+police-court to a scarcely audible accompaniment. It was dressed--but
+the world and all its picture-palaces know how it was dressed. It
+danced and it danced, and it danced the dance which bit all humanity in
+the leg for half a year, and it wound up with the lockstep finale that
+mowed the house down in swathes, sobbing and aching. Somebody in the
+gallery moaned, 'Oh Gord, the Gubby!' and we heard the word run like a
+shudder, for they had not a full breath left among them. Then 'Dal came
+on, an electric star in her dark hair, the diamonds flashing in her
+three-inch heels--a vision that made no sign for thirty counted seconds
+while the police-court scene dissolved behind her into Morgiana's
+Manicure Palace, and they recovered themselves. The star on her forehead
+went out, and a soft light bathed her as she took--slowly, slowly to the
+croon of adoring strings--the eighteen paces forward. We saw her first
+as a queen alone; next as a queen for the first time conscious of her
+subjects, and at the end, when her hands fluttered, as a woman
+delighted, awed not a little, but transfigured and illuminated with
+sheer, compelling affection and goodwill. I caught the broken mutter of
+welcome--the coo which is more than tornadoes of applause. It died and
+rose and died again lovingly.
+
+'She's got it across,' Bat whispered. 'I've never seen her like this. I
+told her to light up the star, but I was wrong, and she knew it. She's
+an artist.'
+
+''Dal, you darling!' some one spoke, not loudly but it carried through
+the house.
+
+'Thank _you_!' 'Dal answered, and in that broken tone one heard the last
+fetter riveted. 'Good evening, boys! I've just come from--now--where the
+dooce was it I have come from?' She turned to the impassive files of
+the Gubby dancers, and went on: 'Ah, so good of you to remind me, you
+dear, bun-faced things. I've just come from the village--The Village
+that Voted the Earth was Flat.'
+
+She swept into that song with the full orchestra. It devastated the
+habitable earth for the next six months. Imagine, then, what its rage
+and pulse must have been at the incandescent hour of its birth! She only
+gave the chorus once. At the end of the second verse, 'Are you _with_
+me, boys?' she cried, and the house tore it clean away from
+her--'_Earth_ was flat--_Earth_ was flat. Flat as my hat--Flatter than
+that'--drowning all but the bassoons and double-basses that marked
+the word.
+
+'Wonderful,' I said to Bat. 'And it's only "Nuts in May," with
+variations.'
+
+'Yes--but _I_ did the variations,' he replied.
+
+At the last verse she gestured to Carlini the conductor, who threw her
+up his baton. She caught it with a boy's ease. 'Are you _with_ me?' she
+cried once more, and--the maddened house behind her--abolished all the
+instruments except the guttural belch of the double-basses on
+'_Earth_'--'The Village that voted the _Earth_ was flat--_Earth_ was
+flat!' It was delirium. Then she picked up the Gubby dancers and led
+them in a clattering improvised lockstep thrice round the stage till her
+last kick sent her diamond-hiked shoe catherine-wheeling to the
+electrolier.
+
+I saw the forest of hands raised to catch it, heard the roaring and
+stamping pass through hurricanes to full typhoon; heard the song, pinned
+down by the faithful double-basses as the bull-dog pins down the
+bellowing bull, overbear even those; till at last the curtain fell and
+Bat took me round to her dressing-room, where she lay spent after her
+seventh call. Still the song, through all those white-washed walls,
+shook the reinforced concrete of the Trefoil as steam pile-drivers shake
+the flanks of a dock.
+
+'I'm all out--first time in my life. Ah! Tell a fellow now, did I get it
+across?' she whispered huskily.
+
+'You know you did,' I replied as she dipped her nose deep in a beaker of
+barley-water. 'They cooed over you.'
+
+Bat nodded. 'And poor Nellie's dead--in Africa, ain't it?'
+
+'I hope I'll die before they stop cooing,' said 'Dal.
+
+'"_Earth_ was flat--_Earth_ was flat!"' Now it was more like mine-pumps
+in flood.
+
+'They'll have the house down if you don't take another,' some one
+called.
+
+'Bless 'em!' said 'Dal, and went out for her eighth, when in the face of
+that cataract she said yawning, 'I don't know how _you_ feel, children,
+but _I_'m dead. You be quiet.'
+
+'Hold a minute,' said Bat to me. 'I've got to hear how it went in the
+provinces. Winnie Deans had it in Manchester, and Ramsden at
+Glasgow--and there are all the films too. I had rather a heavy
+week-end.'
+
+The telephones presently reassured him.
+
+'It'll do,' said he. 'And _he_ said my home address was Jerusalem.' He
+left me humming the refrain of 'The Holy City.' Like Ollyett I found
+myself afraid of that man.
+
+When I got out into the street and met the disgorging picture-palaces
+capering on the pavements and humming it (for he had put the gramophones
+on with the films), and when I saw far to the south the red electrics
+flash 'Gubby' across the Thames, I feared more than ever.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+A few days passed which were like nothing except, perhaps, a suspense of
+fever in which the sick man perceives the searchlights of the world's
+assembled navies in act to converge on one minute fragment of
+wreckage--one only in all the black and agony-strewn sea. Then those
+beams focussed themselves. Earth as we knew it--the full circuit of our
+orb--laid the weight of its impersonal and searing curiosity on this
+Huckley which had voted that it was flat. It asked for news about
+Huckley--where and what it might be, and how it talked--it knew how it
+danced--and how it thought in its wonderful soul. And then, in all the
+zealous, merciless press, Huckley was laid out for it to look at, as a
+drop of pond water is exposed on the sheet of a magic-lantern show. But
+Huckley's sheet was only coterminous with the use of type among mankind.
+For the precise moment that was necessary, Fate ruled it that there
+should be nothing of first importance in the world's idle eye. One
+atrocious murder, a political crisis, an incautious or heady
+continental statesman, the mere catarrh of a king, would have wiped out
+the significance of our message, as a passing cloud annuls the urgent
+helio. But it was halcyon weather in every respect. Ollyett and I did
+not need to lift our little fingers any more than the Alpine climber
+whose last sentence has unkeyed the arch of the avalanche. The thing
+roared and pulverised and swept beyond eyesight all by itself--all by
+itself. And once well away, the fall of kingdoms could not have
+diverted it.
+
+Ours is, after all, a kindly earth. While The Song ran and raped it with
+the cataleptic kick of 'Ta-ra-ra-boom-de-ay,' multiplied by the West
+African significance of 'Everybody's doing it,' plus twice the infernal
+elementality of a certain tune in _Dona et Gamma_; when for all
+practical purposes, literary, dramatic, artistic, social, municipal,
+political, commercial, and administrative, the Earth _was_ flat, the
+Rector of Huckley wrote to us--again as a lover of accuracy--to point
+out that the Huckley vote on 'the alleged flatness of this scene of our
+labours here below' was _not_ unanimous; he and the doctor having voted
+against it. And the great Baron Reuter himself (I am sure it could have
+been none other) flashed that letter in full to the front, back, and
+both wings of this scene of our labours. For Huckley was News. _The Bun_
+also contributed a photograph which cost me some trouble to fake.
+
+'We are a vital nation,' said Ollyett while we were discussing affairs
+at a Bat dinner. 'Only an Englishman could have written that letter at
+this present juncture.'
+
+'It reminded me of a tourist in the Cave of the Winds under Niagara.
+Just one figure in a mackintosh. But perhaps you saw our photo?' I
+said proudly.
+
+'Yes,' Bat replied. 'I've been to Niagara, too. And how's Huckley taking
+it?'
+
+'They don't quite understand, of course,' said Ollyett. 'But it's
+bringing pots of money into the place. Ever since the motor-bus
+excursions were started--'
+
+'I didn't know they had been,' said Pallant.
+
+'Oh yes. Motor char-à-bancs--uniformed guides and key-bugles included.
+They're getting a bit fed up with the tune there nowadays,'
+Ollyett added.
+
+'They play it under his windows, don't they?' Bat asked. 'He can't stop
+the right of way across his park.'
+
+'He cannot,' Ollyett answered. 'By the way, Woodhouse, I've bought that
+font for you from the sexton. I paid fifteen pounds for it.'
+
+'What am I supposed to do with it?' asked Woodhouse.
+
+'You give it to the Victoria and Albert Museum. It is fourteenth-century
+work all right. You can trust me.'
+
+'Is it worth it--now?' said Pallant. 'Not that I'm weakening, but merely
+as a matter of tactics?'
+
+'But this is true,' said Ollyett. 'Besides, it is my hobby, I always
+wanted to be an architect. I'll attend to it myself. It's too serious
+for _The Bun_ and miles too good for _The Cake_.'
+
+He broke ground in a ponderous architectural weekly, which had never
+heard of Huckley. There was no passion in his statement, but mere fact
+backed by a wide range of authorities. He established beyond doubt that
+the old font at Huckley had been thrown out, on Sir Thomas's
+instigation, twenty years ago, to make room for a new one of Bath stone
+adorned with Limoges enamels; and that it had lain ever since in a
+corner of the sexton's shed. He proved, with learned men to support him,
+that there was only one other font in all England to compare with it. So
+Woodhouse bought it and presented it to a grateful South Kensington
+which said it would see the earth still flatter before it returned the
+treasure to purblind Huckley. Bishops by the benchful and most of the
+Royal Academy, not to mention 'Margaritas ante Porcos,' wrote fervently
+to the papers. _Punch_ based a political cartoon on it; the _Times_ a
+third leader, 'The Lust of Newness'; and the _Spectator_ a scholarly and
+delightful middle, 'Village Hausmania.' The vast amused outside world
+said in all its tongues and types: 'Of course! This is just what Huckley
+would do!' And neither Sir Thomas nor the Rector nor the sexton nor any
+one else wrote to deny it.
+
+'You see,' said Ollyett, 'this is much more of a blow to Huckley than it
+looks--because every word of it's true. Your Gubby dance was
+inspiration, I admit, but it hadn't its roots in--'
+
+'Two hemispheres and four continents so far,' I pointed out.
+
+'Its roots in the hearts of Huckley was what I was going to say. Why
+don't you ever come down and look at the place? You've never seen it
+since we were stopped there.'
+
+'I've only my week-ends free,' I said, 'and you seem to spend yours
+there pretty regularly--with the side-car. I was afraid--'
+
+'Oh, _that's_ all right,' he said cheerily. 'We're quite an old engaged
+couple now. As a matter of fact, it happened after "the gravid polled
+Angus" business. Come along this Saturday. Woodhouse says he'll run us
+down after lunch. He wants to see Huckley too.'
+
+Pallant could not accompany us, but Bat took his place.
+
+'It's odd,' said Bat, 'that none of us except Ollyett has ever set eyes
+on Huckley since that time. That's what I always tell My people. Local
+colour is all right after you've got your idea. Before that, it's a mere
+nuisance.' He regaled us on the way down with panoramic views of the
+success--geographical and financial--of 'The Gubby' and The Song.
+
+'By the way,' said he, 'I've assigned 'Dal all the gramophone rights of
+"The Earth." She's a born artist. 'Hadn't sense enough to hit me for
+triple-dubs the morning after. She'd have taken it out in coos.'
+
+'Bless her! And what'll she make out of the gramophone rights?' I asked.
+
+'Lord knows!' he replied. 'I've made fifty-four thousand my little end
+of the business, and it's only just beginning. Hear _that_!'
+
+A shell-pink motor-brake roared up behind us to the music on a key-bugle
+of 'The Village that Voted the Earth was Flat.' In a few minutes we
+overtook another, in natural wood, whose occupants were singing it
+through their noses.
+
+'I don't know that agency. It must be Cook's,' said Ollyett. 'They _do_
+suffer.' We were never out of earshot of the tune the rest of the way
+to Huckley.
+
+Though I knew it would be so, I was disappointed with the actual aspect
+of the spot we had--it is not too much to say--created in the face of
+the nations. The alcoholic pub; the village green; the Baptist chapel;
+the church; the sexton's shed; the Rectory whence the so-wonderful
+letters had come; Sir Thomas's park gate-pillars still violently
+declaring 'The Earth _is_ flat,' were as mean, as average, as ordinary
+as the photograph of a room where a murder has been committed. Ollyett,
+who, of course, knew the place specially well, made the most of it to
+us. Bat, who had employed it as a back-cloth to one of his own dramas,
+dismissed it as a thing used and emptied, but Woodhouse expressed my
+feelings when he said: 'Is that all--after all we've done?'
+
+'_I_ know,' said Ollyett soothingly. '"Like that strange song I heard
+Apollo sing: When Ilion like a mist rose into towers." I've felt the
+same sometimes, though it has been Paradise for me. But they
+_do_ suffer.'
+
+The fourth brake in thirty minutes had just turned into Sir Thomas's
+park to tell the Hall that 'The _Earth_ was flat'; a knot of obviously
+American tourists were kodaking his lodge-gates; while the tea-shop
+opposite the lych-gate was full of people buying postcards of the old
+font as it had lain twenty years in the sexton's shed. We went to the
+alcoholic pub and congratulated the proprietor.
+
+'It's bringin' money to the place,' said he. 'But in a sense you can buy
+money too dear. It isn't doin' us any good. People are laughin' at us.
+That's what they're doin'.... Now, with regard to that Vote of ours you
+may have heard talk about....'
+
+'For Gorze sake, chuck that votin' business,' cried an elderly man at
+the door. 'Money-gettin' or no money-gettin', we're fed up with it.'
+
+'Well, I do think,' said the publican, shifting his ground, 'I do think
+Sir Thomas might ha' managed better in some things.'
+
+'He tole me,'--the elderly man shouldered his way to the bar--'he tole
+me twenty years ago to take an' lay that font in my tool-shed. He _tole_
+me so himself. An' now, after twenty years, me own wife makin' me out
+little better than the common 'angman!'
+
+'That's the sexton,' the publican explained. 'His good lady sells the
+postcards--if you 'aven't got some. But we feel Sir Thomas might ha'
+done better.'
+
+'What's he got to do with it?' said Woodhouse.
+
+'There's nothin' we can trace 'ome to 'im in so many words, but we think
+he might 'ave saved us the font business. Now, in regard to that votin'
+business--'
+
+'Chuck it! Oh, chuck it!' the sexton roared, 'or you'll 'ave me cuttin'
+my throat at cock-crow. 'Ere's another parcel of fun-makers!'
+
+A motor-brake had pulled up at the door and a multitude of men and
+women immediately descended. We went out to look. They bore rolled
+banners, a reading-desk in three pieces, and, I specially noticed, a
+collapsible harmonium, such as is used on ships at sea.
+
+'Salvation Army?' I said, though I saw no uniforms.
+
+Two of them unfurled a banner between poles which bore the legend: 'The
+Earth _is_ flat.' Woodhouse and I turned to Bat. He shook his head. 'No,
+no! Not me.... If I had only seen their costumes in advance!'
+
+'Good Lord!' said Ollyett. 'It's the genuine Society!'
+
+The company advanced on the green with the precision of people well
+broke to these movements. Scene-shifters could not have been quicker
+with the three-piece rostrum, nor stewards with the harmonium. Almost
+before its cross-legs had been kicked into their catches, certainly
+before the tourists by the lodge-gates had begun to move over, a woman
+sat down to it and struck up a hymn:
+
+     Hear ther truth our tongues are telling,
+       Spread ther light from shore to shore,
+     God hath given man a dwelling
+       Flat and flat for evermore.
+
+     When ther Primal Dark retreated,
+       When ther deeps were undesigned,
+     He with rule and level meted
+       Habitation for mankind!
+
+I saw sick envy on Bat's face. 'Curse Nature,' he muttered. 'She gets
+ahead of you every time. To think _I_ forgot hymns and a harmonium!'
+
+Then came the chorus:
+
+     Hear ther truth our tongues are telling,
+       Spread ther light from shore to shore--
+     Oh, be faithful! Oh, be truthful!
+       Earth is flat for evermore.
+
+They sang several verses with the fervour of Christians awaiting their
+lions. Then there were growlings in the air. The sexton, embraced by the
+landlord, two-stepped out of the pub-door. Each was trying to outroar
+the other. 'Apologising in advarnce for what he says,' the landlord
+shouted: 'You'd better go away' (here the sexton began to speak words).
+'This isn't the time nor yet the place for--for any more o' this chat.'
+
+The crowd thickened. I saw the village police-sergeant come out of his
+cottage buckling his belt.
+
+'But surely,' said the woman at the harmonium, 'there must be some
+mistake. We are not suffragettes.'
+
+'Damn it! They'd be a change,' cried the sexton. 'You get out of this!
+Don't talk! _I_ can't stand it for one! Get right out, or we'll
+font you!'
+
+The crowd which was being recruited from every house in sight echoed the
+invitation. The sergeant pushed forward. A man beside the reading-desk
+said: 'But surely we are among dear friends and sympathisers. Listen to
+me for a moment.'
+
+It was the moment that a passing char-à-banc chose to strike into The
+Song. The effect was instantaneous. Bat, Ollyett, and I, who by divers
+roads have learned the psychology of crowds, retreated towards the
+tavern door. Woodhouse, the newspaper proprietor, anxious, I presume, to
+keep touch with the public, dived into the thick of it. Every one else
+told the Society to go away at once. When the lady at the harmonium (I
+began to understand why it is sometimes necessary to kill women) pointed
+at the stencilled park pillars and called them 'the cromlechs of our
+common faith,' there was a snarl and a rush. The police-sergeant checked
+it, but advised the Society to keep on going. The Society withdrew into
+the brake fighting, as it were, a rear-guard action of oratory up each
+step. The collapsed harmonium was hauled in last, and with the perfect
+unreason of crowds, they cheered it loudly, till the chauffeur slipped
+in his clutch and sped away. Then the crowd broke up, congratulating all
+concerned except the sexton, who was held to have disgraced his office
+by having sworn at ladies. We strolled across the green towards
+Woodhouse, who was talking to the police-sergeant near the park-gates.
+We were not twenty yards from him when we saw Sir Thomas Ingell emerge
+from the lodge and rush furiously at Woodhouse with an uplifted stick,
+at the same time shrieking: 'I'll teach you to laugh, you--' but Ollyett
+has the record of the language. By the time we reached them, Sir Thomas
+was on the ground; Woodhouse, very white, held the walking-stick and was
+saying to the sergeant:
+
+'I give this person in charge for assault.'
+
+'But, good Lord!' said the sergeant, whiter than Woodhouse. 'It's Sir
+Thomas.'
+
+'Whoever it is, it isn't fit to be at large,' said Woodhouse. The crowd
+suspecting something wrong began to reassemble, and all the English
+horror of a row in public moved us, headed by the sergeant, inside the
+lodge. We shut both park-gates and lodge-door.
+
+'You saw the assault, sergeant,' Woodhouse went on. 'You can testify I
+used no more force than was necessary to protect myself. You can testify
+that I have not even damaged this person's property. (Here! take your
+stick, you!) You heard the filthy language he used.'
+
+'I--I can't say I did,' the sergeant stammered.
+
+'Oh, but _we_ did!' said Ollyett, and repeated it, to the apron-veiled
+horror of the lodge-keeper's wife.
+
+Sir Thomas on a hard kitchen chair began to talk. He said he had 'stood
+enough of being photographed like a wild beast,' and expressed loud
+regret that he had not killed 'that man,' who was 'conspiring with the
+sergeant to laugh at him.'
+
+''Ad you ever seen 'im before, Sir Thomas?' the sergeant asked.
+
+'No! But it's time an example was made here. I've never seen the sweep
+in my life.'
+
+I think it was Bat Masquerier's magnetic eye that recalled the past to
+him, for his face changed and his jaw dropped. 'But I have!' he groaned.
+'I remember now.'
+
+Here a writhing man entered by the back door. He was, he said, the
+village solicitor. I do not assert that he licked Woodhouse's boots, but
+we should have respected him more if he had and been done with it. His
+notion was that the matter could be accommodated, arranged and
+compromised for gold, and yet more gold. The sergeant thought so too.
+Woodhouse undeceived them both. To the sergeant he said, 'Will you or
+will you not enter the charge?' To the village solicitor he gave the
+name of his lawyers, at which the man wrung his hands and cried, 'Oh,
+Sir T., Sir T.!' in a miserable falsetto, for it was a Bat Masquerier of
+a firm. They conferred together in tragic whispers.
+
+'I don't dive after Dickens,' said Ollyett to Bat and me by the window,
+'but every time _I_ get into a row I notice the police-court always
+fills up with his characters.'
+
+'I've noticed that too,' said Bat. 'But the odd thing is you mustn't
+give the public straight Dickens--not in My business. I wonder why
+that is.'
+
+Then Sir Thomas got his second wind and cursed the day that he, or it
+may have been we, were born. I feared that though he was a Radical he
+might apologise and, since he was an M.P., might lie his way out of the
+difficulty. But he was utterly and truthfully beside himself. He asked
+foolish questions--such as what we were doing in the village at all, and
+how much blackmail Woodhouse expected to make out of him. But neither
+Woodhouse nor the sergeant nor the writhing solicitor listened. The
+upshot of their talk, in the chimney-corner, was that Sir Thomas stood
+engaged to appear next Monday before his brother magistrates on charges
+of assault, disorderly conduct, and language calculated, etc. Ollyett
+was specially careful about the language.
+
+Then we left. The village looked very pretty in the late light--pretty
+and tuneful as a nest of nightingales.
+
+'You'll turn up on Monday, I hope,' said Woodhouse, when we reached
+town. That was his only allusion to the affair.
+
+So we turned up--through a world still singing that the Earth was
+flat--at the little clay-coloured market-town with the large Corn
+Exchange and the small Jubilee memorial. We had some difficulty in
+getting seats in the court. Woodhouse's imported London lawyer was a man
+of commanding personality, with a voice trained to convey blasting
+imputations by tone. When the case was called, he rose and stated his
+client's intention not to proceed with the charge. His client, he went
+on to say, had not entertained, and, of course, in the circumstances
+could not have entertained, any suggestion of accepting on behalf of
+public charities any moneys that might have been offered to him on the
+part of Sir Thomas's estate. At the same time, no one acknowledged more
+sincerely than his client the spirit in which those offers had been made
+by those entitled to make them. But, as a matter of fact--here he became
+the man of the world colloguing with his equals--certain--er--details
+had come to his client's knowledge _since_ the lamentable outburst,
+which ... He shrugged his shoulders. Nothing was served by going into
+them, but he ventured to say that, had those painful circumstances only
+been known earlier, his client would--again 'of course'--never have
+dreamed--A gesture concluded the sentence, and the ensnared Bench looked
+at Sir Thomas with new and withdrawing eyes. Frankly, as they could see,
+it would be nothing less than cruelty to proceed further with
+this--er-unfortunate affair. He asked leave, therefore, to withdraw the
+charge _in toto_, and at the same time to express his client's deepest
+sympathy with all who had been in any way distressed, as his client had
+been, by the fact and the publicity of proceedings which he could, of
+course, again assure them that his client would never have dreamed of
+instituting if, as he hoped he had made plain, certain facts had been
+before his client at the time when.... But he had said enough. For his
+fee it seemed to me that he had.
+
+Heaven inspired Sir Thomas's lawyer--all of a sweat lest his client's
+language should come out--to rise up and thank him. Then, Sir
+Thomas--not yet aware what leprosy had been laid upon him, but grateful
+to escape on any terms--followed suit. He was heard in interested
+silence, and people drew back a pace as Gehazi passed forth.
+
+'You hit hard,' said Bat to Woodhouse afterwards. 'His own people think
+he's mad.'
+
+'You don't say so? I'll show you some of his letters to-night at
+dinner,' he replied.
+
+He brought them to the Red Amber Room of the Chop Suey. We forgot to be
+amazed, as till then we had been amazed, over the Song or 'The Gubby,'
+or the full tide of Fate that seemed to run only for our sakes. It did
+not even interest Ollyett that the verb 'to huckle' had passed into the
+English leader-writers' language. We were studying the interior of a
+soul, flash-lighted to its grimiest corners by the dread of 'losing its
+position.'
+
+'And then it thanked you, didn't it, for dropping the case?' said
+Pallant.
+
+'Yes, and it sent me a telegram to confirm.' Woodhouse turned to Bat.
+'Now d'you think I hit too hard?' he asked.
+
+'No-o!' said Bat. 'After all--I'm talking of every one's business
+now--one can't ever do anything in Art that comes up to Nature in any
+game in life. Just think how this thing has--'
+
+'Just let me run through that little case of yours again,' said Pallant,
+and picked up _The Bun_ which had it set out in full.
+
+'Any chance of 'Dal looking in on us to-night?' Ollyett began.
+
+'She's occupied with her Art too,' Bat answered bitterly. 'What's the
+use of Art? Tell me, some one!' A barrel-organ outside promptly pointed
+out that the _Earth_ was flat. 'The gramophone's killing street organs,
+but I let loose a hundred-and-seventy-four of those hurdygurdys twelve
+hours after The Song,' said Bat. 'Not counting the Provinces.' His face
+brightened a little.
+
+'Look here!' said Pallant over the paper. 'I don't suppose you or those
+asinine J.P.'s knew it--but your lawyer ought to have known that you've
+all put your foot in it most confoundedly over this assault case.'
+
+'What's the matter?' said Woodhouse.
+
+'It's ludicrous. It's insane. There isn't two penn'orth of legality in
+the whole thing. Of course, you could have withdrawn the charge, but the
+way you went about it is childish--besides being illegal. What on earth
+was the Chief Constable thinking of?'
+
+'Oh, he was a friend of Sir Thomas's. They all were for that matter,' I
+replied.
+
+'He ought to be hanged. So ought the Chairman of the Bench. I'm talking
+as a lawyer now.'
+
+'Why, what have we been guilty of? Misprision of treason or compounding
+a felony--or what?' said Ollyett.
+
+'I'll tell you later.' Pallant went back to the paper with knitted
+brows, smiling unpleasantly from time to time. At last he laughed.
+
+'Thank you!' he said to Woodhouse. 'It ought to be pretty useful--for
+us.'
+
+'What d'you mean?' said Ollyett.
+
+'For our side. They are all Rads who are mixed up in this--from the
+Chief Constable down. There must be a Question. There must be a
+Question.'
+
+'Yes, but I wanted the charge withdrawn in my own way,' Woodhouse
+insisted.
+
+'That's nothing to do with the case. It's the legality of your silly
+methods. You wouldn't understand if I talked till morning,' He began to
+pace the room, his hands behind him. 'I wonder if I can get it through
+our Whip's thick head that it's a chance.... That comes of stuffing the
+Bench with radical tinkers,' he muttered.
+
+'Oh, sit down!' said Woodhouse.
+
+'Where's your lawyer to be found now?' he jerked out.
+
+'At the Trefoil,' said Bat promptly. 'I gave him the stage-box for
+to-night. He's an artist too.'
+
+'Then I'm going to see him,' said Pallant. 'Properly handled this ought
+to be a godsend for our side.' He withdrew without apology.
+
+'Certainly, this thing keeps on opening up, and up,' I remarked inanely.
+
+'It's beyond me!' said Bat. 'I don't think if I'd known I'd have
+ever ... Yes, I would, though. He said my home address was--'
+
+'It was his tone--his tone!' Ollyett almost shouted. Woodhouse said
+nothing, but his face whitened as he brooded.
+
+'Well, any way,' Bat went on, 'I'm glad I always believed in God and
+Providence and all those things. Else I should lose my nerve. We've put
+it over the whole world--the full extent of the geographical globe. We
+couldn't stop it if we wanted to now. It's got to burn itself out. I'm
+not in charge any more. What d'you expect'll happen next. Angels?'
+
+I expected nothing. Nothing that I expected approached what I got.
+Politics are not my concern, but, for the moment, since it seemed that
+they were going to 'huckle' with the rest, I took an interest in them.
+They impressed me as a dog's life without a dog's decencies, and I was
+confirmed in this when an unshaven and unwashen Pallant called on me at
+ten o'clock one morning, begging for a bath and a couch.
+
+'Bail too?' I asked. He was in evening dress and his eyes were sunk feet
+in his head.
+
+'No,' he said hoarsely. 'All night sitting. Fifteen divisions. 'Nother
+to-night. Your place was nearer than mine, so--' He began to undress
+in the hall.
+
+When he awoke at one o'clock he gave me lurid accounts of what he said
+was history, but which was obviously collective hysteria. There had been
+a political crisis. He and his fellow M.P.'s had 'done things'--I never
+quite got at the things--for eighteen hours on end, and the pitiless
+Whips were even then at the telephones to herd 'em up to another
+dog-fight. So he snorted and grew hot all over again while he might have
+been resting.
+
+'I'm going to pitch in my question about that miscarriage of justice at
+Huckley this afternoon, if you care to listen to it,' he said. 'It'll be
+absolutely thrown away--in our present state. I told 'em so; but it's my
+only chance for weeks. P'raps Woodhouse would like to come.'
+
+'I'm sure he would. Anything to do with Huckley interests us,' I said.
+
+'It'll miss fire, I'm afraid. Both sides are absolutely cooked. The
+present situation has been working up for some time. You see the row was
+bound to come, etc. etc.,' and he flew off the handle once more.
+
+I telephoned to Woodhouse, and we went to the House together. It was a
+dull, sticky afternoon with thunder in the air. For some reason or
+other, each side was determined to prove its virtue and endurance to the
+utmost. I heard men snarling about it all round me. 'If they won't spare
+us, we'll show 'em no mercy,' 'Break the brutes up from the start. They
+can't stand late hours.' 'Come on! No shirking! I know _you've_ had a
+Turkish bath,' were some of the sentences I caught on our way. The House
+was packed already, and one could feel the negative electricity of a
+jaded crowd wrenching at one's own nerves, and depressing the
+afternoon soul.
+
+'This is bad!' Woodhouse whispered. 'There'll be a row before they've
+finished. Look at the Front Benches!' And he pointed out little personal
+signs by which I was to know that each man was on edge. He might have
+spared himself. The House was ready to snap before a bone had been
+thrown. A sullen minister rose to reply to a staccato question. His
+supporters cheered defiantly. 'None o' that! None o' that!' came from
+the Back Benches. I saw the Speaker's face stiffen like the face of a
+helmsman as he humours a hard-mouthed yacht after a sudden following
+sea. The trouble was barely met in time. There came a fresh, apparently
+causeless gust a few minutes later--savage, threatening, but futile. It
+died out--one could hear the sigh--in sudden wrathful realisation of
+the dreary hours ahead, and the ship of state drifted on.
+
+Then Pallant--and the raw House winced at the torture of his
+voice--rose. It was a twenty-line question, studded with legal
+technicalities. The gist of it was that he wished to know whether the
+appropriate Minister was aware that there had been a grave miscarriage
+of justice on such and such a date, at such and such a place, before
+such and such justices of the peace, in regard to a case which arose--
+
+I heard one desperate, weary 'damn!' float up from the pit of that
+torment. Pallant sawed on--'out of certain events which occurred at the
+village of Huckley.'
+
+The House came to attention with a parting of the lips like a hiccough,
+and it flashed through my mind.... Pallant repeated, 'Huckley. The
+village--'
+
+'That voted the _Earth_ was flat.' A single voice from a back Bench sang
+it once like a lone frog in a far pool.
+
+'_Earth_ was flat,' croaked another voice opposite.
+
+'_Earth_ was flat.' There were several. Then several more.
+
+It was, you understand, the collective, overstrained nerve of the House,
+snapping, strand by strand to various notes, as the hawser parts from
+its moorings.
+
+'The Village that voted the _Earth_ was flat.' The tune was beginning to
+shape itself. More voices were raised and feet began to beat time. Even
+so it did not occur to me that the thing would--
+
+'The Village that voted the _Earth_ was flat!' It was easier now to see
+who were not singing. There were still a few. Of a sudden (and this
+proves the fundamental instability of the cross-bench mind) a
+cross-bencher leaped on his seat and there played an imaginary
+double-bass with tremendous maestro-like wagglings of the elbow.
+
+The last strand parted. The ship of state drifted out helpless on the
+rocking tide of melody.
+
+     'The Village that voted the _Earth_ was flat!
+      The Village that voted the _Earth_ was flat!'
+
+The Irish first conceived the idea of using their order-papers as
+funnels wherewith to reach the correct '_vroom--vroom_' on '_Earth_.'
+Labour, always conservative and respectable at a crisis, stood out
+longer than any other section, but when it came in it was howling
+syndicalism. Then, without distinction of Party, fear of constituents,
+desire for office, or hope of emolument, the House sang at the tops and
+at the bottoms of their voices, swaying their stale bodies and
+epileptically beating with their swelled feet. They sang 'The Village
+that voted the _Earth_ was flat': first, because they wanted to, and
+secondly--which is the terror of that song--because they could not stop.
+For no consideration could they stop.
+
+Pallant was still standing up. Some one pointed at him and they laughed.
+Others began to point, lunging, as it were, in time with the tune. At
+this moment two persons came in practically abreast from behind the
+Speaker's chair, and halted appalled. One happened to be the Prime
+Minister and the other a messenger. The House, with tears running down
+their cheeks, transferred their attention to the paralysed couple. They
+pointed six hundred forefingers at them. They rocked, they waved, and
+they rolled while they pointed, but still they sang. When they weakened
+for an instant, Ireland would yell: 'Are ye _with_ me, bhoys?' and they
+all renewed their strength like Antaeus. No man could say afterwards
+what happened in the Press or the Strangers' Gallery. It was the House,
+the hysterical and abandoned House of Commons that held all eyes, as it
+deafened all ears. I saw both Front Benches bend forward, some with
+their foreheads on their despatch-boxes, the rest with their faces in
+their hands; and their moving shoulders jolted the House out of its last
+rag of decency. Only the Speaker remained unmoved. The entire press of
+Great Britain bore witness next day that he had not even bowed his head.
+The Angel of the Constitution, for vain was the help of man, foretold
+him the exact moment at which the House would have broken into 'The
+Gubby.' He is reported to have said: 'I heard the Irish beginning to
+shuffle it. So I adjourned.' Pallant's version is that he added: 'And I
+was never so grateful to a private member in all my life as I was to
+Mr. Pallant.'
+
+He made no explanation. He did not refer to orders or disorders. He
+simply adjourned the House till six that evening. And the House
+adjourned--some of it nearly on all fours.
+
+I was not correct when I said that the Speaker was the only man who did
+not laugh. Woodhouse was beside me all the time. His face was set and
+quite white--as white, they told me, as Sir Thomas Ingell's when he
+went, by request, to a private interview with his Chief Whip.
+
+
+
+
+THE PRESS
+
+     The Soldier may forget his sword
+       The Sailorman the sea,
+     The Mason may forget the Word
+       And the Priest his litany:
+     The maid may forget both jewel and gem,
+       And the bride her wedding-dress--
+     But the Jew shall forget Jerusalem
+       Ere we forget the Press!
+
+     Who once hath stood through the loaded hour
+       Ere, roaring like the gale,
+     The Harrild and the Hoe devour
+       Their league-long paper bale,
+     And has lit his pipe in the morning calm
+       That follows the midnight stress--
+     He hath sold his heart to the old Black Art
+       We call the daily Press.
+
+     Who once hath dealt in the widest game
+       That all of a man can play,
+     No later love, no larger fame
+       Will lure him long away.
+     As the war-horse smelleth the battle afar,
+       The entered Soul, no less,
+     He saith: 'Ha! Ha!' where the trumpets are
+       And the thunders of the Press.
+
+     Canst thou number the days that we fulfil,
+       Or the _Times_ that we bring forth?
+     Canst thou send the lightnings to do thy will,
+       And cause them reign on earth?
+     Hast thou given a peacock goodly wings
+       To please his foolishness?
+     Sit down at the heart of men and things,
+       Companion of the Press!
+
+     The Pope may launch his Interdict,
+       The Union its decree,
+     But the bubble is blown and the bubble is pricked
+       By Us and such as We.
+     Remember the battle and stand aside
+       While Thrones and Powers confess
+     That King over all the children of pride
+       Is the Press--the Press--the Press!
+
+
+
+In The Presence
+
+(1912)
+
+'So the matter,' the Regimental Chaplain concluded, 'was correct; in
+every way correct. I am well pleased with Rutton Singh and Attar Singh.
+They have gathered the fruit of their lives.'
+
+He folded his arms and sat down on the verandah. The hot day had ended,
+and there was a pleasant smell of cooking along the regimental lines,
+where half-clad men went back and forth with leaf platters and
+water-goglets. The Subadar-Major, in extreme undress, sat on a chair, as
+befitted his rank; the Havildar-Major, his nephew, leaning respectfully
+against the wall. The Regiment was at home and at ease in its own
+quarters in its own district which takes its name from the great
+Muhammadan saint Mian Mir, revered by Jehangir and beloved by Guru Har
+Gobind, sixth of the great Sikh Gurus.
+
+'Quite correct,' the Regimental Chaplain repeated.
+
+No Sikh contradicts his Regimental Chaplain who expounds to him the Holy
+Book of the Grunth Sahib and who knows the lives and legends of all
+the Gurus.
+
+The Subadar-Major bowed his grey head. The Havildar-Major coughed
+respectfully to attract attention and to ask leave to speak. Though he
+was the Subadar-Major's nephew, and though his father held twice as
+much land as his uncle, he knew his place in the scheme of things. The
+Subadar-Major shifted one hand with an iron bracelet on the wrist.
+
+'Was there by any chance any woman at the back of it?' the
+Havildar-Major murmured. 'I was not here when the thing happened.'
+
+'Yes! Yes! Yes! We all know that thou wast in England eating and
+drinking with the Sahibs. We are all surprised that thou canst still
+speak Punjabi.' The Subadar-Major's carefully-tended beard bristled.
+
+'There was no woman,' the Regimental Chaplain growled. 'It was land.
+Hear, you! Rutton Singh and Attar Singh were the elder of four brothers.
+These four held land in--what was the village's name?--oh, Pishapur,
+near Thori, in the Banalu Tehsil of Patiala State, where men can still
+recognise right behaviour when they see it. The two younger brothers
+tilled the land, while Rutton Singh and Attar Singh took service with
+the Regiment, according to the custom of the family.'
+
+'True, true,' said the Havildar-Major. 'There is the same arrangement in
+all good families.'
+
+'Then, listen again,' the Regimental Chaplain went on. 'Their kin on
+their mother's side put great oppression and injustice upon the two
+younger brothers who stayed with the land in Patiala State. Their
+mother's kin loosened beasts into the four brothers' crops when the
+crops were green; they cut the corn by force when it was ripe; they
+broke down the water-courses; they defiled the wells; and they brought
+false charges in the law-courts against all four brothers. They did not
+spare even the cotton-seed, as the saying is.
+
+'Their mother's kin trusted that the young men would thus be forced by
+weight of trouble, and further trouble and perpetual trouble, to quit
+their lands in Pishapur village in Banalu Tehsil in Patiala State. If
+the young men ran away, the land would come whole to their mother's kin.
+I am not a regimental school-master, but is it understood, child?'
+
+'Understood,' said the Havildar-Major grimly. 'Pishapur is not the only
+place where the fence eats the field instead of protecting it. But
+perhaps there was a woman among their mother's kin?'
+
+'God knows!' said the Regimental Chaplain. 'Woman, or man, or
+law-courts, the young men would _not_ be driven off the land which was
+their own by inheritance. They made appeal to Rutton Singh and Attar
+Singh, their brethren who had taken service with _us_ in the Regiment,
+and so knew the world, to help them in their long war against their
+mother's kin in Pishapur. For that reason, because their own land and
+the honour of their house was dear to them, Rutton Singh and Attar Singh
+needs must very often ask for leave to go to Patiala and attend to the
+lawsuits and cattle-poundings there.
+
+'It was not, look you, as though they went back to their own village and
+sat, garlanded with jasmine, in honour, upon chairs before the elders
+under the trees. They went back always to perpetual trouble, either of
+lawsuits, or theft, or strayed cattle; and they sat on thorns.'
+
+'I knew it,' said the Subadar-Major. 'Life was bitter for them both. But
+they were well-conducted men. It was not hard to get them their leave
+from the Colonel Sahib.'
+
+'They spoke to me also,' said the Chaplain. '_"Let him who desires the
+four great gifts apply himself to the words of holy men."_ That is
+written. Often they showed me the papers of the false lawsuits brought
+against them. Often they wept on account of the persecution put upon
+them by their mother's kin. Men thought it was drugs when their eyes
+showed red.'
+
+'They wept in my presence too,' said the Subadar-Major. 'Well-conducted
+men of nine years' service apiece. Rutton Singh was drill-Naik, too.'
+
+'They did all things correctly as Sikhs should,' said the Regimental
+Chaplain. 'When the persecution had endured seven years, Attar Singh
+took leave to Pishapur once again (that was the fourth time in that year
+only) and he called his persecutors together before the village elders,
+and he cast his turban at their feet and besought them by his mother's
+blood to cease from their persecutions. For he told them earnestly that
+he had marched to the boundaries of his patience, and that there could
+be but one end to the matter.
+
+'They gave him abuse. They mocked him and his tears, which was the same
+as though they had mocked the Regiment. Then Attar Singh returned to the
+Regiment, and laid this last trouble before Rutton Singh, the eldest
+brother. But Rutton Singh could not get leave all at once.'
+
+'Because he was drill-Naik and the recruits were to be drilled. I myself
+told him so,' said the Subadar-Major. 'He was a well-conducted man. He
+said he could wait.'
+
+'But when permission was granted, those two took four days' leave,' the
+Chaplain went on.
+
+'I do not think Attar Singh should have taken Baynes Sahib's revolver.
+He was Baynes Sahib's orderly, and all that Sahib's things were open to
+him. It was, therefore, as I count it, shame to Attar Singh,' said the
+Subadar-Major.
+
+'All the words had been said. There was need of arms, and how could
+soldiers use Government rifles upon mere cultivators in the fields?' the
+Regimental Chaplain replied. 'Moreover, the revolver was sent back,
+together with a money-order for the cartridges expended. _"Borrow not;
+but if thou borrowest, pay back soon!"_ That is written in the Hymns.
+Rutton Singh took a sword, and he and Attar Singh went to Pishapur and,
+after word given, the four brethren fell upon their persecutors in
+Pishapur village and slew seventeen, wounding ten. A revolver is better
+than a lawsuit. I say that these four brethren, the two with _us_, and
+the two mere cultivators, slew and wounded twenty-seven--all their
+mother's kin, male and female.
+
+'Then the four mounted to their housetop, and Attar Singh, who was
+always one of the impetuous, said "My work is done," and he made
+_shinan_ (purification) in all men's sight, and he lent Rutton Singh
+Baynes Sahib's revolver, and Rutton Singh shot him in the head.
+
+'So Attar Singh abandoned his body, as an insect abandons a blade of
+grass. But Rutton Singh, having more work to do, went down from the
+housetop and sought an enemy whom he had forgotten--a Patiala man of
+this regiment who had sided with the persecutors. When he overtook the
+man, Rutton Singh hit him twice with bullets and once with the sword.'
+
+'But the man escaped and is now in the hospital here,' said the
+Subadar-Major. 'The doctor says he will live in spite of all.'
+
+'Not Rutton Singh's fault. Rutton Singh left him for dead. Then Rutton
+Singh returned to the housetop, and the three brothers together, Attar
+Singh being dead, sent word by a lad to the police station for an army
+to be dispatched against them that they might die with honours. But none
+came. And yet Patiala State is not under English law and they should
+know virtue there when they see it!
+
+'So, on the third day, Rutton Singh also made _shinan_, and the youngest
+of the brethren shot him also in the head, and _he_ abandoned his body.
+
+'Thus was all correct. There was neither heat, nor haste, nor abuse in
+the matter from end to end. There remained alive not one man or woman of
+their mother's kin which had oppressed them. Of the other villagers of
+Pishapur, who had taken no part in the persecutions, not one was slain.
+Indeed, the villagers sent them food on the housetop for those three
+days while they waited for the police who would not dispatch that army.
+
+'Listen again! I know that Attar Singh and Rutton Singh omitted no
+ceremony of the purifications, and when all was done Baynes Sahib's
+revolver was thrown down from the housetop, together with three rupees
+twelve annas; and order was given for its return by post.'
+
+'And what befell the two younger brethren who were not in the service?'
+the Havildar-Major asked.
+
+'Doubtless they too are dead, but since they were not in the Regiment
+their honour concerns themselves only. So far as _we_ were touched, see
+how correctly we came out of the matter! I think the King should be
+told; for where could you match such a tale except among us Sikhs? _Sri
+wah guru ji ki Khalsa! Sri wah guru ji ki futteh!_' said the
+Regimental Chaplain.
+
+'Would three rupees twelve annas pay for the used cartridges?' said the
+Havildar-Major.
+
+'Attar Singh knew the just price. All Baynes Sahib's gear was in his
+charge. They expended one tin box of fifty cartouches, lacking two which
+were returned. As I said--as I say--the arrangement was made not with
+heat nor blasphemies as a Mussulman would have made it; not with cries
+nor caperings as an idolater would have made it; but conformably to the
+ritual and doctrine of the Sikhs. Hear you! _"Though hundreds of
+amusements are offered to a child it cannot live without milk. If a man
+be divorced from his soul and his soul's desire he certainly will not
+stop to play upon the road, but he will make haste with his
+pilgrimage_." That is written. I rejoice in my disciples.'
+
+'True! True! Correct! Correct!' said the Subadar-Major. There was a
+long, easy silence. One heard a water-wheel creaking somewhere and the
+nearer sound of meal being ground in a quern.
+
+'But he--' the Chaplain pointed a scornful chin at the
+Havildar-Major--'_he_ has been so long in England that--'
+
+'Let the lad alone,' said his uncle. 'He was but two months there, and
+he was chosen for good cause.'
+
+Theoretically, all Sikhs are equal. Practically, there are differences,
+as none know better than well-born, land-owning folk, or long-descended
+chaplains from Amritsar.
+
+'Hast thou heard anything in England to match my tale?' the Chaplain
+sneered.
+
+'I saw more than I could understand, so I have locked up my stories in
+my own mouth,' the Havildar-Major replied meekly.
+
+'Stories? What stories? I know all the stories about England,' said the
+Chaplain. 'I know that _terains_ run underneath their bazaars there, and
+as for their streets stinking with _mota kahars_, only this morning I
+was nearly killed by Duggan Sahib's _mota-kahar_. That young man is
+a devil.'
+
+'I expect Grunthi-jee,' said the Subadar-Major, 'you and I grow too old
+to care for the Kahar-ki-nautch--the Bearer's dance.' He named one of
+the sauciest of the old-time nautches, and smiled at his own pun. Then
+he turned to his nephew. 'When I was a lad and came back to my village
+on leave, I waited the convenient hour, and, the elders giving
+permission, I spoke of what I had seen elsewhere.'
+
+'Ay, my father,' said the Havildar-Major, softly and affectionately. He
+sat himself down with respect, as behoved a mere lad of thirty with a
+bare half-dozen campaigns to his credit.
+
+'There were four men in this affair also,' he began, 'and it was an
+affair that touched the honour, not of one regiment, nor two, but of all
+the Army in Hind. Some part of it I saw; some I heard; but _all_ the
+tale is true. My father's brother knows, and my priest knows, that I was
+in England on business with my Colonel, when the King--the Great Queen's
+son--completed his life.
+
+'First, there was a rumour that sickness was upon him. Next, we knew
+that he lay sick in the Palace. A very great multitude stood outside the
+Palace by night and by day, in the rain as well as the sun, waiting
+for news.
+
+'Then came out one with a written paper, and set it upon a
+gate-side--the word of the King's death--and they read, and groaned.
+This I saw with my own eyes, because the office where my Colonel Sahib
+went daily to talk with Colonel Forsyth Sahib was at the east end of the
+very gardens where the Palace stood. They are larger gardens than
+Shalimar here'--he pointed with his chin up the lines--'or Shahdera
+across the river.
+
+'Next day there was a darkness in the streets, because all the city's
+multitude were clad in black garments, and they spoke as a man speaks in
+the presence of his dead--all those multitudes. In the eyes, in the air,
+and in the heart, there was blackness. I saw it. But that is not
+my tale.
+
+'After ceremonies had been accomplished, and word had gone out to the
+Kings of the Earth that they should come and mourn, the new King--the
+dead King's son--gave commandment that his father's body should be laid,
+coffined, in a certain Temple which is near the river. There are no
+idols in that Temple; neither any carvings, nor paintings, nor gildings.
+It is all grey stone, of one colour as though it were cut out of the
+live rock. It is larger than--yes, than the Durbar Sahib at Amritsar,
+even though the Akal Bunga and the Baba-Atal were added. How old it may
+be God knows. It is the Sahibs' most sacred Temple.
+
+'In that place, by the new King's commandment, they made, as it were, a
+shrine for a saint, with lighted candles at the head and the feet of the
+Dead, and duly appointed watchers for every hour of the day and the
+night, until the dead King should be taken to the place of his fathers,
+which is at Wanidza.
+
+'When all was in order, the new King said, "Give entrance to all
+people," and the doors were opened, and O my uncle! O my teacher! all
+the world entered, walking through that Temple to take farewell of the
+Dead. There was neither distinction, nor price, nor ranking in the host,
+except an order that they should walk by fours.
+
+'As they gathered in the streets without--very, very far off--so they
+entered the Temple, walking by fours: the child, the old man; mother,
+virgin, harlot, trader, priest; of all colours and faiths and customs
+under the firmament of God, from dawn till late at night. I saw it. My
+Colonel gave me leave to go. I stood in the line, many hours, one
+_koss_, two _koss_, distant from the temple.'
+
+'Then why did the multitude not sit down under the trees?' asked the
+priest.
+
+'Because we were still between houses. The city is many _koss_ wide,'
+the Havildar-Major resumed. 'I submitted myself to that slow-moving
+river and thus--thus--a pace at a time--I made pilgrimage. There were in
+my rank a woman, a cripple, and a lascar from the ships.
+
+'When we entered the Temple, the coffin itself was as a shoal in the
+Ravi River, splitting the stream into two branches, one on either side
+of the Dead; and the watchers of the Dead, who were soldiers, stood
+about It, moving no more than the still flame of the candles. Their
+heads were bowed; their hands were clasped; their eyes were cast upon
+the ground--thus. They were not men, but images, and the multitude went
+past them in fours by day, and, except for a little while, by
+night also.
+
+'No, there was no order that the people should come to pay respect. It
+was a free-will pilgrimage. Eight kings had been commanded to come--who
+obeyed--but upon his own Sahibs the new King laid no commandment. Of
+themselves they came.
+
+'I made pilgrimage twice: once for my Salt's sake, and once again for
+wonder and terror and worship. But my mouth cannot declare one thing of
+a hundred thousand things in this matter. There were _lakhs_ of _lakhs_,
+_crores_ of _crores_ of people. I saw them.'
+
+'More than at our great pilgrimages?' the Regimental Chaplain demanded.
+
+'Yes. Those are only cities and districts coming out to pray. This was
+the world walking in grief. And now, hear you! It is the King's custom
+that four swords of Our Armies in Hind should stand always before the
+Presence in case of need.'
+
+'The King's custom, our right,' said the Subadar-Major curtly.
+
+'Also our right. These honoured ones are changed after certain months or
+years, that the honour may be fairly spread. Now it chanced that when
+the old King--the Queen's son--completed his days, the four that stood
+in the Presence were Goorkhas. Neither Sikhs alas, nor Pathans, Rajputs,
+nor Jats. Goorkhas, my father.'
+
+'Idolaters,' said the Chaplain.
+
+'But soldiers; for I remember in the Tirah--' the Havildar-Major began.
+
+'_But_ soldiers, for I remember fifteen campaigns. Go on,' said the
+Subadar-Major.
+
+'And it was their honour and right to furnish one who should stand in
+the Presence by day and by night till It went out to burial. There were
+no more than four all told--four old men to furnish that guard.'
+
+'Old? Old? What talk is this of old men?' said the Subadar-Major.
+
+'Nay. My fault! Your pardon!' The Havildar-Major spread a deprecating
+hand. 'They were strong, hot, valiant men, and the youngest was a lad of
+forty-five.'
+
+'That is better,' the Subadar-Major laughed.
+
+'But for all their strength and heat they could not eat strange food
+from the Sahibs' hands. There was no cooking place in the Temple; but a
+certain Colonel Forsyth Sahib, who had understanding, made arrangement
+whereby they should receive at least a little caste-clean parched grain;
+also cold rice maybe, and water which was pure. Yet, at best, this was
+no more than a hen's mouthful, snatched as each came off his guard. They
+lived on grain and were thankful, as the saying is.
+
+'One hour's guard in every four was each man's burden, for, as I have
+shown, they were but four all told; and the honour of Our Armies in Hind
+was on their heads. The Sahibs could draw upon all the armies in England
+for the other watchers--thousands upon thousands of fresh men--if they
+needed; but these four were but four.
+
+'The Sahibs drew upon the Granadeers for the other watchers. Granadeers
+be very tall men under very tall bearskins, such as Fusilier regiments
+wear in cold weather. Thus, when a Granadeer bowed his head but a very
+little over his stock, the bearskin sloped and showed as though he
+grieved exceedingly. Now the Goorkhas wear flat, green caps--'
+
+'I see, I see,' said the Subadar-Major impatiently.
+
+'They are bull-necked, too; and their stocks are hard, and when they
+bend deeply--deeply--to match the Granadeers--they come nigh to choking
+themselves. That was a handicap against them, when it came to the
+observance of ritual.
+
+'Yet even with their tall, grief-declaring bearskins, the Granadeers
+could not endure the full hour's guard in the Presence. There was good
+cause, as I will show, why no man could endure that terrible hour. So
+for them the hour's guard was cut to one-half. What did it matter to the
+Sahibs? They could draw on ten thousand Granadeers. Forsyth Sahib, who
+had comprehension, put this choice also before the four, and they said,
+"No, ours is the Honour of the Armies of Hind. Whatever the Sahibs do,
+we will suffer the full hour."
+
+'Forsyth Sahib, seeing that they were--knowing that they could neither
+sleep long nor eat much, said, "Is it great suffering?" They said, "It
+is great honour. We will endure."
+
+'Forsyth Sahib, who loves us, said then to the eldest, "Ho, father, tell
+me truly what manner of burden it is; for the full hour's watch breaks
+up our men like water."
+
+'The eldest answered, "Sahib, the burden is the feet of the multitude
+that pass us on either side. Our eyes being lowered and fixed, we see
+those feet only from the knee down--a river of feet, Sahib, that
+never--never--never stops. It is not the standing without any motion; it
+is not hunger; nor is it the dead part before the dawn when maybe a
+single one comes here to weep. It is the burden of the unendurable
+procession of feet from the knee down, that never--never--never stops!"
+
+'Forsyth Sahib said, "By God, I had not considered that! Now I know why
+our men come trembling and twitching off that guard. But at least, my
+father, ease the stock a little beneath the bent chin for that
+one hour."
+
+'The eldest said, "We are in the Presence. Moreover _He_ knew every
+button and braid and hook of every uniform in all His armies."
+
+'Then Forsyth Sahib said no more, except to speak about their parched
+grain, but indeed they could not eat much after their hour, nor could
+they sleep much because of eye-twitchings and the renewed procession of
+the feet before the eyes. Yet they endured each his full hour--not half
+an hour--his one full hour in each four hours.'
+
+'Correct! correct!' said the Subadar-Major and the Chaplain together.
+'We come well out of this affair.'
+
+'But seeing that they were old men,' said the Subadar-Major
+reflectively, 'very old men, worn out by lack of food and sleep, could
+not arrangements have been made, or influence have been secured, or a
+petition presented, whereby a well-born Sikh might have eased them of
+some portion of their great burden, even though his substantive rank--'
+
+'Then they would most certainly have slain me,' said the Havildar-Major
+with a smile.
+
+'And they would have done correctly,' said the Chaplain. 'What befell
+the honourable ones later?'
+
+'This. The Kings of the earth and all the Armies sent flowers and
+such-like to the dead King's palace at Wanidza, where the funeral
+offerings were accepted. There was no order given, but all the world
+made oblation. So the four took counsel--three at a time--and either
+they asked Forsyth Sahib to choose flowers, or themselves they went
+forth and bought flowers--I do not know; but, however it was arranged,
+the flowers were bought and made in the shape of a great drum-like
+circle weighing half a _maund_.
+
+'Forsyth Sahib had said, "Let the flowers be sent to Wanidza with the
+other flowers which all the world is sending." But they said among
+themselves, "It is not fit that these flowers, which are the offerings
+of His Armies in Hind, should come to the Palace of the Presence by the
+hands of hirelings or messengers, or of any man not in His service."
+
+'Hearing this, Forsyth Sahib, though he was much occupied with
+office-work, said, "Give me the flowers, and I will steal a time and
+myself take them to Wanidza."
+
+'The eldest said, "Since when has Forsyth Sahib worn sword?"
+
+'Forsyth Sahib said, "But always. And I wear it in the Presence when I
+put on uniform. I am a Colonel in the Armies of Hind." The eldest said,
+"Of what regiment?" And Forsyth Sahib looked on the carpet and pulled
+the hair of his lip. He saw the trap.'
+
+'Forsyth Sahib's regiment was once the old Forty-sixth Pathans which
+was called--' the Subadar-Major gave the almost forgotten title, adding
+that he had met them in such and such campaigns, when Forsyth Sahib was
+a young captain.
+
+The Havildar-Major took up the tale, saying, 'The eldest knew that also,
+my father. He laughed, and presently Forsyth Sahib laughed.
+
+'"It is true," said Forsyth Sahib. "I have no regiment. For twenty years
+I have been a clerk tied to a thick pen. Therefore I am the more fit to
+be your orderly and messenger in this business."
+
+'The eldest then said, "If it were a matter of my life or the honour of
+_any_ of my household, it would be easy." And Forsyth Sahib joined his
+hands together, half laughing, though he was ready to weep, and he said,
+"Enough! I ask pardon. Which one of you goes with the offering?"
+
+'The eldest said, feigning not to have heard, "Nor must they be
+delivered by a single sword--as though we were pressed for men in His
+service," and they saluted and went out.'
+
+'Were these things seen, or were they told thee?' said the
+Subadar-Major.
+
+'I both saw and heard in the office full of books and papers where my
+Colonel Sahib consulted Forsyth Sahib upon the business that had brought
+my Colonel Sahib to England.'
+
+'And what was that business?' the Regimental Chaplain asked of a sudden,
+looking full at the Havildar-Major, who returned the look without
+a quiver.
+
+'That was not revealed to me,' said the Havildar-Major.
+
+'I heard it might have been some matter touching the integrity of
+certain regiments,' the Chaplain insisted.
+
+'The matter was not in any way open to my ears,' said the
+Havildar-Major.
+
+'Humph!' The Chaplain drew his hard road-worn feet under his robe. 'Let
+us hear the tale that it is permitted thee to tell,' he said, and the
+Havildar-Major went on:
+
+'So then the three, having returned to the Temple, called the fourth,
+who had only forty-five years, when he came off guard, and said, "We go
+to the Palace at Wanidza with the offerings. Remain thou in the
+Presence, and take all our guards, one after the other, till we return."
+
+'Within that next hour they hired a large and strong _mota-kahar_ for
+the journey from the Temple to Wanidza, which is twenty _koss_ or more,
+and they promised expedition. But he who took their guards said, "It is
+not seemly that we should for any cause appear to be in haste. There are
+eighteen medals with eleven clasps and three Orders to consider. Go at
+leisure. I can endure."
+
+'So the three with the offerings were absent three hours and a half, and
+having delivered the offering at Wanidza in the correct manner they
+returned and found the lad on guard, and they did not break his guard
+till his full hour was ended. So _he_ endured four hours in the
+Presence, not stirring one hair, his eyes abased, and the river of
+feet, from the knee down, passing continually before his eyes. When he
+was relieved, it was seen that his eyeballs worked like
+weavers' shuttles.
+
+'And so it was done--not in hot blood, not for a little while, nor yet
+with the smell of slaughter and the noise of shouting to sustain, but in
+silence, for a very long time, rooted to one place before the Presence
+among the most terrible feet of the multitude.'
+
+'Correct!' the Chaplain chuckled.
+
+'But the Goorkhas had the honour,' said the Subadar-Major sadly.
+
+'Theirs was the Honour of His Armies in Hind, and that was Our Honour,'
+the nephew replied.
+
+'Yet I would one Sikh had been concerned in it--even one low-caste Sikh.
+And after?'
+
+'They endured the burden until the end--until It went out of the Temple
+to be laid among the older kings at Wanidza. When all was accomplished
+and It was withdrawn under the earth, Forsyth Sahib said to the four,
+"The King gives command that you be fed here on meat cooked by your own
+cooks. Eat and take ease, my fathers."
+
+'So they loosed their belts and ate. They had not eaten food except by
+snatches for some long time; and when the meat had given them strength
+they slept for very many hours; and it was told me that the procession
+of the unendurable feet ceased to pass before their eyes any more.'
+
+He threw out one hand palm upward to show that the tale was ended.
+
+'We came well and cleanly out of it,' said the Subadar-Major.
+
+'Correct! Correct! Correct!' said the Regimental Chaplain. 'In an evil
+age it is good to hear such things, and there is certainly no doubt that
+this is a very evil age.'
+
+
+
+
+JOBSON'S AMEN
+
+     'Blessed be the English and all their ways and works.
+     Cursed be the Infidels, Hereticks, and Turks!'
+     'Amen,' quo' Jobson, 'but where I used to lie
+     Was neither Candle, Bell nor Book to curse my brethren by:
+
+     'But a palm-tree in full bearing, bowing down, bowing down,
+     To a surf that drove unsparing at the brown-walled town--
+     Conches in a temple, oil-lamps in a dome--
+     And a low moon out of Africa said: "This way home!"'
+
+     'Blessed be the English and all that they profess.
+     Cursed be the Savages that prance in nakedness!'
+     'Amen,' quo' Jobson, 'but where I used to lie
+     Was neither shirt nor pantaloons to catch my brethren by:
+
+     'But a well-wheel slowly creaking, going round, going round,
+     By a water-channel leaking over drowned, warm ground--
+     Parrots very busy in the trellised pepper-vine--
+     And a high sun over Asia shouting: "Rise and shine!"'
+
+     'Blessed be the English and everything they own.
+     Cursed be the Infidels that bow to wood and stone!'
+     'Amen,' quo' Jobson, 'but where I used to lie
+     Was neither pew nor Gospelleer to save my brethren by:
+
+     'But a desert stretched and stricken, left and right, left
+           and right,
+     Where the piled mirages thicken under white-hot light--
+     A skull beneath a sand-hill and a viper coiled inside--
+     And a red wind out of Libya roaring: "Run and hide!"'
+
+     'Blessed be the English and all they make or do.
+     Cursed be the Hereticks who doubt that this is true!'
+     'Amen,' quo' Jobson, 'but where I mean to die
+     Is neither rule nor calliper to judge the matter by:
+
+     'But Himalaya heavenward-heading, sheer and vast, sheer and vast,
+     In a million summits bedding on the last world's past;
+     A certain sacred mountain where the scented cedars climb,
+     And--the feet of my Beloved hurrying back through Time!'
+
+
+
+REGULUS
+
+(1917)
+
+_Regulus, a Roman general, defeated the Carthaginians 256 B.C., but was
+next year defeated and taken prisoner by the Carthaginians, who sent him
+to Rome with an embassy to ask for peace or an exchange of prisoners.
+Regulus strongly advised the Roman Senate to make no terms with the
+enemy. He then returned to Carthage and was put to death._
+
+The Fifth Form had been dragged several times in its collective life,
+from one end of the school Horace to the other. Those were the years
+when Army examiners gave thousands of marks for Latin, and it was Mr.
+King's hated business to defeat them.
+
+Hear him, then, on a raw November morning at second lesson.
+
+'Aha!' he began, rubbing his hands. '_Cras ingens iterabimus aequor._
+Our portion to-day is the Fifth Ode of the Third Book, I
+believe--concerning one Regulus, a gentleman. And how often have we been
+through it?'
+
+'Twice, sir,' said Malpass, head of the Form.
+
+Mr. King shuddered. 'Yes, twice, quite literally,' he said. 'To-day,
+with an eye to your Army _viva-voce_ examinations--ugh!--I shall exact
+somewhat freer and more florid renditions. With feeling and
+comprehension if that be possible. I except'--here his eye swept the
+back benches--'our friend and companion Beetle, from whom, now as
+always, I demand an absolutely literal translation.' The form laughed
+subserviently.
+
+'Spare his blushes! Beetle charms us first.'
+
+Beetle stood up, confident in the possession of a guaranteed construe,
+left behind by M'Turk, who had that day gone into the sick-house with a
+cold. Yet he was too wary a hand to show confidence.
+
+'_Credidimus_, we--believe--we have believed,' he opened in
+hesitating slow time, '_tonantem Joven_, thundering Jove--_regnare_,
+to reign--_caelo_, in heaven. _Augustus_, Augustus--_habebitur_,
+will be held or considered--_praesens divus_, a present
+God--_adjectis Britannis_, the Britons being added--_imperio_, to the
+Empire--_gravibusque Persis_, with the heavy--er, stern Persians.'
+
+'What?'
+
+'The grave or stern Persians.' Beetle pulled up with the
+'Thank-God-I-have-done-my-duty' air of Nelson in the cockpit.
+
+'I am quite aware,' said King, 'that the first stanza is about the
+extent of your knowledge, but continue, sweet one, continue. _Gravibus_,
+by the way, is usually translated as "troublesome."'
+
+Beetle drew a long and tortured breath. The second stanza (which carries
+over to the third) of that Ode is what is technically called a
+'stinker.' But M'Turk had done him handsomely.
+
+'_Milesne Crassi_, had--has the soldier of Crassus--_vixit_,
+lived--_turpis maritus_, a disgraceful husband--'
+
+'You slurred the quantity of the word after _turpis_,' said King. 'Let's
+hear it.'
+
+Beetle guessed again, and for a wonder hit the correct quantity. 'Er--a
+disgraceful husband--_conjuge barbara_, with a barbarous spouse.'
+
+'Why do you select _that_ disgustful equivalent out of all the
+dictionary?' King snapped. 'Isn't "wife" good enough for you?'
+
+'Yes, sir. But what do I do about this bracket, sir? Shall I take it
+now?'
+
+'Confine yourself at present to the soldier of Crassus.'
+
+'Yes, sir. _Et_, and--_consenuit_, has he grown old--_in armis_, in
+the--er--arms--_hositum socerorum_, of his father-in-law's enemies.'
+
+'Who? How? Which?'
+
+'Arms of his enemies' fathers-in-law, sir.'
+
+'Tha-anks. By the way, what meaning might you attach to _in armis_?'
+
+'Oh, weapons--weapons of war, sir.' There was a virginal note in
+Beetle's voice as though he had been falsely accused of uttering
+indecencies. 'Shall I take the bracket now, sir?'
+
+'Since it seems to be troubling you.'
+
+'_Pro Curia_, O for the Senate House--_inversique mores_, and manners
+upset--upside down.'
+
+'Ve-ry like your translation. Meantime, the soldier of Crassus?'
+
+'_Sub rege Medo_, under a Median King--_Marsus et Apulus_, he being a
+Marsian and an Apulian.'
+
+'Who? The Median King?'
+
+'No, sir. The soldier of Crassus. _Oblittus_ agrees with _milesne
+Crassi_, sir,' volunteered too-hasty Beetle.
+
+'Does it? It doesn't with _me_.'
+
+'_Oh-blight-us_,' Beetle corrected hastily, 'forgetful--_anciliorum_, of
+the shields, or trophies--_et nominis_, and the--his name--_et togae_,
+and the toga--_eternaeque Vestae_, and eternal Vesta--_incolumi Jove_,
+Jove being safe--_et urbe Roma_, and the Roman city.' With an air of
+hardly restrained zeal--'Shall I go on, sir?'
+
+Mr. King winced. 'No, thank you. You have indeed given us a translation!
+May I ask if it conveys any meaning whatever to your so-called mind?'
+
+'Oh, I think so, sir.' This with gentle toleration for Horace and all
+his works.
+
+'We envy you. Sit down.'
+
+Beetle sat down relieved, well knowing that a reef of uncharted
+genitives stretched ahead of him, on which in spite of M'Turk's
+sailing-directions he would infallibly have been wrecked.
+
+Rattray, who took up the task, steered neatly through them and came
+unscathed to port.
+
+'Here we require drama,' said King. 'Regulus himself is speaking now.
+Who shall represent the provident-minded Regulus? Winton, will you
+kindly oblige?'
+
+Winton of King's House, a long, heavy, tow-headed Second Fifteen
+forward, overdue for his First Fifteen colours, and in aspect like an
+earnest, elderly horse, rose up, and announced, among other things,
+that he had seen 'signs affixed to Punic deluges.' Half the Form shouted
+for joy, and the other half for joy that there was something to
+shout about.
+
+Mr. King opened and shut his eyes with great swiftness. '_Signa adfixa
+delubris_,' he gasped. 'So _delubris_ is "deluges" is it? Winton, in all
+our dealings, have I ever suspected you of a jest?'
+
+'No, sir,' said the rigid and angular Winton, while the Form rocked
+about him.
+
+'And yet you assert _delubris_ means "deluges." Whether I am a fit
+subject for such a jape is, of course, a matter of opinion, but....
+Winton, you are normally conscientious. May we assume you looked out
+_delubris_?'
+
+'No, sir.' Winton was privileged to speak that truth dangerous to all
+who stand before Kings.
+
+''Made a shot at it then?'
+
+Every line of Winton's body showed he had done nothing of the sort.
+Indeed, the very idea that 'Pater' Winton (and a boy is not called
+'Pater' by companions for his frivolity) would make a shot at anything
+was beyond belief. But he replied, 'Yes,' and all the while worked with
+his right heel as though he were heeling a ball at punt-about.
+
+Though none dared to boast of being a favourite with King, the taciturn,
+three-cornered Winton stood high in his House-Master's opinion. It
+seemed to save him neither rebuke nor punishment, but the two were in
+some fashion sympathetic.
+
+'Hm!' said King drily. 'I was going to say--_Flagito additis damnum_,
+but I think--I think I see the process. Beetle, the translation of
+_delubris_, please.'
+
+Beetle raised his head from his shaking arm long enough to answer:
+'Ruins, sir.'
+
+There was an impressive pause while King checked off crimes on his
+fingers. Then to Beetle the much-enduring man addressed winged words:
+
+'Guessing,' said he. 'Guessing, Beetle, as usual, from the look of
+_delubris_ that it bore some relation to _diluvium_ or deluge, you
+imparted the result of your half-baked lucubrations to Winton who seems
+to have been lost enough to have accepted it. Observing next, your
+companion's fall, from the presumed security of your undistinguished
+position in the rear-guard, you took another pot-shot. The turbid chaos
+of your mind threw up some memory of the word "dilapidations" which you
+have pitifully attempted to disguise under the synonym of "ruins."'
+
+As this was precisely what Beetle had done he looked hurt but forgiving.
+'We will attend to this later,' said King. 'Go on, Winton, and retrieve
+yourself.'
+
+_Delubris_ happened to be the one word which Winton had not looked out
+and had asked Beetle for, when they were settling into their places. He
+forged ahead with no further trouble. Only when he rendered _scilicet_
+as 'forsooth,' King erupted.
+
+'Regulus,' he said, 'was not a leader-writer for the penny press, nor,
+for that matter, was Horace. Regulus says: "The soldier ransomed by gold
+will come keener for the fight--will he by--by gum!" _That's_ the
+meaning of _scilicet_. It indicates contempt--bitter contempt.
+"Forsooth," forsooth! You'll be talking about "speckled beauties" and
+"eventually transpire" next. Howell, what do you make of that doubled
+"Vidi ego--ego vidi"? It wasn't put in to fill up the metre, you know.'
+
+'Isn't it intensive, sir?' said Howell, afflicted by a genuine interest
+in what he read. 'Regulus was a bit in earnest about Rome making no
+terms with Carthage--and he wanted to let the Romans understand it,
+didn't he, sir?'
+
+'Less than your usual grace, but the fact. Regulus _was_ in earnest. He
+was also engaged at the same time in cutting his own throat with every
+word he uttered. He knew Carthage which (your examiners won't ask you
+this so you needn't take notes) was a sort of God-forsaken nigger
+Manchester. Regulus was not thinking about his own life. He was telling
+Rome the truth. He was playing for his side. Those lines from the
+eighteenth to the fortieth ought to be written in blood. Yet there are
+things in human garments which will tell you that Horace was a
+flâneur--a man about town. Avoid such beings. Horace knew a very great
+deal. _He_ knew! _Erit ille fortis_--"will he be brave who once to
+faithless foes has knelt?" And again (stop pawing with your hooves,
+Thornton!) _hic unde vitam sumeret inscius_. That means roughly--but I
+perceive I am ahead of my translators. Begin at _hic unde_, Vernon, and
+let us see if you have the spirit of Regulus.'
+
+Now no one expected fireworks from gentle Paddy Vernon, sub-prefect of
+Hartopp's House, but, as must often be the case with growing boys, his
+mind was in abeyance for the time being, and he said, all in a rush, on
+behalf of Regulus: '_O magna Carthago probrosis altior Italiae ruinis_,
+O Carthage, thou wilt stand forth higher than the ruins of Italy.'
+
+Even Beetle, most lenient of critics, was interested at this point,
+though he did not join the half-groan of reprobation from the wiser
+heads of the Form.
+
+'_Please_ don't mind me,' said King, and Vernon very kindly did not. He
+ploughed on thus: 'He (Regulus) is related to have removed from himself
+the kiss of the shameful wife and of his small children as less by the
+head, and, being stern, to have placed his virile visage on the ground.'
+
+Since King loved 'virile' about as much as he did 'spouse' or 'forsooth'
+the Form looked up hopefully. But Jove thundered not.
+
+'Until,' Vernon continued, 'he should have confirmed the sliding fathers
+as being the author of counsel never given under an alias.'
+
+He stopped, conscious of stillness round him like the dread calm of the
+typhoon's centre. King's opening voice was sweeter than honey.
+
+'I am painfully aware by bitter experience that I cannot give you any
+idea of the passion, the power, the--the essential guts of the lines
+which you have so foully outraged in our presence. But--' the note
+changed, 'so far as in me lies, I will strive to bring home to you,
+Vernon, the fact that there exist in Latin a few pitiful rules of
+grammar, of syntax, nay, even of declension, which were not created for
+your incult sport--your Boeotian diversion. You will, therefore, Vernon,
+write out and bring to me to-morrow a word-for-word English-Latin
+translation of the Ode, together with a full list of all adjectives--an
+adjective is not a verb, Vernon, as the Lower Third will tell you--all
+adjectives, their number, case, and gender. Even now I haven't begun to
+deal with you faithfully.'
+
+'I--I'm very sorry, sir,' Vernon stammered.
+
+'You mistake the symptoms, Vernon. You are possibly discomfited by the
+imposition, but sorrow postulates some sort of mind, intellect, _nous_.
+Your rendering of _probrosis_ alone stamps you as lower than the beasts
+of the field. Will some one take the taste out of our mouths?
+And--talking of tastes--' He coughed. There was a distinct flavour of
+chlorine gas in the air. Up went an eyebrow, though King knew perfectly
+well what it meant.
+
+'Mr. Hartopp's st--science class next door,' said Malpass.
+
+'Oh yes. I had forgotten. Our newly established Modern Side, of course.
+Perowne, open the windows; and Winton, go on once more from _interque
+maerentes_.'
+
+'And hastened away,' said Winton, 'surrounded by his mourning friends,
+into--into illustrious banishment. But I got that out of Conington,
+sir,' he added in one conscientious breath.
+
+'I am aware. The master generally knows his ass's crib, though I acquit
+_you_ of any intention that way. Can you suggest anything for _egregius
+exul_? Only "egregious exile"? I fear "egregious" is a good word ruined.
+No! You can't in this case improve on Conington. Now then for _atqui
+sciebat quae sibi barbarus tortor pararet_. The whole force of it lies
+in the _atqui_.'
+
+'Although he knew,' Winton suggested.
+
+'Stronger than that, I think.'
+
+'He who knew well,' Malpass interpolated.
+
+'Ye-es. "Well though he knew." I don't like Conington's "well-witting."
+It's Wardour Street.'
+
+'Well though he knew what the savage torturer was--was getting ready for
+him,' said Winton.
+
+'Ye-es. Had in store for him.'
+
+'Yet he brushed aside his kinsmen and the people delaying his return.'
+
+'Ye-es; but then how do you render _obstantes_?'
+
+'If it's a free translation mightn't _obstantes_ and _morantem_ come to
+about the same thing, sir?'
+
+'Nothing comes to "about the same thing" with Horace, Winton. As I have
+said, Horace was not a journalist. No, I take it that his kinsmen bodily
+withstood his departure, whereas the crowd--_populumque_--the democracy
+stood about futilely pitying him and getting in the way. Now for that
+noblest of endings--_quam si clientum_,' and King ran off into the
+quotation:
+
+     'As though some tedious business o'er
+     Of clients' court, his journey lay
+     Towards Venafrum's grassy floor
+     Or Sparta-built Tarentum's bay.
+
+All right, Winton. Beetle, when you've quite finished dodging the fresh
+air yonder, give me the meaning of _tendens_--and turn down
+your collar.'
+
+'Me, sir? _Tendens_, sir? Oh! Stretching away in the direction of, sir.'
+
+'Idiot! Regulus was not a feature of the landscape. He was a man,
+self-doomed to death by torture. _Atqui, sciebat_--knowing it--having
+achieved it for his country's sake--can't you hear that _atqui_ cut like
+a knife?--he moved off with some dignity. That is why Horace out of the
+whole golden Latin tongue chose the one word "tendens"--which is utterly
+untranslatable.'
+
+The gross injustice of being asked to translate it, converted Beetle
+into a young Christian martyr, till King buried his nose in his
+handkerchief again.
+
+'I think they've broken another gas-bottle next door, sir,' said Howell.
+'They're always doing it.' The Form coughed as more chlorine came in.
+
+'Well, I suppose we must be patient with the Modern Side,' said King.
+'But it is almost insupportable for this Side. Vernon, what are you
+grinning at?'
+
+Vernon's mind had returned to him glowing and inspired. He chuckled as
+he underlined his Horace.
+
+'It appears to amuse you,' said King. 'Let us participate. What is it?'
+
+'The last two lines of the Tenth Ode, in this book, sir,' was Vernon's
+amazing reply.
+
+'What? Oh, I see. _Non hoc semper erit liminis aut aquae caelestis
+patiens latus_[2].' King's mouth twitched to hide a grin. 'Was that
+done with intention?'
+
+[Footnote 2: 'This side will not always be patient of rain and waiting
+on the threshold.']
+
+'I--I thought it fitted, sir.'
+
+'It does. It's distinctly happy. What put it into your thick head,
+Paddy?'
+
+'I don't know, sir, except we did the Ode last term.'
+
+'And you remembered? The same head that minted _probrosis_ as a verb!
+Vernon, you are an enigma. No! This Side will _not_ always be patient of
+unheavenly gases and waters. I will make representations to our
+so-called Moderns. Meantime (who shall say I am not just?) I remit you
+your accrued pains and penalties in regard to _probrosim, probrosis,
+probrosit_ and other enormities. I oughtn't to do it, but this Side is
+occasionally human. By no means bad, Paddy.'
+
+'Thank you, sir,' said Vernon, wondering how inspiration had visited
+him.
+
+Then King, with a few brisk remarks about Science, headed them back to
+Regulus, of whom and of Horace and Rome and evil-minded commercial
+Carthage and of the democracy eternally futile, he explained, in all
+ages and climes, he spoke for ten minutes; passing thence to the next
+Ode--_Delicta Majorum_--where he fetched up, full-voiced, upon--'_Dis te
+minorem quod geris imperas_' (Thou rulest because thou bearest thyself
+as lower than the Gods)--making it a text for a discourse on manners,
+morals, and respect for authority as distinct from bottled gases, which
+lasted till the bell rang. Then Beetle, concertinaing his books,
+observed to Winton, 'When King's really on tap he's an interestin' dog.
+Hartopp's chlorine uncorked him.'
+
+'Yes; but why did you tell me _delubris_ was "deluges," you silly ass?'
+said Winton.
+
+'Well, that uncorked him too. Look out, you hoof-handed old owl!' Winton
+had cleared for action as the Form poured out like puppies at play and
+was scragging Beetle. Stalky from behind collared Winton low. The three
+fell in confusion.
+
+'_Dis te minorem quod geris imperas_,' quoth Stalky, ruffling Winton's
+lint-white locks. 'Mustn't jape with Number Five study. Don't be too
+virtuous. Don't brood over it. 'Twon't count against you in your future
+caree-ah. Cheer up, Pater.'
+
+'Pull him off my--er--essential guts, will you?' said Beetle from
+beneath. 'He's squashin' 'em.'
+
+They dispersed to their studies.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+No one, the owner least of all, can explain what is in a growing boy's
+mind. It might have been the blind ferment of adolescence; Stalky's
+random remarks about virtue might have stirred him; like his betters he
+might have sought popularity by way of clowning; or, as the Head
+asserted years later, the only known jest of his serious life might have
+worked on him, as a sober-sided man's one love colours and dislocates
+all his after days. But, at the next lesson, mechanical drawing with Mr.
+Lidgett who as drawing-master had very limited powers of punishment,
+Winton fell suddenly from grace and let loose a live mouse in the
+form-room. The whole form, shrieking and leaping high, threw at it all
+the plaster cones, pyramids, and fruit in high relief--not to mention
+ink-pots--that they could lay hands on. Mr. Lidgett reported at once to
+the Head; Winton owned up to his crime, which, venial in the Upper
+Third, pardonable at a price in the Lower Fourth, was, of course, rank
+ruffianism on the part of a Fifth Form boy; and so, by graduated stages,
+he arrived at the Head's study just before lunch, penitent, perturbed,
+annoyed with himself and--as the Head said to King in the corridor after
+the meal--more human than he had known him in seven years.
+
+'You see,' the Head drawled on, 'Winton's only fault is a certain
+costive and unaccommodating virtue. So this comes very happily.'
+
+'I've never noticed any sign of it,' said King. Winton was in King's
+House, and though King as pro-consul might, and did, infernally oppress
+his own Province, once a black and yellow cap was in trouble at the
+hands of the Imperial authority King fought for him to the very last
+steps of Caesar's throne.
+
+'Well, you yourself admitted just now that a mouse was beneath the
+occasion,' the Head answered.
+
+'It was.' Mr. King did not love Mr. Lidgett. 'It should have been a rat.
+But--but--I hate to plead it--it's the lad's first offence.'
+
+'Could you have damned him more completely, King?'
+
+'Hm. What is the penalty?' said King, in retreat, but keeping up a
+rear-guard action.
+
+'Only my usual few lines of Virgil to be shown up by tea-time.'
+
+The Head's eyes turned slightly to that end of the corridor where
+Mullins, Captain of the Games ('Pot,' 'old Pot,' or 'Potiphar' Mullins),
+was pinning up the usual Wednesday notice--'Big, Middle, and Little Side
+Football--A to K, L to Z, 3 to 4.45 P.M.'
+
+You cannot write out the Head's usual few (which means five hundred)
+Latin lines and play football for one hour and three-quarters between
+the hours of 1.30 and 5 P.M. Winton had evidently no intention of trying
+to do so, for he hung about the corridor with a set face and an uneasy
+foot. Yet it was law in the school, compared with which that of the
+Medes and Persians was no more than a non-committal resolution, that any
+boy, outside the First Fifteen, who missed his football for any reason
+whatever, and had not a written excuse, duly signed by competent
+authority to explain his absence, would receive not less than three
+strokes with a ground-ash from the Captain of the Games, generally a
+youth between seventeen and eighteen years, rarely under eleven stone
+('Pot' was nearer thirteen), and always in hard condition.
+
+King knew without inquiry that the Head had given Winton no such excuse.
+
+'But he is practically a member of the First Fifteen. He has played for
+it all this term,' said King. 'I believe his Cap should have arrived
+last week.'
+
+'His Cap has not been given him. Officially, therefore, he is naught. I
+rely on old Pot.'
+
+'But Mullins is Winton's study-mate,' King persisted.
+
+Pot Mullins and Pater Winton were cousins and rather close friends.
+
+'That will make no difference to Mullins--or Winton, if I know 'em,'
+said the Head.
+
+'But--but,' King played his last card desperately, 'I was going to
+recommend Winton for extra sub-prefect in my House, now Carton
+has gone.'
+
+'Certainly,' said the Head. 'Why not? He will be excellent by tea-time,
+I hope.'
+
+At that moment they saw Mr. Lidgett, tripping down the corridor, waylaid
+by Winton.
+
+'It's about that mouse-business at mechanical drawing,' Winton opened,
+swinging across his path.
+
+'Yes, yes, highly disgraceful,' Mr. Lidgett panted.
+
+'I know it was,' said Winton. 'It--it was a cad's trick because--'
+
+'Because you knew I couldn't give you more than fifty lines,' said Mr.
+Lidgett.
+
+'Well, anyhow I've come to apologise for it.'
+
+'Certainly,' said Mr. Lidgett, and added, for he was a kindly man, 'I
+think that shows quite right feeling. I'll tell the Head at once I'm
+satisfied.'
+
+'No--no!' The boy's still unmended voice jumped from the growl to the
+squeak. 'I didn't mean _that_! I--I did it on principle. Please
+don't--er--do anything of that kind.'
+
+Mr. Lidgett looked him up and down and, being an artist, understood.
+
+'Thank you, Winton,' he said. 'This shall be between ourselves.'
+
+'You heard?' said King, indecent pride in his voice.
+
+'Of course. You thought he was going to get Lidgett to beg him off the
+impot.'
+
+King denied this with so much warmth that the Head laughed and King went
+away in a huff.
+
+'By the way,' said the Head, 'I've told Winton to do his lines in your
+form-room--not in his study.'
+
+'Thanks,' said King over his shoulder, for the Head's orders had saved
+Winton and Mullins, who was doing extra Army work in the study, from an
+embarrassing afternoon together.
+
+An hour later, King wandered into his still form-room as though by
+accident. Winton was hard at work.
+
+'Aha!' said King, rubbing his hands. 'This does not look like games,
+Winton. Don't let me arrest your facile pen. Whence this sudden love
+for Virgil?'
+
+'Impot from the Head, sir, for that mouse-business this morning.'
+
+'Rumours thereof have reached us. That was a lapse on your part into
+Lower Thirdery which I don't quite understand.'
+
+The 'tump-tump' of the puntabouts before the sides settled to games came
+through the open window. Winton, like his House-Master, loved fresh air.
+Then they heard Paddy Vernon, sub-prefect on duty, calling the roll in
+the field and marking defaulters. Winton wrote steadily. King curled
+himself up on a desk, hands round knees. One would have said that the
+man was gloating over the boy's misfortune, but the boy understood.
+
+'_Dis te minorem quod geris imperas_,' King quoted presently. 'It is
+necessary to bear oneself as lower than the local gods--even than
+drawing-masters who are precluded from effective retaliation. I _do_
+wish you'd tried that mouse-game with me, Pater.'
+
+Winton grinned; then sobered 'It was a cad's trick, sir, to play on Mr.
+Lidgett.' He peered forward at the page he was copying.
+
+'Well, "the sin _I_ impute to each frustrate ghost"--' King stopped
+himself. 'Why do you goggle like an owl? Hand me the Mantuan and I'll
+dictate. No matter. Any rich Virgilian measures will serve. I may
+peradventure recall a few.' He began:
+
+     'Tu regere imperio populos Romane memento
+     Hae tibi erunt artes pacisque imponere morem,
+     Parcere subjectis et debellare superbos.
+
+There you have it all, Winton. Write that out twice and yet once again.'
+
+For the next forty minutes, with never a glance at the book, King paid
+out the glorious hexameters (and King could read Latin as though it were
+alive), Winton hauling them in and coiling them away behind him as
+trimmers in a telegraph-ship's hold coil away deep-sea cable. King broke
+from the Aeneid to the Georgics and back again, pausing now and then to
+translate some specially loved line or to dwell on the treble-shot
+texture of the ancient fabric. He did not allude to the coming interview
+with Mullins except at the last, when he said, 'I think at this
+juncture, Pater, I need not ask you for the precise significance of
+_atqui sciebat quae sibi barbarus tortor_.'
+
+The ungrateful Winton flushed angrily, and King loafed out to take five
+o'clock call-over, after which he invited little Hartopp to tea and a
+talk on chlorine-gas. Hartopp accepted the challenge like a bantam, and
+the two went up to King's study about the same time as Winton returned
+to the form-room beneath it to finish his lines.
+
+Then half a dozen of the Second Fifteen, who should have been washing,
+strolled in to condole with 'Pater' Winton, whose misfortune and its
+consequences were common talk. No one was more sincere than the long,
+red-headed, knotty-knuckled 'Paddy' Vernon, but, being a careless
+animal, he joggled Winton's desk.
+
+'Curse you for a silly ass!' said Winton. 'Don't do that.'
+
+No one is expected to be polite while under punishment, so Vernon,
+sinking his sub-prefectship, replied peacefully enough:
+
+'Well, don't be wrathy, Pater.'
+
+'I'm not,' said Winton. 'Get out! This ain't your House form-room.'
+
+''Form-room don't belong to you. Why don't you go to your own study?'
+Vernon replied.
+
+'Because Mullins is there waitin' for the victim,' said Stalky
+delicately, and they all laughed. 'You ought to have shaken that mouse
+out of your trouser-leg, Pater. That's the way _I_ did in my youth.
+Pater's revertin' to his second childhood. Never mind, Pater, we all
+respect you and your future caree-ah.'
+
+Winton, still writhing, growled. Vernon leaning on the desk somehow
+shook it again. Then he laughed.
+
+'What are you grinning at?' Winton asked.
+
+'I was only thinkin' of _you_ being sent up to take a lickin' from Pot.
+I swear I don't think it's fair. You've never shirked a game in your
+life, and you're as good as in the First Fifteen already. Your Cap ought
+to have been delivered last week, oughtn't it?'
+
+It was law in the school that no man could by any means enjoy the
+privileges and immunities of the First Fifteen till the black velvet cap
+with the gold tassel, made by dilatory Exeter outfitters, had been
+actually set on his head. Ages ago, a large-built and unruly Second
+Fifteen had attempted to change this law, but the prefects of that age
+were still larger, and the lively experiment had never been repeated.
+
+'Will you,' said Winton very slowly, 'kindly mind your own damned
+business, you cursed, clumsy, fat-headed fool?'
+
+The form-room was as silent as the empty field in the darkness outside.
+Vernon shifted his feet uneasily.
+
+'Well, _I_ shouldn't like to take a lickin' from Pot,' he said.
+
+'Wouldn't you?' Winton asked, as he paged the sheets of lines with hands
+that shook.
+
+'No, I shouldn't,' said Vernon, his freckles growing more distinct on
+the bridge of his white nose.
+
+'Well, I'm going to take it'--Winton moved clear of the desk as he
+spoke. 'But _you're_ going to take a lickin' from me first.' Before any
+one realised it, he had flung himself neighing against Vernon. No
+decencies were observed on either side, and the rest looked on amazed.
+The two met confusedly, Vernon trying to do what he could with his
+longer reach; Winton, insensible to blows, only concerned to drive his
+enemy into a corner and batter him to pulp. This he managed over against
+the fire-place, where Vernon dropped half-stunned. 'Now I'm going to
+give you your lickin',' said Winton. 'Lie there till I get a ground-ash
+and I'll cut you to pieces. If you move, I'll chuck you out of the
+window.' He wound his hands into the boy's collar and waistband, and had
+actually heaved him half off the ground before the others with one
+accord dropped on his head, shoulders, and legs. He fought them crazily
+in an awful hissing silence. Stalky's sensitive nose was rubbed along
+the floor; Beetle received a jolt in the wind that sent him whistling
+and crowing against the wall; Perowne's forehead was cut, and Malpass
+came out with an eye that explained itself like a dying rainbow through
+a whole week.
+
+'Mad! Quite mad!' said Stalky, and for the third time wriggled back to
+Winton's throat. The door opened and King came in, Hartopp's little
+figure just behind him. The mound on the floor panted and heaved but did
+not rise, for Winton still squirmed vengefully. 'Only a little play,
+sir,' said Perowne. ''Only hit my head against a form.' This was
+quite true.
+
+'Oh,' said King. '_Dimovit obstantes propinquos._ You, I presume, are
+the _populus_ delaying Winton's return to--Mullins, eh?'
+
+'No, sir,' said Stalky behind his claret-coloured handkerchief. 'We're
+the _maerentes amicos_.'
+
+'Not bad! You see, some of it sticks after all,' King chuckled to
+Hartopp, and the two masters left without further inquiries.
+
+The boys sat still on the now-passive Winton.
+
+'Well,' said Stalky at last, 'of all the putrid he-asses, Pater, you are
+_the_--'
+
+'I'm sorry. I'm awfully sorry,' Winton began, and they let him rise. He
+held out his hand to the bruised and bewildered Vernon. 'Sorry, Paddy.
+I--I must have lost my temper. I--I don't know what's the matter
+with me.'
+
+''Fat lot of good that'll do my face at tea,' Vernon grunted. 'Why
+couldn't you say there was something wrong with you instead of lamming
+out like a lunatic? Is my lip puffy?'
+
+'Just a trifle. Look at my beak! Well, we got all these pretty marks at
+footer--owin' to the zeal with which we played the game,' said Stalky,
+dusting himself. 'But d'you think you're fit to be let loose again,
+Pater? 'Sure you don't want to kill another sub-prefect? I wish _I_ was
+Pot. I'd cut your sprightly young soul out.'
+
+'I s'pose I ought to go to Pot now,' said Winton.
+
+'And let all the other asses see you lookin' like this! Not much. We'll
+all come up to Number Five Study and wash off in hot water. Beetle, you
+aren't damaged. Go along and light the gas-stove.'
+
+'There's a tin of cocoa in my study somewhere,' Perowne shouted after
+him. 'Rootle round till you find it, and take it up.'
+
+Separately, by different roads, Vernon's jersey pulled half over his
+head, the boys repaired to Number Five Study. Little Hartopp and King, I
+am sorry to say, leaned over the banisters of King's landing
+and watched.
+
+'Ve-ry human,' said little Hartopp. 'Your virtuous Winton, having got
+himself into trouble, takes it out of my poor old Paddy. I wonder what
+precise lie Paddy will tell about his face.'
+
+'But surely you aren't going to embarrass him by asking?' said King.
+
+'_Your_ boy won,' said Hartopp.
+
+'To go back to what we were discussing,' said King quickly, 'do you
+pretend that your modern system of inculcating unrelated facts about
+chlorine, for instance, all of which may be proved fallacies by the time
+the boys grow up, can have any real bearing on education--even the low
+type of it that examiners expect?'
+
+'I maintain nothing. But is it any worse than your Chinese reiteration
+of uncomprehended syllables in a dead tongue?'
+
+'Dead, forsooth!' King fairly danced. 'The only living tongue on earth!
+Chinese! On my word, Hartopp!'
+
+'And at the end of seven years--how often have I said it?' Hartopp went
+on,--'seven years of two hundred and twenty days of six hours each, your
+victims go away with nothing, absolutely nothing, except, perhaps, if
+they've been very attentive, a dozen--no, I'll grant you twenty--one
+score of totally unrelated Latin tags which any child of twelve could
+have absorbed in two terms.'
+
+'But--but can't you realise that if our system brings later--at any
+rate--at a pinch--a simple understanding--grammar and Latinity apart--a
+mere glimpse of the significance (foul word!) of, we'll say, one Ode of
+Horace, one twenty lines of Virgil, we've got what we poor devils of
+ushers are striving after?'
+
+'And what might that be?' said Hartopp.
+
+'Balance, proportion, perspective--life. Your scientific man is the
+unrelated animal--the beast without background. Haven't you ever
+realised _that_ in your atmosphere of stinks?'
+
+'Meantime you make them lose life for the sake of living, eh?'
+
+'Blind again, Hartopp! I told you about Paddy's quotation this morning.
+(But he made _probrosis_ a verb, he did!) You yourself heard young
+Corkran's reference to _maerentes amicos_. It sticks--a little of it
+sticks among the barbarians.'
+
+'Absolutely and essentially Chinese,' said little Hartopp, who, alone of
+the common-room, refused to be outfaced by King. 'But I don't yet
+understand how Paddy came to be licked by Winton. Paddy's supposed to be
+something of a boxer.'
+
+'Beware of vinegar made from honey,' King replied. 'Pater, like some
+other people, is patient and long-suffering, but he has his limits. The
+Head is oppressing him damnably, too. As I pointed out, the boy has
+practically been in the First Fifteen since term began.'
+
+'But, my dear fellow, I've known you give a boy an impot and refuse him
+leave off games, again and again.'
+
+'Ah, but that was when there was real need to get at some oaf who
+couldn't be sensitised in any other way. Now, in our esteemed Head's
+action I see nothing but--'
+
+The conversation from this point does not concern us.
+
+Meantime Winton, very penitent and especially polite towards Vernon, was
+being cheered with cocoa in Number Five Study. They had some difficulty
+in stemming the flood of his apologies. He himself pointed out to Vernon
+that he had attacked a sub-prefect for no reason whatever, and,
+therefore, deserved official punishment.
+
+'I can't think what was the matter with me to-day,' he mourned. 'Ever
+since that blasted mouse-business--'
+
+'Well, then, don't think,' said Stalky. 'Or do you want Paddy to make a
+row about it before all the school?'
+
+Here Vernon was understood to say that he would see Winton and all the
+school somewhere else.
+
+'And if you imagine Perowne and Malpass and me are goin' to give
+evidence at a prefects' meeting just to soothe your beastly conscience,
+you jolly well err,' said Beetle. 'I know what you did.'
+
+'What?' croaked Pater, out of the valley of his humiliation.
+
+'You went Berserk. I've read all about it in _Hypatia_.'
+
+'What's "going Berserk"?' Winton asked.
+
+'Never you mind,' was the reply. 'Now, don't you feel awfully weak and
+seedy?'
+
+'I _am_ rather tired,' said Winton, sighing.
+
+'That's what you ought to be. You've gone Berserk and pretty soon you'll
+go to sleep. But you'll probably be liable to fits of it all your life,'
+Beetle concluded. ''Shouldn't wonder if you murdered some one some day.'
+
+'Shut up--you and your Berserks!' said Stalky. 'Go to Mullins now and
+get it over, Pater.'
+
+'I call it filthy unjust of the Head,' said Vernon. 'Anyhow, you've
+given me my lickin', old man. I hope Pot'll give you yours.'
+
+'I'm awfully sorry--awfully sorry,' was Winton's last word.
+
+It was the custom in that consulship to deal with games' defaulters
+between five o'clock call-over and tea. Mullins, who was old enough to
+pity, did not believe in letting boys wait through the night till the
+chill of the next morning for their punishments. He was finishing off
+the last of the small fry and their excuses when Winton arrived.
+
+'But, please, Mullins'--this was Babcock tertius, a dear little
+twelve-year-old mother's darling--'I had an awful hack on the knee. I've
+been to the Matron about it and she gave me some iodine. I've been
+rubbing it in all day. I thought that would be an excuse off.'
+
+'Let's have a look at it,' said the impassive Mullins. 'That's a
+shin-bruise--about a week old. Touch your toes. I'll give you
+the iodine.'
+
+Babcock yelled loudly as he had many times before. The face of Jevons,
+aged eleven, a new boy that dark wet term, low in the House, low in the
+Lower School, and lowest of all in his home-sick little mind turned
+white at the horror of the sight. They could hear his working lips part
+stickily as Babcock wailed his way out of hearing.
+
+'Hullo, Jevons! What brings you here?' said Mullins.
+
+'Pl-ease, sir, I went for a walk with Babcock tertius.'
+
+'Did you? Then I bet you went to the tuck-shop--and you paid, didn't
+you?'
+
+A nod. Jevons was too terrified to speak.
+
+'Of course, and I bet Babcock told you that old Pot 'ud let you off
+because it was the first time.'
+
+Another nod with a ghost of a smile in it.
+
+'All right.' Mullins picked Jevons up before he could guess what was
+coming, laid him on the table with one hand, with the other gave him
+three emphatic spanks, then held him high in air.
+
+'Now you tell Babcock tertius that he's got you a licking from me, and
+see you jolly well pay it back to him. And when you're prefect of games
+don't you let any one shirk his footer without a written excuse. Where
+d'you play in your game?'
+
+'Forward, sir.'
+
+'You can do better than that. I've seen you run like a young
+buck-rabbit. Ask Dickson from me to try you as three-quarter next game,
+will you? Cut along.'
+
+Jevons left, warm for the first time that day, enormously set up in his
+own esteem, and very hot against the deceitful Babcock.
+
+Mullins turned to Winton. 'Your name's on the list, Pater.' Winton
+nodded.
+
+'I know it. The Head landed me with an impot for that mouse-business at
+mechanical drawing. No excuse.'
+
+'He meant it then?' Mullins jerked his head delicately towards the
+ground-ash on the table. 'I heard something about it.'
+
+Winton nodded. 'A rotten thing to do,' he said. 'Can't think what I was
+doing ever to do it. It counts against a fellow so; and there's some
+more too--'
+
+'All right, Pater. Just stand clear of our photo-bracket, will you?'
+
+The little formality over, there was a pause. Winton swung round, yawned
+in Pot's astonished face and staggered towards the window-seat.
+
+'What's the matter with you, Dick? Ill?'
+
+'No. Perfectly all right, thanks. Only--only a little sleepy.' Winton
+stretched himself out, and then and there fell deeply and
+placidly asleep.
+
+'It isn't a faint,' said the experienced Mullins, 'or his pulse wouldn't
+act. 'Tisn't a fit or he'd snort and twitch. It can't be sunstroke, this
+term, and he hasn't been over-training for anything.' He opened Winton's
+collar, packed a cushion under his head, threw a rug over him and sat
+down to listen to the regular breathing. Before long Stalky arrived, on
+pretence of borrowing a book. He looked at the window-seat.
+
+''Noticed anything wrong with Winton lately?' said Mullins.
+
+''Notice anything wrong with my beak?' Stalky replied. 'Pater went
+Berserk after call-over, and fell on a lot of us for jesting with him
+about his impot. You ought to see Malpass's eye.'
+
+'You mean that Pater fought?' said Mullins.
+
+'Like a devil. Then he nearly went to sleep in our study just now. I
+expect he'll be all right when he wakes up. Rummy business!
+Conscientious old bargee. You ought to have heard his apologies.'
+
+'But Pater can't fight one little bit,' Mullins repeated.
+
+''Twasn't fighting. He just tried to murder every one.' Stalky described
+the affair, and when he left Mullins went off to take counsel with the
+Head, who, out of a cloud of blue smoke, told him that all would yet
+be well.
+
+'Winton,' said he, 'is a little stiff in his moral joints. He'll get
+over that. If he asks you whether to-day's doings will count against
+him in his--'
+
+'But you know it's important to him, sir. His people aren't--very well
+off,' said Mullins.
+
+'That's why I'm taking all this trouble. You must reassure him, Pot. I
+have overcrowded him with new experiences. Oh, by the way, has his
+Cap come?'
+
+'It came at dinner, sir.' Mullins laughed.
+
+Sure enough, when he waked at tea-time, Winton proposed to take Mullins
+all through every one of his day's lapses from grace, and 'Do you think
+it will count against me?' said he.
+
+'Don't you fuss so much about yourself and your silly career,' said
+Mullins. 'You're all right. And oh--here's your First Cap at last. Shove
+it up on the bracket and come on to tea.'
+
+They met King on their way, stepping statelily and rubbing his hands. 'I
+have applied,' said he, 'for the services of an additional sub-prefect
+in Carton's unlamented absence. Your name, Winton, seems to have found
+favour with the powers that be, and--and all things considered--I am
+disposed to give my support to the nomination. You are therefore a
+quasi-lictor.'
+
+'Then it didn't count against me,' Winton gasped as soon as they were
+out of hearing.
+
+A Captain of Games can jest with a sub-prefect publicly.
+
+'You utter ass!' said Mullins, and caught him by the back of his stiff
+neck and ran him down to the hall where the sub-prefects, who sit below
+the salt, made him welcome with the economical bloater-paste
+of mid-term.
+
+King and little Hartopp were sparring in the Reverend John Gillett's
+study at 10 P.M.--classical _versus_ modern as usual.
+
+'Character--proportion--background,' snarled King. 'That is the essence
+of the Humanities.'
+
+'Analects of Confucius,' little Hartopp answered.
+
+'Time,' said the Reverend John behind the soda-water. 'You men oppress
+me. Hartopp, what did you say to Paddy in your dormitories to-night?
+Even _you_ couldn't have overlooked his face.'
+
+'But I did,' said Hartopp calmly. 'I wasn't even humorous about it as
+some clerics might have been. I went straight through and said naught.'
+
+'Poor Paddy! Now, for my part,' said King, 'and you know I am not lavish
+in my praises, I consider Winton a first-class type; absolutely
+first-class.'
+
+'Ha-ardly,' said the Reverend John. 'First-class of the second class, I
+admit. The very best type of second class but'--he shook his head--'it
+should have been a rat. Pater'll never be anything more than a Colonel
+of Engineers.'
+
+'What do you base that verdict on?' said King stiffly.
+
+'He came to me after prayers--with all his conscience.'
+
+'Poor old Pater. Was it the mouse?' said little Hartopp.
+
+'That, and what he called his uncontrollable temper, and his
+responsibilities as sub-prefect.'
+
+'And you?'
+
+'If we had had what is vulgarly called a pi-jaw he'd have had
+hysterics. So I recommended a dose of Epsom salts. He'll take it,
+too--conscientiously. Don't eat me, King. Perhaps, he'll be a K.C.B.'
+
+Ten o'clock struck and the Army class boys in the further studies coming
+to their houses after an hour's extra work passed along the gravel path
+below. Some one was chanting, to the tune of 'White sand and grey sand,'
+_Dis te minorem quod geris imperas_. He stopped outside Mullins' study.
+They heard Mullins' window slide up and then Stalky's voice:
+
+'Ah! Good-evening, Mullins, my _barbarus tortor_. We're the waits. We
+have come to inquire after the local Berserk. Is he doin' as well as can
+be expected in his new caree-ah?'
+
+'Better than you will, in a sec, Stalky,' Mullins grunted.
+
+'Glad of that. We thought he'd like to know that Paddy has been carried
+to the sick-house in ravin' delirium. They think it's concussion of
+the brain.'
+
+'Why, he was all right at prayers,' Winton began earnestly, and they
+heard a laugh in the background as Mullins slammed down the window.
+
+''Night, Regulus,' Stalky sang out, and the light footsteps went on.
+
+'You see. It sticks. A little of it sticks among the barbarians,' said
+King.
+
+'Amen,' said the Reverend John. 'Go to bed.'
+
+
+
+
+A TRANSLATION
+
+HORACE, Bk. V. _Ode 3_
+
+     There are whose study is of smells,
+       And to attentive schools rehearse
+     How something mixed with something else
+       Makes something worse.
+
+     Some cultivate in broths impure
+       The clients of our body--these,
+     Increasing without Venus, cure,
+       Or cause, disease.
+
+     Others the heated wheel extol,
+       And all its offspring, whose concern
+     Is how to make it farthest roll
+       And fastest turn.
+
+     Me, much incurious if the hour
+       Present, or to be paid for, brings
+     Me to Brundusium by the power
+       Of wheels or wings;
+
+     Me, in whose breast no flame hath burned
+       Life-long, save that by Pindar lit,
+     Such lore leaves cold: I am not turned
+       Aside to it
+
+     More than when, sunk in thought profound
+       Of what the unaltering Gods require,
+     My steward (friend but slave) brings round
+       Logs for my fire.
+
+
+
+The Edge of the Evening
+
+(1913)
+
+     Ah! What avails the classic bent,
+       And what the chosen word,
+     Against the undoctored incident
+       That actually occurred?
+
+     And what is Art whereto we press
+       Through paint and prose and rhyme--
+     When Nature in her nakedness
+       Defeats us every time?
+
+'Hi! Hi! Hold your horses! Stop!... Well! Well!' A lean man in a
+sable-lined overcoat leaped from a private car and barred my way up Pall
+Mall. 'You don't know me? You're excusable. I wasn't wearing much of
+anything last time we met--in South Africa.'
+
+The scales fell from my eyes, and I saw him once more in a sky-blue army
+shirt, behind barbed wire, among Dutch prisoners bathing at Simonstown,
+more than a dozen years ago[3]. 'Why, it's Zigler--Laughton O. Zigler!'
+I cried. 'Well, I _am_ glad to see you.'
+
+[Footnote 3: 'The Captive': _Traffics and Discoveries_.]
+
+'Oh no! You don't work any of your English on me. "So glad to see you,
+doncher know--an' ta-ta!" Do you reside in this village?'
+
+'No. I'm up here buying stores.'
+
+'Then you take my automobile. Where to?... Oh, I know _them_! My Lord
+Marshalton is one of the Directors. Pigott, drive to the Army and Navy
+Cooperative Supply Association Limited, Victoria Street, Westminister.'
+
+He settled himself on the deep dove-colour pneumatic cushions, and his
+smile was like the turning on of all the electrics. His teeth were
+whiter than the ivory fittings. He smelt of rare soap and
+cigarettes--such cigarettes as he handed me from a golden box with an
+automatic lighter. On my side of the car was a gold-mounted mirror, card
+and toilette case. I looked at him inquiringly.
+
+'Yes,' he nodded, 'two years after I quit the Cape. She's not an Ohio
+girl, though. She's in the country now. Is that right? She's at our
+little place in the country. We'll go there as soon as you're through
+with your grocery-list. Engagements? The only engagement you've got is
+to grab your grip--get your bag from your hotel, I mean--and come right
+along and meet her. You are the captive of _my_ bow and spear now.'
+
+'I surrender,' I said meekly. 'Did the Zigler automatic gun do all
+this?' I pointed to the car fittings.
+
+'Psha! Think of your rememberin' that! Well, no. The Zigler is a great
+gun--the greatest ever--but life's too short, an' too interestin', to
+squander on pushing her in military society. I've leased my rights in
+her to a Pennsylvanian-Transylvanian citizen full of mentality and moral
+uplift. If those things weigh with the Chancelleries of Europe, he will
+make good and--I shall be surprised. Excuse me!'
+
+He bared his head as we passed the statue of the Great Queen outside
+Buckingham Palace.
+
+'A very great lady!' said he. 'I have enjoyed her hospitality. She
+represents one of the most wonderful institutions in the world. The next
+is the one we are going to. Mrs. Zigler uses 'em, and they break her up
+every week on returned empties.'
+
+'Oh, you mean the Stores?' I said.
+
+'Mrs. Zigler means it more. They are quite ambassadorial in their
+outlook. I guess I'll wait outside and pray while you wrestle with 'em.'
+
+My business at the Stores finished, and my bag retrieved from the hotel,
+his moving palace slid us into the country.
+
+'I owe it to you,' Zigler began as smoothly as the car, 'to tell you
+what I am now. I represent the business end of the American Invasion.
+Not the blame cars themselves--I wouldn't be found dead in one--but the
+tools that make 'em. I am the Zigler Higher-Speed Tool and Lathe Trust.
+The Trust, sir, is entirely my own--in my own inventions. I am the
+Renzalaer ten-cylinder aërial--the lightest aeroplane-engine on the
+market--one price, one power, one guarantee. I am the Orlebar
+Paper-welt, Pulp-panel Company for aeroplane bodies; and I am the Rush
+Silencer for military aeroplanes--absolutely silent--which the Continent
+leases under royalty. With three exceptions, the British aren't wise to
+it yet. That's all I represent at present. You saw me take off my hat
+to your late Queen? I owe every cent I have to that great an' good Lady.
+Yes, sir, I came out of Africa, after my eighteen months' rest-cure and
+open-air treatment and sea-bathing, as her prisoner of war, like a giant
+refreshed. There wasn't anything could hold me, when I'd got my hooks
+into it, after that experience. And to you as a representative British
+citizen, I say here and now that I regard you as the founder of the
+family fortune--Tommy's and mine.'
+
+'But I only gave you some papers and tobacco.'
+
+'What more does any citizen need? The Cullinan diamond wouldn't have
+helped me as much then; an'--talking about South Africa, tell me--'
+
+We talked about South Africa till the car stopped at the Georgian lodge
+of a great park.
+
+'We'll get out here. I want to show you a rather sightly view,' said
+Zigler.
+
+We walked, perhaps, half a mile, across timber-dotted turf, past a lake,
+entered a dark rhododendron-planted wood, ticking with the noise of
+pheasants' feet, and came out suddenly, where five rides met, at a small
+classic temple between lichened stucco statues which faced a circle of
+turf, several acres in extent. Irish yews, of a size that I had never
+seen before, walled the sunless circle like cliffs of riven obsidian,
+except at the lower end, where it gave on to a stretch of undulating
+bare ground ending in a timbered slope half-a-mile away.
+
+'That's where the old Marshalton race-course used to be,' said Zigler.
+'That ice-house is called Flora's Temple. Nell Gwynne and Mrs. Siddons
+an' Taglioni an' all that crowd used to act plays here for King George
+the Third. Wasn't it? Well, George is the only king I play. Let it go at
+that. This circle was the stage, I guess. The kings an' the nobility sat
+in Flora's Temple. I forget who sculped these statues at the door.
+They're the Comic and Tragic Muse. But it's a sightly view, ain't it?'
+
+The sunlight was leaving the park. I caught a glint of silver to the
+southward beyond the wooded ridge.
+
+'That's the ocean--the Channel, I mean,' said Zigler. 'It's twenty-three
+miles as a man flies. A sightly view, ain't it?'
+
+I looked at the severe yews, the dumb yelling mouths of the two statues,
+at the blue-green shadows on the unsunned grass, and at the still bright
+plain in front where some deer were feeding.
+
+'It's a most dramatic contrast, but I think it would be better on a
+summer's day,' I said, and we went on, up one of the noiseless rides, a
+quarter of a mile at least, till we came to the porticoed front of an
+enormous Georgian pile. Four footmen revealed themselves in a hall hung
+with pictures.
+
+'I hired this off of my Lord Marshalton,' Zigler explained, while they
+helped us out of our coats under the severe eyes of ruffed and
+periwigged ancestors. 'Ya-as. They always look at _me_ too, as if I'd
+blown in from the gutter. Which, of course, I have. That's Mary, Lady
+Marshalton. Old man Joshua painted her. Do you see any likeness to my
+Lord Marshalton? Why, haven't you ever met up with him? He was Captain
+Mankeltow--my Royal British Artillery captain that blew up my gun in the
+war, an' then tried to bury me against my religious principles[4].
+Ya-as. His father died and he got the lordship. That was about all he
+got by the time that your British death-duties were through with him. So
+he said I'd oblige him by hiring his ranch. It's a hell an' a half of a
+proposition to handle, but Tommy--Mrs. Laughton--understands it. Come
+right in to the parlour and be very welcome.'
+
+[Footnote 4: "The Captive": _Traffics and Discoveries_.]
+
+He guided me, hand on shoulder, into a babble of high-pitched talk and
+laughter that filled a vast drawing-room. He introduced me as the
+founder of the family fortunes to a little, lithe, dark-eyed woman whose
+speech and greeting were of the soft-lipped South. She in turn presented
+me to her mother, a black-browed snowy-haired old lady with a cap of
+priceless Venetian point, hands that must have held many hearts in their
+time, and a dignity as unquestioned and unquestioning as an empress. She
+was, indeed, a Burton of Savannah, who, on their own ground, out-rank
+the Lees of Virginia. The rest of the company came from Buffalo,
+Cincinnati, Cleveland and Chicago, with here and there a softening
+southern strain. A party of young folk popped corn beneath a mantelpiece
+surmounted by a Gainsborough. Two portly men, half hidden by a cased
+harp, discussed, over sheaves of typewritten documents, the terms of
+some contract. A knot of matrons talked servants--Irish _versus_
+German--across the grand piano. A youth ravaged an old bookcase, while
+beside him a tall girl stared at the portrait of a woman of many loves,
+dead three hundred years, but now leaping to life and warning under the
+shaded frame-light. In a corner half-a-dozen girls examined the glazed
+tables that held the decorations--English and foreign--of the late Lord
+Marshalton.
+
+'See heah! Would this be the Ordeh of the Gyartah?' one said, pointing.
+
+'I presoom likely. No! The Garter has "_Honey swore_"--I know that much.
+This is "Tria juncta" something.'
+
+'Oh, what's that cunning little copper cross with "For Valurr"?' a third
+cried.
+
+'Say! Look at here!' said the young man at the bookcase. 'Here's a first
+edition of _Handley Cross_ and a Beewick's _Birds_ right next to
+it--just like so many best sellers. Look, Maidie!'
+
+The girl beneath the picture half turned her body but not her eyes.
+
+'You don't tell _me_!' she said slowly. 'Their women amounted to
+something after all.'
+
+'But Woman's scope, and outlook was vurry limmutted in those days,' one
+of the matrons put in, from the piano.
+
+'Limmutted? For _her_? If they whurr, I guess she was the limmut. Who
+was she? Peters, whurr's the cat'log?'
+
+A thin butler, in charge of two footmen removing the tea-batteries, slid
+to a table and handed her a blue-and-qilt book. He was button-holed by
+one of the men behind the harp, who wished to get a telephone call
+through to Edinburgh.
+
+'The local office shuts at six,' said Peters. 'But I can get through
+to'--he named some town--'in ten minutes, sir.'
+
+'That suits me. You'll find me here when you've hitched up. Oh, say,
+Peters! We--Mister Olpherts an' me--ain't goin' by that early morning
+train to-morrow--but the other one--on the other line--whatever
+they call it.'
+
+'The nine twenty-seven, sir. Yes, sir. Early breakfast will be at
+half-past eight and the car will be at the door at nine.'
+
+'Peters!' an imperious young voice called. 'What's the matteh with Lord
+Marshalton's Ordeh of the Gyartah? We cyan't find it anyweah.'
+
+'Well, miss, I _have_ heard that that Order is usually returned to His
+Majesty on the death of the holder. Yes, miss.' Then in a whisper to a
+footman, 'More butter for the pop-corn in King Charles's Corner.' He
+stopped behind my chair. 'Your room is Number Eleven, sir. May I trouble
+you for your keys?'
+
+He left the room with a six-year-old maiden called Alice who had
+announced she would not go to bed ''less Peter, Peter, Punkin-eater
+takes me--so there!'
+
+He very kindly looked in on me for a moment as I was dressing for
+dinner. 'Not at all, sir,' he replied to some compliment I paid him. 'I
+valeted the late Lord Marshalton for fifteen years. He was very abrupt
+in his movements, sir. As a rule I never received more than an hour's
+notice of a journey. We used to go to Syria frequently. I have been
+twice to Babylon. Mr. and Mrs. Zigler's requirements are, comparatively
+speaking, few.'
+
+'But the guests?'
+
+'Very little out of the ordinary as soon as one knows their ordinaries.
+Extremely simple, if I may say so, sir.'
+
+I had the privilege of taking Mrs. Burton in to dinner, and was rewarded
+with an entirely new, and to me rather shocking view, of Abraham
+Lincoln, who, she said, had wasted the heritage of his land by blood and
+fire, and had surrendered the remnant to aliens. 'My brother, suh,' she
+said, 'fell at Gettysburg in order that Armenians should colonise New
+England to-day. If I took any interest in any dam-Yankee outside of my
+son-in-law Laughton yondah, I should say that my brother's death had
+been amply avenged.'
+
+The man at her right took up the challenge, and the war spread. Her eyes
+twinkled over the flames she had lit.
+
+'Don't these folk,' she said a little later, 'remind you of Arabs
+picnicking under the Pyramids?'
+
+'I've never seen the Pyramids,' I replied.
+
+'Hm! I didn't know you were as English as all that.' And when I laughed,
+'Are you?'
+
+'Always. It saves trouble.'
+
+'Now that's just what I find so significant among the English'--this was
+Alice's mother, I think, with one elbow well forward among the salted
+almonds. 'Oh, I know how _you_ feel, Madam Burton, but a Northerner
+like myself--I'm Buffalo--even though we come over every year--notices
+the desire for comfort in England. There's so little conflict or uplift
+in British society.'
+
+'But we like being comfortable,' I said.
+
+'I know it. It's very characteristic. But ain't it a little, just a
+little, lacking in adaptability an' imagination?'
+
+'They haven't any need for adaptability,' Madam Burton struck in. 'They
+haven't any Ellis Island standards to live up to.'
+
+'But we can assimilate,' the Buffalo woman charged on.
+
+'Now you _have_ done it!' I whispered to the old lady as the blessed
+word 'assimilation' woke up all the old arguments for and against.
+
+There was not a dull moment in that dinner for me--nor afterwards when
+the boys and girls at the piano played the rag-time tunes of their own
+land, while their elders, inexhaustibly interested, replunged into the
+discussion of that land's future, till there was talk of coon-can. When
+all the company had been set to tables Zigler led me into his book-lined
+study, where I noticed he kept his golf-clubs, and spoke simply as a
+child, gravely as a bishop, of the years that were past since our
+last meeting.
+
+'That's about all, I guess--up to date,' he said when he had unrolled
+the bright map of his fortunes across three continents. 'Bein' rich
+suits me. So does your country, sir. My own country? You heard what
+that Detroit man said at dinner. "A Government of the alien, by the
+alien, for the alien." Mother's right, too. Lincoln killed us. From the
+highest motives--but he killed us. Oh, say, that reminds me. 'J'ever
+kill a man from the highest motives?'
+
+'Not from any motive--as far as I remember.'
+
+'Well, I have. It don't weigh on my mind any, but it was interesting.
+Life _is_ interesting for a rich--for any--man in England. Ya-as! Life
+in England is like settin' in the front row at the theatre and never
+knowin' when the whole blame drama won't spill itself into your lap. I
+didn't always know that. I lie abed now, and I blush to think of some of
+the breaks I made in South Africa. About the British. Not your official
+method of doin' business. But the Spirit. I was 'way, 'way off on the
+Spirit. Are you acquainted with any other country where you'd have to
+kill a man or two to get at the National Spirit?'
+
+'Well,' I answered, 'next to marrying one of its women, killing one of
+its men makes for pretty close intimacy with any country. I take it you
+killed a British citizen.'
+
+'Why, no. Our syndicate confined its operations to aliens--dam-fool
+aliens.... 'J'ever know an English lord called Lundie[5]? Looks like a
+frame-food and soap advertisement. I imagine he was in your Supreme
+Court before he came into his lordship.'
+
+[Footnote 5: 'The Puzzler': _Actions and Reactions_.]
+
+'He is a lawyer--what we call a Law Lord--a Judge of Appeal--not a real
+hereditary lord.'
+
+'That's as much beyond me as _this_!' Zigler slapped a fat Debrett on
+the table. 'But I presoom this unreal Law Lord Lundie is kind o' real in
+his decisions? I judged so. And--one more question. 'Ever meet a man
+called Walen?'
+
+'D'you mean Burton-Walen, the editor of--?' I mentioned the journal.
+
+'That's him. 'Looks like a tough, talks like a Maxim, and trains with
+kings.'
+
+'He does,' I said. 'Burton-Walen knows all the crowned heads of Europe
+intimately. It's his hobby.'
+
+'Well, there's the whole outfit for you--exceptin' my Lord Marshalton,
+_né_ Mankeltow, an' me. All active murderers--specially the Law Lord--or
+accessories after the fact. And what do they hand you out for _that_, in
+this country?'
+
+'Twenty years, I believe,' was my reply.
+
+He reflected a moment.
+
+'No-o-o,' he said, and followed it with a smoke-ring. 'Twenty months at
+the Cape is my limit. Say, murder ain't the soul-shatterin' event those
+nature-fakers in the magazines make out. It develops naturally like any
+other proposition.... Say, 'j'ever play this golf game? It's come up in
+the States from Maine to California, an' we're prodoocin' all the
+champions in sight. Not a business man's play, but interestin'. I've got
+a golf-links in the park here that they tell me is the finest inland
+course ever. I had to pay extra for that when I hired the ranche--last
+year. It was just before I signed the papers that our murder
+eventuated. My Lord Marshalton he asked me down for the week-end to fix
+up something or other--about Peters and the linen, I think 'twas. Mrs.
+Zigler took a holt of the proposition. She understood Peters from the
+word "go." There wasn't any house-party; only fifteen or twenty folk. A
+full house is thirty-two, Tommy tells me. 'Guess we must be near on that
+to-night. In the smoking-room here, my Lord Marshalton--Mankeltow that
+was--introduces me to this Walen man with the nose. He'd been in the War
+too, from start to finish. He knew all the columns and generals that I'd
+battled with in the days of my Zigler gun. We kinder fell into each
+other's arms an' let the harsh world go by for a while.
+
+'Walen he introduces me to your Lord Lundie. _He_ was a new proposition
+to me. If he hadn't been a lawyer he'd have made a lovely cattle-king. I
+thought I had played poker some. Another of my breaks. Ya-as! It cost me
+eleven hundred dollars besides what Tommy said when I retired. I have no
+fault to find with your hereditary aristocracy, or your judiciary, or
+your press.
+
+'Sunday we all went to Church across the Park here.... Psha! Think o'
+your rememberin' my religion! I've become an Episcopalian since I
+married. Ya-as.... After lunch Walen did his crowned-heads-of-Europe
+stunt in the smokin'-room here. He was long on Kings. And Continental
+crises. I do not pretend to follow British domestic politics, but in the
+aeroplane business a man has to know something of international
+possibilities. At present, you British are settin' in kimonoes on
+dynamite kegs. Walen's talk put me wise on the location and size of some
+of the kegs. Ya-as!
+
+'After that, we four went out to look at those golf-links I was hirin'.
+We each took a club. Mine'--he glanced at a great tan bag by the
+fire-place--'was the beginner's friend--the cleek. Well, sir, this golf
+proposition took a holt of me as quick as--quick as death. They had to
+prise me off the greens when it got too dark to see, and then we went
+back to the house. I was walkin' ahead with my Lord Marshalton talkin'
+beginners' golf. (_I_ was the man who ought to have been killed by
+rights.) We cut 'cross lots through the woods to Flora's Temple--that
+place I showed you this afternoon. Lundie and Walen were, maybe, twenty
+or thirty rod behind us in the dark. Marshalton and I stopped at the
+theatre to admire at the ancestral yew-trees. He took me right under the
+biggest--King Somebody's Yew--and while I was spannin' it with my
+handkerchief, he says, "Look heah!" just as if it was a rabbit--and down
+comes a bi-plane into the theatre with no more noise than the dead. My
+Rush Silencer is the only one on the market that allows that sort of
+gumshoe work.... What? A bi-plane--with two men in it. Both men jump out
+and start fussin' with the engines. I was starting to tell Mankeltow--I
+can't remember to call him Marshalton any more--that it looked as if the
+Royal British Flying Corps had got on to my Rush Silencer at last; but
+he steps out from under the yew to these two Stealthy Steves and says,
+"What's the trouble? Can I be of any service?" He thought--so did
+I--'twas some of the boys from Aldershot or Salisbury. Well, sir, from
+there on, the situation developed like a motion-picture in Hell. The man
+on the nigh side of the machine whirls round, pulls his gun and fires
+into Mankeltow's face. I laid him out with my cleek automatically. Any
+one who shoots a friend of mine gets what's comin' to him if I'm within
+reach. He drops. Mankeltow rubs his neck with his handkerchief. The man
+the far side of the machine starts to run. Lundie down the ride, or it
+might have been Walen, shouts, "What's happened?" Mankeltow says,
+"Collar that chap."
+
+'The second man runs ring-a-ring-o'-roses round the machine, one hand
+reachin' behind him. Mankeltow heads him off to me. He breaks blind for
+Walen and Lundie, who are runnin' up the ride. There's some sort of
+mix-up among 'em, which it's too dark to see, and a thud. Walen says,
+"Oh, well collared!" Lundie says, "That's the only thing I never learned
+at Harrow!"... Mankeltow runs up to 'em, still rubbin' his neck, and
+says, "_He_ didn't fire at me. It was the other chap. Where is he?"
+
+'"I've stretched him alongside his machine," I says.
+
+'"Are they poachers?" says Lundie.
+
+'"No. Airmen. I can't make it out," says Mankeltow.
+
+'"Look at here," says Walen, kind of brusque. "This man ain't breathin'
+at all. Didn't you hear somethin' crack when he lit, Lundie?"
+
+'"My God!" says Lundie. "Did I? I thought it was my suspenders"--no, he
+said "braces."
+
+'Right there I left them and sort o' tiptoed back to my man, hopin' he'd
+revived and quit. But he hadn't. That darned cleek had hit him on the
+back of the neck just where his helmet stopped. He'd got _his_. I knew
+it by the way the head rolled in my hands. Then the others came up the
+ride totin' _their_ load. No mistakin' that shuffle on grass. D'you
+remember it--in South Africa? Ya-as.
+
+'"Hsh!" says Lundie. "Do you know I've broken this man's neck?"
+
+'"Same here," I says.
+
+'"What? Both?" says Mankeltow.
+
+'"Nonsense!" says Lord Lundie. "Who'd have thought he was that out of
+training? A man oughtn't to fly if he ain't fit."
+
+'"What did they want here, anyway?" said Walen; and Mankeltow says, "We
+can't leave them in the open. Some one'll come. Carry 'em to
+Flora's Temple."
+
+We toted 'em again and laid 'em out on a stone bench. They were still
+dead in spite of our best attentions. We knew it, but we went through
+the motions till it was quite dark. 'Wonder if all murderers do that?
+"We want a light on this," says Walen after a spell. "There ought to be
+one in the machine. Why didn't they light it?"
+
+'We came out of Flora's Temple, and shut the doors behind us. Some
+stars were showing then--same as when Cain did his little act, I guess.
+I climbed up and searched the machine. She was very well equipped, I
+found two electric torches in clips alongside her barometers by the
+rear seat.
+
+'"What make is she?" says Mankeltow.
+
+'"Continental Renzalaer," I says. "My engines and my Rush Silencer."
+
+'Walen whistles. "Here--let me look," he says, and grabs the other
+torch. She was sure well equipped. We gathered up an armful of cameras
+an' maps an' note-books an' an album of mounted photographs which we
+took to Flora's Temple and spread on a marble-topped table (I'll show
+you to-morrow) which the King of Naples had presented to grandfather
+Marshalton. Walen starts to go through 'em. We wanted to know why our
+friends had been so prejudiced against our society.
+
+'"Wait a minute," says Lord Lundie. "Lend me a handkerchief."
+
+'He pulls out his own, and Walen contributes his green-and-red bandanna,
+and Lundie covers their faces. "Now," he says, "we'll go into the
+evidence."
+
+'There wasn't any flaw in that evidence. Walen read out their last
+observations, and Mankeltow asked questions, and Lord Lundie sort o'
+summarised, and I looked at the photos in the album. 'J'ever see a
+bird's-eye telephoto-survey of England for military purposes? It's
+interestin' but indecent--like turnin' a man upside down. None of those
+close-range panoramas of forts could have been taken without my
+Rush Silencer.
+
+'"I wish _we_ was as thorough as they are," says Mankeltow, when Walen
+stopped translatin'.
+
+'"We've been thorough enough," says Lord Lundie. "The evidence against
+both accused is conclusive. Any other country would give 'em seven years
+in a fortress. We should probably give 'em eighteen months as
+first-class misdemeanants. But their case," he says, "is out of our
+hands. We must review our own. Mr. Zigler," he said, "will you tell us
+what steps you took to bring about the death of the first accused?" I
+told him. He wanted to know specially whether I'd stretched first
+accused before or after he had fired at Mankeltow. Mankeltow testified
+he'd been shot at, and exhibited his neck as evidence. It was scorched.
+
+'"Now, Mr. Walen," says Lord Lundie. "Will you kindly tell us what steps
+you took with regard to the second accused?"
+
+'"The man ran directly at me, me lord," says Walen. "I said, 'Oh no, you
+don't,' and hit him in the face."
+
+'Lord Lundie lifts one hand and uncovers second accused's face. There
+was a bruise on one cheek and the chin was all greened with grass. He
+was a heavy-built man.
+
+'"What happened after that?" says Lord Lundie.
+
+'"To the best of my remembrance he turned from me towards your
+lordship."
+
+'Then Lundie goes ahead. "I stooped, and caught the man round the
+ankles," he says. "The sudden check threw him partially over my left
+shoulder. I jerked him off that shoulder, still holding his ankles, and
+he fell heavily on, it would appear, the point of his chin, death being
+instantaneous."
+
+'"Death being instantaneous," says Walen.
+
+'Lord Lundie takes off his gown and wig--you could see him do it--and
+becomes our fellow-murderer. "That's our case," he says. "I know how _I_
+should direct the jury, but it's an undignified business for a Lord of
+Appeal to lift his hand to, and some of my learned brothers," he says,
+"might be disposed to be facetious."
+
+'I guess I can't be properly sensitised. Any one who steered me out of
+that trouble might have had the laugh on me for generations. But I'm
+only a millionaire. I said we'd better search second accused in case
+he'd been carryin' concealed weapons.
+
+'"That certainly is a point," says Lord Lundie. "But the question for
+the jury would be whether I exercised more force than was necessary to
+prevent him from usin' them." _I_ didn't say anything. He wasn't talkin'
+my language. Second accused had his gun on him sure enough, but it had
+jammed in his hip-pocket. He was too fleshy to reach behind for business
+purposes, and he didn't look a gun-man anyway. Both of 'em carried wads
+of private letters. By the time Walen had translated, we knew how many
+children the fat one had at home and when the thin one reckoned to be
+married. Too bad! Ya-as.
+
+'Says Walen to me while we was rebuttonin' their jackets (they was not
+in uniform): "Ever read a book called _The Wreckers_, Mr. Zigler?"
+
+'"Not that I recall at the present moment," I says.
+
+'"Well, do," he says. "You'd appreciate it. You'd appreciate it now, I
+assure you."
+
+'"I'll remember," I says. "But I don't see how this song and dance helps
+us any. Here's our corpses, here's their machine, and daylight's
+bound to come."
+
+'"Heavens! That reminds me," says Lundie. "What time's dinner?"
+
+'"Half-past eight," says Mankeltow. "It's half-past five now. We knocked
+off golf at twenty to, and if they hadn't been such silly asses, firin'
+pistols like civilians, we'd have had them to dinner. Why, they might be
+sitting with us in the smoking-room this very minute," he says. Then he
+said that no man had a right to take his profession so seriously as
+these two mountebanks.
+
+'"How interestin'!" says Lundie. "I've noticed this impatient attitude
+toward their victim in a good many murderers. I never understood it
+before. Of course, it's the disposal of the body that annoys 'em. Now, I
+wonder," he says, "who our case will come up before? Let's run through
+it again."
+
+'Then Walen whirls in. He'd been bitin' his nails in a corner. We was
+all nerved up by now.... Me? The worst of the bunch. I had to think for
+Tommy as well.
+
+'"We _can't_ be tried," says Walen. "We _mustn't_ be tried! It'll make
+an infernal international stink. What did I tell you in the smoking-room
+after lunch? The tension's at breaking-point already. This 'ud snap it.
+Can't you see that?"
+
+'"I was thinking of the legal aspect of the case," says Lundie. "With a
+good jury we'd likely be acquitted."
+
+'"Acquitted!" says Walen. "Who'd dare acquit us in the face of what 'ud
+be demanded by--the other party? Did you ever hear of the War of
+Jenkins' ear? 'Ever hear of Mason and Slidel? 'Ever hear of an
+ultimatum? You know who _these_ two idiots are; you know who _we_ are--a
+Lord of Appeal, a Viscount of the English peerage, and me--_me_ knowing
+all I know, which the men who know dam' well know that I _do_ know! It's
+our necks or Armageddon. Which do you think this Government would
+choose? We _can't_ be tried!" he says.
+
+'"Then I expect I'll have to resign me club," Lundie goes on. "I don't
+think that's ever been done before by an _ex-officio_ member. I must ask
+the secretary." I guess he was kinder bunkered for the minute, or maybe
+'twas the lordship comin' out on him.
+
+'"Rot!" says Mankeltow. "Walen's right. We can't afford to be tried.
+We'll have to bury them; but my head-gardener locks up all the tools at
+five o'clock."
+
+'"Not on your life!" says Lundie. He was on deck again--as the
+high-class lawyer. "Right or wrong, if we attempt concealment of the
+bodies we're done for."
+
+"'I'm glad of that," says Mankeltow, "because, after all, it ain't
+cricket to bury 'em."
+
+'Somehow--but I know I ain't English--that consideration didn't worry
+me as it ought. An' besides, I was thinkin'--I had to--an' I'd begun to
+see a light 'way off--a little glimmerin' light o' salvation.
+
+'"Then what _are_ we to do?" says Walen. "Zigler, what do you advise?
+Your neck's in it too."
+
+'"Gentlemen," I says, "something Lord Lundie let fall a while back gives
+me an idea. I move that this committee empowers Big Claus and Little
+Claus, who have elected to commit suicide in our midst, to leave the
+premises _as_ they came. I'm asking you to take big chances," I says,
+"but they're all we've got," and then I broke for the bi-plane.
+
+'Don't tell me the English can't think as quick as the next man when
+it's up to them! They lifted 'em out o' Flora's Temple--reverent, but
+not wastin' time--whilst I found out what had brought her down. One
+cylinder was misfirin'. I didn't stop to fix it. My Renzalaer will hold
+up on six. We've proved that. If her crew had relied on my guarantees,
+they'd have been half-way home by then, instead of takin' their seats
+with hangin' heads like they was ashamed. They ought to have been
+ashamed too, playin' gun-men in a British peer's park! I took big
+chances startin' her without controls, but 'twas a dead still night an'
+a clear run--you saw it--across the Theatre into the park, and I prayed
+she'd rise before she hit high timber. I set her all I dared for a quick
+lift. I told Mankeltow that if I gave her too much nose she'd be liable
+to up-end and flop. He didn't want another inquest on his estate. No,
+sir! So I had to fix her up in the dark. Ya-as!
+
+'I took big chances, too, while those other three held on to her and I
+worked her up to full power. My Renzalaer's no ventilation-fan to pull
+against. But I climbed out just in time. I'd hitched the signallin' lamp
+to her tail so's we could track her. Otherwise, with my Rush Silencer,
+we might's well have shooed an owl out of a barn. She left just that way
+when we let her go. No sound except the propellers--_Whoo-oo-oo!
+Whoo-oo-oo!_ There was a dip in the ground ahead. It hid her lamp for a
+second--but there's no such thing as time in real life. Then that lamp
+travelled up the far slope slow--too slow. Then it kinder lifted, we
+judged. Then it sure was liftin'. Then it lifted good. D'you know why?
+Our four naked perspirin' souls was out there underneath her, hikin' her
+heavens high. Yes, sir. _We_ did it!... And that lamp kept liftin' and
+liftin'. Then she side-slipped! My God, she side-slipped twice, which
+was what I'd been afraid of all along! Then she straightened up, and
+went away climbin' to glory, for that blessed star of our hope got
+smaller and smaller till we couldn't track it any more. Then we
+breathed. We hadn't breathed any since their arrival, but we didn't know
+it till we breathed that time--all together. Then we dug our
+finger-nails out of our palms an' came alive again--in instalments.
+
+'Lundie spoke first. "We therefore commit their bodies to the air," he
+says, an' puts his cap on.
+
+'"The deep--the deep," says Walen. "It's just twenty-three miles to the
+Channel."
+
+'"Poor chaps! Poor chaps!" says Mankeltow. "We'd have had 'em to dinner
+if they hadn't lost their heads. I can't tell you how this distresses
+me, Laughton."
+
+'"Well, look at here, Arthur," I says. "It's only God's Own Mercy you
+an' me ain't lyin' in Flora's Temple now, and if that fat man had known
+enough to fetch his gun around while he was runnin', Lord Lundie and
+Walen would have been alongside us."
+
+'"I see that," he says. "But we're alive and they're dead, don't ye
+know."
+
+'"I know it," I says. "That's where the dead are always so damned unfair
+on the survivors."
+
+'"I see that too," he says. "But I'd have given a good deal if it hadn't
+happened, poor chaps!"
+
+'"Amen!" says Lundie. Then? Oh, then we sorter walked back two an' two
+to Flora's Temple an' lit matches to see we hadn't left anything behind.
+Walen, he had confiscated the note-books before they left. There was the
+first man's pistol which we'd forgot to return him, lyin' on the stone
+bench. Mankeltow puts his hand on it--he never touched the trigger--an',
+bein' an automatic, of course the blame thing jarred off--spiteful as
+a rattler!
+
+'"Look out! They'll have one of us yet," says Walen in the dark. But
+they didn't--the Lord hadn't quit being our shepherd--and we heard the
+bullet zip across the veldt--quite like old times. Ya-as!
+
+'"Swine!" says Mankeltow.
+
+'After that I didn't hear any more "Poor chap" talk.... Me? I never
+worried about killing _my_ man. I was too busy figurin' how a British
+jury might regard the proposition. I guess Lundie felt that way too.
+
+'Oh, but say! We had an interestin' time at dinner. Folks was expected
+whose auto had hung up on the road. They hadn't wired, and Peters had
+laid two extra places. We noticed 'em as soon as we sat down. I'd hate
+to say how noticeable they were. Mankeltow with his neck bandaged (he'd
+caught a relaxed throat golfin') sent for Peters and told him to take
+those empty places away--_if you please_. It takes something to rattle
+Peters. He was rattled that time. Nobody else noticed anything.
+And now...'
+
+'Where did they come down?' I asked, as he rose.
+
+'In the Channel, I guess. There was nothing in the papers about 'em.
+Shall we go into the drawin'-room, and see what these boys and girls are
+doin?' But say, ain't life in England inter_es_tin'?
+
+
+
+
+     REBIRTH
+
+       If any God should say
+         "I will restore
+       The world her yesterday
+         Whole as before
+     My Judgment blasted it"--who would not lift
+     Heart, eye, and hand in passion o'er the gift?
+
+       If any God should will
+         To wipe from mind
+       The memory of this ill
+         Which is mankind
+     In soul and substance now--who would not bless
+     Even to tears His loving-tenderness?
+
+       If any God should give
+         Us leave to fly
+       These present deaths we live,
+         And safely die
+     In those lost lives we lived ere we were born--
+     What man but would not laugh the excuse to scorn?
+
+       For we are what we are--
+         So broke to blood
+       And the strict works of war--
+         So long subdued
+     To sacrifice, that threadbare Death commands
+     Hardly observance at our busier hands.
+
+       Yet we were what we were,
+         And, fashioned so,
+       It pleases us to stare
+         At the far show
+     Of unbelievable years and shapes that flit,
+     In our own likeness, on the edge of it.
+
+
+
+The Horse Marines
+
+(1911)
+
+_The Rt. Hon. R.B. Haldane, Secretary of State for War[6], was
+questioned in the House of Commons on April 8th about the rocking-horses
+which the War Office is using for the purpose of teaching recruits to
+ride. Lord Ronaldshay asked the War Secretary if rocking-horses were to
+be supplied to all the cavalry regiments for teaching recruits to ride.
+'The noble Lord,' replied Mr. Haldane, 'is doubtless alluding to certain
+dummy horses on rockers which have been tested with very satisfactory
+results.'... The mechanical steed is a wooden horse with an astonishing
+tail. It is painted brown and mounted on swinging rails. The recruit
+leaps into the saddle and pulls at the reins while the riding-instructor
+rocks the animal to and fro with his foot. The rocking-horses are being
+made at Woolwich. They are quite cheap_.
+
+--Daily Paper.
+
+[Footnote 6: Now Viscount Haldane of Cloan.]
+
+My instructions to Mr. Leggatt, my engineer, had been accurately obeyed.
+He was to bring my car on completion of annual overhaul, from Coventry
+_via_ London, to Southampton Docks to await my arrival; and very pretty
+she looked, under the steamer's side among the railway lines, at six in
+the morning. Next to her new paint and varnish I was most impressed by
+her four brand-new tyres.
+
+'But I didn't order new tyres,' I said as we moved away. 'These are
+Irresilients, too.'
+
+'Treble-ribbed,' said Leggatt. 'Diamond-stud sheathing.'
+
+'Then there has been a mistake.'
+
+'Oh no, sir; they're gratis.'
+
+The number of motor manufacturers who give away complete sets of
+treble-ribbed Irresilient tyres is so limited that I believe I asked
+Leggatt for an explanation.
+
+'I don't know that I could very well explain, sir,' was the answer. 'It
+'ud come better from Mr. Pyecroft. He's on leaf at Portsmouth--staying
+with his uncle. His uncle 'ad the body all night. I'd defy you to find a
+scratch on her even with a microscope.'
+
+'Then we will go home by the Portsmouth road,' I said.
+
+And we went at those speeds which are allowed before the working-day
+begins or the police are thawed out. We were blocked near Portsmouth by
+a battalion of Regulars on the move.
+
+'Whitsuntide manoeuvres just ending,' said Leggatt. 'They've had a
+fortnight in the Downs.'
+
+He said no more until we were in a narrow street somewhere behind
+Portsmouth Town Railway Station, where he slowed at a green-grocery
+shop. The door was open, and a small old man sat on three potato-baskets
+swinging his feet over a stooping blue back.
+
+'You call that shinin' 'em?' he piped. 'Can you see your face in 'em
+yet? No! Then shine 'em, or I'll give you a beltin' you'll remember!'
+
+'If you stop kickin' me in the mouth perhaps I'd do better,' said
+Pyecroft's voice meekly.
+
+We blew the horn.
+
+Pyecroft arose, put away the brushes, and received us not otherwise than
+as a king in his own country.
+
+'Are you going to leave me up here all day?' said the old man.
+
+Pyecroft lifted him down and he hobbled into the back room.
+
+'It's his corns,' Pyecroft explained. 'You can't shine corny feet--and
+he hasn't had his breakfast.'
+
+'I haven't had mine either,' I said.
+
+'Breakfast for two more, uncle,' Pyecroft sang out.
+
+'Go out an' buy it then,' was the answer, 'or else it's half-rations.'
+
+Pyecroft turned to Leggatt, gave him his marketing orders, and
+despatched him with the coppers.
+
+'I have got four new tyres on my car,' I began impressively.
+
+'Yes,' said Mr. Pyecroft. 'You have, and I _will_ say'--he patted my
+car's bonnet--'you earned 'em.'
+
+'I want to know why--,' I went on.
+
+'Quite justifiable. You haven't noticed anything in the papers, have
+you?'
+
+'I've only just landed. I haven't seen a paper for weeks.'
+
+'Then you can lend me a virgin ear. There's been a scandal in the
+Junior Service--the Army, I believe they call 'em.'
+
+A bag of coffee-beans pitched on the counter. 'Roast that,' said the
+uncle from within.
+
+Pyecroft rigged a small coffee-roaster, while I took down the shutters,
+and sold a young lady in curl-papers two bunches of mixed greens and one
+soft orange.
+
+'Sickly stuff to handle on an empty stomach, ain't it?' said Pyecroft.
+
+'What about my new tyres?' I insisted.
+
+'Oh, any amount. But the question is'--he looked at me steadily--'is
+this what you might call a court-martial or a post-mortem inquiry?'
+
+'Strictly a post-mortem,' said I.
+
+'That being so,' said Pyecroft, 'we can rapidly arrive at facts. Last
+Thursday--the shutters go behind those baskets--last Thursday at five
+bells in the forenoon watch, otherwise ten-thirty A.M., your Mr. Leggatt
+was discovered on Westminster Bridge laying his course for the Old
+Kent Road.'
+
+'But that doesn't lead to Southampton,' I interrupted.
+
+'Then perhaps he was swinging the car for compasses. Be that as it may,
+we found him in that latitude, simultaneous as Jules and me was _ong
+route_ for Waterloo to rejoin our respective ships--or Navies I should
+say. Jules was a _permissionaire_, which meant being on leaf, same as
+me, from a French cassowary-cruiser at Portsmouth. A party of her trusty
+and well-beloved petty officers 'ad been seeing London, chaperoned by
+the R.C. Chaplain. Jules 'ad detached himself from the squadron and was
+cruisin' on his own when I joined him, in company of copious
+lady-friends. _But_, mark you, your Mr. Leggatt drew the line at the
+girls. Loud and long he drew it.'
+
+'I'm glad of that,' I said.
+
+'You may be. He adopted the puristical formation from the first. "Yes,"
+he said, when we was annealing him at--but you wouldn't know the pub--"I
+_am_ going to Southampton," he says, "and I'll stretch a point to go
+_via_ Portsmouth; _but_," says he, "seeing what sort of one hell of a
+time invariably trarnspires when we cruise together, Mr. Pyecroft, I do
+_not_ feel myself justified towards my generous and long-suffering
+employer in takin' on that kind of ballast as well." I assure you he
+considered your interests.'
+
+'And the girls?' I asked.
+
+'Oh, I left that to Jules. I'm a monogomite by nature. So we embarked
+strictly _ong garçong_. But I should tell you, in case he didn't, that
+your Mr. Leggatt's care for your interests 'ad extended to sheathing the
+car in matting and gunny-bags to preserve her paint-work. She was all
+swathed up like an I-talian baby.'
+
+'He _is_ careful about his paint-work,' I said.
+
+'For a man with no Service experience I should say he was fair homicidal
+on the subject. If we'd been Marines he couldn't have been more pointed
+in his allusions to our hob-nailed socks. However, we reduced him to a
+malleable condition, and embarked for Portsmouth. I'd seldom rejoined
+my _vaisseau ong automobile, avec_ a fur coat and goggles. Nor
+'ad Jules.'
+
+'Did Jules say much?' I asked, helplessly turning the handle of the
+coffee-roaster.
+
+'That's where I pitied the pore beggar. He 'adn't the language, so to
+speak. He was confined to heavings and shruggin's and copious _Mong
+Jews_! The French are very badly fitted with relief-valves. And then our
+Mr. Leggatt drove. He drove.'
+
+'Was he in a very malleable condition?'
+
+'Not him! We recognised the value of his cargo from the outset. He
+hadn't a chance to get more than moist at the edges. After which we went
+to sleep; and now we'll go to breakfast.'
+
+We entered the back room where everything was in order, and a screeching
+canary made us welcome. The uncle had added sausages and piles of
+buttered toast to the kippers. The coffee, cleared with a piece of
+fish-skin, was a revelation.
+
+Leggatt, who seemed to know the premises, had run the car into the tiny
+backyard where her mirror-like back almost blocked up the windows. He
+minded shop while we ate. Pyecroft passed him his rations through a flap
+in the door. The uncle ordered him in, after breakfast, to wash up, and
+he jumped in his gaiters at the old man's commands as he has never
+jumped to mine.
+
+'To resoom the post-mortem,' said Pyecroft, lighting his pipe. 'My
+slumbers were broken by the propeller ceasing to revolve, and by vile
+language from your Mr. Leggatt.'
+
+'I--I--' Leggatt began, a blue-checked duster in one hand and a cup in
+the other.
+
+'When you're wanted aft you'll be sent for, Mr. Leggatt,' said Pyecroft
+amiably. 'It's clean mess decks for you now. Resooming once more, we was
+on a lonely and desolate ocean near Portsdown, surrounded by gorse
+bushes, and a Boy Scout was stirring my stomach with his little
+copper-stick.'
+
+'"You count ten," he says.
+
+'"Very good, Boy Jones," I says, "count 'em," and I hauled him in over
+the gunnel, and ten I gave him with my large flat hand. The remarks he
+passed, lying face down tryin' to bite my leg, would have reflected
+credit on any Service. Having finished I dropped him overboard again,
+which was my gross political error. I ought to 'ave killed him; because
+he began signalling--rapid and accurate--in a sou'westerly direction.
+Few equatorial calms are to be apprehended when B.P.'s little pets take
+to signallin'. Make a note o' that! Three minutes later we were stopped
+and boarded by Scouts--up our backs, down our necks, and in our boots!
+The last I heard from your Mr. Leggatt as he went under, brushin' 'em
+off his cap, was thanking Heaven he'd covered up the new paint-work with
+mats. An 'eroic soul!'
+
+'Not a scratch on her body,' said Leggatt, pouring out the
+coffee-grounds.
+
+'And Jules?' said I.
+
+'Oh, Jules thought the much advertised Social Revolution had begun, but
+his mackintosh hampered him.
+
+'You told me to bring the mackintosh,' Leggatt whispered to me.
+
+'And when I 'ad 'em half convinced he was a French vicomte coming down
+to visit the Commander-in-Chief at Portsmouth, he tried to take it off.
+Seeing his uniform underneath, some sucking Sherlock Holmes of the Pink
+Eye Patrol (they called him Eddy) deduced that I wasn't speaking
+the truth. Eddy said I was tryin' to sneak into Portsmouth
+unobserved--unobserved mark you!--and join hands with the enemy. It
+trarnspired that the Scouts was conducting a field-day against opposin'
+forces, ably assisted by all branches of the Service, and they was so
+afraid the car wouldn't count ten points to them in the fray, that
+they'd have scalped us, but for the intervention of an umpire--also in
+short under-drawers. A fleshy sight!'
+
+Here Mr. Pyecroft shut his eyes and nodded. 'That umpire,' he said
+suddenly, 'was our Mr. Morshed--a gentleman whose acquaintance you have
+already made _and_ profited by, if I mistake not[7].'
+
+[Footnote 7: 'Their Lawful Occasions,' _Traffics and Discoveries_.]
+
+'Oh, was the Navy in it too?' I said; for I had read of wild doings
+occasionally among the Boy Scouts on the Portsmouth Road, in which Navy,
+Army, and the world at large seemed to have taken part.
+
+'The Navy _was_ in it. I was the only one out of it--for several
+seconds. Our Mr. Morshed failed to recognise me in my fur boa, and my
+appealin' winks at 'im behind your goggles didn't arrive. But when Eddy
+darling had told his story, I saluted, which is difficult in furs, and I
+stated I was bringin' him dispatches from the North. My Mr. Morshed
+cohered on the instant. I've never known his ethergram installations out
+of order yet. "Go and guard your blessed road," he says to the Fratton
+Orphan Asylum standing at attention all round him, and, when they was
+removed--"Pyecroft," he says, still _sotte voce_, "what in Hong-Kong are
+you doing with this dun-coloured _sampan_?"
+
+'It was your Mr. Leggatt's paint-protective matting which caught his
+eye. She _did_ resemble a _sampan_, especially about the stern-works. At
+these remarks I naturally threw myself on 'is bosom, so far as Service
+conditions permitted, and revealed him all, mentioning that the car was
+yours. You know his way of working his lips like a rabbit? Yes, he was
+quite pleased. "_His_ car!" he kept murmuring, working his lips like a
+rabbit. "I owe 'im more than a trifle for things he wrote about me. I'll
+keep the car."
+
+'Your Mr. Leggatt now injected some semi-mutinous remarks to the effect
+that he was your chauffeur in charge of your car, and, as such, capable
+of so acting. Mr. Morshed threw him a glarnce. It sufficed. Didn't it
+suffice, Mr. Leggatt?'
+
+'I knew if something didn't happen, something worse would,' said
+Leggatt. 'It never fails when you're aboard.'
+
+'And Jules?' I demanded.
+
+'Jules was, so to speak, panicking in a water-tight flat through his
+unfortunate lack of language. I had to introduce him as part of the
+_entente cordiale_, and he was put under arrest, too. Then we sat on the
+grass and smoked, while Eddy and Co. violently annoyed the traffic on
+the Portsmouth Road, till the umpires, all in short panties, conferred
+on the valuable lessons of the field-day and added up points, same as at
+target-practice. I didn't hear their conclusions, but our Mr. Morshed
+delivered a farewell address to Eddy and Co., tellin' 'em they ought to
+have deduced from a hundred signs about me, that I was a friendly
+bringin' in dispatches from the North. We left 'em tryin' to find those
+signs in the Scout book, and we reached Mr. Morshed's hotel at
+Portsmouth at 6.27 P.M. _ong automobile_. Here endeth the
+first chapter.'
+
+'Begin the second,' I said.
+
+The uncle and Leggatt had finished washing up and were seated, smoking,
+while the damp duster dried at the fire.
+
+'About what time was it,' said Pyecroft to Leggatt, 'when our Mr.
+Morshed began to talk about uncles?'
+
+'When he came back to the bar, after he'd changed into those rat-catcher
+clothes,' said Leggatt.
+
+'That's right. "Pye," said he, "have you an uncle?" "I have," I says.
+"Here's santy to him," and I finished my sherry and bitters to
+_you_, uncle.'
+
+'That's right,' said Pyecroft's uncle sternly. 'If you hadn't I'd have
+belted you worth rememberin', Emmanuel. I had the body all night.'
+
+Pyecroft smiled affectionately. 'So you 'ad, uncle, an' beautifully you
+looked after her. But as I was saying, "I have an uncle, too," says Mr.
+Morshed, dark and lowering. "Yet somehow I can't love him. I want to
+mortify the beggar. Volunteers to mortify my uncle, one pace to
+the front."
+
+'I took Jules with me the regulation distance. Jules was getting
+interested. Your Mr. Leggatt preserved a strictly nootral attitude.
+
+'"You're a pressed man," says our Mr. Morshed. "I owe your late employer
+much, so to say. The car will manoeuvre all night, as requisite."
+
+'Mr. Leggatt come out noble as your employee, and, by 'Eaven's divine
+grace, instead of arguing, he pleaded his new paint and varnish which
+was Mr. Morshed's one vital spot (he's lootenant on one of the new
+catch-'em-alive-o's now). "True," says he, "paint's an 'oly thing. I'll
+give you one hour to arrange a _modus vivendi_. Full bunkers and steam
+ready by 9 P.M. to-night, _if_ you please."
+
+'Even so, Mr. Leggatt was far from content. _I_ 'ad to arrange the
+details. We run her into the yard here.' Pyecroft nodded through the
+window at my car's glossy back-panels. 'We took off the body with its
+mats and put it in the stable, substitooting (and that yard's a tight
+fit for extensive repairs) the body of uncle's blue delivery cart. It
+overhung a trifle, but after I'd lashed it I knew it wouldn't fetch
+loose. Thus, in our composite cruiser, we repaired once more to the
+hotel, and was immediately dispatched to the toy-shop in the High Street
+where we took aboard one rocking-horse which was waiting for us.'
+
+'Took aboard _what_?' I cried.
+
+'One fourteen-hand dapple-grey rocking-horse, with pure green rockers
+and detachable tail, pair gashly glass eyes, complete set 'orrible
+grinnin' teeth, and two bloody-red nostrils which, protruding from the
+brown papers, produced the _tout ensemble_ of a Ju-ju sacrifice in the
+Benin campaign. Do I make myself comprehensible?'
+
+'Perfectly. Did you say anything?' I asked.
+
+'Only to Jules. To him, I says, wishing to try him. "_Allez à votre
+bateau. Je say mon Lootenong. Eel voo donneray porkwor_." To me, says
+he, "_Vous ong ate hurroo! Jamay de la vee_!" and I saw by his eye he'd
+taken on for the full term of the war. Jules was a blue-eyed,
+brindle-haired beggar of a useful make and inquirin' habits. Your Mr.
+Leggatt he only groaned.'
+
+Leggatt nodded. 'It was like nightmares,' he said. 'It was like
+nightmares.'
+
+'Once more, then,' Pyecroft swept on, 'we returned to the hotel and
+partook of a sumptuous repast, under the able and genial chairmanship of
+our Mr. Morshed, who laid his projecks unreservedly before us. "In the
+first place," he says, opening out bicycle-maps, "my uncle, who, I
+regret to say, is a brigadier-general, has sold his alleged soul to
+Dicky Bridoon for a feathery hat and a pair o' gilt spurs. Jules,
+_conspuez l'oncle_!" So Jules, you'll be glad to hear--'
+
+'One minute, Pye,' I said. 'Who is Dicky Bridoon?'
+
+'I don't usually mingle myself up with the bickerings of the Junior
+Service, but it trarnspired that he was Secretary o' State for Civil
+War, an' he'd been issuing mechanical leather-belly gee-gees which
+doctors recommend for tumour--to the British cavalry in loo of real meat
+horses, to learn to ride on. Don't you remember there was quite a stir
+in the papers owing to the cavalry not appreciatin' 'em? But that's a
+minor item. The main point was that our uncle, in his capacity of
+brigadier-general, mark you, had wrote to the papers highly approvin' o'
+Dicky Bridoon's mechanical substitutes an 'ad thus obtained
+promotion--all same as a agnosticle stoker psalm-singin' 'imself up the
+Service under a pious captain. At that point of the narrative we caught
+a phosphorescent glimmer why the rocking-horse might have been issued;
+but none the less the navigation was intricate. Omitting the fact it was
+dark and cloudy, our brigadier-uncle lay somewhere in the South Downs
+with his brigade, which was manoeuvrin' at Whitsum manoeuvres on a large
+scale--Red Army _versus_ Blue, et cetera; an' all we 'ad to go by was
+those flapping bicycle-maps and your Mr. Leggatt's groans.'
+
+'I was thinking what the Downs mean after dark,' said Leggatt angrily.
+
+'They was worth thinkin' of,' said Pyecroft. 'When we had studied the
+map till it fair spun, we decided to sally forth and creep for uncle by
+hand in the dark, dark night, an' present 'im with the rocking-horse. So
+we embarked at 8.57 P.M.'
+
+'One minute again, please. How much did Jules understand by that time?'
+I asked.
+
+'Sufficient unto the day--or night, perhaps I should say. He told our
+Mr. Morshed he'd follow him _more sang frays_, which is French for dead,
+drunk, or damned. Barrin' 'is paucity o' language, there wasn't a
+blemish on Jules. But what I wished to imply was, when we climbed into
+the back parts of the car, our Lootenant Morshed says to me, "I doubt if
+I'd flick my cigar-ends about too lavish, Mr. Pyecroft. We ought to be
+sitting on five pounds' worth of selected fireworks, and I think the
+rockets are your end." Not being able to smoke with my 'ead over the
+side I threw it away; and then your Mr. Leggatt, 'aving been as nearly
+mutinous as it pays to be with my Mr. Morshed, arched his back
+and drove.'
+
+'Where did he drive to, please?' said I.
+
+'Primerrily, in search of any or either or both armies; seconderrily, of
+course, in search of our brigadier-uncle. Not finding him on the road,
+we ran about the grass looking for him. This took us to a great many
+places in a short time. Ow 'eavenly that lilac did smell on top of that
+first Down--stinkin' its blossomin' little heart out!'
+
+'I 'adn't leesure to notice,' said Mr. Leggatt. 'The Downs were full o'
+chalk-pits, and we'd no lights.'
+
+'We 'ad the bicycle-lamp to look at the map by. Didn't you notice the
+old lady at the window where we saw the man in the night-gown? I thought
+night-gowns as sleepin' rig was extinck, so to speak.'
+
+'I tell you I 'adn't leesure to notice,' Leggatt repeated.
+
+'That's odd. Then what might 'ave made you tell the sentry at the first
+camp we found that you was the _Daily Express_ delivery-waggon?'
+
+'You can't touch pitch without being defiled,' Leggatt answered. ''Oo
+told the officer in the bath we were umpires?'
+
+'Well, he asked us. That was when we found the Territorial battalion
+undressin' in slow time. It lay on the left flank o' the Blue Army, and
+it cackled as it lay, too. But it gave us our position as regards the
+respective armies. We wandered a little more, and at 11.7 P.M., not
+having had a road under us for twenty minutes, we scaled the heights of
+something or other--which are about six hundred feet high. Here we
+'alted to tighten the lashings of the superstructure, and we smelt
+leather and horses three counties deep all round. We was, as you might
+say, in the thick of it.'
+
+'"Ah!" says my Mr. Morshed. "My 'orizon has indeed broadened. What a
+little thing is an uncle, Mr. Pyecroft, in the presence o' these
+glitterin' constellations! Simply ludicrous!" he says, "to waste a
+rocking-horse on an individual. We must socialise it. But we must get
+their 'eads up first. Touch off one rocket, if you please."
+
+'I touched off a green three-pounder which rose several thousand metres,
+and burst into gorgeous stars. "Reproduce the manoeuvre," he says, "at
+the other end o' this ridge--if it don't end in another cliff." So we
+steamed down the ridge a mile and a half east, and then I let Jules
+touch off a pink rocket, or he'd ha' kissed me. That was his only way to
+express his emotions, so to speak. Their heads come up then all around
+us to the extent o' thousands. We hears bugles like cocks crowing below,
+and on the top of it a most impressive sound which I'd never enjoyed
+before because 'itherto I'd always been an inteegral part of it, so to
+say--the noise of 'ole armies gettin' under arms. They must 'ave
+anticipated a night attack, I imagine. Most impressive. Then we 'eard a
+threshin'-machine. "Tutt! Tutt! This is childish!" says Lootenant
+Morshed. "We can't wait till they've finished cutting chaff for their
+horses. We must make 'em understand we're not to be trifled with.
+Expedite 'em with another rocket, Mr. Pyecroft."
+
+'"It's barely possible, sir," I remarks, "that that's a searchlight
+churnin' up," and by the time we backed into a providential chalk
+cutting (which was where our first tyre went pungo) she broke out to the
+northward, and began searching the ridge. A smart bit o' work.'
+
+''Twasn't a puncture. The inner tube had nipped because we skidded so,'
+Leggatt interrupted.
+
+'While your Mr. Leggatt was effectin' repairs, another searchlight broke
+out to the southward, and the two of 'em swept our ridge on both sides.
+Right at the west end of it they showed us the ground rising into a
+hill, so to speak, crowned with what looked like a little fort. Morshed
+saw it before the beams shut off. "That's the key of the position!" he
+says. "Occupy it at all hazards."
+
+'"I haven't half got occupation for the next twenty minutes," says your
+Mr. Leggatt, rootin' and blasphemin' in the dark. Mark, now, 'ow
+Morshed changed his tactics to suit 'is environment. "Right!" says he.
+"I'll stand by the ship. Mr. Pyecroft and Jules, oblige me by doubling
+along the ridge to the east with all the maroons and crackers you can
+carry without spilling. Read the directions careful for the maroons, Mr.
+Pyecroft, and touch them off at half-minute intervals. Jules represents
+musketry an' maxim fire under your command. Remember, it's death or
+Salisbury Gaol! Prob'ly both!"
+
+'By these means and some moderately 'ard runnin', we distracted 'em to
+the eastward. Maroons, you may not be aware, are same as bombs, with the
+anarchism left out. In confined spots like chalk-pits, they knock a
+four-point-seven silly. But you should read the directions before'and.
+In the intervals of the slow but well-directed fire of my cow-guns,
+Jules, who had found a sheep-pond in the dark a little lower down, gave
+what you might call a cinematograph reproduction o' sporadic musketry.
+They was large size crackers, and he concluded with the dull, sickenin'
+thud o' blind shells burstin' on soft ground.'
+
+'How did he manage that?' I said.
+
+'You throw a lighted squib into water and you'll see,' said Pyecroft.
+'Thus, then, we improvised till supplies was exhausted and the
+surrounding landscapes fair 'owled and 'ummed at us. The Jun or Service
+might 'ave 'ad their doubts about the rockets but they couldn't overlook
+our gunfire. Both sides tumbled out full of initiative. I told Jules no
+two flat-feet 'ad any right to be as happy as us, and we went back
+along the ridge to the derelict, and there was our Mr. Morshed
+apostrophin' his 'andiwork over fifty square mile o' country with
+"Attend, all ye who list to hear!" out of the Fifth Reader. He'd got as
+far as "And roused the shepherds o' Stonehenge, the rangers o' Beaulieu"
+when we come up, and he drew our attention to its truth as well as its
+beauty. That's rare in poetry, I'm told. He went right on to--"The red
+glare on Skiddaw roused those beggars at Carlisle"--which he pointed out
+was poetic license for Leith Hill. This allowed your Mr. Leggatt time to
+finish pumpin' up his tyres. I 'eard the sweat 'op off his nose.'
+
+'You know what it is, sir,' said poor Leggatt to me.
+
+'It warfted across my mind, as I listened to what was trarnspirin', that
+it might be easier to make the mess than to wipe it up, but such
+considerations weighed not with our valiant leader.
+
+'"Mr. Pyecroft," he says, "it can't have escaped your notice that we
+'ave one angry and 'ighly intelligent army in front of us, an' another
+'ighly angry and equally intelligent army in our rear. What 'ud you
+recommend?"
+
+'Most men would have besought 'im to do a lateral glide while there was
+yet time, but all I said was: "The rocking-horse isn't expended
+yet, sir."
+
+'He laid his hand on my shoulder. "Pye," says he, "there's worse men
+than you in loftier places. They shall 'ave it. None the less," he
+remarks, "the ice is undeniably packing."
+
+'I may 'ave omitted to point out that at this juncture two large
+armies, both deprived of their night's sleep, was awake, as you might
+say, and hurryin' into each other's arms. Here endeth the
+second chapter.'
+
+He filled his pipe slowly. The uncle had fallen asleep. Leggatt lit
+another cigarette.
+
+'We then proceeded _ong automobile_ along the ridge in a westerly
+direction towards the miniature fort which had been so kindly revealed
+by the searchlight, but which on inspection (your Mr. Leggatt bumped
+into an outlyin' reef of it) proved to be a wurzel-clump;
+_c'est-à-dire_, a parallelogrammatic pile of about three million
+mangold-wurzels, brought up there for the sheep, I suppose. On all
+sides, excep' the one we'd come by, the ground fell away moderately
+quick, and down at the bottom there was a large camp lit up an' full of
+harsh words of command.
+
+'"I said it was the key to the position," Lootenant Morshed remarks.
+"Trot out Persimmon!" which we rightly took to read, "Un-wrap the
+rocking-horse."
+
+'"Houp la!" says Jules in a insubordinate tone, an' slaps Persimmon on
+the flank.
+
+'"Silence!" says the Lootenant. "This is the Royal Navy, not Newmarket";
+and we carried Persimmon to the top of the mangel-wurzel clump
+as directed.
+
+'Owing to the inequalities of the terrain (I _do_ think your Mr. Leggatt
+might have had a spirit-level in his kit) he wouldn't rock free on the
+bed-plate, and while adjustin' him, his detachable tail fetched adrift.
+Our Lootenant was quick to seize the advantage.
+
+'"Remove that transformation," he says. "Substitute one Roman candle.
+Gas-power is superior to manual propulsion."
+
+'So we substituted. He arranged the _pièce de resistarnce_ in the shape
+of large drums--not saucers, mark you--drums of coloured fire, with
+printed instructions, at proper distances round Persimmon. There was a
+brief interregnum while we dug ourselves in among the wurzels by hand.
+Then he touched off the fires, _not_ omitting the Roman candle, and, you
+may take it from me, all was visible. Persimmon shone out in his naked
+splendour, red to port, green to starboard, and one white light at his
+bows, as per Board o' Trade regulations. Only he didn't so much rock,
+you might say, as shrug himself, in a manner of speaking, every time the
+candle went off. One can't have everything. But the rest surpassed our
+highest expectations. I think Persimmon was noblest on the starboard or
+green side--more like when a man thinks he's seeing mackerel in hell,
+don't you know? And yet I'd be the last to deprecate the effect of the
+port light on his teeth, or that blood-shot look in his left eye. He
+knew there was something going on he didn't approve of. He
+looked worried.'
+
+'Did you laugh?' I said.
+
+'I'm not much of a wag myself; nor it wasn't as if we 'ad time to allow
+the spectacle to sink in. The coloured fires was supposed to burn ten
+minutes, whereas it was obvious to the meanest capacity that the Junior
+Service would arrive by forced marches in about two and a half. They
+grarsped our topical allusion as soon as it was across the foot-lights,
+so to speak. They were quite chafed at it. Of course, 'ad we reflected,
+we might have known that exposin' illuminated rockin'-horses to an army
+that was learnin' to ride on 'em partook of the nature of a _double
+entender_, as the French say--same as waggling the tiller lines at a man
+who's had a hanging in the family. I knew the cox of the
+_Archimandrite's_ galley 'arf killed for a similar _plaisan-teree._ But
+we never anticipated lobsters being so sensitive. That was why we
+shifted. We could 'ardly tear our commandin' officer away. He put his
+head on one side, and kept cooin'. The only thing he 'ad neglected to
+provide was a line of retreat; but your Mr. Leggatt--an 'eroic soul in
+the last stage of wet prostration--here took command of the van, or,
+rather, the rear-guard. We walked downhill beside him, holding on to the
+superstructure to prevent her capsizing. These technical details,
+'owever, are beyond me.' He waved his pipe towards Leggatt.
+
+'I saw there was two deepish ruts leadin' down 'ill somewhere,' said
+Leggatt. 'That was when the soldiers stopped laughin', and begun to
+run uphill.'
+
+'Stroll, lovey, stroll!' Pyecroft corrected. 'The Dervish rush took
+place later.'
+
+'So I laid her in these ruts. That was where she must 'ave scraped her
+silencer a bit. Then they turned sharp right--the ruts did--and then she
+stopped bonnet-high in a manure-heap, sir; but I'll swear it was all of
+a one in three gradient. I think it was a barnyard. We waited there,'
+said Leggatt.
+
+'But not for long,' said Pyecroft. 'The lights were towering out of the
+drums on the position we 'ad so valiantly abandoned; and the Junior
+Service was escaladin' it _en masse_. When numerous bodies of 'ighly
+trained men arrive simultaneous in the same latitude from opposite
+directions, each remarking briskly, "What the 'ell did you do _that_
+for?" detonation, as you might say, is practically assured. They didn't
+ask for extraneous aids. If we'd come out with sworn affidavits of what
+we'd done they wouldn't 'ave believed us. They wanted each other's
+company exclusive. Such was the effect of Persimmon on their clarss
+feelings. Idol'try, _I_ call it! Events transpired with the utmost
+velocity and rapidly increasing pressures. There was a few remarks about
+Dicky Bridoon and mechanical horses, and then some one was smacked--hard
+by the sound--in the middle of a remark.'
+
+'That was the man who kept calling for the Forty-fifth Dragoons,' said
+Leggatt. 'He got as far as Drag ...'
+
+'Was it?' said Pyecroft dreamily. 'Well, he couldn't say they didn't
+come. They all came, and they all fell to arguin' whether the Infantry
+should 'ave Persimmon for a regimental pet or the Cavalry should keep
+him for stud purposes. Hence the issue was soon clouded with
+mangold-wurzels. Our commander said we 'ad sowed the good seed, and it
+was bearing abundant fruit. (They weigh between four and seven pounds
+apiece.) Seein' the children 'ad got over their shyness, and 'ad really
+begun to play games, we backed out o' the pit and went down, by steps,
+to the camp below, no man, as you might say, making us afraid. Here we
+enjoyed a front view of the battle, which rolled with renewed impetus,
+owing to both sides receiving strong reinforcements every minute. All
+arms were freely represented; Cavalry, on this occasion only, acting in
+concert with Artillery. They argued the relative merits of horses
+_versus_ feet, so to say, but they didn't neglect Persimmon. The wounded
+rolling downhill with the wurzels informed us that he had long ago been
+socialised, and the smallest souvenirs were worth a man's life. Speaking
+broadly, the Junior Service appeared to be a shade out of 'and, if I may
+venture so far. They did _not_ pay prompt and unhesitating obedience to
+the "Retires" or the "Cease Fires" or the "For 'Eaven's sake come to
+bed, ducky" of their officers, who, I regret to say, were 'otly
+embroiled at the heads of their respective units.'
+
+'How did you find that out?' I asked.
+
+'On account of Lootenant Morshed going to the Mess tent to call on his
+uncle and raise a drink; but all hands had gone to the front. We thought
+we 'eard somebody bathing behind the tent, and we found an oldish
+gentleman tryin' to drown a boy in knickerbockers in a horse-trough. He
+kept him under with a bicycle, so to speak. He 'ad nearly accomplished
+his fell design, when we frustrated him. He was in a highly malleable
+condition and full o' _juice de spree_. "Arsk not what I am," he says.
+"My wife 'll tell me that quite soon enough. Arsk rather what I've
+been," he says. "I've been dinin' here," he says. "I commanded 'em in
+the Eighties," he says, "and, Gawd forgive me," he says, sobbin'
+'eavily, "I've spent this holy evening telling their Colonel they was a
+set of educated inefficients. Hark to 'em!" We could, without strainin'
+ourselves; but how _he_ picked up the gentle murmur of his own corps in
+that on-the-knee party up the hill I don't know. "They've marched and
+fought thirty mile to-day," he shouts, "and now they're tearin' the
+_intestines_ out of the Cavalry up yonder! They won't stop this side the
+gates o' Delhi," he says. "I commanded their ancestors. There's nothing
+wrong with the Service," he says, wringing out his trousers on his lap.
+"'Eaven pardon me for doubtin' 'em! Same old game--same young beggars."
+
+'The boy in the knickerbockers, languishing on a chair, puts in a claim
+for one drink. "Let him go dry," says our friend in shirt-tails. "He's a
+reporter. He run into me on his filthy bicycle and he asked me if I
+could furnish 'im with particulars about the mutiny in the Army. You
+false-'earted proletarian publicist," he says, shakin' his finger at
+'im--for he was reelly annoyed--"I'll teach you to defile what you can't
+comprebend! When my regiment's in a state o' mutiny, I'll do myself the
+honour of informing you personally. You particularly ignorant and very
+narsty little man," he says, "you're no better than a dhobi's donkey! If
+there wasn't dirty linen to wash, you'd starve," he says, "and why I
+haven't drowned you will be the lastin' regret of my life."
+
+'Well, we sat with 'em and 'ad drinks for about half-an-hour in front
+of the Mess tent. He'd ha' killed the reporter if there hadn't been
+witnesses, and the reporter might have taken notes of the battle; so we
+acted as two-way buffers, in a sense. I don't hold with the Press
+mingling up with Service matters. They draw false conclusions. Now, mark
+you, at a moderate estimate, there were seven thousand men in the
+fighting line, half of 'em hurt in their professional feelings, an' the
+other half rubbin' in the liniment, as you might say. All due to
+Persimmon! If you 'adn't seen it you wouldn't 'ave believed it. And yet,
+mark you, not one single unit of 'em even resorted to his belt. They
+confined themselves to natural producks--hands and the wurzels. I
+thought Jules was havin' fits, till it trarnspired the same thought had
+impressed him in the French language. He called it _incroyable_, I
+believe. Seven thousand men, with seven thousand rifles, belts, and
+bayonets, in a violently agitated condition, and not a ungenteel blow
+struck from first to last. The old gentleman drew our attention to it as
+well. It was quite noticeable.
+
+'Lack of ammunition was the primerry cause of the battle ceasin'. A
+Brigade-Major came in, wipin' his nose on both cuffs, and sayin' he 'ad
+'ad snuff. The brigadier-uncle followed. He was, so to speak, sneezin'.
+We thought it best to shift our moorings without attractin' attention;
+so we shifted. They 'ad called the cows 'ome by then. The Junior Service
+was going to bye-bye all round us, as happy as the ship's monkey when
+he's been playin' with the paints, and Lootenant Morshed and Jules kept
+bowin' to port and starboard of the superstructure, acknowledgin' the
+unstinted applause which the multitude would 'ave given 'em if they'd
+known the facts. On the other 'and, as your Mr. Leggatt observed, they
+might 'ave killed us.
+
+'That would have been about five bells in the middle watch, say
+half-past two. A well-spent evening. There was but little to be gained
+by entering Portsmouth at that hour, so we turned off on the grass (this
+was after we had found a road under us), and we cast anchors out at the
+stern and prayed for the day.
+
+'But your Mr. Leggatt he had to make and mend tyres all our watch below.
+It trarnspired she had been running on the rim o' two or three wheels,
+which, very properly, he hadn't reported till the close of the action.
+And that's the reason of your four new tyres. Mr. Morshed was of opinion
+you'd earned 'em. Do you dissent?'
+
+I stretched out my hand, which Pyecroft crushed to pulp. 'No, Pye,' I
+said, deeply moved, 'I agree entirely. But what happened to Jules?'
+
+'We returned him to his own Navy after breakfast. He wouldn't have kept
+much longer without some one in his own language to tell it to. I don't
+know any man I ever took more compassion on than Jules. 'Is sufferings
+swelled him up centimetres, and all he could do on the Hard was to kiss
+Lootenant Morshed and me, _and_ your Mr. Leggatt. He deserved that much.
+A cordial beggar.'
+
+Pyecroft looked at the washed cups on the table, and the low sunshine
+on my car's back in the yard.
+
+'Too early to drink to him,' he said. 'But I feel it just the same.'
+
+The uncle, sunk in his chair, snored a little; the canary answered with
+a shrill lullaby. Pyecroft picked up the duster, threw it over the cage,
+put his finger to his lips, and we tiptoed out into the shop, while
+Leggatt brought the car round.
+
+'I'll look out for the news in the papers,' I said, as I got in.
+
+'Oh, we short-circuited that! Nothing trarnspired excep' a statement to
+the effect that some Territorial battalions had played about with
+turnips at the conclusion of the manoeuvres The taxpayer don't know all
+he gets for his money. Farewell!'
+
+We moved off just in time to be blocked by a regiment coming towards the
+station to entrain for London.
+
+'Beg your pardon, sir,' said a sergeant in charge of the baggage, 'but
+would you mind backin' a bit till we get the waggons past?'
+
+'Certainly,' I said. 'You don't happen to have a rocking-horse among
+your kit, do you?'
+
+The rattle of our reverse drowned his answer, but I saw his eyes. One of
+them was blackish-green, about four days old.
+
+
+
+
+THE LEGEND OF MIRTH
+
+     The Four Archangels, so the legends tell,
+     Raphael, Gabriel, Michael, Azrael,
+     Being first of those to whom the Power was shown,
+     Stood first of all the Host before The Throne,
+     And when the Charges were allotted burst
+     Tumultuous-winged from out the assembly first.
+     Zeal was their spur that bade them strictly heed
+     Their own high judgment on their lightest deed.
+     Zeal was their spur that, when relief was given,
+     Urged them unwearied to fresh toil in Heaven;
+     For Honour's sake perfecting every task
+     Beyond what e'en Perfection's self could ask....
+     And Allah, Who created Zeal and Pride,
+     Knows how the twain are perilous-near allied.
+
+     It chanced on one of Heaven's long-lighted days,
+     The Four and all the Host having gone their ways
+     Each to his Charge, the shining Courts were void
+     Save for one Seraph whom no charge employed,
+     With folden wings and slumber-threatened brow.
+     To whom The Word: 'Beloved, what dost thou?'
+     'By the Permission,' came the answer soft,
+     'Little I do nor do that little oft.
+     As is The Will in Heaven so on Earth
+     Where by The Will I strive to make men mirth.'
+     He ceased and sped, hearing The Word once more:
+     'Beloved, go thy way and greet the Four.'
+
+     Systems and Universes overpast,
+     The Seraph came upon the Four, at last,
+     Guiding and guarding with devoted mind
+     The tedious generations of mankind
+     Who lent at most unwilling ear and eye
+     When they could not escape the ministry....
+     Yet, patient, faithful, firm, persistent, just
+     Toward all that gross, indifferent, facile dust,
+     The Archangels laboured to discharge their trust
+     By precept and example, prayer and law,
+     Advice, reproof, and rule, but, labouring, saw
+     Each in his fellow's countenance confessed,
+     The Doubt that sickens: 'Have I done my best?'
+
+     Even as they sighed and turned to toil anew,
+     The Seraph hailed them with observance due;
+     And after some fit talk of higher things
+     Touched tentative on mundane happenings.
+     This they permitting, he, emboldened thus,
+     Prolused of humankind promiscuous.
+     And, since the large contention less avails
+     Than instances observed, he told them tales--Tales
+     of the shop, the bed, the court, the street,
+     Intimate, elemental, indiscreet:
+     Occasions where Confusion smiting swift
+     Piles jest on jest as snow-slides pile the drift.
+
+     Whence, one by one, beneath derisive skies,
+     The victims bare, bewildered heads arise:
+     Tales of the passing of the spirit, graced
+     With humour blinding as the doom it faced:
+     Stark tales of ribaldry that broke aside
+     To tears, by laughter swallowed ere they dried:
+     Tales to which neither grace nor gain accrue,
+     But only (Allah be exalted!) true,
+     And only, as the Seraph showed that night,
+     Delighting to the limits of delight.
+
+     These he rehearsed with artful pause and halt,
+     And such pretence of memory at fault,
+     That soon the Four--so well the bait was thrown--
+     Came to his aid with memories of their own--
+     Matters dismissed long since as small or vain,
+     Whereof the high significance had lain
+     Hid, till the ungirt glosses made it plain.
+     Then as enlightenment came broad and fast,
+     Each marvelled at his own oblivious past
+     Until--the Gates of Laughter opened wide--
+     The Four, with that bland Seraph at their side,
+     While they recalled, compared, and amplified,
+     In utter mirth forgot both zeal and pride.
+
+     High over Heaven the lamps of midnight burned
+     Ere, weak with merriment, the Four returned,
+     Not in that order they were wont to keep--
+     Pinion to pinion answering, sweep for sweep,
+     In awful diapason heard afar,
+     But shoutingly adrift 'twixt star and star.
+     Reeling a planet's orbit left or right
+     As laughter took them in the abysmal Night;
+     Or, by the point of some remembered jest,
+     Winged and brought helpless down through gulfs unguessed,
+     Where the blank worlds that gather to the birth
+     Leaped in the womb of Darkness at their mirth,
+     And e'en Gehenna's bondsmen understood.
+     They were not damned from human brotherhood.
+
+     Not first nor last of Heaven's high Host, the Four
+     That night took place beneath The Throne once more.
+     O lovelier than their morning majesty,
+     The understanding light behind the eye!
+     O more compelling than their old command,
+     The new-learned friendly gesture of the hand!
+     O sweeter than their zealous fellowship,
+     The wise half-smile that passed from lip to lip!
+     O well and roundly, when Command was given,
+     They told their tale against themselves to Heaven,
+     And in the silence, waiting on The Word,
+     Received the Peace and Pardon of The Lord!
+
+
+
+'My Son's Wife'
+
+(1913)
+
+He had suffered from the disease of the century since his early youth,
+and before he was thirty he was heavily marked with it. He and a few
+friends had rearranged Heaven very comfortably, but the reorganisation
+of Earth, which they called Society, was even greater fun. It demanded
+Work in the shape of many taxi-rides daily; hours of brilliant talk with
+brilliant talkers; some sparkling correspondence; a few silences (but on
+the understanding that their own turn should come soon) while other
+people expounded philosophies; and a fair number of picture-galleries,
+tea-fights, concerts, theatres, music-halls, and cinema shows; the whole
+trimmed with love-making to women whose hair smelt of cigarette-smoke.
+Such strong days sent Frankwell Midmore back to his flat assured that he
+and his friends had helped the World a step nearer the Truth, the Dawn,
+and the New Order.
+
+His temperament, he said, led him more towards concrete data than
+abstract ideas. People who investigate detail are apt to be tired at the
+day's end. The same temperament, or it may have been a woman, made him
+early attach himself to the Immoderate Left of his Cause in the capacity
+of an experimenter in Social Relations. And since the Immoderate Left
+contains plenty of women anxious to help earnest inquirers with large
+independent incomes to arrive at evaluations of essentials, Frankwell
+Midmore's lot was far from contemptible.
+
+At that hour Fate chose to play with him. A widowed aunt, widely
+separated by nature, and more widely by marriage, from all that
+Midmore's mother had ever been or desired to be, died and left him
+possessions. Mrs. Midmore, having that summer embraced a creed which
+denied the existence of death, naturally could not stoop to burial; but
+Midmore had to leave London for the dank country at a season when Social
+Regeneration works best through long, cushioned conferences, two by two,
+after tea. There he faced the bracing ritual of the British funeral, and
+was wept at across the raw grave by an elderly coffin-shaped female with
+a long nose, who called him 'Master Frankie'; and there he was
+congratulated behind an echoing top-hat by a man he mistook for a mute,
+who turned out to be his aunt's lawyer. He wrote his mother next day,
+after a bright account of the funeral:
+
+'So far as I can understand, she has left me between four and five
+hundred a year. It all comes from Ther Land, as they call it down here.
+The unspeakable attorney, Sperrit, and a green-eyed daughter, who hums
+to herself as she tramps but is silent on all subjects except "huntin',"
+insisted on taking me to see it. Ther Land is brown and green in
+alternate slabs like chocolate and pistachio cakes, speckled with
+occasional peasants who do not utter. In case it should not be wet
+enough there is a wet brook in the middle of it. Ther House is by the
+brook. I shall look into it later. If there should be any little memento
+of Jenny that you care for, let me know. Didn't you tell me that
+mid-Victorian furniture is coming into the market again? Jenny's old
+maid--it is called Rhoda Dolbie--tells me that Jenny promised it thirty
+pounds a year. The will does not. Hence, I suppose, the tears at the
+funeral. But that is close on ten per cent of the income. I fancy Jenny
+has destroyed all her private papers and records of her _vie intime_,
+if, indeed, life be possible in such a place. The Sperrit man told me
+that if I had means of my own I might come and live on Ther Land. I
+didn't tell him how much I would pay not to! I cannot think it right
+that any human being should exercise mastery over others in the
+merciless fashion our tom-fool social system permits; so, as it is all
+mine, I intend to sell it whenever the unholy Sperrit can find a
+purchaser.'
+
+And he went to Mr. Sperrit with the idea next day, just before returning
+to town.
+
+'Quite so,' said the lawyer. 'I see your point, of course. But the house
+itself is rather old-fashioned--hardly the type purchasers demand
+nowadays. There's no park, of course, and the bulk of the land is let to
+a life-tenant, a Mr. Sidney. As long as he pays his rent, he can't be
+turned out, and even if he didn't'--Mr. Sperrit's face relaxed a
+shade--'you might have a difficulty.'
