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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Traffics and Discoveries, by Kipling
+#26 in our series by Rudyard Kipling
+
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+Title: Traffics and Discoveries
+
+Author: Rudyard Kipling
+
+Release Date: January, 2006 [EBook #9790]
+[Yes, we are more than one year ahead of schedule]
+[This file was first posted on October 17, 2003]
+
+Edition: 10
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK TRAFFICS AND DISCOVERIES ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Juliet Sutherland, Keith M. Eckrich
+and PG Distributed Proofreaders
+
+
+
+
+TRAFFICS AND DISCOVERIES
+
+
+By Rudyard Kipling
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+_from the Masjid-al-Aqsa of Sayyid Ahmed(Wahabi)_
+
+THE CAPTIVE
+
+_Poseidon'S Law_
+
+THE BONDS OF DISCIPLINE
+
+_The Runners_
+
+A SAHIBS' WAR
+
+_The Wet Litany_
+
+"THEIR LAWFUL OCCASIONS"--PART I.
+
+"THEIR LAWFUL OCCASIONS"--PART II.
+
+_The King's Task_
+
+THE COMPREHENSION OF PRIVATE COOPER
+
+_The Necessitarian_
+
+STEAM TACTICS
+
+_Kaspar's Song in "Varda"_
+
+"WIRELESS"
+
+_Song of the Old Guard_
+
+THE ARMY OF A DREAM--PART I.
+
+THE ARMY OF A DREAM--PART II.
+
+_The Return of the Children_
+
+"THEY"
+
+_From Lyden's "Irenius_"
+
+MRS. BATHURST
+
+     "_Our Fathers Also_"
+
+BELOW THE MILL DAM
+
+
+
+
+
+THE CAPTIVE
+
+FROM THE MASJID-AL-AQSA OF SAYYID AHMED (WAHABI)
+
+  Not with an outcry to Allah nor any complaining
+  He answered his name at the muster and stood to the chaining.
+  When the twin anklets were nipped on the leg-bars that held them,
+  He brotherly greeted the armourers stooping to weld them.
+  Ere the sad dust of the marshalled feet of the chain-gang swallowed him,
+  Observing him nobly at ease, I alighted and followed him.
+  Thus we had speech by the way, but not touching his sorrow
+  Rather his red Yesterday and his regal To-morrow,
+  Wherein he statelily moved to the clink of his chains unregarded,
+  Nowise abashed but contented to drink of the potion awarded.
+  Saluting aloofly his Fate, he made swift with his story;
+  And the words of his mouth were as slaves spreading carpets of glory
+  Embroidered with names of the Djinns--a miraculous weaving--
+  But the cool and perspicuous eye overbore unbelieving.
+  So I submitted myself to the limits of rapture--
+  Bound by this man we had bound, amid captives his capture--
+  Till he returned me to earth and the visions departed;
+  But on him be the Peace and the Blessing: for he was great-hearted!
+
+
+THE CAPTIVE
+
+"He that believeth shall not make haste."--_Isaiah_.
+
+The guard-boat lay across the mouth of the bathing-pool, her crew idly
+spanking the water with the flat of their oars. A red-coated militia-man,
+rifle in hand, sat at the bows, and a petty officer at the stern. Between
+the snow-white cutter and the flat-topped, honey-coloured rocks on the
+beach the green water was troubled with shrimp-pink prisoners-of-war
+bathing. Behind their orderly tin camp and the electric-light poles rose
+those stone-dotted spurs that throw heat on Simonstown. Beneath them the
+little _Barracouta_ nodded to the big _Gibraltar_, and the old _Penelope_,
+that in ten years has been bachelors' club, natural history museum,
+kindergarten, and prison, rooted and dug at her fixed moorings. Far out, a
+three-funnelled Atlantic transport with turtle bow and stern waddled in
+from the deep sea.
+
+Said the sentry, assured of the visitor's good faith, "Talk to 'em? You
+can, to any that speak English. You'll find a lot that do."
+
+Here and there earnest groups gathered round ministers of the Dutch
+Reformed Church, who doubtless preached conciliation, but the majority
+preferred their bath. The God who Looks after Small Things had caused the
+visitor that day to receive two weeks' delayed mails in one from a casual
+postman, and the whole heavy bundle of newspapers, tied with a strap, he
+dangled as bait. At the edge of the beach, cross-legged, undressed to his
+sky-blue army shirt, sat a lean, ginger-haired man, on guard over a dozen
+heaps of clothing. His eyes followed the incoming Atlantic boat.
+
+"Excuse me, Mister," he said, without turning (and the speech betrayed his
+nationality), "would you mind keeping away from these garments? I've been
+elected janitor--on the Dutch vote."
+
+The visitor moved over against the barbed-wire fence and sat down to his
+mail. At the rustle of the newspaper-wrappers the ginger-coloured man
+turned quickly, the hunger of a press-ridden people in his close-set iron-
+grey eyes.
+
+"Have you any use for papers?" said the visitor.
+
+"Have I any use?" A quick, curved forefinger was already snicking off the
+outer covers. "Why, that's the New York postmark! Give me the ads. at the
+back of _Harper's_ and _M'Clure's_ and I'm in touch with God's Country
+again! Did you know how I was aching for papers?"
+
+The visitor told the tale of the casual postman.
+
+"Providential!" said the ginger-coloured man, keen as a terrier on his
+task; "both in time and matter. Yes! ... The _Scientific American_ yet
+once more! Oh, it's good! it's good!" His voice broke as he pressed his
+hawk-like nose against the heavily-inked patent-specifications at the end.
+"Can I keep it? I thank you--I thank you! Why--why--well--well! The
+_American Tyler_ of all things created! Do you subscribe to that?"
+
+"I'm on the free list," said the visitor, nodding.
+
+He extended his blue-tanned hand with that air of Oriental spaciousness
+which distinguishes the native-born American, and met the visitor's grasp
+expertly. "I can only say that you have treated me like a Brother (yes,
+I'll take every last one you can spare), and if ever--" He plucked at the
+bosom of his shirt. "Psha! I forgot I'd no card on me; but my name's
+Zigler--Laughton G. Zigler. An American? If Ohio's still in the Union, I
+am, Sir. But I'm no extreme States'-rights man. I've used all of my native
+country and a few others as I have found occasion, and now I am the
+captive of your bow and spear. I'm not kicking at that. I am not a coerced
+alien, nor a naturalised Texas mule-tender, nor an adventurer on the
+instalment plan. _I_ don't tag after our consul when he comes around,
+expecting the American Eagle to lift me out o' this by the slack of my
+pants. No, sir! If a Britisher went into Indian Territory and shot up his
+surroundings with a Colt automatic (not that _she's_ any sort of weapon,
+but I take her for an illustration), he'd be strung up quicker'n a
+snowflake 'ud melt in hell. No ambassador of yours 'ud save him. I'm my
+neck ahead on this game, anyway. That's how I regard the proposition.
+
+"Have I gone gunning against the British? To a certain extent, I presume
+you never heard tell of the Laughton-Zigler automatic two-inch field-gun,
+with self-feeding hopper, single oil-cylinder recoil, and ballbearing gear
+throughout? Or Laughtite, the new explosive? Absolutely uniform in effect,
+and one-ninth the bulk of any present effete charge--flake, cannonite,
+cordite, troisdorf, cellulose, cocoa, cord, or prism--I don't care what it
+is. Laughtite's immense; so's the Zigler automatic. It's me. It's fifteen
+years of me. You are not a gun-sharp? I am sorry. I could have surprised
+you. Apart from my gun, my tale don't amount to much of anything. I thank
+you, but I don't use any tobacco you'd be likely to carry... Bull Durham?
+_Bull Durham!_ I take it all back--every last word. Bull Durham--here! If
+ever you strike Akron, Ohio, when this fool-war's over, remember you've
+Laughton O. Zigler in your vest pocket. Including the city of Akron. We've
+a little club there.... Hell! What's the sense of talking Akron with no
+pants?
+
+"My gun? ... For two cents I'd have shipped her to our Filipeens. 'Came
+mighty near it too; but from what I'd read in the papers, you can't trust
+Aguinaldo's crowd on scientific matters. Why don't I offer it to our army?
+Well, you've an effete aristocracy running yours, and we've a crowd of
+politicians. The results are practically identical. I am not taking any
+U.S. Army in mine.
+
+"I went to Amsterdam with her--to this Dutch junta that supposes it's
+bossing the war. I wasn't brought up to love the British for one thing,
+and for another I knew that if she got in her fine work (my gun) I'd stand
+more chance of receiving an unbiassed report from a crowd of dam-fool
+British officers than from a hatful of politicians' nephews doing duty as
+commissaries and ordnance sharps. As I said, I put the brown man out of
+the question. That's the way _I_ regarded the proposition.
+
+"The Dutch in Holland don't amount to a row of pins. Maybe I misjudge 'em.
+Maybe they've been swindled too often by self-seeking adventurers to know
+a enthusiast when they see him. Anyway, they're slower than the Wrath o'
+God. But on delusions--as to their winning out next Thursday week at 9
+A.M.--they are--if I may say so--quite British.
+
+"I'll tell you a curious thing, too. I fought 'em for ten days before I
+could get the financial side of my game fixed to my liking. I knew they
+didn't believe in the Zigler, but they'd no call to be crazy-mean. I fixed
+it--free passage and freight for me and the gun to Delagoa Bay, and beyond
+by steam and rail. Then I went aboard to see her crated, and there I
+struck my fellow-passengers--all deadheads, same as me. Well, Sir, I
+turned in my tracks where I stood and besieged the ticket-office, and I
+said, 'Look at here, Van Dunk. I'm paying for my passage and her room in
+the hold--every square and cubic foot.' 'Guess he knocked down the fare to
+himself; but I paid. I paid. I wasn't going to deadhead along o' _that_
+crowd of Pentecostal sweepings. 'Twould have hoodooed my gun for all time.
+That was the way I regarded the proposition. No, Sir, they were not pretty
+company.
+
+"When we struck Pretoria I had a hell-and-a-half of a time trying to
+interest the Dutch vote in my gun an' her potentialities. The bottom was
+out of things rather much just about that time. Kruger was praying some
+and stealing some, and the Hollander lot was singing, 'If you haven't any
+money you needn't come round,' Nobody was spending his dough on anything
+except tickets to Europe. We were both grossly neglected. When I think how
+I used to give performances in the public streets with dummy cartridges,
+filling the hopper and turning the handle till the sweat dropped off me, I
+blush, Sir. I've made her to do her stunts before Kaffirs--naked sons of
+Ham--in Commissioner Street, trying to get a holt somewhere.
+
+"Did I talk? I despise exaggeration--'tain't American or scientific--but
+as true as I'm sitting here like a blue-ended baboon in a kloof, Teddy
+Roosevelt's Western tour was a maiden's sigh compared to my advertising
+work.
+
+"'Long in the spring I was rescued by a commandant called Van Zyl--a big,
+fleshy man with a lame leg. Take away his hair and his gun and he'd make a
+first-class Schenectady bar-keep. He found me and the Zigler on the veldt
+(Pretoria wasn't wholesome at that time), and he annexed me in a
+somnambulistic sort o' way. He was dead against the war from the start,
+but, being a Dutchman, he fought a sight better than the rest of that 'God
+and the Mauser' outfit. Adrian Van Zyl. Slept a heap in the daytime--and
+didn't love niggers. I liked him. I was the only foreigner in his
+commando. The rest was Georgia Crackers and Pennsylvania Dutch--with a
+dash o' Philadelphia lawyer. I could tell you things about them would
+surprise you. Religion for one thing; women for another; but I don't know
+as their notions o' geography weren't the craziest. 'Guess that must be
+some sort of automatic compensation. There wasn't one blamed ant-hill in
+their district they didn't know _and_ use; but the world was flat, they
+said, and England was a day's trek from Cape Town.
+
+"They could fight in their own way, and don't you forget it. But I guess
+you will not. They fought to kill, and, by what I could make out, the
+British fought to be killed. So both parties were accommodated.
+
+"I am the captive of your bow and spear, Sir. The position has its
+obligations--on both sides. You could not be offensive or partisan to me.
+I cannot, for the same reason, be offensive to you. Therefore I will not
+give you my opinions on the conduct of your war.
+
+"Anyway, I didn't take the field as an offensive partisan, but as an
+inventor. It was a condition and not a theory that confronted me. (Yes,
+Sir, I'm a Democrat by conviction, and that was one of the best things
+Grover Cleveland ever got off.)
+
+"After three months' trek, old man Van Zyl had his commando in good shape
+and refitted off the British, and he reckoned he'd wait on a British
+General of his acquaintance that did business on a circuit between
+Stompiesneuk, Jackhalputs, Vrelegen, and Odendaalstroom, year in and year
+out. He was a fixture in that section.
+
+"'He's a dam' good man,' says Van Zyl. 'He's a friend of mine. He sent in
+a fine doctor when I was wounded and our Hollander doc. wanted to cut my
+leg off. Ya, I'll guess we'll stay with him.' Up to date, me and my Zigler
+had lived in innocuous desuetude owing to little odds and ends riding out
+of gear. How in thunder was I to know there wasn't the ghost of any road
+in the country? But raw hide's cheap and lastin'. I guess I'll make my
+next gun a thousand pounds heavier, though.
+
+"Well, Sir, we struck the General on his beat--Vrelegen it was--and our
+crowd opened with the usual compliments at two thousand yards. Van Zyl
+shook himself into his greasy old saddle and says, 'Now we shall be quite
+happy, Mr. Zigler. No more trekking. Joost twelve miles a day till the
+apricots are ripe.'
+
+"Then we hitched on to his outposts, and vedettes, and cossack-picquets,
+or whatever they was called, and we wandered around the veldt arm in arm
+like brothers.
+
+"The way we worked lodge was this way. The General, he had his breakfast
+at 8:45 A.M. to the tick. He might have been a Long Island commuter. At
+8:42 A.M. I'd go down to the Thirty-fourth Street ferry to meet him--I
+mean I'd see the Zigler into position at two thousand (I began at three
+thousand, but that was cold and distant)--and blow him off to two full
+hoppers--eighteen rounds--just as they were bringing in his coffee. If his
+crowd was busy celebrating the anniversary of Waterloo or the last royal
+kid's birthday, they'd open on me with two guns (I'll tell you about them
+later on), but if they were disengaged they'd all stand to their horses
+and pile on the ironmongery, and washers, and typewriters, and five weeks'
+grub, and in half an hour they'd sail out after me and the rest of Van
+Zyl's boys; lying down and firing till 11:45 A.M. or maybe high noon. Then
+we'd go from labour to refreshment, resooming at 2 P.M. and battling till
+tea-time. Tuesday and Friday was the General's moving days. He'd trek
+ahead ten or twelve miles, and we'd loaf around his flankers and exercise
+the ponies a piece. Sometimes he'd get hung up in a drift--stalled
+crossin' a crick--and we'd make playful snatches at his wagons. First time
+that happened I turned the Zigler loose with high hopes, Sir; but the old
+man was well posted on rearguards with a gun to 'em, and I had to haul her
+out with three mules instead of six. I was pretty mad. I wasn't looking
+for any experts back of the Royal British Artillery. Otherwise, the game
+was mostly even. He'd lay out three or four of our commando, and we'd
+gather in four or five of his once a week or thereon. One time, I
+remember, long towards dusk we saw 'em burying five of their boys. They
+stood pretty thick around the graves. We wasn't more than fifteen hundred
+yards off, but old Van Zyl wouldn't fire. He just took off his hat at the
+proper time. He said if you stretched a man at his prayers you'd have to
+hump his bad luck before the Throne as well as your own. I am inclined to
+agree with him. So we browsed along week in and week out. A war-sharp
+might have judged it sort of docile, but for an inventor needing practice
+one day and peace the next for checking his theories, it suited Laughton
+O. Zigler.
+
+"And friendly? Friendly was no word for it. We was brothers in arms.
+
+"Why, I knew those two guns of the Royal British Artillery as well as I
+used to know the old Fifth Avenoo stages. _They_ might have been brothers
+too.
+
+"They'd jolt into action, and wiggle around and skid and spit and cough
+and prize 'emselves back again during our hours of bloody battle till I
+could have wept, Sir, at the spectacle of modern white men chained up to
+these old hand-power, back-number, flint-and-steel reaping machines. One
+of 'em--I called her Baldy--she'd a long white scar all along her barrel--
+I'd made sure of twenty times. I knew her crew by sight, but she'd come
+switching and teturing out of the dust of my shells like--like a hen from
+under a buggy--and she'd dip into a gully, and next thing I'd know 'ud be
+her old nose peeking over the ridge sniffin' for us. Her runnin' mate had
+two grey mules in the lead, and a natural wood wheel repainted, and a
+whole raft of rope-ends trailin' around. 'Jever see Tom Reed with his vest
+off, steerin' Congress through a heat-wave? I've been to Washington often
+--too often--filin' my patents. I called her Tom Reed. We three 'ud play
+pussy-wants-a-corner all round the outposts on off-days--cross-lots
+through the sage and along the mezas till we was short-circuited by
+canons. O, it was great for me and Baldy and Tom Reed! I don't know as we
+didn't neglect the legitimate interests of our respective commanders
+sometimes for this ball-play. I know _I_ did.
+
+"'Long towards the fall the Royal British Artillery grew shy--hung back in
+their breeching sort of--and their shooting was way--way off. I observed
+they wasn't taking any chances, not though I acted kitten almost
+underneath 'em.
+
+"I mentioned it to Van Zyl, because it struck me I had about knocked their
+Royal British moral endways.
+
+"'No,' says he, rocking as usual on his pony. 'My Captain Mankeltow he is
+sick. That is all.'
+
+"'So's your Captain Mankeltow's guns,' I said. 'But I'm going to make 'em
+a heap sicker before he gets well.'
+
+"'No,' says Van Zyl. 'He has had the enteric a little. Now he is better,
+and he was let out from hospital at Jackhalputs. Ah, that Mankeltow! He
+always makes me laugh so. I told him--long back--at Colesberg, I had a
+little home for him at Nooitgedacht. But he would not come--no! He has
+been sick, and I am sorry.'
+
+"'How d'you know that?' I says.
+
+"'Why, only to-day he sends back his love by Johanna Van der Merwe, that
+goes to their doctor for her sick baby's eyes. He sends his love, that
+Mankeltow, and he tells her tell me he has a little garden of roses all
+ready for me in the Dutch Indies--Umballa. He is very funny, my Captain
+Mankeltow.'
+
+"The Dutch and the English ought to fraternise, Sir. They've the same
+notions of humour, to my thinking.'
+
+"'When he gets well,' says Van Zyl, 'you look out, Mr. Americaan. He comes
+back to his guns next Tuesday. Then they shoot better.'
+
+"I wasn't so well acquainted with the Royal British Artillery as old man
+Van Zyl. I knew this Captain Mankeltow by sight, of course, and,
+considering what sort of a man with the hoe he was, I thought he'd done
+right well against my Zigler. But nothing epoch-making.
+
+"Next morning at the usual hour I waited on the General, and old Van Zyl
+come along with some of the boys. Van Zyl didn't hang round the Zigler
+much as a rule, but this was his luck that day.
+
+"He was peeking through his glasses at the camp, and I was helping pepper,
+the General's sow-belly--just as usual--when he turns to me quick and
+says, 'Almighty! How all these Englishmen are liars! You cannot trust
+one,' he says. 'Captain Mankeltow tells our Johanna he comes not back till
+Tuesday, and to-day is Friday, and there he is! Almighty! The English are
+all Chamberlains!'
+
+"If the old man hadn't stopped to make political speeches he'd have had
+his supper in laager that night, I guess. I was busy attending to Tom Reed
+at two thousand when Baldy got in her fine work on me. I saw one sheet of
+white flame wrapped round the hopper, and in the middle of it there was
+one o' my mules straight on end. Nothing out of the way in a mule on end,
+but this mule hadn't any head. I remember it struck me as incongruous at
+the time, and when I'd ciphered it out I was doing the Santos-Dumont act
+without any balloon and my motor out of gear. Then I got to thinking about
+Santos-Dumont and how much better my new way was. Then I thought about
+Professor Langley and the Smithsonian, and wishing I hadn't lied so
+extravagantly in some of my specifications at Washington. Then I quit
+thinking for quite a while, and when I resumed my train of thought I was
+nude, Sir, in a very stale stretcher, and my mouth was full of fine dirt
+all flavoured with Laughtite.
+
+"I coughed up that dirt.
+
+"'Hullo!' says a man walking beside me. 'You've spoke almost in time. Have
+a drink?'
+
+"I don't use rum as a rule, but I did then, because I needed it.
+
+"'What hit us?'I said.
+
+"'Me,' he said. 'I got you fair on the hopper as you pulled out of that
+donga; but I'm sorry to say every last round in the hopper's exploded and
+your gun's in a shocking state. I'm real sorry,' he says. 'I admire your
+gun, Sir.'
+
+"'Are you Captain Mankeltow?' I says.
+
+"'Yes,' he says. 'I presoom you're Mister Zigler. Your commanding officer
+told me about you.'
+
+"'Have you gathered in old man Van Zyl?' I said.
+
+"'Commandant Van Zyl,' he says very stiff, 'was most unfortunately
+wounded, but I am glad to say it's not serious. We hope he'll be able to
+dine with us to-night; and I feel sure,' he says, 'the General would be
+delighted to see you too, though he didn't expect,' he says, 'and no one
+else either, by Jove!' he says, and blushed like the British do when
+they're embarrassed.
+
+"I saw him slide an Episcopalian Prayer-book up his sleeve, and when I
+looked over the edge of the stretcher there was half-a-dozen enlisted men
+--privates--had just quit digging and was standing to attention by their
+spades. I guess he was right on the General not expecting me to dinner;
+but it was all of a piece with their sloppy British way of doing business.
+Any God's quantity of fuss and flubdub to bury a man, and not an ounce of
+forehandedness in the whole outfit to find out whether he was rightly
+dead. And I am a Congregationalist anyway!
+
+"Well, Sir, that was my introduction to the British Army. I'd write a book
+about it if anyone would believe me. This Captain Mankeltow, Royal British
+Artillery, turned the doctor on me (I could write another book about
+_him_) and fixed me up with a suit of his own clothes, and fed me canned
+beef and biscuits, and give me a cigar--a Henry Clay and a whisky-and-
+sparklet. He was a white man.
+
+"'Ye-es, by Jove,' he said, dragging out his words like a twist of
+molasses, 'we've all admired your gun and the way you've worked it. Some
+of us betted you was a British deserter. I won a sovereign on that from a
+yeoman. And, by the way,' he says, 'you've disappointed me groom pretty
+bad.'
+
+"'Where does your groom come in?' I said.
+
+"'Oh, he was the yeoman. He's a dam poor groom,' says my captain, 'but
+he's a way-up barrister when he's at home. He's been running around the
+camp with his tongue out, waiting for the chance of defending you at the
+court-martial.'
+
+"'What court-martial?' I says.
+
+"'On you as a deserter from the Artillery. You'd have had a good run for
+your money. Anyway, you'd never have been hung after the way you worked
+your gun. Deserter ten times over,' he says, 'I'd have stuck out for
+shooting you like a gentleman.'
+
+"Well, Sir, right there it struck me at the pit of my stomach--sort of
+sickish, sweetish feeling--that my position needed regularising pretty
+bad. I ought to have been a naturalised burgher of a year's standing; but
+Ohio's my State, and I wouldn't have gone back on her for a desertful of
+Dutchmen. That and my enthoosiasm as an inventor had led me to the
+existing crisis; but I couldn't expect this Captain Mankeltow to regard
+the proposition that way. There I sat, the rankest breed of
+unreconstructed American citizen, caught red-handed squirting hell at the
+British Army for months on end. I tell _you_, Sir, I wished I was in
+Cincinnatah that summer evening. I'd have compromised on Brooklyn.
+
+"'What d'you do about aliens?' I said, and the dirt I'd coughed up seemed
+all back of my tongue again.
+
+"'Oh,' says he, 'we don't do much of anything. They're about all the
+society we get. I'm a bit of a pro-Boer myself,' he says, 'but between you
+and me the average Boer ain't over and above intellectual. You're the
+first American we've met up with, but of course you're a burgher.'
+
+"It was what I ought to have been if I'd had the sense of a common tick,
+but the way he drawled it out made me mad.
+
+"'Of course I am not,' I says. 'Would _you_ be a naturalised Boer?'
+
+"'I'm fighting against 'em,' he says, lighting a cigarette, 'but it's all
+a matter of opinion.'
+
+"'Well,' I says, 'you can hold any blame opinion you choose, but I'm a
+white man, and my present intention is to die in that colour.'
+
+"He laughed one of those big, thick-ended, British laughs that don't lead
+anywhere, and whacked up some sort of compliment about America that made
+me mad all through.
+
+"I am the captive of your bow and spear, Sir, but I do not understand the
+alleged British joke. It is depressing.
+
+"I was introdooced to five or six officers that evening, and every blame
+one of 'em grinned and asked me why I wasn't in the Filipeens suppressing
+our war! And that was British humour! They all had to get it off their
+chests before they'd talk sense. But they was sound on the Zigler. They
+had all admired her. I made out a fairy-story of me being wearied of the
+war, and having pushed the gun at them these last three months in the hope
+they'd capture it and let me go home. That tickled 'em to death. They made
+me say it three times over, and laughed like kids each time. But half the
+British _are_ kids; specially the older men. My Captain Mankeltow was less
+of it than the others. He talked about the Zigler like a lover, Sir, and I
+drew him diagrams of the hopper-feed and recoil-cylinder in his note-book.
+He asked the one British question I was waiting for, 'Hadn't I made my
+working-parts too light?' The British think weight's strength.
+
+"At last--I'd been shy of opening the subject before--at last I said,
+'Gentlemen, you are the unprejudiced tribunal I've been hunting after. I
+guess you ain't interested in any other gun-factory, and politics don't
+weigh with you. How did it feel your end of the game? What's my gun done,
+anyway?'
+
+"'I hate to disappoint you,' says Captain Mankeltow, 'because I know you
+feel as an inventor.' I wasn't feeling like an inventor just then. I felt
+friendly, but the British haven't more tact than you can pick up with a
+knife out of a plate of soup.
+
+"'The honest truth,' he says, 'is that you've wounded about ten of us one
+way and another, killed two battery horses and four mules, and--oh, yes,'
+he said, 'you've bagged five Kaffirs. But, buck up,' he said, 'we've all
+had mighty close calls'--shaves, he called 'em, I remember. 'Look at my
+pants.'
+
+"They was repaired right across the seat with Minneapolis flour-bagging. I
+could see the stencil.
+
+"'I ain't bluffing,' he says. 'Get the hospital returns, Doc.'
+
+"The doctor gets 'em and reads 'em out under the proper dates. That doctor
+alone was worth the price of admission.
+
+"I was right pleased right through that I hadn't killed any of these
+cheerful kids; but none the less I couldn't help thinking that a few more
+Kaffirs would have served me just as well for advertising purposes as
+white men. No, sir. Anywhichway you regard the proposition, twenty-one
+casualties after months of close friendship like ours was--paltry.
+
+"They gave me taffy about the gun--the British use taffy where we use
+sugar. It's cheaper, and gets there just the same. They sat around and
+proved to me that my gun was too good, too uniform--shot as close as a
+Mannlicher rifle.
+
+"Says one kid chewing a bit of grass: 'I counted eight of your shells,
+Sir, burst in a radius of ten feet. All of 'em would have gone through one
+waggon-tilt. It was beautiful,' he says. 'It was too good.'
+
+"I shouldn't wonder if the boys were right. My Laughtite is too
+mathematically uniform in propelling power. Yes; she was too good for this
+refractory fool of a country. The training gear was broke, too, and we had
+to swivel her around by the trail. But I'll build my next Zigler fifteen
+hundred pounds heavier. Might work in a gasoline motor under the axles. I
+must think that up.
+
+"'Well, gentlemen,' I said, 'I'd hate to have been the death of any of
+you; and if a prisoner can deed away his property, I'd love to present the
+Captain here with what he's seen fit to leave of my Zigler.'
+
+"'Thanks awf'ly,' says my Captain. 'I'd like her very much. She'd look
+fine in the mess at Woolwich. That is, if you don't mind, Mr. Zigler.'
+
+"'Go right ahead,' I says. 'I've come out of all the mess I've any use
+for; but she'll do to spread the light among the Royal British Artillery.'
+
+"I tell you, Sir, there's not much of anything the matter with the Royal
+British Artillery. They're brainy men languishing under an effete system
+which, when you take good holt of it, is England--just all England. 'Times
+I'd feel I was talking with real live citizens, and times I'd feel I'd
+struck the Beef Eaters in the Tower.
+
+"How? Well, this way. I was telling my Captain Mankeltow what Van Zyl had
+said about the British being all Chamberlains when the old man saw him
+back from hospital four days ahead of time.
+
+"'Oh, damn it all!' he says, as serious as the Supreme Court. 'It's too
+bad,' he says. 'Johanna must have misunderstood me, or else I've got the
+wrong Dutch word for these blarsted days of the week. I told Johanna I'd
+be out on Friday. The woman's a fool. Oah, da-am it all!' he says. 'I
+wouldn't have sold old Van Zyl a pup like that,' he says. 'I'll hunt him
+up and apologise.'
+
+"He must have fixed it all right, for when we sailed over to the General's
+dinner my Captain had Van Zyl about half-full of sherry and bitters, as
+happy as a clam. The boys all called him Adrian, and treated him like
+their prodigal father. He'd been hit on the collarbone by a wad of
+shrapnel, and his arm was tied up.
+
+"But the General was the peach. I presume you're acquainted with the
+average run of British generals, but this was my first. I sat on his left
+hand, and he talked like--like the _Ladies' Home Journal_. J'ever read
+that paper? It's refined, Sir--and innocuous, and full of nickel-plated
+sentiments guaranteed to improve the mind. He was it. He began by a Lydia
+Pinkham heart-to-heart talk about my health, and hoped the boys had done
+me well, and that I was enjoying my stay in their midst. Then he thanked
+me for the interesting and valuable lessons that I'd given his crowd--
+specially in the matter of placing artillery and rearguard attacks. He'd
+wipe his long thin moustache between drinks--lime-juice and water he used
+--and blat off into a long 'a-aah,' and ladle out more taffy for me or old
+man Van Zyl on his right. I told him how I'd had my first Pisgah-sight of
+the principles of the Zigler when I was a fourth-class postmaster on a
+star-route in Arkansas. I told him how I'd worked it up by instalments
+when I was machinist in Waterbury, where the dollar-watches come from. He
+had one on his wrist then. I told him how I'd met Zalinski (he'd never
+heard of Zalinski!) when I was an extra clerk in the Naval Construction
+Bureau at Washington. I told him how my uncle, who was a truck-farmer in
+Noo Jersey (he loaned money on mortgage too, for ten acres ain't enough
+now in Noo Jersey), how he'd willed me a quarter of a million dollars,
+because I was the only one of our kin that called him down when he used to
+come home with a hard-cider jag on him and heave ox-bows at his nieces. I
+told him how I'd turned in every red cent on the Zigler, and I told him
+the whole circus of my coming out with her, and so on, and so following;
+and every forty seconds he'd wipe his moustache and blat, 'How
+interesting. Really, now? How interesting.'
+
+"It was like being in an old English book, Sir. Like _Bracebridge Hall_.
+But an American wrote _that!_ I kept peeking around for the Boar's Head
+and the Rosemary and Magna Charta and the Cricket on the Hearth, and the
+rest of the outfit. Then Van Zyl whirled in. He was no ways jagged, but
+thawed--thawed, Sir, and among friends. They began discussing previous
+scraps all along the old man's beat--about sixty of 'em--as well as side-
+shows with other generals and columns. Van Zyl told 'im of a big beat he'd
+worked on a column a week or so before I'd joined him. He demonstrated his
+strategy with forks on the table.
+
+"'There!' said the General, when he'd finished. 'That proves my contention
+to the hilt. Maybe I'm a bit of a pro-Boer, but I stick to it,' he says,
+'that under proper officers, with due regard to his race prejudices, the
+Boer'ud make the finest mounted infantry in the Empire. Adrian,' he says,
+'you're simply squandered on a cattle-run. You ought to be at the Staff
+College with De Wet.'
+
+"'You catch De Wet and I come to your Staff College--eh,' says Adrian,
+laughing. 'But you are so slow, Generaal. Why are you so slow? For a
+month,' he says, 'you do so well and strong that we say we shall hands-up
+and come back to our farms. Then you send to England and make us a present
+of two--three--six hundred young men, with rifles and wagons and rum and
+tobacco, and such a great lot of cartridges, that our young men put up
+their tails and start all over again. If you hold an ox by the horn and
+hit him by the bottom he runs round and round. He never goes anywhere. So,
+too, this war goes round and round. You know that, Generaal!'
+
+"'Quite right, Adrian,' says the General; 'but you must believe your
+Bible.'
+
+"'Hooh!' says Adrian, and reaches for the whisky. 'I've never known a
+Dutchman a professing Atheist, but some few have been rather active
+Agnostics since the British sat down in Pretoria. Old man Van Zyl--he told
+me--had soured on religion after Bloemfontein surrendered. He was a Free
+Stater for one thing.'
+
+"'He that believeth,' says the General, 'shall not make haste. That's in
+Isaiah. We believe we're going to win, and so we don't make haste. As far
+as I'm concerned I'd like this war to last another five years. We'd have
+an army then. It's just this way, Mr. Zigler,' he says, 'our people are
+brimfull of patriotism, but they've been born and brought up between
+houses, and England ain't big enough to train 'em--not if you expect to
+preserve.'
+
+"'Preserve what?' I says. 'England?'
+
+"'No. The game,' he says; 'and that reminds me, gentlemen, we haven't
+drunk the King and Foxhunting.'
+
+"So they drank the King and Fox-hunting. I drank the King because there's
+something about Edward that tickles me (he's so blame British); but I
+rather stood out on the Fox-hunting. I've ridden wolves in the cattle-
+country, and needed a drink pretty bad afterwards, but it never struck me
+as I ought to drink about it--he-red-it-arily.
+
+"'No, as I was saying, Mr. Zigler,' he goes on, 'we have to train our men
+in the field to shoot and ride. I allow six months for it; but many
+column-commanders--not that I ought to say a word against 'em, for they're
+the best fellows that ever stepped, and most of 'em are my dearest
+friends--seem to think that if they have men and horses and guns they can
+take tea with the Boers. It's generally the other way about, ain't it, Mr.
+Zigler?'
+
+"'To some extent, Sir,' I said.
+
+"'I'm _so_ glad you agree with me,' he says. 'My command here I regard as
+a training depot, and you, if I may say so, have been one of my most
+efficient instructors. I mature my men slowly but thoroughly. First I put
+'em in a town which is liable to be attacked by night, where they can
+attend riding-school in the day. Then I use 'em with a convoy, and last I
+put 'em into a column. It takes time,' he says, 'but I flatter myself that
+any men who have worked under me are at least grounded in the rudiments of
+their profession. Adrian,' he says, 'was there anything wrong with the men
+who upset Van Bester's applecart last month when he was trying to cross
+the line to join Piper with those horses he'd stole from Gabbitas?'
+
+"'No, Generaal,' says Van Zyl. 'Your men got the horses back and eleven
+dead; and Van Besters, he ran to Delarey in his shirt. They was very good,
+those men. They shoot hard.'
+
+"_'So_ pleased to hear you say so. I laid 'em down at the beginning of
+this century--a 1900 vintage. _You_ remember 'em, Mankeltow?' he says.
+'The Central Middlesex Buncho Busters--clerks and floorwalkers mostly,'
+and he wiped his moustache. 'It was just the same with the Liverpool
+Buckjumpers, but they were stevedores. Let's see--they were a last-century
+draft, weren't they? They did well after nine months. _You_ know 'em, Van
+Zyl? You didn't get much change out of 'em at Pootfontein?'
+
+"'No,' says Van Zyl. 'At Pootfontein I lost my son Andries.'
+
+"'I beg your pardon, Commandant,' says the General; and the rest of the
+crowd sort of cooed over Adrian.
+
+"'Excoose,' says Adrian. 'It was all right. They were good men those, but
+it is just what I say. Some are so dam good we want to hands-up, and some
+are so dam bad, we say, "Take the Vierkleur into Cape Town." It is not
+upright of you, Generaal. It is not upright of you at all. I do not think
+you ever wish this war to finish.'
+
+"'It's a first-class dress-parade for Armageddon,' says the General. 'With
+luck, we ought to run half a million men through the mill. Why, we might
+even be able to give our Native Army a look in. Oh, not here, of course,
+Adrian, but down in the Colony--say a camp-of-exercise at Worcester. You
+mustn't be prejudiced, Adrian. I've commanded a district in India, and I
+give you my word the native troops are splendid men.'
+
+"'Oh, I should not mind them at Worcester,' says Adrian. 'I would sell you
+forage for them at Worcester--yes, and Paarl and Stellenbosch; but
+Almighty!' he says, 'must I stay with Cronje till you have taught half a
+million of these stupid boys to ride? I shall be an old man.'
+
+"Well, Sir, then and there they began arguing whether St. Helena would
+suit Adrian's health as well as some other places they knew about, and
+fixing up letters of introduction to Dukes and Lords of their
+acquaintance, so's Van Zyl should be well looked after. We own a fair-
+sized block of real estate--America does--but it made me sickish to hear
+this crowd fluttering round the Atlas (oh yes, they had an Atlas), and
+choosing stray continents for Adrian to drink his coffee in. The old man
+allowed he didn't want to roost with Cronje, because one of Cronje's kin
+had jumped one of his farms after Paardeberg. I forget the rights of the
+case, but it was interesting. They decided on a place called Umballa in
+India, because there was a first-class doctor there.
+
+"So Adrian was fixed to drink the King and Foxhunting, and study up the
+Native Army in India (I'd like to see 'em myself), till the British
+General had taught the male white citizens of Great Britain how to ride.
+Don't misunderstand me, Sir. I loved that General. After ten minutes I
+loved him, and I wanted to laugh at him; but at the same time, sitting
+there and hearing him talk about the centuries, I tell you, Sir, it scared
+me. It scared me cold! He admitted everything--he acknowledged the corn
+before you spoke--he was more pleased to hear that his men had been used
+to wipe the geldt with than I was when I knocked out Tom Reed's two lead-
+horses--and he sat back and blew smoke through his nose and matured his
+men like cigars and--he talked of the everlastin' centuries!
+
+"I went to bed nearer nervous prostration than I'd come in a long time.
+Next morning me and Captain Mankeltow fixed up what his shrapnel had left
+of my Zigler for transport to the railroad. She went in on her own wheels,
+and I stencilled her 'Royal Artillery Mess, Woolwich,' on the muzzle, and
+he said he'd be grateful if I'd take charge of her to Cape Town, and hand
+her over to a man in the Ordnance there. 'How are you fixed financially?
+You'll need some money on the way home,' he says at last.
+
+"'For one thing, Cap,' I said, 'I'm not a poor man, and for another I'm
+not going home. I am the captive of your bow and spear. I decline to
+resign office.'
+
+"'Skittles!' he says (that was a great word of his), 'you'll take parole,
+and go back to America and invent another Zigler, a trifle heavier in the
+working parts--I would. We've got more prisoners than we know what to do
+with as it is,' he says. 'You'll only be an additional expense to me as a
+taxpayer. Think of Schedule D,' he says, 'and take parole.'
+
+"'I don't know anything about your tariffs,' I said, 'but when I get to
+Cape Town I write home for money, and I turn in every cent my board'll
+cost your country to any ten-century-old department that's been ordained
+to take it since William the Conqueror came along.'
+
+"'But, confound you for a thick-headed mule,' he says, 'this war ain't any
+more than just started! Do you mean to tell me you're going to play
+prisoner till it's over?'
+
+"'That's about the size of it,' I says, 'if an Englishman and an American
+could ever understand each other.'
+
+"'But, in Heaven's Holy Name, why?' he says, sitting down of a heap on an
+anthill.
+
+"'Well, Cap,' I says, 'I don't pretend to follow your ways of thought, and
+I can't see why you abuse your position to persecute a poor prisoner o'
+war on _his!_'
+
+"'My dear fellow,' he began, throwing up his hands and blushing, 'I'll
+apologise.'
+
+"'But if you insist,' I says, 'there are just one and a half things in
+this world I can't do. The odd half don't matter here; but taking parole,
+and going home, and being interviewed by the boys, and giving lectures on
+my single-handed campaign against the hereditary enemies of my beloved
+country happens to be the one. We'll let it go at that, Cap.'
+
+"'But it'll bore you to death,' he says. The British are a heap more
+afraid of what they call being bored than of dying, I've noticed.
+
+"'I'll survive,' I says, 'I ain't British. I can think,' I says.
+
+"'By God,' he says, coming up to me, and extending the right hand of
+fellowship, 'you ought to be English, Zigler!'
+
+"It's no good getting mad at a compliment like that. The English all do
+it. They're a crazy breed. When they don't know you they freeze up
+tighter'n the St. Lawrence. When they _do_, they go out like an ice-jam in
+April. Up till we prisoners left--four days--my Captain Mankeltow told me
+pretty much all about himself there was; his mother and sisters, and his
+bad brother that was a trooper in some Colonial corps, and how his father
+didn't get on with him, and--well, everything, as I've said. They're
+undomesticated, the British, compared with us. They talk about their own
+family affairs as if they belonged to someone else. 'Taint as if they
+hadn't any shame, but it sounds like it. I guess they talk out loud what
+we think, and we talk out loud what they think.
+
+"I liked my Captain Mankeltow. I liked him as well as any man I'd ever
+struck. He was white. He gave me his silver drinking-flask, and I gave him
+the formula of my Laughtite. That's a hundred and fifty thousand dollars
+in his vest-pocket, on the lowest count, if he has the knowledge to use
+it. No, I didn't tell him the money-value. He was English. He'd send his
+valet to find out.
+
+"Well, me and Adrian and a crowd of dam Dutchmen was sent down the road to
+Cape Town in first-class carriages under escort. (What did I think of your
+enlisted men? They are largely different from ours, Sir: very largely.) As
+I was saying, we slid down south, with Adrian looking out of the car-
+window and crying. Dutchmen cry mighty easy for a breed that fights as
+they do; but I never understood how a Dutchman could curse till we crossed
+into the Orange Free State Colony, and he lifted up his hand and cursed
+Steyn for a solid ten minutes. Then we got into the Colony, and the rebs--
+ministers mostly and schoolmasters--came round the cars with fruit and
+sympathy and texts. Van Zyl talked to 'em in Dutch, and one man, a big
+red-bearded minister, at Beaufort West, I remember, he jest wilted on the
+platform.
+
+"'Keep your prayers for yourself,' says Van Zyl, throwing back a bunch of
+grapes. 'You'll need 'em, and you'll need the fruit too, when the war
+comes down here. _You_ done it,' he says. 'You and your picayune Church
+that's deader than Cronje's dead horses! What sort of a God have you been
+unloading on us, you black _aas vogels_? The British came, and we beat
+'em,' he says, 'and you sat still and prayed. The British beat us, and you
+sat still,' he says. 'You told us to hang on, and we hung on, and our
+farms was burned, and you sat still--you and your God. See here,' he says,
+'I shot my Bible full of bullets after Bloemfontein went, and you and God
+didn't say anything. Take it and pray over it before we Federals help the
+British to knock hell out of you rebels.'
+
+"Then I hauled him back into the car. I judged he'd had a fit. But life's
+curious--and sudden--and mixed. I hadn't any more use for a reb than Van
+Zyl, and I knew something of the lies they'd fed us up with from the
+Colony for a year and more. I told the minister to pull his freight out of
+that, and went on with my lunch, when another man come along and shook
+hands with Van Zyl. He'd known him at close range in the Kimberley seige
+and before. Van Zyl was well seen by his neighbours, I judge. As soon as
+this other man opened his mouth I said, 'You're Kentucky, ain't you?' 'I
+am,' he says; 'and what may you be?' I told him right off, for I was
+pleased to hear good United States in any man's mouth; but he whipped his
+hands behind him and said, 'I'm not knowing any man that fights for a
+Tammany Dutchman. But I presoom you've been well paid, you dam gun-runnin'
+Yank.'
+
+"Well, Sir, I wasn't looking for that, and it near knocked me over, while
+old man Van Zyl started in to explain.
+
+"'Don't you waste your breath, Mister Van Zyl,' the man says. 'I know this
+breed. The South's full of 'em.' Then he whirls round on me and says,
+'Look at here, you Yank. A little thing like a King's neither here nor
+there, but what _you've_ done,' he says, 'is to go back on the White Man
+in six places at once--two hemispheres and four continents--America,
+England, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa. Don't open your
+head,' he says. 'You know well if you'd been caught at this game in our
+country you'd have been jiggling in the bight of a lariat before you could
+reach for your naturalisation papers. Go on and prosper,' he says, 'and
+you'll fetch up by fighting for niggers, as the North did.' And he threw
+me half-a-crown--English money.
+
+"Sir, I do not regard the proposition in that light, but I guess I must
+have been somewhat shook by the explosion. They told me at Cape Town one
+rib was driven in on to my lungs. I am not adducing this as an excuse, but
+the cold God's truth of the matter is--the money on the floor did it.... I
+give up and cried. Put my head down and cried.
+
+"I dream about this still sometimes. He didn't know the circumstances, but
+I dream about it. And it's Hell!
+
+"How do you regard the proposition--as a Brother? If you'd invented your
+own gun, and spent fifty-seven thousand dollars on her--and had paid your
+own expenses from the word 'go'? An American citizen has a right to choose
+his own side in an unpleasantness, and Van Zyl wasn't any Krugerite ...
+and I'd risked my hide at my own expense. I got that man's address from
+Van Zyl; he was a mining man at Kimberley, and I wrote him the facts. But
+he never answered. Guess he thought I lied.... Damned Southern rebel!
+
+"Oh, say. Did I tell you my Captain gave me a letter to an English Lord in
+Cape Town, and he fixed things so's I could lie up a piece in his house? I
+was pretty sick, and threw up some blood from where the rib had gouged
+into the lung--here. This Lord was a crank on guns, and he took charge of
+the Zigler. He had his knife into the British system as much as any
+American. He said he wanted revolution, and not reform, in your army. He
+said the British soldier had failed in every point except courage. He said
+England needed a Monroe Doctrine worse than America--a new doctrine,
+barring out all the Continent, and strictly devoting herself to developing
+her own Colonies. He said he'd abolish half the Foreign Office, and take
+all the old hereditary families clean out of it, because, he said, they
+was expressly trained to fool around with continental diplomats, and to
+despise the Colonies. His own family wasn't more than six hundred years
+old. He was a very brainy man, and a good citizen. We talked politics and
+inventions together when my lung let up on me.
+
+"Did he know my General? Yes. He knew 'em all. Called 'em Teddie and
+Gussie and Willie. They was all of the very best, and all his dearest
+friends; but he told me confidentially they was none of 'em fit to command
+a column in the field. He said they were too fond of advertising. Generals
+don't seem very different from actors or doctors or--yes, Sir--inventors.
+
+"He fixed things for me lovelily at Simons-Town. Had the biggest sort of
+pull--even for a Lord. At first they treated me as a harmless lunatic; but
+after a while I got 'em to let me keep some of their books. If I was left
+alone in the world with the British system of bookkeeping, I'd reconstruct
+the whole British Empire--beginning with the Army. Yes, I'm one of their
+most trusted accountants, and I'm paid for it. As much as a dollar a day.
+I keep that. I've earned it, and I deduct it from the cost of my board.
+When the war's over I'm going to pay up the balance to the British
+Government. Yes, Sir, that's how I regard the proposition.
+
+"Adrian? Oh, he left for Umballa four months back. He told me he was going
+to apply to join the National Scouts if the war didn't end in a year.
+'Tisn't in nature for one Dutchman to shoot another, but if Adrian ever
+meets up with Steyn there'll be an exception to the rule. Ye--es, when the
+war's over it'll take some of the British Army to protect Steyn from his
+fellow-patriots. But the war won't be over yet awhile. He that believeth
+don't hurry, as Isaiah says. The ministers and the school-teachers and the
+rebs'll have a war all to themselves long after the north is quiet.
+
+"I'm pleased with this country--it's big. Not so many folk on the ground
+as in America. There's a boom coming sure. I've talked it over with
+Adrian, and I guess I shall buy a farm somewhere near Bloemfontein and
+start in cattle-raising. It's big and peaceful--a ten-thousand-acre farm.
+I could go on inventing there, too. I'll sell my Zigler, I guess. I'll
+offer the patent rights to the British Government; and if they do the
+'reelly-now-how-interesting' act over her, I'll turn her over to Captain
+Mankeltow and his friend the Lord. They'll pretty quick find some Gussie,
+or Teddie, or Algie who can get her accepted in the proper quarters. I'm
+beginning to know my English.
+
+"And now I'll go in swimming, and read the papers after lunch. I haven't
+had such a good time since Willie died." He pulled the blue shirt over his
+head as the bathers returned to their piles of clothing, and, speaking
+through the folds, added:
+
+"But if you want to realise your assets, you should lease the whole
+proposition to America for ninety-nine years."
+
+
+
+
+THE BONDS OF DISCIPLINE
+
+POSEIDON'S LAW
+
+  When the robust and brass-bound man commissioned first for sea
+  His fragile raft, Poseidon laughed, and, "Mariner," said he,
+  "Behold, a Law immutable I lay on thee and thine,
+  That never shall ye act or tell a falsehood at my shrine.
+
+  "Let Zeus adjudge your landward kin, whose votive meal and salt
+  At easy-cheated altars win oblivion for the fault,
+  But ye the unhoodwinked waves shall test--the immediate gulfs condemn--
+  Unless ye owe the Fates a jest, be slow to jest with them.
+
+  "Ye shall not clear by Greekly speech, nor cozen from your path
+  The twinkling shoal, the leeward beach, and Hadria's white-lipped wrath;
+  Nor tempt with painted cloth for wood my fraud-avenging hosts;
+  Nor make at all or all make good your bulwarks and your boasts.
+
+  "Now and henceforward serve unshod through wet and wakeful shifts,
+  A present and oppressive God, but take, to aid, my gifts--
+  The wide and windward-opened eye, the large and lavish hand,
+  The soul that cannot tell a lie--except upon the land!"
+
+  In dromond and in catafract--wet, wakeful, windward-eyed--
+  He kept Poseidon's Law intact (his ship and freight beside),
+  But, once discharged the dromond's hold, the bireme beached once more,
+  Splendaciously mendacious rolled the brass-bound man ashore.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+  The thranite now and thalamite are pressures low and high,
+  And where three hundred blades bit white the twin-propellers ply:
+  The God that hailed, the keel that sailed, are changed beyond recall,
+  But the robust and brass-bound man he is not changed at all!
+
+  From Punt returned, from Phormio's Fleet, from Javan and Gadire,
+  He strongly occupies the seat about the tavern fire,
+  And, moist with much Falernian or smoked Massilian juice,
+  Revenges there the brass-bound man his long-enforced truce!
+
+
+THE BONDS OF DISCIPLINE
+
+As literature, it is beneath contempt. It concerns the endurance,
+armament, turning-circle, and inner gear of every ship in the British
+Navy--the  whole embellished with profile plates. The Teuton approaches
+the matter with pagan thoroughness; the Muscovite runs him close; but the
+Gaul, ever an artist, breaks enclosure to study the morale, at the present
+day, of the British sailorman.
+
+In this, I conceive, he is from time to time aided by the zealous amateur,
+though I find very little in his dispositions to show that he relies on
+that amateur's hard-won information. There exists--unlike some other
+publication, it is not bound in lead boards--a work by one "M. de C.,"
+based on the absolutely unadorned performances of one of our well-known
+_Acolyte_ type of cruisers. It contains nothing that did not happen. It
+covers a period of two days; runs to twenty-seven pages of large type
+exclusive of appendices; and carries as many exclamation points as the
+average Dumas novel.
+
+I read it with care, from the adorably finished prologue--it is the
+disgrace of our Navy that we cannot produce a commissioned officer capable
+of writing one page of lyric prose--to the eloquent, the joyful, the
+impassioned end; and my first notion was that I had been cheated. In this
+sort of book-collecting you will see how entirely the bibliophile lies at
+the mercy of his agent.
+
+"M. de C.," I read, opened his campaign by stowing away in one of her
+boats what time H.M.S. _Archimandrite_ lay off Funchal. "M. de C." was,
+always on behalf of his country, a Madeira Portuguese fleeing from the
+conscription. They discovered him eighty miles at sea and bade him assist
+the cook. So far this seemed fairly reasonable. Next day, thanks to his
+histrionic powers and his ingratiating address, he was promoted to the
+rank of "supernumerary captain's servant"--a "post which," I give his
+words, "I flatter myself, was created for me alone, and furnished me with
+opportunities unequalled for a task in which one word malapropos would
+have been my destruction."
+
+From this point onward, earth and water between them held no marvels like
+to those "M. de C." had "envisaged"--if I translate him correctly. It
+became clear to me that "M. de C." was either a pyramidal liar, or...
+
+I was not acquainted with any officer, seaman, or marine in the
+_Archimandrite_; but instinct told me I could not go far wrong if I took a
+third-class ticket to Plymouth.
+
+I gathered information on the way from a leading stoker, two seaman-
+gunners, and an odd hand in a torpedo factory. They courteously set my
+feet on the right path, and that led me through the alleys of Devonport to
+a public-house not fifty yards from the water. We drank with the
+proprietor, a huge, yellowish man called Tom Wessels; and when my guides
+had departed, I asked if he could produce any warrant or petty officer of
+the _Archimandrite_.
+
+"The _Bedlamite_, d'you mean--'er last commission, when they all went
+crazy?"
+
+"Shouldn't wonder," I replied. "Fetch me a sample and I'll see."
+
+"You'll excuse me, o' course, but--what d'you want 'im _for?_"
+
+"I want to make him drunk. I want to make you drunk--if you like. I want
+to make him drunk here."
+
+"Spoke very 'andsome. I'll do what I can." He went out towards the water
+that lapped at the foot of the street. I gathered from the pot-boy that he
+was a person of influence beyond Admirals.
+
+In a few minutes I heard the noise of an advancing crowd, and the voice of
+Mr. Wessels.
+
+"'E only wants to make you drunk at 'is expense. Dessay 'e'll stand you
+all a drink. Come up an' look at 'im. 'E don't bite."
+
+A square man, with remarkable eyes, entered at the head of six large
+bluejackets. Behind them gathered a contingent of hopeful free-drinkers.
+
+"'E's the only one I could get. Transferred to the _Postulant_ six months
+back. I found 'im quite accidental." Mr. Wessels beamed.
+
+"I'm in charge o' the cutter. Our wardroom is dinin' on the beach _en
+masse_. They won't be home till mornin'," said the square man with the
+remarkable eyes.  "Are you an _Archimandrite?_" I demanded.
+
+"That's me. I was, as you might say."
+
+"Hold on. I'm a _Archimandrite._" A Red Marine with moist eyes tried to
+climb on the table. "Was you lookin' for a _Bedlamite?_ I've--I've been
+invalided, an' what with that, an' visitin' my family 'ome at Lewes,
+per'aps I've come late. 'Ave I?"
+
+"You've 'ad all that's good for you," said Tom Wessels, as the Red Marine
+sat cross-legged on the floor.
+
+"There are those 'oo haven't 'ad a thing yet!" cried a voice by the door.
+
+"I will take this _Archimandrite_" I said, "and this Marine. Will you
+please give the boat's crew a drink now, and another in half an hour if--
+if Mr.----"
+
+"Pyecroft," said the square man. "Emanuel Pyecroft, second-class petty-
+officer."
+
+"--Mr. Pyecroft doesn't object?"
+
+"He don't. Clear out. Goldin', you picket the hill by yourself, throwin'
+out a skirmishin'-line in ample time to let me know when Number One's
+comin' down from his vittles."
+
+The crowd dissolved. We passed into the quiet of the inner bar, the Red
+Marine zealously leading the way.
+
+"And what do you drink, Mr. Pyecroft?" I said.
+
+"Only water. Warm water, with a little whisky an' sugar an' per'aps a
+lemon."
+
+"Mine's beer," said the Marine. "It always was."
+
+"Look 'ere, Glass. You take an' go to sleep. The picket'll be comin' for
+you in a little time, an' per'aps you'll 'ave slep' it off by then. What's
+your ship, now?" said Mr. Wessels.
+
+"The Ship o' State--most important?" said the Red Marine magnificently,
+and shut his eyes.
+
+"That's right," said Mr. Pyecroft. "He's safest where he is. An' now--
+here's santy to us all!--what d'you want o' me?"
+
+"I want to read you something."
+
+"Tracts, again!" said the Marine, never opening his eyes. "Well. I'm
+game.... A little more 'ead to it, miss, please."
+
+"He thinks 'e's drinkin'--lucky beggar!" said Mr. Pyecroft. "I'm agreeable
+to be read to. 'Twon't alter my convictions. I may as well tell you
+beforehand I'm a Plymouth Brother."
+
+He composed his face with the air of one in the dentist's chair, and I
+began at the third page of "M. de C."
+
+"'_At the moment of asphyxiation, for I had hidden myself under the boat's
+cover, I heard footsteps upon the superstructure and coughed with
+empress_'--coughed loudly, Mr. Pyecroft. '_By this time I judged the
+vessel to be sufficiently far from land. A number of sailors extricated me
+amid language appropriate to their national brutality. I responded that I
+named myself Antonio, and that I sought to save myself from the Portuguese
+conscription_.'
+
+"Ho!" said Mr. Pyecroft, and the fashion of his countenance changed. Then
+pensively: "Ther beggar! What might you have in your hand there?"
+
+"It's the story of Antonio--a stowaway in the _Archimandrite's_ cutter. A
+French spy when he's at home, I fancy. What do _you_ know about it?"
+
+"An' I thought it was tracts! An' yet some'ow I didn't." Mr. Pyecroft
+nodded his head wonderingly. "Our old man was quite right--so was 'Op--so
+was I. 'Ere, Glass!" He kicked the Marine. "Here's our Antonio 'as written
+a impromptu book! He _was_ a spy all right."
+
+The Red Marine turned slightly, speaking with the awful precision of the
+half-drunk. "'As 'e got any-thin' in about my 'orrible death an'
+execution? Ex_cuse_ me, but if I open my eyes, I shan't be well. That's
+where I'm different from _all_ other men. Ahem!"
+
+"What about Glass's execution?" demanded Pyecroft.
+
+"The book's in French," I replied.
+
+"Then it's no good to me."
+
+"Precisely. Now I want you to tell your story just as it happened. I'll
+check it by this book. Take a cigar. I know about his being dragged out of
+the cutter. What I want to know is what was the meaning of all the other
+things, because they're unusual."
+
+"They were," said Mr. Pyecroft with emphasis. "Lookin' back on it as I set
+here more an' more I see what an 'ighly unusual affair it was. But it
+happened. It transpired in the _Archimandrite_--the ship you can trust...
+Antonio! Ther beggar!"
+
+"Take your time, Mr. Pyecroft."
+
+In a few moments we came to it thus--
+
+"The old man was displeased. I don't deny he was quite a little
+displeased. With the mail-boats trottin' into Madeira every twenty
+minutes, he didn't see why a lop-eared Portugee had to take liberties with
+a man-o'-war's first cutter. Any'ow, we couldn't turn ship round for him.
+We drew him out and took him out to Number One. 'Drown 'im,' 'e says.
+'Drown 'im before 'e dirties my fine new decks.' But our owner was
+tenderhearted. 'Take him to the galley,' 'e says. 'Boil 'im! Skin 'im!
+Cook 'im! Cut 'is bloomin' hair? Take 'is bloomin' number! We'll have him
+executed at Ascension.'
+
+"Retallick, our chief cook, an' a Carth'lic, was the on'y one any way near
+grateful; bein' short-'anded in the galley. He annexes the blighter by the
+left ear an' right foot an' sets him to work peelin' potatoes. So then,
+this Antonio that was avoidin' the conscription--"
+
+"_Sub_scription, you pink-eyed matlow!" said the Marine, with the face of
+a stone Buddha, and whimpered sadly: "Pye don't see any fun in it at all."
+
+"_Con_scription--come to his illegitimate sphere in Her Majesty's Navy,
+an' it was just then that Old 'Op, our Yeoman of Signals, an' a fastidious
+joker, made remarks to me about 'is hands.
+
+"'Those 'ands,' says 'Op, 'properly considered, never done a day's honest
+labour in their life. Tell me those hands belong to a blighted Portugee
+manual labourist and I won't call you a liar, but I'll say you an' the
+Admiralty are pretty much unique in your statements.' 'Op was always a
+fastidious joker--in his language as much as anything else. He pursued 'is
+investigations with the eye of an 'awk outside the galley. He knew better
+than to advance line-head against Retallick, so he attacked _ong eshlong_,
+speakin' his remarks as much as possible into the breech of the starboard
+four point seven, an' 'ummin' to 'imself. Our chief cook 'ated 'ummin'.
+'What's the matter of your bowels?' he says at last, fistin' out the mess-
+pork agitated like. "'Don't mind me,' says 'Op. 'I'm only a mildewed
+buntin'-tosser,' 'e says: 'but speakin' for my mess, I do hope,' 'e says,
+'you ain't goin' to boil your Portugee friend's boots along o' that pork
+you're smellin' so gay!'
+
+"'Boots! Boots! Boots!' says Retallick, an' he run round like a earwig in
+a alder-stalk. 'Boots in the galley,' 'e says. 'Cook's mate, cast out an'
+abolish this cutter-cuddlin' abori_gine's_ boots!'"
+
+"They was hove overboard in quick time, an' that was what 'Op was lyin' to
+for. As subsequently transpired.
+
+"'Fine Arab arch to that cutter-cuddler's hinstep,' he says to me. 'Run
+your eye over it, Pye,' 'e says. 'Nails all present an' correct,' 'e says.
+'Bunion on the little toe, too,' 'e says; 'which comes from wearin' a
+tight boot. What do _you_ think?'
+
+"'Dook in trouble, per'aps,' I says. 'He ain't got the hang of spud-
+skinnin'.' No more he 'ad. 'E was simply cannibalisin' 'em.
+
+"'I want to know what 'e 'as got the 'ang of,' says 'Op, obstructed-like.
+'Watch 'im,' 'e says. 'These shoulders were foreign-drilled somewhere.'
+
+'"When it comes to "Down 'ammicks!" which is our naval way o' goin' to
+bye-bye, I took particular trouble over Antonio, 'oo had 'is 'ammick 'ove
+at 'im with general instructions to sling it an' be sugared. In the
+ensuin' melly I pioneered him to the after-'atch, which is a orifice
+communicatin' with the after-flat an' similar suites of apartments. He
+havin' navigated at three fifths power immejit ahead o' me, _I_ wasn't
+goin' to volunteer any assistance, nor he didn't need it.'
+
+"'Mong Jew!' says 'e, sniffin' round. An' twice more 'Mong Jew!'--which is
+pure French. Then he slings 'is 'ammick, nips in, an' coils down. 'Not bad
+for a Portugee conscript,' I says to myself, casts off the tow, abandons
+him, and reports to 'Op.
+
+"About three minutes later I'm over'auled by our sub-lootenant, navigatin'
+under forced draught, with his bearin's 'eated. 'E had the temerity to say
+I'd instructed our Antonio to sling his carcass in the alleyway, an' 'e
+was peevish about it. O' course, I prevaricated like 'ell. You get to do
+that in the service. Nevertheless, to oblige Mr. Ducane, I went an'
+readjusted Antonio. You may not 'ave ascertained that there are two ways
+o' comin' out of an 'ammick when it's cut down. Antonio came out t'other
+way--slidin' 'andsome to his feet. That showed me two things. First, 'e
+had been in an 'ammick before, an' next, he hadn't been asleep. Then I
+reproached 'im for goin' to bed where 'e'd been told to go, instead o'
+standin' by till some one gave him entirely contradictory orders. Which is
+the essence o' naval discipline.
+
+"In the middle o' this argument the gunner protrudes his ram-bow from 'is
+cabin, an' brings it all to an 'urried conclusion with some remarks
+suitable to 'is piebald warrant-rank. Navigatin' thence under easy steam,
+an' leavin' Antonio to re-sling his little foreign self, my large flat
+foot comes in detonatin' contact with a small objec' on the deck. Not
+'altin' for the obstacle, nor changin' step, I shuffles it along under the
+ball of the big toe to the foot o' the hatchway, when, lightly stoopin', I
+catch it in my right hand and continue my evolutions in rapid time till I
+eventuates under 'Op's lee.
+
+"It was a small moroccer-bound pocket-book, full of indelible pencil-
+writin'--in French, for I could plainly discern the _doodeladays_, which
+is about as far as my education runs.
+
+"'Op fists it open and peruses. 'E'd known an 'arf-caste Frenchwoman
+pretty intricate before he was married; when he was trained man in a
+stinkin' gunboat up the Saigon River. He understood a lot o' French--
+domestic brands chiefly--the kind that isn't in print.
+
+"'Pye,' he says to me, 'you're a tattician o' no mean value. I am a trifle
+shady about the precise bearin' an' import' o' this beggar's private log
+here,' 'e says, 'but it's evidently a case for the owner. You'll 'ave your
+share o' the credit,' 'e says.
+
+"'Nay, nay, Pauline,' I says, 'You don't catch Emanuel Pyecroft mine-
+droppin' under any post-captain's bows,' I says, 'in search of honour,' I
+says. 'I've been there oft.'
+
+"'Well, if you must, you must,' 'e says, takin' me up quick. 'But I'll
+speak a good word for you, Pye.'
+
+"'You'll shut your mouth, 'Op,' I says, 'or you an' me'll part brass-rags.
+The owner has his duties, an' I have mine. We will keep station,' I says,
+'nor seek to deviate.'
+
+"'Deviate to blazes!' says 'Op. 'I'm goin' to deviate to the owner's
+comfortable cabin direct.' So he deviated."
+
+Mr. Pyecroft leaned forward and dealt the Marine a large pattern Navy
+kick. "'Ere, Glass! You was sentry when 'Op went to the old man--the first
+time, with Antonio's washin'-book. Tell us what transpired. You're sober.
+You don't know how sober you are!"
+
+The Marine cautiously raised his head a few inches. As Mr. Pyecroft said,
+he was sober--after some R.M.L.I. fashion of his own devising. "'Op bounds
+in like a startled anteloper, carryin' 'is signal-slate at the ready. The
+old man was settin' down to 'is bountiful platter--not like you an' me,
+without anythin' more in sight for an 'ole night an' 'arf a day. Talkin'
+about food--"
+
+"No! No! No!" cried Pyecroft, kicking again. "What about 'Op?" I thought
+the Marine's ribs would have snapped, but he merely hiccuped.
+
+"Oh, 'im! 'E 'ad it written all down on 'is little slate--I think--an' 'e
+shoves it under the old man's nose. 'Shut the door,' says 'Op. 'For
+'Eavin's sake shut the cabin door!' Then the old man must ha' said
+somethin' 'bout irons. 'I'll put 'em on, Sir, in your very presence,' says
+'Op, 'only 'ear my prayer,' or--words to that 'fect.... It was jus' the
+same with me when I called our Sergeant a bladder-bellied, lard-'eaded,
+perspirin' pension-cheater. They on'y put on the charge-sheet 'words to
+that effect,' Spoiled the 'ole 'fect."
+
+"'Op! 'Op! 'Op! What about 'Op?" thundered Pyecroft.
+
+"'Op? Oh, shame thing. Words t' that 'fect. Door shut. Nushin' more
+transphired till 'Op comes out--nose exshtreme angle plungin' fire or--or
+words 'that effect. Proud's parrot. 'Oh, you prou' old parrot,' I says."
+
+Mr. Glass seemed to slumber again.
+
+"Lord! How a little moisture disintegrates, don't it? When we had ship's
+theatricals off Vigo, Glass 'ere played Dick Deadeye to the moral, though
+of course the lower deck wasn't pleased to see a leatherneck interpretin'
+a strictly maritime part, as you might say. It's only his repartees, which
+'e can't contain, that conquers him. Shall I resume my narrative?"
+
+Another drink was brought on this hint, and Mr. Pyecroft resumed.
+
+"The essence o' strategy bein' forethought, the essence o' tattics is
+surprise. Per'aps you didn't know that? My forethought 'avin' secured the
+initial advantage in attack, it remained for the old man to ladle out the
+surprise-packets. 'Eavens! What surprises! That night he dines with the
+wardroom, bein' of the kind--I've told you as we were a 'appy ship?--that
+likes it, and the wardroom liked it too. This ain't common in the service.
+They had up the new Madeira--awful undisciplined stuff which gives you a
+cordite mouth next morning. They told the mess-men to navigate towards the
+extreme an' remote 'orizon, an' they abrogated the sentry about fifteen
+paces out of earshot. Then they had in the Gunner, the Bo'sun, an' the
+Carpenter, an' stood them large round drinks. It all come out later--
+wardroom joints bein' lower-deck hash, as the sayin' is--that our Number
+One stuck to it that 'e couldn't trust the ship for the job. The old man
+swore 'e could, 'avin' commanded 'er over two years. He was right. There
+wasn't a ship, I don't care in what fleet, could come near the
+_Archimandrites_ when we give our mind to a thing. We held the cruiser
+big-gun records, the sailing-cutter (fancy-rig) championship, an' the
+challenge-cup row round the fleet. We 'ad the best nigger-minstrels, the
+best football an' cricket teams, an' the best squee-jee band of anything
+that ever pushed in front of a brace o' screws. An' _yet_ our Number One
+mistrusted us! 'E said we'd be a floatin' hell in a week, an' it 'ud take
+the rest o' the commission to stop our way. They was arguin' it in the
+wardroom when the bridge reports a light three points off the port bow. We
+overtakes her, switches on our search-light, an' she discloses herself as
+a collier o' no mean reputation, makin' about seven knots on 'er lawful
+occasions--to the Cape most like.
+
+"Then the owner--so we 'eard in good time--broke the boom, springin' all
+mines together at close interval.
+
+"'Look 'ere, my jokers,' 'e says (I'm givin' the grist of 'is arguments,
+remember), 'Number One says we can't enlighten this cutter-cuddlin Gaulish
+lootenant on the manners an' customs o' the Navy without makin' the ship a
+market-garden. There's a lot in that,' 'e says, 'specially if we kept it
+up lavish, till we reached Ascension. But,' 'e says, 'the appearance o'
+this strange sail has put a totally new aspect on the game. We can run to
+just one day's amusement for our friend, or else what's the good o'
+discipline? An' then we can turn 'im over to our presumably short-'anded
+fellow-subject in the small-coal line out yonder. He'll be pleased,' says
+the old man, 'an' so will Antonio. M'rover,' he says to Number One, 'I'll
+lay you a dozen o' liquorice an' ink'--it must ha' been that new tawny
+port--'that I've got a ship I can trust--for one day,' 'e says.
+'Wherefore,' he says, 'will you have the extreme goodness to reduce speed
+as requisite for keepin' a proper distance behind this providential tramp
+till further orders?' Now, that's what I call tattics.
+
+"The other manoeuvres developed next day, strictly in accordance with the
+plans as laid down in the wardroom, where they sat long an' steady. 'Op
+whispers to me that Antonio was a Number One spy when 'e was in
+commission, and a French lootenant when 'e was paid off, so I navigated at
+three 'undred and ninety six revolutions to the galley, never 'avin'
+kicked a lootenant up to date. I may as well say that I did not manoeuvre
+against 'im as a Frenchman, because I like Frenchmen, but stric'ly on 'is
+rank an' ratin' in 'is own navy. I inquired after 'is health from
+Retallick.
+
+"'Don't ask me,' 'e says, sneerin' be'ind his silver spectacles. ''E's
+promoted to be captain's second supernumerary servant, to be dressed and
+addressed as such. If 'e does 'is dooties same as he skinned the spuds,
+_I_ ain't for changin' with the old man.'
+
+"In the balmy dawnin' it was given out, all among the 'olystones, by our
+sub-lootenant, who was a three-way-discharge devil, that all orders after
+eight bells was to be executed in inverse ration to the cube o' the
+velocity. 'The reg'lar routine,' he says, 'was arrogated for reasons o'
+state an' policy, an' any flat-foot who presumed to exhibit surprise,
+annoyance, or amusement, would be slightly but firmly reproached.' Then
+the Gunner mops up a heathenish large detail for some hanky-panky in the
+magazines, an' led 'em off along with our Gunnery Jack, which is to say,
+our Gunnery Lootenant.
+
+"That put us on the _viva voce_--particularly when we understood how the
+owner was navigatin' abroad in his sword-belt trustin' us like brothers.
+We shifts into the dress o' the day, an' we musters _an'_ we prays _ong
+reggle_, an' we carries on anticipatory to bafflin' Antonio.
+
+"Then our Sergeant of Marines come to me wringin' his 'ands an' weepin'.
+'E'd been talkin' to the sub-lootenant, an' it looked like as if his
+upper-works were collapsin'.
+
+"'I want a guarantee,' 'e says, wringin' 'is 'ands like this. '_I_ 'aven't
+'ad sunstroke slave-dhowin' in Tajurrah Bay, an' been compelled to live on
+quinine an' chlorodyne ever since. _I_ don't get the horrors off glasses
+o' brown sherry.'
+
+"'What 'ave you got now?' I says.
+
+"'_I_ ain't an officer,' 'e says. '_My_ sword won't be handed back to me
+at the end o' the court-martial on account o' my little weaknesses, an' no
+stain on my character. I'm only a pore beggar of a Red Marine with
+eighteen years' service, an' why for,' says he, wringin' 'is hands like
+this all the time, 'must I chuck away my pension, sub-lootenant or no
+sub-lootenant? Look at 'em,' he says, 'only look at 'em. Marines fallin'
+in for small-arm drill!'
+
+"The leathernecks was layin' aft at the double, an' a more insanitary set
+of accidents I never wish to behold. Most of 'em was in their shirts. They
+had their trousers on, of course--rolled up nearly to the knee, but what I
+mean is belts over shirts. Three or four 'ad _our_ caps, an' them that had
+drawn helmets wore their chin-straps like Portugee earrings. Oh, yes; an'
+three of 'em 'ad only one boot! I knew what our bafflin' tattics was goin'
+to be, but even I was mildly surprised when this gay fantasia of Brazee
+drummers halted under the poop, because of an 'ammick in charge of our
+Navigator, an' a small but 'ighly efficient landin'-party.
+
+"''Ard astern both screws!' says the Navigator. 'Room for the captain's
+'ammick!' The captain's servant--Cockburn 'is name was--had one end, an'
+our newly promoted Antonio, in a blue slop rig, 'ad the other. They slung
+it from the muzzle of the port poop quick-firer thort-ships to a
+stanchion. Then the old man flickered up, smokin' a cigarette, an' brought
+'is stern to an anchor slow an' oriental.
+
+"'What a blessin' it is, Mr. Ducane,' 'e says to our sub-lootenant, 'to be
+out o' sight o' the 'ole pack o' blighted admirals! What's an admiral
+after all?' 'e says. 'Why, 'e's only a post-captain with the pip, Mr.
+Ducane. The drill will now proceed. What O! Antonio, _descendez_ an' get
+me a split.'
+
+"When Antonio came back with the whisky-an'-soda, he was told off to swing
+the 'ammick in slow time, an' that massacritin' small-arm party went on
+with their oratorio. The Sergeant had been kindly excused from
+participating an' he was jumpin' round on the poop-ladder, stretchin' 'is
+leather neck to see the disgustin' exhibition an' cluckin' like a ash-
+hoist. A lot of us went on the fore an' aft bridge an' watched 'em like
+'Listen to the Band in the Park.' All these evolutions, I may as well tell
+you, are highly unusual in the Navy. After ten minutes o' muckin' about,
+Glass 'ere--pity 'e's so drunk!--says that 'e'd had enough exercise for
+'is simple needs an' he wants to go 'ome. Mr. Ducane catches him a
+sanakatowzer of a smite over the 'ead with the flat of his sword. Down
+comes Glass's rifle with language to correspond, and he fiddles with the
+bolt. Up jumps Maclean--'oo was a Gosport 'ighlander--an' lands on Glass's
+neck, thus bringin' him to the deck, fully extended.
+
+"The old man makes a great show o' wakin' up from sweet slumbers. 'Mistah
+Ducane,' he says, 'what is this painful interregnum?' or words to that
+effect. Ducane takes one step to the front, an' salutes: 'Only 'nother
+case of attempted assassination, Sir,' he says.
+
+"'Is that all?' says the old man, while Maclean sits on Glass's collar
+button. 'Take him away,' 'e says, 'he knows the penalty.'"
+
+"Ah! I suppose that is the 'invincible _morgue_ Britannic in the presence
+of brutally provoked mutiny,'" I muttered, as I turned over the pages of
+M. de C.
+
+"So, Glass, 'e was led off kickin' an' squealin', an' hove down the ladder
+into 'is Sergeant's volupshus arms. 'E run Glass forward, an' was all for
+puttin' 'im in irons as a maniac.
+
+"'You refill your waterjacket and cool off!' says Glass, sittin' down
+rather winded. 'The trouble with you is you haven't any imagination.'
+
+"'Haven't I? I've got the remnants of a little poor authority though,' 'e
+says, lookin' pretty vicious.
+
+"'You 'ave?' says Glass. 'Then for pity's sake 'ave some proper feelin'
+too. I'm goin' to be shot this evenin'. You'll take charge o' the firin'-
+party.'
+
+"Some'ow or other, that made the Sergeant froth at the mouth. 'E 'ad no
+more play to his intellects than a spit-kid. 'E just took everything as it
+come. Well, that was about all, I think.... Unless you'd care to have me
+resume my narrative."
+
+We resumed on the old terms, but with rather less hot water. The marine on
+the floor breathed evenly, and Mr. Pyecroft nodded.
+
+"I may have omitted to inform you that our Number One took a general row
+round the situation while the small-arm party was at work, an' o' course
+he supplied the outlines; but the details we coloured in by ourselves.
+These were our tattics to baffle Antonio. It occurs to the Carpenter to
+'ave the steam-cutter down for repairs. 'E gets 'is cheero-party together,
+an' down she comes. You've never seen a steam-cutter let down on the deck,
+'ave you? It's not usual, an' she takes a lot o' humourin'. Thus we 'ave
+the starboard side completely blocked an' the general traffic tricklin'
+over'ead along the fore-an'-aft bridge. Then Chips gets into her an'
+begins balin' out a mess o' small reckonin's on the deck. Simultaneous
+there come up three o' those dirty engine-room objects which we call
+'tiffies,' an' a stoker or two with orders to repair her steamin'-gadgets.
+_They_ get into her an' bale out another young Christmas-treeful of small
+reckonin's--brass mostly. Simultaneous it hits the Pusser that 'e'd better
+serve out mess pork for the poor matlow. These things half shifted
+Retallick, our chief cook, off 'is bed-plate. Yes, you might say they
+broke 'im wide open. 'E wasn't at all used to 'em.
+
+"Number One tells off five or six prime, able-bodied seamen-gunners to the
+pork barrels. You never see pork fisted out of its receptacle, 'ave you?
+Simultaneous, it hits the Gunner that now's the day an' now's the hour for
+a non-continuous class in Maxim instruction. So they all give way
+together, and the general effect was _non plus ultra_. There was the
+cutter's innards spread out like a Fratton pawnbroker's shop; there was
+the 'tiffies' hammerin' in the stern of 'er, an' _they_ ain't antiseptic;
+there was the Maxim class in light skirmishin' order among the pork, an'
+forrard the blacksmith had 'is forge in full blast, makin' 'orse-shoes, I
+suppose. Well, that accounts for the starboard side. The on'y warrant
+officer 'oo hadn't a look in so far was the Bosun. So 'e stated, all out
+of 'is own 'ead, that Chips's reserve o' wood an' timber, which Chips 'ad
+stole at our last refit, needed restowin'. It was on the port booms--a
+young an' healthy forest of it, for Charley Peace wasn't to be named
+'longside o' Chips for burglary.
+
+"'All right,' says our Number One. 'You can 'ave the whole port watch if
+you like. Hell's Hell,' 'e says, 'an when there study to improve.'
+
+"Jarvis was our Bosun's name. He hunted up the 'ole of the port watch by
+hand, as you might say, callin' 'em by name loud an' lovin', which is not
+precisely Navy makee-pigeon. They 'ad that timber-loft off the booms, an'
+they dragged it up and down like so many sweatin' little beavers. But
+Jarvis was jealous o' Chips an' went round the starboard side to envy at
+him.
+
+"'Tain't enough,' 'e says, when he had climbed back. 'Chips 'as got his
+bazaar lookin' like a coal-hulk in a cyclone. We must adop' more drastic
+measures.' Off 'e goes to Number One and communicates with 'im. Number One
+got the old man's leave, on account of our goin' so slow (we were keepin'
+be'ind the tramp), to fit the ship with a full set of patent supernumerary
+sails. Four trysails--yes, you might call 'em trysails--was our Admiralty
+allowance in the un'eard of event of a cruiser breakin' down, but we had
+our awnin's as well. They was all extricated from the various flats an'
+'oles where they was stored, an' at the end o' two hours' hard work Number
+One 'e made out eleven sails o' different sorts and sizes. I don't know
+what exact nature of sail you'd call 'em--pyjama-stun'sles with a touch of
+Sarah's shimmy, per'aps--but the riggin' of 'em an' all the supernumerary
+details, as you might say, bein' carried on through an' over an' between
+the cutter an' the forge an' the pork an' cleanin' guns, an' the Maxim
+class an' the Bosun's calaboose _and_ the paintwork, was sublime. There's
+no other word for it. Sub-lime!
+
+"The old man keeps swimmin' up an' down through it all with the faithful
+Antonio at 'is side, fetchin' him numerous splits. 'E had eight that
+mornin', an' when Antonio was detached to get 'is spy-glass, or his
+gloves, or his lily-white 'andkerchief, the old man man would waste 'em
+down a ventilator. Antonio must ha' learned a lot about our Navy thirst."
+
+"He did."
+
+"Ah! Would you kindly mind turnin' to the precise page indicated an'
+givin' me a _resume_ of 'is tattics?" said Mr. Pyecroft, drinking deeply.
+"I'd like to know 'ow it looked from 'is side o' the deck."
+
+"How will this do?" I said. "'_Once clear of the land, like Voltaire's
+Habakkuk_------"'
+
+"One o' their new commerce-destroyers, I suppose," Mr. Pyecroft
+interjected.
+
+"'--_each man seemed veritably capable of all--to do according to his
+will. The boats, dismantled and forlorn, are lowered upon the planking.
+One cries "Aid me!" flourishing at the same time the weapons of his
+business. A dozen launch themselves upon him in the orgasm of zeal
+misdirected. He beats them off with the howlings of dogs. He has lost a
+hammer. This ferocious outcry signifies that only. Eight men seek the
+utensil, colliding on the way with some many others which, seated in the
+stern of the boat, tear up and scatter upon the planking the ironwork
+which impedes their brutal efforts. Elsewhere, one detaches from on high
+wood, canvas, iron bolts, coal-dust--what do I know_?'"
+
+"That's where 'e's comin' the bloomin' _onjeuew_. 'E knows a lot, reely."
+
+"'_They descend thundering upon the planking, and the spectacle cannot
+reproduce itself. In my capacity of valet to the captain, whom I have well
+and beautifully plied with drink since the rising of the sun (behold me
+also, Ganymede!) I pass throughout observing, it may be not a little. They
+ask orders. There is none to give them. One sits upon the edge of the
+vessel and chants interminably the lugubrious "Roule Britannia"--to endure
+how lomg_?'"
+
+"That was me! On'y 'twas 'A Life on the Ocean Wave'--which I hate more
+than any stinkin' tune I know, havin' dragged too many nasty little guns
+to it. Yes, Number One told me off to that for ten minutes; an' I ain't
+musical, you might say."
+
+"_'Then come marines, half-dressed, seeking vainly through this "tohu-
+bohu_"' (that's one of his names for the _Archimandrite_, Mr. Pyecroft),
+'_for a place whence they shall not be dislodged. The captain, heavy with
+drink, rolls himself from his hammock. He would have his people fire the
+Maxims. They demand which Maxim. That to him is equal. The breech-lock
+indispensable is not there. They demand it of one who opens a barrel of
+pork, for this Navy feeds at all hours. He refers them to the cook,
+yesterday my master_--'"
+
+"Yes, an' Retallick nearly had a fit. What a truthful an' observin' little
+Antonio we 'ave!"
+
+"'_It is discovered in the hands of a boy who says, and they do not rebuke
+him, that he has found it by hazard_.' I'm afraid I haven't translated
+quite correctly, Mr. Pyecroft, but I've done my best."
+
+"Why, it's beautiful--you ought to be a Frenchman--you ought. You don't
+want anything o' _me_. You've got it all there."
+
+"Yes, but I like your side of it. For instance. Here's a little thing I
+can't quite see the end of. Listen! '_Of the domain which Britannia rules
+by sufferance, my gross captain, knew nothing, and his Navigator, if
+possible, less. From the bestial recriminations and the indeterminate
+chaos of the grand deck, I ascended--always with a whisky-and-soda in my
+hands--to a scene truly grotesque. Behold my captain in plain sea, at
+issue with his Navigator! A crisis of nerves due to the enormous quantity
+of alcohol which he had swallowed up to then, has filled for him the ocean
+with dangers, imaginary and fantastic. Incapable of judgment, menaced by
+the phantasms of his brain inflamed, he envisages islands perhaps of the
+Hesperides beneath his keel--vigias innumerable.'_ I don't know what a
+vigia is, Mr. Pyecroft. _'He creates shoals sad and far-reaching of the
+mid-Atlantic!'_ What was that, now?"
+
+"Oh, I see! That come after dinner, when our Navigator threw 'is cap down
+an' danced on it. Danby was quartermaster. They 'ad a tea-party on the
+bridge. It was the old man's contribution. Does he say anything about the
+leadsmen?"
+
+"Is this it? _'Overborne by his superior's causeless suspicion, the
+Navigator took off the badges of his rank and cast them at the feet of my
+captain and sobbed. A disgusting and maudlin reconciliation followed. The
+argument renewed itself, each grasping the wheel, crapulous'_ (that means
+drunk, I think, Mr. Pyecroft), _'shouting. It appeared that my captain
+would chenaler'_ (I don't know what that means, Mr. Pyecroft) _'to the
+Cape. At the end, he placed a sailor with the sound'_ (that's the lead, I
+think) _'in his hand, garnished with suet.'_ Was it garnished with suet?"
+
+"He put two leadsmen in the chains, o' course! He didn't know that there
+mightn't be shoals there, 'e said. Morgan went an' armed his lead, to
+enter into the spirit o' the thing. They 'eaved it for twenty minutes, but
+there wasn't any suet--only tallow, o' course."
+
+"'_Garnished with suet at two thousand metres of profundity. Decidedly the
+Britannic Navy is well guarded_.' Well, that's all right, Mr. Pyecroft.
+Would you mind telling me anything else of interest that happened?"
+
+"There was a good deal, one way an' another. I'd like to know what this
+Antonio thought of our sails."
+
+"He merely says that '_the engines having broken down, an officer
+extemporised a mournful and useless parody of sails_.' Oh, yes! he says
+that some of them looked like '_bonnets in a needlecase_,' I think."
+
+"Bonnets in a needlecase! They were stun'sles. That shows the beggar's no
+sailor. That trick was really the one thing we did. Pho! I thought he was
+a sailorman, an' 'e hasn't sense enough to see what extemporisin' eleven
+good an' drawin' sails out o' four trys'les an' a few awnin's means. 'E
+must have been drunk!"
+
+"Never mind, Mr. Pyecroft. I want to hear about your target-practice, and
+the execution."
+
+"Oh! We had a special target-practice that afternoon all for Antonio. As I
+told my crew--me bein' captain of the port-bow quick-firer, though I'm a
+torpedo man now--it just showed how you can work your gun under any
+discomforts. A shell--twenty six-inch shells--burstin' inboard couldn't
+'ave begun to make the varicose collection o' tit-bits which we had
+spilled on our deck. It was a lather--a rich, creamy lather!
+
+"We took it very easy--that gun-practice. We did it in a complimentary
+'Jenny-'ave-another-cup-o' tea' style, an' the crew was strictly ordered
+not to rupture 'emselves with unnecessary exertion. This isn't our custom
+in the Navy when we're _in puris naturalibus_, as you might say. But we
+wasn't so then. We was impromptu. An' Antonio was busy fetchin' splits for
+the old man, and the old man was wastin' 'em down the ventilators. There
+must 'ave been four inches in the bilges, I should think--wardroom whisky-
+an'-soda.
+
+"Then I thought I might as well bear a hand as look pretty. So I let my
+_bundoop_ go at fifteen 'undred--sightin' very particular. There was a
+sort of 'appy little belch like--no more, I give you my word--an' the
+shell trundled out maybe fifty feet an' dropped into the deep Atlantic.
+
+"'Government powder, Sir!' sings out our Gunnery Jack to the bridge,
+laughin' horrid sarcastic; an' then, of course, we all laughs, which we
+are not encouraged to do _in puris naturalibus_. Then, of course, I saw
+what our Gunnery Jack 'ad been after with his subcutaneous details in the
+magazines all the mornin' watch. He had redooced the charges to a minimum,
+as you might say. But it made me feel a trifle faint an' sickish
+notwithstanding this spit-in-the-eye business. Every time such transpired,
+our Gunnery Lootenant would say somethin' sarcastic about Government
+stores, an' the old man fair howled. 'Op was on the bridge with 'im, an'
+'e told me--'cause 'e's a free-knowledgeist an' reads character--that
+Antonio's face was sweatin' with pure joy. 'Op wanted to kick him. Does
+Antonio say anything about that?"
+
+"Not about the kicking, but he is great on the gun-practice, Mr. Pyecroft.
+He has put all the results into a sort of appendix--a table of shots. He
+says that the figures will speak more eloquently than words."
+
+"What? Nothin' about the way the crews flinched an' hopped? Nothin' about
+the little shells rumblin' out o' the guns so casual?"
+
+"There are a few pages of notes, but they only bear out what you say. He
+says that these things always happen as soon as one of our ships is out of
+sight of land. Oh, yes! I've forgotten. He says, _'From the conversation
+of my captain with his inferiors I gathered that no small proportion of
+the expense of these nominally efficient cartridges finds itself in his
+pockets. So much, indeed, was signified by an officer on the deck below,
+who cried in a high voice: "I hope, Sir, you are making something out of
+it. It is rather monotonous." This insult, so flagrant, albeit well-
+merited, was received with a smile of drunken bonhommy'_--that's
+cheerfulness, Mr. Pyecroft. Your glass is empty."
+
+"Resumin' afresh," said Mr. Pyecroft, after a well-watered interval, "I
+may as well say that the target-practice occupied us two hours, and then
+we had to dig out after the tramp. Then we half an' three-quarters cleaned
+up the decks an' mucked about as requisite, haulin' down the patent awnin'
+stun'sles which Number One 'ad made. The old man was a shade doubtful of
+his course, 'cause I 'eard him say to Number One, 'You were right. A week
+o' this would turn the ship into a Hayti bean-feast. But,' he says
+pathetic, 'haven't they backed the band noble?'
+
+"'Oh! it's a picnic for them,' says Number One.
+
+"'But when do we get rid o' this whisky-peddlin' blighter o' yours, Sir?'
+
+"'That's a cheerful way to speak of a Viscount,' says the old man. "E's
+the bluest blood o' France when he's at home,'
+
+"'Which is the precise landfall I wish 'im to make,' says Number One.'
+It'll take all 'ands and the Captain of the Head to clean up after 'im.'
+
+"'They won't grudge it,' says the old man. 'Just as soon as it's dusk
+we'll overhaul our tramp friend an' waft him over,'
+
+"Then a sno--midshipman--Moorshed was is name--come up an' says somethin'
+in a low voice. It fetches the old man.
+
+"'You'll oblige me,' 'e says, 'by takin' the wardroom poultry for _that_.
+I've ear-marked every fowl we've shipped at Madeira, so there can't be any
+possible mistake. M'rover,' 'e says, 'tell 'em if they spill one drop of
+blood on the deck,' he says, 'they'll not be extenuated, but hung.'
+
+"Mr. Moorshed goes forward, lookin' unusual 'appy, even for him. The
+Marines was enjoyin' a committee-meetin' in their own flat.
+
+"After that, it fell dark, with just a little streaky, oily light on the
+sea--an' any thin' more chronic than the _Archimandrite_ I'd trouble you
+to behold. She looked like a fancy bazaar and a auction-room--yes, she
+almost looked like a passenger-steamer. We'd picked up our tramp, an' was
+about four mile be'ind 'er. I noticed the wardroom as a class, you might
+say, was manoeuvrin' _en masse_, an' then come the order to cockbill the
+yards. We hadn't any yards except a couple o' signallin' sticks, but we
+cock-billed 'em. I hadn't seen that sight, not since thirteen years in the
+West Indies, when a post-captain died o' yellow jack. It means a sign o'
+mourning the yards bein' canted opposite ways, to look drunk an'
+disorderly. They do.
+
+"'An' what might our last giddy-go-round signify?' I asks of 'Op.
+
+"'Good 'Evins!' 'e says, 'Are you in that habit o' permittin' leathernecks
+to assassinate lootenants every morning at drill without immejitly 'avin'
+'em shot on the foc'sle in the horrid crawly-crawly twilight?'"
+
+"'Yes,' I murmured over my dear book, '_the infinitely lugubrious
+crepuscule. A spectacle of barbarity unparalleled--hideous--cold-blooded,
+and yet touched with appalling grandeur_.'"
+
+"Ho! Was that the way Antonio looked at it? That shows he 'ad feelin's. To
+resoom. Without anyone givin' us orders to that effect, we began to creep
+about an' whisper. Things got stiller and stiller, till they was as still
+as--mushrooms! Then the bugler let off the 'Dead March' from the upper
+bridge. He done it to cover the remarks of a cock-bird bein' killed
+forrard, but it came out paralysin' in its _tout ensemble_. You never
+heard the 'Dead March' on a bugle? Then the pipes went twitterin' for both
+watches to attend public execution, an' we came up like so many ghosts,
+the 'ole ship's company. Why, Mucky 'Arcourt, one o' our boys, was that
+took in he give tongue like a beagle-pup, an' was properly kicked down the
+ladder for so doin'. Well, there we lay--engines stopped, rollin' to the
+swell, all dark, yards cock-billed, an' that merry tune yowlin' from the
+upper bridge. We fell in on the foc'sle, leavin' a large open space by the
+capstan, where our sail-maker was sittin' sewin' broken firebars into the
+foot of an old 'ammick. 'E looked like a corpse, an' Mucky had another fit
+o' hysterics, an' you could 'ear us breathin' 'ard. It beat anythin' in
+the theatrical line that even us _Archimandrites_ had done--an' we was the
+ship you could trust. Then come the doctor an' lit a red lamp which he
+used for his photographic muckin's, an' chocked it on the capstan. That
+was finally gashly!
+
+"Then come twelve Marines guardin' Glass 'ere. You wouldn't think to see
+'im what a gratooitous an' aboundin' terror he was that evenin'. 'E was in
+a white shirt 'e'd stole from Cockburn, an' his regulation trousers,
+barefooted. 'E'd pipe-clayed 'is 'ands an' face an' feet an' as much of
+his chest as the openin' of his shirt showed. 'E marched under escort with
+a firm an' undeviatin' step to the capstan, an' came to attention. The old
+man reinforced by an extra strong split--his seventeenth, an' 'e didn't
+throw _that_ down the ventilator--come up on the bridge an' stood like a
+image. 'Op, 'oo was with 'im, says that 'e heard Antonio's teeth singin',
+not chatterin'--singin' like funnel-stays in a typhoon. Yes, a moanin'
+aeolian harp, 'Op said.
+
+"'When you are ready, Sir, drop your 'andkerchief,' Number One whispers.
+
+"'Good Lord!' says the old man, with a jump. 'Eh! What? What a sight! What
+a sight!' an' he stood drinkin' it in, I suppose, for quite two minutes.
+
+"Glass never says a word. 'E shoved aside an 'andkerchief which the
+sub-lootenant proffered 'im to bind 'is eyes with--quiet an' collected;
+an' if we 'adn't been feelin' so very much as we did feel, his gestures
+would 'ave brought down the 'ouse." "I can't open my eyes, or I'll be
+sick," said the Marine with appalling clearness. "I'm pretty far gone--I
+know it--but there wasn't anyone could 'ave beaten Edwardo Glass,
+R.M.L.I., that time. Why, I scared myself nearly into the 'orrors. Go on,
+Pye. Glass is in support--as ever."
+
+"Then the old man drops 'is 'andkerchief, an' the firin'-party fires like
+one man. Glass drops forward, twitchin' an' 'eavin' horrid natural, into
+the shotted 'ammick all spread out before him, and the firin' party closes
+in to guard the remains of the deceased while Sails is stitchin' it up.
+An' when they lifted that 'ammick it was one wringin' mess of blood! They
+on'y expended one wardroom cock-bird, too. Did you know poultry bled that
+extravagant? _I_ never did.
+
+"The old man--so 'Op told me--stayed on the bridge, brought up on a dead
+centre. Number One was similarly, though lesser, impressed, but o' course
+'is duty was to think of 'is fine white decks an' the blood. 'Arf a mo',
+Sir,' he says, when the old man was for leavin'. 'We have to wait for the
+burial, which I am informed takes place immejit.'
+
+"'It's beyond me,' says the owner. 'There was general instructions for an
+execution, but I never knew I had such a dependable push of mountebanks
+aboard,' he says. 'I'm all cold up my back, still.'
+
+"The Marines carried the corpse below. Then the bugle give us some more
+'Dead March,' Then we 'eard a splash from a bow six-pounder port, an' the
+bugle struck up a cheerful tune. The whole lower deck was complimentin'
+Glass, 'oo took it very meek. 'E _is_ a good actor, for all 'e's a
+leatherneck.
+
+"'Now,' said the old man, 'we must turn over Antonio. He's in what I have
+'eard called one perspirin' funk.'
+
+"Of course, I'm tellin' it slow, but it all 'appened much quicker. We run
+down our trampo--without o' course informin' Antonio of 'is 'appy destiny
+--an' inquired of 'er if she had any use for a free and gratis stowaway.
+Oh, yes? she said she'd be highly grateful, but she seemed a shade puzzled
+at our generosity, as you might put it, an' we lay by till she lowered a
+boat. Then Antonio--who was un'appy, distinctly un'appy--was politely
+requested to navigate elsewhere, which I don't think he looked for. 'Op
+was deputed to convey the information, an' 'Op got in one sixteen-inch
+kick which 'oisted 'im all up the ladder. 'Op ain't really vindictive, an'
+'e's fond of the French, especially the women, but his chances o' kicking
+lootenants was like the cartridge--reduced to a minimum.
+
+"The boat 'adn't more than shoved off before a change, as you might say,
+came o'er the spirit of our dream. The old man says, like Elphinstone an'
+Bruce in the Portsmouth election when I was a boy: 'Gentlemen,' he says,
+'for gentlemen you have shown yourselves to be--from the bottom of my
+heart I thank you. The status an' position of our late lamented shipmate
+made it obligate,' 'e says, 'to take certain steps not strictly included
+in the regulations. An' nobly,' says 'e, 'have you assisted me. Now,' 'e
+says, 'you hold the false and felonious reputation of bein' the smartest
+ship in the Service. Pigsties,' 'e says,' is plane trigonometry alongside
+our present disgustin' state. Efface the effects of this indecent orgy,'
+he says. 'Jump, you lop-eared, flat-footed, butter-backed Amalekites! Dig
+out, you briny-eyed beggars!'"
+
+"Do captains talk like that in the Navy, Mr. Pyecroft?" I asked.
+
+"I've told you once I only give the grist of his arguments. The Bosun's
+mate translates it to the lower deck, as you may put it, and the lower
+deck springs smartly to attention. It took us half the night 'fore we got
+'er anyway ship-shape; but by sunrise she was beautiful as ever, and we
+resoomed. I've thought it over a lot since; yes, an' I've thought a lot of
+Antonio trimmin' coal in that tramp's bunkers. 'E must 'ave been highly
+surprised. Wasn't he?"
+
+"He was, Mr. Pyecroft," I responded. "But now we're talking of it, weren't
+you all a little surprised?"
+
+"It come as a pleasant relief to the regular routine," said Mr. Pyecroft.
+"We appreciated it as an easy way o' workin' for your country. But--the
+old man was right--a week o' similar manoeuvres would 'ave knocked our
+moral double-bottoms bung out. Now, couldn't you oblige with Antonio's
+account of Glass's execution?"
+
+I obliged for nearly ten minutes. It was at best but a feeble rendering of
+M. de C.'s magnificent prose, through which the soul of the poet, the eye
+of the mariner, and the heart of the patriot bore magnificent accord. His
+account of his descent from the side of the "_infamous vessel consecrated
+to blood_" in the "_vast and gathering dusk of the trembling ocean_" could
+only be matched by his description of the dishonoured hammock sinking
+unnoticed through the depths, while, above, the bugler played music "_of
+an indefinable brutality_"
+
+"By the way, what did the bugler play after Glass's funeral?" I asked.
+
+"Him? Oh! 'e played 'The Strict Q.T.' It's a very old song. We 'ad it in
+Fratton nearly fifteen years back," said Mr. Pyecroft sleepily.
+
+I stirred the sugar dregs in my glass. Suddenly entered armed men, wet and
+discourteous, Tom Wessels smiling nervously in the background.
+
+"Where is that--minutely particularised person--Glass?" said the sergeant
+of the picket.
+
+"'Ere!" The marine rose to the strictest of attentions. "An' it's no good
+smelling of my breath, because I'm strictly an' ruinously sober."
+
+"Oh! An' what may you have been doin' with yourself?"
+
+"Listenin' to tracts. You can look! I've had the evenin' of my little
+life. Lead on to the _Cornucopia's_ midmost dunjing cell. There's a crowd
+of brass-'atted blighters there which will say I've been absent without
+leaf. Never mind. I forgive them before'and. _The_ evenin' of my life, an'
+please don't forget it." Then in a tone of most ingratiating apology to
+me: "I soaked it all in be'ind my shut eyes. 'I'm"--he jerked a
+contemptuous thumb towards Mr. Pyecroft--"'e's a flatfoot, a indigo-blue
+matlow. 'E never saw the fun from first to last. A mournful beggar--most
+depressin'." Private Glass departed, leaning heavily on the escort's arm.
+
+Mr. Pyecroft wrinkled his brows in thought--the profound and far-reaching
+meditation that follows five glasses of hot whisky-and-water.
+
+"Well, I don't see anything comical--greatly--except here an' there.
+Specially about those redooced charges in the guns. Do _you_ see anything
+funny in it?"
+
+There was that in his eye which warned me the night was too wet for
+argument.
+
+"No, Mr. Pyecroft, I don't," I replied. "It was a beautiful tale, and I
+thank you very much."
+
+
+
+
+A SAHIBS' WAR
+
+THE RUNNERS
+
+                                   _News!_
+  What is the word that they tell now--now--now!
+  The little drums beating in the bazaars?
+      _They_ beat (among the buyers and sellers)
+          _"Nimrud--ah Nimrud!
+          God sends a gnat against Nimrud_!"
+      Watchers, O Watchers a thousand!
+
+                                   _News!_
+  At the edge of the crops--now--now--where the well-wheels are halted,
+  One prepares to loose the bullocks and one scrapes his hoe,
+      _They_ beat (among the sowers and the reapers)
+          _"Nimrud--ah Nimrud!
+          God prepares an ill day for Nimrud_!"
+      Watchers, O Watchers ten thousand.
+
+                                   _News!_
+  By the fires of the camps--now--now--where the travellers meet
+  Where the camels come in and the horses: their men conferring,
+      _They_ beat (among the packmen and the drivers)
+          _"Nimrud--ah Nimrud!
+          Thus it befell last noon to Nimrud_!"
+      Watchers, O Watchers an hundred thousand!
+
+                                   _News!_
+  Under the shadow of the border-peels--now--now--now!
+  In the rocks of the passes where the expectant shoe their horses,
+      _They_ beat (among the rifles and the riders)
+          _"Nimrud--ah Nimrud!
+          Shall we go up against Nimrud_?"
+      Watchers, O Watchers a thousand thousand?
+
+                                   _News!_
+  Bring out the heaps of grain--open the account-books again!
+  Drive forward the well-bullocks against the taxable harvest!
+  Eat and lie under the trees--pitch the police-guarded  fair-grounds,
+      O dancers!
+  Hide away the rifles and let down the ladders from the watch-towers!
+      _They_ beat (among all the peoples)
+          _"Now--now--now!
+          God has reserved the Sword for Nimrud!
+          God has given Victory to Nimrud!"
+          Let us abide under Nimrud_!"
+      O Well-disposed and Heedful, an hundred thousand thousand!
+
+
+A SAHIBS' WAR
+
+Pass? Pass? Pass? I have one pass already, allowing me to go by the _rel_
+from Kroonstadt to Eshtellenbosch, where the horses are, where I am to be
+paid off, and whence I return to India. I am a--trooper of the Gurgaon
+Rissala (cavalry regiment), the One Hundred and Forty-first Punjab
+Cavalry, Do not herd me with these black Kaffirs. I am a Sikh--a trooper
+of the State. The Lieutenant-Sahib does not understand my talk? Is there
+_any_ Sahib on the train who will interpret for a trooper of the Gurgaon
+Rissala going about his business in this devil's devising of a country,
+where there is no flour, no oil, no spice, no red pepper, and no respect
+paid to a Sikh? Is there no help?... God be thanked, here is such a Sahib!
+Protector of the Poor! Heaven-born! Tell the young Lieutenant-Sahib that
+my name is Umr Singh; I am--I was servant to Kurban Sahib, now dead; and I
+have a pass to go to Eshtellenbosch, where the horses are. Do not let him
+herd me with these black Kaffirs!... Yes,  I will sit by this truck till
+the Heaven-born has explained the matter to the young Lieutenant-Sahib who
+does not understand our tongue.
+
+*       *       *       *       *
+
+What orders? The young Lieutenant-Sahib will not detain me? Good! I go
+down to Eshtellenbosch by the next _terain_? Good! I go with the Heaven-
+born? Good! Then for this day I am the Heaven-born's servant. Will the
+Heaven-born bring the honour of his presence to a seat? Here is an empty
+truck; I will spread my blanket over one corner thus--for the sun is hot,
+though not so hot as our Punjab in May. I will prop it up thus, and I will
+arrange this hay thus, so the Presence can sit at ease till God sends us a
+_terain_ for Eshtellenbosch....
+
+The Presence knows the Punjab? Lahore? Amritzar? Attaree, belike? My
+village is north over the fields three miles from Attaree, near the big
+white house which was copied from a certain place of the Great Queen's by
+--by--I have forgotten the name. Can the Presence recall it? Sirdar Dyal
+Singh Attareewalla! Yes, that is the very man; but how does the Presence
+know? Born and bred in Hind, was he? O-o-oh! This is quite a different
+matter. The Sahib's nurse was a Surtee woman from the Bombay side? That
+was a pity. She should have been an up-country wench; for those make stout
+nurses. There is no land like the Punjab. There are no people like the
+Sikhs. Umr Singh is my name, yes. An old man? Yes. A trooper only after
+all these years? Ye-es. Look at my uniform, if the Sahib doubts. Nay--nay;
+the Sahib looks too closely. All marks of rank were picked off it long
+ago, but--but it is true--mine is not a common cloth such as troopers use
+for their coats, and--the Sahib has sharp eyes--that black mark is such a
+mark as a silver chain leaves when long worn on the breast. The Sahib says
+that troopers do not wear silver chains? No-o. Troopers do not wear the
+Arder of Beritish India? No. The Sahib should have been in the Police of
+the Punjab. I am not a trooper, but I have been a Sahib's servant for
+nearly a year--bearer, butler, sweeper, any and all three. The Sahib says
+that Sikhs do not take menial service? True; but it was for Kurban Sahib--
+my Kurban Sahib--dead these three months!
+
+*       *       *       *       *
+
+Young--of a reddish face--with blue eyes, and he lilted a little on his
+feet when he was pleased, and cracked his finger-joints. So did his father
+before him, who was Deputy-Commissioner of Jullundur in my father's time
+when I rode with the Gurgaon Rissala. _My_ father? Jwala Singh. A Sikh of
+Sikhs--he fought against the English at Sobraon and carried the mark to
+his death. So we were knit as it were by a blood-tie, I and my Kurban
+Sahib. Yes, I was a trooper first--nay, I had risen to a Lance-Duffadar, I
+remember--and my father gave me a dun stallion of his own breeding on that
+day; and _he_ was a little baba, sitting upon a wall by the parade-ground
+with his ayah--all in white, Sahib--laughing at the end of our drill. And
+his father and mine talked together, and mine beckoned to me, and I
+dismounted, and the baba put his hand into mine--eighteen--twenty-five--
+twenty-seven years gone now--Kurban Sahib--my Kurban Sahib! Oh, we were
+great friends after that! He cut his teeth on my sword-hilt, as the saying
+is. He called me Big Umr Singh--Buwwa Umwa Singh, for he could not speak
+plain. He stood only this high, Sahib, from the bottom of this truck, but
+he knew all our troopers by name--every one.... And he went to England,
+and he became a young man, and back he came, lilting a little in his walk,
+and cracking his finger-joints--back to his own regiment and to me. He had
+not forgotten either our speech or our customs. He was a Sikh at heart,
+Sahib. He was rich, open-handed, just, a friend of poor troopers, keen-
+eyed, jestful, and careless. _I_ could tell tales about him in his first
+years. There was very little he hid from _me_. I was his Umr Singh, and
+when we were alone he called me Father, and I called him Son. Yes, that
+was how we spoke. We spoke freely together on everything--about war, and
+women, and money, and advancement, and such all.
+
+We spoke about this war, too, long before it came. There were many box-
+wallas, pedlars, with Pathans a few, in this country, notably at the city
+of Yunasbagh (Johannesburg), and they sent news in every week how the
+Sahibs lay without weapons under the heel of the Boer-log; and how big
+guns were hauled up and down the streets to keep Sahibs in order; and how
+a Sahib called Eger Sahib (Edgar?) was killed for a jest by the Boer-log.
+The Sahib knows how we of Hind hear all that passes over the earth? There
+was not a gun cocked in Yunasbagh that the echo did not come into Hind in
+a month. The Sahibs are very clever, but they forget their own cleverness
+has created the _dak_ (the post), and that for an anna or two all things
+become known. We of Hind listened and heard and wondered; and when it was
+a sure thing, as reported by the pedlars and the vegetable-sellers, that
+the Sahibs of Yunasbagh lay in bondage to the Boer-log, certain among us
+asked questions and waited for signs. Others of us mistook the meaning of
+those signs. _Wherefore, Sahib, came the long war in the Tirah_! This
+Kurban Sahib knew, and we talked together. He said, "There is no haste.
+Presently we shall fight, and we shall fight for all Hind in that country
+round Yunasbagh. Here he spoke truth. Does the Sahib not agree? Quite so.
+It is for Hind that the Sahibs are fighting this war. Ye cannot in one
+place rule and in another bear service. Either ye must everywhere rule or
+everywhere obey. God does not make the nations ringstraked. True--true--
+true!"
+
+So did matters ripen--a step at a time. It was nothing to me, except I
+think--and the Sahib sees this, too?--that it is foolish to make an army
+and break their hearts in idleness. Why have they not sent for men of the
+Tochi--the men of the Tirah--the men of Buner? Folly, a thousand times.
+_We_ could have done it all so gently--so gently.
+
+Then, upon a day, Kurban Sahib sent for me and said, "Ho, Dada, I am sick,
+and the doctor gives me a certificate for many months." And he winked, and
+I said, "I will get leave and nurse thee, Child. Shall I bring my
+uniform?" He said, "Yes, and a sword for a sick man to lean on. We go to
+Bombay, and thence by sea to the country of the Hubshis" (niggers). Mark
+his cleverness! He was first of all our men among the native regiments to
+get leave for sickness and to come here. Now they will not let our
+officers go away, sick or well, except they sign a bond not to take part
+in this war-game upon the road. But _he_ was clever. There was no whisper
+of war when he took his sick-leave. I came also? Assuredly. I went to my
+Colonel, and sitting in the chair (I am--I was--of that rank for which a
+chair is placed when we speak with the Colonel) I said, "My child goes
+sick. Give me leave, for I am old and sick also."
+
+And the Colonel, making the word double between English and our tongue,
+said, "Yes, thou art truly _Sikh_"; and he called me an old devil--
+jestingly, as one soldier may jest with another; and he said my Kurban
+Sahib was a liar as to his health (that was true, too), and at long last
+he stood up and shook my hand, and bade me go and bring my Sahib safe
+again. My Sahib back again--aie me!
+
+So I went to Bombay with Kurban Sahib, but there, at sight of the Black
+Water, Wajib Ali, his bearer checked, and said that his mother was dead.
+Then I said to Kurban Sahib, "What is one Mussulman pig more or less? Give
+me the keys of the trunks, and I will lay out the white shirts for
+dinner." Then I beat Wajib Ali at the back of Watson's Hotel, and that
+night I prepared Kurban Sahib's razors. I say, Sahib, that I, a Sikh of
+the Khalsa, an unshorn man, prepared the razors. But I did not put on my
+uniform while I did it. On the other hand, Kurban Sahib took for me, upon
+the steamer, a room in all respects like to his own, and would have given
+me a servant. We spoke of many things on the way to this country; and
+Kurban Sahib told me what he perceived would be the conduct of the war. He
+said, "They have taken men afoot to fight men ahorse, and they will
+foolishly show mercy to these Boer-log because it is believed that they
+are white." He said, "There is but one fault in this war, and that is that
+the Government have not employed _us_, but have made it altogether a
+Sahibs' war. Very many men will thus be killed, and no vengeance will be
+taken." True talk--true talk! It fell as Kurban Sahib foretold.
+
+And we came to this country, even to Cape Town over yonder, and Kurban
+Sahib said, "Bear the baggage to the big dak-bungalow, and I will look for
+employment fit for a sick man." I put on the uniform of my rank and went to
+the big dak-bungalow, called Maun Nihal Seyn, [Footnote: Mount Nelson?]
+and I caused the heavy baggage to be bestowed in that dark lower place--is
+it known to the Sahib?--which was already full of the swords and baggage
+of officers. It is fuller now--dead men's kit all! I was careful to secure
+a receipt for all three pieces. I have it in my belt. They must go back to
+the Punjab.
+
+Anon came Kurban Sahib, lilting a little in his step, which sign I knew,
+and he said, "We are born in a fortunate hour. We go to Eshtellenbosch to
+oversee the despatch of horses." Remember, Kurban Sahib was squadron-
+leader of the Gurgaon Rissala, and _I_ was Umr Singh. So I said, speaking
+as we do--we did--when none was near, "Thou art a groom and I am a grass-
+cutter, but is this any promotion, Child?" At this he laughed, saying,
+"It is the way to better things. Have patience, Father." (Aye, he called me
+father when none were by.) "This war ends not to-morrow nor the next day.
+I have seen the new Sahibs," he said, "and they are fathers of owls--all--
+all--all!"
+
+So we went to Eshtellenbosch, where the horses are; Kurban Sahib doing the
+service of servants in that business. And the whole business was managed
+without forethought by new Sahibs from God knows where, who had never seen
+a tent pitched or a peg driven. They were full of zeal, but empty of all
+knowledge. Then came, little by little from Hind, those Pathans--they are
+just like those vultures up there, Sahib--they always follow slaughter.
+And there came to Eshtellenbosch some Sikhs--Muzbees, though--and some
+Madras monkey-men. They came with horses. Puttiala sent horses. Jhind and
+Nabha sent horses. All the nations of the Khalsa sent horses.
+
+All the ends of the earth sent horses. God knows what the army did with
+them, unless they ate them raw. They used horses as a courtesan uses oil:
+with both hands. These needed many men. Kurban Sahib appointed me to the
+command (what a command for me!) of certain woolly ones--_Hubshis_--whose
+touch and shadow are pollution. They were enormous eaters; sleeping on
+their bellies; laughing without cause; wholly like animals. Some were
+called Fingoes, and some, I think, Red Kaffirs, but they were all Kaffirs
+--filth unspeakable. I taught them to water and feed, and sweep and rub
+down. Yes, I oversaw the work of sweepers--a _jemadar_ of _mehtars_
+(headman of a refuse-gang) was I, and Kurban Sahib little better, for five
+months. Evil months! The war went as Kurban Sahib had said. Our new men
+were slain and no vengeance was taken. It was a war of fools armed with
+the weapons of magicians. Guns that slew at half a day's march, and men
+who, being new, walked blind into high grass and were driven off like
+cattle by the Boer-log! As to the city of Eshtellenbosch, I am not a
+Sahib--only a Sikh. I would have quartered one troop only of the Gurgaon
+Rissala in that city--one little troop--and I would have schooled that
+city till its men learned to kiss the shadow of a Government horse upon
+the ground. There are many _mullahs_ (priests) in Eshtellenbosch. They
+preached the Jehad against us. This is true--all the camp knew it. And
+most of the houses were thatched! A war of fools indeed!
+
+At the end of five months my Kurban Sahib, who had grown lean, said, "The
+reward has come. We go up towards the front with horses to-morrow, and,
+once away, I shall be too sick so return. Make ready the baggage." Thus we
+got away, with some Kaffirs in charge of new horses for a certain new
+regiment that had come in a ship. The second day by _terain_, when we were
+watering at a desolate place without any sort of a bazaar to it, slipped
+out from the horse-boxes one Sikander Khan, that had been a _jemadar_ of
+_saises_ (head-groom) at Eshtellenbosch, and was by service a trooper in a
+Border regiment. Kurban Sahib gave him big abuse for his desertion; but
+the Pathan put up his hands as excusing himself, and Kurban Sahib relented
+and added him to our service. So there were three of us--Kurban Sahib, I,
+and Sikander Khan--Sahib, Sikh, and _Sag_ (dog). But the man said truly,
+"We be far from our homes and both servants of the Raj. Make truce till we
+see the Indus again." I have eaten from the same dish as Sikander Khan--
+beef, too, for aught I know! He said, on the night he stole some swine's
+flesh in a tin from a mess-tent, that in his Book, the Koran, it is
+written that whoso engages in a holy war is freed from ceremonial
+obligations. Wah! He had no more religion than the sword-point picks up of
+sugar and water at baptism. He stole himself a horse at a place where
+there lay a new and very raw regiment. I also procured myself a grey
+gelding there. They let their horses stray too much, those new regiments.
+
+Some shameless regiments would indeed have made away with _our_ horses on
+the road! They exhibited indents and requisitions for horses, and once or
+twice would have uncoupled the trucks; but Kurban Sahib was wise, and I am
+not altogether a fool. There is not much honesty at the front. Notably,
+there was one congregation of hard-bitten horse-thieves; tall, light
+Sahibs, who spoke through their noses for the most part, and upon all
+occasions they said, "Oah Hell!" which, in our tongue, signifies _Jehannum
+ko jao_. They bore each man a vine-leaf upon their uniforms, and they rode
+like Rajputs. Nay, they rode like Sikhs. They rode like the Ustrelyahs!
+The Ustrelyahs, whom we met later, also spoke through their noses not
+little, and they were tall, dark men, with grey, clear eyes, heavily
+eyelashed like camel's eyes--very proper men--a new brand of Sahib to me.
+They said on all occasions, "No fee-ah," which in our tongue means _Durro
+mut_ ("Do not be afraid"), so we called them the _Durro Muts_. Dark, tall
+men, most excellent horsemen, hot and angry, waging war _as_ war, and
+drinking tea as a sandhill drinks water. Thieves? A little, Sahib.
+Sikander Khan swore to me; and he comes of a horse-stealing clan for ten
+generations; he swore a Pathan was a babe beside a _Durro Mut_ in regard
+to horse-lifting. The _Durro Muts_ cannot walk on their feet at all. They
+are like hens on the high road. Therefore they must have horses. Very
+proper men, with a just lust for the war. Aah--"No fee-ah," say the _Durro
+Muts_. _They_ saw the worth of Kurban Sahib. _They_ did not ask him to
+sweep stables. They would by no means let him go. He did substitute for
+one of their troop-leaders who had a fever, one long day in a country full
+of little hills--like the mouth of the Khaibar; and when they returned in
+the evening, the _Durro Muts_ said, "Wallah! This is a man. Steal him!" So
+they stole my Kurban Sahib as they would have stolen anything else that
+they needed, and they sent a sick officer back to Eshtellenbosch in his
+place.
+
+Thus Kurban Sahib came to his own again, and I was his bearer, and
+Sikander Khan was his cook. The law was strict that this was a Sahibs'
+war, but there was no order that a bearer and a cook should not ride with
+their Sahib--and we had naught to wear but our uniforms. We rode up and
+down this accursed country, where there is no bazaar, no pulse, no flour,
+no oil, no spice, no red pepper, no firewood; nothing but raw corn and a
+little cattle. There were no great battles as I saw it, but a plenty of
+gun-firing. When we were many, the Boer-log came out with coffee to greet
+us, and to show us _purwanas_ (permits) from foolish English Generals who
+had gone that way before, certifying they were peaceful and well-disposed.
+When we were few, they hid behind stones and shot us. Now the order was
+that they were Sahibs, and this was a Sahibs' war. Good! But, as I
+understand it, when a Sahib goes to war, he puts on the cloth of war, and
+only those who wear that cloth may take part in the war. Good! That also I
+understand. But these people were as they were in Burma, or as the Afridis
+are. They shot at their pleasure, and when pressed hid the gun and
+exhibited _purwanas_, or lay in a house and said they were farmers. Even
+such farmers as cut up the Madras troops at Hlinedatalone in Burma! Even
+such farmers as slew Cavagnari Sahib and the Guides at Kabul! We schooled
+_those_ men, to be sure--fifteen, aye, twenty of a morning pushed off the
+verandah in front of the Bala Hissar. I looked that the Jung-i-lat Sahib
+(the Commander-in-Chief) would have remembered the old days; but--no. All
+the people shot at us everywhere, and he issued proclamations saying that
+he did not fight the people, but a certain army, which army, in truth, was
+all the Boer-log, who, between them, did not wear enough of uniform to
+make a loincloth. A fool's war from first to last; for it is manifest that
+he who fights should be hung if he fights with a gun in one hand and a
+_purwana_ in the other, as did all these people. Yet we, when they had had
+their bellyful for the time, received them with honour, and gave them
+permits, and refreshed them and fed their wives and their babes, and
+severely punished our soldiers who took their fowls. So the work was to be
+done not once with a few dead, but thrice and four times over. I talked
+much with Kurban Sahib on this, and he said, "It is a Sahibs' war. That is
+the order;" and one night, when Sikander Khan would have lain out beyond
+the pickets with his knife and shown them how it is worked on the Border,
+he hit Sikander Khan between the eyes and came near to breaking in his
+head. Then Sikander Khan, a bandage over his eyes, so that he looked like
+a sick camel, talked to him half one march, and he was more bewildered
+than I, and vowed he would return to Eshtellenbosch. But privately to me
+Kurban Sahib said we should have loosed the Sikhs and the Gurkhas on these
+people till they came in with their foreheads in the dust. For the war was
+not of that sort which they comprehended.
+
+They shot us? Assuredly they shot us from houses adorned with a white
+flag; but when they came to know our custom, their widows sent word by
+Kaffir runners, and presently there was not quite so much firing. _No fee-
+ah_! All the Boer-log with whom we dealt had _purwanas_ signed by mad
+Generals attesting that they were well-disposed to the State.
+
+They had also rifles not a few, and cartridges, which they hid in the
+roof. The women wept very greatly when we burned such houses, but they did
+not approach too near after the flames had taken good hold of the thatch,
+for fear of the bursting cartridges. The women of the Boer-log are very
+clever. They are more clever than the men. The Boer-log are clever? Never,
+never, no! It is the Sahibs who are fools. For their own honour's sake the
+Sahibs must say that the Boer-log are clever; but it is the Sahibs'
+wonderful folly that has made the Boer-log. The Sahibs should have sent
+_us_ into the game.
+
+But the _Durro Muts_ did well. They dealt faithfully with all that country
+thereabouts--not in any way as we of Hind should have dealt, but they were
+not altogether fools. One night when we lay on the top of a ridge in the
+cold, I saw far away a light in a house that appeared for the sixth part
+of an hour and was obscured. Anon it appeared again thrice for the twelfth
+part of an hour. I showed this to Kurban Sahib, for it was a house that
+had been spared--the people having many permits and swearing fidelity at
+our stirrup-leathers. I said to Kurban Sahib, "Send half a troop, Child,
+and finish that house. They signal to their brethren." And he laughed
+where he lay and said, "If I listened to my bearer Umr Singh, there would
+not be left ten houses in all this land." I said, "What need to leave one?
+This is as it was in Burma. They are farmers to-day and fighters to-morrow.
+Let us deal justly with them." He laughed and curled himself up in
+his blanket, and I watched the far light in the house till day. I have
+been on the border in eight wars, not counting Burma. The first Afghan
+War; the second Afghan War; two Mahsud Waziri wars (that is four); two
+Black Mountain wars, if I remember right; the Malakand and Tirah. I do not
+count Burma, or some small things. _I_ know when house signals to house!
+
+I pushed Sikandar Khan with my foot, and he saw it too. He said, "One of
+the Boer-log who brought pumpkins for the mess, which I fried last night,
+lives in yonder house." I said, "How dost thou know?" He said, "Because he
+rode out of the camp another way, but I marked how his horse fought with
+him at the turn of the road; and before the light fell I stole out of the
+camp for evening prayer with Kurban Sahib's glasses, and from a little
+hill I saw the pied horse of that pumpkin-seller hurrying to that house."
+I said naught, but took Kurban Sahib's glasses from his greasy hands and
+cleaned them with a silk handkerchief and returned them to their case.
+Sikander Khan told me that he had been the first man in the Zenab valley
+to use glasses--whereby he finished two blood-feuds cleanly in the course
+of three months' leave. But he was otherwise a liar.
+
+That day Kurban Sahib, with some ten troopers, was sent on to spy the land
+for our camp. The _Durro Muts_ moved slowly at that time. They were
+weighted with grain and forage and carts, and they greatly wished to leave
+these all in some town and go on light to other business which pressed. So
+Kurban Sahib sought a short cut for them, a little off the line of march.
+We were twelve miles before the main body, and we came to a house under a
+high bushed hill, with a nullah, which they call a donga, behind it, and
+an old sangar of piled stones, which they call a kraal, before it. Two
+thorn bushes grew on either side of the door, like babul bushes, covered
+with a golden coloured bloom, and the roof was all of thatch. Before the
+house was a valley of stones that rose to another bush-covered hill. There
+was an old man in the verandah--an old man with a white beard and a wart
+upon the left side of his neck; and a fat woman with the eyes of a swine
+and the jowl of a swine; and a tall young man deprived of understanding.
+His head was hairless, no larger than an orange, and the pits of his
+nostrils were eaten away by a disease. He laughed and slavered and he
+sported sportively before Kurban Sahib. The man brought coffee and the
+woman showed us _purwanas_ from three General Sahibs, certifying that they
+were people of peace and goodwill. Here are the _purwanas_, Sahib. Does
+the Sahib know the Generals who signed them?
+
+They swore the land was empty of Boer-log. They held up their hands and
+swore it. That was about the time of the evening meal. I stood near the
+verandah with Sikander Khan, who was nosing like a jackal on a lost scent.
+At last he took my arm and said, "See yonder! There is the sun on the
+window of the house that signalled last night. This house can see that
+house from here," and he looked at the hill behind him all hairy with
+bushes, and sucked in his breath. Then the idiot with the shrivelled head
+danced by me and threw back that head, and regarded the roof and laughed
+like a hyena, and the fat woman talked loudly, as it were, to cover some
+noise. After this passed I to the back of the house on pretence to get
+water for tea, and I saw fresh fresh horse-dung on the ground, and that
+the ground was cut with the new marks of hoofs; and there had dropped in
+the dirt one cartridge. Then Kurban Sahib called to me in our tongue,
+saying, "Is this a good place to make tea?" and I replied, knowing what he
+meant, "There are over many cooks in the cook-house. Mount and go, Child."
+Then I returned, and he said, smiling to the woman, "Prepare food, and
+when we have loosened our girths we will come in and eat;" but to his men
+he said in a whisper, "Ride away!" No. He did not cover the old man or the
+fat woman with his rifle. That was not his custom. Some fool of the _Durro
+Muts_, being hungry, raised his voice to dispute the order to flee, and
+before we were in our saddles many shots came from the roof--from rifles
+thrust through the thatch. Upon this we rode across the valley of stones,
+and men fired at us from the nullah behind the house, and from the hill
+behind the nullah, as well as from the roof of the house--so many shots
+that it sounded like a drumming in the hills. Then Sikandar Khan, riding
+low, said, "This play is not for us alone, but for the rest of the _Durro
+Muts_," and I said, "Be quiet. Keep place!" for his place was behind me,
+and I rode behind Kurban Sahib. But these new bullets will pass through
+five men arow! We were not hit--not one of us--and we reached the hill of
+rocks and scattered among the stones, and Kurban Sahib turned in his
+saddle and said, "Look at the old man!" He stood in the verandah firing
+swiftly with a gun, the woman beside him and the idiot also--both with
+guns. Kurban Sahib laughed, and I caught him by the wrist, but--his fate
+was written at that hour. The bullet passed under my arm-pit and struck
+him in the liver, and I pulled him backward between two great rocks atilt
+--Kurban Sahib, my Kurban Sahib! From the nullah behind the house and from
+the hills came our Boer-log in number more than a hundred, and Sikandar
+Khan said, "_Now_ we see the meaning of last night's signal. Give me the
+rifle." He took Kurban Sahib's rifle--in this war of fools only the
+doctors carry swords--and lay belly-flat to the work, but Kurban Sahib
+turned where he lay and said, "Be still. It is a Sahibs' war," and Kurban
+Sahib put up his hand--thus; and then his eyes rolled on me, and I gave
+him water that he might pass the more quickly. And at the drinking his
+Spirit received permission....
+
+Thus went our fight, Sahib. We _Durro Muts_ were on a ridge working from
+the north to the south, where lay our main body, and the Boer-log lay in a
+valley working from east to west. There were more than a hundred, and our
+men were ten, but they held the Boer-log in the valley while they swiftly
+passed along the ridge to the south. I saw three Boers drop in the open.
+Then they all hid again and fired heavily at the rocks that hid our men;
+but our men were clever and did not show, but moved away and away, always
+south; and the noise of the battle withdrew itself southward, where we
+could hear the sound of big guns. So it fell stark dark, and Sikandar Khan
+found a deep old jackal's earth amid rocks, into which we slid the body of
+Kurban Sahib upright. Sikandar Khan took his glasses, and I took his
+handkerchief and some letters and a certain thing which I knew hung round
+his neck, and Sikandar Khan is witness that I wrapped them all in the
+handkerchief. Then we took an oath together, and lay still and mourned for
+Kurban Sahib. Sikandar Khan wept till daybreak--even he, a Pathan, a
+Mohammedan! All that night we heard firing to the southward, and when the
+dawn broke the valley was full of Boer-log in carts and on horses. They
+gathered by the house, as we could see through Kurban Sahib's glasses, and
+the old man, who, I take it, was a priest, blessed them, and preached the
+holy war, waving his arm; and the fat woman brought coffee; and the idiot
+capered among them and kissed their horses. Presently they went away in
+haste; they went over the hills and were not; and a black slave came out
+and washed the door-sills with bright water. Sikandar Khan saw through the
+glasses that the stain was blood, and he laughed, saying, "Wounded men lie
+there. We shall yet get vengeance."
+
+About noon we saw a thin, high smoke to the southward, such a smoke as a
+burning house will make in sunshine, and Sikandar Khan, who knows how to
+take a bearing across a hill, said, "At last we have burned the house of
+the pumpkin-seller whence they signalled." And I said: "What need now that
+they have slain my child? Let me mourn." It was a high smoke, and the old
+man, as I saw, came out into the verandah to behold it, and shook his
+clenched hands at it. So we lay till the twilight, foodless and without
+water, for we had vowed a vow neither to eat nor to drink till we had
+accomplished the matter. I had a little opium left, of which I gave
+Sikandar Khan the half, because he loved Kurban Sahib. When it was full
+dark we sharpened our sabres upon a certain softish rock which, mixed with
+water, sharpens steel well, and we took off our boots and we went down to
+the house and looked through the windows very softly. The old man sat
+reading in a book, and the woman sat by the hearth; and the idiot lay on
+the floor with his head against her knee, and he counted his fingers and
+laughed, and she laughed again. So I knew they were mother and son, and I
+laughed, too, for I had suspected this when I claimed her life and her
+body from Sikandar Khan, in our discussion of the spoil. Then we entered
+with bare swords.... Indeed, these Boer-log do not understand the steel,
+for the old man ran towards a rifle in the corner; but Sikandar Khan
+prevented him with a blow of the flat across the hands, and he sat down
+and held up his hands, and I put my fingers on my lips to signify they
+should be silent. But the woman cried, and one stirred in an inner room,
+and a door opened, and a man, bound about the head with rags, stood
+stupidly fumbling with a gun. His whole head fell inside the door, and
+none followed him. It was a very pretty stroke--for a Pathan. They then
+were silent, staring at the head upon the floor, and I said to Sikandar
+Khan, "Fetch ropes! Not even for Kurban Sahib's sake will I defile my
+sword." So he went to seek and returned with three long leather ones, and
+said, "Four wounded lie within, and doubtless each has a permit from a
+General," and he stretched the ropes and laughed. Then I bound the old
+man's hands behind his back, and unwillingly--for he laughed in my face,
+and would have fingered my beard--the idiot's. At this the woman with the
+swine's eyes and the jowl of a swine ran forward, and Sikandar Khan said,
+"Shall I strike or bind? She was thy property on the division." And I
+said, "Refrain! I have made a chain to hold her. Open the door." I pushed
+out the two across the verandah into the darker shade of the thorn-trees,
+and she followed upon her knees and lay along the ground, and pawed at my
+boots and howled. Then Sikandar Khan bore out the lamp, saying that he was
+a butler and would light the table, and I looked for a branch that would
+bear fruit. But the woman hindered me not a little with her screechings
+and plungings, and spoke fast in her tongue, and I replied in my tongue,
+"I am childless to-night because of thy perfidy, and _my_ child was
+praised among men and loved among women. He would have begotten men--not
+animals. Thou hast more years to live than I, but my grief is the
+greater."
+
+I stooped to make sure the noose upon the idiot's neck, and flung the end
+over the branch, and Sikandar Khan held up the lamp that she might well
+see. Then appeared suddenly, a little beyond the light of the lamp, the
+spirit of Kurban Sahib. One hand he held to his side, even where the
+bullet had struck him, and the other he put forward thus, and said, "No.
+It is a Sahibs' war." And I said, "Wait a while, Child, and thou shalt
+sleep." But he came nearer, riding, as it were, upon my eyes, and said,
+"No. It is a Sahibs' war." And Sikandar Khan said, "Is it too heavy?" and
+set down the lamp and came to me; and as he turned to tally on the rope,
+the spirit of Kurban Sahib stood up within arm's reach of us, and his face
+was very angry, and a third time he said, "No. It is a Sahibs' war." And a
+little wind blew out the lamp, and I heard Sikandar Khan's teeth chatter
+in his head.
+
+So we stayed side by side, the ropes in our hand, a very long while, for
+we could not shape any words. Then I heard Sikandar Khan open his water-
+bottle and drink; and when his mouth was slaked he passed to me and said,
+"We are absolved from our vow." So I drank, and together we waited for the
+dawn in that place where we stood--the ropes in our hand. A little after
+third cockcrow we heard the feet of horses and gun wheels very far off,
+and so soon as the light came a shell burst on the threshold of the house,
+and the roof of the verandah that was thatched fell in and blazed before
+the windows. And I said, "What of the wounded Boer-log within?" And
+Sikandar Khan said, "We have heard the order. It is a Sahibs' war. Stand
+still." Then came a second shell--good line, but short--and scattered dust
+upon us where we stood; and then came ten of the little quick shells from
+the gun that speaks like a stammerer--yes, pompom the Sahibs call it--and
+the face of the house folded down like the nose and the chin of an old man
+mumbling, and the forefront of the house lay down. Then Sikandar Khan
+said, "If it be the fate of the wounded to die in the fire, _I_ shall not
+prevent it." And he passed to the back of the house and presently came
+back, and four wounded Boer-log came after him, of whom two could not walk
+upright. And I said, "What hast thou done?" And he said, "I have neither
+spoken to them nor laid hand on them. They follow in hope of mercy." And I
+said, "It is a Sahibs' war. Let them wait the Sahibs' mercy." So they lay
+still, the four men and the idiot, and the fat woman under the thorn-tree,
+and the house burned furiously. Then began the known sound of cartouches
+in the roof--one or two at first; then a trill, and last of all one loud
+noise and the thatch blew here and there, and the captives would have
+crawled aside on account of the heat that was withering the thorn-trees,
+and on account of wood and bricks flying at random. But I said, "Abide!
+Abide! Ye be Sahibs, and this is a Sahibs' war, O Sahibs. There is no
+order that ye should depart from this war." They did not understand my
+words. Yet they abode and they lived.
+
+Presently rode down five troopers of Kurban Sahib's command, and one I
+knew spoke my tongue, having sailed to Calcutta often with horses. So I
+told him all my tale, using bazaar-talk, such as his kidney of Sahib would
+understand; and at the end I said, "An order has reached us here from the
+dead that this is a Sahibs' war. I take the soul of my Kurban Sahib to
+witness that I give over to the justice of the Sahibs these Sahibs who
+have made me childless." Then I gave him the ropes and fell down
+senseless, my heart being very full, but my belly was empty, except for
+the little opium.
+
+They put me into a cart with one of their wounded, and after a while I
+understood that they had fought against the Boer-log for two days and two
+nights. It was all one big trap, Sahib, of which we, with Kurban Sahib,
+saw no more than the outer edge. They were very angry, the _Durro Muts_--
+very angry indeed. I have never seen Sahibs so angry. They buried my
+Kurban Sahib with the rites of his faith upon the top of the ridge
+overlooking the house, and I said the proper prayers of the faith, and
+Sikandar Khan prayed in his fashion and stole five signalling-candles,
+which have each three wicks, and lighted the grave as if it had been the
+grave of a saint on a Friday. He wept very bitterly all that night, and I
+wept with him, and he took hold of my feet and besought me to give him a
+remembrance from Kurban Sahib. So I divided equally with him one of Kurban
+Sahib's handkerchiefs--not the silk ones, for those were given him by a
+certain woman; and I also gave him a button from a coat, and a little
+steel ring of no value that Kurban Sahib used for his keys, and he kissed
+them and put them into his bosom. The rest I have here in that little
+bundle, and I must get the baggage from the hotel in Cape Town--some four
+shirts we sent to be washed, for which we could not wait when we went
+up-country--and I must give them all to my Colonel-Sahib at Sialkote in the
+Punjab. For my child is dead--my baba is dead!... I would have come away
+before; there was no need to stay, the child being dead; but we were far
+from the rail, and the _Durro Muts_ were as brothers to me, and I had come
+to look upon Sikandar Khan as in some sort a friend, and he got me a horse
+and I rode up and down with them; but the life had departed. God knows
+what they called me--orderly, _chaprassi_ (messenger), cook, sweeper, I
+did not know nor care. But once I had pleasure. We came back in a month
+after wide circles to that very valley. I knew it every stone, and I went
+up to the grave, and a clever Sahib of the _Durro Muts_ (we left a troop
+there for a week to school those people with _purwanas_) had cut an
+inscription upon a great rock; and they interpreted it to me, and is was a
+jest such as Kurban Sahib himself would have loved. Oh! I have the
+inscription well copied here. Read it aloud, Sahib, and I will explain the
+jests. There are two very good ones. Begin, Sahib:--
+
+  In Memory of
+  WALTER DECIES CORBYN
+  Late Captain 141st Punjab Cavalry
+
+  The Gurgaon Rissala, that is. Go on, Sahib.
+
+  Treacherously shot near this place by
+  The connivance of the late
+  HENDRIK DIRK UYS
+  A Minister of God
+  Who thrice took the oath of neutrality
+  And Piet his son,
+  This little work
+
+Aha! This is the first jest. The Sahib should see this little work!
+
+
+  Was accomplished in partial
+  And inadequate recognition of their loss
+  By some men who loved him
+
+  _Si monumentum requiris circumspice_
+
+That is the second jest. It signifies that those who would desire to
+behold a proper memorial to Kurban Sahib must look out at the house. And,
+Sahib, the house is not there, nor the well, nor the big tank which they
+call dams, nor the little fruit-trees, nor the cattle. There is nothing
+at all, Sahib, except the two trees withered by the fire. The rest is
+like the desert here--or my hand--or my heart. Empty, Sahib--all empty!
+
+
+
+"THEIR LAWFUL OCCASIONS"
+
+THE WET LITANY
+
+  When the water's countenance
+  Blurrs 'twixt glance and second glance;
+  When the tattered smokes forerun
+  Ashen 'neath a silvered sun;
+  When the curtain of the haze
+  Shuts upon our helpless ways--
+       Hear the Channel Fleet at sea;
+       _Libera nos domine_!
+
+  When the engines' bated pulse
+  Scarcely thrills the nosing hulls;
+  When the wash along the side
+  Sounds, a sudden, magnified
+  When the intolerable blast
+  Marks each blindfold minute passed.
+
+  When the fog-buoy's squattering flight
+  Guides us through the haggard night;
+  When the warning bugle blows;
+  When the lettered doorways close;
+  When our brittle townships press,
+  Impotent, on emptiness.
+
+  When the unseen leadsmen lean
+  Questioning a deep unseen;
+  When their lessened count they tell
+  To a bridge invisible;
+  When the hid and perilous
+  Cliffs return our cry to us.
+
+  When the treble thickness spread
+  Swallows up our next-ahead;
+  When her siren's frightened whine
+  Shows her sheering out of line;
+  When, her passage undiscerned,
+  We must turn where she has turned--
+       Hear the Channel Fleet at sea;
+       _Libera nos Domine_!
+
+"THEIR LAWFUL OCCASIONS"
+
+PART I
+
+  ... "And a security for such as pass on the seas upon
+  their lawful occasions."--_Navy Prayer_.
+
+Disregarding the inventions of the Marine Captain, whose other name is
+Gubbins, let a plain statement suffice.
+
+H.M.S. _Caryatid_ went to Portland to join Blue Fleet for manoeuvres. I
+travelled overland from London by way of Portsmouth, where I fell among
+friends. When I reached Portland, H.M.S. _Caryatid_, whose guest I was to
+have been, had, with Blue Fleet, already sailed for some secret rendezvous
+off the west coast of Ireland, and Portland breakwater was filled with Red
+Fleet, my official enemies and joyous acquaintances, who received me with
+unstinted hospitality. For example, Lieutenant-Commander A.L. Hignett, in
+charge of three destroyers, _Wraith, Stiletto_, and _Kobbold_, due to
+depart at 6 P.M. that evening, offered me a berth on his thirty-knot
+flagship, but I preferred my comforts, and so accepted sleeping-room in
+H.M.S. _Pedantic_ (15,000 tons), leader of the second line. After dining
+aboard her I took boat to Weymouth to get my kit aboard, as the
+battleships would go to war at midnight. In transferring my allegiance
+from Blue to Red Fleet, whatever the Marine Captain may say, I did no
+wrong. I truly intended to return to the _Pedantic_ and help to fight Blue
+Fleet. All I needed was a new toothbrush, which I bought from a chemist in
+a side street at 9:15 P. M. As I turned to go, one entered seeking
+alleviation of a gum-boil. He was dressed in a checked ulster, a black
+silk hat three sizes too small, cord-breeches, boots, and pure brass
+spurs. These he managed painfully, stepping like a prisoner fresh from
+leg-irons. As he adjusted the pepper-plaster to the gum the light fell on
+his face, and I recognised Mr. Emanuel Pyecroft, late second-class petty
+officer of H.M.S. _Archimandrite_, an unforgettable man, met a year before
+under Tom Wessel's roof in Plymouth. It occurred to me that when a petty
+officer takes to spurs he may conceivably meditate desertion. For that
+reason I, though a taxpayer, made no sign. Indeed, it was Mr. Pyecroft,
+following me out of the shop, who said hollowly: "What might you be doing
+here?"
+
+"I'm going on manoeuvres in the _Pedantic_," I replied.
+
+"Ho!" said Mr. Pyecroft. "An' what manner o' manoeuvres d'you expect to
+see in a blighted cathedral like the _Pedantic_? _I_ know 'er. I knew her
+in Malta, when the _Vulcan_ was her permanent tender. Manoeuvres! You
+won't see more than 'Man an' arm watertight doors!' in your little woollen
+undervest."
+
+"I'm sorry for that."
+
+"Why?" He lurched heavily as his spurs caught and twanged like tuning-
+forks. "War's declared at midnight. _Pedantics_ be sugared! Buy an 'am an'
+see life!"
+
+For the moment I fancied Mr. Pyecroft, a fugitive from justice, purposed
+that we two should embrace a Robin Hood career in the uplands of Dorset.
+The spurs troubled me, and I made bold to say as much. "Them!" he said,
+coming to an intricate halt. "They're part of the _prima facie_ evidence.
+But as for me--let me carry your bag--I'm second in command, leadin'-hand,
+cook, steward, an' lavatory man, with a few incidentals for sixpence a day
+extra, on No. 267 torpedo-boat."
+
+"They wear spurs there?"
+
+"Well," said Mr. Peycroft, "seein' that Two Six Seven belongs to Blue
+Fleet, which left the day before yesterday, disguises are imperative. It
+transpired thus. The Right Honourable Lord Gawd Almighty Admiral Master
+Frankie Frobisher, K.C.B., commandin' Blue Fleet, can't be bothered with
+one tin-torpedo-boat more or less; and what with lyin' in the Reserve four
+years, an' what with the new kind o' tiffy which cleans dynamos with
+brick-dust and oil (Blast these spurs! They won't render!), Two Six
+Seven's steam-gadgets was paralytic. Our Mr. Moorshed done his painstakin'
+best--it's his first command of a war-canoe, matoor age nineteen (down
+that alleyway, please!) but be that as it may, His Holiness Frankie is
+aware of us crabbin' ourselves round the breakwater at five knots, an'
+steerin' _pari passu_, as the French say. (Up this alley-way, please!) If
+he'd given Mr. Hinchcliffe, our chief engineer, a little time, it would
+never have transpired, for what Hinch can't drive he can coax; but the new
+port bein' a trifle cloudy, an' 'is joints tinglin' after a post-captain
+dinner, Frankie come on the upper bridge seekin' for a sacrifice. We,
+offerin' a broadside target, got it. He told us what 'is grandmamma, 'oo
+was a lady an' went to sea in stick-and string-batteaus, had told him
+about steam. He throwed in his own prayers for the 'ealth an' safety of
+all steam-packets an' their officers. Then he give us several distinct
+orders. The first few--I kept tally--was all about going to Hell; the next
+many was about not evolutin' in his company, when there; an' the last all
+was simply repeatin' the motions in quick time. Knowin' Frankie's groovin'
+to be badly eroded by age and lack of attention, I didn't much panic; but
+our Mr. Moorshed, 'e took it a little to heart. Me an' Mr. Hinchcliffe
+consoled 'im as well as service conditions permits of, an' we had a
+_resume_-supper at the back o' the Camber--secluded _an'_ lugubrious! Then
+one thing leadin' up to another, an' our orders, except about anchorin'
+where he's booked for, leavin' us a clear 'orizon, Number Two Six Seven is
+now--mind the edge of the wharf--here!"
+
+By mysterious doublings he had brought me out on to the edge of a narrow
+strip of water crowded with coastwise shipping that runs far up into
+Weymouth town. A large foreign timber-brig lay at my feet, and under the
+round of her stern cowered, close to the wharf-edge, a slate-coloured,
+unkempt, two-funnelled craft of a type--but I am no expert--between the
+first-class torpedo-boat and the full-blooded destroyer. From her archaic
+torpedo-tubes at the stern, and quick-firers forward and amidship, she
+must have dated from the early nineties. Hammerings and clinkings, with
+spurts of steam and fumes of hot oil, arose from her inside, and a figure
+in a striped jersey squatted on the engine-room gratings.
+
+"She ain't much of a war-canoe, but you'll see more life in 'er than on an
+whole squadron of bleedin' _Pedantics."_
+
+"But she's laid up here--and Blue Fleet have gone," I protested.
+"Precisely. Only, in his comprehensive orders Frankie didn't put us out of
+action. Thus we're a non-neglectable fightin' factor which you mightn't
+think from this elevation; _an'_ m'rover, Red Fleet don't know we're 'ere.
+Most of us"--he glanced proudly at his boots--"didn't run to spurs, but
+we're disguised pretty devious, as you might say. Morgan, our signaliser,
+when last seen, was a Dawlish bathing-machine proprietor. Hinchcliffe was
+naturally a German waiter, and me you behold as a squire of low degree;
+while yonder Levantine dragoman on the hatch is our Mr. Moorshed. He was
+the second cutter's snotty--_my_ snotty--on the _Archimandrite_--two
+years--Cape Station. Likewise on the West Coast, mangrove swampin', an'
+gettin' the cutter stove in on small an' unlikely bars, an' manufacturin'
+lies to correspond. What I don't know about Mr. Moorshed is precisely the
+same gauge as what Mr. Moorshed don't know about me--half a millimetre, as
+you might say. He comes into awful opulence of his own when 'e's of age;
+an' judgin' from what passed between us when Frankie cursed 'im, I don't
+think 'e cares whether he's broke to-morrow or--the day after. Are you
+beginnin' to follow our tatties? They'll be worth followin'. Or _are_ you
+goin' back to your nice little cabin on the _Pedantic_--which I lay
+they've just dismounted the third engineer out of--to eat four fat meals
+per diem, an' smoke in the casement?"
+
+The figure in the jersey lifted its head and mumbled.
+
+"Yes, Sir," was Mr. Pyecroft's answer. "I 'ave ascertained that _Stiletto,
+Wraith_, and _Kobbold_ left at 6 P. M. with the first division o' Red
+Fleet's cruisers except _Devulotion_ and _Cryptic_, which are delayed by
+engine-room defects." Then to me: "Won't you go aboard? Mr. Moorshed 'ud
+like some one to talk to. You buy an 'am an see life."
+
+At this he vanished; and the Demon of Pure Irresponsibility bade me lower
+myself from the edge of the wharf to the tea-tray plates of No. 267.
+
+"What d'you want?" said the striped jersey.
+
+"I want to join Blue Fleet if I can," I replied. "I've been left behind
+by--an accident.
+
+"Well?"
+
+"Mr. Pyecroft told me to buy a ham and see life. About how big a ham do
+you need?"
+
+"I don't want any ham, thank you. That's the way up the wharf. _Good_-
+night."
+
+"Good-night!" I retraced my steps, wandered in the dark till I found a
+shop, and there purchased, of sardines, canned tongue, lobster, and
+salmon, not less than half a hundredweight. A belated sausage-shop
+supplied me with a partially cut ham of pantomime tonnage. These things I,
+sweating, bore out to the edge of the wharf and set down in the shadow of
+a crane. It was a clear, dark summer night, and from time to time I
+laughed happily to myself. The adventure was preordained on the face of
+it. Pyecroft alone, spurred or barefoot, would have drawn me very far from
+the paths of circumspection. His advice to buy a ham and see life clinched
+it. Presently Mr. Pyecroft--I heard spurs clink--passed me. Then the
+jersey voice said: "What the mischief's that?"
+
+"'Asn't the visitor come aboard, Sir? 'E told me he'd purposely abandoned
+the _Pedantic_ for the pleasure of the trip with us. Told me he was
+official correspondent for the _Times_; an' I know he's littery by the way
+'e tries to talk Navy-talk. Haven't you seen 'im, Sir?"
+
+Slowly and dispassionately the answer drawled long on the night; "Pye, you
+are without exception the biggest liar in the Service!"
+
+"Then what am I to do with the bag, Sir? It's marked with his name." There
+was a pause till Mr. Moorshed said "Oh!" in a tone which the listener
+might construe precisely as he pleased.
+
+"_He_ was the maniac who wanted to buy a ham and see life--was he? If he
+goes back to the _Pedantic_--"
+
+"Pre-cisely, Sir. Gives us all away, Sir."
+
+"Then what possessed _you_ to give it away to him, you owl?"
+
+"I've got his bag. If 'e gives anything away, he'll have to go naked."
+
+At this point I thought it best to rattle my tins and step out of the
+shadow of the crane.
+
+"I've bought the ham," I called sweetly. "Have you still any objection to
+my seeing life, Mr. Moorshed?"
+
+"All right, if you're insured. Won't you come down?"
+
+I descended; Pyecroft, by a silent flank movement, possessing himself of
+all the provisions, which he bore to some hole forward.
+
+"Have you known Mr. Pyecroft long?" said my host.
+
+"Met him once, a year ago, at Devonport. What do you think of him?"
+
+"What do _you_ think of him?"
+
+"I've left the _Pedantic_--her boat will be waiting for me at ten o'clock,
+too--simply because I happened to meet him," I replied.
+
+"That's all right. If you'll come down below, we may get some grub."
+
+We descended a naked steel ladder to a steel-beamed tunnel, perhaps twelve
+feet long by six high. Leather-topped lockers ran along either side; a
+swinging table, with tray and lamp above, occupied the centre. Other
+furniture there was none.
+
+"You can't shave here, of course. We don't wash, and, as a rule, we eat
+with our fingers when we're at sea. D'you mind?"
+
+Mr. Moorshed, black-haired, black-browed, sallow-complexioned, looked me
+over from head to foot and grinned. He was not handsome in any way, but
+his smile drew the heart. "You didn't happen to hear what Frankie told me
+from the flagship, did you? His last instructions, and I've logged them
+here in shorthand, were"--he opened a neat pocket-book--"_'Get out of this
+and conduct your own damned manoeuvres in your own damned tinker fashion!
+You're a disgrace to the Service, and your boat's offal.'"_
+
+"Awful?" I said.
+
+"No--offal--tripes--swipes--ullage." Mr. Pyecroft entered, in the costume
+of his calling, with the ham and an assortment of tin dishes, which he
+dealt out like cards.
+
+"I shall take these as my orders," said Mr. Moorshed. "I'm chucking the
+Service at the end of the year, so it doesn't matter."
+
+We cut into the ham under the ill-trimmed lamp, washed it down with
+whisky, and then smoked. From the foreside of the bulkhead came an
+uninterrupted hammering and clinking, and now and then a hiss of steam.
+
+"That's Mr. Hinchcliffe," said Pyecroft. "He's what is called a first-
+class engine-room artificer. If you hand 'im a drum of oil an' leave 'im
+alone, he can coax a stolen bicycle to do typewritin'."
+
+Very leisurely, at the end of his first pipe, Mr. Moorshed drew out a
+folded map, cut from a newspaper, of the area of manoeuvres, with the
+rules that regulate these wonderful things, below.
+
+"Well, I suppose I know as much as an average stick-and-string admiral,"
+he said, yawning. "Is our petticoat ready yet, Mr. Pyecroft?"
+
+As a preparation for naval manoeuvres these councils seemed inadequate. I
+followed up the ladder into the gloom cast by the wharf edge and the big
+lumber-ship's side. As my eyes stretched to the darkness I saw that No.
+267 had miraculously sprouted an extra pair of funnels--soft, for they
+gave as I touched them.
+
+"More _prima facie_ evidence. You runs a rope fore an' aft, an' you erects
+perpendick-u-arly two canvas tubes, which you distends with cane hoops,
+thus 'avin' as many funnels as a destroyer. At the word o' command, up
+they go like a pair of concertinas, an' consequently collapses equally
+'andy when requisite. Comin' aft we shall doubtless overtake the Dawlish
+bathin'-machine proprietor fittin' on her bustle."
+
+Mr. Pyecroft whispered this in my ear as Moorshed moved toward a group at
+the stern.
+
+"None of us who ain't built that way can be destroyers, but we can look as
+near it as we can. Let me explain to you, Sir, that the stern of a
+Thorneycroft boat, which we are _not_, comes out in a pretty bulge,
+totally different from the Yarrow mark, which again we are not. But, on
+the other 'and, _Dirk, Stiletto, Goblin, Ghoul, Djinn_, and _A-frite_--Red
+Fleet dee-stroyers, with 'oom we hope to consort later on terms o' perfect
+equality--_are_ Thorneycrofts, an' carry that Grecian bend which we are
+now adjustin' to our _arriere-pensee_--as the French would put it--by
+means of painted canvas an' iron rods bent as requisite. Between you an'
+me an' Frankie, we are the _Gnome_, now in the Fleet Reserve at Pompey--
+Portsmouth, I should say."
+
+"The first sea will carry it all away," said Moorshed, leaning gloomily
+outboard, "but it will do for the present."
+
+"We've a lot of _prima facie_ evidence about us," Mr. Pyecroft went on. "A
+first-class torpedo boat sits lower in the water than a destroyer. Hence
+we artificially raise our sides with a black canvas wash-streak to
+represent extra freeboard; _at_ the same time paddin' out the cover of the
+forward three-pounder like as if it was a twelve-pounder, an' variously
+fakin' up the bows of 'er. As you might say, we've took thought an' added
+a cubic to our stature. It's our len'th that sugars us. A 'undred an'
+forty feet, which is our len'th into two 'undred and ten, which is about
+the _Gnome's,_ leaves seventy feet over, which we haven't got."
+
+"Is this all your own notion, Mr. Pyecroft?" I asked.
+
+"In spots, you might say--yes; though we all contributed to make up
+deficiencies. But Mr. Moorshed, not much carin' for further Navy after
+what Frankie said, certainly threw himself into the part with avidity."
+
+"What the dickens are we going to do?"
+
+"Speaking as a seaman gunner, I should say we'd wait till the sights came
+on, an' then fire. Speakin' as a torpedo-coxswain, L.T.O., T.I., M.D.,
+etc., I presume we fall in--Number One in rear of the tube, etc., secure
+tube to ball or diaphragm, clear away securin'-bar, release safety-pin
+from lockin-levers, an' pray Heaven to look down on us. As second in
+command o' 267, I say wait an' see!"
+
+"What's happened? We're off," I said. The timber ship had slid away from
+us.
+
+"We are. Stern first, an' broadside on! If we don't hit anything too hard,
+we'll do."
+
+"Come on the bridge," said Mr. Moorshed. I saw no bridge, but fell over
+some sort of conning-tower forward, near which was a wheel. For the next
+few minutes I was more occupied with cursing my own folly than with the
+science of navigation. Therefore I cannot say how we got out of Weymouth
+Harbour, nor why it was necessary to turn sharp to the left and wallow in
+what appeared to be surf.
+
+"Excuse me," said Mr. Pyecroft behind us, "_I_ don't mind rammin' a
+bathin'-machine; but if only _one_ of them week-end Weymouth blighters has
+thrown his empty baccy-tin into the sea here, we'll rip our plates open on
+it; 267 isn't the _Archimandrite's_ old cutter."
+
+"I am hugging the shore," was the answer.
+
+"There's no actual 'arm in huggin', but it can come expensive if
+pursooed."
+
+"Right-O!" said Moorshed, putting down the wheel, and as we left those
+scant waters I felt 267 move more freely.
+
+A thin cough ran up the speaking-tube.
+
+"Well, what is it, Mr. Hinchcliffe?" said Moorshed.
+
+"I merely wished to report that she is still continuin' to go, Sir."
+
+"Right-O! Can we whack her up to fifteen, d'you think?"
+
+"I'll try, Sir; but we'd prefer to have the engine-room hatch open--at
+first, Sir."
+
+Whacked up then she was, and for half an hour was careered largely through
+the night, turning at last with a suddenness that slung us across the
+narrow deck.
+
+"This," said Mr. Pyecroft, who received me on his chest as a large rock
+receives a shadow, "represents the _Gnome_ arrivin' cautious from the
+direction o' Portsmouth, with Admiralty orders."
+
+He pointed through the darkness ahead, and after much staring my eyes
+opened to a dozen destroyers, in two lines, some few hundred yards away.
+
+"Those are the Red Fleet destroyer flotilla, which is too frail to panic
+about among the full-blooded cruisers inside Portland breakwater, and
+several millimetres too excited over the approachin' war to keep a look-
+out inshore. Hence our tattics!"
+
+We wailed through our siren--a long, malignant, hyena-like howl--and a
+voice hailed us as we went astern tumultuously.
+
+"The _Gnome_--Carteret-Jones--from Portsmouth, with orders--mm--mm--
+_Stiletto_," Moorshed answered through the megaphone in a high, whining
+voice, rather like a chaplain's.
+
+"_Who_?" was the answer.
+
+"Carter--et--Jones."
+
+"Oh, Lord!"
+
+There was a pause; a voice cried to some friend, "It's Podgie, adrift
+on the high seas in charge of a whole dee-stroyer!"
+
+Another voice echoed, "Podgie!" and from its note I gathered that Mr.
+Carteret-Jones had a reputation, but not for independent command.
+
+"Who's your sub?" said the first speaker, a shadow on the bridge of the
+_Dirk_.
+
+"A gunner, at present, Sir. The _Stiletto_--broken down--turns over to
+us."
+
+"When did the _Stiletto_ break down?"
+
+"Off the Start, Sir; two hours after--after she left here this evening, I
+believe. My orders are to report to you for the manoeuvre signal-codes,
+and join Commander Hignett's flotilla, which is in attendance on
+_Stiletto_."
+
+A smothered chuckle greeted this last. Moorshed's voice was high and
+uneasy. Said Pyecroft, with a sigh: "The amount o' trouble me an' my
+bright spurs 'ad fishin' out that information from torpedo coxswains and
+similar blighters in pubs all this afternoon, you would never believe."
+
+"But has the _Stiletto_ broken down?" I asked weakly.
+
+"How else are we to get Red Fleet's private signal-code? Any way, if she
+'asn't now, she will before manoeuvres are ended. It's only executin' in
+anticipation."
+
+"Go astern and send your coxswain aboard for orders, Mr. Jones." Water
+carries sound well, but I do not know whether we were intended to hear the
+next sentence: "They must have given him _one_ intelligent keeper."
+
+"That's me," said Mr. Pyecroft, as a black and coal-stained dinghy--I did
+not foresee how well I should come to know her--was flung overside by
+three men.
+
+"Havin' bought an 'am, we will now see life." He stepped into the boat and
+was away.
+
+"I say, Podgie!"--the speaker was in the last of the line of destroyers,
+as we thumped astern--"aren't you lonely out there?"
+
+"Oh, don't rag me!" said Moorshed. "Do you suppose I'll have to manoeuvre
+with your flo-tilla?"
+
+"No, Podgie! I'm pretty sure our commander will see you sifting cinders in
+Tophet before you come with our flo-tilla."
+
+"Thank you! She steers rather wild at high speeds."
+
+Two men laughed together.
+
+"By the way, who is Mr. Carteret-Jones when he's at home?" I whispered.
+
+"I was with him in the _Britannia_. I didn't like him much, but I'm
+grateful to him now. I must tell him so some day."
+
+"They seemed to know him hereabouts."
+
+"He rammed the _Caryatid_ twice with her own steam-pinnace."
+
+Presently, moved by long strokes, Mr. Pyecroft returned, skimming across
+the dark. The dinghy swung up behind him, even as his heel spurned it.
+
+"Commander Fasset's compliments to Mr. L. Carteret-Jones, and the sooner
+he digs out in pursuance of Admiralty orders as received at Portsmouth,
+the better pleased Commander Fasset will be. But there's a lot more----"
+
+"Whack her up, Mr. Hinchcliffe! Come on to the bridge. We can settle it as
+we go. Well?"
+
+Mr. Pyecroft drew an important breath, and slid off his cap.
+
+"Day an' night private signals of Red Fleet _com_plete, Sir!" He handed a
+little paper to Moorshed. "You see, Sir, the trouble was, that Mr.
+Carteret-Jones bein', so to say, a little new to his duties, 'ad forgot to
+give 'is gunner his Admiralty orders in writin', but, as I told Commander
+Fasset, Mr. Jones had been repeatin' 'em to me, nervous-like, most of the
+way from Portsmouth, so I knew 'em by heart--an' better. The Commander,
+recognisin' in me a man of agility, cautioned me to be a father an' mother
+to Mr. Carteret-Jones."
+
+"Didn't he know you?" I asked, thinking for the moment that there could be
+no duplicates of Emanuel Pyecroft in the Navy.
+
+"What's a torpedo-gunner more or less to a full lootenant commanding six
+thirty-knot destroyers for the first time? 'E seemed to cherish the 'ope
+that 'e might use the _Gnome_ for 'is own 'orrible purposes; but what I
+told him about Mr. Jones's sad lack o' nerve comin' from Pompey, an' going
+dead slow on account of the dark, short-circuited _that_ connection.
+'M'rover,' I says to him, 'our orders is explicit; _Stiletto's_ reported
+broke down somewhere off the Start, an' we've been tryin' to coil down a
+new stiff wire hawser all the evenin', so it looks like towin' 'er back,
+don't it?' I says. That more than ever jams his turrets, an' makes him
+keen to get rid of us. 'E even hinted that Mr. Carteret-Jones passin'
+hawsers an' assistin' the impotent in a sea-way might come pretty
+expensive on the tax-payer. I agreed in a disciplined way. I ain't proud.
+Gawd knows I ain't proud! But when I'm really diggin' out in the fancy
+line, I sometimes think that me in a copper punt, single-'anded, 'ud beat
+a cutter-full of De Rougemongs in a row round the fleet."
+
+At this point I reclined without shame on Mr. Pyecroft's bosom, supported
+by his quivering arm.
+
+"Well?" said Moorshed, scowling into the darkness, as 267's bows snapped
+at the shore seas of the broader Channel, and we swayed together.
+
+"'You'd better go on,' says Commander Fassett, 'an' do what you're told to
+do. I don't envy Hignett if he has to dry-nurse the _Gnome's_ commander.
+But what d'you want with signals?' 'e says. 'It's criminal lunacy to trust
+Mr. Jones with anything that steams.'
+
+"'May I make an observation, Sir?' I says. 'Suppose,' I says, 'you was
+torpedo-gunner on the _Gnome_, an' Mr. Carteret-Jones was your commandin'
+officer, an' you had your reputation _as_ a second in command for the
+first time,' I says, well knowin' it was his first command of a flotilla,
+'what 'ud you do, Sir?' That gouged 'is unprotected ends open--clear back
+to the citadel."
+
+"What did he say?" Moorshed jerked over is shoulder.
+
+"If you were Mr. Carteret-Jones, it might be disrespect for me to repeat
+it, Sir."
+
+"Go ahead," I heard the boy chuckle.
+
+"'Do?' 'e says. 'I'd rub the young blighter's nose into it till I made a
+perishin' man of him, or a perspirin' pillow-case,' 'e says, 'which,' he
+adds, 'is forty per cent, more than he is at present.'
+
+"Whilst he's gettin' the private signals--they're rather particular ones--
+I went forrard to see the _Dirk's_ gunner about borrowin' a holdin'-down
+bolt for our twelve-pounder. My open ears, while I was rovin' over his
+packet, got the followin' authentic particulars." I heard his voice
+change, and his feet shifted. "There's been a last council o' war of
+destroyer-captains at the flagship, an' a lot of things 'as come out. To
+begin with _Cryptic_ and _Devolution_, Captain Panke and Captain Malan--"
+
+"_Cryptic_ and _Devolution_, first-class cruisers," said Mr. Moorshed
+dreamily. "Go on, Pyecroft."
+
+"--bein' delayed by minor defects in engine-room, did _not_, as we know,
+accompany Red Fleet's first division of scouting cruisers, whose
+rendezvous is unknown, but presumed to be somewhere off the Lizard.
+_Cryptic_ an' _Devolution_ left at 9:30 P.M. still reportin' copious minor
+defects in engine-room. Admiral's final instructions was they was to put
+into Torbay, an' mend themselves there. If they can do it in twenty-four
+hours, they're to come on and join the battle squadron at the first
+rendezvous, down Channel somewhere. (I couldn't get that, Sir.) If they
+can't, he'll think about sendin' them some destroyers for escort. But his
+present intention is to go 'ammer and tongs down Channel, usin' 'is
+destroyers for all they're worth, an' thus keepin' Blue Fleet too busy off
+the Irish coast to sniff into any eshtuaries."
+
+"But if those cruisers are crocks, why does the Admiral let 'em out of
+Weymouth at all?" I asked.
+
+"The tax-payer," said Mr. Moorshed.
+
+"An' newspapers," added Mr. Pyecroft. "In Torbay they'll look as they was
+muckin' about for strategical purposes--hanamerin' like blazes in the
+engine room all the weary day, an' the skipper droppin' questions down the
+engine-room hatch every two or three minutes. _I've_ been there. Now,
+Sir?" I saw the white of his eye turn broad on Mr. Moorshed.
+
+The boy dropped his chin over the speaking-tube.
+
+"Mr. Hinchcliffe, what's her extreme economical radius?"
+
+"Three hundred and forty knots, down to swept bunkers."
+
+"Can do," said Moorshed. "By the way, have her revolutions any bearing on
+her speed, Mr. Hinchcliffe?"
+
+"None that I can make out yet, Sir."
+
+"Then slow to eight knots. We'll jog down to forty-nine, forty-five, or
+four about, and three east. That puts us say forty miles from Torbay by
+nine o'clock to-morrow morning. We'll have to muck about till dusk before
+we run in and try our luck with the cruisers."
+
+"Yes, Sir. Their picket boats will be panickin' round them all night. It's
+considered good for the young gentlemen."
+
+"Hallo! War's declared! They're off!" said Moorshed.
+
+He swung 267's head round to get a better view. A few miles to our right
+the low horizon was spangled with small balls of fire, while nearer ran a
+procession of tiny cigar ends.
+
+"Red hot! Set 'em alight," said Mr. Pyecroft. "That's the second destroyer
+flotilla diggin' out for Commander Fassett's reputation."
+
+The smaller lights disappeared; the glare of the destroyers' funnels
+dwindled even as we watched.
+
+"They're going down Channel with lights out, thus showin' their zeal an'
+drivin' all watch-officers crazy. Now, if you'll excuse me, I think I'll
+get you your pyjamas, an' you'll turn in," said Pyecroft.
+
+He piloted me to the steel tunnel, where the ham still swung majestically
+over the swaying table, and dragged out trousers and a coat with a monk's
+hood, all hewn from one hairy inch-thick board.
+
+"If you fall over in these you'll be drowned. They're lammies. I'll chock
+you off with a pillow; but sleepin' in a torpedo-boat's what you might
+call an acquired habit."
+
+I coiled down on an iron-hard horse-hair pillow next the quivering steel
+wall to acquire that habit. The sea, sliding over 267's skin, worried me
+with importunate, half-caught confidences. It drummed tackily to gather my
+attention, coughed, spat, cleared its throat, and, on the eve of that
+portentous communication, retired up stage as a multitude whispering.
+Anon, I caught the tramp of armies afoot, the hum of crowded cities
+awaiting the event, the single sob of a woman, and dry roaring of wild
+beasts. A dropped shovel clanging on the stokehold floor was, naturally
+enough, the unbarring of arena gates; our sucking uplift across the crest
+of some little swell, nothing less than the haling forth of new worlds;
+our half-turning descent into the hollow of its mate, the abysmal plunge
+of God-forgotten planets. Through all these phenomena and more--though I
+ran with wild horses over illimitable plains of rustling grass; though I
+crouched belly-flat under appalling fires of musketry; though I was
+Livingstone, painless, and incurious in the grip of his lion--my shut eyes
+saw the lamp swinging in its gimbals, the irregularly gliding patch of
+light on the steel ladder, and every elastic shadow in the corners of the
+frail angle-irons; while my body strove to accommodate itself to the
+infernal vibration of the machine. At the last I rolled limply on the
+floor, and woke to real life with a bruised nose and a great call to go on
+deck at once.
+
+"It's all right," said a voice in my booming ears. "Morgan and Laughton
+are worse than you!"
+
+I was gripping a rail. Mr. Pyecroft pointed with his foot to two bundles
+beside a torpedo-tube, which at Weymouth had been a signaller and a most
+able seaman. "She'd do better in a bigger sea," said Mr. Pyecroft. "This
+lop is what fetches it up."
+
+The sky behind us whitened as I laboured, and the first dawn drove down
+the Channel, tipping the wave-tops with a chill glare. To me that round
+wind which runs before the true day has ever been fortunate and of good
+omen. It cleared the trouble from my body, and set my soul dancing to
+267's heel and toe across the northerly set of the waves--such waves as I
+had often watched contemptuously from the deck of a ten-thousand-ton
+liner. They shouldered our little hull sideways and passed, scalloped, and
+splayed out, toward the coast, carrying our white wake in loops along
+their hollow backs. In succession we looked down a lead-grey cutting of
+water for half a clear mile, were flung up on its ridge, beheld the
+Channel traffic--full-sailed to that fair breeze--all about us, and swung
+slantwise, light as a bladder, elastic as a basket, into the next furrow.
+Then the sun found us, struck the wet gray bows to living, leaping opal,
+the colourless deep to hard sapphire, the many sails to pearl, and the
+little steam-plume of our escape to an inconstant rainbow.
+
+"A fair day and a fair wind for all, thank God!" said Emanuel Pyecroft,
+throwing back the cowl-like hood of his blanket coat. His face was pitted
+with coal-dust and grime, pallid for lack of sleep; but his eyes shone
+like a gull's.
+
+"I told you you'd see life. Think o' the _Pedantic_ now. Think o' her
+Number One chasin' the mobilised gobbies round the lower deck flats. Think
+o' the pore little snotties now bein' washed, fed, and taught, an' the
+yeoman o' signals with a pink eye wakin' bright 'an brisk to another
+perishin' day of five-flag hoists. Whereas _we_ shall caulk an' smoke
+cigarettes, same as the Spanish destroyers did for three weeks after war
+was declared." He dropped into the wardroom singing:--
+
+If you're going to marry me, marry me, Bill, It's no use muckin' about!
+
+The man at the wheel, uniformed in what had once been a Tam-o'-shanter, a
+pair of very worn R.M.L.I. trousers rolled up to the knee, and a black
+sweater, was smoking a cigarette. Moorshed, in a gray Balaclava and a
+brown mackintosh with a flapping cape, hauled at our supplementary funnel
+guys, and a thing like a waiter from a Soho restaurant sat at the head of
+the engine-room ladder exhorting the unseen below. The following wind beat
+down our smoke and covered all things with an inch-thick layer of stokers,
+so that eyelids, teeth, and feet gritted in their motions. I began to see
+that my previous experiences among battleships and cruisers had been
+altogether beside the mark.
+
+
+PART II
+
+  The wind went down with the sunset--
+    The fog came up with the tide,
+  When the Witch of the North took an Egg-shell (_bis_)
+    With a little Blue Devil inside.
+  "Sink," she said, "or swim," she said,
+    "It's all you will get from me.
+  And that is the finish of him!" she said,
+    And the Egg-shell went to sea.
+
+  The wind got up with the morning,
+    And the fog blew off with the rain,
+  When the Witch of the North saw the Egg-shell
+    And the little Blue Devil again.
+  "Did you swim?" she said. "Did you sink?" she said,
+    And the little Blue Devil replied:
+  "For myself I swam, but I think," he said,
+    "There's somebody sinking outside."
+
+But for the small detail that I was a passenger and a civilian, and might
+not alter her course, torpedo-boat No. 267 was mine to me all that
+priceless day. Moorshed, after breakfast--frizzled ham and a devil that
+Pyecroft made out of sardines, anchovies, and French mustard smashed
+together with a spanner--showed me his few and simple navigating tools,
+and took an observation. Morgan, the signaller, let me hold the chamois
+leathers while he cleaned the searchlight (we seemed to be better equipped
+with electricity than most of our class), that lived under a bulbous
+umbrella-cover amidship. Then Pyecroft and Morgan, standing easy, talked
+together of the King's Service as reformers and revolutionists, so
+notably, that were I not engaged on this tale I would, for its conclusion,
+substitute theirs.
+
+I would speak of Hinchcliffe--Henry Salt Hinchcliffe, first-class engine-
+room artificer, and genius in his line, who was prouder of having taken
+part in the Hat Crusade in his youth than of all his daring, his skill,
+and his nickel-steel nerve. I consorted with him for an hour in the packed
+and dancing engine-room, when Moorshed suggested "whacking her up" to
+eighteen knots, to see if she would stand it. The floor was ankle-deep in
+a creamy batter of oil and water; each moving part flicking more oil in
+zoetrope-circles, and the gauges invisible for their dizzy chattering on
+the chattering steel bulkhead. Leading stoker Grant, said to be a
+bigamist, an ox-eyed man smothered in hair, took me to the stokehold and
+planted me between a searing white furnace and some hell-hot iron plate
+for fifteen minutes, while I listened to the drone of fans and the worry
+of the sea without, striving to wrench all that palpitating firepot wide
+open.
+
+Then I came on deck and watched Moorshed--revolving in his orbit from the
+canvas bustle and torpedo-tubes aft, by way of engine-room, conning-tower,
+and wheel, to the doll's house of a foc'sle--learned in experience
+withheld from me, moved by laws beyond my knowledge, authoritative,
+entirely adequate, and yet, in heart, a child at his play. _I_ could not
+take ten steps along the crowded deck but I collided with some body or
+thing; but he and his satellites swung, passed, and returned on their
+vocations with the freedom and spaciousness of the well-poised stars.
+
+Even now I can at will recall every tone and gesture, with each dissolving
+picture inboard or overside--Hinchcliffe's white arm buried to the
+shoulder in a hornet's nest of spinning machinery; Moorshed's halt and
+jerk to windward as he looked across the water; Pyecroft's back bent over
+the Berthon collapsible boat, while he drilled three men in expanding it
+swiftly; the outflung white water at the foot of a homeward-bound Chinaman
+not a hundred yards away, and her shadow-slashed, rope-purfled sails
+bulging sideways like insolent cheeks; the ribbed and pitted coal-dust on
+our decks, all iridescent under the sun; the first filmy haze that paled
+the shadows of our funnels about lunch time; the gradual die-down and
+dulling over of the short, cheery seas; the sea that changed to a swell:
+the swell that crumbled up and ran allwhither oilily: the triumphant,
+almost audible roll inward of wandering fog-walls that had been stalking
+us for two hours, and--welt upon welt, chill as the grave--the drive of
+the interminable main fog of the Atlantic. We slowed to little more than
+steerage-way and lay listening. Presently a hand-bellows foghorn jarred
+like a corncrake, and there rattled out of the mist a big ship literally
+above us. We could count the rivets in her plates as we scrooped by, and
+the little drops of dew gathered below them.
+
+"Wonder why they're always barks--always steel--always four-masted--an'
+never less than two thousand tons. But they are," said Pyecroft. He was
+out on the turtle-backed bows of her; Moorshed was at the wheel, and
+another man worked the whistle.
+
+"This fog is the best thing could ha' happened to us," said Moorshed. "It
+gives us our chance to run in on the quiet.... Hal-lo!"
+
+A cracked bell rang. Clean and sharp (beautifully grained, too), a
+bowsprit surged over our starboard bow, the bobstay confidentially hooking
+itself into our forward rail.
+
+I saw Pyecroft's arm fly up; heard at the same moment the severing of the
+tense rope, the working of the wheel, Moorshed's voice down the tube
+saying, "Astern a little, please, Mr. Hinchcliffe!" and Pyecroft's cry,
+"Trawler with her gear down! Look out for our propeller, Sir, or we'll be
+wrapped up in the rope."
+
+267 surged quickly under my feet, as the pressure of the downward-bearing
+bobstay was removed. Half-a-dozen men of the foc'sle had already thrown
+out fenders, and stood by to bear off a just visible bulwark.
+
+Still going astern, we touched slowly, broadside on, to a suggestive
+crunching of fenders, and I looked into the deck of a Brixham trawler, her
+crew struck dumb.
+
+"Any luck?" said Moorshed politely.
+
+"Not till we met yeou," was the answer. "The Lard he saved us from they
+big ships to be spitted by the little wan. Where be'e gwine tu with our
+fine new bobstay?"
+
+"Yah! You've had time to splice it by now," said Pyecroft with contempt.
+
+"Aie; but we'm all crushed to port like aigs. You was runnin' twenty-seven
+knots, us reckoned it. Didn't us, Albert?"
+
+"Liker twenty-nine, an' niver no whistle."
+
+"Yes, we always do that. Do you want a tow to Brixham?" said Moorshed.
+
+A great silence fell upon those wet men of the sea.
+
+We lifted a little toward their side, but our silent, quick-breathing
+crew, braced and strained outboard, bore us off as though we had been a
+mere picket-boat.
+
+"What for?" said a puzzled voice.
+
+"For love; for nothing. You'll be abed in Brixham by midnight."
+
+"Yiss; but trawl's down."
+
+"No hurry. I'll pass you a line and go ahead. Sing out when you're ready."
+A rope smacked on their deck with the word; they made it fast; we slid
+forward, and in ten seconds saw nothing save a few feet of the wire rope
+running into fog over our stern; but we heard the noise of debate.
+
+"Catch a Brixham trawler letting go of a free tow in a fog," said Moorshed
+listening.
+
+"But what in the world do you want him for?" I asked.
+
+"Oh, he'll came in handy later."
+
+"Was that your first collision?"
+
+"Yes." I shook hands with him in silence, and our tow hailed us.
+
+"Aie! yeou little man-o'-war!" The voice rose muffled and wailing. "After
+us've upped trawl, us'll be glad of a tow. Leave line just slack abaout as
+'tis now, and kip a good fine look-out be'ind 'ee."
+
+"There's an accommodatin' blighter for you!" said Pyecroft. "Where does he
+expect we'll be, with these currents evolutin' like sailormen at the
+Agricultural Hall?"
+
+I left the bridge to watch the wire-rope at the stern as it drew out and
+smacked down upon the water. By what instinct or guidance 267 kept it from
+fouling her languidly flapping propeller, I cannot tell. The fog now
+thickened and thinned in streaks that bothered the eyes like the glare of
+intermittent flash-lamps; by turns granting us the vision of a sick sun
+that leered and fled, or burying all a thousand fathom deep in gulfs of
+vapours. At no time could we see the trawler though we heard the click of
+her windlass, the jar of her trawl-beam, and the very flap of the fish on
+her deck. Forward was Pyecroft with the lead; on the bridge Moorshed pawed
+a Channel chart; aft sat I, listening to the whole of the British
+Mercantile Marine (never a keel less) returning to England, and watching
+the fog-dew run round the bight of the tow back to its mother-fog.
+
+"Aie! yeou little man-o'-war! We'm done with trawl. You can take us home
+if you know the road."
+
+"Right O!" said Moorshed. "We'll give the fishmonger a run for his money.
+Whack her up, Mr. Hinchcliffe."
+
+The next few hours completed my education. I saw that I ought to be
+afraid, but more clearly (this was when a liner hooted down the back of my
+neck) that any fear which would begin to do justice to the situation
+would, if yielded to, incapacitate me for the rest of my days. A shadow of
+spread sails, deeper than the darkening twilight, brooding over us like
+the wings of Azrael (Pyecroft said she was a Swede), and, miraculously
+withdrawn, persuaded me that there was a working chance that I should
+reach the beach--any beach--alive, if not dry; and (this was when an
+economical tramp laved our port-rail with her condenser water) were I so
+spared, I vowed I would tell my tale worthily.
+
+Thus we floated in space as souls drift through raw time. Night added
+herself to the fog, and I laid hold on my limbs jealously, lest they, too,
+should melt in the general dissolution.
+
+"Where's that prevaricatin' fishmonger?" said Pyecroft, turning a lantern
+on a scant yard of the gleaming wire-rope that pointed like a stick to my
+left. "He's doin' some fancy steerin' on his own. No wonder Mr.
+Hincheliffe is blasphemious. The tow's sheered off to starboard, Sir.
+He'll fair pull the stern out of us."
+
+Moorshed, invisible, cursed through the megaphone into invisibility.
+
+"Aie! yeou little man-o'-war!" The voice butted through the fog with the
+monotonous insistence of a strayed sheep's. "We don't all like the road
+you'm takin'. 'Tis no road to Brixham. You'll be buckled up under Prawle
+Point by'mbye."
+
+"Do you pretend to know where you are?" the megaphone roared.
+
+"Iss, I reckon; but there's no pretence to me!"
+
+"O Peter!" said Pyecroft. "Let's hang him at 'is own gaff."
+
+I could not see what followed, but Moorshed said: "Take another man with
+you. If you lose the tow, you're done. I'll slow her down."
+
+I heard the dinghy splash overboard ere I could cry "Murder!" Heard the
+rasp of a boat-hook along the wire-rope, and then, as it had been in my
+ear, Pyecroft's enormous and jubilant bellow astern: "Why, he's here!
+Right atop of us! The blighter 'as pouched half the tow, like a shark!" A
+long pause filled with soft Devonian bleatings. Then Pyecroft, _solo
+arpeggie_: "Rum? Rum? Rum? Is that all? Come an' try it, uncle."
+
+I lifted my face to where once God's sky had been, and besought The Trues
+I might not die inarticulate, amid these half-worked miracles, but live at
+least till my fellow-mortals could be made one-millionth as happy as I was
+happy. I prayed and I waited, and we went slow--slow as the processes of
+evolution--till the boat-hook rasped again.
+
+"He's not what you might call a scientific navigator," said Pyecroft,
+still in the dinghy, but rising like a fairy from a pantomime trap. "The
+lead's what 'e goes by mostly; rum is what he's come for; an' Brixham is
+'is 'ome. Lay on, Mucduff!"
+
+A white whiskered man in a frock-coat--as I live by bread, a frock-coat!--
+sea-boots, and a comforter crawled over the torpedo-tube into Moorshed's
+grip and vanished forward.
+
+"'E'll probably 'old three gallon (look sharp with that dinghy!); but 'is
+nephew, left in charge of the _Agatha_, wants two bottles command-
+allowance. You're a tax-payer, Sir. Do you think that excessive?"
+
+"Lead there! Lead!" rang out from forward.
+
+"Didn't I say 'e wouldn't understand compass deviations? Watch him close.
+It'll be worth it!"
+
+As I neared the bridge I heard the stranger say: "Let me zmell un!" and to
+his nose was the lead presented by a trained man of the King's Navy.
+
+"I'll tell 'ee where to goo, if yeou'll tell your donkey-man what to du.
+I'm no hand wi' steam." On these lines we proceeded miraculously, and,
+under Moorshed's orders--I was the fisherman's Ganymede, even as
+"M. de C." had served the captain--I found both rum and curacoa in
+a locker, and mixed them equal bulk in an enamelled iron cup.
+
+"Now we'm just abeam o' where we should be," he said at last, "an' here
+we'll lay till she lifts. I'd take 'e in for another bottle--and wan for
+my nevvy; but I reckon yeou'm shart-allowanced for rum. That's nivver no
+Navy rum yeou'm give me. Knowed 'ee by the smack tu un. Anchor now!"
+
+I was between Pyecroft and Moorshed on the bridge, and heard them spring
+to vibrating attention at my side. A man with a lead a few feet to port
+caught the panic through my body, and checked like a wild boar at gaze,
+for not far away an unmistakable ship's bell was ringing. It ceased, and
+another began.
+
+"Them!" said Pyecroft. "Anchored!"
+
+"More!" said our pilot, passing me the cup, and I filled it. The trawler
+astern clattered vehemently on her bell. Pyecroft with a jerk of his arm
+threw loose the forward three-pounder. The bar of the back-sight was
+heavily blobbed with dew; the foresight was invisible.
+
+"No--they wouldn't have their picket-boats out in this weather, though
+they ought to." He returned the barrel to its crotch slowly.
+
+"Be yeou gwine to anchor?" said Macduff, smacking his lips, "or be yeou
+gwine straight on to Livermead Beach?"
+
+"Tell him what we're driving at. Get it into his head somehow," said
+Moorshed; and Pyecroft, snatching the cup from me, enfolded the old man
+with an arm and a mist of wonderful words.
+
+"And if you pull it off," said Moorshed at the last, "I'll give you a
+fiver."
+
+"Lard! What's fivers to me, young man? My nevvy, he likes 'em; but I do
+cherish more on fine drink than filthy lucre any day o' God's good weeks.
+Leave goo my arm, yeou common sailorman! I tall 'ee, gentlemen, I hain't
+the ram-faced, ruddle-nosed old fule yeou reckon I be. Before the mast
+I've fared in my time; fisherman I've been since I seed the unsense of
+sea-dangerin'. Baccy and spirits--yiss, an' cigars too, I've run a plenty.
+I'm no blind harse or boy to be coaxed with your forty-mile free towin'
+and rum atop of all. There's none more sober to Brix'am this tide, I don't
+care who 'tis--than me. _I_ know--_I_ know. Yander'm two great King's
+ships. Yeou'm wishful to sink, burn, and destroy they while us kips 'em
+busy sellin' fish. No need tall me so twanty taime over. Us'll find they
+ships! Us'll find 'em, if us has to break our fine new bowsprit so close
+as Crump's bull's horn!"
+
+"Good egg!" quoth Moorshed, and brought his hand down on the wide
+shoulders with the smack of a beaver's tail.
+
+"Us'll go look for they by hand. Us'll give they something to play upon;
+an' do 'ee deal with them faithfully, an' may the Lard have mercy on your
+sowls! Amen. Put I in dinghy again."
+
+The fog was as dense as ever--we moved in the very womb of night--but I
+cannot recall that I took the faintest note of it as the dinghy, guided by
+the tow-rope, disappeared toward the _Agatha_, Pyecroft rowing. The bell
+began again on the starboard bow.
+
+"We're pretty near," said Moorshed, slowing down. "Out with the Berthon.
+(_We'll_ sell 'em fish, too.) And if any one rows Navy-stroke, I'll break
+his jaw with the tiller. Mr. Hinchcliffe (this down the tube), "you'll
+stay here in charge with Gregory and Shergold and the engine-room staff.
+Morgan stays, too, for signalling purposes." A deep groan broke from
+Morgan's chest, but he said nothing. "If the fog thins and you're seen by
+any one, keep'em quiet with the signals. I can't think of the precise lie
+just now, but _you_ can, Morgan."
+
+"Yes, Sir."
+
+"Suppose their torpedo-nets are down?" I whispered, shivering with
+excitement.
+
+"If they've been repairing minor defects all day, they won't have any one
+to spare from the engine-room, and 'Out nets!' is a job for the whole
+ship's company. I expect they've trusted to the fog--like us. Well,
+Pyecroft?"
+
+That great soul had blown up on to the bridge like a feather. "'Ad to see
+the first o' the rum into the _Agathites_, Sir. They was a bit jealous o'
+their commandin' officer comin' 'ome so richly lacquered, and at first the
+_conversazione_ languished, as you might say. But they sprang to attention
+ere I left. Six sharp strokes on the bells, if any of 'em are sober enough
+to keep tally, will be the signal that our consort 'as cast off her tow
+an' is manceuvrin' on 'er own."
+
+"Right O! Take Laughton with you in the dinghy. Put that Berthon over
+quietly there! Are you all right, Mr. Hinchcliffe?"
+
+I stood back to avoid the rush of half-a-dozen shadows dropping into the
+Berthon boat. A hand caught me by the slack of my garments, moved me in
+generous arcs through the night, and I rested on the bottom of the dinghy.
+
+"I want you for _prima facie_ evidence, in case the vaccination don't
+take," said Pyecroft in my ear. "Push off, Alf!"
+
+The last bell-ringing was high overhead. It was followed by six little
+tinkles from the _Agatha_, the roar of her falling anchor, the clash of
+pans, and loose shouting.
+
+"Where be gwine tu? Port your 'ellum. Aie! you mud-dredger in the fairway,
+goo astern! Out boats! She'll sink us!"
+
+A clear-cut Navy voice drawled from the clouds: "Quiet! you gardeners
+there. This is the _Cryptic_ at anchor."
+
+"Thank you for the range," said Pyecroft, and paddled gingerly. "Feel well
+out in front of you, Alf. Remember your fat fist is our only Marconi
+installation." The voices resumed:
+
+"Bournemouth steamer he says she be."
+
+"Then where be Brixham Harbor?"
+
+"Damme, I'm a tax-payer tu. They've no right to cruise about this way.
+I'll have the laa on 'ee if anything carries away."
+
+Then the man-of-war:
+
+"Short on your anchor! Heave short, you howling maniacs! You'll get
+yourselves smashed in a minute if you drift."
+
+The air was full of these and other voices as the dinghy, checking, swung.
+I passed one hand down Laughton's stretched arm and felt an iron gooseneck
+and a foot or two of a backward-sloping torpedo-net boom. The other hand I
+laid on broad, cold iron--even the flanks of H.M.S. _Cryptic_, which is
+twelve thousand tons.
+
+I heard a scrubby, raspy sound, as though Pyecroft had chosen that hour to
+shave, and I smelled paint. "Drop aft a bit, Alf; we'll put a stencil
+under the stern six-inch casements."
+
+Boom by boom Laughlin slid the dinghy along the towering curved wall.
+Once, twice, and again we stopped, and the keen scrubbing sound was
+renewed.
+
+"Umpires are 'ard-'earted blighters, but this ought to convince 'em....
+Captain Panke's stern-walk is now above our defenceless 'eads. Repeat the
+evolution up the starboard side, Alf."
+
+I was only conscious that we moved around an iron world palpitating with
+life. Though my knowledge was all by touch--as, for example, when Pyecroft
+led my surrendered hand to the base of some bulging sponson, or when my
+palm closed on the knife-edge of the stem and patted it timidly--yet I
+felt lonely and unprotected as the enormous, helpless ship was withdrawn,
+and we drifted away into the void where voices sang:
+
+
+  Tom Pearce, Tom Pearce, lend me thy gray mare,
+  All along, out along, down along lea!
+  I want for to go to Widdicombe Fair
+  With Bill Brewer, Sam Sewer, Peter Gurney, Harry Hawke,
+  Old Uncle Tom Cobley an' all!
+
+"That's old Sinbad an' 'is little lot from the _Agatha_! Give way, Alf!
+_You_ might sing somethin', too."
+
+"I'm no burnin' Patti. Ain't there noise enough for you, Pye?"
+
+"Yes, but it's only amateurs. Give me the tones of 'earth and 'ome. Ha!
+List to the blighter on the 'orizon sayin' his prayers, Navy-fashion.
+'Eaven 'elp me argue that way when I'm a warrant-officer!"
+
+We headed with little lapping strokes toward what seemed to be a fair-
+sized riot.
+
+"An' I've 'eard the _Devolution_ called a happy ship, too," said Pyecroft.
+"Just shows 'ow a man's misled by prejudice. She's peevish--that's what
+she is--nasty-peevish. Prob'ly all because the _Agathites_ are scratching
+'er paint. Well, rub along, Alf. I've got the lymph!"
+
+A voice, which Mr. Pyecroft assured me belonged to a chief carpenter, was
+speaking through an aperture (starboard bow twelve-pounder on the lower
+deck). He did not wish to purchase any fish, even at grossly reduced
+rates. Nobody wished to buy any fish. This ship was the _Devolution_ at
+anchor, and desired no communication with shore boats.
+
+"Mark how the Navy 'olds it's own. He's sober. The _Agathites_ are not, as
+you might say, an' yet they can't live with 'im. It's the discipline that
+does it. 'Ark to the bald an' unconvincin' watch-officer chimin' in. I
+wonder where Mr. Moorshed has got to?"
+
+We drifted down the _Devolution's_ side, as we had drifted down her
+sister's; and we dealt with her in that dense gloom as we had dealt with
+her sister.
+
+"Whai! 'Tis a man-o'-war, after all! I can see the captain's whisker all
+gilt at the edges! We took 'ee for the Bournemouth steamer. Three cheers
+for the real man-o'-war!"
+
+That cry came from under the _Devolution's_ stern. Pyecroft held something
+in his teeth, for I heard him mumble, "Our Mister Moorshed!"
+
+Said a boy's voice above us, just as we dodged a jet of hot water from
+some valve: "I don't half like that cheer. If I'd been the old man I'd ha'
+turned loose the quick-firers at the first go-off. Aren't they rowing
+Navy-stroke, yonder?"
+
+"True," said Pyecroft, listening to retreating oars. "It's time to go 'ome
+when snotties begin to think. The fog's thinnin', too."
+
+I felt a chill breath on my forehead, and saw a few feet of the steel
+stand out darker than the darkness, disappear--it was then the dinghy shot
+away from it--and emerge once more.
+
+"Hallo! what boat's that?" said the voice suspiciously.
+
+"Why, I do believe it's a real man-o'-war, after all," said Pyecroft, and
+kicked Laughton.
+
+"What's that for?" Laughton was no dramatist.
+
+"Answer in character, you blighter! Say somethin' opposite."
+
+"What boat's _thatt_?" The hail was repeated.
+
+"What do yee say-ay?" Pyecroft bellowed, and, under his breath to me:
+"Give us a hand."
+
+"It's called the _Marietta_--F. J. Stokes--Torquay," I began, quaveringly.
+"At least, that's the name on the name-board. I've been dining--on a
+yacht."
+
+"I see." The voice shook a little, and my way opened before me with
+disgraceful ease.
+
+"Yesh. Dining private yacht. _Eshmesheralda_. I belong to Torquay Yacht
+Club. _Are_ you member Torquay Yacht Club?"
+
+"You'd better go to bed, Sir. Good-night." We slid into the rapidly
+thinning fog.
+
+"Dig out, Alf. Put your _nix mangiare_ back into it. The fog's peelin'
+off like a petticoat. Where's Two Six Seven?"
+
+"I can't see her," I replied, "but there's a light low down ahead."
+
+"The _Agatha_!" They rowed desperately through the uneasy dispersal of the
+fog for ten minutes and ducked round the trawler's bow.
+
+"Well, Emanuel means 'God with us'--so far." Pyecroft wiped his brow, laid
+a hand on the low rail, and as he boosted me up to the trawler, I saw
+Moorshed's face, white as pearl in the thinning dark.
+
+"Was it all right?" said he, over the bulwarks.
+
+"Vaccination ain't in it. She's took beautiful. But where's 267, Sir?"
+Pyecroft replied.
+
+"Gone. We came here as the fog lifted. I gave the _Devolution_ four. Was
+that you behind us?"
+
+"Yes, sir; but I only got in three on the _Devolution_. I gave the
+_Cryptic_ nine, though. They're what you might call more or less
+vaccinated."
+
+He lifted me inboard, where Moorshed and six pirates lay round the
+_Agatha's_ hatch. There was a hint of daylight in the cool air.
+
+"Where is the old man?" I asked.
+
+"Still selling 'em fish, I suppose. He's a darling! But I wish I could get
+this filthy paint off my hands. Hallo! What the deuce is the _Cryptic_
+signalling?"
+
+A pale masthead light winked through the last of the fog. It was answered
+by a white pencil to the southward.
+
+"Destroyer signalling with searchlight." Pyecroft leaped on the stern-
+rail. "The first part is private signals. Ah! now she's Morsing against
+the fog. 'P-O-S-T'--yes, 'postpone'--'D-E-P-' (go on)! 'departure--till--
+further--orders--which--will--be com" (he's dropped the other m)
+"'unicated--verbally. End,'." He swung round. "_Cryptic_ is now answering:
+'Ready--proceed--immediately. What--news--promised--destroyer--
+flotilla?'"
+
+"Hallo!" said Moorshed. "Well, never mind, They'll come too late."
+
+"Whew! That's some 'igh-born suckling on the destroyer. Destroyer signals:
+'Care not. All will be known later.' What merry beehive's broken loose
+now?"
+
+"What odds! We've done our little job."
+
+"Why--why--it's Two Six Seven!"
+
+Here Pyecroft dropped from the rail among the fishy nets and shook the
+_Agatha_ with heavings. Moorshed cast aside his cigarette, looked over the
+stern, and fell into his subordinate's arms. I heard the guggle of
+engines, the rattle of a little anchor going over not a hundred yards
+away, a cough, and Morgan's subdued hail. ... So far as I remember, it was
+Laughton whom I hugged; but the men who hugged me most were Pyecroft and
+Moorshed, adrift among the fishy nets.
+
+There was no semblance of discipline in our flight over the _Agatha's_
+side, nor, indeed, were ordinary precautions taken for the common safety,
+because (I was in the Berthon) they held that patent boat open by hand for
+the most part. We regained our own craft, cackling like wild geese, and
+crowded round Moorshed and Hinchcliffe. Behind us the _Agatha's_ boat,
+returning from her fish-selling cruise, yelled: "Have 'ee done the trick?
+Have 'ee done the trick?" and we could only shout hoarsely over the stern,
+guaranteeing them rum by the hold-full.
+
+"Fog got patchy here at 12:27," said Henry Salt Hinchcliffe, growing
+clearer every instant in the dawn. "Went down to Brixham Harbour to keep
+out of the road. Heard whistles to the south and went to look. I had her
+up to sixteen good. Morgan kept on shedding private Red Fleet signals out
+of the signal-book, as the fog cleared, till we was answered by three
+destroyers. Morgan signalled 'em by searchlight: 'Alter course to South
+Seventeen East, so as not to lose time,' They came round quick. We kept
+well away--on their port beam--and Morgan gave 'em their orders." He
+looked at Morgan and coughed.
+
+"The signalman, acting as second in command," said Morgan, swelling, "then
+informed destroyer flotilla that _Cryptic_ and _Devolution_ had made good
+defects, and, in obedience to Admiral's supplementary orders (I was afraid
+they might suspect that, but they didn't), had proceeded at seven knots at
+11:23 p. M. to rendezvous near Channel Islands, seven miles N.N.W. the
+Casquet light. (I've rendezvoused there myself, Sir.) Destroyer flotilla
+would therefore follow cruisers and catch up with them on their course.
+Destroyer flotilla then dug out on course indicated, all funnels sparking
+briskly."
+
+"Who were the destroyers?"
+
+"_Wraith, Kobbold, Stiletto_, Lieutenant-Commander A. L. Hignett, acting
+under Admiral's orders to escort cruisers received off the Dodman at 7 P.
+M. They'd come slow on account of fog."
+
+"Then who were you?"
+
+"We were the _Afrite_, port-engine broke down, put in to Torbay, and there
+instructed by _Cryptic_, previous to her departure with _Devolution_) to
+inform Commander Hignett of change of plans. Lieutenant-Commander Hignett
+signalled that our meeting was quite providential. After this we returned
+to pick up our commanding officer, and being interrogated by _Cryptic_,
+marked time signalling as requisite, which you may have seen. The _Agatha_
+representing the last known rallying-point--or, as I should say, pivot-
+ship of the evolution--it was decided to repair to the _Agatha_ at
+conclusion of manoeuvre."
+
+"Is there such a thing as one fine big drink aboard this one fine big
+battleship?" "Can do, sir," said Pyecroft, and got it. Beginning with Mr.
+Moorshed and ending with myself, junior to the third first-class stoker,
+we drank, and it was as water of the brook, that two and a half inches of
+stiff, treacly, Navy rum. And we looked each in the other's face, and we
+nodded, bright-eyed, burning with bliss.
+
+Moorshed walked aft to the torpedo-tubes and paced back and forth, a
+captain victorious on his own quarterdeck; and the triumphant day broke
+over the green-bedded villas of Torquay to show us the magnitude of our
+victory. There lay the cruisers (I have reason to believe that they had
+made good their defects). They were each four hundred and forty feet long
+and sixty-six wide; they held close upon eight hundred men apiece, and
+they had cost, say, a million and a half the pair. And they were ours, and
+they did not know it. Indeed, the _Cryptic_, senior ship, was signalling
+vehement remarks to our address, which we did not notice.
+
+"If you take these glasses, you'll get the general run o' last night's
+vaccination," said Pyecroft. "Each one represents a torpedo got 'ome, as
+you might say."
+
+I saw on the _Cryptic's_ port side, as she lay half a mile away across the
+glassy water, four neat white squares in outline, a white blur in the
+centre.
+
+"There are five more to starboard. 'Ere's the original!" He handed me a
+paint-dappled copper stencil-plate, two feet square, bearing in the centre
+the six-inch initials, "G.M."
+
+"Ten minutes ago I'd ha' eulogised about that little trick of ours, but
+Morgan's performance has short-circuited me. Are you happy, Morgan?"
+
+"Bustin'," said the signalman briefly.
+
+"You may be. Gawd forgive you, Morgan, for as Queen 'Enrietta said to the
+'ousemaid, _I_ never will. I'd ha' given a year's pay for ten minutes o'
+your signallin' work this mornin'."
+
+"I wouldn't 'ave took it up," was the answer. "Perishin' 'Eavens above!
+Look at the _Devolution's_ semaphore!" Two black wooden arms waved from
+the junior ship's upper bridge. "They've seen it."
+
+"_The_ mote _on_ their neighbour's beam, of course," said Pyecroft, and
+read syllable by syllable: "'Captain Malan to Captain Panke. Is--sten--
+cilled frieze your starboard side new Admiralty regulation, or your Number
+One's private expense?' Now _Cryptic_ is saying, 'Not understood.' Poor
+old _Crippy_, the _Devolute's_ raggin' 'er sore. 'Who is G.M.?' she says.
+That's fetched the _Cryptic_. She's answerin': 'You ought to know. Examine
+own paintwork.' Oh, Lord! they're both on to it now. This is balm. This is
+beginning to be balm. I forgive you, Morgan!"
+
+Two frantic pipes twittered. From either cruiser a whaler dropped into the
+water and madly rowed round the ship: as a gay-coloured hoist rose to the
+_Cryptic's_ yardarm: "Destroyer will close at once. Wish to speak by
+semaphore." Then on the bridge semaphore itself: "Have been trying to
+attract your attention last half hour. Send commanding officer aboard at
+once."
+
+"Our attention? After all the attention we've given 'er, too," said
+Pyecroft. "What a greedy old woman!" To Moorshed: "Signal from the
+_Cryptic_, Sir."
+
+"Never mind that!" said the boy, peering through his glasses. "Our dinghy
+quick, or they'll paint our marks out. Come along!"
+
+By this time I was long past even hysteria. I remember Pyecroft's bending
+back, the surge of the driven dinghy, a knot of amazed faces as we skimmed
+the _Cryptic's_ ram, and the dropped jaw of the midshipman in her whaler
+when we barged fairly into him.
+
+"Mind my paint!" he yelled.
+
+"You mind mine, snotty," said Moorshed. "I was all night putting these
+little ear-marks on you for the umpires to sit on. Leave 'em alone."
+
+We splashed past him to the _Devolution's_ boat, where sat no one less
+than her first lieutenant, a singularly unhandy-looking officer.
+
+"What the deuce is the meaning of this?" he roared, with an accusing
+forefinger.
+
+"You're sunk, that's all. You've been dead half a tide."
+
+"Dead, am I? I'll show you whether I'm dead or not, Sir!"
+
+"Well, you may be a survivor," said Moorshed ingratiatingly, "though it
+isn't at all likely."
+
+The officer choked for a minute. The midshipman crouched up in stern said,
+half aloud: "Then I _was_ right--last night."
+
+"Yesh," I gasped from the dinghy's coal-dust. "Are you member Torquay
+Yacht Club?"
+
+"Hell!" said the first lieutenant, and fled away. The _Cryptic's_ boat was
+already at that cruiser's side, and semaphores flicked zealously from ship
+to ship. We floated, a minute speck, between the two hulls, while the
+pipes went for the captain's galley on the _Devolution_.
+
+"That's all right," said Moorshed. "Wait till the gangway's down and then
+board her decently. We oughtn't to be expected to climb up a ship we've
+sunk."
+
+Pyecroft lay on his disreputable oars till Captain Malan, full-uniformed,
+descended the _Devolution's_ side. With due compliments--not acknowledged,
+I grieve to say--we fell in behind his sumptuous galley, and at last, upon
+pressing invitation, climbed, black as sweeps all, the lowered gangway of
+the _Cryptic_. At the top stood as fine a constellation of marine stars as
+ever sang together of a morning on a King's ship. Every one who could get
+within earshot found that his work took him aft. I counted eleven able
+seamen polishing the breechblock of the stern nine-point-two, four marines
+zealously relieving each other at the life-buoy, six call-boys, nine
+midshipmen of the watch, exclusive of naval cadets, and the higher ranks
+past all census.
+
+"If I die o' joy," said Pyecroft behind his hand, "remember I died
+forgivin' Morgan from the bottom of my 'eart, because, like Martha, we
+'ave scoffed the better part. You'd better try to come to attention, Sir."
+
+Moorshed ran his eye voluptuously over the upper deck battery, the huge
+beam, and the immaculate perspective of power. Captain Panke and Captain
+Malan stood on the well-browned flash-plates by the dazzling hatch.
+Precisely over the flagstaff I saw Two Six Seven astern, her black
+petticoat half hitched up, meekly floating on the still sea. She looked
+like the pious Abigail who has just spoken her mind, and, with folded
+hands, sits thanking Heaven among the pieces. I could almost have sworn
+that she wore black worsted gloves and had a little dry cough. But it was
+Captain Panke that coughed so austerely. He favoured us with a lecture on
+uniform, deportment, and the urgent necessity of answering signals from a
+senior ship. He told us that he disapproved of masquerading, that he loved
+discipline, and would be obliged by an explanation. And while he delivered
+himself deeper and more deeply into our hands, I saw Captain Malan wince.
+He was watching Moorshed's eye.
+
+"I belong to Blue Fleet, Sir. I command Number Two Six Seven," said
+Moorshed, and Captain Planke was dumb. "Have you such a thing as a frame-
+plan of the _Cryptic_ aboard?" He spoke with winning politeness as he
+opened a small and neatly folded paper.
+
+"I have, sir." The little man's face was working with passion.
+
+"Ah! Then I shall be able to show you precisely where you were torpedoed
+last night in"--he consulted the paper with one finely arched eyebrow--"in
+nine places. And since the _Devolution_ is, I understand, a sister ship"--
+he bowed slightly toward Caplain Malan--"the same plan----"
+
+I had followed the clear precision of each word with a dumb amazement
+which seemed to leave my mind abnormally clear. I saw Captain Malan's eye
+turn from Moorshed and seek that of the _Cryptic's_ commander. And he
+telegraphed as clearly as Moorshed was speaking: "My dear friend and
+brother officer, _I_ know Panke; _you_ know Panke; _we_ know Panke--good
+little Panke! In less than three Greenwich chronometer seconds Panke will
+make an enormous ass of himself, and I shall have to put things straight,
+unless you who are a man of tact and discernment----"
+
+"Carry on." The Commander's order supplied the unspoken word. The cruiser
+boiled about her business around us; watch and watch officers together, up
+to the limit of noise permissible. I saw Captain Malan turn to his senior.
+
+"Come to my cabin!" said Panke gratingly, and led the way. Pyecroft and I
+stayed still.
+
+"It's all right," said Pyecroft. "They daren't leave us loose aboard for
+one revolution," and I knew that he had seen what I had seen.
+
+"You, too!" said Captain Malan, returning suddenly. We passed the sentry
+between white enamelled walls of speckless small arms, and since that
+Royal Marine Light infantryman was visibly suffocating from curiosity, I
+winked at him. We entered the chintz-adorned, photo-speckled, brass-
+fendered, tile-stoved main cabin. Moorshed, with a ruler, was
+demonstrating before the frame-plan of H.M.S. _Cryptic_.
+
+"--making nine stencils in all of my initials G.M.," I heard him say.
+"Further, you will find attached to your rudder, and you, too, Sir"--he
+bowed to Captain Malan yet again--"one fourteen-inch Mark IV practice
+torpedo, as issued to first-class torpedo-boats, properly buoyed. I have
+sent full particulars by telegraph to the umpires, and have requested them
+to judge on the facts as they--appear." He nodded through the large window
+to the stencilled _Devolution_ awink with brass work in the morning sun,
+and ceased.
+
+Captain Panke faced us. I remembered that this was only play, and caught
+myself wondering with what keener agony comes the real defeat.
+
+"Good God, Johnny!" he said, dropping his lower lip like a child, "this
+young pup says he has put us both out of action. Inconceivable--eh? My
+first command of one of the class. Eh? What shall we do with him? What
+shall we do with him--eh?"
+
+"As far as I can see, there's no getting over the stencils," his companion
+answered.
+
+"Why didn't I have the nets down? Why didn't I have the nets down?" The
+cry tore itself from Captain Panke's chest as he twisted his hands.
+
+"I suppose we'd better wait and find out what the umpires will say. The
+Admiral won't be exactly pleased." Captain Malan spoke very soothingly.
+Moorshed looked out through the stern door at Two Six Seven. Pyecroft and
+I, at attention, studied the paintwork opposite. Captain Panke had dropped
+into his desk chair, and scribbled nervously at a blotting-pad.
+
+Just before the tension became unendurable, he looked at his junior for a
+lead. "What--what are you going to do about it, Johnny--eh?"
+
+"Well, if you don't want him, I'm going to ask this young gentleman to
+breakfast, and then we'll make and mend clothes till the umpires have
+decided."
+
+Captain Panke flung out a hand swiftly.
+
+"Come with me," said Captain Malan. "Your men had better go back in the
+dinghy to--their--own--ship."
+
+"Yes, I think so," said Moorshed, and passed out behind the captain. We
+followed at a respectful interval, waiting till they had ascended the
+ladder.
+
+Said the sentry, rigid as the naked barometer behind him: "For Gawd's
+sake! 'Ere, come 'ere! For Gawd's sake! What's 'appened? Oh! come '_ere_
+an' tell."
+
+"Tell? You?" said Pyecroft. Neither man's lips moved, and the words were
+whispers: "Your ultimate illegitimate grandchildren might begin to
+understand, not you--nor ever will."
+
+"Captain Malan's galley away, Sir," cried a voice above; and one replied:
+"Then get those two greasers into their dinghy and hoist the blue peter.
+We're out of action."
+
+"Can you do it, Sir?" said Pyecroft at the foot of the ladder. "Do you
+think it is in the English language, or do you not?"
+
+"I don't think I can, but I'll try. If it takes me two years, I'll try."
+
+*       *       *       *       *
+
+There are witnesses who can testify that I have used no artifice. I have,
+on the contrary, cut away priceless slabs of _opus alexandrinum_. My gold
+I have lacquered down to dull bronze, my purples overlaid with sepia of
+the sea, and for hell-hearted ruby and blinding diamond I have substituted
+pale amethyst and mere jargoon. Because I would say again "Disregarding
+the inventions of the Marine Captain whose other name is Gubbins, let a
+plain statement suffice."
+
+
+
+
+THE COMPREHENSION OF PRIVATE COPPER
+
+THE KING'S TASK
+
+  After the sack of the City, when Rome was sunk to a name,
+  In the years when the Lights were darkened, or ever Saint Wilfrid came.
+  Low on the borders of Britain, the ancient poets sing,
+  Between the cliff and the forest there ruled a Saxon king.
+
+  Stubborn all were his people, a stark and a jealous horde--
+  Not to be schooled by the cudgel, scarce to be cowed by the sword;
+  Blithe to turn at their pleasure, bitter to cross in their mood,
+  And set on the ways of their choosing as the hogs of Andred's Wood ...
+
+  They made them laws in the Witan, the laws of flaying and fine,
+  Folkland, common and pannage, the theft and the track of kine;
+  Statutes of tun and of market for the fish and the malt and the meal,
+  The tax on the Bramber packhorse and the tax on the Hastings keel.
+  Over the graves of the Druids and over the wreck of Rome
+  Rudely but deeply they bedded the plinth of the days to come.
+  Behind the feet of the Legions and before the Northman's ire,
+  Rudely but greatly begat they the body of state and of shire.
+  Rudely but greatly they laboured, and their labour stands till now
+  If we trace on our ancient headlands the twist of their eight-ox plough.
+
+
+THE COMPREHENSION OF PRIVATE COPPER
+
+Private Copper's father was a Southdown shepherd; in early youth Copper
+had studied under him. Five years' army service had somewhat blunted
+Private Copper's pastoral instincts, but it occurred to him as a memory of
+the Chalk that sheep, or in this case buck, do not move towards one across
+turf, or in this case, the Colesberg kopjes unless a stranger, or in this
+case an enemy, is in the neighbourhood. Copper, helmet back-first advanced
+with caution, leaving his mates of the picket full a mile behind. The
+picket, concerned for its evening meal, did not protest. A year ago it
+would have been an officer's command, moving as such. To-day it paid
+casual allegiance to a Canadian, nominally a sergeant, actually a trooper
+of Irregular Horse, discovered convalescent in Naauwport Hospital, and
+forthwith employed on odd jobs. Private Copper crawled up the side of a
+bluish rock-strewn hill thinly fringed with brush atop, and remembering
+how he had peered at Sussex conies through the edge of furze-clumps,
+cautiously parted the dry stems before his face. At the foot of the long
+slope sat three farmers smoking. To his natural lust for tobacco was added
+personal wrath because spiky plants were pricking his belly, and Private
+Copper slid the backsight up to fifteen hundred yards....
+
+"Good evening, Khaki. Please don't move," said a voice on his left, and as
+he jerked his head round he saw entirely down the barrel of a well-kept
+Lee-Metford protruding from an insignificant tuft of thorn. Very few
+graven images have moved less than did Private Copper through the next ten
+seconds.
+
+"It's nearer seventeen hundred than fifteen," said a young man in an
+obviously ready-made suit of grey tweed, possessing himself of Private
+Copper's rifle. "Thank _you_. We've got a post of thirty-seven men out
+yonder. You've eleven--eh? We don't want to kill 'em. We have no quarrel
+with poor uneducated Khakis, and we do not want prisoners we do not keep.
+It is demoralising to both sides--eh?"
+
+Private Cooper did not feel called upon to lay down the conduct of
+guerilla warfare. This dark-skinned, dark-haired, and dark-eyed stranger
+was his first intimate enemy. He spoke, allowing for a clipped cadence
+that recalled to Copper vague memories of Umballa, in precisely the same
+offensive accent that the young squire of Wilmington had used fifteen
+years ago when he caught and kicked Alf Copper, a rabbit in each pocket,
+out of the ditches of Cuckmere. The enemy looked Copper up and down,
+folded and re-pocketed a copy of an English weekly which he had been
+reading, and said: "You seem an inarticulate sort of swine--like the rest
+of them--eh?"
+
+"You," said Copper, thinking, somehow, of the crushing answers he had
+never given to the young squire, "are a renegid. Why, you ain't Dutch.
+You're English, same as me."
+
+"_No_, khaki. If you cannot talk civilly to a gentleman I will blow your
+head off."
+
+Copper cringed, and the action overbalanced him so that he rolled some six
+or eight feet downhill, under the lee of a rough rock. His brain was
+working with a swiftness and clarity strange in all his experience of Alf
+Copper. While he rolled he spoke, and the voice from his own jaws amazed
+him: "If you did, 'twouldn't make you any less of a renegid." As a useful
+afterthought he added: "I've sprained my ankle."
+
+The young man was at his side in a flash. Copper made no motion to rise,
+but, cross-legged under the rock, grunted: "'Ow much did old Krujer pay
+you for this? What was you wanted for at 'ome? Where did you desert from?"
+
+"Khaki," said the young man, sitting down in his turn, "you are a shade
+better than your mates. You did not make much more noise than a yoke of
+oxen when you tried to come up this hill, but you are an ignorant diseased
+beast like the rest of your people--eh? When you were at the Ragged
+Schools did they teach you any history, Tommy--'istory I mean?"
+
+"Don't need no schoolin' to know a renegid," said Copper. He had made
+three yards down the hill--out of sight, unless they could see through
+rocks, of the enemy's smoking party.
+
+The young man laughed; and tossed the soldier a black sweating stick of
+"True Affection." (Private Copper had not smoked a pipe for three weeks.)
+
+"_You_ don't get this--eh?" said the young man. "_We_ do. We take it from
+the trains as we want it. You can keep the cake--you po-ah Tommee." Copper
+rammed the good stuff into his long-cold pipe and puffed luxuriously. Two
+years ago the sister of gunner-guard De Souza, East India Railway, had, at
+a dance given by the sergeants to the Allahabad Railway Volunteers,
+informed Copper that she could not think of waltzing with "a poo-ah
+Tommee." Private Copper wondered why that memory should have returned at
+this hour.
+
+"I'm going to waste a little trouble on you before I send you back to your
+picket _quite_ naked--eh? Then you can say how you were overpowered by
+twenty of us and fired off your last round--like the men we picked up at
+the drift playing cards at Stryden's farm--eh? What's your name--eh?"
+
+Private Copper thought for a moment of a far-away housemaid who might
+still, if the local postman had not gone too far, be interested in his
+fate. On the other hand, he was, by temperament, economical of the truth.
+"Pennycuik," he said, "John Pennycuik."
+
+"Thank you. Well, Mr. John Pennycuik, I'm going to teach you a little
+'istory, as you'd call it--eh?"
+
+"'Ow!" said Copper, stuffing his left hand in his mouth. "So long since
+I've smoked I've burned my 'and--an' the pipe's dropped too. No objection
+to my movin' down to fetch it, is there--Sir?"
+
+"I've got you covered," said the young man, graciously, and Private
+Copper, hopping on one leg, because of his sprain, recovered the pipe yet
+another three yards downhill and squatted under another rock slightly
+larger than the first. A roundish boulder made a pleasant rest for his
+captor, who sat cross-legged once more, facing Copper, his rifle across
+his knee, his hand on the trigger-guard.
+
+"Well, Mr. Pennycuik, as I was going to tell you. A little after you were
+born in your English workhouse, your kind, honourable, brave country,
+England, sent an English gentleman, who could not tell a lie, to say that
+so long as the sun rose and the rivers ran in their courses the Transvaal
+would belong to England. Did you ever hear that, khaki--eh?"
+
+"Oh no, Sir," said Copper. This sentence about the sun and the rivers
+happened to be a very aged jest of McBride, the professional humorist of D
+Company, when they discussed the probable length of the war. Copper had
+thrown beef-tins at McBride in the grey dawn of many wet and dry camps for
+intoning it.
+
+"_Of_ course you would not. Now, mann, I tell you, listen." He spat aside
+and cleared his throat. "Because of that little promise, my father he
+moved into the Transvaal and bought a farm--a little place of twenty or
+thirty thousand acres, don't--you--know."
+
+The tone, in spite of the sing-song cadence fighting with the laboured
+parody of the English drawl, was unbearably like the young Wilmington
+squire's, and Copper found himself saying: "I ought to. I've 'elped burn
+some."
+
+"Yes, you'll pay for that later. _And_ he opened a store."
+
+"Ho! Shopkeeper was he?"
+
+"The kind you call "Sir" and sweep the floor for, Pennycuik.... You see,
+in those days one used to believe in the British Government. My father
+did. _Then_ the Transvaal wiped thee earth with the English. They beat
+them six times running. You know _thatt_--eh?"
+
+"Isn't what we've come 'ere for."
+
+"_But_ my father (he knows better now) kept on believing in the English. I
+suppose it was the pretty talk about rivers and suns that cheated him--eh?
+Anyhow, he believed in his own country. Inn his own country. _So_--you
+see--he was a little startled when he found himself handed over to the
+Transvaal as a prisoner of war. That's what it came to, Tommy--a prisoner
+of war. You know what that is--eh? England was too honourable and too
+gentlemanly to take trouble. There were no terms made for my father."
+
+"So 'e made 'em 'imself. Useful old bird." Private Copper sliced up
+another pipeful and looked out across the wrinkled sea of kopjes, through
+which came the roar of the rushing Orange River, so unlike quiet Cuckmere.
+
+The young man's face darkened. "I think I shall sjambok you myself when
+I've quite done with you. _No_, my father (he was a fool) made no terms
+for eight years--ninety-six months--and for every day of them the
+Transvaal made his life hell for my father and--his people."
+
+"I'm glad to hear that," said the impenitent Copper.
+
+"Are you? You can think of it when I'm taking the skin off your back--
+eh?... My father, he lost everything--everything down to his self-respect.
+You don't know what _thatt_ means--eh?"
+
+"Why?" said Copper. "I'm smokin' baccy stole by a renegid. Why wouldn't I
+know?"
+
+If it came to a flogging on that hillside there might be a chance of
+reprisals. Of course, he might be marched to the Boer camp in the next
+valley and there operated upon; but Army life teaches no man to cross
+bridges unnecessarily.
+
+"Yes, after eight years, my father, cheated by your bitch of a country, he
+found out who was the upper dog in South Africa."
+
+"That's me," said Copper valiantly. "If it takes another 'alf century,
+it's me an' the likes of me."
+
+"You? Heaven help you! You'll be screaming at a wagon-wheel in an hour....
+Then it struck my father that he'd like to shoot the people who'd betrayed
+him. You--you--_you_! He told his son all about it. He told him never to
+trust the English. He told him to do them all the harm he could. Mann, I
+tell you, I don't want much telling. I was born in the Transvaal--I'm a
+burgher. If my father didn't love the English, by the Lord, mann, I tell
+you, I hate them from the bottom of my soul."
+
+The voice quavered and ran high. Once more, for no conceivable reason,
+Private Copper found his inward eye turned upon Umballa cantonments of a
+dry dusty afternoon, when the saddle-coloured son of a local hotel-keeper
+came to the barracks to complain of a theft of fowls. He saw the dark
+face, the plover's-egg-tinted eyeballs, and the thin excited hands. Above
+all, he remembered the passionate, queerly-strung words. Slowly he
+returned to South Africa, using the very sentence his sergeant had used to
+the poultry man.
+
+"Go on with your complaint. I'm listenin'."
+
+"Complaint! Complaint about _you_, you ox! We strip and kick your sort by
+thousands."
+
+The young man rocked to and fro above the rifle, whose muzzle thus
+deflected itself from the pit of Private Copper's stomach. His face was
+dusky with rage.
+
+"Yess, I'm a Transvaal burgher. It took us about twenty years to find out
+how rotten you were. _We_ know and you know it now. Your army--it is the
+laughing-stock of the Continent." He tapped the newspaper in his pocket,
+"You think you're going to win, you poor fools. Your people--your own
+people--your silly rotten fools of people will crawl out of it as they did
+after Majuba. They are beginning now. Look what your own working classes,
+the diseased, lying, drinking white stuff that you come out of, are
+saying." He thrust the English weekly, doubled at the leading article, on
+Copper's knee. "See what dirty dogs your masters are. They do not even
+back you in your dirty work. _We_ cleared the country down to Ladysmith--
+to Estcourt. We cleared the country down to Colesberg."
+
+"Yes, we 'ad to clean up be'ind you. Messy, I call it."
+
+"You've had to stop farm-burning because your people daren't do it. They
+were afraid. You daren't kill a spy. You daren't shoot a spy when you
+catch him in your own uniform. You daren't touch our loyall people in Cape
+Town! Your masters wont let you. You will feed our women and children till
+we are quite ready to take them back. _You_ can't put your cowardly noses
+out of the towns you say you've occupied. _You_ daren't move a convoy
+twenty miles. You think you've done something? You've done nothing, and
+you've taken a quarter of a million of men to do it! There isn't a nigger
+in South Africa that doesn't obey us if we lift our finger. You pay the
+stuff four pounds a month and they lie to you. _We_ flog 'em, as I shall
+flog you."
+
+He clasped his hands together and leaned forward his out-thrust chin
+within two feet of Copper's left, or pipe hand.
+
+"Yuss," said Copper, "it's a fair knock-out." The fist landed to a hair on
+the chin-point, the neck snicked like a gun-lock, and the back of the head
+crashed on the boulder behind.
+
+Copper grabbed up both rifles, unshipped the cross-bandoliers, drew forth
+the English weekly, and picking up the lax hands, looked long and intently
+at the fingernails.
+
+"No! Not a sign of it there," he said. "'Is nails are as clean as mine--
+but he talks just like 'em, though. And he's a landlord too! A landed
+proprietor! Shockin', I call it."
+
+The arms began to flap with returning consciousness. Private Copper rose
+up and whispered: "If you open your head, I'll bash it." There was no
+suggestion of sprain in the flung-back left boot. "Now walk in front of
+me, both arms perpendicularly elevated. I'm only a third-class shot, so,
+if you don't object, I'll rest the muzzle of my rifle lightly but firmly
+on your collar-button--coverin' the serviceable vertebree. If your friends
+see us thus engaged, you pray--'ard."
+
+Private and prisoner staggered downhill. No shots broke the peace of the
+afternoon, but once the young man checked and was sick.
+
+"There's a lot of things I could say to you," Copper observed, at the
+close of the paroxysm, "but it doesn't matter. Look 'ere, you call me
+'pore Tommy' again."
+
+The prisoner hesitated.
+
+"Oh, I ain't goin' to do anythin' _to_ you. I'm recon-noiterin' in my own.
+Say 'pore Tommy' 'alf-a-dozen times."
+
+The prisoner obeyed.
+
+"_That's_ what's been puzzlin' me since I 'ad the pleasure o' meetin'
+you," said Copper. "You ain't 'alf-caste, but you talk _chee-chee_--
+_pukka_ bazar chee-chee. Proceed."
+
+"Hullo," said the Sergeant of the picket, twenty minutes later, "where did
+you round him up?"
+
+"On the top o' yonder craggy mounting. There's a mob of 'em sitting round
+their Bibles seventeen 'undred yards (you said it was seventeen 'undred?)
+t'other side--an' I want some coffee." He sat down on the smoke-blackened
+stones by the fire.
+
+"'Ow did you get 'im?" said McBride, professional humorist, quietly
+filching the English weekly from under Copper's armpit.
+
+"On the chin--while 'e was waggin' it at me."
+
+"What is 'e? 'Nother Colonial rebel to be 'orribly disenfranchised, or a
+Cape Minister, or only a loyal farmer with dynamite in both boots. Tell us
+all about it, Burjer!"
+
+"You leave my prisoner alone," said Private Copper. "'E's 'ad losses an'
+trouble; an' it's in the family too. 'E thought I never read the papers,
+so 'e kindly lent me his very own _Jerrold's Weekly_--an' 'e explained it
+to me as patronisin' as a--as a militia subaltern doin' Railway Staff
+Officer. 'E's a left-over from Majuba--one of the worst kind, an' 'earin'
+the evidence as I did, I don't exactly blame 'im. It was this way."
+
+To the picket Private Copper held forth for ten minutes on the life-
+history of his captive. Allowing for some purple patches, it was an
+absolute fair rendering.
+
+"But what I dis-liked was this baccy-priggin' beggar, 'oo's people, on 'is
+own showin', couldn't 'ave been more than thirty or forty years in the
+coun--on this Gawd-forsaken dust-'eap, comin' the squire over me. They're
+all parsons--we know _that_, but parson _an'_ squire is a bit too thick
+for Alf Copper. Why, I caught 'im in the shameful act of tryin' to start a
+aristocracy on a gun an' a wagon an' a _shambuk_! Yes; that's what it was:
+a bloomin' aristocracy."
+
+"No, it weren't," said McBride, at length, on the dirt, above the
+purloined weekly. "You're the aristocrat, Alf. Old _Jerrold's_ givin' it
+you 'ot. You're the uneducated 'ireling of a callous aristocracy which 'as
+sold itself to the 'Ebrew financier. Meantime, Ducky"--he ran his finger
+down a column of assorted paragraphs--"you're slakin' your brutal
+instincks in furious excesses. Shriekin' women an' desolated 'omesteads is
+what you enjoy, Alf ..., Halloa! What's a smokin' 'ektacomb?"
+
+"'Ere! Let's look. 'Aven't seen a proper spicy paper for a year. Good old
+_Jerrold's!"_ Pinewood and Moppet, reservists, flung themselves on
+McBride's shoulders, pinning him to the ground.
+
+"Lie over your own bloomin' side of the bed, an' we can all look," he
+protested.
+
+"They're only po-ah Tommies," said Copper, apologetically, to the
+prisoner. "Po-ah unedicated Khakis. _They_ don't know what they're
+fightin' for. They're lookin' for what the diseased, lying, drinkin' white
+stuff that they come from is sayin' about 'em!"
+
+The prisoner set down his tin of coffee and stared helplessly round the
+circle.
+
+"I--I don't understand them."
+
+The Canadian sergeant, picking his teeth with a thorn, nodded
+sympathetically:
+
+"If it comes to that, _we_ don't in my country!... Say, boys, when you're
+through with your English mail you might's well provide an escort for your
+prisoner. He's waitin'."
+
+"Arf a mo', Sergeant," said McBride, still reading.
+
+"'Ere's Old Barbarity on the ramp again with some of 'is lady friends, 'oo
+don't like concentration camps. Wish they'd visit ours. Pinewood's a
+married man. He'd know how to be'ave!"
+
+"Well, I ain't goin' to amuse my prisoner alone. 'E's gettin' 'omesick,"
+cried Copper. "One of you thieves read out what's vexin' Old Barbarity an'
+'is 'arem these days. You'd better listen, Burjer, because, afterwards,
+I'm goin' to fall out an' perpetrate those nameless barbarities all over
+you to keep up the reputation of the British Army."
+
+From that English weekly, to bar out which a large and perspiring staff of
+Press censors toiled seven days of the week at Cape Town, did Pinewood of
+the Reserve read unctuously excerpts of the speeches of the accredited
+leaders of His Majesty's Opposition. The night-picket arrived in the
+middle of it, but stayed entranced without paying any compliments, till
+Pinewood had entirely finished the leading article, and several occasional
+notes.
+
+"Gentlemen of the jury," said Alf Copper, hitching up what war had left to
+him of trousers--"you've 'eard what 'e's been fed up with. _Do_ you blame
+the beggar? 'Cause I don't! ... Leave 'im alone, McBride. He's my first
+and only cap-ture, an' I'm goin' to walk 'ome with 'im, ain't I, Ducky?
+... Fall in, Burjer. It's Bermuda, or Umballa, or Ceylon for you--and I'd
+give a month's pay to be in your little shoes."
+
+As not infrequently happens, the actual moving off the ground broke the
+prisoner's nerve. He stared at the tinted hills round him, gasped and
+began to struggle--kicking, swearing, weeping, and fluttering all
+together.
+
+"Pore beggar--oh pore, _pore_ beggar!" said Alf, leaning in on one side of
+him, while Pinewood blocked him on the other.
+
+"Let me go! Let me go! Mann, I tell you, let me go----"
+
+"'E screams like a woman!" said McBride. "They'll 'ear 'im five miles
+off."
+
+"There's one or two ought to 'ear 'im--in England," said Copper, putting
+aside a wildly waving arm.
+
+"Married, ain't 'e?" said Pinewood. "I've seen 'em go like this before--
+just at the last. '_Old_ on, old man, No one's goin' to 'urt you."
+
+The last of the sun threw the enormous shadow of a kopje over the little,
+anxious, wriggling group.
+
+"Quit that," said the Serjeant of a sudden. "You're only making him worse.
+Hands _up_, prisoner! Now you get a holt of yourself, or this'll go off."
+
+And indeed the revolver-barrel square at the man's panting chest seemed to
+act like a tonic; he choked, recovered himself, and fell in between Copper
+and Pinewood.
+
+As the picket neared the camp it broke into song that was heard among the
+officers' tents:
+
+  'E sent us 'is blessin' from London town,
+    (The beggar that kep' the cordite down,)
+  But what do we care if 'e smile or frown,
+    The beggar that kep' the cordite down?
+  The mildly nefarious
+  Wildly barbarious
+    Beggar that kept the cordite down!
+
+Said a captain a mile away: "Why are they singing _that?_ We haven't had a
+mail for a month, have we?"
+
+An hour later the same captain said to his servant: "Jenkins, I understand
+the picket have got a--got a newspaper off a prisoner to-day. I wish you
+could lay hands on it, Jenkins. Copy of the _Times_, I think."
+
+"Yes, Sir. Copy of the _Times_, Sir," said Jenkins, without a quiver, and
+went forth to make his own arrangements.
+
+"Copy of the _Times_" said the blameless Alf, from beneath his blanket. "I
+ain't a member of the Soldier's Institoot. Go an' look in the reg'mental
+Readin'-room--Veldt Row, Kopje Street, second turnin' to the left between
+'ere an' Naauwport."
+
+Jenkins summarised briefly in a tense whisper the thing that Alf Copper
+need not be.
+
+"But my particular copy of the _Times_ is specially pro'ibited by the
+censor from corruptin' the morals of the Army. Get a written order from K.
+o' K., properly countersigned, an' I'll think about it."
+
+"I've got all _you_ want," said Jenkins. "'Urry up. I want to 'ave a
+squint myself."
+
+Something gurgled in the darkness, and Private Copper fell back smacking
+his lips.
+
+"Gawd bless my prisoner, and make me a good boy. Amen. 'Ere you are,
+Jenkins. It's dirt cheap at a tot."
+
+
+
+
+STEAM TACTICS
+
+
+THE NECESSITARIAN
+
+  I know not in whose hands are laid
+    To empty upon earth
+  From unsuspected ambuscade
+    The very Urns of Mirth:
+
+  Who bids the Heavenly Lark arise
+    And cheer our solemn round--
+  The Jest beheld with streaming eyes
+    And grovellings on the ground;
+
+  Who joins the flats of Time and Chance
+    Behind the prey preferred,
+  And thrones on Shrieking Circumstance
+    The Sacredly Absurd,
+
+  Till Laughter, voiceless through excess.
+    Waves mute appeal and sore,
+  Above the midriff's deep distress,
+    For breath to laugh once more.
+
+  No creed hath dared to hail him Lord,
+    No raptured choirs proclaim,
+  And Nature's strenuous Overword
+    Hath nowhere breathed his name.
+
+  Yet, may it be, on wayside jape,
+    The selfsame Power bestows
+  The selfsame power as went to shape
+    His Planet or His Rose.
+
+STEAM TACTICS
+I caught sight of their faces as we came up behind the cart in the narrow
+Sussex lane; but though it was not eleven o'clock, they were both asleep.
+
+That the carrier was on the wrong side of the road made no difference to
+his language when I rang my bell. He said aloud of motor-cars, and
+specially of steam ones, all the things which I had read in the faces of
+superior coachmen. Then he pulled slantwise across me.
+
+There was a vociferous steam air-pump attached to that car which could be
+applied at pleasure....
+
+The cart was removed about a bowshot's length in seven and a quarter
+seconds, to the accompaniment of parcels clattering. At the foot of the
+next hill the horse stopped, and the two men came out over the tail-board.
+
+My engineer backed and swung the car, ready to move out of reach.
+
+"The blighted egg-boiler has steam up," said Mr. Hinchcliffe, pausing to
+gather a large stone. "Temporise with the beggar, Pye, till the sights
+come on!"
+
+"I can't leave my 'orse!" roared the carrier; "but bring 'em up 'ere, an'
+I'll kill 'em all over again."
+
+"Good morning, Mr. Pyecroft," I called cheerfully. "Can I give you a lift
+anywhere?"
+
+The attack broke up round my forewheels.
+
+"Well, we _do_ 'ave the knack o' meeting _in puris naturalibus,_ as I've
+so often said." Mr. Pyecroft wrung my hand. "Yes, I'm on leaf. So's Hinch.
+We're visiting friends among these kopjes."
+
+A monotonous bellowing up the road persisted, where the carrier was still
+calling for corpses.
+
+"That's Agg. He's Hinch's cousin. You aren't fortunit in your family
+connections, Hinch. 'E's usin' language in derogation of good manners. Go
+and abolish 'im."
+
+Henry Salt Hinchcliffe stalked back to the cart and spoke to his cousin. I
+recall much that the wind bore to me of his words and the carrier's. It
+seemed as if the friendship of years were dissolving amid throes.
+
+"'Ave it your own silly way, then," roared the carrier, "an' get into
+Linghurst on your own silly feet. I've done with you two runagates." He
+lashed his horse and passed out of sight still rumbling.
+
+"The fleet's sailed," said Pyecroft, "leavin' us on the beach as before.
+Had you any particular port in your mind?"
+
+"Well, I was going to meet a friend at Instead Wick, but I don't mind--"
+
+"Oh! that'll do as well as anything! We're on leaf, you see."
+
+"She'll hardly hold four," said my engineer. I had broken him of the
+foolish habit of being surprised at things, but he was visibly uneasy.
+
+Hinchcliffe returned, drawn as by ropes to my steam-car, round which he
+walked in narrowing circles.
+
+"What's her speed?" he demanded of the engineer.
+
+"Twenty-five," said that loyal man.
+
+"Easy to run?"
+
+"No; very difficult," was the emphatic answer.
+
+"That just shows that you ain't fit for your rating. D'you suppose that a
+man who earns his livin' by runnin' 30-knot destroyers for a parstime--for
+a parstime, mark you!--is going to lie down before any blighted land-
+crabbing steam-pinnace on springs?"
+
+Yet that was what he did. Directly under the car he lay and looked upward
+into pipes--petrol, steam, and water--with a keen and searching eye.
+
+I telegraphed Mr. Pyecroft a question.
+
+"Not--in--the--least," was the answer. "Steam gadgets always take him that
+way. We had a bit of a riot at Parsley Green through his tryin' to show a
+traction-engine haulin' gipsy-wagons how to turn corners."
+
+"Tell him everything he wants to know," I said to the engineer, as I
+dragged out a rug and spread it on the roadside.
+
+"_He_ don't want much showing," said the engineer. Now, the two men had
+not, counting the time we took to stuff our pipes, been together more than
+three minutes.
+
+"This," said Pyecroft, driving an elbow back into the deep verdure of the
+hedge-foot, "is a little bit of all right. Hinch, I shouldn't let too much
+o' that hot muckings drop in my eyes, Your leaf's up in a fortnight, an'
+you'll be wantin' 'em."
+
+"Here!" said Hinchcliffe, still on his back, to the engineer. "Come here
+and show me the lead of this pipe." And the engineer lay down beside him.
+
+"That's all right," said Mr. Hinchcliffe, rising. "But she's more of a bag
+of tricks than I thought. Unship this superstructure aft"--he pointed to
+the back seat--"and I'll have a look at the forced draught."
+
+The engineer obeyed with alacrity. I heard him volunteer the fact that he
+had a brother an artificer in the Navy.
+
+"They couple very well, those two," said Pyecroft critically, while
+Hinchcliffe sniffed round the asbestos-lagged boiler and turned on gay
+jets of steam.
+
+"Now take me up the road," he said. My man, for form's sake, looked at me.
+
+"Yes, take him," I said. "He's all right."
+
+"No, I'm not," said Hinchcliffe of a sudden--"not if I'm expected to judge
+my water out of a little shaving-glass."
+
+The water-gauge of that steam-car was reflected on a mirror to the right
+of the dashboard. I also had found it inconvenient.
+
+"Throw up your arm and look at the gauge under your armpit. Only mind how
+you steer while you're doing it, or you'll get ditched!" I cried, as the
+car ran down the road.
+
+"I wonder!" said Pyecroft, musing. "But, after all, it's your steamin'
+gadgets he's usin' for his libretto, as you might put it. He said to me
+after breakfast only this mornin' 'ow he thanked his Maker, on all fours,
+that he wouldn't see nor smell nor thumb a runnin' bulgine till the
+nineteenth prox. Now look at him Only look at 'im!"
+
+We could see, down the long slope of the road, my driver surrendering his
+seat to Hinchcliffe, while the car flickered generously from hedge to
+hedge.
+
+"What happens if he upsets?"
+
+"The petrol will light up and the boiler may blow up."
+
+"How rambunkshus! And"--Pyecroft blew a slow cloud--"Agg's about three
+hoops up this mornin', too."
+
+"What's that to do with us? He's gone down the road," I retorted.
+
+"Ye--es, but we'll overtake him. He's a vindictive carrier. He and Hinch
+'ad words about pig-breeding this morning. O' course, Hinch don't know the
+elements o' that evolution; but he fell back on 'is naval rank an' office,
+an' Agg grew peevish. I wasn't sorry to get out of the cart ... Have you
+ever considered how, when you an' I meet, so to say, there's nearly always
+a remarkable hectic day ahead of us! Hullo! Behold the beef-boat
+returnin'!"
+
+He rose as the car climbed up the slope, and shouted: "In bow! Way 'nuff!"
+
+"You be quiet!" cried Hinchcliffe, and drew up opposite the rug, his dark
+face shining with joy. "She's the Poetry o' Motion! She's the Angel's
+Dream. She's------" He shut off steam, and the slope being against her,
+the car slid soberly downhill again.
+
+"What's this? I've got the brake on!" he yelled.
+
+"It doesn't hold backwards," I said. "Put her on the mid-link."
+
+"That's a nasty one for the chief engineer o' the _Djinn_, 31-knot,
+T.B.D.," said Pyecroft. "_Do_ you know what the mid-link is, Hinch?"
+
+Once more the car returned to us; but as Pyecroft stooped to gather up the
+rug, Hinchcliffe jerked the lever testily, and with prawn-like speed she
+retired backwards into her own steam.
+
+"Apparently 'e don't," said Pyecroft. "What's he done now, Sir?"
+
+"Reversed her. I've done it myself."
+
+"But he's an engineer."
+
+For the third time the car manoeuvred up the hill.
+
+"I'll teach you to come alongside properly, if I keep you 'tiffies out all
+night!" shouted Pyecroft. It was evidently a quotation. Hinchcliffe's face
+grew livid, and, his hand ever so slightly working on the throttle, the
+car buzzed twenty yards uphill.
+
+"That's enough. We'll take your word for it. The mountain will go to
+Ma'ommed. Stand _fast_!"
+
+Pyecroft and I and the rug marched up where she and Hinchcliffe fumed
+together.
+
+"Not as easy as it looks--eh, Hinch?"
+
+"It is dead easy. I'm going to drive her to Instead Wick--aren't I?" said
+the first-class engine-room artificer. I thought of his performances with
+No. 267 and nodded. After all, it was a small privilege to accord to pure
+genius.
+
+"But my engineer will stand by--at first," I added.
+
+"An' you a family man, too," muttered Pyecroft, swinging himself into the
+right rear seat. "Sure to be a remarkably hectic day when we meet."
+
+We adjusted ourselves and, in the language of the immortal Navy doctor,
+paved our way towards Linghurst, distant by mile-post 11-3/4 miles.
+
+Mr. Hinchcliffe, every nerve and muscle braced, talked only to the
+engineer, and that professionally. I recalled the time when I, too, had
+enjoyed the rack on which he voluntarily extended himself.
+
+And the County of Sussex slid by in slow time.
+
+"How cautious is the 'tiffy-bird!" said Pyecroft.
+
+"Even in a destroyer," Hinch snapped over his shoulder, "you ain't
+expected to con and drive simultaneous. Don't address any remarks to
+_me!_"
+
+"Pump!" said the engineer. "Your water's droppin'."
+
+"_I_ know that. Where the Heavens is that blighted by-pass?"
+
+He beat his right or throttle hand madly on the side of the car till he
+found the bent rod that more or less controls the pump, and, neglecting
+all else, twisted it furiously.
+
+My engineer grabbed the steering-bar just in time to save us lurching into
+a ditch.
+
+"If I was a burnin' peacock, with two hundred bloodshot eyes in my shinin'
+tail, I'd need 'em all on this job!" said Hinch.
+
+"Don't talk! Steer! This ain't the North Atlantic," Pyecroft replied.
+
+"Blast my stokers! Why, the steam's dropped fifty pounds!" Hinchcliffe
+cried.
+
+"Fire's blown out," said the engineer. "Stop her!"
+
+"Does she do that often?" said Hinch, descending.
+
+"Sometimes."
+
+"Anytime?"
+
+"Any time a cross-wind catches her."
+
+The engineer produced a match and stooped.
+
+That car (now, thank Heaven, no more than an evil memory) never lit twice
+in the same fashion. This time she back-fired superbly, and Pyecroft went
+out over the right rear wheel in a column of rich yellow flame.
+
+"I've seen a mine explode at Bantry--once--prematoor," he volunteered.
+
+"That's all right," said Hinchcliffe, brushing down his singed beard with
+a singed forefinger. (He had been watching too closely.) "Has she any more
+little surprises up her dainty sleeve?"
+
+"She hasn't begun yet," said my engineer, with a scornful cough. "Some one
+'as opened the petrol-supply-valve too wide."
+
+"Change places with me, Pyecroft," I commanded, for I remembered that the
+petrol-supply, the steam-lock, and the forced draught were all controlled
+from the right rear seat.
+
+"Me? Why? There's a whole switchboard full o' nickel-plated muckin's which
+I haven't begun to play with yet. The starboard side's crawlin' with 'em."
+
+"Change, or I'll kill you!" said Hinchcliffe, and he looked like it.
+
+"That's the 'tiffy all over. When anything goes wrong, blame it on the
+lower deck. Navigate by your automatic self, then! _I_ won't help you any
+more."
+
+We navigated for a mile in dead silence.
+
+"Talkin' o' wakes----" said Pyecroft suddenly.
+
+"We weren't," Hinchcliffe grunted.
+
+"There's some wakes would break a snake's back; but this of yours, so to
+speak, would fair turn a tapeworm giddy. That's all I wish to observe,
+Hinch. ... Cart at anchor on the port-bow. It's Agg!"
+
+Far up the shaded road into secluded Bromlingleigh we saw the carrier's
+cart at rest before the post-office.
+
+"He's bung in the fairway. How'm I to get past?" said Hinchcliffe.
+"There's no room. Here, Pye, come and relieve the wheel!"
+
+"Nay, nay, Pauline. You've made your own bed. You've as good as left your
+happy home an' family cart to steal it. Now you lie on it."
+
+"Ring your bell," I suggested.
+
+"Glory!" said Pyecroft, falling forward into the nape of Hinchcliffe's
+neck as the car stopped dead.
+
+"Get out o' my back-hair! That must have been the brake I touched off,"
+Hinchcliffe muttered, and repaired his error tumultuously.
+
+We passed the cart as though we had been all Bruges belfry. Agg, from the
+port-office door, regarded us with a too pacific eye. I remembered later
+that the pretty postmistress looked on us pityingly.
+
+Hinchcliffe wiped the sweat from his brow and drew breath. It was the
+first vehicle that he had passed, and I sympathised with him.
+
+"You needn't grip so hard," said my engineer. "She steers as easy as a
+bicycle."
+
+"Ho! You suppose I ride bicycles up an' down my engine-room?" was the
+answer. "I've other things to think about. She's a terror. She's a
+whistlin' lunatic. I'd sooner run the old South-Easter at Simon's Town
+than her!"
+
+"One of the nice things they say about her," I interrupted, "is that no
+engineer is needed to run this machine."
+
+"No. They'd need about seven."
+
+"'Common-sense only is needed,'" I quoted.
+
+"Make a note of that, Hinch. Just common-sense," Pyecroft put in.
+
+"And now," I said, "we'll have to take in water. There isn't more than a
+couple of inches of water in the tank."
+
+"Where d'you get it from?"
+
+"Oh!--cottages and such-like."
+
+"Yes, but that being so, where does your much-advertised twenty-five miles
+an hour come in? Ain't a dung-cart more to the point?"
+
+"If you want to go anywhere, I suppose it would be," I replied.
+
+"_I_ don't want to go anywhere. I'm thinkin' of you who've got to live
+with her. She'll burn her tubes if she loses her water?"
+
+"She will."
+
+"I've never scorched yet, and I not beginnin' now." He shut off steam
+firmly. "Out you get, Pye, an' shove her along by hand."
+
+"Where to?"
+
+"The nearest water-tank," was the reply. "And Sussex is a dry county."
+
+"She ought to have drag-ropes--little pipe-clayed ones," said Pyecroft.
+
+We got out and pushed under the hot sun for half-a-mile till we came to a
+cottage, sparsely inhabited by one child who wept.
+
+"All out haymakin', o' course," said Pyecroft, thrusting his head into the
+parlour for an instant. "What's the evolution now?"
+
+"Skirmish till we find a well," I said.
+
+"Hmm! But they wouldn't 'ave left that kid without a chaperon, so to
+say... I thought so! Where's a stick?"
+
+A bluish and silent beast of the true old sheep-dog breed glided from
+behind an outhouse and without words fell to work.
+
+Pyecroft kept him at bay with a rake-handle while our party, in rallying-
+square, retired along the box-bordered brick-path to the car.
+
+At the garden gate the dumb devil halted, looked back on the child, and
+sat down to scratch.
+
+"That's his three-mile limit, thank Heaven!" said Pyecroft. "Fall in,
+push-party, and proceed with land-transport o' pinnace. I'll protect your
+flanks in case this sniffin' flea-bag is tempted beyond 'is strength."
+
+We pushed off in silence. The car weighed 1,200 lb., and even on
+ball-bearings was a powerful sudorific. From somewhere behind a hedge we
+heard a gross rustic laugh.
+
+"Those are the beggars we lie awake for, patrollin' the high seas. There
+ain't a port in China where we wouldn't be better treated. Yes, a Boxer
+'ud be ashamed of it," said Pyecroft.
+
+A cloud of fine dust boomed down the road.
+
+"Some happy craft with a well-found engine-room! How different!" panted
+Hinchcliffe, bent over the starboard mudguard.
+
+It was a claret-coloured petrol car, and it stopped courteously, as good
+cars will at sight of trouble.
+
+"Water, only water," I answered in reply to offers of help.
+
+"There's a lodge at the end of these oak palings. They'll give you all you
+want. Say I sent you. Gregory--Michael Gregory. Good-bye!"
+
+"Ought to 'ave been in the Service. Prob'ly is," was Pyecroft's comment.
+
+At that thrice-blessed lodge our water-tank was filled (I dare not quote
+Mr. Hinchcliffe's remarks when he saw the collapsible rubber bucket with
+which we did it) and we re-embarked. It seemed that Sir Michael Gregory
+owned many acres, and that his park ran for miles.
+
+"No objection to your going through it," said the lodge-keeper. "It'll
+save you a goodish bit to Instead Wick."
+
+But we needed petrol, which could be purchased at Pigginfold, a few miles
+farther up, and so we held to the main road, as our fate had decreed.
+
+"We've come seven miles in fifty-four minutes, so far," said Hinchcliffe
+(he was driving with greater freedom and less responsibility), "and now we
+have to fill our bunkers. This is worse than the Channel Fleet."
+
+At Pigginfold, after ten minutes, we refilled our petrol tank and lavishly
+oiled our engines. Mr. Hinchcliffe wished to discharge our engineer on the
+grounds that he (Mr. Hinchcliffe) was now entirely abreast of his work. To
+this I demurred, for I knew my car. She had, in the language of the road,
+held up for a day and a half, and by most bitter experience I suspected
+that her time was very near. Therefore, three miles short of Linghurst, I
+was less surprised than any one, excepting always my engineer, when the
+engines set up a lunatic clucking, and, after two or three kicks, jammed.
+
+"Heaven forgive me all the harsh things I may have said about destroyers
+in my sinful time!" wailed Hinchcliffe, snapping back the throttle.
+"What's worryin' Ada now?"
+
+"The forward eccentric-strap screw's dropped off," said the engineer,
+investigating.
+
+"That all? I thought it was a propeller-blade."
+
+"We must go an' look for it. There isn't another."
+
+"Not me," said Pyecroft from his seat. "Out pinnace, Hinch, an' creep for
+it. It won't be more than five miles back."
+
+The two men, with bowed heads, moved up the road.
+
+"Look like etymologists, don't they? Does she decant her innards often, so
+to speak?" Pyecroft asked.
+
+I told him the true tale of a race-full of ball bearings strewn four miles
+along a Hampshire road, and by me recovered in detail. He was profoundly
+touched.
+
+"Poor Hinch! Poor--poor Hinch!" he said. "And that's only one of her
+little games, is it? He'll be homesick for the Navy by night."
+
+When the search-party doubled back with the missing screw, it was
+Hinchcliffe who replaced it in less than five minutes, while my engineer
+looked on admiringly.
+
+"Your boiler's only seated on four little paperclips," he said, crawling
+from beneath her. "She's a wicker-willow lunch-basket below. She's a
+runnin' miracle. Have you had this combustible spirit-lamp long?"
+
+I told him.
+
+"And yet you were afraid to come into the _Nightmare's_ engine-room when
+we were runnin' trials!"
+
+"It's all a matter of taste," Pyecroft volunteered. "But I will say for
+you, Hinch, you've certainly got the hang of her steamin' gadgets in quick
+time."
+
+He was driving her very sweetly, but with a worried look in his eye and a
+tremor in his arm.
+
+"She don't seem so answer her helm somehow," he said.
+
+"There's a lot of play to the steering-gear," said my engineer. "We
+generally tighten it up every few miles."
+
+"'Like me to stop now? We've run as much as one mile and a half without
+incident," he replied tartly.
+
+"Then you're lucky," said my engineer, bristling in turn.
+
+"They'll wreck the whole turret out o' nasty professional spite in a
+minute," said Pyecroft. "That's the worst o' machinery. Man dead ahead,
+Hinch--semaphorin' like the flagship in a fit!"
+
+"Amen!" said Hinchcliffe. "Shall I stop, or shall I cut him down?"
+
+He stopped, for full in the centre of the Linghurst Road stood a person in
+pepper-and-salt raiment (ready-made), with a brown telegraph envelope in
+his hands.
+
+"Twenty-three and a half miles an hour," he began, weighing a small beam-
+engine of a Waterbury in one red paw. "From the top of the hill over our
+measured quarter-mile--twenty-three and a half."
+
+"You manurial gardener----" Hinchcliffe began. I prodded him warningly
+from behind, and laid the other hand on Pyecroft's stiffening knee.
+
+"Also--on information received--drunk and disorderly in charge of a
+motor-car--to the common danger--two men like sailors in appearance,"
+the man went on.
+
+"Like sailors! ... That's Agg's little _roose_. No wonder he smiled at
+us," said Pyecroft.
+
+"I've been waiting for you some time," the man concluded, folding up the
+telegram.
+
+"Who's the owner?"
+
+I indicated myself.
+
+"Then I want you as well as the two seafaring men. Drunk and disorderly
+can be treated summary. You come on."
+
+My relations with the Sussex constabulary have, so far, been of the best,
+but I could not love this person.
+
+"Of course you have your authority to show?" I hinted.
+
+"I'll show it you at Linghurst," he retorted hotly----"all the authority
+you want."
+
+"I only want the badge, or warrant, or whatever it is a plain-clothes man
+has to show."
+
+He made as though to produce it, but checked himself, repeating less
+politely the invitation to Linghurst. The action and the tone confirmed my
+many-times tested theory that the bulk of English shoregoing institutions
+are based on conformable strata of absolutely impervious inaccuracy. I
+reflected and became aware of a drumming on the back of the front seat
+that Pyecroft, bowed forward and relaxed, was tapping with his knuckles.
+The hardly-checked fury on Hinchcliffe's brow had given place to a greasy
+imbecility, and he nodded over the steering-bar. In longs and shorts, as
+laid down by the pious and immortal Mr. Morse, Pyecroft tapped out, "Sham
+drunk. Get him in the car."
+
+"I can't stay here all day," said the constable.
+
+Pyecroft raised his head. Then was seen with what majesty the British
+sailor-man envisages a new situation.
+
+"Met gennelman heavy sheeway," said he. "Do tell me British gelman can't
+give 'ole Brish Navy lif' own blighted ste' cart. Have another drink!"
+
+"I didn't know they were as drunk as all that when they stopped me," I
+explained.
+
+"You can say all that at Linghurst," was the answer. "Come on."
+
+"Quite right," I said. "But the question is, if you take these two out on
+the road, they'll fall down or start killing you."
+
+"Then I'd call on you to assist me in the execution o' my duty."
+
+"But I'd see you further first. You'd better come with us in the car. I'll
+turn this passenger out." (This was my engineer, sitting quite silent.)
+"You don't want him, and, anyhow, he'd only be a witness for the defence."
+
+"That's true," said the constable. "But it wouldn't make any odds--at
+Linghurst."
+
+My engineer skipped into the bracken like a rabbit. I bade him cut across
+Sir Michael Gregory's park, and if he caught my friend, to tell him I
+should probably be rather late for lunch.
+
+"I ain't going to be driven by _him_." Our destined prey pointed at
+Hinchcliffe with apprehension.
+
+"Of course not. You sake my seat and keep the big sailor in order. He's
+too drunk to do much. I'll change places with the other one. Only be
+quick; I want to pay my fine and get it over."
+
+"That's the way to look at it," he said, dropping into the left rear seat.
+"We're making quite a lot out o' you motor gentry." He folded his arms
+judicially as the car gathered way under Hinchcliffe's stealthy hand.
+
+"But _you_ aren't driving?" he cried, half rising.
+
+"You've noticed it?" said Pyecroft, and embraced him with one anaconda-
+like left arm.
+
+"Don't kill him," said Hinchcliffe briefly. "I want to show him what
+twenty-three and a quarter is." We were going a fair twelve, which was
+about the car's limit.
+
+Our passenger swore something and then groaned.
+
+"Hush, darling!" said Pyecroft, "or I'll have to hug you."
+
+The main road, white under the noon sun, lay broad before us, running
+north to Linghurst. We slowed and looked anxiously for a side track.
+
+"And now," said I, "I want to see your authority."
+
+"The badge of your ratin'?" Pyecroft added.
+
+"I'm a constable," he said, and kicked. Indeed, his boots would have
+bewrayed him across half a county's plough; but boots are not legal
+evidence.
+
+"I want your authority," I repeated coldly; "some evidence that you are
+not a common drunken tramp."
+
+It was as I had expected. He had forgotten or mislaid his badge. He had
+neglected to learn the outlines of the work for which he received money
+and consideration; and he expected me, the tax-payer, to go to infinite
+trouble to supplement his deficiencies.
+
+"If you don't believe me, come to Linghurst," was the burden of his almost
+national anthem.
+
+"But I can't run all over Sussex every time a blackmailer jumps up and
+says he is a policeman."
+
+"Why, it's quite close," he persisted.
+
+"'Twon't be--soon," said Hinchcliffe.
+
+"None of the other people ever made any trouble. To be sure, _they_ was
+gentlemen," he cried. "All I can say is, it may be very funny, but it
+ain't fair."
+
+I laboured with him in this dense fog, but to no end. He had forgotten his
+badge, and we were villains for that we did not cart him to the pub or
+barracks where he had left it.
+
+Pyecroft listened critically as we spun along the hard road.
+
+"If he was a concentrated Boer, he couldn't expect much more," he
+observed. "Now, suppose I'd been a lady in a delicate state o' health--
+you'd ha' made me very ill with your doings."
+
+"I wish I 'ad. 'Ere! 'Elp! 'Elp! Hi!"
+
+The man had seen a constable in uniform fifty yards ahead, where a lane
+ran into the road, and would have said more but that Hinchcliffe jerked
+her up that lane with a wrench that nearly capsized us as the constable
+came running heavily.
+
+It seemed to me that both our guest and his fellow-villain in uniform
+smiled as we fled down the road easterly betwixt the narrowing hedges.
+
+"You'll know all about it in a little time," said our guest. "You've only
+yourselves to thank for runnin' your 'ead into a trap." And he whistled
+ostentatiously.
+
+We made no answer.
+
+"If that man 'ad chose, 'e could have identified me," he said.
+
+Still we were silent.
+
+"But 'e'll do it later, when you're caught."
+
+"Not if you go on talking. 'E won't be able to," said Pyecroft. "I don't
+know what traverse you think you're workin', but your duty till you're put
+in cells for a highway robber is to love, honour, an' cherish _me_ most
+special--performin' all evolutions signalled in rapid time. I tell you
+this, in case o' anything turnin' up."
+
+"Don't you fret about things turnin' up," was the reply.
+
+Hinchcliffe had given the car a generous throttle, and she was well set to
+work, when, without warning, the road--there are two or three in Sussex
+like it--turned down and ceased.
+
+"Holy Muckins!" he cried, and stood on both brakes as our helpless tyres
+slithered over wet grass and bracken--down and down into forest--early
+British woodland. It was the change of a nightmare, and that all should
+fit, fifty yards ahead of us a babbling brook barred our way. On the far
+side a velvet green ride, sprinkled with rabbits and fern, gently sloped
+upwards and away, but behind us was no hope. Forty horse-power would never
+have rolled wet pneumatic tyres up that verdurous cliff we had descended.
+
+"H'm!" Our guest coughed significantly. "A great many cars thinks they can
+take this road; but they all come back. We walks after 'em at our
+convenience."
+
+"Meanin' that the other jaunty is now pursuin' us on his lily feet?" said
+Pyecroft.
+
+"_Pre_cisely."
+
+"An' you think," said Pyecroft (I have no hope to render the scorn of the
+words), "_that'll_ make any odds? Get out!"
+
+The man obeyed with alacrity.
+
+"See those spars up-ended over there? I mean that wickyup-thing.
+Hop-poles, then, you rural blighter. Keep on fetching me hop-poles at the
+double."
+
+And he doubled, Pyecroft at his heels; for they had arrived at a perfect
+understanding.
+
+There was a stack of hurdles a few yards down
+
+stream, laid aside after sheep-washing; and there were stepping-stones in
+the brook. Hinchcliffe rearranged these last to make some sort of
+causeway; I brought up the hurdles; and when Pyecroft and his subaltern
+had dropped a dozen hop-poles across the stream, laid them down over all.
+
+"Talk o' the Agricultur'l Hall!" he said, mopping his brow--"'tisn't in it
+with us. The approach to the bridge must now be paved with hurdles, owin'
+to the squashy nature o' the country. Yes, an' we'd better have one or two
+on the far side to lead her on to _terror fermior_. Now, Hinch! Give her
+full steam and 'op along. If she slips off, we're done. Shall I take the
+wheel?"
+
+"No. This is my job," said the first-class engine-room artificer. "Get
+over the far side, and be ready to catch her if she jibs on the uphill."
+
+We crossed that elastic structure and stood ready amid the bracken.
+Hinchcliffe gave her a full steam and she came like a destroyer on her
+trial. There was a crack, a flicker of white water, and she was in our
+arms fifty yards up the slope; or rather, we were behind her, pushing her
+madly towards a patch of raw gravel whereon her wheels could bite. Of the
+bridge remained only a few wildly vibrating hop-poles, and those hurdles
+which had been sunk in the mud of the approaches.
+
+"She--she kicked out all the loose ones behind her as she finished with
+'em," Hinchcliffe panted.
+
+"At the Agricultural Hall they would 'ave been fastened down with
+ribbons," said Pyecroft. "But this ain't Olympia."
+
+"She nearly wrenched the tiller out of my hand. Don't you think I conned
+her like a cock-angel, Pye?"
+
+"_I_ never saw anything like it," said our guest propitiatingly. "And now,
+gentlemen, if you'll let me go back to Linghurst, I promise you you won't
+hear another word from me."
+
+"Get in," said Pyecroft, as we puffed out on to a metalled road once more.
+"We 'aven't begun on _you_ yet."
+
+"A joke's a joke," he replied. "I don't mind a little bit of a joke
+myself, but this is going beyond it."
+
+"Miles an' miles beyond it, if this machine stands up. We'll want water
+pretty soon."
+
+Our guest's countenance brightened, and Pyecroft perceived it.
+
+"Let me tell you," he said earnestly, "I won't make any difference to you
+whatever happens. Barrin' a dhow or two Tajurrah-way, prizes are scarce in
+the Navy. Hence we never abandon 'em."
+
+There was a long silence. Pyecroft broke it suddenly.
+
+"Robert," he said, "have you a mother?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Have you a big brother?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"An' a little sister?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Robert. Does your mamma keep a dog?"
+
+"Yes. Why?"
+
+"All right, Robert. I won't forget it."
+
+I looked for an explanation.
+
+"I saw his cabinet photograph in full uniform on the mantelpiece o' that
+cottage before faithful Fido turned up," Pyecroft whispered. "Ain't you
+glad it's all in the family somehow?"
+
+We filled with water at a cottage on the edge of St. Leonard's Forest,
+and, despite our increasing leakage, made shift to climb the ridge above
+Instead Wick. Knowing the car as I did, I felt sure that final collapse
+would not be long delayed. My sole concern was to run our guest well into
+the wilderness before that came.
+
+On the roof of the world--a naked plateau clothed with young heather--she
+retired from active life in floods of tears. Her feed-water-heater
+(Hinchcliffe blessed it and its maker for three minutes) was leaking
+beyond hope of repair; she had shifted most of her packing, and her water-
+pump would not lift.
+
+"If I had a bit of piping I could disconnect this tin cartridge-case an'
+feed direct into the boiler. It 'ud knock down her speed, but we could get
+on," said he, and looked hopelessly at the long dun ridges that hove us
+above the panorama of Sussex. Northward we could see the London haze.
+Southward, between gaps of the whale-backed Downs, lay the Channel's zinc-
+blue. But all our available population in that vast survey was one cow and
+a kestrel.
+
+"It's down hill to Instead Wick. We can run her there by gravity," I said
+at last.
+
+"Then he'll only have to walk to the station to get home. Unless we take
+off 'is boots first," Pyecroft replied.
+
+"That," said our guest earnestly, "would be theft atop of assault and very
+serious."
+
+"Oh, let's hang him an' be done," Hinchcliffe grunted. "It's evidently
+what he's sufferin' for."
+
+Somehow murder did not appeal to us that warm noon. We sat down to smoke
+in the heather, and presently out of the valley below came the thick beat
+of a petrol-motor ascending. I paid little attention to it till I heard
+the roar of a horn that has no duplicate in all the Home Counties.
+
+"That's the man I was going to lunch with!" I cried. "Hold on!" and I ran
+down the road.
+
+It was a big, black, black-dashed, tonneaued twenty-four horse Octopod;
+and it bore not only Kysh my friend, and Salmon his engineer, but my own
+man, who for the first time in our acquaintance smiled.
+
+"Did they get you? What did you get? I was coming into Linghurst as
+witness to character--your man told me what happened--but I was stopped
+near Instead Wick myself," cried Kysh.
+
+"What for?"
+
+"Leaving car unattended. An infernal swindle, when you think of the loose
+carts outside every pub in the county. I was jawing with the police for an
+hour, but it's no use. They've got it all their own way, and we're
+helpless."
+
+Hereupon I told him my tale, and for proof, as we topped the hill, pointed
+out the little group round my car.
+
+All supreme emotion is dumb. Kysh put on the brake and hugged me to his
+bosom till I groaned. Then, as I remember, he crooned like a mother
+returned to her suckling.
+
+"Divine! Divine!" he murmured. "Command me."
+
+"Take charge of the situation," I said. "You'll find a Mr. Pyecroft on the
+quarter-deck. I'm altogether out of it."
+
+"He shall stay there. Who am I but the instrument of vengeance in the
+hands of an over-ruling Providence? (And I put in fresh sparking-plugs
+this morning.) Salmon, take that steam-kettle home, somehow. I would be
+alone."
+
+"Leggat," I said to my man, "help Salmon home with my car."
+
+"Home? Now? It's hard. It's cruel hard," said Leggat, almost with a sob.
+
+Hinchcliffe outlined my car's condition briefly to the two engineers. Mr.
+Pyecroft clung to our guest, who stared with affrighted eyes at the
+palpitating Octopod; and the free wind of high Sussex whimpered across the
+ling.
+
+"I am quite agreeable to walkin' 'ome all the way on my feet," said our
+guest. "I wouldn't go to any railway station. It 'ud be just the proper
+finish to our little joke." He laughed nervously.
+
+"What's the evolution?" said Pyecroft. "Do we turn over to the new
+cruiser?"
+
+I nodded, and he escorted our guest to the tonneau with care. When I was
+in, he sat himself broad-armed on the little flap-seat which controls the
+door. Hinchcliffe sat by Kysh.
+
+"You drive?" Kysh asked, with the smile that has won him his chequered way
+through the world.
+
+"Steam only, and I've about had my whack for to-day, thanks."
+
+"I see."
+
+The long, low car slid forward and then dropped like a bullet down the
+descent our steam toy had so painfully climbed. Our guest's face blanched,
+and he clutched the back of the tonneau.
+
+"New commander's evidently been trained on a destroyer," said Hinchcliffe.
+
+"What's 'is wonderful name?" whispered Pyecroft. "Ho! Well, I'm glad it
+ain't Saul we've run up against--nor Nimshi, for that matter. This is
+makin' me feel religious."
+
+Our impetus carried us half-way up the next slope, where we steadied to a
+resonant fifteen an hour against the collar.
+
+"What do you think?" I called to Hinchcliffe.
+
+"'Taint as sweet as steam, o' course; but for power it's twice the
+_Furious_ against half the _Jaseur_ in a head-sea."
+
+Volumes could not have touched it more exactly. His bright eyes were glued
+on Kysh's hands juggling with levers behind the discreet backward sloping
+dash.
+
+"An' what sort of a brake might you use?" he said politely.
+
+"This," Kysh replied, as the last of the hill shot up to one in eight. He
+let the car run back a few feet and caught her deftly on the brake,
+repeating the performance cup and ball fashion. It was like being daped
+above the Pit at the end of an uncoiled solar plexus. Even Pyecroft held
+his breath.
+
+"It ain't fair! It ain't fair!" our guest moaned. "You're makin' me sick."
+
+"What an ungrateful blighter he is!" said Pyecroft. "Money couldn't buy
+you a run like this ... Do it well overboard!"
+
+"We'll just trundle up the Forest and drop into the Park Row, I think,"
+said Kysh. "There's a bit of good going hereabouts."
+
+He flung a careless knee over the low raking tiller that the ordinary
+expert puts under his armpit, and down four miles of yellow road, cut
+through barren waste, the Octopod sang like a six-inch shell.
+
+"Whew! But you know your job," said Hinchcliffe. "You're wasted here. I'd
+give something to have you in my engine-room."
+
+"He's steering with 'is little hind-legs," said Pyecroft. "Stand up and
+look at him, Robert. You'll never see such a sight again!"
+
+"Nor don't want to," was our guest's reply. "Five 'undred pounds wouldn't
+begin to cover 'is fines even since I've been with him."
+
+Park Row is reached by one hill which drops three hundred feet in half a
+mile. Kysh had the thought to steer with his hand down the abyss, but the
+manner in which he took the curved bridge at the bottom brought my few
+remaining hairs much nearer the grave.
+
+"We're in Surrey now; better look out," I said.
+
+"Never mind. I'll roll her into Kent for a bit. We've lots of time; it's
+only three o'clock."
+
+"Won't you want to fill your bunkers, or take water, or oil her up?" said
+Hinchcliffe.
+
+"We don't use water, and she's good for two hundred on one tank o' petrol
+if she doesn't break down."
+
+"Two hundred miles from 'ome and mother _and_ faithful Fido to-night,
+Robert," said Pyecroft, slapping our guest on the knee. "Cheer up! Why,
+I've known a destroyer do less."
+
+We passed with some decency through some towns, till by way of the
+Hastings road we whirled into Cramberhurst, which is a deep pit.
+
+"Now," said Kysh, "we begin."
+
+"Previous service not reckoned towards pension," said Pyecroft. "We are
+doin' you lavish, Robert."
+
+"But when's this silly game to finish, any'ow?" our guest snarled.
+
+"Don't worry about the _when_ of it, Robert. The _where's_ the interestin'
+point for you just now."
+
+I had seen Kysh drive before, and I thought I knew the Octopod, but that
+afternoon he and she were exalted beyond my knowledge. He improvised on
+the keys--the snapping levers and quivering accelerators--marvellous
+variations, so that our progress was sometimes a fugue and sometimes a
+barn-dance, varied on open greens by the weaving of fairy rings. When I
+protested, all that he would say was: "I'll hypnotise the fowl! I'll
+dazzle the rooster!" or other words equally futile. And she--oh! that I
+could do her justice!--she turned her broad black bows to the westering
+light, and lifted us high upon hills that we might see and rejoice with
+her. She whooped into veiled hollows of elm and Sussex oak; she devoured
+infinite perspectives of park palings; she surged through forgotten
+hamlets, whose single streets gave back, reduplicated, the clatter of her
+exhaust, and, tireless, she repeated the motions. Over naked uplands she
+droned like a homing bee, her shadow lengthening in the sun that she
+chased to his lair. She nosed up unparochial byways and accommodation-
+roads of the least accommodation, and put old scarred turf or new-raised
+molehills under her most marvellous springs with never a jar. And since
+the King's highway is used for every purpose save traffic, in mid-career
+she stepped aside for, or flung amazing loops about, the brainless driver,
+the driverless horse, the drunken carrier, the engaged couple, the female
+student of the bicycle and her staggering instructor, the pig, the
+perambulator, and the infant school (where it disembogued yelping on
+cross-roads), with the grace of Nellie Farren (upon whom be the Peace) and
+the lithe abandon of all the Vokes family. But at heart she was ever Judic
+as I remember that Judic long ago--Judic clad in bourgeois black from
+wrist to ankle, achieving incredible improprieties.
+
+We were silent--Hinchcliffe and Pyecroft through professional
+appreciation; I with a layman's delight in the expert; and our guest
+because of fear.
+
+At the edge of the evening she smelt the sea to southward and sheered
+thither like the strong-winged albatross, to circle enormously amid green
+flats fringed by martello towers.
+
+"Ain't that Eastbourne yonder?" said our guest, reviving. "I've a aunt
+there--she's cook to a J.P.--could identify me."
+
+"Don't worry her for a little thing like that," said Pyecroft; and ere he
+had ceased to praise family love, our unpaid judiciary, and domestic
+service, the Downs rose between us and the sea, and the Long Man of
+Hillingdon lay out upon the turf.
+
+"Trevington--up yonder--is a fairly isolated little dorp," I said, for I
+was beginning to feel hungry.
+
+"No," said Kysh. "He'd get a lift to the railway in no time.... Besides,
+I'm enjoying myself.... Three pounds eighteen and sixpence. Infernal
+swindle!"
+
+I take it one of his more recent fines was rankling in Kysh's brain; but
+he drove like the Archangel of the Twilight.
+
+About the longitude of Cassocks, Hinchcliffe yawned. "Aren't we goin' to
+maroon our Robert? I'm hungry, too."
+
+"The commodore wants his money back," I answered.
+
+"If he drives like this habitual, there must be a tidyish little lump
+owin' to him," said Pyecroft. "Well, I'm agreeable."
+
+"I didn't know it could be done. S'welp me, I didn't," our guest murmured.
+
+"But you will," said Kysh. And that was the first and last time he
+addressed the man.
+
+We ran through Penfield Green, half stupefied with open air, drugged with
+the relentless boom of the Octopod, and extinct with famine.
+
+"I used to shoot about here," said Kysh, a few miles further on. "Open
+that gate, please," and he slowed as the sun touched the sky-line. At this
+point we left metalled roads and bucked vigorously amid ditches and under
+trees for twenty minutes.
+
+"Only cross-country car on the market," he said, as we wheeled into a
+straw-yard where a lone bull bellowed defiance to our growlings. "Open
+that gate, please. I hope the cattle-bridge will stand up."
+
+"I've took a few risks in my time," said Pyecroft as timbers cracked
+beneath us and we entered between thickets, "but I'm a babe to this man,
+Hinch."
+
+"Don't talk to me. Watch _him!_ It's a liberal education, as Shakespeare
+says. Fallen tree on the port bow, Sir."
+
+"Right! That's my mark. Sit tight!"
+
+She flung up her tail like a sounding whale and buried us in a fifteen-
+foot deep bridle-path buttressed with the exposed roots of enormous
+beeches. The wheels leaped from root to rounded boulder, and it was very
+dark in the shadow of the foliage.
+
+"There ought to be a hammer-pond somewhere about here." Kysh was letting
+her down this chute in brakeful spasms.
+
+"Water dead ahead, Sir. Stack o' brushwood on the starboard beam, and--no
+road," sang Pyecroft.
+
+"Cr-r-ri-key!" said Hinchcliffe, as the car on a wild cant to the left
+went astern, screwing herself round the angle of a track that overhung the
+pond. "If she only had two propellers, I believe she'd talk poetry. She
+can do everything else."
+
+"We're rather on our port wheels now," said Kysh; "but I don't think
+she'll capsize. This road isn't used much by motors."
+
+"You don't say so," said Pyecroft. "What a pity!"
+
+She bored through a mass of crackling brushwood, and emerged into an
+upward sloping fern-glade fenced with woods so virgin, so untouched, that
+William Rufus might have ridden off as we entered. We climbed out of the
+violet-purple shadows towards the upland where the last of the day
+lingered. I was filled to my moist eyes with the almost sacred beauty of
+sense and association that clad the landscape.
+
+"Does 'unger produce 'alluciations?" said Pyecroft in a whisper. "Because
+I've just seen a sacred ibis walkin' arm in arm with a British cock-
+pheasant."
+
+"What are you panickin' at?" said Hinchcliffe. "I've been seein' zebra
+for the last two minutes, but I 'aven't complained."
+
+He pointed behind us, and I beheld a superb painted zebra (Burchell's, I
+think), following our track with palpitating nostrils. The car stopped,
+and it fled away.
+
+There was a little pond in front of us from which rose a dome of irregular
+sticks crowned with a blunt-muzzled beast that sat upon its haunches.
+
+"Is it catching?" said Pyecroft.
+
+"Yes. I'm seeing beaver," I replied.
+
+"It is here!" said Kysh, with the air and gesture of Captain Nemo, and
+half turned.
+
+"No--no--no! For 'Eaven's sake--not 'ere!" Our guest gasped like a sea-
+bathed child, as four efficient hands swung him far out-board on to the
+turf. The car ran back noiselessly down the slope.
+
+"Look! Look! It's sorcery!" cried Hinchcliffe.
+
+There was a report like a pistol shot as the beaver dived from the roof of
+his lodge, but we watched our guest. He was on his knees, praying to
+kangaroos. Yea, in his bowler hat he kneeled before kangaroos--gigantic,
+erect, silhouetted against the light--four buck-kangaroos in the heart of
+Sussex!
+
+And we retrogressed over the velvet grass till our hind-wheels struck
+well-rolled gravel, leading us to sanity, main roads, and, half an hour
+later, the "Grapnel Inn" at Horsham.
+
+*        *        *        *        *
+
+After a great meal we poured libations and made burnt-offerings in honour
+of Kysh, who received our homage graciously, and, by the way, explained a
+few things in the natural history line that had puzzled us. England is a
+most marvellous country, but one is not, till one knows the eccentricities
+of large land-owners, trained to accept kangaroos, zebras, or beavers as
+part of its landscape.
+
+When we went to bed Pyecroft pressed my hand, his voice thick with
+emotion.
+
+"We owe it to you," he said. "We owe it all to you. Didn't I say we never
+met in _pup-pup-puris naturalibus_, if I may so put it, without a
+remarkably hectic day ahead of us?"
+
+"That's all right," I said. "Mind the candle." He was tracing smoke-
+patterns on the wall.
+
+"But what I want to know is whether we'll succeed in acclimatisin' the
+blighter, or whether Sir William Gardner's keepers 'll kill 'im before 'e
+gets accustomed to 'is surroundin's?"
+
+Some day, I think, we must go up the Linghurst Road and find out.
+
+
+
+
+"WIRELESS"
+
+
+KASPAR'S SONG IN VARDA
+
+(_From the Swedish of Stagnelius_.)
+
+  Eyes aloft, over dangerous places,
+    The children follow where Psyche flies,
+  And, in the sweat of their upturned faces,
+    Slash with a net at the empty skies.
+
+  So it goes they fall amid brambles,
+    And sting their toes on the nettle-tops,
+  Till after a thousand scratches and scrambles
+    They wipe their brows, and the hunting stops.
+
+  Then to quiet them comes their father
+    And stills the riot of pain and grief,
+  Saying, "Little ones, go and gather
+    Out of my garden a cabbage leaf.
+
+  "You will find on it whorls and clots of
+    Dull grey eggs that, properly fed,
+  Turn, by way of the worm, to lots of
+    Radiant Psyches raised from the dead."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+  "Heaven is beautiful, Earth is ugly,"
+    The three-dimensioned preacher saith,
+  So we must not look where the snail and the slug lie
+    For Psyche's birth ... And that is our death!
+
+
+"WIRELESS"
+"It's a funny thing, this Marconi business, isn't it?" said Mr. Shaynor,
+coughing heavily. "Nothing seems to make any difference, by what they tell
+me--storms, hills, or anything; but if that's true we shall know before
+morning."
+
+"Of course it's true," I answered, stepping behind the counter. "Where's
+old Mr. Cashell?"
+
+"He's had to go to bed on account of his influenza. He said you'd very
+likely drop in."
+
+"Where's his nephew?"
+
+"Inside, getting the things ready. He told me that the last time they
+experimented they put the pole on the roof of one of the big hotels here,
+and the batteries electrified all the water-supply, and"--he giggled--"the
+ladies got shocks when they took their baths."
+
+"I never heard of that."
+
+"The hotel wouldn't exactly advertise it, would it? Just now, by what Mr.
+Cashell tells me, they're trying to signal from here to Poole, and they're
+using stronger batteries than ever. But, you see, he being the guvnor's
+nephew and all that (and it will be in the papers too), it doesn't matter
+how they electrify things in this house. Are you going to watch?"
+
+"Very much. I've never seen this game. Aren't you going to bed?"
+
+"We don't close till ten on Saturdays. There's a good deal of influenza in
+town, too, and there'll be a dozen prescriptions coming in before morning.
+I generally sleep in the chair here. It's warmer than jumping out of bed
+every time. Bitter cold, isn't it?"
+
+"Freezing hard. I'm sorry your cough's worse."
+
+"Thank you. I don't mind cold so much. It's this wind that fair cuts me to
+pieces." He coughed again hard and hackingly, as an old lady came in for
+ammoniated quinine. "We've just run out of it in bottles, madam," said Mr.
+Shaynor, returning to the professional tone, "but if you will wait two
+minutes, I'll make it up for you, madam."
+
+I had used the shop for some time, and my acquaintance with the proprietor
+had ripened into friendship. It was Mr. Cashell who revealed to me the
+purpose and power of Apothecaries' Hall what time a fellow-chemist had
+made an error in a prescription of mine, had lied to cover his sloth, and
+when error and lie were brought home to him had written vain letters.
+
+"A disgrace to our profession," said the thin, mild-eyed man, hotly, after
+studying the evidence. "You couldn't do a better service to the profession
+than report him to Apothecaries' Hall."
+
+I did so, not knowing what djinns I should evoke; and the result was such
+an apology as one might make who had spent a night on the rack. I
+conceived great respect for Apothecaries' Hall, and esteem for Mr.
+Cashell, a zealous craftsman who magnified his calling. Until Mr. Shaynor
+came down from the North his assistants had by no means agreed with Mr.
+Cashell. "They forget," said he, "that, first and foremost, the compounder
+is a medicine-man. On him depends the physician's reputation. He holds it
+literally in the hollow of his hand, Sir."
+
+Mr. Shaynor's manners had not, perhaps, the polish of the grocery and
+Italian warehouse next door, but he knew and loved his dispensary work in
+every detail. For relaxation he seemed to go no farther afield than the
+romance of drugs--their discovery, preparation packing, and export--but it
+led him to the ends of the earth, and on this subject, and the
+Pharmaceutical Formulary, and Nicholas Culpepper, most confident of
+physicians, we met.
+
+Little by little I grew to know something of his beginnings and his hopes
+--of his mother, who had been a school-teacher in one of the northern
+counties, and of his red-headed father, a small job-master at Kirby Moors,
+who died when he was a child; of the examinations he had passed and of
+their exceeding and increasing difficulty; of his dreams of a shop in
+London; of his hate for the price-cutting Co-operative stores; and, most
+interesting, of his mental attitude towards customers.
+
+"There's a way you get into," he told me, "of serving them carefully, and
+I hope, politely, without stopping your own thinking. I've been reading
+Christie's _New Commercial Plants_ all this autumn, and that needs keeping
+your mind on it, I can tell you. So long as it isn't a prescription, of
+course, I can carry as much as half a page of Christie in my head, and at
+the same time I could sell out all that window twice over, and not a penny
+wrong at the end. As to prescriptions, I think I could make up the general
+run of 'em in my sleep, almost."
+
+For reasons of my own, I was deeply interested in Marconi experiments at
+their outset in England; and it was of a piece with Mr. Cashell's
+unvarying thoughtfulness that, when his nephew the electrician
+appropriated the house for a long-range installation, he should, as I have
+said, invite me to see the result.
+
+The old lady went away with her medicine, and Mr. Shaynor and I stamped on
+the tiled floor behind the counter to keep ourselves warm. The shop, by
+the light of the many electrics, looked like a Paris-diamond mine, for Mr.
+Cashell believed in all the ritual of his craft. Three superb glass jars--
+red, green, and blue--of the sort that led Rosamund to parting with her
+shoes--blazed in the broad plate-glass windows, and there was a confused
+smell of orris, Kodak films, vulcanite, tooth-powder, sachets, and almond-
+cream in the air. Mr. Shaynor fed the dispensary stove, and we sucked
+cayenne-pepper jujubes and menthol lozenges. The brutal east wind had
+cleared the streets, and the few passers-by were muffled to their puckered
+eyes. In the Italian warehouse next door some gay feathered birds and
+game, hung upon hooks, sagged to the wind across the left edge of our
+window-frame.
+
+"They ought to take these poultry in--all knocked about like that," said
+Mr. Shaynor. "Doesn't it make you feel fair perishing? See that old hare!
+The wind's nearly blowing the fur off him."
+
+I saw the belly-fur of the dead beast blown apart in ridges and streaks as
+the wind caught it, showing bluish skin underneath. "Bitter cold," said
+Mr. Shaynor, shuddering. "Fancy going out on a night like this! Oh, here's
+young Mr. Cashell."
+
+The door of the inner office behind the dispensary opened, and an
+energetic, spade-bearded man stepped forth, rubbing his hands.
+
+"I want a bit of tin-foil, Shaynor," he said. "Good-evening. My uncle told
+me you might be coming." This to me, as I began the first of a hundred
+questions.
+
+"I've everything in order," he replied. "We're only waiting until Poole
+calls us up. Excuse me a minute. You can come in whenever you like--but
+I'd better be with the instruments. Give me that tin-foil. Thanks."
+
+While we were talking, a girl--evidently no customer--had come into the
+shop, and the face and bearing of Mr. Shaynor changed. She leaned
+confidently across the counter.
+
+"But I can't," I heard him whisper uneasily--the flush on his cheek was
+dull red, and his eyes shone like a drugged moth's. "I can't. I tell you
+I'm alone in the place."
+
+"No, you aren't. Who's _that_? Let him look after it for half an hour. A
+brisk walk will do you good. Ah, come now, John."
+
+"But he isn't----"
+
+"I don't care. I want you to; we'll only go round by St. Agnes. If you
+don't----"
+
+He crossed to where I stood in the shadow of the dispensary counter, and
+began some sort of broken apology about a lady-friend.
+
+"Yes," she interrupted. "You take the shop for half an hour--to oblige
+_me_, won't you?"
+
+She had a singularly rich and promising voice that well matched her
+outline.
+
+"All right," I said. "I'll do it--but you'd better wrap yourself up, Mr.
+Shaynor."
+
+"Oh, a brisk walk ought to help me. We're only going round by the church."
+I heard him cough grievously as they went out together.
+
+I refilled the stove, and, after reckless expenditure of Mr. Cashell's
+coal, drove some warmth into the shop. I explored many of the glass-
+knobbed drawers that lined the walls, tasted some disconcerting drugs,
+and, by the aid of a few cardamoms, ground ginger, chloric-ether, and
+dilute alcohol, manufactured a new and wildish drink, of which I bore a
+glassful to young Mr. Cashell, busy in the back office. He laughed shortly
+when I told him that Mr. Shaynor had stepped out--but a frail coil of wire
+held all his attention, and he had no word for me bewildered among the
+batteries and rods. The noise of the sea on the beach began to make itself
+heard as the traffic in the street ceased. Then briefly, but very lucidly,
+he gave me the names and uses of the mechanism that crowded the tables and
+the floor.
+
+"When do you expect to get the message from Poole?" I demanded, sipping my
+liquor out of a graduated glass.
+
+"About midnight, if everything is in order. We've got our installation-
+pole fixed to the roof of the house. I shouldn't advise you to turn on a
+tap or anything tonight. We've connected up with the plumbing, and all the
+water will be electrified." He repeated to me the history of the agitated
+ladies at the hotel at the time of the first installation.
+
+"But what _is_ it?" I asked. "Electricity is out of my beat altogether."
+
+"Ah, if you knew _that_ you'd know something nobody knows. It's just It--
+what we call Electricity, but the magic--the manifestations--the Hertzian
+waves--are all revealed by _this_. The coherer, we call it."
+
+He picked up a glass tube not much thicker than a thermometer, in which,
+almost touching, were two tiny silver plugs, and between them an
+infinitesimal pinch of metallic dust. "That's all," he said, proudly, as
+though himself responsible for the wonder. "That is the thing that will
+reveal to us the Powers--whatever the Powers may be--at work--through
+space--a long distance away."
+
+Just then Mr. Shaynor returned alone and stood coughing his heart out on
+the mat.
+
+"Serves you right for being such a fool," said young Mr. Cashell, as
+annoyed as myself at the interruption. "Never mind--we've all the night
+before us to see wonders."
+
+Shaynor clutched the counter, his handkerchief to his lips. When he
+brought it away I saw two bright red stains.
+
+"I--I've got a bit of a rasped throat from smoking cigarettes," he panted.
+"I think I'll try a cubeb."
+
+"Better take some of this. I've been compounding while you've been away."
+I handed him the brew.
+
+"'Twon't make me drunk, will it? I'm almost a teetotaller. My word! That's
+grateful and comforting."
+
+He sat down the empty glass to cough afresh.
+
+"Brr! But it was cold out there! I shouldn't care to be lying in my grave
+a night like this. Don't _you_ ever have a sore throat from smoking?" He
+pocketed the handkerchief after a furtive peep.
+
+"Oh, yes, sometimes," I replied, wondering, while I spoke, into what
+agonies of terror I should fall if ever I saw those bright-red danger-
+signals under my nose. Young Mr. Cashell among the batteries coughed
+slightly to show that he was quite ready to continue his scientific
+explanations, but I was thinking still of the girl with the rich voice and
+the significantly cut mouth, at whose command I had taken charge of the
+shop. It flashed across me that she distantly resembled the seductive
+shape on a gold-framed toilet-water advertisement whose charms were
+unholily heightened by the glare from the red bottle in the window.
+Turning to make sure, I saw Mr. Shaynor's eyes bent in the same direction,
+and by instinct recognised that the flamboyant thing was to him a shrine.
+"What do you take for your--cough?" I asked.
+
+"Well, I'm the wrong side of the counter to believe much in patent
+medicines. But there are asthma cigarettes and there are pastilles. To
+tell you the truth, if you don't object to the smell, which is very like
+incense, I believe, though I'm not a Roman Catholic, Blaudett's Cathedral
+Pastilles relieve me as much as anything."
+
+"Let's try." I had never raided a chemist's shop before, so I was
+thorough. We unearthed the pastilles--brown, gummy cones of benzoin--and
+set them alight under the toilet-water advertisement, where they fumed in
+thin blue spirals.
+
+"Of course," said Mr. Shaynor, to my question, "what one uses in the shop
+for one's self comes out of one's pocket. Why, stock-taking in our
+business is nearly the same as with jewellers--and I can't say more than
+that. But one gets them"--he pointed to the pastille-box--"at trade
+prices." Evidently the censing of the gay, seven-tinted wench with the
+teeth was an established ritual which cost something.
+
+"And when do we shut up shop?"
+
+"We stay like this all night. The gov--old Mr. Cashell--doesn't believe
+in locks and shutters as compared with electric light. Besides it brings
+trade. I'll just sit here in the chair by the stove and write a letter,
+if you don't mind. Electricity isn't my prescription."
+
+The energetic young Mr. Cashell snorted within, and Shaynor settled
+himself up in his chair over which he had thrown a staring red, black, and
+yellow Austrian jute blanket, rather like a table-cover. I cast about,
+amid patent medicine pamphlets, for something to read, but finding little,
+returned to the manufacture of the new drink. The Italian warehouse took
+down its game and went to bed. Across the street blank shutters flung back
+the gaslight in cold smears; the dried pavement seemed to rough up in
+goose-flesh under the scouring of the savage wind, and we could hear, long
+ere he passed, the policeman flapping his arms to keep himself warm.
+Within, the flavours of cardamoms and chloric-ether disputed those of the
+pastilles and a score of drugs and perfume and soap scents. Our electric
+lights, set low down in the windows before the tunbellied Rosamund jars,
+flung inward three monstrous daubs of red, blue, and green, that broke
+into kaleidoscopic lights on the facetted knobs of the drug-drawers, the
+cut-glass scent flagons, and the bulbs of the sparklet bottles. They
+flushed the white-tiled floor in gorgeous patches; splashed along the
+nickel-silver counter-rails, and turned the polished mahogany counter-
+panels to the likeness of intricate grained marbles--slabs of porphyry and
+malachite. Mr. Shaynor unlocked a drawer, and ere he began to write, took
+out a meagre bundle of letters. From my place by the stove, I could see
+the scalloped edges of the paper with a flaring monogram in the corner and
+could even smell the reek of chypre. At each page he turned toward the
+toilet-water lady of the advertisement and devoured her with over-luminous
+eyes. He had drawn the Austrian blanket over his shoulders, and among
+those warring lights he looked more than ever the incarnation of a drugged
+moth--a tiger-moth as I thought.
+
+He put his letter into an envelope, stamped it with stiff mechanical
+movements, and dropped it in the drawer. Then I became aware of the
+silence of a great city asleep--the silence that underlaid the even voice
+of the breakers along the sea-front--a thick, tingling quiet of warm life
+stilled down for its appointed time, and unconsciously I moved about the
+glittering shop as one moves in a sick-room. Young Mr. Cashell was
+adjusting some wire that crackled from time to time with the tense,
+knuckle-stretching sound of the electric spark. Upstairs, where a door
+shut and opened swiftly, I could hear his uncle coughing abed.
+
+"Here," I said, when the drink was properly warmed, "take some of this,
+Mr. Shaynor."
+
+He jerked in his chair with a start and a wrench, and held out his hand
+for the glass. The mixture, of a rich port-wine colour, frothed at the
+top.
+
+"It looks," he said, suddenly, "it looks--those bubbles--like a string of
+pearls winking at you--rather like the pearls round that young lady's
+neck." He turned again to the advertisement where the female in the dove-
+coloured corset had seen fit to put on all her pearls before she cleaned
+her teeth.
+
+"Not bad, is it?" I said.
+
+"Eh?"
+
+He rolled his eyes heavily full on me, and, as I stared, I beheld all
+meaning and consciousness die out of the swiftly dilating pupils. His
+figure lost its stark rigidity, softened into the chair, and, chin on
+chest, hands dropped before him, he rested open-eyed, absolutely still.
+
+"I'm afraid I've rather cooked Shaynor's goose," I said, bearing the fresh
+drink to young Mr. Cashell. "Perhaps it was the chloric-ether."
+
+"Oh, he's all right." The spade-bearded man glanced at him pityingly.
+"Consumptives go off in those sort of doses very often. It's exhaustion...
+I don't wonder. I dare say the liquor will do him good. It's grand stuff,"
+he finished his share appreciatively. "Well, as I was saying--before he
+interrupted--about this little coherer. The pinch of dust, you see, is
+nickel-filings. The Hertzian waves, you see, come out of space from the
+station that despatches 'em, and all these little particles are attracted
+together--cohere, we call it--for just so long as the current passes
+through them. Now, it's important to remember that the current is an
+induced current. There are a good many kinds of induction----"
+
+"Yes, but what _is_ induction?"
+
+"That's rather hard to explain untechnically. But the long and the short
+of it is that when a current of electricity passes through a wire there's
+a lot of magnetism present round that wire; and if you put another wire
+parallel to, and within what we call its magnetic field--why then, the
+second wire will also become charged with electricity."
+
+"On its own account?"
+
+"On its own account."
+
+"Then let's see if I've got it correctly. Miles off, at Poole, or wherever
+it is----"
+
+"It will be anywhere in ten years."
+
+"You've got a charged wire----"
+
+"Charged with Hertzian waves which vibrate, say, two hundred and thirty
+million times a second." Mr. Cashell snaked his forefinger rapidly through
+the air.
+
+"All right--a charged wire at Poole, giving out these waves into space.
+Then this wire of yours sticking out into space--on the roof of the house
+--in some mysterious way gets charged with those waves from Poole----"
+
+"Or anywhere--it only happens to be Poole tonight."
+
+"And those waves set the coherer at work, just like an ordinary telegraph-
+office ticker?"
+
+"No! That's where so many people make the mistake. The Hertzian waves
+wouldn't be strong enough to work a great heavy Morse instrument like
+ours. They can only just make that dust cohere, and while it coheres (a
+little while for a dot and a longer while for a dash) the current from
+this battery--the home battery"--he laid his hand on the thing--"can get
+through to the Morse printing-machine to record the dot or dash. Let me
+make it clearer. Do you know anything about steam?"
+
+"Very little. But go on."
+
+"Well, the coherer is like a steam-valve. Any child can open a valve and
+start a steamer's engines, because a turn of the hand lets in the main
+steam, doesn't it? Now, this home battery here ready to print is the main
+steam. The coherer is the valve, always ready to be turned on. The
+Hertzian wave is the child's hand that turns it."
+
+"I see. That's marvellous."
+
+"Marvellous, isn't it? And, remember, we're only at the beginning. There's
+nothing we sha'n't be able to do in ten years. I want to live--my God, how
+I want to live, and see it develop!" He looked through the door at Shaynor
+breathing lightly in his chair. "Poor beast! And he wants to keep company
+with Fanny Brand."
+
+"Fanny _who_?" I said, for the name struck an obscurely familiar chord in
+my brain--something connected with a stained handkerchief, and the word
+"arterial."
+
+"Fanny Brand--the girl you kept shop for." He laughed, "That's all I know
+about her, and for the life of me I can't see what Shaynor sees in her, or
+she in him."
+
+"_Can't_ you see what he sees in her?" I insisted.
+
+"Oh, yes, if _that's_ what you mean. She's a great, big, fat lump of a
+girl, and so on. I suppose that's why he's so crazy after her. She isn't
+his sort. Well, it doesn't matter. My uncle says he's bound to die before
+the year's out. Your drink's given him a good sleep, at any rate." Young
+Mr. Cashell could not catch Mr. Shaynor's face, which was half turned to
+the advertisement.
+
+I stoked the stove anew, for the room was growing cold, and lighted
+another pastille. Mr. Shaynor in his chair, never moving, looked through
+and over me with eyes as wide and lustreless as those of a dead hare.
+
+"Poole's late," said young Mr. Cashell, when I stepped back. "I'll just
+send them a call."
+
+He pressed a key in the semi-darkness, and with a rending crackle there
+leaped between two brass knobs a spark, streams of sparks, and sparks
+again.
+
+"Grand, isn't it? _That's_ the Power--our unknown Power--kicking and
+fighting to be let loose," said young Mr. Cashell. "There she goes--kick--
+kick--kick into space. I never get over the strangeness of it when I work
+a sending-machine--waves going into space, you know. T.R. is our call.
+Poole ought to answer with L.L.L."
+
+We waited two, three, five minutes. In that silence, of which the boom of
+the tide was an orderly part, I caught the clear "_kiss--kiss--kiss_" of
+the halliards on the roof, as they were blown against the installation-
+pole.
+
+"Poole is not ready. I'll stay here and call you when he is."
+
+I returned to the shop, and set down my glass on a marble slab with a
+careless clink. As I did so, Shaynor rose to his feet, his eyes fixed once
+more on the advertisement, where the young woman bathed in the light from
+the red jar simpered pinkly over her pearls. His lips moved without
+cessation. I stepped nearer to listen. "And threw--and threw--and threw,"
+he repeated, his face all sharp with some inexplicable agony.
+
+I moved forward astonished. But it was then he found words--delivered
+roundly and clearly. These:--
+
+And threw warm gules on Madeleine's young breast.
+
+The trouble passed off his countenance, and he returned lightly to his
+place, rubbing his hands.
+
+It had never occurred to me, though we had many times discussed reading
+and prize-competitions as a diversion, that Mr. Shaynor ever read Keats,
+or could quote him at all appositely. There was, after all, a certain
+stained-glass effect of light on the high bosom of the highly-polished
+picture which might, by stretch of fancy, suggest, as a vile chromo
+recalls some incomparable canvas, the line he had spoken. Night, my drink,
+and solitude were evidently turning Mr. Shaynor into a poet. He sat down
+again and wrote swiftly on his villainous note-paper, his lips quivering.
+
+I shut the door into the inner office and moved up behind him. He made no
+sign that he saw or heard. I looked over his shoulder, and read, amid
+half-formed words, sentences, and wild scratches:--
+
+  --Very cold it was. Very cold
+  The hare--the hare--the hare--
+  The birds----
+
+He raised his head sharply, and frowned toward the blank shutters of the
+poulterer's shop where they jutted out against our window. Then one clear
+line came:--
+
+  The hare, in spite of fur, was very cold.
+
+The head, moving machine-like, turned right to the advertisement where
+the Blaudett's Cathedral pastille reeked abominably. He grunted, and went
+on:--
+
+  Incense in a censer--
+  Before her darling picture framed in gold--
+  Maiden's picture--angel's portrait--
+
+"Hsh!" said Mr. Cashell guardedly from the inner office, as though in the
+presence of spirits. "There's something coming through from somewhere; but
+it isn't Poole." I heard the crackle of sparks as he depressed the keys of
+the transmitter. In my own brain, too, something crackled, or it might
+have been the hair on my head. Then I heard my own voice, in a harsh
+whisper: "Mr. Cashell, there is something coming through here, too. Leave
+me alone till I tell you."
+
+"But I thought you'd come to see this wonderful thing--Sir," indignantly
+at the end.
+
+"Leave me alone till I tell you. Be quiet."
+
+I watched--I waited. Under the blue-veined hand--the dry hand of the
+consumptive--came away clear, without erasure:
+
+And my weak spirit fails To think how the dead must freeze--
+he shivered as he wrote--
+
+Beneath the churchyard mould.
+
+Then he stopped, laid the pen down, and leaned back.
+
+For an instant, that was half an eternity, the shop spun before me in a
+rainbow-tinted whirl, in and through which my own soul most
+dispassionately considered my own soul as that fought with an over-
+mastering fear. Then I smelt the strong smell of cigarettes from Mr.
+Shaynor's clothing, and heard, as though it had been the rending of
+trumpets, the rattle of his breathing. I was still in my place of
+observation, much as one would watch a rifle-shot at the butts, half-bent,
+hands on my knees, and head within a few inches of the black, red, and
+yellow blanket of his shoulder. I was whispering encouragement, evidently
+to my other self, sounding sentences, such as men pronounce in dreams.
+
+"If he has read Keats, it proves nothing. If he hasn't--like causes _must_
+beget like effects. There is no escape from this law. _You_ ought to be
+grateful that you know 'St. Agnes Eve' without the book; because, given
+the circumstances, such as Fanny Brand, who is the key of the enigma, and
+approximately represents the latitude and longitude of Fanny Brawne;
+allowing also for the bright red colour of the arterial blood upon the
+handkerchief, which was just what you were puzzling over in the shop just
+now; and counting the effect of the professional environment, here almost
+perfectly duplicated--the result is logical and inevitable. As inevitable
+as induction."
+
+Still, the other half of my soul refused to be comforted. It was cowering
+in some minute and inadequate corner--at an immense distance.
+
+Hereafter, I found myself one person again, my hands still gripping my
+knees, and my eyes glued on the page before Mr. Shaynor. As dreamers
+accept and explain the upheaval of landscapes and the resurrection of the
+dead, with excerpts from the evening hymn or the multiplication-table, so
+I had accepted the facts, whatever they might be, that I should witness,
+and had devised a theory, sane and plausible to my mind, that explained
+them all. Nay, I was even in advance of my facts, walking hurriedly before
+them, assured that they would fit my theory. And all that I now recall of
+that epoch-making theory are the lofty words: "If he has read Keats it's
+the chloric-ether. If he hasn't, it's the identical bacillus, or Hertzian
+wave of tuberculosis, _plus_ Fanny Brand and the professional status
+which, in conjunction with the main-stream of subconscious thought common
+to all mankind, has thrown up temporarily an induced Keats."
+
+Mr. Shaynor returned to his work, erasing and rewriting as before with
+swiftness. Two or three blank pages he tossed aside. Then he wrote,
+muttering:
+
+The little smoke of a candle that goes out.
+
+"No," he muttered. "Little smoke--little smoke--little smoke. What else?"
+He thrust his chin forward toward the advertisement, whereunder the last
+of the Blaudett's Cathedral pastilles fumed in its holder. "Ah!" Then with
+relief:--
+
+The little smoke that dies in moonlight cold.
+
+Evidently he was snared by the rhymes of his first verse, for he wrote and
+rewrote "gold--cold--mould" many times. Again he sought inspiration from
+the advertisement, and set down, without erasure, the line I had
+overheard:
+
+And threw warm gules on Madeleine's young breast.
+
+As I remembered the original it is "fair"--a trite word--instead of
+"young," and I found myself nodding approval, though I admitted that the
+attempt to reproduce "its little smoke in pallid moonlight died" was a
+failure.
+
+Followed without a break ten or fifteen lines of bald prose--the naked
+soul's confession of its physical yearning for its beloved--unclean as we
+count uncleanliness; unwholesome, but human exceedingly; the raw material,
+so it seemed to me in that hour and in that place, whence Keats wove the
+twenty-sixth, seventh, and eighth stanzas of his poem. Shame I had none in
+overseeing this revelation; and my fear had gone with the smoke of the
+pastille.
+
+"That's it," I murmured. "That's how it's blocked out. Go on! Ink it in,
+man. Ink it in!"
+
+Mr. Shaynor returned to broken verse wherein "loveliness" was made to
+rhyme with a desire to look upon "her empty dress." He picked up a fold of
+the gay, soft blanket, spread it over one hand, caressed it with infinite
+tenderness, thought, muttered, traced some snatches which I could not
+decipher, shut his eyes drowsily, shook his head, and dropped the stuff.
+Here I found myself at fault, for I could not then see (as I do now) in
+what manner a red, black, and yellow Austrian blanket coloured his dreams.
+
+In a few minutes he laid aside his pen, and, chin on hand, considered the
+shop with thoughtful and intelligent eyes. He threw down the blanket,
+rose, passed along a line of drug-drawers, and read the names on the
+labels aloud. Returning, he took from his desk Christie's _New Commercial
+Plants_ and the old Culpepper that I had given him, opened and laid them
+side by side with a clerky air, all trace of passion gone from his face,
+read first in one and then in the other, and paused with pen behind his
+ear.
+
+"What wonder of Heaven's coming now?" I thought.
+
+"Manna--manna--manna," he said at last, under wrinkled brows. "That's what
+I wanted. Good! Now then! Now then! Good! Good! Oh, by God, that's good!"
+His voice rose and he spoke rightly and fully without a falter:--
+
+  Candied apple, quince and plum and gourd,
+  And jellies smoother than the creamy curd,
+  And lucent syrups tinct with cinnamon,
+  Manna and dates in Argosy transferred
+  From Fez; and spiced dainties, every one
+  From silken Samarcand to cedared Lebanon.
+
+He repeated it once more, using "blander" for "smoother" in the second
+line; then wrote it down without erasure, but this time (my set eyes
+missed no stroke of any word) he substituted "soother" for his atrocious
+second thought, so that it came away under his hand as it is written in
+the book--as it is written in the book.
+
+A wind went shouting down the street, and on the heels of the wind
+followed a spurt and rattle of rain.
+
+After a smiling pause--and good right had he to smile--he began anew,
+always tossing the last sheet over his shoulder:--
+
+  "The sharp rain falling on the window-pane,
+  Rattling sleet--the wind-blown sleet."
+
+Then prose: "It is very cold of mornings when the wind brings rain and
+sleet with it. I heard the sleet on the window-pane outside, and thought
+of you, my darling. I am always thinking of you. I wish we could both run
+away like two lovers into the storm and get that little cottage by the
+sea which we are always thinking about, my own dear darling. We could sit
+and watch the sea beneath our windows. It would be a fairyland all of our
+own--a fairy sea--a fairy sea...."
+
+He stopped, raised his head, and listened. The steady drone of the
+Channel along the sea-front that had borne us company so long leaped up a
+note to the sudden fuller surge that signals the change from ebb to
+flood. It beat in like the change of step throughout an army--this
+renewed pulse of the sea--and filled our ears till they, accepting it,
+marked it no longer.
+
+  "A fairyland for you and me
+  Across the foam--beyond ...
+  A magic foam, a perilous sea."
+
+He grunted again with effort and bit his underlip. My throat dried, but I
+dared not gulp to moisten it lest I should break the spell that was
+drawing him nearer and nearer to the high-water mark but two of the sons
+of Adam have reached. Remember that in all the millions permitted there
+are no more than five--five little lines--of which one can say: "These
+are the pure Magic. These are the clear Vision. The rest is only poetry."
+And Mr. Shaynor was playing hot and cold with two of them!
+
+I vowed no unconscious thought of mine should influence the blindfold
+soul, and pinned myself desperately to the other three, repeating and
+re-repeating:
+
+  A savage spot as holy and enchanted
+  As e'er beneath a waning moon was haunted
+  By woman wailing for her demon lover.
+
+But though I believed my brain thus occupied, my every sense hung upon
+the writing under the dry, bony hand, all brown-fingered with chemicals
+and cigarette-smoke.
+
+  Our windows fronting on the dangerous foam,
+
+(he wrote, after long, irresolute snatches), and then--
+
+  "Our open casements facing desolate seas
+  Forlorn--forlorn--"
+
+Here again his face grew peaked and anxious with that sense of loss I had
+first seen when the Power snatched him. But this time the agony was
+tenfold keener. As I watched it mounted like mercury in the tube. It
+lighted his face from within till I thought the visibly scourged soul
+must leap forth naked between his jaws, unable to endure. A drop of sweat
+trickled from my forehead down my nose and splashed on the back of my
+hand.
+
+  "Our windows facing on the desolate seas
+  And pearly foam of magic fairyland--"
+
+  "Not yet--not yet," he muttered, "wait a minute.
+  _Please_ wait a minute. I shall get it then--"
+
+  Our magic windows fronting on the sea,
+  The dangerous foam of desolate seas ..
+  For aye.
+
+"_Ouh_, my God!"
+
+From head to heel he shook--shook from the marrow of his bones
+outwards--then leaped to his feet with raised arms, and slid the chair
+screeching across the tiled floor where it struck the drawers behind and
+fell with a jar. Mechanically, I stooped to recover it.
+
+As I rose, Mr. Shaynor was stretching and yawning at leisure.
+
+"I've had a bit of a doze," he said. "How did I come to knock the chair
+over? You look rather--"
+
+"The chair startled me," I answered. "It was so sudden in this quiet."
+
+Young Mr. Cashell behind his shut door was offendedly silent.
+
+"I suppose I must have been dreaming," said Mr. Shaynor.
+
+"I suppose you must," I said. "Talking of dreams--I--I noticed you
+writing--before--"
+
+He flushed consciously.
+
+"I meant to ask you if you've ever read anything written by a man called
+Keats."
+
+"Oh! I haven't much time to read poetry, and I can't say that I remember
+the name exactly. Is he a popular writer?"
+
+"Middling. I thought you might know him because he's the only poet who
+was ever a druggist. And he's rather what's called the lover's poet."
+
+"Indeed. I must dip into him. What did he write about?"
+
+"A lot of things. Here's a sample that may interest you."
+
+Then and there, carefully, I repeated the verse he had twice spoken and
+once written not ten minutes ago.
+
+"Ah. Anybody could see he was a druggist from that line about the
+tinctures and syrups. It's a fine tribute to our profession."
+
+"I don't know," said young Mr. Cashell, with icy politeness, opening the
+door one half-inch, "if you still happen to be interested in our trifling
+experiments. But, should such be the case----"
+
+I drew him aside, whispering, "Shaynor seemed going off into some sort of
+fit when I spoke to you just now. I thought, even at the risk of being
+rude, it wouldn't do to take you off your instruments just as the call
+was coming through. Don't you see?"
+
+"Granted--granted as soon as asked," he said unbending. "I _did_ think it
+a shade odd at the time. So that was why he knocked the chair down?"
+
+"I hope I haven't missed anything," I said.
+"I'm afraid I can't say that, but you're just in time for the end of a
+rather curious performance. You can come in, too, Mr. Shaynor. Listen,
+while I read it off."
+
+The Morse instrument was ticking furiously. Mr. Cashell interpreted:
+"'_K.K.V. Can make nothing of your signals_.'" A pause. "'_M.M.V. M.M.V.
+Signals unintelligible. Purpose anchor Sandown Bay. Examine instruments
+to-morrow.'_ Do you know what that means? It's a couple of men-o'-war
+working Marconi signals off the Isle of Wight. They are trying to talk to
+each other. Neither can read the other's messages, but all their messages
+are being taken in by our receiver here. They've been going on for ever so
+long. I wish you could have heard it."
+
+"How wonderful!" I said. "Do you mean we're overhearing Portsmouth ships
+trying to talk to each other--that we're eavesdropping across half South
+England?"
+
+"Just that. Their transmitters are all right, but their receivers are out
+of order, so they only get a dot here and a dash there. Nothing clear."
+
+"Why is that?"
+
+"God knows--and Science will know to-morrow. Perhaps the induction is
+faulty; perhaps the receivers aren't tuned to receive just the number of
+vibrations per second that the transmitter sends. Only a word here and
+there. Just enough to tantalise."
+
+Again the Morse sprang to life.
+
+"That's one of 'em complaining now. Listen: '_Disheartening--most
+disheartening_.' It's quite pathetic. Have you ever seen a spiritualistic
+seance? It reminds me of that sometimes--odds and ends of messages coming
+out of nowhere--a word here and there--no good at all."
+
+"But mediums are all impostors," said Mr. Shaynor, in the doorway,
+lighting an asthma-cigarette. "They only do it for the money they can
+make. I've seen 'em."
+
+"Here's Poole, at last--clear as a bell. L.L.L. _Now_ we sha'n't be long."
+Mr. Cashell rattled the keys merrily. "Anything you'd like to tell 'em?"
+
+"No, I don't think so," I said. "I'll go home and get to bed. I'm feeling
+a little tired."
+
+
+
+
+THE ARMY OF A DREAM
+
+SONG OF THE OLD GUARD
+
+"And thou shalt make a candlestick of pure gold of beaten work shall the
+candlestick be made: his shaft and its branches, his bowls, his knops,
+and his flowers, shall be the same.
+
+"And there shall be a knop under two branches of the same, and a knop
+under two branches of the same, and a knop under two branches of the
+same, according to the six branches that proceed out of the candlestick.
+Their knops and their branches shall be the same."--_Exodus._
+
+  "Know this, my brethren, Heaven is clear
+    And all the clouds are gone--
+  The Proper Sort shall flourish now,
+    Good times are coming on"--
+  The evil that was threatened late
+    To all of our degree,
+  Hath passed in discord and debate,
+    And, _Hey then up go we!_
+
+  A common people strove in vain
+    To shame us unto toil,
+  But they are spent and we remain,
+    And we shall share the spoil
+  According to our several needs
+    As Beauty shall decree,
+  As Age ordains or Birth concedes,
+    And, _Hey then up go we!_
+
+  And they that with accursed zeal
+    Our Service would amend,
+  Shall own the odds and come to heel
+    Ere worse befall their end
+  For though no naked word be wrote
+    Yet plainly shall they see
+  What pinneth Orders to their coat,
+    And, _Hey then up go we!_
+
+  Our doorways that, in time of fear,
+    We opened overwide
+  Shall softly close from year to year
+    Till all be purified;
+  For though no fluttering fan be heard
+    Nor chaff be seen to flee--
+  The Lord shall winnow the Lord's Preferred--
+    And, _Hey then up go we!_
+
+  Our altars which the heathen brake
+    Shall rankly smoke anew,
+  And anise, mint, and cummin take
+    Their dread and sovereign due,
+  Whereby the buttons of our trade
+    Shall all restored be
+  With curious work in gilt and braid,
+    And, _Hey then up go we!_
+
+  Then come, my brethren, and prepare
+    The candlesticks and bells,
+  The scarlet, brass, and badger's hair
+    Wherein our Honour dwells,
+  And straitly fence and strictly keep
+    The Ark's integrity
+  Till Armageddon break our sleep ...
+    And, _Hey then up go we!_
+
+
+THE ARMY OF A DREAM
+
+PART I
+
+I sat down in the club smoking-room to fill a pipe.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It was entirely natural that I should be talking to "Boy" Bayley. We had
+met first, twenty odd years ago, at the Indian mess of the Tyneside
+Tail-twisters. Our last meeting, I remembered, had been at the Mount
+Nelson Hotel, which was by no means India, and there we had talked half
+the night. Boy Bayley had gone up that week to the front, where I think
+he stayed a long, long time.
+
+But now he had come back.
+
+"Are you still a Tynesider?" I asked.
+
+"I command the Imperial Guard Battalion of the old regiment, my son," he
+replied.
+
+"Guard which? They've been Fusiliers since Fontenoy. Don't pull my leg,
+Boy."
+
+"I said Guard, not Guard-s. The I. G. Battalion of the Tail-twisters.
+Does that make it any clearer?"
+
+"Not in the least."
+
+"Then come over to the mess and see for yourself. We aren't a step from
+barracks. Keep on my right side. I'm--I'm a bit deaf on the near."
+
+We left the club together and crossed the street to a vast four-storied
+pile, which more resembled a Rowton lodging-house than a barrack. I could
+see no sentry at the gates.
+
+"There ain't any," said the Boy lightly. He led me into a many-tabled
+restaurant full of civilians and grey-green uniforms. At one end of the
+room, on a slightly raised dais, stood a big table.
+
+"Here we are! We usually lunch here and dine in mess by ourselves. These
+are our chaps--but what am I thinking of? You must know most of 'em.
+Devine's my second in command now. There's old Luttrell--remember him at
+Cherat?--Burgard, Verschoyle (you were at school with him), Harrison,
+Pigeon, and Kyd."
+
+With the exception of this last I knew them all, but I could not remember
+that they had all been Tynesiders.
+
+"I've never seen this sort of place," I said, looking round. "Half the
+men here are in plain clothes, and what are those women and children
+doing?"
+
+"Eating, I hope," Boy Bayley answered. "Our canteens would never pay if
+it wasn't for the Line and Militia trade. When they were first started
+people looked on 'em rather as catsmeat-shops; but we got a duchess or
+two to lunch in 'em, and they've been grossly fashionable since."
+
+"So I see," I answered. A woman of the type that shops at the Stores came
+up the room looking about her. A man in the dull-grey uniform of the
+corps rose up to meet her, piloted her to a place between three other
+uniforms, and there began a very merry little meal.
+
+"I give it up," I said. "This is guilty splendour that I don't
+understand."
+
+"Quite simple," said Burgard across the table. "The barrack supplies
+breakfast, dinner, and tea on the Army scale to the Imperial Guard (which
+we call I. G.) when it's in barracks as well as to the Line and Militia.
+They can all invite their friends if they choose to pay for them. That's
+where we make our profits. Look!"
+
+Near one of the doors were four or five tables crowded with workmen in
+the raiment of their callings. They ate steadily, but found time to jest
+with the uniforms about them; and when one o'clock clanged from a big
+half-built block of flats across the street, filed out.
+
+"Those," Devine explained, "are either our Line or Militiamen, as such
+entitled to the regulation whack at regulation cost. It's cheaper than
+they could buy it; an' they meet their friends too. A man'll walk a mile
+in his dinner hour to mess with his own lot."
+
+"Wait a minute," I pleaded. "Will you tell me what those plumbers and
+plasterers and bricklayers that I saw go out just now have to do with
+what I was taught to call the Line?"
+
+"Tell him," said the Boy over his shoulder to Burgard. He was busy
+talking with the large Verschoyle, my old schoolmate.
+
+"The Line comes next to the Guard. The Linesman's generally a town-bird
+who can't afford to be a Volunteer. He has to go into camp in an Area for
+two months his first year, six weeks his second, and a month the third.
+He gets about five bob a week the year round for that and for being on
+duty two days of the week, and for being liable to be ordered out to help
+the Guard in a row. He needn't live in barracks unless he wants to, and
+he and his family can feed at the regimental canteen at usual rates. The
+women like it."
+
+"All this," I said politely, but intensely, "is the raving of delirium.
+Where may your precious recruit who needn't live in barracks learn his
+drill?"
+
+"At his precious school, my child, like the rest of us. The notion of
+allowing a human being to reach his twentieth year before asking him to
+put his feet in the first position _was_ raving lunacy if you like!" Boy
+Bayley dived back into the conversation.
+
+"Very good," I said meekly. "I accept the virtuous plumber who puts in
+two months of his valuable time at Aldershot----"
+
+"Aldershot!" The table exploded. I felt a little annoyed.
+
+"A camp in an Area is not exactly Aldershot," said Burgard. "The Line
+isn't exactly what you fancy. Some of them even come to _us_!"
+
+"You recruit from 'em?"
+
+"I beg your pardon," said Devine with mock solemnity. "The Guard doesn't
+recruit. It selects."
+
+"It would," I said, "with a Spiers and Pond restaurant; pretty girls to
+play with; and----"
+
+"A room apiece, four bob a day and all found," said Verschoyle. "Don't
+forget that."
+
+"Of course!" I said. "It probably beats off recruits with a club."
+
+"No, with the ballot-box," said Verschoyle, laughing. "At least in all
+R.C. companies."
+
+"I didn't know Roman Catholics were so particular," I ventured.
+
+They grinned. "R.C. companies," said the Boy, "mean Right of Choice. When
+a company has been very good and pious for a long time it may, if the
+C.O. thinks fit, choose its own men--all same one-piecee club. All our
+companies are R.C.'s, and as the battalion is making up a few vacancies
+ere starting once more on the wild and trackless 'heef' into the Areas,
+the Linesman is here in force to-day sucking up to our non-coms."
+
+"Would some one mind explaining to me the meaning of every other word
+you've used," I said. "What's a trackless 'heef'? What's an Area? What's
+everything generally?" I asked.
+
+"Oh, 'heefs' part of the British Constitution," said the Boy. "It began
+long ago when they'd first mapped out the big military manoeuvring
+grounds--we call 'em Areas for short--where the I. G. spend two-thirds of
+their time and the other regiments get their training. It was slang
+originally for beef on the hoof, because in the Military Areas two-thirds
+of your meat-rations at least are handed over to you on the hoof, and you
+make your own arrangements. The word 'heef' became a parable for camping
+in the Military Areas and all its miseries. There are two Areas in
+Ireland, one in Wales for hill-work, a couple in Scotland, and a sort of
+parade-ground in the Lake District; but the real working Areas are in
+India, Africa, and Australia, and so on."
+
+"And what do you do there?"
+
+"We 'heef' under service conditions, which are rather like hard work. We
+'heef' in an English Area for about a year, coming into barracks for one
+month to make up wastage. Then we may 'heef' foreign for another year or
+eighteen months. Then we do sea-time in the war boats----"
+
+"_What-t?_" I said.
+
+"Sea-time," Bayley repeated. "Just like Marines,
+to learn about the big guns and how to embark and disembark quick. Then
+we come back to our territorial headquarters for six months, to educate
+the Line and Volunteer camps, to go to Hythe, to keep abreast of any new
+ideas, and then we fill up vacancies. We call those six months 'Schools,'
+Then we begin all over again, thus: Home 'heef,' foreign 'heef,'
+sea-time, schools. 'Heefing' isn't precisely luxurious, but it's on
+'heef' that we make our head-money."
+
+"Or lose it," said the sallow Pigeon, and all laughed, as men will, at
+regimental jokes.
+
+"The Dove never lets me forget that," said Boy Bayley. "It happened last
+March. We were out in the Second Northern Area at the top end of Scotland
+where a lot of those silly deer forests used to be. I'd sooner 'heef' in
+the middle of Australia myself--or Athabasca, with all respect to the
+Dove--he's a native of those parts. We were camped somewhere near
+Caithness, and the Armity (that's the combined Navy and Army board that
+runs our show) sent us about eight hundred raw remounts to break in to
+keep us warm."
+
+"Why horses for a foot regiment?"
+
+"I.G.'s don't foot it unless they're obliged to. No have gee-gee how can
+move? I'll show you later. Well, as I was saying, we broke those beasts
+in on compressed forage and small box-spurs, and then we started across
+Scotland to Applecross to hand 'em over to a horse-depot there. It was
+snowing cruel, and we didn't know the country overmuch. You remember the
+30th--the old East Lancashire--at Mian Mir?
+
+"Their Guard Battalion had been 'heefing' round those parts for six
+months. We thought they'd be snowed up all quiet and comfy, but Burden,
+their C. O., got wind of our coming, and sent spies in to Eschol."
+
+"Confound him," said Luttrell, who was fat and well-liking. "I
+entertained one of 'em--in a red worsted comforter--under Bean Derig. He
+said he was a crofter. 'Gave him a drink too."
+
+"I don't mind admitting," said the Boy, "that, what with the cold and the
+remounts, we were moving rather base over apex. Burden bottled us under
+Sghurr Mohr in a snowstorm. He stampeded half the horses, cut off a lot
+of us in a snow-bank, and generally rubbed our noses in the dirt."
+
+"Was he allowed to do that?" I said.
+
+"There is no peace in a Military Area. If we'd
+beaten him off or got away without losing anyone, we'd have been entitled
+to a day's pay from every man engaged against us. But we didn't. He cut
+off fifty of ours, held 'em as prisoners for the regulation three days,
+and then sent in his bill--three days' pay for each man taken. Fifty men
+at twelve bob a head, plus five pounds for the Dove as a captured
+officer, and Kyd here, his junior, three, made about forty quid to Burden
+& Co. They crowed over us horrid."
+
+"Couldn't you have appealed to an umpire or--or something?"
+
+"We could, but we talked it over with the men and decided to pay and look
+happy. We were fairly had. The 30th knew every foot of Sghurr Mohr. I
+spent three days huntin' 'em in the snow, but they went off on our
+remounts about twenty mile that night."
+
+"Do you always do this sham-fight business?" I asked.
+
+"Once inside an Area you must look after yourself; but I tell you that a
+fight which means that every man-Jack of us may lose a week's pay isn't
+so damn-sham after all. It keeps the men nippy. Still, in the long run,
+it's like whist on a P. & O. It comes out fairly level if you play long
+enough. Now and again, though, one gets a present--say, when a Line
+regiment's out on the 'heef,' and signifies that it's ready to abide by
+the rules of the game. You mustn't take head-money from a Line regiment
+in an Area unless it says that it'll play you; but, after a week or two,
+those clever Linesmen always think they see a chance of making a pot, and
+send in their compliments to the nearest I.G. Then the fun begins. We
+caught a Line regiment single-handed about two years ago in
+Ireland--caught it on the hop between a bog and a beach. It had just
+moved in to join its brigade, and we made a forty-two mile march in
+fourteen hours, and cut it off, lock, stock, and barrel. It went to
+ground like a badger--I _will_ say those Line regiments can dig--but we
+got out privily by night and broke up the only road it could expect to
+get its baggage and company-guns along. Then we blew up a bridge that
+some Sappers had made for experimental purposes (_they_ were rather
+stuffy about it) on its line of retreat, while we lay up in the mountains
+and signalled for the A.C. of those parts."
+
+"Who's an A.C.?" I asked.
+
+"The Adjustment Committee--the umpires of the Military Areas. They're a
+set of superannuated old aunts of colonels kept for the purpose, but they
+occasionally combine to do justice. Our A.C. came, saw our dispositions,
+and said it was a sanguinary massacre for the Line, and that we were
+entitled to our full pound of flesh--head-money for one whole regiment,
+with equipment, four company-guns, and all kit! At Line rates this worked
+out as one fat cheque for two hundred and fifty. Not bad!"
+
+"But we had to pay the Sappers seventy-four quid for blowing their patent
+bridge to pieces," Devine interpolated. "That was a swindle."
+
+"That's true," the Boy went on, "but the Adjustment Committee gave our
+helpless victims a talking to that was worth another hundred to hear."
+
+"But isn't there a lot of unfairness in this head-money system?" I asked.
+
+"Can't have everything perfect," said the Boy. "Head-money is an attempt
+at payment by results, and it gives the men a direct interest in their
+job. Three times out of five, of course, the A. C. will disallow both
+sides' claim, but there's always the chance of bringing off a coup."
+
+"Do all regiments do it?"
+
+"Heavily. The Line pays a bob per prisoner and the Militia ninepence, not
+to mention side-bets which are what really keep the men keen. It isn't
+supposed to be done by the Volunteers, but they gamble worse than anyone.
+Why, the very kids do it when they go to First Camp at Aldershot or
+Salisbury."
+
+"Head-money's a national institution--like betting," said Burgard.
+
+"I should say it was," said Pigeon suddenly. "I was roped in the other
+day as an Adjustment Committee by the Kemptown Board School. I was riding
+under the Brighton racecourse, and I heard the whistle goin' for
+umpire--the regulation, two longs and two shorts. I didn't take any
+notice till an infant about a yard high jumped up from a furze-patch and
+shouted: 'Guard! Guard! Come 'ere! I want you _per_fessionally. Alf says
+'e ain't outflanked. Ain't 'e a liar? Come an' look 'ow I've posted my
+men.' You bet I looked. The young demon trotted by my stirrup and showed
+me his whole army (twenty of 'em) laid out under cover as nicely as you
+please round a cowhouse in a hollow. He kept on shouting: 'I've drew Alf
+into there. 'Is persition ain't tenable. Say it ain't tenable, Guard!' I
+rode round the position, and Alf with his army came out of his cowhouse
+an' sat on the roof and protested like a--like a Militia Colonel; but the
+facts were in favour of my friend and I umpired according. Well, Alf
+abode by my decision. I explained it to him at length, and he solemnly
+paid up his head-money--farthing points if you please."
+
+"Did they pay you umpire's fee?" said Kyd. "I
+umpired a whole afternoon once for a village school at home, and they
+stood me a bottle of hot ginger beer."
+
+"I compromised on a halfpenny--a sticky one--or I'd have hurt their
+feelings," said Pigeon gravely. "But I gave 'em sixpence back."
+
+"How were they manoeuvring and what with?" I asked.
+
+"Oh, by whistle and hand-signal. They had the dummy Board School guns and
+flags for positions, but they were rushing their attack much too quick
+for that open country. I told 'em so, and they admitted it."
+
+"But who taught 'em?" I said.
+
+"They had learned in their schools, of course, like the rest of us. They
+were all of 'em over ten; and squad-drill begins when they're eight. They
+knew their company-drill a heap better than they knew their King's
+English."
+
+"How much drill do the boys put in?" I asked.
+
+"All boys begin physical drill to music in the Board Schools when they're
+six; squad-drill, one hour a week, when they're eight; company-drill when
+they're ten, for an hour and a half a week. Between ten and twelve they
+get battalion drill of a sort. They take the rifle at twelve and record
+their first target-score at thirteen. That's what the Code lays down. But
+it's worked very loosely so long as a boy comes up to the standard of his
+age."
+
+"In Canada we don't need your physical drill. We're born fit," said
+Pigeon, "and our ten-year-olds could knock spots out of your
+twelve-year-olds."
+
+"I may as well explain," said the Boy, "that the Dove is our 'swop'
+officer. He's an untamed Huskie from Nootka Sound when he's at home. An
+I. G. Corps exchanges one officer every two years with a Canadian or
+Australian or African Guard Corps. We've had a year of our Dove, an' we
+shall be sorry to lose him. He humbles our insular pride. Meantime,
+Morten, our 'swop' in Canada, keeps the ferocious Canuck humble. When
+Pij. goes we shall swop Kyd, who's next on the roster, for a Cornstalk or
+a Maori. But about the education-drill. A boy can't attend First Camp, as
+we call it, till he is a trained boy and holds his First Musketry
+certificate. The Education Code says he must be fourteen, and the boys
+usually go to First Camp at about that age. Of course, they've been to
+their little private camps and Boys' Fresh Air Camps and public school
+picnics while they were at school, but First Camp is where the young
+drafts all meet--generally at Aldershot in this part of the world. First
+Camp lasts a week or ten days, and the boys are looked over for
+vaccination and worked lightly in brigades with lots of blank cartridge.
+Second Camp--that's for the fifteen to eighteen-year-olds--lasts ten days
+or a fortnight, and that includes a final medical examination. Men don't
+like to be chucked out on medical certificates much--nowadays. I assure
+you Second Camp, at Salisbury, say, is an experience for a young I.G.
+officer. We're told off to 'em in rotation. A wilderness of monkeys isn't
+in it. The kids are apt to think 'emselves soldiers, and we have to take
+the edge off 'em with lots of picquet-work and night attacks."
+
+"And what happens after Second Camp?"
+
+"It's hard to explain. Our system is so illogical. Theoretically, the
+boys needn't show up for the next three or four years after Second Camp.
+They are supposed to be making their way in life. Actually, the young
+doctor or lawyer or engineer joins a Volunteer battalion that sticks to
+the minimum of camp--ten days per annum. That gives him a holiday in the
+open air, and now that men have taken to endowing their Volunteer
+drill-halls with baths and libraries, he finds, if he can't run to a
+club, that his own drill-hall is an efficient substitute. He meets men
+there who'll be useful to him later, and he keeps himself in touch with
+what's going on while he's studying for his profession. The
+town-birds--such as the chemist's assistant, clerk, plumber, mechanic,
+electrician, and so forth--generally put in for their town Volunteer
+corps as soon as they begin to walk out with the girls. They like takin'
+their true-loves to our restaurants. Look yonder!" I followed his gaze,
+and saw across the room a man and a maid at a far table, forgetting in
+each other's eyes the good food on their plates.
+
+"So it is," said I. "Go ahead."
+
+"Then, too, we have some town Volunteer corps that lay themselves out to
+attract promising youths of nineteen or twenty, and make much of 'em on
+condition that they join their Line battalion and play for their county.
+Under the new county qualifications--birth or three years' residence--that
+means a great deal in League matches, and the same in County cricket."
+
+"By Jove, that's a good notion," I cried. "Who invented it?"
+
+"C. B. Fry--long ago. He said in his paper, that County cricket and
+County volunteering ought to be on the same footing--unpaid and genuine.
+'No cricketer no corps. No corps no cricketer' was his watchword. There
+was a row among the pro's at first, but C. B. won, and later the League
+had to come in. They said at first it would ruin the gate; but when
+County matches began to be _pukka_ county, _plus_ inter-regimental,
+affairs the gate trebled, and as two-thirds of the gate goes to the
+regiments supplying the teams some Volunteer corps fairly wallow in cash.
+It's all unofficial, of course, but League Corps, as they call 'em, can
+take their pick of the Second Camper. Some corps ask ten guineas
+entrance-fee, and get it too, from the young bloods that want to shine in
+the arena. I told you we catered for all tastes. Now, as regards the Line
+proper, I believe the young artisan and mechanic puts in for that before
+he marries. He likes the two-months' 'heef' in his first year, and five
+bob a week is something to go on with between times."
+
+"Do they follow their trade while they're in the Line?" I demanded.
+
+"Why not? How many well-paid artisans work more than four days a week
+anyhow? Remember a Linesman hasn't to be drilled in your sense of the
+word. He must have had at least eight years' grounding in that, as well
+as two or three years in his Volunteer battalion. He can sleep where he
+pleases. He can't leave town-limits without reporting himself, of course,
+but he can get leave if he wants it. He's on duty two days in the week as
+a rule, and he's liable to be invited out for garrison duty down the
+Mediterranean, but his benefit societies will insure him against that.
+I'll tell you about that later. If it's a hard winter and trade's slack,
+a lot of the bachelors are taken into the I. G. barracks (while the I. G.
+is out on the heef) for theoretical instruction. Oh, I assure you the
+Line hasn't half a bad time of it."
+
+"Amazing!" I murmured. "And what about the others?"
+
+"The Volunteers? Observe the beauty of our system. We're a free people.
+We get up and slay the man who says we aren't. But as a little detail we
+never mention, if we don't volunteer in some corps or another--as
+combatants if we're fit, as non-combatants, if we ain't--till we're
+thirty-five we don't vote, and we don't get poor-relief, and the women
+don't love us."
+
+"Oh, that's the compulsion of it?" said I.
+
+Bayley inclined his head gravely. "That, Sir, is the compulsion. We voted
+the legal part of it ourselves in a fit of panic, and we have not yet
+rescinded our resolution. The women attend to the unofficial penalties.
+But being free British citizens----"
+
+"_And_ snobs," put in Pigeon.
+"The point is well taken, Pij------we have supplied ourselves with every
+sort and shape and make of Volunteer corps that you can imagine, and we've
+mixed the whole show up with our Odd Fellows and our I.O.G.T.'s and our
+Buffaloes, and our Burkes and our Debretts, not to mention Leagues and
+Athletic Clubs, till you can't tell t'other from which. You remember the
+young pup who used to look on soldiering as a favour done to his
+ungrateful country--the gun-poking, ferret-pettin', landed gentleman's
+offspring--the suckin' Facey Romford? Well, he generally joins a Foreign
+Service Corps when he leaves college."
+
+"Can Volunteers go foreign, then?"
+
+"Can't they just, if their C.O. _or_ his wife has influence! The Armity
+will always send a well-connected F.S. corps out to help a guard battalion
+in a small campaign. Otherwise F.S. corps make their own arrangements
+about camps. You see, the Military Areas are always open. They can 'heef'
+there (and gamble on head-money) as long as their finances run to it; or
+they can apply to do sea-time in the ships. It's a cheap way for a young
+man to see the world, and if he's any good he can try to get into the
+Guard later."
+
+"The main point," said Pigeon, "is that F.S. corps are 'swagger'--the
+correct thing. It 'ud never do to be drawn for the Militia, don't you
+know," he drawled, trying to render the English voice.
+
+"That's what happens to a chap who doesn't volunteer," said Bayley. "Well,
+after the F.S. corps (we've about forty of 'em) come our territorial
+Volunteer battalions, and a man who can't suit himself somewhere among 'em
+must be a shade difficult. We've got those 'League' corps I was talking
+about; and those studious corps that just scrape through their ten days'
+camp; and we've crack corps of highly-paid mechanics who can afford a two
+months' 'heef' in an interesting Area every other year; and we've senior
+and junior scientific corps of earnest boilermakers and fitters and
+engineers who read papers on high explosives, and do their 'heefing' in a
+wet picket-boat--mine-droppin'--at the ports. Then we've heavy artillery--
+recruited from the big manufacturing towns and ship-building yards--and
+ferocious hard-ridin' Yeomanry (they _can_ ride--now), genteel, semi-
+genteel, and Hooligan corps, and so on and so forth till you come to the
+Home Defence Establishment--the young chaps knocked out under medical
+certificate at the Second Camp, but good enough to sit behind hedges or
+clean up camp, and the old was-birds who've served their time but don't
+care to drop out of the fun of the yearly camps and the halls. They call
+'emselves veterans and do fancy-shooting at Bisley, but, between you and
+me, they're mostly Fresh Air Benefit Clubs. They contribute to the
+Volunteer journals and tell the Guard that it's no good. But I like 'em. I
+shall be one of 'em some day--a copper-nosed was-bird! ... So you see
+we're mixed to a degree on the Volunteer side."
+
+"It sounds that way," I ventured.
+
+"You've overdone it, Bayley," said Devine. "You've missed our one strong
+point." He turned to me and continued: "It's embarkation. The Volunteers
+may be as mixed as the Colonel says, but they _are_ trained to go down to
+the sea in ships. You ought to see a big Bank-Holiday roll-out. We suspend
+most of the usual railway traffic and turn on the military time-table--say
+on Friday at midnight. By 4 A.M. the trains are running from every big
+centre in England to the nearest port at two-minute intervals. As a rule,
+the Armity meets us at the other end with shipping of sorts--fleet
+reserves or regular men of war or hulks--anything you can stick a
+gang-plank to. We pile the men on to the troop-decks, stack the rifles in
+the racks, send down the sea-kit, steam about for a few hours, and land
+'em somewhere. It's a good notion, because our army to be any use _must_
+be an army of embarkation. Why, last Whit Monday we had--how many were
+down at the dock-edge in the first eight hours? Kyd, you're the Volunteer
+enthusiast last from school."
+
+"In the first ten hours over a hundred and eighteen thousand," said Kyd
+across the table, "with thirty-six thousand actually put in and taken out
+of ship. In the whole thirty-six hours we had close on ninety thousand men
+on the water and a hundred and thirty-three thousand on the quays fallen
+in with their sea-kit."
+
+"That must have been a sight," I said.
+
+"One didn't notice it much. It was scattered between Chatham, Dover,
+Portsmouth, Plymouth, Bristol, Liverpool, and so on, merely to give the
+inland men a chance to get rid of their breakfasts. We don't like to
+concentrate and try a big embarkation at any one point. It makes the
+Continent jumpy. Otherwise," said Kyd, "I believe we could get two hundred
+thousand men, with their kits, away on one tide."
+
+"What d'you want with so many?" I asked.
+
+"_We_ don't want one of 'em; but the Continent used to point out, every
+time relations were strained, that nothing would be easier than to raid
+England if they got command of the sea for a week. After a few years some
+genius discovered that it cut both ways, an' there was no reason why we,
+who are supposed to command the sea and own a few ships, should not
+organise our little raids in case of need. The notion caught on among the
+Volunteers--they were getting rather sick of manoeuvres on dry land--and
+since then we haven't heard so much about raids from the Continent," said
+Bayley.
+
+"It's the offensive-defensive," said Verschoyle, "that they talk so much
+about. We learned it _all_ from the Continent--bless 'em! They insisted on
+it so."
+
+"No, we learned it from the Fleet," said Devine. "The Mediterranean Fleet
+landed ten thousand marines and sailors, with guns, in twenty minutes once
+at manoeuvres. That was long ago. I've seen the Fleet Reserve and a few
+paddle-steamers, hired for the day, land twenty-five thousand Volunteers
+at Bantry in four hours--half the men sea-sick too. You've no notion what
+a difference that sort of manoeuvre makes in the calculations of our
+friends on the mainland. The Continent knows what invasion means. It's
+like dealing with a man whose nerve has been shaken. It doesn't cost much
+after all, and it makes us better friends with the great European family.
+We're now as thick as thieves."
+
+"Where does the Imperial Guard come in in all this gorgeousness?" I asked.
+"You're unusual modest about yourselves."
+
+"As a matter of fact, we're supposed to go out and stay out. We're the
+permanently mobilised lot. I don't think there are more than eight I.G.
+battalions in England now. We're a hundred battalions all told. Mostly on
+the 'heef' in India, Africa and so forth."
+
+"A hundred thousand. Isn't that small allowance?" I suggested.
+
+"You think so? One hundred thousand _men_, without a single case of
+venereal, and an average sick list of two per cent, permanently on a war
+footing? Well, perhaps you're right, but it's a useful little force to
+begin with while the others are getting ready. There's the native Indian
+Army also, which isn't a broken reed, and, since 'no Volunteer no Vote' is
+the rule throughout the Empire, you will find a few men in Canada,
+Australia, and elsewhere, that are fairly hefty in their class."
+
+"But a hundred thousand isn't enough for garrison duty," I persisted.
+
+"A hundred thousand _sound_ men, not sick boys, go quite a way," said
+Pigeon.
+
+"We expect the Line to garrison the Mediterranean Ports and thereabouts,"
+said Bayley. "Don't sneer at the mechanic. He's deuced good stuff. He
+isn't rudely ordered out, because this ain't a military despotism, and we
+have to consider people's feelings. The Armity usually brackets three Line
+regiments together, and calls for men for six months or a year for Malta,
+Gib, or elsewhere, at a bob a day. Three battalions will give you nearly a
+whole battalion of bachelors between 'em. You fill up deficiencies with a
+call on the territorial Volunteer battalion, and away you go with what we
+call a Ports battalion. What's astonishing in that? Remember that in this
+country, where fifty per cent of the able-bodied males have got a pretty
+fair notion of soldiering, and, which is more, have all camped out in the
+open, you wake up the spirit of adventure in the young."
+
+"Not much adventure at Malta, Gib, or Cyprus," I retorted. "Don't they get
+sick of it?"
+
+"But you don't realise that we treat 'em rather differently from the
+soldier of the past. You ought to go and see a Ports battalion drawn from
+a manufacturing centre growin' vines in Cyprus in its shirt sleeves; and
+at Gib, and Malta, of course, the battalions are working with the Fleet
+half the time."
+
+"It seems to me," I said angrily, "you are knocking _esprit de corps_ on
+the head with all this Army-Navy jumble. It's as bad as----"
+
+"I know what you're going to say. As bad as what Kitchener used to do when
+he believed that a thousand details picked up on the veldt were as good as
+a column of two regiments. In the old days, when drill was a sort of holy
+sacred art learned in old age, you'd be quite right. But remember _our_
+chaps are broke to drill from childhood, and the theory we work on is that
+a thousand trained Englishmen ought to be about as good as another
+thousand trained Englishmen. We've enlarged our horizon, that's all. Some
+day the Army and the Navy will be interchangeable."
+
+"You've enlarged it enough to fall out of, I think. Now where in all this
+mess of compulsory Volunteers----?"
+
+"My dear boy, there's no compulsion. You've _got_ to be drilled when
+you're a child, same as you've got to learn to read, and if you don't
+pretend to serve in some corps or other till you're thirty-five or
+medically chucked you rank with lunatics, women, and minors. That's fair
+enough."
+
+"Compulsory conscripts," I continued. "Where, as I was going to say, does
+the Militia come in?"
+
+"As I have said--for the men who can't afford volunteering. The Militia is
+recruited by ballot--pretty comprehensively too. Volunteers are exempt,
+but most men not otherwise accounted for are bagged by the Militia. They
+have to put in a minimum three weeks' camp every other year, and they get
+fifteen bob a week and their keep when they're at it, and some sort of a
+yearly fee, I've forgotten how much. 'Tisn't a showy service, but it's
+very useful. It keeps the mass of the men between twenty-five, say, and
+thirty-five moderately fit, and gives the Armity an excuse for having more
+equipment ready--in case of emergencies."
+
+"I don't think you're quite fair on the Militia," drawled Verschoyle.
+"They're better than we give 'em credit for. Don't you remember the Middle
+Moor Collieries' strike?"
+
+"Tell me," I said quickly. Evidently the others knew.
+
+"We-ell, it was no end of a pitman's strike about eight years ago. There
+were twenty-five thousand men involved--Militia, of course. At the end of
+the first month--October--when things were looking rather blue, one of
+those clever Labour leaders got hold of the Militia Act and discovered
+that any Militia regiment could, by a two-thirds vote, go on 'heef' in a
+Military Area in addition to its usual biennial camp. Two-and-twenty
+battalions of Geordies solemnly applied, and they were turned loose into
+the Irish and Scotch Areas under an I.G. Brigadier who had private
+instructions to knock clinkers out of 'em. But the pitman is a strong and
+agile bird. He throve on snowdrifts and entrenching and draggin' guns
+through heather. _He_ was being fed and clothed for nothing, besides
+having a chance of making head-money, and his strike-pay was going clear
+to his wife and family. You see? Wily man. But wachtabittje! When that
+'heef' finished in December the strike was still on. _Then_ that same
+Labour leader found out, from the same Act, that if at any time more than
+thirty or forty men of a Militia regiment wished to volunteer to do
+sea-time and study big guns in the Fleet they were in no wise to be
+discouraged, but were to be taken on as opportunity offered and paid a bob
+a day. Accordingly, about January, Geordie began volunteering for sea-
+time--seven and eight hundred men out of each regiment. Anyhow, it made up
+seventeen thousand men! It was a splendid chance and the Armity jumped at
+it. The Home and Channel Fleets and the North Sea and Cruiser Squadrons
+were strengthened with lame ducks from the Fleet Reserve, and between 'em
+with a little stretching and pushing they accommodated all of that young
+division."
+
+"Yes, but you've forgotten how we lied to the Continent about it. All
+Europe wanted to know what the dooce we were at," said Boy Bayley, "and
+the wretched Cabinet had to stump the country in the depths of winter
+explaining our new system of poor-relief. I beg your pardon, Verschoyle."
+
+"The Armity improvised naval manoeuvres between Gib and Land's End, with
+frequent coalings and landings; ending in a cruise round England that
+fairly paralysed the pitmen. The first day out they wanted the fleet
+stopped while they went ashore and killed their Labour leader, but they
+couldn't be obliged. Then they wanted to mutiny over the coaling--it was
+too like their own job. Oh, they had a lordly timel They came back--the
+combined Fleets anchored off Hull--with a nautical hitch to their
+breeches. They'd had a free fight at Gib with the Ports battalion there;
+they cleared out the town of Lagos; and they'd fought a pitched battle
+with the dockyard-mateys at Devonport. So they'd done 'emselves well, but
+they didn't want any more military life for a bit."
+
+"And the strike?"
+
+"That ended, all right enough, when the strike-money came to an end. The
+pit-owners were furious. They said the Armity had wilfully prolonged the
+strike, and asked questions in the House. The Armity said that they had
+taken advantage of the crisis to put a six months' polish on fifteen
+thousand fine young men, and if the masters cared to come out on the same
+terms they'd be happy to do the same by them."
+
+"And then?"
+
+"Palaver done set," said Bayley. "Everybody laughed."
+
+"I don't quite understand about this sea-time business," I said. "Is the
+Fleet open to take any regiment aboard?"
+
+"Rather. The I.G. must, the Line can, the Militia may, and the Volunteers
+do put in sea-time. The Coast Volunteers began it, and the fashion is
+spreading inland. Under certain circumstances, as Verschoyle told you, a
+Volunteer or Militia regiment can vote whether it 'heefs' wet or dry. If
+it votes wet and has influence (like some F.S. corps), it can sneak into
+the Channel or the Home Fleet and do a cruise round England or to Madeira
+or the North Sea. The regiment, of course, is distributed among the ships,
+and the Fleet dry nurse 'em. It rather breaks up shore discipline, but it
+gives the inland men a bit of experience, and, of course, it gives us a
+fairish supply of men behind the gun, in event of any strain on the Fleet.
+Some coast corps make a specialty of it, and compete for embarking and
+disembarking records. I believe some of the Tyneside engineerin' corps put
+ten per cent of their men through the Fleet engine rooms. But there's no
+need to stay talking here all the afternoon. Come and see the I.G. in his
+lair--the miserable conscript driven up to the colours at the point of the
+bayonet."
+
+PART II
+
+The great hall was emptying apace as the clocks struck two, and we passed
+out through double doors into a huge reading and smoking room, blue with
+tobacco and buzzing with voices.
+
+"We're quieter as a rule," said the Boy. "But we're filling up vacancies
+to-day. Hence the anxious faces of the Line and Militia. Look!" There were
+four tables against the walls, and at each stood a crowd of uniforms. The
+centres of disturbance were noncommissioned officers who, seated, growled
+and wrote down names.
+
+"Come to my table," said Burgard. "Well, Purvis, have you ear-marked our
+little lot?"
+
+"I've been tellin' 'em for the last hour we've only twenty-three
+vacancies," was the sergeant's answer. "I've taken nearly fifty for
+Trials, and this is what's left." Burgard smiled.
+
+"I'm very sorry," he said to the crowd, "but C Company's full."
+
+"Excuse me, Sir," said a man, "but wouldn't sea-time count in my favour?
+I've put in three months with the Fleet. Small quick-firers, Sir? Company
+guns? Any sort of light machinery?"
+
+"Come away," said a voice behind. "They've chucked the best farrier
+between Hull and Dewsbury. Think they'll take _you_ an' your potty quick-
+firers?"
+
+The speaker turned on his heel and swore.
+
+"Oh, damn the Guard, by all means!" said Sergeant Purvis, collecting his
+papers. "D'you suppose it's any pleasure to _me_ to reject chaps of your
+build and make? Vote us a second Guard battalion and we'll accommodate
+you. Now, you can come into Schools and watch Trials if you like."
+
+Most of the men accepted his invitation, but a few walked away angrily. I
+followed from the smoking-room across a wide corridor into a riding-
+school, under whose roof the voices of the few hundred assembled wandered
+in lost echoes.
+
+"I'll leave you, if you don't mind," said Burgard. "Company officers
+aren't supposed to assist at these games. Here, Matthews!" He called to a
+private and put me in his charge.
+
+In the centre of the vast floor my astonished eyes beheld a group of
+stripped men; the pink of their bodies startling the tan.
+
+"These are our crowd," said Matthews. "They've been vetted, an' we're
+putting 'em through their paces."
+
+"They don't look a bit like raw material," I said.
+
+"No, we don't use either raw men or raw meat for that matter in the
+Guard," Matthews replied. "Life's too short."
+
+Purvis stepped forward and barked in the professional manner. It was
+physical drill of the most searching, checked only when he laid his hand
+over some man's heart.
+
+Six or seven, I noticed, were sent back at this stage of the game. Then a
+cry went up from a group of privates standing near the line of contorted
+figures. "White, Purvis, white! Number Nine is spitting white!"
+
+"I know it," said Purvis. "Don't you worry."
+
+"Unfair!" murmured the man who understood quick-firers. "If I couldn't
+shape better than that I'd hire myself out to wheel a perambulator. He's
+cooked."
+
+"Nah," said the intent Matthews. "He'll answer to a month's training like
+a horse. It's only suet. _You've_ been training for this, haven't you?"
+
+"Look at me," said the man simply.
+
+"Yes. You're overtrained," was Matthews' comment. "The Guard isn't a
+circus."
+
+"Guns!" roared Purvis, as the men broke off and panted. "Number off from
+the right. Fourteen is one, three is two, eleven's three, twenty and
+thirty-nine are four and five, and five is six." He was giving them their
+numbers at the guns as they struggled into their uniforms. In like manner
+he told off three other guncrews, and the remainder left at the double, to
+return through the further doors with four light quick-firers jerking at
+the end of man-ropes.
+
+"Knock down and assemble against time!" Purvis called.
+
+The audience closed in a little as the crews flung themselves on the guns,
+which melted, wheel by wheel, beneath their touch.
+
+"I've never seen anything like this," I whispered.
+
+"Huh!" said Matthews scornfully. "They're always doin' it in the Line and
+Militia drill-halls. It's only circus-work."
+
+The guns were assembled again and some one called the time. Then followed
+ten minutes of the quickest firing and feeding with dummy cartridges that
+was ever given man to behold.
+
+"They look as if they might amount to something--this draft," said
+Matthews softly.
+
+"What might you teach 'em after this, then?" I asked.
+
+"To be Guard," said Matthews.
+
+"Spurs," cried Purvis, as the guns disappeared through the doors into the
+stables. Each man plucked at his sleeve, and drew up first one heel and
+then the other.
+
+"What the deuce are they doing?" I asked.
+
+"This," said Matthews. He put his hand to a ticket-pocket inside his
+regulation cuff, showed me two very small black box-spurs: drawing up a
+gaitered foot, he snapped them into the box in the heel, and when I had
+inspected snapped them out again.
+
+"That's all the spur you really need," he said.
+
+Then horses were trotted out into the school barebacked, and the neophytes
+were told to ride.
+
+Evidently the beasts knew the game and enjoyed it, for they would not make
+it easy for the men.
+
+A heap of saddlery was thrown in a corner, and from this each man, as he
+captured his mount, made shift to draw proper equipment, while the
+audience laughed, derided, or called the horses towards them.
+
+It was, most literally, wild horseplay, and by the time it was finished
+the recruits and the company were weak with fatigue and laughter.
+
+"That'll do," said Purvis, while the men rocked in their saddles. "I don't
+see any particular odds between any of you. C Company! Does anybody here
+know anything against any of these men?"
+
+"That's a bit of the Regulations," Matthews whispered. "Just like
+forbiddin' the banns in church. Really, it was all settled long ago when
+the names first came up."
+
+There was no answer.
+
+"You'll take 'em as they stand?"
+
+There was a grunt of assent.
+
+"Very good. There's forty men for twenty-three billets." He turned to the
+sweating horsemen. "I must put you into the Hat."
+
+With great ceremony and a shower of company jokes that I did not follow,
+an enormous Ally Sloper top-hat was produced, into which numbers and
+blanks were dropped, and the whole was handed round to the riders by a
+private, evidently the joker of C Company.
+
+Matthews gave me to understand that each company owned a cherished
+receptacle (sometimes not a respectable one) for the papers of the final
+drawing. He was telling me how his company had once stolen the Sacred
+Article used by D Company for this purpose and of the riot that followed,
+when through the west door of the schools entered a fresh detachment of
+stripped men, and the arena was flooded with another company.
+
+Said Matthews as we withdrew, "Each company does Trials their own way. B
+Company is all for teaching men how to cook and camp. D Company keeps 'em
+to horse-work mostly. We call D the circus-riders and B the cooks. They
+call us the Gunners."
+
+"An' you've rejected _me_," said the man who had done sea-time, pushing
+out before us. "The Army's goin' to the dogs."
+
+I stood in the corridor looking for Burgard.
+
+"Come up to my room and have a smoke," said Matthews, private of the
+Imperial Guard.
+
+We climbed two flights of stone stairs ere we reached an immense landing
+flanked with numbered doors.
+
+Matthews pressed a spring-latch and led me into a little cabin-like room.
+The cot was a standing bunk, with drawers beneath. On the bed lay a
+brilliant blanket; by the bed head was an electric light and a shelf of
+books: a writing table stood in the window, and I dropped into a low
+wicker chair.
+
+"This is a cut above subaltern's quarters," I said, surveying the photos,
+the dhurri on the floor, the rifle in its rack, the field-kit hung up
+behind the door, and the knicknacks on the walls.
+
+"The Line bachelors use 'em while we're away; but they're nice to come
+back to after 'heef.'" Matthews passed me his cigarette-case.
+
+"Where have you 'heefed'?" I said.
+
+"In Scotland, Central Australia, and North-Eastern Rhodesia and the North-
+West Indian front."
+
+"What's your service?"
+
+"Four years. I'll have to go in a year. I got in when I was twenty-two--by
+a fluke--from the Militia direct--on Trials."
+
+"Trials like those we just saw?"
+
+"Not so severe. There was less competition then. I hoped to get my
+stripes, but there's no chance."
+
+"Why?"
+
+"I haven't the knack of handling men. Purvis let me have a half-company
+for a month in Rhodesia--over towards Lake N'Garni. I couldn't work 'em
+properly. It's a gift."
+
+"Do colour-sergeants handle half-companies with you?"
+
+"They can command 'em on the 'heef.' We've only four company officers--
+Burgard, Luttrell, Kyd, and Harrison. Pigeon's our swop, and he's in
+charge of the ponies. Burgard got his company on the 'heef,' You see
+Burgard had been a lieutenant in the Line, but he came into the Guards on
+Trials like the men. _He_ could command. They tried him in India with a
+wing of the battalion for three months. He did well so he got his company.
+That's what made me hopeful. But it's a gift, you see--managing men--and
+so I'm only a senior private. They let ten per cent of us stay on for two
+years extra after our three are finished--to polish the others."
+
+"Aren't you even a corporal?"
+
+"We haven't corporals, or lances for that matter, in the Guard. As a
+senior private I'd take twenty men into action; but one Guard don't tell
+another how to clean himself. You've learned that before you apply. ...
+Come in!"
+
+There was a knock at the door, and Burgard entered, removing his cap.
+
+"I thought you'd be here," he said, as Matthews vacated the other chair
+and sat on the bed. "Well, has Matthews told you all about it? How did our
+Trials go, Matthews?"
+
+"Forty names in the Hat, Sir, at the finish. They'll make a fairish lot.
+Their gun-tricks weren't bad; but D company has taken the best horsemen--
+as usual."
+
+"Oh, I'll attend to that on 'heef.' Give me a man who can handle company-
+guns and I'll engage to make him a horse-master. D company will end by
+thinkin' 'emselves Captain Pigeon's private cavalry some day."
+
+I had never heard a private and a captain talking after this fashion, and
+my face must have betrayed my astonishment, for Burgard said:
+
+"These are not our parade manners. In our rooms, as we say in the Guard,
+all men are men. Outside we are officers and men."
+
+"I begin to see," I stammered. "Matthews was telling me that sergeants
+handled half-companies and rose from the ranks--and I don't see that there
+are any lieutenants--and your companies appear to be two hundred and fifty
+strong. It's a shade confusing to the layman."
+
+Burgard leaned forward didactically. "The Regulations lay down that every
+man's capacity for command must be tested to the uttermost. We construe
+that very literally when we're on the 'heef.' F'r instance, any man can
+apply to take the command next above him, and if a man's too shy to ask,
+his company officer must see that he gets his chance. A sergeant is given
+a wing of the battalion to play with for three weeks--a month, or six
+weeks--according to his capacity, and turned adrift in an Area to make his
+own arrangements. That's what Areas are for--and to experiment in. A good
+gunner--a private very often--has all four company-guns to handle through
+a week's fight, acting for the time as the major. Majors of Guard
+battalions (Verschoyle's our major) are supposed to be responsible for the
+guns, by the way. There's nothing to prevent any man who has the gift
+working his way up to the experimental command of the battalion on 'heef.'
+Purvis, my colour-sergeant, commanded the battalion for three months at
+the back of Coolgardie, an' very well he did it. Bayley 'verted to company
+officer for the time being an' took Harrison's company, and Harrison came
+over to me as my colour-sergeant. D'you see? Well, Purvis is down for a
+commission when there's a vacancy. He's been thoroughly tested, and we all
+like him. Two other sergeants have passed that three months' trial in the
+same way (just as second mates go up for extra master's certificate). They
+have E.C. after their names in the Army List. That shows they're capable
+of taking command in event of war. The result of our system is that you
+could knock out every single officer of a Guard battalion early in the
+day, and the wheels 'ud still go forward, _not_ merely round. We're
+allowed to fill up half our commissioned list from the ranks direct. _Now_
+d'you see why there's such a rush to get into a Guard battalion?"
+
+"Indeed I do. Have you commanded the regiment experimentally?"
+
+"Oh, time and again," Burgard laughed. "We've all had our E.C. turn."
+
+"Doesn't the chopping and changing upset the men?"
+
+"It takes something to upset the Guard. Besides, they're all in the game
+together. They give each other a fair show you may be sure."
+
+"That's true," said Matthews. "When I went to N'Gami with my--with the
+half-company," he sighed, "they helped me all they knew. But it's a gift--
+handling men. I found _that_ out,"
+
+"I know you did," said Burgard softly. "But you found it out in time,
+which is the great thing. You see," he turned to me, "with our limited
+strength we can't afford to have a single man who isn't more than up to
+any duty--in reason. Don't you be led away by what you saw at Trials just
+now. The Volunteers and the Militia have all the monkey-tricks of the
+trade--such as mounting and dismounting guns, and making fancy scores and
+doing record marches; but they need a lot of working up before they can
+pull their weight in the boat."
+
+There was a knock at the door. A note was handed in. Burgard read it and
+smiled.
+
+"Bayley wants to know if you'd care to come with us to the Park and see
+the kids. It's only a Saturday afternoon walk-round before the
+taxpayer.... Very good. If you'll press the button we'll try to do the
+rest."
+
+He led me by two flights of stairs up an iron stairway that gave on a
+platform, not unlike a ship's bridge, immediately above the barrelled
+glass roof of the riding-school. Through a ribbed ventilator I could see B
+Company far below watching some men who chased sheep. Burgard unlocked a
+glass-fronted fire-alarm arrangement flanked with dials and speaking-
+tubes, and bade me press the centre button.
+
+Next moment I should have fallen through the riding-school roof if he had
+not caught me; for the huge building below my feet thrilled to the
+multiplied purring of electric bells. The men in the school vanished like
+minnows before a shadow, and above the stamp of booted feet on staircases
+I heard the neighing of many horses.
+
+"What in the world have I done?" I gasped.
+
+"Turned out the Guard--horse, foot, and guns!"
+
+A telephone bell rang imperiously. Burgard snatched up the receiver:
+
+"Yes, Sir.... _What_, Sir?... I never heard they said that," he laughed,
+"but it would be just like 'em. In an hour and a half? Yes, Sir. Opposite
+the Statue? Yes, Sir."
+
+He turned to me with a wink as he hung up.
+
+"Bayley's playing up for you. Now you'll see some fun."
+
+"Who's going to catch it?" I demanded.
+
+"Only our local Foreign Service Corps. Its C.O. has been boasting that
+it's _en  tat de partir_, and Bayley's going to take him at his word and
+have a kit-inspection this afternoon in the Park. I must tell their
+drill-hall. Look over yonder between that brewery chimney and the mansard
+roof!"
+
+He readdressed himself to the telephone, and I kept my eye on the building
+to the southward. A Blue Peter climbed up to the top of the flagstaff that
+crowned it and blew out in the summer breeze. A black storm-cone followed.
+
+"Inspection for F.S. corps acknowledged, Sir," said Burgard down the
+telephone. "Now we'd better go to the riding-school. The battalion falls
+in there. I have to change, but you're free of the corps. Go anywhere. Ask
+anything. In another ten minutes we're off."
+
+I lingered for a little looking over the great city, its huddle of houses
+and the great fringe of the Park, all framed between the open windows of
+this dial-dotted eyrie.
+
+When I descended the halls and corridors were as hushed as they had been
+noisy, and my feet echoed down the broad tiled staircases. On the third
+floor, Matthews, gaitered and armed, overtook me smiling.
+
+"I thought you might want a guide," said he. "We've five minutes yet," and
+piloted me to the sunsplashed gloom of the riding-school. Three companies
+were in close order on the tan. They moved out at a whistle, and as I
+followed in their rear I was overtaken by Pigeon on a rough black mare.
+
+"Wait a bit," he said, "till the horses are all out of stables, and come
+with us. D Company is the only one mounted just now. We do it to amuse the
+taxpayer," he explained, above the noise of horses on the tan.
+
+"Where are the guns?" I asked, as the mare lipped my coat-collar.
+
+"Gone ahead long ago. They come out of their own door at the back of
+barracks. We don't haul guns through traffic more than we can help.... If
+Belinda breathes down your neck smack her. She'll be quiet in the streets.
+She loves lookin' into the shop-windows."
+
+The mounted company clattered through vaulted concrete corridors in the
+wake of the main body, and filed out into the crowded streets.
+
+When I looked at the townsfolk on the pavement, or in the double-decked
+trams, I saw that the bulk of them saluted, not grudgingly or of
+necessity, but in a light-hearted, even flippant fashion.
+
+"Those are Line and Militia men," said Pigeon. "That old chap in the
+top-hat by the lamp-post is an ex-Guardee. That's why he's saluting in
+slow-time. No, there's no regulation governing these things, but we've all
+fallen into the way of it somehow. Steady, mare!"
+
+"I don't know whether I care about this aggressive militarism," I began,
+when the company halted, and Belinda almost knocked me down. Looking
+forward I saw the badged cuff of a policeman upraised at a crossing, his
+back towards us.
+
+"Horrid aggressive, ain't we?" said Pigeon with a chuckle when we moved on
+again and overtook the main body. Here I caught the strains of the band,
+which Pigeon told me did not accompany the battalion on 'heef,' but lived
+in barracks and made much money by playing at parties in town.
+
+"If we want anything more than drums and fifes on 'heef' we sing," said
+Pigeon. "Singin' helps the wind."
+
+I rejoiced to the marrow of my bones thus to be borne along on billows of
+surging music among magnificent men, in sunlight, through a crowded town
+whose people, I could feel, regarded us with comradeship, affection--and
+more.
+
+"By Jove," I said at last, watching the eyes about us, "these people are
+looking us over as if we were horses."
+
+"Why not? They know the game."
+
+The eyes on the pavement, in the trams, the cabs, at the upper windows,
+swept our lines back and forth with a weighed intensity of regard which at
+first seemed altogether new to me, till I recalled just such eyes, a
+thousand of them, at manoeuvres in the Channel when one crowded battleship
+drew past its sister at biscuit-toss range. Then I stared at the ground,
+overborne by those considering eyes.
+
+Suddenly the music changed to the wail of the Dead March in "Saul," and
+once more--we were crossing a large square--the regiment halted.
+
+"Damn!" said Pigeon, glancing behind him at the mounted company. "I
+believe they save up their Saturday corpses on purpose."
+
+"What is it?" I asked.
+
+"A dead Volunteer. We must play him through." Again I looked forward and
+saw the top of a hearse, followed by two mourning-coaches, boring directly
+up the halted regiment, which opened out company by company to let it
+through.
+
+"But they've got the whole blessed square to funeralise in!" I exclaimed.
+"Why don't they go round?"
+
+"Not so!" Pigeon replied. "In this city it's the Volunteer's perquisite to
+be played through by any corps he happens to meet on his way to the
+cemetery. And they make the most of it. You'll see."
+
+I heard the order, "Rest on your arms," run before the poor little
+procession as the men opened out. The driver pulled the black Flanders
+beasts into a more than funeral crawl, and in the first mourning-coach I
+saw the tearful face of a fat woman (his mother, doubtless), a
+handkerchief pressed to one eye, but the other rolling vigilantly, alight
+with proper pride. Last came a knot of uniformed men--privates, I took it
+--of the dead one's corps.
+
+Said a man in the crowd beside us to the girl on his arm, "There, Jenny!
+That's what I'll get if I 'ave the luck to meet 'em when my time comes."
+
+"You an' your luck," she snapped. "'Ow can you talk such silly nonsense?"
+
+"Played through by the Guard," he repeated slowly. "The undertaker 'oo
+could guarantee _that_, mark you, for all his customers--well, 'e'd
+monopolise the trade, is all I can say. See the horses passagin'
+sideways!"
+
+"She done it a purpose," said the woman with a sniff.
+
+"An' I only hope you'll follow her example. Just as long as you think I'll
+keep, too."
+
+We reclosed when the funeral had left us twenty paces behind. A small boy
+stuck his head out of a carriage and watched us jealously.
+
+"Amazing! Amazing!" I murmured. "Is it regulation?"
+
+"No. Town-custom. It varies a little in different cities, but the people
+value being played through more than most things, I imagine. Duddell, the
+big Ipswich manufacturer--he's a Quaker--tried to bring in a bill to
+suppress it as unchristian." Pigeon laughed.
+
+"And?"
+
+"It cost him his seat next election. You see, we're all in the game."
+
+We reached the Park without further adventure, and found the four company-
+guns with their spike teams and single drivers waiting for us. Many people
+were gathered here, and we were halted, so far as I could see, that they
+might talk with the men in the ranks. The officers broke into groups.
+
+"Why on earth didn't you come along with me?" said Boy Bayley at my side.
+"I was expecting you."
+
+"Well, I had a delicacy about brigading myself with a colonel at the head
+of his regiment, so I stayed with the rear company and the horses. It's
+all too wonderful for any words. What's going to happen next?"
+
+"I've handed over to Verschoyle, who will amuse and edify the school
+children while I take you round our kindergarten. Don't kill any one, Vee.
+Are you goin' to charge 'em?"
+
+Old Verschoyle hitched his big shoulder and nodded precisely as he used to
+do at school. He was a boy of few words grown into a kindly taciturn man.
+
+"Now!" Bayley slid his arm through mine and led me across a riding road
+towards a stretch of rough common (singularly out of place in a park)
+perhaps three-quarters of a mile long and half as wide. On the encircling
+rails leaned an almost unbroken line of men and women--the women
+outnumbering the men. I saw the Guard battalion move up the road flanking
+the common and disappear behind the trees.
+
+As far as the eye could range through the mellow English haze the ground
+inside the railings was dotted with boys in and out of uniform, armed and
+unarmed. I saw squads here, half-companies there; then three companies in
+an open space, wheeling with stately steps; a knot of drums and fifes near
+the railings unconcernedly slashing their way across popular airs; and a
+batch of gamins labouring through some extended attack destined to be
+swept aside by a corps crossing the ground at the double. They broke out
+of furze bushes, ducked over hollows and bunkers, held or fell away from
+hillocks and rough sandbanks till the eye wearied of their busy legs.
+
+Bayley took me through the railings, and gravely returned the salute of a
+freckled twelve-year-old near by.
+
+"What's your corps?" said the Colonel of that Imperial Guard battalion to
+that child.
+
+"Eighth District Board School, fourth standard, Sir. We aren't out
+to-day." Then, with a twinkle, "I go to First Camp next year."
+
+"What are those boys yonder--that squad at the double?"
+
+"Jewboys, Sir. Jewish Voluntary Schools, Sir."
+
+"And that full company extending behind the three elms to the south-west?"
+
+"Private day-schools, Sir, I think. Judging distance, Sir."
+
+"Can you come with us?"
+
+"Certainly, Sir."
+
+"Here's the raw material at the beginning of the process," said Bayley to
+me.
+
+We strolled on towards the strains of "A Bicycle Built for Two," breathed
+jerkily into a mouth-organ by a slim maid of fourteen. Some dozen infants
+with clenched fists and earnest legs were swinging through the extension
+movements which that tune calls for. A stunted hawthorn overhung the
+little group, and from a branch a dirty white handkerchief flapped in the
+breeze. The girl blushed, scowled, and wiped the mouth-organ on her sleeve
+as we came up.
+
+"We're all waiting for our big bruvvers," piped up one bold person in blue
+breeches--seven if he was a day.
+
+"It keeps 'em quieter, Sir," the maiden lisped. "The others are with the
+regiments."
+
+"Yeth, and they've all lots of blank for _you_," said the gentleman in
+blue breeches ferociously.
+
+"Oh, Artie! 'Ush!" the girl cried.
+
+"But why have they lots of blank for _us_?" Bayley asked. Blue Breeches
+stood firm.
+
+"'Cause--'cause the Guard's goin' to fight the Schools this afternoon; but
+my big bruvver says they'll be dam-well surprised."
+
+"_Artie!_" The girl leaped towards him. "You know your ma said I was to
+smack----"
+
+"Don't. Please don't," said Bayley, pink with suppressed mirth. "It was
+all my fault. I must tell old Verschoyle this. I've surprised his plan out
+of the mouths of babes and sucklings."
+
+"What plan?"
+
+"Old Vee has taken the battalion up to the top of the common, and he told
+me he meant to charge down through the kids, but they're on to him
+already. He'll be scuppered. The Guard will be scuppered!"
+
+Here Blue Breeches, overcome by the reproof of his fellows, began to weep.
+
+"I didn't tell," he roared. "My big bruvver _he_ knew when he saw them go
+up the road..."
+
+"Never mind! Never mind, old man," said Bayley soothingly. "I'm not
+fighting to-day. It's all right."
+
+He rightened it yet further with sixpence, and left that band loudly at
+feud over the spoil.
+
+"Oh, Vee! Vee the strategist," he chuckled. "We'll pull Vee's leg
+to-night."
+
+Our freckled friend of the barriers doubled up behind us.
+
+"So you know that my battalion is charging down the ground," Bayley
+demanded.
+
+"Not for certain, Sir, but we're preparin' for the worst," he answered
+with a cheerful grin. "They allow the Schools a little blank ammunition
+after we've passed the third standard; and we nearly always bring it on to
+the ground of Saturdays."
+
+"The deuce you do! Why?"
+
+"On account of these amateur Volunteer corps, Sir. They're always
+experimentin' upon us, Sir, comin' over from their ground an' developin'
+attacks on our flanks. Oh, it's chronic 'ere of a Saturday sometimes,
+unless you flag yourself."
+
+I followed his eye and saw white flags fluttering before a drum and fife
+band and a knot of youths in sweaters gathered round the dummy breech of a
+four-inch gun which they were feeding at express rates.
+
+"The attacks don't interfere with you if you flag yourself, Sir," the boy
+explained. "That's a Second Camp team from the Technical Schools loading
+against time for a bet."
+
+We picked our way deviously through the busy groups. Apparently it was not
+etiquette to notice a Guard officer, and the youths at the twenty-five
+pounder were far too busy to look up. I watched the cleanly finished hoist
+and shove-home of the full-weight shell from a safe distance, when I
+became aware of a change among the scattered boys on the common, who
+disappeared among the hillocks to an accompaniment of querulous whistles.
+A boy or two on bicycles dashed from corps to corps, and on their arrival
+each corps seemed to fade away.
+
+The youths at loading practice did not pause for the growing hush round
+them, nor did the drum and fife band drop a single note. Bayley exploded
+afresh. "The Schools are preparing for our attack, by Jove! I wonder who's
+directin' 'em. Do _you_ know?"
+
+The warrior of the Eighth District looked up shrewdly.
+
+"I saw Mr. Cameron speaking to Mr. Levitt just as the Guard went up the
+road. 'E's our 'ead-master, Mr. Cameron, but Mr. Levitt, of the Sixth
+District, is actin' as senior officer on the ground this Saturday. Most
+likely Mr. Levitt is commandin'."
+
+"How many corps are there here?" I asked.
+
+"Oh, bits of lots of 'em--thirty or forty, p'r'aps, Sir. But the whistles
+says they've all got to rally on the Board Schools. 'Ark! There's the
+whistle for the Private Schools! They've been called up the ground at the
+double."
+
+"Stop!" cried a bearded man with a watch, and the crews dropped beside the
+breech wiping their brows and panting.
+
+"Hullo! there's some attack on the Schools," said one. "Well, Marden, you
+owe me three half-crowns. I've beaten your record. Pay up."
+
+The boy beside us tapped his foot fretfully as he eyed his companions
+melting among the hillocks, but the gun-team adjusted their bets without
+once looking up.
+
+The ground rose a little to a furze-crowned ridge in the centre so that I
+could not see the full length of it, but I heard a faint bubble of blank
+in the distance.
+
+"The Saturday allowance," murmured Bayley. "War's begun, but it wouldn't
+be etiquette for us to interfere. What are you saying, my child?"
+
+"Nothin', Sir, only--only I don't think the Guard will be able to come
+through on so narrer a front, Sir. They'll all be jammed up be'ind the
+ridge if _we_'ve got there in time. It's awful sticky for guns at the end
+of our ground, Sir."
+
+"I'm inclined to think you're right, Moltke. The Guard is hung up:
+distinctly so. Old Vee will have to cut his way through. What a pernicious
+amount of blank the kids seem to have!"
+
+It was quite a respectable roar of battle that rolled among the hillocks
+for ten minutes, always out of our sight. Then we heard the "Cease Fire"
+over the ridge.
+
+"They've sent for the Umpires," the Board School boy squeaked, dancing on
+one foot. "You've been hung up, Sir. I--I thought the sand-pits 'ud stop
+you."
+
+Said one of the jerseyed hobbledehoys at the gun, slipping on his coat:
+"Well, that's enough for this afternoon. I'm off," and moved to the
+railings without even glancing towards the fray.
+
+"I anticipate the worst," said Bayley with gravity after a few minutes.
+"Hullo! Here comes my disgraced corps!"
+
+The Guard was pouring over the ridge--a disorderly mob--horse, foot, and
+guns mixed, while from every hollow of the ground about rose small boys
+cheering shrilly. The outcry was taken up by the parents at the railings,
+and spread to a complete circle of cheers, handclappings, and waved
+handkerchiefs.
+
+Our Eighth District private cast away restraint and openly capered. "We
+got 'em! We got 'em!" he squealed.
+
+The grey-green flood paused a fraction of a minute and drew itself into
+shape, coming to rest before Bayley. Verschoyle saluted.
+
+"Vee, Vee," said Bayley. "Give me back my legions. Well, I hope you're
+proud of yourself?"
+
+"The little beasts were ready for us. Deuced well posted too," Verschoyle
+replied. "I wish you'd seen that first attack on our flank. Rather
+impressive. Who warned 'em?"
+
+"I don't know. I got my information from a baby in blue plush breeches.
+Did they do well?"
+
+"Very decently indeed. I've complimented their C.O. and buttered the whole
+boiling." He lowered his voice. "As a matter o' fact, I halted five good
+minutes to give 'em time to get into position."
+
+"Well, now we can inspect our Foreign Service corps. We sha'n't need the
+men for an hour, Vee."
+
+"Very good, Sir. Colour-sergeants!" cried Verschoyle, raising his voice,
+and the cry ran from company to company. Whereupon the officers left their
+men, people began to climb over the railings, and the regiment dissolved
+among the spectators and the school corps of the city.
+
+"No sense keeping men standing when you don't need 'em," said Bayley.
+"Besides, the Schools learn more from our chaps in an afternoon than they
+can pick up in a month's drill. Look at those Board-schoolmaster captains
+buttonholing old Purvis on the art of war!"
+
+"Wonder what the evening papers'll say about this," said Pigeon.
+
+"You'll know in half an hour," Burgard laughed. "What possessed you to
+take your ponies across the sand-pits, Pij?"
+
+"Pride. Silly pride," said the Canadian.
+
+We crossed the common to a very regulation paradeground overlooked by a
+statue of our Queen. Here were carriages, many and elegant, filled with
+pretty women, and the railings were lined with frockcoats and top hats.
+"This is distinctly social," I suggested to Kyd.
+
+"Ra-ather. Our F.S. corps is nothing if not correct, but Bayley'll sweat
+'em all the same."
+
+I saw six companies drawn up for inspection behind lines of long sausage-
+shaped kit-bags. A band welcomed us with "A Life on the Ocean Wave."
+
+"What cheek!" muttered Verschoyle. "Give 'em beans, Bayley."
+
+"I intend to," said the Colonel, grimly. "Will each of you fellows take a
+company, please, and inspect 'em faithfully. '_En etat de partir_' is
+their little boast, remember. When you've finished you can give 'em a
+little pillow-fighting."
+
+"What does the single cannon on those men's sleeves mean?" I asked.
+
+"That they're big gun-men, who've done time with the Fleet," Bayley
+returned. "Any F.S. corps that has over twenty per cent big-gun men thinks
+itself entitled to play 'A Life on the Ocean Wave'--when it's out of
+hearing of the Navy."
+
+"What beautiful stuff they are! What's their regimental average?"
+
+"It ought to be five eight, height, thirty-eight, chest, and twenty-four
+years, age. What is it?" Bayley asked of a Private.
+
+"Five nine and half, Sir, thirty-nine, twenty-four and a half," was the
+reply, and he added insolently, "_En  tat de partir_." Evidently that F.S.
+corps was on its mettle ready for the worst.
+
+"What about their musketry average?" I went on.
+
+"Not my pidgin," said Bayley. "But they wouldn't be in the corps a day if
+they couldn't shoot; I know _that_ much. Now I'm going to go through 'em
+for socks and slippers."
+
+The kit-inspection exceeded anything I had ever dreamed. I drifted from
+company to company while the Guard officers oppressed them. Twenty per
+cent, at least, of the kits were shovelled out on the grass and gone
+through in detail.
+
+"What have they got jumpers and ducks for?" I asked of Harrison.
+
+"For Fleet work, of course. _En  tat de partir_ with an F. S. corps means
+they are amphibious."
+
+"Who gives 'em their kit--Government?"
+
+"There is a Government allowance, but no C. O. sticks to it. It's the same
+as paint and gold-leaf in the Navy. It comes out of some one's pockets.
+How much does your kit cost you?"--this to the private in front of us.
+
+"About ten or fifteen quid every other year, I suppose," was the answer.
+
+"Very good. Pack your bag--quick."
+
+The man knelt, and with supremely deft hands returned all to the bag,
+lashed and tied it, and fell back.
+
+"Arms," said Harrison. "Strip and show ammunition."
+
+The man divested himself of his rolled greatcoat and haversack with one
+wriggle, as it seemed to me; a twist of a screw removed the side plate of
+the rifle breech (it was not a bolt action). He handed it to Harrison with
+one hand, and with the other loosed his clip-studded belt.
+
+"What baby cartridges!" I exclaimed. "No bigger than bulletted breech-
+caps."
+
+"They're the regulation .256," said Harrison. "No one has complained of
+'em yet. They expand a bit when they arrive.... Empty your bottle, please,
+and show your rations."
+
+The man poured out his water-bottle and showed the two-inch emergency tin.
+
+Harrison passed on to the next, but I was fascinated by the way in which
+the man re-established himself amid his straps and buckles, asking no help
+from either side.
+
+"How long does it take you to prepare for inspection?" I asked him.
+
+"Well, I got ready this afternoon in twelve minutes," he smiled. "I didn't
+see the storm-cone till half-past three. I was at the Club."
+
+"Weren't a good many of you out of town?"
+
+"Not _this_ Saturday. We knew what was coming. You see, if we pull through
+the inspection we may move up one place on the roster for foreign
+service.... You'd better stand back. We're going to pillow-fight."
+
+The companies stooped to the stuffed kit-bags, doubled with them
+variously, piled them in squares and mounds, passed them from shoulder to
+shoulder like buckets at a fire, and repeated the evolution.
+
+"What's the idea?" I asked of Verschoyle, who, arms folded behind him, was
+controlling the display. Many women had descended from the carriages, and
+were pressing in about us admiringly.
+
+"For one thing, it's a fair test of wind and muscle, and for another it
+saves time at the docks. We'll suppose this first company to be drawn up
+on the dock-head and those five others still in the troop-train. How would
+you get their kit into the ship?"
+
+"Fall 'em all in on the platform, march'em to the gangways," I answered,
+"and trust to Heaven and a fatigue party to gather the baggage and drunks
+in later."
+
+"Ye-es, and have half of it sent by the wrong trooper. I know _that_
+game," Verschoyle drawled. "We don't play it any more. Look!"
+
+He raised his voice, and five companies, glistening a little and breathing
+hard, formed at right angles to the sixth, each man embracing his sixty-
+pound bag.
+
+"Pack away," cried Verschoyle, and the great bean-bag game (I can compare
+it to nothing else) began. In five minutes every bag was passed along
+either arm of the T and forward down the sixth company, who passed,
+stacked, and piled them in a great heap. These were followed by the
+rifles, belts, greatcoats, and knapsacks, so that in another five minutes
+the regiment stood, as it were, stripped clean.