+
+'The property brings four hundred a year, I understand,' said Midmore.
+
+'Well, hardly--ha-ardly. Deducting land and income tax, tithes, fire
+insurance, cost of collection and repairs of course, it returned two
+hundred and eighty-four pounds last year. The repairs are rather a large
+item--owing to the brook. I call it Liris--out of Horace, you know.'
+
+Midmore looked at his watch impatiently.
+
+'I suppose you can find somebody to buy it?' he repeated.
+
+'We will do our best, of course, if those are your instructions. Then,
+that is all except'--here Midmore half rose, but Mr. Sperrit's little
+grey eyes held his large brown ones firmly--'except about Rhoda Dolbie,
+Mrs. Werf's maid. I may tell you that we did not draw up your aunt's
+last will. She grew secretive towards the last--elderly people often
+do--and had it done in London. I expect her memory failed her, or she
+mislaid her notes. She used to put them in her spectacle-case.... My
+motor only takes eight minutes to get to the station, Mr. Midmore ...
+but, as I was saying, whenever she made her will with _us_, Mrs. Werf
+always left Rhoda thirty pounds per annum. Charlie, the wills!' A clerk
+with a baldish head and a long nose dealt documents on to the table like
+cards, and breathed heavily behind Midmore. 'It's in no sense a legal
+obligation, of course,' said Mr. Sperrit. 'Ah, that one is dated January
+the 11th, eighteen eighty-nine.'
+
+Midmore looked at his watch again and found himself saying with no good
+grace: 'Well, I suppose she'd better have it--for the present at
+any rate.'
+
+He escaped with an uneasy feeling that two hundred and fifty-four pounds
+a year was not exactly four hundred, and that Charlie's long nose
+annoyed him. Then he returned, first-class, to his own affairs.
+
+Of the two, perhaps three, experiments in Social Relations which he had
+then in hand, one interested him acutely. It had run for some months and
+promised most variegated and interesting developments, on which he dwelt
+luxuriously all the way to town. When he reached his flat he was not
+well prepared for a twelve-page letter explaining, in the diction of the
+Immoderate Left which rubricates its I's and illuminates its T's, that
+the lady had realised greater attractions in another Soul. She
+re-stated, rather than pleaded, the gospel of the Immoderate Left as her
+justification, and ended in an impassioned demand for her right to
+express herself in and on her own life, through which, she pointed out,
+she could pass but once. She added that if, later, she should discover
+Midmore was 'essentially complementary to her needs,' she would tell him
+so. That Midmore had himself written much the same sort of
+epistle--barring the hint of return--to a woman of whom his needs for
+self-expression had caused him to weary three years before, did not
+assist him in the least. He expressed himself to the gas-fire in terms
+essential but not complimentary. Then he reflected on the detached
+criticism of his best friends and her best friends, male and female,
+with whom he and she and others had talked so openly while their gay
+adventure was in flower. He recalled, too--this must have been about
+midnight--her analysis from every angle, remote and most intimate, of
+the mate to whom she had been adjudged under the base convention which
+is styled marriage. Later, at that bad hour when the cattle wake for a
+little, he remembered her in other aspects and went down into the hell
+appointed; desolate, desiring, with no God to call upon. About eleven
+o'clock next morning Eliphaz the Temanite, Bildad the Shuhite, and
+Zophar the Naamathite called upon him 'for they had made appointment
+together' to see how he took it; but the janitor told them that Job had
+gone--into the country, he believed.
+
+Midmore's relief when he found his story was not written across his
+aching temples for Mr. Sperrit to read--the defeated lover, like the
+successful one, believes all earth privy to his soul--was put down by
+Mr. Sperrit to quite different causes. He led him into a morning-room.
+The rest of the house seemed to be full of people, singing to a loud
+piano idiotic songs about cows, and the hall smelt of damp cloaks.
+
+'It's our evening to take the winter cantata,' Mr. Sperrit explained.
+'It's "High Tide on the Coast of Lincolnshire." I hoped you'd come back.
+There are scores of little things to settle. As for the house, of
+course, it stands ready for you at any time. I couldn't get Rhoda out of
+it--nor could Charlie for that matter. She's the sister, isn't she, of
+the nurse who brought you down here when you were four, she says, to
+recover from measles?'
+
+'Is she? Was I?' said Midmore through the bad tastes in his mouth.
+'D'you suppose I could stay there the night?'
+
+Thirty joyous young voices shouted appeal to some one to leave their
+'pipes of parsley 'ollow--'ollow--'ollow!' Mr. Sperrit had to raise his
+voice above the din.
+
+'Well, if I asked you to stay _here_, I should never hear the last of it
+from Rhoda. She's a little cracked, of course, but the soul of devotion
+and capable of anything. _Ne sit ancillae_, you know.'
+
+'Thank you. Then I'll go. I'll walk.' He stumbled out dazed and sick
+into the winter twilight, and sought the square house by the brook.
+
+It was not a dignified entry, because when the door was unchained and
+Rhoda exclaimed, he took two valiant steps into the hall and then
+fainted--as men sometimes will after twenty-two hours of strong emotion
+and little food.
+
+'I'm sorry,' he said when he could speak. He was lying at the foot of
+the stairs, his head on Rhoda's lap.
+
+'Your 'ome is your castle, sir,' was the reply in his hair. 'I smelt it
+wasn't drink. You lay on the sofa till I get your supper.'
+
+She settled him in a drawing-room hung with yellow silk, heavy with the
+smell of dead leaves and oil lamp. Something murmured soothingly in the
+background and overcame the noises in his head. He thought he heard
+horses' feet on wet gravel and a voice singing about ships and flocks
+and grass. It passed close to the shuttered bay-window.
+
+     But each will mourn his own, she saith,
+     And sweeter woman ne'er drew breath
+     Than my son's wife, Elizabeth ...
+     Cusha--cusha--cusha--calling.
+
+The hoofs broke into a canter as Rhoda entered with the tray. 'And then
+I'll put you to bed,' she said. 'Sidney's coming in the morning.'
+Midmore asked no questions. He dragged his poor bruised soul to bed and
+would have pitied it all over again, but the food and warm sherry and
+water drugged him to instant sleep.
+
+Rhoda's voice wakened him, asking whether he would have ''ip, foot, or
+sitz,' which he understood were the baths of the establishment. 'Suppose
+you try all three,' she suggested. 'They're all yours, you know, sir.'
+
+He would have renewed his sorrows with the daylight, but her words
+struck him pleasantly. Everything his eyes opened upon was his very own
+to keep for ever. The carved four-post Chippendale bed, obviously worth
+hundreds; the wavy walnut William and Mary chairs--he had seen worse
+ones labelled twenty guineas apiece; the oval medallion mirror; the
+delicate eighteenth-century wire fireguard; the heavy brocaded curtains
+were his--all his. So, too, a great garden full of birds that faced him
+when he shaved; a mulberry tree, a sun-dial, and a dull, steel-coloured
+brook that murmured level with the edge of a lawn a hundred yards away.
+Peculiarly and privately his own was the smell of sausages and coffee
+that he sniffed at the head of the wide square landing, all set round
+with mysterious doors and Bartolozzi prints. He spent two hours after
+breakfast in exploring his new possessions. His heart leaped up at such
+things as sewing-machines, a rubber-tyred bath-chair in a tiled passage,
+a malachite-headed Malacca cane, boxes and boxes of unopened stationery,
+seal-rings, bunches of keys, and at the bottom of a steel-net reticule a
+little leather purse with seven pounds ten shillings in gold and eleven
+shillings in silver.
+
+'You used to play with that when my sister brought you down here after
+your measles,' said Rhoda as he slipped the money into his pocket. 'Now,
+this was your pore dear auntie's business-room.' She opened a low door.
+'Oh, I forgot about Mr. Sidney! There he is.' An enormous old man with
+rheumy red eyes that blinked under downy white eyebrows sat in an Empire
+chair, his cap in his hands. Rhoda withdrew sniffing. The man looked
+Midmore over in silence, then jerked a thumb towards the door. 'I reckon
+she told you who I be,' he began. 'I'm the only farmer you've got.
+Nothin' goes off my place 'thout it walks on its own feet. What about my
+pig-pound?'
+
+'Well, what about it?' said Midmore.
+
+'That's just what I be come about. The County Councils are getting more
+particular. Did ye know there was swine fever at Pashell's? There _be_.
+It'll 'ave to be in brick.'
+
+'Yes,' said Midmore politely.
+
+'I've bin at your aunt that was, plenty times about it. I don't say she
+wasn't a just woman, but she didn't read the lease same way I did. I be
+used to bein' put upon, but there's no doing any longer 'thout that
+pig-pound.'
+
+'When would you like it?' Midmore asked. It seemed the easiest road to
+take.
+
+'Any time or other suits me, I reckon. He ain't thrivin' where he is,
+an' I paid eighteen shillin' for him.' He crossed his hands on his stick
+and gave no further sign of life.
+
+'Is that all?' Midmore stammered.
+
+'All now--excep''--he glanced fretfully at the table beside him--'excep'
+my usuals. Where's that Rhoda?'
+
+Midmore rang the bell. Rhoda came in with a bottle and a glass. The old
+man helped himself to four stiff fingers, rose in one piece, and stumped
+out. At the door he cried ferociously: 'Don't suppose it's any odds to
+you whether I'm drowned or not, but them floodgates want a wheel and
+winch, they do. I be too old for liftin' 'em with the bar--my time
+o' life.'
+
+'Good riddance if 'e was drowned,' said Rhoda. 'But don't you mind him.
+He's only amusin' himself. Your pore dear auntie used to give 'im 'is
+usual--'tisn't the whisky _you_ drink--an' send 'im about 'is business.'
+
+'I see. Now, is a pig-pound the same thing as a pig-sty?'
+
+Rhoda nodded. ''E needs one, too, but 'e ain't entitled to it. You look
+at 'is lease--third drawer on the left in that Bombay cab'net--an' next
+time 'e comes you ask 'im to read it. That'll choke 'im off, because
+'e can't!'
+
+There was nothing in Midmore's past to teach him the message and
+significance of a hand-written lease of the late 'eighties, but Rhoda
+interpreted.
+
+'It don't mean anything reelly,' was her cheerful conclusion, 'excep'
+you mustn't get rid of him anyhow, an' 'e can do what 'e likes always.
+Lucky for us 'e _do_ farm; and if it wasn't for 'is woman--'
+
+'Oh, there's a Mrs. Sidney, is there?'
+
+'Lor, _no_!' The Sidneys don't marry. They keep. That's his fourth
+since--to my knowledge. He was a takin' man from the first.'
+
+'Any families?'
+
+'They'd be grown up by now if there was, wouldn't they? But you can't
+spend all your days considerin' 'is interests. That's what gave your
+pore aunt 'er indigestion. 'Ave you seen the gun-room?'
+
+Midmore held strong views on the immorality of taking life for pleasure.
+But there was no denying that the late Colonel Werf's seventy-guinea
+breechloaders were good at their filthy job. He loaded one, took it out
+and pointed--merely pointed--it at a cock-pheasant which rose out of a
+shrubbery behind the kitchen, and the flaming bird came down in a long
+slant on the lawn, stone dead. Rhoda from the scullery said it was a
+lovely shot, and told him lunch was ready.
+
+He spent the afternoon gun in one hand, a map in the other, beating the
+bounds of his lands. They lay altogether in a shallow, uninteresting
+valley, flanked with woods and bisected by a brook. Up stream was his
+own house; down stream, less than half a mile, a low red farm-house
+squatted in an old orchard, beside what looked like small lock-gates on
+the Thames. There was no doubt as to ownership. Mr. Sidney saw him while
+yet far off, and bellowed at him about pig-pounds and floodgates. These
+last were two great sliding shutters of weedy oak across the brook,
+which were prised up inch by inch with a crowbar along a notched strip
+of iron, and when Sidney opened them they at once let out half the
+water. Midmore watched it shrink between its aldered banks like some
+conjuring trick. This, too, was his very own.
+
+'I see,' he said. 'How interesting! Now, what's that bell for?' he went
+on, pointing to an old ship's bell in a rude belfry at the end of an
+outhouse. 'Was that a chapel once?' The red-eyed giant seemed to have
+difficulty in expressing himself for the moment and blinked savagely.
+
+'Yes,' he said at last. 'My chapel. When you 'ear that bell ring you'll
+'ear something. Nobody but me 'ud put up with it--but I reckon it don't
+make any odds to you.' He slammed the gates down again, and the brook
+rose behind them with a suck and a grunt.
+
+Midmore moved off, conscious that he might be safer with Rhoda to hold
+his conversational hand. As he passed the front of the farm-house a
+smooth fat woman, with neatly parted grey hair under a widow's cap,
+curtsied to him deferentially through the window. By every teaching of
+the Immoderate Left she had a perfect right to express herself in any
+way she pleased, but the curtsey revolted him. And on his way home he
+was hailed from behind a hedge by a manifest idiot with no roof to his
+mouth, who hallooed and danced round him.
+
+'What did that beast want?' he demanded of Rhoda at tea.
+
+'Jimmy? He only wanted to know if you 'ad any telegrams to send. 'E'll
+go anywhere so long as 'tisn't across running water. That gives 'im 'is
+seizures. Even talkin' about it for fun like makes 'im shake.'
+
+'But why isn't he where he can be properly looked after?'
+
+'What 'arm's 'e doing? E's a love-child, but 'is family can pay for 'im.
+If 'e was locked up 'e'd die all off at once, like a wild rabbit. Won't
+you, please, look at the drive, sir?'
+
+Midmore looked in the fading light. The neat gravel was pitted with
+large roundish holes, and there was a punch or two of the same sort
+on the lawn.
+
+'That's the 'unt comin' 'ome,' Rhoda explained. 'Your pore dear auntie
+always let 'em use our drive for a short cut after the Colonel died. The
+Colonel wouldn't so much because he preserved; but your auntie was
+always an 'orsewoman till 'er sciatica.'
+
+'Isn't there some one who can rake it over or--or something?' said
+Midmore vaguely.
+
+'Oh yes. You'll never see it in the morning, but--you was out when they
+came 'ome an' Mister Fisher--he's the Master--told me to tell you with
+'is compliments that if you wasn't preservin' and cared to 'old to the
+old understanding', is gravel-pit is at your service same as before. 'E
+thought, perhaps, you mightn't know, and it 'ad slipped my mind to tell
+you. It's good gravel, Mister Fisher's, and it binds beautiful on the
+drive. We 'ave to draw it, o' course, from the pit, but--'
+
+Midmore looked at her helplessly.
+
+'Rhoda,' said he, 'what am I supposed to do?'
+
+'Oh, let 'em come through,' she replied. 'You never know. You may want
+to 'unt yourself some day.'
+
+That evening it rained and his misery returned on him, the worse for
+having been diverted. At last he was driven to paw over a few score
+books in a panelled room called the library, and realised with horror
+what the late Colonel Werf's mind must have been in its prime. The
+volumes smelt of a dead world as strongly as they did of mildew. He
+opened and thrust them back, one after another, till crude coloured
+illustrations of men on horses held his eye. He began at random and read
+a little, moved into the drawing-room with the volume, and settled down
+by the fire still reading. It was a foul world into which he peeped for
+the first time--a heavy-eating, hard-drinking hell of horse-copers,
+swindlers, matchmaking mothers, economically dependent virgins selling
+themselves blushingly for cash and lands: Jews, tradesmen, and an
+ill-considered spawn of Dickens-and-horsedung characters (I give
+Midmore's own criticism), but he read on, fascinated, and behold, from
+the pages leaped, as it were, the brother to the red-eyed man of the
+brook, bellowing at a landlord (here Midmore realised that _he_ was that
+very animal) for new barns; and another man who, like himself again,
+objected to hoof-marks on gravel. Outrageous as thought and conception
+were, the stuff seemed to have the rudiments of observation. He dug out
+other volumes by the same author, till Rhoda came in with a silver
+candlestick.
+
+'Rhoda,' said he, 'did you ever hear about a character called James
+Pigg--and Batsey?'
+
+'Why, o' course,' said she. 'The Colonel used to come into the kitchen
+in 'is dressin'-gown an' read us all those Jorrockses.'
+
+'Oh, Lord!' said Midmore, and went to bed with a book called _Handley
+Cross_ under his arm, and a lonelier Columbus into a stranger world the
+wet-ringed moon never looked upon.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Here we omit much. But Midmore never denied that for the epicure in
+sensation the urgent needs of an ancient house, as interpreted by Rhoda
+pointing to daylight through attic-tiles held in place by moss, gives an
+edge to the pleasure of Social Research elsewhere. Equally he found that
+the reaction following prolonged research loses much of its grey terror
+if one knows one can at will bathe the soul in the society of plumbers
+(all the water-pipes had chronic appendicitis), village idiots (Jimmy
+had taken Midmore under his weak wing and camped daily at the
+drive-gates), and a giant with red eyelids whose every action is an
+unpredictable outrage.
+
+Towards spring Midmore filled his house with a few friends of the
+Immoderate Left. It happened to be the day when, all things and Rhoda
+working together, a cartload of bricks, another of sand, and some bags
+of lime had been despatched to build Sidney his almost daily-demanded
+pig-pound. Midmore took his friends across the flat fields with some
+idea of showing them Sidney as a type of 'the peasantry.' They hit the
+minute when Sidney, hoarse with rage, was ordering bricklayer, mate,
+carts and all off his premises. The visitors disposed themselves
+to listen.
+
+'You never give me no notice about changin' the pig,' Sidney shouted.
+The pig--at least eighteen inches long--reared on end in the old sty and
+smiled at the company.
+
+'But, my good man--' Midmore opened.
+
+'I ain't! For aught you know I be a dam' sight worse than you be. You
+can't come and be'ave arbit'ry with me. You _are_ be'avin' arbit'ry! All
+you men go clean away an' don't set foot on my land till I bid ye.'
+
+'But you asked'--Midmore felt his voice jump up--'to have the pig-pound
+built.'
+
+''Spose I did. That's no reason you shouldn't send me notice to change
+the pig. 'Comin' down on me like this 'thout warnin'! That pig's got to
+be got into the cowshed an' all.'
+
+'Then open the door and let him run in,' said Midmore.
+
+'Don't you be'ave arbit'ry with _me_! Take all your dam' men 'ome off my
+land. I won't be treated arbit'ry.'
+
+The carts moved off without a word, and Sidney went into the house and
+slammed the door.
+
+'Now, I hold that is enormously significant,' said a visitor. 'Here you
+have the logical outcome of centuries of feudal oppression--the frenzy
+of fear.' The company looked at Midmore with grave pain.
+
+'But he _did_ worry my life out about his pig-sty,' was all Midmore
+found to say.
+
+Others took up the parable and proved to him if he only held true to the
+gospels of the Immoderate Left the earth would soon be covered with
+'jolly little' pig-sties, built in the intervals of morris-dancing by
+'the peasant' himself.
+
+Midmore felt grateful when the door opened again and Mr. Sidney invited
+them all to retire to the road which, he pointed out, was public. As
+they turned the corner of the house, a smooth-faced woman in a widow's
+cap curtsied to each of them through the window.
+
+Instantly they drew pictures of that woman's lot, deprived of all
+vehicle for self-expression--'the set grey life and apathetic end,' one
+quoted--and they discussed the tremendous significance of village
+theatricals. Even a month ago Midmore would have told them all that he
+knew and Rhoda had dropped about Sidney's forms of self-expression. Now,
+for some strange reason, he was content to let the talk run on from
+village to metropolitan and world drama.
+
+Rhoda advised him after the visitors left that 'if he wanted to do that
+again' he had better go up to town.
+
+'But we only sat on cushions on the floor,' said her master.
+
+'They're too old for romps,' she retorted, 'an' it's only the beginning
+of things. I've seen what _I've_ seen. Besides, they talked and laughed
+in the passage going to their baths--such as took 'em.'
+
+'Don't be a fool, Rhoda,' said Midmore. No man--unless he has loved
+her--will casually dismiss a woman on whose lap he has laid his head.
+
+'Very good,' she snorted, 'but that cuts both ways. An' now, you go down
+to Sidney's this evenin' and put him where he ought to be. He was in his
+right about you givin' 'im notice about changin' the pig, but he 'adn't
+any right to turn it up before your company. No manners, no pig-pound.
+He'll understand.'
+
+Midmore did his best to make him. He found himself reviling the old man
+in speech and with a joy quite new in all his experience. He wound
+up--it was a plagiarism from a plumber--by telling Mr. Sidney that he
+looked like a turkey-cock, had the morals of a parish bull, and need
+never hope for a new pig-pound as long as he or Midmore lived.
+
+'Very good,' said the giant. 'I reckon you thought you 'ad something
+against me, and now you've come down an' told it me like man to man.
+Quite right. I don't bear malice. Now, you send along those bricks an'
+sand, an' I'll make a do to build the pig-pound myself. If you look at
+my lease you'll find out you're bound to provide me materials for the
+repairs. Only--only I thought there'd be no 'arm in my askin' you to do
+it throughout like.'
+
+Midmore fairly gasped. 'Then, why the devil did you turn my carts back
+when--when I sent them up here to do it throughout for you?'
+
+Mr. Sidney sat down on the floodgates, his eyebrows knitted in thought.
+
+'I'll tell you,' he said slowly. ''Twas too dam' like cheatin' a suckin'
+baby. My woman, she said so too.'
+
+For a few seconds the teachings of the Immoderate Left, whose humour is
+all their own, wrestled with those of Mother Earth, who has her own
+humours. Then Midmore laughed till he could scarcely stand. In due time
+Mr. Sidney laughed too--crowing and wheezing crescendo till it broke
+from him in roars. They shook hands, and Midmore went home grateful that
+he had held his tongue among his companions.
+
+When he reached his house he met three or four men and women on
+horse-back, very muddy indeed, coming down the drive. Feeling hungry
+himself, he asked them if they were hungry. They said they were, and he
+bade them enter. Jimmy took their horses, who seemed to know him. Rhoda
+took their battered hats, led the women upstairs for hairpins, and
+presently fed them all with tea-cakes, poached eggs, anchovy toast, and
+drinks from a coromandel-wood liqueur case which Midmore had never known
+that he possessed.
+
+'And I _will_ say,' said Miss Connie Sperrit, her spurred foot on the
+fender and a smoking muffin in her whip hand, 'Rhoda does one top-hole.
+She always did since I was eight.'
+
+'Seven, Miss, was when you began to 'unt,' said Rhoda, setting down more
+buttered toast.
+
+'And so,' the M.F.H. was saying to Midmore, 'when he got to your brute
+Sidney's land, we had to whip 'em off. It's a regular Alsatia for 'em.
+They know it. Why'--he dropped his voice--'I don't want to say anything
+against Sidney as your tenant, of course, but I do believe the old
+scoundrel's perfectly capable of putting down poison.'
+
+'Sidney's capable of anything,' said Midmore with immense feeling; but
+once again he held his tongue. They were a queer community; yet when
+they had stamped and jingled out to their horses again, the house felt
+hugely big and disconcerting.
+
+This may be reckoned the conscious beginning of his double life. It ran
+in odd channels that summer--a riding school, for instance, near Hayes
+Common and a shooting ground near Wormwood Scrubs. A man who has been
+saddle-galled or shoulder-bruised for half the day is not at his London
+best of evenings; and when the bills for his amusements come in he
+curtails his expenses in other directions. So a cloud settled on
+Midmore's name. His London world talked of a hardening of heart and a
+tightening of purse-strings which signified disloyalty to the Cause. One
+man, a confidant of the old expressive days, attacked him robustiously
+and demanded account of his soul's progress. It was not furnished, for
+Midmore was calculating how much it would cost to repave stables so
+dilapidated that even the village idiot apologised for putting visitors'
+horses into them. The man went away, and served up what he had heard of
+the pig-pound episode as a little newspaper sketch, calculated to annoy.
+Midmore read it with an eye as practical as a woman's, and since most of
+his experiences had been among women, at once sought out a woman to whom
+he might tell his sorrow at the disloyalty of his own familiar friend.
+She was so sympathetic that he went on to confide how his bruised
+heart--she knew all about it--had found so-lace, with a long O, in
+another quarter which he indicated rather carefully in case it might be
+betrayed to other loyal friends. As his hints pointed directly towards
+facile Hampstead, and as his urgent business was the purchase of a horse
+from a dealer, Beckenham way, he felt he had done good work. Later, when
+his friend, the scribe, talked to him alluringly of 'secret gardens' and
+those so-laces to which every man who follows the Wider Morality is
+entitled, Midmore lent him a five-pound note which he had got back on
+the price of a ninety-guinea bay gelding. So true it is, as he read in
+one of the late Colonel Werf's books, that 'the young man of the present
+day would sooner lie under an imputation against his morals than against
+his knowledge of horse-flesh.'
+
+Midmore desired more than he desired anything else at that moment to
+ride and, above all, to jump on a ninety-guinea bay gelding with black
+points and a slovenly habit of hitting his fences. He did not wish many
+people except Mr. Sidney, who very kindly lent his soft meadow behind
+the floodgates, to be privy to the matter, which he rightly foresaw
+would take him to the autumn. So he told such friends as hinted at
+country week-end visits that he had practically let his newly inherited
+house. The rent, he said, was an object to him, for he had lately lost
+large sums through ill-considered benevolences. He would name no names,
+but they could guess. And they guessed loyally all round the circle of
+his acquaintance as they spread the news that explained so much.
+
+There remained only one couple of his once intimate associates to
+pacify. They were deeply sympathetic and utterly loyal, of course, but
+as curious as any of the apes whose diet they had adopted. Midmore met
+them in a suburban train, coming up to town, not twenty minutes after he
+had come off two hours' advanced tuition (one guinea an hour) over
+hurdles in a hall. He had, of course, changed his kit, but his too heavy
+bridle-hand shook a little among the newspapers. On the inspiration of
+the moment, which is your natural liar's best hold, he told them that he
+was condemned to a rest-cure. He would lie in semi-darkness drinking
+milk, for weeks and weeks, cut off even from letters. He was astonished
+and delighted at the ease with which the usual lie confounds the unusual
+intellect. They swallowed it as swiftly as they recommended him to live
+on nuts and fruit; but he saw in the woman's eyes the exact reason she
+would set forth for his retirement. After all, she had as much right to
+express herself as he purposed to take for himself; and Midmore believed
+strongly in the fullest equality of the sexes.
+
+That retirement made one small ripple in the strenuous world. The lady
+who had written the twelve-page letter ten months before sent him
+another of eight pages, analysing all the motives that were leading her
+back to him--should she come?--now that he was ill and alone. Much might
+yet be retrieved, she said, out of the waste of jarring lives and
+piteous misunderstandings. It needed only a hand.
+
+But Midmore needed two, next morning very early, for a devil's
+diversion, among wet coppices, called 'cubbing.'
+
+'You haven't a bad seat,' said Miss Sperrit through the morning-mists.
+'But you're worrying him.'
+
+'He pulls so,' Midmore grunted.
+
+'Let him alone, then. Look out for the branches,' she shouted, as they
+whirled up a splashy ride. Cubs were plentiful. Most of the hounds
+attached themselves to a straight-necked youngster of education who
+scuttled out of the woods into the open fields below.
+
+'Hold on!' some one shouted. 'Turn 'em, Midmore. That's your brute
+Sidney's land. It's all wire.'
+
+'Oh, Connie, stop!' Mrs. Sperrit shrieked as her daughter charged at a
+boundary-hedge.
+
+'Wire be damned! I had it all out a fortnight ago. Come on!' This was
+Midmore, buffeting into it a little lower down.
+
+'_I_ knew that!' Connie cried over her shoulder, and she flitted across
+the open pasture, humming to herself.
+
+'Oh, of course! If some people have private information, they can afford
+to thrust.' This was a snuff-coloured habit into which Miss Sperrit had
+cannoned down the ride.
+
+'What! 'Midmore got Sidney to heel? _You_ never did that, Sperrit.' This
+was Mr. Fisher, M.F.H., enlarging the breach Midmore had made.
+
+'No, confound him!' said the father testily. 'Go on, sir! _Injecto ter
+pulvere_--you've kicked half the ditch into my eye already.'
+
+They killed that cub a little short of the haven his mother had told him
+to make for--a two-acre Alsatia of a gorse-patch to which the M.F.H. had
+been denied access for the last fifteen seasons. He expressed his
+gratitude before all the field and Mr. Sidney, at Mr. Sidney's
+farm-house door.
+
+'And if there should be any poultry claims--' he went on.
+
+'There won't be,' said Midmore. 'It's too like cheating a sucking child,
+isn't it, Mr. Sidney?'
+
+'You've got me!' was all the reply. 'I be used to bein' put upon, but
+you've got me, Mus' Midmore.'
+
+Midmore pointed to a new brick pig-pound built in strict disregard of
+the terms of the life-tenant's lease. The gesture told the tale to the
+few who did not know, and they shouted.
+
+Such pagan delights as these were followed by pagan sloth of evenings
+when men and women elsewhere are at their brightest. But Midmore
+preferred to lie out on a yellow silk couch, reading works of a debasing
+vulgarity; or, by invitation, to dine with the Sperrits and savages of
+their kidney. These did not expect flights of fancy or phrasing. They
+lied, except about horses, grudgingly and of necessity, not for art's
+sake; and, men and women alike, they expressed themselves along their
+chosen lines with the serene indifference of the larger animals. Then
+Midmore would go home and identify them, one by one, out of the
+natural-history books by Mr. Surtees, on the table beside the sofa. At
+first they looked upon him coolly, but when the tale of the removed wire
+and the recaptured gorse had gone the rounds, they accepted him for a
+person willing to play their games. True, a faction suspended judgment
+for a while, because they shot, and hoped that Midmore would serve the
+glorious mammon of pheasant-raising rather than the unkempt god of
+fox-hunting. But after he had shown his choice, they did not ask by what
+intellectual process he had arrived at it. He hunted three, sometimes
+four, times a week, which necessitated not only one bay gelding (£94:
+10s.), but a mannerly white-stockinged chestnut (£114), and a black
+mare, rather long in the back but with a mouth of silk (£150), who so
+evidently preferred to carry a lady that it would have been cruel to
+have baulked her. Besides, with that handling she could be sold at a
+profit. And besides, the hunt was a quiet, intimate, kindly little hunt,
+not anxious for strangers, of good report in the _Field_, the servant of
+one M.F.H., given to hospitality, riding well its own horses, and, with
+the exception of Midmore, not novices. But as Miss Sperrit observed,
+after the M.F.H. had said some things to him at a gate: 'It _is_ a pity
+you don't know as much as your horse, but you will in time. It takes
+years and yee-ars. I've been at it for fifteen and I'm only just
+learning. But you've made a decent kick-off.'
+
+So he kicked off in wind and wet and mud, wondering quite sincerely why
+the bubbling ditches and sucking pastures held him from day to day, or
+what so-lace he could find on off days in chasing grooms and
+brick-layers round outhouses.
+
+To make sure he up-rooted himself one week-end of heavy mid-winter rain,
+and re-entered his lost world in the character of Galahad fresh from a
+rest-cure. They all agreed, with an eye over his shoulder for the next
+comer, that he was a different man; but when they asked him for the
+symptoms of nervous strain, and led him all through their own, he
+realised he had lost much of his old skill in lying. His three months'
+absence, too, had put him hopelessly behind the London field. The
+movements, the allusions, the slang of the game had changed. The couples
+had rearranged themselves or were re-crystallizing in fresh triangles,
+whereby he put his foot in it badly. Only one great soul (he who had
+written the account of the pig-pound episode) stood untouched by the
+vast flux of time, and Midmore lent him another fiver for his integrity.
+A woman took him, in the wet forenoon, to a pronouncement on the Oneness
+of Impulse in Humanity, which struck him as a polysyllabic _résumé_ of
+Mr. Sidney's domestic arrangements, plus a clarion call to 'shock
+civilisation into common-sense.'
+
+'And you'll come to tea with me to-morrow?' she asked, after lunch,
+nibbling cashew nuts from a saucer. Midmore replied that there were
+great arrears of work to overtake when a man had been put away for
+so long.
+
+'But you've come back like a giant refreshed.... I hope that
+Daphne'--this was the lady of the twelve and the eight-page
+letter--'will be with us too. She has misunderstood herself, like so
+many of us,' the woman murmured, 'but I think eventually ...' she flung
+out her thin little hands. 'However, these are things that each lonely
+soul must adjust for itself.'
+
+'Indeed, yes,' said Midmore with a deep sigh. The old tricks were
+sprouting in the old atmosphere like mushrooms in a dung-pit. He passed
+into an abrupt reverie, shook his head, as though stung by tumultuous
+memories, and departed without any ceremony of farewell to--catch a
+mid-afternoon express where a man meets associates who talk horse, and
+weather as it affects the horse, all the way down. What worried him most
+was that he had missed a day with the hounds.
+
+He met Rhoda's keen old eyes without flinching; and the drawing-room
+looked very comfortable that wet evening at tea. After all, his visit to
+town had not been wholly a failure. He had burned quite a bushel of
+letters at his flat. A flat--here he reached mechanically towards the
+worn volumes near the sofa--a flat was a consuming animal. As for
+Daphne ... he opened at random on the words: 'His lordship then did as
+desired and disclosed a _tableau_ of considerable strength and variety.'
+Midmore reflected: 'And I used to think.... But she wasn't.... We were
+all babblers and skirters together.... I didn't babble much--thank
+goodness--but I skirted.' He turned the pages backward for more _Sortes
+Surteesianae_, and read: 'When at length they rose to go to bed it
+struck each man as he followed his neighbour upstairs, that the man
+before him walked very crookedly.' He laughed aloud at the fire.
+
+'What about to-morrow?' Rhoda asked, entering with garments over her
+shoulder. 'It's never stopped raining since you left. You'll be
+plastered out of sight an' all in five minutes. You'd better wear your
+next best, 'adn't you? I'm afraid they've shrank. 'Adn't you best
+try 'em on?'
+
+'Here?' said Midmore.
+
+''Suit yourself. I bathed you when you wasn't larger than a leg o'
+lamb,' said the ex-ladies'-maid.
+
+'Rhoda, one of these days I shall get a valet, and a married butler.'
+
+'There's many a true word spoke in jest. But nobody's huntin'
+to-morrow.'
+
+'Why? Have they cancelled the meet?'
+
+'They say it only means slipping and over-reaching in the mud, and they
+all 'ad enough of that to-day. Charlie told me so just now.'
+
+'Oh!' It seemed that the word of Mr. Sperrit's confidential clerk had
+weight.
+
+'Charlie came down to help Mr. Sidney lift the gates,' Rhoda continued.
+
+'The floodgates? They are perfectly easy to handle now. I've put in a
+wheel and a winch.'
+
+'When the brook's really up they must be took clean out on account of
+the rubbish blockin' 'em. That's why Charlie came down.'
+
+Midmore grunted impatiently. 'Everybody has talked to me about that
+brook ever since I came here. It's never done anything yet.'
+
+'This 'as been a dry summer. If you care to look now, sir, I'll get you
+a lantern.'
+
+She paddled out with him into a large wet night. Half-way down the lawn
+her light was reflected on shallow brown water, pricked through with
+grass blades at the edges. Beyond that light, the brook was strangling
+and kicking among hedges and tree-trunks.
+
+'What on earth will happen to the big rose-bed?' was Midmore's first
+word.
+
+'It generally 'as to be restocked after a flood. Ah!' she raised her
+lantern. 'There's two garden-seats knockin' against the sun-dial. Now,
+that won't do the roses any good.'
+
+'This is too absurd. There ought to be some decently thought-out
+system--for--for dealing with this sort of thing.' He peered into the
+rushing gloom. There seemed to be no end to the moisture and the racket.
+In town he had noticed nothing.
+
+'It can't be 'elped,' said Rhoda. 'It's just what it does do once in
+just so often. We'd better go back.'
+
+All earth under foot was sliding in a thousand liquid noises towards
+the hoarse brook. Somebody wailed from the house: ''Fraid o' the water!
+Come 'ere! 'Fraid o' the water!'
+
+'That's Jimmy. Wet always takes 'im that way,' she explained. The idiot
+charged into them, shaking with terror.
+
+'Brave Jimmy! How brave of Jimmy! Come into the hall. What Jimmy got
+now?' she crooned. It was a sodden note which ran: 'Dear Rhoda--Mr.
+Lotten, with whom I rode home this afternoon, told me that if this wet
+keeps up, he's afraid the fish-pond he built last year, where Coxen's
+old mill-dam was, will go, as the dam did once before, he says. If it
+does it's bound to come down the brook. It may be all right, but perhaps
+you had better look out. C.S.'
+
+'If Coxen's dam goes, that means.... I'll 'ave the drawing-room carpet
+up at once to be on the safe side. The claw-'ammer is in the libery.'
+
+'Wait a minute. Sidney's gates are out, you said?'
+
+'Both. He'll need it if Coxen's pond goes.... I've seen it once.'
+
+'I'll just slip down and have a look at Sidney. Light the lantern again,
+please, Rhoda.'
+
+'You won't get _him_ to stir. He's been there since he was born. But
+_she_ don't know anything. I'll fetch your waterproof and some
+top-boots.'
+
+''Fraid o' the water! 'Fraid o' the water!' Jimmy sobbed, pressed
+against a corner of the hall, his hands to his eyes.
+
+'All right, Jimmy. Jimmy can help play with the carpet,' Rhoda
+answered, as Midmore went forth into the darkness and the roarings all
+round. He had never seen such an utterly unregulated state of affairs.
+There was another lantern reflected on the streaming drive.
+
+'Hi! Rhoda! Did you get my note? I came down to make sure. I thought,
+afterwards, Jimmy might funk the water!'
+
+'It's me--Miss Sperrit,' Midmore cried. 'Yes, we got it, thanks.'
+
+'You're back, then. Oh, good!... Is it bad down with you?'
+
+'I'm going to Sidney's to have a look.'
+
+'You won't get _him_ out. 'Lucky I met Bob Lotten. I told him he hadn't
+any business impounding water for his idiotic trout without
+rebuilding the dam.'
+
+'How far up is it? I've only been there once.'
+
+'Not more than four miles as the water will come. He says he's opened
+all the sluices.'
+
+She had turned and fallen into step beside him, her hooded head bowed
+against the thinning rain. As usual she was humming to herself.
+
+'Why on earth did you come out in this weather?' Midmore asked.
+
+'It was worse when you were in town. The rain's taking off now. If it
+wasn't for that pond, I wouldn't worry so much. There's Sidney's bell.
+Come on!' She broke into a run. A cracked bell was jangling feebly down
+the valley.
+
+'Keep on the road!' Midmore shouted. The ditches were snorting
+bank-full on either side, and towards the brook-side the fields were
+afloat and beginning to move in the darkness.
+
+'Catch me going off it! There's his light burning all right.' She halted
+undistressed at a little rise. 'But the flood's in the orchard. Look!'
+She swung her lantern to show a front rank of old apple-trees reflected
+in still, out-lying waters beyond the half-drowned hedge. They could
+hear above the thud-thud of the gorged floodgates, shrieks in two keys
+as monotonous as a steam-organ.
+
+'The high one's the pig.' Miss Sperrit laughed.
+
+'All right! I'll get _her_ out. You stay where you are, and I'll see you
+home afterwards.'
+
+'But the water's only just over the road,' she objected.
+
+'Never mind. Don't you move. Promise?'
+
+'All right. You take my stick, then, and feel for holes in case
+anything's washed out anywhere. This _is_ a lark!'
+
+Midmore took it, and stepped into the water that moved sluggishly as yet
+across the farm road which ran to Sidney's front door from the raised
+and metalled public road. It was half way up to his knees when he
+knocked. As he looked back Miss Sperrit's lantern seemed to float in
+mid-ocean.
+
+'You can't come in or the water'll come with you. I've bunged up all the
+cracks,' Mr. Sidney shouted from within. 'Who be ye?'
+
+'Take me out! Take me out!' the woman shrieked, and the pig from his
+sty behind the house urgently seconded the motion.
+
+'I'm Midmore! Coxen's old mill-dam is likely to go, they say. Come out!'
+
+'I told 'em it would when they made a fish-pond of it. 'Twasn't ever
+puddled proper. But it's a middlin' wide valley. She's got room to
+spread.... Keep still, or I'll take and duck you in the cellar!... You
+go 'ome, Mus' Midmore, an' take the law o' Mus' Lotten soon's you've
+changed your socks.'
+
+'Confound you, aren't you coming out?'
+
+'To catch my death o' cold? I'm all right where I be. I've seen it
+before. But you can take _her_. She's no sort o' use or sense.... Climb
+out through the window. Didn't I tell you I'd plugged the door-cracks,
+you fool's daughter?' The parlour window opened, and the woman flung
+herself into Midmore's arms, nearly knocking him down. Mr. Sidney leaned
+out of the window, pipe in mouth.
+
+'Take her 'ome,' he said, and added oracularly:
+
+     'Two women in one house,
+     Two cats an' one mouse,
+     Two dogs an' one bone--
+     Which I will leave alone.
+
+I've seen it before.' Then he shut and fastened the window.
+
+'A trap! A trap! You had ought to have brought a trap for me. I'll be
+drowned in this wet,' the woman cried.
+
+'Hold up! You can't be any wetter than you are. Come along!' Midmore
+did not at all like the feel of the water over his boot-tops.
+
+'Hooray! Come along!' Miss Sperrit's lantern, not fifty yards away,
+waved cheerily.
+
+The woman threshed towards it like a panic-stricken goose, fell on her
+knees, was jerked up again by Midmore, and pushed on till she collapsed
+at Miss Sperrit's feet.
+
+'But you won't get bronchitis if you go straight to Mr. Midmore's
+house,' said the unsympathetic maiden.
+
+'O Gawd! O Gawd! I wish our 'eavenly Father 'ud forgive me my sins an'
+call me 'ome,' the woman sobbed. 'But I won't go to _'is_ 'ouse!
+I won't.'
+
+'All right, then. Stay here. Now, if we run,' Miss Sperrit whispered to
+Midmore, 'she'll follow us. Not too fast!'
+
+They set off at a considerable trot, and the woman lumbered behind them,
+bellowing, till they met a third lantern--Rhoda holding Jimmy's hand.
+She had got the carpet up, she said, and was escorting Jimmy past the
+water that he dreaded.
+
+'That's all right,' Miss Sperrit pronounced. 'Take Mrs. Sidney back with
+you, Rhoda, and put her to bed. I'll take Jimmy with me. You aren't
+afraid of the water now, are you, Jimmy?'
+
+'Not afraid of anything now.' Jimmy reached for her hand. 'But get away
+from the water quick.'
+
+'I'm coming with you,' Midmore interrupted.
+
+'You most certainly are not. You're drenched. She threw you twice. Go
+home and change. You may have to be out again all night. It's only
+half-past seven now. I'm perfectly safe.' She flung herself lightly over
+a stile, and hurried uphill by the foot-path, out of reach of all but
+the boasts of the flood below.
+
+Rhoda, dead silent, herded Mrs. Sidney to the house.
+
+'You'll find your things laid out on the bed,' she said to Midmore as he
+came up. I'll attend to--to this. _She's_ got nothing to cry for.'
+
+Midmore raced into dry kit, and raced uphill to be rewarded by the sight
+of the lantern just turning into the Sperrits' gate. He came back by way
+of Sidney's farm, where he saw the light twinkling across three acres of
+shining water, for the rain had ceased and the clouds were stripping
+overhead, though the brook was noisier than ever. Now there was only
+that doubtful mill-pond to look after--that and his swirling world
+abandoned to himself alone.
+
+'We shall have to sit up for it,' said Rhoda after dinner. And as the
+drawing-room commanded the best view of the rising flood, they watched
+it from there for a long time, while all the clocks of the house bore
+them company.
+
+''Tisn't the water, it's the mud on the skirting-board after it goes
+down that I mind,' Rhoda whispered. 'The last time Coxen's mill broke, I
+remember it came up to the second--no, third--step o' Mr.
+Sidney's stairs.'
+
+'What did Sidney do about it?'
+
+'He made a notch on the step. 'E said it was a record. Just like 'im.'
+
+'It's up to the drive now,' said Midmore after another long wait. 'And
+the rain stopped before eight, you know.'
+
+'Then Coxen's dam _'as_ broke, and that's the first of the flood-water.'
+She stared out beside him. The water was rising in sudden pulses--an
+inch or two at a time, with great sweeps and lagoons and a sudden
+increase of the brook's proper thunder.
+
+'You can't stand all the time. Take a chair,' Midmore said presently.
+
+Rhoda looked back into the bare room. 'The carpet bein' up _does_ make a
+difference. Thank you, sir, I _will_ 'ave a set-down.'
+
+''Right over the drive now,' said Midmore. He opened the window and
+leaned out. 'Is that wind up the valley, Rhoda?'
+
+'No, that's _it_! But I've seen it before.'
+
+There was not so much a roar as the purposeful drive of a tide across a
+jagged reef, which put down every other sound for twenty minutes. A wide
+sheet of water hurried up to the little terrace on which the house
+stood, pushed round either corner, rose again and stretched, as it were,
+yawning beneath the moonlight, joined other sheets waiting for them in
+unsuspected hollows, and lay out all in one. A puff of wind followed.
+
+'It's right up to the wall now. I can touch it with my finger.' Midmore
+bent over the window-sill.
+
+'I can 'ear it in the cellars,' said Rhoda dolefully. 'Well, we've done
+what we can! I think I'll 'ave a look.' She left the room and was absent
+half an hour or more, during which time he saw a full-grown tree
+hauling itself across the lawn by its naked roots. Then a hurdle knocked
+against the wall, caught on an iron foot-scraper just outside, and made
+a square-headed ripple. The cascade through the cellar-windows
+diminished.
+
+'It's dropping,' Rhoda cried, as she returned. 'It's only tricklin' into
+my cellars now.'
+
+'Wait a minute. I believe--I believe I can see the scraper on the edge
+of the drive just showing!'
+
+In another ten minutes the drive itself roughened and became gravel
+again, tilting all its water towards the shrubbery.
+
+'The pond's gone past,' Rhoda announced. 'We shall only 'ave the common
+flood to contend with now. You'd better go to bed.'
+
+'I ought to go down and have another look at Sidney before daylight.'
+
+'No need. You can see 'is light burnin' from all the upstairs windows.'
+
+'By the way. I forgot about _her_. Where've you put her?'
+
+'In my bed.' Rhoda's tone was ice. 'I wasn't going to undo a room for
+_that_ stuff.'
+
+'But it--it couldn't be helped,' said Midmore. 'She was half drowned.
+One mustn't be narrow-minded, Rhoda, even if her position isn't
+quite--er--regular.'
+
+'Pfff! I wasn't worryin' about that.' She leaned forward to the window.
+'There's the edge of the lawn showin' now. It falls as fast as it rises.
+Dearie'--the change of tone made Midmore jump--'didn't you know that I
+was 'is first? _That's_ what makes it so hard to bear.' Midmore looked
+at the long lizard-like back and had no words.
+
+She went on, still talking through the black window-pane:
+
+'Your pore dear auntie was very kind about it. She said she'd make all
+allowances for one, but no more. Never any more.... Then, you didn't
+know 'oo Charlie was all this time?'
+
+'Your nephew, I always thought.'
+
+'Well, well,' she spoke pityingly. 'Everybody's business being nobody's
+business, I suppose no one thought to tell you. But Charlie made 'is own
+way for 'imself from the beginnin'!... But _her_ upstairs, she never
+produced anything. Just an 'ousekeeper, as you might say. 'Turned over
+an' went to sleep straight off. She 'ad the impudence to ask me for 'ot
+sherry-gruel.'
+
+'Did you give it to her,' said Midmore.
+
+'Me? Your sherry? No!'
+
+The memory of Sidney's outrageous rhyme at the window, and Charlie's
+long nose (he thought it looked interested at the time) as he passed the
+copies of Mrs. Werf's last four wills, overcame Midmore without warning.
+
+'This damp is givin' you a cold,' said Rhoda, rising. 'There you go
+again! Sneezin's a sure sign of it. Better go to bed. You can't do any
+thin' excep''--she stood rigid, with crossed arms--'about me.'
+
+'Well. What about you?' Midmore stuffed the handkerchief into his
+pocket.
+
+'Now you know about it, what are you goin' to do--sir?'
+
+She had the answer on her lean cheek before the sentence was finished.
+
+'Go and see if you can get us something to eat, Rhoda. And beer.'
+
+'I expec' the larder'll be in a swim,' she replied, 'but old bottled
+stuff don't take any harm from wet.' She returned with a tray, all in
+order, and they ate and drank together, and took observations of the
+falling flood till dawn opened its bleared eyes on the wreck of what had
+been a fair garden. Midmore, cold and annoyed, found himself humming:
+
+     'That flood strewed wrecks upon the grass,
+     That ebb swept out the flocks to sea.
+
+There isn't a rose left, Rhoda!
+
+     An awesome ebb and flow it was
+     To many more than mine and me.
+     But each will mourn his ...
+
+It'll cost me a hundred.'
+
+'Now we know the worst,' said Rhoda, 'we can go to bed. I'll lay on the
+kitchen sofa. His light's burnin' still.'
+
+'And _she_?'
+
+'Dirty old cat! You ought to 'ear 'er snore!'
+
+At ten o'clock in the morning, after a maddening hour in his own garden
+on the edge of the retreating brook, Midmore went off to confront more
+damage at Sidney's. The first thing that met him was the pig, snowy
+white, for the water had washed him out of his new sty, calling on high
+heaven for breakfast. The front door had been forced open, and the flood
+had registered its own height in a brown dado on the walls. Midmore
+chased the pig out and called up the stairs.
+
+'I be abed o' course. Which step 'as she rose to?' Sidney cried from
+above. 'The fourth? Then it's beat all records. Come up.'
+
+'Are you ill?' Midmore asked as he entered the room. The red eyelids
+blinked cheerfully. Mr. Sidney, beneath a sumptuous patch-work quilt,
+was smoking.
+
+'Nah! I'm only thankin' God I ain't my own landlord. Take that cheer.
+What's she done?'
+
+'It hasn't gone down enough for me to make sure.'
+
+'Them floodgates o' yourn'll be middlin' far down the brook by now; an'
+your rose-garden have gone after 'em. I saved my chickens, though. You'd
+better get Mus' Sperrit to take the law o' Lotten an' 'is fish-pond.'
+
+'No, thanks. I've trouble enough without that.'
+
+'Hev ye?' Mr. Sidney grinned. 'How did ye make out with those two women
+o' mine last night? I lay they fought.'
+
+'You infernal old scoundrel!' Midmore laughed.
+
+'I be--an' then again I bain't,' was the placid answer. 'But, Rhoda,
+_she_ wouldn't ha' left me last night. Fire or flood, she wouldn't.'
+
+'Why didn't you ever marry her?' Midmore asked.
+
+'Waste of good money. She was willin' without.'
+
+There was a step on the gritty mud below, and a voice humming. Midmore
+rose quickly saying: 'Well, I suppose you're all right now.'
+
+'I be. I ain't a landlord, nor I ain't young--nor anxious. Oh, Mus'
+Midmore! Would it make any odds about her thirty pounds comin' regular
+if I married her? Charlie said maybe 'twould.'
+
+'Did he?' Midmore turned at the door. 'And what did Jimmy say about it?'
+
+'Jimmy?' Mr. Sidney chuckled as the joke took him. 'Oh, _he's_ none o'
+mine. He's Charlie's look-out.'
+
+Midmore slammed the door and ran downstairs.
+
+'Well, this is a--sweet--mess,' said Miss Sperrit in shortest skirts and
+heaviest riding-boots. 'I had to come down and have a look at it. "The
+old mayor climbed the belfry tower." 'Been up all night nursing
+your family?'
+
+'Nearly that! Isn't it cheerful?' He pointed through the door to the
+stairs with small twig-drift on the last three treads.
+
+'It's a record, though,' said she, and hummed to herself:
+
+     'That flood strewed wrecks upon the grass,
+     That ebb swept out the flocks to sea.'
+
+'You're always singing that, aren't you?' Midmore said suddenly as she
+passed into the parlour where slimy chairs had been stranded at
+all angles.
+
+'Am I? Now I come to think of it I believe I do. They say I always hum
+when I ride. Have you noticed it?'
+
+'Of course I have. I notice every--'
+
+'Oh,' she went on hurriedly. 'We had it for the village cantata last
+winter--"The Brides of Enderby."'
+
+'No! "High Tide on the Coast of Lincolnshire."' For some reason Midmore
+spoke sharply.
+
+'Just like that.' She pointed to the befouled walls. 'I say.... Let's
+get this furniture a little straight.... You know it too?'
+
+'Every word, since you sang it of course.'
+
+'When?'
+
+'The first night I ever came down. You rode past the drawing-room window
+in the dark singing it--"And sweeter woman--"'
+
+'I thought the house was empty then. Your aunt always let us use that
+short cut. Ha-hadn't we better get this out into the passage? It'll all
+have to come out anyhow. You take the other side.' They began to lift a
+heavyish table. Their words came jerkily between gasps and their faces
+were as white as--a newly washed and very hungry pig.
+
+'Look out!' Midmore shouted. His legs were whirled from under him, as
+the table, grunting madly, careened and knocked the girl out of sight.
+
+The wild boar of Asia could not have cut down a couple more
+scientifically, but this little pig lacked his ancestor's nerve and fled
+shrieking over their bodies.
+
+'Are you hurt, darling?' was Midmore's first word, and 'No--I'm only
+winded--dear,' was Miss Sperrit's, as he lifted her out of her corner,
+her hat over one eye and her right cheek a smear of mud.
+
+They fed him a little later on some chicken-feed that they found in
+Sidney's quiet barn, a pail of buttermilk out of the dairy, and a
+quantity of onions from a shelf in the back-kitchen.
+
+'Seed-onions, most likely,' said Connie. 'You'll hear about this.'
+
+'What does it matter? They ought to have been gilded. We must buy him.'
+
+'And keep him as long as he lives,' she agreed. 'But I think I ought to
+go home now. You see, when I came out I didn't expect ... Did you?'
+
+'No! Yes.... It had to come.... But if any one had told me an hour
+ago!... Sidney's unspeakable parlour--and the mud on the carpet.'
+
+'Oh, I say! Is my cheek clean now?'
+
+'Not quite. Lend me your hanky again a minute, darling.... What a purler
+you came!'
+
+'You can't talk. 'Remember when your chin hit that table and you said
+"blast"! I was just going to laugh.'
+
+'You didn't laugh when I picked you up. You were going "oo-oo-oo" like a
+little owl.'
+
+'My dear child--'
+
+'Say that again!'
+
+'My dear child. (Do you really like it? I keep it for my best friends.)
+My _dee-ar_ child, I thought I was going to be sick there and then. He
+knocked every ounce of wind out of me--the angel! But I must really go.'
+
+They set off together, very careful not to join hands or take arms.
+
+'Not across the fields,' said Midmore at the stile. 'Come round by--by
+your own place.'
+
+She flushed indignantly.
+
+'It will be yours in a little time,' he went on, shaken with his own
+audacity.
+
+'Not so much of your little times, if you please!' She shied like a colt
+across the road; then instantly, like a colt, her eyes lit with new
+curiosity as she came in sight of the drive-gates.
+
+'And not quite so much of your airs and graces, Madam,' Midmore
+returned, 'or I won't let you use our drive as a short cut any more.'
+
+'Oh, I'll be good. I'll be good.' Her voice changed suddenly. 'I swear
+I'll try to be good, dear. I'm not much of a thing at the best. What
+made _you_....'
+
+'I'm worse--worse! Miles and oceans worse. But what does it matter now?'
+
+They halted beside the gate-pillars.
+
+'I see!' she said, looking up the sodden carriage sweep to the front
+door porch where Rhoda was slapping a wet mat to and fro. '_I_ see....
+Now, I really must go home. No! Don't you come. I must speak to Mother
+first all by myself.'
+
+He watched her up the hill till she was out of sight.
+
+
+
+
+     THE FLOODS
+
+     The rain it rains without a stay
+       In the hills above us, in the hills;
+     And presently the floods break way
+       Whose strength is in the hills.
+     The trees they suck from every cloud,
+     The valley brooks they roar aloud--
+     Bank-high for the lowlands, lowlands,
+       Lowlands under the hills!
+
+     The first wood down is sere and small,
+       From the hills, the brishings off the hills;
+     And then come by the bats and all
+       We cut last year in the hills;
+     And then the roots we tried to cleave
+     But found too tough and had to leave--
+     Polting through the lowlands, lowlands,
+       Lowlands under the hills!
+
+     The eye shall look, the ear shall hark
+       To the hills, the doings in the hills,
+     And rivers mating in the dark
+       With tokens from the hills.
+     Now what is weak will surely go,
+     And what is strong must prove it so.
+     Stand fast in the lowlands, lowlands,
+       Lowlands under the hills!
+
+     The floods they shall not be afraid--
+       Nor the hills above 'em, nor the hills--
+     Of any fence which man has made
+       Betwixt him and the hills.
+     The waters shall not reckon twice
+     For any work of man's device,
+     But bid it down to the lowlands, lowlands,
+       Lowlands under the hills!
+
+     The floods shall sweep corruption clean--
+       By the hills, the blessing of the hills--
+     That more the meadows may be green
+       New-amended from the hills.
+     The crops and cattle shall increase,
+     Nor little children shall not cease--
+     Go--plough the lowlands, lowlands,
+       Lowlands under the hills!
+
+
+
+
+     THE FABULISTS
+
+     When all the world would have a matter hid,
+       Since Truth is seldom friend to any crowd,
+     Men write in fable, as old Æsop did,
+       Jesting at that which none will name aloud.
+     And this they needs must do, or it will fall
+     Unless they please they are not heard at all.
+
+     When desperate Folly daily laboureth
+       To work confusion upon all we have,
+     When diligent Sloth demandeth Freedom's death,
+       And banded Fear commandeth Honour's grave--
+     Even in that certain hour before the fall
+     Unless men please they are not heard at all.
+
+     Needs must all please, yet some not all for need
+       Needs must all toil, yet some not all for gain,
+     But that men taking pleasure may take heed,
+       Whom present toil shall snatch from later pain.
+     Thus some have toiled but their reward was small
+     Since, though they pleased, they were not heard at all.
+
+     This was the lock that lay upon our lips,
+       This was the yoke that we have undergone,
+     Denying us all pleasant fellowships
+       As in our time and generation.
+     Our pleasures unpursued age past recall.
+     And for our pains--we are not heard at all.
+
+     What man hears aught except the groaning guns?
+       What man heeds aught save what each instant brings?
+     When each man's life all imaged life outruns,
+       What man shall pleasure in imaginings?
+     So it hath fallen, as it was bound to fall,
+       We are not, nor we were not, heard at all.
+
+
+
+The Vortex
+
+(August 1914)
+
+     'Thy Lord spoke by inspiration to the Bee.'
+
+     AL KORAN.
+
+I have, to my grief and loss, suppressed several notable stories of my
+friend, the Hon. A.M. Penfentenyou[8], once Minister of Woods and
+Waysides in De Thouar's first administration; later, Premier in all but
+name of one of Our great and growing Dominions; and now, as always, the
+idol of his own Province, which is two and one-half the size of England.
+
+[Footnote 8: See 'The Puzzler,' _Actions and Reactions_.]
+
+For this reason I hold myself at liberty to deal with some portion of
+the truth concerning Penfentenyou's latest visit to Our shores. He
+arrived at my house by car, on a hot summer day, in a white waistcoat
+and spats, sweeping black frock-coat and glistening top-hat--a little
+rounded, perhaps, at the edges, but agile as ever in mind and body.
+
+'What is the trouble now?' I asked, for the last time we had met,
+Penfentenyou was floating a three-million pound loan for his beloved but
+unscrupulous Province, and I did not wish to entertain any more of his
+financial friends.
+
+'We,' Penfentenyou replied ambassadorially, 'have come to have a Voice
+in Your Councils. By the way, the Voice is coming down on the evening
+train with my Agent-General. I thought you wouldn't mind if I invited
+'em. You know We're going to share Your burdens henceforward. You'd
+better get into training.'
+
+'Certainly,' I replied. 'What's the Voice like?'
+
+'He's in earnest,' said Penfentenyou. 'He's got It, and he's got It bad.
+He'll give It to you,' he said.
+
+'What's his name?'
+
+'We call him all sorts of names, but I think you'd better call him Mr.
+Lingnam. You won't have to do it more than once.'
+
+'What's he suffering from?'
+
+'The Empire. He's pretty nearly cured us all of Imperialism at home.
+P'raps he'll cure you.'
+
+'Very good. What am I to do with him?'
+
+'Don't you worry,' said Penfentenyou. 'He'll do it.'
+
+And when Mr. Lingnam appeared half-an-hour later with the Agent-General
+for Penfentenyou's Dominion, he did just that.
+
+He advanced across the lawn eloquent as all the tides. He said he had
+been observing to the Agent-General that it was both politically immoral
+and strategically unsound that forty-four million people should bear the
+entire weight of the defences of Our mighty Empire, but, as he had
+observed (here the Agent-General evaporated), we stood now upon the
+threshold of a new era in which the self-governing _and_ self-respecting
+(bis) Dominions would rightly and righteously, as co-partners in Empery,
+shoulder their share of any burden which the Pan-Imperial Council of
+the Future should allot. The Agent-General was already arranging for
+drinks with Penfentenyou at the other end of the garden. Mr. Lingnam
+swept me on to the most remote bench and settled to his theme.
+
+We dined at eight. At nine Mr. Lingnam was only drawing abreast of
+things Imperial. At ten the Agent-General, who earns his salary, was
+shamelessly dozing on the sofa. At eleven he and Penfentenyou went to
+bed. At midnight Mr. Lingnam brought down his big-bellied despatch box
+with the newspaper clippings and set to federating the Empire in
+earnest. I remember that he had three alternative plans. As a dealer in
+words, I plumped for the resonant third--'Reciprocally co-ordinated
+Senatorial Hegemony'--which he then elaborated in detail for
+three-quarters of an hour. At half-past one he urged me to have faith
+and to remember that nothing mattered except the Idea. Then he retired
+to his room, accompanied by one glass of cold water, and I went into the
+dawn-lit garden and prayed to any Power that might be off duty for the
+blood of Mr. Lingnam, Penfentenyou, and the Agent-General.
+
+To me, as I have often observed elsewhere, the hour of earliest dawn is
+fortunate, and the wind that runs before it has ever been my most
+comfortable counsellor.
+
+'Wait!' it said, all among the night's expectant rosebuds. 'To-morrow is
+also a day. Wait upon the Event!'
+
+I went to bed so at peace with God and Man and Guest that when I waked I
+visited Mr. Lingnam in pyjamas, and he talked to me Pan-Imperially for
+half-an-hour before his bath. Later, the Agent-General said he had
+letters to write, and Penfentenyou invented a Cabinet crisis in his
+adored Dominion which would keep him busy with codes and cables all the
+forenoon. But I said firmly, 'Mr. Lingnam wishes to see a little of the
+country round here. You are coming with us in your own car.'
+
+'It's a hired one,' Penfentenyou objected.
+
+'Yes. Paid for by me as a taxpayer,' I replied.
+
+'And yours has a top, and the weather looks thundery,' said the
+Agent-General. 'Ours hasn't a wind-screen. Even our goggles were hired.'
+
+'I'll lend you goggles,' I said. 'My car is under repairs.'
+
+The hireling who had looked to be returned to London spat and growled on
+the drive. She was an open car, capable of some eighteen miles on the
+flat, with tetanic gears and a perpetual palsy.
+
+'It won't make the least difference,' sighed the Agent-General. 'He'll
+only raise his voice. He did it all the way coming down.'
+
+'I say,' said Penfentenyou suspiciously, 'what are you doing all this
+_for_?'
+
+'Love of the Empire,' I answered, as Mr. Lingnam tripped up in dust-coat
+and binoculars. 'Now, Mr. Lingnam will tell us exactly what he wants to
+see. He probably knows more about England than the rest of us put
+together.'
+
+'I read it up yesterday,' said Mr. Lingnam simply. While we stowed the
+lunch-basket (one can never make too sure with a hired car) he outlined
+a very pretty and instructive little day's run.
+
+'You'll drive, of course?' said Penfentenyou to him. 'It's the only
+thing you know anything about.'
+
+This astonished me, for your greater Federationists are rarely
+mechanicians, but Mr. Lingnam said he would prefer to be inside for the
+present and enjoy our conversation.
+
+Well settled on the back seat, he did not once lift his eyes to the
+mellow landscape around him, or throw a word at the life of the English
+road which to me is one renewed and unreasoned orgy of delight. The
+mustard-coloured scouts of the Automobile Association; their natural
+enemies, the unjust police; our natural enemies, the deliberate
+market-day cattle, broadside-on at all corners, the bicycling
+butcher-boy a furlong behind; road-engines that pulled giddy-go-rounds,
+rifle galleries, and swings, and sucked snortingly from wayside ponds in
+defiance of the notice-board; traction-engines, their trailers piled
+high with road metal; uniformed village nurses, one per seven statute
+miles, flitting by on their wheels; governess-carts full of pink
+children jogging unconcernedly past roaring, brazen touring-cars; the
+wayside rector with virgins in attendance, their faces screwed up
+against our dust; motor-bicycles of every shape charging down at every
+angle; red flags of rifle-ranges; detachments of dusty-putteed
+Territorials; coveys of flagrant children playing in mid-street, and the
+wise, educated English dog safe and quite silent on the pavement if his
+fool-mistress would but cease from trying to save him, passed and
+repassed us in sunlit or shaded settings. But Mr. Lingnam only talked.
+He talked--we all sat together behind so that we could not escape
+him--and he talked above the worn gears and a certain maddening swish of
+one badly patched tire--_and_ he talked of the Federation of the Empire
+against all conceivable dangers except himself. Yet I was neither
+brutally rude like Penfentenyou, nor swooningly bored like the
+Agent-General. I remembered a certain Joseph Finsbury who delighted the
+Tregonwell Arms on the borders of the New Forest with nine'--it should
+have been ten--'versions of a single income of two hundred pounds'
+placing the imaginary person in--but I could not recall the list of
+towns further than 'London, Paris, Bagdad, and Spitsbergen.' This last I
+must have murmured aloud, for the Agent-General suddenly became human
+and went on: 'Bussorah, Heligoland, and the Scilly Islands--'
+
+'What?' growled Penfentenyou.
+
+'Nothing,' said the Agent-General, squeezing my hand affectionately.
+'Only we have just found out that we are brothers.'
+
+'Exactly,' said Mr. Lingnam. 'That's what I've been trying to lead up
+to. We're _all_ brothers. D'you realise that fifteen years ago such a
+conversation as we're having would have been unthinkable? The Empire
+wouldn't have been ripe for it. To go back, even ten years--'
+
+'I've got it,' cried the Agent-General. '"Brighton, Cincinnati, and
+Nijni-Novgorod!" God bless R.L.S.! Go on, Uncle Joseph. I can endure
+much now.'
+
+Mr. Lingnam went on like our shandrydan, slowly and loudly. He admitted
+that a man obsessed with a Central Idea--and, after all, the only thing
+that mattered was the Idea--might become a bore, but the World's Work,
+he pointed out, had been done by bores. So he laid his bones down to
+that work till we abandoned ourselves to the passage of time and the
+Mercy of Allah, Who Alone closes the Mouths of His Prophets. And we
+wasted more than fifty miles of summer's vivid own England upon him
+the while.
+
+About two o'clock we topped Sumtner Rising and looked down on the
+village of Sumtner Barton, which lies just across a single railway line,
+spanned by a red brick bridge. The thick, thunderous June airs brought
+us gusts of melody from a giddy-go-round steam-organ in full blast near
+the pond on the village green. Drums, too, thumped and banners waved and
+regalia flashed at the far end of the broad village street. Mr. Lingnam
+asked why.
+
+'Nothing Imperial, I'm afraid. It looks like a Foresters' Fête--one of
+our big Mutual Benefit Societies,' I explained.
+
+'The Idea only needs to be co-ordinated to Imperial scale--' he began.
+
+'But it means that the pub. will be crowded,' I went on.
+
+'What's the matter with lunching by the roadside here?' said
+Penfentenyou. 'We've got the lunch-basket.'
+
+'Haven't you ever heard of Sumtner Barton ales?' I demanded, and be
+became the administrator at once, saying, '_I_ see! Lingnam can drive us
+in and we'll get some, while Holford'--this was the hireling chauffeur,
+whose views on beer we knew not--'lays out lunch here. That'll be better
+than eating at the pub. We can take in the Foresters' Fête as well, and
+perhaps I can buy some newspapers at the station.'
+
+'True,' I answered. 'The railway station is just under that bridge, and
+we'll come back and lunch here.'
+
+I indicated a terrace of cool clean shade beneath kindly beeches at the
+head of Sumtner Rise. As Holford got out the lunch-basket, a detachment
+of Regular troops on manoeuvres swung down the baking road.
+
+'Ah!' said Mr. Lingnam, the monthly-magazine roll in his voice. 'All
+Europe is an armed camp, groaning, as I remember I once wrote, under the
+weight of its accoutrements.'
+
+'Oh, hop in and drive,' cried Penfentenyou. 'We want that beer!'
+
+It made no difference. Mr. Lingnam could have federated the Empire from
+a tight rope. He continued his oration at the wheel as we trundled.
+
+'The danger to the Younger Nations is of being drawn into this vortex of
+Militarism,' he went on, dodging the rear of the soldiery.
+
+'Slow past troops,' I hinted. 'It saves 'em dust. And we overtake on the
+right as a rule in England.'
+
+'Thanks!' Mr. Lingnam slued over. 'That's another detail which needs to
+be co-ordinated throughout the Empire. But to go back to what I was
+saying. My idea has always been that the component parts of the Empire
+should take counsel among themselves on the approach of war, so that,
+after we have decided on the merits of the _casus belli_, we can
+co-ordinate what part each Dominion shall play whenever war is,
+unfortunately, a possibility.'
+
+We neared the hog-back railway bridge, and the hireling knocked
+piteously at the grade. Mr. Lingnam changed gears, and she hoisted
+herself up to a joyous _Youp-i-addy-i-ay!_ from the steam-organ. As we
+topped the arch we saw a Foresters' band with banners marching down
+the street.
+
+'That's all very fine,' said the Agent-General, 'but in real life things
+have a knack of happening without approaching--'
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+(Some schools of Thought hold that Time is not; and that when we attain
+complete enlightenment we shall behold past, present, and future as One
+Awful Whole. I myself have nearly achieved this.)
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+We dipped over the bridge into the village. A boy on a bicycle, loaded
+with four paper bonnet-boxes, pedalled towards us, out of an alley on
+our right. He bowed his head the better to overcome the ascent, and
+naturally took his left. Mr. Lingnam swerved frantically to the right.
+Penfentenyou shouted. The boy looked up, saw the car was like to squeeze
+him against the bridge wall, flung himself off his machine and across
+the narrow pavement into the nearest house. He slammed the door at the
+precise moment when the car, all brakes set, bunted the abandoned
+bicycle, shattering three of the bonnet-boxes and jerking the fourth
+over the unscreened dashboard into Mr. Lingnam's arms.
+
+There was a dead stillness, then a hiss like that of escaping steam, and
+a man who had been running towards us ran the other way.
+
+'Why! I think that those must be bees,' said Mr. Lingnam.
+
+They were--four full swarms--and the first living objects which he had
+remarked upon all day.
+
+Some one said, 'Oh, God!' The Agent-General went out over the back of
+the car, crying resolutely: 'Stop the traffic! Stop the traffic, there!'
+Penfentenyou was already on the pavement ringing a door-bell, so I had
+both their rugs, which--for I am an apiarist--I threw over my head.
+While I was tucking my trousers into my socks--for I am an apiarist of
+experience--Mr. Lingnam picked up the unexploded bonnet-box and with a
+single magnificent gesture (he told us afterwards he thought there was a
+river beneath) hurled it over the parapet of the bridge, ere he ran
+across the road towards the village green. Now, the station platform
+immediately below was crowded with Foresters and their friends waiting
+to welcome a delegation from a sister Court. I saw the box burst on the
+flint edging of the station garden and the contents sweep forward
+cone-wise like shrapnel. But the result was stimulating rather than
+sedative. All those well-dressed people below shouted like Sodom and
+Gomorrah. Then they moved as a unit into the booking-office, the
+waiting-rooms, and other places, shut doors and windows and declaimed
+aloud, while the incoming train whistled far down the line.
+
+I pivoted round cross-legged on the back seat, like a Circassian beauty
+beneath her veil, and saw Penfentenyou, his coat-collar over his ears,
+dancing before a shut door and holding up handfuls of currency to a
+silver-haired woman at an upper window, who only mouthed and shook her
+head. A little child, carrying a kitten, came smiling round a corner.
+Suddenly (but these things moved me no more than so many yards of
+three-penny cinematograph-film) the kitten leaped spitting from her
+arms, the child burst into tears, Penfentenyou, still dancing, snatched
+her up and tucked her under his coat, the woman's countenance blanched,
+the front door opened, Penfentenyou and the child pressed through, and I
+was alone in an inhospitable world where every one was shutting windows
+and calling children home.
+
+A voice cried: 'You've frowtened 'em! You've frowtened 'em! Throw dust
+on 'em and they'll settle!'
+
+I did not desire to throw dust on any created thing. I needed both hands
+for my draperies and two more for my stockings. Besides, the bees were
+doing me no hurt. They recognised me as a member of the County
+Bee-keepers' Association who had paid his annual subscription and was
+entitled to a free seat at all apicultural exhibitions. The quiver and
+the churn of the hireling car, or it might have been the lurching
+banners and the arrogant big drum, inclined many of them to go up
+street, and pay court to the advancing Foresters' band. So they went,
+such as had not followed Mr. Lingnam in his flight toward the green, and
+I looked out of two goggled eyes instead of half a one at the
+approaching musicians, while I listened with both ears to the delayed
+train's second whistle down the line beneath me.
+
+The Forester's band no more knew what was coming than do troops under
+sudden fire. Indeed, there were the same extravagant gestures and
+contortions as attend wounds and deaths in war; the very same uncanny
+cessations of speech--for the trombone was cut off at midslide, even as
+a man drops with a syllable on his tongue. They clawed, they slapped,
+they fled, leaving behind them a trophy of banners and brasses crudely
+arranged round the big drum. Then that end of the street also shut its
+windows, and the village, stripped of life, lay round me like a reef at
+low tide. Though I am, as I have said, an apiarist in good standing, I
+never realised that there were so many bees in the world. When they had
+woven a flashing haze from one end of the desert street to the other,
+there remained reserves enough to form knops and pendules on all
+window-sills and gutter-ends, without diminishing the multitudes in the
+three oozing bonnet-boxes, or drawing on the Fourth (Railway) Battalion
+in charge of the station below. The prisoners in the waiting-rooms and
+other places there cried out a great deal (I argued that they were dying
+of the heat), and at regular intervals the stationmaster called and
+called to a signalman who was not on duty, and the train whistled as it
+drew nearer.
+
+Then Penfentenyou, venal and adaptable politician of the type that
+survives at the price of all the higher emotions, appeared at the window
+of the house on my right, broken and congested with mirth, the woman
+beside him, and the child in his arms. I saw his mouth open and shut, he
+hollowed his hands round it, but the churr of the motor and the bees
+drowned his words. He pointed dramatically across the street many times
+and fell back, tears running down his face. I turned like a hooded
+barbette in a heavy seaway (not knowing when my trousers would come out
+of my socks again) through one hundred and eighty degrees, and in due
+time bore on the village green. There was a salmon in the pond, rising
+short at a cloud of midges to the tune of _Yip-i-addy_; but there was
+none to gaff him. The swing-boats were empty, cocoa-nuts sat still on
+their red sticks before white screens, and the gay-painted horses of the
+giddy-go-rounds revolved riderless. All was melody, green turf, bright
+water, and this greedy gambolling fish. When I had identified it by its
+grey gills and binoculars as Lingnam, I prostrated myself before Allah
+in that mirth which is more truly labour than any prayer. Then I turned
+to the purple Penfentenyou at the window, and wiped my eyes on the
+rug edge.
+
+He raised the window half one cautious inch and bellowed through the
+crack: 'Did you see _him_? Have they got _you_? I can see lots of
+things from here. It's like a three-ring circus!'
+
+'Can you see the station?' I replied, nodding toward the right rear
+mudguard.
+
+He twisted and craned sideways, but could not command that beautiful
+view.
+
+'No! What's it like?' he cried.
+
+'Hell!' I shouted. The silver-haired woman frowned; so did Penfentenyou,
+and, I think, apologised to her for my language.
+
+'You're always so extreme,' he fluted reproachfully. 'You forget that
+nothing matters except the Idea. Besides, they are this lady's bees.'
+
+He closed the window, and introduced us through it in dumb show; but he
+contrived to give the impression that _I_ was the specimen under glass.
+
+A spurt of damp steam saved me from apoplexy. The train had lost
+patience at last, and was coming into the station directly beneath me to
+see what was the matter. Happy voices sang and heads were thrust out all
+along the compartments, but none answered their songs or greetings. She
+halted, and the people began to get out. Then they began to get in
+again, as their friends in the waiting-rooms advised. All did not catch
+the warning, so there was congestion at the doors, but those whom the
+bees caught got in first.
+
+Still the bees, more bent on their own business than wanton torture,
+kept to the south end of the platform by the bookstall, and that was why
+the completely exposed engine-driver at the north end of the train did
+not at first understand the hermetically sealed stationmaster when the
+latter shouted to him many times to 'get on out o' this.'
+
+'Where are you?' was the reply. 'And what for?'
+
+'It don't matter where I am, an' you'll get what-for in a minute if you
+don't shift,' said the stationmaster. 'Drop 'em at Parson's Meadow and
+they can walk up over the fields.'
+
+That bare-armed, thin-shirted idiot, leaning out of the cab, took the
+stationmaster's orders as an insult to his dignity, and roared at the
+shut offices: 'You'll give me what-for, will you? Look 'ere, I'm not in
+the 'abit of--' His outstretched hand flew to his neck.... Do you know
+that if you sting an engine-driver it is the same as stinging his train?
+She starts with a jerk that nearly smashes the couplings, and runs,
+barking like a dog, till she is out of sight. Nor does she think about
+spilled people and parted families on the platform behind her. I had to
+do all that. There was a man called Fred, and his wife Harriet--a
+cheery, full-blooded couple--who interested me immensely before they
+battered their way into a small detached building, already densely
+occupied. There was also a nameless bachelor who sat under a half-opened
+umbrella and twirled it dizzily, which was so new a game that I
+applauded aloud.
+
+When they had thoroughly cleared the ground, the bees set about making
+comb for publication at the bookstall counter. Presently some bold
+hearts tiptoed out of the waiting-rooms over the loud gravel with the
+consciously modest air of men leaving church, climbed the wooden
+staircase to the bridge, and so reached my level, where the
+inexhaustible bonnet-boxes were still vomiting squadrons and platoons.
+There was little need to bid them descend. They had wrapped their heads
+in handkerchiefs, so that they looked like the disappointed dead
+scuttling back to Purgatory. Only one old gentleman, pontifically draped
+in a banner embroidered 'Temperance and Fortitude,' ran the gauntlet
+up-street, shouting as he passed me, 'It's night or Blücher, Mister.'
+They let him in at the White Hart, the pub. where I should have
+bought the beer.
+
+After this the day sagged. I fell to reckoning how long a man in a
+Turkish bath, weakened by excessive laughter, could live without food,
+and specially drink; and how long a disenfranchised bee could hold out
+under the same conditions.
+
+Obviously, since her one practical joke costs her her life, the bee can
+have but small sense of humour; but her fundamentally dismal and
+ungracious outlook on life impressed me beyond words. She had paralysed
+locomotion, wiped out trade, social intercourse, mutual trust, love,
+friendship, sport, music (the lonely steam-organ had run down at last),
+all that gives substance, colour or savour to life, and yet, in the
+barren desert she had created, was not one whit more near to the
+evolution of a saner order of things. The Heavens were darkened with the
+swarms' divided counsels; the street shimmered with their purposeless
+sallies. They clotted on tiles and gutter-pipes, and began frenziedly to
+build a cell or two of comb ere they discovered that their queen was
+not with them; then flung off to seek her, or whirled, dishevelled and
+insane, into another hissing nebula on the false rumour that she was
+there. I scowled upon them with disfavour, and a massy, blue
+thunder-head rose majestically from behind the elm-trees of Sumtner
+Barton Rectory, arched over and scowled with me. Then I realised that it
+was not bees nor locusts that had darkened the skies, but the on-coming
+of the malignant English thunderstorm--the one thing before which even
+Deborah the bee cannot express her silly little self.
+
+'Aha! _Now_ you'll catch it,' I said, as the herald gusts set the big
+drum rolling down the street like a box-kite. Up and up yearned the dark
+cloud, till the first lightning quivered and cut. Deborah cowered. Where
+she flew, there she fled; where she was, there she sat still; and the
+solid rain closed in on her as a book that is closed when the chapter is
+finished. By the time it had soaked to my second rug, Penfentenyou
+appeared at the window, wiping his false mouth on a napkin.
+
+'Are you all right?' he inquired. 'Then _that's_ all right! Mrs. Bellamy
+says that her bees don't sting in the wet. You'd better fetch Lingnam
+over. He's got to pay for them and the bicycle.'
+
+I had no words which the silver-haired lady could listen to, but paddled
+across the flooded street between flashes to the pond on the green. Mr.
+Lingnam, scarcely visible through the sheeting downpour, trotted round
+the edge. He bore himself nobly, and lied at the mere sight of me.
+
+'Isn't this wet?' he cried. 'It has drenched me to the skin. I shall
+need a change.'
+
+'Come along,' I said. 'I don't know what you'll get, but you deserve
+more.'
+
+Penfentenyou, dry, fed, and in command, let us in. 'You,' he whispered
+to me, 'are to wait in the scullery. Mrs. Bellamy didn't like the way
+you talked about her bees. Hsh! Hsh! She's a kind-hearted lady. She's a
+widow, Lingnam, but she's kept _his_ clothes, and as soon as you've paid
+for the damage she'll rent you a suit. I've arranged it all!'
+
+'Then tell him he mustn't undress in my hall,' said a voice from the
+stair-head.
+
+'Tell _her_--' Lingnam began.
+
+'Come and look at the pretty suit I've chosen,' Penfentenyou cooed, as
+one cajoling a maniac.
+
+I staggered out-of-doors again, and fell into the car, whose
+ever-running machinery masked my yelps and hiccups. When I raised my
+forehead from the wheel, I saw that traffic through the village had been
+resumed, after, as my watch showed, one and one-half hour's suspension.
+There were two limousines, one landau, one doctor's car, three
+touring-cars, one patent steam-laundry van, three tricars, one
+traction-engine, some motor-cycles, one with a side-car, and one brewery
+lorry. It was the allegory of my own imperturbable country, delayed for
+a short time by unforeseen external events but now going about her
+business, and I blessed Her with tears in my eyes, even though I knew
+She looked upon me as drunk and incapable.
+
+Then troops came over the bridge behind me--a company of dripping wet
+Regulars without any expression. In their rear, carrying the
+lunch-basket, marched the Agent-General and Holford the hired chauffeur.
+
+'I say,' said the Agent-General, nodding at the darkened khaki backs.
+'If _that's_ what we've got to depend on in event of war they're a
+broken reed. They ran like hares--ran like hares, I tell you.'
+
+'And you?' I asked.
+
+'Oh, I just sauntered back over the bridge and stopped the traffic that
+end. Then I had lunch. 'Pity about the beer, though. I say--these
+cushions are sopping wet!'
+
+'I'm sorry,' I said. 'I haven't had time to turn 'em.'
+
+'Nor there wasn't any need to 'ave kept the engine runnin' all this
+time,' said Holford sternly. 'I'll 'ave to account for the expenditure
+of petrol. It exceeds the mileage indicated, you see.'
+
+'I'm sorry,' I repeated. After all, that is the way that taxpayers
+regard most crises.
+
+The house-door opened and Penfentenyou and another came out into the now
+thinning rain.
+
+'Ah! There you both are! Here's Lingnam,' he cried. 'He's got a little
+wet. He's had to change.'
+
+'We saw that. I was too sore and weak to begin another laugh, but the
+Agent-General crumpled up where he stood. The late Mr. Bellamy must have
+been a man of tremendous personality, which he had impressed on every
+angle of his garments. I was told later that he had died in delirium
+tremens, which at once explained the pattern, and the reason why Mr.
+Lingnam, writhing inside it, swore so inspiredly. Of the deliberate and
+diffuse Federationist there remained no trace, save the binoculars and
+two damp whiskers. We stood on the pavement, before Elemental Man
+calling on Elemental Powers to condemn and incinerate Creation.
+
+'Well, hadn't we better be getting back?' said the Agent-General.
+
+'Look out!' I remarked casually. 'Those bonnet-boxes are full of bees
+still!'
+
+'Are they?' said the livid Mr. Lingnam, and tilted them over with the
+late Mr. Bellamy's large boots. Deborah rolled out in drenched lumps
+into the swilling gutter. There was a muffled shriek at the window where
+Mrs. Bellamy gesticulated.
+
+'It's all right. I've paid for them,' said Mr. Lingnam. He dumped out
+the last dregs like mould from a pot-bound flower-pot.
+
+'What? Are you going to take 'em home with you?' said the Agent-General.
+
+'No!' He passed a wet hand over his streaky forehead. 'Wasn't there a
+bicycle that was the beginning of this trouble?' said he.
+
+'It's under the fore-axle, sir,' said Holford promptly. 'I can fish it
+out from 'ere.'
+
+'Not till I've done with it, please.' Before we could stop him, he had
+jumped into the car and taken charge. The hireling leaped into her
+collar, surged, shrieked (less loudly than Mrs. Bellamy at the window),
+and swept on. That which came out behind her was, as Holford truly
+observed, no joy-wheel. Mr. Lingnam swung round the big drum in the
+market-place and thundered back, shouting: 'Leave it alone. It's
+my meat!'
+
+'Mince-meat, 'e means,' said Holford after this second trituration. 'You
+couldn't say now it 'ad ever _been_ one, could you?'
+
+Mrs. Bellamy opened the window and spoke. It appears she had only
+charged for damage to the bicycle, not for the entire machine which Mr.
+Lingnam was ruthlessly gleaning, spoke by spoke, from the highway and
+cramming into the slack of the hood. At last he answered, and I have
+never seen a man foam at the mouth before. 'If you don't stop, I shall
+come into your house--in this car--and drive upstairs and--kill you!'
+
+She stopped; he stopped. Holford took the wheel, and we got away. It was
+time, for the sun shone after the storm, and Deborah beneath the tiles
+and the eaves already felt its reviving influence compel her to her
+interrupted labours of federation. We warned the village policeman at
+the far end of the street that he might have to suspend traffic again.
+The proprietor of the giddy-go-round, swings, and cocoanut-shies wanted
+to know from whom, in this world or another, he could recover damages.
+Mr. Lingnam referred him most directly to Mrs. Bellamy.... Then we
+went home.
+
+After dinner that evening Mr. Lingnam rose stiffly in his place to make
+a few remarks on the Federation of the Empire on the lines of
+Co-ordinated, Offensive Operations, backed by the Entire Effective
+Forces, Moral, Military, and Fiscal, of Permanently Mobilised
+Communities, the whole brought to bear, without any respect to the
+merits of any _casus belli_, instantaneously, automatically, and
+remorselessly at the first faint buzz of war.
+
+'The trouble with Us,' said he, 'is that We take such an infernally long
+time making sure that We are right that We don't go ahead when things
+happen. For instance, I ought to have gone ahead instead of pulling up
+when I hit that bicycle.'
+
+'But you were in the wrong, Lingnam, when you turned to the right,' I
+put in.
+
+'I don't want to hear any more of your damned, detached, mugwumping
+excuses for the other fellow,' he snapped.
+
+'Now you're beginning to see things,' said Penfentenyou. 'I hope you
+won't backslide when the swellings go down.'
+
+
+
+THE SONG OF SEVEN CITIES
+
+     I was Lord of Cities very sumptuously builded.
+     Seven roaring Cities paid me tribute from afar.
+     Ivory their outposts were--the guardrooms of them
+       gilded,
+     And garrisoned with Amazons invincible in war.
+
+     All the world went softly when it walked before my
+       Cities--
+     Neither King nor Army vexed my peoples at their toil.
+     Never horse nor chariot irked or overbore my Cities,
+     Never Mob nor Ruler questioned whence they drew
+       their spoil.
+
+     Banded, mailed and arrogant from sunrise unto sunset,
+     Singing while they sacked it, they possessed the land
+       at large.
+     Yet when men would rob them, they resisted, they
+       made onset
+     And pierced the smoke of battle with a thousand-sabred
+       charge!
+
+     So they warred and trafficked only yesterday, my Cities.
+     To-day there is no mark or mound of where my Cities
+       stood.
+     For the River rose at midnight and it washed away my
+       Cities.
+     They are evened with Atlantis and the towns before the
+       Flood.
+
+     Rain on rain-gorged channels raised the water-levels
+       round them,
+     Freshet backed on freshet swelled and swept their
+       world from sight,
+     Till the emboldened floods linked arms and flashing forward
+       drowned them--
+     Drowned my Seven Cities and their peoples in one
+       night!
+
+     Low among the alders lie their derelict foundations,
+     The beams wherein they trusted and the plinths whereon
+       they built--
+     My rulers and their treasure and their unborn populations,
+     Dead, destroyed, aborted, and defiled with mud and
+       silt!
+
+     The Daughters of the Palace whom they cherished in
+       my Cities,
+     My silver-tongued Princesses, and the promise of their
+       May--
+     Their bridegrooms of the June-tide--all have perished
+       in my Cities,
+     With the harsh envenomed virgins that can neither
+       love nor play.
+
+     I was Lord of Cities--I will build anew my Cities,
+     Seven, set on rocks, above the wrath of any flood.
+     Nor will I rest from search till I have filled anew my Cities
+     With peoples undefeated of the dark, enduring blood.
+
+     To the sound of trumpets shall their seed restore my Cities.
+     Wealthy and well-weaponed, that once more may I behold
+     All the world go softly when it walks before my Cities,
+     And the horses and the chariots fleeing from them as of old!
+
+
+
+'Swept and Garnished'
+
+(January 1915)
+
+When the first waves of feverish cold stole over Frau Ebermann she very
+wisely telephoned for the doctor and went to bed. He diagnosed the
+attack as mild influenza, prescribed the appropriate remedies, and left
+her to the care of her one servant in her comfortable Berlin flat. Frau
+Ebermann, beneath the thick coverlet, curled up with what patience she
+could until the aspirin should begin to act, and Anna should come back
+from the chemist with the formamint, the ammoniated quinine, the
+eucalyptus, and the little tin steam-inhaler. Meantime, every bone in
+her body ached; her head throbbed; her hot, dry hands would not stay the
+same size for a minute together; and her body, tucked into the smallest
+possible compass, shrank from the chill of the well-warmed sheets.
+
+Of a sudden she noticed that an imitation-lace cover which should have
+lain mathematically square with the imitation-marble top of the radiator
+behind the green plush sofa had slipped away so that one corner hung
+over the bronze-painted steam pipes. She recalled that she must have
+rested her poor head against the radiator-top while she was taking off
+her boots. She tried to get up and set the thing straight, but the
+radiator at once receded toward the horizon, which, unlike true
+horizons, slanted diagonally, exactly parallel with the dropped lace
+edge of the cover. Frau Ebermann groaned through sticky lips and
+lay still.
+
+'Certainly, I have a temperature,' she said. 'Certainly, I have a grave
+temperature. I should have been warned by that chill after dinner.'
+
+She resolved to shut her hot-lidded eyes, but opened them in a little
+while to torture herself with the knowledge of that ungeometrical thing
+against the far wall. Then she saw a child--an untidy, thin-faced little
+girl of about ten, who must have strayed in from the adjoining flat.
+This proved--Frau Ebermann groaned again at the way the world falls to
+bits when one is sick--proved that Anna had forgotten to shut the outer
+door of the flat when she went to the chemist. Frau Ebermann had had
+children of her own, but they were all grown up now, and she had never
+been a child-lover in any sense. Yet the intruder might be made to serve
+her scheme of things.
+
+'Make--put,' she muttered thickly, 'that white thing straight on the top
+of that yellow thing.'
+
+The child paid no attention, but moved about the room, investigating
+everything that came in her way--the yellow cut-glass handles of the
+chest of drawers, the stamped bronze hook to hold back the heavy puce
+curtains, and the mauve enamel, New Art finger-plates on the door. Frau
+Ebermann watched indignantly.
+
+'Aie! That is bad and rude. Go away!' she cried, though it hurt her to
+raise her voice. 'Go away by the road you came!' The child passed
+behind the bed-foot, where she could not see her. 'Shut the door as you
+go. I will speak to Anna, but--first, put that white thing straight.'
+
+She closed her eyes in misery of body and soul. The outer door clicked,
+and Anna entered, very penitent that she had stayed so long at the
+chemist's. But it had been difficult to find the proper type of
+inhaler, and--
+
+'Where did the child go?' moaned Frau Ebermann--'the child that was
+here?'
+
+'There was no child,' said startled Anna. 'How should any child come in
+when I shut the door behind me after I go out? All the keys of the flats
+are different.'
+
+'No, no! You forgot this time. But my back is aching, and up my legs
+also. Besides, who knows what it may have fingered and upset? Look
+and see.'
+
+'Nothing is fingered, nothing is upset,' Anna replied, as she took the
+inhaler from its paper box.
+
+'Yes, there is. Now I remember all about it. Put--put that white thing,
+with the open edge--the lace, I mean--quite straight on that--' she
+pointed. Anna, accustomed to her ways, understood and went to it.
+
+'Now, is it quite straight?' Frau Ebermann demanded.
+
+'Perfectly,' said Anna. 'In fact, in the very centre of the radiator.'
+Anna measured the equal margins with her knuckle, as she had been told
+to do when she first took service.
+
+'And my tortoise-shell hair brushes?' Frau Ebermann could not command
+her dressing-table from where she lay.
+
+'Perfectly straight, side by side in the big tray, and the comb laid
+across them. Your watch also in the coralline watch-holder.
+Everything'--she moved round the room to make sure--'everything is as
+you have it when you are well.' Frau Ebermann sighed with relief. It
+seemed to her that the room and her head had suddenly grown cooler.
+
+'Good!' said she. 'Now warm my night-gown in the kitchen, so it will be
+ready when I have perspired. And the towels also. Make the inhaler
+steam, and put in the eucalyptus; that is good for the larynx. Then sit
+you in the kitchen, and come when I ring. But, first, my
+hot-water bottle.'
+
+It was brought and scientifically tucked in.
+
+'What news?' said Frau Ebermann drowsily. She had not been out that day.
+
+'Another victory,' said Anna. 'Many more prisoners and guns.'
+
+Frau Ebermann purred, one might almost say grunted, contentedly.
+
+'That is good too,' she said; and Anna, after lighting the inhaler-lamp,
+went out.
+
+Frau Ebermann reflected that in an hour or so the aspirin would begin to
+work, and all would be well. To-morrow--no, the day after--she would
+take up life with something to talk over with her friends at coffee. It
+was rare--every one knew it--that she should be overcome by any
+ailment. Yet in all her distresses she had not allowed the minutest
+deviation from daily routine and ritual. She would tell her friends--she
+ran over their names one by one--exactly what measures she had taken
+against the lace cover on the radiator-top and in regard to her two
+tortoise-shell hair brushes and the comb at right angles. How she had
+set everything in order--everything in order. She roved further afield
+as she wriggled her toes luxuriously on the hot-water bottle. If it
+pleased our dear God to take her to Himself, and she was not so young as
+she had been--there was that plate of the four lower ones in the blue
+tooth-glass, for instance--He should find all her belongings fit to meet
+His eye. 'Swept and garnished' were the words that shaped themselves in
+her intent brain. 'Swept and garnished for--'
+
+No, it was certainly not for the dear Lord that she had swept; she would
+have her room swept out to-morrow or the day after, and garnished. Her
+hands began to swell again into huge pillows of nothingness. Then they
+shrank, and so did her head, to minute dots. It occurred to her that she
+was waiting for some event, some tremendously important event, to come
+to pass. She lay with shut eyes for a long time till her head and hands
+should return to their proper size.
+
+She opened her eyes with a jerk.
+
+'How stupid of me,' she said aloud, 'to set the room in order for a
+parcel of dirty little children!'
+
+They were there--five of them, two little boys and three girls--headed
+by the anxious-eyed ten-year-old whom she had seen before. They must
+have entered by the outer door, which Anna had neglected to shut behind
+her when she returned with the inhaler. She counted them backward and
+forward as one counts scales--one, two, three, four, five.
+
+They took no notice of her, but hung about, first on one foot then on
+the other, like strayed chickens, the smaller ones holding by the
+larger. They had the air of utterly wearied passengers in a railway
+waiting-room, and their clothes were disgracefully dirty.
+
+'Go away!' cried Frau Ebermann at last, after she had struggled, it
+seemed to her, for years to shape the words.
+
+'You called?' said Anna at the living-room door.
+
+'No,' said her mistress. 'Did you shut the flat door when you came in?'
+
+'Assuredly,' said Anna. 'Besides, it is made to catch shut of itself.'
+
+'Then go away,' said she, very little above a whisper. If Anna pretended
+not to see the children, she would speak to Anna later on.
+
+'And now,' she said, turning toward them as soon as the door closed. The
+smallest of the crowd smiled at her, and shook his head before he buried
+it in his sister's skirts.
+
+'Why--don't--you--go--away?' she whispered earnestly.
+
+Again they took no notice, but, guided by the elder girl, set themselves
+to climb, boots and all, on to the green plush sofa in front of the
+radiator. The little boys had to be pushed, as they could not compass
+the stretch unaided. They settled themselves in a row, with small gasps
+of relief, and pawed the plush approvingly.
+
+'I ask you--I ask you why do you not go away--why do you not go away?'
+Frau Ebermann found herself repeating the question twenty times. It
+seemed to her that everything in the world hung on the answer. 'You know
+you should not come into houses and rooms unless you are invited. Not
+houses and bedrooms, you know.'
+
+'No,' a solemn little six-year-old repeated, 'not houses nor bedrooms,
+nor dining-rooms, nor churches, nor all those places. Shouldn't come in.
+It's rude.'
+
+'Yes, he said so,' the younger girl put in proudly. 'He said it. He told
+them only pigs would do that.' The line nodded and dimpled one to
+another with little explosive giggles, such as children use when they
+tell deeds of great daring against their elders.
+
+'If you know it is wrong, that makes it much worse,' said Frau Ebermann.
+
+'Oh yes; much worse,' they assented cheerfully, till the smallest boy
+changed his smile to a baby wail of weariness.
+
+'When will they come for us?' he asked, and the girl at the head of the
+row hauled him bodily into her square little capable lap.
+
+'He's tired,' she explained. 'He is only four. He only had his first
+breeches this spring.' They came almost under his armpits, and were held
+up by broad linen braces, which, his sorrow diverted for the moment, he
+patted proudly.
+
+'Yes, beautiful, dear,' said both girls.
+
+'Go away!' said Frau Ebermann. 'Go home to your father and mother!'
+
+Their faces grew grave at once.
+
+'H'sh! We _can't_,' whispered the eldest. 'There isn't anything left.'
+
+'All gone,' a boy echoed, and he puffed through pursed lips. 'Like
+_that_, uncle told me. Both cows too.'
+
+'And my own three ducks,' the boy on the girl's lap said sleepily.
+
+'So, you see, we came here.' The elder girl leaned forward a little,
+caressing the child she rocked.
+
+'I--I don't understand,' said Frau Ebermann 'Are you lost, then? You
+must tell our police.'
+
+'Oh no; we are only waiting.'
+
+'But what are you waiting _for?_'
+
+'We are waiting for our people to come for us. They told us to come here
+and wait for them. So we are waiting till they come,' the eldest
+girl replied.
+
+'Yes. We are waiting till our people come for us,' said all the others
+in chorus.
+
+'But,' said Frau Ebermann very patiently--'but now tell me, for I tell
+you that I am not in the least angry, where do you come from? Where do
+you come from?'
+
+The five gave the names of two villages of which she had read in the
+papers,
+
+'That is silly,' said Frau Ebermann. 'The people fired on us, and they
+were punished. Those places are wiped out, stamped flat.'
+
+'Yes, yes, wiped out, stamped flat. That is why and--I have lost the
+ribbon off my pigtail,' said the younger girl. She looked behind her
+over the sofa-back.
+
+'It is not here,' said the elder. 'It was lost before. Don't you
+remember?'
+
+'Now, if you are lost, you must go and tell our police. They will take
+care of you and give you food,' said Frau Ebermann. 'Anna will show you
+the way there.'
+
+'No,'--this was the six-year-old with the smile,--'we must wait here
+till our people come for us. Mustn't we, sister?'
+
+'Of course. We wait here till our people come for us. All the world
+knows that,' said the eldest girl.
+
+'Yes.' The boy in her lap had waked again. 'Little children, too--as
+little as Henri, and _he_ doesn't wear trousers yet. As little as
+all that.'
+
+'I don't understand,' said Frau Ebermann, shivering. In spite of the
+heat of the room and the damp breath of the steam-inhaler, the aspirin
+was not doing its duty.
+
+The girl raised her blue eyes and looked at the woman for an instant.
+
+'You see,' she said, emphasising her statements with her ringers,
+'_they_ told _us_ to wait _here_ till _our_ people came for us. So we
+came. We wait till our people come for us.'
+
+'That is silly again,' said Frau Ebermann. 'It is no good for you to
+wait here. Do you know what this place is? You have been to school? It
+is Berlin, the capital of Germany.'
+
+'Yes, yes,' they all cried; 'Berlin, capital of Germany. We know that.
+That is why we came.'
+
+'So, you see, it is no good,' she said triumphantly, 'because your
+people can never come for you here.'
+
+'They told us to come here and wait till our people came for us.' They
+delivered this as if it were a lesson in school. Then they sat still,
+their hands orderly folded on their laps, smiling as sweetly as ever.
+
+'Go away! Go away!' Frau Ebermann shrieked.
+
+'You called?' said Anna, entering.
+
+'No. Go away! Go away!'
+
+'Very good, old cat,' said the maid under her breath. 'Next time you
+_may_ call,' and she returned to her friend in the kitchen.
+
+'I ask you--ask you, _please_ to go away,' Frau Ebermann pleaded. 'Go to
+my Anna through that door, and she will give you cakes and sweeties. It
+is not kind of you to come into my room and behave so badly.'
+
+'Where else shall we go now?' the elder girl demanded, turning to her
+little company. They fell into discussion. One preferred the broad
+street with trees, another the railway station; but when she suggested
+an Emperor's palace, they agreed with her.
+
+'We will go then,' she said, and added half apologetically to Frau
+Ebermann, 'You see, they are so little they like to meet all
+the others.'
+
+'What others?' said Frau Ebermann.
+
+'The others--hundreds and hundreds and thousands and thousands of the
+others.'
+
+'That is a lie. There cannot be a hundred even, much less a thousand,'
+cried Frau Ebermann.
+
+'So?' said the girl politely.
+
+'Yes. _I_ tell you; and I have very good information. I know how it
+happened. You should have been more careful. You should not have run out
+to see the horses and guns passing. That is how it is done when our
+troops pass through. My son has written me so.'
+
+They had clambered down from the sofa, and gathered round the bed with
+eager, interested eyes.
+
+'Horses and guns going by--how fine!' some one whispered.
+
+'Yes, yes; believe me, _that_ is how the accidents to the children
+happen. You must know yourself that it is true. One runs out to look--'
+
+'But I never saw any at all,' a boy cried sorrowfully. 'Only one noise I
+heard. That was when Aunt Emmeline's house fell down.'
+
+'But listen to me. _I_ am telling you! One runs out to look, because one
+is little and cannot see well. So one peeps between the man's legs, and
+then--you know how close those big horses and guns turn the
+corners--then one's foot slips and one gets run over. That's how it
+happens. Several times it had happened, but not many times; certainly
+not a hundred, perhaps not twenty. So, you see, you _must_ be all. Tell
+me now that you are all that there are, and Anna shall give you
+the cakes.'
+
+'Thousands,' a boy repeated monotonously. 'Then we all come here to
+wait till our people come for us.'
+
+'But now we will go away from here. The poor lady is tired,' said the
+elder girl, plucking his sleeve.
+
+'Oh, you hurt, you hurt!' he cried, and burst into tears.
+
+'What is that for?' said Frau Ebermann. 'To cry in a room where a poor
+lady is sick is very inconsiderate.'
+
+'Oh, but look, lady!' said the elder girl.
+
+Frau Ebermann looked and saw.
+
+'_Au revoir_, lady.' They made their little smiling bows and curtseys
+undisturbed by her loud cries. '_Au revoir,_ lady. We will wait till our
+people come for us.'
+
+When Anna at last ran in, she found her mistress on her knees, busily
+cleaning the floor with the lace cover from the radiator, because, she
+explained, it was all spotted with the blood of five children--she was
+perfectly certain there could not be more than five in the whole
+world--who had gone away for the moment, but were now waiting round the
+corner, and Anna was to find them and give them cakes to stop the
+bleeding, while her mistress swept and garnished that Our dear Lord when
+He came might find everything as it should be.
+
+
+
+Mary Postgate
+
+(1915)
+
+Of Miss Mary Postgate, Lady McCausland wrote that she was 'thoroughly
+conscientious, tidy, companionable, and ladylike. I am very sorry to
+part with her, and shall always be interested in her welfare.'
+
+Miss Fowler engaged her on this recommendation, and to her surprise, for
+she had had experience of companions, found that it was true. Miss
+Fowler was nearer sixty than fifty at the time, but though she needed
+care she did not exhaust her attendant's vitality. On the contrary, she
+gave out, stimulatingly and with reminiscences. Her father had been a
+minor Court official in the days when the Great Exhibition of 1851 had
+just set its seal on Civilisation made perfect. Some of Miss Fowler's
+tales, none the less, were not always for the young. Mary was not young,
+and though her speech was as colourless as her eyes or her hair, she was
+never shocked. She listened unflinchingly to every one; said at the end,
+'How interesting!' or 'How shocking!' as the case might be, and never
+again referred to it, for she prided herself on a trained mind, which
+'did not dwell on these things.' She was, too, a treasure at domestic
+accounts, for which the village tradesmen, with their weekly books,
+loved her not. Otherwise she had no enemies; provoked no jealousy even
+among the plainest; neither gossip nor slander had ever been traced to
+her; she supplied the odd place at the Rector's or the Doctor's table at
+half an hour's notice; she was a sort of public aunt to very many small
+children of the village street, whose parents, while accepting
+everything, would have been swift to resent what they called
+'patronage'; she served on the Village Nursing Committee as Miss
+Fowler's nominee when Miss Fowler was crippled by rheumatoid arthritis,
+and came out of six months' fortnightly meetings equally respected by
+all the cliques.
+
+And when Fate threw Miss Fowler's nephew, an unlovely orphan of eleven,
+on Miss Fowler's hands, Mary Postgate stood to her share of the business
+of education as practised in private and public schools. She checked
+printed clothes-lists, and unitemised bills of extras; wrote to Head and
+House masters, matrons, nurses and doctors, and grieved or rejoiced over
+half-term reports. Young Wyndham Fowler repaid her in his holidays by
+calling her 'Gatepost,' 'Postey,' or 'Packthread,' by thumping her
+between her narrow shoulders, or by chasing her bleating, round the
+garden, her large mouth open, her large nose high in air, at a
+stiff-necked shamble very like a camel's. Later on he filled the house
+with clamour, argument, and harangues as to his personal needs, likes
+and dislikes, and the limitations of 'you women,' reducing Mary to tears
+of physical fatigue, or, when he chose to be humorous, of helpless
+laughter. At crises, which multiplied as he grew older, she was his
+ambassadress and his interpretress to Miss Fowler, who had no large
+sympathy with the young; a vote in his interest at the councils on his
+future; his sewing-woman, strictly accountable for mislaid boots and
+garments; always his butt and his slave.
+
+And when he decided to become a solicitor, and had entered an office in
+London; when his greeting had changed from 'Hullo, Postey, you old
+beast,' to Mornin', Packthread,' there came a war which, unlike all wars
+that Mary could remember, did not stay decently outside England and in
+the newspapers, but intruded on the lives of people whom she knew. As
+she said to Miss Fowler, it was 'most vexatious.' It took the Rector's
+son who was going into business with his elder brother; it took the
+Colonel's nephew on the eve of fruit-farming in Canada; it took Mrs.
+Grant's son who, his mother said, was devoted to the ministry; and, very
+early indeed, it took Wynn Fowler, who announced on a postcard that he
+had joined the Flying Corps and wanted a cardigan waistcoat.
+
+'He must go, and he must have the waistcoat,' said Miss Fowler. So Mary
+got the proper-sized needles and wool, while Miss Fowler told the men of
+her establishment--two gardeners and an odd man, aged sixty--that those
+who could join the Army had better do so. The gardeners left. Cheape,
+the odd man, stayed on, and was promoted to the gardener's cottage. The
+cook, scorning to be limited in luxuries, also left, after a spirited
+scene with Miss Fowler, and took the housemaid with her. Miss Fowler
+gazetted Nellie, Cheape's seventeen-year-old daughter, to the vacant
+post; Mrs. Cheape to the rank of cook, with occasional cleaning bouts;
+and the reduced establishment moved forward smoothly.
+
+Wynn demanded an increase in his allowance. Miss Fowler, who always
+looked facts in the face, said, 'He must have it. The chances are he
+won't live long to draw it, and if three hundred makes him happy--'
+
+Wynn was grateful, and came over, in his tight-buttoned uniform, to say
+so. His training centre was not thirty miles away, and his talk was so
+technical that it had to be explained by charts of the various types of
+machines. He gave Mary such a chart.
+
+'And you'd better study it, Postey,' he said. 'You'll be seeing a lot of
+'em soon.' So Mary studied the chart, but when Wynn next arrived to
+swell and exalt himself before his womenfolk, she failed badly in
+cross-examination, and he rated her as in the old days.
+
+'You _look_ more or less like a human being,' he said in his new Service
+voice. 'You _must_ have had a brain at some time in your past. What have
+you done with it? Where d'you keep it? A sheep would know more than you
+do, Postey. You're lamentable. You are less use than an empty tin can,
+you dowey old cassowary.'
+
+'I suppose that's how your superior officer talks to _you_?' said Miss
+Fowler from her chair.
+
+'But Postey doesn't mind,' Wynn replied. 'Do you, Packthread?'
+
+'Why? Was Wynn saying anything? I shall get this right next time you
+come,' she muttered, and knitted her pale brows again over the diagrams
+of Taubes, Farmans, and Zeppelins.
+
+In a few weeks the mere land and sea battles which she read to Miss
+Fowler after breakfast passed her like idle breath. Her heart and her
+interest were high in the air with Wynn, who had finished 'rolling'
+(whatever that might be) and had gone on from a 'taxi' to a machine more
+or less his own. One morning it circled over their very chimneys,
+alighted on Vegg's Heath, almost outside the garden gate, and Wynn came
+in, blue with cold, shouting for food. He and she drew Miss Fowler's
+bath-chair, as they had often done, along the Heath foot-path to look at
+the bi-plane. Mary observed that 'it smelt very badly.'
+
+'Postey, I believe you think with your nose,' said Wynn. 'I know you
+don't with your mind. Now, what type's that?'
+
+'I'll go and get the chart,' said Mary.
+
+'You're hopeless! You haven't the mental capacity of a white mouse,' he
+cried, and explained the dials and the sockets for bomb-dropping till it
+was time to mount and ride the wet clouds once more.
+
+'Ah!' said Mary, as the stinking thing flared upward. 'Wait till our
+Flying Corps gets to work! Wynn says it's much safer than in the
+trenches.'
+
+'I wonder,' said Miss Fowler. 'Tell Cheape to come and tow me home
+again.'
+
+'It's all downhill. I can do it,' said Mary, 'if you put the brake on.'
+She laid her lean self against the pushing-bar and home they trundled.
+
+'Now, be careful you aren't heated and catch a chill,' said overdressed
+Miss Fowler.
+
+'Nothing makes me perspire,' said Mary. As she bumped the chair under
+the porch she straightened her long back. The exertion had given her a
+colour, and the wind had loosened a wisp of hair across her forehead.
+Miss Fowler glanced at her.
+
+'What do you ever think of, Mary?' she demanded suddenly.
+
+'Oh, Wynn says he wants another three pairs of stockings--as thick as we
+can make them.'
+
+'Yes. But I mean the things that women think about. Here you are, more
+than forty--'
+
+'Forty-four,' said truthful Mary.
+
+'Well?'
+
+'Well?' Mary offered Miss Fowler her shoulder as usual.
+
+'And you've been with me ten years now.'
+
+'Let's see,' said Mary. 'Wynn was eleven when he came. He's twenty now,
+and I came two years before that. It must be eleven.'
+
+'Eleven! And you've never told me anything that matters in all that
+while. Looking back, it seems to me that _I_'ve done all the talking.'
+
+'I'm afraid I'm not much of a conversationalist. As Wynn says, I haven't
+the mind. Let me take your hat.'
+
+Miss Fowler, moving stiffly from the hip, stamped her rubber-tipped
+stick on the tiled hall floor. 'Mary, aren't you _anything_ except a
+companion? Would you _ever_ have been anything except a companion?'
+
+Mary hung up the garden hat on its proper peg. 'No,' she said after
+consideration. 'I don't imagine I ever should. But I've no imagination,
+I'm afraid.'
+
+She fetched Miss Fowler her eleven-o'clock glass of Contrexéville.
+
+That was the wet December when it rained six inches to the month, and
+the women went abroad as little as might be. Wynn's flying chariot
+visited them several times, and for two mornings (he had warned her by
+postcard) Mary heard the thresh of his propellers at dawn. The second
+time she ran to the window, and stared at the whitening sky. A little
+blur passed overhead. She lifted her lean arms towards it.
+
+That evening at six o'clock there came an announcement in an official
+envelope that Second Lieutenant W. Fowler had been killed during a trial
+flight. Death was instantaneous. She read it and carried it to
+Miss Fowler.
+
+'I never expected anything else,' said Miss Fowler; 'but I'm sorry it
+happened before he had done anything.'
+
+The room was whirling round Mary Postgate, but she found herself quite
+steady in the midst of it.
+
+'Yes,' she said. 'It's a great pity he didn't die in action after he had
+killed somebody.'
+
+'He was killed instantly. That's one comfort,' Miss Fowler went on.
+
+'But Wynn says the shock of a fall kills a man at once--whatever happens
+to the tanks,' quoted Mary.
+
+The room was coming to rest now. She heard Miss Fowler say impatiently,
+'But why can't we cry, Mary?' and herself replying, 'There's nothing to
+cry for. He has done his duty as much as Mrs. Grant's son did.'
+
+'And when he died, _she_ came and cried all the morning,' said Miss
+Fowler. 'This only makes me feel tired--terribly tired. Will you help me
+to bed, please, Mary?--And I think I'd like the hot-water bottle.'
+
+So Mary helped her and sat beside, talking of Wynn in his riotous youth.
+
+'I believe,' said Miss Fowler suddenly, 'that old people and young
+people slip from under a stroke like this. The middle-aged feel
+it most.'
+
+'I expect that's true,' said Mary, rising. 'I'm going to put away the
+things in his room now. Shall we wear mourning?'
+
+'Certainly not,' said Miss Fowler. 'Except, of course, at the funeral. I
+can't go. You will. I want you to arrange about his being buried here.
+What a blessing it didn't happen at Salisbury!'
+
+Every one, from the Authorities of the Flying Corps to the Rector, was
+most kind and sympathetic. Mary found herself for the moment in a world
+where bodies were in the habit of being despatched by all sorts of
+conveyances to all sorts of places. And at the funeral two young men in
+buttoned-up uniforms stood beside the grave and spoke to her afterwards.
+
+'You're Miss Postgate, aren't you?' said one. 'Fowler told me about you.
+He was a good chap--a first-class fellow--a great loss.'
+
+'Great loss!' growled his companion. 'We're all awfully sorry.'
+
+'How high did he fall from?' Mary whispered.
+
+'Pretty nearly four thousand feet, I should think, didn't he? You were
+up that day, Monkey?'
+
+'All of that,' the other child replied. 'My bar made three thousand, and
+I wasn't as high as him by a lot.'
+
+'Then _that's_ all right,' said Mary. 'Thank you very much.'
+
+They moved away as Mrs. Grant flung herself weeping on Mary's flat
+chest, under the lych-gate, and cried, '_I_ know how it feels! _I_ know
+how it feels!'
+
+'But both his parents are dead,' Mary returned, as she fended her off.
+'Perhaps they've all met by now,' she added vaguely as she escaped
+towards the coach.
+
+'I've thought of that too,' wailed Mrs. Grant; 'but then he'll be
+practically a stranger to them. Quite embarrassing!'
+
+Mary faithfully reported every detail of the ceremony to Miss Fowler,
+who, when she described Mrs. Grant's outburst, laughed aloud.
+
+'Oh, how Wynn would have enjoyed it! He was always utterly unreliable at
+funerals. D'you remember--' And they talked of him again, each piecing
+out the other's gaps. 'And now,' said Miss Fowler, 'we'll pull up the
+blinds and we'll have a general tidy. That always does us good. Have you
+seen to Wynn's things?'
+
+'Everything--since he first came,' said Mary. 'He was never
+destructive--even with his toys.'
+
+They faced that neat room.
+
+'It can't be natural not to cry,' Mary said at last. 'I'm _so_ afraid
+you'll have a reaction.'
+
+'As I told you, we old people slip from under the stroke. It's you I'm
+afraid for. Have you cried yet?'
+
+'I can't. It only makes me angry with the Germans.'
+
+'That's sheer waste of vitality,' said Miss Fowler. 'We must live till
+the war's finished.' She opened a full wardrobe. 'Now, I've been
+thinking things over. This is my plan. All his civilian clothes can be
+given away--Belgian refugees, and so on.'
+
+Mary nodded. 'Boots, collars, and gloves?'
+
+'Yes. We don't need to keep anything except his cap and belt.'
+
+'They came back yesterday with his Flying Corps clothes'--Mary pointed
+to a roll on the little iron bed.
+
+'Ah, but keep his Service things. Some one may be glad of them later. Do
+you remember his sizes?'
+
+'Five feet eight and a half; thirty-six inches round the chest. But he
+told me he's just put on an inch and a half. I'll mark it on a label and
+tie it on his sleeping-bag.'
+
+'So that disposes of _that_,' said Miss Fowler, tapping the palm of one
+hand with the ringed third finger of the other. 'What waste it all is!
+We'll get his old school trunk to-morrow and pack his civilian clothes.'
+
+'And the rest?' said Mary. 'His books and pictures and the games and the
+toys--and--and the rest?'
+
+'My plan is to burn every single thing,' said Miss Fowler. 'Then we
+shall know where they are and no one can handle them afterwards. What do
+you think?'
+
+'I think that would be much the best,' said Mary. 'But there's such a
+lot of them.'
+
+'We'll burn them in the destructor,' said Miss Fowler.
+
+This was an open-air furnace for the consumption of refuse; a little
+circular four-foot tower of pierced brick over an iron grating. Miss
+Fowler had noticed the design in a gardening journal years ago, and had
+had it built at the bottom of the garden. It suited her tidy soul, for
+it saved unsightly rubbish-heaps, and the ashes lightened the stiff
+clay soil.
+
+Mary considered for a moment, saw her way clear, and nodded again. They
+spent the evening putting away well-remembered civilian suits,
+underclothes that Mary had marked, and the regiments of very gaudy socks
+and ties. A second trunk was needed, and, after that, a little
+packing-case, and it was late next day when Cheape and the local carrier
+lifted them to the cart. The Rector luckily knew of a friend's son,
+about five feet eight and a half inches high, to whom a complete Flying
+Corps outfit would be most acceptable, and sent his gardener's son down
+with a barrow to take delivery of it. The cap was hung up in Miss
+Fowler's bedroom, the belt in Miss Postgate's; for, as Miss Fowler said,
+they had no desire to make tea-party talk of them.
+
+'That disposes of _that_,' said Miss Fowler. 'I'll leave the rest to
+you, Mary. I can't run up and down the garden. You'd better take the big
+clothes-basket and get Nellie to help you.'
+
+'I shall take the wheel-barrow and do it myself,' said Mary, and for
+once in her life closed her mouth.
+
+Miss Fowler, in moments of irritation, had called Mary deadly
+methodical. She put on her oldest waterproof and gardening-hat and her
+ever-slipping goloshes, for the weather was on the edge of more rain.
+She gathered fire-lighters from the kitchen, a half-scuttle of coals,
+and a faggot of brushwood. These she wheeled in the barrow down the
+mossed paths to the dank little laurel shrubbery where the destructor
+stood under the drip of three oaks. She climbed the wire fence into the
+Rector's glebe just behind, and from his tenant's rick pulled two large
+armfuls of good hay, which she spread neatly on the fire-bars. Next,
+journey by journey, passing Miss Fowler's white face at the morning-room
+window each time, she brought down in the towel-covered clothes-basket,
+on the wheel-barrow, thumbed and used Hentys, Marryats, Levers,
+Stevensons, Baroness Orczys, Garvices, schoolbooks, and atlases,
+unrelated piles of the _Motor Cyclist_, the _Light Car_, and catalogues
+of Olympia Exhibitions; the remnants of a fleet of sailing-ships from
+ninepenny cutters to a three-guinea yacht; a prep.-school dressing-gown;
+bats from three-and-sixpence to twenty-four shillings; cricket and
+tennis balls; disintegrated steam and clockwork locomotives with their
+twisted rails; a grey and red tin model of a submarine; a dumb
+gramophone and cracked records; golf-clubs that had to be broken across
+the knee, like his walking-sticks, and an assegai; photographs of
+private and public school cricket and football elevens, and his O.T.C.
+on the line of march; kodaks, and film-rolls; some pewters, and one real
+silver cup, for boxing competitions and Junior Hurdles; sheaves of
+school photographs; Miss Fowler's photograph; her own which he had borne
+off in fun and (good care she took not to ask!) had never returned; a
+playbox with a secret drawer; a load of flannels, belts, and jerseys,
+and a pair of spiked shoes unearthed in the attic; a packet of all the
+letters that Miss Fowler and she had ever written to him, kept for some
+absurd reason through all these years; a five-day attempt at a diary;
+framed pictures of racing motors in full Brooklands career, and load
+upon load of undistinguishable wreckage of tool-boxes, rabbit-hutches,
+electric batteries, tin soldiers, fret-saw outfits, and jig-saw puzzles.
+
+Miss Fowler at the window watched her come and go, and said to herself,
+'Mary's an old woman. I never realised it before.'
+
+After lunch she recommended her to rest.
+
+'I'm not in the least tired,' said Mary. 'I've got it all arranged. I'm
+going to the village at two o'clock for some paraffin. Nellie hasn't
+enough, and the walk will do me good.'
+
+She made one last quest round the house before she started, and found
+that she had overlooked nothing. It began to mist as soon as she had
+skirted Vegg's Heath, where Wynn used to descend--it seemed to her that
+she could almost hear the beat of his propellers overhead, but there was
+nothing to see. She hoisted her umbrella and lunged into the blind wet
+till she had reached the shelter of the empty village. As she came out
+of Mr. Kidd's shop with a bottle full of paraffin in her string
+shopping-bag, she met Nurse Eden, the village nurse, and fell into talk
+with her, as usual, about the village children. They were just parting
+opposite the 'Royal Oak,' when a gun, they fancied, was fired
+immediately behind the house. It was followed by a child's shriek dying
+into a wail.
+
+'Accident!' said Nurse Eden promptly, and dashed through the empty bar,
+followed by Mary. They found Mrs. Gerritt, the publican's wife, who
+could only gasp and point to the yard, where a little cart-lodge was
+sliding sideways amid a clatter of tiles. Nurse Eden snatched up a sheet
+drying before the fire, ran out, lifted something from the ground, and
+flung the sheet round it. The sheet turned scarlet and half her uniform
+too, as she bore the load into the kitchen. It was little Edna Gerritt,
+aged nine, whom Mary had known since her perambulator days.
+
+'Am I hurted bad?' Edna asked, and died between Nurse Eden's dripping
+hands. The sheet fell aside and for an instant, before she could shut
+her eyes, Mary saw the ripped and shredded body.
+
+'It's a wonder she spoke at all,' said Nurse Eden. 'What in God's name
+was it?'
+
+'A bomb,' said Mary.
+
+'One o' the Zeppelins?'
+
+'No. An aeroplane. I thought I heard it on the Heath, but I fancied it
+was one of ours. It must have shut off its engines as it came down.
+That's why we didn't notice it.'
+
+'The filthy pigs!' said Nurse Eden, all white and shaken. 'See the
+pickle I'm in! Go and tell Dr. Hennis, Miss Postgate.' Nurse looked at
+the mother, who had dropped face down on the floor. 'She's only in a
+fit. Turn her over.'
+
+Mary heaved Mrs. Gerritt right side up, and hurried off for the doctor.
+When she told her tale, he asked her to sit down in the surgery till he
+got her something.
+
+'But I don't need it, I assure you,' said she. 'I don't think it would
+be wise to tell Miss Fowler about it, do you? Her heart is so irritable
+in this weather.'
+
+Dr. Hennis looked at her admiringly as he packed up his bag.
+
+'No. Don't tell anybody till we're sure,' he said, and hastened to the
+'Royal Oak,' while Mary went on with the paraffin. The village behind
+her was as quiet as usual, for the news had not yet spread. She frowned
+a little to herself, her large nostrils expanded uglily, and from time
+to time she muttered a phrase which Wynn, who never restrained himself
+before his womenfolk, had applied to the enemy. 'Bloody pagans! They
+_are_ bloody pagans. But,' she continued, falling back on the teaching
+that had made her what she was, 'one mustn't let one's mind dwell on
+these things.'
+
+Before she reached the house Dr. Hennis, who was also a special
+constable, overtook her in his car.
+
+'Oh, Miss Postgate,' he said, 'I wanted to tell you that that accident
+at the "Royal Oak" was due to Gerritt's stable tumbling down. It's been
+dangerous for a long time. It ought to have been condemned.'
+
+'I thought I heard an explosion too,' said Mary.
+
+'You might have been misled by the beams snapping. I've been looking at
+'em. They were dry-rotted through and through. Of course, as they broke,
+they would make a noise just like a gun.'
+
+'Yes?' said Mary politely.
+
+'Poor little Edna was playing underneath it,' he went on, still holding
+her with his eyes, 'and that and the tiles cut her to pieces, you see?'
+
+'I saw it,' said Mary, shaking her head. 'I heard it too.'
+
+'Well, we cannot be sure.' Dr. Hennis changed his tone completely. 'I
+know both you and Nurse Eden (I've been speaking to her) are perfectly
+trustworthy, and I can rely on you not to say anything--yet at least. It
+is no good to stir up people unless--'
+
+'Oh, I never do--anyhow,' said Mary, and Dr. Hennis went on to the
+county town.
+
+After all, she told herself, it might, just possibly, have been the
+collapse of the old stable that had done all those things to poor little
+Edna. She was sorry she had even hinted at other things, but Nurse Eden
+was discretion itself. By the time she reached home the affair seemed
+increasingly remote by its very monstrosity. As she came in, Miss Fowler
+told her that a couple of aeroplanes had passed half an hour ago.
+
+'I thought I heard them,' she replied, 'I'm going down to the garden
+now. I've got the paraffin.'
+
+'Yes, but--what _have_ you got on your boots? They're soaking wet.
+Change them at once.'
+
+Not only did Mary obey but she wrapped the boots in a newspaper, and
+put them into the string bag with the bottle. So, armed with the longest
+kitchen poker, she left.
+
+'It's raining again,' was Miss Fowler's last word, 'but--I know you
+won't be happy till that's disposed of.'
+
+'It won't take long. I've got everything down there, and I've put the
+lid on the destructor to keep the wet out.'
+
+The shrubbery was filling with twilight by the time she had completed
+her arrangements and sprinkled the sacrificial oil. As she lit the match
+that would burn her heart to ashes, she heard a groan or a grunt behind
+the dense Portugal laurels.
+
+'Cheape?' she called impatiently, but Cheape, with his ancient lumbago,
+in his comfortable cottage would be the last man to profane the
+sanctuary. 'Sheep,' she concluded, and threw in the fusee. The pyre went
+up in a roar, and the immediate flame hastened night around her.
+
+'How Wynn would have loved this!' she thought, stepping back from the
+blaze.
+
+By its light she saw, half hidden behind a laurel not five paces away, a
+bareheaded man sitting very stiffly at the foot of one of the oaks. A
+broken branch lay across his lap--one booted leg protruding from beneath
+it. His head moved ceaselessly from side to side, but his body was as
+still as the tree's trunk. He was dressed--she moved sideways to look
+more closely--in a uniform something like Wynn's, with a flap buttoned
+across the chest. For an instant, she had some idea that it might be
+one of the young flying men she had met at the funeral. But their heads
+were dark and glossy. This man's was as pale as a baby's, and so closely
+cropped that she could see the disgusting pinky skin beneath. His
+lips moved.
+
+'What do you say?' Mary moved towards him and stooped.
+
+'Laty! Laty! Laty!' he muttered, while his hands picked at the dead wet
+leaves. There was no doubt as to his nationality. It made her so angry
+that she strode back to the destructor, though it was still too hot to
+use the poker there. Wynn's books seemed to be catching well. She looked
+up at the oak behind the man; several of the light upper and two or
+three rotten lower branches had broken and scattered their rubbish on
+the shrubbery path. On the lowest fork a helmet with dependent strings,
+showed like a bird's-nest in the light of a long-tongued flame.
+Evidently this person had fallen through the tree. Wynn had told her
+that it was quite possible for people to fall out of aeroplanes. Wynn
+told her too, that trees were useful things to break an aviator's fall,
+but in this case the aviator must have been broken or he would have
+moved from his queer position. He seemed helpless except for his
+horrible rolling head. On the other hand, she could see a pistol case at
+his belt--and Mary loathed pistols. Months ago, after reading certain
+Belgian reports together, she and Miss Fowler had had dealings with
+one--a huge revolver with flat-nosed bullets, which latter, Wynn said,
+were forbidden by the rules of war to be used against civilised
+enemies. 'They're good enough for us,' Miss Fowler had replied. 'Show
+Mary how it works.' And Wynn, laughing at the mere possibility of any
+such need, had led the craven winking Mary into the Rector's disused
+quarry, and had shown her how to fire the terrible machine. It lay now
+in the top-left-hand drawer of her toilet-table--a memento not included
+in the burning. Wynn would be pleased to see how she was not afraid.
+
+She slipped up to the house to get it. When she came through the rain,
+the eyes in the head were alive with expectation. The mouth even tried
+to smile. But at sight of the revolver its corners went down just like
+Edna Gerritt's. A tear trickled from one eye, and the head rolled from
+shoulder to shoulder as though trying to point out something.
+
+'Cassée. Tout cassée,' it whimpered.
+
+'What do you say?' said Mary disgustedly, keeping well to one side,
+though only the head moved.
+
+'Cassée,' it repeated. 'Che me rends. Le médicin! Toctor!'
+
+'Nein!' said she, bringing all her small German to bear with the big
+pistol. 'Ich haben der todt Kinder gesehn.'
+
+The head was still. Mary's hand dropped. She had been careful to keep
+her finger off the trigger for fear of accidents. After a few moments'
+waiting, she returned to the destructor, where the flames were falling,
+and churned up Wynn's charring books with the poker. Again the head
+groaned for the doctor.
+
+'Stop that!' said Mary, and stamped her foot. 'Stop that, you bloody
+pagan!'
+
+The words came quite smoothly and naturally. They were Wynn's own words,
+and Wynn was a gentleman who for no consideration on earth would have
+torn little Edna into those vividly coloured strips and strings. But
+this thing hunched under the oak-tree had done that thing. It was no
+question of reading horrors out of newspapers to Miss Fowler. Mary had
+seen it with her own eyes on the 'Royal Oak' kitchen table. She must not
+allow her mind to dwell upon it. Now Wynn was dead, and everything
+connected with him was lumping and rustling and tinkling under her busy
+poker into red black dust and grey leaves of ash. The thing beneath the
+oak would die too. Mary had seen death more than once. She came of a
+family that had a knack of dying under, as she told Miss Fowler, 'most
+distressing circumstances.' She would stay where she was till she was
+entirely satisfied that It was dead--dead as dear papa in the late
+'eighties; aunt Mary in eighty-nine; mamma in 'ninety-one; cousin Dick
+in ninety-five; Lady McCausland's housemaid in 'ninety-nine; Lady
+McCausland's sister in nineteen hundred and one; Wynn buried five days
+ago; and Edna Gerritt still waiting for decent earth to hide her. As she
+thought--her underlip caught up by one faded canine, brows knit and
+nostrils wide--she wielded the poker with lunges that jarred the grating
+at the bottom, and careful scrapes round the brick-work above. She
+looked at her wrist-watch. It was getting on to half-past four, and the
+rain was coming down in earnest. Tea would be at five. If It did not die
+before that time, she would be soaked and would have to change.
+Meantime, and this occupied her, Wynn's things were burning well in
+spite of the hissing wet, though now and again a book-back with a quite
+distinguishable title would be heaved up out of the mass. The exercise
+of stoking had given her a glow which seemed to reach to the marrow of
+her bones. She hummed--Mary never had a voice--to herself. She had never
+believed in all those advanced views--though Miss Fowler herself leaned
+a little that way--of woman's work in the world; but now she saw there
+was much to be said for them. This, for instance, was _her_ work--work
+which no man, least of all Dr. Hennis, would ever have done. A man, at
+such a crisis, would be what Wynn called a 'sportsman'; would leave
+everything to fetch help, and would certainly bring It into the house.
+Now a woman's business was to make a happy home for--for a husband and
+children. Failing these--it was not a thing one should allow one's mind
+to dwell upon--but--
+
+'Stop it!' Mary cried once more across the shadows. 'Nein, I tell you!
+Ich haben der todt Kinder gesehn.'
+
+_But_ it was a fact. A woman who had missed these things could still be
+useful--more useful than a man in certain respects. She thumped like a
+pavior through the settling ashes at the secret thrill of it. The rain
+was damping the fire, but she could feel--it was too dark to see--that
+her work was done. There was a dull red glow at the bottom of the
+destructor, not enough to char the wooden lid if she slipped it half
+over against the driving wet. This arranged, she leaned on the poker and
+waited, while an increasing rapture laid hold on her. She ceased to
+think. She gave herself up to feel. Her long pleasure was broken by a
+sound that she had waited for in agony several times in her life. She
+leaned forward and listened, smiling. There could be no mistake. She
+closed her eyes and drank it in. Once it ceased abruptly.
+
+'Go on,' she murmured, half aloud. 'That isn't the end.'
+
+Then the end came very distinctly in a lull between two rain-gusts. Mary
+Postgate drew her breath short between her teeth and shivered from head
+to foot. '_That's_ all right,' said she contentedly, and went up to the
+house, where she scandalised the whole routine by taking a luxurious hot
+bath before tea, and came down looking, as Miss Fowler said when she saw
+her lying all relaxed on the other sofa, 'quite handsome!'
+
+
+
+
+     THE BEGINNINGS
+
+     It was not part of their blood,
+       It came to them very late
+     With long arrears to make good,
+       When the English began to hate.
+
+     They were not easily moved,
+       They were icy willing to wait
+     Till every count should be proved,
+       Ere the English began to hate.
+
+     Their voices were even and low,
+       Their eyes were level and straight.
+     There was neither sign nor show,
+       When the English began to hate.
+
+     It was not preached to the crowd,
+       It was not taught by the State.
+     No man spoke it aloud,
+       When the English began to hate.
+
+     It was not suddenly bred,
+       It will not swiftly abate,
+     Through the chill years ahead,
+       When Time shall count from the date
+       That the English began to hate.
+
+
+
+***END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK A DIVERSITY OF CREATURES***
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+<title>The Project Gutenberg eBook of A Diversity of Creatures, by Rudyard Kipling</title>
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+<h1>The Project Gutenberg eBook, A Diversity of Creatures, by Rudyard Kipling</h1>
+<pre>
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at <a href = "https://www.gutenberg.org">www.gutenberg.org</a></pre>
+<p>Title: A Diversity of Creatures</p>
+<p>Author: Rudyard Kipling</p>
+<p>Release Date: August 2, 2004  [eBook #13085]<br>
+Most recently updated: December 10, 2012</p>
+<p>Language: English</p>
+<p>Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1</p>
+<p>***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK A DIVERSITY OF CREATURES***</p>
+<br>
+<br>
+<h3>E-text prepared by Charles Aldarondo, Charlie Kirschner,<br>
+    and the Project Gutenberg Online Distributed Proofreading Team</h3>
+<br>
+<br>
+<hr class="full" noshade>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<h1>A Diversity of<br>
+Creatures</h1>
+<h3>By Rudyard Kipling</h3>
+<h4>1917</h4>
+<br>
+<br>
+<hr style="width: 35%;">
+<br>
+<br>
+<h2>PREFACE</h2>
+<br>
+<blockquote>With two exceptions, the dates at the head of these
+stories show when they were published in magazine form. 'The
+Village that Voted the Earth was Flat,' and 'My Son's Wife' carry
+the dates when they were written.</blockquote>
+<br>
+<p class="loc">RUDYARD KIPLING.</p>
+<br>
+<br>
+<hr style="width: 35%;">
+<br>
+<br>
+<h2>CONTENTS</h2>
+<br>
+<center><a href="#page003">As Easy as ABC</a><br>
+<a href="#page045"><i>MacDonough's Song</i></a><br>
+<a href="#page047">Friendly Brook</a><br>
+<a href="#page065"><i>The Land</i></a><br>
+<a href="#page071">In the Same Boat</a><br>
+<a href="#page104">'<i>Helen all Alone</i>'</a><br>
+<a href="#page107">The Honours of War</a><br>
+<a href="#page131"><i>The Children</i></a><br>
+<a href="#page133">The Dog Hervey</a><br>
+<a href="#page160"><i>The Comforters</i></a><br>
+<a href="#page163">The Village that Voted the Earth was
+Flat</a><br>
+<a href="#page216"><i>The Press</i></a><br>
+<a href="#page219">In the Presence</a><br>
+<a href="#page239"><i>Jobson's Amen</i></a><br>
+<a href="#page241">Regulus</a><br>
+<a href="#page273"><i>A Translation</i></a><br>
+<a href="#page275">The Edge of the Evening</a><br>
+<a href="#page300"><i>Rebirth</i></a><br>
+<a href="#page303">The Horse Marines</a><br>
+<a href="#page330"><i>The Legend of Mirth</i></a><br>
+<a href="#page335">'My Son's Wife'</a><br>
+<a href="#page379"><i>The Floods</i></a><br>
+<a href="#page381"><i>The Fabulists</i></a><br>
+<a href="#page383">The Vortex</a><br>
+<a href="#page405"><i>The Song of Seven Cities</i></a><br>
+<a href="#page409">'Swept and Garnished'</a><br>
+<a href="#page421">Mary Postgate</a><br>
+<a href="#page443"><i>The Beginnings</i></a></center>
+<br>
+<br>
+<hr style="width: 35%;">
+<br>
+<br>
+<h2>A DIVERSITY OF CREATURES</h2>
+<br>
+<br>
+<hr style="width: 35%;">
+<br>
+<br>
+<a name="page003"></a>
+<h2>As Easy as A.B.C.</h2>
+<h3>(1912)</h3>
+<blockquote><i>The A.B.C., that semi-elected, semi-nominated body
+of a few score persons, controls the Planet. Transportation is
+Civilisation, our motto runs. Theoretically we do what we please,
+so long as we do not interfere with the traffic</i> and all it
+implies. <i>Practically, the A.B.C. confirms or annuls all
+international arrangements, and, to judge from its last report,
+finds our tolerant, humorous, lazy little Planet only too ready to
+shift the whole burden of public administration on its
+shoulders</i>.</blockquote>
+<p class="loc">'With the Night Mail<a name="FNanchor1"></a><a href=
+"#Footnote_1">[1]</a>.'</p>
+<blockquote><a name="Footnote_1"></a><a href="#FNanchor1">[1]</a>
+<i>Actions and Reactions</i>.</blockquote>
+<p>Isn't it almost time that our Planet took some interest in the
+proceedings of the A&euml;rial Board of Control? One knows that
+easy communications nowadays, and lack of privacy in the past, have
+killed all curiosity among mankind, but as the Board's Official
+Reporter I am bound to tell my tale.</p>
+<p>At 9.30 A.M., August 26, A.D. 2065, the Board, sitting in
+London, was informed by De Forest that the District of Northern
+Illinois had riotously cut itself out of all systems and would
+remain disconnected till the Board should take over and administer
+it direct.</p>
+<p>Every Northern Illinois freight and passenger tower was, he
+reported, out of action; all District main, local, and guiding
+lights had been extinguished; all General Communications were dumb,
+and through traffic had been diverted. No reason had been given,
+but he gathered unofficially from the Mayor of Chicago that the
+District complained of 'crowd-making and invasion of privacy.'</p>
+<p>As a matter of fact, it is of no importance whether Northern
+Illinois stay in or out of planetary circuit; as a matter of
+policy, any complaint of invasion of privacy needs immediate
+investigation, lest worse follow.</p>
+<p>By 9-45 A.M. De Forest, Dragomiroff (Russia), Takahira (Japan),
+and Pirolo (Italy) were empowered to visit Illinois and 'to take
+such steps as might be necessary for the resumption of traffic and
+<i>all that that implies.'</i> By 10 A.M. the Hall was empty, and
+the four Members and I were aboard what Pirolo insisted on calling
+'my leetle godchild'--that is to say, the new <i>Victor Pirolo</i>.
+Our Planet prefers to know Victor Pirolo as a gentle, grey-haired
+enthusiast who spends his time near Foggia, inventing or creating
+new breeds of Spanish-Italian olive-trees; but there is another
+side to his nature--the manufacture of quaint inventions, of which
+the <i>Victor Pirolo</i> is, perhaps, not the least surprising. She
+and a few score sister-craft of the same type embody his latest
+ideas. But she is not comfortable. An A.B.C. boat does not take the
+air with the level-keeled lift of a liner, but shoots up
+rocket-fashion like the 'aeroplane' of our ancestors, and makes her
+height at top-speed from the first. That is why I found myself
+sitting suddenly on the large lap of Eustace Arnott, who commands
+the A.B.C. Fleet. One knows vaguely that there is such a thing as a
+Fleet somewhere on the Planet, and that, theoretically, it exists
+for the purposes of what used to be known as 'war.' Only a week
+before, while visiting a glacier sanatorium behind Gothaven, I had
+seen some squadrons making false auroras far to the north while
+they manoeuvred round the Pole; but, naturally, it had never
+occurred to me that the things could be used in earnest.</p>
+<p>Said Arnott to De Forest as I staggered to a seat on the
+chart-room divan: 'We're tremendously grateful to 'em in Illinois.
+We've never had a chance of exercising all the Fleet together. I've
+turned in a General Call, and I expect we'll have at least two
+hundred keels aloft this evening.'</p>
+<p>'Well aloft?' De Forest asked.</p>
+<p>'Of course, sir. Out of sight till they're called for.'</p>
+<p>Arnott laughed as he lolled over the transparent chart-table
+where the map of the summer-blue Atlantic slid along, degree by
+degree, in exact answer to our progress. Our dial already showed
+320 m.p.h. and we were two thousand feet above the uppermost
+traffic lines.</p>
+<p>'Now, where is this Illinois District of yours?' said
+Dragomiroff. 'One travels so much, one sees so little. Oh, I
+remember! It is in North America.'</p>
+<p>De Forest, whose business it is to know the out districts, told
+us that it lay at the foot of Lake Michigan, on a road to nowhere
+in particular, was about half an hour's run from end to end, and,
+except in one corner, as flat as the sea. Like most flat countries
+nowadays, it was heavily guarded against invasion of privacy by
+forced timber--fifty-foot spruce and tamarack, grown in five years.
+The population was close on two millions, largely migratory between
+Florida and California, with a backbone of small farms (they call a
+thousand acres a farm in Illinois) whose owners come into Chicago
+for amusements and society during the winter. They were, he said,
+noticeably kind, quiet folk, but a little exacting, as all flat
+countries must be, in their notions of privacy. There had, for
+instance, been no printed news-sheet in Illinois for twenty-seven
+years. Chicago argued that engines for printed news sooner or later
+developed into engines for invasion of privacy, which in turn might
+bring the old terror of Crowds and blackmail back to the Planet. So
+news-sheets were not.</p>
+<p>'And that's Illinois,' De Forest concluded. 'You see, in the Old
+Days, she was in the forefront of what they used to call
+"progress," and Chicago--'</p>
+<p>'Chicago?' said Takahira. 'That's the little place where there
+is Salati's Statue of the Nigger in Flames? A fine bit of old
+work.'</p>
+<p>'When did you see it?' asked De Forest quickly. 'They only
+unveil it once a year.'</p>
+<p>'I know. At Thanksgiving. It was then,' said Takahira, with a
+shudder. 'And they sang MacDonough's Song, too.'</p>
+<p>'Whew!' De Forest whistled. 'I did not know that! I wish you'd
+told me before. MacDonough's Song may have had its uses when it was
+composed, but it was an infernal legacy for any man to leave
+behind.'</p>
+<p>'It's protective instinct, my dear fellows,' said Pirolo,
+rolling a cigarette. 'The Planet, she has had her dose of popular
+government. She suffers from inherited agoraphobia. She has
+no--ah--use for Crowds.'</p>
+<p>Dragomiroff leaned forward to give him a light. 'Certainly,'
+said the white-bearded Russian, 'the Planet has taken all
+precautions against Crowds for the past hundred years. What is our
+total population to-day? Six hundred million, we hope; five
+hundred, we think; but--but if next year's census shows more than
+four hundred and fifty, I myself will eat all the extra little
+babies. We have cut the birth-rate out--right out! For a long time
+we have said to Almighty God, "Thank You, Sir, but we do not much
+like Your game of life, so we will not play."'</p>
+<p>'Anyhow,' said Arnott defiantly, 'men live a century apiece on
+the average now.'</p>
+<p>'Oh, that is quite well! I am rich--you are rich--we are all
+rich and happy because we are so few and we live so long. Only
+<i>I</i> think Almighty God He will remember what the Planet was
+like in the time of Crowds and the Plague. Perhaps He will send us
+nerves. Eh, Pirolo?'</p>
+<p>The Italian blinked into space. 'Perhaps,' he said, 'He has sent
+them already. Anyhow, you cannot argue with the Planet. She does
+not forget the Old Days, and--what can you do?'</p>
+<p>'For sure we can't remake the world.' De Forest glanced at the
+map flowing smoothly across the table from west to east. 'We ought
+to be over our ground by nine to-night. There won't be much sleep
+afterwards.'</p>
+<p>On which hint we dispersed, and I slept till Takahira waked me
+for dinner. Our ancestors thought nine hours' sleep ample for their
+little lives. We, living thirty years longer, feel ourselves
+defrauded with less than eleven out of the twenty-four.</p>
+<p>By ten o'clock we were over Lake Michigan. The west shore was
+lightless, except for a dull ground-glare at Chicago, and a single
+traffic-directing light--its leading beam pointing north--at
+Waukegan on our starboard bow. None of the Lake villages gave any
+sign of life; and inland, westward, so far as we could see,
+blackness lay unbroken on the level earth. We swooped down and
+skimmed low across the dark, throwing calls county by county. Now
+and again we picked up the faint glimmer of a house-light, or heard
+the rasp and rend of a cultivator being played across the fields,
+but Northern Illinois as a whole was one inky, apparently
+uninhabited, waste of high, forced woods. Only our illuminated map,
+with its little pointer switching from county to county as we
+wheeled and twisted, gave us any idea of our position. Our calls,
+urgent, pleading, coaxing or commanding, through the General
+Communicator brought no answer. Illinois strictly maintained her
+own privacy in the timber which she grew for that purpose.</p>
+<p>'Oh, this is absurd!' said De Forest. 'We're like an owl trying
+to work a wheat-field. Is this Bureau Creek? Let's land, Arnott,
+and get hold of some one.'</p>
+<p>We brushed over a belt of forced woodland--fifteen-year-old
+maple sixty feet high--grounded on a private meadow-dock, none too
+big, where we moored to our own grapnels, and hurried out through
+the warm dark night towards a light in a verandah. As we neared the
+garden gate I could have sworn we had stepped knee-deep in
+quicksand, for we could scarcely drag our feet against the
+prickling currents that clogged them. After five paces we stopped,
+wiping our foreheads, as hopelessly stuck on dry smooth turf as so
+many cows in a bog.</p>
+<p>'Pest!' cried Pirolo angrily. 'We are ground-circuited. And it
+is my own system of ground-circuits too! I know the pull.'</p>
+<p>'Good evening,' said a girl's voice from the verandah. 'Oh, I'm
+sorry! We've locked up. Wait a minute.'</p>
+<p>We heard the click of a switch, and almost fell forward as the
+currents round our knees were withdrawn.</p>
+<p>The girl laughed, and laid aside her knitting. An old-fashioned
+Controller stood at her elbow, which she reversed from time to
+time, and we could hear the snort and clank of the obedient
+cultivator half a mile away, behind the guardian woods.</p>
+<p>'Come in and sit down,' she said. 'I'm only playing a plough.
+Dad's gone to Chicago to--Ah! Then it was <i>your</i> call I heard
+just now!'</p>
+<p>She had caught sight of Arnott's Board uniform, leaped to the
+switch, and turned it full on.</p>
+<p>We were checked, gasping, waist-deep in current this time, three
+yards from the verandah.</p>
+<p>'We only want to know what's the matter with Illinois,' said De
+Forest placidly.</p>
+<p>'Then hadn't you better go to Chicago and find out?' she
+answered. 'There's nothing wrong here. We own ourselves.'</p>
+<p>'How can we go anywhere if you won't loose us?' De Forest went
+on, while Arnott scowled. Admirals of Fleets are still quite human
+when their dignity is touched.</p>
+<p>'Stop a minute--you don't know how funny you look!' She put her
+hands on her hips and laughed mercilessly.</p>
+<p>'Don't worry about that,' said Arnott, and whistled. A voice
+answered from the <i>Victor Pirolo</i> in the meadow.</p>
+<p>'Only a single-fuse ground-circuit!' Arnott called. 'Sort it out
+gently, please.'</p>
+<p>We heard the ping of a breaking lamp; a fuse blew out somewhere
+in the verandah roof, frightening a nestful of birds. The
+ground-circuit was open. We stooped and rubbed our tingling
+ankles.</p>
+<p>'How rude--how very rude of you!' the maiden cried.</p>
+<p>''Sorry, but we haven't time to look funny,' said Arnott. 'We've
+got to go to Chicago; and if I were you, young lady, I'd go into
+the cellars for the next two hours, and take mother with me.'</p>
+<p>Off he strode, with us at his heels, muttering indignantly, till
+the humour of the thing struck and doubled him up with laughter at
+the foot of the gang-way ladder.</p>
+<p>'The Board hasn't shown what you might call a fat spark on this
+occasion,' said De Forest, wiping his eyes. 'I hope I didn't look
+as big a fool as you did, Arnott! Hullo! What on earth is that? Dad
+coming home from Chicago?'</p>
+<p>There was a rattle and a rush, and a five-plough cultivator,
+blades in air like so many teeth, trundled itself at us round the
+edge of the timber, fuming and sparking furiously.</p>
+<p>'Jump!' said Arnott, as we bundled ourselves through the
+none-too-wide door. 'Never mind about shutting it. Up!'</p>
+<p>The <i>Victor Pirolo</i> lifted like a bubble, and the vicious
+machine shot just underneath us, clawing high as it passed.</p>
+<p>'There's a nice little spit-kitten for you!' said Arnott,
+dusting his knees. 'We ask her a civil question. First she circuits
+us and then she plays a cultivator at us!'</p>
+<p>'And then we fly,' said Dragomiroff. 'If I were forty years more
+young, I would go back and kiss her. Ho! Ho!'</p>
+<p>'I,' said Pirolo, 'would smack her! My pet ship has been chased
+by a dirty plough; a--how do you say?--agricultural implement.'</p>
+<p>'Oh, that is Illinois all over,' said De Forest. 'They don't
+content themselves with talking about privacy. They arrange to have
+it. And now, where's your alleged fleet, Arnott? We must assert
+ourselves against this wench.'</p>
+<p>Arnott pointed to the black heavens.</p>
+<p>'Waiting on--up there,' said he. 'Shall I give them the whole
+installation, sir?'</p>
+<p>'Oh, I don't think the young lady is quite worth that,' said De
+Forest. 'Get over Chicago, and perhaps we'll see something.'</p>
+<p>In a few minutes we were hanging at two thousand feet over an
+oblong block of incandescence in the centre of the little town.</p>
+<p>'That looks like the old City Hall. Yes, there's Salati's Statue
+in front of it,' said Takahira. 'But what on earth are they doing
+to the place? I thought they used it for a market nowadays! Drop a
+little, please.'</p>
+<p>We could hear the sputter and crackle of road-surfacing
+machines--the cheap Western type which fuse stone and rubbish into
+lava-like ribbed glass for their rough country roads. Three or four
+surfacers worked on each side of a square of ruins. The brick and
+stone wreckage crumbled, slid forward, and presently spread out
+into white-hot pools of sticky slag, which the levelling-rods
+smoothed more or less flat. Already a third of the big block had
+been so treated, and was cooling to dull red before our astonished
+eyes.</p>
+<p>'It is the Old Market,' said De Forest. 'Well, there's nothing
+to prevent Illinois from making a road through a market. It doesn't
+interfere with traffic, that I can see.'</p>
+<p>'Hsh!' said Arnott, gripping me by the shoulder. 'Listen!
+They're singing. Why on the earth are they singing?'</p>
+<p>We dropped again till we could see the black fringe of people at
+the edge of that glowing square.</p>
+<p>At first they only roared against the roar of the surfacers and
+levellers. Then the words came up clearly--the words of the
+Forbidden Song that all men knew, and none let pass their
+lips--poor Pat MacDonough's Song, made in the days of the Crowds
+and the Plague--every silly word of it loaded to sparking-point
+with the Planet's inherited memories of horror, panic, fear and
+cruelty. And Chicago--innocent, contented little Chicago--was
+singing it aloud to the infernal tune that carried riot, pestilence
+and lunacy round our Planet a few generations ago!</p>
+<blockquote>'Once there was The People--Terror gave it birth;<br>
+Once there was The People, and it made a hell of
+earth!'</blockquote>
+<p>(Then the stamp and pause):</p>
+<blockquote>'Earth arose and crushed it. Listen, oh, ye slain!<br>
+Once there was The People--it shall never be again!'</blockquote>
+<p>The levellers thrust in savagely against the ruins as the song
+renewed itself again, again and again, louder than the crash of the
+melting walls.</p>
+<p>De Forest frowned.</p>
+<p>'I don't like that,' he said. 'They've broken back to the Old
+Days! They'll be killing somebody soon. I think we'd better divert
+'em, Arnott.'</p>
+<p>'Ay, ay, sir.' Arnott's hand went to his cap, and we heard the
+hull of the <i>Victor Pirolo</i> ring to the command: 'Lamps! Both
+watches stand by! Lamps! Lamps! Lamps!'</p>
+<p>'Keep still!' Takahira whispered to me. 'Blinkers, please,
+quartermaster.'</p>
+<p>'It's all right--all right!' said Pirolo from behind, and to my
+horror slipped over my head some sort of rubber helmet that locked
+with a snap. I could feel thick colloid bosses before my eyes, but
+I stood in absolute darkness.</p>
+<p>'To save the sight,' he explained, and pushed me on to the
+chart-room divan. 'You will see in a minute.'</p>
+<p>As he spoke I became aware of a thin thread of almost
+intolerable light, let down from heaven at an immense distance--one
+vertical hairsbreadth of frozen lightning.</p>
+<p>'Those are our flanking ships,' said Arnott at my elbow. 'That
+one is over Galena. Look south--that other one's over Keithburg.
+Vincennes is behind us, and north yonder is Winthrop Woods. The
+Fleet's in position, sir'--this to De Forest. 'As soon as you give
+the word.'</p>
+<p>'Ah no! No!' cried Dragomiroff at my side. I could feel the old
+man tremble. 'I do not know all that you can do, but be kind! I ask
+you to be a little kind to them below! This is
+horrible--horrible!'</p>
+<blockquote>'When a Woman kills a Chicken,<br>
+Dynasties and Empires sicken,'</blockquote>
+<p>Takahira quoted. 'It is too late to be gentle now.'</p>
+<p>'Then take off my helmet! Take off my helmet!' Dragomiroff began
+hysterically.</p>
+<p>Pirolo must have put his arm round him.</p>
+<p>'Hush,' he said, 'I am here. It is all right, Ivan, my dear
+fellow.'</p>
+<p>'I'll just send our little girl in Bureau County a warning,'
+said Arnott. 'She don't deserve it, but we'll allow her a minute or
+two to take mamma to the cellar.'</p>
+<p>In the utter hush that followed the growling spark after Arnott
+had linked up his Service Communicator with the invisible Fleet, we
+heard MacDonough's Song from the city beneath us grow fainter as we
+rose to position. Then I clapped my hand before my mask lenses, for
+it was as though the floor of Heaven had been riddled and all the
+inconceivable blaze of suns in the making was poured through the
+manholes.</p>
+<p>'You needn't count,' said Arnott. I had had no thought of such a
+thing. 'There are two hundred and fifty keels up there, five miles
+apart. Full power, please, for another twelve seconds.'</p>
+<p>The firmament, as far as eye could reach, stood on pillars of
+white fire. One fell on the glowing square at Chicago, and turned
+it black.</p>
+<p>'Oh! Oh! Oh! Can men be allowed to do such things?' Dragomiroff
+cried, and fell across our knees.</p>
+<p>'Glass of water, please,' said Takahira to a helmeted shape that
+leaped forward. 'He is a little faint.'</p>
+<p>The lights switched off, and the darkness stunned like an
+avalanche. We could hear Dragomiroff's teeth on the glass edge.</p>
+<p>Pirolo was comforting him.</p>
+<p>'All right, all ra-ight,' he repeated. 'Come and lie down. Come
+below and take off your mask. I give you my word, old friend, it is
+all right. They are my siege-lights. Little Victor Pirolo's leetle
+lights. You know <i>me</i>! I do not hurt people.'</p>
+<p>'Pardon!' Dragomiroff moaned. 'I have never seen Death. I have
+never seen the Board take action. Shall we go down and burn them
+alive, or is that already done?'</p>
+<p>'Oh, hush,' said Pirolo, and I think he rocked him in his
+arms.</p>
+<p>'Do we repeat, sir?' Arnott asked De Forest.</p>
+<p>'Give 'em a minute's break,' De Forest replied. 'They may need
+it.'</p>
+<p>We waited a minute, and then MacDonough's Song, broken but
+defiant, rose from undefeated Chicago.</p>
+<p>'They seem fond of that tune,' said De Forest. 'I should let 'em
+have it, Arnott.'</p>
+<p>'Very good, sir,' said Arnott, and felt his way to the
+Communicator keys.</p>
+<p>No lights broke forth, but the hollow of the skies made herself
+the mouth for one note that touched the raw fibre of the brain. Men
+hear such sounds in delirium, advancing like tides from horizons
+beyond the ruled foreshores of space.</p>
+<p>'That's our pitch-pipe,' said Arnott. 'We may be a bit ragged.
+I've never conducted two hundred and fifty performers before.' He
+pulled out the couplers, and struck a full chord on the Service
+Communicators.</p>
+<p>The beams of light leaped down again, and danced, solemnly and
+awfully, a stilt-dance, sweeping thirty or forty miles left and
+right at each stiff-legged kick, while the darkness delivered
+itself--there is no scale to measure against that utterance--of the
+tune to which they kept time. Certain notes--one learnt to expect
+them with terror--cut through one's marrow, but, after three
+minutes, thought and emotion passed in indescribable agony.</p>
+<p>We saw, we heard, but I think we were in some sort swooning. The
+two hundred and fifty beams shifted, re-formed, straddled and
+split, narrowed, widened, rippled in ribbons, broke into a thousand
+white-hot parallel lines, melted and revolved in interwoven rings
+like old-fashioned engine-turning, flung up to the zenith, made as
+if to descend and renew the torment, halted at the last instant,
+twizzled insanely round the horizon, and vanished, to bring back
+for the hundredth time darkness more shattering than their
+instantly renewed light over all Illinois. Then the tune and lights
+ceased together, and we heard one single devastating wail that
+shook all the horizon as a rubbed wet finger shakes the rim of a
+bowl.</p>
+<p>'Ah, that is my new siren,' said Pirolo. 'You can break an
+iceberg in half, if you find the proper pitch. They will whistle by
+squadrons now. It is the wind through pierced shutters in the
+bows.'</p>
+<p>I had collapsed beside Dragomiroff, broken and snivelling
+feebly, because I had been delivered before my time to all the
+terrors of Judgment Day, and the Archangels of the Resurrection
+were hailing me naked across the Universe to the sound of the music
+of the spheres.</p>
+<p>Then I saw De Forest smacking Arnott's helmet with his open
+hand. The wailing died down in a long shriek as a black shadow
+swooped past us, and returned to her place above the lower
+clouds.</p>
+<p>'I hate to interrupt a specialist when he's enjoying himself,'
+said De Forest. 'But, as a matter of fact, all Illinois has been
+asking us to stop for these last fifteen seconds.'</p>
+<p>'What a pity.' Arnott slipped off his mask. 'I wanted you to
+hear us really hum. Our lower C can lift street-paving.'</p>
+<p>'It is Hell--Hell!' cried Dragomiroff, and sobbed aloud.</p>
+<p>Arnott looked away as he answered:</p>
+<p>'It's a few thousand volts ahead of the old
+shoot-'em-and-sink-'em game, but I should scarcely call it
+<i>that</i>. What shall I tell the Fleet, sir?'</p>
+<p>'Tell 'em we're very pleased and impressed. I don't think they
+need wait on any longer. There isn't a spark left down there.' De
+Forest pointed. 'They'll be deaf and blind.'</p>
+<p>'Oh, I think not, sir. The demonstration lasted less than ten
+minutes.'</p>
+<p>'Marvellous!' Takahira sighed. 'I should have said it was half a
+night. Now, shall we go down and pick up the pieces?'</p>
+<p>'But first a small drink,' said Pirolo. 'The Board must not
+arrive weeping at its own works.'</p>
+<p>'I am an old fool--an old fool!' Dragomiroff began piteously. 'I
+did not know what would happen. It is all new to me. We reason with
+them in Little Russia.'</p>
+<p>Chicago North landing-tower was unlighted, and Arnott worked his
+ship into the clips by her own lights. As soon as these broke out
+we heard groanings of horror and appeal from many people below.</p>
+<p>'All right,' shouted Arnott into the darkness. 'We aren't
+beginning again!' We descended by the stairs, to find ourselves
+knee-deep in a grovelling crowd, some crying that they were blind,
+others beseeching us not to make any more noises, but the greater
+part writhing face downward, their hands or their caps before their
+eyes.</p>
+<p>It was Pirolo who came to our rescue. He climbed the side of a
+surfacing-machine, and there, gesticulating as though they could
+see, made oration to those afflicted people of Illinois.</p>
+<p>'You stchewpids!' he began. 'There is nothing to fuss for. Of
+course, your eyes will smart and be red to-morrow. You will look as
+if you and your wives had drunk too much, but in a little while you
+will see again as well as before. I tell you this, and I--I am
+Pirolo. Victor Pirolo!'</p>
+<p>The crowd with one accord shuddered, for many legends attach to
+Victor Pirolo of Foggia, deep in the secrets of God.</p>
+<p>'Pirolo?' An unsteady voice lifted itself. 'Then tell us was
+there anything except light in those lights of yours just now?'</p>
+<p>The question was repeated from every corner of the darkness.</p>
+<p>Pirolo laughed.</p>
+<p>'No!' he thundered. (Why have small men such large voices?) 'I
+give you my word and the Board's word that there was nothing except
+light--just light! You stchewpids! Your birth-rate is too low
+already as it is. Some day I must invent something to send it up,
+but send it down--never!'</p>
+<p>'Is that true?--We thought--somebody said--'</p>
+<p>One could feel the tension relax all round.</p>
+<p>'You too big fools,' Pirolo cried. 'You could have sent us a
+call and we would have told you.'</p>
+<p>'Send you a call!' a deep voice shouted. 'I wish you had been at
+our end of the wire.'</p>
+<p>'I'm glad I wasn't,' said De Forest. 'It was bad enough from
+behind the lamps. Never mind! It's over now. Is there any one here
+I can talk business with? I'm De Forest--for the Board.'</p>
+<p>'You might begin with me, for one--I'm Mayor,' the bass voice
+replied.</p>
+<p>A big man rose unsteadily from the street, and staggered towards
+us where we sat on the broad turf-edging, in front of the garden
+fences.</p>
+<p>'I ought to be the first on my feet. Am I?' said he.</p>
+<p>'Yes,' said De Forest, and steadied him as he dropped down
+beside us.</p>
+<p>'Hello, Andy. Is that you?' a voice called.</p>
+<p>'Excuse me,' said the Mayor; 'that sounds like my Chief of
+Police, Bluthner!'</p>
+<p>'Bluthner it is; and here's Mulligan and Keefe--on their
+feet.'</p>
+<p>'Bring 'em up please, Blut. We're supposed to be the Four in
+charge of this hamlet. What we says, goes. And, De Forest, what do
+you say?'</p>
+<p>'Nothing--yet,' De Forest answered, as we made room for the
+panting, reeling men. '<i>You've</i> cut out of system. Well?'</p>
+<p>'Tell the steward to send down drinks, please,' Arnott whispered
+to an orderly at his side.</p>
+<p>'Good!' said the Mayor, smacking his dry lips. 'Now I suppose we
+can take it, De Forest, that henceforward the Board will administer
+us direct?'</p>
+<p>'Not if the Board can avoid it,' De Forest laughed. 'The A.B.C.
+is responsible for the planetary traffic only.'</p>
+<p>'<i>And all that that implies</i>.' The big Four who ran Chicago
+chanted their Magna Charta like children at school.</p>
+<p>'Well, get on,' said De Forest wearily. 'What is your silly
+trouble anyway?'</p>
+<p>'Too much dam' Democracy,' said the Mayor, laying his hand on De
+Forest's knee.</p>
+<p>'So? I thought Illinois had had her dose of that.'</p>
+<p>'She has. That's why. Blut, what did you do with our prisoners
+last night?'</p>
+<p>'Locked 'em in the water-tower to prevent the women killing
+'em,' the Chief of Police replied. 'I'm too blind to move just yet,
+but--'</p>
+<p>'Arnott, send some of your people, please, and fetch 'em along,'
+said De Forest.</p>
+<p>'They're triple-circuited,' the Mayor called. 'You'll have to
+blow out three fuses.' He turned to De Forest, his large outline
+just visible in the paling darkness. 'I hate to throw any more work
+on the Board. I'm an administrator myself, but we've had a little
+fuss with our Serviles. What? In a big city there's bound to be a
+few men and women who can't live without listening to themselves,
+and who prefer drinking out of pipes they don't own both ends of.
+They inhabit flats and hotels all the year round. They say it saves
+'em trouble. Anyway, it gives 'em more time to make trouble for
+their neighbours. We call 'em Serviles locally. And they are apt to
+be tuberculous.'</p>
+<p>'Just so!' said the man called Mulligan. Transportation is
+Civilisation. Democracy is Disease. I've proved it by the
+blood-test, every time.'</p>
+<p>'Mulligan's our Health Officer, and a one-idea man,' said the
+Mayor, laughing. 'But it's true that most Serviles haven't much
+control. They <i>will</i> talk; and when people take to talking as
+a business, anything may arrive--mayn't it, De Forest?'</p>
+<p>'Anything--except the facts of the case,' said De Forest,
+laughing.</p>
+<p>'I'll give you those in a minute,' said the Mayor. 'Our Serviles
+got to talking--first in their houses and then on the streets,
+telling men and women how to manage their own affairs. (You can't
+teach a Servile not to finger his neighbour's soul.) That's
+invasion of privacy, of course, but in Chicago we'll suffer
+anything sooner than make Crowds. Nobody took much notice, and so I
+let 'em alone. My fault! I was warned there would be trouble, but
+there hasn't been a Crowd or murder in Illinois for nineteen
+years.'</p>
+<p>'Twenty-two,' said his Chief of Police.</p>
+<p>'Likely. Anyway, we'd forgot such things. So, from talking in
+the houses and on the streets, our Serviles go to calling a meeting
+at the Old Market yonder.' He nodded across the square where the
+wrecked buildings heaved up grey in the dawn-glimmer behind the
+square-cased statue of The Negro in Flames. 'There's nothing to
+prevent any one calling meetings except that it's against human
+nature to stand in a Crowd, besides being bad for the health. I
+ought to have known by the way our men and women attended that
+first meeting that trouble was brewing. There were as many as a
+thousand in the market-place, touching each other. Touching! Then
+the Serviles turned in all tongue-switches and talked, and
+we--'</p>
+<p>'What did they talk about?' said Takahira.</p>
+<p>'First, how badly things were managed in the city. That pleased
+us Four--we were on the platform--because we hoped to catch one or
+two good men for City work. You know how rare executive capacity
+is. Even if we didn't it's--it's refreshing to find any one
+interested enough in our job to damn our eyes. You don't know what
+it means to work, year in, year out, without a spark of difference
+with a living soul.'</p>
+<p>'Oh, don't we!' said De Forest. 'There are times on the Board
+when we'd give our positions if any one would kick us out and take
+hold of things themselves.'</p>
+<p>'But they won't,' said the Mayor ruefully. 'I assure you, sir,
+we Four have done things in Chicago, in the hope of rousing people,
+that would have discredited Nero. But what do they say? "Very good,
+Andy. Have it your own way. Anything's better than a Crowd. I'll go
+back to my land." You <i>can't</i> do anything with folk who can go
+where they please, and don't want anything on God's earth except
+their own way. There isn't a kick or a kicker left on the
+Planet.'</p>
+<p>'Then I suppose that little shed yonder fell down by itself?'
+said De Forest. We could see the bare and still smoking ruins, and
+hear the slag-pools crackle as they hardened and set.</p>
+<p>'Oh, that's only amusement. 'Tell you later. As I was saying,
+our Serviles held the meeting, and pretty soon we had to
+ground-circuit the platform to save 'em from being killed. And that
+didn't make our people any more pacific.'</p>
+<p>'How d'you mean?' I ventured to ask.</p>
+<p>'If you've ever been ground-circuited,' said the Mayor, 'you'll
+know it don't improve any man's temper to be held up straining
+against nothing. No, sir! Eight or nine hundred folk kept pawing
+and buzzing like flies in treacle for two hours, while a pack of
+perfectly safe Serviles invades their mental and spiritual privacy,
+may be amusing to watch, but they are not pleasant to handle
+afterwards.'</p>
+<p>Pirolo chuckled.</p>
+<p>'Our folk own themselves. They were of opinion things were going
+too far and too fiery. I warned the Serviles; but they're born
+house-dwellers. Unless a fact hits 'em on the head they cannot see
+it. Would you believe me, they went on to talk of what they called
+"popular government"? They did! They wanted us to go back to the
+old Voodoo-business of voting with papers and wooden boxes, and
+word-drunk people and printed formulas, and news-sheets! They said
+they practised it among themselves about what they'd have to eat in
+their flats and hotels. Yes, sir! They stood up behind Bluthner's
+doubled ground-circuits, and they said that, in this present year
+of grace, <i>to</i> self-owning men and women, <i>on</i> that very
+spot! Then they finished'--he lowered his voice cautiously--'by
+talking about "The People." And then Bluthner he had to sit up all
+night in charge of the circuits because he couldn't trust his men
+to keep 'em shut.'</p>
+<p>'It was trying 'em too high,' the Chief of Police broke in. 'But
+we couldn't hold the Crowd ground-circuited for ever. I gathered in
+all the Serviles on charge of Crowd-making, and put 'em in the
+water-tower, and then I let things cut loose. I had to! The
+District lit like a sparked gas-tank!'</p>
+<p>'The news was out over seven degrees of country,' the Mayor
+continued; 'and when once it's a question of invasion of privacy,
+good-bye to right and reason in Illinois! They began turning out
+traffic-lights and locking up landing-towers on Thursday night.
+Friday, they stopped all traffic and asked for the Board to take
+over. Then they wanted to clean Chicago off the side of the Lake
+and rebuild elsewhere--just for a souvenir of "The People" that the
+Serviles talked about. I suggested that they should slag the Old
+Market where the meeting was held, while I turned in a call to you
+all on the Board. That kept 'em quiet till you came along. And--and
+now <i>you</i> can take hold of the situation.'</p>
+<p>'Any chance of their quieting down?' De Forest asked.</p>
+<p>'You can try,' said the Mayor.</p>
+<p>De Forest raised his voice in the face of the reviving Crowd
+that had edged in towards us. Day was come.</p>
+<p>'Don't you think this business can be arranged?' he began. But
+there was a roar of angry voices:</p>
+<p>'We've finished with Crowds! We aren't going back to the Old
+Days! Take us over! Take the Serviles away! Administer direct or
+we'll kill 'em! Down with The People!'</p>
+<p>An attempt was made to begin MacDonough's Song. It got no
+further than the first line, for the <i>Victor Pirolo</i> sent down
+a warning drone on one stopped horn. A wrecked side-wall of the Old
+Market tottered and fell inwards on the slag-pools. None spoke or
+moved till the last of the dust had settled down again, turning the
+steel case of Salati's Statue ashy grey.</p>
+<p>'You see you'll just <i>have</i> to take us over,' the Mayor
+whispered.</p>
+<p>De Forest shrugged his shoulders.</p>
+<p>'You talk as if executive capacity could be snatched out of the
+air like so much horse-power. Can't you manage yourselves on any
+terms?' he said.</p>
+<p>'We can, if you say so. It will only cost those few lives to
+begin with,'</p>
+<p>The Mayor pointed across the square, where Arnott's men guided a
+stumbling group of ten or twelve men and women to the lake front
+and halted them under the Statue.</p>
+<p>'Now I think,' said Takahira under his breath, 'there will be
+trouble.'</p>
+<p>The mass in front of us growled like beasts.</p>
+<p>At that moment the sun rose clear, and revealed the blinking
+assembly to itself. As soon as it realized that it was a crowd we
+saw the shiver of horror and mutual repulsion shoot across it
+precisely as the steely flaws shot across the lake outside. Nothing
+was said, and, being half blind, of course it moved slowly. Yet in
+less than fifteen minutes most of that vast multitude--three
+thousand at the lowest count--melted away like frost on south
+eaves. The remnant stretched themselves on the grass, where a crowd
+feels and looks less like a crowd.</p>
+<p>'These mean business,' the Mayor whispered to Takahira. 'There
+are a goodish few women there who've borne children. I don't like
+it.'</p>
+<p>The morning draught off the lake stirred the trees round us with
+promise of a hot day; the sun reflected itself dazzlingly on the
+canister-shaped covering of Salati's Statue; cocks crew in the
+gardens, and we could hear gate-latches clicking in the distance as
+people stumblingly resought their homes.</p>
+<p>'I'm afraid there won't be any morning deliveries,' said De
+Forest. 'We rather upset things in the country last night.'</p>
+<p>'That makes no odds,' the Mayor returned. 'We're all provisioned
+for six months. <i>We</i> take no chances.'</p>
+<p>Nor, when you come to think of it, does any one else. It must be
+three-quarters of a generation since any house or city faced a food
+shortage. Yet is there house or city on the Planet to-day that has
+not half a year's provisions laid in? We are like the shipwrecked
+seamen in the old books, who, having once nearly starved to death,
+ever afterwards hide away bits of food and biscuit. Truly we trust
+no Crowds, nor system based on Crowds!</p>
+<p>De Forest waited till the last footstep had died away. Meantime
+the prisoners at the base of the Statue shuffled, posed, and
+fidgeted, with the shamelessness of quite little children. None of
+them were more than six feet high, and many of them were as
+grey-haired as the ravaged, harassed heads of old pictures. They
+huddled together in actual touch, while the crowd, spaced at large
+intervals, looked at them with congested eyes.</p>
+<p>Suddenly a man among them began to talk. The Mayor had not in
+the least exaggerated. It appeared that our Planet lay sunk in
+slavery beneath the heel of the A&euml;rial Board of Control. The
+orator urged us to arise in our might, burst our prison doors and
+break our fetters (all his metaphors, by the way, were of the most
+medi&aelig;val). Next he demanded that every matter of daily life,
+including most of the physical functions, should be submitted for
+decision at any time of the week, month, or year to, I gathered,
+anybody who happened to be passing by or residing within a certain
+radius, and that everybody should forthwith abandon his concerns to
+settle the matter, first by crowd-making, next by talking to the
+crowds made, and lastly by describing crosses on pieces of paper,
+which rubbish should later be counted with certain mystic
+ceremonies and oaths. Out of this amazing play, he assured us,
+would automatically arise a higher, nobler, and kinder world,
+based--he demonstrated this with the awful lucidity of the
+insane--based on the sanctity of the Crowd and the villainy of the
+single person. In conclusion, he called loudly upon God to testify
+to his personal merits and integrity. When the flow ceased, I
+turned bewildered to Takahira, who was nodding solemnly.</p>
+<p>'Quite correct,' said he. 'It is all in the old books. He has
+left nothing out, not even the war-talk.'</p>
+<p>'But I don't see how this stuff can upset a child, much less a
+district,' I replied.</p>
+<p>'Ah, you are too young,' said Dragomiroff. 'For another thing,
+you are not a mamma. Please look at the mammas.'</p>
+<p>Ten or fifteen women who remained had separated themselves from
+the silent men, and were drawing in towards the prisoners. It
+reminded one of the stealthy encircling, before the rush in at the
+quarry, of wolves round musk-oxen in the North. The prisoners saw,
+and drew together more closely. The Mayor covered his face with his
+hands for an instant. De Forest, bareheaded, stepped forward
+between the prisoners, and the slowly, stiffly moving line.</p>
+<p>'That's all very interesting,' he said to the dry-lipped orator.
+'But the point seems that you've been making crowds and invading
+privacy.'</p>
+<p>A woman stepped forward, and would have spoken, but there was a
+quick assenting murmur from the men, who realised that De Forest
+was trying to pull the situation down to ground-line.</p>
+<p>'Yes! Yes!' they cried. 'We cut out because they made crowds and
+invaded privacy! Stick to that! Keep on that switch! Lift the
+Serviles out of this! The Board's in charge! Hsh!'</p>
+<p>'Yes, the Board's in charge,' said De Forest. 'I'll take formal
+evidence of crowd-making if you like, but the Members of the Board
+can testify to it. Will that do?'</p>
+<p>The women had closed in another pace, with hands that clenched
+and unclenched at their sides.</p>
+<p>'Good! Good enough!' the men cried. 'We're content. Only take
+them away quickly.'</p>
+<p>'Come along up!' said De Forest to the captives, 'Breakfast is
+quite ready.'</p>
+<p>It appeared, however, that they did not wish to go. They
+intended to remain in Chicago and make crowds. They pointed out
+that De Forest's proposal was gross invasion of privacy.</p>
+<p>'My dear fellow,' said Pirolo to the most voluble of the
+leaders, 'you hurry, or your crowd that can't be wrong will kill
+you!'</p>
+<p>'But that would be murder,' answered the believer in crowds; and
+there was a roar of laughter from all sides that seemed to show the
+crisis had broken.</p>
+<p>A woman stepped forward from the line of women, laughing, I
+protest, as merrily as any of the company. One hand, of course,
+shaded her eyes, the other was at her throat.</p>
+<p>'Oh, they needn't be afraid of being killed!' she called.</p>
+<p>'Not in the least,' said De Forest. 'But don't you think that,
+now the Board's in charge, you might go home while we get these
+people away?'</p>
+<p>'I shall be home long before that. It--it has been rather a
+trying day.'</p>
+<p>She stood up to her full height, dwarfing even De Forest's
+six-foot-eight, and smiled, with eyes closed against the fierce
+light.</p>
+<p>'Yes, rather,' said De Forest. 'I'm afraid you feel the glare a
+little. We'll have the ship down.'</p>
+<p>He motioned to the <i>Pirolo</i> to drop between us and the sun,
+and at the same time to loop-circuit the prisoners, who were a
+trifle unsteady. We saw them stiffen to the current where they
+stood. The woman's voice went on, sweet and deep and unshaken:</p>
+<p>'I don't suppose you men realise how much this--this sort of
+thing means to a woman. I've borne three. We women don't want our
+children given to Crowds. It must be an inherited instinct. Crowds
+make trouble. They bring back the Old Days. Hate, fear, blackmail,
+publicity, "The People"--<i>That! That! That</i>!' She pointed to
+the Statue, and the crowd growled once more.</p>
+<p>'Yes, if they are allowed to go on,' said De Forest. 'But this
+little affair--'</p>
+<p>'It means so much to us women that this--this little affair
+should never happen again. Of course, never's a big word, but one
+feels so strongly that it is important to stop crowds at the very
+beginning. Those creatures'--she pointed with her left hand at the
+prisoners swaying like seaweed in a tideway as the circuit pulled
+them--'those people have friends and wives and children in the city
+and elsewhere. One doesn't want anything done to <i>them</i>, you
+know. It's terrible to force a human being out of fifty or sixty
+years of good life. I'm only forty myself. <i>I</i> know. But, at
+the same time, one feels that an example should be made, because no
+price is too heavy to pay if--if these people and <i>all that they
+imply</i> can be put an end to. Do you quite understand, or would
+you be kind enough to tell your men to take the casing off the
+Statue? It's worth looking at.'</p>
+<p>'I understand perfectly. But I don't think anybody here wants to
+see the Statue on an empty stomach. Excuse me one moment.' De
+Forest called up to the ship, 'A flying loop ready on the port
+side, if you please.' Then to the woman he said with some
+crispness, 'You might leave us a little discretion in the
+matter.'</p>
+<p>'Oh, of course. Thank you for being so patient. I know my
+arguments are silly, but--' She half turned away and went on in a
+changed voice, 'Perhaps this will help you to decide.'</p>
+<p>She threw out her right arm with a knife in it. Before the blade
+could be returned to her throat or her bosom it was twitched from
+her grip, sparked as it flew out of the shadow of the ship above,
+and fell flashing in the sunshine at the foot of the Statue fifty
+yards away. The outflung arm was arrested, rigid as a bar for an
+instant, till the releasing circuit permitted her to bring it
+slowly to her side. The other women shrank back silent among the
+men.</p>
+<p>Pirolo rubbed his hands, and Takahira nodded.</p>
+<p>'That was clever of you, De Forest,' said he.</p>
+<p>'What a glorious pose!' Dragomiroff murmured, for the frightened
+woman was on the edge of tears.</p>
+<p>'Why did you stop me? I would have done it!' she cried.</p>
+<p>'I have no doubt you would,' said De Forest. 'But we can't waste
+a life like yours on these people. I hope the arrest didn't sprain
+your wrist; it's so hard to regulate a flying loop. But I think you
+are quite right about those persons' women and children. We'll take
+them all away with us if you promise not to do anything stupid to
+yourself.'</p>
+<p>'I promise--I promise.' She controlled herself with an effort.
+'But it is so important to us women. We know what it means; and I
+thought if you saw I was in earnest--'</p>
+<p>'I saw you were, and you've gained your point. I shall take all
+your Serviles away with me at once. The Mayor will make lists of
+their friends and families in the city and the district, and he'll
+ship them after us this afternoon.'</p>
+<p>'Sure,' said the Mayor, rising to his feet. 'Keefe, if you can
+see, hadn't you better finish levelling off the Old Market? It
+don't look sightly the way it is now, and we shan't use it for
+crowds any more.'</p>
+<p>'I think you had better wipe out that Statue as well, Mr.
+Mayor,' said De Forest. 'I don't question its merits as a work of
+art, but I believe it's a shade morbid.'</p>
+<p>'Certainly, sir. Oh, Keefe! Slag the Nigger before you go on to
+fuse the Market. I'll get to the Communicators and tell the
+District that the Board is in charge. Are you making any special
+appointments, sir?'</p>
+<p>'None. We haven't men to waste on these back-woods. Carry on as
+before, but under the Board. Arnott, run your Serviles aboard,
+please. Ground ship and pass them through the bilge-doors. We'll
+wait till we've finished with this work of art.'</p>
+<p>The prisoners trailed past him, talking fluently, but unable to
+gesticulate in the drag of the current. Then the surfacers rolled
+up, two on each side of the Statue. With one accord the spectators
+looked elsewhere, but there was no need. Keefe turned on full
+power, and the thing simply melted within its case. All I saw was a
+surge of white-hot metal pouring over the plinth, a glimpse of
+Salati's inscription, 'To the Eternal Memory of the Justice of the
+People,' ere the stone base itself cracked and powdered into finest
+lime. The crowd cheered.</p>
+<p>'Thank you,' said De Forest; 'but we want our break-fasts, and I
+expect you do too. Good-bye, Mr. Mayor! Delighted to see you at any
+time, but I hope I shan't have to, officially, for the next thirty
+years. Good-bye, madam. Yes. We're all given to nerves nowadays. I
+suffer from them myself. Good-bye, gentlemen all! You're under the
+tyrannous heel of the Board from this moment, but if ever you feel
+like breaking your fetters you've only to let us know. This is no
+treat to us. Good luck!'</p>
+<p>We embarked amid shouts, and did not check our lift till they
+had dwindled into whispers. Then De Forest flung himself on the
+chart-room divan and mopped his forehead.</p>
+<p>'I don't mind men,' he panted, 'but women are the devil!'</p>
+<p>'Still the devil,' said Pirolo cheerfully. 'That one would have
+suicided.'</p>
+<p>'I know it. That was why I signalled for the flying loop to be
+clapped on her. I owe you an apology for that, Arnott. I hadn't
+time to catch your eye, and you were busy with our caitiffs. By the
+way, who actually answered my signal? It was a smart piece of
+work.'</p>
+<p>'Ilroy,' said Arnott; 'but he overloaded the wave. It may be
+pretty gallery-work to knock a knife out of a lady's hand, but
+didn't you notice how she rubbed 'em? He scorched her fingers.
+Slovenly, I call it.'</p>
+<p>'Far be it from me to interfere with Fleet discipline, but don't
+be too hard on the boy. If that woman had killed herself they would
+have killed every Servile and everything related to a Servile
+throughout the district by nightfall.'</p>
+<p>'That was what she was playing for,' Takahira said. 'And with
+our Fleet gone we could have done nothing to hold them.'</p>
+<p>'I may be ass enough to walk into a ground-circuit,' said
+Arnott, 'but I don't dismiss my Fleet till I'm reasonably sure that
+trouble is over. They're in position still, and I intend to keep
+'em there till the Serviles are shipped out of the district. That
+last little crowd meant murder, my friends.'</p>
+<p>'Nerves! All nerves!' said Pirolo. 'You cannot argue with
+agoraphobia.'</p>
+<p>'And it is not as if they had seen much dead--or <i>is</i> it?'
+said Takahira.</p>
+<p>'In all my ninety years I have never seen Death.' Dragomiroff
+spoke as one who would excuse himself. 'Perhaps that was why--last
+night--'</p>
+<p>Then it came out as we sat over breakfast, that, with the
+exception of Arnott and Pirolo, none of us had ever seen a corpse,
+or knew in what manner the spirit passes.</p>
+<p>'We're a nice lot to flap about governing the Planet,' De Forest
+laughed. 'I confess, now it's all over, that my main fear was I
+mightn't be able to pull it off without losing a life.'</p>
+<p>'I thought of that too,' said Arnott; 'but there's no death
+reported, and I've inquired everywhere. What are we supposed to do
+with our passengers? I've fed 'em.'</p>
+<p>'We're between two switches,' De Forest drawled. 'If we drop
+them in any place that isn't under the Board the natives will make
+their presence an excuse for cutting out, same as Illinois did, and
+forcing the Board to take over. If we drop them in any place under
+the Board's control they'll be killed as soon as our backs are
+turned.'</p>
+<p>'If you say so,' said Pirolo thoughtfully, 'I can guarantee that
+they will become extinct in process of time, quite happily. What is
+their birth-rate now?'</p>
+<p>'Go down and ask 'em,' said De Forest.</p>
+<p>'I think they might become nervous and tear me to bits,' the
+philosopher of Foggia replied.</p>
+<p>'Not really? Well?'</p>
+<p>'Open the bilge-doors,' said Takahira with a downward jerk of
+the thumb.</p>
+<p>'Scarcely--after all the trouble we've taken to save 'em,' said
+De Forest.</p>
+<p>'Try London,' Arnott suggested. 'You could turn Satan himself
+loose there, and they'd only ask him to dinner.'</p>
+<p>'Good man! You've given me an idea. Vincent! Oh, Vincent!' He
+threw the General Communicator open so that we could all hear, and
+in a few minutes the chart-room filled with the rich, fruity voice
+of Leopold Vincent, who has purveyed all London her choicest
+amusements for the last thirty years. We answered with expectant
+grins, as though we were actually in the stalls of, say, the
+Combination on a first night.</p>
+<p>'We've picked up something in your line,' De Forest began.</p>
+<p>'That's good, dear man. If it's old enough. There's nothing to
+beat the old things for business purposes. Have you seen <i>London,
+Chatham, and Dover</i> at Earl's Court? No? I thought I missed you
+there. Immense! I've had the real steam locomotive engines built
+from the old designs and the iron rails cast specially by hand.