+
+"Of course on a trooper there'd be a company below stacking the kit away,"
+said Verschoyle, "but that wasn't so bad."
+
+"Bad!" I cried. "It was miraculous!"
+
+"Circus-work--all circus-work!" said Pigeon. "It won't prevent 'em bein'
+sick as dogs when the ship rolls." The crowd round us applauded, while the
+men looked meekly down their self-conscious noses.
+
+A little grey-whiskered man trotted up to the Boy.
+
+"Have we made good, Bayley?" he said. "Are we _en  tat de partir_?"
+
+"That's what I shall report," said Bayley, smiling.
+
+"I thought my bit o' French 'ud draw you," said the little man, rubbing
+his hands.
+
+"Who is he?" I whispered to Pigeon.
+
+"Ramsay--their C.O. An old Guard captain. A keen little devil. They say he
+spends six hundred a year on the show. He used to be in the Lincolns till
+he came into his property."
+
+"Take 'em home an' make 'em drunk," I heard Bayley say. "I suppose you'll
+have a dinner to celebrate. But you may as well tell the officers of E
+company that I don't think much of them. I sha'n't report it, but their
+men were all over the shop."
+
+"Well, they're young, you see," Colonel Ramsay began.
+
+"You're quite right. Send 'em to me and I'll talk to 'em. Youth is the
+time to learn."
+
+"Six hundred a year," I repeated to Pigeon. "That must be an awful tax on
+a man. Worse than in the old volunteering days."
+
+"That's where you make your mistake," said Verschoyle. "In the old days a
+man had to spend his money to coax his men to drill because they weren't
+the genuine article. You know what I mean. They made a favour of putting
+in drills, didn't they? And they were, most of 'em, the children we have
+to take over at Second Camp, weren't they? Well, now that a C. O. is sure
+of his _men_, now that he hasn't to waste himself in conciliating an'
+bribin', an' beerin' _kids_, he doesn't care what he spends on his corps,
+because every pound tells. Do you understand?"
+
+"I see what you mean, Vee. Having the male material guaranteed----"
+
+"And trained material at that," Pigeon put in. "Eight years in the
+schools, remember, as well as----"
+
+"Precisely. A man rejoices in working them up. That's as it should be," I
+said.
+
+"Bayly's saying the very same to those F. S. pups," said Verschoyle.
+
+The Boy was behind us, between two young F. S. officers, a hand on the
+shoulder of each.
+
+"Yes, that's all doocid interesting," he growled paternally. "But you
+forget, my sons, now that your men are bound to serve, you're trebly bound
+to put a polish on 'em. You've let your company simply go to seed. Don't
+try and explain. I've told all those lies myself in my time. It's only
+idleness. _I_ know. Come and lunch with me to-morrow and I'll give you a
+wrinkle or two in barracks." He turned to me.
+
+"Suppose we pick up Vee's defeated legion and go home. You'll dine with us
+to-night. Good-bye, Ramsay. Yes, you're _en etat de partir_, right enough.
+You'd better get Lady Gertrude to talk to the Armity if you want the corps
+sent foreign. I'm no politician."
+
+We strolled away from the great white statue of the Widow, with sceptre,
+orb, and crown, that looked toward the city, and regained the common,
+where the Guard battalion walked with the female of its species and the
+children of all its relatives. At sight of the officers the uniforms began
+to detach themselves and gather in companies. A Board School corps was
+moving off the ground, headed by its drums and fifes, which it assisted
+with song. As we drew nearer we caught the words, for they were launched
+with intention:--
+
+  'Oo is it mashes the country nurse?
+    The Guardsman!
+  'Oo is it takes the lydy's purse?
+    The Guardsman!
+  Calls for a drink, and a mild cigar,
+  Batters a sovereign down on the bar,
+  Collars the change and says "Ta-ta!"
+    The Guardsman!
+
+"Why, that's one of old Jemmy Fawne's songs. I haven't heard it in ages,"
+I began.
+
+"Little devils!" said Pigeon.
+"Speshul! Extra speshul! Sports Edition!" a newsboy cried. "'Ere y'are,
+Captain. Defeat o' the Guard!"
+
+"I'll buy a copy," said the Boy, as Pigeon blushed wrathfully. "I must, to
+see how the Dove lost his mounted company." He unfolded the flapping sheet
+and we crowded round it.
+
+"'_Complete Rout of the Guard,_'" he read. "'_Too Narrow a Front._' That's
+one for you, Vee! '_Attack Anticipated by Mr. Levitt, B. A._' Aha! '_The
+Schools Stand Fast._'"
+
+"Here's another version," said Kyd, waving a tinted sheet. "'_To your
+tents, O Israel! The Hebrew Schools stop the Mounted Troops._' Pij, were
+you scuppered by Jewboys?"
+
+"'_Umpires Decide all Four Guns Lost,_'" Bayley went on. "By Jove,
+there'll have to be an inquiry into this regrettable incident, Vee!"
+
+"I'll never try to amuse the kids again," said the baited Verschoyle.
+"Children and newspapers are low things.... And I was hit on the nose by a
+wad, too! They oughtn't to be allowed blank ammunition!"
+
+So we leaned against the railings in the warm twilight haze while the
+battalion, silently as a shadow, formed up behind us ready to be taken
+over. The heat, the hum of the great city, as it might have been the hum
+of a camped army, the creaking of the belts, and the well-known faces bent
+above them, brought back to me the memory of another evening, years ago,
+when Verschoyle and I waited for news of guns missing in no sham fight.
+
+"A regular Sanna's Post, isn't it?" I said at last. "D'you remember, Vee--
+by the market-square--that night when the wagons went out?"
+
+Then it came upon me, with no horror, but a certain mild wonder, that we
+had waited, Vee and I, that night for the body of Boy Bayley; and that Vee
+himself had died of typhoid in the spring of 1902. The rustling of the
+papers continued, but Bayley, shifting slightly, revealed to me the three-
+day old wound on his left side that had soaked the ground about him. I saw
+Pigeon fling up a helpless arm as to guard himself against a spatter of
+shrapnel, and Luttrell with a foolish tight-lipped smile lurched over all
+in one jointless piece. Only old Vee's honest face held steady for awhile
+against the darkness that had swallowed up the battalion behind us. Then
+his jaw dropped and the face stiffened, so that a fly made bold to explore
+the puffed and scornful nostril.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I waked brushing a fly from my nose, and saw the Club waiter set out the
+evening papers on the table.
+
+
+
+
+"THEY"
+
+
+THE RETURN OF THE CHILDREN
+
+  Neither the harps nor the crowns amused, nor the cherubs' dove-winged
+     races--
+  Holding hands forlornly the Children wandered beneath the Dome;
+  Plucking the radiant robes of the passers by, and with pitiful faces
+  Begging what Princes and Powers refused:--"Ah, please will you let us
+     go home?"
+
+  Over the jewelled floor, nigh weeping, ran to them Mary the Mother,
+  Kneeled and caressed and made promise with kisses, and drew them along
+     to the gateway--
+  Yea, the all-iron unbribable Door which Peter must guard and none other.
+  Straightway She took the Keys from his keeping, and opened and freed
+     them straightway.
+
+  Then to Her Son, Who had seen and smiled, She said: "On the night that
+     I bore Thee
+  What didst Thou care for a love beyond mine or a heaven that was not my
+     arm?
+  Didst Thou push from the nipple O Child, to hear the angels adore Thee?
+  When we two lay in the breath of the kine?" And He said:--"Thou hast
+     done no harm."
+
+  So through the Void the Children ran homeward merrily hand in hand,
+  Looking neither to left nor right where the breathless Heavens stood
+     still;
+  And the Guards of the Void resheathed their swords, for they heard the
+     Command.
+  "Shall I that have suffered the children to come to me hold them against
+     their will?"
+
+
+"THEY"
+One view called me to another; one hill top to its fellow, half across the
+county, and since I could answer at no more trouble than the snapping
+forward of a lever, I let the country flow under my wheels. The orchid-
+studded flats of the East gave way to the thyme, ilex, and grey grass of
+the Downs; these again to the rich cornland and fig-trees of the lower
+coast, where you carry the beat of the tide on your left hand for fifteen
+level miles; and when at last I turned inland through a huddle of rounded
+hills and woods I had run myself clean out of my known marks. Beyond that
+precise hamlet which stands godmother to the capital of the United States,
+I found hidden villages where bees, the only things awake, boomed in
+eighty-foot lindens that overhung grey Norman churches; miraculous brooks
+diving under stone bridges built for heavier traffic than would ever vex
+them again; tithe-barns larger than their churches, and an old smithy that
+cried out aloud how it had once been a hall of the Knights of the Temple.
+Gipsies I found on a common where the gorse, bracken, and heath fought it
+out together up a mile of Roman road; and a little farther on I disturbed
+a red fox rolling dog-fashion in the naked sunlight.
+
+As the wooded hills closed about me I stood up in the car to take the
+bearings of that great Down whose ringed head is a landmark for fifty
+miles across the low countries. I judged that the lie of the country would
+bring me across some westward running road that went to his feet, but I
+did not allow for the confusing veils of the woods. A quick turn plunged
+me first into a green cutting brimful of liquid sunshine, next into a
+gloomy tunnel where last year's dead leaves whispered and scuffled about
+my tyres. The strong hazel stuff meeting overhead had not been cut for a
+couple of generations at least, nor had any axe helped the moss-cankered
+oak and beech to spring above them. Here the road changed frankly into a
+carpetted ride on whose brown velvet spent primrose-clumps showed like
+jade, and a few sickly, white-stalked bluebells nodded together. As the
+slope favoured I shut off the power and slid over the whirled leaves,
+expecting every moment to meet a keeper; but I only heard a jay, far off,
+arguing against the silence under the twilight of the trees.
+
+Still the track descended. I was on the point of reversing and working my
+way back on the second speed ere I ended in some swamp, when I saw
+sunshine through the tangle ahead and lifted the brake.
+
+It was down again at once. As the light beat across my face my fore-wheels
+took the turf of a great still lawn from which sprang horsemen ten feet
+high with levelled lances, monstrous peacocks, and sleek round-headed
+maids of honour--blue, black, and glistening--all of clipped yew. Across
+the lawn--the marshalled woods besieged it on three sides--stood an
+ancient house of lichened and weather-worn stone, with mullioned windows
+and roofs of rose-red tile. It was flanked by semi-circular walls, also
+rose-red, that closed the lawn on the fourth side, and at their feet a box
+hedge grew man-high. There were doves on the roof about the slim brick
+chimneys, and I caught a glimpse of an octagonal dove-house behind the
+screening wall.
+
+Here, then, I stayed; a horseman's green spear laid at my breast; held by
+the exceeding beauty of that jewel in that setting.
+
+"If I am not packed off for a trespasser, or if this knight does not ride
+a wallop at me," thought I, "Shakespeare and Queen Elizabeth at least must
+come out of that half-open garden door and ask me to tea."
+
+A child appeared at an upper window, and I thought the little thing waved
+a friendly hand. But it was to call a companion, for presently another
+bright head showed. Then I heard a laugh among the yew-peacocks, and
+turning to make sure (till then I had been watching the house only) I saw
+the silver of a fountain behind a hedge thrown up against the sun. The
+doves on the roof cooed to the cooing water; but between the two notes I
+caught the utterly happy chuckle of a child absorbed in some light
+mischief.
+
+The garden door--heavy oak sunk deep in the thickness of the wall--opened
+further: a woman in a big garden hat set her foot slowly on the time-
+hollowed stone step and as slowly walked across the turf. I was forming
+some apology when she lifted up her head and I saw that she was blind.
+
+"I heard you," she said. "Isn't that a motor car?"
+
+"I'm afraid I've made a mistake in my road. I should have turned off up
+above--I never dreamed"--I began.
+
+"But I'm very glad. Fancy a motor car coming into the garden! It will be
+such a treat----" She turned and made as though looking about her. "You--
+you haven't seen any one have you--perhaps?"
+
+"No one to speak to, but the children seemed interested at a distance."
+
+"Which?"
+
+"I saw a couple up at the window just now, and I think I heard a little
+chap in the grounds."
+
+"Oh, lucky you!" she cried, and her face brightened. "I hear them, of
+course, but that's all. You've seen them and heard them?"
+
+"Yes," I answered. "And if I know anything of children one of them's
+having a beautiful time by the fountain yonder. Escaped, I should
+imagine."
+
+"You're fond of children?"
+
+I gave her one or two reasons why I did not altogether hate them.
+
+"Of course, of course," she said. "Then you understand. Then you won't
+think it foolish if I ask you to take your car through the gardens, once
+or twice--quite slowly. I'm sure they'd like to see it. They see so
+little, poor things. One tries to make their life pleasant, but----" she
+threw out her hands towards the woods. "We're so out of the world here."
+
+"That will be splendid," I said. "But I can't cut up your grass."
+
+She faced to the right. "Wait a minute," she said. "We're at the South
+gate, aren't we? Behind those peacocks there's a flagged path. We call it
+the Peacock's Walk. You can't see it from here, they tell me, but if you
+squeeze along by the edge of the wood you can turn at the first peacock
+and get on to the flags."
+
+It was sacrilege to wake that dreaming house-front with the clatter of
+machinery, but I swung the car to clear the turf, brushed along the edge
+of the wood and turned in on the broad stone path where the fountain-basin
+lay like one star-sapphire.
+
+"May I come too?" she cried. "No, please don't help me. They'll like it
+better if they see me."
+
+She felt her way lightly to the front of the car, and with one foot on the
+step she called: "Children, oh, children! Look and see what's going to
+happen!"
+
+The voice would have drawn lost souls from the Pit, for the yearning that
+underlay its sweetness, and I was not surprised to hear an answering shout
+behind the yews. It must have been the child by the fountain, but he fled
+at our approach, leaving a little toy boat in the water. I saw the glint
+of his blue blouse among the still horsemen.
+
+Very disposedly we paraded the length of the walk and at her request
+backed again. This time the child had got the better of his panic, but
+stood far off and doubting.
+
+"The little fellow's watching us," I said. "I wonder if he'd like a ride."
+
+"They're very shy still. Very shy. But, oh, lucky you to be able to see
+them! Let's listen."
+
+I stopped the machine at once, and the humid stillness, heavy with the
+scent of box, cloaked us deep. Shears I could hear where some gardener was
+clipping; a mumble of bees and broken voices that might have been the
+doves.
+
+"Oh, unkind!" she said weariedly.
+
+"Perhaps they're only shy of the motor. The little maid at the window
+looks tremendously interested."
+
+"Yes?" She raised her head. "It was wrong of me to say that. They are
+really fond of me. It's the only thing that makes life worth living--when
+they're fond of you, isn't it? I daren't think what the place would be
+without them. By the way, is it beautiful?"
+
+"I think it is the most beautiful place I have ever seen."
+
+"So they all tell me. I can feel it, of course, but that isn't quite the
+same thing."
+
+"Then have you never---?" I began, but stopped abashed.
+
+"Not since I can remember. It happened when I was only a few months old,
+they tell me. And yet I must remember something, else how could I dream
+about colours. I see light in my dreams, and colours, but I never see
+_them_. I only hear them just as I do when I'm awake."
+
+"It's difficult to see faces in dreams. Some people can, but most of us
+haven't the gift," I went on, looking up at the window where the child
+stood all but hidden.
+
+"I've heard that too," she said. "And they tell me that one never sees a
+dead person's face in a dream. Is that true?"
+
+"I believe it is--now I come to think of it."
+
+"But how is it with yourself--yourself?" The blind eyes turned towards me.
+
+"I have never seen the faces of my dead in any dream," I answered.
+
+"Then it must be as bad as being blind."
+
+The sun had dipped behind the woods and the long shades were possessing
+the insolent horsemen one by one. I saw the light die from off the top of
+a glossy-leaved lance and all the brave hard green turn to soft black. The
+house, accepting another day at end, as it had accepted an hundred
+thousand gone, seemed to settle deeper into its rest among the shadows.
+
+"Have you ever wanted to?" she said after the silence.
+
+"Very much sometimes," I replied. The child had left the window as the
+shadows closed upon it.
+
+"Ah! So've I, but I don't suppose it's allowed. ... Where d'you live?"
+
+"Quite the other side of the county--sixty miles and more, and I must be
+going back. I've come without my big lamp."
+
+"But it's not dark yet. I can feel it."
+
+"I'm afraid it will be by the time I get home. Could you lend me someone
+to set me on my road at first? I've utterly lost myself."
+
+"I'll send Madden with you to the cross-roads. We are so out of the world,
+I don't wonder you were lost! I'll guide you round to the front of the
+house; but you will go slowly, won't you, till you're out of the grounds?
+It isn't foolish, do you think?"
+
+"I promise you I'll go like this," I said, and let the car start herself
+down the flagged path.
+
+We skirted the left wing of the house, whose elaborately cast lead
+guttering alone was worth a day's journey; passed under a great rose-grown
+gate in the red wall, and so round to the high front of the house which in
+beauty and stateliness as much excelled the back as that all others I had
+seen.
+
+"Is it so very beautiful?" she said wistfully when she heard my raptures.
+"And you like the lead-figures too? There's the old azalea garden behind.
+They say that this place must have been made for children. Will you help
+me out, please? I should like to come with you as far as the cross-roads,
+but I mustn't leave them. Is that you, Madden? I want you to show this
+gentleman the way to the cross-roads. He has lost his way but--he has seen
+them."
+
+A butler appeared noiselessly at the miracle of old oak that must be
+called the front door, and slipped aside to put on his hat. She stood
+looking at me with open blue eyes in which no sight lay, and I saw for the
+first time that she was beautiful.
+
+"Remember," she said quietly, "if you are fond of them you will come
+again," and disappeared within the house.
+
+The butler in the car said nothing till we were nearly at the lodge gates,
+where catching a glimpse of a blue blouse in a shrubbery I swerved amply
+lest the devil that leads little boys to play should drag me into child-
+murder.
+
+"Excuse me," he asked of a sudden, "but why did you do that, Sir?"
+
+"The child yonder."
+
+"Our young gentleman in blue?"
+
+"Of course."
+
+"He runs about a good deal. Did you see him by the fountain, Sir?"
+
+"Oh, yes, several times. Do we turn here?"
+
+"Yes, Sir. And did you 'appen to see them upstairs too?"
+
+"At the upper window? Yes."
+
+"Was that before the mistress come out to speak to you, Sir?"
+
+"A little before that. Why d'you want to know?"
+
+He paused a little. "Only to make sure that--that they had seen the car,
+Sir, because with children running about, though I'm sure you're driving
+particularly careful, there might be an accident. That was all, Sir. Here
+are the cross-roads. You can't miss your way from now on. Thank you, Sir,
+but that isn't _our_ custom, not with----"
+
+"I beg your pardon," I said, and thrust away the British silver.
+
+"Oh, it's quite right with the rest of 'em as a rule. Goodbye, Sir."
+
+He retired into the armour-plated conning tower of his caste and walked
+away. Evidently a butler solicitous for the honour of his house, and
+interested, probably through a maid, in the nursery.
+
+Once beyond the signposts at the cross-roads I looked back, but the
+crumpled hills interlaced so jealously that I could not see where the
+house had lain. When I asked its name at a cottage along the road, the fat
+woman who sold sweetmeats there gave me to understand that people with
+motor cars had small right to live--much less to "go about talking like
+carriage folk." They were not a pleasant-mannered community.
+
+When I retraced my route on the map that evening I was little wiser.
+Hawkin's Old Farm appeared to be the survey title of the place, and the
+old County Gazetteer, generally so ample, did not allude to it. The big
+house of those parts was Hodnington Hall, Georgian with early Victorian
+embellishments, as an atrocious steel engraving attested. I carried my
+difficulty to a neighbour--a deep-rooted tree of that soil--and he gave me
+a name of a family which conveyed no meaning.
+
+A month or so later--I went again, or it may have been that my car took
+the road of her own volition. She over-ran the fruitless Downs, threaded
+every turn of the maze of lanes below the hills, drew through the high-
+walled woods, impenetrable in their full leaf, came out at the cross roads
+where the butler had left me, and a little further on developed an
+internal trouble which forced me to turn her in on a grass way-waste that
+cut into a summer-silent hazel wood. So far as I could make sure by the
+sun and a six-inch Ordnance map, this should be the road flank of that
+wood which I had first explored from the heights above. I made a mighty
+serious business of my repairs and a glittering shop of my repair kit,
+spanners, pump, and the like, which I spread out orderly upon a rug. It
+was a trap to catch all childhood, for on such a day, I argued, the
+children would not be far off. When I paused in my work I listened, but
+the wood was so full of the noises of summer (though the birds had mated)
+that I could not at first distinguish these from the tread of small
+cautious feet stealing across the dead leaves. I rang my bell in an
+alluring manner, but the feet fled, and I repented, for to a child a
+sudden noise is very real terror. I must have been at work half an hour
+when I heard in the wood the voice of the blind woman crying: "Children,
+oh children, where are you?" and the stillness made slow to close on the
+perfection of that cry. She came towards me, half feeling her way between
+the tree boles, and though a child it seemed clung to her skirt, it
+swerved into the leafage like a rabbit as she drew nearer.
+
+"Is that you?" she said, "from the other side of the county?"
+
+"Yes, it's me from the other side of the county."
+
+"Then why didn't you come through the upper woods? They were there just
+now."
+
+"They were here a few minutes ago. I expect they knew my car had broken
+down, and came to see the fun."
+
+"Nothing serious, I hope? How do cars break down?"
+
+"In fifty different ways. Only mine has chosen the fifty first."
+
+She laughed merrily at the tiny joke, cooed with delicious laughter, and
+pushed her hat back.
+
+"Let me hear," she said.
+
+"Wait a moment," I cried, "and I'll get you a cushion."
+
+She set her foot on the rug all covered with spare parts, and stooped
+above it eagerly. "What delightful things!" The hands through which she
+saw glanced in the chequered sunlight. "A box here--another box! Why
+you've arranged them like playing shop!"
+
+"I confess now that I put it out to attract them. I don't need half those
+things really."
+
+"How nice of you! I heard your bell in the upper wood. You say they were
+here before that?"
+
+"I'm sure of it. Why are they so shy? That little fellow in blue who was
+with you just now ought to have got over his fright. He's been watching me
+like a Red Indian."
+
+"It must have been your bell," she said. "I heard one of them go past me
+in trouble when I was coming down. They're shy--so shy even with me." She
+turned her face over her shoulder and cried again: "Children! Oh,
+children! Look and see!"
+
+"They must have gone off together on their own affairs,"
+
+I suggested, for there was a murmur behind us of lowered voices broken by
+the sudden squeaking giggles of childhood. I returned to my tinkerings and
+she leaned forward, her chin on her hand, listening interestedly.
+
+"How many are they?" I said at last. The work was finished, but I saw no
+reason to go.
+
+Her forehead puckered a little in thought. "I don't quite know," she said
+simply. "Sometimes more--sometimes less. They come and stay with me
+because I love them, you see."
+
+"That must be very jolly," I said, replacing a drawer, and as I spoke I
+heard the inanity of my answer.
+
+"You--you aren't laughing at me," she cried. "I--I haven't any of my own.
+I never married. People laugh at me sometimes about them because--
+because------"
+
+"Because they're savages," I returned. "It's nothing to fret for. That
+sort laugh at everything that isn't in their own fat lives."
+
+"I don't know. How should I? I only don't like being laughed at about
+_them_. It hurts; and when one can't see.... I don't want to seem silly,"
+her chin quivered like a child's as she spoke, "but we blindies have only
+one skin, I think. Everything outside hits straight at our souls. It's
+different with you. You've such good defences in your eyes--looking out--
+before anyone can really pain you in your soul. People forget that with
+us."
+
+I was silent reviewing that inexhaustible matter--the more than inherited
+(since it is also carefully taught) brutality of the Christian peoples,
+beside which the mere heathendom of the West Coast nigger is clean and
+restrained. It led me a long distance into myself.
+
+"Don't do that!" she said of a sudden, putting her hands before her eyes.
+
+"What?"
+
+She made a gesture with her hand.
+
+"That! It's--it's all purple and black. Don't! That colour hurts."
+
+"But, how in the world do you know about colours?" I exclaimed, for here
+was a revelation indeed.
+
+"Colours as colours?" she asked.
+
+"No. _Those_ Colours which you saw just now."
+
+"You know as well as I do," she laughed, "else you wouldn't have asked
+that question. They aren't in the world at all. They're in _you_--when you
+went so angry."
+
+"D'you mean a dull purplish patch, like port-wine mixed with ink?" I said.
+
+"I've never seen ink or port-wine, but the colours aren't mixed. They are
+separate--all separate."
+
+"Do you mean black streaks and jags across the purple?"
+
+She nodded. "Yes--if they are like this," and zigzagged her finger again,
+"but it's more red than purple--that bad colour."
+
+"And what are the colours at the top of the--whatever you see?"
+
+Slowly she leaned forward and traced on the rug the figure of the Egg
+itself.
+
+"I see them so," she said, pointing with a grass stem, "white, green,
+yellow, red, purple, and when people are angry or bad, black across the
+red--as you were just now."
+
+"Who told you anything about it--in the beginning?" I demanded.
+
+"About the colours? No one. I used to ask what colours were when I was
+little--in table-covers and curtains and carpets, you see--because some
+colours hurt me and some made me happy. People told me; and when I got
+older that was how I saw people." Again she traced the outline of the Egg
+which it is given to very few of us to see.
+
+"All by yourself?" I repeated.
+
+"All by myself. There wasn't anyone else. I only found out afterwards that
+other people did not see the Colours."
+
+She leaned against the tree-hole plaiting and unplaiting chance-plucked
+grass stems. The children in the wood had drawn nearer. I could see them
+with the tail of my eye frolicking like squirrels.
+
+"Now I am sure you will never laugh at me," she went on after a long
+silence. "Nor at _them_."
+
+"Goodness! No!" I cried, jolted out of my train of thought. "A man who
+laughs at a child--unless the child is laughing too--is a heathen!"
+
+"I didn't mean that of course. You'd never laugh _at_ children, but I
+thought--I used to think--that perhaps you might laugh about _them_. So
+now I beg your pardon.... What are you going to laugh at?"
+
+I had made no sound, but she knew.
+
+"At the notion of your begging my pardon. If you had done your duty as a
+pillar of the state and a landed proprietress you ought to have summoned
+me for trespass when I barged through your woods the other day. It was
+disgraceful of me--inexcusable."
+
+She looked at me, her head against the tree trunk--long and steadfastly--
+this woman who could see the naked soul.
+
+"How curious," she half whispered. "How very curious."
+
+"Why, what have I done?"
+
+"You don't understand ... and yet you understood about the Colours. Don't
+you understand?"
+
+She spoke with a passion that nothing had justified, and I faced her
+bewilderedly as she rose. The children had gathered themselves in a
+roundel behind a bramble bush. One sleek head bent over something smaller,
+and the set of the little shoulders told me that fingers were on lips.
+They, too, had some child's tremendous secret. I alone was hopelessly
+astray there in the broad sunlight.
+
+"No," I said, and shook my head as though the dead eyes could note.
+"Whatever it is, I don't understand yet. Perhaps I shall later--if you'll
+let me come again."
+
+"You will come again," she answered. "You will surely come again and walk
+in the wood."
+
+"Perhaps the children will know me well enough by that time to let me play
+with them--as a favour. You know what children are like."
+
+"It isn't a matter of favour but of right," she replied, and while I
+wondered what she meant, a dishevelled woman plunged round the bend of the
+road, loose-haired, purple, almost lowing with agony as she ran. It was my
+rude, fat friend of the sweetmeat shop. The blind woman heard and stepped
+forward. "What is it, Mrs. Madehurst?" she asked.
+
+The woman flung her apron over her head and literally grovelled in the
+dust, crying that her grandchild was sick to death, that the local doctor
+was away fishing, that Jenny the mother was at her wits end, and so forth,
+with repetitions and bellowings.
+
+"Where's the next nearest doctor?" I asked between paroxysms.
+
+"Madden will tell you. Go round to the house and take him with you. I'll
+attend to this. Be quick!" She half-supported the fat woman into the
+shade. In two minutes I was blowing all the horns of Jericho under the
+front of the House Beautiful, and Madden, in the pantry, rose to the
+crisis like a butler and a man.
+
+A quarter of an hour at illegal speeds caught us a doctor five miles away.
+Within the half-hour we had decanted him, much interested in motors, at
+the door of the sweetmeat shop, and drew up the road to await the verdict.
+
+"Useful things cars," said Madden, all man and no butler. "If I'd had one
+when mine took sick she wouldn't have died."
+
+"How was it?" I asked.
+
+"Croup. Mrs. Madden was away. No one knew what to do. I drove eight miles
+in a tax cart for the doctor. She was choked when we came back. This car
+'d ha' saved her. She'd have been close on ten now."
+
+"I'm sorry," I said. "I thought you were rather fond of children from what
+you told me going to the cross-roads the other day."
+
+"Have you seen 'em again, Sir--this mornin'?"
+
+"Yes, but they're well broke to cars. I couldn't get any of them within
+twenty yards of it."
+
+He looked at me carefully as a scout considers a stranger--not as a menial
+should lift his eyes to his divinely appointed superior.
+
+"I wonder why," he said just above the breath that he drew.
+
+We waited on. A light wind from the sea wandered up and down the long
+lines of the woods, and the wayside grasses, whitened already with summer
+dust, rose and bowed in sallow waves.
+
+A woman, wiping the suds off her arms, came out of the cottage next the
+sweetmeat shop.
+
+"I've be'n listenin' in de back-yard," she said cheerily. "He says
+Arthur's unaccountable bad. Did ye hear him shruck just now? Unaccountable
+bad. I reckon t'will come Jenny's turn to walk in de wood nex' week along,
+Mr. Madden."
+
+"Excuse me, Sir, but your lap-robe is slipping," said Madden
+deferentially. The woman started, dropped a curtsey, and hurried away.
+
+"What does she mean by 'walking in the wood'?" I asked.
+
+"It must be some saying they use hereabouts. I'm from Norfolk myself,"
+said Madden. "They're an independent lot in this county. She took you for
+a chauffeur, Sir."
+
+I saw the Doctor come out of the cottage followed by a draggle-tailed
+wench who clung to his arm as though he could make treaty for her with
+Death. "Dat sort," she wailed--"dey're just as much to us dat has 'em as
+if dey was lawful born. Just as much--just as much! An' God he'd be just
+as pleased if you saved 'un, Doctor. Don't take it from me. Miss Florence
+will tell ye de very same. Don't leave 'im, Doctor!"
+
+"I know. I know," said the man, "but he'll be quiet for a while now.
+We'll get the nurse and the medicine as fast as we can." He signalled me
+to come forward with the car, and I strove not to be privy to what
+followed; but I saw the girl's face, blotched and frozen with grief, and I
+felt the hand without a ring clutching at my knees when we moved away.
+
+The Doctor was a man of some humour, for I remember he claimed my car
+under the Oath of AEsculapius, and used it and me without mercy. First we
+convoyed Mrs. Madehurst and the blind woman to wait by the sick bed till
+the nurse should come. Next we invaded a neat county town for
+prescriptions (the Doctor said the trouble was cerebro-spinal meningitis),
+and when the County Institute, banked and flanked with scared market
+cattle, reported itself out of nurses for the moment we literally flung
+ourselves loose upon the county. We conferred with the owners of great
+houses--magnates at the ends of overarching avenues whose big-boned
+womenfolk strode away from their tea-tables to listen to the imperious
+Doctor. At last a white-haired lady sitting under a cedar of Lebanon and
+surrounded by a court of magnificent Borzois--all hostile to motors--gave
+the Doctor, who received them as from a princess, written orders which we
+bore many miles at top speed, through a park, to a French nunnery, where
+we took over in exchange a pallid-faced and trembling Sister. She knelt at
+the bottom of the tonneau telling her beads without pause till, by short
+cuts of the Doctor's invention, we had her to the sweetmeat shop once
+more. It was a long afternoon crowded with mad episodes that rose and
+dissolved like the dust of our wheels; cross-sections of remote and
+incomprehensible lives through which we raced at right angles; and I went
+home in the dusk, wearied out, to dream of the clashing horns of cattle;
+round-eyed nuns walking in a garden of graves; pleasant tea-parties
+beneath shaded trees; the carbolic-scented, grey-painted corridors of the
+County Institute; the steps of shy children in the wood, and the hands
+that clung to my knees as the motor began to move.
+
+*       *       *       *       *
+
+I had intended to return in a day or two, but it pleased Fate to hold me
+from that side of the county, on many pretexts, till the elder and the
+wild rose had fruited. There came at last a brilliant day, swept clear
+from the south-west, that brought the hills within hand's reach--a day of
+unstable airs and high filmy clouds. Through no merit of my own I was
+free, and set the car for the third time on that known road. As I reached
+the crest of the Downs I felt the soft air change, saw it glaze under the
+sun; and, looking down at the sea, in that instant beheld the blue of the
+Channel turn through polished silver and dulled steel to dingy pewter. A
+laden collier hugging the coast steered outward for deeper water and,
+across copper-coloured haze, I saw sails rise one by one on the anchored
+fishing-fleet. In a deep dene behind me an eddy of sudden wind drummed
+through sheltered oaks, and spun aloft the first day sample of autumn
+leaves. When I reached the beach road the sea-fog fumed over the
+brickfields, and the tide was telling all the groins of the gale beyond
+Ushant. In less than an hour summer England vanished in chill grey. We
+were again the shut island of the North, all the ships of the world
+bellowing at our perilous gates; and between their outcries ran the piping
+of bewildered gulls. My cap dripped moisture, the folds of the rug held it
+in pools or sluiced it away in runnels, and the salt-rime stuck to my
+lips.
+
+Inland the smell of autumn loaded the thickened fog among the trees, and
+the drip became a continuous shower. Yet the late flowers--mallow of the
+wayside, scabious of the field, and dahlia of the garden--showed gay in
+the mist, and beyond the sea's breath there was little sign of decay in
+the leaf. Yet in the villages the house doors were all open, and bare-
+legged, bare-headed children sat at ease on the damp doorsteps to shout
+"pip-pip" at the stranger.
+
+I made bold to call at the sweetmeat shop, where Mrs. Madehurst met me
+with a fat woman's hospitable tears. Jenny's child, she said, had died two
+days after the nun had come. It was, she felt, best out of the way, even
+though insurance offices, for reasons which she did not pretend to follow,
+would not willingly insure such stray lives. "Not but what Jenny didn't
+tend to Arthur as though he'd come all proper at de end of de first year--
+like Jenny herself." Thanks to Miss Florence, the child had been buried
+with a pomp which, in Mrs. Madehurst's opinion, more than covered the
+small irregularity of its birth. She described the coffin, within and
+without, the glass hearse, and the evergreen lining of the grave.
+
+"But how's the mother?" I asked.
+
+"Jenny? Oh, she'll get over it. I've felt dat way with one or two o' my
+own. She'll get over. She's walkin' in de wood now."
+
+"In this weather?"
+
+Mrs. Madehurst looked at me with narrowed eyes across the counter.
+
+"I dunno but it opens de 'eart like. Yes, it opens de 'eart. Dat's where
+losin' and bearin' comes so alike in de long run, we do say."
+
+Now the wisdom of the old wives is greater than that of all the Fathers,
+and this last oracle sent me thinking so extendedly as I went up the road,
+that I nearly ran over a woman and a child at the wooded corner by the
+lodge gates of the House Beautiful.
+
+"Awful weather!" I cried, as I slowed dead for the turn.
+
+"Not so bad," she answered placidly out of the fog. "Mine's used to 'un.
+You'll find yours indoors, I reckon."
+
+Indoors, Madden received me with professional courtesy, and kind inquiries
+for the health of the motor, which he would put under cover.
+
+I waited in a still, nut-brown hall, pleasant with late flowers and warmed
+with a delicious wood fire--a place of good influence and great peace.
+(Men and women may sometimes, after great effort, achieve a creditable
+lie; but the house, which is their temple, cannot say anything save the
+truth of those who have lived in it.) A child's cart and a doll lay on the
+black-and-white floor, where a rug had been kicked back. I felt that the
+children had only just hurried away--to hide themselves, most like--in the
+many turns of the great adzed staircase that climbed statelily out of the
+hall, or to crouch at gaze behind the lions and roses of the carven
+gallery above. Then I heard her voice above me, singing as the blind sing
+--from the soul:--
+
+
+  In the pleasant orchard-closes.
+
+And all my early summer came back at the call.
+
+  In the pleasant orchard-closes,
+  God bless all our gains say we--
+  But may God bless all our losses,
+  Better suits with our degree,
+
+She dropped the marring fifth line, and repeated--
+
+  Better suits with our degree!
+
+I saw her lean over the gallery, her linked hands white as pearl against
+the oak.
+
+"Is that you--from the other side of the county?" she called.
+
+"Yes, me--from the other side of the county," I answered laughing.
+
+"What a long time before you had to come here again." She ran down the
+stairs, one hand lightly touching the broad rail. "It's two months and
+four days. Summer's gone!"
+
+"I meant to come before, but Fate prevented."
+
+"I knew it. Please do something to that fire. They won't let me play with
+it, but I can feel it's behaving badly. Hit it!"
+
+I looked on either side of the deep fireplace, and found but a
+half-charred hedge-stake with which I punched a black log into flame.
+
+"It never goes out, day or night," she said, as though explaining. "In
+case any one conies in with cold toes, you see."
+
+"It's even lovelier inside than it was out," I murmured. The red light
+poured itself along the age-polished dusky panels till the Tudor roses
+and lions of the gallery took colour and motion. An old eagle-topped
+convex mirror gathered the picture into its mysterious heart, distorting
+afresh the distorted shadows, and curving the gallery lines into the
+curves of a ship. The day was shutting down in half a gale as the fog
+turned to stringy scud. Through the uncurtained mullions of the broad
+window I could see valiant horsemen of the lawn rear and recover against
+the wind that taunted them with legions of dead leaves.
+"Yes, it must be beautiful," she said. "Would you like to go over it?
+There's still light enough upstairs."
+
+I followed her up the unflinching, wagon-wide staircase to the gallery
+whence opened the thin fluted Elizabethan doors.
+
+"Feel how they put the latch low down for the sake of the children." She
+swung a light door inward.
+
+"By the way, where are they?" I asked. "I haven't even heard them to-day."
+
+She did not answer at once. Then, "I can only hear them," she replied
+softly. "This is one of their rooms--everything ready, you see."
+
+She pointed into a heavily-timbered room. There were little low gate
+tables and children's chairs. A doll's house, its hooked front half open,
+faced a great dappled rocking-horse, from whose padded saddle it was but a
+child's scramble to the broad window-seat overlooking the lawn. A toy gun
+lay in a corner beside a gilt wooden cannon.
+
+"Surely they've only just gone," I whispered. In the failing light a door
+creaked cautiously. I heard the rustle of a frock and the patter of feet--
+quick feet through a room beyond.
+
+"I heard that," she cried triumphantly. "Did you? Children, O children,
+where are you?"
+
+The voice filled the walls that held it lovingly to the last perfect note,
+but there came no answering shout such as I had heard in the garden. We
+hurried on from room to oak-floored room; up a step here, down three steps
+there; among a maze of passages; always mocked by our quarry. One might as
+well have tried to work an unstopped warren with a single ferret. There
+were bolt-holes innumerable--recesses in walls, embrasures of deep slitten
+windows now darkened, whence they could start up behind us; and abandoned
+fireplaces, six feet deep in the masonry, as well as the tangle of
+communicating doors. Above all, they had the twilight for their helper in
+our game. I had caught one or two joyous chuckles of evasion, and once or
+twice had seen the silhouette of a child's frock against some darkening
+window at the end of a passage; but we returned empty-handed to the
+gallery, just as a middle-aged woman was setting a lamp in its niche.
+
+"No, I haven't seen her either this evening, Miss Florence," I heard her
+say, "but that Turpin he says he wants to see you about his shed."
+
+"Oh, Mr. Turpin must want to see me very badly. Tell him to come to the
+hall, Mrs. Madden."
+
+I looked down into the hall whose only light was the dulled fire, and deep
+in the shadow I saw them at last. They must have slipped down while we
+were in the passages, and now thought themselves perfectly hidden behind
+an old gilt leather screen. By child's law, my fruitless chase was as good
+as an introduction, but since I had taken so much trouble I resolved to
+force them to come forward later by the simple trick, which children
+detest, of pretending not to notice them. They lay close, in a little
+huddle, no more than shadows except when a quick flame betrayed an
+outline.
+
+"And now we'll have some tea," she said. "I believe I ought to have
+offered it you at first, but one doesn't arrive at manners somehow when
+one lives alone and is considered--h'm--peculiar." Then with very pretty
+scorn, "would you like a lamp to see to eat by?" "The firelight's much
+pleasanter, I think." We descended into that delicious gloom and Madden
+brought tea.
+
+I took my chair in the direction of the screen ready to surprise or be
+surprised as the game should go, and at her permission, since a hearth is
+always sacred, bent forward to play with the fire.
+
+"Where do you get these beautiful short faggots from?" I asked idly. "Why,
+they are tallies!"
+
+"Of course," she said. "As I can't read or write I'm driven back on the
+early English tally for my accounts. Give me one and I'll tell you what it
+meant."
+
+I passed her an unburned hazel-tally, about a foot long, and she ran her
+thumb down the nicks.
+
+"This is the milk-record for the home farm for the month of April last
+year, in gallons," said she. "I don't know what I should have done without
+tallies. An old forester of mine taught me the system. It's out of date
+now for every one else; but my tenants respect it. One of them's coming
+now to see me. Oh, it doesn't matter. He has no business here out of
+office hours. He's a greedy, ignorant man--very greedy or--he wouldn't
+come here after dark."
+
+"Have you much land then?"
+
+"Only a couple of hundred acres in hand, thank goodness. The other six
+hundred are nearly all let to folk who knew my folk before me, but this
+Turpin is quite a new man--and a highway robber."
+
+"But are you sure I sha'n't be----?"
+
+"Certainly not. You have the right. He hasn't any children."
+
+"Ah, the children!" I said, and slid my low chair back till it nearly
+touched the screen that hid them. "I wonder whether they'll come out for
+me."
+
+There was a murmur of voices--Madden's and a deeper note--at the low, dark
+side door, and a ginger-headed, canvas-gaitered giant of the unmistakable
+tenant farmer type stumbled or was pushed in.
+
+"Come to the fire, Mr. Turpin," she said.
+
+"If--if you please, Miss, I'll--I'll be quite as well by the door." He
+clung to the latch as he spoke like a frightened child. Of a sudden I
+realised that he was in the grip of some almost overpowering fear.
+
+"Well?"
+
+"About that new shed for the young stock--that was all. These first autumn
+storms settin' in ... but I'll come again, Miss." His teeth did not
+chatter much more than the door latch.
+
+"I think not," she answered levelly. "The new shed--m'm. What did my agent
+write you on the 15th?"
+
+"I--fancied p'raps that if I came to see you--ma--man to man like, Miss.
+But----"
+
+His eyes rolled into every corner of the room wide with horror. He half
+opened the door through which he had entered, but I noticed it shut again
+--from without and firmly.
+
+"He wrote what I told him," she went on. "You are overstocked already.
+Dunnett's Farm never carried more than fifty bullocks--even in Mr.
+Wright's time. And _he_ used cake. You've sixty-seven and you don't cake.
+You've broken the lease in that respect. You're dragging the heart out of
+the farm."
+
+"I'm--I'm getting some minerals--superphosphates--next week. I've as good
+as ordered a truck-load already. I'll go down to the station to-morrow
+about 'em. Then I can come and see you man to man like, Miss, in the
+daylight.... That gentleman's not going away, is he?" He almost shrieked.
+
+I had only slid the chair a little further back, reaching behind me to tap
+on the leather of the screen, but he jumped like a rat.
+
+"No. Please attend to me, Mr. Turpin." She turned in her chair and faced
+him with his back to the door. It was an old and sordid little piece of
+scheming that she forced from him--his plea for the new cowshed at his
+landlady's expense, that he might with the covered manure pay his next
+year's rent out of the valuation after, as she made clear, he had bled the
+enriched pastures to the bone. I could not but admire the intensity of his
+greed, when I saw him out-facing for its sake whatever terror it was that
+ran wet on his forehead.
+
+I ceased to tap the leather--was, indeed, calculating the cost of the
+shed--when I felt my relaxed hand taken and turned softly between the soft
+hands of a child. So at last I had triumphed. In a moment I would turn and
+acquaint myself with those quick-footed wanderers....
+
+The little brushing kiss fell in the centre of my palm--as a gift on which
+the fingers were, once, expected to close: as the all faithful half-
+reproachful signal of a waiting child not used to neglect even when
+grown-ups were busiest--a fragment of the mute code devised very long ago.
+
+Then I knew. And it was as though I had known from the first day when I
+looked across the lawn at the high window.
+
+I heard the door shut. The woman turned to me in silence, and I felt that
+she knew.
+
+What time passed after this I cannot say. I was roused by the fall of a
+log, and mechanically rose to put it back. Then I returned to my place in
+the chair very close to the screen.
+
+"Now you understand," she whispered, across the packed shadows.
+
+"Yes, I understand--now. Thank you."
+
+"I--I only hear them." She bowed her head in her hands. "I have no right,
+you know--no other right. I have neither borne nor lost--neither borne nor
+lost!"
+
+"Be very glad then," said I, for my soul was torn open within me.
+
+"Forgive me!"
+
+She was still, and I went back to my sorrow and my joy.
+
+"It was because I loved them so," she said at last, brokenly. "_That_ was
+why it was, even from the first--even before I knew that they--they were
+all I should ever have. And I loved them so!"
+
+She stretched out her arms to the shadows and the shadows within the
+shadow.
+
+"They came because I loved them--because I needed them. I--I must have
+made them come. Was that wrong, think you?"
+
+"No--no."
+
+"I--I grant you that the toys and--and all that sort of thing were
+nonsense, but--but I used to so hate empty rooms myself when I was
+little." She pointed to the gallery. "And the passages all empty. ... And
+how could I ever bear the garden door shut? Suppose----"
+
+"Don't! For pity's sake, don't!" I cried. The twilight had brought a cold
+rain with gusty squalls that plucked at the leaded windows.
+
+"And the same thing with keeping the fire in all night. _I_ don't think it
+so foolish--do you?"
+
+I looked at the broad brick hearth, saw, through tears I believe, that
+there was no unpassable iron on or near it, and bowed my head.
+
+"I did all that and lots of other things--just to make believe. Then they
+came. I heard them, but I didn't know that they were not mine by right
+till Mrs. Madden told me----"
+
+"The butler's wife? What?"
+
+"One of them--I heard--she saw. And knew. Hers! _Not_ for me. I didn't
+know at first. Perhaps I was jealous. Afterwards, I began to understand
+that it was only because I loved them, not because----... Oh, you _must_
+bear or lose," she said piteously. "There is no other way--and yet they
+love me. They must! Don't they?"
+
+There was no sound in the room except the lapping voices of the fire, but
+we two listened intently, and she at least took comfort from what she
+heard. She recovered herself and half rose. I sat still in my chair by the
+screen.
+
+"Don't think me a wretch to whine about myself like this, but--but I'm all
+in the dark, you know, and _you_ can see."
+
+In truth I could see, and my vision confirmed me in my resolve, though
+that was like the very parting of spirit and flesh. Yet a little longer I
+would stay since it was the last time.
+
+"You think it is wrong, then?" she cried sharply, though I had said
+nothing.
+
+"Not for you. A thousand times no. For you it is right.... I am grateful
+to you beyond words. For me it would be wrong. For me only...."
+
+"Why?" she said, but passed her hand before her face as she had done at
+our second meeting in the wood. "Oh, I see," she went on simply as a
+child. "For you it would be wrong." Then with a little indrawn laugh,
+"and, d'you remember, I called you lucky--once--at first. You who must
+never come here again!"
+
+She left me to sit a little longer by the screen, and I heard the sound of
+her feet die out along the gallery above.
+
+
+
+
+MRS. BATHURST
+
+FROM LYDEN'S "IRENIUS"
+
+ACT III. Sc. II.
+
+Gow.--Had it been your Prince instead of a groom caught in this noose
+there's not an astrologer of the city----
+
+PRINCE.--Sacked! Sacked! We were a city yesterday.
+
+Gow.--So be it, but I was not governor. Not an astrologer, but would ha'
+sworn he'd foreseen it at the last versary of Venus, when Vulcan caught
+her with Mars in the house of stinking Capricorn. But since 'tis Jack of
+the Straw that hangs, the forgetful stars had it not on their tablets.
+
+PRINCE.--Another life! Were there any left to die? How did the
+poor fool come by it?
+
+Gow.--_Simpliciter_ thus. She that damned him to death knew not that she
+did it, or would have died ere she had done it. For she loved him. He
+that hangs him does so in obedience to the Duke, and asks no more than
+"Where is the rope?" The Duke, very exactly he hath told us, works God's
+will, in which holy employ he's not to be questioned. We have then left
+upon this finger, only Jack whose soul now plucks the left sleeve of
+Destiny in Hell to overtake why she clapped him up like a fly on a sunny
+wall. Whuff! Soh!
+
+PRINCE.--Your cloak, Ferdinand. I'll sleep now.
+
+FERDINAND.--Sleep, then.. He too, loved his life?
+
+Gow.--He was born of woman ... but at the end threw life from
+him, like your Prince, for a little sleep ... "Have I any look of a
+King?" said he, clanking his chain--"to be so baited on all sides by
+Fortune, that I must e'en die now to live with myself one day longer?" I
+left him railing at Fortune and woman's love.
+
+FERDINAND.--Ah, woman's love!
+
+_(Aside)_ Who knows not Fortune, glutted on easy thrones, Stealing from
+feasts as rare to coneycatch, Privily in the hedgerows for a clown With
+that same cruel-lustful hand and eye, Those nails and wedges, that one
+hammer and lead, And the very gerb of long-stored lightnings loosed
+Yesterday 'gainst some King.
+
+
+
+MRS. BATHURST
+The day that I chose to visit H.M.S. _Peridot_ in Simon's Bay was the day
+that the Admiral had chosen to send her up the coast. She was just
+steaming out to sea as my train came in, and since the rest of the Fleet
+were either coaling or busy at the rifle-ranges a thousand feet up the
+hill, I found myself stranded, lunchless, on the sea-front with no hope of
+return to Cape Town before five P.M. At this crisis I had the luck to come
+across my friend Inspector Hooper, Cape Government Railways, in command of
+an engine and a brake-van chalked for repair.
+
+"If you get something to eat," he said, "I'll run you down to Glengariff
+siding till the goods comes along. It's cooler there than here, you see."
+
+I got food and drink from the Greeks who sell all things at a price, and
+the engine trotted us a couple of miles up the line to a bay of drifted
+sand and a plank-platform half buried in sand not a hundred yards from the
+edge of the surf. Moulded dunes, whiter than any snow, rolled far inland
+up a brown and purple valley of splintered rocks and dry scrub. A crowd of
+Malays hauled at a net beside two blue and green boats on the beach; a
+picnic party danced and shouted barefoot where a tiny river trickled
+across the flat, and a circle of dry hills, whose feet were set in sands
+of silver, locked us in against a seven-coloured sea. At either horn of
+the bay the railway line, cut just above high water-mark, ran round a
+shoulder of piled rocks, and disappeared.
+
+"You see there's always a breeze here," said Hooper, opening the door as
+the engine left us in the siding on the sand, and the strong south-easter
+buffeting under Elsie's Peak dusted sand into our tickey beer. Presently
+he sat down to a file full of spiked documents. He had returned from a
+long trip up-country, where he had been reporting on damaged rolling-
+stock, as far away as Rhodesia. The weight of the bland wind on my
+eyelids; the song of it under the car roof, and high up among the rocks;
+the drift of fine grains chasing each other musically ashore; the tramp of
+the surf; the voices of the picnickers; the rustle of Hooper's file, and
+the presence of the assured sun, joined with the beer to cast me into
+magical slumber. The hills of False Bay were just dissolving into those of
+fairyland when I heard footsteps on the sand outside, and the clink of our
+couplings.
+
+"Stop that!" snapped Hooper, without raising his head from his work. "It's
+those dirty little Malay boys, you see: they're always playing with the
+trucks...."
+
+"Don't be hard on 'em. The railway's a general refuge in Africa," I
+replied.
+
+"'Tis--up-country at any rate. That reminds me," he felt in his waistcoat-
+pocket, "I've got a curiosity for you from Wankies--beyond Buluwayo. It's
+more of a souvenir perhaps than----"
+
+"The old hotel's inhabited," cried a voice. "White men from the language.
+Marines to the front! Come on, Pritch. Here's your Belmont. Wha--i--i!"
+
+The last word dragged like a rope as Mr. Pyecroft ran round to the open
+door, and stood looking up into my face. Behind him an enormous Sergeant
+of Marines trailed a stalk of dried seaweed, and dusted the sand nervously
+from his fingers.
+
+"What are you doing here?" I asked. "I thought the _Hierophant_ was down
+the coast?"
+
+"We came in last Tuesday--from Tristan D'Acunha--for overhaul, and we
+shall be in dockyard 'ands for two months, with boiler-seatings."
+
+"Come and sit down," Hooper put away the file.
+
+"This is Mr. Hooper of the Railway," I exclaimed, as Pyecroft turned to
+haul up the black-moustached sergeant.
+
+"This is Sergeant Pritchard, of the _Agaric_, an old shipmate," said he.
+"We were strollin' on the beach." The monster blushed and nodded. He
+filled up one side of the van when he sat down.
+
+"And this is my friend, Mr. Pyecroft," I added to Hooper, already busy
+with the extra beer which my prophetic soul had bought from the Greeks.
+
+"_Moi aussi_" quoth Pyecroft, and drew out beneath his coat a labelled
+quart bottle.
+
+"Why, it's Bass," cried Hooper.
+
+"It was Pritchard," said Pyecroft. "They can't resist him."
+
+"That's not so," said Pritchard, mildly.
+
+"Not _verbatim_ per'aps, but the look in the eye came to the same thing."
+
+"Where was it?" I demanded.
+
+"Just on beyond here--at Kalk Bay. She was slappin' a rug in a back
+verandah. Pritch hadn't more than brought his batteries to bear, before
+she stepped indoors an' sent it flyin' over the wall."
+
+Pyecroft patted the warm bottle.
+
+"It was all a mistake," said Pritchard. "I shouldn't wonder if she mistook
+me for Maclean. We're about of a size."
+
+I had heard householders of Muizenburg, St. James's, and Kalk Bay complain
+of the difficulty of keeping beer or good servants at the seaside, and I
+began to see the reason. None the less, it was excellent Bass, and I too
+drank to the health of that large-minded maid.
+
+"It's the uniform that fetches 'em, an' they fetch it," said Pyecroft. "My
+simple navy blue is respectable, but not fascinatin'. Now Pritch in 'is
+Number One rig is always 'purr Mary, on the terrace'--_ex officio_ as you
+might say."
+
+"She took me for Maclean, I tell you," Pritchard insisted. "Why--why--to
+listen to him you wouldn't think that only yesterday----"
+
+"Pritch," said Pyecroft, "be warned in time. If we begin tellin' what we
+know about each other we'll be turned out of the pub. Not to mention
+aggravated desertion on several occasions----"
+
+"Never anything more than absence without leaf--I defy you to prove it,"
+said the Sergeant hotly. "An' if it comes to that how about Vancouver in
+'87?"
+
+"How about it? Who pulled bow in the gig going ashore? Who told Boy
+Niven...?"
+
+"Surely you were court martialled for that?" I said. The story of Boy
+Niven who lured seven or eight able-bodied seamen and marines into the
+woods of British Columbia used to be a legend of the Fleet.
+
+"Yes, we were court-martialled to rights," said Pritchard, "but we should
+have been tried for murder if Boy Niven 'adn't been unusually tough. He
+told us he had an uncle 'oo'd give us land to farm. 'E said he was born at
+the back o' Vancouver Island, and _all_ the time the beggar was a balmy
+Barnado Orphan!"
+
+"_But_ we believed him," said Pyecroft. "I did--you did--Paterson did--an'
+'oo was the Marine that married the cocoanut-woman afterwards--him with
+the mouth?"
+
+"Oh, Jones, Spit-Kid Jones. I 'aven't thought of 'im in years," said
+Pritchard. "Yes, Spit-Kid believed it, an' George Anstey and Moon. We were
+very young an' very curious."
+
+"_But_ lovin' an' trustful to a degree," said Pyecroft.
+
+"Remember when 'e told us to walk in single file for fear o' bears?
+'Remember, Pye, when 'e 'opped about in that bog full o' ferns an' sniffed
+an' said 'e could smell the smoke of 'is uncle's farm? An' _all_ the time
+it was a dirty little out-lyin' uninhabited island. We walked round it in
+a day, an' come back to our boat lyin' on the beach. A whole day Boy Niven
+kept us walkin' in circles lookin' for 'is uncle's farm! He said his uncle
+was compelled by the law of the land to give us a farm!"
+
+"Don't get hot, Pritch. We believed," said Pyecroft.
+
+"He'd been readin' books. He only did it to get a run ashore an' have
+himself talked of. A day an' a night--eight of us--followin' Boy Niven
+round an uninhabited island in the Vancouver archipelago! Then the picket
+came for us an' a nice pack o' idiots we looked!"
+
+"What did you get for it?" Hooper asked.
+
+"Heavy thunder with continuous lightning for two hours. Thereafter sleet-
+squalls, a confused sea, and cold, unfriendly weather till conclusion o'
+cruise," said Pyecroft. "It was only what we expected, but what we felt,
+an' I assure you, Mr. Hooper, even a sailor-man has a heart to break, was
+bein' told that we able seamen an' promisin' marines 'ad misled Boy Niven.
+Yes, we poor back-to-the-landers was supposed to 'ave misled him! He
+rounded on us, o' course, an' got off easy."
+
+"Excep' for what we gave him in the steerin'-flat when we came out o'
+cells. 'Eard anything of 'im lately, Pye?"
+
+"Signal Boatswain in the Channel Fleet, I believe--Mr. L.L. Niven is."
+
+"An' Anstey died o' fever in Benin," Pritchard mused. "What come to Moon?
+Spit-Kid we know about."
+
+"Moon--Moon! Now where did I last...? Oh yes, when I was in the
+_Palladium_! I met Quigley at Buncrana Station. He told me Moon 'ad run
+when the _Astrild_ sloop was cruising among the South Seas three years
+back. He always showed signs o' bein' a Mormonastic beggar. Yes, he
+slipped off quietly an' they 'adn't time to chase 'im round the islands
+even if the navigatin' officer 'ad been equal to the job."
+
+"Wasn't he?" said Hooper.
+
+"Not so. Accordin' to Quigley the _Astrild_ spent half her commission
+rompin' up the beach like a she-turtle, an' the other half hatching
+turtles' eggs on the top o' numerous reefs. When she was docked at Sydney
+her copper looked like Aunt Maria's washing on the line--an' her 'midship
+frames was sprung. The commander swore the dockyard 'ad done it haulin'
+the pore thing on to the slips. They _do_ do strange things at sea, Mr.
+Hooper."
+
+"Ah! I'm not a tax-payer," said Hooper, and opened a fresh bottle. The
+Sergeant seemed to be one who had a difficulty in dropping subjects.
+
+"How it all comes back, don't it?" he said. "Why Moon must 'ave 'ad
+sixteen years' service before he ran."
+
+"It takes 'em at all ages. Look at--you know," said Pyecroft.
+
+"Who?" I asked.
+
+"A service man within eighteen months of his pension, is the party you're
+thinkin' of," said Pritchard. "A warrant 'oose name begins with a V.,
+isn't it?"
+
+"But, in a way o' puttin' it, we can't say that he actually did desert,"
+Pyecroft suggested.
+
+"Oh, no," said Pritchard. "It was only permanent absence up country
+without leaf. That was all."
+
+"Up country?" said Hooper. "Did they circulate his description?"
+
+"What for?" said Pritchard, most impolitely.
+
+"Because deserters are like columns in the war. They don't move away from
+the line, you see. I've known a chap caught at Salisbury that way tryin'
+to get to Nyassa. They tell me, but o' course I don't know, that they
+don't ask questions on the Nyassa Lake Flotilla up there. I've heard of a
+P. and O. quartermaster in full command of an armed launch there."
+
+"Do you think Click 'ud ha' gone up that way?" Pritchard asked.
+
+"There's no saying. He was sent up to Bloemfontein to take over some Navy
+ammunition left in the fort. We know he took it over and saw it into the
+trucks. Then there was no more Click--then or thereafter. Four months ago
+it transpired, and thus the _casus belli_ stands at present," said
+Pyecroft.
+
+"What were his marks?" said Hooper again.
+
+"Does the Railway get a reward for returnin' 'em, then?" said Pritchard.
+
+"If I did d'you suppose I'd talk about it?" Hooper retorted angrily.
+
+"You seemed so very interested," said Pritchard with equal crispness.
+
+"Why was he called Click?" I asked to tide over an uneasy little break in
+the conversation. The two men were staring at each other very fixedly.
+
+"Because of an ammunition hoist carryin' away," said Pyecroft. "And it
+carried away four of 'is teeth--on the lower port side, wasn't it, Pritch?
+The substitutes which he bought weren't screwed home in a manner o'
+sayin'. When he talked fast they used to lift a little on the bed plate.
+'Ence, 'Click.' They called 'im a superior man which is what we'd call a
+long, black-'aired, genteely speakin', 'alf-bred beggar on the lower
+deck."
+
+"Four false teeth on the lower left jaw," said Hooper, his hand in his
+waistcoat pocket. "What tattoo marks?"
+
+"Look here," began Pritchard, half rising. "I'm sure we're very grateful
+to you as a gentleman for your 'orspitality, but per'aps we may 'ave made
+an error in--"
+
+I looked at Pyecroft for aid, Hooper was crimsoning rapidly.
+
+"If the fat marine now occupying the foc'sle will kindly bring 'is _status
+quo_ to an anchor yet once more, we may be able to talk like gentlemen--
+not to say friends," said Pyecroft. "He regards you, Mr. Hooper, as a
+emissary of the Law."
+
+"I only wish to observe that when a gentleman exhibits such a peculiar, or
+I should rather say, such a _bloomin'_ curiosity in identification marks
+as our friend here----"
+
+"Mr. Pritchard," I interposed, "I'll take all the responsibility for Mr.
+Hooper."
+
+"An' _you_'ll apologise all round," said Pyecroft. "You're a rude little
+man, Pritch."
+
+"But how was I----" he began, wavering.
+
+"I don't know an' I don't care. Apologise!"
+
+The giant looked round bewildered and took our little hands into his vast
+grip, one by one. "I was wrong," he said meekly as a sheep. "My suspicions
+was unfounded. Mr. Hooper, I apologise."
+
+"You did quite right to look out for your own end o' the line," said
+Hooper. "I'd ha' done the same with a gentleman I didn't know, you see. If
+you don't mind I'd like to hear a little more o' your Mr. Vickery. It's
+safe with me, you see."
+
+"Why did Vickery run," I began, but Pyecroft's smile made me turn my
+question to "Who was she?"
+
+"She kep' a little hotel at Hauraki--near Auckland," said Pyecroft.
+
+"By Gawd!" roared Pritchard, slapping his hand on his leg. "Not Mrs.
+Bathurst!"
+
+Pyecroft nodded slowly, and the Sergeant called all the powers of darkness
+to witness his bewilderment.
+
+"So far as I could get at it Mrs. B. was the lady in question."
+
+"But Click was married," cried Pritchard.
+
+"An' 'ad a fifteen year old daughter. 'E's shown me her photograph.
+Settin' that aside, so to say, 'ave you ever found these little things
+make much difference? Because I haven't."
+
+"Good Lord Alive an' Watchin'!... Mrs. Bathurst...." Then with another
+roar: "You can say what you please, Pye, but you don't make me believe it
+was any of 'er fault. She wasn't _that!_"
+
+"If I was going to say what I please, I'd begin by callin' you a silly ox
+an' work up to the higher pressures at leisure. I'm trying to say solely
+what transpired. M'rover, for once you're right. It wasn't her fault."
+
+"You couldn't 'aven't made me believe it if it 'ad been," was the answer.
+
+Such faith in a Sergeant of Marines interested me greatly. "Never mind
+about that," I cried. "Tell me what she was like."
+
+"She was a widow," said Pyecroft. "Left so very young and never
+re-spliced. She kep' a little hotel for warrants and non-coms close to
+Auckland, an' she always wore black silk, and 'er neck--"
+
+"You ask what she was like," Pritchard broke in. "Let me give you an
+instance. I was at Auckland first in '97, at the end o' the _Marroquin's_
+commission, an' as I'd been promoted I went up with the others. She used
+to look after us all, an' she never lost by it--not a penny! 'Pay me now,'
+she'd say, 'or settle later. I know you won't let me suffer. Send the
+money from home if you like,' Why, gentlemen all, I tell you I've seen
+that lady take her own gold watch an' chain off her neck in the bar an'
+pass it to a bosun 'oo'd come ashore without 'is ticker an' 'ad to catch
+the last boat. 'I don't know your name,' she said, 'but when you've done
+with it, you'll find plenty that know me on the front. Send it back by one
+o' them.' And it was worth thirty pounds if it was worth 'arf a crown. The
+little gold watch, Pye, with the blue monogram at the back. But, as I was
+sayin', in those days she kep' a beer that agreed with me--Slits it was
+called. One way an' another I must 'ave punished a good few bottles of it
+while we was in the bay--comin' ashore every night or so. Chaffin across
+the bar like, once when we were alone, 'Mrs. B.,' I said, 'when next I
+call I want you to remember that this is my particular--just as you're my
+particular?' (She'd let you go _that_ far!) 'Just as you're my
+particular,' I said. 'Oh, thank you, Sergeant Pritchard,' she says, an'
+put 'er hand up to the curl be'ind 'er ear. Remember that way she had,
+Pye?"
+
+"I think so," said the sailor.
+
+"Yes, 'Thank you, Sergeant Pritchard,' she says. 'The least I can do is to
+mark it for you in case you change your mind. There's no great demand for
+it in the Fleet,' she says, 'but to make sure I'll put it at the back o'
+the shelf,' an' she snipped off a piece of her hair ribbon with that old
+dolphin cigar cutter on the bar--remember it, Pye?--an' she tied a bow
+round what was left--just four bottles. That was '97--no, '96. In '98 I
+was in the _Resiliant_--China station--full commission. In Nineteen One,
+mark you, I was in the _Carthusian_, back in Auckland Bay again. Of course
+I went up to Mrs. B.'s with the rest of us to see how things were goin'.
+They were the same as ever. (Remember the big tree on the pavement by the
+side-bar, Pye?) I never said anythin' in special (there was too many of us
+talkin' to her), but she saw me at once."
+
+"That wasn't difficult?" I ventured.
+
+"Ah, but wait. I was comin' up to the bar, when, 'Ada,' she says to her
+niece, 'get me Sergeant Pritchard's particular,' and, gentlemen all, I
+tell you before I could shake 'ands with the lady, there were those four
+bottles o' Slits, with 'er 'air ribbon in a bow round each o' their necks,
+set down in front o' me, an' as she drew the cork she looked at me under
+her eyebrows in that blindish way she had o' lookin', an', 'Sergeant
+Pritchard,' she says, 'I do 'ope you 'aven't changed your mind about your
+particulars.' That's the kind o' woman she was--after five years!"
+
+"I don't _see_ her yet somehow," said Hooper, but with sympathy.
+
+"She--she never scrupled to feed a lame duck or set 'er foot on a scorpion
+at any time of 'er life," Pritchard added valiantly.
+
+"That don't help me either. My mother's like that for one."
+
+The giant heaved inside his uniform and rolled his eyes at the car-roof.
+Said Pyecroft suddenly:--
+
+"How many women have you been intimate with all over the world, Pritch?"
+
+Pritchard blushed plum colour to the short hairs of his seventeen-inch
+neck.
+
+"'Undreds," said Pyecroft. "So've I. How many of 'em can you remember in
+your own mind, settin' aside the first--an' per'aps the last--_and one
+more_?"
+
+"Few, wonderful few, now I tax myself," said Sergeant Pritchard,
+relievedly.
+
+"An' how many times might you 'ave been at Aukland?"
+
+"One--two," he began. "Why, I can't make it more than three times in ten
+years. But I can remember every time that I ever saw Mrs. B."
+
+"So can I--an' I've only been to Auckland twice--how she stood an' what
+she was sayin' an' what she looked like. That's the secret. 'Tisn't
+beauty, so to speak, nor good talk necessarily. It's just It. Some
+women'll stay in a man's memory if they once walked down a street, but
+most of 'em you can live with a month on end, an' next commission you'd be
+put to it to certify whether they talked in their sleep or not, as one
+might say."
+
+"Ah," said Hooper. "That's more the idea. I've known just two women of
+that nature."
+
+"An' it was no fault o' theirs?" asked Pritchard.
+
+"None whatever. I know that!"
+
+"An' if a man gets struck with that kind o' woman, Mr. Hooper?" Pritchard
+went on.
+
+"He goes crazy--or just saves himself," was the slow answer.
+
+"You've hit it," said the Sergeant. "You've seen an' known somethin' in
+the course o' your life, Mr. Hooper. I'm lookin' at you!" He set down his
+bottle.
+
+"And how often had Vickery seen her?" I asked.
+
+"That's the dark an' bloody mystery," Pyecroft answered. "I'd never come
+across him till I come out in the _Hierophant_ just now, an' there wasn't
+any one in the ship who knew much about him. You see, he was what you call
+a superior man. 'E spoke to me once or twice about Auckland and Mrs. B. on
+the voyage out. I called that to mind subsequently. There must 'ave been a
+good deal between 'em, to my way o' thinkin'. Mind you I'm only giving you
+my _sum_ of it all, because all I know is second-hand so to speak, or
+rather I should say more than second-'and."
+
+"How?" said Hooper peremptorily. "You must have seen it or heard it."
+
+"Yes," said Pyecroft. "I used to think seein' and hearin' was the only
+regulation aids to ascertainin' facts, but as we get older we get more
+accommodatin'. The cylinders work easier, I suppose.... Were you in Cape
+Town last December when Phyllis's Circus came?"
+
+"No--up country," said Hooper, a little nettled at the change of venue.
+
+"I ask because they had a new turn of a scientific nature called 'Home and
+Friends for a Tickey.'"
+
+"Oh, you mean the cinematograph--the pictures of prize-fights and
+steamers. I've seen 'em up country."
+
+"Biograph or cinematograph was what I was alludin' to. London Bridge with
+the omnibuses--a troopship goin' to the war--marines on parade at
+Portsmouth an' the Plymouth Express arrivin' at Paddin'ton."
+
+"Seen 'em all. Seen 'em all," said Hooper impatiently.
+
+"We _Hierophants_ came in just before Christmas week an' leaf was easy."
+
+"I think a man gets fed up with Cape Town quicker than anywhere else on
+the station. Why, even Durban's more like Nature. We was there for
+Christmas," Pritchard put in.
+
+"Not bein' a devotee of Indian _peeris_, as our Doctor said to the Pusser,
+I can't exactly say. Phyllis's was good enough after musketry practice at
+Mozambique. I couldn't get off the first two or three nights on account of
+what you might call an imbroglio with our Torpedo Lieutenant in the
+submerged flat, where some pride of the West country had sugared up a
+gyroscope; but I remember Vickery went ashore with our Carpenter Rigdon--
+old Crocus we called him. As a general rule Crocus never left 'is ship
+unless an' until he was 'oisted out with a winch, but _when_ 'e went 'e
+would return noddin' like a lily gemmed with dew. We smothered him down
+below that night, but the things 'e said about Vickery as a fittin'
+playmate for a Warrant Officer of 'is cubic capacity, before we got him
+quiet, was what I should call pointed."
+
+"I've been with Crocus--in the _Redoubtable_," said the Sergeant. "He's a
+character if there is one."
+
+"Next night I went into Cape Town with Dawson and Pratt; but just at the
+door of the Circus I came across Vickery. 'Oh!' he says, 'you're the man
+I'm looking for. Come and sit next me. This way to the shillin' places!'
+I went astern at once, protestin' because tickey seats better suited my
+so-called finances. 'Come on,' says Vickery, 'I'm payin'.' Naturally I
+abandoned Pratt and Dawson in anticipation o' drinks to match the seats.
+'No,' he says, when this was 'inted--'not now. Not now. As many as you
+please afterwards, but I want you sober for the occasion.' I caught 'is
+face under a lamp just then, an' the appearance of it quite cured me of my
+thirsts. Don't mistake. It didn't frighten me. It made me anxious. I can't
+tell you what it was like, but that was the effect which it 'ad on me. If
+you want to know, it reminded me of those things in bottles in those
+herbalistic shops at Plymouth--preserved in spirits of wine. White an'
+crumply things--previous to birth as you might say."
+
+"You 'ave a beastial mind, Pye," said the Sergeant, relighting his pipe.
+
+"Perhaps. We were in the front row, an' 'Home an' Friends' came on early.
+Vickery touched me on the knee when the number went up. 'If you see
+anything that strikes you,' he says, 'drop me a hint'; then he went on
+clicking. We saw London Bridge an' so forth an' so on, an' it was most
+interestin'. I'd never seen it before. You 'eard a little dynamo like
+buzzin', but the pictures were the real thing--alive an' movin'."
+
+"I've seen 'em," said Hooper. "Of course they are taken from the very
+thing itself--you see."
+
+"Then the Western Mail came in to Paddin'ton on the big magic lantern
+sheet. First we saw the platform empty an' the porters standin' by. Then
+the engine come in, head on, an' the women in the front row jumped: she
+headed so straight. Then the doors opened and the passengers came out and
+the porters got the luggage--just like life. Only--only when any one came
+down too far towards us that was watchin', they walked right out o' the
+picture, so to speak. I was 'ighly interested, I can tell you. So were all
+of us. I watched an old man with a rug 'oo'd dropped a book an' was tryin'
+to pick it up, when quite slowly, from be'ind two porters--carryin' a
+little reticule an' lookin' from side to side--comes out Mrs. Bathurst.
+There was no mistakin' the walk in a hundred thousand. She come forward--
+right forward--she looked out straight at us with that blindish look which
+Pritch alluded to. She walked on and on till she melted out of the
+picture--like--like a shadow jumpin' over a candle, an' as she went I
+'eard Dawson in the ticky seats be'ind sing out: 'Christ! There's
+Mrs. B.!'"
+
+Hooper swallowed his spittle and leaned forward intently.
+
+"Vickery touched me on the knee again. He was clickin' his four false
+teeth with his jaw down like an enteric at the last kick. 'Are you sure?'
+says he. 'Sure,' I says, 'didn't you 'ear Dawson give tongue? Why, it's
+the woman herself.' 'I was sure before,' he says, 'but I brought you to
+make sure. Will you come again with me to-morrow?'
+
+"'Willingly,' I says, 'it's like meetin' old friends.'
+
+"'Yes,' he says, openin' his watch, 'very like. It will be four-and-twenty
+hours less four minutes before I see her again. Come and have a drink,' he
+says. 'It may amuse you, but it's no sort of earthly use to me.' He went
+out shaking his head an' stumblin' over people's feet as if he was drunk
+already. I anticipated a swift drink an' a speedy return, because I wanted
+to see the performin' elephants. Instead o' which Vickery began to
+navigate the town at the rate o' knots, lookin' in at a bar every three
+minutes approximate Greenwich time. I'm not a drinkin' man, though there
+are those present"--he cocked his unforgetable eye at me--"who may have
+seen me more or less imbued with the fragrant spirit. None the less, when
+I drink I like to do it at anchor an' not at an average speed of eighteen
+knots on the measured mile. There's a tank as you might say at the back o'
+that big hotel up the hill--what do they call it?"
+
+"The Molteno Reservoir," I suggested, and Hooper nodded.
+
+"That was his limit o' drift. We walked there an' we come down through the
+Gardens--there was a South-Easter blowin'--an' we finished up by the
+Docks. Then we bore up the road to Salt River, and wherever there was a
+pub Vickery put in sweatin'. He didn't look at what he drunk--he didn't
+look at the change. He walked an' he drunk an' he perspired in rivers. I
+understood why old Crocus 'ad come back in the condition 'e did, because
+Vickery an' I 'ad two an' a half hours o' this gipsy manoeuvre an' when we
+got back to the station there wasn't a dry atom on or in me."
+
+"Did he say anything?" Pritchard asked.
+
+"The sum total of 'is conversation from 7.45 P.M. till 11.15 P.M. was
+'Let's have another.' Thus the mornin' an' the evenin' were the first day,
+as Scripture says.... To abbreviate a lengthy narrative, I went into Cape
+Town for five consecutive nights with Master Vickery, and in that time I
+must 'ave logged about fifty knots over the ground an' taken in two gallon
+o' all the worst spirits south the Equator. The evolution never varied.
+Two shilling seats for us two; five minutes o' the pictures, an' perhaps
+forty-five seconds o' Mrs. B. walking down towards us with that blindish
+look in her eyes an' the reticule in her hand. Then out walk--and drink
+till train time."
+
+"What did you think?" said Hooper, his hand fingering his waistcoat
+pocket.
+
+"Several things," said Pyecroft. "To tell you the truth, I aren't quite
+done thinkin' about it yet. Mad? The man was a dumb lunatic--must 'ave
+been for months--years p'raps. I know somethin' o' maniacs, as every man
+in the Service must. I've been shipmates with a mad skipper--an' a lunatic
+Number One, but never both together I thank 'Eaven. I could give you the
+names o' three captains now 'oo ought to be in an asylum, but you don't
+find me interferin' with the mentally afflicted till they begin to lay
+about 'em with rammers an' winch-handles. Only once I crept up a little
+into the wind towards Master Vickery. 'I wonder what she's doin' in
+England,' I says. 'Don't it seem to you she's lookin' for somebody?' That
+was in the Gardens again, with the South-Easter blowin' as we were makin'
+our desperate round. 'She's lookin' for me,' he says, stoppin' dead under
+a lamp an' clickin'. When he wasn't drinkin', in which case all 'is teeth
+clicked on the glass, 'e was clickin' 'is four false teeth like a Marconi
+ticker. 'Yes! lookin' for me,' he said, an' he went on very softly an' as
+you might say affectionately. '_But?_ he went on, 'in future, Mr.
+Pyecroft, I should take it kindly of you if you'd confine your remarks to
+the drinks set before you. Otherwise,' he says, 'with the best will in the
+world towards you, I may find myself guilty of murder! Do you understand?'
+he says. 'Perfectly,' I says, 'but would it at all soothe you to know that
+in such a case the chances o' your being killed are precisely equivalent
+to the chances o' me being outed.' 'Why, no,' he says, 'I'm almost afraid
+that 'ud be a temptation,'
+
+"Then I said--we was right under the lamp by that arch at the end o' the
+Gardens where the trams came round--'Assumin' murder was done--or
+attempted murder--I put it to you that you would still be left so badly
+crippled, as one might say, that your subsequent capture by the police--to
+'oom you would 'ave to explain--would be largely inevitable.' 'That's
+better,' 'e says, passin' 'is hands over his forehead. 'That's much
+better, because,' he says, 'do you know, as I am now, Pye, I'm not so sure
+if I could explain anything much.' Those were the only particular words I
+had with 'im in our walks as I remember."
+
+"What walks!" said Hooper. "Oh my soul, what walks!"
+
+"They were chronic," said Pyecroft gravely, "but I didn't anticipate any
+danger till the Circus left. Then I anticipated that, bein' deprived of
+'is stimulant, he might react on me, so to say, with a hatchet.
+Consequently, after the final performance an' the ensuin' wet walk, I kep'
+myself aloof from my superior officer on board in the execution of 'is
+duty as you might put it. Consequently, I was interested when the sentry
+informs me while I was passin' on my lawful occasions that Click had asked
+to see the captain. As a general rule warrant officers don't dissipate
+much of the owner's time, but Click put in an hour and more be'ind that
+door. My duties kep' me within eyeshot of it. Vickery came out first, an'
+'e actually nodded at me an' smiled. This knocked me out o' the boat,
+because, havin' seen 'is face for five consecutive nights, I didn't
+anticipate any change there more than a condenser in hell, so to speak.
+The owner emerged later. His face didn't read off at all, so I fell back
+on his cox, 'oo'd been eight years with him and knew him better than boat
+signals. Lamson--that was the cox's name--crossed 'is bows once or twice
+at low speeds an' dropped down to me visibly concerned. 'He's shipped 'is
+court-martial face,' says Lamson. 'Some one's goin' to be 'ung. I've never
+seen that look but once before when they chucked the gun-sights overboard
+in the _Fantastic_.' Throwin' gun-sights overboard, Mr. Hooper, is the
+equivalent for mutiny in these degenerate days. It's done to attract the
+notice of the authorities an' the _Western Mornin' News_--generally by a
+stoker. Naturally, word went round the lower deck an' we had a private
+over'aul of our little consciences. But, barrin' a shirt which a second-
+class stoker said 'ad walked into 'is bag from the marines flat by itself,
+nothin' vital transpired. The owner went about flyin' the signal for
+'attend public execution,' so to say, but there was no corpse at the
+yardarm. 'E lunched on the beach an' 'e returned with 'is regulation
+harbour-routine face about 3 P. M. Thus Lamson lost prestige for raising
+false alarms. The only person 'oo might 'ave connected the epicycloidal
+gears correctly was one Pyecroft, when he was told that Mr. Vickery would
+go up country that same evening to take over certain naval ammunition left
+after the war in Bloemfontein Fort. No details was ordered to accompany
+Master Vickery. He was told off first person singular--as a unit---by
+himself."
+
+The marine whistled penetratingly.
+
+"That's what I thought," said Pyecroft. "I went ashore with him in the
+cutter an' 'e asked me to walk through the station. He was clickin'
+audibly, but otherwise seemed happy-ish.
+
+"'You might like to know,' he says, stoppin' just opposite the Admiral's
+front gate, 'that Phyllis's Circus will be performin' at Worcester
+to-morrow night. So I shall see 'er yet once again. You've been very
+patient with me,' he says.
+
+"'Look here, Vickery,' I said, 'this thing's come to be just as much as I
+can stand. Consume your own smoke. I don't want to know any more.'
+
+"'You!' he said. 'What have you got to complain of?--you've only 'ad to
+watch. I'm _it_,' he says, 'but that's neither here nor there,' he says.
+'I've one thing to say before shakin' 'ands. Remember,' 'e says--we were
+just by the Admiral's garden-gate then--'remember, that I am _not_ a
+murderer, because my lawful wife died in childbed six weeks after I came
+out. That much at least I am clear of,' 'e says.
+
+"'Then what have you done that signifies?' I said. 'What's the rest of
+it?'
+
+"'The rest,' 'e says, 'is silence,' an' he shook 'ands and went clickin'
+into Simons Town station."
+
+"Did he stop to see Mrs. Bathurst at Worcester?" I asked.
+
+"It's not known. He reported at Bloemfontein, saw the ammunition into the
+trucks, and then 'e disappeared. Went out--deserted, if you care to put it
+so--within eighteen months of his pension, an' if what 'e said about 'is
+wife was true he was a free man as 'e then stood. How do you read it off?"
+
+"Poor devil!" said Hooper. "To see her that way every night! I wonder what
+it was."
+
+"I've made my 'ead ache in that direction many a long night."
+
+"But I'll swear Mrs. B. 'ad no 'and in it," said the Sergeant unshaken.
+
+"No. Whatever the wrong or deceit was, he did it, I'm sure o' that. I 'ad
+to look at 'is face for five consecutive nights. I'm not so fond o'
+navigatin' about Cape Town with a South-Easter blowin' these days. I can
+hear those teeth click, so to say."
+
+"Ah, those teeth," said Hooper, and his hand went to his waistcoat pocket
+once more. "Permanent things false teeth are. You read about 'em in all
+the murder trials."
+
+"What d'you suppose the captain knew--or did?" I asked.
+
+"I never turned my searchlight that way," Pyecroft answered unblushingly.
+
+We all reflected together, and drummed on empty beer bottles as the
+picnic-party, sunburned, wet, and sandy, passed our door singing "The
+Honeysuckle and the Bee."
+
+"Pretty girl under that kapje," said Pyecroft.
+
+"They never circulated his description?" said Pritchard.
+
+"I was askin' you before these gentlemen came," said Hooper to me,
+"whether you knew Wankies--on the way to the Zambesi--beyond Buluwayo?"
+
+"Would he pass there--tryin' to get to that Lake what's 'is name?" said
+Pritchard.
+
+Hooper shook his head and went on: "There's a curious bit o' line there,
+you see. It runs through solid teak forest--a sort o' mahogany really--
+seventy-two miles without a curve. I've had a train derailed there twenty-
+three times in forty miles. I was up there a month ago relievin' a sick
+inspector, you see. He told me to look out for a couple of tramps in the
+teak."
+
+"Two?" Pyecroft said. "I don't envy that other man if----"
+
+"We get heaps of tramps up there since the war. The inspector told me I'd
+find 'em at M'Bindwe siding waiting to go North. He'd given 'em some grub
+and quinine, you see. I went up on a construction train. I looked out for
+'em. I saw them miles ahead along the straight, waiting in the teak. One
+of 'em was standin' up by the dead-end of tke siding an' the other was
+squattin' down lookin' up at 'im, you see."
+
+"What did you do for 'em?" said Pritchard.
+
+"There wasn't much I could do, except bury 'em. There'd been a bit of a
+thunderstorm in the teak, you see, and they were both stone dead and as
+black as charcoal. That's what they really were, you see--charcoal. They
+fell to bits when we tried to shift 'em. The man who was standin' up had
+the false teeth. I saw 'em shinin' against the black. Fell to bits he did
+too, like his mate squatting down an' watchin' him, both of 'em all wet in
+the rain. Both burned to charcoal, you see. And--that's what made me ask
+about marks just now--the false-toother was tattooed on the arms and
+chest--a crown and foul anchor with M.V. above."
+
+"I've seen that," said Pyecroft quickly. "It was so."
+
+"But if he was all charcoal-like?" said Pritchard, shuddering.
+
+"You know how writing shows up white on a burned letter? Well, it was like
+that, you see. We buried 'em in the teak and I kept... But he was a friend
+of you two gentlemen, you see."
+
+Mr. Hooper brought his hand away from his waistcoat-pocket--empty.
+
+Pritchard covered his face with his hands for a moment, like a child
+shutting out an ugliness.
+
+"And to think of her at Hauraki!" he murmured--"with 'er 'air-ribbon on my
+beer. 'Ada,' she said to her niece... Oh, my Gawd!"...
+
+  "On a summer afternoon, when the honeysuckle blooms,
+  And all Nature seems at rest,
+  Underneath the bower, 'mid the perfume of the flower,
+  Sat a maiden with the one she loves the best----"
+
+sang the picnic-party waiting for their train at Glengariff.
+
+"Well, I don't know how you feel about it," said Pyecroft, "but 'avin'
+seen 'is face for five consecutive nights on end, I'm inclined to finish
+what's left of the beer an' thank Gawd he's dead!"
+
+
+
+
+BELOW THE MILL DAM
+
+"OUR FATHERS ALSO"
+
+  By--they are by with mirth and tears,
+  Wit or the works of Desire--
+  Cushioned about on the kindly years
+  Between the wall and the fire.
+
+  The grapes are pressed, the corn is shocked--
+  Standeth no more to glean;
+  For the Gates of Love and Learning locked
+  When they went out between.
+
+  All lore our Lady Venus bares
+  Signalled it was or told
+  By the dear lips long given to theirs
+  And longer to the mould.
+
+  All Profit, all Device, all Truth
+  Written it was or said
+  By the mighty men of their mighty youth.
+  Which is mighty being dead.
+
+  The film that floats before their eyes
+  The Temple's Veil they call;
+  And the dust that on the Shewbread lies
+  Is holy over all.
+
+  Warn them of seas that slip our yoke
+  Of slow conspiring stars--
+  The ancient Front of Things unbroke
+  But heavy with new wars?
+
+  By--they are by with mirth and tears.
+  Wit or the waste of Desire--
+  Cushioned about on the kindly years
+  Between the wall and the fire.
+
+
+BELOW THE MILL DAM
+
+"Book--Book--Domesday Book!" They were letting in the water for the evening
+stint at Robert's Mill, and the wooden Wheel where lived the Spirit of the
+Mill settled to its nine hundred year old song: "Here Azor, a freeman,
+held one rod, but it never paid geld. _Nun-nun-nunquam geldavit_. Here
+Reinbert has one villein and four cottars with one plough--and wood for
+six hogs and two fisheries of sixpence and a mill of ten shillings--_unum
+molinum_--one mill. Reinbert's mill--Robert's Mill. Then and afterwards
+and now--_tunc et post et modo_--Robert's Mill. Book--Book--Domesday
+Book!"
+
+"I confess," said the Black Rat on the crossbeam, luxuriously trimming his
+whiskers--"I confess I am not above appreciating my position and all it
+means." He was a genuine old English black rat, a breed which, report
+says, is rapidly diminishing before the incursions of the brown variety.
+
+"Appreciation is the surest sign of inadequacy," said the Grey Cat, coiled
+up on a piece of sacking.
+
+"But I know what you mean," she added. "To sit by right at the heart of
+things--eh?"
+
+"Yes," said the Black Rat, as the old mill shook and the heavy stones
+thuttered on the grist. "To possess--er--all this environment as an
+integral part of one's daily life must insensibly of course ... You see?"
+
+"I feel," said the Grey Cat. "Indeed, if _we_ are not saturated with the
+spirit of the Mill, who should be?"
+
+"Book--Book--Domesday Book!" the Wheel, set to his work, was running off
+the tenure of the whole rape, for he knew Domesday Book backwards and
+forwards: "_In Ferle tenuit Abbatia de Wiltuna unam hidam et unam virgam
+et dimidiam. Nunquam geldavit_. And Agemond, a freeman, has half a hide
+and one rod. I remember Agemond well. Charmin' fellow--friend of mine. He
+married a Norman girl in the days when we rather looked down on the
+Normans as upstarts. An' Agemond's dead? So he is. Eh, dearie me! dearie
+me! I remember the wolves howling outside his door in the big frost of Ten
+Fifty-Nine.... _Essewelde hundredum nunquam geldum reddidit_. Book! Book!
+Domesday Book!"
+
+"After all," the Grey Cat continued, "atmospere is life. It is the
+influences under which we live that count in the long run. Now, outside"--
+she cocked one ear towards the half-opened door--"there is an absurd
+convention that rats and cats are, I won't go so far as to say natural
+enemies, but opposed forces. Some such ruling may be crudely effective--I
+don't for a minute presume to set up my standards as final--among the
+ditches; but from the larger point of view that one gains by living at the
+heart of things, it seems for a rule of life a little overstrained. Why,
+because some of your associates have, shall I say, liberal views on the
+ultimate destination of a sack of--er--middlings don't they call them----"
+
+"Something of that sort," said the Black Rat, a most sharp and sweet-
+toothed judge of everything ground in the mill for the last three years.
+
+"Thanks--middlings be it. _Why_, as I was saying, must I disarrange my fur
+and my digestion to chase you round the dusty arena whenever we happen to
+meet?"
+
+"As little reason," said the Black Rat, "as there is for me, who, I trust,
+am a person of ordinarily decent instincts, to wait till you have gone on
+a round of calls, and then to assassinate your very charming children."
+
+"Exactly! It has its humorous side though." The Grey Cat yawned. "The
+miller seems afflicted by it. He shouted large and vague threats to my
+address, last night at tea, that he wasn't going to keep cats who 'caught
+no mice.' Those were his words. I remember the grammar sticking in my
+throat like a herring-bone."
+
+"And what did you do?"
+
+"What does one do when a barbarian utters? One ceases to utter and
+removes. I removed--towards his pantry. It was a _riposte_ he might
+appreciate."
+
+"Really those people grow absolutely insufferable," said the Black Rat.
+"There is a local ruffian who answers to the name of Mangles--a builder--
+who has taken possession of the outhouses on the far side of the Wheel for
+the last fortnight. He has constructed cubical horrors in red brick where
+those deliciously picturesque pigstyes used to stand. Have you noticed?"
+
+"There has been much misdirected activity of late among the humans. They
+jabber inordinately. I haven't yet been able to arrive at their reason for
+existence." The Cat yawned.
+
+"A couple of them came in here last week with wires, and fixed them all
+about the walls. Wires protected by some abominable composition, ending in
+iron brackets with glass bulbs. Utterly useless for any purpose and
+artistically absolutely hideous. What do they mean?"
+
+"Aaah! I have known _four_-and-twenty leaders of revolt in Faenza," said
+the Cat, who kept good company with the boarders spending a summer at the
+Mill Farm. "It means nothing except that humans occasionally bring their
+dogs with them. I object to dogs in all forms."
+
+"Shouldn't object to dogs," said the Wheel sleepily.... "The Abbot of
+Wilton kept the best pack in the county. He enclosed all the Harryngton
+Woods to Sturt Common. Aluric, a freeman, was dispossessed of his holding.
+They tried the case at Lewes, but he got no change out of William de
+Warrenne on the bench. William de Warrenne fined Aluric eight and
+fourpence for treason, and the Abbot of Wilton excommunicated him for
+blasphemy. Aluric was no sportsman. Then the Abbot's brother married ...
+I've forgotten her name, but she was a charmin' little woman. The Lady
+Philippa was her daughter. That was after the barony was conferred. She
+rode devilish straight to hounds. They were a bit throatier than we breed
+now, but a good pack: one of the best. The Abbot kept 'em in splendid
+shape. Now, who was the woman the Abbot kept? Book--Book! I shall have to
+go right back to Domesday and work up the centuries: _Modo per omnia
+reddit burgum tunc--tunc--tunc_! Was it _burgum_ or _hundredum_? I shall
+remember in a minute. There's no hurry." He paused as he turned over
+silvered with showering drops.
+
+"This won't do," said the Waters in the sluice. "Keep moving."
+
+The Wheel swung forward; the Waters roared on the buckets and dropped down
+to the darkness below.
+
+"Noisier than usual," said the Black Rat. "It must have been raining up
+the valley."
+
+"Floods maybe," said the Wheel dreamily. "It isn't the proper season, but
+they can come without warning. I shall never forget the big one--when the
+Miller went to sleep and forgot to open the hatches. More than two hundred
+years ago it was, but I recall it distinctly. Most unsettling."
+
+"We lifted that wheel off his bearings," cried the Waters. "We said, 'Take
+away that bauble!' And in the morning he was five mile down the valley--
+hung up in a tree."
+
+"Vulgar!" said the Cat. "But I am sure he never lost his dignity."
+
+"We don't know. He looked like the Ace of Diamonds when we had finished
+with him.... Move on there! Keep on moving. Over! Get over!"
+
+"And why on this day more than any other," said the Wheel statelily. "I am
+not aware that my department requires the stimulus of external pressure to
+keep it up to its duties. I trust I have the elementary instincts of a
+gentleman."
+
+"Maybe," the Waters answered together, leaping down on the buckets. "We
+only know that you are very stiff on your bearings. Over, get over!"
+
+The Wheel creaked and groaned. There was certainly greater pressure upon
+him that he had ever felt, and his revolutions had increased from six and
+three-quarters to eight and a third per minute. But the uproar between the
+narrow, weed-hung walls annoyed the Grey Cat.
+
+"Isn't it almost time," she said plaintively, "that the person who is paid
+to understand these things shuts off those vehement drippings with that
+screw-thing on the top of that box-thing."
+
+"They'll be shut off at eight o'clock as usual," said Rat; "then we can go
+to dinner."
+
+"But we shan't be shut off till ever so late," said the Waters gaily. "We
+shall keep it up all night."
+
+"The ineradicable offensiveness of youth is partially compensated for by
+its eternal hopefulness," said the Cat. "Our dam is not, I am glad to say,
+designed to furnish water for more than four hours at a time. Reserve is
+Life."
+
+"Thank goodness!" said the Black Rat. "Then they can return to their
+native ditches."
+
+"Ditches!" cried the Waters; "Raven's Gill Brook is no ditch. It is almost
+navigable, and _we_ come from there away." They slid over solid and
+compact till the Wheel thudded under their weight.
+
+"Raven's Gill Brook," said the Rat. "_I_ never heard of Raven's Gill."
+
+"We are the waters of Harpenden Brook--down from under Callton Rise. Phew!
+how the race stinks compared with the heather country." Another five foot
+of water flung itself against the Wheel, broke, roared, gurgled, and was
+gone.
+
+"Indeed," said the Grey Cat, "I am sorry to tell you that Raven's Gill
+Brook is cut off from this valley by an absolutely impassable range of
+mountains, and Callton Rise is more than nine miles away. It belongs to
+another system entirely."
+
+"Ah yes," said the Rat, grinning, "but we forget that, for the young,
+water always runs uphill."
+
+"Oh, hopeless! hopeless! hopeless!" cried the Waters, descending open-
+palmed upon the Wheel "There is nothing between here and Raven's Gill
+Brook that a hundred yards of channelling and a few square feet of
+concrete could not remove; and hasn't removed!"
+
+"And Harpenden Brook is north of Raven's Gill and runs into Raven's Gill
+at the foot of Callton Rise, where ilex trees are, and _we_ come from
+there!" These were the glassy, clear waters of the high chalk.
+
+"And Batten's Ponds, that are fed by springs, have been led through
+Trott's Wood, taking the spare water from the old Witches' Spring under
+Churt Haw, and we--we--_we_ are their combined waters!" Those were the
+Waters from the upland bogs and moors--a porter-coloured, dusky, and foam-
+flecked flood.
+
+"It's all very interesting," purred the Cat to the sliding waters, "and I
+have no doubt that Trott's Woods and Bott's Woods are tremendously
+important places; but if you could manage to do your work--whose value I
+don't in the least dispute--a little more soberly, I, for one, should be
+grateful."
+
+"Book--book--book--book--book--Domesday Book!" The urged Wheel was fairly
+clattering now: "In Burgelstaltone a monk holds of Earl Godwin one hide
+and a half with eight villeins. There is a church--and a monk.... I
+remember that monk. Blessed if he could rattle his rosary off any quicker
+than I am doing now ... and wood for seven hogs. I must be running twelve
+to the minute ... almost as fast as Steam. Damnable invention, Steam! ...
+Surely it's time we went to dinner or prayers--or something. Can't keep up
+this pressure, day in and day out, and not feel it. I don't mind for
+myself, of course. _Noblesse oblige_, you know. I'm only thinking of the
+Upper and the Nether Millstones. They came out of the common rock. They
+can't be expected to----"
+
+"Don't worry on our account, please," said the Millstones huskily. "So
+long as you supply the power we'll supply the weight and the bite."
+
+"Isn't it a trifle blasphemous, though, to work you in this way?" grunted
+the Wheel. "I seem to remember something about the Mills of God grinding
+'slowly.' _Slowly_ was the word!"
+
+"But we are not the Mills of God. We're only the Upper and the Nether
+Millstones. We have received no instructions to be anything else. We are
+actuated by power transmitted through you."
+
+"Ah, but let us be merciful as we are strong. Think of all the beautiful
+little plants that grow on my woodwork. There are five varieties of rare
+moss within less than one square yard--and all these delicate jewels of
+nature are being grievously knocked about by this excessive rush of the
+water."
+
+"Umph!" growled the Millstones. "What with your religious scruples and
+your taste for botany we'd hardly know you for the Wheel that put the
+carter's son under last autumn. You never worried about _him_!"
+
+"He ought to have known better."
+
+"So ought your jewels of nature. Tell 'em to grow where it's safe."
+
+"How a purely mercantile life debases and brutalises!" said the Cat to the
+Rat.
+
+"They were such beautiful little plants too," said the Rat tenderly.
+"Maiden's-tongue and hart's-hair fern trellising all over the wall just as
+they do on the sides of churches in the Downs. Think what a joy the sight
+of them must be to our sturdy peasants pulling hay!"
+
+"Golly!" said the Millstones. "There's nothing like coming to the heart of
+things for information"; and they returned to the song that all English
+water-mills have sung from time beyond telling:
+
+  There was a jovial miller once
+  Lived on the River Dee,
+  And this the burden of his song
+  For ever used to be.
+
+Then, as fresh grist poured in and dulled the note:
+
+  I care for nobody--no not I,
+  And nobody cares for me.
+
+"Even these stones have absorbed something of our atmosphere," said the
+Grey Cat. "Nine-tenths of the trouble in this world comes from lack of
+detachment."
+
+"One of your people died from forgetting that, didn't she?" said the Rat.
+
+"One only. The example has sufficed us for generations."
+
+"Ah! but what happened to Don't Care?" the Waters demanded.
+
+"Brutal riding to death of the casual analogy is another mark of
+provincialism!" The Grey Cat raised her tufted chin. "I am going to sleep.
+With my social obligations I must snatch rest when I can; but, as our old
+friend here says, _Noblesse oblige_.... Pity me! Three functions to-night
+in the village, and a barn dance across the valley!"
+
+"There's no chance, I suppose, of your looking in on the loft about two.
+Some of our young people are going to amuse themselves with a new sacque-
+dance--best white flour only," said the Black Rat.
+
+"I believe I am officially supposed not to countenance that sort of thing,
+but youth is youth. ... By the way, the humans set my milk-bowl in the
+loft these days; I hope your youngsters respect it."
+
+"My dear lady," said the Black Rat, bowing, "you grieve me. You hurt me
+inexpressibly. After all these years, too!"
+
+"A general crush is so mixed--highways and hedges--all that sort of thing
+--and no one can answer for one's best friends. _I_ never try. So long as
+mine are amusin' and in full voice, and can hold their own at a tile-
+party, I'm as catholic as these mixed waters in the dam here!"
+
+"We aren't mixed. We _have_ mixed. We are one now," said the Waters
+sulkily.
+
+"Still uttering?" said the Cat. "Never mind, here's the Miller coming to
+shut you off. Ye-es, I have known--_four_--or five is it?--and twenty
+leaders of revolt in Faenza.... A little more babble in the dam, a little
+more noise in the sluice, a little extra splashing on the wheel,
+and then----"
+
+"They will find that nothing has occurred," said the Black Rat. "The old
+things persist and survive and are recognised--our old friend here first
+of all. By the way," he turned toward the Wheel, "I believe we have to
+congratulate you on your latest honour."
+
+"Profoundly well deserved--even if he had never--as he has---laboured
+strenuously through a long life for the amelioration of millkind," said
+the Cat, who belonged to many tile and outhouse committees. "Doubly
+deserved, I may say, for the silent and dignified rebuke his existence
+offers to the clattering, fidgety-footed demands of--er--some people. What
+form did the honour take?"
+
+"It was," said the Wheel bashfully, "a machine-moulded pinion."
+
+"Pinions! Oh, how heavenly!" the Black Rat sighed. "I never see a bat
+without wishing for wings."
+
+"Not exactly that sort of pinion," said the Wheel, "but a really ornate
+circle of toothed iron wheels. Absurd, of course, but gratifying. Mr.
+Mangles and an associate herald invested me with it personally--on my left
+rim--the side that you can't see from the mill. I hadn't meant to say
+anything about it--or the new steel straps round my axles--bright red, you
+know--to be worn on all occasions--but, without false modesty, I assure
+you that the recognition cheered me not a little."
+
+"How intensely gratifying!" said the Black Rat. "I must really steal an
+hour between lights some day and see what they are doing on your left
+side."
+
+"By the way, have you any light on this recent activity of Mr. Mangles?"
+the Grey Cat asked. "He seems to be building small houses on the far side
+of the tail-race. Believe me, I don't ask from any vulgar curiosity."
+
+"It affects our Order," said the Black Rat simply but firmly.
+
+"Thank you," said the Wheel. "Let me see if I can tabulate it properly.
+Nothing like system in accounts of all kinds. Book! Book! Book! On the
+side of the Wheel towards the hundred of Burgelstaltone, where till now
+was a stye of three hogs, Mangles, a freeman, with four villeins, and two
+carts of two thousand bricks, has a new small house of five yards and a
+half, and one roof of iron and a floor of cement. Then, now, and
+afterwards beer in large tankards. And Felden, a stranger, with three
+villeins and one very great cart, deposits on it one engine of iron and
+brass and a small iron mill of four feet, and a broad strap of leather.
+And Mangles, the builder, with two villeins, constructs the floor for the
+same, and a floor of new brick with wires for the small mill. There are
+there also chalices filled with iron and water, in number fifty-seven. The
+whole is valued at one hundred and seventy-four pounds.... I'm sorry I
+can't make myself clearer, but you can see for yourself."
+
+"Amazingly lucid," said the Cat. She was the more to be admired because
+the language of Domesday Book is not, perhaps, the clearest medium wherein
+to describe a small but complete electric-light installation, deriving its
+power from a water-wheel by means of cogs and gearing.
+
+"See for yourself--by all means, see for yourself," said the Waters,
+spluttering and choking with mirth.
+
+"Upon my word," said the Black Rat furiously, "I may be at fault, but I
+wholly fail to perceive where these offensive eavesdroppers--er--come in.
+We were discussing a matter that solely affected our Order."
+
+Suddenly they heard, as they had heard many times before, the Miller
+shutting off the water. To the rattle and rumble of the labouring stones
+succeeded thick silence, punctuated with little drops from the stayed
+wheel. Then some water-bird in the dam fluttered her wings as she slid to
+her nest, and the plop of a water-rat sounded like the fall of a log in
+the water.
+
+"It is all over--it always is all over at just this time. Listen, the
+Miller is going to bed--as usual. Nothing has occurred," said the Cat.
+
+Something creaked in the house where the pig-styes had stood, as metal
+engaged on metal with a clink and a burr.
+
+"Shall I turn her on?" cried the Miller.
+
+"Ay," said the voice from the dynamo-house.
+
+"A human in Mangles' new house!" the Rat squeaked.
+
+"What of it?" said the Grey Cat. "Even supposing Mr. Mangles' cats'-meat-
+coloured hovel ululated with humans, can't you see for yourself--that--?"
+
+There was a solid crash of released waters leaping upon the wheel more
+furiously than ever, a grinding of cogs, a hum like the hum of a hornet,
+and then the unvisited darkness of the old mill was scattered by
+intolerable white light. It threw up every cobweb, every burl and knot in
+the beams and the floor; till the shadows behind the flakes of rough
+plaster on the wall lay clear-cut as shadows of mountains on the
+photographed moon.
+
+"See! See! See!" hissed the Waters in full flood. "Yes, see for
+yourselves. Nothing has occurred. Can't you see?"
+
+The Rat, amazed, had fallen from his foothold and lay half-stunned on the
+floor. The Cat, following her instinct, leaped nigh to the ceiling, and
+with flattened ears and bared teeth backed in a corner ready to fight
+whatever terror might be loosed on her. But nothing happened. Through the
+long aching minutes nothing whatever happened, and her wire-brush tail
+returned slowly to its proper shape.
+
+"Whatever it is," she said at last, "it's overdone. They can never keep it
+up, you know."
+
+"Much you know," said the Waters. "Over you go, old man. You can take the
+full head of us now. Those new steel axle-straps of yours can stand
+anything. Come along, Raven's Gill, Harpenden, Callton Rise, Batten's
+Ponds, Witches' Spring, all together! Let's show these gentlemen how to
+work!"
+
+"But--but--I thought it was a decoration. Why--why--why--it only means
+more work for _me_!"
+
+"Exactly. You're to supply about sixty eight-candle lights when required.
+But they won't be all in use at once----"
+
+"Ah! I thought as much," said the Cat. "The reaction is bound to come."
+
+"_And_" said the Waters, "you will do the ordinary work of the mill as
+well."
+
+"Impossible!" the old Wheel quivered as it drove. "Aluric never did it--
+nor Azor, nor Reinbert. Not even William de Warrenne or the Papal Legate.
+There's no precedent for it. I tell you there's no precedent for working a
+wheel like this."
+
+"Wait a while! We're making one as fast as we can. Aluric and Co. are
+dead. So's the Papal Legate. You've no notion how dead they are, but we're
+here--the Waters of Five Separate Systems. We're just as interesting as
+Domesday Book. Would you like to hear about the land-tenure in Trott's
+Wood? It's squat-right, chiefly." The mocking Waters leaped one over the
+other, chuckling and chattering profanely.
+
+"In that hundred Jenkins, a tinker, with one dog--_unis canis_--holds, by
+the Grace of God and a habit he has of working hard, _unam hidam_--a large
+potato patch. Charmin' fellow, Jenkins. Friend of ours. Now, who the dooce
+did Jenkins keep? ... In the hundred of Callton is one charcoal-burner
+_irreligiosissimus homo_--a bit of a rip--but a thorough sportsman. _Ibi
+est ecclesia. Non multum_. Not much of a church, _quia_ because,
+_episcopus_ the Vicar irritated the Nonconformists _tunc et post et modo_
+--then and afterwards and now--until they built a cut-stone Congregational
+chapel with red brick facings that did not return itself--_defendebat se_
+--at four thousand pounds."
+
+"Charcoal-burners, vicars, schismatics, and red brick facings," groaned
+the Wheel. "But this is sheer blasphemy. What waters have they let in upon
+me?"
+
+"Floods from the gutters. Faugh, this light is positively sickening!" said
+the Cat, rearranging her fur.
+
+"We come down from the clouds or up from the springs, exactly like all
+other waters everywhere. Is that what's surprising you?" sang the Waters.
+
+"Of course not. I know my work if you don't. What I complain of is your
+lack of reverence and repose. You've no instinct of deference towards your
+betters--your heartless parody of the Sacred volume (the Wheel meant
+Domesday Book)--proves it."
+
+"Our betters?" said the Waters most solemnly. "What is there in all this
+dammed race that hasn't come down from the clouds, or----"
+
+"Spare me that talk, please," the Wheel persisted. "You'd _never_
+understand. It's the tone--your tone that we object to."
+
+"Yes. It's your tone," said the Black Rat, picking himself up limb by
+limb.
+
+"If you thought a trifle more about the work you're supposed to do, and a
+trifle less about your precious feelings, you'd render a little more duty
+in return for the power vested in you--we mean wasted on you," the Waters
+replied.
+
+"I have been some hundreds of years laboriously acquiring the knowledge
+which you see fit to challenge so light-heartedly," the Wheel jarred.
+
+"Challenge him! Challenge him!" clamoured the little waves riddling down
+through the tail-race. "As well now as later. Take him up!"
+
+The main mass of the Waters plunging on the Wheel shocked that well-bolted
+structure almost into box-lids by saying: "Very good. Tell us what you
+suppose yourself to be doing at the present moment."
+
+"Waiving the offensive form of your question, I answer, purely as a matter
+of courtesy, that I am engaged in the trituration of farinaceous
+substances whose ultimate destination it would be a breach of the trust
+reposed in me to reveal."
+
+"Fiddle!" said the Waters. "We knew it all along! The first direct
+question shows his ignorance of his own job. Listen, old thing. Thanks to
+us, you are now actuating a machine of whose construction you know
+nothing, that that machine may, over wires of whose ramifications you are,
+by your very position, profoundly ignorant, deliver a power which you can
+never realise, to localities beyond the extreme limits of your mental
+horizon, with the object of producing phenomena which in your wildest
+dreams (if you ever dream) you could never comprehend. Is that clear, or
+would you like it all in words of four syllables?"
+
+"Your assumptions are deliciously sweeping, but may I point out that a
+decent and--the dear old Abbot of Wilton would have put it in his resonant
+monkish Latin much better than I can--a scholarly reserve, does not
+necessarily connote blank vacuity of mind on all subjects."
+
+"Ah, the dear old Abbot of Wilton," said the Rat sympathetically, as one
+nursed in that bosom. "Charmin' fellow--thorough scholar and gentleman.
+Such a pity!"
+
+"Oh, Sacred Fountains!" the Waters were fairly boiling. "He goes out of
+his way to expose his ignorance by triple bucketfuls. He creaks to high
+Heaven that he is hopelessly behind the common order of things! He invites
+the streams of Five Watersheds to witness his su-su-su-pernal
+incompetence, and then he talks as though there were untold reserves of
+knowledge behind him that he is too modest to bring forward. For a bland,
+circular, absolutely sincere impostor, you're a miracle, O Wheel!"
+
+"I do not pretend to be anything more than an integral portion of an
+accepted and not altogether mushroom institution."
+
+"Quite so," said the Waters. "Then go round--hard----"
+
+"To what end?" asked the Wheel.
+
+"Till a big box of tanks in your house begins to fizz and fume--gassing is
+the proper word."
+
+"It would be," said the Cat, sniffing.
+
+"That will show that your accumulators are full. When the accumulators are
+exhausted, and the lights burn badly, you will find us whacking you round
+and round again."
+
+"The end of life as decreed by Mangles and his creatures is to go whacking
+round and round for ever," said the Cat.
+
+"In order," the Rat said, "that you may throw raw and unnecessary
+illumination upon all the unloveliness in the world. Unloveliness which we
+shall--er--have always with us. At the same time you will riotously
+neglect the so-called little but vital graces that make up Life."
+
+"Yes, Life," said the Cat, "with its dim delicious half-tones and veiled
+indeterminate distances. Its surprisals, escapes, encounters, and dizzying
+leaps--its full-throated choruses in honour of the morning star, and its
+melting reveries beneath the sun-warmed wall."
+
+"Oh, you can go on the tiles, Pussalina, just the same as usual," said the
+laughing Waters. "_We_ sha'n't interfere with you."
+
+"On the tiles, forsooth!" hissed the Cat.
+
+"Well, that's what it amounts to," persisted the Waters. "We see a good
+deal of the minor graces of life on our way down to our job."
+
+"And--but I fear I speak to deaf ears--do they never impress you?" said
+the Wheel.
+
+"Enormously," said the Waters. "We have already learned six refined
+synonyms for loafing."
+
+"But (here again I feel as though preaching in the wilderness) it never
+occurs to you that there may exist some small difference between the
+wholly animal--ah--rumination of bovine minds and the discerning, well-
+apportioned leisure of the finer type of intellect?"
+
+"Oh, yes. The bovine mind goes to sleep under a hedge and makes no bones
+about it when it's shouted at. We've seen _that_--in haying-time--all
+along the meadows. The finer type is wide awake enough to fudge up excuses
+for shirking, and mean enough to get stuffy when its excuses aren't
+accepted. Turn over!"
+
+"But, my good people, no gentleman gets stuffy as you call it. A certain
+proper pride, to put it no higher, forbids---"
+
+"Nothing that he wants to do if he really wants to do it. Get along! What
+are you giving us? D'you suppose we've scoured half heaven in the clouds,
+and half earth in the mists, to be taken in at this time of the day by a
+bone-idle, old hand-quern of your type?"
+
+"It is not for me to bandy personalities with you. I can only say that I
+simply decline to accept the situation."
+
+"Decline away. It doesn't make any odds. They'll probably put in a turbine
+if you decline too much."
+
+"What's a turbine?" said the Wheel, quickly.
+
+"A little thing you don't see, that performs surprising revolutions. But
+you won't decline. You'll hang on to your two nice red-strapped axles and
+your new machine-moulded pinions like--a--like a leech on a lily stem!
+There's centuries of work in your old bones if you'd only apply yourself
+to it; and, mechanically, an overshot wheel with this head of water is
+about as efficient as a turbine."
+
+"So in future I am to be considered mechanically? I have been painted by
+at least five Royal Academicians."
+
+"Oh, you can be painted by five hundred when you aren't at work, of
+course. But while you are at work you'll work. You won't half-stop and
+think and talk about rare plants and dicky-birds and farinaceous fiduciary
+interests. You'll continue to revolve, and this new head of water will see
+that you do so continue."
+
+"It is a matter on which it would be exceedingly ill-advised to form a
+hasty or a premature conclusion. I will give it my most careful
+consideration," said the Wheel.
+
+"Please do," said the Waters gravely. "Hullo! Here's the Miller again."
+
+The Cat coiled herself in a picturesque attitude on the softest corner of
+a sack, and the Rat without haste, yet certainly without rest, slipped
+behind the sacking as though an appointment had just occurred to him.
+
+In the doorway, with the young Engineer, stood the Miller grinning
+amazedly.
+
+"Well--well--well! 'tis true-ly won'erful. An' what a power o' dirt! It
+come over me now looking at these lights, that I've never rightly seen my
+own mill before. She needs a lot bein' done to her."
+
+"Ah! I suppose one must make oneself moderately agreeable to the baser
+sort. They have their uses. This thing controls the dairy." The Cat,
+pincing on her toes, came forward and rubbed her head against the Miller's
+knee.
+
+"Ay, you pretty puss," he said, stooping. "You're as big a cheat as the
+rest of 'em that catch no mice about me. A won'erful smooth-skinned,
+rough-tongued cheat you be. I've more than half a mind----"
+
+"She does her work well," said the Engineer, pointing to where the Rat's
+beady eyes showed behind the sacking. "Cats and Rats livin' together--
+see?"
+
+"Too much they do--too long they've done. I'm sick and tired of it. Go and
+take a swim and larn to find your own vittles honest when you come out,
+Pussy."
+
+"My word!" said the Waters, as a sprawling Cat landed all unannounced in
+the centre of the tail-race. "Is that you, Mewsalina? You seem to have
+been quarrelling with your best friend. Get over to the left. It's
+shallowest there. Up on that alder-root with all four paws. Good-night!"
+
+"You'll never get any they rats," said the Miller, as the young Engineer
+struck wrathfully with his stick at the sacking. "They're not the common
+sort. They're the old black English sort."
+
+"Are they, by Jove? I must catch one to stuff, some day."
+
+*       *       *       *       *
+
+Six months later, in the chill of a January afternoon, they were letting
+in the Waters as usual.
+
+"Come along! It's both gears this evening," said the Wheel, kicking
+joyously in the first rush of the icy stream. "There's a heavy load of
+grist just in from Lamber's Wood. Eleven miles it came in an hour and a
+half in our new motor-lorry, and the Miller's rigged five new five-candle
+lights in his cow-stables. I'm feeding 'em to-night. There's a cow due to
+calve. Oh, while I think of it, what's the news from Callton Rise?"
+
+"The waters are finding their level as usual--but why do you ask?" said
+the deep outpouring Waters.
+
+"Because Mangles and Felden and the Miller are talking of increasing the
+plant here and running a saw-mill by electricity. I was wondering whether
+we----"
+
+"I beg your pardon," said the Waters chuckling. "_What_ did you say?"
+
+"Whether _we_, of course, had power enough for the job. It will be a
+biggish contract. There's all Harpenden Brook to be considered and
+Batten's Ponds as well, and Witches' Fountain, and the Churt's Hawd
+system.
+
+"We've power enough for anything in the world," said the Waters. "The only
+question is whether you could stand the strain if we came down on you full
+head."
+
+"Of course I can," said the Wheel. "Mangles is going to turn me into a set
+of turbines--beauties."
+
+"Oh--er--I suppose it's the frost that has made us a little thick-headed,
+but to whom are we talking?" asked the amazed Waters.
+
+"To me--the Spirit of the Mill, of course."
+
+"Not to the old Wheel, then?"
+
+"I happen to be living in the old Wheel just at present. When the turbines
+are installed I shall go and live in them. What earthly difference does it
+make?"
+
+"Absolutely none," said the Waters, "in the earth or in the waters under
+the earth. But we thought turbines didn't appeal to you."
+
+"Not like turbines? Me? My dear fellows, turbines are good for fifteen
+hundred revolutions a minute--and with our power we can drive 'em at full
+speed. Why, there's nothing we couldn't grind or saw or illuminate or heat
+with a set of turbines! That's to say if all the Five Watersheds are
+agreeable."
+
+"Oh, we've been agreeable for ever so long."
+
+"Then why didn't you tell me?"
+
+"Don't know. Suppose it slipped our memory."
+
+The Waters were holding themselves in for fear of bursting with mirth.
+
+"How careless of you! You should keep abreast of the age, my dear fellows.
+We might have settled it long ago, if you'd only spoken. Yes, four good
+turbines and a neat brick penstock--eh? This old Wheel's absurdly out of
+date."
+
+"Well," said the Cat, who after a little proud seclusion had returned to
+her place impenitent as ever. "Praised be Pasht and the Old Gods, that
+whatever may have happened _I_, at least, have preserved the Spirit of the
+Mill!"
+
+She looked round as expecting her faithful ally, the Black Rat; but that
+very week the Engineer had caught and stuffed him, and had put him in a
+glass case; he being a genuine old English black rat. That breed, the
+report says, is rapidly diminishing before the incursions of the brown
+variety.
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's Traffics and Discoveries, by Rudyard Kipling
+
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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Traffics and Discoveries, by Kipling
+#26 in our series by Rudyard Kipling
+
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+*****These eBooks Were Prepared By Thousands of Volunteers!*****
+
+
+Title: Traffics and Discoveries
+
+Author: Rudyard Kipling
+
+Release Date: January, 2006 [EBook #9790]
+[Yes, we are more than one year ahead of schedule]
+[This file was first posted on October 17, 2003]
+
+Edition: 10
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK TRAFFICS AND DISCOVERIES ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Juliet Sutherland, Keith M. Eckrich
+and PG Distributed Proofreaders
+
+
+
+
+TRAFFICS AND DISCOVERIES
+
+
+By Rudyard Kipling
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+_from the Masjid-al-Aqsa of Sayyid Ahmed(Wahabi)_
+
+THE CAPTIVE
+
+_Poseidon'S Law_
+
+THE BONDS OF DISCIPLINE
+
+_The Runners_
+
+A SAHIBS' WAR
+
+_The Wet Litany_
+
+"THEIR LAWFUL OCCASIONS"--PART I.
+
+"THEIR LAWFUL OCCASIONS"--PART II.
+
+_The King's Task_
+
+THE COMPREHENSION OF PRIVATE COOPER
+
+_The Necessitarian_
+
+STEAM TACTICS
+
+_Kaspar's Song in "Varda"_
+
+"WIRELESS"
+
+_Song of the Old Guard_
+
+THE ARMY OF A DREAM--PART I.
+
+THE ARMY OF A DREAM--PART II.
+
+_The Return of the Children_
+
+"THEY"
+
+_From Lyden's "Irenius_"
+
+MRS. BATHURST
+
+     "_Our Fathers Also_"
+
+BELOW THE MILL DAM
+
+
+
+
+
+THE CAPTIVE
+
+FROM THE MASJID-AL-AQSA OF SAYYID AHMED (WAHABI)
+
+  Not with an outcry to Allah nor any complaining
+  He answered his name at the muster and stood to the chaining.
+  When the twin anklets were nipped on the leg-bars that held them,
+  He brotherly greeted the armourers stooping to weld them.
+  Ere the sad dust of the marshalled feet of the chain-gang swallowed him,
+  Observing him nobly at ease, I alighted and followed him.
+  Thus we had speech by the way, but not touching his sorrow
+  Rather his red Yesterday and his regal To-morrow,
+  Wherein he statelily moved to the clink of his chains unregarded,
+  Nowise abashed but contented to drink of the potion awarded.
+  Saluting aloofly his Fate, he made swift with his story;
+  And the words of his mouth were as slaves spreading carpets of glory
+  Embroidered with names of the Djinns--a miraculous weaving--
+  But the cool and perspicuous eye overbore unbelieving.
+  So I submitted myself to the limits of rapture--
+  Bound by this man we had bound, amid captives his capture--
+  Till he returned me to earth and the visions departed;
+  But on him be the Peace and the Blessing: for he was great-hearted!
+
+
+THE CAPTIVE
+
+"He that believeth shall not make haste."--_Isaiah_.
+
+The guard-boat lay across the mouth of the bathing-pool, her crew idly
+spanking the water with the flat of their oars. A red-coated militia-man,
+rifle in hand, sat at the bows, and a petty officer at the stern. Between
+the snow-white cutter and the flat-topped, honey-coloured rocks on the
+beach the green water was troubled with shrimp-pink prisoners-of-war
+bathing. Behind their orderly tin camp and the electric-light poles rose
+those stone-dotted spurs that throw heat on Simonstown. Beneath them the
+little _Barracouta_ nodded to the big _Gibraltar_, and the old _Penelope_,
+that in ten years has been bachelors' club, natural history museum,
+kindergarten, and prison, rooted and dug at her fixed moorings. Far out, a
+three-funnelled Atlantic transport with turtle bow and stern waddled in
+from the deep sea.
+
+Said the sentry, assured of the visitor's good faith, "Talk to 'em? You
+can, to any that speak English. You'll find a lot that do."
+
+Here and there earnest groups gathered round ministers of the Dutch
+Reformed Church, who doubtless preached conciliation, but the majority
+preferred their bath. The God who Looks after Small Things had caused the
+visitor that day to receive two weeks' delayed mails in one from a casual
+postman, and the whole heavy bundle of newspapers, tied with a strap, he
+dangled as bait. At the edge of the beach, cross-legged, undressed to his
+sky-blue army shirt, sat a lean, ginger-haired man, on guard over a dozen
+heaps of clothing. His eyes followed the incoming Atlantic boat.
+
+"Excuse me, Mister," he said, without turning (and the speech betrayed his
+nationality), "would you mind keeping away from these garments? I've been
+elected janitor--on the Dutch vote."
+
+The visitor moved over against the barbed-wire fence and sat down to his
+mail. At the rustle of the newspaper-wrappers the ginger-coloured man
+turned quickly, the hunger of a press-ridden people in his close-set iron-
+grey eyes.
+
+"Have you any use for papers?" said the visitor.
+
+"Have I any use?" A quick, curved forefinger was already snicking off the
+outer covers. "Why, that's the New York postmark! Give me the ads. at the
+back of _Harper's_ and _M'Clure's_ and I'm in touch with God's Country
+again! Did you know how I was aching for papers?"
+
+The visitor told the tale of the casual postman.
+
+"Providential!" said the ginger-coloured man, keen as a terrier on his
+task; "both in time and matter. Yes! ... The _Scientific American_ yet
+once more! Oh, it's good! it's good!" His voice broke as he pressed his
+hawk-like nose against the heavily-inked patent-specifications at the end.
+"Can I keep it? I thank you--I thank you! Why--why--well--well! The
+_American Tyler_ of all things created! Do you subscribe to that?"
+
+"I'm on the free list," said the visitor, nodding.
+
+He extended his blue-tanned hand with that air of Oriental spaciousness
+which distinguishes the native-born American, and met the visitor's grasp
+expertly. "I can only say that you have treated me like a Brother (yes,
+I'll take every last one you can spare), and if ever--" He plucked at the
+bosom of his shirt. "Psha! I forgot I'd no card on me; but my name's
+Zigler--Laughton G. Zigler. An American? If Ohio's still in the Union, I
+am, Sir. But I'm no extreme States'-rights man. I've used all of my native
+country and a few others as I have found occasion, and now I am the
+captive of your bow and spear. I'm not kicking at that. I am not a coerced
+alien, nor a naturalised Texas mule-tender, nor an adventurer on the
+instalment plan. _I_ don't tag after our consul when he comes around,
+expecting the American Eagle to lift me out o' this by the slack of my
+pants. No, sir! If a Britisher went into Indian Territory and shot up his
+surroundings with a Colt automatic (not that _she's_ any sort of weapon,
+but I take her for an illustration), he'd be strung up quicker'n a
+snowflake 'ud melt in hell. No ambassador of yours 'ud save him. I'm my
+neck ahead on this game, anyway. That's how I regard the proposition.
+
+"Have I gone gunning against the British? To a certain extent, I presume
+you never heard tell of the Laughton-Zigler automatic two-inch field-gun,
+with self-feeding hopper, single oil-cylinder recoil, and ballbearing gear
+throughout? Or Laughtite, the new explosive? Absolutely uniform in effect,
+and one-ninth the bulk of any present effete charge--flake, cannonite,
+cordite, troisdorf, cellulose, cocoa, cord, or prism--I don't care what it
+is. Laughtite's immense; so's the Zigler automatic. It's me. It's fifteen
+years of me. You are not a gun-sharp? I am sorry. I could have surprised
+you. Apart from my gun, my tale don't amount to much of anything. I thank
+you, but I don't use any tobacco you'd be likely to carry... Bull Durham?
+_Bull Durham!_ I take it all back--every last word. Bull Durham--here! If
+ever you strike Akron, Ohio, when this fool-war's over, remember you've
+Laughton O. Zigler in your vest pocket. Including the city of Akron. We've
+a little club there.... Hell! What's the sense of talking Akron with no
+pants?
+
+"My gun? ... For two cents I'd have shipped her to our Filipeens. 'Came
+mighty near it too; but from what I'd read in the papers, you can't trust
+Aguinaldo's crowd on scientific matters. Why don't I offer it to our army?
+Well, you've an effete aristocracy running yours, and we've a crowd of
+politicians. The results are practically identical. I am not taking any
+U.S. Army in mine.
+
+"I went to Amsterdam with her--to this Dutch junta that supposes it's
+bossing the war. I wasn't brought up to love the British for one thing,
+and for another I knew that if she got in her fine work (my gun) I'd stand
+more chance of receiving an unbiassed report from a crowd of dam-fool
+British officers than from a hatful of politicians' nephews doing duty as
+commissaries and ordnance sharps. As I said, I put the brown man out of
+the question. That's the way _I_ regarded the proposition.
+
+"The Dutch in Holland don't amount to a row of pins. Maybe I misjudge 'em.
+Maybe they've been swindled too often by self-seeking adventurers to know
+a enthusiast when they see him. Anyway, they're slower than the Wrath o'
+God. But on delusions--as to their winning out next Thursday week at 9
+A.M.--they are--if I may say so--quite British.
+
+"I'll tell you a curious thing, too. I fought 'em for ten days before I
+could get the financial side of my game fixed to my liking. I knew they
+didn't believe in the Zigler, but they'd no call to be crazy-mean. I fixed
+it--free passage and freight for me and the gun to Delagoa Bay, and beyond
+by steam and rail. Then I went aboard to see her crated, and there I
+struck my fellow-passengers--all deadheads, same as me. Well, Sir, I
+turned in my tracks where I stood and besieged the ticket-office, and I
+said, 'Look at here, Van Dunk. I'm paying for my passage and her room in
+the hold--every square and cubic foot.' 'Guess he knocked down the fare to
+himself; but I paid. I paid. I wasn't going to deadhead along o' _that_
+crowd of Pentecostal sweepings. 'Twould have hoodooed my gun for all time.
+That was the way I regarded the proposition. No, Sir, they were not pretty
+company.
+
+"When we struck Pretoria I had a hell-and-a-half of a time trying to
+interest the Dutch vote in my gun an' her potentialities. The bottom was
+out of things rather much just about that time. Kruger was praying some
+and stealing some, and the Hollander lot was singing, 'If you haven't any
+money you needn't come round,' Nobody was spending his dough on anything
+except tickets to Europe. We were both grossly neglected. When I think how
+I used to give performances in the public streets with dummy cartridges,
+filling the hopper and turning the handle till the sweat dropped off me, I
+blush, Sir. I've made her to do her stunts before Kaffirs--naked sons of
+Ham--in Commissioner Street, trying to get a holt somewhere.
+
+"Did I talk? I despise exaggeration--'tain't American or scientific--but
+as true as I'm sitting here like a blue-ended baboon in a kloof, Teddy
+Roosevelt's Western tour was a maiden's sigh compared to my advertising
+work.
+
+"'Long in the spring I was rescued by a commandant called Van Zyl--a big,
+fleshy man with a lame leg. Take away his hair and his gun and he'd make a
+first-class Schenectady bar-keep. He found me and the Zigler on the veldt
+(Pretoria wasn't wholesome at that time), and he annexed me in a
+somnambulistic sort o' way. He was dead against the war from the start,
+but, being a Dutchman, he fought a sight better than the rest of that 'God
+and the Mauser' outfit. Adrian Van Zyl. Slept a heap in the daytime--and
+didn't love niggers. I liked him. I was the only foreigner in his
+commando. The rest was Georgia Crackers and Pennsylvania Dutch--with a
+dash o' Philadelphia lawyer. I could tell you things about them would
+surprise you. Religion for one thing; women for another; but I don't know
+as their notions o' geography weren't the craziest. 'Guess that must be
+some sort of automatic compensation. There wasn't one blamed ant-hill in
+their district they didn't know _and_ use; but the world was flat, they
+said, and England was a day's trek from Cape Town.
+
+"They could fight in their own way, and don't you forget it. But I guess
+you will not. They fought to kill, and, by what I could make out, the
+British fought to be killed. So both parties were accommodated.
+
+"I am the captive of your bow and spear, Sir. The position has its
+obligations--on both sides. You could not be offensive or partisan to me.
+I cannot, for the same reason, be offensive to you. Therefore I will not
+give you my opinions on the conduct of your war.
+
+"Anyway, I didn't take the field as an offensive partisan, but as an
+inventor. It was a condition and not a theory that confronted me. (Yes,
+Sir, I'm a Democrat by conviction, and that was one of the best things
+Grover Cleveland ever got off.)
+
+"After three months' trek, old man Van Zyl had his commando in good shape
+and refitted off the British, and he reckoned he'd wait on a British
+General of his acquaintance that did business on a circuit between
+Stompiesneuk, Jackhalputs, Vrelegen, and Odendaalstroom, year in and year
+out. He was a fixture in that section.
+
+"'He's a dam' good man,' says Van Zyl. 'He's a friend of mine. He sent in
+a fine doctor when I was wounded and our Hollander doc. wanted to cut my
+leg off. Ya, I'll guess we'll stay with him.' Up to date, me and my Zigler
+had lived in innocuous desuetude owing to little odds and ends riding out
+of gear. How in thunder was I to know there wasn't the ghost of any road
+in the country? But raw hide's cheap and lastin'. I guess I'll make my
+next gun a thousand pounds heavier, though.
+
+"Well, Sir, we struck the General on his beat--Vrelegen it was--and our
+crowd opened with the usual compliments at two thousand yards. Van Zyl
+shook himself into his greasy old saddle and says, 'Now we shall be quite
+happy, Mr. Zigler. No more trekking. Joost twelve miles a day till the
+apricots are ripe.'
+
+"Then we hitched on to his outposts, and vedettes, and cossack-picquets,
+or whatever they was called, and we wandered around the veldt arm in arm
+like brothers.
+
+"The way we worked lodge was this way. The General, he had his breakfast
+at 8:45 A.M. to the tick. He might have been a Long Island commuter. At
+8:42 A.M. I'd go down to the Thirty-fourth Street ferry to meet him--I
+mean I'd see the Zigler into position at two thousand (I began at three
+thousand, but that was cold and distant)--and blow him off to two full
+hoppers--eighteen rounds--just as they were bringing in his coffee. If his
+crowd was busy celebrating the anniversary of Waterloo or the last royal
+kid's birthday, they'd open on me with two guns (I'll tell you about them
+later on), but if they were disengaged they'd all stand to their horses
+and pile on the ironmongery, and washers, and typewriters, and five weeks'
+grub, and in half an hour they'd sail out after me and the rest of Van
+Zyl's boys; lying down and firing till 11:45 A.M. or maybe high noon. Then
+we'd go from labour to refreshment, resooming at 2 P.M. and battling till
+tea-time. Tuesday and Friday was the General's moving days. He'd trek
+ahead ten or twelve miles, and we'd loaf around his flankers and exercise
+the ponies a piece. Sometimes he'd get hung up in a drift--stalled
+crossin' a crick--and we'd make playful snatches at his wagons. First time
+that happened I turned the Zigler loose with high hopes, Sir; but the old
+man was well posted on rearguards with a gun to 'em, and I had to haul her
+out with three mules instead of six. I was pretty mad. I wasn't looking
+for any experts back of the Royal British Artillery. Otherwise, the game
+was mostly even. He'd lay out three or four of our commando, and we'd
+gather in four or five of his once a week or thereon. One time, I
+remember, long towards dusk we saw 'em burying five of their boys. They
+stood pretty thick around the graves. We wasn't more than fifteen hundred
+yards off, but old Van Zyl wouldn't fire. He just took off his hat at the
+proper time. He said if you stretched a man at his prayers you'd have to
+hump his bad luck before the Throne as well as your own. I am inclined to
+agree with him. So we browsed along week in and week out. A war-sharp
+might have judged it sort of docile, but for an inventor needing practice
+one day and peace the next for checking his theories, it suited Laughton
+O. Zigler.
+
+"And friendly? Friendly was no word for it. We was brothers in arms.
+
+"Why, I knew those two guns of the Royal British Artillery as well as I
+used to know the old Fifth Avenoo stages. _They_ might have been brothers
+too.
+
+"They'd jolt into action, and wiggle around and skid and spit and cough
+and prize 'emselves back again during our hours of bloody battle till I
+could have wept, Sir, at the spectacle of modern white men chained up to
+these old hand-power, back-number, flint-and-steel reaping machines. One
+of 'em--I called her Baldy--she'd a long white scar all along her barrel--
+I'd made sure of twenty times. I knew her crew by sight, but she'd come
+switching and teturing out of the dust of my shells like--like a hen from
+under a buggy--and she'd dip into a gully, and next thing I'd know 'ud be
+her old nose peeking over the ridge sniffin' for us. Her runnin' mate had
+two grey mules in the lead, and a natural wood wheel repainted, and a
+whole raft of rope-ends trailin' around. 'Jever see Tom Reed with his vest
+off, steerin' Congress through a heat-wave? I've been to Washington often
+--too often--filin' my patents. I called her Tom Reed. We three 'ud play
+pussy-wants-a-corner all round the outposts on off-days--cross-lots
+through the sage and along the mezas till we was short-circuited by
+canons. O, it was great for me and Baldy and Tom Reed! I don't know as we
+didn't neglect the legitimate interests of our respective commanders
+sometimes for this ball-play. I know _I_ did.
+
+"'Long towards the fall the Royal British Artillery grew shy--hung back in
+their breeching sort of--and their shooting was way--way off. I observed
+they wasn't taking any chances, not though I acted kitten almost
+underneath 'em.
+
+"I mentioned it to Van Zyl, because it struck me I had about knocked their
+Royal British moral endways.
+
+"'No,' says he, rocking as usual on his pony. 'My Captain Mankeltow he is
+sick. That is all.'
+
+"'So's your Captain Mankeltow's guns,' I said. 'But I'm going to make 'em
+a heap sicker before he gets well.'
+
+"'No,' says Van Zyl. 'He has had the enteric a little. Now he is better,
+and he was let out from hospital at Jackhalputs. Ah, that Mankeltow! He
+always makes me laugh so. I told him--long back--at Colesberg, I had a
+little home for him at Nooitgedacht. But he would not come--no! He has
+been sick, and I am sorry.'
+
+"'How d'you know that?' I says.
+
+"'Why, only to-day he sends back his love by Johanna Van der Merwe, that
+goes to their doctor for her sick baby's eyes. He sends his love, that
+Mankeltow, and he tells her tell me he has a little garden of roses all
+ready for me in the Dutch Indies--Umballa. He is very funny, my Captain
+Mankeltow.'
+
+"The Dutch and the English ought to fraternise, Sir. They've the same
+notions of humour, to my thinking.'
+
+"'When he gets well,' says Van Zyl, 'you look out, Mr. Americaan. He comes
+back to his guns next Tuesday. Then they shoot better.'
+
+"I wasn't so well acquainted with the Royal British Artillery as old man
+Van Zyl. I knew this Captain Mankeltow by sight, of course, and,
+considering what sort of a man with the hoe he was, I thought he'd done
+right well against my Zigler. But nothing epoch-making.
+
+"Next morning at the usual hour I waited on the General, and old Van Zyl
+come along with some of the boys. Van Zyl didn't hang round the Zigler
+much as a rule, but this was his luck that day.
+
+"He was peeking through his glasses at the camp, and I was helping pepper,
+the General's sow-belly--just as usual--when he turns to me quick and
+says, 'Almighty! How all these Englishmen are liars! You cannot trust
+one,' he says. 'Captain Mankeltow tells our Johanna he comes not back till
+Tuesday, and to-day is Friday, and there he is! Almighty! The English are
+all Chamberlains!'
+
+"If the old man hadn't stopped to make political speeches he'd have had
+his supper in laager that night, I guess. I was busy attending to Tom Reed
+at two thousand when Baldy got in her fine work on me. I saw one sheet of
+white flame wrapped round the hopper, and in the middle of it there was
+one o' my mules straight on end. Nothing out of the way in a mule on end,
+but this mule hadn't any head. I remember it struck me as incongruous at
+the time, and when I'd ciphered it out I was doing the Santos-Dumont act
+without any balloon and my motor out of gear. Then I got to thinking about
+Santos-Dumont and how much better my new way was. Then I thought about
+Professor Langley and the Smithsonian, and wishing I hadn't lied so
+extravagantly in some of my specifications at Washington. Then I quit
+thinking for quite a while, and when I resumed my train of thought I was
+nude, Sir, in a very stale stretcher, and my mouth was full of fine dirt
+all flavoured with Laughtite.
+
+"I coughed up that dirt.
+
+"'Hullo!' says a man walking beside me. 'You've spoke almost in time. Have
+a drink?'
+
+"I don't use rum as a rule, but I did then, because I needed it.
+
+"'What hit us?'I said.
+
+"'Me,' he said. 'I got you fair on the hopper as you pulled out of that
+donga; but I'm sorry to say every last round in the hopper's exploded and
+your gun's in a shocking state. I'm real sorry,' he says. 'I admire your
+gun, Sir.'
+
+"'Are you Captain Mankeltow?' I says.
+
+"'Yes,' he says. 'I presoom you're Mister Zigler. Your commanding officer
+told me about you.'
+
+"'Have you gathered in old man Van Zyl?' I said.
+
+"'Commandant Van Zyl,' he says very stiff, 'was most unfortunately
+wounded, but I am glad to say it's not serious. We hope he'll be able to
+dine with us to-night; and I feel sure,' he says, 'the General would be
+delighted to see you too, though he didn't expect,' he says, 'and no one
+else either, by Jove!' he says, and blushed like the British do when
+they're embarrassed.
+
+"I saw him slide an Episcopalian Prayer-book up his sleeve, and when I
+looked over the edge of the stretcher there was half-a-dozen enlisted men
+--privates--had just quit digging and was standing to attention by their
+spades. I guess he was right on the General not expecting me to dinner;
+but it was all of a piece with their sloppy British way of doing business.
+Any God's quantity of fuss and flubdub to bury a man, and not an ounce of
+forehandedness in the whole outfit to find out whether he was rightly
+dead. And I am a Congregationalist anyway!
+
+"Well, Sir, that was my introduction to the British Army. I'd write a book
+about it if anyone would believe me. This Captain Mankeltow, Royal British
+Artillery, turned the doctor on me (I could write another book about
+_him_) and fixed me up with a suit of his own clothes, and fed me canned
+beef and biscuits, and give me a cigar--a Henry Clay and a whisky-and-
+sparklet. He was a white man.
+
+"'Ye-es, by Jove,' he said, dragging out his words like a twist of
+molasses, 'we've all admired your gun and the way you've worked it. Some
+of us betted you was a British deserter. I won a sovereign on that from a
+yeoman. And, by the way,' he says, 'you've disappointed me groom pretty
+bad.'
+
+"'Where does your groom come in?' I said.
+
+"'Oh, he was the yeoman. He's a dam poor groom,' says my captain, 'but
+he's a way-up barrister when he's at home. He's been running around the
+camp with his tongue out, waiting for the chance of defending you at the
+court-martial.'
+
+"'What court-martial?' I says.
+
+"'On you as a deserter from the Artillery. You'd have had a good run for
+your money. Anyway, you'd never have been hung after the way you worked
+your gun. Deserter ten times over,' he says, 'I'd have stuck out for
+shooting you like a gentleman.'
+
+"Well, Sir, right there it struck me at the pit of my stomach--sort of
+sickish, sweetish feeling--that my position needed regularising pretty
+bad. I ought to have been a naturalised burgher of a year's standing; but
+Ohio's my State, and I wouldn't have gone back on her for a desertful of
+Dutchmen. That and my enthoosiasm as an inventor had led me to the
+existing crisis; but I couldn't expect this Captain Mankeltow to regard
+the proposition that way. There I sat, the rankest breed of
+unreconstructed American citizen, caught red-handed squirting hell at the
+British Army for months on end. I tell _you_, Sir, I wished I was in
+Cincinnatah that summer evening. I'd have compromised on Brooklyn.
+
+"'What d'you do about aliens?' I said, and the dirt I'd coughed up seemed
+all back of my tongue again.
+
+"'Oh,' says he, 'we don't do much of anything. They're about all the
+society we get. I'm a bit of a pro-Boer myself,' he says, 'but between you
+and me the average Boer ain't over and above intellectual. You're the
+first American we've met up with, but of course you're a burgher.'
+
+"It was what I ought to have been if I'd had the sense of a common tick,
+but the way he drawled it out made me mad.
+
+"'Of course I am not,' I says. 'Would _you_ be a naturalised Boer?'
+
+"'I'm fighting against 'em,' he says, lighting a cigarette, 'but it's all
+a matter of opinion.'
+
+"'Well,' I says, 'you can hold any blame opinion you choose, but I'm a
+white man, and my present intention is to die in that colour.'
+
+"He laughed one of those big, thick-ended, British laughs that don't lead
+anywhere, and whacked up some sort of compliment about America that made
+me mad all through.
+
+"I am the captive of your bow and spear, Sir, but I do not understand the
+alleged British joke. It is depressing.
+
+"I was introdooced to five or six officers that evening, and every blame
+one of 'em grinned and asked me why I wasn't in the Filipeens suppressing
+our war! And that was British humour! They all had to get it off their
+chests before they'd talk sense. But they was sound on the Zigler. They
+had all admired her. I made out a fairy-story of me being wearied of the
+war, and having pushed the gun at them these last three months in the hope
+they'd capture it and let me go home. That tickled 'em to death. They made
+me say it three times over, and laughed like kids each time. But half the
+British _are_ kids; specially the older men. My Captain Mankeltow was less
+of it than the others. He talked about the Zigler like a lover, Sir, and I
+drew him diagrams of the hopper-feed and recoil-cylinder in his note-book.
+He asked the one British question I was waiting for, 'Hadn't I made my
+working-parts too light?' The British think weight's strength.
+
+"At last--I'd been shy of opening the subject before--at last I said,
+'Gentlemen, you are the unprejudiced tribunal I've been hunting after. I
+guess you ain't interested in any other gun-factory, and politics don't
+weigh with you. How did it feel your end of the game? What's my gun done,
+anyway?'
+
+"'I hate to disappoint you,' says Captain Mankeltow, 'because I know you
+feel as an inventor.' I wasn't feeling like an inventor just then. I felt
+friendly, but the British haven't more tact than you can pick up with a
+knife out of a plate of soup.
+
+"'The honest truth,' he says, 'is that you've wounded about ten of us one
+way and another, killed two battery horses and four mules, and--oh, yes,'
+he said, 'you've bagged five Kaffirs. But, buck up,' he said, 'we've all
+had mighty close calls'--shaves, he called 'em, I remember. 'Look at my
+pants.'
+
+"They was repaired right across the seat with Minneapolis flour-bagging. I
+could see the stencil.
+
+"'I ain't bluffing,' he says. 'Get the hospital returns, Doc.'
+
+"The doctor gets 'em and reads 'em out under the proper dates. That doctor
+alone was worth the price of admission.
+
+"I was right pleased right through that I hadn't killed any of these
+cheerful kids; but none the less I couldn't help thinking that a few more
+Kaffirs would have served me just as well for advertising purposes as
+white men. No, sir. Anywhichway you regard the proposition, twenty-one
+casualties after months of close friendship like ours was--paltry.
+
+"They gave me taffy about the gun--the British use taffy where we use
+sugar. It's cheaper, and gets there just the same. They sat around and
+proved to me that my gun was too good, too uniform--shot as close as a
+Mannlicher rifle.
+
+"Says one kid chewing a bit of grass: 'I counted eight of your shells,
+Sir, burst in a radius of ten feet. All of 'em would have gone through one
+waggon-tilt. It was beautiful,' he says. 'It was too good.'
+
+"I shouldn't wonder if the boys were right. My Laughtite is too
+mathematically uniform in propelling power. Yes; she was too good for this
+refractory fool of a country. The training gear was broke, too, and we had
+to swivel her around by the trail. But I'll build my next Zigler fifteen
+hundred pounds heavier. Might work in a gasoline motor under the axles. I
+must think that up.
+
+"'Well, gentlemen,' I said, 'I'd hate to have been the death of any of
+you; and if a prisoner can deed away his property, I'd love to present the
+Captain here with what he's seen fit to leave of my Zigler.'
+
+"'Thanks awf'ly,' says my Captain. 'I'd like her very much. She'd look
+fine in the mess at Woolwich. That is, if you don't mind, Mr. Zigler.'
+
+"'Go right ahead,' I says. 'I've come out of all the mess I've any use
+for; but she'll do to spread the light among the Royal British Artillery.'
+
+"I tell you, Sir, there's not much of anything the matter with the Royal
+British Artillery. They're brainy men languishing under an effete system
+which, when you take good holt of it, is England--just all England. 'Times
+I'd feel I was talking with real live citizens, and times I'd feel I'd
+struck the Beef Eaters in the Tower.
+
+"How? Well, this way. I was telling my Captain Mankeltow what Van Zyl had
+said about the British being all Chamberlains when the old man saw him
+back from hospital four days ahead of time.
+
+"'Oh, damn it all!' he says, as serious as the Supreme Court. 'It's too
+bad,' he says. 'Johanna must have misunderstood me, or else I've got the
+wrong Dutch word for these blarsted days of the week. I told Johanna I'd
+be out on Friday. The woman's a fool. Oah, da-am it all!' he says. 'I
+wouldn't have sold old Van Zyl a pup like that,' he says. 'I'll hunt him
+up and apologise.'
+
+"He must have fixed it all right, for when we sailed over to the General's
+dinner my Captain had Van Zyl about half-full of sherry and bitters, as
+happy as a clam. The boys all called him Adrian, and treated him like
+their prodigal father. He'd been hit on the collarbone by a wad of
+shrapnel, and his arm was tied up.
+
+"But the General was the peach. I presume you're acquainted with the
+average run of British generals, but this was my first. I sat on his left
+hand, and he talked like--like the _Ladies' Home Journal_. J'ever read
+that paper? It's refined, Sir--and innocuous, and full of nickel-plated
+sentiments guaranteed to improve the mind. He was it. He began by a Lydia
+Pinkham heart-to-heart talk about my health, and hoped the boys had done
+me well, and that I was enjoying my stay in their midst. Then he thanked
+me for the interesting and valuable lessons that I'd given his crowd--
+specially in the matter of placing artillery and rearguard attacks. He'd
+wipe his long thin moustache between drinks--lime-juice and water he used
+--and blat off into a long 'a-aah,' and ladle out more taffy for me or old
+man Van Zyl on his right. I told him how I'd had my first Pisgah-sight of
+the principles of the Zigler when I was a fourth-class postmaster on a
+star-route in Arkansas. I told him how I'd worked it up by instalments
+when I was machinist in Waterbury, where the dollar-watches come from. He
+had one on his wrist then. I told him how I'd met Zalinski (he'd never
+heard of Zalinski!) when I was an extra clerk in the Naval Construction
+Bureau at Washington. I told him how my uncle, who was a truck-farmer in
+Noo Jersey (he loaned money on mortgage too, for ten acres ain't enough
+now in Noo Jersey), how he'd willed me a quarter of a million dollars,
+because I was the only one of our kin that called him down when he used to
+come home with a hard-cider jag on him and heave ox-bows at his nieces. I
+told him how I'd turned in every red cent on the Zigler, and I told him
+the whole circus of my coming out with her, and so on, and so following;
+and every forty seconds he'd wipe his moustache and blat, 'How
+interesting. Really, now? How interesting.'
+
+"It was like being in an old English book, Sir. Like _Bracebridge Hall_.
+But an American wrote _that!_ I kept peeking around for the Boar's Head
+and the Rosemary and Magna Charta and the Cricket on the Hearth, and the
+rest of the outfit. Then Van Zyl whirled in. He was no ways jagged, but
+thawed--thawed, Sir, and among friends. They began discussing previous
+scraps all along the old man's beat--about sixty of 'em--as well as side-
+shows with other generals and columns. Van Zyl told 'im of a big beat he'd
+worked on a column a week or so before I'd joined him. He demonstrated his
+strategy with forks on the table.
+
+"'There!' said the General, when he'd finished. 'That proves my contention
+to the hilt. Maybe I'm a bit of a pro-Boer, but I stick to it,' he says,
+'that under proper officers, with due regard to his race prejudices, the
+Boer'ud make the finest mounted infantry in the Empire. Adrian,' he says,
+'you're simply squandered on a cattle-run. You ought to be at the Staff
+College with De Wet.'
+
+"'You catch De Wet and I come to your Staff College--eh,' says Adrian,
+laughing. 'But you are so slow, Generaal. Why are you so slow? For a
+month,' he says, 'you do so well and strong that we say we shall hands-up
+and come back to our farms. Then you send to England and make us a present
+of two--three--six hundred young men, with rifles and wagons and rum and
+tobacco, and such a great lot of cartridges, that our young men put up
+their tails and start all over again. If you hold an ox by the horn and
+hit him by the bottom he runs round and round. He never goes anywhere. So,
+too, this war goes round and round. You know that, Generaal!'
+
+"'Quite right, Adrian,' says the General; 'but you must believe your
+Bible.'
+
+"'Hooh!' says Adrian, and reaches for the whisky. 'I've never known a
+Dutchman a professing Atheist, but some few have been rather active
+Agnostics since the British sat down in Pretoria. Old man Van Zyl--he told
+me--had soured on religion after Bloemfontein surrendered. He was a Free
+Stater for one thing.'
+
+"'He that believeth,' says the General, 'shall not make haste. That's in
+Isaiah. We believe we're going to win, and so we don't make haste. As far
+as I'm concerned I'd like this war to last another five years. We'd have
+an army then. It's just this way, Mr. Zigler,' he says, 'our people are
+brimfull of patriotism, but they've been born and brought up between
+houses, and England ain't big enough to train 'em--not if you expect to
+preserve.'
+
+"'Preserve what?' I says. 'England?'
+
+"'No. The game,' he says; 'and that reminds me, gentlemen, we haven't
+drunk the King and Foxhunting.'
+
+"So they drank the King and Fox-hunting. I drank the King because there's
+something about Edward that tickles me (he's so blame British); but I
+rather stood out on the Fox-hunting. I've ridden wolves in the cattle-
+country, and needed a drink pretty bad afterwards, but it never struck me
+as I ought to drink about it--he-red-it-arily.
+
+"'No, as I was saying, Mr. Zigler,' he goes on, 'we have to train our men
+in the field to shoot and ride. I allow six months for it; but many
+column-commanders--not that I ought to say a word against 'em, for they're
+the best fellows that ever stepped, and most of 'em are my dearest
+friends--seem to think that if they have men and horses and guns they can
+take tea with the Boers. It's generally the other way about, ain't it, Mr.
+Zigler?'
+
+"'To some extent, Sir,' I said.
+
+"'I'm _so_ glad you agree with me,' he says. 'My command here I regard as
+a training depot, and you, if I may say so, have been one of my most
+efficient instructors. I mature my men slowly but thoroughly. First I put
+'em in a town which is liable to be attacked by night, where they can
+attend riding-school in the day. Then I use 'em with a convoy, and last I
+put 'em into a column. It takes time,' he says, 'but I flatter myself that
+any men who have worked under me are at least grounded in the rudiments of
+their profession. Adrian,' he says, 'was there anything wrong with the men
+who upset Van Bester's applecart last month when he was trying to cross
+the line to join Piper with those horses he'd stole from Gabbitas?'
+
+"'No, Generaal,' says Van Zyl. 'Your men got the horses back and eleven
+dead; and Van Besters, he ran to Delarey in his shirt. They was very good,
+those men. They shoot hard.'
+
+"_'So_ pleased to hear you say so. I laid 'em down at the beginning of
+this century--a 1900 vintage. _You_ remember 'em, Mankeltow?' he says.
+'The Central Middlesex Buncho Busters--clerks and floorwalkers mostly,'
+and he wiped his moustache. 'It was just the same with the Liverpool
+Buckjumpers, but they were stevedores. Let's see--they were a last-century
+draft, weren't they? They did well after nine months. _You_ know 'em, Van
+Zyl? You didn't get much change out of 'em at Pootfontein?'
+
+"'No,' says Van Zyl. 'At Pootfontein I lost my son Andries.'
+
+"'I beg your pardon, Commandant,' says the General; and the rest of the
+crowd sort of cooed over Adrian.
+
+"'Excoose,' says Adrian. 'It was all right. They were good men those, but
+it is just what I say. Some are so dam good we want to hands-up, and some
+are so dam bad, we say, "Take the Vierkleur into Cape Town." It is not
+upright of you, Generaal. It is not upright of you at all. I do not think
+you ever wish this war to finish.'
+
+"'It's a first-class dress-parade for Armageddon,' says the General. 'With
+luck, we ought to run half a million men through the mill. Why, we might
+even be able to give our Native Army a look in. Oh, not here, of course,
+Adrian, but down in the Colony--say a camp-of-exercise at Worcester. You
+mustn't be prejudiced, Adrian. I've commanded a district in India, and I
+give you my word the native troops are splendid men.'
+
+"'Oh, I should not mind them at Worcester,' says Adrian. 'I would sell you
+forage for them at Worcester--yes, and Paarl and Stellenbosch; but
+Almighty!' he says, 'must I stay with Cronje till you have taught half a
+million of these stupid boys to ride? I shall be an old man.'
+
+"Well, Sir, then and there they began arguing whether St. Helena would
+suit Adrian's health as well as some other places they knew about, and
+fixing up letters of introduction to Dukes and Lords of their
+acquaintance, so's Van Zyl should be well looked after. We own a fair-
+sized block of real estate--America does--but it made me sickish to hear
+this crowd fluttering round the Atlas (oh yes, they had an Atlas), and
+choosing stray continents for Adrian to drink his coffee in. The old man
+allowed he didn't want to roost with Cronje, because one of Cronje's kin
+had jumped one of his farms after Paardeberg. I forget the rights of the
+case, but it was interesting. They decided on a place called Umballa in
+India, because there was a first-class doctor there.
+
+"So Adrian was fixed to drink the King and Foxhunting, and study up the
+Native Army in India (I'd like to see 'em myself), till the British
+General had taught the male white citizens of Great Britain how to ride.
+Don't misunderstand me, Sir. I loved that General. After ten minutes I
+loved him, and I wanted to laugh at him; but at the same time, sitting
+there and hearing him talk about the centuries, I tell you, Sir, it scared
+me. It scared me cold! He admitted everything--he acknowledged the corn
+before you spoke--he was more pleased to hear that his men had been used
+to wipe the geldt with than I was when I knocked out Tom Reed's two lead-
+horses--and he sat back and blew smoke through his nose and matured his
+men like cigars and--he talked of the everlastin' centuries!
+
+"I went to bed nearer nervous prostration than I'd come in a long time.
+Next morning me and Captain Mankeltow fixed up what his shrapnel had left
+of my Zigler for transport to the railroad. She went in on her own wheels,
+and I stencilled her 'Royal Artillery Mess, Woolwich,' on the muzzle, and
+he said he'd be grateful if I'd take charge of her to Cape Town, and hand
+her over to a man in the Ordnance there. 'How are you fixed financially?
+You'll need some money on the way home,' he says at last.
+
+"'For one thing, Cap,' I said, 'I'm not a poor man, and for another I'm
+not going home. I am the captive of your bow and spear. I decline to
+resign office.'
+
+"'Skittles!' he says (that was a great word of his), 'you'll take parole,
+and go back to America and invent another Zigler, a trifle heavier in the
+working parts--I would. We've got more prisoners than we know what to do
+with as it is,' he says. 'You'll only be an additional expense to me as a
+taxpayer. Think of Schedule D,' he says, 'and take parole.'
+
+"'I don't know anything about your tariffs,' I said, 'but when I get to
+Cape Town I write home for money, and I turn in every cent my board'll
+cost your country to any ten-century-old department that's been ordained
+to take it since William the Conqueror came along.'
+
+"'But, confound you for a thick-headed mule,' he says, 'this war ain't any
+more than just started! Do you mean to tell me you're going to play
+prisoner till it's over?'
+
+"'That's about the size of it,' I says, 'if an Englishman and an American
+could ever understand each other.'
+
+"'But, in Heaven's Holy Name, why?' he says, sitting down of a heap on an
+anthill.
+
+"'Well, Cap,' I says, 'I don't pretend to follow your ways of thought, and
+I can't see why you abuse your position to persecute a poor prisoner o'
+war on _his!_'
+
+"'My dear fellow,' he began, throwing up his hands and blushing, 'I'll
+apologise.'
+
+"'But if you insist,' I says, 'there are just one and a half things in
+this world I can't do. The odd half don't matter here; but taking parole,
+and going home, and being interviewed by the boys, and giving lectures on
+my single-handed campaign against the hereditary enemies of my beloved
+country happens to be the one. We'll let it go at that, Cap.'
+
+"'But it'll bore you to death,' he says. The British are a heap more
+afraid of what they call being bored than of dying, I've noticed.
+
+"'I'll survive,' I says, 'I ain't British. I can think,' I says.
+
+"'By God,' he says, coming up to me, and extending the right hand of
+fellowship, 'you ought to be English, Zigler!'
+
+"It's no good getting mad at a compliment like that. The English all do
+it. They're a crazy breed. When they don't know you they freeze up
+tighter'n the St. Lawrence. When they _do_, they go out like an ice-jam in
+April. Up till we prisoners left--four days--my Captain Mankeltow told me
+pretty much all about himself there was; his mother and sisters, and his
+bad brother that was a trooper in some Colonial corps, and how his father
+didn't get on with him, and--well, everything, as I've said. They're
+undomesticated, the British, compared with us. They talk about their own
+family affairs as if they belonged to someone else. 'Taint as if they
+hadn't any shame, but it sounds like it. I guess they talk out loud what
+we think, and we talk out loud what they think.
+
+"I liked my Captain Mankeltow. I liked him as well as any man I'd ever
+struck. He was white. He gave me his silver drinking-flask, and I gave him
+the formula of my Laughtite. That's a hundred and fifty thousand dollars
+in his vest-pocket, on the lowest count, if he has the knowledge to use
+it. No, I didn't tell him the money-value. He was English. He'd send his
+valet to find out.
+
+"Well, me and Adrian and a crowd of dam Dutchmen was sent down the road to
+Cape Town in first-class carriages under escort. (What did I think of your
+enlisted men? They are largely different from ours, Sir: very largely.) As
+I was saying, we slid down south, with Adrian looking out of the car-
+window and crying. Dutchmen cry mighty easy for a breed that fights as
+they do; but I never understood how a Dutchman could curse till we crossed
+into the Orange Free State Colony, and he lifted up his hand and cursed
+Steyn for a solid ten minutes. Then we got into the Colony, and the rebs--
+ministers mostly and schoolmasters--came round the cars with fruit and
+sympathy and texts. Van Zyl talked to 'em in Dutch, and one man, a big
+red-bearded minister, at Beaufort West, I remember, he jest wilted on the
+platform.
+
+"'Keep your prayers for yourself,' says Van Zyl, throwing back a bunch of
+grapes. 'You'll need 'em, and you'll need the fruit too, when the war
+comes down here. _You_ done it,' he says. 'You and your picayune Church
+that's deader than Cronje's dead horses! What sort of a God have you been
+unloading on us, you black _aas vogels_? The British came, and we beat
+'em,' he says, 'and you sat still and prayed. The British beat us, and you
+sat still,' he says. 'You told us to hang on, and we hung on, and our
+farms was burned, and you sat still--you and your God. See here,' he says,
+'I shot my Bible full of bullets after Bloemfontein went, and you and God
+didn't say anything. Take it and pray over it before we Federals help the
+British to knock hell out of you rebels.'
+
+"Then I hauled him back into the car. I judged he'd had a fit. But life's
+curious--and sudden--and mixed. I hadn't any more use for a reb than Van
+Zyl, and I knew something of the lies they'd fed us up with from the
+Colony for a year and more. I told the minister to pull his freight out of
+that, and went on with my lunch, when another man come along and shook
+hands with Van Zyl. He'd known him at close range in the Kimberley seige
+and before. Van Zyl was well seen by his neighbours, I judge. As soon as
+this other man opened his mouth I said, 'You're Kentucky, ain't you?' 'I
+am,' he says; 'and what may you be?' I told him right off, for I was
+pleased to hear good United States in any man's mouth; but he whipped his
+hands behind him and said, 'I'm not knowing any man that fights for a
+Tammany Dutchman. But I presoom you've been well paid, you dam gun-runnin'
+Yank.'
+
+"Well, Sir, I wasn't looking for that, and it near knocked me over, while
+old man Van Zyl started in to explain.
+
+"'Don't you waste your breath, Mister Van Zyl,' the man says. 'I know this
+breed. The South's full of 'em.' Then he whirls round on me and says,
+'Look at here, you Yank. A little thing like a King's neither here nor
+there, but what _you've_ done,' he says, 'is to go back on the White Man
+in six places at once--two hemispheres and four continents--America,
+England, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa. Don't open your
+head,' he says. 'You know well if you'd been caught at this game in our
+country you'd have been jiggling in the bight of a lariat before you could
+reach for your naturalisation papers. Go on and prosper,' he says, 'and
+you'll fetch up by fighting for niggers, as the North did.' And he threw
+me half-a-crown--English money.
+
+"Sir, I do not regard the proposition in that light, but I guess I must
+have been somewhat shook by the explosion. They told me at Cape Town one
+rib was driven in on to my lungs. I am not adducing this as an excuse, but
+the cold God's truth of the matter is--the money on the floor did it.... I
+give up and cried. Put my head down and cried.
+
+"I dream about this still sometimes. He didn't know the circumstances, but
+I dream about it. And it's Hell!
+
+"How do you regard the proposition--as a Brother? If you'd invented your
+own gun, and spent fifty-seven thousand dollars on her--and had paid your
+own expenses from the word 'go'? An American citizen has a right to choose
+his own side in an unpleasantness, and Van Zyl wasn't any Krugerite ...
+and I'd risked my hide at my own expense. I got that man's address from
+Van Zyl; he was a mining man at Kimberley, and I wrote him the facts. But
+he never answered. Guess he thought I lied.... Damned Southern rebel!
+
+"Oh, say. Did I tell you my Captain gave me a letter to an English Lord in
+Cape Town, and he fixed things so's I could lie up a piece in his house? I
+was pretty sick, and threw up some blood from where the rib had gouged
+into the lung--here. This Lord was a crank on guns, and he took charge of
+the Zigler. He had his knife into the British system as much as any
+American. He said he wanted revolution, and not reform, in your army. He
+said the British soldier had failed in every point except courage. He said
+England needed a Monroe Doctrine worse than America--a new doctrine,
+barring out all the Continent, and strictly devoting herself to developing
+her own Colonies. He said he'd abolish half the Foreign Office, and take
+all the old hereditary families clean out of it, because, he said, they
+was expressly trained to fool around with continental diplomats, and to
+despise the Colonies. His own family wasn't more than six hundred years
+old. He was a very brainy man, and a good citizen. We talked politics and
+inventions together when my lung let up on me.
+
+"Did he know my General? Yes. He knew 'em all. Called 'em Teddie and
+Gussie and Willie. They was all of the very best, and all his dearest
+friends; but he told me confidentially they was none of 'em fit to command
+a column in the field. He said they were too fond of advertising. Generals
+don't seem very different from actors or doctors or--yes, Sir--inventors.
+
+"He fixed things for me lovelily at Simons-Town. Had the biggest sort of
+pull--even for a Lord. At first they treated me as a harmless lunatic; but
+after a while I got 'em to let me keep some of their books. If I was left
+alone in the world with the British system of bookkeeping, I'd reconstruct
+the whole British Empire--beginning with the Army. Yes, I'm one of their
+most trusted accountants, and I'm paid for it. As much as a dollar a day.
+I keep that. I've earned it, and I deduct it from the cost of my board.
+When the war's over I'm going to pay up the balance to the British
+Government. Yes, Sir, that's how I regard the proposition.
+
+"Adrian? Oh, he left for Umballa four months back. He told me he was going
+to apply to join the National Scouts if the war didn't end in a year.
+'Tisn't in nature for one Dutchman to shoot another, but if Adrian ever
+meets up with Steyn there'll be an exception to the rule. Ye--es, when the
+war's over it'll take some of the British Army to protect Steyn from his
+fellow-patriots. But the war won't be over yet awhile. He that believeth
+don't hurry, as Isaiah says. The ministers and the school-teachers and the
+rebs'll have a war all to themselves long after the north is quiet.
+
+"I'm pleased with this country--it's big. Not so many folk on the ground
+as in America. There's a boom coming sure. I've talked it over with
+Adrian, and I guess I shall buy a farm somewhere near Bloemfontein and
+start in cattle-raising. It's big and peaceful--a ten-thousand-acre farm.
+I could go on inventing there, too. I'll sell my Zigler, I guess. I'll
+offer the patent rights to the British Government; and if they do the
+'reelly-now-how-interesting' act over her, I'll turn her over to Captain
+Mankeltow and his friend the Lord. They'll pretty quick find some Gussie,
+or Teddie, or Algie who can get her accepted in the proper quarters. I'm
+beginning to know my English.
+
+"And now I'll go in swimming, and read the papers after lunch. I haven't
+had such a good time since Willie died." He pulled the blue shirt over his
+head as the bathers returned to their piles of clothing, and, speaking
+through the folds, added:
+
+"But if you want to realise your assets, you should lease the whole
+proposition to America for ninety-nine years."
+
+
+
+
+THE BONDS OF DISCIPLINE
+
+POSEIDON'S LAW
+
+  When the robust and brass-bound man commissioned first for sea
+  His fragile raft, Poseidon laughed, and, "Mariner," said he,
+  "Behold, a Law immutable I lay on thee and thine,
+  That never shall ye act or tell a falsehood at my shrine.
+
+  "Let Zeus adjudge your landward kin, whose votive meal and salt
+  At easy-cheated altars win oblivion for the fault,
+  But ye the unhoodwinked waves shall test--the immediate gulfs condemn--
+  Unless ye owe the Fates a jest, be slow to jest with them.
+
+  "Ye shall not clear by Greekly speech, nor cozen from your path
+  The twinkling shoal, the leeward beach, and Hadria's white-lipped wrath;
+  Nor tempt with painted cloth for wood my fraud-avenging hosts;
+  Nor make at all or all make good your bulwarks and your boasts.
+
+  "Now and henceforward serve unshod through wet and wakeful shifts,
+  A present and oppressive God, but take, to aid, my gifts--
+  The wide and windward-opened eye, the large and lavish hand,
+  The soul that cannot tell a lie--except upon the land!"
+
+  In dromond and in catafract--wet, wakeful, windward-eyed--
+  He kept Poseidon's Law intact (his ship and freight beside),
+  But, once discharged the dromond's hold, the bireme beached once more,
+  Splendaciously mendacious rolled the brass-bound man ashore.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+  The thranite now and thalamite are pressures low and high,
+  And where three hundred blades bit white the twin-propellers ply:
+  The God that hailed, the keel that sailed, are changed beyond recall,
+  But the robust and brass-bound man he is not changed at all!
+
+  From Punt returned, from Phormio's Fleet, from Javan and Gadire,
+  He strongly occupies the seat about the tavern fire,
+  And, moist with much Falernian or smoked Massilian juice,
+  Revenges there the brass-bound man his long-enforced truce!
+
+
+THE BONDS OF DISCIPLINE
+
+As literature, it is beneath contempt. It concerns the endurance,
+armament, turning-circle, and inner gear of every ship in the British
+Navy--the  whole embellished with profile plates. The Teuton approaches
+the matter with pagan thoroughness; the Muscovite runs him close; but the
+Gaul, ever an artist, breaks enclosure to study the morale, at the present
+day, of the British sailorman.
+
+In this, I conceive, he is from time to time aided by the zealous amateur,
+though I find very little in his dispositions to show that he relies on
+that amateur's hard-won information. There exists--unlike some other
+publication, it is not bound in lead boards--a work by one "M. de C.,"
+based on the absolutely unadorned performances of one of our well-known
+_Acolyte_ type of cruisers. It contains nothing that did not happen. It
+covers a period of two days; runs to twenty-seven pages of large type
+exclusive of appendices; and carries as many exclamation points as the
+average Dumas novel.
+
+I read it with care, from the adorably finished prologue--it is the
+disgrace of our Navy that we cannot produce a commissioned officer capable
+of writing one page of lyric prose--to the eloquent, the joyful, the
+impassioned end; and my first notion was that I had been cheated. In this
+sort of book-collecting you will see how entirely the bibliophile lies at
+the mercy of his agent.
+
+"M. de C.," I read, opened his campaign by stowing away in one of her
+boats what time H.M.S. _Archimandrite_ lay off Funchal. "M. de C." was,
+always on behalf of his country, a Madeira Portuguese fleeing from the
+conscription. They discovered him eighty miles at sea and bade him assist
+the cook. So far this seemed fairly reasonable. Next day, thanks to his
+histrionic powers and his ingratiating address, he was promoted to the
+rank of "supernumerary captain's servant"--a "post which," I give his
+words, "I flatter myself, was created for me alone, and furnished me with
+opportunities unequalled for a task in which one word malapropos would
+have been my destruction."
+
+From this point onward, earth and water between them held no marvels like
+to those "M. de C." had "envisaged"--if I translate him correctly. It
+became clear to me that "M. de C." was either a pyramidal liar, or...
+
+I was not acquainted with any officer, seaman, or marine in the
+_Archimandrite_; but instinct told me I could not go far wrong if I took a
+third-class ticket to Plymouth.
+
+I gathered information on the way from a leading stoker, two seaman-
+gunners, and an odd hand in a torpedo factory. They courteously set my
+feet on the right path, and that led me through the alleys of Devonport to
+a public-house not fifty yards from the water. We drank with the
+proprietor, a huge, yellowish man called Tom Wessels; and when my guides
+had departed, I asked if he could produce any warrant or petty officer of
+the _Archimandrite_.
+
+"The _Bedlamite_, d'you mean--'er last commission, when they all went
+crazy?"
+
+"Shouldn't wonder," I replied. "Fetch me a sample and I'll see."
+
+"You'll excuse me, o' course, but--what d'you want 'im _for?_"
+
+"I want to make him drunk. I want to make you drunk--if you like. I want
+to make him drunk here."
+
+"Spoke very 'andsome. I'll do what I can." He went out towards the water
+that lapped at the foot of the street. I gathered from the pot-boy that he
+was a person of influence beyond Admirals.
+
+In a few minutes I heard the noise of an advancing crowd, and the voice of
+Mr. Wessels.
+
+"'E only wants to make you drunk at 'is expense. Dessay 'e'll stand you
+all a drink. Come up an' look at 'im. 'E don't bite."
+
+A square man, with remarkable eyes, entered at the head of six large
+bluejackets. Behind them gathered a contingent of hopeful free-drinkers.
+
+"'E's the only one I could get. Transferred to the _Postulant_ six months
+back. I found 'im quite accidental." Mr. Wessels beamed.
+
+"I'm in charge o' the cutter. Our wardroom is dinin' on the beach _en
+masse_. They won't be home till mornin'," said the square man with the
+remarkable eyes.  "Are you an _Archimandrite?_" I demanded.
+
+"That's me. I was, as you might say."
+
+"Hold on. I'm a _Archimandrite._" A Red Marine with moist eyes tried to
+climb on the table. "Was you lookin' for a _Bedlamite?_ I've--I've been
+invalided, an' what with that, an' visitin' my family 'ome at Lewes,
+per'aps I've come late. 'Ave I?"
+
+"You've 'ad all that's good for you," said Tom Wessels, as the Red Marine
+sat cross-legged on the floor.
+
+"There are those 'oo haven't 'ad a thing yet!" cried a voice by the door.
+
+"I will take this _Archimandrite_" I said, "and this Marine. Will you
+please give the boat's crew a drink now, and another in half an hour if--
+if Mr.----"
+
+"Pyecroft," said the square man. "Emanuel Pyecroft, second-class petty-
+officer."
+
+"--Mr. Pyecroft doesn't object?"
+
+"He don't. Clear out. Goldin', you picket the hill by yourself, throwin'
+out a skirmishin'-line in ample time to let me know when Number One's
+comin' down from his vittles."
+
+The crowd dissolved. We passed into the quiet of the inner bar, the Red
+Marine zealously leading the way.
+
+"And what do you drink, Mr. Pyecroft?" I said.
+
+"Only water. Warm water, with a little whisky an' sugar an' per'aps a
+lemon."
+
+"Mine's beer," said the Marine. "It always was."
+
+"Look 'ere, Glass. You take an' go to sleep. The picket'll be comin' for
+you in a little time, an' per'aps you'll 'ave slep' it off by then. What's
+your ship, now?" said Mr. Wessels.
+
+"The Ship o' State--most important?" said the Red Marine magnificently,
+and shut his eyes.
+
+"That's right," said Mr. Pyecroft. "He's safest where he is. An' now--
+here's santy to us all!--what d'you want o' me?"
+
+"I want to read you something."
+
+"Tracts, again!" said the Marine, never opening his eyes. "Well. I'm
+game.... A little more 'ead to it, miss, please."
+
+"He thinks 'e's drinkin'--lucky beggar!" said Mr. Pyecroft. "I'm agreeable
+to be read to. 'Twon't alter my convictions. I may as well tell you
+beforehand I'm a Plymouth Brother."
+
+He composed his face with the air of one in the dentist's chair, and I
+began at the third page of "M. de C."
+
+"'_At the moment of asphyxiation, for I had hidden myself under the boat's
+cover, I heard footsteps upon the superstructure and coughed with
+empress_'--coughed loudly, Mr. Pyecroft. '_By this time I judged the
+vessel to be sufficiently far from land. A number of sailors extricated me
+amid language appropriate to their national brutality. I responded that I
+named myself Antonio, and that I sought to save myself from the Portuguese
+conscription_.'
+
+"Ho!" said Mr. Pyecroft, and the fashion of his countenance changed. Then
+pensively: "Ther beggar! What might you have in your hand there?"
+
+"It's the story of Antonio--a stowaway in the _Archimandrite's_ cutter. A
+French spy when he's at home, I fancy. What do _you_ know about it?"
+
+"An' I thought it was tracts! An' yet some'ow I didn't." Mr. Pyecroft
+nodded his head wonderingly. "Our old man was quite right--so was 'Op--so
+was I. 'Ere, Glass!" He kicked the Marine. "Here's our Antonio 'as written
+a impromptu book! He _was_ a spy all right."
+
+The Red Marine turned slightly, speaking with the awful precision of the
+half-drunk. "'As 'e got any-thin' in about my 'orrible death an'
+execution? Ex_cuse_ me, but if I open my eyes, I shan't be well. That's
+where I'm different from _all_ other men. Ahem!"
+
+"What about Glass's execution?" demanded Pyecroft.
+
+"The book's in French," I replied.
+
+"Then it's no good to me."
+
+"Precisely. Now I want you to tell your story just as it happened. I'll
+check it by this book. Take a cigar. I know about his being dragged out of
+the cutter. What I want to know is what was the meaning of all the other
+things, because they're unusual."
+
+"They were," said Mr. Pyecroft with emphasis. "Lookin' back on it as I set
+here more an' more I see what an 'ighly unusual affair it was. But it
+happened. It transpired in the _Archimandrite_--the ship you can trust...
+Antonio! Ther beggar!"
+
+"Take your time, Mr. Pyecroft."
+
+In a few moments we came to it thus--
+
+"The old man was displeased. I don't deny he was quite a little
+displeased. With the mail-boats trottin' into Madeira every twenty
+minutes, he didn't see why a lop-eared Portugee had to take liberties with
+a man-o'-war's first cutter. Any'ow, we couldn't turn ship round for him.
+We drew him out and took him out to Number One. 'Drown 'im,' 'e says.
+'Drown 'im before 'e dirties my fine new decks.' But our owner was
+tenderhearted. 'Take him to the galley,' 'e says. 'Boil 'im! Skin 'im!
+Cook 'im! Cut 'is bloomin' hair? Take 'is bloomin' number! We'll have him
+executed at Ascension.'
+
+"Retallick, our chief cook, an' a Carth'lic, was the on'y one any way near
+grateful; bein' short-'anded in the galley. He annexes the blighter by the
+left ear an' right foot an' sets him to work peelin' potatoes. So then,
+this Antonio that was avoidin' the conscription--"
+
+"_Sub_scription, you pink-eyed matlow!" said the Marine, with the face of
+a stone Buddha, and whimpered sadly: "Pye don't see any fun in it at all."
+
+"_Con_scription--come to his illegitimate sphere in Her Majesty's Navy,
+an' it was just then that Old 'Op, our Yeoman of Signals, an' a fastidious
+joker, made remarks to me about 'is hands.
+
+"'Those 'ands,' says 'Op, 'properly considered, never done a day's honest
+labour in their life. Tell me those hands belong to a blighted Portugee
+manual labourist and I won't call you a liar, but I'll say you an' the
+Admiralty are pretty much unique in your statements.' 'Op was always a
+fastidious joker--in his language as much as anything else. He pursued 'is
+investigations with the eye of an 'awk outside the galley. He knew better
+than to advance line-head against Retallick, so he attacked _ong eshlong_,
+speakin' his remarks as much as possible into the breech of the starboard
+four point seven, an' 'ummin' to 'imself. Our chief cook 'ated 'ummin'.
+'What's the matter of your bowels?' he says at last, fistin' out the mess-
+pork agitated like. "'Don't mind me,' says 'Op. 'I'm only a mildewed
+buntin'-tosser,' 'e says: 'but speakin' for my mess, I do hope,' 'e says,
+'you ain't goin' to boil your Portugee friend's boots along o' that pork
+you're smellin' so gay!'
+
+"'Boots! Boots! Boots!' says Retallick, an' he run round like a earwig in
+a alder-stalk. 'Boots in the galley,' 'e says. 'Cook's mate, cast out an'
+abolish this cutter-cuddlin' abori_gine's_ boots!'"
+
+"They was hove overboard in quick time, an' that was what 'Op was lyin' to
+for. As subsequently transpired.
+
+"'Fine Arab arch to that cutter-cuddler's hinstep,' he says to me. 'Run
+your eye over it, Pye,' 'e says. 'Nails all present an' correct,' 'e says.
+'Bunion on the little toe, too,' 'e says; 'which comes from wearin' a
+tight boot. What do _you_ think?'
+
+"'Dook in trouble, per'aps,' I says. 'He ain't got the hang of spud-
+skinnin'.' No more he 'ad. 'E was simply cannibalisin' 'em.
+
+"'I want to know what 'e 'as got the 'ang of,' says 'Op, obstructed-like.
+'Watch 'im,' 'e says. 'These shoulders were foreign-drilled somewhere.'
+
+'"When it comes to "Down 'ammicks!" which is our naval way o' goin' to
+bye-bye, I took particular trouble over Antonio, 'oo had 'is 'ammick 'ove
+at 'im with general instructions to sling it an' be sugared. In the
+ensuin' melly I pioneered him to the after-'atch, which is a orifice
+communicatin' with the after-flat an' similar suites of apartments. He
+havin' navigated at three fifths power immejit ahead o' me, _I_ wasn't
+goin' to volunteer any assistance, nor he didn't need it.'
+
+"'Mong Jew!' says 'e, sniffin' round. An' twice more 'Mong Jew!'--which is
+pure French. Then he slings 'is 'ammick, nips in, an' coils down. 'Not bad
+for a Portugee conscript,' I says to myself, casts off the tow, abandons
+him, and reports to 'Op.
+
+"About three minutes later I'm over'auled by our sub-lootenant, navigatin'
+under forced draught, with his bearin's 'eated. 'E had the temerity to say
+I'd instructed our Antonio to sling his carcass in the alleyway, an' 'e
+was peevish about it. O' course, I prevaricated like 'ell. You get to do
+that in the service. Nevertheless, to oblige Mr. Ducane, I went an'
+readjusted Antonio. You may not 'ave ascertained that there are two ways
+o' comin' out of an 'ammick when it's cut down. Antonio came out t'other
+way--slidin' 'andsome to his feet. That showed me two things. First, 'e
+had been in an 'ammick before, an' next, he hadn't been asleep. Then I
+reproached 'im for goin' to bed where 'e'd been told to go, instead o'
+standin' by till some one gave him entirely contradictory orders. Which is
+the essence o' naval discipline.
+
+"In the middle o' this argument the gunner protrudes his ram-bow from 'is
+cabin, an' brings it all to an 'urried conclusion with some remarks
+suitable to 'is piebald warrant-rank. Navigatin' thence under easy steam,
+an' leavin' Antonio to re-sling his little foreign self, my large flat
+foot comes in detonatin' contact with a small objec' on the deck. Not
+'altin' for the obstacle, nor changin' step, I shuffles it along under the
+ball of the big toe to the foot o' the hatchway, when, lightly stoopin', I
+catch it in my right hand and continue my evolutions in rapid time till I
+eventuates under 'Op's lee.
+
+"It was a small moroccer-bound pocket-book, full of indelible pencil-
+writin'--in French, for I could plainly discern the _doodeladays_, which
+is about as far as my education runs.
+
+"'Op fists it open and peruses. 'E'd known an 'arf-caste Frenchwoman
+pretty intricate before he was married; when he was trained man in a
+stinkin' gunboat up the Saigon River. He understood a lot o' French--
+domestic brands chiefly--the kind that isn't in print.
+
+"'Pye,' he says to me, 'you're a tattician o' no mean value. I am a trifle
+shady about the precise bearin' an' import' o' this beggar's private log
+here,' 'e says, 'but it's evidently a case for the owner. You'll 'ave your
+share o' the credit,' 'e says.
+
+"'Nay, nay, Pauline,' I says, 'You don't catch Emanuel Pyecroft mine-
+droppin' under any post-captain's bows,' I says, 'in search of honour,' I
+says. 'I've been there oft.'
+
+"'Well, if you must, you must,' 'e says, takin' me up quick. 'But I'll
+speak a good word for you, Pye.'
+
+"'You'll shut your mouth, 'Op,' I says, 'or you an' me'll part brass-rags.
+The owner has his duties, an' I have mine. We will keep station,' I says,
+'nor seek to deviate.'
+
+"'Deviate to blazes!' says 'Op. 'I'm goin' to deviate to the owner's
+comfortable cabin direct.' So he deviated."
+
+Mr. Pyecroft leaned forward and dealt the Marine a large pattern Navy
+kick. "'Ere, Glass! You was sentry when 'Op went to the old man--the first
+time, with Antonio's washin'-book. Tell us what transpired. You're sober.
+You don't know how sober you are!"
+
+The Marine cautiously raised his head a few inches. As Mr. Pyecroft said,
+he was sober--after some R.M.L.I. fashion of his own devising. "'Op bounds
+in like a startled anteloper, carryin' 'is signal-slate at the ready. The
+old man was settin' down to 'is bountiful platter--not like you an' me,
+without anythin' more in sight for an 'ole night an' 'arf a day. Talkin'
+about food--"
+
+"No! No! No!" cried Pyecroft, kicking again. "What about 'Op?" I thought
+the Marine's ribs would have snapped, but he merely hiccuped.
+
+"Oh, 'im! 'E 'ad it written all down on 'is little slate--I think--an' 'e
+shoves it under the old man's nose. 'Shut the door,' says 'Op. 'For
+'Eavin's sake shut the cabin door!' Then the old man must ha' said
+somethin' 'bout irons. 'I'll put 'em on, Sir, in your very presence,' says
+'Op, 'only 'ear my prayer,' or--words to that 'fect.... It was jus' the
+same with me when I called our Sergeant a bladder-bellied, lard-'eaded,
+perspirin' pension-cheater. They on'y put on the charge-sheet 'words to
+that effect,' Spoiled the 'ole 'fect."
+
+"'Op! 'Op! 'Op! What about 'Op?" thundered Pyecroft.
+
+"'Op? Oh, shame thing. Words t' that 'fect. Door shut. Nushin' more
+transphired till 'Op comes out--nose exshtreme angle plungin' fire or--or
+words 'that effect. Proud's parrot. 'Oh, you prou' old parrot,' I says."
+
+Mr. Glass seemed to slumber again.
+
+"Lord! How a little moisture disintegrates, don't it? When we had ship's
+theatricals off Vigo, Glass 'ere played Dick Deadeye to the moral, though
+of course the lower deck wasn't pleased to see a leatherneck interpretin'
+a strictly maritime part, as you might say. It's only his repartees, which
+'e can't contain, that conquers him. Shall I resume my narrative?"
+
+Another drink was brought on this hint, and Mr. Pyecroft resumed.
+
+"The essence o' strategy bein' forethought, the essence o' tattics is
+surprise. Per'aps you didn't know that? My forethought 'avin' secured the
+initial advantage in attack, it remained for the old man to ladle out the
+surprise-packets. 'Eavens! What surprises! That night he dines with the
+wardroom, bein' of the kind--I've told you as we were a 'appy ship?--that
+likes it, and the wardroom liked it too. This ain't common in the service.
+They had up the new Madeira--awful undisciplined stuff which gives you a
+cordite mouth next morning. They told the mess-men to navigate towards the
+extreme an' remote 'orizon, an' they abrogated the sentry about fifteen
+paces out of earshot. Then they had in the Gunner, the Bo'sun, an' the
+Carpenter, an' stood them large round drinks. It all come out later--
+wardroom joints bein' lower-deck hash, as the sayin' is--that our Number
+One stuck to it that 'e couldn't trust the ship for the job. The old man
+swore 'e could, 'avin' commanded 'er over two years. He was right. There
+wasn't a ship, I don't care in what fleet, could come near the
+_Archimandrites_ when we give our mind to a thing. We held the cruiser
+big-gun records, the sailing-cutter (fancy-rig) championship, an' the
+challenge-cup row round the fleet. We 'ad the best nigger-minstrels, the
+best football an' cricket teams, an' the best squee-jee band of anything
+that ever pushed in front of a brace o' screws. An' _yet_ our Number One
+mistrusted us! 'E said we'd be a floatin' hell in a week, an' it 'ud take
+the rest o' the commission to stop our way. They was arguin' it in the
+wardroom when the bridge reports a light three points off the port bow. We
+overtakes her, switches on our search-light, an' she discloses herself as
+a collier o' no mean reputation, makin' about seven knots on 'er lawful
+occasions--to the Cape most like.
+
+"Then the owner--so we 'eard in good time--broke the boom, springin' all
+mines together at close interval.
+
+"'Look 'ere, my jokers,' 'e says (I'm givin' the grist of 'is arguments,
+remember), 'Number One says we can't enlighten this cutter-cuddlin Gaulish
+lootenant on the manners an' customs o' the Navy without makin' the ship a
+market-garden. There's a lot in that,' 'e says, 'specially if we kept it
+up lavish, till we reached Ascension. But,' 'e says, 'the appearance o'
+this strange sail has put a totally new aspect on the game. We can run to
+just one day's amusement for our friend, or else what's the good o'
+discipline? An' then we can turn 'im over to our presumably short-'anded
+fellow-subject in the small-coal line out yonder. He'll be pleased,' says
+the old man, 'an' so will Antonio. M'rover,' he says to Number One, 'I'll
+lay you a dozen o' liquorice an' ink'--it must ha' been that new tawny
+port--'that I've got a ship I can trust--for one day,' 'e says.
+'Wherefore,' he says, 'will you have the extreme goodness to reduce speed
+as requisite for keepin' a proper distance behind this providential tramp
+till further orders?' Now, that's what I call tattics.
+
+"The other manoeuvres developed next day, strictly in accordance with the
+plans as laid down in the wardroom, where they sat long an' steady. 'Op
+whispers to me that Antonio was a Number One spy when 'e was in
+commission, and a French lootenant when 'e was paid off, so I navigated at
+three 'undred and ninety six revolutions to the galley, never 'avin'
+kicked a lootenant up to date. I may as well say that I did not manoeuvre
+against 'im as a Frenchman, because I like Frenchmen, but stric'ly on 'is
+rank an' ratin' in 'is own navy. I inquired after 'is health from
+Retallick.
+
+"'Don't ask me,' 'e says, sneerin' be'ind his silver spectacles. ''E's
+promoted to be captain's second supernumerary servant, to be dressed and
+addressed as such. If 'e does 'is dooties same as he skinned the spuds,
+_I_ ain't for changin' with the old man.'
+
+"In the balmy dawnin' it was given out, all among the 'olystones, by our
+sub-lootenant, who was a three-way-discharge devil, that all orders after
+eight bells was to be executed in inverse ration to the cube o' the
+velocity. 'The reg'lar routine,' he says, 'was arrogated for reasons o'
+state an' policy, an' any flat-foot who presumed to exhibit surprise,
+annoyance, or amusement, would be slightly but firmly reproached.' Then
+the Gunner mops up a heathenish large detail for some hanky-panky in the
+magazines, an' led 'em off along with our Gunnery Jack, which is to say,
+our Gunnery Lootenant.
+
+"That put us on the _viva voce_--particularly when we understood how the
+owner was navigatin' abroad in his sword-belt trustin' us like brothers.
+We shifts into the dress o' the day, an' we musters _an'_ we prays _ong
+reggle_, an' we carries on anticipatory to bafflin' Antonio.
+
+"Then our Sergeant of Marines come to me wringin' his 'ands an' weepin'.
+'E'd been talkin' to the sub-lootenant, an' it looked like as if his
+upper-works were collapsin'.
+
+"'I want a guarantee,' 'e says, wringin' 'is 'ands like this. '_I_ 'aven't
+'ad sunstroke slave-dhowin' in Tajurrah Bay, an' been compelled to live on
+quinine an' chlorodyne ever since. _I_ don't get the horrors off glasses
+o' brown sherry.'
+
+"'What 'ave you got now?' I says.
+
+"'_I_ ain't an officer,' 'e says. '_My_ sword won't be handed back to me
+at the end o' the court-martial on account o' my little weaknesses, an' no
+stain on my character. I'm only a pore beggar of a Red Marine with
+eighteen years' service, an' why for,' says he, wringin' 'is hands like
+this all the time, 'must I chuck away my pension, sub-lootenant or no
+sub-lootenant? Look at 'em,' he says, 'only look at 'em. Marines fallin'
+in for small-arm drill!'
+
+"The leathernecks was layin' aft at the double, an' a more insanitary set
+of accidents I never wish to behold. Most of 'em was in their shirts. They
+had their trousers on, of course--rolled up nearly to the knee, but what I
+mean is belts over shirts. Three or four 'ad _our_ caps, an' them that had
+drawn helmets wore their chin-straps like Portugee earrings. Oh, yes; an'
+three of 'em 'ad only one boot! I knew what our bafflin' tattics was goin'
+to be, but even I was mildly surprised when this gay fantasia of Brazee
+drummers halted under the poop, because of an 'ammick in charge of our
+Navigator, an' a small but 'ighly efficient landin'-party.