+Cloth cushions in the carriages, too! Immense! And paper railway
+tickets. And Polly Milton.'</p>
+<p>'Polly Milton back again!' said Arnott rapturously. 'Book me two
+stalls for to-morrow night. What's she singing now, bless her?'</p>
+<p>'The old songs. Nothing comes up to the old touch. Listen to
+this, dear men.' Vincent carolled with flourishes:</p>
+<blockquote>Oh, cruel lamps of London,<br>
+If tears your light could drown,<br>
+Your victims' eyes would weep them,<br>
+Oh, lights of London Town!</blockquote>
+<p>'Then they weep.'</p>
+<p>'You see?' Pirolo waved his hands at us. 'The old world always
+weeped when it saw crowds together. It did not know why, but it
+weeped. We know why, but we do not weep, except when we pay to be
+made to by fat, wicked old Vincent.'</p>
+<p>'Old, yourself!' Vincent laughed. 'I'm a public benefactor, I
+keep the world soft and united.'</p>
+<p>'And I'm De Forest of the Board,' said De Forest acidly, 'trying
+to get a little business done. As I was saying, I've picked up a
+few people in Chicago.'</p>
+<p>'I cut out. Chicago is--'</p>
+<p>'Do listen! They're perfectly unique.'</p>
+<p>'Do they build houses of baked mudblocks while you wait--eh?
+That's an old contact.'</p>
+<p>'They're an untouched primitive community, with all the old
+ideas.'</p>
+<p>'Sewing-machines and maypole-dances? Cooking on coal-gas stoves,
+lighting pipes with matches, and driving horses? Gerolstein tried
+that last year. An absolute blow-out!'</p>
+<p>De Forest plugged him wrathfully, and poured out the story of
+our doings for the last twenty-four hours on the top-note.</p>
+<p>'And they do it <i>all</i> in public,' he concluded. 'You can't
+stop 'em. The more public, the better they are pleased. They'll
+talk for hours--like you! Now you can come in again!'</p>
+<p>'Do you really mean they know how to vote?' said Vincent. 'Can
+they act it?'</p>
+<p>'Act? It's their life to 'em! And you never saw such faces!
+Scarred like volcanoes. Envy, hatred, and malice in plain sight.
+Wonderfully flexible voices. They weep, too.'</p>
+<p>'Aloud? In public?'</p>
+<p>'I guarantee. Not a spark of shame or reticence in the entire
+installation. It's the chance of your career.'</p>
+<p>'D'you say you've brought their voting props along--those papers
+and ballot-box things?'</p>
+<p>'No, confound you! I'm not a luggage-lifter. Apply direct to the
+Mayor of Chicago. He'll forward you everything. Well?'</p>
+<p>'Wait a minute. Did Chicago want to kill 'em? That 'ud look well
+on the Communicators.'</p>
+<p>'Yes! They were only rescued with difficulty from a howling
+mob--if you know what that is.'</p>
+<p>'But I don't,' answered the Great Vincent simply.</p>
+<p>'Well then, they'll tell you themselves. They can make speeches
+hours long.'</p>
+<p>'How many are there?'</p>
+<p>'By the time we ship 'em all over they'll be perhaps a hundred,
+counting children. An old world in miniature. Can't you see
+it?'</p>
+<p>'M-yes; but I've got to pay for it if it's a blow-out, dear
+man.'</p>
+<p>'They can sing the old war songs in the streets. They can get
+word-drunk, and make crowds, and invade privacy in the genuine
+old-fashioned way; and they'll do the voting trick as often as you
+ask 'em a question.'</p>
+<p>'Too good!' said Vincent.</p>
+<p>'You unbelieving Jew! I've got a dozen head aboard here. I'll
+put you through direct. Sample 'em yourself.'</p>
+<p>He lifted the switch and we listened. Our passengers on the
+lower deck at once, but not less than five at a time, explained
+themselves to Vincent. They had been taken from the bosom of their
+families, stripped of their possessions, given food without
+finger-bowls, and cast into captivity in a noisome dungeon.</p>
+<p>'But look here,' said Arnott aghast; 'they're saying what isn't
+true. My lower deck isn't noisome, and I saw to the finger-bowls
+myself.'</p>
+<p>'My people talk like that sometimes in Little Russia,' said
+Dragomiroff. 'We reason with them. We never kill. No!'</p>
+<p>'But it's not true,' Arnott insisted. 'What can you do with
+people who don't tell facts? They're mad!'</p>
+<p>'Hsh!' said Pirolo, his hand to his ear. 'It is such a little
+time since all the Planet told lies.'</p>
+<p>We heard Vincent silkily sympathetic. Would they, he asked,
+repeat their assertions in public--before a vast public? Only let
+Vincent give them a chance, and the Planet, they vowed, should ring
+with their wrongs. Their aim in life--two women and a man explained
+it together--was to reform the world. Oddly enough, this also had
+been Vincent's life-dream. He offered them an arena in which to
+explain, and by their living example to raise the Planet to loftier
+levels. He was eloquent on the moral uplift of a simple, old-world
+life presented in its entirety to a deboshed civilisation.</p>
+<p>Could they--would they--for three months certain, devote
+themselves under his auspices, as missionaries, to the elevation of
+mankind at a place called Earl's Court, which he said, with some
+truth, was one of the intellectual centres of the Planet? They
+thanked him, and demanded (we could hear his chuckle of delight)
+time to discuss and to vote on the matter. The vote, solemnly
+managed by counting heads--one head, one vote--was favourable. His
+offer, therefore, was accepted, and they moved a vote of thanks to
+him in two speeches--one by what they called the 'proposer' and the
+other by the 'seconder.'</p>
+<p>Vincent threw over to us, his voice shaking with gratitude:</p>
+<p>'I've got 'em! Did you hear those speeches? That's Nature, dear
+men. Art can't teach <i>that.</i> And they voted as easily as
+lying. I've never had a troupe of natural liars before. Bless you,
+dear men! Remember, you're on my free lists for ever, anywhere--all
+of you. Oh, Gerolstein will be sick--sick!'</p>
+<p>'Then you think they'll do?' said De Forest.</p>
+<p>'Do? The Little Village'll go crazy! I'll knock up a series of
+old-world plays for 'em. Their voices will make you laugh and cry.
+My God, dear men, where <i>do</i> you suppose they picked up all
+their misery from, on this sweet earth? I'll have a pageant of the
+world's beginnings, and Mosenthal shall do the music. I'll--'</p>
+<p>'Go and knock up a village for 'em by to-night. We'll meet you
+at No. 15 West Landing Tower,' said De Forest. 'Remember the rest
+will be coming along to-morrow.'</p>
+<p>'Let 'em all come!' said Vincent. 'You don't know how hard it is
+nowadays even for me, to find something that really gets under the
+public's damned iridium-plated hide. But I've got it at last.
+Good-bye!'</p>
+<p>'Well,' said De Forest when we had finished laughing, 'if any
+one understood corruption in London I might have played off Vincent
+against Gerolstein, and sold my captives at enormous prices. As it
+is, I shall have to be their legal adviser to-night when the
+contracts are signed. And they won't exactly press any commission
+on me, either.'</p>
+<p>'Meantime,' said Takahira, 'we cannot, of course, confine
+members of Leopold Vincent's last-engaged company. Chairs for the
+ladies, please, Arnott.'</p>
+<p>'Then I go to bed,' said De Forest. 'I can't face any more
+women!' And he vanished.</p>
+<p>When our passengers were released and given another meal
+(finger-bowls came first this time) they told us what they thought
+of us and the Board; and, like Vincent, we all marvelled how they
+had contrived to extract and secrete so much bitter poison and
+unrest out of the good life God gives us. They raged, they stormed,
+they palpitated, flushed and exhausted their poor, torn nerves,
+panted themselves into silence, and renewed the senseless,
+shameless attacks.</p>
+<p>'But can't you understand,' said Pirolo pathetically to a
+shrieking woman, 'that if we'd left you in Chicago you'd have been
+killed?'</p>
+<p>'No, we shouldn't. You were bound to save us from being
+murdered.'</p>
+<p>'Then we should have had to kill a lot of other people.'</p>
+<p>'That doesn't matter. We were preaching the Truth. You can't
+stop us. We shall go on preaching in London; and <i>then</i> you'll
+see!'</p>
+<p>'You can see now,' said Pirolo, and opened a lower shutter.</p>
+<p>We were closing on the Little Village, with her three million
+people spread out at ease inside her ring of girdling Main-Traffic
+lights--those eight fixed beams at Chatham, Tonbridge, Redhill,
+Dorking, Woking, St. Albans, Chipping Ongar, and Southend.</p>
+<p>Leopold Vincent's new company looked, with small pale faces, at
+the silence, the size, and the separated houses.</p>
+<p>Then some began to weep aloud, shamelessly--always without
+shame.</p>
+<br>
+<br>
+<hr style="width: 35%;">
+<br>
+<br>
+<a name="page045"></a>
+<div class="poem">
+<div class="stanza">
+<p class="i2"><b>MACDONOUGH'S SONG</b></p>
+</div>
+<div class="stanza">
+<p>Whether the State can loose and bind</p>
+<p class="i1">In Heaven as well as on Earth:</p>
+<p>If it be wiser to kill mankind</p>
+<p class="i1">Before or after the birth--</p>
+<p>These are matters of high concern</p>
+<p class="i1">Where State-kept schoolmen are;</p>
+<p>But Holy State (we have lived to learn)</p>
+<p class="i1">Endeth in Holy War.</p>
+</div>
+<div class="stanza">
+<p>Whether The People be led by the Lord,</p>
+<p class="i1">Or lured by the loudest throat:</p>
+<p>If it be quicker to die by the sword</p>
+<p class="i1">Or cheaper to die by vote--</p>
+<p>These are the things we have dealt with once,</p>
+<p class="i1">(And they will not rise from their grave)</p>
+<p>For Holy People, however it runs,</p>
+<p class="i1">Endeth in wholly Slave.</p>
+</div>
+<div class="stanza">
+<p>Whatsoever, for any cause,</p>
+<p class="i1">Seeketh to take or give,</p>
+<p>Power above or beyond the Laws,</p>
+<p class="i1">Suffer it not to live!</p>
+<p>Holy State or Holy King--</p>
+<p class="i1">Or Holy People's Will--</p>
+<p>Have no truck with the senseless thing.</p>
+<p class="i1">Order the guns and kill!</p>
+<p class="i2"><i>Saying--after--me:--</i></p>
+</div>
+<div class="stanza">
+<p><i>Once there was The People--Terror gave it birth;</i></p>
+<p><i>Once there was The People and it made a Hell of
+Earth.</i></p>
+<p><i>Earth arose and crushed it. Listen, O ye slain!</i></p>
+<p><i>Once there was The People--it shall never be again!</i></p>
+</div>
+</div>
+<br>
+<br>
+<hr style="width: 35%;">
+<br>
+<br>
+<a name="page047"></a>
+<h2>Friendly Brook</h2>
+<h3>(March 1914)</h3>
+<br>
+<p>The valley was so choked with fog that one could scarcely see a
+cow's length across a field. Every blade, twig, bracken-frond, and
+hoof-print carried water, and the air was filled with the noise of
+rushing ditches and field-drains, all delivering to the brook
+below. A week's November rain on water-logged land had gorged her
+to full flood, and she proclaimed it aloud.</p>
+<p>Two men in sackcloth aprons were considering an untrimmed hedge
+that ran down the hillside and disappeared into mist beside those
+roarings. They stood back and took stock of the neglected growth,
+tapped an elbow of hedge-oak here, a mossed beech-stub there,
+swayed a stooled ash back and forth, and looked at each other.</p>
+<p>'I reckon she's about two rod thick,' said Jabez the younger,
+'an' she hasn't felt iron since--when has she, Jesse?'</p>
+<p>'Call it twenty-five year, Jabez, an' you won't be far out.'</p>
+<p>'Umm!' Jabez rubbed his wet handbill on his wetter coat-sleeve.
+'She ain't a hedge. She's all manner o' trees. We'll just about
+have to--' He paused, as professional etiquette required.</p>
+<p>'Just about have to side her up an' see what she'll bear. But
+hadn't we best--?' Jesse paused in his turn, both men being artists
+and equals.</p>
+<p>'Get some kind o' line to go by.' Jabez ranged up and down till
+he found a thinner place, and with clean snicks of the handbill
+revealed the original face of the fence. Jesse took over the
+dripping stuff as it fell forward, and, with a grasp and a kick,
+made it to lie orderly on the bank till it should be faggoted.</p>
+<p>By noon a length of unclean jungle had turned itself into a
+cattle-proof barrier, tufted here and there with little plumes of
+the sacred holly which no woodman touches without orders.</p>
+<p>'Now we've a witness-board to go by!' said Jesse at last.</p>
+<p>'She won't be as easy as this all along,' Jabez answered.
+'She'll need plenty stakes and binders when we come to the
+brook.'</p>
+<p>'Well, ain't we plenty?' Jesse pointed to the ragged perspective
+ahead of them that plunged downhill into the fog. 'I lay there's a
+cord an' a half o' firewood, let alone faggots, 'fore we get
+anywheres anigh the brook.'</p>
+<p>'The brook's got up a piece since morning,' said Jabez. 'Sounds
+like's if she was over Wickenden's door-stones.'</p>
+<p>Jesse listened, too. There was a growl in the brook's roar as
+though she worried something hard.</p>
+<p>'Yes. She's over Wickenden's door-stones,' he replied. 'Now
+she'll flood acrost Alder Bay an' that'll ease her.'</p>
+<p>'She won't ease Jim Wickenden's hay none if she do,' Jabez
+grunted. 'I told Jim he'd set that liddle hay-stack o' his too low
+down in the medder. I <i>told</i> him so when he was drawin' the
+bottom for it.'</p>
+<p>'I told him so, too,' said Jesse. 'I told him 'fore ever you
+did. I told him when the County Council tarred the roads up along.'
+He pointed uphill, where unseen automobiles and road-engines droned
+past continually. 'A tarred road, she shoots every drop o' water
+into a valley same's a slate roof. 'Tisn't as 'twas in the old
+days, when the waters soaked in and soaked out in the way o'
+nature. It rooshes off they tarred roads all of a lump, and
+naturally every drop is bound to descend into the valley. And
+there's tar roads both two sides this valley for ten mile. That's
+what I told Jim Wickenden when they tarred the roads last year. But
+he's a valley-man. He don't hardly ever journey uphill.'</p>
+<p>'What did he say when you told him that?' Jabez demanded, with a
+little change of voice.</p>
+<p>'Why? What did he say to you when <i>you</i> told him?' was the
+answer.</p>
+<p>'What he said to you, I reckon, Jesse.'</p>
+<p>'Then, you don't need me to say it over again, Jabez.'</p>
+<p>'Well, let be how 'twill, what was he gettin' <i>after</i> when
+he said what he said to me?' Jabez insisted.</p>
+<p>'I dunno; unless you tell me what manner o' words he said to
+<i>you</i>.'</p>
+<p>Jabez drew back from the hedge--all hedges are nests of
+treachery and eavesdropping--and moved to an open cattle-lodge in
+the centre of the field.</p>
+<p>'No need to go ferretin' around,' said Jesse. 'None can't see us
+here 'fore we see them.'</p>
+<p>'What was Jim Wickenden gettin' at when I said he'd set his
+stack too near anigh the brook?' Jabez dropped his voice. 'He was
+in his mind.'</p>
+<p>'He ain't never been out of it yet to my knowledge,' Jesse
+drawled, and uncorked his tea-bottle.</p>
+<p>'But then Jim says: "I ain't goin' to shift my stack a yard," he
+says. "The Brook's been good friends to me, and if she be minded,"
+he says, "to take a snatch at my hay, I ain't settin' out to
+withstand her." That's what Jim Wickenden says to me last--last
+June-end 'twas,' said Jabez.</p>
+<p>'Nor he hasn't shifted his stack, neither,' Jesse replied. 'An'
+if there's more rain, the brook she'll shift it for him.'</p>
+<p>'No need tell <i>me</i>! But I want to know what Jim was gettin'
+<i>at</i>?'</p>
+<p>Jabez opened his clasp-knife very deliberately; Jesse as
+carefully opened his. They unfolded the newspapers that wrapped
+their dinners, coiled away and pocketed the string that bound the
+packages, and sat down on the edge of the lodge manger. The rain
+began to fall again through the fog, and the brook's voice
+rose.</p>
+<hr style="width: 25%;">
+<p>'But I always allowed Mary was his lawful child, like,' said
+Jabez, after Jesse had spoken for a while.</p>
+<p>''Tain't so.... Jim Wickenden's woman she never made nothing.
+She come out o' Lewes with her stockin's round her heels, an' she
+never made nor mended aught till she died. <i>He</i> had to light
+fire an' get breakfast every mornin' except Sundays, while she
+sowed it abed. Then she took an' died, sixteen, seventeen, year
+back; but she never had no childern.'</p>
+<p>'They was valley-folk,' said Jabez apologetically. 'I'd no call
+to go in among 'em, but I always allowed Mary--'</p>
+<p>'No. Mary come out o' one o' those Lunnon Childern Societies.
+After his woman died, Jim got his mother back from his sister over
+to Peasmarsh, which she'd gone to house with when Jim married. His
+mother kept house for Jim after his woman died. They do say 'twas
+his mother led him on toward adoptin' of Mary--to furnish out the
+house with a child, like, and to keep him off of gettin' a noo
+woman. He mostly done what his mother contrived. 'Cardenly, twixt
+'em, they asked for a child from one o' those Lunnon
+societies--same as it might ha' been these Barnardo children--an'
+Mary was sent down to 'em, in a candle-box, I've heard.'</p>
+<p>'Then Mary is chance-born. I never knowed that,' said Jabez.
+'Yet I must ha' heard it some time or other ...'</p>
+<p>'No. She ain't. 'Twould ha' been better for some folk if she had
+been. She come to Jim in a candle-box with all the proper
+papers--lawful child o' some couple in Lunnon somewheres--mother
+dead, father drinkin'. <i>And</i> there was that Lunnon society's
+five shillin's a week for her. Jim's mother she wouldn't despise
+week-end money, but I never heard Jim was much of a muck-grubber.
+Let be how 'twill, they two mothered up Mary no bounds, till it
+looked at last like they'd forgot she wasn't their own flesh an'
+blood. Yes, I reckon they forgot Mary wasn't their'n by
+rights.'</p>
+<p>'That's no new thing,' said Jabez. 'There's more'n one or two in
+this parish wouldn't surrender back their Bernarders. You ask Mark
+Copley an' his woman an' that Bernarder cripple-babe o'
+theirs.'</p>
+<p>'Maybe they need the five shillin',' Jesse suggested.</p>
+<p>'It's handy,' said Jabez. 'But the child's more. "Dada" he says,
+an' "Mumma" he says, with his great rollin' head-piece all hurdled
+up in that iron collar. <i>He</i> won't live long--his backbone's
+rotten, like. But they Copleys do just about set store by him--five
+bob or no five bob.'</p>
+<p>'Same way with Jim an' his mother,' Jesse went on. 'There was
+talk betwixt 'em after a few years o' not takin' any more week-end
+money for Mary; but let alone <i>she</i> never passed a farden in
+the mire 'thout longin's, Jim didn't care, like, to push himself
+forward into the Society's remembrance. So naun came of it. The
+week-end money would ha' made no odds to Jim--not after his uncle
+willed him they four cottages at Eastbourne <i>an'</i> money in the
+bank.'</p>
+<p>'That was true, too, then? I heard something in a scadderin'
+word-o'-mouth way,' said Jabez.</p>
+<p>'I'll answer for the house property, because Jim he requested my
+signed name at the foot o' some papers concernin' it. Regardin' the
+money in the bank, he nature-ally wouldn't like such things talked
+about all round the parish, so he took strangers for
+witnesses.'</p>
+<p>'Then 'twill make Mary worth seekin' after?'</p>
+<p>'She'll need it. Her Maker ain't done much for her outside nor
+yet in.'</p>
+<p>'That ain't no odds.' Jabez shook his head till the water
+showered off his hat-brim. 'If Mary has money, she'll be wed before
+any likely pore maid. She's cause to be grateful to Jim.'</p>
+<p>'She hides it middlin' close, then,' said Jesse. 'It don't
+sometimes look to me as if Mary has her natural rightful feelin's.
+She don't put on an apron o' Mondays 'thout being druv to it--in
+the kitchen <i>or</i> the hen-house. She's studyin' to be a
+school-teacher. She'll make a beauty! I never knowed her show any
+sort o' kindness to nobody--not even when Jim's mother was took
+dumb. No! 'Twadn't no stroke. It stifled the old lady in the throat
+here. First she couldn't shape her words no shape; then she
+clucked, like, an' lastly she couldn't more than suck down
+spoon-meat an' hold her peace. Jim took her to Doctor Harding, an'
+Harding he bundled her off to Brighton Hospital on a ticket, but
+they couldn't make no stay to her afflictions there; and she was
+bundled off to Lunnon, an' they lit a great old lamp inside her,
+and Jim told me they couldn't make out nothing in no sort there;
+and, along o' one thing an' another, an' all their spyin's and
+pryin's, she come back a hem sight worse than when she started. Jim
+said he'd have no more hospitalizin', so he give her a slate, which
+she tied to her waist-string, and what she was minded to say she
+writ on it.'</p>
+<p>'Now, I never knowed that! But they're valley-folk,' Jabez
+repeated.</p>
+<p>''Twadn't particular noticeable, for she wasn't a talkin' woman
+any time o' her days. Mary had all three's tongue.... Well, then,
+two years this summer, come what I'm tellin' you. Mary's Lunnon
+father, which they'd put clean out o' their minds, arrived down
+from Lunnon with the law on his side, sayin' he'd take his daughter
+back to Lunnon, after all. I was working for Mus' Dockett at Pounds
+Farm that summer, but I was obligin' Jim that evenin' muckin' out
+his pig-pen. I seed a stranger come traipsin' over the bridge agin'
+Wickenden's door-stones. 'Twadn't the new County Council bridge
+with the handrail. They hadn't given it in for a public right o'
+way then. 'Twas just a bit o' lathy old plank which Jim had throwed
+acrost the brook for his own conveniences. The man wasn't
+drunk--only a little concerned in liquor, like--an' his back was a
+mask where he'd slipped in the muck comin' along. He went up the
+bricks past Jim's mother, which was feedin' the ducks, an' set
+himself down at the table inside--Jim was just changin' his
+socks--an' the man let Jim know all his rights and aims regardin'
+Mary. Then there just about <i>was</i> a hurly-bulloo? Jim's fust
+mind was to pitch him forth, but he'd done that once in his young
+days, and got six months up to Lewes jail along o' the man fallin'
+on his head. So he swallowed his spittle an' let him talk. The law
+about Mary <i>was</i> on the man's side from fust to last, for he
+showed us all the papers. Then Mary come downstairs--she'd been
+studyin' for an examination--an' the man tells her who he was, an'
+she says he had ought to have took proper care of his own flesh and
+blood while he had it by him, an' not to think he could ree-claim
+it when it suited. He says somethin' or other, but she looks him up
+an' down, front an' backwent, an' she just tongues him scadderin'
+out o' doors, and he went away stuffin' all the papers back into
+his hat, talkin' most abusefully. Then she come back an' freed her
+mind against Jim an' his mother for not havin' warned her of her
+upbringin's, which it come out she hadn't ever been told. They
+didn't say naun to her. They never did. <i>I'd</i> ha' packed her
+off with any man that would ha' took her--an' God's pity on
+him!'</p>
+<p>'Umm!' said Jabez, and sucked his pipe.</p>
+<p>'So then, that was the beginnin.' The man come back again next
+week or so, an' he catched Jim alone, 'thout his mother this time,
+an' he fair beazled him with his papers an' his talk--for the law
+<i>was</i> on his side--till Jim went down into his money-purse an'
+give him ten shillings hush-money--he told me--to withdraw away for
+a bit an' leave Mary with 'em.'</p>
+<p>'But that's no way to get rid o' man or woman,' Jabez said.</p>
+<p>'No more 'tis. I told Jim so. "What can I do?" Jim says. "The
+law's <i>with</i> the man. I walk about daytimes thinkin' o' it
+till I sweats my underclothes wringin', an' I lie abed nights
+thinkin' o' it till I sweats my sheets all of a sop. 'Tisn't as if
+I was a young man," he says, "nor yet as if I was a pore man. Maybe
+he'll drink hisself to death." I e'en a'most told him outright what
+foolishness he was enterin' into, but he knowed it--he knowed
+it--because he said next time the man come 'twould be fifteen
+shillin's. An' next time 'twas. Just fifteen shillin's!'</p>
+<p>'An' <i>was</i> the man her father?' asked Jabez.</p>
+<p>'He had the proofs an' the papers. Jim showed me what that
+Lunnon Childern's Society had answered when Mary writ up to 'em an'
+taxed 'em with it. I lay she hadn't been proper polite in her
+letters to 'em, for they answered middlin' short. They said the
+matter was out o' their hands, but--let's see if I remember--oh,
+yes,--they ree-gretted there had been an oversight. I reckon they
+had sent Mary out in the candle-box as a orphan instead o' havin' a
+father. Terrible awkward! Then, when he'd drinked up the money, the
+man come again--in his usuals--an' he kept hammerin' on and
+hammerin' on about his duty to his pore dear wife, an' what he'd do
+for his dear daughter in Lunnon, till the tears runned down his two
+dirty cheeks an' he come away with more money. Jim used to slip it
+into his hand behind the door; but his mother she heard the chink.
+She didn't hold with hush-money. She'd write out all her feelin's
+on the slate, an' Jim 'ud be settin' up half the night answerin'
+back an' showing that the man had the law with him.'</p>
+<p>'Hadn't that man no trade nor business, then?'</p>
+<p>'He told me he was a printer. I reckon, though, he lived on the
+rates like the rest of 'em up there in Lunnon.'</p>
+<p>'An' how did Mary take it?'</p>
+<p>'She said she'd sooner go into service than go with the man. I
+reckon a mistress 'ud be middlin' put to it for a maid 'fore she
+put Mary into cap an' gown. She was studyin' to be a
+schoo-ool-teacher. A beauty she'll make!... Well, that was how
+things went that fall. Mary's Lunnon father kep' comin' an' comin'
+'carden as he'd drinked out the money Jim gave him; an' each time
+he'd put-up his price for not takin' Mary away. Jim's mother, she
+didn't like partin' with no money, an' bein' obliged to write her
+feelin's on the slate instead o' givin' 'em vent by mouth, she was
+just about mad. Just about she <i>was</i> mad!</p>
+<p>'Come November, I lodged with Jim in the outside room over
+'gainst his hen-house. I paid <i>her</i> my rent. I was workin' for
+Dockett at Pounds--gettin' chestnut-bats out o' Perry Shaw. Just
+such weather as this be--rain atop o' rain after a wet October.
+(An' I remember it ended in dry frostes right away up to
+Christmas.) Dockett he'd sent up to Perry Shaw for me--no, he comes
+puffin' up to me himself--because a big corner-piece o' the bank
+had slipped into the brook where she makes that elber at the bottom
+o' the Seventeen Acre, an' all the rubbishy alders an' sallies
+which he ought to have cut out when he took the farm, they'd
+slipped with the slip, an' the brook was comin' rooshin' down atop
+of 'em, an' they'd just about back an' spill the waters over his
+winter wheat. The water was lyin' in the flats already. "Gor
+a-mighty, Jesse!" he bellers out at me, "get that rubbish away all
+manners you can. Don't stop for no fagottin', but give the brook
+play or my wheat's past salvation. I can't lend you no help," he
+says, "but work an' I'll pay ye."'</p>
+<p>'You had him there,' Jabez chuckled.</p>
+<p>'Yes. I reckon I had ought to have drove my bargain, but the
+brook was backin' up on good bread-corn. So 'cardenly, I laid into
+the mess of it, workin' off the bank where the trees was drownin'
+themselves head-down in the roosh--just such weather as this--an'
+the brook creepin' up on me all the time. 'Long toward noon, Jim
+comes mowchin' along with his toppin' axe over his shoulder.</p>
+<p>'"Be you minded for an extra hand at your job?" he says.</p>
+<p>'"Be you minded to turn to?" I ses, an'--no more talk to it--Jim
+laid in alongside o' me. He's no hunger with a toppin' axe.'</p>
+<p>'Maybe, but I've seed him at a job o' throwin' in the woods, an'
+he didn't seem to make out no shape,' said Jabez. 'He haven't got
+the shoulders, nor yet the judgment--<i>my</i> opinion--when he's
+dealin' with full-girt timber. He don't rightly make up his mind
+where he's goin' to throw her.'</p>
+<p>'We wasn't throwin' nothin'. We was cuttin' out they soft
+alders, an' haulin' 'em up the bank 'fore they could back the
+waters on the wheat. Jim didn't say much, 'less it was that he'd
+had a postcard from Mary's Lunnon father, night before, sayin' he
+was comin' down that mornin'. Jim, he'd sweated all night, an' he
+didn't reckon hisself equal to the talkin' an' the swearin' an' the
+cryin', an' his mother blamin' him afterwards on the slate. "It
+spiled my day to think of it," he ses, when we was eatin' our
+pieces. "So I've fair cried dunghill an' run. Mother'll have to
+tackle him by herself. I lay <i>she</i> won't give him no
+hush-money," he ses. "I lay he'll be surprised by the time he's
+done with <i>her</i>," he ses. An' that was e'en a'most all the
+talk we had concernin' it. But he's no hunger with the toppin'
+axe.</p>
+<p>'The brook she'd crep' up an' up on us, an' she kep' creepin'
+upon us till we was workin' knee-deep in the shallers, cuttin' an'
+pookin' an' pullin' what we could get to o' the rubbish. There was
+a middlin' lot comin' down-stream, too--cattle-bars, an' hop-poles
+and odds-ends bats, all poltin' down together; but they rooshed
+round the elber good shape by the time we'd backed out they drowned
+trees. Come four o'clock we reckoned we'd done a proper day's work,
+an' she'd take no harm if we left her. We couldn't puddle about
+there in the dark an' wet to no more advantage. Jim he was pourin'
+the water out of his boots--no, I was doin' that. Jim was kneelin'
+to unlace his'n. "Damn it all, Jesse," he ses, standin' up; "the
+flood must be over my doorsteps at home, for here comes my old
+white-top bee-skep!"'</p>
+<p>'Yes. I allus heard he paints his bee-skeps,' Jabez put in. 'I
+dunno paint don't tarrify bees more'n it keeps em' dry.'</p>
+<p>'"I'll have a pook at it," he ses, an' he pooks at it as it
+comes round the elber. The roosh nigh jerked the pooker out of his
+hand-grips, an' he calls to me, an' I come runnin' barefoot. Then
+we pulled on the pooker, an' it reared up on eend in the roosh, an'
+we guessed what 'twas. 'Cardenly we pulled it in into a shaller,
+an' it rolled a piece, an' a great old stiff man's arm nigh hit me
+in the face. Then we was sure. "'Tis a man," ses Jim. But the face
+was all a mask. "I reckon it's Mary's Lunnon father," he ses
+presently. "Lend me a match and I'll make sure." He never used
+baccy. We lit three matches one by another, well's we could in the
+rain, an' he cleaned off some o' the slob with a tussick o' grass.
+"Yes," he ses. "It's Mary's Lunnon father. He won't tarrify us no
+more. D'you want him, Jesse?" he ses.</p>
+<p>'"No," I ses. "If this was Eastbourne beach like, he'd be
+half-a-crown apiece to us 'fore the coroner; but now we'd only lose
+a day havin' to 'tend the inquest. I lay he fell into the
+brook."</p>
+<p>'"I lay he did," ses Jim. "I wonder if he saw mother." He turns
+him over, an' opens his coat and puts his fingers in the waistcoat
+pocket an' starts laughin'. "He's seen mother, right enough," he
+ses. "An' he's got the best of her, too. <i>She</i> won't be able
+to crow no more over <i>me</i> 'bout givin' him money. <i>I</i>
+never give him more than a sovereign. She's give him two!" an' he
+trousers 'em, laughin' all the time. "An' now we'll pook him back
+again, for I've done with him," he ses.</p>
+<p>'So we pooked him back into the middle of the brook, an' we saw
+he went round the elber 'thout balkin', an' we walked quite a piece
+beside of him to set him on his ways. When we couldn't see no more,
+we went home by the high road, because we knowed the brook 'u'd be
+out acrost the medders, an' we wasn't goin' to hunt for Jim's
+little rotten old bridge in that dark--an' rainin' Heavens' hard,
+too. I was middlin' pleased to see light an' vittles again when we
+got home. Jim he pressed me to come insides for a drink. He don't
+drink in a generality, but he was rid of all his troubles that
+evenin', d'ye see? "Mother," he ses so soon as the door ope'd,
+"have you seen him?" She whips out her slate an' writes down--"No."
+"Oh, no," ses Jim. "You don't get out of it that way, mother. I lay
+you <i>have</i> seen him, an' I lay he's bested you for all your
+talk, same as he bested me. Make a clean breast of it, mother," he
+ses. "He got round you too." She was goin' for the slate again, but
+he stops her. "It's all right, mother," he ses. "I've seen him
+sense you have, an' he won't trouble us no more." The old lady
+looks up quick as a robin, an' she writes, "Did he say so?" "No,"
+ses Jim, laughin'. "He didn't say so. That's how I know. But he
+bested <i>you</i>, mother. You can't have it in at <i>me</i> for
+bein' soft-hearted. You're twice as tender-hearted as what I be.
+Look!" he ses, an' he shows her the two sovereigns. "Put 'em away
+where they belong," he ses. "He won't never come for no more; an'
+now we'll have our drink," he ses, "for we've earned it."</p>
+<p>'Nature-ally they weren't goin' to let me see where they kep'
+their monies. She went upstairs with it--for the whisky.'</p>
+<p>'I never knowed Jim was a drinkin' man--in his own house, like,'
+said Jabez.</p>
+<p>'No more he isn't; but what he takes he likes good. He won't
+tech no publican's hogwash acrost the bar. Four shillin's he paid
+for that bottle o' whisky. I know, because when the old lady
+brought it down there wasn't more'n jest a liddle few dreenin's an'
+dregs in it. Nothin' to set before neighbours, I do assure
+you.'</p>
+<p>'"Why, 'twas half full last week, mother," he ses. "You don't
+mean," he ses, "you've given him all that as well? It's two
+shillin's worth," he ses. (That's how I knowed he paid four.)
+"Well, well, mother, you be too tender-'carted to live. But I don't
+grudge it to him," he ses. "I don't grudge him nothin' he can
+keep." So, 'cardenly, we drinked up what little sup was left.'</p>
+<p>'An' what come to Mary's Lunnon father?' said Jabez after a full
+minute's silence.</p>
+<p>'I be too tired to go readin' papers of evenin's; but Dockett he
+told me, that very week, I think, that they'd inquested on a man
+down at Robertsbridge which had poked and poked up agin' so many
+bridges an' banks, like, they couldn't make naun out of him.'</p>
+<p>'An' what did Mary say to all these doin's?'</p>
+<p>'The old lady bundled her off to the village 'fore her Lunnon
+father come, to buy week-end stuff (an' she forgot the half o' it).
+When we come in she was upstairs studyin' to be a school-teacher.
+None told her naun about it. 'Twadn't girls' affairs.'</p>
+<p>'Reckon <i>she</i> knowed?' Jabez went on.</p>
+<p>'She? She must have guessed it middlin' close when she saw her
+money come back. But she never mentioned it in writing so far's I
+know. She were more worritted that night on account of two-three
+her chickens bein' drowned, for the flood had skewed their old
+hen-house round on her postes. I cobbled her up next mornin' when
+the brook shrinked.'</p>
+<p>'An' where did you find the bridge? Some fur down-stream, didn't
+ye?'</p>
+<p>'Just where she allus was. She hadn't shifted but very little.
+The brook had gulled out the bank a piece under one eend o' the
+plank, so's she was liable to tilt ye sideways if you wasn't
+careful. But I pooked three-four bricks under her, an' she was all
+plumb again.'</p>
+<p>'Well, I dunno how it <i>looks</i> like, but let be how 'twill,'
+said Jabez, 'he hadn't no business to come down from Lunnon
+tarrifyin' people, an' threatenin' to take away children which
+they'd hobbed up for their lawful own--even if 'twas Mary
+Wickenden.'</p>
+<p>'He had the business right enough, an' he had the law with
+him--no gettin' over that,' said Jesse. 'But he had the drink with
+him, too, an' that was where he failed, like.'</p>
+<p>'Well, well! Let be how 'twill, the brook was a good friend to
+Jim. I see it now. I allus <i>did</i> wonder what he was gettin' at
+when he said that, when I talked to him about shiftin' the stack.
+"You dunno everythin'," he ses. "The Brook's been a good friend to
+me," he ses, "an' if she's minded to have a snatch at my hay,
+<i>I</i> ain't settin' out to withstand her."'</p>
+<p>'I reckon she's about shifted it, too, by now,' Jesse chuckled.
+'Hark! That ain't any slip off the bank which she's got hold
+of.'</p>
+<p>The Brook had changed her note again. It sounded as though she
+were mumbling something soft.</p>
+<br>
+<br>
+<hr style="width: 35%;">
+<br>
+<br>
+<a name="page065"></a>
+<div class="poem">
+<div class="stanza">
+<p class="i5"><b>THE LAND</b></p>
+</div>
+<div class="stanza">
+<p>When Julius Fabricius, Sub-Prefect of the Weald,</p>
+<p>In the days of Diocletian owned our Lower River-field,</p>
+<p>He called to him Hobdenius--a Briton of the Clay,</p>
+<p>Saying: 'What about that River-piece for layin' in to hay?'</p>
+</div>
+<div class="stanza">
+<p>And the aged Hobden answered: 'I remember as a lad</p>
+<p>My father told your father that she wanted dreenin' bad.</p>
+<p>An' the more that you neeglect her the less you'll get her
+clean.</p>
+<p>Have it jest <i>as</i> you've a mind to, but, if I was you, I'd
+dreen.'</p>
+</div>
+<div class="stanza">
+<p>So they drained it long and crossways in the lavish Roman
+style.</p>
+<p>Still we find among the river-drift their flakes of ancient
+tile,</p>
+<p>And in drouthy middle August, when the bones of meadows
+show,</p>
+<p>We can trace the lines they followed sixteen hundred years
+ago.</p>
+</div>
+<div class="stanza">
+<p>Then Julius Fabricius died as even Prefects do,</p>
+<p>And after certain centuries, Imperial Rome died too.</p>
+<p>Then did robbers enter Britain from across the Northern main</p>
+<p>And our Lower River-field was won by Ogier the Dane.</p>
+</div>
+<div class="stanza">
+<p>Well could Ogier work his war-boat--well could Ogier wield his
+brand--</p>
+<p>Much he knew of foaming waters--not so much of farming land.</p>
+<p>So he called to him a Hobden of the old unaltered blood.</p>
+<p>Saying: 'What about that River-bit, she doesn't look no
+good?'</p>
+</div>
+<div class="stanza">
+<p>And that aged Hobden answered: ''Tain't for <i>me</i> to
+interfere,</p>
+<p>But I've known that bit o' meadow now for five and fifty
+year.</p>
+<p>Have it <i>jest</i> as you've a mind to, but I've proved it time
+on time,</p>
+<p>If you want to change her nature you have <i>got</i> to give her
+lime!'</p>
+</div>
+<div class="stanza">
+<p>Ogier sent his wains to Lewes, twenty hours' solemn walk,</p>
+<p>And drew back great abundance of the cool, grey, healing
+chalk.</p>
+<p>And old Hobden spread it broadcast, never heeding what was
+in't;</p>
+<p>Which is why in cleaning ditches, now and then we find a
+flint.</p>
+</div>
+<div class="stanza">
+<p>Ogier died. His sons grew English. Anglo-Saxon was their
+name,</p>
+<p>Till out of blossomed Normandy another pirate came;</p>
+<p>For Duke William conquered England and divided with his men,</p>
+<p>And our Lower River-field he gave to William of Warenne.</p>
+</div>
+<div class="stanza">
+<p>But the Brook (you know her habit) rose one rainy Autumn
+night</p>
+<p>And tore down sodden flitches of the bank to left and right.</p>
+<p>So, said William to his Bailiff as they rode their dripping
+rounds:</p>
+<p>'Hob, what about that River-bit--the Brook's got up no
+bounds?'</p>
+</div>
+<div class="stanza">
+<p>And that aged Hobden answered: ''Tain't my business to
+advise,</p>
+<p>But ye might ha' known 'twould happen from the way the valley
+lies.</p>
+<p>When ye can't hold back the water you must try and save the
+sile.</p>
+<p>Hev it jest as you've a <i>mind</i> to, but, if I was you, I'd
+spile!'</p>
+</div>
+<div class="stanza">
+<p>They spiled along the water-course with trunks of
+willow-trees</p>
+<p>And planks of elms behind 'em and immortal oaken knees.</p>
+<p>And when the spates of Autumn whirl the gravel-beds away</p>
+<p>You can see their faithful fragments iron-hard in iron clay.</p>
+</div>
+<div class="stanza">
+<hr style="width: 25%;"></div>
+<div class="stanza">
+<p><i>Georgii Quinti Anno Sexto</i>, I, who own the
+River-field,</p>
+<p>Am fortified with title-deeds, attested, signed and sealed,</p>
+<p>Guaranteeing me, my assigns, my executors and heirs</p>
+<p>All sorts of powers and profits which--are neither mine nor
+theirs.</p>
+</div>
+<div class="stanza">
+<p>I have rights of chase and warren, as my dignity requires.</p>
+<p>I can fish--but Hobden tickles. I can shoot--but Hobden
+wires.</p>
+<p>I repair, but he reopens, certain gaps which, men allege,</p>
+<p>Have been used by every Hobden since a Hobden swapped a
+hedge.</p>
+</div>
+<div class="stanza">
+<p>Shall I dog his morning progress o'er the track-betraying
+dew?</p>
+<p>Demand his dinner-basket into which my pheasant flew?</p>
+<p>Confiscate his evening faggot into which the conies ran,</p>
+<p>And summons him to judgment? I would sooner summons Pan.</p>
+</div>
+<div class="stanza">
+<p>His dead are in the churchyard--thirty generations laid.</p>
+<p>Their names went down in Domesday Book when Domesday Book was
+made.</p>
+<p>And the passion and the piety and prowess of his line</p>
+<p>Have seeded, rooted, fruited in some land the Law calls
+mine.</p>
+</div>
+<div class="stanza">
+<p>Not for any beast that burrows, not for any bird that flies,</p>
+<p>Would I lose his large sound council, miss his keen amending
+eyes.</p>
+<p>He is bailiff, woodman, wheelwright, field-surveyor,
+engineer,</p>
+<p>And if flagrantly a poacher--'tain't for me to interfere.</p>
+</div>
+<div class="stanza">
+<p>'Hob, what about that River-bit?' I turn to him again</p>
+<p>With Fabricius and Ogier and William of Warenne.</p>
+<p>'Hev it jest as you've a mind to, <i>but</i>'--and so he takes
+command.</p>
+<p>For whoever pays the taxes old Mus' Hobden owns the land.</p>
+</div>
+</div>
+<br>
+<br>
+<hr style="width: 35%;">
+<br>
+<br>
+<a name="page071"></a>
+<h2>In the Same Boat</h2>
+<h3>(1911)</h3>
+<br>
+<p>'A throbbing vein,' said Dr. Gilbert soothingly, 'is the mother
+of delusion.'</p>
+<p>'Then how do you account for my knowing when the thing is due?'
+Conroy's voice rose almost to a break.</p>
+<p>'Of course, but you should have consulted a doctor before
+using--palliatives.'</p>
+<p>'It was driving me mad. And now I can't give them up.'</p>
+<p>''Not so bad as that! One doesn't form fatal habits at
+twenty-five. Think again. Were you ever frightened as a child?'</p>
+<p>'I don't remember. It began when I was a boy.'</p>
+<p>'With or without the spasm? By the way, do you mind describing
+the spasm again?'</p>
+<p>'Well,' said Conroy, twisting in the chair, 'I'm no musician,
+but suppose you were a violin-string--vibrating--and some one put
+his finger on you? As if a finger were put on the naked soul!
+Awful!'</p>
+<p>'So's indigestion--so's nightmare--while it lasts.'</p>
+<p>'But the horror afterwards knocks me out for days. And the
+waiting for it ... and then this drug habit! It can't go on!' He
+shook as he spoke, and the chair creaked.</p>
+<p>'My dear fellow,' said the doctor, 'when you're older you'll
+know what burdens the best of us carry. A fox to every
+Spartan.'</p>
+<p>'That doesn't help <i>me</i>. I can't! I can't!' cried Conroy,
+and burst into tears.</p>
+<p>'Don't apologise,' said Gilbert, when the paroxysm ended. 'I'm
+used to people coming a little--unstuck in this room.'</p>
+<p>'It's those tabloids!' Conroy stamped his foot feebly as he blew
+his nose. 'They've knocked me out. I used to be fit once. Oh, I've
+tried exercise and everything. But--if one sits down for a minute
+when it's due--even at four in the morning--it runs up behind
+one.'</p>
+<p>'Ye-es. Many things come in the quiet of the morning. You always
+know when the visitation is due?'</p>
+<p>'What would I give not to be sure!' he sobbed.</p>
+<p>'We'll put that aside for the moment. I'm thinking of a case
+where what we'll call an&aelig;mia of the brain was masked (I don't
+say cured) by vibration. He couldn't sleep, or thought he couldn't,
+but a steamer voyage and the thump of the screw--'</p>
+<p>'A steamer? After what I've told you!' Conroy almost shrieked.
+'I'd sooner ...'</p>
+<p>'Of course <i>not</i> a steamer in your case, but a long railway
+journey the next time you think it will trouble you. It sounds
+absurd, but--'</p>
+<p>'I'd try anything. I nearly have,' Conroy sighed.</p>
+<p>'Nonsense! I've given you a tonic that will clear <i>that</i>
+notion from your head. Give the train a chance, and don't begin the
+journey by bucking yourself up with tabloids. Take them along, but
+hold them in reserve--in reserve.'</p>
+<p>'D'you think I've self-control enough, after what you've heard?'
+said Conroy.</p>
+<p>Dr. Gilbert smiled. 'Yes. After what I've seen,' he glanced
+round the room, 'I have no hesitation in saying you have quite as
+much self-control as many other people. I'll write you later about
+your journey. Meantime, the tonic,' and he gave some general
+directions before Conroy left.</p>
+<p>An hour later Dr. Gilbert hurried to the links, where the others
+of his regular week-end game awaited him. It was a rigid round,
+played as usual at the trot, for the tension of the week lay as
+heavy on the two King's Counsels and Sir John Chartres as on
+Gilbert. The lawyers were old enemies of the Admiralty Court, and
+Sir John of the frosty eyebrows and Abernethy manner was bracketed
+with, but before, Rutherford Gilbert among nerve-specialists.</p>
+<p>At the Club-house afterwards the lawyers renewed their squabble
+over a tangled collision case, and the doctors as naturally
+compared professional matters.</p>
+<p>'Lies--all lies,' said Sir John, when Gilbert had told him
+Conroy's trouble. '<i>Post hoc, propter hoc</i>. The man or woman
+who drugs is <i>ipso facto</i> a liar. You've no imagination.'</p>
+<p>''Pity you haven't a little--occasionally.'</p>
+<p>'I have believed a certain type of patient in my time. It's
+always the same. For reasons not given in the consulting-room they
+take to the drug. Certain symptoms follow. They will swear to you,
+and believe it, that they took the drug to mask the symptoms. What
+does your man use? Najdolene? I thought so. I had practically the
+duplicate of your case last Thursday. Same old Najdolene--same old
+lie.'</p>
+<p>'Tell me the symptoms, and I'll draw my own inferences,
+Johnnie.'</p>
+<p>'Symptoms! The girl was rank poisoned with Najdolene. Ramping,
+stamping possession. Gad, I thought she'd have the chandelier
+down.'</p>
+<p>'Mine came unstuck too, and he has the physique of a bull,' said
+Gilbert. 'What delusions had yours?'</p>
+<p>'Faces--faces with mildew on them. In any other walk of life
+we'd call it the Horrors. She told me, of course, she took the
+drugs to mask the faces. <i>Post hoc, propter hoc</i> again. All
+liars!'</p>
+<p>'What's that?' said the senior K.C. quickly. 'Sounds
+professional.'</p>
+<p>'Go away! Not for you, Sandy.' Sir John turned a shoulder
+against him and walked with Gilbert in the chill evening.</p>
+<p>To Conroy in his chambers came, one week later, this letter:</p>
+<blockquote>DEAR MR. CONROY--If your plan of a night's trip on the
+17th still holds good, and you have no particular destination in
+view, you could do me a kindness. A Miss Henschil, in whom I am
+interested, goes down to the West by the 10.8 from Waterloo (Number
+3 platform) on that night. She is not exactly an invalid, but, like
+so many of us, a little shaken in her nerves. Her maid, of course,
+accompanies her, but if I knew you were in the same train it would
+be an additional source of strength. Will you please write and let
+me know whether the 10.8 from Waterloo, Number 3 platform, on the
+17th, suits you, and I will meet you there? Don't forget my
+caution, and keep up the tonic.--Yours sincerely,</blockquote>
+<p class="loc">L. RUTHERFORD GILBERT.</p>
+<br>
+<p>'He knows I'm scarcely fit to look after myself,' was Conroy's
+thought. 'And he wants me to look after a woman!'</p>
+<p>Yet, at the end of half an hour's irresolution, he accepted.</p>
+<p>Now Conroy's trouble, which had lasted for years, was this:</p>
+<p>On a certain night, while he lay between sleep and wake, he
+would be overtaken by a long shuddering sigh, which he learned to
+know was the sign that his brain had once more conceived its
+horror, and in time--in due time--would bring it forth.</p>
+<p>Drugs could so well veil that horror that it shuffled along no
+worse than as a freezing dream in a procession of disorderly
+dreams; but over the return of the event drugs had no control. Once
+that sigh had passed his lips the thing was inevitable, and through
+the days granted before its rebirth he walked in torment. For the
+first two years he had striven to fend it off by distractions, but
+neither exercise nor drink availed. Then he had come to the
+tabloids of the excellent M. Najdol. These guarantee, on the label,
+'Refreshing and absolutely natural sleep to the soul-weary.' They
+are carried in a case with a spring which presses one scented
+tabloid to the end of the tube, whence it can be lipped off in
+stroking the moustache or adjusting the veil.</p>
+<p>Three years of M. Najdol's preparations do not fit a man for
+many careers. His friends, who knew he did not drink, assumed that
+Conroy had strained his heart through valiant outdoor exercises,
+and Conroy had with some care invented an imaginary doctor,
+symptoms, and regimen, which he discussed with them and with his
+mother in Hereford. She maintained that he would grow out of it,
+and recommended nux vomica.</p>
+<p>When at last Conroy faced a real doctor, it was, he hoped, to be
+saved from suicide by a strait-waistcoat. Yet Dr. Gilbert had but
+given him more drugs--a tonic, for instance, that would couple
+railway carnages--and had advised a night in the train. Not alone
+the horrors of a railway journey (for which a man who dare keep no
+servant must e'en pack, label, and address his own bag), but the
+necessity for holding himself in hand before a stranger 'a little
+shaken in her nerves.'</p>
+<p>He spent a long forenoon packing, because when he assembled and
+counted things his mind slid off to the hours that remained of the
+day before his night, and he found himself counting minutes aloud.
+At such times the injustice of his fate would drive him to revolts
+which no servant should witness, but on this evening Dr. Gilbert's
+tonic held him fairly calm while he put up his patent razors.</p>
+<p>Waterloo Station shook him into real life. The change for his
+ticket needed concentration, if only to prevent shillings and pence
+turning into minutes at the booking-office; and he spoke quickly to
+a porter about the disposition of his bag. The old 10.8 from
+Waterloo to the West was an all-night caravan that halted, in the
+interests of the milk traffic, at almost every station.</p>
+<p>Dr. Gilbert stood by the door of the one composite
+corridor-coach; an older and stouter man behind him. 'So glad
+you're here!' he cried. 'Let me get your ticket.'</p>
+<p>'Certainly not,' Conroy answered. 'I got it myself--long ago. My
+bag's in too,' he added proudly.</p>
+<p>'I beg your pardon. Miss Henschil's here. I'll introduce
+you.'</p>
+<p>'But--but,' he stammered--'think of the state I'm in. If
+anything happens I shall collapse.'</p>
+<p>'Not you. You'd rise to the occasion like a bird. And as for the
+self-control you were talking of the other day'--Gilbert swung him
+round--'look!'</p>
+<p>A young man in an ulster over a silk-faced frock-coat stood by
+the carriage window, weeping shamelessly.</p>
+<p>'Oh, but that's only drink,' Conroy said. 'I haven't had one of
+my--my things since lunch.'</p>
+<p>'Excellent!' said Gilbert. 'I knew I could depend on you. Come
+along. Wait for a minute, Chartres.'</p>
+<p>A tall woman, veiled, sat by the far window. She bowed her head
+as the doctor murmured Conroy knew not what. Then he disappeared
+and the inspector came for tickets.</p>
+<p>'My maid--next compartment,' she said slowly.</p>
+<p>Conroy showed his ticket, but in returning it to the
+sleeve-pocket of his ulster the little silver Najdolene case
+slipped from his glove and fell to the floor. He snatched it up as
+the moving train flung him into his seat.</p>
+<p>'How nice!' said the woman. She leisurely lifted her veil,
+unbottoned the first button of her left glove, and pressed out from
+its palm a Najdolene-case.</p>
+<p>'Don't!' said Conroy, not realising he had spoken.</p>
+<p>'I beg your pardon.' The deep voice was measured, even, and low.
+Conroy knew what made it so.</p>
+<p>'I said "don't"! He wouldn't like you to do it!'</p>
+<p>'No, he would not.' She held the tube with its ever-presented
+tabloid between finger and thumb. 'But aren't you one of
+the--ah--"soul-weary" too?'</p>
+<p>'That's why. Oh, please don't! Not at first. I--I haven't had
+one since morning. You--you'll set me off!'</p>
+<p>'You? Are you so far gone as that?'</p>
+<p>He nodded, pressing his palms together. The train jolted through
+Vauxhall points, and was welcomed with the clang of empty milk-cans
+for the West.</p>
+<p>After long silence she lifted her great eyes, and, with an
+innocence that would have deceived any sound man, asked Conroy to
+call her maid to bring her a forgotten book.</p>
+<p>Conroy shook his head. 'No. Our sort can't read. Don't!'</p>
+<p>'Were you sent to watch me?' The voice never changed.</p>
+<p>'Me? I need a keeper myself much more--<i>this</i> night of
+all!'</p>
+<p>'This night? Have you a night, then? They disbelieved <i>me</i>
+when I told them of mine.' She leaned back and laughed, always
+slowly. 'Aren't doctors stu-upid? They don't know.'</p>
+<p>She leaned her elbow on her knee, lifted her veil that had
+fallen, and, chin in hand, stared at him. He looked at her--till
+his eyes were blurred with tears.</p>
+<p>'Have I been there, think you?' she said.</p>
+<p>'Surely--surely,' Conroy answered, for he had well seen the fear
+and the horror that lived behind the heavy-lidded eyes, the fine
+tracing on the broad forehead, and the guard set about the
+desirable mouth.</p>
+<p>'Then--suppose we have one--just one apiece? I've gone without
+since this afternoon.'</p>
+<p>He put up his hand, and would have shouted, but his voice
+broke.</p>
+<p>'Don't! Can't you see that it helps me to help you to keep it
+off? Don't let's both go down together.'</p>
+<p>'But I want one. It's a poor heart that never rejoices. Just
+one. It's my night.'</p>
+<p>'It's mine--too. My sixty-fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh.' He
+shut his lips firmly against the tide of visualised numbers that
+threatened to carry him along.</p>
+<p>'Ah, it's only my thirty-ninth.' She paused as he had done. 'I
+wonder if I shall last into the sixties.... Talk to me or I shall
+go crazy. You're a man. You're the stronger vessel. Tell me when
+you went to pieces.'</p>
+<p>'One, two, three, four, five, six, seven--eight--I beg your
+pardon.'</p>
+<p>'Not in the least. I always pretend I've dropped a stitch of my
+knitting. I count the days till the last day, then the hours, then
+the minutes. Do you?'</p>
+<p>'I don't think I've done very much else for the last--' said
+Conroy, shivering, for the night was cold, with a chill he
+recognised.</p>
+<p>'Oh, how comforting to find some one who can talk sense! It's
+not always the same date, is it?'</p>
+<p>'What difference would that make?' He unbuttoned his ulster with
+a jerk. 'You're a sane woman. Can't you see the
+wicked--wicked--wicked' (dust flew from the padded arm-rest as he
+struck it) unfairness of it? What have I done?'</p>
+<p>She laid her large hand on his shoulder very firmly.</p>
+<p>'If you begin to think over that,' she said, 'you'll go to
+pieces and be ashamed. Tell me yours, and I'll tell you mine. Only
+be quiet--be quiet, lad, or you'll set me off!' She made shift to
+soothe him, though her chin trembled.</p>
+<p>'Well,' said he at last, picking at the arm-rest between them,
+'mine's nothing much, of course.'</p>
+<p>'Don't be a fool! That's for doctors--and mothers.'</p>
+<p>'It's Hell,' Conroy muttered. 'It begins on a steamer--on a
+stifling hot night. I come out of my cabin. I pass through the
+saloon where the stewards have rolled up the carpets, and the
+boards are bare and hot and soapy.'</p>
+<p>'I've travelled too,' she said.</p>
+<p>'Ah! I come on deck. I walk down a covered alleyway. Butcher's
+meat, bananas, oil, that sort of smell.'</p>
+<p>Again she nodded.</p>
+<p>'It's a lead-coloured steamer, and the sea's lead-coloured.
+Perfectly smooth sea--perfectly still ship, except for the engines
+running, and her waves going off in lines and lines and lines--dull
+grey. All this time I know something's going to happen.'</p>
+<p>'I know. Something going to happen,' she whispered.</p>
+<p>'Then I hear a thud in the engine-room. Then the noise of
+machinery falling down--like fire-irons--and then two most awful
+yells. They're more like hoots, and I know--I know while I
+listen--that it means that two men have died as they hooted. It was
+their last breath hooting out of them--in most awful pain. Do you
+understand?'</p>
+<p>'I ought to. Go on.'</p>
+<p>'That's the first part. Then I hear bare feet running along the
+alleyway. One of the scalded men comes up behind me and says quite
+distinctly, "My friend! All is lost!" Then he taps me on the
+shoulder and I hear him drop down dead.' He panted and wiped his
+forehead.</p>
+<p>'So that is your night?' she said.</p>
+<p>'That is my night. It comes every few weeks--so many days after
+I get what I call sentence. Then I begin to count.'</p>
+<p>'Get sentence? D'you mean <i>this</i>?' She half closed her
+eyes, drew a deep breath, and shuddered. '"Notice" I call it. Sir
+John thought it was all lies.'</p>
+<p>She had unpinned her hat and thrown it on the seat opposite,
+showing the immense mass of her black hair, rolled low in the nape
+of the columnar neck and looped over the left ear. But Conroy had
+no eyes except for her grave eyes.</p>
+<p>'Listen now!' said she. 'I walk down a road, a white sandy road
+near the sea. There are broken fences on either side, and Men come
+and look at me over them.'</p>
+<p>'Just men? Do they speak?'</p>
+<p>'They try to. Their faces are all mildewy--eaten away,' and she
+hid her face for an instant with her left hand. 'It's the
+Faces--the Faces!'</p>
+<p>'Yes. Like my two hoots. I know.'</p>
+<p>'Ah! But the place itself--the bareness--and the glitter and the
+salt smells, and the wind blowing the sand! The Men run after me
+and I run.... I know what's coming too. One of them touches
+me.'</p>
+<p>'Yes! What comes then? We've both shirked that.'</p>
+<p>'One awful shock--not palpitation, but shock, shock, shock!'</p>
+<p>'As though your soul were being stopped--as you'd stop a
+finger-bowl humming?' he said.</p>
+<p>'Just that,' she answered. 'One's very soul--the soul that one
+lives by--stopped. So!'</p>
+<p>She drove her thumb deep into the arm-rest. 'And now,' she
+whined to him, 'now that we've stirred each other up this way,
+mightn't we have just one?'</p>
+<p>'No,' said Conroy, shaking. 'Let's hold on. We're past'--he
+peered out of the black windows--'Woking. There's the Necropolis.
+How long till dawn?'</p>
+<p>'Oh, cruel long yet. If one dozes for a minute, it catches
+one.'</p>
+<p>'And how d'you find that this'--he tapped the palm of his
+glove--'helps you?'</p>
+<p>'It covers up the thing from being too real--if one takes
+enough--you know. Only--only--one loses everything else. I've been
+no more than a bogie-girl for two years. What would you give to be
+real again? This lying's such a nuisance.'</p>
+<p>'One must protect oneself--and there's one's mother to think
+of,' he answered.</p>
+<p>'True. I hope allowances are made for us somewhere. Our
+burden--can you hear?--our burden is heavy enough.'</p>
+<p>She rose, towering into the roof of the carriage. Conroy's
+ungentle grip pulled her back.</p>
+<p>'Now <i>you</i> are foolish. Sit down,' said he.</p>
+<p>'But the cruelty of it! Can't you see it? Don't you feel it?
+Let's take one now--before I--'</p>
+<p>'Sit down!' cried Conroy, and the sweat stood again on his
+forehead. He had fought through a few nights, and had been defeated
+on more, and he knew the rebellion that flares beyond control to
+exhaustion.</p>
+<p>She smoothed her hair and dropped back, but for a while her head
+and throat moved with the sickening motion of a captured
+wry-neck.</p>
+<p>'Once,' she said, spreading out her hands, 'I ripped my
+counterpane from end to end. That takes strength. I had it then.
+I've little now. "All dorn," as my little niece says. And you,
+lad?'</p>
+<p>'"All dorn"! Let me keep your case for you till the
+morning.'</p>
+<p>'But the cold feeling is beginning.'</p>
+<p>'Lend it me, then.'</p>
+<p>'And the drag down my right side. I shan't be able to move in a
+minute.'</p>
+<p>'I can scarcely lift my arm myself,' said Conroy. 'We're in for
+it.'</p>
+<p>'Then why are you so foolish? You know it'll be easier if we
+have only one--only one apiece.'</p>
+<p>She was lifting the case to her mouth. With tremendous effort
+Conroy caught it. The two moved like jointed dolls, and when their
+hands met it was as wood on wood.</p>
+<p>'You must--not!' said Conroy. His jaws stiffened, and the cold
+climbed from his feet up.</p>
+<p>'Why--must--I--not?' She repeated the words idiotically.</p>
+<p>Conroy could only shake his head, while he bore down on the hand
+and the case in it.</p>
+<p>Her speech went from her altogether. The wonderful lips rested
+half over the even teeth, the breath was in the nostrils only, the
+eyes dulled, the face set grey, and through the glove the hand
+struck like ice.</p>
+<p>Presently her soul came back and stood behind her eyes--only
+thing that had life in all that place--stood and looked for
+Conroy's soul. He too was fettered in every limb, but somewhere at
+an immense distance he heard his heart going about its work as the
+engine-room carries on through and beneath the all but overwhelming
+wave. His one hope, he knew, was not to lose the eyes that clung to
+his, because there was an Evil abroad which would possess him if he
+looked aside by a hair-breadth.</p>
+<p>The rest was darkness through which some distant planet spun
+while cymbals clashed. (Beyond Farnborough the 10.8 rolls out many
+empty milk-cans at every halt.) Then a body came to life with
+intolerable pricklings. Limb by limb, after agonies of terror, that
+body returned to him, steeped in most perfect physical weariness
+such as follows a long day's rowing. He saw the heavy lids droop
+over her eyes--the watcher behind them departed--and, his soul
+sinking into assured peace, Conroy slept.</p>
+<p>Light on his eyes and a salt breath roused him without shock.
+Her hand still held his. She slept, forehead down upon it, but the
+movement of his waking waked her too, and she sneezed like a
+child.</p>
+<p>'I--I think it's morning,' said Conroy.</p>
+<p>'And nothing has happened! Did you see your Men? I didn't see my
+Faces. Does it mean we've escaped? Did--did you take any after I
+went to sleep? I'll swear I didn't,' she stammered.</p>
+<p>'No, there wasn't any need. We've slept through it.'</p>
+<p>'No need! Thank God! There was no need! Oh, look!'</p>
+<p>The train was running under red cliffs along a sea-wall washed
+by waves that were colourless in the early light. Southward the sun
+rose mistily upon the Channel.</p>
+<p>She leaned out of the window and breathed to the bottom of her
+lungs, while the wind wrenched down her dishevelled hair and blew
+it below her waist.</p>
+<p>'Well!' she said with splendid eyes. 'Aren't you still waiting
+for something to happen?'</p>
+<p>'No. Not till next time. We've been let off,' Conroy answered,
+breathing as deeply as she.</p>
+<p>'Then we ought to say our prayers.'</p>
+<p>'What nonsense! Some one will see us.'</p>
+<p>'We needn't kneel. Stand up and say "Our Father." We
+<i>must</i>!'</p>
+<p>It was the first time since childhood that Conroy had prayed.
+They laughed hysterically when a curve threw them against an
+arm-rest.</p>
+<p>'Now for breakfast!' she cried. 'My maid--Nurse Blaber--has the
+basket and things. It'll be ready in twenty minutes. Oh! Look at my
+hair!' and she went out laughing.</p>
+<p>Conroy's first discovery, made without fumbling or counting
+letters on taps, was that the London and South Western's allowance
+of washing-water is inadequate. He used every drop, rioting in the
+cold tingle on neck and arms. To shave in a moving train balked
+him, but the next halt gave him a chance, which, to his own
+surprise, he took. As he stared at himself in the mirror he smiled
+and nodded. There were points about this person with the clear, if
+sunken, eye and the almost uncompressed mouth. But when he bore his
+bag back to his compartment, the weight of it on a limp arm humbled
+that new pride.</p>
+<p>'My friend,' he said, half aloud, 'you go into training. You're
+putty.'</p>
+<p>She met him in the spare compartment, where her maid had laid
+breakfast.</p>
+<p>'By Jove!' he said, halting at the doorway, 'I hadn't realised
+how beautiful you were!'</p>
+<p>'The same to you, lad. Sit down. I could eat a horse.'</p>
+<p>'I shouldn't,' said the maid quietly. 'The less you eat the
+better.' She was a small, freckled woman, with light fluffy hair
+and pale-blue eyes that looked through all veils.</p>
+<p>'This is Miss Blaber,' said Miss Henschil. 'He's one of the
+soul-weary too, Nursey.'</p>
+<p>'I know it. But when one has just given it up a full meal
+doesn't agree. That's why I've only brought you bread and
+butter.'</p>
+<p>She went out quietly, and Conroy reddened.</p>
+<p>'We're still children, you see,' said Miss Henschil. 'But I'm
+well enough to feel some shame of it. D'you take sugar?'</p>
+<p>They starved together heroically, and Nurse Blaber was good
+enough to signify approval when she came to clear away.</p>
+<p>'Nursey?' Miss Henschil insinuated, and flushed.</p>
+<p>'Do you smoke?' said the nurse coolly to Conroy.</p>
+<p>'I haven't in years. Now you mention it, I think I'd like a
+cigarette--or something.'</p>
+<p>'I used to. D'you think it would keep me quiet?' Miss Henschil
+said.</p>
+<p>'Perhaps. Try these.' The nurse handed them her
+cigarette-case.</p>
+<p>'Don't take anything else,' she commanded, and went away with
+the tea-basket.</p>
+<p>'Good!' grunted Conroy, between mouthfuls of tobacco.</p>
+<p>'Better than nothing,' said Miss Henschil; but for a while they
+felt ashamed, yet with the comfort of children punished
+together.</p>
+<p>'Now,' she whispered, 'who were you when you were a man?'</p>
+<p>Conroy told her, and in return she gave him her history. It
+delighted them both to deal once more in worldly
+concerns--families, names, places, and dates--with a person of
+understanding.</p>
+<p>She came, she said, of Lancashire folk--wealthy cotton-spinners,
+who still kept the broadened <i>a</i> and slurred aspirate of the
+old stock. She lived with an old masterful mother in an opulent
+world north of Lancaster Gate, where people in Society gave parties
+at a Mecca called the Langham Hotel.</p>
+<p>She herself had been launched into Society there, and the
+flowers at the ball had cost eighty-seven pounds; but, being
+reckoned peculiar, she had made few friends among her own sex. She
+had attracted many men, for she was a beauty--<i>the</i> beauty, in
+fact, of Society, she said.</p>
+<p>She spoke utterly without shame or reticence, as a life-prisoner
+tells his past to a fellow-prisoner; and Conroy nodded across the
+smoke-rings.</p>
+<p>'Do you remember when you got into the carriage?' she asked.
+'(Oh, I wish I had some knitting!) Did you notice aught, lad?'</p>
+<p>Conroy thought back. It was ages since. 'Wasn't there some one
+outside the door--crying?' he asked.</p>
+<p>'He's--he's the little man I was engaged to,' she said. 'But I
+made him break it off. I told him 'twas no good. But he won't, yo'
+see.'</p>
+<p>'<i>That</i> fellow? Why, he doesn't come up to your
+shoulder.'</p>
+<p>'That's naught to do with it. I think all the world of him. I'm
+a foolish wench'--her speech wandered as she settled herself
+cosily, one elbow on the arm-rest. 'We'd been engaged--I couldn't
+help that--and he worships the ground I tread on. But it's no use.
+I'm not responsible, you see. His two sisters are against it,
+though I've the money. They're right, but they think it's the
+dri-ink,' she drawled. 'They're Methody--the Skinners. You see,
+their grandfather that started the Patton Mills, he died o' the
+dri-ink.'</p>
+<p>'I see,' said Conroy. The grave face before him under the lifted
+veil was troubled.</p>
+<p>'George Skinner.' She breathed it softly. 'I'd make him a good
+wife, by God's gra-ace--if I could. But it's no use. I'm not
+responsible. But he'll not take "No" for an answer. I used to call
+him "Toots." He's of no consequence, yo' see.'</p>
+<p>'That's in Dickens,' said Conroy, quite quickly. 'I haven't
+thought of Toots for years. He was at Doctor Blimber's.'</p>
+<p>'And so--that's my trouble,' she concluded, ever so slightly
+wringing her hands. 'But I--don't you think--there's hope now?'</p>
+<p>'Eh?' said Conroy. 'Oh yes! This is the first time I've turned
+my corner without help. With your help, I should say.'</p>
+<p>'It'll come back, though.'</p>
+<p>'Then shall we meet it in the same way? Here's my card. Write me
+your train, and we'll go together.'</p>
+<p>'Yes. We must do that. But between times--when we want--' She
+looked at her palm, the four fingers working on it. 'It's hard to
+give 'em up.'</p>
+<p>'But think what we have gained already, and let me have the case
+to keep.'</p>
+<p>She shook her head, and threw her cigarette out of the window.
+'Not yet.'</p>
+<p>'Then let's lend our cases to Nurse, and we'll get through
+to-day on cigarettes. I'll call her while we feel strong.'</p>
+<p>She hesitated, but yielded at last, and Nurse accepted the
+offerings with a smile.</p>
+<p>'<i>You'll</i> be all right,' she said to Miss Henschil. 'But if
+I were you'--to Conroy--'I'd take strong exercise.'</p>
+<p>When they reached their destination Conroy set himself to obey
+Nurse Blaber. He had no remembrance of that day, except one streak
+of blue sea to his left, gorse-bushes to his right, and, before
+him, a coast-guard's track marked with white-washed stones that he
+counted up to the far thousands. As he returned to the little town
+he saw Miss Henschil on the beach below the cliffs. She kneeled at
+Nurse Blaber's feet, weeping and pleading.</p>
+<hr style="width: 25%;">
+<p>Twenty-five days later a telegram came to Conroy's rooms:
+'<i>Notice given. Waterloo again. Twenty-fourth.'</i> That same
+evening he was wakened by the shudder and the sigh that told him
+his sentence had gone forth. Yet he reflected on his pillow that he
+had, in spite of lapses, snatched something like three weeks of
+life, which included several rides on a horse before breakfast--the
+hour one most craves Najdolene; five consecutive evenings on the
+river at Hammersmith in a tub where he had well stretched the white
+arms that passing crews mocked at; a game of rackets at his club;
+three dinners, one small dance, and one human flirtation with a
+human woman. More notable still, he had settled his month's
+accounts, only once confusing petty cash with the days of grace
+allowed him. Next morning he rode his hired beast in the park
+victoriously. He saw Miss Henschil on horse-back near Lancaster
+Gate, talking to a young man at the railings.</p>
+<p>She wheeled and cantered toward him.</p>
+<p>'By Jove! How well you look!' he cried, without salutation. 'I
+didn't know you rode.'</p>
+<p>'I used to once,' she replied. 'I'm all soft now.'</p>
+<p>They swept off together down the ride.</p>
+<p>'Your beast pulls,' he said.</p>
+<p>'Wa-ant him to. Gi-gives me something to think of. How've you
+been?' she panted. 'I wish chemists' shops hadn't red lights.'</p>
+<p>'Have you slipped out and bought some, then?'</p>
+<p>'You don't know Nursey. Eh, but it's good to be on a horse
+again! This chap cost me two hundred.'</p>
+<p>'Then you've been swindled,' said Conroy.</p>
+<p>'I know it, but it's no odds. I must go back to Toots and send
+him away. He's neglecting his work for me.'</p>
+<p>She swung her heavy-topped animal on his none too sound hocks.
+''Sentence come, lad?'</p>
+<p>'Yes. But I'm not minding it so much this time.'</p>
+<p>'Waterloo, then--and God help us!' She thundered back to the
+little frock-coated figure that waited faithfully near the
+gate.</p>
+<p>Conroy felt the spring sun on his shoulders and trotted home.
+That evening he went out with a man in a pair oar, and was rowed to
+a standstill. But the other man owned he could not have kept the
+pace five minutes longer.</p>
+<hr style="width: 25%;">
+<p>He carried his bag all down Number 3 platform at Waterloo, and
+hove it with one hand into the rack.</p>
+<p>'Well done!' said Nurse Blaber, in the corridor. 'We've improved
+too.'</p>
+<p>Dr. Gilbert and an older man came out of the next
+compartment.</p>
+<p>'Hallo!' said Gilbert. 'Why haven't you been to see me, Mr.
+Conroy? Come under the lamp. Take off your hat. No--no. Sit, you
+young giant. Ve-ry good. Look here a minute, Johnnie.'</p>
+<p>A little, round-bellied, hawk-faced person glared at him.</p>
+<p>'Gilbert was right about the beauty of the beast,' he muttered.
+'D'you keep it in your glove now?' he went on, and punched Conroy
+in the short ribs.</p>
+<p>'No,' said Conroy meekly, but without coughing. 'Nowhere--on my
+honour! I've chucked it for good.'</p>
+<p>'Wait till you are a sound man before you say <i>that</i>, Mr.
+Conroy.' Sir John Chartres stumped out, saying to Gilbert in the
+corridor, 'It's all very fine, but the question is shall I or we
+"Sir Pandarus of Troy become," eh? We're bound to think of the
+children.'</p>
+<p>'Have you been vetted?' said Miss Henschil, a few minutes after
+the train started. 'May I sit with you? I--I don't trust myself
+yet. I can't give up as easily as you can, seemingly.'</p>
+<p>'Can't you? I never saw any one so improved in a month.'</p>
+<p>'Look here!' She reached across to the rack, single-handed
+lifted Conroy's bag, and held it at arm's length. 'I counted ten
+slowly. And I didn't think of hours or minutes,' she boasted.</p>
+<p>'Don't remind me,' he cried.</p>
+<p>'Ah! Now I've reminded myself. I wish I hadn't. Do you think
+it'll be easier for us to-night?'</p>
+<p>'Oh, don't.' The smell of the carriage had brought back all his
+last trip to him, and Conroy moved uneasily.</p>
+<p>'I'm sorry. I've brought some games,' she went on. 'Draughts and
+cards--but they all mean counting. I wish I'd brought chess, but I
+can't play chess. What can we do? Talk about something.'</p>
+<p>'Well, how's Toots, to begin with?' said Conroy.</p>
+<p>'Why? Did you see him on the platform?'</p>
+<p>'No. Was he there? I didn't notice.'</p>
+<p>'Oh yes. He doesn't understand. He's desperately jealous. I told
+him it doesn't matter. Will you please let me hold your hand? I
+believe I'm beginning to get the chill.'</p>
+<p>'Toots ought to envy me,' said Conroy.</p>
+<p>'He does. He paid you a high compliment the other night. He's
+taken to calling again--in spite of all they say.'</p>
+<p>Conroy inclined his head. He felt cold, and knew surely he would
+be colder.</p>
+<p>'He said,' she yawned. '(Beg your pardon.) He said he couldn't
+see how I could help falling in love with a man like you; and he
+called himself a damned little rat, and he beat his head on the
+piano last night.'</p>
+<p>'The piano? You play, then?'</p>
+<p>'Only to him. He thinks the world of my accomplishments. Then I
+told him I wouldn't have you if you were the last man on earth
+instead of only the best-looking--not with a million in each
+stocking.'</p>
+<p>'No, not with a million in each stocking,' said Conroy
+vehemently. 'Isn't that odd?'</p>
+<p>'I suppose so--to any one who doesn't know. Well, where was I?
+Oh, George as good as told me I was deceiving him, and he wanted to
+go away without saying good-night. He hates standing a-tiptoe, but
+he must if I won't sit down.'</p>
+<p>Conroy would have smiled, but the chill that foreran the coming
+of the Lier-in-Wait was upon him, and his hand closed warningly on
+hers.</p>
+<p>'And--and so--' she was trying to say, when her hour also
+overtook her, leaving alive only the fear-dilated eyes that turned
+to Conroy. Hand froze on hand and the body with it as they waited
+for the horror in the blackness that heralded it. Yet through the
+worst Conroy saw, at an uncountable distance, one minute glint of
+light in his night. Thither would he go and escape his fear; and
+behold, that light was the light in the watch-tower of her eyes,
+where her locked soul signalled to his soul: 'Look at me!'</p>
+<p>In time, from him and from her, the Thing sheered aside, that
+each soul might step down and resume its own concerns. He thought
+confusedly of people on the skirts of a thunderstorm, withdrawing
+from windows where the torn night is, to their known and furnished
+beds. Then he dozed, till in some drowsy turn his hand fell from
+her warmed hand.</p>
+<p>'That's all. The Faces haven't come,' he heard her say.
+'All--thank God! I don't feel even I need what Nursey promised me.
+Do you?'</p>
+<p>'No.' He rubbed his eyes. 'But don't make too sure.'</p>
+<p>'Certainly not. We shall have to try again next month. I'm
+afraid it will be an awful nuisance for you.'</p>
+<p>'Not to me, I assure you,' said Conroy, and they leaned back and
+laughed at the flatness of the words, after the hells through which
+they had just risen.</p>
+<p>'And now,' she said, strict eyes on Conroy, '<i>why</i> wouldn't
+you take me--not with a million in each stocking?'</p>
+<p>'I don't know. That's what I've been puzzling over.'</p>
+<p>'So have I. We're as handsome a couple as I've ever seen. Are
+you well off, lad?'</p>
+<p>'They call me so,' said Conroy, smiling.</p>
+<p>'That's North country.' She laughed again. Setting aside my good
+looks and yours, I've four thousand a year of my own, and the rents
+should make it six. That's a match some old cats would lap tea all
+night to fettle up.'</p>
+<p>'It is. Lucky Toots!' said Conroy.</p>
+<p>'Ay,' she answered, 'he'll be the luckiest lad in London if I
+win through. Who's yours?'</p>
+<p>'No--no one, dear. I've been in Hell for years. I only want to
+get out and be alive and--so on. Isn't that reason enough?'</p>
+<p>'Maybe, for a man. But I never minded things much till George
+came. I was all stu-upid like.'</p>
+<p>'So was I, but now I think I can live. It ought to be less next
+month, oughtn't it?' he said.</p>
+<p>'I hope so. Ye-es. There's nothing much for a maid except to be
+married, and I ask no more. Whoever yours is, when you've found
+her, she shall have a wedding present from Mrs. George Skinner
+that--'</p>
+<p>'But she wouldn't understand it any more than Toots.'</p>
+<p>'He doesn't matter--except to me. I can't keep my eyes open,
+thank God! Good-night, lad.'</p>
+<p>Conroy followed her with his eyes. Beauty there was, grace there
+was, strength, and enough of the rest to drive better men than
+George Skinner to beat their heads on piano-tops--but for the
+new-found life of him Conroy could not feel one flutter of instinct
+or emotion that turned to herward. He put up his feet and fell
+asleep, dreaming of a joyous, normal world recovered--with interest
+on arrears. There were many things in it, but no one face of any
+one woman.</p>
+<hr style="width: 25%;">
+<p>Thrice afterward they took the same train, and each time their
+trouble shrank and weakened. Miss Henschil talked of Toots, his
+multiplied calls, the things he had said to his sisters, the much
+worse things his sisters had replied; of the late (he seemed very
+dead to them) M. Najdol's gifts for the soul-weary; of shopping, of
+house rents, and the cost of really artistic furniture and
+linen.</p>
+<p>Conroy explained the exercises in which he delighted--mighty
+labours of play undertaken against other mighty men, till he
+sweated and, having bathed, slept. He had visited his mother, too,
+in Hereford, and he talked something of her and of the home-life,
+which his body, cut out of all clean life for five years,
+innocently and deeply enjoyed. Nurse Blaber was a little interested
+in Conroy's mother, but, as a rule, she smoked her cigarette and
+read her paper-backed novels in her own compartment.</p>
+<p>On their last trip she volunteered to sit with them, and buried
+herself in <i>The Cloister and the Hearth</i> while they whispered
+together. On that occasion (it was near Salisbury) at two in the
+morning, when the Lier-in-Wait brushed them with his wing, it meant
+no more than that they should cease talk for the instant, and for
+the instant hold hands, as even utter strangers on the deep may do
+when their ship rolls underfoot.</p>
+<p>'But still,' said Nurse Blaber, not looking up, 'I think your
+Mr. Skinner might feel jealous of all this.'</p>
+<p>'It would be difficult to explain,' said Conroy.</p>
+<p>'Then you'd better not be at my wedding,' Miss Henschil
+laughed.</p>
+<p>'After all we've gone through, too. But I suppose you ought to
+leave me out. Is the day fixed?' he cried.</p>
+<p>'Twenty-second of September--in spite of both his sisters. I can
+risk it now.' Her face was glorious as she flushed.</p>
+<p>'My dear chap!' He shook hands unreservedly, and she gave back
+his grip without flinching. 'I can't tell you how pleased I
+am!'</p>
+<p>'Gracious Heavens!' said Nurse Blaber, in a new voice. 'Oh, I
+beg your pardon. I forgot I wasn't paid to be surprised.'</p>
+<p>'What at? Oh, I see!' Miss Henschil explained to Conroy. 'She
+expected you were going to kiss me, or I was going to kiss you, or
+something.'</p>
+<p>'After all you've gone through, as Mr. Conroy said,'</p>
+<p>'But I couldn't, could you?' said Miss Henschil, with a disgust
+as frank as that on Conroy's face. 'It would be horrible--horrible.
+And yet, of course, you're wonderfully handsome. How d'you account
+for it, Nursey?'</p>
+<p>Nurse Blaber shook her head. 'I was hired to cure you of a
+habit, dear. When you're cured I shall go on to the next case--that
+senile-decay one at Bourne-mouth I told you about.'</p>
+<p>'And I shall be left alone with George! But suppose it isn't
+cured,' said Miss Henschil of a sudden. Suppose it comes back
+again. What can I do? I can't send for <i>him</i> in this way when
+I'm a married woman!' She pointed like an infant.</p>
+<p>'I'd come, of course,' Conroy answered. 'But, seriously, that is
+a consideration.'</p>
+<p>They looked at each other, alarmed and anxious, and then toward
+Nurse Blaber, who closed her book, marked the place, and turned to
+face them.</p>
+<p>'Have you ever talked to your mother as you have to me?' she
+said.</p>
+<p>'No. I might have spoken to dad--but mother's different. What
+d'you mean?'</p>
+<p>'And you've never talked to your mother either, Mr. Conroy?'</p>
+<p>'Not till I took Najdolene. Then I told her it was my heart.
+There's no need to say anything, now that I'm practically over it,
+is there?'</p>
+<p>'Not if it doesn't come back, but--' She beckoned with a stumpy,
+triumphant linger that drew their heads close together. 'You know I
+always go in and read a chapter to mother at tea, child.'</p>
+<p>'I know you do. You're an angel,' Miss Henschil patted the blue
+shoulder next her. 'Mother's Church of England now,' she explained.
+'But she'll have her Bible with her pikelets at tea every night
+like the Skinners.'</p>
+<p>'It was Naaman and Gehazi last Tuesday that gave me a clue. I
+said I'd never seen a case of leprosy, and your mother said she'd
+seen too many.'</p>
+<p>'Where? She never told me,' Miss Henschil began.</p>
+<p>'A few months before you were born--on her trip to Australia--at
+Mola or Molo something or other. It took me three evenings to get
+it all out.'</p>
+<p>'Ay--mother's suspicious of questions,' said Miss Henschil to
+Conroy. 'She'll lock the door of every room she's in, if it's but
+for five minutes. She was a Tackberry from Jarrow way, yo'
+see.'</p>
+<p>'She described your men to the life--men with faces all eaten
+away, staring at her over the fence of a lepers' hospital in this
+Molo Island. They begged from her, and she ran, she told me, all
+down the street, back to the pier. One touched her and she nearly
+fainted. She's ashamed of that still.'</p>
+<p>'My men? The sand and the fences?' Miss Henschil muttered.</p>
+<p>'Yes. You know how tidy she is and how she hates wind. She
+remembered that the fences were broken--she remembered the wind
+blowing. Sand--sun--salt wind--fences--faces--I got it all out of
+her, bit by bit. You don't know what I know! And it all happened
+three or four months before you were born. There!' Nurse Blaber
+slapped her knee with her little hand triumphantly.</p>
+<p>'Would that account for it?' Miss Henschil shook from head to
+foot.</p>
+<p>'Absolutely. I don't care who you ask! You never imagined the
+thing. It was <i>laid</i> on you. It happened on earth to
+<i>you</i>! Quick, Mr. Conroy, she's too heavy for me! I'll get the
+flask.'</p>
+<p>Miss Henschil leaned forward and collapsed, as Conroy told her
+afterwards, like a factory chimney. She came out of her swoon with
+teeth that chattered on the cup.</p>
+<p>'No--no,' she said, gulping. 'It's not hysterics. Yo' see I've
+no call to hev 'em any more. No call--no reason whatever. God be
+praised! Can't yo' <i>feel</i> I'm a right woman now?'</p>
+<p>'Stop hugging me!' said Nurse Blaber. 'You don't know your
+strength. Finish the brandy and water. It's perfectly reasonable,
+and I'll lay long odds Mr. Conroy's case is something of the same.
+I've been thinking--'</p>
+<p>'I wonder--' said Conroy, and pushed the girl back as she swayed
+again.</p>
+<p>Nurse Blaber smoothed her pale hair. 'Yes. Your trouble, or
+something like it, happened somewhere on earth or sea to the mother
+who bore you. Ask her, child. Ask her and be done with it once for
+all.'</p>
+<p>'I will,' said Conroy.... 'There ought to be--' He opened his
+bag and hunted breathlessly.</p>
+<p>'Bless you! Oh, God bless you, Nursey!' Miss Henschil was
+sobbing. 'You don't know what this means to me. It takes it all
+off--from the beginning.'</p>
+<p>'But doesn't it make any difference to you now?' the nurse asked
+curiously. 'Now that you're rightfully a woman?'</p>
+<p>Conroy, busy with his bag, had not heard. Miss Henschil stared
+across, and her beauty, freed from the shadow of any fear, blazed
+up within her. 'I see what you mean,' she said. 'But it hasn't
+changed anything. I want Toots. <i>He</i> has never been out of his
+mind in his life--except over silly me.'</p>
+<p>'It's all right,' said Conroy, stooping under the lamp, Bradshaw
+in hand. 'If I change at Templecombe--for Bristol
+(Bristol--Hereford--yes)--I can be with mother for breakfast in her
+room and find out.'</p>
+<p>'Quick, then,' said Nurse Blaber. 'We've passed Gillingham quite
+a while. You'd better take some of our sandwiches.' She went out to
+get them. Conroy and Miss Henschil would have danced, but there is
+no room for giants in a South-Western compartment.</p>
+<p>'Good-bye, good luck, lad. Eh, but you've changed already--like
+me. Send a wire to our hotel as soon as you're sure,' said Miss
+Henschil. 'What should I have done without you?'</p>
+<p>'Or I?' said Conroy. 'But it's Nurse that's saving us
+really.'</p>
+<p>'Then thank her,' said Miss Henschil, looking straight at him.
+'Yes, I would. She'd like it.'</p>
+<p>When Nurse Blaber came back after the parting at Templecombe her
+nose and her eyelids were red, but, for all that, her face
+reflected a great light even while she sniffed over <i>The Cloister
+and the Hearth</i>.</p>
+<p>Miss Henschil, deep in a house furnisher's catalogue, did not
+speak for twenty minutes. Then she said, between adding totals of
+best, guest, and servants' sheets, 'But why should our times have
+been the same, Nursey?'</p>
+<p>'Because a child is born somewhere every second of the clock,'
+Nurse Blaber answered. 'And besides that, you probably set each
+other off by talking and thinking about it. You shouldn't, you
+know.'</p>
+<p>'Ay, but you've never been in Hell,' said Miss Henschil.</p>
+<p>The telegram handed in at Hereford at 12.46 and delivered to
+Miss Henschil on the beach of a certain village at 2.7 ran
+thus:</p>
+<p>'"<i>Absolutely confirmed. She says she remembers hearing noise
+of accident in engine-room returning from India
+eighty-five.</i>"'</p>
+<p>'He means the year, not the thermometer,' said Nurse Blaber,
+throwing pebbles at the cold sea.</p>
+<p>'"<i>And two men scalded thus explaining my hoots.</i>" (The
+idea of telling me that!) "<i>Subsequently silly clergyman
+passenger ran up behind her calling for joke, 'Friend, all is
+lost,' thus accounting very words.</i>"'</p>
+<p>Nurse Blaber purred audibly.</p>
+<p>'"<i>She says only remembers being upset minute or two.
+Unspeakable relief. Best love Nursey, who is jewel. Get out of her
+what she would like best.</i>" Oh, I oughtn't to have read that,'
+said Miss Henschil.</p>
+<p>'It doesn't matter. I don't want anything,' said Nurse Blaber,
+'and if I did I shouldn't get it.'</p>
+<br>
+<br>
+<hr style="width: 35%;">
+<br>
+<br>
+<a name="page104"></a>
+<div class="poem">
+<div class="stanza">
+<p class="i9"><b>'HELEN ALL ALONE'</b></p>
+</div>
+<div class="stanza">
+<p class="i7">There was darkness under Heaven</p>
+<p class="i8">For an hour's space--</p>
+<p class="i7">Darkness that we knew was given</p>
+<p class="i8">Us for special grace.</p>
+<p class="i7">Sun and moon and stars were hid,</p>
+<p class="i8">God had left His Throne,</p>
+<p class="i7">When Helen came to me, she did,</p>
+<p class="i8">Helen all alone!</p>
+</div>
+<div class="stanza">
+<p class="i7">Side by side (because our fate</p>
+<p class="i8">Damned us ere our birth)</p>
+<p class="i7">We stole out of Limbo Gate</p>
+<p class="i8">Looking for the Earth.</p>
+<p class="i7">Hand in pulling hand amid</p>
+<p class="i8">Fear no dreams have known,</p>
+<p class="i7">Helen ran with me, she did,</p>
+<p class="i8">Helen all alone!</p>
+</div>
+<div class="stanza">
+<p class="i7">When the Horror passing speech</p>
+<p class="i8">Hunted us along,</p>
+<p class="i7">Each laid hold on each, and each</p>
+<p class="i8">Found the other strong.</p>
+<p class="i7">In the teeth of things forbid</p>
+<p class="i8">And Reason overthrown,</p>
+<p class="i7">Helen stood by me, she did,</p>
+<p class="i8">Helen all alone!</p>
+</div>
+<div class="stanza">
+<p class="i7">When, at last, we heard the Fires</p>
+<p class="i8">Dull and die away,</p>
+<p class="i7">When, at last, our linked desires</p>
+<p class="i8">Dragged us up to day,</p>
+<p class="i7">When, at last, our souls were rid</p>
+<p class="i8">Of what that Night had shown,</p>
+<p class="i7">Helen passed from me, she did,</p>
+<p class="i8">Helen all alone!</p>
+</div>
+<div class="stanza">
+<p class="i7">Let her go and find a mate,</p>
+<p class="i8">As I will find a bride,</p>
+<p class="i7">Knowing naught of Limbo Gate</p>
+<p class="i8">Or Who are penned inside.</p>
+<p class="i7">There is knowledge God forbid</p>
+<p class="i8">More than one should own.</p>
+<p class="i7">So Helen went from me, she did,</p>
+<p class="i7">Oh my soul, be glad she did!</p>
+<p class="i8">Helen all alone!</p>
+</div>
+</div>
+<br>
+<br>
+<hr style="width: 35%;">
+<br>
+<br>
+<a name="page107"></a>
+<h2>The Honours of War</h2>
+<h3>(1911)</h3>
+<br>
+<p>A hooded motor had followed mine from the Guildford Road up the
+drive to The Infant's ancestral hall, and had turned off to the
+stables.</p>
+<p>'We're having a quiet evening together. Stalky's upstairs
+changing. Dinner's at 7.15 sharp, because we're hungry. His room's
+next to yours,' said The Infant, nursing a cobwebbed bottle of
+Burgundy.</p>
+<p>Then I found Lieutenant-Colonel A.L. Corkran, I.A., who borrowed
+a collar-stud and told me about the East and his Sikh regiment.</p>
+<p>'And are your subalterns as good as ever?' I asked.</p>
+<p>'Amazin'--simply amazin'! All I've got to do is to find 'em
+jobs. They keep touchin' their caps to me and askin' for more work.
+'Come at me with their tongues hangin' out. <i>I</i> used to run
+the other way at their age.'</p>
+<p>'And when they err?' said I. 'I suppose they do sometimes?'</p>
+<p>'Then they run to me again to weep with remorse over their
+virgin peccadilloes. I never cuddled my Colonel when I was in
+trouble. Lambs--positive lambs!'</p>
+<p>'And what do you say to 'em?'</p>
+<p>'Talk to 'em like a papa. Tell 'em how I can't understand it,
+an' how shocked I am, and how grieved their parents'll be; and
+throw in a little about the Army Regulations and the Ten
+Commandments. 'Makes one feel rather a sweep when one thinks of
+what one used to do at their age. D'you remember--'</p>
+<p>We remembered together till close on seven o'clock. As we went
+out into the gallery that runs round the big hall, we saw The
+Infant, below, talking to two deferential well-set-up lads whom I
+had known, on and off, in the holidays, any time for the last ten
+years. One of them had a bruised cheek, and the other a weeping
+left eye.</p>
+<p>'Yes, that's the style,' said Stalky below his breath. 'They're
+brought up on lemon-squash and mobilisation text-books. I say, the
+girls we knew must have been much better than they pretended they
+were; for I'll swear it isn't the fathers.'</p>
+<p>'But why on earth did you do it?' The Infant was shouting. 'You
+know what it means nowadays.'</p>
+<p>'Well, sir,' said Bobby Trivett, the taller of the two, 'Wontner
+talks too much, for one thing. He didn't join till he was
+twenty-three, and, besides that, he used to lecture on tactics in
+the ante-room. He said Clausewitz was the only tactician, and he
+illustrated his theories with cigar-ends. He was that sort of chap,
+sir.'</p>
+<p>'And he didn't much care whose cigar-ends they were,' said
+Eames, who was shorter and pinker.</p>
+<p>'And then he <i>would</i> talk about the 'Varsity,' said Bobby.
+'He got a degree there. And he told us we weren't intellectual. He
+told the Adjutant so, sir. He was just that kind of chap, sir, if
+you understand.'</p>
+<p>Stalky and I backed behind a tall Japanese jar of chrysanthemums
+and listened more intently.</p>
+<p>'Was all the Mess in it, or only you two?' The Infant demanded,
+chewing his moustache.</p>
+<p>'The Adjutant went to bed, of course, sir, and the Senior
+Subaltern said he wasn't going to risk his commission--they're
+awfully down on ragging nowadays in the Service--but the rest of
+us--er--attended to him,' said Bobby.</p>
+<p>'Much?' The Infant asked. The boys smiled deprecatingly.</p>
+<p>'Not in the ante-room, sir,' said Eames. 'Then he called us
+silly children, and went to bed, and we sat up discussin', and I
+suppose we got a bit above ourselves, and we--er--'</p>
+<p>'Went to his quarters and drew him?' The Infant suggested.</p>
+<p>'Well, we only asked him to get out of bed, and we put his
+helmet and sword-belt on for him, and we sung him bits out of the
+Blue Fairy Book--the cram-book on Army organisation. Oh yes, and
+then we asked him to drink old Clausewitz's health, as a
+brother-tactician, in milk-punch and Worcester sauce, and so on. We
+had to help him a little there. He bites. There wasn't much else
+that time; but, you know, the War Office is severe on ragging these
+days.' Bobby stopped with a lopsided smile.</p>
+<p>'And then,' Eames went on, 'then Wontner said we'd done several
+pounds' worth of damage to his furniture.'</p>
+<p>'Oh,' said The Infant, 'he's that kind of man, is he? Does he
+brush his teeth?'</p>
+<p>'Oh yes, he's quite clean all over!' said Trivett; 'but his
+father's a wealthy barrister.'</p>
+<p>'Solicitor,' Eames corrected, 'and so this Mister Wontner is out
+for our blood. He's going to make a first-class row about
+it--appeal to the War Office--court of inquiry--spicy bits in the
+papers, and songs in the music-halls. He told us so.'</p>
+<p>'That's the sort of chap he is,' said Trivett. 'And that means
+old Dhurrah-bags, our Colonel, 'll be put on half-pay, same as that
+case in the Scarifungers' Mess; and our Adjutant'll have to
+exchange, like it was with that fellow in the 73rd Dragoons, and
+there'll be misery all round. He means making it too hot for us,
+and his papa'll back him.'</p>
+<p>'Yes, that's all very fine,' said The Infant; 'but I left the
+Service about the time you were born, Bobby. What's it got to do
+with me?'</p>
+<p>'Father told me I was always to go to you when I was in trouble,
+and you've been awfully good to me since he ...'</p>
+<p>'Better stay to dinner.' The Infant mopped his forehead.</p>
+<p>'Thank you very much, but the fact is--' Trivett halted.</p>
+<p>'This afternoon, about four, to be exact--' Eames broke in.</p>
+<p>'We went over to Wontner's quarters to talk things over. The row
+only happened last night, and we found him writing letters as hard
+as he could to his father--getting up his case for the War Office,
+you know. He read us some of 'em, but I'm not a good judge of
+style. We tried to ride him off quietly--apologies and so
+forth--but it was the milk-punch and mayonnaise that defeated
+us.'</p>
+<p>'Yes, he wasn't taking anything except pure revenge,' said
+Eames.</p>
+<p>'He said he'd make an example of the regiment, and he was
+particularly glad that he'd landed our Colonel. He told us so. Old
+Dhurrah-bags don't sympathise with Wontner's tactical lectures. He
+says Wontner ought to learn manners first, but we thought--'
+Trivett turned to Eames, who was less a son of the house than
+himself, Eames's father being still alive.</p>
+<p>'Then,' Eames went on, 'he became rather noisome, and we thought
+we might as well impound the correspondence'--he wrinkled his
+swelled left eye--'and after that, we got him to take a seat in my
+car.'</p>
+<p>'He was in a sack, you know,' Trivett explained. 'He wouldn't go
+any other way. But we didn't hurt him.'</p>
+<p>'Oh no! His head's sticking out quite clear, and'--Eames rushed
+the fence--'we've put him in your garage--er <i>pendente
+lite</i>.'</p>
+<p>'My garage!' Infant's voice nearly broke with horror.</p>
+<p>'Well, father always told me if I was in trouble, Uncle
+George--'</p>
+<p>Bobby's sentence died away as The Infant collapsed on a divan
+and said no more than, 'Your commissions!' There was a long, long
+silence.</p>
+<p>'What price your latter-day lime-juice subaltern?' I whispered
+to Stalky behind my hand. His nostrils expanded, and he drummed on
+the edge of the Japanese jar with his knuckles.</p>
+<p>'Confound your father, Bobby!' The Infant groaned. 'Raggin's a
+criminal offence these days. It isn't as if--'</p>
+<p>'Come on,' said Stalky. 'That was my old Line battalion in
+Egypt. They nearly slung old Dhurrah-bags and me out of the Service
+in '85 for ragging.' He descended the stairs and The Infant rolled
+appealing eyes at him.</p>
+<p>'I heard what you youngsters have confessed,' he began; and in
+his orderly-room voice, which is almost as musical as his singing
+one, he tongue-lashed those lads in such sort as was a privilege
+and a revelation to listen to. Till then they had known him almost
+as a relative--we were all brevet, deputy, or acting uncles to The
+Infant's friends' brood--a sympathetic elder brother, sound on
+finance. They had never met Colonel A.L. Corkran in the Chair of
+Justice. And while he flayed and rent and blistered, and wiped the
+floor with them, and while they looked for hiding-places and found
+none on that floor, I remembered (1) the up-ending of 'Dolly'
+Macshane at Dalhousie, which came perilously near a court-martial
+on Second-Lieutenant Corkran; (2) the burning of Captain Parmilee's
+mosquito-curtains on a hot Indian dawn, when the captain slept in
+his garden, and Lieutenant Corkran, smoking, rode by after a
+successful whist night at the club; (3) the introduction of an ekka
+pony, with ekka attached, into a brother captain's tent on a frosty
+night in Peshawur, and the removal of tent, pole, cot, and captain
+all wrapped in chilly canvas; (4) the bath that was given to
+Elliot-Hacker on his own verandah--his lady-love saw it and broke
+off the engagement, which was what the Mess intended, she being an
+Eurasian--and the powdering all over of Elliot-Hacker with flour
+and turmeric from the bazaar.</p>
+<p>When he took breath I realised how only Satan can rebuke sin.
+The good don't know enough.</p>
+<p>'Now,' said Stalky, 'get out! No, not out of the house. Go to
+your rooms.'</p>
+<p>'I'll send your dinner, Bobby,' said The Infant. 'Ipps!'</p>
+<p>Nothing had ever been known to astonish Ipps, the butler. He
+entered and withdrew with his charges. After all, he had suffered
+from Bobby since Bobby's twelfth year.</p>
+<p>'They've done everything they could, short of murder,' said The
+Infant. 'You know what this'll mean for the regiment. It isn't as
+if we were dealing with Sahibs nowadays.'</p>
+<p>'Quite so.' Stalky turned on me. 'Go and release the bagman,' he
+said.</p>
+<p>''Tisn't my garage,' I pleaded. 'I'm company. Besides, he'll
+probably slay me. He's been in the sack for hours.'</p>
+<p>'Look here,' Stalky thundered--the years had fallen from us
+both--'is your--am I commandin' or are you? We've got to pull this
+thing off somehow or other. Cut over to the garage, make much of
+him, and bring him over. He's dining with us. Be quick, you
+dithering ass!'</p>
+<p>I was quick enough; but as I ran through the shrubbery I
+wondered how one extricates the subaltern of the present day from a
+sack without hurting his feelings. Anciently, one slit the end
+open, taking off his boots first, and then fled.</p>
+<p>Imagine a sumptuously-equipped garage, half-filled by The
+Infant's cobalt-blue, grey-corded silk limousine and a
+mud-splashed, cheap, hooded four-seater. In the back seat of this
+last, conceive a fiery chestnut head emerging from a long oat-sack;
+an implacable white face, with blazing eyes and jaws that worked
+ceaselessly at the loop of the string that was drawn round its
+neck. The effect, under the electrics, was that of a demon
+caterpillar wrathfully spinning its own cocoon.</p>
+<p>'Good evening!' I said genially. 'Let me help you out of that.'
+The head glared. 'We've got 'em,' I went on. 'They came to quite
+the wrong shop for this sort of game--quite the wrong shop.'</p>
+<p>'Game!' said the head. 'We'll see about that. Let me out.'</p>
+<p>It was not a promising voice for one so young, and, as usual, I
+had no knife.</p>
+<p>'You've chewed the string so I can't find the knot,' I said as I
+worked with trembling fingers at the cater-pillar's throat.
+Something untied itself, and Mr. Wontner wriggled out, collarless,
+tieless, his coat split half down his back, his waistcoat
+unbuttoned, his watch-chain snapped, his trousers rucked well above
+the knees.</p>
+<p>'Where,' he said grimly, as he pulled them down, 'are Master
+Trivett and Master Eames?'</p>
+<p>'Both arrested, of course,' I replied. 'Sir George'--I gave The
+Infant's full title as a baronet--'is a Justice of the Peace. He'd
+be very pleased if you dined with us. There's a room ready for
+you.' I picked up the sack.</p>
+<p>'D'you know,' said Mr. Wontner through his teeth--but the car's
+bonnet was between us, 'that this looks to me like--I won't say
+conspiracy <i>yet</i>, but uncommonly like a confederacy.'</p>
+<p>When injured souls begin to distinguish and qualify, danger is
+over. So I grew bold.</p>
+<p>''Sorry you take it that way,' I said. 'You come here in
+trouble--'</p>
+<p>'My good fool,' he interrupted, with a half-hysterical snort,
+'let me assure you that the trouble will recoil on the other
+men!'</p>
+<p>'As you please,' I went on. 'Anyhow, the chaps who got you into
+trouble are arrested, and the magistrate who arrested 'em asks you
+to dinner. Shall I tell him you're walking back to Aldershot?'</p>
+<p>He picked some fluff off his waistcoat.</p>
+<p>'I'm in no position to dictate terms yet,' he said. 'That will
+come later. I must probe into this a little further. In the
+meantime, I accept your invitation without prejudice--if you
+understand what that means.'</p>
+<p>I understood and began to be happy again. Sub-alterns without
+prejudices were quite new to me. 'All right,' I replied; 'if you'll
+go up to the house, I'll turn out the lights.'</p>
+<p>He walked off stiffly, while I searched the sack and the car for
+the impounded correspondence that Bobby had talked of. I found
+nothing except, as the police reports say, the trace of a struggle.
+He had kicked half the varnish off the back of the front seat, and
+had bitten the leather padding where he could reach it. Evidently a
+purposeful and hard-mouthed young gentleman.</p>
+<p>'Well done!' said Stalky at the door. 'So he didn't slay you.
+Stop laughing. He's talking to The Infant now about depositions.
+Look here, you're nearest his size. Cut up to your rooms and give
+Ipps your dinner things and a clean shirt for him.'</p>
+<p>'But I haven't got another suit,' I said.</p>
+<p>'You! I'm not thinking of you! We've got to conciliate
+<i>him</i>. He's in filthy rags and a filthy temper, and he won't
+feel decent till he's dressed. You're the sacrifice. Be quick! And
+clean socks, remember!'</p>
+<p>Once more I trotted up to my room, changed into unseasonable
+unbrushed grey tweeds, put studs into a clean shirt, dug out fresh
+socks, handed the whole garniture over to Ipps, and returned to the
+hall just in time to hear Stalky say, 'I'm a stockbroker, but I
+have the honour to hold His Majesty's commission in a Territorial
+battalion.' Then I felt as though I might be beginning to be
+repaid.</p>
+<p>'I have a very high opinion of the Territorials myself,' said
+Mr. Wontner above a glass of sherry. (Infant never lets us put
+bitters into anything above twenty years old.) 'But if you had any
+experience of the Service, you would find that the Average Army
+Man--'</p>
+<p>Here The Infant suggested changing, and Ipps, before whom no
+human passion can assert itself, led Mr. Wontner away.</p>
+<p>'Why the devil did you tell him I was on the Bench?' said Infant
+wrathfully to me. 'You know I ain't now. Why didn't he stay in his
+father's office? He's a raging blight!'</p>
+<p>'Not a bit of it,' said Stalky cheerfully. 'He's a little shaken
+and excited. Probably Beetle annoyed him in the garage, but we must
+overlook that. We've contained him so far, and I'm going to nibble
+round his outposts at dinner. All you've got to do, Infant, is to
+remember you're a gentleman in your own house. Don't hop! You'll
+find it pretty difficult before dinner's over. I don't want to hear
+anything at all from you, Beetle.'</p>
+<p>'But I'm just beginning to like him,' I said. 'Do let me
+play!'</p>
+<p>'Not till I ask you. You'll overdo it. Poor old Dhurrah-bags! A
+scandal 'ud break him up!'</p>
+<p>'But as long as a regiment has no say as to who joins it, it's
+bound to rag,' Infant began. 'Why--why, they varnished me when I
+joined!' He squirmed at the thought of it.</p>
+<p>'Don't be owls! We ain't discussing principles! We've got to
+save the court of inquiry if we can,' said Stalky.</p>
+<p>Five minutes later--at 7.45 to be precise--we four sat down to
+such a dinner as, I hold, only The Infant's cook can produce, with
+wines worthy of pontifical banquets. A man in the extremity of rage
+and injured dignity is precisely like a typhoid patient. He asks no
+questions, accepts what is put before him, and babbles in one
+key--very often of trifles. But food and drink are the very best of
+drugs. I think it was Heidsieck Dry Monopole '92--Stalky as usual
+stuck to Burgundy--that began to unlock Mr. Wontner's heart behind
+my shirt-front. Me he snubbed throughout, after the Oxford manner,
+because I had seen him in the sack, and he did not intend me to
+presume; but to Stalky and The Infant, while I admired the set of
+my dinner-jacket across his shoulders, he made his plans of revenge
+very clear indeed. He had even sketched out some of the paragraphs
+that were to appear in the papers, and if Stalky had allowed me to
+speak, I would have told him that they were rather neatly
+phrased.</p>
+<p>'You ought to be able to get whackin' damages out of 'em, into
+the bargain,' said Stalky, after Mr. Wontner had outlined his
+position legally.</p>
+<p>'My de-ah sir,' Mr. Wontner applied himself to his glass, 'it
+isn't a matter that gentlemen usually discuss, but, I assure you,
+we Wontners'--he waved a well-kept hand--'do not stand in any need
+of filthy lucre.' In the next three minutes, we learned exactly
+what his father was worth, which, as he pointed out, was a trifle
+no man of the world dwelt on. Stalky envied aloud, and I delivered
+my first kick at The Infant's ankle. Thence we drifted to
+education, and the Average Army Man, and the desolating vacuity--I
+remember these words--of Army Society, notably among its womenkind.
+It appeared there was some sort of narrow convention in the Army
+against mentioning a woman's name at Mess. We were much surprised
+at this--Stalky would not let me express my surprise--but we took
+it from Mr. Wontner, who said we might, that it was so. Next he
+touched on Colonels of the old school, and their cognisance of
+tactics. Not that he himself pretended to any skill in tactics, but
+after three years at the 'Varsity--none of us had had a 'Varsity
+education--a man insensibly contracted the habit of clear thinking.
+At least, he could automatically co-ordinate his ideas, and the
+jealousy of these muddle-headed Colonels was inconceivable. We
+would understand that it was his duty to force on the retirement of
+his Colonel, who had been in the conspiracy against him; to make
+his Adjutant resign or exchange; and to give the half-dozen
+childish subalterns who had vexed his dignity a chance to retrieve
+themselves in other corps--West African ones, he hoped. For
+himself, after the case was decided, he proposed to go on living in
+the regiment, just to prove--for he bore no malice--that times had
+changed, <i>nosque mutamur in illis</i>--if we knew what that
+meant. Infant had curled his legs out of reach, so I was quite free
+to return thanks yet once more to Allah for the diversity of His
+creatures in His adorable world.</p>
+<p>And so, by way of an eighty-year-old liqueur brandy, to tactics
+and the great General Clausewitz, unknown to the Average Army Man.
+Here The Infant, at a whisper from Ipps--whose face had darkened
+like a mulberry while he waited--excused himself and went away, but
+Stalky, Colonel of Territorials, wanted some tips on tactics. He
+got them unbrokenly for ten minutes--Wontner and Clausewitz mixed,
+but Wontner in a film of priceless cognac distinctly on top. When
+The Infant came back, he renewed his clear-spoken demand that
+Infant should take his depositions. I supposed this to be a family
+trait of the Wontners, whom I had been visualising for some time
+past even to the third generation.</p>
+<p>'But, hang it all, they're both asleep!' said Infant, scowling
+at me. 'Ipps let 'em have the '81 port.'</p>
+<p>'Asleep!' said Stalky, rising at once. 'I don't see that makes
+any difference. As a matter of form, you'd better identify them.
+I'll show you the way.'</p>
+<p>We followed up the white stone side-staircase that leads to the
+bachelors' wing. Mr. Wontner seemed surprised that the boys were
+not in the coal-cellar.</p>
+<p>'Oh, a chap's assumed to be innocent until he's proved guilty,'
+said Stalky, mounting step by step. 'How did they get you into the
+sack, Mr. Wontner?'</p>
+<p>'Jumped on me from behind--two to one,' said Mr. Wontner
+briefly. 'I think I handed each of them something first, but they
+roped my arms and legs.'</p>
+<p>'And did they photograph you in the sack?'</p>
+<p>'Good Heavens, no!' Mr. Wontner shuddered.</p>
+<p>'That's lucky. Awful thing to live down--a photograph, isn't
+it?' said Stalky to me as we reached the landing. 'I'm thinking of
+the newspapers, of course.'</p>
+<p>'Oh, but you can easily have sketches in the illustrated papers
+from accounts supplied by eye-witnesses,' I said.</p>
+<p>Mr. Wontner turned him round. It was the first time he had
+honoured me by his notice since our talk in the garage.</p>
+<p>'Ah,' said he, 'do you pretend to any special knowledge in these
+matters?'</p>
+<p>'I'm a journalist by profession,' I answered simply but nobly.
+'As soon as you're at liberty, I'd like to have your account of the
+affair.'</p>
+<p>Now I thought he would have loved me for this, but he only
+replied in an uncomfortable, uncoming-on voice, 'Oh, you would,
+would you?'</p>
+<p>'Not if it's any trouble, of course,' I said. 'I can always get
+their version from the defendants. Do either of 'em draw or sketch
+at all, Mr. Wontner? Or perhaps your father might--'</p>
+<p>Then he said quite hotly, 'I wish you to understand very
+clearly, my good man, that a gentleman's name can't be dragged
+through the gutter to bolster up the circulation of your wretched
+sheet, whatever it may be.'</p>
+<p>'It is ----' I named a journal of enormous sales which
+specialises in scholastic, military, and other scandals. 'I don't
+know yet what it can't do, Mr. Wontner.'</p>
+<p>'I didn't know that I was dealing with a reporter' said Mr.
+Wontner.</p>
+<p>We were all halted outside a shut door. Ipps had followed
+us.</p>
+<p>'But surely you want it in the papers, don't you?' I urged.
+'With a scandal like this, one couldn't, in justice to the
+democracy, be exclusive. We'd syndicate it here and in the United
+States. I helped you out of the sack, if you remember.'</p>
+<p>'I wish to goodness you'd stop talking!' he snapped, and sat
+down on a chair. Stalky's hand on my shoulder quietly signalled me
+out of action, but I felt that my fire had not been
+misdirected.</p>
+<p>'I'll answer for him,' said Stalky to Wontner, in an undertone
+that dropped to a whisper. I caught--'Not without my
+leave--dependent on me for market-tips,' and other gratifying
+tributes to my integrity.</p>
+<p>Still Mr. Wontner sat in his chair, and still we waited on him.
+The Infant's face showed worry and heavy grief; Stalky's, a bright
+and bird-like interest; mine was hidden behind his shoulders, but
+on the face of Ipps were written emotions that no butler should
+cherish towards any guest. Contempt and wrath were the least of
+them. And Mr. Wontner was looking full at Ipps, as Ipps was looking
+at him. Mr. Wontner's father, I understood, kept a butler and two
+footmen.</p>
+<p>'D'you suppose they're shamming, in order to get off?' he said
+at last. Ipps shook his head and noiselessly threw the door open.
+The boys had finished their dinner and were fast asleep--one on a
+sofa, one in a long chair--their faces fallen back to the lines of
+their childhood. They had had a wildish night, a hard day, that
+ended with a telling-off from an artist, and the assurance they had
+wrecked their prospects for life. What else should youth do, then,
+but eat, and drink '81 port, and remember their sorrows no
+more?</p>
+<p>Mr. Wontner looked at them severely, Ipps within easy reach, his
+hands quite ready. 'Childish,' said Mr. Wontner at last. 'Childish
+but necessary. Er--have you such a thing as a rope on the premises,
+and a sack--two sacks and two ropes? I'm afraid I can't resist the
+temptation. That man understands, doesn't he, that this is a
+private matter?'</p>
+<p>'That man,' who was me, was off to the basement like one of
+Infant's own fallow-deer. The stables gave me what I wanted, and
+coming back with it through a dark passage, I ran squarely into
+Ipps. 'Go on!' he grunted. 'The minute he lays hands on Master
+Bobby, Master Bobby's saved. But that person ought to be told how
+near he came to being assaulted. It was touch-and-go with me all
+the time from the soup down, I assure you.'</p>
+<p>I arrived breathless with the sacks and the ropes. 'They were
+two to one with me,' said Mr. Wontner, as he took them. 'If they
+wake--'</p>
+<p>'We'll stand by,' Stalky replied. 'Two to one is quite
+fair.'</p>
+<p>But the boys hardly grunted as Mr. Wontner roped first one and
+then the other. Even when they were slid into the sacks they only
+mumbled, with rolling heads, through sticky lips, and snored
+on.</p>
+<p>'Port?' said Mr. Wontner virtuously.</p>
+<p>'Nervous exhaustion. They aren't much more than kids, after all.
+What's next?' said Stalky.</p>
+<p>'I want to take 'em away with me, please.'</p>
+<p>Stalky looked at him with respect.</p>
+<p>'I'll have my car round in five minutes,' said The Infant.
+'Ipps'll help carry 'em downstairs,' and he shook Mr. Wontner by
+the hand.</p>
+<p>We were all perfectly serious till the two bundles were dumped
+on a divan in the hall, and the boys waked and began to realise
+what had happened.</p>
+<p>'Yah!' said Mr. Wontner, with the simplicity of twelve years
+old. 'Who's scored now?' And he sat upon them. The tension broke in
+a storm of laughter, led, I think, by Ipps.</p>
+<p>'Asinine--absolutely asinine!' said Mr. Wontner, with folded
+arms from his lively chair. But he drank in the flattery and the
+fellowship of it all with quite a brainless grin, as we rolled and
+stamped round him, and wiped the tears from our cheeks.</p>
+<p>'Hang it!' said Bobby Trivett. 'We're defeated!'</p>
+<p>'By tactics, too,' said Eames. 'I didn't think you knew 'em,
+Clausewitz. It's a fair score. What are you going to do with
+us?'</p>
+<p>'Take you back to Mess,' said Mr. Wontner.</p>
+<p>'Not like this?'</p>
+<p>'Oh no. Worse--much worse! I haven't begun with you yet. And you
+thought you'd scored! Yah!'</p>
+<p>They had scored beyond their wildest dream. The man in whose
+hands it lay to shame them, their Colonel, their Adjutant, their
+Regiment, and their Service, had cast away all shadow of his legal
+rights for the sake of a common or bear-garden rag--such a rag as
+if it came to the ears of the authorities, would cost him his
+commission. They were saved, and their saviour was their equal and
+their brother. So they chaffed and reviled him as such till he
+again squashed the breath out of them, and we others laughed louder
+than they.</p>
+<p>'Fall in!' said Stalky when the limousine came round. 'This is
+the score of the century. I wouldn't miss it for a brigade! We
+shan't be long, Infant!'</p>
+<p>I hurried into a coat.</p>
+<p>'Is there any necessity for that reporter-chap to come too?'
+said Mr. Wontner in an unguarded whisper. 'He isn't dressed for one
+thing.'</p>
+<p>Bobby and Eames wriggled round to look at the reporter, began a
+joyous bellow, and suddenly stopped.</p>
+<p>'What's the matter?' said Wontner with suspicion.</p>
+<p>'Nothing,' said Bobby. 'I die happy, Clausewitz. Take me up
+tenderly.'</p>
+<p>We packed into the car, bearing our sheaves with us, and for
+half an hour, as the cool night-air fanned his thoughtful brow, Mr.
+Wontner was quite abreast of himself. Though he said nothing
+unworthy, he triumphed and trumpeted a little loudly over the
+sacks. I sat between them on the back seat, and applauded him
+servilely till he reminded me that what I had seen and what he had
+said was not for publication. I hinted, while the boys plunged with
+joy inside their trappings, that this might be a matter for
+arrangement. 'Then a sovereign shan't part us,' said Mr. Wontner
+cheerily, and both boys fell into lively hysterics. 'I don't see
+where the joke comes in for you,' said Mr. Wontner. 'I thought it
+was my little jokelet to-night.'</p>
+<p>'No, Clausewitz,' gasped Bobby. 'Some is, but not all. I'll be
+good now. I'll give you my parole till we get to Mess. I wouldn't
+be out of this for a fiver.'</p>
+<p>'Nor me,' said Eames, and he gave his parole to attempt no
+escape or evasion.</p>
+<p>'Now, I suppose,' said Mr. Wontner largely to Stalky, as we
+neared the suburbs of Ash, 'you have a good deal of practical
+joking on the Stock Exchange, haven't you?'</p>
+<p>'And when were you on the Stock Exchange, Uncle Leonard?' piped
+Bobby, while Eames laid his sobbing head on my shoulder.</p>
+<p>'I'm sorry,' said Stalky, 'but the fact is, I command a regiment
+myself when I'm at home. Your Colonel knows me, I think.' He gave
+his name. Mr. Wontner seemed to have heard of it. We had to pick
+Eames off the floor, where he had cast himself from excess of
+delight.</p>
+<p>'Oh, Heavens!' said Mr. Wontner after a long pause. 'What have I
+done? What haven't I done?' We felt the temperature in the car rise
+as he blushed.</p>
+<p>'You didn't talk tactics, Clausewitz?' said Bobby. 'Oh, say it
+wasn't tactics, darling!'</p>
+<p>'It was,' said Wontner.</p>
+<p>Eames was all among our feet again, crying, 'If you don't let me
+get my arms up, I'll be sick. Let's hear what you said. Tell
+us.'</p>
+<p>But Mr. Wontner turned to Stalky. 'It's no good my begging your
+pardon, sir, I suppose,' he said.</p>
+<p>'Don't you notice 'em,' said Stalky. 'It was a fair rag all
+round, and anyhow, you two youngsters haven't any right to talk
+tactics. You've been rolled up, horse, foot, and guns.'</p>
+<p>'I'll make a treaty. If you'll let us go and change presently,'
+said Bobby, 'I'll promise we won't tell about you, Clausewitz.
+<i>You</i> talked tactics to Uncle Len? Old Dhurrah-bags will like
+that. He don't love you, Claus.'</p>
+<p>'If I've made one ass of myself, I shall take extra care to make
+asses of you!' said Wontner. 'I want to stop, please, at the next
+milliner's shop on the right. It ought to be close here.'</p>
+<p>He evidently knew the country even in the dark, for the car
+stopped at a brilliantly-lighted millinery establishment, where--it
+was Saturday evening--a young lady was clearing up the counter. I
+followed him, as a good reporter should.</p>
+<p>'Have you got--' he began. 'Ah, those'll do!' He pointed to two
+hairy plush beehive bonnets, one magenta, the other a conscientious
+electric blue. 'How much, please? I'll take them both, and that
+bunch of peacock feathers, and that red feather thing.' It was a
+brilliant crimson-dyed pigeon's wing.</p>
+<p>'Now I want some yards of muslin with a nice, fierce pattern,
+please.' He got it--yellow with black tulips--and returned heavily
+laden.</p>
+<p>'Sorry to have kept you,' said he. 'Now we'll go to my quarters
+to change and beautify.'</p>
+<p>We came to them--opposite a dun waste of parade-ground that
+might have been Mian Mir--and bugles as they blew and drums as they
+rolled set heart-strings echoing.</p>
+<p>We hoisted the boys out and arranged them on chairs, while
+Wontner changed into uniform, but stopped when he saw me taking off
+my jacket.</p>
+<p>'What on earth's that for?' said he.</p>
+<p>'Because you've been wearing my evening things,' I said. 'I want
+to get into 'em again, if you don't mind.'</p>
+<p>'Then you aren't a reporter?' he said.</p>
+<p>'No,' I said, 'but that shan't part us.'</p>
+<p>'Oh, hurry!' cried Eames in desperate convulsions. 'We can't
+stand this much longer. 'Tisn't fair on the young.'</p>
+<p>'I'll attend to you in good time,' said Wontner; and when he had
+made careful toilet, he unwrapped the bonnets, put the peacock's
+feather into the magenta one, pinned the crimson wing on the blue
+one, set them daintily on the boys' heads, and bade them admire the
+effect in his shaving-glass while he ripped the muslin into
+lengths, bound it first, and draped it artistically afterwards a
+little below their knees. He finished off with a gigantic sash-bow,
+obi fashion. 'Hobble skirts,' he explained to Stalky, who nodded
+approval.</p>
+<p>Next he split open the bottom of each sack so that they could
+walk, but with very short steps. 'I ought to have got you white
+satin slippers,' he murmured, 'and I'm sorry there's no rouge.'</p>
+<p>'Don't worry on our account, old man--you're doing us proud,'
+said Bobby from under his hat. 'This beats milk-punch and
+mayonnaise.'</p>
+<p>'Oh, why didn't we think of these things when we had him at our
+mercy?' Eames wailed. 'Never mind--we'll try it on the next chap.
+You've a mind, Claus.'</p>
+<p>'Now we'll call on 'em at Mess,' said Wontner, as they minced
+towards the door.</p>
+<p>'I think I'll call on your Colonel,' said Stalky. 'He oughtn't
+to miss this. Your first attempt? I assure you I couldn't have done
+it better myself. Thank you!' He held out his hand.</p>
+<p>'Thank <i>you</i>, sir!' said Wontner, shaking it. 'I'm more
+grateful to you than I can say, and--and I'd like you to believe
+some time that I'm not quite as big a--'</p>
+<p>'Not in the least,' Stalky interrupted. 'If I were writing a
+confidential report on you, I should put you down as rather
+adequate. Look after your geishas, or they'll fall!'</p>
+<p>We watched the three cross the road and disappear into the
+shadow of the Mess verandah. There was a noise. Then telephone
+bells rang, a sergeant and a Mess waiter charged out, and the noise
+grew, till at last the Mess was a little noisy.</p>
+<p>We came back, ten minutes later, with Colonel Dalziell, who had
+been taking his sorrows to bed with him. The ante-room was quite
+full and visitors were still arriving, but it was possible to hear
+oneself speak occasionally. Trivett and Eames, in sack and sash,
+sat side by side on a table, their hats at a ravishing angle,
+coquettishly twiddling their tied feet. In the intervals of singing
+'Put Me Among the Girls,' they sipped whisky-and-soda held to their
+lips by, I regret to say, a Major. Public opinion seemed to be
+against allowing them to change their costume till they should have
+danced in it. Wontner, lying more or less gracefully at the level
+of the chandelier in the arms of six subalterns, was lecturing on
+tactics and imploring to be let down, which he was with a run when
+they realised that the Colonel was there. Then he picked himself up
+from the sofa and said: 'I want to apologise, sir, to you and the
+Mess for having been such an ass ever since I joined!'</p>
+<p>This was when the noise began.</p>
+<p>Seeing the night promised to be wet, Stalky and I went home
+again in The Infant's car. It was some time since we had tasted the
+hot air that lies between the cornice and the ceiling of crowded
+rooms.</p>
+<p>After half an hour's silence, Stalky said to me: 'I don't know
+what you've been doing, but I believe I've been weepin'. Would you
+put that down to Burgundy or senile decay?'</p>
+<br>
+<br>
+<hr style="width: 35%;">
+<br>
+<br>
+<a name="page131"></a>
+<div class="poem">
+<div class="stanza">
+<p class="i8"><b>THE CHILDREN</b></p>
+</div>
+<div class="stanza">
+<p>These were our children who died for our lands: they were dear
+in our sight.</p>
+<p class="i1">We have only the memory left of their home-treasured
+sayings and laughter.</p>
+<p class="i1">The price of our loss shall be paid to our hands, not
+another's hereafter.</p>
+<p>Neither the Alien nor Priest shall decide on it. That is our
+right. <i>But who shall return us the children</i>?</p>
+</div>
+<div class="stanza">
+<p>At the hour the Barbarian chose to disclose his pretences,</p>
+<p class="i1">And raged against Man, they engaged, on the breasts
+that they bared for us,</p>
+<p class="i1">The first felon-stroke of the sword he had long-time
+prepared for us--</p>
+<p>Their bodies were all our defence while we wrought our
+defences.</p>
+</div>
+<div class="stanza">
+<p>They bought us anew with their blood, forbearing to blame
+us,</p>
+<p>Those hours which we had not made good when the Judgment
+o'ercame us.</p>
+<p>They believed us and perished for it. Our statecraft, our
+learning.</p>
+</div>
+<div class="stanza">
+<p>Delivered them bound to the Pit and alive to the burning</p>
+<p>Whither they mirthfully hastened as jostling for honour.</p>
+<p>Not since her birth has our Earth seen such worth loosed upon
+her.</p>
+</div>
+<div class="stanza">
+<p>Nor was their agony brief, or once only imposed on them.</p>
+<p class="i1">The wounded, the war-spent, the sick received no
+exemption:</p>
+<p class="i1">Being cured they returned and endured and achieved
+our redemption,</p>
+<p>Hopeless themselves of relief, till Death, marvelling, closed on
+them.</p>
+</div>
+<div class="stanza">
+<p>That flesh we had nursed from the first in all cleanness was
+given</p>
+<p>To corruption unveiled and assailed by the malice of
+Heaven--</p>
+<p>By the heart-shaking jests of Decay where it lolled on the
+wires--</p>
+<p>To be blanched or gay-painted by fumes--to be cindered by
+fires--</p>
+<p>To be senselessly tossed and retossed in stale mutilation</p>
+<p>From crater to crater. For this we shall take expiation.</p>
+<p class="i4"><i>But who shall return us our children</i>?</p>
+</div>
+</div>
+<br>
+<br>
+<hr style="width: 35%;">
+<br>
+<br>
+<a name="page133"></a>
+<h2>The Dog Hervey</h2>
+<h3>(April 1914)</h3>
+<br>
+<p>My friend Attley, who would give away his own head if you told
+him you had lost yours, was giving away a six-months-old litter of
+Bettina's pups, and half-a-dozen women were in raptures at the show
+on Mittleham lawn.</p>
+<p>We picked by lot. Mrs. Godfrey drew first choice; her married
+daughter, second. I was third, but waived my right because I was
+already owned by Malachi, Bettina's full brother, whom I had
+brought over in the car to visit his nephews and nieces, and he
+would have slain them all if I had taken home one. Milly, Mrs.
+Godfrey's younger daughter, pounced on my rejection with squeals of
+delight, and Attley turned to a dark, sallow-skinned, slack-mouthed
+girl, who had come over for tennis, and invited her to pick. She
+put on a pince-nez that made her look like a camel, knelt clumsily,
+for she was long from the hip to the knee, breathed hard, and
+considered the last couple.</p>
+<p>'I think I'd like that sandy-pied one,' she said.</p>
+<p>'Oh, not him, Miss Sichliffe!' Attley cried. 'He was overlaid or
+had sunstroke or something. They call him The Looney in the
+kennels. Besides, he squints.'</p>
+<p>'I think that's rather fetching,' she answered. Neither Malachi
+nor I had ever seen a squinting dog before.</p>
+<p>'That's chorea--St. Vitus's dance,' Mrs. Godfrey put in. 'He
+ought to have been drowned.'</p>
+<p>'But I like his cast of countenance,' the girl persisted.</p>
+<p>'He doesn't look a good life,' I said, 'but perhaps he can be
+patched up.' Miss Sichliffe turned crimson; I saw Mrs. Godfrey
+exchange a glance with her married daughter, and knew I had said
+something which would have to be lived down.</p>
+<p>'Yes,' Miss Sichliffe went on, her voice shaking, 'he isn't a
+good life, but perhaps I can--patch him up. Come here, sir.' The
+misshapen beast lurched toward her, squinting down his own nose
+till he fell over his own toes. Then, luckily, Bettina ran across
+the lawn and reminded Malachi of their puppyhood. All that family
+are as queer as Dick's hatband, and fight like man and wife. I had
+to separate them, and Mrs. Godfrey helped me till they retired
+under the rhododendrons and had it out in silence.</p>
+<p>'D'you know what that girl's father was?' Mrs. Godfrey
+asked.</p>
+<p>'No,' I replied. 'I loathe her for her own sake. She breathes
+through her mouth.'</p>
+<p>'He was a retired doctor,' she explained. 'He used to pick up
+stormy young men in the repentant stage, take them home, and patch
+them up till they were sound enough to be insured. Then he insured
+them heavily, and let them out into the world again--with an
+appetite. Of course, no one knew him while he was alive, but he
+left pots of money to his daughter.'</p>
+<p>'Strictly legitimate--highly respectable,' I said. 'But what a
+life for the daughter!'</p>
+<p>'Mustn't it have been! <i>Now</i> d'you realise what you said
+just now?'</p>
+<p>'Perfectly; and now you've made me quite happy, shall we go back
+to the house?'</p>
+<p>When we reached it they were all inside, sitting in committee on
+names.</p>
+<p>'What shall you call yours?' I heard Milly ask Miss
+Sichliffe.</p>
+<p>'Harvey,' she replied--'Harvey's Sauce, you know. He's going to
+be quite saucy when I've'--she saw Mrs. Godfrey and me coming
+through the French window--'when he's stronger.'</p>
+<p>Attley, the well-meaning man, to make me feel at ease, asked
+what I thought of the name.</p>
+<p>'Oh, splendid,' I said at random. 'H with an A, A with an R, R
+with a--'</p>
+<p>'But that's Little Bingo,' some one said, and they all
+laughed.</p>
+<p>Miss Sichliffe, her hands joined across her long knees, drawled,
+'You ought always to verify your quotations.'</p>
+<p>It was not a kindly thrust, but something in the word
+'quotation' set the automatic side of my brain at work on some
+shadow of a word or phrase that kept itself out of memory's reach
+as a cat sits just beyond a dog's jump. When I was going home, Miss
+Sichliffe came up to me in the twilight, the pup on a leash,
+swinging her big shoes at the end of her tennis-racket.</p>
+<p>''Sorry,' she said in her thick schoolboy-like voice. 'I'm sorry
+for what I said to you about verifying quotations. I didn't know
+you well enough and--anyhow, I oughtn't to have.'</p>
+<p>'But you were quite right about Little Bingo,' I answered. 'The
+spelling ought to have reminded me.'</p>
+<p>'Yes, of course. It's the spelling,' she said, and slouched off
+with the pup sliding after her. Once again my brain began to worry
+after something that would have meant something if it had been
+properly spelled. I confided my trouble to Malachi on the way home,
+but Bettina had bitten him in four places, and he was busy.</p>
+<p>Weeks later, Attley came over to see me, and before his car
+stopped Malachi let me know that Bettina was sitting beside the
+chauffeur. He greeted her by the scruff of the neck as she hopped
+down; and I greeted Mrs. Godfrey, Attley, and a big basket.</p>
+<p>'You've got to help me,' said Attley tiredly. We took the basket
+into the garden, and there staggered out the angular shadow of a
+sandy-pied, broken-haired terrier, with one imbecile and one
+delirious ear, and two most hideous squints. Bettina and Malachi,
+already at grips on the lawn, saw him, let go, and fled in opposite
+directions.</p>
+<p>'Why have you brought that fetid hound here?' I demanded.</p>
+<p>'Harvey? For you to take care of,' said Attley. 'He's had
+distemper, but <i>I</i>'m going abroad.'</p>
+<p>'Take him with you. I won't have him. He's mentally
+afflicted.'</p>
+<p>'Look here,' Attley almost shouted, 'do I strike you as a
+fool?'</p>
+<p>'Always,' said I.</p>
+<p>'Well, then, if you say so, and Ella says so, that proves I
+ought to go abroad.'</p>
+<p>'Will's wrong, quite wrong,' Mrs. Godfrey interrupted; 'but you
+must take the pup.'</p>
+<p>'My dear boy, my dear boy, don't you ever give anything to a
+woman,' Attley snorted.</p>
+<p>Bit by bit I got the story out of them in the quiet garden
+(never a sign from Bettina and Malachi), while Harvey stared me out
+of countenance, first with one cuttlefish eye and then with the
+other.</p>
+<p>It appeared that, a month after Miss Sichliffe took him, the dog
+Harvey developed distemper. Miss Sichliffe had nursed him herself
+for some time; then she carried him in her arms the two miles to
+Mittleham, and wept--actually wept--at Attley's feet, saying that
+Harvey was all she had or expected to have in this world, and
+Attley must cure him. Attley, being by wealth, position, and
+temperament guardian to all lame dogs, had put everything aside for
+this unsavoury job, and, he asserted, Miss Sichliffe had virtually
+lived with him ever since.</p>
+<p>'She went home at night, of course,' he exploded, 'but the rest
+of the time she simply infested the premises. Goodness knows, I'm
+not particular, but it was a scandal. Even the servants!... Three
+and four times a day, and notes in between, to know how the beast
+was. Hang it all, don't laugh! And wanting to send me flowers and
+goldfish. Do I look as if I wanted goldfish? Can't you two stop for
+a minute?' (Mrs. Godfrey and I were clinging to each other for
+support.) 'And it isn't as if I was--was so alluring a personality,
+is it?'</p>
+<p>Attley commands more trust, goodwill, and affection than most
+men, for he is that rare angel, an absolutely unselfish bachelor,
+content to be run by contending syndicates of zealous friends. His
+situation seemed desperate, and I told him so.</p>
+<p>'Instant flight is your only remedy,' was my verdict. I'll take
+care of both your cars while you're away, and you can send me over
+all the greenhouse fruit.'</p>
+<p>'But why should I be chased out of my house by a she-dromedary?'
+he wailed.</p>
+<p>'Oh, stop! Stop!' Mrs. Godfrey sobbed. 'You're both wrong. I
+admit you're right, but I <i>know</i> you're wrong.'</p>
+<p>'Three <i>and</i> four times a day,' said Attley, with an awful
+countenance. 'I'm not a vain man, but--look here, Ella, I'm not
+sensitive, I hope, but if you persist in making a joke of it--'</p>
+<p>'Oh, be quiet!' she almost shrieked. 'D'you imagine for one
+instant that your friends would ever let Mittleham pass out of
+their hands? I quite agree it is unseemly for a grown girl to come
+to Mittleham at all hours of the day and night--'</p>
+<p>'I told you she went home o' nights,' Attley growled.</p>
+<p>'Specially if she goes home o' nights. Oh, but think of the life
+she must have led, Will!'</p>
+<p>'I'm not interfering with it; only she must leave me alone.'</p>
+<p>'She may want to patch you up and insure you,' I suggested.</p>
+<p>'D'you know what <i>you</i> are?' Mrs. Godfrey turned on me with
+the smile I have feared for the last quarter of a century. 'You're
+the nice, kind, wise, doggy friend. You don't know how wise and
+nice you are supposed to be. Will has sent Harvey to you to
+complete the poor angel's convalescence. You know all about dogs,
+or Will wouldn't have done it. He's written her that. You're too
+far off for her to make daily calls on you. P'r'aps she'll drop in
+two or three times a week, and write on other days. But it doesn't
+matter what she does, because you don't own Mittleham, don't you
+see?'</p>
+<p>I told her I saw most clearly.</p>
+<p>'Oh, you'll get over that in a few days,' Mrs. Godfrey
+countered. 'You're the sporting, responsible, doggy friend
+who--'</p>
+<p>'He used to look at me like that at first,' said Attley, with a
+visible shudder, 'but he gave it up after a bit. It's only because
+you're new to him.'</p>
+<p>'But, confound you! he's a ghoul--' I began.</p>
+<p>'And when he gets quite well, you'll send him back to her direct
+with your love, and she'll give you some pretty four-tailed
+goldfish,' said Mrs. Godfrey, rising. 'That's all settled. Car,
+please. We're going to Brighton to lunch together.'</p>
+<p>They ran before I could get into my stride, so I told the dog
+Harvey what I thought of them and his mistress. He never shifted
+his position, but stared at me, an intense, lopsided stare, eye
+after eye. Malachi came along when he had seen his sister off, and
+from a distance counselled me to drown the brute and consort with
+gentlemen again. But the dog Harvey never even cocked his cockable
+ear.</p>
+<p>And so it continued as long as he was with me. Where I sat, he
+sat and stared; where I walked, he walked beside, head stiffly
+slewed over one shoulder in single-barrelled contemplation of me.
+He never gave tongue, never closed in for a caress, seldom let me
+stir a step alone. And, to my amazement, Malachi, who suffered no
+stranger to live within our gates, saw this gaunt, growing,
+green-eyed devil wipe him out of my service and company without a
+whimper. Indeed, one would have said the situation interested him,
+for he would meet us returning from grim walks together, and look
+alternately at Harvey and at me with the same quivering interest
+that he showed at the mouth of a rat-hole. Outside these
+inspections, Malachi withdrew himself as only a dog or a woman
+can.</p>
+<p>Miss Sichliffe came over after a few days (luckily I was out)
+with some elaborate story of paying calls in the neighbourhood. She
+sent me a note of thanks next day. I was reading it when Harvey and
+Malachi entered and disposed themselves as usual, Harvey close up
+to stare at me, Malachi half under the sofa, watching us both. Out
+of curiosity I returned Harvey's stare, then pulled his lopsided
+head on to my knee, and took his eye for several minutes. Now, in
+Malachi's eye I can see at any hour all that there is of the normal
+decent dog, flecked here and there with that strained half-soul
+which man's love and association have added to his nature. But with
+Harvey the eye was perplexed, as a tortured man's. Only by looking
+far into its deeps could one make out the spirit of the proper
+animal, beclouded and cowering beneath some unfair burden.</p>
+<p>Leggatt, my chauffeur, came in for orders.</p>
+<p>'How d'you think Harvey's coming on?' I said, as I rubbed the
+brute's gulping neck. The vet had warned me of the possibilities of
+spinal trouble following distemper.</p>
+<p>'He ain't <i>my</i> fancy,' was the reply. 'But <i>I</i> don't
+question his comings and goings so long as I 'aven't to sit alone
+in a room with him.'</p>
+<p>'Why? He's as meek as Moses,' I said.</p>
+<p>'He fair gives me the creeps. P'r'aps he'll go out in fits.'</p>
+<p>But Harvey, as I wrote his mistress from time to time, throve,
+and when he grew better, would play by himself grisly games of
+spying, walking up, hailing, and chasing another dog. From these he
+would break off of a sudden and return to his normal stiff gait,
+with the air of one who had forgotten some matter of life and
+death, which could be reached only by staring at me. I left him one
+evening posturing with the unseen on the lawn, and went inside to
+finish some letters for the post. I must have been at work nearly
+an hour, for I was going to turn on the lights, when I felt there
+was somebody in the room whom, the short hairs at the back of my
+neck warned me, I was not in the least anxious to face. There was a
+mirror on the wall. As I lifted my eyes to it I saw the dog Harvey
+reflected near the shadow by the closed door. He had reared himself
+full-length on his hind legs, his head a little one side to clear a
+sofa between us, and he was looking at me. The face, with its
+knitted brows and drawn lips, was the face of a dog, but the look,
+for the fraction of time that I caught it, was human--wholly and
+horribly human. When the blood in my body went forward again he had
+dropped to the floor, and was merely studying me in his usual
+one-eyed fashion. Next day I returned him to Miss Sichliffe. I
+would not have kept him another day for the wealth of Asia, or even
+Ella Godfrey's approval.</p>
+<p>Miss Sichliffe's house I discovered to be a mid-Victorian
+mansion of peculiar villainy even for its period, surrounded by
+gardens of conflicting colours, all dazzling with glass and fresh
+paint on ironwork. Striped blinds, for it was a blazing autumn
+morning, covered most of the windows, and a voice sang to the piano
+an almost forgotten song of Jean Ingelow's--</p>
+<blockquote>Methought that the stars were blinking bright,<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;And the old brig's sails unfurled--</blockquote>
+<p>Down came the loud pedal, and the unrestrained cry swelled out
+across a bed of tritomas consuming in their own fires--</p>
+<blockquote>When I said I will sail to my love this night<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;On the other side of the world.</blockquote>
+<p>I have no music, but the voice drew. I waited till the end:</p>
+<div class="poem">
+<div class="stanza">
+<p class="i4">Oh, maid most dear, I am not here</p>
+<p class="i5">I have no place apart--</p>
+<p class="i4">No dwelling more on sea or shore,</p>
+<p class="i5">But only in thy heart.</p>
+</div>
+</div>
+<p>It seemed to me a poor life that had no more than that to do at
+eleven o'clock of a Tuesday forenoon. Then Miss Sichliffe suddenly
+lumbered through a French window in clumsy haste, her brows
+contracted against the light.</p>
+<p>'Well?' she said, delivering the word like a spear-thrust, with
+the full weight of a body behind it.</p>
+<p>'I've brought Harvey back at last,' I replied. 'Here he is.'</p>
+<p>But it was at me she looked, not at the dog who had cast himself
+at her feet--looked as though she would have fished my soul out of
+my breast on the instant.</p>
+<p>'Wha--what did you think of him? What did <i>you</i> make of
+him?' she panted. I was too taken aback for the moment to reply.
+Her voice broke as she stooped to the dog at her knees. 'O Harvey,
+Harvey! You utterly worthless old devil!' she cried, and the dog
+cringed and abased himself in servility that one could scarcely
+bear to look upon. I made to go.</p>
+<p>'Oh, but please, you mustn't!' She tugged at the car's side.
+'Wouldn't you like some flowers or some orchids? We've really
+splendid orchids, and'--she clasped her hands--'there are Japanese
+goldfish--real Japanese goldfish, with four tails. If you don't
+care for 'em, perhaps your friends or somebody--oh, please!'</p>
+<p>Harvey had recovered himself, and I realised that this woman
+beyond the decencies was fawning on me as the dog had fawned on
+her.</p>
+<p>'Certainly,' I said, ashamed to meet her eye. 'I'm lunching at
+Mittleham, but--'</p>
+<p>'There's plenty of time,' she entreated. 'What do <i>you</i>
+think of Harvey?'</p>
+<p>'He's a queer beast,' I said, getting out. 'He does nothing but
+stare at me.'</p>
+<p>'Does he stare at you all the time he's with you?'</p>
+<p>'Always. He's doing it now. Look!'</p>
+<p>We had halted. Harvey had sat down, and was staring from one to
+the other with a weaving motion of the head.</p>
+<p>'He'll do that all day,' I said. 'What is it, Harvey?'</p>
+<p>'Yes, what <i>is</i> it, Harvey?' she echoed. The dog's throat
+twitched, his body stiffened and shook as though he were going to
+have a fit. Then he came back with a visible wrench to his
+unwinking watch.</p>
+<p>'Always so?' she whispered.</p>
+<p>'Always,' I replied, and told her something of his life with me.
+She nodded once or twice, and in the end led me into the house.</p>
+<p>There were unaging pitch-pine doors of Gothic design in it;
+there were inlaid marble mantel-pieces and cut-steel fenders; there
+were stupendous wall-papers, and octagonal, medallioned Wedgwood
+what-nots, and black-and-gilt Austrian images holding candelabra,
+with every other refinement that Art had achieved or wealth had
+bought between 1851 and 1878. And everything reeked of varnish.</p>
+<p>'Now!' she opened a baize door, and pointed down a long corridor
+flanked with more Gothic doors. 'This was where we used to--to
+patch 'em up. You've heard of us. Mrs. Godfrey told you in the
+garden the day I got Harvey given me. I'--she drew in her
+breath--'I live here by myself, and I have a very large income.
+Come back, Harvey.'</p>
+<p>He had tiptoed down the corridor, as rigid as ever, and was
+sitting outside one of the shut doors. 'Look here!' she said, and
+planted herself squarely in front of me. 'I tell you this because
+you--you've patched up Harvey, too. Now, I want you to remember
+that my name is Moira. Mother calls me Marjorie because it's more
+refined; but my real name is Moira, and I am in my thirty-fourth
+year.'</p>
+<p>'Very good,' I said. 'I'll remember all that.'</p>
+<p>'Thank you.' Then with a sudden swoop into the humility of an
+abashed boy--''Sorry if I haven't said the proper things. You
+see--there's Harvey looking at us again. Oh, I want to say--if ever
+you want anything in the way of orchids or goldfish or--or anything
+else that would be useful to you, you've only to come to me for it.
+Under the will I'm perfectly independent, and we're a long-lived
+family, worse luck!' She looked at me, and her face worked like
+glass behind driven flame. 'I may reasonably expect to live another
+fifty years,' she said.</p>
+<p>'Thank you, Miss Sichliffe,' I replied. 'If I want anything, you
+may be sure I'll come to you for it.' She nodded. 'Now I must get
+over to Mittleham,' I said.</p>
+<p>'Mr. Attley will ask you all about this.' For the first time she
+laughed aloud. 'I'm afraid I frightened him nearly out of the
+county. I didn't think, of course. But I dare say he knows by this
+time he was wrong. Say good-bye to Harvey.'</p>
+<p>'Good-bye, old man,' I said. 'Give me a farewell stare, so we
+shall know each other when we meet again.'</p>
+<p>The dog looked up, then moved slowly toward me, and stood, head
+bowed to the floor, shaking in every muscle as I patted him; and
+when I turned, I saw him crawl back to her feet.</p>
+<p>That was not a good preparation for the rampant
+boy-and-girl-dominated lunch at Mittleham, which, as usual, I found
+in possession of everybody except the owner.</p>
+<p>'But what did the dromedary say when you brought her beast
+back?' Attley demanded.</p>
+<p>'The usual polite things,' I replied. 'I'm posing as the nice
+doggy friend nowadays.'</p>
+<p>'I don't envy you. She's never darkened my doors, thank
+goodness, since I left Harvey at your place. I suppose she'll run
+about the county now swearing you cured him. That's a woman's idea
+of gratitude.' Attley seemed rather hurt, and Mrs. Godfrey
+laughed.</p>
+<p>'That proves you were right about Miss Sichliffe, Ella,' I said.
+'She had no designs on anybody.'</p>
+<p>'I'm always right in these matters. But didn't she even offer
+you a goldfish?'</p>
+<p>'Not a thing,' said I. 'You know what an old maid's like where
+her precious dog's concerned.' And though I have tried vainly to
+lie to Ella Godfrey for many years, I believe that in this case I
+succeeded.</p>
+<p>When I turned into our drive that evening, Leggatt observed half
+aloud:</p>
+<p>'I'm glad Zvengali's back where he belongs. It's time our Mike
+had a look in.'</p>
+<p>Sure enough, there was Malachi back again in spirit as well as
+flesh, but still with that odd air of expectation he had picked up
+from Harvey.</p>
+<hr style="width: 25%;">
+<p>It was in January that Attley wrote me that Mrs. Godfrey,
+wintering in Madeira with Milly, her unmarried daughter, had been
+attacked with something like enteric; that the hotel, anxious for
+its good name, had thrust them both out into a cottage annexe; that
+he was off with a nurse, and that I was not to leave England till I
+heard from him again. In a week he wired that Milly was down as
+well, and that I must bring out two more nurses, with suitable
+delicacies.</p>
+<p>Within seventeen hours I had got them all aboard the Cape boat,
+and had seen the women safely collapsed into sea-sickness. The next
+few weeks were for me, as for the invalids, a low delirium, clouded
+with fantastic memories of Portuguese officials trying to tax
+calves'-foot jelly; voluble doctors insisting that true typhoid was
+unknown in the island; nurses who had to be exercised, taken out of
+themselves, and returned on the tick of change of guard; night
+slides down glassy, cobbled streets, smelling of sewage and
+flowers, between walls whose every stone and patch Attley and I
+knew; vigils in stucco verandahs, watching the curve and descent of
+great stars or drawing auguries from the break of dawn; insane
+interludes of gambling at the local Casino, where we won heaps of
+unconsoling silver; blasts of steamers arriving and departing in
+the roads; help offered by total strangers, grabbed at or thrust
+aside; the long nightmare crumbling back into sanity one forenoon
+under a vine-covered trellis, where Attley sat hugging a nurse,
+while the others danced a noiseless, neat-footed breakdown never
+learned at the Middlesex Hospital. At last, as the tension came out
+all over us in aches and tingles that we put down to the country
+wine, a vision of Mrs. Godfrey, her grey hair turned to spun-glass,
+but her eyes triumphant over the shadow of retreating death beneath
+them, with Milly, enormously grown, and clutching life back to her
+young breast, both stretched out on cane chairs, clamouring for
+food.</p>
+<p>In this ungirt hour there imported himself into our life a
+youngish-looking middle-aged man of the name of Shend, with a
+blurred face and deprecating eyes. He said he had gambled with me
+at the Casino, which was no recommendation, and I remember that he
+twice gave me a basket of champagne and liqueur brandy for the
+invalids, which a sailor in a red-tasselled cap carried up to the
+cottage for me at 3 A.M. He turned out to be the son of some
+merchant prince in the oil and colour line, and the owner of a
+four-hundred-ton steam yacht, into which, at his gentle insistence,
+we later shifted our camp, staff, and equipage, Milly weeping with
+delight to escape from the horrible cottage. There we lay off
+Funchal for weeks, while Shend did miracles of luxury and
+attendance through deputies, and never once asked how his guests
+were enjoying themselves. Indeed, for several days at a time we
+would see nothing of him. He was, he said, subject to malaria.
+Giving as they do with both hands, I knew that Attley and Mrs.
+Godfrey could take nobly; but I never met a man who so nobly gave
+and so nobly received thanks as Shend did.</p>
+<p>'Tell us why you have been so unbelievably kind to us gipsies,'
+Mrs. Godfrey said to him one day on deck.</p>
+<p>He looked up from a diagram of some Thames-mouth shoals which he
+was explaining to me, and answered with his gentle smile:</p>
+<p>'I will. It's because it makes me happy--it makes me more than
+happy--to be with you. It makes me comfortable. You know how
+selfish men are? If a man feels comfortable all over with certain
+people, he'll bore them to death, just like a dog. You always make
+me feel as if pleasant things were going to happen to me.'</p>
+<p>'Haven't any ever happened before?' Milly asked.</p>
+<p>'This is the most pleasant thing that has happened to me in ever
+so many years,' he replied. 'I feel like the man in the Bible,
+"It's good for me to be here." Generally, I don't feel that it's
+good for me to be anywhere in particular.' Then, as one begging a
+favour. 'You'll let me come home with you--in the same boat, I
+mean? I'd take you back in this thing of mine, and that would save
+you packing your trunks, but she's too lively for spring work
+across the Bay.'</p>
+<p>We booked our berths, and when the time came, he wafted us and
+ours aboard the Southampton mail-boat with the pomp of
+plenipotentiaries and the precision of the Navy. Then he dismissed
+his yacht, and became an inconspicuous passenger in a cabin
+opposite to mine, on the port side.</p>
+<p>We ran at once into early British spring weather, followed by
+sou'west gales. Mrs. Godfrey, Milly, and the nurses disappeared.
+Attley stood it out, visibly yellowing, till the next meal, and
+followed suit, and Shend and I had the little table all to
+ourselves. I found him even more attractive when the women were
+away. The natural sweetness of the man, his voice, and bearing all
+fascinated me, and his knowledge of practical seamanship (he held
+an extra master's certificate) was a real joy. We sat long in the
+empty saloon and longer in the smoking-room, making dashes
+downstairs over slippery decks at the eleventh hour.</p>
+<p>It was on Friday night, just as I was going to bed, that he came
+into my cabin, after cleaning his teeth, which he did half a dozen
+times a day.</p>
+<p>'I say,' he began hurriedly, 'do you mind if I come in here for
+a little? I'm a bit edgy.' I must have shown surprise. 'I'm ever so
+much better about liquor than I used to be, but--it's the whisky in
+the suitcase that throws me. For God's sake, old man, don't go back
+on me to-night! Look at my hands!'</p>
+<p>They were fairly jumping at the wrists. He sat down on a trunk
+that had slid out with the roll. We had reduced speed, and were
+surging in confused seas that pounded on the black port-glasses.
+The night promised to be a pleasant one!</p>
+<p>'You understand, of course, don't you?' he chattered.</p>
+<p>'Oh yes,' I said cheerily; 'but how about--'</p>
+<p>'No, no; on no account the doctor. 'Tell a doctor, tell the
+whole ship. Besides, I've only got a touch of 'em. You'd never have
+guessed it, would you? The tooth-wash does the trick. I'll give you
+the prescription.'</p>
+<p>I'll send a note to the doctor for a prescription, shall I?' I
+suggested.</p>
+<p>'Right! I put myself unreservedly in your hands. 'Fact is, I
+always did. I said to myself--'sure I don't bore you?--the minute I
+saw you, I said, "Thou art the man."' He repeated the phrase as he
+picked at his knees. 'All the same, you can take it from me that
+the ewe-lamb business is a rotten bad one. I don't care how
+unfaithful the shepherd may be. Drunk or sober, 'tisn't
+cricket.'</p>
+<p>A surge of the trunk threw him across the cabin as the steward
+answered my bell. I wrote my requisition to the doctor while Shend
+was struggling to his feet.</p>
+<p>'What's wrong?' he began. 'Oh, I know. We're slowing for
+soundings off Ushant. It's about time, too. You'd better ship the
+dead-lights when you come back, Matchem. It'll save you waking us
+later. This sea's going to get up when the tide turns. That'll show
+you,' he said as the man left, 'that I am to be trusted.
+You--you'll stop me if I say anything I shouldn't, won't you?'</p>
+<p>'Talk away,' I replied, 'if it makes you feel better.'</p>
+<p>'That's it; you've hit it exactly. You always make me feel
+better. I can rely on you. It's awkward soundings but you'll see me
+through it. We'll defeat him yet.... I may be an utterly worthless
+devil, but I'm not a brawler.... I told him so at breakfast. I
+said, "Doctor, I detest brawling, but if ever you allow that girl
+to be insulted again as Clements insulted her, I will break your
+neck with my own hands." You think I was right?'</p>
+<p>'Absolutely,' I agreed.</p>
+<p>'Then we needn't discuss the matter any further. That man was a
+murderer in intention--outside the law, you understand, as it was
+then. They've changed it since--but he never deceived <i>me</i>. I
+told him so. I said to him at the time, "I don't know what price
+you're going to put on my head, but if ever you allow Clements to
+insult her again, you'll never live to claim it."'</p>
+<p>'And what did he do?' I asked, to carry on the conversation, for
+Matchem entered with the bromide.</p>
+<p>'Oh, crumpled up at once. 'Lead still going, Matchem?'</p>
+<p>'I 'aven't 'eard,' said that faithful servant of the
+Union-Castle Company.</p>
+<p>'Quite right. Never alarm the passengers. Ship the dead-light,
+will you?' Matchem shipped it, for we were rolling very heavily.
+There were tramplings and gull-like cries from on deck. Shend
+looked at me with a mariner's eye.</p>
+<p>'That's nothing,' he said protectingly.</p>
+<p>'Oh, it's all right for you,' I said, jumping at the idea.
+'<i>I</i> haven't an extra master's certificate. I'm only a
+passenger. I confess it funks me.'</p>
+<p>Instantly his whole bearing changed to answer the appeal.</p>
+<p>'My dear fellow, it's as simple as houses. We're hunting for
+sixty-five fathom water. Anything short of sixty, with a sou'west
+wind means--but I'll get my Channel Pilot out of my cabin and give
+you the general idea. I'm only too grateful to do anything to put
+your mind at ease.'</p>
+<p>And so, perhaps, for another hour--he declined the
+drink--Channel Pilot in hand, he navigated us round Ushant, and at
+my request up-channel to Southampton, light by light, with
+explanations and reminiscences. I professed myself soothed at last,
+and suggested bed.</p>
+<p>'In a second,' said he. 'Now, you wouldn't think, would you'--he
+glanced off the book toward my wildly swaying dressing-gown on the
+door--'that I've been seeing things for the last half-hour? 'Fact
+is, I'm just on the edge of 'em, skating on thin ice round the
+corner--nor'east as near as nothing--where that dog's looking at
+me.'</p>
+<p>'What's the dog like?' I asked.</p>
+<p>'Ah, that <i>is</i> comforting of you! Most men walk through 'em
+to show me they aren't real. As if I didn't know! But <i>you're</i>
+different. Anybody could see that with half an eye.' He stiffened
+and pointed. 'Damn it all! The dog sees it too with half an--Why,
+he knows you! Knows you perfectly. D'you know <i>him</i>?'</p>
+<p>'How can I tell if he isn't real?' I insisted.</p>
+<p>'But you can! <i>You're</i> all right. I saw that from the
+first. Don't go back on me now or I shall go to pieces like the
+<i>Drummond Castle</i>. I beg your pardon, old man; but, you see,
+you <i>do</i> know the dog. I'll prove it. What's that dog doing?
+Come on! <i>You</i> know.' A tremor shook him, and he put his hand
+on my knee, and whispered with great meaning: 'I'll letter or halve
+it with you. There! You begin.'</p>
+<p>'S,' said I to humour him, for a dog would most likely be
+standing or sitting, or may be scratching or sniffling or
+staring.</p>
+<p>'Q,' he went on, and I could feel the heat of his shaking
+hand.</p>
+<p>'U,' said I. There was no other letter possible; but I was
+shaking too.</p>
+<p>'I.'</p>
+<p>'N.'</p>
+<p>'T-i-n-g,' he ran out. 'There! That proves it. I knew you knew
+him. You don't know what a relief that is. Between ourselves, old
+man, he--he's been turning up lately a--a damn sight more often
+than I cared for. And a squinting dog--a dog that squints! I mean
+that's a bit <i>too</i> much. Eh? What?' He gulped and half rose,
+and I thought that the full tide of delirium would be on him in
+another sentence.</p>
+<p>'Not a bit of it,' I said as a last chance, with my hand over
+the bellpush. 'Why, you've just proved that I know him; so there
+are two of us in the game, anyhow.'</p>
+<p>'By Jove! that <i>is</i> an idea! Of course there are. I knew
+you'd see me through. We'll defeat them yet. Hi, pup!... He's gone.
+Absolutely disappeared!' He sighed with relief, and I caught the
+lucky moment.</p>
+<p>'Good business! I expect he only came to have a look at me,' I
+said. 'Now, get this drink down and turn in to the lower bunk.'</p>
+<p>He obeyed, protesting that he could not inconvenience me, and in
+the midst of apologies sank into a dead sleep. I expected a wakeful
+night, having a certain amount to think over; but no sooner had I
+scrambled into the top bunk than sleep came on me like a wave from
+the other side of the world.</p>
+<p>In the morning there were apologies, which we got over at
+breakfast before our party were about.</p>
+<p>'I suppose--after this--well, I don't blame you. I'm rather a
+lonely chap, though.' His eyes lifted dog-like across the
+table.</p>
+<p>'Shend,' I replied, 'I'm not running a Sunday school. You're
+coming home with me in my car as soon as we land.'</p>
+<p>'That is kind of you--kinder than you think.'</p>
+<p>'That's because you're a little jumpy still. Now, I don't want
+to mix up in your private affairs--'</p>
+<p>'But I'd like you to,' he interrupted.</p>
+<p>'Then, would you mind telling me the Christian name of a girl
+who was insulted by a man called Clements?'</p>
+<p>'Moira,' he whispered; and just then Mrs. Godfrey and Milly came
+to table with their shore-going hats on.</p>
+<p>We did not tie up till noon, but the faithful Leggatt had
+intrigued his way down to the dock-edge, and beside him sat
+Malachi, wearing his collar of gold, or Leggatt makes it look so,
+as eloquent as Demosthenes. Shend flinched a little when he saw
+him. We packed Mrs. Godfrey and Milly into Attley's car--they were
+going with him to Mittleham, of course--and drew clear across the
+railway lines to find England all lit and perfumed for spring.
+Shend sighed with happiness.</p>
+<p>'D'you know,' he said, 'if--if you'd chucked me--I should have
+gone down to my cabin after breakfast and cut my throat. And
+now--it's like a dream--a good dream, you know.'</p>
+<p>We lunched with the other three at Romsey. Then I sat in front
+for a little while to talk to my Malachi. When I looked back, Shend
+was solidly asleep, and stayed so for the next two hours, while
+Leggatt chased Attley's fat Daimler along the green-speckled
+hedges. He woke up when we said good-bye at Mittleham, with
+promises to meet again very soon.</p>
+<p>'And I hope,' said Mrs. Godfrey, 'that everything pleasant will
+happen to you.'</p>
+<p>'Heaps and heaps--all at once,' cried long, weak Milly, waving
+her wet handkerchief.</p>
+<p>'I've just got to look in at a house near here for a minute to
+inquire about a dog,' I said, 'and then we will go home.'</p>
+<p>'I used to know this part of the world,' he replied, and said no
+more till Leggatt shot past the lodge at the Sichliffes's gate.
+Then I heard him gasp.</p>
+<p>Miss Sichliffe, in a green waterproof, an orange jersey, and a
+pinkish leather hat, was working on a bulb-border. She straightened
+herself as the car stopped, and breathed hard. Shend got out and
+walked towards her. They shook hands, turned round together, and
+went into the house. Then the dog Harvey pranced out corkily from
+under the lee of a bench. Malachi, with one joyous swoop, fell on
+him as an enemy and an equal. Harvey, for his part, freed from all
+burden whatsoever except the obvious duty of a man-dog on his own
+ground, met Malachi without reserve or remorse, and with six
+months' additional growth to come and go on.</p>
+<p>'Don't check 'em!' cried Leggatt, dancing round the flurry.
+'They've both been saving up for each other all this time. It'll do
+'em worlds of good.'</p>
+<p>'Leggatt,' I said, 'will you take Mr. Shend's bag and suitcase
+up to the house and put them down just inside the door? Then we
+will go on.'</p>
+<p>So I enjoyed the finish alone. It was a dead heat, and they
+licked each other's jaws in amity till Harvey, one imploring eye on
+me, leaped into the front seat, and Malachi backed his appeal. It
+was theft, but I took him, and we talked all the way home of r-rats
+and r-rabbits and bones and baths and the other basic facts of
+life. That evening after dinner they slept before the fire, with
+their warm chins across the hollows of my ankles--to each chin an
+ankle--till I kicked them upstairs to bed.</p>
+<hr style="width: 25%;">
+<p>I was not at Mittleham when she came over to announce her
+engagement, but I heard of it when Mrs. Godfrey and Attley came,
+forty miles an hour, over to me, and Mrs. Godfrey called me names
+of the worst for suppression of information.</p>
+<p>'As long as it wasn't me, I don't care,' said Attley.</p>
+<p>'I believe you knew it all along,' Mrs. Godfrey repeated. 'Else
+what made you drive that man literally into her arms?'</p>
+<p>'To ask after the dog Harvey,' I replied.</p>
+<p>'Then, what's the beast doing here?' Attley demanded, for
+Malachi and the dog Harvey were deep in a council of the family
+with Bettina, who was being out-argued.</p>
+<p>'Oh, Harvey seemed to think himself <i>de trop</i> where he
+was,' I said. 'And she hasn't sent after him. You'd better save
+Bettina before they kill her.'</p>
+<p>'There's been enough lying about that dog,' said Mrs. Godfrey to
+me. 'If he wasn't born in lies, he was baptized in 'em. D'you know
+why she called him Harvey? It only occurred to me in those dreadful
+days when I was ill, and one can't keep from thinking, and thinks
+everything. D'you know your Boswell? What did Johnson say about
+Hervey--with an e?'</p>
+<p>'Oh, <i>that's</i> it, is it?' I cried incautiously. 'That was
+why I ought to have verified my quotations. The spelling defeated
+me. Wait a moment, and it will come back. Johnson said: "He was a
+vicious man,"' I began.</p>
+<p>'"But very kind to me,"' Mrs. Godfrey prompted. Then, both
+together, '"If you call a dog Hervey, I shall love him."'</p>
+<p>'So you <i>were</i> mixed up in it. At any rate, you had your
+suspicions from the first? Tell me,' she said.</p>
+<p>'Ella,' I said, 'I don't know anything rational or reasonable
+about any of it. It was all--all woman-work, and it scared me
+horribly.'</p>
+<p>'Why?' she asked.</p>
+<p>That was six years ago. I have written this tale to let her
+know--wherever she may be.</p>
+<br>
+<br>
+<hr style="width: 35%;">
+<br>
+<br>
+<a name="page160"></a>
+<div class="poem">
+<div class="stanza">
+<p class="i9"><b>THE COMFORTERS</b></p>
+</div>
+<div class="stanza">
+<p class="i7">Until thy feet have trod the Road</p>
+<p class="i8">Advise not wayside folk,</p>
+<p class="i7">Nor till thy back has borne the Load</p>
+<p class="i8">Break in upon the Broke.</p>
+</div>
+<div class="stanza">
+<p class="i7">Chase not with undesired largesse</p>
+<p class="i8">Of sympathy the heart</p>
+<p class="i7">Which, knowing her own bitterness,</p>
+<p class="i8">Presumes to dwell apart.</p>
+</div>
+<div class="stanza">
+<p class="i7">Employ not that glad hand to raise</p>
+<p class="i8">The God-forgotten head</p>
+<p class="i7">To Heaven, and all the neighbours' gaze--</p>
+<p class="i8">Cover thy mouth instead.</p>
+</div>
+<div class="stanza">
+<p class="i7">The quivering chin, the bitten lip,</p>
+<p class="i8">The cold and sweating brow,</p>
+<p class="i7">Later may yearn for fellowship--</p>
+<p class="i8">Not now, you ass, not now!</p>
+</div>
+<div class="stanza">
+<p class="i7">Time, not thy ne'er so timely speech,</p>
+<p class="i8">Life, not thy views thereon,</p>
+<p class="i7">Shall furnish or deny to each</p>
+<p class="i8">His consolation.</p>
+</div>
+<div class="stanza">
+<p class="i7">Or, if impelled to interfere,</p>
+<p class="i8">Exhort, uplift, advise,</p>
+<p class="i7">Lend not a base, betraying ear</p>
+<p class="i8">To all the victim's cries.</p>
+</div>
+<div class="stanza">
+<p class="i7">Only the Lord can understand</p>
+<p class="i8">When those first pangs begin,</p>
+<p class="i7">How much is reflex action and</p>
+<p class="i8">How much is really sin.</p>
+</div>
+<div class="stanza">
+<p class="i7">E'en from good words thyself refrain,</p>
+<p class="i8">And tremblingly admit</p>
+<p class="i7">There is no anodyne for pain</p>
+<p class="i8">Except the shock of it.</p>
+</div>
+<div class="stanza">
+<p class="i7">So, when thine own dark hour shall fall,</p>
+<p class="i8">Unchallenged canst thou say:</p>
+<p class="i7">'I never worried <i>you</i> at all,</p>
+<p class="i8">For God's sake go away!'</p>
+</div>
+</div>
+<br>
+<br>
+<hr style="width: 35%;">
+<br>
+<br>
+<a name="page163"></a>
+<h2>The Village that Voted the Earth was Flat</h2>
+<h3>(1913)</h3>
+<br>
+<p>Our drive till then had been quite a success. The other men in
+the car were my friend Woodhouse, young Ollyett, a distant
+connection of his, and Pallant, the M.P. Woodhouse's business was
+the treatment and cure of sick journals. He knew by instinct the
+precise moment in a newspaper's life when the impetus of past good
+management is exhausted and it fetches up on the dead-centre
+between slow and expensive collapse and the new start which can be
+given by gold injections--and genius. He was wisely ignorant of
+journalism; but when he stooped on a carcase there was sure to be
+meat. He had that week added a half-dead, halfpenny evening paper
+to his collection, which consisted of a prosperous London daily,
+one provincial ditto, and a limp-bodied weekly of commercial
+leanings. He had also, that very hour, planted me with a large
+block of the evening paper's common shares, and was explaining the
+whole art of editorship to Ollyett, a young man three years from
+Oxford, with coir-matting-coloured hair and a face harshly modelled
+by harsh experiences, who, I understood, was assisting in the new
+venture. Pallant, the long, wrinkled M.P., whose voice is more like
+a crane's than a peacock's, took no shares, but gave us all
+advice.</p>
+<p>'You'll find it rather a knacker's yard,' Woodhouse was saying.
+'Yes, I know they call me The Knacker; but it will pay inside a
+year. All my papers do. I've only one motto: Back your luck and
+back your staff. It'll come out all right.'</p>
+<p>Then the car stopped, and a policeman asked our names and
+addresses for exceeding the speed-limit. We pointed out that the
+road ran absolutely straight for half a mile ahead without even a
+side-lane. 'That's just what we depend on,' said the policeman
+unpleasantly.</p>
+<p>'The usual swindle,' said Woodhouse under his breath. 'What's
+the name of this place?'</p>
+<p>'Huckley,' said the policeman. 'H-u-c-k-l-e-y,' and wrote
+something in his note-book at which young Ollyett protested. A
+large red man on a grey horse who had been watching us from the
+other side of the hedge shouted an order we could not catch. The
+policeman laid his hand on the rim of the right driving-door
+(Woodhouse carries his spare tyres aft), and it closed on the
+button of the electric horn. The grey horse at once bolted, and we
+could hear the rider swearing all across the landscape.</p>
+<p>'Damn it, man, you've got your silly fist on it! Take it off!'
+Woodhouse shouted.</p>
+<p>'Ho!' said the constable, looking carefully at his fingers as
+though we had trapped them. 'That won't do you any good either,'
+and he wrote once more in his note-book before he allowed us to
+go.</p>
+<p>This was Woodhouse's first brush with motor law, and since I
+expected no ill consequences to myself, I pointed out that it was
+very serious. I took the same view myself when in due time I found
+that I, too, was summonsed on charges ranging from the use of
+obscene language to endangering traffic.</p>
+<p>Judgment was done in a little pale-yellow market-town with a
+small, Jubilee clock-tower and a large corn-exchange. Woodhouse
+drove us there in his car. Pallant, who had not been included in
+the summons, came with us as moral support. While we waited
+outside, the fat man on the grey horse rode up and entered into
+loud talk with his brother magistrates. He said to one of them--for
+I took the trouble to note it down--'It falls away from my
+lodge-gates, dead straight, three-quarters of a mile. I'd defy any
+one to resist it. We rooked seventy pounds out of 'em last month.
+No car can resist the temptation. You ought to have one your side
+the county, Mike. They simply can't resist it.'</p>
+<p>'Whew!' said Woodhouse. 'We're in for trouble. Don't you say a
+word--or Ollyett either! I'll pay the fines and we'll get it over
+as soon as possible. Where's Pallant?'</p>
+<p>'At the back of the court somewhere,' said Ollyett. 'I saw him
+slip in just now.'</p>
+<p>The fat man then took his seat on the Bench, of which he was
+chairman, and I gathered from a bystander that his name was Sir
+Thomas Ingell, Bart., M.P., of Ingell Park, Huckley. He began with
+an allocution pitched in a tone that would have justified revolt
+throughout empires. Evidence, when the crowded little court did not
+drown it with applause, was given in the pauses of the address.
+They were all very proud of their Sir Thomas, and looked from him
+to us, wondering why we did not applaud too.</p>
+<p>Taking its time from the chairman, the Bench rollicked with us
+for seventeen minutes. Sir Thomas explained that he was sick and
+tired of processions of cads of our type, who would be better
+employed breaking stones on the road than in frightening horses
+worth more than themselves or their ancestors. This was after it
+had been proved that Woodhouse's man had turned on the horn
+purposely to annoy Sir Thomas, who happened to be riding by'! There
+were other remarks too--primitive enough,--but it was the
+unspeakable brutality of the tone, even more than the quality of
+the justice, or the laughter of the audience that stung our souls
+out of all reason. When we were dismissed--to the tune of
+twenty-three pounds, twelve shillings and sixpence--we waited for
+Pallant to join us, while we listened to the next case--one of
+driving without a licence. Ollyett with an eye to his evening
+paper, had already taken very full notes of our own, but we did not
+wish to seem prejudiced.</p>
+<p>'It's all right,' said the reporter of the local paper
+soothingly. 'We never report Sir Thomas <i>in extenso</i>. Only the
+fines and charges.'</p>
+<p>'Oh, thank you,' Ollyett replied, and I heard him ask who every
+one in court might be. The local reporter was very
+communicative.</p>
+<p>The new victim, a large, flaxen-haired man in somewhat striking
+clothes, to which Sir Thomas, now thoroughly warmed, drew public
+attention, said that he had left his licence at home. Sir Thomas
+asked him if he expected the police to go to his home address at
+Jerusalem to find it for him; and the court roared. Nor did Sir
+Thomas approve of the man's name, but insisted on calling him 'Mr.
+Masquerader,' and every time he did so, all his people shouted.
+Evidently this was their established <i>auto-da-f&eacute;</i>.</p>
+<p>'He didn't summons me--because I'm in the House, I suppose. I
+think I shall have to ask a Question,' said Pallant, reappearing at
+the close of the case.</p>
+<p>'I think <i>I</i> shall have to give it a little publicity too,'
+said Woodhouse. 'We can't have this kind of thing going on, you
+know.' His face was set and quite white. Pallant's, on the other
+hand, was black, and I know that my very stomach had turned with
+rage. Ollyett was dum.</p>
+<p>'Well, let's have lunch,' Woodhouse said at last. 'Then we can
+get away before the show breaks up.'</p>
+<p>We drew Ollyett from the arms of the local reporter, crossed the
+Market Square to the Red Lion and found Sir Thomas's 'Mr.
+Masquerader' just sitting down to beer, beef and pickles.</p>
+<p>'Ah!' said he, in a large voice. 'Companions in misfortune.
+Won't you gentlemen join me?'</p>
+<p>'Delighted,' said Woodhouse. 'What did you get?'</p>
+<p>'I haven't decided. It might make a good turn, but--the public
+aren't educated up to it yet. It's beyond 'em. If it wasn't, that
+red dub on the Bench would be worth fifty a week.'</p>
+<p>'Where?' said Woodhouse. The man looked at him with unaffected
+surprise.</p>
+<p>'At any one of My places,' he replied. 'But perhaps you live
+here?'</p>
+<p>'Good heavens!' cried young Ollyett suddenly. 'You <i>are</i>
+Masquerier, then? I thought you were!'</p>
+<p>'Bat Masquerier.' He let the words fall with the weight of an
+international ultimatum. 'Yes, that's all I am. But you have the
+advantage of me, gentlemen.'</p>
+<p>For the moment, while we were introducing ourselves, I was
+puzzled. Then I recalled prismatic music-hall posters--of enormous
+acreage--that had been the unnoticed background of my visits to
+London for years past. Posters of men and women, singers,
+jongleurs, impersonators and audacities of every draped and
+undraped brand, all moved on and off in London and the Provinces by
+Bat Masquerier--with the long wedge-tailed flourish following the
+final 'r.'</p>
+<p>'<i>I</i> knew you at once,' said Pallant, the trained M.P., and
+I promptly backed the lie. Woodhouse mumbled excuses. Bat
+Masquerier was not moved for or against us any more than the
+frontage of one of his own palaces.</p>
+<p>'I always tell My people there's a limit to the size of the
+lettering,' he said. 'Overdo that and the ret'na doesn't take it
+in. Advertisin' is the most delicate of all the sciences.'</p>
+<p>'There's one man in the world who is going to get a little of it
+if I live for the next twenty-four hours,' said Woodhouse, and
+explained how this would come about.</p>
+<p>Masquerier stared at him lengthily with gunmetal-blue eyes.</p>
+<p>'You mean it?' he drawled; the voice was as magnetic as the
+look.</p>
+<p>'<i>I</i> do,' said Ollyett. 'That business of the horn alone
+ought to have him off the Bench in three months.' Masquerier looked
+at him even longer than he had looked at Woodhouse.</p>
+<p>'He told <i>me</i>,' he said suddenly, 'that my home-address was
+Jerusalem. You heard that?'</p>
+<p>'But it was the tone--the tone,' Ollyett cried.</p>
+<p>'You noticed that, too, did you?' said Masquerier. 'That's the
+artistic temperament. You can do a lot with it. And I'm Bat
+Masquerier,' he went on. He dropped his chin in his fists and
+scowled straight in front of him.... 'I made the Silhouettes--I
+made the Trefoil and the Jocunda. I made 'Dal Benzaguen.' Here
+Ollyett sat straight up, for in common with the youth of that year
+he worshipped Miss Vidal Benzaguen of the Trefoil immensely and
+unreservedly. '"<i>Is</i> that a dressing-gown or an ulster you're
+supposed to be wearing?" You heard <i>that</i>?... "And I suppose
+you hadn't time to brush your hair either?" You heard
+<i>that</i>?... Now, you hear <i>me</i>!' His voice filled the
+coffee-room, then dropped to a whisper as dreadful as a surgeon's
+before an operation. He spoke for several minutes. Pallant muttered
+'Hear! hear!' I saw Ollyett's eye flash--it was to Ollyett that
+Masquerier addressed himself chiefly,--and Woodhouse leaned forward
+with joined hands.</p>
+<p>'Are you <i>with</i> me?' he went on, gathering us all up in one
+sweep of the arm. 'When I begin a thing I see it through,
+gentlemen. What Bat can't break, breaks him! But I haven't struck
+that thing yet. This is no one-turn turn-it-down show. This is
+business to the dead finish. Are you with me, gentlemen? Good! Now,
+we'll pool our assets. One London morning, and one provincial
+daily, didn't you say? One weekly commercial ditto and one
+M.P.'</p>
+<p>'Not much use, I'm afraid,' Pallant smirked.</p>
+<p>'But privileged. <i>But</i> privileged,' he returned. 'And we
+have also my little team--London, Blackburn, Liverpool, Leeds--I'll
+tell you about Manchester later--and Me! Bat Masquerier.' He
+breathed the name reverently into his tankard. 'Gentlemen, when our
+combination has finished with Sir Thomas Ingell, Bart., M.P., and
+everything else that is his, Sodom and Gomorrah will be a winsome
+bit of Merrie England beside 'em. I must go back to town now, but I
+trust you gentlemen will give me the pleasure of your company at
+dinner to-night at the Chop Suey--the Red Amber Room--and we'll
+block out the scenario.' He laid his hand on young Ollyett's
+shoulder and added: 'It's your brains I want.' Then he left, in a
+good deal of astrachan collar and nickel-plated limousine, and the
+place felt less crowded.</p>
+<p>We ordered our car a few minutes later. As Woodhouse, Ollyett
+and I were getting in, Sir Thomas Ingell, Bart., M.P., came out of
+the Hall of Justice across the square and mounted his horse. I have
+sometimes thought that if he had gone in silence he might even then
+have been saved, but as he settled himself in the saddle he caught
+sight of us and must needs shout: 'Not off yet? You'd better get
+away and you'd better be careful.' At that moment Pallant, who had
+been buying picture-postcards, came out of the inn, took Sir
+Thomas's eye and very leisurely entered the car. It seemed to me
+that for one instant there was a shade of uneasiness on the
+baronet's grey-whiskered face.</p>
+<p>'I hope,' said Woodhouse after several miles, 'I hope he's a
+widower.'</p>
+<p>'Yes,' said Pallant. 'For his poor, dear wife's sake I hope
+that, very much indeed. I suppose he didn't see me in Court. Oh,
+here's the parish history of Huckley written by the Rector and
+here's your share of the picture-postcards. Are we all dining with
+this Mr. Masquerier to-night?'</p>
+<p>'Yes!' said we all.</p>
+<hr style="width: 25%;">
+<p>If Woodhouse knew nothing of journalism, young Ollyett, who had
+graduated in a hard school, knew a good deal. Our halfpenny evening
+paper, which we will call <i>The Bun</i> to distinguish her from
+her prosperous morning sister, <i>The Cake</i>, was not only
+diseased but corrupt. We found this out when a man brought us the
+prospectus of a new oil-field and demanded sub-leaders on its
+prosperity. Ollyett talked pure Brasenose to him for three minutes.
+Otherwise he spoke and wrote trade-English--a toothsome amalgam of
+Americanisms and epigrams. But though the slang changes the game
+never alters, and Ollyett and I and, in the end, some others
+enjoyed it immensely. It was weeks ere we could see the wood for
+the trees, but so soon as the staff realised that they had
+proprietors who backed them right or wrong, and specially when they
+were wrong (which is the sole secret of journalism), and that their
+fate did not hang on any passing owner's passing mood, they did
+miracles.</p>
+<p>But we did not neglect Huckley. As Ollyett said our first care
+was to create an 'arresting atmosphere' round it. He used to visit
+the village of week-ends, on a motor-bicycle with a side-car; for
+which reason I left the actual place alone and dealt with it in the
+abstract. Yet it was I who drew first blood. Two inhabitants of
+Huckley wrote to contradict a small, quite solid paragraph in
+<i>The Bun</i> that a hoopoe had been seen at Huckley and had, 'of
+course, been shot by the local sportsmen.' There was some heat in
+their letters, both of which we published. Our version of how the
+hoopoe got his crest from King Solomon was, I grieve to say, so
+inaccurate that the Rector himself--no sportsman as he pointed out,
+but a lover of accuracy--wrote to us to correct it. We gave his
+letter good space and thanked him.</p>
+<p>'This priest is going to be useful,' said Ollyett. 'He has the
+impartial mind. I shall vitalise him.'</p>
+<p>Forthwith he created M.L. Sigden, a recluse of refined tastes
+who in <i>The Bun</i> demanded to know whether this
+Huckley-of-the-Hoopoe was the Hugly of his boyhood and whether, by
+any chance, the fell change of name had been wrought by collusion
+between a local magnate and the railway, in the mistaken interests
+of spurious refinement. 'For I knew it and loved it with the
+maidens of my day--<i>eheu ab angulo!</i>--as Hugly,' wrote M.L.
+Sigden from Oxf.</p>
+<p>Though other papers scoffed, <i>The Bun</i> was gravely
+sympathetic. Several people wrote to deny that Huckley had been
+changed at birth. Only the Rector--no philosopher as he pointed
+out, but a lover of accuracy--had his doubts, which he laid
+publicly before Mr. M.L. Sigden who suggested, through <i>The
+Bun</i>, that the little place might have begun life in Anglo-Saxon
+days as 'Hogslea' or among the Normans as 'Argil&eacute;,' on
+account of its much clay. The Rector had his own ideas too (he said
+it was mostly gravel), and M.L. Sigden had a fund of reminiscences.
+Oddly enough--which is seldom the case with free
+reading-matter--our subscribers rather relished the correspondence,
+and contemporaries quoted freely.</p>
+<p>'The secret of power,' said Ollyett, 'is not the big stick. It's
+the liftable stick.' (This means the 'arresting' quotation of six
+or seven lines.) 'Did you see the <i>Spec.</i> had a middle on
+"Rural Tenacities" last week. That was all Huckley. I'm doing a
+"Mobiquity" on Huckley next week.'</p>
+<p>Our 'Mobiquities' were Friday evening accounts of easy
+motor-bike-<i>cum</i>-side-car trips round London, illustrated (we
+could never get that machine to work properly) by smudgy maps.