+
+"''Ard astern both screws!' says the Navigator. 'Room for the captain's
+'ammick!' The captain's servant--Cockburn 'is name was--had one end, an'
+our newly promoted Antonio, in a blue slop rig, 'ad the other. They slung
+it from the muzzle of the port poop quick-firer thort-ships to a
+stanchion. Then the old man flickered up, smokin' a cigarette, an' brought
+'is stern to an anchor slow an' oriental.
+
+"'What a blessin' it is, Mr. Ducane,' 'e says to our sub-lootenant, 'to be
+out o' sight o' the 'ole pack o' blighted admirals! What's an admiral
+after all?' 'e says. 'Why, 'e's only a post-captain with the pip, Mr.
+Ducane. The drill will now proceed. What O! Antonio, _descendez_ an' get
+me a split.'
+
+"When Antonio came back with the whisky-an'-soda, he was told off to swing
+the 'ammick in slow time, an' that massacritin' small-arm party went on
+with their oratorio. The Sergeant had been kindly excused from
+participating an' he was jumpin' round on the poop-ladder, stretchin' 'is
+leather neck to see the disgustin' exhibition an' cluckin' like a ash-
+hoist. A lot of us went on the fore an' aft bridge an' watched 'em like
+'Listen to the Band in the Park.' All these evolutions, I may as well tell
+you, are highly unusual in the Navy. After ten minutes o' muckin' about,
+Glass 'ere--pity 'e's so drunk!--says that 'e'd had enough exercise for
+'is simple needs an' he wants to go 'ome. Mr. Ducane catches him a
+sanakatowzer of a smite over the 'ead with the flat of his sword. Down
+comes Glass's rifle with language to correspond, and he fiddles with the
+bolt. Up jumps Maclean--'oo was a Gosport 'ighlander--an' lands on Glass's
+neck, thus bringin' him to the deck, fully extended.
+
+"The old man makes a great show o' wakin' up from sweet slumbers. 'Mistah
+Ducane,' he says, 'what is this painful interregnum?' or words to that
+effect. Ducane takes one step to the front, an' salutes: 'Only 'nother
+case of attempted assassination, Sir,' he says.
+
+"'Is that all?' says the old man, while Maclean sits on Glass's collar
+button. 'Take him away,' 'e says, 'he knows the penalty.'"
+
+"Ah! I suppose that is the 'invincible _morgue_ Britannic in the presence
+of brutally provoked mutiny,'" I muttered, as I turned over the pages of
+M. de C.
+
+"So, Glass, 'e was led off kickin' an' squealin', an' hove down the ladder
+into 'is Sergeant's volupshus arms. 'E run Glass forward, an' was all for
+puttin' 'im in irons as a maniac.
+
+"'You refill your waterjacket and cool off!' says Glass, sittin' down
+rather winded. 'The trouble with you is you haven't any imagination.'
+
+"'Haven't I? I've got the remnants of a little poor authority though,' 'e
+says, lookin' pretty vicious.
+
+"'You 'ave?' says Glass. 'Then for pity's sake 'ave some proper feelin'
+too. I'm goin' to be shot this evenin'. You'll take charge o' the firin'-
+party.'
+
+"Some'ow or other, that made the Sergeant froth at the mouth. 'E 'ad no
+more play to his intellects than a spit-kid. 'E just took everything as it
+come. Well, that was about all, I think.... Unless you'd care to have me
+resume my narrative."
+
+We resumed on the old terms, but with rather less hot water. The marine on
+the floor breathed evenly, and Mr. Pyecroft nodded.
+
+"I may have omitted to inform you that our Number One took a general row
+round the situation while the small-arm party was at work, an' o' course
+he supplied the outlines; but the details we coloured in by ourselves.
+These were our tattics to baffle Antonio. It occurs to the Carpenter to
+'ave the steam-cutter down for repairs. 'E gets 'is cheero-party together,
+an' down she comes. You've never seen a steam-cutter let down on the deck,
+'ave you? It's not usual, an' she takes a lot o' humourin'. Thus we 'ave
+the starboard side completely blocked an' the general traffic tricklin'
+over'ead along the fore-an'-aft bridge. Then Chips gets into her an'
+begins balin' out a mess o' small reckonin's on the deck. Simultaneous
+there come up three o' those dirty engine-room objects which we call
+'tiffies,' an' a stoker or two with orders to repair her steamin'-gadgets.
+_They_ get into her an' bale out another young Christmas-treeful of small
+reckonin's--brass mostly. Simultaneous it hits the Pusser that 'e'd better
+serve out mess pork for the poor matlow. These things half shifted
+Retallick, our chief cook, off 'is bed-plate. Yes, you might say they
+broke 'im wide open. 'E wasn't at all used to 'em.
+
+"Number One tells off five or six prime, able-bodied seamen-gunners to the
+pork barrels. You never see pork fisted out of its receptacle, 'ave you?
+Simultaneous, it hits the Gunner that now's the day an' now's the hour for
+a non-continuous class in Maxim instruction. So they all give way
+together, and the general effect was _non plus ultra_. There was the
+cutter's innards spread out like a Fratton pawnbroker's shop; there was
+the 'tiffies' hammerin' in the stern of 'er, an' _they_ ain't antiseptic;
+there was the Maxim class in light skirmishin' order among the pork, an'
+forrard the blacksmith had 'is forge in full blast, makin' 'orse-shoes, I
+suppose. Well, that accounts for the starboard side. The on'y warrant
+officer 'oo hadn't a look in so far was the Bosun. So 'e stated, all out
+of 'is own 'ead, that Chips's reserve o' wood an' timber, which Chips 'ad
+stole at our last refit, needed restowin'. It was on the port booms--a
+young an' healthy forest of it, for Charley Peace wasn't to be named
+'longside o' Chips for burglary.
+
+"'All right,' says our Number One. 'You can 'ave the whole port watch if
+you like. Hell's Hell,' 'e says, 'an when there study to improve.'
+
+"Jarvis was our Bosun's name. He hunted up the 'ole of the port watch by
+hand, as you might say, callin' 'em by name loud an' lovin', which is not
+precisely Navy makee-pigeon. They 'ad that timber-loft off the booms, an'
+they dragged it up and down like so many sweatin' little beavers. But
+Jarvis was jealous o' Chips an' went round the starboard side to envy at
+him.
+
+"'Tain't enough,' 'e says, when he had climbed back. 'Chips 'as got his
+bazaar lookin' like a coal-hulk in a cyclone. We must adop' more drastic
+measures.' Off 'e goes to Number One and communicates with 'im. Number One
+got the old man's leave, on account of our goin' so slow (we were keepin'
+be'ind the tramp), to fit the ship with a full set of patent supernumerary
+sails. Four trysails--yes, you might call 'em trysails--was our Admiralty
+allowance in the un'eard of event of a cruiser breakin' down, but we had
+our awnin's as well. They was all extricated from the various flats an'
+'oles where they was stored, an' at the end o' two hours' hard work Number
+One 'e made out eleven sails o' different sorts and sizes. I don't know
+what exact nature of sail you'd call 'em--pyjama-stun'sles with a touch of
+Sarah's shimmy, per'aps--but the riggin' of 'em an' all the supernumerary
+details, as you might say, bein' carried on through an' over an' between
+the cutter an' the forge an' the pork an' cleanin' guns, an' the Maxim
+class an' the Bosun's calaboose _and_ the paintwork, was sublime. There's
+no other word for it. Sub-lime!
+
+"The old man keeps swimmin' up an' down through it all with the faithful
+Antonio at 'is side, fetchin' him numerous splits. 'E had eight that
+mornin', an' when Antonio was detached to get 'is spy-glass, or his
+gloves, or his lily-white 'andkerchief, the old man man would waste 'em
+down a ventilator. Antonio must ha' learned a lot about our Navy thirst."
+
+"He did."
+
+"Ah! Would you kindly mind turnin' to the precise page indicated an'
+givin' me a _résumé_ of 'is tattics?" said Mr. Pyecroft, drinking deeply.
+"I'd like to know 'ow it looked from 'is side o' the deck."
+
+"How will this do?" I said. "'_Once clear of the land, like Voltaire's
+Habakkuk_------"'
+
+"One o' their new commerce-destroyers, I suppose," Mr. Pyecroft
+interjected.
+
+"'--_each man seemed veritably capable of all--to do according to his
+will. The boats, dismantled and forlorn, are lowered upon the planking.
+One cries "Aid me!" flourishing at the same time the weapons of his
+business. A dozen launch themselves upon him in the orgasm of zeal
+misdirected. He beats them off with the howlings of dogs. He has lost a
+hammer. This ferocious outcry signifies that only. Eight men seek the
+utensil, colliding on the way with some many others which, seated in the
+stern of the boat, tear up and scatter upon the planking the ironwork
+which impedes their brutal efforts. Elsewhere, one detaches from on high
+wood, canvas, iron bolts, coal-dust--what do I know_?'"
+
+"That's where 'e's comin' the bloomin' _onjeuew_. 'E knows a lot, reely."
+
+"'_They descend thundering upon the planking, and the spectacle cannot
+reproduce itself. In my capacity of valet to the captain, whom I have well
+and beautifully plied with drink since the rising of the sun (behold me
+also, Ganymede!) I pass throughout observing, it may be not a little. They
+ask orders. There is none to give them. One sits upon the edge of the
+vessel and chants interminably the lugubrious "Roule Britannia"--to endure
+how lomg_?'"
+
+"That was me! On'y 'twas 'A Life on the Ocean Wave'--which I hate more
+than any stinkin' tune I know, havin' dragged too many nasty little guns
+to it. Yes, Number One told me off to that for ten minutes; an' I ain't
+musical, you might say."
+
+"_'Then come marines, half-dressed, seeking vainly through this "tohu-
+bohu_"' (that's one of his names for the _Archimandrite_, Mr. Pyecroft),
+'_for a place whence they shall not be dislodged. The captain, heavy with
+drink, rolls himself from his hammock. He would have his people fire the
+Maxims. They demand which Maxim. That to him is equal. The breech-lock
+indispensable is not there. They demand it of one who opens a barrel of
+pork, for this Navy feeds at all hours. He refers them to the cook,
+yesterday my master_--'"
+
+"Yes, an' Retallick nearly had a fit. What a truthful an' observin' little
+Antonio we 'ave!"
+
+"'_It is discovered in the hands of a boy who says, and they do not rebuke
+him, that he has found it by hazard_.' I'm afraid I haven't translated
+quite correctly, Mr. Pyecroft, but I've done my best."
+
+"Why, it's beautiful--you ought to be a Frenchman--you ought. You don't
+want anything o' _me_. You've got it all there."
+
+"Yes, but I like your side of it. For instance. Here's a little thing I
+can't quite see the end of. Listen! '_Of the domain which Britannia rules
+by sufferance, my gross captain, knew nothing, and his Navigator, if
+possible, less. From the bestial recriminations and the indeterminate
+chaos of the grand deck, I ascended--always with a whisky-and-soda in my
+hands--to a scene truly grotesque. Behold my captain in plain sea, at
+issue with his Navigator! A crisis of nerves due to the enormous quantity
+of alcohol which he had swallowed up to then, has filled for him the ocean
+with dangers, imaginary and fantastic. Incapable of judgment, menaced by
+the phantasms of his brain inflamed, he envisages islands perhaps of the
+Hesperides beneath his keel--vigias innumerable.'_ I don't know what a
+vigia is, Mr. Pyecroft. _'He creates shoals sad and far-reaching of the
+mid-Atlantic!'_ What was that, now?"
+
+"Oh, I see! That come after dinner, when our Navigator threw 'is cap down
+an' danced on it. Danby was quartermaster. They 'ad a tea-party on the
+bridge. It was the old man's contribution. Does he say anything about the
+leadsmen?"
+
+"Is this it? _'Overborne by his superior's causeless suspicion, the
+Navigator took off the badges of his rank and cast them at the feet of my
+captain and sobbed. A disgusting and maudlin reconciliation followed. The
+argument renewed itself, each grasping the wheel, crapulous'_ (that means
+drunk, I think, Mr. Pyecroft), _'shouting. It appeared that my captain
+would chenaler'_ (I don't know what that means, Mr. Pyecroft) _'to the
+Cape. At the end, he placed a sailor with the sound'_ (that's the lead, I
+think) _'in his hand, garnished with suet.'_ Was it garnished with suet?"
+
+"He put two leadsmen in the chains, o' course! He didn't know that there
+mightn't be shoals there, 'e said. Morgan went an' armed his lead, to
+enter into the spirit o' the thing. They 'eaved it for twenty minutes, but
+there wasn't any suet--only tallow, o' course."
+
+"'_Garnished with suet at two thousand metres of profundity. Decidedly the
+Britannic Navy is well guarded_.' Well, that's all right, Mr. Pyecroft.
+Would you mind telling me anything else of interest that happened?"
+
+"There was a good deal, one way an' another. I'd like to know what this
+Antonio thought of our sails."
+
+"He merely says that '_the engines having broken down, an officer
+extemporised a mournful and useless parody of sails_.' Oh, yes! he says
+that some of them looked like '_bonnets in a needlecase_,' I think."
+
+"Bonnets in a needlecase! They were stun'sles. That shows the beggar's no
+sailor. That trick was really the one thing we did. Pho! I thought he was
+a sailorman, an' 'e hasn't sense enough to see what extemporisin' eleven
+good an' drawin' sails out o' four trys'les an' a few awnin's means. 'E
+must have been drunk!"
+
+"Never mind, Mr. Pyecroft. I want to hear about your target-practice, and
+the execution."
+
+"Oh! We had a special target-practice that afternoon all for Antonio. As I
+told my crew--me bein' captain of the port-bow quick-firer, though I'm a
+torpedo man now--it just showed how you can work your gun under any
+discomforts. A shell--twenty six-inch shells--burstin' inboard couldn't
+'ave begun to make the varicose collection o' tit-bits which we had
+spilled on our deck. It was a lather--a rich, creamy lather!
+
+"We took it very easy--that gun-practice. We did it in a complimentary
+'Jenny-'ave-another-cup-o' tea' style, an' the crew was strictly ordered
+not to rupture 'emselves with unnecessary exertion. This isn't our custom
+in the Navy when we're _in puris naturalibus_, as you might say. But we
+wasn't so then. We was impromptu. An' Antonio was busy fetchin' splits for
+the old man, and the old man was wastin' 'em down the ventilators. There
+must 'ave been four inches in the bilges, I should think--wardroom whisky-
+an'-soda.
+
+"Then I thought I might as well bear a hand as look pretty. So I let my
+_bundoop_ go at fifteen 'undred--sightin' very particular. There was a
+sort of 'appy little belch like--no more, I give you my word--an' the
+shell trundled out maybe fifty feet an' dropped into the deep Atlantic.
+
+"'Government powder, Sir!' sings out our Gunnery Jack to the bridge,
+laughin' horrid sarcastic; an' then, of course, we all laughs, which we
+are not encouraged to do _in puris naturalibus_. Then, of course, I saw
+what our Gunnery Jack 'ad been after with his subcutaneous details in the
+magazines all the mornin' watch. He had redooced the charges to a minimum,
+as you might say. But it made me feel a trifle faint an' sickish
+notwithstanding this spit-in-the-eye business. Every time such transpired,
+our Gunnery Lootenant would say somethin' sarcastic about Government
+stores, an' the old man fair howled. 'Op was on the bridge with 'im, an'
+'e told me--'cause 'e's a free-knowledgeist an' reads character--that
+Antonio's face was sweatin' with pure joy. 'Op wanted to kick him. Does
+Antonio say anything about that?"
+
+"Not about the kicking, but he is great on the gun-practice, Mr. Pyecroft.
+He has put all the results into a sort of appendix--a table of shots. He
+says that the figures will speak more eloquently than words."
+
+"What? Nothin' about the way the crews flinched an' hopped? Nothin' about
+the little shells rumblin' out o' the guns so casual?"
+
+"There are a few pages of notes, but they only bear out what you say. He
+says that these things always happen as soon as one of our ships is out of
+sight of land. Oh, yes! I've forgotten. He says, _'From the conversation
+of my captain with his inferiors I gathered that no small proportion of
+the expense of these nominally efficient cartridges finds itself in his
+pockets. So much, indeed, was signified by an officer on the deck below,
+who cried in a high voice: "I hope, Sir, you are making something out of
+it. It is rather monotonous." This insult, so flagrant, albeit well-
+merited, was received with a smile of drunken bonhommy'_--that's
+cheerfulness, Mr. Pyecroft. Your glass is empty."
+
+"Resumin' afresh," said Mr. Pyecroft, after a well-watered interval, "I
+may as well say that the target-practice occupied us two hours, and then
+we had to dig out after the tramp. Then we half an' three-quarters cleaned
+up the decks an' mucked about as requisite, haulin' down the patent awnin'
+stun'sles which Number One 'ad made. The old man was a shade doubtful of
+his course, 'cause I 'eard him say to Number One, 'You were right. A week
+o' this would turn the ship into a Hayti bean-feast. But,' he says
+pathetic, 'haven't they backed the band noble?'
+
+"'Oh! it's a picnic for them,' says Number One.
+
+"'But when do we get rid o' this whisky-peddlin' blighter o' yours, Sir?'
+
+"'That's a cheerful way to speak of a Viscount,' says the old man. "E's
+the bluest blood o' France when he's at home,'
+
+"'Which is the precise landfall I wish 'im to make,' says Number One.'
+It'll take all 'ands and the Captain of the Head to clean up after 'im.'
+
+"'They won't grudge it,' says the old man. 'Just as soon as it's dusk
+we'll overhaul our tramp friend an' waft him over,'
+
+"Then a sno--midshipman--Moorshed was is name--come up an' says somethin'
+in a low voice. It fetches the old man.
+
+"'You'll oblige me,' 'e says, 'by takin' the wardroom poultry for _that_.
+I've ear-marked every fowl we've shipped at Madeira, so there can't be any
+possible mistake. M'rover,' 'e says, 'tell 'em if they spill one drop of
+blood on the deck,' he says, 'they'll not be extenuated, but hung.'
+
+"Mr. Moorshed goes forward, lookin' unusual 'appy, even for him. The
+Marines was enjoyin' a committee-meetin' in their own flat.
+
+"After that, it fell dark, with just a little streaky, oily light on the
+sea--an' any thin' more chronic than the _Archimandrite_ I'd trouble you
+to behold. She looked like a fancy bazaar and a auction-room--yes, she
+almost looked like a passenger-steamer. We'd picked up our tramp, an' was
+about four mile be'ind 'er. I noticed the wardroom as a class, you might
+say, was manoeuvrin' _en masse_, an' then come the order to cockbill the
+yards. We hadn't any yards except a couple o' signallin' sticks, but we
+cock-billed 'em. I hadn't seen that sight, not since thirteen years in the
+West Indies, when a post-captain died o' yellow jack. It means a sign o'
+mourning the yards bein' canted opposite ways, to look drunk an'
+disorderly. They do.
+
+"'An' what might our last giddy-go-round signify?' I asks of 'Op.
+
+"'Good 'Evins!' 'e says, 'Are you in that habit o' permittin' leathernecks
+to assassinate lootenants every morning at drill without immejitly 'avin'
+'em shot on the foc'sle in the horrid crawly-crawly twilight?'"
+
+"'Yes,' I murmured over my dear book, '_the infinitely lugubrious
+crepuscule. A spectacle of barbarity unparalleled--hideous--cold-blooded,
+and yet touched with appalling grandeur_.'"
+
+"Ho! Was that the way Antonio looked at it? That shows he 'ad feelin's. To
+resoom. Without anyone givin' us orders to that effect, we began to creep
+about an' whisper. Things got stiller and stiller, till they was as still
+as--mushrooms! Then the bugler let off the 'Dead March' from the upper
+bridge. He done it to cover the remarks of a cock-bird bein' killed
+forrard, but it came out paralysin' in its _tout ensemble_. You never
+heard the 'Dead March' on a bugle? Then the pipes went twitterin' for both
+watches to attend public execution, an' we came up like so many ghosts,
+the 'ole ship's company. Why, Mucky 'Arcourt, one o' our boys, was that
+took in he give tongue like a beagle-pup, an' was properly kicked down the
+ladder for so doin'. Well, there we lay--engines stopped, rollin' to the
+swell, all dark, yards cock-billed, an' that merry tune yowlin' from the
+upper bridge. We fell in on the foc'sle, leavin' a large open space by the
+capstan, where our sail-maker was sittin' sewin' broken firebars into the
+foot of an old 'ammick. 'E looked like a corpse, an' Mucky had another fit
+o' hysterics, an' you could 'ear us breathin' 'ard. It beat anythin' in
+the theatrical line that even us _Archimandrites_ had done--an' we was the
+ship you could trust. Then come the doctor an' lit a red lamp which he
+used for his photographic muckin's, an' chocked it on the capstan. That
+was finally gashly!
+
+"Then come twelve Marines guardin' Glass 'ere. You wouldn't think to see
+'im what a gratooitous an' aboundin' terror he was that evenin'. 'E was in
+a white shirt 'e'd stole from Cockburn, an' his regulation trousers,
+barefooted. 'E'd pipe-clayed 'is 'ands an' face an' feet an' as much of
+his chest as the openin' of his shirt showed. 'E marched under escort with
+a firm an' undeviatin' step to the capstan, an' came to attention. The old
+man reinforced by an extra strong split--his seventeenth, an' 'e didn't
+throw _that_ down the ventilator--come up on the bridge an' stood like a
+image. 'Op, 'oo was with 'im, says that 'e heard Antonio's teeth singin',
+not chatterin'--singin' like funnel-stays in a typhoon. Yes, a moanin'
+æolian harp, 'Op said.
+
+"'When you are ready, Sir, drop your 'andkerchief,' Number One whispers.
+
+"'Good Lord!' says the old man, with a jump. 'Eh! What? What a sight! What
+a sight!' an' he stood drinkin' it in, I suppose, for quite two minutes.
+
+"Glass never says a word. 'E shoved aside an 'andkerchief which the
+sub-lootenant proffered 'im to bind 'is eyes with--quiet an' collected;
+an' if we 'adn't been feelin' so very much as we did feel, his gestures
+would 'ave brought down the 'ouse." "I can't open my eyes, or I'll be
+sick," said the Marine with appalling clearness. "I'm pretty far gone--I
+know it--but there wasn't anyone could 'ave beaten Edwardo Glass,
+R.M.L.I., that time. Why, I scared myself nearly into the 'orrors. Go on,
+Pye. Glass is in support--as ever."
+
+"Then the old man drops 'is 'andkerchief, an' the firin'-party fires like
+one man. Glass drops forward, twitchin' an' 'eavin' horrid natural, into
+the shotted 'ammick all spread out before him, and the firin' party closes
+in to guard the remains of the deceased while Sails is stitchin' it up.
+An' when they lifted that 'ammick it was one wringin' mess of blood! They
+on'y expended one wardroom cock-bird, too. Did you know poultry bled that
+extravagant? _I_ never did.
+
+"The old man--so 'Op told me--stayed on the bridge, brought up on a dead
+centre. Number One was similarly, though lesser, impressed, but o' course
+'is duty was to think of 'is fine white decks an' the blood. 'Arf a mo',
+Sir,' he says, when the old man was for leavin'. 'We have to wait for the
+burial, which I am informed takes place immejit.'
+
+"'It's beyond me,' says the owner. 'There was general instructions for an
+execution, but I never knew I had such a dependable push of mountebanks
+aboard,' he says. 'I'm all cold up my back, still.'
+
+"The Marines carried the corpse below. Then the bugle give us some more
+'Dead March,' Then we 'eard a splash from a bow six-pounder port, an' the
+bugle struck up a cheerful tune. The whole lower deck was complimentin'
+Glass, 'oo took it very meek. 'E _is_ a good actor, for all 'e's a
+leatherneck.
+
+"'Now,' said the old man, 'we must turn over Antonio. He's in what I have
+'eard called one perspirin' funk.'
+
+"Of course, I'm tellin' it slow, but it all 'appened much quicker. We run
+down our trampo--without o' course informin' Antonio of 'is 'appy destiny
+--an' inquired of 'er if she had any use for a free and gratis stowaway.
+Oh, yes? she said she'd be highly grateful, but she seemed a shade puzzled
+at our generosity, as you might put it, an' we lay by till she lowered a
+boat. Then Antonio--who was un'appy, distinctly un'appy--was politely
+requested to navigate elsewhere, which I don't think he looked for. 'Op
+was deputed to convey the information, an' 'Op got in one sixteen-inch
+kick which 'oisted 'im all up the ladder. 'Op ain't really vindictive, an'
+'e's fond of the French, especially the women, but his chances o' kicking
+lootenants was like the cartridge--reduced to a minimum.
+
+"The boat 'adn't more than shoved off before a change, as you might say,
+came o'er the spirit of our dream. The old man says, like Elphinstone an'
+Bruce in the Portsmouth election when I was a boy: 'Gentlemen,' he says,
+'for gentlemen you have shown yourselves to be--from the bottom of my
+heart I thank you. The status an' position of our late lamented shipmate
+made it obligate,' 'e says, 'to take certain steps not strictly included
+in the regulations. An' nobly,' says 'e, 'have you assisted me. Now,' 'e
+says, 'you hold the false and felonious reputation of bein' the smartest
+ship in the Service. Pigsties,' 'e says,' is plane trigonometry alongside
+our present disgustin' state. Efface the effects of this indecent orgy,'
+he says. 'Jump, you lop-eared, flat-footed, butter-backed Amalekites! Dig
+out, you briny-eyed beggars!'"
+
+"Do captains talk like that in the Navy, Mr. Pyecroft?" I asked.
+
+"I've told you once I only give the grist of his arguments. The Bosun's
+mate translates it to the lower deck, as you may put it, and the lower
+deck springs smartly to attention. It took us half the night 'fore we got
+'er anyway ship-shape; but by sunrise she was beautiful as ever, and we
+resoomed. I've thought it over a lot since; yes, an' I've thought a lot of
+Antonio trimmin' coal in that tramp's bunkers. 'E must 'ave been highly
+surprised. Wasn't he?"
+
+"He was, Mr. Pyecroft," I responded. "But now we're talking of it, weren't
+you all a little surprised?"
+
+"It come as a pleasant relief to the regular routine," said Mr. Pyecroft.
+"We appreciated it as an easy way o' workin' for your country. But--the
+old man was right--a week o' similar manoeuvres would 'ave knocked our
+moral double-bottoms bung out. Now, couldn't you oblige with Antonio's
+account of Glass's execution?"
+
+I obliged for nearly ten minutes. It was at best but a feeble rendering of
+M. de C.'s magnificent prose, through which the soul of the poet, the eye
+of the mariner, and the heart of the patriot bore magnificent accord. His
+account of his descent from the side of the "_infamous vessel consecrated
+to blood_" in the "_vast and gathering dusk of the trembling ocean_" could
+only be matched by his description of the dishonoured hammock sinking
+unnoticed through the depths, while, above, the bugler played music "_of
+an indefinable brutality_"
+
+"By the way, what did the bugler play after Glass's funeral?" I asked.
+
+"Him? Oh! 'e played 'The Strict Q.T.' It's a very old song. We 'ad it in
+Fratton nearly fifteen years back," said Mr. Pyecroft sleepily.
+
+I stirred the sugar dregs in my glass. Suddenly entered armed men, wet and
+discourteous, Tom Wessels smiling nervously in the background.
+
+"Where is that--minutely particularised person--Glass?" said the sergeant
+of the picket.
+
+"'Ere!" The marine rose to the strictest of attentions. "An' it's no good
+smelling of my breath, because I'm strictly an' ruinously sober."
+
+"Oh! An' what may you have been doin' with yourself?"
+
+"Listenin' to tracts. You can look! I've had the evenin' of my little
+life. Lead on to the _Cornucopia's_ midmost dunjing cell. There's a crowd
+of brass-'atted blighters there which will say I've been absent without
+leaf. Never mind. I forgive them before'and. _The_ evenin' of my life, an'
+please don't forget it." Then in a tone of most ingratiating apology to
+me: "I soaked it all in be'ind my shut eyes. 'I'm"--he jerked a
+contemptuous thumb towards Mr. Pyecroft--"'e's a flatfoot, a indigo-blue
+matlow. 'E never saw the fun from first to last. A mournful beggar--most
+depressin'." Private Glass departed, leaning heavily on the escort's arm.
+
+Mr. Pyecroft wrinkled his brows in thought--the profound and far-reaching
+meditation that follows five glasses of hot whisky-and-water.
+
+"Well, I don't see anything comical--greatly--except here an' there.
+Specially about those redooced charges in the guns. Do _you_ see anything
+funny in it?"
+
+There was that in his eye which warned me the night was too wet for
+argument.
+
+"No, Mr. Pyecroft, I don't," I replied. "It was a beautiful tale, and I
+thank you very much."
+
+
+
+
+A SAHIBS' WAR
+
+THE RUNNERS
+
+                                   _News!_
+  What is the word that they tell now--now--now!
+  The little drums beating in the bazaars?
+      _They_ beat (among the buyers and sellers)
+          _"Nimrud--ah Nimrud!
+          God sends a gnat against Nimrud_!"
+      Watchers, O Watchers a thousand!
+
+                                   _News!_
+  At the edge of the crops--now--now--where the well-wheels are halted,
+  One prepares to loose the bullocks and one scrapes his hoe,
+      _They_ beat (among the sowers and the reapers)
+          _"Nimrud--ah Nimrud!
+          God prepares an ill day for Nimrud_!"
+      Watchers, O Watchers ten thousand.
+
+                                   _News!_
+  By the fires of the camps--now--now--where the travellers meet
+  Where the camels come in and the horses: their men conferring,
+      _They_ beat (among the packmen and the drivers)
+          _"Nimrud--ah Nimrud!
+          Thus it befell last noon to Nimrud_!"
+      Watchers, O Watchers an hundred thousand!
+
+                                   _News!_
+  Under the shadow of the border-peels--now--now--now!
+  In the rocks of the passes where the expectant shoe their horses,
+      _They_ beat (among the rifles and the riders)
+          _"Nimrud--ah Nimrud!
+          Shall we go up against Nimrud_?"
+      Watchers, O Watchers a thousand thousand?
+
+                                   _News!_
+  Bring out the heaps of grain--open the account-books again!
+  Drive forward the well-bullocks against the taxable harvest!
+  Eat and lie under the trees--pitch the police-guarded  fair-grounds,
+      O dancers!
+  Hide away the rifles and let down the ladders from the watch-towers!
+      _They_ beat (among all the peoples)
+          _"Now--now--now!
+          God has reserved the Sword for Nimrud!
+          God has given Victory to Nimrud!"
+          Let us abide under Nimrud_!"
+      O Well-disposed and Heedful, an hundred thousand thousand!
+
+
+A SAHIBS' WAR
+
+Pass? Pass? Pass? I have one pass already, allowing me to go by the _rêl_
+from Kroonstadt to Eshtellenbosch, where the horses are, where I am to be
+paid off, and whence I return to India. I am a--trooper of the Gurgaon
+Rissala (cavalry regiment), the One Hundred and Forty-first Punjab
+Cavalry, Do not herd me with these black Kaffirs. I am a Sikh--a trooper
+of the State. The Lieutenant-Sahib does not understand my talk? Is there
+_any_ Sahib on the train who will interpret for a trooper of the Gurgaon
+Rissala going about his business in this devil's devising of a country,
+where there is no flour, no oil, no spice, no red pepper, and no respect
+paid to a Sikh? Is there no help?... God be thanked, here is such a Sahib!
+Protector of the Poor! Heaven-born! Tell the young Lieutenant-Sahib that
+my name is Umr Singh; I am--I was servant to Kurban Sahib, now dead; and I
+have a pass to go to Eshtellenbosch, where the horses are. Do not let him
+herd me with these black Kaffirs!... Yes,  I will sit by this truck till
+the Heaven-born has explained the matter to the young Lieutenant-Sahib who
+does not understand our tongue.
+
+*       *       *       *       *
+
+What orders? The young Lieutenant-Sahib will not detain me? Good! I go
+down to Eshtellenbosch by the next _terain_? Good! I go with the Heaven-
+born? Good! Then for this day I am the Heaven-born's servant. Will the
+Heaven-born bring the honour of his presence to a seat? Here is an empty
+truck; I will spread my blanket over one corner thus--for the sun is hot,
+though not so hot as our Punjab in May. I will prop it up thus, and I will
+arrange this hay thus, so the Presence can sit at ease till God sends us a
+_terain_ for Eshtellenbosch....
+
+The Presence knows the Punjab? Lahore? Amritzar? Attaree, belike? My
+village is north over the fields three miles from Attaree, near the big
+white house which was copied from a certain place of the Great Queen's by
+--by--I have forgotten the name. Can the Presence recall it? Sirdar Dyal
+Singh Attareewalla! Yes, that is the very man; but how does the Presence
+know? Born and bred in Hind, was he? O-o-oh! This is quite a different
+matter. The Sahib's nurse was a Surtee woman from the Bombay side? That
+was a pity. She should have been an up-country wench; for those make stout
+nurses. There is no land like the Punjab. There are no people like the
+Sikhs. Umr Singh is my name, yes. An old man? Yes. A trooper only after
+all these years? Ye-es. Look at my uniform, if the Sahib doubts. Nay--nay;
+the Sahib looks too closely. All marks of rank were picked off it long
+ago, but--but it is true--mine is not a common cloth such as troopers use
+for their coats, and--the Sahib has sharp eyes--that black mark is such a
+mark as a silver chain leaves when long worn on the breast. The Sahib says
+that troopers do not wear silver chains? No-o. Troopers do not wear the
+Arder of Beritish India? No. The Sahib should have been in the Police of
+the Punjab. I am not a trooper, but I have been a Sahib's servant for
+nearly a year--bearer, butler, sweeper, any and all three. The Sahib says
+that Sikhs do not take menial service? True; but it was for Kurban Sahib--
+my Kurban Sahib--dead these three months!
+
+*       *       *       *       *
+
+Young--of a reddish face--with blue eyes, and he lilted a little on his
+feet when he was pleased, and cracked his finger-joints. So did his father
+before him, who was Deputy-Commissioner of Jullundur in my father's time
+when I rode with the Gurgaon Rissala. _My_ father? Jwala Singh. A Sikh of
+Sikhs--he fought against the English at Sobraon and carried the mark to
+his death. So we were knit as it were by a blood-tie, I and my Kurban
+Sahib. Yes, I was a trooper first--nay, I had risen to a Lance-Duffadar, I
+remember--and my father gave me a dun stallion of his own breeding on that
+day; and _he_ was a little baba, sitting upon a wall by the parade-ground
+with his ayah--all in white, Sahib--laughing at the end of our drill. And
+his father and mine talked together, and mine beckoned to me, and I
+dismounted, and the baba put his hand into mine--eighteen--twenty-five--
+twenty-seven years gone now--Kurban Sahib--my Kurban Sahib! Oh, we were
+great friends after that! He cut his teeth on my sword-hilt, as the saying
+is. He called me Big Umr Singh--Buwwa Umwa Singh, for he could not speak
+plain. He stood only this high, Sahib, from the bottom of this truck, but
+he knew all our troopers by name--every one.... And he went to England,
+and he became a young man, and back he came, lilting a little in his walk,
+and cracking his finger-joints--back to his own regiment and to me. He had
+not forgotten either our speech or our customs. He was a Sikh at heart,
+Sahib. He was rich, open-handed, just, a friend of poor troopers, keen-
+eyed, jestful, and careless. _I_ could tell tales about him in his first
+years. There was very little he hid from _me_. I was his Umr Singh, and
+when we were alone he called me Father, and I called him Son. Yes, that
+was how we spoke. We spoke freely together on everything--about war, and
+women, and money, and advancement, and such all.
+
+We spoke about this war, too, long before it came. There were many box-
+wallas, pedlars, with Pathans a few, in this country, notably at the city
+of Yunasbagh (Johannesburg), and they sent news in every week how the
+Sahibs lay without weapons under the heel of the Boer-log; and how big
+guns were hauled up and down the streets to keep Sahibs in order; and how
+a Sahib called Eger Sahib (Edgar?) was killed for a jest by the Boer-log.
+The Sahib knows how we of Hind hear all that passes over the earth? There
+was not a gun cocked in Yunasbagh that the echo did not come into Hind in
+a month. The Sahibs are very clever, but they forget their own cleverness
+has created the _dak_ (the post), and that for an anna or two all things
+become known. We of Hind listened and heard and wondered; and when it was
+a sure thing, as reported by the pedlars and the vegetable-sellers, that
+the Sahibs of Yunasbagh lay in bondage to the Boer-log, certain among us
+asked questions and waited for signs. Others of us mistook the meaning of
+those signs. _Wherefore, Sahib, came the long war in the Tirah_! This
+Kurban Sahib knew, and we talked together. He said, "There is no haste.
+Presently we shall fight, and we shall fight for all Hind in that country
+round Yunasbagh. Here he spoke truth. Does the Sahib not agree? Quite so.
+It is for Hind that the Sahibs are fighting this war. Ye cannot in one
+place rule and in another bear service. Either ye must everywhere rule or
+everywhere obey. God does not make the nations ringstraked. True--true--
+true!"
+
+So did matters ripen--a step at a time. It was nothing to me, except I
+think--and the Sahib sees this, too?--that it is foolish to make an army
+and break their hearts in idleness. Why have they not sent for men of the
+Tochi--the men of the Tirah--the men of Buner? Folly, a thousand times.
+_We_ could have done it all so gently--so gently.
+
+Then, upon a day, Kurban Sahib sent for me and said, "Ho, Dada, I am sick,
+and the doctor gives me a certificate for many months." And he winked, and
+I said, "I will get leave and nurse thee, Child. Shall I bring my
+uniform?" He said, "Yes, and a sword for a sick man to lean on. We go to
+Bombay, and thence by sea to the country of the Hubshis" (niggers). Mark
+his cleverness! He was first of all our men among the native regiments to
+get leave for sickness and to come here. Now they will not let our
+officers go away, sick or well, except they sign a bond not to take part
+in this war-game upon the road. But _he_ was clever. There was no whisper
+of war when he took his sick-leave. I came also? Assuredly. I went to my
+Colonel, and sitting in the chair (I am--I was--of that rank for which a
+chair is placed when we speak with the Colonel) I said, "My child goes
+sick. Give me leave, for I am old and sick also."
+
+And the Colonel, making the word double between English and our tongue,
+said, "Yes, thou art truly _Sikh_"; and he called me an old devil--
+jestingly, as one soldier may jest with another; and he said my Kurban
+Sahib was a liar as to his health (that was true, too), and at long last
+he stood up and shook my hand, and bade me go and bring my Sahib safe
+again. My Sahib back again--aie me!
+
+So I went to Bombay with Kurban Sahib, but there, at sight of the Black
+Water, Wajib Ali, his bearer checked, and said that his mother was dead.
+Then I said to Kurban Sahib, "What is one Mussulman pig more or less? Give
+me the keys of the trunks, and I will lay out the white shirts for
+dinner." Then I beat Wajib Ali at the back of Watson's Hotel, and that
+night I prepared Kurban Sahib's razors. I say, Sahib, that I, a Sikh of
+the Khalsa, an unshorn man, prepared the razors. But I did not put on my
+uniform while I did it. On the other hand, Kurban Sahib took for me, upon
+the steamer, a room in all respects like to his own, and would have given
+me a servant. We spoke of many things on the way to this country; and
+Kurban Sahib told me what he perceived would be the conduct of the war. He
+said, "They have taken men afoot to fight men ahorse, and they will
+foolishly show mercy to these Boer-log because it is believed that they
+are white." He said, "There is but one fault in this war, and that is that
+the Government have not employed _us_, but have made it altogether a
+Sahibs' war. Very many men will thus be killed, and no vengeance will be
+taken." True talk--true talk! It fell as Kurban Sahib foretold.
+
+And we came to this country, even to Cape Town over yonder, and Kurban
+Sahib said, "Bear the baggage to the big dak-bungalow, and I will look for
+employment fit for a sick man." I put on the uniform of my rank and went to
+the big dak-bungalow, called Maun Nihâl Seyn, [Footnote: Mount Nelson?]
+and I caused the heavy baggage to be bestowed in that dark lower place--is
+it known to the Sahib?--which was already full of the swords and baggage
+of officers. It is fuller now--dead men's kit all! I was careful to secure
+a receipt for all three pieces. I have it in my belt. They must go back to
+the Punjab.
+
+Anon came Kurban Sahib, lilting a little in his step, which sign I knew,
+and he said, "We are born in a fortunate hour. We go to Eshtellenbosch to
+oversee the despatch of horses." Remember, Kurban Sahib was squadron-
+leader of the Gurgaon Rissala, and _I_ was Umr Singh. So I said, speaking
+as we do--we did--when none was near, "Thou art a groom and I am a grass-
+cutter, but is this any promotion, Child?" At this he laughed, saying,
+"It is the way to better things. Have patience, Father." (Aye, he called me
+father when none were by.) "This war ends not to-morrow nor the next day.
+I have seen the new Sahibs," he said, "and they are fathers of owls--all--
+all--all!"
+
+So we went to Eshtellenbosch, where the horses are; Kurban Sahib doing the
+service of servants in that business. And the whole business was managed
+without forethought by new Sahibs from God knows where, who had never seen
+a tent pitched or a peg driven. They were full of zeal, but empty of all
+knowledge. Then came, little by little from Hind, those Pathans--they are
+just like those vultures up there, Sahib--they always follow slaughter.
+And there came to Eshtellenbosch some Sikhs--Muzbees, though--and some
+Madras monkey-men. They came with horses. Puttiala sent horses. Jhind and
+Nabha sent horses. All the nations of the Khalsa sent horses.
+
+All the ends of the earth sent horses. God knows what the army did with
+them, unless they ate them raw. They used horses as a courtesan uses oil:
+with both hands. These needed many men. Kurban Sahib appointed me to the
+command (what a command for me!) of certain woolly ones--_Hubshis_--whose
+touch and shadow are pollution. They were enormous eaters; sleeping on
+their bellies; laughing without cause; wholly like animals. Some were
+called Fingoes, and some, I think, Red Kaffirs, but they were all Kaffirs
+--filth unspeakable. I taught them to water and feed, and sweep and rub
+down. Yes, I oversaw the work of sweepers--a _jemadar_ of _mehtars_
+(headman of a refuse-gang) was I, and Kurban Sahib little better, for five
+months. Evil months! The war went as Kurban Sahib had said. Our new men
+were slain and no vengeance was taken. It was a war of fools armed with
+the weapons of magicians. Guns that slew at half a day's march, and men
+who, being new, walked blind into high grass and were driven off like
+cattle by the Boer-log! As to the city of Eshtellenbosch, I am not a
+Sahib--only a Sikh. I would have quartered one troop only of the Gurgaon
+Rissala in that city--one little troop--and I would have schooled that
+city till its men learned to kiss the shadow of a Government horse upon
+the ground. There are many _mullahs_ (priests) in Eshtellenbosch. They
+preached the Jehad against us. This is true--all the camp knew it. And
+most of the houses were thatched! A war of fools indeed!
+
+At the end of five months my Kurban Sahib, who had grown lean, said, "The
+reward has come. We go up towards the front with horses to-morrow, and,
+once away, I shall be too sick so return. Make ready the baggage." Thus we
+got away, with some Kaffirs in charge of new horses for a certain new
+regiment that had come in a ship. The second day by _terain_, when we were
+watering at a desolate place without any sort of a bazaar to it, slipped
+out from the horse-boxes one Sikander Khan, that had been a _jemadar_ of
+_saises_ (head-groom) at Eshtellenbosch, and was by service a trooper in a
+Border regiment. Kurban Sahib gave him big abuse for his desertion; but
+the Pathan put up his hands as excusing himself, and Kurban Sahib relented
+and added him to our service. So there were three of us--Kurban Sahib, I,
+and Sikander Khan--Sahib, Sikh, and _Sag_ (dog). But the man said truly,
+"We be far from our homes and both servants of the Raj. Make truce till we
+see the Indus again." I have eaten from the same dish as Sikander Khan--
+beef, too, for aught I know! He said, on the night he stole some swine's
+flesh in a tin from a mess-tent, that in his Book, the Koran, it is
+written that whoso engages in a holy war is freed from ceremonial
+obligations. Wah! He had no more religion than the sword-point picks up of
+sugar and water at baptism. He stole himself a horse at a place where
+there lay a new and very raw regiment. I also procured myself a grey
+gelding there. They let their horses stray too much, those new regiments.
+
+Some shameless regiments would indeed have made away with _our_ horses on
+the road! They exhibited indents and requisitions for horses, and once or
+twice would have uncoupled the trucks; but Kurban Sahib was wise, and I am
+not altogether a fool. There is not much honesty at the front. Notably,
+there was one congregation of hard-bitten horse-thieves; tall, light
+Sahibs, who spoke through their noses for the most part, and upon all
+occasions they said, "Oah Hell!" which, in our tongue, signifies _Jehannum
+ko jao_. They bore each man a vine-leaf upon their uniforms, and they rode
+like Rajputs. Nay, they rode like Sikhs. They rode like the Ustrelyahs!
+The Ustrelyahs, whom we met later, also spoke through their noses not
+little, and they were tall, dark men, with grey, clear eyes, heavily
+eyelashed like camel's eyes--very proper men--a new brand of Sahib to me.
+They said on all occasions, "No fee-ah," which in our tongue means _Durro
+mut_ ("Do not be afraid"), so we called them the _Durro Muts_. Dark, tall
+men, most excellent horsemen, hot and angry, waging war _as_ war, and
+drinking tea as a sandhill drinks water. Thieves? A little, Sahib.
+Sikander Khan swore to me; and he comes of a horse-stealing clan for ten
+generations; he swore a Pathan was a babe beside a _Durro Mut_ in regard
+to horse-lifting. The _Durro Muts_ cannot walk on their feet at all. They
+are like hens on the high road. Therefore they must have horses. Very
+proper men, with a just lust for the war. Aah--"No fee-ah," say the _Durro
+Muts_. _They_ saw the worth of Kurban Sahib. _They_ did not ask him to
+sweep stables. They would by no means let him go. He did substitute for
+one of their troop-leaders who had a fever, one long day in a country full
+of little hills--like the mouth of the Khaibar; and when they returned in
+the evening, the _Durro Muts_ said, "Wallah! This is a man. Steal him!" So
+they stole my Kurban Sahib as they would have stolen anything else that
+they needed, and they sent a sick officer back to Eshtellenbosch in his
+place.
+
+Thus Kurban Sahib came to his own again, and I was his bearer, and
+Sikander Khan was his cook. The law was strict that this was a Sahibs'
+war, but there was no order that a bearer and a cook should not ride with
+their Sahib--and we had naught to wear but our uniforms. We rode up and
+down this accursed country, where there is no bazaar, no pulse, no flour,
+no oil, no spice, no red pepper, no firewood; nothing but raw corn and a
+little cattle. There were no great battles as I saw it, but a plenty of
+gun-firing. When we were many, the Boer-log came out with coffee to greet
+us, and to show us _purwanas_ (permits) from foolish English Generals who
+had gone that way before, certifying they were peaceful and well-disposed.
+When we were few, they hid behind stones and shot us. Now the order was
+that they were Sahibs, and this was a Sahibs' war. Good! But, as I
+understand it, when a Sahib goes to war, he puts on the cloth of war, and
+only those who wear that cloth may take part in the war. Good! That also I
+understand. But these people were as they were in Burma, or as the Afridis
+are. They shot at their pleasure, and when pressed hid the gun and
+exhibited _purwanas_, or lay in a house and said they were farmers. Even
+such farmers as cut up the Madras troops at Hlinedatalone in Burma! Even
+such farmers as slew Cavagnari Sahib and the Guides at Kabul! We schooled
+_those_ men, to be sure--fifteen, aye, twenty of a morning pushed off the
+verandah in front of the Bala Hissar. I looked that the Jung-i-lat Sahib
+(the Commander-in-Chief) would have remembered the old days; but--no. All
+the people shot at us everywhere, and he issued proclamations saying that
+he did not fight the people, but a certain army, which army, in truth, was
+all the Boer-log, who, between them, did not wear enough of uniform to
+make a loincloth. A fool's war from first to last; for it is manifest that
+he who fights should be hung if he fights with a gun in one hand and a
+_purwana_ in the other, as did all these people. Yet we, when they had had
+their bellyful for the time, received them with honour, and gave them
+permits, and refreshed them and fed their wives and their babes, and
+severely punished our soldiers who took their fowls. So the work was to be
+done not once with a few dead, but thrice and four times over. I talked
+much with Kurban Sahib on this, and he said, "It is a Sahibs' war. That is
+the order;" and one night, when Sikander Khan would have lain out beyond
+the pickets with his knife and shown them how it is worked on the Border,
+he hit Sikander Khan between the eyes and came near to breaking in his
+head. Then Sikander Khan, a bandage over his eyes, so that he looked like
+a sick camel, talked to him half one march, and he was more bewildered
+than I, and vowed he would return to Eshtellenbosch. But privately to me
+Kurban Sahib said we should have loosed the Sikhs and the Gurkhas on these
+people till they came in with their foreheads in the dust. For the war was
+not of that sort which they comprehended.
+
+They shot us? Assuredly they shot us from houses adorned with a white
+flag; but when they came to know our custom, their widows sent word by
+Kaffir runners, and presently there was not quite so much firing. _No fee-
+ah_! All the Boer-log with whom we dealt had _purwanas_ signed by mad
+Generals attesting that they were well-disposed to the State.
+
+They had also rifles not a few, and cartridges, which they hid in the
+roof. The women wept very greatly when we burned such houses, but they did
+not approach too near after the flames had taken good hold of the thatch,
+for fear of the bursting cartridges. The women of the Boer-log are very
+clever. They are more clever than the men. The Boer-log are clever? Never,
+never, no! It is the Sahibs who are fools. For their own honour's sake the
+Sahibs must say that the Boer-log are clever; but it is the Sahibs'
+wonderful folly that has made the Boer-log. The Sahibs should have sent
+_us_ into the game.
+
+But the _Durro Muts_ did well. They dealt faithfully with all that country
+thereabouts--not in any way as we of Hind should have dealt, but they were
+not altogether fools. One night when we lay on the top of a ridge in the
+cold, I saw far away a light in a house that appeared for the sixth part
+of an hour and was obscured. Anon it appeared again thrice for the twelfth
+part of an hour. I showed this to Kurban Sahib, for it was a house that
+had been spared--the people having many permits and swearing fidelity at
+our stirrup-leathers. I said to Kurban Sahib, "Send half a troop, Child,
+and finish that house. They signal to their brethren." And he laughed
+where he lay and said, "If I listened to my bearer Umr Singh, there would
+not be left ten houses in all this land." I said, "What need to leave one?
+This is as it was in Burma. They are farmers to-day and fighters to-morrow.
+Let us deal justly with them." He laughed and curled himself up in
+his blanket, and I watched the far light in the house till day. I have
+been on the border in eight wars, not counting Burma. The first Afghan
+War; the second Afghan War; two Mahsud Waziri wars (that is four); two
+Black Mountain wars, if I remember right; the Malakand and Tirah. I do not
+count Burma, or some small things. _I_ know when house signals to house!
+
+I pushed Sikandar Khan with my foot, and he saw it too. He said, "One of
+the Boer-log who brought pumpkins for the mess, which I fried last night,
+lives in yonder house." I said, "How dost thou know?" He said, "Because he
+rode out of the camp another way, but I marked how his horse fought with
+him at the turn of the road; and before the light fell I stole out of the
+camp for evening prayer with Kurban Sahib's glasses, and from a little
+hill I saw the pied horse of that pumpkin-seller hurrying to that house."
+I said naught, but took Kurban Sahib's glasses from his greasy hands and
+cleaned them with a silk handkerchief and returned them to their case.
+Sikander Khan told me that he had been the first man in the Zenab valley
+to use glasses--whereby he finished two blood-feuds cleanly in the course
+of three months' leave. But he was otherwise a liar.
+
+That day Kurban Sahib, with some ten troopers, was sent on to spy the land
+for our camp. The _Durro Muts_ moved slowly at that time. They were
+weighted with grain and forage and carts, and they greatly wished to leave
+these all in some town and go on light to other business which pressed. So
+Kurban Sahib sought a short cut for them, a little off the line of march.
+We were twelve miles before the main body, and we came to a house under a
+high bushed hill, with a nullah, which they call a donga, behind it, and
+an old sangar of piled stones, which they call a kraal, before it. Two
+thorn bushes grew on either side of the door, like babul bushes, covered
+with a golden coloured bloom, and the roof was all of thatch. Before the
+house was a valley of stones that rose to another bush-covered hill. There
+was an old man in the verandah--an old man with a white beard and a wart
+upon the left side of his neck; and a fat woman with the eyes of a swine
+and the jowl of a swine; and a tall young man deprived of understanding.
+His head was hairless, no larger than an orange, and the pits of his
+nostrils were eaten away by a disease. He laughed and slavered and he
+sported sportively before Kurban Sahib. The man brought coffee and the
+woman showed us _purwanas_ from three General Sahibs, certifying that they
+were people of peace and goodwill. Here are the _purwanas_, Sahib. Does
+the Sahib know the Generals who signed them?
+
+They swore the land was empty of Boer-log. They held up their hands and
+swore it. That was about the time of the evening meal. I stood near the
+verandah with Sikander Khan, who was nosing like a jackal on a lost scent.
+At last he took my arm and said, "See yonder! There is the sun on the
+window of the house that signalled last night. This house can see that
+house from here," and he looked at the hill behind him all hairy with
+bushes, and sucked in his breath. Then the idiot with the shrivelled head
+danced by me and threw back that head, and regarded the roof and laughed
+like a hyena, and the fat woman talked loudly, as it were, to cover some
+noise. After this passed I to the back of the house on pretence to get
+water for tea, and I saw fresh fresh horse-dung on the ground, and that
+the ground was cut with the new marks of hoofs; and there had dropped in
+the dirt one cartridge. Then Kurban Sahib called to me in our tongue,
+saying, "Is this a good place to make tea?" and I replied, knowing what he
+meant, "There are over many cooks in the cook-house. Mount and go, Child."
+Then I returned, and he said, smiling to the woman, "Prepare food, and
+when we have loosened our girths we will come in and eat;" but to his men
+he said in a whisper, "Ride away!" No. He did not cover the old man or the
+fat woman with his rifle. That was not his custom. Some fool of the _Durro
+Muts_, being hungry, raised his voice to dispute the order to flee, and
+before we were in our saddles many shots came from the roof--from rifles
+thrust through the thatch. Upon this we rode across the valley of stones,
+and men fired at us from the nullah behind the house, and from the hill
+behind the nullah, as well as from the roof of the house--so many shots
+that it sounded like a drumming in the hills. Then Sikandar Khan, riding
+low, said, "This play is not for us alone, but for the rest of the _Durro
+Muts_," and I said, "Be quiet. Keep place!" for his place was behind me,
+and I rode behind Kurban Sahib. But these new bullets will pass through
+five men arow! We were not hit--not one of us--and we reached the hill of
+rocks and scattered among the stones, and Kurban Sahib turned in his
+saddle and said, "Look at the old man!" He stood in the verandah firing
+swiftly with a gun, the woman beside him and the idiot also--both with
+guns. Kurban Sahib laughed, and I caught him by the wrist, but--his fate
+was written at that hour. The bullet passed under my arm-pit and struck
+him in the liver, and I pulled him backward between two great rocks atilt
+--Kurban Sahib, my Kurban Sahib! From the nullah behind the house and from
+the hills came our Boer-log in number more than a hundred, and Sikandar
+Khan said, "_Now_ we see the meaning of last night's signal. Give me the
+rifle." He took Kurban Sahib's rifle--in this war of fools only the
+doctors carry swords--and lay belly-flat to the work, but Kurban Sahib
+turned where he lay and said, "Be still. It is a Sahibs' war," and Kurban
+Sahib put up his hand--thus; and then his eyes rolled on me, and I gave
+him water that he might pass the more quickly. And at the drinking his
+Spirit received permission....
+
+Thus went our fight, Sahib. We _Durro Muts_ were on a ridge working from
+the north to the south, where lay our main body, and the Boer-log lay in a
+valley working from east to west. There were more than a hundred, and our
+men were ten, but they held the Boer-log in the valley while they swiftly
+passed along the ridge to the south. I saw three Boers drop in the open.
+Then they all hid again and fired heavily at the rocks that hid our men;
+but our men were clever and did not show, but moved away and away, always
+south; and the noise of the battle withdrew itself southward, where we
+could hear the sound of big guns. So it fell stark dark, and Sikandar Khan
+found a deep old jackal's earth amid rocks, into which we slid the body of
+Kurban Sahib upright. Sikandar Khan took his glasses, and I took his
+handkerchief and some letters and a certain thing which I knew hung round
+his neck, and Sikandar Khan is witness that I wrapped them all in the
+handkerchief. Then we took an oath together, and lay still and mourned for
+Kurban Sahib. Sikandar Khan wept till daybreak--even he, a Pathan, a
+Mohammedan! All that night we heard firing to the southward, and when the
+dawn broke the valley was full of Boer-log in carts and on horses. They
+gathered by the house, as we could see through Kurban Sahib's glasses, and
+the old man, who, I take it, was a priest, blessed them, and preached the
+holy war, waving his arm; and the fat woman brought coffee; and the idiot
+capered among them and kissed their horses. Presently they went away in
+haste; they went over the hills and were not; and a black slave came out
+and washed the door-sills with bright water. Sikandar Khan saw through the
+glasses that the stain was blood, and he laughed, saying, "Wounded men lie
+there. We shall yet get vengeance."
+
+About noon we saw a thin, high smoke to the southward, such a smoke as a
+burning house will make in sunshine, and Sikandar Khan, who knows how to
+take a bearing across a hill, said, "At last we have burned the house of
+the pumpkin-seller whence they signalled." And I said: "What need now that
+they have slain my child? Let me mourn." It was a high smoke, and the old
+man, as I saw, came out into the verandah to behold it, and shook his
+clenched hands at it. So we lay till the twilight, foodless and without
+water, for we had vowed a vow neither to eat nor to drink till we had
+accomplished the matter. I had a little opium left, of which I gave
+Sikandar Khan the half, because he loved Kurban Sahib. When it was full
+dark we sharpened our sabres upon a certain softish rock which, mixed with
+water, sharpens steel well, and we took off our boots and we went down to
+the house and looked through the windows very softly. The old man sat
+reading in a book, and the woman sat by the hearth; and the idiot lay on
+the floor with his head against her knee, and he counted his fingers and
+laughed, and she laughed again. So I knew they were mother and son, and I
+laughed, too, for I had suspected this when I claimed her life and her
+body from Sikandar Khan, in our discussion of the spoil. Then we entered
+with bare swords.... Indeed, these Boer-log do not understand the steel,
+for the old man ran towards a rifle in the corner; but Sikandar Khan
+prevented him with a blow of the flat across the hands, and he sat down
+and held up his hands, and I put my fingers on my lips to signify they
+should be silent. But the woman cried, and one stirred in an inner room,
+and a door opened, and a man, bound about the head with rags, stood
+stupidly fumbling with a gun. His whole head fell inside the door, and
+none followed him. It was a very pretty stroke--for a Pathan. They then
+were silent, staring at the head upon the floor, and I said to Sikandar
+Khan, "Fetch ropes! Not even for Kurban Sahib's sake will I defile my
+sword." So he went to seek and returned with three long leather ones, and
+said, "Four wounded lie within, and doubtless each has a permit from a
+General," and he stretched the ropes and laughed. Then I bound the old
+man's hands behind his back, and unwillingly--for he laughed in my face,
+and would have fingered my beard--the idiot's. At this the woman with the
+swine's eyes and the jowl of a swine ran forward, and Sikandar Khan said,
+"Shall I strike or bind? She was thy property on the division." And I
+said, "Refrain! I have made a chain to hold her. Open the door." I pushed
+out the two across the verandah into the darker shade of the thorn-trees,
+and she followed upon her knees and lay along the ground, and pawed at my
+boots and howled. Then Sikandar Khan bore out the lamp, saying that he was
+a butler and would light the table, and I looked for a branch that would
+bear fruit. But the woman hindered me not a little with her screechings
+and plungings, and spoke fast in her tongue, and I replied in my tongue,
+"I am childless to-night because of thy perfidy, and _my_ child was
+praised among men and loved among women. He would have begotten men--not
+animals. Thou hast more years to live than I, but my grief is the
+greater."
+
+I stooped to make sure the noose upon the idiot's neck, and flung the end
+over the branch, and Sikandar Khan held up the lamp that she might well
+see. Then appeared suddenly, a little beyond the light of the lamp, the
+spirit of Kurban Sahib. One hand he held to his side, even where the
+bullet had struck him, and the other he put forward thus, and said, "No.
+It is a Sahibs' war." And I said, "Wait a while, Child, and thou shalt
+sleep." But he came nearer, riding, as it were, upon my eyes, and said,
+"No. It is a Sahibs' war." And Sikandar Khan said, "Is it too heavy?" and
+set down the lamp and came to me; and as he turned to tally on the rope,
+the spirit of Kurban Sahib stood up within arm's reach of us, and his face
+was very angry, and a third time he said, "No. It is a Sahibs' war." And a
+little wind blew out the lamp, and I heard Sikandar Khan's teeth chatter
+in his head.
+
+So we stayed side by side, the ropes in our hand, a very long while, for
+we could not shape any words. Then I heard Sikandar Khan open his water-
+bottle and drink; and when his mouth was slaked he passed to me and said,
+"We are absolved from our vow." So I drank, and together we waited for the
+dawn in that place where we stood--the ropes in our hand. A little after
+third cockcrow we heard the feet of horses and gun wheels very far off,
+and so soon as the light came a shell burst on the threshold of the house,
+and the roof of the verandah that was thatched fell in and blazed before
+the windows. And I said, "What of the wounded Boer-log within?" And
+Sikandar Khan said, "We have heard the order. It is a Sahibs' war. Stand
+still." Then came a second shell--good line, but short--and scattered dust
+upon us where we stood; and then came ten of the little quick shells from
+the gun that speaks like a stammerer--yes, pompom the Sahibs call it--and
+the face of the house folded down like the nose and the chin of an old man
+mumbling, and the forefront of the house lay down. Then Sikandar Khan
+said, "If it be the fate of the wounded to die in the fire, _I_ shall not
+prevent it." And he passed to the back of the house and presently came
+back, and four wounded Boer-log came after him, of whom two could not walk
+upright. And I said, "What hast thou done?" And he said, "I have neither
+spoken to them nor laid hand on them. They follow in hope of mercy." And I
+said, "It is a Sahibs' war. Let them wait the Sahibs' mercy." So they lay
+still, the four men and the idiot, and the fat woman under the thorn-tree,
+and the house burned furiously. Then began the known sound of cartouches
+in the roof--one or two at first; then a trill, and last of all one loud
+noise and the thatch blew here and there, and the captives would have
+crawled aside on account of the heat that was withering the thorn-trees,
+and on account of wood and bricks flying at random. But I said, "Abide!
+Abide! Ye be Sahibs, and this is a Sahibs' war, O Sahibs. There is no
+order that ye should depart from this war." They did not understand my
+words. Yet they abode and they lived.
+
+Presently rode down five troopers of Kurban Sahib's command, and one I
+knew spoke my tongue, having sailed to Calcutta often with horses. So I
+told him all my tale, using bazaar-talk, such as his kidney of Sahib would
+understand; and at the end I said, "An order has reached us here from the
+dead that this is a Sahibs' war. I take the soul of my Kurban Sahib to
+witness that I give over to the justice of the Sahibs these Sahibs who
+have made me childless." Then I gave him the ropes and fell down
+senseless, my heart being very full, but my belly was empty, except for
+the little opium.
+
+They put me into a cart with one of their wounded, and after a while I
+understood that they had fought against the Boer-log for two days and two
+nights. It was all one big trap, Sahib, of which we, with Kurban Sahib,
+saw no more than the outer edge. They were very angry, the _Durro Muts_--
+very angry indeed. I have never seen Sahibs so angry. They buried my
+Kurban Sahib with the rites of his faith upon the top of the ridge
+overlooking the house, and I said the proper prayers of the faith, and
+Sikandar Khan prayed in his fashion and stole five signalling-candles,
+which have each three wicks, and lighted the grave as if it had been the
+grave of a saint on a Friday. He wept very bitterly all that night, and I
+wept with him, and he took hold of my feet and besought me to give him a
+remembrance from Kurban Sahib. So I divided equally with him one of Kurban
+Sahib's handkerchiefs--not the silk ones, for those were given him by a
+certain woman; and I also gave him a button from a coat, and a little
+steel ring of no value that Kurban Sahib used for his keys, and he kissed
+them and put them into his bosom. The rest I have here in that little
+bundle, and I must get the baggage from the hotel in Cape Town--some four
+shirts we sent to be washed, for which we could not wait when we went
+up-country--and I must give them all to my Colonel-Sahib at Sialkote in the
+Punjab. For my child is dead--my baba is dead!... I would have come away
+before; there was no need to stay, the child being dead; but we were far
+from the rail, and the _Durro Muts_ were as brothers to me, and I had come
+to look upon Sikandar Khan as in some sort a friend, and he got me a horse
+and I rode up and down with them; but the life had departed. God knows
+what they called me--orderly, _chaprassi_ (messenger), cook, sweeper, I
+did not know nor care. But once I had pleasure. We came back in a month
+after wide circles to that very valley. I knew it every stone, and I went
+up to the grave, and a clever Sahib of the _Durro Muts_ (we left a troop
+there for a week to school those people with _purwanas_) had cut an
+inscription upon a great rock; and they interpreted it to me, and is was a
+jest such as Kurban Sahib himself would have loved. Oh! I have the
+inscription well copied here. Read it aloud, Sahib, and I will explain the
+jests. There are two very good ones. Begin, Sahib:--
+
+  In Memory of
+  WALTER DECIES CORBYN
+  Late Captain 141st Punjab Cavalry
+
+  The Gurgaon Rissala, that is. Go on, Sahib.
+
+  Treacherously shot near this place by
+  The connivance of the late
+  HENDRIK DIRK UYS
+  A Minister of God
+  Who thrice took the oath of neutrality
+  And Piet his son,
+  This little work
+
+Aha! This is the first jest. The Sahib should see this little work!
+
+
+  Was accomplished in partial
+  And inadequate recognition of their loss
+  By some men who loved him
+
+  _Si monumentum requiris circumspice_
+
+That is the second jest. It signifies that those who would desire to
+behold a proper memorial to Kurban Sahib must look out at the house. And,
+Sahib, the house is not there, nor the well, nor the big tank which they
+call dams, nor the little fruit-trees, nor the cattle. There is nothing
+at all, Sahib, except the two trees withered by the fire. The rest is
+like the desert here--or my hand--or my heart. Empty, Sahib--all empty!
+
+
+
+"THEIR LAWFUL OCCASIONS"
+
+THE WET LITANY
+
+  When the water's countenance
+  Blurrs 'twixt glance and second glance;
+  When the tattered smokes forerun
+  Ashen 'neath a silvered sun;
+  When the curtain of the haze
+  Shuts upon our helpless ways--
+       Hear the Channel Fleet at sea;
+       _Libera nos domine_!
+
+  When the engines' bated pulse
+  Scarcely thrills the nosing hulls;
+  When the wash along the side
+  Sounds, a sudden, magnified
+  When the intolerable blast
+  Marks each blindfold minute passed.
+
+  When the fog-buoy's squattering flight
+  Guides us through the haggard night;
+  When the warning bugle blows;
+  When the lettered doorways close;
+  When our brittle townships press,
+  Impotent, on emptiness.
+
+  When the unseen leadsmen lean
+  Questioning a deep unseen;
+  When their lessened count they tell
+  To a bridge invisible;
+  When the hid and perilous
+  Cliffs return our cry to us.
+
+  When the treble thickness spread
+  Swallows up our next-ahead;
+  When her siren's frightened whine
+  Shows her sheering out of line;
+  When, her passage undiscerned,
+  We must turn where she has turned--
+       Hear the Channel Fleet at sea;
+       _Libera nos Domine_!
+
+"THEIR LAWFUL OCCASIONS"
+
+PART I
+
+  ... "And a security for such as pass on the seas upon
+  their lawful occasions."--_Navy Prayer_.
+
+Disregarding the inventions of the Marine Captain, whose other name is
+Gubbins, let a plain statement suffice.
+
+H.M.S. _Caryatid_ went to Portland to join Blue Fleet for manoeuvres. I
+travelled overland from London by way of Portsmouth, where I fell among
+friends. When I reached Portland, H.M.S. _Caryatid_, whose guest I was to
+have been, had, with Blue Fleet, already sailed for some secret rendezvous
+off the west coast of Ireland, and Portland breakwater was filled with Red
+Fleet, my official enemies and joyous acquaintances, who received me with
+unstinted hospitality. For example, Lieutenant-Commander A.L. Hignett, in
+charge of three destroyers, _Wraith, Stiletto_, and _Kobbold_, due to
+depart at 6 P.M. that evening, offered me a berth on his thirty-knot
+flagship, but I preferred my comforts, and so accepted sleeping-room in
+H.M.S. _Pedantic_ (15,000 tons), leader of the second line. After dining
+aboard her I took boat to Weymouth to get my kit aboard, as the
+battleships would go to war at midnight. In transferring my allegiance
+from Blue to Red Fleet, whatever the Marine Captain may say, I did no
+wrong. I truly intended to return to the _Pedantic_ and help to fight Blue
+Fleet. All I needed was a new toothbrush, which I bought from a chemist in
+a side street at 9:15 P. M. As I turned to go, one entered seeking
+alleviation of a gum-boil. He was dressed in a checked ulster, a black
+silk hat three sizes too small, cord-breeches, boots, and pure brass
+spurs. These he managed painfully, stepping like a prisoner fresh from
+leg-irons. As he adjusted the pepper-plaster to the gum the light fell on
+his face, and I recognised Mr. Emanuel Pyecroft, late second-class petty
+officer of H.M.S. _Archimandrite_, an unforgettable man, met a year before
+under Tom Wessel's roof in Plymouth. It occurred to me that when a petty
+officer takes to spurs he may conceivably meditate desertion. For that
+reason I, though a taxpayer, made no sign. Indeed, it was Mr. Pyecroft,
+following me out of the shop, who said hollowly: "What might you be doing
+here?"
+
+"I'm going on manoeuvres in the _Pedantic_," I replied.
+
+"Ho!" said Mr. Pyecroft. "An' what manner o' manoeuvres d'you expect to
+see in a blighted cathedral like the _Pedantic_? _I_ know 'er. I knew her
+in Malta, when the _Vulcan_ was her permanent tender. Manoeuvres! You
+won't see more than 'Man an' arm watertight doors!' in your little woollen
+undervest."
+
+"I'm sorry for that."
+
+"Why?" He lurched heavily as his spurs caught and twanged like tuning-
+forks. "War's declared at midnight. _Pedantics_ be sugared! Buy an 'am an'
+see life!"
+
+For the moment I fancied Mr. Pyecroft, a fugitive from justice, purposed
+that we two should embrace a Robin Hood career in the uplands of Dorset.
+The spurs troubled me, and I made bold to say as much. "Them!" he said,
+coming to an intricate halt. "They're part of the _prima facie_ evidence.
+But as for me--let me carry your bag--I'm second in command, leadin'-hand,
+cook, steward, an' lavatory man, with a few incidentals for sixpence a day
+extra, on No. 267 torpedo-boat."
+
+"They wear spurs there?"
+
+"Well," said Mr. Peycroft, "seein' that Two Six Seven belongs to Blue
+Fleet, which left the day before yesterday, disguises are imperative. It
+transpired thus. The Right Honourable Lord Gawd Almighty Admiral Master
+Frankie Frobisher, K.C.B., commandin' Blue Fleet, can't be bothered with
+one tin-torpedo-boat more or less; and what with lyin' in the Reserve four
+years, an' what with the new kind o' tiffy which cleans dynamos with
+brick-dust and oil (Blast these spurs! They won't render!), Two Six
+Seven's steam-gadgets was paralytic. Our Mr. Moorshed done his painstakin'
+best--it's his first command of a war-canoe, matoor age nineteen (down
+that alleyway, please!) but be that as it may, His Holiness Frankie is
+aware of us crabbin' ourselves round the breakwater at five knots, an'
+steerin' _pari passu_, as the French say. (Up this alley-way, please!) If
+he'd given Mr. Hinchcliffe, our chief engineer, a little time, it would
+never have transpired, for what Hinch can't drive he can coax; but the new
+port bein' a trifle cloudy, an' 'is joints tinglin' after a post-captain
+dinner, Frankie come on the upper bridge seekin' for a sacrifice. We,
+offerin' a broadside target, got it. He told us what 'is grandmamma, 'oo
+was a lady an' went to sea in stick-and string-batteaus, had told him
+about steam. He throwed in his own prayers for the 'ealth an' safety of
+all steam-packets an' their officers. Then he give us several distinct
+orders. The first few--I kept tally--was all about going to Hell; the next
+many was about not evolutin' in his company, when there; an' the last all
+was simply repeatin' the motions in quick time. Knowin' Frankie's groovin'
+to be badly eroded by age and lack of attention, I didn't much panic; but
+our Mr. Moorshed, 'e took it a little to heart. Me an' Mr. Hinchcliffe
+consoled 'im as well as service conditions permits of, an' we had a
+_résumé_-supper at the back o' the Camber--secluded _an'_ lugubrious! Then
+one thing leadin' up to another, an' our orders, except about anchorin'
+where he's booked for, leavin' us a clear 'orizon, Number Two Six Seven is
+now--mind the edge of the wharf--here!"
+
+By mysterious doublings he had brought me out on to the edge of a narrow
+strip of water crowded with coastwise shipping that runs far up into
+Weymouth town. A large foreign timber-brig lay at my feet, and under the
+round of her stern cowered, close to the wharf-edge, a slate-coloured,
+unkempt, two-funnelled craft of a type--but I am no expert--between the
+first-class torpedo-boat and the full-blooded destroyer. From her archaic
+torpedo-tubes at the stern, and quick-firers forward and amidship, she
+must have dated from the early nineties. Hammerings and clinkings, with
+spurts of steam and fumes of hot oil, arose from her inside, and a figure
+in a striped jersey squatted on the engine-room gratings.
+
+"She ain't much of a war-canoe, but you'll see more life in 'er than on an
+whole squadron of bleedin' _Pedantics."_
+
+"But she's laid up here--and Blue Fleet have gone," I protested.
+"Precisely. Only, in his comprehensive orders Frankie didn't put us out of
+action. Thus we're a non-neglectable fightin' factor which you mightn't
+think from this elevation; _an'_ m'rover, Red Fleet don't know we're 'ere.
+Most of us"--he glanced proudly at his boots--"didn't run to spurs, but
+we're disguised pretty devious, as you might say. Morgan, our signaliser,
+when last seen, was a Dawlish bathing-machine proprietor. Hinchcliffe was
+naturally a German waiter, and me you behold as a squire of low degree;
+while yonder Levantine dragoman on the hatch is our Mr. Moorshed. He was
+the second cutter's snotty--_my_ snotty--on the _Archimandrite_--two
+years--Cape Station. Likewise on the West Coast, mangrove swampin', an'
+gettin' the cutter stove in on small an' unlikely bars, an' manufacturin'
+lies to correspond. What I don't know about Mr. Moorshed is precisely the
+same gauge as what Mr. Moorshed don't know about me--half a millimetre, as
+you might say. He comes into awful opulence of his own when 'e's of age;
+an' judgin' from what passed between us when Frankie cursed 'im, I don't
+think 'e cares whether he's broke to-morrow or--the day after. Are you
+beginnin' to follow our tatties? They'll be worth followin'. Or _are_ you
+goin' back to your nice little cabin on the _Pedantic_--which I lay
+they've just dismounted the third engineer out of--to eat four fat meals
+per diem, an' smoke in the casement?"
+
+The figure in the jersey lifted its head and mumbled.
+
+"Yes, Sir," was Mr. Pyecroft's answer. "I 'ave ascertained that _Stiletto,
+Wraith_, and _Kobbold_ left at 6 P. M. with the first division o' Red
+Fleet's cruisers except _Devulotion_ and _Cryptic_, which are delayed by
+engine-room defects." Then to me: "Won't you go aboard? Mr. Moorshed 'ud
+like some one to talk to. You buy an 'am an see life."
+
+At this he vanished; and the Demon of Pure Irresponsibility bade me lower
+myself from the edge of the wharf to the tea-tray plates of No. 267.
+
+"What d'you want?" said the striped jersey.
+
+"I want to join Blue Fleet if I can," I replied. "I've been left behind
+by--an accident.
+
+"Well?"
+
+"Mr. Pyecroft told me to buy a ham and see life. About how big a ham do
+you need?"
+
+"I don't want any ham, thank you. That's the way up the wharf. _Good_-
+night."
+
+"Good-night!" I retraced my steps, wandered in the dark till I found a
+shop, and there purchased, of sardines, canned tongue, lobster, and
+salmon, not less than half a hundredweight. A belated sausage-shop
+supplied me with a partially cut ham of pantomime tonnage. These things I,
+sweating, bore out to the edge of the wharf and set down in the shadow of
+a crane. It was a clear, dark summer night, and from time to time I
+laughed happily to myself. The adventure was preordained on the face of
+it. Pyecroft alone, spurred or barefoot, would have drawn me very far from
+the paths of circumspection. His advice to buy a ham and see life clinched
+it. Presently Mr. Pyecroft--I heard spurs clink--passed me. Then the
+jersey voice said: "What the mischief's that?"
+
+"'Asn't the visitor come aboard, Sir? 'E told me he'd purposely abandoned
+the _Pedantic_ for the pleasure of the trip with us. Told me he was
+official correspondent for the _Times_; an' I know he's littery by the way
+'e tries to talk Navy-talk. Haven't you seen 'im, Sir?"
+
+Slowly and dispassionately the answer drawled long on the night; "Pye, you
+are without exception the biggest liar in the Service!"
+
+"Then what am I to do with the bag, Sir? It's marked with his name." There
+was a pause till Mr. Moorshed said "Oh!" in a tone which the listener
+might construe precisely as he pleased.
+
+"_He_ was the maniac who wanted to buy a ham and see life--was he? If he
+goes back to the _Pedantic_--"
+
+"Pre-cisely, Sir. Gives us all away, Sir."
+
+"Then what possessed _you_ to give it away to him, you owl?"
+
+"I've got his bag. If 'e gives anything away, he'll have to go naked."
+
+At this point I thought it best to rattle my tins and step out of the
+shadow of the crane.
+
+"I've bought the ham," I called sweetly. "Have you still any objection to
+my seeing life, Mr. Moorshed?"
+
+"All right, if you're insured. Won't you come down?"
+
+I descended; Pyecroft, by a silent flank movement, possessing himself of
+all the provisions, which he bore to some hole forward.
+
+"Have you known Mr. Pyecroft long?" said my host.
+
+"Met him once, a year ago, at Devonport. What do you think of him?"
+
+"What do _you_ think of him?"
+
+"I've left the _Pedantic_--her boat will be waiting for me at ten o'clock,
+too--simply because I happened to meet him," I replied.
+
+"That's all right. If you'll come down below, we may get some grub."
+
+We descended a naked steel ladder to a steel-beamed tunnel, perhaps twelve
+feet long by six high. Leather-topped lockers ran along either side; a
+swinging table, with tray and lamp above, occupied the centre. Other
+furniture there was none.
+
+"You can't shave here, of course. We don't wash, and, as a rule, we eat
+with our fingers when we're at sea. D'you mind?"
+
+Mr. Moorshed, black-haired, black-browed, sallow-complexioned, looked me
+over from head to foot and grinned. He was not handsome in any way, but
+his smile drew the heart. "You didn't happen to hear what Frankie told me
+from the flagship, did you? His last instructions, and I've logged them
+here in shorthand, were"--he opened a neat pocket-book--"_'Get out of this
+and conduct your own damned manoeuvres in your own damned tinker fashion!
+You're a disgrace to the Service, and your boat's offal.'"_
+
+"Awful?" I said.
+
+"No--offal--tripes--swipes--ullage." Mr. Pyecroft entered, in the costume
+of his calling, with the ham and an assortment of tin dishes, which he
+dealt out like cards.
+
+"I shall take these as my orders," said Mr. Moorshed. "I'm chucking the
+Service at the end of the year, so it doesn't matter."
+
+We cut into the ham under the ill-trimmed lamp, washed it down with
+whisky, and then smoked. From the foreside of the bulkhead came an
+uninterrupted hammering and clinking, and now and then a hiss of steam.
+
+"That's Mr. Hinchcliffe," said Pyecroft. "He's what is called a first-
+class engine-room artificer. If you hand 'im a drum of oil an' leave 'im
+alone, he can coax a stolen bicycle to do typewritin'."
+
+Very leisurely, at the end of his first pipe, Mr. Moorshed drew out a
+folded map, cut from a newspaper, of the area of manoeuvres, with the
+rules that regulate these wonderful things, below.
+
+"Well, I suppose I know as much as an average stick-and-string admiral,"
+he said, yawning. "Is our petticoat ready yet, Mr. Pyecroft?"
+
+As a preparation for naval manoeuvres these councils seemed inadequate. I
+followed up the ladder into the gloom cast by the wharf edge and the big
+lumber-ship's side. As my eyes stretched to the darkness I saw that No.
+267 had miraculously sprouted an extra pair of funnels--soft, for they
+gave as I touched them.
+
+"More _prima facie_ evidence. You runs a rope fore an' aft, an' you erects
+perpendick-u-arly two canvas tubes, which you distends with cane hoops,
+thus 'avin' as many funnels as a destroyer. At the word o' command, up
+they go like a pair of concertinas, an' consequently collapses equally
+'andy when requisite. Comin' aft we shall doubtless overtake the Dawlish
+bathin'-machine proprietor fittin' on her bustle."
+
+Mr. Pyecroft whispered this in my ear as Moorshed moved toward a group at
+the stern.
+
+"None of us who ain't built that way can be destroyers, but we can look as
+near it as we can. Let me explain to you, Sir, that the stern of a
+Thorneycroft boat, which we are _not_, comes out in a pretty bulge,
+totally different from the Yarrow mark, which again we are not. But, on
+the other 'and, _Dirk, Stiletto, Goblin, Ghoul, Djinn_, and _A-frite_--Red
+Fleet dee-stroyers, with 'oom we hope to consort later on terms o' perfect
+equality--_are_ Thorneycrofts, an' carry that Grecian bend which we are
+now adjustin' to our _arriere-pensée_--as the French would put it--by
+means of painted canvas an' iron rods bent as requisite. Between you an'
+me an' Frankie, we are the _Gnome_, now in the Fleet Reserve at Pompey--
+Portsmouth, I should say."
+
+"The first sea will carry it all away," said Moorshed, leaning gloomily
+outboard, "but it will do for the present."
+
+"We've a lot of _prima facie_ evidence about us," Mr. Pyecroft went on. "A
+first-class torpedo boat sits lower in the water than a destroyer. Hence
+we artificially raise our sides with a black canvas wash-streak to
+represent extra freeboard; _at_ the same time paddin' out the cover of the
+forward three-pounder like as if it was a twelve-pounder, an' variously
+fakin' up the bows of 'er. As you might say, we've took thought an' added
+a cubic to our stature. It's our len'th that sugars us. A 'undred an'
+forty feet, which is our len'th into two 'undred and ten, which is about
+the _Gnome's,_ leaves seventy feet over, which we haven't got."
+
+"Is this all your own notion, Mr. Pyecroft?" I asked.
+
+"In spots, you might say--yes; though we all contributed to make up
+deficiencies. But Mr. Moorshed, not much carin' for further Navy after
+what Frankie said, certainly threw himself into the part with avidity."
+
+"What the dickens are we going to do?"
+
+"Speaking as a seaman gunner, I should say we'd wait till the sights came
+on, an' then fire. Speakin' as a torpedo-coxswain, L.T.O., T.I., M.D.,
+etc., I presume we fall in--Number One in rear of the tube, etc., secure
+tube to ball or diaphragm, clear away securin'-bar, release safety-pin
+from lockin-levers, an' pray Heaven to look down on us. As second in
+command o' 267, I say wait an' see!"
+
+"What's happened? We're off," I said. The timber ship had slid away from
+us.
+
+"We are. Stern first, an' broadside on! If we don't hit anything too hard,
+we'll do."
+
+"Come on the bridge," said Mr. Moorshed. I saw no bridge, but fell over
+some sort of conning-tower forward, near which was a wheel. For the next
+few minutes I was more occupied with cursing my own folly than with the
+science of navigation. Therefore I cannot say how we got out of Weymouth
+Harbour, nor why it was necessary to turn sharp to the left and wallow in
+what appeared to be surf.
+
+"Excuse me," said Mr. Pyecroft behind us, "_I_ don't mind rammin' a
+bathin'-machine; but if only _one_ of them week-end Weymouth blighters has
+thrown his empty baccy-tin into the sea here, we'll rip our plates open on
+it; 267 isn't the _Archimandrite's_ old cutter."
+
+"I am hugging the shore," was the answer.
+
+"There's no actual 'arm in huggin', but it can come expensive if
+pursooed."
+
+"Right-O!" said Moorshed, putting down the wheel, and as we left those
+scant waters I felt 267 move more freely.
+
+A thin cough ran up the speaking-tube.
+
+"Well, what is it, Mr. Hinchcliffe?" said Moorshed.
+
+"I merely wished to report that she is still continuin' to go, Sir."
+
+"Right-O! Can we whack her up to fifteen, d'you think?"
+
+"I'll try, Sir; but we'd prefer to have the engine-room hatch open--at
+first, Sir."
+
+Whacked up then she was, and for half an hour was careered largely through
+the night, turning at last with a suddenness that slung us across the
+narrow deck.
+
+"This," said Mr. Pyecroft, who received me on his chest as a large rock
+receives a shadow, "represents the _Gnome_ arrivin' cautious from the
+direction o' Portsmouth, with Admiralty orders."
+
+He pointed through the darkness ahead, and after much staring my eyes
+opened to a dozen destroyers, in two lines, some few hundred yards away.
+
+"Those are the Red Fleet destroyer flotilla, which is too frail to panic
+about among the full-blooded cruisers inside Portland breakwater, and
+several millimetres too excited over the approachin' war to keep a look-
+out inshore. Hence our tattics!"
+
+We wailed through our siren--a long, malignant, hyena-like howl--and a
+voice hailed us as we went astern tumultuously.
+
+"The _Gnome_--Carteret-Jones--from Portsmouth, with orders--mm--mm--
+_Stiletto_," Moorshed answered through the megaphone in a high, whining
+voice, rather like a chaplain's.
+
+"_Who_?" was the answer.
+
+"Carter--et--Jones."
+
+"Oh, Lord!"
+
+There was a pause; a voice cried to some friend, "It's Podgie, adrift
+on the high seas in charge of a whole dee-stroyer!"
+
+Another voice echoed, "Podgie!" and from its note I gathered that Mr.
+Carteret-Jones had a reputation, but not for independent command.
+
+"Who's your sub?" said the first speaker, a shadow on the bridge of the
+_Dirk_.
+
+"A gunner, at present, Sir. The _Stiletto_--broken down--turns over to
+us."
+
+"When did the _Stiletto_ break down?"
+
+"Off the Start, Sir; two hours after--after she left here this evening, I
+believe. My orders are to report to you for the manoeuvre signal-codes,
+and join Commander Hignett's flotilla, which is in attendance on
+_Stiletto_."
+
+A smothered chuckle greeted this last. Moorshed's voice was high and
+uneasy. Said Pyecroft, with a sigh: "The amount o' trouble me an' my
+bright spurs 'ad fishin' out that information from torpedo coxswains and
+similar blighters in pubs all this afternoon, you would never believe."
+
+"But has the _Stiletto_ broken down?" I asked weakly.
+
+"How else are we to get Red Fleet's private signal-code? Any way, if she
+'asn't now, she will before manoeuvres are ended. It's only executin' in
+anticipation."
+
+"Go astern and send your coxswain aboard for orders, Mr. Jones." Water
+carries sound well, but I do not know whether we were intended to hear the
+next sentence: "They must have given him _one_ intelligent keeper."
+
+"That's me," said Mr. Pyecroft, as a black and coal-stained dinghy--I did
+not foresee how well I should come to know her--was flung overside by
+three men.
+
+"Havin' bought an 'am, we will now see life." He stepped into the boat and
+was away.
+
+"I say, Podgie!"--the speaker was in the last of the line of destroyers,
+as we thumped astern--"aren't you lonely out there?"
+
+"Oh, don't rag me!" said Moorshed. "Do you suppose I'll have to manoeuvre
+with your flo-tilla?"
+
+"No, Podgie! I'm pretty sure our commander will see you sifting cinders in
+Tophet before you come with our flo-tilla."
+
+"Thank you! She steers rather wild at high speeds."
+
+Two men laughed together.
+
+"By the way, who is Mr. Carteret-Jones when he's at home?" I whispered.
+
+"I was with him in the _Britannia_. I didn't like him much, but I'm
+grateful to him now. I must tell him so some day."
+
+"They seemed to know him hereabouts."
+
+"He rammed the _Caryatid_ twice with her own steam-pinnace."
+
+Presently, moved by long strokes, Mr. Pyecroft returned, skimming across
+the dark. The dinghy swung up behind him, even as his heel spurned it.
+
+"Commander Fasset's compliments to Mr. L. Carteret-Jones, and the sooner
+he digs out in pursuance of Admiralty orders as received at Portsmouth,
+the better pleased Commander Fasset will be. But there's a lot more----"
+
+"Whack her up, Mr. Hinchcliffe! Come on to the bridge. We can settle it as
+we go. Well?"
+
+Mr. Pyecroft drew an important breath, and slid off his cap.
+
+"Day an' night private signals of Red Fleet _com_plete, Sir!" He handed a
+little paper to Moorshed. "You see, Sir, the trouble was, that Mr.
+Carteret-Jones bein', so to say, a little new to his duties, 'ad forgot to
+give 'is gunner his Admiralty orders in writin', but, as I told Commander
+Fasset, Mr. Jones had been repeatin' 'em to me, nervous-like, most of the
+way from Portsmouth, so I knew 'em by heart--an' better. The Commander,
+recognisin' in me a man of agility, cautioned me to be a father an' mother
+to Mr. Carteret-Jones."
+
+"Didn't he know you?" I asked, thinking for the moment that there could be
+no duplicates of Emanuel Pyecroft in the Navy.
+
+"What's a torpedo-gunner more or less to a full lootenant commanding six
+thirty-knot destroyers for the first time? 'E seemed to cherish the 'ope
+that 'e might use the _Gnome_ for 'is own 'orrible purposes; but what I
+told him about Mr. Jones's sad lack o' nerve comin' from Pompey, an' going
+dead slow on account of the dark, short-circuited _that_ connection.
+'M'rover,' I says to him, 'our orders is explicit; _Stiletto's_ reported
+broke down somewhere off the Start, an' we've been tryin' to coil down a
+new stiff wire hawser all the evenin', so it looks like towin' 'er back,
+don't it?' I says. That more than ever jams his turrets, an' makes him
+keen to get rid of us. 'E even hinted that Mr. Carteret-Jones passin'
+hawsers an' assistin' the impotent in a sea-way might come pretty
+expensive on the tax-payer. I agreed in a disciplined way. I ain't proud.
+Gawd knows I ain't proud! But when I'm really diggin' out in the fancy
+line, I sometimes think that me in a copper punt, single-'anded, 'ud beat
+a cutter-full of De Rougemongs in a row round the fleet."
+
+At this point I reclined without shame on Mr. Pyecroft's bosom, supported
+by his quivering arm.
+
+"Well?" said Moorshed, scowling into the darkness, as 267's bows snapped
+at the shore seas of the broader Channel, and we swayed together.
+
+"'You'd better go on,' says Commander Fassett, 'an' do what you're told to
+do. I don't envy Hignett if he has to dry-nurse the _Gnome's_ commander.
+But what d'you want with signals?' 'e says. 'It's criminal lunacy to trust
+Mr. Jones with anything that steams.'
+
+"'May I make an observation, Sir?' I says. 'Suppose,' I says, 'you was
+torpedo-gunner on the _Gnome_, an' Mr. Carteret-Jones was your commandin'
+officer, an' you had your reputation _as_ a second in command for the
+first time,' I says, well knowin' it was his first command of a flotilla,
+'what 'ud you do, Sir?' That gouged 'is unprotected ends open--clear back
+to the citadel."
+
+"What did he say?" Moorshed jerked over is shoulder.
+
+"If you were Mr. Carteret-Jones, it might be disrespect for me to repeat
+it, Sir."
+
+"Go ahead," I heard the boy chuckle.
+
+"'Do?' 'e says. 'I'd rub the young blighter's nose into it till I made a
+perishin' man of him, or a perspirin' pillow-case,' 'e says, 'which,' he
+adds, 'is forty per cent, more than he is at present.'
+
+"Whilst he's gettin' the private signals--they're rather particular ones--
+I went forrard to see the _Dirk's_ gunner about borrowin' a holdin'-down
+bolt for our twelve-pounder. My open ears, while I was rovin' over his
+packet, got the followin' authentic particulars." I heard his voice
+change, and his feet shifted. "There's been a last council o' war of
+destroyer-captains at the flagship, an' a lot of things 'as come out. To
+begin with _Cryptic_ and _Devolution_, Captain Panke and Captain Malan--"
+
+"_Cryptic_ and _Devolution_, first-class cruisers," said Mr. Moorshed
+dreamily. "Go on, Pyecroft."
+
+"--bein' delayed by minor defects in engine-room, did _not_, as we know,
+accompany Red Fleet's first division of scouting cruisers, whose
+rendezvous is unknown, but presumed to be somewhere off the Lizard.
+_Cryptic_ an' _Devolution_ left at 9:30 P.M. still reportin' copious minor
+defects in engine-room. Admiral's final instructions was they was to put
+into Torbay, an' mend themselves there. If they can do it in twenty-four
+hours, they're to come on and join the battle squadron at the first
+rendezvous, down Channel somewhere. (I couldn't get that, Sir.) If they
+can't, he'll think about sendin' them some destroyers for escort. But his
+present intention is to go 'ammer and tongs down Channel, usin' 'is
+destroyers for all they're worth, an' thus keepin' Blue Fleet too busy off
+the Irish coast to sniff into any eshtuaries."
+
+"But if those cruisers are crocks, why does the Admiral let 'em out of
+Weymouth at all?" I asked.
+
+"The tax-payer," said Mr. Moorshed.
+
+"An' newspapers," added Mr. Pyecroft. "In Torbay they'll look as they was
+muckin' about for strategical purposes--hanamerin' like blazes in the
+engine room all the weary day, an' the skipper droppin' questions down the
+engine-room hatch every two or three minutes. _I've_ been there. Now,
+Sir?" I saw the white of his eye turn broad on Mr. Moorshed.
+
+The boy dropped his chin over the speaking-tube.
+
+"Mr. Hinchcliffe, what's her extreme economical radius?"
+
+"Three hundred and forty knots, down to swept bunkers."
+
+"Can do," said Moorshed. "By the way, have her revolutions any bearing on
+her speed, Mr. Hinchcliffe?"
+
+"None that I can make out yet, Sir."
+
+"Then slow to eight knots. We'll jog down to forty-nine, forty-five, or
+four about, and three east. That puts us say forty miles from Torbay by
+nine o'clock to-morrow morning. We'll have to muck about till dusk before
+we run in and try our luck with the cruisers."
+
+"Yes, Sir. Their picket boats will be panickin' round them all night. It's
+considered good for the young gentlemen."
+
+"Hallo! War's declared! They're off!" said Moorshed.
+
+He swung 267's head round to get a better view. A few miles to our right
+the low horizon was spangled with small balls of fire, while nearer ran a
+procession of tiny cigar ends.
+
+"Red hot! Set 'em alight," said Mr. Pyecroft. "That's the second destroyer
+flotilla diggin' out for Commander Fassett's reputation."
+
+The smaller lights disappeared; the glare of the destroyers' funnels
+dwindled even as we watched.
+
+"They're going down Channel with lights out, thus showin' their zeal an'
+drivin' all watch-officers crazy. Now, if you'll excuse me, I think I'll
+get you your pyjamas, an' you'll turn in," said Pyecroft.
+
+He piloted me to the steel tunnel, where the ham still swung majestically
+over the swaying table, and dragged out trousers and a coat with a monk's
+hood, all hewn from one hairy inch-thick board.
+
+"If you fall over in these you'll be drowned. They're lammies. I'll chock
+you off with a pillow; but sleepin' in a torpedo-boat's what you might
+call an acquired habit."
+
+I coiled down on an iron-hard horse-hair pillow next the quivering steel
+wall to acquire that habit. The sea, sliding over 267's skin, worried me
+with importunate, half-caught confidences. It drummed tackily to gather my
+attention, coughed, spat, cleared its throat, and, on the eve of that
+portentous communication, retired up stage as a multitude whispering.
+Anon, I caught the tramp of armies afoot, the hum of crowded cities
+awaiting the event, the single sob of a woman, and dry roaring of wild
+beasts. A dropped shovel clanging on the stokehold floor was, naturally
+enough, the unbarring of arena gates; our sucking uplift across the crest
+of some little swell, nothing less than the haling forth of new worlds;
+our half-turning descent into the hollow of its mate, the abysmal plunge
+of God-forgotten planets. Through all these phenomena and more--though I
+ran with wild horses over illimitable plains of rustling grass; though I
+crouched belly-flat under appalling fires of musketry; though I was
+Livingstone, painless, and incurious in the grip of his lion--my shut eyes
+saw the lamp swinging in its gimbals, the irregularly gliding patch of
+light on the steel ladder, and every elastic shadow in the corners of the
+frail angle-irons; while my body strove to accommodate itself to the
+infernal vibration of the machine. At the last I rolled limply on the
+floor, and woke to real life with a bruised nose and a great call to go on
+deck at once.
+
+"It's all right," said a voice in my booming ears. "Morgan and Laughton
+are worse than you!"
+
+I was gripping a rail. Mr. Pyecroft pointed with his foot to two bundles
+beside a torpedo-tube, which at Weymouth had been a signaller and a most
+able seaman. "She'd do better in a bigger sea," said Mr. Pyecroft. "This
+lop is what fetches it up."
+
+The sky behind us whitened as I laboured, and the first dawn drove down
+the Channel, tipping the wave-tops with a chill glare. To me that round
+wind which runs before the true day has ever been fortunate and of good
+omen. It cleared the trouble from my body, and set my soul dancing to
+267's heel and toe across the northerly set of the waves--such waves as I
+had often watched contemptuously from the deck of a ten-thousand-ton
+liner. They shouldered our little hull sideways and passed, scalloped, and
+splayed out, toward the coast, carrying our white wake in loops along
+their hollow backs. In succession we looked down a lead-grey cutting of
+water for half a clear mile, were flung up on its ridge, beheld the
+Channel traffic--full-sailed to that fair breeze--all about us, and swung
+slantwise, light as a bladder, elastic as a basket, into the next furrow.
+Then the sun found us, struck the wet gray bows to living, leaping opal,
+the colourless deep to hard sapphire, the many sails to pearl, and the
+little steam-plume of our escape to an inconstant rainbow.
+
+"A fair day and a fair wind for all, thank God!" said Emanuel Pyecroft,
+throwing back the cowl-like hood of his blanket coat. His face was pitted
+with coal-dust and grime, pallid for lack of sleep; but his eyes shone
+like a gull's.
+
+"I told you you'd see life. Think o' the _Pedantic_ now. Think o' her
+Number One chasin' the mobilised gobbies round the lower deck flats. Think
+o' the pore little snotties now bein' washed, fed, and taught, an' the
+yeoman o' signals with a pink eye wakin' bright 'an brisk to another
+perishin' day of five-flag hoists. Whereas _we_ shall caulk an' smoke
+cigarettes, same as the Spanish destroyers did for three weeks after war
+was declared." He dropped into the wardroom singing:--
+
+If you're going to marry me, marry me, Bill, It's no use muckin' about!
+
+The man at the wheel, uniformed in what had once been a Tam-o'-shanter, a
+pair of very worn R.M.L.I. trousers rolled up to the knee, and a black
+sweater, was smoking a cigarette. Moorshed, in a gray Balaclava and a
+brown mackintosh with a flapping cape, hauled at our supplementary funnel
+guys, and a thing like a waiter from a Soho restaurant sat at the head of
+the engine-room ladder exhorting the unseen below. The following wind beat
+down our smoke and covered all things with an inch-thick layer of stokers,
+so that eyelids, teeth, and feet gritted in their motions. I began to see
+that my previous experiences among battleships and cruisers had been
+altogether beside the mark.
+
+
+PART II
+
+  The wind went down with the sunset--
+    The fog came up with the tide,
+  When the Witch of the North took an Egg-shell (_bis_)
+    With a little Blue Devil inside.
+  "Sink," she said, "or swim," she said,
+    "It's all you will get from me.
+  And that is the finish of him!" she said,
+    And the Egg-shell went to sea.
+
+  The wind got up with the morning,
+    And the fog blew off with the rain,
+  When the Witch of the North saw the Egg-shell
+    And the little Blue Devil again.
+  "Did you swim?" she said. "Did you sink?" she said,
+    And the little Blue Devil replied:
+  "For myself I swam, but I think," he said,
+    "There's somebody sinking outside."
+
+But for the small detail that I was a passenger and a civilian, and might
+not alter her course, torpedo-boat No. 267 was mine to me all that
+priceless day. Moorshed, after breakfast--frizzled ham and a devil that
+Pyecroft made out of sardines, anchovies, and French mustard smashed
+together with a spanner--showed me his few and simple navigating tools,
+and took an observation. Morgan, the signaller, let me hold the chamois
+leathers while he cleaned the searchlight (we seemed to be better equipped
+with electricity than most of our class), that lived under a bulbous
+umbrella-cover amidship. Then Pyecroft and Morgan, standing easy, talked
+together of the King's Service as reformers and revolutionists, so
+notably, that were I not engaged on this tale I would, for its conclusion,
+substitute theirs.
+
+I would speak of Hinchcliffe--Henry Salt Hinchcliffe, first-class engine-
+room artificer, and genius in his line, who was prouder of having taken
+part in the Hat Crusade in his youth than of all his daring, his skill,
+and his nickel-steel nerve. I consorted with him for an hour in the packed
+and dancing engine-room, when Moorshed suggested "whacking her up" to
+eighteen knots, to see if she would stand it. The floor was ankle-deep in
+a creamy batter of oil and water; each moving part flicking more oil in
+zoetrope-circles, and the gauges invisible for their dizzy chattering on
+the chattering steel bulkhead. Leading stoker Grant, said to be a
+bigamist, an ox-eyed man smothered in hair, took me to the stokehold and
+planted me between a searing white furnace and some hell-hot iron plate
+for fifteen minutes, while I listened to the drone of fans and the worry
+of the sea without, striving to wrench all that palpitating firepot wide
+open.
+
+Then I came on deck and watched Moorshed--revolving in his orbit from the
+canvas bustle and torpedo-tubes aft, by way of engine-room, conning-tower,
+and wheel, to the doll's house of a foc'sle--learned in experience
+withheld from me, moved by laws beyond my knowledge, authoritative,
+entirely adequate, and yet, in heart, a child at his play. _I_ could not
+take ten steps along the crowded deck but I collided with some body or
+thing; but he and his satellites swung, passed, and returned on their
+vocations with the freedom and spaciousness of the well-poised stars.
+
+Even now I can at will recall every tone and gesture, with each dissolving
+picture inboard or overside--Hinchcliffe's white arm buried to the
+shoulder in a hornet's nest of spinning machinery; Moorshed's halt and
+jerk to windward as he looked across the water; Pyecroft's back bent over
+the Berthon collapsible boat, while he drilled three men in expanding it
+swiftly; the outflung white water at the foot of a homeward-bound Chinaman
+not a hundred yards away, and her shadow-slashed, rope-purfled sails
+bulging sideways like insolent cheeks; the ribbed and pitted coal-dust on
+our decks, all iridescent under the sun; the first filmy haze that paled
+the shadows of our funnels about lunch time; the gradual die-down and
+dulling over of the short, cheery seas; the sea that changed to a swell:
+the swell that crumbled up and ran allwhither oilily: the triumphant,
+almost audible roll inward of wandering fog-walls that had been stalking
+us for two hours, and--welt upon welt, chill as the grave--the drive of
+the interminable main fog of the Atlantic. We slowed to little more than
+steerage-way and lay listening. Presently a hand-bellows foghorn jarred
+like a corncrake, and there rattled out of the mist a big ship literally
+above us. We could count the rivets in her plates as we scrooped by, and
+the little drops of dew gathered below them.
+
+"Wonder why they're always barks--always steel--always four-masted--an'
+never less than two thousand tons. But they are," said Pyecroft. He was
+out on the turtle-backed bows of her; Moorshed was at the wheel, and
+another man worked the whistle.
+
+"This fog is the best thing could ha' happened to us," said Moorshed. "It
+gives us our chance to run in on the quiet.... Hal-lo!"
+
+A cracked bell rang. Clean and sharp (beautifully grained, too), a
+bowsprit surged over our starboard bow, the bobstay confidentially hooking
+itself into our forward rail.
+
+I saw Pyecroft's arm fly up; heard at the same moment the severing of the
+tense rope, the working of the wheel, Moorshed's voice down the tube
+saying, "Astern a little, please, Mr. Hinchcliffe!" and Pyecroft's cry,
+"Trawler with her gear down! Look out for our propeller, Sir, or we'll be
+wrapped up in the rope."
+
+267 surged quickly under my feet, as the pressure of the downward-bearing
+bobstay was removed. Half-a-dozen men of the foc'sle had already thrown
+out fenders, and stood by to bear off a just visible bulwark.
+
+Still going astern, we touched slowly, broadside on, to a suggestive
+crunching of fenders, and I looked into the deck of a Brixham trawler, her
+crew struck dumb.
+
+"Any luck?" said Moorshed politely.
+
+"Not till we met yeou," was the answer. "The Lard he saved us from they
+big ships to be spitted by the little wan. Where be'e gwine tu with our
+fine new bobstay?"
+
+"Yah! You've had time to splice it by now," said Pyecroft with contempt.
+
+"Aie; but we'm all crushed to port like aigs. You was runnin' twenty-seven
+knots, us reckoned it. Didn't us, Albert?"
+
+"Liker twenty-nine, an' niver no whistle."
+
+"Yes, we always do that. Do you want a tow to Brixham?" said Moorshed.
+
+A great silence fell upon those wet men of the sea.
+
+We lifted a little toward their side, but our silent, quick-breathing
+crew, braced and strained outboard, bore us off as though we had been a
+mere picket-boat.
+
+"What for?" said a puzzled voice.
+
+"For love; for nothing. You'll be abed in Brixham by midnight."
+
+"Yiss; but trawl's down."
+
+"No hurry. I'll pass you a line and go ahead. Sing out when you're ready."
+A rope smacked on their deck with the word; they made it fast; we slid
+forward, and in ten seconds saw nothing save a few feet of the wire rope
+running into fog over our stern; but we heard the noise of debate.
+
+"Catch a Brixham trawler letting go of a free tow in a fog," said Moorshed
+listening.
+
+"But what in the world do you want him for?" I asked.
+
+"Oh, he'll came in handy later."
+
+"Was that your first collision?"
+
+"Yes." I shook hands with him in silence, and our tow hailed us.
+
+"Aie! yeou little man-o'-war!" The voice rose muffled and wailing. "After
+us've upped trawl, us'll be glad of a tow. Leave line just slack abaout as
+'tis now, and kip a good fine look-out be'ind 'ee."
+
+"There's an accommodatin' blighter for you!" said Pyecroft. "Where does he
+expect we'll be, with these currents evolutin' like sailormen at the
+Agricultural Hall?"
+
+I left the bridge to watch the wire-rope at the stern as it drew out and
+smacked down upon the water. By what instinct or guidance 267 kept it from
+fouling her languidly flapping propeller, I cannot tell. The fog now
+thickened and thinned in streaks that bothered the eyes like the glare of
+intermittent flash-lamps; by turns granting us the vision of a sick sun
+that leered and fled, or burying all a thousand fathom deep in gulfs of
+vapours. At no time could we see the trawler though we heard the click of
+her windlass, the jar of her trawl-beam, and the very flap of the fish on
+her deck. Forward was Pyecroft with the lead; on the bridge Moorshed pawed
+a Channel chart; aft sat I, listening to the whole of the British
+Mercantile Marine (never a keel less) returning to England, and watching
+the fog-dew run round the bight of the tow back to its mother-fog.
+
+"Aie! yeou little man-o'-war! We'm done with trawl. You can take us home
+if you know the road."
+
+"Right O!" said Moorshed. "We'll give the fishmonger a run for his money.
+Whack her up, Mr. Hinchcliffe."
+
+The next few hours completed my education. I saw that I ought to be
+afraid, but more clearly (this was when a liner hooted down the back of my
+neck) that any fear which would begin to do justice to the situation
+would, if yielded to, incapacitate me for the rest of my days. A shadow of
+spread sails, deeper than the darkening twilight, brooding over us like
+the wings of Azrael (Pyecroft said she was a Swede), and, miraculously
+withdrawn, persuaded me that there was a working chance that I should
+reach the beach--any beach--alive, if not dry; and (this was when an
+economical tramp laved our port-rail with her condenser water) were I so
+spared, I vowed I would tell my tale worthily.
+
+Thus we floated in space as souls drift through raw time. Night added
+herself to the fog, and I laid hold on my limbs jealously, lest they, too,
+should melt in the general dissolution.
+
+"Where's that prevaricatin' fishmonger?" said Pyecroft, turning a lantern
+on a scant yard of the gleaming wire-rope that pointed like a stick to my
+left. "He's doin' some fancy steerin' on his own. No wonder Mr.
+Hincheliffe is blasphemious. The tow's sheered off to starboard, Sir.
+He'll fair pull the stern out of us."
+
+Moorshed, invisible, cursed through the megaphone into invisibility.
+
+"Aie! yeou little man-o'-war!" The voice butted through the fog with the
+monotonous insistence of a strayed sheep's. "We don't all like the road
+you'm takin'. 'Tis no road to Brixham. You'll be buckled up under Prawle
+Point by'mbye."
+
+"Do you pretend to know where you are?" the megaphone roared.
+
+"Iss, I reckon; but there's no pretence to me!"
+
+"O Peter!" said Pyecroft. "Let's hang him at 'is own gaff."
+
+I could not see what followed, but Moorshed said: "Take another man with
+you. If you lose the tow, you're done. I'll slow her down."
+
+I heard the dinghy splash overboard ere I could cry "Murder!" Heard the
+rasp of a boat-hook along the wire-rope, and then, as it had been in my
+ear, Pyecroft's enormous and jubilant bellow astern: "Why, he's here!
+Right atop of us! The blighter 'as pouched half the tow, like a shark!" A
+long pause filled with soft Devonian bleatings. Then Pyecroft, _solo
+arpeggie_: "Rum? Rum? Rum? Is that all? Come an' try it, uncle."
+
+I lifted my face to where once God's sky had been, and besought The Trues
+I might not die inarticulate, amid these half-worked miracles, but live at
+least till my fellow-mortals could be made one-millionth as happy as I was
+happy. I prayed and I waited, and we went slow--slow as the processes of
+evolution--till the boat-hook rasped again.
+
+"He's not what you might call a scientific navigator," said Pyecroft,
+still in the dinghy, but rising like a fairy from a pantomime trap. "The
+lead's what 'e goes by mostly; rum is what he's come for; an' Brixham is
+'is 'ome. Lay on, Mucduff!"
+
+A white whiskered man in a frock-coat--as I live by bread, a frock-coat!--
+sea-boots, and a comforter crawled over the torpedo-tube into Moorshed's
+grip and vanished forward.
+
+"'E'll probably 'old three gallon (look sharp with that dinghy!); but 'is
+nephew, left in charge of the _Agatha_, wants two bottles command-
+allowance. You're a tax-payer, Sir. Do you think that excessive?"
+
+"Lead there! Lead!" rang out from forward.
+
+"Didn't I say 'e wouldn't understand compass deviations? Watch him close.
+It'll be worth it!"
+
+As I neared the bridge I heard the stranger say: "Let me zmell un!" and to
+his nose was the lead presented by a trained man of the King's Navy.
+
+"I'll tell 'ee where to goo, if yeou'll tell your donkey-man what to du.
+I'm no hand wi' steam." On these lines we proceeded miraculously, and,
+under Moorshed's orders--I was the fisherman's Ganymede, even as
+"M. de C." had served the captain--I found both rum and curaçoa in
+a locker, and mixed them equal bulk in an enamelled iron cup.
+
+"Now we'm just abeam o' where we should be," he said at last, "an' here
+we'll lay till she lifts. I'd take 'e in for another bottle--and wan for
+my nevvy; but I reckon yeou'm shart-allowanced for rum. That's nivver no
+Navy rum yeou'm give me. Knowed 'ee by the smack tu un. Anchor now!"
+
+I was between Pyecroft and Moorshed on the bridge, and heard them spring
+to vibrating attention at my side. A man with a lead a few feet to port
+caught the panic through my body, and checked like a wild boar at gaze,
+for not far away an unmistakable ship's bell was ringing. It ceased, and
+another began.
+
+"Them!" said Pyecroft. "Anchored!"
+
+"More!" said our pilot, passing me the cup, and I filled it. The trawler
+astern clattered vehemently on her bell. Pyecroft with a jerk of his arm
+threw loose the forward three-pounder. The bar of the back-sight was
+heavily blobbed with dew; the foresight was invisible.
+
+"No--they wouldn't have their picket-boats out in this weather, though
+they ought to." He returned the barrel to its crotch slowly.
+
+"Be yeou gwine to anchor?" said Macduff, smacking his lips, "or be yeou
+gwine straight on to Livermead Beach?"
+
+"Tell him what we're driving at. Get it into his head somehow," said
+Moorshed; and Pyecroft, snatching the cup from me, enfolded the old man
+with an arm and a mist of wonderful words.
+
+"And if you pull it off," said Moorshed at the last, "I'll give you a
+fiver."
+
+"Lard! What's fivers to me, young man? My nevvy, he likes 'em; but I do
+cherish more on fine drink than filthy lucre any day o' God's good weeks.
+Leave goo my arm, yeou common sailorman! I tall 'ee, gentlemen, I hain't
+the ram-faced, ruddle-nosed old fule yeou reckon I be. Before the mast
+I've fared in my time; fisherman I've been since I seed the unsense of
+sea-dangerin'. Baccy and spirits--yiss, an' cigars too, I've run a plenty.
+I'm no blind harse or boy to be coaxed with your forty-mile free towin'
+and rum atop of all. There's none more sober to Brix'am this tide, I don't
+care who 'tis--than me. _I_ know--_I_ know. Yander'm two great King's
+ships. Yeou'm wishful to sink, burn, and destroy they while us kips 'em
+busy sellin' fish. No need tall me so twanty taime over. Us'll find they
+ships! Us'll find 'em, if us has to break our fine new bowsprit so close
+as Crump's bull's horn!"
+
+"Good egg!" quoth Moorshed, and brought his hand down on the wide
+shoulders with the smack of a beaver's tail.
+
+"Us'll go look for they by hand. Us'll give they something to play upon;
+an' do 'ee deal with them faithfully, an' may the Lard have mercy on your
+sowls! Amen. Put I in dinghy again."
+
+The fog was as dense as ever--we moved in the very womb of night--but I
+cannot recall that I took the faintest note of it as the dinghy, guided by
+the tow-rope, disappeared toward the _Agatha_, Pyecroft rowing. The bell
+began again on the starboard bow.
+
+"We're pretty near," said Moorshed, slowing down. "Out with the Berthon.
+(_We'll_ sell 'em fish, too.) And if any one rows Navy-stroke, I'll break
+his jaw with the tiller. Mr. Hinchcliffe (this down the tube), "you'll
+stay here in charge with Gregory and Shergold and the engine-room staff.
+Morgan stays, too, for signalling purposes." A deep groan broke from
+Morgan's chest, but he said nothing. "If the fog thins and you're seen by
+any one, keep'em quiet with the signals. I can't think of the precise lie
+just now, but _you_ can, Morgan."
+
+"Yes, Sir."
+
+"Suppose their torpedo-nets are down?" I whispered, shivering with
+excitement.
+
+"If they've been repairing minor defects all day, they won't have any one
+to spare from the engine-room, and 'Out nets!' is a job for the whole
+ship's company. I expect they've trusted to the fog--like us. Well,
+Pyecroft?"
+
+That great soul had blown up on to the bridge like a feather. "'Ad to see
+the first o' the rum into the _Agathites_, Sir. They was a bit jealous o'
+their commandin' officer comin' 'ome so richly lacquered, and at first the
+_conversazione_ languished, as you might say. But they sprang to attention
+ere I left. Six sharp strokes on the bells, if any of 'em are sober enough
+to keep tally, will be the signal that our consort 'as cast off her tow
+an' is manceuvrin' on 'er own."
+
+"Right O! Take Laughton with you in the dinghy. Put that Berthon over
+quietly there! Are you all right, Mr. Hinchcliffe?"
+
+I stood back to avoid the rush of half-a-dozen shadows dropping into the
+Berthon boat. A hand caught me by the slack of my garments, moved me in
+generous arcs through the night, and I rested on the bottom of the dinghy.
+
+"I want you for _prima facie_ evidence, in case the vaccination don't
+take," said Pyecroft in my ear. "Push off, Alf!"
+
+The last bell-ringing was high overhead. It was followed by six little
+tinkles from the _Agatha_, the roar of her falling anchor, the clash of
+pans, and loose shouting.
+
+"Where be gwine tu? Port your 'ellum. Aie! you mud-dredger in the fairway,
+goo astern! Out boats! She'll sink us!"
+
+A clear-cut Navy voice drawled from the clouds: "Quiet! you gardeners
+there. This is the _Cryptic_ at anchor."
+
+"Thank you for the range," said Pyecroft, and paddled gingerly. "Feel well
+out in front of you, Alf. Remember your fat fist is our only Marconi
+installation." The voices resumed:
+
+"Bournemouth steamer he says she be."
+
+"Then where be Brixham Harbor?"
+
+"Damme, I'm a tax-payer tu. They've no right to cruise about this way.
+I'll have the laa on 'ee if anything carries away."
+
+Then the man-of-war:
+
+"Short on your anchor! Heave short, you howling maniacs! You'll get
+yourselves smashed in a minute if you drift."
+
+The air was full of these and other voices as the dinghy, checking, swung.
+I passed one hand down Laughton's stretched arm and felt an iron gooseneck
+and a foot or two of a backward-sloping torpedo-net boom. The other hand I
+laid on broad, cold iron--even the flanks of H.M.S. _Cryptic_, which is
+twelve thousand tons.
+
+I heard a scrubby, raspy sound, as though Pyecroft had chosen that hour to
+shave, and I smelled paint. "Drop aft a bit, Alf; we'll put a stencil
+under the stern six-inch casements."
+
+Boom by boom Laughlin slid the dinghy along the towering curved wall.
+Once, twice, and again we stopped, and the keen scrubbing sound was
+renewed.
+
+"Umpires are 'ard-'earted blighters, but this ought to convince 'em....
+Captain Panke's stern-walk is now above our defenceless 'eads. Repeat the
+evolution up the starboard side, Alf."
+
+I was only conscious that we moved around an iron world palpitating with
+life. Though my knowledge was all by touch--as, for example, when Pyecroft
+led my surrendered hand to the base of some bulging sponson, or when my
+palm closed on the knife-edge of the stem and patted it timidly--yet I
+felt lonely and unprotected as the enormous, helpless ship was withdrawn,
+and we drifted away into the void where voices sang:
+
+
+  Tom Pearce, Tom Pearce, lend me thy gray mare,
+  All along, out along, down along lea!
+  I want for to go to Widdicombe Fair
+  With Bill Brewer, Sam Sewer, Peter Gurney, Harry Hawke,
+  Old Uncle Tom Cobley an' all!
+
+"That's old Sinbad an' 'is little lot from the _Agatha_! Give way, Alf!
+_You_ might sing somethin', too."
+
+"I'm no burnin' Patti. Ain't there noise enough for you, Pye?"
+
+"Yes, but it's only amateurs. Give me the tones of 'earth and 'ome. Ha!
+List to the blighter on the 'orizon sayin' his prayers, Navy-fashion.
+'Eaven 'elp me argue that way when I'm a warrant-officer!"
+
+We headed with little lapping strokes toward what seemed to be a fair-
+sized riot.
+
+"An' I've 'eard the _Devolution_ called a happy ship, too," said Pyecroft.
+"Just shows 'ow a man's misled by prejudice. She's peevish--that's what
+she is--nasty-peevish. Prob'ly all because the _Agathites_ are scratching
+'er paint. Well, rub along, Alf. I've got the lymph!"
+
+A voice, which Mr. Pyecroft assured me belonged to a chief carpenter, was
+speaking through an aperture (starboard bow twelve-pounder on the lower
+deck). He did not wish to purchase any fish, even at grossly reduced
+rates. Nobody wished to buy any fish. This ship was the _Devolution_ at
+anchor, and desired no communication with shore boats.
+
+"Mark how the Navy 'olds it's own. He's sober. The _Agathites_ are not, as
+you might say, an' yet they can't live with 'im. It's the discipline that
+does it. 'Ark to the bald an' unconvincin' watch-officer chimin' in. I
+wonder where Mr. Moorshed has got to?"
+
+We drifted down the _Devolution's_ side, as we had drifted down her
+sister's; and we dealt with her in that dense gloom as we had dealt with
+her sister.
+
+"Whai! 'Tis a man-o'-war, after all! I can see the captain's whisker all
+gilt at the edges! We took 'ee for the Bournemouth steamer. Three cheers
+for the real man-o'-war!"
+
+That cry came from under the _Devolution's_ stern. Pyecroft held something
+in his teeth, for I heard him mumble, "Our Mister Moorshed!"
+
+Said a boy's voice above us, just as we dodged a jet of hot water from
+some valve: "I don't half like that cheer. If I'd been the old man I'd ha'
+turned loose the quick-firers at the first go-off. Aren't they rowing
+Navy-stroke, yonder?"
+
+"True," said Pyecroft, listening to retreating oars. "It's time to go 'ome
+when snotties begin to think. The fog's thinnin', too."
+
+I felt a chill breath on my forehead, and saw a few feet of the steel
+stand out darker than the darkness, disappear--it was then the dinghy shot
+away from it--and emerge once more.
+
+"Hallo! what boat's that?" said the voice suspiciously.
+
+"Why, I do believe it's a real man-o'-war, after all," said Pyecroft, and
+kicked Laughton.
+
+"What's that for?" Laughton was no dramatist.
+
+"Answer in character, you blighter! Say somethin' opposite."
+
+"What boat's _thatt_?" The hail was repeated.
+
+"What do yee say-ay?" Pyecroft bellowed, and, under his breath to me:
+"Give us a hand."
+
+"It's called the _Marietta_--F. J. Stokes--Torquay," I began, quaveringly.
+"At least, that's the name on the name-board. I've been dining--on a
+yacht."
+
+"I see." The voice shook a little, and my way opened before me with
+disgraceful ease.
+
+"Yesh. Dining private yacht. _Eshmesheralda_. I belong to Torquay Yacht
+Club. _Are_ you member Torquay Yacht Club?"
+
+"You'd better go to bed, Sir. Good-night." We slid into the rapidly
+thinning fog.
+
+"Dig out, Alf. Put your _nix mangiare_ back into it. The fog's peelin'
+off like a petticoat. Where's Two Six Seven?"
+
+"I can't see her," I replied, "but there's a light low down ahead."
+
+"The _Agatha_!" They rowed desperately through the uneasy dispersal of the
+fog for ten minutes and ducked round the trawler's bow.
+
+"Well, Emanuel means 'God with us'--so far." Pyecroft wiped his brow, laid
+a hand on the low rail, and as he boosted me up to the trawler, I saw
+Moorshed's face, white as pearl in the thinning dark.
+
+"Was it all right?" said he, over the bulwarks.
+
+"Vaccination ain't in it. She's took beautiful. But where's 267, Sir?"
+Pyecroft replied.
+
+"Gone. We came here as the fog lifted. I gave the _Devolution_ four. Was
+that you behind us?"
+
+"Yes, sir; but I only got in three on the _Devolution_. I gave the
+_Cryptic_ nine, though. They're what you might call more or less
+vaccinated."
+
+He lifted me inboard, where Moorshed and six pirates lay round the
+_Agatha's_ hatch. There was a hint of daylight in the cool air.
+
+"Where is the old man?" I asked.
+
+"Still selling 'em fish, I suppose. He's a darling! But I wish I could get
+this filthy paint off my hands. Hallo! What the deuce is the _Cryptic_
+signalling?"
+
+A pale masthead light winked through the last of the fog. It was answered
+by a white pencil to the southward.
+
+"Destroyer signalling with searchlight." Pyecroft leaped on the stern-
+rail. "The first part is private signals. Ah! now she's Morsing against
+the fog. 'P-O-S-T'--yes, 'postpone'--'D-E-P-' (go on)! 'departure--till--
+further--orders--which--will--be com" (he's dropped the other m)
+"'unicated--verbally. End,'." He swung round. "_Cryptic_ is now answering:
+'Ready--proceed--immediately. What--news--promised--destroyer--
+flotilla?'"
+
+"Hallo!" said Moorshed. "Well, never mind, They'll come too late."
+
+"Whew! That's some 'igh-born suckling on the destroyer. Destroyer signals:
+'Care not. All will be known later.' What merry beehive's broken loose
+now?"
+
+"What odds! We've done our little job."
+
+"Why--why--it's Two Six Seven!"
+
+Here Pyecroft dropped from the rail among the fishy nets and shook the
+_Agatha_ with heavings. Moorshed cast aside his cigarette, looked over the
+stern, and fell into his subordinate's arms. I heard the guggle of
+engines, the rattle of a little anchor going over not a hundred yards
+away, a cough, and Morgan's subdued hail. ... So far as I remember, it was
+Laughton whom I hugged; but the men who hugged me most were Pyecroft and
+Moorshed, adrift among the fishy nets.
+
+There was no semblance of discipline in our flight over the _Agatha's_
+side, nor, indeed, were ordinary precautions taken for the common safety,
+because (I was in the Berthon) they held that patent boat open by hand for
+the most part. We regained our own craft, cackling like wild geese, and
+crowded round Moorshed and Hinchcliffe. Behind us the _Agatha's_ boat,
+returning from her fish-selling cruise, yelled: "Have 'ee done the trick?
+Have 'ee done the trick?" and we could only shout hoarsely over the stern,
+guaranteeing them rum by the hold-full.
+
+"Fog got patchy here at 12:27," said Henry Salt Hinchcliffe, growing
+clearer every instant in the dawn. "Went down to Brixham Harbour to keep
+out of the road. Heard whistles to the south and went to look. I had her
+up to sixteen good. Morgan kept on shedding private Red Fleet signals out
+of the signal-book, as the fog cleared, till we was answered by three
+destroyers. Morgan signalled 'em by searchlight: 'Alter course to South
+Seventeen East, so as not to lose time,' They came round quick. We kept
+well away--on their port beam--and Morgan gave 'em their orders." He
+looked at Morgan and coughed.
+
+"The signalman, acting as second in command," said Morgan, swelling, "then
+informed destroyer flotilla that _Cryptic_ and _Devolution_ had made good
+defects, and, in obedience to Admiral's supplementary orders (I was afraid
+they might suspect that, but they didn't), had proceeded at seven knots at
+11:23 p. M. to rendezvous near Channel Islands, seven miles N.N.W. the
+Casquet light. (I've rendezvoused there myself, Sir.) Destroyer flotilla
+would therefore follow cruisers and catch up with them on their course.
+Destroyer flotilla then dug out on course indicated, all funnels sparking
+briskly."
+
+"Who were the destroyers?"
+
+"_Wraith, Kobbold, Stiletto_, Lieutenant-Commander A. L. Hignett, acting
+under Admiral's orders to escort cruisers received off the Dodman at 7 P.
+M. They'd come slow on account of fog."
+
+"Then who were you?"
+
+"We were the _Afrite_, port-engine broke down, put in to Torbay, and there
+instructed by _Cryptic_, previous to her departure with _Devolution_) to
+inform Commander Hignett of change of plans. Lieutenant-Commander Hignett
+signalled that our meeting was quite providential. After this we returned
+to pick up our commanding officer, and being interrogated by _Cryptic_,
+marked time signalling as requisite, which you may have seen. The _Agatha_
+representing the last known rallying-point--or, as I should say, pivot-
+ship of the evolution--it was decided to repair to the _Agatha_ at
+conclusion of manoeuvre."
+
+"Is there such a thing as one fine big drink aboard this one fine big
+battleship?" "Can do, sir," said Pyecroft, and got it. Beginning with Mr.
+Moorshed and ending with myself, junior to the third first-class stoker,
+we drank, and it was as water of the brook, that two and a half inches of
+stiff, treacly, Navy rum. And we looked each in the other's face, and we
+nodded, bright-eyed, burning with bliss.
+
+Moorshed walked aft to the torpedo-tubes and paced back and forth, a
+captain victorious on his own quarterdeck; and the triumphant day broke
+over the green-bedded villas of Torquay to show us the magnitude of our
+victory. There lay the cruisers (I have reason to believe that they had
+made good their defects). They were each four hundred and forty feet long
+and sixty-six wide; they held close upon eight hundred men apiece, and
+they had cost, say, a million and a half the pair. And they were ours, and
+they did not know it. Indeed, the _Cryptic_, senior ship, was signalling
+vehement remarks to our address, which we did not notice.
+
+"If you take these glasses, you'll get the general run o' last night's
+vaccination," said Pyecroft. "Each one represents a torpedo got 'ome, as
+you might say."
+
+I saw on the _Cryptic's_ port side, as she lay half a mile away across the
+glassy water, four neat white squares in outline, a white blur in the
+centre.
+
+"There are five more to starboard. 'Ere's the original!" He handed me a
+paint-dappled copper stencil-plate, two feet square, bearing in the centre
+the six-inch initials, "G.M."
+
+"Ten minutes ago I'd ha' eulogised about that little trick of ours, but
+Morgan's performance has short-circuited me. Are you happy, Morgan?"
+
+"Bustin'," said the signalman briefly.
+
+"You may be. Gawd forgive you, Morgan, for as Queen 'Enrietta said to the
+'ousemaid, _I_ never will. I'd ha' given a year's pay for ten minutes o'
+your signallin' work this mornin'."
+
+"I wouldn't 'ave took it up," was the answer. "Perishin' 'Eavens above!
+Look at the _Devolution's_ semaphore!" Two black wooden arms waved from
+the junior ship's upper bridge. "They've seen it."
+
+"_The_ mote _on_ their neighbour's beam, of course," said Pyecroft, and
+read syllable by syllable: "'Captain Malan to Captain Panke. Is--sten--
+cilled frieze your starboard side new Admiralty regulation, or your Number
+One's private expense?' Now _Cryptic_ is saying, 'Not understood.' Poor
+old _Crippy_, the _Devolute's_ raggin' 'er sore. 'Who is G.M.?' she says.
+That's fetched the _Cryptic_. She's answerin': 'You ought to know. Examine
+own paintwork.' Oh, Lord! they're both on to it now. This is balm. This is
+beginning to be balm. I forgive you, Morgan!"
+
+Two frantic pipes twittered. From either cruiser a whaler dropped into the
+water and madly rowed round the ship: as a gay-coloured hoist rose to the
+_Cryptic's_ yardarm: "Destroyer will close at once. Wish to speak by
+semaphore." Then on the bridge semaphore itself: "Have been trying to
+attract your attention last half hour. Send commanding officer aboard at
+once."
+
+"Our attention? After all the attention we've given 'er, too," said
+Pyecroft. "What a greedy old woman!" To Moorshed: "Signal from the
+_Cryptic_, Sir."
+
+"Never mind that!" said the boy, peering through his glasses. "Our dinghy
+quick, or they'll paint our marks out. Come along!"
+
+By this time I was long past even hysteria. I remember Pyecroft's bending
+back, the surge of the driven dinghy, a knot of amazed faces as we skimmed
+the _Cryptic's_ ram, and the dropped jaw of the midshipman in her whaler
+when we barged fairly into him.
+
+"Mind my paint!" he yelled.
+
+"You mind mine, snotty," said Moorshed. "I was all night putting these
+little ear-marks on you for the umpires to sit on. Leave 'em alone."
+
+We splashed past him to the _Devolution's_ boat, where sat no one less
+than her first lieutenant, a singularly unhandy-looking officer.
+
+"What the deuce is the meaning of this?" he roared, with an accusing
+forefinger.
+
+"You're sunk, that's all. You've been dead half a tide."
+
+"Dead, am I? I'll show you whether I'm dead or not, Sir!"
+
+"Well, you may be a survivor," said Moorshed ingratiatingly, "though it
+isn't at all likely."
+
+The officer choked for a minute. The midshipman crouched up in stern said,
+half aloud: "Then I _was_ right--last night."
+
+"Yesh," I gasped from the dinghy's coal-dust. "Are you member Torquay
+Yacht Club?"
+
+"Hell!" said the first lieutenant, and fled away. The _Cryptic's_ boat was
+already at that cruiser's side, and semaphores flicked zealously from ship
+to ship. We floated, a minute speck, between the two hulls, while the
+pipes went for the captain's galley on the _Devolution_.
+
+"That's all right," said Moorshed. "Wait till the gangway's down and then
+board her decently. We oughtn't to be expected to climb up a ship we've
+sunk."
+
+Pyecroft lay on his disreputable oars till Captain Malan, full-uniformed,
+descended the _Devolution's_ side. With due compliments--not acknowledged,
+I grieve to say--we fell in behind his sumptuous galley, and at last, upon
+pressing invitation, climbed, black as sweeps all, the lowered gangway of
+the _Cryptic_. At the top stood as fine a constellation of marine stars as
+ever sang together of a morning on a King's ship. Every one who could get
+within earshot found that his work took him aft. I counted eleven able
+seamen polishing the breechblock of the stern nine-point-two, four marines
+zealously relieving each other at the life-buoy, six call-boys, nine
+midshipmen of the watch, exclusive of naval cadets, and the higher ranks
+past all census.
+
+"If I die o' joy," said Pyecroft behind his hand, "remember I died
+forgivin' Morgan from the bottom of my 'eart, because, like Martha, we
+'ave scoffed the better part. You'd better try to come to attention, Sir."
+
+Moorshed ran his eye voluptuously over the upper deck battery, the huge
+beam, and the immaculate perspective of power. Captain Panke and Captain
+Malan stood on the well-browned flash-plates by the dazzling hatch.
+Precisely over the flagstaff I saw Two Six Seven astern, her black
+petticoat half hitched up, meekly floating on the still sea. She looked
+like the pious Abigail who has just spoken her mind, and, with folded
+hands, sits thanking Heaven among the pieces. I could almost have sworn
+that she wore black worsted gloves and had a little dry cough. But it was
+Captain Panke that coughed so austerely. He favoured us with a lecture on
+uniform, deportment, and the urgent necessity of answering signals from a
+senior ship. He told us that he disapproved of masquerading, that he loved
+discipline, and would be obliged by an explanation. And while he delivered
+himself deeper and more deeply into our hands, I saw Captain Malan wince.
+He was watching Moorshed's eye.
+
+"I belong to Blue Fleet, Sir. I command Number Two Six Seven," said
+Moorshed, and Captain Planke was dumb. "Have you such a thing as a frame-
+plan of the _Cryptic_ aboard?" He spoke with winning politeness as he
+opened a small and neatly folded paper.
+
+"I have, sir." The little man's face was working with passion.
+
+"Ah! Then I shall be able to show you precisely where you were torpedoed
+last night in"--he consulted the paper with one finely arched eyebrow--"in
+nine places. And since the _Devolution_ is, I understand, a sister ship"--
+he bowed slightly toward Caplain Malan--"the same plan----"
+
+I had followed the clear precision of each word with a dumb amazement
+which seemed to leave my mind abnormally clear. I saw Captain Malan's eye
+turn from Moorshed and seek that of the _Cryptic's_ commander. And he
+telegraphed as clearly as Moorshed was speaking: "My dear friend and
+brother officer, _I_ know Panke; _you_ know Panke; _we_ know Panke--good
+little Panke! In less than three Greenwich chronometer seconds Panke will
+make an enormous ass of himself, and I shall have to put things straight,
+unless you who are a man of tact and discernment----"
+
+"Carry on." The Commander's order supplied the unspoken word. The cruiser
+boiled about her business around us; watch and watch officers together, up
+to the limit of noise permissible. I saw Captain Malan turn to his senior.
+
+"Come to my cabin!" said Panke gratingly, and led the way. Pyecroft and I
+stayed still.
+
+"It's all right," said Pyecroft. "They daren't leave us loose aboard for
+one revolution," and I knew that he had seen what I had seen.
+
+"You, too!" said Captain Malan, returning suddenly. We passed the sentry
+between white enamelled walls of speckless small arms, and since that
+Royal Marine Light infantryman was visibly suffocating from curiosity, I
+winked at him. We entered the chintz-adorned, photo-speckled, brass-
+fendered, tile-stoved main cabin. Moorshed, with a ruler, was
+demonstrating before the frame-plan of H.M.S. _Cryptic_.
+
+"--making nine stencils in all of my initials G.M.," I heard him say.
+"Further, you will find attached to your rudder, and you, too, Sir"--he
+bowed to Captain Malan yet again--"one fourteen-inch Mark IV practice
+torpedo, as issued to first-class torpedo-boats, properly buoyed. I have
+sent full particulars by telegraph to the umpires, and have requested them
+to judge on the facts as they--appear." He nodded through the large window
+to the stencilled _Devolution_ awink with brass work in the morning sun,
+and ceased.
+
+Captain Panke faced us. I remembered that this was only play, and caught
+myself wondering with what keener agony comes the real defeat.
+
+"Good God, Johnny!" he said, dropping his lower lip like a child, "this
+young pup says he has put us both out of action. Inconceivable--eh? My
+first command of one of the class. Eh? What shall we do with him? What
+shall we do with him--eh?"
+
+"As far as I can see, there's no getting over the stencils," his companion
+answered.
+
+"Why didn't I have the nets down? Why didn't I have the nets down?" The
+cry tore itself from Captain Panke's chest as he twisted his hands.
+
+"I suppose we'd better wait and find out what the umpires will say. The
+Admiral won't be exactly pleased." Captain Malan spoke very soothingly.
+Moorshed looked out through the stern door at Two Six Seven. Pyecroft and
+I, at attention, studied the paintwork opposite. Captain Panke had dropped
+into his desk chair, and scribbled nervously at a blotting-pad.
+
+Just before the tension became unendurable, he looked at his junior for a
+lead. "What--what are you going to do about it, Johnny--eh?"
+
+"Well, if you don't want him, I'm going to ask this young gentleman to
+breakfast, and then we'll make and mend clothes till the umpires have
+decided."
+
+Captain Panke flung out a hand swiftly.
+
+"Come with me," said Captain Malan. "Your men had better go back in the
+dinghy to--their--own--ship."
+
+"Yes, I think so," said Moorshed, and passed out behind the captain. We
+followed at a respectful interval, waiting till they had ascended the
+ladder.
+
+Said the sentry, rigid as the naked barometer behind him: "For Gawd's
+sake! 'Ere, come 'ere! For Gawd's sake! What's 'appened? Oh! come '_ere_
+an' tell."
+
+"Tell? You?" said Pyecroft. Neither man's lips moved, and the words were
+whispers: "Your ultimate illegitimate grandchildren might begin to
+understand, not you--nor ever will."
+
+"Captain Malan's galley away, Sir," cried a voice above; and one replied:
+"Then get those two greasers into their dinghy and hoist the blue peter.
+We're out of action."
+
+"Can you do it, Sir?" said Pyecroft at the foot of the ladder. "Do you
+think it is in the English language, or do you not?"
+
+"I don't think I can, but I'll try. If it takes me two years, I'll try."
+
+*       *       *       *       *
+
+There are witnesses who can testify that I have used no artifice. I have,
+on the contrary, cut away priceless slabs of _opus alexandrinum_. My gold
+I have lacquered down to dull bronze, my purples overlaid with sepia of
+the sea, and for hell-hearted ruby and blinding diamond I have substituted
+pale amethyst and mere jargoon. Because I would say again "Disregarding
+the inventions of the Marine Captain whose other name is Gubbins, let a
+plain statement suffice."
+
+
+
+
+THE COMPREHENSION OF PRIVATE COPPER
+
+THE KING'S TASK
+
+  After the sack of the City, when Rome was sunk to a name,
+  In the years when the Lights were darkened, or ever Saint Wilfrid came.
+  Low on the borders of Britain, the ancient poets sing,
+  Between the cliff and the forest there ruled a Saxon king.
+
+  Stubborn all were his people, a stark and a jealous horde--
+  Not to be schooled by the cudgel, scarce to be cowed by the sword;
+  Blithe to turn at their pleasure, bitter to cross in their mood,
+  And set on the ways of their choosing as the hogs of Andred's Wood ...
+
+  They made them laws in the Witan, the laws of flaying and fine,
+  Folkland, common and pannage, the theft and the track of kine;
+  Statutes of tun and of market for the fish and the malt and the meal,
+  The tax on the Bramber packhorse and the tax on the Hastings keel.
+  Over the graves of the Druids and over the wreck of Rome
+  Rudely but deeply they bedded the plinth of the days to come.
+  Behind the feet of the Legions and before the Northman's ire,
+  Rudely but greatly begat they the body of state and of shire.
+  Rudely but greatly they laboured, and their labour stands till now
+  If we trace on our ancient headlands the twist of their eight-ox plough.
+
+
+THE COMPREHENSION OF PRIVATE COPPER
+
+Private Copper's father was a Southdown shepherd; in early youth Copper
+had studied under him. Five years' army service had somewhat blunted
+Private Copper's pastoral instincts, but it occurred to him as a memory of
+the Chalk that sheep, or in this case buck, do not move towards one across
+turf, or in this case, the Colesberg kopjes unless a stranger, or in this
+case an enemy, is in the neighbourhood. Copper, helmet back-first advanced
+with caution, leaving his mates of the picket full a mile behind. The
+picket, concerned for its evening meal, did not protest. A year ago it
+would have been an officer's command, moving as such. To-day it paid
+casual allegiance to a Canadian, nominally a sergeant, actually a trooper
+of Irregular Horse, discovered convalescent in Naauwport Hospital, and
+forthwith employed on odd jobs. Private Copper crawled up the side of a
+bluish rock-strewn hill thinly fringed with brush atop, and remembering
+how he had peered at Sussex conies through the edge of furze-clumps,
+cautiously parted the dry stems before his face. At the foot of the long
+slope sat three farmers smoking. To his natural lust for tobacco was added
+personal wrath because spiky plants were pricking his belly, and Private
+Copper slid the backsight up to fifteen hundred yards....
+
+"Good evening, Khaki. Please don't move," said a voice on his left, and as
+he jerked his head round he saw entirely down the barrel of a well-kept
+Lee-Metford protruding from an insignificant tuft of thorn. Very few
+graven images have moved less than did Private Copper through the next ten
+seconds.
+
+"It's nearer seventeen hundred than fifteen," said a young man in an
+obviously ready-made suit of grey tweed, possessing himself of Private
+Copper's rifle. "Thank _you_. We've got a post of thirty-seven men out
+yonder. You've eleven--eh? We don't want to kill 'em. We have no quarrel
+with poor uneducated Khakis, and we do not want prisoners we do not keep.
+It is demoralising to both sides--eh?"
+
+Private Cooper did not feel called upon to lay down the conduct of
+guerilla warfare. This dark-skinned, dark-haired, and dark-eyed stranger
+was his first intimate enemy. He spoke, allowing for a clipped cadence
+that recalled to Copper vague memories of Umballa, in precisely the same
+offensive accent that the young squire of Wilmington had used fifteen
+years ago when he caught and kicked Alf Copper, a rabbit in each pocket,
+out of the ditches of Cuckmere. The enemy looked Copper up and down,
+folded and re-pocketed a copy of an English weekly which he had been
+reading, and said: "You seem an inarticulate sort of swine--like the rest
+of them--eh?"
+
+"You," said Copper, thinking, somehow, of the crushing answers he had
+never given to the young squire, "are a renegid. Why, you ain't Dutch.
+You're English, same as me."
+
+"_No_, khaki. If you cannot talk civilly to a gentleman I will blow your
+head off."
+
+Copper cringed, and the action overbalanced him so that he rolled some six
+or eight feet downhill, under the lee of a rough rock. His brain was
+working with a swiftness and clarity strange in all his experience of Alf
+Copper. While he rolled he spoke, and the voice from his own jaws amazed
+him: "If you did, 'twouldn't make you any less of a renegid." As a useful
+afterthought he added: "I've sprained my ankle."
+
+The young man was at his side in a flash. Copper made no motion to rise,
+but, cross-legged under the rock, grunted: "'Ow much did old Krujer pay
+you for this? What was you wanted for at 'ome? Where did you desert from?"
+
+"Khaki," said the young man, sitting down in his turn, "you are a shade
+better than your mates. You did not make much more noise than a yoke of
+oxen when you tried to come up this hill, but you are an ignorant diseased
+beast like the rest of your people--eh? When you were at the Ragged
+Schools did they teach you any history, Tommy--'istory I mean?"
+
+"Don't need no schoolin' to know a renegid," said Copper. He had made
+three yards down the hill--out of sight, unless they could see through
+rocks, of the enemy's smoking party.
+
+The young man laughed; and tossed the soldier a black sweating stick of
+"True Affection." (Private Copper had not smoked a pipe for three weeks.)
+
+"_You_ don't get this--eh?" said the young man. "_We_ do. We take it from
+the trains as we want it. You can keep the cake--you po-ah Tommee." Copper
+rammed the good stuff into his long-cold pipe and puffed luxuriously. Two
+years ago the sister of gunner-guard De Souza, East India Railway, had, at
+a dance given by the sergeants to the Allahabad Railway Volunteers,
+informed Copper that she could not think of waltzing with "a poo-ah
+Tommee." Private Copper wondered why that memory should have returned at
+this hour.
+
+"I'm going to waste a little trouble on you before I send you back to your
+picket _quite_ naked--eh? Then you can say how you were overpowered by
+twenty of us and fired off your last round--like the men we picked up at
+the drift playing cards at Stryden's farm--eh? What's your name--eh?"
+
+Private Copper thought for a moment of a far-away housemaid who might
+still, if the local postman had not gone too far, be interested in his
+fate. On the other hand, he was, by temperament, economical of the truth.
+"Pennycuik," he said, "John Pennycuik."
+
+"Thank you. Well, Mr. John Pennycuik, I'm going to teach you a little
+'istory, as you'd call it--eh?"
+
+"'Ow!" said Copper, stuffing his left hand in his mouth. "So long since
+I've smoked I've burned my 'and--an' the pipe's dropped too. No objection
+to my movin' down to fetch it, is there--Sir?"
+
+"I've got you covered," said the young man, graciously, and Private
+Copper, hopping on one leg, because of his sprain, recovered the pipe yet
+another three yards downhill and squatted under another rock slightly
+larger than the first. A roundish boulder made a pleasant rest for his
+captor, who sat cross-legged once more, facing Copper, his rifle across
+his knee, his hand on the trigger-guard.
+
+"Well, Mr. Pennycuik, as I was going to tell you. A little after you were
+born in your English workhouse, your kind, honourable, brave country,
+England, sent an English gentleman, who could not tell a lie, to say that
+so long as the sun rose and the rivers ran in their courses the Transvaal
+would belong to England. Did you ever hear that, khaki--eh?"
+
+"Oh no, Sir," said Copper. This sentence about the sun and the rivers
+happened to be a very aged jest of McBride, the professional humorist of D
+Company, when they discussed the probable length of the war. Copper had
+thrown beef-tins at McBride in the grey dawn of many wet and dry camps for
+intoning it.
+
+"_Of_ course you would not. Now, mann, I tell you, listen." He spat aside
+and cleared his throat. "Because of that little promise, my father he
+moved into the Transvaal and bought a farm--a little place of twenty or
+thirty thousand acres, don't--you--know."
+
+The tone, in spite of the sing-song cadence fighting with the laboured
+parody of the English drawl, was unbearably like the young Wilmington
+squire's, and Copper found himself saying: "I ought to. I've 'elped burn
+some."
+
+"Yes, you'll pay for that later. _And_ he opened a store."
+
+"Ho! Shopkeeper was he?"
+
+"The kind you call "Sir" and sweep the floor for, Pennycuik.... You see,
+in those days one used to believe in the British Government. My father
+did. _Then_ the Transvaal wiped thee earth with the English. They beat
+them six times running. You know _thatt_--eh?"
+
+"Isn't what we've come 'ere for."
+
+"_But_ my father (he knows better now) kept on believing in the English. I
+suppose it was the pretty talk about rivers and suns that cheated him--eh?
+Anyhow, he believed in his own country. Inn his own country. _So_--you
+see--he was a little startled when he found himself handed over to the
+Transvaal as a prisoner of war. That's what it came to, Tommy--a prisoner
+of war. You know what that is--eh? England was too honourable and too
+gentlemanly to take trouble. There were no terms made for my father."
+
+"So 'e made 'em 'imself. Useful old bird." Private Copper sliced up
+another pipeful and looked out across the wrinkled sea of kopjes, through
+which came the roar of the rushing Orange River, so unlike quiet Cuckmere.
+
+The young man's face darkened. "I think I shall sjambok you myself when
+I've quite done with you. _No_, my father (he was a fool) made no terms
+for eight years--ninety-six months--and for every day of them the
+Transvaal made his life hell for my father and--his people."
+
+"I'm glad to hear that," said the impenitent Copper.
+
+"Are you? You can think of it when I'm taking the skin off your back--
+eh?... My father, he lost everything--everything down to his self-respect.
+You don't know what _thatt_ means--eh?"
+
+"Why?" said Copper. "I'm smokin' baccy stole by a renegid. Why wouldn't I
+know?"
+
+If it came to a flogging on that hillside there might be a chance of
+reprisals. Of course, he might be marched to the Boer camp in the next
+valley and there operated upon; but Army life teaches no man to cross
+bridges unnecessarily.
+
+"Yes, after eight years, my father, cheated by your bitch of a country, he
+found out who was the upper dog in South Africa."
+
+"That's me," said Copper valiantly. "If it takes another 'alf century,
+it's me an' the likes of me."
+
+"You? Heaven help you! You'll be screaming at a wagon-wheel in an hour....
+Then it struck my father that he'd like to shoot the people who'd betrayed
+him. You--you--_you_! He told his son all about it. He told him never to
+trust the English. He told him to do them all the harm he could. Mann, I
+tell you, I don't want much telling. I was born in the Transvaal--I'm a
+burgher. If my father didn't love the English, by the Lord, mann, I tell
+you, I hate them from the bottom of my soul."
+
+The voice quavered and ran high. Once more, for no conceivable reason,
+Private Copper found his inward eye turned upon Umballa cantonments of a
+dry dusty afternoon, when the saddle-coloured son of a local hotel-keeper
+came to the barracks to complain of a theft of fowls. He saw the dark
+face, the plover's-egg-tinted eyeballs, and the thin excited hands. Above
+all, he remembered the passionate, queerly-strung words. Slowly he
+returned to South Africa, using the very sentence his sergeant had used to
+the poultry man.
+
+"Go on with your complaint. I'm listenin'."
+
+"Complaint! Complaint about _you_, you ox! We strip and kick your sort by
+thousands."
+
+The young man rocked to and fro above the rifle, whose muzzle thus
+deflected itself from the pit of Private Copper's stomach. His face was
+dusky with rage.
+
+"Yess, I'm a Transvaal burgher. It took us about twenty years to find out
+how rotten you were. _We_ know and you know it now. Your army--it is the
+laughing-stock of the Continent." He tapped the newspaper in his pocket,
+"You think you're going to win, you poor fools. Your people--your own
+people--your silly rotten fools of people will crawl out of it as they did
+after Majuba. They are beginning now. Look what your own working classes,
+the diseased, lying, drinking white stuff that you come out of, are
+saying." He thrust the English weekly, doubled at the leading article, on
+Copper's knee. "See what dirty dogs your masters are. They do not even
+back you in your dirty work. _We_ cleared the country down to Ladysmith--
+to Estcourt. We cleared the country down to Colesberg."
+
+"Yes, we 'ad to clean up be'ind you. Messy, I call it."
+
+"You've had to stop farm-burning because your people daren't do it. They
+were afraid. You daren't kill a spy. You daren't shoot a spy when you
+catch him in your own uniform. You daren't touch our loyall people in Cape
+Town! Your masters wont let you. You will feed our women and children till
+we are quite ready to take them back. _You_ can't put your cowardly noses
+out of the towns you say you've occupied. _You_ daren't move a convoy
+twenty miles. You think you've done something? You've done nothing, and
+you've taken a quarter of a million of men to do it! There isn't a nigger
+in South Africa that doesn't obey us if we lift our finger. You pay the
+stuff four pounds a month and they lie to you. _We_ flog 'em, as I shall
+flog you."
+
+He clasped his hands together and leaned forward his out-thrust chin
+within two feet of Copper's left, or pipe hand.
+
+"Yuss," said Copper, "it's a fair knock-out." The fist landed to a hair on
+the chin-point, the neck snicked like a gun-lock, and the back of the head
+crashed on the boulder behind.
+
+Copper grabbed up both rifles, unshipped the cross-bandoliers, drew forth
+the English weekly, and picking up the lax hands, looked long and intently
+at the fingernails.
+
+"No! Not a sign of it there," he said. "'Is nails are as clean as mine--
+but he talks just like 'em, though. And he's a landlord too! A landed
+proprietor! Shockin', I call it."
+
+The arms began to flap with returning consciousness. Private Copper rose
+up and whispered: "If you open your head, I'll bash it." There was no
+suggestion of sprain in the flung-back left boot. "Now walk in front of
+me, both arms perpendicularly elevated. I'm only a third-class shot, so,
+if you don't object, I'll rest the muzzle of my rifle lightly but firmly
+on your collar-button--coverin' the serviceable vertebree. If your friends
+see us thus engaged, you pray--'ard."
+
+Private and prisoner staggered downhill. No shots broke the peace of the
+afternoon, but once the young man checked and was sick.
+
+"There's a lot of things I could say to you," Copper observed, at the
+close of the paroxysm, "but it doesn't matter. Look 'ere, you call me
+'pore Tommy' again."
+
+The prisoner hesitated.
+
+"Oh, I ain't goin' to do anythin' _to_ you. I'm recon-noiterin' in my own.
+Say 'pore Tommy' 'alf-a-dozen times."
+
+The prisoner obeyed.
+
+"_That's_ what's been puzzlin' me since I 'ad the pleasure o' meetin'
+you," said Copper. "You ain't 'alf-caste, but you talk _chee-chee_--
+_pukka_ bazar chee-chee. Proceed."
+
+"Hullo," said the Sergeant of the picket, twenty minutes later, "where did
+you round him up?"
+
+"On the top o' yonder craggy mounting. There's a mob of 'em sitting round
+their Bibles seventeen 'undred yards (you said it was seventeen 'undred?)
+t'other side--an' I want some coffee." He sat down on the smoke-blackened
+stones by the fire.
+
+"'Ow did you get 'im?" said McBride, professional humorist, quietly
+filching the English weekly from under Copper's armpit.
+
+"On the chin--while 'e was waggin' it at me."
+
+"What is 'e? 'Nother Colonial rebel to be 'orribly disenfranchised, or a
+Cape Minister, or only a loyal farmer with dynamite in both boots. Tell us
+all about it, Burjer!"
+
+"You leave my prisoner alone," said Private Copper. "'E's 'ad losses an'
+trouble; an' it's in the family too. 'E thought I never read the papers,
+so 'e kindly lent me his very own _Jerrold's Weekly_--an' 'e explained it
+to me as patronisin' as a--as a militia subaltern doin' Railway Staff
+Officer. 'E's a left-over from Majuba--one of the worst kind, an' 'earin'
+the evidence as I did, I don't exactly blame 'im. It was this way."
+
+To the picket Private Copper held forth for ten minutes on the life-
+history of his captive. Allowing for some purple patches, it was an
+absolute fair rendering.
+
+"But what I dis-liked was this baccy-priggin' beggar, 'oo's people, on 'is
+own showin', couldn't 'ave been more than thirty or forty years in the
+coun--on this Gawd-forsaken dust-'eap, comin' the squire over me. They're
+all parsons--we know _that_, but parson _an'_ squire is a bit too thick
+for Alf Copper. Why, I caught 'im in the shameful act of tryin' to start a
+aristocracy on a gun an' a wagon an' a _shambuk_! Yes; that's what it was:
+a bloomin' aristocracy."
+
+"No, it weren't," said McBride, at length, on the dirt, above the
+purloined weekly. "You're the aristocrat, Alf. Old _Jerrold's_ givin' it
+you 'ot. You're the uneducated 'ireling of a callous aristocracy which 'as
+sold itself to the 'Ebrew financier. Meantime, Ducky"--he ran his finger
+down a column of assorted paragraphs--"you're slakin' your brutal
+instincks in furious excesses. Shriekin' women an' desolated 'omesteads is
+what you enjoy, Alf ..., Halloa! What's a smokin' 'ektacomb?"
+
+"'Ere! Let's look. 'Aven't seen a proper spicy paper for a year. Good old
+_Jerrold's!"_ Pinewood and Moppet, reservists, flung themselves on
+McBride's shoulders, pinning him to the ground.
+
+"Lie over your own bloomin' side of the bed, an' we can all look," he
+protested.
+
+"They're only po-ah Tommies," said Copper, apologetically, to the
+prisoner. "Po-ah unedicated Khakis. _They_ don't know what they're
+fightin' for. They're lookin' for what the diseased, lying, drinkin' white
+stuff that they come from is sayin' about 'em!"
+
+The prisoner set down his tin of coffee and stared helplessly round the
+circle.
+
+"I--I don't understand them."
+
+The Canadian sergeant, picking his teeth with a thorn, nodded
+sympathetically:
+
+"If it comes to that, _we_ don't in my country!... Say, boys, when you're
+through with your English mail you might's well provide an escort for your
+prisoner. He's waitin'."
+
+"Arf a mo', Sergeant," said McBride, still reading.
+
+"'Ere's Old Barbarity on the ramp again with some of 'is lady friends, 'oo
+don't like concentration camps. Wish they'd visit ours. Pinewood's a
+married man. He'd know how to be'ave!"
+
+"Well, I ain't goin' to amuse my prisoner alone. 'E's gettin' 'omesick,"
+cried Copper. "One of you thieves read out what's vexin' Old Barbarity an'
+'is 'arem these days. You'd better listen, Burjer, because, afterwards,
+I'm goin' to fall out an' perpetrate those nameless barbarities all over
+you to keep up the reputation of the British Army."
+
+From that English weekly, to bar out which a large and perspiring staff of
+Press censors toiled seven days of the week at Cape Town, did Pinewood of
+the Reserve read unctuously excerpts of the speeches of the accredited
+leaders of His Majesty's Opposition. The night-picket arrived in the
+middle of it, but stayed entranced without paying any compliments, till
+Pinewood had entirely finished the leading article, and several occasional
+notes.
+
+"Gentlemen of the jury," said Alf Copper, hitching up what war had left to
+him of trousers--"you've 'eard what 'e's been fed up with. _Do_ you blame
+the beggar? 'Cause I don't! ... Leave 'im alone, McBride. He's my first
+and only cap-ture, an' I'm goin' to walk 'ome with 'im, ain't I, Ducky?
+... Fall in, Burjer. It's Bermuda, or Umballa, or Ceylon for you--and I'd
+give a month's pay to be in your little shoes."
+
+As not infrequently happens, the actual moving off the ground broke the
+prisoner's nerve. He stared at the tinted hills round him, gasped and
+began to struggle--kicking, swearing, weeping, and fluttering all
+together.
+
+"Pore beggar--oh pore, _pore_ beggar!" said Alf, leaning in on one side of
+him, while Pinewood blocked him on the other.
+
+"Let me go! Let me go! Mann, I tell you, let me go----"
+
+"'E screams like a woman!" said McBride. "They'll 'ear 'im five miles
+off."
+
+"There's one or two ought to 'ear 'im--in England," said Copper, putting
+aside a wildly waving arm.
+
+"Married, ain't 'e?" said Pinewood. "I've seen 'em go like this before--
+just at the last. '_Old_ on, old man, No one's goin' to 'urt you."
+
+The last of the sun threw the enormous shadow of a kopje over the little,
+anxious, wriggling group.
+
+"Quit that," said the Serjeant of a sudden. "You're only making him worse.
+Hands _up_, prisoner! Now you get a holt of yourself, or this'll go off."
+
+And indeed the revolver-barrel square at the man's panting chest seemed to
+act like a tonic; he choked, recovered himself, and fell in between Copper
+and Pinewood.
+
+As the picket neared the camp it broke into song that was heard among the
+officers' tents:
+
+  'E sent us 'is blessin' from London town,
+    (The beggar that kep' the cordite down,)
+  But what do we care if 'e smile or frown,
+    The beggar that kep' the cordite down?
+  The mildly nefarious
+  Wildly barbarious
+    Beggar that kept the cordite down!
+
+Said a captain a mile away: "Why are they singing _that?_ We haven't had a
+mail for a month, have we?"
+
+An hour later the same captain said to his servant: "Jenkins, I understand
+the picket have got a--got a newspaper off a prisoner to-day. I wish you
+could lay hands on it, Jenkins. Copy of the _Times_, I think."
+
+"Yes, Sir. Copy of the _Times_, Sir," said Jenkins, without a quiver, and
+went forth to make his own arrangements.
+
+"Copy of the _Times_" said the blameless Alf, from beneath his blanket. "I
+ain't a member of the Soldier's Institoot. Go an' look in the reg'mental
+Readin'-room--Veldt Row, Kopje Street, second turnin' to the left between
+'ere an' Naauwport."
+
+Jenkins summarised briefly in a tense whisper the thing that Alf Copper
+need not be.
+
+"But my particular copy of the _Times_ is specially pro'ibited by the
+censor from corruptin' the morals of the Army. Get a written order from K.
+o' K., properly countersigned, an' I'll think about it."
+
+"I've got all _you_ want," said Jenkins. "'Urry up. I want to 'ave a
+squint myself."
+
+Something gurgled in the darkness, and Private Copper fell back smacking
+his lips.
+
+"Gawd bless my prisoner, and make me a good boy. Amen. 'Ere you are,
+Jenkins. It's dirt cheap at a tot."
+
+
+
+
+STEAM TACTICS
+
+
+THE NECESSITARIAN
+
+  I know not in whose hands are laid
+    To empty upon earth
+  From unsuspected ambuscade
+    The very Urns of Mirth:
+
+  Who bids the Heavenly Lark arise
+    And cheer our solemn round--
+  The Jest beheld with streaming eyes
+    And grovellings on the ground;
+
+  Who joins the flats of Time and Chance
+    Behind the prey preferred,
+  And thrones on Shrieking Circumstance
+    The Sacredly Absurd,
+
+  Till Laughter, voiceless through excess.
+    Waves mute appeal and sore,
+  Above the midriff's deep distress,
+    For breath to laugh once more.
+
+  No creed hath dared to hail him Lord,
+    No raptured choirs proclaim,
+  And Nature's strenuous Overword
+    Hath nowhere breathed his name.
+
+  Yet, may it be, on wayside jape,
+    The selfsame Power bestows
+  The selfsame power as went to shape
+    His Planet or His Rose.
+
+STEAM TACTICS
+I caught sight of their faces as we came up behind the cart in the narrow
+Sussex lane; but though it was not eleven o'clock, they were both asleep.
+
+That the carrier was on the wrong side of the road made no difference to
+his language when I rang my bell. He said aloud of motor-cars, and
+specially of steam ones, all the things which I had read in the faces of
+superior coachmen. Then he pulled slantwise across me.
+
+There was a vociferous steam air-pump attached to that car which could be
+applied at pleasure....
+
+The cart was removed about a bowshot's length in seven and a quarter
+seconds, to the accompaniment of parcels clattering. At the foot of the
+next hill the horse stopped, and the two men came out over the tail-board.
+
+My engineer backed and swung the car, ready to move out of reach.
+
+"The blighted egg-boiler has steam up," said Mr. Hinchcliffe, pausing to
+gather a large stone. "Temporise with the beggar, Pye, till the sights
+come on!"
+
+"I can't leave my 'orse!" roared the carrier; "but bring 'em up 'ere, an'
+I'll kill 'em all over again."
+
+"Good morning, Mr. Pyecroft," I called cheerfully. "Can I give you a lift
+anywhere?"
+
+The attack broke up round my forewheels.
+
+"Well, we _do_ 'ave the knack o' meeting _in puris naturalibus,_ as I've
+so often said." Mr. Pyecroft wrung my hand. "Yes, I'm on leaf. So's Hinch.
+We're visiting friends among these kopjes."
+
+A monotonous bellowing up the road persisted, where the carrier was still
+calling for corpses.
+
+"That's Agg. He's Hinch's cousin. You aren't fortunit in your family
+connections, Hinch. 'E's usin' language in derogation of good manners. Go
+and abolish 'im."
+
+Henry Salt Hinchcliffe stalked back to the cart and spoke to his cousin. I
+recall much that the wind bore to me of his words and the carrier's. It
+seemed as if the friendship of years were dissolving amid throes.
+
+"'Ave it your own silly way, then," roared the carrier, "an' get into
+Linghurst on your own silly feet. I've done with you two runagates." He
+lashed his horse and passed out of sight still rumbling.
+
+"The fleet's sailed," said Pyecroft, "leavin' us on the beach as before.
+Had you any particular port in your mind?"
+
+"Well, I was going to meet a friend at Instead Wick, but I don't mind--"
+
+"Oh! that'll do as well as anything! We're on leaf, you see."
+
+"She'll hardly hold four," said my engineer. I had broken him of the
+foolish habit of being surprised at things, but he was visibly uneasy.
+
+Hinchcliffe returned, drawn as by ropes to my steam-car, round which he
+walked in narrowing circles.
+
+"What's her speed?" he demanded of the engineer.
+
+"Twenty-five," said that loyal man.
+
+"Easy to run?"
+
+"No; very difficult," was the emphatic answer.
+
+"That just shows that you ain't fit for your rating. D'you suppose that a
+man who earns his livin' by runnin' 30-knot destroyers for a parstime--for
+a parstime, mark you!--is going to lie down before any blighted land-
+crabbing steam-pinnace on springs?"
+
+Yet that was what he did. Directly under the car he lay and looked upward
+into pipes--petrol, steam, and water--with a keen and searching eye.
+
+I telegraphed Mr. Pyecroft a question.
+
+"Not--in--the--least," was the answer. "Steam gadgets always take him that
+way. We had a bit of a riot at Parsley Green through his tryin' to show a
+traction-engine haulin' gipsy-wagons how to turn corners."
+
+"Tell him everything he wants to know," I said to the engineer, as I
+dragged out a rug and spread it on the roadside.
+
+"_He_ don't want much showing," said the engineer. Now, the two men had
+not, counting the time we took to stuff our pipes, been together more than
+three minutes.
+
+"This," said Pyecroft, driving an elbow back into the deep verdure of the
+hedge-foot, "is a little bit of all right. Hinch, I shouldn't let too much
+o' that hot muckings drop in my eyes, Your leaf's up in a fortnight, an'
+you'll be wantin' 'em."
+
+"Here!" said Hinchcliffe, still on his back, to the engineer. "Come here
+and show me the lead of this pipe." And the engineer lay down beside him.
+
+"That's all right," said Mr. Hinchcliffe, rising. "But she's more of a bag
+of tricks than I thought. Unship this superstructure aft"--he pointed to
+the back seat--"and I'll have a look at the forced draught."
+
+The engineer obeyed with alacrity. I heard him volunteer the fact that he
+had a brother an artificer in the Navy.
+
+"They couple very well, those two," said Pyecroft critically, while
+Hinchcliffe sniffed round the asbestos-lagged boiler and turned on gay
+jets of steam.
+
+"Now take me up the road," he said. My man, for form's sake, looked at me.
+
+"Yes, take him," I said. "He's all right."
+
+"No, I'm not," said Hinchcliffe of a sudden--"not if I'm expected to judge
+my water out of a little shaving-glass."
+
+The water-gauge of that steam-car was reflected on a mirror to the right
+of the dashboard. I also had found it inconvenient.
+
+"Throw up your arm and look at the gauge under your armpit. Only mind how
+you steer while you're doing it, or you'll get ditched!" I cried, as the
+car ran down the road.
+
+"I wonder!" said Pyecroft, musing. "But, after all, it's your steamin'
+gadgets he's usin' for his libretto, as you might put it. He said to me
+after breakfast only this mornin' 'ow he thanked his Maker, on all fours,
+that he wouldn't see nor smell nor thumb a runnin' bulgine till the
+nineteenth prox. Now look at him Only look at 'im!"
+
+We could see, down the long slope of the road, my driver surrendering his
+seat to Hinchcliffe, while the car flickered generously from hedge to
+hedge.
+
+"What happens if he upsets?"
+
+"The petrol will light up and the boiler may blow up."
+
+"How rambunkshus! And"--Pyecroft blew a slow cloud--"Agg's about three
+hoops up this mornin', too."
+
+"What's that to do with us? He's gone down the road," I retorted.
+
+"Ye--es, but we'll overtake him. He's a vindictive carrier. He and Hinch
+'ad words about pig-breeding this morning. O' course, Hinch don't know the
+elements o' that evolution; but he fell back on 'is naval rank an' office,
+an' Agg grew peevish. I wasn't sorry to get out of the cart ... Have you
+ever considered how, when you an' I meet, so to say, there's nearly always
+a remarkable hectic day ahead of us! Hullo! Behold the beef-boat
+returnin'!"
+
+He rose as the car climbed up the slope, and shouted: "In bow! Way 'nuff!"
+
+"You be quiet!" cried Hinchcliffe, and drew up opposite the rug, his dark
+face shining with joy. "She's the Poetry o' Motion! She's the Angel's
+Dream. She's------" He shut off steam, and the slope being against her,
+the car slid soberly downhill again.
+
+"What's this? I've got the brake on!" he yelled.
+
+"It doesn't hold backwards," I said. "Put her on the mid-link."
+
+"That's a nasty one for the chief engineer o' the _Djinn_, 31-knot,
+T.B.D.," said Pyecroft. "_Do_ you know what the mid-link is, Hinch?"
+
+Once more the car returned to us; but as Pyecroft stooped to gather up the
+rug, Hinchcliffe jerked the lever testily, and with prawn-like speed she
+retired backwards into her own steam.
+
+"Apparently 'e don't," said Pyecroft. "What's he done now, Sir?"
+
+"Reversed her. I've done it myself."
+
+"But he's an engineer."
+
+For the third time the car manoeuvred up the hill.
+
+"I'll teach you to come alongside properly, if I keep you 'tiffies out all
+night!" shouted Pyecroft. It was evidently a quotation. Hinchcliffe's face
+grew livid, and, his hand ever so slightly working on the throttle, the
+car buzzed twenty yards uphill.
+
+"That's enough. We'll take your word for it. The mountain will go to
+Ma'ommed. Stand _fast_!"
+
+Pyecroft and I and the rug marched up where she and Hinchcliffe fumed
+together.
+
+"Not as easy as it looks--eh, Hinch?"
+
+"It is dead easy. I'm going to drive her to Instead Wick--aren't I?" said
+the first-class engine-room artificer. I thought of his performances with
+No. 267 and nodded. After all, it was a small privilege to accord to pure
+genius.
+
+"But my engineer will stand by--at first," I added.
+
+"An' you a family man, too," muttered Pyecroft, swinging himself into the
+right rear seat. "Sure to be a remarkably hectic day when we meet."
+
+We adjusted ourselves and, in the language of the immortal Navy doctor,
+paved our way towards Linghurst, distant by mile-post 11-3/4 miles.
+
+Mr. Hinchcliffe, every nerve and muscle braced, talked only to the
+engineer, and that professionally. I recalled the time when I, too, had
+enjoyed the rack on which he voluntarily extended himself.
+
+And the County of Sussex slid by in slow time.
+
+"How cautious is the 'tiffy-bird!" said Pyecroft.
+
+"Even in a destroyer," Hinch snapped over his shoulder, "you ain't
+expected to con and drive simultaneous. Don't address any remarks to
+_me!_"
+
+"Pump!" said the engineer. "Your water's droppin'."
+
+"_I_ know that. Where the Heavens is that blighted by-pass?"
+
+He beat his right or throttle hand madly on the side of the car till he
+found the bent rod that more or less controls the pump, and, neglecting
+all else, twisted it furiously.
+
+My engineer grabbed the steering-bar just in time to save us lurching into
+a ditch.
+
+"If I was a burnin' peacock, with two hundred bloodshot eyes in my shinin'
+tail, I'd need 'em all on this job!" said Hinch.
+
+"Don't talk! Steer! This ain't the North Atlantic," Pyecroft replied.
+
+"Blast my stokers! Why, the steam's dropped fifty pounds!" Hinchcliffe
+cried.
+
+"Fire's blown out," said the engineer. "Stop her!"
+
+"Does she do that often?" said Hinch, descending.
+
+"Sometimes."
+
+"Anytime?"
+
+"Any time a cross-wind catches her."
+
+The engineer produced a match and stooped.
+
+That car (now, thank Heaven, no more than an evil memory) never lit twice
+in the same fashion. This time she back-fired superbly, and Pyecroft went
+out over the right rear wheel in a column of rich yellow flame.
+
+"I've seen a mine explode at Bantry--once--prematoor," he volunteered.
+
+"That's all right," said Hinchcliffe, brushing down his singed beard with
+a singed forefinger. (He had been watching too closely.) "Has she any more
+little surprises up her dainty sleeve?"
+
+"She hasn't begun yet," said my engineer, with a scornful cough. "Some one
+'as opened the petrol-supply-valve too wide."
+
+"Change places with me, Pyecroft," I commanded, for I remembered that the
+petrol-supply, the steam-lock, and the forced draught were all controlled
+from the right rear seat.
+
+"Me? Why? There's a whole switchboard full o' nickel-plated muckin's which
+I haven't begun to play with yet. The starboard side's crawlin' with 'em."
+
+"Change, or I'll kill you!" said Hinchcliffe, and he looked like it.
+
+"That's the 'tiffy all over. When anything goes wrong, blame it on the
+lower deck. Navigate by your automatic self, then! _I_ won't help you any
+more."
+
+We navigated for a mile in dead silence.
+
+"Talkin' o' wakes----" said Pyecroft suddenly.
+
+"We weren't," Hinchcliffe grunted.
+
+"There's some wakes would break a snake's back; but this of yours, so to
+speak, would fair turn a tapeworm giddy. That's all I wish to observe,
+Hinch. ... Cart at anchor on the port-bow. It's Agg!"
+
+Far up the shaded road into secluded Bromlingleigh we saw the carrier's
+cart at rest before the post-office.
+
+"He's bung in the fairway. How'm I to get past?" said Hinchcliffe.
+"There's no room. Here, Pye, come and relieve the wheel!"
+
+"Nay, nay, Pauline. You've made your own bed. You've as good as left your
+happy home an' family cart to steal it. Now you lie on it."
+
+"Ring your bell," I suggested.
+
+"Glory!" said Pyecroft, falling forward into the nape of Hinchcliffe's
+neck as the car stopped dead.
+
+"Get out o' my back-hair! That must have been the brake I touched off,"
+Hinchcliffe muttered, and repaired his error tumultuously.
+
+We passed the cart as though we had been all Bruges belfry. Agg, from the
+port-office door, regarded us with a too pacific eye. I remembered later
+that the pretty postmistress looked on us pityingly.
+
+Hinchcliffe wiped the sweat from his brow and drew breath. It was the
+first vehicle that he had passed, and I sympathised with him.
+
+"You needn't grip so hard," said my engineer. "She steers as easy as a
+bicycle."
+
+"Ho! You suppose I ride bicycles up an' down my engine-room?" was the
+answer. "I've other things to think about. She's a terror. She's a
+whistlin' lunatic. I'd sooner run the old South-Easter at Simon's Town
+than her!"
+
+"One of the nice things they say about her," I interrupted, "is that no
+engineer is needed to run this machine."
+
+"No. They'd need about seven."
+
+"'Common-sense only is needed,'" I quoted.
+
+"Make a note of that, Hinch. Just common-sense," Pyecroft put in.
+
+"And now," I said, "we'll have to take in water. There isn't more than a
+couple of inches of water in the tank."
+
+"Where d'you get it from?"
+
+"Oh!--cottages and such-like."
+
+"Yes, but that being so, where does your much-advertised twenty-five miles
+an hour come in? Ain't a dung-cart more to the point?"
+
+"If you want to go anywhere, I suppose it would be," I replied.
+
+"_I_ don't want to go anywhere. I'm thinkin' of you who've got to live
+with her. She'll burn her tubes if she loses her water?"
+
+"She will."
+
+"I've never scorched yet, and I not beginnin' now." He shut off steam
+firmly. "Out you get, Pye, an' shove her along by hand."
+
+"Where to?"
+
+"The nearest water-tank," was the reply. "And Sussex is a dry county."
+
+"She ought to have drag-ropes--little pipe-clayed ones," said Pyecroft.
+
+We got out and pushed under the hot sun for half-a-mile till we came to a
+cottage, sparsely inhabited by one child who wept.
+
+"All out haymakin', o' course," said Pyecroft, thrusting his head into the
+parlour for an instant. "What's the evolution now?"
+
+"Skirmish till we find a well," I said.
+
+"Hmm! But they wouldn't 'ave left that kid without a chaperon, so to
+say... I thought so! Where's a stick?"
+
+A bluish and silent beast of the true old sheep-dog breed glided from
+behind an outhouse and without words fell to work.
+
+Pyecroft kept him at bay with a rake-handle while our party, in rallying-
+square, retired along the box-bordered brick-path to the car.
+
+At the garden gate the dumb devil halted, looked back on the child, and
+sat down to scratch.
+
+"That's his three-mile limit, thank Heaven!" said Pyecroft. "Fall in,
+push-party, and proceed with land-transport o' pinnace. I'll protect your
+flanks in case this sniffin' flea-bag is tempted beyond 'is strength."
+
+We pushed off in silence. The car weighed 1,200 lb., and even on
+ball-bearings was a powerful sudorific. From somewhere behind a hedge we
+heard a gross rustic laugh.
+
+"Those are the beggars we lie awake for, patrollin' the high seas. There
+ain't a port in China where we wouldn't be better treated. Yes, a Boxer
+'ud be ashamed of it," said Pyecroft.
+
+A cloud of fine dust boomed down the road.
+
+"Some happy craft with a well-found engine-room! How different!" panted
+Hinchcliffe, bent over the starboard mudguard.
+
+It was a claret-coloured petrol car, and it stopped courteously, as good
+cars will at sight of trouble.
+
+"Water, only water," I answered in reply to offers of help.
+
+"There's a lodge at the end of these oak palings. They'll give you all you
+want. Say I sent you. Gregory--Michael Gregory. Good-bye!"
+
+"Ought to 'ave been in the Service. Prob'ly is," was Pyecroft's comment.
+
+At that thrice-blessed lodge our water-tank was filled (I dare not quote
+Mr. Hinchcliffe's remarks when he saw the collapsible rubber bucket with
+which we did it) and we re-embarked. It seemed that Sir Michael Gregory
+owned many acres, and that his park ran for miles.
+
+"No objection to your going through it," said the lodge-keeper. "It'll
+save you a goodish bit to Instead Wick."
+
+But we needed petrol, which could be purchased at Pigginfold, a few miles
+farther up, and so we held to the main road, as our fate had decreed.
+
+"We've come seven miles in fifty-four minutes, so far," said Hinchcliffe
+(he was driving with greater freedom and less responsibility), "and now we
+have to fill our bunkers. This is worse than the Channel Fleet."
+
+At Pigginfold, after ten minutes, we refilled our petrol tank and lavishly
+oiled our engines. Mr. Hinchcliffe wished to discharge our engineer on the
+grounds that he (Mr. Hinchcliffe) was now entirely abreast of his work. To
+this I demurred, for I knew my car. She had, in the language of the road,
+held up for a day and a half, and by most bitter experience I suspected
+that her time was very near. Therefore, three miles short of Linghurst, I
+was less surprised than any one, excepting always my engineer, when the
+engines set up a lunatic clucking, and, after two or three kicks, jammed.
+
+"Heaven forgive me all the harsh things I may have said about destroyers
+in my sinful time!" wailed Hinchcliffe, snapping back the throttle.
+"What's worryin' Ada now?"
+
+"The forward eccentric-strap screw's dropped off," said the engineer,
+investigating.
+
+"That all? I thought it was a propeller-blade."
+
+"We must go an' look for it. There isn't another."
+
+"Not me," said Pyecroft from his seat. "Out pinnace, Hinch, an' creep for
+it. It won't be more than five miles back."
+
+The two men, with bowed heads, moved up the road.
+
+"Look like etymologists, don't they? Does she decant her innards often, so
+to speak?" Pyecroft asked.
+
+I told him the true tale of a race-full of ball bearings strewn four miles
+along a Hampshire road, and by me recovered in detail. He was profoundly
+touched.
+
+"Poor Hinch! Poor--poor Hinch!" he said. "And that's only one of her
+little games, is it? He'll be homesick for the Navy by night."
+
+When the search-party doubled back with the missing screw, it was
+Hinchcliffe who replaced it in less than five minutes, while my engineer
+looked on admiringly.
+
+"Your boiler's only seated on four little paperclips," he said, crawling
+from beneath her. "She's a wicker-willow lunch-basket below. She's a
+runnin' miracle. Have you had this combustible spirit-lamp long?"
+
+I told him.
+
+"And yet you were afraid to come into the _Nightmare's_ engine-room when
+we were runnin' trials!"
+
+"It's all a matter of taste," Pyecroft volunteered. "But I will say for
+you, Hinch, you've certainly got the hang of her steamin' gadgets in quick
+time."
+
+He was driving her very sweetly, but with a worried look in his eye and a
+tremor in his arm.
+
+"She don't seem so answer her helm somehow," he said.
+
+"There's a lot of play to the steering-gear," said my engineer. "We
+generally tighten it up every few miles."
+
+"'Like me to stop now? We've run as much as one mile and a half without
+incident," he replied tartly.
+
+"Then you're lucky," said my engineer, bristling in turn.
+
+"They'll wreck the whole turret out o' nasty professional spite in a
+minute," said Pyecroft. "That's the worst o' machinery. Man dead ahead,
+Hinch--semaphorin' like the flagship in a fit!"
+
+"Amen!" said Hinchcliffe. "Shall I stop, or shall I cut him down?"
+
+He stopped, for full in the centre of the Linghurst Road stood a person in
+pepper-and-salt raiment (ready-made), with a brown telegraph envelope in
+his hands.
+
+"Twenty-three and a half miles an hour," he began, weighing a small beam-
+engine of a Waterbury in one red paw. "From the top of the hill over our
+measured quarter-mile--twenty-three and a half."
+
+"You manurial gardener----" Hinchcliffe began. I prodded him warningly
+from behind, and laid the other hand on Pyecroft's stiffening knee.
+
+"Also--on information received--drunk and disorderly in charge of a
+motor-car--to the common danger--two men like sailors in appearance,"
+the man went on.
+
+"Like sailors! ... That's Agg's little _roose_. No wonder he smiled at
+us," said Pyecroft.
+
+"I've been waiting for you some time," the man concluded, folding up the
+telegram.
+
+"Who's the owner?"
+
+I indicated myself.
+
+"Then I want you as well as the two seafaring men. Drunk and disorderly
+can be treated summary. You come on."
+
+My relations with the Sussex constabulary have, so far, been of the best,
+but I could not love this person.
+
+"Of course you have your authority to show?" I hinted.
+
+"I'll show it you at Linghurst," he retorted hotly----"all the authority
+you want."
+
+"I only want the badge, or warrant, or whatever it is a plain-clothes man
+has to show."
+
+He made as though to produce it, but checked himself, repeating less
+politely the invitation to Linghurst. The action and the tone confirmed my
+many-times tested theory that the bulk of English shoregoing institutions
+are based on conformable strata of absolutely impervious inaccuracy. I
+reflected and became aware of a drumming on the back of the front seat
+that Pyecroft, bowed forward and relaxed, was tapping with his knuckles.
+The hardly-checked fury on Hinchcliffe's brow had given place to a greasy
+imbecility, and he nodded over the steering-bar. In longs and shorts, as
+laid down by the pious and immortal Mr. Morse, Pyecroft tapped out, "Sham
+drunk. Get him in the car."
+
+"I can't stay here all day," said the constable.
+
+Pyecroft raised his head. Then was seen with what majesty the British
+sailor-man envisages a new situation.
+
+"Met gennelman heavy sheeway," said he. "Do tell me British gelman can't
+give 'ole Brish Navy lif' own blighted ste' cart. Have another drink!"
+
+"I didn't know they were as drunk as all that when they stopped me," I
+explained.
+
+"You can say all that at Linghurst," was the answer. "Come on."
+
+"Quite right," I said. "But the question is, if you take these two out on
+the road, they'll fall down or start killing you."
+
+"Then I'd call on you to assist me in the execution o' my duty."
+
+"But I'd see you further first. You'd better come with us in the car. I'll
+turn this passenger out." (This was my engineer, sitting quite silent.)
+"You don't want him, and, anyhow, he'd only be a witness for the defence."
+
+"That's true," said the constable. "But it wouldn't make any odds--at
+Linghurst."
+
+My engineer skipped into the bracken like a rabbit. I bade him cut across
+Sir Michael Gregory's park, and if he caught my friend, to tell him I
+should probably be rather late for lunch.
+
+"I ain't going to be driven by _him_." Our destined prey pointed at
+Hinchcliffe with apprehension.
+
+"Of course not. You sake my seat and keep the big sailor in order. He's
+too drunk to do much. I'll change places with the other one. Only be
+quick; I want to pay my fine and get it over."
+
+"That's the way to look at it," he said, dropping into the left rear seat.
+"We're making quite a lot out o' you motor gentry." He folded his arms
+judicially as the car gathered way under Hinchcliffe's stealthy hand.
+
+"But _you_ aren't driving?" he cried, half rising.
+
+"You've noticed it?" said Pyecroft, and embraced him with one anaconda-
+like left arm.
+
+"Don't kill him," said Hinchcliffe briefly. "I want to show him what
+twenty-three and a quarter is." We were going a fair twelve, which was
+about the car's limit.
+
+Our passenger swore something and then groaned.
+
+"Hush, darling!" said Pyecroft, "or I'll have to hug you."
+
+The main road, white under the noon sun, lay broad before us, running
+north to Linghurst. We slowed and looked anxiously for a side track.
+
+"And now," said I, "I want to see your authority."
+
+"The badge of your ratin'?" Pyecroft added.
+
+"I'm a constable," he said, and kicked. Indeed, his boots would have
+bewrayed him across half a county's plough; but boots are not legal
+evidence.
+
+"I want your authority," I repeated coldly; "some evidence that you are
+not a common drunken tramp."
+
+It was as I had expected. He had forgotten or mislaid his badge. He had
+neglected to learn the outlines of the work for which he received money
+and consideration; and he expected me, the tax-payer, to go to infinite
+trouble to supplement his deficiencies.
+
+"If you don't believe me, come to Linghurst," was the burden of his almost
+national anthem.
+
+"But I can't run all over Sussex every time a blackmailer jumps up and
+says he is a policeman."
+
+"Why, it's quite close," he persisted.
+
+"'Twon't be--soon," said Hinchcliffe.
+
+"None of the other people ever made any trouble. To be sure, _they_ was
+gentlemen," he cried. "All I can say is, it may be very funny, but it
+ain't fair."
+
+I laboured with him in this dense fog, but to no end. He had forgotten his
+badge, and we were villains for that we did not cart him to the pub or
+barracks where he had left it.
+
+Pyecroft listened critically as we spun along the hard road.
+
+"If he was a concentrated Boer, he couldn't expect much more," he
+observed. "Now, suppose I'd been a lady in a delicate state o' health--
+you'd ha' made me very ill with your doings."
+
+"I wish I 'ad. 'Ere! 'Elp! 'Elp! Hi!"
+
+The man had seen a constable in uniform fifty yards ahead, where a lane
+ran into the road, and would have said more but that Hinchcliffe jerked
+her up that lane with a wrench that nearly capsized us as the constable
+came running heavily.
+
+It seemed to me that both our guest and his fellow-villain in uniform
+smiled as we fled down the road easterly betwixt the narrowing hedges.
+
+"You'll know all about it in a little time," said our guest. "You've only
+yourselves to thank for runnin' your 'ead into a trap." And he whistled
+ostentatiously.
+
+We made no answer.
+
+"If that man 'ad chose, 'e could have identified me," he said.
+
+Still we were silent.
+
+"But 'e'll do it later, when you're caught."
+
+"Not if you go on talking. 'E won't be able to," said Pyecroft. "I don't
+know what traverse you think you're workin', but your duty till you're put
+in cells for a highway robber is to love, honour, an' cherish _me_ most
+special--performin' all evolutions signalled in rapid time. I tell you
+this, in case o' anything turnin' up."
+
+"Don't you fret about things turnin' up," was the reply.
+
+Hinchcliffe had given the car a generous throttle, and she was well set to
+work, when, without warning, the road--there are two or three in Sussex
+like it--turned down and ceased.
+
+"Holy Muckins!" he cried, and stood on both brakes as our helpless tyres
+slithered over wet grass and bracken--down and down into forest--early
+British woodland. It was the change of a nightmare, and that all should
+fit, fifty yards ahead of us a babbling brook barred our way. On the far
+side a velvet green ride, sprinkled with rabbits and fern, gently sloped
+upwards and away, but behind us was no hope. Forty horse-power would never
+have rolled wet pneumatic tyres up that verdurous cliff we had descended.
+
+"H'm!" Our guest coughed significantly. "A great many cars thinks they can
+take this road; but they all come back. We walks after 'em at our
+convenience."
+
+"Meanin' that the other jaunty is now pursuin' us on his lily feet?" said
+Pyecroft.
+
+"_Pre_cisely."
+
+"An' you think," said Pyecroft (I have no hope to render the scorn of the
+words), "_that'll_ make any odds? Get out!"
+
+The man obeyed with alacrity.
+
+"See those spars up-ended over there? I mean that wickyup-thing.
+Hop-poles, then, you rural blighter. Keep on fetching me hop-poles at the
+double."
+
+And he doubled, Pyecroft at his heels; for they had arrived at a perfect
+understanding.
+
+There was a stack of hurdles a few yards down
+
+stream, laid aside after sheep-washing; and there were stepping-stones in
+the brook. Hinchcliffe rearranged these last to make some sort of
+causeway; I brought up the hurdles; and when Pyecroft and his subaltern
+had dropped a dozen hop-poles across the stream, laid them down over all.
+
+"Talk o' the Agricultur'l Hall!" he said, mopping his brow--"'tisn't in it
+with us. The approach to the bridge must now be paved with hurdles, owin'
+to the squashy nature o' the country. Yes, an' we'd better have one or two
+on the far side to lead her on to _terror fermior_. Now, Hinch! Give her
+full steam and 'op along. If she slips off, we're done. Shall I take the
+wheel?"
+
+"No. This is my job," said the first-class engine-room artificer. "Get
+over the far side, and be ready to catch her if she jibs on the uphill."
+
+We crossed that elastic structure and stood ready amid the bracken.
+Hinchcliffe gave her a full steam and she came like a destroyer on her
+trial. There was a crack, a flicker of white water, and she was in our
+arms fifty yards up the slope; or rather, we were behind her, pushing her
+madly towards a patch of raw gravel whereon her wheels could bite. Of the
+bridge remained only a few wildly vibrating hop-poles, and those hurdles
+which had been sunk in the mud of the approaches.
+
+"She--she kicked out all the loose ones behind her as she finished with
+'em," Hinchcliffe panted.
+
+"At the Agricultural Hall they would 'ave been fastened down with
+ribbons," said Pyecroft. "But this ain't Olympia."
+
+"She nearly wrenched the tiller out of my hand. Don't you think I conned
+her like a cock-angel, Pye?"
+
+"_I_ never saw anything like it," said our guest propitiatingly. "And now,
+gentlemen, if you'll let me go back to Linghurst, I promise you you won't
+hear another word from me."
+
+"Get in," said Pyecroft, as we puffed out on to a metalled road once more.
+"We 'aven't begun on _you_ yet."
+
+"A joke's a joke," he replied. "I don't mind a little bit of a joke
+myself, but this is going beyond it."
+
+"Miles an' miles beyond it, if this machine stands up. We'll want water
+pretty soon."
+
+Our guest's countenance brightened, and Pyecroft perceived it.
+
+"Let me tell you," he said earnestly, "I won't make any difference to you
+whatever happens. Barrin' a dhow or two Tajurrah-way, prizes are scarce in
+the Navy. Hence we never abandon 'em."
+
+There was a long silence. Pyecroft broke it suddenly.
+
+"Robert," he said, "have you a mother?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Have you a big brother?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"An' a little sister?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Robert. Does your mamma keep a dog?"
+
+"Yes. Why?"
+
+"All right, Robert. I won't forget it."
+
+I looked for an explanation.
+
+"I saw his cabinet photograph in full uniform on the mantelpiece o' that
+cottage before faithful Fido turned up," Pyecroft whispered. "Ain't you
+glad it's all in the family somehow?"
+
+We filled with water at a cottage on the edge of St. Leonard's Forest,
+and, despite our increasing leakage, made shift to climb the ridge above
+Instead Wick. Knowing the car as I did, I felt sure that final collapse
+would not be long delayed. My sole concern was to run our guest well into
+the wilderness before that came.
+
+On the roof of the world--a naked plateau clothed with young heather--she
+retired from active life in floods of tears. Her feed-water-heater
+(Hinchcliffe blessed it and its maker for three minutes) was leaking
+beyond hope of repair; she had shifted most of her packing, and her water-
+pump would not lift.
+
+"If I had a bit of piping I could disconnect this tin cartridge-case an'
+feed direct into the boiler. It 'ud knock down her speed, but we could get
+on," said he, and looked hopelessly at the long dun ridges that hove us
+above the panorama of Sussex. Northward we could see the London haze.
+Southward, between gaps of the whale-backed Downs, lay the Channel's zinc-
+blue. But all our available population in that vast survey was one cow and
+a kestrel.
+
+"It's down hill to Instead Wick. We can run her there by gravity," I said
+at last.
+
+"Then he'll only have to walk to the station to get home. Unless we take
+off 'is boots first," Pyecroft replied.
+
+"That," said our guest earnestly, "would be theft atop of assault and very
+serious."
+
+"Oh, let's hang him an' be done," Hinchcliffe grunted. "It's evidently
+what he's sufferin' for."
+
+Somehow murder did not appeal to us that warm noon. We sat down to smoke
+in the heather, and presently out of the valley below came the thick beat
+of a petrol-motor ascending. I paid little attention to it till I heard
+the roar of a horn that has no duplicate in all the Home Counties.