+Ollyett wrote the stuff with a fervour and a delicacy which I
+always ascribed to the side-car. His account of Epping Forest, for
+instance, was simply young love with its soul at its lips. But his
+Huckley 'Mobiquity' would have sickened a soap-boiler. It
+chemically combined loathsome familiarity, leering suggestion,
+slimy piety and rancid 'social service' in one fuming compost that
+fairly lifted me off my feet.</p>
+<p>'Yes,' said he, after compliments. 'It's the most vital,
+arresting and dynamic bit of tump I've done up to date. <i>Non
+nobis gloria!</i> I met Sir Thomas Ingell in his own park. He
+talked to me again. He inspired most of it.'</p>
+<p>'Which? The "glutinous native drawl," or "the neglected adenoids
+of the village children"?' I demanded.</p>
+<p>'Oh, no! That's only to bring in the panel doctor. It's the last
+flight we--I'm proudest of.'</p>
+<p>This dealt with 'the crepuscular penumbra spreading her dim
+limbs over the boskage'; with 'jolly rabbits'; with a herd of
+'gravid polled Angus'; and with the 'arresting, gipsy-like face of
+their swart, scholarly owner--as well known at the Royal
+Agricultural Shows as that of our late King-Emperor.'</p>
+<p>'"Swart" is good and so's "gravid,"' said I, 'but the panel
+doctor will be annoyed about the adenoids.'</p>
+<p>'Not half as much as Sir Thomas will about his face,' said
+Ollyett. 'And if you only knew what I've left out!'</p>
+<p>He was right. The panel doctor spent his week-end (this is the
+advantage of Friday articles) in overwhelming us with a
+professional counterblast of no interest whatever to our
+subscribers. We told him so, and he, then and there, battered his
+way with it into the <i>Lancet</i> where they are keen on glands,
+and forgot us altogether. But Sir Thomas Ingell was of sterner
+stuff. He must have spent a happy week-end too. The letter which we
+received from him on Monday proved him to be a kinless loon of
+upright life, for no woman, however remotely interested in a man
+would have let it pass the home wastepaper-basket. He objected to
+our references to his own herd, to his own labours in his own
+village, which he said was a Model Village, and to our infernal
+insolence; but he objected most to our invoice of his features. We
+wrote him courtously to ask whether the letter was meant for
+publication. He, remembering, I presume, the Duke of Wellington,
+wrote back, 'publish and be damned.'</p>
+<p>'Oh! This is too easy,' Ollyett said as he began heading the
+letter.</p>
+<p>'Stop a minute,' I said. 'The game is getting a little beyond
+us. To-night's the Bat dinner.' (I may have forgotten to tell you
+that our dinner with Bat Masquerier in the Red Amber Room of the
+Chop Suey had come to be a weekly affair.) 'Hold it over till
+they've all seen it.'</p>
+<p>'Perhaps you're right,' he said. 'You might waste it.'</p>
+<p>At dinner, then, Sir Thomas's letter was handed round. Bat
+seemed to be thinking of other matters, but Pallant was very
+interested.</p>
+<p>'I've got an idea,' he said presently. 'Could you put something
+into <i>The Bun</i> to-morrow about foot-and-mouth disease in that
+fellow's herd?'</p>
+<p>'Oh, plague if you like,' Ollyett replied. 'They're only five
+measly Shorthorns. I saw one lying down in the park. She'll serve
+as a sub-stratum of fact.'</p>
+<p>'Then, do that; and hold the letter over meanwhile. I think
+<i>I</i> come in here,' said Pallant.</p>
+<p>'Why?' said I.</p>
+<p>'Because there's something coming up in the House about
+foot-and-mouth, and because he wrote me a letter after that little
+affair when he fined you. 'Took ten days to think it over. Here you
+are,' said Pallant. 'House of Commons paper, you see.'</p>
+<p>We read:</p>
+<blockquote>DEAR PALLANT--Although in the past our paths have not
+lain much together, I am sure you will agree with me that on the
+floor of the House all members are on a footing of equality. I make
+bold, therefore, to approach you in a matter which I think capable
+of a very different interpretation from that which perhaps was put
+upon it by your friends. Will you let them know that that was the
+case and that I was in no way swayed by animus in the exercise of
+my magisterial duties, which as you, as a brother magistrate, can
+imagine are frequently very distasteful to--Yours very
+sincerely,</blockquote>
+<p class="loc">T. INGELL.</p>
+<br>
+<blockquote><i>P.S.</i>--I have seen to it that the motor vigilance
+to which your friends took exception has been considerably relaxed
+in my district.</blockquote>
+<p>'What did you answer?' said Ollyett, when all our opinions had
+been expressed.</p>
+<p>'I told him I couldn't do anything in the matter. And I
+couldn't--then. But you'll remember to put in that foot-and-mouth
+paragraph. I want something to work upon.'</p>
+<p>'It seems to me <i>The Bun</i> has done all the work up to
+date,' I suggested. 'When does <i>The Cake</i> come in?'</p>
+<p>'<i>The Cake</i>,' said Woodhouse, and I remembered afterwards
+that he spoke like a Cabinet Minister on the eve of a Budget,
+'reserves to itself the fullest right to deal with situations as
+they arise.'</p>
+<p>'Ye-eh!' Bat Masquerier shook himself out of his thoughts.
+'"Situations as they arise." I ain't idle either. But there's no
+use fishing till the swim's baited. You'--he turned to
+Ollyett--'manufacture very good ground-bait.... I always tell My
+people--What the deuce is that?'</p>
+<p>There was a burst of song from another private dining-room
+across the landing. 'It ees some ladies from the Trefoil,' the
+waiter began.</p>
+<p>'Oh, I know that. What are they singing, though?'</p>
+<p>He rose and went out, to be greeted by shouts of applause from
+that merry company. Then there was silence, such as one hears in
+the form-room after a master's entry. Then a voice that we loved
+began again: 'Here we go gathering nuts in May--nuts in May--nuts
+in May!'</p>
+<p>'It's only 'Dal--and some nuts,' he explained when he returned.
+'She says she's coming in to dessert.' He sat down, humming the old
+tune to himself, and till Miss Vidal Benzaguen entered, he held us
+speechless with tales of the artistic temperament.</p>
+<p>We obeyed Pallant to the extent of slipping into <i>The Bun</i>
+a wary paragraph about cows lying down and dripping at the mouth,
+which might be read either as an unkind libel or, in the hands of a
+capable lawyer, as a piece of faithful nature-study.</p>
+<p>'And besides,' said Ollyett, 'we allude to "gravid polled
+Angus." I am advised that no action can lie in respect of virgin
+Shorthorns. Pallant wants us to come to the House to-night. He's
+got us places for the Strangers' Gallery. I'm beginning to like
+Pallant.'</p>
+<p>'Masquerier seems to like you,' I said.</p>
+<p>'Yes, but I'm afraid of him,' Ollyett answered with perfect
+sincerity. 'I am. He's the Absolutely Amoral Soul. I've never met
+one yet.'</p>
+<p>We went to the House together. It happened to be an Irish
+afternoon, and as soon as I had got the cries and the faces a
+little sorted out, I gathered there were grievances in the air, but
+how many of them was beyond me.</p>
+<p>'It's all right,' said Ollyett of the trained ear. 'They've shut
+their ports against--oh yes--export of Irish cattle! Foot-and-mouth
+disease at Ballyhellion. <i>I</i> see Pallant's idea!'</p>
+<p>The House was certainly all mouth for the moment, but, as I
+could feel, quite in earnest. A Minister with a piece of
+typewritten paper seemed to be fending off volleys of insults. He
+reminded me somehow of a nervous huntsman breaking up a fox in the
+face of rabid hounds.</p>
+<p>'It's question-time. They're asking questions,' said Ollyett.
+'Look! Pallant's up.'</p>
+<p>There was no mistaking it. His voice, which his enemies said was
+his one parliamentary asset, silenced the hubbub as toothache
+silences mere singing in the ears. He said:</p>
+<p>'Arising out of that, may I ask if any special consideration has
+recently been shown in regard to any suspected outbreak of this
+disease on <i>this</i> side of the Channel?'</p>
+<p>He raised his hand; it held a noon edition of <i>The Bun</i>. We
+had thought it best to drop the paragraph out of the later ones. He
+would have continued, but something in a grey frock-coat roared and
+bounded on a bench opposite, and waved another <i>Bun</i>. It was
+Sir Thomas Ingell.</p>
+<p>'As the owner of the herd so dastardly implicated--' His voice
+was drowned in shouts of 'Order!'--the Irish leading.</p>
+<p>'What's wrong?' I asked Ollyett. 'He's got his hat on his head,
+hasn't he?'</p>
+<p>'Yes, but his wrath should have been put as a question.'</p>
+<p>'Arising out of that, Mr. Speaker, Sirrr!' Sir Thomas bellowed
+through a lull, 'are you aware that--that all this is a
+conspiracy--part of a dastardly conspiracy to make Huckley
+ridiculous--to make <i>us</i> ridiculous? Part of a deep-laid plot
+to make <i>me</i> ridiculous, Mr. Speaker, Sir!'</p>
+<p>The man's face showed almost black against his white whiskers,
+and he struck out swimmingly with his arms. His vehemence puzzled
+and held the House for an instant, and the Speaker took advantage
+of it to lift his pack from Ireland to a new scent. He addressed
+Sir Thomas Ingell in tones of measured rebuke, meant also, I
+imagine, for the whole House, which lowered its hackles at the
+word. Then Pallant, shocked and pained: 'I can only express my
+profound surprise that in response to my simple question the
+honourable member should have thought fit to indulge in a personal
+attack. If I have in any way offended--'</p>
+<p>Again the Speaker intervened, for it appeared that he regulated
+these matters.</p>
+<p>He, too, expressed surprise, and Sir Thomas sat back in a hush
+of reprobation that seemed to have the chill of the centuries
+behind it. The Empire's work was resumed.</p>
+<p>'Beautiful!' said I, and I felt hot and cold up my back.</p>
+<p>'And now we'll publish his letter,' said Ollyett.</p>
+<p>We did--on the heels of his carefully reported outburst. We made
+no comment. With that rare instinct for grasping the heart of a
+situation which is the mark of the Anglo-Saxon, all our
+contemporaries and, I should say, two-thirds of our correspondents
+demanded how such a person could be made more ridiculous than he
+had already proved himself to be. But beyond spelling his name
+'Injle,' we alone refused to hit a man when he was down.</p>
+<p>'There's no need,' said Ollyett. 'The whole press is on the
+huckle from end to end.'</p>
+<p>Even Woodhouse was a little astonished at the ease with which it
+had come about, and said as much.</p>
+<p>'Rot!' said Ollyett. 'We haven't really begun. Huckley isn't
+news yet.'</p>
+<p>'What do you mean?' said Woodhouse, who had grown to have great
+respect for his young but by no means distant connection.</p>
+<p>'Mean? By the grace of God, Master Ridley, I mean to have it so
+that when Huckley turns over in its sleep, Reuters and the Press
+Association jump out of bed to cable.' Then he went off at score
+about certain restorations in Huckley Church which, he said--and he
+seemed to spend his every week-end there--had been perpetrated by
+the Rector's predecessor, who had abolished a 'leper-window' or a
+'squinch-hole' (whatever these may be) to institute a lavatory in
+the vestry. It did not strike me as stuff for which Reuters or the
+Press Association would lose much sleep, and I left him declaiming
+to Woodhouse about a fourteenth-century font which, he said, he had
+unearthed in the sexton's tool-shed.</p>
+<p>My methods were more on the lines of peaceful penetration. An
+odd copy, in <i>The Bun's</i> rag-and-bone library, of Hone's
+<i>Every-Day Book</i> had revealed to me the existence of a village
+dance founded, like all village dances, on Druidical mysteries
+connected with the Solar Solstice (which is always unchallengeable)
+and Mid-summer Morning, which is dewy and refreshing to the London
+eye. For this I take no credit--Hone being a mine any one can
+work--but that I rechristened that dance, after I had revised it,
+'The Gubby' is my title to immortal fame. It was still to be
+witnessed, I wrote, 'in all its poignant purity at Huckley, that
+last home of significant medi&aelig;val survivals'; and I fell so
+in love with my creation that I kept it back for days, enamelling
+and burnishing.</p>
+<p>'You's better put it in,' said Ollyett at last. 'It's time we
+asserted ourselves again. The other fellows are beginning to poach.
+You saw that thing in the <i>Pinnacle</i> about Sir Thomas's Model
+Village? He must have got one of their chaps down to do it.'</p>
+<p>''Nothing like the wounds of a friend,' I said. 'That account of
+the non-alcoholic pub alone was--'</p>
+<p>'I liked the bit best about the white-tiled laundry and the
+Fallen Virgins who wash Sir Thomas's dress shirts. Our side
+couldn't come within a mile of that, you know. We haven't the
+proper flair for sexual slobber.'</p>
+<p>'That's what I'm always saying,' I retorted. 'Leave 'em alone.
+The other fellows are doing our work for us now. Besides I want to
+touch up my "Gubby Dance" a little more.'</p>
+<p>'No. You'll spoil it. Let's shove it in to-day. For one thing
+it's Literature. I don't go in for compliments as you know, but,
+etc. etc.'</p>
+<p>I had a healthy suspicion of young Ollyett in every aspect, but
+though I knew that I should have to pay for it, I fell to his
+flattery, and my priceless article on the 'Gubby Dance' appeared.
+Next Saturday he asked me to bring out <i>The Bun</i> in his
+absence, which I naturally assumed would be connected with the
+little maroon side-car. I was wrong.</p>
+<p>On the following Monday I glanced at <i>The Cake</i> at
+breakfast-time to make sure, as usual, of her inferiority to my
+beloved but unremunerative <i>Bun</i>. I opened on a heading: 'The
+Village that Voted the Earth was Flat.' I read ... I read that the
+Geoplanarian Society--a society devoted to the proposition that the
+earth is flat--had held its Annual Banquet and Exercises at Huckley
+on Saturday, when after convincing addresses, amid scenes of the
+greatest enthusiasm, Huckley village had decided by an unanimous
+vote of 438 that the earth was flat. I do not remember that I
+breathed again till I had finished the two columns of description
+that followed. Only one man could have written them. They were
+flawless--crisp, nervous, austere yet human, poignant, vital,
+arresting--most distinctly arresting--dynamic enough to shift a
+city--and quotable by whole sticks at a time. And there was a
+leader, a grave and poised leader, which tore me in two with mirth,
+until I remembered that I had been left out--infamously and
+unjustifiably dropped. I went to Ollyett's rooms. He was
+breakfasting, and, to do him justice, looked
+conscience-stricken.</p>
+<p>'It wasn't my fault,' he began. 'It was Bat Masquerier. I swear
+<i>I</i> would have asked you to come if--'</p>
+<p>'Never mind that,' I said. 'It's the best bit of work you've
+ever done or will do. Did any of it happen?'</p>
+<p>'Happen? Heavens! D'you think even <i>I</i> could have invented
+it?'</p>
+<p>'Is it exclusive to <i>The Cake</i>?' I cried.</p>
+<p>'It cost Bat Masquerier two thousand,' Ollyett replied. 'D'you
+think he'd let any one else in on that? But I give you my sacred
+word I knew nothing about it till he asked me to come down and
+cover it. He had Huckley posted in three colours, "The
+Geoplanarians' Annual Banquet and Exercises." Yes, he invented
+"Geoplanarians." He wanted Huckley to think it meant aeroplanes.
+Yes, I know that there is a real Society that thinks the world's
+flat--they ought to be grateful for the lift--but Bat made his own.
+He did! He created the whole show, I tell you. He swept out half
+his Halls for the job. Think of that--on a Saturday! They--we went
+down in motor char-&agrave;-bancs--three of 'em--one pink, one
+primrose, and one forget-me-not blue--twenty people in each one and
+"The Earth <i>is</i> Flat" on each side and across the back. I went
+with Teddy Rickets and Lafone from the Trefoil, and both the
+Silhouette Sisters, and--wait a minute!--the Crossleigh Trio. You
+know the Every-Day Dramas Trio at the Jocunda--Ada Crossleigh,
+"Bunt" Crossleigh, and little Victorine? Them. And there was Hoke
+Ramsden, the lightning-change chap in <i>Morgiana and
+Drexel</i>--and there was Billy Turpeen. Yes, you know him! The
+North London Star. "I'm the Referee that got himself disliked at
+Blackheath." <i>That</i> chap! And there was Mackaye--that one-eyed
+Scotch fellow that all Glasgow is crazy about. Talk of
+subordinating yourself for Art's sake! Mackaye was the earnest
+inquirer who got converted at the end of the meeting. And there was
+quite a lot of girls I didn't know, and--oh, yes--there was 'Dal!
+'Dal Benzaguen herself! We sat together, going and coming. She's
+all the darling there ever was. She sent you her love, and she told
+me to tell you that she won't forget about Nellie Farren. She says
+you've given her an ideal to work for. She? Oh, she was the Lady
+Secretary to the Geoplanarians, of course. I forget who were in the
+other brakes--provincial stars mostly--but they played up
+gorgeously. The art of the music-hall's changed since your day.
+They didn't overdo it a bit. You see, people who believe the earth
+is flat don't dress quite like other people. You may have noticed
+that I hinted at that in my account. It's a rather flat-fronted
+Ionic style--neo-Victorian, except for the bustles, 'Dal told
+me,--but 'Dal looked heavenly in it! So did little Victorine. And
+there was a girl in the blue brake--she's a provincial--but she's
+coming to town this winter and she'll knock 'em--Winnie Deans.
+Remember that! She told Huckley how she had suffered for the Cause
+as a governess in a rich family where they believed that the world
+is round, and how she threw up her job sooner than teach immoral
+geography. That was at the overflow meeting outside the Baptist
+chapel. She knocked 'em to sawdust! We must look out for Winnie....
+But Lafone! Lafone was beyond everything. Impact,
+personality--conviction--the whole bag o' tricks! He sweated
+conviction. Gad, he convinced <i>me</i> while he was speaking!
+(Him? He was President of the Geoplanarians, of course. Haven't you
+read my account?) It <i>is</i> an infernally plausible theory.
+After all, no one has actually proved the earth is round, have
+they?'</p>
+<p>'Never mind the earth. What about Huckley?'</p>
+<p>'Oh, Huckley got tight. That's the worst of these model villages
+if you let 'em smell fire-water. There's one alcoholic pub in the
+place that Sir Thomas can't get rid of. Bat made it his base. He
+sent down the banquet in two motor lorries--dinner for five hundred
+and drinks for ten thousand. Huckley voted all right. Don't you
+make any mistake about that. No vote, no dinner. A unanimous
+vote--exactly as I've said. At least, the Rector and the Doctor
+were the only dissentients. We didn't count them. Oh yes, Sir
+Thomas was there. He came and grinned at us through his park gates.
+He'll grin worse to-day. There's an aniline dye that you rub
+through a stencil-plate that eats about a foot into any stone and
+wears good to the last. Bat had both the lodge-gates stencilled
+"The Earth <i>is</i> flat!" and all the barns and walls they could
+get at.... Oh Lord, but Huckley was drunk! We had to fill 'em up to
+make 'em forgive us for not being aeroplanes. Unthankful yokels!
+D'you realise that Emperors couldn't have commanded the talent Bat
+decanted on 'em? Why, 'Dal alone was.... And by eight o'clock not
+even a bit of paper left! The whole show packed up and gone, and
+Huckley hoo-raying for the earth being flat.'</p>
+<p>'Very good,' I began. 'I am, as you know, a one-third proprietor
+of <i>The Bun</i>.'</p>
+<p>'I didn't forget that,' Ollyett interrupted. 'That was uppermost
+in my mind all the time. I've got a special account for <i>The
+Bun</i> to-day--it's an idyll--and just to show how I thought of
+you, I told 'Dal, coming home, about your Gubby Dance, and she told
+Winnie. Winnie came back in our char-&agrave;-banc. After a bit we
+had to get out and dance it in a field. It's quite a dance the way
+we did it--and Lafone invented a sort of gorilla lockstep
+procession at the end. Bat had sent down a film-chap on the chance
+of getting something. He was the son of a clergyman--a most dynamic
+personality. He said there isn't anything for the cinema in
+meetings <i>qua</i> meetings--they lack action. Films are a branch
+of art by themselves. But he went wild over the Gubby. He said it
+was like Peter's vision at Joppa. He took about a million feet of
+it. Then I photoed it exclusive for <i>The Bun</i>. I've sent 'em
+in already, only remember we must eliminate Winnie's left leg in
+the first figure. It's too arresting.... And there you are! But I
+tell you I'm afraid of Bat. That man's the Personal Devil. He did
+it all. He didn't even come down himself. He said he'd distract his
+people.'</p>
+<p>'Why didn't he ask me to come?' I persisted.</p>
+<p>'Because he said you'd distract me. He said he wanted my brains
+on ice. He got 'em. I believe it's the best thing I've ever done.'
+He reached for <i>The Cake</i> and re-read it luxuriously. 'Yes,
+out and away the best--supremely quotable,' he concluded,
+and--after another survey--'By God, what a genius I was
+yesterday!'</p>
+<p>I would have been angry, but I had not the time. That morning,
+Press agencies grovelled to me in <i>The Bun</i> office for leave
+to use certain photos, which, they understood, I controlled, of a
+certain village dance. When I had sent the fifth man away on the
+edge of tears, my self-respect came back a little. Then there was
+<i>The Bun's</i> poster to get out. Art being elimination, I fined
+it down to two words (one too many, as it proved)--'The Gubby!' in
+red, at which our manager protested; but by five o'clock he told me
+that I was <i>the</i> Napoleon of Fleet Street. Ollyett's account
+in <i>The Bun</i> of the Geoplanarians' Exercises and Love Feast
+lacked the supreme shock of his version in <i>The Cake</i>, but it
+bruised more; while the photos of 'The Gubby' (which, with Winnie's
+left leg, was why I had set the doubtful press to work so early)
+were beyond praise and, next day, beyond price. But even then I did
+not understand.</p>
+<p>A week later, I think it was, Bat Masquerier telephoned to me to
+come to the Trefoil.</p>
+<p>'It's your turn now,' he said. 'I'm not asking Ollyett. Come to
+the stage-box.'</p>
+<p>I went, and, as Bat's guest, was received as Royalty is not. We
+sat well back and looked out on the packed thousands. It was
+<i>Morgiana and Drexel</i>, that fluid and electric review which
+Bat--though he gave Lafone the credit--really created.</p>
+<p>'Ye-es,' said Bat dreamily, after Morgiana had given 'the nasty
+jar' to the Forty Thieves in their forty oil 'combinations.' 'As
+you say, I've got 'em and I can hold 'em. What a man does doesn't
+matter much; and how he does it don't matter either. It's the
+<i>when</i>--the psychological moment. 'Press can't make up for it;
+money can't; brains can't. A lot's luck, but all the rest is
+genius. I'm not speaking about My people now. I'm talking of
+Myself.'</p>
+<p>Then 'Dal--she was the only one who dared--knocked at the door
+and stood behind us all alive and panting as Morgiana. Lafone was
+carrying the police-court scene, and the house was ripped up
+crossways with laughter.</p>
+<p>'Ah! Tell a fellow now,' she asked me for the twentieth time,
+'did you love Nellie Farren when you were young?'</p>
+<p>'Did we love her?' I answered. '"If the earth and the sky and
+the sea"--There were three million of us, 'Dal, and we worshipped
+her.'</p>
+<p>'How did she get it across?' Dal went on.</p>
+<p>'She was Nellie. The houses used to coo over her when she came
+on.'</p>
+<p>'I've had a good deal, but I've never been cooed over yet,' said
+'Dal wistfully.</p>
+<p>'It isn't the how, it's the when,' Bat repeated. 'Ah!'</p>
+<p>He leaned forward as the house began to rock and peal
+full-throatedly. 'Dal fled. A sinuous and silent procession was
+filing into the police-court to a scarcely audible accompaniment.
+It was dressed--but the world and all its picture-palaces know how
+it was dressed. It danced and it danced, and it danced the dance
+which bit all humanity in the leg for half a year, and it wound up
+with the lockstep finale that mowed the house down in swathes,
+sobbing and aching. Somebody in the gallery moaned, 'Oh Gord, the
+Gubby!' and we heard the word run like a shudder, for they had not
+a full breath left among them. Then 'Dal came on, an electric star
+in her dark hair, the diamonds flashing in her three-inch heels--a
+vision that made no sign for thirty counted seconds while the
+police-court scene dissolved behind her into Morgiana's Manicure
+Palace, and they recovered themselves. The star on her forehead
+went out, and a soft light bathed her as she took--slowly, slowly
+to the croon of adoring strings--the eighteen paces forward. We saw
+her first as a queen alone; next as a queen for the first time
+conscious of her subjects, and at the end, when her hands
+fluttered, as a woman delighted, awed not a little, but
+transfigured and illuminated with sheer, compelling affection and
+goodwill. I caught the broken mutter of welcome--the coo which is
+more than tornadoes of applause. It died and rose and died again
+lovingly.</p>
+<p>'She's got it across,' Bat whispered. 'I've never seen her like
+this. I told her to light up the star, but I was wrong, and she
+knew it. She's an artist.'</p>
+<p>''Dal, you darling!' some one spoke, not loudly but it carried
+through the house.</p>
+<p>'Thank <i>you</i>!' 'Dal answered, and in that broken tone one
+heard the last fetter riveted. 'Good evening, boys! I've just come
+from--now--where the dooce was it I have come from?' She turned to
+the impassive files of the Gubby dancers, and went on: 'Ah, so good
+of you to remind me, you dear, bun-faced things. I've just come
+from the village--The Village that Voted the Earth was Flat.'</p>
+<p>She swept into that song with the full orchestra. It devastated
+the habitable earth for the next six months. Imagine, then, what
+its rage and pulse must have been at the incandescent hour of its
+birth! She only gave the chorus once. At the end of the second
+verse, 'Are you <i>with</i> me, boys?' she cried, and the house
+tore it clean away from her--'<i>Earth</i> was flat--<i>Earth</i>
+was flat. Flat as my hat--Flatter than that'--drowning all but the
+bassoons and double-basses that marked the word.</p>
+<p>'Wonderful,' I said to Bat. 'And it's only "Nuts in May," with
+variations.'</p>
+<p>'Yes--but <i>I</i> did the variations,' he replied.</p>
+<p>At the last verse she gestured to Carlini the conductor, who
+threw her up his baton. She caught it with a boy's ease. 'Are you
+<i>with</i> me?' she cried once more, and--the maddened house
+behind her--abolished all the instruments except the guttural belch
+of the double-basses on '<i>Earth</i>'--'The Village that voted the
+<i>Earth</i> was flat--<i>Earth</i> was flat!' It was delirium.
+Then she picked up the Gubby dancers and led them in a clattering
+improvised lockstep thrice round the stage till her last kick sent
+her diamond-hiked shoe catherine-wheeling to the electrolier.</p>
+<p>I saw the forest of hands raised to catch it, heard the roaring
+and stamping pass through hurricanes to full typhoon; heard the
+song, pinned down by the faithful double-basses as the bull-dog
+pins down the bellowing bull, overbear even those; till at last the
+curtain fell and Bat took me round to her dressing-room, where she
+lay spent after her seventh call. Still the song, through all those
+white-washed walls, shook the reinforced concrete of the Trefoil as
+steam pile-drivers shake the flanks of a dock.</p>
+<p>'I'm all out--first time in my life. Ah! Tell a fellow now, did
+I get it across?' she whispered huskily.</p>
+<p>'You know you did,' I replied as she dipped her nose deep in a
+beaker of barley-water. 'They cooed over you.'</p>
+<p>Bat nodded. 'And poor Nellie's dead--in Africa, ain't it?'</p>
+<p>'I hope I'll die before they stop cooing,' said 'Dal.</p>
+<p>'"<i>Earth</i> was flat--<i>Earth</i> was flat!"' Now it was
+more like mine-pumps in flood.</p>
+<p>'They'll have the house down if you don't take another,' some
+one called.</p>
+<p>'Bless 'em!' said 'Dal, and went out for her eighth, when in the
+face of that cataract she said yawning, 'I don't know how
+<i>you</i> feel, children, but <i>I</i>'m dead. You be quiet.'</p>
+<p>'Hold a minute,' said Bat to me. 'I've got to hear how it went
+in the provinces. Winnie Deans had it in Manchester, and Ramsden at
+Glasgow--and there are all the films too. I had rather a heavy
+week-end.'</p>
+<p>The telephones presently reassured him.</p>
+<p>'It'll do,' said he. 'And <i>he</i> said my home address was
+Jerusalem.' He left me humming the refrain of 'The Holy City.' Like
+Ollyett I found myself afraid of that man.</p>
+<p>When I got out into the street and met the disgorging
+picture-palaces capering on the pavements and humming it (for he
+had put the gramophones on with the films), and when I saw far to
+the south the red electrics flash 'Gubby' across the Thames, I
+feared more than ever.</p>
+<hr style="width: 25%;">
+<p>A few days passed which were like nothing except, perhaps, a
+suspense of fever in which the sick man perceives the searchlights
+of the world's assembled navies in act to converge on one minute
+fragment of wreckage--one only in all the black and agony-strewn
+sea. Then those beams focussed themselves. Earth as we knew it--the
+full circuit of our orb--laid the weight of its impersonal and
+searing curiosity on this Huckley which had voted that it was flat.
+It asked for news about Huckley--where and what it might be, and
+how it talked--it knew how it danced--and how it thought in its
+wonderful soul. And then, in all the zealous, merciless press,
+Huckley was laid out for it to look at, as a drop of pond water is
+exposed on the sheet of a magic-lantern show. But Huckley's sheet
+was only coterminous with the use of type among mankind. For the
+precise moment that was necessary, Fate ruled it that there should
+be nothing of first importance in the world's idle eye. One
+atrocious murder, a political crisis, an incautious or heady
+continental statesman, the mere catarrh of a king, would have wiped
+out the significance of our message, as a passing cloud annuls the
+urgent helio. But it was halcyon weather in every respect. Ollyett
+and I did not need to lift our little fingers any more than the
+Alpine climber whose last sentence has unkeyed the arch of the
+avalanche. The thing roared and pulverised and swept beyond
+eyesight all by itself--all by itself. And once well away, the fall
+of kingdoms could not have diverted it.</p>
+<p>Ours is, after all, a kindly earth. While The Song ran and raped
+it with the cataleptic kick of 'Ta-ra-ra-boom-de-ay,' multiplied by
+the West African significance of 'Everybody's doing it,' plus twice
+the infernal elementality of a certain tune in <i>Dona et
+Gamma</i>; when for all practical purposes, literary, dramatic,
+artistic, social, municipal, political, commercial, and
+administrative, the Earth <i>was</i> flat, the Rector of Huckley
+wrote to us--again as a lover of accuracy--to point out that the
+Huckley vote on 'the alleged flatness of this scene of our labours
+here below' was <i>not</i> unanimous; he and the doctor having
+voted against it. And the great Baron Reuter himself (I am sure it
+could have been none other) flashed that letter in full to the
+front, back, and both wings of this scene of our labours. For
+Huckley was News. <i>The Bun</i> also contributed a photograph
+which cost me some trouble to fake.</p>
+<p>'We are a vital nation,' said Ollyett while we were discussing
+affairs at a Bat dinner. 'Only an Englishman could have written
+that letter at this present juncture.'</p>
+<p>'It reminded me of a tourist in the Cave of the Winds under
+Niagara. Just one figure in a mackintosh. But perhaps you saw our
+photo?' I said proudly.</p>
+<p>'Yes,' Bat replied. 'I've been to Niagara, too. And how's
+Huckley taking it?'</p>
+<p>'They don't quite understand, of course,' said Ollyett. 'But
+it's bringing pots of money into the place. Ever since the
+motor-bus excursions were started--'</p>
+<p>'I didn't know they had been,' said Pallant.</p>
+<p>'Oh yes. Motor char-&agrave;-bancs--uniformed guides and
+key-bugles included. They're getting a bit fed up with the tune
+there nowadays,' Ollyett added.</p>
+<p>'They play it under his windows, don't they?' Bat asked. 'He
+can't stop the right of way across his park.'</p>
+<p>'He cannot,' Ollyett answered. 'By the way, Woodhouse, I've
+bought that font for you from the sexton. I paid fifteen pounds for
+it.'</p>
+<p>'What am I supposed to do with it?' asked Woodhouse.</p>
+<p>'You give it to the Victoria and Albert Museum. It is
+fourteenth-century work all right. You can trust me.'</p>
+<p>'Is it worth it--now?' said Pallant. 'Not that I'm weakening,
+but merely as a matter of tactics?'</p>
+<p>'But this is true,' said Ollyett. 'Besides, it is my hobby, I
+always wanted to be an architect. I'll attend to it myself. It's
+too serious for <i>The Bun</i> and miles too good for <i>The
+Cake</i>.'</p>
+<p>He broke ground in a ponderous architectural weekly, which had
+never heard of Huckley. There was no passion in his statement, but
+mere fact backed by a wide range of authorities. He established
+beyond doubt that the old font at Huckley had been thrown out, on
+Sir Thomas's instigation, twenty years ago, to make room for a new
+one of Bath stone adorned with Limoges enamels; and that it had
+lain ever since in a corner of the sexton's shed. He proved, with
+learned men to support him, that there was only one other font in
+all England to compare with it. So Woodhouse bought it and
+presented it to a grateful South Kensington which said it would see
+the earth still flatter before it returned the treasure to purblind
+Huckley. Bishops by the benchful and most of the Royal Academy, not
+to mention 'Margaritas ante Porcos,' wrote fervently to the papers.
+<i>Punch</i> based a political cartoon on it; the <i>Times</i> a
+third leader, 'The Lust of Newness'; and the <i>Spectator</i> a
+scholarly and delightful middle, 'Village Hausmania.' The vast
+amused outside world said in all its tongues and types: 'Of course!
+This is just what Huckley would do!' And neither Sir Thomas nor the
+Rector nor the sexton nor any one else wrote to deny it.</p>
+<p>'You see,' said Ollyett, 'this is much more of a blow to Huckley
+than it looks--because every word of it's true. Your Gubby dance
+was inspiration, I admit, but it hadn't its roots in--'</p>
+<p>'Two hemispheres and four continents so far,' I pointed out.</p>
+<p>'Its roots in the hearts of Huckley was what I was going to say.
+Why don't you ever come down and look at the place? You've never
+seen it since we were stopped there.'</p>
+<p>'I've only my week-ends free,' I said, 'and you seem to spend
+yours there pretty regularly--with the side-car. I was
+afraid--'</p>
+<p>'Oh, <i>that's</i> all right,' he said cheerily. 'We're quite an
+old engaged couple now. As a matter of fact, it happened after "the
+gravid polled Angus" business. Come along this Saturday. Woodhouse
+says he'll run us down after lunch. He wants to see Huckley
+too.'</p>
+<p>Pallant could not accompany us, but Bat took his place.</p>
+<p>'It's odd,' said Bat, 'that none of us except Ollyett has ever
+set eyes on Huckley since that time. That's what I always tell My
+people. Local colour is all right after you've got your idea.
+Before that, it's a mere nuisance.' He regaled us on the way down
+with panoramic views of the success--geographical and financial--of
+'The Gubby' and The Song.</p>
+<p>'By the way,' said he, 'I've assigned 'Dal all the gramophone
+rights of "The Earth." She's a born artist. 'Hadn't sense enough to
+hit me for triple-dubs the morning after. She'd have taken it out
+in coos.'</p>
+<p>'Bless her! And what'll she make out of the gramophone rights?'
+I asked.</p>
+<p>'Lord knows!' he replied. 'I've made fifty-four thousand my
+little end of the business, and it's only just beginning. Hear
+<i>that</i>!'</p>
+<p>A shell-pink motor-brake roared up behind us to the music on a
+key-bugle of 'The Village that Voted the Earth was Flat.' In a few
+minutes we overtook another, in natural wood, whose occupants were
+singing it through their noses.</p>
+<p>'I don't know that agency. It must be Cook's,' said Ollyett.
+'They <i>do</i> suffer.' We were never out of earshot of the tune
+the rest of the way to Huckley.</p>
+<p>Though I knew it would be so, I was disappointed with the actual
+aspect of the spot we had--it is not too much to say--created in
+the face of the nations. The alcoholic pub; the village green; the
+Baptist chapel; the church; the sexton's shed; the Rectory whence
+the so-wonderful letters had come; Sir Thomas's park gate-pillars
+still violently declaring 'The Earth <i>is</i> flat,' were as mean,
+as average, as ordinary as the photograph of a room where a murder
+has been committed. Ollyett, who, of course, knew the place
+specially well, made the most of it to us. Bat, who had employed it
+as a back-cloth to one of his own dramas, dismissed it as a thing
+used and emptied, but Woodhouse expressed my feelings when he said:
+'Is that all--after all we've done?'</p>
+<p>'<i>I</i> know,' said Ollyett soothingly. '"Like that strange
+song I heard Apollo sing: When Ilion like a mist rose into towers."
+I've felt the same sometimes, though it has been Paradise for me.
+But they <i>do</i> suffer.'</p>
+<p>The fourth brake in thirty minutes had just turned into Sir
+Thomas's park to tell the Hall that 'The <i>Earth</i> was flat'; a
+knot of obviously American tourists were kodaking his lodge-gates;
+while the tea-shop opposite the lych-gate was full of people buying
+postcards of the old font as it had lain twenty years in the
+sexton's shed. We went to the alcoholic pub and congratulated the
+proprietor.</p>
+<p>'It's bringin' money to the place,' said he. 'But in a sense you
+can buy money too dear. It isn't doin' us any good. People are
+laughin' at us. That's what they're doin'.... Now, with regard to
+that Vote of ours you may have heard talk about....'</p>
+<p>'For Gorze sake, chuck that votin' business,' cried an elderly
+man at the door. 'Money-gettin' or no money-gettin', we're fed up
+with it.'</p>
+<p>'Well, I do think,' said the publican, shifting his ground, 'I
+do think Sir Thomas might ha' managed better in some things.'</p>
+<p>'He tole me,'--the elderly man shouldered his way to the
+bar--'he tole me twenty years ago to take an' lay that font in my
+tool-shed. He <i>tole</i> me so himself. An' now, after twenty
+years, me own wife makin' me out little better than the common
+'angman!'</p>
+<p>'That's the sexton,' the publican explained. 'His good lady
+sells the postcards--if you 'aven't got some. But we feel Sir
+Thomas might ha' done better.'</p>
+<p>'What's he got to do with it?' said Woodhouse.</p>
+<p>'There's nothin' we can trace 'ome to 'im in so many words, but
+we think he might 'ave saved us the font business. Now, in regard
+to that votin' business--'</p>
+<p>'Chuck it! Oh, chuck it!' the sexton roared, 'or you'll 'ave me
+cuttin' my throat at cock-crow. 'Ere's another parcel of
+fun-makers!'</p>
+<p>A motor-brake had pulled up at the door and a multitude of men
+and women immediately descended. We went out to look. They bore
+rolled banners, a reading-desk in three pieces, and, I specially
+noticed, a collapsible harmonium, such as is used on ships at
+sea.</p>
+<p>'Salvation Army?' I said, though I saw no uniforms.</p>
+<p>Two of them unfurled a banner between poles which bore the
+legend: 'The Earth <i>is</i> flat.' Woodhouse and I turned to Bat.
+He shook his head. 'No, no! Not me.... If I had only seen their
+costumes in advance!'</p>
+<p>'Good Lord!' said Ollyett. 'It's the genuine Society!'</p>
+<p>The company advanced on the green with the precision of people
+well broke to these movements. Scene-shifters could not have been
+quicker with the three-piece rostrum, nor stewards with the
+harmonium. Almost before its cross-legs had been kicked into their
+catches, certainly before the tourists by the lodge-gates had begun
+to move over, a woman sat down to it and struck up a hymn:</p>
+<div class="poem">
+<div class="stanza">
+<p class="i5">Hear ther truth our tongues are telling,</p>
+<p class="i6">Spread ther light from shore to shore,</p>
+<p class="i5">God hath given man a dwelling</p>
+<p class="i6">Flat and flat for evermore.</p>
+</div>
+<div class="stanza">
+<p class="i5">When ther Primal Dark retreated,</p>
+<p class="i6">When ther deeps were undesigned,</p>
+<p class="i5">He with rule and level meted</p>
+<p class="i6">Habitation for mankind!</p>
+</div>
+</div>
+<p>I saw sick envy on Bat's face. 'Curse Nature,' he muttered. 'She
+gets ahead of you every time. To think <i>I</i> forgot hymns and a
+harmonium!'</p>
+<p>Then came the chorus:</p>
+<div class="poem">
+<div class="stanza">
+<p class="i5">Hear ther truth our tongues are telling,</p>
+<p class="i6">Spread ther light from shore to shore--</p>
+<p class="i5">Oh, be faithful! Oh, be truthful!</p>
+<p class="i6">Earth is flat for evermore.</p>
+</div>
+</div>
+<p>They sang several verses with the fervour of Christians awaiting
+their lions. Then there were growlings in the air. The sexton,
+embraced by the landlord, two-stepped out of the pub-door. Each was
+trying to outroar the other. 'Apologising in advarnce for what he
+says,' the landlord shouted: 'You'd better go away' (here the
+sexton began to speak words). 'This isn't the time nor yet the
+place for--for any more o' this chat.'</p>
+<p>The crowd thickened. I saw the village police-sergeant come out
+of his cottage buckling his belt.</p>
+<p>'But surely,' said the woman at the harmonium, 'there must be
+some mistake. We are not suffragettes.'</p>
+<p>'Damn it! They'd be a change,' cried the sexton. 'You get out of
+this! Don't talk! <i>I</i> can't stand it for one! Get right out,
+or we'll font you!'</p>
+<p>The crowd which was being recruited from every house in sight
+echoed the invitation. The sergeant pushed forward. A man beside
+the reading-desk said: 'But surely we are among dear friends and
+sympathisers. Listen to me for a moment.'</p>
+<p>It was the moment that a passing char-&agrave;-banc chose to
+strike into The Song. The effect was instantaneous. Bat, Ollyett,
+and I, who by divers roads have learned the psychology of crowds,
+retreated towards the tavern door. Woodhouse, the newspaper
+proprietor, anxious, I presume, to keep touch with the public,
+dived into the thick of it. Every one else told the Society to go
+away at once. When the lady at the harmonium (I began to understand
+why it is sometimes necessary to kill women) pointed at the
+stencilled park pillars and called them 'the cromlechs of our
+common faith,' there was a snarl and a rush. The police-sergeant
+checked it, but advised the Society to keep on going. The Society
+withdrew into the brake fighting, as it were, a rear-guard action
+of oratory up each step. The collapsed harmonium was hauled in
+last, and with the perfect unreason of crowds, they cheered it
+loudly, till the chauffeur slipped in his clutch and sped away.
+Then the crowd broke up, congratulating all concerned except the
+sexton, who was held to have disgraced his office by having sworn
+at ladies. We strolled across the green towards Woodhouse, who was
+talking to the police-sergeant near the park-gates. We were not
+twenty yards from him when we saw Sir Thomas Ingell emerge from the
+lodge and rush furiously at Woodhouse with an uplifted stick, at
+the same time shrieking: 'I'll teach you to laugh, you--' but
+Ollyett has the record of the language. By the time we reached
+them, Sir Thomas was on the ground; Woodhouse, very white, held the
+walking-stick and was saying to the sergeant:</p>
+<p>'I give this person in charge for assault.'</p>
+<p>'But, good Lord!' said the sergeant, whiter than Woodhouse.
+'It's Sir Thomas.'</p>
+<p>'Whoever it is, it isn't fit to be at large,' said Woodhouse.
+The crowd suspecting something wrong began to reassemble, and all
+the English horror of a row in public moved us, headed by the
+sergeant, inside the lodge. We shut both park-gates and
+lodge-door.</p>
+<p>'You saw the assault, sergeant,' Woodhouse went on. 'You can
+testify I used no more force than was necessary to protect myself.
+You can testify that I have not even damaged this person's
+property. (Here! take your stick, you!) You heard the filthy
+language he used.'</p>
+<p>'I--I can't say I did,' the sergeant stammered.</p>
+<p>'Oh, but <i>we</i> did!' said Ollyett, and repeated it, to the
+apron-veiled horror of the lodge-keeper's wife.</p>
+<p>Sir Thomas on a hard kitchen chair began to talk. He said he had
+'stood enough of being photographed like a wild beast,' and
+expressed loud regret that he had not killed 'that man,' who was
+'conspiring with the sergeant to laugh at him.'</p>
+<p>''Ad you ever seen 'im before, Sir Thomas?' the sergeant
+asked.</p>
+<p>'No! But it's time an example was made here. I've never seen the
+sweep in my life.'</p>
+<p>I think it was Bat Masquerier's magnetic eye that recalled the
+past to him, for his face changed and his jaw dropped. 'But I
+have!' he groaned. 'I remember now.'</p>
+<p>Here a writhing man entered by the back door. He was, he said,
+the village solicitor. I do not assert that he licked Woodhouse's
+boots, but we should have respected him more if he had and been
+done with it. His notion was that the matter could be accommodated,
+arranged and compromised for gold, and yet more gold. The sergeant
+thought so too. Woodhouse undeceived them both. To the sergeant he
+said, 'Will you or will you not enter the charge?' To the village
+solicitor he gave the name of his lawyers, at which the man wrung
+his hands and cried, 'Oh, Sir T., Sir T.!' in a miserable falsetto,
+for it was a Bat Masquerier of a firm. They conferred together in
+tragic whispers.</p>
+<p>'I don't dive after Dickens,' said Ollyett to Bat and me by the
+window, 'but every time <i>I</i> get into a row I notice the
+police-court always fills up with his characters.'</p>
+<p>'I've noticed that too,' said Bat. 'But the odd thing is you
+mustn't give the public straight Dickens--not in My business. I
+wonder why that is.'</p>
+<p>Then Sir Thomas got his second wind and cursed the day that he,
+or it may have been we, were born. I feared that though he was a
+Radical he might apologise and, since he was an M.P., might lie his
+way out of the difficulty. But he was utterly and truthfully beside
+himself. He asked foolish questions--such as what we were doing in
+the village at all, and how much blackmail Woodhouse expected to
+make out of him. But neither Woodhouse nor the sergeant nor the
+writhing solicitor listened. The upshot of their talk, in the
+chimney-corner, was that Sir Thomas stood engaged to appear next
+Monday before his brother magistrates on charges of assault,
+disorderly conduct, and language calculated, etc. Ollyett was
+specially careful about the language.</p>
+<p>Then we left. The village looked very pretty in the late
+light--pretty and tuneful as a nest of nightingales.</p>
+<p>'You'll turn up on Monday, I hope,' said Woodhouse, when we
+reached town. That was his only allusion to the affair.</p>
+<p>So we turned up--through a world still singing that the Earth
+was flat--at the little clay-coloured market-town with the large
+Corn Exchange and the small Jubilee memorial. We had some
+difficulty in getting seats in the court. Woodhouse's imported
+London lawyer was a man of commanding personality, with a voice
+trained to convey blasting imputations by tone. When the case was
+called, he rose and stated his client's intention not to proceed
+with the charge. His client, he went on to say, had not
+entertained, and, of course, in the circumstances could not have
+entertained, any suggestion of accepting on behalf of public
+charities any moneys that might have been offered to him on the
+part of Sir Thomas's estate. At the same time, no one acknowledged
+more sincerely than his client the spirit in which those offers had
+been made by those entitled to make them. But, as a matter of
+fact--here he became the man of the world colloguing with his
+equals--certain--er--details had come to his client's knowledge
+<i>since</i> the lamentable outburst, which ... He shrugged his
+shoulders. Nothing was served by going into them, but he ventured
+to say that, had those painful circumstances only been known
+earlier, his client would--again 'of course'--never have dreamed--A
+gesture concluded the sentence, and the ensnared Bench looked at
+Sir Thomas with new and withdrawing eyes. Frankly, as they could
+see, it would be nothing less than cruelty to proceed further with
+this--er-unfortunate affair. He asked leave, therefore, to withdraw
+the charge <i>in toto</i>, and at the same time to express his
+client's deepest sympathy with all who had been in any way
+distressed, as his client had been, by the fact and the publicity
+of proceedings which he could, of course, again assure them that
+his client would never have dreamed of instituting if, as he hoped
+he had made plain, certain facts had been before his client at the
+time when.... But he had said enough. For his fee it seemed to me
+that he had.</p>
+<p>Heaven inspired Sir Thomas's lawyer--all of a sweat lest his
+client's language should come out--to rise up and thank him. Then,
+Sir Thomas--not yet aware what leprosy had been laid upon him, but
+grateful to escape on any terms--followed suit. He was heard in
+interested silence, and people drew back a pace as Gehazi passed
+forth.</p>
+<p>'You hit hard,' said Bat to Woodhouse afterwards. 'His own
+people think he's mad.'</p>
+<p>'You don't say so? I'll show you some of his letters to-night at
+dinner,' he replied.</p>
+<p>He brought them to the Red Amber Room of the Chop Suey. We
+forgot to be amazed, as till then we had been amazed, over the Song
+or 'The Gubby,' or the full tide of Fate that seemed to run only
+for our sakes. It did not even interest Ollyett that the verb 'to
+huckle' had passed into the English leader-writers' language. We
+were studying the interior of a soul, flash-lighted to its grimiest
+corners by the dread of 'losing its position.'</p>
+<p>'And then it thanked you, didn't it, for dropping the case?'
+said Pallant.</p>
+<p>'Yes, and it sent me a telegram to confirm.' Woodhouse turned to
+Bat. 'Now d'you think I hit too hard?' he asked.</p>
+<p>'No-o!' said Bat. 'After all--I'm talking of every one's
+business now--one can't ever do anything in Art that comes up to
+Nature in any game in life. Just think how this thing has--'</p>
+<p>'Just let me run through that little case of yours again,' said
+Pallant, and picked up <i>The Bun</i> which had it set out in
+full.</p>
+<p>'Any chance of 'Dal looking in on us to-night?' Ollyett
+began.</p>
+<p>'She's occupied with her Art too,' Bat answered bitterly.
+'What's the use of Art? Tell me, some one!' A barrel-organ outside
+promptly pointed out that the <i>Earth</i> was flat. 'The
+gramophone's killing street organs, but I let loose a
+hundred-and-seventy-four of those hurdygurdys twelve hours after
+The Song,' said Bat. 'Not counting the Provinces.' His face
+brightened a little.</p>
+<p>'Look here!' said Pallant over the paper. 'I don't suppose you
+or those asinine J.P.'s knew it--but your lawyer ought to have
+known that you've all put your foot in it most confoundedly over
+this assault case.'</p>
+<p>'What's the matter?' said Woodhouse.</p>
+<p>'It's ludicrous. It's insane. There isn't two penn'orth of
+legality in the whole thing. Of course, you could have withdrawn
+the charge, but the way you went about it is childish--besides
+being illegal. What on earth was the Chief Constable thinking
+of?'</p>
+<p>'Oh, he was a friend of Sir Thomas's. They all were for that
+matter,' I replied.</p>
+<p>'He ought to be hanged. So ought the Chairman of the Bench. I'm
+talking as a lawyer now.'</p>
+<p>'Why, what have we been guilty of? Misprision of treason or
+compounding a felony--or what?' said Ollyett.</p>
+<p>'I'll tell you later.' Pallant went back to the paper with
+knitted brows, smiling unpleasantly from time to time. At last he
+laughed.</p>
+<p>'Thank you!' he said to Woodhouse. 'It ought to be pretty
+useful--for us.'</p>
+<p>'What d'you mean?' said Ollyett.</p>
+<p>'For our side. They are all Rads who are mixed up in this--from
+the Chief Constable down. There must be a Question. There must be a
+Question.'</p>
+<p>'Yes, but I wanted the charge withdrawn in my own way,'
+Woodhouse insisted.</p>
+<p>'That's nothing to do with the case. It's the legality of your
+silly methods. You wouldn't understand if I talked till morning,'
+He began to pace the room, his hands behind him. 'I wonder if I can
+get it through our Whip's thick head that it's a chance.... That
+comes of stuffing the Bench with radical tinkers,' he muttered.</p>
+<p>'Oh, sit down!' said Woodhouse.</p>
+<p>'Where's your lawyer to be found now?' he jerked out.</p>
+<p>'At the Trefoil,' said Bat promptly. 'I gave him the stage-box
+for to-night. He's an artist too.'</p>
+<p>'Then I'm going to see him,' said Pallant. 'Properly handled
+this ought to be a godsend for our side.' He withdrew without
+apology.</p>
+<p>'Certainly, this thing keeps on opening up, and up,' I remarked
+inanely.</p>
+<p>'It's beyond me!' said Bat. 'I don't think if I'd known I'd have
+ever ... Yes, I would, though. He said my home address was--'</p>
+<p>'It was his tone--his tone!' Ollyett almost shouted. Woodhouse
+said nothing, but his face whitened as he brooded.</p>
+<p>'Well, any way,' Bat went on, 'I'm glad I always believed in God
+and Providence and all those things. Else I should lose my nerve.
+We've put it over the whole world--the full extent of the
+geographical globe. We couldn't stop it if we wanted to now. It's
+got to burn itself out. I'm not in charge any more. What d'you
+expect'll happen next. Angels?'</p>
+<p>I expected nothing. Nothing that I expected approached what I
+got. Politics are not my concern, but, for the moment, since it
+seemed that they were going to 'huckle' with the rest, I took an
+interest in them. They impressed me as a dog's life without a dog's
+decencies, and I was confirmed in this when an unshaven and
+unwashen Pallant called on me at ten o'clock one morning, begging
+for a bath and a couch.</p>
+<p>'Bail too?' I asked. He was in evening dress and his eyes were
+sunk feet in his head.</p>
+<p>'No,' he said hoarsely. 'All night sitting. Fifteen divisions.
+'Nother to-night. Your place was nearer than mine, so--' He began
+to undress in the hall.</p>
+<p>When he awoke at one o'clock he gave me lurid accounts of what
+he said was history, but which was obviously collective hysteria.
+There had been a political crisis. He and his fellow M.P.'s had
+'done things'--I never quite got at the things--for eighteen hours
+on end, and the pitiless Whips were even then at the telephones to
+herd 'em up to another dog-fight. So he snorted and grew hot all
+over again while he might have been resting.</p>
+<p>'I'm going to pitch in my question about that miscarriage of
+justice at Huckley this afternoon, if you care to listen to it,' he
+said. 'It'll be absolutely thrown away--in our present state. I
+told 'em so; but it's my only chance for weeks. P'raps Woodhouse
+would like to come.'</p>
+<p>'I'm sure he would. Anything to do with Huckley interests us,' I
+said.</p>
+<p>'It'll miss fire, I'm afraid. Both sides are absolutely cooked.
+The present situation has been working up for some time. You see
+the row was bound to come, etc. etc.,' and he flew off the handle
+once more.</p>
+<p>I telephoned to Woodhouse, and we went to the House together. It
+was a dull, sticky afternoon with thunder in the air. For some
+reason or other, each side was determined to prove its virtue and
+endurance to the utmost. I heard men snarling about it all round
+me. 'If they won't spare us, we'll show 'em no mercy,' 'Break the
+brutes up from the start. They can't stand late hours.' 'Come on!
+No shirking! I know <i>you've</i> had a Turkish bath,' were some of
+the sentences I caught on our way. The House was packed already,
+and one could feel the negative electricity of a jaded crowd
+wrenching at one's own nerves, and depressing the afternoon
+soul.</p>
+<p>'This is bad!' Woodhouse whispered. 'There'll be a row before
+they've finished. Look at the Front Benches!' And he pointed out
+little personal signs by which I was to know that each man was on
+edge. He might have spared himself. The House was ready to snap
+before a bone had been thrown. A sullen minister rose to reply to a
+staccato question. His supporters cheered defiantly. 'None o' that!
+None o' that!' came from the Back Benches. I saw the Speaker's face
+stiffen like the face of a helmsman as he humours a hard-mouthed
+yacht after a sudden following sea. The trouble was barely met in
+time. There came a fresh, apparently causeless gust a few minutes
+later--savage, threatening, but futile. It died out--one could hear
+the sigh--in sudden wrathful realisation of the dreary hours ahead,
+and the ship of state drifted on.</p>
+<p>Then Pallant--and the raw House winced at the torture of his
+voice--rose. It was a twenty-line question, studded with legal
+technicalities. The gist of it was that he wished to know whether
+the appropriate Minister was aware that there had been a grave
+miscarriage of justice on such and such a date, at such and such a
+place, before such and such justices of the peace, in regard to a
+case which arose--</p>
+<p>I heard one desperate, weary 'damn!' float up from the pit of
+that torment. Pallant sawed on--'out of certain events which
+occurred at the village of Huckley.'</p>
+<p>The House came to attention with a parting of the lips like a
+hiccough, and it flashed through my mind.... Pallant repeated,
+'Huckley. The village--'</p>
+<p>'That voted the <i>Earth</i> was flat.' A single voice from a
+back Bench sang it once like a lone frog in a far pool.</p>
+<p>'<i>Earth</i> was flat,' croaked another voice opposite.</p>
+<p>'<i>Earth</i> was flat.' There were several. Then several
+more.</p>
+<p>It was, you understand, the collective, overstrained nerve of
+the House, snapping, strand by strand to various notes, as the
+hawser parts from its moorings.</p>
+<p>'The Village that voted the <i>Earth</i> was flat.' The tune was
+beginning to shape itself. More voices were raised and feet began
+to beat time. Even so it did not occur to me that the thing
+would--</p>
+<p>'The Village that voted the <i>Earth</i> was flat!' It was
+easier now to see who were not singing. There were still a few. Of
+a sudden (and this proves the fundamental instability of the
+cross-bench mind) a cross-bencher leaped on his seat and there
+played an imaginary double-bass with tremendous maestro-like
+wagglings of the elbow.</p>
+<p>The last strand parted. The ship of state drifted out helpless
+on the rocking tide of melody.</p>
+<div class="poem">
+<div class="stanza">
+<p class="i5">'The Village that voted the <i>Earth</i> was
+flat!</p>
+<p class="i5">&nbsp;The Village that voted the <i>Earth</i> was
+flat!'</p>
+</div>
+</div>
+<p>The Irish first conceived the idea of using their order-papers
+as funnels wherewith to reach the correct '<i>vroom--vroom</i>' on
+'<i>Earth</i>.' Labour, always conservative and respectable at a
+crisis, stood out longer than any other section, but when it came
+in it was howling syndicalism. Then, without distinction of Party,
+fear of constituents, desire for office, or hope of emolument, the
+House sang at the tops and at the bottoms of their voices, swaying
+their stale bodies and epileptically beating with their swelled
+feet. They sang 'The Village that voted the <i>Earth</i> was flat':
+first, because they wanted to, and secondly--which is the terror of
+that song--because they could not stop. For no consideration could
+they stop.</p>
+<p>Pallant was still standing up. Some one pointed at him and they
+laughed. Others began to point, lunging, as it were, in time with
+the tune. At this moment two persons came in practically abreast
+from behind the Speaker's chair, and halted appalled. One happened
+to be the Prime Minister and the other a messenger. The House, with
+tears running down their cheeks, transferred their attention to the
+paralysed couple. They pointed six hundred forefingers at them.
+They rocked, they waved, and they rolled while they pointed, but
+still they sang. When they weakened for an instant, Ireland would
+yell: 'Are ye <i>with</i> me, bhoys?' and they all renewed their
+strength like Antaeus. No man could say afterwards what happened in
+the Press or the Strangers' Gallery. It was the House, the
+hysterical and abandoned House of Commons that held all eyes, as it
+deafened all ears. I saw both Front Benches bend forward, some with
+their foreheads on their despatch-boxes, the rest with their faces
+in their hands; and their moving shoulders jolted the House out of
+its last rag of decency. Only the Speaker remained unmoved. The
+entire press of Great Britain bore witness next day that he had not
+even bowed his head. The Angel of the Constitution, for vain was
+the help of man, foretold him the exact moment at which the House
+would have broken into 'The Gubby.' He is reported to have said: 'I
+heard the Irish beginning to shuffle it. So I adjourned.' Pallant's
+version is that he added: 'And I was never so grateful to a private
+member in all my life as I was to Mr. Pallant.'</p>
+<p>He made no explanation. He did not refer to orders or disorders.
+He simply adjourned the House till six that evening. And the House
+adjourned--some of it nearly on all fours.</p>
+<p>I was not correct when I said that the Speaker was the only man
+who did not laugh. Woodhouse was beside me all the time. His face
+was set and quite white--as white, they told me, as Sir Thomas
+Ingell's when he went, by request, to a private interview with his
+Chief Whip.</p>
+<br>
+<br>
+<hr style="width: 35%;">
+<br>
+<br>
+<a name="page216"></a>
+<div class="poem">
+<div class="stanza">
+<p class="i8"><b>THE PRESS</b></p>
+</div>
+<div class="stanza">
+<p class="i3">The Soldier may forget his sword</p>
+<p class="i4">The Sailorman the sea,</p>
+<p class="i3">The Mason may forget the Word</p>
+<p class="i4">And the Priest his litany:</p>
+<p class="i3">The maid may forget both jewel and gem,</p>
+<p class="i4">And the bride her wedding-dress--</p>
+<p class="i3">But the Jew shall forget Jerusalem</p>
+<p class="i4">Ere we forget the Press!</p>
+</div>
+<div class="stanza">
+<p class="i3">Who once hath stood through the loaded hour</p>
+<p class="i4">Ere, roaring like the gale,</p>
+<p class="i3">The Harrild and the Hoe devour</p>
+<p class="i4">Their league-long paper bale,</p>
+<p class="i3">And has lit his pipe in the morning calm</p>
+<p class="i4">That follows the midnight stress--</p>
+<p class="i3">He hath sold his heart to the old Black Art</p>
+<p class="i4">We call the daily Press.</p>
+</div>
+<div class="stanza">
+<p class="i3">Who once hath dealt in the widest game</p>
+<p class="i4">That all of a man can play,</p>
+<p class="i3">No later love, no larger fame</p>
+<p class="i4">Will lure him long away.</p>
+<p class="i3">As the war-horse smelleth the battle afar,</p>
+<p class="i4">The entered Soul, no less,</p>
+<p class="i3">He saith: 'Ha! Ha!' where the trumpets are</p>
+<p class="i4">And the thunders of the Press.</p>
+</div>
+<div class="stanza">
+<p class="i3">Canst thou number the days that we fulfil,</p>
+<p class="i4">Or the <i>Times</i> that we bring forth?</p>
+<p class="i3">Canst thou send the lightnings to do thy will,</p>
+<p class="i4">And cause them reign on earth?</p>
+<p class="i3">Hast thou given a peacock goodly wings</p>
+<p class="i4">To please his foolishness?</p>
+<p class="i3">Sit down at the heart of men and things,</p>
+<p class="i4">Companion of the Press!</p>
+</div>
+<div class="stanza">
+<p class="i3">The Pope may launch his Interdict,</p>
+<p class="i4">The Union its decree,</p>
+<p class="i3">But the bubble is blown and the bubble is pricked</p>
+<p class="i4">By Us and such as We.</p>
+<p class="i3">Remember the battle and stand aside</p>
+<p class="i4">While Thrones and Powers confess</p>
+<p class="i3">That King over all the children of pride</p>
+<p class="i4">Is the Press--the Press--the Press!</p>
+</div>
+</div>
+<br>
+<br>
+<hr style="width: 35%;">
+<br>
+<br>
+<a name="page219"></a>
+<h2>In The Presence</h2>
+<h3>(1912)</h3>
+<br>
+<p>'So the matter,' the Regimental Chaplain concluded, 'was
+correct; in every way correct. I am well pleased with Rutton Singh
+and Attar Singh. They have gathered the fruit of their lives.'</p>
+<p>He folded his arms and sat down on the verandah. The hot day had
+ended, and there was a pleasant smell of cooking along the
+regimental lines, where half-clad men went back and forth with leaf
+platters and water-goglets. The Subadar-Major, in extreme undress,
+sat on a chair, as befitted his rank; the Havildar-Major, his
+nephew, leaning respectfully against the wall. The Regiment was at
+home and at ease in its own quarters in its own district which
+takes its name from the great Muhammadan saint Mian Mir, revered by
+Jehangir and beloved by Guru Har Gobind, sixth of the great Sikh
+Gurus.</p>
+<p>'Quite correct,' the Regimental Chaplain repeated.</p>
+<p>No Sikh contradicts his Regimental Chaplain who expounds to him
+the Holy Book of the Grunth Sahib and who knows the lives and
+legends of all the Gurus.</p>
+<p>The Subadar-Major bowed his grey head. The Havildar-Major
+coughed respectfully to attract attention and to ask leave to
+speak. Though he was the Subadar-Major's nephew, and though his
+father held twice as much land as his uncle, he knew his place in
+the scheme of things. The Subadar-Major shifted one hand with an
+iron bracelet on the wrist.</p>
+<p>'Was there by any chance any woman at the back of it?' the
+Havildar-Major murmured. 'I was not here when the thing
+happened.'</p>
+<p>'Yes! Yes! Yes! We all know that thou wast in England eating and
+drinking with the Sahibs. We are all surprised that thou canst
+still speak Punjabi.' The Subadar-Major's carefully-tended beard
+bristled.</p>
+<p>'There was no woman,' the Regimental Chaplain growled. 'It was
+land. Hear, you! Rutton Singh and Attar Singh were the elder of
+four brothers. These four held land in--what was the village's
+name?--oh, Pishapur, near Thori, in the Banalu Tehsil of Patiala
+State, where men can still recognise right behaviour when they see
+it. The two younger brothers tilled the land, while Rutton Singh
+and Attar Singh took service with the Regiment, according to the
+custom of the family.'</p>
+<p>'True, true,' said the Havildar-Major. 'There is the same
+arrangement in all good families.'</p>
+<p>'Then, listen again,' the Regimental Chaplain went on. 'Their
+kin on their mother's side put great oppression and injustice upon
+the two younger brothers who stayed with the land in Patiala State.
+Their mother's kin loosened beasts into the four brothers' crops
+when the crops were green; they cut the corn by force when it was
+ripe; they broke down the water-courses; they defiled the wells;
+and they brought false charges in the law-courts against all four
+brothers. They did not spare even the cotton-seed, as the saying
+is.</p>
+<p>'Their mother's kin trusted that the young men would thus be
+forced by weight of trouble, and further trouble and perpetual
+trouble, to quit their lands in Pishapur village in Banalu Tehsil
+in Patiala State. If the young men ran away, the land would come
+whole to their mother's kin. I am not a regimental school-master,
+but is it understood, child?'</p>
+<p>'Understood,' said the Havildar-Major grimly. 'Pishapur is not
+the only place where the fence eats the field instead of protecting
+it. But perhaps there was a woman among their mother's kin?'</p>
+<p>'God knows!' said the Regimental Chaplain. 'Woman, or man, or
+law-courts, the young men would <i>not</i> be driven off the land
+which was their own by inheritance. They made appeal to Rutton
+Singh and Attar Singh, their brethren who had taken service with
+<i>us</i> in the Regiment, and so knew the world, to help them in
+their long war against their mother's kin in Pishapur. For that
+reason, because their own land and the honour of their house was
+dear to them, Rutton Singh and Attar Singh needs must very often
+ask for leave to go to Patiala and attend to the lawsuits and
+cattle-poundings there.</p>
+<p>'It was not, look you, as though they went back to their own
+village and sat, garlanded with jasmine, in honour, upon chairs
+before the elders under the trees. They went back always to
+perpetual trouble, either of lawsuits, or theft, or strayed cattle;
+and they sat on thorns.'</p>
+<p>'I knew it,' said the Subadar-Major. 'Life was bitter for them
+both. But they were well-conducted men. It was not hard to get them
+their leave from the Colonel Sahib.'</p>
+<p>'They spoke to me also,' said the Chaplain. '<i>"Let him who
+desires the four great gifts apply himself to the words of holy
+men."</i> That is written. Often they showed me the papers of the
+false lawsuits brought against them. Often they wept on account of
+the persecution put upon them by their mother's kin. Men thought it
+was drugs when their eyes showed red.'</p>
+<p>'They wept in my presence too,' said the Subadar-Major.
+'Well-conducted men of nine years' service apiece. Rutton Singh was
+drill-Naik, too.'</p>
+<p>'They did all things correctly as Sikhs should,' said the
+Regimental Chaplain. 'When the persecution had endured seven years,
+Attar Singh took leave to Pishapur once again (that was the fourth
+time in that year only) and he called his persecutors together
+before the village elders, and he cast his turban at their feet and
+besought them by his mother's blood to cease from their
+persecutions. For he told them earnestly that he had marched to the
+boundaries of his patience, and that there could be but one end to
+the matter.</p>
+<p>'They gave him abuse. They mocked him and his tears, which was
+the same as though they had mocked the Regiment. Then Attar Singh
+returned to the Regiment, and laid this last trouble before Rutton
+Singh, the eldest brother. But Rutton Singh could not get leave all
+at once.'</p>
+<p>'Because he was drill-Naik and the recruits were to be drilled.
+I myself told him so,' said the Subadar-Major. 'He was a
+well-conducted man. He said he could wait.'</p>
+<p>'But when permission was granted, those two took four days'
+leave,' the Chaplain went on.</p>
+<p>'I do not think Attar Singh should have taken Baynes Sahib's
+revolver. He was Baynes Sahib's orderly, and all that Sahib's
+things were open to him. It was, therefore, as I count it, shame to
+Attar Singh,' said the Subadar-Major.</p>
+<p>'All the words had been said. There was need of arms, and how
+could soldiers use Government rifles upon mere cultivators in the
+fields?' the Regimental Chaplain replied. 'Moreover, the revolver
+was sent back, together with a money-order for the cartridges
+expended. <i>"Borrow not; but if thou borrowest, pay back
+soon!"</i> That is written in the Hymns. Rutton Singh took a sword,
+and he and Attar Singh went to Pishapur and, after word given, the
+four brethren fell upon their persecutors in Pishapur village and
+slew seventeen, wounding ten. A revolver is better than a lawsuit.
+I say that these four brethren, the two with <i>us</i>, and the two
+mere cultivators, slew and wounded twenty-seven--all their mother's
+kin, male and female.</p>
+<p>'Then the four mounted to their housetop, and Attar Singh, who
+was always one of the impetuous, said "My work is done," and he
+made <i>shinan</i> (purification) in all men's sight, and he lent
+Rutton Singh Baynes Sahib's revolver, and Rutton Singh shot him in
+the head.</p>
+<p>'So Attar Singh abandoned his body, as an insect abandons a
+blade of grass. But Rutton Singh, having more work to do, went down
+from the housetop and sought an enemy whom he had forgotten--a
+Patiala man of this regiment who had sided with the persecutors.
+When he overtook the man, Rutton Singh hit him twice with bullets
+and once with the sword.'</p>
+<p>'But the man escaped and is now in the hospital here,' said the
+Subadar-Major. 'The doctor says he will live in spite of all.'</p>
+<p>'Not Rutton Singh's fault. Rutton Singh left him for dead. Then
+Rutton Singh returned to the housetop, and the three brothers
+together, Attar Singh being dead, sent word by a lad to the police
+station for an army to be dispatched against them that they might
+die with honours. But none came. And yet Patiala State is not under
+English law and they should know virtue there when they see it!</p>
+<p>'So, on the third day, Rutton Singh also made <i>shinan</i>, and
+the youngest of the brethren shot him also in the head, and
+<i>he</i> abandoned his body.</p>
+<p>'Thus was all correct. There was neither heat, nor haste, nor
+abuse in the matter from end to end. There remained alive not one
+man or woman of their mother's kin which had oppressed them. Of the
+other villagers of Pishapur, who had taken no part in the
+persecutions, not one was slain. Indeed, the villagers sent them
+food on the housetop for those three days while they waited for the
+police who would not dispatch that army.</p>
+<p>'Listen again! I know that Attar Singh and Rutton Singh omitted
+no ceremony of the purifications, and when all was done Baynes
+Sahib's revolver was thrown down from the housetop, together with
+three rupees twelve annas; and order was given for its return by
+post.'</p>
+<p>'And what befell the two younger brethren who were not in the
+service?' the Havildar-Major asked.</p>
+<p>'Doubtless they too are dead, but since they were not in the
+Regiment their honour concerns themselves only. So far as <i>we</i>
+were touched, see how correctly we came out of the matter! I think
+the King should be told; for where could you match such a tale
+except among us Sikhs? <i>Sri wah guru ji ki Khalsa! Sri wah guru
+ji ki futteh!</i>' said the Regimental Chaplain.</p>
+<p>'Would three rupees twelve annas pay for the used cartridges?'
+said the Havildar-Major.</p>
+<p>'Attar Singh knew the just price. All Baynes Sahib's gear was in
+his charge. They expended one tin box of fifty cartouches, lacking
+two which were returned. As I said--as I say--the arrangement was
+made not with heat nor blasphemies as a Mussulman would have made
+it; not with cries nor caperings as an idolater would have made it;
+but conformably to the ritual and doctrine of the Sikhs. Hear you!
+<i>"Though hundreds of amusements are offered to a child it cannot
+live without milk. If a man be divorced from his soul and his
+soul's desire he certainly will not stop to play upon the road, but
+he will make haste with his pilgrimage</i>." That is written. I
+rejoice in my disciples.'</p>
+<p>'True! True! Correct! Correct!' said the Subadar-Major. There
+was a long, easy silence. One heard a water-wheel creaking
+somewhere and the nearer sound of meal being ground in a quern.</p>
+<p>'But he--' the Chaplain pointed a scornful chin at the
+Havildar-Major--'<i>he</i> has been so long in England that--'</p>
+<p>'Let the lad alone,' said his uncle. 'He was but two months
+there, and he was chosen for good cause.'</p>
+<p>Theoretically, all Sikhs are equal. Practically, there are
+differences, as none know better than well-born, land-owning folk,
+or long-descended chaplains from Amritsar.</p>
+<p>'Hast thou heard anything in England to match my tale?' the
+Chaplain sneered.</p>
+<p>'I saw more than I could understand, so I have locked up my
+stories in my own mouth,' the Havildar-Major replied meekly.</p>
+<p>'Stories? What stories? I know all the stories about England,'
+said the Chaplain. 'I know that <i>terains</i> run underneath their
+bazaars there, and as for their streets stinking with <i>mota
+kahars</i>, only this morning I was nearly killed by Duggan Sahib's
+<i>mota-kahar</i>. That young man is a devil.'</p>
+<p>'I expect Grunthi-jee,' said the Subadar-Major, 'you and I grow
+too old to care for the Kahar-ki-nautch--the Bearer's dance.' He
+named one of the sauciest of the old-time nautches, and smiled at
+his own pun. Then he turned to his nephew. 'When I was a lad and
+came back to my village on leave, I waited the convenient hour,
+and, the elders giving permission, I spoke of what I had seen
+elsewhere.'</p>
+<p>'Ay, my father,' said the Havildar-Major, softly and
+affectionately. He sat himself down with respect, as behoved a mere
+lad of thirty with a bare half-dozen campaigns to his credit.</p>
+<p>'There were four men in this affair also,' he began, 'and it was
+an affair that touched the honour, not of one regiment, nor two,
+but of all the Army in Hind. Some part of it I saw; some I heard;
+but <i>all</i> the tale is true. My father's brother knows, and my
+priest knows, that I was in England on business with my Colonel,
+when the King--the Great Queen's son--completed his life.</p>
+<p>'First, there was a rumour that sickness was upon him. Next, we
+knew that he lay sick in the Palace. A very great multitude stood
+outside the Palace by night and by day, in the rain as well as the
+sun, waiting for news.</p>
+<p>'Then came out one with a written paper, and set it upon a
+gate-side--the word of the King's death--and they read, and
+groaned. This I saw with my own eyes, because the office where my
+Colonel Sahib went daily to talk with Colonel Forsyth Sahib was at
+the east end of the very gardens where the Palace stood. They are
+larger gardens than Shalimar here'--he pointed with his chin up the
+lines--'or Shahdera across the river.</p>
+<p>'Next day there was a darkness in the streets, because all the
+city's multitude were clad in black garments, and they spoke as a
+man speaks in the presence of his dead--all those multitudes. In
+the eyes, in the air, and in the heart, there was blackness. I saw
+it. But that is not my tale.</p>
+<p>'After ceremonies had been accomplished, and word had gone out
+to the Kings of the Earth that they should come and mourn, the new
+King--the dead King's son--gave commandment that his father's body
+should be laid, coffined, in a certain Temple which is near the
+river. There are no idols in that Temple; neither any carvings, nor
+paintings, nor gildings. It is all grey stone, of one colour as
+though it were cut out of the live rock. It is larger than--yes,
+than the Durbar Sahib at Amritsar, even though the Akal Bunga and
+the Baba-Atal were added. How old it may be God knows. It is the
+Sahibs' most sacred Temple.</p>
+<p>'In that place, by the new King's commandment, they made, as it
+were, a shrine for a saint, with lighted candles at the head and
+the feet of the Dead, and duly appointed watchers for every hour of
+the day and the night, until the dead King should be taken to the
+place of his fathers, which is at Wanidza.</p>
+<p>'When all was in order, the new King said, "Give entrance to all
+people," and the doors were opened, and O my uncle! O my teacher!
+all the world entered, walking through that Temple to take farewell
+of the Dead. There was neither distinction, nor price, nor ranking
+in the host, except an order that they should walk by fours.</p>
+<p>'As they gathered in the streets without--very, very far off--so
+they entered the Temple, walking by fours: the child, the old man;
+mother, virgin, harlot, trader, priest; of all colours and faiths
+and customs under the firmament of God, from dawn till late at
+night. I saw it. My Colonel gave me leave to go. I stood in the
+line, many hours, one <i>koss</i>, two <i>koss</i>, distant from
+the temple.'</p>
+<p>'Then why did the multitude not sit down under the trees?' asked
+the priest.</p>
+<p>'Because we were still between houses. The city is many
+<i>koss</i> wide,' the Havildar-Major resumed. 'I submitted myself
+to that slow-moving river and thus--thus--a pace at a time--I made
+pilgrimage. There were in my rank a woman, a cripple, and a lascar
+from the ships.</p>
+<p>'When we entered the Temple, the coffin itself was as a shoal in
+the Ravi River, splitting the stream into two branches, one on
+either side of the Dead; and the watchers of the Dead, who were
+soldiers, stood about It, moving no more than the still flame of
+the candles. Their heads were bowed; their hands were clasped;
+their eyes were cast upon the ground--thus. They were not men, but
+images, and the multitude went past them in fours by day, and,
+except for a little while, by night also.</p>
+<p>'No, there was no order that the people should come to pay
+respect. It was a free-will pilgrimage. Eight kings had been
+commanded to come--who obeyed--but upon his own Sahibs the new King
+laid no commandment. Of themselves they came.</p>
+<p>'I made pilgrimage twice: once for my Salt's sake, and once
+again for wonder and terror and worship. But my mouth cannot
+declare one thing of a hundred thousand things in this matter.
+There were <i>lakhs</i> of <i>lakhs</i>, <i>crores</i> of
+<i>crores</i> of people. I saw them.'</p>
+<p>'More than at our great pilgrimages?' the Regimental Chaplain
+demanded.</p>
+<p>'Yes. Those are only cities and districts coming out to pray.
+This was the world walking in grief. And now, hear you! It is the
+King's custom that four swords of Our Armies in Hind should stand
+always before the Presence in case of need.'</p>
+<p>'The King's custom, our right,' said the Subadar-Major
+curtly.</p>
+<p>'Also our right. These honoured ones are changed after certain
+months or years, that the honour may be fairly spread. Now it
+chanced that when the old King--the Queen's son--completed his
+days, the four that stood in the Presence were Goorkhas. Neither
+Sikhs alas, nor Pathans, Rajputs, nor Jats. Goorkhas, my
+father.'</p>
+<p>'Idolaters,' said the Chaplain.</p>
+<p>'But soldiers; for I remember in the Tirah--' the Havildar-Major
+began.</p>
+<p>'<i>But</i> soldiers, for I remember fifteen campaigns. Go on,'
+said the Subadar-Major.</p>
+<p>'And it was their honour and right to furnish one who should
+stand in the Presence by day and by night till It went out to
+burial. There were no more than four all told--four old men to
+furnish that guard.'</p>
+<p>'Old? Old? What talk is this of old men?' said the
+Subadar-Major.</p>
+<p>'Nay. My fault! Your pardon!' The Havildar-Major spread a
+deprecating hand. 'They were strong, hot, valiant men, and the
+youngest was a lad of forty-five.'</p>
+<p>'That is better,' the Subadar-Major laughed.</p>
+<p>'But for all their strength and heat they could not eat strange
+food from the Sahibs' hands. There was no cooking place in the
+Temple; but a certain Colonel Forsyth Sahib, who had understanding,
+made arrangement whereby they should receive at least a little
+caste-clean parched grain; also cold rice maybe, and water which
+was pure. Yet, at best, this was no more than a hen's mouthful,
+snatched as each came off his guard. They lived on grain and were
+thankful, as the saying is.</p>
+<p>'One hour's guard in every four was each man's burden, for, as I
+have shown, they were but four all told; and the honour of Our
+Armies in Hind was on their heads. The Sahibs could draw upon all
+the armies in England for the other watchers--thousands upon
+thousands of fresh men--if they needed; but these four were but
+four.</p>
+<p>'The Sahibs drew upon the Granadeers for the other watchers.
+Granadeers be very tall men under very tall bearskins, such as
+Fusilier regiments wear in cold weather. Thus, when a Granadeer
+bowed his head but a very little over his stock, the bearskin
+sloped and showed as though he grieved exceedingly. Now the
+Goorkhas wear flat, green caps--'</p>
+<p>'I see, I see,' said the Subadar-Major impatiently.</p>
+<p>'They are bull-necked, too; and their stocks are hard, and when
+they bend deeply--deeply--to match the Granadeers--they come nigh
+to choking themselves. That was a handicap against them, when it
+came to the observance of ritual.</p>
+<p>'Yet even with their tall, grief-declaring bearskins, the
+Granadeers could not endure the full hour's guard in the Presence.
+There was good cause, as I will show, why no man could endure that
+terrible hour. So for them the hour's guard was cut to one-half.
+What did it matter to the Sahibs? They could draw on ten thousand
+Granadeers. Forsyth Sahib, who had comprehension, put this choice
+also before the four, and they said, "No, ours is the Honour of the
+Armies of Hind. Whatever the Sahibs do, we will suffer the full
+hour."</p>
+<p>'Forsyth Sahib, seeing that they were--knowing that they could
+neither sleep long nor eat much, said, "Is it great suffering?"
+They said, "It is great honour. We will endure."</p>
+<p>'Forsyth Sahib, who loves us, said then to the eldest, "Ho,
+father, tell me truly what manner of burden it is; for the full
+hour's watch breaks up our men like water."</p>
+<p>'The eldest answered, "Sahib, the burden is the feet of the
+multitude that pass us on either side. Our eyes being lowered and
+fixed, we see those feet only from the knee down--a river of feet,
+Sahib, that never--never--never stops. It is not the standing
+without any motion; it is not hunger; nor is it the dead part
+before the dawn when maybe a single one comes here to weep. It is
+the burden of the unendurable procession of feet from the knee
+down, that never--never--never stops!"</p>
+<p>'Forsyth Sahib said, "By God, I had not considered that! Now I
+know why our men come trembling and twitching off that guard. But
+at least, my father, ease the stock a little beneath the bent chin
+for that one hour."</p>
+<p>'The eldest said, "We are in the Presence. Moreover <i>He</i>
+knew every button and braid and hook of every uniform in all His
+armies."</p>
+<p>'Then Forsyth Sahib said no more, except to speak about their
+parched grain, but indeed they could not eat much after their hour,
+nor could they sleep much because of eye-twitchings and the renewed
+procession of the feet before the eyes. Yet they endured each his
+full hour--not half an hour--his one full hour in each four
+hours.'</p>
+<p>'Correct! correct!' said the Subadar-Major and the Chaplain
+together. 'We come well out of this affair.'</p>
+<p>'But seeing that they were old men,' said the Subadar-Major
+reflectively, 'very old men, worn out by lack of food and sleep,
+could not arrangements have been made, or influence have been
+secured, or a petition presented, whereby a well-born Sikh might
+have eased them of some portion of their great burden, even though
+his substantive rank--'</p>
+<p>'Then they would most certainly have slain me,' said the
+Havildar-Major with a smile.</p>
+<p>'And they would have done correctly,' said the Chaplain. 'What
+befell the honourable ones later?'</p>
+<p>'This. The Kings of the earth and all the Armies sent flowers
+and such-like to the dead King's palace at Wanidza, where the
+funeral offerings were accepted. There was no order given, but all
+the world made oblation. So the four took counsel--three at a
+time--and either they asked Forsyth Sahib to choose flowers, or
+themselves they went forth and bought flowers--I do not know; but,
+however it was arranged, the flowers were bought and made in the
+shape of a great drum-like circle weighing half a <i>maund</i>.</p>
+<p>'Forsyth Sahib had said, "Let the flowers be sent to Wanidza
+with the other flowers which all the world is sending." But they
+said among themselves, "It is not fit that these flowers, which are
+the offerings of His Armies in Hind, should come to the Palace of
+the Presence by the hands of hirelings or messengers, or of any man
+not in His service."</p>
+<p>'Hearing this, Forsyth Sahib, though he was much occupied with
+office-work, said, "Give me the flowers, and I will steal a time
+and myself take them to Wanidza."</p>
+<p>'The eldest said, "Since when has Forsyth Sahib worn sword?"</p>
+<p>'Forsyth Sahib said, "But always. And I wear it in the Presence
+when I put on uniform. I am a Colonel in the Armies of Hind." The
+eldest said, "Of what regiment?" And Forsyth Sahib looked on the
+carpet and pulled the hair of his lip. He saw the trap.'</p>
+<p>'Forsyth Sahib's regiment was once the old Forty-sixth Pathans
+which was called--' the Subadar-Major gave the almost forgotten
+title, adding that he had met them in such and such campaigns, when
+Forsyth Sahib was a young captain.</p>
+<p>The Havildar-Major took up the tale, saying, 'The eldest knew
+that also, my father. He laughed, and presently Forsyth Sahib
+laughed.</p>
+<p>'"It is true," said Forsyth Sahib. "I have no regiment. For
+twenty years I have been a clerk tied to a thick pen. Therefore I
+am the more fit to be your orderly and messenger in this
+business."</p>
+<p>'The eldest then said, "If it were a matter of my life or the
+honour of <i>any</i> of my household, it would be easy." And
+Forsyth Sahib joined his hands together, half laughing, though he
+was ready to weep, and he said, "Enough! I ask pardon. Which one of
+you goes with the offering?"</p>
+<p>'The eldest said, feigning not to have heard, "Nor must they be
+delivered by a single sword--as though we were pressed for men in
+His service," and they saluted and went out.'</p>
+<p>'Were these things seen, or were they told thee?' said the
+Subadar-Major.</p>
+<p>'I both saw and heard in the office full of books and papers
+where my Colonel Sahib consulted Forsyth Sahib upon the business
+that had brought my Colonel Sahib to England.'</p>
+<p>'And what was that business?' the Regimental Chaplain asked of a
+sudden, looking full at the Havildar-Major, who returned the look
+without a quiver.</p>
+<p>'That was not revealed to me,' said the Havildar-Major.</p>
+<p>'I heard it might have been some matter touching the integrity
+of certain regiments,' the Chaplain insisted.</p>
+<p>'The matter was not in any way open to my ears,' said the
+Havildar-Major.</p>
+<p>'Humph!' The Chaplain drew his hard road-worn feet under his
+robe. 'Let us hear the tale that it is permitted thee to tell,' he
+said, and the Havildar-Major went on:</p>
+<p>'So then the three, having returned to the Temple, called the
+fourth, who had only forty-five years, when he came off guard, and
+said, "We go to the Palace at Wanidza with the offerings. Remain
+thou in the Presence, and take all our guards, one after the other,
+till we return."</p>
+<p>'Within that next hour they hired a large and strong
+<i>mota-kahar</i> for the journey from the Temple to Wanidza, which
+is twenty <i>koss</i> or more, and they promised expedition. But he
+who took their guards said, "It is not seemly that we should for
+any cause appear to be in haste. There are eighteen medals with
+eleven clasps and three Orders to consider. Go at leisure. I can
+endure."</p>
+<p>'So the three with the offerings were absent three hours and a
+half, and having delivered the offering at Wanidza in the correct
+manner they returned and found the lad on guard, and they did not
+break his guard till his full hour was ended. So <i>he</i> endured
+four hours in the Presence, not stirring one hair, his eyes abased,
+and the river of feet, from the knee down, passing continually
+before his eyes. When he was relieved, it was seen that his
+eyeballs worked like weavers' shuttles.</p>
+<p>'And so it was done--not in hot blood, not for a little while,
+nor yet with the smell of slaughter and the noise of shouting to
+sustain, but in silence, for a very long time, rooted to one place
+before the Presence among the most terrible feet of the
+multitude.'</p>
+<p>'Correct!' the Chaplain chuckled.</p>
+<p>'But the Goorkhas had the honour,' said the Subadar-Major
+sadly.</p>
+<p>'Theirs was the Honour of His Armies in Hind, and that was Our
+Honour,' the nephew replied.</p>
+<p>'Yet I would one Sikh had been concerned in it--even one
+low-caste Sikh. And after?'</p>
+<p>'They endured the burden until the end--until It went out of the
+Temple to be laid among the older kings at Wanidza. When all was
+accomplished and It was withdrawn under the earth, Forsyth Sahib
+said to the four, "The King gives command that you be fed here on
+meat cooked by your own cooks. Eat and take ease, my fathers."</p>
+<p>'So they loosed their belts and ate. They had not eaten food
+except by snatches for some long time; and when the meat had given
+them strength they slept for very many hours; and it was told me
+that the procession of the unendurable feet ceased to pass before
+their eyes any more.'</p>
+<p>He threw out one hand palm upward to show that the tale was
+ended.</p>
+<p>'We came well and cleanly out of it,' said the
+Subadar-Major.</p>
+<p>'Correct! Correct! Correct!' said the Regimental Chaplain. 'In
+an evil age it is good to hear such things, and there is certainly
+no doubt that this is a very evil age.'</p>
+<br>
+<br>
+<hr style="width: 35%;">
+<br>
+<br>
+<a name="page239"></a>
+<div class="poem">
+<div class="stanza">
+<p class="i5"><b>JOBSON'S AMEN</b></p>
+</div>
+<div class="stanza">
+<p>'Blessed be the English and all their ways and works.</p>
+<p>Cursed be the Infidels, Hereticks, and Turks!'</p>
+<p>'Amen,' quo' Jobson, 'but where I used to lie</p>
+<p>Was neither Candle, Bell nor Book to curse my brethren by:</p>
+</div>
+<div class="stanza">
+<p>'But a palm-tree in full bearing, bowing down, bowing down,</p>
+<p>To a surf that drove unsparing at the brown-walled town--</p>
+<p>Conches in a temple, oil-lamps in a dome--</p>
+<p>And a low moon out of Africa said: "This way home!"'</p>
+</div>
+<div class="stanza">
+<p>'Blessed be the English and all that they profess.</p>
+<p>Cursed be the Savages that prance in nakedness!'</p>
+<p>'Amen,' quo' Jobson, 'but where I used to lie</p>
+<p>Was neither shirt nor pantaloons to catch my brethren by:</p>
+</div>
+<div class="stanza">
+<p>'But a well-wheel slowly creaking, going round, going round,</p>
+<p>By a water-channel leaking over drowned, warm ground--</p>
+<p>Parrots very busy in the trellised pepper-vine--</p>
+<p>And a high sun over Asia shouting: "Rise and shine!"'</p>
+</div>
+<div class="stanza">
+<p>'Blessed be the English and everything they own.</p>
+<p>Cursed be the Infidels that bow to wood and stone!'</p>
+<p>'Amen,' quo' Jobson, 'but where I used to lie</p>
+<p>Was neither pew nor Gospelleer to save my brethren by:</p>
+</div>
+<div class="stanza">
+<p>'But a desert stretched and stricken, left and right, left and
+right,</p>
+<p>Where the piled mirages thicken under white-hot light--</p>
+<p>A skull beneath a sand-hill and a viper coiled inside--</p>
+<p>And a red wind out of Libya roaring: "Run and hide!"'</p>
+</div>
+<div class="stanza">
+<p>'Blessed be the English and all they make or do.</p>
+<p>Cursed be the Hereticks who doubt that this is true!'</p>
+<p>'Amen,' quo' Jobson, 'but where I mean to die</p>
+<p>Is neither rule nor calliper to judge the matter by:</p>
+</div>
+<div class="stanza">
+<p>'But Himalaya heavenward-heading, sheer and vast, sheer and
+vast,</p>
+<p>In a million summits bedding on the last world's past;</p>
+<p>A certain sacred mountain where the scented cedars climb,</p>
+<p>And--the feet of my Beloved hurrying back through Time!'</p>
+</div>
+</div>
+<br>
+<br>
+<hr style="width: 35%;">
+<br>
+<br>
+<a name="page241"></a>
+<h2>REGULUS</h2>
+<h3>(1917)</h3>
+<br>
+<blockquote><i>Regulus, a Roman general, defeated the Carthaginians
+256 B.C., but was next year defeated and taken prisoner by the
+Carthaginians, who sent him to Rome with an embassy to ask for
+peace or an exchange of prisoners. Regulus strongly advised the
+Roman Senate to make no terms with the enemy. He then returned to
+Carthage and was put to death.</i></blockquote>
+<br>
+<p>The Fifth Form had been dragged several times in its collective
+life, from one end of the school Horace to the other. Those were
+the years when Army examiners gave thousands of marks for Latin,
+and it was Mr. King's hated business to defeat them.</p>
+<p>Hear him, then, on a raw November morning at second lesson.</p>
+<p>'Aha!' he began, rubbing his hands. '<i>Cras ingens iterabimus
+aequor.</i> Our portion to-day is the Fifth Ode of the Third Book,
+I believe--concerning one Regulus, a gentleman. And how often have
+we been through it?'</p>
+<p>'Twice, sir,' said Malpass, head of the Form.</p>
+<p>Mr. King shuddered. 'Yes, twice, quite literally,' he said.
+'To-day, with an eye to your Army <i>viva-voce</i>
+examinations--ugh!--I shall exact somewhat freer and more florid
+renditions. With feeling and comprehension if that be possible. I
+except'--here his eye swept the back benches--'our friend and
+companion Beetle, from whom, now as always, I demand an absolutely
+literal translation.' The form laughed subserviently.</p>
+<p>'Spare his blushes! Beetle charms us first.'</p>
+<p>Beetle stood up, confident in the possession of a guaranteed
+construe, left behind by M'Turk, who had that day gone into the
+sick-house with a cold. Yet he was too wary a hand to show
+confidence.</p>
+<p>'<i>Credidimus</i>, we--believe--we have believed,' he opened in
+hesitating slow time, '<i>tonantem Joven</i>, thundering
+Jove--<i>regnare</i>, to reign--<i>caelo</i>, in heaven.
+<i>Augustus</i>, Augustus--<i>habebitur</i>, will be held or
+considered--<i>praesens divus</i>, a present God--<i>adjectis
+Britannis</i>, the Britons being added--<i>imperio</i>, to the
+Empire--<i>gravibusque Persis</i>, with the heavy--er, stern
+Persians.'</p>
+<p>'What?'</p>
+<p>'The grave or stern Persians.' Beetle pulled up with the
+'Thank-God-I-have-done-my-duty' air of Nelson in the cockpit.</p>
+<p>'I am quite aware,' said King, 'that the first stanza is about
+the extent of your knowledge, but continue, sweet one, continue.
+<i>Gravibus</i>, by the way, is usually translated as
+"troublesome."'</p>
+<p>Beetle drew a long and tortured breath. The second stanza (which
+carries over to the third) of that Ode is what is technically
+called a 'stinker.' But M'Turk had done him handsomely.</p>
+<p>'<i>Milesne Crassi</i>, had--has the soldier of
+Crassus--<i>vixit</i>, lived--<i>turpis maritus</i>, a disgraceful
+husband--'</p>
+<p>'You slurred the quantity of the word after <i>turpis</i>,' said
+King. 'Let's hear it.'</p>
+<p>Beetle guessed again, and for a wonder hit the correct quantity.
+'Er--a disgraceful husband--<i>conjuge barbara</i>, with a
+barbarous spouse.'</p>
+<p>'Why do you select <i>that</i> disgustful equivalent out of all
+the dictionary?' King snapped. 'Isn't "wife" good enough for
+you?'</p>
+<p>'Yes, sir. But what do I do about this bracket, sir? Shall I
+take it now?'</p>
+<p>'Confine yourself at present to the soldier of Crassus.'</p>
+<p>'Yes, sir. <i>Et</i>, and--<i>consenuit</i>, has he grown
+old--<i>in armis</i>, in the--er--arms--<i>hositum socerorum</i>,
+of his father-in-law's enemies.'</p>
+<p>'Who? How? Which?'</p>
+<p>'Arms of his enemies' fathers-in-law, sir.'</p>
+<p>'Tha-anks. By the way, what meaning might you attach to <i>in
+armis</i>?'</p>
+<p>'Oh, weapons--weapons of war, sir.' There was a virginal note in
+Beetle's voice as though he had been falsely accused of uttering
+indecencies. 'Shall I take the bracket now, sir?'</p>
+<p>'Since it seems to be troubling you.'</p>
+<p>'<i>Pro Curia</i>, O for the Senate House--<i>inversique
+mores</i>, and manners upset--upside down.'</p>
+<p>'Ve-ry like your translation. Meantime, the soldier of
+Crassus?'</p>
+<p>'<i>Sub rege Medo</i>, under a Median King--<i>Marsus et
+Apulus</i>, he being a Marsian and an Apulian.'</p>
+<p>'Who? The Median King?'</p>
+<p>'No, sir. The soldier of Crassus. <i>Oblittus</i> agrees with
+<i>milesne Crassi</i>, sir,' volunteered too-hasty Beetle.</p>
+<p>'Does it? It doesn't with <i>me</i>.'</p>
+<p>'<i>Oh-blight-us</i>,' Beetle corrected hastily,
+'forgetful--<i>anciliorum</i>, of the shields, or trophies--<i>et
+nominis</i>, and the--his name--<i>et togae</i>, and the
+toga--<i>eternaeque Vestae</i>, and eternal Vesta--<i>incolumi
+Jove</i>, Jove being safe--<i>et urbe Roma</i>, and the Roman
+city.' With an air of hardly restrained zeal--'Shall I go on,
+sir?'</p>
+<p>Mr. King winced. 'No, thank you. You have indeed given us a
+translation! May I ask if it conveys any meaning whatever to your
+so-called mind?'</p>
+<p>'Oh, I think so, sir.' This with gentle toleration for Horace
+and all his works.</p>
+<p>'We envy you. Sit down.'</p>
+<p>Beetle sat down relieved, well knowing that a reef of uncharted
+genitives stretched ahead of him, on which in spite of M'Turk's
+sailing-directions he would infallibly have been wrecked.</p>
+<p>Rattray, who took up the task, steered neatly through them and
+came unscathed to port.</p>
+<p>'Here we require drama,' said King. 'Regulus himself is speaking
+now. Who shall represent the provident-minded Regulus? Winton, will
+you kindly oblige?'</p>
+<p>Winton of King's House, a long, heavy, tow-headed Second Fifteen
+forward, overdue for his First Fifteen colours, and in aspect like
+an earnest, elderly horse, rose up, and announced, among other
+things, that he had seen 'signs affixed to Punic deluges.' Half the
+Form shouted for joy, and the other half for joy that there was
+something to shout about.</p>
+<p>Mr. King opened and shut his eyes with great swiftness.
+'<i>Signa adfixa delubris</i>,' he gasped. 'So <i>delubris</i> is
+"deluges" is it? Winton, in all our dealings, have I ever suspected
+you of a jest?'</p>
+<p>'No, sir,' said the rigid and angular Winton, while the Form
+rocked about him.</p>
+<p>'And yet you assert <i>delubris</i> means "deluges." Whether I
+am a fit subject for such a jape is, of course, a matter of
+opinion, but.... Winton, you are normally conscientious. May we
+assume you looked out <i>delubris</i>?'</p>
+<p>'No, sir.' Winton was privileged to speak that truth dangerous
+to all who stand before Kings.</p>
+<p>''Made a shot at it then?'</p>
+<p>Every line of Winton's body showed he had done nothing of the
+sort. Indeed, the very idea that 'Pater' Winton (and a boy is not
+called 'Pater' by companions for his frivolity) would make a shot
+at anything was beyond belief. But he replied, 'Yes,' and all the
+while worked with his right heel as though he were heeling a ball
+at punt-about.</p>
+<p>Though none dared to boast of being a favourite with King, the
+taciturn, three-cornered Winton stood high in his House-Master's
+opinion. It seemed to save him neither rebuke nor punishment, but
+the two were in some fashion sympathetic.</p>
+<p>'Hm!' said King drily. 'I was going to say--<i>Flagito additis
+damnum</i>, but I think--I think I see the process. Beetle, the
+translation of <i>delubris</i>, please.'</p>
+<p>Beetle raised his head from his shaking arm long enough to
+answer: 'Ruins, sir.'</p>
+<p>There was an impressive pause while King checked off crimes on
+his fingers. Then to Beetle the much-enduring man addressed winged
+words:</p>
+<p>'Guessing,' said he. 'Guessing, Beetle, as usual, from the look
+of <i>delubris</i> that it bore some relation to <i>diluvium</i> or
+deluge, you imparted the result of your half-baked lucubrations to
+Winton who seems to have been lost enough to have accepted it.
+Observing next, your companion's fall, from the presumed security
+of your undistinguished position in the rear-guard, you took
+another pot-shot. The turbid chaos of your mind threw up some
+memory of the word "dilapidations" which you have pitifully
+attempted to disguise under the synonym of "ruins."'</p>
+<p>As this was precisely what Beetle had done he looked hurt but
+forgiving. 'We will attend to this later,' said King. 'Go on,
+Winton, and retrieve yourself.'</p>
+<p><i>Delubris</i> happened to be the one word which Winton had not
+looked out and had asked Beetle for, when they were settling into
+their places. He forged ahead with no further trouble. Only when he
+rendered <i>scilicet</i> as 'forsooth,' King erupted.</p>
+<p>'Regulus,' he said, 'was not a leader-writer for the penny
+press, nor, for that matter, was Horace. Regulus says: "The soldier
+ransomed by gold will come keener for the fight--will he by--by
+gum!" <i>That's</i> the meaning of <i>scilicet</i>. It indicates
+contempt--bitter contempt. "Forsooth," forsooth! You'll be talking
+about "speckled beauties" and "eventually transpire" next. Howell,
+what do you make of that doubled "Vidi ego--ego vidi"? It wasn't
+put in to fill up the metre, you know.'</p>
+<p>'Isn't it intensive, sir?' said Howell, afflicted by a genuine
+interest in what he read. 'Regulus was a bit in earnest about Rome
+making no terms with Carthage--and he wanted to let the Romans
+understand it, didn't he, sir?'</p>
+<p>'Less than your usual grace, but the fact. Regulus <i>was</i> in
+earnest. He was also engaged at the same time in cutting his own
+throat with every word he uttered. He knew Carthage which (your
+examiners won't ask you this so you needn't take notes) was a sort
+of God-forsaken nigger Manchester. Regulus was not thinking about
+his own life. He was telling Rome the truth. He was playing for his
+side. Those lines from the eighteenth to the fortieth ought to be
+written in blood. Yet there are things in human garments which will
+tell you that Horace was a fl&acirc;neur--a man about town. Avoid
+such beings. Horace knew a very great deal. <i>He</i> knew! <i>Erit
+ille fortis</i>--"will he be brave who once to faithless foes has
+knelt?" And again (stop pawing with your hooves, Thornton!) <i>hic
+unde vitam sumeret inscius</i>. That means roughly--but I perceive
+I am ahead of my translators. Begin at <i>hic unde</i>, Vernon, and
+let us see if you have the spirit of Regulus.'</p>
+<p>Now no one expected fireworks from gentle Paddy Vernon,
+sub-prefect of Hartopp's House, but, as must often be the case with
+growing boys, his mind was in abeyance for the time being, and he
+said, all in a rush, on behalf of Regulus: '<i>O magna Carthago
+probrosis altior Italiae ruinis</i>, O Carthage, thou wilt stand
+forth higher than the ruins of Italy.'</p>
+<p>Even Beetle, most lenient of critics, was interested at this
+point, though he did not join the half-groan of reprobation from
+the wiser heads of the Form.</p>
+<p>'<i>Please</i> don't mind me,' said King, and Vernon very kindly
+did not. He ploughed on thus: 'He (Regulus) is related to have
+removed from himself the kiss of the shameful wife and of his small
+children as less by the head, and, being stern, to have placed his
+virile visage on the ground.'</p>
+<p>Since King loved 'virile' about as much as he did 'spouse' or
+'forsooth' the Form looked up hopefully. But Jove thundered
+not.</p>
+<p>'Until,' Vernon continued, 'he should have confirmed the sliding
+fathers as being the author of counsel never given under an
+alias.'</p>
+<p>He stopped, conscious of stillness round him like the dread calm
+of the typhoon's centre. King's opening voice was sweeter than
+honey.</p>
+<p>'I am painfully aware by bitter experience that I cannot give
+you any idea of the passion, the power, the--the essential guts of
+the lines which you have so foully outraged in our presence. But--'
+the note changed, 'so far as in me lies, I will strive to bring
+home to you, Vernon, the fact that there exist in Latin a few
+pitiful rules of grammar, of syntax, nay, even of declension, which
+were not created for your incult sport--your Boeotian diversion.
+You will, therefore, Vernon, write out and bring to me to-morrow a
+word-for-word English-Latin translation of the Ode, together with a
+full list of all adjectives--an adjective is not a verb, Vernon, as
+the Lower Third will tell you--all adjectives, their number, case,
+and gender. Even now I haven't begun to deal with you
+faithfully.'</p>
+<p>'I--I'm very sorry, sir,' Vernon stammered.</p>
+<p>'You mistake the symptoms, Vernon. You are possibly discomfited
+by the imposition, but sorrow postulates some sort of mind,
+intellect, <i>nous</i>. Your rendering of <i>probrosis</i> alone
+stamps you as lower than the beasts of the field. Will some one
+take the taste out of our mouths? And--talking of tastes--' He
+coughed. There was a distinct flavour of chlorine gas in the air.
+Up went an eyebrow, though King knew perfectly well what it
+meant.</p>
+<p>'Mr. Hartopp's st--science class next door,' said Malpass.</p>
+<p>'Oh yes. I had forgotten. Our newly established Modern Side, of
+course. Perowne, open the windows; and Winton, go on once more from
+<i>interque maerentes</i>.'</p>
+<p>'And hastened away,' said Winton, 'surrounded by his mourning
+friends, into--into illustrious banishment. But I got that out of
+Conington, sir,' he added in one conscientious breath.</p>
+<p>'I am aware. The master generally knows his ass's crib, though I
+acquit <i>you</i> of any intention that way. Can you suggest
+anything for <i>egregius exul</i>? Only "egregious exile"? I fear
+"egregious" is a good word ruined. No! You can't in this case
+improve on Conington. Now then for <i>atqui sciebat quae sibi
+barbarus tortor pararet</i>. The whole force of it lies in the
+<i>atqui</i>.'</p>
+<p>'Although he knew,' Winton suggested.</p>
+<p>'Stronger than that, I think.'</p>
+<p>'He who knew well,' Malpass interpolated.</p>
+<p>'Ye-es. "Well though he knew." I don't like Conington's
+"well-witting." It's Wardour Street.'</p>
+<p>'Well though he knew what the savage torturer was--was getting
+ready for him,' said Winton.</p>
+<p>'Ye-es. Had in store for him.'</p>
+<p>'Yet he brushed aside his kinsmen and the people delaying his
+return.'</p>
+<p>'Ye-es; but then how do you render <i>obstantes</i>?'</p>
+<p>'If it's a free translation mightn't <i>obstantes</i> and
+<i>morantem</i> come to about the same thing, sir?'</p>
+<p>'Nothing comes to "about the same thing" with Horace, Winton. As
+I have said, Horace was not a journalist. No, I take it that his
+kinsmen bodily withstood his departure, whereas the
+crowd--<i>populumque</i>--the democracy stood about futilely
+pitying him and getting in the way. Now for that noblest of
+endings--<i>quam si clientum</i>,' and King ran off into the
+quotation:</p>
+<blockquote>'As though some tedious business o'er<br>
+Of clients' court, his journey lay<br>
+Towards Venafrum's grassy floor<br>
+Or Sparta-built Tarentum's bay.</blockquote>
+<p>All right, Winton. Beetle, when you've quite finished dodging
+the fresh air yonder, give me the meaning of <i>tendens</i>--and
+turn down your collar.'</p>
+<p>'Me, sir? <i>Tendens</i>, sir? Oh! Stretching away in the
+direction of, sir.'</p>
+<p>'Idiot! Regulus was not a feature of the landscape. He was a
+man, self-doomed to death by torture. <i>Atqui,
+sciebat</i>--knowing it--having achieved it for his country's
+sake--can't you hear that <i>atqui</i> cut like a knife?--he moved
+off with some dignity. That is why Horace out of the whole golden
+Latin tongue chose the one word "tendens"--which is utterly
+untranslatable.'</p>
+<p>The gross injustice of being asked to translate it, converted
+Beetle into a young Christian martyr, till King buried his nose in
+his handkerchief again.</p>
+<p>'I think they've broken another gas-bottle next door, sir,' said
+Howell. 'They're always doing it.' The Form coughed as more
+chlorine came in.</p>
+<p>'Well, I suppose we must be patient with the Modern Side,' said
+King. 'But it is almost insupportable for this Side. Vernon, what
+are you grinning at?'</p>
+<p>Vernon's mind had returned to him glowing and inspired. He
+chuckled as he underlined his Horace.</p>
+<p>'It appears to amuse you,' said King. 'Let us participate. What
+is it?'</p>
+<p>'The last two lines of the Tenth Ode, in this book, sir,' was
+Vernon's amazing reply.</p>
+<p>'What? Oh, I see. <i>Non hoc semper erit liminis aut aquae
+caelestis patiens latus</i><a name="FNanchor2"></a><a href=
+"#Footnote_2">[2]</a>.' King's mouth twitched to hide a grin. 'Was
+that done with intention?'</p>
+<blockquote><a name="Footnote_2"></a><a href="#FNanchor2">[2]</a>
+'This side will not always be patient of rain and waiting on the
+threshold.'</blockquote>
+<p>'I--I thought it fitted, sir.'</p>
+<p>'It does. It's distinctly happy. What put it into your thick
+head, Paddy?'</p>
+<p>'I don't know, sir, except we did the Ode last term.'</p>
+<p>'And you remembered? The same head that minted <i>probrosis</i>
+as a verb! Vernon, you are an enigma. No! This Side will <i>not</i>
+always be patient of unheavenly gases and waters. I will make
+representations to our so-called Moderns. Meantime (who shall say I
+am not just?) I remit you your accrued pains and penalties in
+regard to <i>probrosim, probrosis, probrosit</i> and other
+enormities. I oughtn't to do it, but this Side is occasionally
+human. By no means bad, Paddy.'</p>
+<p>'Thank you, sir,' said Vernon, wondering how inspiration had
+visited him.</p>
+<p>Then King, with a few brisk remarks about Science, headed them
+back to Regulus, of whom and of Horace and Rome and evil-minded
+commercial Carthage and of the democracy eternally futile, he
+explained, in all ages and climes, he spoke for ten minutes;
+passing thence to the next Ode--<i>Delicta Majorum</i>--where he
+fetched up, full-voiced, upon--'<i>Dis te minorem quod geris
+imperas</i>' (Thou rulest because thou bearest thyself as lower
+than the Gods)--making it a text for a discourse on manners,
+morals, and respect for authority as distinct from bottled gases,
+which lasted till the bell rang. Then Beetle, concertinaing his
+books, observed to Winton, 'When King's really on tap he's an
+interestin' dog. Hartopp's chlorine uncorked him.'</p>
+<p>'Yes; but why did you tell me <i>delubris</i> was "deluges," you
+silly ass?' said Winton.</p>
+<p>'Well, that uncorked him too. Look out, you hoof-handed old
+owl!' Winton had cleared for action as the Form poured out like
+puppies at play and was scragging Beetle. Stalky from behind
+collared Winton low. The three fell in confusion.</p>
+<p>'<i>Dis te minorem quod geris imperas</i>,' quoth Stalky,
+ruffling Winton's lint-white locks. 'Mustn't jape with Number Five
+study. Don't be too virtuous. Don't brood over it. 'Twon't count
+against you in your future caree-ah. Cheer up, Pater.'</p>
+<p>'Pull him off my--er--essential guts, will you?' said Beetle
+from beneath. 'He's squashin' 'em.'</p>
+<p>They dispersed to their studies.</p>
+<hr style="width: 25%;">
+<p>No one, the owner least of all, can explain what is in a growing
+boy's mind. It might have been the blind ferment of adolescence;
+Stalky's random remarks about virtue might have stirred him; like
+his betters he might have sought popularity by way of clowning; or,
+as the Head asserted years later, the only known jest of his
+serious life might have worked on him, as a sober-sided man's one
+love colours and dislocates all his after days. But, at the next
+lesson, mechanical drawing with Mr. Lidgett who as drawing-master
+had very limited powers of punishment, Winton fell suddenly from
+grace and let loose a live mouse in the form-room. The whole form,
+shrieking and leaping high, threw at it all the plaster cones,
+pyramids, and fruit in high relief--not to mention ink-pots--that
+they could lay hands on. Mr. Lidgett reported at once to the Head;
+Winton owned up to his crime, which, venial in the Upper Third,
+pardonable at a price in the Lower Fourth, was, of course, rank
+ruffianism on the part of a Fifth Form boy; and so, by graduated
+stages, he arrived at the Head's study just before lunch, penitent,
+perturbed, annoyed with himself and--as the Head said to King in
+the corridor after the meal--more human than he had known him in
+seven years.</p>
+<p>'You see,' the Head drawled on, 'Winton's only fault is a
+certain costive and unaccommodating virtue. So this comes very
+happily.'</p>
+<p>'I've never noticed any sign of it,' said King. Winton was in
+King's House, and though King as pro-consul might, and did,
+infernally oppress his own Province, once a black and yellow cap
+was in trouble at the hands of the Imperial authority King fought
+for him to the very last steps of Caesar's throne.</p>
+<p>'Well, you yourself admitted just now that a mouse was beneath
+the occasion,' the Head answered.</p>
+<p>'It was.' Mr. King did not love Mr. Lidgett. 'It should have
+been a rat. But--but--I hate to plead it--it's the lad's first
+offence.'</p>
+<p>'Could you have damned him more completely, King?'</p>
+<p>'Hm. What is the penalty?' said King, in retreat, but keeping up
+a rear-guard action.</p>
+<p>'Only my usual few lines of Virgil to be shown up by
+tea-time.'</p>
+<p>The Head's eyes turned slightly to that end of the corridor
+where Mullins, Captain of the Games ('Pot,' 'old Pot,' or
+'Potiphar' Mullins), was pinning up the usual Wednesday
+notice--'Big, Middle, and Little Side Football--A to K, L to Z, 3
+to 4.45 P.M.'</p>
+<p>You cannot write out the Head's usual few (which means five
+hundred) Latin lines and play football for one hour and
+three-quarters between the hours of 1.30 and 5 P.M. Winton had
+evidently no intention of trying to do so, for he hung about the
+corridor with a set face and an uneasy foot. Yet it was law in the
+school, compared with which that of the Medes and Persians was no
+more than a non-committal resolution, that any boy, outside the
+First Fifteen, who missed his football for any reason whatever, and
+had not a written excuse, duly signed by competent authority to
+explain his absence, would receive not less than three strokes with
+a ground-ash from the Captain of the Games, generally a youth
+between seventeen and eighteen years, rarely under eleven stone
+('Pot' was nearer thirteen), and always in hard condition.</p>
+<p>King knew without inquiry that the Head had given Winton no such
+excuse.</p>
+<p>'But he is practically a member of the First Fifteen. He has
+played for it all this term,' said King. 'I believe his Cap should
+have arrived last week.'</p>
+<p>'His Cap has not been given him. Officially, therefore, he is
+naught. I rely on old Pot.'</p>
+<p>'But Mullins is Winton's study-mate,' King persisted.</p>
+<p>Pot Mullins and Pater Winton were cousins and rather close
+friends.</p>
+<p>'That will make no difference to Mullins--or Winton, if I know
+'em,' said the Head.</p>
+<p>'But--but,' King played his last card desperately, 'I was going
+to recommend Winton for extra sub-prefect in my House, now Carton
+has gone.'</p>
+<p>'Certainly,' said the Head. 'Why not? He will be excellent by
+tea-time, I hope.'</p>
+<p>At that moment they saw Mr. Lidgett, tripping down the corridor,
+waylaid by Winton.</p>
+<p>'It's about that mouse-business at mechanical drawing,' Winton
+opened, swinging across his path.</p>
+<p>'Yes, yes, highly disgraceful,' Mr. Lidgett panted.</p>
+<p>'I know it was,' said Winton. 'It--it was a cad's trick
+because--'</p>
+<p>'Because you knew I couldn't give you more than fifty lines,'
+said Mr. Lidgett.</p>
+<p>'Well, anyhow I've come to apologise for it.'</p>
+<p>'Certainly,' said Mr. Lidgett, and added, for he was a kindly
+man, 'I think that shows quite right feeling. I'll tell the Head at
+once I'm satisfied.'</p>
+<p>'No--no!' The boy's still unmended voice jumped from the growl
+to the squeak. 'I didn't mean <i>that</i>! I--I did it on
+principle. Please don't--er--do anything of that kind.'</p>
+<p>Mr. Lidgett looked him up and down and, being an artist,
+understood.</p>
+<p>'Thank you, Winton,' he said. 'This shall be between
+ourselves.'</p>
+<p>'You heard?' said King, indecent pride in his voice.</p>
+<p>'Of course. You thought he was going to get Lidgett to beg him
+off the impot.'</p>
+<p>King denied this with so much warmth that the Head laughed and
+King went away in a huff.</p>
+<p>'By the way,' said the Head, 'I've told Winton to do his lines
+in your form-room--not in his study.'</p>
+<p>'Thanks,' said King over his shoulder, for the Head's orders had
+saved Winton and Mullins, who was doing extra Army work in the
+study, from an embarrassing afternoon together.</p>
+<p>An hour later, King wandered into his still form-room as though
+by accident. Winton was hard at work.</p>
+<p>'Aha!' said King, rubbing his hands. 'This does not look like
+games, Winton. Don't let me arrest your facile pen. Whence this
+sudden love for Virgil?'</p>
+<p>'Impot from the Head, sir, for that mouse-business this
+morning.'</p>
+<p>'Rumours thereof have reached us. That was a lapse on your part
+into Lower Thirdery which I don't quite understand.'</p>
+<p>The 'tump-tump' of the puntabouts before the sides settled to
+games came through the open window. Winton, like his House-Master,
+loved fresh air. Then they heard Paddy Vernon, sub-prefect on duty,
+calling the roll in the field and marking defaulters. Winton wrote
+steadily. King curled himself up on a desk, hands round knees. One
+would have said that the man was gloating over the boy's
+misfortune, but the boy understood.</p>
+<p>'<i>Dis te minorem quod geris imperas</i>,' King quoted
+presently. 'It is necessary to bear oneself as lower than the local
+gods--even than drawing-masters who are precluded from effective
+retaliation. I <i>do</i> wish you'd tried that mouse-game with me,
+Pater.'</p>
+<p>Winton grinned; then sobered 'It was a cad's trick, sir, to play
+on Mr. Lidgett.' He peered forward at the page he was copying.</p>
+<p>'Well, "the sin <i>I</i> impute to each frustrate ghost"--' King
+stopped himself. 'Why do you goggle like an owl? Hand me the
+Mantuan and I'll dictate. No matter. Any rich Virgilian measures
+will serve. I may peradventure recall a few.' He began:</p>
+<blockquote>'Tu regere imperio populos Romane memento<br>
+Hae tibi erunt artes pacisque imponere morem,<br>
+Parcere subjectis et debellare superbos.</blockquote>
+<p>There you have it all, Winton. Write that out twice and yet once
+again.'</p>
+<p>For the next forty minutes, with never a glance at the book,
+King paid out the glorious hexameters (and King could read Latin as
+though it were alive), Winton hauling them in and coiling them away
+behind him as trimmers in a telegraph-ship's hold coil away
+deep-sea cable. King broke from the Aeneid to the Georgics and back
+again, pausing now and then to translate some specially loved line
+or to dwell on the treble-shot texture of the ancient fabric. He
+did not allude to the coming interview with Mullins except at the
+last, when he said, 'I think at this juncture, Pater, I need not
+ask you for the precise significance of <i>atqui sciebat quae sibi
+barbarus tortor</i>.'</p>
+<p>The ungrateful Winton flushed angrily, and King loafed out to
+take five o'clock call-over, after which he invited little Hartopp
+to tea and a talk on chlorine-gas. Hartopp accepted the challenge
+like a bantam, and the two went up to King's study about the same
+time as Winton returned to the form-room beneath it to finish his
+lines.</p>
+<p>Then half a dozen of the Second Fifteen, who should have been
+washing, strolled in to condole with 'Pater' Winton, whose
+misfortune and its consequences were common talk. No one was more
+sincere than the long, red-headed, knotty-knuckled 'Paddy' Vernon,
+but, being a careless animal, he joggled Winton's desk.</p>
+<p>'Curse you for a silly ass!' said Winton. 'Don't do that.'</p>
+<p>No one is expected to be polite while under punishment, so
+Vernon, sinking his sub-prefectship, replied peacefully enough:</p>
+<p>'Well, don't be wrathy, Pater.'</p>
+<p>'I'm not,' said Winton. 'Get out! This ain't your House
+form-room.'</p>
+<p>''Form-room don't belong to you. Why don't you go to your own
+study?' Vernon replied.</p>
+<p>'Because Mullins is there waitin' for the victim,' said Stalky
+delicately, and they all laughed. 'You ought to have shaken that
+mouse out of your trouser-leg, Pater. That's the way <i>I</i> did
+in my youth. Pater's revertin' to his second childhood. Never mind,
+Pater, we all respect you and your future caree-ah.'</p>
+<p>Winton, still writhing, growled. Vernon leaning on the desk
+somehow shook it again. Then he laughed.</p>
+<p>'What are you grinning at?' Winton asked.</p>
+<p>'I was only thinkin' of <i>you</i> being sent up to take a
+lickin' from Pot. I swear I don't think it's fair. You've never
+shirked a game in your life, and you're as good as in the First
+Fifteen already. Your Cap ought to have been delivered last week,
+oughtn't it?'</p>
+<p>It was law in the school that no man could by any means enjoy
+the privileges and immunities of the First Fifteen till the black
+velvet cap with the gold tassel, made by dilatory Exeter
+outfitters, had been actually set on his head. Ages ago, a
+large-built and unruly Second Fifteen had attempted to change this
+law, but the prefects of that age were still larger, and the lively
+experiment had never been repeated.</p>
+<p>'Will you,' said Winton very slowly, 'kindly mind your own
+damned business, you cursed, clumsy, fat-headed fool?'</p>
+<p>The form-room was as silent as the empty field in the darkness
+outside. Vernon shifted his feet uneasily.</p>
+<p>'Well, <i>I</i> shouldn't like to take a lickin' from Pot,' he
+said.</p>
+<p>'Wouldn't you?' Winton asked, as he paged the sheets of lines
+with hands that shook.</p>
+<p>'No, I shouldn't,' said Vernon, his freckles growing more
+distinct on the bridge of his white nose.</p>
+<p>'Well, I'm going to take it'--Winton moved clear of the desk as
+he spoke. 'But <i>you're</i> going to take a lickin' from me
+first.' Before any one realised it, he had flung himself neighing
+against Vernon. No decencies were observed on either side, and the
+rest looked on amazed. The two met confusedly, Vernon trying to do
+what he could with his longer reach; Winton, insensible to blows,
+only concerned to drive his enemy into a corner and batter him to
+pulp. This he managed over against the fire-place, where Vernon
+dropped half-stunned. 'Now I'm going to give you your lickin','
+said Winton. 'Lie there till I get a ground-ash and I'll cut you to
+pieces. If you move, I'll chuck you out of the window.' He wound
+his hands into the boy's collar and waistband, and had actually
+heaved him half off the ground before the others with one accord
+dropped on his head, shoulders, and legs. He fought them crazily in
+an awful hissing silence. Stalky's sensitive nose was rubbed along
+the floor; Beetle received a jolt in the wind that sent him
+whistling and crowing against the wall; Perowne's forehead was cut,
+and Malpass came out with an eye that explained itself like a dying
+rainbow through a whole week.</p>
+<p>'Mad! Quite mad!' said Stalky, and for the third time wriggled
+back to Winton's throat. The door opened and King came in,
+Hartopp's little figure just behind him. The mound on the floor
+panted and heaved but did not rise, for Winton still squirmed
+vengefully. 'Only a little play, sir,' said Perowne. ''Only hit my
+head against a form.' This was quite true.</p>
+<p>'Oh,' said King. '<i>Dimovit obstantes propinquos.</i> You, I
+presume, are the <i>populus</i> delaying Winton's return
+to--Mullins, eh?'</p>
+<p>'No, sir,' said Stalky behind his claret-coloured handkerchief.
+'We're the <i>maerentes amicos</i>.'</p>
+<p>'Not bad! You see, some of it sticks after all,' King chuckled
+to Hartopp, and the two masters left without further inquiries.</p>
+<p>The boys sat still on the now-passive Winton.</p>
+<p>'Well,' said Stalky at last, 'of all the putrid he-asses, Pater,
+you are <i>the</i>--'</p>
+<p>'I'm sorry. I'm awfully sorry,' Winton began, and they let him
+rise. He held out his hand to the bruised and bewildered Vernon.
+'Sorry, Paddy. I--I must have lost my temper. I--I don't know
+what's the matter with me.'</p>
+<p>''Fat lot of good that'll do my face at tea,' Vernon grunted.
+'Why couldn't you say there was something wrong with you instead of
+lamming out like a lunatic? Is my lip puffy?'</p>
+<p>'Just a trifle. Look at my beak! Well, we got all these pretty
+marks at footer--owin' to the zeal with which we played the game,'
+said Stalky, dusting himself. 'But d'you think you're fit to be let
+loose again, Pater? 'Sure you don't want to kill another
+sub-prefect? I wish <i>I</i> was Pot. I'd cut your sprightly young
+soul out.'</p>
+<p>'I s'pose I ought to go to Pot now,' said Winton.</p>
+<p>'And let all the other asses see you lookin' like this! Not
+much. We'll all come up to Number Five Study and wash off in hot
+water. Beetle, you aren't damaged. Go along and light the
+gas-stove.'</p>
+<p>'There's a tin of cocoa in my study somewhere,' Perowne shouted
+after him. 'Rootle round till you find it, and take it up.'</p>
+<p>Separately, by different roads, Vernon's jersey pulled half over
+his head, the boys repaired to Number Five Study. Little Hartopp
+and King, I am sorry to say, leaned over the banisters of King's
+landing and watched.</p>
+<p>'Ve-ry human,' said little Hartopp. 'Your virtuous Winton,
+having got himself into trouble, takes it out of my poor old Paddy.
+I wonder what precise lie Paddy will tell about his face.'</p>
+<p>'But surely you aren't going to embarrass him by asking?' said
+King.</p>
+<p>'<i>Your</i> boy won,' said Hartopp.</p>
+<p>'To go back to what we were discussing,' said King quickly, 'do
+you pretend that your modern system of inculcating unrelated facts
+about chlorine, for instance, all of which may be proved fallacies
+by the time the boys grow up, can have any real bearing on
+education--even the low type of it that examiners expect?'</p>
+<p>'I maintain nothing. But is it any worse than your Chinese
+reiteration of uncomprehended syllables in a dead tongue?'</p>
+<p>'Dead, forsooth!' King fairly danced. 'The only living tongue on
+earth! Chinese! On my word, Hartopp!'</p>
+<p>'And at the end of seven years--how often have I said it?'
+Hartopp went on,--'seven years of two hundred and twenty days of
+six hours each, your victims go away with nothing, absolutely
+nothing, except, perhaps, if they've been very attentive, a
+dozen--no, I'll grant you twenty--one score of totally unrelated
+Latin tags which any child of twelve could have absorbed in two
+terms.'</p>
+<p>'But--but can't you realise that if our system brings later--at
+any rate--at a pinch--a simple understanding--grammar and Latinity
+apart--a mere glimpse of the significance (foul word!) of, we'll
+say, one Ode of Horace, one twenty lines of Virgil, we've got what
+we poor devils of ushers are striving after?'</p>
+<p>'And what might that be?' said Hartopp.</p>
+<p>'Balance, proportion, perspective--life. Your scientific man is
+the unrelated animal--the beast without background. Haven't you
+ever realised <i>that</i> in your atmosphere of stinks?'</p>
+<p>'Meantime you make them lose life for the sake of living,
+eh?'</p>
+<p>'Blind again, Hartopp! I told you about Paddy's quotation this
+morning. (But he made <i>probrosis</i> a verb, he did!) You
+yourself heard young Corkran's reference to <i>maerentes
+amicos</i>. It sticks--a little of it sticks among the
+barbarians.'</p>
+<p>'Absolutely and essentially Chinese,' said little Hartopp, who,
+alone of the common-room, refused to be outfaced by King. 'But I
+don't yet understand how Paddy came to be licked by Winton. Paddy's
+supposed to be something of a boxer.'</p>
+<p>'Beware of vinegar made from honey,' King replied. 'Pater, like
+some other people, is patient and long-suffering, but he has his
+limits. The Head is oppressing him damnably, too. As I pointed out,
+the boy has practically been in the First Fifteen since term
+began.'</p>
+<p>'But, my dear fellow, I've known you give a boy an impot and
+refuse him leave off games, again and again.'</p>
+<p>'Ah, but that was when there was real need to get at some oaf
+who couldn't be sensitised in any other way. Now, in our esteemed
+Head's action I see nothing but--'</p>
+<p>The conversation from this point does not concern us.</p>
+<p>Meantime Winton, very penitent and especially polite towards
+Vernon, was being cheered with cocoa in Number Five Study. They had
+some difficulty in stemming the flood of his apologies. He himself
+pointed out to Vernon that he had attacked a sub-prefect for no
+reason whatever, and, therefore, deserved official punishment.</p>
+<p>'I can't think what was the matter with me to-day,' he mourned.
+'Ever since that blasted mouse-business--'</p>
+<p>'Well, then, don't think,' said Stalky. 'Or do you want Paddy to
+make a row about it before all the school?'</p>
+<p>Here Vernon was understood to say that he would see Winton and
+all the school somewhere else.</p>
+<p>'And if you imagine Perowne and Malpass and me are goin' to give
+evidence at a prefects' meeting just to soothe your beastly
+conscience, you jolly well err,' said Beetle. 'I know what you
+did.'</p>
+<p>'What?' croaked Pater, out of the valley of his humiliation.</p>
+<p>'You went Berserk. I've read all about it in
+<i>Hypatia</i>.'</p>
+<p>'What's "going Berserk"?' Winton asked.</p>
+<p>'Never you mind,' was the reply. 'Now, don't you feel awfully
+weak and seedy?'</p>
+<p>'I <i>am</i> rather tired,' said Winton, sighing.</p>
+<p>'That's what you ought to be. You've gone Berserk and pretty
+soon you'll go to sleep. But you'll probably be liable to fits of
+it all your life,' Beetle concluded. ''Shouldn't wonder if you
+murdered some one some day.'</p>
+<p>'Shut up--you and your Berserks!' said Stalky. 'Go to Mullins
+now and get it over, Pater.'</p>
+<p>'I call it filthy unjust of the Head,' said Vernon. 'Anyhow,
+you've given me my lickin', old man. I hope Pot'll give you
+yours.'</p>
+<p>'I'm awfully sorry--awfully sorry,' was Winton's last word.</p>
+<p>It was the custom in that consulship to deal with games'
+defaulters between five o'clock call-over and tea. Mullins, who was
+old enough to pity, did not believe in letting boys wait through
+the night till the chill of the next morning for their punishments.
+He was finishing off the last of the small fry and their excuses
+when Winton arrived.</p>
+<p>'But, please, Mullins'--this was Babcock tertius, a dear little
+twelve-year-old mother's darling--'I had an awful hack on the knee.
+I've been to the Matron about it and she gave me some iodine. I've
+been rubbing it in all day. I thought that would be an excuse
+off.'</p>
+<p>'Let's have a look at it,' said the impassive Mullins. 'That's a
+shin-bruise--about a week old. Touch your toes. I'll give you the
+iodine.'</p>
+<p>Babcock yelled loudly as he had many times before. The face of
+Jevons, aged eleven, a new boy that dark wet term, low in the
+House, low in the Lower School, and lowest of all in his home-sick
+little mind turned white at the horror of the sight. They could
+hear his working lips part stickily as Babcock wailed his way out
+of hearing.</p>
+<p>'Hullo, Jevons! What brings you here?' said Mullins.</p>
+<p>'Pl-ease, sir, I went for a walk with Babcock tertius.'</p>
+<p>'Did you? Then I bet you went to the tuck-shop--and you paid,
+didn't you?'</p>
+<p>A nod. Jevons was too terrified to speak.</p>
+<p>'Of course, and I bet Babcock told you that old Pot 'ud let you
+off because it was the first time.'</p>
+<p>Another nod with a ghost of a smile in it.</p>
+<p>'All right.' Mullins picked Jevons up before he could guess what
+was coming, laid him on the table with one hand, with the other
+gave him three emphatic spanks, then held him high in air.</p>
+<p>'Now you tell Babcock tertius that he's got you a licking from
+me, and see you jolly well pay it back to him. And when you're
+prefect of games don't you let any one shirk his footer without a
+written excuse. Where d'you play in your game?'</p>
+<p>'Forward, sir.'</p>
+<p>'You can do better than that. I've seen you run like a young
+buck-rabbit. Ask Dickson from me to try you as three-quarter next
+game, will you? Cut along.'</p>
+<p>Jevons left, warm for the first time that day, enormously set up
+in his own esteem, and very hot against the deceitful Babcock.</p>
+<p>Mullins turned to Winton. 'Your name's on the list, Pater.'
+Winton nodded.</p>
+<p>'I know it. The Head landed me with an impot for that
+mouse-business at mechanical drawing. No excuse.'</p>
+<p>'He meant it then?' Mullins jerked his head delicately towards
+the ground-ash on the table. 'I heard something about it.'</p>
+<p>Winton nodded. 'A rotten thing to do,' he said. 'Can't think
+what I was doing ever to do it. It counts against a fellow so; and
+there's some more too--'</p>
+<p>'All right, Pater. Just stand clear of our photo-bracket, will
+you?'</p>
+<p>The little formality over, there was a pause. Winton swung
+round, yawned in Pot's astonished face and staggered towards the
+window-seat.</p>
+<p>'What's the matter with you, Dick? Ill?'</p>
+<p>'No. Perfectly all right, thanks. Only--only a little sleepy.'
+Winton stretched himself out, and then and there fell deeply and
+placidly asleep.</p>
+<p>'It isn't a faint,' said the experienced Mullins, 'or his pulse
+wouldn't act. 'Tisn't a fit or he'd snort and twitch. It can't be
+sunstroke, this term, and he hasn't been over-training for
+anything.' He opened Winton's collar, packed a cushion under his
+head, threw a rug over him and sat down to listen to the regular
+breathing. Before long Stalky arrived, on pretence of borrowing a
+book. He looked at the window-seat.</p>
+<p>''Noticed anything wrong with Winton lately?' said Mullins.</p>
+<p>''Notice anything wrong with my beak?' Stalky replied. 'Pater
+went Berserk after call-over, and fell on a lot of us for jesting
+with him about his impot. You ought to see Malpass's eye.'</p>
+<p>'You mean that Pater fought?' said Mullins.</p>
+<p>'Like a devil. Then he nearly went to sleep in our study just
+now. I expect he'll be all right when he wakes up. Rummy business!
+Conscientious old bargee. You ought to have heard his
+apologies.'</p>
+<p>'But Pater can't fight one little bit,' Mullins repeated.</p>
+<p>''Twasn't fighting. He just tried to murder every one.' Stalky
+described the affair, and when he left Mullins went off to take
+counsel with the Head, who, out of a cloud of blue smoke, told him
+that all would yet be well.</p>
+<p>'Winton,' said he, 'is a little stiff in his moral joints. He'll
+get over that. If he asks you whether to-day's doings will count
+against him in his--'</p>
+<p>'But you know it's important to him, sir. His people
+aren't--very well off,' said Mullins.</p>
+<p>'That's why I'm taking all this trouble. You must reassure him,
+Pot. I have overcrowded him with new experiences. Oh, by the way,
+has his Cap come?'</p>
+<p>'It came at dinner, sir.' Mullins laughed.</p>
+<p>Sure enough, when he waked at tea-time, Winton proposed to take
+Mullins all through every one of his day's lapses from grace, and
+'Do you think it will count against me?' said he.</p>
+<p>'Don't you fuss so much about yourself and your silly career,'
+said Mullins. 'You're all right. And oh--here's your First Cap at
+last. Shove it up on the bracket and come on to tea.'</p>
+<p>They met King on their way, stepping statelily and rubbing his
+hands. 'I have applied,' said he, 'for the services of an
+additional sub-prefect in Carton's unlamented absence. Your name,
+Winton, seems to have found favour with the powers that be,
+and--and all things considered--I am disposed to give my support to
+the nomination. You are therefore a quasi-lictor.'</p>
+<p>'Then it didn't count against me,' Winton gasped as soon as they
+were out of hearing.</p>
+<p>A Captain of Games can jest with a sub-prefect publicly.</p>
+<p>'You utter ass!' said Mullins, and caught him by the back of his
+stiff neck and ran him down to the hall where the sub-prefects, who
+sit below the salt, made him welcome with the economical
+bloater-paste of mid-term.</p>
+<p>King and little Hartopp were sparring in the Reverend John
+Gillett's study at 10 P.M.--classical <i>versus</i> modern as
+usual.</p>
+<p>'Character--proportion--background,' snarled King. 'That is the
+essence of the Humanities.'</p>
+<p>'Analects of Confucius,' little Hartopp answered.</p>
+<p>'Time,' said the Reverend John behind the soda-water. 'You men
+oppress me. Hartopp, what did you say to Paddy in your dormitories
+to-night? Even <i>you</i> couldn't have overlooked his face.'</p>
+<p>'But I did,' said Hartopp calmly. 'I wasn't even humorous about
+it as some clerics might have been. I went straight through and
+said naught.'</p>
+<p>'Poor Paddy! Now, for my part,' said King, 'and you know I am
+not lavish in my praises, I consider Winton a first-class type;
+absolutely first-class.'</p>
+<p>'Ha-ardly,' said the Reverend John. 'First-class of the second
+class, I admit. The very best type of second class but'--he shook
+his head--'it should have been a rat. Pater'll never be anything
+more than a Colonel of Engineers.'</p>
+<p>'What do you base that verdict on?' said King stiffly.</p>
+<p>'He came to me after prayers--with all his conscience.'</p>
+<p>'Poor old Pater. Was it the mouse?' said little Hartopp.</p>
+<p>'That, and what he called his uncontrollable temper, and his
+responsibilities as sub-prefect.'</p>
+<p>'And you?'</p>
+<p>'If we had had what is vulgarly called a pi-jaw he'd have had
+hysterics. So I recommended a dose of Epsom salts. He'll take it,
+too--conscientiously. Don't eat me, King. Perhaps, he'll be a
+K.C.B.'</p>
+<p>Ten o'clock struck and the Army class boys in the further
+studies coming to their houses after an hour's extra work passed
+along the gravel path below. Some one was chanting, to the tune of
+'White sand and grey sand,' <i>Dis te minorem quod geris
+imperas</i>. He stopped outside Mullins' study. They heard Mullins'
+window slide up and then Stalky's voice:</p>
+<p>'Ah! Good-evening, Mullins, my <i>barbarus tortor</i>. We're the
+waits. We have come to inquire after the local Berserk. Is he doin'
+as well as can be expected in his new caree-ah?'</p>
+<p>'Better than you will, in a sec, Stalky,' Mullins grunted.</p>
+<p>'Glad of that. We thought he'd like to know that Paddy has been
+carried to the sick-house in ravin' delirium. They think it's
+concussion of the brain.'</p>
+<p>'Why, he was all right at prayers,' Winton began earnestly, and
+they heard a laugh in the background as Mullins slammed down the
+window.</p>
+<p>''Night, Regulus,' Stalky sang out, and the light footsteps went
+on.</p>
+<p>'You see. It sticks. A little of it sticks among the
+barbarians,' said King.</p>
+<p>'Amen,' said the Reverend John. 'Go to bed.'</p>
+<br>
+<br>
+<hr style="width: 35%;">
+<br>
+<br>
+<a name="page273"></a>
+<div class="poem">
+<div class="stanza">
+<p class="i7"><b>A TRANSLATION</b></p>
+</div>
+<div class="stanza">
+<p class="i7"><b>HORACE, Bk. V. <i>Ode 3</i></b></p>
+</div>
+<div class="stanza">
+<p class="i3">There are whose study is of smells,</p>
+<p class="i4">And to attentive schools rehearse</p>
+<p class="i3">How something mixed with something else</p>
+<p class="i4">Makes something worse.</p>
+</div>
+<div class="stanza">
+<p class="i3">Some cultivate in broths impure</p>
+<p class="i4">The clients of our body--these,</p>
+<p class="i3">Increasing without Venus, cure,</p>
+<p class="i4">Or cause, disease.</p>
+</div>
+<div class="stanza">
+<p class="i3">Others the heated wheel extol,</p>
+<p class="i4">And all its offspring, whose concern</p>
+<p class="i3">Is how to make it farthest roll</p>
+<p class="i4">And fastest turn.</p>
+</div>
+<div class="stanza">
+<p class="i3">Me, much incurious if the hour</p>
+<p class="i4">Present, or to be paid for, brings</p>
+<p class="i3">Me to Brundusium by the power</p>
+<p class="i4">Of wheels or wings;</p>
+</div>
+<div class="stanza">
+<p class="i3">Me, in whose breast no flame hath burned</p>
+<p class="i4">Life-long, save that by Pindar lit,</p>
+<p class="i3">Such lore leaves cold: I am not turned</p>
+<p class="i4">Aside to it</p>
+</div>
+<div class="stanza">
+<p class="i3">More than when, sunk in thought profound</p>
+<p class="i4">Of what the unaltering Gods require,</p>
+<p class="i3">My steward (friend but slave) brings round</p>
+<p class="i4">Logs for my fire.</p>
+</div>
+</div>
+<br>
+<br>
+<hr style="width: 35%;">
+<br>
+<br>
+<a name="page275"></a>
+<h2>The Edge of the Evening</h2>
+<h3>(1913)</h3>
+<br>
+<div class="poem">
+<div class="stanza">
+<p class="i5">Ah! What avails the classic bent,</p>
+<p class="i6">And what the chosen word,</p>
+<p class="i5">Against the undoctored incident</p>
+<p class="i6">That actually occurred?</p>
+</div>
+<div class="stanza">
+<p class="i5">And what is Art whereto we press</p>
+<p class="i6">Through paint and prose and rhyme--</p>
+<p class="i5">When Nature in her nakedness</p>
+<p class="i6">Defeats us every time?</p>
+</div>
+</div>
+<br>
+<p>'Hi! Hi! Hold your horses! Stop!... Well! Well!' A lean man in a
+sable-lined overcoat leaped from a private car and barred my way up
+Pall Mall. 'You don't know me? You're excusable. I wasn't wearing
+much of anything last time we met--in South Africa.'</p>
+<p>The scales fell from my eyes, and I saw him once more in a
+sky-blue army shirt, behind barbed wire, among Dutch prisoners
+bathing at Simonstown, more than a dozen years ago<a name=
+"FNanchor3"></a><a href="#Footnote_3">[3]</a>. 'Why, it's
+Zigler--Laughton O. Zigler!' I cried. 'Well, I <i>am</i> glad to
+see you.'</p>
+<blockquote><a name="Footnote_3"></a><a href="#FNanchor3">[3]</a>
+'The Captive': <i>Traffics and Discoveries</i>.</blockquote>
+<p>'Oh no! You don't work any of your English on me. "So glad to
+see you, doncher know--an' ta-ta!" Do you reside in this
+village?'</p>
+<p>'No. I'm up here buying stores.'</p>
+<p>'Then you take my automobile. Where to?... Oh, I know
+<i>them</i>! My Lord Marshalton is one of the Directors. Pigott,
+drive to the Army and Navy Cooperative Supply Association Limited,
+Victoria Street, Westminister.'</p>
+<p>He settled himself on the deep dove-colour pneumatic cushions,
+and his smile was like the turning on of all the electrics. His
+teeth were whiter than the ivory fittings. He smelt of rare soap
+and cigarettes--such cigarettes as he handed me from a golden box
+with an automatic lighter. On my side of the car was a gold-mounted
+mirror, card and toilette case. I looked at him inquiringly.</p>
+<p>'Yes,' he nodded, 'two years after I quit the Cape. She's not an
+Ohio girl, though. She's in the country now. Is that right? She's
+at our little place in the country. We'll go there as soon as
+you're through with your grocery-list. Engagements? The only
+engagement you've got is to grab your grip--get your bag from your
+hotel, I mean--and come right along and meet her. You are the
+captive of <i>my</i> bow and spear now.'</p>
+<p>'I surrender,' I said meekly. 'Did the Zigler automatic gun do
+all this?' I pointed to the car fittings.</p>
+<p>'Psha! Think of your rememberin' that! Well, no. The Zigler is a
+great gun--the greatest ever--but life's too short, an' too
+interestin', to squander on pushing her in military society. I've
+leased my rights in her to a Pennsylvanian-Transylvanian citizen
+full of mentality and moral uplift. If those things weigh with the
+Chancelleries of Europe, he will make good and--I shall be
+surprised. Excuse me!'</p>
+<p>He bared his head as we passed the statue of the Great Queen
+outside Buckingham Palace.</p>
+<p>'A very great lady!' said he. 'I have enjoyed her hospitality.
+She represents one of the most wonderful institutions in the world.
+The next is the one we are going to. Mrs. Zigler uses 'em, and they
+break her up every week on returned empties.'</p>
+<p>'Oh, you mean the Stores?' I said.</p>
+<p>'Mrs. Zigler means it more. They are quite ambassadorial in
+their outlook. I guess I'll wait outside and pray while you wrestle
+with 'em.'</p>
+<p>My business at the Stores finished, and my bag retrieved from
+the hotel, his moving palace slid us into the country.</p>
+<p>'I owe it to you,' Zigler began as smoothly as the car, 'to tell
+you what I am now. I represent the business end of the American
+Invasion. Not the blame cars themselves--I wouldn't be found dead
+in one--but the tools that make 'em. I am the Zigler Higher-Speed
+Tool and Lathe Trust. The Trust, sir, is entirely my own--in my own
+inventions. I am the Renzalaer ten-cylinder a&euml;rial--the
+lightest aeroplane-engine on the market--one price, one power, one
+guarantee. I am the Orlebar Paper-welt, Pulp-panel Company for
+aeroplane bodies; and I am the Rush Silencer for military
+aeroplanes--absolutely silent--which the Continent leases under
+royalty. With three exceptions, the British aren't wise to it yet.
+That's all I represent at present. You saw me take off my hat to
+your late Queen? I owe every cent I have to that great an' good
+Lady. Yes, sir, I came out of Africa, after my eighteen months'
+rest-cure and open-air treatment and sea-bathing, as her prisoner
+of war, like a giant refreshed. There wasn't anything could hold
+me, when I'd got my hooks into it, after that experience. And to
+you as a representative British citizen, I say here and now that I
+regard you as the founder of the family fortune--Tommy's and
+mine.'</p>
+<p>'But I only gave you some papers and tobacco.'</p>
+<p>'What more does any citizen need? The Cullinan diamond wouldn't
+have helped me as much then; an'--talking about South Africa, tell
+me--'</p>
+<p>We talked about South Africa till the car stopped at the
+Georgian lodge of a great park.</p>
+<p>'We'll get out here. I want to show you a rather sightly view,'
+said Zigler.</p>
+<p>We walked, perhaps, half a mile, across timber-dotted turf, past
+a lake, entered a dark rhododendron-planted wood, ticking with the
+noise of pheasants' feet, and came out suddenly, where five rides
+met, at a small classic temple between lichened stucco statues
+which faced a circle of turf, several acres in extent. Irish yews,
+of a size that I had never seen before, walled the sunless circle
+like cliffs of riven obsidian, except at the lower end, where it
+gave on to a stretch of undulating bare ground ending in a timbered
+slope half-a-mile away.</p>
+<p>'That's where the old Marshalton race-course used to be,' said
+Zigler. 'That ice-house is called Flora's Temple. Nell Gwynne and
+Mrs. Siddons an' Taglioni an' all that crowd used to act plays here
+for King George the Third. Wasn't it? Well, George is the only king
+I play. Let it go at that. This circle was the stage, I guess. The
+kings an' the nobility sat in Flora's Temple. I forget who sculped
+these statues at the door. They're the Comic and Tragic Muse. But
+it's a sightly view, ain't it?'</p>
+<p>The sunlight was leaving the park. I caught a glint of silver to
+the southward beyond the wooded ridge.</p>
+<p>'That's the ocean--the Channel, I mean,' said Zigler. 'It's
+twenty-three miles as a man flies. A sightly view, ain't it?'</p>
+<p>I looked at the severe yews, the dumb yelling mouths of the two
+statues, at the blue-green shadows on the unsunned grass, and at
+the still bright plain in front where some deer were feeding.</p>
+<p>'It's a most dramatic contrast, but I think it would be better
+on a summer's day,' I said, and we went on, up one of the noiseless
+rides, a quarter of a mile at least, till we came to the porticoed
+front of an enormous Georgian pile. Four footmen revealed
+themselves in a hall hung with pictures.</p>
+<p>'I hired this off of my Lord Marshalton,' Zigler explained,
+while they helped us out of our coats under the severe eyes of
+ruffed and periwigged ancestors. 'Ya-as. They always look at
+<i>me</i> too, as if I'd blown in from the gutter. Which, of
+course, I have. That's Mary, Lady Marshalton. Old man Joshua
+painted her. Do you see any likeness to my Lord Marshalton? Why,
+haven't you ever met up with him? He was Captain Mankeltow--my
+Royal British Artillery captain that blew up my gun in the war, an'
+then tried to bury me against my religious principles<a name=
+"FNanchor4"></a><a href="#Footnote_4">[4]</a>. Ya-as. His father
+died and he got the lordship. That was about all he got by the time
+that your British death-duties were through with him. So he said
+I'd oblige him by hiring his ranch. It's a hell an' a half of a
+proposition to handle, but Tommy--Mrs. Laughton--understands it.
+Come right in to the parlour and be very welcome.'</p>
+<blockquote><a name="Footnote_4"></a><a href="#FNanchor4">[4]</a>
+"The Captive": <i>Traffics and Discoveries</i>.</blockquote>
+<p>He guided me, hand on shoulder, into a babble of high-pitched
+talk and laughter that filled a vast drawing-room. He introduced me
+as the founder of the family fortunes to a little, lithe, dark-eyed
+woman whose speech and greeting were of the soft-lipped South. She
+in turn presented me to her mother, a black-browed snowy-haired old
+lady with a cap of priceless Venetian point, hands that must have
+held many hearts in their time, and a dignity as unquestioned and
+unquestioning as an empress. She was, indeed, a Burton of Savannah,
+who, on their own ground, out-rank the Lees of Virginia. The rest
+of the company came from Buffalo, Cincinnati, Cleveland and
+Chicago, with here and there a softening southern strain. A party
+of young folk popped corn beneath a mantelpiece surmounted by a
+Gainsborough. Two portly men, half hidden by a cased harp,
+discussed, over sheaves of typewritten documents, the terms of some
+contract. A knot of matrons talked servants--Irish <i>versus</i>
+German--across the grand piano. A youth ravaged an old bookcase,
+while beside him a tall girl stared at the portrait of a woman of
+many loves, dead three hundred years, but now leaping to life and
+warning under the shaded frame-light. In a corner half-a-dozen
+girls examined the glazed tables that held the decorations--English
+and foreign--of the late Lord Marshalton.</p>
+<p>'See heah! Would this be the Ordeh of the Gyartah?' one said,
+pointing.</p>
+<p>'I presoom likely. No! The Garter has "<i>Honey swore</i>"--I
+know that much. This is "Tria juncta" something.'</p>
+<p>'Oh, what's that cunning little copper cross with "For Valurr"?'
+a third cried.</p>
+<p>'Say! Look at here!' said the young man at the bookcase. 'Here's
+a first edition of <i>Handley Cross</i> and a Beewick's
+<i>Birds</i> right next to it--just like so many best sellers.
+Look, Maidie!'</p>
+<p>The girl beneath the picture half turned her body but not her
+eyes.</p>
+<p>'You don't tell <i>me</i>!' she said slowly. 'Their women
+amounted to something after all.'</p>
+<p>'But Woman's scope, and outlook was vurry limmutted in those
+days,' one of the matrons put in, from the piano.</p>
+<p>'Limmutted? For <i>her</i>? If they whurr, I guess she was the
+limmut. Who was she? Peters, whurr's the cat'log?'</p>
+<p>A thin butler, in charge of two footmen removing the
+tea-batteries, slid to a table and handed her a blue-and-qilt book.
+He was button-holed by one of the men behind the harp, who wished
+to get a telephone call through to Edinburgh.</p>
+<p>'The local office shuts at six,' said Peters. 'But I can get
+through to'--he named some town--'in ten minutes, sir.'</p>
+<p>'That suits me. You'll find me here when you've hitched up. Oh,
+say, Peters! We--Mister Olpherts an' me--ain't goin' by that early
+morning train to-morrow--but the other one--on the other
+line--whatever they call it.'</p>
+<p>'The nine twenty-seven, sir. Yes, sir. Early breakfast will be
+at half-past eight and the car will be at the door at nine.'</p>
+<p>'Peters!' an imperious young voice called. 'What's the matteh
+with Lord Marshalton's Ordeh of the Gyartah? We cyan't find it
+anyweah.'</p>
+<p>'Well, miss, I <i>have</i> heard that that Order is usually
+returned to His Majesty on the death of the holder. Yes, miss.'
+Then in a whisper to a footman, 'More butter for the pop-corn in
+King Charles's Corner.' He stopped behind my chair. 'Your room is
+Number Eleven, sir. May I trouble you for your keys?'</p>
+<p>He left the room with a six-year-old maiden called Alice who had
+announced she would not go to bed ''less Peter, Peter, Punkin-eater
+takes me--so there!'</p>
+<p>He very kindly looked in on me for a moment as I was dressing
+for dinner. 'Not at all, sir,' he replied to some compliment I paid
+him. 'I valeted the late Lord Marshalton for fifteen years. He was
+very abrupt in his movements, sir. As a rule I never received more
+than an hour's notice of a journey. We used to go to Syria
+frequently. I have been twice to Babylon. Mr. and Mrs. Zigler's
+requirements are, comparatively speaking, few.'</p>
+<p>'But the guests?'</p>
+<p>'Very little out of the ordinary as soon as one knows their
+ordinaries. Extremely simple, if I may say so, sir.'</p>
+<p>I had the privilege of taking Mrs. Burton in to dinner, and was
+rewarded with an entirely new, and to me rather shocking view, of
+Abraham Lincoln, who, she said, had wasted the heritage of his land
+by blood and fire, and had surrendered the remnant to aliens. 'My
+brother, suh,' she said, 'fell at Gettysburg in order that
+Armenians should colonise New England to-day. If I took any
+interest in any dam-Yankee outside of my son-in-law Laughton
+yondah, I should say that my brother's death had been amply
+avenged.'</p>
+<p>The man at her right took up the challenge, and the war spread.
+Her eyes twinkled over the flames she had lit.</p>
+<p>'Don't these folk,' she said a little later, 'remind you of
+Arabs picnicking under the Pyramids?'</p>
+<p>'I've never seen the Pyramids,' I replied.</p>
+<p>'Hm! I didn't know you were as English as all that.' And when I
+laughed, 'Are you?'</p>
+<p>'Always. It saves trouble.'</p>
+<p>'Now that's just what I find so significant among the
+English'--this was Alice's mother, I think, with one elbow well
+forward among the salted almonds. 'Oh, I know how <i>you</i> feel,
+Madam Burton, but a Northerner like myself--I'm Buffalo--even
+though we come over every year--notices the desire for comfort in
+England. There's so little conflict or uplift in British
+society.'</p>
+<p>'But we like being comfortable,' I said.</p>
+<p>'I know it. It's very characteristic. But ain't it a little,
+just a little, lacking in adaptability an' imagination?'</p>
+<p>'They haven't any need for adaptability,' Madam Burton struck
+in. 'They haven't any Ellis Island standards to live up to.'</p>
+<p>'But we can assimilate,' the Buffalo woman charged on.</p>
+<p>'Now you <i>have</i> done it!' I whispered to the old lady as
+the blessed word 'assimilation' woke up all the old arguments for
+and against.</p>
+<p>There was not a dull moment in that dinner for me--nor
+afterwards when the boys and girls at the piano played the rag-time
+tunes of their own land, while their elders, inexhaustibly
+interested, replunged into the discussion of that land's future,
+till there was talk of coon-can. When all the company had been set
+to tables Zigler led me into his book-lined study, where I noticed
+he kept his golf-clubs, and spoke simply as a child, gravely as a
+bishop, of the years that were past since our last meeting.</p>
+<p>'That's about all, I guess--up to date,' he said when he had
+unrolled the bright map of his fortunes across three continents.
+'Bein' rich suits me. So does your country, sir. My own country?
+You heard what that Detroit man said at dinner. "A Government of
+the alien, by the alien, for the alien." Mother's right, too.
+Lincoln killed us. From the highest motives--but he killed us. Oh,
+say, that reminds me. 'J'ever kill a man from the highest
+motives?'</p>
+<p>'Not from any motive--as far as I remember.'</p>
+<p>'Well, I have. It don't weigh on my mind any, but it was
+interesting. Life <i>is</i> interesting for a rich--for any--man in
+England. Ya-as! Life in England is like settin' in the front row at
+the theatre and never knowin' when the whole blame drama won't
+spill itself into your lap. I didn't always know that. I lie abed
+now, and I blush to think of some of the breaks I made in South
+Africa. About the British. Not your official method of doin'
+business. But the Spirit. I was 'way, 'way off on the Spirit. Are
+you acquainted with any other country where you'd have to kill a
+man or two to get at the National Spirit?'</p>
+<p>'Well,' I answered, 'next to marrying one of its women, killing
+one of its men makes for pretty close intimacy with any country. I
+take it you killed a British citizen.'</p>
+<p>'Why, no. Our syndicate confined its operations to
+aliens--dam-fool aliens.... 'J'ever know an English lord called
+Lundie<a name="FNanchor5"></a><a href="#Footnote_5">[5]</a>? Looks
+like a frame-food and soap advertisement. I imagine he was in your
+Supreme Court before he came into his lordship.'</p>
+<blockquote><a name="Footnote_5"></a><a href="#FNanchor5">[5]</a>
+'The Puzzler': <i>Actions and Reactions</i>.</blockquote>
+<p>'He is a lawyer--what we call a Law Lord--a Judge of Appeal--not
+a real hereditary lord.'</p>
+<p>'That's as much beyond me as <i>this</i>!' Zigler slapped a fat
+Debrett on the table. 'But I presoom this unreal Law Lord Lundie is
+kind o' real in his decisions? I judged so. And--one more question.
+'Ever meet a man called Walen?'</p>
+<p>'D'you mean Burton-Walen, the editor of--?' I mentioned the
+journal.</p>
+<p>'That's him. 'Looks like a tough, talks like a Maxim, and trains
+with kings.'</p>
+<p>'He does,' I said. 'Burton-Walen knows all the crowned heads of
+Europe intimately. It's his hobby.'</p>
+<p>'Well, there's the whole outfit for you--exceptin' my Lord
+Marshalton, <i>n&eacute;</i> Mankeltow, an' me. All active
+murderers--specially the Law Lord--or accessories after the fact.
+And what do they hand you out for <i>that</i>, in this
+country?'</p>
+<p>'Twenty years, I believe,' was my reply.</p>
+<p>He reflected a moment.</p>
+<p>'No-o-o,' he said, and followed it with a smoke-ring. 'Twenty
+months at the Cape is my limit. Say, murder ain't the
+soul-shatterin' event those nature-fakers in the magazines make
+out. It develops naturally like any other proposition.... Say,
+'j'ever play this golf game? It's come up in the States from Maine
+to California, an' we're prodoocin' all the champions in sight. Not
+a business man's play, but interestin'. I've got a golf-links in
+the park here that they tell me is the finest inland course ever. I
+had to pay extra for that when I hired the ranche--last year. It
+was just before I signed the papers that our murder eventuated. My
+Lord Marshalton he asked me down for the week-end to fix up
+something or other--about Peters and the linen, I think 'twas. Mrs.
+Zigler took a holt of the proposition. She understood Peters from
+the word "go." There wasn't any house-party; only fifteen or twenty
+folk. A full house is thirty-two, Tommy tells me. 'Guess we must be
+near on that to-night. In the smoking-room here, my Lord
+Marshalton--Mankeltow that was--introduces me to this Walen man
+with the nose. He'd been in the War too, from start to finish. He
+knew all the columns and generals that I'd battled with in the days
+of my Zigler gun. We kinder fell into each other's arms an' let the
+harsh world go by for a while.</p>
+<p>'Walen he introduces me to your Lord Lundie. <i>He</i> was a new
+proposition to me. If he hadn't been a lawyer he'd have made a
+lovely cattle-king. I thought I had played poker some. Another of
+my breaks. Ya-as! It cost me eleven hundred dollars besides what
+Tommy said when I retired. I have no fault to find with your
+hereditary aristocracy, or your judiciary, or your press.</p>
+<p>'Sunday we all went to Church across the Park here.... Psha!
+Think o' your rememberin' my religion! I've become an Episcopalian
+since I married. Ya-as.... After lunch Walen did his
+crowned-heads-of-Europe stunt in the smokin'-room here. He was long
+on Kings. And Continental crises. I do not pretend to follow
+British domestic politics, but in the aeroplane business a man has
+to know something of international possibilities. At present, you
+British are settin' in kimonoes on dynamite kegs. Walen's talk put
+me wise on the location and size of some of the kegs. Ya-as!</p>
+<p>'After that, we four went out to look at those golf-links I was
+hirin'. We each took a club. Mine'--he glanced at a great tan bag
+by the fire-place--'was the beginner's friend--the cleek. Well,
+sir, this golf proposition took a holt of me as quick as--quick as
+death. They had to prise me off the greens when it got too dark to
+see, and then we went back to the house. I was walkin' ahead with
+my Lord Marshalton talkin' beginners' golf. (<i>I</i> was the man
+who ought to have been killed by rights.) We cut 'cross lots
+through the woods to Flora's Temple--that place I showed you this
+afternoon. Lundie and Walen were, maybe, twenty or thirty rod
+behind us in the dark. Marshalton and I stopped at the theatre to
+admire at the ancestral yew-trees. He took me right under the
+biggest--King Somebody's Yew--and while I was spannin' it with my
+handkerchief, he says, "Look heah!" just as if it was a rabbit--and
+down comes a bi-plane into the theatre with no more noise than the
+dead. My Rush Silencer is the only one on the market that allows
+that sort of gumshoe work.... What? A bi-plane--with two men in it.
+Both men jump out and start fussin' with the engines. I was
+starting to tell Mankeltow--I can't remember to call him Marshalton
+any more--that it looked as if the Royal British Flying Corps had
+got on to my Rush Silencer at last; but he steps out from under the
+yew to these two Stealthy Steves and says, "What's the trouble? Can
+I be of any service?" He thought--so did I--'twas some of the boys
+from Aldershot or Salisbury. Well, sir, from there on, the
+situation developed like a motion-picture in Hell. The man on the
+nigh side of the machine whirls round, pulls his gun and fires into
+Mankeltow's face. I laid him out with my cleek automatically. Any
+one who shoots a friend of mine gets what's comin' to him if I'm
+within reach. He drops. Mankeltow rubs his neck with his
+handkerchief. The man the far side of the machine starts to run.
+Lundie down the ride, or it might have been Walen, shouts, "What's
+happened?" Mankeltow says, "Collar that chap."</p>
+<p>'The second man runs ring-a-ring-o'-roses round the machine, one
+hand reachin' behind him. Mankeltow heads him off to me. He breaks
+blind for Walen and Lundie, who are runnin' up the ride. There's
+some sort of mix-up among 'em, which it's too dark to see, and a
+thud. Walen says, "Oh, well collared!" Lundie says, "That's the
+only thing I never learned at Harrow!"... Mankeltow runs up to 'em,
+still rubbin' his neck, and says, "<i>He</i> didn't fire at me. It
+was the other chap. Where is he?"</p>
+<p>'"I've stretched him alongside his machine," I says.</p>
+<p>'"Are they poachers?" says Lundie.</p>
+<p>'"No. Airmen. I can't make it out," says Mankeltow.</p>
+<p>'"Look at here," says Walen, kind of brusque. "This man ain't
+breathin' at all. Didn't you hear somethin' crack when he lit,
+Lundie?"</p>
+<p>'"My God!" says Lundie. "Did I? I thought it was my
+suspenders"--no, he said "braces."</p>
+<p>'Right there I left them and sort o' tiptoed back to my man,
+hopin' he'd revived and quit. But he hadn't. That darned cleek had
+hit him on the back of the neck just where his helmet stopped. He'd
+got <i>his</i>. I knew it by the way the head rolled in my hands.
+Then the others came up the ride totin' <i>their</i> load. No
+mistakin' that shuffle on grass. D'you remember it--in South
+Africa? Ya-as.</p>
+<p>'"Hsh!" says Lundie. "Do you know I've broken this man's
+neck?"</p>
+<p>'"Same here," I says.</p>
+<p>'"What? Both?" says Mankeltow.</p>
+<p>'"Nonsense!" says Lord Lundie. "Who'd have thought he was that
+out of training? A man oughtn't to fly if he ain't fit."</p>
+<p>'"What did they want here, anyway?" said Walen; and Mankeltow
+says, "We can't leave them in the open. Some one'll come. Carry 'em
+to Flora's Temple."</p>
+<p>We toted 'em again and laid 'em out on a stone bench. They were
+still dead in spite of our best attentions. We knew it, but we went
+through the motions till it was quite dark. 'Wonder if all
+murderers do that? "We want a light on this," says Walen after a
+spell. "There ought to be one in the machine. Why didn't they light
+it?"</p>
+<p>'We came out of Flora's Temple, and shut the doors behind us.
+Some stars were showing then--same as when Cain did his little act,
+I guess. I climbed up and searched the machine. She was very well
+equipped, I found two electric torches in clips alongside her
+barometers by the rear seat.</p>
+<p>'"What make is she?" says Mankeltow.</p>
+<p>'"Continental Renzalaer," I says. "My engines and my Rush
+Silencer."</p>
+<p>'Walen whistles. "Here--let me look," he says, and grabs the
+other torch. She was sure well equipped. We gathered up an armful
+of cameras an' maps an' note-books an' an album of mounted
+photographs which we took to Flora's Temple and spread on a
+marble-topped table (I'll show you to-morrow) which the King of
+Naples had presented to grandfather Marshalton. Walen starts to go
+through 'em. We wanted to know why our friends had been so
+prejudiced against our society.</p>
+<p>'"Wait a minute," says Lord Lundie. "Lend me a
+handkerchief."</p>
+<p>'He pulls out his own, and Walen contributes his green-and-red
+bandanna, and Lundie covers their faces. "Now," he says, "we'll go
+into the evidence."</p>
+<p>'There wasn't any flaw in that evidence. Walen read out their
+last observations, and Mankeltow asked questions, and Lord Lundie
+sort o' summarised, and I looked at the photos in the album.
+'J'ever see a bird's-eye telephoto-survey of England for military
+purposes? It's interestin' but indecent--like turnin' a man upside
+down. None of those close-range panoramas of forts could have been
+taken without my Rush Silencer.</p>
+<p>'"I wish <i>we</i> was as thorough as they are," says Mankeltow,
+when Walen stopped translatin'.</p>
+<p>'"We've been thorough enough," says Lord Lundie. "The evidence
+against both accused is conclusive. Any other country would give
+'em seven years in a fortress. We should probably give 'em eighteen
+months as first-class misdemeanants. But their case," he says, "is
+out of our hands. We must review our own. Mr. Zigler," he said,
+"will you tell us what steps you took to bring about the death of
+the first accused?" I told him. He wanted to know specially whether
+I'd stretched first accused before or after he had fired at
+Mankeltow. Mankeltow testified he'd been shot at, and exhibited his
+neck as evidence. It was scorched.</p>
+<p>'"Now, Mr. Walen," says Lord Lundie. "Will you kindly tell us
+what steps you took with regard to the second accused?"</p>
+<p>'"The man ran directly at me, me lord," says Walen. "I said, 'Oh
+no, you don't,' and hit him in the face."</p>
+<p>'Lord Lundie lifts one hand and uncovers second accused's face.
+There was a bruise on one cheek and the chin was all greened with
+grass. He was a heavy-built man.</p>
+<p>'"What happened after that?" says Lord Lundie.</p>
+<p>'"To the best of my remembrance he turned from me towards your
+lordship."</p>
+<p>'Then Lundie goes ahead. "I stooped, and caught the man round
+the ankles," he says. "The sudden check threw him partially over my
+left shoulder. I jerked him off that shoulder, still holding his
+ankles, and he fell heavily on, it would appear, the point of his
+chin, death being instantaneous."</p>
+<p>'"Death being instantaneous," says Walen.</p>
+<p>'Lord Lundie takes off his gown and wig--you could see him do
+it--and becomes our fellow-murderer. "That's our case," he says. "I
+know how <i>I</i> should direct the jury, but it's an undignified
+business for a Lord of Appeal to lift his hand to, and some of my
+learned brothers," he says, "might be disposed to be
+facetious."</p>
+<p>'I guess I can't be properly sensitised. Any one who steered me
+out of that trouble might have had the laugh on me for generations.
+But I'm only a millionaire. I said we'd better search second
+accused in case he'd been carryin' concealed weapons.</p>
+<p>'"That certainly is a point," says Lord Lundie. "But the
+question for the jury would be whether I exercised more force than
+was necessary to prevent him from usin' them." <i>I</i> didn't say
+anything. He wasn't talkin' my language. Second accused had his gun
+on him sure enough, but it had jammed in his hip-pocket. He was too
+fleshy to reach behind for business purposes, and he didn't look a
+gun-man anyway. Both of 'em carried wads of private letters. By the
+time Walen had translated, we knew how many children the fat one
+had at home and when the thin one reckoned to be married. Too bad!
+Ya-as.</p>
+<p>'Says Walen to me while we was rebuttonin' their jackets (they
+was not in uniform): "Ever read a book called <i>The Wreckers</i>,
+Mr. Zigler?"</p>
+<p>'"Not that I recall at the present moment," I says.</p>
+<p>'"Well, do," he says. "You'd appreciate it. You'd appreciate it
+now, I assure you."</p>
+<p>'"I'll remember," I says. "But I don't see how this song and
+dance helps us any. Here's our corpses, here's their machine, and
+daylight's bound to come."</p>
+<p>'"Heavens! That reminds me," says Lundie. "What time's
+dinner?"</p>
+<p>'"Half-past eight," says Mankeltow. "It's half-past five now. We
+knocked off golf at twenty to, and if they hadn't been such silly
+asses, firin' pistols like civilians, we'd have had them to dinner.
+Why, they might be sitting with us in the smoking-room this very
+minute," he says. Then he said that no man had a right to take his
+profession so seriously as these two mountebanks.</p>
+<p>'"How interestin'!" says Lundie. "I've noticed this impatient
+attitude toward their victim in a good many murderers. I never
+understood it before. Of course, it's the disposal of the body that
+annoys 'em. Now, I wonder," he says, "who our case will come up
+before? Let's run through it again."</p>
+<p>'Then Walen whirls in. He'd been bitin' his nails in a corner.
+We was all nerved up by now.... Me? The worst of the bunch. I had
+to think for Tommy as well.</p>
+<p>'"We <i>can't</i> be tried," says Walen. "We <i>mustn't</i> be
+tried! It'll make an infernal international stink. What did I tell
+you in the smoking-room after lunch? The tension's at
+breaking-point already. This 'ud snap it. Can't you see that?"</p>
+<p>'"I was thinking of the legal aspect of the case," says Lundie.
+"With a good jury we'd likely be acquitted."</p>
+<p>'"Acquitted!" says Walen. "Who'd dare acquit us in the face of
+what 'ud be demanded by--the other party? Did you ever hear of the
+War of Jenkins' ear? 'Ever hear of Mason and Slidel? 'Ever hear of
+an ultimatum? You know who <i>these</i> two idiots are; you know
+who <i>we</i> are--a Lord of Appeal, a Viscount of the English
+peerage, and me--<i>me</i> knowing all I know, which the men who
+know dam' well know that I <i>do</i> know! It's our necks or
+Armageddon. Which do you think this Government would choose? We
+<i>can't</i> be tried!" he says.</p>
+<p>'"Then I expect I'll have to resign me club," Lundie goes on. "I
+don't think that's ever been done before by an <i>ex-officio</i>
+member. I must ask the secretary." I guess he was kinder bunkered
+for the minute, or maybe 'twas the lordship comin' out on him.</p>
+<p>'"Rot!" says Mankeltow. "Walen's right. We can't afford to be
+tried. We'll have to bury them; but my head-gardener locks up all
+the tools at five o'clock."</p>
+<p>'"Not on your life!" says Lundie. He was on deck again--as the
+high-class lawyer. "Right or wrong, if we attempt concealment of
+the bodies we're done for."</p>
+<p>"'I'm glad of that," says Mankeltow, "because, after all, it
+ain't cricket to bury 'em."</p>
+<p>'Somehow--but I know I ain't English--that consideration didn't
+worry me as it ought. An' besides, I was thinkin'--I had to--an'
+I'd begun to see a light 'way off--a little glimmerin' light o'
+salvation.</p>
+<p>'"Then what <i>are</i> we to do?" says Walen. "Zigler, what do
+you advise? Your neck's in it too."</p>
+<p>'"Gentlemen," I says, "something Lord Lundie let fall a while
+back gives me an idea. I move that this committee empowers Big
+Claus and Little Claus, who have elected to commit suicide in our
+midst, to leave the premises <i>as</i> they came. I'm asking you to
+take big chances," I says, "but they're all we've got," and then I
+broke for the bi-plane.</p>
+<p>'Don't tell me the English can't think as quick as the next man
+when it's up to them! They lifted 'em out o' Flora's
+Temple--reverent, but not wastin' time--whilst I found out what had
+brought her down. One cylinder was misfirin'. I didn't stop to fix
+it. My Renzalaer will hold up on six. We've proved that. If her
+crew had relied on my guarantees, they'd have been half-way home by
+then, instead of takin' their seats with hangin' heads like they
+was ashamed. They ought to have been ashamed too, playin' gun-men
+in a British peer's park! I took big chances startin' her without
+controls, but 'twas a dead still night an' a clear run--you saw
+it--across the Theatre into the park, and I prayed she'd rise
+before she hit high timber. I set her all I dared for a quick lift.
+I told Mankeltow that if I gave her too much nose she'd be liable
+to up-end and flop. He didn't want another inquest on his estate.
+No, sir! So I had to fix her up in the dark. Ya-as!</p>
+<p>'I took big chances, too, while those other three held on to her
+and I worked her up to full power. My Renzalaer's no
+ventilation-fan to pull against. But I climbed out just in time.
+I'd hitched the signallin' lamp to her tail so's we could track
+her. Otherwise, with my Rush Silencer, we might's well have shooed
+an owl out of a barn. She left just that way when we let her go. No
+sound except the propellers--<i>Whoo-oo-oo! Whoo-oo-oo!</i> There
+was a dip in the ground ahead. It hid her lamp for a second--but
+there's no such thing as time in real life. Then that lamp
+travelled up the far slope slow--too slow. Then it kinder lifted,
+we judged. Then it sure was liftin'. Then it lifted good. D'you
+know why? Our four naked perspirin' souls was out there underneath
+her, hikin' her heavens high. Yes, sir. <i>We</i> did it!... And
+that lamp kept liftin' and liftin'. Then she side-slipped! My God,
+she side-slipped twice, which was what I'd been afraid of all
+along! Then she straightened up, and went away climbin' to glory,
+for that blessed star of our hope got smaller and smaller till we
+couldn't track it any more. Then we breathed. We hadn't breathed
+any since their arrival, but we didn't know it till we breathed
+that time--all together. Then we dug our finger-nails out of our
+palms an' came alive again--in instalments.</p>
+<p>'Lundie spoke first. "We therefore commit their bodies to the
+air," he says, an' puts his cap on.</p>
+<p>'"The deep--the deep," says Walen. "It's just twenty-three miles
+to the Channel."</p>
+<p>'"Poor chaps! Poor chaps!" says Mankeltow. "We'd have had 'em to
+dinner if they hadn't lost their heads. I can't tell you how this
+distresses me, Laughton."</p>
+<p>'"Well, look at here, Arthur," I says. "It's only God's Own
+Mercy you an' me ain't lyin' in Flora's Temple now, and if that fat
+man had known enough to fetch his gun around while he was runnin',
+Lord Lundie and Walen would have been alongside us."</p>
+<p>'"I see that," he says. "But we're alive and they're dead, don't
+ye know."</p>
+<p>'"I know it," I says. "That's where the dead are always so
+damned unfair on the survivors."</p>
+<p>'"I see that too," he says. "But I'd have given a good deal if
+it hadn't happened, poor chaps!"</p>
+<p>'"Amen!" says Lundie. Then? Oh, then we sorter walked back two
+an' two to Flora's Temple an' lit matches to see we hadn't left
+anything behind. Walen, he had confiscated the note-books before
+they left. There was the first man's pistol which we'd forgot to
+return him, lyin' on the stone bench. Mankeltow puts his hand on
+it--he never touched the trigger--an', bein' an automatic, of
+course the blame thing jarred off--spiteful as a rattler!</p>
+<p>'"Look out! They'll have one of us yet," says Walen in the dark.
+But they didn't--the Lord hadn't quit being our shepherd--and we
+heard the bullet zip across the veldt--quite like old times.
+Ya-as!</p>
+<p>'"Swine!" says Mankeltow.</p>
+<p>'After that I didn't hear any more "Poor chap" talk.... Me? I
+never worried about killing <i>my</i> man. I was too busy figurin'
+how a British jury might regard the proposition. I guess Lundie
+felt that way too.</p>
+<p>'Oh, but say! We had an interestin' time at dinner. Folks was
+expected whose auto had hung up on the road. They hadn't wired, and
+Peters had laid two extra places. We noticed 'em as soon as we sat
+down. I'd hate to say how noticeable they were. Mankeltow with his
+neck bandaged (he'd caught a relaxed throat golfin') sent for
+Peters and told him to take those empty places away--<i>if you
+please</i>. It takes something to rattle Peters. He was rattled
+that time. Nobody else noticed anything. And now...'</p>
+<p>'Where did they come down?' I asked, as he rose.</p>
+<p>'In the Channel, I guess. There was nothing in the papers about
+'em. Shall we go into the drawin'-room, and see what these boys and
+girls are doin?' But say, ain't life in England
+inter<i>es</i>tin'?"</p>
+<br>
+<br>
+<hr style="width: 35%;">
+<br>
+<br>
+<a name="page300"></a>
+<div class="poem">
+<div class="stanza">
+<p class="i6"><b>REBIRTH</b></p>
+</div>
+<div class="stanza">
+<p class="i5">If any God should say</p>
+<p class="i6">"I will restore</p>
+<p class="i5">The world her yesterday</p>
+<p class="i6">Whole as before</p>
+<p>My Judgment blasted it"--who would not lift</p>
+<p>Heart, eye, and hand in passion o'er the gift?</p>
+</div>
+<div class="stanza">
+<p class="i5">If any God should will</p>
+<p class="i6">To wipe from mind</p>
+<p class="i5">The memory of this ill</p>
+<p class="i6">Which is mankind</p>
+<p>In soul and substance now--who would not bless</p>
+<p>Even to tears His loving-tenderness?</p>
+</div>
+<div class="stanza">
+<p class="i5">If any God should give</p>
+<p class="i6">Us leave to fly</p>
+<p class="i5">These present deaths we live,</p>
+<p class="i6">And safely die</p>
+<p>In those lost lives we lived ere we were born--</p>
+<p>What man but would not laugh the excuse to scorn?</p>
+</div>
+<div class="stanza">
+<p class="i5">For we are what we are--</p>
+<p class="i6">So broke to blood</p>
+<p class="i5">And the strict works of war--</p>
+<p class="i6">So long subdued</p>
+<p>To sacrifice, that threadbare Death commands</p>
+<p>Hardly observance at our busier hands.</p>
+</div>
+<div class="stanza">
+<p class="i5">Yet we were what we were,</p>
+<p class="i6">And, fashioned so,</p>
+<p class="i5">It pleases us to stare</p>
+<p class="i6">At the far show</p>
+<p>Of unbelievable years and shapes that flit,</p>
+<p>In our own likeness, on the edge of it.</p>
+</div>
+</div>
+<br>
+<br>
+<hr style="width: 35%;">
+<br>
+<br>
+<a name="page303"></a>
+<h2>The Horse Marines</h2>
+<h3>(1911)</h3>
+<br>
+<blockquote><i>The Rt. Hon. R.B. Haldane, Secretary of State for
+War<a name="FNanchor6"></a><a href="#Footnote_6">[6]</a>, was
+questioned in the House of Commons on April 8th about the
+rocking-horses which the War Office is using for the purpose of
+teaching recruits to ride. Lord Ronaldshay asked the War Secretary
+if rocking-horses were to be supplied to all the cavalry regiments
+for teaching recruits to ride. 'The noble Lord,' replied Mr.
+Haldane, 'is doubtless alluding to certain dummy horses on rockers
+which have been tested with very satisfactory results.'... The
+mechanical steed is a wooden horse with an astonishing tail. It is
+painted brown and mounted on swinging rails. The recruit leaps into
+the saddle and pulls at the reins while the riding-instructor rocks
+the animal to and fro with his foot. The rocking-horses are being
+made at Woolwich. They are quite cheap</i>.</blockquote>
+<p class="loc">--Daily Paper.</p>
+<blockquote><a name="Footnote_6"></a><a href="#FNanchor6">[6]</a>
+Now Viscount Haldane of Cloan.</blockquote>
+<p>My instructions to Mr. Leggatt, my engineer, had been accurately
+obeyed. He was to bring my car on completion of annual overhaul,
+from Coventry <i>via</i> London, to Southampton Docks to await my
+arrival; and very pretty she looked, under the steamer's side among
+the railway lines, at six in the morning. Next to her new paint and
+varnish I was most impressed by her four brand-new tyres.</p>
+<p>'But I didn't order new tyres,' I said as we moved away. 'These
+are Irresilients, too.'</p>
+<p>'Treble-ribbed,' said Leggatt. 'Diamond-stud sheathing.'</p>
+<p>'Then there has been a mistake.'</p>
+<p>'Oh no, sir; they're gratis.'</p>
+<p>The number of motor manufacturers who give away complete sets of
+treble-ribbed Irresilient tyres is so limited that I believe I
+asked Leggatt for an explanation.</p>
+<p>'I don't know that I could very well explain, sir,' was the
+answer. 'It 'ud come better from Mr. Pyecroft. He's on leaf at
+Portsmouth--staying with his uncle. His uncle 'ad the body all
+night. I'd defy you to find a scratch on her even with a
+microscope.'</p>
+<p>'Then we will go home by the Portsmouth road,' I said.</p>
+<p>And we went at those speeds which are allowed before the
+working-day begins or the police are thawed out. We were blocked
+near Portsmouth by a battalion of Regulars on the move.</p>
+<p>'Whitsuntide manoeuvres just ending,' said Leggatt. 'They've had
+a fortnight in the Downs.'</p>
+<p>He said no more until we were in a narrow street somewhere
+behind Portsmouth Town Railway Station, where he slowed at a
+green-grocery shop. The door was open, and a small old man sat on
+three potato-baskets swinging his feet over a stooping blue
+back.</p>
+<p>'You call that shinin' 'em?' he piped. 'Can you see your face in
+'em yet? No! Then shine 'em, or I'll give you a beltin' you'll
+remember!'</p>
+<p>'If you stop kickin' me in the mouth perhaps I'd do better,'
+said Pyecroft's voice meekly.</p>
+<p>We blew the horn.</p>
+<p>Pyecroft arose, put away the brushes, and received us not
+otherwise than as a king in his own country.</p>
+<p>'Are you going to leave me up here all day?' said the old
+man.</p>
+<p>Pyecroft lifted him down and he hobbled into the back room.</p>
+<p>'It's his corns,' Pyecroft explained. 'You can't shine corny
+feet--and he hasn't had his breakfast.'</p>
+<p>'I haven't had mine either,' I said.</p>
+<p>'Breakfast for two more, uncle,' Pyecroft sang out.</p>
+<p>'Go out an' buy it then,' was the answer, 'or else it's
+half-rations.'</p>
+<p>Pyecroft turned to Leggatt, gave him his marketing orders, and
+despatched him with the coppers.</p>
+<p>'I have got four new tyres on my car,' I began impressively.</p>
+<p>'Yes,' said Mr. Pyecroft. 'You have, and I <i>will</i> say'--he
+patted my car's bonnet--'you earned 'em.'</p>
+<p>'I want to know why--,' I went on.</p>
+<p>'Quite justifiable. You haven't noticed anything in the papers,
+have you?'</p>
+<p>'I've only just landed. I haven't seen a paper for weeks.'</p>
+<p>'Then you can lend me a virgin ear. There's been a scandal in
+the Junior Service--the Army, I believe they call 'em.'</p>
+<p>A bag of coffee-beans pitched on the counter. 'Roast that,' said
+the uncle from within.</p>
+<p>Pyecroft rigged a small coffee-roaster, while I took down the
+shutters, and sold a young lady in curl-papers two bunches of mixed
+greens and one soft orange.</p>
+<p>'Sickly stuff to handle on an empty stomach, ain't it?' said
+Pyecroft.</p>
+<p>'What about my new tyres?' I insisted.</p>
+<p>'Oh, any amount. But the question is'--he looked at me
+steadily--'is this what you might call a court-martial or a
+post-mortem inquiry?'</p>
+<p>'Strictly a post-mortem,' said I.</p>
+<p>'That being so,' said Pyecroft, 'we can rapidly arrive at facts.
+Last Thursday--the shutters go behind those baskets--last Thursday
+at five bells in the forenoon watch, otherwise ten-thirty A.M.,
+your Mr. Leggatt was discovered on Westminster Bridge laying his
+course for the Old Kent Road.'</p>
+<p>'But that doesn't lead to Southampton,' I interrupted.</p>
+<p>'Then perhaps he was swinging the car for compasses. Be that as
+it may, we found him in that latitude, simultaneous as Jules and me
+was <i>ong route</i> for Waterloo to rejoin our respective
+ships--or Navies I should say. Jules was a <i>permissionaire</i>,
+which meant being on leaf, same as me, from a French
+cassowary-cruiser at Portsmouth. A party of her trusty and
+well-beloved petty officers 'ad been seeing London, chaperoned by
+the R.C. Chaplain. Jules 'ad detached himself from the squadron and
+was cruisin' on his own when I joined him, in company of copious
+lady-friends. <i>But</i>, mark you, your Mr. Leggatt drew the line
+at the girls. Loud and long he drew it.'</p>
+<p>'I'm glad of that,' I said.</p>
+<p>'You may be. He adopted the puristical formation from the first.
+"Yes," he said, when we was annealing him at--but you wouldn't know
+the pub--"I <i>am</i> going to Southampton," he says, "and I'll
+stretch a point to go <i>via</i> Portsmouth; <i>but</i>," says he,
+"seeing what sort of one hell of a time invariably trarnspires when
+we cruise together, Mr. Pyecroft, I do <i>not</i> feel myself
+justified towards my generous and long-suffering employer in takin'
+on that kind of ballast as well." I assure you he considered your
+interests.'</p>
+<p>'And the girls?' I asked.</p>
+<p>'Oh, I left that to Jules. I'm a monogomite by nature. So we
+embarked strictly <i>ong gar&ccedil;ong</i>. But I should tell you,
+in case he didn't, that your Mr. Leggatt's care for your interests
+'ad extended to sheathing the car in matting and gunny-bags to
+preserve her paint-work. She was all swathed up like an I-talian
+baby.'</p>
+<p>'He <i>is</i> careful about his paint-work,' I said.</p>
+<p>'For a man with no Service experience I should say he was fair
+homicidal on the subject. If we'd been Marines he couldn't have
+been more pointed in his allusions to our hob-nailed socks.
+However, we reduced him to a malleable condition, and embarked for
+Portsmouth. I'd seldom rejoined my <i>vaisseau ong automobile,
+avec</i> a fur coat and goggles. Nor 'ad Jules.'</p>
+<p>'Did Jules say much?' I asked, helplessly turning the handle of
+the coffee-roaster.</p>
+<p>'That's where I pitied the pore beggar. He 'adn't the language,
+so to speak. He was confined to heavings and shruggin's and copious
+<i>Mong Jews</i>! The French are very badly fitted with
+relief-valves. And then our Mr. Leggatt drove. He drove.'</p>
+<p>'Was he in a very malleable condition?'</p>
+<p>'Not him! We recognised the value of his cargo from the outset.
+He hadn't a chance to get more than moist at the edges. After which
+we went to sleep; and now we'll go to breakfast.'</p>
+<p>We entered the back room where everything was in order, and a
+screeching canary made us welcome. The uncle had added sausages and
+piles of buttered toast to the kippers. The coffee, cleared with a
+piece of fish-skin, was a revelation.</p>
+<p>Leggatt, who seemed to know the premises, had run the car into
+the tiny backyard where her mirror-like back almost blocked up the
+windows. He minded shop while we ate. Pyecroft passed him his
+rations through a flap in the door. The uncle ordered him in, after
+breakfast, to wash up, and he jumped in his gaiters at the old
+man's commands as he has never jumped to mine.</p>
+<p>'To resoom the post-mortem,' said Pyecroft, lighting his pipe.