+
+"That's the man I was going to lunch with!" I cried. "Hold on!" and I ran
+down the road.
+
+It was a big, black, black-dashed, tonneaued twenty-four horse Octopod;
+and it bore not only Kysh my friend, and Salmon his engineer, but my own
+man, who for the first time in our acquaintance smiled.
+
+"Did they get you? What did you get? I was coming into Linghurst as
+witness to character--your man told me what happened--but I was stopped
+near Instead Wick myself," cried Kysh.
+
+"What for?"
+
+"Leaving car unattended. An infernal swindle, when you think of the loose
+carts outside every pub in the county. I was jawing with the police for an
+hour, but it's no use. They've got it all their own way, and we're
+helpless."
+
+Hereupon I told him my tale, and for proof, as we topped the hill, pointed
+out the little group round my car.
+
+All supreme emotion is dumb. Kysh put on the brake and hugged me to his
+bosom till I groaned. Then, as I remember, he crooned like a mother
+returned to her suckling.
+
+"Divine! Divine!" he murmured. "Command me."
+
+"Take charge of the situation," I said. "You'll find a Mr. Pyecroft on the
+quarter-deck. I'm altogether out of it."
+
+"He shall stay there. Who am I but the instrument of vengeance in the
+hands of an over-ruling Providence? (And I put in fresh sparking-plugs
+this morning.) Salmon, take that steam-kettle home, somehow. I would be
+alone."
+
+"Leggat," I said to my man, "help Salmon home with my car."
+
+"Home? Now? It's hard. It's cruel hard," said Leggat, almost with a sob.
+
+Hinchcliffe outlined my car's condition briefly to the two engineers. Mr.
+Pyecroft clung to our guest, who stared with affrighted eyes at the
+palpitating Octopod; and the free wind of high Sussex whimpered across the
+ling.
+
+"I am quite agreeable to walkin' 'ome all the way on my feet," said our
+guest. "I wouldn't go to any railway station. It 'ud be just the proper
+finish to our little joke." He laughed nervously.
+
+"What's the evolution?" said Pyecroft. "Do we turn over to the new
+cruiser?"
+
+I nodded, and he escorted our guest to the tonneau with care. When I was
+in, he sat himself broad-armed on the little flap-seat which controls the
+door. Hinchcliffe sat by Kysh.
+
+"You drive?" Kysh asked, with the smile that has won him his chequered way
+through the world.
+
+"Steam only, and I've about had my whack for to-day, thanks."
+
+"I see."
+
+The long, low car slid forward and then dropped like a bullet down the
+descent our steam toy had so painfully climbed. Our guest's face blanched,
+and he clutched the back of the tonneau.
+
+"New commander's evidently been trained on a destroyer," said Hinchcliffe.
+
+"What's 'is wonderful name?" whispered Pyecroft. "Ho! Well, I'm glad it
+ain't Saul we've run up against--nor Nimshi, for that matter. This is
+makin' me feel religious."
+
+Our impetus carried us half-way up the next slope, where we steadied to a
+resonant fifteen an hour against the collar.
+
+"What do you think?" I called to Hinchcliffe.
+
+"'Taint as sweet as steam, o' course; but for power it's twice the
+_Furious_ against half the _Jaseur_ in a head-sea."
+
+Volumes could not have touched it more exactly. His bright eyes were glued
+on Kysh's hands juggling with levers behind the discreet backward sloping
+dash.
+
+"An' what sort of a brake might you use?" he said politely.
+
+"This," Kysh replied, as the last of the hill shot up to one in eight. He
+let the car run back a few feet and caught her deftly on the brake,
+repeating the performance cup and ball fashion. It was like being daped
+above the Pit at the end of an uncoiled solar plexus. Even Pyecroft held
+his breath.
+
+"It ain't fair! It ain't fair!" our guest moaned. "You're makin' me sick."
+
+"What an ungrateful blighter he is!" said Pyecroft. "Money couldn't buy
+you a run like this ... Do it well overboard!"
+
+"We'll just trundle up the Forest and drop into the Park Row, I think,"
+said Kysh. "There's a bit of good going hereabouts."
+
+He flung a careless knee over the low raking tiller that the ordinary
+expert puts under his armpit, and down four miles of yellow road, cut
+through barren waste, the Octopod sang like a six-inch shell.
+
+"Whew! But you know your job," said Hinchcliffe. "You're wasted here. I'd
+give something to have you in my engine-room."
+
+"He's steering with 'is little hind-legs," said Pyecroft. "Stand up and
+look at him, Robert. You'll never see such a sight again!"
+
+"Nor don't want to," was our guest's reply. "Five 'undred pounds wouldn't
+begin to cover 'is fines even since I've been with him."
+
+Park Row is reached by one hill which drops three hundred feet in half a
+mile. Kysh had the thought to steer with his hand down the abyss, but the
+manner in which he took the curved bridge at the bottom brought my few
+remaining hairs much nearer the grave.
+
+"We're in Surrey now; better look out," I said.
+
+"Never mind. I'll roll her into Kent for a bit. We've lots of time; it's
+only three o'clock."
+
+"Won't you want to fill your bunkers, or take water, or oil her up?" said
+Hinchcliffe.
+
+"We don't use water, and she's good for two hundred on one tank o' petrol
+if she doesn't break down."
+
+"Two hundred miles from 'ome and mother _and_ faithful Fido to-night,
+Robert," said Pyecroft, slapping our guest on the knee. "Cheer up! Why,
+I've known a destroyer do less."
+
+We passed with some decency through some towns, till by way of the
+Hastings road we whirled into Cramberhurst, which is a deep pit.
+
+"Now," said Kysh, "we begin."
+
+"Previous service not reckoned towards pension," said Pyecroft. "We are
+doin' you lavish, Robert."
+
+"But when's this silly game to finish, any'ow?" our guest snarled.
+
+"Don't worry about the _when_ of it, Robert. The _where's_ the interestin'
+point for you just now."
+
+I had seen Kysh drive before, and I thought I knew the Octopod, but that
+afternoon he and she were exalted beyond my knowledge. He improvised on
+the keys--the snapping levers and quivering accelerators--marvellous
+variations, so that our progress was sometimes a fugue and sometimes a
+barn-dance, varied on open greens by the weaving of fairy rings. When I
+protested, all that he would say was: "I'll hypnotise the fowl! I'll
+dazzle the rooster!" or other words equally futile. And she--oh! that I
+could do her justice!--she turned her broad black bows to the westering
+light, and lifted us high upon hills that we might see and rejoice with
+her. She whooped into veiled hollows of elm and Sussex oak; she devoured
+infinite perspectives of park palings; she surged through forgotten
+hamlets, whose single streets gave back, reduplicated, the clatter of her
+exhaust, and, tireless, she repeated the motions. Over naked uplands she
+droned like a homing bee, her shadow lengthening in the sun that she
+chased to his lair. She nosed up unparochial byways and accommodation-
+roads of the least accommodation, and put old scarred turf or new-raised
+molehills under her most marvellous springs with never a jar. And since
+the King's highway is used for every purpose save traffic, in mid-career
+she stepped aside for, or flung amazing loops about, the brainless driver,
+the driverless horse, the drunken carrier, the engaged couple, the female
+student of the bicycle and her staggering instructor, the pig, the
+perambulator, and the infant school (where it disembogued yelping on
+cross-roads), with the grace of Nellie Farren (upon whom be the Peace) and
+the lithe abandon of all the Vokes family. But at heart she was ever Judic
+as I remember that Judic long ago--Judic clad in bourgeois black from
+wrist to ankle, achieving incredible improprieties.
+
+We were silent--Hinchcliffe and Pyecroft through professional
+appreciation; I with a layman's delight in the expert; and our guest
+because of fear.
+
+At the edge of the evening she smelt the sea to southward and sheered
+thither like the strong-winged albatross, to circle enormously amid green
+flats fringed by martello towers.
+
+"Ain't that Eastbourne yonder?" said our guest, reviving. "I've a aunt
+there--she's cook to a J.P.--could identify me."
+
+"Don't worry her for a little thing like that," said Pyecroft; and ere he
+had ceased to praise family love, our unpaid judiciary, and domestic
+service, the Downs rose between us and the sea, and the Long Man of
+Hillingdon lay out upon the turf.
+
+"Trevington--up yonder--is a fairly isolated little dorp," I said, for I
+was beginning to feel hungry.
+
+"No," said Kysh. "He'd get a lift to the railway in no time.... Besides,
+I'm enjoying myself.... Three pounds eighteen and sixpence. Infernal
+swindle!"
+
+I take it one of his more recent fines was rankling in Kysh's brain; but
+he drove like the Archangel of the Twilight.
+
+About the longitude of Cassocks, Hinchcliffe yawned. "Aren't we goin' to
+maroon our Robert? I'm hungry, too."
+
+"The commodore wants his money back," I answered.
+
+"If he drives like this habitual, there must be a tidyish little lump
+owin' to him," said Pyecroft. "Well, I'm agreeable."
+
+"I didn't know it could be done. S'welp me, I didn't," our guest murmured.
+
+"But you will," said Kysh. And that was the first and last time he
+addressed the man.
+
+We ran through Penfield Green, half stupefied with open air, drugged with
+the relentless boom of the Octopod, and extinct with famine.
+
+"I used to shoot about here," said Kysh, a few miles further on. "Open
+that gate, please," and he slowed as the sun touched the sky-line. At this
+point we left metalled roads and bucked vigorously amid ditches and under
+trees for twenty minutes.
+
+"Only cross-country car on the market," he said, as we wheeled into a
+straw-yard where a lone bull bellowed defiance to our growlings. "Open
+that gate, please. I hope the cattle-bridge will stand up."
+
+"I've took a few risks in my time," said Pyecroft as timbers cracked
+beneath us and we entered between thickets, "but I'm a babe to this man,
+Hinch."
+
+"Don't talk to me. Watch _him!_ It's a liberal education, as Shakespeare
+says. Fallen tree on the port bow, Sir."
+
+"Right! That's my mark. Sit tight!"
+
+She flung up her tail like a sounding whale and buried us in a fifteen-
+foot deep bridle-path buttressed with the exposed roots of enormous
+beeches. The wheels leaped from root to rounded boulder, and it was very
+dark in the shadow of the foliage.
+
+"There ought to be a hammer-pond somewhere about here." Kysh was letting
+her down this chute in brakeful spasms.
+
+"Water dead ahead, Sir. Stack o' brushwood on the starboard beam, and--no
+road," sang Pyecroft.
+
+"Cr-r-ri-key!" said Hinchcliffe, as the car on a wild cant to the left
+went astern, screwing herself round the angle of a track that overhung the
+pond. "If she only had two propellers, I believe she'd talk poetry. She
+can do everything else."
+
+"We're rather on our port wheels now," said Kysh; "but I don't think
+she'll capsize. This road isn't used much by motors."
+
+"You don't say so," said Pyecroft. "What a pity!"
+
+She bored through a mass of crackling brushwood, and emerged into an
+upward sloping fern-glade fenced with woods so virgin, so untouched, that
+William Rufus might have ridden off as we entered. We climbed out of the
+violet-purple shadows towards the upland where the last of the day
+lingered. I was filled to my moist eyes with the almost sacred beauty of
+sense and association that clad the landscape.
+
+"Does 'unger produce 'alluciations?" said Pyecroft in a whisper. "Because
+I've just seen a sacred ibis walkin' arm in arm with a British cock-
+pheasant."
+
+"What are you panickin' at?" said Hinchcliffe. "I've been seein' zebra
+for the last two minutes, but I 'aven't complained."
+
+He pointed behind us, and I beheld a superb painted zebra (Burchell's, I
+think), following our track with palpitating nostrils. The car stopped,
+and it fled away.
+
+There was a little pond in front of us from which rose a dome of irregular
+sticks crowned with a blunt-muzzled beast that sat upon its haunches.
+
+"Is it catching?" said Pyecroft.
+
+"Yes. I'm seeing beaver," I replied.
+
+"It is here!" said Kysh, with the air and gesture of Captain Nemo, and
+half turned.
+
+"No--no--no! For 'Eaven's sake--not 'ere!" Our guest gasped like a sea-
+bathed child, as four efficient hands swung him far out-board on to the
+turf. The car ran back noiselessly down the slope.
+
+"Look! Look! It's sorcery!" cried Hinchcliffe.
+
+There was a report like a pistol shot as the beaver dived from the roof of
+his lodge, but we watched our guest. He was on his knees, praying to
+kangaroos. Yea, in his bowler hat he kneeled before kangaroos--gigantic,
+erect, silhouetted against the light--four buck-kangaroos in the heart of
+Sussex!
+
+And we retrogressed over the velvet grass till our hind-wheels struck
+well-rolled gravel, leading us to sanity, main roads, and, half an hour
+later, the "Grapnel Inn" at Horsham.
+
+*        *        *        *        *
+
+After a great meal we poured libations and made burnt-offerings in honour
+of Kysh, who received our homage graciously, and, by the way, explained a
+few things in the natural history line that had puzzled us. England is a
+most marvellous country, but one is not, till one knows the eccentricities
+of large land-owners, trained to accept kangaroos, zebras, or beavers as
+part of its landscape.
+
+When we went to bed Pyecroft pressed my hand, his voice thick with
+emotion.
+
+"We owe it to you," he said. "We owe it all to you. Didn't I say we never
+met in _pup-pup-puris naturalibus_, if I may so put it, without a
+remarkably hectic day ahead of us?"
+
+"That's all right," I said. "Mind the candle." He was tracing smoke-
+patterns on the wall.
+
+"But what I want to know is whether we'll succeed in acclimatisin' the
+blighter, or whether Sir William Gardner's keepers 'll kill 'im before 'e
+gets accustomed to 'is surroundin's?"
+
+Some day, I think, we must go up the Linghurst Road and find out.
+
+
+
+
+"WIRELESS"
+
+
+KASPAR'S SONG IN VARDA
+
+(_From the Swedish of Stagnelius_.)
+
+  Eyes aloft, over dangerous places,
+    The children follow where Psyche flies,
+  And, in the sweat of their upturned faces,
+    Slash with a net at the empty skies.
+
+  So it goes they fall amid brambles,
+    And sting their toes on the nettle-tops,
+  Till after a thousand scratches and scrambles
+    They wipe their brows, and the hunting stops.
+
+  Then to quiet them comes their father
+    And stills the riot of pain and grief,
+  Saying, "Little ones, go and gather
+    Out of my garden a cabbage leaf.
+
+  "You will find on it whorls and clots of
+    Dull grey eggs that, properly fed,
+  Turn, by way of the worm, to lots of
+    Radiant Psyches raised from the dead."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+  "Heaven is beautiful, Earth is ugly,"
+    The three-dimensioned preacher saith,
+  So we must not look where the snail and the slug lie
+    For Psyche's birth ... And that is our death!
+
+
+"WIRELESS"
+"It's a funny thing, this Marconi business, isn't it?" said Mr. Shaynor,
+coughing heavily. "Nothing seems to make any difference, by what they tell
+me--storms, hills, or anything; but if that's true we shall know before
+morning."
+
+"Of course it's true," I answered, stepping behind the counter. "Where's
+old Mr. Cashell?"
+
+"He's had to go to bed on account of his influenza. He said you'd very
+likely drop in."
+
+"Where's his nephew?"
+
+"Inside, getting the things ready. He told me that the last time they
+experimented they put the pole on the roof of one of the big hotels here,
+and the batteries electrified all the water-supply, and"--he giggled--"the
+ladies got shocks when they took their baths."
+
+"I never heard of that."
+
+"The hotel wouldn't exactly advertise it, would it? Just now, by what Mr.
+Cashell tells me, they're trying to signal from here to Poole, and they're
+using stronger batteries than ever. But, you see, he being the guvnor's
+nephew and all that (and it will be in the papers too), it doesn't matter
+how they electrify things in this house. Are you going to watch?"
+
+"Very much. I've never seen this game. Aren't you going to bed?"
+
+"We don't close till ten on Saturdays. There's a good deal of influenza in
+town, too, and there'll be a dozen prescriptions coming in before morning.
+I generally sleep in the chair here. It's warmer than jumping out of bed
+every time. Bitter cold, isn't it?"
+
+"Freezing hard. I'm sorry your cough's worse."
+
+"Thank you. I don't mind cold so much. It's this wind that fair cuts me to
+pieces." He coughed again hard and hackingly, as an old lady came in for
+ammoniated quinine. "We've just run out of it in bottles, madam," said Mr.
+Shaynor, returning to the professional tone, "but if you will wait two
+minutes, I'll make it up for you, madam."
+
+I had used the shop for some time, and my acquaintance with the proprietor
+had ripened into friendship. It was Mr. Cashell who revealed to me the
+purpose and power of Apothecaries' Hall what time a fellow-chemist had
+made an error in a prescription of mine, had lied to cover his sloth, and
+when error and lie were brought home to him had written vain letters.
+
+"A disgrace to our profession," said the thin, mild-eyed man, hotly, after
+studying the evidence. "You couldn't do a better service to the profession
+than report him to Apothecaries' Hall."
+
+I did so, not knowing what djinns I should evoke; and the result was such
+an apology as one might make who had spent a night on the rack. I
+conceived great respect for Apothecaries' Hall, and esteem for Mr.
+Cashell, a zealous craftsman who magnified his calling. Until Mr. Shaynor
+came down from the North his assistants had by no means agreed with Mr.
+Cashell. "They forget," said he, "that, first and foremost, the compounder
+is a medicine-man. On him depends the physician's reputation. He holds it
+literally in the hollow of his hand, Sir."
+
+Mr. Shaynor's manners had not, perhaps, the polish of the grocery and
+Italian warehouse next door, but he knew and loved his dispensary work in
+every detail. For relaxation he seemed to go no farther afield than the
+romance of drugs--their discovery, preparation packing, and export--but it
+led him to the ends of the earth, and on this subject, and the
+Pharmaceutical Formulary, and Nicholas Culpepper, most confident of
+physicians, we met.
+
+Little by little I grew to know something of his beginnings and his hopes
+--of his mother, who had been a school-teacher in one of the northern
+counties, and of his red-headed father, a small job-master at Kirby Moors,
+who died when he was a child; of the examinations he had passed and of
+their exceeding and increasing difficulty; of his dreams of a shop in
+London; of his hate for the price-cutting Co-operative stores; and, most
+interesting, of his mental attitude towards customers.
+
+"There's a way you get into," he told me, "of serving them carefully, and
+I hope, politely, without stopping your own thinking. I've been reading
+Christie's _New Commercial Plants_ all this autumn, and that needs keeping
+your mind on it, I can tell you. So long as it isn't a prescription, of
+course, I can carry as much as half a page of Christie in my head, and at
+the same time I could sell out all that window twice over, and not a penny
+wrong at the end. As to prescriptions, I think I could make up the general
+run of 'em in my sleep, almost."
+
+For reasons of my own, I was deeply interested in Marconi experiments at
+their outset in England; and it was of a piece with Mr. Cashell's
+unvarying thoughtfulness that, when his nephew the electrician
+appropriated the house for a long-range installation, he should, as I have
+said, invite me to see the result.
+
+The old lady went away with her medicine, and Mr. Shaynor and I stamped on
+the tiled floor behind the counter to keep ourselves warm. The shop, by
+the light of the many electrics, looked like a Paris-diamond mine, for Mr.
+Cashell believed in all the ritual of his craft. Three superb glass jars--
+red, green, and blue--of the sort that led Rosamund to parting with her
+shoes--blazed in the broad plate-glass windows, and there was a confused
+smell of orris, Kodak films, vulcanite, tooth-powder, sachets, and almond-
+cream in the air. Mr. Shaynor fed the dispensary stove, and we sucked
+cayenne-pepper jujubes and menthol lozenges. The brutal east wind had
+cleared the streets, and the few passers-by were muffled to their puckered
+eyes. In the Italian warehouse next door some gay feathered birds and
+game, hung upon hooks, sagged to the wind across the left edge of our
+window-frame.
+
+"They ought to take these poultry in--all knocked about like that," said
+Mr. Shaynor. "Doesn't it make you feel fair perishing? See that old hare!
+The wind's nearly blowing the fur off him."
+
+I saw the belly-fur of the dead beast blown apart in ridges and streaks as
+the wind caught it, showing bluish skin underneath. "Bitter cold," said
+Mr. Shaynor, shuddering. "Fancy going out on a night like this! Oh, here's
+young Mr. Cashell."
+
+The door of the inner office behind the dispensary opened, and an
+energetic, spade-bearded man stepped forth, rubbing his hands.
+
+"I want a bit of tin-foil, Shaynor," he said. "Good-evening. My uncle told
+me you might be coming." This to me, as I began the first of a hundred
+questions.
+
+"I've everything in order," he replied. "We're only waiting until Poole
+calls us up. Excuse me a minute. You can come in whenever you like--but
+I'd better be with the instruments. Give me that tin-foil. Thanks."
+
+While we were talking, a girl--evidently no customer--had come into the
+shop, and the face and bearing of Mr. Shaynor changed. She leaned
+confidently across the counter.
+
+"But I can't," I heard him whisper uneasily--the flush on his cheek was
+dull red, and his eyes shone like a drugged moth's. "I can't. I tell you
+I'm alone in the place."
+
+"No, you aren't. Who's _that_? Let him look after it for half an hour. A
+brisk walk will do you good. Ah, come now, John."
+
+"But he isn't----"
+
+"I don't care. I want you to; we'll only go round by St. Agnes. If you
+don't----"
+
+He crossed to where I stood in the shadow of the dispensary counter, and
+began some sort of broken apology about a lady-friend.
+
+"Yes," she interrupted. "You take the shop for half an hour--to oblige
+_me_, won't you?"
+
+She had a singularly rich and promising voice that well matched her
+outline.
+
+"All right," I said. "I'll do it--but you'd better wrap yourself up, Mr.
+Shaynor."
+
+"Oh, a brisk walk ought to help me. We're only going round by the church."
+I heard him cough grievously as they went out together.
+
+I refilled the stove, and, after reckless expenditure of Mr. Cashell's
+coal, drove some warmth into the shop. I explored many of the glass-
+knobbed drawers that lined the walls, tasted some disconcerting drugs,
+and, by the aid of a few cardamoms, ground ginger, chloric-ether, and
+dilute alcohol, manufactured a new and wildish drink, of which I bore a
+glassful to young Mr. Cashell, busy in the back office. He laughed shortly
+when I told him that Mr. Shaynor had stepped out--but a frail coil of wire
+held all his attention, and he had no word for me bewildered among the
+batteries and rods. The noise of the sea on the beach began to make itself
+heard as the traffic in the street ceased. Then briefly, but very lucidly,
+he gave me the names and uses of the mechanism that crowded the tables and
+the floor.
+
+"When do you expect to get the message from Poole?" I demanded, sipping my
+liquor out of a graduated glass.
+
+"About midnight, if everything is in order. We've got our installation-
+pole fixed to the roof of the house. I shouldn't advise you to turn on a
+tap or anything tonight. We've connected up with the plumbing, and all the
+water will be electrified." He repeated to me the history of the agitated
+ladies at the hotel at the time of the first installation.
+
+"But what _is_ it?" I asked. "Electricity is out of my beat altogether."
+
+"Ah, if you knew _that_ you'd know something nobody knows. It's just It--
+what we call Electricity, but the magic--the manifestations--the Hertzian
+waves--are all revealed by _this_. The coherer, we call it."
+
+He picked up a glass tube not much thicker than a thermometer, in which,
+almost touching, were two tiny silver plugs, and between them an
+infinitesimal pinch of metallic dust. "That's all," he said, proudly, as
+though himself responsible for the wonder. "That is the thing that will
+reveal to us the Powers--whatever the Powers may be--at work--through
+space--a long distance away."
+
+Just then Mr. Shaynor returned alone and stood coughing his heart out on
+the mat.
+
+"Serves you right for being such a fool," said young Mr. Cashell, as
+annoyed as myself at the interruption. "Never mind--we've all the night
+before us to see wonders."
+
+Shaynor clutched the counter, his handkerchief to his lips. When he
+brought it away I saw two bright red stains.
+
+"I--I've got a bit of a rasped throat from smoking cigarettes," he panted.
+"I think I'll try a cubeb."
+
+"Better take some of this. I've been compounding while you've been away."
+I handed him the brew.
+
+"'Twon't make me drunk, will it? I'm almost a teetotaller. My word! That's
+grateful and comforting."
+
+He sat down the empty glass to cough afresh.
+
+"Brr! But it was cold out there! I shouldn't care to be lying in my grave
+a night like this. Don't _you_ ever have a sore throat from smoking?" He
+pocketed the handkerchief after a furtive peep.
+
+"Oh, yes, sometimes," I replied, wondering, while I spoke, into what
+agonies of terror I should fall if ever I saw those bright-red danger-
+signals under my nose. Young Mr. Cashell among the batteries coughed
+slightly to show that he was quite ready to continue his scientific
+explanations, but I was thinking still of the girl with the rich voice and
+the significantly cut mouth, at whose command I had taken charge of the
+shop. It flashed across me that she distantly resembled the seductive
+shape on a gold-framed toilet-water advertisement whose charms were
+unholily heightened by the glare from the red bottle in the window.
+Turning to make sure, I saw Mr. Shaynor's eyes bent in the same direction,
+and by instinct recognised that the flamboyant thing was to him a shrine.
+"What do you take for your--cough?" I asked.
+
+"Well, I'm the wrong side of the counter to believe much in patent
+medicines. But there are asthma cigarettes and there are pastilles. To
+tell you the truth, if you don't object to the smell, which is very like
+incense, I believe, though I'm not a Roman Catholic, Blaudett's Cathedral
+Pastilles relieve me as much as anything."
+
+"Let's try." I had never raided a chemist's shop before, so I was
+thorough. We unearthed the pastilles--brown, gummy cones of benzoin--and
+set them alight under the toilet-water advertisement, where they fumed in
+thin blue spirals.
+
+"Of course," said Mr. Shaynor, to my question, "what one uses in the shop
+for one's self comes out of one's pocket. Why, stock-taking in our
+business is nearly the same as with jewellers--and I can't say more than
+that. But one gets them"--he pointed to the pastille-box--"at trade
+prices." Evidently the censing of the gay, seven-tinted wench with the
+teeth was an established ritual which cost something.
+
+"And when do we shut up shop?"
+
+"We stay like this all night. The gov--old Mr. Cashell--doesn't believe
+in locks and shutters as compared with electric light. Besides it brings
+trade. I'll just sit here in the chair by the stove and write a letter,
+if you don't mind. Electricity isn't my prescription."
+
+The energetic young Mr. Cashell snorted within, and Shaynor settled
+himself up in his chair over which he had thrown a staring red, black, and
+yellow Austrian jute blanket, rather like a table-cover. I cast about,
+amid patent medicine pamphlets, for something to read, but finding little,
+returned to the manufacture of the new drink. The Italian warehouse took
+down its game and went to bed. Across the street blank shutters flung back
+the gaslight in cold smears; the dried pavement seemed to rough up in
+goose-flesh under the scouring of the savage wind, and we could hear, long
+ere he passed, the policeman flapping his arms to keep himself warm.
+Within, the flavours of cardamoms and chloric-ether disputed those of the
+pastilles and a score of drugs and perfume and soap scents. Our electric
+lights, set low down in the windows before the tunbellied Rosamund jars,
+flung inward three monstrous daubs of red, blue, and green, that broke
+into kaleidoscopic lights on the facetted knobs of the drug-drawers, the
+cut-glass scent flagons, and the bulbs of the sparklet bottles. They
+flushed the white-tiled floor in gorgeous patches; splashed along the
+nickel-silver counter-rails, and turned the polished mahogany counter-
+panels to the likeness of intricate grained marbles--slabs of porphyry and
+malachite. Mr. Shaynor unlocked a drawer, and ere he began to write, took
+out a meagre bundle of letters. From my place by the stove, I could see
+the scalloped edges of the paper with a flaring monogram in the corner and
+could even smell the reek of chypre. At each page he turned toward the
+toilet-water lady of the advertisement and devoured her with over-luminous
+eyes. He had drawn the Austrian blanket over his shoulders, and among
+those warring lights he looked more than ever the incarnation of a drugged
+moth--a tiger-moth as I thought.
+
+He put his letter into an envelope, stamped it with stiff mechanical
+movements, and dropped it in the drawer. Then I became aware of the
+silence of a great city asleep--the silence that underlaid the even voice
+of the breakers along the sea-front--a thick, tingling quiet of warm life
+stilled down for its appointed time, and unconsciously I moved about the
+glittering shop as one moves in a sick-room. Young Mr. Cashell was
+adjusting some wire that crackled from time to time with the tense,
+knuckle-stretching sound of the electric spark. Upstairs, where a door
+shut and opened swiftly, I could hear his uncle coughing abed.
+
+"Here," I said, when the drink was properly warmed, "take some of this,
+Mr. Shaynor."
+
+He jerked in his chair with a start and a wrench, and held out his hand
+for the glass. The mixture, of a rich port-wine colour, frothed at the
+top.
+
+"It looks," he said, suddenly, "it looks--those bubbles--like a string of
+pearls winking at you--rather like the pearls round that young lady's
+neck." He turned again to the advertisement where the female in the dove-
+coloured corset had seen fit to put on all her pearls before she cleaned
+her teeth.
+
+"Not bad, is it?" I said.
+
+"Eh?"
+
+He rolled his eyes heavily full on me, and, as I stared, I beheld all
+meaning and consciousness die out of the swiftly dilating pupils. His
+figure lost its stark rigidity, softened into the chair, and, chin on
+chest, hands dropped before him, he rested open-eyed, absolutely still.
+
+"I'm afraid I've rather cooked Shaynor's goose," I said, bearing the fresh
+drink to young Mr. Cashell. "Perhaps it was the chloric-ether."
+
+"Oh, he's all right." The spade-bearded man glanced at him pityingly.
+"Consumptives go off in those sort of doses very often. It's exhaustion...
+I don't wonder. I dare say the liquor will do him good. It's grand stuff,"
+he finished his share appreciatively. "Well, as I was saying--before he
+interrupted--about this little coherer. The pinch of dust, you see, is
+nickel-filings. The Hertzian waves, you see, come out of space from the
+station that despatches 'em, and all these little particles are attracted
+together--cohere, we call it--for just so long as the current passes
+through them. Now, it's important to remember that the current is an
+induced current. There are a good many kinds of induction----"
+
+"Yes, but what _is_ induction?"
+
+"That's rather hard to explain untechnically. But the long and the short
+of it is that when a current of electricity passes through a wire there's
+a lot of magnetism present round that wire; and if you put another wire
+parallel to, and within what we call its magnetic field--why then, the
+second wire will also become charged with electricity."
+
+"On its own account?"
+
+"On its own account."
+
+"Then let's see if I've got it correctly. Miles off, at Poole, or wherever
+it is----"
+
+"It will be anywhere in ten years."
+
+"You've got a charged wire----"
+
+"Charged with Hertzian waves which vibrate, say, two hundred and thirty
+million times a second." Mr. Cashell snaked his forefinger rapidly through
+the air.
+
+"All right--a charged wire at Poole, giving out these waves into space.
+Then this wire of yours sticking out into space--on the roof of the house
+--in some mysterious way gets charged with those waves from Poole----"
+
+"Or anywhere--it only happens to be Poole tonight."
+
+"And those waves set the coherer at work, just like an ordinary telegraph-
+office ticker?"
+
+"No! That's where so many people make the mistake. The Hertzian waves
+wouldn't be strong enough to work a great heavy Morse instrument like
+ours. They can only just make that dust cohere, and while it coheres (a
+little while for a dot and a longer while for a dash) the current from
+this battery--the home battery"--he laid his hand on the thing--"can get
+through to the Morse printing-machine to record the dot or dash. Let me
+make it clearer. Do you know anything about steam?"
+
+"Very little. But go on."
+
+"Well, the coherer is like a steam-valve. Any child can open a valve and
+start a steamer's engines, because a turn of the hand lets in the main
+steam, doesn't it? Now, this home battery here ready to print is the main
+steam. The coherer is the valve, always ready to be turned on. The
+Hertzian wave is the child's hand that turns it."
+
+"I see. That's marvellous."
+
+"Marvellous, isn't it? And, remember, we're only at the beginning. There's
+nothing we sha'n't be able to do in ten years. I want to live--my God, how
+I want to live, and see it develop!" He looked through the door at Shaynor
+breathing lightly in his chair. "Poor beast! And he wants to keep company
+with Fanny Brand."
+
+"Fanny _who_?" I said, for the name struck an obscurely familiar chord in
+my brain--something connected with a stained handkerchief, and the word
+"arterial."
+
+"Fanny Brand--the girl you kept shop for." He laughed, "That's all I know
+about her, and for the life of me I can't see what Shaynor sees in her, or
+she in him."
+
+"_Can't_ you see what he sees in her?" I insisted.
+
+"Oh, yes, if _that's_ what you mean. She's a great, big, fat lump of a
+girl, and so on. I suppose that's why he's so crazy after her. She isn't
+his sort. Well, it doesn't matter. My uncle says he's bound to die before
+the year's out. Your drink's given him a good sleep, at any rate." Young
+Mr. Cashell could not catch Mr. Shaynor's face, which was half turned to
+the advertisement.
+
+I stoked the stove anew, for the room was growing cold, and lighted
+another pastille. Mr. Shaynor in his chair, never moving, looked through
+and over me with eyes as wide and lustreless as those of a dead hare.
+
+"Poole's late," said young Mr. Cashell, when I stepped back. "I'll just
+send them a call."
+
+He pressed a key in the semi-darkness, and with a rending crackle there
+leaped between two brass knobs a spark, streams of sparks, and sparks
+again.
+
+"Grand, isn't it? _That's_ the Power--our unknown Power--kicking and
+fighting to be let loose," said young Mr. Cashell. "There she goes--kick--
+kick--kick into space. I never get over the strangeness of it when I work
+a sending-machine--waves going into space, you know. T.R. is our call.
+Poole ought to answer with L.L.L."
+
+We waited two, three, five minutes. In that silence, of which the boom of
+the tide was an orderly part, I caught the clear "_kiss--kiss--kiss_" of
+the halliards on the roof, as they were blown against the installation-
+pole.
+
+"Poole is not ready. I'll stay here and call you when he is."
+
+I returned to the shop, and set down my glass on a marble slab with a
+careless clink. As I did so, Shaynor rose to his feet, his eyes fixed once
+more on the advertisement, where the young woman bathed in the light from
+the red jar simpered pinkly over her pearls. His lips moved without
+cessation. I stepped nearer to listen. "And threw--and threw--and threw,"
+he repeated, his face all sharp with some inexplicable agony.
+
+I moved forward astonished. But it was then he found words--delivered
+roundly and clearly. These:--
+
+And threw warm gules on Madeleine's young breast.
+
+The trouble passed off his countenance, and he returned lightly to his
+place, rubbing his hands.
+
+It had never occurred to me, though we had many times discussed reading
+and prize-competitions as a diversion, that Mr. Shaynor ever read Keats,
+or could quote him at all appositely. There was, after all, a certain
+stained-glass effect of light on the high bosom of the highly-polished
+picture which might, by stretch of fancy, suggest, as a vile chromo
+recalls some incomparable canvas, the line he had spoken. Night, my drink,
+and solitude were evidently turning Mr. Shaynor into a poet. He sat down
+again and wrote swiftly on his villainous note-paper, his lips quivering.
+
+I shut the door into the inner office and moved up behind him. He made no
+sign that he saw or heard. I looked over his shoulder, and read, amid
+half-formed words, sentences, and wild scratches:--
+
+  --Very cold it was. Very cold
+  The hare--the hare--the hare--
+  The birds----
+
+He raised his head sharply, and frowned toward the blank shutters of the
+poulterer's shop where they jutted out against our window. Then one clear
+line came:--
+
+  The hare, in spite of fur, was very cold.
+
+The head, moving machine-like, turned right to the advertisement where
+the Blaudett's Cathedral pastille reeked abominably. He grunted, and went
+on:--
+
+  Incense in a censer--
+  Before her darling picture framed in gold--
+  Maiden's picture--angel's portrait--
+
+"Hsh!" said Mr. Cashell guardedly from the inner office, as though in the
+presence of spirits. "There's something coming through from somewhere; but
+it isn't Poole." I heard the crackle of sparks as he depressed the keys of
+the transmitter. In my own brain, too, something crackled, or it might
+have been the hair on my head. Then I heard my own voice, in a harsh
+whisper: "Mr. Cashell, there is something coming through here, too. Leave
+me alone till I tell you."
+
+"But I thought you'd come to see this wonderful thing--Sir," indignantly
+at the end.
+
+"Leave me alone till I tell you. Be quiet."
+
+I watched--I waited. Under the blue-veined hand--the dry hand of the
+consumptive--came away clear, without erasure:
+
+And my weak spirit fails To think how the dead must freeze--
+he shivered as he wrote--
+
+Beneath the churchyard mould.
+
+Then he stopped, laid the pen down, and leaned back.
+
+For an instant, that was half an eternity, the shop spun before me in a
+rainbow-tinted whirl, in and through which my own soul most
+dispassionately considered my own soul as that fought with an over-
+mastering fear. Then I smelt the strong smell of cigarettes from Mr.
+Shaynor's clothing, and heard, as though it had been the rending of
+trumpets, the rattle of his breathing. I was still in my place of
+observation, much as one would watch a rifle-shot at the butts, half-bent,
+hands on my knees, and head within a few inches of the black, red, and
+yellow blanket of his shoulder. I was whispering encouragement, evidently
+to my other self, sounding sentences, such as men pronounce in dreams.
+
+"If he has read Keats, it proves nothing. If he hasn't--like causes _must_
+beget like effects. There is no escape from this law. _You_ ought to be
+grateful that you know 'St. Agnes Eve' without the book; because, given
+the circumstances, such as Fanny Brand, who is the key of the enigma, and
+approximately represents the latitude and longitude of Fanny Brawne;
+allowing also for the bright red colour of the arterial blood upon the
+handkerchief, which was just what you were puzzling over in the shop just
+now; and counting the effect of the professional environment, here almost
+perfectly duplicated--the result is logical and inevitable. As inevitable
+as induction."
+
+Still, the other half of my soul refused to be comforted. It was cowering
+in some minute and inadequate corner--at an immense distance.
+
+Hereafter, I found myself one person again, my hands still gripping my
+knees, and my eyes glued on the page before Mr. Shaynor. As dreamers
+accept and explain the upheaval of landscapes and the resurrection of the
+dead, with excerpts from the evening hymn or the multiplication-table, so
+I had accepted the facts, whatever they might be, that I should witness,
+and had devised a theory, sane and plausible to my mind, that explained
+them all. Nay, I was even in advance of my facts, walking hurriedly before
+them, assured that they would fit my theory. And all that I now recall of
+that epoch-making theory are the lofty words: "If he has read Keats it's
+the chloric-ether. If he hasn't, it's the identical bacillus, or Hertzian
+wave of tuberculosis, _plus_ Fanny Brand and the professional status
+which, in conjunction with the main-stream of subconscious thought common
+to all mankind, has thrown up temporarily an induced Keats."
+
+Mr. Shaynor returned to his work, erasing and rewriting as before with
+swiftness. Two or three blank pages he tossed aside. Then he wrote,
+muttering:
+
+The little smoke of a candle that goes out.
+
+"No," he muttered. "Little smoke--little smoke--little smoke. What else?"
+He thrust his chin forward toward the advertisement, whereunder the last
+of the Blaudett's Cathedral pastilles fumed in its holder. "Ah!" Then with
+relief:--
+
+The little smoke that dies in moonlight cold.
+
+Evidently he was snared by the rhymes of his first verse, for he wrote and
+rewrote "gold--cold--mould" many times. Again he sought inspiration from
+the advertisement, and set down, without erasure, the line I had
+overheard:
+
+And threw warm gules on Madeleine's young breast.
+
+As I remembered the original it is "fair"--a trite word--instead of
+"young," and I found myself nodding approval, though I admitted that the
+attempt to reproduce "its little smoke in pallid moonlight died" was a
+failure.
+
+Followed without a break ten or fifteen lines of bald prose--the naked
+soul's confession of its physical yearning for its beloved--unclean as we
+count uncleanliness; unwholesome, but human exceedingly; the raw material,
+so it seemed to me in that hour and in that place, whence Keats wove the
+twenty-sixth, seventh, and eighth stanzas of his poem. Shame I had none in
+overseeing this revelation; and my fear had gone with the smoke of the
+pastille.
+
+"That's it," I murmured. "That's how it's blocked out. Go on! Ink it in,
+man. Ink it in!"
+
+Mr. Shaynor returned to broken verse wherein "loveliness" was made to
+rhyme with a desire to look upon "her empty dress." He picked up a fold of
+the gay, soft blanket, spread it over one hand, caressed it with infinite
+tenderness, thought, muttered, traced some snatches which I could not
+decipher, shut his eyes drowsily, shook his head, and dropped the stuff.
+Here I found myself at fault, for I could not then see (as I do now) in
+what manner a red, black, and yellow Austrian blanket coloured his dreams.
+
+In a few minutes he laid aside his pen, and, chin on hand, considered the
+shop with thoughtful and intelligent eyes. He threw down the blanket,
+rose, passed along a line of drug-drawers, and read the names on the
+labels aloud. Returning, he took from his desk Christie's _New Commercial
+Plants_ and the old Culpepper that I had given him, opened and laid them
+side by side with a clerky air, all trace of passion gone from his face,
+read first in one and then in the other, and paused with pen behind his
+ear.
+
+"What wonder of Heaven's coming now?" I thought.
+
+"Manna--manna--manna," he said at last, under wrinkled brows. "That's what
+I wanted. Good! Now then! Now then! Good! Good! Oh, by God, that's good!"
+His voice rose and he spoke rightly and fully without a falter:--
+
+  Candied apple, quince and plum and gourd,
+  And jellies smoother than the creamy curd,
+  And lucent syrups tinct with cinnamon,
+  Manna and dates in Argosy transferred
+  From Fez; and spiced dainties, every one
+  From silken Samarcand to cedared Lebanon.
+
+He repeated it once more, using "blander" for "smoother" in the second
+line; then wrote it down without erasure, but this time (my set eyes
+missed no stroke of any word) he substituted "soother" for his atrocious
+second thought, so that it came away under his hand as it is written in
+the book--as it is written in the book.
+
+A wind went shouting down the street, and on the heels of the wind
+followed a spurt and rattle of rain.
+
+After a smiling pause--and good right had he to smile--he began anew,
+always tossing the last sheet over his shoulder:--
+
+  "The sharp rain falling on the window-pane,
+  Rattling sleet--the wind-blown sleet."
+
+Then prose: "It is very cold of mornings when the wind brings rain and
+sleet with it. I heard the sleet on the window-pane outside, and thought
+of you, my darling. I am always thinking of you. I wish we could both run
+away like two lovers into the storm and get that little cottage by the
+sea which we are always thinking about, my own dear darling. We could sit
+and watch the sea beneath our windows. It would be a fairyland all of our
+own--a fairy sea--a fairy sea...."
+
+He stopped, raised his head, and listened. The steady drone of the
+Channel along the sea-front that had borne us company so long leaped up a
+note to the sudden fuller surge that signals the change from ebb to
+flood. It beat in like the change of step throughout an army--this
+renewed pulse of the sea--and filled our ears till they, accepting it,
+marked it no longer.
+
+  "A fairyland for you and me
+  Across the foam--beyond ...
+  A magic foam, a perilous sea."
+
+He grunted again with effort and bit his underlip. My throat dried, but I
+dared not gulp to moisten it lest I should break the spell that was
+drawing him nearer and nearer to the high-water mark but two of the sons
+of Adam have reached. Remember that in all the millions permitted there
+are no more than five--five little lines--of which one can say: "These
+are the pure Magic. These are the clear Vision. The rest is only poetry."
+And Mr. Shaynor was playing hot and cold with two of them!
+
+I vowed no unconscious thought of mine should influence the blindfold
+soul, and pinned myself desperately to the other three, repeating and
+re-repeating:
+
+  A savage spot as holy and enchanted
+  As e'er beneath a waning moon was haunted
+  By woman wailing for her demon lover.
+
+But though I believed my brain thus occupied, my every sense hung upon
+the writing under the dry, bony hand, all brown-fingered with chemicals
+and cigarette-smoke.
+
+  Our windows fronting on the dangerous foam,
+
+(he wrote, after long, irresolute snatches), and then--
+
+  "Our open casements facing desolate seas
+  Forlorn--forlorn--"
+
+Here again his face grew peaked and anxious with that sense of loss I had
+first seen when the Power snatched him. But this time the agony was
+tenfold keener. As I watched it mounted like mercury in the tube. It
+lighted his face from within till I thought the visibly scourged soul
+must leap forth naked between his jaws, unable to endure. A drop of sweat
+trickled from my forehead down my nose and splashed on the back of my
+hand.
+
+  "Our windows facing on the desolate seas
+  And pearly foam of magic fairyland--"
+
+  "Not yet--not yet," he muttered, "wait a minute.
+  _Please_ wait a minute. I shall get it then--"
+
+  Our magic windows fronting on the sea,
+  The dangerous foam of desolate seas ..
+  For aye.
+
+"_Ouh_, my God!"
+
+From head to heel he shook--shook from the marrow of his bones
+outwards--then leaped to his feet with raised arms, and slid the chair
+screeching across the tiled floor where it struck the drawers behind and
+fell with a jar. Mechanically, I stooped to recover it.
+
+As I rose, Mr. Shaynor was stretching and yawning at leisure.
+
+"I've had a bit of a doze," he said. "How did I come to knock the chair
+over? You look rather--"
+
+"The chair startled me," I answered. "It was so sudden in this quiet."
+
+Young Mr. Cashell behind his shut door was offendedly silent.
+
+"I suppose I must have been dreaming," said Mr. Shaynor.
+
+"I suppose you must," I said. "Talking of dreams--I--I noticed you
+writing--before--"
+
+He flushed consciously.
+
+"I meant to ask you if you've ever read anything written by a man called
+Keats."
+
+"Oh! I haven't much time to read poetry, and I can't say that I remember
+the name exactly. Is he a popular writer?"
+
+"Middling. I thought you might know him because he's the only poet who
+was ever a druggist. And he's rather what's called the lover's poet."
+
+"Indeed. I must dip into him. What did he write about?"
+
+"A lot of things. Here's a sample that may interest you."
+
+Then and there, carefully, I repeated the verse he had twice spoken and
+once written not ten minutes ago.
+
+"Ah. Anybody could see he was a druggist from that line about the
+tinctures and syrups. It's a fine tribute to our profession."
+
+"I don't know," said young Mr. Cashell, with icy politeness, opening the
+door one half-inch, "if you still happen to be interested in our trifling
+experiments. But, should such be the case----"
+
+I drew him aside, whispering, "Shaynor seemed going off into some sort of
+fit when I spoke to you just now. I thought, even at the risk of being
+rude, it wouldn't do to take you off your instruments just as the call
+was coming through. Don't you see?"
+
+"Granted--granted as soon as asked," he said unbending. "I _did_ think it
+a shade odd at the time. So that was why he knocked the chair down?"
+
+"I hope I haven't missed anything," I said.
+"I'm afraid I can't say that, but you're just in time for the end of a
+rather curious performance. You can come in, too, Mr. Shaynor. Listen,
+while I read it off."
+
+The Morse instrument was ticking furiously. Mr. Cashell interpreted:
+"'_K.K.V. Can make nothing of your signals_.'" A pause. "'_M.M.V. M.M.V.
+Signals unintelligible. Purpose anchor Sandown Bay. Examine instruments
+to-morrow.'_ Do you know what that means? It's a couple of men-o'-war
+working Marconi signals off the Isle of Wight. They are trying to talk to
+each other. Neither can read the other's messages, but all their messages
+are being taken in by our receiver here. They've been going on for ever so
+long. I wish you could have heard it."
+
+"How wonderful!" I said. "Do you mean we're overhearing Portsmouth ships
+trying to talk to each other--that we're eavesdropping across half South
+England?"
+
+"Just that. Their transmitters are all right, but their receivers are out
+of order, so they only get a dot here and a dash there. Nothing clear."
+
+"Why is that?"
+
+"God knows--and Science will know to-morrow. Perhaps the induction is
+faulty; perhaps the receivers aren't tuned to receive just the number of
+vibrations per second that the transmitter sends. Only a word here and
+there. Just enough to tantalise."
+
+Again the Morse sprang to life.
+
+"That's one of 'em complaining now. Listen: '_Disheartening--most
+disheartening_.' It's quite pathetic. Have you ever seen a spiritualistic
+seance? It reminds me of that sometimes--odds and ends of messages coming
+out of nowhere--a word here and there--no good at all."
+
+"But mediums are all impostors," said Mr. Shaynor, in the doorway,
+lighting an asthma-cigarette. "They only do it for the money they can
+make. I've seen 'em."
+
+"Here's Poole, at last--clear as a bell. L.L.L. _Now_ we sha'n't be long."
+Mr. Cashell rattled the keys merrily. "Anything you'd like to tell 'em?"
+
+"No, I don't think so," I said. "I'll go home and get to bed. I'm feeling
+a little tired."
+
+
+
+
+THE ARMY OF A DREAM
+
+SONG OF THE OLD GUARD
+
+"And thou shalt make a candlestick of pure gold of beaten work shall the
+candlestick be made: his shaft and its branches, his bowls, his knops,
+and his flowers, shall be the same.
+
+"And there shall be a knop under two branches of the same, and a knop
+under two branches of the same, and a knop under two branches of the
+same, according to the six branches that proceed out of the candlestick.
+Their knops and their branches shall be the same."--_Exodus._
+
+  "Know this, my brethren, Heaven is clear
+    And all the clouds are gone--
+  The Proper Sort shall flourish now,
+    Good times are coming on"--
+  The evil that was threatened late
+    To all of our degree,
+  Hath passed in discord and debate,
+    And, _Hey then up go we!_
+
+  A common people strove in vain
+    To shame us unto toil,
+  But they are spent and we remain,
+    And we shall share the spoil
+  According to our several needs
+    As Beauty shall decree,
+  As Age ordains or Birth concedes,
+    And, _Hey then up go we!_
+
+  And they that with accursed zeal
+    Our Service would amend,
+  Shall own the odds and come to heel
+    Ere worse befall their end
+  For though no naked word be wrote
+    Yet plainly shall they see
+  What pinneth Orders to their coat,
+    And, _Hey then up go we!_
+
+  Our doorways that, in time of fear,
+    We opened overwide
+  Shall softly close from year to year
+    Till all be purified;
+  For though no fluttering fan be heard
+    Nor chaff be seen to flee--
+  The Lord shall winnow the Lord's Preferred--
+    And, _Hey then up go we!_
+
+  Our altars which the heathen brake
+    Shall rankly smoke anew,
+  And anise, mint, and cummin take
+    Their dread and sovereign due,
+  Whereby the buttons of our trade
+    Shall all restored be
+  With curious work in gilt and braid,
+    And, _Hey then up go we!_
+
+  Then come, my brethren, and prepare
+    The candlesticks and bells,
+  The scarlet, brass, and badger's hair
+    Wherein our Honour dwells,
+  And straitly fence and strictly keep
+    The Ark's integrity
+  Till Armageddon break our sleep ...
+    And, _Hey then up go we!_
+
+
+THE ARMY OF A DREAM
+
+PART I
+
+I sat down in the club smoking-room to fill a pipe.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It was entirely natural that I should be talking to "Boy" Bayley. We had
+met first, twenty odd years ago, at the Indian mess of the Tyneside
+Tail-twisters. Our last meeting, I remembered, had been at the Mount
+Nelson Hotel, which was by no means India, and there we had talked half
+the night. Boy Bayley had gone up that week to the front, where I think
+he stayed a long, long time.
+
+But now he had come back.
+
+"Are you still a Tynesider?" I asked.
+
+"I command the Imperial Guard Battalion of the old regiment, my son," he
+replied.
+
+"Guard which? They've been Fusiliers since Fontenoy. Don't pull my leg,
+Boy."
+
+"I said Guard, not Guard-s. The I. G. Battalion of the Tail-twisters.
+Does that make it any clearer?"
+
+"Not in the least."
+
+"Then come over to the mess and see for yourself. We aren't a step from
+barracks. Keep on my right side. I'm--I'm a bit deaf on the near."
+
+We left the club together and crossed the street to a vast four-storied
+pile, which more resembled a Rowton lodging-house than a barrack. I could
+see no sentry at the gates.
+
+"There ain't any," said the Boy lightly. He led me into a many-tabled
+restaurant full of civilians and grey-green uniforms. At one end of the
+room, on a slightly raised dais, stood a big table.
+
+"Here we are! We usually lunch here and dine in mess by ourselves. These
+are our chaps--but what am I thinking of? You must know most of 'em.
+Devine's my second in command now. There's old Luttrell--remember him at
+Cherat?--Burgard, Verschoyle (you were at school with him), Harrison,
+Pigeon, and Kyd."
+
+With the exception of this last I knew them all, but I could not remember
+that they had all been Tynesiders.
+
+"I've never seen this sort of place," I said, looking round. "Half the
+men here are in plain clothes, and what are those women and children
+doing?"
+
+"Eating, I hope," Boy Bayley answered. "Our canteens would never pay if
+it wasn't for the Line and Militia trade. When they were first started
+people looked on 'em rather as catsmeat-shops; but we got a duchess or
+two to lunch in 'em, and they've been grossly fashionable since."
+
+"So I see," I answered. A woman of the type that shops at the Stores came
+up the room looking about her. A man in the dull-grey uniform of the
+corps rose up to meet her, piloted her to a place between three other
+uniforms, and there began a very merry little meal.
+
+"I give it up," I said. "This is guilty splendour that I don't
+understand."
+
+"Quite simple," said Burgard across the table. "The barrack supplies
+breakfast, dinner, and tea on the Army scale to the Imperial Guard (which
+we call I. G.) when it's in barracks as well as to the Line and Militia.
+They can all invite their friends if they choose to pay for them. That's
+where we make our profits. Look!"
+
+Near one of the doors were four or five tables crowded with workmen in
+the raiment of their callings. They ate steadily, but found time to jest
+with the uniforms about them; and when one o'clock clanged from a big
+half-built block of flats across the street, filed out.
+
+"Those," Devine explained, "are either our Line or Militiamen, as such
+entitled to the regulation whack at regulation cost. It's cheaper than
+they could buy it; an' they meet their friends too. A man'll walk a mile
+in his dinner hour to mess with his own lot."
+
+"Wait a minute," I pleaded. "Will you tell me what those plumbers and
+plasterers and bricklayers that I saw go out just now have to do with
+what I was taught to call the Line?"
+
+"Tell him," said the Boy over his shoulder to Burgard. He was busy
+talking with the large Verschoyle, my old schoolmate.
+
+"The Line comes next to the Guard. The Linesman's generally a town-bird
+who can't afford to be a Volunteer. He has to go into camp in an Area for
+two months his first year, six weeks his second, and a month the third.
+He gets about five bob a week the year round for that and for being on
+duty two days of the week, and for being liable to be ordered out to help
+the Guard in a row. He needn't live in barracks unless he wants to, and
+he and his family can feed at the regimental canteen at usual rates. The
+women like it."
+
+"All this," I said politely, but intensely, "is the raving of delirium.
+Where may your precious recruit who needn't live in barracks learn his
+drill?"
+
+"At his precious school, my child, like the rest of us. The notion of
+allowing a human being to reach his twentieth year before asking him to
+put his feet in the first position _was_ raving lunacy if you like!" Boy
+Bayley dived back into the conversation.
+
+"Very good," I said meekly. "I accept the virtuous plumber who puts in
+two months of his valuable time at Aldershot----"
+
+"Aldershot!" The table exploded. I felt a little annoyed.
+
+"A camp in an Area is not exactly Aldershot," said Burgard. "The Line
+isn't exactly what you fancy. Some of them even come to _us_!"
+
+"You recruit from 'em?"
+
+"I beg your pardon," said Devine with mock solemnity. "The Guard doesn't
+recruit. It selects."
+
+"It would," I said, "with a Spiers and Pond restaurant; pretty girls to
+play with; and----"
+
+"A room apiece, four bob a day and all found," said Verschoyle. "Don't
+forget that."
+
+"Of course!" I said. "It probably beats off recruits with a club."
+
+"No, with the ballot-box," said Verschoyle, laughing. "At least in all
+R.C. companies."
+
+"I didn't know Roman Catholics were so particular," I ventured.
+
+They grinned. "R.C. companies," said the Boy, "mean Right of Choice. When
+a company has been very good and pious for a long time it may, if the
+C.O. thinks fit, choose its own men--all same one-piecee club. All our
+companies are R.C.'s, and as the battalion is making up a few vacancies
+ere starting once more on the wild and trackless 'heef' into the Areas,
+the Linesman is here in force to-day sucking up to our non-coms."
+
+"Would some one mind explaining to me the meaning of every other word
+you've used," I said. "What's a trackless 'heef'? What's an Area? What's
+everything generally?" I asked.
+
+"Oh, 'heefs' part of the British Constitution," said the Boy. "It began
+long ago when they'd first mapped out the big military manoeuvring
+grounds--we call 'em Areas for short--where the I. G. spend two-thirds of
+their time and the other regiments get their training. It was slang
+originally for beef on the hoof, because in the Military Areas two-thirds
+of your meat-rations at least are handed over to you on the hoof, and you
+make your own arrangements. The word 'heef' became a parable for camping
+in the Military Areas and all its miseries. There are two Areas in
+Ireland, one in Wales for hill-work, a couple in Scotland, and a sort of
+parade-ground in the Lake District; but the real working Areas are in
+India, Africa, and Australia, and so on."
+
+"And what do you do there?"
+
+"We 'heef' under service conditions, which are rather like hard work. We
+'heef' in an English Area for about a year, coming into barracks for one
+month to make up wastage. Then we may 'heef' foreign for another year or
+eighteen months. Then we do sea-time in the war boats----"
+
+"_What-t?_" I said.
+
+"Sea-time," Bayley repeated. "Just like Marines,
+to learn about the big guns and how to embark and disembark quick. Then
+we come back to our territorial headquarters for six months, to educate
+the Line and Volunteer camps, to go to Hythe, to keep abreast of any new
+ideas, and then we fill up vacancies. We call those six months 'Schools,'
+Then we begin all over again, thus: Home 'heef,' foreign 'heef,'
+sea-time, schools. 'Heefing' isn't precisely luxurious, but it's on
+'heef' that we make our head-money."
+
+"Or lose it," said the sallow Pigeon, and all laughed, as men will, at
+regimental jokes.
+
+"The Dove never lets me forget that," said Boy Bayley. "It happened last
+March. We were out in the Second Northern Area at the top end of Scotland
+where a lot of those silly deer forests used to be. I'd sooner 'heef' in
+the middle of Australia myself--or Athabasca, with all respect to the
+Dove--he's a native of those parts. We were camped somewhere near
+Caithness, and the Armity (that's the combined Navy and Army board that
+runs our show) sent us about eight hundred raw remounts to break in to
+keep us warm."
+
+"Why horses for a foot regiment?"
+
+"I.G.'s don't foot it unless they're obliged to. No have gee-gee how can
+move? I'll show you later. Well, as I was saying, we broke those beasts
+in on compressed forage and small box-spurs, and then we started across
+Scotland to Applecross to hand 'em over to a horse-depot there. It was
+snowing cruel, and we didn't know the country overmuch. You remember the
+30th--the old East Lancashire--at Mian Mir?
+
+"Their Guard Battalion had been 'heefing' round those parts for six
+months. We thought they'd be snowed up all quiet and comfy, but Burden,
+their C. O., got wind of our coming, and sent spies in to Eschol."
+
+"Confound him," said Luttrell, who was fat and well-liking. "I
+entertained one of 'em--in a red worsted comforter--under Bean Derig. He
+said he was a crofter. 'Gave him a drink too."
+
+"I don't mind admitting," said the Boy, "that, what with the cold and the
+remounts, we were moving rather base over apex. Burden bottled us under
+Sghurr Mohr in a snowstorm. He stampeded half the horses, cut off a lot
+of us in a snow-bank, and generally rubbed our noses in the dirt."
+
+"Was he allowed to do that?" I said.
+
+"There is no peace in a Military Area. If we'd
+beaten him off or got away without losing anyone, we'd have been entitled
+to a day's pay from every man engaged against us. But we didn't. He cut
+off fifty of ours, held 'em as prisoners for the regulation three days,
+and then sent in his bill--three days' pay for each man taken. Fifty men
+at twelve bob a head, plus five pounds for the Dove as a captured
+officer, and Kyd here, his junior, three, made about forty quid to Burden
+& Co. They crowed over us horrid."
+
+"Couldn't you have appealed to an umpire or--or something?"
+
+"We could, but we talked it over with the men and decided to pay and look
+happy. We were fairly had. The 30th knew every foot of Sghurr Mohr. I
+spent three days huntin' 'em in the snow, but they went off on our
+remounts about twenty mile that night."
+
+"Do you always do this sham-fight business?" I asked.
+
+"Once inside an Area you must look after yourself; but I tell you that a
+fight which means that every man-Jack of us may lose a week's pay isn't
+so damn-sham after all. It keeps the men nippy. Still, in the long run,
+it's like whist on a P. & O. It comes out fairly level if you play long
+enough. Now and again, though, one gets a present--say, when a Line
+regiment's out on the 'heef,' and signifies that it's ready to abide by
+the rules of the game. You mustn't take head-money from a Line regiment
+in an Area unless it says that it'll play you; but, after a week or two,
+those clever Linesmen always think they see a chance of making a pot, and
+send in their compliments to the nearest I.G. Then the fun begins. We
+caught a Line regiment single-handed about two years ago in
+Ireland--caught it on the hop between a bog and a beach. It had just
+moved in to join its brigade, and we made a forty-two mile march in
+fourteen hours, and cut it off, lock, stock, and barrel. It went to
+ground like a badger--I _will_ say those Line regiments can dig--but we
+got out privily by night and broke up the only road it could expect to
+get its baggage and company-guns along. Then we blew up a bridge that
+some Sappers had made for experimental purposes (_they_ were rather
+stuffy about it) on its line of retreat, while we lay up in the mountains
+and signalled for the A.C. of those parts."
+
+"Who's an A.C.?" I asked.
+
+"The Adjustment Committee--the umpires of the Military Areas. They're a
+set of superannuated old aunts of colonels kept for the purpose, but they
+occasionally combine to do justice. Our A.C. came, saw our dispositions,
+and said it was a sanguinary massacre for the Line, and that we were
+entitled to our full pound of flesh--head-money for one whole regiment,
+with equipment, four company-guns, and all kit! At Line rates this worked
+out as one fat cheque for two hundred and fifty. Not bad!"
+
+"But we had to pay the Sappers seventy-four quid for blowing their patent
+bridge to pieces," Devine interpolated. "That was a swindle."
+
+"That's true," the Boy went on, "but the Adjustment Committee gave our
+helpless victims a talking to that was worth another hundred to hear."
+
+"But isn't there a lot of unfairness in this head-money system?" I asked.
+
+"Can't have everything perfect," said the Boy. "Head-money is an attempt
+at payment by results, and it gives the men a direct interest in their
+job. Three times out of five, of course, the A. C. will disallow both
+sides' claim, but there's always the chance of bringing off a coup."
+
+"Do all regiments do it?"
+
+"Heavily. The Line pays a bob per prisoner and the Militia ninepence, not
+to mention side-bets which are what really keep the men keen. It isn't
+supposed to be done by the Volunteers, but they gamble worse than anyone.
+Why, the very kids do it when they go to First Camp at Aldershot or
+Salisbury."
+
+"Head-money's a national institution--like betting," said Burgard.
+
+"I should say it was," said Pigeon suddenly. "I was roped in the other
+day as an Adjustment Committee by the Kemptown Board School. I was riding
+under the Brighton racecourse, and I heard the whistle goin' for
+umpire--the regulation, two longs and two shorts. I didn't take any
+notice till an infant about a yard high jumped up from a furze-patch and
+shouted: 'Guard! Guard! Come 'ere! I want you _per_fessionally. Alf says
+'e ain't outflanked. Ain't 'e a liar? Come an' look 'ow I've posted my
+men.' You bet I looked. The young demon trotted by my stirrup and showed
+me his whole army (twenty of 'em) laid out under cover as nicely as you
+please round a cowhouse in a hollow. He kept on shouting: 'I've drew Alf
+into there. 'Is persition ain't tenable. Say it ain't tenable, Guard!' I
+rode round the position, and Alf with his army came out of his cowhouse
+an' sat on the roof and protested like a--like a Militia Colonel; but the
+facts were in favour of my friend and I umpired according. Well, Alf
+abode by my decision. I explained it to him at length, and he solemnly
+paid up his head-money--farthing points if you please."
+
+"Did they pay you umpire's fee?" said Kyd. "I
+umpired a whole afternoon once for a village school at home, and they
+stood me a bottle of hot ginger beer."
+
+"I compromised on a halfpenny--a sticky one--or I'd have hurt their
+feelings," said Pigeon gravely. "But I gave 'em sixpence back."
+
+"How were they manoeuvring and what with?" I asked.
+
+"Oh, by whistle and hand-signal. They had the dummy Board School guns and
+flags for positions, but they were rushing their attack much too quick
+for that open country. I told 'em so, and they admitted it."
+
+"But who taught 'em?" I said.
+
+"They had learned in their schools, of course, like the rest of us. They
+were all of 'em over ten; and squad-drill begins when they're eight. They
+knew their company-drill a heap better than they knew their King's
+English."
+
+"How much drill do the boys put in?" I asked.
+
+"All boys begin physical drill to music in the Board Schools when they're
+six; squad-drill, one hour a week, when they're eight; company-drill when
+they're ten, for an hour and a half a week. Between ten and twelve they
+get battalion drill of a sort. They take the rifle at twelve and record
+their first target-score at thirteen. That's what the Code lays down. But
+it's worked very loosely so long as a boy comes up to the standard of his
+age."
+
+"In Canada we don't need your physical drill. We're born fit," said
+Pigeon, "and our ten-year-olds could knock spots out of your
+twelve-year-olds."
+
+"I may as well explain," said the Boy, "that the Dove is our 'swop'
+officer. He's an untamed Huskie from Nootka Sound when he's at home. An
+I. G. Corps exchanges one officer every two years with a Canadian or
+Australian or African Guard Corps. We've had a year of our Dove, an' we
+shall be sorry to lose him. He humbles our insular pride. Meantime,
+Morten, our 'swop' in Canada, keeps the ferocious Canuck humble. When
+Pij. goes we shall swop Kyd, who's next on the roster, for a Cornstalk or
+a Maori. But about the education-drill. A boy can't attend First Camp, as
+we call it, till he is a trained boy and holds his First Musketry
+certificate. The Education Code says he must be fourteen, and the boys
+usually go to First Camp at about that age. Of course, they've been to
+their little private camps and Boys' Fresh Air Camps and public school
+picnics while they were at school, but First Camp is where the young
+drafts all meet--generally at Aldershot in this part of the world. First
+Camp lasts a week or ten days, and the boys are looked over for
+vaccination and worked lightly in brigades with lots of blank cartridge.
+Second Camp--that's for the fifteen to eighteen-year-olds--lasts ten days
+or a fortnight, and that includes a final medical examination. Men don't
+like to be chucked out on medical certificates much--nowadays. I assure
+you Second Camp, at Salisbury, say, is an experience for a young I.G.
+officer. We're told off to 'em in rotation. A wilderness of monkeys isn't
+in it. The kids are apt to think 'emselves soldiers, and we have to take
+the edge off 'em with lots of picquet-work and night attacks."
+
+"And what happens after Second Camp?"
+
+"It's hard to explain. Our system is so illogical. Theoretically, the
+boys needn't show up for the next three or four years after Second Camp.
+They are supposed to be making their way in life. Actually, the young
+doctor or lawyer or engineer joins a Volunteer battalion that sticks to
+the minimum of camp--ten days per annum. That gives him a holiday in the
+open air, and now that men have taken to endowing their Volunteer
+drill-halls with baths and libraries, he finds, if he can't run to a
+club, that his own drill-hall is an efficient substitute. He meets men
+there who'll be useful to him later, and he keeps himself in touch with
+what's going on while he's studying for his profession. The
+town-birds--such as the chemist's assistant, clerk, plumber, mechanic,
+electrician, and so forth--generally put in for their town Volunteer
+corps as soon as they begin to walk out with the girls. They like takin'
+their true-loves to our restaurants. Look yonder!" I followed his gaze,
+and saw across the room a man and a maid at a far table, forgetting in
+each other's eyes the good food on their plates.
+
+"So it is," said I. "Go ahead."
+
+"Then, too, we have some town Volunteer corps that lay themselves out to
+attract promising youths of nineteen or twenty, and make much of 'em on
+condition that they join their Line battalion and play for their county.
+Under the new county qualifications--birth or three years' residence--that
+means a great deal in League matches, and the same in County cricket."
+
+"By Jove, that's a good notion," I cried. "Who invented it?"
+
+"C. B. Fry--long ago. He said in his paper, that County cricket and
+County volunteering ought to be on the same footing--unpaid and genuine.
+'No cricketer no corps. No corps no cricketer' was his watchword. There
+was a row among the pro's at first, but C. B. won, and later the League
+had to come in. They said at first it would ruin the gate; but when
+County matches began to be _pukka_ county, _plus_ inter-regimental,
+affairs the gate trebled, and as two-thirds of the gate goes to the
+regiments supplying the teams some Volunteer corps fairly wallow in cash.
+It's all unofficial, of course, but League Corps, as they call 'em, can
+take their pick of the Second Camper. Some corps ask ten guineas
+entrance-fee, and get it too, from the young bloods that want to shine in
+the arena. I told you we catered for all tastes. Now, as regards the Line
+proper, I believe the young artisan and mechanic puts in for that before
+he marries. He likes the two-months' 'heef' in his first year, and five
+bob a week is something to go on with between times."
+
+"Do they follow their trade while they're in the Line?" I demanded.
+
+"Why not? How many well-paid artisans work more than four days a week
+anyhow? Remember a Linesman hasn't to be drilled in your sense of the
+word. He must have had at least eight years' grounding in that, as well
+as two or three years in his Volunteer battalion. He can sleep where he
+pleases. He can't leave town-limits without reporting himself, of course,
+but he can get leave if he wants it. He's on duty two days in the week as
+a rule, and he's liable to be invited out for garrison duty down the
+Mediterranean, but his benefit societies will insure him against that.
+I'll tell you about that later. If it's a hard winter and trade's slack,
+a lot of the bachelors are taken into the I. G. barracks (while the I. G.
+is out on the heef) for theoretical instruction. Oh, I assure you the
+Line hasn't half a bad time of it."
+
+"Amazing!" I murmured. "And what about the others?"
+
+"The Volunteers? Observe the beauty of our system. We're a free people.
+We get up and slay the man who says we aren't. But as a little detail we
+never mention, if we don't volunteer in some corps or another--as
+combatants if we're fit, as non-combatants, if we ain't--till we're
+thirty-five we don't vote, and we don't get poor-relief, and the women
+don't love us."
+
+"Oh, that's the compulsion of it?" said I.
+
+Bayley inclined his head gravely. "That, Sir, is the compulsion. We voted
+the legal part of it ourselves in a fit of panic, and we have not yet
+rescinded our resolution. The women attend to the unofficial penalties.
+But being free British citizens----"
+
+"_And_ snobs," put in Pigeon.
+"The point is well taken, Pij------we have supplied ourselves with every
+sort and shape and make of Volunteer corps that you can imagine, and we've
+mixed the whole show up with our Odd Fellows and our I.O.G.T.'s and our
+Buffaloes, and our Burkes and our Debretts, not to mention Leagues and
+Athletic Clubs, till you can't tell t'other from which. You remember the
+young pup who used to look on soldiering as a favour done to his
+ungrateful country--the gun-poking, ferret-pettin', landed gentleman's
+offspring--the suckin' Facey Romford? Well, he generally joins a Foreign
+Service Corps when he leaves college."
+
+"Can Volunteers go foreign, then?"
+
+"Can't they just, if their C.O. _or_ his wife has influence! The Armity
+will always send a well-connected F.S. corps out to help a guard battalion
+in a small campaign. Otherwise F.S. corps make their own arrangements
+about camps. You see, the Military Areas are always open. They can 'heef'
+there (and gamble on head-money) as long as their finances run to it; or
+they can apply to do sea-time in the ships. It's a cheap way for a young
+man to see the world, and if he's any good he can try to get into the
+Guard later."
+
+"The main point," said Pigeon, "is that F.S. corps are 'swagger'--the
+correct thing. It 'ud never do to be drawn for the Militia, don't you
+know," he drawled, trying to render the English voice.
+
+"That's what happens to a chap who doesn't volunteer," said Bayley. "Well,
+after the F.S. corps (we've about forty of 'em) come our territorial
+Volunteer battalions, and a man who can't suit himself somewhere among 'em
+must be a shade difficult. We've got those 'League' corps I was talking
+about; and those studious corps that just scrape through their ten days'
+camp; and we've crack corps of highly-paid mechanics who can afford a two
+months' 'heef' in an interesting Area every other year; and we've senior
+and junior scientific corps of earnest boilermakers and fitters and
+engineers who read papers on high explosives, and do their 'heefing' in a
+wet picket-boat--mine-droppin'--at the ports. Then we've heavy artillery--
+recruited from the big manufacturing towns and ship-building yards--and
+ferocious hard-ridin' Yeomanry (they _can_ ride--now), genteel, semi-
+genteel, and Hooligan corps, and so on and so forth till you come to the
+Home Defence Establishment--the young chaps knocked out under medical
+certificate at the Second Camp, but good enough to sit behind hedges or
+clean up camp, and the old was-birds who've served their time but don't
+care to drop out of the fun of the yearly camps and the halls. They call
+'emselves veterans and do fancy-shooting at Bisley, but, between you and
+me, they're mostly Fresh Air Benefit Clubs. They contribute to the
+Volunteer journals and tell the Guard that it's no good. But I like 'em. I
+shall be one of 'em some day--a copper-nosed was-bird! ... So you see
+we're mixed to a degree on the Volunteer side."
+
+"It sounds that way," I ventured.
+
+"You've overdone it, Bayley," said Devine. "You've missed our one strong
+point." He turned to me and continued: "It's embarkation. The Volunteers
+may be as mixed as the Colonel says, but they _are_ trained to go down to
+the sea in ships. You ought to see a big Bank-Holiday roll-out. We suspend
+most of the usual railway traffic and turn on the military time-table--say
+on Friday at midnight. By 4 A.M. the trains are running from every big
+centre in England to the nearest port at two-minute intervals. As a rule,
+the Armity meets us at the other end with shipping of sorts--fleet
+reserves or regular men of war or hulks--anything you can stick a
+gang-plank to. We pile the men on to the troop-decks, stack the rifles in
+the racks, send down the sea-kit, steam about for a few hours, and land
+'em somewhere. It's a good notion, because our army to be any use _must_
+be an army of embarkation. Why, last Whit Monday we had--how many were
+down at the dock-edge in the first eight hours? Kyd, you're the Volunteer
+enthusiast last from school."
+
+"In the first ten hours over a hundred and eighteen thousand," said Kyd
+across the table, "with thirty-six thousand actually put in and taken out
+of ship. In the whole thirty-six hours we had close on ninety thousand men
+on the water and a hundred and thirty-three thousand on the quays fallen
+in with their sea-kit."
+
+"That must have been a sight," I said.
+
+"One didn't notice it much. It was scattered between Chatham, Dover,
+Portsmouth, Plymouth, Bristol, Liverpool, and so on, merely to give the
+inland men a chance to get rid of their breakfasts. We don't like to
+concentrate and try a big embarkation at any one point. It makes the
+Continent jumpy. Otherwise," said Kyd, "I believe we could get two hundred
+thousand men, with their kits, away on one tide."
+
+"What d'you want with so many?" I asked.
+
+"_We_ don't want one of 'em; but the Continent used to point out, every
+time relations were strained, that nothing would be easier than to raid
+England if they got command of the sea for a week. After a few years some
+genius discovered that it cut both ways, an' there was no reason why we,
+who are supposed to command the sea and own a few ships, should not
+organise our little raids in case of need. The notion caught on among the
+Volunteers--they were getting rather sick of manoeuvres on dry land--and
+since then we haven't heard so much about raids from the Continent," said
+Bayley.
+
+"It's the offensive-defensive," said Verschoyle, "that they talk so much
+about. We learned it _all_ from the Continent--bless 'em! They insisted on
+it so."
+
+"No, we learned it from the Fleet," said Devine. "The Mediterranean Fleet
+landed ten thousand marines and sailors, with guns, in twenty minutes once
+at manoeuvres. That was long ago. I've seen the Fleet Reserve and a few
+paddle-steamers, hired for the day, land twenty-five thousand Volunteers
+at Bantry in four hours--half the men sea-sick too. You've no notion what
+a difference that sort of manoeuvre makes in the calculations of our
+friends on the mainland. The Continent knows what invasion means. It's
+like dealing with a man whose nerve has been shaken. It doesn't cost much
+after all, and it makes us better friends with the great European family.
+We're now as thick as thieves."
+
+"Where does the Imperial Guard come in in all this gorgeousness?" I asked.
+"You're unusual modest about yourselves."
+
+"As a matter of fact, we're supposed to go out and stay out. We're the
+permanently mobilised lot. I don't think there are more than eight I.G.
+battalions in England now. We're a hundred battalions all told. Mostly on
+the 'heef' in India, Africa and so forth."
+
+"A hundred thousand. Isn't that small allowance?" I suggested.
+
+"You think so? One hundred thousand _men_, without a single case of
+venereal, and an average sick list of two per cent, permanently on a war
+footing? Well, perhaps you're right, but it's a useful little force to
+begin with while the others are getting ready. There's the native Indian
+Army also, which isn't a broken reed, and, since 'no Volunteer no Vote' is
+the rule throughout the Empire, you will find a few men in Canada,
+Australia, and elsewhere, that are fairly hefty in their class."
+
+"But a hundred thousand isn't enough for garrison duty," I persisted.
+
+"A hundred thousand _sound_ men, not sick boys, go quite a way," said
+Pigeon.
+
+"We expect the Line to garrison the Mediterranean Ports and thereabouts,"
+said Bayley. "Don't sneer at the mechanic. He's deuced good stuff. He
+isn't rudely ordered out, because this ain't a military despotism, and we
+have to consider people's feelings. The Armity usually brackets three Line
+regiments together, and calls for men for six months or a year for Malta,
+Gib, or elsewhere, at a bob a day. Three battalions will give you nearly a
+whole battalion of bachelors between 'em. You fill up deficiencies with a
+call on the territorial Volunteer battalion, and away you go with what we
+call a Ports battalion. What's astonishing in that? Remember that in this
+country, where fifty per cent of the able-bodied males have got a pretty
+fair notion of soldiering, and, which is more, have all camped out in the
+open, you wake up the spirit of adventure in the young."
+
+"Not much adventure at Malta, Gib, or Cyprus," I retorted. "Don't they get
+sick of it?"
+
+"But you don't realise that we treat 'em rather differently from the
+soldier of the past. You ought to go and see a Ports battalion drawn from
+a manufacturing centre growin' vines in Cyprus in its shirt sleeves; and
+at Gib, and Malta, of course, the battalions are working with the Fleet
+half the time."
+
+"It seems to me," I said angrily, "you are knocking _esprit de corps_ on
+the head with all this Army-Navy jumble. It's as bad as----"
+
+"I know what you're going to say. As bad as what Kitchener used to do when
+he believed that a thousand details picked up on the veldt were as good as
+a column of two regiments. In the old days, when drill was a sort of holy
+sacred art learned in old age, you'd be quite right. But remember _our_
+chaps are broke to drill from childhood, and the theory we work on is that
+a thousand trained Englishmen ought to be about as good as another
+thousand trained Englishmen. We've enlarged our horizon, that's all. Some
+day the Army and the Navy will be interchangeable."
+
+"You've enlarged it enough to fall out of, I think. Now where in all this
+mess of compulsory Volunteers----?"
+
+"My dear boy, there's no compulsion. You've _got_ to be drilled when
+you're a child, same as you've got to learn to read, and if you don't
+pretend to serve in some corps or other till you're thirty-five or
+medically chucked you rank with lunatics, women, and minors. That's fair
+enough."
+
+"Compulsory conscripts," I continued. "Where, as I was going to say, does
+the Militia come in?"
+
+"As I have said--for the men who can't afford volunteering. The Militia is
+recruited by ballot--pretty comprehensively too. Volunteers are exempt,
+but most men not otherwise accounted for are bagged by the Militia. They
+have to put in a minimum three weeks' camp every other year, and they get
+fifteen bob a week and their keep when they're at it, and some sort of a
+yearly fee, I've forgotten how much. 'Tisn't a showy service, but it's
+very useful. It keeps the mass of the men between twenty-five, say, and
+thirty-five moderately fit, and gives the Armity an excuse for having more
+equipment ready--in case of emergencies."
+
+"I don't think you're quite fair on the Militia," drawled Verschoyle.
+"They're better than we give 'em credit for. Don't you remember the Middle
+Moor Collieries' strike?"
+
+"Tell me," I said quickly. Evidently the others knew.
+
+"We-ell, it was no end of a pitman's strike about eight years ago. There
+were twenty-five thousand men involved--Militia, of course. At the end of
+the first month--October--when things were looking rather blue, one of
+those clever Labour leaders got hold of the Militia Act and discovered
+that any Militia regiment could, by a two-thirds vote, go on 'heef' in a
+Military Area in addition to its usual biennial camp. Two-and-twenty
+battalions of Geordies solemnly applied, and they were turned loose into
+the Irish and Scotch Areas under an I.G. Brigadier who had private
+instructions to knock clinkers out of 'em. But the pitman is a strong and
+agile bird. He throve on snowdrifts and entrenching and draggin' guns
+through heather. _He_ was being fed and clothed for nothing, besides
+having a chance of making head-money, and his strike-pay was going clear
+to his wife and family. You see? Wily man. But wachtabittje! When that
+'heef' finished in December the strike was still on. _Then_ that same
+Labour leader found out, from the same Act, that if at any time more than
+thirty or forty men of a Militia regiment wished to volunteer to do
+sea-time and study big guns in the Fleet they were in no wise to be
+discouraged, but were to be taken on as opportunity offered and paid a bob
+a day. Accordingly, about January, Geordie began volunteering for sea-
+time--seven and eight hundred men out of each regiment. Anyhow, it made up
+seventeen thousand men! It was a splendid chance and the Armity jumped at
+it. The Home and Channel Fleets and the North Sea and Cruiser Squadrons
+were strengthened with lame ducks from the Fleet Reserve, and between 'em
+with a little stretching and pushing they accommodated all of that young
+division."
+
+"Yes, but you've forgotten how we lied to the Continent about it. All
+Europe wanted to know what the dooce we were at," said Boy Bayley, "and
+the wretched Cabinet had to stump the country in the depths of winter
+explaining our new system of poor-relief. I beg your pardon, Verschoyle."
+
+"The Armity improvised naval manoeuvres between Gib and Land's End, with
+frequent coalings and landings; ending in a cruise round England that
+fairly paralysed the pitmen. The first day out they wanted the fleet
+stopped while they went ashore and killed their Labour leader, but they
+couldn't be obliged. Then they wanted to mutiny over the coaling--it was
+too like their own job. Oh, they had a lordly timel They came back--the
+combined Fleets anchored off Hull--with a nautical hitch to their
+breeches. They'd had a free fight at Gib with the Ports battalion there;
+they cleared out the town of Lagos; and they'd fought a pitched battle
+with the dockyard-mateys at Devonport. So they'd done 'emselves well, but
+they didn't want any more military life for a bit."
+
+"And the strike?"
+
+"That ended, all right enough, when the strike-money came to an end. The
+pit-owners were furious. They said the Armity had wilfully prolonged the
+strike, and asked questions in the House. The Armity said that they had
+taken advantage of the crisis to put a six months' polish on fifteen
+thousand fine young men, and if the masters cared to come out on the same
+terms they'd be happy to do the same by them."
+
+"And then?"
+
+"Palaver done set," said Bayley. "Everybody laughed."
+
+"I don't quite understand about this sea-time business," I said. "Is the
+Fleet open to take any regiment aboard?"
+
+"Rather. The I.G. must, the Line can, the Militia may, and the Volunteers
+do put in sea-time. The Coast Volunteers began it, and the fashion is
+spreading inland. Under certain circumstances, as Verschoyle told you, a
+Volunteer or Militia regiment can vote whether it 'heefs' wet or dry. If
+it votes wet and has influence (like some F.S. corps), it can sneak into
+the Channel or the Home Fleet and do a cruise round England or to Madeira
+or the North Sea. The regiment, of course, is distributed among the ships,
+and the Fleet dry nurse 'em. It rather breaks up shore discipline, but it
+gives the inland men a bit of experience, and, of course, it gives us a
+fairish supply of men behind the gun, in event of any strain on the Fleet.
+Some coast corps make a specialty of it, and compete for embarking and
+disembarking records. I believe some of the Tyneside engineerin' corps put
+ten per cent of their men through the Fleet engine rooms. But there's no
+need to stay talking here all the afternoon. Come and see the I.G. in his
+lair--the miserable conscript driven up to the colours at the point of the
+bayonet."
+
+PART II
+
+The great hall was emptying apace as the clocks struck two, and we passed
+out through double doors into a huge reading and smoking room, blue with
+tobacco and buzzing with voices.
+
+"We're quieter as a rule," said the Boy. "But we're filling up vacancies
+to-day. Hence the anxious faces of the Line and Militia. Look!" There were
+four tables against the walls, and at each stood a crowd of uniforms. The
+centres of disturbance were noncommissioned officers who, seated, growled
+and wrote down names.
+
+"Come to my table," said Burgard. "Well, Purvis, have you ear-marked our
+little lot?"
+
+"I've been tellin' 'em for the last hour we've only twenty-three
+vacancies," was the sergeant's answer. "I've taken nearly fifty for
+Trials, and this is what's left." Burgard smiled.
+
+"I'm very sorry," he said to the crowd, "but C Company's full."
+
+"Excuse me, Sir," said a man, "but wouldn't sea-time count in my favour?
+I've put in three months with the Fleet. Small quick-firers, Sir? Company
+guns? Any sort of light machinery?"
+
+"Come away," said a voice behind. "They've chucked the best farrier
+between Hull and Dewsbury. Think they'll take _you_ an' your potty quick-
+firers?"
+
+The speaker turned on his heel and swore.
+
+"Oh, damn the Guard, by all means!" said Sergeant Purvis, collecting his
+papers. "D'you suppose it's any pleasure to _me_ to reject chaps of your
+build and make? Vote us a second Guard battalion and we'll accommodate
+you. Now, you can come into Schools and watch Trials if you like."
+
+Most of the men accepted his invitation, but a few walked away angrily. I
+followed from the smoking-room across a wide corridor into a riding-
+school, under whose roof the voices of the few hundred assembled wandered
+in lost echoes.
+
+"I'll leave you, if you don't mind," said Burgard. "Company officers
+aren't supposed to assist at these games. Here, Matthews!" He called to a
+private and put me in his charge.
+
+In the centre of the vast floor my astonished eyes beheld a group of
+stripped men; the pink of their bodies startling the tan.
+
+"These are our crowd," said Matthews. "They've been vetted, an' we're
+putting 'em through their paces."
+
+"They don't look a bit like raw material," I said.
+
+"No, we don't use either raw men or raw meat for that matter in the
+Guard," Matthews replied. "Life's too short."
+
+Purvis stepped forward and barked in the professional manner. It was
+physical drill of the most searching, checked only when he laid his hand
+over some man's heart.
+
+Six or seven, I noticed, were sent back at this stage of the game. Then a
+cry went up from a group of privates standing near the line of contorted
+figures. "White, Purvis, white! Number Nine is spitting white!"
+
+"I know it," said Purvis. "Don't you worry."
+
+"Unfair!" murmured the man who understood quick-firers. "If I couldn't
+shape better than that I'd hire myself out to wheel a perambulator. He's
+cooked."
+
+"Nah," said the intent Matthews. "He'll answer to a month's training like
+a horse. It's only suet. _You've_ been training for this, haven't you?"
+
+"Look at me," said the man simply.
+
+"Yes. You're overtrained," was Matthews' comment. "The Guard isn't a
+circus."
+
+"Guns!" roared Purvis, as the men broke off and panted. "Number off from
+the right. Fourteen is one, three is two, eleven's three, twenty and
+thirty-nine are four and five, and five is six." He was giving them their
+numbers at the guns as they struggled into their uniforms. In like manner
+he told off three other guncrews, and the remainder left at the double, to
+return through the further doors with four light quick-firers jerking at
+the end of man-ropes.
+
+"Knock down and assemble against time!" Purvis called.
+
+The audience closed in a little as the crews flung themselves on the guns,
+which melted, wheel by wheel, beneath their touch.
+
+"I've never seen anything like this," I whispered.
+
+"Huh!" said Matthews scornfully. "They're always doin' it in the Line and
+Militia drill-halls. It's only circus-work."
+
+The guns were assembled again and some one called the time. Then followed
+ten minutes of the quickest firing and feeding with dummy cartridges that
+was ever given man to behold.
+
+"They look as if they might amount to something--this draft," said
+Matthews softly.
+
+"What might you teach 'em after this, then?" I asked.
+
+"To be Guard," said Matthews.
+
+"Spurs," cried Purvis, as the guns disappeared through the doors into the
+stables. Each man plucked at his sleeve, and drew up first one heel and
+then the other.
+
+"What the deuce are they doing?" I asked.
+
+"This," said Matthews. He put his hand to a ticket-pocket inside his
+regulation cuff, showed me two very small black box-spurs: drawing up a
+gaitered foot, he snapped them into the box in the heel, and when I had
+inspected snapped them out again.
+
+"That's all the spur you really need," he said.
+
+Then horses were trotted out into the school barebacked, and the neophytes
+were told to ride.
+
+Evidently the beasts knew the game and enjoyed it, for they would not make
+it easy for the men.
+
+A heap of saddlery was thrown in a corner, and from this each man, as he
+captured his mount, made shift to draw proper equipment, while the
+audience laughed, derided, or called the horses towards them.
+
+It was, most literally, wild horseplay, and by the time it was finished
+the recruits and the company were weak with fatigue and laughter.
+
+"That'll do," said Purvis, while the men rocked in their saddles. "I don't
+see any particular odds between any of you. C Company! Does anybody here
+know anything against any of these men?"
+
+"That's a bit of the Regulations," Matthews whispered. "Just like
+forbiddin' the banns in church. Really, it was all settled long ago when
+the names first came up."
+
+There was no answer.
+
+"You'll take 'em as they stand?"
+
+There was a grunt of assent.
+
+"Very good. There's forty men for twenty-three billets." He turned to the
+sweating horsemen. "I must put you into the Hat."
+
+With great ceremony and a shower of company jokes that I did not follow,
+an enormous Ally Sloper top-hat was produced, into which numbers and
+blanks were dropped, and the whole was handed round to the riders by a
+private, evidently the joker of C Company.
+
+Matthews gave me to understand that each company owned a cherished
+receptacle (sometimes not a respectable one) for the papers of the final
+drawing. He was telling me how his company had once stolen the Sacred
+Article used by D Company for this purpose and of the riot that followed,
+when through the west door of the schools entered a fresh detachment of
+stripped men, and the arena was flooded with another company.
+
+Said Matthews as we withdrew, "Each company does Trials their own way. B
+Company is all for teaching men how to cook and camp. D Company keeps 'em
+to horse-work mostly. We call D the circus-riders and B the cooks. They
+call us the Gunners."
+
+"An' you've rejected _me_," said the man who had done sea-time, pushing
+out before us. "The Army's goin' to the dogs."
+
+I stood in the corridor looking for Burgard.
+
+"Come up to my room and have a smoke," said Matthews, private of the
+Imperial Guard.
+
+We climbed two flights of stone stairs ere we reached an immense landing
+flanked with numbered doors.
+
+Matthews pressed a spring-latch and led me into a little cabin-like room.
+The cot was a standing bunk, with drawers beneath. On the bed lay a
+brilliant blanket; by the bed head was an electric light and a shelf of
+books: a writing table stood in the window, and I dropped into a low
+wicker chair.
+
+"This is a cut above subaltern's quarters," I said, surveying the photos,
+the dhurri on the floor, the rifle in its rack, the field-kit hung up
+behind the door, and the knicknacks on the walls.
+
+"The Line bachelors use 'em while we're away; but they're nice to come
+back to after 'heef.'" Matthews passed me his cigarette-case.
+
+"Where have you 'heefed'?" I said.
+
+"In Scotland, Central Australia, and North-Eastern Rhodesia and the North-
+West Indian front."
+
+"What's your service?"
+
+"Four years. I'll have to go in a year. I got in when I was twenty-two--by
+a fluke--from the Militia direct--on Trials."
+
+"Trials like those we just saw?"
+
+"Not so severe. There was less competition then. I hoped to get my
+stripes, but there's no chance."
+
+"Why?"
+
+"I haven't the knack of handling men. Purvis let me have a half-company
+for a month in Rhodesia--over towards Lake N'Garni. I couldn't work 'em
+properly. It's a gift."
+
+"Do colour-sergeants handle half-companies with you?"
+
+"They can command 'em on the 'heef.' We've only four company officers--
+Burgard, Luttrell, Kyd, and Harrison. Pigeon's our swop, and he's in
+charge of the ponies. Burgard got his company on the 'heef,' You see
+Burgard had been a lieutenant in the Line, but he came into the Guards on
+Trials like the men. _He_ could command. They tried him in India with a
+wing of the battalion for three months. He did well so he got his company.
+That's what made me hopeful. But it's a gift, you see--managing men--and
+so I'm only a senior private. They let ten per cent of us stay on for two
+years extra after our three are finished--to polish the others."
+
+"Aren't you even a corporal?"
+
+"We haven't corporals, or lances for that matter, in the Guard. As a
+senior private I'd take twenty men into action; but one Guard don't tell
+another how to clean himself. You've learned that before you apply. ...
+Come in!"
+
+There was a knock at the door, and Burgard entered, removing his cap.
+
+"I thought you'd be here," he said, as Matthews vacated the other chair
+and sat on the bed. "Well, has Matthews told you all about it? How did our
+Trials go, Matthews?"
+
+"Forty names in the Hat, Sir, at the finish. They'll make a fairish lot.
+Their gun-tricks weren't bad; but D company has taken the best horsemen--
+as usual."
+
+"Oh, I'll attend to that on 'heef.' Give me a man who can handle company-
+guns and I'll engage to make him a horse-master. D company will end by
+thinkin' 'emselves Captain Pigeon's private cavalry some day."
+
+I had never heard a private and a captain talking after this fashion, and
+my face must have betrayed my astonishment, for Burgard said:
+
+"These are not our parade manners. In our rooms, as we say in the Guard,
+all men are men. Outside we are officers and men."
+
+"I begin to see," I stammered. "Matthews was telling me that sergeants
+handled half-companies and rose from the ranks--and I don't see that there
+are any lieutenants--and your companies appear to be two hundred and fifty
+strong. It's a shade confusing to the layman."
+
+Burgard leaned forward didactically. "The Regulations lay down that every
+man's capacity for command must be tested to the uttermost. We construe
+that very literally when we're on the 'heef.' F'r instance, any man can
+apply to take the command next above him, and if a man's too shy to ask,
+his company officer must see that he gets his chance. A sergeant is given
+a wing of the battalion to play with for three weeks--a month, or six
+weeks--according to his capacity, and turned adrift in an Area to make his
+own arrangements. That's what Areas are for--and to experiment in. A good
+gunner--a private very often--has all four company-guns to handle through
+a week's fight, acting for the time as the major. Majors of Guard
+battalions (Verschoyle's our major) are supposed to be responsible for the
+guns, by the way. There's nothing to prevent any man who has the gift
+working his way up to the experimental command of the battalion on 'heef.'
+Purvis, my colour-sergeant, commanded the battalion for three months at
+the back of Coolgardie, an' very well he did it. Bayley 'verted to company
+officer for the time being an' took Harrison's company, and Harrison came
+over to me as my colour-sergeant. D'you see? Well, Purvis is down for a
+commission when there's a vacancy. He's been thoroughly tested, and we all
+like him. Two other sergeants have passed that three months' trial in the
+same way (just as second mates go up for extra master's certificate). They
+have E.C. after their names in the Army List. That shows they're capable
+of taking command in event of war. The result of our system is that you
+could knock out every single officer of a Guard battalion early in the
+day, and the wheels 'ud still go forward, _not_ merely round. We're
+allowed to fill up half our commissioned list from the ranks direct. _Now_
+d'you see why there's such a rush to get into a Guard battalion?"
+
+"Indeed I do. Have you commanded the regiment experimentally?"
+
+"Oh, time and again," Burgard laughed. "We've all had our E.C. turn."
+
+"Doesn't the chopping and changing upset the men?"
+
+"It takes something to upset the Guard. Besides, they're all in the game
+together. They give each other a fair show you may be sure."
+
+"That's true," said Matthews. "When I went to N'Gami with my--with the
+half-company," he sighed, "they helped me all they knew. But it's a gift--
+handling men. I found _that_ out,"
+
+"I know you did," said Burgard softly. "But you found it out in time,
+which is the great thing. You see," he turned to me, "with our limited
+strength we can't afford to have a single man who isn't more than up to
+any duty--in reason. Don't you be led away by what you saw at Trials just
+now. The Volunteers and the Militia have all the monkey-tricks of the
+trade--such as mounting and dismounting guns, and making fancy scores and
+doing record marches; but they need a lot of working up before they can
+pull their weight in the boat."
+
+There was a knock at the door. A note was handed in. Burgard read it and
+smiled.
+
+"Bayley wants to know if you'd care to come with us to the Park and see
+the kids. It's only a Saturday afternoon walk-round before the
+taxpayer.... Very good. If you'll press the button we'll try to do the
+rest."
+
+He led me by two flights of stairs up an iron stairway that gave on a
+platform, not unlike a ship's bridge, immediately above the barrelled
+glass roof of the riding-school. Through a ribbed ventilator I could see B
+Company far below watching some men who chased sheep. Burgard unlocked a
+glass-fronted fire-alarm arrangement flanked with dials and speaking-
+tubes, and bade me press the centre button.
+
+Next moment I should have fallen through the riding-school roof if he had
+not caught me; for the huge building below my feet thrilled to the
+multiplied purring of electric bells. The men in the school vanished like
+minnows before a shadow, and above the stamp of booted feet on staircases
+I heard the neighing of many horses.
+
+"What in the world have I done?" I gasped.
+
+"Turned out the Guard--horse, foot, and guns!"
+
+A telephone bell rang imperiously. Burgard snatched up the receiver:
+
+"Yes, Sir.... _What_, Sir?... I never heard they said that," he laughed,
+"but it would be just like 'em. In an hour and a half? Yes, Sir. Opposite
+the Statue? Yes, Sir."
+
+He turned to me with a wink as he hung up.
+
+"Bayley's playing up for you. Now you'll see some fun."
+
+"Who's going to catch it?" I demanded.
+
+"Only our local Foreign Service Corps. Its C.O. has been boasting that
+it's _en  tat de partir_, and Bayley's going to take him at his word and
+have a kit-inspection this afternoon in the Park. I must tell their
+drill-hall. Look over yonder between that brewery chimney and the mansard
+roof!"
+
+He readdressed himself to the telephone, and I kept my eye on the building
+to the southward. A Blue Peter climbed up to the top of the flagstaff that
+crowned it and blew out in the summer breeze. A black storm-cone followed.
+
+"Inspection for F.S. corps acknowledged, Sir," said Burgard down the
+telephone. "Now we'd better go to the riding-school. The battalion falls
+in there. I have to change, but you're free of the corps. Go anywhere. Ask
+anything. In another ten minutes we're off."
+
+I lingered for a little looking over the great city, its huddle of houses
+and the great fringe of the Park, all framed between the open windows of
+this dial-dotted eyrie.
+
+When I descended the halls and corridors were as hushed as they had been
+noisy, and my feet echoed down the broad tiled staircases. On the third
+floor, Matthews, gaitered and armed, overtook me smiling.
+
+"I thought you might want a guide," said he. "We've five minutes yet," and
+piloted me to the sunsplashed gloom of the riding-school. Three companies
+were in close order on the tan. They moved out at a whistle, and as I
+followed in their rear I was overtaken by Pigeon on a rough black mare.
+
+"Wait a bit," he said, "till the horses are all out of stables, and come
+with us. D Company is the only one mounted just now. We do it to amuse the
+taxpayer," he explained, above the noise of horses on the tan.
+
+"Where are the guns?" I asked, as the mare lipped my coat-collar.
+
+"Gone ahead long ago. They come out of their own door at the back of
+barracks. We don't haul guns through traffic more than we can help.... If
+Belinda breathes down your neck smack her. She'll be quiet in the streets.
+She loves lookin' into the shop-windows."
+
+The mounted company clattered through vaulted concrete corridors in the
+wake of the main body, and filed out into the crowded streets.
+
+When I looked at the townsfolk on the pavement, or in the double-decked
+trams, I saw that the bulk of them saluted, not grudgingly or of
+necessity, but in a light-hearted, even flippant fashion.
+
+"Those are Line and Militia men," said Pigeon. "That old chap in the
+top-hat by the lamp-post is an ex-Guardee. That's why he's saluting in
+slow-time. No, there's no regulation governing these things, but we've all
+fallen into the way of it somehow. Steady, mare!"
+
+"I don't know whether I care about this aggressive militarism," I began,
+when the company halted, and Belinda almost knocked me down. Looking
+forward I saw the badged cuff of a policeman upraised at a crossing, his
+back towards us.
+
+"Horrid aggressive, ain't we?" said Pigeon with a chuckle when we moved on
+again and overtook the main body. Here I caught the strains of the band,
+which Pigeon told me did not accompany the battalion on 'heef,' but lived
+in barracks and made much money by playing at parties in town.
+
+"If we want anything more than drums and fifes on 'heef' we sing," said
+Pigeon. "Singin' helps the wind."
+
+I rejoiced to the marrow of my bones thus to be borne along on billows of
+surging music among magnificent men, in sunlight, through a crowded town
+whose people, I could feel, regarded us with comradeship, affection--and
+more.
+
+"By Jove," I said at last, watching the eyes about us, "these people are
+looking us over as if we were horses."
+
+"Why not? They know the game."
+
+The eyes on the pavement, in the trams, the cabs, at the upper windows,
+swept our lines back and forth with a weighed intensity of regard which at
+first seemed altogether new to me, till I recalled just such eyes, a
+thousand of them, at manoeuvres in the Channel when one crowded battleship
+drew past its sister at biscuit-toss range. Then I stared at the ground,
+overborne by those considering eyes.
+
+Suddenly the music changed to the wail of the Dead March in "Saul," and
+once more--we were crossing a large square--the regiment halted.
+
+"Damn!" said Pigeon, glancing behind him at the mounted company. "I
+believe they save up their Saturday corpses on purpose."
+
+"What is it?" I asked.
+
+"A dead Volunteer. We must play him through." Again I looked forward and
+saw the top of a hearse, followed by two mourning-coaches, boring directly
+up the halted regiment, which opened out company by company to let it
+through.
+
+"But they've got the whole blessed square to funeralise in!" I exclaimed.
+"Why don't they go round?"
+
+"Not so!" Pigeon replied. "In this city it's the Volunteer's perquisite to
+be played through by any corps he happens to meet on his way to the
+cemetery. And they make the most of it. You'll see."
+
+I heard the order, "Rest on your arms," run before the poor little
+procession as the men opened out. The driver pulled the black Flanders
+beasts into a more than funeral crawl, and in the first mourning-coach I
+saw the tearful face of a fat woman (his mother, doubtless), a
+handkerchief pressed to one eye, but the other rolling vigilantly, alight
+with proper pride. Last came a knot of uniformed men--privates, I took it
+--of the dead one's corps.
+
+Said a man in the crowd beside us to the girl on his arm, "There, Jenny!
+That's what I'll get if I 'ave the luck to meet 'em when my time comes."
+
+"You an' your luck," she snapped. "'Ow can you talk such silly nonsense?"
+
+"Played through by the Guard," he repeated slowly. "The undertaker 'oo
+could guarantee _that_, mark you, for all his customers--well, 'e'd
+monopolise the trade, is all I can say. See the horses passagin'
+sideways!"
+
+"She done it a purpose," said the woman with a sniff.
+
+"An' I only hope you'll follow her example. Just as long as you think I'll
+keep, too."
+
+We reclosed when the funeral had left us twenty paces behind. A small boy
+stuck his head out of a carriage and watched us jealously.
+
+"Amazing! Amazing!" I murmured. "Is it regulation?"
+
+"No. Town-custom. It varies a little in different cities, but the people
+value being played through more than most things, I imagine. Duddell, the
+big Ipswich manufacturer--he's a Quaker--tried to bring in a bill to
+suppress it as unchristian." Pigeon laughed.
+
+"And?"
+
+"It cost him his seat next election. You see, we're all in the game."
+
+We reached the Park without further adventure, and found the four company-
+guns with their spike teams and single drivers waiting for us. Many people
+were gathered here, and we were halted, so far as I could see, that they
+might talk with the men in the ranks. The officers broke into groups.
+
+"Why on earth didn't you come along with me?" said Boy Bayley at my side.
+"I was expecting you."
+
+"Well, I had a delicacy about brigading myself with a colonel at the head
+of his regiment, so I stayed with the rear company and the horses. It's
+all too wonderful for any words. What's going to happen next?"
+
+"I've handed over to Verschoyle, who will amuse and edify the school
+children while I take you round our kindergarten. Don't kill any one, Vee.
+Are you goin' to charge 'em?"
+
+Old Verschoyle hitched his big shoulder and nodded precisely as he used to
+do at school. He was a boy of few words grown into a kindly taciturn man.
+
+"Now!" Bayley slid his arm through mine and led me across a riding road
+towards a stretch of rough common (singularly out of place in a park)
+perhaps three-quarters of a mile long and half as wide. On the encircling
+rails leaned an almost unbroken line of men and women--the women
+outnumbering the men. I saw the Guard battalion move up the road flanking
+the common and disappear behind the trees.
+
+As far as the eye could range through the mellow English haze the ground
+inside the railings was dotted with boys in and out of uniform, armed and
+unarmed. I saw squads here, half-companies there; then three companies in
+an open space, wheeling with stately steps; a knot of drums and fifes near
+the railings unconcernedly slashing their way across popular airs; and a
+batch of gamins labouring through some extended attack destined to be
+swept aside by a corps crossing the ground at the double. They broke out
+of furze bushes, ducked over hollows and bunkers, held or fell away from
+hillocks and rough sandbanks till the eye wearied of their busy legs.
+
+Bayley took me through the railings, and gravely returned the salute of a
+freckled twelve-year-old near by.
+
+"What's your corps?" said the Colonel of that Imperial Guard battalion to
+that child.
+
+"Eighth District Board School, fourth standard, Sir. We aren't out
+to-day." Then, with a twinkle, "I go to First Camp next year."
+
+"What are those boys yonder--that squad at the double?"
+
+"Jewboys, Sir. Jewish Voluntary Schools, Sir."
+
+"And that full company extending behind the three elms to the south-west?"
+
+"Private day-schools, Sir, I think. Judging distance, Sir."
+
+"Can you come with us?"
+
+"Certainly, Sir."
+
+"Here's the raw material at the beginning of the process," said Bayley to
+me.
+
+We strolled on towards the strains of "A Bicycle Built for Two," breathed
+jerkily into a mouth-organ by a slim maid of fourteen. Some dozen infants
+with clenched fists and earnest legs were swinging through the extension
+movements which that tune calls for. A stunted hawthorn overhung the
+little group, and from a branch a dirty white handkerchief flapped in the
+breeze. The girl blushed, scowled, and wiped the mouth-organ on her sleeve
+as we came up.
+
+"We're all waiting for our big bruvvers," piped up one bold person in blue
+breeches--seven if he was a day.
+
+"It keeps 'em quieter, Sir," the maiden lisped. "The others are with the
+regiments."
+
+"Yeth, and they've all lots of blank for _you_," said the gentleman in
+blue breeches ferociously.
+
+"Oh, Artie! 'Ush!" the girl cried.
+
+"But why have they lots of blank for _us_?" Bayley asked. Blue Breeches
+stood firm.
+
+"'Cause--'cause the Guard's goin' to fight the Schools this afternoon; but
+my big bruvver says they'll be dam-well surprised."
+
+"_Artie!_" The girl leaped towards him. "You know your ma said I was to
+smack----"
+
+"Don't. Please don't," said Bayley, pink with suppressed mirth. "It was
+all my fault. I must tell old Verschoyle this. I've surprised his plan out
+of the mouths of babes and sucklings."
+
+"What plan?"
+
+"Old Vee has taken the battalion up to the top of the common, and he told
+me he meant to charge down through the kids, but they're on to him
+already. He'll be scuppered. The Guard will be scuppered!"
+
+Here Blue Breeches, overcome by the reproof of his fellows, began to weep.
+
+"I didn't tell," he roared. "My big bruvver _he_ knew when he saw them go
+up the road..."
+
+"Never mind! Never mind, old man," said Bayley soothingly. "I'm not
+fighting to-day. It's all right."
+
+He rightened it yet further with sixpence, and left that band loudly at
+feud over the spoil.
+
+"Oh, Vee! Vee the strategist," he chuckled. "We'll pull Vee's leg
+to-night."
+
+Our freckled friend of the barriers doubled up behind us.
+
+"So you know that my battalion is charging down the ground," Bayley
+demanded.
+
+"Not for certain, Sir, but we're preparin' for the worst," he answered
+with a cheerful grin. "They allow the Schools a little blank ammunition
+after we've passed the third standard; and we nearly always bring it on to
+the ground of Saturdays."
+
+"The deuce you do! Why?"
+
+"On account of these amateur Volunteer corps, Sir. They're always
+experimentin' upon us, Sir, comin' over from their ground an' developin'
+attacks on our flanks. Oh, it's chronic 'ere of a Saturday sometimes,
+unless you flag yourself."
+
+I followed his eye and saw white flags fluttering before a drum and fife
+band and a knot of youths in sweaters gathered round the dummy breech of a
+four-inch gun which they were feeding at express rates.
+
+"The attacks don't interfere with you if you flag yourself, Sir," the boy
+explained. "That's a Second Camp team from the Technical Schools loading
+against time for a bet."
+
+We picked our way deviously through the busy groups. Apparently it was not
+etiquette to notice a Guard officer, and the youths at the twenty-five
+pounder were far too busy to look up. I watched the cleanly finished hoist
+and shove-home of the full-weight shell from a safe distance, when I
+became aware of a change among the scattered boys on the common, who
+disappeared among the hillocks to an accompaniment of querulous whistles.
+A boy or two on bicycles dashed from corps to corps, and on their arrival
+each corps seemed to fade away.
+
+The youths at loading practice did not pause for the growing hush round
+them, nor did the drum and fife band drop a single note. Bayley exploded
+afresh. "The Schools are preparing for our attack, by Jove! I wonder who's
+directin' 'em. Do _you_ know?"
+
+The warrior of the Eighth District looked up shrewdly.
+
+"I saw Mr. Cameron speaking to Mr. Levitt just as the Guard went up the
+road. 'E's our 'ead-master, Mr. Cameron, but Mr. Levitt, of the Sixth
+District, is actin' as senior officer on the ground this Saturday. Most
+likely Mr. Levitt is commandin'."
+
+"How many corps are there here?" I asked.
+
+"Oh, bits of lots of 'em--thirty or forty, p'r'aps, Sir. But the whistles
+says they've all got to rally on the Board Schools. 'Ark! There's the
+whistle for the Private Schools! They've been called up the ground at the
+double."
+
+"Stop!" cried a bearded man with a watch, and the crews dropped beside the
+breech wiping their brows and panting.
+
+"Hullo! there's some attack on the Schools," said one. "Well, Marden, you
+owe me three half-crowns. I've beaten your record. Pay up."
+
+The boy beside us tapped his foot fretfully as he eyed his companions
+melting among the hillocks, but the gun-team adjusted their bets without
+once looking up.
+
+The ground rose a little to a furze-crowned ridge in the centre so that I
+could not see the full length of it, but I heard a faint bubble of blank
+in the distance.
+
+"The Saturday allowance," murmured Bayley. "War's begun, but it wouldn't
+be etiquette for us to interfere. What are you saying, my child?"
+
+"Nothin', Sir, only--only I don't think the Guard will be able to come
+through on so narrer a front, Sir. They'll all be jammed up be'ind the
+ridge if _we_'ve got there in time. It's awful sticky for guns at the end
+of our ground, Sir."
+
+"I'm inclined to think you're right, Moltke. The Guard is hung up:
+distinctly so. Old Vee will have to cut his way through. What a pernicious
+amount of blank the kids seem to have!"
+
+It was quite a respectable roar of battle that rolled among the hillocks
+for ten minutes, always out of our sight. Then we heard the "Cease Fire"
+over the ridge.
+
+"They've sent for the Umpires," the Board School boy squeaked, dancing on
+one foot. "You've been hung up, Sir. I--I thought the sand-pits 'ud stop
+you."
+
+Said one of the jerseyed hobbledehoys at the gun, slipping on his coat:
+"Well, that's enough for this afternoon. I'm off," and moved to the
+railings without even glancing towards the fray.
+
+"I anticipate the worst," said Bayley with gravity after a few minutes.
+"Hullo! Here comes my disgraced corps!"
+
+The Guard was pouring over the ridge--a disorderly mob--horse, foot, and
+guns mixed, while from every hollow of the ground about rose small boys
+cheering shrilly. The outcry was taken up by the parents at the railings,
+and spread to a complete circle of cheers, handclappings, and waved
+handkerchiefs.
+
+Our Eighth District private cast away restraint and openly capered. "We
+got 'em! We got 'em!" he squealed.
+
+The grey-green flood paused a fraction of a minute and drew itself into
+shape, coming to rest before Bayley. Verschoyle saluted.
+
+"Vee, Vee," said Bayley. "Give me back my legions. Well, I hope you're
+proud of yourself?"
+
+"The little beasts were ready for us. Deuced well posted too," Verschoyle
+replied. "I wish you'd seen that first attack on our flank. Rather
+impressive. Who warned 'em?"
+
+"I don't know. I got my information from a baby in blue plush breeches.
+Did they do well?"
+
+"Very decently indeed. I've complimented their C.O. and buttered the whole
+boiling." He lowered his voice. "As a matter o' fact, I halted five good
+minutes to give 'em time to get into position."
+
+"Well, now we can inspect our Foreign Service corps. We sha'n't need the
+men for an hour, Vee."
+
+"Very good, Sir. Colour-sergeants!" cried Verschoyle, raising his voice,
+and the cry ran from company to company. Whereupon the officers left their
+men, people began to climb over the railings, and the regiment dissolved
+among the spectators and the school corps of the city.
+
+"No sense keeping men standing when you don't need 'em," said Bayley.
+"Besides, the Schools learn more from our chaps in an afternoon than they
+can pick up in a month's drill. Look at those Board-schoolmaster captains
+buttonholing old Purvis on the art of war!"
+
+"Wonder what the evening papers'll say about this," said Pigeon.
+
+"You'll know in half an hour," Burgard laughed. "What possessed you to
+take your ponies across the sand-pits, Pij?"
+
+"Pride. Silly pride," said the Canadian.
+
+We crossed the common to a very regulation paradeground overlooked by a
+statue of our Queen. Here were carriages, many and elegant, filled with
+pretty women, and the railings were lined with frockcoats and top hats.
+"This is distinctly social," I suggested to Kyd.
+
+"Ra-ather. Our F.S. corps is nothing if not correct, but Bayley'll sweat
+'em all the same."
+
+I saw six companies drawn up for inspection behind lines of long sausage-
+shaped kit-bags. A band welcomed us with "A Life on the Ocean Wave."
+
+"What cheek!" muttered Verschoyle. "Give 'em beans, Bayley."
+
+"I intend to," said the Colonel, grimly. "Will each of you fellows take a
+company, please, and inspect 'em faithfully. '_En état de partir_' is
+their little boast, remember. When you've finished you can give 'em a
+little pillow-fighting."
+
+"What does the single cannon on those men's sleeves mean?" I asked.
+
+"That they're big gun-men, who've done time with the Fleet," Bayley
+returned. "Any F.S. corps that has over twenty per cent big-gun men thinks
+itself entitled to play 'A Life on the Ocean Wave'--when it's out of
+hearing of the Navy."
+
+"What beautiful stuff they are! What's their regimental average?"
+
+"It ought to be five eight, height, thirty-eight, chest, and twenty-four
+years, age. What is it?" Bayley asked of a Private.
+
+"Five nine and half, Sir, thirty-nine, twenty-four and a half," was the
+reply, and he added insolently, "_En  tat de partir_." Evidently that F.S.
+corps was on its mettle ready for the worst.
+
+"What about their musketry average?" I went on.
+
+"Not my pidgin," said Bayley. "But they wouldn't be in the corps a day if
+they couldn't shoot; I know _that_ much. Now I'm going to go through 'em
+for socks and slippers."
+
+The kit-inspection exceeded anything I had ever dreamed. I drifted from
+company to company while the Guard officers oppressed them. Twenty per
+cent, at least, of the kits were shovelled out on the grass and gone
+through in detail.
+
+"What have they got jumpers and ducks for?" I asked of Harrison.
+
+"For Fleet work, of course. _En  tat de partir_ with an F. S. corps means
+they are amphibious."
+
+"Who gives 'em their kit--Government?"
+
+"There is a Government allowance, but no C. O. sticks to it. It's the same
+as paint and gold-leaf in the Navy. It comes out of some one's pockets.
+How much does your kit cost you?"--this to the private in front of us.
+
+"About ten or fifteen quid every other year, I suppose," was the answer.
+
+"Very good. Pack your bag--quick."
+
+The man knelt, and with supremely deft hands returned all to the bag,
+lashed and tied it, and fell back.
+
+"Arms," said Harrison. "Strip and show ammunition."
+
+The man divested himself of his rolled greatcoat and haversack with one
+wriggle, as it seemed to me; a twist of a screw removed the side plate of
+the rifle breech (it was not a bolt action). He handed it to Harrison with
+one hand, and with the other loosed his clip-studded belt.
+
+"What baby cartridges!" I exclaimed. "No bigger than bulletted breech-
+caps."
+
+"They're the regulation .256," said Harrison. "No one has complained of
+'em yet. They expand a bit when they arrive.... Empty your bottle, please,
+and show your rations."
+
+The man poured out his water-bottle and showed the two-inch emergency tin.
+
+Harrison passed on to the next, but I was fascinated by the way in which
+the man re-established himself amid his straps and buckles, asking no help
+from either side.
+
+"How long does it take you to prepare for inspection?" I asked him.
+
+"Well, I got ready this afternoon in twelve minutes," he smiled. "I didn't
+see the storm-cone till half-past three. I was at the Club."
+
+"Weren't a good many of you out of town?"
+
+"Not _this_ Saturday. We knew what was coming. You see, if we pull through
+the inspection we may move up one place on the roster for foreign
+service.... You'd better stand back. We're going to pillow-fight."
+
+The companies stooped to the stuffed kit-bags, doubled with them
+variously, piled them in squares and mounds, passed them from shoulder to
+shoulder like buckets at a fire, and repeated the evolution.
+
+"What's the idea?" I asked of Verschoyle, who, arms folded behind him, was
+controlling the display. Many women had descended from the carriages, and
+were pressing in about us admiringly.
+
+"For one thing, it's a fair test of wind and muscle, and for another it
+saves time at the docks. We'll suppose this first company to be drawn up
+on the dock-head and those five others still in the troop-train. How would
+you get their kit into the ship?"
+
+"Fall 'em all in on the platform, march'em to the gangways," I answered,
+"and trust to Heaven and a fatigue party to gather the baggage and drunks
+in later."
+
+"Ye-es, and have half of it sent by the wrong trooper. I know _that_
+game," Verschoyle drawled. "We don't play it any more. Look!"
+
+He raised his voice, and five companies, glistening a little and breathing
+hard, formed at right angles to the sixth, each man embracing his sixty-
+pound bag.
+
+"Pack away," cried Verschoyle, and the great bean-bag game (I can compare
+it to nothing else) began. In five minutes every bag was passed along
+either arm of the T and forward down the sixth company, who passed,
+stacked, and piled them in a great heap. These were followed by the
+rifles, belts, greatcoats, and knapsacks, so that in another five minutes
+the regiment stood, as it were, stripped clean.
+
+"Of course on a trooper there'd be a company below stacking the kit away,"
+said Verschoyle, "but that wasn't so bad."
+
+"Bad!" I cried. "It was miraculous!"
+
+"Circus-work--all circus-work!" said Pigeon. "It won't prevent 'em bein'
+sick as dogs when the ship rolls." The crowd round us applauded, while the
+men looked meekly down their self-conscious noses.
+
+A little grey-whiskered man trotted up to the Boy.
+
+"Have we made good, Bayley?" he said. "Are we _en  tat de partir_?"
+
+"That's what I shall report," said Bayley, smiling.
+
+"I thought my bit o' French 'ud draw you," said the little man, rubbing
+his hands.
+
+"Who is he?" I whispered to Pigeon.
+
+"Ramsay--their C.O. An old Guard captain. A keen little devil. They say he
+spends six hundred a year on the show. He used to be in the Lincolns till
+he came into his property."
+
+"Take 'em home an' make 'em drunk," I heard Bayley say. "I suppose you'll
+have a dinner to celebrate. But you may as well tell the officers of E
+company that I don't think much of them. I sha'n't report it, but their
+men were all over the shop."
+
+"Well, they're young, you see," Colonel Ramsay began.
+
+"You're quite right. Send 'em to me and I'll talk to 'em. Youth is the
+time to learn."
+
+"Six hundred a year," I repeated to Pigeon. "That must be an awful tax on
+a man. Worse than in the old volunteering days."
+
+"That's where you make your mistake," said Verschoyle. "In the old days a
+man had to spend his money to coax his men to drill because they weren't
+the genuine article. You know what I mean. They made a favour of putting
+in drills, didn't they? And they were, most of 'em, the children we have
+to take over at Second Camp, weren't they? Well, now that a C. O. is sure
+of his _men_, now that he hasn't to waste himself in conciliating an'
+bribin', an' beerin' _kids_, he doesn't care what he spends on his corps,
+because every pound tells. Do you understand?"
+
+"I see what you mean, Vee. Having the male material guaranteed----"
+
+"And trained material at that," Pigeon put in. "Eight years in the
+schools, remember, as well as----"
+
+"Precisely. A man rejoices in working them up. That's as it should be," I
+said.
+
+"Bayly's saying the very same to those F. S. pups," said Verschoyle.
+
+The Boy was behind us, between two young F. S. officers, a hand on the
+shoulder of each.
+
+"Yes, that's all doocid interesting," he growled paternally. "But you
+forget, my sons, now that your men are bound to serve, you're trebly bound
+to put a polish on 'em. You've let your company simply go to seed. Don't
+try and explain. I've told all those lies myself in my time. It's only
+idleness. _I_ know. Come and lunch with me to-morrow and I'll give you a
+wrinkle or two in barracks." He turned to me.
+
+"Suppose we pick up Vee's defeated legion and go home. You'll dine with us
+to-night. Good-bye, Ramsay. Yes, you're _en état de partir_, right enough.
+You'd better get Lady Gertrude to talk to the Armity if you want the corps
+sent foreign. I'm no politician."
+
+We strolled away from the great white statue of the Widow, with sceptre,
+orb, and crown, that looked toward the city, and regained the common,
+where the Guard battalion walked with the female of its species and the
+children of all its relatives. At sight of the officers the uniforms began
+to detach themselves and gather in companies. A Board School corps was
+moving off the ground, headed by its drums and fifes, which it assisted
+with song. As we drew nearer we caught the words, for they were launched
+with intention:--
+
+  'Oo is it mashes the country nurse?
+    The Guardsman!
+  'Oo is it takes the lydy's purse?
+    The Guardsman!
+  Calls for a drink, and a mild cigar,
+  Batters a sovereign down on the bar,
+  Collars the change and says "Ta-ta!"
+    The Guardsman!
+
+"Why, that's one of old Jemmy Fawne's songs. I haven't heard it in ages,"
+I began.
+
+"Little devils!" said Pigeon.
+"Speshul! Extra speshul! Sports Edition!" a newsboy cried. "'Ere y'are,
+Captain. Defeat o' the Guard!"
+
+"I'll buy a copy," said the Boy, as Pigeon blushed wrathfully. "I must, to
+see how the Dove lost his mounted company." He unfolded the flapping sheet
+and we crowded round it.
+
+"'_Complete Rout of the Guard,_'" he read. "'_Too Narrow a Front._' That's
+one for you, Vee! '_Attack Anticipated by Mr. Levitt, B. A._' Aha! '_The
+Schools Stand Fast._'"
+
+"Here's another version," said Kyd, waving a tinted sheet. "'_To your
+tents, O Israel! The Hebrew Schools stop the Mounted Troops._' Pij, were
+you scuppered by Jewboys?"
+
+"'_Umpires Decide all Four Guns Lost,_'" Bayley went on. "By Jove,
+there'll have to be an inquiry into this regrettable incident, Vee!"
+
+"I'll never try to amuse the kids again," said the baited Verschoyle.
+"Children and newspapers are low things.... And I was hit on the nose by a
+wad, too! They oughtn't to be allowed blank ammunition!"
+
+So we leaned against the railings in the warm twilight haze while the
+battalion, silently as a shadow, formed up behind us ready to be taken
+over. The heat, the hum of the great city, as it might have been the hum
+of a camped army, the creaking of the belts, and the well-known faces bent
+above them, brought back to me the memory of another evening, years ago,
+when Verschoyle and I waited for news of guns missing in no sham fight.
+
+"A regular Sanna's Post, isn't it?" I said at last. "D'you remember, Vee--
+by the market-square--that night when the wagons went out?"
+
+Then it came upon me, with no horror, but a certain mild wonder, that we
+had waited, Vee and I, that night for the body of Boy Bayley; and that Vee
+himself had died of typhoid in the spring of 1902. The rustling of the
+papers continued, but Bayley, shifting slightly, revealed to me the three-
+day old wound on his left side that had soaked the ground about him. I saw
+Pigeon fling up a helpless arm as to guard himself against a spatter of
+shrapnel, and Luttrell with a foolish tight-lipped smile lurched over all
+in one jointless piece. Only old Vee's honest face held steady for awhile
+against the darkness that had swallowed up the battalion behind us. Then
+his jaw dropped and the face stiffened, so that a fly made bold to explore
+the puffed and scornful nostril.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I waked brushing a fly from my nose, and saw the Club waiter set out the
+evening papers on the table.
+
+
+
+
+"THEY"
+
+
+THE RETURN OF THE CHILDREN
+
+  Neither the harps nor the crowns amused, nor the cherubs' dove-winged
+     races--
+  Holding hands forlornly the Children wandered beneath the Dome;
+  Plucking the radiant robes of the passers by, and with pitiful faces
+  Begging what Princes and Powers refused:--"Ah, please will you let us
+     go home?"
+
+  Over the jewelled floor, nigh weeping, ran to them Mary the Mother,
+  Kneeled and caressed and made promise with kisses, and drew them along
+     to the gateway--
+  Yea, the all-iron unbribable Door which Peter must guard and none other.
+  Straightway She took the Keys from his keeping, and opened and freed
+     them straightway.
+
+  Then to Her Son, Who had seen and smiled, She said: "On the night that
+     I bore Thee
+  What didst Thou care for a love beyond mine or a heaven that was not my
+     arm?
+  Didst Thou push from the nipple O Child, to hear the angels adore Thee?
+  When we two lay in the breath of the kine?" And He said:--"Thou hast
+     done no harm."
+
+  So through the Void the Children ran homeward merrily hand in hand,
+  Looking neither to left nor right where the breathless Heavens stood
+     still;
+  And the Guards of the Void resheathed their swords, for they heard the
+     Command.
+  "Shall I that have suffered the children to come to me hold them against
+     their will?"
+
+
+"THEY"
+One view called me to another; one hill top to its fellow, half across the
+county, and since I could answer at no more trouble than the snapping
+forward of a lever, I let the country flow under my wheels. The orchid-
+studded flats of the East gave way to the thyme, ilex, and grey grass of
+the Downs; these again to the rich cornland and fig-trees of the lower
+coast, where you carry the beat of the tide on your left hand for fifteen
+level miles; and when at last I turned inland through a huddle of rounded
+hills and woods I had run myself clean out of my known marks. Beyond that
+precise hamlet which stands godmother to the capital of the United States,
+I found hidden villages where bees, the only things awake, boomed in
+eighty-foot lindens that overhung grey Norman churches; miraculous brooks
+diving under stone bridges built for heavier traffic than would ever vex
+them again; tithe-barns larger than their churches, and an old smithy that
+cried out aloud how it had once been a hall of the Knights of the Temple.
+Gipsies I found on a common where the gorse, bracken, and heath fought it
+out together up a mile of Roman road; and a little farther on I disturbed
+a red fox rolling dog-fashion in the naked sunlight.
+
+As the wooded hills closed about me I stood up in the car to take the
+bearings of that great Down whose ringed head is a landmark for fifty
+miles across the low countries. I judged that the lie of the country would
+bring me across some westward running road that went to his feet, but I
+did not allow for the confusing veils of the woods. A quick turn plunged
+me first into a green cutting brimful of liquid sunshine, next into a
+gloomy tunnel where last year's dead leaves whispered and scuffled about
+my tyres. The strong hazel stuff meeting overhead had not been cut for a
+couple of generations at least, nor had any axe helped the moss-cankered
+oak and beech to spring above them. Here the road changed frankly into a
+carpetted ride on whose brown velvet spent primrose-clumps showed like
+jade, and a few sickly, white-stalked bluebells nodded together. As the
+slope favoured I shut off the power and slid over the whirled leaves,
+expecting every moment to meet a keeper; but I only heard a jay, far off,
+arguing against the silence under the twilight of the trees.
+
+Still the track descended. I was on the point of reversing and working my
+way back on the second speed ere I ended in some swamp, when I saw
+sunshine through the tangle ahead and lifted the brake.
+
+It was down again at once. As the light beat across my face my fore-wheels
+took the turf of a great still lawn from which sprang horsemen ten feet
+high with levelled lances, monstrous peacocks, and sleek round-headed
+maids of honour--blue, black, and glistening--all of clipped yew. Across
+the lawn--the marshalled woods besieged it on three sides--stood an
+ancient house of lichened and weather-worn stone, with mullioned windows
+and roofs of rose-red tile. It was flanked by semi-circular walls, also
+rose-red, that closed the lawn on the fourth side, and at their feet a box
+hedge grew man-high. There were doves on the roof about the slim brick
+chimneys, and I caught a glimpse of an octagonal dove-house behind the
+screening wall.
+
+Here, then, I stayed; a horseman's green spear laid at my breast; held by
+the exceeding beauty of that jewel in that setting.
+
+"If I am not packed off for a trespasser, or if this knight does not ride
+a wallop at me," thought I, "Shakespeare and Queen Elizabeth at least must
+come out of that half-open garden door and ask me to tea."
+
+A child appeared at an upper window, and I thought the little thing waved
+a friendly hand. But it was to call a companion, for presently another
+bright head showed. Then I heard a laugh among the yew-peacocks, and
+turning to make sure (till then I had been watching the house only) I saw
+the silver of a fountain behind a hedge thrown up against the sun. The
+doves on the roof cooed to the cooing water; but between the two notes I
+caught the utterly happy chuckle of a child absorbed in some light
+mischief.
+
+The garden door--heavy oak sunk deep in the thickness of the wall--opened
+further: a woman in a big garden hat set her foot slowly on the time-
+hollowed stone step and as slowly walked across the turf. I was forming
+some apology when she lifted up her head and I saw that she was blind.
+
+"I heard you," she said. "Isn't that a motor car?"
+
+"I'm afraid I've made a mistake in my road. I should have turned off up
+above--I never dreamed"--I began.
+
+"But I'm very glad. Fancy a motor car coming into the garden! It will be
+such a treat----" She turned and made as though looking about her. "You--
+you haven't seen any one have you--perhaps?"
+
+"No one to speak to, but the children seemed interested at a distance."
+
+"Which?"
+
+"I saw a couple up at the window just now, and I think I heard a little
+chap in the grounds."
+
+"Oh, lucky you!" she cried, and her face brightened. "I hear them, of
+course, but that's all. You've seen them and heard them?"
+
+"Yes," I answered. "And if I know anything of children one of them's
+having a beautiful time by the fountain yonder. Escaped, I should
+imagine."
+
+"You're fond of children?"
+
+I gave her one or two reasons why I did not altogether hate them.
+
+"Of course, of course," she said. "Then you understand. Then you won't
+think it foolish if I ask you to take your car through the gardens, once
+or twice--quite slowly. I'm sure they'd like to see it. They see so
+little, poor things. One tries to make their life pleasant, but----" she
+threw out her hands towards the woods. "We're so out of the world here."
+
+"That will be splendid," I said. "But I can't cut up your grass."
+
+She faced to the right. "Wait a minute," she said. "We're at the South
+gate, aren't we? Behind those peacocks there's a flagged path. We call it
+the Peacock's Walk. You can't see it from here, they tell me, but if you
+squeeze along by the edge of the wood you can turn at the first peacock
+and get on to the flags."
+
+It was sacrilege to wake that dreaming house-front with the clatter of
+machinery, but I swung the car to clear the turf, brushed along the edge
+of the wood and turned in on the broad stone path where the fountain-basin
+lay like one star-sapphire.
+
+"May I come too?" she cried. "No, please don't help me. They'll like it
+better if they see me."
+
+She felt her way lightly to the front of the car, and with one foot on the
+step she called: "Children, oh, children! Look and see what's going to
+happen!"
+
+The voice would have drawn lost souls from the Pit, for the yearning that
+underlay its sweetness, and I was not surprised to hear an answering shout
+behind the yews. It must have been the child by the fountain, but he fled
+at our approach, leaving a little toy boat in the water. I saw the glint
+of his blue blouse among the still horsemen.
+
+Very disposedly we paraded the length of the walk and at her request
+backed again. This time the child had got the better of his panic, but
+stood far off and doubting.
+
+"The little fellow's watching us," I said. "I wonder if he'd like a ride."
+
+"They're very shy still. Very shy. But, oh, lucky you to be able to see
+them! Let's listen."
+
+I stopped the machine at once, and the humid stillness, heavy with the
+scent of box, cloaked us deep. Shears I could hear where some gardener was
+clipping; a mumble of bees and broken voices that might have been the
+doves.
+
+"Oh, unkind!" she said weariedly.
+
+"Perhaps they're only shy of the motor. The little maid at the window
+looks tremendously interested."
+
+"Yes?" She raised her head. "It was wrong of me to say that. They are
+really fond of me. It's the only thing that makes life worth living--when
+they're fond of you, isn't it? I daren't think what the place would be
+without them. By the way, is it beautiful?"
+
+"I think it is the most beautiful place I have ever seen."
+
+"So they all tell me. I can feel it, of course, but that isn't quite the
+same thing."
+
+"Then have you never---?" I began, but stopped abashed.
+
+"Not since I can remember. It happened when I was only a few months old,
+they tell me. And yet I must remember something, else how could I dream
+about colours. I see light in my dreams, and colours, but I never see
+_them_. I only hear them just as I do when I'm awake."
+
+"It's difficult to see faces in dreams. Some people can, but most of us
+haven't the gift," I went on, looking up at the window where the child
+stood all but hidden.
+
+"I've heard that too," she said. "And they tell me that one never sees a
+dead person's face in a dream. Is that true?"
+
+"I believe it is--now I come to think of it."
+
+"But how is it with yourself--yourself?" The blind eyes turned towards me.
+
+"I have never seen the faces of my dead in any dream," I answered.
+
+"Then it must be as bad as being blind."
+
+The sun had dipped behind the woods and the long shades were possessing
+the insolent horsemen one by one. I saw the light die from off the top of
+a glossy-leaved lance and all the brave hard green turn to soft black. The
+house, accepting another day at end, as it had accepted an hundred
+thousand gone, seemed to settle deeper into its rest among the shadows.
+
+"Have you ever wanted to?" she said after the silence.
+
+"Very much sometimes," I replied. The child had left the window as the
+shadows closed upon it.
+
+"Ah! So've I, but I don't suppose it's allowed. ... Where d'you live?"
+
+"Quite the other side of the county--sixty miles and more, and I must be
+going back. I've come without my big lamp."
+
+"But it's not dark yet. I can feel it."
+
+"I'm afraid it will be by the time I get home. Could you lend me someone
+to set me on my road at first? I've utterly lost myself."
+
+"I'll send Madden with you to the cross-roads. We are so out of the world,
+I don't wonder you were lost! I'll guide you round to the front of the
+house; but you will go slowly, won't you, till you're out of the grounds?
+It isn't foolish, do you think?"
+
+"I promise you I'll go like this," I said, and let the car start herself
+down the flagged path.
+
+We skirted the left wing of the house, whose elaborately cast lead
+guttering alone was worth a day's journey; passed under a great rose-grown
+gate in the red wall, and so round to the high front of the house which in
+beauty and stateliness as much excelled the back as that all others I had
+seen.
+
+"Is it so very beautiful?" she said wistfully when she heard my raptures.
+"And you like the lead-figures too? There's the old azalea garden behind.
+They say that this place must have been made for children. Will you help
+me out, please? I should like to come with you as far as the cross-roads,
+but I mustn't leave them. Is that you, Madden? I want you to show this
+gentleman the way to the cross-roads. He has lost his way but--he has seen
+them."
+
+A butler appeared noiselessly at the miracle of old oak that must be
+called the front door, and slipped aside to put on his hat. She stood
+looking at me with open blue eyes in which no sight lay, and I saw for the
+first time that she was beautiful.
+
+"Remember," she said quietly, "if you are fond of them you will come
+again," and disappeared within the house.
+
+The butler in the car said nothing till we were nearly at the lodge gates,
+where catching a glimpse of a blue blouse in a shrubbery I swerved amply
+lest the devil that leads little boys to play should drag me into child-
+murder.
+
+"Excuse me," he asked of a sudden, "but why did you do that, Sir?"
+
+"The child yonder."
+
+"Our young gentleman in blue?"
+
+"Of course."
+
+"He runs about a good deal. Did you see him by the fountain, Sir?"
+
+"Oh, yes, several times. Do we turn here?"
+
+"Yes, Sir. And did you 'appen to see them upstairs too?"
+
+"At the upper window? Yes."
+
+"Was that before the mistress come out to speak to you, Sir?"
+
+"A little before that. Why d'you want to know?"
+
+He paused a little. "Only to make sure that--that they had seen the car,
+Sir, because with children running about, though I'm sure you're driving
+particularly careful, there might be an accident. That was all, Sir. Here
+are the cross-roads. You can't miss your way from now on. Thank you, Sir,
+but that isn't _our_ custom, not with----"
+
+"I beg your pardon," I said, and thrust away the British silver.
+
+"Oh, it's quite right with the rest of 'em as a rule. Goodbye, Sir."
+
+He retired into the armour-plated conning tower of his caste and walked
+away. Evidently a butler solicitous for the honour of his house, and
+interested, probably through a maid, in the nursery.
+
+Once beyond the signposts at the cross-roads I looked back, but the
+crumpled hills interlaced so jealously that I could not see where the
+house had lain. When I asked its name at a cottage along the road, the fat
+woman who sold sweetmeats there gave me to understand that people with
+motor cars had small right to live--much less to "go about talking like
+carriage folk." They were not a pleasant-mannered community.
+
+When I retraced my route on the map that evening I was little wiser.
+Hawkin's Old Farm appeared to be the survey title of the place, and the
+old County Gazetteer, generally so ample, did not allude to it. The big
+house of those parts was Hodnington Hall, Georgian with early Victorian
+embellishments, as an atrocious steel engraving attested. I carried my
+difficulty to a neighbour--a deep-rooted tree of that soil--and he gave me
+a name of a family which conveyed no meaning.
+
+A month or so later--I went again, or it may have been that my car took
+the road of her own volition. She over-ran the fruitless Downs, threaded
+every turn of the maze of lanes below the hills, drew through the high-
+walled woods, impenetrable in their full leaf, came out at the cross roads
+where the butler had left me, and a little further on developed an
+internal trouble which forced me to turn her in on a grass way-waste that
+cut into a summer-silent hazel wood. So far as I could make sure by the
+sun and a six-inch Ordnance map, this should be the road flank of that
+wood which I had first explored from the heights above. I made a mighty
+serious business of my repairs and a glittering shop of my repair kit,
+spanners, pump, and the like, which I spread out orderly upon a rug. It
+was a trap to catch all childhood, for on such a day, I argued, the
+children would not be far off. When I paused in my work I listened, but
+the wood was so full of the noises of summer (though the birds had mated)
+that I could not at first distinguish these from the tread of small
+cautious feet stealing across the dead leaves. I rang my bell in an
+alluring manner, but the feet fled, and I repented, for to a child a
+sudden noise is very real terror. I must have been at work half an hour
+when I heard in the wood the voice of the blind woman crying: "Children,
+oh children, where are you?" and the stillness made slow to close on the
+perfection of that cry. She came towards me, half feeling her way between
+the tree boles, and though a child it seemed clung to her skirt, it
+swerved into the leafage like a rabbit as she drew nearer.
+
+"Is that you?" she said, "from the other side of the county?"
+
+"Yes, it's me from the other side of the county."
+
+"Then why didn't you come through the upper woods? They were there just
+now."
+
+"They were here a few minutes ago. I expect they knew my car had broken
+down, and came to see the fun."
+
+"Nothing serious, I hope? How do cars break down?"
+
+"In fifty different ways. Only mine has chosen the fifty first."
+
+She laughed merrily at the tiny joke, cooed with delicious laughter, and
+pushed her hat back.
+
+"Let me hear," she said.
+
+"Wait a moment," I cried, "and I'll get you a cushion."
+
+She set her foot on the rug all covered with spare parts, and stooped
+above it eagerly. "What delightful things!" The hands through which she
+saw glanced in the chequered sunlight. "A box here--another box! Why
+you've arranged them like playing shop!"
+
+"I confess now that I put it out to attract them. I don't need half those
+things really."
+
+"How nice of you! I heard your bell in the upper wood. You say they were
+here before that?"
+
+"I'm sure of it. Why are they so shy? That little fellow in blue who was
+with you just now ought to have got over his fright. He's been watching me
+like a Red Indian."
+
+"It must have been your bell," she said. "I heard one of them go past me
+in trouble when I was coming down. They're shy--so shy even with me." She
+turned her face over her shoulder and cried again: "Children! Oh,
+children! Look and see!"
+
+"They must have gone off together on their own affairs,"
+
+I suggested, for there was a murmur behind us of lowered voices broken by
+the sudden squeaking giggles of childhood. I returned to my tinkerings and
+she leaned forward, her chin on her hand, listening interestedly.
+
+"How many are they?" I said at last. The work was finished, but I saw no
+reason to go.
+
+Her forehead puckered a little in thought. "I don't quite know," she said
+simply. "Sometimes more--sometimes less. They come and stay with me
+because I love them, you see."
+
+"That must be very jolly," I said, replacing a drawer, and as I spoke I
+heard the inanity of my answer.
+
+"You--you aren't laughing at me," she cried. "I--I haven't any of my own.
+I never married. People laugh at me sometimes about them because--
+because------"
+
+"Because they're savages," I returned. "It's nothing to fret for. That
+sort laugh at everything that isn't in their own fat lives."
+
+"I don't know. How should I? I only don't like being laughed at about
+_them_. It hurts; and when one can't see.... I don't want to seem silly,"
+her chin quivered like a child's as she spoke, "but we blindies have only
+one skin, I think. Everything outside hits straight at our souls. It's
+different with you. You've such good defences in your eyes--looking out--
+before anyone can really pain you in your soul. People forget that with
+us."
+
+I was silent reviewing that inexhaustible matter--the more than inherited
+(since it is also carefully taught) brutality of the Christian peoples,
+beside which the mere heathendom of the West Coast nigger is clean and
+restrained. It led me a long distance into myself.
+
+"Don't do that!" she said of a sudden, putting her hands before her eyes.
+
+"What?"
+
+She made a gesture with her hand.
+
+"That! It's--it's all purple and black. Don't! That colour hurts."
+
+"But, how in the world do you know about colours?" I exclaimed, for here
+was a revelation indeed.
+
+"Colours as colours?" she asked.
+
+"No. _Those_ Colours which you saw just now."
+
+"You know as well as I do," she laughed, "else you wouldn't have asked
+that question. They aren't in the world at all. They're in _you_--when you
+went so angry."
+
+"D'you mean a dull purplish patch, like port-wine mixed with ink?" I said.
+
+"I've never seen ink or port-wine, but the colours aren't mixed. They are
+separate--all separate."
+
+"Do you mean black streaks and jags across the purple?"
+
+She nodded. "Yes--if they are like this," and zigzagged her finger again,
+"but it's more red than purple--that bad colour."
+
+"And what are the colours at the top of the--whatever you see?"
+
+Slowly she leaned forward and traced on the rug the figure of the Egg
+itself.
+
+"I see them so," she said, pointing with a grass stem, "white, green,
+yellow, red, purple, and when people are angry or bad, black across the
+red--as you were just now."
+
+"Who told you anything about it--in the beginning?" I demanded.
+
+"About the colours? No one. I used to ask what colours were when I was
+little--in table-covers and curtains and carpets, you see--because some
+colours hurt me and some made me happy. People told me; and when I got
+older that was how I saw people." Again she traced the outline of the Egg
+which it is given to very few of us to see.
+
+"All by yourself?" I repeated.
+
+"All by myself. There wasn't anyone else. I only found out afterwards that
+other people did not see the Colours."
+
+She leaned against the tree-hole plaiting and unplaiting chance-plucked
+grass stems. The children in the wood had drawn nearer. I could see them
+with the tail of my eye frolicking like squirrels.
+
+"Now I am sure you will never laugh at me," she went on after a long
+silence. "Nor at _them_."
+
+"Goodness! No!" I cried, jolted out of my train of thought. "A man who
+laughs at a child--unless the child is laughing too--is a heathen!"
+
+"I didn't mean that of course. You'd never laugh _at_ children, but I
+thought--I used to think--that perhaps you might laugh about _them_. So
+now I beg your pardon.... What are you going to laugh at?"
+
+I had made no sound, but she knew.
+
+"At the notion of your begging my pardon. If you had done your duty as a
+pillar of the state and a landed proprietress you ought to have summoned
+me for trespass when I barged through your woods the other day. It was
+disgraceful of me--inexcusable."
+
+She looked at me, her head against the tree trunk--long and steadfastly--
+this woman who could see the naked soul.
+
+"How curious," she half whispered. "How very curious."
+
+"Why, what have I done?"
+
+"You don't understand ... and yet you understood about the Colours. Don't
+you understand?"
+
+She spoke with a passion that nothing had justified, and I faced her
+bewilderedly as she rose. The children had gathered themselves in a
+roundel behind a bramble bush. One sleek head bent over something smaller,
+and the set of the little shoulders told me that fingers were on lips.
+They, too, had some child's tremendous secret. I alone was hopelessly
+astray there in the broad sunlight.
+
+"No," I said, and shook my head as though the dead eyes could note.
+"Whatever it is, I don't understand yet. Perhaps I shall later--if you'll
+let me come again."
+
+"You will come again," she answered. "You will surely come again and walk
+in the wood."
+
+"Perhaps the children will know me well enough by that time to let me play
+with them--as a favour. You know what children are like."
+
+"It isn't a matter of favour but of right," she replied, and while I
+wondered what she meant, a dishevelled woman plunged round the bend of the
+road, loose-haired, purple, almost lowing with agony as she ran. It was my
+rude, fat friend of the sweetmeat shop. The blind woman heard and stepped
+forward. "What is it, Mrs. Madehurst?" she asked.
+
+The woman flung her apron over her head and literally grovelled in the
+dust, crying that her grandchild was sick to death, that the local doctor
+was away fishing, that Jenny the mother was at her wits end, and so forth,
+with repetitions and bellowings.
+
+"Where's the next nearest doctor?" I asked between paroxysms.
+
+"Madden will tell you. Go round to the house and take him with you. I'll
+attend to this. Be quick!" She half-supported the fat woman into the
+shade. In two minutes I was blowing all the horns of Jericho under the
+front of the House Beautiful, and Madden, in the pantry, rose to the
+crisis like a butler and a man.
+
+A quarter of an hour at illegal speeds caught us a doctor five miles away.
+Within the half-hour we had decanted him, much interested in motors, at
+the door of the sweetmeat shop, and drew up the road to await the verdict.
+
+"Useful things cars," said Madden, all man and no butler. "If I'd had one
+when mine took sick she wouldn't have died."
+
+"How was it?" I asked.
+
+"Croup. Mrs. Madden was away. No one knew what to do. I drove eight miles
+in a tax cart for the doctor. She was choked when we came back. This car
+'d ha' saved her. She'd have been close on ten now."
+
+"I'm sorry," I said. "I thought you were rather fond of children from what
+you told me going to the cross-roads the other day."
+
+"Have you seen 'em again, Sir--this mornin'?"
+
+"Yes, but they're well broke to cars. I couldn't get any of them within
+twenty yards of it."
+
+He looked at me carefully as a scout considers a stranger--not as a menial
+should lift his eyes to his divinely appointed superior.
+
+"I wonder why," he said just above the breath that he drew.
+
+We waited on. A light wind from the sea wandered up and down the long
+lines of the woods, and the wayside grasses, whitened already with summer
+dust, rose and bowed in sallow waves.
+
+A woman, wiping the suds off her arms, came out of the cottage next the
+sweetmeat shop.
+
+"I've be'n listenin' in de back-yard," she said cheerily. "He says
+Arthur's unaccountable bad. Did ye hear him shruck just now? Unaccountable
+bad. I reckon t'will come Jenny's turn to walk in de wood nex' week along,
+Mr. Madden."
+
+"Excuse me, Sir, but your lap-robe is slipping," said Madden
+deferentially. The woman started, dropped a curtsey, and hurried away.
+
+"What does she mean by 'walking in the wood'?" I asked.
+
+"It must be some saying they use hereabouts. I'm from Norfolk myself,"
+said Madden. "They're an independent lot in this county. She took you for
+a chauffeur, Sir."
+
+I saw the Doctor come out of the cottage followed by a draggle-tailed
+wench who clung to his arm as though he could make treaty for her with
+Death. "Dat sort," she wailed--"dey're just as much to us dat has 'em as
+if dey was lawful born. Just as much--just as much! An' God he'd be just
+as pleased if you saved 'un, Doctor. Don't take it from me. Miss Florence
+will tell ye de very same. Don't leave 'im, Doctor!"
+
+"I know. I know," said the man, "but he'll be quiet for a while now.
+We'll get the nurse and the medicine as fast as we can." He signalled me
+to come forward with the car, and I strove not to be privy to what
+followed; but I saw the girl's face, blotched and frozen with grief, and I
+felt the hand without a ring clutching at my knees when we moved away.
+
+The Doctor was a man of some humour, for I remember he claimed my car
+under the Oath of Æsculapius, and used it and me without mercy. First we
+convoyed Mrs. Madehurst and the blind woman to wait by the sick bed till
+the nurse should come. Next we invaded a neat county town for
+prescriptions (the Doctor said the trouble was cerebro-spinal meningitis),
+and when the County Institute, banked and flanked with scared market
+cattle, reported itself out of nurses for the moment we literally flung
+ourselves loose upon the county. We conferred with the owners of great
+houses--magnates at the ends of overarching avenues whose big-boned
+womenfolk strode away from their tea-tables to listen to the imperious
+Doctor. At last a white-haired lady sitting under a cedar of Lebanon and
+surrounded by a court of magnificent Borzois--all hostile to motors--gave
+the Doctor, who received them as from a princess, written orders which we
+bore many miles at top speed, through a park, to a French nunnery, where
+we took over in exchange a pallid-faced and trembling Sister. She knelt at
+the bottom of the tonneau telling her beads without pause till, by short
+cuts of the Doctor's invention, we had her to the sweetmeat shop once
+more. It was a long afternoon crowded with mad episodes that rose and
+dissolved like the dust of our wheels; cross-sections of remote and
+incomprehensible lives through which we raced at right angles; and I went
+home in the dusk, wearied out, to dream of the clashing horns of cattle;
+round-eyed nuns walking in a garden of graves; pleasant tea-parties
+beneath shaded trees; the carbolic-scented, grey-painted corridors of the
+County Institute; the steps of shy children in the wood, and the hands
+that clung to my knees as the motor began to move.
+
+*       *       *       *       *
+
+I had intended to return in a day or two, but it pleased Fate to hold me
+from that side of the county, on many pretexts, till the elder and the
+wild rose had fruited. There came at last a brilliant day, swept clear
+from the south-west, that brought the hills within hand's reach--a day of
+unstable airs and high filmy clouds. Through no merit of my own I was
+free, and set the car for the third time on that known road. As I reached
+the crest of the Downs I felt the soft air change, saw it glaze under the
+sun; and, looking down at the sea, in that instant beheld the blue of the
+Channel turn through polished silver and dulled steel to dingy pewter. A
+laden collier hugging the coast steered outward for deeper water and,
+across copper-coloured haze, I saw sails rise one by one on the anchored
+fishing-fleet. In a deep dene behind me an eddy of sudden wind drummed
+through sheltered oaks, and spun aloft the first day sample of autumn
+leaves. When I reached the beach road the sea-fog fumed over the
+brickfields, and the tide was telling all the groins of the gale beyond
+Ushant. In less than an hour summer England vanished in chill grey. We
+were again the shut island of the North, all the ships of the world
+bellowing at our perilous gates; and between their outcries ran the piping
+of bewildered gulls. My cap dripped moisture, the folds of the rug held it
+in pools or sluiced it away in runnels, and the salt-rime stuck to my
+lips.
+
+Inland the smell of autumn loaded the thickened fog among the trees, and
+the drip became a continuous shower. Yet the late flowers--mallow of the
+wayside, scabious of the field, and dahlia of the garden--showed gay in
+the mist, and beyond the sea's breath there was little sign of decay in
+the leaf. Yet in the villages the house doors were all open, and bare-
+legged, bare-headed children sat at ease on the damp doorsteps to shout
+"pip-pip" at the stranger.
+
+I made bold to call at the sweetmeat shop, where Mrs. Madehurst met me
+with a fat woman's hospitable tears. Jenny's child, she said, had died two
+days after the nun had come. It was, she felt, best out of the way, even
+though insurance offices, for reasons which she did not pretend to follow,
+would not willingly insure such stray lives. "Not but what Jenny didn't
+tend to Arthur as though he'd come all proper at de end of de first year--
+like Jenny herself." Thanks to Miss Florence, the child had been buried
+with a pomp which, in Mrs. Madehurst's opinion, more than covered the
+small irregularity of its birth. She described the coffin, within and
+without, the glass hearse, and the evergreen lining of the grave.
+
+"But how's the mother?" I asked.
+
+"Jenny? Oh, she'll get over it. I've felt dat way with one or two o' my
+own. She'll get over. She's walkin' in de wood now."
+
+"In this weather?"
+
+Mrs. Madehurst looked at me with narrowed eyes across the counter.
+
+"I dunno but it opens de 'eart like. Yes, it opens de 'eart. Dat's where
+losin' and bearin' comes so alike in de long run, we do say."
+
+Now the wisdom of the old wives is greater than that of all the Fathers,
+and this last oracle sent me thinking so extendedly as I went up the road,
+that I nearly ran over a woman and a child at the wooded corner by the
+lodge gates of the House Beautiful.
+
+"Awful weather!" I cried, as I slowed dead for the turn.
+
+"Not so bad," she answered placidly out of the fog. "Mine's used to 'un.
+You'll find yours indoors, I reckon."
+
+Indoors, Madden received me with professional courtesy, and kind inquiries
+for the health of the motor, which he would put under cover.
+
+I waited in a still, nut-brown hall, pleasant with late flowers and warmed
+with a delicious wood fire--a place of good influence and great peace.
+(Men and women may sometimes, after great effort, achieve a creditable
+lie; but the house, which is their temple, cannot say anything save the
+truth of those who have lived in it.) A child's cart and a doll lay on the
+black-and-white floor, where a rug had been kicked back. I felt that the
+children had only just hurried away--to hide themselves, most like--in the
+many turns of the great adzed staircase that climbed statelily out of the
+hall, or to crouch at gaze behind the lions and roses of the carven
+gallery above. Then I heard her voice above me, singing as the blind sing
+--from the soul:--
+
+
+  In the pleasant orchard-closes.
+
+And all my early summer came back at the call.
+
+  In the pleasant orchard-closes,
+  God bless all our gains say we--
+  But may God bless all our losses,
+  Better suits with our degree,
+
+She dropped the marring fifth line, and repeated--
+
+  Better suits with our degree!
+
+I saw her lean over the gallery, her linked hands white as pearl against
+the oak.
+
+"Is that you--from the other side of the county?" she called.
+
+"Yes, me--from the other side of the county," I answered laughing.
+
+"What a long time before you had to come here again." She ran down the
+stairs, one hand lightly touching the broad rail. "It's two months and
+four days. Summer's gone!"
+
+"I meant to come before, but Fate prevented."
+
+"I knew it. Please do something to that fire. They won't let me play with
+it, but I can feel it's behaving badly. Hit it!"
+
+I looked on either side of the deep fireplace, and found but a
+half-charred hedge-stake with which I punched a black log into flame.
+
+"It never goes out, day or night," she said, as though explaining. "In
+case any one conies in with cold toes, you see."
+
+"It's even lovelier inside than it was out," I murmured. The red light
+poured itself along the age-polished dusky panels till the Tudor roses
+and lions of the gallery took colour and motion. An old eagle-topped
+convex mirror gathered the picture into its mysterious heart, distorting
+afresh the distorted shadows, and curving the gallery lines into the
+curves of a ship. The day was shutting down in half a gale as the fog
+turned to stringy scud. Through the uncurtained mullions of the broad
+window I could see valiant horsemen of the lawn rear and recover against
+the wind that taunted them with legions of dead leaves.
+"Yes, it must be beautiful," she said. "Would you like to go over it?
+There's still light enough upstairs."
+
+I followed her up the unflinching, wagon-wide staircase to the gallery
+whence opened the thin fluted Elizabethan doors.
+
+"Feel how they put the latch low down for the sake of the children." She
+swung a light door inward.
+
+"By the way, where are they?" I asked. "I haven't even heard them to-day."
+
+She did not answer at once. Then, "I can only hear them," she replied
+softly. "This is one of their rooms--everything ready, you see."
+
+She pointed into a heavily-timbered room. There were little low gate
+tables and children's chairs. A doll's house, its hooked front half open,
+faced a great dappled rocking-horse, from whose padded saddle it was but a
+child's scramble to the broad window-seat overlooking the lawn. A toy gun
+lay in a corner beside a gilt wooden cannon.
+
+"Surely they've only just gone," I whispered. In the failing light a door
+creaked cautiously. I heard the rustle of a frock and the patter of feet--
+quick feet through a room beyond.
+
+"I heard that," she cried triumphantly. "Did you? Children, O children,
+where are you?"
+
+The voice filled the walls that held it lovingly to the last perfect note,
+but there came no answering shout such as I had heard in the garden. We
+hurried on from room to oak-floored room; up a step here, down three steps
+there; among a maze of passages; always mocked by our quarry. One might as
+well have tried to work an unstopped warren with a single ferret. There
+were bolt-holes innumerable--recesses in walls, embrasures of deep slitten
+windows now darkened, whence they could start up behind us; and abandoned
+fireplaces, six feet deep in the masonry, as well as the tangle of
+communicating doors. Above all, they had the twilight for their helper in
+our game. I had caught one or two joyous chuckles of evasion, and once or
+twice had seen the silhouette of a child's frock against some darkening
+window at the end of a passage; but we returned empty-handed to the
+gallery, just as a middle-aged woman was setting a lamp in its niche.
+
+"No, I haven't seen her either this evening, Miss Florence," I heard her
+say, "but that Turpin he says he wants to see you about his shed."
+
+"Oh, Mr. Turpin must want to see me very badly. Tell him to come to the
+hall, Mrs. Madden."
+
+I looked down into the hall whose only light was the dulled fire, and deep
+in the shadow I saw them at last. They must have slipped down while we
+were in the passages, and now thought themselves perfectly hidden behind
+an old gilt leather screen. By child's law, my fruitless chase was as good
+as an introduction, but since I had taken so much trouble I resolved to
+force them to come forward later by the simple trick, which children
+detest, of pretending not to notice them. They lay close, in a little
+huddle, no more than shadows except when a quick flame betrayed an
+outline.
+
+"And now we'll have some tea," she said. "I believe I ought to have
+offered it you at first, but one doesn't arrive at manners somehow when
+one lives alone and is considered--h'm--peculiar." Then with very pretty
+scorn, "would you like a lamp to see to eat by?" "The firelight's much
+pleasanter, I think." We descended into that delicious gloom and Madden
+brought tea.
+
+I took my chair in the direction of the screen ready to surprise or be
+surprised as the game should go, and at her permission, since a hearth is
+always sacred, bent forward to play with the fire.
+
+"Where do you get these beautiful short faggots from?" I asked idly. "Why,
+they are tallies!"
+
+"Of course," she said. "As I can't read or write I'm driven back on the
+early English tally for my accounts. Give me one and I'll tell you what it
+meant."
+
+I passed her an unburned hazel-tally, about a foot long, and she ran her
+thumb down the nicks.
+
+"This is the milk-record for the home farm for the month of April last
+year, in gallons," said she. "I don't know what I should have done without
+tallies. An old forester of mine taught me the system. It's out of date
+now for every one else; but my tenants respect it. One of them's coming
+now to see me. Oh, it doesn't matter. He has no business here out of
+office hours. He's a greedy, ignorant man--very greedy or--he wouldn't
+come here after dark."
+
+"Have you much land then?"
+
+"Only a couple of hundred acres in hand, thank goodness. The other six
+hundred are nearly all let to folk who knew my folk before me, but this
+Turpin is quite a new man--and a highway robber."
+
+"But are you sure I sha'n't be----?"
+
+"Certainly not. You have the right. He hasn't any children."
+
+"Ah, the children!" I said, and slid my low chair back till it nearly
+touched the screen that hid them. "I wonder whether they'll come out for
+me."
+
+There was a murmur of voices--Madden's and a deeper note--at the low, dark
+side door, and a ginger-headed, canvas-gaitered giant of the unmistakable
+tenant farmer type stumbled or was pushed in.
+
+"Come to the fire, Mr. Turpin," she said.
+
+"If--if you please, Miss, I'll--I'll be quite as well by the door." He
+clung to the latch as he spoke like a frightened child. Of a sudden I
+realised that he was in the grip of some almost overpowering fear.
+
+"Well?"
+
+"About that new shed for the young stock--that was all. These first autumn
+storms settin' in ... but I'll come again, Miss." His teeth did not
+chatter much more than the door latch.
+
+"I think not," she answered levelly. "The new shed--m'm. What did my agent
+write you on the 15th?"
+
+"I--fancied p'raps that if I came to see you--ma--man to man like, Miss.
+But----"
+
+His eyes rolled into every corner of the room wide with horror. He half
+opened the door through which he had entered, but I noticed it shut again
+--from without and firmly.
+
+"He wrote what I told him," she went on. "You are overstocked already.
+Dunnett's Farm never carried more than fifty bullocks--even in Mr.
+Wright's time. And _he_ used cake. You've sixty-seven and you don't cake.
+You've broken the lease in that respect. You're dragging the heart out of
+the farm."
+
+"I'm--I'm getting some minerals--superphosphates--next week. I've as good
+as ordered a truck-load already. I'll go down to the station to-morrow
+about 'em. Then I can come and see you man to man like, Miss, in the
+daylight.... That gentleman's not going away, is he?" He almost shrieked.
+
+I had only slid the chair a little further back, reaching behind me to tap
+on the leather of the screen, but he jumped like a rat.
+
+"No. Please attend to me, Mr. Turpin." She turned in her chair and faced
+him with his back to the door. It was an old and sordid little piece of
+scheming that she forced from him--his plea for the new cowshed at his
+landlady's expense, that he might with the covered manure pay his next
+year's rent out of the valuation after, as she made clear, he had bled the
+enriched pastures to the bone. I could not but admire the intensity of his
+greed, when I saw him out-facing for its sake whatever terror it was that
+ran wet on his forehead.
+
+I ceased to tap the leather--was, indeed, calculating the cost of the
+shed--when I felt my relaxed hand taken and turned softly between the soft
+hands of a child. So at last I had triumphed. In a moment I would turn and
+acquaint myself with those quick-footed wanderers....
+
+The little brushing kiss fell in the centre of my palm--as a gift on which
+the fingers were, once, expected to close: as the all faithful half-
+reproachful signal of a waiting child not used to neglect even when
+grown-ups were busiest--a fragment of the mute code devised very long ago.
+
+Then I knew. And it was as though I had known from the first day when I
+looked across the lawn at the high window.
+
+I heard the door shut. The woman turned to me in silence, and I felt that
+she knew.
+
+What time passed after this I cannot say. I was roused by the fall of a
+log, and mechanically rose to put it back. Then I returned to my place in
+the chair very close to the screen.
+
+"Now you understand," she whispered, across the packed shadows.
+
+"Yes, I understand--now. Thank you."
+
+"I--I only hear them." She bowed her head in her hands. "I have no right,
+you know--no other right. I have neither borne nor lost--neither borne nor
+lost!"
+
+"Be very glad then," said I, for my soul was torn open within me.
+
+"Forgive me!"
+
+She was still, and I went back to my sorrow and my joy.
+
+"It was because I loved them so," she said at last, brokenly. "_That_ was
+why it was, even from the first--even before I knew that they--they were
+all I should ever have. And I loved them so!"
+
+She stretched out her arms to the shadows and the shadows within the
+shadow.
+
+"They came because I loved them--because I needed them. I--I must have
+made them come. Was that wrong, think you?"
+
+"No--no."
+
+"I--I grant you that the toys and--and all that sort of thing were
+nonsense, but--but I used to so hate empty rooms myself when I was
+little." She pointed to the gallery. "And the passages all empty. ... And
+how could I ever bear the garden door shut? Suppose----"
+
+"Don't! For pity's sake, don't!" I cried. The twilight had brought a cold
+rain with gusty squalls that plucked at the leaded windows.
+
+"And the same thing with keeping the fire in all night. _I_ don't think it
+so foolish--do you?"
+
+I looked at the broad brick hearth, saw, through tears I believe, that
+there was no unpassable iron on or near it, and bowed my head.
+
+"I did all that and lots of other things--just to make believe. Then they
+came. I heard them, but I didn't know that they were not mine by right
+till Mrs. Madden told me----"
+
+"The butler's wife? What?"
+
+"One of them--I heard--she saw. And knew. Hers! _Not_ for me. I didn't
+know at first. Perhaps I was jealous. Afterwards, I began to understand
+that it was only because I loved them, not because----... Oh, you _must_
+bear or lose," she said piteously. "There is no other way--and yet they
+love me. They must! Don't they?"
+
+There was no sound in the room except the lapping voices of the fire, but
+we two listened intently, and she at least took comfort from what she
+heard. She recovered herself and half rose. I sat still in my chair by the
+screen.
+
+"Don't think me a wretch to whine about myself like this, but--but I'm all
+in the dark, you know, and _you_ can see."
+
+In truth I could see, and my vision confirmed me in my resolve, though
+that was like the very parting of spirit and flesh. Yet a little longer I
+would stay since it was the last time.
+
+"You think it is wrong, then?" she cried sharply, though I had said
+nothing.
+
+"Not for you. A thousand times no. For you it is right.... I am grateful
+to you beyond words. For me it would be wrong. For me only...."
+
+"Why?" she said, but passed her hand before her face as she had done at
+our second meeting in the wood. "Oh, I see," she went on simply as a
+child. "For you it would be wrong." Then with a little indrawn laugh,
+"and, d'you remember, I called you lucky--once--at first. You who must
+never come here again!"
+
+She left me to sit a little longer by the screen, and I heard the sound of
+her feet die out along the gallery above.
+
+
+
+
+MRS. BATHURST
+
+FROM LYDEN'S "IRENIUS"
+
+ACT III. Sc. II.
+
+Gow.--Had it been your Prince instead of a groom caught in this noose
+there's not an astrologer of the city----
+
+PRINCE.--Sacked! Sacked! We were a city yesterday.
+
+Gow.--So be it, but I was not governor. Not an astrologer, but would ha'
+sworn he'd foreseen it at the last versary of Venus, when Vulcan caught
+her with Mars in the house of stinking Capricorn. But since 'tis Jack of
+the Straw that hangs, the forgetful stars had it not on their tablets.
+
+PRINCE.--Another life! Were there any left to die? How did the
+poor fool come by it?
+
+Gow.--_Simpliciter_ thus. She that damned him to death knew not that she
+did it, or would have died ere she had done it. For she loved him. He
+that hangs him does so in obedience to the Duke, and asks no more than
+"Where is the rope?" The Duke, very exactly he hath told us, works God's
+will, in which holy employ he's not to be questioned. We have then left
+upon this finger, only Jack whose soul now plucks the left sleeve of
+Destiny in Hell to overtake why she clapped him up like a fly on a sunny
+wall. Whuff! Soh!
+
+PRINCE.--Your cloak, Ferdinand. I'll sleep now.
+
+FERDINAND.--Sleep, then.. He too, loved his life?
+
+Gow.--He was born of woman ... but at the end threw life from
+him, like your Prince, for a little sleep ... "Have I any look of a
+King?" said he, clanking his chain--"to be so baited on all sides by
+Fortune, that I must e'en die now to live with myself one day longer?" I
+left him railing at Fortune and woman's love.
+
+FERDINAND.--Ah, woman's love!
+
+_(Aside)_ Who knows not Fortune, glutted on easy thrones, Stealing from
+feasts as rare to coneycatch, Privily in the hedgerows for a clown With
+that same cruel-lustful hand and eye, Those nails and wedges, that one
+hammer and lead, And the very gerb of long-stored lightnings loosed
+Yesterday 'gainst some King.
+
+
+
+MRS. BATHURST
+The day that I chose to visit H.M.S. _Peridot_ in Simon's Bay was the day
+that the Admiral had chosen to send her up the coast. She was just
+steaming out to sea as my train came in, and since the rest of the Fleet
+were either coaling or busy at the rifle-ranges a thousand feet up the
+hill, I found myself stranded, lunchless, on the sea-front with no hope of
+return to Cape Town before five P.M. At this crisis I had the luck to come
+across my friend Inspector Hooper, Cape Government Railways, in command of
+an engine and a brake-van chalked for repair.
+
+"If you get something to eat," he said, "I'll run you down to Glengariff
+siding till the goods comes along. It's cooler there than here, you see."
+
+I got food and drink from the Greeks who sell all things at a price, and
+the engine trotted us a couple of miles up the line to a bay of drifted
+sand and a plank-platform half buried in sand not a hundred yards from the
+edge of the surf. Moulded dunes, whiter than any snow, rolled far inland
+up a brown and purple valley of splintered rocks and dry scrub. A crowd of
+Malays hauled at a net beside two blue and green boats on the beach; a
+picnic party danced and shouted barefoot where a tiny river trickled
+across the flat, and a circle of dry hills, whose feet were set in sands
+of silver, locked us in against a seven-coloured sea. At either horn of
+the bay the railway line, cut just above high water-mark, ran round a
+shoulder of piled rocks, and disappeared.
+
+"You see there's always a breeze here," said Hooper, opening the door as
+the engine left us in the siding on the sand, and the strong south-easter
+buffeting under Elsie's Peak dusted sand into our tickey beer. Presently
+he sat down to a file full of spiked documents. He had returned from a
+long trip up-country, where he had been reporting on damaged rolling-
+stock, as far away as Rhodesia. The weight of the bland wind on my
+eyelids; the song of it under the car roof, and high up among the rocks;
+the drift of fine grains chasing each other musically ashore; the tramp of
+the surf; the voices of the picnickers; the rustle of Hooper's file, and
+the presence of the assured sun, joined with the beer to cast me into
+magical slumber. The hills of False Bay were just dissolving into those of
+fairyland when I heard footsteps on the sand outside, and the clink of our
+couplings.
+
+"Stop that!" snapped Hooper, without raising his head from his work. "It's
+those dirty little Malay boys, you see: they're always playing with the
+trucks...."
+
+"Don't be hard on 'em. The railway's a general refuge in Africa," I
+replied.
+
+"'Tis--up-country at any rate. That reminds me," he felt in his waistcoat-
+pocket, "I've got a curiosity for you from Wankies--beyond Buluwayo. It's
+more of a souvenir perhaps than----"
+
+"The old hotel's inhabited," cried a voice. "White men from the language.
+Marines to the front! Come on, Pritch. Here's your Belmont. Wha--i--i!"
+
+The last word dragged like a rope as Mr. Pyecroft ran round to the open
+door, and stood looking up into my face. Behind him an enormous Sergeant
+of Marines trailed a stalk of dried seaweed, and dusted the sand nervously
+from his fingers.
+
+"What are you doing here?" I asked. "I thought the _Hierophant_ was down
+the coast?"
+
+"We came in last Tuesday--from Tristan D'Acunha--for overhaul, and we
+shall be in dockyard 'ands for two months, with boiler-seatings."
+
+"Come and sit down," Hooper put away the file.
+
+"This is Mr. Hooper of the Railway," I exclaimed, as Pyecroft turned to
+haul up the black-moustached sergeant.
+
+"This is Sergeant Pritchard, of the _Agaric_, an old shipmate," said he.
+"We were strollin' on the beach." The monster blushed and nodded. He
+filled up one side of the van when he sat down.
+
+"And this is my friend, Mr. Pyecroft," I added to Hooper, already busy
+with the extra beer which my prophetic soul had bought from the Greeks.
+
+"_Moi aussi_" quoth Pyecroft, and drew out beneath his coat a labelled
+quart bottle.
+
+"Why, it's Bass," cried Hooper.
+
+"It was Pritchard," said Pyecroft. "They can't resist him."
+
+"That's not so," said Pritchard, mildly.
+
+"Not _verbatim_ per'aps, but the look in the eye came to the same thing."
+
+"Where was it?" I demanded.
+
+"Just on beyond here--at Kalk Bay. She was slappin' a rug in a back
+verandah. Pritch hadn't more than brought his batteries to bear, before
+she stepped indoors an' sent it flyin' over the wall."
+
+Pyecroft patted the warm bottle.
+
+"It was all a mistake," said Pritchard. "I shouldn't wonder if she mistook
+me for Maclean. We're about of a size."
+
+I had heard householders of Muizenburg, St. James's, and Kalk Bay complain
+of the difficulty of keeping beer or good servants at the seaside, and I
+began to see the reason. None the less, it was excellent Bass, and I too
+drank to the health of that large-minded maid.
+
+"It's the uniform that fetches 'em, an' they fetch it," said Pyecroft. "My
+simple navy blue is respectable, but not fascinatin'. Now Pritch in 'is
+Number One rig is always 'purr Mary, on the terrace'--_ex officio_ as you
+might say."
+
+"She took me for Maclean, I tell you," Pritchard insisted. "Why--why--to
+listen to him you wouldn't think that only yesterday----"
+
+"Pritch," said Pyecroft, "be warned in time. If we begin tellin' what we
+know about each other we'll be turned out of the pub. Not to mention
+aggravated desertion on several occasions----"
+
+"Never anything more than absence without leaf--I defy you to prove it,"
+said the Sergeant hotly. "An' if it comes to that how about Vancouver in
+'87?"
+
+"How about it? Who pulled bow in the gig going ashore? Who told Boy
+Niven...?"
+
+"Surely you were court martialled for that?" I said. The story of Boy
+Niven who lured seven or eight able-bodied seamen and marines into the
+woods of British Columbia used to be a legend of the Fleet.
+
+"Yes, we were court-martialled to rights," said Pritchard, "but we should
+have been tried for murder if Boy Niven 'adn't been unusually tough. He
+told us he had an uncle 'oo'd give us land to farm. 'E said he was born at
+the back o' Vancouver Island, and _all_ the time the beggar was a balmy
+Barnado Orphan!"
+
+"_But_ we believed him," said Pyecroft. "I did--you did--Paterson did--an'
+'oo was the Marine that married the cocoanut-woman afterwards--him with
+the mouth?"
+
+"Oh, Jones, Spit-Kid Jones. I 'aven't thought of 'im in years," said
+Pritchard. "Yes, Spit-Kid believed it, an' George Anstey and Moon. We were
+very young an' very curious."
+
+"_But_ lovin' an' trustful to a degree," said Pyecroft.
+
+"Remember when 'e told us to walk in single file for fear o' bears?
+'Remember, Pye, when 'e 'opped about in that bog full o' ferns an' sniffed
+an' said 'e could smell the smoke of 'is uncle's farm? An' _all_ the time
+it was a dirty little out-lyin' uninhabited island. We walked round it in
+a day, an' come back to our boat lyin' on the beach. A whole day Boy Niven
+kept us walkin' in circles lookin' for 'is uncle's farm! He said his uncle
+was compelled by the law of the land to give us a farm!"
+
+"Don't get hot, Pritch. We believed," said Pyecroft.
+
+"He'd been readin' books. He only did it to get a run ashore an' have
+himself talked of. A day an' a night--eight of us--followin' Boy Niven
+round an uninhabited island in the Vancouver archipelago! Then the picket
+came for us an' a nice pack o' idiots we looked!"
+
+"What did you get for it?" Hooper asked.
+
+"Heavy thunder with continuous lightning for two hours. Thereafter sleet-
+squalls, a confused sea, and cold, unfriendly weather till conclusion o'
+cruise," said Pyecroft. "It was only what we expected, but what we felt,
+an' I assure you, Mr. Hooper, even a sailor-man has a heart to break, was
+bein' told that we able seamen an' promisin' marines 'ad misled Boy Niven.
+Yes, we poor back-to-the-landers was supposed to 'ave misled him! He
+rounded on us, o' course, an' got off easy."
+
+"Excep' for what we gave him in the steerin'-flat when we came out o'
+cells. 'Eard anything of 'im lately, Pye?"
+
+"Signal Boatswain in the Channel Fleet, I believe--Mr. L.L. Niven is."
+
+"An' Anstey died o' fever in Benin," Pritchard mused. "What come to Moon?
+Spit-Kid we know about."
+
+"Moon--Moon! Now where did I last...? Oh yes, when I was in the
+_Palladium_! I met Quigley at Buncrana Station. He told me Moon 'ad run
+when the _Astrild_ sloop was cruising among the South Seas three years
+back. He always showed signs o' bein' a Mormonastic beggar. Yes, he
+slipped off quietly an' they 'adn't time to chase 'im round the islands
+even if the navigatin' officer 'ad been equal to the job."
+
+"Wasn't he?" said Hooper.
+
+"Not so. Accordin' to Quigley the _Astrild_ spent half her commission
+rompin' up the beach like a she-turtle, an' the other half hatching
+turtles' eggs on the top o' numerous reefs. When she was docked at Sydney
+her copper looked like Aunt Maria's washing on the line--an' her 'midship
+frames was sprung. The commander swore the dockyard 'ad done it haulin'
+the pore thing on to the slips. They _do_ do strange things at sea, Mr.
+Hooper."
+
+"Ah! I'm not a tax-payer," said Hooper, and opened a fresh bottle. The
+Sergeant seemed to be one who had a difficulty in dropping subjects.
+
+"How it all comes back, don't it?" he said. "Why Moon must 'ave 'ad
+sixteen years' service before he ran."
+
+"It takes 'em at all ages. Look at--you know," said Pyecroft.
+
+"Who?" I asked.
+
+"A service man within eighteen months of his pension, is the party you're
+thinkin' of," said Pritchard. "A warrant 'oose name begins with a V.,
+isn't it?"
+
+"But, in a way o' puttin' it, we can't say that he actually did desert,"
+Pyecroft suggested.
+
+"Oh, no," said Pritchard. "It was only permanent absence up country
+without leaf. That was all."
+
+"Up country?" said Hooper. "Did they circulate his description?"
+
+"What for?" said Pritchard, most impolitely.
+
+"Because deserters are like columns in the war. They don't move away from
+the line, you see. I've known a chap caught at Salisbury that way tryin'
+to get to Nyassa. They tell me, but o' course I don't know, that they
+don't ask questions on the Nyassa Lake Flotilla up there. I've heard of a
+P. and O. quartermaster in full command of an armed launch there."
+
+"Do you think Click 'ud ha' gone up that way?" Pritchard asked.
+
+"There's no saying. He was sent up to Bloemfontein to take over some Navy
+ammunition left in the fort. We know he took it over and saw it into the
+trucks. Then there was no more Click--then or thereafter. Four months ago
+it transpired, and thus the _casus belli_ stands at present," said
+Pyecroft.
+
+"What were his marks?" said Hooper again.
+
+"Does the Railway get a reward for returnin' 'em, then?" said Pritchard.
+
+"If I did d'you suppose I'd talk about it?" Hooper retorted angrily.
+
+"You seemed so very interested," said Pritchard with equal crispness.
+
+"Why was he called Click?" I asked to tide over an uneasy little break in
+the conversation. The two men were staring at each other very fixedly.
+
+"Because of an ammunition hoist carryin' away," said Pyecroft. "And it
+carried away four of 'is teeth--on the lower port side, wasn't it, Pritch?
+The substitutes which he bought weren't screwed home in a manner o'
+sayin'. When he talked fast they used to lift a little on the bed plate.
+'Ence, 'Click.' They called 'im a superior man which is what we'd call a
+long, black-'aired, genteely speakin', 'alf-bred beggar on the lower
+deck."
+
+"Four false teeth on the lower left jaw," said Hooper, his hand in his
+waistcoat pocket. "What tattoo marks?"
+
+"Look here," began Pritchard, half rising. "I'm sure we're very grateful
+to you as a gentleman for your 'orspitality, but per'aps we may 'ave made
+an error in--"
+
+I looked at Pyecroft for aid, Hooper was crimsoning rapidly.
+
+"If the fat marine now occupying the foc'sle will kindly bring 'is _status
+quo_ to an anchor yet once more, we may be able to talk like gentlemen--
+not to say friends," said Pyecroft. "He regards you, Mr. Hooper, as a
+emissary of the Law."
+
+"I only wish to observe that when a gentleman exhibits such a peculiar, or
+I should rather say, such a _bloomin'_ curiosity in identification marks
+as our friend here----"
+
+"Mr. Pritchard," I interposed, "I'll take all the responsibility for Mr.
+Hooper."
+
+"An' _you_'ll apologise all round," said Pyecroft. "You're a rude little
+man, Pritch."
+
+"But how was I----" he began, wavering.
+
+"I don't know an' I don't care. Apologise!"
+
+The giant looked round bewildered and took our little hands into his vast
+grip, one by one. "I was wrong," he said meekly as a sheep. "My suspicions
+was unfounded. Mr. Hooper, I apologise."
+
+"You did quite right to look out for your own end o' the line," said
+Hooper. "I'd ha' done the same with a gentleman I didn't know, you see. If
+you don't mind I'd like to hear a little more o' your Mr. Vickery. It's
+safe with me, you see."
+
+"Why did Vickery run," I began, but Pyecroft's smile made me turn my
+question to "Who was she?"
+
+"She kep' a little hotel at Hauraki--near Auckland," said Pyecroft.
+
+"By Gawd!" roared Pritchard, slapping his hand on his leg. "Not Mrs.
+Bathurst!"
+
+Pyecroft nodded slowly, and the Sergeant called all the powers of darkness
+to witness his bewilderment.
+
+"So far as I could get at it Mrs. B. was the lady in question."
+
+"But Click was married," cried Pritchard.
+
+"An' 'ad a fifteen year old daughter. 'E's shown me her photograph.
+Settin' that aside, so to say, 'ave you ever found these little things
+make much difference? Because I haven't."
+
+"Good Lord Alive an' Watchin'!... Mrs. Bathurst...." Then with another
+roar: "You can say what you please, Pye, but you don't make me believe it
+was any of 'er fault. She wasn't _that!_"
+
+"If I was going to say what I please, I'd begin by callin' you a silly ox
+an' work up to the higher pressures at leisure. I'm trying to say solely
+what transpired. M'rover, for once you're right. It wasn't her fault."
+
+"You couldn't 'aven't made me believe it if it 'ad been," was the answer.
+
+Such faith in a Sergeant of Marines interested me greatly. "Never mind
+about that," I cried. "Tell me what she was like."
+
+"She was a widow," said Pyecroft. "Left so very young and never
+re-spliced. She kep' a little hotel for warrants and non-coms close to
+Auckland, an' she always wore black silk, and 'er neck--"
+
+"You ask what she was like," Pritchard broke in. "Let me give you an
+instance. I was at Auckland first in '97, at the end o' the _Marroquin's_
+commission, an' as I'd been promoted I went up with the others. She used
+to look after us all, an' she never lost by it--not a penny! 'Pay me now,'
+she'd say, 'or settle later. I know you won't let me suffer. Send the
+money from home if you like,' Why, gentlemen all, I tell you I've seen
+that lady take her own gold watch an' chain off her neck in the bar an'
+pass it to a bosun 'oo'd come ashore without 'is ticker an' 'ad to catch
+the last boat. 'I don't know your name,' she said, 'but when you've done
+with it, you'll find plenty that know me on the front. Send it back by one
+o' them.' And it was worth thirty pounds if it was worth 'arf a crown. The
+little gold watch, Pye, with the blue monogram at the back. But, as I was
+sayin', in those days she kep' a beer that agreed with me--Slits it was
+called. One way an' another I must 'ave punished a good few bottles of it
+while we was in the bay--comin' ashore every night or so. Chaffin across
+the bar like, once when we were alone, 'Mrs. B.,' I said, 'when next I
+call I want you to remember that this is my particular--just as you're my
+particular?' (She'd let you go _that_ far!) 'Just as you're my
+particular,' I said. 'Oh, thank you, Sergeant Pritchard,' she says, an'
+put 'er hand up to the curl be'ind 'er ear. Remember that way she had,
+Pye?"
+
+"I think so," said the sailor.
+
+"Yes, 'Thank you, Sergeant Pritchard,' she says. 'The least I can do is to
+mark it for you in case you change your mind. There's no great demand for
+it in the Fleet,' she says, 'but to make sure I'll put it at the back o'
+the shelf,' an' she snipped off a piece of her hair ribbon with that old
+dolphin cigar cutter on the bar--remember it, Pye?--an' she tied a bow
+round what was left--just four bottles. That was '97--no, '96. In '98 I
+was in the _Resiliant_--China station--full commission. In Nineteen One,
+mark you, I was in the _Carthusian_, back in Auckland Bay again. Of course
+I went up to Mrs. B.'s with the rest of us to see how things were goin'.
+They were the same as ever. (Remember the big tree on the pavement by the
+side-bar, Pye?) I never said anythin' in special (there was too many of us
+talkin' to her), but she saw me at once."
+
+"That wasn't difficult?" I ventured.
+
+"Ah, but wait. I was comin' up to the bar, when, 'Ada,' she says to her
+niece, 'get me Sergeant Pritchard's particular,' and, gentlemen all, I
+tell you before I could shake 'ands with the lady, there were those four
+bottles o' Slits, with 'er 'air ribbon in a bow round each o' their necks,
+set down in front o' me, an' as she drew the cork she looked at me under
+her eyebrows in that blindish way she had o' lookin', an', 'Sergeant
+Pritchard,' she says, 'I do 'ope you 'aven't changed your mind about your
+particulars.' That's the kind o' woman she was--after five years!"
+
+"I don't _see_ her yet somehow," said Hooper, but with sympathy.
+
+"She--she never scrupled to feed a lame duck or set 'er foot on a scorpion
+at any time of 'er life," Pritchard added valiantly.
+
+"That don't help me either. My mother's like that for one."
+
+The giant heaved inside his uniform and rolled his eyes at the car-roof.
+Said Pyecroft suddenly:--
+
+"How many women have you been intimate with all over the world, Pritch?"
+
+Pritchard blushed plum colour to the short hairs of his seventeen-inch
+neck.
+
+"'Undreds," said Pyecroft. "So've I. How many of 'em can you remember in
+your own mind, settin' aside the first--an' per'aps the last--_and one
+more_?"
+
+"Few, wonderful few, now I tax myself," said Sergeant Pritchard,
+relievedly.
+
+"An' how many times might you 'ave been at Aukland?"
+
+"One--two," he began. "Why, I can't make it more than three times in ten
+years. But I can remember every time that I ever saw Mrs. B."
+
+"So can I--an' I've only been to Auckland twice--how she stood an' what
+she was sayin' an' what she looked like. That's the secret. 'Tisn't
+beauty, so to speak, nor good talk necessarily. It's just It. Some
+women'll stay in a man's memory if they once walked down a street, but
+most of 'em you can live with a month on end, an' next commission you'd be
+put to it to certify whether they talked in their sleep or not, as one
+might say."
+
+"Ah," said Hooper. "That's more the idea. I've known just two women of
+that nature."
+
+"An' it was no fault o' theirs?" asked Pritchard.
+
+"None whatever. I know that!"
+
+"An' if a man gets struck with that kind o' woman, Mr. Hooper?" Pritchard
+went on.
+
+"He goes crazy--or just saves himself," was the slow answer.
+
+"You've hit it," said the Sergeant. "You've seen an' known somethin' in
+the course o' your life, Mr. Hooper. I'm lookin' at you!" He set down his
+bottle.
+
+"And how often had Vickery seen her?" I asked.
+
+"That's the dark an' bloody mystery," Pyecroft answered. "I'd never come
+across him till I come out in the _Hierophant_ just now, an' there wasn't
+any one in the ship who knew much about him. You see, he was what you call
+a superior man. 'E spoke to me once or twice about Auckland and Mrs. B. on
+the voyage out. I called that to mind subsequently. There must 'ave been a
+good deal between 'em, to my way o' thinkin'. Mind you I'm only giving you
+my _sum_ of it all, because all I know is second-hand so to speak, or
+rather I should say more than second-'and."
+
+"How?" said Hooper peremptorily. "You must have seen it or heard it."
+
+"Yes," said Pyecroft. "I used to think seein' and hearin' was the only
+regulation aids to ascertainin' facts, but as we get older we get more
+accommodatin'. The cylinders work easier, I suppose.... Were you in Cape
+Town last December when Phyllis's Circus came?"
+
+"No--up country," said Hooper, a little nettled at the change of venue.
+
+"I ask because they had a new turn of a scientific nature called 'Home and
+Friends for a Tickey.'"
+
+"Oh, you mean the cinematograph--the pictures of prize-fights and
+steamers. I've seen 'em up country."
+
+"Biograph or cinematograph was what I was alludin' to. London Bridge with
+the omnibuses--a troopship goin' to the war--marines on parade at
+Portsmouth an' the Plymouth Express arrivin' at Paddin'ton."
+
+"Seen 'em all. Seen 'em all," said Hooper impatiently.
+
+"We _Hierophants_ came in just before Christmas week an' leaf was easy."
+
+"I think a man gets fed up with Cape Town quicker than anywhere else on
+the station. Why, even Durban's more like Nature. We was there for
+Christmas," Pritchard put in.
+
+"Not bein' a devotee of Indian _peeris_, as our Doctor said to the Pusser,
+I can't exactly say. Phyllis's was good enough after musketry practice at
+Mozambique. I couldn't get off the first two or three nights on account of
+what you might call an imbroglio with our Torpedo Lieutenant in the
+submerged flat, where some pride of the West country had sugared up a
+gyroscope; but I remember Vickery went ashore with our Carpenter Rigdon--
+old Crocus we called him. As a general rule Crocus never left 'is ship
+unless an' until he was 'oisted out with a winch, but _when_ 'e went 'e
+would return noddin' like a lily gemmed with dew. We smothered him down
+below that night, but the things 'e said about Vickery as a fittin'
+playmate for a Warrant Officer of 'is cubic capacity, before we got him
+quiet, was what I should call pointed."
+
+"I've been with Crocus--in the _Redoubtable_," said the Sergeant. "He's a
+character if there is one."
+
+"Next night I went into Cape Town with Dawson and Pratt; but just at the
+door of the Circus I came across Vickery. 'Oh!' he says, 'you're the man
+I'm looking for. Come and sit next me. This way to the shillin' places!'
+I went astern at once, protestin' because tickey seats better suited my
+so-called finances. 'Come on,' says Vickery, 'I'm payin'.' Naturally I
+abandoned Pratt and Dawson in anticipation o' drinks to match the seats.
+'No,' he says, when this was 'inted--'not now. Not now. As many as you
+please afterwards, but I want you sober for the occasion.' I caught 'is
+face under a lamp just then, an' the appearance of it quite cured me of my
+thirsts. Don't mistake. It didn't frighten me. It made me anxious. I can't
+tell you what it was like, but that was the effect which it 'ad on me. If
+you want to know, it reminded me of those things in bottles in those
+herbalistic shops at Plymouth--preserved in spirits of wine. White an'
+crumply things--previous to birth as you might say."
+
+"You 'ave a beastial mind, Pye," said the Sergeant, relighting his pipe.
+
+"Perhaps. We were in the front row, an' 'Home an' Friends' came on early.
+Vickery touched me on the knee when the number went up. 'If you see
+anything that strikes you,' he says, 'drop me a hint'; then he went on
+clicking. We saw London Bridge an' so forth an' so on, an' it was most
+interestin'. I'd never seen it before. You 'eard a little dynamo like
+buzzin', but the pictures were the real thing--alive an' movin'."
+
+"I've seen 'em," said Hooper. "Of course they are taken from the very
+thing itself--you see."
+
+"Then the Western Mail came in to Paddin'ton on the big magic lantern
+sheet. First we saw the platform empty an' the porters standin' by. Then
+the engine come in, head on, an' the women in the front row jumped: she
+headed so straight. Then the doors opened and the passengers came out and
+the porters got the luggage--just like life. Only--only when any one came
+down too far towards us that was watchin', they walked right out o' the
+picture, so to speak. I was 'ighly interested, I can tell you. So were all
+of us. I watched an old man with a rug 'oo'd dropped a book an' was tryin'
+to pick it up, when quite slowly, from be'ind two porters--carryin' a
+little reticule an' lookin' from side to side--comes out Mrs. Bathurst.
+There was no mistakin' the walk in a hundred thousand. She come forward--
+right forward--she looked out straight at us with that blindish look which
+Pritch alluded to. She walked on and on till she melted out of the
+picture--like--like a shadow jumpin' over a candle, an' as she went I
+'eard Dawson in the ticky seats be'ind sing out: 'Christ! There's
+Mrs. B.!'"
+
+Hooper swallowed his spittle and leaned forward intently.