+'My slumbers were broken by the propeller ceasing to revolve, and
+by vile language from your Mr. Leggatt.'</p>
+<p>'I--I--' Leggatt began, a blue-checked duster in one hand and a
+cup in the other.</p>
+<p>'When you're wanted aft you'll be sent for, Mr. Leggatt,' said
+Pyecroft amiably. 'It's clean mess decks for you now. Resooming
+once more, we was on a lonely and desolate ocean near Portsdown,
+surrounded by gorse bushes, and a Boy Scout was stirring my stomach
+with his little copper-stick.'</p>
+<p>'"You count ten," he says.</p>
+<p>'"Very good, Boy Jones," I says, "count 'em," and I hauled him
+in over the gunnel, and ten I gave him with my large flat hand. The
+remarks he passed, lying face down tryin' to bite my leg, would
+have reflected credit on any Service. Having finished I dropped him
+overboard again, which was my gross political error. I ought to
+'ave killed him; because he began signalling--rapid and
+accurate--in a sou'westerly direction. Few equatorial calms are to
+be apprehended when B.P.'s little pets take to signallin'. Make a
+note o' that! Three minutes later we were stopped and boarded by
+Scouts--up our backs, down our necks, and in our boots! The last I
+heard from your Mr. Leggatt as he went under, brushin' 'em off his
+cap, was thanking Heaven he'd covered up the new paint-work with
+mats. An 'eroic soul!'</p>
+<p>'Not a scratch on her body,' said Leggatt, pouring out the
+coffee-grounds.</p>
+<p>'And Jules?' said I.</p>
+<p>'Oh, Jules thought the much advertised Social Revolution had
+begun, but his mackintosh hampered him.</p>
+<p>'You told me to bring the mackintosh,' Leggatt whispered to
+me.</p>
+<p>'And when I 'ad 'em half convinced he was a French vicomte
+coming down to visit the Commander-in-Chief at Portsmouth, he tried
+to take it off. Seeing his uniform underneath, some sucking
+Sherlock Holmes of the Pink Eye Patrol (they called him Eddy)
+deduced that I wasn't speaking the truth. Eddy said I was tryin' to
+sneak into Portsmouth unobserved--unobserved mark you!--and join
+hands with the enemy. It trarnspired that the Scouts was conducting
+a field-day against opposin' forces, ably assisted by all branches
+of the Service, and they was so afraid the car wouldn't count ten
+points to them in the fray, that they'd have scalped us, but for
+the intervention of an umpire--also in short under-drawers. A
+fleshy sight!'</p>
+<p>Here Mr. Pyecroft shut his eyes and nodded. 'That umpire,' he
+said suddenly, 'was our Mr. Morshed--a gentleman whose acquaintance
+you have already made <i>and</i> profited by, if I mistake
+not<a name="FNanchor7"></a><a href="#Footnote_7">[7]</a>.'</p>
+<blockquote><a name="Footnote_7"></a><a href="#FNanchor7">[7]</a>
+'Their Lawful Occasions,' <i>Traffics and
+Discoveries</i>.</blockquote>
+<p>'Oh, was the Navy in it too?' I said; for I had read of wild
+doings occasionally among the Boy Scouts on the Portsmouth Road, in
+which Navy, Army, and the world at large seemed to have taken
+part.</p>
+<p>'The Navy <i>was</i> in it. I was the only one out of it--for
+several seconds. Our Mr. Morshed failed to recognise me in my fur
+boa, and my appealin' winks at 'im behind your goggles didn't
+arrive. But when Eddy darling had told his story, I saluted, which
+is difficult in furs, and I stated I was bringin' him dispatches
+from the North. My Mr. Morshed cohered on the instant. I've never
+known his ethergram installations out of order yet. "Go and guard
+your blessed road," he says to the Fratton Orphan Asylum standing
+at attention all round him, and, when they was removed--"Pyecroft,"
+he says, still <i>sotte voce</i>, "what in Hong-Kong are you doing
+with this dun-coloured <i>sampan</i>?"</p>
+<p>'It was your Mr. Leggatt's paint-protective matting which caught
+his eye. She <i>did</i> resemble a <i>sampan</i>, especially about
+the stern-works. At these remarks I naturally threw myself on 'is
+bosom, so far as Service conditions permitted, and revealed him
+all, mentioning that the car was yours. You know his way of working
+his lips like a rabbit? Yes, he was quite pleased. "<i>His</i>
+car!" he kept murmuring, working his lips like a rabbit. "I owe 'im
+more than a trifle for things he wrote about me. I'll keep the
+car."</p>
+<p>'Your Mr. Leggatt now injected some semi-mutinous remarks to the
+effect that he was your chauffeur in charge of your car, and, as
+such, capable of so acting. Mr. Morshed threw him a glarnce. It
+sufficed. Didn't it suffice, Mr. Leggatt?'</p>
+<p>'I knew if something didn't happen, something worse would,' said
+Leggatt. 'It never fails when you're aboard.'</p>
+<p>'And Jules?' I demanded.</p>
+<p>'Jules was, so to speak, panicking in a water-tight flat through
+his unfortunate lack of language. I had to introduce him as part of
+the <i>entente cordiale</i>, and he was put under arrest, too. Then
+we sat on the grass and smoked, while Eddy and Co. violently
+annoyed the traffic on the Portsmouth Road, till the umpires, all
+in short panties, conferred on the valuable lessons of the
+field-day and added up points, same as at target-practice. I didn't
+hear their conclusions, but our Mr. Morshed delivered a farewell
+address to Eddy and Co., tellin' 'em they ought to have deduced
+from a hundred signs about me, that I was a friendly bringin' in
+dispatches from the North. We left 'em tryin' to find those signs
+in the Scout book, and we reached Mr. Morshed's hotel at Portsmouth
+at 6.27 P.M. <i>ong automobile</i>. Here endeth the first
+chapter.'</p>
+<p>'Begin the second,' I said.</p>
+<p>The uncle and Leggatt had finished washing up and were seated,
+smoking, while the damp duster dried at the fire.</p>
+<p>'About what time was it,' said Pyecroft to Leggatt, 'when our
+Mr. Morshed began to talk about uncles?'</p>
+<p>'When he came back to the bar, after he'd changed into those
+rat-catcher clothes,' said Leggatt.</p>
+<p>'That's right. "Pye," said he, "have you an uncle?" "I have," I
+says. "Here's santy to him," and I finished my sherry and bitters
+to <i>you</i>, uncle.'</p>
+<p>'That's right,' said Pyecroft's uncle sternly. 'If you hadn't
+I'd have belted you worth rememberin', Emmanuel. I had the body all
+night.'</p>
+<p>Pyecroft smiled affectionately. 'So you 'ad, uncle, an'
+beautifully you looked after her. But as I was saying, "I have an
+uncle, too," says Mr. Morshed, dark and lowering. "Yet somehow I
+can't love him. I want to mortify the beggar. Volunteers to mortify
+my uncle, one pace to the front."</p>
+<p>'I took Jules with me the regulation distance. Jules was getting
+interested. Your Mr. Leggatt preserved a strictly nootral
+attitude.</p>
+<p>'"You're a pressed man," says our Mr. Morshed. "I owe your late
+employer much, so to say. The car will manoeuvre all night, as
+requisite."</p>
+<p>'Mr. Leggatt come out noble as your employee, and, by 'Eaven's
+divine grace, instead of arguing, he pleaded his new paint and
+varnish which was Mr. Morshed's one vital spot (he's lootenant on
+one of the new catch-'em-alive-o's now). "True," says he, "paint's
+an 'oly thing. I'll give you one hour to arrange a <i>modus
+vivendi</i>. Full bunkers and steam ready by 9 P.M. to-night,
+<i>if</i> you please."</p>
+<p>'Even so, Mr. Leggatt was far from content. <i>I</i> 'ad to
+arrange the details. We run her into the yard here.' Pyecroft
+nodded through the window at my car's glossy back-panels. 'We took
+off the body with its mats and put it in the stable, substitooting
+(and that yard's a tight fit for extensive repairs) the body of
+uncle's blue delivery cart. It overhung a trifle, but after I'd
+lashed it I knew it wouldn't fetch loose. Thus, in our composite
+cruiser, we repaired once more to the hotel, and was immediately
+dispatched to the toy-shop in the High Street where we took aboard
+one rocking-horse which was waiting for us.'</p>
+<p>'Took aboard <i>what</i>?' I cried.</p>
+<p>'One fourteen-hand dapple-grey rocking-horse, with pure green
+rockers and detachable tail, pair gashly glass eyes, complete set
+'orrible grinnin' teeth, and two bloody-red nostrils which,
+protruding from the brown papers, produced the <i>tout ensemble</i>
+of a Ju-ju sacrifice in the Benin campaign. Do I make myself
+comprehensible?'</p>
+<p>'Perfectly. Did you say anything?' I asked.</p>
+<p>'Only to Jules. To him, I says, wishing to try him. "<i>Allez
+&agrave; votre bateau. Je say mon Lootenong. Eel voo donneray
+porkwor</i>." To me, says he, "<i>Vous ong ate hurroo! Jamay de la
+vee</i>!" and I saw by his eye he'd taken on for the full term of
+the war. Jules was a blue-eyed, brindle-haired beggar of a useful
+make and inquirin' habits. Your Mr. Leggatt he only groaned.'</p>
+<p>Leggatt nodded. 'It was like nightmares,' he said. 'It was like
+nightmares.'</p>
+<p>'Once more, then,' Pyecroft swept on, 'we returned to the hotel
+and partook of a sumptuous repast, under the able and genial
+chairmanship of our Mr. Morshed, who laid his projecks unreservedly
+before us. "In the first place," he says, opening out bicycle-maps,
+"my uncle, who, I regret to say, is a brigadier-general, has sold
+his alleged soul to Dicky Bridoon for a feathery hat and a pair o'
+gilt spurs. Jules, <i>conspuez l'oncle</i>!" So Jules, you'll be
+glad to hear--'</p>
+<p>'One minute, Pye,' I said. 'Who is Dicky Bridoon?'</p>
+<p>'I don't usually mingle myself up with the bickerings of the
+Junior Service, but it trarnspired that he was Secretary o' State
+for Civil War, an' he'd been issuing mechanical leather-belly
+gee-gees which doctors recommend for tumour--to the British cavalry
+in loo of real meat horses, to learn to ride on. Don't you remember
+there was quite a stir in the papers owing to the cavalry not
+appreciatin' 'em? But that's a minor item. The main point was that
+our uncle, in his capacity of brigadier-general, mark you, had
+wrote to the papers highly approvin' o' Dicky Bridoon's mechanical
+substitutes an 'ad thus obtained promotion--all same as a
+agnosticle stoker psalm-singin' 'imself up the Service under a
+pious captain. At that point of the narrative we caught a
+phosphorescent glimmer why the rocking-horse might have been
+issued; but none the less the navigation was intricate. Omitting
+the fact it was dark and cloudy, our brigadier-uncle lay somewhere
+in the South Downs with his brigade, which was manoeuvrin' at
+Whitsum manoeuvres on a large scale--Red Army <i>versus</i> Blue,
+et cetera; an' all we 'ad to go by was those flapping bicycle-maps
+and your Mr. Leggatt's groans.'</p>
+<p>'I was thinking what the Downs mean after dark,' said Leggatt
+angrily.</p>
+<p>'They was worth thinkin' of,' said Pyecroft. 'When we had
+studied the map till it fair spun, we decided to sally forth and
+creep for uncle by hand in the dark, dark night, an' present 'im
+with the rocking-horse. So we embarked at 8.57 P.M.'</p>
+<p>'One minute again, please. How much did Jules understand by that
+time?' I asked.</p>
+<p>'Sufficient unto the day--or night, perhaps I should say. He
+told our Mr. Morshed he'd follow him <i>more sang frays</i>, which
+is French for dead, drunk, or damned. Barrin' 'is paucity o'
+language, there wasn't a blemish on Jules. But what I wished to
+imply was, when we climbed into the back parts of the car, our
+Lootenant Morshed says to me, "I doubt if I'd flick my cigar-ends
+about too lavish, Mr. Pyecroft. We ought to be sitting on five
+pounds' worth of selected fireworks, and I think the rockets are
+your end." Not being able to smoke with my 'ead over the side I
+threw it away; and then your Mr. Leggatt, 'aving been as nearly
+mutinous as it pays to be with my Mr. Morshed, arched his back and
+drove.'</p>
+<p>'Where did he drive to, please?' said I.</p>
+<p>'Primerrily, in search of any or either or both armies;
+seconderrily, of course, in search of our brigadier-uncle. Not
+finding him on the road, we ran about the grass looking for him.
+This took us to a great many places in a short time. Ow 'eavenly
+that lilac did smell on top of that first Down--stinkin' its
+blossomin' little heart out!'</p>
+<p>'I 'adn't leesure to notice,' said Mr. Leggatt. 'The Downs were
+full o' chalk-pits, and we'd no lights.'</p>
+<p>'We 'ad the bicycle-lamp to look at the map by. Didn't you
+notice the old lady at the window where we saw the man in the
+night-gown? I thought night-gowns as sleepin' rig was extinck, so
+to speak.'</p>
+<p>'I tell you I 'adn't leesure to notice,' Leggatt repeated.</p>
+<p>'That's odd. Then what might 'ave made you tell the sentry at
+the first camp we found that you was the <i>Daily Express</i>
+delivery-waggon?'</p>
+<p>'You can't touch pitch without being defiled,' Leggatt answered.
+''Oo told the officer in the bath we were umpires?'</p>
+<p>'Well, he asked us. That was when we found the Territorial
+battalion undressin' in slow time. It lay on the left flank o' the
+Blue Army, and it cackled as it lay, too. But it gave us our
+position as regards the respective armies. We wandered a little
+more, and at 11.7 P.M., not having had a road under us for twenty
+minutes, we scaled the heights of something or other--which are
+about six hundred feet high. Here we 'alted to tighten the lashings
+of the superstructure, and we smelt leather and horses three
+counties deep all round. We was, as you might say, in the thick of
+it.'</p>
+<p>'"Ah!" says my Mr. Morshed. "My 'orizon has indeed broadened.
+What a little thing is an uncle, Mr. Pyecroft, in the presence o'
+these glitterin' constellations! Simply ludicrous!" he says, "to
+waste a rocking-horse on an individual. We must socialise it. But
+we must get their 'eads up first. Touch off one rocket, if you
+please."</p>
+<p>'I touched off a green three-pounder which rose several thousand
+metres, and burst into gorgeous stars. "Reproduce the manoeuvre,"
+he says, "at the other end o' this ridge--if it don't end in
+another cliff." So we steamed down the ridge a mile and a half
+east, and then I let Jules touch off a pink rocket, or he'd ha'
+kissed me. That was his only way to express his emotions, so to
+speak. Their heads come up then all around us to the extent o'
+thousands. We hears bugles like cocks crowing below, and on the top
+of it a most impressive sound which I'd never enjoyed before
+because 'itherto I'd always been an inteegral part of it, so to
+say--the noise of 'ole armies gettin' under arms. They must 'ave
+anticipated a night attack, I imagine. Most impressive. Then we
+'eard a threshin'-machine. "Tutt! Tutt! This is childish!" says
+Lootenant Morshed. "We can't wait till they've finished cutting
+chaff for their horses. We must make 'em understand we're not to be
+trifled with. Expedite 'em with another rocket, Mr. Pyecroft."</p>
+<p>'"It's barely possible, sir," I remarks, "that that's a
+searchlight churnin' up," and by the time we backed into a
+providential chalk cutting (which was where our first tyre went
+pungo) she broke out to the northward, and began searching the
+ridge. A smart bit o' work.'</p>
+<p>''Twasn't a puncture. The inner tube had nipped because we
+skidded so,' Leggatt interrupted.</p>
+<p>'While your Mr. Leggatt was effectin' repairs, another
+searchlight broke out to the southward, and the two of 'em swept
+our ridge on both sides. Right at the west end of it they showed us
+the ground rising into a hill, so to speak, crowned with what
+looked like a little fort. Morshed saw it before the beams shut
+off. "That's the key of the position!" he says. "Occupy it at all
+hazards."</p>
+<p>'"I haven't half got occupation for the next twenty minutes,"
+says your Mr. Leggatt, rootin' and blasphemin' in the dark. Mark,
+now, 'ow Morshed changed his tactics to suit 'is environment.
+"Right!" says he. "I'll stand by the ship. Mr. Pyecroft and Jules,
+oblige me by doubling along the ridge to the east with all the
+maroons and crackers you can carry without spilling. Read the
+directions careful for the maroons, Mr. Pyecroft, and touch them
+off at half-minute intervals. Jules represents musketry an' maxim
+fire under your command. Remember, it's death or Salisbury Gaol!
+Prob'ly both!"</p>
+<p>'By these means and some moderately 'ard runnin', we distracted
+'em to the eastward. Maroons, you may not be aware, are same as
+bombs, with the anarchism left out. In confined spots like
+chalk-pits, they knock a four-point-seven silly. But you should
+read the directions before'and. In the intervals of the slow but
+well-directed fire of my cow-guns, Jules, who had found a
+sheep-pond in the dark a little lower down, gave what you might
+call a cinematograph reproduction o' sporadic musketry. They was
+large size crackers, and he concluded with the dull, sickenin' thud
+o' blind shells burstin' on soft ground.'</p>
+<p>'How did he manage that?' I said.</p>
+<p>'You throw a lighted squib into water and you'll see,' said
+Pyecroft. 'Thus, then, we improvised till supplies was exhausted
+and the surrounding landscapes fair 'owled and 'ummed at us. The
+Jun or Service might 'ave 'ad their doubts about the rockets but
+they couldn't overlook our gunfire. Both sides tumbled out full of
+initiative. I told Jules no two flat-feet 'ad any right to be as
+happy as us, and we went back along the ridge to the derelict, and
+there was our Mr. Morshed apostrophin' his 'andiwork over fifty
+square mile o' country with "Attend, all ye who list to hear!" out
+of the Fifth Reader. He'd got as far as "And roused the shepherds
+o' Stonehenge, the rangers o' Beaulieu" when we come up, and he
+drew our attention to its truth as well as its beauty. That's rare
+in poetry, I'm told. He went right on to--"The red glare on Skiddaw
+roused those beggars at Carlisle"--which he pointed out was poetic
+license for Leith Hill. This allowed your Mr. Leggatt time to
+finish pumpin' up his tyres. I 'eard the sweat 'op off his
+nose.'</p>
+<p>'You know what it is, sir,' said poor Leggatt to me.</p>
+<p>'It warfted across my mind, as I listened to what was
+trarnspirin', that it might be easier to make the mess than to wipe
+it up, but such considerations weighed not with our valiant
+leader.</p>
+<p>'"Mr. Pyecroft," he says, "it can't have escaped your notice
+that we 'ave one angry and 'ighly intelligent army in front of us,
+an' another 'ighly angry and equally intelligent army in our rear.
+What 'ud you recommend?"</p>
+<p>'Most men would have besought 'im to do a lateral glide while
+there was yet time, but all I said was: "The rocking-horse isn't
+expended yet, sir."</p>
+<p>'He laid his hand on my shoulder. "Pye," says he, "there's worse
+men than you in loftier places. They shall 'ave it. None the less,"
+he remarks, "the ice is undeniably packing."</p>
+<p>'I may 'ave omitted to point out that at this juncture two large
+armies, both deprived of their night's sleep, was awake, as you
+might say, and hurryin' into each other's arms. Here endeth the
+second chapter.'</p>
+<p>He filled his pipe slowly. The uncle had fallen asleep. Leggatt
+lit another cigarette.</p>
+<p>'We then proceeded <i>ong automobile</i> along the ridge in a
+westerly direction towards the miniature fort which had been so
+kindly revealed by the searchlight, but which on inspection (your
+Mr. Leggatt bumped into an outlyin' reef of it) proved to be a
+wurzel-clump; <i>c'est-&agrave;-dire</i>, a parallelogrammatic pile
+of about three million mangold-wurzels, brought up there for the
+sheep, I suppose. On all sides, excep' the one we'd come by, the
+ground fell away moderately quick, and down at the bottom there was
+a large camp lit up an' full of harsh words of command.</p>
+<p>'"I said it was the key to the position," Lootenant Morshed
+remarks. "Trot out Persimmon!" which we rightly took to read,
+"Un-wrap the rocking-horse."</p>
+<p>'"Houp la!" says Jules in a insubordinate tone, an' slaps
+Persimmon on the flank.</p>
+<p>'"Silence!" says the Lootenant. "This is the Royal Navy, not
+Newmarket"; and we carried Persimmon to the top of the
+mangel-wurzel clump as directed.</p>
+<p>'Owing to the inequalities of the terrain (I <i>do</i> think
+your Mr. Leggatt might have had a spirit-level in his kit) he
+wouldn't rock free on the bed-plate, and while adjustin' him, his
+detachable tail fetched adrift. Our Lootenant was quick to seize
+the advantage.</p>
+<p>'"Remove that transformation," he says. "Substitute one Roman
+candle. Gas-power is superior to manual propulsion."</p>
+<p>'So we substituted. He arranged the <i>pi&egrave;ce de
+resistarnce</i> in the shape of large drums--not saucers, mark
+you--drums of coloured fire, with printed instructions, at proper
+distances round Persimmon. There was a brief interregnum while we
+dug ourselves in among the wurzels by hand. Then he touched off the
+fires, <i>not</i> omitting the Roman candle, and, you may take it
+from me, all was visible. Persimmon shone out in his naked
+splendour, red to port, green to starboard, and one white light at
+his bows, as per Board o' Trade regulations. Only he didn't so much
+rock, you might say, as shrug himself, in a manner of speaking,
+every time the candle went off. One can't have everything. But the
+rest surpassed our highest expectations. I think Persimmon was
+noblest on the starboard or green side--more like when a man thinks
+he's seeing mackerel in hell, don't you know? And yet I'd be the
+last to deprecate the effect of the port light on his teeth, or
+that blood-shot look in his left eye. He knew there was something
+going on he didn't approve of. He looked worried.'</p>
+<p>'Did you laugh?' I said.</p>
+<p>'I'm not much of a wag myself; nor it wasn't as if we 'ad time
+to allow the spectacle to sink in. The coloured fires was supposed
+to burn ten minutes, whereas it was obvious to the meanest capacity
+that the Junior Service would arrive by forced marches in about two
+and a half. They grarsped our topical allusion as soon as it was
+across the foot-lights, so to speak. They were quite chafed at it.
+Of course, 'ad we reflected, we might have known that exposin'
+illuminated rockin'-horses to an army that was learnin' to ride on
+'em partook of the nature of a <i>double entender</i>, as the
+French say--same as waggling the tiller lines at a man who's had a
+hanging in the family. I knew the cox of the <i>Archimandrite's</i>
+galley 'arf killed for a similar <i>plaisan-teree.</i> But we never
+anticipated lobsters being so sensitive. That was why we shifted.
+We could 'ardly tear our commandin' officer away. He put his head
+on one side, and kept cooin'. The only thing he 'ad neglected to
+provide was a line of retreat; but your Mr. Leggatt--an 'eroic soul
+in the last stage of wet prostration--here took command of the van,
+or, rather, the rear-guard. We walked downhill beside him, holding
+on to the superstructure to prevent her capsizing. These technical
+details, 'owever, are beyond me.' He waved his pipe towards
+Leggatt.</p>
+<p>'I saw there was two deepish ruts leadin' down 'ill somewhere,'
+said Leggatt. 'That was when the soldiers stopped laughin', and
+begun to run uphill.'</p>
+<p>'Stroll, lovey, stroll!' Pyecroft corrected. 'The Dervish rush
+took place later.'</p>
+<p>'So I laid her in these ruts. That was where she must 'ave
+scraped her silencer a bit. Then they turned sharp right--the ruts
+did--and then she stopped bonnet-high in a manure-heap, sir; but
+I'll swear it was all of a one in three gradient. I think it was a
+barnyard. We waited there,' said Leggatt.</p>
+<p>'But not for long,' said Pyecroft. 'The lights were towering out
+of the drums on the position we 'ad so valiantly abandoned; and the
+Junior Service was escaladin' it <i>en masse</i>. When numerous
+bodies of 'ighly trained men arrive simultaneous in the same
+latitude from opposite directions, each remarking briskly, "What
+the 'ell did you do <i>that</i> for?" detonation, as you might say,
+is practically assured. They didn't ask for extraneous aids. If
+we'd come out with sworn affidavits of what we'd done they wouldn't
+'ave believed us. They wanted each other's company exclusive. Such
+was the effect of Persimmon on their clarss feelings. Idol'try,
+<i>I</i> call it! Events transpired with the utmost velocity and
+rapidly increasing pressures. There was a few remarks about Dicky
+Bridoon and mechanical horses, and then some one was smacked--hard
+by the sound--in the middle of a remark.'</p>
+<p>'That was the man who kept calling for the Forty-fifth
+Dragoons,' said Leggatt. 'He got as far as Drag ...'</p>
+<p>'Was it?' said Pyecroft dreamily. 'Well, he couldn't say they
+didn't come. They all came, and they all fell to arguin' whether
+the Infantry should 'ave Persimmon for a regimental pet or the
+Cavalry should keep him for stud purposes. Hence the issue was soon
+clouded with mangold-wurzels. Our commander said we 'ad sowed the
+good seed, and it was bearing abundant fruit. (They weigh between
+four and seven pounds apiece.) Seein' the children 'ad got over
+their shyness, and 'ad really begun to play games, we backed out o'
+the pit and went down, by steps, to the camp below, no man, as you
+might say, making us afraid. Here we enjoyed a front view of the
+battle, which rolled with renewed impetus, owing to both sides
+receiving strong reinforcements every minute. All arms were freely
+represented; Cavalry, on this occasion only, acting in concert with
+Artillery. They argued the relative merits of horses <i>versus</i>
+feet, so to say, but they didn't neglect Persimmon. The wounded
+rolling downhill with the wurzels informed us that he had long ago
+been socialised, and the smallest souvenirs were worth a man's
+life. Speaking broadly, the Junior Service appeared to be a shade
+out of 'and, if I may venture so far. They did <i>not</i> pay
+prompt and unhesitating obedience to the "Retires" or the "Cease
+Fires" or the "For 'Eaven's sake come to bed, ducky" of their
+officers, who, I regret to say, were 'otly embroiled at the heads
+of their respective units.'</p>
+<p>'How did you find that out?' I asked.</p>
+<p>'On account of Lootenant Morshed going to the Mess tent to call
+on his uncle and raise a drink; but all hands had gone to the
+front. We thought we 'eard somebody bathing behind the tent, and we
+found an oldish gentleman tryin' to drown a boy in knickerbockers
+in a horse-trough. He kept him under with a bicycle, so to speak.
+He 'ad nearly accomplished his fell design, when we frustrated him.
+He was in a highly malleable condition and full o' <i>juice de
+spree</i>. "Arsk not what I am," he says. "My wife 'll tell me that
+quite soon enough. Arsk rather what I've been," he says. "I've been
+dinin' here," he says. "I commanded 'em in the Eighties," he says,
+"and, Gawd forgive me," he says, sobbin' 'eavily, "I've spent this
+holy evening telling their Colonel they was a set of educated
+inefficients. Hark to 'em!" We could, without strainin' ourselves;
+but how <i>he</i> picked up the gentle murmur of his own corps in
+that on-the-knee party up the hill I don't know. "They've marched
+and fought thirty mile to-day," he shouts, "and now they're tearin'
+the <i>intestines</i> out of the Cavalry up yonder! They won't stop
+this side the gates o' Delhi," he says. "I commanded their
+ancestors. There's nothing wrong with the Service," he says,
+wringing out his trousers on his lap. "'Eaven pardon me for
+doubtin' 'em! Same old game--same young beggars."</p>
+<p>'The boy in the knickerbockers, languishing on a chair, puts in
+a claim for one drink. "Let him go dry," says our friend in
+shirt-tails. "He's a reporter. He run into me on his filthy bicycle
+and he asked me if I could furnish 'im with particulars about the
+mutiny in the Army. You false-'earted proletarian publicist," he
+says, shakin' his finger at 'im--for he was reelly annoyed--"I'll
+teach you to defile what you can't comprebend! When my regiment's
+in a state o' mutiny, I'll do myself the honour of informing you
+personally. You particularly ignorant and very narsty little man,"
+he says, "you're no better than a dhobi's donkey! If there wasn't
+dirty linen to wash, you'd starve," he says, "and why I haven't
+drowned you will be the lastin' regret of my life."</p>
+<p>'Well, we sat with 'em and 'ad drinks for about half-an-hour in
+front of the Mess tent. He'd ha' killed the reporter if there
+hadn't been witnesses, and the reporter might have taken notes of
+the battle; so we acted as two-way buffers, in a sense. I don't
+hold with the Press mingling up with Service matters. They draw
+false conclusions. Now, mark you, at a moderate estimate, there
+were seven thousand men in the fighting line, half of 'em hurt in
+their professional feelings, an' the other half rubbin' in the
+liniment, as you might say. All due to Persimmon! If you 'adn't
+seen it you wouldn't 'ave believed it. And yet, mark you, not one
+single unit of 'em even resorted to his belt. They confined
+themselves to natural producks--hands and the wurzels. I thought
+Jules was havin' fits, till it trarnspired the same thought had
+impressed him in the French language. He called it
+<i>incroyable</i>, I believe. Seven thousand men, with seven
+thousand rifles, belts, and bayonets, in a violently agitated
+condition, and not a ungenteel blow struck from first to last. The
+old gentleman drew our attention to it as well. It was quite
+noticeable.</p>
+<p>'Lack of ammunition was the primerry cause of the battle
+ceasin'. A Brigade-Major came in, wipin' his nose on both cuffs,
+and sayin' he 'ad 'ad snuff. The brigadier-uncle followed. He was,
+so to speak, sneezin'. We thought it best to shift our moorings
+without attractin' attention; so we shifted. They 'ad called the
+cows 'ome by then. The Junior Service was going to bye-bye all
+round us, as happy as the ship's monkey when he's been playin' with
+the paints, and Lootenant Morshed and Jules kept bowin' to port and
+starboard of the superstructure, acknowledgin' the unstinted
+applause which the multitude would 'ave given 'em if they'd known
+the facts. On the other 'and, as your Mr. Leggatt observed, they
+might 'ave killed us.</p>
+<p>'That would have been about five bells in the middle watch, say
+half-past two. A well-spent evening. There was but little to be
+gained by entering Portsmouth at that hour, so we turned off on the
+grass (this was after we had found a road under us), and we cast
+anchors out at the stern and prayed for the day.</p>
+<p>'But your Mr. Leggatt he had to make and mend tyres all our
+watch below. It trarnspired she had been running on the rim o' two
+or three wheels, which, very properly, he hadn't reported till the
+close of the action. And that's the reason of your four new tyres.
+Mr. Morshed was of opinion you'd earned 'em. Do you dissent?'</p>
+<p>I stretched out my hand, which Pyecroft crushed to pulp. 'No,
+Pye,' I said, deeply moved, 'I agree entirely. But what happened to
+Jules?'</p>
+<p>'We returned him to his own Navy after breakfast. He wouldn't
+have kept much longer without some one in his own language to tell
+it to. I don't know any man I ever took more compassion on than
+Jules. 'Is sufferings swelled him up centimetres, and all he could
+do on the Hard was to kiss Lootenant Morshed and me, <i>and</i>
+your Mr. Leggatt. He deserved that much. A cordial beggar.'</p>
+<p>Pyecroft looked at the washed cups on the table, and the low
+sunshine on my car's back in the yard.</p>
+<p>'Too early to drink to him,' he said. 'But I feel it just the
+same.'</p>
+<p>The uncle, sunk in his chair, snored a little; the canary
+answered with a shrill lullaby. Pyecroft picked up the duster,
+threw it over the cage, put his finger to his lips, and we tiptoed
+out into the shop, while Leggatt brought the car round.</p>
+<p>'I'll look out for the news in the papers,' I said, as I got
+in.</p>
+<p>'Oh, we short-circuited that! Nothing trarnspired excep' a
+statement to the effect that some Territorial battalions had played
+about with turnips at the conclusion of the manoeuvres The taxpayer
+don't know all he gets for his money. Farewell!'</p>
+<p>We moved off just in time to be blocked by a regiment coming
+towards the station to entrain for London.</p>
+<p>'Beg your pardon, sir,' said a sergeant in charge of the
+baggage, 'but would you mind backin' a bit till we get the waggons
+past?'</p>
+<p>'Certainly,' I said. 'You don't happen to have a rocking-horse
+among your kit, do you?'</p>
+<p>The rattle of our reverse drowned his answer, but I saw his
+eyes. One of them was blackish-green, about four days old.</p>
+<br>
+<br>
+<hr style="width: 35%;">
+<br>
+<br>
+<a name="page330"></a>
+<div class="poem">
+<div class="stanza">
+<p class="i3"><b>THE LEGEND OF MIRTH</b></p>
+</div>
+<div class="stanza">
+<p>The Four Archangels, so the legends tell,</p>
+<p>Raphael, Gabriel, Michael, Azrael,</p>
+<p>Being first of those to whom the Power was shown,</p>
+<p>Stood first of all the Host before The Throne,</p>
+<p>And when the Charges were allotted burst</p>
+<p>Tumultuous-winged from out the assembly first.</p>
+<p>Zeal was their spur that bade them strictly heed</p>
+<p>Their own high judgment on their lightest deed.</p>
+<p>Zeal was their spur that, when relief was given,</p>
+<p>Urged them unwearied to fresh toil in Heaven;</p>
+<p>For Honour's sake perfecting every task</p>
+<p>Beyond what e'en Perfection's self could ask....</p>
+<p>And Allah, Who created Zeal and Pride,</p>
+<p>Knows how the twain are perilous-near allied.</p>
+</div>
+<div class="stanza">
+<p>It chanced on one of Heaven's long-lighted days,</p>
+<p>The Four and all the Host having gone their ways</p>
+<p>Each to his Charge, the shining Courts were void</p>
+<p>Save for one Seraph whom no charge employed,</p>
+<p>With folden wings and slumber-threatened brow.</p>
+<p>To whom The Word: 'Beloved, what dost thou?'</p>
+<p>'By the Permission,' came the answer soft,</p>
+<p>'Little I do nor do that little oft.</p>
+<p>As is The Will in Heaven so on Earth</p>
+<p>Where by The Will I strive to make men mirth.'</p>
+<p>He ceased and sped, hearing The Word once more:</p>
+<p>'Beloved, go thy way and greet the Four.'</p>
+</div>
+<div class="stanza">
+<p>Systems and Universes overpast,</p>
+<p>The Seraph came upon the Four, at last,</p>
+<p>Guiding and guarding with devoted mind</p>
+<p>The tedious generations of mankind</p>
+<p>Who lent at most unwilling ear and eye</p>
+<p>When they could not escape the ministry....</p>
+<p>Yet, patient, faithful, firm, persistent, just</p>
+<p>Toward all that gross, indifferent, facile dust,</p>
+<p>The Archangels laboured to discharge their trust</p>
+<p>By precept and example, prayer and law,</p>
+<p>Advice, reproof, and rule, but, labouring, saw</p>
+<p>Each in his fellow's countenance confessed,</p>
+<p>The Doubt that sickens: 'Have I done my best?'</p>
+</div>
+<div class="stanza">
+<p>Even as they sighed and turned to toil anew,</p>
+<p>The Seraph hailed them with observance due;</p>
+<p>And after some fit talk of higher things</p>
+<p>Touched tentative on mundane happenings.</p>
+<p>This they permitting, he, emboldened thus,</p>
+<p>Prolused of humankind promiscuous.</p>
+<p>And, since the large contention less avails</p>
+<p>Than instances observed, he told them tales--Tales</p>
+<p>of the shop, the bed, the court, the street,</p>
+<p>Intimate, elemental, indiscreet:</p>
+<p>Occasions where Confusion smiting swift</p>
+<p>Piles jest on jest as snow-slides pile the drift.</p>
+</div>
+<div class="stanza">
+<p>Whence, one by one, beneath derisive skies,</p>
+<p>The victims bare, bewildered heads arise:</p>
+<p>Tales of the passing of the spirit, graced</p>
+<p>With humour blinding as the doom it faced:</p>
+<p>Stark tales of ribaldry that broke aside</p>
+<p>To tears, by laughter swallowed ere they dried:</p>
+<p>Tales to which neither grace nor gain accrue,</p>
+<p>But only (Allah be exalted!) true,</p>
+<p>And only, as the Seraph showed that night,</p>
+<p>Delighting to the limits of delight.</p>
+</div>
+<div class="stanza">
+<p>These he rehearsed with artful pause and halt,</p>
+<p>And such pretence of memory at fault,</p>
+<p>That soon the Four--so well the bait was thrown--</p>
+<p>Came to his aid with memories of their own--</p>
+<p>Matters dismissed long since as small or vain,</p>
+<p>Whereof the high significance had lain</p>
+<p>Hid, till the ungirt glosses made it plain.</p>
+<p>Then as enlightenment came broad and fast,</p>
+<p>Each marvelled at his own oblivious past</p>
+<p>Until--the Gates of Laughter opened wide--</p>
+<p>The Four, with that bland Seraph at their side,</p>
+<p>While they recalled, compared, and amplified,</p>
+<p>In utter mirth forgot both zeal and pride.</p>
+</div>
+<div class="stanza">
+<p>High over Heaven the lamps of midnight burned</p>
+<p>Ere, weak with merriment, the Four returned,</p>
+<p>Not in that order they were wont to keep--</p>
+<p>Pinion to pinion answering, sweep for sweep,</p>
+<p>In awful diapason heard afar,</p>
+<p>But shoutingly adrift 'twixt star and star.</p>
+<p>Reeling a planet's orbit left or right</p>
+<p>As laughter took them in the abysmal Night;</p>
+<p>Or, by the point of some remembered jest,</p>
+<p>Winged and brought helpless down through gulfs unguessed,</p>
+<p>Where the blank worlds that gather to the birth</p>
+<p>Leaped in the womb of Darkness at their mirth,</p>
+<p>And e'en Gehenna's bondsmen understood.</p>
+<p>They were not damned from human brotherhood.</p>
+</div>
+<div class="stanza">
+<p>Not first nor last of Heaven's high Host, the Four</p>
+<p>That night took place beneath The Throne once more.</p>
+<p>O lovelier than their morning majesty,</p>
+<p>The understanding light behind the eye!</p>
+<p>O more compelling than their old command,</p>
+<p>The new-learned friendly gesture of the hand!</p>
+<p>O sweeter than their zealous fellowship,</p>
+<p>The wise half-smile that passed from lip to lip!</p>
+<p>O well and roundly, when Command was given,</p>
+<p>They told their tale against themselves to Heaven,</p>
+<p>And in the silence, waiting on The Word,</p>
+<p>Received the Peace and Pardon of The Lord!</p>
+</div>
+</div>
+<br>
+<br>
+<hr style="width: 35%;">
+<br>
+<br>
+<a name="page335"></a>
+<h2>'My Son's Wife'</h2>
+<h3>(1913)</h3>
+<br>
+<p>He had suffered from the disease of the century since his early
+youth, and before he was thirty he was heavily marked with it. He
+and a few friends had rearranged Heaven very comfortably, but the
+reorganisation of Earth, which they called Society, was even
+greater fun. It demanded Work in the shape of many taxi-rides
+daily; hours of brilliant talk with brilliant talkers; some
+sparkling correspondence; a few silences (but on the understanding
+that their own turn should come soon) while other people expounded
+philosophies; and a fair number of picture-galleries, tea-fights,
+concerts, theatres, music-halls, and cinema shows; the whole
+trimmed with love-making to women whose hair smelt of
+cigarette-smoke. Such strong days sent Frankwell Midmore back to
+his flat assured that he and his friends had helped the World a
+step nearer the Truth, the Dawn, and the New Order.</p>
+<p>His temperament, he said, led him more towards concrete data
+than abstract ideas. People who investigate detail are apt to be
+tired at the day's end. The same temperament, or it may have been a
+woman, made him early attach himself to the Immoderate Left of his
+Cause in the capacity of an experimenter in Social Relations. And
+since the Immoderate Left contains plenty of women anxious to help
+earnest inquirers with large independent incomes to arrive at
+evaluations of essentials, Frankwell Midmore's lot was far from
+contemptible.</p>
+<p>At that hour Fate chose to play with him. A widowed aunt, widely
+separated by nature, and more widely by marriage, from all that
+Midmore's mother had ever been or desired to be, died and left him
+possessions. Mrs. Midmore, having that summer embraced a creed
+which denied the existence of death, naturally could not stoop to
+burial; but Midmore had to leave London for the dank country at a
+season when Social Regeneration works best through long, cushioned
+conferences, two by two, after tea. There he faced the bracing
+ritual of the British funeral, and was wept at across the raw grave
+by an elderly coffin-shaped female with a long nose, who called him
+'Master Frankie'; and there he was congratulated behind an echoing
+top-hat by a man he mistook for a mute, who turned out to be his
+aunt's lawyer. He wrote his mother next day, after a bright account
+of the funeral:</p>
+<p>'So far as I can understand, she has left me between four and
+five hundred a year. It all comes from Ther Land, as they call it
+down here. The unspeakable attorney, Sperrit, and a green-eyed
+daughter, who hums to herself as she tramps but is silent on all
+subjects except "huntin'," insisted on taking me to see it. Ther
+Land is brown and green in alternate slabs like chocolate and
+pistachio cakes, speckled with occasional peasants who do not
+utter. In case it should not be wet enough there is a wet brook in
+the middle of it. Ther House is by the brook. I shall look into it
+later. If there should be any little memento of Jenny that you care
+for, let me know. Didn't you tell me that mid-Victorian furniture
+is coming into the market again? Jenny's old maid--it is called
+Rhoda Dolbie--tells me that Jenny promised it thirty pounds a year.
+The will does not. Hence, I suppose, the tears at the funeral. But
+that is close on ten per cent of the income. I fancy Jenny has
+destroyed all her private papers and records of her <i>vie
+intime</i>, if, indeed, life be possible in such a place. The
+Sperrit man told me that if I had means of my own I might come and
+live on Ther Land. I didn't tell him how much I would pay not to! I
+cannot think it right that any human being should exercise mastery
+over others in the merciless fashion our tom-fool social system
+permits; so, as it is all mine, I intend to sell it whenever the
+unholy Sperrit can find a purchaser.'</p>
+<p>And he went to Mr. Sperrit with the idea next day, just before
+returning to town.</p>
+<p>'Quite so,' said the lawyer. 'I see your point, of course. But
+the house itself is rather old-fashioned--hardly the type
+purchasers demand nowadays. There's no park, of course, and the
+bulk of the land is let to a life-tenant, a Mr. Sidney. As long as
+he pays his rent, he can't be turned out, and even if he
+didn't'--Mr. Sperrit's face relaxed a shade--'you might have a
+difficulty.'</p>
+<p>'The property brings four hundred a year, I understand,' said
+Midmore.</p>
+<p>'Well, hardly--ha-ardly. Deducting land and income tax, tithes,
+fire insurance, cost of collection and repairs of course, it
+returned two hundred and eighty-four pounds last year. The repairs
+are rather a large item--owing to the brook. I call it Liris--out
+of Horace, you know.'</p>
+<p>Midmore looked at his watch impatiently.</p>
+<p>'I suppose you can find somebody to buy it?' he repeated.</p>
+<p>'We will do our best, of course, if those are your instructions.
+Then, that is all except'--here Midmore half rose, but Mr.
+Sperrit's little grey eyes held his large brown ones
+firmly--'except about Rhoda Dolbie, Mrs. Werf's maid. I may tell
+you that we did not draw up your aunt's last will. She grew
+secretive towards the last--elderly people often do--and had it
+done in London. I expect her memory failed her, or she mislaid her
+notes. She used to put them in her spectacle-case.... My motor only
+takes eight minutes to get to the station, Mr. Midmore ... but, as
+I was saying, whenever she made her will with <i>us</i>, Mrs. Werf
+always left Rhoda thirty pounds per annum. Charlie, the wills!' A
+clerk with a baldish head and a long nose dealt documents on to the
+table like cards, and breathed heavily behind Midmore. 'It's in no
+sense a legal obligation, of course,' said Mr. Sperrit. 'Ah, that
+one is dated January the 11th, eighteen eighty-nine.'</p>
+<p>Midmore looked at his watch again and found himself saying with
+no good grace: 'Well, I suppose she'd better have it--for the
+present at any rate.'</p>
+<p>He escaped with an uneasy feeling that two hundred and
+fifty-four pounds a year was not exactly four hundred, and that
+Charlie's long nose annoyed him. Then he returned, first-class, to
+his own affairs.</p>
+<p>Of the two, perhaps three, experiments in Social Relations which
+he had then in hand, one interested him acutely. It had run for
+some months and promised most variegated and interesting
+developments, on which he dwelt luxuriously all the way to town.
+When he reached his flat he was not well prepared for a twelve-page
+letter explaining, in the diction of the Immoderate Left which
+rubricates its I's and illuminates its T's, that the lady had
+realised greater attractions in another Soul. She re-stated, rather
+than pleaded, the gospel of the Immoderate Left as her
+justification, and ended in an impassioned demand for her right to
+express herself in and on her own life, through which, she pointed
+out, she could pass but once. She added that if, later, she should
+discover Midmore was 'essentially complementary to her needs,' she
+would tell him so. That Midmore had himself written much the same
+sort of epistle--barring the hint of return--to a woman of whom his
+needs for self-expression had caused him to weary three years
+before, did not assist him in the least. He expressed himself to
+the gas-fire in terms essential but not complimentary. Then he
+reflected on the detached criticism of his best friends and her
+best friends, male and female, with whom he and she and others had
+talked so openly while their gay adventure was in flower. He
+recalled, too--this must have been about midnight--her analysis
+from every angle, remote and most intimate, of the mate to whom she
+had been adjudged under the base convention which is styled
+marriage. Later, at that bad hour when the cattle wake for a
+little, he remembered her in other aspects and went down into the
+hell appointed; desolate, desiring, with no God to call upon. About
+eleven o'clock next morning Eliphaz the Temanite, Bildad the
+Shuhite, and Zophar the Naamathite called upon him 'for they had
+made appointment together' to see how he took it; but the janitor
+told them that Job had gone--into the country, he believed.</p>
+<p>Midmore's relief when he found his story was not written across
+his aching temples for Mr. Sperrit to read--the defeated lover,
+like the successful one, believes all earth privy to his soul--was
+put down by Mr. Sperrit to quite different causes. He led him into
+a morning-room. The rest of the house seemed to be full of people,
+singing to a loud piano idiotic songs about cows, and the hall
+smelt of damp cloaks.</p>
+<p>'It's our evening to take the winter cantata,' Mr. Sperrit
+explained. 'It's "High Tide on the Coast of Lincolnshire." I hoped
+you'd come back. There are scores of little things to settle. As
+for the house, of course, it stands ready for you at any time. I
+couldn't get Rhoda out of it--nor could Charlie for that matter.
+She's the sister, isn't she, of the nurse who brought you down here
+when you were four, she says, to recover from measles?'</p>
+<p>'Is she? Was I?' said Midmore through the bad tastes in his
+mouth. 'D'you suppose I could stay there the night?'</p>
+<p>Thirty joyous young voices shouted appeal to some one to leave
+their 'pipes of parsley 'ollow--'ollow--'ollow!' Mr. Sperrit had to
+raise his voice above the din.</p>
+<p>'Well, if I asked you to stay <i>here</i>, I should never hear
+the last of it from Rhoda. She's a little cracked, of course, but
+the soul of devotion and capable of anything. <i>Ne sit
+ancillae</i>, you know.'</p>
+<p>'Thank you. Then I'll go. I'll walk.' He stumbled out dazed and
+sick into the winter twilight, and sought the square house by the
+brook.</p>
+<p>It was not a dignified entry, because when the door was
+unchained and Rhoda exclaimed, he took two valiant steps into the
+hall and then fainted--as men sometimes will after twenty-two hours
+of strong emotion and little food.</p>
+<p>'I'm sorry,' he said when he could speak. He was lying at the
+foot of the stairs, his head on Rhoda's lap.</p>
+<p>'Your 'ome is your castle, sir,' was the reply in his hair. 'I
+smelt it wasn't drink. You lay on the sofa till I get your
+supper.'</p>
+<p>She settled him in a drawing-room hung with yellow silk, heavy
+with the smell of dead leaves and oil lamp. Something murmured
+soothingly in the background and overcame the noises in his head.
+He thought he heard horses' feet on wet gravel and a voice singing
+about ships and flocks and grass. It passed close to the shuttered
+bay-window.</p>
+<blockquote>But each will mourn his own, she saith,<br>
+And sweeter woman ne'er drew breath<br>
+Than my son's wife, Elizabeth ...<br>
+Cusha--cusha--cusha--calling.</blockquote>
+<p>The hoofs broke into a canter as Rhoda entered with the tray.
+'And then I'll put you to bed,' she said. 'Sidney's coming in the
+morning.' Midmore asked no questions. He dragged his poor bruised
+soul to bed and would have pitied it all over again, but the food
+and warm sherry and water drugged him to instant sleep.</p>
+<p>Rhoda's voice wakened him, asking whether he would have ''ip,
+foot, or sitz,' which he understood were the baths of the
+establishment. 'Suppose you try all three,' she suggested. 'They're
+all yours, you know, sir.'</p>
+<p>He would have renewed his sorrows with the daylight, but her
+words struck him pleasantly. Everything his eyes opened upon was
+his very own to keep for ever. The carved four-post Chippendale
+bed, obviously worth hundreds; the wavy walnut William and Mary
+chairs--he had seen worse ones labelled twenty guineas apiece; the
+oval medallion mirror; the delicate eighteenth-century wire
+fireguard; the heavy brocaded curtains were his--all his. So, too,
+a great garden full of birds that faced him when he shaved; a
+mulberry tree, a sun-dial, and a dull, steel-coloured brook that
+murmured level with the edge of a lawn a hundred yards away.
+Peculiarly and privately his own was the smell of sausages and
+coffee that he sniffed at the head of the wide square landing, all
+set round with mysterious doors and Bartolozzi prints. He spent two
+hours after breakfast in exploring his new possessions. His heart
+leaped up at such things as sewing-machines, a rubber-tyred
+bath-chair in a tiled passage, a malachite-headed Malacca cane,
+boxes and boxes of unopened stationery, seal-rings, bunches of
+keys, and at the bottom of a steel-net reticule a little leather
+purse with seven pounds ten shillings in gold and eleven shillings
+in silver.</p>
+<p>'You used to play with that when my sister brought you down here
+after your measles,' said Rhoda as he slipped the money into his
+pocket. 'Now, this was your pore dear auntie's business-room.' She
+opened a low door. 'Oh, I forgot about Mr. Sidney! There he is.' An
+enormous old man with rheumy red eyes that blinked under downy
+white eyebrows sat in an Empire chair, his cap in his hands. Rhoda
+withdrew sniffing. The man looked Midmore over in silence, then
+jerked a thumb towards the door. 'I reckon she told you who I be,'
+he began. 'I'm the only farmer you've got. Nothin' goes off my
+place 'thout it walks on its own feet. What about my
+pig-pound?'</p>
+<p>'Well, what about it?' said Midmore.</p>
+<p>'That's just what I be come about. The County Councils are
+getting more particular. Did ye know there was swine fever at
+Pashell's? There <i>be</i>. It'll 'ave to be in brick.'</p>
+<p>'Yes,' said Midmore politely.</p>
+<p>'I've bin at your aunt that was, plenty times about it. I don't
+say she wasn't a just woman, but she didn't read the lease same way
+I did. I be used to bein' put upon, but there's no doing any longer
+'thout that pig-pound.'</p>
+<p>'When would you like it?' Midmore asked. It seemed the easiest
+road to take.</p>
+<p>'Any time or other suits me, I reckon. He ain't thrivin' where
+he is, an' I paid eighteen shillin' for him.' He crossed his hands
+on his stick and gave no further sign of life.</p>
+<p>'Is that all?' Midmore stammered.</p>
+<p>'All now--excep''--he glanced fretfully at the table beside
+him--'excep' my usuals. Where's that Rhoda?'</p>
+<p>Midmore rang the bell. Rhoda came in with a bottle and a glass.
+The old man helped himself to four stiff fingers, rose in one
+piece, and stumped out. At the door he cried ferociously: 'Don't
+suppose it's any odds to you whether I'm drowned or not, but them
+floodgates want a wheel and winch, they do. I be too old for
+liftin' 'em with the bar--my time o' life.'</p>
+<p>'Good riddance if 'e was drowned,' said Rhoda. 'But don't you
+mind him. He's only amusin' himself. Your pore dear auntie used to
+give 'im 'is usual--'tisn't the whisky <i>you</i> drink--an' send
+'im about 'is business.'</p>
+<p>'I see. Now, is a pig-pound the same thing as a pig-sty?'</p>
+<p>Rhoda nodded. ''E needs one, too, but 'e ain't entitled to it.
+You look at 'is lease--third drawer on the left in that Bombay
+cab'net--an' next time 'e comes you ask 'im to read it. That'll
+choke 'im off, because 'e can't!'</p>
+<p>There was nothing in Midmore's past to teach him the message and
+significance of a hand-written lease of the late 'eighties, but
+Rhoda interpreted.</p>
+<p>'It don't mean anything reelly,' was her cheerful conclusion,
+'excep' you mustn't get rid of him anyhow, an' 'e can do what 'e
+likes always. Lucky for us 'e <i>do</i> farm; and if it wasn't for
+'is woman--'</p>
+<p>'Oh, there's a Mrs. Sidney, is there?'</p>
+<p>'Lor, <i>no</i>!' The Sidneys don't marry. They keep. That's his
+fourth since--to my knowledge. He was a takin' man from the
+first.'</p>
+<p>'Any families?'</p>
+<p>'They'd be grown up by now if there was, wouldn't they? But you
+can't spend all your days considerin' 'is interests. That's what
+gave your pore aunt 'er indigestion. 'Ave you seen the
+gun-room?'</p>
+<p>Midmore held strong views on the immorality of taking life for
+pleasure. But there was no denying that the late Colonel Werf's
+seventy-guinea breechloaders were good at their filthy job. He
+loaded one, took it out and pointed--merely pointed--it at a
+cock-pheasant which rose out of a shrubbery behind the kitchen, and
+the flaming bird came down in a long slant on the lawn, stone dead.
+Rhoda from the scullery said it was a lovely shot, and told him
+lunch was ready.</p>
+<p>He spent the afternoon gun in one hand, a map in the other,
+beating the bounds of his lands. They lay altogether in a shallow,
+uninteresting valley, flanked with woods and bisected by a brook.
+Up stream was his own house; down stream, less than half a mile, a
+low red farm-house squatted in an old orchard, beside what looked
+like small lock-gates on the Thames. There was no doubt as to
+ownership. Mr. Sidney saw him while yet far off, and bellowed at
+him about pig-pounds and floodgates. These last were two great
+sliding shutters of weedy oak across the brook, which were prised
+up inch by inch with a crowbar along a notched strip of iron, and
+when Sidney opened them they at once let out half the water.
+Midmore watched it shrink between its aldered banks like some
+conjuring trick. This, too, was his very own.</p>
+<p>'I see,' he said. 'How interesting! Now, what's that bell for?'
+he went on, pointing to an old ship's bell in a rude belfry at the
+end of an outhouse. 'Was that a chapel once?' The red-eyed giant
+seemed to have difficulty in expressing himself for the moment and
+blinked savagely.</p>
+<p>'Yes,' he said at last. 'My chapel. When you 'ear that bell ring
+you'll 'ear something. Nobody but me 'ud put up with it--but I
+reckon it don't make any odds to you.' He slammed the gates down
+again, and the brook rose behind them with a suck and a grunt.</p>
+<p>Midmore moved off, conscious that he might be safer with Rhoda
+to hold his conversational hand. As he passed the front of the
+farm-house a smooth fat woman, with neatly parted grey hair under a
+widow's cap, curtsied to him deferentially through the window. By
+every teaching of the Immoderate Left she had a perfect right to
+express herself in any way she pleased, but the curtsey revolted
+him. And on his way home he was hailed from behind a hedge by a
+manifest idiot with no roof to his mouth, who hallooed and danced
+round him.</p>
+<p>'What did that beast want?' he demanded of Rhoda at tea.</p>
+<p>'Jimmy? He only wanted to know if you 'ad any telegrams to send.
+'E'll go anywhere so long as 'tisn't across running water. That
+gives 'im 'is seizures. Even talkin' about it for fun like makes
+'im shake.'</p>
+<p>'But why isn't he where he can be properly looked after?'</p>
+<p>'What 'arm's 'e doing? E's a love-child, but 'is family can pay
+for 'im. If 'e was locked up 'e'd die all off at once, like a wild
+rabbit. Won't you, please, look at the drive, sir?'</p>
+<p>Midmore looked in the fading light. The neat gravel was pitted
+with large roundish holes, and there was a punch or two of the same
+sort on the lawn.</p>
+<p>'That's the 'unt comin' 'ome,' Rhoda explained. 'Your pore dear
+auntie always let 'em use our drive for a short cut after the
+Colonel died. The Colonel wouldn't so much because he preserved;
+but your auntie was always an 'orsewoman till 'er sciatica.'</p>
+<p>'Isn't there some one who can rake it over or--or something?'
+said Midmore vaguely.</p>
+<p>'Oh yes. You'll never see it in the morning, but--you was out
+when they came 'ome an' Mister Fisher--he's the Master--told me to
+tell you with 'is compliments that if you wasn't preservin' and
+cared to 'old to the old understanding', is gravel-pit is at your
+service same as before. 'E thought, perhaps, you mightn't know, and
+it 'ad slipped my mind to tell you. It's good gravel, Mister
+Fisher's, and it binds beautiful on the drive. We 'ave to draw it,
+o' course, from the pit, but--'</p>
+<p>Midmore looked at her helplessly.</p>
+<p>'Rhoda,' said he, 'what am I supposed to do?'</p>
+<p>'Oh, let 'em come through,' she replied. 'You never know. You
+may want to 'unt yourself some day.'</p>
+<p>That evening it rained and his misery returned on him, the worse
+for having been diverted. At last he was driven to paw over a few
+score books in a panelled room called the library, and realised
+with horror what the late Colonel Werf's mind must have been in its
+prime. The volumes smelt of a dead world as strongly as they did of
+mildew. He opened and thrust them back, one after another, till
+crude coloured illustrations of men on horses held his eye. He
+began at random and read a little, moved into the drawing-room with
+the volume, and settled down by the fire still reading. It was a
+foul world into which he peeped for the first time--a heavy-eating,
+hard-drinking hell of horse-copers, swindlers, matchmaking mothers,
+economically dependent virgins selling themselves blushingly for
+cash and lands: Jews, tradesmen, and an ill-considered spawn of
+Dickens-and-horsedung characters (I give Midmore's own criticism),
+but he read on, fascinated, and behold, from the pages leaped, as
+it were, the brother to the red-eyed man of the brook, bellowing at
+a landlord (here Midmore realised that <i>he</i> was that very
+animal) for new barns; and another man who, like himself again,
+objected to hoof-marks on gravel. Outrageous as thought and
+conception were, the stuff seemed to have the rudiments of
+observation. He dug out other volumes by the same author, till
+Rhoda came in with a silver candlestick.</p>
+<p>'Rhoda,' said he, 'did you ever hear about a character called
+James Pigg--and Batsey?'</p>
+<p>'Why, o' course,' said she. 'The Colonel used to come into the
+kitchen in 'is dressin'-gown an' read us all those Jorrockses.'</p>
+<p>'Oh, Lord!' said Midmore, and went to bed with a book called
+<i>Handley Cross</i> under his arm, and a lonelier Columbus into a
+stranger world the wet-ringed moon never looked upon.</p>
+<hr style="width: 25%;">
+<p>Here we omit much. But Midmore never denied that for the epicure
+in sensation the urgent needs of an ancient house, as interpreted
+by Rhoda pointing to daylight through attic-tiles held in place by
+moss, gives an edge to the pleasure of Social Research elsewhere.
+Equally he found that the reaction following prolonged research
+loses much of its grey terror if one knows one can at will bathe
+the soul in the society of plumbers (all the water-pipes had
+chronic appendicitis), village idiots (Jimmy had taken Midmore
+under his weak wing and camped daily at the drive-gates), and a
+giant with red eyelids whose every action is an unpredictable
+outrage.</p>
+<p>Towards spring Midmore filled his house with a few friends of
+the Immoderate Left. It happened to be the day when, all things and
+Rhoda working together, a cartload of bricks, another of sand, and
+some bags of lime had been despatched to build Sidney his almost
+daily-demanded pig-pound. Midmore took his friends across the flat
+fields with some idea of showing them Sidney as a type of 'the
+peasantry.' They hit the minute when Sidney, hoarse with rage, was
+ordering bricklayer, mate, carts and all off his premises. The
+visitors disposed themselves to listen.</p>
+<p>'You never give me no notice about changin' the pig,' Sidney
+shouted. The pig--at least eighteen inches long--reared on end in
+the old sty and smiled at the company.</p>
+<p>'But, my good man--' Midmore opened.</p>
+<p>'I ain't! For aught you know I be a dam' sight worse than you
+be. You can't come and be'ave arbit'ry with me. You <i>are</i>
+be'avin' arbit'ry! All you men go clean away an' don't set foot on
+my land till I bid ye.'</p>
+<p>'But you asked'--Midmore felt his voice jump up--'to have the
+pig-pound built.'</p>
+<p>''Spose I did. That's no reason you shouldn't send me notice to
+change the pig. 'Comin' down on me like this 'thout warnin'! That
+pig's got to be got into the cowshed an' all.'</p>
+<p>'Then open the door and let him run in,' said Midmore.</p>
+<p>'Don't you be'ave arbit'ry with <i>me</i>! Take all your dam'
+men 'ome off my land. I won't be treated arbit'ry.'</p>
+<p>The carts moved off without a word, and Sidney went into the
+house and slammed the door.</p>
+<p>'Now, I hold that is enormously significant,' said a visitor.
+'Here you have the logical outcome of centuries of feudal
+oppression--the frenzy of fear.' The company looked at Midmore with
+grave pain.</p>
+<p>'But he <i>did</i> worry my life out about his pig-sty,' was all
+Midmore found to say.</p>
+<p>Others took up the parable and proved to him if he only held
+true to the gospels of the Immoderate Left the earth would soon be
+covered with 'jolly little' pig-sties, built in the intervals of
+morris-dancing by 'the peasant' himself.</p>
+<p>Midmore felt grateful when the door opened again and Mr. Sidney
+invited them all to retire to the road which, he pointed out, was
+public. As they turned the corner of the house, a smooth-faced
+woman in a widow's cap curtsied to each of them through the
+window.</p>
+<p>Instantly they drew pictures of that woman's lot, deprived of
+all vehicle for self-expression--'the set grey life and apathetic
+end,' one quoted--and they discussed the tremendous significance of
+village theatricals. Even a month ago Midmore would have told them
+all that he knew and Rhoda had dropped about Sidney's forms of
+self-expression. Now, for some strange reason, he was content to
+let the talk run on from village to metropolitan and world
+drama.</p>
+<p>Rhoda advised him after the visitors left that 'if he wanted to
+do that again' he had better go up to town.</p>
+<p>'But we only sat on cushions on the floor,' said her master.</p>
+<p>'They're too old for romps,' she retorted, 'an' it's only the
+beginning of things. I've seen what <i>I've</i> seen. Besides, they
+talked and laughed in the passage going to their baths--such as
+took 'em.'</p>
+<p>'Don't be a fool, Rhoda,' said Midmore. No man--unless he has
+loved her--will casually dismiss a woman on whose lap he has laid
+his head.</p>
+<p>'Very good,' she snorted, 'but that cuts both ways. An' now, you
+go down to Sidney's this evenin' and put him where he ought to be.
+He was in his right about you givin' 'im notice about changin' the
+pig, but he 'adn't any right to turn it up before your company. No
+manners, no pig-pound. He'll understand.'</p>
+<p>Midmore did his best to make him. He found himself reviling the
+old man in speech and with a joy quite new in all his experience.
+He wound up--it was a plagiarism from a plumber--by telling Mr.
+Sidney that he looked like a turkey-cock, had the morals of a
+parish bull, and need never hope for a new pig-pound as long as he
+or Midmore lived.</p>
+<p>'Very good,' said the giant. 'I reckon you thought you 'ad
+something against me, and now you've come down an' told it me like
+man to man. Quite right. I don't bear malice. Now, you send along
+those bricks an' sand, an' I'll make a do to build the pig-pound
+myself. If you look at my lease you'll find out you're bound to
+provide me materials for the repairs. Only--only I thought there'd
+be no 'arm in my askin' you to do it throughout like.'</p>
+<p>Midmore fairly gasped. 'Then, why the devil did you turn my
+carts back when--when I sent them up here to do it throughout for
+you?'</p>
+<p>Mr. Sidney sat down on the floodgates, his eyebrows knitted in
+thought.</p>
+<p>'I'll tell you,' he said slowly. ''Twas too dam' like cheatin' a
+suckin' baby. My woman, she said so too.'</p>
+<p>For a few seconds the teachings of the Immoderate Left, whose
+humour is all their own, wrestled with those of Mother Earth, who
+has her own humours. Then Midmore laughed till he could scarcely
+stand. In due time Mr. Sidney laughed too--crowing and wheezing
+crescendo till it broke from him in roars. They shook hands, and
+Midmore went home grateful that he had held his tongue among his
+companions.</p>
+<p>When he reached his house he met three or four men and women on
+horse-back, very muddy indeed, coming down the drive. Feeling
+hungry himself, he asked them if they were hungry. They said they
+were, and he bade them enter. Jimmy took their horses, who seemed
+to know him. Rhoda took their battered hats, led the women upstairs
+for hairpins, and presently fed them all with tea-cakes, poached
+eggs, anchovy toast, and drinks from a coromandel-wood liqueur case
+which Midmore had never known that he possessed.</p>
+<p>'And I <i>will</i> say,' said Miss Connie Sperrit, her spurred
+foot on the fender and a smoking muffin in her whip hand, 'Rhoda
+does one top-hole. She always did since I was eight.'</p>
+<p>'Seven, Miss, was when you began to 'unt,' said Rhoda, setting
+down more buttered toast.</p>
+<p>'And so,' the M.F.H. was saying to Midmore, 'when he got to your
+brute Sidney's land, we had to whip 'em off. It's a regular Alsatia
+for 'em. They know it. Why'--he dropped his voice--'I don't want to
+say anything against Sidney as your tenant, of course, but I do
+believe the old scoundrel's perfectly capable of putting down
+poison.'</p>
+<p>'Sidney's capable of anything,' said Midmore with immense
+feeling; but once again he held his tongue. They were a queer
+community; yet when they had stamped and jingled out to their
+horses again, the house felt hugely big and disconcerting.</p>
+<p>This may be reckoned the conscious beginning of his double life.
+It ran in odd channels that summer--a riding school, for instance,
+near Hayes Common and a shooting ground near Wormwood Scrubs. A man
+who has been saddle-galled or shoulder-bruised for half the day is
+not at his London best of evenings; and when the bills for his
+amusements come in he curtails his expenses in other directions. So
+a cloud settled on Midmore's name. His London world talked of a
+hardening of heart and a tightening of purse-strings which
+signified disloyalty to the Cause. One man, a confidant of the old
+expressive days, attacked him robustiously and demanded account of
+his soul's progress. It was not furnished, for Midmore was
+calculating how much it would cost to repave stables so dilapidated
+that even the village idiot apologised for putting visitors' horses
+into them. The man went away, and served up what he had heard of
+the pig-pound episode as a little newspaper sketch, calculated to
+annoy. Midmore read it with an eye as practical as a woman's, and
+since most of his experiences had been among women, at once sought
+out a woman to whom he might tell his sorrow at the disloyalty of
+his own familiar friend. She was so sympathetic that he went on to
+confide how his bruised heart--she knew all about it--had found
+so-lace, with a long O, in another quarter which he indicated
+rather carefully in case it might be betrayed to other loyal
+friends. As his hints pointed directly towards facile Hampstead,
+and as his urgent business was the purchase of a horse from a
+dealer, Beckenham way, he felt he had done good work. Later, when
+his friend, the scribe, talked to him alluringly of 'secret
+gardens' and those so-laces to which every man who follows the
+Wider Morality is entitled, Midmore lent him a five-pound note
+which he had got back on the price of a ninety-guinea bay gelding.
+So true it is, as he read in one of the late Colonel Werf's books,
+that 'the young man of the present day would sooner lie under an
+imputation against his morals than against his knowledge of
+horse-flesh.'</p>
+<p>Midmore desired more than he desired anything else at that
+moment to ride and, above all, to jump on a ninety-guinea bay
+gelding with black points and a slovenly habit of hitting his
+fences. He did not wish many people except Mr. Sidney, who very
+kindly lent his soft meadow behind the floodgates, to be privy to
+the matter, which he rightly foresaw would take him to the autumn.
+So he told such friends as hinted at country week-end visits that
+he had practically let his newly inherited house. The rent, he
+said, was an object to him, for he had lately lost large sums
+through ill-considered benevolences. He would name no names, but
+they could guess. And they guessed loyally all round the circle of
+his acquaintance as they spread the news that explained so
+much.</p>
+<p>There remained only one couple of his once intimate associates
+to pacify. They were deeply sympathetic and utterly loyal, of
+course, but as curious as any of the apes whose diet they had
+adopted. Midmore met them in a suburban train, coming up to town,
+not twenty minutes after he had come off two hours' advanced
+tuition (one guinea an hour) over hurdles in a hall. He had, of
+course, changed his kit, but his too heavy bridle-hand shook a
+little among the newspapers. On the inspiration of the moment,
+which is your natural liar's best hold, he told them that he was
+condemned to a rest-cure. He would lie in semi-darkness drinking
+milk, for weeks and weeks, cut off even from letters. He was
+astonished and delighted at the ease with which the usual lie
+confounds the unusual intellect. They swallowed it as swiftly as
+they recommended him to live on nuts and fruit; but he saw in the
+woman's eyes the exact reason she would set forth for his
+retirement. After all, she had as much right to express herself as
+he purposed to take for himself; and Midmore believed strongly in
+the fullest equality of the sexes.</p>
+<p>That retirement made one small ripple in the strenuous world.
+The lady who had written the twelve-page letter ten months before
+sent him another of eight pages, analysing all the motives that
+were leading her back to him--should she come?--now that he was ill
+and alone. Much might yet be retrieved, she said, out of the waste
+of jarring lives and piteous misunderstandings. It needed only a
+hand.</p>
+<p>But Midmore needed two, next morning very early, for a devil's
+diversion, among wet coppices, called 'cubbing.'</p>
+<p>'You haven't a bad seat,' said Miss Sperrit through the
+morning-mists. 'But you're worrying him.'</p>
+<p>'He pulls so,' Midmore grunted.</p>
+<p>'Let him alone, then. Look out for the branches,' she shouted,
+as they whirled up a splashy ride. Cubs were plentiful. Most of the
+hounds attached themselves to a straight-necked youngster of
+education who scuttled out of the woods into the open fields
+below.</p>
+<p>'Hold on!' some one shouted. 'Turn 'em, Midmore. That's your
+brute Sidney's land. It's all wire.'</p>
+<p>'Oh, Connie, stop!' Mrs. Sperrit shrieked as her daughter
+charged at a boundary-hedge.</p>
+<p>'Wire be damned! I had it all out a fortnight ago. Come on!'
+This was Midmore, buffeting into it a little lower down.</p>
+<p>'<i>I</i>knew that!' Connie cried over her shoulder, and she
+flitted across the open pasture, humming to herself.</p>
+<p>'Oh, of course! If some people have private information, they
+can afford to thrust.' This was a snuff-coloured habit into which
+Miss Sperrit had cannoned down the ride.</p>
+<p>'What! 'Midmore got Sidney to heel? <i>You</i> never did that,
+Sperrit.' This was Mr. Fisher, M.F.H., enlarging the breach Midmore
+had made.</p>
+<p>'No, confound him!' said the father testily. 'Go on, sir!
+<i>Injecto ter pulvere</i>--you've kicked half the ditch into my
+eye already.'</p>
+<p>They killed that cub a little short of the haven his mother had
+told him to make for--a two-acre Alsatia of a gorse-patch to which
+the M.F.H. had been denied access for the last fifteen seasons. He
+expressed his gratitude before all the field and Mr. Sidney, at Mr.
+Sidney's farm-house door.</p>
+<p>'And if there should be any poultry claims--' he went on.</p>
+<p>'There won't be,' said Midmore. 'It's too like cheating a
+sucking child, isn't it, Mr. Sidney?'</p>
+<p>'You've got me!' was all the reply. 'I be used to bein' put
+upon, but you've got me, Mus' Midmore.'</p>
+<p>Midmore pointed to a new brick pig-pound built in strict
+disregard of the terms of the life-tenant's lease. The gesture told
+the tale to the few who did not know, and they shouted.</p>
+<p>Such pagan delights as these were followed by pagan sloth of
+evenings when men and women elsewhere are at their brightest. But
+Midmore preferred to lie out on a yellow silk couch, reading works
+of a debasing vulgarity; or, by invitation, to dine with the
+Sperrits and savages of their kidney. These did not expect flights
+of fancy or phrasing. They lied, except about horses, grudgingly
+and of necessity, not for art's sake; and, men and women alike,
+they expressed themselves along their chosen lines with the serene
+indifference of the larger animals. Then Midmore would go home and
+identify them, one by one, out of the natural-history books by Mr.
+Surtees, on the table beside the sofa. At first they looked upon
+him coolly, but when the tale of the removed wire and the
+recaptured gorse had gone the rounds, they accepted him for a
+person willing to play their games. True, a faction suspended
+judgment for a while, because they shot, and hoped that Midmore
+would serve the glorious mammon of pheasant-raising rather than the
+unkempt god of fox-hunting. But after he had shown his choice, they
+did not ask by what intellectual process he had arrived at it. He
+hunted three, sometimes four, times a week, which necessitated not
+only one bay gelding (&pound;94: 10s.), but a mannerly
+white-stockinged chestnut (&pound;114), and a black mare, rather
+long in the back but with a mouth of silk (&pound;150), who so
+evidently preferred to carry a lady that it would have been cruel
+to have baulked her. Besides, with that handling she could be sold
+at a profit. And besides, the hunt was a quiet, intimate, kindly
+little hunt, not anxious for strangers, of good report in the
+<i>Field</i>, the servant of one M.F.H., given to hospitality,
+riding well its own horses, and, with the exception of Midmore, not
+novices. But as Miss Sperrit observed, after the M.F.H. had said
+some things to him at a gate: 'It <i>is</i> a pity you don't know
+as much as your horse, but you will in time. It takes years and
+yee-ars. I've been at it for fifteen and I'm only just learning.
+But you've made a decent kick-off.'</p>
+<p>So he kicked off in wind and wet and mud, wondering quite
+sincerely why the bubbling ditches and sucking pastures held him
+from day to day, or what so-lace he could find on off days in
+chasing grooms and brick-layers round outhouses.</p>
+<p>To make sure he up-rooted himself one week-end of heavy
+mid-winter rain, and re-entered his lost world in the character of
+Galahad fresh from a rest-cure. They all agreed, with an eye over
+his shoulder for the next comer, that he was a different man; but
+when they asked him for the symptoms of nervous strain, and led him
+all through their own, he realised he had lost much of his old
+skill in lying. His three months' absence, too, had put him
+hopelessly behind the London field. The movements, the allusions,
+the slang of the game had changed. The couples had rearranged
+themselves or were re-crystallizing in fresh triangles, whereby he
+put his foot in it badly. Only one great soul (he who had written
+the account of the pig-pound episode) stood untouched by the vast
+flux of time, and Midmore lent him another fiver for his integrity.
+A woman took him, in the wet forenoon, to a pronouncement on the
+Oneness of Impulse in Humanity, which struck him as a polysyllabic
+<i>r&eacute;sum&eacute;</i> of Mr. Sidney's domestic arrangements,
+plus a clarion call to 'shock civilisation into common-sense.'</p>
+<p>'And you'll come to tea with me to-morrow?' she asked, after
+lunch, nibbling cashew nuts from a saucer. Midmore replied that
+there were great arrears of work to overtake when a man had been
+put away for so long.</p>
+<p>'But you've come back like a giant refreshed.... I hope that
+Daphne'--this was the lady of the twelve and the eight-page
+letter--'will be with us too. She has misunderstood herself, like
+so many of us,' the woman murmured, 'but I think eventually ...'
+she flung out her thin little hands. 'However, these are things
+that each lonely soul must adjust for itself.'</p>
+<p>'Indeed, yes,' said Midmore with a deep sigh. The old tricks
+were sprouting in the old atmosphere like mushrooms in a dung-pit.
+He passed into an abrupt reverie, shook his head, as though stung
+by tumultuous memories, and departed without any ceremony of
+farewell to--catch a mid-afternoon express where a man meets
+associates who talk horse, and weather as it affects the horse, all
+the way down. What worried him most was that he had missed a day
+with the hounds.</p>
+<p>He met Rhoda's keen old eyes without flinching; and the
+drawing-room looked very comfortable that wet evening at tea. After
+all, his visit to town had not been wholly a failure. He had burned
+quite a bushel of letters at his flat. A flat--here he reached
+mechanically towards the worn volumes near the sofa--a flat was a
+consuming animal. As for Daphne ... he opened at random on the
+words: 'His lordship then did as desired and disclosed a
+<i>tableau</i> of considerable strength and variety.' Midmore
+reflected: 'And I used to think.... But she wasn't.... We were all
+babblers and skirters together.... I didn't babble much--thank
+goodness--but I skirted.' He turned the pages backward for more
+<i>Sortes Surteesianae</i>, and read: 'When at length they rose to
+go to bed it struck each man as he followed his neighbour upstairs,
+that the man before him walked very crookedly.' He laughed aloud at
+the fire.</p>
+<p>'What about to-morrow?' Rhoda asked, entering with garments over
+her shoulder. 'It's never stopped raining since you left. You'll be
+plastered out of sight an' all in five minutes. You'd better wear
+your next best, 'adn't you? I'm afraid they've shrank. 'Adn't you
+best try 'em on?'</p>
+<p>'Here?' said Midmore.</p>
+<p>''Suit yourself. I bathed you when you wasn't larger than a leg
+o' lamb,' said the ex-ladies'-maid.</p>
+<p>'Rhoda, one of these days I shall get a valet, and a married
+butler.'</p>
+<p>'There's many a true word spoke in jest. But nobody's huntin'
+to-morrow.'</p>
+<p>'Why? Have they cancelled the meet?'</p>
+<p>'They say it only means slipping and over-reaching in the mud,
+and they all 'ad enough of that to-day. Charlie told me so just
+now.'</p>
+<p>'Oh!' It seemed that the word of Mr. Sperrit's confidential
+clerk had weight.</p>
+<p>'Charlie came down to help Mr. Sidney lift the gates,' Rhoda
+continued.</p>
+<p>'The floodgates? They are perfectly easy to handle now. I've put
+in a wheel and a winch.'</p>
+<p>'When the brook's really up they must be took clean out on
+account of the rubbish blockin' 'em. That's why Charlie came
+down.'</p>
+<p>Midmore grunted impatiently. 'Everybody has talked to me about
+that brook ever since I came here. It's never done anything
+yet.'</p>
+<p>'This 'as been a dry summer. If you care to look now, sir, I'll
+get you a lantern.'</p>
+<p>She paddled out with him into a large wet night. Half-way down
+the lawn her light was reflected on shallow brown water, pricked
+through with grass blades at the edges. Beyond that light, the
+brook was strangling and kicking among hedges and tree-trunks.</p>
+<p>'What on earth will happen to the big rose-bed?' was Midmore's
+first word.</p>
+<p>'It generally 'as to be restocked after a flood. Ah!' she raised
+her lantern. 'There's two garden-seats knockin' against the
+sun-dial. Now, that won't do the roses any good.'</p>
+<p>'This is too absurd. There ought to be some decently thought-out
+system--for--for dealing with this sort of thing.' He peered into
+the rushing gloom. There seemed to be no end to the moisture and
+the racket. In town he had noticed nothing.</p>
+<p>'It can't be 'elped,' said Rhoda. 'It's just what it does do
+once in just so often. We'd better go back.'</p>
+<p>All earth under foot was sliding in a thousand liquid noises
+towards the hoarse brook. Somebody wailed from the house: ''Fraid
+o' the water! Come 'ere! 'Fraid o' the water!'</p>
+<p>'That's Jimmy. Wet always takes 'im that way,' she explained.
+The idiot charged into them, shaking with terror.</p>
+<p>'Brave Jimmy! How brave of Jimmy! Come into the hall. What Jimmy
+got now?' she crooned. It was a sodden note which ran: 'Dear
+Rhoda--Mr. Lotten, with whom I rode home this afternoon, told me
+that if this wet keeps up, he's afraid the fish-pond he built last
+year, where Coxen's old mill-dam was, will go, as the dam did once
+before, he says. If it does it's bound to come down the brook. It
+may be all right, but perhaps you had better look out. C.S.'</p>
+<p>'If Coxen's dam goes, that means.... I'll 'ave the drawing-room
+carpet up at once to be on the safe side. The claw-'ammer is in the
+libery.'</p>
+<p>'Wait a minute. Sidney's gates are out, you said?'</p>
+<p>'Both. He'll need it if Coxen's pond goes.... I've seen it
+once.'</p>
+<p>'I'll just slip down and have a look at Sidney. Light the
+lantern again, please, Rhoda.'</p>
+<p>'You won't get <i>him</i> to stir. He's been there since he was
+born. But <i>she</i> don't know anything. I'll fetch your
+waterproof and some top-boots.'</p>
+<p>''Fraid o' the water! 'Fraid o' the water!' Jimmy sobbed,
+pressed against a corner of the hall, his hands to his eyes.</p>
+<p>'All right, Jimmy. Jimmy can help play with the carpet,' Rhoda
+answered, as Midmore went forth into the darkness and the roarings
+all round. He had never seen such an utterly unregulated state of
+affairs. There was another lantern reflected on the streaming
+drive.</p>
+<p>'Hi! Rhoda! Did you get my note? I came down to make sure. I
+thought, afterwards, Jimmy might funk the water!'</p>
+<p>'It's me--Miss Sperrit,' Midmore cried. 'Yes, we got it,
+thanks.'</p>
+<p>'You're back, then. Oh, good!... Is it bad down with you?'</p>
+<p>'I'm going to Sidney's to have a look.'</p>
+<p>'You won't get <i>him</i> out. 'Lucky I met Bob Lotten. I told
+him he hadn't any business impounding water for his idiotic trout
+without rebuilding the dam.'</p>
+<p>'How far up is it? I've only been there once.'</p>
+<p>'Not more than four miles as the water will come. He says he's
+opened all the sluices.'</p>
+<p>She had turned and fallen into step beside him, her hooded head
+bowed against the thinning rain. As usual she was humming to
+herself.</p>
+<p>'Why on earth did you come out in this weather?' Midmore
+asked.</p>
+<p>'It was worse when you were in town. The rain's taking off now.
+If it wasn't for that pond, I wouldn't worry so much. There's
+Sidney's bell. Come on!' She broke into a run. A cracked bell was
+jangling feebly down the valley.</p>
+<p>'Keep on the road!' Midmore shouted. The ditches were snorting
+bank-full on either side, and towards the brook-side the fields
+were afloat and beginning to move in the darkness.</p>
+<p>'Catch me going off it! There's his light burning all right.'
+She halted undistressed at a little rise. 'But the flood's in the
+orchard. Look!' She swung her lantern to show a front rank of old
+apple-trees reflected in still, out-lying waters beyond the
+half-drowned hedge. They could hear above the thud-thud of the
+gorged floodgates, shrieks in two keys as monotonous as a
+steam-organ.</p>
+<p>'The high one's the pig.' Miss Sperrit laughed.</p>
+<p>'All right! I'll get <i>her</i> out. You stay where you are, and
+I'll see you home afterwards.'</p>
+<p>'But the water's only just over the road,' she objected.</p>
+<p>'Never mind. Don't you move. Promise?'</p>
+<p>'All right. You take my stick, then, and feel for holes in case
+anything's washed out anywhere. This <i>is</i> a lark!'</p>
+<p>Midmore took it, and stepped into the water that moved
+sluggishly as yet across the farm road which ran to Sidney's front
+door from the raised and metalled public road. It was half way up
+to his knees when he knocked. As he looked back Miss Sperrit's
+lantern seemed to float in mid-ocean.</p>
+<p>'You can't come in or the water'll come with you. I've bunged up
+all the cracks,' Mr. Sidney shouted from within. 'Who be ye?'</p>
+<p>'Take me out! Take me out!' the woman shrieked, and the pig from
+his sty behind the house urgently seconded the motion.</p>
+<p>'I'm Midmore! Coxen's old mill-dam is likely to go, they say.
+Come out!'</p>
+<p>'I told 'em it would when they made a fish-pond of it. 'Twasn't
+ever puddled proper. But it's a middlin' wide valley. She's got
+room to spread.... Keep still, or I'll take and duck you in the
+cellar!... You go 'ome, Mus' Midmore, an' take the law o' Mus'
+Lotten soon's you've changed your socks.'</p>
+<p>'Confound you, aren't you coming out?'</p>
+<p>'To catch my death o' cold? I'm all right where I be. I've seen
+it before. But you can take <i>her</i>. She's no sort o' use or
+sense.... Climb out through the window. Didn't I tell you I'd
+plugged the door-cracks, you fool's daughter?' The parlour window
+opened, and the woman flung herself into Midmore's arms, nearly
+knocking him down. Mr. Sidney leaned out of the window, pipe in
+mouth.</p>
+<p>'Take her 'ome,' he said, and added oracularly:</p>
+<blockquote>'Two women in one house,<br>
+Two cats an' one mouse,<br>
+Two dogs an' one bone--<br>
+Which I will leave alone.</blockquote>
+<p>I've seen it before.' Then he shut and fastened the window.</p>
+<p>'A trap! A trap! You had ought to have brought a trap for me.
+I'll be drowned in this wet,' the woman cried.</p>
+<p>'Hold up! You can't be any wetter than you are. Come along!'
+Midmore did not at all like the feel of the water over his
+boot-tops.</p>
+<p>'Hooray! Come along!' Miss Sperrit's lantern, not fifty yards
+away, waved cheerily.</p>
+<p>The woman threshed towards it like a panic-stricken goose, fell
+on her knees, was jerked up again by Midmore, and pushed on till
+she collapsed at Miss Sperrit's feet.</p>
+<p>'But you won't get bronchitis if you go straight to Mr.
+Midmore's house,' said the unsympathetic maiden.</p>
+<p>'O Gawd! O Gawd! I wish our 'eavenly Father 'ud forgive me my
+sins an' call me 'ome,' the woman sobbed. 'But I won't go to
+<i>'is</i> 'ouse! I won't.'</p>
+<p>'All right, then. Stay here. Now, if we run,' Miss Sperrit
+whispered to Midmore, 'she'll follow us. Not too fast!'</p>
+<p>They set off at a considerable trot, and the woman lumbered
+behind them, bellowing, till they met a third lantern--Rhoda
+holding Jimmy's hand. She had got the carpet up, she said, and was
+escorting Jimmy past the water that he dreaded.</p>
+<p>'That's all right,' Miss Sperrit pronounced. 'Take Mrs. Sidney
+back with you, Rhoda, and put her to bed. I'll take Jimmy with me.
+You aren't afraid of the water now, are you, Jimmy?'</p>
+<p>'Not afraid of anything now.' Jimmy reached for her hand. 'But
+get away from the water quick.'</p>
+<p>'I'm coming with you,' Midmore interrupted.</p>
+<p>'You most certainly are not. You're drenched. She threw you
+twice. Go home and change. You may have to be out again all night.
+It's only half-past seven now. I'm perfectly safe.' She flung
+herself lightly over a stile, and hurried uphill by the foot-path,
+out of reach of all but the boasts of the flood below.</p>
+<p>Rhoda, dead silent, herded Mrs. Sidney to the house.</p>
+<p>'You'll find your things laid out on the bed,' she said to
+Midmore as he came up. I'll attend to--to this. <i>She's</i> got
+nothing to cry for.'</p>
+<p>Midmore raced into dry kit, and raced uphill to be rewarded by
+the sight of the lantern just turning into the Sperrits' gate. He
+came back by way of Sidney's farm, where he saw the light twinkling
+across three acres of shining water, for the rain had ceased and
+the clouds were stripping overhead, though the brook was noisier
+than ever. Now there was only that doubtful mill-pond to look
+after--that and his swirling world abandoned to himself alone.</p>
+<p>'We shall have to sit up for it,' said Rhoda after dinner. And
+as the drawing-room commanded the best view of the rising flood,
+they watched it from there for a long time, while all the clocks of
+the house bore them company.</p>
+<p>''Tisn't the water, it's the mud on the skirting-board after it
+goes down that I mind,' Rhoda whispered. 'The last time Coxen's
+mill broke, I remember it came up to the second--no, third--step o'
+Mr. Sidney's stairs.'</p>
+<p>'What did Sidney do about it?'</p>
+<p>'He made a notch on the step. 'E said it was a record. Just like
+'im.'</p>
+<p>'It's up to the drive now,' said Midmore after another long
+wait. 'And the rain stopped before eight, you know.'</p>
+<p>'Then Coxen's dam <i>'as</i> broke, and that's the first of the
+flood-water.' She stared out beside him. The water was rising in
+sudden pulses--an inch or two at a time, with great sweeps and
+lagoons and a sudden increase of the brook's proper thunder.</p>
+<p>'You can't stand all the time. Take a chair,' Midmore said
+presently.</p>
+<p>Rhoda looked back into the bare room. 'The carpet bein' up
+<i>does</i> make a difference. Thank you, sir, I <i>will</i> 'ave a
+set-down.'</p>
+<p>''Right over the drive now,' said Midmore. He opened the window
+and leaned out. 'Is that wind up the valley, Rhoda?'</p>
+<p>'No, that's <i>it</i>! But I've seen it before.'</p>
+<p>There was not so much a roar as the purposeful drive of a tide
+across a jagged reef, which put down every other sound for twenty
+minutes. A wide sheet of water hurried up to the little terrace on
+which the house stood, pushed round either corner, rose again and
+stretched, as it were, yawning beneath the moonlight, joined other
+sheets waiting for them in unsuspected hollows, and lay out all in
+one. A puff of wind followed.</p>
+<p>'It's right up to the wall now. I can touch it with my finger.'
+Midmore bent over the window-sill.</p>
+<p>'I can 'ear it in the cellars,' said Rhoda dolefully. 'Well,
+we've done what we can! I think I'll 'ave a look.' She left the
+room and was absent half an hour or more, during which time he saw
+a full-grown tree hauling itself across the lawn by its naked
+roots. Then a hurdle knocked against the wall, caught on an iron
+foot-scraper just outside, and made a square-headed ripple. The
+cascade through the cellar-windows diminished.</p>
+<p>'It's dropping,' Rhoda cried, as she returned. 'It's only
+tricklin' into my cellars now.'</p>
+<p>'Wait a minute. I believe--I believe I can see the scraper on
+the edge of the drive just showing!'</p>
+<p>In another ten minutes the drive itself roughened and became
+gravel again, tilting all its water towards the shrubbery.</p>
+<p>'The pond's gone past,' Rhoda announced. 'We shall only 'ave the
+common flood to contend with now. You'd better go to bed.'</p>
+<p>'I ought to go down and have another look at Sidney before
+daylight.'</p>
+<p>'No need. You can see 'is light burnin' from all the upstairs
+windows.'</p>
+<p>'By the way. I forgot about <i>her</i>. Where've you put
+her?'</p>
+<p>'In my bed.' Rhoda's tone was ice. 'I wasn't going to undo a
+room for <i>that</i> stuff.'</p>
+<p>'But it--it couldn't be helped,' said Midmore. 'She was half
+drowned. One mustn't be narrow-minded, Rhoda, even if her position
+isn't quite--er--regular.'</p>
+<p>'Pfff! I wasn't worryin' about that.' She leaned forward to the
+window. 'There's the edge of the lawn showin' now. It falls as fast
+as it rises. Dearie'--the change of tone made Midmore jump--'didn't
+you know that I was 'is first? <i>That's</i> what makes it so hard
+to bear.' Midmore looked at the long lizard-like back and had no
+words.</p>
+<p>She went on, still talking through the black window-pane:</p>
+<p>'Your pore dear auntie was very kind about it. She said she'd
+make all allowances for one, but no more. Never any more.... Then,
+you didn't know 'oo Charlie was all this time?'</p>
+<p>'Your nephew, I always thought.'</p>
+<p>'Well, well,' she spoke pityingly. 'Everybody's business being
+nobody's business, I suppose no one thought to tell you. But
+Charlie made 'is own way for 'imself from the beginnin'!... But
+<i>her</i> upstairs, she never produced anything. Just an
+'ousekeeper, as you might say. 'Turned over an' went to sleep
+straight off. She 'ad the impudence to ask me for 'ot
+sherry-gruel.'</p>
+<p>'Did you give it to her,' said Midmore.</p>
+<p>'Me? Your sherry? No!'</p>
+<p>The memory of Sidney's outrageous rhyme at the window, and
+Charlie's long nose (he thought it looked interested at the time)
+as he passed the copies of Mrs. Werf's last four wills, overcame
+Midmore without warning.</p>
+<p>'This damp is givin' you a cold,' said Rhoda, rising. 'There you
+go again! Sneezin's a sure sign of it. Better go to bed. You can't
+do any thin' excep''--she stood rigid, with crossed arms--'about
+me.'</p>
+<p>'Well. What about you?' Midmore stuffed the handkerchief into
+his pocket.</p>
+<p>'Now you know about it, what are you goin' to do--sir?'</p>
+<p>She had the answer on her lean cheek before the sentence was
+finished.</p>
+<p>'Go and see if you can get us something to eat, Rhoda. And
+beer.'</p>
+<p>'I expec' the larder'll be in a swim,' she replied, 'but old
+bottled stuff don't take any harm from wet.' She returned with a
+tray, all in order, and they ate and drank together, and took
+observations of the falling flood till dawn opened its bleared eyes
+on the wreck of what had been a fair garden. Midmore, cold and
+annoyed, found himself humming:</p>
+<blockquote>'That flood strewed wrecks upon the grass,<br>
+That ebb swept out the flocks to sea.</blockquote>
+<p>There isn't a rose left, Rhoda!</p>
+<blockquote>An awesome ebb and flow it was<br>
+To many more than mine and me.<br>
+But each will mourn his ...</blockquote>
+<p>It'll cost me a hundred.'</p>
+<p>'Now we know the worst,' said Rhoda, 'we can go to bed. I'll lay
+on the kitchen sofa. His light's burnin' still.'</p>
+<p>'And <i>she</i>?'</p>
+<p>'Dirty old cat! You ought to 'ear 'er snore!'</p>
+<p>At ten o'clock in the morning, after a maddening hour in his own
+garden on the edge of the retreating brook, Midmore went off to
+confront more damage at Sidney's. The first thing that met him was
+the pig, snowy white, for the water had washed him out of his new
+sty, calling on high heaven for breakfast. The front door had been
+forced open, and the flood had registered its own height in a brown
+dado on the walls. Midmore chased the pig out and called up the
+stairs.</p>
+<p>'I be abed o' course. Which step 'as she rose to?' Sidney cried
+from above. 'The fourth? Then it's beat all records. Come up.'</p>
+<p>'Are you ill?' Midmore asked as he entered the room. The red
+eyelids blinked cheerfully. Mr. Sidney, beneath a sumptuous
+patch-work quilt, was smoking.</p>
+<p>'Nah! I'm only thankin' God I ain't my own landlord. Take that
+cheer. What's she done?'</p>
+<p>'It hasn't gone down enough for me to make sure.'</p>
+<p>'Them floodgates o' yourn'll be middlin' far down the brook by
+now; an' your rose-garden have gone after 'em. I saved my chickens,
+though. You'd better get Mus' Sperrit to take the law o' Lotten an'
+'is fish-pond.'</p>
+<p>'No, thanks. I've trouble enough without that.'</p>
+<p>'Hev ye?' Mr. Sidney grinned. 'How did ye make out with those
+two women o' mine last night? I lay they fought.'</p>
+<p>'You infernal old scoundrel!' Midmore laughed.</p>
+<p>'I be--an' then again I bain't,' was the placid answer. 'But,
+Rhoda, <i>she</i> wouldn't ha' left me last night. Fire or flood,
+she wouldn't.'</p>
+<p>'Why didn't you ever marry her?' Midmore asked.</p>
+<p>'Waste of good money. She was willin' without.'</p>
+<p>There was a step on the gritty mud below, and a voice humming.
+Midmore rose quickly saying: 'Well, I suppose you're all right
+now.'</p>
+<p>'I be. I ain't a landlord, nor I ain't young--nor anxious. Oh,
+Mus' Midmore! Would it make any odds about her thirty pounds comin'
+regular if I married her? Charlie said maybe 'twould.'</p>
+<p>'Did he?' Midmore turned at the door. 'And what did Jimmy say
+about it?'</p>
+<p>'Jimmy?' Mr. Sidney chuckled as the joke took him. 'Oh,
+<i>he's</i> none o' mine. He's Charlie's look-out.'</p>
+<p>Midmore slammed the door and ran downstairs.</p>
+<p>'Well, this is a--sweet--mess,' said Miss Sperrit in shortest
+skirts and heaviest riding-boots. 'I had to come down and have a
+look at it. "The old mayor climbed the belfry tower." 'Been up all
+night nursing your family?'</p>
+<p>'Nearly that! Isn't it cheerful?' He pointed through the door to
+the stairs with small twig-drift on the last three treads.</p>
+<p>'It's a record, though,' said she, and hummed to herself:</p>
+<blockquote>'That flood strewed wrecks upon the grass,<br>
+That ebb swept out the flocks to sea.'</blockquote>
+<p>'You're always singing that, aren't you?' Midmore said suddenly
+as she passed into the parlour where slimy chairs had been stranded
+at all angles.</p>
+<p>'Am I? Now I come to think of it I believe I do. They say I
+always hum when I ride. Have you noticed it?'</p>
+<p>'Of course I have. I notice every--'</p>
+<p>'Oh,' she went on hurriedly. 'We had it for the village cantata
+last winter--"The Brides of Enderby."'</p>
+<p>'No! "High Tide on the Coast of Lincolnshire."' For some reason
+Midmore spoke sharply.</p>
+<p>'Just like that.' She pointed to the befouled walls. 'I say....
+Let's get this furniture a little straight.... You know it
+too?'</p>
+<p>'Every word, since you sang it of course.'</p>
+<p>'When?'</p>
+<p>'The first night I ever came down. You rode past the
+drawing-room window in the dark singing it--"And sweeter
+woman--"'</p>
+<p>'I thought the house was empty then. Your aunt always let us use
+that short cut. Ha-hadn't we better get this out into the passage?
+It'll all have to come out anyhow. You take the other side.' They
+began to lift a heavyish table. Their words came jerkily between
+gasps and their faces were as white as--a newly washed and very
+hungry pig.</p>
+<p>'Look out!' Midmore shouted. His legs were whirled from under
+him, as the table, grunting madly, careened and knocked the girl
+out of sight.</p>
+<p>The wild boar of Asia could not have cut down a couple more
+scientifically, but this little pig lacked his ancestor's nerve and
+fled shrieking over their bodies.</p>
+<p>'Are you hurt, darling?' was Midmore's first word, and 'No--I'm
+only winded--dear,' was Miss Sperrit's, as he lifted her out of her
+corner, her hat over one eye and her right cheek a smear of
+mud.</p>
+<p>They fed him a little later on some chicken-feed that they found
+in Sidney's quiet barn, a pail of buttermilk out of the dairy, and
+a quantity of onions from a shelf in the back-kitchen.</p>
+<p>'Seed-onions, most likely,' said Connie. 'You'll hear about
+this.'</p>
+<p>'What does it matter? They ought to have been gilded. We must
+buy him.'</p>
+<p>'And keep him as long as he lives,' she agreed. 'But I think I
+ought to go home now. You see, when I came out I didn't expect ...
+Did you?'</p>
+<p>'No! Yes.... It had to come.... But if any one had told me an
+hour ago!... Sidney's unspeakable parlour--and the mud on the
+carpet.'</p>
+<p>'Oh, I say! Is my cheek clean now?'</p>
+<p>'Not quite. Lend me your hanky again a minute, darling.... What
+a purler you came!'</p>
+<p>'You can't talk. 'Remember when your chin hit that table and you
+said "blast"! I was just going to laugh.'</p>
+<p>'You didn't laugh when I picked you up. You were going
+"oo-oo-oo" like a little owl.'</p>
+<p>'My dear child--'</p>
+<p>'Say that again!'</p>
+<p>'My dear child. (Do you really like it? I keep it for my best
+friends.) My <i>dee-ar</i> child, I thought I was going to be sick
+there and then. He knocked every ounce of wind out of me--the
+angel! But I must really go.'</p>
+<p>They set off together, very careful not to join hands or take
+arms.</p>
+<p>'Not across the fields,' said Midmore at the stile. 'Come round
+by--by your own place.'</p>
+<p>She flushed indignantly.</p>
+<p>'It will be yours in a little time,' he went on, shaken with his
+own audacity.</p>
+<p>'Not so much of your little times, if you please!' She shied
+like a colt across the road; then instantly, like a colt, her eyes
+lit with new curiosity as she came in sight of the drive-gates.</p>
+<p>'And not quite so much of your airs and graces, Madam,' Midmore
+returned, 'or I won't let you use our drive as a short cut any
+more.'</p>
+<p>'Oh, I'll be good. I'll be good.' Her voice changed suddenly. 'I
+swear I'll try to be good, dear. I'm not much of a thing at the
+best. What made <i>you</i>....'</p>
+<p>'I'm worse--worse! Miles and oceans worse. But what does it
+matter now?'</p>
+<p>They halted beside the gate-pillars.</p>
+<p>'I see!' she said, looking up the sodden carriage sweep to the
+front door porch where Rhoda was slapping a wet mat to and fro.
+'<i>I</i> see.... Now, I really must go home. No! Don't you come. I
+must speak to Mother first all by myself.'</p>
+<p>He watched her up the hill till she was out of sight.</p>
+<br>
+<br>
+<hr style="width: 35%;">
+<br>
+<br>
+<a name="page379"></a>
+<div class="poem">
+<div class="stanza">
+<p class="i9"><b>THE FLOODS</b></p>
+</div>
+<div class="stanza">
+<p class="i6">The rain it rains without a stay</p>
+<p class="i7">In the hills above us, in the hills;</p>
+<p class="i6">And presently the floods break way</p>
+<p class="i7">Whose strength is in the hills.</p>
+<p class="i6">The trees they suck from every cloud,</p>
+<p class="i6">The valley brooks they roar aloud--</p>
+<p class="i6">Bank-high for the lowlands, lowlands,</p>
+<p class="i7">Lowlands under the hills!</p>
+</div>
+<div class="stanza">
+<p class="i6">The first wood down is sere and small,</p>
+<p class="i7">From the hills, the brishings off the hills;</p>
+<p class="i6">And then come by the bats and all</p>
+<p class="i7">We cut last year in the hills;</p>
+<p class="i6">And then the roots we tried to cleave</p>
+<p class="i6">But found too tough and had to leave--</p>
+<p class="i6">Polting through the lowlands, lowlands,</p>
+<p class="i7">Lowlands under the hills!</p>
+</div>
+<div class="stanza">
+<p class="i6">The eye shall look, the ear shall hark</p>
+<p class="i7">To the hills, the doings in the hills,</p>
+<p class="i6">And rivers mating in the dark</p>
+<p class="i7">With tokens from the hills.</p>
+<p class="i6">Now what is weak will surely go,</p>
+<p class="i6">And what is strong must prove it so.</p>
+<p class="i6">Stand fast in the lowlands, lowlands,</p>
+<p class="i7">Lowlands under the hills!</p>
+</div>
+<div class="stanza">
+<p class="i6">The floods they shall not be afraid--</p>
+<p class="i7">Nor the hills above 'em, nor the hills--</p>
+<p class="i6">Of any fence which man has made</p>
+<p class="i7">Betwixt him and the hills.</p>
+<p class="i6">The waters shall not reckon twice</p>
+<p class="i6">For any work of man's device,</p>
+<p class="i6">But bid it down to the lowlands, lowlands,</p>
+<p class="i7">Lowlands under the hills!</p>
+</div>
+<div class="stanza">
+<p class="i6">The floods shall sweep corruption clean--</p>
+<p class="i7">By the hills, the blessing of the hills--</p>
+<p class="i6">That more the meadows may be green</p>
+<p class="i7">New-amended from the hills.</p>
+<p class="i6">The crops and cattle shall increase,</p>
+<p class="i6">Nor little children shall not cease--</p>
+<p class="i6">Go--plough the lowlands, lowlands,</p>
+<p class="i7">Lowlands under the hills!</p>
+</div>
+</div>
+<br>
+<br>
+<hr style="width: 35%;">
+<br>
+<br>
+<a name="page381"></a>
+<div class="poem">
+<div class="stanza">
+<p class="i7"><b>THE FABULISTS</b></p>
+</div>
+<div class="stanza">
+<p class="i3">When all the world would have a matter hid,</p>
+<p class="i4">Since Truth is seldom friend to any crowd,</p>
+<p class="i3">Men write in fable, as old &AElig;sop did,</p>
+<p class="i4">Jesting at that which none will name aloud.</p>
+<p class="i3">And this they needs must do, or it will fall</p>
+<p class="i3">Unless they please they are not heard at all.</p>
+</div>
+<div class="stanza">
+<p class="i3">When desperate Folly daily laboureth</p>
+<p class="i4">To work confusion upon all we have,</p>
+<p class="i3">When diligent Sloth demandeth Freedom's death,</p>
+<p class="i4">And banded Fear commandeth Honour's grave--</p>
+<p class="i3">Even in that certain hour before the fall</p>
+<p class="i3">Unless men please they are not heard at all.</p>
+</div>
+<div class="stanza">
+<p class="i3">Needs must all please, yet some not all for need</p>
+<p class="i4">Needs must all toil, yet some not all for gain,</p>
+<p class="i3">But that men taking pleasure may take heed,</p>
+<p class="i4">Whom present toil shall snatch from later pain.</p>
+<p class="i3">Thus some have toiled but their reward was small</p>
+<p class="i3">Since, though they pleased, they were not heard at
+all.</p>
+</div>
+<div class="stanza">
+<p class="i3">This was the lock that lay upon our lips,</p>
+<p class="i4">This was the yoke that we have undergone,</p>
+<p class="i3">Denying us all pleasant fellowships</p>
+<p class="i4">As in our time and generation.</p>
+<p class="i3">Our pleasures unpursued age past recall.</p>
+<p class="i3">And for our pains--we are not heard at all.</p>
+</div>
+<div class="stanza">
+<p class="i3">What man hears aught except the groaning guns?</p>
+<p class="i4">What man heeds aught save what each instant
+brings?</p>
+<p class="i3">When each man's life all imaged life outruns,</p>
+<p class="i4">What man shall pleasure in imaginings?</p>
+<p class="i3">So it hath fallen, as it was bound to fall,</p>
+<p class="i4">We are not, nor we were not, heard at all.</p>
+</div>
+</div>
+<br>
+<br>
+<hr style="width: 35%;">
+<br>
+<br>
+<a name="page383"></a>
+<h2>The Vortex</h2>
+<h3>(August 1914)</h3>
+<center>'Thy Lord spoke by inspiration to the Bee.'</center>
+<p class="loc">AL KORAN.</p>
+<br>
+<p>I have, to my grief and loss, suppressed several notable stories
+of my friend, the Hon. A.M. Penfentenyou<a name=
+"FNanchor8"></a><a href="#Footnote_8">[8]</a>, once Minister of
+Woods and Waysides in De Thouar's first administration; later,
+Premier in all but name of one of Our great and growing Dominions;
+and now, as always, the idol of his own Province, which is two and
+one-half the size of England.</p>
+<blockquote><a name="Footnote_8"></a><a href="#FNanchor8">[8]</a>
+See 'The Puzzler,' <i>Actions and Reactions</i>.</blockquote>
+<p>For this reason I hold myself at liberty to deal with some
+portion of the truth concerning Penfentenyou's latest visit to Our
+shores. He arrived at my house by car, on a hot summer day, in a
+white waistcoat and spats, sweeping black frock-coat and glistening
+top-hat--a little rounded, perhaps, at the edges, but agile as ever
+in mind and body.</p>
+<p>'What is the trouble now?' I asked, for the last time we had
+met, Penfentenyou was floating a three-million pound loan for his
+beloved but unscrupulous Province, and I did not wish to entertain
+any more of his financial friends.</p>
+<p>'We,' Penfentenyou replied ambassadorially, 'have come to have a
+Voice in Your Councils. By the way, the Voice is coming down on the
+evening train with my Agent-General. I thought you wouldn't mind if
+I invited 'em. You know We're going to share Your burdens
+henceforward. You'd better get into training.'</p>
+<p>'Certainly,' I replied. 'What's the Voice like?'</p>
+<p>'He's in earnest,' said Penfentenyou. 'He's got It, and he's got
+It bad. He'll give It to you,' he said.</p>
+<p>'What's his name?'</p>
+<p>'We call him all sorts of names, but I think you'd better call
+him Mr. Lingnam. You won't have to do it more than once.'</p>
+<p>'What's he suffering from?'</p>
+<p>'The Empire. He's pretty nearly cured us all of Imperialism at
+home. P'raps he'll cure you.'</p>
+<p>'Very good. What am I to do with him?'</p>
+<p>'Don't you worry,' said Penfentenyou. 'He'll do it.'</p>
+<p>And when Mr. Lingnam appeared half-an-hour later with the
+Agent-General for Penfentenyou's Dominion, he did just that.</p>
+<p>He advanced across the lawn eloquent as all the tides. He said
+he had been observing to the Agent-General that it was both
+politically immoral and strategically unsound that forty-four
+million people should bear the entire weight of the defences of Our
+mighty Empire, but, as he had observed (here the Agent-General
+evaporated), we stood now upon the threshold of a new era in which
+the self-governing <i>and</i> self-respecting (bis) Dominions would
+rightly and righteously, as co-partners in Empery, shoulder their
+share of any burden which the Pan-Imperial Council of the Future
+should allot. The Agent-General was already arranging for drinks
+with Penfentenyou at the other end of the garden. Mr. Lingnam swept
+me on to the most remote bench and settled to his theme.</p>
+<p>We dined at eight. At nine Mr. Lingnam was only drawing abreast
+of things Imperial. At ten the Agent-General, who earns his salary,
+was shamelessly dozing on the sofa. At eleven he and Penfentenyou
+went to bed. At midnight Mr. Lingnam brought down his big-bellied
+despatch box with the newspaper clippings and set to federating the
+Empire in earnest. I remember that he had three alternative plans.
+As a dealer in words, I plumped for the resonant
+third--'Reciprocally co-ordinated Senatorial Hegemony'--which he
+then elaborated in detail for three-quarters of an hour. At
+half-past one he urged me to have faith and to remember that
+nothing mattered except the Idea. Then he retired to his room,
+accompanied by one glass of cold water, and I went into the
+dawn-lit garden and prayed to any Power that might be off duty for
+the blood of Mr. Lingnam, Penfentenyou, and the Agent-General.</p>
+<p>To me, as I have often observed elsewhere, the hour of earliest
+dawn is fortunate, and the wind that runs before it has ever been
+my most comfortable counsellor.</p>
+<p>'Wait!' it said, all among the night's expectant rosebuds.
+'To-morrow is also a day. Wait upon the Event!'</p>
+<p>I went to bed so at peace with God and Man and Guest that when I
+waked I visited Mr. Lingnam in pyjamas, and he talked to me
+Pan-Imperially for half-an-hour before his bath. Later, the
+Agent-General said he had letters to write, and Penfentenyou
+invented a Cabinet crisis in his adored Dominion which would keep
+him busy with codes and cables all the forenoon. But I said firmly,
+'Mr. Lingnam wishes to see a little of the country round here. You
+are coming with us in your own car.'</p>
+<p>'It's a hired one,' Penfentenyou objected.</p>
+<p>'Yes. Paid for by me as a taxpayer,' I replied.</p>
+<p>'And yours has a top, and the weather looks thundery,' said the
+Agent-General. 'Ours hasn't a wind-screen. Even our goggles were
+hired.'</p>
+<p>'I'll lend you goggles,' I said. 'My car is under repairs.'</p>
+<p>The hireling who had looked to be returned to London spat and
+growled on the drive. She was an open car, capable of some eighteen
+miles on the flat, with tetanic gears and a perpetual palsy.</p>
+<p>'It won't make the least difference,' sighed the Agent-General.
+'He'll only raise his voice. He did it all the way coming
+down.'</p>
+<p>'I say,' said Penfentenyou suspiciously, 'what are you doing all
+this <i>for</i>?'</p>
+<p>'Love of the Empire,' I answered, as Mr. Lingnam tripped up in
+dust-coat and binoculars. 'Now, Mr. Lingnam will tell us exactly
+what he wants to see. He probably knows more about England than the
+rest of us put together.'</p>
+<p>'I read it up yesterday,' said Mr. Lingnam simply. While we
+stowed the lunch-basket (one can never make too sure with a hired
+car) he outlined a very pretty and instructive little day's
+run.</p>
+<p>'You'll drive, of course?' said Penfentenyou to him. 'It's the
+only thing you know anything about.'</p>
+<p>This astonished me, for your greater Federationists are rarely
+mechanicians, but Mr. Lingnam said he would prefer to be inside for
+the present and enjoy our conversation.</p>
+<p>Well settled on the back seat, he did not once lift his eyes to
+the mellow landscape around him, or throw a word at the life of the
+English road which to me is one renewed and unreasoned orgy of
+delight. The mustard-coloured scouts of the Automobile Association;
+their natural enemies, the unjust police; our natural enemies, the
+deliberate market-day cattle, broadside-on at all corners, the
+bicycling butcher-boy a furlong behind; road-engines that pulled
+giddy-go-rounds, rifle galleries, and swings, and sucked snortingly
+from wayside ponds in defiance of the notice-board;
+traction-engines, their trailers piled high with road metal;
+uniformed village nurses, one per seven statute miles, flitting by
+on their wheels; governess-carts full of pink children jogging
+unconcernedly past roaring, brazen touring-cars; the wayside rector
+with virgins in attendance, their faces screwed up against our
+dust; motor-bicycles of every shape charging down at every angle;
+red flags of rifle-ranges; detachments of dusty-putteed
+Territorials; coveys of flagrant children playing in mid-street,
+and the wise, educated English dog safe and quite silent on the
+pavement if his fool-mistress would but cease from trying to save
+him, passed and repassed us in sunlit or shaded settings. But Mr.
+Lingnam only talked. He talked--we all sat together behind so that
+we could not escape him--and he talked above the worn gears and a
+certain maddening swish of one badly patched tire--<i>and</i> he
+talked of the Federation of the Empire against all conceivable
+dangers except himself. Yet I was neither brutally rude like
+Penfentenyou, nor swooningly bored like the Agent-General. I
+remembered a certain Joseph Finsbury who delighted the Tregonwell
+Arms on the borders of the New Forest with nine'--it should have
+been ten--'versions of a single income of two hundred pounds'
+placing the imaginary person in--but I could not recall the list of
+towns further than 'London, Paris, Bagdad, and Spitsbergen.' This
+last I must have murmured aloud, for the Agent-General suddenly
+became human and went on: 'Bussorah, Heligoland, and the Scilly
+Islands--'</p>
+<p>'What?' growled Penfentenyou.</p>
+<p>'Nothing,' said the Agent-General, squeezing my hand
+affectionately. 'Only we have just found out that we are
+brothers.'</p>
+<p>'Exactly,' said Mr. Lingnam. 'That's what I've been trying to
+lead up to. We're <i>all</i> brothers. D'you realise that fifteen
+years ago such a conversation as we're having would have been
+unthinkable? The Empire wouldn't have been ripe for it. To go back,
+even ten years--'</p>
+<p>'I've got it,' cried the Agent-General. '"Brighton, Cincinnati,
+and Nijni-Novgorod!" God bless R.L.S.! Go on, Uncle Joseph. I can
+endure much now.'</p>
+<p>Mr. Lingnam went on like our shandrydan, slowly and loudly. He
+admitted that a man obsessed with a Central Idea--and, after all,
+the only thing that mattered was the Idea--might become a bore, but
+the World's Work, he pointed out, had been done by bores. So he
+laid his bones down to that work till we abandoned ourselves to the
+passage of time and the Mercy of Allah, Who Alone closes the Mouths
+of His Prophets. And we wasted more than fifty miles of summer's
+vivid own England upon him the while.</p>
+<p>About two o'clock we topped Sumtner Rising and looked down on
+the village of Sumtner Barton, which lies just across a single
+railway line, spanned by a red brick bridge. The thick, thunderous
+June airs brought us gusts of melody from a giddy-go-round
+steam-organ in full blast near the pond on the village green.
+Drums, too, thumped and banners waved and regalia flashed at the
+far end of the broad village street. Mr. Lingnam asked why.</p>
+<p>'Nothing Imperial, I'm afraid. It looks like a Foresters'
+F&ecirc;te--one of our big Mutual Benefit Societies,' I
+explained.</p>
+<p>'The Idea only needs to be co-ordinated to Imperial scale--' he
+began.</p>
+<p>'But it means that the pub. will be crowded,' I went on.</p>
+<p>'What's the matter with lunching by the roadside here?' said
+Penfentenyou. 'We've got the lunch-basket.'</p>
+<p>'Haven't you ever heard of Sumtner Barton ales?' I demanded, and
+be became the administrator at once, saying, '<i>I</i> see! Lingnam
+can drive us in and we'll get some, while Holford'--this was the
+hireling chauffeur, whose views on beer we knew not--'lays out
+lunch here. That'll be better than eating at the pub. We can take
+in the Foresters' F&ecirc;te as well, and perhaps I can buy some
+newspapers at the station.'</p>
+<p>'True,' I answered. 'The railway station is just under that
+bridge, and we'll come back and lunch here.'</p>
+<p>I indicated a terrace of cool clean shade beneath kindly beeches
+at the head of Sumtner Rise. As Holford got out the lunch-basket, a
+detachment of Regular troops on manoeuvres swung down the baking
+road.</p>
+<p>'Ah!' said Mr. Lingnam, the monthly-magazine roll in his voice.
+'All Europe is an armed camp, groaning, as I remember I once wrote,
+under the weight of its accoutrements.'</p>
+<p>'Oh, hop in and drive,' cried Penfentenyou. 'We want that
+beer!'</p>
+<p>It made no difference. Mr. Lingnam could have federated the
+Empire from a tight rope. He continued his oration at the wheel as
+we trundled.</p>
+<p>'The danger to the Younger Nations is of being drawn into this
+vortex of Militarism,' he went on, dodging the rear of the
+soldiery.</p>
+<p>'Slow past troops,' I hinted. 'It saves 'em dust. And we
+overtake on the right as a rule in England.'</p>
+<p>'Thanks!' Mr. Lingnam slued over. 'That's another detail which
+needs to be co-ordinated throughout the Empire. But to go back to
+what I was saying. My idea has always been that the component parts
+of the Empire should take counsel among themselves on the approach
+of war, so that, after we have decided on the merits of the
+<i>casus belli</i>, we can co-ordinate what part each Dominion
+shall play whenever war is, unfortunately, a possibility.'</p>
+<p>We neared the hog-back railway bridge, and the hireling knocked
+piteously at the grade. Mr. Lingnam changed gears, and she hoisted
+herself up to a joyous <i>Youp-i-addy-i-ay!</i> from the
+steam-organ. As we topped the arch we saw a Foresters' band with
+banners marching down the street.</p>
+<p>'That's all very fine,' said the Agent-General, 'but in real
+life things have a knack of happening without approaching--'</p>
+<hr style="width: 25%;">
+<p>(Some schools of Thought hold that Time is not; and that when we
+attain complete enlightenment we shall behold past, present, and
+future as One Awful Whole. I myself have nearly achieved this.)</p>
+<hr style="width: 25%;">
+<p>We dipped over the bridge into the village. A boy on a bicycle,
+loaded with four paper bonnet-boxes, pedalled towards us, out of an
+alley on our right. He bowed his head the better to overcome the
+ascent, and naturally took his left. Mr. Lingnam swerved
+frantically to the right. Penfentenyou shouted. The boy looked up,
+saw the car was like to squeeze him against the bridge wall, flung
+himself off his machine and across the narrow pavement into the
+nearest house. He slammed the door at the precise moment when the
+car, all brakes set, bunted the abandoned bicycle, shattering three
+of the bonnet-boxes and jerking the fourth over the unscreened
+dashboard into Mr. Lingnam's arms.</p>
+<p>There was a dead stillness, then a hiss like that of escaping
+steam, and a man who had been running towards us ran the other
+way.</p>
+<p>'Why! I think that those must be bees,' said Mr. Lingnam.</p>
+<p>They were--four full swarms--and the first living objects which
+he had remarked upon all day.</p>
+<p>Some one said, 'Oh, God!' The Agent-General went out over the
+back of the car, crying resolutely: 'Stop the traffic! Stop the
+traffic, there!' Penfentenyou was already on the pavement ringing a
+door-bell, so I had both their rugs, which--for I am an apiarist--I
+threw over my head. While I was tucking my trousers into my
+socks--for I am an apiarist of experience--Mr. Lingnam picked up
+the unexploded bonnet-box and with a single magnificent gesture (he
+told us afterwards he thought there was a river beneath) hurled it
+over the parapet of the bridge, ere he ran across the road towards
+the village green. Now, the station platform immediately below was
+crowded with Foresters and their friends waiting to welcome a
+delegation from a sister Court. I saw the box burst on the flint
+edging of the station garden and the contents sweep forward
+cone-wise like shrapnel. But the result was stimulating rather than
+sedative. All those well-dressed people below shouted like Sodom
+and Gomorrah. Then they moved as a unit into the booking-office,
+the waiting-rooms, and other places, shut doors and windows and
+declaimed aloud, while the incoming train whistled far down the
+line.</p>
+<p>I pivoted round cross-legged on the back seat, like a Circassian
+beauty beneath her veil, and saw Penfentenyou, his coat-collar over
+his ears, dancing before a shut door and holding up handfuls of
+currency to a silver-haired woman at an upper window, who only
+mouthed and shook her head. A little child, carrying a kitten, came
+smiling round a corner. Suddenly (but these things moved me no more
+than so many yards of three-penny cinematograph-film) the kitten
+leaped spitting from her arms, the child burst into tears,
+Penfentenyou, still dancing, snatched her up and tucked her under
+his coat, the woman's countenance blanched, the front door opened,
+Penfentenyou and the child pressed through, and I was alone in an
+inhospitable world where every one was shutting windows and calling
+children home.</p>
+<p>A voice cried: 'You've frowtened 'em! You've frowtened 'em!
+Throw dust on 'em and they'll settle!'</p>
+<p>I did not desire to throw dust on any created thing. I needed
+both hands for my draperies and two more for my stockings. Besides,
+the bees were doing me no hurt. They recognised me as a member of
+the County Bee-keepers' Association who had paid his annual
+subscription and was entitled to a free seat at all apicultural
+exhibitions. The quiver and the churn of the hireling car, or it
+might have been the lurching banners and the arrogant big drum,
+inclined many of them to go up street, and pay court to the
+advancing Foresters' band. So they went, such as had not followed
+Mr. Lingnam in his flight toward the green, and I looked out of two
+goggled eyes instead of half a one at the approaching musicians,
+while I listened with both ears to the delayed train's second
+whistle down the line beneath me.</p>
+<p>The Forester's band no more knew what was coming than do troops
+under sudden fire. Indeed, there were the same extravagant gestures
+and contortions as attend wounds and deaths in war; the very same
+uncanny cessations of speech--for the trombone was cut off at
+midslide, even as a man drops with a syllable on his tongue. They
+clawed, they slapped, they fled, leaving behind them a trophy of
+banners and brasses crudely arranged round the big drum. Then that
+end of the street also shut its windows, and the village, stripped
+of life, lay round me like a reef at low tide. Though I am, as I
+have said, an apiarist in good standing, I never realised that
+there were so many bees in the world. When they had woven a
+flashing haze from one end of the desert street to the other, there
+remained reserves enough to form knops and pendules on all
+window-sills and gutter-ends, without diminishing the multitudes in
+the three oozing bonnet-boxes, or drawing on the Fourth (Railway)
+Battalion in charge of the station below. The prisoners in the
+waiting-rooms and other places there cried out a great deal (I
+argued that they were dying of the heat), and at regular intervals
+the stationmaster called and called to a signalman who was not on
+duty, and the train whistled as it drew nearer.</p>
+<p>Then Penfentenyou, venal and adaptable politician of the type
+that survives at the price of all the higher emotions, appeared at
+the window of the house on my right, broken and congested with
+mirth, the woman beside him, and the child in his arms. I saw his
+mouth open and shut, he hollowed his hands round it, but the churr
+of the motor and the bees drowned his words. He pointed
+dramatically across the street many times and fell back, tears
+running down his face. I turned like a hooded barbette in a heavy
+seaway (not knowing when my trousers would come out of my socks
+again) through one hundred and eighty degrees, and in due time bore
+on the village green. There was a salmon in the pond, rising short
+at a cloud of midges to the tune of <i>Yip-i-addy</i>; but there
+was none to gaff him. The swing-boats were empty, cocoa-nuts sat
+still on their red sticks before white screens, and the gay-painted
+horses of the giddy-go-rounds revolved riderless. All was melody,
+green turf, bright water, and this greedy gambolling fish. When I
+had identified it by its grey gills and binoculars as Lingnam, I
+prostrated myself before Allah in that mirth which is more truly
+labour than any prayer. Then I turned to the purple Penfentenyou at
+the window, and wiped my eyes on the rug edge.</p>
+<p>He raised the window half one cautious inch and bellowed through
+the crack: 'Did you see <i>him</i>? Have they got <i>you</i>? I can
+see lots of things from here. It's like a three-ring circus!'</p>
+<p>'Can you see the station?' I replied, nodding toward the right
+rear mudguard.</p>
+<p>He twisted and craned sideways, but could not command that
+beautiful view.</p>
+<p>'No! What's it like?' he cried.</p>
+<p>'Hell!' I shouted. The silver-haired woman frowned; so did
+Penfentenyou, and, I think, apologised to her for my language.</p>
+<p>'You're always so extreme,' he fluted reproachfully. 'You forget
+that nothing matters except the Idea. Besides, they are this lady's
+bees.'</p>
+<p>He closed the window, and introduced us through it in dumb show;
+but he contrived to give the impression that <i>I</i> was the
+specimen under glass.</p>
+<p>A spurt of damp steam saved me from apoplexy. The train had lost
+patience at last, and was coming into the station directly beneath
+me to see what was the matter. Happy voices sang and heads were
+thrust out all along the compartments, but none answered their
+songs or greetings. She halted, and the people began to get out.
+Then they began to get in again, as their friends in the
+waiting-rooms advised. All did not catch the warning, so there was
+congestion at the doors, but those whom the bees caught got in
+first.</p>
+<p>Still the bees, more bent on their own business than wanton
+torture, kept to the south end of the platform by the bookstall,
+and that was why the completely exposed engine-driver at the north
+end of the train did not at first understand the hermetically
+sealed stationmaster when the latter shouted to him many times to
+'get on out o' this.'</p>
+<p>'Where are you?' was the reply. 'And what for?'</p>
+<p>'It don't matter where I am, an' you'll get what-for in a minute
+if you don't shift,' said the stationmaster. 'Drop 'em at Parson's
+Meadow and they can walk up over the fields.'</p>
+<p>That bare-armed, thin-shirted idiot, leaning out of the cab,
+took the stationmaster's orders as an insult to his dignity, and
+roared at the shut offices: 'You'll give me what-for, will you?
+Look 'ere, I'm not in the 'abit of--' His outstretched hand flew to
+his neck.... Do you know that if you sting an engine-driver it is
+the same as stinging his train? She starts with a jerk that nearly
+smashes the couplings, and runs, barking like a dog, till she is
+out of sight. Nor does she think about spilled people and parted
+families on the platform behind her. I had to do all that. There
+was a man called Fred, and his wife Harriet--a cheery, full-blooded
+couple--who interested me immensely before they battered their way
+into a small detached building, already densely occupied. There was
+also a nameless bachelor who sat under a half-opened umbrella and
+twirled it dizzily, which was so new a game that I applauded
+aloud.</p>
+<p>When they had thoroughly cleared the ground, the bees set about
+making comb for publication at the bookstall counter. Presently
+some bold hearts tiptoed out of the waiting-rooms over the loud
+gravel with the consciously modest air of men leaving church,
+climbed the wooden staircase to the bridge, and so reached my
+level, where the inexhaustible bonnet-boxes were still vomiting
+squadrons and platoons. There was little need to bid them descend.
+They had wrapped their heads in handkerchiefs, so that they looked
+like the disappointed dead scuttling back to Purgatory. Only one
+old gentleman, pontifically draped in a banner embroidered
+'Temperance and Fortitude,' ran the gauntlet up-street, shouting as
+he passed me, 'It's night or Bl&uuml;cher, Mister.' They let him in
+at the White Hart, the pub. where I should have bought the
+beer.</p>
+<p>After this the day sagged. I fell to reckoning how long a man in
+a Turkish bath, weakened by excessive laughter, could live without
+food, and specially drink; and how long a disenfranchised bee could
+hold out under the same conditions.</p>
+<p>Obviously, since her one practical joke costs her her life, the
+bee can have but small sense of humour; but her fundamentally
+dismal and ungracious outlook on life impressed me beyond words.
+She had paralysed locomotion, wiped out trade, social intercourse,
+mutual trust, love, friendship, sport, music (the lonely
+steam-organ had run down at last), all that gives substance, colour
+or savour to life, and yet, in the barren desert she had created,
+was not one whit more near to the evolution of a saner order of
+things. The Heavens were darkened with the swarms' divided
+counsels; the street shimmered with their purposeless sallies. They
+clotted on tiles and gutter-pipes, and began frenziedly to build a
+cell or two of comb ere they discovered that their queen was not
+with them; then flung off to seek her, or whirled, dishevelled and
+insane, into another hissing nebula on the false rumour that she
+was there. I scowled upon them with disfavour, and a massy, blue
+thunder-head rose majestically from behind the elm-trees of Sumtner
+Barton Rectory, arched over and scowled with me. Then I realised
+that it was not bees nor locusts that had darkened the skies, but
+the on-coming of the malignant English thunderstorm--the one thing
+before which even Deborah the bee cannot express her silly little
+self.</p>
+<p>'Aha! <i>Now</i> you'll catch it,' I said, as the herald gusts
+set the big drum rolling down the street like a box-kite. Up and up
+yearned the dark cloud, till the first lightning quivered and cut.
+Deborah cowered. Where she flew, there she fled; where she was,
+there she sat still; and the solid rain closed in on her as a book
+that is closed when the chapter is finished. By the time it had
+soaked to my second rug, Penfentenyou appeared at the window,
+wiping his false mouth on a napkin.</p>
+<p>'Are you all right?' he inquired. 'Then <i>that's</i> all right!
+Mrs. Bellamy says that her bees don't sting in the wet. You'd
+better fetch Lingnam over. He's got to pay for them and the
+bicycle.'</p>
+<p>I had no words which the silver-haired lady could listen to, but
+paddled across the flooded street between flashes to the pond on
+the green. Mr. Lingnam, scarcely visible through the sheeting
+downpour, trotted round the edge. He bore himself nobly, and lied
+at the mere sight of me.</p>
+<p>'Isn't this wet?' he cried. 'It has drenched me to the skin. I
+shall need a change.'</p>
+<p>'Come along,' I said. 'I don't know what you'll get, but you
+deserve more.'</p>
+<p>Penfentenyou, dry, fed, and in command, let us in. 'You,' he
+whispered to me, 'are to wait in the scullery. Mrs. Bellamy didn't
+like the way you talked about her bees. Hsh! Hsh! She's a
+kind-hearted lady. She's a widow, Lingnam, but she's kept
+<i>his</i> clothes, and as soon as you've paid for the damage
+she'll rent you a suit. I've arranged it all!'</p>
+<p>'Then tell him he mustn't undress in my hall,' said a voice from
+the stair-head.</p>
+<p>'Tell <i>her</i>--' Lingnam began.</p>
+<p>'Come and look at the pretty suit I've chosen,' Penfentenyou
+cooed, as one cajoling a maniac.</p>
+<p>I staggered out-of-doors again, and fell into the car, whose
+ever-running machinery masked my yelps and hiccups. When I raised
+my forehead from the wheel, I saw that traffic through the village
+had been resumed, after, as my watch showed, one and one-half
+hour's suspension. There were two limousines, one landau, one
+doctor's car, three touring-cars, one patent steam-laundry van,
+three tricars, one traction-engine, some motor-cycles, one with a
+side-car, and one brewery lorry. It was the allegory of my own
+imperturbable country, delayed for a short time by unforeseen
+external events but now going about her business, and I blessed Her
+with tears in my eyes, even though I knew She looked upon me as
+drunk and incapable.</p>
+<p>Then troops came over the bridge behind me--a company of
+dripping wet Regulars without any expression. In their rear,
+carrying the lunch-basket, marched the Agent-General and Holford
+the hired chauffeur.</p>
+<p>'I say,' said the Agent-General, nodding at the darkened khaki
+backs. 'If <i>that's</i> what we've got to depend on in event of
+war they're a broken reed. They ran like hares--ran like hares, I
+tell you.'</p>
+<p>'And you?' I asked.</p>
+<p>'Oh, I just sauntered back over the bridge and stopped the
+traffic that end. Then I had lunch. 'Pity about the beer, though. I
+say--these cushions are sopping wet!'</p>
+<p>'I'm sorry,' I said. 'I haven't had time to turn 'em.'</p>
+<p>'Nor there wasn't any need to 'ave kept the engine runnin' all
+this time,' said Holford sternly. 'I'll 'ave to account for the
+expenditure of petrol. It exceeds the mileage indicated, you
+see.'</p>
+<p>'I'm sorry,' I repeated. After all, that is the way that
+taxpayers regard most crises.</p>
+<p>The house-door opened and Penfentenyou and another came out into
+the now thinning rain.</p>
+<p>'Ah! There you both are! Here's Lingnam,' he cried. 'He's got a
+little wet. He's had to change.'</p>
+<p>'We saw that. I was too sore and weak to begin another laugh,
+but the Agent-General crumpled up where he stood. The late Mr.
+Bellamy must have been a man of tremendous personality, which he
+had impressed on every angle of his garments. I was told later that
+he had died in delirium tremens, which at once explained the
+pattern, and the reason why Mr. Lingnam, writhing inside it, swore
+so inspiredly. Of the deliberate and diffuse Federationist there
+remained no trace, save the binoculars and two damp whiskers. We
+stood on the pavement, before Elemental Man calling on Elemental
+Powers to condemn and incinerate Creation.</p>
+<p>'Well, hadn't we better be getting back?' said the
+Agent-General.</p>
+<p>'Look out!' I remarked casually. 'Those bonnet-boxes are full of
+bees still!'</p>
+<p>'Are they?' said the livid Mr. Lingnam, and tilted them over
+with the late Mr. Bellamy's large boots. Deborah rolled out in
+drenched lumps into the swilling gutter. There was a muffled shriek
+at the window where Mrs. Bellamy gesticulated.</p>
+<p>'It's all right. I've paid for them,' said Mr. Lingnam. He
+dumped out the last dregs like mould from a pot-bound
+flower-pot.</p>
+<p>'What? Are you going to take 'em home with you?' said the
+Agent-General.</p>
+<p>'No!' He passed a wet hand over his streaky forehead. 'Wasn't
+there a bicycle that was the beginning of this trouble?' said
+he.</p>
+<p>'It's under the fore-axle, sir,' said Holford promptly. 'I can
+fish it out from 'ere.'</p>
+<p>'Not till I've done with it, please.' Before we could stop him,
+he had jumped into the car and taken charge. The hireling leaped
+into her collar, surged, shrieked (less loudly than Mrs. Bellamy at
+the window), and swept on. That which came out behind her was, as
+Holford truly observed, no joy-wheel. Mr. Lingnam swung round the
+big drum in the market-place and thundered back, shouting: 'Leave
+it alone. It's my meat!'</p>
+<p>'Mince-meat, 'e means,' said Holford after this second
+trituration. 'You couldn't say now it 'ad ever <i>been</i> one,
+could you?'</p>
+<p>Mrs. Bellamy opened the window and spoke. It appears she had
+only charged for damage to the bicycle, not for the entire machine
+which Mr. Lingnam was ruthlessly gleaning, spoke by spoke, from the
+highway and cramming into the slack of the hood. At last he
+answered, and I have never seen a man foam at the mouth before. 'If
+you don't stop, I shall come into your house--in this car--and
+drive upstairs and--kill you!'</p>
+<p>She stopped; he stopped. Holford took the wheel, and we got
+away. It was time, for the sun shone after the storm, and Deborah
+beneath the tiles and the eaves already felt its reviving influence
+compel her to her interrupted labours of federation. We warned the
+village policeman at the far end of the street that he might have
+to suspend traffic again. The proprietor of the giddy-go-round,
+swings, and cocoanut-shies wanted to know from whom, in this world
+or another, he could recover damages. Mr. Lingnam referred him most
+directly to Mrs. Bellamy.... Then we went home.</p>
+<p>After dinner that evening Mr. Lingnam rose stiffly in his place
+to make a few remarks on the Federation of the Empire on the lines
+of Co-ordinated, Offensive Operations, backed by the Entire
+Effective Forces, Moral, Military, and Fiscal, of Permanently
+Mobilised Communities, the whole brought to bear, without any
+respect to the merits of any <i>casus belli</i>, instantaneously,
+automatically, and remorselessly at the first faint buzz of
+war.</p>
+<p>'The trouble with Us,' said he, 'is that We take such an
+infernally long time making sure that We are right that We don't go
+ahead when things happen. For instance, I ought to have gone ahead
+instead of pulling up when I hit that bicycle.'</p>
+<p>'But you were in the wrong, Lingnam, when you turned to the
+right,' I put in.</p>
+<p>'I don't want to hear any more of your damned, detached,
+mugwumping excuses for the other fellow,' he snapped.</p>
+<p>'Now you're beginning to see things,' said Penfentenyou. 'I hope
+you won't backslide when the swellings go down.'</p>
+<br>
+<br>
+<hr style="width: 35%;">
+<br>
+<br>
+<a name="page405"></a>
+<div class="poem">
+<div class="stanza">
+<p class="i3"><b>THE SONG OF SEVEN CITIES</b></p>
+</div>
+<div class="stanza">
+<p>I was Lord of Cities very sumptuously builded.</p>
+<p>Seven roaring Cities paid me tribute from afar.</p>
+<p>Ivory their outposts were--the guardrooms of them gilded,</p>
+<p>And garrisoned with Amazons invincible in war.</p>
+</div>
+<div class="stanza">
+<p>All the world went softly when it walked before my Cities--</p>
+<p>Neither King nor Army vexed my peoples at their toil.</p>
+<p>Never horse nor chariot irked or overbore my Cities,</p>
+<p>Never Mob nor Ruler questioned whence they drew their spoil.</p>
+</div>
+<div class="stanza">
+<p>Banded, mailed and arrogant from sunrise unto sunset,</p>
+<p>Singing while they sacked it, they possessed the land at
+large.</p>
+<p>Yet when men would rob them, they resisted, they made onset</p>
+<p>And pierced the smoke of battle with a thousand-sabred
+charge!</p>
+</div>
+<div class="stanza">
+<p>So they warred and trafficked only yesterday, my Cities.</p>
+<p>To-day there is no mark or mound of where my Cities stood.</p>
+<p>For the River rose at midnight and it washed away my Cities.</p>
+<p>They are evened with Atlantis and the towns before the
+Flood.</p>
+</div>
+<div class="stanza">
+<p>Rain on rain-gorged channels raised the water-levels round
+them,</p>
+<p>Freshet backed on freshet swelled and swept their world from
+sight,</p>
+<p>Till the emboldened floods linked arms and flashing forward
+drowned them--</p>
+<p>Drowned my Seven Cities and their peoples in one night!</p>
+</div>
+<div class="stanza">
+<p>Low among the alders lie their derelict foundations,</p>
+<p>The beams wherein they trusted and the plinths whereon they
+built--</p>
+<p>My rulers and their treasure and their unborn populations,</p>
+<p>Dead, destroyed, aborted, and defiled with mud and silt!</p>
+</div>
+<div class="stanza">
+<p>The Daughters of the Palace whom they cherished in my
+Cities,</p>
+<p>My silver-tongued Princesses, and the promise of their May--</p>
+<p>Their bridegrooms of the June-tide--all have perished in my
+Cities,</p>
+<p>With the harsh envenomed virgins that can neither love nor
+play.</p>
+</div>
+<div class="stanza">
+<p>I was Lord of Cities--I will build anew my Cities,</p>
+<p>Seven, set on rocks, above the wrath of any flood.</p>
+<p>Nor will I rest from search till I have filled anew my
+Cities</p>
+<p>With peoples undefeated of the dark, enduring blood.</p>
+</div>
+<div class="stanza">
+<p>To the sound of trumpets shall their seed restore my Cities.</p>
+<p>Wealthy and well-weaponed, that once more may I behold</p>
+<p>All the world go softly when it walks before my Cities,</p>
+<p>And the horses and the chariots fleeing from them as of old!</p>
+</div>
+</div>
+<br>
+<br>
+<hr style="width: 35%;">
+<br>
+<br>
+<a name="page409"></a>
+<h2>'Swept and Garnished'</h2>
+<h3>(January 1915)</h3>
+<br>
+<p>When the first waves of feverish cold stole over Frau Ebermann
+she very wisely telephoned for the doctor and went to bed. He
+diagnosed the attack as mild influenza, prescribed the appropriate
+remedies, and left her to the care of her one servant in her
+comfortable Berlin flat. Frau Ebermann, beneath the thick coverlet,
+curled up with what patience she could until the aspirin should
+begin to act, and Anna should come back from the chemist with the
+formamint, the ammoniated quinine, the eucalyptus, and the little
+tin steam-inhaler. Meantime, every bone in her body ached; her head
+throbbed; her hot, dry hands would not stay the same size for a
+minute together; and her body, tucked into the smallest possible
+compass, shrank from the chill of the well-warmed sheets.</p>
+<p>Of a sudden she noticed that an imitation-lace cover which
+should have lain mathematically square with the imitation-marble
+top of the radiator behind the green plush sofa had slipped away so
+that one corner hung over the bronze-painted steam pipes. She
+recalled that she must have rested her poor head against the
+radiator-top while she was taking off her boots. She tried to get
+up and set the thing straight, but the radiator at once receded
+toward the horizon, which, unlike true horizons, slanted
+diagonally, exactly parallel with the dropped lace edge of the
+cover. Frau Ebermann groaned through sticky lips and lay still.</p>
+<p>'Certainly, I have a temperature,' she said. 'Certainly, I have
+a grave temperature. I should have been warned by that chill after
+dinner.'</p>
+<p>She resolved to shut her hot-lidded eyes, but opened them in a
+little while to torture herself with the knowledge of that
+ungeometrical thing against the far wall. Then she saw a child--an
+untidy, thin-faced little girl of about ten, who must have strayed
+in from the adjoining flat. This proved--Frau Ebermann groaned
+again at the way the world falls to bits when one is sick--proved
+that Anna had forgotten to shut the outer door of the flat when she
+went to the chemist. Frau Ebermann had had children of her own, but
+they were all grown up now, and she had never been a child-lover in
+any sense. Yet the intruder might be made to serve her scheme of
+things.</p>
+<p>'Make--put,' she muttered thickly, 'that white thing straight on
+the top of that yellow thing.'</p>
+<p>The child paid no attention, but moved about the room,
+investigating everything that came in her way--the yellow cut-glass
+handles of the chest of drawers, the stamped bronze hook to hold
+back the heavy puce curtains, and the mauve enamel, New Art
+finger-plates on the door. Frau Ebermann watched indignantly.</p>
+<p>'Aie! That is bad and rude. Go away!' she cried, though it hurt
+her to raise her voice. 'Go away by the road you came!' The child
+passed behind the bed-foot, where she could not see her. 'Shut the
+door as you go. I will speak to Anna, but--first, put that white
+thing straight.'</p>
+<p>She closed her eyes in misery of body and soul. The outer door
+clicked, and Anna entered, very penitent that she had stayed so
+long at the chemist's. But it had been difficult to find the proper
+type of inhaler, and--</p>
+<p>'Where did the child go?' moaned Frau Ebermann--'the child that
+was here?'</p>
+<p>'There was no child,' said startled Anna. 'How should any child
+come in when I shut the door behind me after I go out? All the keys
+of the flats are different.'</p>
+<p>'No, no! You forgot this time. But my back is aching, and up my
+legs also. Besides, who knows what it may have fingered and upset?
+Look and see.'</p>
+<p>'Nothing is fingered, nothing is upset,' Anna replied, as she
+took the inhaler from its paper box.</p>
+<p>'Yes, there is. Now I remember all about it. Put--put that white
+thing, with the open edge--the lace, I mean--quite straight on
+that--' she pointed. Anna, accustomed to her ways, understood and
+went to it.</p>
+<p>'Now, is it quite straight?' Frau Ebermann demanded.</p>
+<p>'Perfectly,' said Anna. 'In fact, in the very centre of the
+radiator.' Anna measured the equal margins with her knuckle, as she
+had been told to do when she first took service.</p>
+<p>'And my tortoise-shell hair brushes?' Frau Ebermann could not
+command her dressing-table from where she lay.</p>
+<p>'Perfectly straight, side by side in the big tray, and the comb
+laid across them. Your watch also in the coralline watch-holder.
+Everything'--she moved round the room to make sure--'everything is
+as you have it when you are well.' Frau Ebermann sighed with
+relief. It seemed to her that the room and her head had suddenly
+grown cooler.</p>
+<p>'Good!' said she. 'Now warm my night-gown in the kitchen, so it
+will be ready when I have perspired. And the towels also. Make the
+inhaler steam, and put in the eucalyptus; that is good for the
+larynx. Then sit you in the kitchen, and come when I ring. But,
+first, my hot-water bottle.'</p>
+<p>It was brought and scientifically tucked in.</p>
+<p>'What news?' said Frau Ebermann drowsily. She had not been out
+that day.</p>
+<p>'Another victory,' said Anna. 'Many more prisoners and
+guns.'</p>
+<p>Frau Ebermann purred, one might almost say grunted,
+contentedly.</p>
+<p>'That is good too,' she said; and Anna, after lighting the
+inhaler-lamp, went out.</p>
+<p>Frau Ebermann reflected that in an hour or so the aspirin would
+begin to work, and all would be well. To-morrow--no, the day
+after--she would take up life with something to talk over with her
+friends at coffee. It was rare--every one knew it--that she should
+be overcome by any ailment. Yet in all her distresses she had not
+allowed the minutest deviation from daily routine and ritual. She
+would tell her friends--she ran over their names one by
+one--exactly what measures she had taken against the lace cover on
+the radiator-top and in regard to her two tortoise-shell hair
+brushes and the comb at right angles. How she had set everything in
+order--everything in order. She roved further afield as she
+wriggled her toes luxuriously on the hot-water bottle. If it
+pleased our dear God to take her to Himself, and she was not so
+young as she had been--there was that plate of the four lower ones
+in the blue tooth-glass, for instance--He should find all her
+belongings fit to meet His eye. 'Swept and garnished' were the
+words that shaped themselves in her intent brain. 'Swept and
+garnished for--'</p>
+<p>No, it was certainly not for the dear Lord that she had swept;
+she would have her room swept out to-morrow or the day after, and
+garnished. Her hands began to swell again into huge pillows of
+nothingness. Then they shrank, and so did her head, to minute dots.
+It occurred to her that she was waiting for some event, some
+tremendously important event, to come to pass. She lay with shut
+eyes for a long time till her head and hands should return to their
+proper size.</p>
+<p>She opened her eyes with a jerk.</p>
+<p>'How stupid of me,' she said aloud, 'to set the room in order
+for a parcel of dirty little children!'</p>
+<p>They were there--five of them, two little boys and three
+girls--headed by the anxious-eyed ten-year-old whom she had seen
+before. They must have entered by the outer door, which Anna had
+neglected to shut behind her when she returned with the inhaler.
+She counted them backward and forward as one counts scales--one,
+two, three, four, five.</p>
+<p>They took no notice of her, but hung about, first on one foot
+then on the other, like strayed chickens, the smaller ones holding
+by the larger. They had the air of utterly wearied passengers in a
+railway waiting-room, and their clothes were disgracefully
+dirty.</p>
+<p>'Go away!' cried Frau Ebermann at last, after she had struggled,
+it seemed to her, for years to shape the words.</p>
+<p>'You called?' said Anna at the living-room door.</p>
+<p>'No,' said her mistress. 'Did you shut the flat door when you
+came in?'</p>
+<p>'Assuredly,' said Anna. 'Besides, it is made to catch shut of
+itself.'</p>
+<p>'Then go away,' said she, very little above a whisper. If Anna
+pretended not to see the children, she would speak to Anna later
+on.</p>
+<p>'And now,' she said, turning toward them as soon as the door
+closed. The smallest of the crowd smiled at her, and shook his head
+before he buried it in his sister's skirts.</p>
+<p>'Why--don't--you--go--away?' she whispered earnestly.</p>
+<p>Again they took no notice, but, guided by the elder girl, set
+themselves to climb, boots and all, on to the green plush sofa in
+front of the radiator. The little boys had to be pushed, as they
+could not compass the stretch unaided. They settled themselves in a
+row, with small gasps of relief, and pawed the plush
+approvingly.</p>
+<p>'I ask you--I ask you why do you not go away--why do you not go
+away?' Frau Ebermann found herself repeating the question twenty
+times. It seemed to her that everything in the world hung on the
+answer. 'You know you should not come into houses and rooms unless
+you are invited. Not houses and bedrooms, you know.'</p>
+<p>'No,' a solemn little six-year-old repeated, 'not houses nor
+bedrooms, nor dining-rooms, nor churches, nor all those places.
+Shouldn't come in. It's rude.'</p>
+<p>'Yes, he said so,' the younger girl put in proudly. 'He said it.
+He told them only pigs would do that.' The line nodded and dimpled
+one to another with little explosive giggles, such as children use
+when they tell deeds of great daring against their elders.</p>
+<p>'If you know it is wrong, that makes it much worse,' said Frau
+Ebermann.</p>
+<p>'Oh yes; much worse,' they assented cheerfully, till the
+smallest boy changed his smile to a baby wail of weariness.</p>
+<p>'When will they come for us?' he asked, and the girl at the head
+of the row hauled him bodily into her square little capable
+lap.</p>
+<p>'He's tired,' she explained. 'He is only four. He only had his
+first breeches this spring.' They came almost under his armpits,
+and were held up by broad linen braces, which, his sorrow diverted
+for the moment, he patted proudly.</p>
+<p>'Yes, beautiful, dear,' said both girls.</p>
+<p>'Go away!' said Frau Ebermann. 'Go home to your father and
+mother!'</p>
+<p>Their faces grew grave at once.</p>
+<p>'H'sh! We <i>can't</i>,' whispered the eldest. 'There isn't
+anything left.'</p>
+<p>'All gone,' a boy echoed, and he puffed through pursed lips.
+'Like <i>that</i>, uncle told me. Both cows too.'</p>
+<p>'And my own three ducks,' the boy on the girl's lap said
+sleepily.</p>
+<p>'So, you see, we came here.' The elder girl leaned forward a
+little, caressing the child she rocked.</p>
+<p>'I--I don't understand,' said Frau Ebermann 'Are you lost, then?
+You must tell our police.'</p>
+<p>'Oh no; we are only waiting.'</p>
+<p>'But what are you waiting <i>for?</i>'</p>
+<p>'We are waiting for our people to come for us. They told us to
+come here and wait for them. So we are waiting till they come,' the
+eldest girl replied.</p>
+<p>'Yes. We are waiting till our people come for us,' said all the
+others in chorus.</p>
+<p>'But,' said Frau Ebermann very patiently--'but now tell me, for
+I tell you that I am not in the least angry, where do you come
+from? Where do you come from?'</p>
+<p>The five gave the names of two villages of which she had read in
+the papers,</p>
+<p>'That is silly,' said Frau Ebermann. 'The people fired on us,
+and they were punished. Those places are wiped out, stamped
+flat.'</p>
+<p>'Yes, yes, wiped out, stamped flat. That is why and--I have lost
+the ribbon off my pigtail,' said the younger girl. She looked
+behind her over the sofa-back.</p>
+<p>'It is not here,' said the elder. 'It was lost before. Don't you
+remember?'</p>
+<p>'Now, if you are lost, you must go and tell our police. They
+will take care of you and give you food,' said Frau Ebermann. 'Anna
+will show you the way there.'</p>
+<p>'No,'--this was the six-year-old with the smile,--'we must wait
+here till our people come for us. Mustn't we, sister?'</p>
+<p>'Of course. We wait here till our people come for us. All the
+world knows that,' said the eldest girl.</p>
+<p>'Yes.' The boy in her lap had waked again. 'Little children,
+too--as little as Henri, and <i>he</i> doesn't wear trousers yet.
+As little as all that.'</p>
+<p>'I don't understand,' said Frau Ebermann, shivering. In spite of
+the heat of the room and the damp breath of the steam-inhaler, the
+aspirin was not doing its duty.</p>
+<p>The girl raised her blue eyes and looked at the woman for an
+instant.</p>
+<p>'You see,' she said, emphasising her statements with her
+ringers, '<i>they</i> told <i>us</i> to wait <i>here</i> till
+<i>our</i> people came for us. So we came. We wait till our people
+come for us.'</p>
+<p>'That is silly again,' said Frau Ebermann. 'It is no good for
+you to wait here. Do you know what this place is? You have been to
+school? It is Berlin, the capital of Germany.'</p>
+<p>'Yes, yes,' they all cried; 'Berlin, capital of Germany. We know
+that. That is why we came.'</p>
+<p>'So, you see, it is no good,' she said triumphantly, 'because
+your people can never come for you here.'</p>
+<p>'They told us to come here and wait till our people came for
+us.' They delivered this as if it were a lesson in school. Then
+they sat still, their hands orderly folded on their laps, smiling
+as sweetly as ever.</p>
+<p>'Go away! Go away!' Frau Ebermann shrieked.</p>
+<p>'You called?' said Anna, entering.</p>
+<p>'No. Go away! Go away!'</p>
+<p>'Very good, old cat,' said the maid under her breath. 'Next time
+you <i>may</i> call,' and she returned to her friend in the
+kitchen.</p>
+<p>'I ask you--ask you, <i>please</i> to go away,' Frau Ebermann
+pleaded. 'Go to my Anna through that door, and she will give you
+cakes and sweeties. It is not kind of you to come into my room and
+behave so badly.'</p>
+<p>'Where else shall we go now?' the elder girl demanded, turning
+to her little company. They fell into discussion. One preferred the
+broad street with trees, another the railway station; but when she
+suggested an Emperor's palace, they agreed with her.</p>
+<p>'We will go then,' she said, and added half apologetically to
+Frau Ebermann, 'You see, they are so little they like to meet all
+the others.'</p>
+<p>'What others?' said Frau Ebermann.</p>
+<p>'The others--hundreds and hundreds and thousands and thousands
+of the others.'</p>
+<p>'That is a lie. There cannot be a hundred even, much less a
+thousand,' cried Frau Ebermann.</p>
+<p>'So?' said the girl politely.</p>
+<p>'Yes. <i>I</i> tell you; and I have very good information. I
+know how it happened. You should have been more careful. You should
+not have run out to see the horses and guns passing. That is how it
+is done when our troops pass through. My son has written me
+so.'</p>
+<p>They had clambered down from the sofa, and gathered round the
+bed with eager, interested eyes.</p>
+<p>'Horses and guns going by--how fine!' some one whispered.</p>
+<p>'Yes, yes; believe me, <i>that</i> is how the accidents to the
+children happen. You must know yourself that it is true. One runs
+out to look--'</p>
+<p>'But I never saw any at all,' a boy cried sorrowfully. 'Only one
+noise I heard. That was when Aunt Emmeline's house fell down.'</p>
+<p>'But listen to me. <i>I</i> am telling you! One runs out to
+look, because one is little and cannot see well. So one peeps
+between the man's legs, and then--you know how close those big
+horses and guns turn the corners--then one's foot slips and one
+gets run over. That's how it happens. Several times it had
+happened, but not many times; certainly not a hundred, perhaps not
+twenty. So, you see, you <i>must</i> be all. Tell me now that you
+are all that there are, and Anna shall give you the cakes.'</p>
+<p>'Thousands,' a boy repeated monotonously. 'Then we all come here
+to wait till our people come for us.'</p>
+<p>'But now we will go away from here. The poor lady is tired,'
+said the elder girl, plucking his sleeve.</p>
+<p>'Oh, you hurt, you hurt!' he cried, and burst into tears.</p>
+<p>'What is that for?' said Frau Ebermann. 'To cry in a room where
+a poor lady is sick is very inconsiderate.'</p>
+<p>'Oh, but look, lady!' said the elder girl.</p>
+<p>Frau Ebermann looked and saw.</p>
+<p>'<i>Au revoir</i>, lady.' They made their little smiling bows
+and curtseys undisturbed by her loud cries. '<i>Au revoir,</i>
+lady. We will wait till our people come for us.'</p>
+<p>When Anna at last ran in, she found her mistress on her knees,
+busily cleaning the floor with the lace cover from the radiator,
+because, she explained, it was all spotted with the blood of five
+children--she was perfectly certain there could not be more than
+five in the whole world--who had gone away for the moment, but were
+now waiting round the corner, and Anna was to find them and give
+them cakes to stop the bleeding, while her mistress swept and
+garnished that Our dear Lord when He came might find everything as
+it should be.</p>
+<br>
+<br>
+<hr style="width: 35%;">
+<br>
+<br>
+<a name="page421"></a>
+<h2>Mary Postgate</h2>
+<h3>(1915)</h3>
+<br>
+<p>Of Miss Mary Postgate, Lady McCausland wrote that she was
+'thoroughly conscientious, tidy, companionable, and ladylike. I am
+very sorry to part with her, and shall always be interested in her
+welfare.'</p>
+<p>Miss Fowler engaged her on this recommendation, and to her
+surprise, for she had had experience of companions, found that it
+was true. Miss Fowler was nearer sixty than fifty at the time, but
+though she needed care she did not exhaust her attendant's
+vitality. On the contrary, she gave out, stimulatingly and with
+reminiscences. Her father had been a minor Court official in the
+days when the Great Exhibition of 1851 had just set its seal on
+Civilisation made perfect. Some of Miss Fowler's tales, none the
+less, were not always for the young. Mary was not young, and though
+her speech was as colourless as her eyes or her hair, she was never
+shocked. She listened unflinchingly to every one; said at the end,
+'How interesting!' or 'How shocking!' as the case might be, and
+never again referred to it, for she prided herself on a trained
+mind, which 'did not dwell on these things.' She was, too, a
+treasure at domestic accounts, for which the village tradesmen,
+with their weekly books, loved her not. Otherwise she had no
+enemies; provoked no jealousy even among the plainest; neither
+gossip nor slander had ever been traced to her; she supplied the
+odd place at the Rector's or the Doctor's table at half an hour's
+notice; she was a sort of public aunt to very many small children
+of the village street, whose parents, while accepting everything,
+would have been swift to resent what they called 'patronage'; she
+served on the Village Nursing Committee as Miss Fowler's nominee
+when Miss Fowler was crippled by rheumatoid arthritis, and came out
+of six months' fortnightly meetings equally respected by all the
+cliques.</p>
+<p>And when Fate threw Miss Fowler's nephew, an unlovely orphan of
+eleven, on Miss Fowler's hands, Mary Postgate stood to her share of
+the business of education as practised in private and public
+schools. She checked printed clothes-lists, and unitemised bills of
+extras; wrote to Head and House masters, matrons, nurses and
+doctors, and grieved or rejoiced over half-term reports. Young
+Wyndham Fowler repaid her in his holidays by calling her
+'Gatepost,' 'Postey,' or 'Packthread,' by thumping her between her
+narrow shoulders, or by chasing her bleating, round the garden, her
+large mouth open, her large nose high in air, at a stiff-necked
+shamble very like a camel's. Later on he filled the house with
+clamour, argument, and harangues as to his personal needs, likes
+and dislikes, and the limitations of 'you women,' reducing Mary to
+tears of physical fatigue, or, when he chose to be humorous, of
+helpless laughter. At crises, which multiplied as he grew older,
+she was his ambassadress and his interpretress to Miss Fowler, who
+had no large sympathy with the young; a vote in his interest at the
+councils on his future; his sewing-woman, strictly accountable for
+mislaid boots and garments; always his butt and his slave.</p>
+<p>And when he decided to become a solicitor, and had entered an
+office in London; when his greeting had changed from 'Hullo,
+Postey, you old beast,' to Mornin', Packthread,' there came a war
+which, unlike all wars that Mary could remember, did not stay
+decently outside England and in the newspapers, but intruded on the
+lives of people whom she knew. As she said to Miss Fowler, it was
+'most vexatious.' It took the Rector's son who was going into
+business with his elder brother; it took the Colonel's nephew on
+the eve of fruit-farming in Canada; it took Mrs. Grant's son who,
+his mother said, was devoted to the ministry; and, very early
+indeed, it took Wynn Fowler, who announced on a postcard that he
+had joined the Flying Corps and wanted a cardigan waistcoat.</p>
+<p>'He must go, and he must have the waistcoat,' said Miss Fowler.
+So Mary got the proper-sized needles and wool, while Miss Fowler
+told the men of her establishment--two gardeners and an odd man,
+aged sixty--that those who could join the Army had better do so.
+The gardeners left. Cheape, the odd man, stayed on, and was
+promoted to the gardener's cottage. The cook, scorning to be
+limited in luxuries, also left, after a spirited scene with Miss
+Fowler, and took the housemaid with her. Miss Fowler gazetted
+Nellie, Cheape's seventeen-year-old daughter, to the vacant post;
+Mrs. Cheape to the rank of cook, with occasional cleaning bouts;
+and the reduced establishment moved forward smoothly.</p>
+<p>Wynn demanded an increase in his allowance. Miss Fowler, who
+always looked facts in the face, said, 'He must have it. The
+chances are he won't live long to draw it, and if three hundred
+makes him happy--'</p>
+<p>Wynn was grateful, and came over, in his tight-buttoned uniform,
+to say so. His training centre was not thirty miles away, and his
+talk was so technical that it had to be explained by charts of the
+various types of machines. He gave Mary such a chart.</p>
+<p>'And you'd better study it, Postey,' he said. 'You'll be seeing
+a lot of 'em soon.' So Mary studied the chart, but when Wynn next
+arrived to swell and exalt himself before his womenfolk, she failed
+badly in cross-examination, and he rated her as in the old
+days.</p>
+<p>'You <i>look</i> more or less like a human being,' he said in
+his new Service voice. 'You <i>must</i> have had a brain at some
+time in your past. What have you done with it? Where d'you keep it?
+A sheep would know more than you do, Postey. You're lamentable. You
+are less use than an empty tin can, you dowey old cassowary.'</p>
+<p>'I suppose that's how your superior officer talks to
+<i>you</i>?' said Miss Fowler from her chair.</p>
+<p>'But Postey doesn't mind,' Wynn replied. 'Do you,
+Packthread?'</p>
+<p>'Why? Was Wynn saying anything? I shall get this right next time
+you come,' she muttered, and knitted her pale brows again over the
+diagrams of Taubes, Farmans, and Zeppelins.</p>
+<p>In a few weeks the mere land and sea battles which she read to
+Miss Fowler after breakfast passed her like idle breath. Her heart
+and her interest were high in the air with Wynn, who had finished
+'rolling' (whatever that might be) and had gone on from a 'taxi' to
+a machine more or less his own. One morning it circled over their
+very chimneys, alighted on Vegg's Heath, almost outside the garden
+gate, and Wynn came in, blue with cold, shouting for food. He and
+she drew Miss Fowler's bath-chair, as they had often done, along
+the Heath foot-path to look at the bi-plane. Mary observed that 'it
+smelt very badly.'</p>
+<p>'Postey, I believe you think with your nose,' said Wynn. 'I know
+you don't with your mind. Now, what type's that?'</p>
+<p>'I'll go and get the chart,' said Mary.</p>
+<p>'You're hopeless! You haven't the mental capacity of a white
+mouse,' he cried, and explained the dials and the sockets for
+bomb-dropping till it was time to mount and ride the wet clouds
+once more.</p>
+<p>'Ah!' said Mary, as the stinking thing flared upward. 'Wait till
+our Flying Corps gets to work! Wynn says it's much safer than in
+the trenches.'</p>
+<p>'I wonder,' said Miss Fowler. 'Tell Cheape to come and tow me
+home again.'</p>
+<p>'It's all downhill. I can do it,' said Mary, 'if you put the
+brake on.' She laid her lean self against the pushing-bar and home
+they trundled.</p>
+<p>'Now, be careful you aren't heated and catch a chill,' said
+overdressed Miss Fowler.</p>
+<p>'Nothing makes me perspire,' said Mary. As she bumped the chair
+under the porch she straightened her long back. The exertion had
+given her a colour, and the wind had loosened a wisp of hair across
+her forehead. Miss Fowler glanced at her.</p>
+<p>'What do you ever think of, Mary?' she demanded suddenly.</p>
+<p>'Oh, Wynn says he wants another three pairs of stockings--as
+thick as we can make them.'</p>
+<p>'Yes. But I mean the things that women think about. Here you
+are, more than forty--'</p>
+<p>'Forty-four,' said truthful Mary.</p>
+<p>'Well?'</p>
+<p>'Well?' Mary offered Miss Fowler her shoulder as usual.</p>
+<p>'And you've been with me ten years now.'</p>
+<p>'Let's see,' said Mary. 'Wynn was eleven when he came. He's
+twenty now, and I came two years before that. It must be
+eleven.'</p>
+<p>'Eleven! And you've never told me anything that matters in all
+that while. Looking back, it seems to me that <i>I</i>'ve done all
+the talking.'</p>
+<p>'I'm afraid I'm not much of a conversationalist. As Wynn says, I
+haven't the mind. Let me take your hat.'</p>
+<p>Miss Fowler, moving stiffly from the hip, stamped her
+rubber-tipped stick on the tiled hall floor. 'Mary, aren't you
+<i>anything</i> except a companion? Would you <i>ever</i> have been
+anything except a companion?'</p>
+<p>Mary hung up the garden hat on its proper peg. 'No,' she said
+after consideration. 'I don't imagine I ever should. But I've no
+imagination, I'm afraid.'</p>
+<p>She fetched Miss Fowler her eleven-o'clock glass of
+Contrex&eacute;ville.</p>
+<p>That was the wet December when it rained six inches to the
+month, and the women went abroad as little as might be. Wynn's
+flying chariot visited them several times, and for two mornings (he
+had warned her by postcard) Mary heard the thresh of his propellers
+at dawn. The second time she ran to the window, and stared at the
+whitening sky. A little blur passed overhead. She lifted her lean
+arms towards it.</p>
+<p>That evening at six o'clock there came an announcement in an
+official envelope that Second Lieutenant W. Fowler had been killed
+during a trial flight. Death was instantaneous. She read it and
+carried it to Miss Fowler.</p>
+<p>'I never expected anything else,' said Miss Fowler; 'but I'm
+sorry it happened before he had done anything.'</p>
+<p>The room was whirling round Mary Postgate, but she found herself
+quite steady in the midst of it.</p>
+<p>'Yes,' she said. 'It's a great pity he didn't die in action
+after he had killed somebody.'</p>
+<p>'He was killed instantly. That's one comfort,' Miss Fowler went
+on.</p>
+<p>'But Wynn says the shock of a fall kills a man at once--whatever
+happens to the tanks,' quoted Mary.</p>
+<p>The room was coming to rest now. She heard Miss Fowler say
+impatiently, 'But why can't we cry, Mary?' and herself replying,
+'There's nothing to cry for. He has done his duty as much as Mrs.
+Grant's son did.'</p>
+<p>'And when he died, <i>she</i> came and cried all the morning,'
+said Miss Fowler. 'This only makes me feel tired--terribly tired.
+Will you help me to bed, please, Mary?--And I think I'd like the
+hot-water bottle.'</p>
+<p>So Mary helped her and sat beside, talking of Wynn in his
+riotous youth.</p>
+<p>'I believe,' said Miss Fowler suddenly, 'that old people and
+young people slip from under a stroke like this. The middle-aged
+feel it most.'</p>
+<p>'I expect that's true,' said Mary, rising. 'I'm going to put
+away the things in his room now. Shall we wear mourning?'</p>
+<p>'Certainly not,' said Miss Fowler. 'Except, of course, at the
+funeral. I can't go. You will. I want you to arrange about his
+being buried here. What a blessing it didn't happen at
+Salisbury!'</p>
+<p>Every one, from the Authorities of the Flying Corps to the
+Rector, was most kind and sympathetic. Mary found herself for the
+moment in a world where bodies were in the habit of being
+despatched by all sorts of conveyances to all sorts of places. And
+at the funeral two young men in buttoned-up uniforms stood beside
+the grave and spoke to her afterwards.</p>
+<p>'You're Miss Postgate, aren't you?' said one. 'Fowler told me
+about you. He was a good chap--a first-class fellow--a great
+loss.'</p>
+<p>'Great loss!' growled his companion. 'We're all awfully
+sorry.'</p>
+<p>'How high did he fall from?' Mary whispered.</p>
+<p>'Pretty nearly four thousand feet, I should think, didn't he?
+You were up that day, Monkey?'</p>
+<p>'All of that,' the other child replied. 'My bar made three
+thousand, and I wasn't as high as him by a lot.'</p>
+<p>'Then <i>that's</i> all right,' said Mary. 'Thank you very
+much.'</p>
+<p>They moved away as Mrs. Grant flung herself weeping on Mary's
+flat chest, under the lych-gate, and cried, '<i>I</i> know how it
+feels! <i>I</i> know how it feels!'</p>
+<p>'But both his parents are dead,' Mary returned, as she fended
+her off. 'Perhaps they've all met by now,' she added vaguely as she
+escaped towards the coach.</p>
+<p>'I've thought of that too,' wailed Mrs. Grant; 'but then he'll
+be practically a stranger to them. Quite embarrassing!'</p>
+<p>Mary faithfully reported every detail of the ceremony to Miss
+Fowler, who, when she described Mrs. Grant's outburst, laughed
+aloud.</p>
+<p>'Oh, how Wynn would have enjoyed it! He was always utterly
+unreliable at funerals. D'you remember--' And they talked of him
+again, each piecing out the other's gaps. 'And now,' said Miss
+Fowler, 'we'll pull up the blinds and we'll have a general tidy.
+That always does us good. Have you seen to Wynn's things?'</p>
+<p>'Everything--since he first came,' said Mary. 'He was never
+destructive--even with his toys.'</p>
+<p>They faced that neat room.</p>
+<p>'It can't be natural not to cry,' Mary said at last. 'I'm
+<i>so</i> afraid you'll have a reaction.'</p>
+<p>'As I told you, we old people slip from under the stroke. It's
+you I'm afraid for. Have you cried yet?'</p>
+<p>'I can't. It only makes me angry with the Germans.'</p>
+<p>'That's sheer waste of vitality,' said Miss Fowler. 'We must
+live till the war's finished.' She opened a full wardrobe. 'Now,
+I've been thinking things over. This is my plan. All his civilian
+clothes can be given away--Belgian refugees, and so on.'</p>
+<p>Mary nodded. 'Boots, collars, and gloves?'</p>
+<p>'Yes. We don't need to keep anything except his cap and
+belt.'</p>
+<p>'They came back yesterday with his Flying Corps clothes'--Mary
+pointed to a roll on the little iron bed.</p>
+<p>'Ah, but keep his Service things. Some one may be glad of them
+later. Do you remember his sizes?'</p>
+<p>'Five feet eight and a half; thirty-six inches round the chest.
+But he told me he's just put on an inch and a half. I'll mark it on
+a label and tie it on his sleeping-bag.'</p>
+<p>'So that disposes of <i>that</i>,' said Miss Fowler, tapping the
+palm of one hand with the ringed third finger of the other. 'What
+waste it all is! We'll get his old school trunk to-morrow and pack
+his civilian clothes.'</p>
+<p>'And the rest?' said Mary. 'His books and pictures and the games
+and the toys--and--and the rest?'</p>
+<p>'My plan is to burn every single thing,' said Miss Fowler. 'Then
+we shall know where they are and no one can handle them afterwards.
+What do you think?'</p>
+<p>'I think that would be much the best,' said Mary. 'But there's
+such a lot of them.'</p>
+<p>'We'll burn them in the destructor,' said Miss Fowler.</p>
+<p>This was an open-air furnace for the consumption of refuse; a
+little circular four-foot tower of pierced brick over an iron
+grating. Miss Fowler had noticed the design in a gardening journal
+years ago, and had had it built at the bottom of the garden. It
+suited her tidy soul, for it saved unsightly rubbish-heaps, and the
+ashes lightened the stiff clay soil.</p>
+<p>Mary considered for a moment, saw her way clear, and nodded
+again. They spent the evening putting away well-remembered civilian
+suits, underclothes that Mary had marked, and the regiments of very
+gaudy socks and ties. A second trunk was needed, and, after that, a
+little packing-case, and it was late next day when Cheape and the
+local carrier lifted them to the cart. The Rector luckily knew of a
+friend's son, about five feet eight and a half inches high, to whom
+a complete Flying Corps outfit would be most acceptable, and sent
+his gardener's son down with a barrow to take delivery of it. The
+cap was hung up in Miss Fowler's bedroom, the belt in Miss
+Postgate's; for, as Miss Fowler said, they had no desire to make
+tea-party talk of them.</p>
+<p>'That disposes of <i>that</i>,' said Miss Fowler. 'I'll leave
+the rest to you, Mary. I can't run up and down the garden. You'd
+better take the big clothes-basket and get Nellie to help you.'</p>
+<p>'I shall take the wheel-barrow and do it myself,' said Mary, and
+for once in her life closed her mouth.</p>
+<p>Miss Fowler, in moments of irritation, had called Mary deadly
+methodical. She put on her oldest waterproof and gardening-hat and
+her ever-slipping goloshes, for the weather was on the edge of more
+rain. She gathered fire-lighters from the kitchen, a half-scuttle
+of coals, and a faggot of brushwood. These she wheeled in the
+barrow down the mossed paths to the dank little laurel shrubbery
+where the destructor stood under the drip of three oaks. She
+climbed the wire fence into the Rector's glebe just behind, and
+from his tenant's rick pulled two large armfuls of good hay, which
+she spread neatly on the fire-bars. Next, journey by journey,
+passing Miss Fowler's white face at the morning-room window each
+time, she brought down in the towel-covered clothes-basket, on the
+wheel-barrow, thumbed and used Hentys, Marryats, Levers,
+Stevensons, Baroness Orczys, Garvices, schoolbooks, and atlases,
+unrelated piles of the <i>Motor Cyclist</i>, the <i>Light Car</i>,
+and catalogues of Olympia Exhibitions; the remnants of a fleet of
+sailing-ships from ninepenny cutters to a three-guinea yacht; a
+prep.-school dressing-gown; bats from three-and-sixpence to
+twenty-four shillings; cricket and tennis balls; disintegrated
+steam and clockwork locomotives with their twisted rails; a grey
+and red tin model of a submarine; a dumb gramophone and cracked
+records; golf-clubs that had to be broken across the knee, like his
+walking-sticks, and an assegai; photographs of private and public
+school cricket and football elevens, and his O.T.C. on the line of
+march; kodaks, and film-rolls; some pewters, and one real silver
+cup, for boxing competitions and Junior Hurdles; sheaves of school
+photographs; Miss Fowler's photograph; her own which he had borne
+off in fun and (good care she took not to ask!) had never returned;
+a playbox with a secret drawer; a load of flannels, belts, and
+jerseys, and a pair of spiked shoes unearthed in the attic; a
+packet of all the letters that Miss Fowler and she had ever written
+to him, kept for some absurd reason through all these years; a
+five-day attempt at a diary; framed pictures of racing motors in
+full Brooklands career, and load upon load of undistinguishable
+wreckage of tool-boxes, rabbit-hutches, electric batteries, tin
+soldiers, fret-saw outfits, and jig-saw puzzles.</p>
+<p>Miss Fowler at the window watched her come and go, and said to
+herself, 'Mary's an old woman. I never realised it before.'</p>
+<p>After lunch she recommended her to rest.</p>
+<p>'I'm not in the least tired,' said Mary. 'I've got it all
+arranged. I'm going to the village at two o'clock for some
+paraffin. Nellie hasn't enough, and the walk will do me good.'</p>
+<p>She made one last quest round the house before she started, and
+found that she had overlooked nothing. It began to mist as soon as
+she had skirted Vegg's Heath, where Wynn used to descend--it seemed
+to her that she could almost hear the beat of his propellers
+overhead, but there was nothing to see. She hoisted her umbrella
+and lunged into the blind wet till she had reached the shelter of
+the empty village. As she came out of Mr. Kidd's shop with a bottle
+full of paraffin in her string shopping-bag, she met Nurse Eden,
+the village nurse, and fell into talk with her, as usual, about the
+village children. They were just parting opposite the 'Royal Oak,'
+when a gun, they fancied, was fired immediately behind the house.
+It was followed by a child's shriek dying into a wail.</p>
+<p>'Accident!' said Nurse Eden promptly, and dashed through the
+empty bar, followed by Mary. They found Mrs. Gerritt, the
+publican's wife, who could only gasp and point to the yard, where a
+little cart-lodge was sliding sideways amid a clatter of tiles.
+Nurse Eden snatched up a sheet drying before the fire, ran out,
+lifted something from the ground, and flung the sheet round it. The
+sheet turned scarlet and half her uniform too, as she bore the load
+into the kitchen. It was little Edna Gerritt, aged nine, whom Mary
+had known since her perambulator days.</p>
+<p>'Am I hurted bad?' Edna asked, and died between Nurse Eden's
+dripping hands. The sheet fell aside and for an instant, before she
+could shut her eyes, Mary saw the ripped and shredded body.</p>
+<p>'It's a wonder she spoke at all,' said Nurse Eden. 'What in
+God's name was it?'</p>
+<p>'A bomb,' said Mary.</p>
+<p>'One o' the Zeppelins?'</p>
+<p>'No. An aeroplane. I thought I heard it on the Heath, but I
+fancied it was one of ours. It must have shut off its engines as it
+came down. That's why we didn't notice it.'</p>
+<p>'The filthy pigs!' said Nurse Eden, all white and shaken. 'See
+the pickle I'm in! Go and tell Dr. Hennis, Miss Postgate.' Nurse
+looked at the mother, who had dropped face down on the floor.
+'She's only in a fit. Turn her over.'</p>
+<p>Mary heaved Mrs. Gerritt right side up, and hurried off for the
+doctor. When she told her tale, he asked her to sit down in the
+surgery till he got her something.</p>
+<p>'But I don't need it, I assure you,' said she. 'I don't think it
+would be wise to tell Miss Fowler about it, do you? Her heart is so
+irritable in this weather.'</p>
+<p>Dr. Hennis looked at her admiringly as he packed up his bag.</p>
+<p>'No. Don't tell anybody till we're sure,' he said, and hastened
+to the 'Royal Oak,' while Mary went on with the paraffin. The
+village behind her was as quiet as usual, for the news had not yet
+spread. She frowned a little to herself, her large nostrils
+expanded uglily, and from time to time she muttered a phrase which
+Wynn, who never restrained himself before his womenfolk, had
+applied to the enemy. 'Bloody pagans! They <i>are</i> bloody
+pagans. But,' she continued, falling back on the teaching that had
+made her what she was, 'one mustn't let one's mind dwell on these
+things.'</p>
+<p>Before she reached the house Dr. Hennis, who was also a special
+constable, overtook her in his car.</p>
+<p>'Oh, Miss Postgate,' he said, 'I wanted to tell you that that
+accident at the "Royal Oak" was due to Gerritt's stable tumbling
+down. It's been dangerous for a long time. It ought to have been
+condemned.'</p>
+<p>'I thought I heard an explosion too,' said Mary.</p>
+<p>'You might have been misled by the beams snapping. I've been
+looking at 'em. They were dry-rotted through and through. Of
+course, as they broke, they would make a noise just like a
+gun.'</p>
+<p>'Yes?' said Mary politely.</p>
+<p>'Poor little Edna was playing underneath it,' he went on, still
+holding her with his eyes, 'and that and the tiles cut her to
+pieces, you see?'</p>
+<p>'I saw it,' said Mary, shaking her head. 'I heard it too.'</p>
+<p>'Well, we cannot be sure.' Dr. Hennis changed his tone
+completely. 'I know both you and Nurse Eden (I've been speaking to
+her) are perfectly trustworthy, and I can rely on you not to say
+anything--yet at least. It is no good to stir up people
+unless--'</p>
+<p>'Oh, I never do--anyhow,' said Mary, and Dr. Hennis went on to
+the county town.</p>
+<p>After all, she told herself, it might, just possibly, have been
+the collapse of the old stable that had done all those things to
+poor little Edna. She was sorry she had even hinted at other
+things, but Nurse Eden was discretion itself. By the time she
+reached home the affair seemed increasingly remote by its very
+monstrosity. As she came in, Miss Fowler told her that a couple of
+aeroplanes had passed half an hour ago.</p>
+<p>'I thought I heard them,' she replied, 'I'm going down to the
+garden now. I've got the paraffin.'</p>
+<p>'Yes, but--what <i>have</i> you got on your boots? They're
+soaking wet. Change them at once.'</p>
+<p>Not only did Mary obey but she wrapped the boots in a newspaper,
+and put them into the string bag with the bottle. So, armed with
+the longest kitchen poker, she left.</p>
+<p>'It's raining again,' was Miss Fowler's last word, 'but--I know
+you won't be happy till that's disposed of.'</p>
+<p>'It won't take long. I've got everything down there, and I've
+put the lid on the destructor to keep the wet out.'</p>
+<p>The shrubbery was filling with twilight by the time she had
+completed her arrangements and sprinkled the sacrificial oil. As
+she lit the match that would burn her heart to ashes, she heard a
+groan or a grunt behind the dense Portugal laurels.</p>
+<p>'Cheape?' she called impatiently, but Cheape, with his ancient
+lumbago, in his comfortable cottage would be the last man to
+profane the sanctuary. 'Sheep,' she concluded, and threw in the
+fusee. The pyre went up in a roar, and the immediate flame hastened
+night around her.</p>
+<p>'How Wynn would have loved this!' she thought, stepping back
+from the blaze.</p>
+<p>By its light she saw, half hidden behind a laurel not five paces
+away, a bareheaded man sitting very stiffly at the foot of one of
+the oaks. A broken branch lay across his lap--one booted leg
+protruding from beneath it. His head moved ceaselessly from side to
+side, but his body was as still as the tree's trunk. He was
+dressed--she moved sideways to look more closely--in a uniform
+something like Wynn's, with a flap buttoned across the chest. For
+an instant, she had some idea that it might be one of the young
+flying men she had met at the funeral. But their heads were dark
+and glossy. This man's was as pale as a baby's, and so closely
+cropped that she could see the disgusting pinky skin beneath. His
+lips moved.</p>
+<p>'What do you say?' Mary moved towards him and stooped.</p>
+<p>'Laty! Laty! Laty!' he muttered, while his hands picked at the
+dead wet leaves. There was no doubt as to his nationality. It made
+her so angry that she strode back to the destructor, though it was
+still too hot to use the poker there. Wynn's books seemed to be
+catching well. She looked up at the oak behind the man; several of
+the light upper and two or three rotten lower branches had broken
+and scattered their rubbish on the shrubbery path. On the lowest
+fork a helmet with dependent strings, showed like a bird's-nest in
+the light of a long-tongued flame. Evidently this person had fallen
+through the tree. Wynn had told her that it was quite possible for
+people to fall out of aeroplanes. Wynn told her too, that trees
+were useful things to break an aviator's fall, but in this case the
+aviator must have been broken or he would have moved from his queer
+position. He seemed helpless except for his horrible rolling head.
+On the other hand, she could see a pistol case at his belt--and
+Mary loathed pistols. Months ago, after reading certain Belgian
+reports together, she and Miss Fowler had had dealings with one--a
+huge revolver with flat-nosed bullets, which latter, Wynn said,
+were forbidden by the rules of war to be used against civilised
+enemies. 'They're good enough for us,' Miss Fowler had replied.
+'Show Mary how it works.' And Wynn, laughing at the mere
+possibility of any such need, had led the craven winking Mary into
+the Rector's disused quarry, and had shown her how to fire the
+terrible machine. It lay now in the top-left-hand drawer of her
+toilet-table--a memento not included in the burning. Wynn would be
+pleased to see how she was not afraid.</p>
+<p>She slipped up to the house to get it. When she came through the
+rain, the eyes in the head were alive with expectation. The mouth
+even tried to smile. But at sight of the revolver its corners went
+down just like Edna Gerritt's. A tear trickled from one eye, and
+the head rolled from shoulder to shoulder as though trying to point
+out something.</p>
+<p>'Cass&eacute;e. Tout cass&eacute;e,' it whimpered.</p>
+<p>'What do you say?' said Mary disgustedly, keeping well to one
+side, though only the head moved.</p>
+<p>'Cass&eacute;e,' it repeated. 'Che me rends. Le m&eacute;dicin!
+Toctor!'</p>
+<p>'Nein!' said she, bringing all her small German to bear with the
+big pistol. 'Ich haben der todt Kinder gesehn.'</p>
+<p>The head was still. Mary's hand dropped. She had been careful to
+keep her finger off the trigger for fear of accidents. After a few
+moments' waiting, she returned to the destructor, where the flames
+were falling, and churned up Wynn's charring books with the poker.
+Again the head groaned for the doctor.</p>
+<p>'Stop that!' said Mary, and stamped her foot. 'Stop that, you
+bloody pagan!'</p>
+<p>The words came quite smoothly and naturally. They were Wynn's
+own words, and Wynn was a gentleman who for no consideration on
+earth would have torn little Edna into those vividly coloured
+strips and strings. But this thing hunched under the oak-tree had
+done that thing. It was no question of reading horrors out of
+newspapers to Miss Fowler. Mary had seen it with her own eyes on
+the 'Royal Oak' kitchen table. She must not allow her mind to dwell
+upon it. Now Wynn was dead, and everything connected with him was
+lumping and rustling and tinkling under her busy poker into red
+black dust and grey leaves of ash. The thing beneath the oak would
+die too. Mary had seen death more than once. She came of a family
+that had a knack of dying under, as she told Miss Fowler, 'most
+distressing circumstances.' She would stay where she was till she
+was entirely satisfied that It was dead--dead as dear papa in the
+late 'eighties; aunt Mary in eighty-nine; mamma in 'ninety-one;
+cousin Dick in ninety-five; Lady McCausland's housemaid in
+'ninety-nine; Lady McCausland's sister in nineteen hundred and one;
+Wynn buried five days ago; and Edna Gerritt still waiting for
+decent earth to hide her. As she thought--her underlip caught up by
+one faded canine, brows knit and nostrils wide--she wielded the
+poker with lunges that jarred the grating at the bottom, and
+careful scrapes round the brick-work above. She looked at her
+wrist-watch. It was getting on to half-past four, and the rain was
+coming down in earnest. Tea would be at five. If It did not die
+before that time, she would be soaked and would have to change.
+Meantime, and this occupied her, Wynn's things were burning well in
+spite of the hissing wet, though now and again a book-back with a
+quite distinguishable title would be heaved up out of the mass. The
+exercise of stoking had given her a glow which seemed to reach to
+the marrow of her bones. She hummed--Mary never had a voice--to
+herself. She had never believed in all those advanced views--though
+Miss Fowler herself leaned a little that way--of woman's work in
+the world; but now she saw there was much to be said for them.
+This, for instance, was <i>her</i> work--work which no man, least
+of all Dr. Hennis, would ever have done. A man, at such a crisis,
+would be what Wynn called a 'sportsman'; would leave everything to
+fetch help, and would certainly bring It into the house. Now a
+woman's business was to make a happy home for--for a husband and
+children. Failing these--it was not a thing one should allow one's
+mind to dwell upon--but--</p>
+<p>'Stop it!' Mary cried once more across the shadows. 'Nein, I
+tell you! Ich haben der todt Kinder gesehn.'</p>
+<p><i>But</i> it was a fact. A woman who had missed these things
+could still be useful--more useful than a man in certain respects.