+
+"Vickery touched me on the knee again. He was clickin' his four false
+teeth with his jaw down like an enteric at the last kick. 'Are you sure?'
+says he. 'Sure,' I says, 'didn't you 'ear Dawson give tongue? Why, it's
+the woman herself.' 'I was sure before,' he says, 'but I brought you to
+make sure. Will you come again with me to-morrow?'
+
+"'Willingly,' I says, 'it's like meetin' old friends.'
+
+"'Yes,' he says, openin' his watch, 'very like. It will be four-and-twenty
+hours less four minutes before I see her again. Come and have a drink,' he
+says. 'It may amuse you, but it's no sort of earthly use to me.' He went
+out shaking his head an' stumblin' over people's feet as if he was drunk
+already. I anticipated a swift drink an' a speedy return, because I wanted
+to see the performin' elephants. Instead o' which Vickery began to
+navigate the town at the rate o' knots, lookin' in at a bar every three
+minutes approximate Greenwich time. I'm not a drinkin' man, though there
+are those present"--he cocked his unforgetable eye at me--"who may have
+seen me more or less imbued with the fragrant spirit. None the less, when
+I drink I like to do it at anchor an' not at an average speed of eighteen
+knots on the measured mile. There's a tank as you might say at the back o'
+that big hotel up the hill--what do they call it?"
+
+"The Molteno Reservoir," I suggested, and Hooper nodded.
+
+"That was his limit o' drift. We walked there an' we come down through the
+Gardens--there was a South-Easter blowin'--an' we finished up by the
+Docks. Then we bore up the road to Salt River, and wherever there was a
+pub Vickery put in sweatin'. He didn't look at what he drunk--he didn't
+look at the change. He walked an' he drunk an' he perspired in rivers. I
+understood why old Crocus 'ad come back in the condition 'e did, because
+Vickery an' I 'ad two an' a half hours o' this gipsy manoeuvre an' when we
+got back to the station there wasn't a dry atom on or in me."
+
+"Did he say anything?" Pritchard asked.
+
+"The sum total of 'is conversation from 7.45 P.M. till 11.15 P.M. was
+'Let's have another.' Thus the mornin' an' the evenin' were the first day,
+as Scripture says.... To abbreviate a lengthy narrative, I went into Cape
+Town for five consecutive nights with Master Vickery, and in that time I
+must 'ave logged about fifty knots over the ground an' taken in two gallon
+o' all the worst spirits south the Equator. The evolution never varied.
+Two shilling seats for us two; five minutes o' the pictures, an' perhaps
+forty-five seconds o' Mrs. B. walking down towards us with that blindish
+look in her eyes an' the reticule in her hand. Then out walk--and drink
+till train time."
+
+"What did you think?" said Hooper, his hand fingering his waistcoat
+pocket.
+
+"Several things," said Pyecroft. "To tell you the truth, I aren't quite
+done thinkin' about it yet. Mad? The man was a dumb lunatic--must 'ave
+been for months--years p'raps. I know somethin' o' maniacs, as every man
+in the Service must. I've been shipmates with a mad skipper--an' a lunatic
+Number One, but never both together I thank 'Eaven. I could give you the
+names o' three captains now 'oo ought to be in an asylum, but you don't
+find me interferin' with the mentally afflicted till they begin to lay
+about 'em with rammers an' winch-handles. Only once I crept up a little
+into the wind towards Master Vickery. 'I wonder what she's doin' in
+England,' I says. 'Don't it seem to you she's lookin' for somebody?' That
+was in the Gardens again, with the South-Easter blowin' as we were makin'
+our desperate round. 'She's lookin' for me,' he says, stoppin' dead under
+a lamp an' clickin'. When he wasn't drinkin', in which case all 'is teeth
+clicked on the glass, 'e was clickin' 'is four false teeth like a Marconi
+ticker. 'Yes! lookin' for me,' he said, an' he went on very softly an' as
+you might say affectionately. '_But?_ he went on, 'in future, Mr.
+Pyecroft, I should take it kindly of you if you'd confine your remarks to
+the drinks set before you. Otherwise,' he says, 'with the best will in the
+world towards you, I may find myself guilty of murder! Do you understand?'
+he says. 'Perfectly,' I says, 'but would it at all soothe you to know that
+in such a case the chances o' your being killed are precisely equivalent
+to the chances o' me being outed.' 'Why, no,' he says, 'I'm almost afraid
+that 'ud be a temptation,'
+
+"Then I said--we was right under the lamp by that arch at the end o' the
+Gardens where the trams came round--'Assumin' murder was done--or
+attempted murder--I put it to you that you would still be left so badly
+crippled, as one might say, that your subsequent capture by the police--to
+'oom you would 'ave to explain--would be largely inevitable.' 'That's
+better,' 'e says, passin' 'is hands over his forehead. 'That's much
+better, because,' he says, 'do you know, as I am now, Pye, I'm not so sure
+if I could explain anything much.' Those were the only particular words I
+had with 'im in our walks as I remember."
+
+"What walks!" said Hooper. "Oh my soul, what walks!"
+
+"They were chronic," said Pyecroft gravely, "but I didn't anticipate any
+danger till the Circus left. Then I anticipated that, bein' deprived of
+'is stimulant, he might react on me, so to say, with a hatchet.
+Consequently, after the final performance an' the ensuin' wet walk, I kep'
+myself aloof from my superior officer on board in the execution of 'is
+duty as you might put it. Consequently, I was interested when the sentry
+informs me while I was passin' on my lawful occasions that Click had asked
+to see the captain. As a general rule warrant officers don't dissipate
+much of the owner's time, but Click put in an hour and more be'ind that
+door. My duties kep' me within eyeshot of it. Vickery came out first, an'
+'e actually nodded at me an' smiled. This knocked me out o' the boat,
+because, havin' seen 'is face for five consecutive nights, I didn't
+anticipate any change there more than a condenser in hell, so to speak.
+The owner emerged later. His face didn't read off at all, so I fell back
+on his cox, 'oo'd been eight years with him and knew him better than boat
+signals. Lamson--that was the cox's name--crossed 'is bows once or twice
+at low speeds an' dropped down to me visibly concerned. 'He's shipped 'is
+court-martial face,' says Lamson. 'Some one's goin' to be 'ung. I've never
+seen that look but once before when they chucked the gun-sights overboard
+in the _Fantastic_.' Throwin' gun-sights overboard, Mr. Hooper, is the
+equivalent for mutiny in these degenerate days. It's done to attract the
+notice of the authorities an' the _Western Mornin' News_--generally by a
+stoker. Naturally, word went round the lower deck an' we had a private
+over'aul of our little consciences. But, barrin' a shirt which a second-
+class stoker said 'ad walked into 'is bag from the marines flat by itself,
+nothin' vital transpired. The owner went about flyin' the signal for
+'attend public execution,' so to say, but there was no corpse at the
+yardarm. 'E lunched on the beach an' 'e returned with 'is regulation
+harbour-routine face about 3 P. M. Thus Lamson lost prestige for raising
+false alarms. The only person 'oo might 'ave connected the epicycloidal
+gears correctly was one Pyecroft, when he was told that Mr. Vickery would
+go up country that same evening to take over certain naval ammunition left
+after the war in Bloemfontein Fort. No details was ordered to accompany
+Master Vickery. He was told off first person singular--as a unit---by
+himself."
+
+The marine whistled penetratingly.
+
+"That's what I thought," said Pyecroft. "I went ashore with him in the
+cutter an' 'e asked me to walk through the station. He was clickin'
+audibly, but otherwise seemed happy-ish.
+
+"'You might like to know,' he says, stoppin' just opposite the Admiral's
+front gate, 'that Phyllis's Circus will be performin' at Worcester
+to-morrow night. So I shall see 'er yet once again. You've been very
+patient with me,' he says.
+
+"'Look here, Vickery,' I said, 'this thing's come to be just as much as I
+can stand. Consume your own smoke. I don't want to know any more.'
+
+"'You!' he said. 'What have you got to complain of?--you've only 'ad to
+watch. I'm _it_,' he says, 'but that's neither here nor there,' he says.
+'I've one thing to say before shakin' 'ands. Remember,' 'e says--we were
+just by the Admiral's garden-gate then--'remember, that I am _not_ a
+murderer, because my lawful wife died in childbed six weeks after I came
+out. That much at least I am clear of,' 'e says.
+
+"'Then what have you done that signifies?' I said. 'What's the rest of
+it?'
+
+"'The rest,' 'e says, 'is silence,' an' he shook 'ands and went clickin'
+into Simons Town station."
+
+"Did he stop to see Mrs. Bathurst at Worcester?" I asked.
+
+"It's not known. He reported at Bloemfontein, saw the ammunition into the
+trucks, and then 'e disappeared. Went out--deserted, if you care to put it
+so--within eighteen months of his pension, an' if what 'e said about 'is
+wife was true he was a free man as 'e then stood. How do you read it off?"
+
+"Poor devil!" said Hooper. "To see her that way every night! I wonder what
+it was."
+
+"I've made my 'ead ache in that direction many a long night."
+
+"But I'll swear Mrs. B. 'ad no 'and in it," said the Sergeant unshaken.
+
+"No. Whatever the wrong or deceit was, he did it, I'm sure o' that. I 'ad
+to look at 'is face for five consecutive nights. I'm not so fond o'
+navigatin' about Cape Town with a South-Easter blowin' these days. I can
+hear those teeth click, so to say."
+
+"Ah, those teeth," said Hooper, and his hand went to his waistcoat pocket
+once more. "Permanent things false teeth are. You read about 'em in all
+the murder trials."
+
+"What d'you suppose the captain knew--or did?" I asked.
+
+"I never turned my searchlight that way," Pyecroft answered unblushingly.
+
+We all reflected together, and drummed on empty beer bottles as the
+picnic-party, sunburned, wet, and sandy, passed our door singing "The
+Honeysuckle and the Bee."
+
+"Pretty girl under that kapje," said Pyecroft.
+
+"They never circulated his description?" said Pritchard.
+
+"I was askin' you before these gentlemen came," said Hooper to me,
+"whether you knew Wankies--on the way to the Zambesi--beyond Buluwayo?"
+
+"Would he pass there--tryin' to get to that Lake what's 'is name?" said
+Pritchard.
+
+Hooper shook his head and went on: "There's a curious bit o' line there,
+you see. It runs through solid teak forest--a sort o' mahogany really--
+seventy-two miles without a curve. I've had a train derailed there twenty-
+three times in forty miles. I was up there a month ago relievin' a sick
+inspector, you see. He told me to look out for a couple of tramps in the
+teak."
+
+"Two?" Pyecroft said. "I don't envy that other man if----"
+
+"We get heaps of tramps up there since the war. The inspector told me I'd
+find 'em at M'Bindwe siding waiting to go North. He'd given 'em some grub
+and quinine, you see. I went up on a construction train. I looked out for
+'em. I saw them miles ahead along the straight, waiting in the teak. One
+of 'em was standin' up by the dead-end of tke siding an' the other was
+squattin' down lookin' up at 'im, you see."
+
+"What did you do for 'em?" said Pritchard.
+
+"There wasn't much I could do, except bury 'em. There'd been a bit of a
+thunderstorm in the teak, you see, and they were both stone dead and as
+black as charcoal. That's what they really were, you see--charcoal. They
+fell to bits when we tried to shift 'em. The man who was standin' up had
+the false teeth. I saw 'em shinin' against the black. Fell to bits he did
+too, like his mate squatting down an' watchin' him, both of 'em all wet in
+the rain. Both burned to charcoal, you see. And--that's what made me ask
+about marks just now--the false-toother was tattooed on the arms and
+chest--a crown and foul anchor with M.V. above."
+
+"I've seen that," said Pyecroft quickly. "It was so."
+
+"But if he was all charcoal-like?" said Pritchard, shuddering.
+
+"You know how writing shows up white on a burned letter? Well, it was like
+that, you see. We buried 'em in the teak and I kept... But he was a friend
+of you two gentlemen, you see."
+
+Mr. Hooper brought his hand away from his waistcoat-pocket--empty.
+
+Pritchard covered his face with his hands for a moment, like a child
+shutting out an ugliness.
+
+"And to think of her at Hauraki!" he murmured--"with 'er 'air-ribbon on my
+beer. 'Ada,' she said to her niece... Oh, my Gawd!"...
+
+  "On a summer afternoon, when the honeysuckle blooms,
+  And all Nature seems at rest,
+  Underneath the bower, 'mid the perfume of the flower,
+  Sat a maiden with the one she loves the best----"
+
+sang the picnic-party waiting for their train at Glengariff.
+
+"Well, I don't know how you feel about it," said Pyecroft, "but 'avin'
+seen 'is face for five consecutive nights on end, I'm inclined to finish
+what's left of the beer an' thank Gawd he's dead!"
+
+
+
+
+BELOW THE MILL DAM
+
+"OUR FATHERS ALSO"
+
+  By--they are by with mirth and tears,
+  Wit or the works of Desire--
+  Cushioned about on the kindly years
+  Between the wall and the fire.
+
+  The grapes are pressed, the corn is shocked--
+  Standeth no more to glean;
+  For the Gates of Love and Learning locked
+  When they went out between.
+
+  All lore our Lady Venus bares
+  Signalled it was or told
+  By the dear lips long given to theirs
+  And longer to the mould.
+
+  All Profit, all Device, all Truth
+  Written it was or said
+  By the mighty men of their mighty youth.
+  Which is mighty being dead.
+
+  The film that floats before their eyes
+  The Temple's Veil they call;
+  And the dust that on the Shewbread lies
+  Is holy over all.
+
+  Warn them of seas that slip our yoke
+  Of slow conspiring stars--
+  The ancient Front of Things unbroke
+  But heavy with new wars?
+
+  By--they are by with mirth and tears.
+  Wit or the waste of Desire--
+  Cushioned about on the kindly years
+  Between the wall and the fire.
+
+
+BELOW THE MILL DAM
+
+"Book--Book--Domesday Book!" They were letting in the water for the evening
+stint at Robert's Mill, and the wooden Wheel where lived the Spirit of the
+Mill settled to its nine hundred year old song: "Here Azor, a freeman,
+held one rod, but it never paid geld. _Nun-nun-nunquam geldavit_. Here
+Reinbert has one villein and four cottars with one plough--and wood for
+six hogs and two fisheries of sixpence and a mill of ten shillings--_unum
+molinum_--one mill. Reinbert's mill--Robert's Mill. Then and afterwards
+and now--_tunc et post et modo_--Robert's Mill. Book--Book--Domesday
+Book!"
+
+"I confess," said the Black Rat on the crossbeam, luxuriously trimming his
+whiskers--"I confess I am not above appreciating my position and all it
+means." He was a genuine old English black rat, a breed which, report
+says, is rapidly diminishing before the incursions of the brown variety.
+
+"Appreciation is the surest sign of inadequacy," said the Grey Cat, coiled
+up on a piece of sacking.
+
+"But I know what you mean," she added. "To sit by right at the heart of
+things--eh?"
+
+"Yes," said the Black Rat, as the old mill shook and the heavy stones
+thuttered on the grist. "To possess--er--all this environment as an
+integral part of one's daily life must insensibly of course ... You see?"
+
+"I feel," said the Grey Cat. "Indeed, if _we_ are not saturated with the
+spirit of the Mill, who should be?"
+
+"Book--Book--Domesday Book!" the Wheel, set to his work, was running off
+the tenure of the whole rape, for he knew Domesday Book backwards and
+forwards: "_In Ferle tenuit Abbatia de Wiltuna unam hidam et unam virgam
+et dimidiam. Nunquam geldavit_. And Agemond, a freeman, has half a hide
+and one rod. I remember Agemond well. Charmin' fellow--friend of mine. He
+married a Norman girl in the days when we rather looked down on the
+Normans as upstarts. An' Agemond's dead? So he is. Eh, dearie me! dearie
+me! I remember the wolves howling outside his door in the big frost of Ten
+Fifty-Nine.... _Essewelde hundredum nunquam geldum reddidit_. Book! Book!
+Domesday Book!"
+
+"After all," the Grey Cat continued, "atmospere is life. It is the
+influences under which we live that count in the long run. Now, outside"--
+she cocked one ear towards the half-opened door--"there is an absurd
+convention that rats and cats are, I won't go so far as to say natural
+enemies, but opposed forces. Some such ruling may be crudely effective--I
+don't for a minute presume to set up my standards as final--among the
+ditches; but from the larger point of view that one gains by living at the
+heart of things, it seems for a rule of life a little overstrained. Why,
+because some of your associates have, shall I say, liberal views on the
+ultimate destination of a sack of--er--middlings don't they call them----"
+
+"Something of that sort," said the Black Rat, a most sharp and sweet-
+toothed judge of everything ground in the mill for the last three years.
+
+"Thanks--middlings be it. _Why_, as I was saying, must I disarrange my fur
+and my digestion to chase you round the dusty arena whenever we happen to
+meet?"
+
+"As little reason," said the Black Rat, "as there is for me, who, I trust,
+am a person of ordinarily decent instincts, to wait till you have gone on
+a round of calls, and then to assassinate your very charming children."
+
+"Exactly! It has its humorous side though." The Grey Cat yawned. "The
+miller seems afflicted by it. He shouted large and vague threats to my
+address, last night at tea, that he wasn't going to keep cats who 'caught
+no mice.' Those were his words. I remember the grammar sticking in my
+throat like a herring-bone."
+
+"And what did you do?"
+
+"What does one do when a barbarian utters? One ceases to utter and
+removes. I removed--towards his pantry. It was a _riposte_ he might
+appreciate."
+
+"Really those people grow absolutely insufferable," said the Black Rat.
+"There is a local ruffian who answers to the name of Mangles--a builder--
+who has taken possession of the outhouses on the far side of the Wheel for
+the last fortnight. He has constructed cubical horrors in red brick where
+those deliciously picturesque pigstyes used to stand. Have you noticed?"
+
+"There has been much misdirected activity of late among the humans. They
+jabber inordinately. I haven't yet been able to arrive at their reason for
+existence." The Cat yawned.
+
+"A couple of them came in here last week with wires, and fixed them all
+about the walls. Wires protected by some abominable composition, ending in
+iron brackets with glass bulbs. Utterly useless for any purpose and
+artistically absolutely hideous. What do they mean?"
+
+"Aaah! I have known _four_-and-twenty leaders of revolt in Faenza," said
+the Cat, who kept good company with the boarders spending a summer at the
+Mill Farm. "It means nothing except that humans occasionally bring their
+dogs with them. I object to dogs in all forms."
+
+"Shouldn't object to dogs," said the Wheel sleepily.... "The Abbot of
+Wilton kept the best pack in the county. He enclosed all the Harryngton
+Woods to Sturt Common. Aluric, a freeman, was dispossessed of his holding.
+They tried the case at Lewes, but he got no change out of William de
+Warrenne on the bench. William de Warrenne fined Aluric eight and
+fourpence for treason, and the Abbot of Wilton excommunicated him for
+blasphemy. Aluric was no sportsman. Then the Abbot's brother married ...
+I've forgotten her name, but she was a charmin' little woman. The Lady
+Philippa was her daughter. That was after the barony was conferred. She
+rode devilish straight to hounds. They were a bit throatier than we breed
+now, but a good pack: one of the best. The Abbot kept 'em in splendid
+shape. Now, who was the woman the Abbot kept? Book--Book! I shall have to
+go right back to Domesday and work up the centuries: _Modo per omnia
+reddit burgum tunc--tunc--tunc_! Was it _burgum_ or _hundredum_? I shall
+remember in a minute. There's no hurry." He paused as he turned over
+silvered with showering drops.
+
+"This won't do," said the Waters in the sluice. "Keep moving."
+
+The Wheel swung forward; the Waters roared on the buckets and dropped down
+to the darkness below.
+
+"Noisier than usual," said the Black Rat. "It must have been raining up
+the valley."
+
+"Floods maybe," said the Wheel dreamily. "It isn't the proper season, but
+they can come without warning. I shall never forget the big one--when the
+Miller went to sleep and forgot to open the hatches. More than two hundred
+years ago it was, but I recall it distinctly. Most unsettling."
+
+"We lifted that wheel off his bearings," cried the Waters. "We said, 'Take
+away that bauble!' And in the morning he was five mile down the valley--
+hung up in a tree."
+
+"Vulgar!" said the Cat. "But I am sure he never lost his dignity."
+
+"We don't know. He looked like the Ace of Diamonds when we had finished
+with him.... Move on there! Keep on moving. Over! Get over!"
+
+"And why on this day more than any other," said the Wheel statelily. "I am
+not aware that my department requires the stimulus of external pressure to
+keep it up to its duties. I trust I have the elementary instincts of a
+gentleman."
+
+"Maybe," the Waters answered together, leaping down on the buckets. "We
+only know that you are very stiff on your bearings. Over, get over!"
+
+The Wheel creaked and groaned. There was certainly greater pressure upon
+him that he had ever felt, and his revolutions had increased from six and
+three-quarters to eight and a third per minute. But the uproar between the
+narrow, weed-hung walls annoyed the Grey Cat.
+
+"Isn't it almost time," she said plaintively, "that the person who is paid
+to understand these things shuts off those vehement drippings with that
+screw-thing on the top of that box-thing."
+
+"They'll be shut off at eight o'clock as usual," said Rat; "then we can go
+to dinner."
+
+"But we shan't be shut off till ever so late," said the Waters gaily. "We
+shall keep it up all night."
+
+"The ineradicable offensiveness of youth is partially compensated for by
+its eternal hopefulness," said the Cat. "Our dam is not, I am glad to say,
+designed to furnish water for more than four hours at a time. Reserve is
+Life."
+
+"Thank goodness!" said the Black Rat. "Then they can return to their
+native ditches."
+
+"Ditches!" cried the Waters; "Raven's Gill Brook is no ditch. It is almost
+navigable, and _we_ come from there away." They slid over solid and
+compact till the Wheel thudded under their weight.
+
+"Raven's Gill Brook," said the Rat. "_I_ never heard of Raven's Gill."
+
+"We are the waters of Harpenden Brook--down from under Callton Rise. Phew!
+how the race stinks compared with the heather country." Another five foot
+of water flung itself against the Wheel, broke, roared, gurgled, and was
+gone.
+
+"Indeed," said the Grey Cat, "I am sorry to tell you that Raven's Gill
+Brook is cut off from this valley by an absolutely impassable range of
+mountains, and Callton Rise is more than nine miles away. It belongs to
+another system entirely."
+
+"Ah yes," said the Rat, grinning, "but we forget that, for the young,
+water always runs uphill."
+
+"Oh, hopeless! hopeless! hopeless!" cried the Waters, descending open-
+palmed upon the Wheel "There is nothing between here and Raven's Gill
+Brook that a hundred yards of channelling and a few square feet of
+concrete could not remove; and hasn't removed!"
+
+"And Harpenden Brook is north of Raven's Gill and runs into Raven's Gill
+at the foot of Callton Rise, where ilex trees are, and _we_ come from
+there!" These were the glassy, clear waters of the high chalk.
+
+"And Batten's Ponds, that are fed by springs, have been led through
+Trott's Wood, taking the spare water from the old Witches' Spring under
+Churt Haw, and we--we--_we_ are their combined waters!" Those were the
+Waters from the upland bogs and moors--a porter-coloured, dusky, and foam-
+flecked flood.
+
+"It's all very interesting," purred the Cat to the sliding waters, "and I
+have no doubt that Trott's Woods and Bott's Woods are tremendously
+important places; but if you could manage to do your work--whose value I
+don't in the least dispute--a little more soberly, I, for one, should be
+grateful."
+
+"Book--book--book--book--book--Domesday Book!" The urged Wheel was fairly
+clattering now: "In Burgelstaltone a monk holds of Earl Godwin one hide
+and a half with eight villeins. There is a church--and a monk.... I
+remember that monk. Blessed if he could rattle his rosary off any quicker
+than I am doing now ... and wood for seven hogs. I must be running twelve
+to the minute ... almost as fast as Steam. Damnable invention, Steam! ...
+Surely it's time we went to dinner or prayers--or something. Can't keep up
+this pressure, day in and day out, and not feel it. I don't mind for
+myself, of course. _Noblesse oblige_, you know. I'm only thinking of the
+Upper and the Nether Millstones. They came out of the common rock. They
+can't be expected to----"
+
+"Don't worry on our account, please," said the Millstones huskily. "So
+long as you supply the power we'll supply the weight and the bite."
+
+"Isn't it a trifle blasphemous, though, to work you in this way?" grunted
+the Wheel. "I seem to remember something about the Mills of God grinding
+'slowly.' _Slowly_ was the word!"
+
+"But we are not the Mills of God. We're only the Upper and the Nether
+Millstones. We have received no instructions to be anything else. We are
+actuated by power transmitted through you."
+
+"Ah, but let us be merciful as we are strong. Think of all the beautiful
+little plants that grow on my woodwork. There are five varieties of rare
+moss within less than one square yard--and all these delicate jewels of
+nature are being grievously knocked about by this excessive rush of the
+water."
+
+"Umph!" growled the Millstones. "What with your religious scruples and
+your taste for botany we'd hardly know you for the Wheel that put the
+carter's son under last autumn. You never worried about _him_!"
+
+"He ought to have known better."
+
+"So ought your jewels of nature. Tell 'em to grow where it's safe."
+
+"How a purely mercantile life debases and brutalises!" said the Cat to the
+Rat.
+
+"They were such beautiful little plants too," said the Rat tenderly.
+"Maiden's-tongue and hart's-hair fern trellising all over the wall just as
+they do on the sides of churches in the Downs. Think what a joy the sight
+of them must be to our sturdy peasants pulling hay!"
+
+"Golly!" said the Millstones. "There's nothing like coming to the heart of
+things for information"; and they returned to the song that all English
+water-mills have sung from time beyond telling:
+
+  There was a jovial miller once
+  Lived on the River Dee,
+  And this the burden of his song
+  For ever used to be.
+
+Then, as fresh grist poured in and dulled the note:
+
+  I care for nobody--no not I,
+  And nobody cares for me.
+
+"Even these stones have absorbed something of our atmosphere," said the
+Grey Cat. "Nine-tenths of the trouble in this world comes from lack of
+detachment."
+
+"One of your people died from forgetting that, didn't she?" said the Rat.
+
+"One only. The example has sufficed us for generations."
+
+"Ah! but what happened to Don't Care?" the Waters demanded.
+
+"Brutal riding to death of the casual analogy is another mark of
+provincialism!" The Grey Cat raised her tufted chin. "I am going to sleep.
+With my social obligations I must snatch rest when I can; but, as our old
+friend here says, _Noblesse oblige_.... Pity me! Three functions to-night
+in the village, and a barn dance across the valley!"
+
+"There's no chance, I suppose, of your looking in on the loft about two.
+Some of our young people are going to amuse themselves with a new sacque-
+dance--best white flour only," said the Black Rat.
+
+"I believe I am officially supposed not to countenance that sort of thing,
+but youth is youth. ... By the way, the humans set my milk-bowl in the
+loft these days; I hope your youngsters respect it."
+
+"My dear lady," said the Black Rat, bowing, "you grieve me. You hurt me
+inexpressibly. After all these years, too!"
+
+"A general crush is so mixed--highways and hedges--all that sort of thing
+--and no one can answer for one's best friends. _I_ never try. So long as
+mine are amusin' and in full voice, and can hold their own at a tile-
+party, I'm as catholic as these mixed waters in the dam here!"
+
+"We aren't mixed. We _have_ mixed. We are one now," said the Waters
+sulkily.
+
+"Still uttering?" said the Cat. "Never mind, here's the Miller coming to
+shut you off. Ye-es, I have known--_four_--or five is it?--and twenty
+leaders of revolt in Faenza.... A little more babble in the dam, a little
+more noise in the sluice, a little extra splashing on the wheel,
+and then----"
+
+"They will find that nothing has occurred," said the Black Rat. "The old
+things persist and survive and are recognised--our old friend here first
+of all. By the way," he turned toward the Wheel, "I believe we have to
+congratulate you on your latest honour."
+
+"Profoundly well deserved--even if he had never--as he has---laboured
+strenuously through a long life for the amelioration of millkind," said
+the Cat, who belonged to many tile and outhouse committees. "Doubly
+deserved, I may say, for the silent and dignified rebuke his existence
+offers to the clattering, fidgety-footed demands of--er--some people. What
+form did the honour take?"
+
+"It was," said the Wheel bashfully, "a machine-moulded pinion."
+
+"Pinions! Oh, how heavenly!" the Black Rat sighed. "I never see a bat
+without wishing for wings."
+
+"Not exactly that sort of pinion," said the Wheel, "but a really ornate
+circle of toothed iron wheels. Absurd, of course, but gratifying. Mr.
+Mangles and an associate herald invested me with it personally--on my left
+rim--the side that you can't see from the mill. I hadn't meant to say
+anything about it--or the new steel straps round my axles--bright red, you
+know--to be worn on all occasions--but, without false modesty, I assure
+you that the recognition cheered me not a little."
+
+"How intensely gratifying!" said the Black Rat. "I must really steal an
+hour between lights some day and see what they are doing on your left
+side."
+
+"By the way, have you any light on this recent activity of Mr. Mangles?"
+the Grey Cat asked. "He seems to be building small houses on the far side
+of the tail-race. Believe me, I don't ask from any vulgar curiosity."
+
+"It affects our Order," said the Black Rat simply but firmly.
+
+"Thank you," said the Wheel. "Let me see if I can tabulate it properly.
+Nothing like system in accounts of all kinds. Book! Book! Book! On the
+side of the Wheel towards the hundred of Burgelstaltone, where till now
+was a stye of three hogs, Mangles, a freeman, with four villeins, and two
+carts of two thousand bricks, has a new small house of five yards and a
+half, and one roof of iron and a floor of cement. Then, now, and
+afterwards beer in large tankards. And Felden, a stranger, with three
+villeins and one very great cart, deposits on it one engine of iron and
+brass and a small iron mill of four feet, and a broad strap of leather.
+And Mangles, the builder, with two villeins, constructs the floor for the
+same, and a floor of new brick with wires for the small mill. There are
+there also chalices filled with iron and water, in number fifty-seven. The
+whole is valued at one hundred and seventy-four pounds.... I'm sorry I
+can't make myself clearer, but you can see for yourself."
+
+"Amazingly lucid," said the Cat. She was the more to be admired because
+the language of Domesday Book is not, perhaps, the clearest medium wherein
+to describe a small but complete electric-light installation, deriving its
+power from a water-wheel by means of cogs and gearing.
+
+"See for yourself--by all means, see for yourself," said the Waters,
+spluttering and choking with mirth.
+
+"Upon my word," said the Black Rat furiously, "I may be at fault, but I
+wholly fail to perceive where these offensive eavesdroppers--er--come in.
+We were discussing a matter that solely affected our Order."
+
+Suddenly they heard, as they had heard many times before, the Miller
+shutting off the water. To the rattle and rumble of the labouring stones
+succeeded thick silence, punctuated with little drops from the stayed
+wheel. Then some water-bird in the dam fluttered her wings as she slid to
+her nest, and the plop of a water-rat sounded like the fall of a log in
+the water.
+
+"It is all over--it always is all over at just this time. Listen, the
+Miller is going to bed--as usual. Nothing has occurred," said the Cat.
+
+Something creaked in the house where the pig-styes had stood, as metal
+engaged on metal with a clink and a burr.
+
+"Shall I turn her on?" cried the Miller.
+
+"Ay," said the voice from the dynamo-house.
+
+"A human in Mangles' new house!" the Rat squeaked.
+
+"What of it?" said the Grey Cat. "Even supposing Mr. Mangles' cats'-meat-
+coloured hovel ululated with humans, can't you see for yourself--that--?"
+
+There was a solid crash of released waters leaping upon the wheel more
+furiously than ever, a grinding of cogs, a hum like the hum of a hornet,
+and then the unvisited darkness of the old mill was scattered by
+intolerable white light. It threw up every cobweb, every burl and knot in
+the beams and the floor; till the shadows behind the flakes of rough
+plaster on the wall lay clear-cut as shadows of mountains on the
+photographed moon.
+
+"See! See! See!" hissed the Waters in full flood. "Yes, see for
+yourselves. Nothing has occurred. Can't you see?"
+
+The Rat, amazed, had fallen from his foothold and lay half-stunned on the
+floor. The Cat, following her instinct, leaped nigh to the ceiling, and
+with flattened ears and bared teeth backed in a corner ready to fight
+whatever terror might be loosed on her. But nothing happened. Through the
+long aching minutes nothing whatever happened, and her wire-brush tail
+returned slowly to its proper shape.
+
+"Whatever it is," she said at last, "it's overdone. They can never keep it
+up, you know."
+
+"Much you know," said the Waters. "Over you go, old man. You can take the
+full head of us now. Those new steel axle-straps of yours can stand
+anything. Come along, Raven's Gill, Harpenden, Callton Rise, Batten's
+Ponds, Witches' Spring, all together! Let's show these gentlemen how to
+work!"
+
+"But--but--I thought it was a decoration. Why--why--why--it only means
+more work for _me_!"
+
+"Exactly. You're to supply about sixty eight-candle lights when required.
+But they won't be all in use at once----"
+
+"Ah! I thought as much," said the Cat. "The reaction is bound to come."
+
+"_And_" said the Waters, "you will do the ordinary work of the mill as
+well."
+
+"Impossible!" the old Wheel quivered as it drove. "Aluric never did it--
+nor Azor, nor Reinbert. Not even William de Warrenne or the Papal Legate.
+There's no precedent for it. I tell you there's no precedent for working a
+wheel like this."
+
+"Wait a while! We're making one as fast as we can. Aluric and Co. are
+dead. So's the Papal Legate. You've no notion how dead they are, but we're
+here--the Waters of Five Separate Systems. We're just as interesting as
+Domesday Book. Would you like to hear about the land-tenure in Trott's
+Wood? It's squat-right, chiefly." The mocking Waters leaped one over the
+other, chuckling and chattering profanely.
+
+"In that hundred Jenkins, a tinker, with one dog--_unis canis_--holds, by
+the Grace of God and a habit he has of working hard, _unam hidam_--a large
+potato patch. Charmin' fellow, Jenkins. Friend of ours. Now, who the dooce
+did Jenkins keep? ... In the hundred of Callton is one charcoal-burner
+_irreligiosissimus homo_--a bit of a rip--but a thorough sportsman. _Ibi
+est ecclesia. Non multum_. Not much of a church, _quia_ because,
+_episcopus_ the Vicar irritated the Nonconformists _tunc et post et modo_
+--then and afterwards and now--until they built a cut-stone Congregational
+chapel with red brick facings that did not return itself--_defendebat se_
+--at four thousand pounds."
+
+"Charcoal-burners, vicars, schismatics, and red brick facings," groaned
+the Wheel. "But this is sheer blasphemy. What waters have they let in upon
+me?"
+
+"Floods from the gutters. Faugh, this light is positively sickening!" said
+the Cat, rearranging her fur.
+
+"We come down from the clouds or up from the springs, exactly like all
+other waters everywhere. Is that what's surprising you?" sang the Waters.
+
+"Of course not. I know my work if you don't. What I complain of is your
+lack of reverence and repose. You've no instinct of deference towards your
+betters--your heartless parody of the Sacred volume (the Wheel meant
+Domesday Book)--proves it."
+
+"Our betters?" said the Waters most solemnly. "What is there in all this
+dammed race that hasn't come down from the clouds, or----"
+
+"Spare me that talk, please," the Wheel persisted. "You'd _never_
+understand. It's the tone--your tone that we object to."
+
+"Yes. It's your tone," said the Black Rat, picking himself up limb by
+limb.
+
+"If you thought a trifle more about the work you're supposed to do, and a
+trifle less about your precious feelings, you'd render a little more duty
+in return for the power vested in you--we mean wasted on you," the Waters
+replied.
+
+"I have been some hundreds of years laboriously acquiring the knowledge
+which you see fit to challenge so light-heartedly," the Wheel jarred.
+
+"Challenge him! Challenge him!" clamoured the little waves riddling down
+through the tail-race. "As well now as later. Take him up!"
+
+The main mass of the Waters plunging on the Wheel shocked that well-bolted
+structure almost into box-lids by saying: "Very good. Tell us what you
+suppose yourself to be doing at the present moment."
+
+"Waiving the offensive form of your question, I answer, purely as a matter
+of courtesy, that I am engaged in the trituration of farinaceous
+substances whose ultimate destination it would be a breach of the trust
+reposed in me to reveal."
+
+"Fiddle!" said the Waters. "We knew it all along! The first direct
+question shows his ignorance of his own job. Listen, old thing. Thanks to
+us, you are now actuating a machine of whose construction you know
+nothing, that that machine may, over wires of whose ramifications you are,
+by your very position, profoundly ignorant, deliver a power which you can
+never realise, to localities beyond the extreme limits of your mental
+horizon, with the object of producing phenomena which in your wildest
+dreams (if you ever dream) you could never comprehend. Is that clear, or
+would you like it all in words of four syllables?"
+
+"Your assumptions are deliciously sweeping, but may I point out that a
+decent and--the dear old Abbot of Wilton would have put it in his resonant
+monkish Latin much better than I can--a scholarly reserve, does not
+necessarily connote blank vacuity of mind on all subjects."
+
+"Ah, the dear old Abbot of Wilton," said the Rat sympathetically, as one
+nursed in that bosom. "Charmin' fellow--thorough scholar and gentleman.
+Such a pity!"
+
+"Oh, Sacred Fountains!" the Waters were fairly boiling. "He goes out of
+his way to expose his ignorance by triple bucketfuls. He creaks to high
+Heaven that he is hopelessly behind the common order of things! He invites
+the streams of Five Watersheds to witness his su-su-su-pernal
+incompetence, and then he talks as though there were untold reserves of
+knowledge behind him that he is too modest to bring forward. For a bland,
+circular, absolutely sincere impostor, you're a miracle, O Wheel!"
+
+"I do not pretend to be anything more than an integral portion of an
+accepted and not altogether mushroom institution."
+
+"Quite so," said the Waters. "Then go round--hard----"
+
+"To what end?" asked the Wheel.
+
+"Till a big box of tanks in your house begins to fizz and fume--gassing is
+the proper word."
+
+"It would be," said the Cat, sniffing.
+
+"That will show that your accumulators are full. When the accumulators are
+exhausted, and the lights burn badly, you will find us whacking you round
+and round again."
+
+"The end of life as decreed by Mangles and his creatures is to go whacking
+round and round for ever," said the Cat.
+
+"In order," the Rat said, "that you may throw raw and unnecessary
+illumination upon all the unloveliness in the world. Unloveliness which we
+shall--er--have always with us. At the same time you will riotously
+neglect the so-called little but vital graces that make up Life."
+
+"Yes, Life," said the Cat, "with its dim delicious half-tones and veiled
+indeterminate distances. Its surprisals, escapes, encounters, and dizzying
+leaps--its full-throated choruses in honour of the morning star, and its
+melting reveries beneath the sun-warmed wall."
+
+"Oh, you can go on the tiles, Pussalina, just the same as usual," said the
+laughing Waters. "_We_ sha'n't interfere with you."
+
+"On the tiles, forsooth!" hissed the Cat.
+
+"Well, that's what it amounts to," persisted the Waters. "We see a good
+deal of the minor graces of life on our way down to our job."
+
+"And--but I fear I speak to deaf ears--do they never impress you?" said
+the Wheel.
+
+"Enormously," said the Waters. "We have already learned six refined
+synonyms for loafing."
+
+"But (here again I feel as though preaching in the wilderness) it never
+occurs to you that there may exist some small difference between the
+wholly animal--ah--rumination of bovine minds and the discerning, well-
+apportioned leisure of the finer type of intellect?"
+
+"Oh, yes. The bovine mind goes to sleep under a hedge and makes no bones
+about it when it's shouted at. We've seen _that_--in haying-time--all
+along the meadows. The finer type is wide awake enough to fudge up excuses
+for shirking, and mean enough to get stuffy when its excuses aren't
+accepted. Turn over!"
+
+"But, my good people, no gentleman gets stuffy as you call it. A certain
+proper pride, to put it no higher, forbids---"
+
+"Nothing that he wants to do if he really wants to do it. Get along! What
+are you giving us? D'you suppose we've scoured half heaven in the clouds,
+and half earth in the mists, to be taken in at this time of the day by a
+bone-idle, old hand-quern of your type?"
+
+"It is not for me to bandy personalities with you. I can only say that I
+simply decline to accept the situation."
+
+"Decline away. It doesn't make any odds. They'll probably put in a turbine
+if you decline too much."
+
+"What's a turbine?" said the Wheel, quickly.
+
+"A little thing you don't see, that performs surprising revolutions. But
+you won't decline. You'll hang on to your two nice red-strapped axles and
+your new machine-moulded pinions like--a--like a leech on a lily stem!
+There's centuries of work in your old bones if you'd only apply yourself
+to it; and, mechanically, an overshot wheel with this head of water is
+about as efficient as a turbine."
+
+"So in future I am to be considered mechanically? I have been painted by
+at least five Royal Academicians."
+
+"Oh, you can be painted by five hundred when you aren't at work, of
+course. But while you are at work you'll work. You won't half-stop and
+think and talk about rare plants and dicky-birds and farinaceous fiduciary
+interests. You'll continue to revolve, and this new head of water will see
+that you do so continue."
+
+"It is a matter on which it would be exceedingly ill-advised to form a
+hasty or a premature conclusion. I will give it my most careful
+consideration," said the Wheel.
+
+"Please do," said the Waters gravely. "Hullo! Here's the Miller again."
+
+The Cat coiled herself in a picturesque attitude on the softest corner of
+a sack, and the Rat without haste, yet certainly without rest, slipped
+behind the sacking as though an appointment had just occurred to him.
+
+In the doorway, with the young Engineer, stood the Miller grinning
+amazedly.
+
+"Well--well--well! 'tis true-ly won'erful. An' what a power o' dirt! It
+come over me now looking at these lights, that I've never rightly seen my
+own mill before. She needs a lot bein' done to her."
+
+"Ah! I suppose one must make oneself moderately agreeable to the baser
+sort. They have their uses. This thing controls the dairy." The Cat,
+pincing on her toes, came forward and rubbed her head against the Miller's
+knee.
+
+"Ay, you pretty puss," he said, stooping. "You're as big a cheat as the
+rest of 'em that catch no mice about me. A won'erful smooth-skinned,
+rough-tongued cheat you be. I've more than half a mind----"
+
+"She does her work well," said the Engineer, pointing to where the Rat's
+beady eyes showed behind the sacking. "Cats and Rats livin' together--
+see?"
+
+"Too much they do--too long they've done. I'm sick and tired of it. Go and
+take a swim and larn to find your own vittles honest when you come out,
+Pussy."
+
+"My word!" said the Waters, as a sprawling Cat landed all unannounced in
+the centre of the tail-race. "Is that you, Mewsalina? You seem to have
+been quarrelling with your best friend. Get over to the left. It's
+shallowest there. Up on that alder-root with all four paws. Good-night!"
+
+"You'll never get any they rats," said the Miller, as the young Engineer
+struck wrathfully with his stick at the sacking. "They're not the common
+sort. They're the old black English sort."
+
+"Are they, by Jove? I must catch one to stuff, some day."
+
+*       *       *       *       *
+
+Six months later, in the chill of a January afternoon, they were letting
+in the Waters as usual.
+
+"Come along! It's both gears this evening," said the Wheel, kicking
+joyously in the first rush of the icy stream. "There's a heavy load of
+grist just in from Lamber's Wood. Eleven miles it came in an hour and a
+half in our new motor-lorry, and the Miller's rigged five new five-candle
+lights in his cow-stables. I'm feeding 'em to-night. There's a cow due to
+calve. Oh, while I think of it, what's the news from Callton Rise?"
+
+"The waters are finding their level as usual--but why do you ask?" said
+the deep outpouring Waters.
+
+"Because Mangles and Felden and the Miller are talking of increasing the
+plant here and running a saw-mill by electricity. I was wondering whether
+we----"
+
+"I beg your pardon," said the Waters chuckling. "_What_ did you say?"
+
+"Whether _we_, of course, had power enough for the job. It will be a
+biggish contract. There's all Harpenden Brook to be considered and
+Batten's Ponds as well, and Witches' Fountain, and the Churt's Hawd
+system.
+
+"We've power enough for anything in the world," said the Waters. "The only
+question is whether you could stand the strain if we came down on you full
+head."
+
+"Of course I can," said the Wheel. "Mangles is going to turn me into a set
+of turbines--beauties."
+
+"Oh--er--I suppose it's the frost that has made us a little thick-headed,
+but to whom are we talking?" asked the amazed Waters.
+
+"To me--the Spirit of the Mill, of course."
+
+"Not to the old Wheel, then?"
+
+"I happen to be living in the old Wheel just at present. When the turbines
+are installed I shall go and live in them. What earthly difference does it
+make?"
+
+"Absolutely none," said the Waters, "in the earth or in the waters under
+the earth. But we thought turbines didn't appeal to you."
+
+"Not like turbines? Me? My dear fellows, turbines are good for fifteen
+hundred revolutions a minute--and with our power we can drive 'em at full
+speed. Why, there's nothing we couldn't grind or saw or illuminate or heat
+with a set of turbines! That's to say if all the Five Watersheds are
+agreeable."
+
+"Oh, we've been agreeable for ever so long."
+
+"Then why didn't you tell me?"
+
+"Don't know. Suppose it slipped our memory."
+
+The Waters were holding themselves in for fear of bursting with mirth.
+
+"How careless of you! You should keep abreast of the age, my dear fellows.
+We might have settled it long ago, if you'd only spoken. Yes, four good
+turbines and a neat brick penstock--eh? This old Wheel's absurdly out of
+date."
+
+"Well," said the Cat, who after a little proud seclusion had returned to
+her place impenitent as ever. "Praised be Pasht and the Old Gods, that
+whatever may have happened _I_, at least, have preserved the Spirit of the
+Mill!"
+
+She looked round as expecting her faithful ally, the Black Rat; but that
+very week the Engineer had caught and stuffed him, and had put him in a
+glass case; he being a genuine old English black rat. That breed, the
+report says, is rapidly diminishing before the incursions of the brown
+variety.
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's Traffics and Discoveries, by Rudyard Kipling
+
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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Traffics and Discoveries, 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: Traffics and Discoveries
+
+Author: Rudyard Kipling
+
+Posting Date: December 11, 2011 [EBook #9790]
+Release Date: January, 2006
+First Posted: October 17, 2003
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK TRAFFICS AND DISCOVERIES ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Juliet Sutherland, Keith M. Eckrich and PG
+Distributed Proofreaders
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+TRAFFICS AND DISCOVERIES
+
+
+By Rudyard Kipling
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+_from the Masjid-al-Aqsa of Sayyid Ahmed(Wahabi)_
+
+THE CAPTIVE
+
+_Poseidon'S Law_
+
+THE BONDS OF DISCIPLINE
+
+_The Runners_
+
+A SAHIBS' WAR
+
+_The Wet Litany_
+
+"THEIR LAWFUL OCCASIONS"--PART I.
+
+"THEIR LAWFUL OCCASIONS"--PART II.
+
+_The King's Task_
+
+THE COMPREHENSION OF PRIVATE COOPER
+
+_The Necessitarian_
+
+STEAM TACTICS
+
+_Kaspar's Song in "Varda"_
+
+"WIRELESS"
+
+_Song of the Old Guard_
+
+THE ARMY OF A DREAM--PART I.
+
+THE ARMY OF A DREAM--PART II.
+
+_The Return of the Children_
+
+"THEY"
+
+_From Lyden's "Irenius_"
+
+MRS. BATHURST
+
+     "_Our Fathers Also_"
+
+BELOW THE MILL DAM
+
+
+
+
+
+THE CAPTIVE
+
+FROM THE MASJID-AL-AQSA OF SAYYID AHMED (WAHABI)
+
+  Not with an outcry to Allah nor any complaining
+  He answered his name at the muster and stood to the chaining.
+  When the twin anklets were nipped on the leg-bars that held them,
+  He brotherly greeted the armourers stooping to weld them.
+  Ere the sad dust of the marshalled feet of the chain-gang swallowed him,
+  Observing him nobly at ease, I alighted and followed him.
+  Thus we had speech by the way, but not touching his sorrow
+  Rather his red Yesterday and his regal To-morrow,
+  Wherein he statelily moved to the clink of his chains unregarded,
+  Nowise abashed but contented to drink of the potion awarded.
+  Saluting aloofly his Fate, he made swift with his story;
+  And the words of his mouth were as slaves spreading carpets of glory
+  Embroidered with names of the Djinns--a miraculous weaving--
+  But the cool and perspicuous eye overbore unbelieving.
+  So I submitted myself to the limits of rapture--
+  Bound by this man we had bound, amid captives his capture--
+  Till he returned me to earth and the visions departed;
+  But on him be the Peace and the Blessing: for he was great-hearted!
+
+
+THE CAPTIVE
+
+"He that believeth shall not make haste."--_Isaiah_.
+
+The guard-boat lay across the mouth of the bathing-pool, her crew idly
+spanking the water with the flat of their oars. A red-coated militia-man,
+rifle in hand, sat at the bows, and a petty officer at the stern. Between
+the snow-white cutter and the flat-topped, honey-coloured rocks on the
+beach the green water was troubled with shrimp-pink prisoners-of-war
+bathing. Behind their orderly tin camp and the electric-light poles rose
+those stone-dotted spurs that throw heat on Simonstown. Beneath them the
+little _Barracouta_ nodded to the big _Gibraltar_, and the old _Penelope_,
+that in ten years has been bachelors' club, natural history museum,
+kindergarten, and prison, rooted and dug at her fixed moorings. Far out, a
+three-funnelled Atlantic transport with turtle bow and stern waddled in
+from the deep sea.
+
+Said the sentry, assured of the visitor's good faith, "Talk to 'em? You
+can, to any that speak English. You'll find a lot that do."
+
+Here and there earnest groups gathered round ministers of the Dutch
+Reformed Church, who doubtless preached conciliation, but the majority
+preferred their bath. The God who Looks after Small Things had caused the
+visitor that day to receive two weeks' delayed mails in one from a casual
+postman, and the whole heavy bundle of newspapers, tied with a strap, he
+dangled as bait. At the edge of the beach, cross-legged, undressed to his
+sky-blue army shirt, sat a lean, ginger-haired man, on guard over a dozen
+heaps of clothing. His eyes followed the incoming Atlantic boat.
+
+"Excuse me, Mister," he said, without turning (and the speech betrayed his
+nationality), "would you mind keeping away from these garments? I've been
+elected janitor--on the Dutch vote."
+
+The visitor moved over against the barbed-wire fence and sat down to his
+mail. At the rustle of the newspaper-wrappers the ginger-coloured man
+turned quickly, the hunger of a press-ridden people in his close-set iron-
+grey eyes.
+
+"Have you any use for papers?" said the visitor.
+
+"Have I any use?" A quick, curved forefinger was already snicking off the
+outer covers. "Why, that's the New York postmark! Give me the ads. at the
+back of _Harper's_ and _M'Clure's_ and I'm in touch with God's Country
+again! Did you know how I was aching for papers?"
+
+The visitor told the tale of the casual postman.
+
+"Providential!" said the ginger-coloured man, keen as a terrier on his
+task; "both in time and matter. Yes! ... The _Scientific American_ yet
+once more! Oh, it's good! it's good!" His voice broke as he pressed his
+hawk-like nose against the heavily-inked patent-specifications at the end.
+"Can I keep it? I thank you--I thank you! Why--why--well--well! The
+_American Tyler_ of all things created! Do you subscribe to that?"
+
+"I'm on the free list," said the visitor, nodding.
+
+He extended his blue-tanned hand with that air of Oriental spaciousness
+which distinguishes the native-born American, and met the visitor's grasp
+expertly. "I can only say that you have treated me like a Brother (yes,
+I'll take every last one you can spare), and if ever--" He plucked at the
+bosom of his shirt. "Psha! I forgot I'd no card on me; but my name's
+Zigler--Laughton G. Zigler. An American? If Ohio's still in the Union, I
+am, Sir. But I'm no extreme States'-rights man. I've used all of my native
+country and a few others as I have found occasion, and now I am the
+captive of your bow and spear. I'm not kicking at that. I am not a coerced
+alien, nor a naturalised Texas mule-tender, nor an adventurer on the
+instalment plan. _I_ don't tag after our consul when he comes around,
+expecting the American Eagle to lift me out o' this by the slack of my
+pants. No, sir! If a Britisher went into Indian Territory and shot up his
+surroundings with a Colt automatic (not that _she's_ any sort of weapon,
+but I take her for an illustration), he'd be strung up quicker'n a
+snowflake 'ud melt in hell. No ambassador of yours 'ud save him. I'm my
+neck ahead on this game, anyway. That's how I regard the proposition.
+
+"Have I gone gunning against the British? To a certain extent, I presume
+you never heard tell of the Laughton-Zigler automatic two-inch field-gun,
+with self-feeding hopper, single oil-cylinder recoil, and ballbearing gear
+throughout? Or Laughtite, the new explosive? Absolutely uniform in effect,
+and one-ninth the bulk of any present effete charge--flake, cannonite,
+cordite, troisdorf, cellulose, cocoa, cord, or prism--I don't care what it
+is. Laughtite's immense; so's the Zigler automatic. It's me. It's fifteen
+years of me. You are not a gun-sharp? I am sorry. I could have surprised
+you. Apart from my gun, my tale don't amount to much of anything. I thank
+you, but I don't use any tobacco you'd be likely to carry... Bull Durham?
+_Bull Durham!_ I take it all back--every last word. Bull Durham--here! If
+ever you strike Akron, Ohio, when this fool-war's over, remember you've
+Laughton O. Zigler in your vest pocket. Including the city of Akron. We've
+a little club there.... Hell! What's the sense of talking Akron with no
+pants?
+
+"My gun? ... For two cents I'd have shipped her to our Filipeens. 'Came
+mighty near it too; but from what I'd read in the papers, you can't trust
+Aguinaldo's crowd on scientific matters. Why don't I offer it to our army?
+Well, you've an effete aristocracy running yours, and we've a crowd of
+politicians. The results are practically identical. I am not taking any
+U.S. Army in mine.
+
+"I went to Amsterdam with her--to this Dutch junta that supposes it's
+bossing the war. I wasn't brought up to love the British for one thing,
+and for another I knew that if she got in her fine work (my gun) I'd stand
+more chance of receiving an unbiassed report from a crowd of dam-fool
+British officers than from a hatful of politicians' nephews doing duty as
+commissaries and ordnance sharps. As I said, I put the brown man out of
+the question. That's the way _I_ regarded the proposition.
+
+"The Dutch in Holland don't amount to a row of pins. Maybe I misjudge 'em.
+Maybe they've been swindled too often by self-seeking adventurers to know
+a enthusiast when they see him. Anyway, they're slower than the Wrath o'
+God. But on delusions--as to their winning out next Thursday week at 9
+A.M.--they are--if I may say so--quite British.
+
+"I'll tell you a curious thing, too. I fought 'em for ten days before I
+could get the financial side of my game fixed to my liking. I knew they
+didn't believe in the Zigler, but they'd no call to be crazy-mean. I fixed
+it--free passage and freight for me and the gun to Delagoa Bay, and beyond
+by steam and rail. Then I went aboard to see her crated, and there I
+struck my fellow-passengers--all deadheads, same as me. Well, Sir, I
+turned in my tracks where I stood and besieged the ticket-office, and I
+said, 'Look at here, Van Dunk. I'm paying for my passage and her room in
+the hold--every square and cubic foot.' 'Guess he knocked down the fare to
+himself; but I paid. I paid. I wasn't going to deadhead along o' _that_
+crowd of Pentecostal sweepings. 'Twould have hoodooed my gun for all time.
+That was the way I regarded the proposition. No, Sir, they were not pretty
+company.
+
+"When we struck Pretoria I had a hell-and-a-half of a time trying to
+interest the Dutch vote in my gun an' her potentialities. The bottom was
+out of things rather much just about that time. Kruger was praying some
+and stealing some, and the Hollander lot was singing, 'If you haven't any
+money you needn't come round,' Nobody was spending his dough on anything
+except tickets to Europe. We were both grossly neglected. When I think how
+I used to give performances in the public streets with dummy cartridges,
+filling the hopper and turning the handle till the sweat dropped off me, I
+blush, Sir. I've made her to do her stunts before Kaffirs--naked sons of
+Ham--in Commissioner Street, trying to get a holt somewhere.
+
+"Did I talk? I despise exaggeration--'tain't American or scientific--but
+as true as I'm sitting here like a blue-ended baboon in a kloof, Teddy
+Roosevelt's Western tour was a maiden's sigh compared to my advertising
+work.
+
+"'Long in the spring I was rescued by a commandant called Van Zyl--a big,
+fleshy man with a lame leg. Take away his hair and his gun and he'd make a
+first-class Schenectady bar-keep. He found me and the Zigler on the veldt
+(Pretoria wasn't wholesome at that time), and he annexed me in a
+somnambulistic sort o' way. He was dead against the war from the start,
+but, being a Dutchman, he fought a sight better than the rest of that 'God
+and the Mauser' outfit. Adrian Van Zyl. Slept a heap in the daytime--and
+didn't love niggers. I liked him. I was the only foreigner in his
+commando. The rest was Georgia Crackers and Pennsylvania Dutch--with a
+dash o' Philadelphia lawyer. I could tell you things about them would
+surprise you. Religion for one thing; women for another; but I don't know
+as their notions o' geography weren't the craziest. 'Guess that must be
+some sort of automatic compensation. There wasn't one blamed ant-hill in
+their district they didn't know _and_ use; but the world was flat, they
+said, and England was a day's trek from Cape Town.
+
+"They could fight in their own way, and don't you forget it. But I guess
+you will not. They fought to kill, and, by what I could make out, the
+British fought to be killed. So both parties were accommodated.
+
+"I am the captive of your bow and spear, Sir. The position has its
+obligations--on both sides. You could not be offensive or partisan to me.
+I cannot, for the same reason, be offensive to you. Therefore I will not
+give you my opinions on the conduct of your war.
+
+"Anyway, I didn't take the field as an offensive partisan, but as an
+inventor. It was a condition and not a theory that confronted me. (Yes,
+Sir, I'm a Democrat by conviction, and that was one of the best things
+Grover Cleveland ever got off.)
+
+"After three months' trek, old man Van Zyl had his commando in good shape
+and refitted off the British, and he reckoned he'd wait on a British
+General of his acquaintance that did business on a circuit between
+Stompiesneuk, Jackhalputs, Vrelegen, and Odendaalstroom, year in and year
+out. He was a fixture in that section.
+
+"'He's a dam' good man,' says Van Zyl. 'He's a friend of mine. He sent in
+a fine doctor when I was wounded and our Hollander doc. wanted to cut my
+leg off. Ya, I'll guess we'll stay with him.' Up to date, me and my Zigler
+had lived in innocuous desuetude owing to little odds and ends riding out
+of gear. How in thunder was I to know there wasn't the ghost of any road
+in the country? But raw hide's cheap and lastin'. I guess I'll make my
+next gun a thousand pounds heavier, though.
+
+"Well, Sir, we struck the General on his beat--Vrelegen it was--and our
+crowd opened with the usual compliments at two thousand yards. Van Zyl
+shook himself into his greasy old saddle and says, 'Now we shall be quite
+happy, Mr. Zigler. No more trekking. Joost twelve miles a day till the
+apricots are ripe.'
+
+"Then we hitched on to his outposts, and vedettes, and cossack-picquets,
+or whatever they was called, and we wandered around the veldt arm in arm
+like brothers.
+
+"The way we worked lodge was this way. The General, he had his breakfast
+at 8:45 A.M. to the tick. He might have been a Long Island commuter. At
+8:42 A.M. I'd go down to the Thirty-fourth Street ferry to meet him--I
+mean I'd see the Zigler into position at two thousand (I began at three
+thousand, but that was cold and distant)--and blow him off to two full
+hoppers--eighteen rounds--just as they were bringing in his coffee. If his
+crowd was busy celebrating the anniversary of Waterloo or the last royal
+kid's birthday, they'd open on me with two guns (I'll tell you about them
+later on), but if they were disengaged they'd all stand to their horses
+and pile on the ironmongery, and washers, and typewriters, and five weeks'
+grub, and in half an hour they'd sail out after me and the rest of Van
+Zyl's boys; lying down and firing till 11:45 A.M. or maybe high noon. Then
+we'd go from labour to refreshment, resooming at 2 P.M. and battling till
+tea-time. Tuesday and Friday was the General's moving days. He'd trek
+ahead ten or twelve miles, and we'd loaf around his flankers and exercise
+the ponies a piece. Sometimes he'd get hung up in a drift--stalled
+crossin' a crick--and we'd make playful snatches at his wagons. First time
+that happened I turned the Zigler loose with high hopes, Sir; but the old
+man was well posted on rearguards with a gun to 'em, and I had to haul her
+out with three mules instead of six. I was pretty mad. I wasn't looking
+for any experts back of the Royal British Artillery. Otherwise, the game
+was mostly even. He'd lay out three or four of our commando, and we'd
+gather in four or five of his once a week or thereon. One time, I
+remember, long towards dusk we saw 'em burying five of their boys. They
+stood pretty thick around the graves. We wasn't more than fifteen hundred
+yards off, but old Van Zyl wouldn't fire. He just took off his hat at the
+proper time. He said if you stretched a man at his prayers you'd have to
+hump his bad luck before the Throne as well as your own. I am inclined to
+agree with him. So we browsed along week in and week out. A war-sharp
+might have judged it sort of docile, but for an inventor needing practice
+one day and peace the next for checking his theories, it suited Laughton
+O. Zigler.
+
+"And friendly? Friendly was no word for it. We was brothers in arms.
+
+"Why, I knew those two guns of the Royal British Artillery as well as I
+used to know the old Fifth Avenoo stages. _They_ might have been brothers
+too.
+
+"They'd jolt into action, and wiggle around and skid and spit and cough
+and prize 'emselves back again during our hours of bloody battle till I
+could have wept, Sir, at the spectacle of modern white men chained up to
+these old hand-power, back-number, flint-and-steel reaping machines. One
+of 'em--I called her Baldy--she'd a long white scar all along her barrel--
+I'd made sure of twenty times. I knew her crew by sight, but she'd come
+switching and teturing out of the dust of my shells like--like a hen from
+under a buggy--and she'd dip into a gully, and next thing I'd know 'ud be
+her old nose peeking over the ridge sniffin' for us. Her runnin' mate had
+two grey mules in the lead, and a natural wood wheel repainted, and a
+whole raft of rope-ends trailin' around. 'Jever see Tom Reed with his vest
+off, steerin' Congress through a heat-wave? I've been to Washington often
+--too often--filin' my patents. I called her Tom Reed. We three 'ud play
+pussy-wants-a-corner all round the outposts on off-days--cross-lots
+through the sage and along the mezas till we was short-circuited by
+canons. O, it was great for me and Baldy and Tom Reed! I don't know as we
+didn't neglect the legitimate interests of our respective commanders
+sometimes for this ball-play. I know _I_ did.
+
+"'Long towards the fall the Royal British Artillery grew shy--hung back in
+their breeching sort of--and their shooting was way--way off. I observed
+they wasn't taking any chances, not though I acted kitten almost
+underneath 'em.
+
+"I mentioned it to Van Zyl, because it struck me I had about knocked their
+Royal British moral endways.
+
+"'No,' says he, rocking as usual on his pony. 'My Captain Mankeltow he is
+sick. That is all.'
+
+"'So's your Captain Mankeltow's guns,' I said. 'But I'm going to make 'em
+a heap sicker before he gets well.'
+
+"'No,' says Van Zyl. 'He has had the enteric a little. Now he is better,
+and he was let out from hospital at Jackhalputs. Ah, that Mankeltow! He
+always makes me laugh so. I told him--long back--at Colesberg, I had a
+little home for him at Nooitgedacht. But he would not come--no! He has
+been sick, and I am sorry.'
+
+"'How d'you know that?' I says.
+
+"'Why, only to-day he sends back his love by Johanna Van der Merwe, that
+goes to their doctor for her sick baby's eyes. He sends his love, that
+Mankeltow, and he tells her tell me he has a little garden of roses all
+ready for me in the Dutch Indies--Umballa. He is very funny, my Captain
+Mankeltow.'
+
+"The Dutch and the English ought to fraternise, Sir. They've the same
+notions of humour, to my thinking.'
+
+"'When he gets well,' says Van Zyl, 'you look out, Mr. Americaan. He comes
+back to his guns next Tuesday. Then they shoot better.'
+
+"I wasn't so well acquainted with the Royal British Artillery as old man
+Van Zyl. I knew this Captain Mankeltow by sight, of course, and,
+considering what sort of a man with the hoe he was, I thought he'd done
+right well against my Zigler. But nothing epoch-making.
+
+"Next morning at the usual hour I waited on the General, and old Van Zyl
+come along with some of the boys. Van Zyl didn't hang round the Zigler
+much as a rule, but this was his luck that day.
+
+"He was peeking through his glasses at the camp, and I was helping pepper,
+the General's sow-belly--just as usual--when he turns to me quick and
+says, 'Almighty! How all these Englishmen are liars! You cannot trust
+one,' he says. 'Captain Mankeltow tells our Johanna he comes not back till
+Tuesday, and to-day is Friday, and there he is! Almighty! The English are
+all Chamberlains!'
+
+"If the old man hadn't stopped to make political speeches he'd have had
+his supper in laager that night, I guess. I was busy attending to Tom Reed
+at two thousand when Baldy got in her fine work on me. I saw one sheet of
+white flame wrapped round the hopper, and in the middle of it there was
+one o' my mules straight on end. Nothing out of the way in a mule on end,
+but this mule hadn't any head. I remember it struck me as incongruous at
+the time, and when I'd ciphered it out I was doing the Santos-Dumont act
+without any balloon and my motor out of gear. Then I got to thinking about
+Santos-Dumont and how much better my new way was. Then I thought about
+Professor Langley and the Smithsonian, and wishing I hadn't lied so
+extravagantly in some of my specifications at Washington. Then I quit
+thinking for quite a while, and when I resumed my train of thought I was
+nude, Sir, in a very stale stretcher, and my mouth was full of fine dirt
+all flavoured with Laughtite.
+
+"I coughed up that dirt.
+
+"'Hullo!' says a man walking beside me. 'You've spoke almost in time. Have
+a drink?'
+
+"I don't use rum as a rule, but I did then, because I needed it.
+
+"'What hit us?'I said.
+
+"'Me,' he said. 'I got you fair on the hopper as you pulled out of that
+donga; but I'm sorry to say every last round in the hopper's exploded and
+your gun's in a shocking state. I'm real sorry,' he says. 'I admire your
+gun, Sir.'
+
+"'Are you Captain Mankeltow?' I says.
+
+"'Yes,' he says. 'I presoom you're Mister Zigler. Your commanding officer
+told me about you.'
+
+"'Have you gathered in old man Van Zyl?' I said.
+
+"'Commandant Van Zyl,' he says very stiff, 'was most unfortunately
+wounded, but I am glad to say it's not serious. We hope he'll be able to
+dine with us to-night; and I feel sure,' he says, 'the General would be
+delighted to see you too, though he didn't expect,' he says, 'and no one
+else either, by Jove!' he says, and blushed like the British do when
+they're embarrassed.
+
+"I saw him slide an Episcopalian Prayer-book up his sleeve, and when I
+looked over the edge of the stretcher there was half-a-dozen enlisted men
+--privates--had just quit digging and was standing to attention by their
+spades. I guess he was right on the General not expecting me to dinner;
+but it was all of a piece with their sloppy British way of doing business.
+Any God's quantity of fuss and flubdub to bury a man, and not an ounce of
+forehandedness in the whole outfit to find out whether he was rightly
+dead. And I am a Congregationalist anyway!
+
+"Well, Sir, that was my introduction to the British Army. I'd write a book
+about it if anyone would believe me. This Captain Mankeltow, Royal British
+Artillery, turned the doctor on me (I could write another book about
+_him_) and fixed me up with a suit of his own clothes, and fed me canned
+beef and biscuits, and give me a cigar--a Henry Clay and a whisky-and-
+sparklet. He was a white man.
+
+"'Ye-es, by Jove,' he said, dragging out his words like a twist of
+molasses, 'we've all admired your gun and the way you've worked it. Some
+of us betted you was a British deserter. I won a sovereign on that from a
+yeoman. And, by the way,' he says, 'you've disappointed me groom pretty
+bad.'
+
+"'Where does your groom come in?' I said.
+
+"'Oh, he was the yeoman. He's a dam poor groom,' says my captain, 'but
+he's a way-up barrister when he's at home. He's been running around the
+camp with his tongue out, waiting for the chance of defending you at the
+court-martial.'
+
+"'What court-martial?' I says.
+
+"'On you as a deserter from the Artillery. You'd have had a good run for
+your money. Anyway, you'd never have been hung after the way you worked
+your gun. Deserter ten times over,' he says, 'I'd have stuck out for
+shooting you like a gentleman.'
+
+"Well, Sir, right there it struck me at the pit of my stomach--sort of
+sickish, sweetish feeling--that my position needed regularising pretty
+bad. I ought to have been a naturalised burgher of a year's standing; but
+Ohio's my State, and I wouldn't have gone back on her for a desertful of
+Dutchmen. That and my enthoosiasm as an inventor had led me to the
+existing crisis; but I couldn't expect this Captain Mankeltow to regard
+the proposition that way. There I sat, the rankest breed of
+unreconstructed American citizen, caught red-handed squirting hell at the
+British Army for months on end. I tell _you_, Sir, I wished I was in
+Cincinnatah that summer evening. I'd have compromised on Brooklyn.
+
+"'What d'you do about aliens?' I said, and the dirt I'd coughed up seemed
+all back of my tongue again.
+
+"'Oh,' says he, 'we don't do much of anything. They're about all the
+society we get. I'm a bit of a pro-Boer myself,' he says, 'but between you
+and me the average Boer ain't over and above intellectual. You're the
+first American we've met up with, but of course you're a burgher.'
+
+"It was what I ought to have been if I'd had the sense of a common tick,
+but the way he drawled it out made me mad.
+
+"'Of course I am not,' I says. 'Would _you_ be a naturalised Boer?'
+
+"'I'm fighting against 'em,' he says, lighting a cigarette, 'but it's all
+a matter of opinion.'
+
+"'Well,' I says, 'you can hold any blame opinion you choose, but I'm a
+white man, and my present intention is to die in that colour.'
+
+"He laughed one of those big, thick-ended, British laughs that don't lead
+anywhere, and whacked up some sort of compliment about America that made
+me mad all through.
+
+"I am the captive of your bow and spear, Sir, but I do not understand the
+alleged British joke. It is depressing.
+
+"I was introdooced to five or six officers that evening, and every blame
+one of 'em grinned and asked me why I wasn't in the Filipeens suppressing
+our war! And that was British humour! They all had to get it off their
+chests before they'd talk sense. But they was sound on the Zigler. They
+had all admired her. I made out a fairy-story of me being wearied of the
+war, and having pushed the gun at them these last three months in the hope
+they'd capture it and let me go home. That tickled 'em to death. They made
+me say it three times over, and laughed like kids each time. But half the
+British _are_ kids; specially the older men. My Captain Mankeltow was less
+of it than the others. He talked about the Zigler like a lover, Sir, and I
+drew him diagrams of the hopper-feed and recoil-cylinder in his note-book.
+He asked the one British question I was waiting for, 'Hadn't I made my
+working-parts too light?' The British think weight's strength.
+
+"At last--I'd been shy of opening the subject before--at last I said,
+'Gentlemen, you are the unprejudiced tribunal I've been hunting after. I
+guess you ain't interested in any other gun-factory, and politics don't
+weigh with you. How did it feel your end of the game? What's my gun done,
+anyway?'
+
+"'I hate to disappoint you,' says Captain Mankeltow, 'because I know you
+feel as an inventor.' I wasn't feeling like an inventor just then. I felt
+friendly, but the British haven't more tact than you can pick up with a
+knife out of a plate of soup.
+
+"'The honest truth,' he says, 'is that you've wounded about ten of us one
+way and another, killed two battery horses and four mules, and--oh, yes,'
+he said, 'you've bagged five Kaffirs. But, buck up,' he said, 'we've all
+had mighty close calls'--shaves, he called 'em, I remember. 'Look at my
+pants.'
+
+"They was repaired right across the seat with Minneapolis flour-bagging. I
+could see the stencil.
+
+"'I ain't bluffing,' he says. 'Get the hospital returns, Doc.'
+
+"The doctor gets 'em and reads 'em out under the proper dates. That doctor
+alone was worth the price of admission.
+
+"I was right pleased right through that I hadn't killed any of these
+cheerful kids; but none the less I couldn't help thinking that a few more
+Kaffirs would have served me just as well for advertising purposes as
+white men. No, sir. Anywhichway you regard the proposition, twenty-one
+casualties after months of close friendship like ours was--paltry.
+
+"They gave me taffy about the gun--the British use taffy where we use
+sugar. It's cheaper, and gets there just the same. They sat around and
+proved to me that my gun was too good, too uniform--shot as close as a
+Mannlicher rifle.
+
+"Says one kid chewing a bit of grass: 'I counted eight of your shells,
+Sir, burst in a radius of ten feet. All of 'em would have gone through one
+waggon-tilt. It was beautiful,' he says. 'It was too good.'
+
+"I shouldn't wonder if the boys were right. My Laughtite is too
+mathematically uniform in propelling power. Yes; she was too good for this
+refractory fool of a country. The training gear was broke, too, and we had
+to swivel her around by the trail. But I'll build my next Zigler fifteen
+hundred pounds heavier. Might work in a gasoline motor under the axles. I
+must think that up.
+
+"'Well, gentlemen,' I said, 'I'd hate to have been the death of any of
+you; and if a prisoner can deed away his property, I'd love to present the
+Captain here with what he's seen fit to leave of my Zigler.'
+
+"'Thanks awf'ly,' says my Captain. 'I'd like her very much. She'd look
+fine in the mess at Woolwich. That is, if you don't mind, Mr. Zigler.'
+
+"'Go right ahead,' I says. 'I've come out of all the mess I've any use
+for; but she'll do to spread the light among the Royal British Artillery.'
+
+"I tell you, Sir, there's not much of anything the matter with the Royal
+British Artillery. They're brainy men languishing under an effete system
+which, when you take good holt of it, is England--just all England. 'Times
+I'd feel I was talking with real live citizens, and times I'd feel I'd
+struck the Beef Eaters in the Tower.
+
+"How? Well, this way. I was telling my Captain Mankeltow what Van Zyl had
+said about the British being all Chamberlains when the old man saw him
+back from hospital four days ahead of time.
+
+"'Oh, damn it all!' he says, as serious as the Supreme Court. 'It's too
+bad,' he says. 'Johanna must have misunderstood me, or else I've got the
+wrong Dutch word for these blarsted days of the week. I told Johanna I'd
+be out on Friday. The woman's a fool. Oah, da-am it all!' he says. 'I
+wouldn't have sold old Van Zyl a pup like that,' he says. 'I'll hunt him
+up and apologise.'
+
+"He must have fixed it all right, for when we sailed over to the General's
+dinner my Captain had Van Zyl about half-full of sherry and bitters, as
+happy as a clam. The boys all called him Adrian, and treated him like
+their prodigal father. He'd been hit on the collarbone by a wad of
+shrapnel, and his arm was tied up.
+
+"But the General was the peach. I presume you're acquainted with the
+average run of British generals, but this was my first. I sat on his left
+hand, and he talked like--like the _Ladies' Home Journal_. J'ever read
+that paper? It's refined, Sir--and innocuous, and full of nickel-plated
+sentiments guaranteed to improve the mind. He was it. He began by a Lydia
+Pinkham heart-to-heart talk about my health, and hoped the boys had done
+me well, and that I was enjoying my stay in their midst. Then he thanked
+me for the interesting and valuable lessons that I'd given his crowd--
+specially in the matter of placing artillery and rearguard attacks. He'd
+wipe his long thin moustache between drinks--lime-juice and water he used
+--and blat off into a long 'a-aah,' and ladle out more taffy for me or old
+man Van Zyl on his right. I told him how I'd had my first Pisgah-sight of
+the principles of the Zigler when I was a fourth-class postmaster on a
+star-route in Arkansas. I told him how I'd worked it up by instalments
+when I was machinist in Waterbury, where the dollar-watches come from. He
+had one on his wrist then. I told him how I'd met Zalinski (he'd never
+heard of Zalinski!) when I was an extra clerk in the Naval Construction
+Bureau at Washington. I told him how my uncle, who was a truck-farmer in
+Noo Jersey (he loaned money on mortgage too, for ten acres ain't enough
+now in Noo Jersey), how he'd willed me a quarter of a million dollars,
+because I was the only one of our kin that called him down when he used to
+come home with a hard-cider jag on him and heave ox-bows at his nieces. I
+told him how I'd turned in every red cent on the Zigler, and I told him
+the whole circus of my coming out with her, and so on, and so following;
+and every forty seconds he'd wipe his moustache and blat, 'How
+interesting. Really, now? How interesting.'
+
+"It was like being in an old English book, Sir. Like _Bracebridge Hall_.
+But an American wrote _that!_ I kept peeking around for the Boar's Head
+and the Rosemary and Magna Charta and the Cricket on the Hearth, and the
+rest of the outfit. Then Van Zyl whirled in. He was no ways jagged, but
+thawed--thawed, Sir, and among friends. They began discussing previous
+scraps all along the old man's beat--about sixty of 'em--as well as side-
+shows with other generals and columns. Van Zyl told 'im of a big beat he'd
+worked on a column a week or so before I'd joined him. He demonstrated his
+strategy with forks on the table.
+
+"'There!' said the General, when he'd finished. 'That proves my contention
+to the hilt. Maybe I'm a bit of a pro-Boer, but I stick to it,' he says,
+'that under proper officers, with due regard to his race prejudices, the
+Boer'ud make the finest mounted infantry in the Empire. Adrian,' he says,
+'you're simply squandered on a cattle-run. You ought to be at the Staff
+College with De Wet.'
+
+"'You catch De Wet and I come to your Staff College--eh,' says Adrian,
+laughing. 'But you are so slow, Generaal. Why are you so slow? For a
+month,' he says, 'you do so well and strong that we say we shall hands-up
+and come back to our farms. Then you send to England and make us a present
+of two--three--six hundred young men, with rifles and wagons and rum and
+tobacco, and such a great lot of cartridges, that our young men put up
+their tails and start all over again. If you hold an ox by the horn and
+hit him by the bottom he runs round and round. He never goes anywhere. So,
+too, this war goes round and round. You know that, Generaal!'
+
+"'Quite right, Adrian,' says the General; 'but you must believe your
+Bible.'
+
+"'Hooh!' says Adrian, and reaches for the whisky. 'I've never known a
+Dutchman a professing Atheist, but some few have been rather active
+Agnostics since the British sat down in Pretoria. Old man Van Zyl--he told
+me--had soured on religion after Bloemfontein surrendered. He was a Free
+Stater for one thing.'
+
+"'He that believeth,' says the General, 'shall not make haste. That's in
+Isaiah. We believe we're going to win, and so we don't make haste. As far
+as I'm concerned I'd like this war to last another five years. We'd have
+an army then. It's just this way, Mr. Zigler,' he says, 'our people are
+brimfull of patriotism, but they've been born and brought up between
+houses, and England ain't big enough to train 'em--not if you expect to
+preserve.'
+
+"'Preserve what?' I says. 'England?'
+
+"'No. The game,' he says; 'and that reminds me, gentlemen, we haven't
+drunk the King and Foxhunting.'
+
+"So they drank the King and Fox-hunting. I drank the King because there's
+something about Edward that tickles me (he's so blame British); but I
+rather stood out on the Fox-hunting. I've ridden wolves in the cattle-
+country, and needed a drink pretty bad afterwards, but it never struck me
+as I ought to drink about it--he-red-it-arily.
+
+"'No, as I was saying, Mr. Zigler,' he goes on, 'we have to train our men
+in the field to shoot and ride. I allow six months for it; but many
+column-commanders--not that I ought to say a word against 'em, for they're
+the best fellows that ever stepped, and most of 'em are my dearest
+friends--seem to think that if they have men and horses and guns they can
+take tea with the Boers. It's generally the other way about, ain't it, Mr.
+Zigler?'
+
+"'To some extent, Sir,' I said.
+
+"'I'm _so_ glad you agree with me,' he says. 'My command here I regard as
+a training depot, and you, if I may say so, have been one of my most
+efficient instructors. I mature my men slowly but thoroughly. First I put
+'em in a town which is liable to be attacked by night, where they can
+attend riding-school in the day. Then I use 'em with a convoy, and last I
+put 'em into a column. It takes time,' he says, 'but I flatter myself that
+any men who have worked under me are at least grounded in the rudiments of
+their profession. Adrian,' he says, 'was there anything wrong with the men
+who upset Van Bester's applecart last month when he was trying to cross
+the line to join Piper with those horses he'd stole from Gabbitas?'
+
+"'No, Generaal,' says Van Zyl. 'Your men got the horses back and eleven
+dead; and Van Besters, he ran to Delarey in his shirt. They was very good,
+those men. They shoot hard.'
+
+"_'So_ pleased to hear you say so. I laid 'em down at the beginning of
+this century--a 1900 vintage. _You_ remember 'em, Mankeltow?' he says.
+'The Central Middlesex Buncho Busters--clerks and floorwalkers mostly,'
+and he wiped his moustache. 'It was just the same with the Liverpool
+Buckjumpers, but they were stevedores. Let's see--they were a last-century
+draft, weren't they? They did well after nine months. _You_ know 'em, Van
+Zyl? You didn't get much change out of 'em at Pootfontein?'
+
+"'No,' says Van Zyl. 'At Pootfontein I lost my son Andries.'
+
+"'I beg your pardon, Commandant,' says the General; and the rest of the
+crowd sort of cooed over Adrian.
+
+"'Excoose,' says Adrian. 'It was all right. They were good men those, but
+it is just what I say. Some are so dam good we want to hands-up, and some
+are so dam bad, we say, "Take the Vierkleur into Cape Town." It is not
+upright of you, Generaal. It is not upright of you at all. I do not think
+you ever wish this war to finish.'
+
+"'It's a first-class dress-parade for Armageddon,' says the General. 'With
+luck, we ought to run half a million men through the mill. Why, we might
+even be able to give our Native Army a look in. Oh, not here, of course,
+Adrian, but down in the Colony--say a camp-of-exercise at Worcester. You
+mustn't be prejudiced, Adrian. I've commanded a district in India, and I
+give you my word the native troops are splendid men.'
+
+"'Oh, I should not mind them at Worcester,' says Adrian. 'I would sell you
+forage for them at Worcester--yes, and Paarl and Stellenbosch; but
+Almighty!' he says, 'must I stay with Cronje till you have taught half a
+million of these stupid boys to ride? I shall be an old man.'
+
+"Well, Sir, then and there they began arguing whether St. Helena would
+suit Adrian's health as well as some other places they knew about, and
+fixing up letters of introduction to Dukes and Lords of their
+acquaintance, so's Van Zyl should be well looked after. We own a fair-
+sized block of real estate--America does--but it made me sickish to hear
+this crowd fluttering round the Atlas (oh yes, they had an Atlas), and
+choosing stray continents for Adrian to drink his coffee in. The old man
+allowed he didn't want to roost with Cronje, because one of Cronje's kin
+had jumped one of his farms after Paardeberg. I forget the rights of the
+case, but it was interesting. They decided on a place called Umballa in
+India, because there was a first-class doctor there.
+
+"So Adrian was fixed to drink the King and Foxhunting, and study up the
+Native Army in India (I'd like to see 'em myself), till the British
+General had taught the male white citizens of Great Britain how to ride.
+Don't misunderstand me, Sir. I loved that General. After ten minutes I
+loved him, and I wanted to laugh at him; but at the same time, sitting
+there and hearing him talk about the centuries, I tell you, Sir, it scared
+me. It scared me cold! He admitted everything--he acknowledged the corn
+before you spoke--he was more pleased to hear that his men had been used
+to wipe the geldt with than I was when I knocked out Tom Reed's two lead-
+horses--and he sat back and blew smoke through his nose and matured his
+men like cigars and--he talked of the everlastin' centuries!
+
+"I went to bed nearer nervous prostration than I'd come in a long time.
+Next morning me and Captain Mankeltow fixed up what his shrapnel had left
+of my Zigler for transport to the railroad. She went in on her own wheels,
+and I stencilled her 'Royal Artillery Mess, Woolwich,' on the muzzle, and
+he said he'd be grateful if I'd take charge of her to Cape Town, and hand
+her over to a man in the Ordnance there. 'How are you fixed financially?
+You'll need some money on the way home,' he says at last.
+
+"'For one thing, Cap,' I said, 'I'm not a poor man, and for another I'm
+not going home. I am the captive of your bow and spear. I decline to
+resign office.'
+
+"'Skittles!' he says (that was a great word of his), 'you'll take parole,
+and go back to America and invent another Zigler, a trifle heavier in the
+working parts--I would. We've got more prisoners than we know what to do
+with as it is,' he says. 'You'll only be an additional expense to me as a
+taxpayer. Think of Schedule D,' he says, 'and take parole.'
+
+"'I don't know anything about your tariffs,' I said, 'but when I get to
+Cape Town I write home for money, and I turn in every cent my board'll
+cost your country to any ten-century-old department that's been ordained
+to take it since William the Conqueror came along.'
+
+"'But, confound you for a thick-headed mule,' he says, 'this war ain't any
+more than just started! Do you mean to tell me you're going to play
+prisoner till it's over?'
+
+"'That's about the size of it,' I says, 'if an Englishman and an American
+could ever understand each other.'
+
+"'But, in Heaven's Holy Name, why?' he says, sitting down of a heap on an
+anthill.
+
+"'Well, Cap,' I says, 'I don't pretend to follow your ways of thought, and
+I can't see why you abuse your position to persecute a poor prisoner o'
+war on _his!_'
+
+"'My dear fellow,' he began, throwing up his hands and blushing, 'I'll
+apologise.'
+
+"'But if you insist,' I says, 'there are just one and a half things in
+this world I can't do. The odd half don't matter here; but taking parole,
+and going home, and being interviewed by the boys, and giving lectures on
+my single-handed campaign against the hereditary enemies of my beloved
+country happens to be the one. We'll let it go at that, Cap.'
+
+"'But it'll bore you to death,' he says. The British are a heap more
+afraid of what they call being bored than of dying, I've noticed.
+
+"'I'll survive,' I says, 'I ain't British. I can think,' I says.
+
+"'By God,' he says, coming up to me, and extending the right hand of
+fellowship, 'you ought to be English, Zigler!'
+
+"It's no good getting mad at a compliment like that. The English all do
+it. They're a crazy breed. When they don't know you they freeze up
+tighter'n the St. Lawrence. When they _do_, they go out like an ice-jam in
+April. Up till we prisoners left--four days--my Captain Mankeltow told me
+pretty much all about himself there was; his mother and sisters, and his
+bad brother that was a trooper in some Colonial corps, and how his father
+didn't get on with him, and--well, everything, as I've said. They're
+undomesticated, the British, compared with us. They talk about their own
+family affairs as if they belonged to someone else. 'Taint as if they
+hadn't any shame, but it sounds like it. I guess they talk out loud what
+we think, and we talk out loud what they think.
+
+"I liked my Captain Mankeltow. I liked him as well as any man I'd ever
+struck. He was white. He gave me his silver drinking-flask, and I gave him
+the formula of my Laughtite. That's a hundred and fifty thousand dollars
+in his vest-pocket, on the lowest count, if he has the knowledge to use
+it. No, I didn't tell him the money-value. He was English. He'd send his
+valet to find out.
+
+"Well, me and Adrian and a crowd of dam Dutchmen was sent down the road to
+Cape Town in first-class carriages under escort. (What did I think of your
+enlisted men? They are largely different from ours, Sir: very largely.) As
+I was saying, we slid down south, with Adrian looking out of the car-
+window and crying. Dutchmen cry mighty easy for a breed that fights as
+they do; but I never understood how a Dutchman could curse till we crossed
+into the Orange Free State Colony, and he lifted up his hand and cursed
+Steyn for a solid ten minutes. Then we got into the Colony, and the rebs--
+ministers mostly and schoolmasters--came round the cars with fruit and
+sympathy and texts. Van Zyl talked to 'em in Dutch, and one man, a big
+red-bearded minister, at Beaufort West, I remember, he jest wilted on the
+platform.
+
+"'Keep your prayers for yourself,' says Van Zyl, throwing back a bunch of
+grapes. 'You'll need 'em, and you'll need the fruit too, when the war
+comes down here. _You_ done it,' he says. 'You and your picayune Church
+that's deader than Cronje's dead horses! What sort of a God have you been
+unloading on us, you black _aas vogels_? The British came, and we beat
+'em,' he says, 'and you sat still and prayed. The British beat us, and you
+sat still,' he says. 'You told us to hang on, and we hung on, and our
+farms was burned, and you sat still--you and your God. See here,' he says,
+'I shot my Bible full of bullets after Bloemfontein went, and you and God
+didn't say anything. Take it and pray over it before we Federals help the
+British to knock hell out of you rebels.'
+
+"Then I hauled him back into the car. I judged he'd had a fit. But life's
+curious--and sudden--and mixed. I hadn't any more use for a reb than Van
+Zyl, and I knew something of the lies they'd fed us up with from the
+Colony for a year and more. I told the minister to pull his freight out of
+that, and went on with my lunch, when another man come along and shook
+hands with Van Zyl. He'd known him at close range in the Kimberley seige
+and before. Van Zyl was well seen by his neighbours, I judge. As soon as
+this other man opened his mouth I said, 'You're Kentucky, ain't you?' 'I
+am,' he says; 'and what may you be?' I told him right off, for I was
+pleased to hear good United States in any man's mouth; but he whipped his
+hands behind him and said, 'I'm not knowing any man that fights for a
+Tammany Dutchman. But I presoom you've been well paid, you dam gun-runnin'
+Yank.'
+
+"Well, Sir, I wasn't looking for that, and it near knocked me over, while
+old man Van Zyl started in to explain.
+
+"'Don't you waste your breath, Mister Van Zyl,' the man says. 'I know this
+breed. The South's full of 'em.' Then he whirls round on me and says,
+'Look at here, you Yank. A little thing like a King's neither here nor
+there, but what _you've_ done,' he says, 'is to go back on the White Man
+in six places at once--two hemispheres and four continents--America,
+England, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa. Don't open your
+head,' he says. 'You know well if you'd been caught at this game in our
+country you'd have been jiggling in the bight of a lariat before you could
+reach for your naturalisation papers. Go on and prosper,' he says, 'and
+you'll fetch up by fighting for niggers, as the North did.' And he threw
+me half-a-crown--English money.
+
+"Sir, I do not regard the proposition in that light, but I guess I must
+have been somewhat shook by the explosion. They told me at Cape Town one
+rib was driven in on to my lungs. I am not adducing this as an excuse, but
+the cold God's truth of the matter is--the money on the floor did it.... I
+give up and cried. Put my head down and cried.
+
+"I dream about this still sometimes. He didn't know the circumstances, but
+I dream about it. And it's Hell!
+
+"How do you regard the proposition--as a Brother? If you'd invented your
+own gun, and spent fifty-seven thousand dollars on her--and had paid your
+own expenses from the word 'go'? An American citizen has a right to choose
+his own side in an unpleasantness, and Van Zyl wasn't any Krugerite ...
+and I'd risked my hide at my own expense. I got that man's address from
+Van Zyl; he was a mining man at Kimberley, and I wrote him the facts. But
+he never answered. Guess he thought I lied.... Damned Southern rebel!
+
+"Oh, say. Did I tell you my Captain gave me a letter to an English Lord in
+Cape Town, and he fixed things so's I could lie up a piece in his house? I
+was pretty sick, and threw up some blood from where the rib had gouged
+into the lung--here. This Lord was a crank on guns, and he took charge of
+the Zigler. He had his knife into the British system as much as any
+American. He said he wanted revolution, and not reform, in your army. He
+said the British soldier had failed in every point except courage. He said
+England needed a Monroe Doctrine worse than America--a new doctrine,
+barring out all the Continent, and strictly devoting herself to developing
+her own Colonies. He said he'd abolish half the Foreign Office, and take
+all the old hereditary families clean out of it, because, he said, they
+was expressly trained to fool around with continental diplomats, and to
+despise the Colonies. His own family wasn't more than six hundred years
+old. He was a very brainy man, and a good citizen. We talked politics and
+inventions together when my lung let up on me.
+
+"Did he know my General? Yes. He knew 'em all. Called 'em Teddie and
+Gussie and Willie. They was all of the very best, and all his dearest
+friends; but he told me confidentially they was none of 'em fit to command
+a column in the field. He said they were too fond of advertising. Generals
+don't seem very different from actors or doctors or--yes, Sir--inventors.
+
+"He fixed things for me lovelily at Simons-Town. Had the biggest sort of
+pull--even for a Lord. At first they treated me as a harmless lunatic; but
+after a while I got 'em to let me keep some of their books. If I was left
+alone in the world with the British system of bookkeeping, I'd reconstruct
+the whole British Empire--beginning with the Army. Yes, I'm one of their
+most trusted accountants, and I'm paid for it. As much as a dollar a day.
+I keep that. I've earned it, and I deduct it from the cost of my board.
+When the war's over I'm going to pay up the balance to the British
+Government. Yes, Sir, that's how I regard the proposition.
+
+"Adrian? Oh, he left for Umballa four months back. He told me he was going
+to apply to join the National Scouts if the war didn't end in a year.
+'Tisn't in nature for one Dutchman to shoot another, but if Adrian ever
+meets up with Steyn there'll be an exception to the rule. Ye--es, when the
+war's over it'll take some of the British Army to protect Steyn from his
+fellow-patriots. But the war won't be over yet awhile. He that believeth
+don't hurry, as Isaiah says. The ministers and the school-teachers and the
+rebs'll have a war all to themselves long after the north is quiet.
+
+"I'm pleased with this country--it's big. Not so many folk on the ground
+as in America. There's a boom coming sure. I've talked it over with
+Adrian, and I guess I shall buy a farm somewhere near Bloemfontein and
+start in cattle-raising. It's big and peaceful--a ten-thousand-acre farm.
+I could go on inventing there, too. I'll sell my Zigler, I guess. I'll
+offer the patent rights to the British Government; and if they do the
+'reelly-now-how-interesting' act over her, I'll turn her over to Captain
+Mankeltow and his friend the Lord. They'll pretty quick find some Gussie,
+or Teddie, or Algie who can get her accepted in the proper quarters. I'm
+beginning to know my English.
+
+"And now I'll go in swimming, and read the papers after lunch. I haven't
+had such a good time since Willie died." He pulled the blue shirt over his
+head as the bathers returned to their piles of clothing, and, speaking
+through the folds, added:
+
+"But if you want to realise your assets, you should lease the whole
+proposition to America for ninety-nine years."
+
+
+
+
+THE BONDS OF DISCIPLINE
+
+POSEIDON'S LAW
+
+  When the robust and brass-bound man commissioned first for sea
+  His fragile raft, Poseidon laughed, and, "Mariner," said he,
+  "Behold, a Law immutable I lay on thee and thine,
+  That never shall ye act or tell a falsehood at my shrine.
+
+  "Let Zeus adjudge your landward kin, whose votive meal and salt
+  At easy-cheated altars win oblivion for the fault,
+  But ye the unhoodwinked waves shall test--the immediate gulfs condemn--
+  Unless ye owe the Fates a jest, be slow to jest with them.
+
+  "Ye shall not clear by Greekly speech, nor cozen from your path
+  The twinkling shoal, the leeward beach, and Hadria's white-lipped wrath;
+  Nor tempt with painted cloth for wood my fraud-avenging hosts;
+  Nor make at all or all make good your bulwarks and your boasts.
+
+  "Now and henceforward serve unshod through wet and wakeful shifts,
+  A present and oppressive God, but take, to aid, my gifts--
+  The wide and windward-opened eye, the large and lavish hand,
+  The soul that cannot tell a lie--except upon the land!"
+
+  In dromond and in catafract--wet, wakeful, windward-eyed--
+  He kept Poseidon's Law intact (his ship and freight beside),
+  But, once discharged the dromond's hold, the bireme beached once more,
+  Splendaciously mendacious rolled the brass-bound man ashore.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+  The thranite now and thalamite are pressures low and high,
+  And where three hundred blades bit white the twin-propellers ply:
+  The God that hailed, the keel that sailed, are changed beyond recall,
+  But the robust and brass-bound man he is not changed at all!
+
+  From Punt returned, from Phormio's Fleet, from Javan and Gadire,
+  He strongly occupies the seat about the tavern fire,
+  And, moist with much Falernian or smoked Massilian juice,
+  Revenges there the brass-bound man his long-enforced truce!
+
+
+THE BONDS OF DISCIPLINE
+
+As literature, it is beneath contempt. It concerns the endurance,
+armament, turning-circle, and inner gear of every ship in the British
+Navy--the  whole embellished with profile plates. The Teuton approaches
+the matter with pagan thoroughness; the Muscovite runs him close; but the
+Gaul, ever an artist, breaks enclosure to study the morale, at the present
+day, of the British sailorman.
+
+In this, I conceive, he is from time to time aided by the zealous amateur,
+though I find very little in his dispositions to show that he relies on
+that amateur's hard-won information. There exists--unlike some other
+publication, it is not bound in lead boards--a work by one "M. de C.,"
+based on the absolutely unadorned performances of one of our well-known
+_Acolyte_ type of cruisers. It contains nothing that did not happen. It
+covers a period of two days; runs to twenty-seven pages of large type
+exclusive of appendices; and carries as many exclamation points as the
+average Dumas novel.
+
+I read it with care, from the adorably finished prologue--it is the
+disgrace of our Navy that we cannot produce a commissioned officer capable
+of writing one page of lyric prose--to the eloquent, the joyful, the
+impassioned end; and my first notion was that I had been cheated. In this
+sort of book-collecting you will see how entirely the bibliophile lies at
+the mercy of his agent.
+
+"M. de C.," I read, opened his campaign by stowing away in one of her
+boats what time H.M.S. _Archimandrite_ lay off Funchal. "M. de C." was,
+always on behalf of his country, a Madeira Portuguese fleeing from the
+conscription. They discovered him eighty miles at sea and bade him assist
+the cook. So far this seemed fairly reasonable. Next day, thanks to his
+histrionic powers and his ingratiating address, he was promoted to the
+rank of "supernumerary captain's servant"--a "post which," I give his
+words, "I flatter myself, was created for me alone, and furnished me with
+opportunities unequalled for a task in which one word malapropos would
+have been my destruction."
+
+From this point onward, earth and water between them held no marvels like
+to those "M. de C." had "envisaged"--if I translate him correctly. It
+became clear to me that "M. de C." was either a pyramidal liar, or...
+
+I was not acquainted with any officer, seaman, or marine in the
+_Archimandrite_; but instinct told me I could not go far wrong if I took a
+third-class ticket to Plymouth.
+
+I gathered information on the way from a leading stoker, two seaman-
+gunners, and an odd hand in a torpedo factory. They courteously set my
+feet on the right path, and that led me through the alleys of Devonport to
+a public-house not fifty yards from the water. We drank with the
+proprietor, a huge, yellowish man called Tom Wessels; and when my guides
+had departed, I asked if he could produce any warrant or petty officer of
+the _Archimandrite_.
+
+"The _Bedlamite_, d'you mean--'er last commission, when they all went
+crazy?"
+
+"Shouldn't wonder," I replied. "Fetch me a sample and I'll see."
+
+"You'll excuse me, o' course, but--what d'you want 'im _for?_"
+
+"I want to make him drunk. I want to make you drunk--if you like. I want
+to make him drunk here."
+
+"Spoke very 'andsome. I'll do what I can." He went out towards the water
+that lapped at the foot of the street. I gathered from the pot-boy that he
+was a person of influence beyond Admirals.
+
+In a few minutes I heard the noise of an advancing crowd, and the voice of
+Mr. Wessels.
+
+"'E only wants to make you drunk at 'is expense. Dessay 'e'll stand you
+all a drink. Come up an' look at 'im. 'E don't bite."
+
+A square man, with remarkable eyes, entered at the head of six large
+bluejackets. Behind them gathered a contingent of hopeful free-drinkers.
+
+"'E's the only one I could get. Transferred to the _Postulant_ six months
+back. I found 'im quite accidental." Mr. Wessels beamed.
+
+"I'm in charge o' the cutter. Our wardroom is dinin' on the beach _en
+masse_. They won't be home till mornin'," said the square man with the
+remarkable eyes.  "Are you an _Archimandrite?_" I demanded.
+
+"That's me. I was, as you might say."
+
+"Hold on. I'm a _Archimandrite._" A Red Marine with moist eyes tried to
+climb on the table. "Was you lookin' for a _Bedlamite?_ I've--I've been
+invalided, an' what with that, an' visitin' my family 'ome at Lewes,
+per'aps I've come late. 'Ave I?"
+
+"You've 'ad all that's good for you," said Tom Wessels, as the Red Marine
+sat cross-legged on the floor.
+
+"There are those 'oo haven't 'ad a thing yet!" cried a voice by the door.
+
+"I will take this _Archimandrite_" I said, "and this Marine. Will you
+please give the boat's crew a drink now, and another in half an hour if--
+if Mr.----"
+
+"Pyecroft," said the square man. "Emanuel Pyecroft, second-class petty-
+officer."
+
+"--Mr. Pyecroft doesn't object?"
+
+"He don't. Clear out. Goldin', you picket the hill by yourself, throwin'
+out a skirmishin'-line in ample time to let me know when Number One's
+comin' down from his vittles."
+
+The crowd dissolved. We passed into the quiet of the inner bar, the Red
+Marine zealously leading the way.
+
+"And what do you drink, Mr. Pyecroft?" I said.
+
+"Only water. Warm water, with a little whisky an' sugar an' per'aps a
+lemon."
+
+"Mine's beer," said the Marine. "It always was."
+
+"Look 'ere, Glass. You take an' go to sleep. The picket'll be comin' for
+you in a little time, an' per'aps you'll 'ave slep' it off by then. What's
+your ship, now?" said Mr. Wessels.
+
+"The Ship o' State--most important?" said the Red Marine magnificently,
+and shut his eyes.
+
+"That's right," said Mr. Pyecroft. "He's safest where he is. An' now--
+here's santy to us all!--what d'you want o' me?"
+
+"I want to read you something."
+
+"Tracts, again!" said the Marine, never opening his eyes. "Well. I'm
+game.... A little more 'ead to it, miss, please."
+
+"He thinks 'e's drinkin'--lucky beggar!" said Mr. Pyecroft. "I'm agreeable
+to be read to. 'Twon't alter my convictions. I may as well tell you
+beforehand I'm a Plymouth Brother."
+
+He composed his face with the air of one in the dentist's chair, and I
+began at the third page of "M. de C."
+
+"'_At the moment of asphyxiation, for I had hidden myself under the boat's
+cover, I heard footsteps upon the superstructure and coughed with
+empress_'--coughed loudly, Mr. Pyecroft. '_By this time I judged the
+vessel to be sufficiently far from land. A number of sailors extricated me
+amid language appropriate to their national brutality. I responded that I
+named myself Antonio, and that I sought to save myself from the Portuguese
+conscription_.'
+
+"Ho!" said Mr. Pyecroft, and the fashion of his countenance changed. Then
+pensively: "Ther beggar! What might you have in your hand there?"
+
+"It's the story of Antonio--a stowaway in the _Archimandrite's_ cutter. A
+French spy when he's at home, I fancy. What do _you_ know about it?"
+
+"An' I thought it was tracts! An' yet some'ow I didn't." Mr. Pyecroft
+nodded his head wonderingly. "Our old man was quite right--so was 'Op--so
+was I. 'Ere, Glass!" He kicked the Marine. "Here's our Antonio 'as written
+a impromptu book! He _was_ a spy all right."
+
+The Red Marine turned slightly, speaking with the awful precision of the
+half-drunk. "'As 'e got any-thin' in about my 'orrible death an'
+execution? Ex_cuse_ me, but if I open my eyes, I shan't be well. That's
+where I'm different from _all_ other men. Ahem!"
+
+"What about Glass's execution?" demanded Pyecroft.
+
+"The book's in French," I replied.
+
+"Then it's no good to me."
+
+"Precisely. Now I want you to tell your story just as it happened. I'll
+check it by this book. Take a cigar. I know about his being dragged out of
+the cutter. What I want to know is what was the meaning of all the other
+things, because they're unusual."
+
+"They were," said Mr. Pyecroft with emphasis. "Lookin' back on it as I set
+here more an' more I see what an 'ighly unusual affair it was. But it
+happened. It transpired in the _Archimandrite_--the ship you can trust...
+Antonio! Ther beggar!"
+
+"Take your time, Mr. Pyecroft."
+
+In a few moments we came to it thus--
+
+"The old man was displeased. I don't deny he was quite a little
+displeased. With the mail-boats trottin' into Madeira every twenty
+minutes, he didn't see why a lop-eared Portugee had to take liberties with
+a man-o'-war's first cutter. Any'ow, we couldn't turn ship round for him.
+We drew him out and took him out to Number One. 'Drown 'im,' 'e says.
+'Drown 'im before 'e dirties my fine new decks.' But our owner was
+tenderhearted. 'Take him to the galley,' 'e says. 'Boil 'im! Skin 'im!
+Cook 'im! Cut 'is bloomin' hair? Take 'is bloomin' number! We'll have him
+executed at Ascension.'
+
+"Retallick, our chief cook, an' a Carth'lic, was the on'y one any way near
+grateful; bein' short-'anded in the galley. He annexes the blighter by the
+left ear an' right foot an' sets him to work peelin' potatoes. So then,
+this Antonio that was avoidin' the conscription--"
+
+"_Sub_scription, you pink-eyed matlow!" said the Marine, with the face of
+a stone Buddha, and whimpered sadly: "Pye don't see any fun in it at all."
+
+"_Con_scription--come to his illegitimate sphere in Her Majesty's Navy,
+an' it was just then that Old 'Op, our Yeoman of Signals, an' a fastidious
+joker, made remarks to me about 'is hands.
+
+"'Those 'ands,' says 'Op, 'properly considered, never done a day's honest
+labour in their life. Tell me those hands belong to a blighted Portugee
+manual labourist and I won't call you a liar, but I'll say you an' the
+Admiralty are pretty much unique in your statements.' 'Op was always a
+fastidious joker--in his language as much as anything else. He pursued 'is
+investigations with the eye of an 'awk outside the galley. He knew better
+than to advance line-head against Retallick, so he attacked _ong eshlong_,
+speakin' his remarks as much as possible into the breech of the starboard
+four point seven, an' 'ummin' to 'imself. Our chief cook 'ated 'ummin'.
+'What's the matter of your bowels?' he says at last, fistin' out the mess-
+pork agitated like. "'Don't mind me,' says 'Op. 'I'm only a mildewed
+buntin'-tosser,' 'e says: 'but speakin' for my mess, I do hope,' 'e says,
+'you ain't goin' to boil your Portugee friend's boots along o' that pork
+you're smellin' so gay!'
+
+"'Boots! Boots! Boots!' says Retallick, an' he run round like a earwig in
+a alder-stalk. 'Boots in the galley,' 'e says. 'Cook's mate, cast out an'
+abolish this cutter-cuddlin' abori_gine's_ boots!'"
+
+"They was hove overboard in quick time, an' that was what 'Op was lyin' to
+for. As subsequently transpired.
+
+"'Fine Arab arch to that cutter-cuddler's hinstep,' he says to me. 'Run
+your eye over it, Pye,' 'e says. 'Nails all present an' correct,' 'e says.
+'Bunion on the little toe, too,' 'e says; 'which comes from wearin' a
+tight boot. What do _you_ think?'
+
+"'Dook in trouble, per'aps,' I says. 'He ain't got the hang of spud-
+skinnin'.' No more he 'ad. 'E was simply cannibalisin' 'em.
+
+"'I want to know what 'e 'as got the 'ang of,' says 'Op, obstructed-like.
+'Watch 'im,' 'e says. 'These shoulders were foreign-drilled somewhere.'
+
+'"When it comes to "Down 'ammicks!" which is our naval way o' goin' to
+bye-bye, I took particular trouble over Antonio, 'oo had 'is 'ammick 'ove
+at 'im with general instructions to sling it an' be sugared. In the
+ensuin' melly I pioneered him to the after-'atch, which is a orifice
+communicatin' with the after-flat an' similar suites of apartments. He
+havin' navigated at three fifths power immejit ahead o' me, _I_ wasn't
+goin' to volunteer any assistance, nor he didn't need it.'
+
+"'Mong Jew!' says 'e, sniffin' round. An' twice more 'Mong Jew!'--which is
+pure French. Then he slings 'is 'ammick, nips in, an' coils down. 'Not bad
+for a Portugee conscript,' I says to myself, casts off the tow, abandons
+him, and reports to 'Op.
+
+"About three minutes later I'm over'auled by our sub-lootenant, navigatin'
+under forced draught, with his bearin's 'eated. 'E had the temerity to say
+I'd instructed our Antonio to sling his carcass in the alleyway, an' 'e
+was peevish about it. O' course, I prevaricated like 'ell. You get to do
+that in the service. Nevertheless, to oblige Mr. Ducane, I went an'
+readjusted Antonio. You may not 'ave ascertained that there are two ways
+o' comin' out of an 'ammick when it's cut down. Antonio came out t'other
+way--slidin' 'andsome to his feet. That showed me two things. First, 'e
+had been in an 'ammick before, an' next, he hadn't been asleep. Then I
+reproached 'im for goin' to bed where 'e'd been told to go, instead o'
+standin' by till some one gave him entirely contradictory orders. Which is
+the essence o' naval discipline.
+
+"In the middle o' this argument the gunner protrudes his ram-bow from 'is
+cabin, an' brings it all to an 'urried conclusion with some remarks
+suitable to 'is piebald warrant-rank. Navigatin' thence under easy steam,
+an' leavin' Antonio to re-sling his little foreign self, my large flat
+foot comes in detonatin' contact with a small objec' on the deck. Not
+'altin' for the obstacle, nor changin' step, I shuffles it along under the
+ball of the big toe to the foot o' the hatchway, when, lightly stoopin', I
+catch it in my right hand and continue my evolutions in rapid time till I
+eventuates under 'Op's lee.
+
+"It was a small moroccer-bound pocket-book, full of indelible pencil-
+writin'--in French, for I could plainly discern the _doodeladays_, which
+is about as far as my education runs.
+
+"'Op fists it open and peruses. 'E'd known an 'arf-caste Frenchwoman
+pretty intricate before he was married; when he was trained man in a
+stinkin' gunboat up the Saigon River. He understood a lot o' French--
+domestic brands chiefly--the kind that isn't in print.
+
+"'Pye,' he says to me, 'you're a tattician o' no mean value. I am a trifle
+shady about the precise bearin' an' import' o' this beggar's private log
+here,' 'e says, 'but it's evidently a case for the owner. You'll 'ave your
+share o' the credit,' 'e says.
+
+"'Nay, nay, Pauline,' I says, 'You don't catch Emanuel Pyecroft mine-
+droppin' under any post-captain's bows,' I says, 'in search of honour,' I
+says. 'I've been there oft.'
+
+"'Well, if you must, you must,' 'e says, takin' me up quick. 'But I'll
+speak a good word for you, Pye.'
+
+"'You'll shut your mouth, 'Op,' I says, 'or you an' me'll part brass-rags.
+The owner has his duties, an' I have mine. We will keep station,' I says,
+'nor seek to deviate.'
+
+"'Deviate to blazes!' says 'Op. 'I'm goin' to deviate to the owner's
+comfortable cabin direct.' So he deviated."
+
+Mr. Pyecroft leaned forward and dealt the Marine a large pattern Navy
+kick. "'Ere, Glass! You was sentry when 'Op went to the old man--the first
+time, with Antonio's washin'-book. Tell us what transpired. You're sober.
+You don't know how sober you are!"
+
+The Marine cautiously raised his head a few inches. As Mr. Pyecroft said,
+he was sober--after some R.M.L.I. fashion of his own devising. "'Op bounds
+in like a startled anteloper, carryin' 'is signal-slate at the ready. The
+old man was settin' down to 'is bountiful platter--not like you an' me,
+without anythin' more in sight for an 'ole night an' 'arf a day. Talkin'
+about food--"
+
+"No! No! No!" cried Pyecroft, kicking again. "What about 'Op?" I thought
+the Marine's ribs would have snapped, but he merely hiccuped.
+
+"Oh, 'im! 'E 'ad it written all down on 'is little slate--I think--an' 'e
+shoves it under the old man's nose. 'Shut the door,' says 'Op. 'For
+'Eavin's sake shut the cabin door!' Then the old man must ha' said
+somethin' 'bout irons. 'I'll put 'em on, Sir, in your very presence,' says
+'Op, 'only 'ear my prayer,' or--words to that 'fect.... It was jus' the
+same with me when I called our Sergeant a bladder-bellied, lard-'eaded,
+perspirin' pension-cheater. They on'y put on the charge-sheet 'words to
+that effect,' Spoiled the 'ole 'fect."
+
+"'Op! 'Op! 'Op! What about 'Op?" thundered Pyecroft.
+
+"'Op? Oh, shame thing. Words t' that 'fect. Door shut. Nushin' more
+transphired till 'Op comes out--nose exshtreme angle plungin' fire or--or
+words 'that effect. Proud's parrot. 'Oh, you prou' old parrot,' I says."
+
+Mr. Glass seemed to slumber again.
+
+"Lord! How a little moisture disintegrates, don't it? When we had ship's
+theatricals off Vigo, Glass 'ere played Dick Deadeye to the moral, though
+of course the lower deck wasn't pleased to see a leatherneck interpretin'
+a strictly maritime part, as you might say. It's only his repartees, which
+'e can't contain, that conquers him. Shall I resume my narrative?"
+
+Another drink was brought on this hint, and Mr. Pyecroft resumed.
+
+"The essence o' strategy bein' forethought, the essence o' tattics is
+surprise. Per'aps you didn't know that? My forethought 'avin' secured the
+initial advantage in attack, it remained for the old man to ladle out the
+surprise-packets. 'Eavens! What surprises! That night he dines with the
+wardroom, bein' of the kind--I've told you as we were a 'appy ship?--that
+likes it, and the wardroom liked it too. This ain't common in the service.
+They had up the new Madeira--awful undisciplined stuff which gives you a
+cordite mouth next morning. They told the mess-men to navigate towards the
+extreme an' remote 'orizon, an' they abrogated the sentry about fifteen
+paces out of earshot. Then they had in the Gunner, the Bo'sun, an' the
+Carpenter, an' stood them large round drinks. It all come out later--
+wardroom joints bein' lower-deck hash, as the sayin' is--that our Number
+One stuck to it that 'e couldn't trust the ship for the job. The old man
+swore 'e could, 'avin' commanded 'er over two years. He was right. There
+wasn't a ship, I don't care in what fleet, could come near the
+_Archimandrites_ when we give our mind to a thing. We held the cruiser
+big-gun records, the sailing-cutter (fancy-rig) championship, an' the
+challenge-cup row round the fleet. We 'ad the best nigger-minstrels, the
+best football an' cricket teams, an' the best squee-jee band of anything
+that ever pushed in front of a brace o' screws. An' _yet_ our Number One
+mistrusted us! 'E said we'd be a floatin' hell in a week, an' it 'ud take
+the rest o' the commission to stop our way. They was arguin' it in the
+wardroom when the bridge reports a light three points off the port bow. We
+overtakes her, switches on our search-light, an' she discloses herself as
+a collier o' no mean reputation, makin' about seven knots on 'er lawful
+occasions--to the Cape most like.
+
+"Then the owner--so we 'eard in good time--broke the boom, springin' all
+mines together at close interval.
+
+"'Look 'ere, my jokers,' 'e says (I'm givin' the grist of 'is arguments,
+remember), 'Number One says we can't enlighten this cutter-cuddlin Gaulish
+lootenant on the manners an' customs o' the Navy without makin' the ship a
+market-garden. There's a lot in that,' 'e says, 'specially if we kept it
+up lavish, till we reached Ascension. But,' 'e says, 'the appearance o'
+this strange sail has put a totally new aspect on the game. We can run to
+just one day's amusement for our friend, or else what's the good o'
+discipline? An' then we can turn 'im over to our presumably short-'anded
+fellow-subject in the small-coal line out yonder. He'll be pleased,' says
+the old man, 'an' so will Antonio. M'rover,' he says to Number One, 'I'll
+lay you a dozen o' liquorice an' ink'--it must ha' been that new tawny
+port--'that I've got a ship I can trust--for one day,' 'e says.
+'Wherefore,' he says, 'will you have the extreme goodness to reduce speed
+as requisite for keepin' a proper distance behind this providential tramp
+till further orders?' Now, that's what I call tattics.
+
+"The other manoeuvres developed next day, strictly in accordance with the
+plans as laid down in the wardroom, where they sat long an' steady. 'Op
+whispers to me that Antonio was a Number One spy when 'e was in
+commission, and a French lootenant when 'e was paid off, so I navigated at
+three 'undred and ninety six revolutions to the galley, never 'avin'
+kicked a lootenant up to date. I may as well say that I did not manoeuvre
+against 'im as a Frenchman, because I like Frenchmen, but stric'ly on 'is
+rank an' ratin' in 'is own navy. I inquired after 'is health from
+Retallick.
+
+"'Don't ask me,' 'e says, sneerin' be'ind his silver spectacles. ''E's
+promoted to be captain's second supernumerary servant, to be dressed and
+addressed as such. If 'e does 'is dooties same as he skinned the spuds,
+_I_ ain't for changin' with the old man.'
+
+"In the balmy dawnin' it was given out, all among the 'olystones, by our
+sub-lootenant, who was a three-way-discharge devil, that all orders after
+eight bells was to be executed in inverse ration to the cube o' the
+velocity. 'The reg'lar routine,' he says, 'was arrogated for reasons o'
+state an' policy, an' any flat-foot who presumed to exhibit surprise,
+annoyance, or amusement, would be slightly but firmly reproached.' Then
+the Gunner mops up a heathenish large detail for some hanky-panky in the
+magazines, an' led 'em off along with our Gunnery Jack, which is to say,
+our Gunnery Lootenant.
+
+"That put us on the _viva voce_--particularly when we understood how the
+owner was navigatin' abroad in his sword-belt trustin' us like brothers.
+We shifts into the dress o' the day, an' we musters _an'_ we prays _ong
+reggle_, an' we carries on anticipatory to bafflin' Antonio.
+
+"Then our Sergeant of Marines come to me wringin' his 'ands an' weepin'.
+'E'd been talkin' to the sub-lootenant, an' it looked like as if his
+upper-works were collapsin'.
+
+"'I want a guarantee,' 'e says, wringin' 'is 'ands like this. '_I_ 'aven't
+'ad sunstroke slave-dhowin' in Tajurrah Bay, an' been compelled to live on
+quinine an' chlorodyne ever since. _I_ don't get the horrors off glasses
+o' brown sherry.'
+
+"'What 'ave you got now?' I says.
+
+"'_I_ ain't an officer,' 'e says. '_My_ sword won't be handed back to me
+at the end o' the court-martial on account o' my little weaknesses, an' no
+stain on my character. I'm only a pore beggar of a Red Marine with
+eighteen years' service, an' why for,' says he, wringin' 'is hands like
+this all the time, 'must I chuck away my pension, sub-lootenant or no
+sub-lootenant? Look at 'em,' he says, 'only look at 'em. Marines fallin'
+in for small-arm drill!'
+
+"The leathernecks was layin' aft at the double, an' a more insanitary set
+of accidents I never wish to behold. Most of 'em was in their shirts. They
+had their trousers on, of course--rolled up nearly to the knee, but what I
+mean is belts over shirts. Three or four 'ad _our_ caps, an' them that had
+drawn helmets wore their chin-straps like Portugee earrings. Oh, yes; an'
+three of 'em 'ad only one boot! I knew what our bafflin' tattics was goin'
+to be, but even I was mildly surprised when this gay fantasia of Brazee
+drummers halted under the poop, because of an 'ammick in charge of our
+Navigator, an' a small but 'ighly efficient landin'-party.
+
+"''Ard astern both screws!' says the Navigator. 'Room for the captain's
+'ammick!' The captain's servant--Cockburn 'is name was--had one end, an'
+our newly promoted Antonio, in a blue slop rig, 'ad the other. They slung
+it from the muzzle of the port poop quick-firer thort-ships to a
+stanchion. Then the old man flickered up, smokin' a cigarette, an' brought
+'is stern to an anchor slow an' oriental.
+
+"'What a blessin' it is, Mr. Ducane,' 'e says to our sub-lootenant, 'to be
+out o' sight o' the 'ole pack o' blighted admirals! What's an admiral
+after all?' 'e says. 'Why, 'e's only a post-captain with the pip, Mr.
+Ducane. The drill will now proceed. What O! Antonio, _descendez_ an' get
+me a split.'
+
+"When Antonio came back with the whisky-an'-soda, he was told off to swing
+the 'ammick in slow time, an' that massacritin' small-arm party went on
+with their oratorio. The Sergeant had been kindly excused from
+participating an' he was jumpin' round on the poop-ladder, stretchin' 'is
+leather neck to see the disgustin' exhibition an' cluckin' like a ash-
+hoist. A lot of us went on the fore an' aft bridge an' watched 'em like
+'Listen to the Band in the Park.' All these evolutions, I may as well tell
+you, are highly unusual in the Navy. After ten minutes o' muckin' about,
+Glass 'ere--pity 'e's so drunk!--says that 'e'd had enough exercise for
+'is simple needs an' he wants to go 'ome. Mr. Ducane catches him a
+sanakatowzer of a smite over the 'ead with the flat of his sword. Down
+comes Glass's rifle with language to correspond, and he fiddles with the
+bolt. Up jumps Maclean--'oo was a Gosport 'ighlander--an' lands on Glass's
+neck, thus bringin' him to the deck, fully extended.
+
+"The old man makes a great show o' wakin' up from sweet slumbers. 'Mistah
+Ducane,' he says, 'what is this painful interregnum?' or words to that
+effect. Ducane takes one step to the front, an' salutes: 'Only 'nother
+case of attempted assassination, Sir,' he says.
+
+"'Is that all?' says the old man, while Maclean sits on Glass's collar
+button. 'Take him away,' 'e says, 'he knows the penalty.'"
+
+"Ah! I suppose that is the 'invincible _morgue_ Britannic in the presence
+of brutally provoked mutiny,'" I muttered, as I turned over the pages of
+M. de C.
+
+"So, Glass, 'e was led off kickin' an' squealin', an' hove down the ladder
+into 'is Sergeant's volupshus arms. 'E run Glass forward, an' was all for
+puttin' 'im in irons as a maniac.
+
+"'You refill your waterjacket and cool off!' says Glass, sittin' down
+rather winded. 'The trouble with you is you haven't any imagination.'
+
+"'Haven't I? I've got the remnants of a little poor authority though,' 'e
+says, lookin' pretty vicious.
+
+"'You 'ave?' says Glass. 'Then for pity's sake 'ave some proper feelin'
+too. I'm goin' to be shot this evenin'. You'll take charge o' the firin'-
+party.'
+
+"Some'ow or other, that made the Sergeant froth at the mouth. 'E 'ad no
+more play to his intellects than a spit-kid. 'E just took everything as it
+come. Well, that was about all, I think.... Unless you'd care to have me
+resume my narrative."
+
+We resumed on the old terms, but with rather less hot water. The marine on
+the floor breathed evenly, and Mr. Pyecroft nodded.
+
+"I may have omitted to inform you that our Number One took a general row
+round the situation while the small-arm party was at work, an' o' course
+he supplied the outlines; but the details we coloured in by ourselves.
+These were our tattics to baffle Antonio. It occurs to the Carpenter to
+'ave the steam-cutter down for repairs. 'E gets 'is cheero-party together,
+an' down she comes. You've never seen a steam-cutter let down on the deck,
+'ave you? It's not usual, an' she takes a lot o' humourin'. Thus we 'ave
+the starboard side completely blocked an' the general traffic tricklin'
+over'ead along the fore-an'-aft bridge. Then Chips gets into her an'
+begins balin' out a mess o' small reckonin's on the deck. Simultaneous
+there come up three o' those dirty engine-room objects which we call
+'tiffies,' an' a stoker or two with orders to repair her steamin'-gadgets.
+_They_ get into her an' bale out another young Christmas-treeful of small
+reckonin's--brass mostly. Simultaneous it hits the Pusser that 'e'd better
+serve out mess pork for the poor matlow. These things half shifted
+Retallick, our chief cook, off 'is bed-plate. Yes, you might say they
+broke 'im wide open. 'E wasn't at all used to 'em.
+
+"Number One tells off five or six prime, able-bodied seamen-gunners to the
+pork barrels. You never see pork fisted out of its receptacle, 'ave you?
+Simultaneous, it hits the Gunner that now's the day an' now's the hour for
+a non-continuous class in Maxim instruction. So they all give way
+together, and the general effect was _non plus ultra_. There was the
+cutter's innards spread out like a Fratton pawnbroker's shop; there was
+the 'tiffies' hammerin' in the stern of 'er, an' _they_ ain't antiseptic;
+there was the Maxim class in light skirmishin' order among the pork, an'
+forrard the blacksmith had 'is forge in full blast, makin' 'orse-shoes, I
+suppose. Well, that accounts for the starboard side. The on'y warrant
+officer 'oo hadn't a look in so far was the Bosun. So 'e stated, all out
+of 'is own 'ead, that Chips's reserve o' wood an' timber, which Chips 'ad
+stole at our last refit, needed restowin'. It was on the port booms--a
+young an' healthy forest of it, for Charley Peace wasn't to be named
+'longside o' Chips for burglary.
+
+"'All right,' says our Number One. 'You can 'ave the whole port watch if
+you like. Hell's Hell,' 'e says, 'an when there study to improve.'
+
+"Jarvis was our Bosun's name. He hunted up the 'ole of the port watch by
+hand, as you might say, callin' 'em by name loud an' lovin', which is not
+precisely Navy makee-pigeon. They 'ad that timber-loft off the booms, an'
+they dragged it up and down like so many sweatin' little beavers. But
+Jarvis was jealous o' Chips an' went round the starboard side to envy at
+him.
+
+"'Tain't enough,' 'e says, when he had climbed back. 'Chips 'as got his
+bazaar lookin' like a coal-hulk in a cyclone. We must adop' more drastic
+measures.' Off 'e goes to Number One and communicates with 'im. Number One
+got the old man's leave, on account of our goin' so slow (we were keepin'
+be'ind the tramp), to fit the ship with a full set of patent supernumerary
+sails. Four trysails--yes, you might call 'em trysails--was our Admiralty
+allowance in the un'eard of event of a cruiser breakin' down, but we had
+our awnin's as well. They was all extricated from the various flats an'
+'oles where they was stored, an' at the end o' two hours' hard work Number
+One 'e made out eleven sails o' different sorts and sizes. I don't know
+what exact nature of sail you'd call 'em--pyjama-stun'sles with a touch of
+Sarah's shimmy, per'aps--but the riggin' of 'em an' all the supernumerary
+details, as you might say, bein' carried on through an' over an' between
+the cutter an' the forge an' the pork an' cleanin' guns, an' the Maxim
+class an' the Bosun's calaboose _and_ the paintwork, was sublime. There's
+no other word for it. Sub-lime!
+
+"The old man keeps swimmin' up an' down through it all with the faithful
+Antonio at 'is side, fetchin' him numerous splits. 'E had eight that
+mornin', an' when Antonio was detached to get 'is spy-glass, or his
+gloves, or his lily-white 'andkerchief, the old man would waste 'em
+down a ventilator. Antonio must ha' learned a lot about our Navy thirst."
+
+"He did."
+
+"Ah! Would you kindly mind turnin' to the precise page indicated an'
+givin' me a _résumé_ of 'is tattics?" said Mr. Pyecroft, drinking deeply.
+"I'd like to know 'ow it looked from 'is side o' the deck."
+
+"How will this do?" I said. "'_Once clear of the land, like Voltaire's
+Habakkuk_------"'
+
+"One o' their new commerce-destroyers, I suppose," Mr. Pyecroft
+interjected.
+
+"'--_each man seemed veritably capable of all--to do according to his
+will. The boats, dismantled and forlorn, are lowered upon the planking.
+One cries "Aid me!" flourishing at the same time the weapons of his
+business. A dozen launch themselves upon him in the orgasm of zeal
+misdirected. He beats them off with the howlings of dogs. He has lost a
+hammer. This ferocious outcry signifies that only. Eight men seek the
+utensil, colliding on the way with some many others which, seated in the
+stern of the boat, tear up and scatter upon the planking the ironwork
+which impedes their brutal efforts. Elsewhere, one detaches from on high
+wood, canvas, iron bolts, coal-dust--what do I know_?'"
+
+"That's where 'e's comin' the bloomin' _onjenew_. 'E knows a lot, reely."
+
+"'_They descend thundering upon the planking, and the spectacle cannot
+reproduce itself. In my capacity of valet to the captain, whom I have well
+and beautifully plied with drink since the rising of the sun (behold me
+also, Ganymede!) I pass throughout observing, it may be not a little. They
+ask orders. There is none to give them. One sits upon the edge of the
+vessel and chants interminably the lugubrious "Roule Britannia"--to endure
+how lomg_?'"
+
+"That was me! On'y 'twas 'A Life on the Ocean Wave'--which I hate more
+than any stinkin' tune I know, havin' dragged too many nasty little guns
+to it. Yes, Number One told me off to that for ten minutes; an' I ain't
+musical, you might say."
+
+"_'Then come marines, half-dressed, seeking vainly through this "tohu-
+bohu_"' (that's one of his names for the _Archimandrite_, Mr. Pyecroft),
+'_for a place whence they shall not be dislodged. The captain, heavy with
+drink, rolls himself from his hammock. He would have his people fire the
+Maxims. They demand which Maxim. That to him is equal. The breech-lock
+indispensable is not there. They demand it of one who opens a barrel of
+pork, for this Navy feeds at all hours. He refers them to the cook,
+yesterday my master_--'"
+
+"Yes, an' Retallick nearly had a fit. What a truthful an' observin' little
+Antonio we 'ave!"
+
+"'_It is discovered in the hands of a boy who says, and they do not rebuke
+him, that he has found it by hazard_.' I'm afraid I haven't translated
+quite correctly, Mr. Pyecroft, but I've done my best."
+
+"Why, it's beautiful--you ought to be a Frenchman--you ought. You don't
+want anything o' _me_. You've got it all there."
+
+"Yes, but I like your side of it. For instance. Here's a little thing I
+can't quite see the end of. Listen! '_Of the domain which Britannia rules
+by sufferance, my gross captain, knew nothing, and his Navigator, if
+possible, less. From the bestial recriminations and the indeterminate
+chaos of the grand deck, I ascended--always with a whisky-and-soda in my
+hands--to a scene truly grotesque. Behold my captain in plain sea, at
+issue with his Navigator! A crisis of nerves due to the enormous quantity
+of alcohol which he had swallowed up to then, has filled for him the ocean
+with dangers, imaginary and fantastic. Incapable of judgment, menaced by
+the phantasms of his brain inflamed, he envisages islands perhaps of the
+Hesperides beneath his keel--vigias innumerable.'_ I don't know what a
+vigia is, Mr. Pyecroft. _'He creates shoals sad and far-reaching of the
+mid-Atlantic!'_ What was that, now?"
+
+"Oh, I see! That come after dinner, when our Navigator threw 'is cap down
+an' danced on it. Danby was quartermaster. They 'ad a tea-party on the
+bridge. It was the old man's contribution. Does he say anything about the
+leadsmen?"
+
+"Is this it? _'Overborne by his superior's causeless suspicion, the
+Navigator took off the badges of his rank and cast them at the feet of my
+captain and sobbed. A disgusting and maudlin reconciliation followed. The
+argument renewed itself, each grasping the wheel, crapulous'_ (that means
+drunk, I think, Mr. Pyecroft), _'shouting. It appeared that my captain
+would chenaler'_ (I don't know what that means, Mr. Pyecroft) _'to the
+Cape. At the end, he placed a sailor with the sound'_ (that's the lead, I
+think) _'in his hand, garnished with suet.'_ Was it garnished with suet?"
+
+"He put two leadsmen in the chains, o' course! He didn't know that there
+mightn't be shoals there, 'e said. Morgan went an' armed his lead, to
+enter into the spirit o' the thing. They 'eaved it for twenty minutes, but
+there wasn't any suet--only tallow, o' course."
+
+"'_Garnished with suet at two thousand metres of profundity. Decidedly the
+Britannic Navy is well guarded_.' Well, that's all right, Mr. Pyecroft.
+Would you mind telling me anything else of interest that happened?"
+
+"There was a good deal, one way an' another. I'd like to know what this
+Antonio thought of our sails."
+
+"He merely says that '_the engines having broken down, an officer
+extemporised a mournful and useless parody of sails_.' Oh, yes! he says
+that some of them looked like '_bonnets in a needlecase_,' I think."
+
+"Bonnets in a needlecase! They were stun'sles. That shows the beggar's no
+sailor. That trick was really the one thing we did. Pho! I thought he was
+a sailorman, an' 'e hasn't sense enough to see what extemporisin' eleven
+good an' drawin' sails out o' four trys'les an' a few awnin's means. 'E
+must have been drunk!"
+
+"Never mind, Mr. Pyecroft. I want to hear about your target-practice, and
+the execution."
+
+"Oh! We had a special target-practice that afternoon all for Antonio. As I
+told my crew--me bein' captain of the port-bow quick-firer, though I'm a
+torpedo man now--it just showed how you can work your gun under any
+discomforts. A shell--twenty six-inch shells--burstin' inboard couldn't
+'ave begun to make the varicose collection o' tit-bits which we had
+spilled on our deck. It was a lather--a rich, creamy lather!
+
+"We took it very easy--that gun-practice. We did it in a complimentary
+'Jenny-'ave-another-cup-o' tea' style, an' the crew was strictly ordered
+not to rupture 'emselves with unnecessary exertion. This isn't our custom
+in the Navy when we're _in puris naturalibus_, as you might say. But we
+wasn't so then. We was impromptu. An' Antonio was busy fetchin' splits for
+the old man, and the old man was wastin' 'em down the ventilators. There
+must 'ave been four inches in the bilges, I should think--wardroom whisky-
+an'-soda.
+
+"Then I thought I might as well bear a hand as look pretty. So I let my
+_bundoop_ go at fifteen 'undred--sightin' very particular. There was a
+sort of 'appy little belch like--no more, I give you my word--an' the
+shell trundled out maybe fifty feet an' dropped into the deep Atlantic.
+
+"'Government powder, Sir!' sings out our Gunnery Jack to the bridge,
+laughin' horrid sarcastic; an' then, of course, we all laughs, which we
+are not encouraged to do _in puris naturalibus_. Then, of course, I saw
+what our Gunnery Jack 'ad been after with his subcutaneous details in the
+magazines all the mornin' watch. He had redooced the charges to a minimum,
+as you might say. But it made me feel a trifle faint an' sickish
+notwithstanding this spit-in-the-eye business. Every time such transpired,
+our Gunnery Lootenant would say somethin' sarcastic about Government
+stores, an' the old man fair howled. 'Op was on the bridge with 'im, an'
+'e told me--'cause 'e's a free-knowledgeist an' reads character--that
+Antonio's face was sweatin' with pure joy. 'Op wanted to kick him. Does
+Antonio say anything about that?"
+
+"Not about the kicking, but he is great on the gun-practice, Mr. Pyecroft.
+He has put all the results into a sort of appendix--a table of shots. He
+says that the figures will speak more eloquently than words."
+
+"What? Nothin' about the way the crews flinched an' hopped? Nothin' about
+the little shells rumblin' out o' the guns so casual?"
+
+"There are a few pages of notes, but they only bear out what you say. He
+says that these things always happen as soon as one of our ships is out of
+sight of land. Oh, yes! I've forgotten. He says, _'From the conversation
+of my captain with his inferiors I gathered that no small proportion of
+the expense of these nominally efficient cartridges finds itself in his
+pockets. So much, indeed, was signified by an officer on the deck below,
+who cried in a high voice: "I hope, Sir, you are making something out of
+it. It is rather monotonous." This insult, so flagrant, albeit well-
+merited, was received with a smile of drunken bonhommy'_--that's
+cheerfulness, Mr. Pyecroft. Your glass is empty."
+
+"Resumin' afresh," said Mr. Pyecroft, after a well-watered interval, "I
+may as well say that the target-practice occupied us two hours, and then
+we had to dig out after the tramp. Then we half an' three-quarters cleaned
+up the decks an' mucked about as requisite, haulin' down the patent awnin'
+stun'sles which Number One 'ad made. The old man was a shade doubtful of
+his course, 'cause I 'eard him say to Number One, 'You were right. A week
+o' this would turn the ship into a Hayti bean-feast. But,' he says
+pathetic, 'haven't they backed the band noble?'
+
+"'Oh! it's a picnic for them,' says Number One.
+
+"'But when do we get rid o' this whisky-peddlin' blighter o' yours, Sir?'
+
+"'That's a cheerful way to speak of a Viscount,' says the old man. "E's
+the bluest blood o' France when he's at home,'
+
+"'Which is the precise landfall I wish 'im to make,' says Number One.'
+It'll take all 'ands and the Captain of the Head to clean up after 'im.'
+
+"'They won't grudge it,' says the old man. 'Just as soon as it's dusk
+we'll overhaul our tramp friend an' waft him over,'
+
+"Then a sno--midshipman--Moorshed was is name--come up an' says somethin'
+in a low voice. It fetches the old man.
+
+"'You'll oblige me,' 'e says, 'by takin' the wardroom poultry for _that_.
+I've ear-marked every fowl we've shipped at Madeira, so there can't be any
+possible mistake. M'rover,' 'e says, 'tell 'em if they spill one drop of
+blood on the deck,' he says, 'they'll not be extenuated, but hung.'
+
+"Mr. Moorshed goes forward, lookin' unusual 'appy, even for him. The
+Marines was enjoyin' a committee-meetin' in their own flat.
+
+"After that, it fell dark, with just a little streaky, oily light on the
+sea--an' anythin' more chronic than the _Archimandrite_ I'd trouble you
+to behold. She looked like a fancy bazaar and a auction-room--yes, she
+almost looked like a passenger-steamer. We'd picked up our tramp, an' was
+about four mile be'ind 'er. I noticed the wardroom as a class, you might
+say, was manoeuvrin' _en masse_, an' then come the order to cockbill the
+yards. We hadn't any yards except a couple o' signallin' sticks, but we
+cock-billed 'em. I hadn't seen that sight, not since thirteen years in the
+West Indies, when a post-captain died o' yellow jack. It means a sign o'
+mourning the yards bein' canted opposite ways, to look drunk an'
+disorderly. They do.
+
+"'An' what might our last giddy-go-round signify?' I asks of 'Op.
+
+"'Good 'Evins!' 'e says, 'Are you in the habit o' permittin' leathernecks
+to assassinate lootenants every morning at drill without immejitly 'avin'
+'em shot on the foc'sle in the horrid crawly-crawly twilight?'"
+
+"'Yes,' I murmured over my dear book, '_the infinitely lugubrious
+crepuscule. A spectacle of barbarity unparalleled--hideous--cold-blooded,
+and yet touched with appalling grandeur_.'"
+
+"Ho! Was that the way Antonio looked at it? That shows he 'ad feelin's. To
+resoom. Without anyone givin' us orders to that effect, we began to creep
+about an' whisper. Things got stiller and stiller, till they was as still
+as--mushrooms! Then the bugler let off the 'Dead March' from the upper
+bridge. He done it to cover the remarks of a cock-bird bein' killed
+forrard, but it came out paralysin' in its _tout ensemble_. You never
+heard the 'Dead March' on a bugle? Then the pipes went twitterin' for both
+watches to attend public execution, an' we came up like so many ghosts,
+the 'ole ship's company. Why, Mucky 'Arcourt, one o' our boys, was that
+took in he give tongue like a beagle-pup, an' was properly kicked down the
+ladder for so doin'. Well, there we lay--engines stopped, rollin' to the
+swell, all dark, yards cock-billed, an' that merry tune yowlin' from the
+upper bridge. We fell in on the foc'sle, leavin' a large open space by the
+capstan, where our sail-maker was sittin' sewin' broken firebars into the
+foot of an old 'ammick. 'E looked like a corpse, an' Mucky had another fit
+o' hysterics, an' you could 'ear us breathin' 'ard. It beat anythin' in
+the theatrical line that even us _Archimandrites_ had done--an' we was the
+ship you could trust. Then come the doctor an' lit a red lamp which he
+used for his photographic muckin's, an' chocked it on the capstan. That
+was finally gashly!
+
+"Then come twelve Marines guardin' Glass 'ere. You wouldn't think to see
+'im what a gratooitous an' aboundin' terror he was that evenin'. 'E was in
+a white shirt 'e'd stole from Cockburn, an' his regulation trousers,
+barefooted. 'E'd pipe-clayed 'is 'ands an' face an' feet an' as much of
+his chest as the openin' of his shirt showed. 'E marched under escort with
+a firm an' undeviatin' step to the capstan, an' came to attention. The old
+man reinforced by an extra strong split--his seventeenth, an' 'e didn't
+throw _that_ down the ventilator--come up on the bridge an' stood like a
+image. 'Op, 'oo was with 'im, says that 'e heard Antonio's teeth singin',
+not chatterin'--singin' like funnel-stays in a typhoon. Yes, a moanin'
+æolian harp, 'Op said.
+
+"'When you are ready, Sir, drop your 'andkerchief,' Number One whispers.
+
+"'Good Lord!' says the old man, with a jump. 'Eh! What? What a sight! What
+a sight!' an' he stood drinkin' it in, I suppose, for quite two minutes.
+
+"Glass never says a word. 'E shoved aside an 'andkerchief which the
+sub-lootenant proffered 'im to bind 'is eyes with--quiet an' collected;
+an' if we 'adn't been feelin' so very much as we did feel, his gestures
+would 'ave brought down the 'ouse." "I can't open my eyes, or I'll be
+sick," said the Marine with appalling clearness. "I'm pretty far gone--I
+know it--but there wasn't anyone could 'ave beaten Edwardo Glass,
+R.M.L.I., that time. Why, I scared myself nearly into the 'orrors. Go on,
+Pye. Glass is in support--as ever."
+
+"Then the old man drops 'is 'andkerchief, an' the firin'-party fires like
+one man. Glass drops forward, twitchin' an' 'eavin' horrid natural, into
+the shotted 'ammick all spread out before him, and the firin' party closes
+in to guard the remains of the deceased while Sails is stitchin' it up.
+An' when they lifted that 'ammick it was one wringin' mess of blood! They
+on'y expended one wardroom cock-bird, too. Did you know poultry bled that
+extravagant? _I_ never did.
+
+"The old man--so 'Op told me--stayed on the bridge, brought up on a dead
+centre. Number One was similarly, though lesser, impressed, but o' course
+'is duty was to think of 'is fine white decks an' the blood. 'Arf a mo',
+Sir,' he says, when the old man was for leavin'. 'We have to wait for the
+burial, which I am informed takes place immejit.'
+
+"'It's beyond me,' says the owner. 'There was general instructions for an
+execution, but I never knew I had such a dependable push of mountebanks
+aboard,' he says. 'I'm all cold up my back, still.'
+
+"The Marines carried the corpse below. Then the bugle give us some more
+'Dead March,' Then we 'eard a splash from a bow six-pounder port, an' the
+bugle struck up a cheerful tune. The whole lower deck was complimentin'
+Glass, 'oo took it very meek. 'E _is_ a good actor, for all 'e's a
+leatherneck.
+
+"'Now,' said the old man, 'we must turn over Antonio. He's in what I have
+'eard called one perspirin' funk.'
+
+"Of course, I'm tellin' it slow, but it all 'appened much quicker. We run
+down our trampo--without o' course informin' Antonio of 'is 'appy destiny
+--an' inquired of 'er if she had any use for a free and gratis stowaway.
+Oh, yes? she said she'd be highly grateful, but she seemed a shade puzzled
+at our generosity, as you might put it, an' we lay by till she lowered a
+boat. Then Antonio--who was un'appy, distinctly un'appy--was politely
+requested to navigate elsewhere, which I don't think he looked for. 'Op
+was deputed to convey the information, an' 'Op got in one sixteen-inch
+kick which 'oisted 'im all up the ladder. 'Op ain't really vindictive, an'
+'e's fond of the French, especially the women, but his chances o' kicking
+lootenants was like the cartridge--reduced to a minimum.
+
+"The boat 'adn't more than shoved off before a change, as you might say,
+came o'er the spirit of our dream. The old man says, like Elphinstone an'
+Bruce in the Portsmouth election when I was a boy: 'Gentlemen,' he says,
+'for gentlemen you have shown yourselves to be--from the bottom of my
+heart I thank you. The status an' position of our late lamented shipmate
+made it obligate,' 'e says, 'to take certain steps not strictly included
+in the regulations. An' nobly,' says 'e, 'have you assisted me. Now,' 'e
+says, 'you hold the false and felonious reputation of bein' the smartest
+ship in the Service. Pigsties,' 'e says,' is plane trigonometry alongside
+our present disgustin' state. Efface the effects of this indecent orgy,'
+he says. 'Jump, you lop-eared, flat-footed, butter-backed Amalekites! Dig
+out, you briny-eyed beggars!'"
+
+"Do captains talk like that in the Navy, Mr. Pyecroft?" I asked.
+
+"I've told you once I only give the grist of his arguments. The Bosun's
+mate translates it to the lower deck, as you may put it, and the lower
+deck springs smartly to attention. It took us half the night 'fore we got
+'er anyway ship-shape; but by sunrise she was beautiful as ever, and we
+resoomed. I've thought it over a lot since; yes, an' I've thought a lot of
+Antonio trimmin' coal in that tramp's bunkers. 'E must 'ave been highly
+surprised. Wasn't he?"
+
+"He was, Mr. Pyecroft," I responded. "But now we're talking of it, weren't
+you all a little surprised?"
+
+"It come as a pleasant relief to the regular routine," said Mr. Pyecroft.
+"We appreciated it as an easy way o' workin' for your country. But--the
+old man was right--a week o' similar manoeuvres would 'ave knocked our
+moral double-bottoms bung out. Now, couldn't you oblige with Antonio's
+account of Glass's execution?"
+
+I obliged for nearly ten minutes. It was at best but a feeble rendering of
+M. de C.'s magnificent prose, through which the soul of the poet, the eye
+of the mariner, and the heart of the patriot bore magnificent accord. His
+account of his descent from the side of the "_infamous vessel consecrated
+to blood_" in the "_vast and gathering dusk of the trembling ocean_" could
+only be matched by his description of the dishonoured hammock sinking
+unnoticed through the depths, while, above, the bugler played music "_of
+an indefinable brutality_"
+
+"By the way, what did the bugler play after Glass's funeral?" I asked.
+
+"Him? Oh! 'e played 'The Strict Q.T.' It's a very old song. We 'ad it in
+Fratton nearly fifteen years back," said Mr. Pyecroft sleepily.
+
+I stirred the sugar dregs in my glass. Suddenly entered armed men, wet and
+discourteous, Tom Wessels smiling nervously in the background.
+
+"Where is that--minutely particularised person--Glass?" said the sergeant
+of the picket.
+
+"'Ere!" The marine rose to the strictest of attentions. "An' it's no good
+smelling of my breath, because I'm strictly an' ruinously sober."
+
+"Oh! An' what may you have been doin' with yourself?"
+
+"Listenin' to tracts. You can look! I've had the evenin' of my little
+life. Lead on to the _Cornucopia's_ midmost dunjing cell. There's a crowd
+of brass-'atted blighters there which will say I've been absent without
+leaf. Never mind. I forgive them before'and. _The_ evenin' of my life, an'
+please don't forget it." Then in a tone of most ingratiating apology to
+me: "I soaked it all in be'ind my shut eyes. 'I'm"--he jerked a
+contemptuous thumb towards Mr. Pyecroft--"'e's a flatfoot, a indigo-blue
+matlow. 'E never saw the fun from first to last. A mournful beggar--most
+depressin'." Private Glass departed, leaning heavily on the escort's arm.
+
+Mr. Pyecroft wrinkled his brows in thought--the profound and far-reaching
+meditation that follows five glasses of hot whisky-and-water.
+
+"Well, I don't see anything comical--greatly--except here an' there.
+Specially about those redooced charges in the guns. Do _you_ see anything
+funny in it?"
+
+There was that in his eye which warned me the night was too wet for
+argument.
+
+"No, Mr. Pyecroft, I don't," I replied. "It was a beautiful tale, and I
+thank you very much."
+
+
+
+
+A SAHIBS' WAR
+
+THE RUNNERS
+
+                                   _News!_
+  What is the word that they tell now--now--now!
+  The little drums beating in the bazaars?
+      _They_ beat (among the buyers and sellers)
+          _"Nimrud--ah Nimrud!
+          God sends a gnat against Nimrud_!"
+      Watchers, O Watchers a thousand!
+
+                                   _News!_
+  At the edge of the crops--now--now--where the well-wheels are halted,
+  One prepares to loose the bullocks and one scrapes his hoe,
+      _They_ beat (among the sowers and the reapers)
+          _"Nimrud--ah Nimrud!
+          God prepares an ill day for Nimrud_!"
+      Watchers, O Watchers ten thousand.
+
+                                   _News!_
+  By the fires of the camps--now--now--where the travellers meet
+  Where the camels come in and the horses: their men conferring,
+      _They_ beat (among the packmen and the drivers)
+          _"Nimrud--ah Nimrud!
+          Thus it befell last noon to Nimrud_!"
+      Watchers, O Watchers an hundred thousand!
+
+                                   _News!_
+  Under the shadow of the border-peels--now--now--now!
+  In the rocks of the passes where the expectant shoe their horses,
+      _They_ beat (among the rifles and the riders)
+          _"Nimrud--ah Nimrud!
+          Shall we go up against Nimrud_?"
+      Watchers, O Watchers a thousand thousand?
+
+                                   _News!_
+  Bring out the heaps of grain--open the account-books again!
+  Drive forward the well-bullocks against the taxable harvest!
+  Eat and lie under the trees--pitch the police-guarded  fair-grounds,
+      O dancers!
+  Hide away the rifles and let down the ladders from the watch-towers!
+      _They_ beat (among all the peoples)
+          _"Now--now--now!
+          God has reserved the Sword for Nimrud!
+          God has given Victory to Nimrud!"
+          Let us abide under Nimrud_!"
+      O Well-disposed and Heedful, an hundred thousand thousand!
+
+
+A SAHIBS' WAR
+
+Pass? Pass? Pass? I have one pass already, allowing me to go by the _rêl_
+from Kroonstadt to Eshtellenbosch, where the horses are, where I am to be
+paid off, and whence I return to India. I am a--trooper of the Gurgaon
+Rissala (cavalry regiment), the One Hundred and Forty-first Punjab
+Cavalry, Do not herd me with these black Kaffirs. I am a Sikh--a trooper
+of the State. The Lieutenant-Sahib does not understand my talk? Is there
+_any_ Sahib on the train who will interpret for a trooper of the Gurgaon
+Rissala going about his business in this devil's devising of a country,
+where there is no flour, no oil, no spice, no red pepper, and no respect
+paid to a Sikh? Is there no help?... God be thanked, here is such a Sahib!
+Protector of the Poor! Heaven-born! Tell the young Lieutenant-Sahib that
+my name is Umr Singh; I am--I was servant to Kurban Sahib, now dead; and I
+have a pass to go to Eshtellenbosch, where the horses are. Do not let him
+herd me with these black Kaffirs!... Yes,  I will sit by this truck till
+the Heaven-born has explained the matter to the young Lieutenant-Sahib who
+does not understand our tongue.
+
+*       *       *       *       *
+
+What orders? The young Lieutenant-Sahib will not detain me? Good! I go
+down to Eshtellenbosch by the next _terain_? Good! I go with the Heaven-
+born? Good! Then for this day I am the Heaven-born's servant. Will the
+Heaven-born bring the honour of his presence to a seat? Here is an empty
+truck; I will spread my blanket over one corner thus--for the sun is hot,
+though not so hot as our Punjab in May. I will prop it up thus, and I will
+arrange this hay thus, so the Presence can sit at ease till God sends us a
+_terain_ for Eshtellenbosch....
+
+The Presence knows the Punjab? Lahore? Amritzar? Attaree, belike? My
+village is north over the fields three miles from Attaree, near the big
+white house which was copied from a certain place of the Great Queen's by
+--by--I have forgotten the name. Can the Presence recall it? Sirdar Dyal
+Singh Attareewalla! Yes, that is the very man; but how does the Presence
+know? Born and bred in Hind, was he? O-o-oh! This is quite a different
+matter. The Sahib's nurse was a Surtee woman from the Bombay side? That
+was a pity. She should have been an up-country wench; for those make stout
+nurses. There is no land like the Punjab. There are no people like the
+Sikhs. Umr Singh is my name, yes. An old man? Yes. A trooper only after
+all these years? Ye-es. Look at my uniform, if the Sahib doubts. Nay--nay;
+the Sahib looks too closely. All marks of rank were picked off it long
+ago, but--but it is true--mine is not a common cloth such as troopers use
+for their coats, and--the Sahib has sharp eyes--that black mark is such a
+mark as a silver chain leaves when long worn on the breast. The Sahib says
+that troopers do not wear silver chains? No-o. Troopers do not wear the
+Arder of Beritish India? No. The Sahib should have been in the Police of
+the Punjab. I am not a trooper, but I have been a Sahib's servant for
+nearly a year--bearer, butler, sweeper, any and all three. The Sahib says
+that Sikhs do not take menial service? True; but it was for Kurban Sahib--
+my Kurban Sahib--dead these three months!
+
+*       *       *       *       *
+
+Young--of a reddish face--with blue eyes, and he lilted a little on his
+feet when he was pleased, and cracked his finger-joints. So did his father
+before him, who was Deputy-Commissioner of Jullundur in my father's time
+when I rode with the Gurgaon Rissala. _My_ father? Jwala Singh. A Sikh of
+Sikhs--he fought against the English at Sobraon and carried the mark to
+his death. So we were knit as it were by a blood-tie, I and my Kurban
+Sahib. Yes, I was a trooper first--nay, I had risen to a Lance-Duffadar, I
+remember--and my father gave me a dun stallion of his own breeding on that
+day; and _he_ was a little baba, sitting upon a wall by the parade-ground
+with his ayah--all in white, Sahib--laughing at the end of our drill. And
+his father and mine talked together, and mine beckoned to me, and I
+dismounted, and the baba put his hand into mine--eighteen--twenty-five--
+twenty-seven years gone now--Kurban Sahib--my Kurban Sahib! Oh, we were
+great friends after that! He cut his teeth on my sword-hilt, as the saying
+is. He called me Big Umr Singh--Buwwa Umwa Singh, for he could not speak
+plain. He stood only this high, Sahib, from the bottom of this truck, but
+he knew all our troopers by name--every one.... And he went to England,
+and he became a young man, and back he came, lilting a little in his walk,
+and cracking his finger-joints--back to his own regiment and to me. He had
+not forgotten either our speech or our customs. He was a Sikh at heart,
+Sahib. He was rich, open-handed, just, a friend of poor troopers, keen-
+eyed, jestful, and careless. _I_ could tell tales about him in his first
+years. There was very little he hid from _me_. I was his Umr Singh, and
+when we were alone he called me Father, and I called him Son. Yes, that
+was how we spoke. We spoke freely together on everything--about war, and
+women, and money, and advancement, and such all.
+
+We spoke about this war, too, long before it came. There were many box-
+wallas, pedlars, with Pathans a few, in this country, notably at the city
+of Yunasbagh (Johannesburg), and they sent news in every week how the
+Sahibs lay without weapons under the heel of the Boer-log; and how big
+guns were hauled up and down the streets to keep Sahibs in order; and how
+a Sahib called Eger Sahib (Edgar?) was killed for a jest by the Boer-log.
+The Sahib knows how we of Hind hear all that passes over the earth? There
+was not a gun cocked in Yunasbagh that the echo did not come into Hind in
+a month. The Sahibs are very clever, but they forget their own cleverness
+has created the _dak_ (the post), and that for an anna or two all things
+become known. We of Hind listened and heard and wondered; and when it was
+a sure thing, as reported by the pedlars and the vegetable-sellers, that
+the Sahibs of Yunasbagh lay in bondage to the Boer-log, certain among us
+asked questions and waited for signs. Others of us mistook the meaning of
+those signs. _Wherefore, Sahib, came the long war in the Tirah_! This
+Kurban Sahib knew, and we talked together. He said, "There is no haste.
+Presently we shall fight, and we shall fight for all Hind in that country
+round Yunasbagh. Here he spoke truth. Does the Sahib not agree? Quite so.
+It is for Hind that the Sahibs are fighting this war. Ye cannot in one
+place rule and in another bear service. Either ye must everywhere rule or
+everywhere obey. God does not make the nations ringstraked. True--true--
+true!"
+
+So did matters ripen--a step at a time. It was nothing to me, except I
+think--and the Sahib sees this, too?--that it is foolish to make an army
+and break their hearts in idleness. Why have they not sent for men of the
+Tochi--the men of the Tirah--the men of Buner? Folly, a thousand times.
+_We_ could have done it all so gently--so gently.
+
+Then, upon a day, Kurban Sahib sent for me and said, "Ho, Dada, I am sick,
+and the doctor gives me a certificate for many months." And he winked, and
+I said, "I will get leave and nurse thee, Child. Shall I bring my
+uniform?" He said, "Yes, and a sword for a sick man to lean on. We go to
+Bombay, and thence by sea to the country of the Hubshis" (niggers). Mark
+his cleverness! He was first of all our men among the native regiments to
+get leave for sickness and to come here. Now they will not let our
+officers go away, sick or well, except they sign a bond not to take part
+in this war-game upon the road. But _he_ was clever. There was no whisper
+of war when he took his sick-leave. I came also? Assuredly. I went to my
+Colonel, and sitting in the chair (I am--I was--of that rank for which a
+chair is placed when we speak with the Colonel) I said, "My child goes
+sick. Give me leave, for I am old and sick also."
+
+And the Colonel, making the word double between English and our tongue,
+said, "Yes, thou art truly _Sikh_"; and he called me an old devil--
+jestingly, as one soldier may jest with another; and he said my Kurban
+Sahib was a liar as to his health (that was true, too), and at long last
+he stood up and shook my hand, and bade me go and bring my Sahib safe
+again. My Sahib back again--aie me!
+
+So I went to Bombay with Kurban Sahib, but there, at sight of the Black
+Water, Wajib Ali, his bearer checked, and said that his mother was dead.
+Then I said to Kurban Sahib, "What is one Mussulman pig more or less? Give
+me the keys of the trunks, and I will lay out the white shirts for
+dinner." Then I beat Wajib Ali at the back of Watson's Hotel, and that
+night I prepared Kurban Sahib's razors. I say, Sahib, that I, a Sikh of
+the Khalsa, an unshorn man, prepared the razors. But I did not put on my
+uniform while I did it. On the other hand, Kurban Sahib took for me, upon
+the steamer, a room in all respects like to his own, and would have given
+me a servant. We spoke of many things on the way to this country; and
+Kurban Sahib told me what he perceived would be the conduct of the war. He
+said, "They have taken men afoot to fight men ahorse, and they will
+foolishly show mercy to these Boer-log because it is believed that they
+are white." He said, "There is but one fault in this war, and that is that
+the Government have not employed _us_, but have made it altogether a
+Sahibs' war. Very many men will thus be killed, and no vengeance will be
+taken." True talk--true talk! It fell as Kurban Sahib foretold.
+
+And we came to this country, even to Cape Town over yonder, and Kurban
+Sahib said, "Bear the baggage to the big dak-bungalow, and I will look for
+employment fit for a sick man." I put on the uniform of my rank and went to
+the big dak-bungalow, called Maun Nihâl Seyn, [Footnote: Mount Nelson?]
+and I caused the heavy baggage to be bestowed in that dark lower place--is
+it known to the Sahib?--which was already full of the swords and baggage
+of officers. It is fuller now--dead men's kit all! I was careful to secure
+a receipt for all three pieces. I have it in my belt. They must go back to
+the Punjab.
+
+Anon came Kurban Sahib, lilting a little in his step, which sign I knew,
+and he said, "We are born in a fortunate hour. We go to Eshtellenbosch to
+oversee the despatch of horses." Remember, Kurban Sahib was squadron-
+leader of the Gurgaon Rissala, and _I_ was Umr Singh. So I said, speaking
+as we do--we did--when none was near, "Thou art a groom and I am a grass-
+cutter, but is this any promotion, Child?" At this he laughed, saying,
+"It is the way to better things. Have patience, Father." (Aye, he called me
+father when none were by.) "This war ends not to-morrow nor the next day.
+I have seen the new Sahibs," he said, "and they are fathers of owls--all--
+all--all!"
+
+So we went to Eshtellenbosch, where the horses are; Kurban Sahib doing the
+service of servants in that business. And the whole business was managed
+without forethought by new Sahibs from God knows where, who had never seen
+a tent pitched or a peg driven. They were full of zeal, but empty of all
+knowledge. Then came, little by little from Hind, those Pathans--they are
+just like those vultures up there, Sahib--they always follow slaughter.
+And there came to Eshtellenbosch some Sikhs--Muzbees, though--and some
+Madras monkey-men. They came with horses. Puttiala sent horses. Jhind and
+Nabha sent horses. All the nations of the Khalsa sent horses.
+
+All the ends of the earth sent horses. God knows what the army did with
+them, unless they ate them raw. They used horses as a courtesan uses oil:
+with both hands. These needed many men. Kurban Sahib appointed me to the
+command (what a command for me!) of certain woolly ones--_Hubshis_--whose
+touch and shadow are pollution. They were enormous eaters; sleeping on
+their bellies; laughing without cause; wholly like animals. Some were
+called Fingoes, and some, I think, Red Kaffirs, but they were all Kaffirs
+--filth unspeakable. I taught them to water and feed, and sweep and rub
+down. Yes, I oversaw the work of sweepers--a _jemadar_ of _mehtars_
+(headman of a refuse-gang) was I, and Kurban Sahib little better, for five
+months. Evil months! The war went as Kurban Sahib had said. Our new men
+were slain and no vengeance was taken. It was a war of fools armed with
+the weapons of magicians. Guns that slew at half a day's march, and men
+who, being new, walked blind into high grass and were driven off like
+cattle by the Boer-log! As to the city of Eshtellenbosch, I am not a
+Sahib--only a Sikh. I would have quartered one troop only of the Gurgaon
+Rissala in that city--one little troop--and I would have schooled that
+city till its men learned to kiss the shadow of a Government horse upon
+the ground. There are many _mullahs_ (priests) in Eshtellenbosch. They
+preached the Jehad against us. This is true--all the camp knew it. And
+most of the houses were thatched! A war of fools indeed!
+
+At the end of five months my Kurban Sahib, who had grown lean, said, "The
+reward has come. We go up towards the front with horses to-morrow, and,
+once away, I shall be too sick so return. Make ready the baggage." Thus we
+got away, with some Kaffirs in charge of new horses for a certain new
+regiment that had come in a ship. The second day by _terain_, when we were
+watering at a desolate place without any sort of a bazaar to it, slipped
+out from the horse-boxes one Sikander Khan, that had been a _jemadar_ of
+_saises_ (head-groom) at Eshtellenbosch, and was by service a trooper in a
+Border regiment. Kurban Sahib gave him big abuse for his desertion; but
+the Pathan put up his hands as excusing himself, and Kurban Sahib relented
+and added him to our service. So there were three of us--Kurban Sahib, I,
+and Sikander Khan--Sahib, Sikh, and _Sag_ (dog). But the man said truly,
+"We be far from our homes and both servants of the Raj. Make truce till we
+see the Indus again." I have eaten from the same dish as Sikander Khan--
+beef, too, for aught I know! He said, on the night he stole some swine's
+flesh in a tin from a mess-tent, that in his Book, the Koran, it is
+written that whoso engages in a holy war is freed from ceremonial
+obligations. Wah! He had no more religion than the sword-point picks up of
+sugar and water at baptism. He stole himself a horse at a place where
+there lay a new and very raw regiment. I also procured myself a grey
+gelding there. They let their horses stray too much, those new regiments.
+
+Some shameless regiments would indeed have made away with _our_ horses on
+the road! They exhibited indents and requisitions for horses, and once or
+twice would have uncoupled the trucks; but Kurban Sahib was wise, and I am
+not altogether a fool. There is not much honesty at the front. Notably,
+there was one congregation of hard-bitten horse-thieves; tall, light
+Sahibs, who spoke through their noses for the most part, and upon all
+occasions they said, "Oah Hell!" which, in our tongue, signifies _Jehannum
+ko jao_. They bore each man a vine-leaf upon their uniforms, and they rode
+like Rajputs. Nay, they rode like Sikhs. They rode like the Ustrelyahs!
+The Ustrelyahs, whom we met later, also spoke through their noses not
+little, and they were tall, dark men, with grey, clear eyes, heavily
+eyelashed like camel's eyes--very proper men--a new brand of Sahib to me.
+They said on all occasions, "No fee-ah," which in our tongue means _Durro
+mut_ ("Do not be afraid"), so we called them the _Durro Muts_. Dark, tall
+men, most excellent horsemen, hot and angry, waging war _as_ war, and
+drinking tea as a sandhill drinks water. Thieves? A little, Sahib.
+Sikander Khan swore to me; and he comes of a horse-stealing clan for ten
+generations; he swore a Pathan was a babe beside a _Durro Mut_ in regard
+to horse-lifting. The _Durro Muts_ cannot walk on their feet at all. They
+are like hens on the high road. Therefore they must have horses. Very
+proper men, with a just lust for the war. Aah--"No fee-ah," say the _Durro
+Muts_. _They_ saw the worth of Kurban Sahib. _They_ did not ask him to
+sweep stables. They would by no means let him go. He did substitute for
+one of their troop-leaders who had a fever, one long day in a country full
+of little hills--like the mouth of the Khaibar; and when they returned in
+the evening, the _Durro Muts_ said, "Wallah! This is a man. Steal him!" So
+they stole my Kurban Sahib as they would have stolen anything else that
+they needed, and they sent a sick officer back to Eshtellenbosch in his
+place.
+
+Thus Kurban Sahib came to his own again, and I was his bearer, and
+Sikander Khan was his cook. The law was strict that this was a Sahibs'
+war, but there was no order that a bearer and a cook should not ride with
+their Sahib--and we had naught to wear but our uniforms. We rode up and
+down this accursed country, where there is no bazaar, no pulse, no flour,
+no oil, no spice, no red pepper, no firewood; nothing but raw corn and a
+little cattle. There were no great battles as I saw it, but a plenty of
+gun-firing. When we were many, the Boer-log came out with coffee to greet
+us, and to show us _purwanas_ (permits) from foolish English Generals who
+had gone that way before, certifying they were peaceful and well-disposed.
+When we were few, they hid behind stones and shot us. Now the order was
+that they were Sahibs, and this was a Sahibs' war. Good! But, as I
+understand it, when a Sahib goes to war, he puts on the cloth of war, and
+only those who wear that cloth may take part in the war. Good! That also I
+understand. But these people were as they were in Burma, or as the Afridis
+are. They shot at their pleasure, and when pressed hid the gun and
+exhibited _purwanas_, or lay in a house and said they were farmers. Even
+such farmers as cut up the Madras troops at Hlinedatalone in Burma! Even
+such farmers as slew Cavagnari Sahib and the Guides at Kabul! We schooled
+_those_ men, to be sure--fifteen, aye, twenty of a morning pushed off the
+verandah in front of the Bala Hissar. I looked that the Jung-i-lat Sahib
+(the Commander-in-Chief) would have remembered the old days; but--no. All
+the people shot at us everywhere, and he issued proclamations saying that
+he did not fight the people, but a certain army, which army, in truth, was
+all the Boer-log, who, between them, did not wear enough of uniform to
+make a loincloth. A fool's war from first to last; for it is manifest that
+he who fights should be hung if he fights with a gun in one hand and a
+_purwana_ in the other, as did all these people. Yet we, when they had had
+their bellyful for the time, received them with honour, and gave them
+permits, and refreshed them and fed their wives and their babes, and
+severely punished our soldiers who took their fowls. So the work was to be
+done not once with a few dead, but thrice and four times over. I talked
+much with Kurban Sahib on this, and he said, "It is a Sahibs' war. That is
+the order;" and one night, when Sikander Khan would have lain out beyond
+the pickets with his knife and shown them how it is worked on the Border,
+he hit Sikander Khan between the eyes and came near to breaking in his
+head. Then Sikander Khan, a bandage over his eyes, so that he looked like
+a sick camel, talked to him half one march, and he was more bewildered
+than I, and vowed he would return to Eshtellenbosch. But privately to me
+Kurban Sahib said we should have loosed the Sikhs and the Gurkhas on these
+people till they came in with their foreheads in the dust. For the war was
+not of that sort which they comprehended.
+
+They shot us? Assuredly they shot us from houses adorned with a white
+flag; but when they came to know our custom, their widows sent word by
+Kaffir runners, and presently there was not quite so much firing. _No fee-
+ah_! All the Boer-log with whom we dealt had _purwanas_ signed by mad
+Generals attesting that they were well-disposed to the State.
+
+They had also rifles not a few, and cartridges, which they hid in the
+roof. The women wept very greatly when we burned such houses, but they did
+not approach too near after the flames had taken good hold of the thatch,
+for fear of the bursting cartridges. The women of the Boer-log are very
+clever. They are more clever than the men. The Boer-log are clever? Never,
+never, no! It is the Sahibs who are fools. For their own honour's sake the
+Sahibs must say that the Boer-log are clever; but it is the Sahibs'
+wonderful folly that has made the Boer-log. The Sahibs should have sent
+_us_ into the game.
+
+But the _Durro Muts_ did well. They dealt faithfully with all that country
+thereabouts--not in any way as we of Hind should have dealt, but they were
+not altogether fools. One night when we lay on the top of a ridge in the
+cold, I saw far away a light in a house that appeared for the sixth part
+of an hour and was obscured. Anon it appeared again thrice for the twelfth
+part of an hour. I showed this to Kurban Sahib, for it was a house that
+had been spared--the people having many permits and swearing fidelity at
+our stirrup-leathers. I said to Kurban Sahib, "Send half a troop, Child,
+and finish that house. They signal to their brethren." And he laughed
+where he lay and said, "If I listened to my bearer Umr Singh, there would
+not be left ten houses in all this land." I said, "What need to leave one?
+This is as it was in Burma. They are farmers to-day and fighters to-morrow.
+Let us deal justly with them." He laughed and curled himself up in
+his blanket, and I watched the far light in the house till day. I have
+been on the border in eight wars, not counting Burma. The first Afghan
+War; the second Afghan War; two Mahsud Waziri wars (that is four); two
+Black Mountain wars, if I remember right; the Malakand and Tirah. I do not
+count Burma, or some small things. _I_ know when house signals to house!
+
+I pushed Sikandar Khan with my foot, and he saw it too. He said, "One of
+the Boer-log who brought pumpkins for the mess, which I fried last night,
+lives in yonder house." I said, "How dost thou know?" He said, "Because he
+rode out of the camp another way, but I marked how his horse fought with
+him at the turn of the road; and before the light fell I stole out of the
+camp for evening prayer with Kurban Sahib's glasses, and from a little
+hill I saw the pied horse of that pumpkin-seller hurrying to that house."
+I said naught, but took Kurban Sahib's glasses from his greasy hands and
+cleaned them with a silk handkerchief and returned them to their case.
+Sikander Khan told me that he had been the first man in the Zenab valley
+to use glasses--whereby he finished two blood-feuds cleanly in the course
+of three months' leave. But he was otherwise a liar.
+
+That day Kurban Sahib, with some ten troopers, was sent on to spy the land
+for our camp. The _Durro Muts_ moved slowly at that time. They were
+weighted with grain and forage and carts, and they greatly wished to leave
+these all in some town and go on light to other business which pressed. So
+Kurban Sahib sought a short cut for them, a little off the line of march.
+We were twelve miles before the main body, and we came to a house under a
+high bushed hill, with a nullah, which they call a donga, behind it, and
+an old sangar of piled stones, which they call a kraal, before it. Two
+thorn bushes grew on either side of the door, like babul bushes, covered
+with a golden coloured bloom, and the roof was all of thatch. Before the
+house was a valley of stones that rose to another bush-covered hill. There
+was an old man in the verandah--an old man with a white beard and a wart
+upon the left side of his neck; and a fat woman with the eyes of a swine
+and the jowl of a swine; and a tall young man deprived of understanding.
+His head was hairless, no larger than an orange, and the pits of his
+nostrils were eaten away by a disease. He laughed and slavered and he
+sported sportively before Kurban Sahib. The man brought coffee and the
+woman showed us _purwanas_ from three General Sahibs, certifying that they
+were people of peace and goodwill. Here are the _purwanas_, Sahib. Does
+the Sahib know the Generals who signed them?
+
+They swore the land was empty of Boer-log. They held up their hands and
+swore it. That was about the time of the evening meal. I stood near the
+verandah with Sikander Khan, who was nosing like a jackal on a lost scent.
+At last he took my arm and said, "See yonder! There is the sun on the
+window of the house that signalled last night. This house can see that
+house from here," and he looked at the hill behind him all hairy with
+bushes, and sucked in his breath. Then the idiot with the shrivelled head
+danced by me and threw back that head, and regarded the roof and laughed
+like a hyena, and the fat woman talked loudly, as it were, to cover some
+noise. After this passed I to the back of the house on pretence to get
+water for tea, and I saw fresh fresh horse-dung on the ground, and that
+the ground was cut with the new marks of hoofs; and there had dropped in
+the dirt one cartridge. Then Kurban Sahib called to me in our tongue,
+saying, "Is this a good place to make tea?" and I replied, knowing what he
+meant, "There are over many cooks in the cook-house. Mount and go, Child."
+Then I returned, and he said, smiling to the woman, "Prepare food, and
+when we have loosened our girths we will come in and eat;" but to his men
+he said in a whisper, "Ride away!" No. He did not cover the old man or the
+fat woman with his rifle. That was not his custom. Some fool of the _Durro
+Muts_, being hungry, raised his voice to dispute the order to flee, and
+before we were in our saddles many shots came from the roof--from rifles
+thrust through the thatch. Upon this we rode across the valley of stones,
+and men fired at us from the nullah behind the house, and from the hill
+behind the nullah, as well as from the roof of the house--so many shots
+that it sounded like a drumming in the hills. Then Sikandar Khan, riding
+low, said, "This play is not for us alone, but for the rest of the _Durro
+Muts_," and I said, "Be quiet. Keep place!" for his place was behind me,
+and I rode behind Kurban Sahib. But these new bullets will pass through
+five men arow! We were not hit--not one of us--and we reached the hill of
+rocks and scattered among the stones, and Kurban Sahib turned in his
+saddle and said, "Look at the old man!" He stood in the verandah firing
+swiftly with a gun, the woman beside him and the idiot also--both with
+guns. Kurban Sahib laughed, and I caught him by the wrist, but--his fate
+was written at that hour. The bullet passed under my arm-pit and struck
+him in the liver, and I pulled him backward between two great rocks atilt
+--Kurban Sahib, my Kurban Sahib! From the nullah behind the house and from
+the hills came our Boer-log in number more than a hundred, and Sikandar
+Khan said, "_Now_ we see the meaning of last night's signal. Give me the
+rifle." He took Kurban Sahib's rifle--in this war of fools only the
+doctors carry swords--and lay belly-flat to the work, but Kurban Sahib
+turned where he lay and said, "Be still. It is a Sahibs' war," and Kurban
+Sahib put up his hand--thus; and then his eyes rolled on me, and I gave
+him water that he might pass the more quickly. And at the drinking his
+Spirit received permission....
+
+Thus went our fight, Sahib. We _Durro Muts_ were on a ridge working from
+the north to the south, where lay our main body, and the Boer-log lay in a
+valley working from east to west. There were more than a hundred, and our
+men were ten, but they held the Boer-log in the valley while they swiftly
+passed along the ridge to the south. I saw three Boers drop in the open.
+Then they all hid again and fired heavily at the rocks that hid our men;
+but our men were clever and did not show, but moved away and away, always
+south; and the noise of the battle withdrew itself southward, where we
+could hear the sound of big guns. So it fell stark dark, and Sikandar Khan
+found a deep old jackal's earth amid rocks, into which we slid the body of
+Kurban Sahib upright. Sikandar Khan took his glasses, and I took his
+handkerchief and some letters and a certain thing which I knew hung round
+his neck, and Sikandar Khan is witness that I wrapped them all in the
+handkerchief. Then we took an oath together, and lay still and mourned for
+Kurban Sahib. Sikandar Khan wept till daybreak--even he, a Pathan, a
+Mohammedan! All that night we heard firing to the southward, and when the
+dawn broke the valley was full of Boer-log in carts and on horses. They
+gathered by the house, as we could see through Kurban Sahib's glasses, and
+the old man, who, I take it, was a priest, blessed them, and preached the
+holy war, waving his arm; and the fat woman brought coffee; and the idiot
+capered among them and kissed their horses. Presently they went away in
+haste; they went over the hills and were not; and a black slave came out
+and washed the door-sills with bright water. Sikandar Khan saw through the
+glasses that the stain was blood, and he laughed, saying, "Wounded men lie
+there. We shall yet get vengeance."
+
+About noon we saw a thin, high smoke to the southward, such a smoke as a
+burning house will make in sunshine, and Sikandar Khan, who knows how to
+take a bearing across a hill, said, "At last we have burned the house of
+the pumpkin-seller whence they signalled." And I said: "What need now that
+they have slain my child? Let me mourn." It was a high smoke, and the old
+man, as I saw, came out into the verandah to behold it, and shook his
+clenched hands at it. So we lay till the twilight, foodless and without
+water, for we had vowed a vow neither to eat nor to drink till we had
+accomplished the matter. I had a little opium left, of which I gave
+Sikandar Khan the half, because he loved Kurban Sahib. When it was full
+dark we sharpened our sabres upon a certain softish rock which, mixed with
+water, sharpens steel well, and we took off our boots and we went down to
+the house and looked through the windows very softly. The old man sat
+reading in a book, and the woman sat by the hearth; and the idiot lay on
+the floor with his head against her knee, and he counted his fingers and
+laughed, and she laughed again. So I knew they were mother and son, and I
+laughed, too, for I had suspected this when I claimed her life and her
+body from Sikandar Khan, in our discussion of the spoil. Then we entered
+with bare swords.... Indeed, these Boer-log do not understand the steel,
+for the old man ran towards a rifle in the corner; but Sikandar Khan
+prevented him with a blow of the flat across the hands, and he sat down
+and held up his hands, and I put my fingers on my lips to signify they
+should be silent. But the woman cried, and one stirred in an inner room,
+and a door opened, and a man, bound about the head with rags, stood
+stupidly fumbling with a gun. His whole head fell inside the door, and
+none followed him. It was a very pretty stroke--for a Pathan. They then
+were silent, staring at the head upon the floor, and I said to Sikandar
+Khan, "Fetch ropes! Not even for Kurban Sahib's sake will I defile my
+sword." So he went to seek and returned with three long leather ones, and
+said, "Four wounded lie within, and doubtless each has a permit from a
+General," and he stretched the ropes and laughed. Then I bound the old
+man's hands behind his back, and unwillingly--for he laughed in my face,
+and would have fingered my beard--the idiot's. At this the woman with the
+swine's eyes and the jowl of a swine ran forward, and Sikandar Khan said,
+"Shall I strike or bind? She was thy property on the division." And I
+said, "Refrain! I have made a chain to hold her. Open the door." I pushed
+out the two across the verandah into the darker shade of the thorn-trees,
+and she followed upon her knees and lay along the ground, and pawed at my
+boots and howled. Then Sikandar Khan bore out the lamp, saying that he was
+a butler and would light the table, and I looked for a branch that would
+bear fruit. But the woman hindered me not a little with her screechings
+and plungings, and spoke fast in her tongue, and I replied in my tongue,
+"I am childless to-night because of thy perfidy, and _my_ child was
+praised among men and loved among women. He would have begotten men--not
+animals. Thou hast more years to live than I, but my grief is the
+greater."
+
+I stooped to make sure the noose upon the idiot's neck, and flung the end
+over the branch, and Sikandar Khan held up the lamp that she might well
+see. Then appeared suddenly, a little beyond the light of the lamp, the
+spirit of Kurban Sahib. One hand he held to his side, even where the
+bullet had struck him, and the other he put forward thus, and said, "No.
+It is a Sahibs' war." And I said, "Wait a while, Child, and thou shalt
+sleep." But he came nearer, riding, as it were, upon my eyes, and said,
+"No. It is a Sahibs' war." And Sikandar Khan said, "Is it too heavy?" and
+set down the lamp and came to me; and as he turned to tally on the rope,
+the spirit of Kurban Sahib stood up within arm's reach of us, and his face
+was very angry, and a third time he said, "No. It is a Sahibs' war." And a
+little wind blew out the lamp, and I heard Sikandar Khan's teeth chatter
+in his head.
+
+So we stayed side by side, the ropes in our hand, a very long while, for
+we could not shape any words. Then I heard Sikandar Khan open his water-
+bottle and drink; and when his mouth was slaked he passed to me and said,
+"We are absolved from our vow." So I drank, and together we waited for the
+dawn in that place where we stood--the ropes in our hand. A little after
+third cockcrow we heard the feet of horses and gun wheels very far off,
+and so soon as the light came a shell burst on the threshold of the house,
+and the roof of the verandah that was thatched fell in and blazed before
+the windows. And I said, "What of the wounded Boer-log within?" And
+Sikandar Khan said, "We have heard the order. It is a Sahibs' war. Stand
+still." Then came a second shell--good line, but short--and scattered dust
+upon us where we stood; and then came ten of the little quick shells from
+the gun that speaks like a stammerer--yes, pompom the Sahibs call it--and
+the face of the house folded down like the nose and the chin of an old man
+mumbling, and the forefront of the house lay down. Then Sikandar Khan
+said, "If it be the fate of the wounded to die in the fire, _I_ shall not
+prevent it." And he passed to the back of the house and presently came
+back, and four wounded Boer-log came after him, of whom two could not walk
+upright. And I said, "What hast thou done?" And he said, "I have neither
+spoken to them nor laid hand on them. They follow in hope of mercy." And I
+said, "It is a Sahibs' war. Let them wait the Sahibs' mercy." So they lay
+still, the four men and the idiot, and the fat woman under the thorn-tree,
+and the house burned furiously. Then began the known sound of cartouches
+in the roof--one or two at first; then a trill, and last of all one loud
+noise and the thatch blew here and there, and the captives would have
+crawled aside on account of the heat that was withering the thorn-trees,
+and on account of wood and bricks flying at random. But I said, "Abide!
+Abide! Ye be Sahibs, and this is a Sahibs' war, O Sahibs. There is no
+order that ye should depart from this war." They did not understand my
+words. Yet they abode and they lived.
+
+Presently rode down five troopers of Kurban Sahib's command, and one I
+knew spoke my tongue, having sailed to Calcutta often with horses. So I
+told him all my tale, using bazaar-talk, such as his kidney of Sahib would
+understand; and at the end I said, "An order has reached us here from the
+dead that this is a Sahibs' war. I take the soul of my Kurban Sahib to
+witness that I give over to the justice of the Sahibs these Sahibs who
+have made me childless." Then I gave him the ropes and fell down
+senseless, my heart being very full, but my belly was empty, except for
+the little opium.
+
+They put me into a cart with one of their wounded, and after a while I
+understood that they had fought against the Boer-log for two days and two
+nights. It was all one big trap, Sahib, of which we, with Kurban Sahib,
+saw no more than the outer edge. They were very angry, the _Durro Muts_--
+very angry indeed. I have never seen Sahibs so angry. They buried my
+Kurban Sahib with the rites of his faith upon the top of the ridge
+overlooking the house, and I said the proper prayers of the faith, and
+Sikandar Khan prayed in his fashion and stole five signalling-candles,
+which have each three wicks, and lighted the grave as if it had been the
+grave of a saint on a Friday. He wept very bitterly all that night, and I
+wept with him, and he took hold of my feet and besought me to give him a
+remembrance from Kurban Sahib. So I divided equally with him one of Kurban
+Sahib's handkerchiefs--not the silk ones, for those were given him by a
+certain woman; and I also gave him a button from a coat, and a little
+steel ring of no value that Kurban Sahib used for his keys, and he kissed
+them and put them into his bosom. The rest I have here in that little
+bundle, and I must get the baggage from the hotel in Cape Town--some four
+shirts we sent to be washed, for which we could not wait when we went
+up-country--and I must give them all to my Colonel-Sahib at Sialkote in the
+Punjab. For my child is dead--my baba is dead!... I would have come away
+before; there was no need to stay, the child being dead; but we were far
+from the rail, and the _Durro Muts_ were as brothers to me, and I had come
+to look upon Sikandar Khan as in some sort a friend, and he got me a horse
+and I rode up and down with them; but the life had departed. God knows
+what they called me--orderly, _chaprassi_ (messenger), cook, sweeper, I
+did not know nor care. But once I had pleasure. We came back in a month
+after wide circles to that very valley. I knew it every stone, and I went
+up to the grave, and a clever Sahib of the _Durro Muts_ (we left a troop
+there for a week to school those people with _purwanas_) had cut an
+inscription upon a great rock; and they interpreted it to me, and is was a
+jest such as Kurban Sahib himself would have loved. Oh! I have the
+inscription well copied here. Read it aloud, Sahib, and I will explain the
+jests. There are two very good ones. Begin, Sahib:--
+
+  In Memory of
+  WALTER DECIES CORBYN
+  Late Captain 141st Punjab Cavalry
+
+  The Gurgaon Rissala, that is. Go on, Sahib.
+
+  Treacherously shot near this place by
+  The connivance of the late
+  HENDRIK DIRK UYS
+  A Minister of God
+  Who thrice took the oath of neutrality
+  And Piet his son,
+  This little work
+
+Aha! This is the first jest. The Sahib should see this little work!
+
+
+  Was accomplished in partial
+  And inadequate recognition of their loss
+  By some men who loved him
+
+  _Si monumentum requiris circumspice_
+
+That is the second jest. It signifies that those who would desire to
+behold a proper memorial to Kurban Sahib must look out at the house. And,
+Sahib, the house is not there, nor the well, nor the big tank which they
+call dams, nor the little fruit-trees, nor the cattle. There is nothing
+at all, Sahib, except the two trees withered by the fire. The rest is
+like the desert here--or my hand--or my heart. Empty, Sahib--all empty!
+
+
+
+"THEIR LAWFUL OCCASIONS"
+
+THE WET LITANY
+
+  When the water's countenance
+  Blurrs 'twixt glance and second glance;
+  When the tattered smokes forerun
+  Ashen 'neath a silvered sun;
+  When the curtain of the haze
+  Shuts upon our helpless ways--
+       Hear the Channel Fleet at sea;
+       _Libera nos domine_!
+
+  When the engines' bated pulse
+  Scarcely thrills the nosing hulls;
+  When the wash along the side
+  Sounds, a sudden, magnified
+  When the intolerable blast
+  Marks each blindfold minute passed.
+
+  When the fog-buoy's squattering flight
+  Guides us through the haggard night;
+  When the warning bugle blows;
+  When the lettered doorways close;
+  When our brittle townships press,
+  Impotent, on emptiness.
+
+  When the unseen leadsmen lean
+  Questioning a deep unseen;
+  When their lessened count they tell
+  To a bridge invisible;
+  When the hid and perilous
+  Cliffs return our cry to us.
+
+  When the treble thickness spread
+  Swallows up our next-ahead;
+  When her siren's frightened whine
+  Shows her sheering out of line;
+  When, her passage undiscerned,
+  We must turn where she has turned--
+       Hear the Channel Fleet at sea;
+       _Libera nos Domine_!
+
+"THEIR LAWFUL OCCASIONS"
+
+PART I
+
+  ... "And a security for such as pass on the seas upon
+  their lawful occasions."--_Navy Prayer_.
+
+Disregarding the inventions of the Marine Captain, whose other name is
+Gubbins, let a plain statement suffice.
+
+H.M.S. _Caryatid_ went to Portland to join Blue Fleet for manoeuvres. I
+travelled overland from London by way of Portsmouth, where I fell among
+friends. When I reached Portland, H.M.S. _Caryatid_, whose guest I was to
+have been, had, with Blue Fleet, already sailed for some secret rendezvous
+off the west coast of Ireland, and Portland breakwater was filled with Red
+Fleet, my official enemies and joyous acquaintances, who received me with
+unstinted hospitality. For example, Lieutenant-Commander A.L. Hignett, in
+charge of three destroyers, _Wraith, Stiletto_, and _Kobbold_, due to
+depart at 6 P.M. that evening, offered me a berth on his thirty-knot
+flagship, but I preferred my comforts, and so accepted sleeping-room in
+H.M.S. _Pedantic_ (15,000 tons), leader of the second line. After dining
+aboard her I took boat to Weymouth to get my kit aboard, as the
+battleships would go to war at midnight. In transferring my allegiance
+from Blue to Red Fleet, whatever the Marine Captain may say, I did no
+wrong. I truly intended to return to the _Pedantic_ and help to fight Blue
+Fleet. All I needed was a new toothbrush, which I bought from a chemist in
+a side street at 9:15 P. M. As I turned to go, one entered seeking
+alleviation of a gum-boil. He was dressed in a checked ulster, a black
+silk hat three sizes too small, cord-breeches, boots, and pure brass
+spurs. These he managed painfully, stepping like a prisoner fresh from
+leg-irons. As he adjusted the pepper-plaster to the gum the light fell on
+his face, and I recognised Mr. Emanuel Pyecroft, late second-class petty
+officer of H.M.S. _Archimandrite_, an unforgettable man, met a year before
+under Tom Wessel's roof in Plymouth. It occurred to me that when a petty
+officer takes to spurs he may conceivably meditate desertion. For that
+reason I, though a taxpayer, made no sign. Indeed, it was Mr. Pyecroft,
+following me out of the shop, who said hollowly: "What might you be doing
+here?"
+
+"I'm going on manoeuvres in the _Pedantic_," I replied.
+
+"Ho!" said Mr. Pyecroft. "An' what manner o' manoeuvres d'you expect to
+see in a blighted cathedral like the _Pedantic_? _I_ know 'er. I knew her
+in Malta, when the _Vulcan_ was her permanent tender. Manoeuvres! You
+won't see more than 'Man an' arm watertight doors!' in your little woollen
+undervest."
+
+"I'm sorry for that."
+
+"Why?" He lurched heavily as his spurs caught and twanged like tuning-
+forks. "War's declared at midnight. _Pedantics_ be sugared! Buy an 'am an'
+see life!"
+
+For the moment I fancied Mr. Pyecroft, a fugitive from justice, purposed
+that we two should embrace a Robin Hood career in the uplands of Dorset.
+The spurs troubled me, and I made bold to say as much. "Them!" he said,
+coming to an intricate halt. "They're part of the _prima facie_ evidence.
+But as for me--let me carry your bag--I'm second in command, leadin'-hand,
+cook, steward, an' lavatory man, with a few incidentals for sixpence a day
+extra, on No. 267 torpedo-boat."
+
+"They wear spurs there?"
+
+"Well," said Mr. Peycroft, "seein' that Two Six Seven belongs to Blue
+Fleet, which left the day before yesterday, disguises are imperative. It
+transpired thus. The Right Honourable Lord Gawd Almighty Admiral Master
+Frankie Frobisher, K.C.B., commandin' Blue Fleet, can't be bothered with
+one tin-torpedo-boat more or less; and what with lyin' in the Reserve four
+years, an' what with the new kind o' tiffy which cleans dynamos with
+brick-dust and oil (Blast these spurs! They won't render!), Two Six
+Seven's steam-gadgets was paralytic. Our Mr. Moorshed done his painstakin'
+best--it's his first command of a war-canoe, matoor age nineteen (down
+that alleyway, please!) but be that as it may, His Holiness Frankie is
+aware of us crabbin' ourselves round the breakwater at five knots, an'
+steerin' _pari passu_, as the French say. (Up this alley-way, please!) If
+he'd given Mr. Hinchcliffe, our chief engineer, a little time, it would
+never have transpired, for what Hinch can't drive he can coax; but the new
+port bein' a trifle cloudy, an' 'is joints tinglin' after a post-captain
+dinner, Frankie come on the upper bridge seekin' for a sacrifice. We,
+offerin' a broadside target, got it. He told us what 'is grandmamma, 'oo
+was a lady an' went to sea in stick-and string-batteaus, had told him
+about steam. He throwed in his own prayers for the 'ealth an' safety of
+all steam-packets an' their officers. Then he give us several distinct
+orders. The first few--I kept tally--was all about going to Hell; the next
+many was about not evolutin' in his company, when there; an' the last all
+was simply repeatin' the motions in quick time. Knowin' Frankie's groovin'
+to be badly eroded by age and lack of attention, I didn't much panic; but
+our Mr. Moorshed, 'e took it a little to heart. Me an' Mr. Hinchcliffe
+consoled 'im as well as service conditions permits of, an' we had a
+_résumé_-supper at the back o' the Camber--secluded _an'_ lugubrious! Then
+one thing leadin' up to another, an' our orders, except about anchorin'
+where he's booked for, leavin' us a clear 'orizon, Number Two Six Seven is
+now--mind the edge of the wharf--here!"
+
+By mysterious doublings he had brought me out on to the edge of a narrow
+strip of water crowded with coastwise shipping that runs far up into
+Weymouth town. A large foreign timber-brig lay at my feet, and under the
+round of her stern cowered, close to the wharf-edge, a slate-coloured,
+unkempt, two-funnelled craft of a type--but I am no expert--between the
+first-class torpedo-boat and the full-blooded destroyer. From her archaic
+torpedo-tubes at the stern, and quick-firers forward and amidship, she
+must have dated from the early nineties. Hammerings and clinkings, with
+spurts of steam and fumes of hot oil, arose from her inside, and a figure
+in a striped jersey squatted on the engine-room gratings.
+
+"She ain't much of a war-canoe, but you'll see more life in 'er than on an
+whole squadron of bleedin' _Pedantics."_
+
+"But she's laid up here--and Blue Fleet have gone," I protested.
+"Precisely. Only, in his comprehensive orders Frankie didn't put us out of
+action. Thus we're a non-neglectable fightin' factor which you mightn't
+think from this elevation; _an'_ m'rover, Red Fleet don't know we're 'ere.