+She thumped like a pavior through the settling ashes at the secret
+thrill of it. The rain was damping the fire, but she could feel--it
+was too dark to see--that her work was done. There was a dull red
+glow at the bottom of the destructor, not enough to char the wooden
+lid if she slipped it half over against the driving wet. This
+arranged, she leaned on the poker and waited, while an increasing
+rapture laid hold on her. She ceased to think. She gave herself up
+to feel. Her long pleasure was broken by a sound that she had
+waited for in agony several times in her life. She leaned forward
+and listened, smiling. There could be no mistake. She closed her
+eyes and drank it in. Once it ceased abruptly.</p>
+<p>'Go on,' she murmured, half aloud. 'That isn't the end.'</p>
+<p>Then the end came very distinctly in a lull between two
+rain-gusts. Mary Postgate drew her breath short between her teeth
+and shivered from head to foot. '<i>That's</i> all right,' said she
+contentedly, and went up to the house, where she scandalised the
+whole routine by taking a luxurious hot bath before tea, and came
+down looking, as Miss Fowler said when she saw her lying all
+relaxed on the other sofa, 'quite handsome!'</p>
+<br>
+<br>
+<hr style="width: 35%;">
+<br>
+<br>
+<a name="page443"></a>
+<div class="poem">
+<div class="stanza">
+<p class="i9"><b>THE BEGINNINGS</b></p>
+</div>
+<div class="stanza">
+<p class="i7">It was not part of their blood,</p>
+<p class="i8">It came to them very late</p>
+<p class="i7">With long arrears to make good,</p>
+<p class="i8">When the English began to hate.</p>
+</div>
+<div class="stanza">
+<p class="i7">They were not easily moved,</p>
+<p class="i8">They were icy willing to wait</p>
+<p class="i7">Till every count should be proved,</p>
+<p class="i8">Ere the English began to hate.</p>
+</div>
+<div class="stanza">
+<p class="i7">Their voices were even and low,</p>
+<p class="i8">Their eyes were level and straight.</p>
+<p class="i7">There was neither sign nor show,</p>
+<p class="i8">When the English began to hate.</p>
+</div>
+<div class="stanza">
+<p class="i7">It was not preached to the crowd,</p>
+<p class="i8">It was not taught by the State.</p>
+<p class="i7">No man spoke it aloud,</p>
+<p class="i8">When the English began to hate.</p>
+</div>
+<div class="stanza">
+<p class="i7">It was not suddenly bred,</p>
+<p class="i8">It will not swiftly abate,</p>
+<p class="i7">Through the chill years ahead,</p>
+<p class="i8">When Time shall count from the date</p>
+<p class="i8">That the English began to hate.</p>
+</div>
+</div>
+<br>
+<br>
+<hr class="full" noshade>
+<p>***END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK A DIVERSITY OF CREATURES***</p>
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+The Project Gutenberg eBook, A Diversity of Creatures, by Rudyard Kipling
+
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+
+
+
+Title: A Diversity of Creatures
+
+Author: Rudyard Kipling
+
+Release Date: August 2, 2004  [eBook #13085]
+Most recently updated: December 10, 2012
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-646-US (US-ASCII)
+
+
+***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK A DIVERSITY OF CREATURES***
+
+
+E-text prepared by Charles Aldarondo, Charlie Kirschner, and the Project
+Gutenberg Online Distributed Proofreading Team
+
+
+
+A DIVERSITY OF CREATURES
+
+By
+
+RUDYARD KIPLING
+
+1917
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+PREFACE
+
+
+With two exceptions, the dates at the head of these stories show when
+they were published in magazine form. 'The Village that Voted the Earth
+was Flat,' and 'My Son's Wife' carry the dates when they were written.
+
+RUDYARD KIPLING.
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+As Easy as ABC
+
+ _MacDonough's Song_
+
+Friendly Brook
+
+ _The Land_
+
+In the Same Boat
+
+ '_Helen all Alone_'
+
+The Honours of War
+
+ _The Children_
+
+The Dog Hervey
+
+ _The Comforters_
+
+The Village that Voted the Earth was Flat
+
+ _The Press_
+
+In the Presence
+
+ _Jobson's Amen_
+
+Regulus
+
+ _A Translation_
+
+The Edge of the Evening
+
+ _Rebirth_
+
+The Horse Marines
+
+ _The Legend of Mirth_
+
+'My Son's Wife'
+
+ _The Floods_
+
+ _The Fabulists_
+
+The Vortex
+
+ _The Song of Seven Cities_
+
+'Swept and Garnished'
+
+Mary Postgate
+
+ _The Beginnings_
+
+
+
+
+A DIVERSITY OF CREATURES
+
+
+
+
+As Easy as A.B.C.
+
+(1912)
+
+_The A.B.C., that semi-elected, semi-nominated body of a few score
+persons, controls the Planet. Transportation is Civilisation, our motto
+runs. Theoretically we do what we please, so long as we do not interfere
+with the traffic_ and all it implies. _Practically, the A.B.C. confirms
+or annuls all international arrangements, and, to judge from its last
+report, finds our tolerant, humorous, lazy little Planet only too ready
+to shift the whole burden of public administration on its shoulders_.
+
+'With the Night Mail[1].'
+
+[Footnote 1: _Actions and Reactions_.]
+
+Isn't it almost time that our Planet took some interest in the
+proceedings of the Aerial Board of Control? One knows that easy
+communications nowadays, and lack of privacy in the past, have killed
+all curiosity among mankind, but as the Board's Official Reporter I am
+bound to tell my tale.
+
+At 9.30 A.M., August 26, A.D. 2065, the Board, sitting in London, was
+informed by De Forest that the District of Northern Illinois had
+riotously cut itself out of all systems and would remain disconnected
+till the Board should take over and administer it direct.
+
+Every Northern Illinois freight and passenger tower was, he reported,
+out of action; all District main, local, and guiding lights had been
+extinguished; all General Communications were dumb, and through traffic
+had been diverted. No reason had been given, but he gathered
+unofficially from the Mayor of Chicago that the District complained of
+'crowd-making and invasion of privacy.'
+
+As a matter of fact, it is of no importance whether Northern Illinois
+stay in or out of planetary circuit; as a matter of policy, any
+complaint of invasion of privacy needs immediate investigation, lest
+worse follow.
+
+By 9-45 A.M. De Forest, Dragomiroff (Russia), Takahira (Japan), and
+Pirolo (Italy) were empowered to visit Illinois and 'to take such steps
+as might be necessary for the resumption of traffic and _all that that
+implies.'_ By 10 A.M. the Hall was empty, and the four Members and I
+were aboard what Pirolo insisted on calling 'my leetle godchild'--that
+is to say, the new _Victor Pirolo_. Our Planet prefers to know Victor
+Pirolo as a gentle, grey-haired enthusiast who spends his time near
+Foggia, inventing or creating new breeds of Spanish-Italian olive-trees;
+but there is another side to his nature--the manufacture of quaint
+inventions, of which the _Victor Pirolo_ is, perhaps, not the least
+surprising. She and a few score sister-craft of the same type embody his
+latest ideas. But she is not comfortable. An A.B.C. boat does not take
+the air with the level-keeled lift of a liner, but shoots up
+rocket-fashion like the 'aeroplane' of our ancestors, and makes her
+height at top-speed from the first. That is why I found myself sitting
+suddenly on the large lap of Eustace Arnott, who commands the A.B.C.
+Fleet. One knows vaguely that there is such a thing as a Fleet somewhere
+on the Planet, and that, theoretically, it exists for the purposes of
+what used to be known as 'war.' Only a week before, while visiting a
+glacier sanatorium behind Gothaven, I had seen some squadrons making
+false auroras far to the north while they manoeuvred round the Pole;
+but, naturally, it had never occurred to me that the things could be
+used in earnest.
+
+Said Arnott to De Forest as I staggered to a seat on the chart-room
+divan: 'We're tremendously grateful to 'em in Illinois. We've never had
+a chance of exercising all the Fleet together. I've turned in a General
+Call, and I expect we'll have at least two hundred keels aloft
+this evening.'
+
+'Well aloft?' De Forest asked.
+
+'Of course, sir. Out of sight till they're called for.'
+
+Arnott laughed as he lolled over the transparent chart-table where the
+map of the summer-blue Atlantic slid along, degree by degree, in exact
+answer to our progress. Our dial already showed 320 m.p.h. and we were
+two thousand feet above the uppermost traffic lines.
+
+'Now, where is this Illinois District of yours?' said Dragomiroff. 'One
+travels so much, one sees so little. Oh, I remember! It is in
+North America.'
+
+De Forest, whose business it is to know the out districts, told us that
+it lay at the foot of Lake Michigan, on a road to nowhere in particular,
+was about half an hour's run from end to end, and, except in one corner,
+as flat as the sea. Like most flat countries nowadays, it was heavily
+guarded against invasion of privacy by forced timber--fifty-foot spruce
+and tamarack, grown in five years. The population was close on two
+millions, largely migratory between Florida and California, with a
+backbone of small farms (they call a thousand acres a farm in Illinois)
+whose owners come into Chicago for amusements and society during the
+winter. They were, he said, noticeably kind, quiet folk, but a little
+exacting, as all flat countries must be, in their notions of privacy.
+There had, for instance, been no printed news-sheet in Illinois for
+twenty-seven years. Chicago argued that engines for printed news sooner
+or later developed into engines for invasion of privacy, which in turn
+might bring the old terror of Crowds and blackmail back to the Planet.
+So news-sheets were not.
+
+'And that's Illinois,' De Forest concluded. 'You see, in the Old Days,
+she was in the forefront of what they used to call "progress," and
+Chicago--'
+
+'Chicago?' said Takahira. 'That's the little place where there is
+Salati's Statue of the Nigger in Flames? A fine bit of old work.'
+
+'When did you see it?' asked De Forest quickly. 'They only unveil it
+once a year.'
+
+'I know. At Thanksgiving. It was then,' said Takahira, with a shudder.
+'And they sang MacDonough's Song, too.'
+
+'Whew!' De Forest whistled. 'I did not know that! I wish you'd told me
+before. MacDonough's Song may have had its uses when it was composed,
+but it was an infernal legacy for any man to leave behind.'
+
+'It's protective instinct, my dear fellows,' said Pirolo, rolling a
+cigarette. 'The Planet, she has had her dose of popular government. She
+suffers from inherited agoraphobia. She has no--ah--use for Crowds.'
+
+Dragomiroff leaned forward to give him a light. 'Certainly,' said the
+white-bearded Russian, 'the Planet has taken all precautions against
+Crowds for the past hundred years. What is our total population to-day?
+Six hundred million, we hope; five hundred, we think; but--but if next
+year's census shows more than four hundred and fifty, I myself will eat
+all the extra little babies. We have cut the birth-rate out--right out!
+For a long time we have said to Almighty God, "Thank You, Sir, but we do
+not much like Your game of life, so we will not play."'
+
+'Anyhow,' said Arnott defiantly, 'men live a century apiece on the
+average now.'
+
+'Oh, that is quite well! I am rich--you are rich--we are all rich and
+happy because we are so few and we live so long. Only _I_ think Almighty
+God He will remember what the Planet was like in the time of Crowds and
+the Plague. Perhaps He will send us nerves. Eh, Pirolo?'
+
+The Italian blinked into space. 'Perhaps,' he said, 'He has sent them
+already. Anyhow, you cannot argue with the Planet. She does not forget
+the Old Days, and--what can you do?'
+
+'For sure we can't remake the world.' De Forest glanced at the map
+flowing smoothly across the table from west to east. 'We ought to be
+over our ground by nine to-night. There won't be much sleep afterwards.'
+
+On which hint we dispersed, and I slept till Takahira waked me for
+dinner. Our ancestors thought nine hours' sleep ample for their little
+lives. We, living thirty years longer, feel ourselves defrauded with
+less than eleven out of the twenty-four.
+
+By ten o'clock we were over Lake Michigan. The west shore was lightless,
+except for a dull ground-glare at Chicago, and a single
+traffic-directing light--its leading beam pointing north--at Waukegan on
+our starboard bow. None of the Lake villages gave any sign of life; and
+inland, westward, so far as we could see, blackness lay unbroken on the
+level earth. We swooped down and skimmed low across the dark, throwing
+calls county by county. Now and again we picked up the faint glimmer of
+a house-light, or heard the rasp and rend of a cultivator being played
+across the fields, but Northern Illinois as a whole was one inky,
+apparently uninhabited, waste of high, forced woods. Only our
+illuminated map, with its little pointer switching from county to county
+as we wheeled and twisted, gave us any idea of our position. Our calls,
+urgent, pleading, coaxing or commanding, through the General
+Communicator brought no answer. Illinois strictly maintained her own
+privacy in the timber which she grew for that purpose.
+
+'Oh, this is absurd!' said De Forest. 'We're like an owl trying to work
+a wheat-field. Is this Bureau Creek? Let's land, Arnott, and get hold of
+some one.'
+
+We brushed over a belt of forced woodland--fifteen-year-old maple sixty
+feet high--grounded on a private meadow-dock, none too big, where we
+moored to our own grapnels, and hurried out through the warm dark night
+towards a light in a verandah. As we neared the garden gate I could have
+sworn we had stepped knee-deep in quicksand, for we could scarcely drag
+our feet against the prickling currents that clogged them. After five
+paces we stopped, wiping our foreheads, as hopelessly stuck on dry
+smooth turf as so many cows in a bog.
+
+'Pest!' cried Pirolo angrily. 'We are ground-circuited. And it is my own
+system of ground-circuits too! I know the pull.'
+
+'Good evening,' said a girl's voice from the verandah. 'Oh, I'm sorry!
+We've locked up. Wait a minute.'
+
+We heard the click of a switch, and almost fell forward as the currents
+round our knees were withdrawn.
+
+The girl laughed, and laid aside her knitting. An old-fashioned
+Controller stood at her elbow, which she reversed from time to time, and
+we could hear the snort and clank of the obedient cultivator half a mile
+away, behind the guardian woods.
+
+'Come in and sit down,' she said. 'I'm only playing a plough. Dad's
+gone to Chicago to--Ah! Then it was _your_ call I heard just now!'
+
+She had caught sight of Arnott's Board uniform, leaped to the switch,
+and turned it full on.
+
+We were checked, gasping, waist-deep in current this time, three yards
+from the verandah.
+
+'We only want to know what's the matter with Illinois,' said De Forest
+placidly.
+
+'Then hadn't you better go to Chicago and find out?' she answered.
+'There's nothing wrong here. We own ourselves.'
+
+'How can we go anywhere if you won't loose us?' De Forest went on, while
+Arnott scowled. Admirals of Fleets are still quite human when their
+dignity is touched.
+
+'Stop a minute--you don't know how funny you look!' She put her hands on
+her hips and laughed mercilessly.
+
+'Don't worry about that,' said Arnott, and whistled. A voice answered
+from the _Victor Pirolo_ in the meadow.
+
+'Only a single-fuse ground-circuit!' Arnott called. 'Sort it out gently,
+please.'
+
+We heard the ping of a breaking lamp; a fuse blew out somewhere in the
+verandah roof, frightening a nestful of birds. The ground-circuit was
+open. We stooped and rubbed our tingling ankles.
+
+'How rude--how very rude of you!' the maiden cried.
+
+''Sorry, but we haven't time to look funny,' said Arnott. 'We've got to
+go to Chicago; and if I were you, young lady, I'd go into the cellars
+for the next two hours, and take mother with me.'
+
+Off he strode, with us at his heels, muttering indignantly, till the
+humour of the thing struck and doubled him up with laughter at the foot
+of the gang-way ladder.
+
+'The Board hasn't shown what you might call a fat spark on this
+occasion,' said De Forest, wiping his eyes. 'I hope I didn't look as big
+a fool as you did, Arnott! Hullo! What on earth is that? Dad coming home
+from Chicago?'
+
+There was a rattle and a rush, and a five-plough cultivator, blades in
+air like so many teeth, trundled itself at us round the edge of the
+timber, fuming and sparking furiously.
+
+'Jump!' said Arnott, as we bundled ourselves through the none-too-wide
+door. 'Never mind about shutting it. Up!'
+
+The _Victor Pirolo_ lifted like a bubble, and the vicious machine shot
+just underneath us, clawing high as it passed.
+
+'There's a nice little spit-kitten for you!' said Arnott, dusting his
+knees. 'We ask her a civil question. First she circuits us and then she
+plays a cultivator at us!'
+
+'And then we fly,' said Dragomiroff. 'If I were forty years more young,
+I would go back and kiss her. Ho! Ho!'
+
+'I,' said Pirolo, 'would smack her! My pet ship has been chased by a
+dirty plough; a--how do you say?--agricultural implement.'
+
+'Oh, that is Illinois all over,' said De Forest. 'They don't content
+themselves with talking about privacy. They arrange to have it. And now,
+where's your alleged fleet, Arnott? We must assert ourselves against
+this wench.'
+
+Arnott pointed to the black heavens.
+
+'Waiting on--up there,' said he. 'Shall I give them the whole
+installation, sir?'
+
+'Oh, I don't think the young lady is quite worth that,' said De Forest.
+'Get over Chicago, and perhaps we'll see something.'
+
+In a few minutes we were hanging at two thousand feet over an oblong
+block of incandescence in the centre of the little town.
+
+'That looks like the old City Hall. Yes, there's Salati's Statue in
+front of it,' said Takahira. 'But what on earth are they doing to the
+place? I thought they used it for a market nowadays! Drop a
+little, please.'
+
+We could hear the sputter and crackle of road-surfacing machines--the
+cheap Western type which fuse stone and rubbish into lava-like ribbed
+glass for their rough country roads. Three or four surfacers worked on
+each side of a square of ruins. The brick and stone wreckage crumbled,
+slid forward, and presently spread out into white-hot pools of sticky
+slag, which the levelling-rods smoothed more or less flat. Already a
+third of the big block had been so treated, and was cooling to dull red
+before our astonished eyes.
+
+'It is the Old Market,' said De Forest. 'Well, there's nothing to
+prevent Illinois from making a road through a market. It doesn't
+interfere with traffic, that I can see.'
+
+'Hsh!' said Arnott, gripping me by the shoulder. 'Listen! They're
+singing. Why on the earth are they singing?'
+
+We dropped again till we could see the black fringe of people at the
+edge of that glowing square.
+
+At first they only roared against the roar of the surfacers and
+levellers. Then the words came up clearly--the words of the Forbidden
+Song that all men knew, and none let pass their lips--poor Pat
+MacDonough's Song, made in the days of the Crowds and the Plague--every
+silly word of it loaded to sparking-point with the Planet's inherited
+memories of horror, panic, fear and cruelty. And Chicago--innocent,
+contented little Chicago--was singing it aloud to the infernal tune that
+carried riot, pestilence and lunacy round our Planet a few
+generations ago!
+
+     'Once there was The People--Terror gave it birth;
+     Once there was The People, and it made a hell of earth!'
+
+(Then the stamp and pause):
+
+     'Earth arose and crushed it. Listen, oh, ye slain!
+     Once there was The People--it shall never be again!'
+
+The levellers thrust in savagely against the ruins as the song renewed
+itself again, again and again, louder than the crash of the
+melting walls.
+
+De Forest frowned.
+
+'I don't like that,' he said. 'They've broken back to the Old Days!
+They'll be killing somebody soon. I think we'd better divert
+'em, Arnott.'
+
+'Ay, ay, sir.' Arnott's hand went to his cap, and we heard the hull of
+the _Victor Pirolo_ ring to the command: 'Lamps! Both watches stand by!
+Lamps! Lamps! Lamps!'
+
+'Keep still!' Takahira whispered to me. 'Blinkers, please,
+quartermaster.'
+
+'It's all right--all right!' said Pirolo from behind, and to my horror
+slipped over my head some sort of rubber helmet that locked with a snap.
+I could feel thick colloid bosses before my eyes, but I stood in
+absolute darkness.
+
+'To save the sight,' he explained, and pushed me on to the chart-room
+divan. 'You will see in a minute.'
+
+As he spoke I became aware of a thin thread of almost intolerable light,
+let down from heaven at an immense distance--one vertical hairsbreadth
+of frozen lightning.
+
+'Those are our flanking ships,' said Arnott at my elbow. 'That one is
+over Galena. Look south--that other one's over Keithburg. Vincennes is
+behind us, and north yonder is Winthrop Woods. The Fleet's in position,
+sir'--this to De Forest. 'As soon as you give the word.'
+
+'Ah no! No!' cried Dragomiroff at my side. I could feel the old man
+tremble. 'I do not know all that you can do, but be kind! I ask you to
+be a little kind to them below! This is horrible--horrible!'
+
+     'When a Woman kills a Chicken,
+     Dynasties and Empires sicken,'
+
+Takahira quoted. 'It is too late to be gentle now.'
+
+'Then take off my helmet! Take off my helmet!' Dragomiroff began
+hysterically.
+
+Pirolo must have put his arm round him.
+
+'Hush,' he said, 'I am here. It is all right, Ivan, my dear fellow.'
+
+'I'll just send our little girl in Bureau County a warning,' said
+Arnott. 'She don't deserve it, but we'll allow her a minute or two to
+take mamma to the cellar.'
+
+In the utter hush that followed the growling spark after Arnott had
+linked up his Service Communicator with the invisible Fleet, we heard
+MacDonough's Song from the city beneath us grow fainter as we rose to
+position. Then I clapped my hand before my mask lenses, for it was as
+though the floor of Heaven had been riddled and all the inconceivable
+blaze of suns in the making was poured through the manholes.
+
+'You needn't count,' said Arnott. I had had no thought of such a thing.
+'There are two hundred and fifty keels up there, five miles apart. Full
+power, please, for another twelve seconds.'
+
+The firmament, as far as eye could reach, stood on pillars of white
+fire. One fell on the glowing square at Chicago, and turned it black.
+
+'Oh! Oh! Oh! Can men be allowed to do such things?' Dragomiroff cried,
+and fell across our knees.
+
+'Glass of water, please,' said Takahira to a helmeted shape that leaped
+forward. 'He is a little faint.'
+
+The lights switched off, and the darkness stunned like an avalanche. We
+could hear Dragomiroff's teeth on the glass edge.
+
+Pirolo was comforting him.
+
+'All right, all ra-ight,' he repeated. 'Come and lie down. Come below
+and take off your mask. I give you my word, old friend, it is all right.
+They are my siege-lights. Little Victor Pirolo's leetle lights. You know
+_me_! I do not hurt people.'
+
+'Pardon!' Dragomiroff moaned. 'I have never seen Death. I have never
+seen the Board take action. Shall we go down and burn them alive, or is
+that already done?'
+
+'Oh, hush,' said Pirolo, and I think he rocked him in his arms.
+
+'Do we repeat, sir?' Arnott asked De Forest.
+
+'Give 'em a minute's break,' De Forest replied. 'They may need it.'
+
+We waited a minute, and then MacDonough's Song, broken but defiant, rose
+from undefeated Chicago.
+
+'They seem fond of that tune,' said De Forest. 'I should let 'em have
+it, Arnott.'
+
+'Very good, sir,' said Arnott, and felt his way to the Communicator
+keys.
+
+No lights broke forth, but the hollow of the skies made herself the
+mouth for one note that touched the raw fibre of the brain. Men hear
+such sounds in delirium, advancing like tides from horizons beyond the
+ruled foreshores of space.
+
+'That's our pitch-pipe,' said Arnott. 'We may be a bit ragged. I've
+never conducted two hundred and fifty performers before.' He pulled out
+the couplers, and struck a full chord on the Service Communicators.
+
+The beams of light leaped down again, and danced, solemnly and awfully,
+a stilt-dance, sweeping thirty or forty miles left and right at each
+stiff-legged kick, while the darkness delivered itself--there is no
+scale to measure against that utterance--of the tune to which they kept
+time. Certain notes--one learnt to expect them with terror--cut through
+one's marrow, but, after three minutes, thought and emotion passed in
+indescribable agony.
+
+We saw, we heard, but I think we were in some sort swooning. The two
+hundred and fifty beams shifted, re-formed, straddled and split,
+narrowed, widened, rippled in ribbons, broke into a thousand white-hot
+parallel lines, melted and revolved in interwoven rings like
+old-fashioned engine-turning, flung up to the zenith, made as if to
+descend and renew the torment, halted at the last instant, twizzled
+insanely round the horizon, and vanished, to bring back for the
+hundredth time darkness more shattering than their instantly renewed
+light over all Illinois. Then the tune and lights ceased together, and
+we heard one single devastating wail that shook all the horizon as a
+rubbed wet finger shakes the rim of a bowl.
+
+'Ah, that is my new siren,' said Pirolo. 'You can break an iceberg in
+half, if you find the proper pitch. They will whistle by squadrons now.
+It is the wind through pierced shutters in the bows.'
+
+I had collapsed beside Dragomiroff, broken and snivelling feebly,
+because I had been delivered before my time to all the terrors of
+Judgment Day, and the Archangels of the Resurrection were hailing me
+naked across the Universe to the sound of the music of the spheres.
+
+Then I saw De Forest smacking Arnott's helmet with his open hand. The
+wailing died down in a long shriek as a black shadow swooped past us,
+and returned to her place above the lower clouds.
+
+'I hate to interrupt a specialist when he's enjoying himself,' said De
+Forest. 'But, as a matter of fact, all Illinois has been asking us to
+stop for these last fifteen seconds.'
+
+'What a pity.' Arnott slipped off his mask. 'I wanted you to hear us
+really hum. Our lower C can lift street-paving.'
+
+'It is Hell--Hell!' cried Dragomiroff, and sobbed aloud.
+
+Arnott looked away as he answered:
+
+'It's a few thousand volts ahead of the old shoot-'em-and-sink-'em game,
+but I should scarcely call it _that_. What shall I tell the Fleet, sir?'
+
+'Tell 'em we're very pleased and impressed. I don't think they need wait
+on any longer. There isn't a spark left down there.' De Forest pointed.
+'They'll be deaf and blind.'
+
+'Oh, I think not, sir. The demonstration lasted less than ten minutes.'
+
+'Marvellous!' Takahira sighed. 'I should have said it was half a night.
+Now, shall we go down and pick up the pieces?'
+
+'But first a small drink,' said Pirolo. 'The Board must not arrive
+weeping at its own works.'
+
+'I am an old fool--an old fool!' Dragomiroff began piteously. 'I did not
+know what would happen. It is all new to me. We reason with them in
+Little Russia.'
+
+Chicago North landing-tower was unlighted, and Arnott worked his ship
+into the clips by her own lights. As soon as these broke out we heard
+groanings of horror and appeal from many people below.
+
+'All right,' shouted Arnott into the darkness. 'We aren't beginning
+again!' We descended by the stairs, to find ourselves knee-deep in a
+grovelling crowd, some crying that they were blind, others beseeching us
+not to make any more noises, but the greater part writhing face
+downward, their hands or their caps before their eyes.
+
+It was Pirolo who came to our rescue. He climbed the side of a
+surfacing-machine, and there, gesticulating as though they could see,
+made oration to those afflicted people of Illinois.
+
+'You stchewpids!' he began. 'There is nothing to fuss for. Of course,
+your eyes will smart and be red to-morrow. You will look as if you and
+your wives had drunk too much, but in a little while you will see again
+as well as before. I tell you this, and I--I am Pirolo. Victor Pirolo!'
+
+The crowd with one accord shuddered, for many legends attach to Victor
+Pirolo of Foggia, deep in the secrets of God.
+
+'Pirolo?' An unsteady voice lifted itself. 'Then tell us was there
+anything except light in those lights of yours just now?'
+
+The question was repeated from every corner of the darkness.
+
+Pirolo laughed.
+
+'No!' he thundered. (Why have small men such large voices?) 'I give you
+my word and the Board's word that there was nothing except light--just
+light! You stchewpids! Your birth-rate is too low already as it is. Some
+day I must invent something to send it up, but send it down--never!'
+
+'Is that true?--We thought--somebody said--'
+
+One could feel the tension relax all round.
+
+'You too big fools,' Pirolo cried. 'You could have sent us a call and we
+would have told you.'
+
+'Send you a call!' a deep voice shouted. 'I wish you had been at our end
+of the wire.'
+
+'I'm glad I wasn't,' said De Forest. 'It was bad enough from behind the
+lamps. Never mind! It's over now. Is there any one here I can talk
+business with? I'm De Forest--for the Board.'
+
+'You might begin with me, for one--I'm Mayor,' the bass voice replied.
+
+A big man rose unsteadily from the street, and staggered towards us
+where we sat on the broad turf-edging, in front of the garden fences.
+
+'I ought to be the first on my feet. Am I?' said he.
+
+'Yes,' said De Forest, and steadied him as he dropped down beside us.
+
+'Hello, Andy. Is that you?' a voice called.
+
+'Excuse me,' said the Mayor; 'that sounds like my Chief of Police,
+Bluthner!'
+
+'Bluthner it is; and here's Mulligan and Keefe--on their feet.'
+
+'Bring 'em up please, Blut. We're supposed to be the Four in charge of
+this hamlet. What we says, goes. And, De Forest, what do you say?'
+
+'Nothing--yet,' De Forest answered, as we made room for the panting,
+reeling men. '_You've_ cut out of system. Well?'
+
+'Tell the steward to send down drinks, please,' Arnott whispered to an
+orderly at his side.
+
+'Good!' said the Mayor, smacking his dry lips. 'Now I suppose we can
+take it, De Forest, that henceforward the Board will administer
+us direct?'
+
+'Not if the Board can avoid it,' De Forest laughed. 'The A.B.C. is
+responsible for the planetary traffic only.'
+
+'_And all that that implies_.' The big Four who ran Chicago chanted
+their Magna Charta like children at school.
+
+'Well, get on,' said De Forest wearily. 'What is your silly trouble
+anyway?'
+
+'Too much dam' Democracy,' said the Mayor, laying his hand on De
+Forest's knee.
+
+'So? I thought Illinois had had her dose of that.'
+
+'She has. That's why. Blut, what did you do with our prisoners last
+night?'
+
+'Locked 'em in the water-tower to prevent the women killing 'em,' the
+Chief of Police replied. 'I'm too blind to move just yet, but--'
+
+'Arnott, send some of your people, please, and fetch 'em along,' said De
+Forest.
+
+'They're triple-circuited,' the Mayor called. 'You'll have to blow out
+three fuses.' He turned to De Forest, his large outline just visible in
+the paling darkness. 'I hate to throw any more work on the Board. I'm an
+administrator myself, but we've had a little fuss with our Serviles.
+What? In a big city there's bound to be a few men and women who can't
+live without listening to themselves, and who prefer drinking out of
+pipes they don't own both ends of. They inhabit flats and hotels all the
+year round. They say it saves 'em trouble. Anyway, it gives 'em more
+time to make trouble for their neighbours. We call 'em Serviles locally.
+And they are apt to be tuberculous.'
+
+'Just so!' said the man called Mulligan. Transportation is Civilisation.
+Democracy is Disease. I've proved it by the blood-test, every time.'
+
+'Mulligan's our Health Officer, and a one-idea man,' said the Mayor,
+laughing. 'But it's true that most Serviles haven't much control. They
+_will_ talk; and when people take to talking as a business, anything may
+arrive--mayn't it, De Forest?'
+
+'Anything--except the facts of the case,' said De Forest, laughing.
+
+'I'll give you those in a minute,' said the Mayor. 'Our Serviles got to
+talking--first in their houses and then on the streets, telling men and
+women how to manage their own affairs. (You can't teach a Servile not to
+finger his neighbour's soul.) That's invasion of privacy, of course, but
+in Chicago we'll suffer anything sooner than make Crowds. Nobody took
+much notice, and so I let 'em alone. My fault! I was warned there would
+be trouble, but there hasn't been a Crowd or murder in Illinois for
+nineteen years.'
+
+'Twenty-two,' said his Chief of Police.
+
+'Likely. Anyway, we'd forgot such things. So, from talking in the houses
+and on the streets, our Serviles go to calling a meeting at the Old
+Market yonder.' He nodded across the square where the wrecked buildings
+heaved up grey in the dawn-glimmer behind the square-cased statue of The
+Negro in Flames. 'There's nothing to prevent any one calling meetings
+except that it's against human nature to stand in a Crowd, besides being
+bad for the health. I ought to have known by the way our men and women
+attended that first meeting that trouble was brewing. There were as many
+as a thousand in the market-place, touching each other. Touching! Then
+the Serviles turned in all tongue-switches and talked, and we--'
+
+'What did they talk about?' said Takahira.
+
+'First, how badly things were managed in the city. That pleased us
+Four--we were on the platform--because we hoped to catch one or two
+good men for City work. You know how rare executive capacity is. Even if
+we didn't it's--it's refreshing to find any one interested enough in our
+job to damn our eyes. You don't know what it means to work, year in,
+year out, without a spark of difference with a living soul.'
+
+'Oh, don't we!' said De Forest. 'There are times on the Board when we'd
+give our positions if any one would kick us out and take hold of things
+themselves.'
+
+'But they won't,' said the Mayor ruefully. 'I assure you, sir, we Four
+have done things in Chicago, in the hope of rousing people, that would
+have discredited Nero. But what do they say? "Very good, Andy. Have it
+your own way. Anything's better than a Crowd. I'll go back to my land."
+You _can't_ do anything with folk who can go where they please, and
+don't want anything on God's earth except their own way. There isn't a
+kick or a kicker left on the Planet.'
+
+'Then I suppose that little shed yonder fell down by itself?' said De
+Forest. We could see the bare and still smoking ruins, and hear the
+slag-pools crackle as they hardened and set.
+
+'Oh, that's only amusement. 'Tell you later. As I was saying, our
+Serviles held the meeting, and pretty soon we had to ground-circuit the
+platform to save 'em from being killed. And that didn't make our people
+any more pacific.'
+
+'How d'you mean?' I ventured to ask.
+
+'If you've ever been ground-circuited,' said the Mayor, 'you'll know it
+don't improve any man's temper to be held up straining against nothing.
+No, sir! Eight or nine hundred folk kept pawing and buzzing like flies
+in treacle for two hours, while a pack of perfectly safe Serviles
+invades their mental and spiritual privacy, may be amusing to watch, but
+they are not pleasant to handle afterwards.'
+
+Pirolo chuckled.
+
+'Our folk own themselves. They were of opinion things were going too far
+and too fiery. I warned the Serviles; but they're born house-dwellers.
+Unless a fact hits 'em on the head they cannot see it. Would you believe
+me, they went on to talk of what they called "popular government"? They
+did! They wanted us to go back to the old Voodoo-business of voting with
+papers and wooden boxes, and word-drunk people and printed formulas, and
+news-sheets! They said they practised it among themselves about what
+they'd have to eat in their flats and hotels. Yes, sir! They stood up
+behind Bluthner's doubled ground-circuits, and they said that, in this
+present year of grace, _to_ self-owning men and women, _on_ that very
+spot! Then they finished'--he lowered his voice cautiously--'by talking
+about "The People." And then Bluthner he had to sit up all night in
+charge of the circuits because he couldn't trust his men to keep
+'em shut.'
+
+'It was trying 'em too high,' the Chief of Police broke in. 'But we
+couldn't hold the Crowd ground-circuited for ever. I gathered in all the
+Serviles on charge of Crowd-making, and put 'em in the water-tower, and
+then I let things cut loose. I had to! The District lit like a sparked
+gas-tank!'
+
+'The news was out over seven degrees of country,' the Mayor continued;
+'and when once it's a question of invasion of privacy, good-bye to right
+and reason in Illinois! They began turning out traffic-lights and
+locking up landing-towers on Thursday night. Friday, they stopped all
+traffic and asked for the Board to take over. Then they wanted to clean
+Chicago off the side of the Lake and rebuild elsewhere--just for a
+souvenir of "The People" that the Serviles talked about. I suggested
+that they should slag the Old Market where the meeting was held, while I
+turned in a call to you all on the Board. That kept 'em quiet till you
+came along. And--and now _you_ can take hold of the situation.'
+
+'Any chance of their quieting down?' De Forest asked.
+
+'You can try,' said the Mayor.
+
+De Forest raised his voice in the face of the reviving Crowd that had
+edged in towards us. Day was come.
+
+'Don't you think this business can be arranged?' he began. But there was
+a roar of angry voices:
+
+'We've finished with Crowds! We aren't going back to the Old Days! Take
+us over! Take the Serviles away! Administer direct or we'll kill 'em!
+Down with The People!'
+
+An attempt was made to begin MacDonough's Song. It got no further than
+the first line, for the _Victor Pirolo_ sent down a warning drone on one
+stopped horn. A wrecked side-wall of the Old Market tottered and fell
+inwards on the slag-pools. None spoke or moved till the last of the dust
+had settled down again, turning the steel case of Salati's Statue
+ashy grey.
+
+'You see you'll just _have_ to take us over,' the Mayor whispered.
+
+De Forest shrugged his shoulders.
+
+'You talk as if executive capacity could be snatched out of the air like
+so much horse-power. Can't you manage yourselves on any terms?' he said.
+
+'We can, if you say so. It will only cost those few lives to begin
+with,'
+
+The Mayor pointed across the square, where Arnott's men guided a
+stumbling group of ten or twelve men and women to the lake front and
+halted them under the Statue.
+
+'Now I think,' said Takahira under his breath, 'there will be trouble.'
+
+The mass in front of us growled like beasts.
+
+At that moment the sun rose clear, and revealed the blinking assembly to
+itself. As soon as it realized that it was a crowd we saw the shiver of
+horror and mutual repulsion shoot across it precisely as the steely
+flaws shot across the lake outside. Nothing was said, and, being half
+blind, of course it moved slowly. Yet in less than fifteen minutes most
+of that vast multitude--three thousand at the lowest count--melted away
+like frost on south eaves. The remnant stretched themselves on the
+grass, where a crowd feels and looks less like a crowd.
+
+'These mean business,' the Mayor whispered to Takahira. 'There are a
+goodish few women there who've borne children. I don't like it.'
+
+The morning draught off the lake stirred the trees round us with promise
+of a hot day; the sun reflected itself dazzlingly on the canister-shaped
+covering of Salati's Statue; cocks crew in the gardens, and we could
+hear gate-latches clicking in the distance as people stumblingly
+resought their homes.
+
+'I'm afraid there won't be any morning deliveries,' said De Forest. 'We
+rather upset things in the country last night.'
+
+'That makes no odds,' the Mayor returned. 'We're all provisioned for six
+months. _We_ take no chances.'
+
+Nor, when you come to think of it, does any one else. It must be
+three-quarters of a generation since any house or city faced a food
+shortage. Yet is there house or city on the Planet to-day that has not
+half a year's provisions laid in? We are like the shipwrecked seamen in
+the old books, who, having once nearly starved to death, ever afterwards
+hide away bits of food and biscuit. Truly we trust no Crowds, nor system
+based on Crowds!
+
+De Forest waited till the last footstep had died away. Meantime the
+prisoners at the base of the Statue shuffled, posed, and fidgeted, with
+the shamelessness of quite little children. None of them were more than
+six feet high, and many of them were as grey-haired as the ravaged,
+harassed heads of old pictures. They huddled together in actual touch,
+while the crowd, spaced at large intervals, looked at them with
+congested eyes.
+
+Suddenly a man among them began to talk. The Mayor had not in the least
+exaggerated. It appeared that our Planet lay sunk in slavery beneath the
+heel of the Aerial Board of Control. The orator urged us to arise in our
+might, burst our prison doors and break our fetters (all his metaphors,
+by the way, were of the most mediaeval). Next he demanded that every
+matter of daily life, including most of the physical functions, should
+be submitted for decision at any time of the week, month, or year to, I
+gathered, anybody who happened to be passing by or residing within a
+certain radius, and that everybody should forthwith abandon his concerns
+to settle the matter, first by crowd-making, next by talking to the
+crowds made, and lastly by describing crosses on pieces of paper, which
+rubbish should later be counted with certain mystic ceremonies and
+oaths. Out of this amazing play, he assured us, would automatically
+arise a higher, nobler, and kinder world, based--he demonstrated this
+with the awful lucidity of the insane--based on the sanctity of the
+Crowd and the villainy of the single person. In conclusion, he called
+loudly upon God to testify to his personal merits and integrity. When
+the flow ceased, I turned bewildered to Takahira, who was
+nodding solemnly.
+
+'Quite correct,' said he. 'It is all in the old books. He has left
+nothing out, not even the war-talk.'
+
+'But I don't see how this stuff can upset a child, much less a
+district,' I replied.
+
+'Ah, you are too young,' said Dragomiroff. 'For another thing, you are
+not a mamma. Please look at the mammas.'
+
+Ten or fifteen women who remained had separated themselves from the
+silent men, and were drawing in towards the prisoners. It reminded one
+of the stealthy encircling, before the rush in at the quarry, of wolves
+round musk-oxen in the North. The prisoners saw, and drew together more
+closely. The Mayor covered his face with his hands for an instant. De
+Forest, bareheaded, stepped forward between the prisoners, and the
+slowly, stiffly moving line.
+
+'That's all very interesting,' he said to the dry-lipped orator. 'But
+the point seems that you've been making crowds and invading privacy.'
+
+A woman stepped forward, and would have spoken, but there was a quick
+assenting murmur from the men, who realised that De Forest was trying to
+pull the situation down to ground-line.
+
+'Yes! Yes!' they cried. 'We cut out because they made crowds and invaded
+privacy! Stick to that! Keep on that switch! Lift the Serviles out of
+this! The Board's in charge! Hsh!'
+
+'Yes, the Board's in charge,' said De Forest. 'I'll take formal evidence
+of crowd-making if you like, but the Members of the Board can testify to
+it. Will that do?'
+
+The women had closed in another pace, with hands that clenched and
+unclenched at their sides.
+
+'Good! Good enough!' the men cried. 'We're content. Only take them away
+quickly.'
+
+'Come along up!' said De Forest to the captives, 'Breakfast is quite
+ready.'
+
+It appeared, however, that they did not wish to go. They intended to
+remain in Chicago and make crowds. They pointed out that De Forest's
+proposal was gross invasion of privacy.
+
+'My dear fellow,' said Pirolo to the most voluble of the leaders, 'you
+hurry, or your crowd that can't be wrong will kill you!'
+
+'But that would be murder,' answered the believer in crowds; and there
+was a roar of laughter from all sides that seemed to show the crisis
+had broken.
+
+A woman stepped forward from the line of women, laughing, I protest, as
+merrily as any of the company. One hand, of course, shaded her eyes, the
+other was at her throat.
+
+'Oh, they needn't be afraid of being killed!' she called.
+
+'Not in the least,' said De Forest. 'But don't you think that, now the
+Board's in charge, you might go home while we get these people away?'
+
+'I shall be home long before that. It--it has been rather a trying day.'
+
+She stood up to her full height, dwarfing even De Forest's
+six-foot-eight, and smiled, with eyes closed against the fierce light.
+
+'Yes, rather,' said De Forest. 'I'm afraid you feel the glare a little.
+We'll have the ship down.'
+
+He motioned to the _Pirolo_ to drop between us and the sun, and at the
+same time to loop-circuit the prisoners, who were a trifle unsteady. We
+saw them stiffen to the current where they stood. The woman's voice went
+on, sweet and deep and unshaken:
+
+'I don't suppose you men realise how much this--this sort of thing means
+to a woman. I've borne three. We women don't want our children given to
+Crowds. It must be an inherited instinct. Crowds make trouble. They
+bring back the Old Days. Hate, fear, blackmail, publicity, "The
+People"--_That! That! That_!' She pointed to the Statue, and the crowd
+growled once more.
+
+'Yes, if they are allowed to go on,' said De Forest. 'But this little
+affair--'
+
+'It means so much to us women that this--this little affair should never
+happen again. Of course, never's a big word, but one feels so strongly
+that it is important to stop crowds at the very beginning. Those
+creatures'--she pointed with her left hand at the prisoners swaying like
+seaweed in a tideway as the circuit pulled them--'those people have
+friends and wives and children in the city and elsewhere. One doesn't
+want anything done to _them_, you know. It's terrible to force a human
+being out of fifty or sixty years of good life. I'm only forty myself.
+_I_ know. But, at the same time, one feels that an example should be
+made, because no price is too heavy to pay if--if these people and _all
+that they imply_ can be put an end to. Do you quite understand, or would
+you be kind enough to tell your men to take the casing off the Statue?
+It's worth looking at.'
+
+'I understand perfectly. But I don't think anybody here wants to see
+the Statue on an empty stomach. Excuse me one moment.' De Forest called
+up to the ship, 'A flying loop ready on the port side, if you please.'
+Then to the woman he said with some crispness, 'You might leave us a
+little discretion in the matter.'
+
+'Oh, of course. Thank you for being so patient. I know my arguments are
+silly, but--' She half turned away and went on in a changed voice,
+'Perhaps this will help you to decide.'
+
+She threw out her right arm with a knife in it. Before the blade could
+be returned to her throat or her bosom it was twitched from her grip,
+sparked as it flew out of the shadow of the ship above, and fell
+flashing in the sunshine at the foot of the Statue fifty yards away. The
+outflung arm was arrested, rigid as a bar for an instant, till the
+releasing circuit permitted her to bring it slowly to her side. The
+other women shrank back silent among the men.
+
+Pirolo rubbed his hands, and Takahira nodded.
+
+'That was clever of you, De Forest,' said he.
+
+'What a glorious pose!' Dragomiroff murmured, for the frightened woman
+was on the edge of tears.
+
+'Why did you stop me? I would have done it!' she cried.
+
+'I have no doubt you would,' said De Forest. 'But we can't waste a life
+like yours on these people. I hope the arrest didn't sprain your wrist;
+it's so hard to regulate a flying loop. But I think you are quite right
+about those persons' women and children. We'll take them all away with
+us if you promise not to do anything stupid to yourself.'
+
+'I promise--I promise.' She controlled herself with an effort. 'But it
+is so important to us women. We know what it means; and I thought if you
+saw I was in earnest--'
+
+'I saw you were, and you've gained your point. I shall take all your
+Serviles away with me at once. The Mayor will make lists of their
+friends and families in the city and the district, and he'll ship them
+after us this afternoon.'
+
+'Sure,' said the Mayor, rising to his feet. 'Keefe, if you can see,
+hadn't you better finish levelling off the Old Market? It don't look
+sightly the way it is now, and we shan't use it for crowds any more.'
+
+'I think you had better wipe out that Statue as well, Mr. Mayor,' said
+De Forest. 'I don't question its merits as a work of art, but I believe
+it's a shade morbid.'
+
+'Certainly, sir. Oh, Keefe! Slag the Nigger before you go on to fuse the
+Market. I'll get to the Communicators and tell the District that the
+Board is in charge. Are you making any special appointments, sir?'
+
+'None. We haven't men to waste on these back-woods. Carry on as before,
+but under the Board. Arnott, run your Serviles aboard, please. Ground
+ship and pass them through the bilge-doors. We'll wait till we've
+finished with this work of art.'
+
+The prisoners trailed past him, talking fluently, but unable to
+gesticulate in the drag of the current. Then the surfacers rolled up,
+two on each side of the Statue. With one accord the spectators looked
+elsewhere, but there was no need. Keefe turned on full power, and the
+thing simply melted within its case. All I saw was a surge of white-hot
+metal pouring over the plinth, a glimpse of Salati's inscription, 'To the
+Eternal Memory of the Justice of the People,' ere the stone base itself
+cracked and powdered into finest lime. The crowd cheered.
+
+'Thank you,' said De Forest; 'but we want our break-fasts, and I expect
+you do too. Good-bye, Mr. Mayor! Delighted to see you at any time, but I
+hope I shan't have to, officially, for the next thirty years. Good-bye,
+madam. Yes. We're all given to nerves nowadays. I suffer from them
+myself. Good-bye, gentlemen all! You're under the tyrannous heel of the
+Board from this moment, but if ever you feel like breaking your fetters
+you've only to let us know. This is no treat to us. Good luck!'
+
+We embarked amid shouts, and did not check our lift till they had
+dwindled into whispers. Then De Forest flung himself on the chart-room
+divan and mopped his forehead.
+
+'I don't mind men,' he panted, 'but women are the devil!'
+
+'Still the devil,' said Pirolo cheerfully. 'That one would have
+suicided.'
+
+'I know it. That was why I signalled for the flying loop to be clapped
+on her. I owe you an apology for that, Arnott. I hadn't time to catch
+your eye, and you were busy with our caitiffs. By the way, who actually
+answered my signal? It was a smart piece of work.'
+
+'Ilroy,' said Arnott; 'but he overloaded the wave. It may be pretty
+gallery-work to knock a knife out of a lady's hand, but didn't you
+notice how she rubbed 'em? He scorched her fingers. Slovenly, I
+call it.'
+
+'Far be it from me to interfere with Fleet discipline, but don't be too
+hard on the boy. If that woman had killed herself they would have killed
+every Servile and everything related to a Servile throughout the
+district by nightfall.'
+
+'That was what she was playing for,' Takahira said. 'And with our Fleet
+gone we could have done nothing to hold them.'
+
+'I may be ass enough to walk into a ground-circuit,' said Arnott, 'but I
+don't dismiss my Fleet till I'm reasonably sure that trouble is over.
+They're in position still, and I intend to keep 'em there till the
+Serviles are shipped out of the district. That last little crowd meant
+murder, my friends.'
+
+'Nerves! All nerves!' said Pirolo. 'You cannot argue with agoraphobia.'
+
+'And it is not as if they had seen much dead--or _is_ it?' said
+Takahira.
+
+'In all my ninety years I have never seen Death.' Dragomiroff spoke as
+one who would excuse himself. 'Perhaps that was why--last night--'
+
+Then it came out as we sat over breakfast, that, with the exception of
+Arnott and Pirolo, none of us had ever seen a corpse, or knew in what
+manner the spirit passes.
+
+'We're a nice lot to flap about governing the Planet,' De Forest
+laughed. 'I confess, now it's all over, that my main fear was I mightn't
+be able to pull it off without losing a life.'
+
+'I thought of that too,' said Arnott; 'but there's no death reported,
+and I've inquired everywhere. What are we supposed to do with our
+passengers? I've fed 'em.'
+
+'We're between two switches,' De Forest drawled. 'If we drop them in any
+place that isn't under the Board the natives will make their presence an
+excuse for cutting out, same as Illinois did, and forcing the Board to
+take over. If we drop them in any place under the Board's control
+they'll be killed as soon as our backs are turned.'
+
+'If you say so,' said Pirolo thoughtfully, 'I can guarantee that they
+will become extinct in process of time, quite happily. What is their
+birth-rate now?'
+
+'Go down and ask 'em,' said De Forest.
+
+'I think they might become nervous and tear me to bits,' the philosopher
+of Foggia replied.
+
+'Not really? Well?'
+
+'Open the bilge-doors,' said Takahira with a downward jerk of the thumb.
+
+'Scarcely--after all the trouble we've taken to save 'em,' said De
+Forest.
+
+'Try London,' Arnott suggested. 'You could turn Satan himself loose
+there, and they'd only ask him to dinner.'
+
+'Good man! You've given me an idea. Vincent! Oh, Vincent!' He threw the
+General Communicator open so that we could all hear, and in a few
+minutes the chart-room filled with the rich, fruity voice of Leopold
+Vincent, who has purveyed all London her choicest amusements for the
+last thirty years. We answered with expectant grins, as though we were
+actually in the stalls of, say, the Combination on a first night.
+
+'We've picked up something in your line,' De Forest began.
+
+'That's good, dear man. If it's old enough. There's nothing to beat the
+old things for business purposes. Have you seen _London, Chatham, and
+Dover_ at Earl's Court? No? I thought I missed you there. Immense! I've
+had the real steam locomotive engines built from the old designs and the
+iron rails cast specially by hand. Cloth cushions in the carriages, too!
+Immense! And paper railway tickets. And Polly Milton.'
+
+'Polly Milton back again!' said Arnott rapturously. 'Book me two stalls
+for to-morrow night. What's she singing now, bless her?'
+
+'The old songs. Nothing comes up to the old touch. Listen to this, dear
+men.' Vincent carolled with flourishes:
+
+     Oh, cruel lamps of London,
+     If tears your light could drown,
+     Your victims' eyes would weep them,
+     Oh, lights of London Town!
+
+'Then they weep.'
+
+'You see?' Pirolo waved his hands at us. 'The old world always weeped
+when it saw crowds together. It did not know why, but it weeped. We know
+why, but we do not weep, except when we pay to be made to by fat, wicked
+old Vincent.'
+
+'Old, yourself!' Vincent laughed. 'I'm a public benefactor, I keep the
+world soft and united.'
+
+'And I'm De Forest of the Board,' said De Forest acidly, 'trying to get
+a little business done. As I was saying, I've picked up a few people
+in Chicago.'
+
+'I cut out. Chicago is--'
+
+'Do listen! They're perfectly unique.'
+
+'Do they build houses of baked mudblocks while you wait--eh? That's an
+old contact.'
+
+'They're an untouched primitive community, with all the old ideas.'
+
+'Sewing-machines and maypole-dances? Cooking on coal-gas stoves,
+lighting pipes with matches, and driving horses? Gerolstein tried that
+last year. An absolute blow-out!'
+
+De Forest plugged him wrathfully, and poured out the story of our doings
+for the last twenty-four hours on the top-note.
+
+'And they do it _all_ in public,' he concluded. 'You can't stop 'em. The
+more public, the better they are pleased. They'll talk for hours--like
+you! Now you can come in again!'
+
+'Do you really mean they know how to vote?' said Vincent. 'Can they act
+it?'
+
+'Act? It's their life to 'em! And you never saw such faces! Scarred
+like volcanoes. Envy, hatred, and malice in plain sight. Wonderfully
+flexible voices. They weep, too.'
+
+'Aloud? In public?'
+
+'I guarantee. Not a spark of shame or reticence in the entire
+installation. It's the chance of your career.'
+
+'D'you say you've brought their voting props along--those papers and
+ballot-box things?'
+
+'No, confound you! I'm not a luggage-lifter. Apply direct to the Mayor
+of Chicago. He'll forward you everything. Well?'
+
+'Wait a minute. Did Chicago want to kill 'em? That 'ud look well on the
+Communicators.'
+
+'Yes! They were only rescued with difficulty from a howling mob--if you
+know what that is.'
+
+'But I don't,' answered the Great Vincent simply.
+
+'Well then, they'll tell you themselves. They can make speeches hours
+long.'
+
+'How many are there?'
+
+'By the time we ship 'em all over they'll be perhaps a hundred, counting
+children. An old world in miniature. Can't you see it?'
+
+'M-yes; but I've got to pay for it if it's a blow-out, dear man.'
+
+'They can sing the old war songs in the streets. They can get
+word-drunk, and make crowds, and invade privacy in the genuine
+old-fashioned way; and they'll do the voting trick as often as you ask
+'em a question.'
+
+'Too good!' said Vincent.
+
+'You unbelieving Jew! I've got a dozen head aboard here. I'll put you
+through direct. Sample 'em yourself.'
+
+He lifted the switch and we listened. Our passengers on the lower deck
+at once, but not less than five at a time, explained themselves to
+Vincent. They had been taken from the bosom of their families, stripped
+of their possessions, given food without finger-bowls, and cast into
+captivity in a noisome dungeon.
+
+'But look here,' said Arnott aghast; 'they're saying what isn't true. My
+lower deck isn't noisome, and I saw to the finger-bowls myself.'
+
+'My people talk like that sometimes in Little Russia,' said Dragomiroff.
+'We reason with them. We never kill. No!'
+
+'But it's not true,' Arnott insisted. 'What can you do with people who
+don't tell facts? They're mad!'
+
+'Hsh!' said Pirolo, his hand to his ear. 'It is such a little time since
+all the Planet told lies.'
+
+We heard Vincent silkily sympathetic. Would they, he asked, repeat their
+assertions in public--before a vast public? Only let Vincent give them a
+chance, and the Planet, they vowed, should ring with their wrongs. Their
+aim in life--two women and a man explained it together--was to reform
+the world. Oddly enough, this also had been Vincent's life-dream. He
+offered them an arena in which to explain, and by their living example
+to raise the Planet to loftier levels. He was eloquent on the moral
+uplift of a simple, old-world life presented in its entirety to a
+deboshed civilisation.
+
+Could they--would they--for three months certain, devote themselves
+under his auspices, as missionaries, to the elevation of mankind at a
+place called Earl's Court, which he said, with some truth, was one of
+the intellectual centres of the Planet? They thanked him, and demanded
+(we could hear his chuckle of delight) time to discuss and to vote on
+the matter. The vote, solemnly managed by counting heads--one head, one
+vote--was favourable. His offer, therefore, was accepted, and they moved
+a vote of thanks to him in two speeches--one by what they called the
+'proposer' and the other by the 'seconder.'
+
+Vincent threw over to us, his voice shaking with gratitude:
+
+'I've got 'em! Did you hear those speeches? That's Nature, dear men. Art
+can't teach _that._ And they voted as easily as lying. I've never had a
+troupe of natural liars before. Bless you, dear men! Remember, you're on
+my free lists for ever, anywhere--all of you. Oh, Gerolstein will be
+sick--sick!'
+
+'Then you think they'll do?' said De Forest.
+
+'Do? The Little Village'll go crazy! I'll knock up a series of old-world
+plays for 'em. Their voices will make you laugh and cry. My God, dear
+men, where _do_ you suppose they picked up all their misery from, on
+this sweet earth? I'll have a pageant of the world's beginnings, and
+Mosenthal shall do the music. I'll--'
+
+'Go and knock up a village for 'em by to-night. We'll meet you at No. 15
+West Landing Tower,' said De Forest. 'Remember the rest will be coming
+along to-morrow.'
+
+'Let 'em all come!' said Vincent. 'You don't know how hard it is
+nowadays even for me, to find something that really gets under the
+public's damned iridium-plated hide. But I've got it at last. Good-bye!'
+
+'Well,' said De Forest when we had finished laughing, 'if any one
+understood corruption in London I might have played off Vincent against
+Gerolstein, and sold my captives at enormous prices. As it is, I shall
+have to be their legal adviser to-night when the contracts are signed.
+And they won't exactly press any commission on me, either.'
+
+'Meantime,' said Takahira, 'we cannot, of course, confine members of
+Leopold Vincent's last-engaged company. Chairs for the ladies,
+please, Arnott.'
+
+'Then I go to bed,' said De Forest. 'I can't face any more women!' And
+he vanished.
+
+When our passengers were released and given another meal (finger-bowls
+came first this time) they told us what they thought of us and the
+Board; and, like Vincent, we all marvelled how they had contrived to
+extract and secrete so much bitter poison and unrest out of the good
+life God gives us. They raged, they stormed, they palpitated, flushed
+and exhausted their poor, torn nerves, panted themselves into silence,
+and renewed the senseless, shameless attacks.
+
+'But can't you understand,' said Pirolo pathetically to a shrieking
+woman, 'that if we'd left you in Chicago you'd have been killed?'
+
+'No, we shouldn't. You were bound to save us from being murdered.'
+
+'Then we should have had to kill a lot of other people.'
+
+'That doesn't matter. We were preaching the Truth. You can't stop us. We
+shall go on preaching in London; and _then_ you'll see!'
+
+'You can see now,' said Pirolo, and opened a lower shutter.
+
+We were closing on the Little Village, with her three million people
+spread out at ease inside her ring of girdling Main-Traffic
+lights--those eight fixed beams at Chatham, Tonbridge, Redhill, Dorking,
+Woking, St. Albans, Chipping Ongar, and Southend.
+
+Leopold Vincent's new company looked, with small pale faces, at the
+silence, the size, and the separated houses.
+
+Then some began to weep aloud, shamelessly--always without shame.
+
+
+
+     MACDONOUGH'S SONG
+
+     Whether the State can loose and bind
+       In Heaven as well as on Earth:
+     If it be wiser to kill mankind
+       Before or after the birth--
+     These are matters of high concern
+       Where State-kept schoolmen are;
+     But Holy State (we have lived to learn)
+       Endeth in Holy War.
+
+     Whether The People be led by the Lord,
+       Or lured by the loudest throat:
+     If it be quicker to die by the sword
+       Or cheaper to die by vote--
+     These are the things we have dealt with once,
+       (And they will not rise from their grave)
+     For Holy People, however it runs,
+       Endeth in wholly Slave.
+
+     Whatsoever, for any cause,
+       Seeketh to take or give,
+     Power above or beyond the Laws,
+       Suffer it not to live!
+     Holy State or Holy King--
+       Or Holy People's Will--
+     Have no truck with the senseless thing.
+       Order the guns and kill!
+         _Saying--after--me:--_
+
+     _Once there was The People--Terror gave it birth;
+     Once there was The People and it made a Hell of Earth.
+     Earth arose and crushed it. Listen, O ye slain!
+     Once there was The People--it shall never be again!_
+
+
+
+
+Friendly Brook
+
+(March 1914)
+
+
+The valley was so choked with fog that one could scarcely see a cow's
+length across a field. Every blade, twig, bracken-frond, and hoof-print
+carried water, and the air was filled with the noise of rushing ditches
+and field-drains, all delivering to the brook below. A week's November
+rain on water-logged land had gorged her to full flood, and she
+proclaimed it aloud.
+
+Two men in sackcloth aprons were considering an untrimmed hedge that ran
+down the hillside and disappeared into mist beside those roarings. They
+stood back and took stock of the neglected growth, tapped an elbow of
+hedge-oak here, a mossed beech-stub there, swayed a stooled ash back and
+forth, and looked at each other.
+
+'I reckon she's about two rod thick,' said Jabez the younger, 'an' she
+hasn't felt iron since--when has she, Jesse?'
+
+'Call it twenty-five year, Jabez, an' you won't be far out.'
+
+'Umm!' Jabez rubbed his wet handbill on his wetter coat-sleeve. 'She
+ain't a hedge. She's all manner o' trees. We'll just about have to--' He
+paused, as professional etiquette required.
+
+'Just about have to side her up an' see what she'll bear. But hadn't we
+best--?' Jesse paused in his turn, both men being artists and equals.
+
+'Get some kind o' line to go by.' Jabez ranged up and down till he found
+a thinner place, and with clean snicks of the handbill revealed the
+original face of the fence. Jesse took over the dripping stuff as it
+fell forward, and, with a grasp and a kick, made it to lie orderly on
+the bank till it should be faggoted.
+
+By noon a length of unclean jungle had turned itself into a cattle-proof
+barrier, tufted here and there with little plumes of the sacred holly
+which no woodman touches without orders.
+
+'Now we've a witness-board to go by!' said Jesse at last.
+
+'She won't be as easy as this all along,' Jabez answered. 'She'll need
+plenty stakes and binders when we come to the brook.'
+
+'Well, ain't we plenty?' Jesse pointed to the ragged perspective ahead
+of them that plunged downhill into the fog. 'I lay there's a cord an' a
+half o' firewood, let alone faggots, 'fore we get anywheres anigh
+the brook.'
+
+'The brook's got up a piece since morning,' said Jabez. 'Sounds like's
+if she was over Wickenden's door-stones.'
+
+Jesse listened, too. There was a growl in the brook's roar as though she
+worried something hard.
+
+'Yes. She's over Wickenden's door-stones,' he replied. 'Now she'll flood
+acrost Alder Bay an' that'll ease her.'
+
+'She won't ease Jim Wickenden's hay none if she do,' Jabez grunted. 'I
+told Jim he'd set that liddle hay-stack o' his too low down in the
+medder. I _told_ him so when he was drawin' the bottom for it.'
+
+'I told him so, too,' said Jesse. 'I told him 'fore ever you did. I told
+him when the County Council tarred the roads up along.' He pointed
+uphill, where unseen automobiles and road-engines droned past
+continually. 'A tarred road, she shoots every drop o' water into a
+valley same's a slate roof. 'Tisn't as 'twas in the old days, when the
+waters soaked in and soaked out in the way o' nature. It rooshes off
+they tarred roads all of a lump, and naturally every drop is bound to
+descend into the valley. And there's tar roads both two sides this
+valley for ten mile. That's what I told Jim Wickenden when they tarred
+the roads last year. But he's a valley-man. He don't hardly ever
+journey uphill.'
+
+'What did he say when you told him that?' Jabez demanded, with a little
+change of voice.
+
+'Why? What did he say to you when _you_ told him?' was the answer.
+
+'What he said to you, I reckon, Jesse.'
+
+'Then, you don't need me to say it over again, Jabez.'
+
+'Well, let be how 'twill, what was he gettin' _after_ when he said what
+he said to me?' Jabez insisted.
+
+'I dunno; unless you tell me what manner o' words he said to _you_.'
+
+Jabez drew back from the hedge--all hedges are nests of treachery and
+eavesdropping--and moved to an open cattle-lodge in the centre of
+the field.
+
+'No need to go ferretin' around,' said Jesse. 'None can't see us here
+'fore we see them.'
+
+'What was Jim Wickenden gettin' at when I said he'd set his stack too
+near anigh the brook?' Jabez dropped his voice. 'He was in his mind.'
+
+'He ain't never been out of it yet to my knowledge,' Jesse drawled, and
+uncorked his tea-bottle.
+
+'But then Jim says: "I ain't goin' to shift my stack a yard," he says.
+"The Brook's been good friends to me, and if she be minded," he says,
+"to take a snatch at my hay, I ain't settin' out to withstand her."
+That's what Jim Wickenden says to me last--last June-end 'twas,'
+said Jabez.
+
+'Nor he hasn't shifted his stack, neither,' Jesse replied. 'An' if
+there's more rain, the brook she'll shift it for him.'
+
+'No need tell _me_! But I want to know what Jim was gettin' _at_?'
+
+Jabez opened his clasp-knife very deliberately; Jesse as carefully
+opened his. They unfolded the newspapers that wrapped their dinners,
+coiled away and pocketed the string that bound the packages, and sat
+down on the edge of the lodge manger. The rain began to fall again
+through the fog, and the brook's voice rose.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+'But I always allowed Mary was his lawful child, like,' said Jabez,
+after Jesse had spoken for a while.
+
+''Tain't so.... Jim Wickenden's woman she never made nothing. She come
+out o' Lewes with her stockin's round her heels, an' she never made nor
+mended aught till she died. _He_ had to light fire an' get breakfast
+every mornin' except Sundays, while she sowed it abed. Then she took an'
+died, sixteen, seventeen, year back; but she never had no childern.'
+
+'They was valley-folk,' said Jabez apologetically. 'I'd no call to go in
+among 'em, but I always allowed Mary--'
+
+'No. Mary come out o' one o' those Lunnon Childern Societies. After his
+woman died, Jim got his mother back from his sister over to Peasmarsh,
+which she'd gone to house with when Jim married. His mother kept house
+for Jim after his woman died. They do say 'twas his mother led him on
+toward adoptin' of Mary--to furnish out the house with a child, like,
+and to keep him off of gettin' a noo woman. He mostly done what his
+mother contrived. 'Cardenly, twixt 'em, they asked for a child from one
+o' those Lunnon societies--same as it might ha' been these Barnardo
+children--an' Mary was sent down to 'em, in a candle-box, I've heard.'
+
+'Then Mary is chance-born. I never knowed that,' said Jabez. 'Yet I must
+ha' heard it some time or other ...'
+
+'No. She ain't. 'Twould ha' been better for some folk if she had been.
+She come to Jim in a candle-box with all the proper papers--lawful child
+o' some couple in Lunnon somewheres--mother dead, father drinkin'.
+_And_ there was that Lunnon society's five shillin's a week for her.
+Jim's mother she wouldn't despise week-end money, but I never heard Jim
+was much of a muck-grubber. Let be how 'twill, they two mothered up Mary
+no bounds, till it looked at last like they'd forgot she wasn't their
+own flesh an' blood. Yes, I reckon they forgot Mary wasn't their'n
+by rights.'
+
+'That's no new thing,' said Jabez. 'There's more'n one or two in this
+parish wouldn't surrender back their Bernarders. You ask Mark Copley an'
+his woman an' that Bernarder cripple-babe o' theirs.'
+
+'Maybe they need the five shillin',' Jesse suggested.
+
+'It's handy,' said Jabez. 'But the child's more. "Dada" he says, an'
+"Mumma" he says, with his great rollin' head-piece all hurdled up in
+that iron collar. _He_ won't live long--his backbone's rotten, like. But
+they Copleys do just about set store by him--five bob or no five bob.'
+
+'Same way with Jim an' his mother,' Jesse went on. 'There was talk
+betwixt 'em after a few years o' not takin' any more week-end money for
+Mary; but let alone _she_ never passed a farden in the mire 'thout
+longin's, Jim didn't care, like, to push himself forward into the
+Society's remembrance. So naun came of it. The week-end money would ha'
+made no odds to Jim--not after his uncle willed him they four cottages
+at Eastbourne _an'_ money in the bank.'
+
+'That was true, too, then? I heard something in a scadderin'
+word-o'-mouth way,' said Jabez.
+
+'I'll answer for the house property, because Jim he requested my signed
+name at the foot o' some papers concernin' it. Regardin' the money in
+the bank, he nature-ally wouldn't like such things talked about all
+round the parish, so he took strangers for witnesses.'
+
+'Then 'twill make Mary worth seekin' after?'
+
+'She'll need it. Her Maker ain't done much for her outside nor yet in.'
+
+'That ain't no odds.' Jabez shook his head till the water showered off
+his hat-brim. 'If Mary has money, she'll be wed before any likely pore
+maid. She's cause to be grateful to Jim.'
+
+'She hides it middlin' close, then,' said Jesse. 'It don't sometimes
+look to me as if Mary has her natural rightful feelin's. She don't put
+on an apron o' Mondays 'thout being druv to it--in the kitchen _or_ the
+hen-house. She's studyin' to be a school-teacher. She'll make a beauty!
+I never knowed her show any sort o' kindness to nobody--not even when
+Jim's mother was took dumb. No! 'Twadn't no stroke. It stifled the old
+lady in the throat here. First she couldn't shape her words no shape;
+then she clucked, like, an' lastly she couldn't more than suck down
+spoon-meat an' hold her peace. Jim took her to Doctor Harding, an'
+Harding he bundled her off to Brighton Hospital on a ticket, but they
+couldn't make no stay to her afflictions there; and she was bundled off
+to Lunnon, an' they lit a great old lamp inside her, and Jim told me
+they couldn't make out nothing in no sort there; and, along o' one thing
+an' another, an' all their spyin's and pryin's, she come back a hem
+sight worse than when she started. Jim said he'd have no more
+hospitalizin', so he give her a slate, which she tied to her
+waist-string, and what she was minded to say she writ on it.'
+
+'Now, I never knowed that! But they're valley-folk,' Jabez repeated.
+
+''Twadn't particular noticeable, for she wasn't a talkin' woman any time
+o' her days. Mary had all three's tongue.... Well, then, two years this
+summer, come what I'm tellin' you. Mary's Lunnon father, which they'd
+put clean out o' their minds, arrived down from Lunnon with the law on
+his side, sayin' he'd take his daughter back to Lunnon, after all. I was
+working for Mus' Dockett at Pounds Farm that summer, but I was obligin'
+Jim that evenin' muckin' out his pig-pen. I seed a stranger come
+traipsin' over the bridge agin' Wickenden's door-stones. 'Twadn't the
+new County Council bridge with the handrail. They hadn't given it in for
+a public right o' way then. 'Twas just a bit o' lathy old plank which
+Jim had throwed acrost the brook for his own conveniences. The man
+wasn't drunk--only a little concerned in liquor, like--an' his back was
+a mask where he'd slipped in the muck comin' along. He went up the
+bricks past Jim's mother, which was feedin' the ducks, an' set himself
+down at the table inside--Jim was just changin' his socks--an' the man
+let Jim know all his rights and aims regardin' Mary. Then there just
+about _was_ a hurly-bulloo? Jim's fust mind was to pitch him forth, but
+he'd done that once in his young days, and got six months up to Lewes
+jail along o' the man fallin' on his head. So he swallowed his spittle
+an' let him talk. The law about Mary _was_ on the man's side from fust
+to last, for he showed us all the papers. Then Mary come
+downstairs--she'd been studyin' for an examination--an' the man tells
+her who he was, an' she says he had ought to have took proper care of
+his own flesh and blood while he had it by him, an' not to think he
+could ree-claim it when it suited. He says somethin' or other, but she
+looks him up an' down, front an' backwent, an' she just tongues him
+scadderin' out o' doors, and he went away stuffin' all the papers back
+into his hat, talkin' most abusefully. Then she come back an' freed her
+mind against Jim an' his mother for not havin' warned her of her
+upbringin's, which it come out she hadn't ever been told. They didn't
+say naun to her. They never did. _I'd_ ha' packed her off with any man
+that would ha' took her--an' God's pity on him!'
+
+'Umm!' said Jabez, and sucked his pipe.
+
+'So then, that was the beginnin.' The man come back again next week or
+so, an' he catched Jim alone, 'thout his mother this time, an' he fair
+beazled him with his papers an' his talk--for the law _was_ on his
+side--till Jim went down into his money-purse an' give him ten shillings
+hush-money--he told me--to withdraw away for a bit an' leave Mary
+with 'em.'
+
+'But that's no way to get rid o' man or woman,' Jabez said.
+
+'No more 'tis. I told Jim so. "What can I do?" Jim says. "The law's
+_with_ the man. I walk about daytimes thinkin' o' it till I sweats my
+underclothes wringin', an' I lie abed nights thinkin' o' it till I
+sweats my sheets all of a sop. 'Tisn't as if I was a young man," he
+says, "nor yet as if I was a pore man. Maybe he'll drink hisself to
+death." I e'en a'most told him outright what foolishness he was enterin'
+into, but he knowed it--he knowed it--because he said next time the man
+come 'twould be fifteen shillin's. An' next time 'twas. Just fifteen
+shillin's!'
+
+'An' _was_ the man her father?' asked Jabez.
+
+'He had the proofs an' the papers. Jim showed me what that Lunnon
+Childern's Society had answered when Mary writ up to 'em an' taxed 'em
+with it. I lay she hadn't been proper polite in her letters to 'em, for
+they answered middlin' short. They said the matter was out o' their
+hands, but--let's see if I remember--oh, yes,--they ree-gretted there
+had been an oversight. I reckon they had sent Mary out in the candle-box
+as a orphan instead o' havin' a father. Terrible awkward! Then, when
+he'd drinked up the money, the man come again--in his usuals--an' he
+kept hammerin' on and hammerin' on about his duty to his pore dear wife,
+an' what he'd do for his dear daughter in Lunnon, till the tears runned
+down his two dirty cheeks an' he come away with more money. Jim used to
+slip it into his hand behind the door; but his mother she heard the
+chink. She didn't hold with hush-money. She'd write out all her feelin's
+on the slate, an' Jim 'ud be settin' up half the night answerin' back
+an' showing that the man had the law with him.'
+
+'Hadn't that man no trade nor business, then?'
+
+'He told me he was a printer. I reckon, though, he lived on the rates
+like the rest of 'em up there in Lunnon.'
+
+'An' how did Mary take it?'
+
+'She said she'd sooner go into service than go with the man. I reckon a
+mistress 'ud be middlin' put to it for a maid 'fore she put Mary into
+cap an' gown. She was studyin' to be a schoo-ool-teacher. A beauty
+she'll make!... Well, that was how things went that fall. Mary's Lunnon
+father kep' comin' an' comin' 'carden as he'd drinked out the money Jim
+gave him; an' each time he'd put-up his price for not takin' Mary away.
+Jim's mother, she didn't like partin' with no money, an' bein' obliged
+to write her feelin's on the slate instead o' givin' 'em vent by mouth,
+she was just about mad. Just about she _was_ mad!
+
+'Come November, I lodged with Jim in the outside room over 'gainst his
+hen-house. I paid _her_ my rent. I was workin' for Dockett at
+Pounds--gettin' chestnut-bats out o' Perry Shaw. Just such weather as
+this be--rain atop o' rain after a wet October. (An' I remember it ended
+in dry frostes right away up to Christmas.) Dockett he'd sent up to
+Perry Shaw for me--no, he comes puffin' up to me himself--because a big
+corner-piece o' the bank had slipped into the brook where she makes that
+elber at the bottom o' the Seventeen Acre, an' all the rubbishy alders
+an' sallies which he ought to have cut out when he took the farm,
+they'd slipped with the slip, an' the brook was comin' rooshin' down
+atop of 'em, an' they'd just about back an' spill the waters over his
+winter wheat. The water was lyin' in the flats already. "Gor a-mighty,
+Jesse!" he bellers out at me, "get that rubbish away all manners you
+can. Don't stop for no fagottin', but give the brook play or my wheat's
+past salvation. I can't lend you no help," he says, "but work an'
+I'll pay ye."'
+
+'You had him there,' Jabez chuckled.
+
+'Yes. I reckon I had ought to have drove my bargain, but the brook was
+backin' up on good bread-corn. So 'cardenly, I laid into the mess of it,
+workin' off the bank where the trees was drownin' themselves head-down
+in the roosh--just such weather as this--an' the brook creepin' up on me
+all the time. 'Long toward noon, Jim comes mowchin' along with his
+toppin' axe over his shoulder.
+
+'"Be you minded for an extra hand at your job?" he says.
+
+'"Be you minded to turn to?" I ses, an'--no more talk to it--Jim laid in
+alongside o' me. He's no hunger with a toppin' axe.'
+
+'Maybe, but I've seed him at a job o' throwin' in the woods, an' he
+didn't seem to make out no shape,' said Jabez. 'He haven't got the
+shoulders, nor yet the judgment--_my_ opinion--when he's dealin' with
+full-girt timber. He don't rightly make up his mind where he's goin' to
+throw her.'
+
+'We wasn't throwin' nothin'. We was cuttin' out they soft alders, an'
+haulin' 'em up the bank 'fore they could back the waters on the wheat.
+Jim didn't say much, 'less it was that he'd had a postcard from Mary's
+Lunnon father, night before, sayin' he was comin' down that mornin'.
+Jim, he'd sweated all night, an' he didn't reckon hisself equal to the
+talkin' an' the swearin' an' the cryin', an' his mother blamin' him
+afterwards on the slate. "It spiled my day to think of it," he ses, when
+we was eatin' our pieces. "So I've fair cried dunghill an' run.
+Mother'll have to tackle him by herself. I lay _she_ won't give him no
+hush-money," he ses. "I lay he'll be surprised by the time he's done
+with _her_," he ses. An' that was e'en a'most all the talk we had
+concernin' it. But he's no hunger with the toppin' axe.
+
+'The brook she'd crep' up an' up on us, an' she kep' creepin' upon us
+till we was workin' knee-deep in the shallers, cuttin' an' pookin' an'
+pullin' what we could get to o' the rubbish. There was a middlin' lot
+comin' down-stream, too--cattle-bars, an' hop-poles and odds-ends bats,
+all poltin' down together; but they rooshed round the elber good shape
+by the time we'd backed out they drowned trees. Come four o'clock we
+reckoned we'd done a proper day's work, an' she'd take no harm if we
+left her. We couldn't puddle about there in the dark an' wet to no more
+advantage. Jim he was pourin' the water out of his boots--no, I was
+doin' that. Jim was kneelin' to unlace his'n. "Damn it all, Jesse," he
+ses, standin' up; "the flood must be over my doorsteps at home, for here
+comes my old white-top bee-skep!"'
+
+'Yes. I allus heard he paints his bee-skeps,' Jabez put in. 'I dunno
+paint don't tarrify bees more'n it keeps em' dry.'
+
+'"I'll have a pook at it," he ses, an' he pooks at it as it comes round
+the elber. The roosh nigh jerked the pooker out of his hand-grips, an'
+he calls to me, an' I come runnin' barefoot. Then we pulled on the
+pooker, an' it reared up on eend in the roosh, an' we guessed what
+'twas. 'Cardenly we pulled it in into a shaller, an' it rolled a piece,
+an' a great old stiff man's arm nigh hit me in the face. Then we was
+sure. "'Tis a man," ses Jim. But the face was all a mask. "I reckon it's
+Mary's Lunnon father," he ses presently. "Lend me a match and I'll make
+sure." He never used baccy. We lit three matches one by another, well's
+we could in the rain, an' he cleaned off some o' the slob with a tussick
+o' grass. "Yes," he ses. "It's Mary's Lunnon father. He won't tarrify us
+no more. D'you want him, Jesse?" he ses.
+
+'"No," I ses. "If this was Eastbourne beach like, he'd be half-a-crown
+apiece to us 'fore the coroner; but now we'd only lose a day havin' to
+'tend the inquest. I lay he fell into the brook."
+
+'"I lay he did," ses Jim. "I wonder if he saw mother." He turns him
+over, an' opens his coat and puts his fingers in the waistcoat pocket
+an' starts laughin'. "He's seen mother, right enough," he ses. "An' he's
+got the best of her, too. _She_ won't be able to crow no more over _me_
+'bout givin' him money. _I_ never give him more than a sovereign. She's
+give him two!" an' he trousers 'em, laughin' all the time. "An' now
+we'll pook him back again, for I've done with him," he ses.
+
+'So we pooked him back into the middle of the brook, an' we saw he went
+round the elber 'thout balkin', an' we walked quite a piece beside of
+him to set him on his ways. When we couldn't see no more, we went home
+by the high road, because we knowed the brook 'u'd be out acrost the
+medders, an' we wasn't goin' to hunt for Jim's little rotten old bridge
+in that dark--an' rainin' Heavens' hard, too. I was middlin' pleased to
+see light an' vittles again when we got home. Jim he pressed me to come
+insides for a drink. He don't drink in a generality, but he was rid of
+all his troubles that evenin', d'ye see? "Mother," he ses so soon as the
+door ope'd, "have you seen him?" She whips out her slate an' writes
+down--"No." "Oh, no," ses Jim. "You don't get out of it that way,
+mother. I lay you _have_ seen him, an' I lay he's bested you for all
+your talk, same as he bested me. Make a clean breast of it, mother," he
+ses. "He got round you too." She was goin' for the slate again, but he
+stops her. "It's all right, mother," he ses. "I've seen him sense you
+have, an' he won't trouble us no more." The old lady looks up quick as a
+robin, an' she writes, "Did he say so?" "No," ses Jim, laughin'. "He
+didn't say so. That's how I know. But he bested _you_, mother. You can't
+have it in at _me_ for bein' soft-hearted. You're twice as
+tender-hearted as what I be. Look!" he ses, an' he shows her the two
+sovereigns. "Put 'em away where they belong," he ses. "He won't never
+come for no more; an' now we'll have our drink," he ses, "for we've
+earned it."
+
+'Nature-ally they weren't goin' to let me see where they kep' their
+monies. She went upstairs with it--for the whisky.'
+
+'I never knowed Jim was a drinkin' man--in his own house, like,' said
+Jabez.
+
+'No more he isn't; but what he takes he likes good. He won't tech no
+publican's hogwash acrost the bar. Four shillin's he paid for that
+bottle o' whisky. I know, because when the old lady brought it down
+there wasn't more'n jest a liddle few dreenin's an' dregs in it. Nothin'
+to set before neighbours, I do assure you.'
+
+'"Why, 'twas half full last week, mother," he ses. "You don't mean," he
+ses, "you've given him all that as well? It's two shillin's worth," he
+ses. (That's how I knowed he paid four.) "Well, well, mother, you be too
+tender-'carted to live. But I don't grudge it to him," he ses. "I don't
+grudge him nothin' he can keep." So, 'cardenly, we drinked up what
+little sup was left.'
+
+'An' what come to Mary's Lunnon father?' said Jabez after a full
+minute's silence.
+
+'I be too tired to go readin' papers of evenin's; but Dockett he told
+me, that very week, I think, that they'd inquested on a man down at
+Robertsbridge which had poked and poked up agin' so many bridges an'
+banks, like, they couldn't make naun out of him.'
+
+'An' what did Mary say to all these doin's?'
+
+'The old lady bundled her off to the village 'fore her Lunnon father
+come, to buy week-end stuff (an' she forgot the half o' it). When we
+come in she was upstairs studyin' to be a school-teacher. None told her
+naun about it. 'Twadn't girls' affairs.'
+
+'Reckon _she_ knowed?' Jabez went on.
+
+'She? She must have guessed it middlin' close when she saw her money
+come back. But she never mentioned it in writing so far's I know. She
+were more worritted that night on account of two-three her chickens
+bein' drowned, for the flood had skewed their old hen-house round on her
+postes. I cobbled her up next mornin' when the brook shrinked.'
+
+'An' where did you find the bridge? Some fur down-stream, didn't ye?'
+
+'Just where she allus was. She hadn't shifted but very little. The brook
+had gulled out the bank a piece under one eend o' the plank, so's she
+was liable to tilt ye sideways if you wasn't careful. But I pooked
+three-four bricks under her, an' she was all plumb again.'
+
+'Well, I dunno how it _looks_ like, but let be how 'twill,' said Jabez,
+'he hadn't no business to come down from Lunnon tarrifyin' people, an'
+threatenin' to take away children which they'd hobbed up for their
+lawful own--even if 'twas Mary Wickenden.'
+
+'He had the business right enough, an' he had the law with him--no
+gettin' over that,' said Jesse. 'But he had the drink with him, too, an'
+that was where he failed, like.'
+
+'Well, well! Let be how 'twill, the brook was a good friend to Jim. I
+see it now. I allus _did_ wonder what he was gettin' at when he said
+that, when I talked to him about shiftin' the stack. "You dunno
+everythin'," he ses. "The Brook's been a good friend to me," he ses,
+"an' if she's minded to have a snatch at my hay, _I_ ain't settin' out
+to withstand her."'
+
+'I reckon she's about shifted it, too, by now,' Jesse chuckled. 'Hark!
+That ain't any slip off the bank which she's got hold of.'
+
+The Brook had changed her note again. It sounded as though she were
+mumbling something soft.
+
+
+
+
+     THE LAND
+
+     When Julius Fabricius, Sub-Prefect of the Weald,
+     In the days of Diocletian owned our Lower River-field,
+     He called to him Hobdenius--a Briton of the Clay,
+     Saying: 'What about that River-piece for layin' in to hay?'
+
+     And the aged Hobden answered: 'I remember as a lad
+     My father told your father that she wanted dreenin' bad.
+     An' the more that you neeglect her the less you'll get her clean.
+     Have it jest _as_ you've a mind to, but, if I was you, I'd dreen.'
+
+     So they drained it long and crossways in the lavish Roman style.
+     Still we find among the river-drift their flakes of ancient tile,
+     And in drouthy middle August, when the bones of meadows show,
+     We can trace the lines they followed sixteen hundred years ago.
+
+     Then Julius Fabricius died as even Prefects do,
+     And after certain centuries, Imperial Rome died too.
+     Then did robbers enter Britain from across the Northern main
+     And our Lower River-field was won by Ogier the Dane.
+
+     Well could Ogier work his war-boat--well could Ogier wield
+          his brand--
+     Much he knew of foaming waters--not so much of farming land.
+     So he called to him a Hobden of the old unaltered blood.
+     Saying: 'What about that River-bit, she doesn't look no good?'
+
+     And that aged Hobden answered: ''Tain't for _me_ to interfere,
+     But I've known that bit o' meadow now for five and fifty year.
+     Have it _jest_ as you've a mind to, but I've proved it time
+          on time,
+     If you want to change her nature you have _got_ to give her lime!'
+
+     Ogier sent his wains to Lewes, twenty hours' solemn walk,
+     And drew back great abundance of the cool, grey, healing chalk.
+     And old Hobden spread it broadcast, never heeding what was in't;
+     Which is why in cleaning ditches, now and then we find a flint.
+
+     Ogier died. His sons grew English. Anglo-Saxon was their name,
+     Till out of blossomed Normandy another pirate came;
+     For Duke William conquered England and divided with his men,
+     And our Lower River-field he gave to William of Warenne.
+
+     But the Brook (you know her habit) rose one rainy Autumn night
+     And tore down sodden flitches of the bank to left and right.
+     So, said William to his Bailiff as they rode their dripping rounds:
+     'Hob, what about that River-bit--the Brook's got up no bounds?'
+
+     And that aged Hobden answered: ''Tain't my business to advise,
+     But ye might ha' known 'twould happen from the way the valley lies.
+     When ye can't hold back the water you must try and save the sile.
+     Hev it jest as you've a _mind_ to, but, if I was you, I'd spile!'
+
+     They spiled along the water-course with trunks of willow-trees
+     And planks of elms behind 'em and immortal oaken knees.
+     And when the spates of Autumn whirl the gravel-beds away
+     You can see their faithful fragments iron-hard in iron clay.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+     _Georgii Quinti Anno Sexto_, I, who own the River-field,
+     Am fortified with title-deeds, attested, signed and sealed,
+     Guaranteeing me, my assigns, my executors and heirs
+     All sorts of powers and profits which--are neither mine nor theirs.
+
+     I have rights of chase and warren, as my dignity requires.
+     I can fish--but Hobden tickles. I can shoot--but Hobden wires.
+     I repair, but he reopens, certain gaps which, men allege,
+     Have been used by every Hobden since a Hobden swapped a hedge.
+
+     Shall I dog his morning progress o'er the track-betraying dew?
+     Demand his dinner-basket into which my pheasant flew?
+     Confiscate his evening faggot into which the conies ran,
+     And summons him to judgment? I would sooner summons Pan.
+
+     His dead are in the churchyard--thirty generations laid.
+     Their names went down in Domesday Book when Domesday Book was made.
+     And the passion and the piety and prowess of his line
+     Have seeded, rooted, fruited in some land the Law calls mine.
+
+     Not for any beast that burrows, not for any bird that flies,
+     Would I lose his large sound council, miss his keen amending eyes.
+     He is bailiff, woodman, wheelwright, field-surveyor, engineer,
+     And if flagrantly a poacher--'tain't for me to interfere.
+
+     'Hob, what about that River-bit?' I turn to him again
+     With Fabricius and Ogier and William of Warenne.
+     'Hev it jest as you've a mind to, _but_'--and so he takes command.
+     For whoever pays the taxes old Mus' Hobden owns the land.
+
+
+
+In the Same Boat
+
+(1911)
+
+'A throbbing vein,' said Dr. Gilbert soothingly, 'is the mother of
+delusion.'
+
+'Then how do you account for my knowing when the thing is due?' Conroy's
+voice rose almost to a break.
+
+'Of course, but you should have consulted a doctor before
+using--palliatives.'
+
+'It was driving me mad. And now I can't give them up.'
+
+''Not so bad as that! One doesn't form fatal habits at twenty-five.
+Think again. Were you ever frightened as a child?'
+
+'I don't remember. It began when I was a boy.'
+
+'With or without the spasm? By the way, do you mind describing the spasm
+again?'
+
+'Well,' said Conroy, twisting in the chair, 'I'm no musician, but
+suppose you were a violin-string--vibrating--and some one put his finger
+on you? As if a finger were put on the naked soul! Awful!'
+
+'So's indigestion--so's nightmare--while it lasts.'
+
+'But the horror afterwards knocks me out for days. And the waiting for
+it ... and then this drug habit! It can't go on!' He shook as he spoke,
+and the chair creaked.
+
+'My dear fellow,' said the doctor, 'when you're older you'll know what
+burdens the best of us carry. A fox to every Spartan.'
+
+'That doesn't help _me_. I can't! I can't!' cried Conroy, and burst into
+tears.
+
+'Don't apologise,' said Gilbert, when the paroxysm ended. 'I'm used to
+people coming a little--unstuck in this room.'
+
+'It's those tabloids!' Conroy stamped his foot feebly as he blew his
+nose. 'They've knocked me out. I used to be fit once. Oh, I've tried
+exercise and everything. But--if one sits down for a minute when it's
+due--even at four in the morning--it runs up behind one.'
+
+'Ye-es. Many things come in the quiet of the morning. You always know
+when the visitation is due?'
+
+'What would I give not to be sure!' he sobbed.
+
+'We'll put that aside for the moment. I'm thinking of a case where what
+we'll call anaemia of the brain was masked (I don't say cured) by
+vibration. He couldn't sleep, or thought he couldn't, but a steamer
+voyage and the thump of the screw--'
+
+'A steamer? After what I've told you!' Conroy almost shrieked. 'I'd
+sooner ...'
+
+'Of course _not_ a steamer in your case, but a long railway journey the
+next time you think it will trouble you. It sounds absurd, but--'
+
+'I'd try anything. I nearly have,' Conroy sighed.
+
+'Nonsense! I've given you a tonic that will clear _that_ notion from
+your head. Give the train a chance, and don't begin the journey by
+bucking yourself up with tabloids. Take them along, but hold them in
+reserve--in reserve.'
+
+'D'you think I've self-control enough, after what you've heard?' said
+Conroy.
+
+Dr. Gilbert smiled. 'Yes. After what I've seen,' he glanced round the
+room, 'I have no hesitation in saying you have quite as much
+self-control as many other people. I'll write you later about your
+journey. Meantime, the tonic,' and he gave some general directions
+before Conroy left.
+
+An hour later Dr. Gilbert hurried to the links, where the others of his
+regular week-end game awaited him. It was a rigid round, played as usual
+at the trot, for the tension of the week lay as heavy on the two King's
+Counsels and Sir John Chartres as on Gilbert. The lawyers were old
+enemies of the Admiralty Court, and Sir John of the frosty eyebrows and
+Abernethy manner was bracketed with, but before, Rutherford Gilbert
+among nerve-specialists.
+
+At the Club-house afterwards the lawyers renewed their squabble over a
+tangled collision case, and the doctors as naturally compared
+professional matters.
+
+'Lies--all lies,' said Sir John, when Gilbert had told him Conroy's
+trouble. '_Post hoc, propter hoc_. The man or woman who drugs is _ipso
+facto_ a liar. You've no imagination.'
+
+''Pity you haven't a little--occasionally.'
+
+'I have believed a certain type of patient in my time. It's always the
+same. For reasons not given in the consulting-room they take to the
+drug. Certain symptoms follow. They will swear to you, and believe it,
+that they took the drug to mask the symptoms. What does your man use?
+Najdolene? I thought so. I had practically the duplicate of your case
+last Thursday. Same old Najdolene--same old lie.'
+
+'Tell me the symptoms, and I'll draw my own inferences, Johnnie.'
+
+'Symptoms! The girl was rank poisoned with Najdolene. Ramping, stamping
+possession. Gad, I thought she'd have the chandelier down.'
+
+'Mine came unstuck too, and he has the physique of a bull,' said
+Gilbert. 'What delusions had yours?'
+
+'Faces--faces with mildew on them. In any other walk of life we'd call
+it the Horrors. She told me, of course, she took the drugs to mask the
+faces. _Post hoc, propter hoc_ again. All liars!'
+
+'What's that?' said the senior K.C. quickly. 'Sounds professional.'
+
+'Go away! Not for you, Sandy.' Sir John turned a shoulder against him
+and walked with Gilbert in the chill evening.
+
+To Conroy in his chambers came, one week later, this letter:
+
+     DEAR MR. CONROY--If your plan of a night's trip on the 17th
+     still holds good, and you have no particular destination in
+     view, you could do me a kindness. A Miss Henschil, in whom I
+     am interested, goes down to the West by the 10.8 from
+     Waterloo (Number 3 platform) on that night. She is not
+     exactly an invalid, but, like so many of us, a little shaken
+     in her nerves. Her maid, of course, accompanies her, but if I
+     knew you were in the same train it would be an additional
+     source of strength. Will you please write and let me know
+     whether the 10.8 from Waterloo, Number 3 platform, on the
+     17th, suits you, and I will meet you there? Don't forget my
+     caution, and keep up the tonic.--Yours sincerely,
+
+     L. RUTHERFORD GILBERT.
+
+'He knows I'm scarcely fit to look after myself,' was Conroy's thought.
+'And he wants me to look after a woman!'
+
+Yet, at the end of half an hour's irresolution, he accepted.
+
+Now Conroy's trouble, which had lasted for years, was this:
+
+On a certain night, while he lay between sleep and wake, he would be
+overtaken by a long shuddering sigh, which he learned to know was the
+sign that his brain had once more conceived its horror, and in time--in
+due time--would bring it forth.
+
+Drugs could so well veil that horror that it shuffled along no worse
+than as a freezing dream in a procession of disorderly dreams; but over
+the return of the event drugs had no control. Once that sigh had passed
+his lips the thing was inevitable, and through the days granted before
+its rebirth he walked in torment. For the first two years he had striven
+to fend it off by distractions, but neither exercise nor drink availed.
+Then he had come to the tabloids of the excellent M. Najdol. These
+guarantee, on the label, 'Refreshing and absolutely natural sleep to the
+soul-weary.' They are carried in a case with a spring which presses one
+scented tabloid to the end of the tube, whence it can be lipped off in
+stroking the moustache or adjusting the veil.
+
+Three years of M. Najdol's preparations do not fit a man for many
+careers. His friends, who knew he did not drink, assumed that Conroy had
+strained his heart through valiant outdoor exercises, and Conroy had
+with some care invented an imaginary doctor, symptoms, and regimen,
+which he discussed with them and with his mother in Hereford. She
+maintained that he would grow out of it, and recommended nux vomica.
+
+When at last Conroy faced a real doctor, it was, he hoped, to be saved
+from suicide by a strait-waistcoat. Yet Dr. Gilbert had but given him
+more drugs--a tonic, for instance, that would couple railway
+carnages--and had advised a night in the train. Not alone the horrors of
+a railway journey (for which a man who dare keep no servant must e'en
+pack, label, and address his own bag), but the necessity for holding
+himself in hand before a stranger 'a little shaken in her nerves.'
+
+He spent a long forenoon packing, because when he assembled and counted
+things his mind slid off to the hours that remained of the day before
+his night, and he found himself counting minutes aloud. At such times
+the injustice of his fate would drive him to revolts which no servant
+should witness, but on this evening Dr. Gilbert's tonic held him fairly
+calm while he put up his patent razors.
+
+Waterloo Station shook him into real life. The change for his ticket
+needed concentration, if only to prevent shillings and pence turning
+into minutes at the booking-office; and he spoke quickly to a porter
+about the disposition of his bag. The old 10.8 from Waterloo to the West
+was an all-night caravan that halted, in the interests of the milk
+traffic, at almost every station.
+
+Dr. Gilbert stood by the door of the one composite corridor-coach; an
+older and stouter man behind him. 'So glad you're here!' he cried. 'Let
+me get your ticket.'
+
+'Certainly not,' Conroy answered. 'I got it myself--long ago. My bag's
+in too,' he added proudly.
+
+'I beg your pardon. Miss Henschil's here. I'll introduce you.'
+
+'But--but,' he stammered--'think of the state I'm in. If anything
+happens I shall collapse.'
+
+'Not you. You'd rise to the occasion like a bird. And as for the
+self-control you were talking of the other day'--Gilbert swung him
+round--'look!'
+
+A young man in an ulster over a silk-faced frock-coat stood by the
+carriage window, weeping shamelessly.
+
+'Oh, but that's only drink,' Conroy said. 'I haven't had one of my--my
+things since lunch.'
+
+'Excellent!' said Gilbert. 'I knew I could depend on you. Come along.
+Wait for a minute, Chartres.'
+
+A tall woman, veiled, sat by the far window. She bowed her head as the
+doctor murmured Conroy knew not what. Then he disappeared and the
+inspector came for tickets.
+
+'My maid--next compartment,' she said slowly.
+
+Conroy showed his ticket, but in returning it to the sleeve-pocket of
+his ulster the little silver Najdolene case slipped from his glove and
+fell to the floor. He snatched it up as the moving train flung him
+into his seat.
+
+'How nice!' said the woman. She leisurely lifted her veil, unbottoned
+the first button of her left glove, and pressed out from its palm a
+Najdolene-case.
+
+'Don't!' said Conroy, not realising he had spoken.
+
+'I beg your pardon.' The deep voice was measured, even, and low. Conroy
+knew what made it so.
+
+'I said "don't"! He wouldn't like you to do it!'
+
+'No, he would not.' She held the tube with its ever-presented tabloid
+between finger and thumb. 'But aren't you one of the--ah--"soul-weary"
+too?'
+
+'That's why. Oh, please don't! Not at first. I--I haven't had one since
+morning. You--you'll set me off!'
+
+'You? Are you so far gone as that?'
+
+He nodded, pressing his palms together. The train jolted through
+Vauxhall points, and was welcomed with the clang of empty milk-cans
+for the West.
+
+After long silence she lifted her great eyes, and, with an innocence
+that would have deceived any sound man, asked Conroy to call her maid to
+bring her a forgotten book.
+
+Conroy shook his head. 'No. Our sort can't read. Don't!'
+
+'Were you sent to watch me?' The voice never changed.
+
+'Me? I need a keeper myself much more--_this_ night of all!'
+
+'This night? Have you a night, then? They disbelieved _me_ when I told
+them of mine.' She leaned back and laughed, always slowly. 'Aren't
+doctors stu-upid? They don't know.'
+
+She leaned her elbow on her knee, lifted her veil that had fallen, and,
+chin in hand, stared at him. He looked at her--till his eyes were
+blurred with tears.
+
+'Have I been there, think you?' she said.
+
+'Surely--surely,' Conroy answered, for he had well seen the fear and the
+horror that lived behind the heavy-lidded eyes, the fine tracing on the
+broad forehead, and the guard set about the desirable mouth.
+
+'Then--suppose we have one--just one apiece? I've gone without since
+this afternoon.'
+
+He put up his hand, and would have shouted, but his voice broke.
+
+'Don't! Can't you see that it helps me to help you to keep it off? Don't
+let's both go down together.'
+
+'But I want one. It's a poor heart that never rejoices. Just one. It's
+my night.'
+
+'It's mine--too. My sixty-fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh.' He shut his
+lips firmly against the tide of visualised numbers that threatened to
+carry him along.
+
+'Ah, it's only my thirty-ninth.' She paused as he had done. 'I wonder if
+I shall last into the sixties.... Talk to me or I shall go crazy. You're
+a man. You're the stronger vessel. Tell me when you went to pieces.'
+
+'One, two, three, four, five, six, seven--eight--I beg your pardon.'
+
+'Not in the least. I always pretend I've dropped a stitch of my
+knitting. I count the days till the last day, then the hours, then the
+minutes. Do you?'
+
+'I don't think I've done very much else for the last--' said Conroy,
+shivering, for the night was cold, with a chill he recognised.
+
+'Oh, how comforting to find some one who can talk sense! It's not always
+the same date, is it?'
+
+'What difference would that make?' He unbuttoned his ulster with a jerk.
+'You're a sane woman. Can't you see the wicked--wicked--wicked' (dust
+flew from the padded arm-rest as he struck it) unfairness of it? What
+have I done?'
+
+She laid her large hand on his shoulder very firmly.
+
+'If you begin to think over that,' she said, 'you'll go to pieces and be
+ashamed. Tell me yours, and I'll tell you mine. Only be quiet--be quiet,
+lad, or you'll set me off!' She made shift to soothe him, though her
+chin trembled.
+
+'Well,' said he at last, picking at the arm-rest between them, 'mine's
+nothing much, of course.'
+
+'Don't be a fool! That's for doctors--and mothers.'
+
+'It's Hell,' Conroy muttered. 'It begins on a steamer--on a stifling hot
+night. I come out of my cabin. I pass through the saloon where the
+stewards have rolled up the carpets, and the boards are bare and hot
+and soapy.'
+
+'I've travelled too,' she said.
+
+'Ah! I come on deck. I walk down a covered alleyway. Butcher's meat,
+bananas, oil, that sort of smell.'
+
+Again she nodded.
+
+'It's a lead-coloured steamer, and the sea's lead-coloured. Perfectly
+smooth sea--perfectly still ship, except for the engines running, and
+her waves going off in lines and lines and lines--dull grey. All this
+time I know something's going to happen.'
+
+'I know. Something going to happen,' she whispered.
+
+'Then I hear a thud in the engine-room. Then the noise of machinery
+falling down--like fire-irons--and then two most awful yells. They're
+more like hoots, and I know--I know while I listen--that it means that
+two men have died as they hooted. It was their last breath hooting out
+of them--in most awful pain. Do you understand?'
+
+'I ought to. Go on.'
+
+'That's the first part. Then I hear bare feet running along the
+alleyway. One of the scalded men comes up behind me and says quite
+distinctly, "My friend! All is lost!" Then he taps me on the shoulder
+and I hear him drop down dead.' He panted and wiped his forehead.
+
+'So that is your night?' she said.
+
+'That is my night. It comes every few weeks--so many days after I get
+what I call sentence. Then I begin to count.'
+
+'Get sentence? D'you mean _this_?' She half closed her eyes, drew a
+deep breath, and shuddered. '"Notice" I call it. Sir John thought it was
+all lies.'
+
+She had unpinned her hat and thrown it on the seat opposite, showing the
+immense mass of her black hair, rolled low in the nape of the columnar
+neck and looped over the left ear. But Conroy had no eyes except for her
+grave eyes.
+
+'Listen now!' said she. 'I walk down a road, a white sandy road near the
+sea. There are broken fences on either side, and Men come and look at me
+over them.'
+
+'Just men? Do they speak?'
+
+'They try to. Their faces are all mildewy--eaten away,' and she hid her
+face for an instant with her left hand. 'It's the Faces--the Faces!'
+
+'Yes. Like my two hoots. I know.'
+
+'Ah! But the place itself--the bareness--and the glitter and the salt
+smells, and the wind blowing the sand! The Men run after me and I
+run.... I know what's coming too. One of them touches me.'
+
+'Yes! What comes then? We've both shirked that.'
+
+'One awful shock--not palpitation, but shock, shock, shock!'
+
+'As though your soul were being stopped--as you'd stop a finger-bowl
+humming?' he said.
+
+'Just that,' she answered. 'One's very soul--the soul that one lives
+by--stopped. So!'
+
+She drove her thumb deep into the arm-rest. 'And now,' she whined to
+him, 'now that we've stirred each other up this way, mightn't we have
+just one?'
+
+'No,' said Conroy, shaking. 'Let's hold on. We're past'--he peered out
+of the black windows--'Woking. There's the Necropolis. How long
+till dawn?'
+
+'Oh, cruel long yet. If one dozes for a minute, it catches one.'
+
+'And how d'you find that this'--he tapped the palm of his glove--'helps
+you?'
+
+'It covers up the thing from being too real--if one takes enough--you
+know. Only--only--one loses everything else. I've been no more than a
+bogie-girl for two years. What would you give to be real again? This
+lying's such a nuisance.'
+
+'One must protect oneself--and there's one's mother to think of,' he
+answered.
+
+'True. I hope allowances are made for us somewhere. Our burden--can you
+hear?--our burden is heavy enough.'
+
+She rose, towering into the roof of the carriage. Conroy's ungentle grip
+pulled her back.
+
+'Now _you_ are foolish. Sit down,' said he.
+
+'But the cruelty of it! Can't you see it? Don't you feel it? Let's take
+one now--before I--'
+
+'Sit down!' cried Conroy, and the sweat stood again on his forehead. He
+had fought through a few nights, and had been defeated on more, and he
+knew the rebellion that flares beyond control to exhaustion.
+
+She smoothed her hair and dropped back, but for a while her head and
+throat moved with the sickening motion of a captured wry-neck.
+
+'Once,' she said, spreading out her hands, 'I ripped my counterpane
+from end to end. That takes strength. I had it then. I've little now.
+"All dorn," as my little niece says. And you, lad?'
+
+'"All dorn"! Let me keep your case for you till the morning.'
+
+'But the cold feeling is beginning.'
+
+'Lend it me, then.'
+
+'And the drag down my right side. I shan't be able to move in a minute.'
+
+'I can scarcely lift my arm myself,' said Conroy. 'We're in for it.'
+
+'Then why are you so foolish? You know it'll be easier if we have only
+one--only one apiece.'
+
+She was lifting the case to her mouth. With tremendous effort Conroy
+caught it. The two moved like jointed dolls, and when their hands met it
+was as wood on wood.
+
+'You must--not!' said Conroy. His jaws stiffened, and the cold climbed
+from his feet up.
+
+'Why--must--I--not?' She repeated the words idiotically.
+
+Conroy could only shake his head, while he bore down on the hand and the
+case in it.
+
+Her speech went from her altogether. The wonderful lips rested half over
+the even teeth, the breath was in the nostrils only, the eyes dulled,
+the face set grey, and through the glove the hand struck like ice.
+
+Presently her soul came back and stood behind her eyes--only thing that
+had life in all that place--stood and looked for Conroy's soul. He too
+was fettered in every limb, but somewhere at an immense distance he
+heard his heart going about its work as the engine-room carries on
+through and beneath the all but overwhelming wave. His one hope, he
+knew, was not to lose the eyes that clung to his, because there was an
+Evil abroad which would possess him if he looked aside by a
+hair-breadth.
+
+The rest was darkness through which some distant planet spun while
+cymbals clashed. (Beyond Farnborough the 10.8 rolls out many empty
+milk-cans at every halt.) Then a body came to life with intolerable
+pricklings. Limb by limb, after agonies of terror, that body returned to
+him, steeped in most perfect physical weariness such as follows a long
+day's rowing. He saw the heavy lids droop over her eyes--the watcher
+behind them departed--and, his soul sinking into assured peace,
+Conroy slept.
+
+Light on his eyes and a salt breath roused him without shock. Her hand
+still held his. She slept, forehead down upon it, but the movement of
+his waking waked her too, and she sneezed like a child.
+
+'I--I think it's morning,' said Conroy.
+
+'And nothing has happened! Did you see your Men? I didn't see my Faces.
+Does it mean we've escaped? Did--did you take any after I went to sleep?
+I'll swear I didn't,' she stammered.
+
+'No, there wasn't any need. We've slept through it.'
+
+'No need! Thank God! There was no need! Oh, look!'
+
+The train was running under red cliffs along a sea-wall washed by waves
+that were colourless in the early light. Southward the sun rose mistily
+upon the Channel.
+
+She leaned out of the window and breathed to the bottom of her lungs,
+while the wind wrenched down her dishevelled hair and blew it below
+her waist.
+
+'Well!' she said with splendid eyes. 'Aren't you still waiting for
+something to happen?'
+
+'No. Not till next time. We've been let off,' Conroy answered, breathing
+as deeply as she.
+
+'Then we ought to say our prayers.'
+
+'What nonsense! Some one will see us.'
+
+'We needn't kneel. Stand up and say "Our Father." We _must_!'
+
+It was the first time since childhood that Conroy had prayed. They
+laughed hysterically when a curve threw them against an arm-rest.
+
+'Now for breakfast!' she cried. 'My maid--Nurse Blaber--has the basket
+and things. It'll be ready in twenty minutes. Oh! Look at my hair!' and
+she went out laughing.
+
+Conroy's first discovery, made without fumbling or counting letters on
+taps, was that the London and South Western's allowance of washing-water
+is inadequate. He used every drop, rioting in the cold tingle on neck
+and arms. To shave in a moving train balked him, but the next halt gave
+him a chance, which, to his own surprise, he took. As he stared at
+himself in the mirror he smiled and nodded. There were points about this
+person with the clear, if sunken, eye and the almost uncompressed mouth.
+But when he bore his bag back to his compartment, the weight of it on a
+limp arm humbled that new pride.
+
+'My friend,' he said, half aloud, 'you go into training. You're putty.'
+
+She met him in the spare compartment, where her maid had laid breakfast.
+
+'By Jove!' he said, halting at the doorway, 'I hadn't realised how
+beautiful you were!'
+
+'The same to you, lad. Sit down. I could eat a horse.'
+
+'I shouldn't,' said the maid quietly. 'The less you eat the better.' She
+was a small, freckled woman, with light fluffy hair and pale-blue eyes
+that looked through all veils.
+
+'This is Miss Blaber,' said Miss Henschil. 'He's one of the soul-weary
+too, Nursey.'
+
+'I know it. But when one has just given it up a full meal doesn't agree.
+That's why I've only brought you bread and butter.'
+
+She went out quietly, and Conroy reddened.
+
+'We're still children, you see,' said Miss Henschil. 'But I'm well
+enough to feel some shame of it. D'you take sugar?'
+
+They starved together heroically, and Nurse Blaber was good enough to
+signify approval when she came to clear away.
+
+'Nursey?' Miss Henschil insinuated, and flushed.
+
+'Do you smoke?' said the nurse coolly to Conroy.
+
+'I haven't in years. Now you mention it, I think I'd like a
+cigarette--or something.'
+
+'I used to. D'you think it would keep me quiet?' Miss Henschil said.
+
+'Perhaps. Try these.' The nurse handed them her cigarette-case.
+
+'Don't take anything else,' she commanded, and went away with the
+tea-basket.
+
+'Good!' grunted Conroy, between mouthfuls of tobacco.
+
+'Better than nothing,' said Miss Henschil; but for a while they felt
+ashamed, yet with the comfort of children punished together.
+
+'Now,' she whispered, 'who were you when you were a man?'
+
+Conroy told her, and in return she gave him her history. It delighted
+them both to deal once more in worldly concerns--families, names,
+places, and dates--with a person of understanding.
+
+She came, she said, of Lancashire folk--wealthy cotton-spinners, who
+still kept the broadened _a_ and slurred aspirate of the old stock. She
+lived with an old masterful mother in an opulent world north of
+Lancaster Gate, where people in Society gave parties at a Mecca called
+the Langham Hotel.
+
+She herself had been launched into Society there, and the flowers at the
+ball had cost eighty-seven pounds; but, being reckoned peculiar, she had
+made few friends among her own sex. She had attracted many men, for she
+was a beauty--_the_ beauty, in fact, of Society, she said.
+
+She spoke utterly without shame or reticence, as a life-prisoner tells
+his past to a fellow-prisoner; and Conroy nodded across the smoke-rings.
+
+'Do you remember when you got into the carriage?' she asked. '(Oh, I
+wish I had some knitting!) Did you notice aught, lad?'
+
+Conroy thought back. It was ages since. 'Wasn't there some one outside
+the door--crying?' he asked.
+
+'He's--he's the little man I was engaged to,' she said. 'But I made him
+break it off. I told him 'twas no good. But he won't, yo' see.'
+
+'_That_ fellow? Why, he doesn't come up to your shoulder.'
+
+'That's naught to do with it. I think all the world of him. I'm a
+foolish wench'--her speech wandered as she settled herself cosily, one
+elbow on the arm-rest. 'We'd been engaged--I couldn't help that--and he
+worships the ground I tread on. But it's no use. I'm not responsible,
+you see. His two sisters are against it, though I've the money. They're
+right, but they think it's the dri-ink,' she drawled. 'They're
+Methody--the Skinners. You see, their grandfather that started the
+Patton Mills, he died o' the dri-ink.'
+
+'I see,' said Conroy. The grave face before him under the lifted veil
+was troubled.
+
+'George Skinner.' She breathed it softly. 'I'd make him a good wife, by
+God's gra-ace--if I could. But it's no use. I'm not responsible. But
+he'll not take "No" for an answer. I used to call him "Toots." He's of
+no consequence, yo' see.'
+
+'That's in Dickens,' said Conroy, quite quickly. 'I haven't thought of
+Toots for years. He was at Doctor Blimber's.'
+
+'And so--that's my trouble,' she concluded, ever so slightly wringing
+her hands. 'But I--don't you think--there's hope now?'
+
+'Eh?' said Conroy. 'Oh yes! This is the first time I've turned my corner
+without help. With your help, I should say.'
+
+'It'll come back, though.'
+
+'Then shall we meet it in the same way? Here's my card. Write me your
+train, and we'll go together.'
+
+'Yes. We must do that. But between times--when we want--' She looked at
+her palm, the four fingers working on it. 'It's hard to give 'em up.'
+
+'But think what we have gained already, and let me have the case to
+keep.'
+
+She shook her head, and threw her cigarette out of the window. 'Not
+yet.'
+
+'Then let's lend our cases to Nurse, and we'll get through to-day on
+cigarettes. I'll call her while we feel strong.'
+
+She hesitated, but yielded at last, and Nurse accepted the offerings
+with a smile.
+
+'_You'll_ be all right,' she said to Miss Henschil. 'But if I were
+you'--to Conroy--'I'd take strong exercise.'
+
+When they reached their destination Conroy set himself to obey Nurse
+Blaber. He had no remembrance of that day, except one streak of blue sea
+to his left, gorse-bushes to his right, and, before him, a coast-guard's
+track marked with white-washed stones that he counted up to the far
+thousands. As he returned to the little town he saw Miss Henschil on the
+beach below the cliffs. She kneeled at Nurse Blaber's feet, weeping
+and pleading.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Twenty-five days later a telegram came to Conroy's rooms: '_Notice
+given. Waterloo again. Twenty-fourth.'_ That same evening he was wakened
+by the shudder and the sigh that told him his sentence had gone forth.
+Yet he reflected on his pillow that he had, in spite of lapses, snatched
+something like three weeks of life, which included several rides on a
+horse before breakfast--the hour one most craves Najdolene; five
+consecutive evenings on the river at Hammersmith in a tub where he had
+well stretched the white arms that passing crews mocked at; a game of
+rackets at his club; three dinners, one small dance, and one human
+flirtation with a human woman. More notable still, he had settled his
+month's accounts, only once confusing petty cash with the days of grace
+allowed him. Next morning he rode his hired beast in the park
+victoriously. He saw Miss Henschil on horse-back near Lancaster Gate,
+talking to a young man at the railings.
+
+She wheeled and cantered toward him.
+
+'By Jove! How well you look!' he cried, without salutation. 'I didn't
+know you rode.'
+
+'I used to once,' she replied. 'I'm all soft now.'
+
+They swept off together down the ride.
+
+'Your beast pulls,' he said.
+
+'Wa-ant him to. Gi-gives me something to think of. How've you been?'
+she panted. 'I wish chemists' shops hadn't red lights.'
+
+'Have you slipped out and bought some, then?'
+
+'You don't know Nursey. Eh, but it's good to be on a horse again! This
+chap cost me two hundred.'
+
+'Then you've been swindled,' said Conroy.
+
+'I know it, but it's no odds. I must go back to Toots and send him away.
+He's neglecting his work for me.'
+
+She swung her heavy-topped animal on his none too sound hocks.
+''Sentence come, lad?'
+
+'Yes. But I'm not minding it so much this time.'
+
+'Waterloo, then--and God help us!' She thundered back to the little
+frock-coated figure that waited faithfully near the gate.
+
+Conroy felt the spring sun on his shoulders and trotted home. That
+evening he went out with a man in a pair oar, and was rowed to a
+standstill. But the other man owned he could not have kept the pace five
+minutes longer.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+He carried his bag all down Number 3 platform at Waterloo, and hove it
+with one hand into the rack.
+
+'Well done!' said Nurse Blaber, in the corridor. 'We've improved too.'
+
+Dr. Gilbert and an older man came out of the next compartment.
+
+'Hallo!' said Gilbert. 'Why haven't you been to see me, Mr. Conroy? Come
+under the lamp. Take off your hat. No--no. Sit, you young giant. Ve-ry
+good. Look here a minute, Johnnie.'
+
+A little, round-bellied, hawk-faced person glared at him.
+
+'Gilbert was right about the beauty of the beast,' he muttered. 'D'you
+keep it in your glove now?' he went on, and punched Conroy in the
+short ribs.
+
+'No,' said Conroy meekly, but without coughing. 'Nowhere--on my honour!
+I've chucked it for good.'
+
+'Wait till you are a sound man before you say _that_, Mr. Conroy.' Sir
+John Chartres stumped out, saying to Gilbert in the corridor, 'It's all
+very fine, but the question is shall I or we "Sir Pandarus of Troy
+become," eh? We're bound to think of the children.'
+
+'Have you been vetted?' said Miss Henschil, a few minutes after the
+train started. 'May I sit with you? I--I don't trust myself yet. I can't
+give up as easily as you can, seemingly.'
+
+'Can't you? I never saw any one so improved in a month.'
+
+'Look here!' She reached across to the rack, single-handed lifted
+Conroy's bag, and held it at arm's length. 'I counted ten slowly. And I
+didn't think of hours or minutes,' she boasted.
+
+'Don't remind me,' he cried.
+
+'Ah! Now I've reminded myself. I wish I hadn't. Do you think it'll be
+easier for us to-night?'
+
+'Oh, don't.' The smell of the carriage had brought back all his last
+trip to him, and Conroy moved uneasily.
+
+'I'm sorry. I've brought some games,' she went on. 'Draughts and
+cards--but they all mean counting. I wish I'd brought chess, but I can't
+play chess. What can we do? Talk about something.'
+
+'Well, how's Toots, to begin with?' said Conroy.
+
+'Why? Did you see him on the platform?'
+
+'No. Was he there? I didn't notice.'
+
+'Oh yes. He doesn't understand. He's desperately jealous. I told him it
+doesn't matter. Will you please let me hold your hand? I believe I'm
+beginning to get the chill.'
+
+'Toots ought to envy me,' said Conroy.
+
+'He does. He paid you a high compliment the other night. He's taken to
+calling again--in spite of all they say.'
+
+Conroy inclined his head. He felt cold, and knew surely he would be
+colder.
+
+'He said,' she yawned. '(Beg your pardon.) He said he couldn't see how I
+could help falling in love with a man like you; and he called himself a
+damned little rat, and he beat his head on the piano last night.'
+
+'The piano? You play, then?'
+
+'Only to him. He thinks the world of my accomplishments. Then I told him
+I wouldn't have you if you were the last man on earth instead of only
+the best-looking--not with a million in each stocking.'
+
+'No, not with a million in each stocking,' said Conroy vehemently.
+'Isn't that odd?'
+
+'I suppose so--to any one who doesn't know. Well, where was I? Oh,
+George as good as told me I was deceiving him, and he wanted to go away
+without saying good-night. He hates standing a-tiptoe, but he must if I
+won't sit down.'
+
+Conroy would have smiled, but the chill that foreran the coming of the
+Lier-in-Wait was upon him, and his hand closed warningly on hers.
+
+'And--and so--' she was trying to say, when her hour also overtook her,
+leaving alive only the fear-dilated eyes that turned to Conroy. Hand
+froze on hand and the body with it as they waited for the horror in the
+blackness that heralded it. Yet through the worst Conroy saw, at an
+uncountable distance, one minute glint of light in his night. Thither
+would he go and escape his fear; and behold, that light was the light in
+the watch-tower of her eyes, where her locked soul signalled to his
+soul: 'Look at me!'
+
+In time, from him and from her, the Thing sheered aside, that each soul
+might step down and resume its own concerns. He thought confusedly of
+people on the skirts of a thunderstorm, withdrawing from windows where
+the torn night is, to their known and furnished beds. Then he dozed,
+till in some drowsy turn his hand fell from her warmed hand.
+
+'That's all. The Faces haven't come,' he heard her say. 'All--thank God!
+I don't feel even I need what Nursey promised me. Do you?'
+
+'No.' He rubbed his eyes. 'But don't make too sure.'
+
+'Certainly not. We shall have to try again next month. I'm afraid it
+will be an awful nuisance for you.'
+
+'Not to me, I assure you,' said Conroy, and they leaned back and
+laughed at the flatness of the words, after the hells through which they
+had just risen.
+
+'And now,' she said, strict eyes on Conroy, '_why_ wouldn't you take
+me--not with a million in each stocking?'
+
+'I don't know. That's what I've been puzzling over.'
+
+'So have I. We're as handsome a couple as I've ever seen. Are you well
+off, lad?'
+
+'They call me so,' said Conroy, smiling.
+
+'That's North country.' She laughed again. Setting aside my good looks
+and yours, I've four thousand a year of my own, and the rents should
+make it six. That's a match some old cats would lap tea all night to
+fettle up.'
+
+'It is. Lucky Toots!' said Conroy.
+
+'Ay,' she answered, 'he'll be the luckiest lad in London if I win
+through. Who's yours?'
+
+'No--no one, dear. I've been in Hell for years. I only want to get out
+and be alive and--so on. Isn't that reason enough?'
+
+'Maybe, for a man. But I never minded things much till George came. I
+was all stu-upid like.'
+
+'So was I, but now I think I can live. It ought to be less next month,
+oughtn't it?' he said.
+
+'I hope so. Ye-es. There's nothing much for a maid except to be married,
+and I ask no more. Whoever yours is, when you've found her, she shall
+have a wedding present from Mrs. George Skinner that--'
+
+'But she wouldn't understand it any more than Toots.'
+
+'He doesn't matter--except to me. I can't keep my eyes open, thank God!
+Good-night, lad.'
+
+Conroy followed her with his eyes. Beauty there was, grace there was,
+strength, and enough of the rest to drive better men than George Skinner
+to beat their heads on piano-tops--but for the new-found life of him
+Conroy could not feel one flutter of instinct or emotion that turned to
+herward. He put up his feet and fell asleep, dreaming of a joyous,
+normal world recovered--with interest on arrears. There were many things
+in it, but no one face of any one woman.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Thrice afterward they took the same train, and each time their trouble
+shrank and weakened. Miss Henschil talked of Toots, his multiplied
+calls, the things he had said to his sisters, the much worse things his
+sisters had replied; of the late (he seemed very dead to them) M.
+Najdol's gifts for the soul-weary; of shopping, of house rents, and the
+cost of really artistic furniture and linen.
+
+Conroy explained the exercises in which he delighted--mighty labours of
+play undertaken against other mighty men, till he sweated and, having
+bathed, slept. He had visited his mother, too, in Hereford, and he
+talked something of her and of the home-life, which his body, cut out of
+all clean life for five years, innocently and deeply enjoyed. Nurse
+Blaber was a little interested in Conroy's mother, but, as a rule, she
+smoked her cigarette and read her paper-backed novels in her own
+compartment.
+
+On their last trip she volunteered to sit with them, and buried herself
+in _The Cloister and the Hearth_ while they whispered together. On that
+occasion (it was near Salisbury) at two in the morning, when the
+Lier-in-Wait brushed them with his wing, it meant no more than that they
+should cease talk for the instant, and for the instant hold hands, as
+even utter strangers on the deep may do when their ship rolls underfoot.
+
+'But still,' said Nurse Blaber, not looking up, 'I think your Mr.
+Skinner might feel jealous of all this.'
+
+'It would be difficult to explain,' said Conroy.
+
+'Then you'd better not be at my wedding,' Miss Henschil laughed.
+
+'After all we've gone through, too. But I suppose you ought to leave me
+out. Is the day fixed?' he cried.
+
+'Twenty-second of September--in spite of both his sisters. I can risk it
+now.' Her face was glorious as she flushed.
+
+'My dear chap!' He shook hands unreservedly, and she gave back his grip
+without flinching. 'I can't tell you how pleased I am!'
+
+'Gracious Heavens!' said Nurse Blaber, in a new voice. 'Oh, I beg your
+pardon. I forgot I wasn't paid to be surprised.'
+
+'What at? Oh, I see!' Miss Henschil explained to Conroy. 'She expected
+you were going to kiss me, or I was going to kiss you, or something.'
+
+'After all you've gone through, as Mr. Conroy said,'
+
+'But I couldn't, could you?' said Miss Henschil, with a disgust as frank
+as that on Conroy's face. 'It would be horrible--horrible. And yet, of
+course, you're wonderfully handsome. How d'you account for it, Nursey?'
+
+Nurse Blaber shook her head. 'I was hired to cure you of a habit, dear.
+When you're cured I shall go on to the next case--that senile-decay one
+at Bourne-mouth I told you about.'
+
+'And I shall be left alone with George! But suppose it isn't cured,'
+said Miss Henschil of a sudden. Suppose it comes back again. What can I
+do? I can't send for _him_ in this way when I'm a married woman!' She
+pointed like an infant.
+
+'I'd come, of course,' Conroy answered. 'But, seriously, that is a
+consideration.'
+
+They looked at each other, alarmed and anxious, and then toward Nurse
+Blaber, who closed her book, marked the place, and turned to face them.
+
+'Have you ever talked to your mother as you have to me?' she said.
+
+'No. I might have spoken to dad--but mother's different. What d'you
+mean?'
+
+'And you've never talked to your mother either, Mr. Conroy?'
+
+'Not till I took Najdolene. Then I told her it was my heart. There's no
+need to say anything, now that I'm practically over it, is there?'
+
+'Not if it doesn't come back, but--' She beckoned with a stumpy,
+triumphant linger that drew their heads close together. 'You know I
+always go in and read a chapter to mother at tea, child.'
+
+'I know you do. You're an angel,' Miss Henschil patted the blue
+shoulder next her. 'Mother's Church of England now,' she explained. 'But
+she'll have her Bible with her pikelets at tea every night like the
+Skinners.'
+
+'It was Naaman and Gehazi last Tuesday that gave me a clue. I said I'd
+never seen a case of leprosy, and your mother said she'd seen too many.'
+
+'Where? She never told me,' Miss Henschil began.
+
+'A few months before you were born--on her trip to Australia--at Mola or
+Molo something or other. It took me three evenings to get it all out.'
+
+'Ay--mother's suspicious of questions,' said Miss Henschil to Conroy.
+'She'll lock the door of every room she's in, if it's but for five
+minutes. She was a Tackberry from Jarrow way, yo' see.'
+
+'She described your men to the life--men with faces all eaten away,
+staring at her over the fence of a lepers' hospital in this Molo Island.
+They begged from her, and she ran, she told me, all down the street,
+back to the pier. One touched her and she nearly fainted. She's ashamed
+of that still.'
+
+'My men? The sand and the fences?' Miss Henschil muttered.
+
+'Yes. You know how tidy she is and how she hates wind. She remembered
+that the fences were broken--she remembered the wind blowing.
+Sand--sun--salt wind--fences--faces--I got it all out of her, bit by
+bit. You don't know what I know! And it all happened three or four
+months before you were born. There!' Nurse Blaber slapped her knee with
+her little hand triumphantly.
+
+'Would that account for it?' Miss Henschil shook from head to foot.
+
+'Absolutely. I don't care who you ask! You never imagined the thing. It
+was _laid_ on you. It happened on earth to _you_! Quick, Mr. Conroy,
+she's too heavy for me! I'll get the flask.'
+
+Miss Henschil leaned forward and collapsed, as Conroy told her
+afterwards, like a factory chimney. She came out of her swoon with teeth
+that chattered on the cup.
+
+'No--no,' she said, gulping. 'It's not hysterics. Yo' see I've no call
+to hev 'em any more. No call--no reason whatever. God be praised! Can't
+yo' _feel_ I'm a right woman now?'
+
+'Stop hugging me!' said Nurse Blaber. 'You don't know your strength.
+Finish the brandy and water. It's perfectly reasonable, and I'll lay
+long odds Mr. Conroy's case is something of the same. I've been
+thinking--'
+
+'I wonder--' said Conroy, and pushed the girl back as she swayed again.
+
+Nurse Blaber smoothed her pale hair. 'Yes. Your trouble, or something
+like it, happened somewhere on earth or sea to the mother who bore you.
+Ask her, child. Ask her and be done with it once for all.'
+
+'I will,' said Conroy.... 'There ought to be--' He opened his bag and
+hunted breathlessly.
+
+'Bless you! Oh, God bless you, Nursey!' Miss Henschil was sobbing. 'You
+don't know what this means to me. It takes it all off--from the
+beginning.'
+
+'But doesn't it make any difference to you now?' the nurse asked
+curiously. 'Now that you're rightfully a woman?'
+
+Conroy, busy with his bag, had not heard. Miss Henschil stared across,
+and her beauty, freed from the shadow of any fear, blazed up within her.
+'I see what you mean,' she said. 'But it hasn't changed anything. I want
+Toots. _He_ has never been out of his mind in his life--except over
+silly me.'
+
+'It's all right,' said Conroy, stooping under the lamp,
+Bradshaw in hand. 'If I change at Templecombe--for Bristol
+(Bristol--Hereford--yes)--I can be with mother for breakfast in her room
+and find out.'
+
+'Quick, then,' said Nurse Blaber. 'We've passed Gillingham quite a
+while. You'd better take some of our sandwiches.' She went out to get
+them. Conroy and Miss Henschil would have danced, but there is no room
+for giants in a South-Western compartment.
+
+'Good-bye, good luck, lad. Eh, but you've changed already--like me. Send
+a wire to our hotel as soon as you're sure,' said Miss Henschil. 'What
+should I have done without you?'
+
+'Or I?' said Conroy. 'But it's Nurse that's saving us really.'
+
+'Then thank her,' said Miss Henschil, looking straight at him. 'Yes, I
+would. She'd like it.'
+
+When Nurse Blaber came back after the parting at Templecombe her nose
+and her eyelids were red, but, for all that, her face reflected a great
+light even while she sniffed over _The Cloister and the Hearth_.
+
+Miss Henschil, deep in a house furnisher's catalogue, did not speak for
+twenty minutes. Then she said, between adding totals of best, guest, and
+servants' sheets, 'But why should our times have been the same, Nursey?'
+
+'Because a child is born somewhere every second of the clock,' Nurse
+Blaber answered. 'And besides that, you probably set each other off by
+talking and thinking about it. You shouldn't, you know.'
+
+'Ay, but you've never been in Hell,' said Miss Henschil.
+
+The telegram handed in at Hereford at 12.46 and delivered to Miss
+Henschil on the beach of a certain village at 2.7 ran thus:
+
+'"_Absolutely confirmed. She says she remembers hearing noise of
+accident in engine-room returning from India eighty-five._"'
+
+'He means the year, not the thermometer,' said Nurse Blaber, throwing
+pebbles at the cold sea.
+
+'"_And two men scalded thus explaining my hoots._" (The idea of telling
+me that!) "_Subsequently silly clergyman passenger ran up behind her
+calling for joke, 'Friend, all is lost,' thus accounting very words._"'
+
+Nurse Blaber purred audibly.
+
+'"_She says only remembers being upset minute or two. Unspeakable
+relief. Best love Nursey, who is jewel. Get out of her what she would
+like best._" Oh, I oughtn't to have read that,' said Miss Henschil.
+
+'It doesn't matter. I don't want anything,' said Nurse Blaber, 'and if I
+did I shouldn't get it.'
+
+
+
+
+     'HELEN ALL ALONE'
+
+     There was darkness under Heaven
+       For an hour's space--
+     Darkness that we knew was given
+       Us for special grace.
+     Sun and moon and stars were hid,
+       God had left His Throne,
+     When Helen came to me, she did,
+       Helen all alone!
+
+     Side by side (because our fate
+       Damned us ere our birth)
+     We stole out of Limbo Gate
+       Looking for the Earth.
+     Hand in pulling hand amid
+       Fear no dreams have known,
+     Helen ran with me, she did,
+       Helen all alone!
+
+     When the Horror passing speech
+       Hunted us along,
+     Each laid hold on each, and each
+       Found the other strong.
+     In the teeth of things forbid
+       And Reason overthrown,
+     Helen stood by me, she did,
+       Helen all alone!
+
+     When, at last, we heard the Fires
+       Dull and die away,
+     When, at last, our linked desires
+       Dragged us up to day,
+     When, at last, our souls were rid
+       Of what that Night had shown,
+     Helen passed from me, she did,
+       Helen all alone!
+
+     Let her go and find a mate,
+       As I will find a bride,
+     Knowing naught of Limbo Gate
+       Or Who are penned inside.
+     There is knowledge God forbid
+       More than one should own.
+     So Helen went from me, she did,
+     Oh my soul, be glad she did!
+       Helen all alone!
+
+
+
+The Honours of War
+
+(1911)
+
+A hooded motor had followed mine from the Guildford Road up the drive to
+The Infant's ancestral hall, and had turned off to the stables.
+
+'We're having a quiet evening together. Stalky's upstairs changing.
+Dinner's at 7.15 sharp, because we're hungry. His room's next to yours,'
+said The Infant, nursing a cobwebbed bottle of Burgundy.
+
+Then I found Lieutenant-Colonel A.L. Corkran, I.A., who borrowed a
+collar-stud and told me about the East and his Sikh regiment.
+
+'And are your subalterns as good as ever?' I asked.
+
+'Amazin'--simply amazin'! All I've got to do is to find 'em jobs. They
+keep touchin' their caps to me and askin' for more work. 'Come at me
+with their tongues hangin' out. _I_ used to run the other way at
+their age.'
+
+'And when they err?' said I. 'I suppose they do sometimes?'
+
+'Then they run to me again to weep with remorse over their virgin
+peccadilloes. I never cuddled my Colonel when I was in trouble.
+Lambs--positive lambs!'
+
+'And what do you say to 'em?'
+
+'Talk to 'em like a papa. Tell 'em how I can't understand it, an' how
+shocked I am, and how grieved their parents'll be; and throw in a
+little about the Army Regulations and the Ten Commandments. 'Makes one
+feel rather a sweep when one thinks of what one used to do at their age.
+D'you remember--'
+
+We remembered together till close on seven o'clock. As we went out into
+the gallery that runs round the big hall, we saw The Infant, below,
+talking to two deferential well-set-up lads whom I had known, on and
+off, in the holidays, any time for the last ten years. One of them had a
+bruised cheek, and the other a weeping left eye.
+
+'Yes, that's the style,' said Stalky below his breath. 'They're brought
+up on lemon-squash and mobilisation text-books. I say, the girls we knew
+must have been much better than they pretended they were; for I'll swear
+it isn't the fathers.'
+
+'But why on earth did you do it?' The Infant was shouting. 'You know
+what it means nowadays.'
+
+'Well, sir,' said Bobby Trivett, the taller of the two, 'Wontner talks
+too much, for one thing. He didn't join till he was twenty-three, and,
+besides that, he used to lecture on tactics in the ante-room. He said
+Clausewitz was the only tactician, and he illustrated his theories with
+cigar-ends. He was that sort of chap, sir.'
+
+'And he didn't much care whose cigar-ends they were,' said Eames, who
+was shorter and pinker.
+
+'And then he _would_ talk about the 'Varsity,' said Bobby. 'He got a
+degree there. And he told us we weren't intellectual. He told the
+Adjutant so, sir. He was just that kind of chap, sir, if you
+understand.'
+
+Stalky and I backed behind a tall Japanese jar of chrysanthemums and
+listened more intently.
+
+'Was all the Mess in it, or only you two?' The Infant demanded, chewing
+his moustache.
+
+'The Adjutant went to bed, of course, sir, and the Senior Subaltern said
+he wasn't going to risk his commission--they're awfully down on ragging
+nowadays in the Service--but the rest of us--er--attended to him,'
+said Bobby.
+
+'Much?' The Infant asked. The boys smiled deprecatingly.
+
+'Not in the ante-room, sir,' said Eames. 'Then he called us silly
+children, and went to bed, and we sat up discussin', and I suppose we
+got a bit above ourselves, and we--er--'
+
+'Went to his quarters and drew him?' The Infant suggested.
+
+'Well, we only asked him to get out of bed, and we put his helmet and
+sword-belt on for him, and we sung him bits out of the Blue Fairy
+Book--the cram-book on Army organisation. Oh yes, and then we asked him
+to drink old Clausewitz's health, as a brother-tactician, in milk-punch
+and Worcester sauce, and so on. We had to help him a little there. He
+bites. There wasn't much else that time; but, you know, the War Office
+is severe on ragging these days.' Bobby stopped with a lopsided smile.
+
+'And then,' Eames went on, 'then Wontner said we'd done several pounds'
+worth of damage to his furniture.'
+
+'Oh,' said The Infant, 'he's that kind of man, is he? Does he brush his
+teeth?'
+
+'Oh yes, he's quite clean all over!' said Trivett; 'but his father's a
+wealthy barrister.'
+
+'Solicitor,' Eames corrected, 'and so this Mister Wontner is out for our
+blood. He's going to make a first-class row about it--appeal to the War
+Office--court of inquiry--spicy bits in the papers, and songs in the
+music-halls. He told us so.'
+
+'That's the sort of chap he is,' said Trivett. 'And that means old
+Dhurrah-bags, our Colonel, 'll be put on half-pay, same as that case in
+the Scarifungers' Mess; and our Adjutant'll have to exchange, like it
+was with that fellow in the 73rd Dragoons, and there'll be misery all
+round. He means making it too hot for us, and his papa'll back him.'
+
+'Yes, that's all very fine,' said The Infant; 'but I left the Service
+about the time you were born, Bobby. What's it got to do with me?'
+
+'Father told me I was always to go to you when I was in trouble, and
+you've been awfully good to me since he ...'
+
+'Better stay to dinner.' The Infant mopped his forehead.
+
+'Thank you very much, but the fact is--' Trivett halted.
+
+'This afternoon, about four, to be exact--' Eames broke in.
+
+'We went over to Wontner's quarters to talk things over. The row only
+happened last night, and we found him writing letters as hard as he
+could to his father--getting up his case for the War Office, you know.
+He read us some of 'em, but I'm not a good judge of style. We tried to
+ride him off quietly--apologies and so forth--but it was the milk-punch
+and mayonnaise that defeated us.'
+
+'Yes, he wasn't taking anything except pure revenge,' said Eames.
+
+'He said he'd make an example of the regiment, and he was particularly
+glad that he'd landed our Colonel. He told us so. Old Dhurrah-bags don't
+sympathise with Wontner's tactical lectures. He says Wontner ought to
+learn manners first, but we thought--' Trivett turned to Eames, who was
+less a son of the house than himself, Eames's father being still alive.
+
+'Then,' Eames went on, 'he became rather noisome, and we thought we
+might as well impound the correspondence'--he wrinkled his swelled left
+eye--'and after that, we got him to take a seat in my car.'
+
+'He was in a sack, you know,' Trivett explained. 'He wouldn't go any
+other way. But we didn't hurt him.'
+
+'Oh no! His head's sticking out quite clear, and'--Eames rushed the
+fence--'we've put him in your garage--er _pendente lite_.'
+
+'My garage!' Infant's voice nearly broke with horror.
+
+'Well, father always told me if I was in trouble, Uncle George--'
+
+Bobby's sentence died away as The Infant collapsed on a divan and said
+no more than, 'Your commissions!' There was a long, long silence.
+
+'What price your latter-day lime-juice subaltern?' I whispered to
+Stalky behind my hand. His nostrils expanded, and he drummed on the edge
+of the Japanese jar with his knuckles.
+
+'Confound your father, Bobby!' The Infant groaned. 'Raggin's a criminal
+offence these days. It isn't as if--'
+
+'Come on,' said Stalky. 'That was my old Line battalion in Egypt. They
+nearly slung old Dhurrah-bags and me out of the Service in '85 for
+ragging.' He descended the stairs and The Infant rolled appealing
+eyes at him.
+
+'I heard what you youngsters have confessed,' he began; and in his
+orderly-room voice, which is almost as musical as his singing one, he
+tongue-lashed those lads in such sort as was a privilege and a
+revelation to listen to. Till then they had known him almost as a
+relative--we were all brevet, deputy, or acting uncles to The Infant's
+friends' brood--a sympathetic elder brother, sound on finance. They had
+never met Colonel A.L. Corkran in the Chair of Justice. And while he
+flayed and rent and blistered, and wiped the floor with them, and while
+they looked for hiding-places and found none on that floor, I remembered
+(1) the up-ending of 'Dolly' Macshane at Dalhousie, which came
+perilously near a court-martial on Second-Lieutenant Corkran; (2) the
+burning of Captain Parmilee's mosquito-curtains on a hot Indian dawn,
+when the captain slept in his garden, and Lieutenant Corkran, smoking,
+rode by after a successful whist night at the club; (3) the
+introduction of an ekka pony, with ekka attached, into a brother
+captain's tent on a frosty night in Peshawur, and the removal of tent,
+pole, cot, and captain all wrapped in chilly canvas; (4) the bath that
+was given to Elliot-Hacker on his own verandah--his lady-love saw it and
+broke off the engagement, which was what the Mess intended, she being an
+Eurasian--and the powdering all over of Elliot-Hacker with flour and
+turmeric from the bazaar.
+
+When he took breath I realised how only Satan can rebuke sin. The good
+don't know enough.
+
+'Now,' said Stalky, 'get out! No, not out of the house. Go to your
+rooms.'
+
+'I'll send your dinner, Bobby,' said The Infant. 'Ipps!'
+
+Nothing had ever been known to astonish Ipps, the butler. He entered and
+withdrew with his charges. After all, he had suffered from Bobby since
+Bobby's twelfth year.
+
+'They've done everything they could, short of murder,' said The Infant.
+'You know what this'll mean for the regiment. It isn't as if we were
+dealing with Sahibs nowadays.'
+
+'Quite so.' Stalky turned on me. 'Go and release the bagman,' he said.
+
+''Tisn't my garage,' I pleaded. 'I'm company. Besides, he'll probably
+slay me. He's been in the sack for hours.'
+
+'Look here,' Stalky thundered--the years had fallen from us both--'is
+your--am I commandin' or are you? We've got to pull this thing off
+somehow or other. Cut over to the garage, make much of him, and bring
+him over. He's dining with us. Be quick, you dithering ass!'
+
+I was quick enough; but as I ran through the shrubbery I wondered how
+one extricates the subaltern of the present day from a sack without
+hurting his feelings. Anciently, one slit the end open, taking off his
+boots first, and then fled.
+
+Imagine a sumptuously-equipped garage, half-filled by The Infant's
+cobalt-blue, grey-corded silk limousine and a mud-splashed, cheap,
+hooded four-seater. In the back seat of this last, conceive a fiery
+chestnut head emerging from a long oat-sack; an implacable white face,
+with blazing eyes and jaws that worked ceaselessly at the loop of the
+string that was drawn round its neck. The effect, under the electrics,
+was that of a demon caterpillar wrathfully spinning its own cocoon.
+
+'Good evening!' I said genially. 'Let me help you out of that.' The head
+glared. 'We've got 'em,' I went on. 'They came to quite the wrong shop
+for this sort of game--quite the wrong shop.'
+
+'Game!' said the head. 'We'll see about that. Let me out.'
+
+It was not a promising voice for one so young, and, as usual, I had no
+knife.
+
+'You've chewed the string so I can't find the knot,' I said as I worked
+with trembling fingers at the cater-pillar's throat. Something untied
+itself, and Mr. Wontner wriggled out, collarless, tieless, his coat
+split half down his back, his waistcoat unbuttoned, his watch-chain
+snapped, his trousers rucked well above the knees.
+
+'Where,' he said grimly, as he pulled them down, 'are Master Trivett and
+Master Eames?'
+
+'Both arrested, of course,' I replied. 'Sir George'--I gave The Infant's
+full title as a baronet--'is a Justice of the Peace. He'd be very
+pleased if you dined with us. There's a room ready for you.' I picked
+up the sack.
+
+'D'you know,' said Mr. Wontner through his teeth--but the car's bonnet
+was between us, 'that this looks to me like--I won't say conspiracy
+_yet_, but uncommonly like a confederacy.'
+
+When injured souls begin to distinguish and qualify, danger is over. So
+I grew bold.
+
+''Sorry you take it that way,' I said. 'You come here in trouble--'
+
+'My good fool,' he interrupted, with a half-hysterical snort, 'let me
+assure you that the trouble will recoil on the other men!'
+
+'As you please,' I went on. 'Anyhow, the chaps who got you into trouble
+are arrested, and the magistrate who arrested 'em asks you to dinner.
+Shall I tell him you're walking back to Aldershot?'
+
+He picked some fluff off his waistcoat.
+
+'I'm in no position to dictate terms yet,' he said. 'That will come
+later. I must probe into this a little further. In the meantime, I
+accept your invitation without prejudice--if you understand what
+that means.'
+
+I understood and began to be happy again. Sub-alterns without
+prejudices were quite new to me. 'All right,' I replied; 'if you'll go
+up to the house, I'll turn out the lights.'
+
+He walked off stiffly, while I searched the sack and the car for the
+impounded correspondence that Bobby had talked of. I found nothing
+except, as the police reports say, the trace of a struggle. He had
+kicked half the varnish off the back of the front seat, and had bitten
+the leather padding where he could reach it. Evidently a purposeful and
+hard-mouthed young gentleman.
+
+'Well done!' said Stalky at the door. 'So he didn't slay you. Stop
+laughing. He's talking to The Infant now about depositions. Look here,
+you're nearest his size. Cut up to your rooms and give Ipps your dinner
+things and a clean shirt for him.'
+
+'But I haven't got another suit,' I said.
+
+'You! I'm not thinking of you! We've got to conciliate _him_. He's in
+filthy rags and a filthy temper, and he won't feel decent till he's
+dressed. You're the sacrifice. Be quick! And clean socks, remember!'
+
+Once more I trotted up to my room, changed into unseasonable unbrushed
+grey tweeds, put studs into a clean shirt, dug out fresh socks, handed
+the whole garniture over to Ipps, and returned to the hall just in time
+to hear Stalky say, 'I'm a stockbroker, but I have the honour to hold
+His Majesty's commission in a Territorial battalion.' Then I felt as
+though I might be beginning to be repaid.
+
+'I have a very high opinion of the Territorials myself,' said Mr.
+Wontner above a glass of sherry. (Infant never lets us put bitters into
+anything above twenty years old.) 'But if you had any experience of the
+Service, you would find that the Average Army Man--'
+
+Here The Infant suggested changing, and Ipps, before whom no human
+passion can assert itself, led Mr. Wontner away.
+
+'Why the devil did you tell him I was on the Bench?' said Infant
+wrathfully to me. 'You know I ain't now. Why didn't he stay in his
+father's office? He's a raging blight!'
+
+'Not a bit of it,' said Stalky cheerfully. 'He's a little shaken and
+excited. Probably Beetle annoyed him in the garage, but we must overlook
+that. We've contained him so far, and I'm going to nibble round his
+outposts at dinner. All you've got to do, Infant, is to remember you're
+a gentleman in your own house. Don't hop! You'll find it pretty
+difficult before dinner's over. I don't want to hear anything at all
+from you, Beetle.'
+
+'But I'm just beginning to like him,' I said. 'Do let me play!'
+
+'Not till I ask you. You'll overdo it. Poor old Dhurrah-bags! A scandal
+'ud break him up!'
+
+'But as long as a regiment has no say as to who joins it, it's bound to
+rag,' Infant began. 'Why--why, they varnished me when I joined!' He
+squirmed at the thought of it.
+
+'Don't be owls! We ain't discussing principles! We've got to save the
+court of inquiry if we can,' said Stalky.
+
+Five minutes later--at 7.45 to be precise--we four sat down to such a
+dinner as, I hold, only The Infant's cook can produce, with wines worthy
+of pontifical banquets. A man in the extremity of rage and injured
+dignity is precisely like a typhoid patient. He asks no questions,
+accepts what is put before him, and babbles in one key--very often of
+trifles. But food and drink are the very best of drugs. I think it was
+Heidsieck Dry Monopole '92--Stalky as usual stuck to Burgundy--that
+began to unlock Mr. Wontner's heart behind my shirt-front. Me he snubbed
+throughout, after the Oxford manner, because I had seen him in the sack,
+and he did not intend me to presume; but to Stalky and The Infant, while
+I admired the set of my dinner-jacket across his shoulders, he made his
+plans of revenge very clear indeed. He had even sketched out some of the
+paragraphs that were to appear in the papers, and if Stalky had allowed
+me to speak, I would have told him that they were rather neatly phrased.
+
+'You ought to be able to get whackin' damages out of 'em, into the
+bargain,' said Stalky, after Mr. Wontner had outlined his
+position legally.
+
+'My de-ah sir,' Mr. Wontner applied himself to his glass, 'it isn't a
+matter that gentlemen usually discuss, but, I assure you, we
+Wontners'--he waved a well-kept hand--'do not stand in any need of
+filthy lucre.' In the next three minutes, we learned exactly what his
+father was worth, which, as he pointed out, was a trifle no man of the
+world dwelt on. Stalky envied aloud, and I delivered my first kick at
+The Infant's ankle. Thence we drifted to education, and the Average Army
+Man, and the desolating vacuity--I remember these words--of Army
+Society, notably among its womenkind. It appeared there was some sort of
+narrow convention in the Army against mentioning a woman's name at Mess.
+We were much surprised at this--Stalky would not let me express my
+surprise--but we took it from Mr. Wontner, who said we might, that it
+was so. Next he touched on Colonels of the old school, and their
+cognisance of tactics. Not that he himself pretended to any skill in
+tactics, but after three years at the 'Varsity--none of us had had a
+'Varsity education--a man insensibly contracted the habit of clear
+thinking. At least, he could automatically co-ordinate his ideas, and
+the jealousy of these muddle-headed Colonels was inconceivable. We would
+understand that it was his duty to force on the retirement of his
+Colonel, who had been in the conspiracy against him; to make his
+Adjutant resign or exchange; and to give the half-dozen childish
+subalterns who had vexed his dignity a chance to retrieve themselves in
+other corps--West African ones, he hoped. For himself, after the case
+was decided, he proposed to go on living in the regiment, just to
+prove--for he bore no malice--that times had changed, _nosque mutamur in
+illis_--if we knew what that meant. Infant had curled his legs out of
+reach, so I was quite free to return thanks yet once more to Allah for
+the diversity of His creatures in His adorable world.
+
+And so, by way of an eighty-year-old liqueur brandy, to tactics and the
+great General Clausewitz, unknown to the Average Army Man. Here The
+Infant, at a whisper from Ipps--whose face had darkened like a mulberry
+while he waited--excused himself and went away, but Stalky, Colonel of
+Territorials, wanted some tips on tactics. He got them unbrokenly for
+ten minutes--Wontner and Clausewitz mixed, but Wontner in a film of
+priceless cognac distinctly on top. When The Infant came back, he
+renewed his clear-spoken demand that Infant should take his depositions.
+I supposed this to be a family trait of the Wontners, whom I had been
+visualising for some time past even to the third generation.
+
+'But, hang it all, they're both asleep!' said Infant, scowling at me.
+'Ipps let 'em have the '81 port.'
+
+'Asleep!' said Stalky, rising at once. 'I don't see that makes any
+difference. As a matter of form, you'd better identify them. I'll show
+you the way.'
+
+We followed up the white stone side-staircase that leads to the
+bachelors' wing. Mr. Wontner seemed surprised that the boys were not in
+the coal-cellar.
+
+'Oh, a chap's assumed to be innocent until he's proved guilty,' said
+Stalky, mounting step by step. 'How did they get you into the sack,
+Mr. Wontner?'
+
+'Jumped on me from behind--two to one,' said Mr. Wontner briefly. 'I
+think I handed each of them something first, but they roped my arms
+and legs.'
+
+'And did they photograph you in the sack?'
+
+'Good Heavens, no!' Mr. Wontner shuddered.
+
+'That's lucky. Awful thing to live down--a photograph, isn't it?' said
+Stalky to me as we reached the landing. 'I'm thinking of the newspapers,
+of course.'
+
+'Oh, but you can easily have sketches in the illustrated papers from
+accounts supplied by eye-witnesses,' I said.
+
+Mr. Wontner turned him round. It was the first time he had honoured me
+by his notice since our talk in the garage.
+
+'Ah,' said he, 'do you pretend to any special knowledge in these
+matters?'
+
+'I'm a journalist by profession,' I answered simply but nobly. 'As soon
+as you're at liberty, I'd like to have your account of the affair.'
+
+Now I thought he would have loved me for this, but he only replied in an
+uncomfortable, uncoming-on voice, 'Oh, you would, would you?'
+
+'Not if it's any trouble, of course,' I said. 'I can always get their
+version from the defendants. Do either of 'em draw or sketch at all, Mr.
+Wontner? Or perhaps your father might--'
+
+Then he said quite hotly, 'I wish you to understand very clearly, my
+good man, that a gentleman's name can't be dragged through the gutter to
+bolster up the circulation of your wretched sheet, whatever it may be.'
+
+'It is ----' I named a journal of enormous sales which specialises in
+scholastic, military, and other scandals. 'I don't know yet what it
+can't do, Mr. Wontner.'
+
+'I didn't know that I was dealing with a reporter' said Mr. Wontner.
+
+We were all halted outside a shut door. Ipps had followed us.
+
+'But surely you want it in the papers, don't you?' I urged. 'With a
+scandal like this, one couldn't, in justice to the democracy, be
+exclusive. We'd syndicate it here and in the United States. I helped you
+out of the sack, if you remember.'
+
+'I wish to goodness you'd stop talking!' he snapped, and sat down on a
+chair. Stalky's hand on my shoulder quietly signalled me out of action,
+but I felt that my fire had not been misdirected.
+
+'I'll answer for him,' said Stalky to Wontner, in an undertone that
+dropped to a whisper. I caught--'Not without my leave--dependent on me
+for market-tips,' and other gratifying tributes to my integrity.
+
+Still Mr. Wontner sat in his chair, and still we waited on him. The
+Infant's face showed worry and heavy grief; Stalky's, a bright and
+bird-like interest; mine was hidden behind his shoulders, but on the
+face of Ipps were written emotions that no butler should cherish towards
+any guest. Contempt and wrath were the least of them. And Mr. Wontner
+was looking full at Ipps, as Ipps was looking at him. Mr. Wontner's
+father, I understood, kept a butler and two footmen.
+
+'D'you suppose they're shamming, in order to get off?' he said at last.
+Ipps shook his head and noiselessly threw the door open. The boys had
+finished their dinner and were fast asleep--one on a sofa, one in a long
+chair--their faces fallen back to the lines of their childhood. They had
+had a wildish night, a hard day, that ended with a telling-off from an
+artist, and the assurance they had wrecked their prospects for life.
+What else should youth do, then, but eat, and drink '81 port, and
+remember their sorrows no more?
+
+Mr. Wontner looked at them severely, Ipps within easy reach, his hands
+quite ready. 'Childish,' said Mr. Wontner at last. 'Childish but
+necessary. Er--have you such a thing as a rope on the premises, and a
+sack--two sacks and two ropes? I'm afraid I can't resist the temptation.
+That man understands, doesn't he, that this is a private matter?'
+
+'That man,' who was me, was off to the basement like one of Infant's own
+fallow-deer. The stables gave me what I wanted, and coming back with it
+through a dark passage, I ran squarely into Ipps. 'Go on!' he grunted.
+'The minute he lays hands on Master Bobby, Master Bobby's saved. But
+that person ought to be told how near he came to being assaulted. It was
+touch-and-go with me all the time from the soup down, I assure you.'
+
+I arrived breathless with the sacks and the ropes. 'They were two to one
+with me,' said Mr. Wontner, as he took them. 'If they wake--'
+
+'We'll stand by,' Stalky replied. 'Two to one is quite fair.'
+
+But the boys hardly grunted as Mr. Wontner roped first one and then the
+other. Even when they were slid into the sacks they only mumbled, with
+rolling heads, through sticky lips, and snored on.
+
+'Port?' said Mr. Wontner virtuously.
+
+'Nervous exhaustion. They aren't much more than kids, after all. What's
+next?' said Stalky.
+
+'I want to take 'em away with me, please.'
+
+Stalky looked at him with respect.
+
+'I'll have my car round in five minutes,' said The Infant. 'Ipps'll help
+carry 'em downstairs,' and he shook Mr. Wontner by the hand.
+
+We were all perfectly serious till the two bundles were dumped on a
+divan in the hall, and the boys waked and began to realise what
+had happened.
+
+'Yah!' said Mr. Wontner, with the simplicity of twelve years old. 'Who's
+scored now?' And he sat upon them. The tension broke in a storm of
+laughter, led, I think, by Ipps.
+
+'Asinine--absolutely asinine!' said Mr. Wontner, with folded arms from
+his lively chair. But he drank in the flattery and the fellowship of it
+all with quite a brainless grin, as we rolled and stamped round him, and
+wiped the tears from our cheeks.
+
+'Hang it!' said Bobby Trivett. 'We're defeated!'
+
+'By tactics, too,' said Eames. 'I didn't think you knew 'em, Clausewitz.
+It's a fair score. What are you going to do with us?'
+
+'Take you back to Mess,' said Mr. Wontner.
+
+'Not like this?'
+
+'Oh no. Worse--much worse! I haven't begun with you yet. And you
+thought you'd scored! Yah!'
+
+They had scored beyond their wildest dream. The man in whose hands it
+lay to shame them, their Colonel, their Adjutant, their Regiment, and
+their Service, had cast away all shadow of his legal rights for the sake
+of a common or bear-garden rag--such a rag as if it came to the ears of
+the authorities, would cost him his commission. They were saved, and
+their saviour was their equal and their brother. So they chaffed and
+reviled him as such till he again squashed the breath out of them, and
+we others laughed louder than they.
+
+'Fall in!' said Stalky when the limousine came round. 'This is the score
+of the century. I wouldn't miss it for a brigade! We shan't be
+long, Infant!'
+
+I hurried into a coat.
+
+'Is there any necessity for that reporter-chap to come too?' said Mr.
+Wontner in an unguarded whisper. 'He isn't dressed for one thing.'
+
+Bobby and Eames wriggled round to look at the reporter, began a joyous
+bellow, and suddenly stopped.
+
+'What's the matter?' said Wontner with suspicion.
+
+'Nothing,' said Bobby. 'I die happy, Clausewitz. Take me up tenderly.'
+
+We packed into the car, bearing our sheaves with us, and for half an
+hour, as the cool night-air fanned his thoughtful brow, Mr. Wontner was
+quite abreast of himself. Though he said nothing unworthy, he triumphed
+and trumpeted a little loudly over the sacks. I sat between them on the
+back seat, and applauded him servilely till he reminded me that what I
+had seen and what he had said was not for publication. I hinted, while
+the boys plunged with joy inside their trappings, that this might be a
+matter for arrangement. 'Then a sovereign shan't part us,' said Mr.
+Wontner cheerily, and both boys fell into lively hysterics. 'I don't see
+where the joke comes in for you,' said Mr. Wontner. 'I thought it was my
+little jokelet to-night.'
+
+'No, Clausewitz,' gasped Bobby. 'Some is, but not all. I'll be good now.
+I'll give you my parole till we get to Mess. I wouldn't be out of this
+for a fiver.'
+
+'Nor me,' said Eames, and he gave his parole to attempt no escape or
+evasion.
+
+'Now, I suppose,' said Mr. Wontner largely to Stalky, as we neared the
+suburbs of Ash, 'you have a good deal of practical joking on the Stock
+Exchange, haven't you?'
+
+'And when were you on the Stock Exchange, Uncle Leonard?' piped Bobby,
+while Eames laid his sobbing head on my shoulder.
+
+'I'm sorry,' said Stalky, 'but the fact is, I command a regiment myself
+when I'm at home. Your Colonel knows me, I think.' He gave his name. Mr.
+Wontner seemed to have heard of it. We had to pick Eames off the floor,
+where he had cast himself from excess of delight.
+
+'Oh, Heavens!' said Mr. Wontner after a long pause. 'What have I done?
+What haven't I done?' We felt the temperature in the car rise as
+he blushed.
+
+'You didn't talk tactics, Clausewitz?' said Bobby. 'Oh, say it wasn't
+tactics, darling!'
+
+'It was,' said Wontner.
+
+Eames was all among our feet again, crying, 'If you don't let me get my
+arms up, I'll be sick. Let's hear what you said. Tell us.'
+
+But Mr. Wontner turned to Stalky. 'It's no good my begging your pardon,
+sir, I suppose,' he said.
+
+'Don't you notice 'em,' said Stalky. 'It was a fair rag all round, and
+anyhow, you two youngsters haven't any right to talk tactics. You've
+been rolled up, horse, foot, and guns.'
+
+'I'll make a treaty. If you'll let us go and change presently,' said
+Bobby, 'I'll promise we won't tell about you, Clausewitz. _You_ talked
+tactics to Uncle Len? Old Dhurrah-bags will like that. He don't love
+you, Claus.'
+
+'If I've made one ass of myself, I shall take extra care to make asses
+of you!' said Wontner. 'I want to stop, please, at the next milliner's
+shop on the right. It ought to be close here.'
+
+He evidently knew the country even in the dark, for the car stopped at a
+brilliantly-lighted millinery establishment, where--it was Saturday
+evening--a young lady was clearing up the counter. I followed him, as a
+good reporter should.
+
+'Have you got--' he began. 'Ah, those'll do!' He pointed to two hairy
+plush beehive bonnets, one magenta, the other a conscientious electric
+blue. 'How much, please? I'll take them both, and that bunch of peacock
+feathers, and that red feather thing.' It was a brilliant crimson-dyed
+pigeon's wing.
+
+'Now I want some yards of muslin with a nice, fierce pattern, please.'
+He got it--yellow with black tulips--and returned heavily laden.
+
+'Sorry to have kept you,' said he. 'Now we'll go to my quarters to
+change and beautify.'
+
+We came to them--opposite a dun waste of parade-ground that might have
+been Mian Mir--and bugles as they blew and drums as they rolled set
+heart-strings echoing.
+
+We hoisted the boys out and arranged them on chairs, while Wontner
+changed into uniform, but stopped when he saw me taking off my jacket.
+
+'What on earth's that for?' said he.
+
+'Because you've been wearing my evening things,' I said. 'I want to get
+into 'em again, if you don't mind.'
+
+'Then you aren't a reporter?' he said.
+
+'No,' I said, 'but that shan't part us.'
+
+'Oh, hurry!' cried Eames in desperate convulsions. 'We can't stand this
+much longer. 'Tisn't fair on the young.'
+
+'I'll attend to you in good time,' said Wontner; and when he had made
+careful toilet, he unwrapped the bonnets, put the peacock's feather into
+the magenta one, pinned the crimson wing on the blue one, set them
+daintily on the boys' heads, and bade them admire the effect in his
+shaving-glass while he ripped the muslin into lengths, bound it first,
+and draped it artistically afterwards a little below their knees. He
+finished off with a gigantic sash-bow, obi fashion. 'Hobble skirts,' he
+explained to Stalky, who nodded approval.
+
+Next he split open the bottom of each sack so that they could walk, but
+with very short steps. 'I ought to have got you white satin slippers,'
+he murmured, 'and I'm sorry there's no rouge.'
+
+'Don't worry on our account, old man--you're doing us proud,' said Bobby
+from under his hat. 'This beats milk-punch and mayonnaise.'
+
+'Oh, why didn't we think of these things when we had him at our mercy?'
+Eames wailed. 'Never mind--we'll try it on the next chap. You've a
+mind, Claus.'
+
+'Now we'll call on 'em at Mess,' said Wontner, as they minced towards
+the door.
+
+'I think I'll call on your Colonel,' said Stalky. 'He oughtn't to miss
+this. Your first attempt? I assure you I couldn't have done it better
+myself. Thank you!' He held out his hand.
+
+'Thank _you_, sir!' said Wontner, shaking it. 'I'm more grateful to you
+than I can say, and--and I'd like you to believe some time that I'm not
+quite as big a--'
+
+'Not in the least,' Stalky interrupted. 'If I were writing a
+confidential report on you, I should put you down as rather adequate.
+Look after your geishas, or they'll fall!'
+
+We watched the three cross the road and disappear into the shadow of the
+Mess verandah. There was a noise. Then telephone bells rang, a sergeant
+and a Mess waiter charged out, and the noise grew, till at last the Mess
+was a little noisy.
+
+We came back, ten minutes later, with Colonel Dalziell, who had been
+taking his sorrows to bed with him. The ante-room was quite full and
+visitors were still arriving, but it was possible to hear oneself speak
+occasionally. Trivett and Eames, in sack and sash, sat side by side on a
+table, their hats at a ravishing angle, coquettishly twiddling their
+tied feet. In the intervals of singing 'Put Me Among the Girls,' they
+sipped whisky-and-soda held to their lips by, I regret to say, a Major.
+Public opinion seemed to be against allowing them to change their
+costume till they should have danced in it. Wontner, lying more or less
+gracefully at the level of the chandelier in the arms of six subalterns,
+was lecturing on tactics and imploring to be let down, which he was with
+a run when they realised that the Colonel was there. Then he picked
+himself up from the sofa and said: 'I want to apologise, sir, to you and
+the Mess for having been such an ass ever since I joined!'
+
+This was when the noise began.
+
+Seeing the night promised to be wet, Stalky and I went home again in The
+Infant's car. It was some time since we had tasted the hot air that lies
+between the cornice and the ceiling of crowded rooms.
+
+After half an hour's silence, Stalky said to me: 'I don't know what
+you've been doing, but I believe I've been weepin'. Would you put that
+down to Burgundy or senile decay?'
+
+
+
+
+THE CHILDREN
+
+     These were our children who died for our lands: they
+         were dear in our sight.
+       We have only the memory left of their home-treasured
+         sayings and laughter.
+       The price of our loss shall be paid to our hands, not
+         another's hereafter.
+     Neither the Alien nor Priest shall decide on it. That is our right.
+           _But who shall return us the children_?
+
+     At the hour the Barbarian chose to disclose his pretences,
+       And raged against Man, they engaged, on the breasts
+         that they bared for us,
+       The first felon-stroke of the sword he had long-time
+         prepared for us--
+     Their bodies were all our defence while we wrought our defences.
+
+     They bought us anew with their blood, forbearing to blame us,
+     Those hours which we had not made good when the Judgment
+          o'ercame us.
+     They believed us and perished for it. Our statecraft, our learning.
+
+     Delivered them bound to the Pit and alive to the burning
+     Whither they mirthfully hastened as jostling for honour.
+     Not since her birth has our Earth seen such worth loosed upon her.
+
+     Nor was their agony brief, or once only imposed on them.
+       The wounded, the war-spent, the sick received no exemption:
+       Being cured they returned and endured and achieved our redemption,
+     Hopeless themselves of relief, till Death, marvelling, closed
+          on them.
+
+     That flesh we had nursed from the first in all cleanness was given
+     To corruption unveiled and assailed by the malice of Heaven--
+     By the heart-shaking jests of Decay where it lolled on the wires--
+     To be blanched or gay-painted by fumes--to be cindered by fires--
+     To be senselessly tossed and retossed in stale mutilation
+     From crater to crater. For this we shall take expiation.
+         _But who shall return us our children_?
+
+
+
+The Dog Hervey
+
+(April 1914)
+
+My friend Attley, who would give away his own head if you told him you
+had lost yours, was giving away a six-months-old litter of Bettina's
+pups, and half-a-dozen women were in raptures at the show on
+Mittleham lawn.
+
+We picked by lot. Mrs. Godfrey drew first choice; her married daughter,
+second. I was third, but waived my right because I was already owned by
+Malachi, Bettina's full brother, whom I had brought over in the car to
+visit his nephews and nieces, and he would have slain them all if I had
+taken home one. Milly, Mrs. Godfrey's younger daughter, pounced on my
+rejection with squeals of delight, and Attley turned to a dark,
+sallow-skinned, slack-mouthed girl, who had come over for tennis, and
+invited her to pick. She put on a pince-nez that made her look like a
+camel, knelt clumsily, for she was long from the hip to the knee,
+breathed hard, and considered the last couple.
+
+'I think I'd like that sandy-pied one,' she said.
+
+'Oh, not him, Miss Sichliffe!' Attley cried. 'He was overlaid or had
+sunstroke or something. They call him The Looney in the kennels.
+Besides, he squints.'
+
+'I think that's rather fetching,' she answered. Neither Malachi nor I
+had ever seen a squinting dog before.
+
+'That's chorea--St. Vitus's dance,' Mrs. Godfrey put in. 'He ought to
+have been drowned.'
+
+'But I like his cast of countenance,' the girl persisted.
+
+'He doesn't look a good life,' I said, 'but perhaps he can be patched
+up.' Miss Sichliffe turned crimson; I saw Mrs. Godfrey exchange a glance
+with her married daughter, and knew I had said something which would
+have to be lived down.
+
+'Yes,' Miss Sichliffe went on, her voice shaking, 'he isn't a good life,
+but perhaps I can--patch him up. Come here, sir.' The misshapen beast
+lurched toward her, squinting down his own nose till he fell over his
+own toes. Then, luckily, Bettina ran across the lawn and reminded
+Malachi of their puppyhood. All that family are as queer as Dick's
+hatband, and fight like man and wife. I had to separate them, and Mrs.
+Godfrey helped me till they retired under the rhododendrons and had it
+out in silence.
+
+'D'you know what that girl's father was?' Mrs. Godfrey asked.
+
+'No,' I replied. 'I loathe her for her own sake. She breathes through
+her mouth.'
+
+'He was a retired doctor,' she explained. 'He used to pick up stormy
+young men in the repentant stage, take them home, and patch them up till
+they were sound enough to be insured. Then he insured them heavily, and
+let them out into the world again--with an appetite. Of course, no one
+knew him while he was alive, but he left pots of money to his daughter.'
+
+'Strictly legitimate--highly respectable,' I said. 'But what a life for
+the daughter!'
+
+'Mustn't it have been! _Now_ d'you realise what you said just now?'
+
+'Perfectly; and now you've made me quite happy, shall we go back to the
+house?'
+
+When we reached it they were all inside, sitting in committee on names.
+
+'What shall you call yours?' I heard Milly ask Miss Sichliffe.
+
+'Harvey,' she replied--'Harvey's Sauce, you know. He's going to be quite
+saucy when I've'--she saw Mrs. Godfrey and me coming through the French
+window--'when he's stronger.'
+
+Attley, the well-meaning man, to make me feel at ease, asked what I
+thought of the name.
+
+'Oh, splendid,' I said at random. 'H with an A, A with an R, R with a--'
+
+'But that's Little Bingo,' some one said, and they all laughed.
+
+Miss Sichliffe, her hands joined across her long knees, drawled, 'You
+ought always to verify your quotations.'
+
+It was not a kindly thrust, but something in the word 'quotation' set
+the automatic side of my brain at work on some shadow of a word or
+phrase that kept itself out of memory's reach as a cat sits just beyond
+a dog's jump. When I was going home, Miss Sichliffe came up to me in the
+twilight, the pup on a leash, swinging her big shoes at the end of her
+tennis-racket.
+
+''Sorry,' she said in her thick schoolboy-like voice. 'I'm sorry for
+what I said to you about verifying quotations. I didn't know you well
+enough and--anyhow, I oughtn't to have.'
+
+'But you were quite right about Little Bingo,' I answered. 'The spelling
+ought to have reminded me.'
+
+'Yes, of course. It's the spelling,' she said, and slouched off with the
+pup sliding after her. Once again my brain began to worry after
+something that would have meant something if it had been properly
+spelled. I confided my trouble to Malachi on the way home, but Bettina
+had bitten him in four places, and he was busy.
+
+Weeks later, Attley came over to see me, and before his car stopped
+Malachi let me know that Bettina was sitting beside the chauffeur. He
+greeted her by the scruff of the neck as she hopped down; and I greeted
+Mrs. Godfrey, Attley, and a big basket.
+
+'You've got to help me,' said Attley tiredly. We took the basket into
+the garden, and there staggered out the angular shadow of a sandy-pied,
+broken-haired terrier, with one imbecile and one delirious ear, and two
+most hideous squints. Bettina and Malachi, already at grips on the lawn,
+saw him, let go, and fled in opposite directions.
+
+'Why have you brought that fetid hound here?' I demanded.
+
+'Harvey? For you to take care of,' said Attley. 'He's had distemper, but
+_I_'m going abroad.'
+
+'Take him with you. I won't have him. He's mentally afflicted.'
+
+'Look here,' Attley almost shouted, 'do I strike you as a fool?'
+
+'Always,' said I.
+
+'Well, then, if you say so, and Ella says so, that proves I ought to go
+abroad.'
+
+'Will's wrong, quite wrong,' Mrs. Godfrey interrupted; 'but you must
+take the pup.'
+
+'My dear boy, my dear boy, don't you ever give anything to a woman,'
+Attley snorted.
+
+Bit by bit I got the story out of them in the quiet garden (never a sign
+from Bettina and Malachi), while Harvey stared me out of countenance,
+first with one cuttlefish eye and then with the other.
+
+It appeared that, a month after Miss Sichliffe took him, the dog Harvey
+developed distemper. Miss Sichliffe had nursed him herself for some
+time; then she carried him in her arms the two miles to Mittleham, and
+wept--actually wept--at Attley's feet, saying that Harvey was all she
+had or expected to have in this world, and Attley must cure him. Attley,
+being by wealth, position, and temperament guardian to all lame dogs,
+had put everything aside for this unsavoury job, and, he asserted, Miss
+Sichliffe had virtually lived with him ever since.
+
+'She went home at night, of course,' he exploded, 'but the rest of the
+time she simply infested the premises. Goodness knows, I'm not
+particular, but it was a scandal. Even the servants!... Three and four
+times a day, and notes in between, to know how the beast was. Hang it
+all, don't laugh! And wanting to send me flowers and goldfish. Do I look
+as if I wanted goldfish? Can't you two stop for a minute?' (Mrs. Godfrey
+and I were clinging to each other for support.) 'And it isn't as if I
+was--was so alluring a personality, is it?'
+
+Attley commands more trust, goodwill, and affection than most men, for
+he is that rare angel, an absolutely unselfish bachelor, content to be
+run by contending syndicates of zealous friends. His situation seemed
+desperate, and I told him so.
+
+'Instant flight is your only remedy,' was my verdict. I'll take care of
+both your cars while you're away, and you can send me over all the
+greenhouse fruit.'
+
+'But why should I be chased out of my house by a she-dromedary?' he
+wailed.
+
+'Oh, stop! Stop!' Mrs. Godfrey sobbed. 'You're both wrong. I admit
+you're right, but I _know_ you're wrong.'
+
+'Three _and_ four times a day,' said Attley, with an awful countenance.
+'I'm not a vain man, but--look here, Ella, I'm not sensitive, I hope,
+but if you persist in making a joke of it--'
+
+'Oh, be quiet!' she almost shrieked. 'D'you imagine for one instant that
+your friends would ever let Mittleham pass out of their hands? I quite
+agree it is unseemly for a grown girl to come to Mittleham at all hours
+of the day and night--'
+
+'I told you she went home o' nights,' Attley growled.
+
+'Specially if she goes home o' nights. Oh, but think of the life she
+must have led, Will!'
+
+'I'm not interfering with it; only she must leave me alone.'
+
+'She may want to patch you up and insure you,' I suggested.
+
+'D'you know what _you_ are?' Mrs. Godfrey turned on me with the smile I
+have feared for the last quarter of a century. 'You're the nice, kind,
+wise, doggy friend. You don't know how wise and nice you are supposed to
+be. Will has sent Harvey to you to complete the poor angel's
+convalescence. You know all about dogs, or Will wouldn't have done it.
+He's written her that. You're too far off for her to make daily calls on
+you. P'r'aps she'll drop in two or three times a week, and write on
+other days. But it doesn't matter what she does, because you don't own
+Mittleham, don't you see?'
+
+I told her I saw most clearly.
+
+'Oh, you'll get over that in a few days,' Mrs. Godfrey countered.
+'You're the sporting, responsible, doggy friend who--'
+
+'He used to look at me like that at first,' said Attley, with a visible
+shudder, 'but he gave it up after a bit. It's only because you're new
+to him.'
+
+'But, confound you! he's a ghoul--' I began.
+
+'And when he gets quite well, you'll send him back to her direct with
+your love, and she'll give you some pretty four-tailed goldfish,' said
+Mrs. Godfrey, rising. 'That's all settled. Car, please. We're going to
+Brighton to lunch together.'
+
+They ran before I could get into my stride, so I told the dog Harvey
+what I thought of them and his mistress. He never shifted his position,
+but stared at me, an intense, lopsided stare, eye after eye. Malachi
+came along when he had seen his sister off, and from a distance
+counselled me to drown the brute and consort with gentlemen again. But
+the dog Harvey never even cocked his cockable ear.
+
+And so it continued as long as he was with me. Where I sat, he sat and
+stared; where I walked, he walked beside, head stiffly slewed over one
+shoulder in single-barrelled contemplation of me. He never gave tongue,
+never closed in for a caress, seldom let me stir a step alone. And, to
+my amazement, Malachi, who suffered no stranger to live within our
+gates, saw this gaunt, growing, green-eyed devil wipe him out of my
+service and company without a whimper. Indeed, one would have said the
+situation interested him, for he would meet us returning from grim walks
+together, and look alternately at Harvey and at me with the same
+quivering interest that he showed at the mouth of a rat-hole. Outside
+these inspections, Malachi withdrew himself as only a dog or a
+woman can.
+
+Miss Sichliffe came over after a few days (luckily I was out) with some
+elaborate story of paying calls in the neighbourhood. She sent me a note
+of thanks next day. I was reading it when Harvey and Malachi entered and
+disposed themselves as usual, Harvey close up to stare at me, Malachi
+half under the sofa, watching us both. Out of curiosity I returned
+Harvey's stare, then pulled his lopsided head on to my knee, and took
+his eye for several minutes. Now, in Malachi's eye I can see at any hour
+all that there is of the normal decent dog, flecked here and there with
+that strained half-soul which man's love and association have added to
+his nature. But with Harvey the eye was perplexed, as a tortured man's.
+Only by looking far into its deeps could one make out the spirit of the
+proper animal, beclouded and cowering beneath some unfair burden.
+
+Leggatt, my chauffeur, came in for orders.
+
+'How d'you think Harvey's coming on?' I said, as I rubbed the brute's
+gulping neck. The vet had warned me of the possibilities of spinal
+trouble following distemper.
+
+'He ain't _my_ fancy,' was the reply. 'But _I_ don't question his
+comings and goings so long as I 'aven't to sit alone in a room
+with him.'
+
+'Why? He's as meek as Moses,' I said.
+
+'He fair gives me the creeps. P'r'aps he'll go out in fits.'
+
+But Harvey, as I wrote his mistress from time to time, throve, and when
+he grew better, would play by himself grisly games of spying, walking
+up, hailing, and chasing another dog. From these he would break off of a
+sudden and return to his normal stiff gait, with the air of one who had
+forgotten some matter of life and death, which could be reached only by
+staring at me. I left him one evening posturing with the unseen on the
+lawn, and went inside to finish some letters for the post. I must have
+been at work nearly an hour, for I was going to turn on the lights,
+when I felt there was somebody in the room whom, the short hairs at the
+back of my neck warned me, I was not in the least anxious to face. There
+was a mirror on the wall. As I lifted my eyes to it I saw the dog Harvey
+reflected near the shadow by the closed door. He had reared himself
+full-length on his hind legs, his head a little one side to clear a sofa
+between us, and he was looking at me. The face, with its knitted brows
+and drawn lips, was the face of a dog, but the look, for the fraction of
+time that I caught it, was human--wholly and horribly human. When the
+blood in my body went forward again he had dropped to the floor, and was
+merely studying me in his usual one-eyed fashion. Next day I returned
+him to Miss Sichliffe. I would not have kept him another day for the
+wealth of Asia, or even Ella Godfrey's approval.
+
+Miss Sichliffe's house I discovered to be a mid-Victorian mansion of
+peculiar villainy even for its period, surrounded by gardens of
+conflicting colours, all dazzling with glass and fresh paint on
+ironwork. Striped blinds, for it was a blazing autumn morning, covered
+most of the windows, and a voice sang to the piano an almost forgotten
+song of Jean Ingelow's--
+
+     Methought that the stars were blinking bright,
+       And the old brig's sails unfurled--
+
+Down came the loud pedal, and the unrestrained cry swelled out across a
+bed of tritomas consuming in their own fires--
+
+     When I said I will sail to my love this night
+       On the other side of the world.
+
+I have no music, but the voice drew. I waited till the end:
+
+     Oh, maid most dear, I am not here
+       I have no place apart--
+     No dwelling more on sea or shore,
+       But only in thy heart.
+
+It seemed to me a poor life that had no more than that to do at eleven
+o'clock of a Tuesday forenoon. Then Miss Sichliffe suddenly lumbered
+through a French window in clumsy haste, her brows contracted against
+the light.
+
+'Well?' she said, delivering the word like a spear-thrust, with the full
+weight of a body behind it.
+
+'I've brought Harvey back at last,' I replied. 'Here he is.'
+
+But it was at me she looked, not at the dog who had cast himself at her
+feet--looked as though she would have fished my soul out of my breast on
+the instant.
+
+'Wha--what did you think of him? What did _you_ make of him?' she
+panted. I was too taken aback for the moment to reply. Her voice broke
+as she stooped to the dog at her knees. 'O Harvey, Harvey! You utterly
+worthless old devil!' she cried, and the dog cringed and abased himself
+in servility that one could scarcely bear to look upon. I made to go.
+
+'Oh, but please, you mustn't!' She tugged at the car's side. 'Wouldn't
+you like some flowers or some orchids? We've really splendid orchids,
+and'--she clasped her hands--'there are Japanese goldfish--real
+Japanese goldfish, with four tails. If you don't care for 'em, perhaps
+your friends or somebody--oh, please!'
+
+Harvey had recovered himself, and I realised that this woman beyond the
+decencies was fawning on me as the dog had fawned on her.
+
+'Certainly,' I said, ashamed to meet her eye. 'I'm lunching at
+Mittleham, but--'
+
+'There's plenty of time,' she entreated. 'What do _you_ think of
+Harvey?'
+
+'He's a queer beast,' I said, getting out. 'He does nothing but stare at
+me.'
+
+'Does he stare at you all the time he's with you?'
+
+'Always. He's doing it now. Look!'
+
+We had halted. Harvey had sat down, and was staring from one to the
+other with a weaving motion of the head.
+
+'He'll do that all day,' I said. 'What is it, Harvey?'
+
+'Yes, what _is_ it, Harvey?' she echoed. The dog's throat twitched, his
+body stiffened and shook as though he were going to have a fit. Then he
+came back with a visible wrench to his unwinking watch.
+
+'Always so?' she whispered.
+
+'Always,' I replied, and told her something of his life with me. She
+nodded once or twice, and in the end led me into the house.
+
+There were unaging pitch-pine doors of Gothic design in it; there were
+inlaid marble mantel-pieces and cut-steel fenders; there were stupendous
+wall-papers, and octagonal, medallioned Wedgwood what-nots, and
+black-and-gilt Austrian images holding candelabra, with every other
+refinement that Art had achieved or wealth had bought between 1851 and
+1878. And everything reeked of varnish.
+
+'Now!' she opened a baize door, and pointed down a long corridor flanked
+with more Gothic doors. 'This was where we used to--to patch 'em up.
+You've heard of us. Mrs. Godfrey told you in the garden the day I got
+Harvey given me. I'--she drew in her breath--'I live here by myself, and
+I have a very large income. Come back, Harvey.'
+
+He had tiptoed down the corridor, as rigid as ever, and was sitting
+outside one of the shut doors. 'Look here!' she said, and planted
+herself squarely in front of me. 'I tell you this because you--you've
+patched up Harvey, too. Now, I want you to remember that my name is
+Moira. Mother calls me Marjorie because it's more refined; but my real
+name is Moira, and I am in my thirty-fourth year.'
+
+'Very good,' I said. 'I'll remember all that.'
+
+'Thank you.' Then with a sudden swoop into the humility of an abashed
+boy--''Sorry if I haven't said the proper things. You see--there's
+Harvey looking at us again. Oh, I want to say--if ever you want anything
+in the way of orchids or goldfish or--or anything else that would be
+useful to you, you've only to come to me for it. Under the will I'm
+perfectly independent, and we're a long-lived family, worse luck!' She
+looked at me, and her face worked like glass behind driven flame. 'I may
+reasonably expect to live another fifty years,' she said.
+
+'Thank you, Miss Sichliffe,' I replied. 'If I want anything, you may be
+sure I'll come to you for it.' She nodded. 'Now I must get over to
+Mittleham,' I said.
+
+'Mr. Attley will ask you all about this.' For the first time she laughed
+aloud. 'I'm afraid I frightened him nearly out of the county. I didn't
+think, of course. But I dare say he knows by this time he was wrong. Say
+good-bye to Harvey.'
+
+'Good-bye, old man,' I said. 'Give me a farewell stare, so we shall know
+each other when we meet again.'
+
+The dog looked up, then moved slowly toward me, and stood, head bowed to
+the floor, shaking in every muscle as I patted him; and when I turned, I
+saw him crawl back to her feet.
+
+That was not a good preparation for the rampant boy-and-girl-dominated
+lunch at Mittleham, which, as usual, I found in possession of everybody
+except the owner.
+
+'But what did the dromedary say when you brought her beast back?' Attley
+demanded.
+
+'The usual polite things,' I replied. 'I'm posing as the nice doggy
+friend nowadays.'
+
+'I don't envy you. She's never darkened my doors, thank goodness, since
+I left Harvey at your place. I suppose she'll run about the county now
+swearing you cured him. That's a woman's idea of gratitude.' Attley
+seemed rather hurt, and Mrs. Godfrey laughed.
+
+'That proves you were right about Miss Sichliffe, Ella,' I said. 'She
+had no designs on anybody.'
+
+'I'm always right in these matters. But didn't she even offer you a
+goldfish?'
+
+'Not a thing,' said I. 'You know what an old maid's like where her
+precious dog's concerned.' And though I have tried vainly to lie to Ella
+Godfrey for many years, I believe that in this case I succeeded.
+
+When I turned into our drive that evening, Leggatt observed half aloud:
+
+'I'm glad Zvengali's back where he belongs. It's time our Mike had a
+look in.'
+
+Sure enough, there was Malachi back again in spirit as well as flesh,
+but still with that odd air of expectation he had picked up from Harvey.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It was in January that Attley wrote me that Mrs. Godfrey, wintering in
+Madeira with Milly, her unmarried daughter, had been attacked with
+something like enteric; that the hotel, anxious for its good name, had
+thrust them both out into a cottage annexe; that he was off with a
+nurse, and that I was not to leave England till I heard from him again.
+In a week he wired that Milly was down as well, and that I must bring
+out two more nurses, with suitable delicacies.
+
+Within seventeen hours I had got them all aboard the Cape boat, and had
+seen the women safely collapsed into sea-sickness. The next few weeks
+were for me, as for the invalids, a low delirium, clouded with fantastic
+memories of Portuguese officials trying to tax calves'-foot jelly;
+voluble doctors insisting that true typhoid was unknown in the island;
+nurses who had to be exercised, taken out of themselves, and returned on
+the tick of change of guard; night slides down glassy, cobbled streets,
+smelling of sewage and flowers, between walls whose every stone and
+patch Attley and I knew; vigils in stucco verandahs, watching the curve
+and descent of great stars or drawing auguries from the break of dawn;
+insane interludes of gambling at the local Casino, where we won heaps of
+unconsoling silver; blasts of steamers arriving and departing in the
+roads; help offered by total strangers, grabbed at or thrust aside; the
+long nightmare crumbling back into sanity one forenoon under a
+vine-covered trellis, where Attley sat hugging a nurse, while the others
+danced a noiseless, neat-footed breakdown never learned at the Middlesex
+Hospital. At last, as the tension came out all over us in aches and
+tingles that we put down to the country wine, a vision of Mrs. Godfrey,
+her grey hair turned to spun-glass, but her eyes triumphant over the
+shadow of retreating death beneath them, with Milly, enormously grown,
+and clutching life back to her young breast, both stretched out on cane
+chairs, clamouring for food.
+
+In this ungirt hour there imported himself into our life a
+youngish-looking middle-aged man of the name of Shend, with a blurred
+face and deprecating eyes. He said he had gambled with me at the Casino,
+which was no recommendation, and I remember that he twice gave me a
+basket of champagne and liqueur brandy for the invalids, which a sailor
+in a red-tasselled cap carried up to the cottage for me at 3 A.M. He
+turned out to be the son of some merchant prince in the oil and colour
+line, and the owner of a four-hundred-ton steam yacht, into which, at
+his gentle insistence, we later shifted our camp, staff, and equipage,
+Milly weeping with delight to escape from the horrible cottage. There we
+lay off Funchal for weeks, while Shend did miracles of luxury and
+attendance through deputies, and never once asked how his guests were
+enjoying themselves. Indeed, for several days at a time we would see
+nothing of him. He was, he said, subject to malaria. Giving as they do
+with both hands, I knew that Attley and Mrs. Godfrey could take nobly;
+but I never met a man who so nobly gave and so nobly received thanks as
+Shend did.
+
+'Tell us why you have been so unbelievably kind to us gipsies,' Mrs.
+Godfrey said to him one day on deck.
+
+He looked up from a diagram of some Thames-mouth shoals which he was
+explaining to me, and answered with his gentle smile:
+
+'I will. It's because it makes me happy--it makes me more than happy--to
+be with you. It makes me comfortable. You know how selfish men are? If a
+man feels comfortable all over with certain people, he'll bore them to
+death, just like a dog. You always make me feel as if pleasant things
+were going to happen to me.'
+
+'Haven't any ever happened before?' Milly asked.
+
+'This is the most pleasant thing that has happened to me in ever so many
+years,' he replied. 'I feel like the man in the Bible, "It's good for me
+to be here." Generally, I don't feel that it's good for me to be
+anywhere in particular.' Then, as one begging a favour. 'You'll let me
+come home with you--in the same boat, I mean? I'd take you back in this
+thing of mine, and that would save you packing your trunks, but she's
+too lively for spring work across the Bay.'
+
+We booked our berths, and when the time came, he wafted us and ours
+aboard the Southampton mail-boat with the pomp of plenipotentiaries and
+the precision of the Navy. Then he dismissed his yacht, and became an
+inconspicuous passenger in a cabin opposite to mine, on the port side.
+
+We ran at once into early British spring weather, followed by sou'west
+gales. Mrs. Godfrey, Milly, and the nurses disappeared. Attley stood it
+out, visibly yellowing, till the next meal, and followed suit, and Shend
+and I had the little table all to ourselves. I found him even more
+attractive when the women were away. The natural sweetness of the man,
+his voice, and bearing all fascinated me, and his knowledge of practical
+seamanship (he held an extra master's certificate) was a real joy. We
+sat long in the empty saloon and longer in the smoking-room, making
+dashes downstairs over slippery decks at the eleventh hour.
+
+It was on Friday night, just as I was going to bed, that he came into my
+cabin, after cleaning his teeth, which he did half a dozen times a day.
+
+'I say,' he began hurriedly, 'do you mind if I come in here for a
+little? I'm a bit edgy.' I must have shown surprise. 'I'm ever so much
+better about liquor than I used to be, but--it's the whisky in the
+suitcase that throws me. For God's sake, old man, don't go back on me
+to-night! Look at my hands!'
+
+They were fairly jumping at the wrists. He sat down on a trunk that had
+slid out with the roll. We had reduced speed, and were surging in
+confused seas that pounded on the black port-glasses. The night promised
+to be a pleasant one!
+
+'You understand, of course, don't you?' he chattered.
+
+'Oh yes,' I said cheerily; 'but how about--'
+
+'No, no; on no account the doctor. 'Tell a doctor, tell the whole ship.
+Besides, I've only got a touch of 'em. You'd never have guessed it,
+would you? The tooth-wash does the trick. I'll give you the
+prescription.'
+
+I'll send a note to the doctor for a prescription, shall I?' I
+suggested.
+
+'Right! I put myself unreservedly in your hands. 'Fact is, I always did.
+I said to myself--'sure I don't bore you?--the minute I saw you, I said,
+"Thou art the man."' He repeated the phrase as he picked at his knees.
+'All the same, you can take it from me that the ewe-lamb business is a
+rotten bad one. I don't care how unfaithful the shepherd may be. Drunk
+or sober, 'tisn't cricket.'
+
+A surge of the trunk threw him across the cabin as the steward answered
+my bell. I wrote my requisition to the doctor while Shend was struggling
+to his feet.
+
+'What's wrong?' he began. 'Oh, I know. We're slowing for soundings off
+Ushant. It's about time, too. You'd better ship the dead-lights when you
+come back, Matchem. It'll save you waking us later. This sea's going to
+get up when the tide turns. That'll show you,' he said as the man left,
+'that I am to be trusted. You--you'll stop me if I say anything I
+shouldn't, won't you?'
+
+'Talk away,' I replied, 'if it makes you feel better.'
+
+'That's it; you've hit it exactly. You always make me feel better. I can
+rely on you. It's awkward soundings but you'll see me through it. We'll
+defeat him yet.... I may be an utterly worthless devil, but I'm not a
+brawler.... I told him so at breakfast. I said, "Doctor, I detest
+brawling, but if ever you allow that girl to be insulted again as
+Clements insulted her, I will break your neck with my own hands." You
+think I was right?'
+
+'Absolutely,' I agreed.
+
+'Then we needn't discuss the matter any further. That man was a murderer
+in intention--outside the law, you understand, as it was then. They've
+changed it since--but he never deceived _me_. I told him so. I said to
+him at the time, "I don't know what price you're going to put on my
+head, but if ever you allow Clements to insult her again, you'll never
+live to claim it."'
+
+'And what did he do?' I asked, to carry on the conversation, for Matchem
+entered with the bromide.
+
+'Oh, crumpled up at once. 'Lead still going, Matchem?'
+
+'I 'aven't 'eard,' said that faithful servant of the Union-Castle
+Company.
+
+'Quite right. Never alarm the passengers. Ship the dead-light, will
+you?' Matchem shipped it, for we were rolling very heavily. There were
+tramplings and gull-like cries from on deck. Shend looked at me with a
+mariner's eye.
+
+'That's nothing,' he said protectingly.
+
+'Oh, it's all right for you,' I said, jumping at the idea. '_I_ haven't
+an extra master's certificate. I'm only a passenger. I confess it
+funks me.'
+
+Instantly his whole bearing changed to answer the appeal.
+
+'My dear fellow, it's as simple as houses. We're hunting for sixty-five
+fathom water. Anything short of sixty, with a sou'west wind means--but
+I'll get my Channel Pilot out of my cabin and give you the general idea.
+I'm only too grateful to do anything to put your mind at ease.'
+
+And so, perhaps, for another hour--he declined the drink--Channel Pilot
+in hand, he navigated us round Ushant, and at my request up-channel to
+Southampton, light by light, with explanations and reminiscences. I
+professed myself soothed at last, and suggested bed.
+
+'In a second,' said he. 'Now, you wouldn't think, would you'--he glanced
+off the book toward my wildly swaying dressing-gown on the door--'that
+I've been seeing things for the last half-hour? 'Fact is, I'm just on
+the edge of 'em, skating on thin ice round the corner--nor'east as near
+as nothing--where that dog's looking at me.'
+
+'What's the dog like?' I asked.
+
+'Ah, that _is_ comforting of you! Most men walk through 'em to show me
+they aren't real. As if I didn't know! But _you're_ different. Anybody
+could see that with half an eye.' He stiffened and pointed. 'Damn it
+all! The dog sees it too with half an--Why, he knows you! Knows you
+perfectly. D'you know _him_?'
+
+'How can I tell if he isn't real?' I insisted.
+
+'But you can! _You're_ all right. I saw that from the first. Don't go
+back on me now or I shall go to pieces like the _Drummond Castle_. I beg
+your pardon, old man; but, you see, you _do_ know the dog. I'll prove
+it. What's that dog doing? Come on! _You_ know.' A tremor shook him, and
+he put his hand on my knee, and whispered with great meaning: 'I'll
+letter or halve it with you. There! You begin.'
+
+'S,' said I to humour him, for a dog would most likely be standing or
+sitting, or may be scratching or sniffling or staring.
+
+'Q,' he went on, and I could feel the heat of his shaking hand.
+
+'U,' said I. There was no other letter possible; but I was shaking too.
+
+'I.'
+
+'N.'
+
+'T-i-n-g,' he ran out. 'There! That proves it. I knew you knew him. You
+don't know what a relief that is. Between ourselves, old man, he--he's
+been turning up lately a--a damn sight more often than I cared for. And
+a squinting dog--a dog that squints! I mean that's a bit _too_ much.
+Eh? What?' He gulped and half rose, and I thought that the full tide of
+delirium would be on him in another sentence.
+
+'Not a bit of it,' I said as a last chance, with my hand over the
+bellpush. 'Why, you've just proved that I know him; so there are two of
+us in the game, anyhow.'
+
+'By Jove! that _is_ an idea! Of course there are. I knew you'd see me
+through. We'll defeat them yet. Hi, pup!... He's gone. Absolutely
+disappeared!' He sighed with relief, and I caught the lucky moment.
+
+'Good business! I expect he only came to have a look at me,' I said.
+'Now, get this drink down and turn in to the lower bunk.'
+
+He obeyed, protesting that he could not inconvenience me, and in the
+midst of apologies sank into a dead sleep. I expected a wakeful night,
+having a certain amount to think over; but no sooner had I scrambled
+into the top bunk than sleep came on me like a wave from the other side
+of the world.
+
+In the morning there were apologies, which we got over at breakfast
+before our party were about.
+
+'I suppose--after this--well, I don't blame you. I'm rather a lonely
+chap, though.' His eyes lifted dog-like across the table.
+
+'Shend,' I replied, 'I'm not running a Sunday school. You're coming home
+with me in my car as soon as we land.'
+
+'That is kind of you--kinder than you think.'
+
+'That's because you're a little jumpy still. Now, I don't want to mix
+up in your private affairs--'
+
+'But I'd like you to,' he interrupted.
+
+'Then, would you mind telling me the Christian name of a girl who was
+insulted by a man called Clements?'
+
+'Moira,' he whispered; and just then Mrs. Godfrey and Milly came to
+table with their shore-going hats on.
+
+We did not tie up till noon, but the faithful Leggatt had intrigued his
+way down to the dock-edge, and beside him sat Malachi, wearing his
+collar of gold, or Leggatt makes it look so, as eloquent as Demosthenes.
+Shend flinched a little when he saw him. We packed Mrs. Godfrey and
+Milly into Attley's car--they were going with him to Mittleham, of
+course--and drew clear across the railway lines to find England all lit
+and perfumed for spring. Shend sighed with happiness.
+
+'D'you know,' he said, 'if--if you'd chucked me--I should have gone down
+to my cabin after breakfast and cut my throat. And now--it's like a
+dream--a good dream, you know.'
+
+We lunched with the other three at Romsey. Then I sat in front for a
+little while to talk to my Malachi. When I looked back, Shend was
+solidly asleep, and stayed so for the next two hours, while Leggatt
+chased Attley's fat Daimler along the green-speckled hedges. He woke up
+when we said good-bye at Mittleham, with promises to meet again
+very soon.
+
+'And I hope,' said Mrs. Godfrey, 'that everything pleasant will happen
+to you.'
+
+'Heaps and heaps--all at once,' cried long, weak Milly, waving her wet
+handkerchief.
+
+'I've just got to look in at a house near here for a minute to inquire
+about a dog,' I said, 'and then we will go home.'
+
+'I used to know this part of the world,' he replied, and said no more
+till Leggatt shot past the lodge at the Sichliffes's gate. Then I
+heard him gasp.
+
+Miss Sichliffe, in a green waterproof, an orange jersey, and a pinkish
+leather hat, was working on a bulb-border. She straightened herself as
+the car stopped, and breathed hard. Shend got out and walked towards
+her. They shook hands, turned round together, and went into the house.
+Then the dog Harvey pranced out corkily from under the lee of a bench.
+Malachi, with one joyous swoop, fell on him as an enemy and an equal.
+Harvey, for his part, freed from all burden whatsoever except the
+obvious duty of a man-dog on his own ground, met Malachi without reserve
+or remorse, and with six months' additional growth to come and go on.
+
+'Don't check 'em!' cried Leggatt, dancing round the flurry. 'They've
+both been saving up for each other all this time. It'll do 'em worlds
+of good.'
+
+'Leggatt,' I said, 'will you take Mr. Shend's bag and suitcase up to the
+house and put them down just inside the door? Then we will go on.'
+
+So I enjoyed the finish alone. It was a dead heat, and they licked each
+other's jaws in amity till Harvey, one imploring eye on me, leaped into
+the front seat, and Malachi backed his appeal. It was theft, but I took
+him, and we talked all the way home of r-rats and r-rabbits and bones
+and baths and the other basic facts of life. That evening after dinner
+they slept before the fire, with their warm chins across the hollows of
+my ankles--to each chin an ankle--till I kicked them upstairs to bed.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I was not at Mittleham when she came over to announce her engagement,
+but I heard of it when Mrs. Godfrey and Attley came, forty miles an
+hour, over to me, and Mrs. Godfrey called me names of the worst for
+suppression of information.
+
+'As long as it wasn't me, I don't care,' said Attley.
+
+'I believe you knew it all along,' Mrs. Godfrey repeated. 'Else what
+made you drive that man literally into her arms?'
+
+'To ask after the dog Harvey,' I replied.
+
+'Then, what's the beast doing here?' Attley demanded, for Malachi and
+the dog Harvey were deep in a council of the family with Bettina, who
+was being out-argued.
+
+'Oh, Harvey seemed to think himself _de trop_ where he was,' I said.
+'And she hasn't sent after him. You'd better save Bettina before they
+kill her.'
+
+'There's been enough lying about that dog,' said Mrs. Godfrey to me. 'If
+he wasn't born in lies, he was baptized in 'em. D'you know why she
+called him Harvey? It only occurred to me in those dreadful days when I
+was ill, and one can't keep from thinking, and thinks everything. D'you
+know your Boswell? What did Johnson say about Hervey--with an e?'
+
+'Oh, _that's_ it, is it?' I cried incautiously. 'That was why I ought to
+have verified my quotations. The spelling defeated me. Wait a moment,
+and it will come back. Johnson said: "He was a vicious man,"' I began.
+
+'"But very kind to me,"' Mrs. Godfrey prompted. Then, both together,
+'"If you call a dog Hervey, I shall love him."'
+
+'So you _were_ mixed up in it. At any rate, you had your suspicions from
+the first? Tell me,' she said.
+
+'Ella,' I said, 'I don't know anything rational or reasonable about any
+of it. It was all--all woman-work, and it scared me horribly.'
+
+'Why?' she asked.
+
+That was six years ago. I have written this tale to let her
+know--wherever she may be.
+
+
+
+THE COMFORTERS
+
+
+     Until thy feet have trod the Road
+       Advise not wayside folk,
+     Nor till thy back has borne the Load
+       Break in upon the Broke.
+
+     Chase not with undesired largesse
+       Of sympathy the heart
+     Which, knowing her own bitterness,
+       Presumes to dwell apart.
+
+     Employ not that glad hand to raise
+       The God-forgotten head
+     To Heaven, and all the neighbours' gaze--
+       Cover thy mouth instead.
+
+     The quivering chin, the bitten lip,
+       The cold and sweating brow,
+     Later may yearn for fellowship--
+       Not now, you ass, not now!
+
+     Time, not thy ne'er so timely speech,
+       Life, not thy views thereon,
+     Shall furnish or deny to each
+       His consolation.
+
+     Or, if impelled to interfere,
+       Exhort, uplift, advise,
+     Lend not a base, betraying ear
+       To all the victim's cries.
+
+     Only the Lord can understand
+       When those first pangs begin,
+     How much is reflex action and
+       How much is really sin.
+
+     E'en from good words thyself refrain,
+       And tremblingly admit
+     There is no anodyne for pain
+       Except the shock of it.
+
+     So, when thine own dark hour shall fall,
+       Unchallenged canst thou say:
+     'I never worried _you_ at all,
+       For God's sake go away!'
+
+
+
+
+The Village that Voted the Earth was Flat
+
+(1913)
+
+
+Our drive till then had been quite a success. The other men in the car
+were my friend Woodhouse, young Ollyett, a distant connection of his,
+and Pallant, the M.P. Woodhouse's business was the treatment and cure of
+sick journals. He knew by instinct the precise moment in a newspaper's
+life when the impetus of past good management is exhausted and it
+fetches up on the dead-centre between slow and expensive collapse and
+the new start which can be given by gold injections--and genius. He was
+wisely ignorant of journalism; but when he stooped on a carcase there
+was sure to be meat. He had that week added a half-dead, halfpenny
+evening paper to his collection, which consisted of a prosperous London
+daily, one provincial ditto, and a limp-bodied weekly of commercial
+leanings. He had also, that very hour, planted me with a large block of
+the evening paper's common shares, and was explaining the whole art of
+editorship to Ollyett, a young man three years from Oxford, with
+coir-matting-coloured hair and a face harshly modelled by harsh
+experiences, who, I understood, was assisting in the new venture.
+Pallant, the long, wrinkled M.P., whose voice is more like a crane's
+than a peacock's, took no shares, but gave us all advice.
+
+'You'll find it rather a knacker's yard,' Woodhouse was saying. 'Yes, I
+know they call me The Knacker; but it will pay inside a year. All my
+papers do. I've only one motto: Back your luck and back your staff.
+It'll come out all right.'
+
+Then the car stopped, and a policeman asked our names and addresses for
+exceeding the speed-limit. We pointed out that the road ran absolutely
+straight for half a mile ahead without even a side-lane. 'That's just
+what we depend on,' said the policeman unpleasantly.
+
+'The usual swindle,' said Woodhouse under his breath. 'What's the name
+of this place?'
+
+'Huckley,' said the policeman. 'H-u-c-k-l-e-y,' and wrote something in
+his note-book at which young Ollyett protested. A large red man on a
+grey horse who had been watching us from the other side of the hedge
+shouted an order we could not catch. The policeman laid his hand on the
+rim of the right driving-door (Woodhouse carries his spare tyres aft),
+and it closed on the button of the electric horn. The grey horse at once
+bolted, and we could hear the rider swearing all across the landscape.
+
+'Damn it, man, you've got your silly fist on it! Take it off!' Woodhouse
+shouted.
+
+'Ho!' said the constable, looking carefully at his fingers as though we
+had trapped them. 'That won't do you any good either,' and he wrote once
+more in his note-book before he allowed us to go.
+
+This was Woodhouse's first brush with motor law, and since I expected
+no ill consequences to myself, I pointed out that it was very serious. I
+took the same view myself when in due time I found that I, too, was
+summonsed on charges ranging from the use of obscene language to
+endangering traffic.
+
+Judgment was done in a little pale-yellow market-town with a small,
+Jubilee clock-tower and a large corn-exchange. Woodhouse drove us there
+in his car. Pallant, who had not been included in the summons, came with
+us as moral support. While we waited outside, the fat man on the grey
+horse rode up and entered into loud talk with his brother magistrates.
+He said to one of them--for I took the trouble to note it down--'It
+falls away from my lodge-gates, dead straight, three-quarters of a mile.
+I'd defy any one to resist it. We rooked seventy pounds out of 'em last
+month. No car can resist the temptation. You ought to have one your side
+the county, Mike. They simply can't resist it.'
+
+'Whew!' said Woodhouse. 'We're in for trouble. Don't you say a word--or
+Ollyett either! I'll pay the fines and we'll get it over as soon as
+possible. Where's Pallant?'
+
+'At the back of the court somewhere,' said Ollyett. 'I saw him slip in
+just now.'
+
+The fat man then took his seat on the Bench, of which he was chairman,
+and I gathered from a bystander that his name was Sir Thomas Ingell,
+Bart., M.P., of Ingell Park, Huckley. He began with an allocution
+pitched in a tone that would have justified revolt throughout empires.
+Evidence, when the crowded little court did not drown it with applause,
+was given in the pauses of the address. They were all very proud of
+their Sir Thomas, and looked from him to us, wondering why we did not
+applaud too.
+
+Taking its time from the chairman, the Bench rollicked with us for
+seventeen minutes. Sir Thomas explained that he was sick and tired of
+processions of cads of our type, who would be better employed breaking
+stones on the road than in frightening horses worth more than themselves
+or their ancestors. This was after it had been proved that Woodhouse's
+man had turned on the horn purposely to annoy Sir Thomas, who happened
+to be riding by'! There were other remarks too--primitive enough,--but
+it was the unspeakable brutality of the tone, even more than the quality
+of the justice, or the laughter of the audience that stung our souls out
+of all reason. When we were dismissed--to the tune of twenty-three
+pounds, twelve shillings and sixpence--we waited for Pallant to join us,
+while we listened to the next case--one of driving without a licence.
+Ollyett with an eye to his evening paper, had already taken very full
+notes of our own, but we did not wish to seem prejudiced.
+
+'It's all right,' said the reporter of the local paper soothingly. 'We
+never report Sir Thomas _in extenso_. Only the fines and charges.'
+
+'Oh, thank you,' Ollyett replied, and I heard him ask who every one in
+court might be. The local reporter was very communicative.
+
+The new victim, a large, flaxen-haired man in somewhat striking
+clothes, to which Sir Thomas, now thoroughly warmed, drew public
+attention, said that he had left his licence at home. Sir Thomas asked
+him if he expected the police to go to his home address at Jerusalem to
+find it for him; and the court roared. Nor did Sir Thomas approve of the
+man's name, but insisted on calling him 'Mr. Masquerader,' and every
+time he did so, all his people shouted. Evidently this was their
+established _auto-da-fe_.
+
+'He didn't summons me--because I'm in the House, I suppose. I think I
+shall have to ask a Question,' said Pallant, reappearing at the close
+of the case.
+
+'I think _I_ shall have to give it a little publicity too,' said
+Woodhouse. 'We can't have this kind of thing going on, you know.' His
+face was set and quite white. Pallant's, on the other hand, was black,
+and I know that my very stomach had turned with rage. Ollyett was dum.
+
+'Well, let's have lunch,' Woodhouse said at last. 'Then we can get away
+before the show breaks up.'
+
+We drew Ollyett from the arms of the local reporter, crossed the Market
+Square to the Red Lion and found Sir Thomas's 'Mr. Masquerader' just
+sitting down to beer, beef and pickles.
+
+'Ah!' said he, in a large voice. 'Companions in misfortune. Won't you
+gentlemen join me?'
+
+'Delighted,' said Woodhouse. 'What did you get?'
+
+'I haven't decided. It might make a good turn, but--the public aren't
+educated up to it yet. It's beyond 'em. If it wasn't, that red dub on
+the Bench would be worth fifty a week.'
+
+'Where?' said Woodhouse. The man looked at him with unaffected surprise.
+
+'At any one of My places,' he replied. 'But perhaps you live here?'
+
+'Good heavens!' cried young Ollyett suddenly. 'You _are_ Masquerier,
+then? I thought you were!'
+
+'Bat Masquerier.' He let the words fall with the weight of an
+international ultimatum. 'Yes, that's all I am. But you have the
+advantage of me, gentlemen.'
+
+For the moment, while we were introducing ourselves, I was puzzled. Then
+I recalled prismatic music-hall posters--of enormous acreage--that had
+been the unnoticed background of my visits to London for years past.
+Posters of men and women, singers, jongleurs, impersonators and
+audacities of every draped and undraped brand, all moved on and off in
+London and the Provinces by Bat Masquerier--with the long wedge-tailed
+flourish following the final 'r.'
+
+'_I_ knew you at once,' said Pallant, the trained M.P., and I promptly
+backed the lie. Woodhouse mumbled excuses. Bat Masquerier was not moved
+for or against us any more than the frontage of one of his own palaces.
+
+'I always tell My people there's a limit to the size of the lettering,'
+he said. 'Overdo that and the ret'na doesn't take it in. Advertisin' is
+the most delicate of all the sciences.'
+
+'There's one man in the world who is going to get a little of it if I
+live for the next twenty-four hours,' said Woodhouse, and explained how
+this would come about.
+
+Masquerier stared at him lengthily with gunmetal-blue eyes.
+
+'You mean it?' he drawled; the voice was as magnetic as the look.
+
+'_I_ do,' said Ollyett. 'That business of the horn alone ought to have
+him off the Bench in three months.' Masquerier looked at him even longer
+than he had looked at Woodhouse.
+
+'He told _me_,' he said suddenly, 'that my home-address was Jerusalem.
+You heard that?'
+
+'But it was the tone--the tone,' Ollyett cried.
+
+'You noticed that, too, did you?' said Masquerier. 'That's the artistic
+temperament. You can do a lot with it. And I'm Bat Masquerier,' he went
+on. He dropped his chin in his fists and scowled straight in front of
+him.... 'I made the Silhouettes--I made the Trefoil and the Jocunda. I
+made 'Dal Benzaguen.' Here Ollyett sat straight up, for in common with
+the youth of that year he worshipped Miss Vidal Benzaguen of the Trefoil
+immensely and unreservedly. '"_Is_ that a dressing-gown or an ulster
+you're supposed to be wearing?" You heard _that_?... "And I suppose you
+hadn't time to brush your hair either?" You heard _that_?... Now, you
+hear _me_!' His voice filled the coffee-room, then dropped to a whisper
+as dreadful as a surgeon's before an operation. He spoke for several
+minutes. Pallant muttered 'Hear! hear!' I saw Ollyett's eye flash--it
+was to Ollyett that Masquerier addressed himself chiefly,--and
+Woodhouse leaned forward with joined hands.
+
+'Are you _with_ me?' he went on, gathering us all up in one sweep of the
+arm. 'When I begin a thing I see it through, gentlemen. What Bat can't
+break, breaks him! But I haven't struck that thing yet. This is no
+one-turn turn-it-down show. This is business to the dead finish. Are you
+with me, gentlemen? Good! Now, we'll pool our assets. One London
+morning, and one provincial daily, didn't you say? One weekly commercial
+ditto and one M.P.'
+
+'Not much use, I'm afraid,' Pallant smirked.
+
+'But privileged. _But_ privileged,' he returned. 'And we have also my
+little team--London, Blackburn, Liverpool, Leeds--I'll tell you about
+Manchester later--and Me! Bat Masquerier.' He breathed the name
+reverently into his tankard. 'Gentlemen, when our combination has
+finished with Sir Thomas Ingell, Bart., M.P., and everything else that
+is his, Sodom and Gomorrah will be a winsome bit of Merrie England
+beside 'em. I must go back to town now, but I trust you gentlemen will
+give me the pleasure of your company at dinner to-night at the Chop
+Suey--the Red Amber Room--and we'll block out the scenario.' He laid his
+hand on young Ollyett's shoulder and added: 'It's your brains I want.'
+Then he left, in a good deal of astrachan collar and nickel-plated
+limousine, and the place felt less crowded.
+
+We ordered our car a few minutes later. As Woodhouse, Ollyett and I were
+getting in, Sir Thomas Ingell, Bart., M.P., came out of the Hall of
+Justice across the square and mounted his horse. I have sometimes
+thought that if he had gone in silence he might even then have been
+saved, but as he settled himself in the saddle he caught sight of us and
+must needs shout: 'Not off yet? You'd better get away and you'd better
+be careful.' At that moment Pallant, who had been buying
+picture-postcards, came out of the inn, took Sir Thomas's eye and very
+leisurely entered the car. It seemed to me that for one instant there
+was a shade of uneasiness on the baronet's grey-whiskered face.
+
+'I hope,' said Woodhouse after several miles, 'I hope he's a widower.'
+
+'Yes,' said Pallant. 'For his poor, dear wife's sake I hope that, very
+much indeed. I suppose he didn't see me in Court. Oh, here's the parish
+history of Huckley written by the Rector and here's your share of the
+picture-postcards. Are we all dining with this Mr. Masquerier to-night?'
+
+'Yes!' said we all.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+If Woodhouse knew nothing of journalism, young Ollyett, who had
+graduated in a hard school, knew a good deal. Our halfpenny evening
+paper, which we will call _The Bun_ to distinguish her from her
+prosperous morning sister, _The Cake_, was not only diseased but
+corrupt. We found this out when a man brought us the prospectus of a new
+oil-field and demanded sub-leaders on its prosperity. Ollyett talked
+pure Brasenose to him for three minutes. Otherwise he spoke and wrote
+trade-English--a toothsome amalgam of Americanisms and epigrams. But
+though the slang changes the game never alters, and Ollyett and I and,
+in the end, some others enjoyed it immensely. It was weeks ere we could
+see the wood for the trees, but so soon as the staff realised that they
+had proprietors who backed them right or wrong, and specially when they
+were wrong (which is the sole secret of journalism), and that their fate
+did not hang on any passing owner's passing mood, they did miracles.
+
+But we did not neglect Huckley. As Ollyett said our first care was to
+create an 'arresting atmosphere' round it. He used to visit the village
+of week-ends, on a motor-bicycle with a side-car; for which reason I
+left the actual place alone and dealt with it in the abstract. Yet it
+was I who drew first blood. Two inhabitants of Huckley wrote to
+contradict a small, quite solid paragraph in _The Bun_ that a hoopoe had
+been seen at Huckley and had, 'of course, been shot by the local
+sportsmen.' There was some heat in their letters, both of which we
+published. Our version of how the hoopoe got his crest from King Solomon
+was, I grieve to say, so inaccurate that the Rector himself--no
+sportsman as he pointed out, but a lover of accuracy--wrote to us to
+correct it. We gave his letter good space and thanked him.
+
+'This priest is going to be useful,' said Ollyett. 'He has the impartial
+mind. I shall vitalise him.'
+
+Forthwith he created M.L. Sigden, a recluse of refined tastes who in
+_The Bun_ demanded to know whether this Huckley-of-the-Hoopoe was the
+Hugly of his boyhood and whether, by any chance, the fell change of name
+had been wrought by collusion between a local magnate and the railway,
+in the mistaken interests of spurious refinement. 'For I knew it and
+loved it with the maidens of my day--_eheu ab angulo!_--as Hugly,' wrote
+M.L. Sigden from Oxf.
+
+Though other papers scoffed, _The Bun_ was gravely sympathetic. Several
+people wrote to deny that Huckley had been changed at birth. Only the
+Rector--no philosopher as he pointed out, but a lover of accuracy--had
+his doubts, which he laid publicly before Mr. M.L. Sigden who suggested,
+through _The Bun_, that the little place might have begun life in
+Anglo-Saxon days as 'Hogslea' or among the Normans as 'Argile,' on
+account of its much clay. The Rector had his own ideas too (he said it
+was mostly gravel), and M.L. Sigden had a fund of reminiscences. Oddly
+enough--which is seldom the case with free reading-matter--our
+subscribers rather relished the correspondence, and contemporaries
+quoted freely.
+
+'The secret of power,' said Ollyett, 'is not the big stick. It's the
+liftable stick.' (This means the 'arresting' quotation of six or seven
+lines.) 'Did you see the _Spec._ had a middle on "Rural Tenacities" last
+week. That was all Huckley. I'm doing a "Mobiquity" on Huckley
+next week.'
+
+Our 'Mobiquities' were Friday evening accounts of easy
+motor-bike-_cum_-side-car trips round London, illustrated (we could
+never get that machine to work properly) by smudgy maps. Ollyett wrote
+the stuff with a fervour and a delicacy which I always ascribed to the
+side-car. His account of Epping Forest, for instance, was simply young
+love with its soul at its lips. But his Huckley 'Mobiquity' would have
+sickened a soap-boiler. It chemically combined loathsome familiarity,
+leering suggestion, slimy piety and rancid 'social service' in one
+fuming compost that fairly lifted me off my feet.
+
+'Yes,' said he, after compliments. 'It's the most vital, arresting and
+dynamic bit of tump I've done up to date. _Non nobis gloria!_ I met Sir
+Thomas Ingell in his own park. He talked to me again. He inspired
+most of it.'
+
+'Which? The "glutinous native drawl," or "the neglected adenoids of the
+village children"?' I demanded.
+
+'Oh, no! That's only to bring in the panel doctor. It's the last flight
+we--I'm proudest of.'
+
+This dealt with 'the crepuscular penumbra spreading her dim limbs over
+the boskage'; with 'jolly rabbits'; with a herd of 'gravid polled
+Angus'; and with the 'arresting, gipsy-like face of their swart,
+scholarly owner--as well known at the Royal Agricultural Shows as that
+of our late King-Emperor.'
+
+'"Swart" is good and so's "gravid,"' said I, 'but the panel doctor will
+be annoyed about the adenoids.'
+
+'Not half as much as Sir Thomas will about his face,' said Ollyett. 'And
+if you only knew what I've left out!'
+
+He was right. The panel doctor spent his week-end (this is the
+advantage of Friday articles) in overwhelming us with a professional
+counterblast of no interest whatever to our subscribers. We told him so,
+and he, then and there, battered his way with it into the _Lancet_ where
+they are keen on glands, and forgot us altogether. But Sir Thomas Ingell
+was of sterner stuff. He must have spent a happy week-end too. The
+letter which we received from him on Monday proved him to be a kinless
+loon of upright life, for no woman, however remotely interested in a man
+would have let it pass the home wastepaper-basket. He objected to our
+references to his own herd, to his own labours in his own village, which
+he said was a Model Village, and to our infernal insolence; but he
+objected most to our invoice of his features. We wrote him courtously to
+ask whether the letter was meant for publication. He, remembering, I
+presume, the Duke of Wellington, wrote back, 'publish and be damned.'
+
+'Oh! This is too easy,' Ollyett said as he began heading the letter.
+
+'Stop a minute,' I said. 'The game is getting a little beyond us.
+To-night's the Bat dinner.' (I may have forgotten to tell you that our
+dinner with Bat Masquerier in the Red Amber Room of the Chop Suey had
+come to be a weekly affair.) 'Hold it over till they've all seen it.'
+
+'Perhaps you're right,' he said. 'You might waste it.'
+
+At dinner, then, Sir Thomas's letter was handed round. Bat seemed to be
+thinking of other matters, but Pallant was very interested.
+
+'I've got an idea,' he said presently. 'Could you put something into
+_The Bun_ to-morrow about foot-and-mouth disease in that fellow's herd?'
+
+'Oh, plague if you like,' Ollyett replied. 'They're only five measly
+Shorthorns. I saw one lying down in the park. She'll serve as a
+sub-stratum of fact.'
+
+'Then, do that; and hold the letter over meanwhile. I think _I_ come in
+here,' said Pallant.
+
+'Why?' said I.
+
+'Because there's something coming up in the House about foot-and-mouth,
+and because he wrote me a letter after that little affair when he fined
+you. 'Took ten days to think it over. Here you are,' said Pallant.
+'House of Commons paper, you see.'
+
+We read:
+
+     DEAR PALLANT--Although in the past our paths have not lain
+     much together, I am sure you will agree with me that on the
+     floor of the House all members are on a footing of equality.
+     I make bold, therefore, to approach you in a matter which I
+     think capable of a very different interpretation from that
+     which perhaps was put upon it by your friends. Will you let
+     them know that that was the case and that I was in no way
+     swayed by animus in the exercise of my magisterial duties,
+     which as you, as a brother magistrate, can imagine are
+     frequently very distasteful to--Yours very sincerely,
+
+     T. INGELL.
+
+     _P.S._--I have seen to it that the motor vigilance to which
+     your friends took exception has been considerably relaxed in
+     my district.
+
+'What did you answer?' said Ollyett, when all our opinions had been
+expressed.
+
+'I told him I couldn't do anything in the matter. And I couldn't--then.
+But you'll remember to put in that foot-and-mouth paragraph. I want
+something to work upon.'
+
+'It seems to me _The Bun_ has done all the work up to date,' I
+suggested. 'When does _The Cake_ come in?'
+
+'_The Cake_,' said Woodhouse, and I remembered afterwards that he spoke
+like a Cabinet Minister on the eve of a Budget, 'reserves to itself the
+fullest right to deal with situations as they arise.'
+
+'Ye-eh!' Bat Masquerier shook himself out of his thoughts. '"Situations
+as they arise." I ain't idle either. But there's no use fishing till the
+swim's baited. You'--he turned to Ollyett--'manufacture very good
+ground-bait.... I always tell My people--What the deuce is that?'
+
+There was a burst of song from another private dining-room across the
+landing. 'It ees some ladies from the Trefoil,' the waiter began.
+
+'Oh, I know that. What are they singing, though?'
+
+He rose and went out, to be greeted by shouts of applause from that
+merry company. Then there was silence, such as one hears in the
+form-room after a master's entry. Then a voice that we loved began
+again: 'Here we go gathering nuts in May--nuts in May--nuts in May!'
+
+'It's only 'Dal--and some nuts,' he explained when he returned. 'She
+says she's coming in to dessert.' He sat down, humming the old tune to
+himself, and till Miss Vidal Benzaguen entered, he held us speechless
+with tales of the artistic temperament.
+
+We obeyed Pallant to the extent of slipping into _The Bun_ a wary
+paragraph about cows lying down and dripping at the mouth, which might
+be read either as an unkind libel or, in the hands of a capable lawyer,
+as a piece of faithful nature-study.
+
+'And besides,' said Ollyett, 'we allude to "gravid polled Angus." I am
+advised that no action can lie in respect of virgin Shorthorns. Pallant
+wants us to come to the House to-night. He's got us places for the
+Strangers' Gallery. I'm beginning to like Pallant.'
+
+'Masquerier seems to like you,' I said.
+
+'Yes, but I'm afraid of him,' Ollyett answered with perfect sincerity.
+'I am. He's the Absolutely Amoral Soul. I've never met one yet.'
+
+We went to the House together. It happened to be an Irish afternoon, and
+as soon as I had got the cries and the faces a little sorted out, I
+gathered there were grievances in the air, but how many of them was
+beyond me.
+
+'It's all right,' said Ollyett of the trained ear. 'They've shut their
+ports against--oh yes--export of Irish cattle! Foot-and-mouth disease at
+Ballyhellion. _I_ see Pallant's idea!'
+
+The House was certainly all mouth for the moment, but, as I could feel,
+quite in earnest. A Minister with a piece of typewritten paper seemed to
+be fending off volleys of insults. He reminded me somehow of a nervous
+huntsman breaking up a fox in the face of rabid hounds.
+
+'It's question-time. They're asking questions,' said Ollyett. 'Look!
+Pallant's up.'
+
+There was no mistaking it. His voice, which his enemies said was his one
+parliamentary asset, silenced the hubbub as toothache silences mere
+singing in the ears. He said:
+
+'Arising out of that, may I ask if any special consideration has
+recently been shown in regard to any suspected outbreak of this disease
+on _this_ side of the Channel?'
+
+He raised his hand; it held a noon edition of _The Bun_. We had thought
+it best to drop the paragraph out of the later ones. He would have
+continued, but something in a grey frock-coat roared and bounded on a
+bench opposite, and waved another _Bun_. It was Sir Thomas Ingell.
+
+'As the owner of the herd so dastardly implicated--' His voice was
+drowned in shouts of 'Order!'--the Irish leading.
+
+'What's wrong?' I asked Ollyett. 'He's got his hat on his head, hasn't
+he?'
+
+'Yes, but his wrath should have been put as a question.'
+
+'Arising out of that, Mr. Speaker, Sirrr!' Sir Thomas bellowed through a
+lull, 'are you aware that--that all this is a conspiracy--part of a
+dastardly conspiracy to make Huckley ridiculous--to make _us_
+ridiculous? Part of a deep-laid plot to make _me_ ridiculous, Mr.
+Speaker, Sir!'
+
+The man's face showed almost black against his white whiskers, and he
+struck out swimmingly with his arms. His vehemence puzzled and held the
+House for an instant, and the Speaker took advantage of it to lift his
+pack from Ireland to a new scent. He addressed Sir Thomas Ingell in
+tones of measured rebuke, meant also, I imagine, for the whole House,
+which lowered its hackles at the word. Then Pallant, shocked and pained:
+'I can only express my profound surprise that in response to my simple
+question the honourable member should have thought fit to indulge in a
+personal attack. If I have in any way offended--'
+
+Again the Speaker intervened, for it appeared that he regulated these
+matters.
+
+He, too, expressed surprise, and Sir Thomas sat back in a hush of
+reprobation that seemed to have the chill of the centuries behind it.
+The Empire's work was resumed.
+
+'Beautiful!' said I, and I felt hot and cold up my back.
+
+'And now we'll publish his letter,' said Ollyett.
+
+We did--on the heels of his carefully reported outburst. We made no
+comment. With that rare instinct for grasping the heart of a situation
+which is the mark of the Anglo-Saxon, all our contemporaries and, I
+should say, two-thirds of our correspondents demanded how such a person
+could be made more ridiculous than he had already proved himself to be.
+But beyond spelling his name 'Injle,' we alone refused to hit a man when
+he was down.
+
+'There's no need,' said Ollyett. 'The whole press is on the huckle from
+end to end.'
+
+Even Woodhouse was a little astonished at the ease with which it had
+come about, and said as much.
+
+'Rot!' said Ollyett. 'We haven't really begun. Huckley isn't news yet.'
+
+'What do you mean?' said Woodhouse, who had grown to have great respect
+for his young but by no means distant connection.
+
+'Mean? By the grace of God, Master Ridley, I mean to have it so that
+when Huckley turns over in its sleep, Reuters and the Press Association
+jump out of bed to cable.' Then he went off at score about certain
+restorations in Huckley Church which, he said--and he seemed to spend
+his every week-end there--had been perpetrated by the Rector's
+predecessor, who had abolished a 'leper-window' or a 'squinch-hole'
+(whatever these may be) to institute a lavatory in the vestry. It did
+not strike me as stuff for which Reuters or the Press Association would
+lose much sleep, and I left him declaiming to Woodhouse about a
+fourteenth-century font which, he said, he had unearthed in the sexton's
+tool-shed.
+
+My methods were more on the lines of peaceful penetration. An odd copy,
+in _The Bun's_ rag-and-bone library, of Hone's _Every-Day Book_ had
+revealed to me the existence of a village dance founded, like all
+village dances, on Druidical mysteries connected with the Solar Solstice
+(which is always unchallengeable) and Mid-summer Morning, which is dewy
+and refreshing to the London eye. For this I take no credit--Hone being
+a mine any one can work--but that I rechristened that dance, after I
+had revised it, 'The Gubby' is my title to immortal fame. It was still
+to be witnessed, I wrote, 'in all its poignant purity at Huckley, that
+last home of significant mediaeval survivals'; and I fell so in love with
+my creation that I kept it back for days, enamelling and burnishing.
+
+'You's better put it in,' said Ollyett at last. 'It's time we asserted
+ourselves again. The other fellows are beginning to poach. You saw that
+thing in the _Pinnacle_ about Sir Thomas's Model Village? He must have
+got one of their chaps down to do it.'
+
+''Nothing like the wounds of a friend,' I said. 'That account of the
+non-alcoholic pub alone was--'
+
+'I liked the bit best about the white-tiled laundry and the Fallen
+Virgins who wash Sir Thomas's dress shirts. Our side couldn't come
+within a mile of that, you know. We haven't the proper flair for
+sexual slobber.'
+
+'That's what I'm always saying,' I retorted. 'Leave 'em alone. The other
+fellows are doing our work for us now. Besides I want to touch up my
+"Gubby Dance" a little more.'
+
+'No. You'll spoil it. Let's shove it in to-day. For one thing it's
+Literature. I don't go in for compliments as you know, but, etc. etc.'
+
+I had a healthy suspicion of young Ollyett in every aspect, but though I
+knew that I should have to pay for it, I fell to his flattery, and my
+priceless article on the 'Gubby Dance' appeared. Next Saturday he asked
+me to bring out _The Bun_ in his absence, which I naturally assumed
+would be connected with the little maroon side-car. I was wrong.
+
+On the following Monday I glanced at _The Cake_ at breakfast-time to
+make sure, as usual, of her inferiority to my beloved but unremunerative
+_Bun_. I opened on a heading: 'The Village that Voted the Earth was
+Flat.' I read ... I read that the Geoplanarian Society--a society
+devoted to the proposition that the earth is flat--had held its Annual
+Banquet and Exercises at Huckley on Saturday, when after convincing
+addresses, amid scenes of the greatest enthusiasm, Huckley village had
+decided by an unanimous vote of 438 that the earth was flat. I do not
+remember that I breathed again till I had finished the two columns of
+description that followed. Only one man could have written them. They
+were flawless--crisp, nervous, austere yet human, poignant, vital,
+arresting--most distinctly arresting--dynamic enough to shift a
+city--and quotable by whole sticks at a time. And there was a leader, a
+grave and poised leader, which tore me in two with mirth, until I
+remembered that I had been left out--infamously and unjustifiably
+dropped. I went to Ollyett's rooms. He was breakfasting, and, to do him
+justice, looked conscience-stricken.
+
+'It wasn't my fault,' he began. 'It was Bat Masquerier. I swear _I_
+would have asked you to come if--'
+
+'Never mind that,' I said. 'It's the best bit of work you've ever done
+or will do. Did any of it happen?'
+
+'Happen? Heavens! D'you think even _I_ could have invented it?'
+
+'Is it exclusive to _The Cake_?' I cried.
+
+'It cost Bat Masquerier two thousand,' Ollyett replied. 'D'you think
+he'd let any one else in on that? But I give you my sacred word I knew
+nothing about it till he asked me to come down and cover it. He had
+Huckley posted in three colours, "The Geoplanarians' Annual Banquet and
+Exercises." Yes, he invented "Geoplanarians." He wanted Huckley to think
+it meant aeroplanes. Yes, I know that there is a real Society that
+thinks the world's flat--they ought to be grateful for the lift--but Bat
+made his own. He did! He created the whole show, I tell you. He swept
+out half his Halls for the job. Think of that--on a Saturday! They--we
+went down in motor char-a-bancs--three of 'em--one pink, one primrose,
+and one forget-me-not blue--twenty people in each one and "The Earth
+_is_ Flat" on each side and across the back. I went with Teddy Rickets
+and Lafone from the Trefoil, and both the Silhouette Sisters, and--wait
+a minute!--the Crossleigh Trio. You know the Every-Day Dramas Trio at
+the Jocunda--Ada Crossleigh, "Bunt" Crossleigh, and little Victorine?
+Them. And there was Hoke Ramsden, the lightning-change chap in _Morgiana
+and Drexel_--and there was Billy Turpeen. Yes, you know him! The North
+London Star. "I'm the Referee that got himself disliked at Blackheath."
+_That_ chap! And there was Mackaye--that one-eyed Scotch fellow that all
+Glasgow is crazy about. Talk of subordinating yourself for Art's sake!
+Mackaye was the earnest inquirer who got converted at the end of the
+meeting. And there was quite a lot of girls I didn't know, and--oh,
+yes--there was 'Dal! 'Dal Benzaguen herself! We sat together, going and
+coming. She's all the darling there ever was. She sent you her love, and
+she told me to tell you that she won't forget about Nellie Farren. She
+says you've given her an ideal to work for. She? Oh, she was the Lady
+Secretary to the Geoplanarians, of course. I forget who were in the
+other brakes--provincial stars mostly--but they played up gorgeously.
+The art of the music-hall's changed since your day. They didn't overdo
+it a bit. You see, people who believe the earth is flat don't dress
+quite like other people. You may have noticed that I hinted at that in
+my account. It's a rather flat-fronted Ionic style--neo-Victorian,
+except for the bustles, 'Dal told me,--but 'Dal looked heavenly in it!
+So did little Victorine. And there was a girl in the blue brake--she's a
+provincial--but she's coming to town this winter and she'll knock
+'em--Winnie Deans. Remember that! She told Huckley how she had suffered
+for the Cause as a governess in a rich family where they believed that
+the world is round, and how she threw up her job sooner than teach
+immoral geography. That was at the overflow meeting outside the
+Baptist chapel. She knocked 'em to sawdust! We must look out for
+Winnie.... But Lafone! Lafone was beyond everything. Impact,
+personality--conviction--the whole bag o' tricks! He sweated conviction.
+Gad, he convinced _me_ while he was speaking! (Him? He was President of
+the Geoplanarians, of course. Haven't you read my account?) It _is_ an
+infernally plausible theory. After all, no one has actually proved the
+earth is round, have they?'
+
+'Never mind the earth. What about Huckley?'
+
+'Oh, Huckley got tight. That's the worst of these model villages if you
+let 'em smell fire-water. There's one alcoholic pub in the place that
+Sir Thomas can't get rid of. Bat made it his base. He sent down the
+banquet in two motor lorries--dinner for five hundred and drinks for ten
+thousand. Huckley voted all right. Don't you make any mistake about
+that. No vote, no dinner. A unanimous vote--exactly as I've said. At
+least, the Rector and the Doctor were the only dissentients. We didn't
+count them. Oh yes, Sir Thomas was there. He came and grinned at us
+through his park gates. He'll grin worse to-day. There's an aniline dye
+that you rub through a stencil-plate that eats about a foot into any
+stone and wears good to the last. Bat had both the lodge-gates
+stencilled "The Earth _is_ flat!" and all the barns and walls they could
+get at.... Oh Lord, but Huckley was drunk! We had to fill 'em up to make
+'em forgive us for not being aeroplanes. Unthankful yokels! D'you
+realise that Emperors couldn't have commanded the talent Bat decanted on
+'em? Why, 'Dal alone was.... And by eight o'clock not even a bit of
+paper left! The whole show packed up and gone, and Huckley hoo-raying
+for the earth being flat.'
+
+'Very good,' I began. 'I am, as you know, a one-third proprietor of
+_The Bun_.'
+
+'I didn't forget that,' Ollyett interrupted. 'That was uppermost in my
+mind all the time. I've got a special account for _The Bun_ to-day--it's
+an idyll--and just to show how I thought of you, I told 'Dal, coming
+home, about your Gubby Dance, and she told Winnie. Winnie came back in
+our char-a-banc. After a bit we had to get out and dance it in a field.
+It's quite a dance the way we did it--and Lafone invented a sort of
+gorilla lockstep procession at the end. Bat had sent down a film-chap on
+the chance of getting something. He was the son of a clergyman--a most
+dynamic personality. He said there isn't anything for the cinema in
+meetings _qua_ meetings--they lack action. Films are a branch of art by
+themselves. But he went wild over the Gubby. He said it was like Peter's
+vision at Joppa. He took about a million feet of it. Then I photoed it
+exclusive for _The Bun_. I've sent 'em in already, only remember we must
+eliminate Winnie's left leg in the first figure. It's too arresting....
+And there you are! But I tell you I'm afraid of Bat. That man's the
+Personal Devil. He did it all. He didn't even come down himself. He said
+he'd distract his people.'
+
+'Why didn't he ask me to come?' I persisted.
+
+'Because he said you'd distract me. He said he wanted my brains on ice.
+He got 'em. I believe it's the best thing I've ever done.' He reached
+for _The Cake_ and re-read it luxuriously. 'Yes, out and away the
+best--supremely quotable,' he concluded, and--after another survey--'By
+God, what a genius I was yesterday!'
+
+I would have been angry, but I had not the time. That morning, Press
+agencies grovelled to me in _The Bun_ office for leave to use certain
+photos, which, they understood, I controlled, of a certain village
+dance. When I had sent the fifth man away on the edge of tears, my
+self-respect came back a little. Then there was _The Bun's_ poster to
+get out. Art being elimination, I fined it down to two words (one too
+many, as it proved)--'The Gubby!' in red, at which our manager
+protested; but by five o'clock he told me that I was _the_ Napoleon of
+Fleet Street. Ollyett's account in _The Bun_ of the Geoplanarians'
+Exercises and Love Feast lacked the supreme shock of his version in _The
+Cake_, but it bruised more; while the photos of 'The Gubby' (which, with
+Winnie's left leg, was why I had set the doubtful press to work so
+early) were beyond praise and, next day, beyond price. But even then I
+did not understand.
+
+A week later, I think it was, Bat Masquerier telephoned to me to come to
+the Trefoil.
+
+'It's your turn now,' he said. 'I'm not asking Ollyett. Come to the
+stage-box.'
+
+I went, and, as Bat's guest, was received as Royalty is not. We sat well
+back and looked out on the packed thousands. It was _Morgiana and
+Drexel_, that fluid and electric review which Bat--though he gave Lafone
+the credit--really created.
+
+'Ye-es,' said Bat dreamily, after Morgiana had given 'the nasty jar' to
+the Forty Thieves in their forty oil 'combinations.' 'As you say, I've
+got 'em and I can hold 'em. What a man does doesn't matter much; and how
+he does it don't matter either. It's the _when_--the psychological
+moment. 'Press can't make up for it; money can't; brains can't. A lot's
+luck, but all the rest is genius. I'm not speaking about My people now.
+I'm talking of Myself.'
+
+Then 'Dal--she was the only one who dared--knocked at the door and stood
+behind us all alive and panting as Morgiana. Lafone was carrying the
+police-court scene, and the house was ripped up crossways with laughter.
+
+'Ah! Tell a fellow now,' she asked me for the twentieth time, 'did you
+love Nellie Farren when you were young?'
+
+'Did we love her?' I answered. '"If the earth and the sky and the
+sea"--There were three million of us, 'Dal, and we worshipped her.'
+
+'How did she get it across?' Dal went on.
+
+'She was Nellie. The houses used to coo over her when she came on.'
+
+'I've had a good deal, but I've never been cooed over yet,' said 'Dal
+wistfully.
+
+'It isn't the how, it's the when,' Bat repeated. 'Ah!'
+
+He leaned forward as the house began to rock and peal full-throatedly.
+'Dal fled. A sinuous and silent procession was filing into the
+police-court to a scarcely audible accompaniment. It was dressed--but
+the world and all its picture-palaces know how it was dressed. It
+danced and it danced, and it danced the dance which bit all humanity in
+the leg for half a year, and it wound up with the lockstep finale that
+mowed the house down in swathes, sobbing and aching. Somebody in the
+gallery moaned, 'Oh Gord, the Gubby!' and we heard the word run like a
+shudder, for they had not a full breath left among them. Then 'Dal came
+on, an electric star in her dark hair, the diamonds flashing in her
+three-inch heels--a vision that made no sign for thirty counted seconds
+while the police-court scene dissolved behind her into Morgiana's
+Manicure Palace, and they recovered themselves. The star on her forehead
+went out, and a soft light bathed her as she took--slowly, slowly to the
+croon of adoring strings--the eighteen paces forward. We saw her first
+as a queen alone; next as a queen for the first time conscious of her
+subjects, and at the end, when her hands fluttered, as a woman
+delighted, awed not a little, but transfigured and illuminated with
+sheer, compelling affection and goodwill. I caught the broken mutter of
+welcome--the coo which is more than tornadoes of applause. It died and
+rose and died again lovingly.
+
+'She's got it across,' Bat whispered. 'I've never seen her like this. I
+told her to light up the star, but I was wrong, and she knew it. She's
+an artist.'
+
+''Dal, you darling!' some one spoke, not loudly but it carried through
+the house.
+
+'Thank _you_!' 'Dal answered, and in that broken tone one heard the last
+fetter riveted. 'Good evening, boys! I've just come from--now--where the
+dooce was it I have come from?' She turned to the impassive files of
+the Gubby dancers, and went on: 'Ah, so good of you to remind me, you
+dear, bun-faced things. I've just come from the village--The Village
+that Voted the Earth was Flat.'
+
+She swept into that song with the full orchestra. It devastated the
+habitable earth for the next six months. Imagine, then, what its rage
+and pulse must have been at the incandescent hour of its birth! She only
+gave the chorus once. At the end of the second verse, 'Are you _with_
+me, boys?' she cried, and the house tore it clean away from
+her--'_Earth_ was flat--_Earth_ was flat. Flat as my hat--Flatter than
+that'--drowning all but the bassoons and double-basses that marked
+the word.
+
+'Wonderful,' I said to Bat. 'And it's only "Nuts in May," with
+variations.'
+
+'Yes--but _I_ did the variations,' he replied.
+
+At the last verse she gestured to Carlini the conductor, who threw her
+up his baton. She caught it with a boy's ease. 'Are you _with_ me?' she
+cried once more, and--the maddened house behind her--abolished all the
+instruments except the guttural belch of the double-basses on
+'_Earth_'--'The Village that voted the _Earth_ was flat--_Earth_ was
+flat!' It was delirium. Then she picked up the Gubby dancers and led
+them in a clattering improvised lockstep thrice round the stage till her
+last kick sent her diamond-hiked shoe catherine-wheeling to the
+electrolier.
+
+I saw the forest of hands raised to catch it, heard the roaring and
+stamping pass through hurricanes to full typhoon; heard the song, pinned
+down by the faithful double-basses as the bull-dog pins down the
+bellowing bull, overbear even those; till at last the curtain fell and
+Bat took me round to her dressing-room, where she lay spent after her
+seventh call. Still the song, through all those white-washed walls,
+shook the reinforced concrete of the Trefoil as steam pile-drivers shake
+the flanks of a dock.
+
+'I'm all out--first time in my life. Ah! Tell a fellow now, did I get it
+across?' she whispered huskily.
+
+'You know you did,' I replied as she dipped her nose deep in a beaker of
+barley-water. 'They cooed over you.'
+
+Bat nodded. 'And poor Nellie's dead--in Africa, ain't it?'
+
+'I hope I'll die before they stop cooing,' said 'Dal.
+
+'"_Earth_ was flat--_Earth_ was flat!"' Now it was more like mine-pumps
+in flood.
+
+'They'll have the house down if you don't take another,' some one
+called.
+
+'Bless 'em!' said 'Dal, and went out for her eighth, when in the face of
+that cataract she said yawning, 'I don't know how _you_ feel, children,
+but _I_'m dead. You be quiet.'
+
+'Hold a minute,' said Bat to me. 'I've got to hear how it went in the
+provinces. Winnie Deans had it in Manchester, and Ramsden at
+Glasgow--and there are all the films too. I had rather a heavy
+week-end.'
+
+The telephones presently reassured him.
+
+'It'll do,' said he. 'And _he_ said my home address was Jerusalem.' He
+left me humming the refrain of 'The Holy City.' Like Ollyett I found
+myself afraid of that man.
+
+When I got out into the street and met the disgorging picture-palaces
+capering on the pavements and humming it (for he had put the gramophones
+on with the films), and when I saw far to the south the red electrics
+flash 'Gubby' across the Thames, I feared more than ever.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+A few days passed which were like nothing except, perhaps, a suspense of
+fever in which the sick man perceives the searchlights of the world's
+assembled navies in act to converge on one minute fragment of
+wreckage--one only in all the black and agony-strewn sea. Then those
+beams focussed themselves. Earth as we knew it--the full circuit of our
+orb--laid the weight of its impersonal and searing curiosity on this
+Huckley which had voted that it was flat. It asked for news about
+Huckley--where and what it might be, and how it talked--it knew how it
+danced--and how it thought in its wonderful soul. And then, in all the
+zealous, merciless press, Huckley was laid out for it to look at, as a
+drop of pond water is exposed on the sheet of a magic-lantern show. But
+Huckley's sheet was only coterminous with the use of type among mankind.
+For the precise moment that was necessary, Fate ruled it that there
+should be nothing of first importance in the world's idle eye. One
+atrocious murder, a political crisis, an incautious or heady
+continental statesman, the mere catarrh of a king, would have wiped out
+the significance of our message, as a passing cloud annuls the urgent
+helio. But it was halcyon weather in every respect. Ollyett and I did
+not need to lift our little fingers any more than the Alpine climber
+whose last sentence has unkeyed the arch of the avalanche. The thing
+roared and pulverised and swept beyond eyesight all by itself--all by
+itself. And once well away, the fall of kingdoms could not have
+diverted it.
+
+Ours is, after all, a kindly earth. While The Song ran and raped it with
+the cataleptic kick of 'Ta-ra-ra-boom-de-ay,' multiplied by the West
+African significance of 'Everybody's doing it,' plus twice the infernal
+elementality of a certain tune in _Dona et Gamma_; when for all
+practical purposes, literary, dramatic, artistic, social, municipal,
+political, commercial, and administrative, the Earth _was_ flat, the
+Rector of Huckley wrote to us--again as a lover of accuracy--to point
+out that the Huckley vote on 'the alleged flatness of this scene of our
+labours here below' was _not_ unanimous; he and the doctor having voted
+against it. And the great Baron Reuter himself (I am sure it could have
+been none other) flashed that letter in full to the front, back, and
+both wings of this scene of our labours. For Huckley was News. _The Bun_
+also contributed a photograph which cost me some trouble to fake.
+
+'We are a vital nation,' said Ollyett while we were discussing affairs
+at a Bat dinner. 'Only an Englishman could have written that letter at
+this present juncture.'
+
+'It reminded me of a tourist in the Cave of the Winds under Niagara.
+Just one figure in a mackintosh. But perhaps you saw our photo?' I
+said proudly.
+
+'Yes,' Bat replied. 'I've been to Niagara, too. And how's Huckley taking
+it?'
+
+'They don't quite understand, of course,' said Ollyett. 'But it's
+bringing pots of money into the place. Ever since the motor-bus
+excursions were started--'
+
+'I didn't know they had been,' said Pallant.
+
+'Oh yes. Motor char-a-bancs--uniformed guides and key-bugles included.
+They're getting a bit fed up with the tune there nowadays,'
+Ollyett added.
+
+'They play it under his windows, don't they?' Bat asked. 'He can't stop
+the right of way across his park.'
+
+'He cannot,' Ollyett answered. 'By the way, Woodhouse, I've bought that
+font for you from the sexton. I paid fifteen pounds for it.'
+
+'What am I supposed to do with it?' asked Woodhouse.
+
+'You give it to the Victoria and Albert Museum. It is fourteenth-century
+work all right. You can trust me.'
+
+'Is it worth it--now?' said Pallant. 'Not that I'm weakening, but merely
+as a matter of tactics?'
+
+'But this is true,' said Ollyett. 'Besides, it is my hobby, I always
+wanted to be an architect. I'll attend to it myself. It's too serious
+for _The Bun_ and miles too good for _The Cake_.'
+
+He broke ground in a ponderous architectural weekly, which had never
+heard of Huckley. There was no passion in his statement, but mere fact
+backed by a wide range of authorities. He established beyond doubt that
+the old font at Huckley had been thrown out, on Sir Thomas's
+instigation, twenty years ago, to make room for a new one of Bath stone
+adorned with Limoges enamels; and that it had lain ever since in a
+corner of the sexton's shed. He proved, with learned men to support him,
+that there was only one other font in all England to compare with it. So
+Woodhouse bought it and presented it to a grateful South Kensington
+which said it would see the earth still flatter before it returned the
+treasure to purblind Huckley. Bishops by the benchful and most of the
+Royal Academy, not to mention 'Margaritas ante Porcos,' wrote fervently
+to the papers. _Punch_ based a political cartoon on it; the _Times_ a
+third leader, 'The Lust of Newness'; and the _Spectator_ a scholarly and
+delightful middle, 'Village Hausmania.' The vast amused outside world
+said in all its tongues and types: 'Of course! This is just what Huckley
+would do!' And neither Sir Thomas nor the Rector nor the sexton nor any
+one else wrote to deny it.
+
+'You see,' said Ollyett, 'this is much more of a blow to Huckley than it
+looks--because every word of it's true. Your Gubby dance was
+inspiration, I admit, but it hadn't its roots in--'
+
+'Two hemispheres and four continents so far,' I pointed out.
+
+'Its roots in the hearts of Huckley was what I was going to say. Why
+don't you ever come down and look at the place? You've never seen it
+since we were stopped there.'
+
+'I've only my week-ends free,' I said, 'and you seem to spend yours
+there pretty regularly--with the side-car. I was afraid--'
+
+'Oh, _that's_ all right,' he said cheerily. 'We're quite an old engaged
+couple now. As a matter of fact, it happened after "the gravid polled
+Angus" business. Come along this Saturday. Woodhouse says he'll run us
+down after lunch. He wants to see Huckley too.'
+
+Pallant could not accompany us, but Bat took his place.
+
+'It's odd,' said Bat, 'that none of us except Ollyett has ever set eyes
+on Huckley since that time. That's what I always tell My people. Local
+colour is all right after you've got your idea. Before that, it's a mere
+nuisance.' He regaled us on the way down with panoramic views of the
+success--geographical and financial--of 'The Gubby' and The Song.
+
+'By the way,' said he, 'I've assigned 'Dal all the gramophone rights of
+"The Earth." She's a born artist. 'Hadn't sense enough to hit me for
+triple-dubs the morning after. She'd have taken it out in coos.'
+
+'Bless her! And what'll she make out of the gramophone rights?' I asked.
+
+'Lord knows!' he replied. 'I've made fifty-four thousand my little end
+of the business, and it's only just beginning. Hear _that_!'
+
+A shell-pink motor-brake roared up behind us to the music on a key-bugle
+of 'The Village that Voted the Earth was Flat.' In a few minutes we
+overtook another, in natural wood, whose occupants were singing it
+through their noses.
+
+'I don't know that agency. It must be Cook's,' said Ollyett. 'They _do_
+suffer.' We were never out of earshot of the tune the rest of the way
+to Huckley.
+
+Though I knew it would be so, I was disappointed with the actual aspect
+of the spot we had--it is not too much to say--created in the face of
+the nations. The alcoholic pub; the village green; the Baptist chapel;
+the church; the sexton's shed; the Rectory whence the so-wonderful
+letters had come; Sir Thomas's park gate-pillars still violently
+declaring 'The Earth _is_ flat,' were as mean, as average, as ordinary
+as the photograph of a room where a murder has been committed. Ollyett,
+who, of course, knew the place specially well, made the most of it to
+us. Bat, who had employed it as a back-cloth to one of his own dramas,
+dismissed it as a thing used and emptied, but Woodhouse expressed my
+feelings when he said: 'Is that all--after all we've done?'
+
+'_I_ know,' said Ollyett soothingly. '"Like that strange song I heard
+Apollo sing: When Ilion like a mist rose into towers." I've felt the
+same sometimes, though it has been Paradise for me. But they
+_do_ suffer.'
+
+The fourth brake in thirty minutes had just turned into Sir Thomas's
+park to tell the Hall that 'The _Earth_ was flat'; a knot of obviously
+American tourists were kodaking his lodge-gates; while the tea-shop
+opposite the lych-gate was full of people buying postcards of the old
+font as it had lain twenty years in the sexton's shed. We went to the
+alcoholic pub and congratulated the proprietor.
+
+'It's bringin' money to the place,' said he. 'But in a sense you can buy
+money too dear. It isn't doin' us any good. People are laughin' at us.
+That's what they're doin'.... Now, with regard to that Vote of ours you
+may have heard talk about....'
+
+'For Gorze sake, chuck that votin' business,' cried an elderly man at
+the door. 'Money-gettin' or no money-gettin', we're fed up with it.'
+
+'Well, I do think,' said the publican, shifting his ground, 'I do think
+Sir Thomas might ha' managed better in some things.'
+
+'He tole me,'--the elderly man shouldered his way to the bar--'he tole
+me twenty years ago to take an' lay that font in my tool-shed. He _tole_
+me so himself. An' now, after twenty years, me own wife makin' me out
+little better than the common 'angman!'
+
+'That's the sexton,' the publican explained. 'His good lady sells the
+postcards--if you 'aven't got some. But we feel Sir Thomas might ha'
+done better.'
+
+'What's he got to do with it?' said Woodhouse.
+
+'There's nothin' we can trace 'ome to 'im in so many words, but we think
+he might 'ave saved us the font business. Now, in regard to that votin'
+business--'
+
+'Chuck it! Oh, chuck it!' the sexton roared, 'or you'll 'ave me cuttin'
+my throat at cock-crow. 'Ere's another parcel of fun-makers!'
+
+A motor-brake had pulled up at the door and a multitude of men and
+women immediately descended. We went out to look. They bore rolled
+banners, a reading-desk in three pieces, and, I specially noticed, a
+collapsible harmonium, such as is used on ships at sea.
+
+'Salvation Army?' I said, though I saw no uniforms.
+
+Two of them unfurled a banner between poles which bore the legend: 'The
+Earth _is_ flat.' Woodhouse and I turned to Bat. He shook his head. 'No,
+no! Not me.... If I had only seen their costumes in advance!'
+
+'Good Lord!' said Ollyett. 'It's the genuine Society!'
+
+The company advanced on the green with the precision of people well
+broke to these movements. Scene-shifters could not have been quicker
+with the three-piece rostrum, nor stewards with the harmonium. Almost
+before its cross-legs had been kicked into their catches, certainly
+before the tourists by the lodge-gates had begun to move over, a woman
+sat down to it and struck up a hymn:
+
+     Hear ther truth our tongues are telling,
+       Spread ther light from shore to shore,
+     God hath given man a dwelling
+       Flat and flat for evermore.
+
+     When ther Primal Dark retreated,
+       When ther deeps were undesigned,
+     He with rule and level meted
+       Habitation for mankind!
+
+I saw sick envy on Bat's face. 'Curse Nature,' he muttered. 'She gets
+ahead of you every time. To think _I_ forgot hymns and a harmonium!'
+
+Then came the chorus:
+
+     Hear ther truth our tongues are telling,
+       Spread ther light from shore to shore--
+     Oh, be faithful! Oh, be truthful!
+       Earth is flat for evermore.
+
+They sang several verses with the fervour of Christians awaiting their
+lions. Then there were growlings in the air. The sexton, embraced by the
+landlord, two-stepped out of the pub-door. Each was trying to outroar
+the other. 'Apologising in advarnce for what he says,' the landlord
+shouted: 'You'd better go away' (here the sexton began to speak words).
+'This isn't the time nor yet the place for--for any more o' this chat.'
+
+The crowd thickened. I saw the village police-sergeant come out of his
+cottage buckling his belt.
+
+'But surely,' said the woman at the harmonium, 'there must be some
+mistake. We are not suffragettes.'
+
+'Damn it! They'd be a change,' cried the sexton. 'You get out of this!
+Don't talk! _I_ can't stand it for one! Get right out, or we'll
+font you!'
+
+The crowd which was being recruited from every house in sight echoed the
+invitation. The sergeant pushed forward. A man beside the reading-desk
+said: 'But surely we are among dear friends and sympathisers. Listen to
+me for a moment.'
+
+It was the moment that a passing char-a-banc chose to strike into The
+Song. The effect was instantaneous. Bat, Ollyett, and I, who by divers
+roads have learned the psychology of crowds, retreated towards the
+tavern door. Woodhouse, the newspaper proprietor, anxious, I presume, to
+keep touch with the public, dived into the thick of it. Every one else
+told the Society to go away at once. When the lady at the harmonium (I
+began to understand why it is sometimes necessary to kill women) pointed
+at the stencilled park pillars and called them 'the cromlechs of our
+common faith,' there was a snarl and a rush. The police-sergeant checked
+it, but advised the Society to keep on going. The Society withdrew into
+the brake fighting, as it were, a rear-guard action of oratory up each
+step. The collapsed harmonium was hauled in last, and with the perfect
+unreason of crowds, they cheered it loudly, till the chauffeur slipped
+in his clutch and sped away. Then the crowd broke up, congratulating all
+concerned except the sexton, who was held to have disgraced his office
+by having sworn at ladies. We strolled across the green towards
+Woodhouse, who was talking to the police-sergeant near the park-gates.
+We were not twenty yards from him when we saw Sir Thomas Ingell emerge
+from the lodge and rush furiously at Woodhouse with an uplifted stick,
+at the same time shrieking: 'I'll teach you to laugh, you--' but Ollyett
+has the record of the language. By the time we reached them, Sir Thomas
+was on the ground; Woodhouse, very white, held the walking-stick and was
+saying to the sergeant:
+
+'I give this person in charge for assault.'
+
+'But, good Lord!' said the sergeant, whiter than Woodhouse. 'It's Sir
+Thomas.'
+
+'Whoever it is, it isn't fit to be at large,' said Woodhouse. The crowd
+suspecting something wrong began to reassemble, and all the English
+horror of a row in public moved us, headed by the sergeant, inside the
+lodge. We shut both park-gates and lodge-door.
+
+'You saw the assault, sergeant,' Woodhouse went on. 'You can testify I
+used no more force than was necessary to protect myself. You can testify
+that I have not even damaged this person's property. (Here! take your
+stick, you!) You heard the filthy language he used.'
+
+'I--I can't say I did,' the sergeant stammered.
+
+'Oh, but _we_ did!' said Ollyett, and repeated it, to the apron-veiled
+horror of the lodge-keeper's wife.
+
+Sir Thomas on a hard kitchen chair began to talk. He said he had 'stood
+enough of being photographed like a wild beast,' and expressed loud
+regret that he had not killed 'that man,' who was 'conspiring with the
+sergeant to laugh at him.'
+
+''Ad you ever seen 'im before, Sir Thomas?' the sergeant asked.
+
+'No! But it's time an example was made here. I've never seen the sweep
+in my life.'
+
+I think it was Bat Masquerier's magnetic eye that recalled the past to
+him, for his face changed and his jaw dropped. 'But I have!' he groaned.
+'I remember now.'
+
+Here a writhing man entered by the back door. He was, he said, the
+village solicitor. I do not assert that he licked Woodhouse's boots, but
+we should have respected him more if he had and been done with it. His
+notion was that the matter could be accommodated, arranged and
+compromised for gold, and yet more gold. The sergeant thought so too.
+Woodhouse undeceived them both. To the sergeant he said, 'Will you or
+will you not enter the charge?' To the village solicitor he gave the
+name of his lawyers, at which the man wrung his hands and cried, 'Oh,
+Sir T., Sir T.!' in a miserable falsetto, for it was a Bat Masquerier of
+a firm. They conferred together in tragic whispers.
+
+'I don't dive after Dickens,' said Ollyett to Bat and me by the window,
+'but every time _I_ get into a row I notice the police-court always
+fills up with his characters.'
+
+'I've noticed that too,' said Bat. 'But the odd thing is you mustn't
+give the public straight Dickens--not in My business. I wonder why
+that is.'
+
+Then Sir Thomas got his second wind and cursed the day that he, or it
+may have been we, were born. I feared that though he was a Radical he
+might apologise and, since he was an M.P., might lie his way out of the
+difficulty. But he was utterly and truthfully beside himself. He asked
+foolish questions--such as what we were doing in the village at all, and
+how much blackmail Woodhouse expected to make out of him. But neither
+Woodhouse nor the sergeant nor the writhing solicitor listened. The
+upshot of their talk, in the chimney-corner, was that Sir Thomas stood
+engaged to appear next Monday before his brother magistrates on charges
+of assault, disorderly conduct, and language calculated, etc. Ollyett
+was specially careful about the language.
+
+Then we left. The village looked very pretty in the late light--pretty
+and tuneful as a nest of nightingales.
+
+'You'll turn up on Monday, I hope,' said Woodhouse, when we reached
+town. That was his only allusion to the affair.
+
+So we turned up--through a world still singing that the Earth was
+flat--at the little clay-coloured market-town with the large Corn
+Exchange and the small Jubilee memorial. We had some difficulty in
+getting seats in the court. Woodhouse's imported London lawyer was a man
+of commanding personality, with a voice trained to convey blasting
+imputations by tone. When the case was called, he rose and stated his
+client's intention not to proceed with the charge. His client, he went
+on to say, had not entertained, and, of course, in the circumstances
+could not have entertained, any suggestion of accepting on behalf of
+public charities any moneys that might have been offered to him on the
+part of Sir Thomas's estate. At the same time, no one acknowledged more
+sincerely than his client the spirit in which those offers had been made
+by those entitled to make them. But, as a matter of fact--here he became
+the man of the world colloguing with his equals--certain--er--details
+had come to his client's knowledge _since_ the lamentable outburst,
+which ... He shrugged his shoulders. Nothing was served by going into
+them, but he ventured to say that, had those painful circumstances only
+been known earlier, his client would--again 'of course'--never have
+dreamed--A gesture concluded the sentence, and the ensnared Bench looked
+at Sir Thomas with new and withdrawing eyes. Frankly, as they could see,
+it would be nothing less than cruelty to proceed further with
+this--er-unfortunate affair. He asked leave, therefore, to withdraw the
+charge _in toto_, and at the same time to express his client's deepest
+sympathy with all who had been in any way distressed, as his client had
+been, by the fact and the publicity of proceedings which he could, of
+course, again assure them that his client would never have dreamed of
+instituting if, as he hoped he had made plain, certain facts had been
+before his client at the time when.... But he had said enough. For his
+fee it seemed to me that he had.
+
+Heaven inspired Sir Thomas's lawyer--all of a sweat lest his client's
+language should come out--to rise up and thank him. Then, Sir
+Thomas--not yet aware what leprosy had been laid upon him, but grateful
+to escape on any terms--followed suit. He was heard in interested
+silence, and people drew back a pace as Gehazi passed forth.
+
+'You hit hard,' said Bat to Woodhouse afterwards. 'His own people think
+he's mad.'
+
+'You don't say so? I'll show you some of his letters to-night at
+dinner,' he replied.
+
+He brought them to the Red Amber Room of the Chop Suey. We forgot to be
+amazed, as till then we had been amazed, over the Song or 'The Gubby,'
+or the full tide of Fate that seemed to run only for our sakes. It did
+not even interest Ollyett that the verb 'to huckle' had passed into the
+English leader-writers' language. We were studying the interior of a
+soul, flash-lighted to its grimiest corners by the dread of 'losing its
+position.'
+
+'And then it thanked you, didn't it, for dropping the case?' said
+Pallant.
+
+'Yes, and it sent me a telegram to confirm.' Woodhouse turned to Bat.
+'Now d'you think I hit too hard?' he asked.
+
+'No-o!' said Bat. 'After all--I'm talking of every one's business
+now--one can't ever do anything in Art that comes up to Nature in any
+game in life. Just think how this thing has--'
+
+'Just let me run through that little case of yours again,' said Pallant,
+and picked up _The Bun_ which had it set out in full.
+
+'Any chance of 'Dal looking in on us to-night?' Ollyett began.
+
+'She's occupied with her Art too,' Bat answered bitterly. 'What's the
+use of Art? Tell me, some one!' A barrel-organ outside promptly pointed
+out that the _Earth_ was flat. 'The gramophone's killing street organs,
+but I let loose a hundred-and-seventy-four of those hurdygurdys twelve
+hours after The Song,' said Bat. 'Not counting the Provinces.' His face
+brightened a little.
+
+'Look here!' said Pallant over the paper. 'I don't suppose you or those
+asinine J.P.'s knew it--but your lawyer ought to have known that you've
+all put your foot in it most confoundedly over this assault case.'
+
+'What's the matter?' said Woodhouse.
+
+'It's ludicrous. It's insane. There isn't two penn'orth of legality in
+the whole thing. Of course, you could have withdrawn the charge, but the
+way you went about it is childish--besides being illegal. What on earth
+was the Chief Constable thinking of?'
+
+'Oh, he was a friend of Sir Thomas's. They all were for that matter,' I
+replied.
+
+'He ought to be hanged. So ought the Chairman of the Bench. I'm talking
+as a lawyer now.'
+
+'Why, what have we been guilty of? Misprision of treason or compounding
+a felony--or what?' said Ollyett.
+
+'I'll tell you later.' Pallant went back to the paper with knitted
+brows, smiling unpleasantly from time to time. At last he laughed.
+
+'Thank you!' he said to Woodhouse. 'It ought to be pretty useful--for
+us.'
+
+'What d'you mean?' said Ollyett.
+
+'For our side. They are all Rads who are mixed up in this--from the
+Chief Constable down. There must be a Question. There must be a
+Question.'
+
+'Yes, but I wanted the charge withdrawn in my own way,' Woodhouse
+insisted.
+
+'That's nothing to do with the case. It's the legality of your silly
+methods. You wouldn't understand if I talked till morning,' He began to
+pace the room, his hands behind him. 'I wonder if I can get it through
+our Whip's thick head that it's a chance.... That comes of stuffing the
+Bench with radical tinkers,' he muttered.
+
+'Oh, sit down!' said Woodhouse.
+
+'Where's your lawyer to be found now?' he jerked out.
+
+'At the Trefoil,' said Bat promptly. 'I gave him the stage-box for
+to-night. He's an artist too.'
+
+'Then I'm going to see him,' said Pallant. 'Properly handled this ought
+to be a godsend for our side.' He withdrew without apology.
+
+'Certainly, this thing keeps on opening up, and up,' I remarked inanely.
+
+'It's beyond me!' said Bat. 'I don't think if I'd known I'd have
+ever ... Yes, I would, though. He said my home address was--'
+
+'It was his tone--his tone!' Ollyett almost shouted. Woodhouse said
+nothing, but his face whitened as he brooded.
+
+'Well, any way,' Bat went on, 'I'm glad I always believed in God and
+Providence and all those things. Else I should lose my nerve. We've put
+it over the whole world--the full extent of the geographical globe. We
+couldn't stop it if we wanted to now. It's got to burn itself out. I'm
+not in charge any more. What d'you expect'll happen next. Angels?'
+
+I expected nothing. Nothing that I expected approached what I got.
+Politics are not my concern, but, for the moment, since it seemed that
+they were going to 'huckle' with the rest, I took an interest in them.
+They impressed me as a dog's life without a dog's decencies, and I was
+confirmed in this when an unshaven and unwashen Pallant called on me at
+ten o'clock one morning, begging for a bath and a couch.
+
+'Bail too?' I asked. He was in evening dress and his eyes were sunk feet
+in his head.
+
+'No,' he said hoarsely. 'All night sitting. Fifteen divisions. 'Nother
+to-night. Your place was nearer than mine, so--' He began to undress
+in the hall.
+
+When he awoke at one o'clock he gave me lurid accounts of what he said
+was history, but which was obviously collective hysteria. There had been
+a political crisis. He and his fellow M.P.'s had 'done things'--I never
+quite got at the things--for eighteen hours on end, and the pitiless
+Whips were even then at the telephones to herd 'em up to another
+dog-fight. So he snorted and grew hot all over again while he might have
+been resting.
+
+'I'm going to pitch in my question about that miscarriage of justice at
+Huckley this afternoon, if you care to listen to it,' he said. 'It'll be
+absolutely thrown away--in our present state. I told 'em so; but it's my
+only chance for weeks. P'raps Woodhouse would like to come.'
+
+'I'm sure he would. Anything to do with Huckley interests us,' I said.
+
+'It'll miss fire, I'm afraid. Both sides are absolutely cooked. The
+present situation has been working up for some time. You see the row was
+bound to come, etc. etc.,' and he flew off the handle once more.
+
+I telephoned to Woodhouse, and we went to the House together. It was a
+dull, sticky afternoon with thunder in the air. For some reason or
+other, each side was determined to prove its virtue and endurance to the
+utmost. I heard men snarling about it all round me. 'If they won't spare
+us, we'll show 'em no mercy,' 'Break the brutes up from the start. They
+can't stand late hours.' 'Come on! No shirking! I know _you've_ had a
+Turkish bath,' were some of the sentences I caught on our way. The House
+was packed already, and one could feel the negative electricity of a
+jaded crowd wrenching at one's own nerves, and depressing the
+afternoon soul.
+
+'This is bad!' Woodhouse whispered. 'There'll be a row before they've
+finished. Look at the Front Benches!' And he pointed out little personal
+signs by which I was to know that each man was on edge. He might have
+spared himself. The House was ready to snap before a bone had been
+thrown. A sullen minister rose to reply to a staccato question. His
+supporters cheered defiantly. 'None o' that! None o' that!' came from
+the Back Benches. I saw the Speaker's face stiffen like the face of a
+helmsman as he humours a hard-mouthed yacht after a sudden following
+sea. The trouble was barely met in time. There came a fresh, apparently
+causeless gust a few minutes later--savage, threatening, but futile. It
+died out--one could hear the sigh--in sudden wrathful realisation of
+the dreary hours ahead, and the ship of state drifted on.
+
+Then Pallant--and the raw House winced at the torture of his
+voice--rose. It was a twenty-line question, studded with legal
+technicalities. The gist of it was that he wished to know whether the
+appropriate Minister was aware that there had been a grave miscarriage
+of justice on such and such a date, at such and such a place, before
+such and such justices of the peace, in regard to a case which arose--
+
+I heard one desperate, weary 'damn!' float up from the pit of that
+torment. Pallant sawed on--'out of certain events which occurred at the
+village of Huckley.'
+
+The House came to attention with a parting of the lips like a hiccough,
+and it flashed through my mind.... Pallant repeated, 'Huckley. The
+village--'
+
+'That voted the _Earth_ was flat.' A single voice from a back Bench sang
+it once like a lone frog in a far pool.
+
+'_Earth_ was flat,' croaked another voice opposite.
+
+'_Earth_ was flat.' There were several. Then several more.
+
+It was, you understand, the collective, overstrained nerve of the House,
+snapping, strand by strand to various notes, as the hawser parts from
+its moorings.
+
+'The Village that voted the _Earth_ was flat.' The tune was beginning to
+shape itself. More voices were raised and feet began to beat time. Even
+so it did not occur to me that the thing would--
+
+'The Village that voted the _Earth_ was flat!' It was easier now to see
+who were not singing. There were still a few. Of a sudden (and this
+proves the fundamental instability of the cross-bench mind) a
+cross-bencher leaped on his seat and there played an imaginary
+double-bass with tremendous maestro-like wagglings of the elbow.
+
+The last strand parted. The ship of state drifted out helpless on the
+rocking tide of melody.
+
+     'The Village that voted the _Earth_ was flat!
+      The Village that voted the _Earth_ was flat!'
+
+The Irish first conceived the idea of using their order-papers as
+funnels wherewith to reach the correct '_vroom--vroom_' on '_Earth_.'
+Labour, always conservative and respectable at a crisis, stood out
+longer than any other section, but when it came in it was howling
+syndicalism. Then, without distinction of Party, fear of constituents,
+desire for office, or hope of emolument, the House sang at the tops and
+at the bottoms of their voices, swaying their stale bodies and
+epileptically beating with their swelled feet. They sang 'The Village
+that voted the _Earth_ was flat': first, because they wanted to, and
+secondly--which is the terror of that song--because they could not stop.
+For no consideration could they stop.
+
+Pallant was still standing up. Some one pointed at him and they laughed.
+Others began to point, lunging, as it were, in time with the tune. At
+this moment two persons came in practically abreast from behind the
+Speaker's chair, and halted appalled. One happened to be the Prime
+Minister and the other a messenger. The House, with tears running down
+their cheeks, transferred their attention to the paralysed couple. They
+pointed six hundred forefingers at them. They rocked, they waved, and
+they rolled while they pointed, but still they sang. When they weakened
+for an instant, Ireland would yell: 'Are ye _with_ me, bhoys?' and they
+all renewed their strength like Antaeus. No man could say afterwards
+what happened in the Press or the Strangers' Gallery. It was the House,
+the hysterical and abandoned House of Commons that held all eyes, as it
+deafened all ears. I saw both Front Benches bend forward, some with
+their foreheads on their despatch-boxes, the rest with their faces in
+their hands; and their moving shoulders jolted the House out of its last
+rag of decency. Only the Speaker remained unmoved. The entire press of
+Great Britain bore witness next day that he had not even bowed his head.
+The Angel of the Constitution, for vain was the help of man, foretold
+him the exact moment at which the House would have broken into 'The
+Gubby.' He is reported to have said: 'I heard the Irish beginning to
+shuffle it. So I adjourned.' Pallant's version is that he added: 'And I
+was never so grateful to a private member in all my life as I was to
+Mr. Pallant.'
+
+He made no explanation. He did not refer to orders or disorders. He
+simply adjourned the House till six that evening. And the House
+adjourned--some of it nearly on all fours.
+
+I was not correct when I said that the Speaker was the only man who did
+not laugh. Woodhouse was beside me all the time. His face was set and
+quite white--as white, they told me, as Sir Thomas Ingell's when he
+went, by request, to a private interview with his Chief Whip.
+
+
+
+
+THE PRESS
+
+     The Soldier may forget his sword
+       The Sailorman the sea,
+     The Mason may forget the Word
+       And the Priest his litany:
+     The maid may forget both jewel and gem,
+       And the bride her wedding-dress--
+     But the Jew shall forget Jerusalem
+       Ere we forget the Press!
+
+     Who once hath stood through the loaded hour
+       Ere, roaring like the gale,
+     The Harrild and the Hoe devour
+       Their league-long paper bale,
+     And has lit his pipe in the morning calm
+       That follows the midnight stress--
+     He hath sold his heart to the old Black Art
+       We call the daily Press.
+
+     Who once hath dealt in the widest game
+       That all of a man can play,
+     No later love, no larger fame
+       Will lure him long away.
+     As the war-horse smelleth the battle afar,
+       The entered Soul, no less,
+     He saith: 'Ha! Ha!' where the trumpets are
+       And the thunders of the Press.
+
+     Canst thou number the days that we fulfil,
+       Or the _Times_ that we bring forth?
+     Canst thou send the lightnings to do thy will,
+       And cause them reign on earth?
+     Hast thou given a peacock goodly wings
+       To please his foolishness?
+     Sit down at the heart of men and things,
+       Companion of the Press!
+
+     The Pope may launch his Interdict,
+       The Union its decree,
+     But the bubble is blown and the bubble is pricked
+       By Us and such as We.
+     Remember the battle and stand aside
+       While Thrones and Powers confess
+     That King over all the children of pride
+       Is the Press--the Press--the Press!
+
+
+
+In The Presence
+
+(1912)
+
+'So the matter,' the Regimental Chaplain concluded, 'was correct; in
+every way correct. I am well pleased with Rutton Singh and Attar Singh.
+They have gathered the fruit of their lives.'
+
+He folded his arms and sat down on the verandah. The hot day had ended,
+and there was a pleasant smell of cooking along the regimental lines,
+where half-clad men went back and forth with leaf platters and
+water-goglets. The Subadar-Major, in extreme undress, sat on a chair, as
+befitted his rank; the Havildar-Major, his nephew, leaning respectfully
+against the wall. The Regiment was at home and at ease in its own
+quarters in its own district which takes its name from the great
+Muhammadan saint Mian Mir, revered by Jehangir and beloved by Guru Har
+Gobind, sixth of the great Sikh Gurus.
+
+'Quite correct,' the Regimental Chaplain repeated.
+
+No Sikh contradicts his Regimental Chaplain who expounds to him the Holy
+Book of the Grunth Sahib and who knows the lives and legends of all
+the Gurus.
+
+The Subadar-Major bowed his grey head. The Havildar-Major coughed
+respectfully to attract attention and to ask leave to speak. Though he
+was the Subadar-Major's nephew, and though his father held twice as
+much land as his uncle, he knew his place in the scheme of things. The
+Subadar-Major shifted one hand with an iron bracelet on the wrist.
+
+'Was there by any chance any woman at the back of it?' the
+Havildar-Major murmured. 'I was not here when the thing happened.'
+
+'Yes! Yes! Yes! We all know that thou wast in England eating and
+drinking with the Sahibs. We are all surprised that thou canst still
+speak Punjabi.' The Subadar-Major's carefully-tended beard bristled.
+
+'There was no woman,' the Regimental Chaplain growled. 'It was land.
+Hear, you! Rutton Singh and Attar Singh were the elder of four brothers.
+These four held land in--what was the village's name?--oh, Pishapur,
+near Thori, in the Banalu Tehsil of Patiala State, where men can still
+recognise right behaviour when they see it. The two younger brothers
+tilled the land, while Rutton Singh and Attar Singh took service with
+the Regiment, according to the custom of the family.'
+
+'True, true,' said the Havildar-Major. 'There is the same arrangement in
+all good families.'
+
+'Then, listen again,' the Regimental Chaplain went on. 'Their kin on
+their mother's side put great oppression and injustice upon the two
+younger brothers who stayed with the land in Patiala State. Their
+mother's kin loosened beasts into the four brothers' crops when the
+crops were green; they cut the corn by force when it was ripe; they
+broke down the water-courses; they defiled the wells; and they brought
+false charges in the law-courts against all four brothers. They did not
+spare even the cotton-seed, as the saying is.
+
+'Their mother's kin trusted that the young men would thus be forced by
+weight of trouble, and further trouble and perpetual trouble, to quit
+their lands in Pishapur village in Banalu Tehsil in Patiala State. If
+the young men ran away, the land would come whole to their mother's kin.
+I am not a regimental school-master, but is it understood, child?'
+
+'Understood,' said the Havildar-Major grimly. 'Pishapur is not the only
+place where the fence eats the field instead of protecting it. But
+perhaps there was a woman among their mother's kin?'
+
+'God knows!' said the Regimental Chaplain. 'Woman, or man, or
+law-courts, the young men would _not_ be driven off the land which was
+their own by inheritance. They made appeal to Rutton Singh and Attar
+Singh, their brethren who had taken service with _us_ in the Regiment,
+and so knew the world, to help them in their long war against their
+mother's kin in Pishapur. For that reason, because their own land and
+the honour of their house was dear to them, Rutton Singh and Attar Singh
+needs must very often ask for leave to go to Patiala and attend to the
+lawsuits and cattle-poundings there.
+
+'It was not, look you, as though they went back to their own village and
+sat, garlanded with jasmine, in honour, upon chairs before the elders
+under the trees. They went back always to perpetual trouble, either of
+lawsuits, or theft, or strayed cattle; and they sat on thorns.'
+
+'I knew it,' said the Subadar-Major. 'Life was bitter for them both. But
+they were well-conducted men. It was not hard to get them their leave
+from the Colonel Sahib.'
+
+'They spoke to me also,' said the Chaplain. '_"Let him who desires the
+four great gifts apply himself to the words of holy men."_ That is
+written. Often they showed me the papers of the false lawsuits brought
+against them. Often they wept on account of the persecution put upon
+them by their mother's kin. Men thought it was drugs when their eyes
+showed red.'
+
+'They wept in my presence too,' said the Subadar-Major. 'Well-conducted
+men of nine years' service apiece. Rutton Singh was drill-Naik, too.'
+
+'They did all things correctly as Sikhs should,' said the Regimental
+Chaplain. 'When the persecution had endured seven years, Attar Singh
+took leave to Pishapur once again (that was the fourth time in that year
+only) and he called his persecutors together before the village elders,
+and he cast his turban at their feet and besought them by his mother's
+blood to cease from their persecutions. For he told them earnestly that
+he had marched to the boundaries of his patience, and that there could
+be but one end to the matter.
+
+'They gave him abuse. They mocked him and his tears, which was the same
+as though they had mocked the Regiment. Then Attar Singh returned to the
+Regiment, and laid this last trouble before Rutton Singh, the eldest
+brother. But Rutton Singh could not get leave all at once.'
+
+'Because he was drill-Naik and the recruits were to be drilled. I myself
+told him so,' said the Subadar-Major. 'He was a well-conducted man. He
+said he could wait.'
+
+'But when permission was granted, those two took four days' leave,' the
+Chaplain went on.
+
+'I do not think Attar Singh should have taken Baynes Sahib's revolver.
+He was Baynes Sahib's orderly, and all that Sahib's things were open to
+him. It was, therefore, as I count it, shame to Attar Singh,' said the
+Subadar-Major.
+
+'All the words had been said. There was need of arms, and how could
+soldiers use Government rifles upon mere cultivators in the fields?' the
+Regimental Chaplain replied. 'Moreover, the revolver was sent back,
+together with a money-order for the cartridges expended. _"Borrow not;
+but if thou borrowest, pay back soon!"_ That is written in the Hymns.
+Rutton Singh took a sword, and he and Attar Singh went to Pishapur and,
+after word given, the four brethren fell upon their persecutors in
+Pishapur village and slew seventeen, wounding ten. A revolver is better
+than a lawsuit. I say that these four brethren, the two with _us_, and
+the two mere cultivators, slew and wounded twenty-seven--all their
+mother's kin, male and female.
+
+'Then the four mounted to their housetop, and Attar Singh, who was
+always one of the impetuous, said "My work is done," and he made
+_shinan_ (purification) in all men's sight, and he lent Rutton Singh
+Baynes Sahib's revolver, and Rutton Singh shot him in the head.
+
+'So Attar Singh abandoned his body, as an insect abandons a blade of
+grass. But Rutton Singh, having more work to do, went down from the
+housetop and sought an enemy whom he had forgotten--a Patiala man of
+this regiment who had sided with the persecutors. When he overtook the
+man, Rutton Singh hit him twice with bullets and once with the sword.'
+
+'But the man escaped and is now in the hospital here,' said the
+Subadar-Major. 'The doctor says he will live in spite of all.'
+
+'Not Rutton Singh's fault. Rutton Singh left him for dead. Then Rutton
+Singh returned to the housetop, and the three brothers together, Attar
+Singh being dead, sent word by a lad to the police station for an army
+to be dispatched against them that they might die with honours. But none
+came. And yet Patiala State is not under English law and they should
+know virtue there when they see it!
+
+'So, on the third day, Rutton Singh also made _shinan_, and the youngest
+of the brethren shot him also in the head, and _he_ abandoned his body.
+
+'Thus was all correct. There was neither heat, nor haste, nor abuse in
+the matter from end to end. There remained alive not one man or woman of
+their mother's kin which had oppressed them. Of the other villagers of
+Pishapur, who had taken no part in the persecutions, not one was slain.
+Indeed, the villagers sent them food on the housetop for those three
+days while they waited for the police who would not dispatch that army.
+
+'Listen again! I know that Attar Singh and Rutton Singh omitted no
+ceremony of the purifications, and when all was done Baynes Sahib's
+revolver was thrown down from the housetop, together with three rupees
+twelve annas; and order was given for its return by post.'
+
+'And what befell the two younger brethren who were not in the service?'
+the Havildar-Major asked.
+
+'Doubtless they too are dead, but since they were not in the Regiment
+their honour concerns themselves only. So far as _we_ were touched, see
+how correctly we came out of the matter! I think the King should be
+told; for where could you match such a tale except among us Sikhs? _Sri
+wah guru ji ki Khalsa! Sri wah guru ji ki futteh!_' said the
+Regimental Chaplain.
+
+'Would three rupees twelve annas pay for the used cartridges?' said the
+Havildar-Major.
+
+'Attar Singh knew the just price. All Baynes Sahib's gear was in his
+charge. They expended one tin box of fifty cartouches, lacking two which
+were returned. As I said--as I say--the arrangement was made not with
+heat nor blasphemies as a Mussulman would have made it; not with cries
+nor caperings as an idolater would have made it; but conformably to the
+ritual and doctrine of the Sikhs. Hear you! _"Though hundreds of
+amusements are offered to a child it cannot live without milk. If a man
+be divorced from his soul and his soul's desire he certainly will not
+stop to play upon the road, but he will make haste with his
+pilgrimage_." That is written. I rejoice in my disciples.'
+
+'True! True! Correct! Correct!' said the Subadar-Major. There was a
+long, easy silence. One heard a water-wheel creaking somewhere and the
+nearer sound of meal being ground in a quern.
+
+'But he--' the Chaplain pointed a scornful chin at the
+Havildar-Major--'_he_ has been so long in England that--'
+
+'Let the lad alone,' said his uncle. 'He was but two months there, and
+he was chosen for good cause.'
+
+Theoretically, all Sikhs are equal. Practically, there are differences,
+as none know better than well-born, land-owning folk, or long-descended
+chaplains from Amritsar.
+
+'Hast thou heard anything in England to match my tale?' the Chaplain
+sneered.
+
+'I saw more than I could understand, so I have locked up my stories in
+my own mouth,' the Havildar-Major replied meekly.
+
+'Stories? What stories? I know all the stories about England,' said the
+Chaplain. 'I know that _terains_ run underneath their bazaars there, and
+as for their streets stinking with _mota kahars_, only this morning I
+was nearly killed by Duggan Sahib's _mota-kahar_. That young man is
+a devil.'
+
+'I expect Grunthi-jee,' said the Subadar-Major, 'you and I grow too old
+to care for the Kahar-ki-nautch--the Bearer's dance.' He named one of
+the sauciest of the old-time nautches, and smiled at his own pun. Then
+he turned to his nephew. 'When I was a lad and came back to my village
+on leave, I waited the convenient hour, and, the elders giving
+permission, I spoke of what I had seen elsewhere.'
+
+'Ay, my father,' said the Havildar-Major, softly and affectionately. He
+sat himself down with respect, as behoved a mere lad of thirty with a
+bare half-dozen campaigns to his credit.
+
+'There were four men in this affair also,' he began, 'and it was an
+affair that touched the honour, not of one regiment, nor two, but of all
+the Army in Hind. Some part of it I saw; some I heard; but _all_ the
+tale is true. My father's brother knows, and my priest knows, that I was
+in England on business with my Colonel, when the King--the Great Queen's
+son--completed his life.
+
+'First, there was a rumour that sickness was upon him. Next, we knew
+that he lay sick in the Palace. A very great multitude stood outside the
+Palace by night and by day, in the rain as well as the sun, waiting
+for news.
+
+'Then came out one with a written paper, and set it upon a
+gate-side--the word of the King's death--and they read, and groaned.
+This I saw with my own eyes, because the office where my Colonel Sahib
+went daily to talk with Colonel Forsyth Sahib was at the east end of the
+very gardens where the Palace stood. They are larger gardens than
+Shalimar here'--he pointed with his chin up the lines--'or Shahdera
+across the river.
+
+'Next day there was a darkness in the streets, because all the city's
+multitude were clad in black garments, and they spoke as a man speaks in
+the presence of his dead--all those multitudes. In the eyes, in the air,
+and in the heart, there was blackness. I saw it. But that is not
+my tale.
+
+'After ceremonies had been accomplished, and word had gone out to the
+Kings of the Earth that they should come and mourn, the new King--the
+dead King's son--gave commandment that his father's body should be laid,
+coffined, in a certain Temple which is near the river. There are no
+idols in that Temple; neither any carvings, nor paintings, nor gildings.
+It is all grey stone, of one colour as though it were cut out of the
+live rock. It is larger than--yes, than the Durbar Sahib at Amritsar,
+even though the Akal Bunga and the Baba-Atal were added. How old it may
+be God knows. It is the Sahibs' most sacred Temple.
+
+'In that place, by the new King's commandment, they made, as it were, a
+shrine for a saint, with lighted candles at the head and the feet of the
+Dead, and duly appointed watchers for every hour of the day and the
+night, until the dead King should be taken to the place of his fathers,
+which is at Wanidza.
+
+'When all was in order, the new King said, "Give entrance to all
+people," and the doors were opened, and O my uncle! O my teacher! all
+the world entered, walking through that Temple to take farewell of the
+Dead. There was neither distinction, nor price, nor ranking in the host,
+except an order that they should walk by fours.
+
+'As they gathered in the streets without--very, very far off--so they
+entered the Temple, walking by fours: the child, the old man; mother,
+virgin, harlot, trader, priest; of all colours and faiths and customs
+under the firmament of God, from dawn till late at night. I saw it. My
+Colonel gave me leave to go. I stood in the line, many hours, one
+_koss_, two _koss_, distant from the temple.'
+
+'Then why did the multitude not sit down under the trees?' asked the
+priest.
+
+'Because we were still between houses. The city is many _koss_ wide,'
+the Havildar-Major resumed. 'I submitted myself to that slow-moving
+river and thus--thus--a pace at a time--I made pilgrimage. There were in
+my rank a woman, a cripple, and a lascar from the ships.
+
+'When we entered the Temple, the coffin itself was as a shoal in the
+Ravi River, splitting the stream into two branches, one on either side
+of the Dead; and the watchers of the Dead, who were soldiers, stood
+about It, moving no more than the still flame of the candles. Their
+heads were bowed; their hands were clasped; their eyes were cast upon
+the ground--thus. They were not men, but images, and the multitude went
+past them in fours by day, and, except for a little while, by
+night also.
+
+'No, there was no order that the people should come to pay respect. It
+was a free-will pilgrimage. Eight kings had been commanded to come--who
+obeyed--but upon his own Sahibs the new King laid no commandment. Of
+themselves they came.
+
+'I made pilgrimage twice: once for my Salt's sake, and once again for
+wonder and terror and worship. But my mouth cannot declare one thing of
+a hundred thousand things in this matter. There were _lakhs_ of _lakhs_,
+_crores_ of _crores_ of people. I saw them.'
+
+'More than at our great pilgrimages?' the Regimental Chaplain demanded.
+
+'Yes. Those are only cities and districts coming out to pray. This was
+the world walking in grief. And now, hear you! It is the King's custom
+that four swords of Our Armies in Hind should stand always before the
+Presence in case of need.'
+
+'The King's custom, our right,' said the Subadar-Major curtly.
+
+'Also our right. These honoured ones are changed after certain months or
+years, that the honour may be fairly spread. Now it chanced that when
+the old King--the Queen's son--completed his days, the four that stood
+in the Presence were Goorkhas. Neither Sikhs alas, nor Pathans, Rajputs,
+nor Jats. Goorkhas, my father.'
+
+'Idolaters,' said the Chaplain.
+
+'But soldiers; for I remember in the Tirah--' the Havildar-Major began.
+
+'_But_ soldiers, for I remember fifteen campaigns. Go on,' said the
+Subadar-Major.
+
+'And it was their honour and right to furnish one who should stand in
+the Presence by day and by night till It went out to burial. There were
+no more than four all told--four old men to furnish that guard.'
+
+'Old? Old? What talk is this of old men?' said the Subadar-Major.
+
+'Nay. My fault! Your pardon!' The Havildar-Major spread a deprecating
+hand. 'They were strong, hot, valiant men, and the youngest was a lad of
+forty-five.'
+
+'That is better,' the Subadar-Major laughed.
+
+'But for all their strength and heat they could not eat strange food
+from the Sahibs' hands. There was no cooking place in the Temple; but a
+certain Colonel Forsyth Sahib, who had understanding, made arrangement
+whereby they should receive at least a little caste-clean parched grain;
+also cold rice maybe, and water which was pure. Yet, at best, this was
+no more than a hen's mouthful, snatched as each came off his guard. They
+lived on grain and were thankful, as the saying is.
+
+'One hour's guard in every four was each man's burden, for, as I have
+shown, they were but four all told; and the honour of Our Armies in Hind
+was on their heads. The Sahibs could draw upon all the armies in England
+for the other watchers--thousands upon thousands of fresh men--if they
+needed; but these four were but four.
+
+'The Sahibs drew upon the Granadeers for the other watchers. Granadeers
+be very tall men under very tall bearskins, such as Fusilier regiments
+wear in cold weather. Thus, when a Granadeer bowed his head but a very
+little over his stock, the bearskin sloped and showed as though he
+grieved exceedingly. Now the Goorkhas wear flat, green caps--'
+
+'I see, I see,' said the Subadar-Major impatiently.
+
+'They are bull-necked, too; and their stocks are hard, and when they
+bend deeply--deeply--to match the Granadeers--they come nigh to choking
+themselves. That was a handicap against them, when it came to the
+observance of ritual.
+
+'Yet even with their tall, grief-declaring bearskins, the Granadeers
+could not endure the full hour's guard in the Presence. There was good
+cause, as I will show, why no man could endure that terrible hour. So
+for them the hour's guard was cut to one-half. What did it matter to the
+Sahibs? They could draw on ten thousand Granadeers. Forsyth Sahib, who
+had comprehension, put this choice also before the four, and they said,
+"No, ours is the Honour of the Armies of Hind. Whatever the Sahibs do,
+we will suffer the full hour."
+
+'Forsyth Sahib, seeing that they were--knowing that they could neither
+sleep long nor eat much, said, "Is it great suffering?" They said, "It
+is great honour. We will endure."
+
+'Forsyth Sahib, who loves us, said then to the eldest, "Ho, father, tell
+me truly what manner of burden it is; for the full hour's watch breaks
+up our men like water."
+
+'The eldest answered, "Sahib, the burden is the feet of the multitude
+that pass us on either side. Our eyes being lowered and fixed, we see
+those feet only from the knee down--a river of feet, Sahib, that
+never--never--never stops. It is not the standing without any motion; it
+is not hunger; nor is it the dead part before the dawn when maybe a
+single one comes here to weep. It is the burden of the unendurable
+procession of feet from the knee down, that never--never--never stops!"
+
+'Forsyth Sahib said, "By God, I had not considered that! Now I know why
+our men come trembling and twitching off that guard. But at least, my
+father, ease the stock a little beneath the bent chin for that
+one hour."
+
+'The eldest said, "We are in the Presence. Moreover _He_ knew every
+button and braid and hook of every uniform in all His armies."
+
+'Then Forsyth Sahib said no more, except to speak about their parched
+grain, but indeed they could not eat much after their hour, nor could
+they sleep much because of eye-twitchings and the renewed procession of
+the feet before the eyes. Yet they endured each his full hour--not half
+an hour--his one full hour in each four hours.'
+
+'Correct! correct!' said the Subadar-Major and the Chaplain together.
+'We come well out of this affair.'
+
+'But seeing that they were old men,' said the Subadar-Major
+reflectively, 'very old men, worn out by lack of food and sleep, could
+not arrangements have been made, or influence have been secured, or a
+petition presented, whereby a well-born Sikh might have eased them of
+some portion of their great burden, even though his substantive rank--'
+
+'Then they would most certainly have slain me,' said the Havildar-Major
+with a smile.
+
+'And they would have done correctly,' said the Chaplain. 'What befell
+the honourable ones later?'
+
+'This. The Kings of the earth and all the Armies sent flowers and
+such-like to the dead King's palace at Wanidza, where the funeral
+offerings were accepted. There was no order given, but all the world
+made oblation. So the four took counsel--three at a time--and either
+they asked Forsyth Sahib to choose flowers, or themselves they went
+forth and bought flowers--I do not know; but, however it was arranged,
+the flowers were bought and made in the shape of a great drum-like
+circle weighing half a _maund_.
+
+'Forsyth Sahib had said, "Let the flowers be sent to Wanidza with the
+other flowers which all the world is sending." But they said among
+themselves, "It is not fit that these flowers, which are the offerings
+of His Armies in Hind, should come to the Palace of the Presence by the
+hands of hirelings or messengers, or of any man not in His service."
+
+'Hearing this, Forsyth Sahib, though he was much occupied with
+office-work, said, "Give me the flowers, and I will steal a time and
+myself take them to Wanidza."
+
+'The eldest said, "Since when has Forsyth Sahib worn sword?"
+
+'Forsyth Sahib said, "But always. And I wear it in the Presence when I
+put on uniform. I am a Colonel in the Armies of Hind." The eldest said,
+"Of what regiment?" And Forsyth Sahib looked on the carpet and pulled
+the hair of his lip. He saw the trap.'
+
+'Forsyth Sahib's regiment was once the old Forty-sixth Pathans which
+was called--' the Subadar-Major gave the almost forgotten title, adding
+that he had met them in such and such campaigns, when Forsyth Sahib was
+a young captain.
+
+The Havildar-Major took up the tale, saying, 'The eldest knew that also,
+my father. He laughed, and presently Forsyth Sahib laughed.
+
+'"It is true," said Forsyth Sahib. "I have no regiment. For twenty years
+I have been a clerk tied to a thick pen. Therefore I am the more fit to
+be your orderly and messenger in this business."
+
+'The eldest then said, "If it were a matter of my life or the honour of
+_any_ of my household, it would be easy." And Forsyth Sahib joined his
+hands together, half laughing, though he was ready to weep, and he said,
+"Enough! I ask pardon. Which one of you goes with the offering?"
+
+'The eldest said, feigning not to have heard, "Nor must they be
+delivered by a single sword--as though we were pressed for men in His
+service," and they saluted and went out.'
+
+'Were these things seen, or were they told thee?' said the
+Subadar-Major.
+
+'I both saw and heard in the office full of books and papers where my
+Colonel Sahib consulted Forsyth Sahib upon the business that had brought
+my Colonel Sahib to England.'
+
+'And what was that business?' the Regimental Chaplain asked of a sudden,
+looking full at the Havildar-Major, who returned the look without
+a quiver.
+
+'That was not revealed to me,' said the Havildar-Major.
+
+'I heard it might have been some matter touching the integrity of
+certain regiments,' the Chaplain insisted.
+
+'The matter was not in any way open to my ears,' said the
+Havildar-Major.
+
+'Humph!' The Chaplain drew his hard road-worn feet under his robe. 'Let
+us hear the tale that it is permitted thee to tell,' he said, and the
+Havildar-Major went on:
+
+'So then the three, having returned to the Temple, called the fourth,
+who had only forty-five years, when he came off guard, and said, "We go
+to the Palace at Wanidza with the offerings. Remain thou in the
+Presence, and take all our guards, one after the other, till we return."
+
+'Within that next hour they hired a large and strong _mota-kahar_ for
+the journey from the Temple to Wanidza, which is twenty _koss_ or more,
+and they promised expedition. But he who took their guards said, "It is
+not seemly that we should for any cause appear to be in haste. There are
+eighteen medals with eleven clasps and three Orders to consider. Go at
+leisure. I can endure."
+
+'So the three with the offerings were absent three hours and a half, and
+having delivered the offering at Wanidza in the correct manner they
+returned and found the lad on guard, and they did not break his guard
+till his full hour was ended. So _he_ endured four hours in the
+Presence, not stirring one hair, his eyes abased, and the river of
+feet, from the knee down, passing continually before his eyes. When he
+was relieved, it was seen that his eyeballs worked like
+weavers' shuttles.
+
+'And so it was done--not in hot blood, not for a little while, nor yet
+with the smell of slaughter and the noise of shouting to sustain, but in
+silence, for a very long time, rooted to one place before the Presence
+among the most terrible feet of the multitude.'
+
+'Correct!' the Chaplain chuckled.
+
+'But the Goorkhas had the honour,' said the Subadar-Major sadly.
+
+'Theirs was the Honour of His Armies in Hind, and that was Our Honour,'
+the nephew replied.
+
+'Yet I would one Sikh had been concerned in it--even one low-caste Sikh.
+And after?'
+
+'They endured the burden until the end--until It went out of the Temple
+to be laid among the older kings at Wanidza. When all was accomplished
+and It was withdrawn under the earth, Forsyth Sahib said to the four,
+"The King gives command that you be fed here on meat cooked by your own
+cooks. Eat and take ease, my fathers."
+
+'So they loosed their belts and ate. They had not eaten food except by
+snatches for some long time; and when the meat had given them strength
+they slept for very many hours; and it was told me that the procession
+of the unendurable feet ceased to pass before their eyes any more.'
+
+He threw out one hand palm upward to show that the tale was ended.
+
+'We came well and cleanly out of it,' said the Subadar-Major.
+
+'Correct! Correct! Correct!' said the Regimental Chaplain. 'In an evil
+age it is good to hear such things, and there is certainly no doubt that
+this is a very evil age.'
+
+
+
+
+JOBSON'S AMEN
+
+     'Blessed be the English and all their ways and works.
+     Cursed be the Infidels, Hereticks, and Turks!'
+     'Amen,' quo' Jobson, 'but where I used to lie
+     Was neither Candle, Bell nor Book to curse my brethren by:
+
+     'But a palm-tree in full bearing, bowing down, bowing down,
+     To a surf that drove unsparing at the brown-walled town--
+     Conches in a temple, oil-lamps in a dome--
+     And a low moon out of Africa said: "This way home!"'
+
+     'Blessed be the English and all that they profess.
+     Cursed be the Savages that prance in nakedness!'
+     'Amen,' quo' Jobson, 'but where I used to lie
+     Was neither shirt nor pantaloons to catch my brethren by:
+
+     'But a well-wheel slowly creaking, going round, going round,
+     By a water-channel leaking over drowned, warm ground--
+     Parrots very busy in the trellised pepper-vine--
+     And a high sun over Asia shouting: "Rise and shine!"'
+
+     'Blessed be the English and everything they own.
+     Cursed be the Infidels that bow to wood and stone!'
+     'Amen,' quo' Jobson, 'but where I used to lie
+     Was neither pew nor Gospelleer to save my brethren by:
+
+     'But a desert stretched and stricken, left and right, left
+           and right,
+     Where the piled mirages thicken under white-hot light--
+     A skull beneath a sand-hill and a viper coiled inside--
+     And a red wind out of Libya roaring: "Run and hide!"'
+
+     'Blessed be the English and all they make or do.
+     Cursed be the Hereticks who doubt that this is true!'
+     'Amen,' quo' Jobson, 'but where I mean to die
+     Is neither rule nor calliper to judge the matter by:
+
+     'But Himalaya heavenward-heading, sheer and vast, sheer and vast,
+     In a million summits bedding on the last world's past;
+     A certain sacred mountain where the scented cedars climb,
+     And--the feet of my Beloved hurrying back through Time!'
+
+
+
+REGULUS
+
+(1917)
+
+_Regulus, a Roman general, defeated the Carthaginians 256 B.C., but was
+next year defeated and taken prisoner by the Carthaginians, who sent him
+to Rome with an embassy to ask for peace or an exchange of prisoners.
+Regulus strongly advised the Roman Senate to make no terms with the
+enemy. He then returned to Carthage and was put to death._
+
+The Fifth Form had been dragged several times in its collective life,
+from one end of the school Horace to the other. Those were the years
+when Army examiners gave thousands of marks for Latin, and it was Mr.
+King's hated business to defeat them.
+
+Hear him, then, on a raw November morning at second lesson.
+
+'Aha!' he began, rubbing his hands. '_Cras ingens iterabimus aequor._
+Our portion to-day is the Fifth Ode of the Third Book, I
+believe--concerning one Regulus, a gentleman. And how often have we been
+through it?'
+
+'Twice, sir,' said Malpass, head of the Form.
+
+Mr. King shuddered. 'Yes, twice, quite literally,' he said. 'To-day,
+with an eye to your Army _viva-voce_ examinations--ugh!--I shall exact
+somewhat freer and more florid renditions. With feeling and
+comprehension if that be possible. I except'--here his eye swept the
+back benches--'our friend and companion Beetle, from whom, now as
+always, I demand an absolutely literal translation.' The form laughed
+subserviently.
+
+'Spare his blushes! Beetle charms us first.'
+
+Beetle stood up, confident in the possession of a guaranteed construe,
+left behind by M'Turk, who had that day gone into the sick-house with a
+cold. Yet he was too wary a hand to show confidence.
+
+'_Credidimus_, we--believe--we have believed,' he opened in
+hesitating slow time, '_tonantem Joven_, thundering Jove--_regnare_,
+to reign--_caelo_, in heaven. _Augustus_, Augustus--_habebitur_,
+will be held or considered--_praesens divus_, a present
+God--_adjectis Britannis_, the Britons being added--_imperio_, to the
+Empire--_gravibusque Persis_, with the heavy--er, stern Persians.'
+
+'What?'
+
+'The grave or stern Persians.' Beetle pulled up with the
+'Thank-God-I-have-done-my-duty' air of Nelson in the cockpit.
+
+'I am quite aware,' said King, 'that the first stanza is about the
+extent of your knowledge, but continue, sweet one, continue. _Gravibus_,
+by the way, is usually translated as "troublesome."'
+
+Beetle drew a long and tortured breath. The second stanza (which carries
+over to the third) of that Ode is what is technically called a
+'stinker.' But M'Turk had done him handsomely.
+
+'_Milesne Crassi_, had--has the soldier of Crassus--_vixit_,
+lived--_turpis maritus_, a disgraceful husband--'
+
+'You slurred the quantity of the word after _turpis_,' said King. 'Let's
+hear it.'
+
+Beetle guessed again, and for a wonder hit the correct quantity. 'Er--a
+disgraceful husband--_conjuge barbara_, with a barbarous spouse.'
+
+'Why do you select _that_ disgustful equivalent out of all the
+dictionary?' King snapped. 'Isn't "wife" good enough for you?'
+
+'Yes, sir. But what do I do about this bracket, sir? Shall I take it
+now?'
+
+'Confine yourself at present to the soldier of Crassus.'
+
+'Yes, sir. _Et_, and--_consenuit_, has he grown old--_in armis_, in
+the--er--arms--_hositum socerorum_, of his father-in-law's enemies.'
+
+'Who? How? Which?'
+
+'Arms of his enemies' fathers-in-law, sir.'
+
+'Tha-anks. By the way, what meaning might you attach to _in armis_?'
+
+'Oh, weapons--weapons of war, sir.' There was a virginal note in
+Beetle's voice as though he had been falsely accused of uttering
+indecencies. 'Shall I take the bracket now, sir?'
+
+'Since it seems to be troubling you.'
+
+'_Pro Curia_, O for the Senate House--_inversique mores_, and manners
+upset--upside down.'
+
+'Ve-ry like your translation. Meantime, the soldier of Crassus?'
+
+'_Sub rege Medo_, under a Median King--_Marsus et Apulus_, he being a
+Marsian and an Apulian.'
+
+'Who? The Median King?'
+
+'No, sir. The soldier of Crassus. _Oblittus_ agrees with _milesne
+Crassi_, sir,' volunteered too-hasty Beetle.
+
+'Does it? It doesn't with _me_.'
+
+'_Oh-blight-us_,' Beetle corrected hastily, 'forgetful--_anciliorum_, of
+the shields, or trophies--_et nominis_, and the--his name--_et togae_,
+and the toga--_eternaeque Vestae_, and eternal Vesta--_incolumi Jove_,
+Jove being safe--_et urbe Roma_, and the Roman city.' With an air of
+hardly restrained zeal--'Shall I go on, sir?'
+
+Mr. King winced. 'No, thank you. You have indeed given us a translation!
+May I ask if it conveys any meaning whatever to your so-called mind?'
+
+'Oh, I think so, sir.' This with gentle toleration for Horace and all
+his works.
+
+'We envy you. Sit down.'
+
+Beetle sat down relieved, well knowing that a reef of uncharted
+genitives stretched ahead of him, on which in spite of M'Turk's
+sailing-directions he would infallibly have been wrecked.
+
+Rattray, who took up the task, steered neatly through them and came
+unscathed to port.
+
+'Here we require drama,' said King. 'Regulus himself is speaking now.
+Who shall represent the provident-minded Regulus? Winton, will you
+kindly oblige?'
+
+Winton of King's House, a long, heavy, tow-headed Second Fifteen
+forward, overdue for his First Fifteen colours, and in aspect like an
+earnest, elderly horse, rose up, and announced, among other things,
+that he had seen 'signs affixed to Punic deluges.' Half the Form shouted
+for joy, and the other half for joy that there was something to
+shout about.
+
+Mr. King opened and shut his eyes with great swiftness. '_Signa adfixa
+delubris_,' he gasped. 'So _delubris_ is "deluges" is it? Winton, in all
+our dealings, have I ever suspected you of a jest?'
+
+'No, sir,' said the rigid and angular Winton, while the Form rocked
+about him.
+
+'And yet you assert _delubris_ means "deluges." Whether I am a fit
+subject for such a jape is, of course, a matter of opinion, but....
+Winton, you are normally conscientious. May we assume you looked out
+_delubris_?'
+
+'No, sir.' Winton was privileged to speak that truth dangerous to all
+who stand before Kings.
+
+''Made a shot at it then?'
+
+Every line of Winton's body showed he had done nothing of the sort.
+Indeed, the very idea that 'Pater' Winton (and a boy is not called
+'Pater' by companions for his frivolity) would make a shot at anything
+was beyond belief. But he replied, 'Yes,' and all the while worked with
+his right heel as though he were heeling a ball at punt-about.
+
+Though none dared to boast of being a favourite with King, the taciturn,
+three-cornered Winton stood high in his House-Master's opinion. It
+seemed to save him neither rebuke nor punishment, but the two were in
+some fashion sympathetic.
+
+'Hm!' said King drily. 'I was going to say--_Flagito additis damnum_,
+but I think--I think I see the process. Beetle, the translation of
+_delubris_, please.'
+
+Beetle raised his head from his shaking arm long enough to answer:
+'Ruins, sir.'
+
+There was an impressive pause while King checked off crimes on his
+fingers. Then to Beetle the much-enduring man addressed winged words:
+
+'Guessing,' said he. 'Guessing, Beetle, as usual, from the look of
+_delubris_ that it bore some relation to _diluvium_ or deluge, you
+imparted the result of your half-baked lucubrations to Winton who seems
+to have been lost enough to have accepted it. Observing next, your
+companion's fall, from the presumed security of your undistinguished
+position in the rear-guard, you took another pot-shot. The turbid chaos
+of your mind threw up some memory of the word "dilapidations" which you
+have pitifully attempted to disguise under the synonym of "ruins."'
+
+As this was precisely what Beetle had done he looked hurt but forgiving.
+'We will attend to this later,' said King. 'Go on, Winton, and retrieve
+yourself.'
+
+_Delubris_ happened to be the one word which Winton had not looked out
+and had asked Beetle for, when they were settling into their places. He
+forged ahead with no further trouble. Only when he rendered _scilicet_
+as 'forsooth,' King erupted.
+
+'Regulus,' he said, 'was not a leader-writer for the penny press, nor,
+for that matter, was Horace. Regulus says: "The soldier ransomed by gold
+will come keener for the fight--will he by--by gum!" _That's_ the
+meaning of _scilicet_. It indicates contempt--bitter contempt.
+"Forsooth," forsooth! You'll be talking about "speckled beauties" and
+"eventually transpire" next. Howell, what do you make of that doubled
+"Vidi ego--ego vidi"? It wasn't put in to fill up the metre, you know.'
+
+'Isn't it intensive, sir?' said Howell, afflicted by a genuine interest
+in what he read. 'Regulus was a bit in earnest about Rome making no
+terms with Carthage--and he wanted to let the Romans understand it,
+didn't he, sir?'
+
+'Less than your usual grace, but the fact. Regulus _was_ in earnest. He
+was also engaged at the same time in cutting his own throat with every
+word he uttered. He knew Carthage which (your examiners won't ask you
+this so you needn't take notes) was a sort of God-forsaken nigger
+Manchester. Regulus was not thinking about his own life. He was telling
+Rome the truth. He was playing for his side. Those lines from the
+eighteenth to the fortieth ought to be written in blood. Yet there are
+things in human garments which will tell you that Horace was a
+flaneur--a man about town. Avoid such beings. Horace knew a very great
+deal. _He_ knew! _Erit ille fortis_--"will he be brave who once to
+faithless foes has knelt?" And again (stop pawing with your hooves,
+Thornton!) _hic unde vitam sumeret inscius_. That means roughly--but I
+perceive I am ahead of my translators. Begin at _hic unde_, Vernon, and
+let us see if you have the spirit of Regulus.'
+
+Now no one expected fireworks from gentle Paddy Vernon, sub-prefect of
+Hartopp's House, but, as must often be the case with growing boys, his
+mind was in abeyance for the time being, and he said, all in a rush, on
+behalf of Regulus: '_O magna Carthago probrosis altior Italiae ruinis_,
+O Carthage, thou wilt stand forth higher than the ruins of Italy.'
+
+Even Beetle, most lenient of critics, was interested at this point,
+though he did not join the half-groan of reprobation from the wiser
+heads of the Form.
+
+'_Please_ don't mind me,' said King, and Vernon very kindly did not. He
+ploughed on thus: 'He (Regulus) is related to have removed from himself
+the kiss of the shameful wife and of his small children as less by the
+head, and, being stern, to have placed his virile visage on the ground.'
+
+Since King loved 'virile' about as much as he did 'spouse' or 'forsooth'
+the Form looked up hopefully. But Jove thundered not.
+
+'Until,' Vernon continued, 'he should have confirmed the sliding fathers
+as being the author of counsel never given under an alias.'
+
+He stopped, conscious of stillness round him like the dread calm of the
+typhoon's centre. King's opening voice was sweeter than honey.
+
+'I am painfully aware by bitter experience that I cannot give you any
+idea of the passion, the power, the--the essential guts of the lines
+which you have so foully outraged in our presence. But--' the note
+changed, 'so far as in me lies, I will strive to bring home to you,
+Vernon, the fact that there exist in Latin a few pitiful rules of
+grammar, of syntax, nay, even of declension, which were not created for
+your incult sport--your Boeotian diversion. You will, therefore, Vernon,
+write out and bring to me to-morrow a word-for-word English-Latin
+translation of the Ode, together with a full list of all adjectives--an
+adjective is not a verb, Vernon, as the Lower Third will tell you--all
+adjectives, their number, case, and gender. Even now I haven't begun to
+deal with you faithfully.'
+
+'I--I'm very sorry, sir,' Vernon stammered.
+
+'You mistake the symptoms, Vernon. You are possibly discomfited by the
+imposition, but sorrow postulates some sort of mind, intellect, _nous_.
+Your rendering of _probrosis_ alone stamps you as lower than the beasts
+of the field. Will some one take the taste out of our mouths?
+And--talking of tastes--' He coughed. There was a distinct flavour of
+chlorine gas in the air. Up went an eyebrow, though King knew perfectly
+well what it meant.
+
+'Mr. Hartopp's st--science class next door,' said Malpass.
+
+'Oh yes. I had forgotten. Our newly established Modern Side, of course.
+Perowne, open the windows; and Winton, go on once more from _interque
+maerentes_.'
+
+'And hastened away,' said Winton, 'surrounded by his mourning friends,
+into--into illustrious banishment. But I got that out of Conington,
+sir,' he added in one conscientious breath.
+
+'I am aware. The master generally knows his ass's crib, though I acquit
+_you_ of any intention that way. Can you suggest anything for _egregius
+exul_? Only "egregious exile"? I fear "egregious" is a good word ruined.
+No! You can't in this case improve on Conington. Now then for _atqui
+sciebat quae sibi barbarus tortor pararet_. The whole force of it lies
+in the _atqui_.'
+
+'Although he knew,' Winton suggested.
+
+'Stronger than that, I think.'
+
+'He who knew well,' Malpass interpolated.
+
+'Ye-es. "Well though he knew." I don't like Conington's "well-witting."
+It's Wardour Street.'
+
+'Well though he knew what the savage torturer was--was getting ready for
+him,' said Winton.
+
+'Ye-es. Had in store for him.'
+
+'Yet he brushed aside his kinsmen and the people delaying his return.'
+
+'Ye-es; but then how do you render _obstantes_?'
+
+'If it's a free translation mightn't _obstantes_ and _morantem_ come to
+about the same thing, sir?'
+
+'Nothing comes to "about the same thing" with Horace, Winton. As I have
+said, Horace was not a journalist. No, I take it that his kinsmen bodily
+withstood his departure, whereas the crowd--_populumque_--the democracy
+stood about futilely pitying him and getting in the way. Now for that
+noblest of endings--_quam si clientum_,' and King ran off into the
+quotation:
+
+     'As though some tedious business o'er
+     Of clients' court, his journey lay
+     Towards Venafrum's grassy floor
+     Or Sparta-built Tarentum's bay.
+
+All right, Winton. Beetle, when you've quite finished dodging the fresh
+air yonder, give me the meaning of _tendens_--and turn down
+your collar.'
+
+'Me, sir? _Tendens_, sir? Oh! Stretching away in the direction of, sir.'
+
+'Idiot! Regulus was not a feature of the landscape. He was a man,
+self-doomed to death by torture. _Atqui, sciebat_--knowing it--having
+achieved it for his country's sake--can't you hear that _atqui_ cut like
+a knife?--he moved off with some dignity. That is why Horace out of the
+whole golden Latin tongue chose the one word "tendens"--which is utterly
+untranslatable.'
+
+The gross injustice of being asked to translate it, converted Beetle
+into a young Christian martyr, till King buried his nose in his
+handkerchief again.
+
+'I think they've broken another gas-bottle next door, sir,' said Howell.
+'They're always doing it.' The Form coughed as more chlorine came in.
+
+'Well, I suppose we must be patient with the Modern Side,' said King.
+'But it is almost insupportable for this Side. Vernon, what are you
+grinning at?'
+
+Vernon's mind had returned to him glowing and inspired. He chuckled as
+he underlined his Horace.
+
+'It appears to amuse you,' said King. 'Let us participate. What is it?'
+
+'The last two lines of the Tenth Ode, in this book, sir,' was Vernon's
+amazing reply.
+
+'What? Oh, I see. _Non hoc semper erit liminis aut aquae caelestis
+patiens latus_[2].' King's mouth twitched to hide a grin. 'Was that
+done with intention?'
+
+[Footnote 2: 'This side will not always be patient of rain and waiting
+on the threshold.']
+
+'I--I thought it fitted, sir.'
+
+'It does. It's distinctly happy. What put it into your thick head,
+Paddy?'
+
+'I don't know, sir, except we did the Ode last term.'
+
+'And you remembered? The same head that minted _probrosis_ as a verb!
+Vernon, you are an enigma. No! This Side will _not_ always be patient of
+unheavenly gases and waters. I will make representations to our
+so-called Moderns. Meantime (who shall say I am not just?) I remit you
+your accrued pains and penalties in regard to _probrosim, probrosis,
+probrosit_ and other enormities. I oughtn't to do it, but this Side is
+occasionally human. By no means bad, Paddy.'
+
+'Thank you, sir,' said Vernon, wondering how inspiration had visited
+him.
+
+Then King, with a few brisk remarks about Science, headed them back to
+Regulus, of whom and of Horace and Rome and evil-minded commercial
+Carthage and of the democracy eternally futile, he explained, in all
+ages and climes, he spoke for ten minutes; passing thence to the next
+Ode--_Delicta Majorum_--where he fetched up, full-voiced, upon--'_Dis te
+minorem quod geris imperas_' (Thou rulest because thou bearest thyself
+as lower than the Gods)--making it a text for a discourse on manners,
+morals, and respect for authority as distinct from bottled gases, which
+lasted till the bell rang. Then Beetle, concertinaing his books,
+observed to Winton, 'When King's really on tap he's an interestin' dog.
+Hartopp's chlorine uncorked him.'
+
+'Yes; but why did you tell me _delubris_ was "deluges," you silly ass?'
+said Winton.
+
+'Well, that uncorked him too. Look out, you hoof-handed old owl!' Winton
+had cleared for action as the Form poured out like puppies at play and
+was scragging Beetle. Stalky from behind collared Winton low. The three
+fell in confusion.
+
+'_Dis te minorem quod geris imperas_,' quoth Stalky, ruffling Winton's
+lint-white locks. 'Mustn't jape with Number Five study. Don't be too
+virtuous. Don't brood over it. 'Twon't count against you in your future
+caree-ah. Cheer up, Pater.'
+
+'Pull him off my--er--essential guts, will you?' said Beetle from
+beneath. 'He's squashin' 'em.'
+
+They dispersed to their studies.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+No one, the owner least of all, can explain what is in a growing boy's
+mind. It might have been the blind ferment of adolescence; Stalky's
+random remarks about virtue might have stirred him; like his betters he
+might have sought popularity by way of clowning; or, as the Head
+asserted years later, the only known jest of his serious life might have
+worked on him, as a sober-sided man's one love colours and dislocates
+all his after days. But, at the next lesson, mechanical drawing with Mr.
+Lidgett who as drawing-master had very limited powers of punishment,
+Winton fell suddenly from grace and let loose a live mouse in the
+form-room. The whole form, shrieking and leaping high, threw at it all
+the plaster cones, pyramids, and fruit in high relief--not to mention
+ink-pots--that they could lay hands on. Mr. Lidgett reported at once to
+the Head; Winton owned up to his crime, which, venial in the Upper
+Third, pardonable at a price in the Lower Fourth, was, of course, rank
+ruffianism on the part of a Fifth Form boy; and so, by graduated stages,
+he arrived at the Head's study just before lunch, penitent, perturbed,
+annoyed with himself and--as the Head said to King in the corridor after
+the meal--more human than he had known him in seven years.
+
+'You see,' the Head drawled on, 'Winton's only fault is a certain
+costive and unaccommodating virtue. So this comes very happily.'
+
+'I've never noticed any sign of it,' said King. Winton was in King's
+House, and though King as pro-consul might, and did, infernally oppress
+his own Province, once a black and yellow cap was in trouble at the
+hands of the Imperial authority King fought for him to the very last
+steps of Caesar's throne.
+
+'Well, you yourself admitted just now that a mouse was beneath the
+occasion,' the Head answered.
+
+'It was.' Mr. King did not love Mr. Lidgett. 'It should have been a rat.
+But--but--I hate to plead it--it's the lad's first offence.'
+
+'Could you have damned him more completely, King?'
+
+'Hm. What is the penalty?' said King, in retreat, but keeping up a
+rear-guard action.
+
+'Only my usual few lines of Virgil to be shown up by tea-time.'
+
+The Head's eyes turned slightly to that end of the corridor where
+Mullins, Captain of the Games ('Pot,' 'old Pot,' or 'Potiphar' Mullins),
+was pinning up the usual Wednesday notice--'Big, Middle, and Little Side
+Football--A to K, L to Z, 3 to 4.45 P.M.'
+
+You cannot write out the Head's usual few (which means five hundred)
+Latin lines and play football for one hour and three-quarters between
+the hours of 1.30 and 5 P.M. Winton had evidently no intention of trying
+to do so, for he hung about the corridor with a set face and an uneasy
+foot. Yet it was law in the school, compared with which that of the
+Medes and Persians was no more than a non-committal resolution, that any
+boy, outside the First Fifteen, who missed his football for any reason
+whatever, and had not a written excuse, duly signed by competent
+authority to explain his absence, would receive not less than three
+strokes with a ground-ash from the Captain of the Games, generally a
+youth between seventeen and eighteen years, rarely under eleven stone
+('Pot' was nearer thirteen), and always in hard condition.
+
+King knew without inquiry that the Head had given Winton no such excuse.
+
+'But he is practically a member of the First Fifteen. He has played for
+it all this term,' said King. 'I believe his Cap should have arrived
+last week.'
+
+'His Cap has not been given him. Officially, therefore, he is naught. I
+rely on old Pot.'
+
+'But Mullins is Winton's study-mate,' King persisted.
+
+Pot Mullins and Pater Winton were cousins and rather close friends.
+
+'That will make no difference to Mullins--or Winton, if I know 'em,'
+said the Head.
+
+'But--but,' King played his last card desperately, 'I was going to
+recommend Winton for extra sub-prefect in my House, now Carton
+has gone.'
+
+'Certainly,' said the Head. 'Why not? He will be excellent by tea-time,
+I hope.'
+
+At that moment they saw Mr. Lidgett, tripping down the corridor, waylaid
+by Winton.
+
+'It's about that mouse-business at mechanical drawing,' Winton opened,
+swinging across his path.
+
+'Yes, yes, highly disgraceful,' Mr. Lidgett panted.
+
+'I know it was,' said Winton. 'It--it was a cad's trick because--'
+
+'Because you knew I couldn't give you more than fifty lines,' said Mr.
+Lidgett.
+
+'Well, anyhow I've come to apologise for it.'
+
+'Certainly,' said Mr. Lidgett, and added, for he was a kindly man, 'I
+think that shows quite right feeling. I'll tell the Head at once I'm
+satisfied.'
+
+'No--no!' The boy's still unmended voice jumped from the growl to the
+squeak. 'I didn't mean _that_! I--I did it on principle. Please
+don't--er--do anything of that kind.'
+
+Mr. Lidgett looked him up and down and, being an artist, understood.
+
+'Thank you, Winton,' he said. 'This shall be between ourselves.'
+
+'You heard?' said King, indecent pride in his voice.
+
+'Of course. You thought he was going to get Lidgett to beg him off the
+impot.'
+
+King denied this with so much warmth that the Head laughed and King went
+away in a huff.
+
+'By the way,' said the Head, 'I've told Winton to do his lines in your
+form-room--not in his study.'
+
+'Thanks,' said King over his shoulder, for the Head's orders had saved
+Winton and Mullins, who was doing extra Army work in the study, from an
+embarrassing afternoon together.
+
+An hour later, King wandered into his still form-room as though by
+accident. Winton was hard at work.
+
+'Aha!' said King, rubbing his hands. 'This does not look like games,
+Winton. Don't let me arrest your facile pen. Whence this sudden love
+for Virgil?'
+
+'Impot from the Head, sir, for that mouse-business this morning.'
+
+'Rumours thereof have reached us. That was a lapse on your part into
+Lower Thirdery which I don't quite understand.'
+
+The 'tump-tump' of the puntabouts before the sides settled to games came
+through the open window. Winton, like his House-Master, loved fresh air.
+Then they heard Paddy Vernon, sub-prefect on duty, calling the roll in
+the field and marking defaulters. Winton wrote steadily. King curled
+himself up on a desk, hands round knees. One would have said that the
+man was gloating over the boy's misfortune, but the boy understood.
+
+'_Dis te minorem quod geris imperas_,' King quoted presently. 'It is
+necessary to bear oneself as lower than the local gods--even than
+drawing-masters who are precluded from effective retaliation. I _do_
+wish you'd tried that mouse-game with me, Pater.'
+
+Winton grinned; then sobered 'It was a cad's trick, sir, to play on Mr.
+Lidgett.' He peered forward at the page he was copying.
+
+'Well, "the sin _I_ impute to each frustrate ghost"--' King stopped
+himself. 'Why do you goggle like an owl? Hand me the Mantuan and I'll
+dictate. No matter. Any rich Virgilian measures will serve. I may
+peradventure recall a few.' He began:
+
+     'Tu regere imperio populos Romane memento
+     Hae tibi erunt artes pacisque imponere morem,
+     Parcere subjectis et debellare superbos.
+
+There you have it all, Winton. Write that out twice and yet once again.'
+
+For the next forty minutes, with never a glance at the book, King paid
+out the glorious hexameters (and King could read Latin as though it were
+alive), Winton hauling them in and coiling them away behind him as
+trimmers in a telegraph-ship's hold coil away deep-sea cable. King broke
+from the Aeneid to the Georgics and back again, pausing now and then to
+translate some specially loved line or to dwell on the treble-shot
+texture of the ancient fabric. He did not allude to the coming interview
+with Mullins except at the last, when he said, 'I think at this
+juncture, Pater, I need not ask you for the precise significance of
+_atqui sciebat quae sibi barbarus tortor_.'
+
+The ungrateful Winton flushed angrily, and King loafed out to take five
+o'clock call-over, after which he invited little Hartopp to tea and a
+talk on chlorine-gas. Hartopp accepted the challenge like a bantam, and
+the two went up to King's study about the same time as Winton returned
+to the form-room beneath it to finish his lines.
+
+Then half a dozen of the Second Fifteen, who should have been washing,
+strolled in to condole with 'Pater' Winton, whose misfortune and its
+consequences were common talk. No one was more sincere than the long,
+red-headed, knotty-knuckled 'Paddy' Vernon, but, being a careless
+animal, he joggled Winton's desk.
+
+'Curse you for a silly ass!' said Winton. 'Don't do that.'
+
+No one is expected to be polite while under punishment, so Vernon,
+sinking his sub-prefectship, replied peacefully enough:
+
+'Well, don't be wrathy, Pater.'
+
+'I'm not,' said Winton. 'Get out! This ain't your House form-room.'
+
+''Form-room don't belong to you. Why don't you go to your own study?'
+Vernon replied.
+
+'Because Mullins is there waitin' for the victim,' said Stalky
+delicately, and they all laughed. 'You ought to have shaken that mouse
+out of your trouser-leg, Pater. That's the way _I_ did in my youth.
+Pater's revertin' to his second childhood. Never mind, Pater, we all
+respect you and your future caree-ah.'
+
+Winton, still writhing, growled. Vernon leaning on the desk somehow
+shook it again. Then he laughed.
+
+'What are you grinning at?' Winton asked.
+
+'I was only thinkin' of _you_ being sent up to take a lickin' from Pot.
+I swear I don't think it's fair. You've never shirked a game in your
+life, and you're as good as in the First Fifteen already. Your Cap ought
+to have been delivered last week, oughtn't it?'
+
+It was law in the school that no man could by any means enjoy the
+privileges and immunities of the First Fifteen till the black velvet cap
+with the gold tassel, made by dilatory Exeter outfitters, had been
+actually set on his head. Ages ago, a large-built and unruly Second
+Fifteen had attempted to change this law, but the prefects of that age
+were still larger, and the lively experiment had never been repeated.
+
+'Will you,' said Winton very slowly, 'kindly mind your own damned
+business, you cursed, clumsy, fat-headed fool?'
+
+The form-room was as silent as the empty field in the darkness outside.
+Vernon shifted his feet uneasily.
+
+'Well, _I_ shouldn't like to take a lickin' from Pot,' he said.
+
+'Wouldn't you?' Winton asked, as he paged the sheets of lines with hands
+that shook.
+
+'No, I shouldn't,' said Vernon, his freckles growing more distinct on
+the bridge of his white nose.
+
+'Well, I'm going to take it'--Winton moved clear of the desk as he
+spoke. 'But _you're_ going to take a lickin' from me first.' Before any
+one realised it, he had flung himself neighing against Vernon. No
+decencies were observed on either side, and the rest looked on amazed.
+The two met confusedly, Vernon trying to do what he could with his
+longer reach; Winton, insensible to blows, only concerned to drive his
+enemy into a corner and batter him to pulp. This he managed over against
+the fire-place, where Vernon dropped half-stunned. 'Now I'm going to
+give you your lickin',' said Winton. 'Lie there till I get a ground-ash
+and I'll cut you to pieces. If you move, I'll chuck you out of the
+window.' He wound his hands into the boy's collar and waistband, and had
+actually heaved him half off the ground before the others with one
+accord dropped on his head, shoulders, and legs. He fought them crazily
+in an awful hissing silence. Stalky's sensitive nose was rubbed along
+the floor; Beetle received a jolt in the wind that sent him whistling
+and crowing against the wall; Perowne's forehead was cut, and Malpass
+came out with an eye that explained itself like a dying rainbow through
+a whole week.
+
+'Mad! Quite mad!' said Stalky, and for the third time wriggled back to
+Winton's throat. The door opened and King came in, Hartopp's little
+figure just behind him. The mound on the floor panted and heaved but did
+not rise, for Winton still squirmed vengefully. 'Only a little play,
+sir,' said Perowne. ''Only hit my head against a form.' This was
+quite true.
+
+'Oh,' said King. '_Dimovit obstantes propinquos._ You, I presume, are
+the _populus_ delaying Winton's return to--Mullins, eh?'
+
+'No, sir,' said Stalky behind his claret-coloured handkerchief. 'We're
+the _maerentes amicos_.'
+
+'Not bad! You see, some of it sticks after all,' King chuckled to
+Hartopp, and the two masters left without further inquiries.
+
+The boys sat still on the now-passive Winton.
+
+'Well,' said Stalky at last, 'of all the putrid he-asses, Pater, you are
+_the_--'
+
+'I'm sorry. I'm awfully sorry,' Winton began, and they let him rise. He
+held out his hand to the bruised and bewildered Vernon. 'Sorry, Paddy.
+I--I must have lost my temper. I--I don't know what's the matter
+with me.'
+
+''Fat lot of good that'll do my face at tea,' Vernon grunted. 'Why
+couldn't you say there was something wrong with you instead of lamming
+out like a lunatic? Is my lip puffy?'
+
+'Just a trifle. Look at my beak! Well, we got all these pretty marks at
+footer--owin' to the zeal with which we played the game,' said Stalky,
+dusting himself. 'But d'you think you're fit to be let loose again,
+Pater? 'Sure you don't want to kill another sub-prefect? I wish _I_ was
+Pot. I'd cut your sprightly young soul out.'
+
+'I s'pose I ought to go to Pot now,' said Winton.
+
+'And let all the other asses see you lookin' like this! Not much. We'll
+all come up to Number Five Study and wash off in hot water. Beetle, you
+aren't damaged. Go along and light the gas-stove.'
+
+'There's a tin of cocoa in my study somewhere,' Perowne shouted after
+him. 'Rootle round till you find it, and take it up.'
+
+Separately, by different roads, Vernon's jersey pulled half over his
+head, the boys repaired to Number Five Study. Little Hartopp and King, I
+am sorry to say, leaned over the banisters of King's landing
+and watched.
+
+'Ve-ry human,' said little Hartopp. 'Your virtuous Winton, having got
+himself into trouble, takes it out of my poor old Paddy. I wonder what
+precise lie Paddy will tell about his face.'
+
+'But surely you aren't going to embarrass him by asking?' said King.
+
+'_Your_ boy won,' said Hartopp.
+
+'To go back to what we were discussing,' said King quickly, 'do you
+pretend that your modern system of inculcating unrelated facts about
+chlorine, for instance, all of which may be proved fallacies by the time
+the boys grow up, can have any real bearing on education--even the low
+type of it that examiners expect?'
+
+'I maintain nothing. But is it any worse than your Chinese reiteration
+of uncomprehended syllables in a dead tongue?'
+
+'Dead, forsooth!' King fairly danced. 'The only living tongue on earth!
+Chinese! On my word, Hartopp!'
+
+'And at the end of seven years--how often have I said it?' Hartopp went
+on,--'seven years of two hundred and twenty days of six hours each, your
+victims go away with nothing, absolutely nothing, except, perhaps, if
+they've been very attentive, a dozen--no, I'll grant you twenty--one
+score of totally unrelated Latin tags which any child of twelve could
+have absorbed in two terms.'
+
+'But--but can't you realise that if our system brings later--at any
+rate--at a pinch--a simple understanding--grammar and Latinity apart--a
+mere glimpse of the significance (foul word!) of, we'll say, one Ode of
+Horace, one twenty lines of Virgil, we've got what we poor devils of
+ushers are striving after?'
+
+'And what might that be?' said Hartopp.
+
+'Balance, proportion, perspective--life. Your scientific man is the
+unrelated animal--the beast without background. Haven't you ever
+realised _that_ in your atmosphere of stinks?'
+
+'Meantime you make them lose life for the sake of living, eh?'
+
+'Blind again, Hartopp! I told you about Paddy's quotation this morning.
+(But he made _probrosis_ a verb, he did!) You yourself heard young
+Corkran's reference to _maerentes amicos_. It sticks--a little of it
+sticks among the barbarians.'
+
+'Absolutely and essentially Chinese,' said little Hartopp, who, alone of
+the common-room, refused to be outfaced by King. 'But I don't yet
+understand how Paddy came to be licked by Winton. Paddy's supposed to be
+something of a boxer.'
+
+'Beware of vinegar made from honey,' King replied. 'Pater, like some
+other people, is patient and long-suffering, but he has his limits. The
+Head is oppressing him damnably, too. As I pointed out, the boy has
+practically been in the First Fifteen since term began.'
+
+'But, my dear fellow, I've known you give a boy an impot and refuse him
+leave off games, again and again.'
+
+'Ah, but that was when there was real need to get at some oaf who
+couldn't be sensitised in any other way. Now, in our esteemed Head's
+action I see nothing but--'
+
+The conversation from this point does not concern us.
+
+Meantime Winton, very penitent and especially polite towards Vernon, was
+being cheered with cocoa in Number Five Study. They had some difficulty
+in stemming the flood of his apologies. He himself pointed out to Vernon
+that he had attacked a sub-prefect for no reason whatever, and,
+therefore, deserved official punishment.
+
+'I can't think what was the matter with me to-day,' he mourned. 'Ever
+since that blasted mouse-business--'
+
+'Well, then, don't think,' said Stalky. 'Or do you want Paddy to make a
+row about it before all the school?'
+
+Here Vernon was understood to say that he would see Winton and all the
+school somewhere else.
+
+'And if you imagine Perowne and Malpass and me are goin' to give
+evidence at a prefects' meeting just to soothe your beastly conscience,
+you jolly well err,' said Beetle. 'I know what you did.'
+
+'What?' croaked Pater, out of the valley of his humiliation.
+
+'You went Berserk. I've read all about it in _Hypatia_.'
+
+'What's "going Berserk"?' Winton asked.
+
+'Never you mind,' was the reply. 'Now, don't you feel awfully weak and
+seedy?'
+
+'I _am_ rather tired,' said Winton, sighing.
+
+'That's what you ought to be. You've gone Berserk and pretty soon you'll
+go to sleep. But you'll probably be liable to fits of it all your life,'
+Beetle concluded. ''Shouldn't wonder if you murdered some one some day.'
+
+'Shut up--you and your Berserks!' said Stalky. 'Go to Mullins now and
+get it over, Pater.'
+
+'I call it filthy unjust of the Head,' said Vernon. 'Anyhow, you've
+given me my lickin', old man. I hope Pot'll give you yours.'
+
+'I'm awfully sorry--awfully sorry,' was Winton's last word.
+
+It was the custom in that consulship to deal with games' defaulters
+between five o'clock call-over and tea. Mullins, who was old enough to
+pity, did not believe in letting boys wait through the night till the
+chill of the next morning for their punishments. He was finishing off
+the last of the small fry and their excuses when Winton arrived.
+
+'But, please, Mullins'--this was Babcock tertius, a dear little
+twelve-year-old mother's darling--'I had an awful hack on the knee. I've
+been to the Matron about it and she gave me some iodine. I've been
+rubbing it in all day. I thought that would be an excuse off.'
+
+'Let's have a look at it,' said the impassive Mullins. 'That's a
+shin-bruise--about a week old. Touch your toes. I'll give you
+the iodine.'
+
+Babcock yelled loudly as he had many times before. The face of Jevons,
+aged eleven, a new boy that dark wet term, low in the House, low in the
+Lower School, and lowest of all in his home-sick little mind turned
+white at the horror of the sight. They could hear his working lips part
+stickily as Babcock wailed his way out of hearing.
+
+'Hullo, Jevons! What brings you here?' said Mullins.
+
+'Pl-ease, sir, I went for a walk with Babcock tertius.'
+
+'Did you? Then I bet you went to the tuck-shop--and you paid, didn't
+you?'
+
+A nod. Jevons was too terrified to speak.
+
+'Of course, and I bet Babcock told you that old Pot 'ud let you off
+because it was the first time.'
+
+Another nod with a ghost of a smile in it.
+
+'All right.' Mullins picked Jevons up before he could guess what was
+coming, laid him on the table with one hand, with the other gave him
+three emphatic spanks, then held him high in air.
+
+'Now you tell Babcock tertius that he's got you a licking from me, and
+see you jolly well pay it back to him. And when you're prefect of games
+don't you let any one shirk his footer without a written excuse. Where
+d'you play in your game?'
+
+'Forward, sir.'
+
+'You can do better than that. I've seen you run like a young
+buck-rabbit. Ask Dickson from me to try you as three-quarter next game,
+will you? Cut along.'
+
+Jevons left, warm for the first time that day, enormously set up in his
+own esteem, and very hot against the deceitful Babcock.
+
+Mullins turned to Winton. 'Your name's on the list, Pater.' Winton
+nodded.
+
+'I know it. The Head landed me with an impot for that mouse-business at
+mechanical drawing. No excuse.'
+
+'He meant it then?' Mullins jerked his head delicately towards the
+ground-ash on the table. 'I heard something about it.'
+
+Winton nodded. 'A rotten thing to do,' he said. 'Can't think what I was
+doing ever to do it. It counts against a fellow so; and there's some
+more too--'
+
+'All right, Pater. Just stand clear of our photo-bracket, will you?'
+
+The little formality over, there was a pause. Winton swung round, yawned
+in Pot's astonished face and staggered towards the window-seat.
+
+'What's the matter with you, Dick? Ill?'
+
+'No. Perfectly all right, thanks. Only--only a little sleepy.' Winton
+stretched himself out, and then and there fell deeply and
+placidly asleep.
+
+'It isn't a faint,' said the experienced Mullins, 'or his pulse wouldn't
+act. 'Tisn't a fit or he'd snort and twitch. It can't be sunstroke, this
+term, and he hasn't been over-training for anything.' He opened Winton's
+collar, packed a cushion under his head, threw a rug over him and sat
+down to listen to the regular breathing. Before long Stalky arrived, on
+pretence of borrowing a book. He looked at the window-seat.
+
+''Noticed anything wrong with Winton lately?' said Mullins.
+
+''Notice anything wrong with my beak?' Stalky replied. 'Pater went
+Berserk after call-over, and fell on a lot of us for jesting with him
+about his impot. You ought to see Malpass's eye.'
+
+'You mean that Pater fought?' said Mullins.
+
+'Like a devil. Then he nearly went to sleep in our study just now. I
+expect he'll be all right when he wakes up. Rummy business!
+Conscientious old bargee. You ought to have heard his apologies.'
+
+'But Pater can't fight one little bit,' Mullins repeated.
+
+''Twasn't fighting. He just tried to murder every one.' Stalky described
+the affair, and when he left Mullins went off to take counsel with the
+Head, who, out of a cloud of blue smoke, told him that all would yet
+be well.
+
+'Winton,' said he, 'is a little stiff in his moral joints. He'll get
+over that. If he asks you whether to-day's doings will count against
+him in his--'
+
+'But you know it's important to him, sir. His people aren't--very well
+off,' said Mullins.
+
+'That's why I'm taking all this trouble. You must reassure him, Pot. I
+have overcrowded him with new experiences. Oh, by the way, has his
+Cap come?'
+
+'It came at dinner, sir.' Mullins laughed.
+
+Sure enough, when he waked at tea-time, Winton proposed to take Mullins
+all through every one of his day's lapses from grace, and 'Do you think
+it will count against me?' said he.
+
+'Don't you fuss so much about yourself and your silly career,' said
+Mullins. 'You're all right. And oh--here's your First Cap at last. Shove
+it up on the bracket and come on to tea.'
+
+They met King on their way, stepping statelily and rubbing his hands. 'I
+have applied,' said he, 'for the services of an additional sub-prefect
+in Carton's unlamented absence. Your name, Winton, seems to have found
+favour with the powers that be, and--and all things considered--I am
+disposed to give my support to the nomination. You are therefore a
+quasi-lictor.'
+
+'Then it didn't count against me,' Winton gasped as soon as they were
+out of hearing.
+
+A Captain of Games can jest with a sub-prefect publicly.
+
+'You utter ass!' said Mullins, and caught him by the back of his stiff
+neck and ran him down to the hall where the sub-prefects, who sit below
+the salt, made him welcome with the economical bloater-paste
+of mid-term.
+
+King and little Hartopp were sparring in the Reverend John Gillett's
+study at 10 P.M.--classical _versus_ modern as usual.
+
+'Character--proportion--background,' snarled King. 'That is the essence
+of the Humanities.'
+
+'Analects of Confucius,' little Hartopp answered.
+
+'Time,' said the Reverend John behind the soda-water. 'You men oppress
+me. Hartopp, what did you say to Paddy in your dormitories to-night?
+Even _you_ couldn't have overlooked his face.'
+
+'But I did,' said Hartopp calmly. 'I wasn't even humorous about it as
+some clerics might have been. I went straight through and said naught.'
+
+'Poor Paddy! Now, for my part,' said King, 'and you know I am not lavish
+in my praises, I consider Winton a first-class type; absolutely
+first-class.'
+
+'Ha-ardly,' said the Reverend John. 'First-class of the second class, I
+admit. The very best type of second class but'--he shook his head--'it
+should have been a rat. Pater'll never be anything more than a Colonel
+of Engineers.'
+
+'What do you base that verdict on?' said King stiffly.
+
+'He came to me after prayers--with all his conscience.'
+
+'Poor old Pater. Was it the mouse?' said little Hartopp.
+
+'That, and what he called his uncontrollable temper, and his
+responsibilities as sub-prefect.'
+
+'And you?'
+
+'If we had had what is vulgarly called a pi-jaw he'd have had
+hysterics. So I recommended a dose of Epsom salts. He'll take it,
+too--conscientiously. Don't eat me, King. Perhaps, he'll be a K.C.B.'
+
+Ten o'clock struck and the Army class boys in the further studies coming
+to their houses after an hour's extra work passed along the gravel path
+below. Some one was chanting, to the tune of 'White sand and grey sand,'
+_Dis te minorem quod geris imperas_. He stopped outside Mullins' study.
+They heard Mullins' window slide up and then Stalky's voice:
+
+'Ah! Good-evening, Mullins, my _barbarus tortor_. We're the waits. We
+have come to inquire after the local Berserk. Is he doin' as well as can
+be expected in his new caree-ah?'
+
+'Better than you will, in a sec, Stalky,' Mullins grunted.
+
+'Glad of that. We thought he'd like to know that Paddy has been carried
+to the sick-house in ravin' delirium. They think it's concussion of
+the brain.'
+
+'Why, he was all right at prayers,' Winton began earnestly, and they
+heard a laugh in the background as Mullins slammed down the window.
+
+''Night, Regulus,' Stalky sang out, and the light footsteps went on.
+
+'You see. It sticks. A little of it sticks among the barbarians,' said
+King.
+
+'Amen,' said the Reverend John. 'Go to bed.'
+
+
+
+
+A TRANSLATION
+
+HORACE, Bk. V. _Ode 3_
+
+     There are whose study is of smells,
+       And to attentive schools rehearse
+     How something mixed with something else
+       Makes something worse.
+
+     Some cultivate in broths impure
+       The clients of our body--these,
+     Increasing without Venus, cure,
+       Or cause, disease.
+
+     Others the heated wheel extol,
+       And all its offspring, whose concern
+     Is how to make it farthest roll
+       And fastest turn.
+
+     Me, much incurious if the hour
+       Present, or to be paid for, brings
+     Me to Brundusium by the power
+       Of wheels or wings;
+
+     Me, in whose breast no flame hath burned
+       Life-long, save that by Pindar lit,
+     Such lore leaves cold: I am not turned
+       Aside to it
+
+     More than when, sunk in thought profound
+       Of what the unaltering Gods require,
+     My steward (friend but slave) brings round
+       Logs for my fire.
+
+
+
+The Edge of the Evening
+
+(1913)
+
+     Ah! What avails the classic bent,
+       And what the chosen word,
+     Against the undoctored incident
+       That actually occurred?
+
+     And what is Art whereto we press
+       Through paint and prose and rhyme--
+     When Nature in her nakedness
+       Defeats us every time?
+
+'Hi! Hi! Hold your horses! Stop!... Well! Well!' A lean man in a
+sable-lined overcoat leaped from a private car and barred my way up Pall
+Mall. 'You don't know me? You're excusable. I wasn't wearing much of
+anything last time we met--in South Africa.'
+
+The scales fell from my eyes, and I saw him once more in a sky-blue army
+shirt, behind barbed wire, among Dutch prisoners bathing at Simonstown,
+more than a dozen years ago[3]. 'Why, it's Zigler--Laughton O. Zigler!'
+I cried. 'Well, I _am_ glad to see you.'
+
+[Footnote 3: 'The Captive': _Traffics and Discoveries_.]
+
+'Oh no! You don't work any of your English on me. "So glad to see you,
+doncher know--an' ta-ta!" Do you reside in this village?'
+
+'No. I'm up here buying stores.'
+
+'Then you take my automobile. Where to?... Oh, I know _them_! My Lord
+Marshalton is one of the Directors. Pigott, drive to the Army and Navy
+Cooperative Supply Association Limited, Victoria Street, Westminister.'
+
+He settled himself on the deep dove-colour pneumatic cushions, and his
+smile was like the turning on of all the electrics. His teeth were
+whiter than the ivory fittings. He smelt of rare soap and
+cigarettes--such cigarettes as he handed me from a golden box with an
+automatic lighter. On my side of the car was a gold-mounted mirror, card
+and toilette case. I looked at him inquiringly.
+
+'Yes,' he nodded, 'two years after I quit the Cape. She's not an Ohio
+girl, though. She's in the country now. Is that right? She's at our
+little place in the country. We'll go there as soon as you're through
+with your grocery-list. Engagements? The only engagement you've got is
+to grab your grip--get your bag from your hotel, I mean--and come right
+along and meet her. You are the captive of _my_ bow and spear now.'
+
+'I surrender,' I said meekly. 'Did the Zigler automatic gun do all
+this?' I pointed to the car fittings.
+
+'Psha! Think of your rememberin' that! Well, no. The Zigler is a great
+gun--the greatest ever--but life's too short, an' too interestin', to
+squander on pushing her in military society. I've leased my rights in
+her to a Pennsylvanian-Transylvanian citizen full of mentality and moral
+uplift. If those things weigh with the Chancelleries of Europe, he will
+make good and--I shall be surprised. Excuse me!'
+
+He bared his head as we passed the statue of the Great Queen outside
+Buckingham Palace.
+
+'A very great lady!' said he. 'I have enjoyed her hospitality. She
+represents one of the most wonderful institutions in the world. The next
+is the one we are going to. Mrs. Zigler uses 'em, and they break her up
+every week on returned empties.'
+
+'Oh, you mean the Stores?' I said.
+
+'Mrs. Zigler means it more. They are quite ambassadorial in their
+outlook. I guess I'll wait outside and pray while you wrestle with 'em.'
+
+My business at the Stores finished, and my bag retrieved from the hotel,
+his moving palace slid us into the country.
+
+'I owe it to you,' Zigler began as smoothly as the car, 'to tell you
+what I am now. I represent the business end of the American Invasion.
+Not the blame cars themselves--I wouldn't be found dead in one--but the
+tools that make 'em. I am the Zigler Higher-Speed Tool and Lathe Trust.
+The Trust, sir, is entirely my own--in my own inventions. I am the
+Renzalaer ten-cylinder aerial--the lightest aeroplane-engine on the
+market--one price, one power, one guarantee. I am the Orlebar
+Paper-welt, Pulp-panel Company for aeroplane bodies; and I am the Rush
+Silencer for military aeroplanes--absolutely silent--which the Continent
+leases under royalty. With three exceptions, the British aren't wise to
+it yet. That's all I represent at present. You saw me take off my hat
+to your late Queen? I owe every cent I have to that great an' good Lady.
+Yes, sir, I came out of Africa, after my eighteen months' rest-cure and
+open-air treatment and sea-bathing, as her prisoner of war, like a giant
+refreshed. There wasn't anything could hold me, when I'd got my hooks
+into it, after that experience. And to you as a representative British
+citizen, I say here and now that I regard you as the founder of the
+family fortune--Tommy's and mine.'
+
+'But I only gave you some papers and tobacco.'
+
+'What more does any citizen need? The Cullinan diamond wouldn't have
+helped me as much then; an'--talking about South Africa, tell me--'
+
+We talked about South Africa till the car stopped at the Georgian lodge
+of a great park.
+
+'We'll get out here. I want to show you a rather sightly view,' said
+Zigler.
+
+We walked, perhaps, half a mile, across timber-dotted turf, past a lake,
+entered a dark rhododendron-planted wood, ticking with the noise of
+pheasants' feet, and came out suddenly, where five rides met, at a small
+classic temple between lichened stucco statues which faced a circle of
+turf, several acres in extent. Irish yews, of a size that I had never
+seen before, walled the sunless circle like cliffs of riven obsidian,
+except at the lower end, where it gave on to a stretch of undulating
+bare ground ending in a timbered slope half-a-mile away.
+
+'That's where the old Marshalton race-course used to be,' said Zigler.
+'That ice-house is called Flora's Temple. Nell Gwynne and Mrs. Siddons
+an' Taglioni an' all that crowd used to act plays here for King George
+the Third. Wasn't it? Well, George is the only king I play. Let it go at
+that. This circle was the stage, I guess. The kings an' the nobility sat
+in Flora's Temple. I forget who sculped these statues at the door.
+They're the Comic and Tragic Muse. But it's a sightly view, ain't it?'
+
+The sunlight was leaving the park. I caught a glint of silver to the
+southward beyond the wooded ridge.
+
+'That's the ocean--the Channel, I mean,' said Zigler. 'It's twenty-three
+miles as a man flies. A sightly view, ain't it?'
+
+I looked at the severe yews, the dumb yelling mouths of the two statues,
+at the blue-green shadows on the unsunned grass, and at the still bright
+plain in front where some deer were feeding.
+
+'It's a most dramatic contrast, but I think it would be better on a
+summer's day,' I said, and we went on, up one of the noiseless rides, a
+quarter of a mile at least, till we came to the porticoed front of an
+enormous Georgian pile. Four footmen revealed themselves in a hall hung
+with pictures.
+
+'I hired this off of my Lord Marshalton,' Zigler explained, while they
+helped us out of our coats under the severe eyes of ruffed and
+periwigged ancestors. 'Ya-as. They always look at _me_ too, as if I'd
+blown in from the gutter. Which, of course, I have. That's Mary, Lady
+Marshalton. Old man Joshua painted her. Do you see any likeness to my
+Lord Marshalton? Why, haven't you ever met up with him? He was Captain
+Mankeltow--my Royal British Artillery captain that blew up my gun in the
+war, an' then tried to bury me against my religious principles[4].
+Ya-as. His father died and he got the lordship. That was about all he
+got by the time that your British death-duties were through with him. So
+he said I'd oblige him by hiring his ranch. It's a hell an' a half of a
+proposition to handle, but Tommy--Mrs. Laughton--understands it. Come
+right in to the parlour and be very welcome.'
+
+[Footnote 4: "The Captive": _Traffics and Discoveries_.]
+
+He guided me, hand on shoulder, into a babble of high-pitched talk and
+laughter that filled a vast drawing-room. He introduced me as the
+founder of the family fortunes to a little, lithe, dark-eyed woman whose
+speech and greeting were of the soft-lipped South. She in turn presented
+me to her mother, a black-browed snowy-haired old lady with a cap of
+priceless Venetian point, hands that must have held many hearts in their
+time, and a dignity as unquestioned and unquestioning as an empress. She
+was, indeed, a Burton of Savannah, who, on their own ground, out-rank
+the Lees of Virginia. The rest of the company came from Buffalo,
+Cincinnati, Cleveland and Chicago, with here and there a softening
+southern strain. A party of young folk popped corn beneath a mantelpiece
+surmounted by a Gainsborough. Two portly men, half hidden by a cased
+harp, discussed, over sheaves of typewritten documents, the terms of
+some contract. A knot of matrons talked servants--Irish _versus_
+German--across the grand piano. A youth ravaged an old bookcase, while
+beside him a tall girl stared at the portrait of a woman of many loves,
+dead three hundred years, but now leaping to life and warning under the
+shaded frame-light. In a corner half-a-dozen girls examined the glazed
+tables that held the decorations--English and foreign--of the late Lord
+Marshalton.
+
+'See heah! Would this be the Ordeh of the Gyartah?' one said, pointing.
+
+'I presoom likely. No! The Garter has "_Honey swore_"--I know that much.
+This is "Tria juncta" something.'
+
+'Oh, what's that cunning little copper cross with "For Valurr"?' a third
+cried.
+
+'Say! Look at here!' said the young man at the bookcase. 'Here's a first
+edition of _Handley Cross_ and a Beewick's _Birds_ right next to
+it--just like so many best sellers. Look, Maidie!'
+
+The girl beneath the picture half turned her body but not her eyes.
+
+'You don't tell _me_!' she said slowly. 'Their women amounted to
+something after all.'
+
+'But Woman's scope, and outlook was vurry limmutted in those days,' one
+of the matrons put in, from the piano.
+
+'Limmutted? For _her_? If they whurr, I guess she was the limmut. Who
+was she? Peters, whurr's the cat'log?'
+
+A thin butler, in charge of two footmen removing the tea-batteries, slid
+to a table and handed her a blue-and-qilt book. He was button-holed by
+one of the men behind the harp, who wished to get a telephone call
+through to Edinburgh.
+
+'The local office shuts at six,' said Peters. 'But I can get through
+to'--he named some town--'in ten minutes, sir.'
+
+'That suits me. You'll find me here when you've hitched up. Oh, say,
+Peters! We--Mister Olpherts an' me--ain't goin' by that early morning
+train to-morrow--but the other one--on the other line--whatever
+they call it.'
+
+'The nine twenty-seven, sir. Yes, sir. Early breakfast will be at
+half-past eight and the car will be at the door at nine.'
+
+'Peters!' an imperious young voice called. 'What's the matteh with Lord
+Marshalton's Ordeh of the Gyartah? We cyan't find it anyweah.'
+
+'Well, miss, I _have_ heard that that Order is usually returned to His
+Majesty on the death of the holder. Yes, miss.' Then in a whisper to a
+footman, 'More butter for the pop-corn in King Charles's Corner.' He
+stopped behind my chair. 'Your room is Number Eleven, sir. May I trouble
+you for your keys?'
+
+He left the room with a six-year-old maiden called Alice who had
+announced she would not go to bed ''less Peter, Peter, Punkin-eater
+takes me--so there!'
+
+He very kindly looked in on me for a moment as I was dressing for
+dinner. 'Not at all, sir,' he replied to some compliment I paid him. 'I
+valeted the late Lord Marshalton for fifteen years. He was very abrupt
+in his movements, sir. As a rule I never received more than an hour's
+notice of a journey. We used to go to Syria frequently. I have been
+twice to Babylon. Mr. and Mrs. Zigler's requirements are, comparatively
+speaking, few.'
+
+'But the guests?'
+
+'Very little out of the ordinary as soon as one knows their ordinaries.
+Extremely simple, if I may say so, sir.'
+
+I had the privilege of taking Mrs. Burton in to dinner, and was rewarded
+with an entirely new, and to me rather shocking view, of Abraham
+Lincoln, who, she said, had wasted the heritage of his land by blood and
+fire, and had surrendered the remnant to aliens. 'My brother, suh,' she
+said, 'fell at Gettysburg in order that Armenians should colonise New
+England to-day. If I took any interest in any dam-Yankee outside of my
+son-in-law Laughton yondah, I should say that my brother's death had
+been amply avenged.'
+
+The man at her right took up the challenge, and the war spread. Her eyes
+twinkled over the flames she had lit.
+
+'Don't these folk,' she said a little later, 'remind you of Arabs
+picnicking under the Pyramids?'
+
+'I've never seen the Pyramids,' I replied.
+
+'Hm! I didn't know you were as English as all that.' And when I laughed,
+'Are you?'
+
+'Always. It saves trouble.'
+
+'Now that's just what I find so significant among the English'--this was
+Alice's mother, I think, with one elbow well forward among the salted
+almonds. 'Oh, I know how _you_ feel, Madam Burton, but a Northerner
+like myself--I'm Buffalo--even though we come over every year--notices
+the desire for comfort in England. There's so little conflict or uplift
+in British society.'
+
+'But we like being comfortable,' I said.
+
+'I know it. It's very characteristic. But ain't it a little, just a
+little, lacking in adaptability an' imagination?'
+
+'They haven't any need for adaptability,' Madam Burton struck in. 'They
+haven't any Ellis Island standards to live up to.'
+
+'But we can assimilate,' the Buffalo woman charged on.
+
+'Now you _have_ done it!' I whispered to the old lady as the blessed
+word 'assimilation' woke up all the old arguments for and against.
+
+There was not a dull moment in that dinner for me--nor afterwards when
+the boys and girls at the piano played the rag-time tunes of their own
+land, while their elders, inexhaustibly interested, replunged into the
+discussion of that land's future, till there was talk of coon-can. When
+all the company had been set to tables Zigler led me into his book-lined
+study, where I noticed he kept his golf-clubs, and spoke simply as a
+child, gravely as a bishop, of the years that were past since our
+last meeting.
+
+'That's about all, I guess--up to date,' he said when he had unrolled
+the bright map of his fortunes across three continents. 'Bein' rich
+suits me. So does your country, sir. My own country? You heard what
+that Detroit man said at dinner. "A Government of the alien, by the
+alien, for the alien." Mother's right, too. Lincoln killed us. From the
+highest motives--but he killed us. Oh, say, that reminds me. 'J'ever
+kill a man from the highest motives?'
+
+'Not from any motive--as far as I remember.'
+
+'Well, I have. It don't weigh on my mind any, but it was interesting.
+Life _is_ interesting for a rich--for any--man in England. Ya-as! Life
+in England is like settin' in the front row at the theatre and never
+knowin' when the whole blame drama won't spill itself into your lap. I
+didn't always know that. I lie abed now, and I blush to think of some of
+the breaks I made in South Africa. About the British. Not your official
+method of doin' business. But the Spirit. I was 'way, 'way off on the
+Spirit. Are you acquainted with any other country where you'd have to
+kill a man or two to get at the National Spirit?'
+
+'Well,' I answered, 'next to marrying one of its women, killing one of
+its men makes for pretty close intimacy with any country. I take it you
+killed a British citizen.'
+
+'Why, no. Our syndicate confined its operations to aliens--dam-fool
+aliens.... 'J'ever know an English lord called Lundie[5]? Looks like a
+frame-food and soap advertisement. I imagine he was in your Supreme
+Court before he came into his lordship.'
+
+[Footnote 5: 'The Puzzler': _Actions and Reactions_.]
+
+'He is a lawyer--what we call a Law Lord--a Judge of Appeal--not a real
+hereditary lord.'
+
+'That's as much beyond me as _this_!' Zigler slapped a fat Debrett on
+the table. 'But I presoom this unreal Law Lord Lundie is kind o' real in
+his decisions? I judged so. And--one more question. 'Ever meet a man
+called Walen?'
+
+'D'you mean Burton-Walen, the editor of--?' I mentioned the journal.
+
+'That's him. 'Looks like a tough, talks like a Maxim, and trains with
+kings.'
+
+'He does,' I said. 'Burton-Walen knows all the crowned heads of Europe
+intimately. It's his hobby.'
+
+'Well, there's the whole outfit for you--exceptin' my Lord Marshalton,
+_ne_ Mankeltow, an' me. All active murderers--specially the Law Lord--or
+accessories after the fact. And what do they hand you out for _that_, in
+this country?'
+
+'Twenty years, I believe,' was my reply.
+
+He reflected a moment.
+
+'No-o-o,' he said, and followed it with a smoke-ring. 'Twenty months at
+the Cape is my limit. Say, murder ain't the soul-shatterin' event those
+nature-fakers in the magazines make out. It develops naturally like any
+other proposition.... Say, 'j'ever play this golf game? It's come up in
+the States from Maine to California, an' we're prodoocin' all the
+champions in sight. Not a business man's play, but interestin'. I've got
+a golf-links in the park here that they tell me is the finest inland
+course ever. I had to pay extra for that when I hired the ranche--last
+year. It was just before I signed the papers that our murder
+eventuated. My Lord Marshalton he asked me down for the week-end to fix
+up something or other--about Peters and the linen, I think 'twas. Mrs.
+Zigler took a holt of the proposition. She understood Peters from the
+word "go." There wasn't any house-party; only fifteen or twenty folk. A
+full house is thirty-two, Tommy tells me. 'Guess we must be near on that
+to-night. In the smoking-room here, my Lord Marshalton--Mankeltow that
+was--introduces me to this Walen man with the nose. He'd been in the War
+too, from start to finish. He knew all the columns and generals that I'd
+battled with in the days of my Zigler gun. We kinder fell into each
+other's arms an' let the harsh world go by for a while.
+
+'Walen he introduces me to your Lord Lundie. _He_ was a new proposition
+to me. If he hadn't been a lawyer he'd have made a lovely cattle-king. I
+thought I had played poker some. Another of my breaks. Ya-as! It cost me
+eleven hundred dollars besides what Tommy said when I retired. I have no
+fault to find with your hereditary aristocracy, or your judiciary, or
+your press.
+
+'Sunday we all went to Church across the Park here.... Psha! Think o'
+your rememberin' my religion! I've become an Episcopalian since I
+married. Ya-as.... After lunch Walen did his crowned-heads-of-Europe
+stunt in the smokin'-room here. He was long on Kings. And Continental
+crises. I do not pretend to follow British domestic politics, but in the
+aeroplane business a man has to know something of international
+possibilities. At present, you British are settin' in kimonoes on
+dynamite kegs. Walen's talk put me wise on the location and size of some
+of the kegs. Ya-as!
+
+'After that, we four went out to look at those golf-links I was hirin'.
+We each took a club. Mine'--he glanced at a great tan bag by the
+fire-place--'was the beginner's friend--the cleek. Well, sir, this golf
+proposition took a holt of me as quick as--quick as death. They had to
+prise me off the greens when it got too dark to see, and then we went
+back to the house. I was walkin' ahead with my Lord Marshalton talkin'
+beginners' golf. (_I_ was the man who ought to have been killed by
+rights.) We cut 'cross lots through the woods to Flora's Temple--that
+place I showed you this afternoon. Lundie and Walen were, maybe, twenty
+or thirty rod behind us in the dark. Marshalton and I stopped at the
+theatre to admire at the ancestral yew-trees. He took me right under the
+biggest--King Somebody's Yew--and while I was spannin' it with my
+handkerchief, he says, "Look heah!" just as if it was a rabbit--and down
+comes a bi-plane into the theatre with no more noise than the dead. My
+Rush Silencer is the only one on the market that allows that sort of
+gumshoe work.... What? A bi-plane--with two men in it. Both men jump out
+and start fussin' with the engines. I was starting to tell Mankeltow--I
+can't remember to call him Marshalton any more--that it looked as if the
+Royal British Flying Corps had got on to my Rush Silencer at last; but
+he steps out from under the yew to these two Stealthy Steves and says,
+"What's the trouble? Can I be of any service?" He thought--so did
+I--'twas some of the boys from Aldershot or Salisbury. Well, sir, from
+there on, the situation developed like a motion-picture in Hell. The man
+on the nigh side of the machine whirls round, pulls his gun and fires
+into Mankeltow's face. I laid him out with my cleek automatically. Any
+one who shoots a friend of mine gets what's comin' to him if I'm within
+reach. He drops. Mankeltow rubs his neck with his handkerchief. The man
+the far side of the machine starts to run. Lundie down the ride, or it
+might have been Walen, shouts, "What's happened?" Mankeltow says,
+"Collar that chap."
+
+'The second man runs ring-a-ring-o'-roses round the machine, one hand
+reachin' behind him. Mankeltow heads him off to me. He breaks blind for
+Walen and Lundie, who are runnin' up the ride. There's some sort of
+mix-up among 'em, which it's too dark to see, and a thud. Walen says,
+"Oh, well collared!" Lundie says, "That's the only thing I never learned
+at Harrow!"... Mankeltow runs up to 'em, still rubbin' his neck, and
+says, "_He_ didn't fire at me. It was the other chap. Where is he?"
+
+'"I've stretched him alongside his machine," I says.
+
+'"Are they poachers?" says Lundie.
+
+'"No. Airmen. I can't make it out," says Mankeltow.
+
+'"Look at here," says Walen, kind of brusque. "This man ain't breathin'
+at all. Didn't you hear somethin' crack when he lit, Lundie?"
+
+'"My God!" says Lundie. "Did I? I thought it was my suspenders"--no, he
+said "braces."
+
+'Right there I left them and sort o' tiptoed back to my man, hopin' he'd
+revived and quit. But he hadn't. That darned cleek had hit him on the
+back of the neck just where his helmet stopped. He'd got _his_. I knew
+it by the way the head rolled in my hands. Then the others came up the
+ride totin' _their_ load. No mistakin' that shuffle on grass. D'you
+remember it--in South Africa? Ya-as.
+
+'"Hsh!" says Lundie. "Do you know I've broken this man's neck?"
+
+'"Same here," I says.
+
+'"What? Both?" says Mankeltow.
+
+'"Nonsense!" says Lord Lundie. "Who'd have thought he was that out of
+training? A man oughtn't to fly if he ain't fit."
+
+'"What did they want here, anyway?" said Walen; and Mankeltow says, "We
+can't leave them in the open. Some one'll come. Carry 'em to
+Flora's Temple."
+
+We toted 'em again and laid 'em out on a stone bench. They were still
+dead in spite of our best attentions. We knew it, but we went through
+the motions till it was quite dark. 'Wonder if all murderers do that?
+"We want a light on this," says Walen after a spell. "There ought to be
+one in the machine. Why didn't they light it?"
+
+'We came out of Flora's Temple, and shut the doors behind us. Some
+stars were showing then--same as when Cain did his little act, I guess.
+I climbed up and searched the machine. She was very well equipped, I
+found two electric torches in clips alongside her barometers by the
+rear seat.
+
+'"What make is she?" says Mankeltow.
+
+'"Continental Renzalaer," I says. "My engines and my Rush Silencer."
+
+'Walen whistles. "Here--let me look," he says, and grabs the other
+torch. She was sure well equipped. We gathered up an armful of cameras
+an' maps an' note-books an' an album of mounted photographs which we
+took to Flora's Temple and spread on a marble-topped table (I'll show
+you to-morrow) which the King of Naples had presented to grandfather
+Marshalton. Walen starts to go through 'em. We wanted to know why our
+friends had been so prejudiced against our society.
+
+'"Wait a minute," says Lord Lundie. "Lend me a handkerchief."
+
+'He pulls out his own, and Walen contributes his green-and-red bandanna,
+and Lundie covers their faces. "Now," he says, "we'll go into the
+evidence."
+
+'There wasn't any flaw in that evidence. Walen read out their last
+observations, and Mankeltow asked questions, and Lord Lundie sort o'
+summarised, and I looked at the photos in the album. 'J'ever see a
+bird's-eye telephoto-survey of England for military purposes? It's
+interestin' but indecent--like turnin' a man upside down. None of those
+close-range panoramas of forts could have been taken without my
+Rush Silencer.
+
+'"I wish _we_ was as thorough as they are," says Mankeltow, when Walen
+stopped translatin'.
+
+'"We've been thorough enough," says Lord Lundie. "The evidence against
+both accused is conclusive. Any other country would give 'em seven years
+in a fortress. We should probably give 'em eighteen months as
+first-class misdemeanants. But their case," he says, "is out of our
+hands. We must review our own. Mr. Zigler," he said, "will you tell us
+what steps you took to bring about the death of the first accused?" I
+told him. He wanted to know specially whether I'd stretched first
+accused before or after he had fired at Mankeltow. Mankeltow testified
+he'd been shot at, and exhibited his neck as evidence. It was scorched.
+
+'"Now, Mr. Walen," says Lord Lundie. "Will you kindly tell us what steps
+you took with regard to the second accused?"
+
+'"The man ran directly at me, me lord," says Walen. "I said, 'Oh no, you
+don't,' and hit him in the face."
+
+'Lord Lundie lifts one hand and uncovers second accused's face. There
+was a bruise on one cheek and the chin was all greened with grass. He
+was a heavy-built man.
+
+'"What happened after that?" says Lord Lundie.
+
+'"To the best of my remembrance he turned from me towards your
+lordship."
+
+'Then Lundie goes ahead. "I stooped, and caught the man round the
+ankles," he says. "The sudden check threw him partially over my left
+shoulder. I jerked him off that shoulder, still holding his ankles, and
+he fell heavily on, it would appear, the point of his chin, death being
+instantaneous."
+
+'"Death being instantaneous," says Walen.
+
+'Lord Lundie takes off his gown and wig--you could see him do it--and
+becomes our fellow-murderer. "That's our case," he says. "I know how _I_
+should direct the jury, but it's an undignified business for a Lord of
+Appeal to lift his hand to, and some of my learned brothers," he says,
+"might be disposed to be facetious."
+
+'I guess I can't be properly sensitised. Any one who steered me out of
+that trouble might have had the laugh on me for generations. But I'm
+only a millionaire. I said we'd better search second accused in case
+he'd been carryin' concealed weapons.
+
+'"That certainly is a point," says Lord Lundie. "But the question for
+the jury would be whether I exercised more force than was necessary to
+prevent him from usin' them." _I_ didn't say anything. He wasn't talkin'
+my language. Second accused had his gun on him sure enough, but it had
+jammed in his hip-pocket. He was too fleshy to reach behind for business
+purposes, and he didn't look a gun-man anyway. Both of 'em carried wads
+of private letters. By the time Walen had translated, we knew how many
+children the fat one had at home and when the thin one reckoned to be
+married. Too bad! Ya-as.
+
+'Says Walen to me while we was rebuttonin' their jackets (they was not
+in uniform): "Ever read a book called _The Wreckers_, Mr. Zigler?"
+
+'"Not that I recall at the present moment," I says.
+
+'"Well, do," he says. "You'd appreciate it. You'd appreciate it now, I
+assure you."
+
+'"I'll remember," I says. "But I don't see how this song and dance helps
+us any. Here's our corpses, here's their machine, and daylight's
+bound to come."
+
+'"Heavens! That reminds me," says Lundie. "What time's dinner?"
+
+'"Half-past eight," says Mankeltow. "It's half-past five now. We knocked
+off golf at twenty to, and if they hadn't been such silly asses, firin'
+pistols like civilians, we'd have had them to dinner. Why, they might be
+sitting with us in the smoking-room this very minute," he says. Then he
+said that no man had a right to take his profession so seriously as
+these two mountebanks.
+
+'"How interestin'!" says Lundie. "I've noticed this impatient attitude
+toward their victim in a good many murderers. I never understood it
+before. Of course, it's the disposal of the body that annoys 'em. Now, I
+wonder," he says, "who our case will come up before? Let's run through
+it again."
+
+'Then Walen whirls in. He'd been bitin' his nails in a corner. We was
+all nerved up by now.... Me? The worst of the bunch. I had to think for
+Tommy as well.
+
+'"We _can't_ be tried," says Walen. "We _mustn't_ be tried! It'll make
+an infernal international stink. What did I tell you in the smoking-room
+after lunch? The tension's at breaking-point already. This 'ud snap it.
+Can't you see that?"
+
+'"I was thinking of the legal aspect of the case," says Lundie. "With a
+good jury we'd likely be acquitted."
+
+'"Acquitted!" says Walen. "Who'd dare acquit us in the face of what 'ud
+be demanded by--the other party? Did you ever hear of the War of
+Jenkins' ear? 'Ever hear of Mason and Slidel? 'Ever hear of an
+ultimatum? You know who _these_ two idiots are; you know who _we_ are--a
+Lord of Appeal, a Viscount of the English peerage, and me--_me_ knowing
+all I know, which the men who know dam' well know that I _do_ know! It's
+our necks or Armageddon. Which do you think this Government would
+choose? We _can't_ be tried!" he says.
+
+'"Then I expect I'll have to resign me club," Lundie goes on. "I don't
+think that's ever been done before by an _ex-officio_ member. I must ask
+the secretary." I guess he was kinder bunkered for the minute, or maybe
+'twas the lordship comin' out on him.
+
+'"Rot!" says Mankeltow. "Walen's right. We can't afford to be tried.