+Most of us"--he glanced proudly at his boots--"didn't run to spurs, but
+we're disguised pretty devious, as you might say. Morgan, our signaliser,
+when last seen, was a Dawlish bathing-machine proprietor. Hinchcliffe was
+naturally a German waiter, and me you behold as a squire of low degree;
+while yonder Levantine dragoman on the hatch is our Mr. Moorshed. He was
+the second cutter's snotty--_my_ snotty--on the _Archimandrite_--two
+years--Cape Station. Likewise on the West Coast, mangrove swampin', an'
+gettin' the cutter stove in on small an' unlikely bars, an' manufacturin'
+lies to correspond. What I don't know about Mr. Moorshed is precisely the
+same gauge as what Mr. Moorshed don't know about me--half a millimetre, as
+you might say. He comes into awful opulence of his own when 'e's of age;
+an' judgin' from what passed between us when Frankie cursed 'im, I don't
+think 'e cares whether he's broke to-morrow or--the day after. Are you
+beginnin' to follow our tattics? They'll be worth followin'. Or _are_ you
+goin' back to your nice little cabin on the _Pedantic_--which I lay
+they've just dismounted the third engineer out of--to eat four fat meals
+per diem, an' smoke in the casement?"
+
+The figure in the jersey lifted its head and mumbled.
+
+"Yes, Sir," was Mr. Pyecroft's answer. "I 'ave ascertained that _Stiletto,
+Wraith_, and _Kobbold_ left at 6 P. M. with the first division o' Red
+Fleet's cruisers except _Devolotion_ and _Cryptic_, which are delayed by
+engine-room defects." Then to me: "Won't you go aboard? Mr. Moorshed 'ud
+like some one to talk to. You buy an 'am an see life."
+
+At this he vanished; and the Demon of Pure Irresponsibility bade me lower
+myself from the edge of the wharf to the tea-tray plates of No. 267.
+
+"What d'you want?" said the striped jersey.
+
+"I want to join Blue Fleet if I can," I replied. "I've been left behind
+by--an accident.
+
+"Well?"
+
+"Mr. Pyecroft told me to buy a ham and see life. About how big a ham do
+you need?"
+
+"I don't want any ham, thank you. That's the way up the wharf. _Good_-
+night."
+
+"Good-night!" I retraced my steps, wandered in the dark till I found a
+shop, and there purchased, of sardines, canned tongue, lobster, and
+salmon, not less than half a hundredweight. A belated sausage-shop
+supplied me with a partially cut ham of pantomime tonnage. These things I,
+sweating, bore out to the edge of the wharf and set down in the shadow of
+a crane. It was a clear, dark summer night, and from time to time I
+laughed happily to myself. The adventure was preordained on the face of
+it. Pyecroft alone, spurred or barefoot, would have drawn me very far from
+the paths of circumspection. His advice to buy a ham and see life clinched
+it. Presently Mr. Pyecroft--I heard spurs clink--passed me. Then the
+jersey voice said: "What the mischief's that?"
+
+"'Asn't the visitor come aboard, Sir? 'E told me he'd purposely abandoned
+the _Pedantic_ for the pleasure of the trip with us. Told me he was
+official correspondent for the _Times_; an' I know he's littery by the way
+'e tries to talk Navy-talk. Haven't you seen 'im, Sir?"
+
+Slowly and dispassionately the answer drawled long on the night; "Pye, you
+are without exception the biggest liar in the Service!"
+
+"Then what am I to do with the bag, Sir? It's marked with his name." There
+was a pause till Mr. Moorshed said "Oh!" in a tone which the listener
+might construe precisely as he pleased.
+
+"_He_ was the maniac who wanted to buy a ham and see life--was he? If he
+goes back to the _Pedantic_--"
+
+"Pre-cisely, Sir. Gives us all away, Sir."
+
+"Then what possessed _you_ to give it away to him, you owl?"
+
+"I've got his bag. If 'e gives anything away, he'll have to go naked."
+
+At this point I thought it best to rattle my tins and step out of the
+shadow of the crane.
+
+"I've bought the ham," I called sweetly. "Have you still any objection to
+my seeing life, Mr. Moorshed?"
+
+"All right, if you're insured. Won't you come down?"
+
+I descended; Pyecroft, by a silent flank movement, possessing himself of
+all the provisions, which he bore to some hole forward.
+
+"Have you known Mr. Pyecroft long?" said my host.
+
+"Met him once, a year ago, at Devonport. What do you think of him?"
+
+"What do _you_ think of him?"
+
+"I've left the _Pedantic_--her boat will be waiting for me at ten o'clock,
+too--simply because I happened to meet him," I replied.
+
+"That's all right. If you'll come down below, we may get some grub."
+
+We descended a naked steel ladder to a steel-beamed tunnel, perhaps twelve
+feet long by six high. Leather-topped lockers ran along either side; a
+swinging table, with tray and lamp above, occupied the centre. Other
+furniture there was none.
+
+"You can't shave here, of course. We don't wash, and, as a rule, we eat
+with our fingers when we're at sea. D'you mind?"
+
+Mr. Moorshed, black-haired, black-browed, sallow-complexioned, looked me
+over from head to foot and grinned. He was not handsome in any way, but
+his smile drew the heart. "You didn't happen to hear what Frankie told me
+from the flagship, did you? His last instructions, and I've logged them
+here in shorthand, were"--he opened a neat pocket-book--"_'Get out of this
+and conduct your own damned manoeuvres in your own damned tinker fashion!
+You're a disgrace to the Service, and your boat's offal.'"_
+
+"Awful?" I said.
+
+"No--offal--tripes--swipes--ullage." Mr. Pyecroft entered, in the costume
+of his calling, with the ham and an assortment of tin dishes, which he
+dealt out like cards.
+
+"I shall take these as my orders," said Mr. Moorshed. "I'm chucking the
+Service at the end of the year, so it doesn't matter."
+
+We cut into the ham under the ill-trimmed lamp, washed it down with
+whisky, and then smoked. From the foreside of the bulkhead came an
+uninterrupted hammering and clinking, and now and then a hiss of steam.
+
+"That's Mr. Hinchcliffe," said Pyecroft. "He's what is called a first-
+class engine-room artificer. If you hand 'im a drum of oil an' leave 'im
+alone, he can coax a stolen bicycle to do typewritin'."
+
+Very leisurely, at the end of his first pipe, Mr. Moorshed drew out a
+folded map, cut from a newspaper, of the area of manoeuvres, with the
+rules that regulate these wonderful things, below.
+
+"Well, I suppose I know as much as an average stick-and-string admiral,"
+he said, yawning. "Is our petticoat ready yet, Mr. Pyecroft?"
+
+As a preparation for naval manoeuvres these councils seemed inadequate. I
+followed up the ladder into the gloom cast by the wharf edge and the big
+lumber-ship's side. As my eyes stretched to the darkness I saw that No.
+267 had miraculously sprouted an extra pair of funnels--soft, for they
+gave as I touched them.
+
+"More _prima facie_ evidence. You runs a rope fore an' aft, an' you erects
+perpendick-u-arly two canvas tubes, which you distends with cane hoops,
+thus 'avin' as many funnels as a destroyer. At the word o' command, up
+they go like a pair of concertinas, an' consequently collapses equally
+'andy when requisite. Comin' aft we shall doubtless overtake the Dawlish
+bathin'-machine proprietor fittin' on her bustle."
+
+Mr. Pyecroft whispered this in my ear as Moorshed moved toward a group at
+the stern.
+
+"None of us who ain't built that way can be destroyers, but we can look as
+near it as we can. Let me explain to you, Sir, that the stern of a
+Thorneycroft boat, which we are _not_, comes out in a pretty bulge,
+totally different from the Yarrow mark, which again we are not. But, on
+the other 'and, _Dirk, Stiletto, Goblin, Ghoul, Djinn_, and _A-frite_--Red
+Fleet dee-stroyers, with 'oom we hope to consort later on terms o' perfect
+equality--_are_ Thorneycrofts, an' carry that Grecian bend which we are
+now adjustin' to our _arriere-pensée_--as the French would put it--by
+means of painted canvas an' iron rods bent as requisite. Between you an'
+me an' Frankie, we are the _Gnome_, now in the Fleet Reserve at Pompey--
+Portsmouth, I should say."
+
+"The first sea will carry it all away," said Moorshed, leaning gloomily
+outboard, "but it will do for the present."
+
+"We've a lot of _prima facie_ evidence about us," Mr. Pyecroft went on. "A
+first-class torpedo boat sits lower in the water than a destroyer. Hence
+we artificially raise our sides with a black canvas wash-streak to
+represent extra freeboard; _at_ the same time paddin' out the cover of the
+forward three-pounder like as if it was a twelve-pounder, an' variously
+fakin' up the bows of 'er. As you might say, we've took thought an' added
+a cubic to our stature. It's our len'th that sugars us. A 'undred an'
+forty feet, which is our len'th into two 'undred and ten, which is about
+the _Gnome's,_ leaves seventy feet over, which we haven't got."
+
+"Is this all your own notion, Mr. Pyecroft?" I asked.
+
+"In spots, you might say--yes; though we all contributed to make up
+deficiencies. But Mr. Moorshed, not much carin' for further Navy after
+what Frankie said, certainly threw himself into the part with avidity."
+
+"What the dickens are we going to do?"
+
+"Speaking as a seaman gunner, I should say we'd wait till the sights came
+on, an' then fire. Speakin' as a torpedo-coxswain, L.T.O., T.I., M.D.,
+etc., I presume we fall in--Number One in rear of the tube, etc., secure
+tube to ball or diaphragm, clear away securin'-bar, release safety-pin
+from lockin-levers, an' pray Heaven to look down on us. As second in
+command o' 267, I say wait an' see!"
+
+"What's happened? We're off," I said. The timber ship had slid away from
+us.
+
+"We are. Stern first, an' broadside on! If we don't hit anything too hard,
+we'll do."
+
+"Come on the bridge," said Mr. Moorshed. I saw no bridge, but fell over
+some sort of conning-tower forward, near which was a wheel. For the next
+few minutes I was more occupied with cursing my own folly than with the
+science of navigation. Therefore I cannot say how we got out of Weymouth
+Harbour, nor why it was necessary to turn sharp to the left and wallow in
+what appeared to be surf.
+
+"Excuse me," said Mr. Pyecroft behind us, "_I_ don't mind rammin' a
+bathin'-machine; but if only _one_ of them week-end Weymouth blighters has
+thrown his empty baccy-tin into the sea here, we'll rip our plates open on
+it; 267 isn't the _Archimandrite's_ old cutter."
+
+"I am hugging the shore," was the answer.
+
+"There's no actual 'arm in huggin', but it can come expensive if
+pursooed."
+
+"Right-O!" said Moorshed, putting down the wheel, and as we left those
+scant waters I felt 267 move more freely.
+
+A thin cough ran up the speaking-tube.
+
+"Well, what is it, Mr. Hinchcliffe?" said Moorshed.
+
+"I merely wished to report that she is still continuin' to go, Sir."
+
+"Right-O! Can we whack her up to fifteen, d'you think?"
+
+"I'll try, Sir; but we'd prefer to have the engine-room hatch open--at
+first, Sir."
+
+Whacked up then she was, and for half an hour was careered largely through
+the night, turning at last with a suddenness that slung us across the
+narrow deck.
+
+"This," said Mr. Pyecroft, who received me on his chest as a large rock
+receives a shadow, "represents the _Gnome_ arrivin' cautious from the
+direction o' Portsmouth, with Admiralty orders."
+
+He pointed through the darkness ahead, and after much staring my eyes
+opened to a dozen destroyers, in two lines, some few hundred yards away.
+
+"Those are the Red Fleet destroyer flotilla, which is too frail to panic
+about among the full-blooded cruisers inside Portland breakwater, and
+several millimetres too excited over the approachin' war to keep a look-
+out inshore. Hence our tattics!"
+
+We wailed through our siren--a long, malignant, hyena-like howl--and a
+voice hailed us as we went astern tumultuously.
+
+"The _Gnome_--Carteret-Jones--from Portsmouth, with orders--mm--mm--
+_Stiletto_," Moorshed answered through the megaphone in a high, whining
+voice, rather like a chaplain's.
+
+"_Who_?" was the answer.
+
+"Carter--et--Jones."
+
+"Oh, Lord!"
+
+There was a pause; a voice cried to some friend, "It's Podgie, adrift
+on the high seas in charge of a whole dee-stroyer!"
+
+Another voice echoed, "Podgie!" and from its note I gathered that Mr.
+Carteret-Jones had a reputation, but not for independent command.
+
+"Who's your sub?" said the first speaker, a shadow on the bridge of the
+_Dirk_.
+
+"A gunner, at present, Sir. The _Stiletto_--broken down--turns over to
+us."
+
+"When did the _Stiletto_ break down?"
+
+"Off the Start, Sir; two hours after--after she left here this evening, I
+believe. My orders are to report to you for the manoeuvre signal-codes,
+and join Commander Hignett's flotilla, which is in attendance on
+_Stiletto_."
+
+A smothered chuckle greeted this last. Moorshed's voice was high and
+uneasy. Said Pyecroft, with a sigh: "The amount o' trouble me an' my
+bright spurs 'ad fishin' out that information from torpedo coxswains and
+similar blighters in pubs all this afternoon, you would never believe."
+
+"But has the _Stiletto_ broken down?" I asked weakly.
+
+"How else are we to get Red Fleet's private signal-code? Any way, if she
+'asn't now, she will before manoeuvres are ended. It's only executin' in
+anticipation."
+
+"Go astern and send your coxswain aboard for orders, Mr. Jones." Water
+carries sound well, but I do not know whether we were intended to hear the
+next sentence: "They must have given him _one_ intelligent keeper."
+
+"That's me," said Mr. Pyecroft, as a black and coal-stained dinghy--I did
+not foresee how well I should come to know her--was flung overside by
+three men.
+
+"Havin' bought an 'am, we will now see life." He stepped into the boat and
+was away.
+
+"I say, Podgie!"--the speaker was in the last of the line of destroyers,
+as we thumped astern--"aren't you lonely out there?"
+
+"Oh, don't rag me!" said Moorshed. "Do you suppose I'll have to manoeuvre
+with your flo-tilla?"
+
+"No, Podgie! I'm pretty sure our commander will see you sifting cinders in
+Tophet before you come with our flo-tilla."
+
+"Thank you! She steers rather wild at high speeds."
+
+Two men laughed together.
+
+"By the way, who is Mr. Carteret-Jones when he's at home?" I whispered.
+
+"I was with him in the _Britannia_. I didn't like him much, but I'm
+grateful to him now. I must tell him so some day."
+
+"They seemed to know him hereabouts."
+
+"He rammed the _Caryatid_ twice with her own steam-pinnace."
+
+Presently, moved by long strokes, Mr. Pyecroft returned, skimming across
+the dark. The dinghy swung up behind him, even as his heel spurned it.
+
+"Commander Fasset's compliments to Mr. L. Carteret-Jones, and the sooner
+he digs out in pursuance of Admiralty orders as received at Portsmouth,
+the better pleased Commander Fasset will be. But there's a lot more----"
+
+"Whack her up, Mr. Hinchcliffe! Come on to the bridge. We can settle it as
+we go. Well?"
+
+Mr. Pyecroft drew an important breath, and slid off his cap.
+
+"Day an' night private signals of Red Fleet _com_plete, Sir!" He handed a
+little paper to Moorshed. "You see, Sir, the trouble was, that Mr.
+Carteret-Jones bein', so to say, a little new to his duties, 'ad forgot to
+give 'is gunner his Admiralty orders in writin', but, as I told Commander
+Fasset, Mr. Jones had been repeatin' 'em to me, nervous-like, most of the
+way from Portsmouth, so I knew 'em by heart--an' better. The Commander,
+recognisin' in me a man of agility, cautioned me to be a father an' mother
+to Mr. Carteret-Jones."
+
+"Didn't he know you?" I asked, thinking for the moment that there could be
+no duplicates of Emanuel Pyecroft in the Navy.
+
+"What's a torpedo-gunner more or less to a full lootenant commanding six
+thirty-knot destroyers for the first time? 'E seemed to cherish the 'ope
+that 'e might use the _Gnome_ for 'is own 'orrible purposes; but what I
+told him about Mr. Jones's sad lack o' nerve comin' from Pompey, an' going
+dead slow on account of the dark, short-circuited _that_ connection.
+'M'rover,' I says to him, 'our orders is explicit; _Stiletto's_ reported
+broke down somewhere off the Start, an' we've been tryin' to coil down a
+new stiff wire hawser all the evenin', so it looks like towin' 'er back,
+don't it?' I says. That more than ever jams his turrets, an' makes him
+keen to get rid of us. 'E even hinted that Mr. Carteret-Jones passin'
+hawsers an' assistin' the impotent in a sea-way might come pretty
+expensive on the tax-payer. I agreed in a disciplined way. I ain't proud.
+Gawd knows I ain't proud! But when I'm really diggin' out in the fancy
+line, I sometimes think that me in a copper punt, single-'anded, 'ud beat
+a cutter-full of De Rougemongs in a row round the fleet."
+
+At this point I reclined without shame on Mr. Pyecroft's bosom, supported
+by his quivering arm.
+
+"Well?" said Moorshed, scowling into the darkness, as 267's bows snapped
+at the shore seas of the broader Channel, and we swayed together.
+
+"'You'd better go on,' says Commander Fassett, 'an' do what you're told to
+do. I don't envy Hignett if he has to dry-nurse the _Gnome's_ commander.
+But what d'you want with signals?' 'e says. 'It's criminal lunacy to trust
+Mr. Jones with anything that steams.'
+
+"'May I make an observation, Sir?' I says. 'Suppose,' I says, 'you was
+torpedo-gunner on the _Gnome_, an' Mr. Carteret-Jones was your commandin'
+officer, an' you had your reputation _as_ a second in command for the
+first time,' I says, well knowin' it was his first command of a flotilla,
+'what 'ud you do, Sir?' That gouged 'is unprotected ends open--clear back
+to the citadel."
+
+"What did he say?" Moorshed jerked over is shoulder.
+
+"If you were Mr. Carteret-Jones, it might be disrespect for me to repeat
+it, Sir."
+
+"Go ahead," I heard the boy chuckle.
+
+"'Do?' 'e says. 'I'd rub the young blighter's nose into it till I made a
+perishin' man of him, or a perspirin' pillow-case,' 'e says, 'which,' he
+adds, 'is forty per cent, more than he is at present.'
+
+"Whilst he's gettin' the private signals--they're rather particular ones--
+I went forrard to see the _Dirk's_ gunner about borrowin' a holdin'-down
+bolt for our twelve-pounder. My open ears, while I was rovin' over his
+packet, got the followin' authentic particulars." I heard his voice
+change, and his feet shifted. "There's been a last council o' war of
+destroyer-captains at the flagship, an' a lot of things 'as come out. To
+begin with _Cryptic_ and _Devolution_, Captain Panke and Captain Malan--"
+
+"_Cryptic_ and _Devolution_, first-class cruisers," said Mr. Moorshed
+dreamily. "Go on, Pyecroft."
+
+"--bein' delayed by minor defects in engine-room, did _not_, as we know,
+accompany Red Fleet's first division of scouting cruisers, whose
+rendezvous is unknown, but presumed to be somewhere off the Lizard.
+_Cryptic_ an' _Devolution_ left at 9:30 P.M. still reportin' copious minor
+defects in engine-room. Admiral's final instructions was they was to put
+into Torbay, an' mend themselves there. If they can do it in twenty-four
+hours, they're to come on and join the battle squadron at the first
+rendezvous, down Channel somewhere. (I couldn't get that, Sir.) If they
+can't, he'll think about sendin' them some destroyers for escort. But his
+present intention is to go 'ammer and tongs down Channel, usin' 'is
+destroyers for all they're worth, an' thus keepin' Blue Fleet too busy off
+the Irish coast to sniff into any eshtuaries."
+
+"But if those cruisers are crocks, why does the Admiral let 'em out of
+Weymouth at all?" I asked.
+
+"The tax-payer," said Mr. Moorshed.
+
+"An' newspapers," added Mr. Pyecroft. "In Torbay they'll look as they was
+muckin' about for strategical purposes--hammerin' like blazes in the
+engine room all the weary day, an' the skipper droppin' questions down the
+engine-room hatch every two or three minutes. _I've_ been there. Now,
+Sir?" I saw the white of his eye turn broad on Mr. Moorshed.
+
+The boy dropped his chin over the speaking-tube.
+
+"Mr. Hinchcliffe, what's her extreme economical radius?"
+
+"Three hundred and forty knots, down to swept bunkers."
+
+"Can do," said Moorshed. "By the way, have her revolutions any bearing on
+her speed, Mr. Hinchcliffe?"
+
+"None that I can make out yet, Sir."
+
+"Then slow to eight knots. We'll jog down to forty-nine, forty-five, or
+four about, and three east. That puts us say forty miles from Torbay by
+nine o'clock to-morrow morning. We'll have to muck about till dusk before
+we run in and try our luck with the cruisers."
+
+"Yes, Sir. Their picket boats will be panickin' round them all night. It's
+considered good for the young gentlemen."
+
+"Hallo! War's declared! They're off!" said Moorshed.
+
+He swung 267's head round to get a better view. A few miles to our right
+the low horizon was spangled with small balls of fire, while nearer ran a
+procession of tiny cigar ends.
+
+"Red hot! Set 'em alight," said Mr. Pyecroft. "That's the second destroyer
+flotilla diggin' out for Commander Fassett's reputation."
+
+The smaller lights disappeared; the glare of the destroyers' funnels
+dwindled even as we watched.
+
+"They're going down Channel with lights out, thus showin' their zeal an'
+drivin' all watch-officers crazy. Now, if you'll excuse me, I think I'll
+get you your pyjamas, an' you'll turn in," said Pyecroft.
+
+He piloted me to the steel tunnel, where the ham still swung majestically
+over the swaying table, and dragged out trousers and a coat with a monk's
+hood, all hewn from one hairy inch-thick board.
+
+"If you fall over in these you'll be drowned. They're lammies. I'll chock
+you off with a pillow; but sleepin' in a torpedo-boat's what you might
+call an acquired habit."
+
+I coiled down on an iron-hard horse-hair pillow next the quivering steel
+wall to acquire that habit. The sea, sliding over 267's skin, worried me
+with importunate, half-caught confidences. It drummed tackily to gather my
+attention, coughed, spat, cleared its throat, and, on the eve of that
+portentous communication, retired up stage as a multitude whispering.
+Anon, I caught the tramp of armies afoot, the hum of crowded cities
+awaiting the event, the single sob of a woman, and dry roaring of wild
+beasts. A dropped shovel clanging on the stokehold floor was, naturally
+enough, the unbarring of arena gates; our sucking uplift across the crest
+of some little swell, nothing less than the haling forth of new worlds;
+our half-turning descent into the hollow of its mate, the abysmal plunge
+of God-forgotten planets. Through all these phenomena and more--though I
+ran with wild horses over illimitable plains of rustling grass; though I
+crouched belly-flat under appalling fires of musketry; though I was
+Livingstone, painless, and incurious in the grip of his lion--my shut eyes
+saw the lamp swinging in its gimbals, the irregularly gliding patch of
+light on the steel ladder, and every elastic shadow in the corners of the
+frail angle-irons; while my body strove to accommodate itself to the
+infernal vibration of the machine. At the last I rolled limply on the
+floor, and woke to real life with a bruised nose and a great call to go on
+deck at once.
+
+"It's all right," said a voice in my booming ears. "Morgan and Laughton
+are worse than you!"
+
+I was gripping a rail. Mr. Pyecroft pointed with his foot to two bundles
+beside a torpedo-tube, which at Weymouth had been a signaller and a most
+able seaman. "She'd do better in a bigger sea," said Mr. Pyecroft. "This
+lop is what fetches it up."
+
+The sky behind us whitened as I laboured, and the first dawn drove down
+the Channel, tipping the wave-tops with a chill glare. To me that round
+wind which runs before the true day has ever been fortunate and of good
+omen. It cleared the trouble from my body, and set my soul dancing to
+267's heel and toe across the northerly set of the waves--such waves as I
+had often watched contemptuously from the deck of a ten-thousand-ton
+liner. They shouldered our little hull sideways and passed, scalloped, and
+splayed out, toward the coast, carrying our white wake in loops along
+their hollow backs. In succession we looked down a lead-grey cutting of
+water for half a clear mile, were flung up on its ridge, beheld the
+Channel traffic--full-sailed to that fair breeze--all about us, and swung
+slantwise, light as a bladder, elastic as a basket, into the next furrow.
+Then the sun found us, struck the wet gray bows to living, leaping opal,
+the colourless deep to hard sapphire, the many sails to pearl, and the
+little steam-plume of our escape to an inconstant rainbow.
+
+"A fair day and a fair wind for all, thank God!" said Emanuel Pyecroft,
+throwing back the cowl-like hood of his blanket coat. His face was pitted
+with coal-dust and grime, pallid for lack of sleep; but his eyes shone
+like a gull's.
+
+"I told you you'd see life. Think o' the _Pedantic_ now. Think o' her
+Number One chasin' the mobilised gobbies round the lower deck flats. Think
+o' the pore little snotties now bein' washed, fed, and taught, an' the
+yeoman o' signals with a pink eye wakin' bright 'an brisk to another
+perishin' day of five-flag hoists. Whereas _we_ shall caulk an' smoke
+cigarettes, same as the Spanish destroyers did for three weeks after war
+was declared." He dropped into the wardroom singing:--
+
+If you're going to marry me, marry me, Bill, It's no use muckin' about!
+
+The man at the wheel, uniformed in what had once been a Tam-o'-shanter, a
+pair of very worn R.M.L.I. trousers rolled up to the knee, and a black
+sweater, was smoking a cigarette. Moorshed, in a gray Balaclava and a
+brown mackintosh with a flapping cape, hauled at our supplementary funnel
+guys, and a thing like a waiter from a Soho restaurant sat at the head of
+the engine-room ladder exhorting the unseen below. The following wind beat
+down our smoke and covered all things with an inch-thick layer of stokers,
+so that eyelids, teeth, and feet gritted in their motions. I began to see
+that my previous experiences among battleships and cruisers had been
+altogether beside the mark.
+
+
+PART II
+
+  The wind went down with the sunset--
+    The fog came up with the tide,
+  When the Witch of the North took an Egg-shell (_bis_)
+    With a little Blue Devil inside.
+  "Sink," she said, "or swim," she said,
+    "It's all you will get from me.
+  And that is the finish of him!" she said,
+    And the Egg-shell went to sea.
+
+  The wind got up with the morning,
+    And the fog blew off with the rain,
+  When the Witch of the North saw the Egg-shell
+    And the little Blue Devil again.
+  "Did you swim?" she said. "Did you sink?" she said,
+    And the little Blue Devil replied:
+  "For myself I swam, but I think," he said,
+    "There's somebody sinking outside."
+
+But for the small detail that I was a passenger and a civilian, and might
+not alter her course, torpedo-boat No. 267 was mine to me all that
+priceless day. Moorshed, after breakfast--frizzled ham and a devil that
+Pyecroft made out of sardines, anchovies, and French mustard smashed
+together with a spanner--showed me his few and simple navigating tools,
+and took an observation. Morgan, the signaller, let me hold the chamois
+leathers while he cleaned the searchlight (we seemed to be better equipped
+with electricity than most of our class), that lived under a bulbous
+umbrella-cover amidship. Then Pyecroft and Morgan, standing easy, talked
+together of the King's Service as reformers and revolutionists, so
+notably, that were I not engaged on this tale I would, for its conclusion,
+substitute theirs.
+
+I would speak of Hinchcliffe--Henry Salt Hinchcliffe, first-class engine-
+room artificer, and genius in his line, who was prouder of having taken
+part in the Hat Crusade in his youth than of all his daring, his skill,
+and his nickel-steel nerve. I consorted with him for an hour in the packed
+and dancing engine-room, when Moorshed suggested "whacking her up" to
+eighteen knots, to see if she would stand it. The floor was ankle-deep in
+a creamy batter of oil and water; each moving part flicking more oil in
+zoetrope-circles, and the gauges invisible for their dizzy chattering on
+the chattering steel bulkhead. Leading stoker Grant, said to be a
+bigamist, an ox-eyed man smothered in hair, took me to the stokehold and
+planted me between a searing white furnace and some hell-hot iron plate
+for fifteen minutes, while I listened to the drone of fans and the worry
+of the sea without, striving to wrench all that palpitating firepot wide
+open.
+
+Then I came on deck and watched Moorshed--revolving in his orbit from the
+canvas bustle and torpedo-tubes aft, by way of engine-room, conning-tower,
+and wheel, to the doll's house of a foc'sle--learned in experience
+withheld from me, moved by laws beyond my knowledge, authoritative,
+entirely adequate, and yet, in heart, a child at his play. _I_ could not
+take ten steps along the crowded deck but I collided with some body or
+thing; but he and his satellites swung, passed, and returned on their
+vocations with the freedom and spaciousness of the well-poised stars.
+
+Even now I can at will recall every tone and gesture, with each dissolving
+picture inboard or overside--Hinchcliffe's white arm buried to the
+shoulder in a hornet's nest of spinning machinery; Moorshed's halt and
+jerk to windward as he looked across the water; Pyecroft's back bent over
+the Berthon collapsible boat, while he drilled three men in expanding it
+swiftly; the outflung white water at the foot of a homeward-bound Chinaman
+not a hundred yards away, and her shadow-slashed, rope-purfled sails
+bulging sideways like insolent cheeks; the ribbed and pitted coal-dust on
+our decks, all iridescent under the sun; the first filmy haze that paled
+the shadows of our funnels about lunch time; the gradual die-down and
+dulling over of the short, cheery seas; the sea that changed to a swell:
+the swell that crumbled up and ran allwhither oilily: the triumphant,
+almost audible roll inward of wandering fog-walls that had been stalking
+us for two hours, and--welt upon welt, chill as the grave--the drive of
+the interminable main fog of the Atlantic. We slowed to little more than
+steerage-way and lay listening. Presently a hand-bellows foghorn jarred
+like a corncrake, and there rattled out of the mist a big ship literally
+above us. We could count the rivets in her plates as we scrooped by, and
+the little drops of dew gathered below them.
+
+"Wonder why they're always barks--always steel--always four-masted--an'
+never less than two thousand tons. But they are," said Pyecroft. He was
+out on the turtle-backed bows of her; Moorshed was at the wheel, and
+another man worked the whistle.
+
+"This fog is the best thing could ha' happened to us," said Moorshed. "It
+gives us our chance to run in on the quiet.... Hal-lo!"
+
+A cracked bell rang. Clean and sharp (beautifully grained, too), a
+bowsprit surged over our starboard bow, the bobstay confidentially hooking
+itself into our forward rail.
+
+I saw Pyecroft's arm fly up; heard at the same moment the severing of the
+tense rope, the working of the wheel, Moorshed's voice down the tube
+saying, "Astern a little, please, Mr. Hinchcliffe!" and Pyecroft's cry,
+"Trawler with her gear down! Look out for our propeller, Sir, or we'll be
+wrapped up in the rope."
+
+267 surged quickly under my feet, as the pressure of the downward-bearing
+bobstay was removed. Half-a-dozen men of the foc'sle had already thrown
+out fenders, and stood by to bear off a just visible bulwark.
+
+Still going astern, we touched slowly, broadside on, to a suggestive
+crunching of fenders, and I looked into the deck of a Brixham trawler, her
+crew struck dumb.
+
+"Any luck?" said Moorshed politely.
+
+"Not till we met yeou," was the answer. "The Lard he saved us from they
+big ships to be spitted by the little wan. Where be'e gwine tu with our
+fine new bobstay?"
+
+"Yah! You've had time to splice it by now," said Pyecroft with contempt.
+
+"Aie; but we'm all crushed to port like aigs. You was runnin' twenty-seven
+knots, us reckoned it. Didn't us, Albert?"
+
+"Liker twenty-nine, an' niver no whistle."
+
+"Yes, we always do that. Do you want a tow to Brixham?" said Moorshed.
+
+A great silence fell upon those wet men of the sea.
+
+We lifted a little toward their side, but our silent, quick-breathing
+crew, braced and strained outboard, bore us off as though we had been a
+mere picket-boat.
+
+"What for?" said a puzzled voice.
+
+"For love; for nothing. You'll be abed in Brixham by midnight."
+
+"Yiss; but trawl's down."
+
+"No hurry. I'll pass you a line and go ahead. Sing out when you're ready."
+A rope smacked on their deck with the word; they made it fast; we slid
+forward, and in ten seconds saw nothing save a few feet of the wire rope
+running into fog over our stern; but we heard the noise of debate.
+
+"Catch a Brixham trawler letting go of a free tow in a fog," said Moorshed
+listening.
+
+"But what in the world do you want him for?" I asked.
+
+"Oh, he'll came in handy later."
+
+"Was that your first collision?"
+
+"Yes." I shook hands with him in silence, and our tow hailed us.
+
+"Aie! yeou little man-o'-war!" The voice rose muffled and wailing. "After
+us've upped trawl, us'll be glad of a tow. Leave line just slack abaout as
+'tis now, and kip a good fine look-out be'ind 'ee."
+
+"There's an accommodatin' blighter for you!" said Pyecroft. "Where does he
+expect we'll be, with these currents evolutin' like sailormen at the
+Agricultural Hall?"
+
+I left the bridge to watch the wire-rope at the stern as it drew out and
+smacked down upon the water. By what instinct or guidance 267 kept it from
+fouling her languidly flapping propeller, I cannot tell. The fog now
+thickened and thinned in streaks that bothered the eyes like the glare of
+intermittent flash-lamps; by turns granting us the vision of a sick sun
+that leered and fled, or burying all a thousand fathom deep in gulfs of
+vapours. At no time could we see the trawler though we heard the click of
+her windlass, the jar of her trawl-beam, and the very flap of the fish on
+her deck. Forward was Pyecroft with the lead; on the bridge Moorshed pawed
+a Channel chart; aft sat I, listening to the whole of the British
+Mercantile Marine (never a keel less) returning to England, and watching
+the fog-dew run round the bight of the tow back to its mother-fog.
+
+"Aie! yeou little man-o'-war! We'm done with trawl. You can take us home
+if you know the road."
+
+"Right O!" said Moorshed. "We'll give the fishmonger a run for his money.
+Whack her up, Mr. Hinchcliffe."
+
+The next few hours completed my education. I saw that I ought to be
+afraid, but more clearly (this was when a liner hooted down the back of my
+neck) that any fear which would begin to do justice to the situation
+would, if yielded to, incapacitate me for the rest of my days. A shadow of
+spread sails, deeper than the darkening twilight, brooding over us like
+the wings of Azrael (Pyecroft said she was a Swede), and, miraculously
+withdrawn, persuaded me that there was a working chance that I should
+reach the beach--any beach--alive, if not dry; and (this was when an
+economical tramp laved our port-rail with her condenser water) were I so
+spared, I vowed I would tell my tale worthily.
+
+Thus we floated in space as souls drift through raw time. Night added
+herself to the fog, and I laid hold on my limbs jealously, lest they, too,
+should melt in the general dissolution.
+
+"Where's that prevaricatin' fishmonger?" said Pyecroft, turning a lantern
+on a scant yard of the gleaming wire-rope that pointed like a stick to my
+left. "He's doin' some fancy steerin' on his own. No wonder Mr.
+Hincheliffe is blasphemious. The tow's sheered off to starboard, Sir.
+He'll fair pull the stern out of us."
+
+Moorshed, invisible, cursed through the megaphone into invisibility.
+
+"Aie! yeou little man-o'-war!" The voice butted through the fog with the
+monotonous insistence of a strayed sheep's. "We don't all like the road
+you'm takin'. 'Tis no road to Brixham. You'll be buckled up under Prawle
+Point by'mbye."
+
+"Do you pretend to know where you are?" the megaphone roared.
+
+"Iss, I reckon; but there's no pretence to me!"
+
+"O Peter!" said Pyecroft. "Let's hang him at 'is own gaff."
+
+I could not see what followed, but Moorshed said: "Take another man with
+you. If you lose the tow, you're done. I'll slow her down."
+
+I heard the dinghy splash overboard ere I could cry "Murder!" Heard the
+rasp of a boat-hook along the wire-rope, and then, as it had been in my
+ear, Pyecroft's enormous and jubilant bellow astern: "Why, he's here!
+Right atop of us! The blighter 'as pouched half the tow, like a shark!" A
+long pause filled with soft Devonian bleatings. Then Pyecroft, _solo
+arpeggio_: "Rum? Rum? Rum? Is that all? Come an' try it, uncle."
+
+I lifted my face to where once God's sky had been, and besought The Trues
+I might not die inarticulate, amid these half-worked miracles, but live at
+least till my fellow-mortals could be made one-millionth as happy as I was
+happy. I prayed and I waited, and we went slow--slow as the processes of
+evolution--till the boat-hook rasped again.
+
+"He's not what you might call a scientific navigator," said Pyecroft,
+still in the dinghy, but rising like a fairy from a pantomime trap. "The
+lead's what 'e goes by mostly; rum is what he's come for; an' Brixham is
+'is 'ome. Lay on, Mucduff!"
+
+A white whiskered man in a frock-coat--as I live by bread, a frock-coat!--
+sea-boots, and a comforter crawled over the torpedo-tube into Moorshed's
+grip and vanished forward.
+
+"'E'll probably 'old three gallon (look sharp with that dinghy!); but 'is
+nephew, left in charge of the _Agatha_, wants two bottles command-
+allowance. You're a tax-payer, Sir. Do you think that excessive?"
+
+"Lead there! Lead!" rang out from forward.
+
+"Didn't I say 'e wouldn't understand compass deviations? Watch him close.
+It'll be worth it!"
+
+As I neared the bridge I heard the stranger say: "Let me zmell un!" and to
+his nose was the lead presented by a trained man of the King's Navy.
+
+"I'll tell 'ee where to goo, if yeou'll tell your donkey-man what to du.
+I'm no hand wi' steam." On these lines we proceeded miraculously, and,
+under Moorshed's orders--I was the fisherman's Ganymede, even as
+"M. de C." had served the captain--I found both rum and curaçoa in
+a locker, and mixed them equal bulk in an enamelled iron cup.
+
+"Now we'm just abeam o' where we should be," he said at last, "an' here
+we'll lay till she lifts. I'd take 'e in for another bottle--and wan for
+my nevvy; but I reckon yeou'm shart-allowanced for rum. That's nivver no
+Navy rum yeou'm give me. Knowed 'ee by the smack tu un. Anchor now!"
+
+I was between Pyecroft and Moorshed on the bridge, and heard them spring
+to vibrating attention at my side. A man with a lead a few feet to port
+caught the panic through my body, and checked like a wild boar at gaze,
+for not far away an unmistakable ship's bell was ringing. It ceased, and
+another began.
+
+"Them!" said Pyecroft. "Anchored!"
+
+"More!" said our pilot, passing me the cup, and I filled it. The trawler
+astern clattered vehemently on her bell. Pyecroft with a jerk of his arm
+threw loose the forward three-pounder. The bar of the back-sight was
+heavily blobbed with dew; the foresight was invisible.
+
+"No--they wouldn't have their picket-boats out in this weather, though
+they ought to." He returned the barrel to its crotch slowly.
+
+"Be yeou gwine to anchor?" said Macduff, smacking his lips, "or be yeou
+gwine straight on to Livermead Beach?"
+
+"Tell him what we're driving at. Get it into his head somehow," said
+Moorshed; and Pyecroft, snatching the cup from me, enfolded the old man
+with an arm and a mist of wonderful words.
+
+"And if you pull it off," said Moorshed at the last, "I'll give you a
+fiver."
+
+"Lard! What's fivers to me, young man? My nevvy, he likes 'em; but I do
+cherish more on fine drink than filthy lucre any day o' God's good weeks.
+Leave goo my arm, yeou common sailorman! I tall 'ee, gentlemen, I hain't
+the ram-faced, ruddle-nosed old fule yeou reckon I be. Before the mast
+I've fared in my time; fisherman I've been since I seed the unsense of
+sea-dangerin'. Baccy and spirits--yiss, an' cigars too, I've run a plenty.
+I'm no blind harse or boy to be coaxed with your forty-mile free towin'
+and rum atop of all. There's none more sober to Brix'am this tide, I don't
+care who 'tis--than me. _I_ know--_I_ know. Yander'm two great King's
+ships. Yeou'm wishful to sink, burn, and destroy they while us kips 'em
+busy sellin' fish. No need tall me so twanty taime over. Us'll find they
+ships! Us'll find 'em, if us has to break our fine new bowsprit so close
+as Crump's bull's horn!"
+
+"Good egg!" quoth Moorshed, and brought his hand down on the wide
+shoulders with the smack of a beaver's tail.
+
+"Us'll go look for they by hand. Us'll give they something to play upon;
+an' do 'ee deal with them faithfully, an' may the Lard have mercy on your
+sowls! Amen. Put I in dinghy again."
+
+The fog was as dense as ever--we moved in the very womb of night--but I
+cannot recall that I took the faintest note of it as the dinghy, guided by
+the tow-rope, disappeared toward the _Agatha_, Pyecroft rowing. The bell
+began again on the starboard bow.
+
+"We're pretty near," said Moorshed, slowing down. "Out with the Berthon.
+(_We'll_ sell 'em fish, too.) And if any one rows Navy-stroke, I'll break
+his jaw with the tiller. Mr. Hinchcliffe (this down the tube), "you'll
+stay here in charge with Gregory and Shergold and the engine-room staff.
+Morgan stays, too, for signalling purposes." A deep groan broke from
+Morgan's chest, but he said nothing. "If the fog thins and you're seen by
+any one, keep'em quiet with the signals. I can't think of the precise lie
+just now, but _you_ can, Morgan."
+
+"Yes, Sir."
+
+"Suppose their torpedo-nets are down?" I whispered, shivering with
+excitement.
+
+"If they've been repairing minor defects all day, they won't have any one
+to spare from the engine-room, and 'Out nets!' is a job for the whole
+ship's company. I expect they've trusted to the fog--like us. Well,
+Pyecroft?"
+
+That great soul had blown up on to the bridge like a feather. "'Ad to see
+the first o' the rum into the _Agathites_, Sir. They was a bit jealous o'
+their commandin' officer comin' 'ome so richly lacquered, and at first the
+_conversazione_ languished, as you might say. But they sprang to attention
+ere I left. Six sharp strokes on the bells, if any of 'em are sober enough
+to keep tally, will be the signal that our consort 'as cast off her tow
+an' is manceuvrin' on 'er own."
+
+"Right O! Take Laughton with you in the dinghy. Put that Berthon over
+quietly there! Are you all right, Mr. Hinchcliffe?"
+
+I stood back to avoid the rush of half-a-dozen shadows dropping into the
+Berthon boat. A hand caught me by the slack of my garments, moved me in
+generous arcs through the night, and I rested on the bottom of the dinghy.
+
+"I want you for _prima facie_ evidence, in case the vaccination don't
+take," said Pyecroft in my ear. "Push off, Alf!"
+
+The last bell-ringing was high overhead. It was followed by six little
+tinkles from the _Agatha_, the roar of her falling anchor, the clash of
+pans, and loose shouting.
+
+"Where be gwine tu? Port your 'ellum. Aie! you mud-dredger in the fairway,
+goo astern! Out boats! She'll sink us!"
+
+A clear-cut Navy voice drawled from the clouds: "Quiet! you gardeners
+there. This is the _Cryptic_ at anchor."
+
+"Thank you for the range," said Pyecroft, and paddled gingerly. "Feel well
+out in front of you, Alf. Remember your fat fist is our only Marconi
+installation." The voices resumed:
+
+"Bournemouth steamer he says she be."
+
+"Then where be Brixham Harbor?"
+
+"Damme, I'm a tax-payer tu. They've no right to cruise about this way.
+I'll have the laa on 'ee if anything carries away."
+
+Then the man-of-war:
+
+"Short on your anchor! Heave short, you howling maniacs! You'll get
+yourselves smashed in a minute if you drift."
+
+The air was full of these and other voices as the dinghy, checking, swung.
+I passed one hand down Laughton's stretched arm and felt an iron gooseneck
+and a foot or two of a backward-sloping torpedo-net boom. The other hand I
+laid on broad, cold iron--even the flanks of H.M.S. _Cryptic_, which is
+twelve thousand tons.
+
+I heard a scrubby, raspy sound, as though Pyecroft had chosen that hour to
+shave, and I smelled paint. "Drop aft a bit, Alf; we'll put a stencil
+under the stern six-inch casements."
+
+Boom by boom Laughlin slid the dinghy along the towering curved wall.
+Once, twice, and again we stopped, and the keen scrubbing sound was
+renewed.
+
+"Umpires are 'ard-'earted blighters, but this ought to convince 'em....
+Captain Panke's stern-walk is now above our defenceless 'eads. Repeat the
+evolution up the starboard side, Alf."
+
+I was only conscious that we moved around an iron world palpitating with
+life. Though my knowledge was all by touch--as, for example, when Pyecroft
+led my surrendered hand to the base of some bulging sponson, or when my
+palm closed on the knife-edge of the stem and patted it timidly--yet I
+felt lonely and unprotected as the enormous, helpless ship was withdrawn,
+and we drifted away into the void where voices sang:
+
+
+  Tom Pearce, Tom Pearce, lend me thy gray mare,
+  All along, out along, down along lea!
+  I want for to go to Widdicombe Fair
+  With Bill Brewer, Sam Sewer, Peter Gurney, Harry Hawke,
+  Old Uncle Tom Cobley an' all!
+
+"That's old Sinbad an' 'is little lot from the _Agatha_! Give way, Alf!
+_You_ might sing somethin', too."
+
+"I'm no burnin' Patti. Ain't there noise enough for you, Pye?"
+
+"Yes, but it's only amateurs. Give me the tones of 'earth and 'ome. Ha!
+List to the blighter on the 'orizon sayin' his prayers, Navy-fashion.
+'Eaven 'elp me argue that way when I'm a warrant-officer!"
+
+We headed with little lapping strokes toward what seemed to be a fair-
+sized riot.
+
+"An' I've 'eard the _Devolution_ called a happy ship, too," said Pyecroft.
+"Just shows 'ow a man's misled by prejudice. She's peevish--that's what
+she is--nasty-peevish. Prob'ly all because the _Agathites_ are scratching
+'er paint. Well, rub along, Alf. I've got the lymph!"
+
+A voice, which Mr. Pyecroft assured me belonged to a chief carpenter, was
+speaking through an aperture (starboard bow twelve-pounder on the lower
+deck). He did not wish to purchase any fish, even at grossly reduced
+rates. Nobody wished to buy any fish. This ship was the _Devolution_ at
+anchor, and desired no communication with shore boats.
+
+"Mark how the Navy 'olds it's own. He's sober. The _Agathites_ are not, as
+you might say, an' yet they can't live with 'im. It's the discipline that
+does it. 'Ark to the bald an' unconvincin' watch-officer chimin' in. I
+wonder where Mr. Moorshed has got to?"
+
+We drifted down the _Devolution's_ side, as we had drifted down her
+sister's; and we dealt with her in that dense gloom as we had dealt with
+her sister.
+
+"Whai! 'Tis a man-o'-war, after all! I can see the captain's whisker all
+gilt at the edges! We took 'ee for the Bournemouth steamer. Three cheers
+for the real man-o'-war!"
+
+That cry came from under the _Devolution's_ stern. Pyecroft held something
+in his teeth, for I heard him mumble, "Our Mister Moorshed!"
+
+Said a boy's voice above us, just as we dodged a jet of hot water from
+some valve: "I don't half like that cheer. If I'd been the old man I'd ha'
+turned loose the quick-firers at the first go-off. Aren't they rowing
+Navy-stroke, yonder?"
+
+"True," said Pyecroft, listening to retreating oars. "It's time to go 'ome
+when snotties begin to think. The fog's thinnin', too."
+
+I felt a chill breath on my forehead, and saw a few feet of the steel
+stand out darker than the darkness, disappear--it was then the dinghy shot
+away from it--and emerge once more.
+
+"Hallo! what boat's that?" said the voice suspiciously.
+
+"Why, I do believe it's a real man-o'-war, after all," said Pyecroft, and
+kicked Laughton.
+
+"What's that for?" Laughton was no dramatist.
+
+"Answer in character, you blighter! Say somethin' opposite."
+
+"What boat's _thatt_?" The hail was repeated.
+
+"What do yee say-ay?" Pyecroft bellowed, and, under his breath to me:
+"Give us a hand."
+
+"It's called the _Marietta_--F. J. Stokes--Torquay," I began, quaveringly.
+"At least, that's the name on the name-board. I've been dining--on a
+yacht."
+
+"I see." The voice shook a little, and my way opened before me with
+disgraceful ease.
+
+"Yesh. Dining private yacht. _Eshmesheralda_. I belong to Torquay Yacht
+Club. _Are_ you member Torquay Yacht Club?"
+
+"You'd better go to bed, Sir. Good-night." We slid into the rapidly
+thinning fog.
+
+"Dig out, Alf. Put your _nix mangiare_ back into it. The fog's peelin'
+off like a petticoat. Where's Two Six Seven?"
+
+"I can't see her," I replied, "but there's a light low down ahead."
+
+"The _Agatha_!" They rowed desperately through the uneasy dispersal of the
+fog for ten minutes and ducked round the trawler's bow.
+
+"Well, Emanuel means 'God with us'--so far." Pyecroft wiped his brow, laid
+a hand on the low rail, and as he boosted me up to the trawler, I saw
+Moorshed's face, white as pearl in the thinning dark.
+
+"Was it all right?" said he, over the bulwarks.
+
+"Vaccination ain't in it. She's took beautiful. But where's 267, Sir?"
+Pyecroft replied.
+
+"Gone. We came here as the fog lifted. I gave the _Devolution_ four. Was
+that you behind us?"
+
+"Yes, sir; but I only got in three on the _Devolution_. I gave the
+_Cryptic_ nine, though. They're what you might call more or less
+vaccinated."
+
+He lifted me inboard, where Moorshed and six pirates lay round the
+_Agatha's_ hatch. There was a hint of daylight in the cool air.
+
+"Where is the old man?" I asked.
+
+"Still selling 'em fish, I suppose. He's a darling! But I wish I could get
+this filthy paint off my hands. Hallo! What the deuce is the _Cryptic_
+signalling?"
+
+A pale masthead light winked through the last of the fog. It was answered
+by a white pencil to the southward.
+
+"Destroyer signalling with searchlight." Pyecroft leaped on the stern-
+rail. "The first part is private signals. Ah! now she's Morsing against
+the fog. 'P-O-S-T'--yes, 'postpone'--'D-E-P-' (go on)! 'departure--till--
+further--orders--which--will--be com" (he's dropped the other m)
+"'unicated--verbally. End,'." He swung round. "_Cryptic_ is now answering:
+'Ready--proceed--immediately. What--news--promised--destroyer--
+flotilla?'"
+
+"Hallo!" said Moorshed. "Well, never mind, They'll come too late."
+
+"Whew! That's some 'igh-born suckling on the destroyer. Destroyer signals:
+'Care not. All will be known later.' What merry beehive's broken loose
+now?"
+
+"What odds! We've done our little job."
+
+"Why--why--it's Two Six Seven!"
+
+Here Pyecroft dropped from the rail among the fishy nets and shook the
+_Agatha_ with heavings. Moorshed cast aside his cigarette, looked over the
+stern, and fell into his subordinate's arms. I heard the guggle of
+engines, the rattle of a little anchor going over not a hundred yards
+away, a cough, and Morgan's subdued hail. ... So far as I remember, it was
+Laughton whom I hugged; but the men who hugged me most were Pyecroft and
+Moorshed, adrift among the fishy nets.
+
+There was no semblance of discipline in our flight over the _Agatha's_
+side, nor, indeed, were ordinary precautions taken for the common safety,
+because (I was in the Berthon) they held that patent boat open by hand for
+the most part. We regained our own craft, cackling like wild geese, and
+crowded round Moorshed and Hinchcliffe. Behind us the _Agatha's_ boat,
+returning from her fish-selling cruise, yelled: "Have 'ee done the trick?
+Have 'ee done the trick?" and we could only shout hoarsely over the stern,
+guaranteeing them rum by the hold-full.
+
+"Fog got patchy here at 12:27," said Henry Salt Hinchcliffe, growing
+clearer every instant in the dawn. "Went down to Brixham Harbour to keep
+out of the road. Heard whistles to the south and went to look. I had her
+up to sixteen good. Morgan kept on shedding private Red Fleet signals out
+of the signal-book, as the fog cleared, till we was answered by three
+destroyers. Morgan signalled 'em by searchlight: 'Alter course to South
+Seventeen East, so as not to lose time,' They came round quick. We kept
+well away--on their port beam--and Morgan gave 'em their orders." He
+looked at Morgan and coughed.
+
+"The signalman, acting as second in command," said Morgan, swelling, "then
+informed destroyer flotilla that _Cryptic_ and _Devolution_ had made good
+defects, and, in obedience to Admiral's supplementary orders (I was afraid
+they might suspect that, but they didn't), had proceeded at seven knots at
+11:23 p. M. to rendezvous near Channel Islands, seven miles N.N.W. the
+Casquet light. (I've rendezvoused there myself, Sir.) Destroyer flotilla
+would therefore follow cruisers and catch up with them on their course.
+Destroyer flotilla then dug out on course indicated, all funnels sparking
+briskly."
+
+"Who were the destroyers?"
+
+"_Wraith, Kobbold, Stiletto_, Lieutenant-Commander A. L. Hignett, acting
+under Admiral's orders to escort cruisers received off the Dodman at 7 P.
+M. They'd come slow on account of fog."
+
+"Then who were you?"
+
+"We were the _Afrite_, port-engine broke down, put in to Torbay, and there
+instructed by _Cryptic_, previous to her departure with _Devolution_) to
+inform Commander Hignett of change of plans. Lieutenant-Commander Hignett
+signalled that our meeting was quite providential. After this we returned
+to pick up our commanding officer, and being interrogated by _Cryptic_,
+marked time signalling as requisite, which you may have seen. The _Agatha_
+representing the last known rallying-point--or, as I should say, pivot-
+ship of the evolution--it was decided to repair to the _Agatha_ at
+conclusion of manoeuvre."
+
+"Is there such a thing as one fine big drink aboard this one fine big
+battleship?" "Can do, sir," said Pyecroft, and got it. Beginning with Mr.
+Moorshed and ending with myself, junior to the third first-class stoker,
+we drank, and it was as water of the brook, that two and a half inches of
+stiff, treacly, Navy rum. And we looked each in the other's face, and we
+nodded, bright-eyed, burning with bliss.
+
+Moorshed walked aft to the torpedo-tubes and paced back and forth, a
+captain victorious on his own quarterdeck; and the triumphant day broke
+over the green-bedded villas of Torquay to show us the magnitude of our
+victory. There lay the cruisers (I have reason to believe that they had
+made good their defects). They were each four hundred and forty feet long
+and sixty-six wide; they held close upon eight hundred men apiece, and
+they had cost, say, a million and a half the pair. And they were ours, and
+they did not know it. Indeed, the _Cryptic_, senior ship, was signalling
+vehement remarks to our address, which we did not notice.
+
+"If you take these glasses, you'll get the general run o' last night's
+vaccination," said Pyecroft. "Each one represents a torpedo got 'ome, as
+you might say."
+
+I saw on the _Cryptic's_ port side, as she lay half a mile away across the
+glassy water, four neat white squares in outline, a white blur in the
+centre.
+
+"There are five more to starboard. 'Ere's the original!" He handed me a
+paint-dappled copper stencil-plate, two feet square, bearing in the centre
+the six-inch initials, "G.M."
+
+"Ten minutes ago I'd ha' eulogised about that little trick of ours, but
+Morgan's performance has short-circuited me. Are you happy, Morgan?"
+
+"Bustin'," said the signalman briefly.
+
+"You may be. Gawd forgive you, Morgan, for as Queen 'Enrietta said to the
+'ousemaid, _I_ never will. I'd ha' given a year's pay for ten minutes o'
+your signallin' work this mornin'."
+
+"I wouldn't 'ave took it up," was the answer. "Perishin' 'Eavens above!
+Look at the _Devolution's_ semaphore!" Two black wooden arms waved from
+the junior ship's upper bridge. "They've seen it."
+
+"_The_ mote _on_ their neighbour's beam, of course," said Pyecroft, and
+read syllable by syllable: "'Captain Malan to Captain Panke. Is--sten--
+cilled frieze your starboard side new Admiralty regulation, or your Number
+One's private expense?' Now _Cryptic_ is saying, 'Not understood.' Poor
+old _Crippy_, the _Devolute's_ raggin' 'er sore. 'Who is G.M.?' she says.
+That's fetched the _Cryptic_. She's answerin': 'You ought to know. Examine
+own paintwork.' Oh, Lord! they're both on to it now. This is balm. This is
+beginning to be balm. I forgive you, Morgan!"
+
+Two frantic pipes twittered. From either cruiser a whaler dropped into the
+water and madly rowed round the ship: as a gay-coloured hoist rose to the
+_Cryptic's_ yardarm: "Destroyer will close at once. Wish to speak by
+semaphore." Then on the bridge semaphore itself: "Have been trying to
+attract your attention last half hour. Send commanding officer aboard at
+once."
+
+"Our attention? After all the attention we've given 'er, too," said
+Pyecroft. "What a greedy old woman!" To Moorshed: "Signal from the
+_Cryptic_, Sir."
+
+"Never mind that!" said the boy, peering through his glasses. "Our dinghy
+quick, or they'll paint our marks out. Come along!"
+
+By this time I was long past even hysteria. I remember Pyecroft's bending
+back, the surge of the driven dinghy, a knot of amazed faces as we skimmed
+the _Cryptic's_ ram, and the dropped jaw of the midshipman in her whaler
+when we barged fairly into him.
+
+"Mind my paint!" he yelled.
+
+"You mind mine, snotty," said Moorshed. "I was all night putting these
+little ear-marks on you for the umpires to sit on. Leave 'em alone."
+
+We splashed past him to the _Devolution's_ boat, where sat no one less
+than her first lieutenant, a singularly unhandy-looking officer.
+
+"What the deuce is the meaning of this?" he roared, with an accusing
+forefinger.
+
+"You're sunk, that's all. You've been dead half a tide."
+
+"Dead, am I? I'll show you whether I'm dead or not, Sir!"
+
+"Well, you may be a survivor," said Moorshed ingratiatingly, "though it
+isn't at all likely."
+
+The officer choked for a minute. The midshipman crouched up in stern said,
+half aloud: "Then I _was_ right--last night."
+
+"Yesh," I gasped from the dinghy's coal-dust. "Are you member Torquay
+Yacht Club?"
+
+"Hell!" said the first lieutenant, and fled away. The _Cryptic's_ boat was
+already at that cruiser's side, and semaphores flicked zealously from ship
+to ship. We floated, a minute speck, between the two hulls, while the
+pipes went for the captain's galley on the _Devolution_.
+
+"That's all right," said Moorshed. "Wait till the gangway's down and then
+board her decently. We oughtn't to be expected to climb up a ship we've
+sunk."
+
+Pyecroft lay on his disreputable oars till Captain Malan, full-uniformed,
+descended the _Devolution's_ side. With due compliments--not acknowledged,
+I grieve to say--we fell in behind his sumptuous galley, and at last, upon
+pressing invitation, climbed, black as sweeps all, the lowered gangway of
+the _Cryptic_. At the top stood as fine a constellation of marine stars as
+ever sang together of a morning on a King's ship. Every one who could get
+within earshot found that his work took him aft. I counted eleven able
+seamen polishing the breechblock of the stern nine-point-two, four marines
+zealously relieving each other at the life-buoy, six call-boys, nine
+midshipmen of the watch, exclusive of naval cadets, and the higher ranks
+past all census.
+
+"If I die o' joy," said Pyecroft behind his hand, "remember I died
+forgivin' Morgan from the bottom of my 'eart, because, like Martha, we
+'ave scoffed the better part. You'd better try to come to attention, Sir."
+
+Moorshed ran his eye voluptuously over the upper deck battery, the huge
+beam, and the immaculate perspective of power. Captain Panke and Captain
+Malan stood on the well-browned flash-plates by the dazzling hatch.
+Precisely over the flagstaff I saw Two Six Seven astern, her black
+petticoat half hitched up, meekly floating on the still sea. She looked
+like the pious Abigail who has just spoken her mind, and, with folded
+hands, sits thanking Heaven among the pieces. I could almost have sworn
+that she wore black worsted gloves and had a little dry cough. But it was
+Captain Panke that coughed so austerely. He favoured us with a lecture on
+uniform, deportment, and the urgent necessity of answering signals from a
+senior ship. He told us that he disapproved of masquerading, that he loved
+discipline, and would be obliged by an explanation. And while he delivered
+himself deeper and more deeply into our hands, I saw Captain Malan wince.
+He was watching Moorshed's eye.
+
+"I belong to Blue Fleet, Sir. I command Number Two Six Seven," said
+Moorshed, and Captain Planke was dumb. "Have you such a thing as a frame-
+plan of the _Cryptic_ aboard?" He spoke with winning politeness as he
+opened a small and neatly folded paper.
+
+"I have, sir." The little man's face was working with passion.
+
+"Ah! Then I shall be able to show you precisely where you were torpedoed
+last night in"--he consulted the paper with one finely arched eyebrow--"in
+nine places. And since the _Devolution_ is, I understand, a sister ship"--
+he bowed slightly toward Caplain Malan--"the same plan----"
+
+I had followed the clear precision of each word with a dumb amazement
+which seemed to leave my mind abnormally clear. I saw Captain Malan's eye
+turn from Moorshed and seek that of the _Cryptic's_ commander. And he
+telegraphed as clearly as Moorshed was speaking: "My dear friend and
+brother officer, _I_ know Panke; _you_ know Panke; _we_ know Panke--good
+little Panke! In less than three Greenwich chronometer seconds Panke will
+make an enormous ass of himself, and I shall have to put things straight,
+unless you who are a man of tact and discernment----"
+
+"Carry on." The Commander's order supplied the unspoken word. The cruiser
+boiled about her business around us; watch and watch officers together, up
+to the limit of noise permissible. I saw Captain Malan turn to his senior.
+
+"Come to my cabin!" said Panke gratingly, and led the way. Pyecroft and I
+stayed still.
+
+"It's all right," said Pyecroft. "They daren't leave us loose aboard for
+one revolution," and I knew that he had seen what I had seen.
+
+"You, too!" said Captain Malan, returning suddenly. We passed the sentry
+between white enamelled walls of speckless small arms, and since that
+Royal Marine Light infantryman was visibly suffocating from curiosity, I
+winked at him. We entered the chintz-adorned, photo-speckled, brass-
+fendered, tile-stoved main cabin. Moorshed, with a ruler, was
+demonstrating before the frame-plan of H.M.S. _Cryptic_.
+
+"--making nine stencils in all of my initials G.M.," I heard him say.
+"Further, you will find attached to your rudder, and you, too, Sir"--he
+bowed to Captain Malan yet again--"one fourteen-inch Mark IV practice
+torpedo, as issued to first-class torpedo-boats, properly buoyed. I have
+sent full particulars by telegraph to the umpires, and have requested them
+to judge on the facts as they--appear." He nodded through the large window
+to the stencilled _Devolution_ awink with brass work in the morning sun,
+and ceased.
+
+Captain Panke faced us. I remembered that this was only play, and caught
+myself wondering with what keener agony comes the real defeat.
+
+"Good God, Johnny!" he said, dropping his lower lip like a child, "this
+young pup says he has put us both out of action. Inconceivable--eh? My
+first command of one of the class. Eh? What shall we do with him? What
+shall we do with him--eh?"
+
+"As far as I can see, there's no getting over the stencils," his companion
+answered.
+
+"Why didn't I have the nets down? Why didn't I have the nets down?" The
+cry tore itself from Captain Panke's chest as he twisted his hands.
+
+"I suppose we'd better wait and find out what the umpires will say. The
+Admiral won't be exactly pleased." Captain Malan spoke very soothingly.
+Moorshed looked out through the stern door at Two Six Seven. Pyecroft and
+I, at attention, studied the paintwork opposite. Captain Panke had dropped
+into his desk chair, and scribbled nervously at a blotting-pad.
+
+Just before the tension became unendurable, he looked at his junior for a
+lead. "What--what are you going to do about it, Johnny--eh?"
+
+"Well, if you don't want him, I'm going to ask this young gentleman to
+breakfast, and then we'll make and mend clothes till the umpires have
+decided."
+
+Captain Panke flung out a hand swiftly.
+
+"Come with me," said Captain Malan. "Your men had better go back in the
+dinghy to--their--own--ship."
+
+"Yes, I think so," said Moorshed, and passed out behind the captain. We
+followed at a respectful interval, waiting till they had ascended the
+ladder.
+
+Said the sentry, rigid as the naked barometer behind him: "For Gawd's
+sake! 'Ere, come 'ere! For Gawd's sake! What's 'appened? Oh! come '_ere_
+an' tell."
+
+"Tell? You?" said Pyecroft. Neither man's lips moved, and the words were
+whispers: "Your ultimate illegitimate grandchildren might begin to
+understand, not you--nor ever will."
+
+"Captain Malan's galley away, Sir," cried a voice above; and one replied:
+"Then get those two greasers into their dinghy and hoist the blue peter.
+We're out of action."
+
+"Can you do it, Sir?" said Pyecroft at the foot of the ladder. "Do you
+think it is in the English language, or do you not?"
+
+"I don't think I can, but I'll try. If it takes me two years, I'll try."
+
+*       *       *       *       *
+
+There are witnesses who can testify that I have used no artifice. I have,
+on the contrary, cut away priceless slabs of _opus alexandrinum_. My gold
+I have lacquered down to dull bronze, my purples overlaid with sepia of
+the sea, and for hell-hearted ruby and blinding diamond I have substituted
+pale amethyst and mere jargoon. Because I would say again "Disregarding
+the inventions of the Marine Captain whose other name is Gubbins, let a
+plain statement suffice."
+
+
+
+
+THE COMPREHENSION OF PRIVATE COPPER
+
+THE KING'S TASK
+
+  After the sack of the City, when Rome was sunk to a name,
+  In the years when the Lights were darkened, or ever Saint Wilfrid came.
+  Low on the borders of Britain, the ancient poets sing,
+  Between the cliff and the forest there ruled a Saxon king.
+
+  Stubborn all were his people, a stark and a jealous horde--
+  Not to be schooled by the cudgel, scarce to be cowed by the sword;
+  Blithe to turn at their pleasure, bitter to cross in their mood,
+  And set on the ways of their choosing as the hogs of Andred's Wood ...
+
+  They made them laws in the Witan, the laws of flaying and fine,
+  Folkland, common and pannage, the theft and the track of kine;
+  Statutes of tun and of market for the fish and the malt and the meal,
+  The tax on the Bramber packhorse and the tax on the Hastings keel.
+  Over the graves of the Druids and over the wreck of Rome
+  Rudely but deeply they bedded the plinth of the days to come.
+  Behind the feet of the Legions and before the Northman's ire,
+  Rudely but greatly begat they the body of state and of shire.
+  Rudely but greatly they laboured, and their labour stands till now
+  If we trace on our ancient headlands the twist of their eight-ox plough.
+
+
+THE COMPREHENSION OF PRIVATE COPPER
+
+Private Copper's father was a Southdown shepherd; in early youth Copper
+had studied under him. Five years' army service had somewhat blunted
+Private Copper's pastoral instincts, but it occurred to him as a memory of
+the Chalk that sheep, or in this case buck, do not move towards one across
+turf, or in this case, the Colesberg kopjes unless a stranger, or in this
+case an enemy, is in the neighbourhood. Copper, helmet back-first advanced
+with caution, leaving his mates of the picket full a mile behind. The
+picket, concerned for its evening meal, did not protest. A year ago it
+would have been an officer's command, moving as such. To-day it paid
+casual allegiance to a Canadian, nominally a sergeant, actually a trooper
+of Irregular Horse, discovered convalescent in Naauwport Hospital, and
+forthwith employed on odd jobs. Private Copper crawled up the side of a
+bluish rock-strewn hill thinly fringed with brush atop, and remembering
+how he had peered at Sussex conies through the edge of furze-clumps,
+cautiously parted the dry stems before his face. At the foot of the long
+slope sat three farmers smoking. To his natural lust for tobacco was added
+personal wrath because spiky plants were pricking his belly, and Private
+Copper slid the backsight up to fifteen hundred yards....
+
+"Good evening, Khaki. Please don't move," said a voice on his left, and as
+he jerked his head round he saw entirely down the barrel of a well-kept
+Lee-Metford protruding from an insignificant tuft of thorn. Very few
+graven images have moved less than did Private Copper through the next ten
+seconds.
+
+"It's nearer seventeen hundred than fifteen," said a young man in an
+obviously ready-made suit of grey tweed, possessing himself of Private
+Copper's rifle. "Thank _you_. We've got a post of thirty-seven men out
+yonder. You've eleven--eh? We don't want to kill 'em. We have no quarrel
+with poor uneducated Khakis, and we do not want prisoners we do not keep.
+It is demoralising to both sides--eh?"
+
+Private Cooper did not feel called upon to lay down the conduct of
+guerilla warfare. This dark-skinned, dark-haired, and dark-eyed stranger
+was his first intimate enemy. He spoke, allowing for a clipped cadence
+that recalled to Copper vague memories of Umballa, in precisely the same
+offensive accent that the young squire of Wilmington had used fifteen
+years ago when he caught and kicked Alf Copper, a rabbit in each pocket,
+out of the ditches of Cuckmere. The enemy looked Copper up and down,
+folded and re-pocketed a copy of an English weekly which he had been
+reading, and said: "You seem an inarticulate sort of swine--like the rest
+of them--eh?"
+
+"You," said Copper, thinking, somehow, of the crushing answers he had
+never given to the young squire, "are a renegid. Why, you ain't Dutch.
+You're English, same as me."
+
+"_No_, khaki. If you cannot talk civilly to a gentleman I will blow your
+head off."
+
+Copper cringed, and the action overbalanced him so that he rolled some six
+or eight feet downhill, under the lee of a rough rock. His brain was
+working with a swiftness and clarity strange in all his experience of Alf
+Copper. While he rolled he spoke, and the voice from his own jaws amazed
+him: "If you did, 'twouldn't make you any less of a renegid." As a useful
+afterthought he added: "I've sprained my ankle."
+
+The young man was at his side in a flash. Copper made no motion to rise,
+but, cross-legged under the rock, grunted: "'Ow much did old Krujer pay
+you for this? What was you wanted for at 'ome? Where did you desert from?"
+
+"Khaki," said the young man, sitting down in his turn, "you are a shade
+better than your mates. You did not make much more noise than a yoke of
+oxen when you tried to come up this hill, but you are an ignorant diseased
+beast like the rest of your people--eh? When you were at the Ragged
+Schools did they teach you any history, Tommy--'istory I mean?"
+
+"Don't need no schoolin' to know a renegid," said Copper. He had made
+three yards down the hill--out of sight, unless they could see through
+rocks, of the enemy's smoking party.
+
+The young man laughed; and tossed the soldier a black sweating stick of
+"True Affection." (Private Copper had not smoked a pipe for three weeks.)
+
+"_You_ don't get this--eh?" said the young man. "_We_ do. We take it from
+the trains as we want it. You can keep the cake--you po-ah Tommee." Copper
+rammed the good stuff into his long-cold pipe and puffed luxuriously. Two
+years ago the sister of gunner-guard De Souza, East India Railway, had, at
+a dance given by the sergeants to the Allahabad Railway Volunteers,
+informed Copper that she could not think of waltzing with "a poo-ah
+Tommee." Private Copper wondered why that memory should have returned at
+this hour.
+
+"I'm going to waste a little trouble on you before I send you back to your
+picket _quite_ naked--eh? Then you can say how you were overpowered by
+twenty of us and fired off your last round--like the men we picked up at
+the drift playing cards at Stryden's farm--eh? What's your name--eh?"
+
+Private Copper thought for a moment of a far-away housemaid who might
+still, if the local postman had not gone too far, be interested in his
+fate. On the other hand, he was, by temperament, economical of the truth.
+"Pennycuik," he said, "John Pennycuik."
+
+"Thank you. Well, Mr. John Pennycuik, I'm going to teach you a little
+'istory, as you'd call it--eh?"
+
+"'Ow!" said Copper, stuffing his left hand in his mouth. "So long since
+I've smoked I've burned my 'and--an' the pipe's dropped too. No objection
+to my movin' down to fetch it, is there--Sir?"
+
+"I've got you covered," said the young man, graciously, and Private
+Copper, hopping on one leg, because of his sprain, recovered the pipe yet
+another three yards downhill and squatted under another rock slightly
+larger than the first. A roundish boulder made a pleasant rest for his
+captor, who sat cross-legged once more, facing Copper, his rifle across
+his knee, his hand on the trigger-guard.
+
+"Well, Mr. Pennycuik, as I was going to tell you. A little after you were
+born in your English workhouse, your kind, honourable, brave country,
+England, sent an English gentleman, who could not tell a lie, to say that
+so long as the sun rose and the rivers ran in their courses the Transvaal
+would belong to England. Did you ever hear that, khaki--eh?"
+
+"Oh no, Sir," said Copper. This sentence about the sun and the rivers
+happened to be a very aged jest of McBride, the professional humorist of D
+Company, when they discussed the probable length of the war. Copper had
+thrown beef-tins at McBride in the grey dawn of many wet and dry camps for
+intoning it.
+
+"_Of_ course you would not. Now, mann, I tell you, listen." He spat aside
+and cleared his throat. "Because of that little promise, my father he
+moved into the Transvaal and bought a farm--a little place of twenty or
+thirty thousand acres, don't--you--know."
+
+The tone, in spite of the sing-song cadence fighting with the laboured
+parody of the English drawl, was unbearably like the young Wilmington
+squire's, and Copper found himself saying: "I ought to. I've 'elped burn
+some."
+
+"Yes, you'll pay for that later. _And_ he opened a store."
+
+"Ho! Shopkeeper was he?"
+
+"The kind you call "Sir" and sweep the floor for, Pennycuik.... You see,
+in those days one used to believe in the British Government. My father
+did. _Then_ the Transvaal wiped thee earth with the English. They beat
+them six times running. You know _thatt_--eh?"
+
+"Isn't what we've come 'ere for."
+
+"_But_ my father (he knows better now) kept on believing in the English. I
+suppose it was the pretty talk about rivers and suns that cheated him--eh?
+Anyhow, he believed in his own country. Inn his own country. _So_--you
+see--he was a little startled when he found himself handed over to the
+Transvaal as a prisoner of war. That's what it came to, Tommy--a prisoner
+of war. You know what that is--eh? England was too honourable and too
+gentlemanly to take trouble. There were no terms made for my father."
+
+"So 'e made 'em 'imself. Useful old bird." Private Copper sliced up
+another pipeful and looked out across the wrinkled sea of kopjes, through
+which came the roar of the rushing Orange River, so unlike quiet Cuckmere.
+
+The young man's face darkened. "I think I shall sjambok you myself when
+I've quite done with you. _No_, my father (he was a fool) made no terms
+for eight years--ninety-six months--and for every day of them the
+Transvaal made his life hell for my father and--his people."
+
+"I'm glad to hear that," said the impenitent Copper.
+
+"Are you? You can think of it when I'm taking the skin off your back--
+eh?... My father, he lost everything--everything down to his self-respect.
+You don't know what _thatt_ means--eh?"
+
+"Why?" said Copper. "I'm smokin' baccy stole by a renegid. Why wouldn't I
+know?"
+
+If it came to a flogging on that hillside there might be a chance of
+reprisals. Of course, he might be marched to the Boer camp in the next
+valley and there operated upon; but Army life teaches no man to cross
+bridges unnecessarily.
+
+"Yes, after eight years, my father, cheated by your bitch of a country, he
+found out who was the upper dog in South Africa."
+
+"That's me," said Copper valiantly. "If it takes another 'alf century,
+it's me an' the likes of me."
+
+"You? Heaven help you! You'll be screaming at a wagon-wheel in an hour....
+Then it struck my father that he'd like to shoot the people who'd betrayed
+him. You--you--_you_! He told his son all about it. He told him never to
+trust the English. He told him to do them all the harm he could. Mann, I
+tell you, I don't want much telling. I was born in the Transvaal--I'm a
+burgher. If my father didn't love the English, by the Lord, mann, I tell
+you, I hate them from the bottom of my soul."
+
+The voice quavered and ran high. Once more, for no conceivable reason,
+Private Copper found his inward eye turned upon Umballa cantonments of a
+dry dusty afternoon, when the saddle-coloured son of a local hotel-keeper
+came to the barracks to complain of a theft of fowls. He saw the dark
+face, the plover's-egg-tinted eyeballs, and the thin excited hands. Above
+all, he remembered the passionate, queerly-strung words. Slowly he
+returned to South Africa, using the very sentence his sergeant had used to
+the poultry man.
+
+"Go on with your complaint. I'm listenin'."
+
+"Complaint! Complaint about _you_, you ox! We strip and kick your sort by
+thousands."
+
+The young man rocked to and fro above the rifle, whose muzzle thus
+deflected itself from the pit of Private Copper's stomach. His face was
+dusky with rage.
+
+"Yess, I'm a Transvaal burgher. It took us about twenty years to find out
+how rotten you were. _We_ know and you know it now. Your army--it is the
+laughing-stock of the Continent." He tapped the newspaper in his pocket,
+"You think you're going to win, you poor fools. Your people--your own
+people--your silly rotten fools of people will crawl out of it as they did
+after Majuba. They are beginning now. Look what your own working classes,
+the diseased, lying, drinking white stuff that you come out of, are
+saying." He thrust the English weekly, doubled at the leading article, on
+Copper's knee. "See what dirty dogs your masters are. They do not even
+back you in your dirty work. _We_ cleared the country down to Ladysmith--
+to Estcourt. We cleared the country down to Colesberg."
+
+"Yes, we 'ad to clean up be'ind you. Messy, I call it."
+
+"You've had to stop farm-burning because your people daren't do it. They
+were afraid. You daren't kill a spy. You daren't shoot a spy when you
+catch him in your own uniform. You daren't touch our loyall people in Cape
+Town! Your masters wont let you. You will feed our women and children till
+we are quite ready to take them back. _You_ can't put your cowardly noses
+out of the towns you say you've occupied. _You_ daren't move a convoy
+twenty miles. You think you've done something? You've done nothing, and
+you've taken a quarter of a million of men to do it! There isn't a nigger
+in South Africa that doesn't obey us if we lift our finger. You pay the
+stuff four pounds a month and they lie to you. _We_ flog 'em, as I shall
+flog you."
+
+He clasped his hands together and leaned forward his out-thrust chin
+within two feet of Copper's left, or pipe hand.
+
+"Yuss," said Copper, "it's a fair knock-out." The fist landed to a hair on
+the chin-point, the neck snicked like a gun-lock, and the back of the head
+crashed on the boulder behind.
+
+Copper grabbed up both rifles, unshipped the cross-bandoliers, drew forth
+the English weekly, and picking up the lax hands, looked long and intently
+at the fingernails.
+
+"No! Not a sign of it there," he said. "'Is nails are as clean as mine--
+but he talks just like 'em, though. And he's a landlord too! A landed
+proprietor! Shockin', I call it."
+
+The arms began to flap with returning consciousness. Private Copper rose
+up and whispered: "If you open your head, I'll bash it." There was no
+suggestion of sprain in the flung-back left boot. "Now walk in front of
+me, both arms perpendicularly elevated. I'm only a third-class shot, so,
+if you don't object, I'll rest the muzzle of my rifle lightly but firmly
+on your collar-button--coverin' the serviceable vertebree. If your friends
+see us thus engaged, you pray--'ard."
+
+Private and prisoner staggered downhill. No shots broke the peace of the
+afternoon, but once the young man checked and was sick.
+
+"There's a lot of things I could say to you," Copper observed, at the
+close of the paroxysm, "but it doesn't matter. Look 'ere, you call me
+'pore Tommy' again."
+
+The prisoner hesitated.
+
+"Oh, I ain't goin' to do anythin' _to_ you. I'm recon-noiterin' in my own.
+Say 'pore Tommy' 'alf-a-dozen times."
+
+The prisoner obeyed.
+
+"_That's_ what's been puzzlin' me since I 'ad the pleasure o' meetin'
+you," said Copper. "You ain't 'alf-caste, but you talk _chee-chee_--
+_pukka_ bazar chee-chee. Proceed."
+
+"Hullo," said the Sergeant of the picket, twenty minutes later, "where did
+you round him up?"
+
+"On the top o' yonder craggy mounting. There's a mob of 'em sitting round
+their Bibles seventeen 'undred yards (you said it was seventeen 'undred?)
+t'other side--an' I want some coffee." He sat down on the smoke-blackened
+stones by the fire.
+
+"'Ow did you get 'im?" said McBride, professional humorist, quietly
+filching the English weekly from under Copper's armpit.
+
+"On the chin--while 'e was waggin' it at me."
+
+"What is 'e? 'Nother Colonial rebel to be 'orribly disenfranchised, or a
+Cape Minister, or only a loyal farmer with dynamite in both boots. Tell us
+all about it, Burjer!"
+
+"You leave my prisoner alone," said Private Copper. "'E's 'ad losses an'
+trouble; an' it's in the family too. 'E thought I never read the papers,
+so 'e kindly lent me his very own _Jerrold's Weekly_--an' 'e explained it
+to me as patronisin' as a--as a militia subaltern doin' Railway Staff
+Officer. 'E's a left-over from Majuba--one of the worst kind, an' 'earin'
+the evidence as I did, I don't exactly blame 'im. It was this way."
+
+To the picket Private Copper held forth for ten minutes on the life-
+history of his captive. Allowing for some purple patches, it was an
+absolute fair rendering.
+
+"But what I dis-liked was this baccy-priggin' beggar, 'oo's people, on 'is
+own showin', couldn't 'ave been more than thirty or forty years in the
+coun--on this Gawd-forsaken dust-'eap, comin' the squire over me. They're
+all parsons--we know _that_, but parson _an'_ squire is a bit too thick
+for Alf Copper. Why, I caught 'im in the shameful act of tryin' to start a
+aristocracy on a gun an' a wagon an' a _shambuk_! Yes; that's what it was:
+a bloomin' aristocracy."
+
+"No, it weren't," said McBride, at length, on the dirt, above the
+purloined weekly. "You're the aristocrat, Alf. Old _Jerrold's_ givin' it
+you 'ot. You're the uneducated 'ireling of a callous aristocracy which 'as
+sold itself to the 'Ebrew financier. Meantime, Ducky"--he ran his finger
+down a column of assorted paragraphs--"you're slakin' your brutal
+instincks in furious excesses. Shriekin' women an' desolated 'omesteads is
+what you enjoy, Alf ..., Halloa! What's a smokin' 'ektacomb?"
+
+"'Ere! Let's look. 'Aven't seen a proper spicy paper for a year. Good old
+_Jerrold's!"_ Pinewood and Moppet, reservists, flung themselves on
+McBride's shoulders, pinning him to the ground.
+
+"Lie over your own bloomin' side of the bed, an' we can all look," he
+protested.
+
+"They're only po-ah Tommies," said Copper, apologetically, to the
+prisoner. "Po-ah unedicated Khakis. _They_ don't know what they're
+fightin' for. They're lookin' for what the diseased, lying, drinkin' white
+stuff that they come from is sayin' about 'em!"
+
+The prisoner set down his tin of coffee and stared helplessly round the
+circle.
+
+"I--I don't understand them."
+
+The Canadian sergeant, picking his teeth with a thorn, nodded
+sympathetically:
+
+"If it comes to that, _we_ don't in my country!... Say, boys, when you're
+through with your English mail you might's well provide an escort for your
+prisoner. He's waitin'."
+
+"Arf a mo', Sergeant," said McBride, still reading.
+
+"'Ere's Old Barbarity on the ramp again with some of 'is lady friends, 'oo
+don't like concentration camps. Wish they'd visit ours. Pinewood's a
+married man. He'd know how to be'ave!"
+
+"Well, I ain't goin' to amuse my prisoner alone. 'E's gettin' 'omesick,"
+cried Copper. "One of you thieves read out what's vexin' Old Barbarity an'
+'is 'arem these days. You'd better listen, Burjer, because, afterwards,
+I'm goin' to fall out an' perpetrate those nameless barbarities all over
+you to keep up the reputation of the British Army."
+
+From that English weekly, to bar out which a large and perspiring staff of
+Press censors toiled seven days of the week at Cape Town, did Pinewood of
+the Reserve read unctuously excerpts of the speeches of the accredited
+leaders of His Majesty's Opposition. The night-picket arrived in the
+middle of it, but stayed entranced without paying any compliments, till
+Pinewood had entirely finished the leading article, and several occasional
+notes.
+
+"Gentlemen of the jury," said Alf Copper, hitching up what war had left to
+him of trousers--"you've 'eard what 'e's been fed up with. _Do_ you blame
+the beggar? 'Cause I don't! ... Leave 'im alone, McBride. He's my first
+and only cap-ture, an' I'm goin' to walk 'ome with 'im, ain't I, Ducky?
+... Fall in, Burjer. It's Bermuda, or Umballa, or Ceylon for you--and I'd
+give a month's pay to be in your little shoes."
+
+As not infrequently happens, the actual moving off the ground broke the
+prisoner's nerve. He stared at the tinted hills round him, gasped and
+began to struggle--kicking, swearing, weeping, and fluttering all
+together.
+
+"Pore beggar--oh pore, _pore_ beggar!" said Alf, leaning in on one side of
+him, while Pinewood blocked him on the other.
+
+"Let me go! Let me go! Mann, I tell you, let me go----"
+
+"'E screams like a woman!" said McBride. "They'll 'ear 'im five miles
+off."
+
+"There's one or two ought to 'ear 'im--in England," said Copper, putting
+aside a wildly waving arm.
+
+"Married, ain't 'e?" said Pinewood. "I've seen 'em go like this before--
+just at the last. '_Old_ on, old man, No one's goin' to 'urt you."
+
+The last of the sun threw the enormous shadow of a kopje over the little,
+anxious, wriggling group.
+
+"Quit that," said the Serjeant of a sudden. "You're only making him worse.
+Hands _up_, prisoner! Now you get a holt of yourself, or this'll go off."
+
+And indeed the revolver-barrel square at the man's panting chest seemed to
+act like a tonic; he choked, recovered himself, and fell in between Copper
+and Pinewood.
+
+As the picket neared the camp it broke into song that was heard among the
+officers' tents:
+
+  'E sent us 'is blessin' from London town,
+    (The beggar that kep' the cordite down,)
+  But what do we care if 'e smile or frown,
+    The beggar that kep' the cordite down?
+  The mildly nefarious
+  Wildly barbarious
+    Beggar that kept the cordite down!
+
+Said a captain a mile away: "Why are they singing _that?_ We haven't had a
+mail for a month, have we?"
+
+An hour later the same captain said to his servant: "Jenkins, I understand
+the picket have got a--got a newspaper off a prisoner to-day. I wish you
+could lay hands on it, Jenkins. Copy of the _Times_, I think."
+
+"Yes, Sir. Copy of the _Times_, Sir," said Jenkins, without a quiver, and
+went forth to make his own arrangements.
+
+"Copy of the _Times_" said the blameless Alf, from beneath his blanket. "I
+ain't a member of the Soldier's Institoot. Go an' look in the reg'mental
+Readin'-room--Veldt Row, Kopje Street, second turnin' to the left between
+'ere an' Naauwport."
+
+Jenkins summarised briefly in a tense whisper the thing that Alf Copper
+need not be.
+
+"But my particular copy of the _Times_ is specially pro'ibited by the
+censor from corruptin' the morals of the Army. Get a written order from K.
+o' K., properly countersigned, an' I'll think about it."
+
+"I've got all _you_ want," said Jenkins. "'Urry up. I want to 'ave a
+squint myself."
+
+Something gurgled in the darkness, and Private Copper fell back smacking
+his lips.
+
+"Gawd bless my prisoner, and make me a good boy. Amen. 'Ere you are,
+Jenkins. It's dirt cheap at a tot."
+
+
+
+
+STEAM TACTICS
+
+
+THE NECESSITARIAN
+
+  I know not in whose hands are laid
+    To empty upon earth
+  From unsuspected ambuscade
+    The very Urns of Mirth:
+
+  Who bids the Heavenly Lark arise
+    And cheer our solemn round--
+  The Jest beheld with streaming eyes
+    And grovellings on the ground;
+
+  Who joins the flats of Time and Chance
+    Behind the prey preferred,
+  And thrones on Shrieking Circumstance
+    The Sacredly Absurd,
+
+  Till Laughter, voiceless through excess.
+    Waves mute appeal and sore,
+  Above the midriff's deep distress,
+    For breath to laugh once more.
+
+  No creed hath dared to hail him Lord,
+    No raptured choirs proclaim,
+  And Nature's strenuous Overword
+    Hath nowhere breathed his name.
+
+  Yet, may it be, on wayside jape,
+    The selfsame Power bestows
+  The selfsame power as went to shape
+    His Planet or His Rose.
+
+STEAM TACTICS
+I caught sight of their faces as we came up behind the cart in the narrow
+Sussex lane; but though it was not eleven o'clock, they were both asleep.
+
+That the carrier was on the wrong side of the road made no difference to
+his language when I rang my bell. He said aloud of motor-cars, and
+specially of steam ones, all the things which I had read in the faces of
+superior coachmen. Then he pulled slantwise across me.
+
+There was a vociferous steam air-pump attached to that car which could be
+applied at pleasure....
+
+The cart was removed about a bowshot's length in seven and a quarter
+seconds, to the accompaniment of parcels clattering. At the foot of the
+next hill the horse stopped, and the two men came out over the tail-board.
+
+My engineer backed and swung the car, ready to move out of reach.
+
+"The blighted egg-boiler has steam up," said Mr. Hinchcliffe, pausing to
+gather a large stone. "Temporise with the beggar, Pye, till the sights
+come on!"
+
+"I can't leave my 'orse!" roared the carrier; "but bring 'em up 'ere, an'
+I'll kill 'em all over again."
+
+"Good morning, Mr. Pyecroft," I called cheerfully. "Can I give you a lift
+anywhere?"
+
+The attack broke up round my forewheels.
+
+"Well, we _do_ 'ave the knack o' meeting _in puris naturalibus,_ as I've
+so often said." Mr. Pyecroft wrung my hand. "Yes, I'm on leaf. So's Hinch.
+We're visiting friends among these kopjes."
+
+A monotonous bellowing up the road persisted, where the carrier was still
+calling for corpses.
+
+"That's Agg. He's Hinch's cousin. You aren't fortunit in your family
+connections, Hinch. 'E's usin' language in derogation of good manners. Go
+and abolish 'im."
+
+Henry Salt Hinchcliffe stalked back to the cart and spoke to his cousin. I
+recall much that the wind bore to me of his words and the carrier's. It
+seemed as if the friendship of years were dissolving amid throes.
+
+"'Ave it your own silly way, then," roared the carrier, "an' get into
+Linghurst on your own silly feet. I've done with you two runagates." He
+lashed his horse and passed out of sight still rumbling.
+
+"The fleet's sailed," said Pyecroft, "leavin' us on the beach as before.
+Had you any particular port in your mind?"
+
+"Well, I was going to meet a friend at Instead Wick, but I don't mind--"
+
+"Oh! that'll do as well as anything! We're on leaf, you see."
+
+"She'll hardly hold four," said my engineer. I had broken him of the
+foolish habit of being surprised at things, but he was visibly uneasy.
+
+Hinchcliffe returned, drawn as by ropes to my steam-car, round which he
+walked in narrowing circles.
+
+"What's her speed?" he demanded of the engineer.
+
+"Twenty-five," said that loyal man.
+
+"Easy to run?"
+
+"No; very difficult," was the emphatic answer.
+
+"That just shows that you ain't fit for your rating. D'you suppose that a
+man who earns his livin' by runnin' 30-knot destroyers for a parstime--for
+a parstime, mark you!--is going to lie down before any blighted land-
+crabbing steam-pinnace on springs?"
+
+Yet that was what he did. Directly under the car he lay and looked upward
+into pipes--petrol, steam, and water--with a keen and searching eye.
+
+I telegraphed Mr. Pyecroft a question.
+
+"Not--in--the--least," was the answer. "Steam gadgets always take him that
+way. We had a bit of a riot at Parsley Green through his tryin' to show a
+traction-engine haulin' gipsy-wagons how to turn corners."
+
+"Tell him everything he wants to know," I said to the engineer, as I
+dragged out a rug and spread it on the roadside.
+
+"_He_ don't want much showing," said the engineer. Now, the two men had
+not, counting the time we took to stuff our pipes, been together more than
+three minutes.
+
+"This," said Pyecroft, driving an elbow back into the deep verdure of the
+hedge-foot, "is a little bit of all right. Hinch, I shouldn't let too much
+o' that hot muckings drop in my eyes, Your leaf's up in a fortnight, an'
+you'll be wantin' 'em."
+
+"Here!" said Hinchcliffe, still on his back, to the engineer. "Come here
+and show me the lead of this pipe." And the engineer lay down beside him.
+
+"That's all right," said Mr. Hinchcliffe, rising. "But she's more of a bag
+of tricks than I thought. Unship this superstructure aft"--he pointed to
+the back seat--"and I'll have a look at the forced draught."
+
+The engineer obeyed with alacrity. I heard him volunteer the fact that he
+had a brother an artificer in the Navy.
+
+"They couple very well, those two," said Pyecroft critically, while
+Hinchcliffe sniffed round the asbestos-lagged boiler and turned on gay
+jets of steam.
+
+"Now take me up the road," he said. My man, for form's sake, looked at me.
+
+"Yes, take him," I said. "He's all right."
+
+"No, I'm not," said Hinchcliffe of a sudden--"not if I'm expected to judge
+my water out of a little shaving-glass."
+
+The water-gauge of that steam-car was reflected on a mirror to the right
+of the dashboard. I also had found it inconvenient.
+
+"Throw up your arm and look at the gauge under your armpit. Only mind how
+you steer while you're doing it, or you'll get ditched!" I cried, as the
+car ran down the road.
+
+"I wonder!" said Pyecroft, musing. "But, after all, it's your steamin'
+gadgets he's usin' for his libretto, as you might put it. He said to me
+after breakfast only this mornin' 'ow he thanked his Maker, on all fours,
+that he wouldn't see nor smell nor thumb a runnin' bulgine till the
+nineteenth prox. Now look at him! Only look at 'im!"
+
+We could see, down the long slope of the road, my driver surrendering his
+seat to Hinchcliffe, while the car flickered generously from hedge to
+hedge.
+
+"What happens if he upsets?"
+
+"The petrol will light up and the boiler may blow up."
+
+"How rambunkshus! And"--Pyecroft blew a slow cloud--"Agg's about three
+hoops up this mornin', too."
+
+"What's that to do with us? He's gone down the road," I retorted.
+
+"Ye--es, but we'll overtake him. He's a vindictive carrier. He and Hinch
+'ad words about pig-breeding this morning. O' course, Hinch don't know the
+elements o' that evolution; but he fell back on 'is naval rank an' office,
+an' Agg grew peevish. I wasn't sorry to get out of the cart ... Have you
+ever considered how, when you an' I meet, so to say, there's nearly always
+a remarkable hectic day ahead of us! Hullo! Behold the beef-boat
+returnin'!"
+
+He rose as the car climbed up the slope, and shouted: "In bow! Way 'nuff!"
+
+"You be quiet!" cried Hinchcliffe, and drew up opposite the rug, his dark
+face shining with joy. "She's the Poetry o' Motion! She's the Angel's
+Dream. She's------" He shut off steam, and the slope being against her,
+the car slid soberly downhill again.
+
+"What's this? I've got the brake on!" he yelled.
+
+"It doesn't hold backwards," I said. "Put her on the mid-link."
+
+"That's a nasty one for the chief engineer o' the _Djinn_, 31-knot,
+T.B.D.," said Pyecroft. "_Do_ you know what the mid-link is, Hinch?"
+
+Once more the car returned to us; but as Pyecroft stooped to gather up the
+rug, Hinchcliffe jerked the lever testily, and with prawn-like speed she
+retired backwards into her own steam.
+
+"Apparently 'e don't," said Pyecroft. "What's he done now, Sir?"
+
+"Reversed her. I've done it myself."
+
+"But he's an engineer."
+
+For the third time the car manoeuvred up the hill.
+
+"I'll teach you to come alongside properly, if I keep you 'tiffies out all
+night!" shouted Pyecroft. It was evidently a quotation. Hinchcliffe's face
+grew livid, and, his hand ever so slightly working on the throttle, the
+car buzzed twenty yards uphill.
+
+"That's enough. We'll take your word for it. The mountain will go to
+Ma'ommed. Stand _fast_!"
+
+Pyecroft and I and the rug marched up where she and Hinchcliffe fumed
+together.
+
+"Not as easy as it looks--eh, Hinch?"
+
+"It is dead easy. I'm going to drive her to Instead Wick--aren't I?" said
+the first-class engine-room artificer. I thought of his performances with
+No. 267 and nodded. After all, it was a small privilege to accord to pure
+genius.
+
+"But my engineer will stand by--at first," I added.
+
+"An' you a family man, too," muttered Pyecroft, swinging himself into the
+right rear seat. "Sure to be a remarkably hectic day when we meet."
+
+We adjusted ourselves and, in the language of the immortal Navy doctor,
+paved our way towards Linghurst, distant by mile-post 11-3/4 miles.
+
+Mr. Hinchcliffe, every nerve and muscle braced, talked only to the
+engineer, and that professionally. I recalled the time when I, too, had
+enjoyed the rack on which he voluntarily extended himself.
+
+And the County of Sussex slid by in slow time.
+
+"How cautious is the 'tiffy-bird!" said Pyecroft.
+
+"Even in a destroyer," Hinch snapped over his shoulder, "you ain't
+expected to con and drive simultaneous. Don't address any remarks to
+_me!_"
+
+"Pump!" said the engineer. "Your water's droppin'."
+
+"_I_ know that. Where the Heavens is that blighted by-pass?"
+
+He beat his right or throttle hand madly on the side of the car till he
+found the bent rod that more or less controls the pump, and, neglecting
+all else, twisted it furiously.
+
+My engineer grabbed the steering-bar just in time to save us lurching into
+a ditch.
+
+"If I was a burnin' peacock, with two hundred bloodshot eyes in my shinin'
+tail, I'd need 'em all on this job!" said Hinch.
+
+"Don't talk! Steer! This ain't the North Atlantic," Pyecroft replied.
+
+"Blast my stokers! Why, the steam's dropped fifty pounds!" Hinchcliffe
+cried.
+
+"Fire's blown out," said the engineer. "Stop her!"
+
+"Does she do that often?" said Hinch, descending.
+
+"Sometimes."
+
+"Anytime?"
+
+"Any time a cross-wind catches her."
+
+The engineer produced a match and stooped.
+
+That car (now, thank Heaven, no more than an evil memory) never lit twice
+in the same fashion. This time she back-fired superbly, and Pyecroft went
+out over the right rear wheel in a column of rich yellow flame.
+
+"I've seen a mine explode at Bantry--once--prematoor," he volunteered.
+
+"That's all right," said Hinchcliffe, brushing down his singed beard with
+a singed forefinger. (He had been watching too closely.) "Has she any more
+little surprises up her dainty sleeve?"
+
+"She hasn't begun yet," said my engineer, with a scornful cough. "Some one
+'as opened the petrol-supply-valve too wide."
+
+"Change places with me, Pyecroft," I commanded, for I remembered that the
+petrol-supply, the steam-lock, and the forced draught were all controlled
+from the right rear seat.
+
+"Me? Why? There's a whole switchboard full o' nickel-plated muckin's which
+I haven't begun to play with yet. The starboard side's crawlin' with 'em."
+
+"Change, or I'll kill you!" said Hinchcliffe, and he looked like it.
+
+"That's the 'tiffy all over. When anything goes wrong, blame it on the
+lower deck. Navigate by your automatic self, then! _I_ won't help you any
+more."
+
+We navigated for a mile in dead silence.
+
+"Talkin' o' wakes----" said Pyecroft suddenly.
+
+"We weren't," Hinchcliffe grunted.
+
+"There's some wakes would break a snake's back; but this of yours, so to
+speak, would fair turn a tapeworm giddy. That's all I wish to observe,
+Hinch. ... Cart at anchor on the port-bow. It's Agg!"
+
+Far up the shaded road into secluded Bromlingleigh we saw the carrier's
+cart at rest before the post-office.
+
+"He's bung in the fairway. How'm I to get past?" said Hinchcliffe.
+"There's no room. Here, Pye, come and relieve the wheel!"
+
+"Nay, nay, Pauline. You've made your own bed. You've as good as left your
+happy home an' family cart to steal it. Now you lie on it."
+
+"Ring your bell," I suggested.
+
+"Glory!" said Pyecroft, falling forward into the nape of Hinchcliffe's
+neck as the car stopped dead.
+
+"Get out o' my back-hair! That must have been the brake I touched off,"
+Hinchcliffe muttered, and repaired his error tumultuously.
+
+We passed the cart as though we had been all Bruges belfry. Agg, from the
+port-office door, regarded us with a too pacific eye. I remembered later
+that the pretty postmistress looked on us pityingly.
+
+Hinchcliffe wiped the sweat from his brow and drew breath. It was the
+first vehicle that he had passed, and I sympathised with him.
+
+"You needn't grip so hard," said my engineer. "She steers as easy as a
+bicycle."
+
+"Ho! You suppose I ride bicycles up an' down my engine-room?" was the
+answer. "I've other things to think about. She's a terror. She's a
+whistlin' lunatic. I'd sooner run the old South-Easter at Simon's Town
+than her!"
+
+"One of the nice things they say about her," I interrupted, "is that no
+engineer is needed to run this machine."
+
+"No. They'd need about seven."
+
+"'Common-sense only is needed,'" I quoted.
+
+"Make a note of that, Hinch. Just common-sense," Pyecroft put in.
+
+"And now," I said, "we'll have to take in water. There isn't more than a
+couple of inches of water in the tank."
+
+"Where d'you get it from?"
+
+"Oh!--cottages and such-like."
+
+"Yes, but that being so, where does your much-advertised twenty-five miles
+an hour come in? Ain't a dung-cart more to the point?"
+
+"If you want to go anywhere, I suppose it would be," I replied.
+
+"_I_ don't want to go anywhere. I'm thinkin' of you who've got to live
+with her. She'll burn her tubes if she loses her water?"
+
+"She will."
+
+"I've never scorched yet, and I not beginnin' now." He shut off steam
+firmly. "Out you get, Pye, an' shove her along by hand."
+
+"Where to?"
+
+"The nearest water-tank," was the reply. "And Sussex is a dry county."
+
+"She ought to have drag-ropes--little pipe-clayed ones," said Pyecroft.
+
+We got out and pushed under the hot sun for half-a-mile till we came to a
+cottage, sparsely inhabited by one child who wept.
+
+"All out haymakin', o' course," said Pyecroft, thrusting his head into the
+parlour for an instant. "What's the evolution now?"
+
+"Skirmish till we find a well," I said.
+
+"Hmm! But they wouldn't 'ave left that kid without a chaperon, so to
+say... I thought so! Where's a stick?"
+
+A bluish and silent beast of the true old sheep-dog breed glided from
+behind an outhouse and without words fell to work.
+
+Pyecroft kept him at bay with a rake-handle while our party, in rallying-
+square, retired along the box-bordered brick-path to the car.
+
+At the garden gate the dumb devil halted, looked back on the child, and
+sat down to scratch.
+
+"That's his three-mile limit, thank Heaven!" said Pyecroft. "Fall in,
+push-party, and proceed with land-transport o' pinnace. I'll protect your
+flanks in case this sniffin' flea-bag is tempted beyond 'is strength."
+
+We pushed off in silence. The car weighed 1,200 lb., and even on
+ball-bearings was a powerful sudorific. From somewhere behind a hedge we
+heard a gross rustic laugh.
+
+"Those are the beggars we lie awake for, patrollin' the high seas. There
+ain't a port in China where we wouldn't be better treated. Yes, a Boxer
+'ud be ashamed of it," said Pyecroft.
+
+A cloud of fine dust boomed down the road.
+
+"Some happy craft with a well-found engine-room! How different!" panted
+Hinchcliffe, bent over the starboard mudguard.
+
+It was a claret-coloured petrol car, and it stopped courteously, as good
+cars will at sight of trouble.
+
+"Water, only water," I answered in reply to offers of help.
+
+"There's a lodge at the end of these oak palings. They'll give you all you
+want. Say I sent you. Gregory--Michael Gregory. Good-bye!"
+
+"Ought to 'ave been in the Service. Prob'ly is," was Pyecroft's comment.
+
+At that thrice-blessed lodge our water-tank was filled (I dare not quote
+Mr. Hinchcliffe's remarks when he saw the collapsible rubber bucket with
+which we did it) and we re-embarked. It seemed that Sir Michael Gregory
+owned many acres, and that his park ran for miles.
+
+"No objection to your going through it," said the lodge-keeper. "It'll
+save you a goodish bit to Instead Wick."
+
+But we needed petrol, which could be purchased at Pigginfold, a few miles
+farther up, and so we held to the main road, as our fate had decreed.
+
+"We've come seven miles in fifty-four minutes, so far," said Hinchcliffe
+(he was driving with greater freedom and less responsibility), "and now we
+have to fill our bunkers. This is worse than the Channel Fleet."
+
+At Pigginfold, after ten minutes, we refilled our petrol tank and lavishly
+oiled our engines. Mr. Hinchcliffe wished to discharge our engineer on the
+grounds that he (Mr. Hinchcliffe) was now entirely abreast of his work. To
+this I demurred, for I knew my car. She had, in the language of the road,
+held up for a day and a half, and by most bitter experience I suspected
+that her time was very near. Therefore, three miles short of Linghurst, I
+was less surprised than any one, excepting always my engineer, when the
+engines set up a lunatic clucking, and, after two or three kicks, jammed.
+
+"Heaven forgive me all the harsh things I may have said about destroyers
+in my sinful time!" wailed Hinchcliffe, snapping back the throttle.
+"What's worryin' Ada now?"
+
+"The forward eccentric-strap screw's dropped off," said the engineer,
+investigating.
+
+"That all? I thought it was a propeller-blade."
+
+"We must go an' look for it. There isn't another."
+
+"Not me," said Pyecroft from his seat. "Out pinnace, Hinch, an' creep for
+it. It won't be more than five miles back."
+
+The two men, with bowed heads, moved up the road.
+
+"Look like etymologists, don't they? Does she decant her innards often, so
+to speak?" Pyecroft asked.
+
+I told him the true tale of a race-full of ball bearings strewn four miles
+along a Hampshire road, and by me recovered in detail. He was profoundly
+touched.
+
+"Poor Hinch! Poor--poor Hinch!" he said. "And that's only one of her
+little games, is it? He'll be homesick for the Navy by night."
+
+When the search-party doubled back with the missing screw, it was
+Hinchcliffe who replaced it in less than five minutes, while my engineer
+looked on admiringly.
+
+"Your boiler's only seated on four little paperclips," he said, crawling
+from beneath her. "She's a wicker-willow lunch-basket below. She's a
+runnin' miracle. Have you had this combustible spirit-lamp long?"
+
+I told him.
+
+"And yet you were afraid to come into the _Nightmare's_ engine-room when
+we were runnin' trials!"
+
+"It's all a matter of taste," Pyecroft volunteered. "But I will say for
+you, Hinch, you've certainly got the hang of her steamin' gadgets in quick
+time."
+
+He was driving her very sweetly, but with a worried look in his eye and a
+tremor in his arm.
+
+"She don't seem so answer her helm somehow," he said.
+
+"There's a lot of play to the steering-gear," said my engineer. "We
+generally tighten it up every few miles."
+
+"'Like me to stop now? We've run as much as one mile and a half without
+incident," he replied tartly.
+
+"Then you're lucky," said my engineer, bristling in turn.
+
+"They'll wreck the whole turret out o' nasty professional spite in a
+minute," said Pyecroft. "That's the worst o' machinery. Man dead ahead,
+Hinch--semaphorin' like the flagship in a fit!"
+
+"Amen!" said Hinchcliffe. "Shall I stop, or shall I cut him down?"
+
+He stopped, for full in the centre of the Linghurst Road stood a person in
+pepper-and-salt raiment (ready-made), with a brown telegraph envelope in
+his hands.
+
+"Twenty-three and a half miles an hour," he began, weighing a small beam-
+engine of a Waterbury in one red paw. "From the top of the hill over our
+measured quarter-mile--twenty-three and a half."
+
+"You manurial gardener----" Hinchcliffe began. I prodded him warningly
+from behind, and laid the other hand on Pyecroft's stiffening knee.
+
+"Also--on information received--drunk and disorderly in charge of a
+motor-car--to the common danger--two men like sailors in appearance,"
+the man went on.
+
+"Like sailors! ... That's Agg's little _roose_. No wonder he smiled at
+us," said Pyecroft.
+
+"I've been waiting for you some time," the man concluded, folding up the
+telegram.
+
+"Who's the owner?"
+
+I indicated myself.
+
+"Then I want you as well as the two seafaring men. Drunk and disorderly
+can be treated summary. You come on."
+
+My relations with the Sussex constabulary have, so far, been of the best,
+but I could not love this person.
+
+"Of course you have your authority to show?" I hinted.
+
+"I'll show it you at Linghurst," he retorted hotly----"all the authority
+you want."
+
+"I only want the badge, or warrant, or whatever it is a plain-clothes man
+has to show."
+
+He made as though to produce it, but checked himself, repeating less
+politely the invitation to Linghurst. The action and the tone confirmed my
+many-times tested theory that the bulk of English shoregoing institutions
+are based on conformable strata of absolutely impervious inaccuracy. I
+reflected and became aware of a drumming on the back of the front seat
+that Pyecroft, bowed forward and relaxed, was tapping with his knuckles.
+The hardly-checked fury on Hinchcliffe's brow had given place to a greasy
+imbecility, and he nodded over the steering-bar. In longs and shorts, as
+laid down by the pious and immortal Mr. Morse, Pyecroft tapped out, "Sham
+drunk. Get him in the car."
+
+"I can't stay here all day," said the constable.
+
+Pyecroft raised his head. Then was seen with what majesty the British
+sailor-man envisages a new situation.
+
+"Met gennelman heavy sheeway," said he. "Do tell me British gelman can't
+give 'ole Brish Navy lif' own blighted ste' cart. Have another drink!"
+
+"I didn't know they were as drunk as all that when they stopped me," I
+explained.
+
+"You can say all that at Linghurst," was the answer. "Come on."
+
+"Quite right," I said. "But the question is, if you take these two out on
+the road, they'll fall down or start killing you."
+
+"Then I'd call on you to assist me in the execution o' my duty."
+
+"But I'd see you further first. You'd better come with us in the car. I'll
+turn this passenger out." (This was my engineer, sitting quite silent.)
+"You don't want him, and, anyhow, he'd only be a witness for the defence."
+
+"That's true," said the constable. "But it wouldn't make any odds--at
+Linghurst."
+
+My engineer skipped into the bracken like a rabbit. I bade him cut across
+Sir Michael Gregory's park, and if he caught my friend, to tell him I
+should probably be rather late for lunch.
+
+"I ain't going to be driven by _him_." Our destined prey pointed at
+Hinchcliffe with apprehension.
+
+"Of course not. You sake my seat and keep the big sailor in order. He's
+too drunk to do much. I'll change places with the other one. Only be
+quick; I want to pay my fine and get it over."
+
+"That's the way to look at it," he said, dropping into the left rear seat.
+"We're making quite a lot out o' you motor gentry." He folded his arms
+judicially as the car gathered way under Hinchcliffe's stealthy hand.
+
+"But _you_ aren't driving?" he cried, half rising.
+
+"You've noticed it?" said Pyecroft, and embraced him with one anaconda-
+like left arm.
+
+"Don't kill him," said Hinchcliffe briefly. "I want to show him what
+twenty-three and a quarter is." We were going a fair twelve, which was
+about the car's limit.
+
+Our passenger swore something and then groaned.
+
+"Hush, darling!" said Pyecroft, "or I'll have to hug you."
+
+The main road, white under the noon sun, lay broad before us, running
+north to Linghurst. We slowed and looked anxiously for a side track.
+
+"And now," said I, "I want to see your authority."
+
+"The badge of your ratin'?" Pyecroft added.
+
+"I'm a constable," he said, and kicked. Indeed, his boots would have
+bewrayed him across half a county's plough; but boots are not legal
+evidence.
+
+"I want your authority," I repeated coldly; "some evidence that you are
+not a common drunken tramp."
+
+It was as I had expected. He had forgotten or mislaid his badge. He had
+neglected to learn the outlines of the work for which he received money
+and consideration; and he expected me, the tax-payer, to go to infinite
+trouble to supplement his deficiencies.
+
+"If you don't believe me, come to Linghurst," was the burden of his almost
+national anthem.
+
+"But I can't run all over Sussex every time a blackmailer jumps up and
+says he is a policeman."
+
+"Why, it's quite close," he persisted.
+
+"'Twon't be--soon," said Hinchcliffe.
+
+"None of the other people ever made any trouble. To be sure, _they_ was
+gentlemen," he cried. "All I can say is, it may be very funny, but it
+ain't fair."
+
+I laboured with him in this dense fog, but to no end. He had forgotten his
+badge, and we were villains for that we did not cart him to the pub or
+barracks where he had left it.
+
+Pyecroft listened critically as we spun along the hard road.
+
+"If he was a concentrated Boer, he couldn't expect much more," he
+observed. "Now, suppose I'd been a lady in a delicate state o' health--
+you'd ha' made me very ill with your doings."
+
+"I wish I 'ad. 'Ere! 'Elp! 'Elp! Hi!"
+
+The man had seen a constable in uniform fifty yards ahead, where a lane
+ran into the road, and would have said more but that Hinchcliffe jerked
+her up that lane with a wrench that nearly capsized us as the constable
+came running heavily.
+
+It seemed to me that both our guest and his fellow-villain in uniform
+smiled as we fled down the road easterly betwixt the narrowing hedges.
+
+"You'll know all about it in a little time," said our guest. "You've only
+yourselves to thank for runnin' your 'ead into a trap." And he whistled
+ostentatiously.
+
+We made no answer.
+
+"If that man 'ad chose, 'e could have identified me," he said.
+
+Still we were silent.
+
+"But 'e'll do it later, when you're caught."
+
+"Not if you go on talking. 'E won't be able to," said Pyecroft. "I don't
+know what traverse you think you're workin', but your duty till you're put
+in cells for a highway robber is to love, honour, an' cherish _me_ most
+special--performin' all evolutions signalled in rapid time. I tell you
+this, in case o' anything turnin' up."
+
+"Don't you fret about things turnin' up," was the reply.
+
+Hinchcliffe had given the car a generous throttle, and she was well set to
+work, when, without warning, the road--there are two or three in Sussex
+like it--turned down and ceased.
+
+"Holy Muckins!" he cried, and stood on both brakes as our helpless tyres
+slithered over wet grass and bracken--down and down into forest--early
+British woodland. It was the change of a nightmare, and that all should
+fit, fifty yards ahead of us a babbling brook barred our way. On the far
+side a velvet green ride, sprinkled with rabbits and fern, gently sloped
+upwards and away, but behind us was no hope. Forty horse-power would never
+have rolled wet pneumatic tyres up that verdurous cliff we had descended.
+
+"H'm!" Our guest coughed significantly. "A great many cars thinks they can
+take this road; but they all come back. We walks after 'em at our
+convenience."
+
+"Meanin' that the other jaunty is now pursuin' us on his lily feet?" said
+Pyecroft.
+
+"_Pre_cisely."
+
+"An' you think," said Pyecroft (I have no hope to render the scorn of the
+words), "_that'll_ make any odds? Get out!"
+
+The man obeyed with alacrity.
+
+"See those spars up-ended over there? I mean that wickyup-thing.
+Hop-poles, then, you rural blighter. Keep on fetching me hop-poles at the
+double."
+
+And he doubled, Pyecroft at his heels; for they had arrived at a perfect
+understanding.
+
+There was a stack of hurdles a few yards down
+
+stream, laid aside after sheep-washing; and there were stepping-stones in
+the brook. Hinchcliffe rearranged these last to make some sort of
+causeway; I brought up the hurdles; and when Pyecroft and his subaltern
+had dropped a dozen hop-poles across the stream, laid them down over all.
+
+"Talk o' the Agricultur'l Hall!" he said, mopping his brow--"'tisn't in it
+with us. The approach to the bridge must now be paved with hurdles, owin'
+to the squashy nature o' the country. Yes, an' we'd better have one or two
+on the far side to lead her on to _terror fermior_. Now, Hinch! Give her
+full steam and 'op along. If she slips off, we're done. Shall I take the
+wheel?"
+
+"No. This is my job," said the first-class engine-room artificer. "Get
+over the far side, and be ready to catch her if she jibs on the uphill."
+
+We crossed that elastic structure and stood ready amid the bracken.
+Hinchcliffe gave her a full steam and she came like a destroyer on her
+trial. There was a crack, a flicker of white water, and she was in our
+arms fifty yards up the slope; or rather, we were behind her, pushing her
+madly towards a patch of raw gravel whereon her wheels could bite. Of the
+bridge remained only a few wildly vibrating hop-poles, and those hurdles
+which had been sunk in the mud of the approaches.
+
+"She--she kicked out all the loose ones behind her as she finished with
+'em," Hinchcliffe panted.
+
+"At the Agricultural Hall they would 'ave been fastened down with
+ribbons," said Pyecroft. "But this ain't Olympia."
+
+"She nearly wrenched the tiller out of my hand. Don't you think I conned
+her like a cock-angel, Pye?"
+
+"_I_ never saw anything like it," said our guest propitiatingly. "And now,
+gentlemen, if you'll let me go back to Linghurst, I promise you you won't
+hear another word from me."
+
+"Get in," said Pyecroft, as we puffed out on to a metalled road once more.
+"We 'aven't begun on _you_ yet."
+
+"A joke's a joke," he replied. "I don't mind a little bit of a joke
+myself, but this is going beyond it."
+
+"Miles an' miles beyond it, if this machine stands up. We'll want water
+pretty soon."
+
+Our guest's countenance brightened, and Pyecroft perceived it.
+
+"Let me tell you," he said earnestly, "It won't make any difference to you
+whatever happens. Barrin' a dhow or two Tajurrah-way, prizes are scarce in
+the Navy. Hence we never abandon 'em."
+
+There was a long silence. Pyecroft broke it suddenly.
+
+"Robert," he said, "have you a mother?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Have you a big brother?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"An' a little sister?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Robert. Does your mamma keep a dog?"
+
+"Yes. Why?"
+
+"All right, Robert. I won't forget it."
+
+I looked for an explanation.
+
+"I saw his cabinet photograph in full uniform on the mantelpiece o' that
+cottage before faithful Fido turned up," Pyecroft whispered. "Ain't you
+glad it's all in the family somehow?"
+
+We filled with water at a cottage on the edge of St. Leonard's Forest,
+and, despite our increasing leakage, made shift to climb the ridge above
+Instead Wick. Knowing the car as I did, I felt sure that final collapse
+would not be long delayed. My sole concern was to run our guest well into
+the wilderness before that came.
+
+On the roof of the world--a naked plateau clothed with young heather--she
+retired from active life in floods of tears. Her feed-water-heater
+(Hinchcliffe blessed it and its maker for three minutes) was leaking
+beyond hope of repair; she had shifted most of her packing, and her water-
+pump would not lift.
+
+"If I had a bit of piping I could disconnect this tin cartridge-case an'
+feed direct into the boiler. It 'ud knock down her speed, but we could get
+on," said he, and looked hopelessly at the long dun ridges that hove us
+above the panorama of Sussex. Northward we could see the London haze.
+Southward, between gaps of the whale-backed Downs, lay the Channel's zinc-
+blue. But all our available population in that vast survey was one cow and
+a kestrel.
+
+"It's down hill to Instead Wick. We can run her there by gravity," I said
+at last.
+
+"Then he'll only have to walk to the station to get home. Unless we take
+off 'is boots first," Pyecroft replied.
+
+"That," said our guest earnestly, "would be theft atop of assault and very
+serious."
+
+"Oh, let's hang him an' be done," Hinchcliffe grunted. "It's evidently
+what he's sufferin' for."
+
+Somehow murder did not appeal to us that warm noon. We sat down to smoke
+in the heather, and presently out of the valley below came the thick beat
+of a petrol-motor ascending. I paid little attention to it till I heard
+the roar of a horn that has no duplicate in all the Home Counties.
+
+"That's the man I was going to lunch with!" I cried. "Hold on!" and I ran
+down the road.
+
+It was a big, black, black-dashed, tonneaued twenty-four horse Octopod;
+and it bore not only Kysh my friend, and Salmon his engineer, but my own
+man, who for the first time in our acquaintance smiled.
+
+"Did they get you? What did you get? I was coming into Linghurst as
+witness to character--your man told me what happened--but I was stopped
+near Instead Wick myself," cried Kysh.
+
+"What for?"
+
+"Leaving car unattended. An infernal swindle, when you think of the loose
+carts outside every pub in the county. I was jawing with the police for an
+hour, but it's no use. They've got it all their own way, and we're
+helpless."
+
+Hereupon I told him my tale, and for proof, as we topped the hill, pointed
+out the little group round my car.
+
+All supreme emotion is dumb. Kysh put on the brake and hugged me to his
+bosom till I groaned. Then, as I remember, he crooned like a mother
+returned to her suckling.
+
+"Divine! Divine!" he murmured. "Command me."
+
+"Take charge of the situation," I said. "You'll find a Mr. Pyecroft on the
+quarter-deck. I'm altogether out of it."
+
+"He shall stay there. Who am I but the instrument of vengeance in the
+hands of an over-ruling Providence? (And I put in fresh sparking-plugs
+this morning.) Salmon, take that steam-kettle home, somehow. I would be
+alone."
+
+"Leggat," I said to my man, "help Salmon home with my car."
+
+"Home? Now? It's hard. It's cruel hard," said Leggat, almost with a sob.
+
+Hinchcliffe outlined my car's condition briefly to the two engineers. Mr.
+Pyecroft clung to our guest, who stared with affrighted eyes at the
+palpitating Octopod; and the free wind of high Sussex whimpered across the
+ling.
+
+"I am quite agreeable to walkin' 'ome all the way on my feet," said our
+guest. "I wouldn't go to any railway station. It 'ud be just the proper
+finish to our little joke." He laughed nervously.
+
+"What's the evolution?" said Pyecroft. "Do we turn over to the new
+cruiser?"
+
+I nodded, and he escorted our guest to the tonneau with care. When I was
+in, he sat himself broad-armed on the little flap-seat which controls the
+door. Hinchcliffe sat by Kysh.
+
+"You drive?" Kysh asked, with the smile that has won him his chequered way
+through the world.
+
+"Steam only, and I've about had my whack for to-day, thanks."
+
+"I see."
+
+The long, low car slid forward and then dropped like a bullet down the
+descent our steam toy had so painfully climbed. Our guest's face blanched,
+and he clutched the back of the tonneau.
+
+"New commander's evidently been trained on a destroyer," said Hinchcliffe.
+
+"What's 'is wonderful name?" whispered Pyecroft. "Ho! Well, I'm glad it
+ain't Saul we've run up against--nor Nimshi, for that matter. This is
+makin' me feel religious."
+
+Our impetus carried us half-way up the next slope, where we steadied to a
+resonant fifteen an hour against the collar.
+
+"What do you think?" I called to Hinchcliffe.
+
+"'Taint as sweet as steam, o' course; but for power it's twice the
+_Furious_ against half the _Jaseur_ in a head-sea."
+
+Volumes could not have touched it more exactly. His bright eyes were glued
+on Kysh's hands juggling with levers behind the discreet backward sloping
+dash.
+
+"An' what sort of a brake might you use?" he said politely.
+
+"This," Kysh replied, as the last of the hill shot up to one in eight. He
+let the car run back a few feet and caught her deftly on the brake,
+repeating the performance cup and ball fashion. It was like being daped
+above the Pit at the end of an uncoiled solar plexus. Even Pyecroft held
+his breath.
+
+"It ain't fair! It ain't fair!" our guest moaned. "You're makin' me sick."
+
+"What an ungrateful blighter he is!" said Pyecroft. "Money couldn't buy
+you a run like this ... Do it well overboard!"
+
+"We'll just trundle up the Forest and drop into the Park Row, I think,"
+said Kysh. "There's a bit of good going hereabouts."
+
+He flung a careless knee over the low raking tiller that the ordinary
+expert puts under his armpit, and down four miles of yellow road, cut
+through barren waste, the Octopod sang like a six-inch shell.
+
+"Whew! But you know your job," said Hinchcliffe. "You're wasted here. I'd
+give something to have you in my engine-room."
+
+"He's steering with 'is little hind-legs," said Pyecroft. "Stand up and
+look at him, Robert. You'll never see such a sight again!"
+
+"Nor don't want to," was our guest's reply. "Five 'undred pounds wouldn't
+begin to cover 'is fines even since I've been with him."
+
+Park Row is reached by one hill which drops three hundred feet in half a
+mile. Kysh had the thought to steer with his hand down the abyss, but the
+manner in which he took the curved bridge at the bottom brought my few
+remaining hairs much nearer the grave.
+
+"We're in Surrey now; better look out," I said.
+
+"Never mind. I'll roll her into Kent for a bit. We've lots of time; it's
+only three o'clock."
+
+"Won't you want to fill your bunkers, or take water, or oil her up?" said
+Hinchcliffe.
+
+"We don't use water, and she's good for two hundred on one tank o' petrol
+if she doesn't break down."
+
+"Two hundred miles from 'ome and mother _and_ faithful Fido to-night,
+Robert," said Pyecroft, slapping our guest on the knee. "Cheer up! Why,
+I've known a destroyer do less."
+
+We passed with some decency through some towns, till by way of the
+Hastings road we whirled into Cramberhurst, which is a deep pit.
+
+"Now," said Kysh, "we begin."
+
+"Previous service not reckoned towards pension," said Pyecroft. "We are
+doin' you lavish, Robert."
+
+"But when's this silly game to finish, any'ow?" our guest snarled.
+
+"Don't worry about the _when_ of it, Robert. The _where's_ the interestin'
+point for you just now."
+
+I had seen Kysh drive before, and I thought I knew the Octopod, but that
+afternoon he and she were exalted beyond my knowledge. He improvised on
+the keys--the snapping levers and quivering accelerators--marvellous
+variations, so that our progress was sometimes a fugue and sometimes a
+barn-dance, varied on open greens by the weaving of fairy rings. When I
+protested, all that he would say was: "I'll hypnotise the fowl! I'll
+dazzle the rooster!" or other words equally futile. And she--oh! that I
+could do her justice!--she turned her broad black bows to the westering
+light, and lifted us high upon hills that we might see and rejoice with
+her. She whooped into veiled hollows of elm and Sussex oak; she devoured
+infinite perspectives of park palings; she surged through forgotten
+hamlets, whose single streets gave back, reduplicated, the clatter of her
+exhaust, and, tireless, she repeated the motions. Over naked uplands she
+droned like a homing bee, her shadow lengthening in the sun that she
+chased to his lair. She nosed up unparochial byways and accommodation-
+roads of the least accommodation, and put old scarred turf or new-raised
+molehills under her most marvellous springs with never a jar. And since
+the King's highway is used for every purpose save traffic, in mid-career
+she stepped aside for, or flung amazing loops about, the brainless driver,
+the driverless horse, the drunken carrier, the engaged couple, the female
+student of the bicycle and her staggering instructor, the pig, the
+perambulator, and the infant school (where it disembogued yelping on
+cross-roads), with the grace of Nellie Farren (upon whom be the Peace) and
+the lithe abandon of all the Vokes family. But at heart she was ever Judic
+as I remember that Judic long ago--Judic clad in bourgeois black from
+wrist to ankle, achieving incredible improprieties.
+
+We were silent--Hinchcliffe and Pyecroft through professional
+appreciation; I with a layman's delight in the expert; and our guest
+because of fear.
+
+At the edge of the evening she smelt the sea to southward and sheered
+thither like the strong-winged albatross, to circle enormously amid green
+flats fringed by martello towers.
+
+"Ain't that Eastbourne yonder?" said our guest, reviving. "I've a aunt
+there--she's cook to a J.P.--could identify me."
+
+"Don't worry her for a little thing like that," said Pyecroft; and ere he
+had ceased to praise family love, our unpaid judiciary, and domestic
+service, the Downs rose between us and the sea, and the Long Man of
+Hillingdon lay out upon the turf.
+
+"Trevington--up yonder--is a fairly isolated little dorp," I said, for I
+was beginning to feel hungry.
+
+"No," said Kysh. "He'd get a lift to the railway in no time.... Besides,
+I'm enjoying myself.... Three pounds eighteen and sixpence. Infernal
+swindle!"
+
+I take it one of his more recent fines was rankling in Kysh's brain; but
+he drove like the Archangel of the Twilight.
+
+About the longitude of Cassocks, Hinchcliffe yawned. "Aren't we goin' to
+maroon our Robert? I'm hungry, too."
+
+"The commodore wants his money back," I answered.
+
+"If he drives like this habitual, there must be a tidyish little lump
+owin' to him," said Pyecroft. "Well, I'm agreeable."
+
+"I didn't know it could be done. S'welp me, I didn't," our guest murmured.
+
+"But you will," said Kysh. And that was the first and last time he
+addressed the man.
+
+We ran through Penfield Green, half stupefied with open air, drugged with
+the relentless boom of the Octopod, and extinct with famine.
+
+"I used to shoot about here," said Kysh, a few miles further on. "Open
+that gate, please," and he slowed as the sun touched the sky-line. At this
+point we left metalled roads and bucked vigorously amid ditches and under
+trees for twenty minutes.
+
+"Only cross-country car on the market," he said, as we wheeled into a
+straw-yard where a lone bull bellowed defiance to our growlings. "Open
+that gate, please. I hope the cattle-bridge will stand up."
+
+"I've took a few risks in my time," said Pyecroft as timbers cracked
+beneath us and we entered between thickets, "but I'm a babe to this man,
+Hinch."
+
+"Don't talk to me. Watch _him!_ It's a liberal education, as Shakespeare
+says. Fallen tree on the port bow, Sir."
+
+"Right! That's my mark. Sit tight!"
+
+She flung up her tail like a sounding whale and buried us in a fifteen-
+foot deep bridle-path buttressed with the exposed roots of enormous
+beeches. The wheels leaped from root to rounded boulder, and it was very
+dark in the shadow of the foliage.
+
+"There ought to be a hammer-pond somewhere about here." Kysh was letting
+her down this chute in brakeful spasms.
+
+"Water dead ahead, Sir. Stack o' brushwood on the starboard beam, and--no
+road," sang Pyecroft.
+
+"Cr-r-ri-key!" said Hinchcliffe, as the car on a wild cant to the left
+went astern, screwing herself round the angle of a track that overhung the
+pond. "If she only had two propellers, I believe she'd talk poetry. She
+can do everything else."
+
+"We're rather on our port wheels now," said Kysh; "but I don't think
+she'll capsize. This road isn't used much by motors."
+
+"You don't say so," said Pyecroft. "What a pity!"
+
+She bored through a mass of crackling brushwood, and emerged into an
+upward sloping fern-glade fenced with woods so virgin, so untouched, that
+William Rufus might have ridden off as we entered. We climbed out of the
+violet-purple shadows towards the upland where the last of the day
+lingered. I was filled to my moist eyes with the almost sacred beauty of
+sense and association that clad the landscape.
+
+"Does 'unger produce 'alluciations?" said Pyecroft in a whisper. "Because
+I've just seen a sacred ibis walkin' arm in arm with a British cock-
+pheasant."
+
+"What are you panickin' at?" said Hinchcliffe. "I've been seein' zebra
+for the last two minutes, but I 'aven't complained."
+
+He pointed behind us, and I beheld a superb painted zebra (Burchell's, I
+think), following our track with palpitating nostrils. The car stopped,
+and it fled away.
+
+There was a little pond in front of us from which rose a dome of irregular
+sticks crowned with a blunt-muzzled beast that sat upon its haunches.
+
+"Is it catching?" said Pyecroft.
+
+"Yes. I'm seeing beaver," I replied.
+
+"It is here!" said Kysh, with the air and gesture of Captain Nemo, and
+half turned.
+
+"No--no--no! For 'Eaven's sake--not 'ere!" Our guest gasped like a sea-
+bathed child, as four efficient hands swung him far out-board on to the
+turf. The car ran back noiselessly down the slope.
+
+"Look! Look! It's sorcery!" cried Hinchcliffe.
+
+There was a report like a pistol shot as the beaver dived from the roof of
+his lodge, but we watched our guest. He was on his knees, praying to
+kangaroos. Yea, in his bowler hat he kneeled before kangaroos--gigantic,
+erect, silhouetted against the light--four buck-kangaroos in the heart of
+Sussex!
+
+And we retrogressed over the velvet grass till our hind-wheels struck
+well-rolled gravel, leading us to sanity, main roads, and, half an hour
+later, the "Grapnel Inn" at Horsham.
+
+*        *        *        *        *
+
+After a great meal we poured libations and made burnt-offerings in honour
+of Kysh, who received our homage graciously, and, by the way, explained a
+few things in the natural history line that had puzzled us. England is a
+most marvellous country, but one is not, till one knows the eccentricities
+of large land-owners, trained to accept kangaroos, zebras, or beavers as
+part of its landscape.
+
+When we went to bed Pyecroft pressed my hand, his voice thick with
+emotion.
+
+"We owe it to you," he said. "We owe it all to you. Didn't I say we never
+met in _pup-pup-puris naturalibus_, if I may so put it, without a
+remarkably hectic day ahead of us?"
+
+"That's all right," I said. "Mind the candle." He was tracing smoke-
+patterns on the wall.
+
+"But what I want to know is whether we'll succeed in acclimatisin' the
+blighter, or whether Sir William Gardner's keepers 'll kill 'im before 'e
+gets accustomed to 'is surroundin's?"
+
+Some day, I think, we must go up the Linghurst Road and find out.
+
+
+
+
+"WIRELESS"
+
+
+KASPAR'S SONG IN VARDA
+
+(_From the Swedish of Stagnelius_.)
+
+  Eyes aloft, over dangerous places,
+    The children follow where Psyche flies,
+  And, in the sweat of their upturned faces,
+    Slash with a net at the empty skies.
+
+  So it goes they fall amid brambles,
+    And sting their toes on the nettle-tops,
+  Till after a thousand scratches and scrambles
+    They wipe their brows, and the hunting stops.
+
+  Then to quiet them comes their father
+    And stills the riot of pain and grief,
+  Saying, "Little ones, go and gather
+    Out of my garden a cabbage leaf.
+
+  "You will find on it whorls and clots of
+    Dull grey eggs that, properly fed,
+  Turn, by way of the worm, to lots of
+    Radiant Psyches raised from the dead."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+  "Heaven is beautiful, Earth is ugly,"
+    The three-dimensioned preacher saith,
+  So we must not look where the snail and the slug lie
+    For Psyche's birth ... And that is our death!
+
+
+"WIRELESS"
+"It's a funny thing, this Marconi business, isn't it?" said Mr. Shaynor,
+coughing heavily. "Nothing seems to make any difference, by what they tell
+me--storms, hills, or anything; but if that's true we shall know before
+morning."
+
+"Of course it's true," I answered, stepping behind the counter. "Where's
+old Mr. Cashell?"
+
+"He's had to go to bed on account of his influenza. He said you'd very
+likely drop in."
+
+"Where's his nephew?"
+
+"Inside, getting the things ready. He told me that the last time they
+experimented they put the pole on the roof of one of the big hotels here,
+and the batteries electrified all the water-supply, and"--he giggled--"the
+ladies got shocks when they took their baths."
+
+"I never heard of that."
+
+"The hotel wouldn't exactly advertise it, would it? Just now, by what Mr.
+Cashell tells me, they're trying to signal from here to Poole, and they're
+using stronger batteries than ever. But, you see, he being the guvnor's
+nephew and all that (and it will be in the papers too), it doesn't matter
+how they electrify things in this house. Are you going to watch?"
+
+"Very much. I've never seen this game. Aren't you going to bed?"
+
+"We don't close till ten on Saturdays. There's a good deal of influenza in
+town, too, and there'll be a dozen prescriptions coming in before morning.
+I generally sleep in the chair here. It's warmer than jumping out of bed
+every time. Bitter cold, isn't it?"
+
+"Freezing hard. I'm sorry your cough's worse."
+
+"Thank you. I don't mind cold so much. It's this wind that fair cuts me to
+pieces." He coughed again hard and hackingly, as an old lady came in for
+ammoniated quinine. "We've just run out of it in bottles, madam," said Mr.
+Shaynor, returning to the professional tone, "but if you will wait two
+minutes, I'll make it up for you, madam."
+
+I had used the shop for some time, and my acquaintance with the proprietor
+had ripened into friendship. It was Mr. Cashell who revealed to me the
+purpose and power of Apothecaries' Hall what time a fellow-chemist had
+made an error in a prescription of mine, had lied to cover his sloth, and
+when error and lie were brought home to him had written vain letters.
+
+"A disgrace to our profession," said the thin, mild-eyed man, hotly, after
+studying the evidence. "You couldn't do a better service to the profession
+than report him to Apothecaries' Hall."
+
+I did so, not knowing what djinns I should evoke; and the result was such
+an apology as one might make who had spent a night on the rack. I
+conceived great respect for Apothecaries' Hall, and esteem for Mr.
+Cashell, a zealous craftsman who magnified his calling. Until Mr. Shaynor
+came down from the North his assistants had by no means agreed with Mr.
+Cashell. "They forget," said he, "that, first and foremost, the compounder
+is a medicine-man. On him depends the physician's reputation. He holds it
+literally in the hollow of his hand, Sir."
+
+Mr. Shaynor's manners had not, perhaps, the polish of the grocery and
+Italian warehouse next door, but he knew and loved his dispensary work in
+every detail. For relaxation he seemed to go no farther afield than the
+romance of drugs--their discovery, preparation packing, and export--but it
+led him to the ends of the earth, and on this subject, and the
+Pharmaceutical Formulary, and Nicholas Culpepper, most confident of
+physicians, we met.
+
+Little by little I grew to know something of his beginnings and his hopes
+--of his mother, who had been a school-teacher in one of the northern
+counties, and of his red-headed father, a small job-master at Kirby Moors,
+who died when he was a child; of the examinations he had passed and of
+their exceeding and increasing difficulty; of his dreams of a shop in
+London; of his hate for the price-cutting Co-operative stores; and, most
+interesting, of his mental attitude towards customers.
+
+"There's a way you get into," he told me, "of serving them carefully, and
+I hope, politely, without stopping your own thinking. I've been reading
+Christie's _New Commercial Plants_ all this autumn, and that needs keeping
+your mind on it, I can tell you. So long as it isn't a prescription, of
+course, I can carry as much as half a page of Christie in my head, and at
+the same time I could sell out all that window twice over, and not a penny
+wrong at the end. As to prescriptions, I think I could make up the general
+run of 'em in my sleep, almost."
+
+For reasons of my own, I was deeply interested in Marconi experiments at
+their outset in England; and it was of a piece with Mr. Cashell's
+unvarying thoughtfulness that, when his nephew the electrician
+appropriated the house for a long-range installation, he should, as I have
+said, invite me to see the result.
+
+The old lady went away with her medicine, and Mr. Shaynor and I stamped on
+the tiled floor behind the counter to keep ourselves warm. The shop, by
+the light of the many electrics, looked like a Paris-diamond mine, for Mr.
+Cashell believed in all the ritual of his craft. Three superb glass jars--
+red, green, and blue--of the sort that led Rosamund to parting with her
+shoes--blazed in the broad plate-glass windows, and there was a confused
+smell of orris, Kodak films, vulcanite, tooth-powder, sachets, and almond-
+cream in the air. Mr. Shaynor fed the dispensary stove, and we sucked
+cayenne-pepper jujubes and menthol lozenges. The brutal east wind had
+cleared the streets, and the few passers-by were muffled to their puckered
+eyes. In the Italian warehouse next door some gay feathered birds and
+game, hung upon hooks, sagged to the wind across the left edge of our
+window-frame.
+
+"They ought to take these poultry in--all knocked about like that," said
+Mr. Shaynor. "Doesn't it make you feel fair perishing? See that old hare!
+The wind's nearly blowing the fur off him."
+
+I saw the belly-fur of the dead beast blown apart in ridges and streaks as
+the wind caught it, showing bluish skin underneath. "Bitter cold," said
+Mr. Shaynor, shuddering. "Fancy going out on a night like this! Oh, here's
+young Mr. Cashell."
+
+The door of the inner office behind the dispensary opened, and an
+energetic, spade-bearded man stepped forth, rubbing his hands.
+
+"I want a bit of tin-foil, Shaynor," he said. "Good-evening. My uncle told
+me you might be coming." This to me, as I began the first of a hundred
+questions.
+
+"I've everything in order," he replied. "We're only waiting until Poole
+calls us up. Excuse me a minute. You can come in whenever you like--but
+I'd better be with the instruments. Give me that tin-foil. Thanks."
+
+While we were talking, a girl--evidently no customer--had come into the
+shop, and the face and bearing of Mr. Shaynor changed. She leaned
+confidently across the counter.
+
+"But I can't," I heard him whisper uneasily--the flush on his cheek was
+dull red, and his eyes shone like a drugged moth's. "I can't. I tell you
+I'm alone in the place."
+
+"No, you aren't. Who's _that_? Let him look after it for half an hour. A
+brisk walk will do you good. Ah, come now, John."
+
+"But he isn't----"
+
+"I don't care. I want you to; we'll only go round by St. Agnes. If you
+don't----"
+
+He crossed to where I stood in the shadow of the dispensary counter, and
+began some sort of broken apology about a lady-friend.
+
+"Yes," she interrupted. "You take the shop for half an hour--to oblige
+_me_, won't you?"
+
+She had a singularly rich and promising voice that well matched her
+outline.
+
+"All right," I said. "I'll do it--but you'd better wrap yourself up, Mr.
+Shaynor."
+
+"Oh, a brisk walk ought to help me. We're only going round by the church."
+I heard him cough grievously as they went out together.
+
+I refilled the stove, and, after reckless expenditure of Mr. Cashell's
+coal, drove some warmth into the shop. I explored many of the glass-
+knobbed drawers that lined the walls, tasted some disconcerting drugs,
+and, by the aid of a few cardamoms, ground ginger, chloric-ether, and
+dilute alcohol, manufactured a new and wildish drink, of which I bore a
+glassful to young Mr. Cashell, busy in the back office. He laughed shortly
+when I told him that Mr. Shaynor had stepped out--but a frail coil of wire
+held all his attention, and he had no word for me bewildered among the
+batteries and rods. The noise of the sea on the beach began to make itself
+heard as the traffic in the street ceased. Then briefly, but very lucidly,
+he gave me the names and uses of the mechanism that crowded the tables and
+the floor.
+
+"When do you expect to get the message from Poole?" I demanded, sipping my
+liquor out of a graduated glass.
+
+"About midnight, if everything is in order. We've got our installation-
+pole fixed to the roof of the house. I shouldn't advise you to turn on a
+tap or anything tonight. We've connected up with the plumbing, and all the
+water will be electrified." He repeated to me the history of the agitated
+ladies at the hotel at the time of the first installation.
+
+"But what _is_ it?" I asked. "Electricity is out of my beat altogether."
+
+"Ah, if you knew _that_ you'd know something nobody knows. It's just It--
+what we call Electricity, but the magic--the manifestations--the Hertzian
+waves--are all revealed by _this_. The coherer, we call it."
+
+He picked up a glass tube not much thicker than a thermometer, in which,
+almost touching, were two tiny silver plugs, and between them an
+infinitesimal pinch of metallic dust. "That's all," he said, proudly, as
+though himself responsible for the wonder. "That is the thing that will
+reveal to us the Powers--whatever the Powers may be--at work--through
+space--a long distance away."
+
+Just then Mr. Shaynor returned alone and stood coughing his heart out on
+the mat.
+
+"Serves you right for being such a fool," said young Mr. Cashell, as
+annoyed as myself at the interruption. "Never mind--we've all the night
+before us to see wonders."
+
+Shaynor clutched the counter, his handkerchief to his lips. When he
+brought it away I saw two bright red stains.
+
+"I--I've got a bit of a rasped throat from smoking cigarettes," he panted.
+"I think I'll try a cubeb."
+
+"Better take some of this. I've been compounding while you've been away."
+I handed him the brew.
+
+"'Twon't make me drunk, will it? I'm almost a teetotaller. My word! That's
+grateful and comforting."
+
+He sat down the empty glass to cough afresh.
+
+"Brr! But it was cold out there! I shouldn't care to be lying in my grave
+a night like this. Don't _you_ ever have a sore throat from smoking?" He
+pocketed the handkerchief after a furtive peep.
+
+"Oh, yes, sometimes," I replied, wondering, while I spoke, into what
+agonies of terror I should fall if ever I saw those bright-red danger-
+signals under my nose. Young Mr. Cashell among the batteries coughed
+slightly to show that he was quite ready to continue his scientific
+explanations, but I was thinking still of the girl with the rich voice and
+the significantly cut mouth, at whose command I had taken charge of the
+shop. It flashed across me that she distantly resembled the seductive
+shape on a gold-framed toilet-water advertisement whose charms were
+unholily heightened by the glare from the red bottle in the window.
+Turning to make sure, I saw Mr. Shaynor's eyes bent in the same direction,
+and by instinct recognised that the flamboyant thing was to him a shrine.
+"What do you take for your--cough?" I asked.
+
+"Well, I'm the wrong side of the counter to believe much in patent
+medicines. But there are asthma cigarettes and there are pastilles. To
+tell you the truth, if you don't object to the smell, which is very like
+incense, I believe, though I'm not a Roman Catholic, Blaudett's Cathedral
+Pastilles relieve me as much as anything."
+
+"Let's try." I had never raided a chemist's shop before, so I was
+thorough. We unearthed the pastilles--brown, gummy cones of benzoin--and
+set them alight under the toilet-water advertisement, where they fumed in
+thin blue spirals.
+
+"Of course," said Mr. Shaynor, to my question, "what one uses in the shop
+for one's self comes out of one's pocket. Why, stock-taking in our
+business is nearly the same as with jewellers--and I can't say more than
+that. But one gets them"--he pointed to the pastille-box--"at trade
+prices." Evidently the censing of the gay, seven-tinted wench with the
+teeth was an established ritual which cost something.
+
+"And when do we shut up shop?"
+
+"We stay like this all night. The gov--old Mr. Cashell--doesn't believe
+in locks and shutters as compared with electric light. Besides it brings
+trade. I'll just sit here in the chair by the stove and write a letter,
+if you don't mind. Electricity isn't my prescription."
+
+The energetic young Mr. Cashell snorted within, and Shaynor settled
+himself up in his chair over which he had thrown a staring red, black, and
+yellow Austrian jute blanket, rather like a table-cover. I cast about,
+amid patent medicine pamphlets, for something to read, but finding little,
+returned to the manufacture of the new drink. The Italian warehouse took
+down its game and went to bed. Across the street blank shutters flung back
+the gaslight in cold smears; the dried pavement seemed to rough up in
+goose-flesh under the scouring of the savage wind, and we could hear, long
+ere he passed, the policeman flapping his arms to keep himself warm.
+Within, the flavours of cardamoms and chloric-ether disputed those of the
+pastilles and a score of drugs and perfume and soap scents. Our electric
+lights, set low down in the windows before the tunbellied Rosamund jars,
+flung inward three monstrous daubs of red, blue, and green, that broke
+into kaleidoscopic lights on the facetted knobs of the drug-drawers, the
+cut-glass scent flagons, and the bulbs of the sparklet bottles. They
+flushed the white-tiled floor in gorgeous patches; splashed along the
+nickel-silver counter-rails, and turned the polished mahogany counter-
+panels to the likeness of intricate grained marbles--slabs of porphyry and
+malachite. Mr. Shaynor unlocked a drawer, and ere he began to write, took
+out a meagre bundle of letters. From my place by the stove, I could see
+the scalloped edges of the paper with a flaring monogram in the corner and
+could even smell the reek of chypre. At each page he turned toward the
+toilet-water lady of the advertisement and devoured her with over-luminous
+eyes. He had drawn the Austrian blanket over his shoulders, and among
+those warring lights he looked more than ever the incarnation of a drugged
+moth--a tiger-moth as I thought.
+
+He put his letter into an envelope, stamped it with stiff mechanical
+movements, and dropped it in the drawer. Then I became aware of the
+silence of a great city asleep--the silence that underlaid the even voice
+of the breakers along the sea-front--a thick, tingling quiet of warm life
+stilled down for its appointed time, and unconsciously I moved about the
+glittering shop as one moves in a sick-room. Young Mr. Cashell was
+adjusting some wire that crackled from time to time with the tense,
+knuckle-stretching sound of the electric spark. Upstairs, where a door
+shut and opened swiftly, I could hear his uncle coughing abed.
+
+"Here," I said, when the drink was properly warmed, "take some of this,
+Mr. Shaynor."
+
+He jerked in his chair with a start and a wrench, and held out his hand
+for the glass. The mixture, of a rich port-wine colour, frothed at the
+top.
+
+"It looks," he said, suddenly, "it looks--those bubbles--like a string of
+pearls winking at you--rather like the pearls round that young lady's
+neck." He turned again to the advertisement where the female in the dove-
+coloured corset had seen fit to put on all her pearls before she cleaned
+her teeth.
+
+"Not bad, is it?" I said.
+
+"Eh?"
+
+He rolled his eyes heavily full on me, and, as I stared, I beheld all
+meaning and consciousness die out of the swiftly dilating pupils. His
+figure lost its stark rigidity, softened into the chair, and, chin on
+chest, hands dropped before him, he rested open-eyed, absolutely still.
+
+"I'm afraid I've rather cooked Shaynor's goose," I said, bearing the fresh
+drink to young Mr. Cashell. "Perhaps it was the chloric-ether."
+
+"Oh, he's all right." The spade-bearded man glanced at him pityingly.
+"Consumptives go off in those sort of doses very often. It's exhaustion...
+I don't wonder. I dare say the liquor will do him good. It's grand stuff,"
+he finished his share appreciatively. "Well, as I was saying--before he
+interrupted--about this little coherer. The pinch of dust, you see, is
+nickel-filings. The Hertzian waves, you see, come out of space from the
+station that despatches 'em, and all these little particles are attracted
+together--cohere, we call it--for just so long as the current passes
+through them. Now, it's important to remember that the current is an
+induced current. There are a good many kinds of induction----"
+
+"Yes, but what _is_ induction?"
+
+"That's rather hard to explain untechnically. But the long and the short
+of it is that when a current of electricity passes through a wire there's
+a lot of magnetism present round that wire; and if you put another wire
+parallel to, and within what we call its magnetic field--why then, the
+second wire will also become charged with electricity."
+
+"On its own account?"
+
+"On its own account."
+
+"Then let's see if I've got it correctly. Miles off, at Poole, or wherever
+it is----"
+
+"It will be anywhere in ten years."
+
+"You've got a charged wire----"
+
+"Charged with Hertzian waves which vibrate, say, two hundred and thirty
+million times a second." Mr. Cashell snaked his forefinger rapidly through
+the air.
+
+"All right--a charged wire at Poole, giving out these waves into space.
+Then this wire of yours sticking out into space--on the roof of the house
+--in some mysterious way gets charged with those waves from Poole----"
+
+"Or anywhere--it only happens to be Poole tonight."
+
+"And those waves set the coherer at work, just like an ordinary telegraph-
+office ticker?"
+
+"No! That's where so many people make the mistake. The Hertzian waves
+wouldn't be strong enough to work a great heavy Morse instrument like
+ours. They can only just make that dust cohere, and while it coheres (a
+little while for a dot and a longer while for a dash) the current from
+this battery--the home battery"--he laid his hand on the thing--"can get
+through to the Morse printing-machine to record the dot or dash. Let me
+make it clearer. Do you know anything about steam?"
+
+"Very little. But go on."
+
+"Well, the coherer is like a steam-valve. Any child can open a valve and
+start a steamer's engines, because a turn of the hand lets in the main
+steam, doesn't it? Now, this home battery here ready to print is the main
+steam. The coherer is the valve, always ready to be turned on. The
+Hertzian wave is the child's hand that turns it."
+
+"I see. That's marvellous."
+
+"Marvellous, isn't it? And, remember, we're only at the beginning. There's
+nothing we sha'n't be able to do in ten years. I want to live--my God, how
+I want to live, and see it develop!" He looked through the door at Shaynor
+breathing lightly in his chair. "Poor beast! And he wants to keep company
+with Fanny Brand."
+
+"Fanny _who_?" I said, for the name struck an obscurely familiar chord in
+my brain--something connected with a stained handkerchief, and the word
+"arterial."
+
+"Fanny Brand--the girl you kept shop for." He laughed, "That's all I know
+about her, and for the life of me I can't see what Shaynor sees in her, or
+she in him."
+
+"_Can't_ you see what he sees in her?" I insisted.
+
+"Oh, yes, if _that's_ what you mean. She's a great, big, fat lump of a
+girl, and so on. I suppose that's why he's so crazy after her. She isn't
+his sort. Well, it doesn't matter. My uncle says he's bound to die before
+the year's out. Your drink's given him a good sleep, at any rate." Young
+Mr. Cashell could not catch Mr. Shaynor's face, which was half turned to
+the advertisement.
+
+I stoked the stove anew, for the room was growing cold, and lighted
+another pastille. Mr. Shaynor in his chair, never moving, looked through
+and over me with eyes as wide and lustreless as those of a dead hare.
+
+"Poole's late," said young Mr. Cashell, when I stepped back. "I'll just
+send them a call."
+
+He pressed a key in the semi-darkness, and with a rending crackle there
+leaped between two brass knobs a spark, streams of sparks, and sparks
+again.
+
+"Grand, isn't it? _That's_ the Power--our unknown Power--kicking and
+fighting to be let loose," said young Mr. Cashell. "There she goes--kick--
+kick--kick into space. I never get over the strangeness of it when I work
+a sending-machine--waves going into space, you know. T.R. is our call.
+Poole ought to answer with L.L.L."
+
+We waited two, three, five minutes. In that silence, of which the boom of
+the tide was an orderly part, I caught the clear "_kiss--kiss--kiss_" of
+the halliards on the roof, as they were blown against the installation-
+pole.
+
+"Poole is not ready. I'll stay here and call you when he is."
+
+I returned to the shop, and set down my glass on a marble slab with a
+careless clink. As I did so, Shaynor rose to his feet, his eyes fixed once
+more on the advertisement, where the young woman bathed in the light from
+the red jar simpered pinkly over her pearls. His lips moved without
+cessation. I stepped nearer to listen. "And threw--and threw--and threw,"
+he repeated, his face all sharp with some inexplicable agony.
+
+I moved forward astonished. But it was then he found words--delivered
+roundly and clearly. These:--
+
+And threw warm gules on Madeleine's young breast.
+
+The trouble passed off his countenance, and he returned lightly to his
+place, rubbing his hands.
+
+It had never occurred to me, though we had many times discussed reading
+and prize-competitions as a diversion, that Mr. Shaynor ever read Keats,
+or could quote him at all appositely. There was, after all, a certain
+stained-glass effect of light on the high bosom of the highly-polished
+picture which might, by stretch of fancy, suggest, as a vile chromo
+recalls some incomparable canvas, the line he had spoken. Night, my drink,
+and solitude were evidently turning Mr. Shaynor into a poet. He sat down
+again and wrote swiftly on his villainous note-paper, his lips quivering.
+
+I shut the door into the inner office and moved up behind him. He made no
+sign that he saw or heard. I looked over his shoulder, and read, amid
+half-formed words, sentences, and wild scratches:--
+
+  --Very cold it was. Very cold
+  The hare--the hare--the hare--
+  The birds----
+
+He raised his head sharply, and frowned toward the blank shutters of the
+poulterer's shop where they jutted out against our window. Then one clear
+line came:--
+
+  The hare, in spite of fur, was very cold.
+
+The head, moving machine-like, turned right to the advertisement where
+the Blaudett's Cathedral pastille reeked abominably. He grunted, and went
+on:--
+
+  Incense in a censer--
+  Before her darling picture framed in gold--
+  Maiden's picture--angel's portrait--
+
+"Hsh!" said Mr. Cashell guardedly from the inner office, as though in the
+presence of spirits. "There's something coming through from somewhere; but
+it isn't Poole." I heard the crackle of sparks as he depressed the keys of
+the transmitter. In my own brain, too, something crackled, or it might
+have been the hair on my head. Then I heard my own voice, in a harsh
+whisper: "Mr. Cashell, there is something coming through here, too. Leave
+me alone till I tell you."
+
+"But I thought you'd come to see this wonderful thing--Sir," indignantly
+at the end.
+
+"Leave me alone till I tell you. Be quiet."
+
+I watched--I waited. Under the blue-veined hand--the dry hand of the
+consumptive--came away clear, without erasure:
+
+And my weak spirit fails To think how the dead must freeze--
+he shivered as he wrote--
+
+Beneath the churchyard mould.
+
+Then he stopped, laid the pen down, and leaned back.
+
+For an instant, that was half an eternity, the shop spun before me in a
+rainbow-tinted whirl, in and through which my own soul most
+dispassionately considered my own soul as that fought with an over-
+mastering fear. Then I smelt the strong smell of cigarettes from Mr.
+Shaynor's clothing, and heard, as though it had been the rending of
+trumpets, the rattle of his breathing. I was still in my place of
+observation, much as one would watch a rifle-shot at the butts, half-bent,
+hands on my knees, and head within a few inches of the black, red, and
+yellow blanket of his shoulder. I was whispering encouragement, evidently
+to my other self, sounding sentences, such as men pronounce in dreams.
+
+"If he has read Keats, it proves nothing. If he hasn't--like causes _must_
+beget like effects. There is no escape from this law. _You_ ought to be
+grateful that you know 'St. Agnes Eve' without the book; because, given
+the circumstances, such as Fanny Brand, who is the key of the enigma, and
+approximately represents the latitude and longitude of Fanny Brawne;
+allowing also for the bright red colour of the arterial blood upon the
+handkerchief, which was just what you were puzzling over in the shop just
+now; and counting the effect of the professional environment, here almost
+perfectly duplicated--the result is logical and inevitable. As inevitable
+as induction."
+
+Still, the other half of my soul refused to be comforted. It was cowering
+in some minute and inadequate corner--at an immense distance.
+
+Hereafter, I found myself one person again, my hands still gripping my
+knees, and my eyes glued on the page before Mr. Shaynor. As dreamers
+accept and explain the upheaval of landscapes and the resurrection of the
+dead, with excerpts from the evening hymn or the multiplication-table, so
+I had accepted the facts, whatever they might be, that I should witness,
+and had devised a theory, sane and plausible to my mind, that explained
+them all. Nay, I was even in advance of my facts, walking hurriedly before
+them, assured that they would fit my theory. And all that I now recall of
+that epoch-making theory are the lofty words: "If he has read Keats it's
+the chloric-ether. If he hasn't, it's the identical bacillus, or Hertzian
+wave of tuberculosis, _plus_ Fanny Brand and the professional status
+which, in conjunction with the main-stream of subconscious thought common
+to all mankind, has thrown up temporarily an induced Keats."
+
+Mr. Shaynor returned to his work, erasing and rewriting as before with
+swiftness. Two or three blank pages he tossed aside. Then he wrote,
+muttering:
+
+The little smoke of a candle that goes out.
+
+"No," he muttered. "Little smoke--little smoke--little smoke. What else?"
+He thrust his chin forward toward the advertisement, whereunder the last
+of the Blaudett's Cathedral pastilles fumed in its holder. "Ah!" Then with
+relief:--
+
+The little smoke that dies in moonlight cold.
+
+Evidently he was snared by the rhymes of his first verse, for he wrote and
+rewrote "gold--cold--mould" many times. Again he sought inspiration from
+the advertisement, and set down, without erasure, the line I had
+overheard:
+
+And threw warm gules on Madeleine's young breast.
+
+As I remembered the original it is "fair"--a trite word--instead of
+"young," and I found myself nodding approval, though I admitted that the
+attempt to reproduce "its little smoke in pallid moonlight died" was a
+failure.
+
+Followed without a break ten or fifteen lines of bald prose--the naked
+soul's confession of its physical yearning for its beloved--unclean as we
+count uncleanliness; unwholesome, but human exceedingly; the raw material,
+so it seemed to me in that hour and in that place, whence Keats wove the
+twenty-sixth, seventh, and eighth stanzas of his poem. Shame I had none in
+overseeing this revelation; and my fear had gone with the smoke of the
+pastille.
+
+"That's it," I murmured. "That's how it's blocked out. Go on! Ink it in,
+man. Ink it in!"
+
+Mr. Shaynor returned to broken verse wherein "loveliness" was made to
+rhyme with a desire to look upon "her empty dress." He picked up a fold of
+the gay, soft blanket, spread it over one hand, caressed it with infinite
+tenderness, thought, muttered, traced some snatches which I could not
+decipher, shut his eyes drowsily, shook his head, and dropped the stuff.
+Here I found myself at fault, for I could not then see (as I do now) in
+what manner a red, black, and yellow Austrian blanket coloured his dreams.
+
+In a few minutes he laid aside his pen, and, chin on hand, considered the
+shop with thoughtful and intelligent eyes. He threw down the blanket,
+rose, passed along a line of drug-drawers, and read the names on the
+labels aloud. Returning, he took from his desk Christie's _New Commercial
+Plants_ and the old Culpepper that I had given him, opened and laid them
+side by side with a clerky air, all trace of passion gone from his face,
+read first in one and then in the other, and paused with pen behind his
+ear.
+
+"What wonder of Heaven's coming now?" I thought.
+
+"Manna--manna--manna," he said at last, under wrinkled brows. "That's what
+I wanted. Good! Now then! Now then! Good! Good! Oh, by God, that's good!"
+His voice rose and he spoke rightly and fully without a falter:--
+
+  Candied apple, quince and plum and gourd,
+  And jellies smoother than the creamy curd,
+  And lucent syrups tinct with cinnamon,
+  Manna and dates in Argosy transferred
+  From Fez; and spiced dainties, every one
+  From silken Samarcand to cedared Lebanon.
+
+He repeated it once more, using "blander" for "smoother" in the second
+line; then wrote it down without erasure, but this time (my set eyes
+missed no stroke of any word) he substituted "soother" for his atrocious
+second thought, so that it came away under his hand as it is written in
+the book--as it is written in the book.
+
+A wind went shouting down the street, and on the heels of the wind
+followed a spurt and rattle of rain.
+
+After a smiling pause--and good right had he to smile--he began anew,
+always tossing the last sheet over his shoulder:--
+
+  "The sharp rain falling on the window-pane,
+  Rattling sleet--the wind-blown sleet."
+
+Then prose: "It is very cold of mornings when the wind brings rain and
+sleet with it. I heard the sleet on the window-pane outside, and thought
+of you, my darling. I am always thinking of you. I wish we could both run
+away like two lovers into the storm and get that little cottage by the
+sea which we are always thinking about, my own dear darling. We could sit
+and watch the sea beneath our windows. It would be a fairyland all of our
+own--a fairy sea--a fairy sea...."
+
+He stopped, raised his head, and listened. The steady drone of the
+Channel along the sea-front that had borne us company so long leaped up a
+note to the sudden fuller surge that signals the change from ebb to
+flood. It beat in like the change of step throughout an army--this
+renewed pulse of the sea--and filled our ears till they, accepting it,
+marked it no longer.
+
+  "A fairyland for you and me
+  Across the foam--beyond ...
+  A magic foam, a perilous sea."
+
+He grunted again with effort and bit his underlip. My throat dried, but I
+dared not gulp to moisten it lest I should break the spell that was
+drawing him nearer and nearer to the high-water mark but two of the sons
+of Adam have reached. Remember that in all the millions permitted there
+are no more than five--five little lines--of which one can say: "These
+are the pure Magic. These are the clear Vision. The rest is only poetry."
+And Mr. Shaynor was playing hot and cold with two of them!
+
+I vowed no unconscious thought of mine should influence the blindfold
+soul, and pinned myself desperately to the other three, repeating and
+re-repeating:
+
+  A savage spot as holy and enchanted
+  As e'er beneath a waning moon was haunted
+  By woman wailing for her demon lover.
+
+But though I believed my brain thus occupied, my every sense hung upon
+the writing under the dry, bony hand, all brown-fingered with chemicals
+and cigarette-smoke.
+
+  Our windows fronting on the dangerous foam,
+
+(he wrote, after long, irresolute snatches), and then--
+
+  "Our open casements facing desolate seas
+  Forlorn--forlorn--"
+
+Here again his face grew peaked and anxious with that sense of loss I had
+first seen when the Power snatched him. But this time the agony was
+tenfold keener. As I watched it mounted like mercury in the tube. It
+lighted his face from within till I thought the visibly scourged soul
+must leap forth naked between his jaws, unable to endure. A drop of sweat
+trickled from my forehead down my nose and splashed on the back of my
+hand.
+
+  "Our windows facing on the desolate seas
+  And pearly foam of magic fairyland--"
+
+  "Not yet--not yet," he muttered, "wait a minute.
+  _Please_ wait a minute. I shall get it then--"
+
+  Our magic windows fronting on the sea,
+  The dangerous foam of desolate seas ..
+  For aye.
+
+"_Ouh_, my God!"
+
+From head to heel he shook--shook from the marrow of his bones
+outwards--then leaped to his feet with raised arms, and slid the chair
+screeching across the tiled floor where it struck the drawers behind and
+fell with a jar. Mechanically, I stooped to recover it.
+
+As I rose, Mr. Shaynor was stretching and yawning at leisure.
+
+"I've had a bit of a doze," he said. "How did I come to knock the chair
+over? You look rather--"
+
+"The chair startled me," I answered. "It was so sudden in this quiet."
+
+Young Mr. Cashell behind his shut door was offendedly silent.
+
+"I suppose I must have been dreaming," said Mr. Shaynor.
+
+"I suppose you must," I said. "Talking of dreams--I--I noticed you
+writing--before--"
+
+He flushed consciously.
+
+"I meant to ask you if you've ever read anything written by a man called
+Keats."
+
+"Oh! I haven't much time to read poetry, and I can't say that I remember
+the name exactly. Is he a popular writer?"
+
+"Middling. I thought you might know him because he's the only poet who
+was ever a druggist. And he's rather what's called the lover's poet."
+
+"Indeed. I must dip into him. What did he write about?"
+
+"A lot of things. Here's a sample that may interest you."
+
+Then and there, carefully, I repeated the verse he had twice spoken and
+once written not ten minutes ago.
+
+"Ah. Anybody could see he was a druggist from that line about the
+tinctures and syrups. It's a fine tribute to our profession."
+
+"I don't know," said young Mr. Cashell, with icy politeness, opening the
+door one half-inch, "if you still happen to be interested in our trifling
+experiments. But, should such be the case----"
+
+I drew him aside, whispering, "Shaynor seemed going off into some sort of
+fit when I spoke to you just now. I thought, even at the risk of being
+rude, it wouldn't do to take you off your instruments just as the call
+was coming through. Don't you see?"
+
+"Granted--granted as soon as asked," he said unbending. "I _did_ think it
+a shade odd at the time. So that was why he knocked the chair down?"
+
+"I hope I haven't missed anything," I said.
+"I'm afraid I can't say that, but you're just in time for the end of a
+rather curious performance. You can come in, too, Mr. Shaynor. Listen,
+while I read it off."
+
+The Morse instrument was ticking furiously. Mr. Cashell interpreted:
+"'_K.K.V. Can make nothing of your signals_.'" A pause. "'_M.M.V. M.M.V.
+Signals unintelligible. Purpose anchor Sandown Bay. Examine instruments
+to-morrow.'_ Do you know what that means? It's a couple of men-o'-war
+working Marconi signals off the Isle of Wight. They are trying to talk to
+each other. Neither can read the other's messages, but all their messages
+are being taken in by our receiver here. They've been going on for ever so
+long. I wish you could have heard it."
+
+"How wonderful!" I said. "Do you mean we're overhearing Portsmouth ships
+trying to talk to each other--that we're eavesdropping across half South
+England?"
+
+"Just that. Their transmitters are all right, but their receivers are out
+of order, so they only get a dot here and a dash there. Nothing clear."
+
+"Why is that?"
+
+"God knows--and Science will know to-morrow. Perhaps the induction is
+faulty; perhaps the receivers aren't tuned to receive just the number of
+vibrations per second that the transmitter sends. Only a word here and
+there. Just enough to tantalise."
+
+Again the Morse sprang to life.
+
+"That's one of 'em complaining now. Listen: '_Disheartening--most
+disheartening_.' It's quite pathetic. Have you ever seen a spiritualistic
+seance? It reminds me of that sometimes--odds and ends of messages coming
+out of nowhere--a word here and there--no good at all."
+
+"But mediums are all impostors," said Mr. Shaynor, in the doorway,
+lighting an asthma-cigarette. "They only do it for the money they can
+make. I've seen 'em."
+
+"Here's Poole, at last--clear as a bell. L.L.L. _Now_ we sha'n't be long."
+Mr. Cashell rattled the keys merrily. "Anything you'd like to tell 'em?"
+
+"No, I don't think so," I said. "I'll go home and get to bed. I'm feeling
+a little tired."
+
+
+
+
+THE ARMY OF A DREAM
+
+SONG OF THE OLD GUARD
+
+"And thou shalt make a candlestick of pure gold of beaten work shall the
+candlestick be made: his shaft and its branches, his bowls, his knops,
+and his flowers, shall be the same.
+
+"And there shall be a knop under two branches of the same, and a knop
+under two branches of the same, and a knop under two branches of the
+same, according to the six branches that proceed out of the candlestick.
+Their knops and their branches shall be the same."--_Exodus._
+
+  "Know this, my brethren, Heaven is clear
+    And all the clouds are gone--
+  The Proper Sort shall flourish now,
+    Good times are coming on"--
+  The evil that was threatened late
+    To all of our degree,
+  Hath passed in discord and debate,
+    And, _Hey then up go we!_
+
+  A common people strove in vain
+    To shame us unto toil,
+  But they are spent and we remain,
+    And we shall share the spoil
+  According to our several needs
+    As Beauty shall decree,
+  As Age ordains or Birth concedes,
+    And, _Hey then up go we!_
+
+  And they that with accursed zeal
+    Our Service would amend,
+  Shall own the odds and come to heel
+    Ere worse befall their end
+  For though no naked word be wrote
+    Yet plainly shall they see
+  What pinneth Orders to their coat,
+    And, _Hey then up go we!_
+
+  Our doorways that, in time of fear,
+    We opened overwide
+  Shall softly close from year to year
+    Till all be purified;
+  For though no fluttering fan be heard
+    Nor chaff be seen to flee--
+  The Lord shall winnow the Lord's Preferred--
+    And, _Hey then up go we!_
+
+  Our altars which the heathen brake
+    Shall rankly smoke anew,
+  And anise, mint, and cummin take
+    Their dread and sovereign due,
+  Whereby the buttons of our trade
+    Shall all restored be
+  With curious work in gilt and braid,
+    And, _Hey then up go we!_
+
+  Then come, my brethren, and prepare
+    The candlesticks and bells,
+  The scarlet, brass, and badger's hair
+    Wherein our Honour dwells,
+  And straitly fence and strictly keep
+    The Ark's integrity
+  Till Armageddon break our sleep ...
+    And, _Hey then up go we!_
+
+
+THE ARMY OF A DREAM
+
+PART I
+
+I sat down in the club smoking-room to fill a pipe.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It was entirely natural that I should be talking to "Boy" Bayley. We had
+met first, twenty odd years ago, at the Indian mess of the Tyneside
+Tail-twisters. Our last meeting, I remembered, had been at the Mount
+Nelson Hotel, which was by no means India, and there we had talked half
+the night. Boy Bayley had gone up that week to the front, where I think
+he stayed a long, long time.
+
+But now he had come back.
+
+"Are you still a Tynesider?" I asked.
+
+"I command the Imperial Guard Battalion of the old regiment, my son," he
+replied.
+
+"Guard which? They've been Fusiliers since Fontenoy. Don't pull my leg,
+Boy."
+
+"I said Guard, not Guard-s. The I. G. Battalion of the Tail-twisters.
+Does that make it any clearer?"
+
+"Not in the least."
+
+"Then come over to the mess and see for yourself. We aren't a step from
+barracks. Keep on my right side. I'm--I'm a bit deaf on the near."
+
+We left the club together and crossed the street to a vast four-storied
+pile, which more resembled a Rowton lodging-house than a barrack. I could
+see no sentry at the gates.
+
+"There ain't any," said the Boy lightly. He led me into a many-tabled
+restaurant full of civilians and grey-green uniforms. At one end of the
+room, on a slightly raised dais, stood a big table.
+
+"Here we are! We usually lunch here and dine in mess by ourselves. These
+are our chaps--but what am I thinking of? You must know most of 'em.
+Devine's my second in command now. There's old Luttrell--remember him at
+Cherat?--Burgard, Verschoyle (you were at school with him), Harrison,
+Pigeon, and Kyd."
+
+With the exception of this last I knew them all, but I could not remember
+that they had all been Tynesiders.
+
+"I've never seen this sort of place," I said, looking round. "Half the
+men here are in plain clothes, and what are those women and children
+doing?"
+
+"Eating, I hope," Boy Bayley answered. "Our canteens would never pay if
+it wasn't for the Line and Militia trade. When they were first started
+people looked on 'em rather as catsmeat-shops; but we got a duchess or
+two to lunch in 'em, and they've been grossly fashionable since."
+
+"So I see," I answered. A woman of the type that shops at the Stores came
+up the room looking about her. A man in the dull-grey uniform of the
+corps rose up to meet her, piloted her to a place between three other
+uniforms, and there began a very merry little meal.
+
+"I give it up," I said. "This is guilty splendour that I don't
+understand."
+
+"Quite simple," said Burgard across the table. "The barrack supplies
+breakfast, dinner, and tea on the Army scale to the Imperial Guard (which
+we call I. G.) when it's in barracks as well as to the Line and Militia.
+They can all invite their friends if they choose to pay for them. That's
+where we make our profits. Look!"
+
+Near one of the doors were four or five tables crowded with workmen in
+the raiment of their callings. They ate steadily, but found time to jest
+with the uniforms about them; and when one o'clock clanged from a big
+half-built block of flats across the street, filed out.
+
+"Those," Devine explained, "are either our Line or Militiamen, as such
+entitled to the regulation whack at regulation cost. It's cheaper than
+they could buy it; an' they meet their friends too. A man'll walk a mile
+in his dinner hour to mess with his own lot."
+
+"Wait a minute," I pleaded. "Will you tell me what those plumbers and
+plasterers and bricklayers that I saw go out just now have to do with
+what I was taught to call the Line?"
+
+"Tell him," said the Boy over his shoulder to Burgard. He was busy
+talking with the large Verschoyle, my old schoolmate.
+
+"The Line comes next to the Guard. The Linesman's generally a town-bird
+who can't afford to be a Volunteer. He has to go into camp in an Area for
+two months his first year, six weeks his second, and a month the third.
+He gets about five bob a week the year round for that and for being on
+duty two days of the week, and for being liable to be ordered out to help
+the Guard in a row. He needn't live in barracks unless he wants to, and
+he and his family can feed at the regimental canteen at usual rates. The
+women like it."
+
+"All this," I said politely, but intensely, "is the raving of delirium.
+Where may your precious recruit who needn't live in barracks learn his
+drill?"
+
+"At his precious school, my child, like the rest of us. The notion of
+allowing a human being to reach his twentieth year before asking him to
+put his feet in the first position _was_ raving lunacy if you like!" Boy
+Bayley dived back into the conversation.
+
+"Very good," I said meekly. "I accept the virtuous plumber who puts in
+two months of his valuable time at Aldershot----"
+
+"Aldershot!" The table exploded. I felt a little annoyed.
+
+"A camp in an Area is not exactly Aldershot," said Burgard. "The Line
+isn't exactly what you fancy. Some of them even come to _us_!"
+
+"You recruit from 'em?"
+
+"I beg your pardon," said Devine with mock solemnity. "The Guard doesn't
+recruit. It selects."
+
+"It would," I said, "with a Spiers and Pond restaurant; pretty girls to
+play with; and----"
+
+"A room apiece, four bob a day and all found," said Verschoyle. "Don't
+forget that."
+
+"Of course!" I said. "It probably beats off recruits with a club."
+
+"No, with the ballot-box," said Verschoyle, laughing. "At least in all
+R.C. companies."
+
+"I didn't know Roman Catholics were so particular," I ventured.
+
+They grinned. "R.C. companies," said the Boy, "mean Right of Choice. When
+a company has been very good and pious for a long time it may, if the
+C.O. thinks fit, choose its own men--all same one-piecee club. All our
+companies are R.C.'s, and as the battalion is making up a few vacancies
+ere starting once more on the wild and trackless 'heef' into the Areas,
+the Linesman is here in force to-day sucking up to our non-coms."
+
+"Would some one mind explaining to me the meaning of every other word
+you've used," I said. "What's a trackless 'heef'? What's an Area? What's
+everything generally?" I asked.
+
+"Oh, 'heefs' part of the British Constitution," said the Boy. "It began
+long ago when they'd first mapped out the big military manoeuvring
+grounds--we call 'em Areas for short--where the I. G. spend two-thirds of
+their time and the other regiments get their training. It was slang
+originally for beef on the hoof, because in the Military Areas two-thirds
+of your meat-rations at least are handed over to you on the hoof, and you
+make your own arrangements. The word 'heef' became a parable for camping
+in the Military Areas and all its miseries. There are two Areas in
+Ireland, one in Wales for hill-work, a couple in Scotland, and a sort of
+parade-ground in the Lake District; but the real working Areas are in
+India, Africa, and Australia, and so on."
+
+"And what do you do there?"
+
+"We 'heef' under service conditions, which are rather like hard work. We
+'heef' in an English Area for about a year, coming into barracks for one
+month to make up wastage. Then we may 'heef' foreign for another year or
+eighteen months. Then we do sea-time in the war boats----"
+
+"_What-t?_" I said.
+
+"Sea-time," Bayley repeated. "Just like Marines,
+to learn about the big guns and how to embark and disembark quick. Then
+we come back to our territorial headquarters for six months, to educate
+the Line and Volunteer camps, to go to Hythe, to keep abreast of any new
+ideas, and then we fill up vacancies. We call those six months 'Schools,'
+Then we begin all over again, thus: Home 'heef,' foreign 'heef,'
+sea-time, schools. 'Heefing' isn't precisely luxurious, but it's on
+'heef' that we make our head-money."
+
+"Or lose it," said the sallow Pigeon, and all laughed, as men will, at
+regimental jokes.
+
+"The Dove never lets me forget that," said Boy Bayley. "It happened last
+March. We were out in the Second Northern Area at the top end of Scotland
+where a lot of those silly deer forests used to be. I'd sooner 'heef' in
+the middle of Australia myself--or Athabasca, with all respect to the
+Dove--he's a native of those parts. We were camped somewhere near
+Caithness, and the Armity (that's the combined Navy and Army board that
+runs our show) sent us about eight hundred raw remounts to break in to
+keep us warm."
+
+"Why horses for a foot regiment?"
+
+"I.G.'s don't foot it unless they're obliged to. No have gee-gee how can
+move? I'll show you later. Well, as I was saying, we broke those beasts
+in on compressed forage and small box-spurs, and then we started across
+Scotland to Applecross to hand 'em over to a horse-depot there. It was
+snowing cruel, and we didn't know the country overmuch. You remember the
+30th--the old East Lancashire--at Mian Mir?
+
+"Their Guard Battalion had been 'heefing' round those parts for six
+months. We thought they'd be snowed up all quiet and comfy, but Burden,
+their C. O., got wind of our coming, and sent spies in to Eschol."
+
+"Confound him," said Luttrell, who was fat and well-liking. "I
+entertained one of 'em--in a red worsted comforter--under Bean Derig. He
+said he was a crofter. 'Gave him a drink too."
+
+"I don't mind admitting," said the Boy, "that, what with the cold and the
+remounts, we were moving rather base over apex. Burden bottled us under
+Sghurr Mohr in a snowstorm. He stampeded half the horses, cut off a lot
+of us in a snow-bank, and generally rubbed our noses in the dirt."
+
+"Was he allowed to do that?" I said.
+
+"There is no peace in a Military Area. If we'd
+beaten him off or got away without losing anyone, we'd have been entitled
+to a day's pay from every man engaged against us. But we didn't. He cut
+off fifty of ours, held 'em as prisoners for the regulation three days,
+and then sent in his bill--three days' pay for each man taken. Fifty men
+at twelve bob a head, plus five pounds for the Dove as a captured
+officer, and Kyd here, his junior, three, made about forty quid to Burden
+& Co. They crowed over us horrid."
+
+"Couldn't you have appealed to an umpire or--or something?"
+
+"We could, but we talked it over with the men and decided to pay and look
+happy. We were fairly had. The 30th knew every foot of Sghurr Mohr. I
+spent three days huntin' 'em in the snow, but they went off on our
+remounts about twenty mile that night."
+
+"Do you always do this sham-fight business?" I asked.
+
+"Once inside an Area you must look after yourself; but I tell you that a
+fight which means that every man-Jack of us may lose a week's pay isn't
+so damn-sham after all. It keeps the men nippy. Still, in the long run,
+it's like whist on a P. & O. It comes out fairly level if you play long
+enough. Now and again, though, one gets a present--say, when a Line
+regiment's out on the 'heef,' and signifies that it's ready to abide by
+the rules of the game. You mustn't take head-money from a Line regiment
+in an Area unless it says that it'll play you; but, after a week or two,
+those clever Linesmen always think they see a chance of making a pot, and
+send in their compliments to the nearest I.G. Then the fun begins. We
+caught a Line regiment single-handed about two years ago in
+Ireland--caught it on the hop between a bog and a beach. It had just
+moved in to join its brigade, and we made a forty-two mile march in
+fourteen hours, and cut it off, lock, stock, and barrel. It went to
+ground like a badger--I _will_ say those Line regiments can dig--but we
+got out privily by night and broke up the only road it could expect to
+get its baggage and company-guns along. Then we blew up a bridge that
+some Sappers had made for experimental purposes (_they_ were rather
+stuffy about it) on its line of retreat, while we lay up in the mountains
+and signalled for the A.C. of those parts."
+
+"Who's an A.C.?" I asked.
+
+"The Adjustment Committee--the umpires of the Military Areas. They're a
+set of superannuated old aunts of colonels kept for the purpose, but they
+occasionally combine to do justice. Our A.C. came, saw our dispositions,
+and said it was a sanguinary massacre for the Line, and that we were
+entitled to our full pound of flesh--head-money for one whole regiment,
+with equipment, four company-guns, and all kit! At Line rates this worked
+out as one fat cheque for two hundred and fifty. Not bad!"
+
+"But we had to pay the Sappers seventy-four quid for blowing their patent
+bridge to pieces," Devine interpolated. "That was a swindle."
+
+"That's true," the Boy went on, "but the Adjustment Committee gave our
+helpless victims a talking to that was worth another hundred to hear."
+
+"But isn't there a lot of unfairness in this head-money system?" I asked.
+
+"Can't have everything perfect," said the Boy. "Head-money is an attempt
+at payment by results, and it gives the men a direct interest in their
+job. Three times out of five, of course, the A. C. will disallow both
+sides' claim, but there's always the chance of bringing off a coup."
+
+"Do all regiments do it?"
+
+"Heavily. The Line pays a bob per prisoner and the Militia ninepence, not
+to mention side-bets which are what really keep the men keen. It isn't
+supposed to be done by the Volunteers, but they gamble worse than anyone.
+Why, the very kids do it when they go to First Camp at Aldershot or
+Salisbury."
+
+"Head-money's a national institution--like betting," said Burgard.
+
+"I should say it was," said Pigeon suddenly. "I was roped in the other
+day as an Adjustment Committee by the Kemptown Board School. I was riding
+under the Brighton racecourse, and I heard the whistle goin' for
+umpire--the regulation, two longs and two shorts. I didn't take any
+notice till an infant about a yard high jumped up from a furze-patch and
+shouted: 'Guard! Guard! Come 'ere! I want you _per_fessionally. Alf says
+'e ain't outflanked. Ain't 'e a liar? Come an' look 'ow I've posted my
+men.' You bet I looked. The young demon trotted by my stirrup and showed
+me his whole army (twenty of 'em) laid out under cover as nicely as you
+please round a cowhouse in a hollow. He kept on shouting: 'I've drew Alf
+into there. 'Is persition ain't tenable. Say it ain't tenable, Guard!' I
+rode round the position, and Alf with his army came out of his cowhouse
+an' sat on the roof and protested like a--like a Militia Colonel; but the
+facts were in favour of my friend and I umpired according. Well, Alf
+abode by my decision. I explained it to him at length, and he solemnly
+paid up his head-money--farthing points if you please."
+
+"Did they pay you umpire's fee?" said Kyd. "I
+umpired a whole afternoon once for a village school at home, and they
+stood me a bottle of hot ginger beer."
+
+"I compromised on a halfpenny--a sticky one--or I'd have hurt their
+feelings," said Pigeon gravely. "But I gave 'em sixpence back."
+
+"How were they manoeuvring and what with?" I asked.
+
+"Oh, by whistle and hand-signal. They had the dummy Board School guns and
+flags for positions, but they were rushing their attack much too quick
+for that open country. I told 'em so, and they admitted it."
+
+"But who taught 'em?" I said.
+
+"They had learned in their schools, of course, like the rest of us. They
+were all of 'em over ten; and squad-drill begins when they're eight. They
+knew their company-drill a heap better than they knew their King's
+English."
+
+"How much drill do the boys put in?" I asked.
+
+"All boys begin physical drill to music in the Board Schools when they're
+six; squad-drill, one hour a week, when they're eight; company-drill when
+they're ten, for an hour and a half a week. Between ten and twelve they
+get battalion drill of a sort. They take the rifle at twelve and record
+their first target-score at thirteen. That's what the Code lays down. But
+it's worked very loosely so long as a boy comes up to the standard of his
+age."
+
+"In Canada we don't need your physical drill. We're born fit," said
+Pigeon, "and our ten-year-olds could knock spots out of your
+twelve-year-olds."
+
+"I may as well explain," said the Boy, "that the Dove is our 'swop'
+officer. He's an untamed Huskie from Nootka Sound when he's at home. An
+I. G. Corps exchanges one officer every two years with a Canadian or
+Australian or African Guard Corps. We've had a year of our Dove, an' we
+shall be sorry to lose him. He humbles our insular pride. Meantime,
+Morten, our 'swop' in Canada, keeps the ferocious Canuck humble. When
+Pij. goes we shall swop Kyd, who's next on the roster, for a Cornstalk or
+a Maori. But about the education-drill. A boy can't attend First Camp, as
+we call it, till he is a trained boy and holds his First Musketry
+certificate. The Education Code says he must be fourteen, and the boys
+usually go to First Camp at about that age. Of course, they've been to
+their little private camps and Boys' Fresh Air Camps and public school
+picnics while they were at school, but First Camp is where the young
+drafts all meet--generally at Aldershot in this part of the world. First
+Camp lasts a week or ten days, and the boys are looked over for
+vaccination and worked lightly in brigades with lots of blank cartridge.
+Second Camp--that's for the fifteen to eighteen-year-olds--lasts ten days
+or a fortnight, and that includes a final medical examination. Men don't
+like to be chucked out on medical certificates much--nowadays. I assure
+you Second Camp, at Salisbury, say, is an experience for a young I.G.
+officer. We're told off to 'em in rotation. A wilderness of monkeys isn't
+in it. The kids are apt to think 'emselves soldiers, and we have to take
+the edge off 'em with lots of picquet-work and night attacks."
+
+"And what happens after Second Camp?"
+
+"It's hard to explain. Our system is so illogical. Theoretically, the
+boys needn't show up for the next three or four years after Second Camp.
+They are supposed to be making their way in life. Actually, the young
+doctor or lawyer or engineer joins a Volunteer battalion that sticks to
+the minimum of camp--ten days per annum. That gives him a holiday in the
+open air, and now that men have taken to endowing their Volunteer
+drill-halls with baths and libraries, he finds, if he can't run to a
+club, that his own drill-hall is an efficient substitute. He meets men
+there who'll be useful to him later, and he keeps himself in touch with
+what's going on while he's studying for his profession. The
+town-birds--such as the chemist's assistant, clerk, plumber, mechanic,
+electrician, and so forth--generally put in for their town Volunteer
+corps as soon as they begin to walk out with the girls. They like takin'
+their true-loves to our restaurants. Look yonder!" I followed his gaze,
+and saw across the room a man and a maid at a far table, forgetting in
+each other's eyes the good food on their plates.
+
+"So it is," said I. "Go ahead."
+
+"Then, too, we have some town Volunteer corps that lay themselves out to
+attract promising youths of nineteen or twenty, and make much of 'em on
+condition that they join their Line battalion and play for their county.
+Under the new county qualifications--birth or three years' residence--that
+means a great deal in League matches, and the same in County cricket."
+
+"By Jove, that's a good notion," I cried. "Who invented it?"
+
+"C. B. Fry--long ago. He said in his paper, that County cricket and
+County volunteering ought to be on the same footing--unpaid and genuine.
+'No cricketer no corps. No corps no cricketer' was his watchword. There
+was a row among the pro's at first, but C. B. won, and later the League
+had to come in. They said at first it would ruin the gate; but when
+County matches began to be _pukka_ county, _plus_ inter-regimental,
+affairs the gate trebled, and as two-thirds of the gate goes to the
+regiments supplying the teams some Volunteer corps fairly wallow in cash.
+It's all unofficial, of course, but League Corps, as they call 'em, can
+take their pick of the Second Camper. Some corps ask ten guineas
+entrance-fee, and get it too, from the young bloods that want to shine in
+the arena. I told you we catered for all tastes. Now, as regards the Line
+proper, I believe the young artisan and mechanic puts in for that before
+he marries. He likes the two-months' 'heef' in his first year, and five
+bob a week is something to go on with between times."
+
+"Do they follow their trade while they're in the Line?" I demanded.
+
+"Why not? How many well-paid artisans work more than four days a week
+anyhow? Remember a Linesman hasn't to be drilled in your sense of the
+word. He must have had at least eight years' grounding in that, as well
+as two or three years in his Volunteer battalion. He can sleep where he
+pleases. He can't leave town-limits without reporting himself, of course,
+but he can get leave if he wants it. He's on duty two days in the week as
+a rule, and he's liable to be invited out for garrison duty down the
+Mediterranean, but his benefit societies will insure him against that.
+I'll tell you about that later. If it's a hard winter and trade's slack,
+a lot of the bachelors are taken into the I. G. barracks (while the I. G.
+is out on the heef) for theoretical instruction. Oh, I assure you the
+Line hasn't half a bad time of it."
+
+"Amazing!" I murmured. "And what about the others?"
+
+"The Volunteers? Observe the beauty of our system. We're a free people.
+We get up and slay the man who says we aren't. But as a little detail we
+never mention, if we don't volunteer in some corps or another--as
+combatants if we're fit, as non-combatants, if we ain't--till we're
+thirty-five we don't vote, and we don't get poor-relief, and the women
+don't love us."
+
+"Oh, that's the compulsion of it?" said I.
+
+Bayley inclined his head gravely. "That, Sir, is the compulsion. We voted
+the legal part of it ourselves in a fit of panic, and we have not yet
+rescinded our resolution. The women attend to the unofficial penalties.
+But being free British citizens----"
+
+"_And_ snobs," put in Pigeon.
+"The point is well taken, Pij------we have supplied ourselves with every
+sort and shape and make of Volunteer corps that you can imagine, and we've
+mixed the whole show up with our Odd Fellows and our I.O.G.T.'s and our
+Buffaloes, and our Burkes and our Debretts, not to mention Leagues and
+Athletic Clubs, till you can't tell t'other from which. You remember the
+young pup who used to look on soldiering as a favour done to his
+ungrateful country--the gun-poking, ferret-pettin', landed gentleman's
+offspring--the suckin' Facey Romford? Well, he generally joins a Foreign
+Service Corps when he leaves college."
+
+"Can Volunteers go foreign, then?"
+
+"Can't they just, if their C.O. _or_ his wife has influence! The Armity
+will always send a well-connected F.S. corps out to help a guard battalion
+in a small campaign. Otherwise F.S. corps make their own arrangements
+about camps. You see, the Military Areas are always open. They can 'heef'
+there (and gamble on head-money) as long as their finances run to it; or
+they can apply to do sea-time in the ships. It's a cheap way for a young
+man to see the world, and if he's any good he can try to get into the
+Guard later."
+
+"The main point," said Pigeon, "is that F.S. corps are 'swagger'--the
+correct thing. It 'ud never do to be drawn for the Militia, don't you
+know," he drawled, trying to render the English voice.
+
+"That's what happens to a chap who doesn't volunteer," said Bayley. "Well,
+after the F.S. corps (we've about forty of 'em) come our territorial
+Volunteer battalions, and a man who can't suit himself somewhere among 'em
+must be a shade difficult. We've got those 'League' corps I was talking
+about; and those studious corps that just scrape through their ten days'
+camp; and we've crack corps of highly-paid mechanics who can afford a two
+months' 'heef' in an interesting Area every other year; and we've senior
+and junior scientific corps of earnest boilermakers and fitters and
+engineers who read papers on high explosives, and do their 'heefing' in a
+wet picket-boat--mine-droppin'--at the ports. Then we've heavy artillery--
+recruited from the big manufacturing towns and ship-building yards--and
+ferocious hard-ridin' Yeomanry (they _can_ ride--now), genteel, semi-
+genteel, and Hooligan corps, and so on and so forth till you come to the
+Home Defence Establishment--the young chaps knocked out under medical
+certificate at the Second Camp, but good enough to sit behind hedges or
+clean up camp, and the old was-birds who've served their time but don't
+care to drop out of the fun of the yearly camps and the halls. They call
+'emselves veterans and do fancy-shooting at Bisley, but, between you and
+me, they're mostly Fresh Air Benefit Clubs. They contribute to the
+Volunteer journals and tell the Guard that it's no good. But I like 'em. I
+shall be one of 'em some day--a copper-nosed was-bird! ... So you see
+we're mixed to a degree on the Volunteer side."
+
+"It sounds that way," I ventured.
+
+"You've overdone it, Bayley," said Devine. "You've missed our one strong
+point." He turned to me and continued: "It's embarkation. The Volunteers
+may be as mixed as the Colonel says, but they _are_ trained to go down to
+the sea in ships. You ought to see a big Bank-Holiday roll-out. We suspend
+most of the usual railway traffic and turn on the military time-table--say
+on Friday at midnight. By 4 A.M. the trains are running from every big
+centre in England to the nearest port at two-minute intervals. As a rule,
+the Armity meets us at the other end with shipping of sorts--fleet
+reserves or regular men of war or hulks--anything you can stick a
+gang-plank to. We pile the men on to the troop-decks, stack the rifles in
+the racks, send down the sea-kit, steam about for a few hours, and land
+'em somewhere. It's a good notion, because our army to be any use _must_
+be an army of embarkation. Why, last Whit Monday we had--how many were
+down at the dock-edge in the first eight hours? Kyd, you're the Volunteer
+enthusiast last from school."