+We'll have to bury them; but my head-gardener locks up all the tools at
+five o'clock."
+
+'"Not on your life!" says Lundie. He was on deck again--as the
+high-class lawyer. "Right or wrong, if we attempt concealment of the
+bodies we're done for."
+
+"'I'm glad of that," says Mankeltow, "because, after all, it ain't
+cricket to bury 'em."
+
+'Somehow--but I know I ain't English--that consideration didn't worry
+me as it ought. An' besides, I was thinkin'--I had to--an' I'd begun to
+see a light 'way off--a little glimmerin' light o' salvation.
+
+'"Then what _are_ we to do?" says Walen. "Zigler, what do you advise?
+Your neck's in it too."
+
+'"Gentlemen," I says, "something Lord Lundie let fall a while back gives
+me an idea. I move that this committee empowers Big Claus and Little
+Claus, who have elected to commit suicide in our midst, to leave the
+premises _as_ they came. I'm asking you to take big chances," I says,
+"but they're all we've got," and then I broke for the bi-plane.
+
+'Don't tell me the English can't think as quick as the next man when
+it's up to them! They lifted 'em out o' Flora's Temple--reverent, but
+not wastin' time--whilst I found out what had brought her down. One
+cylinder was misfirin'. I didn't stop to fix it. My Renzalaer will hold
+up on six. We've proved that. If her crew had relied on my guarantees,
+they'd have been half-way home by then, instead of takin' their seats
+with hangin' heads like they was ashamed. They ought to have been
+ashamed too, playin' gun-men in a British peer's park! I took big
+chances startin' her without controls, but 'twas a dead still night an'
+a clear run--you saw it--across the Theatre into the park, and I prayed
+she'd rise before she hit high timber. I set her all I dared for a quick
+lift. I told Mankeltow that if I gave her too much nose she'd be liable
+to up-end and flop. He didn't want another inquest on his estate. No,
+sir! So I had to fix her up in the dark. Ya-as!
+
+'I took big chances, too, while those other three held on to her and I
+worked her up to full power. My Renzalaer's no ventilation-fan to pull
+against. But I climbed out just in time. I'd hitched the signallin' lamp
+to her tail so's we could track her. Otherwise, with my Rush Silencer,
+we might's well have shooed an owl out of a barn. She left just that way
+when we let her go. No sound except the propellers--_Whoo-oo-oo!
+Whoo-oo-oo!_ There was a dip in the ground ahead. It hid her lamp for a
+second--but there's no such thing as time in real life. Then that lamp
+travelled up the far slope slow--too slow. Then it kinder lifted, we
+judged. Then it sure was liftin'. Then it lifted good. D'you know why?
+Our four naked perspirin' souls was out there underneath her, hikin' her
+heavens high. Yes, sir. _We_ did it!... And that lamp kept liftin' and
+liftin'. Then she side-slipped! My God, she side-slipped twice, which
+was what I'd been afraid of all along! Then she straightened up, and
+went away climbin' to glory, for that blessed star of our hope got
+smaller and smaller till we couldn't track it any more. Then we
+breathed. We hadn't breathed any since their arrival, but we didn't know
+it till we breathed that time--all together. Then we dug our
+finger-nails out of our palms an' came alive again--in instalments.
+
+'Lundie spoke first. "We therefore commit their bodies to the air," he
+says, an' puts his cap on.
+
+'"The deep--the deep," says Walen. "It's just twenty-three miles to the
+Channel."
+
+'"Poor chaps! Poor chaps!" says Mankeltow. "We'd have had 'em to dinner
+if they hadn't lost their heads. I can't tell you how this distresses
+me, Laughton."
+
+'"Well, look at here, Arthur," I says. "It's only God's Own Mercy you
+an' me ain't lyin' in Flora's Temple now, and if that fat man had known
+enough to fetch his gun around while he was runnin', Lord Lundie and
+Walen would have been alongside us."
+
+'"I see that," he says. "But we're alive and they're dead, don't ye
+know."
+
+'"I know it," I says. "That's where the dead are always so damned unfair
+on the survivors."
+
+'"I see that too," he says. "But I'd have given a good deal if it hadn't
+happened, poor chaps!"
+
+'"Amen!" says Lundie. Then? Oh, then we sorter walked back two an' two
+to Flora's Temple an' lit matches to see we hadn't left anything behind.
+Walen, he had confiscated the note-books before they left. There was the
+first man's pistol which we'd forgot to return him, lyin' on the stone
+bench. Mankeltow puts his hand on it--he never touched the trigger--an',
+bein' an automatic, of course the blame thing jarred off--spiteful as
+a rattler!
+
+'"Look out! They'll have one of us yet," says Walen in the dark. But
+they didn't--the Lord hadn't quit being our shepherd--and we heard the
+bullet zip across the veldt--quite like old times. Ya-as!
+
+'"Swine!" says Mankeltow.
+
+'After that I didn't hear any more "Poor chap" talk.... Me? I never
+worried about killing _my_ man. I was too busy figurin' how a British
+jury might regard the proposition. I guess Lundie felt that way too.
+
+'Oh, but say! We had an interestin' time at dinner. Folks was expected
+whose auto had hung up on the road. They hadn't wired, and Peters had
+laid two extra places. We noticed 'em as soon as we sat down. I'd hate
+to say how noticeable they were. Mankeltow with his neck bandaged (he'd
+caught a relaxed throat golfin') sent for Peters and told him to take
+those empty places away--_if you please_. It takes something to rattle
+Peters. He was rattled that time. Nobody else noticed anything.
+And now...'
+
+'Where did they come down?' I asked, as he rose.
+
+'In the Channel, I guess. There was nothing in the papers about 'em.
+Shall we go into the drawin'-room, and see what these boys and girls are
+doin?' But say, ain't life in England inter_es_tin'?
+
+
+
+
+     REBIRTH
+
+       If any God should say
+         "I will restore
+       The world her yesterday
+         Whole as before
+     My Judgment blasted it"--who would not lift
+     Heart, eye, and hand in passion o'er the gift?
+
+       If any God should will
+         To wipe from mind
+       The memory of this ill
+         Which is mankind
+     In soul and substance now--who would not bless
+     Even to tears His loving-tenderness?
+
+       If any God should give
+         Us leave to fly
+       These present deaths we live,
+         And safely die
+     In those lost lives we lived ere we were born--
+     What man but would not laugh the excuse to scorn?
+
+       For we are what we are--
+         So broke to blood
+       And the strict works of war--
+         So long subdued
+     To sacrifice, that threadbare Death commands
+     Hardly observance at our busier hands.
+
+       Yet we were what we were,
+         And, fashioned so,
+       It pleases us to stare
+         At the far show
+     Of unbelievable years and shapes that flit,
+     In our own likeness, on the edge of it.
+
+
+
+The Horse Marines
+
+(1911)
+
+_The Rt. Hon. R.B. Haldane, Secretary of State for War[6], was
+questioned in the House of Commons on April 8th about the rocking-horses
+which the War Office is using for the purpose of teaching recruits to
+ride. Lord Ronaldshay asked the War Secretary if rocking-horses were to
+be supplied to all the cavalry regiments for teaching recruits to ride.
+'The noble Lord,' replied Mr. Haldane, 'is doubtless alluding to certain
+dummy horses on rockers which have been tested with very satisfactory
+results.'... The mechanical steed is a wooden horse with an astonishing
+tail. It is painted brown and mounted on swinging rails. The recruit
+leaps into the saddle and pulls at the reins while the riding-instructor
+rocks the animal to and fro with his foot. The rocking-horses are being
+made at Woolwich. They are quite cheap_.
+
+--Daily Paper.
+
+[Footnote 6: Now Viscount Haldane of Cloan.]
+
+My instructions to Mr. Leggatt, my engineer, had been accurately obeyed.
+He was to bring my car on completion of annual overhaul, from Coventry
+_via_ London, to Southampton Docks to await my arrival; and very pretty
+she looked, under the steamer's side among the railway lines, at six in
+the morning. Next to her new paint and varnish I was most impressed by
+her four brand-new tyres.
+
+'But I didn't order new tyres,' I said as we moved away. 'These are
+Irresilients, too.'
+
+'Treble-ribbed,' said Leggatt. 'Diamond-stud sheathing.'
+
+'Then there has been a mistake.'
+
+'Oh no, sir; they're gratis.'
+
+The number of motor manufacturers who give away complete sets of
+treble-ribbed Irresilient tyres is so limited that I believe I asked
+Leggatt for an explanation.
+
+'I don't know that I could very well explain, sir,' was the answer. 'It
+'ud come better from Mr. Pyecroft. He's on leaf at Portsmouth--staying
+with his uncle. His uncle 'ad the body all night. I'd defy you to find a
+scratch on her even with a microscope.'
+
+'Then we will go home by the Portsmouth road,' I said.
+
+And we went at those speeds which are allowed before the working-day
+begins or the police are thawed out. We were blocked near Portsmouth by
+a battalion of Regulars on the move.
+
+'Whitsuntide manoeuvres just ending,' said Leggatt. 'They've had a
+fortnight in the Downs.'
+
+He said no more until we were in a narrow street somewhere behind
+Portsmouth Town Railway Station, where he slowed at a green-grocery
+shop. The door was open, and a small old man sat on three potato-baskets
+swinging his feet over a stooping blue back.
+
+'You call that shinin' 'em?' he piped. 'Can you see your face in 'em
+yet? No! Then shine 'em, or I'll give you a beltin' you'll remember!'
+
+'If you stop kickin' me in the mouth perhaps I'd do better,' said
+Pyecroft's voice meekly.
+
+We blew the horn.
+
+Pyecroft arose, put away the brushes, and received us not otherwise than
+as a king in his own country.
+
+'Are you going to leave me up here all day?' said the old man.
+
+Pyecroft lifted him down and he hobbled into the back room.
+
+'It's his corns,' Pyecroft explained. 'You can't shine corny feet--and
+he hasn't had his breakfast.'
+
+'I haven't had mine either,' I said.
+
+'Breakfast for two more, uncle,' Pyecroft sang out.
+
+'Go out an' buy it then,' was the answer, 'or else it's half-rations.'
+
+Pyecroft turned to Leggatt, gave him his marketing orders, and
+despatched him with the coppers.
+
+'I have got four new tyres on my car,' I began impressively.
+
+'Yes,' said Mr. Pyecroft. 'You have, and I _will_ say'--he patted my
+car's bonnet--'you earned 'em.'
+
+'I want to know why--,' I went on.
+
+'Quite justifiable. You haven't noticed anything in the papers, have
+you?'
+
+'I've only just landed. I haven't seen a paper for weeks.'
+
+'Then you can lend me a virgin ear. There's been a scandal in the
+Junior Service--the Army, I believe they call 'em.'
+
+A bag of coffee-beans pitched on the counter. 'Roast that,' said the
+uncle from within.
+
+Pyecroft rigged a small coffee-roaster, while I took down the shutters,
+and sold a young lady in curl-papers two bunches of mixed greens and one
+soft orange.
+
+'Sickly stuff to handle on an empty stomach, ain't it?' said Pyecroft.
+
+'What about my new tyres?' I insisted.
+
+'Oh, any amount. But the question is'--he looked at me steadily--'is
+this what you might call a court-martial or a post-mortem inquiry?'
+
+'Strictly a post-mortem,' said I.
+
+'That being so,' said Pyecroft, 'we can rapidly arrive at facts. Last
+Thursday--the shutters go behind those baskets--last Thursday at five
+bells in the forenoon watch, otherwise ten-thirty A.M., your Mr. Leggatt
+was discovered on Westminster Bridge laying his course for the Old
+Kent Road.'
+
+'But that doesn't lead to Southampton,' I interrupted.
+
+'Then perhaps he was swinging the car for compasses. Be that as it may,
+we found him in that latitude, simultaneous as Jules and me was _ong
+route_ for Waterloo to rejoin our respective ships--or Navies I should
+say. Jules was a _permissionaire_, which meant being on leaf, same as
+me, from a French cassowary-cruiser at Portsmouth. A party of her trusty
+and well-beloved petty officers 'ad been seeing London, chaperoned by
+the R.C. Chaplain. Jules 'ad detached himself from the squadron and was
+cruisin' on his own when I joined him, in company of copious
+lady-friends. _But_, mark you, your Mr. Leggatt drew the line at the
+girls. Loud and long he drew it.'
+
+'I'm glad of that,' I said.
+
+'You may be. He adopted the puristical formation from the first. "Yes,"
+he said, when we was annealing him at--but you wouldn't know the pub--"I
+_am_ going to Southampton," he says, "and I'll stretch a point to go
+_via_ Portsmouth; _but_," says he, "seeing what sort of one hell of a
+time invariably trarnspires when we cruise together, Mr. Pyecroft, I do
+_not_ feel myself justified towards my generous and long-suffering
+employer in takin' on that kind of ballast as well." I assure you he
+considered your interests.'
+
+'And the girls?' I asked.
+
+'Oh, I left that to Jules. I'm a monogomite by nature. So we embarked
+strictly _ong garcong_. But I should tell you, in case he didn't, that
+your Mr. Leggatt's care for your interests 'ad extended to sheathing the
+car in matting and gunny-bags to preserve her paint-work. She was all
+swathed up like an I-talian baby.'
+
+'He _is_ careful about his paint-work,' I said.
+
+'For a man with no Service experience I should say he was fair homicidal
+on the subject. If we'd been Marines he couldn't have been more pointed
+in his allusions to our hob-nailed socks. However, we reduced him to a
+malleable condition, and embarked for Portsmouth. I'd seldom rejoined
+my _vaisseau ong automobile, avec_ a fur coat and goggles. Nor
+'ad Jules.'
+
+'Did Jules say much?' I asked, helplessly turning the handle of the
+coffee-roaster.
+
+'That's where I pitied the pore beggar. He 'adn't the language, so to
+speak. He was confined to heavings and shruggin's and copious _Mong
+Jews_! The French are very badly fitted with relief-valves. And then our
+Mr. Leggatt drove. He drove.'
+
+'Was he in a very malleable condition?'
+
+'Not him! We recognised the value of his cargo from the outset. He
+hadn't a chance to get more than moist at the edges. After which we went
+to sleep; and now we'll go to breakfast.'
+
+We entered the back room where everything was in order, and a screeching
+canary made us welcome. The uncle had added sausages and piles of
+buttered toast to the kippers. The coffee, cleared with a piece of
+fish-skin, was a revelation.
+
+Leggatt, who seemed to know the premises, had run the car into the tiny
+backyard where her mirror-like back almost blocked up the windows. He
+minded shop while we ate. Pyecroft passed him his rations through a flap
+in the door. The uncle ordered him in, after breakfast, to wash up, and
+he jumped in his gaiters at the old man's commands as he has never
+jumped to mine.
+
+'To resoom the post-mortem,' said Pyecroft, lighting his pipe. 'My
+slumbers were broken by the propeller ceasing to revolve, and by vile
+language from your Mr. Leggatt.'
+
+'I--I--' Leggatt began, a blue-checked duster in one hand and a cup in
+the other.
+
+'When you're wanted aft you'll be sent for, Mr. Leggatt,' said Pyecroft
+amiably. 'It's clean mess decks for you now. Resooming once more, we was
+on a lonely and desolate ocean near Portsdown, surrounded by gorse
+bushes, and a Boy Scout was stirring my stomach with his little
+copper-stick.'
+
+'"You count ten," he says.
+
+'"Very good, Boy Jones," I says, "count 'em," and I hauled him in over
+the gunnel, and ten I gave him with my large flat hand. The remarks he
+passed, lying face down tryin' to bite my leg, would have reflected
+credit on any Service. Having finished I dropped him overboard again,
+which was my gross political error. I ought to 'ave killed him; because
+he began signalling--rapid and accurate--in a sou'westerly direction.
+Few equatorial calms are to be apprehended when B.P.'s little pets take
+to signallin'. Make a note o' that! Three minutes later we were stopped
+and boarded by Scouts--up our backs, down our necks, and in our boots!
+The last I heard from your Mr. Leggatt as he went under, brushin' 'em
+off his cap, was thanking Heaven he'd covered up the new paint-work with
+mats. An 'eroic soul!'
+
+'Not a scratch on her body,' said Leggatt, pouring out the
+coffee-grounds.
+
+'And Jules?' said I.
+
+'Oh, Jules thought the much advertised Social Revolution had begun, but
+his mackintosh hampered him.
+
+'You told me to bring the mackintosh,' Leggatt whispered to me.
+
+'And when I 'ad 'em half convinced he was a French vicomte coming down
+to visit the Commander-in-Chief at Portsmouth, he tried to take it off.
+Seeing his uniform underneath, some sucking Sherlock Holmes of the Pink
+Eye Patrol (they called him Eddy) deduced that I wasn't speaking
+the truth. Eddy said I was tryin' to sneak into Portsmouth
+unobserved--unobserved mark you!--and join hands with the enemy. It
+trarnspired that the Scouts was conducting a field-day against opposin'
+forces, ably assisted by all branches of the Service, and they was so
+afraid the car wouldn't count ten points to them in the fray, that
+they'd have scalped us, but for the intervention of an umpire--also in
+short under-drawers. A fleshy sight!'
+
+Here Mr. Pyecroft shut his eyes and nodded. 'That umpire,' he said
+suddenly, 'was our Mr. Morshed--a gentleman whose acquaintance you have
+already made _and_ profited by, if I mistake not[7].'
+
+[Footnote 7: 'Their Lawful Occasions,' _Traffics and Discoveries_.]
+
+'Oh, was the Navy in it too?' I said; for I had read of wild doings
+occasionally among the Boy Scouts on the Portsmouth Road, in which Navy,
+Army, and the world at large seemed to have taken part.
+
+'The Navy _was_ in it. I was the only one out of it--for several
+seconds. Our Mr. Morshed failed to recognise me in my fur boa, and my
+appealin' winks at 'im behind your goggles didn't arrive. But when Eddy
+darling had told his story, I saluted, which is difficult in furs, and I
+stated I was bringin' him dispatches from the North. My Mr. Morshed
+cohered on the instant. I've never known his ethergram installations out
+of order yet. "Go and guard your blessed road," he says to the Fratton
+Orphan Asylum standing at attention all round him, and, when they was
+removed--"Pyecroft," he says, still _sotte voce_, "what in Hong-Kong are
+you doing with this dun-coloured _sampan_?"
+
+'It was your Mr. Leggatt's paint-protective matting which caught his
+eye. She _did_ resemble a _sampan_, especially about the stern-works. At
+these remarks I naturally threw myself on 'is bosom, so far as Service
+conditions permitted, and revealed him all, mentioning that the car was
+yours. You know his way of working his lips like a rabbit? Yes, he was
+quite pleased. "_His_ car!" he kept murmuring, working his lips like a
+rabbit. "I owe 'im more than a trifle for things he wrote about me. I'll
+keep the car."
+
+'Your Mr. Leggatt now injected some semi-mutinous remarks to the effect
+that he was your chauffeur in charge of your car, and, as such, capable
+of so acting. Mr. Morshed threw him a glarnce. It sufficed. Didn't it
+suffice, Mr. Leggatt?'
+
+'I knew if something didn't happen, something worse would,' said
+Leggatt. 'It never fails when you're aboard.'
+
+'And Jules?' I demanded.
+
+'Jules was, so to speak, panicking in a water-tight flat through his
+unfortunate lack of language. I had to introduce him as part of the
+_entente cordiale_, and he was put under arrest, too. Then we sat on the
+grass and smoked, while Eddy and Co. violently annoyed the traffic on
+the Portsmouth Road, till the umpires, all in short panties, conferred
+on the valuable lessons of the field-day and added up points, same as at
+target-practice. I didn't hear their conclusions, but our Mr. Morshed
+delivered a farewell address to Eddy and Co., tellin' 'em they ought to
+have deduced from a hundred signs about me, that I was a friendly
+bringin' in dispatches from the North. We left 'em tryin' to find those
+signs in the Scout book, and we reached Mr. Morshed's hotel at
+Portsmouth at 6.27 P.M. _ong automobile_. Here endeth the
+first chapter.'
+
+'Begin the second,' I said.
+
+The uncle and Leggatt had finished washing up and were seated, smoking,
+while the damp duster dried at the fire.
+
+'About what time was it,' said Pyecroft to Leggatt, 'when our Mr.
+Morshed began to talk about uncles?'
+
+'When he came back to the bar, after he'd changed into those rat-catcher
+clothes,' said Leggatt.
+
+'That's right. "Pye," said he, "have you an uncle?" "I have," I says.
+"Here's santy to him," and I finished my sherry and bitters to
+_you_, uncle.'
+
+'That's right,' said Pyecroft's uncle sternly. 'If you hadn't I'd have
+belted you worth rememberin', Emmanuel. I had the body all night.'
+
+Pyecroft smiled affectionately. 'So you 'ad, uncle, an' beautifully you
+looked after her. But as I was saying, "I have an uncle, too," says Mr.
+Morshed, dark and lowering. "Yet somehow I can't love him. I want to
+mortify the beggar. Volunteers to mortify my uncle, one pace to
+the front."
+
+'I took Jules with me the regulation distance. Jules was getting
+interested. Your Mr. Leggatt preserved a strictly nootral attitude.
+
+'"You're a pressed man," says our Mr. Morshed. "I owe your late employer
+much, so to say. The car will manoeuvre all night, as requisite."
+
+'Mr. Leggatt come out noble as your employee, and, by 'Eaven's divine
+grace, instead of arguing, he pleaded his new paint and varnish which
+was Mr. Morshed's one vital spot (he's lootenant on one of the new
+catch-'em-alive-o's now). "True," says he, "paint's an 'oly thing. I'll
+give you one hour to arrange a _modus vivendi_. Full bunkers and steam
+ready by 9 P.M. to-night, _if_ you please."
+
+'Even so, Mr. Leggatt was far from content. _I_ 'ad to arrange the
+details. We run her into the yard here.' Pyecroft nodded through the
+window at my car's glossy back-panels. 'We took off the body with its
+mats and put it in the stable, substitooting (and that yard's a tight
+fit for extensive repairs) the body of uncle's blue delivery cart. It
+overhung a trifle, but after I'd lashed it I knew it wouldn't fetch
+loose. Thus, in our composite cruiser, we repaired once more to the
+hotel, and was immediately dispatched to the toy-shop in the High Street
+where we took aboard one rocking-horse which was waiting for us.'
+
+'Took aboard _what_?' I cried.
+
+'One fourteen-hand dapple-grey rocking-horse, with pure green rockers
+and detachable tail, pair gashly glass eyes, complete set 'orrible
+grinnin' teeth, and two bloody-red nostrils which, protruding from the
+brown papers, produced the _tout ensemble_ of a Ju-ju sacrifice in the
+Benin campaign. Do I make myself comprehensible?'
+
+'Perfectly. Did you say anything?' I asked.
+
+'Only to Jules. To him, I says, wishing to try him. "_Allez a votre
+bateau. Je say mon Lootenong. Eel voo donneray porkwor_." To me, says
+he, "_Vous ong ate hurroo! Jamay de la vee_!" and I saw by his eye he'd
+taken on for the full term of the war. Jules was a blue-eyed,
+brindle-haired beggar of a useful make and inquirin' habits. Your Mr.
+Leggatt he only groaned.'
+
+Leggatt nodded. 'It was like nightmares,' he said. 'It was like
+nightmares.'
+
+'Once more, then,' Pyecroft swept on, 'we returned to the hotel and
+partook of a sumptuous repast, under the able and genial chairmanship of
+our Mr. Morshed, who laid his projecks unreservedly before us. "In the
+first place," he says, opening out bicycle-maps, "my uncle, who, I
+regret to say, is a brigadier-general, has sold his alleged soul to
+Dicky Bridoon for a feathery hat and a pair o' gilt spurs. Jules,
+_conspuez l'oncle_!" So Jules, you'll be glad to hear--'
+
+'One minute, Pye,' I said. 'Who is Dicky Bridoon?'
+
+'I don't usually mingle myself up with the bickerings of the Junior
+Service, but it trarnspired that he was Secretary o' State for Civil
+War, an' he'd been issuing mechanical leather-belly gee-gees which
+doctors recommend for tumour--to the British cavalry in loo of real meat
+horses, to learn to ride on. Don't you remember there was quite a stir
+in the papers owing to the cavalry not appreciatin' 'em? But that's a
+minor item. The main point was that our uncle, in his capacity of
+brigadier-general, mark you, had wrote to the papers highly approvin' o'
+Dicky Bridoon's mechanical substitutes an 'ad thus obtained
+promotion--all same as a agnosticle stoker psalm-singin' 'imself up the
+Service under a pious captain. At that point of the narrative we caught
+a phosphorescent glimmer why the rocking-horse might have been issued;
+but none the less the navigation was intricate. Omitting the fact it was
+dark and cloudy, our brigadier-uncle lay somewhere in the South Downs
+with his brigade, which was manoeuvrin' at Whitsum manoeuvres on a large
+scale--Red Army _versus_ Blue, et cetera; an' all we 'ad to go by was
+those flapping bicycle-maps and your Mr. Leggatt's groans.'
+
+'I was thinking what the Downs mean after dark,' said Leggatt angrily.
+
+'They was worth thinkin' of,' said Pyecroft. 'When we had studied the
+map till it fair spun, we decided to sally forth and creep for uncle by
+hand in the dark, dark night, an' present 'im with the rocking-horse. So
+we embarked at 8.57 P.M.'
+
+'One minute again, please. How much did Jules understand by that time?'
+I asked.
+
+'Sufficient unto the day--or night, perhaps I should say. He told our
+Mr. Morshed he'd follow him _more sang frays_, which is French for dead,
+drunk, or damned. Barrin' 'is paucity o' language, there wasn't a
+blemish on Jules. But what I wished to imply was, when we climbed into
+the back parts of the car, our Lootenant Morshed says to me, "I doubt if
+I'd flick my cigar-ends about too lavish, Mr. Pyecroft. We ought to be
+sitting on five pounds' worth of selected fireworks, and I think the
+rockets are your end." Not being able to smoke with my 'ead over the
+side I threw it away; and then your Mr. Leggatt, 'aving been as nearly
+mutinous as it pays to be with my Mr. Morshed, arched his back
+and drove.'
+
+'Where did he drive to, please?' said I.
+
+'Primerrily, in search of any or either or both armies; seconderrily, of
+course, in search of our brigadier-uncle. Not finding him on the road,
+we ran about the grass looking for him. This took us to a great many
+places in a short time. Ow 'eavenly that lilac did smell on top of that
+first Down--stinkin' its blossomin' little heart out!'
+
+'I 'adn't leesure to notice,' said Mr. Leggatt. 'The Downs were full o'
+chalk-pits, and we'd no lights.'
+
+'We 'ad the bicycle-lamp to look at the map by. Didn't you notice the
+old lady at the window where we saw the man in the night-gown? I thought
+night-gowns as sleepin' rig was extinck, so to speak.'
+
+'I tell you I 'adn't leesure to notice,' Leggatt repeated.
+
+'That's odd. Then what might 'ave made you tell the sentry at the first
+camp we found that you was the _Daily Express_ delivery-waggon?'
+
+'You can't touch pitch without being defiled,' Leggatt answered. ''Oo
+told the officer in the bath we were umpires?'
+
+'Well, he asked us. That was when we found the Territorial battalion
+undressin' in slow time. It lay on the left flank o' the Blue Army, and
+it cackled as it lay, too. But it gave us our position as regards the
+respective armies. We wandered a little more, and at 11.7 P.M., not
+having had a road under us for twenty minutes, we scaled the heights of
+something or other--which are about six hundred feet high. Here we
+'alted to tighten the lashings of the superstructure, and we smelt
+leather and horses three counties deep all round. We was, as you might
+say, in the thick of it.'
+
+'"Ah!" says my Mr. Morshed. "My 'orizon has indeed broadened. What a
+little thing is an uncle, Mr. Pyecroft, in the presence o' these
+glitterin' constellations! Simply ludicrous!" he says, "to waste a
+rocking-horse on an individual. We must socialise it. But we must get
+their 'eads up first. Touch off one rocket, if you please."
+
+'I touched off a green three-pounder which rose several thousand metres,
+and burst into gorgeous stars. "Reproduce the manoeuvre," he says, "at
+the other end o' this ridge--if it don't end in another cliff." So we
+steamed down the ridge a mile and a half east, and then I let Jules
+touch off a pink rocket, or he'd ha' kissed me. That was his only way to
+express his emotions, so to speak. Their heads come up then all around
+us to the extent o' thousands. We hears bugles like cocks crowing below,
+and on the top of it a most impressive sound which I'd never enjoyed
+before because 'itherto I'd always been an inteegral part of it, so to
+say--the noise of 'ole armies gettin' under arms. They must 'ave
+anticipated a night attack, I imagine. Most impressive. Then we 'eard a
+threshin'-machine. "Tutt! Tutt! This is childish!" says Lootenant
+Morshed. "We can't wait till they've finished cutting chaff for their
+horses. We must make 'em understand we're not to be trifled with.
+Expedite 'em with another rocket, Mr. Pyecroft."
+
+'"It's barely possible, sir," I remarks, "that that's a searchlight
+churnin' up," and by the time we backed into a providential chalk
+cutting (which was where our first tyre went pungo) she broke out to the
+northward, and began searching the ridge. A smart bit o' work.'
+
+''Twasn't a puncture. The inner tube had nipped because we skidded so,'
+Leggatt interrupted.
+
+'While your Mr. Leggatt was effectin' repairs, another searchlight broke
+out to the southward, and the two of 'em swept our ridge on both sides.
+Right at the west end of it they showed us the ground rising into a
+hill, so to speak, crowned with what looked like a little fort. Morshed
+saw it before the beams shut off. "That's the key of the position!" he
+says. "Occupy it at all hazards."
+
+'"I haven't half got occupation for the next twenty minutes," says your
+Mr. Leggatt, rootin' and blasphemin' in the dark. Mark, now, 'ow
+Morshed changed his tactics to suit 'is environment. "Right!" says he.
+"I'll stand by the ship. Mr. Pyecroft and Jules, oblige me by doubling
+along the ridge to the east with all the maroons and crackers you can
+carry without spilling. Read the directions careful for the maroons, Mr.
+Pyecroft, and touch them off at half-minute intervals. Jules represents
+musketry an' maxim fire under your command. Remember, it's death or
+Salisbury Gaol! Prob'ly both!"
+
+'By these means and some moderately 'ard runnin', we distracted 'em to
+the eastward. Maroons, you may not be aware, are same as bombs, with the
+anarchism left out. In confined spots like chalk-pits, they knock a
+four-point-seven silly. But you should read the directions before'and.
+In the intervals of the slow but well-directed fire of my cow-guns,
+Jules, who had found a sheep-pond in the dark a little lower down, gave
+what you might call a cinematograph reproduction o' sporadic musketry.
+They was large size crackers, and he concluded with the dull, sickenin'
+thud o' blind shells burstin' on soft ground.'
+
+'How did he manage that?' I said.
+
+'You throw a lighted squib into water and you'll see,' said Pyecroft.
+'Thus, then, we improvised till supplies was exhausted and the
+surrounding landscapes fair 'owled and 'ummed at us. The Jun or Service
+might 'ave 'ad their doubts about the rockets but they couldn't overlook
+our gunfire. Both sides tumbled out full of initiative. I told Jules no
+two flat-feet 'ad any right to be as happy as us, and we went back
+along the ridge to the derelict, and there was our Mr. Morshed
+apostrophin' his 'andiwork over fifty square mile o' country with
+"Attend, all ye who list to hear!" out of the Fifth Reader. He'd got as
+far as "And roused the shepherds o' Stonehenge, the rangers o' Beaulieu"
+when we come up, and he drew our attention to its truth as well as its
+beauty. That's rare in poetry, I'm told. He went right on to--"The red
+glare on Skiddaw roused those beggars at Carlisle"--which he pointed out
+was poetic license for Leith Hill. This allowed your Mr. Leggatt time to
+finish pumpin' up his tyres. I 'eard the sweat 'op off his nose.'
+
+'You know what it is, sir,' said poor Leggatt to me.
+
+'It warfted across my mind, as I listened to what was trarnspirin', that
+it might be easier to make the mess than to wipe it up, but such
+considerations weighed not with our valiant leader.
+
+'"Mr. Pyecroft," he says, "it can't have escaped your notice that we
+'ave one angry and 'ighly intelligent army in front of us, an' another
+'ighly angry and equally intelligent army in our rear. What 'ud you
+recommend?"
+
+'Most men would have besought 'im to do a lateral glide while there was
+yet time, but all I said was: "The rocking-horse isn't expended
+yet, sir."
+
+'He laid his hand on my shoulder. "Pye," says he, "there's worse men
+than you in loftier places. They shall 'ave it. None the less," he
+remarks, "the ice is undeniably packing."
+
+'I may 'ave omitted to point out that at this juncture two large
+armies, both deprived of their night's sleep, was awake, as you might
+say, and hurryin' into each other's arms. Here endeth the
+second chapter.'
+
+He filled his pipe slowly. The uncle had fallen asleep. Leggatt lit
+another cigarette.
+
+'We then proceeded _ong automobile_ along the ridge in a westerly
+direction towards the miniature fort which had been so kindly revealed
+by the searchlight, but which on inspection (your Mr. Leggatt bumped
+into an outlyin' reef of it) proved to be a wurzel-clump;
+_c'est-a-dire_, a parallelogrammatic pile of about three million
+mangold-wurzels, brought up there for the sheep, I suppose. On all
+sides, excep' the one we'd come by, the ground fell away moderately
+quick, and down at the bottom there was a large camp lit up an' full of
+harsh words of command.
+
+'"I said it was the key to the position," Lootenant Morshed remarks.
+"Trot out Persimmon!" which we rightly took to read, "Un-wrap the
+rocking-horse."
+
+'"Houp la!" says Jules in a insubordinate tone, an' slaps Persimmon on
+the flank.
+
+'"Silence!" says the Lootenant. "This is the Royal Navy, not Newmarket";
+and we carried Persimmon to the top of the mangel-wurzel clump
+as directed.
+
+'Owing to the inequalities of the terrain (I _do_ think your Mr. Leggatt
+might have had a spirit-level in his kit) he wouldn't rock free on the
+bed-plate, and while adjustin' him, his detachable tail fetched adrift.
+Our Lootenant was quick to seize the advantage.
+
+'"Remove that transformation," he says. "Substitute one Roman candle.
+Gas-power is superior to manual propulsion."
+
+'So we substituted. He arranged the _piece de resistarnce_ in the shape
+of large drums--not saucers, mark you--drums of coloured fire, with
+printed instructions, at proper distances round Persimmon. There was a
+brief interregnum while we dug ourselves in among the wurzels by hand.
+Then he touched off the fires, _not_ omitting the Roman candle, and, you
+may take it from me, all was visible. Persimmon shone out in his naked
+splendour, red to port, green to starboard, and one white light at his
+bows, as per Board o' Trade regulations. Only he didn't so much rock,
+you might say, as shrug himself, in a manner of speaking, every time the
+candle went off. One can't have everything. But the rest surpassed our
+highest expectations. I think Persimmon was noblest on the starboard or
+green side--more like when a man thinks he's seeing mackerel in hell,
+don't you know? And yet I'd be the last to deprecate the effect of the
+port light on his teeth, or that blood-shot look in his left eye. He
+knew there was something going on he didn't approve of. He
+looked worried.'
+
+'Did you laugh?' I said.
+
+'I'm not much of a wag myself; nor it wasn't as if we 'ad time to allow
+the spectacle to sink in. The coloured fires was supposed to burn ten
+minutes, whereas it was obvious to the meanest capacity that the Junior
+Service would arrive by forced marches in about two and a half. They
+grarsped our topical allusion as soon as it was across the foot-lights,
+so to speak. They were quite chafed at it. Of course, 'ad we reflected,
+we might have known that exposin' illuminated rockin'-horses to an army
+that was learnin' to ride on 'em partook of the nature of a _double
+entender_, as the French say--same as waggling the tiller lines at a man
+who's had a hanging in the family. I knew the cox of the
+_Archimandrite's_ galley 'arf killed for a similar _plaisan-teree._ But
+we never anticipated lobsters being so sensitive. That was why we
+shifted. We could 'ardly tear our commandin' officer away. He put his
+head on one side, and kept cooin'. The only thing he 'ad neglected to
+provide was a line of retreat; but your Mr. Leggatt--an 'eroic soul in
+the last stage of wet prostration--here took command of the van, or,
+rather, the rear-guard. We walked downhill beside him, holding on to the
+superstructure to prevent her capsizing. These technical details,
+'owever, are beyond me.' He waved his pipe towards Leggatt.
+
+'I saw there was two deepish ruts leadin' down 'ill somewhere,' said
+Leggatt. 'That was when the soldiers stopped laughin', and begun to
+run uphill.'
+
+'Stroll, lovey, stroll!' Pyecroft corrected. 'The Dervish rush took
+place later.'
+
+'So I laid her in these ruts. That was where she must 'ave scraped her
+silencer a bit. Then they turned sharp right--the ruts did--and then she
+stopped bonnet-high in a manure-heap, sir; but I'll swear it was all of
+a one in three gradient. I think it was a barnyard. We waited there,'
+said Leggatt.
+
+'But not for long,' said Pyecroft. 'The lights were towering out of the
+drums on the position we 'ad so valiantly abandoned; and the Junior
+Service was escaladin' it _en masse_. When numerous bodies of 'ighly
+trained men arrive simultaneous in the same latitude from opposite
+directions, each remarking briskly, "What the 'ell did you do _that_
+for?" detonation, as you might say, is practically assured. They didn't
+ask for extraneous aids. If we'd come out with sworn affidavits of what
+we'd done they wouldn't 'ave believed us. They wanted each other's
+company exclusive. Such was the effect of Persimmon on their clarss
+feelings. Idol'try, _I_ call it! Events transpired with the utmost
+velocity and rapidly increasing pressures. There was a few remarks about
+Dicky Bridoon and mechanical horses, and then some one was smacked--hard
+by the sound--in the middle of a remark.'
+
+'That was the man who kept calling for the Forty-fifth Dragoons,' said
+Leggatt. 'He got as far as Drag ...'
+
+'Was it?' said Pyecroft dreamily. 'Well, he couldn't say they didn't
+come. They all came, and they all fell to arguin' whether the Infantry
+should 'ave Persimmon for a regimental pet or the Cavalry should keep
+him for stud purposes. Hence the issue was soon clouded with
+mangold-wurzels. Our commander said we 'ad sowed the good seed, and it
+was bearing abundant fruit. (They weigh between four and seven pounds
+apiece.) Seein' the children 'ad got over their shyness, and 'ad really
+begun to play games, we backed out o' the pit and went down, by steps,
+to the camp below, no man, as you might say, making us afraid. Here we
+enjoyed a front view of the battle, which rolled with renewed impetus,
+owing to both sides receiving strong reinforcements every minute. All
+arms were freely represented; Cavalry, on this occasion only, acting in
+concert with Artillery. They argued the relative merits of horses
+_versus_ feet, so to say, but they didn't neglect Persimmon. The wounded
+rolling downhill with the wurzels informed us that he had long ago been
+socialised, and the smallest souvenirs were worth a man's life. Speaking
+broadly, the Junior Service appeared to be a shade out of 'and, if I may
+venture so far. They did _not_ pay prompt and unhesitating obedience to
+the "Retires" or the "Cease Fires" or the "For 'Eaven's sake come to
+bed, ducky" of their officers, who, I regret to say, were 'otly
+embroiled at the heads of their respective units.'
+
+'How did you find that out?' I asked.
+
+'On account of Lootenant Morshed going to the Mess tent to call on his
+uncle and raise a drink; but all hands had gone to the front. We thought
+we 'eard somebody bathing behind the tent, and we found an oldish
+gentleman tryin' to drown a boy in knickerbockers in a horse-trough. He
+kept him under with a bicycle, so to speak. He 'ad nearly accomplished
+his fell design, when we frustrated him. He was in a highly malleable
+condition and full o' _juice de spree_. "Arsk not what I am," he says.
+"My wife 'll tell me that quite soon enough. Arsk rather what I've
+been," he says. "I've been dinin' here," he says. "I commanded 'em in
+the Eighties," he says, "and, Gawd forgive me," he says, sobbin'
+'eavily, "I've spent this holy evening telling their Colonel they was a
+set of educated inefficients. Hark to 'em!" We could, without strainin'
+ourselves; but how _he_ picked up the gentle murmur of his own corps in
+that on-the-knee party up the hill I don't know. "They've marched and
+fought thirty mile to-day," he shouts, "and now they're tearin' the
+_intestines_ out of the Cavalry up yonder! They won't stop this side the
+gates o' Delhi," he says. "I commanded their ancestors. There's nothing
+wrong with the Service," he says, wringing out his trousers on his lap.
+"'Eaven pardon me for doubtin' 'em! Same old game--same young beggars."
+
+'The boy in the knickerbockers, languishing on a chair, puts in a claim
+for one drink. "Let him go dry," says our friend in shirt-tails. "He's a
+reporter. He run into me on his filthy bicycle and he asked me if I
+could furnish 'im with particulars about the mutiny in the Army. You
+false-'earted proletarian publicist," he says, shakin' his finger at
+'im--for he was reelly annoyed--"I'll teach you to defile what you can't
+comprebend! When my regiment's in a state o' mutiny, I'll do myself the
+honour of informing you personally. You particularly ignorant and very
+narsty little man," he says, "you're no better than a dhobi's donkey! If
+there wasn't dirty linen to wash, you'd starve," he says, "and why I
+haven't drowned you will be the lastin' regret of my life."
+
+'Well, we sat with 'em and 'ad drinks for about half-an-hour in front
+of the Mess tent. He'd ha' killed the reporter if there hadn't been
+witnesses, and the reporter might have taken notes of the battle; so we
+acted as two-way buffers, in a sense. I don't hold with the Press
+mingling up with Service matters. They draw false conclusions. Now, mark
+you, at a moderate estimate, there were seven thousand men in the
+fighting line, half of 'em hurt in their professional feelings, an' the
+other half rubbin' in the liniment, as you might say. All due to
+Persimmon! If you 'adn't seen it you wouldn't 'ave believed it. And yet,
+mark you, not one single unit of 'em even resorted to his belt. They
+confined themselves to natural producks--hands and the wurzels. I
+thought Jules was havin' fits, till it trarnspired the same thought had
+impressed him in the French language. He called it _incroyable_, I
+believe. Seven thousand men, with seven thousand rifles, belts, and
+bayonets, in a violently agitated condition, and not a ungenteel blow
+struck from first to last. The old gentleman drew our attention to it as
+well. It was quite noticeable.
+
+'Lack of ammunition was the primerry cause of the battle ceasin'. A
+Brigade-Major came in, wipin' his nose on both cuffs, and sayin' he 'ad
+'ad snuff. The brigadier-uncle followed. He was, so to speak, sneezin'.
+We thought it best to shift our moorings without attractin' attention;
+so we shifted. They 'ad called the cows 'ome by then. The Junior Service
+was going to bye-bye all round us, as happy as the ship's monkey when
+he's been playin' with the paints, and Lootenant Morshed and Jules kept
+bowin' to port and starboard of the superstructure, acknowledgin' the
+unstinted applause which the multitude would 'ave given 'em if they'd
+known the facts. On the other 'and, as your Mr. Leggatt observed, they
+might 'ave killed us.
+
+'That would have been about five bells in the middle watch, say
+half-past two. A well-spent evening. There was but little to be gained
+by entering Portsmouth at that hour, so we turned off on the grass (this
+was after we had found a road under us), and we cast anchors out at the
+stern and prayed for the day.
+
+'But your Mr. Leggatt he had to make and mend tyres all our watch below.
+It trarnspired she had been running on the rim o' two or three wheels,
+which, very properly, he hadn't reported till the close of the action.
+And that's the reason of your four new tyres. Mr. Morshed was of opinion
+you'd earned 'em. Do you dissent?'
+
+I stretched out my hand, which Pyecroft crushed to pulp. 'No, Pye,' I
+said, deeply moved, 'I agree entirely. But what happened to Jules?'
+
+'We returned him to his own Navy after breakfast. He wouldn't have kept
+much longer without some one in his own language to tell it to. I don't
+know any man I ever took more compassion on than Jules. 'Is sufferings
+swelled him up centimetres, and all he could do on the Hard was to kiss
+Lootenant Morshed and me, _and_ your Mr. Leggatt. He deserved that much.
+A cordial beggar.'
+
+Pyecroft looked at the washed cups on the table, and the low sunshine
+on my car's back in the yard.
+
+'Too early to drink to him,' he said. 'But I feel it just the same.'
+
+The uncle, sunk in his chair, snored a little; the canary answered with
+a shrill lullaby. Pyecroft picked up the duster, threw it over the cage,
+put his finger to his lips, and we tiptoed out into the shop, while
+Leggatt brought the car round.
+
+'I'll look out for the news in the papers,' I said, as I got in.
+
+'Oh, we short-circuited that! Nothing trarnspired excep' a statement to
+the effect that some Territorial battalions had played about with
+turnips at the conclusion of the manoeuvres The taxpayer don't know all
+he gets for his money. Farewell!'
+
+We moved off just in time to be blocked by a regiment coming towards the
+station to entrain for London.
+
+'Beg your pardon, sir,' said a sergeant in charge of the baggage, 'but
+would you mind backin' a bit till we get the waggons past?'
+
+'Certainly,' I said. 'You don't happen to have a rocking-horse among
+your kit, do you?'
+
+The rattle of our reverse drowned his answer, but I saw his eyes. One of
+them was blackish-green, about four days old.
+
+
+
+
+THE LEGEND OF MIRTH
+
+     The Four Archangels, so the legends tell,
+     Raphael, Gabriel, Michael, Azrael,
+     Being first of those to whom the Power was shown,
+     Stood first of all the Host before The Throne,
+     And when the Charges were allotted burst
+     Tumultuous-winged from out the assembly first.
+     Zeal was their spur that bade them strictly heed
+     Their own high judgment on their lightest deed.
+     Zeal was their spur that, when relief was given,
+     Urged them unwearied to fresh toil in Heaven;
+     For Honour's sake perfecting every task
+     Beyond what e'en Perfection's self could ask....
+     And Allah, Who created Zeal and Pride,
+     Knows how the twain are perilous-near allied.
+
+     It chanced on one of Heaven's long-lighted days,
+     The Four and all the Host having gone their ways
+     Each to his Charge, the shining Courts were void
+     Save for one Seraph whom no charge employed,
+     With folden wings and slumber-threatened brow.
+     To whom The Word: 'Beloved, what dost thou?'
+     'By the Permission,' came the answer soft,
+     'Little I do nor do that little oft.
+     As is The Will in Heaven so on Earth
+     Where by The Will I strive to make men mirth.'
+     He ceased and sped, hearing The Word once more:
+     'Beloved, go thy way and greet the Four.'
+
+     Systems and Universes overpast,
+     The Seraph came upon the Four, at last,
+     Guiding and guarding with devoted mind
+     The tedious generations of mankind
+     Who lent at most unwilling ear and eye
+     When they could not escape the ministry....
+     Yet, patient, faithful, firm, persistent, just
+     Toward all that gross, indifferent, facile dust,
+     The Archangels laboured to discharge their trust
+     By precept and example, prayer and law,
+     Advice, reproof, and rule, but, labouring, saw
+     Each in his fellow's countenance confessed,
+     The Doubt that sickens: 'Have I done my best?'
+
+     Even as they sighed and turned to toil anew,
+     The Seraph hailed them with observance due;
+     And after some fit talk of higher things
+     Touched tentative on mundane happenings.
+     This they permitting, he, emboldened thus,
+     Prolused of humankind promiscuous.
+     And, since the large contention less avails
+     Than instances observed, he told them tales--Tales
+     of the shop, the bed, the court, the street,
+     Intimate, elemental, indiscreet:
+     Occasions where Confusion smiting swift
+     Piles jest on jest as snow-slides pile the drift.
+
+     Whence, one by one, beneath derisive skies,
+     The victims bare, bewildered heads arise:
+     Tales of the passing of the spirit, graced
+     With humour blinding as the doom it faced:
+     Stark tales of ribaldry that broke aside
+     To tears, by laughter swallowed ere they dried:
+     Tales to which neither grace nor gain accrue,
+     But only (Allah be exalted!) true,
+     And only, as the Seraph showed that night,
+     Delighting to the limits of delight.
+
+     These he rehearsed with artful pause and halt,
+     And such pretence of memory at fault,
+     That soon the Four--so well the bait was thrown--
+     Came to his aid with memories of their own--
+     Matters dismissed long since as small or vain,
+     Whereof the high significance had lain
+     Hid, till the ungirt glosses made it plain.
+     Then as enlightenment came broad and fast,
+     Each marvelled at his own oblivious past
+     Until--the Gates of Laughter opened wide--
+     The Four, with that bland Seraph at their side,
+     While they recalled, compared, and amplified,
+     In utter mirth forgot both zeal and pride.
+
+     High over Heaven the lamps of midnight burned
+     Ere, weak with merriment, the Four returned,
+     Not in that order they were wont to keep--
+     Pinion to pinion answering, sweep for sweep,
+     In awful diapason heard afar,
+     But shoutingly adrift 'twixt star and star.
+     Reeling a planet's orbit left or right
+     As laughter took them in the abysmal Night;
+     Or, by the point of some remembered jest,
+     Winged and brought helpless down through gulfs unguessed,
+     Where the blank worlds that gather to the birth
+     Leaped in the womb of Darkness at their mirth,
+     And e'en Gehenna's bondsmen understood.
+     They were not damned from human brotherhood.
+
+     Not first nor last of Heaven's high Host, the Four
+     That night took place beneath The Throne once more.
+     O lovelier than their morning majesty,
+     The understanding light behind the eye!
+     O more compelling than their old command,
+     The new-learned friendly gesture of the hand!
+     O sweeter than their zealous fellowship,
+     The wise half-smile that passed from lip to lip!
+     O well and roundly, when Command was given,
+     They told their tale against themselves to Heaven,
+     And in the silence, waiting on The Word,
+     Received the Peace and Pardon of The Lord!
+
+
+
+'My Son's Wife'
+
+(1913)
+
+He had suffered from the disease of the century since his early youth,
+and before he was thirty he was heavily marked with it. He and a few
+friends had rearranged Heaven very comfortably, but the reorganisation
+of Earth, which they called Society, was even greater fun. It demanded
+Work in the shape of many taxi-rides daily; hours of brilliant talk with
+brilliant talkers; some sparkling correspondence; a few silences (but on
+the understanding that their own turn should come soon) while other
+people expounded philosophies; and a fair number of picture-galleries,
+tea-fights, concerts, theatres, music-halls, and cinema shows; the whole
+trimmed with love-making to women whose hair smelt of cigarette-smoke.
+Such strong days sent Frankwell Midmore back to his flat assured that he
+and his friends had helped the World a step nearer the Truth, the Dawn,
+and the New Order.
+
+His temperament, he said, led him more towards concrete data than
+abstract ideas. People who investigate detail are apt to be tired at the
+day's end. The same temperament, or it may have been a woman, made him
+early attach himself to the Immoderate Left of his Cause in the capacity
+of an experimenter in Social Relations. And since the Immoderate Left
+contains plenty of women anxious to help earnest inquirers with large
+independent incomes to arrive at evaluations of essentials, Frankwell
+Midmore's lot was far from contemptible.
+
+At that hour Fate chose to play with him. A widowed aunt, widely
+separated by nature, and more widely by marriage, from all that
+Midmore's mother had ever been or desired to be, died and left him
+possessions. Mrs. Midmore, having that summer embraced a creed which
+denied the existence of death, naturally could not stoop to burial; but
+Midmore had to leave London for the dank country at a season when Social
+Regeneration works best through long, cushioned conferences, two by two,
+after tea. There he faced the bracing ritual of the British funeral, and
+was wept at across the raw grave by an elderly coffin-shaped female with
+a long nose, who called him 'Master Frankie'; and there he was
+congratulated behind an echoing top-hat by a man he mistook for a mute,
+who turned out to be his aunt's lawyer. He wrote his mother next day,
+after a bright account of the funeral:
+
+'So far as I can understand, she has left me between four and five
+hundred a year. It all comes from Ther Land, as they call it down here.
+The unspeakable attorney, Sperrit, and a green-eyed daughter, who hums
+to herself as she tramps but is silent on all subjects except "huntin',"
+insisted on taking me to see it. Ther Land is brown and green in
+alternate slabs like chocolate and pistachio cakes, speckled with
+occasional peasants who do not utter. In case it should not be wet
+enough there is a wet brook in the middle of it. Ther House is by the
+brook. I shall look into it later. If there should be any little memento
+of Jenny that you care for, let me know. Didn't you tell me that
+mid-Victorian furniture is coming into the market again? Jenny's old
+maid--it is called Rhoda Dolbie--tells me that Jenny promised it thirty
+pounds a year. The will does not. Hence, I suppose, the tears at the
+funeral. But that is close on ten per cent of the income. I fancy Jenny
+has destroyed all her private papers and records of her _vie intime_,
+if, indeed, life be possible in such a place. The Sperrit man told me
+that if I had means of my own I might come and live on Ther Land. I
+didn't tell him how much I would pay not to! I cannot think it right
+that any human being should exercise mastery over others in the
+merciless fashion our tom-fool social system permits; so, as it is all
+mine, I intend to sell it whenever the unholy Sperrit can find a
+purchaser.'
+
+And he went to Mr. Sperrit with the idea next day, just before returning
+to town.
+
+'Quite so,' said the lawyer. 'I see your point, of course. But the house
+itself is rather old-fashioned--hardly the type purchasers demand
+nowadays. There's no park, of course, and the bulk of the land is let to
+a life-tenant, a Mr. Sidney. As long as he pays his rent, he can't be
+turned out, and even if he didn't'--Mr. Sperrit's face relaxed a
+shade--'you might have a difficulty.'
+
+'The property brings four hundred a year, I understand,' said Midmore.
+
+'Well, hardly--ha-ardly. Deducting land and income tax, tithes, fire
+insurance, cost of collection and repairs of course, it returned two
+hundred and eighty-four pounds last year. The repairs are rather a large
+item--owing to the brook. I call it Liris--out of Horace, you know.'
+
+Midmore looked at his watch impatiently.
+
+'I suppose you can find somebody to buy it?' he repeated.
+
+'We will do our best, of course, if those are your instructions. Then,
+that is all except'--here Midmore half rose, but Mr. Sperrit's little
+grey eyes held his large brown ones firmly--'except about Rhoda Dolbie,
+Mrs. Werf's maid. I may tell you that we did not draw up your aunt's
+last will. She grew secretive towards the last--elderly people often
+do--and had it done in London. I expect her memory failed her, or she
+mislaid her notes. She used to put them in her spectacle-case.... My
+motor only takes eight minutes to get to the station, Mr. Midmore ...
+but, as I was saying, whenever she made her will with _us_, Mrs. Werf
+always left Rhoda thirty pounds per annum. Charlie, the wills!' A clerk
+with a baldish head and a long nose dealt documents on to the table like
+cards, and breathed heavily behind Midmore. 'It's in no sense a legal
+obligation, of course,' said Mr. Sperrit. 'Ah, that one is dated January
+the 11th, eighteen eighty-nine.'
+
+Midmore looked at his watch again and found himself saying with no good
+grace: 'Well, I suppose she'd better have it--for the present at
+any rate.'
+
+He escaped with an uneasy feeling that two hundred and fifty-four pounds
+a year was not exactly four hundred, and that Charlie's long nose
+annoyed him. Then he returned, first-class, to his own affairs.
+
+Of the two, perhaps three, experiments in Social Relations which he had
+then in hand, one interested him acutely. It had run for some months and
+promised most variegated and interesting developments, on which he dwelt
+luxuriously all the way to town. When he reached his flat he was not
+well prepared for a twelve-page letter explaining, in the diction of the
+Immoderate Left which rubricates its I's and illuminates its T's, that
+the lady had realised greater attractions in another Soul. She
+re-stated, rather than pleaded, the gospel of the Immoderate Left as her
+justification, and ended in an impassioned demand for her right to
+express herself in and on her own life, through which, she pointed out,
+she could pass but once. She added that if, later, she should discover
+Midmore was 'essentially complementary to her needs,' she would tell him
+so. That Midmore had himself written much the same sort of
+epistle--barring the hint of return--to a woman of whom his needs for
+self-expression had caused him to weary three years before, did not
+assist him in the least. He expressed himself to the gas-fire in terms
+essential but not complimentary. Then he reflected on the detached
+criticism of his best friends and her best friends, male and female,
+with whom he and she and others had talked so openly while their gay
+adventure was in flower. He recalled, too--this must have been about
+midnight--her analysis from every angle, remote and most intimate, of
+the mate to whom she had been adjudged under the base convention which
+is styled marriage. Later, at that bad hour when the cattle wake for a
+little, he remembered her in other aspects and went down into the hell
+appointed; desolate, desiring, with no God to call upon. About eleven
+o'clock next morning Eliphaz the Temanite, Bildad the Shuhite, and
+Zophar the Naamathite called upon him 'for they had made appointment
+together' to see how he took it; but the janitor told them that Job had
+gone--into the country, he believed.
+
+Midmore's relief when he found his story was not written across his
+aching temples for Mr. Sperrit to read--the defeated lover, like the
+successful one, believes all earth privy to his soul--was put down by
+Mr. Sperrit to quite different causes. He led him into a morning-room.
+The rest of the house seemed to be full of people, singing to a loud
+piano idiotic songs about cows, and the hall smelt of damp cloaks.
+
+'It's our evening to take the winter cantata,' Mr. Sperrit explained.
+'It's "High Tide on the Coast of Lincolnshire." I hoped you'd come back.
+There are scores of little things to settle. As for the house, of
+course, it stands ready for you at any time. I couldn't get Rhoda out of
+it--nor could Charlie for that matter. She's the sister, isn't she, of
+the nurse who brought you down here when you were four, she says, to
+recover from measles?'
+
+'Is she? Was I?' said Midmore through the bad tastes in his mouth.
+'D'you suppose I could stay there the night?'
+
+Thirty joyous young voices shouted appeal to some one to leave their
+'pipes of parsley 'ollow--'ollow--'ollow!' Mr. Sperrit had to raise his
+voice above the din.
+
+'Well, if I asked you to stay _here_, I should never hear the last of it
+from Rhoda. She's a little cracked, of course, but the soul of devotion
+and capable of anything. _Ne sit ancillae_, you know.'
+
+'Thank you. Then I'll go. I'll walk.' He stumbled out dazed and sick
+into the winter twilight, and sought the square house by the brook.
+
+It was not a dignified entry, because when the door was unchained and
+Rhoda exclaimed, he took two valiant steps into the hall and then
+fainted--as men sometimes will after twenty-two hours of strong emotion
+and little food.
+
+'I'm sorry,' he said when he could speak. He was lying at the foot of
+the stairs, his head on Rhoda's lap.
+
+'Your 'ome is your castle, sir,' was the reply in his hair. 'I smelt it
+wasn't drink. You lay on the sofa till I get your supper.'
+
+She settled him in a drawing-room hung with yellow silk, heavy with the
+smell of dead leaves and oil lamp. Something murmured soothingly in the
+background and overcame the noises in his head. He thought he heard
+horses' feet on wet gravel and a voice singing about ships and flocks
+and grass. It passed close to the shuttered bay-window.
+
+     But each will mourn his own, she saith,
+     And sweeter woman ne'er drew breath
+     Than my son's wife, Elizabeth ...
+     Cusha--cusha--cusha--calling.
+
+The hoofs broke into a canter as Rhoda entered with the tray. 'And then
+I'll put you to bed,' she said. 'Sidney's coming in the morning.'
+Midmore asked no questions. He dragged his poor bruised soul to bed and
+would have pitied it all over again, but the food and warm sherry and
+water drugged him to instant sleep.
+
+Rhoda's voice wakened him, asking whether he would have ''ip, foot, or
+sitz,' which he understood were the baths of the establishment. 'Suppose
+you try all three,' she suggested. 'They're all yours, you know, sir.'
+
+He would have renewed his sorrows with the daylight, but her words
+struck him pleasantly. Everything his eyes opened upon was his very own
+to keep for ever. The carved four-post Chippendale bed, obviously worth
+hundreds; the wavy walnut William and Mary chairs--he had seen worse
+ones labelled twenty guineas apiece; the oval medallion mirror; the
+delicate eighteenth-century wire fireguard; the heavy brocaded curtains
+were his--all his. So, too, a great garden full of birds that faced him
+when he shaved; a mulberry tree, a sun-dial, and a dull, steel-coloured
+brook that murmured level with the edge of a lawn a hundred yards away.
+Peculiarly and privately his own was the smell of sausages and coffee
+that he sniffed at the head of the wide square landing, all set round
+with mysterious doors and Bartolozzi prints. He spent two hours after
+breakfast in exploring his new possessions. His heart leaped up at such
+things as sewing-machines, a rubber-tyred bath-chair in a tiled passage,
+a malachite-headed Malacca cane, boxes and boxes of unopened stationery,
+seal-rings, bunches of keys, and at the bottom of a steel-net reticule a
+little leather purse with seven pounds ten shillings in gold and eleven
+shillings in silver.
+
+'You used to play with that when my sister brought you down here after
+your measles,' said Rhoda as he slipped the money into his pocket. 'Now,
+this was your pore dear auntie's business-room.' She opened a low door.
+'Oh, I forgot about Mr. Sidney! There he is.' An enormous old man with
+rheumy red eyes that blinked under downy white eyebrows sat in an Empire
+chair, his cap in his hands. Rhoda withdrew sniffing. The man looked
+Midmore over in silence, then jerked a thumb towards the door. 'I reckon
+she told you who I be,' he began. 'I'm the only farmer you've got.
+Nothin' goes off my place 'thout it walks on its own feet. What about my
+pig-pound?'
+
+'Well, what about it?' said Midmore.
+
+'That's just what I be come about. The County Councils are getting more
+particular. Did ye know there was swine fever at Pashell's? There _be_.
+It'll 'ave to be in brick.'
+
+'Yes,' said Midmore politely.
+
+'I've bin at your aunt that was, plenty times about it. I don't say she
+wasn't a just woman, but she didn't read the lease same way I did. I be
+used to bein' put upon, but there's no doing any longer 'thout that
+pig-pound.'
+
+'When would you like it?' Midmore asked. It seemed the easiest road to
+take.
+
+'Any time or other suits me, I reckon. He ain't thrivin' where he is,
+an' I paid eighteen shillin' for him.' He crossed his hands on his stick
+and gave no further sign of life.
+
+'Is that all?' Midmore stammered.
+
+'All now--excep''--he glanced fretfully at the table beside him--'excep'
+my usuals. Where's that Rhoda?'
+
+Midmore rang the bell. Rhoda came in with a bottle and a glass. The old
+man helped himself to four stiff fingers, rose in one piece, and stumped
+out. At the door he cried ferociously: 'Don't suppose it's any odds to
+you whether I'm drowned or not, but them floodgates want a wheel and
+winch, they do. I be too old for liftin' 'em with the bar--my time
+o' life.'
+
+'Good riddance if 'e was drowned,' said Rhoda. 'But don't you mind him.
+He's only amusin' himself. Your pore dear auntie used to give 'im 'is
+usual--'tisn't the whisky _you_ drink--an' send 'im about 'is business.'
+
+'I see. Now, is a pig-pound the same thing as a pig-sty?'
+
+Rhoda nodded. ''E needs one, too, but 'e ain't entitled to it. You look
+at 'is lease--third drawer on the left in that Bombay cab'net--an' next
+time 'e comes you ask 'im to read it. That'll choke 'im off, because
+'e can't!'
+
+There was nothing in Midmore's past to teach him the message and
+significance of a hand-written lease of the late 'eighties, but Rhoda
+interpreted.
+
+'It don't mean anything reelly,' was her cheerful conclusion, 'excep'
+you mustn't get rid of him anyhow, an' 'e can do what 'e likes always.
+Lucky for us 'e _do_ farm; and if it wasn't for 'is woman--'
+
+'Oh, there's a Mrs. Sidney, is there?'
+
+'Lor, _no_!' The Sidneys don't marry. They keep. That's his fourth
+since--to my knowledge. He was a takin' man from the first.'
+
+'Any families?'
+
+'They'd be grown up by now if there was, wouldn't they? But you can't
+spend all your days considerin' 'is interests. That's what gave your
+pore aunt 'er indigestion. 'Ave you seen the gun-room?'
+
+Midmore held strong views on the immorality of taking life for pleasure.
+But there was no denying that the late Colonel Werf's seventy-guinea
+breechloaders were good at their filthy job. He loaded one, took it out
+and pointed--merely pointed--it at a cock-pheasant which rose out of a
+shrubbery behind the kitchen, and the flaming bird came down in a long
+slant on the lawn, stone dead. Rhoda from the scullery said it was a
+lovely shot, and told him lunch was ready.
+
+He spent the afternoon gun in one hand, a map in the other, beating the
+bounds of his lands. They lay altogether in a shallow, uninteresting
+valley, flanked with woods and bisected by a brook. Up stream was his
+own house; down stream, less than half a mile, a low red farm-house
+squatted in an old orchard, beside what looked like small lock-gates on
+the Thames. There was no doubt as to ownership. Mr. Sidney saw him while
+yet far off, and bellowed at him about pig-pounds and floodgates. These
+last were two great sliding shutters of weedy oak across the brook,
+which were prised up inch by inch with a crowbar along a notched strip
+of iron, and when Sidney opened them they at once let out half the
+water. Midmore watched it shrink between its aldered banks like some
+conjuring trick. This, too, was his very own.
+
+'I see,' he said. 'How interesting! Now, what's that bell for?' he went
+on, pointing to an old ship's bell in a rude belfry at the end of an
+outhouse. 'Was that a chapel once?' The red-eyed giant seemed to have
+difficulty in expressing himself for the moment and blinked savagely.
+
+'Yes,' he said at last. 'My chapel. When you 'ear that bell ring you'll
+'ear something. Nobody but me 'ud put up with it--but I reckon it don't
+make any odds to you.' He slammed the gates down again, and the brook
+rose behind them with a suck and a grunt.
+
+Midmore moved off, conscious that he might be safer with Rhoda to hold
+his conversational hand. As he passed the front of the farm-house a
+smooth fat woman, with neatly parted grey hair under a widow's cap,
+curtsied to him deferentially through the window. By every teaching of
+the Immoderate Left she had a perfect right to express herself in any
+way she pleased, but the curtsey revolted him. And on his way home he
+was hailed from behind a hedge by a manifest idiot with no roof to his
+mouth, who hallooed and danced round him.
+
+'What did that beast want?' he demanded of Rhoda at tea.
+
+'Jimmy? He only wanted to know if you 'ad any telegrams to send. 'E'll
+go anywhere so long as 'tisn't across running water. That gives 'im 'is
+seizures. Even talkin' about it for fun like makes 'im shake.'
+
+'But why isn't he where he can be properly looked after?'
+
+'What 'arm's 'e doing? E's a love-child, but 'is family can pay for 'im.
+If 'e was locked up 'e'd die all off at once, like a wild rabbit. Won't
+you, please, look at the drive, sir?'
+
+Midmore looked in the fading light. The neat gravel was pitted with
+large roundish holes, and there was a punch or two of the same sort
+on the lawn.
+
+'That's the 'unt comin' 'ome,' Rhoda explained. 'Your pore dear auntie
+always let 'em use our drive for a short cut after the Colonel died. The
+Colonel wouldn't so much because he preserved; but your auntie was
+always an 'orsewoman till 'er sciatica.'
+
+'Isn't there some one who can rake it over or--or something?' said
+Midmore vaguely.
+
+'Oh yes. You'll never see it in the morning, but--you was out when they
+came 'ome an' Mister Fisher--he's the Master--told me to tell you with
+'is compliments that if you wasn't preservin' and cared to 'old to the
+old understanding', is gravel-pit is at your service same as before. 'E
+thought, perhaps, you mightn't know, and it 'ad slipped my mind to tell
+you. It's good gravel, Mister Fisher's, and it binds beautiful on the
+drive. We 'ave to draw it, o' course, from the pit, but--'
+
+Midmore looked at her helplessly.
+
+'Rhoda,' said he, 'what am I supposed to do?'
+
+'Oh, let 'em come through,' she replied. 'You never know. You may want
+to 'unt yourself some day.'
+
+That evening it rained and his misery returned on him, the worse for
+having been diverted. At last he was driven to paw over a few score
+books in a panelled room called the library, and realised with horror
+what the late Colonel Werf's mind must have been in its prime. The
+volumes smelt of a dead world as strongly as they did of mildew. He
+opened and thrust them back, one after another, till crude coloured
+illustrations of men on horses held his eye. He began at random and read
+a little, moved into the drawing-room with the volume, and settled down
+by the fire still reading. It was a foul world into which he peeped for
+the first time--a heavy-eating, hard-drinking hell of horse-copers,
+swindlers, matchmaking mothers, economically dependent virgins selling
+themselves blushingly for cash and lands: Jews, tradesmen, and an
+ill-considered spawn of Dickens-and-horsedung characters (I give
+Midmore's own criticism), but he read on, fascinated, and behold, from
+the pages leaped, as it were, the brother to the red-eyed man of the
+brook, bellowing at a landlord (here Midmore realised that _he_ was that
+very animal) for new barns; and another man who, like himself again,
+objected to hoof-marks on gravel. Outrageous as thought and conception
+were, the stuff seemed to have the rudiments of observation. He dug out
+other volumes by the same author, till Rhoda came in with a silver
+candlestick.
+
+'Rhoda,' said he, 'did you ever hear about a character called James
+Pigg--and Batsey?'
+
+'Why, o' course,' said she. 'The Colonel used to come into the kitchen
+in 'is dressin'-gown an' read us all those Jorrockses.'
+
+'Oh, Lord!' said Midmore, and went to bed with a book called _Handley
+Cross_ under his arm, and a lonelier Columbus into a stranger world the
+wet-ringed moon never looked upon.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Here we omit much. But Midmore never denied that for the epicure in
+sensation the urgent needs of an ancient house, as interpreted by Rhoda
+pointing to daylight through attic-tiles held in place by moss, gives an
+edge to the pleasure of Social Research elsewhere. Equally he found that
+the reaction following prolonged research loses much of its grey terror
+if one knows one can at will bathe the soul in the society of plumbers
+(all the water-pipes had chronic appendicitis), village idiots (Jimmy
+had taken Midmore under his weak wing and camped daily at the
+drive-gates), and a giant with red eyelids whose every action is an
+unpredictable outrage.
+
+Towards spring Midmore filled his house with a few friends of the
+Immoderate Left. It happened to be the day when, all things and Rhoda
+working together, a cartload of bricks, another of sand, and some bags
+of lime had been despatched to build Sidney his almost daily-demanded
+pig-pound. Midmore took his friends across the flat fields with some
+idea of showing them Sidney as a type of 'the peasantry.' They hit the
+minute when Sidney, hoarse with rage, was ordering bricklayer, mate,
+carts and all off his premises. The visitors disposed themselves
+to listen.
+
+'You never give me no notice about changin' the pig,' Sidney shouted.
+The pig--at least eighteen inches long--reared on end in the old sty and
+smiled at the company.
+
+'But, my good man--' Midmore opened.
+
+'I ain't! For aught you know I be a dam' sight worse than you be. You
+can't come and be'ave arbit'ry with me. You _are_ be'avin' arbit'ry! All
+you men go clean away an' don't set foot on my land till I bid ye.'
+
+'But you asked'--Midmore felt his voice jump up--'to have the pig-pound
+built.'
+
+''Spose I did. That's no reason you shouldn't send me notice to change
+the pig. 'Comin' down on me like this 'thout warnin'! That pig's got to
+be got into the cowshed an' all.'
+
+'Then open the door and let him run in,' said Midmore.
+
+'Don't you be'ave arbit'ry with _me_! Take all your dam' men 'ome off my
+land. I won't be treated arbit'ry.'
+
+The carts moved off without a word, and Sidney went into the house and
+slammed the door.
+
+'Now, I hold that is enormously significant,' said a visitor. 'Here you
+have the logical outcome of centuries of feudal oppression--the frenzy
+of fear.' The company looked at Midmore with grave pain.
+
+'But he _did_ worry my life out about his pig-sty,' was all Midmore
+found to say.
+
+Others took up the parable and proved to him if he only held true to the
+gospels of the Immoderate Left the earth would soon be covered with
+'jolly little' pig-sties, built in the intervals of morris-dancing by
+'the peasant' himself.
+
+Midmore felt grateful when the door opened again and Mr. Sidney invited
+them all to retire to the road which, he pointed out, was public. As
+they turned the corner of the house, a smooth-faced woman in a widow's
+cap curtsied to each of them through the window.
+
+Instantly they drew pictures of that woman's lot, deprived of all
+vehicle for self-expression--'the set grey life and apathetic end,' one
+quoted--and they discussed the tremendous significance of village
+theatricals. Even a month ago Midmore would have told them all that he
+knew and Rhoda had dropped about Sidney's forms of self-expression. Now,
+for some strange reason, he was content to let the talk run on from
+village to metropolitan and world drama.
+
+Rhoda advised him after the visitors left that 'if he wanted to do that
+again' he had better go up to town.
+
+'But we only sat on cushions on the floor,' said her master.
+
+'They're too old for romps,' she retorted, 'an' it's only the beginning
+of things. I've seen what _I've_ seen. Besides, they talked and laughed
+in the passage going to their baths--such as took 'em.'
+
+'Don't be a fool, Rhoda,' said Midmore. No man--unless he has loved
+her--will casually dismiss a woman on whose lap he has laid his head.
+
+'Very good,' she snorted, 'but that cuts both ways. An' now, you go down
+to Sidney's this evenin' and put him where he ought to be. He was in his
+right about you givin' 'im notice about changin' the pig, but he 'adn't
+any right to turn it up before your company. No manners, no pig-pound.
+He'll understand.'
+
+Midmore did his best to make him. He found himself reviling the old man
+in speech and with a joy quite new in all his experience. He wound
+up--it was a plagiarism from a plumber--by telling Mr. Sidney that he
+looked like a turkey-cock, had the morals of a parish bull, and need
+never hope for a new pig-pound as long as he or Midmore lived.
+
+'Very good,' said the giant. 'I reckon you thought you 'ad something
+against me, and now you've come down an' told it me like man to man.
+Quite right. I don't bear malice. Now, you send along those bricks an'
+sand, an' I'll make a do to build the pig-pound myself. If you look at
+my lease you'll find out you're bound to provide me materials for the
+repairs. Only--only I thought there'd be no 'arm in my askin' you to do
+it throughout like.'
+
+Midmore fairly gasped. 'Then, why the devil did you turn my carts back
+when--when I sent them up here to do it throughout for you?'
+
+Mr. Sidney sat down on the floodgates, his eyebrows knitted in thought.
+
+'I'll tell you,' he said slowly. ''Twas too dam' like cheatin' a suckin'
+baby. My woman, she said so too.'
+
+For a few seconds the teachings of the Immoderate Left, whose humour is
+all their own, wrestled with those of Mother Earth, who has her own
+humours. Then Midmore laughed till he could scarcely stand. In due time
+Mr. Sidney laughed too--crowing and wheezing crescendo till it broke
+from him in roars. They shook hands, and Midmore went home grateful that
+he had held his tongue among his companions.
+
+When he reached his house he met three or four men and women on
+horse-back, very muddy indeed, coming down the drive. Feeling hungry
+himself, he asked them if they were hungry. They said they were, and he
+bade them enter. Jimmy took their horses, who seemed to know him. Rhoda
+took their battered hats, led the women upstairs for hairpins, and
+presently fed them all with tea-cakes, poached eggs, anchovy toast, and
+drinks from a coromandel-wood liqueur case which Midmore had never known
+that he possessed.
+
+'And I _will_ say,' said Miss Connie Sperrit, her spurred foot on the
+fender and a smoking muffin in her whip hand, 'Rhoda does one top-hole.
+She always did since I was eight.'
+
+'Seven, Miss, was when you began to 'unt,' said Rhoda, setting down more
+buttered toast.
+
+'And so,' the M.F.H. was saying to Midmore, 'when he got to your brute
+Sidney's land, we had to whip 'em off. It's a regular Alsatia for 'em.
+They know it. Why'--he dropped his voice--'I don't want to say anything
+against Sidney as your tenant, of course, but I do believe the old
+scoundrel's perfectly capable of putting down poison.'
+
+'Sidney's capable of anything,' said Midmore with immense feeling; but
+once again he held his tongue. They were a queer community; yet when
+they had stamped and jingled out to their horses again, the house felt
+hugely big and disconcerting.
+
+This may be reckoned the conscious beginning of his double life. It ran
+in odd channels that summer--a riding school, for instance, near Hayes
+Common and a shooting ground near Wormwood Scrubs. A man who has been
+saddle-galled or shoulder-bruised for half the day is not at his London
+best of evenings; and when the bills for his amusements come in he
+curtails his expenses in other directions. So a cloud settled on
+Midmore's name. His London world talked of a hardening of heart and a
+tightening of purse-strings which signified disloyalty to the Cause. One
+man, a confidant of the old expressive days, attacked him robustiously
+and demanded account of his soul's progress. It was not furnished, for
+Midmore was calculating how much it would cost to repave stables so
+dilapidated that even the village idiot apologised for putting visitors'
+horses into them. The man went away, and served up what he had heard of
+the pig-pound episode as a little newspaper sketch, calculated to annoy.
+Midmore read it with an eye as practical as a woman's, and since most of
+his experiences had been among women, at once sought out a woman to whom
+he might tell his sorrow at the disloyalty of his own familiar friend.
+She was so sympathetic that he went on to confide how his bruised
+heart--she knew all about it--had found so-lace, with a long O, in
+another quarter which he indicated rather carefully in case it might be
+betrayed to other loyal friends. As his hints pointed directly towards
+facile Hampstead, and as his urgent business was the purchase of a horse
+from a dealer, Beckenham way, he felt he had done good work. Later, when
+his friend, the scribe, talked to him alluringly of 'secret gardens' and
+those so-laces to which every man who follows the Wider Morality is
+entitled, Midmore lent him a five-pound note which he had got back on
+the price of a ninety-guinea bay gelding. So true it is, as he read in
+one of the late Colonel Werf's books, that 'the young man of the present
+day would sooner lie under an imputation against his morals than against
+his knowledge of horse-flesh.'
+
+Midmore desired more than he desired anything else at that moment to
+ride and, above all, to jump on a ninety-guinea bay gelding with black
+points and a slovenly habit of hitting his fences. He did not wish many
+people except Mr. Sidney, who very kindly lent his soft meadow behind
+the floodgates, to be privy to the matter, which he rightly foresaw
+would take him to the autumn. So he told such friends as hinted at
+country week-end visits that he had practically let his newly inherited
+house. The rent, he said, was an object to him, for he had lately lost
+large sums through ill-considered benevolences. He would name no names,
+but they could guess. And they guessed loyally all round the circle of
+his acquaintance as they spread the news that explained so much.
+
+There remained only one couple of his once intimate associates to
+pacify. They were deeply sympathetic and utterly loyal, of course, but
+as curious as any of the apes whose diet they had adopted. Midmore met
+them in a suburban train, coming up to town, not twenty minutes after he
+had come off two hours' advanced tuition (one guinea an hour) over
+hurdles in a hall. He had, of course, changed his kit, but his too heavy
+bridle-hand shook a little among the newspapers. On the inspiration of
+the moment, which is your natural liar's best hold, he told them that he
+was condemned to a rest-cure. He would lie in semi-darkness drinking
+milk, for weeks and weeks, cut off even from letters. He was astonished
+and delighted at the ease with which the usual lie confounds the unusual
+intellect. They swallowed it as swiftly as they recommended him to live
+on nuts and fruit; but he saw in the woman's eyes the exact reason she
+would set forth for his retirement. After all, she had as much right to
+express herself as he purposed to take for himself; and Midmore believed
+strongly in the fullest equality of the sexes.
+
+That retirement made one small ripple in the strenuous world. The lady
+who had written the twelve-page letter ten months before sent him
+another of eight pages, analysing all the motives that were leading her
+back to him--should she come?--now that he was ill and alone. Much might
+yet be retrieved, she said, out of the waste of jarring lives and
+piteous misunderstandings. It needed only a hand.
+
+But Midmore needed two, next morning very early, for a devil's
+diversion, among wet coppices, called 'cubbing.'
+
+'You haven't a bad seat,' said Miss Sperrit through the morning-mists.
+'But you're worrying him.'
+
+'He pulls so,' Midmore grunted.
+
+'Let him alone, then. Look out for the branches,' she shouted, as they
+whirled up a splashy ride. Cubs were plentiful. Most of the hounds
+attached themselves to a straight-necked youngster of education who
+scuttled out of the woods into the open fields below.
+
+'Hold on!' some one shouted. 'Turn 'em, Midmore. That's your brute
+Sidney's land. It's all wire.'
+
+'Oh, Connie, stop!' Mrs. Sperrit shrieked as her daughter charged at a
+boundary-hedge.
+
+'Wire be damned! I had it all out a fortnight ago. Come on!' This was
+Midmore, buffeting into it a little lower down.
+
+'_I_ knew that!' Connie cried over her shoulder, and she flitted across
+the open pasture, humming to herself.
+
+'Oh, of course! If some people have private information, they can afford
+to thrust.' This was a snuff-coloured habit into which Miss Sperrit had
+cannoned down the ride.
+
+'What! 'Midmore got Sidney to heel? _You_ never did that, Sperrit.' This
+was Mr. Fisher, M.F.H., enlarging the breach Midmore had made.
+
+'No, confound him!' said the father testily. 'Go on, sir! _Injecto ter
+pulvere_--you've kicked half the ditch into my eye already.'
+
+They killed that cub a little short of the haven his mother had told him
+to make for--a two-acre Alsatia of a gorse-patch to which the M.F.H. had
+been denied access for the last fifteen seasons. He expressed his
+gratitude before all the field and Mr. Sidney, at Mr. Sidney's
+farm-house door.
+
+'And if there should be any poultry claims--' he went on.
+
+'There won't be,' said Midmore. 'It's too like cheating a sucking child,
+isn't it, Mr. Sidney?'
+
+'You've got me!' was all the reply. 'I be used to bein' put upon, but
+you've got me, Mus' Midmore.'
+
+Midmore pointed to a new brick pig-pound built in strict disregard of
+the terms of the life-tenant's lease. The gesture told the tale to the
+few who did not know, and they shouted.
+
+Such pagan delights as these were followed by pagan sloth of evenings
+when men and women elsewhere are at their brightest. But Midmore
+preferred to lie out on a yellow silk couch, reading works of a debasing
+vulgarity; or, by invitation, to dine with the Sperrits and savages of
+their kidney. These did not expect flights of fancy or phrasing. They
+lied, except about horses, grudgingly and of necessity, not for art's
+sake; and, men and women alike, they expressed themselves along their
+chosen lines with the serene indifference of the larger animals. Then
+Midmore would go home and identify them, one by one, out of the
+natural-history books by Mr. Surtees, on the table beside the sofa. At
+first they looked upon him coolly, but when the tale of the removed wire
+and the recaptured gorse had gone the rounds, they accepted him for a
+person willing to play their games. True, a faction suspended judgment
+for a while, because they shot, and hoped that Midmore would serve the
+glorious mammon of pheasant-raising rather than the unkempt god of
+fox-hunting. But after he had shown his choice, they did not ask by what
+intellectual process he had arrived at it. He hunted three, sometimes
+four, times a week, which necessitated not only one bay gelding (L94:
+10s.), but a mannerly white-stockinged chestnut (L114), and a black
+mare, rather long in the back but with a mouth of silk (L150), who so
+evidently preferred to carry a lady that it would have been cruel to
+have baulked her. Besides, with that handling she could be sold at a
+profit. And besides, the hunt was a quiet, intimate, kindly little hunt,
+not anxious for strangers, of good report in the _Field_, the servant of
+one M.F.H., given to hospitality, riding well its own horses, and, with
+the exception of Midmore, not novices. But as Miss Sperrit observed,
+after the M.F.H. had said some things to him at a gate: 'It _is_ a pity
+you don't know as much as your horse, but you will in time. It takes
+years and yee-ars. I've been at it for fifteen and I'm only just
+learning. But you've made a decent kick-off.'
+
+So he kicked off in wind and wet and mud, wondering quite sincerely why
+the bubbling ditches and sucking pastures held him from day to day, or
+what so-lace he could find on off days in chasing grooms and
+brick-layers round outhouses.
+
+To make sure he up-rooted himself one week-end of heavy mid-winter rain,
+and re-entered his lost world in the character of Galahad fresh from a
+rest-cure. They all agreed, with an eye over his shoulder for the next
+comer, that he was a different man; but when they asked him for the
+symptoms of nervous strain, and led him all through their own, he
+realised he had lost much of his old skill in lying. His three months'
+absence, too, had put him hopelessly behind the London field. The
+movements, the allusions, the slang of the game had changed. The couples
+had rearranged themselves or were re-crystallizing in fresh triangles,
+whereby he put his foot in it badly. Only one great soul (he who had
+written the account of the pig-pound episode) stood untouched by the
+vast flux of time, and Midmore lent him another fiver for his integrity.
+A woman took him, in the wet forenoon, to a pronouncement on the Oneness
+of Impulse in Humanity, which struck him as a polysyllabic _resume_ of
+Mr. Sidney's domestic arrangements, plus a clarion call to 'shock
+civilisation into common-sense.'
+
+'And you'll come to tea with me to-morrow?' she asked, after lunch,
+nibbling cashew nuts from a saucer. Midmore replied that there were
+great arrears of work to overtake when a man had been put away for
+so long.
+
+'But you've come back like a giant refreshed.... I hope that
+Daphne'--this was the lady of the twelve and the eight-page
+letter--'will be with us too. She has misunderstood herself, like so
+many of us,' the woman murmured, 'but I think eventually ...' she flung
+out her thin little hands. 'However, these are things that each lonely
+soul must adjust for itself.'
+
+'Indeed, yes,' said Midmore with a deep sigh. The old tricks were
+sprouting in the old atmosphere like mushrooms in a dung-pit. He passed
+into an abrupt reverie, shook his head, as though stung by tumultuous
+memories, and departed without any ceremony of farewell to--catch a
+mid-afternoon express where a man meets associates who talk horse, and
+weather as it affects the horse, all the way down. What worried him most
+was that he had missed a day with the hounds.
+
+He met Rhoda's keen old eyes without flinching; and the drawing-room
+looked very comfortable that wet evening at tea. After all, his visit to
+town had not been wholly a failure. He had burned quite a bushel of
+letters at his flat. A flat--here he reached mechanically towards the
+worn volumes near the sofa--a flat was a consuming animal. As for
+Daphne ... he opened at random on the words: 'His lordship then did as
+desired and disclosed a _tableau_ of considerable strength and variety.'
+Midmore reflected: 'And I used to think.... But she wasn't.... We were
+all babblers and skirters together.... I didn't babble much--thank
+goodness--but I skirted.' He turned the pages backward for more _Sortes
+Surteesianae_, and read: 'When at length they rose to go to bed it
+struck each man as he followed his neighbour upstairs, that the man
+before him walked very crookedly.' He laughed aloud at the fire.
+
+'What about to-morrow?' Rhoda asked, entering with garments over her
+shoulder. 'It's never stopped raining since you left. You'll be
+plastered out of sight an' all in five minutes. You'd better wear your
+next best, 'adn't you? I'm afraid they've shrank. 'Adn't you best
+try 'em on?'
+
+'Here?' said Midmore.
+
+''Suit yourself. I bathed you when you wasn't larger than a leg o'
+lamb,' said the ex-ladies'-maid.
+
+'Rhoda, one of these days I shall get a valet, and a married butler.'
+
+'There's many a true word spoke in jest. But nobody's huntin'
+to-morrow.'
+
+'Why? Have they cancelled the meet?'
+
+'They say it only means slipping and over-reaching in the mud, and they
+all 'ad enough of that to-day. Charlie told me so just now.'
+
+'Oh!' It seemed that the word of Mr. Sperrit's confidential clerk had
+weight.
+
+'Charlie came down to help Mr. Sidney lift the gates,' Rhoda continued.
+
+'The floodgates? They are perfectly easy to handle now. I've put in a
+wheel and a winch.'
+
+'When the brook's really up they must be took clean out on account of
+the rubbish blockin' 'em. That's why Charlie came down.'
+
+Midmore grunted impatiently. 'Everybody has talked to me about that
+brook ever since I came here. It's never done anything yet.'
+
+'This 'as been a dry summer. If you care to look now, sir, I'll get you
+a lantern.'
+
+She paddled out with him into a large wet night. Half-way down the lawn
+her light was reflected on shallow brown water, pricked through with
+grass blades at the edges. Beyond that light, the brook was strangling
+and kicking among hedges and tree-trunks.
+
+'What on earth will happen to the big rose-bed?' was Midmore's first
+word.
+
+'It generally 'as to be restocked after a flood. Ah!' she raised her
+lantern. 'There's two garden-seats knockin' against the sun-dial. Now,
+that won't do the roses any good.'
+
+'This is too absurd. There ought to be some decently thought-out
+system--for--for dealing with this sort of thing.' He peered into the
+rushing gloom. There seemed to be no end to the moisture and the racket.
+In town he had noticed nothing.
+
+'It can't be 'elped,' said Rhoda. 'It's just what it does do once in
+just so often. We'd better go back.'
+
+All earth under foot was sliding in a thousand liquid noises towards
+the hoarse brook. Somebody wailed from the house: ''Fraid o' the water!
+Come 'ere! 'Fraid o' the water!'
+
+'That's Jimmy. Wet always takes 'im that way,' she explained. The idiot
+charged into them, shaking with terror.
+
+'Brave Jimmy! How brave of Jimmy! Come into the hall. What Jimmy got
+now?' she crooned. It was a sodden note which ran: 'Dear Rhoda--Mr.
+Lotten, with whom I rode home this afternoon, told me that if this wet
+keeps up, he's afraid the fish-pond he built last year, where Coxen's
+old mill-dam was, will go, as the dam did once before, he says. If it
+does it's bound to come down the brook. It may be all right, but perhaps
+you had better look out. C.S.'
+
+'If Coxen's dam goes, that means.... I'll 'ave the drawing-room carpet
+up at once to be on the safe side. The claw-'ammer is in the libery.'
+
+'Wait a minute. Sidney's gates are out, you said?'
+
+'Both. He'll need it if Coxen's pond goes.... I've seen it once.'
+
+'I'll just slip down and have a look at Sidney. Light the lantern again,
+please, Rhoda.'
+
+'You won't get _him_ to stir. He's been there since he was born. But
+_she_ don't know anything. I'll fetch your waterproof and some
+top-boots.'
+
+''Fraid o' the water! 'Fraid o' the water!' Jimmy sobbed, pressed
+against a corner of the hall, his hands to his eyes.
+
+'All right, Jimmy. Jimmy can help play with the carpet,' Rhoda
+answered, as Midmore went forth into the darkness and the roarings all
+round. He had never seen such an utterly unregulated state of affairs.
+There was another lantern reflected on the streaming drive.
+
+'Hi! Rhoda! Did you get my note? I came down to make sure. I thought,
+afterwards, Jimmy might funk the water!'
+
+'It's me--Miss Sperrit,' Midmore cried. 'Yes, we got it, thanks.'
+
+'You're back, then. Oh, good!... Is it bad down with you?'
+
+'I'm going to Sidney's to have a look.'
+
+'You won't get _him_ out. 'Lucky I met Bob Lotten. I told him he hadn't
+any business impounding water for his idiotic trout without
+rebuilding the dam.'
+
+'How far up is it? I've only been there once.'
+
+'Not more than four miles as the water will come. He says he's opened
+all the sluices.'
+
+She had turned and fallen into step beside him, her hooded head bowed
+against the thinning rain. As usual she was humming to herself.
+
+'Why on earth did you come out in this weather?' Midmore asked.
+
+'It was worse when you were in town. The rain's taking off now. If it
+wasn't for that pond, I wouldn't worry so much. There's Sidney's bell.
+Come on!' She broke into a run. A cracked bell was jangling feebly down
+the valley.
+
+'Keep on the road!' Midmore shouted. The ditches were snorting
+bank-full on either side, and towards the brook-side the fields were
+afloat and beginning to move in the darkness.
+
+'Catch me going off it! There's his light burning all right.' She halted
+undistressed at a little rise. 'But the flood's in the orchard. Look!'
+She swung her lantern to show a front rank of old apple-trees reflected
+in still, out-lying waters beyond the half-drowned hedge. They could
+hear above the thud-thud of the gorged floodgates, shrieks in two keys
+as monotonous as a steam-organ.
+
+'The high one's the pig.' Miss Sperrit laughed.
+
+'All right! I'll get _her_ out. You stay where you are, and I'll see you
+home afterwards.'
+
+'But the water's only just over the road,' she objected.
+
+'Never mind. Don't you move. Promise?'
+
+'All right. You take my stick, then, and feel for holes in case
+anything's washed out anywhere. This _is_ a lark!'
+
+Midmore took it, and stepped into the water that moved sluggishly as yet
+across the farm road which ran to Sidney's front door from the raised
+and metalled public road. It was half way up to his knees when he
+knocked. As he looked back Miss Sperrit's lantern seemed to float in
+mid-ocean.
+
+'You can't come in or the water'll come with you. I've bunged up all the
+cracks,' Mr. Sidney shouted from within. 'Who be ye?'
+
+'Take me out! Take me out!' the woman shrieked, and the pig from his
+sty behind the house urgently seconded the motion.
+
+'I'm Midmore! Coxen's old mill-dam is likely to go, they say. Come out!'
+
+'I told 'em it would when they made a fish-pond of it. 'Twasn't ever
+puddled proper. But it's a middlin' wide valley. She's got room to
+spread.... Keep still, or I'll take and duck you in the cellar!... You
+go 'ome, Mus' Midmore, an' take the law o' Mus' Lotten soon's you've
+changed your socks.'
+
+'Confound you, aren't you coming out?'
+
+'To catch my death o' cold? I'm all right where I be. I've seen it
+before. But you can take _her_. She's no sort o' use or sense.... Climb
+out through the window. Didn't I tell you I'd plugged the door-cracks,
+you fool's daughter?' The parlour window opened, and the woman flung
+herself into Midmore's arms, nearly knocking him down. Mr. Sidney leaned
+out of the window, pipe in mouth.
+
+'Take her 'ome,' he said, and added oracularly:
+
+     'Two women in one house,
+     Two cats an' one mouse,
+     Two dogs an' one bone--
+     Which I will leave alone.
+
+I've seen it before.' Then he shut and fastened the window.
+
+'A trap! A trap! You had ought to have brought a trap for me. I'll be
+drowned in this wet,' the woman cried.
+
+'Hold up! You can't be any wetter than you are. Come along!' Midmore
+did not at all like the feel of the water over his boot-tops.
+
+'Hooray! Come along!' Miss Sperrit's lantern, not fifty yards away,
+waved cheerily.
+
+The woman threshed towards it like a panic-stricken goose, fell on her
+knees, was jerked up again by Midmore, and pushed on till she collapsed
+at Miss Sperrit's feet.
+
+'But you won't get bronchitis if you go straight to Mr. Midmore's
+house,' said the unsympathetic maiden.
+
+'O Gawd! O Gawd! I wish our 'eavenly Father 'ud forgive me my sins an'
+call me 'ome,' the woman sobbed. 'But I won't go to _'is_ 'ouse!
+I won't.'
+
+'All right, then. Stay here. Now, if we run,' Miss Sperrit whispered to
+Midmore, 'she'll follow us. Not too fast!'
+
+They set off at a considerable trot, and the woman lumbered behind them,
+bellowing, till they met a third lantern--Rhoda holding Jimmy's hand.
+She had got the carpet up, she said, and was escorting Jimmy past the
+water that he dreaded.
+
+'That's all right,' Miss Sperrit pronounced. 'Take Mrs. Sidney back with
+you, Rhoda, and put her to bed. I'll take Jimmy with me. You aren't
+afraid of the water now, are you, Jimmy?'
+
+'Not afraid of anything now.' Jimmy reached for her hand. 'But get away
+from the water quick.'
+
+'I'm coming with you,' Midmore interrupted.
+
+'You most certainly are not. You're drenched. She threw you twice. Go
+home and change. You may have to be out again all night. It's only
+half-past seven now. I'm perfectly safe.' She flung herself lightly over
+a stile, and hurried uphill by the foot-path, out of reach of all but
+the boasts of the flood below.
+
+Rhoda, dead silent, herded Mrs. Sidney to the house.
+
+'You'll find your things laid out on the bed,' she said to Midmore as he
+came up. I'll attend to--to this. _She's_ got nothing to cry for.'
+
+Midmore raced into dry kit, and raced uphill to be rewarded by the sight
+of the lantern just turning into the Sperrits' gate. He came back by way
+of Sidney's farm, where he saw the light twinkling across three acres of
+shining water, for the rain had ceased and the clouds were stripping
+overhead, though the brook was noisier than ever. Now there was only
+that doubtful mill-pond to look after--that and his swirling world
+abandoned to himself alone.
+
+'We shall have to sit up for it,' said Rhoda after dinner. And as the
+drawing-room commanded the best view of the rising flood, they watched
+it from there for a long time, while all the clocks of the house bore
+them company.
+
+''Tisn't the water, it's the mud on the skirting-board after it goes
+down that I mind,' Rhoda whispered. 'The last time Coxen's mill broke, I
+remember it came up to the second--no, third--step o' Mr.
+Sidney's stairs.'
+
+'What did Sidney do about it?'
+
+'He made a notch on the step. 'E said it was a record. Just like 'im.'
+
+'It's up to the drive now,' said Midmore after another long wait. 'And
+the rain stopped before eight, you know.'
+
+'Then Coxen's dam _'as_ broke, and that's the first of the flood-water.'
+She stared out beside him. The water was rising in sudden pulses--an
+inch or two at a time, with great sweeps and lagoons and a sudden
+increase of the brook's proper thunder.
+
+'You can't stand all the time. Take a chair,' Midmore said presently.
+
+Rhoda looked back into the bare room. 'The carpet bein' up _does_ make a
+difference. Thank you, sir, I _will_ 'ave a set-down.'
+
+''Right over the drive now,' said Midmore. He opened the window and
+leaned out. 'Is that wind up the valley, Rhoda?'
+
+'No, that's _it_! But I've seen it before.'
+
+There was not so much a roar as the purposeful drive of a tide across a
+jagged reef, which put down every other sound for twenty minutes. A wide
+sheet of water hurried up to the little terrace on which the house
+stood, pushed round either corner, rose again and stretched, as it were,
+yawning beneath the moonlight, joined other sheets waiting for them in
+unsuspected hollows, and lay out all in one. A puff of wind followed.
+
+'It's right up to the wall now. I can touch it with my finger.' Midmore
+bent over the window-sill.
+
+'I can 'ear it in the cellars,' said Rhoda dolefully. 'Well, we've done
+what we can! I think I'll 'ave a look.' She left the room and was absent
+half an hour or more, during which time he saw a full-grown tree
+hauling itself across the lawn by its naked roots. Then a hurdle knocked
+against the wall, caught on an iron foot-scraper just outside, and made
+a square-headed ripple. The cascade through the cellar-windows
+diminished.
+
+'It's dropping,' Rhoda cried, as she returned. 'It's only tricklin' into
+my cellars now.'
+
+'Wait a minute. I believe--I believe I can see the scraper on the edge
+of the drive just showing!'
+
+In another ten minutes the drive itself roughened and became gravel
+again, tilting all its water towards the shrubbery.
+
+'The pond's gone past,' Rhoda announced. 'We shall only 'ave the common
+flood to contend with now. You'd better go to bed.'
+
+'I ought to go down and have another look at Sidney before daylight.'
+
+'No need. You can see 'is light burnin' from all the upstairs windows.'
+
+'By the way. I forgot about _her_. Where've you put her?'
+
+'In my bed.' Rhoda's tone was ice. 'I wasn't going to undo a room for
+_that_ stuff.'
+
+'But it--it couldn't be helped,' said Midmore. 'She was half drowned.
+One mustn't be narrow-minded, Rhoda, even if her position isn't
+quite--er--regular.'
+
+'Pfff! I wasn't worryin' about that.' She leaned forward to the window.
+'There's the edge of the lawn showin' now. It falls as fast as it rises.
+Dearie'--the change of tone made Midmore jump--'didn't you know that I
+was 'is first? _That's_ what makes it so hard to bear.' Midmore looked
+at the long lizard-like back and had no words.
+
+She went on, still talking through the black window-pane:
+
+'Your pore dear auntie was very kind about it. She said she'd make all
+allowances for one, but no more. Never any more.... Then, you didn't
+know 'oo Charlie was all this time?'
+
+'Your nephew, I always thought.'
+
+'Well, well,' she spoke pityingly. 'Everybody's business being nobody's
+business, I suppose no one thought to tell you. But Charlie made 'is own
+way for 'imself from the beginnin'!... But _her_ upstairs, she never
+produced anything. Just an 'ousekeeper, as you might say. 'Turned over
+an' went to sleep straight off. She 'ad the impudence to ask me for 'ot
+sherry-gruel.'
+
+'Did you give it to her,' said Midmore.
+
+'Me? Your sherry? No!'
+
+The memory of Sidney's outrageous rhyme at the window, and Charlie's
+long nose (he thought it looked interested at the time) as he passed the
+copies of Mrs. Werf's last four wills, overcame Midmore without warning.
+
+'This damp is givin' you a cold,' said Rhoda, rising. 'There you go
+again! Sneezin's a sure sign of it. Better go to bed. You can't do any
+thin' excep''--she stood rigid, with crossed arms--'about me.'
+
+'Well. What about you?' Midmore stuffed the handkerchief into his
+pocket.
+
+'Now you know about it, what are you goin' to do--sir?'
+
+She had the answer on her lean cheek before the sentence was finished.
+
+'Go and see if you can get us something to eat, Rhoda. And beer.'
+
+'I expec' the larder'll be in a swim,' she replied, 'but old bottled
+stuff don't take any harm from wet.' She returned with a tray, all in
+order, and they ate and drank together, and took observations of the
+falling flood till dawn opened its bleared eyes on the wreck of what had
+been a fair garden. Midmore, cold and annoyed, found himself humming:
+
+     'That flood strewed wrecks upon the grass,
+     That ebb swept out the flocks to sea.
+
+There isn't a rose left, Rhoda!
+
+     An awesome ebb and flow it was
+     To many more than mine and me.
+     But each will mourn his ...
+
+It'll cost me a hundred.'
+
+'Now we know the worst,' said Rhoda, 'we can go to bed. I'll lay on the
+kitchen sofa. His light's burnin' still.'
+
+'And _she_?'
+
+'Dirty old cat! You ought to 'ear 'er snore!'
+
+At ten o'clock in the morning, after a maddening hour in his own garden
+on the edge of the retreating brook, Midmore went off to confront more
+damage at Sidney's. The first thing that met him was the pig, snowy
+white, for the water had washed him out of his new sty, calling on high
+heaven for breakfast. The front door had been forced open, and the flood
+had registered its own height in a brown dado on the walls. Midmore
+chased the pig out and called up the stairs.
+
+'I be abed o' course. Which step 'as she rose to?' Sidney cried from
+above. 'The fourth? Then it's beat all records. Come up.'
+
+'Are you ill?' Midmore asked as he entered the room. The red eyelids
+blinked cheerfully. Mr. Sidney, beneath a sumptuous patch-work quilt,
+was smoking.
+
+'Nah! I'm only thankin' God I ain't my own landlord. Take that cheer.
+What's she done?'
+
+'It hasn't gone down enough for me to make sure.'
+
+'Them floodgates o' yourn'll be middlin' far down the brook by now; an'
+your rose-garden have gone after 'em. I saved my chickens, though. You'd
+better get Mus' Sperrit to take the law o' Lotten an' 'is fish-pond.'
+
+'No, thanks. I've trouble enough without that.'
+
+'Hev ye?' Mr. Sidney grinned. 'How did ye make out with those two women
+o' mine last night? I lay they fought.'
+
+'You infernal old scoundrel!' Midmore laughed.
+
+'I be--an' then again I bain't,' was the placid answer. 'But, Rhoda,
+_she_ wouldn't ha' left me last night. Fire or flood, she wouldn't.'
+
+'Why didn't you ever marry her?' Midmore asked.
+
+'Waste of good money. She was willin' without.'
+
+There was a step on the gritty mud below, and a voice humming. Midmore
+rose quickly saying: 'Well, I suppose you're all right now.'
+
+'I be. I ain't a landlord, nor I ain't young--nor anxious. Oh, Mus'
+Midmore! Would it make any odds about her thirty pounds comin' regular
+if I married her? Charlie said maybe 'twould.'
+
+'Did he?' Midmore turned at the door. 'And what did Jimmy say about it?'
+
+'Jimmy?' Mr. Sidney chuckled as the joke took him. 'Oh, _he's_ none o'
+mine. He's Charlie's look-out.'
+
+Midmore slammed the door and ran downstairs.
+
+'Well, this is a--sweet--mess,' said Miss Sperrit in shortest skirts and
+heaviest riding-boots. 'I had to come down and have a look at it. "The
+old mayor climbed the belfry tower." 'Been up all night nursing
+your family?'
+
+'Nearly that! Isn't it cheerful?' He pointed through the door to the
+stairs with small twig-drift on the last three treads.
+
+'It's a record, though,' said she, and hummed to herself:
+
+     'That flood strewed wrecks upon the grass,
+     That ebb swept out the flocks to sea.'
+
+'You're always singing that, aren't you?' Midmore said suddenly as she
+passed into the parlour where slimy chairs had been stranded at
+all angles.
+
+'Am I? Now I come to think of it I believe I do. They say I always hum
+when I ride. Have you noticed it?'
+
+'Of course I have. I notice every--'
+
+'Oh,' she went on hurriedly. 'We had it for the village cantata last
+winter--"The Brides of Enderby."'
+
+'No! "High Tide on the Coast of Lincolnshire."' For some reason Midmore
+spoke sharply.
+
+'Just like that.' She pointed to the befouled walls. 'I say.... Let's
+get this furniture a little straight.... You know it too?'
+
+'Every word, since you sang it of course.'
+
+'When?'
+
+'The first night I ever came down. You rode past the drawing-room window
+in the dark singing it--"And sweeter woman--"'
+
+'I thought the house was empty then. Your aunt always let us use that
+short cut. Ha-hadn't we better get this out into the passage? It'll all
+have to come out anyhow. You take the other side.' They began to lift a
+heavyish table. Their words came jerkily between gasps and their faces
+were as white as--a newly washed and very hungry pig.
+
+'Look out!' Midmore shouted. His legs were whirled from under him, as
+the table, grunting madly, careened and knocked the girl out of sight.
+
+The wild boar of Asia could not have cut down a couple more
+scientifically, but this little pig lacked his ancestor's nerve and fled
+shrieking over their bodies.
+
+'Are you hurt, darling?' was Midmore's first word, and 'No--I'm only
+winded--dear,' was Miss Sperrit's, as he lifted her out of her corner,
+her hat over one eye and her right cheek a smear of mud.
+
+They fed him a little later on some chicken-feed that they found in
+Sidney's quiet barn, a pail of buttermilk out of the dairy, and a
+quantity of onions from a shelf in the back-kitchen.
+
+'Seed-onions, most likely,' said Connie. 'You'll hear about this.'
+
+'What does it matter? They ought to have been gilded. We must buy him.'
+
+'And keep him as long as he lives,' she agreed. 'But I think I ought to
+go home now. You see, when I came out I didn't expect ... Did you?'
+
+'No! Yes.... It had to come.... But if any one had told me an hour
+ago!... Sidney's unspeakable parlour--and the mud on the carpet.'
+
+'Oh, I say! Is my cheek clean now?'
+
+'Not quite. Lend me your hanky again a minute, darling.... What a purler
+you came!'
+
+'You can't talk. 'Remember when your chin hit that table and you said
+"blast"! I was just going to laugh.'
+
+'You didn't laugh when I picked you up. You were going "oo-oo-oo" like a
+little owl.'
+
+'My dear child--'
+
+'Say that again!'
+
+'My dear child. (Do you really like it? I keep it for my best friends.)
+My _dee-ar_ child, I thought I was going to be sick there and then. He
+knocked every ounce of wind out of me--the angel! But I must really go.'
+
+They set off together, very careful not to join hands or take arms.
+
+'Not across the fields,' said Midmore at the stile. 'Come round by--by
+your own place.'
+
+She flushed indignantly.
+
+'It will be yours in a little time,' he went on, shaken with his own
+audacity.
+
+'Not so much of your little times, if you please!' She shied like a colt
+across the road; then instantly, like a colt, her eyes lit with new
+curiosity as she came in sight of the drive-gates.
+
+'And not quite so much of your airs and graces, Madam,' Midmore
+returned, 'or I won't let you use our drive as a short cut any more.'
+
+'Oh, I'll be good. I'll be good.' Her voice changed suddenly. 'I swear
+I'll try to be good, dear. I'm not much of a thing at the best. What
+made _you_....'
+
+'I'm worse--worse! Miles and oceans worse. But what does it matter now?'
+
+They halted beside the gate-pillars.
+
+'I see!' she said, looking up the sodden carriage sweep to the front
+door porch where Rhoda was slapping a wet mat to and fro. '_I_ see....
+Now, I really must go home. No! Don't you come. I must speak to Mother
+first all by myself.'
+
+He watched her up the hill till she was out of sight.
+
+
+
+
+     THE FLOODS
+
+     The rain it rains without a stay
+       In the hills above us, in the hills;
+     And presently the floods break way
+       Whose strength is in the hills.
+     The trees they suck from every cloud,
+     The valley brooks they roar aloud--
+     Bank-high for the lowlands, lowlands,
+       Lowlands under the hills!
+
+     The first wood down is sere and small,
+       From the hills, the brishings off the hills;
+     And then come by the bats and all
+       We cut last year in the hills;
+     And then the roots we tried to cleave
+     But found too tough and had to leave--
+     Polting through the lowlands, lowlands,
+       Lowlands under the hills!
+
+     The eye shall look, the ear shall hark
+       To the hills, the doings in the hills,
+     And rivers mating in the dark
+       With tokens from the hills.
+     Now what is weak will surely go,
+     And what is strong must prove it so.
+     Stand fast in the lowlands, lowlands,
+       Lowlands under the hills!
+
+     The floods they shall not be afraid--
+       Nor the hills above 'em, nor the hills--
+     Of any fence which man has made
+       Betwixt him and the hills.
+     The waters shall not reckon twice
+     For any work of man's device,
+     But bid it down to the lowlands, lowlands,
+       Lowlands under the hills!
+
+     The floods shall sweep corruption clean--
+       By the hills, the blessing of the hills--
+     That more the meadows may be green
+       New-amended from the hills.
+     The crops and cattle shall increase,
+     Nor little children shall not cease--
+     Go--plough the lowlands, lowlands,
+       Lowlands under the hills!
+
+
+
+
+     THE FABULISTS
+
+     When all the world would have a matter hid,
+       Since Truth is seldom friend to any crowd,
+     Men write in fable, as old AEsop did,
+       Jesting at that which none will name aloud.
+     And this they needs must do, or it will fall
+     Unless they please they are not heard at all.
+
+     When desperate Folly daily laboureth
+       To work confusion upon all we have,
+     When diligent Sloth demandeth Freedom's death,
+       And banded Fear commandeth Honour's grave--
+     Even in that certain hour before the fall
+     Unless men please they are not heard at all.
+
+     Needs must all please, yet some not all for need
+       Needs must all toil, yet some not all for gain,
+     But that men taking pleasure may take heed,
+       Whom present toil shall snatch from later pain.
+     Thus some have toiled but their reward was small
+     Since, though they pleased, they were not heard at all.
+
+     This was the lock that lay upon our lips,
+       This was the yoke that we have undergone,
+     Denying us all pleasant fellowships
+       As in our time and generation.
+     Our pleasures unpursued age past recall.
+     And for our pains--we are not heard at all.
+
+     What man hears aught except the groaning guns?
+       What man heeds aught save what each instant brings?
+     When each man's life all imaged life outruns,
+       What man shall pleasure in imaginings?
+     So it hath fallen, as it was bound to fall,
+       We are not, nor we were not, heard at all.
+
+
+
+The Vortex
+
+(August 1914)
+
+     'Thy Lord spoke by inspiration to the Bee.'
+
+     AL KORAN.
+
+I have, to my grief and loss, suppressed several notable stories of my
+friend, the Hon. A.M. Penfentenyou[8], once Minister of Woods and
+Waysides in De Thouar's first administration; later, Premier in all but
+name of one of Our great and growing Dominions; and now, as always, the
+idol of his own Province, which is two and one-half the size of England.
+
+[Footnote 8: See 'The Puzzler,' _Actions and Reactions_.]
+
+For this reason I hold myself at liberty to deal with some portion of
+the truth concerning Penfentenyou's latest visit to Our shores. He
+arrived at my house by car, on a hot summer day, in a white waistcoat
+and spats, sweeping black frock-coat and glistening top-hat--a little
+rounded, perhaps, at the edges, but agile as ever in mind and body.
+
+'What is the trouble now?' I asked, for the last time we had met,
+Penfentenyou was floating a three-million pound loan for his beloved but
+unscrupulous Province, and I did not wish to entertain any more of his
+financial friends.
+
+'We,' Penfentenyou replied ambassadorially, 'have come to have a Voice
+in Your Councils. By the way, the Voice is coming down on the evening
+train with my Agent-General. I thought you wouldn't mind if I invited
+'em. You know We're going to share Your burdens henceforward. You'd
+better get into training.'
+
+'Certainly,' I replied. 'What's the Voice like?'
+
+'He's in earnest,' said Penfentenyou. 'He's got It, and he's got It bad.
+He'll give It to you,' he said.
+
+'What's his name?'
+
+'We call him all sorts of names, but I think you'd better call him Mr.
+Lingnam. You won't have to do it more than once.'
+
+'What's he suffering from?'
+
+'The Empire. He's pretty nearly cured us all of Imperialism at home.
+P'raps he'll cure you.'
+
+'Very good. What am I to do with him?'
+
+'Don't you worry,' said Penfentenyou. 'He'll do it.'
+
+And when Mr. Lingnam appeared half-an-hour later with the Agent-General
+for Penfentenyou's Dominion, he did just that.
+
+He advanced across the lawn eloquent as all the tides. He said he had
+been observing to the Agent-General that it was both politically immoral
+and strategically unsound that forty-four million people should bear the
+entire weight of the defences of Our mighty Empire, but, as he had
+observed (here the Agent-General evaporated), we stood now upon the
+threshold of a new era in which the self-governing _and_ self-respecting
+(bis) Dominions would rightly and righteously, as co-partners in Empery,
+shoulder their share of any burden which the Pan-Imperial Council of
+the Future should allot. The Agent-General was already arranging for
+drinks with Penfentenyou at the other end of the garden. Mr. Lingnam
+swept me on to the most remote bench and settled to his theme.
+
+We dined at eight. At nine Mr. Lingnam was only drawing abreast of
+things Imperial. At ten the Agent-General, who earns his salary, was
+shamelessly dozing on the sofa. At eleven he and Penfentenyou went to
+bed. At midnight Mr. Lingnam brought down his big-bellied despatch box
+with the newspaper clippings and set to federating the Empire in
+earnest. I remember that he had three alternative plans. As a dealer in
+words, I plumped for the resonant third--'Reciprocally co-ordinated
+Senatorial Hegemony'--which he then elaborated in detail for
+three-quarters of an hour. At half-past one he urged me to have faith
+and to remember that nothing mattered except the Idea. Then he retired
+to his room, accompanied by one glass of cold water, and I went into the
+dawn-lit garden and prayed to any Power that might be off duty for the
+blood of Mr. Lingnam, Penfentenyou, and the Agent-General.
+
+To me, as I have often observed elsewhere, the hour of earliest dawn is
+fortunate, and the wind that runs before it has ever been my most
+comfortable counsellor.
+
+'Wait!' it said, all among the night's expectant rosebuds. 'To-morrow is
+also a day. Wait upon the Event!'
+
+I went to bed so at peace with God and Man and Guest that when I waked I
+visited Mr. Lingnam in pyjamas, and he talked to me Pan-Imperially for
+half-an-hour before his bath. Later, the Agent-General said he had
+letters to write, and Penfentenyou invented a Cabinet crisis in his
+adored Dominion which would keep him busy with codes and cables all the
+forenoon. But I said firmly, 'Mr. Lingnam wishes to see a little of the
+country round here. You are coming with us in your own car.'
+
+'It's a hired one,' Penfentenyou objected.
+
+'Yes. Paid for by me as a taxpayer,' I replied.
+
+'And yours has a top, and the weather looks thundery,' said the
+Agent-General. 'Ours hasn't a wind-screen. Even our goggles were hired.'
+
+'I'll lend you goggles,' I said. 'My car is under repairs.'
+
+The hireling who had looked to be returned to London spat and growled on
+the drive. She was an open car, capable of some eighteen miles on the
+flat, with tetanic gears and a perpetual palsy.
+
+'It won't make the least difference,' sighed the Agent-General. 'He'll
+only raise his voice. He did it all the way coming down.'
+
+'I say,' said Penfentenyou suspiciously, 'what are you doing all this
+_for_?'
+
+'Love of the Empire,' I answered, as Mr. Lingnam tripped up in dust-coat
+and binoculars. 'Now, Mr. Lingnam will tell us exactly what he wants to
+see. He probably knows more about England than the rest of us put
+together.'
+
+'I read it up yesterday,' said Mr. Lingnam simply. While we stowed the
+lunch-basket (one can never make too sure with a hired car) he outlined
+a very pretty and instructive little day's run.
+
+'You'll drive, of course?' said Penfentenyou to him. 'It's the only
+thing you know anything about.'
+
+This astonished me, for your greater Federationists are rarely
+mechanicians, but Mr. Lingnam said he would prefer to be inside for the
+present and enjoy our conversation.
+
+Well settled on the back seat, he did not once lift his eyes to the
+mellow landscape around him, or throw a word at the life of the English
+road which to me is one renewed and unreasoned orgy of delight. The
+mustard-coloured scouts of the Automobile Association; their natural
+enemies, the unjust police; our natural enemies, the deliberate
+market-day cattle, broadside-on at all corners, the bicycling
+butcher-boy a furlong behind; road-engines that pulled giddy-go-rounds,
+rifle galleries, and swings, and sucked snortingly from wayside ponds in
+defiance of the notice-board; traction-engines, their trailers piled
+high with road metal; uniformed village nurses, one per seven statute
+miles, flitting by on their wheels; governess-carts full of pink
+children jogging unconcernedly past roaring, brazen touring-cars; the
+wayside rector with virgins in attendance, their faces screwed up
+against our dust; motor-bicycles of every shape charging down at every
+angle; red flags of rifle-ranges; detachments of dusty-putteed
+Territorials; coveys of flagrant children playing in mid-street, and the
+wise, educated English dog safe and quite silent on the pavement if his
+fool-mistress would but cease from trying to save him, passed and
+repassed us in sunlit or shaded settings. But Mr. Lingnam only talked.
+He talked--we all sat together behind so that we could not escape
+him--and he talked above the worn gears and a certain maddening swish of
+one badly patched tire--_and_ he talked of the Federation of the Empire
+against all conceivable dangers except himself. Yet I was neither
+brutally rude like Penfentenyou, nor swooningly bored like the
+Agent-General. I remembered a certain Joseph Finsbury who delighted the
+Tregonwell Arms on the borders of the New Forest with nine'--it should
+have been ten--'versions of a single income of two hundred pounds'
+placing the imaginary person in--but I could not recall the list of
+towns further than 'London, Paris, Bagdad, and Spitsbergen.' This last I
+must have murmured aloud, for the Agent-General suddenly became human
+and went on: 'Bussorah, Heligoland, and the Scilly Islands--'
+
+'What?' growled Penfentenyou.
+
+'Nothing,' said the Agent-General, squeezing my hand affectionately.
+'Only we have just found out that we are brothers.'
+
+'Exactly,' said Mr. Lingnam. 'That's what I've been trying to lead up
+to. We're _all_ brothers. D'you realise that fifteen years ago such a
+conversation as we're having would have been unthinkable? The Empire
+wouldn't have been ripe for it. To go back, even ten years--'
+
+'I've got it,' cried the Agent-General. '"Brighton, Cincinnati, and
+Nijni-Novgorod!" God bless R.L.S.! Go on, Uncle Joseph. I can endure
+much now.'
+
+Mr. Lingnam went on like our shandrydan, slowly and loudly. He admitted
+that a man obsessed with a Central Idea--and, after all, the only thing
+that mattered was the Idea--might become a bore, but the World's Work,
+he pointed out, had been done by bores. So he laid his bones down to
+that work till we abandoned ourselves to the passage of time and the
+Mercy of Allah, Who Alone closes the Mouths of His Prophets. And we
+wasted more than fifty miles of summer's vivid own England upon him
+the while.
+
+About two o'clock we topped Sumtner Rising and looked down on the
+village of Sumtner Barton, which lies just across a single railway line,
+spanned by a red brick bridge. The thick, thunderous June airs brought
+us gusts of melody from a giddy-go-round steam-organ in full blast near
+the pond on the village green. Drums, too, thumped and banners waved and
+regalia flashed at the far end of the broad village street. Mr. Lingnam
+asked why.
+
+'Nothing Imperial, I'm afraid. It looks like a Foresters' Fete--one of
+our big Mutual Benefit Societies,' I explained.
+
+'The Idea only needs to be co-ordinated to Imperial scale--' he began.
+
+'But it means that the pub. will be crowded,' I went on.
+
+'What's the matter with lunching by the roadside here?' said
+Penfentenyou. 'We've got the lunch-basket.'
+
+'Haven't you ever heard of Sumtner Barton ales?' I demanded, and be
+became the administrator at once, saying, '_I_ see! Lingnam can drive us
+in and we'll get some, while Holford'--this was the hireling chauffeur,
+whose views on beer we knew not--'lays out lunch here. That'll be better
+than eating at the pub. We can take in the Foresters' Fete as well, and
+perhaps I can buy some newspapers at the station.'
+
+'True,' I answered. 'The railway station is just under that bridge, and
+we'll come back and lunch here.'
+
+I indicated a terrace of cool clean shade beneath kindly beeches at the
+head of Sumtner Rise. As Holford got out the lunch-basket, a detachment
+of Regular troops on manoeuvres swung down the baking road.
+
+'Ah!' said Mr. Lingnam, the monthly-magazine roll in his voice. 'All
+Europe is an armed camp, groaning, as I remember I once wrote, under the
+weight of its accoutrements.'
+
+'Oh, hop in and drive,' cried Penfentenyou. 'We want that beer!'
+
+It made no difference. Mr. Lingnam could have federated the Empire from
+a tight rope. He continued his oration at the wheel as we trundled.
+
+'The danger to the Younger Nations is of being drawn into this vortex of
+Militarism,' he went on, dodging the rear of the soldiery.
+
+'Slow past troops,' I hinted. 'It saves 'em dust. And we overtake on the
+right as a rule in England.'
+
+'Thanks!' Mr. Lingnam slued over. 'That's another detail which needs to
+be co-ordinated throughout the Empire. But to go back to what I was
+saying. My idea has always been that the component parts of the Empire
+should take counsel among themselves on the approach of war, so that,
+after we have decided on the merits of the _casus belli_, we can
+co-ordinate what part each Dominion shall play whenever war is,
+unfortunately, a possibility.'
+
+We neared the hog-back railway bridge, and the hireling knocked
+piteously at the grade. Mr. Lingnam changed gears, and she hoisted
+herself up to a joyous _Youp-i-addy-i-ay!_ from the steam-organ. As we
+topped the arch we saw a Foresters' band with banners marching down
+the street.
+
+'That's all very fine,' said the Agent-General, 'but in real life things
+have a knack of happening without approaching--'
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+(Some schools of Thought hold that Time is not; and that when we attain
+complete enlightenment we shall behold past, present, and future as One
+Awful Whole. I myself have nearly achieved this.)
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+We dipped over the bridge into the village. A boy on a bicycle, loaded
+with four paper bonnet-boxes, pedalled towards us, out of an alley on
+our right. He bowed his head the better to overcome the ascent, and
+naturally took his left. Mr. Lingnam swerved frantically to the right.
+Penfentenyou shouted. The boy looked up, saw the car was like to squeeze
+him against the bridge wall, flung himself off his machine and across
+the narrow pavement into the nearest house. He slammed the door at the
+precise moment when the car, all brakes set, bunted the abandoned
+bicycle, shattering three of the bonnet-boxes and jerking the fourth
+over the unscreened dashboard into Mr. Lingnam's arms.
+
+There was a dead stillness, then a hiss like that of escaping steam, and
+a man who had been running towards us ran the other way.
+
+'Why! I think that those must be bees,' said Mr. Lingnam.
+
+They were--four full swarms--and the first living objects which he had
+remarked upon all day.
+
+Some one said, 'Oh, God!' The Agent-General went out over the back of
+the car, crying resolutely: 'Stop the traffic! Stop the traffic, there!'
+Penfentenyou was already on the pavement ringing a door-bell, so I had
+both their rugs, which--for I am an apiarist--I threw over my head.
+While I was tucking my trousers into my socks--for I am an apiarist of
+experience--Mr. Lingnam picked up the unexploded bonnet-box and with a
+single magnificent gesture (he told us afterwards he thought there was a
+river beneath) hurled it over the parapet of the bridge, ere he ran
+across the road towards the village green. Now, the station platform
+immediately below was crowded with Foresters and their friends waiting
+to welcome a delegation from a sister Court. I saw the box burst on the
+flint edging of the station garden and the contents sweep forward
+cone-wise like shrapnel. But the result was stimulating rather than
+sedative. All those well-dressed people below shouted like Sodom and
+Gomorrah. Then they moved as a unit into the booking-office, the
+waiting-rooms, and other places, shut doors and windows and declaimed
+aloud, while the incoming train whistled far down the line.
+
+I pivoted round cross-legged on the back seat, like a Circassian beauty
+beneath her veil, and saw Penfentenyou, his coat-collar over his ears,
+dancing before a shut door and holding up handfuls of currency to a
+silver-haired woman at an upper window, who only mouthed and shook her
+head. A little child, carrying a kitten, came smiling round a corner.
+Suddenly (but these things moved me no more than so many yards of
+three-penny cinematograph-film) the kitten leaped spitting from her
+arms, the child burst into tears, Penfentenyou, still dancing, snatched
+her up and tucked her under his coat, the woman's countenance blanched,
+the front door opened, Penfentenyou and the child pressed through, and I
+was alone in an inhospitable world where every one was shutting windows
+and calling children home.
+
+A voice cried: 'You've frowtened 'em! You've frowtened 'em! Throw dust
+on 'em and they'll settle!'
+
+I did not desire to throw dust on any created thing. I needed both hands
+for my draperies and two more for my stockings. Besides, the bees were
+doing me no hurt. They recognised me as a member of the County
+Bee-keepers' Association who had paid his annual subscription and was
+entitled to a free seat at all apicultural exhibitions. The quiver and
+the churn of the hireling car, or it might have been the lurching
+banners and the arrogant big drum, inclined many of them to go up
+street, and pay court to the advancing Foresters' band. So they went,
+such as had not followed Mr. Lingnam in his flight toward the green, and
+I looked out of two goggled eyes instead of half a one at the
+approaching musicians, while I listened with both ears to the delayed
+train's second whistle down the line beneath me.
+
+The Forester's band no more knew what was coming than do troops under
+sudden fire. Indeed, there were the same extravagant gestures and
+contortions as attend wounds and deaths in war; the very same uncanny
+cessations of speech--for the trombone was cut off at midslide, even as
+a man drops with a syllable on his tongue. They clawed, they slapped,
+they fled, leaving behind them a trophy of banners and brasses crudely
+arranged round the big drum. Then that end of the street also shut its
+windows, and the village, stripped of life, lay round me like a reef at
+low tide. Though I am, as I have said, an apiarist in good standing, I
+never realised that there were so many bees in the world. When they had
+woven a flashing haze from one end of the desert street to the other,
+there remained reserves enough to form knops and pendules on all
+window-sills and gutter-ends, without diminishing the multitudes in the
+three oozing bonnet-boxes, or drawing on the Fourth (Railway) Battalion
+in charge of the station below. The prisoners in the waiting-rooms and
+other places there cried out a great deal (I argued that they were dying
+of the heat), and at regular intervals the stationmaster called and
+called to a signalman who was not on duty, and the train whistled as it
+drew nearer.
+
+Then Penfentenyou, venal and adaptable politician of the type that
+survives at the price of all the higher emotions, appeared at the window
+of the house on my right, broken and congested with mirth, the woman
+beside him, and the child in his arms. I saw his mouth open and shut, he
+hollowed his hands round it, but the churr of the motor and the bees
+drowned his words. He pointed dramatically across the street many times
+and fell back, tears running down his face. I turned like a hooded
+barbette in a heavy seaway (not knowing when my trousers would come out
+of my socks again) through one hundred and eighty degrees, and in due
+time bore on the village green. There was a salmon in the pond, rising
+short at a cloud of midges to the tune of _Yip-i-addy_; but there was
+none to gaff him. The swing-boats were empty, cocoa-nuts sat still on
+their red sticks before white screens, and the gay-painted horses of the
+giddy-go-rounds revolved riderless. All was melody, green turf, bright
+water, and this greedy gambolling fish. When I had identified it by its
+grey gills and binoculars as Lingnam, I prostrated myself before Allah
+in that mirth which is more truly labour than any prayer. Then I turned
+to the purple Penfentenyou at the window, and wiped my eyes on the
+rug edge.
+
+He raised the window half one cautious inch and bellowed through the
+crack: 'Did you see _him_? Have they got _you_? I can see lots of
+things from here. It's like a three-ring circus!'
+
+'Can you see the station?' I replied, nodding toward the right rear
+mudguard.
+
+He twisted and craned sideways, but could not command that beautiful
+view.
+
+'No! What's it like?' he cried.
+
+'Hell!' I shouted. The silver-haired woman frowned; so did Penfentenyou,
+and, I think, apologised to her for my language.
+
+'You're always so extreme,' he fluted reproachfully. 'You forget that
+nothing matters except the Idea. Besides, they are this lady's bees.'
+
+He closed the window, and introduced us through it in dumb show; but he
+contrived to give the impression that _I_ was the specimen under glass.
+
+A spurt of damp steam saved me from apoplexy. The train had lost
+patience at last, and was coming into the station directly beneath me to
+see what was the matter. Happy voices sang and heads were thrust out all
+along the compartments, but none answered their songs or greetings. She
+halted, and the people began to get out. Then they began to get in
+again, as their friends in the waiting-rooms advised. All did not catch
+the warning, so there was congestion at the doors, but those whom the
+bees caught got in first.
+
+Still the bees, more bent on their own business than wanton torture,
+kept to the south end of the platform by the bookstall, and that was why
+the completely exposed engine-driver at the north end of the train did
+not at first understand the hermetically sealed stationmaster when the
+latter shouted to him many times to 'get on out o' this.'
+
+'Where are you?' was the reply. 'And what for?'
+
+'It don't matter where I am, an' you'll get what-for in a minute if you
+don't shift,' said the stationmaster. 'Drop 'em at Parson's Meadow and
+they can walk up over the fields.'
+
+That bare-armed, thin-shirted idiot, leaning out of the cab, took the
+stationmaster's orders as an insult to his dignity, and roared at the
+shut offices: 'You'll give me what-for, will you? Look 'ere, I'm not in
+the 'abit of--' His outstretched hand flew to his neck.... Do you know
+that if you sting an engine-driver it is the same as stinging his train?
+She starts with a jerk that nearly smashes the couplings, and runs,
+barking like a dog, till she is out of sight. Nor does she think about
+spilled people and parted families on the platform behind her. I had to
+do all that. There was a man called Fred, and his wife Harriet--a
+cheery, full-blooded couple--who interested me immensely before they
+battered their way into a small detached building, already densely
+occupied. There was also a nameless bachelor who sat under a half-opened
+umbrella and twirled it dizzily, which was so new a game that I
+applauded aloud.
+
+When they had thoroughly cleared the ground, the bees set about making
+comb for publication at the bookstall counter. Presently some bold
+hearts tiptoed out of the waiting-rooms over the loud gravel with the
+consciously modest air of men leaving church, climbed the wooden
+staircase to the bridge, and so reached my level, where the
+inexhaustible bonnet-boxes were still vomiting squadrons and platoons.
+There was little need to bid them descend. They had wrapped their heads
+in handkerchiefs, so that they looked like the disappointed dead
+scuttling back to Purgatory. Only one old gentleman, pontifically draped
+in a banner embroidered 'Temperance and Fortitude,' ran the gauntlet
+up-street, shouting as he passed me, 'It's night or Bluecher, Mister.'
+They let him in at the White Hart, the pub. where I should have
+bought the beer.
+
+After this the day sagged. I fell to reckoning how long a man in a
+Turkish bath, weakened by excessive laughter, could live without food,
+and specially drink; and how long a disenfranchised bee could hold out
+under the same conditions.
+
+Obviously, since her one practical joke costs her her life, the bee can
+have but small sense of humour; but her fundamentally dismal and
+ungracious outlook on life impressed me beyond words. She had paralysed
+locomotion, wiped out trade, social intercourse, mutual trust, love,
+friendship, sport, music (the lonely steam-organ had run down at last),
+all that gives substance, colour or savour to life, and yet, in the
+barren desert she had created, was not one whit more near to the
+evolution of a saner order of things. The Heavens were darkened with the
+swarms' divided counsels; the street shimmered with their purposeless
+sallies. They clotted on tiles and gutter-pipes, and began frenziedly to
+build a cell or two of comb ere they discovered that their queen was
+not with them; then flung off to seek her, or whirled, dishevelled and
+insane, into another hissing nebula on the false rumour that she was
+there. I scowled upon them with disfavour, and a massy, blue
+thunder-head rose majestically from behind the elm-trees of Sumtner
+Barton Rectory, arched over and scowled with me. Then I realised that it
+was not bees nor locusts that had darkened the skies, but the on-coming
+of the malignant English thunderstorm--the one thing before which even
+Deborah the bee cannot express her silly little self.
+
+'Aha! _Now_ you'll catch it,' I said, as the herald gusts set the big
+drum rolling down the street like a box-kite. Up and up yearned the dark
+cloud, till the first lightning quivered and cut. Deborah cowered. Where
+she flew, there she fled; where she was, there she sat still; and the
+solid rain closed in on her as a book that is closed when the chapter is
+finished. By the time it had soaked to my second rug, Penfentenyou
+appeared at the window, wiping his false mouth on a napkin.
+
+'Are you all right?' he inquired. 'Then _that's_ all right! Mrs. Bellamy
+says that her bees don't sting in the wet. You'd better fetch Lingnam
+over. He's got to pay for them and the bicycle.'
+
+I had no words which the silver-haired lady could listen to, but paddled
+across the flooded street between flashes to the pond on the green. Mr.
+Lingnam, scarcely visible through the sheeting downpour, trotted round
+the edge. He bore himself nobly, and lied at the mere sight of me.
+
+'Isn't this wet?' he cried. 'It has drenched me to the skin. I shall
+need a change.'
+
+'Come along,' I said. 'I don't know what you'll get, but you deserve
+more.'
+
+Penfentenyou, dry, fed, and in command, let us in. 'You,' he whispered
+to me, 'are to wait in the scullery. Mrs. Bellamy didn't like the way
+you talked about her bees. Hsh! Hsh! She's a kind-hearted lady. She's a
+widow, Lingnam, but she's kept _his_ clothes, and as soon as you've paid
+for the damage she'll rent you a suit. I've arranged it all!'
+
+'Then tell him he mustn't undress in my hall,' said a voice from the
+stair-head.
+
+'Tell _her_--' Lingnam began.
+
+'Come and look at the pretty suit I've chosen,' Penfentenyou cooed, as
+one cajoling a maniac.
+
+I staggered out-of-doors again, and fell into the car, whose
+ever-running machinery masked my yelps and hiccups. When I raised my
+forehead from the wheel, I saw that traffic through the village had been
+resumed, after, as my watch showed, one and one-half hour's suspension.
+There were two limousines, one landau, one doctor's car, three
+touring-cars, one patent steam-laundry van, three tricars, one
+traction-engine, some motor-cycles, one with a side-car, and one brewery
+lorry. It was the allegory of my own imperturbable country, delayed for
+a short time by unforeseen external events but now going about her
+business, and I blessed Her with tears in my eyes, even though I knew
+She looked upon me as drunk and incapable.
+
+Then troops came over the bridge behind me--a company of dripping wet
+Regulars without any expression. In their rear, carrying the
+lunch-basket, marched the Agent-General and Holford the hired chauffeur.
+
+'I say,' said the Agent-General, nodding at the darkened khaki backs.
+'If _that's_ what we've got to depend on in event of war they're a
+broken reed. They ran like hares--ran like hares, I tell you.'
+
+'And you?' I asked.
+
+'Oh, I just sauntered back over the bridge and stopped the traffic that
+end. Then I had lunch. 'Pity about the beer, though. I say--these
+cushions are sopping wet!'
+
+'I'm sorry,' I said. 'I haven't had time to turn 'em.'
+
+'Nor there wasn't any need to 'ave kept the engine runnin' all this
+time,' said Holford sternly. 'I'll 'ave to account for the expenditure
+of petrol. It exceeds the mileage indicated, you see.'
+
+'I'm sorry,' I repeated. After all, that is the way that taxpayers
+regard most crises.
+
+The house-door opened and Penfentenyou and another came out into the now
+thinning rain.
+
+'Ah! There you both are! Here's Lingnam,' he cried. 'He's got a little
+wet. He's had to change.'
+
+'We saw that. I was too sore and weak to begin another laugh, but the
+Agent-General crumpled up where he stood. The late Mr. Bellamy must have
+been a man of tremendous personality, which he had impressed on every
+angle of his garments. I was told later that he had died in delirium
+tremens, which at once explained the pattern, and the reason why Mr.
+Lingnam, writhing inside it, swore so inspiredly. Of the deliberate and
+diffuse Federationist there remained no trace, save the binoculars and
+two damp whiskers. We stood on the pavement, before Elemental Man
+calling on Elemental Powers to condemn and incinerate Creation.
+
+'Well, hadn't we better be getting back?' said the Agent-General.
+
+'Look out!' I remarked casually. 'Those bonnet-boxes are full of bees
+still!'
+
+'Are they?' said the livid Mr. Lingnam, and tilted them over with the
+late Mr. Bellamy's large boots. Deborah rolled out in drenched lumps
+into the swilling gutter. There was a muffled shriek at the window where
+Mrs. Bellamy gesticulated.
+
+'It's all right. I've paid for them,' said Mr. Lingnam. He dumped out
+the last dregs like mould from a pot-bound flower-pot.
+
+'What? Are you going to take 'em home with you?' said the Agent-General.
+
+'No!' He passed a wet hand over his streaky forehead. 'Wasn't there a
+bicycle that was the beginning of this trouble?' said he.
+
+'It's under the fore-axle, sir,' said Holford promptly. 'I can fish it
+out from 'ere.'
+
+'Not till I've done with it, please.' Before we could stop him, he had
+jumped into the car and taken charge. The hireling leaped into her
+collar, surged, shrieked (less loudly than Mrs. Bellamy at the window),
+and swept on. That which came out behind her was, as Holford truly
+observed, no joy-wheel. Mr. Lingnam swung round the big drum in the
+market-place and thundered back, shouting: 'Leave it alone. It's
+my meat!'
+
+'Mince-meat, 'e means,' said Holford after this second trituration. 'You
+couldn't say now it 'ad ever _been_ one, could you?'
+
+Mrs. Bellamy opened the window and spoke. It appears she had only
+charged for damage to the bicycle, not for the entire machine which Mr.
+Lingnam was ruthlessly gleaning, spoke by spoke, from the highway and
+cramming into the slack of the hood. At last he answered, and I have
+never seen a man foam at the mouth before. 'If you don't stop, I shall
+come into your house--in this car--and drive upstairs and--kill you!'
+
+She stopped; he stopped. Holford took the wheel, and we got away. It was
+time, for the sun shone after the storm, and Deborah beneath the tiles
+and the eaves already felt its reviving influence compel her to her
+interrupted labours of federation. We warned the village policeman at
+the far end of the street that he might have to suspend traffic again.
+The proprietor of the giddy-go-round, swings, and cocoanut-shies wanted
+to know from whom, in this world or another, he could recover damages.
+Mr. Lingnam referred him most directly to Mrs. Bellamy.... Then we
+went home.
+
+After dinner that evening Mr. Lingnam rose stiffly in his place to make
+a few remarks on the Federation of the Empire on the lines of
+Co-ordinated, Offensive Operations, backed by the Entire Effective
+Forces, Moral, Military, and Fiscal, of Permanently Mobilised
+Communities, the whole brought to bear, without any respect to the
+merits of any _casus belli_, instantaneously, automatically, and
+remorselessly at the first faint buzz of war.
+
+'The trouble with Us,' said he, 'is that We take such an infernally long
+time making sure that We are right that We don't go ahead when things
+happen. For instance, I ought to have gone ahead instead of pulling up
+when I hit that bicycle.'
+
+'But you were in the wrong, Lingnam, when you turned to the right,' I
+put in.
+
+'I don't want to hear any more of your damned, detached, mugwumping
+excuses for the other fellow,' he snapped.
+
+'Now you're beginning to see things,' said Penfentenyou. 'I hope you
+won't backslide when the swellings go down.'
+
+
+
+THE SONG OF SEVEN CITIES
+
+     I was Lord of Cities very sumptuously builded.
+     Seven roaring Cities paid me tribute from afar.
+     Ivory their outposts were--the guardrooms of them
+       gilded,
+     And garrisoned with Amazons invincible in war.
+
+     All the world went softly when it walked before my
+       Cities--
+     Neither King nor Army vexed my peoples at their toil.
+     Never horse nor chariot irked or overbore my Cities,
+     Never Mob nor Ruler questioned whence they drew
+       their spoil.
+
+     Banded, mailed and arrogant from sunrise unto sunset,
+     Singing while they sacked it, they possessed the land
+       at large.
+     Yet when men would rob them, they resisted, they
+       made onset
+     And pierced the smoke of battle with a thousand-sabred
+       charge!
+
+     So they warred and trafficked only yesterday, my Cities.
+     To-day there is no mark or mound of where my Cities
+       stood.
+     For the River rose at midnight and it washed away my
+       Cities.
+     They are evened with Atlantis and the towns before the
+       Flood.
+
+     Rain on rain-gorged channels raised the water-levels
+       round them,
+     Freshet backed on freshet swelled and swept their
+       world from sight,
+     Till the emboldened floods linked arms and flashing forward
+       drowned them--
+     Drowned my Seven Cities and their peoples in one
+       night!
+
+     Low among the alders lie their derelict foundations,
+     The beams wherein they trusted and the plinths whereon
+       they built--
+     My rulers and their treasure and their unborn populations,
+     Dead, destroyed, aborted, and defiled with mud and
+       silt!
+
+     The Daughters of the Palace whom they cherished in
+       my Cities,
+     My silver-tongued Princesses, and the promise of their
+       May--
+     Their bridegrooms of the June-tide--all have perished
+       in my Cities,
+     With the harsh envenomed virgins that can neither
+       love nor play.
+
+     I was Lord of Cities--I will build anew my Cities,
+     Seven, set on rocks, above the wrath of any flood.
+     Nor will I rest from search till I have filled anew my Cities
+     With peoples undefeated of the dark, enduring blood.
+
+     To the sound of trumpets shall their seed restore my Cities.
+     Wealthy and well-weaponed, that once more may I behold
+     All the world go softly when it walks before my Cities,
+     And the horses and the chariots fleeing from them as of old!
+
+
+
+'Swept and Garnished'
+
+(January 1915)
+
+When the first waves of feverish cold stole over Frau Ebermann she very
+wisely telephoned for the doctor and went to bed. He diagnosed the
+attack as mild influenza, prescribed the appropriate remedies, and left
+her to the care of her one servant in her comfortable Berlin flat. Frau
+Ebermann, beneath the thick coverlet, curled up with what patience she
+could until the aspirin should begin to act, and Anna should come back
+from the chemist with the formamint, the ammoniated quinine, the
+eucalyptus, and the little tin steam-inhaler. Meantime, every bone in
+her body ached; her head throbbed; her hot, dry hands would not stay the
+same size for a minute together; and her body, tucked into the smallest
+possible compass, shrank from the chill of the well-warmed sheets.
+
+Of a sudden she noticed that an imitation-lace cover which should have
+lain mathematically square with the imitation-marble top of the radiator
+behind the green plush sofa had slipped away so that one corner hung
+over the bronze-painted steam pipes. She recalled that she must have
+rested her poor head against the radiator-top while she was taking off
+her boots. She tried to get up and set the thing straight, but the
+radiator at once receded toward the horizon, which, unlike true
+horizons, slanted diagonally, exactly parallel with the dropped lace
+edge of the cover. Frau Ebermann groaned through sticky lips and
+lay still.
+
+'Certainly, I have a temperature,' she said. 'Certainly, I have a grave
+temperature. I should have been warned by that chill after dinner.'
+
+She resolved to shut her hot-lidded eyes, but opened them in a little
+while to torture herself with the knowledge of that ungeometrical thing
+against the far wall. Then she saw a child--an untidy, thin-faced little
+girl of about ten, who must have strayed in from the adjoining flat.
+This proved--Frau Ebermann groaned again at the way the world falls to
+bits when one is sick--proved that Anna had forgotten to shut the outer
+door of the flat when she went to the chemist. Frau Ebermann had had
+children of her own, but they were all grown up now, and she had never
+been a child-lover in any sense. Yet the intruder might be made to serve
+her scheme of things.
+
+'Make--put,' she muttered thickly, 'that white thing straight on the top
+of that yellow thing.'
+
+The child paid no attention, but moved about the room, investigating
+everything that came in her way--the yellow cut-glass handles of the
+chest of drawers, the stamped bronze hook to hold back the heavy puce
+curtains, and the mauve enamel, New Art finger-plates on the door. Frau
+Ebermann watched indignantly.
+
+'Aie! That is bad and rude. Go away!' she cried, though it hurt her to
+raise her voice. 'Go away by the road you came!' The child passed
+behind the bed-foot, where she could not see her. 'Shut the door as you
+go. I will speak to Anna, but--first, put that white thing straight.'
+
+She closed her eyes in misery of body and soul. The outer door clicked,
+and Anna entered, very penitent that she had stayed so long at the
+chemist's. But it had been difficult to find the proper type of
+inhaler, and--
+
+'Where did the child go?' moaned Frau Ebermann--'the child that was
+here?'
+
+'There was no child,' said startled Anna. 'How should any child come in
+when I shut the door behind me after I go out? All the keys of the flats
+are different.'
+
+'No, no! You forgot this time. But my back is aching, and up my legs
+also. Besides, who knows what it may have fingered and upset? Look
+and see.'
+
+'Nothing is fingered, nothing is upset,' Anna replied, as she took the
+inhaler from its paper box.
+
+'Yes, there is. Now I remember all about it. Put--put that white thing,
+with the open edge--the lace, I mean--quite straight on that--' she
+pointed. Anna, accustomed to her ways, understood and went to it.
+
+'Now, is it quite straight?' Frau Ebermann demanded.
+
+'Perfectly,' said Anna. 'In fact, in the very centre of the radiator.'
+Anna measured the equal margins with her knuckle, as she had been told
+to do when she first took service.
+
+'And my tortoise-shell hair brushes?' Frau Ebermann could not command
+her dressing-table from where she lay.
+
+'Perfectly straight, side by side in the big tray, and the comb laid
+across them. Your watch also in the coralline watch-holder.
+Everything'--she moved round the room to make sure--'everything is as
+you have it when you are well.' Frau Ebermann sighed with relief. It
+seemed to her that the room and her head had suddenly grown cooler.
+
+'Good!' said she. 'Now warm my night-gown in the kitchen, so it will be
+ready when I have perspired. And the towels also. Make the inhaler
+steam, and put in the eucalyptus; that is good for the larynx. Then sit
+you in the kitchen, and come when I ring. But, first, my
+hot-water bottle.'
+
+It was brought and scientifically tucked in.
+
+'What news?' said Frau Ebermann drowsily. She had not been out that day.
+
+'Another victory,' said Anna. 'Many more prisoners and guns.'
+
+Frau Ebermann purred, one might almost say grunted, contentedly.
+
+'That is good too,' she said; and Anna, after lighting the inhaler-lamp,
+went out.
+
+Frau Ebermann reflected that in an hour or so the aspirin would begin to
+work, and all would be well. To-morrow--no, the day after--she would
+take up life with something to talk over with her friends at coffee. It
+was rare--every one knew it--that she should be overcome by any
+ailment. Yet in all her distresses she had not allowed the minutest
+deviation from daily routine and ritual. She would tell her friends--she
+ran over their names one by one--exactly what measures she had taken
+against the lace cover on the radiator-top and in regard to her two
+tortoise-shell hair brushes and the comb at right angles. How she had
+set everything in order--everything in order. She roved further afield
+as she wriggled her toes luxuriously on the hot-water bottle. If it
+pleased our dear God to take her to Himself, and she was not so young as
+she had been--there was that plate of the four lower ones in the blue
+tooth-glass, for instance--He should find all her belongings fit to meet
+His eye. 'Swept and garnished' were the words that shaped themselves in
+her intent brain. 'Swept and garnished for--'
+
+No, it was certainly not for the dear Lord that she had swept; she would
+have her room swept out to-morrow or the day after, and garnished. Her
+hands began to swell again into huge pillows of nothingness. Then they
+shrank, and so did her head, to minute dots. It occurred to her that she
+was waiting for some event, some tremendously important event, to come
+to pass. She lay with shut eyes for a long time till her head and hands
+should return to their proper size.
+
+She opened her eyes with a jerk.
+
+'How stupid of me,' she said aloud, 'to set the room in order for a
+parcel of dirty little children!'
+
+They were there--five of them, two little boys and three girls--headed
+by the anxious-eyed ten-year-old whom she had seen before. They must
+have entered by the outer door, which Anna had neglected to shut behind
+her when she returned with the inhaler. She counted them backward and
+forward as one counts scales--one, two, three, four, five.
+
+They took no notice of her, but hung about, first on one foot then on
+the other, like strayed chickens, the smaller ones holding by the
+larger. They had the air of utterly wearied passengers in a railway
+waiting-room, and their clothes were disgracefully dirty.
+
+'Go away!' cried Frau Ebermann at last, after she had struggled, it
+seemed to her, for years to shape the words.
+
+'You called?' said Anna at the living-room door.
+
+'No,' said her mistress. 'Did you shut the flat door when you came in?'
+
+'Assuredly,' said Anna. 'Besides, it is made to catch shut of itself.'
+
+'Then go away,' said she, very little above a whisper. If Anna pretended
+not to see the children, she would speak to Anna later on.
+
+'And now,' she said, turning toward them as soon as the door closed. The
+smallest of the crowd smiled at her, and shook his head before he buried
+it in his sister's skirts.
+
+'Why--don't--you--go--away?' she whispered earnestly.
+
+Again they took no notice, but, guided by the elder girl, set themselves
+to climb, boots and all, on to the green plush sofa in front of the
+radiator. The little boys had to be pushed, as they could not compass
+the stretch unaided. They settled themselves in a row, with small gasps
+of relief, and pawed the plush approvingly.
+
+'I ask you--I ask you why do you not go away--why do you not go away?'
+Frau Ebermann found herself repeating the question twenty times. It
+seemed to her that everything in the world hung on the answer. 'You know
+you should not come into houses and rooms unless you are invited. Not
+houses and bedrooms, you know.'
+
+'No,' a solemn little six-year-old repeated, 'not houses nor bedrooms,
+nor dining-rooms, nor churches, nor all those places. Shouldn't come in.
+It's rude.'
+
+'Yes, he said so,' the younger girl put in proudly. 'He said it. He told
+them only pigs would do that.' The line nodded and dimpled one to
+another with little explosive giggles, such as children use when they
+tell deeds of great daring against their elders.
+
+'If you know it is wrong, that makes it much worse,' said Frau Ebermann.
+
+'Oh yes; much worse,' they assented cheerfully, till the smallest boy
+changed his smile to a baby wail of weariness.
+
+'When will they come for us?' he asked, and the girl at the head of the
+row hauled him bodily into her square little capable lap.
+
+'He's tired,' she explained. 'He is only four. He only had his first
+breeches this spring.' They came almost under his armpits, and were held
+up by broad linen braces, which, his sorrow diverted for the moment, he
+patted proudly.
+
+'Yes, beautiful, dear,' said both girls.
+
+'Go away!' said Frau Ebermann. 'Go home to your father and mother!'
+
+Their faces grew grave at once.
+
+'H'sh! We _can't_,' whispered the eldest. 'There isn't anything left.'
+
+'All gone,' a boy echoed, and he puffed through pursed lips. 'Like
+_that_, uncle told me. Both cows too.'
+
+'And my own three ducks,' the boy on the girl's lap said sleepily.
+
+'So, you see, we came here.' The elder girl leaned forward a little,
+caressing the child she rocked.
+
+'I--I don't understand,' said Frau Ebermann 'Are you lost, then? You
+must tell our police.'
+
+'Oh no; we are only waiting.'
+
+'But what are you waiting _for?_'
+
+'We are waiting for our people to come for us. They told us to come here
+and wait for them. So we are waiting till they come,' the eldest
+girl replied.
+
+'Yes. We are waiting till our people come for us,' said all the others
+in chorus.
+
+'But,' said Frau Ebermann very patiently--'but now tell me, for I tell
+you that I am not in the least angry, where do you come from? Where do
+you come from?'
+
+The five gave the names of two villages of which she had read in the
+papers,
+
+'That is silly,' said Frau Ebermann. 'The people fired on us, and they
+were punished. Those places are wiped out, stamped flat.'
+
+'Yes, yes, wiped out, stamped flat. That is why and--I have lost the
+ribbon off my pigtail,' said the younger girl. She looked behind her
+over the sofa-back.
+
+'It is not here,' said the elder. 'It was lost before. Don't you
+remember?'
+
+'Now, if you are lost, you must go and tell our police. They will take
+care of you and give you food,' said Frau Ebermann. 'Anna will show you
+the way there.'
+
+'No,'--this was the six-year-old with the smile,--'we must wait here
+till our people come for us. Mustn't we, sister?'
+
+'Of course. We wait here till our people come for us. All the world
+knows that,' said the eldest girl.
+
+'Yes.' The boy in her lap had waked again. 'Little children, too--as
+little as Henri, and _he_ doesn't wear trousers yet. As little as
+all that.'
+
+'I don't understand,' said Frau Ebermann, shivering. In spite of the
+heat of the room and the damp breath of the steam-inhaler, the aspirin
+was not doing its duty.
+
+The girl raised her blue eyes and looked at the woman for an instant.
+
+'You see,' she said, emphasising her statements with her ringers,
+'_they_ told _us_ to wait _here_ till _our_ people came for us. So we
+came. We wait till our people come for us.'
+
+'That is silly again,' said Frau Ebermann. 'It is no good for you to
+wait here. Do you know what this place is? You have been to school? It
+is Berlin, the capital of Germany.'
+
+'Yes, yes,' they all cried; 'Berlin, capital of Germany. We know that.
+That is why we came.'
+
+'So, you see, it is no good,' she said triumphantly, 'because your
+people can never come for you here.'
+
+'They told us to come here and wait till our people came for us.' They
+delivered this as if it were a lesson in school. Then they sat still,
+their hands orderly folded on their laps, smiling as sweetly as ever.
+
+'Go away! Go away!' Frau Ebermann shrieked.
+
+'You called?' said Anna, entering.
+
+'No. Go away! Go away!'
+
+'Very good, old cat,' said the maid under her breath. 'Next time you
+_may_ call,' and she returned to her friend in the kitchen.
+
+'I ask you--ask you, _please_ to go away,' Frau Ebermann pleaded. 'Go to
+my Anna through that door, and she will give you cakes and sweeties. It
+is not kind of you to come into my room and behave so badly.'
+
+'Where else shall we go now?' the elder girl demanded, turning to her
+little company. They fell into discussion. One preferred the broad
+street with trees, another the railway station; but when she suggested
+an Emperor's palace, they agreed with her.
+
+'We will go then,' she said, and added half apologetically to Frau
+Ebermann, 'You see, they are so little they like to meet all
+the others.'
+
+'What others?' said Frau Ebermann.
+
+'The others--hundreds and hundreds and thousands and thousands of the
+others.'
+
+'That is a lie. There cannot be a hundred even, much less a thousand,'
+cried Frau Ebermann.
+
+'So?' said the girl politely.
+
+'Yes. _I_ tell you; and I have very good information. I know how it
+happened. You should have been more careful. You should not have run out
+to see the horses and guns passing. That is how it is done when our
+troops pass through. My son has written me so.'
+
+They had clambered down from the sofa, and gathered round the bed with
+eager, interested eyes.
+
+'Horses and guns going by--how fine!' some one whispered.
+
+'Yes, yes; believe me, _that_ is how the accidents to the children
+happen. You must know yourself that it is true. One runs out to look--'
+
+'But I never saw any at all,' a boy cried sorrowfully. 'Only one noise I
+heard. That was when Aunt Emmeline's house fell down.'
+
+'But listen to me. _I_ am telling you! One runs out to look, because one
+is little and cannot see well. So one peeps between the man's legs, and
+then--you know how close those big horses and guns turn the
+corners--then one's foot slips and one gets run over. That's how it
+happens. Several times it had happened, but not many times; certainly
+not a hundred, perhaps not twenty. So, you see, you _must_ be all. Tell
+me now that you are all that there are, and Anna shall give you
+the cakes.'
+
+'Thousands,' a boy repeated monotonously. 'Then we all come here to
+wait till our people come for us.'
+
+'But now we will go away from here. The poor lady is tired,' said the
+elder girl, plucking his sleeve.
+
+'Oh, you hurt, you hurt!' he cried, and burst into tears.
+
+'What is that for?' said Frau Ebermann. 'To cry in a room where a poor
+lady is sick is very inconsiderate.'
+
+'Oh, but look, lady!' said the elder girl.
+
+Frau Ebermann looked and saw.
+
+'_Au revoir_, lady.' They made their little smiling bows and curtseys
+undisturbed by her loud cries. '_Au revoir,_ lady. We will wait till our
+people come for us.'
+
+When Anna at last ran in, she found her mistress on her knees, busily
+cleaning the floor with the lace cover from the radiator, because, she
+explained, it was all spotted with the blood of five children--she was
+perfectly certain there could not be more than five in the whole
+world--who had gone away for the moment, but were now waiting round the
+corner, and Anna was to find them and give them cakes to stop the
+bleeding, while her mistress swept and garnished that Our dear Lord when
+He came might find everything as it should be.
+
+
+
+Mary Postgate
+
+(1915)
+
+Of Miss Mary Postgate, Lady McCausland wrote that she was 'thoroughly
+conscientious, tidy, companionable, and ladylike. I am very sorry to
+part with her, and shall always be interested in her welfare.'
+
+Miss Fowler engaged her on this recommendation, and to her surprise, for
+she had had experience of companions, found that it was true. Miss
+Fowler was nearer sixty than fifty at the time, but though she needed
+care she did not exhaust her attendant's vitality. On the contrary, she
+gave out, stimulatingly and with reminiscences. Her father had been a
+minor Court official in the days when the Great Exhibition of 1851 had
+just set its seal on Civilisation made perfect. Some of Miss Fowler's
+tales, none the less, were not always for the young. Mary was not young,
+and though her speech was as colourless as her eyes or her hair, she was
+never shocked. She listened unflinchingly to every one; said at the end,
+'How interesting!' or 'How shocking!' as the case might be, and never
+again referred to it, for she prided herself on a trained mind, which
+'did not dwell on these things.' She was, too, a treasure at domestic
+accounts, for which the village tradesmen, with their weekly books,
+loved her not. Otherwise she had no enemies; provoked no jealousy even
+among the plainest; neither gossip nor slander had ever been traced to
+her; she supplied the odd place at the Rector's or the Doctor's table at
+half an hour's notice; she was a sort of public aunt to very many small
+children of the village street, whose parents, while accepting
+everything, would have been swift to resent what they called
+'patronage'; she served on the Village Nursing Committee as Miss
+Fowler's nominee when Miss Fowler was crippled by rheumatoid arthritis,
+and came out of six months' fortnightly meetings equally respected by
+all the cliques.
+
+And when Fate threw Miss Fowler's nephew, an unlovely orphan of eleven,
+on Miss Fowler's hands, Mary Postgate stood to her share of the business
+of education as practised in private and public schools. She checked
+printed clothes-lists, and unitemised bills of extras; wrote to Head and
+House masters, matrons, nurses and doctors, and grieved or rejoiced over
+half-term reports. Young Wyndham Fowler repaid her in his holidays by
+calling her 'Gatepost,' 'Postey,' or 'Packthread,' by thumping her
+between her narrow shoulders, or by chasing her bleating, round the
+garden, her large mouth open, her large nose high in air, at a
+stiff-necked shamble very like a camel's. Later on he filled the house
+with clamour, argument, and harangues as to his personal needs, likes
+and dislikes, and the limitations of 'you women,' reducing Mary to tears
+of physical fatigue, or, when he chose to be humorous, of helpless
+laughter. At crises, which multiplied as he grew older, she was his
+ambassadress and his interpretress to Miss Fowler, who had no large
+sympathy with the young; a vote in his interest at the councils on his
+future; his sewing-woman, strictly accountable for mislaid boots and
+garments; always his butt and his slave.
+
+And when he decided to become a solicitor, and had entered an office in
+London; when his greeting had changed from 'Hullo, Postey, you old
+beast,' to Mornin', Packthread,' there came a war which, unlike all wars
+that Mary could remember, did not stay decently outside England and in
+the newspapers, but intruded on the lives of people whom she knew. As
+she said to Miss Fowler, it was 'most vexatious.' It took the Rector's
+son who was going into business with his elder brother; it took the
+Colonel's nephew on the eve of fruit-farming in Canada; it took Mrs.
+Grant's son who, his mother said, was devoted to the ministry; and, very
+early indeed, it took Wynn Fowler, who announced on a postcard that he
+had joined the Flying Corps and wanted a cardigan waistcoat.
+
+'He must go, and he must have the waistcoat,' said Miss Fowler. So Mary
+got the proper-sized needles and wool, while Miss Fowler told the men of
+her establishment--two gardeners and an odd man, aged sixty--that those
+who could join the Army had better do so. The gardeners left. Cheape,
+the odd man, stayed on, and was promoted to the gardener's cottage. The
+cook, scorning to be limited in luxuries, also left, after a spirited
+scene with Miss Fowler, and took the housemaid with her. Miss Fowler
+gazetted Nellie, Cheape's seventeen-year-old daughter, to the vacant
+post; Mrs. Cheape to the rank of cook, with occasional cleaning bouts;
+and the reduced establishment moved forward smoothly.
+
+Wynn demanded an increase in his allowance. Miss Fowler, who always
+looked facts in the face, said, 'He must have it. The chances are he
+won't live long to draw it, and if three hundred makes him happy--'
+
+Wynn was grateful, and came over, in his tight-buttoned uniform, to say
+so. His training centre was not thirty miles away, and his talk was so
+technical that it had to be explained by charts of the various types of
+machines. He gave Mary such a chart.
+
+'And you'd better study it, Postey,' he said. 'You'll be seeing a lot of
+'em soon.' So Mary studied the chart, but when Wynn next arrived to
+swell and exalt himself before his womenfolk, she failed badly in
+cross-examination, and he rated her as in the old days.
+
+'You _look_ more or less like a human being,' he said in his new Service
+voice. 'You _must_ have had a brain at some time in your past. What have
+you done with it? Where d'you keep it? A sheep would know more than you
+do, Postey. You're lamentable. You are less use than an empty tin can,
+you dowey old cassowary.'
+
+'I suppose that's how your superior officer talks to _you_?' said Miss
+Fowler from her chair.
+
+'But Postey doesn't mind,' Wynn replied. 'Do you, Packthread?'
+
+'Why? Was Wynn saying anything? I shall get this right next time you
+come,' she muttered, and knitted her pale brows again over the diagrams
+of Taubes, Farmans, and Zeppelins.
+
+In a few weeks the mere land and sea battles which she read to Miss
+Fowler after breakfast passed her like idle breath. Her heart and her
+interest were high in the air with Wynn, who had finished 'rolling'
+(whatever that might be) and had gone on from a 'taxi' to a machine more
+or less his own. One morning it circled over their very chimneys,
+alighted on Vegg's Heath, almost outside the garden gate, and Wynn came
+in, blue with cold, shouting for food. He and she drew Miss Fowler's
+bath-chair, as they had often done, along the Heath foot-path to look at
+the bi-plane. Mary observed that 'it smelt very badly.'
+
+'Postey, I believe you think with your nose,' said Wynn. 'I know you
+don't with your mind. Now, what type's that?'
+
+'I'll go and get the chart,' said Mary.
+
+'You're hopeless! You haven't the mental capacity of a white mouse,' he
+cried, and explained the dials and the sockets for bomb-dropping till it
+was time to mount and ride the wet clouds once more.
+
+'Ah!' said Mary, as the stinking thing flared upward. 'Wait till our
+Flying Corps gets to work! Wynn says it's much safer than in the
+trenches.'
+
+'I wonder,' said Miss Fowler. 'Tell Cheape to come and tow me home
+again.'
+
+'It's all downhill. I can do it,' said Mary, 'if you put the brake on.'
+She laid her lean self against the pushing-bar and home they trundled.
+
+'Now, be careful you aren't heated and catch a chill,' said overdressed
+Miss Fowler.
+
+'Nothing makes me perspire,' said Mary. As she bumped the chair under
+the porch she straightened her long back. The exertion had given her a
+colour, and the wind had loosened a wisp of hair across her forehead.
+Miss Fowler glanced at her.
+
+'What do you ever think of, Mary?' she demanded suddenly.
+
+'Oh, Wynn says he wants another three pairs of stockings--as thick as we
+can make them.'
+
+'Yes. But I mean the things that women think about. Here you are, more
+than forty--'
+
+'Forty-four,' said truthful Mary.
+
+'Well?'
+
+'Well?' Mary offered Miss Fowler her shoulder as usual.
+
+'And you've been with me ten years now.'
+
+'Let's see,' said Mary. 'Wynn was eleven when he came. He's twenty now,
+and I came two years before that. It must be eleven.'
+
+'Eleven! And you've never told me anything that matters in all that
+while. Looking back, it seems to me that _I_'ve done all the talking.'
+
+'I'm afraid I'm not much of a conversationalist. As Wynn says, I haven't
+the mind. Let me take your hat.'
+
+Miss Fowler, moving stiffly from the hip, stamped her rubber-tipped
+stick on the tiled hall floor. 'Mary, aren't you _anything_ except a
+companion? Would you _ever_ have been anything except a companion?'
+
+Mary hung up the garden hat on its proper peg. 'No,' she said after
+consideration. 'I don't imagine I ever should. But I've no imagination,
+I'm afraid.'
+
+She fetched Miss Fowler her eleven-o'clock glass of Contrexeville.
+
+That was the wet December when it rained six inches to the month, and
+the women went abroad as little as might be. Wynn's flying chariot
+visited them several times, and for two mornings (he had warned her by
+postcard) Mary heard the thresh of his propellers at dawn. The second
+time she ran to the window, and stared at the whitening sky. A little
+blur passed overhead. She lifted her lean arms towards it.
+
+That evening at six o'clock there came an announcement in an official
+envelope that Second Lieutenant W. Fowler had been killed during a trial
+flight. Death was instantaneous. She read it and carried it to
+Miss Fowler.
+
+'I never expected anything else,' said Miss Fowler; 'but I'm sorry it
+happened before he had done anything.'
+
+The room was whirling round Mary Postgate, but she found herself quite
+steady in the midst of it.
+
+'Yes,' she said. 'It's a great pity he didn't die in action after he had
+killed somebody.'
+
+'He was killed instantly. That's one comfort,' Miss Fowler went on.
+
+'But Wynn says the shock of a fall kills a man at once--whatever happens
+to the tanks,' quoted Mary.
+
+The room was coming to rest now. She heard Miss Fowler say impatiently,
+'But why can't we cry, Mary?' and herself replying, 'There's nothing to
+cry for. He has done his duty as much as Mrs. Grant's son did.'
+
+'And when he died, _she_ came and cried all the morning,' said Miss
+Fowler. 'This only makes me feel tired--terribly tired. Will you help me
+to bed, please, Mary?--And I think I'd like the hot-water bottle.'
+
+So Mary helped her and sat beside, talking of Wynn in his riotous youth.
+
+'I believe,' said Miss Fowler suddenly, 'that old people and young
+people slip from under a stroke like this. The middle-aged feel
+it most.'
+
+'I expect that's true,' said Mary, rising. 'I'm going to put away the
+things in his room now. Shall we wear mourning?'
+
+'Certainly not,' said Miss Fowler. 'Except, of course, at the funeral. I
+can't go. You will. I want you to arrange about his being buried here.
+What a blessing it didn't happen at Salisbury!'
+
+Every one, from the Authorities of the Flying Corps to the Rector, was
+most kind and sympathetic. Mary found herself for the moment in a world
+where bodies were in the habit of being despatched by all sorts of
+conveyances to all sorts of places. And at the funeral two young men in
+buttoned-up uniforms stood beside the grave and spoke to her afterwards.
+
+'You're Miss Postgate, aren't you?' said one. 'Fowler told me about you.
+He was a good chap--a first-class fellow--a great loss.'
+
+'Great loss!' growled his companion. 'We're all awfully sorry.'
+
+'How high did he fall from?' Mary whispered.
+
+'Pretty nearly four thousand feet, I should think, didn't he? You were
+up that day, Monkey?'
+
+'All of that,' the other child replied. 'My bar made three thousand, and
+I wasn't as high as him by a lot.'
+
+'Then _that's_ all right,' said Mary. 'Thank you very much.'
+
+They moved away as Mrs. Grant flung herself weeping on Mary's flat
+chest, under the lych-gate, and cried, '_I_ know how it feels! _I_ know
+how it feels!'
+
+'But both his parents are dead,' Mary returned, as she fended her off.
+'Perhaps they've all met by now,' she added vaguely as she escaped
+towards the coach.
+
+'I've thought of that too,' wailed Mrs. Grant; 'but then he'll be
+practically a stranger to them. Quite embarrassing!'
+
+Mary faithfully reported every detail of the ceremony to Miss Fowler,
+who, when she described Mrs. Grant's outburst, laughed aloud.
+
+'Oh, how Wynn would have enjoyed it! He was always utterly unreliable at
+funerals. D'you remember--' And they talked of him again, each piecing
+out the other's gaps. 'And now,' said Miss Fowler, 'we'll pull up the
+blinds and we'll have a general tidy. That always does us good. Have you
+seen to Wynn's things?'
+
+'Everything--since he first came,' said Mary. 'He was never
+destructive--even with his toys.'
+
+They faced that neat room.
+
+'It can't be natural not to cry,' Mary said at last. 'I'm _so_ afraid
+you'll have a reaction.'
+
+'As I told you, we old people slip from under the stroke. It's you I'm
+afraid for. Have you cried yet?'
+
+'I can't. It only makes me angry with the Germans.'
+
+'That's sheer waste of vitality,' said Miss Fowler. 'We must live till
+the war's finished.' She opened a full wardrobe. 'Now, I've been
+thinking things over. This is my plan. All his civilian clothes can be
+given away--Belgian refugees, and so on.'
+
+Mary nodded. 'Boots, collars, and gloves?'
+
+'Yes. We don't need to keep anything except his cap and belt.'
+
+'They came back yesterday with his Flying Corps clothes'--Mary pointed
+to a roll on the little iron bed.
+
+'Ah, but keep his Service things. Some one may be glad of them later. Do
+you remember his sizes?'
+
+'Five feet eight and a half; thirty-six inches round the chest. But he
+told me he's just put on an inch and a half. I'll mark it on a label and
+tie it on his sleeping-bag.'
+
+'So that disposes of _that_,' said Miss Fowler, tapping the palm of one
+hand with the ringed third finger of the other. 'What waste it all is!
+We'll get his old school trunk to-morrow and pack his civilian clothes.'
+
+'And the rest?' said Mary. 'His books and pictures and the games and the
+toys--and--and the rest?'
+
+'My plan is to burn every single thing,' said Miss Fowler. 'Then we
+shall know where they are and no one can handle them afterwards. What do
+you think?'
+
+'I think that would be much the best,' said Mary. 'But there's such a
+lot of them.'
+
+'We'll burn them in the destructor,' said Miss Fowler.
+
+This was an open-air furnace for the consumption of refuse; a little
+circular four-foot tower of pierced brick over an iron grating. Miss
+Fowler had noticed the design in a gardening journal years ago, and had
+had it built at the bottom of the garden. It suited her tidy soul, for
+it saved unsightly rubbish-heaps, and the ashes lightened the stiff
+clay soil.
+
+Mary considered for a moment, saw her way clear, and nodded again. They
+spent the evening putting away well-remembered civilian suits,
+underclothes that Mary had marked, and the regiments of very gaudy socks
+and ties. A second trunk was needed, and, after that, a little
+packing-case, and it was late next day when Cheape and the local carrier
+lifted them to the cart. The Rector luckily knew of a friend's son,
+about five feet eight and a half inches high, to whom a complete Flying
+Corps outfit would be most acceptable, and sent his gardener's son down
+with a barrow to take delivery of it. The cap was hung up in Miss
+Fowler's bedroom, the belt in Miss Postgate's; for, as Miss Fowler said,
+they had no desire to make tea-party talk of them.
+
+'That disposes of _that_,' said Miss Fowler. 'I'll leave the rest to
+you, Mary. I can't run up and down the garden. You'd better take the big
+clothes-basket and get Nellie to help you.'
+
+'I shall take the wheel-barrow and do it myself,' said Mary, and for
+once in her life closed her mouth.
+
+Miss Fowler, in moments of irritation, had called Mary deadly
+methodical. She put on her oldest waterproof and gardening-hat and her
+ever-slipping goloshes, for the weather was on the edge of more rain.
+She gathered fire-lighters from the kitchen, a half-scuttle of coals,
+and a faggot of brushwood. These she wheeled in the barrow down the
+mossed paths to the dank little laurel shrubbery where the destructor
+stood under the drip of three oaks. She climbed the wire fence into the
+Rector's glebe just behind, and from his tenant's rick pulled two large
+armfuls of good hay, which she spread neatly on the fire-bars. Next,
+journey by journey, passing Miss Fowler's white face at the morning-room
+window each time, she brought down in the towel-covered clothes-basket,
+on the wheel-barrow, thumbed and used Hentys, Marryats, Levers,
+Stevensons, Baroness Orczys, Garvices, schoolbooks, and atlases,
+unrelated piles of the _Motor Cyclist_, the _Light Car_, and catalogues
+of Olympia Exhibitions; the remnants of a fleet of sailing-ships from
+ninepenny cutters to a three-guinea yacht; a prep.-school dressing-gown;
+bats from three-and-sixpence to twenty-four shillings; cricket and
+tennis balls; disintegrated steam and clockwork locomotives with their
+twisted rails; a grey and red tin model of a submarine; a dumb
+gramophone and cracked records; golf-clubs that had to be broken across
+the knee, like his walking-sticks, and an assegai; photographs of
+private and public school cricket and football elevens, and his O.T.C.
+on the line of march; kodaks, and film-rolls; some pewters, and one real
+silver cup, for boxing competitions and Junior Hurdles; sheaves of
+school photographs; Miss Fowler's photograph; her own which he had borne
+off in fun and (good care she took not to ask!) had never returned; a
+playbox with a secret drawer; a load of flannels, belts, and jerseys,
+and a pair of spiked shoes unearthed in the attic; a packet of all the
+letters that Miss Fowler and she had ever written to him, kept for some
+absurd reason through all these years; a five-day attempt at a diary;
+framed pictures of racing motors in full Brooklands career, and load
+upon load of undistinguishable wreckage of tool-boxes, rabbit-hutches,
+electric batteries, tin soldiers, fret-saw outfits, and jig-saw puzzles.
+
+Miss Fowler at the window watched her come and go, and said to herself,
+'Mary's an old woman. I never realised it before.'
+
+After lunch she recommended her to rest.
+
+'I'm not in the least tired,' said Mary. 'I've got it all arranged. I'm
+going to the village at two o'clock for some paraffin. Nellie hasn't
+enough, and the walk will do me good.'
+
+She made one last quest round the house before she started, and found
+that she had overlooked nothing. It began to mist as soon as she had
+skirted Vegg's Heath, where Wynn used to descend--it seemed to her that
+she could almost hear the beat of his propellers overhead, but there was
+nothing to see. She hoisted her umbrella and lunged into the blind wet
+till she had reached the shelter of the empty village. As she came out
+of Mr. Kidd's shop with a bottle full of paraffin in her string
+shopping-bag, she met Nurse Eden, the village nurse, and fell into talk
+with her, as usual, about the village children. They were just parting
+opposite the 'Royal Oak,' when a gun, they fancied, was fired
+immediately behind the house. It was followed by a child's shriek dying
+into a wail.
+
+'Accident!' said Nurse Eden promptly, and dashed through the empty bar,
+followed by Mary. They found Mrs. Gerritt, the publican's wife, who
+could only gasp and point to the yard, where a little cart-lodge was
+sliding sideways amid a clatter of tiles. Nurse Eden snatched up a sheet
+drying before the fire, ran out, lifted something from the ground, and
+flung the sheet round it. The sheet turned scarlet and half her uniform
+too, as she bore the load into the kitchen. It was little Edna Gerritt,
+aged nine, whom Mary had known since her perambulator days.
+
+'Am I hurted bad?' Edna asked, and died between Nurse Eden's dripping
+hands. The sheet fell aside and for an instant, before she could shut
+her eyes, Mary saw the ripped and shredded body.
+
+'It's a wonder she spoke at all,' said Nurse Eden. 'What in God's name
+was it?'
+
+'A bomb,' said Mary.
+
+'One o' the Zeppelins?'
+
+'No. An aeroplane. I thought I heard it on the Heath, but I fancied it
+was one of ours. It must have shut off its engines as it came down.
+That's why we didn't notice it.'
+
+'The filthy pigs!' said Nurse Eden, all white and shaken. 'See the
+pickle I'm in! Go and tell Dr. Hennis, Miss Postgate.' Nurse looked at
+the mother, who had dropped face down on the floor. 'She's only in a
+fit. Turn her over.'
+
+Mary heaved Mrs. Gerritt right side up, and hurried off for the doctor.
+When she told her tale, he asked her to sit down in the surgery till he
+got her something.
+
+'But I don't need it, I assure you,' said she. 'I don't think it would
+be wise to tell Miss Fowler about it, do you? Her heart is so irritable
+in this weather.'
+
+Dr. Hennis looked at her admiringly as he packed up his bag.
+
+'No. Don't tell anybody till we're sure,' he said, and hastened to the
+'Royal Oak,' while Mary went on with the paraffin. The village behind
+her was as quiet as usual, for the news had not yet spread. She frowned
+a little to herself, her large nostrils expanded uglily, and from time
+to time she muttered a phrase which Wynn, who never restrained himself
+before his womenfolk, had applied to the enemy. 'Bloody pagans! They
+_are_ bloody pagans. But,' she continued, falling back on the teaching
+that had made her what she was, 'one mustn't let one's mind dwell on
+these things.'
+
+Before she reached the house Dr. Hennis, who was also a special
+constable, overtook her in his car.
+
+'Oh, Miss Postgate,' he said, 'I wanted to tell you that that accident
+at the "Royal Oak" was due to Gerritt's stable tumbling down. It's been
+dangerous for a long time. It ought to have been condemned.'
+
+'I thought I heard an explosion too,' said Mary.
+
+'You might have been misled by the beams snapping. I've been looking at
+'em. They were dry-rotted through and through. Of course, as they broke,
+they would make a noise just like a gun.'
+
+'Yes?' said Mary politely.
+
+'Poor little Edna was playing underneath it,' he went on, still holding
+her with his eyes, 'and that and the tiles cut her to pieces, you see?'
+
+'I saw it,' said Mary, shaking her head. 'I heard it too.'
+
+'Well, we cannot be sure.' Dr. Hennis changed his tone completely. 'I
+know both you and Nurse Eden (I've been speaking to her) are perfectly
+trustworthy, and I can rely on you not to say anything--yet at least. It
+is no good to stir up people unless--'
+
+'Oh, I never do--anyhow,' said Mary, and Dr. Hennis went on to the
+county town.
+
+After all, she told herself, it might, just possibly, have been the
+collapse of the old stable that had done all those things to poor little
+Edna. She was sorry she had even hinted at other things, but Nurse Eden
+was discretion itself. By the time she reached home the affair seemed
+increasingly remote by its very monstrosity. As she came in, Miss Fowler
+told her that a couple of aeroplanes had passed half an hour ago.
+
+'I thought I heard them,' she replied, 'I'm going down to the garden
+now. I've got the paraffin.'
+
+'Yes, but--what _have_ you got on your boots? They're soaking wet.
+Change them at once.'
+
+Not only did Mary obey but she wrapped the boots in a newspaper, and
+put them into the string bag with the bottle. So, armed with the longest
+kitchen poker, she left.
+
+'It's raining again,' was Miss Fowler's last word, 'but--I know you
+won't be happy till that's disposed of.'
+
+'It won't take long. I've got everything down there, and I've put the
+lid on the destructor to keep the wet out.'
+
+The shrubbery was filling with twilight by the time she had completed
+her arrangements and sprinkled the sacrificial oil. As she lit the match
+that would burn her heart to ashes, she heard a groan or a grunt behind
+the dense Portugal laurels.
+
+'Cheape?' she called impatiently, but Cheape, with his ancient lumbago,
+in his comfortable cottage would be the last man to profane the
+sanctuary. 'Sheep,' she concluded, and threw in the fusee. The pyre went
+up in a roar, and the immediate flame hastened night around her.
+
+'How Wynn would have loved this!' she thought, stepping back from the
+blaze.
+
+By its light she saw, half hidden behind a laurel not five paces away, a
+bareheaded man sitting very stiffly at the foot of one of the oaks. A
+broken branch lay across his lap--one booted leg protruding from beneath
+it. His head moved ceaselessly from side to side, but his body was as
+still as the tree's trunk. He was dressed--she moved sideways to look
+more closely--in a uniform something like Wynn's, with a flap buttoned
+across the chest. For an instant, she had some idea that it might be
+one of the young flying men she had met at the funeral. But their heads
+were dark and glossy. This man's was as pale as a baby's, and so closely
+cropped that she could see the disgusting pinky skin beneath. His
+lips moved.
+
+'What do you say?' Mary moved towards him and stooped.
+
+'Laty! Laty! Laty!' he muttered, while his hands picked at the dead wet
+leaves. There was no doubt as to his nationality. It made her so angry
+that she strode back to the destructor, though it was still too hot to
+use the poker there. Wynn's books seemed to be catching well. She looked
+up at the oak behind the man; several of the light upper and two or
+three rotten lower branches had broken and scattered their rubbish on
+the shrubbery path. On the lowest fork a helmet with dependent strings,
+showed like a bird's-nest in the light of a long-tongued flame.
+Evidently this person had fallen through the tree. Wynn had told her
+that it was quite possible for people to fall out of aeroplanes. Wynn
+told her too, that trees were useful things to break an aviator's fall,
+but in this case the aviator must have been broken or he would have
+moved from his queer position. He seemed helpless except for his
+horrible rolling head. On the other hand, she could see a pistol case at
+his belt--and Mary loathed pistols. Months ago, after reading certain
+Belgian reports together, she and Miss Fowler had had dealings with
+one--a huge revolver with flat-nosed bullets, which latter, Wynn said,
+were forbidden by the rules of war to be used against civilised
+enemies. 'They're good enough for us,' Miss Fowler had replied. 'Show
+Mary how it works.' And Wynn, laughing at the mere possibility of any
+such need, had led the craven winking Mary into the Rector's disused
+quarry, and had shown her how to fire the terrible machine. It lay now
+in the top-left-hand drawer of her toilet-table--a memento not included
+in the burning. Wynn would be pleased to see how she was not afraid.
+
+She slipped up to the house to get it. When she came through the rain,
+the eyes in the head were alive with expectation. The mouth even tried
+to smile. But at sight of the revolver its corners went down just like
+Edna Gerritt's. A tear trickled from one eye, and the head rolled from
+shoulder to shoulder as though trying to point out something.
+
+'Cassee. Tout cassee,' it whimpered.
+
+'What do you say?' said Mary disgustedly, keeping well to one side,
+though only the head moved.
+
+'Cassee,' it repeated. 'Che me rends. Le medicin! Toctor!'
+
+'Nein!' said she, bringing all her small German to bear with the big
+pistol. 'Ich haben der todt Kinder gesehn.'
+
+The head was still. Mary's hand dropped. She had been careful to keep
+her finger off the trigger for fear of accidents. After a few moments'
+waiting, she returned to the destructor, where the flames were falling,
+and churned up Wynn's charring books with the poker. Again the head
+groaned for the doctor.
+
+'Stop that!' said Mary, and stamped her foot. 'Stop that, you bloody
+pagan!'
+
+The words came quite smoothly and naturally. They were Wynn's own words,
+and Wynn was a gentleman who for no consideration on earth would have
+torn little Edna into those vividly coloured strips and strings. But
+this thing hunched under the oak-tree had done that thing. It was no
+question of reading horrors out of newspapers to Miss Fowler. Mary had
+seen it with her own eyes on the 'Royal Oak' kitchen table. She must not
+allow her mind to dwell upon it. Now Wynn was dead, and everything
+connected with him was lumping and rustling and tinkling under her busy
+poker into red black dust and grey leaves of ash. The thing beneath the
+oak would die too. Mary had seen death more than once. She came of a
+family that had a knack of dying under, as she told Miss Fowler, 'most
+distressing circumstances.' She would stay where she was till she was
+entirely satisfied that It was dead--dead as dear papa in the late
+'eighties; aunt Mary in eighty-nine; mamma in 'ninety-one; cousin Dick
+in ninety-five; Lady McCausland's housemaid in 'ninety-nine; Lady
+McCausland's sister in nineteen hundred and one; Wynn buried five days
+ago; and Edna Gerritt still waiting for decent earth to hide her. As she
+thought--her underlip caught up by one faded canine, brows knit and
+nostrils wide--she wielded the poker with lunges that jarred the grating
+at the bottom, and careful scrapes round the brick-work above. She
+looked at her wrist-watch. It was getting on to half-past four, and the
+rain was coming down in earnest. Tea would be at five. If It did not die
+before that time, she would be soaked and would have to change.
+Meantime, and this occupied her, Wynn's things were burning well in
+spite of the hissing wet, though now and again a book-back with a quite
+distinguishable title would be heaved up out of the mass. The exercise
+of stoking had given her a glow which seemed to reach to the marrow of
+her bones. She hummed--Mary never had a voice--to herself. She had never
+believed in all those advanced views--though Miss Fowler herself leaned
+a little that way--of woman's work in the world; but now she saw there
+was much to be said for them. This, for instance, was _her_ work--work
+which no man, least of all Dr. Hennis, would ever have done. A man, at
+such a crisis, would be what Wynn called a 'sportsman'; would leave
+everything to fetch help, and would certainly bring It into the house.
+Now a woman's business was to make a happy home for--for a husband and
+children. Failing these--it was not a thing one should allow one's mind
+to dwell upon--but--
+
+'Stop it!' Mary cried once more across the shadows. 'Nein, I tell you!
+Ich haben der todt Kinder gesehn.'
+
+_But_ it was a fact. A woman who had missed these things could still be
+useful--more useful than a man in certain respects. She thumped like a
+pavior through the settling ashes at the secret thrill of it. The rain
+was damping the fire, but she could feel--it was too dark to see--that
+her work was done. There was a dull red glow at the bottom of the
+destructor, not enough to char the wooden lid if she slipped it half
+over against the driving wet. This arranged, she leaned on the poker and
+waited, while an increasing rapture laid hold on her. She ceased to
+think. She gave herself up to feel. Her long pleasure was broken by a
+sound that she had waited for in agony several times in her life. She
+leaned forward and listened, smiling. There could be no mistake. She
+closed her eyes and drank it in. Once it ceased abruptly.
+
+'Go on,' she murmured, half aloud. 'That isn't the end.'
+
+Then the end came very distinctly in a lull between two rain-gusts. Mary
+Postgate drew her breath short between her teeth and shivered from head
+to foot. '_That's_ all right,' said she contentedly, and went up to the
+house, where she scandalised the whole routine by taking a luxurious hot
+bath before tea, and came down looking, as Miss Fowler said when she saw
+her lying all relaxed on the other sofa, 'quite handsome!'
+
+
+
+
+     THE BEGINNINGS
+
+     It was not part of their blood,
+       It came to them very late
+     With long arrears to make good,
+       When the English began to hate.
+
+     They were not easily moved,
+       They were icy willing to wait
+     Till every count should be proved,
+       Ere the English began to hate.
+
+     Their voices were even and low,
+       Their eyes were level and straight.
+     There was neither sign nor show,
+       When the English began to hate.
+
+     It was not preached to the crowd,
+       It was not taught by the State.
+     No man spoke it aloud,
+       When the English began to hate.
+
+     It was not suddenly bred,
+       It will not swiftly abate,
+     Through the chill years ahead,
+       When Time shall count from the date
+       That the English began to hate.
+
+
+
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