+
+"In the first ten hours over a hundred and eighteen thousand," said Kyd
+across the table, "with thirty-six thousand actually put in and taken out
+of ship. In the whole thirty-six hours we had close on ninety thousand men
+on the water and a hundred and thirty-three thousand on the quays fallen
+in with their sea-kit."
+
+"That must have been a sight," I said.
+
+"One didn't notice it much. It was scattered between Chatham, Dover,
+Portsmouth, Plymouth, Bristol, Liverpool, and so on, merely to give the
+inland men a chance to get rid of their breakfasts. We don't like to
+concentrate and try a big embarkation at any one point. It makes the
+Continent jumpy. Otherwise," said Kyd, "I believe we could get two hundred
+thousand men, with their kits, away on one tide."
+
+"What d'you want with so many?" I asked.
+
+"_We_ don't want one of 'em; but the Continent used to point out, every
+time relations were strained, that nothing would be easier than to raid
+England if they got command of the sea for a week. After a few years some
+genius discovered that it cut both ways, an' there was no reason why we,
+who are supposed to command the sea and own a few ships, should not
+organise our little raids in case of need. The notion caught on among the
+Volunteers--they were getting rather sick of manoeuvres on dry land--and
+since then we haven't heard so much about raids from the Continent," said
+Bayley.
+
+"It's the offensive-defensive," said Verschoyle, "that they talk so much
+about. We learned it _all_ from the Continent--bless 'em! They insisted on
+it so."
+
+"No, we learned it from the Fleet," said Devine. "The Mediterranean Fleet
+landed ten thousand marines and sailors, with guns, in twenty minutes once
+at manoeuvres. That was long ago. I've seen the Fleet Reserve and a few
+paddle-steamers, hired for the day, land twenty-five thousand Volunteers
+at Bantry in four hours--half the men sea-sick too. You've no notion what
+a difference that sort of manoeuvre makes in the calculations of our
+friends on the mainland. The Continent knows what invasion means. It's
+like dealing with a man whose nerve has been shaken. It doesn't cost much
+after all, and it makes us better friends with the great European family.
+We're now as thick as thieves."
+
+"Where does the Imperial Guard come in in all this gorgeousness?" I asked.
+"You're unusual modest about yourselves."
+
+"As a matter of fact, we're supposed to go out and stay out. We're the
+permanently mobilised lot. I don't think there are more than eight I.G.
+battalions in England now. We're a hundred battalions all told. Mostly on
+the 'heef' in India, Africa and so forth."
+
+"A hundred thousand. Isn't that small allowance?" I suggested.
+
+"You think so? One hundred thousand _men_, without a single case of
+venereal, and an average sick list of two per cent, permanently on a war
+footing? Well, perhaps you're right, but it's a useful little force to
+begin with while the others are getting ready. There's the native Indian
+Army also, which isn't a broken reed, and, since 'no Volunteer no Vote' is
+the rule throughout the Empire, you will find a few men in Canada,
+Australia, and elsewhere, that are fairly hefty in their class."
+
+"But a hundred thousand isn't enough for garrison duty," I persisted.
+
+"A hundred thousand _sound_ men, not sick boys, go quite a way," said
+Pigeon.
+
+"We expect the Line to garrison the Mediterranean Ports and thereabouts,"
+said Bayley. "Don't sneer at the mechanic. He's deuced good stuff. He
+isn't rudely ordered out, because this ain't a military despotism, and we
+have to consider people's feelings. The Armity usually brackets three Line
+regiments together, and calls for men for six months or a year for Malta,
+Gib, or elsewhere, at a bob a day. Three battalions will give you nearly a
+whole battalion of bachelors between 'em. You fill up deficiencies with a
+call on the territorial Volunteer battalion, and away you go with what we
+call a Ports battalion. What's astonishing in that? Remember that in this
+country, where fifty per cent of the able-bodied males have got a pretty
+fair notion of soldiering, and, which is more, have all camped out in the
+open, you wake up the spirit of adventure in the young."
+
+"Not much adventure at Malta, Gib, or Cyprus," I retorted. "Don't they get
+sick of it?"
+
+"But you don't realise that we treat 'em rather differently from the
+soldier of the past. You ought to go and see a Ports battalion drawn from
+a manufacturing centre growin' vines in Cyprus in its shirt sleeves; and
+at Gib, and Malta, of course, the battalions are working with the Fleet
+half the time."
+
+"It seems to me," I said angrily, "you are knocking _esprit de corps_ on
+the head with all this Army-Navy jumble. It's as bad as----"
+
+"I know what you're going to say. As bad as what Kitchener used to do when
+he believed that a thousand details picked up on the veldt were as good as
+a column of two regiments. In the old days, when drill was a sort of holy
+sacred art learned in old age, you'd be quite right. But remember _our_
+chaps are broke to drill from childhood, and the theory we work on is that
+a thousand trained Englishmen ought to be about as good as another
+thousand trained Englishmen. We've enlarged our horizon, that's all. Some
+day the Army and the Navy will be interchangeable."
+
+"You've enlarged it enough to fall out of, I think. Now where in all this
+mess of compulsory Volunteers----?"
+
+"My dear boy, there's no compulsion. You've _got_ to be drilled when
+you're a child, same as you've got to learn to read, and if you don't
+pretend to serve in some corps or other till you're thirty-five or
+medically chucked you rank with lunatics, women, and minors. That's fair
+enough."
+
+"Compulsory conscripts," I continued. "Where, as I was going to say, does
+the Militia come in?"
+
+"As I have said--for the men who can't afford volunteering. The Militia is
+recruited by ballot--pretty comprehensively too. Volunteers are exempt,
+but most men not otherwise accounted for are bagged by the Militia. They
+have to put in a minimum three weeks' camp every other year, and they get
+fifteen bob a week and their keep when they're at it, and some sort of a
+yearly fee, I've forgotten how much. 'Tisn't a showy service, but it's
+very useful. It keeps the mass of the men between twenty-five, say, and
+thirty-five moderately fit, and gives the Armity an excuse for having more
+equipment ready--in case of emergencies."
+
+"I don't think you're quite fair on the Militia," drawled Verschoyle.
+"They're better than we give 'em credit for. Don't you remember the Middle
+Moor Collieries' strike?"
+
+"Tell me," I said quickly. Evidently the others knew.
+
+"We-ell, it was no end of a pitman's strike about eight years ago. There
+were twenty-five thousand men involved--Militia, of course. At the end of
+the first month--October--when things were looking rather blue, one of
+those clever Labour leaders got hold of the Militia Act and discovered
+that any Militia regiment could, by a two-thirds vote, go on 'heef' in a
+Military Area in addition to its usual biennial camp. Two-and-twenty
+battalions of Geordies solemnly applied, and they were turned loose into
+the Irish and Scotch Areas under an I.G. Brigadier who had private
+instructions to knock clinkers out of 'em. But the pitman is a strong and
+agile bird. He throve on snowdrifts and entrenching and draggin' guns
+through heather. _He_ was being fed and clothed for nothing, besides
+having a chance of making head-money, and his strike-pay was going clear
+to his wife and family. You see? Wily man. But wachtabittje! When that
+'heef' finished in December the strike was still on. _Then_ that same
+Labour leader found out, from the same Act, that if at any time more than
+thirty or forty men of a Militia regiment wished to volunteer to do
+sea-time and study big guns in the Fleet they were in no wise to be
+discouraged, but were to be taken on as opportunity offered and paid a bob
+a day. Accordingly, about January, Geordie began volunteering for sea-
+time--seven and eight hundred men out of each regiment. Anyhow, it made up
+seventeen thousand men! It was a splendid chance and the Armity jumped at
+it. The Home and Channel Fleets and the North Sea and Cruiser Squadrons
+were strengthened with lame ducks from the Fleet Reserve, and between 'em
+with a little stretching and pushing they accommodated all of that young
+division."
+
+"Yes, but you've forgotten how we lied to the Continent about it. All
+Europe wanted to know what the dooce we were at," said Boy Bayley, "and
+the wretched Cabinet had to stump the country in the depths of winter
+explaining our new system of poor-relief. I beg your pardon, Verschoyle."
+
+"The Armity improvised naval manoeuvres between Gib and Land's End, with
+frequent coalings and landings; ending in a cruise round England that
+fairly paralysed the pitmen. The first day out they wanted the fleet
+stopped while they went ashore and killed their Labour leader, but they
+couldn't be obliged. Then they wanted to mutiny over the coaling--it was
+too like their own job. Oh, they had a lordly timel They came back--the
+combined Fleets anchored off Hull--with a nautical hitch to their
+breeches. They'd had a free fight at Gib with the Ports battalion there;
+they cleared out the town of Lagos; and they'd fought a pitched battle
+with the dockyard-mateys at Devonport. So they'd done 'emselves well, but
+they didn't want any more military life for a bit."
+
+"And the strike?"
+
+"That ended, all right enough, when the strike-money came to an end. The
+pit-owners were furious. They said the Armity had wilfully prolonged the
+strike, and asked questions in the House. The Armity said that they had
+taken advantage of the crisis to put a six months' polish on fifteen
+thousand fine young men, and if the masters cared to come out on the same
+terms they'd be happy to do the same by them."
+
+"And then?"
+
+"Palaver done set," said Bayley. "Everybody laughed."
+
+"I don't quite understand about this sea-time business," I said. "Is the
+Fleet open to take any regiment aboard?"
+
+"Rather. The I.G. must, the Line can, the Militia may, and the Volunteers
+do put in sea-time. The Coast Volunteers began it, and the fashion is
+spreading inland. Under certain circumstances, as Verschoyle told you, a
+Volunteer or Militia regiment can vote whether it 'heefs' wet or dry. If
+it votes wet and has influence (like some F.S. corps), it can sneak into
+the Channel or the Home Fleet and do a cruise round England or to Madeira
+or the North Sea. The regiment, of course, is distributed among the ships,
+and the Fleet dry nurse 'em. It rather breaks up shore discipline, but it
+gives the inland men a bit of experience, and, of course, it gives us a
+fairish supply of men behind the gun, in event of any strain on the Fleet.
+Some coast corps make a specialty of it, and compete for embarking and
+disembarking records. I believe some of the Tyneside engineerin' corps put
+ten per cent of their men through the Fleet engine rooms. But there's no
+need to stay talking here all the afternoon. Come and see the I.G. in his
+lair--the miserable conscript driven up to the colours at the point of the
+bayonet."
+
+PART II
+
+The great hall was emptying apace as the clocks struck two, and we passed
+out through double doors into a huge reading and smoking room, blue with
+tobacco and buzzing with voices.
+
+"We're quieter as a rule," said the Boy. "But we're filling up vacancies
+to-day. Hence the anxious faces of the Line and Militia. Look!" There were
+four tables against the walls, and at each stood a crowd of uniforms. The
+centres of disturbance were noncommissioned officers who, seated, growled
+and wrote down names.
+
+"Come to my table," said Burgard. "Well, Purvis, have you ear-marked our
+little lot?"
+
+"I've been tellin' 'em for the last hour we've only twenty-three
+vacancies," was the sergeant's answer. "I've taken nearly fifty for
+Trials, and this is what's left." Burgard smiled.
+
+"I'm very sorry," he said to the crowd, "but C Company's full."
+
+"Excuse me, Sir," said a man, "but wouldn't sea-time count in my favour?
+I've put in three months with the Fleet. Small quick-firers, Sir? Company
+guns? Any sort of light machinery?"
+
+"Come away," said a voice behind. "They've chucked the best farrier
+between Hull and Dewsbury. Think they'll take _you_ an' your potty quick-
+firers?"
+
+The speaker turned on his heel and swore.
+
+"Oh, damn the Guard, by all means!" said Sergeant Purvis, collecting his
+papers. "D'you suppose it's any pleasure to _me_ to reject chaps of your
+build and make? Vote us a second Guard battalion and we'll accommodate
+you. Now, you can come into Schools and watch Trials if you like."
+
+Most of the men accepted his invitation, but a few walked away angrily. I
+followed from the smoking-room across a wide corridor into a riding-
+school, under whose roof the voices of the few hundred assembled wandered
+in lost echoes.
+
+"I'll leave you, if you don't mind," said Burgard. "Company officers
+aren't supposed to assist at these games. Here, Matthews!" He called to a
+private and put me in his charge.
+
+In the centre of the vast floor my astonished eyes beheld a group of
+stripped men; the pink of their bodies startling the tan.
+
+"These are our crowd," said Matthews. "They've been vetted, an' we're
+putting 'em through their paces."
+
+"They don't look a bit like raw material," I said.
+
+"No, we don't use either raw men or raw meat for that matter in the
+Guard," Matthews replied. "Life's too short."
+
+Purvis stepped forward and barked in the professional manner. It was
+physical drill of the most searching, checked only when he laid his hand
+over some man's heart.
+
+Six or seven, I noticed, were sent back at this stage of the game. Then a
+cry went up from a group of privates standing near the line of contorted
+figures. "White, Purvis, white! Number Nine is spitting white!"
+
+"I know it," said Purvis. "Don't you worry."
+
+"Unfair!" murmured the man who understood quick-firers. "If I couldn't
+shape better than that I'd hire myself out to wheel a perambulator. He's
+cooked."
+
+"Nah," said the intent Matthews. "He'll answer to a month's training like
+a horse. It's only suet. _You've_ been training for this, haven't you?"
+
+"Look at me," said the man simply.
+
+"Yes. You're overtrained," was Matthews' comment. "The Guard isn't a
+circus."
+
+"Guns!" roared Purvis, as the men broke off and panted. "Number off from
+the right. Fourteen is one, three is two, eleven's three, twenty and
+thirty-nine are four and five, and five is six." He was giving them their
+numbers at the guns as they struggled into their uniforms. In like manner
+he told off three other guncrews, and the remainder left at the double, to
+return through the further doors with four light quick-firers jerking at
+the end of man-ropes.
+
+"Knock down and assemble against time!" Purvis called.
+
+The audience closed in a little as the crews flung themselves on the guns,
+which melted, wheel by wheel, beneath their touch.
+
+"I've never seen anything like this," I whispered.
+
+"Huh!" said Matthews scornfully. "They're always doin' it in the Line and
+Militia drill-halls. It's only circus-work."
+
+The guns were assembled again and some one called the time. Then followed
+ten minutes of the quickest firing and feeding with dummy cartridges that
+was ever given man to behold.
+
+"They look as if they might amount to something--this draft," said
+Matthews softly.
+
+"What might you teach 'em after this, then?" I asked.
+
+"To be Guard," said Matthews.
+
+"Spurs," cried Purvis, as the guns disappeared through the doors into the
+stables. Each man plucked at his sleeve, and drew up first one heel and
+then the other.
+
+"What the deuce are they doing?" I asked.
+
+"This," said Matthews. He put his hand to a ticket-pocket inside his
+regulation cuff, showed me two very small black box-spurs: drawing up a
+gaitered foot, he snapped them into the box in the heel, and when I had
+inspected snapped them out again.
+
+"That's all the spur you really need," he said.
+
+Then horses were trotted out into the school barebacked, and the neophytes
+were told to ride.
+
+Evidently the beasts knew the game and enjoyed it, for they would not make
+it easy for the men.
+
+A heap of saddlery was thrown in a corner, and from this each man, as he
+captured his mount, made shift to draw proper equipment, while the
+audience laughed, derided, or called the horses towards them.
+
+It was, most literally, wild horseplay, and by the time it was finished
+the recruits and the company were weak with fatigue and laughter.
+
+"That'll do," said Purvis, while the men rocked in their saddles. "I don't
+see any particular odds between any of you. C Company! Does anybody here
+know anything against any of these men?"
+
+"That's a bit of the Regulations," Matthews whispered. "Just like
+forbiddin' the banns in church. Really, it was all settled long ago when
+the names first came up."
+
+There was no answer.
+
+"You'll take 'em as they stand?"
+
+There was a grunt of assent.
+
+"Very good. There's forty men for twenty-three billets." He turned to the
+sweating horsemen. "I must put you into the Hat."
+
+With great ceremony and a shower of company jokes that I did not follow,
+an enormous Ally Sloper top-hat was produced, into which numbers and
+blanks were dropped, and the whole was handed round to the riders by a
+private, evidently the joker of C Company.
+
+Matthews gave me to understand that each company owned a cherished
+receptacle (sometimes not a respectable one) for the papers of the final
+drawing. He was telling me how his company had once stolen the Sacred
+Article used by D Company for this purpose and of the riot that followed,
+when through the west door of the schools entered a fresh detachment of
+stripped men, and the arena was flooded with another company.
+
+Said Matthews as we withdrew, "Each company does Trials their own way. B
+Company is all for teaching men how to cook and camp. D Company keeps 'em
+to horse-work mostly. We call D the circus-riders and B the cooks. They
+call us the Gunners."
+
+"An' you've rejected _me_," said the man who had done sea-time, pushing
+out before us. "The Army's goin' to the dogs."
+
+I stood in the corridor looking for Burgard.
+
+"Come up to my room and have a smoke," said Matthews, private of the
+Imperial Guard.
+
+We climbed two flights of stone stairs ere we reached an immense landing
+flanked with numbered doors.
+
+Matthews pressed a spring-latch and led me into a little cabin-like room.
+The cot was a standing bunk, with drawers beneath. On the bed lay a
+brilliant blanket; by the bed head was an electric light and a shelf of
+books: a writing table stood in the window, and I dropped into a low
+wicker chair.
+
+"This is a cut above subaltern's quarters," I said, surveying the photos,
+the dhurri on the floor, the rifle in its rack, the field-kit hung up
+behind the door, and the knicknacks on the walls.
+
+"The Line bachelors use 'em while we're away; but they're nice to come
+back to after 'heef.'" Matthews passed me his cigarette-case.
+
+"Where have you 'heefed'?" I said.
+
+"In Scotland, Central Australia, and North-Eastern Rhodesia and the North-
+West Indian front."
+
+"What's your service?"
+
+"Four years. I'll have to go in a year. I got in when I was twenty-two--by
+a fluke--from the Militia direct--on Trials."
+
+"Trials like those we just saw?"
+
+"Not so severe. There was less competition then. I hoped to get my
+stripes, but there's no chance."
+
+"Why?"
+
+"I haven't the knack of handling men. Purvis let me have a half-company
+for a month in Rhodesia--over towards Lake N'Garni. I couldn't work 'em
+properly. It's a gift."
+
+"Do colour-sergeants handle half-companies with you?"
+
+"They can command 'em on the 'heef.' We've only four company officers--
+Burgard, Luttrell, Kyd, and Harrison. Pigeon's our swop, and he's in
+charge of the ponies. Burgard got his company on the 'heef,' You see
+Burgard had been a lieutenant in the Line, but he came into the Guards on
+Trials like the men. _He_ could command. They tried him in India with a
+wing of the battalion for three months. He did well so he got his company.
+That's what made me hopeful. But it's a gift, you see--managing men--and
+so I'm only a senior private. They let ten per cent of us stay on for two
+years extra after our three are finished--to polish the others."
+
+"Aren't you even a corporal?"
+
+"We haven't corporals, or lances for that matter, in the Guard. As a
+senior private I'd take twenty men into action; but one Guard don't tell
+another how to clean himself. You've learned that before you apply. ...
+Come in!"
+
+There was a knock at the door, and Burgard entered, removing his cap.
+
+"I thought you'd be here," he said, as Matthews vacated the other chair
+and sat on the bed. "Well, has Matthews told you all about it? How did our
+Trials go, Matthews?"
+
+"Forty names in the Hat, Sir, at the finish. They'll make a fairish lot.
+Their gun-tricks weren't bad; but D company has taken the best horsemen--
+as usual."
+
+"Oh, I'll attend to that on 'heef.' Give me a man who can handle company-
+guns and I'll engage to make him a horse-master. D company will end by
+thinkin' 'emselves Captain Pigeon's private cavalry some day."
+
+I had never heard a private and a captain talking after this fashion, and
+my face must have betrayed my astonishment, for Burgard said:
+
+"These are not our parade manners. In our rooms, as we say in the Guard,
+all men are men. Outside we are officers and men."
+
+"I begin to see," I stammered. "Matthews was telling me that sergeants
+handled half-companies and rose from the ranks--and I don't see that there
+are any lieutenants--and your companies appear to be two hundred and fifty
+strong. It's a shade confusing to the layman."
+
+Burgard leaned forward didactically. "The Regulations lay down that every
+man's capacity for command must be tested to the uttermost. We construe
+that very literally when we're on the 'heef.' F'r instance, any man can
+apply to take the command next above him, and if a man's too shy to ask,
+his company officer must see that he gets his chance. A sergeant is given
+a wing of the battalion to play with for three weeks--a month, or six
+weeks--according to his capacity, and turned adrift in an Area to make his
+own arrangements. That's what Areas are for--and to experiment in. A good
+gunner--a private very often--has all four company-guns to handle through
+a week's fight, acting for the time as the major. Majors of Guard
+battalions (Verschoyle's our major) are supposed to be responsible for the
+guns, by the way. There's nothing to prevent any man who has the gift
+working his way up to the experimental command of the battalion on 'heef.'
+Purvis, my colour-sergeant, commanded the battalion for three months at
+the back of Coolgardie, an' very well he did it. Bayley 'verted to company
+officer for the time being an' took Harrison's company, and Harrison came
+over to me as my colour-sergeant. D'you see? Well, Purvis is down for a
+commission when there's a vacancy. He's been thoroughly tested, and we all
+like him. Two other sergeants have passed that three months' trial in the
+same way (just as second mates go up for extra master's certificate). They
+have E.C. after their names in the Army List. That shows they're capable
+of taking command in event of war. The result of our system is that you
+could knock out every single officer of a Guard battalion early in the
+day, and the wheels 'ud still go forward, _not_ merely round. We're
+allowed to fill up half our commissioned list from the ranks direct. _Now_
+d'you see why there's such a rush to get into a Guard battalion?"
+
+"Indeed I do. Have you commanded the regiment experimentally?"
+
+"Oh, time and again," Burgard laughed. "We've all had our E.C. turn."
+
+"Doesn't the chopping and changing upset the men?"
+
+"It takes something to upset the Guard. Besides, they're all in the game
+together. They give each other a fair show you may be sure."
+
+"That's true," said Matthews. "When I went to N'Gami with my--with the
+half-company," he sighed, "they helped me all they knew. But it's a gift--
+handling men. I found _that_ out,"
+
+"I know you did," said Burgard softly. "But you found it out in time,
+which is the great thing. You see," he turned to me, "with our limited
+strength we can't afford to have a single man who isn't more than up to
+any duty--in reason. Don't you be led away by what you saw at Trials just
+now. The Volunteers and the Militia have all the monkey-tricks of the
+trade--such as mounting and dismounting guns, and making fancy scores and
+doing record marches; but they need a lot of working up before they can
+pull their weight in the boat."
+
+There was a knock at the door. A note was handed in. Burgard read it and
+smiled.
+
+"Bayley wants to know if you'd care to come with us to the Park and see
+the kids. It's only a Saturday afternoon walk-round before the
+taxpayer.... Very good. If you'll press the button we'll try to do the
+rest."
+
+He led me by two flights of stairs up an iron stairway that gave on a
+platform, not unlike a ship's bridge, immediately above the barrelled
+glass roof of the riding-school. Through a ribbed ventilator I could see B
+Company far below watching some men who chased sheep. Burgard unlocked a
+glass-fronted fire-alarm arrangement flanked with dials and speaking-
+tubes, and bade me press the centre button.
+
+Next moment I should have fallen through the riding-school roof if he had
+not caught me; for the huge building below my feet thrilled to the
+multiplied purring of electric bells. The men in the school vanished like
+minnows before a shadow, and above the stamp of booted feet on staircases
+I heard the neighing of many horses.
+
+"What in the world have I done?" I gasped.
+
+"Turned out the Guard--horse, foot, and guns!"
+
+A telephone bell rang imperiously. Burgard snatched up the receiver:
+
+"Yes, Sir.... _What_, Sir?... I never heard they said that," he laughed,
+"but it would be just like 'em. In an hour and a half? Yes, Sir. Opposite
+the Statue? Yes, Sir."
+
+He turned to me with a wink as he hung up.
+
+"Bayley's playing up for you. Now you'll see some fun."
+
+"Who's going to catch it?" I demanded.
+
+"Only our local Foreign Service Corps. Its C.O. has been boasting that
+it's _en  état de partir_, and Bayley's going to take him at his word and
+have a kit-inspection this afternoon in the Park. I must tell their
+drill-hall. Look over yonder between that brewery chimney and the mansard
+roof!"
+
+He readdressed himself to the telephone, and I kept my eye on the building
+to the southward. A Blue Peter climbed up to the top of the flagstaff that
+crowned it and blew out in the summer breeze. A black storm-cone followed.
+
+"Inspection for F.S. corps acknowledged, Sir," said Burgard down the
+telephone. "Now we'd better go to the riding-school. The battalion falls
+in there. I have to change, but you're free of the corps. Go anywhere. Ask
+anything. In another ten minutes we're off."
+
+I lingered for a little looking over the great city, its huddle of houses
+and the great fringe of the Park, all framed between the open windows of
+this dial-dotted eyrie.
+
+When I descended the halls and corridors were as hushed as they had been
+noisy, and my feet echoed down the broad tiled staircases. On the third
+floor, Matthews, gaitered and armed, overtook me smiling.
+
+"I thought you might want a guide," said he. "We've five minutes yet," and
+piloted me to the sunsplashed gloom of the riding-school. Three companies
+were in close order on the tan. They moved out at a whistle, and as I
+followed in their rear I was overtaken by Pigeon on a rough black mare.
+
+"Wait a bit," he said, "till the horses are all out of stables, and come
+with us. D Company is the only one mounted just now. We do it to amuse the
+taxpayer," he explained, above the noise of horses on the tan.
+
+"Where are the guns?" I asked, as the mare lipped my coat-collar.
+
+"Gone ahead long ago. They come out of their own door at the back of
+barracks. We don't haul guns through traffic more than we can help.... If
+Belinda breathes down your neck smack her. She'll be quiet in the streets.
+She loves lookin' into the shop-windows."
+
+The mounted company clattered through vaulted concrete corridors in the
+wake of the main body, and filed out into the crowded streets.
+
+When I looked at the townsfolk on the pavement, or in the double-decked
+trams, I saw that the bulk of them saluted, not grudgingly or of
+necessity, but in a light-hearted, even flippant fashion.
+
+"Those are Line and Militia men," said Pigeon. "That old chap in the
+top-hat by the lamp-post is an ex-Guardee. That's why he's saluting in
+slow-time. No, there's no regulation governing these things, but we've all
+fallen into the way of it somehow. Steady, mare!"
+
+"I don't know whether I care about this aggressive militarism," I began,
+when the company halted, and Belinda almost knocked me down. Looking
+forward I saw the badged cuff of a policeman upraised at a crossing, his
+back towards us.
+
+"Horrid aggressive, ain't we?" said Pigeon with a chuckle when we moved on
+again and overtook the main body. Here I caught the strains of the band,
+which Pigeon told me did not accompany the battalion on 'heef,' but lived
+in barracks and made much money by playing at parties in town.
+
+"If we want anything more than drums and fifes on 'heef' we sing," said
+Pigeon. "Singin' helps the wind."
+
+I rejoiced to the marrow of my bones thus to be borne along on billows of
+surging music among magnificent men, in sunlight, through a crowded town
+whose people, I could feel, regarded us with comradeship, affection--and
+more.
+
+"By Jove," I said at last, watching the eyes about us, "these people are
+looking us over as if we were horses."
+
+"Why not? They know the game."
+
+The eyes on the pavement, in the trams, the cabs, at the upper windows,
+swept our lines back and forth with a weighed intensity of regard which at
+first seemed altogether new to me, till I recalled just such eyes, a
+thousand of them, at manoeuvres in the Channel when one crowded battleship
+drew past its sister at biscuit-toss range. Then I stared at the ground,
+overborne by those considering eyes.
+
+Suddenly the music changed to the wail of the Dead March in "Saul," and
+once more--we were crossing a large square--the regiment halted.
+
+"Damn!" said Pigeon, glancing behind him at the mounted company. "I
+believe they save up their Saturday corpses on purpose."
+
+"What is it?" I asked.
+
+"A dead Volunteer. We must play him through." Again I looked forward and
+saw the top of a hearse, followed by two mourning-coaches, boring directly
+up the halted regiment, which opened out company by company to let it
+through.
+
+"But they've got the whole blessed square to funeralise in!" I exclaimed.
+"Why don't they go round?"
+
+"Not so!" Pigeon replied. "In this city it's the Volunteer's perquisite to
+be played through by any corps he happens to meet on his way to the
+cemetery. And they make the most of it. You'll see."
+
+I heard the order, "Rest on your arms," run before the poor little
+procession as the men opened out. The driver pulled the black Flanders
+beasts into a more than funeral crawl, and in the first mourning-coach I
+saw the tearful face of a fat woman (his mother, doubtless), a
+handkerchief pressed to one eye, but the other rolling vigilantly, alight
+with proper pride. Last came a knot of uniformed men--privates, I took it
+--of the dead one's corps.
+
+Said a man in the crowd beside us to the girl on his arm, "There, Jenny!
+That's what I'll get if I 'ave the luck to meet 'em when my time comes."
+
+"You an' your luck," she snapped. "'Ow can you talk such silly nonsense?"
+
+"Played through by the Guard," he repeated slowly. "The undertaker 'oo
+could guarantee _that_, mark you, for all his customers--well, 'e'd
+monopolise the trade, is all I can say. See the horses passagin'
+sideways!"
+
+"She done it a purpose," said the woman with a sniff.
+
+"An' I only hope you'll follow her example. Just as long as you think I'll
+keep, too."
+
+We reclosed when the funeral had left us twenty paces behind. A small boy
+stuck his head out of a carriage and watched us jealously.
+
+"Amazing! Amazing!" I murmured. "Is it regulation?"
+
+"No. Town-custom. It varies a little in different cities, but the people
+value being played through more than most things, I imagine. Duddell, the
+big Ipswich manufacturer--he's a Quaker--tried to bring in a bill to
+suppress it as unchristian." Pigeon laughed.
+
+"And?"
+
+"It cost him his seat next election. You see, we're all in the game."
+
+We reached the Park without further adventure, and found the four company-
+guns with their spike teams and single drivers waiting for us. Many people
+were gathered here, and we were halted, so far as I could see, that they
+might talk with the men in the ranks. The officers broke into groups.
+
+"Why on earth didn't you come along with me?" said Boy Bayley at my side.
+"I was expecting you."
+
+"Well, I had a delicacy about brigading myself with a colonel at the head
+of his regiment, so I stayed with the rear company and the horses. It's
+all too wonderful for any words. What's going to happen next?"
+
+"I've handed over to Verschoyle, who will amuse and edify the school
+children while I take you round our kindergarten. Don't kill any one, Vee.
+Are you goin' to charge 'em?"
+
+Old Verschoyle hitched his big shoulder and nodded precisely as he used to
+do at school. He was a boy of few words grown into a kindly taciturn man.
+
+"Now!" Bayley slid his arm through mine and led me across a riding road
+towards a stretch of rough common (singularly out of place in a park)
+perhaps three-quarters of a mile long and half as wide. On the encircling
+rails leaned an almost unbroken line of men and women--the women
+outnumbering the men. I saw the Guard battalion move up the road flanking
+the common and disappear behind the trees.
+
+As far as the eye could range through the mellow English haze the ground
+inside the railings was dotted with boys in and out of uniform, armed and
+unarmed. I saw squads here, half-companies there; then three companies in
+an open space, wheeling with stately steps; a knot of drums and fifes near
+the railings unconcernedly slashing their way across popular airs; and a
+batch of gamins labouring through some extended attack destined to be
+swept aside by a corps crossing the ground at the double. They broke out
+of furze bushes, ducked over hollows and bunkers, held or fell away from
+hillocks and rough sandbanks till the eye wearied of their busy legs.
+
+Bayley took me through the railings, and gravely returned the salute of a
+freckled twelve-year-old near by.
+
+"What's your corps?" said the Colonel of that Imperial Guard battalion to
+that child.
+
+"Eighth District Board School, fourth standard, Sir. We aren't out
+to-day." Then, with a twinkle, "I go to First Camp next year."
+
+"What are those boys yonder--that squad at the double?"
+
+"Jewboys, Sir. Jewish Voluntary Schools, Sir."
+
+"And that full company extending behind the three elms to the south-west?"
+
+"Private day-schools, Sir, I think. Judging distance, Sir."
+
+"Can you come with us?"
+
+"Certainly, Sir."
+
+"Here's the raw material at the beginning of the process," said Bayley to
+me.
+
+We strolled on towards the strains of "A Bicycle Built for Two," breathed
+jerkily into a mouth-organ by a slim maid of fourteen. Some dozen infants
+with clenched fists and earnest legs were swinging through the extension
+movements which that tune calls for. A stunted hawthorn overhung the
+little group, and from a branch a dirty white handkerchief flapped in the
+breeze. The girl blushed, scowled, and wiped the mouth-organ on her sleeve
+as we came up.
+
+"We're all waiting for our big bruvvers," piped up one bold person in blue
+breeches--seven if he was a day.
+
+"It keeps 'em quieter, Sir," the maiden lisped. "The others are with the
+regiments."
+
+"Yeth, and they've all lots of blank for _you_," said the gentleman in
+blue breeches ferociously.
+
+"Oh, Artie! 'Ush!" the girl cried.
+
+"But why have they lots of blank for _us_?" Bayley asked. Blue Breeches
+stood firm.
+
+"'Cause--'cause the Guard's goin' to fight the Schools this afternoon; but
+my big bruvver says they'll be dam-well surprised."
+
+"_Artie!_" The girl leaped towards him. "You know your ma said I was to
+smack----"
+
+"Don't. Please don't," said Bayley, pink with suppressed mirth. "It was
+all my fault. I must tell old Verschoyle this. I've surprised his plan out
+of the mouths of babes and sucklings."
+
+"What plan?"
+
+"Old Vee has taken the battalion up to the top of the common, and he told
+me he meant to charge down through the kids, but they're on to him
+already. He'll be scuppered. The Guard will be scuppered!"
+
+Here Blue Breeches, overcome by the reproof of his fellows, began to weep.
+
+"I didn't tell," he roared. "My big bruvver _he_ knew when he saw them go
+up the road..."
+
+"Never mind! Never mind, old man," said Bayley soothingly. "I'm not
+fighting to-day. It's all right."
+
+He rightened it yet further with sixpence, and left that band loudly at
+feud over the spoil.
+
+"Oh, Vee! Vee the strategist," he chuckled. "We'll pull Vee's leg
+to-night."
+
+Our freckled friend of the barriers doubled up behind us.
+
+"So you know that my battalion is charging down the ground," Bayley
+demanded.
+
+"Not for certain, Sir, but we're preparin' for the worst," he answered
+with a cheerful grin. "They allow the Schools a little blank ammunition
+after we've passed the third standard; and we nearly always bring it on to
+the ground of Saturdays."
+
+"The deuce you do! Why?"
+
+"On account of these amateur Volunteer corps, Sir. They're always
+experimentin' upon us, Sir, comin' over from their ground an' developin'
+attacks on our flanks. Oh, it's chronic 'ere of a Saturday sometimes,
+unless you flag yourself."
+
+I followed his eye and saw white flags fluttering before a drum and fife
+band and a knot of youths in sweaters gathered round the dummy breech of a
+four-inch gun which they were feeding at express rates.
+
+"The attacks don't interfere with you if you flag yourself, Sir," the boy
+explained. "That's a Second Camp team from the Technical Schools loading
+against time for a bet."
+
+We picked our way deviously through the busy groups. Apparently it was not
+etiquette to notice a Guard officer, and the youths at the twenty-five
+pounder were far too busy to look up. I watched the cleanly finished hoist
+and shove-home of the full-weight shell from a safe distance, when I
+became aware of a change among the scattered boys on the common, who
+disappeared among the hillocks to an accompaniment of querulous whistles.
+A boy or two on bicycles dashed from corps to corps, and on their arrival
+each corps seemed to fade away.
+
+The youths at loading practice did not pause for the growing hush round
+them, nor did the drum and fife band drop a single note. Bayley exploded
+afresh. "The Schools are preparing for our attack, by Jove! I wonder who's
+directin' 'em. Do _you_ know?"
+
+The warrior of the Eighth District looked up shrewdly.
+
+"I saw Mr. Cameron speaking to Mr. Levitt just as the Guard went up the
+road. 'E's our 'ead-master, Mr. Cameron, but Mr. Levitt, of the Sixth
+District, is actin' as senior officer on the ground this Saturday. Most
+likely Mr. Levitt is commandin'."
+
+"How many corps are there here?" I asked.
+
+"Oh, bits of lots of 'em--thirty or forty, p'r'aps, Sir. But the whistles
+says they've all got to rally on the Board Schools. 'Ark! There's the
+whistle for the Private Schools! They've been called up the ground at the
+double."
+
+"Stop!" cried a bearded man with a watch, and the crews dropped beside the
+breech wiping their brows and panting.
+
+"Hullo! there's some attack on the Schools," said one. "Well, Marden, you
+owe me three half-crowns. I've beaten your record. Pay up."
+
+The boy beside us tapped his foot fretfully as he eyed his companions
+melting among the hillocks, but the gun-team adjusted their bets without
+once looking up.
+
+The ground rose a little to a furze-crowned ridge in the centre so that I
+could not see the full length of it, but I heard a faint bubble of blank
+in the distance.
+
+"The Saturday allowance," murmured Bayley. "War's begun, but it wouldn't
+be etiquette for us to interfere. What are you saying, my child?"
+
+"Nothin', Sir, only--only I don't think the Guard will be able to come
+through on so narrer a front, Sir. They'll all be jammed up be'ind the
+ridge if _we_'ve got there in time. It's awful sticky for guns at the end
+of our ground, Sir."
+
+"I'm inclined to think you're right, Moltke. The Guard is hung up:
+distinctly so. Old Vee will have to cut his way through. What a pernicious
+amount of blank the kids seem to have!"
+
+It was quite a respectable roar of battle that rolled among the hillocks
+for ten minutes, always out of our sight. Then we heard the "Cease Fire"
+over the ridge.
+
+"They've sent for the Umpires," the Board School boy squeaked, dancing on
+one foot. "You've been hung up, Sir. I--I thought the sand-pits 'ud stop
+you."
+
+Said one of the jerseyed hobbledehoys at the gun, slipping on his coat:
+"Well, that's enough for this afternoon. I'm off," and moved to the
+railings without even glancing towards the fray.
+
+"I anticipate the worst," said Bayley with gravity after a few minutes.
+"Hullo! Here comes my disgraced corps!"
+
+The Guard was pouring over the ridge--a disorderly mob--horse, foot, and
+guns mixed, while from every hollow of the ground about rose small boys
+cheering shrilly. The outcry was taken up by the parents at the railings,
+and spread to a complete circle of cheers, handclappings, and waved
+handkerchiefs.
+
+Our Eighth District private cast away restraint and openly capered. "We
+got 'em! We got 'em!" he squealed.
+
+The grey-green flood paused a fraction of a minute and drew itself into
+shape, coming to rest before Bayley. Verschoyle saluted.
+
+"Vee, Vee," said Bayley. "Give me back my legions. Well, I hope you're
+proud of yourself?"
+
+"The little beasts were ready for us. Deuced well posted too," Verschoyle
+replied. "I wish you'd seen that first attack on our flank. Rather
+impressive. Who warned 'em?"
+
+"I don't know. I got my information from a baby in blue plush breeches.
+Did they do well?"
+
+"Very decently indeed. I've complimented their C.O. and buttered the whole
+boiling." He lowered his voice. "As a matter o' fact, I halted five good
+minutes to give 'em time to get into position."
+
+"Well, now we can inspect our Foreign Service corps. We sha'n't need the
+men for an hour, Vee."
+
+"Very good, Sir. Colour-sergeants!" cried Verschoyle, raising his voice,
+and the cry ran from company to company. Whereupon the officers left their
+men, people began to climb over the railings, and the regiment dissolved
+among the spectators and the school corps of the city.
+
+"No sense keeping men standing when you don't need 'em," said Bayley.
+"Besides, the Schools learn more from our chaps in an afternoon than they
+can pick up in a month's drill. Look at those Board-schoolmaster captains
+buttonholing old Purvis on the art of war!"
+
+"Wonder what the evening papers'll say about this," said Pigeon.
+
+"You'll know in half an hour," Burgard laughed. "What possessed you to
+take your ponies across the sand-pits, Pij?"
+
+"Pride. Silly pride," said the Canadian.
+
+We crossed the common to a very regulation paradeground overlooked by a
+statue of our Queen. Here were carriages, many and elegant, filled with
+pretty women, and the railings were lined with frockcoats and top hats.
+"This is distinctly social," I suggested to Kyd.
+
+"Ra-ather. Our F.S. corps is nothing if not correct, but Bayley'll sweat
+'em all the same."
+
+I saw six companies drawn up for inspection behind lines of long sausage-
+shaped kit-bags. A band welcomed us with "A Life on the Ocean Wave."
+
+"What cheek!" muttered Verschoyle. "Give 'em beans, Bayley."
+
+"I intend to," said the Colonel, grimly. "Will each of you fellows take a
+company, please, and inspect 'em faithfully. '_En état de partir_' is
+their little boast, remember. When you've finished you can give 'em a
+little pillow-fighting."
+
+"What does the single cannon on those men's sleeves mean?" I asked.
+
+"That they're big gun-men, who've done time with the Fleet," Bayley
+returned. "Any F.S. corps that has over twenty per cent big-gun men thinks
+itself entitled to play 'A Life on the Ocean Wave'--when it's out of
+hearing of the Navy."
+
+"What beautiful stuff they are! What's their regimental average?"
+
+"It ought to be five eight, height, thirty-eight, chest, and twenty-four
+years, age. What is it?" Bayley asked of a Private.
+
+"Five nine and half, Sir, thirty-nine, twenty-four and a half," was the
+reply, and he added insolently, "_En état de partir_." Evidently that F.S.
+corps was on its mettle ready for the worst.
+
+"What about their musketry average?" I went on.
+
+"Not my pidgin," said Bayley. "But they wouldn't be in the corps a day if
+they couldn't shoot; I know _that_ much. Now I'm going to go through 'em
+for socks and slippers."
+
+The kit-inspection exceeded anything I had ever dreamed. I drifted from
+company to company while the Guard officers oppressed them. Twenty per
+cent, at least, of the kits were shovelled out on the grass and gone
+through in detail.
+
+"What have they got jumpers and ducks for?" I asked of Harrison.
+
+"For Fleet work, of course. _En état de partir_ with an F. S. corps means
+they are amphibious."
+
+"Who gives 'em their kit--Government?"
+
+"There is a Government allowance, but no C. O. sticks to it. It's the same
+as paint and gold-leaf in the Navy. It comes out of some one's pockets.
+How much does your kit cost you?"--this to the private in front of us.
+
+"About ten or fifteen quid every other year, I suppose," was the answer.
+
+"Very good. Pack your bag--quick."
+
+The man knelt, and with supremely deft hands returned all to the bag,
+lashed and tied it, and fell back.
+
+"Arms," said Harrison. "Strip and show ammunition."
+
+The man divested himself of his rolled greatcoat and haversack with one
+wriggle, as it seemed to me; a twist of a screw removed the side plate of
+the rifle breech (it was not a bolt action). He handed it to Harrison with
+one hand, and with the other loosed his clip-studded belt.
+
+"What baby cartridges!" I exclaimed. "No bigger than bulletted breech-
+caps."
+
+"They're the regulation .256," said Harrison. "No one has complained of
+'em yet. They expand a bit when they arrive.... Empty your bottle, please,
+and show your rations."
+
+The man poured out his water-bottle and showed the two-inch emergency tin.
+
+Harrison passed on to the next, but I was fascinated by the way in which
+the man re-established himself amid his straps and buckles, asking no help
+from either side.
+
+"How long does it take you to prepare for inspection?" I asked him.
+
+"Well, I got ready this afternoon in twelve minutes," he smiled. "I didn't
+see the storm-cone till half-past three. I was at the Club."
+
+"Weren't a good many of you out of town?"
+
+"Not _this_ Saturday. We knew what was coming. You see, if we pull through
+the inspection we may move up one place on the roster for foreign
+service.... You'd better stand back. We're going to pillow-fight."
+
+The companies stooped to the stuffed kit-bags, doubled with them
+variously, piled them in squares and mounds, passed them from shoulder to
+shoulder like buckets at a fire, and repeated the evolution.
+
+"What's the idea?" I asked of Verschoyle, who, arms folded behind him, was
+controlling the display. Many women had descended from the carriages, and
+were pressing in about us admiringly.
+
+"For one thing, it's a fair test of wind and muscle, and for another it
+saves time at the docks. We'll suppose this first company to be drawn up
+on the dock-head and those five others still in the troop-train. How would
+you get their kit into the ship?"
+
+"Fall 'em all in on the platform, march'em to the gangways," I answered,
+"and trust to Heaven and a fatigue party to gather the baggage and drunks
+in later."
+
+"Ye-es, and have half of it sent by the wrong trooper. I know _that_
+game," Verschoyle drawled. "We don't play it any more. Look!"
+
+He raised his voice, and five companies, glistening a little and breathing
+hard, formed at right angles to the sixth, each man embracing his sixty-
+pound bag.
+
+"Pack away," cried Verschoyle, and the great bean-bag game (I can compare
+it to nothing else) began. In five minutes every bag was passed along
+either arm of the T and forward down the sixth company, who passed,
+stacked, and piled them in a great heap. These were followed by the
+rifles, belts, greatcoats, and knapsacks, so that in another five minutes
+the regiment stood, as it were, stripped clean.
+
+"Of course on a trooper there'd be a company below stacking the kit away,"
+said Verschoyle, "but that wasn't so bad."
+
+"Bad!" I cried. "It was miraculous!"
+
+"Circus-work--all circus-work!" said Pigeon. "It won't prevent 'em bein'
+sick as dogs when the ship rolls." The crowd round us applauded, while the
+men looked meekly down their self-conscious noses.
+
+A little grey-whiskered man trotted up to the Boy.
+
+"Have we made good, Bayley?" he said. "Are we _en état de partir_?"
+
+"That's what I shall report," said Bayley, smiling.
+
+"I thought my bit o' French 'ud draw you," said the little man, rubbing
+his hands.
+
+"Who is he?" I whispered to Pigeon.
+
+"Ramsay--their C.O. An old Guard captain. A keen little devil. They say he
+spends six hundred a year on the show. He used to be in the Lincolns till
+he came into his property."
+
+"Take 'em home an' make 'em drunk," I heard Bayley say. "I suppose you'll
+have a dinner to celebrate. But you may as well tell the officers of E
+company that I don't think much of them. I sha'n't report it, but their
+men were all over the shop."
+
+"Well, they're young, you see," Colonel Ramsay began.
+
+"You're quite right. Send 'em to me and I'll talk to 'em. Youth is the
+time to learn."
+
+"Six hundred a year," I repeated to Pigeon. "That must be an awful tax on
+a man. Worse than in the old volunteering days."
+
+"That's where you make your mistake," said Verschoyle. "In the old days a
+man had to spend his money to coax his men to drill because they weren't
+the genuine article. You know what I mean. They made a favour of putting
+in drills, didn't they? And they were, most of 'em, the children we have
+to take over at Second Camp, weren't they? Well, now that a C. O. is sure
+of his _men_, now that he hasn't to waste himself in conciliating an'
+bribin', an' beerin' _kids_, he doesn't care what he spends on his corps,
+because every pound tells. Do you understand?"
+
+"I see what you mean, Vee. Having the male material guaranteed----"
+
+"And trained material at that," Pigeon put in. "Eight years in the
+schools, remember, as well as----"
+
+"Precisely. A man rejoices in working them up. That's as it should be," I
+said.
+
+"Bayly's saying the very same to those F. S. pups," said Verschoyle.
+
+The Boy was behind us, between two young F. S. officers, a hand on the
+shoulder of each.
+
+"Yes, that's all doocid interesting," he growled paternally. "But you
+forget, my sons, now that your men are bound to serve, you're trebly bound
+to put a polish on 'em. You've let your company simply go to seed. Don't
+try and explain. I've told all those lies myself in my time. It's only
+idleness. _I_ know. Come and lunch with me to-morrow and I'll give you a
+wrinkle or two in barracks." He turned to me.
+
+"Suppose we pick up Vee's defeated legion and go home. You'll dine with us
+to-night. Good-bye, Ramsay. Yes, you're _en état de partir_, right enough.
+You'd better get Lady Gertrude to talk to the Armity if you want the corps
+sent foreign. I'm no politician."
+
+We strolled away from the great white statue of the Widow, with sceptre,
+orb, and crown, that looked toward the city, and regained the common,
+where the Guard battalion walked with the female of its species and the
+children of all its relatives. At sight of the officers the uniforms began
+to detach themselves and gather in companies. A Board School corps was
+moving off the ground, headed by its drums and fifes, which it assisted
+with song. As we drew nearer we caught the words, for they were launched
+with intention:--
+
+  'Oo is it mashes the country nurse?
+    The Guardsman!
+  'Oo is it takes the lydy's purse?
+    The Guardsman!
+  Calls for a drink, and a mild cigar,
+  Batters a sovereign down on the bar,
+  Collars the change and says "Ta-ta!"
+    The Guardsman!
+
+"Why, that's one of old Jemmy Fawne's songs. I haven't heard it in ages,"
+I began.
+
+"Little devils!" said Pigeon.
+"Speshul! Extra speshul! Sports Edition!" a newsboy cried. "'Ere y'are,
+Captain. Defeat o' the Guard!"
+
+"I'll buy a copy," said the Boy, as Pigeon blushed wrathfully. "I must, to
+see how the Dove lost his mounted company." He unfolded the flapping sheet
+and we crowded round it.
+
+"'_Complete Rout of the Guard,_'" he read. "'_Too Narrow a Front._' That's
+one for you, Vee! '_Attack Anticipated by Mr. Levitt, B. A._' Aha! '_The
+Schools Stand Fast._'"
+
+"Here's another version," said Kyd, waving a tinted sheet. "'_To your
+tents, O Israel! The Hebrew Schools stop the Mounted Troops._' Pij, were
+you scuppered by Jewboys?"
+
+"'_Umpires Decide all Four Guns Lost,_'" Bayley went on. "By Jove,
+there'll have to be an inquiry into this regrettable incident, Vee!"
+
+"I'll never try to amuse the kids again," said the baited Verschoyle.
+"Children and newspapers are low things.... And I was hit on the nose by a
+wad, too! They oughtn't to be allowed blank ammunition!"
+
+So we leaned against the railings in the warm twilight haze while the
+battalion, silently as a shadow, formed up behind us ready to be taken
+over. The heat, the hum of the great city, as it might have been the hum
+of a camped army, the creaking of the belts, and the well-known faces bent
+above them, brought back to me the memory of another evening, years ago,
+when Verschoyle and I waited for news of guns missing in no sham fight.
+
+"A regular Sanna's Post, isn't it?" I said at last. "D'you remember, Vee--
+by the market-square--that night when the wagons went out?"
+
+Then it came upon me, with no horror, but a certain mild wonder, that we
+had waited, Vee and I, that night for the body of Boy Bayley; and that Vee
+himself had died of typhoid in the spring of 1902. The rustling of the
+papers continued, but Bayley, shifting slightly, revealed to me the three-
+day old wound on his left side that had soaked the ground about him. I saw
+Pigeon fling up a helpless arm as to guard himself against a spatter of
+shrapnel, and Luttrell with a foolish tight-lipped smile lurched over all
+in one jointless piece. Only old Vee's honest face held steady for awhile
+against the darkness that had swallowed up the battalion behind us. Then
+his jaw dropped and the face stiffened, so that a fly made bold to explore
+the puffed and scornful nostril.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I waked brushing a fly from my nose, and saw the Club waiter set out the
+evening papers on the table.
+
+
+
+
+"THEY"
+
+
+THE RETURN OF THE CHILDREN
+
+  Neither the harps nor the crowns amused, nor the cherubs' dove-winged
+     races--
+  Holding hands forlornly the Children wandered beneath the Dome;
+  Plucking the radiant robes of the passers by, and with pitiful faces
+  Begging what Princes and Powers refused:--"Ah, please will you let us
+     go home?"
+
+  Over the jewelled floor, nigh weeping, ran to them Mary the Mother,
+  Kneeled and caressed and made promise with kisses, and drew them along
+     to the gateway--
+  Yea, the all-iron unbribable Door which Peter must guard and none other.
+  Straightway She took the Keys from his keeping, and opened and freed
+     them straightway.
+
+  Then to Her Son, Who had seen and smiled, She said: "On the night that
+     I bore Thee
+  What didst Thou care for a love beyond mine or a heaven that was not my
+     arm?
+  Didst Thou push from the nipple O Child, to hear the angels adore Thee?
+  When we two lay in the breath of the kine?" And He said:--"Thou hast
+     done no harm."
+
+  So through the Void the Children ran homeward merrily hand in hand,
+  Looking neither to left nor right where the breathless Heavens stood
+     still;
+  And the Guards of the Void resheathed their swords, for they heard the
+     Command.
+  "Shall I that have suffered the children to come to me hold them against
+     their will?"
+
+
+"THEY"
+One view called me to another; one hill top to its fellow, half across the
+county, and since I could answer at no more trouble than the snapping
+forward of a lever, I let the country flow under my wheels. The orchid-
+studded flats of the East gave way to the thyme, ilex, and grey grass of
+the Downs; these again to the rich cornland and fig-trees of the lower
+coast, where you carry the beat of the tide on your left hand for fifteen
+level miles; and when at last I turned inland through a huddle of rounded
+hills and woods I had run myself clean out of my known marks. Beyond that
+precise hamlet which stands godmother to the capital of the United States,
+I found hidden villages where bees, the only things awake, boomed in
+eighty-foot lindens that overhung grey Norman churches; miraculous brooks
+diving under stone bridges built for heavier traffic than would ever vex
+them again; tithe-barns larger than their churches, and an old smithy that
+cried out aloud how it had once been a hall of the Knights of the Temple.
+Gipsies I found on a common where the gorse, bracken, and heath fought it
+out together up a mile of Roman road; and a little farther on I disturbed
+a red fox rolling dog-fashion in the naked sunlight.
+
+As the wooded hills closed about me I stood up in the car to take the
+bearings of that great Down whose ringed head is a landmark for fifty
+miles across the low countries. I judged that the lie of the country would
+bring me across some westward running road that went to his feet, but I
+did not allow for the confusing veils of the woods. A quick turn plunged
+me first into a green cutting brimful of liquid sunshine, next into a
+gloomy tunnel where last year's dead leaves whispered and scuffled about
+my tyres. The strong hazel stuff meeting overhead had not been cut for a
+couple of generations at least, nor had any axe helped the moss-cankered
+oak and beech to spring above them. Here the road changed frankly into a
+carpetted ride on whose brown velvet spent primrose-clumps showed like
+jade, and a few sickly, white-stalked bluebells nodded together. As the
+slope favoured I shut off the power and slid over the whirled leaves,
+expecting every moment to meet a keeper; but I only heard a jay, far off,
+arguing against the silence under the twilight of the trees.
+
+Still the track descended. I was on the point of reversing and working my
+way back on the second speed ere I ended in some swamp, when I saw
+sunshine through the tangle ahead and lifted the brake.
+
+It was down again at once. As the light beat across my face my fore-wheels
+took the turf of a great still lawn from which sprang horsemen ten feet
+high with levelled lances, monstrous peacocks, and sleek round-headed
+maids of honour--blue, black, and glistening--all of clipped yew. Across
+the lawn--the marshalled woods besieged it on three sides--stood an
+ancient house of lichened and weather-worn stone, with mullioned windows
+and roofs of rose-red tile. It was flanked by semi-circular walls, also
+rose-red, that closed the lawn on the fourth side, and at their feet a box
+hedge grew man-high. There were doves on the roof about the slim brick
+chimneys, and I caught a glimpse of an octagonal dove-house behind the
+screening wall.
+
+Here, then, I stayed; a horseman's green spear laid at my breast; held by
+the exceeding beauty of that jewel in that setting.
+
+"If I am not packed off for a trespasser, or if this knight does not ride
+a wallop at me," thought I, "Shakespeare and Queen Elizabeth at least must
+come out of that half-open garden door and ask me to tea."
+
+A child appeared at an upper window, and I thought the little thing waved
+a friendly hand. But it was to call a companion, for presently another
+bright head showed. Then I heard a laugh among the yew-peacocks, and
+turning to make sure (till then I had been watching the house only) I saw
+the silver of a fountain behind a hedge thrown up against the sun. The
+doves on the roof cooed to the cooing water; but between the two notes I
+caught the utterly happy chuckle of a child absorbed in some light
+mischief.
+
+The garden door--heavy oak sunk deep in the thickness of the wall--opened
+further: a woman in a big garden hat set her foot slowly on the time-
+hollowed stone step and as slowly walked across the turf. I was forming
+some apology when she lifted up her head and I saw that she was blind.
+
+"I heard you," she said. "Isn't that a motor car?"
+
+"I'm afraid I've made a mistake in my road. I should have turned off up
+above--I never dreamed"--I began.
+
+"But I'm very glad. Fancy a motor car coming into the garden! It will be
+such a treat----" She turned and made as though looking about her. "You--
+you haven't seen any one have you--perhaps?"
+
+"No one to speak to, but the children seemed interested at a distance."
+
+"Which?"
+
+"I saw a couple up at the window just now, and I think I heard a little
+chap in the grounds."
+
+"Oh, lucky you!" she cried, and her face brightened. "I hear them, of
+course, but that's all. You've seen them and heard them?"
+
+"Yes," I answered. "And if I know anything of children one of them's
+having a beautiful time by the fountain yonder. Escaped, I should
+imagine."
+
+"You're fond of children?"
+
+I gave her one or two reasons why I did not altogether hate them.
+
+"Of course, of course," she said. "Then you understand. Then you won't
+think it foolish if I ask you to take your car through the gardens, once
+or twice--quite slowly. I'm sure they'd like to see it. They see so
+little, poor things. One tries to make their life pleasant, but----" she
+threw out her hands towards the woods. "We're so out of the world here."
+
+"That will be splendid," I said. "But I can't cut up your grass."
+
+She faced to the right. "Wait a minute," she said. "We're at the South
+gate, aren't we? Behind those peacocks there's a flagged path. We call it
+the Peacock's Walk. You can't see it from here, they tell me, but if you
+squeeze along by the edge of the wood you can turn at the first peacock
+and get on to the flags."
+
+It was sacrilege to wake that dreaming house-front with the clatter of
+machinery, but I swung the car to clear the turf, brushed along the edge
+of the wood and turned in on the broad stone path where the fountain-basin
+lay like one star-sapphire.
+
+"May I come too?" she cried. "No, please don't help me. They'll like it
+better if they see me."
+
+She felt her way lightly to the front of the car, and with one foot on the
+step she called: "Children, oh, children! Look and see what's going to
+happen!"
+
+The voice would have drawn lost souls from the Pit, for the yearning that
+underlay its sweetness, and I was not surprised to hear an answering shout
+behind the yews. It must have been the child by the fountain, but he fled
+at our approach, leaving a little toy boat in the water. I saw the glint
+of his blue blouse among the still horsemen.
+
+Very disposedly we paraded the length of the walk and at her request
+backed again. This time the child had got the better of his panic, but
+stood far off and doubting.
+
+"The little fellow's watching us," I said. "I wonder if he'd like a ride."
+
+"They're very shy still. Very shy. But, oh, lucky you to be able to see
+them! Let's listen."
+
+I stopped the machine at once, and the humid stillness, heavy with the
+scent of box, cloaked us deep. Shears I could hear where some gardener was
+clipping; a mumble of bees and broken voices that might have been the
+doves.
+
+"Oh, unkind!" she said weariedly.
+
+"Perhaps they're only shy of the motor. The little maid at the window
+looks tremendously interested."
+
+"Yes?" She raised her head. "It was wrong of me to say that. They are
+really fond of me. It's the only thing that makes life worth living--when
+they're fond of you, isn't it? I daren't think what the place would be
+without them. By the way, is it beautiful?"
+
+"I think it is the most beautiful place I have ever seen."
+
+"So they all tell me. I can feel it, of course, but that isn't quite the
+same thing."
+
+"Then have you never---?" I began, but stopped abashed.
+
+"Not since I can remember. It happened when I was only a few months old,
+they tell me. And yet I must remember something, else how could I dream
+about colours. I see light in my dreams, and colours, but I never see
+_them_. I only hear them just as I do when I'm awake."
+
+"It's difficult to see faces in dreams. Some people can, but most of us
+haven't the gift," I went on, looking up at the window where the child
+stood all but hidden.
+
+"I've heard that too," she said. "And they tell me that one never sees a
+dead person's face in a dream. Is that true?"
+
+"I believe it is--now I come to think of it."
+
+"But how is it with yourself--yourself?" The blind eyes turned towards me.
+
+"I have never seen the faces of my dead in any dream," I answered.
+
+"Then it must be as bad as being blind."
+
+The sun had dipped behind the woods and the long shades were possessing
+the insolent horsemen one by one. I saw the light die from off the top of
+a glossy-leaved lance and all the brave hard green turn to soft black. The
+house, accepting another day at end, as it had accepted an hundred
+thousand gone, seemed to settle deeper into its rest among the shadows.
+
+"Have you ever wanted to?" she said after the silence.
+
+"Very much sometimes," I replied. The child had left the window as the
+shadows closed upon it.
+
+"Ah! So've I, but I don't suppose it's allowed. ... Where d'you live?"
+
+"Quite the other side of the county--sixty miles and more, and I must be
+going back. I've come without my big lamp."
+
+"But it's not dark yet. I can feel it."
+
+"I'm afraid it will be by the time I get home. Could you lend me someone
+to set me on my road at first? I've utterly lost myself."
+
+"I'll send Madden with you to the cross-roads. We are so out of the world,
+I don't wonder you were lost! I'll guide you round to the front of the
+house; but you will go slowly, won't you, till you're out of the grounds?
+It isn't foolish, do you think?"
+
+"I promise you I'll go like this," I said, and let the car start herself
+down the flagged path.
+
+We skirted the left wing of the house, whose elaborately cast lead
+guttering alone was worth a day's journey; passed under a great rose-grown
+gate in the red wall, and so round to the high front of the house which in
+beauty and stateliness as much excelled the back as that all others I had
+seen.
+
+"Is it so very beautiful?" she said wistfully when she heard my raptures.
+"And you like the lead-figures too? There's the old azalea garden behind.
+They say that this place must have been made for children. Will you help
+me out, please? I should like to come with you as far as the cross-roads,
+but I mustn't leave them. Is that you, Madden? I want you to show this
+gentleman the way to the cross-roads. He has lost his way but--he has seen
+them."
+
+A butler appeared noiselessly at the miracle of old oak that must be
+called the front door, and slipped aside to put on his hat. She stood
+looking at me with open blue eyes in which no sight lay, and I saw for the
+first time that she was beautiful.
+
+"Remember," she said quietly, "if you are fond of them you will come
+again," and disappeared within the house.
+
+The butler in the car said nothing till we were nearly at the lodge gates,
+where catching a glimpse of a blue blouse in a shrubbery I swerved amply
+lest the devil that leads little boys to play should drag me into child-
+murder.
+
+"Excuse me," he asked of a sudden, "but why did you do that, Sir?"
+
+"The child yonder."
+
+"Our young gentleman in blue?"
+
+"Of course."
+
+"He runs about a good deal. Did you see him by the fountain, Sir?"
+
+"Oh, yes, several times. Do we turn here?"
+
+"Yes, Sir. And did you 'appen to see them upstairs too?"
+
+"At the upper window? Yes."
+
+"Was that before the mistress come out to speak to you, Sir?"
+
+"A little before that. Why d'you want to know?"
+
+He paused a little. "Only to make sure that--that they had seen the car,
+Sir, because with children running about, though I'm sure you're driving
+particularly careful, there might be an accident. That was all, Sir. Here
+are the cross-roads. You can't miss your way from now on. Thank you, Sir,
+but that isn't _our_ custom, not with----"
+
+"I beg your pardon," I said, and thrust away the British silver.
+
+"Oh, it's quite right with the rest of 'em as a rule. Goodbye, Sir."
+
+He retired into the armour-plated conning tower of his caste and walked
+away. Evidently a butler solicitous for the honour of his house, and
+interested, probably through a maid, in the nursery.
+
+Once beyond the signposts at the cross-roads I looked back, but the
+crumpled hills interlaced so jealously that I could not see where the
+house had lain. When I asked its name at a cottage along the road, the fat
+woman who sold sweetmeats there gave me to understand that people with
+motor cars had small right to live--much less to "go about talking like
+carriage folk." They were not a pleasant-mannered community.
+
+When I retraced my route on the map that evening I was little wiser.
+Hawkin's Old Farm appeared to be the survey title of the place, and the
+old County Gazetteer, generally so ample, did not allude to it. The big
+house of those parts was Hodnington Hall, Georgian with early Victorian
+embellishments, as an atrocious steel engraving attested. I carried my
+difficulty to a neighbour--a deep-rooted tree of that soil--and he gave me
+a name of a family which conveyed no meaning.
+
+A month or so later--I went again, or it may have been that my car took
+the road of her own volition. She over-ran the fruitless Downs, threaded
+every turn of the maze of lanes below the hills, drew through the high-
+walled woods, impenetrable in their full leaf, came out at the cross roads
+where the butler had left me, and a little further on developed an
+internal trouble which forced me to turn her in on a grass way-waste that
+cut into a summer-silent hazel wood. So far as I could make sure by the
+sun and a six-inch Ordnance map, this should be the road flank of that
+wood which I had first explored from the heights above. I made a mighty
+serious business of my repairs and a glittering shop of my repair kit,
+spanners, pump, and the like, which I spread out orderly upon a rug. It
+was a trap to catch all childhood, for on such a day, I argued, the
+children would not be far off. When I paused in my work I listened, but
+the wood was so full of the noises of summer (though the birds had mated)
+that I could not at first distinguish these from the tread of small
+cautious feet stealing across the dead leaves. I rang my bell in an
+alluring manner, but the feet fled, and I repented, for to a child a
+sudden noise is very real terror. I must have been at work half an hour
+when I heard in the wood the voice of the blind woman crying: "Children,
+oh children, where are you?" and the stillness made slow to close on the
+perfection of that cry. She came towards me, half feeling her way between
+the tree boles, and though a child it seemed clung to her skirt, it
+swerved into the leafage like a rabbit as she drew nearer.
+
+"Is that you?" she said, "from the other side of the county?"
+
+"Yes, it's me from the other side of the county."
+
+"Then why didn't you come through the upper woods? They were there just
+now."
+
+"They were here a few minutes ago. I expect they knew my car had broken
+down, and came to see the fun."
+
+"Nothing serious, I hope? How do cars break down?"
+
+"In fifty different ways. Only mine has chosen the fifty first."
+
+She laughed merrily at the tiny joke, cooed with delicious laughter, and
+pushed her hat back.
+
+"Let me hear," she said.
+
+"Wait a moment," I cried, "and I'll get you a cushion."
+
+She set her foot on the rug all covered with spare parts, and stooped
+above it eagerly. "What delightful things!" The hands through which she
+saw glanced in the chequered sunlight. "A box here--another box! Why
+you've arranged them like playing shop!"
+
+"I confess now that I put it out to attract them. I don't need half those
+things really."
+
+"How nice of you! I heard your bell in the upper wood. You say they were
+here before that?"
+
+"I'm sure of it. Why are they so shy? That little fellow in blue who was
+with you just now ought to have got over his fright. He's been watching me
+like a Red Indian."
+
+"It must have been your bell," she said. "I heard one of them go past me
+in trouble when I was coming down. They're shy--so shy even with me." She
+turned her face over her shoulder and cried again: "Children! Oh,
+children! Look and see!"
+
+"They must have gone off together on their own affairs,"
+
+I suggested, for there was a murmur behind us of lowered voices broken by
+the sudden squeaking giggles of childhood. I returned to my tinkerings and
+she leaned forward, her chin on her hand, listening interestedly.
+
+"How many are they?" I said at last. The work was finished, but I saw no
+reason to go.
+
+Her forehead puckered a little in thought. "I don't quite know," she said
+simply. "Sometimes more--sometimes less. They come and stay with me
+because I love them, you see."
+
+"That must be very jolly," I said, replacing a drawer, and as I spoke I
+heard the inanity of my answer.
+
+"You--you aren't laughing at me," she cried. "I--I haven't any of my own.
+I never married. People laugh at me sometimes about them because--
+because------"
+
+"Because they're savages," I returned. "It's nothing to fret for. That
+sort laugh at everything that isn't in their own fat lives."
+
+"I don't know. How should I? I only don't like being laughed at about
+_them_. It hurts; and when one can't see.... I don't want to seem silly,"
+her chin quivered like a child's as she spoke, "but we blindies have only
+one skin, I think. Everything outside hits straight at our souls. It's
+different with you. You've such good defences in your eyes--looking out--
+before anyone can really pain you in your soul. People forget that with
+us."
+
+I was silent reviewing that inexhaustible matter--the more than inherited
+(since it is also carefully taught) brutality of the Christian peoples,
+beside which the mere heathendom of the West Coast nigger is clean and
+restrained. It led me a long distance into myself.
+
+"Don't do that!" she said of a sudden, putting her hands before her eyes.
+
+"What?"
+
+She made a gesture with her hand.
+
+"That! It's--it's all purple and black. Don't! That colour hurts."
+
+"But, how in the world do you know about colours?" I exclaimed, for here
+was a revelation indeed.
+
+"Colours as colours?" she asked.
+
+"No. _Those_ Colours which you saw just now."
+
+"You know as well as I do," she laughed, "else you wouldn't have asked
+that question. They aren't in the world at all. They're in _you_--when you
+went so angry."
+
+"D'you mean a dull purplish patch, like port-wine mixed with ink?" I said.
+
+"I've never seen ink or port-wine, but the colours aren't mixed. They are
+separate--all separate."
+
+"Do you mean black streaks and jags across the purple?"
+
+She nodded. "Yes--if they are like this," and zigzagged her finger again,
+"but it's more red than purple--that bad colour."
+
+"And what are the colours at the top of the--whatever you see?"
+
+Slowly she leaned forward and traced on the rug the figure of the Egg
+itself.
+
+"I see them so," she said, pointing with a grass stem, "white, green,
+yellow, red, purple, and when people are angry or bad, black across the
+red--as you were just now."
+
+"Who told you anything about it--in the beginning?" I demanded.
+
+"About the colours? No one. I used to ask what colours were when I was
+little--in table-covers and curtains and carpets, you see--because some
+colours hurt me and some made me happy. People told me; and when I got
+older that was how I saw people." Again she traced the outline of the Egg
+which it is given to very few of us to see.
+
+"All by yourself?" I repeated.
+
+"All by myself. There wasn't anyone else. I only found out afterwards that
+other people did not see the Colours."
+
+She leaned against the tree-hole plaiting and unplaiting chance-plucked
+grass stems. The children in the wood had drawn nearer. I could see them
+with the tail of my eye frolicking like squirrels.
+
+"Now I am sure you will never laugh at me," she went on after a long
+silence. "Nor at _them_."
+
+"Goodness! No!" I cried, jolted out of my train of thought. "A man who
+laughs at a child--unless the child is laughing too--is a heathen!"
+
+"I didn't mean that of course. You'd never laugh _at_ children, but I
+thought--I used to think--that perhaps you might laugh about _them_. So
+now I beg your pardon.... What are you going to laugh at?"
+
+I had made no sound, but she knew.
+
+"At the notion of your begging my pardon. If you had done your duty as a
+pillar of the state and a landed proprietress you ought to have summoned
+me for trespass when I barged through your woods the other day. It was
+disgraceful of me--inexcusable."
+
+She looked at me, her head against the tree trunk--long and steadfastly--
+this woman who could see the naked soul.
+
+"How curious," she half whispered. "How very curious."
+
+"Why, what have I done?"
+
+"You don't understand ... and yet you understood about the Colours. Don't
+you understand?"
+
+She spoke with a passion that nothing had justified, and I faced her
+bewilderedly as she rose. The children had gathered themselves in a
+roundel behind a bramble bush. One sleek head bent over something smaller,
+and the set of the little shoulders told me that fingers were on lips.
+They, too, had some child's tremendous secret. I alone was hopelessly
+astray there in the broad sunlight.
+
+"No," I said, and shook my head as though the dead eyes could note.
+"Whatever it is, I don't understand yet. Perhaps I shall later--if you'll
+let me come again."
+
+"You will come again," she answered. "You will surely come again and walk
+in the wood."
+
+"Perhaps the children will know me well enough by that time to let me play
+with them--as a favour. You know what children are like."
+
+"It isn't a matter of favour but of right," she replied, and while I
+wondered what she meant, a dishevelled woman plunged round the bend of the
+road, loose-haired, purple, almost lowing with agony as she ran. It was my
+rude, fat friend of the sweetmeat shop. The blind woman heard and stepped
+forward. "What is it, Mrs. Madehurst?" she asked.
+
+The woman flung her apron over her head and literally grovelled in the
+dust, crying that her grandchild was sick to death, that the local doctor
+was away fishing, that Jenny the mother was at her wits end, and so forth,
+with repetitions and bellowings.
+
+"Where's the next nearest doctor?" I asked between paroxysms.
+
+"Madden will tell you. Go round to the house and take him with you. I'll
+attend to this. Be quick!" She half-supported the fat woman into the
+shade. In two minutes I was blowing all the horns of Jericho under the
+front of the House Beautiful, and Madden, in the pantry, rose to the
+crisis like a butler and a man.
+
+A quarter of an hour at illegal speeds caught us a doctor five miles away.
+Within the half-hour we had decanted him, much interested in motors, at
+the door of the sweetmeat shop, and drew up the road to await the verdict.
+
+"Useful things cars," said Madden, all man and no butler. "If I'd had one
+when mine took sick she wouldn't have died."
+
+"How was it?" I asked.
+
+"Croup. Mrs. Madden was away. No one knew what to do. I drove eight miles
+in a tax cart for the doctor. She was choked when we came back. This car
+'d ha' saved her. She'd have been close on ten now."
+
+"I'm sorry," I said. "I thought you were rather fond of children from what
+you told me going to the cross-roads the other day."
+
+"Have you seen 'em again, Sir--this mornin'?"
+
+"Yes, but they're well broke to cars. I couldn't get any of them within
+twenty yards of it."
+
+He looked at me carefully as a scout considers a stranger--not as a menial
+should lift his eyes to his divinely appointed superior.
+
+"I wonder why," he said just above the breath that he drew.
+
+We waited on. A light wind from the sea wandered up and down the long
+lines of the woods, and the wayside grasses, whitened already with summer
+dust, rose and bowed in sallow waves.
+
+A woman, wiping the suds off her arms, came out of the cottage next the
+sweetmeat shop.
+
+"I've be'n listenin' in de back-yard," she said cheerily. "He says
+Arthur's unaccountable bad. Did ye hear him shruck just now? Unaccountable
+bad. I reckon t'will come Jenny's turn to walk in de wood nex' week along,
+Mr. Madden."
+
+"Excuse me, Sir, but your lap-robe is slipping," said Madden
+deferentially. The woman started, dropped a curtsey, and hurried away.
+
+"What does she mean by 'walking in the wood'?" I asked.
+
+"It must be some saying they use hereabouts. I'm from Norfolk myself,"
+said Madden. "They're an independent lot in this county. She took you for
+a chauffeur, Sir."
+
+I saw the Doctor come out of the cottage followed by a draggle-tailed
+wench who clung to his arm as though he could make treaty for her with
+Death. "Dat sort," she wailed--"dey're just as much to us dat has 'em as
+if dey was lawful born. Just as much--just as much! An' God he'd be just
+as pleased if you saved 'un, Doctor. Don't take it from me. Miss Florence
+will tell ye de very same. Don't leave 'im, Doctor!"
+
+"I know. I know," said the man, "but he'll be quiet for a while now.
+We'll get the nurse and the medicine as fast as we can." He signalled me
+to come forward with the car, and I strove not to be privy to what
+followed; but I saw the girl's face, blotched and frozen with grief, and I
+felt the hand without a ring clutching at my knees when we moved away.
+
+The Doctor was a man of some humour, for I remember he claimed my car
+under the Oath of Æsculapius, and used it and me without mercy. First we
+convoyed Mrs. Madehurst and the blind woman to wait by the sick bed till
+the nurse should come. Next we invaded a neat county town for
+prescriptions (the Doctor said the trouble was cerebro-spinal meningitis),
+and when the County Institute, banked and flanked with scared market
+cattle, reported itself out of nurses for the moment we literally flung
+ourselves loose upon the county. We conferred with the owners of great
+houses--magnates at the ends of overarching avenues whose big-boned
+womenfolk strode away from their tea-tables to listen to the imperious
+Doctor. At last a white-haired lady sitting under a cedar of Lebanon and
+surrounded by a court of magnificent Borzois--all hostile to motors--gave
+the Doctor, who received them as from a princess, written orders which we
+bore many miles at top speed, through a park, to a French nunnery, where
+we took over in exchange a pallid-faced and trembling Sister. She knelt at
+the bottom of the tonneau telling her beads without pause till, by short
+cuts of the Doctor's invention, we had her to the sweetmeat shop once
+more. It was a long afternoon crowded with mad episodes that rose and
+dissolved like the dust of our wheels; cross-sections of remote and
+incomprehensible lives through which we raced at right angles; and I went
+home in the dusk, wearied out, to dream of the clashing horns of cattle;
+round-eyed nuns walking in a garden of graves; pleasant tea-parties
+beneath shaded trees; the carbolic-scented, grey-painted corridors of the
+County Institute; the steps of shy children in the wood, and the hands
+that clung to my knees as the motor began to move.
+
+*       *       *       *       *
+
+I had intended to return in a day or two, but it pleased Fate to hold me
+from that side of the county, on many pretexts, till the elder and the
+wild rose had fruited. There came at last a brilliant day, swept clear
+from the south-west, that brought the hills within hand's reach--a day of
+unstable airs and high filmy clouds. Through no merit of my own I was
+free, and set the car for the third time on that known road. As I reached
+the crest of the Downs I felt the soft air change, saw it glaze under the
+sun; and, looking down at the sea, in that instant beheld the blue of the
+Channel turn through polished silver and dulled steel to dingy pewter. A
+laden collier hugging the coast steered outward for deeper water and,
+across copper-coloured haze, I saw sails rise one by one on the anchored
+fishing-fleet. In a deep dene behind me an eddy of sudden wind drummed
+through sheltered oaks, and spun aloft the first day sample of autumn
+leaves. When I reached the beach road the sea-fog fumed over the
+brickfields, and the tide was telling all the groins of the gale beyond
+Ushant. In less than an hour summer England vanished in chill grey. We
+were again the shut island of the North, all the ships of the world
+bellowing at our perilous gates; and between their outcries ran the piping
+of bewildered gulls. My cap dripped moisture, the folds of the rug held it
+in pools or sluiced it away in runnels, and the salt-rime stuck to my
+lips.
+
+Inland the smell of autumn loaded the thickened fog among the trees, and
+the drip became a continuous shower. Yet the late flowers--mallow of the
+wayside, scabious of the field, and dahlia of the garden--showed gay in
+the mist, and beyond the sea's breath there was little sign of decay in
+the leaf. Yet in the villages the house doors were all open, and bare-
+legged, bare-headed children sat at ease on the damp doorsteps to shout
+"pip-pip" at the stranger.
+
+I made bold to call at the sweetmeat shop, where Mrs. Madehurst met me
+with a fat woman's hospitable tears. Jenny's child, she said, had died two
+days after the nun had come. It was, she felt, best out of the way, even
+though insurance offices, for reasons which she did not pretend to follow,
+would not willingly insure such stray lives. "Not but what Jenny didn't
+tend to Arthur as though he'd come all proper at de end of de first year--
+like Jenny herself." Thanks to Miss Florence, the child had been buried
+with a pomp which, in Mrs. Madehurst's opinion, more than covered the
+small irregularity of its birth. She described the coffin, within and
+without, the glass hearse, and the evergreen lining of the grave.
+
+"But how's the mother?" I asked.
+
+"Jenny? Oh, she'll get over it. I've felt dat way with one or two o' my
+own. She'll get over. She's walkin' in de wood now."
+
+"In this weather?"
+
+Mrs. Madehurst looked at me with narrowed eyes across the counter.
+
+"I dunno but it opens de 'eart like. Yes, it opens de 'eart. Dat's where
+losin' and bearin' comes so alike in de long run, we do say."
+
+Now the wisdom of the old wives is greater than that of all the Fathers,
+and this last oracle sent me thinking so extendedly as I went up the road,
+that I nearly ran over a woman and a child at the wooded corner by the
+lodge gates of the House Beautiful.
+
+"Awful weather!" I cried, as I slowed dead for the turn.
+
+"Not so bad," she answered placidly out of the fog. "Mine's used to 'un.
+You'll find yours indoors, I reckon."
+
+Indoors, Madden received me with professional courtesy, and kind inquiries
+for the health of the motor, which he would put under cover.
+
+I waited in a still, nut-brown hall, pleasant with late flowers and warmed
+with a delicious wood fire--a place of good influence and great peace.
+(Men and women may sometimes, after great effort, achieve a creditable
+lie; but the house, which is their temple, cannot say anything save the
+truth of those who have lived in it.) A child's cart and a doll lay on the
+black-and-white floor, where a rug had been kicked back. I felt that the
+children had only just hurried away--to hide themselves, most like--in the
+many turns of the great adzed staircase that climbed statelily out of the
+hall, or to crouch at gaze behind the lions and roses of the carven
+gallery above. Then I heard her voice above me, singing as the blind sing
+--from the soul:--
+
+
+  In the pleasant orchard-closes.
+
+And all my early summer came back at the call.
+
+  In the pleasant orchard-closes,
+  God bless all our gains say we--
+  But may God bless all our losses,
+  Better suits with our degree,
+
+She dropped the marring fifth line, and repeated--
+
+  Better suits with our degree!
+
+I saw her lean over the gallery, her linked hands white as pearl against
+the oak.
+
+"Is that you--from the other side of the county?" she called.
+
+"Yes, me--from the other side of the county," I answered laughing.
+
+"What a long time before you had to come here again." She ran down the
+stairs, one hand lightly touching the broad rail. "It's two months and
+four days. Summer's gone!"
+
+"I meant to come before, but Fate prevented."
+
+"I knew it. Please do something to that fire. They won't let me play with
+it, but I can feel it's behaving badly. Hit it!"
+
+I looked on either side of the deep fireplace, and found but a
+half-charred hedge-stake with which I punched a black log into flame.
+
+"It never goes out, day or night," she said, as though explaining. "In
+case any one conies in with cold toes, you see."
+
+"It's even lovelier inside than it was out," I murmured. The red light
+poured itself along the age-polished dusky panels till the Tudor roses
+and lions of the gallery took colour and motion. An old eagle-topped
+convex mirror gathered the picture into its mysterious heart, distorting
+afresh the distorted shadows, and curving the gallery lines into the
+curves of a ship. The day was shutting down in half a gale as the fog
+turned to stringy scud. Through the uncurtained mullions of the broad
+window I could see valiant horsemen of the lawn rear and recover against
+the wind that taunted them with legions of dead leaves.
+"Yes, it must be beautiful," she said. "Would you like to go over it?
+There's still light enough upstairs."
+
+I followed her up the unflinching, wagon-wide staircase to the gallery
+whence opened the thin fluted Elizabethan doors.
+
+"Feel how they put the latch low down for the sake of the children." She
+swung a light door inward.
+
+"By the way, where are they?" I asked. "I haven't even heard them to-day."
+
+She did not answer at once. Then, "I can only hear them," she replied
+softly. "This is one of their rooms--everything ready, you see."
+
+She pointed into a heavily-timbered room. There were little low gate
+tables and children's chairs. A doll's house, its hooked front half open,
+faced a great dappled rocking-horse, from whose padded saddle it was but a
+child's scramble to the broad window-seat overlooking the lawn. A toy gun
+lay in a corner beside a gilt wooden cannon.
+
+"Surely they've only just gone," I whispered. In the failing light a door
+creaked cautiously. I heard the rustle of a frock and the patter of feet--
+quick feet through a room beyond.
+
+"I heard that," she cried triumphantly. "Did you? Children, O children,
+where are you?"
+
+The voice filled the walls that held it lovingly to the last perfect note,
+but there came no answering shout such as I had heard in the garden. We
+hurried on from room to oak-floored room; up a step here, down three steps
+there; among a maze of passages; always mocked by our quarry. One might as
+well have tried to work an unstopped warren with a single ferret. There
+were bolt-holes innumerable--recesses in walls, embrasures of deep slitten
+windows now darkened, whence they could start up behind us; and abandoned
+fireplaces, six feet deep in the masonry, as well as the tangle of
+communicating doors. Above all, they had the twilight for their helper in
+our game. I had caught one or two joyous chuckles of evasion, and once or
+twice had seen the silhouette of a child's frock against some darkening
+window at the end of a passage; but we returned empty-handed to the
+gallery, just as a middle-aged woman was setting a lamp in its niche.
+
+"No, I haven't seen her either this evening, Miss Florence," I heard her
+say, "but that Turpin he says he wants to see you about his shed."
+
+"Oh, Mr. Turpin must want to see me very badly. Tell him to come to the
+hall, Mrs. Madden."
+
+I looked down into the hall whose only light was the dulled fire, and deep
+in the shadow I saw them at last. They must have slipped down while we
+were in the passages, and now thought themselves perfectly hidden behind
+an old gilt leather screen. By child's law, my fruitless chase was as good
+as an introduction, but since I had taken so much trouble I resolved to
+force them to come forward later by the simple trick, which children
+detest, of pretending not to notice them. They lay close, in a little
+huddle, no more than shadows except when a quick flame betrayed an
+outline.
+
+"And now we'll have some tea," she said. "I believe I ought to have
+offered it you at first, but one doesn't arrive at manners somehow when
+one lives alone and is considered--h'm--peculiar." Then with very pretty
+scorn, "would you like a lamp to see to eat by?" "The firelight's much
+pleasanter, I think." We descended into that delicious gloom and Madden
+brought tea.
+
+I took my chair in the direction of the screen ready to surprise or be
+surprised as the game should go, and at her permission, since a hearth is
+always sacred, bent forward to play with the fire.
+
+"Where do you get these beautiful short faggots from?" I asked idly. "Why,
+they are tallies!"
+
+"Of course," she said. "As I can't read or write I'm driven back on the
+early English tally for my accounts. Give me one and I'll tell you what it
+meant."
+
+I passed her an unburned hazel-tally, about a foot long, and she ran her
+thumb down the nicks.
+
+"This is the milk-record for the home farm for the month of April last
+year, in gallons," said she. "I don't know what I should have done without
+tallies. An old forester of mine taught me the system. It's out of date
+now for every one else; but my tenants respect it. One of them's coming
+now to see me. Oh, it doesn't matter. He has no business here out of
+office hours. He's a greedy, ignorant man--very greedy or--he wouldn't
+come here after dark."
+
+"Have you much land then?"
+
+"Only a couple of hundred acres in hand, thank goodness. The other six
+hundred are nearly all let to folk who knew my folk before me, but this
+Turpin is quite a new man--and a highway robber."
+
+"But are you sure I sha'n't be----?"
+
+"Certainly not. You have the right. He hasn't any children."
+
+"Ah, the children!" I said, and slid my low chair back till it nearly
+touched the screen that hid them. "I wonder whether they'll come out for
+me."
+
+There was a murmur of voices--Madden's and a deeper note--at the low, dark
+side door, and a ginger-headed, canvas-gaitered giant of the unmistakable
+tenant farmer type stumbled or was pushed in.
+
+"Come to the fire, Mr. Turpin," she said.
+
+"If--if you please, Miss, I'll--I'll be quite as well by the door." He
+clung to the latch as he spoke like a frightened child. Of a sudden I
+realised that he was in the grip of some almost overpowering fear.
+
+"Well?"
+
+"About that new shed for the young stock--that was all. These first autumn
+storms settin' in ... but I'll come again, Miss." His teeth did not
+chatter much more than the door latch.
+
+"I think not," she answered levelly. "The new shed--m'm. What did my agent
+write you on the 15th?"
+
+"I--fancied p'raps that if I came to see you--ma--man to man like, Miss.
+But----"
+
+His eyes rolled into every corner of the room wide with horror. He half
+opened the door through which he had entered, but I noticed it shut again
+--from without and firmly.
+
+"He wrote what I told him," she went on. "You are overstocked already.
+Dunnett's Farm never carried more than fifty bullocks--even in Mr.
+Wright's time. And _he_ used cake. You've sixty-seven and you don't cake.
+You've broken the lease in that respect. You're dragging the heart out of
+the farm."
+
+"I'm--I'm getting some minerals--superphosphates--next week. I've as good
+as ordered a truck-load already. I'll go down to the station to-morrow
+about 'em. Then I can come and see you man to man like, Miss, in the
+daylight.... That gentleman's not going away, is he?" He almost shrieked.
+
+I had only slid the chair a little further back, reaching behind me to tap
+on the leather of the screen, but he jumped like a rat.
+
+"No. Please attend to me, Mr. Turpin." She turned in her chair and faced
+him with his back to the door. It was an old and sordid little piece of
+scheming that she forced from him--his plea for the new cowshed at his
+landlady's expense, that he might with the covered manure pay his next
+year's rent out of the valuation after, as she made clear, he had bled the
+enriched pastures to the bone. I could not but admire the intensity of his
+greed, when I saw him out-facing for its sake whatever terror it was that
+ran wet on his forehead.
+
+I ceased to tap the leather--was, indeed, calculating the cost of the
+shed--when I felt my relaxed hand taken and turned softly between the soft
+hands of a child. So at last I had triumphed. In a moment I would turn and
+acquaint myself with those quick-footed wanderers....
+
+The little brushing kiss fell in the centre of my palm--as a gift on which
+the fingers were, once, expected to close: as the all faithful half-
+reproachful signal of a waiting child not used to neglect even when
+grown-ups were busiest--a fragment of the mute code devised very long ago.
+
+Then I knew. And it was as though I had known from the first day when I
+looked across the lawn at the high window.
+
+I heard the door shut. The woman turned to me in silence, and I felt that
+she knew.
+
+What time passed after this I cannot say. I was roused by the fall of a
+log, and mechanically rose to put it back. Then I returned to my place in
+the chair very close to the screen.
+
+"Now you understand," she whispered, across the packed shadows.
+
+"Yes, I understand--now. Thank you."
+
+"I--I only hear them." She bowed her head in her hands. "I have no right,
+you know--no other right. I have neither borne nor lost--neither borne nor
+lost!"
+
+"Be very glad then," said I, for my soul was torn open within me.
+
+"Forgive me!"
+
+She was still, and I went back to my sorrow and my joy.
+
+"It was because I loved them so," she said at last, brokenly. "_That_ was
+why it was, even from the first--even before I knew that they--they were
+all I should ever have. And I loved them so!"
+
+She stretched out her arms to the shadows and the shadows within the
+shadow.
+
+"They came because I loved them--because I needed them. I--I must have
+made them come. Was that wrong, think you?"
+
+"No--no."
+
+"I--I grant you that the toys and--and all that sort of thing were
+nonsense, but--but I used to so hate empty rooms myself when I was
+little." She pointed to the gallery. "And the passages all empty. ... And
+how could I ever bear the garden door shut? Suppose----"
+
+"Don't! For pity's sake, don't!" I cried. The twilight had brought a cold
+rain with gusty squalls that plucked at the leaded windows.
+
+"And the same thing with keeping the fire in all night. _I_ don't think it
+so foolish--do you?"
+
+I looked at the broad brick hearth, saw, through tears I believe, that
+there was no unpassable iron on or near it, and bowed my head.
+
+"I did all that and lots of other things--just to make believe. Then they
+came. I heard them, but I didn't know that they were not mine by right
+till Mrs. Madden told me----"
+
+"The butler's wife? What?"
+
+"One of them--I heard--she saw. And knew. Hers! _Not_ for me. I didn't
+know at first. Perhaps I was jealous. Afterwards, I began to understand
+that it was only because I loved them, not because----... Oh, you _must_
+bear or lose," she said piteously. "There is no other way--and yet they
+love me. They must! Don't they?"
+
+There was no sound in the room except the lapping voices of the fire, but
+we two listened intently, and she at least took comfort from what she
+heard. She recovered herself and half rose. I sat still in my chair by the
+screen.
+
+"Don't think me a wretch to whine about myself like this, but--but I'm all
+in the dark, you know, and _you_ can see."
+
+In truth I could see, and my vision confirmed me in my resolve, though
+that was like the very parting of spirit and flesh. Yet a little longer I
+would stay since it was the last time.
+
+"You think it is wrong, then?" she cried sharply, though I had said
+nothing.
+
+"Not for you. A thousand times no. For you it is right.... I am grateful
+to you beyond words. For me it would be wrong. For me only...."
+
+"Why?" she said, but passed her hand before her face as she had done at
+our second meeting in the wood. "Oh, I see," she went on simply as a
+child. "For you it would be wrong." Then with a little indrawn laugh,
+"and, d'you remember, I called you lucky--once--at first. You who must
+never come here again!"
+
+She left me to sit a little longer by the screen, and I heard the sound of
+her feet die out along the gallery above.
+
+
+
+
+MRS. BATHURST
+
+FROM LYDEN'S "IRENIUS"
+
+ACT III. Sc. II.
+
+Gow.--Had it been your Prince instead of a groom caught in this noose
+there's not an astrologer of the city----
+
+PRINCE.--Sacked! Sacked! We were a city yesterday.
+
+Gow.--So be it, but I was not governor. Not an astrologer, but would ha'
+sworn he'd foreseen it at the last versary of Venus, when Vulcan caught
+her with Mars in the house of stinking Capricorn. But since 'tis Jack of
+the Straw that hangs, the forgetful stars had it not on their tablets.
+
+PRINCE.--Another life! Were there any left to die? How did the
+poor fool come by it?
+
+Gow.--_Simpliciter_ thus. She that damned him to death knew not that she
+did it, or would have died ere she had done it. For she loved him. He
+that hangs him does so in obedience to the Duke, and asks no more than
+"Where is the rope?" The Duke, very exactly he hath told us, works God's
+will, in which holy employ he's not to be questioned. We have then left
+upon this finger, only Jack whose soul now plucks the left sleeve of
+Destiny in Hell to overtake why she clapped him up like a fly on a sunny
+wall. Whuff! Soh!
+
+PRINCE.--Your cloak, Ferdinand. I'll sleep now.
+
+FERDINAND.--Sleep, then.. He too, loved his life?
+
+Gow.--He was born of woman ... but at the end threw life from
+him, like your Prince, for a little sleep ... "Have I any look of a
+King?" said he, clanking his chain--"to be so baited on all sides by
+Fortune, that I must e'en die now to live with myself one day longer?" I
+left him railing at Fortune and woman's love.
+
+FERDINAND.--Ah, woman's love!
+
+_(Aside)_ Who knows not Fortune, glutted on easy thrones, Stealing from
+feasts as rare to coneycatch, Privily in the hedgerows for a clown With
+that same cruel-lustful hand and eye, Those nails and wedges, that one
+hammer and lead, And the very gerb of long-stored lightnings loosed
+Yesterday 'gainst some King.
+
+
+
+MRS. BATHURST
+The day that I chose to visit H.M.S. _Peridot_ in Simon's Bay was the day
+that the Admiral had chosen to send her up the coast. She was just
+steaming out to sea as my train came in, and since the rest of the Fleet
+were either coaling or busy at the rifle-ranges a thousand feet up the
+hill, I found myself stranded, lunchless, on the sea-front with no hope of
+return to Cape Town before five P.M. At this crisis I had the luck to come
+across my friend Inspector Hooper, Cape Government Railways, in command of
+an engine and a brake-van chalked for repair.
+
+"If you get something to eat," he said, "I'll run you down to Glengariff
+siding till the goods comes along. It's cooler there than here, you see."
+
+I got food and drink from the Greeks who sell all things at a price, and
+the engine trotted us a couple of miles up the line to a bay of drifted
+sand and a plank-platform half buried in sand not a hundred yards from the
+edge of the surf. Moulded dunes, whiter than any snow, rolled far inland
+up a brown and purple valley of splintered rocks and dry scrub. A crowd of
+Malays hauled at a net beside two blue and green boats on the beach; a
+picnic party danced and shouted barefoot where a tiny river trickled
+across the flat, and a circle of dry hills, whose feet were set in sands
+of silver, locked us in against a seven-coloured sea. At either horn of
+the bay the railway line, cut just above high water-mark, ran round a
+shoulder of piled rocks, and disappeared.
+
+"You see there's always a breeze here," said Hooper, opening the door as
+the engine left us in the siding on the sand, and the strong south-easter
+buffeting under Elsie's Peak dusted sand into our tickey beer. Presently
+he sat down to a file full of spiked documents. He had returned from a
+long trip up-country, where he had been reporting on damaged rolling-
+stock, as far away as Rhodesia. The weight of the bland wind on my
+eyelids; the song of it under the car roof, and high up among the rocks;
+the drift of fine grains chasing each other musically ashore; the tramp of
+the surf; the voices of the picnickers; the rustle of Hooper's file, and
+the presence of the assured sun, joined with the beer to cast me into
+magical slumber. The hills of False Bay were just dissolving into those of
+fairyland when I heard footsteps on the sand outside, and the clink of our
+couplings.
+
+"Stop that!" snapped Hooper, without raising his head from his work. "It's
+those dirty little Malay boys, you see: they're always playing with the
+trucks...."
+
+"Don't be hard on 'em. The railway's a general refuge in Africa," I
+replied.
+
+"'Tis--up-country at any rate. That reminds me," he felt in his waistcoat-
+pocket, "I've got a curiosity for you from Wankies--beyond Buluwayo. It's
+more of a souvenir perhaps than----"
+
+"The old hotel's inhabited," cried a voice. "White men from the language.
+Marines to the front! Come on, Pritch. Here's your Belmont. Wha--i--i!"
+
+The last word dragged like a rope as Mr. Pyecroft ran round to the open
+door, and stood looking up into my face. Behind him an enormous Sergeant
+of Marines trailed a stalk of dried seaweed, and dusted the sand nervously
+from his fingers.
+
+"What are you doing here?" I asked. "I thought the _Hierophant_ was down
+the coast?"
+
+"We came in last Tuesday--from Tristan D'Acunha--for overhaul, and we
+shall be in dockyard 'ands for two months, with boiler-seatings."
+
+"Come and sit down," Hooper put away the file.
+
+"This is Mr. Hooper of the Railway," I exclaimed, as Pyecroft turned to
+haul up the black-moustached sergeant.
+
+"This is Sergeant Pritchard, of the _Agaric_, an old shipmate," said he.
+"We were strollin' on the beach." The monster blushed and nodded. He
+filled up one side of the van when he sat down.
+
+"And this is my friend, Mr. Pyecroft," I added to Hooper, already busy
+with the extra beer which my prophetic soul had bought from the Greeks.
+
+"_Moi aussi_" quoth Pyecroft, and drew out beneath his coat a labelled
+quart bottle.
+
+"Why, it's Bass," cried Hooper.
+
+"It was Pritchard," said Pyecroft. "They can't resist him."
+
+"That's not so," said Pritchard, mildly.
+
+"Not _verbatim_ per'aps, but the look in the eye came to the same thing."
+
+"Where was it?" I demanded.
+
+"Just on beyond here--at Kalk Bay. She was slappin' a rug in a back
+verandah. Pritch hadn't more than brought his batteries to bear, before
+she stepped indoors an' sent it flyin' over the wall."
+
+Pyecroft patted the warm bottle.
+
+"It was all a mistake," said Pritchard. "I shouldn't wonder if she mistook
+me for Maclean. We're about of a size."
+
+I had heard householders of Muizenburg, St. James's, and Kalk Bay complain
+of the difficulty of keeping beer or good servants at the seaside, and I
+began to see the reason. None the less, it was excellent Bass, and I too
+drank to the health of that large-minded maid.
+
+"It's the uniform that fetches 'em, an' they fetch it," said Pyecroft. "My
+simple navy blue is respectable, but not fascinatin'. Now Pritch in 'is
+Number One rig is always 'purr Mary, on the terrace'--_ex officio_ as you
+might say."
+
+"She took me for Maclean, I tell you," Pritchard insisted. "Why--why--to
+listen to him you wouldn't think that only yesterday----"
+
+"Pritch," said Pyecroft, "be warned in time. If we begin tellin' what we
+know about each other we'll be turned out of the pub. Not to mention
+aggravated desertion on several occasions----"
+
+"Never anything more than absence without leaf--I defy you to prove it,"
+said the Sergeant hotly. "An' if it comes to that how about Vancouver in
+'87?"
+
+"How about it? Who pulled bow in the gig going ashore? Who told Boy
+Niven...?"
+
+"Surely you were court martialled for that?" I said. The story of Boy
+Niven who lured seven or eight able-bodied seamen and marines into the
+woods of British Columbia used to be a legend of the Fleet.
+
+"Yes, we were court-martialled to rights," said Pritchard, "but we should
+have been tried for murder if Boy Niven 'adn't been unusually tough. He
+told us he had an uncle 'oo'd give us land to farm. 'E said he was born at
+the back o' Vancouver Island, and _all_ the time the beggar was a balmy
+Barnado Orphan!"
+
+"_But_ we believed him," said Pyecroft. "I did--you did--Paterson did--an'
+'oo was the Marine that married the cocoanut-woman afterwards--him with
+the mouth?"
+
+"Oh, Jones, Spit-Kid Jones. I 'aven't thought of 'im in years," said
+Pritchard. "Yes, Spit-Kid believed it, an' George Anstey and Moon. We were
+very young an' very curious."
+
+"_But_ lovin' an' trustful to a degree," said Pyecroft.
+
+"Remember when 'e told us to walk in single file for fear o' bears?
+'Remember, Pye, when 'e 'opped about in that bog full o' ferns an' sniffed
+an' said 'e could smell the smoke of 'is uncle's farm? An' _all_ the time
+it was a dirty little out-lyin' uninhabited island. We walked round it in
+a day, an' come back to our boat lyin' on the beach. A whole day Boy Niven
+kept us walkin' in circles lookin' for 'is uncle's farm! He said his uncle
+was compelled by the law of the land to give us a farm!"
+
+"Don't get hot, Pritch. We believed," said Pyecroft.
+
+"He'd been readin' books. He only did it to get a run ashore an' have
+himself talked of. A day an' a night--eight of us--followin' Boy Niven
+round an uninhabited island in the Vancouver archipelago! Then the picket
+came for us an' a nice pack o' idiots we looked!"
+
+"What did you get for it?" Hooper asked.
+
+"Heavy thunder with continuous lightning for two hours. Thereafter sleet-
+squalls, a confused sea, and cold, unfriendly weather till conclusion o'
+cruise," said Pyecroft. "It was only what we expected, but what we felt,
+an' I assure you, Mr. Hooper, even a sailor-man has a heart to break, was
+bein' told that we able seamen an' promisin' marines 'ad misled Boy Niven.
+Yes, we poor back-to-the-landers was supposed to 'ave misled him! He
+rounded on us, o' course, an' got off easy."
+
+"Excep' for what we gave him in the steerin'-flat when we came out o'
+cells. 'Eard anything of 'im lately, Pye?"
+
+"Signal Boatswain in the Channel Fleet, I believe--Mr. L.L. Niven is."
+
+"An' Anstey died o' fever in Benin," Pritchard mused. "What come to Moon?
+Spit-Kid we know about."
+
+"Moon--Moon! Now where did I last...? Oh yes, when I was in the
+_Palladium_! I met Quigley at Buncrana Station. He told me Moon 'ad run
+when the _Astrild_ sloop was cruising among the South Seas three years
+back. He always showed signs o' bein' a Mormonastic beggar. Yes, he
+slipped off quietly an' they 'adn't time to chase 'im round the islands
+even if the navigatin' officer 'ad been equal to the job."
+
+"Wasn't he?" said Hooper.
+
+"Not so. Accordin' to Quigley the _Astrild_ spent half her commission
+rompin' up the beach like a she-turtle, an' the other half hatching
+turtles' eggs on the top o' numerous reefs. When she was docked at Sydney
+her copper looked like Aunt Maria's washing on the line--an' her 'midship
+frames was sprung. The commander swore the dockyard 'ad done it haulin'
+the pore thing on to the slips. They _do_ do strange things at sea, Mr.
+Hooper."
+
+"Ah! I'm not a tax-payer," said Hooper, and opened a fresh bottle. The
+Sergeant seemed to be one who had a difficulty in dropping subjects.
+
+"How it all comes back, don't it?" he said. "Why Moon must 'ave 'ad
+sixteen years' service before he ran."
+
+"It takes 'em at all ages. Look at--you know," said Pyecroft.
+
+"Who?" I asked.
+
+"A service man within eighteen months of his pension, is the party you're
+thinkin' of," said Pritchard. "A warrant 'oose name begins with a V.,
+isn't it?"
+
+"But, in a way o' puttin' it, we can't say that he actually did desert,"
+Pyecroft suggested.
+
+"Oh, no," said Pritchard. "It was only permanent absence up country
+without leaf. That was all."
+
+"Up country?" said Hooper. "Did they circulate his description?"
+
+"What for?" said Pritchard, most impolitely.
+
+"Because deserters are like columns in the war. They don't move away from
+the line, you see. I've known a chap caught at Salisbury that way tryin'
+to get to Nyassa. They tell me, but o' course I don't know, that they
+don't ask questions on the Nyassa Lake Flotilla up there. I've heard of a
+P. and O. quartermaster in full command of an armed launch there."
+
+"Do you think Click 'ud ha' gone up that way?" Pritchard asked.
+
+"There's no saying. He was sent up to Bloemfontein to take over some Navy
+ammunition left in the fort. We know he took it over and saw it into the
+trucks. Then there was no more Click--then or thereafter. Four months ago
+it transpired, and thus the _casus belli_ stands at present," said
+Pyecroft.
+
+"What were his marks?" said Hooper again.
+
+"Does the Railway get a reward for returnin' 'em, then?" said Pritchard.
+
+"If I did d'you suppose I'd talk about it?" Hooper retorted angrily.
+
+"You seemed so very interested," said Pritchard with equal crispness.
+
+"Why was he called Click?" I asked to tide over an uneasy little break in
+the conversation. The two men were staring at each other very fixedly.
+
+"Because of an ammunition hoist carryin' away," said Pyecroft. "And it
+carried away four of 'is teeth--on the lower port side, wasn't it, Pritch?
+The substitutes which he bought weren't screwed home in a manner o'
+sayin'. When he talked fast they used to lift a little on the bed plate.
+'Ence, 'Click.' They called 'im a superior man which is what we'd call a
+long, black-'aired, genteely speakin', 'alf-bred beggar on the lower
+deck."
+
+"Four false teeth on the lower left jaw," said Hooper, his hand in his
+waistcoat pocket. "What tattoo marks?"
+
+"Look here," began Pritchard, half rising. "I'm sure we're very grateful
+to you as a gentleman for your 'orspitality, but per'aps we may 'ave made
+an error in--"
+
+I looked at Pyecroft for aid, Hooper was crimsoning rapidly.
+
+"If the fat marine now occupying the foc'sle will kindly bring 'is _status
+quo_ to an anchor yet once more, we may be able to talk like gentlemen--
+not to say friends," said Pyecroft. "He regards you, Mr. Hooper, as a
+emissary of the Law."
+
+"I only wish to observe that when a gentleman exhibits such a peculiar, or
+I should rather say, such a _bloomin'_ curiosity in identification marks
+as our friend here----"
+
+"Mr. Pritchard," I interposed, "I'll take all the responsibility for Mr.
+Hooper."
+
+"An' _you_'ll apologise all round," said Pyecroft. "You're a rude little
+man, Pritch."
+
+"But how was I----" he began, wavering.
+
+"I don't know an' I don't care. Apologise!"
+
+The giant looked round bewildered and took our little hands into his vast
+grip, one by one. "I was wrong," he said meekly as a sheep. "My suspicions
+was unfounded. Mr. Hooper, I apologise."
+
+"You did quite right to look out for your own end o' the line," said
+Hooper. "I'd ha' done the same with a gentleman I didn't know, you see. If
+you don't mind I'd like to hear a little more o' your Mr. Vickery. It's
+safe with me, you see."
+
+"Why did Vickery run," I began, but Pyecroft's smile made me turn my
+question to "Who was she?"
+
+"She kep' a little hotel at Hauraki--near Auckland," said Pyecroft.
+
+"By Gawd!" roared Pritchard, slapping his hand on his leg. "Not Mrs.
+Bathurst!"
+
+Pyecroft nodded slowly, and the Sergeant called all the powers of darkness
+to witness his bewilderment.
+
+"So far as I could get at it Mrs. B. was the lady in question."
+
+"But Click was married," cried Pritchard.
+
+"An' 'ad a fifteen year old daughter. 'E's shown me her photograph.
+Settin' that aside, so to say, 'ave you ever found these little things
+make much difference? Because I haven't."
+
+"Good Lord Alive an' Watchin'!... Mrs. Bathurst...." Then with another
+roar: "You can say what you please, Pye, but you don't make me believe it
+was any of 'er fault. She wasn't _that!_"
+
+"If I was going to say what I please, I'd begin by callin' you a silly ox
+an' work up to the higher pressures at leisure. I'm trying to say solely
+what transpired. M'rover, for once you're right. It wasn't her fault."
+
+"You couldn't 'aven't made me believe it if it 'ad been," was the answer.
+
+Such faith in a Sergeant of Marines interested me greatly. "Never mind
+about that," I cried. "Tell me what she was like."
+
+"She was a widow," said Pyecroft. "Left so very young and never
+re-spliced. She kep' a little hotel for warrants and non-coms close to
+Auckland, an' she always wore black silk, and 'er neck--"
+
+"You ask what she was like," Pritchard broke in. "Let me give you an
+instance. I was at Auckland first in '97, at the end o' the _Marroquin's_
+commission, an' as I'd been promoted I went up with the others. She used
+to look after us all, an' she never lost by it--not a penny! 'Pay me now,'
+she'd say, 'or settle later. I know you won't let me suffer. Send the
+money from home if you like,' Why, gentlemen all, I tell you I've seen
+that lady take her own gold watch an' chain off her neck in the bar an'
+pass it to a bosun 'oo'd come ashore without 'is ticker an' 'ad to catch
+the last boat. 'I don't know your name,' she said, 'but when you've done
+with it, you'll find plenty that know me on the front. Send it back by one
+o' them.' And it was worth thirty pounds if it was worth 'arf a crown. The
+little gold watch, Pye, with the blue monogram at the back. But, as I was
+sayin', in those days she kep' a beer that agreed with me--Slits it was
+called. One way an' another I must 'ave punished a good few bottles of it
+while we was in the bay--comin' ashore every night or so. Chaffin across
+the bar like, once when we were alone, 'Mrs. B.,' I said, 'when next I
+call I want you to remember that this is my particular--just as you're my
+particular?' (She'd let you go _that_ far!) 'Just as you're my
+particular,' I said. 'Oh, thank you, Sergeant Pritchard,' she says, an'
+put 'er hand up to the curl be'ind 'er ear. Remember that way she had,
+Pye?"
+
+"I think so," said the sailor.
+
+"Yes, 'Thank you, Sergeant Pritchard,' she says. 'The least I can do is to
+mark it for you in case you change your mind. There's no great demand for
+it in the Fleet,' she says, 'but to make sure I'll put it at the back o'
+the shelf,' an' she snipped off a piece of her hair ribbon with that old
+dolphin cigar cutter on the bar--remember it, Pye?--an' she tied a bow
+round what was left--just four bottles. That was '97--no, '96. In '98 I
+was in the _Resiliant_--China station--full commission. In Nineteen One,
+mark you, I was in the _Carthusian_, back in Auckland Bay again. Of course
+I went up to Mrs. B.'s with the rest of us to see how things were goin'.
+They were the same as ever. (Remember the big tree on the pavement by the
+side-bar, Pye?) I never said anythin' in special (there was too many of us
+talkin' to her), but she saw me at once."
+
+"That wasn't difficult?" I ventured.
+
+"Ah, but wait. I was comin' up to the bar, when, 'Ada,' she says to her
+niece, 'get me Sergeant Pritchard's particular,' and, gentlemen all, I
+tell you before I could shake 'ands with the lady, there were those four
+bottles o' Slits, with 'er 'air ribbon in a bow round each o' their necks,
+set down in front o' me, an' as she drew the cork she looked at me under
+her eyebrows in that blindish way she had o' lookin', an', 'Sergeant
+Pritchard,' she says, 'I do 'ope you 'aven't changed your mind about your
+particulars.' That's the kind o' woman she was--after five years!"
+
+"I don't _see_ her yet somehow," said Hooper, but with sympathy.
+
+"She--she never scrupled to feed a lame duck or set 'er foot on a scorpion
+at any time of 'er life," Pritchard added valiantly.
+
+"That don't help me either. My mother's like that for one."
+
+The giant heaved inside his uniform and rolled his eyes at the car-roof.
+Said Pyecroft suddenly:--
+
+"How many women have you been intimate with all over the world, Pritch?"
+
+Pritchard blushed plum colour to the short hairs of his seventeen-inch
+neck.
+
+"'Undreds," said Pyecroft. "So've I. How many of 'em can you remember in
+your own mind, settin' aside the first--an' per'aps the last--_and one
+more_?"
+
+"Few, wonderful few, now I tax myself," said Sergeant Pritchard,
+relievedly.
+
+"An' how many times might you 'ave been at Aukland?"
+
+"One--two," he began. "Why, I can't make it more than three times in ten
+years. But I can remember every time that I ever saw Mrs. B."
+
+"So can I--an' I've only been to Auckland twice--how she stood an' what
+she was sayin' an' what she looked like. That's the secret. 'Tisn't
+beauty, so to speak, nor good talk necessarily. It's just It. Some
+women'll stay in a man's memory if they once walked down a street, but
+most of 'em you can live with a month on end, an' next commission you'd be
+put to it to certify whether they talked in their sleep or not, as one
+might say."
+
+"Ah," said Hooper. "That's more the idea. I've known just two women of
+that nature."
+
+"An' it was no fault o' theirs?" asked Pritchard.
+
+"None whatever. I know that!"
+
+"An' if a man gets struck with that kind o' woman, Mr. Hooper?" Pritchard
+went on.
+
+"He goes crazy--or just saves himself," was the slow answer.
+
+"You've hit it," said the Sergeant. "You've seen an' known somethin' in
+the course o' your life, Mr. Hooper. I'm lookin' at you!" He set down his
+bottle.
+
+"And how often had Vickery seen her?" I asked.
+
+"That's the dark an' bloody mystery," Pyecroft answered. "I'd never come
+across him till I come out in the _Hierophant_ just now, an' there wasn't
+any one in the ship who knew much about him. You see, he was what you call
+a superior man. 'E spoke to me once or twice about Auckland and Mrs. B. on
+the voyage out. I called that to mind subsequently. There must 'ave been a
+good deal between 'em, to my way o' thinkin'. Mind you I'm only giving you
+my _sum_ of it all, because all I know is second-hand so to speak, or
+rather I should say more than second-'and."
+
+"How?" said Hooper peremptorily. "You must have seen it or heard it."
+
+"Yes," said Pyecroft. "I used to think seein' and hearin' was the only
+regulation aids to ascertainin' facts, but as we get older we get more
+accommodatin'. The cylinders work easier, I suppose.... Were you in Cape
+Town last December when Phyllis's Circus came?"
+
+"No--up country," said Hooper, a little nettled at the change of venue.
+
+"I ask because they had a new turn of a scientific nature called 'Home and
+Friends for a Tickey.'"
+
+"Oh, you mean the cinematograph--the pictures of prize-fights and
+steamers. I've seen 'em up country."
+
+"Biograph or cinematograph was what I was alludin' to. London Bridge with
+the omnibuses--a troopship goin' to the war--marines on parade at
+Portsmouth an' the Plymouth Express arrivin' at Paddin'ton."
+
+"Seen 'em all. Seen 'em all," said Hooper impatiently.
+
+"We _Hierophants_ came in just before Christmas week an' leaf was easy."
+
+"I think a man gets fed up with Cape Town quicker than anywhere else on
+the station. Why, even Durban's more like Nature. We was there for
+Christmas," Pritchard put in.
+
+"Not bein' a devotee of Indian _peeris_, as our Doctor said to the Pusser,
+I can't exactly say. Phyllis's was good enough after musketry practice at
+Mozambique. I couldn't get off the first two or three nights on account of
+what you might call an imbroglio with our Torpedo Lieutenant in the
+submerged flat, where some pride of the West country had sugared up a
+gyroscope; but I remember Vickery went ashore with our Carpenter Rigdon--
+old Crocus we called him. As a general rule Crocus never left 'is ship
+unless an' until he was 'oisted out with a winch, but _when_ 'e went 'e
+would return noddin' like a lily gemmed with dew. We smothered him down
+below that night, but the things 'e said about Vickery as a fittin'
+playmate for a Warrant Officer of 'is cubic capacity, before we got him
+quiet, was what I should call pointed."
+
+"I've been with Crocus--in the _Redoubtable_," said the Sergeant. "He's a
+character if there is one."
+
+"Next night I went into Cape Town with Dawson and Pratt; but just at the
+door of the Circus I came across Vickery. 'Oh!' he says, 'you're the man
+I'm looking for. Come and sit next me. This way to the shillin' places!'
+I went astern at once, protestin' because tickey seats better suited my
+so-called finances. 'Come on,' says Vickery, 'I'm payin'.' Naturally I
+abandoned Pratt and Dawson in anticipation o' drinks to match the seats.
+'No,' he says, when this was 'inted--'not now. Not now. As many as you
+please afterwards, but I want you sober for the occasion.' I caught 'is
+face under a lamp just then, an' the appearance of it quite cured me of my
+thirsts. Don't mistake. It didn't frighten me. It made me anxious. I can't
+tell you what it was like, but that was the effect which it 'ad on me. If
+you want to know, it reminded me of those things in bottles in those
+herbalistic shops at Plymouth--preserved in spirits of wine. White an'
+crumply things--previous to birth as you might say."
+
+"You 'ave a beastial mind, Pye," said the Sergeant, relighting his pipe.
+
+"Perhaps. We were in the front row, an' 'Home an' Friends' came on early.
+Vickery touched me on the knee when the number went up. 'If you see
+anything that strikes you,' he says, 'drop me a hint'; then he went on
+clicking. We saw London Bridge an' so forth an' so on, an' it was most
+interestin'. I'd never seen it before. You 'eard a little dynamo like
+buzzin', but the pictures were the real thing--alive an' movin'."
+
+"I've seen 'em," said Hooper. "Of course they are taken from the very
+thing itself--you see."
+
+"Then the Western Mail came in to Paddin'ton on the big magic lantern
+sheet. First we saw the platform empty an' the porters standin' by. Then
+the engine come in, head on, an' the women in the front row jumped: she
+headed so straight. Then the doors opened and the passengers came out and
+the porters got the luggage--just like life. Only--only when any one came
+down too far towards us that was watchin', they walked right out o' the
+picture, so to speak. I was 'ighly interested, I can tell you. So were all
+of us. I watched an old man with a rug 'oo'd dropped a book an' was tryin'
+to pick it up, when quite slowly, from be'ind two porters--carryin' a
+little reticule an' lookin' from side to side--comes out Mrs. Bathurst.
+There was no mistakin' the walk in a hundred thousand. She come forward--
+right forward--she looked out straight at us with that blindish look which
+Pritch alluded to. She walked on and on till she melted out of the
+picture--like--like a shadow jumpin' over a candle, an' as she went I
+'eard Dawson in the ticky seats be'ind sing out: 'Christ! There's
+Mrs. B.!'"
+
+Hooper swallowed his spittle and leaned forward intently.
+
+"Vickery touched me on the knee again. He was clickin' his four false
+teeth with his jaw down like an enteric at the last kick. 'Are you sure?'
+says he. 'Sure,' I says, 'didn't you 'ear Dawson give tongue? Why, it's
+the woman herself.' 'I was sure before,' he says, 'but I brought you to
+make sure. Will you come again with me to-morrow?'
+
+"'Willingly,' I says, 'it's like meetin' old friends.'
+
+"'Yes,' he says, openin' his watch, 'very like. It will be four-and-twenty
+hours less four minutes before I see her again. Come and have a drink,' he
+says. 'It may amuse you, but it's no sort of earthly use to me.' He went
+out shaking his head an' stumblin' over people's feet as if he was drunk
+already. I anticipated a swift drink an' a speedy return, because I wanted
+to see the performin' elephants. Instead o' which Vickery began to
+navigate the town at the rate o' knots, lookin' in at a bar every three
+minutes approximate Greenwich time. I'm not a drinkin' man, though there
+are those present"--he cocked his unforgetable eye at me--"who may have
+seen me more or less imbued with the fragrant spirit. None the less, when
+I drink I like to do it at anchor an' not at an average speed of eighteen
+knots on the measured mile. There's a tank as you might say at the back o'
+that big hotel up the hill--what do they call it?"
+
+"The Molteno Reservoir," I suggested, and Hooper nodded.
+
+"That was his limit o' drift. We walked there an' we come down through the
+Gardens--there was a South-Easter blowin'--an' we finished up by the
+Docks. Then we bore up the road to Salt River, and wherever there was a
+pub Vickery put in sweatin'. He didn't look at what he drunk--he didn't
+look at the change. He walked an' he drunk an' he perspired in rivers. I
+understood why old Crocus 'ad come back in the condition 'e did, because
+Vickery an' I 'ad two an' a half hours o' this gipsy manoeuvre an' when we
+got back to the station there wasn't a dry atom on or in me."
+
+"Did he say anything?" Pritchard asked.
+
+"The sum total of 'is conversation from 7.45 P.M. till 11.15 P.M. was
+'Let's have another.' Thus the mornin' an' the evenin' were the first day,
+as Scripture says.... To abbreviate a lengthy narrative, I went into Cape
+Town for five consecutive nights with Master Vickery, and in that time I
+must 'ave logged about fifty knots over the ground an' taken in two gallon
+o' all the worst spirits south the Equator. The evolution never varied.
+Two shilling seats for us two; five minutes o' the pictures, an' perhaps
+forty-five seconds o' Mrs. B. walking down towards us with that blindish
+look in her eyes an' the reticule in her hand. Then out walk--and drink
+till train time."
+
+"What did you think?" said Hooper, his hand fingering his waistcoat
+pocket.
+
+"Several things," said Pyecroft. "To tell you the truth, I aren't quite
+done thinkin' about it yet. Mad? The man was a dumb lunatic--must 'ave
+been for months--years p'raps. I know somethin' o' maniacs, as every man
+in the Service must. I've been shipmates with a mad skipper--an' a lunatic
+Number One, but never both together I thank 'Eaven. I could give you the
+names o' three captains now 'oo ought to be in an asylum, but you don't
+find me interferin' with the mentally afflicted till they begin to lay
+about 'em with rammers an' winch-handles. Only once I crept up a little
+into the wind towards Master Vickery. 'I wonder what she's doin' in
+England,' I says. 'Don't it seem to you she's lookin' for somebody?' That
+was in the Gardens again, with the South-Easter blowin' as we were makin'
+our desperate round. 'She's lookin' for me,' he says, stoppin' dead under
+a lamp an' clickin'. When he wasn't drinkin', in which case all 'is teeth
+clicked on the glass, 'e was clickin' 'is four false teeth like a Marconi
+ticker. 'Yes! lookin' for me,' he said, an' he went on very softly an' as
+you might say affectionately. '_But?_ he went on, 'in future, Mr.
+Pyecroft, I should take it kindly of you if you'd confine your remarks to
+the drinks set before you. Otherwise,' he says, 'with the best will in the
+world towards you, I may find myself guilty of murder! Do you understand?'
+he says. 'Perfectly,' I says, 'but would it at all soothe you to know that
+in such a case the chances o' your being killed are precisely equivalent
+to the chances o' me being outed.' 'Why, no,' he says, 'I'm almost afraid
+that 'ud be a temptation,'
+
+"Then I said--we was right under the lamp by that arch at the end o' the
+Gardens where the trams came round--'Assumin' murder was done--or
+attempted murder--I put it to you that you would still be left so badly
+crippled, as one might say, that your subsequent capture by the police--to
+'oom you would 'ave to explain--would be largely inevitable.' 'That's
+better,' 'e says, passin' 'is hands over his forehead. 'That's much
+better, because,' he says, 'do you know, as I am now, Pye, I'm not so sure
+if I could explain anything much.' Those were the only particular words I
+had with 'im in our walks as I remember."
+
+"What walks!" said Hooper. "Oh my soul, what walks!"
+
+"They were chronic," said Pyecroft gravely, "but I didn't anticipate any
+danger till the Circus left. Then I anticipated that, bein' deprived of
+'is stimulant, he might react on me, so to say, with a hatchet.
+Consequently, after the final performance an' the ensuin' wet walk, I kep'
+myself aloof from my superior officer on board in the execution of 'is
+duty as you might put it. Consequently, I was interested when the sentry
+informs me while I was passin' on my lawful occasions that Click had asked
+to see the captain. As a general rule warrant officers don't dissipate
+much of the owner's time, but Click put in an hour and more be'ind that
+door. My duties kep' me within eyeshot of it. Vickery came out first, an'
+'e actually nodded at me an' smiled. This knocked me out o' the boat,
+because, havin' seen 'is face for five consecutive nights, I didn't
+anticipate any change there more than a condenser in hell, so to speak.
+The owner emerged later. His face didn't read off at all, so I fell back
+on his cox, 'oo'd been eight years with him and knew him better than boat
+signals. Lamson--that was the cox's name--crossed 'is bows once or twice
+at low speeds an' dropped down to me visibly concerned. 'He's shipped 'is
+court-martial face,' says Lamson. 'Some one's goin' to be 'ung. I've never
+seen that look but once before when they chucked the gun-sights overboard
+in the _Fantastic_.' Throwin' gun-sights overboard, Mr. Hooper, is the
+equivalent for mutiny in these degenerate days. It's done to attract the
+notice of the authorities an' the _Western Mornin' News_--generally by a
+stoker. Naturally, word went round the lower deck an' we had a private
+over'aul of our little consciences. But, barrin' a shirt which a second-
+class stoker said 'ad walked into 'is bag from the marines flat by itself,
+nothin' vital transpired. The owner went about flyin' the signal for
+'attend public execution,' so to say, but there was no corpse at the
+yardarm. 'E lunched on the beach an' 'e returned with 'is regulation
+harbour-routine face about 3 P. M. Thus Lamson lost prestige for raising
+false alarms. The only person 'oo might 'ave connected the epicycloidal
+gears correctly was one Pyecroft, when he was told that Mr. Vickery would
+go up country that same evening to take over certain naval ammunition left
+after the war in Bloemfontein Fort. No details was ordered to accompany
+Master Vickery. He was told off first person singular--as a unit---by
+himself."
+
+The marine whistled penetratingly.
+
+"That's what I thought," said Pyecroft. "I went ashore with him in the
+cutter an' 'e asked me to walk through the station. He was clickin'
+audibly, but otherwise seemed happy-ish.
+
+"'You might like to know,' he says, stoppin' just opposite the Admiral's
+front gate, 'that Phyllis's Circus will be performin' at Worcester
+to-morrow night. So I shall see 'er yet once again. You've been very
+patient with me,' he says.
+
+"'Look here, Vickery,' I said, 'this thing's come to be just as much as I
+can stand. Consume your own smoke. I don't want to know any more.'
+
+"'You!' he said. 'What have you got to complain of?--you've only 'ad to
+watch. I'm _it_,' he says, 'but that's neither here nor there,' he says.
+'I've one thing to say before shakin' 'ands. Remember,' 'e says--we were
+just by the Admiral's garden-gate then--'remember, that I am _not_ a
+murderer, because my lawful wife died in childbed six weeks after I came
+out. That much at least I am clear of,' 'e says.
+
+"'Then what have you done that signifies?' I said. 'What's the rest of
+it?'
+
+"'The rest,' 'e says, 'is silence,' an' he shook 'ands and went clickin'
+into Simons Town station."
+
+"Did he stop to see Mrs. Bathurst at Worcester?" I asked.
+
+"It's not known. He reported at Bloemfontein, saw the ammunition into the
+trucks, and then 'e disappeared. Went out--deserted, if you care to put it
+so--within eighteen months of his pension, an' if what 'e said about 'is
+wife was true he was a free man as 'e then stood. How do you read it off?"
+
+"Poor devil!" said Hooper. "To see her that way every night! I wonder what
+it was."
+
+"I've made my 'ead ache in that direction many a long night."
+
+"But I'll swear Mrs. B. 'ad no 'and in it," said the Sergeant unshaken.
+
+"No. Whatever the wrong or deceit was, he did it, I'm sure o' that. I 'ad
+to look at 'is face for five consecutive nights. I'm not so fond o'
+navigatin' about Cape Town with a South-Easter blowin' these days. I can
+hear those teeth click, so to say."
+
+"Ah, those teeth," said Hooper, and his hand went to his waistcoat pocket
+once more. "Permanent things false teeth are. You read about 'em in all
+the murder trials."
+
+"What d'you suppose the captain knew--or did?" I asked.
+
+"I never turned my searchlight that way," Pyecroft answered unblushingly.
+
+We all reflected together, and drummed on empty beer bottles as the
+picnic-party, sunburned, wet, and sandy, passed our door singing "The
+Honeysuckle and the Bee."
+
+"Pretty girl under that kapje," said Pyecroft.
+
+"They never circulated his description?" said Pritchard.
+
+"I was askin' you before these gentlemen came," said Hooper to me,
+"whether you knew Wankies--on the way to the Zambesi--beyond Buluwayo?"
+
+"Would he pass there--tryin' to get to that Lake what's 'is name?" said
+Pritchard.
+
+Hooper shook his head and went on: "There's a curious bit o' line there,
+you see. It runs through solid teak forest--a sort o' mahogany really--
+seventy-two miles without a curve. I've had a train derailed there twenty-
+three times in forty miles. I was up there a month ago relievin' a sick
+inspector, you see. He told me to look out for a couple of tramps in the
+teak."
+
+"Two?" Pyecroft said. "I don't envy that other man if----"
+
+"We get heaps of tramps up there since the war. The inspector told me I'd
+find 'em at M'Bindwe siding waiting to go North. He'd given 'em some grub
+and quinine, you see. I went up on a construction train. I looked out for
+'em. I saw them miles ahead along the straight, waiting in the teak. One
+of 'em was standin' up by the dead-end of tke siding an' the other was
+squattin' down lookin' up at 'im, you see."
+
+"What did you do for 'em?" said Pritchard.
+
+"There wasn't much I could do, except bury 'em. There'd been a bit of a
+thunderstorm in the teak, you see, and they were both stone dead and as
+black as charcoal. That's what they really were, you see--charcoal. They
+fell to bits when we tried to shift 'em. The man who was standin' up had
+the false teeth. I saw 'em shinin' against the black. Fell to bits he did
+too, like his mate squatting down an' watchin' him, both of 'em all wet in
+the rain. Both burned to charcoal, you see. And--that's what made me ask
+about marks just now--the false-toother was tattooed on the arms and
+chest--a crown and foul anchor with M.V. above."
+
+"I've seen that," said Pyecroft quickly. "It was so."
+
+"But if he was all charcoal-like?" said Pritchard, shuddering.
+
+"You know how writing shows up white on a burned letter? Well, it was like
+that, you see. We buried 'em in the teak and I kept... But he was a friend
+of you two gentlemen, you see."
+
+Mr. Hooper brought his hand away from his waistcoat-pocket--empty.
+
+Pritchard covered his face with his hands for a moment, like a child
+shutting out an ugliness.
+
+"And to think of her at Hauraki!" he murmured--"with 'er 'air-ribbon on my
+beer. 'Ada,' she said to her niece... Oh, my Gawd!"...
+
+  "On a summer afternoon, when the honeysuckle blooms,
+  And all Nature seems at rest,
+  Underneath the bower, 'mid the perfume of the flower,
+  Sat a maiden with the one she loves the best----"
+
+sang the picnic-party waiting for their train at Glengariff.
+
+"Well, I don't know how you feel about it," said Pyecroft, "but 'avin'
+seen 'is face for five consecutive nights on end, I'm inclined to finish
+what's left of the beer an' thank Gawd he's dead!"
+
+
+
+
+BELOW THE MILL DAM
+
+"OUR FATHERS ALSO"
+
+  By--they are by with mirth and tears,
+  Wit or the works of Desire--
+  Cushioned about on the kindly years
+  Between the wall and the fire.
+
+  The grapes are pressed, the corn is shocked--
+  Standeth no more to glean;
+  For the Gates of Love and Learning locked
+  When they went out between.
+
+  All lore our Lady Venus bares
+  Signalled it was or told
+  By the dear lips long given to theirs
+  And longer to the mould.
+
+  All Profit, all Device, all Truth
+  Written it was or said
+  By the mighty men of their mighty youth.
+  Which is mighty being dead.
+
+  The film that floats before their eyes
+  The Temple's Veil they call;
+  And the dust that on the Shewbread lies
+  Is holy over all.
+
+  Warn them of seas that slip our yoke
+  Of slow conspiring stars--
+  The ancient Front of Things unbroke
+  But heavy with new wars?
+
+  By--they are by with mirth and tears.
+  Wit or the waste of Desire--
+  Cushioned about on the kindly years
+  Between the wall and the fire.
+
+
+BELOW THE MILL DAM
+
+"Book--Book--Domesday Book!" They were letting in the water for the evening
+stint at Robert's Mill, and the wooden Wheel where lived the Spirit of the
+Mill settled to its nine hundred year old song: "Here Azor, a freeman,
+held one rod, but it never paid geld. _Nun-nun-nunquam geldavit_. Here
+Reinbert has one villein and four cottars with one plough--and wood for
+six hogs and two fisheries of sixpence and a mill of ten shillings--_unum
+molinum_--one mill. Reinbert's mill--Robert's Mill. Then and afterwards
+and now--_tunc et post et modo_--Robert's Mill. Book--Book--Domesday
+Book!"
+
+"I confess," said the Black Rat on the crossbeam, luxuriously trimming his
+whiskers--"I confess I am not above appreciating my position and all it
+means." He was a genuine old English black rat, a breed which, report
+says, is rapidly diminishing before the incursions of the brown variety.
+
+"Appreciation is the surest sign of inadequacy," said the Grey Cat, coiled
+up on a piece of sacking.
+
+"But I know what you mean," she added. "To sit by right at the heart of
+things--eh?"
+
+"Yes," said the Black Rat, as the old mill shook and the heavy stones
+thuttered on the grist. "To possess--er--all this environment as an
+integral part of one's daily life must insensibly of course ... You see?"
+
+"I feel," said the Grey Cat. "Indeed, if _we_ are not saturated with the
+spirit of the Mill, who should be?"
+
+"Book--Book--Domesday Book!" the Wheel, set to his work, was running off
+the tenure of the whole rape, for he knew Domesday Book backwards and
+forwards: "_In Ferle tenuit Abbatia de Wiltuna unam hidam et unam virgam
+et dimidiam. Nunquam geldavit_. And Agemond, a freeman, has half a hide
+and one rod. I remember Agemond well. Charmin' fellow--friend of mine. He
+married a Norman girl in the days when we rather looked down on the
+Normans as upstarts. An' Agemond's dead? So he is. Eh, dearie me! dearie
+me! I remember the wolves howling outside his door in the big frost of Ten
+Fifty-Nine.... _Essewelde hundredum nunquam geldum reddidit_. Book! Book!
+Domesday Book!"
+
+"After all," the Grey Cat continued, "atmospere is life. It is the
+influences under which we live that count in the long run. Now, outside"--
+she cocked one ear towards the half-opened door--"there is an absurd
+convention that rats and cats are, I won't go so far as to say natural
+enemies, but opposed forces. Some such ruling may be crudely effective--I
+don't for a minute presume to set up my standards as final--among the
+ditches; but from the larger point of view that one gains by living at the
+heart of things, it seems for a rule of life a little overstrained. Why,
+because some of your associates have, shall I say, liberal views on the
+ultimate destination of a sack of--er--middlings don't they call them----"
+
+"Something of that sort," said the Black Rat, a most sharp and sweet-
+toothed judge of everything ground in the mill for the last three years.
+
+"Thanks--middlings be it. _Why_, as I was saying, must I disarrange my fur
+and my digestion to chase you round the dusty arena whenever we happen to
+meet?"
+
+"As little reason," said the Black Rat, "as there is for me, who, I trust,
+am a person of ordinarily decent instincts, to wait till you have gone on
+a round of calls, and then to assassinate your very charming children."
+
+"Exactly! It has its humorous side though." The Grey Cat yawned. "The
+miller seems afflicted by it. He shouted large and vague threats to my
+address, last night at tea, that he wasn't going to keep cats who 'caught
+no mice.' Those were his words. I remember the grammar sticking in my
+throat like a herring-bone."
+
+"And what did you do?"
+
+"What does one do when a barbarian utters? One ceases to utter and
+removes. I removed--towards his pantry. It was a _riposte_ he might
+appreciate."
+
+"Really those people grow absolutely insufferable," said the Black Rat.
+"There is a local ruffian who answers to the name of Mangles--a builder--
+who has taken possession of the outhouses on the far side of the Wheel for
+the last fortnight. He has constructed cubical horrors in red brick where
+those deliciously picturesque pigstyes used to stand. Have you noticed?"
+
+"There has been much misdirected activity of late among the humans. They
+jabber inordinately. I haven't yet been able to arrive at their reason for
+existence." The Cat yawned.
+
+"A couple of them came in here last week with wires, and fixed them all
+about the walls. Wires protected by some abominable composition, ending in
+iron brackets with glass bulbs. Utterly useless for any purpose and
+artistically absolutely hideous. What do they mean?"
+
+"Aaah! I have known _four_-and-twenty leaders of revolt in Faenza," said
+the Cat, who kept good company with the boarders spending a summer at the
+Mill Farm. "It means nothing except that humans occasionally bring their
+dogs with them. I object to dogs in all forms."
+
+"Shouldn't object to dogs," said the Wheel sleepily.... "The Abbot of
+Wilton kept the best pack in the county. He enclosed all the Harryngton
+Woods to Sturt Common. Aluric, a freeman, was dispossessed of his holding.
+They tried the case at Lewes, but he got no change out of William de
+Warrenne on the bench. William de Warrenne fined Aluric eight and
+fourpence for treason, and the Abbot of Wilton excommunicated him for
+blasphemy. Aluric was no sportsman. Then the Abbot's brother married ...
+I've forgotten her name, but she was a charmin' little woman. The Lady
+Philippa was her daughter. That was after the barony was conferred. She
+rode devilish straight to hounds. They were a bit throatier than we breed
+now, but a good pack: one of the best. The Abbot kept 'em in splendid
+shape. Now, who was the woman the Abbot kept? Book--Book! I shall have to
+go right back to Domesday and work up the centuries: _Modo per omnia
+reddit burgum tunc--tunc--tunc_! Was it _burgum_ or _hundredum_? I shall
+remember in a minute. There's no hurry." He paused as he turned over
+silvered with showering drops.
+
+"This won't do," said the Waters in the sluice. "Keep moving."
+
+The Wheel swung forward; the Waters roared on the buckets and dropped down
+to the darkness below.
+
+"Noisier than usual," said the Black Rat. "It must have been raining up
+the valley."
+
+"Floods maybe," said the Wheel dreamily. "It isn't the proper season, but
+they can come without warning. I shall never forget the big one--when the
+Miller went to sleep and forgot to open the hatches. More than two hundred
+years ago it was, but I recall it distinctly. Most unsettling."
+
+"We lifted that wheel off his bearings," cried the Waters. "We said, 'Take
+away that bauble!' And in the morning he was five mile down the valley--
+hung up in a tree."
+
+"Vulgar!" said the Cat. "But I am sure he never lost his dignity."
+
+"We don't know. He looked like the Ace of Diamonds when we had finished
+with him.... Move on there! Keep on moving. Over! Get over!"
+
+"And why on this day more than any other," said the Wheel statelily. "I am
+not aware that my department requires the stimulus of external pressure to
+keep it up to its duties. I trust I have the elementary instincts of a
+gentleman."
+
+"Maybe," the Waters answered together, leaping down on the buckets. "We
+only know that you are very stiff on your bearings. Over, get over!"
+
+The Wheel creaked and groaned. There was certainly greater pressure upon
+him that he had ever felt, and his revolutions had increased from six and
+three-quarters to eight and a third per minute. But the uproar between the
+narrow, weed-hung walls annoyed the Grey Cat.
+
+"Isn't it almost time," she said plaintively, "that the person who is paid
+to understand these things shuts off those vehement drippings with that
+screw-thing on the top of that box-thing."
+
+"They'll be shut off at eight o'clock as usual," said Rat; "then we can go
+to dinner."
+
+"But we shan't be shut off till ever so late," said the Waters gaily. "We
+shall keep it up all night."
+
+"The ineradicable offensiveness of youth is partially compensated for by
+its eternal hopefulness," said the Cat. "Our dam is not, I am glad to say,
+designed to furnish water for more than four hours at a time. Reserve is
+Life."
+
+"Thank goodness!" said the Black Rat. "Then they can return to their
+native ditches."
+
+"Ditches!" cried the Waters; "Raven's Gill Brook is no ditch. It is almost
+navigable, and _we_ come from there away." They slid over solid and
+compact till the Wheel thudded under their weight.
+
+"Raven's Gill Brook," said the Rat. "_I_ never heard of Raven's Gill."
+
+"We are the waters of Harpenden Brook--down from under Callton Rise. Phew!
+how the race stinks compared with the heather country." Another five foot
+of water flung itself against the Wheel, broke, roared, gurgled, and was
+gone.
+
+"Indeed," said the Grey Cat, "I am sorry to tell you that Raven's Gill
+Brook is cut off from this valley by an absolutely impassable range of
+mountains, and Callton Rise is more than nine miles away. It belongs to
+another system entirely."
+
+"Ah yes," said the Rat, grinning, "but we forget that, for the young,
+water always runs uphill."
+
+"Oh, hopeless! hopeless! hopeless!" cried the Waters, descending open-
+palmed upon the Wheel "There is nothing between here and Raven's Gill
+Brook that a hundred yards of channelling and a few square feet of
+concrete could not remove; and hasn't removed!"
+
+"And Harpenden Brook is north of Raven's Gill and runs into Raven's Gill
+at the foot of Callton Rise, where ilex trees are, and _we_ come from
+there!" These were the glassy, clear waters of the high chalk.
+
+"And Batten's Ponds, that are fed by springs, have been led through
+Trott's Wood, taking the spare water from the old Witches' Spring under
+Churt Haw, and we--we--_we_ are their combined waters!" Those were the
+Waters from the upland bogs and moors--a porter-coloured, dusky, and foam-
+flecked flood.
+
+"It's all very interesting," purred the Cat to the sliding waters, "and I
+have no doubt that Trott's Woods and Bott's Woods are tremendously
+important places; but if you could manage to do your work--whose value I
+don't in the least dispute--a little more soberly, I, for one, should be
+grateful."
+
+"Book--book--book--book--book--Domesday Book!" The urged Wheel was fairly
+clattering now: "In Burgelstaltone a monk holds of Earl Godwin one hide
+and a half with eight villeins. There is a church--and a monk.... I
+remember that monk. Blessed if he could rattle his rosary off any quicker
+than I am doing now ... and wood for seven hogs. I must be running twelve
+to the minute ... almost as fast as Steam. Damnable invention, Steam! ...
+Surely it's time we went to dinner or prayers--or something. Can't keep up
+this pressure, day in and day out, and not feel it. I don't mind for
+myself, of course. _Noblesse oblige_, you know. I'm only thinking of the
+Upper and the Nether Millstones. They came out of the common rock. They
+can't be expected to----"
+
+"Don't worry on our account, please," said the Millstones huskily. "So
+long as you supply the power we'll supply the weight and the bite."
+
+"Isn't it a trifle blasphemous, though, to work you in this way?" grunted
+the Wheel. "I seem to remember something about the Mills of God grinding
+'slowly.' _Slowly_ was the word!"
+
+"But we are not the Mills of God. We're only the Upper and the Nether
+Millstones. We have received no instructions to be anything else. We are
+actuated by power transmitted through you."
+
+"Ah, but let us be merciful as we are strong. Think of all the beautiful
+little plants that grow on my woodwork. There are five varieties of rare
+moss within less than one square yard--and all these delicate jewels of
+nature are being grievously knocked about by this excessive rush of the
+water."
+
+"Umph!" growled the Millstones. "What with your religious scruples and
+your taste for botany we'd hardly know you for the Wheel that put the
+carter's son under last autumn. You never worried about _him_!"
+
+"He ought to have known better."
+
+"So ought your jewels of nature. Tell 'em to grow where it's safe."
+
+"How a purely mercantile life debases and brutalises!" said the Cat to the
+Rat.
+
+"They were such beautiful little plants too," said the Rat tenderly.
+"Maiden's-tongue and hart's-hair fern trellising all over the wall just as
+they do on the sides of churches in the Downs. Think what a joy the sight
+of them must be to our sturdy peasants pulling hay!"
+
+"Golly!" said the Millstones. "There's nothing like coming to the heart of
+things for information"; and they returned to the song that all English
+water-mills have sung from time beyond telling:
+
+  There was a jovial miller once
+  Lived on the River Dee,
+  And this the burden of his song
+  For ever used to be.
+
+Then, as fresh grist poured in and dulled the note:
+
+  I care for nobody--no not I,
+  And nobody cares for me.
+
+"Even these stones have absorbed something of our atmosphere," said the
+Grey Cat. "Nine-tenths of the trouble in this world comes from lack of
+detachment."
+
+"One of your people died from forgetting that, didn't she?" said the Rat.
+
+"One only. The example has sufficed us for generations."
+
+"Ah! but what happened to Don't Care?" the Waters demanded.
+
+"Brutal riding to death of the casual analogy is another mark of
+provincialism!" The Grey Cat raised her tufted chin. "I am going to sleep.
+With my social obligations I must snatch rest when I can; but, as our old
+friend here says, _Noblesse oblige_.... Pity me! Three functions to-night
+in the village, and a barn dance across the valley!"
+
+"There's no chance, I suppose, of your looking in on the loft about two.
+Some of our young people are going to amuse themselves with a new sacque-
+dance--best white flour only," said the Black Rat.
+
+"I believe I am officially supposed not to countenance that sort of thing,
+but youth is youth. ... By the way, the humans set my milk-bowl in the
+loft these days; I hope your youngsters respect it."
+
+"My dear lady," said the Black Rat, bowing, "you grieve me. You hurt me
+inexpressibly. After all these years, too!"
+
+"A general crush is so mixed--highways and hedges--all that sort of thing
+--and no one can answer for one's best friends. _I_ never try. So long as
+mine are amusin' and in full voice, and can hold their own at a tile-
+party, I'm as catholic as these mixed waters in the dam here!"
+
+"We aren't mixed. We _have_ mixed. We are one now," said the Waters
+sulkily.
+
+"Still uttering?" said the Cat. "Never mind, here's the Miller coming to
+shut you off. Ye-es, I have known--_four_--or five is it?--and twenty
+leaders of revolt in Faenza.... A little more babble in the dam, a little
+more noise in the sluice, a little extra splashing on the wheel,
+and then----"
+
+"They will find that nothing has occurred," said the Black Rat. "The old
+things persist and survive and are recognised--our old friend here first
+of all. By the way," he turned toward the Wheel, "I believe we have to
+congratulate you on your latest honour."
+
+"Profoundly well deserved--even if he had never--as he has---laboured
+strenuously through a long life for the amelioration of millkind," said
+the Cat, who belonged to many tile and outhouse committees. "Doubly
+deserved, I may say, for the silent and dignified rebuke his existence
+offers to the clattering, fidgety-footed demands of--er--some people. What
+form did the honour take?"
+
+"It was," said the Wheel bashfully, "a machine-moulded pinion."
+
+"Pinions! Oh, how heavenly!" the Black Rat sighed. "I never see a bat
+without wishing for wings."
+
+"Not exactly that sort of pinion," said the Wheel, "but a really ornate
+circle of toothed iron wheels. Absurd, of course, but gratifying. Mr.
+Mangles and an associate herald invested me with it personally--on my left
+rim--the side that you can't see from the mill. I hadn't meant to say
+anything about it--or the new steel straps round my axles--bright red, you
+know--to be worn on all occasions--but, without false modesty, I assure
+you that the recognition cheered me not a little."
+
+"How intensely gratifying!" said the Black Rat. "I must really steal an
+hour between lights some day and see what they are doing on your left
+side."
+
+"By the way, have you any light on this recent activity of Mr. Mangles?"
+the Grey Cat asked. "He seems to be building small houses on the far side
+of the tail-race. Believe me, I don't ask from any vulgar curiosity."
+
+"It affects our Order," said the Black Rat simply but firmly.
+
+"Thank you," said the Wheel. "Let me see if I can tabulate it properly.
+Nothing like system in accounts of all kinds. Book! Book! Book! On the
+side of the Wheel towards the hundred of Burgelstaltone, where till now
+was a stye of three hogs, Mangles, a freeman, with four villeins, and two
+carts of two thousand bricks, has a new small house of five yards and a
+half, and one roof of iron and a floor of cement. Then, now, and
+afterwards beer in large tankards. And Felden, a stranger, with three
+villeins and one very great cart, deposits on it one engine of iron and
+brass and a small iron mill of four feet, and a broad strap of leather.
+And Mangles, the builder, with two villeins, constructs the floor for the
+same, and a floor of new brick with wires for the small mill. There are
+there also chalices filled with iron and water, in number fifty-seven. The
+whole is valued at one hundred and seventy-four pounds.... I'm sorry I
+can't make myself clearer, but you can see for yourself."
+
+"Amazingly lucid," said the Cat. She was the more to be admired because
+the language of Domesday Book is not, perhaps, the clearest medium wherein
+to describe a small but complete electric-light installation, deriving its
+power from a water-wheel by means of cogs and gearing.
+
+"See for yourself--by all means, see for yourself," said the Waters,
+spluttering and choking with mirth.
+
+"Upon my word," said the Black Rat furiously, "I may be at fault, but I
+wholly fail to perceive where these offensive eavesdroppers--er--come in.
+We were discussing a matter that solely affected our Order."
+
+Suddenly they heard, as they had heard many times before, the Miller
+shutting off the water. To the rattle and rumble of the labouring stones
+succeeded thick silence, punctuated with little drops from the stayed
+wheel. Then some water-bird in the dam fluttered her wings as she slid to
+her nest, and the plop of a water-rat sounded like the fall of a log in
+the water.
+
+"It is all over--it always is all over at just this time. Listen, the
+Miller is going to bed--as usual. Nothing has occurred," said the Cat.
+
+Something creaked in the house where the pig-styes had stood, as metal
+engaged on metal with a clink and a burr.
+
+"Shall I turn her on?" cried the Miller.
+
+"Ay," said the voice from the dynamo-house.
+
+"A human in Mangles' new house!" the Rat squeaked.
+
+"What of it?" said the Grey Cat. "Even supposing Mr. Mangles' cats'-meat-
+coloured hovel ululated with humans, can't you see for yourself--that--?"
+
+There was a solid crash of released waters leaping upon the wheel more
+furiously than ever, a grinding of cogs, a hum like the hum of a hornet,
+and then the unvisited darkness of the old mill was scattered by
+intolerable white light. It threw up every cobweb, every burl and knot in
+the beams and the floor; till the shadows behind the flakes of rough
+plaster on the wall lay clear-cut as shadows of mountains on the
+photographed moon.
+
+"See! See! See!" hissed the Waters in full flood. "Yes, see for
+yourselves. Nothing has occurred. Can't you see?"
+
+The Rat, amazed, had fallen from his foothold and lay half-stunned on the
+floor. The Cat, following her instinct, leaped nigh to the ceiling, and
+with flattened ears and bared teeth backed in a corner ready to fight
+whatever terror might be loosed on her. But nothing happened. Through the
+long aching minutes nothing whatever happened, and her wire-brush tail
+returned slowly to its proper shape.
+
+"Whatever it is," she said at last, "it's overdone. They can never keep it
+up, you know."
+
+"Much you know," said the Waters. "Over you go, old man. You can take the
+full head of us now. Those new steel axle-straps of yours can stand
+anything. Come along, Raven's Gill, Harpenden, Callton Rise, Batten's
+Ponds, Witches' Spring, all together! Let's show these gentlemen how to
+work!"
+
+"But--but--I thought it was a decoration. Why--why--why--it only means
+more work for _me_!"
+
+"Exactly. You're to supply about sixty eight-candle lights when required.
+But they won't be all in use at once----"
+
+"Ah! I thought as much," said the Cat. "The reaction is bound to come."
+
+"_And_" said the Waters, "you will do the ordinary work of the mill as
+well."
+
+"Impossible!" the old Wheel quivered as it drove. "Aluric never did it--
+nor Azor, nor Reinbert. Not even William de Warrenne or the Papal Legate.
+There's no precedent for it. I tell you there's no precedent for working a
+wheel like this."
+
+"Wait a while! We're making one as fast as we can. Aluric and Co. are
+dead. So's the Papal Legate. You've no notion how dead they are, but we're
+here--the Waters of Five Separate Systems. We're just as interesting as
+Domesday Book. Would you like to hear about the land-tenure in Trott's
+Wood? It's squat-right, chiefly." The mocking Waters leaped one over the
+other, chuckling and chattering profanely.
+
+"In that hundred Jenkins, a tinker, with one dog--_unis canis_--holds, by
+the Grace of God and a habit he has of working hard, _unam hidam_--a large
+potato patch. Charmin' fellow, Jenkins. Friend of ours. Now, who the dooce
+did Jenkins keep? ... In the hundred of Callton is one charcoal-burner
+_irreligiosissimus homo_--a bit of a rip--but a thorough sportsman. _Ibi
+est ecclesia. Non multum_. Not much of a church, _quia_ because,
+_episcopus_ the Vicar irritated the Nonconformists _tunc et post et modo_
+--then and afterwards and now--until they built a cut-stone Congregational
+chapel with red brick facings that did not return itself--_defendebat se_
+--at four thousand pounds."
+
+"Charcoal-burners, vicars, schismatics, and red brick facings," groaned
+the Wheel. "But this is sheer blasphemy. What waters have they let in upon
+me?"
+
+"Floods from the gutters. Faugh, this light is positively sickening!" said
+the Cat, rearranging her fur.
+
+"We come down from the clouds or up from the springs, exactly like all
+other waters everywhere. Is that what's surprising you?" sang the Waters.
+
+"Of course not. I know my work if you don't. What I complain of is your
+lack of reverence and repose. You've no instinct of deference towards your
+betters--your heartless parody of the Sacred volume (the Wheel meant
+Domesday Book)--proves it."
+
+"Our betters?" said the Waters most solemnly. "What is there in all this
+dammed race that hasn't come down from the clouds, or----"
+
+"Spare me that talk, please," the Wheel persisted. "You'd _never_
+understand. It's the tone--your tone that we object to."
+
+"Yes. It's your tone," said the Black Rat, picking himself up limb by
+limb.
+
+"If you thought a trifle more about the work you're supposed to do, and a
+trifle less about your precious feelings, you'd render a little more duty
+in return for the power vested in you--we mean wasted on you," the Waters
+replied.
+
+"I have been some hundreds of years laboriously acquiring the knowledge
+which you see fit to challenge so light-heartedly," the Wheel jarred.
+
+"Challenge him! Challenge him!" clamoured the little waves riddling down
+through the tail-race. "As well now as later. Take him up!"
+
+The main mass of the Waters plunging on the Wheel shocked that well-bolted
+structure almost into box-lids by saying: "Very good. Tell us what you
+suppose yourself to be doing at the present moment."
+
+"Waiving the offensive form of your question, I answer, purely as a matter
+of courtesy, that I am engaged in the trituration of farinaceous
+substances whose ultimate destination it would be a breach of the trust
+reposed in me to reveal."
+
+"Fiddle!" said the Waters. "We knew it all along! The first direct
+question shows his ignorance of his own job. Listen, old thing. Thanks to
+us, you are now actuating a machine of whose construction you know
+nothing, that that machine may, over wires of whose ramifications you are,
+by your very position, profoundly ignorant, deliver a power which you can
+never realise, to localities beyond the extreme limits of your mental
+horizon, with the object of producing phenomena which in your wildest
+dreams (if you ever dream) you could never comprehend. Is that clear, or
+would you like it all in words of four syllables?"
+
+"Your assumptions are deliciously sweeping, but may I point out that a
+decent and--the dear old Abbot of Wilton would have put it in his resonant
+monkish Latin much better than I can--a scholarly reserve, does not
+necessarily connote blank vacuity of mind on all subjects."
+
+"Ah, the dear old Abbot of Wilton," said the Rat sympathetically, as one
+nursed in that bosom. "Charmin' fellow--thorough scholar and gentleman.
+Such a pity!"
+
+"Oh, Sacred Fountains!" the Waters were fairly boiling. "He goes out of
+his way to expose his ignorance by triple bucketfuls. He creaks to high
+Heaven that he is hopelessly behind the common order of things! He invites
+the streams of Five Watersheds to witness his su-su-su-pernal
+incompetence, and then he talks as though there were untold reserves of
+knowledge behind him that he is too modest to bring forward. For a bland,
+circular, absolutely sincere impostor, you're a miracle, O Wheel!"
+
+"I do not pretend to be anything more than an integral portion of an
+accepted and not altogether mushroom institution."
+
+"Quite so," said the Waters. "Then go round--hard----"
+
+"To what end?" asked the Wheel.
+
+"Till a big box of tanks in your house begins to fizz and fume--gassing is
+the proper word."
+
+"It would be," said the Cat, sniffing.
+
+"That will show that your accumulators are full. When the accumulators are
+exhausted, and the lights burn badly, you will find us whacking you round
+and round again."
+
+"The end of life as decreed by Mangles and his creatures is to go whacking
+round and round for ever," said the Cat.
+
+"In order," the Rat said, "that you may throw raw and unnecessary
+illumination upon all the unloveliness in the world. Unloveliness which we
+shall--er--have always with us. At the same time you will riotously
+neglect the so-called little but vital graces that make up Life."
+
+"Yes, Life," said the Cat, "with its dim delicious half-tones and veiled
+indeterminate distances. Its surprisals, escapes, encounters, and dizzying
+leaps--its full-throated choruses in honour of the morning star, and its
+melting reveries beneath the sun-warmed wall."
+
+"Oh, you can go on the tiles, Pussalina, just the same as usual," said the
+laughing Waters. "_We_ sha'n't interfere with you."
+
+"On the tiles, forsooth!" hissed the Cat.
+
+"Well, that's what it amounts to," persisted the Waters. "We see a good
+deal of the minor graces of life on our way down to our job."
+
+"And--but I fear I speak to deaf ears--do they never impress you?" said
+the Wheel.
+
+"Enormously," said the Waters. "We have already learned six refined
+synonyms for loafing."
+
+"But (here again I feel as though preaching in the wilderness) it never
+occurs to you that there may exist some small difference between the
+wholly animal--ah--rumination of bovine minds and the discerning, well-
+apportioned leisure of the finer type of intellect?"
+
+"Oh, yes. The bovine mind goes to sleep under a hedge and makes no bones
+about it when it's shouted at. We've seen _that_--in haying-time--all
+along the meadows. The finer type is wide awake enough to fudge up excuses
+for shirking, and mean enough to get stuffy when its excuses aren't
+accepted. Turn over!"
+
+"But, my good people, no gentleman gets stuffy as you call it. A certain
+proper pride, to put it no higher, forbids---"
+
+"Nothing that he wants to do if he really wants to do it. Get along! What
+are you giving us? D'you suppose we've scoured half heaven in the clouds,
+and half earth in the mists, to be taken in at this time of the day by a
+bone-idle, old hand-quern of your type?"
+
+"It is not for me to bandy personalities with you. I can only say that I
+simply decline to accept the situation."
+
+"Decline away. It doesn't make any odds. They'll probably put in a turbine
+if you decline too much."
+
+"What's a turbine?" said the Wheel, quickly.
+
+"A little thing you don't see, that performs surprising revolutions. But
+you won't decline. You'll hang on to your two nice red-strapped axles and
+your new machine-moulded pinions like--a--like a leech on a lily stem!
+There's centuries of work in your old bones if you'd only apply yourself
+to it; and, mechanically, an overshot wheel with this head of water is
+about as efficient as a turbine."
+
+"So in future I am to be considered mechanically? I have been painted by
+at least five Royal Academicians."
+
+"Oh, you can be painted by five hundred when you aren't at work, of
+course. But while you are at work you'll work. You won't half-stop and
+think and talk about rare plants and dicky-birds and farinaceous fiduciary
+interests. You'll continue to revolve, and this new head of water will see
+that you do so continue."
+
+"It is a matter on which it would be exceedingly ill-advised to form a
+hasty or a premature conclusion. I will give it my most careful
+consideration," said the Wheel.
+
+"Please do," said the Waters gravely. "Hullo! Here's the Miller again."
+
+The Cat coiled herself in a picturesque attitude on the softest corner of
+a sack, and the Rat without haste, yet certainly without rest, slipped
+behind the sacking as though an appointment had just occurred to him.
+
+In the doorway, with the young Engineer, stood the Miller grinning
+amazedly.
+
+"Well--well--well! 'tis true-ly won'erful. An' what a power o' dirt! It
+come over me now looking at these lights, that I've never rightly seen my
+own mill before. She needs a lot bein' done to her."
+
+"Ah! I suppose one must make oneself moderately agreeable to the baser
+sort. They have their uses. This thing controls the dairy." The Cat,
+pincing on her toes, came forward and rubbed her head against the Miller's
+knee.
+
+"Ay, you pretty puss," he said, stooping. "You're as big a cheat as the
+rest of 'em that catch no mice about me. A won'erful smooth-skinned,
+rough-tongued cheat you be. I've more than half a mind----"
+
+"She does her work well," said the Engineer, pointing to where the Rat's
+beady eyes showed behind the sacking. "Cats and Rats livin' together--
+see?"
+
+"Too much they do--too long they've done. I'm sick and tired of it. Go and
+take a swim and larn to find your own vittles honest when you come out,
+Pussy."
+
+"My word!" said the Waters, as a sprawling Cat landed all unannounced in
+the centre of the tail-race. "Is that you, Mewsalina? You seem to have
+been quarrelling with your best friend. Get over to the left. It's
+shallowest there. Up on that alder-root with all four paws. Good-night!"
+
+"You'll never get any they rats," said the Miller, as the young Engineer
+struck wrathfully with his stick at the sacking. "They're not the common
+sort. They're the old black English sort."
+
+"Are they, by Jove? I must catch one to stuff, some day."
+
+*       *       *       *       *
+
+Six months later, in the chill of a January afternoon, they were letting
+in the Waters as usual.
+
+"Come along! It's both gears this evening," said the Wheel, kicking
+joyously in the first rush of the icy stream. "There's a heavy load of
+grist just in from Lamber's Wood. Eleven miles it came in an hour and a
+half in our new motor-lorry, and the Miller's rigged five new five-candle
+lights in his cow-stables. I'm feeding 'em to-night. There's a cow due to
+calve. Oh, while I think of it, what's the news from Callton Rise?"
+
+"The waters are finding their level as usual--but why do you ask?" said
+the deep outpouring Waters.
+
+"Because Mangles and Felden and the Miller are talking of increasing the
+plant here and running a saw-mill by electricity. I was wondering whether
+we----"
+
+"I beg your pardon," said the Waters chuckling. "_What_ did you say?"
+
+"Whether _we_, of course, had power enough for the job. It will be a
+biggish contract. There's all Harpenden Brook to be considered and
+Batten's Ponds as well, and Witches' Fountain, and the Churt's Hawd
+system.
+
+"We've power enough for anything in the world," said the Waters. "The only
+question is whether you could stand the strain if we came down on you full
+head."
+
+"Of course I can," said the Wheel. "Mangles is going to turn me into a set
+of turbines--beauties."
+
+"Oh--er--I suppose it's the frost that has made us a little thick-headed,
+but to whom are we talking?" asked the amazed Waters.
+
+"To me--the Spirit of the Mill, of course."
+
+"Not to the old Wheel, then?"
+
+"I happen to be living in the old Wheel just at present. When the turbines
+are installed I shall go and live in them. What earthly difference does it
+make?"
+
+"Absolutely none," said the Waters, "in the earth or in the waters under
+the earth. But we thought turbines didn't appeal to you."
+
+"Not like turbines? Me? My dear fellows, turbines are good for fifteen
+hundred revolutions a minute--and with our power we can drive 'em at full
+speed. Why, there's nothing we couldn't grind or saw or illuminate or heat
+with a set of turbines! That's to say if all the Five Watersheds are
+agreeable."
+
+"Oh, we've been agreeable for ever so long."
+
+"Then why didn't you tell me?"
+
+"Don't know. Suppose it slipped our memory."
+
+The Waters were holding themselves in for fear of bursting with mirth.
+
+"How careless of you! You should keep abreast of the age, my dear fellows.
+We might have settled it long ago, if you'd only spoken. Yes, four good
+turbines and a neat brick penstock--eh? This old Wheel's absurdly out of
+date."
+
+"Well," said the Cat, who after a little proud seclusion had returned to
+her place impenitent as ever. "Praised be Pasht and the Old Gods, that
+whatever may have happened _I_, at least, have preserved the Spirit of the
+Mill!"
+
+She looked round as expecting her faithful ally, the Black Rat; but that
+very week the Engineer had caught and stuffed him, and had put him in a
+glass case; he being a genuine old English black rat. That breed, the
+report says, is rapidly diminishing before the incursions of the brown
+variety.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's Traffics and Discoveries, by Rudyard Kipling
+
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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Traffics and Discoveries, 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: Traffics and Discoveries
+
+Author: Rudyard Kipling
+
+Posting Date: December 11, 2011 [EBook #9790]
+Release Date: January, 2006
+First Posted: October 17, 2003
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK TRAFFICS AND DISCOVERIES ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Juliet Sutherland, Keith M. Eckrich and PG
+Distributed Proofreaders
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+TRAFFICS AND DISCOVERIES
+
+
+By Rudyard Kipling
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+_from the Masjid-al-Aqsa of Sayyid Ahmed(Wahabi)_
+
+THE CAPTIVE
+
+_Poseidon'S Law_
+
+THE BONDS OF DISCIPLINE
+
+_The Runners_
+
+A SAHIBS' WAR
+
+_The Wet Litany_
+
+"THEIR LAWFUL OCCASIONS"--PART I.
+
+"THEIR LAWFUL OCCASIONS"--PART II.
+
+_The King's Task_
+
+THE COMPREHENSION OF PRIVATE COOPER
+
+_The Necessitarian_
+
+STEAM TACTICS
+
+_Kaspar's Song in "Varda"_
+
+"WIRELESS"
+
+_Song of the Old Guard_
+
+THE ARMY OF A DREAM--PART I.
+
+THE ARMY OF A DREAM--PART II.
+
+_The Return of the Children_
+
+"THEY"
+
+_From Lyden's "Irenius_"
+
+MRS. BATHURST
+
+     "_Our Fathers Also_"
+
+BELOW THE MILL DAM
+
+
+
+
+
+THE CAPTIVE
+
+FROM THE MASJID-AL-AQSA OF SAYYID AHMED (WAHABI)
+
+  Not with an outcry to Allah nor any complaining
+  He answered his name at the muster and stood to the chaining.
+  When the twin anklets were nipped on the leg-bars that held them,
+  He brotherly greeted the armourers stooping to weld them.
+  Ere the sad dust of the marshalled feet of the chain-gang swallowed him,
+  Observing him nobly at ease, I alighted and followed him.
+  Thus we had speech by the way, but not touching his sorrow
+  Rather his red Yesterday and his regal To-morrow,
+  Wherein he statelily moved to the clink of his chains unregarded,
+  Nowise abashed but contented to drink of the potion awarded.
+  Saluting aloofly his Fate, he made swift with his story;
+  And the words of his mouth were as slaves spreading carpets of glory
+  Embroidered with names of the Djinns--a miraculous weaving--
+  But the cool and perspicuous eye overbore unbelieving.
+  So I submitted myself to the limits of rapture--
+  Bound by this man we had bound, amid captives his capture--
+  Till he returned me to earth and the visions departed;
+  But on him be the Peace and the Blessing: for he was great-hearted!
+
+
+THE CAPTIVE
+
+"He that believeth shall not make haste."--_Isaiah_.
+
+The guard-boat lay across the mouth of the bathing-pool, her crew idly
+spanking the water with the flat of their oars. A red-coated militia-man,
+rifle in hand, sat at the bows, and a petty officer at the stern. Between
+the snow-white cutter and the flat-topped, honey-coloured rocks on the
+beach the green water was troubled with shrimp-pink prisoners-of-war
+bathing. Behind their orderly tin camp and the electric-light poles rose
+those stone-dotted spurs that throw heat on Simonstown. Beneath them the
+little _Barracouta_ nodded to the big _Gibraltar_, and the old _Penelope_,
+that in ten years has been bachelors' club, natural history museum,
+kindergarten, and prison, rooted and dug at her fixed moorings. Far out, a
+three-funnelled Atlantic transport with turtle bow and stern waddled in
+from the deep sea.
+
+Said the sentry, assured of the visitor's good faith, "Talk to 'em? You
+can, to any that speak English. You'll find a lot that do."
+
+Here and there earnest groups gathered round ministers of the Dutch
+Reformed Church, who doubtless preached conciliation, but the majority
+preferred their bath. The God who Looks after Small Things had caused the
+visitor that day to receive two weeks' delayed mails in one from a casual
+postman, and the whole heavy bundle of newspapers, tied with a strap, he
+dangled as bait. At the edge of the beach, cross-legged, undressed to his
+sky-blue army shirt, sat a lean, ginger-haired man, on guard over a dozen
+heaps of clothing. His eyes followed the incoming Atlantic boat.
+
+"Excuse me, Mister," he said, without turning (and the speech betrayed his
+nationality), "would you mind keeping away from these garments? I've been
+elected janitor--on the Dutch vote."
+
+The visitor moved over against the barbed-wire fence and sat down to his
+mail. At the rustle of the newspaper-wrappers the ginger-coloured man
+turned quickly, the hunger of a press-ridden people in his close-set iron-
+grey eyes.
+
+"Have you any use for papers?" said the visitor.
+
+"Have I any use?" A quick, curved forefinger was already snicking off the
+outer covers. "Why, that's the New York postmark! Give me the ads. at the
+back of _Harper's_ and _M'Clure's_ and I'm in touch with God's Country
+again! Did you know how I was aching for papers?"
+
+The visitor told the tale of the casual postman.
+
+"Providential!" said the ginger-coloured man, keen as a terrier on his
+task; "both in time and matter. Yes! ... The _Scientific American_ yet
+once more! Oh, it's good! it's good!" His voice broke as he pressed his
+hawk-like nose against the heavily-inked patent-specifications at the end.
+"Can I keep it? I thank you--I thank you! Why--why--well--well! The
+_American Tyler_ of all things created! Do you subscribe to that?"
+
+"I'm on the free list," said the visitor, nodding.
+
+He extended his blue-tanned hand with that air of Oriental spaciousness
+which distinguishes the native-born American, and met the visitor's grasp
+expertly. "I can only say that you have treated me like a Brother (yes,
+I'll take every last one you can spare), and if ever--" He plucked at the
+bosom of his shirt. "Psha! I forgot I'd no card on me; but my name's
+Zigler--Laughton G. Zigler. An American? If Ohio's still in the Union, I
+am, Sir. But I'm no extreme States'-rights man. I've used all of my native
+country and a few others as I have found occasion, and now I am the
+captive of your bow and spear. I'm not kicking at that. I am not a coerced
+alien, nor a naturalised Texas mule-tender, nor an adventurer on the
+instalment plan. _I_ don't tag after our consul when he comes around,
+expecting the American Eagle to lift me out o' this by the slack of my
+pants. No, sir! If a Britisher went into Indian Territory and shot up his
+surroundings with a Colt automatic (not that _she's_ any sort of weapon,
+but I take her for an illustration), he'd be strung up quicker'n a
+snowflake 'ud melt in hell. No ambassador of yours 'ud save him. I'm my
+neck ahead on this game, anyway. That's how I regard the proposition.
+
+"Have I gone gunning against the British? To a certain extent, I presume
+you never heard tell of the Laughton-Zigler automatic two-inch field-gun,
+with self-feeding hopper, single oil-cylinder recoil, and ballbearing gear
+throughout? Or Laughtite, the new explosive? Absolutely uniform in effect,
+and one-ninth the bulk of any present effete charge--flake, cannonite,
+cordite, troisdorf, cellulose, cocoa, cord, or prism--I don't care what it
+is. Laughtite's immense; so's the Zigler automatic. It's me. It's fifteen
+years of me. You are not a gun-sharp? I am sorry. I could have surprised
+you. Apart from my gun, my tale don't amount to much of anything. I thank
+you, but I don't use any tobacco you'd be likely to carry... Bull Durham?
+_Bull Durham!_ I take it all back--every last word. Bull Durham--here! If
+ever you strike Akron, Ohio, when this fool-war's over, remember you've
+Laughton O. Zigler in your vest pocket. Including the city of Akron. We've
+a little club there.... Hell! What's the sense of talking Akron with no
+pants?
+
+"My gun? ... For two cents I'd have shipped her to our Filipeens. 'Came
+mighty near it too; but from what I'd read in the papers, you can't trust
+Aguinaldo's crowd on scientific matters. Why don't I offer it to our army?
+Well, you've an effete aristocracy running yours, and we've a crowd of
+politicians. The results are practically identical. I am not taking any
+U.S. Army in mine.
+
+"I went to Amsterdam with her--to this Dutch junta that supposes it's
+bossing the war. I wasn't brought up to love the British for one thing,
+and for another I knew that if she got in her fine work (my gun) I'd stand
+more chance of receiving an unbiassed report from a crowd of dam-fool
+British officers than from a hatful of politicians' nephews doing duty as
+commissaries and ordnance sharps. As I said, I put the brown man out of
+the question. That's the way _I_ regarded the proposition.
+
+"The Dutch in Holland don't amount to a row of pins. Maybe I misjudge 'em.
+Maybe they've been swindled too often by self-seeking adventurers to know
+a enthusiast when they see him. Anyway, they're slower than the Wrath o'
+God. But on delusions--as to their winning out next Thursday week at 9
+A.M.--they are--if I may say so--quite British.
+
+"I'll tell you a curious thing, too. I fought 'em for ten days before I
+could get the financial side of my game fixed to my liking. I knew they
+didn't believe in the Zigler, but they'd no call to be crazy-mean. I fixed
+it--free passage and freight for me and the gun to Delagoa Bay, and beyond
+by steam and rail. Then I went aboard to see her crated, and there I
+struck my fellow-passengers--all deadheads, same as me. Well, Sir, I
+turned in my tracks where I stood and besieged the ticket-office, and I
+said, 'Look at here, Van Dunk. I'm paying for my passage and her room in
+the hold--every square and cubic foot.' 'Guess he knocked down the fare to
+himself; but I paid. I paid. I wasn't going to deadhead along o' _that_
+crowd of Pentecostal sweepings. 'Twould have hoodooed my gun for all time.
+That was the way I regarded the proposition. No, Sir, they were not pretty
+company.
+
+"When we struck Pretoria I had a hell-and-a-half of a time trying to
+interest the Dutch vote in my gun an' her potentialities. The bottom was
+out of things rather much just about that time. Kruger was praying some
+and stealing some, and the Hollander lot was singing, 'If you haven't any
+money you needn't come round,' Nobody was spending his dough on anything
+except tickets to Europe. We were both grossly neglected. When I think how
+I used to give performances in the public streets with dummy cartridges,
+filling the hopper and turning the handle till the sweat dropped off me, I
+blush, Sir. I've made her to do her stunts before Kaffirs--naked sons of
+Ham--in Commissioner Street, trying to get a holt somewhere.
+
+"Did I talk? I despise exaggeration--'tain't American or scientific--but
+as true as I'm sitting here like a blue-ended baboon in a kloof, Teddy
+Roosevelt's Western tour was a maiden's sigh compared to my advertising
+work.
+
+"'Long in the spring I was rescued by a commandant called Van Zyl--a big,
+fleshy man with a lame leg. Take away his hair and his gun and he'd make a
+first-class Schenectady bar-keep. He found me and the Zigler on the veldt
+(Pretoria wasn't wholesome at that time), and he annexed me in a
+somnambulistic sort o' way. He was dead against the war from the start,
+but, being a Dutchman, he fought a sight better than the rest of that 'God
+and the Mauser' outfit. Adrian Van Zyl. Slept a heap in the daytime--and
+didn't love niggers. I liked him. I was the only foreigner in his
+commando. The rest was Georgia Crackers and Pennsylvania Dutch--with a
+dash o' Philadelphia lawyer. I could tell you things about them would
+surprise you. Religion for one thing; women for another; but I don't know
+as their notions o' geography weren't the craziest. 'Guess that must be
+some sort of automatic compensation. There wasn't one blamed ant-hill in
+their district they didn't know _and_ use; but the world was flat, they
+said, and England was a day's trek from Cape Town.
+
+"They could fight in their own way, and don't you forget it. But I guess
+you will not. They fought to kill, and, by what I could make out, the
+British fought to be killed. So both parties were accommodated.
+
+"I am the captive of your bow and spear, Sir. The position has its
+obligations--on both sides. You could not be offensive or partisan to me.
+I cannot, for the same reason, be offensive to you. Therefore I will not
+give you my opinions on the conduct of your war.
+
+"Anyway, I didn't take the field as an offensive partisan, but as an
+inventor. It was a condition and not a theory that confronted me. (Yes,
+Sir, I'm a Democrat by conviction, and that was one of the best things
+Grover Cleveland ever got off.)
+
+"After three months' trek, old man Van Zyl had his commando in good shape
+and refitted off the British, and he reckoned he'd wait on a British
+General of his acquaintance that did business on a circuit between
+Stompiesneuk, Jackhalputs, Vrelegen, and Odendaalstroom, year in and year
+out. He was a fixture in that section.
+
+"'He's a dam' good man,' says Van Zyl. 'He's a friend of mine. He sent in
+a fine doctor when I was wounded and our Hollander doc. wanted to cut my
+leg off. Ya, I'll guess we'll stay with him.' Up to date, me and my Zigler
+had lived in innocuous desuetude owing to little odds and ends riding out
+of gear. How in thunder was I to know there wasn't the ghost of any road
+in the country? But raw hide's cheap and lastin'. I guess I'll make my
+next gun a thousand pounds heavier, though.
+
+"Well, Sir, we struck the General on his beat--Vrelegen it was--and our
+crowd opened with the usual compliments at two thousand yards. Van Zyl
+shook himself into his greasy old saddle and says, 'Now we shall be quite
+happy, Mr. Zigler. No more trekking. Joost twelve miles a day till the
+apricots are ripe.'
+
+"Then we hitched on to his outposts, and vedettes, and cossack-picquets,
+or whatever they was called, and we wandered around the veldt arm in arm
+like brothers.
+
+"The way we worked lodge was this way. The General, he had his breakfast
+at 8:45 A.M. to the tick. He might have been a Long Island commuter. At
+8:42 A.M. I'd go down to the Thirty-fourth Street ferry to meet him--I
+mean I'd see the Zigler into position at two thousand (I began at three
+thousand, but that was cold and distant)--and blow him off to two full
+hoppers--eighteen rounds--just as they were bringing in his coffee. If his
+crowd was busy celebrating the anniversary of Waterloo or the last royal
+kid's birthday, they'd open on me with two guns (I'll tell you about them
+later on), but if they were disengaged they'd all stand to their horses
+and pile on the ironmongery, and washers, and typewriters, and five weeks'
+grub, and in half an hour they'd sail out after me and the rest of Van
+Zyl's boys; lying down and firing till 11:45 A.M. or maybe high noon. Then
+we'd go from labour to refreshment, resooming at 2 P.M. and battling till
+tea-time. Tuesday and Friday was the General's moving days. He'd trek
+ahead ten or twelve miles, and we'd loaf around his flankers and exercise
+the ponies a piece. Sometimes he'd get hung up in a drift--stalled
+crossin' a crick--and we'd make playful snatches at his wagons. First time
+that happened I turned the Zigler loose with high hopes, Sir; but the old
+man was well posted on rearguards with a gun to 'em, and I had to haul her
+out with three mules instead of six. I was pretty mad. I wasn't looking
+for any experts back of the Royal British Artillery. Otherwise, the game
+was mostly even. He'd lay out three or four of our commando, and we'd
+gather in four or five of his once a week or thereon. One time, I
+remember, long towards dusk we saw 'em burying five of their boys. They
+stood pretty thick around the graves. We wasn't more than fifteen hundred
+yards off, but old Van Zyl wouldn't fire. He just took off his hat at the
+proper time. He said if you stretched a man at his prayers you'd have to
+hump his bad luck before the Throne as well as your own. I am inclined to
+agree with him. So we browsed along week in and week out. A war-sharp
+might have judged it sort of docile, but for an inventor needing practice
+one day and peace the next for checking his theories, it suited Laughton
+O. Zigler.
+
+"And friendly? Friendly was no word for it. We was brothers in arms.
+
+"Why, I knew those two guns of the Royal British Artillery as well as I
+used to know the old Fifth Avenoo stages. _They_ might have been brothers
+too.
+
+"They'd jolt into action, and wiggle around and skid and spit and cough
+and prize 'emselves back again during our hours of bloody battle till I
+could have wept, Sir, at the spectacle of modern white men chained up to
+these old hand-power, back-number, flint-and-steel reaping machines. One
+of 'em--I called her Baldy--she'd a long white scar all along her barrel--
+I'd made sure of twenty times. I knew her crew by sight, but she'd come
+switching and teturing out of the dust of my shells like--like a hen from
+under a buggy--and she'd dip into a gully, and next thing I'd know 'ud be
+her old nose peeking over the ridge sniffin' for us. Her runnin' mate had
+two grey mules in the lead, and a natural wood wheel repainted, and a
+whole raft of rope-ends trailin' around. 'Jever see Tom Reed with his vest
+off, steerin' Congress through a heat-wave? I've been to Washington often
+--too often--filin' my patents. I called her Tom Reed. We three 'ud play
+pussy-wants-a-corner all round the outposts on off-days--cross-lots
+through the sage and along the mezas till we was short-circuited by
+canons. O, it was great for me and Baldy and Tom Reed! I don't know as we
+didn't neglect the legitimate interests of our respective commanders
+sometimes for this ball-play. I know _I_ did.
+
+"'Long towards the fall the Royal British Artillery grew shy--hung back in
+their breeching sort of--and their shooting was way--way off. I observed
+they wasn't taking any chances, not though I acted kitten almost
+underneath 'em.
+
+"I mentioned it to Van Zyl, because it struck me I had about knocked their
+Royal British moral endways.
+
+"'No,' says he, rocking as usual on his pony. 'My Captain Mankeltow he is
+sick. That is all.'
+
+"'So's your Captain Mankeltow's guns,' I said. 'But I'm going to make 'em
+a heap sicker before he gets well.'
+
+"'No,' says Van Zyl. 'He has had the enteric a little. Now he is better,
+and he was let out from hospital at Jackhalputs. Ah, that Mankeltow! He
+always makes me laugh so. I told him--long back--at Colesberg, I had a
+little home for him at Nooitgedacht. But he would not come--no! He has
+been sick, and I am sorry.'
+
+"'How d'you know that?' I says.
+
+"'Why, only to-day he sends back his love by Johanna Van der Merwe, that
+goes to their doctor for her sick baby's eyes. He sends his love, that
+Mankeltow, and he tells her tell me he has a little garden of roses all
+ready for me in the Dutch Indies--Umballa. He is very funny, my Captain
+Mankeltow.'
+
+"The Dutch and the English ought to fraternise, Sir. They've the same
+notions of humour, to my thinking.'
+
+"'When he gets well,' says Van Zyl, 'you look out, Mr. Americaan. He comes
+back to his guns next Tuesday. Then they shoot better.'
+
+"I wasn't so well acquainted with the Royal British Artillery as old man
+Van Zyl. I knew this Captain Mankeltow by sight, of course, and,
+considering what sort of a man with the hoe he was, I thought he'd done
+right well against my Zigler. But nothing epoch-making.
+
+"Next morning at the usual hour I waited on the General, and old Van Zyl
+come along with some of the boys. Van Zyl didn't hang round the Zigler
+much as a rule, but this was his luck that day.
+
+"He was peeking through his glasses at the camp, and I was helping pepper,
+the General's sow-belly--just as usual--when he turns to me quick and
+says, 'Almighty! How all these Englishmen are liars! You cannot trust
+one,' he says. 'Captain Mankeltow tells our Johanna he comes not back till
+Tuesday, and to-day is Friday, and there he is! Almighty! The English are
+all Chamberlains!'
+
+"If the old man hadn't stopped to make political speeches he'd have had
+his supper in laager that night, I guess. I was busy attending to Tom Reed
+at two thousand when Baldy got in her fine work on me. I saw one sheet of
+white flame wrapped round the hopper, and in the middle of it there was
+one o' my mules straight on end. Nothing out of the way in a mule on end,
+but this mule hadn't any head. I remember it struck me as incongruous at
+the time, and when I'd ciphered it out I was doing the Santos-Dumont act
+without any balloon and my motor out of gear. Then I got to thinking about
+Santos-Dumont and how much better my new way was. Then I thought about
+Professor Langley and the Smithsonian, and wishing I hadn't lied so
+extravagantly in some of my specifications at Washington. Then I quit
+thinking for quite a while, and when I resumed my train of thought I was
+nude, Sir, in a very stale stretcher, and my mouth was full of fine dirt
+all flavoured with Laughtite.
+
+"I coughed up that dirt.
+
+"'Hullo!' says a man walking beside me. 'You've spoke almost in time. Have
+a drink?'
+
+"I don't use rum as a rule, but I did then, because I needed it.
+
+"'What hit us?'I said.
+
+"'Me,' he said. 'I got you fair on the hopper as you pulled out of that
+donga; but I'm sorry to say every last round in the hopper's exploded and
+your gun's in a shocking state. I'm real sorry,' he says. 'I admire your
+gun, Sir.'
+
+"'Are you Captain Mankeltow?' I says.
+
+"'Yes,' he says. 'I presoom you're Mister Zigler. Your commanding officer
+told me about you.'
+
+"'Have you gathered in old man Van Zyl?' I said.
+
+"'Commandant Van Zyl,' he says very stiff, 'was most unfortunately
+wounded, but I am glad to say it's not serious. We hope he'll be able to
+dine with us to-night; and I feel sure,' he says, 'the General would be
+delighted to see you too, though he didn't expect,' he says, 'and no one
+else either, by Jove!' he says, and blushed like the British do when
+they're embarrassed.
+
+"I saw him slide an Episcopalian Prayer-book up his sleeve, and when I
+looked over the edge of the stretcher there was half-a-dozen enlisted men
+--privates--had just quit digging and was standing to attention by their
+spades. I guess he was right on the General not expecting me to dinner;
+but it was all of a piece with their sloppy British way of doing business.
+Any God's quantity of fuss and flubdub to bury a man, and not an ounce of
+forehandedness in the whole outfit to find out whether he was rightly
+dead. And I am a Congregationalist anyway!
+
+"Well, Sir, that was my introduction to the British Army. I'd write a book
+about it if anyone would believe me. This Captain Mankeltow, Royal British
+Artillery, turned the doctor on me (I could write another book about
+_him_) and fixed me up with a suit of his own clothes, and fed me canned
+beef and biscuits, and give me a cigar--a Henry Clay and a whisky-and-
+sparklet. He was a white man.
+
+"'Ye-es, by Jove,' he said, dragging out his words like a twist of
+molasses, 'we've all admired your gun and the way you've worked it. Some
+of us betted you was a British deserter. I won a sovereign on that from a
+yeoman. And, by the way,' he says, 'you've disappointed me groom pretty
+bad.'
+
+"'Where does your groom come in?' I said.
+
+"'Oh, he was the yeoman. He's a dam poor groom,' says my captain, 'but
+he's a way-up barrister when he's at home. He's been running around the
+camp with his tongue out, waiting for the chance of defending you at the
+court-martial.'
+
+"'What court-martial?' I says.
+
+"'On you as a deserter from the Artillery. You'd have had a good run for
+your money. Anyway, you'd never have been hung after the way you worked
+your gun. Deserter ten times over,' he says, 'I'd have stuck out for
+shooting you like a gentleman.'
+
+"Well, Sir, right there it struck me at the pit of my stomach--sort of
+sickish, sweetish feeling--that my position needed regularising pretty
+bad. I ought to have been a naturalised burgher of a year's standing; but
+Ohio's my State, and I wouldn't have gone back on her for a desertful of
+Dutchmen. That and my enthoosiasm as an inventor had led me to the
+existing crisis; but I couldn't expect this Captain Mankeltow to regard
+the proposition that way. There I sat, the rankest breed of
+unreconstructed American citizen, caught red-handed squirting hell at the
+British Army for months on end. I tell _you_, Sir, I wished I was in
+Cincinnatah that summer evening. I'd have compromised on Brooklyn.
+
+"'What d'you do about aliens?' I said, and the dirt I'd coughed up seemed
+all back of my tongue again.
+
+"'Oh,' says he, 'we don't do much of anything. They're about all the
+society we get. I'm a bit of a pro-Boer myself,' he says, 'but between you
+and me the average Boer ain't over and above intellectual. You're the
+first American we've met up with, but of course you're a burgher.'
+
+"It was what I ought to have been if I'd had the sense of a common tick,
+but the way he drawled it out made me mad.
+
+"'Of course I am not,' I says. 'Would _you_ be a naturalised Boer?'
+
+"'I'm fighting against 'em,' he says, lighting a cigarette, 'but it's all
+a matter of opinion.'
+
+"'Well,' I says, 'you can hold any blame opinion you choose, but I'm a
+white man, and my present intention is to die in that colour.'
+
+"He laughed one of those big, thick-ended, British laughs that don't lead
+anywhere, and whacked up some sort of compliment about America that made
+me mad all through.
+
+"I am the captive of your bow and spear, Sir, but I do not understand the
+alleged British joke. It is depressing.
+
+"I was introdooced to five or six officers that evening, and every blame
+one of 'em grinned and asked me why I wasn't in the Filipeens suppressing
+our war! And that was British humour! They all had to get it off their
+chests before they'd talk sense. But they was sound on the Zigler. They
+had all admired her. I made out a fairy-story of me being wearied of the
+war, and having pushed the gun at them these last three months in the hope
+they'd capture it and let me go home. That tickled 'em to death. They made
+me say it three times over, and laughed like kids each time. But half the
+British _are_ kids; specially the older men. My Captain Mankeltow was less
+of it than the others. He talked about the Zigler like a lover, Sir, and I
+drew him diagrams of the hopper-feed and recoil-cylinder in his note-book.
+He asked the one British question I was waiting for, 'Hadn't I made my
+working-parts too light?' The British think weight's strength.
+
+"At last--I'd been shy of opening the subject before--at last I said,
+'Gentlemen, you are the unprejudiced tribunal I've been hunting after. I
+guess you ain't interested in any other gun-factory, and politics don't
+weigh with you. How did it feel your end of the game? What's my gun done,
+anyway?'
+
+"'I hate to disappoint you,' says Captain Mankeltow, 'because I know you
+feel as an inventor.' I wasn't feeling like an inventor just then. I felt
+friendly, but the British haven't more tact than you can pick up with a
+knife out of a plate of soup.
+
+"'The honest truth,' he says, 'is that you've wounded about ten of us one
+way and another, killed two battery horses and four mules, and--oh, yes,'
+he said, 'you've bagged five Kaffirs. But, buck up,' he said, 'we've all
+had mighty close calls'--shaves, he called 'em, I remember. 'Look at my
+pants.'
+
+"They was repaired right across the seat with Minneapolis flour-bagging. I
+could see the stencil.
+
+"'I ain't bluffing,' he says. 'Get the hospital returns, Doc.'
+
+"The doctor gets 'em and reads 'em out under the proper dates. That doctor
+alone was worth the price of admission.
+
+"I was right pleased right through that I hadn't killed any of these
+cheerful kids; but none the less I couldn't help thinking that a few more
+Kaffirs would have served me just as well for advertising purposes as
+white men. No, sir. Anywhichway you regard the proposition, twenty-one
+casualties after months of close friendship like ours was--paltry.
+
+"They gave me taffy about the gun--the British use taffy where we use
+sugar. It's cheaper, and gets there just the same. They sat around and
+proved to me that my gun was too good, too uniform--shot as close as a
+Mannlicher rifle.
+
+"Says one kid chewing a bit of grass: 'I counted eight of your shells,
+Sir, burst in a radius of ten feet. All of 'em would have gone through one
+waggon-tilt. It was beautiful,' he says. 'It was too good.'
+
+"I shouldn't wonder if the boys were right. My Laughtite is too
+mathematically uniform in propelling power. Yes; she was too good for this
+refractory fool of a country. The training gear was broke, too, and we had
+to swivel her around by the trail. But I'll build my next Zigler fifteen
+hundred pounds heavier. Might work in a gasoline motor under the axles. I
+must think that up.
+
+"'Well, gentlemen,' I said, 'I'd hate to have been the death of any of
+you; and if a prisoner can deed away his property, I'd love to present the
+Captain here with what he's seen fit to leave of my Zigler.'
+
+"'Thanks awf'ly,' says my Captain. 'I'd like her very much. She'd look
+fine in the mess at Woolwich. That is, if you don't mind, Mr. Zigler.'
+
+"'Go right ahead,' I says. 'I've come out of all the mess I've any use
+for; but she'll do to spread the light among the Royal British Artillery.'
+
+"I tell you, Sir, there's not much of anything the matter with the Royal
+British Artillery. They're brainy men languishing under an effete system
+which, when you take good holt of it, is England--just all England. 'Times
+I'd feel I was talking with real live citizens, and times I'd feel I'd
+struck the Beef Eaters in the Tower.
+
+"How? Well, this way. I was telling my Captain Mankeltow what Van Zyl had
+said about the British being all Chamberlains when the old man saw him
+back from hospital four days ahead of time.
+
+"'Oh, damn it all!' he says, as serious as the Supreme Court. 'It's too
+bad,' he says. 'Johanna must have misunderstood me, or else I've got the
+wrong Dutch word for these blarsted days of the week. I told Johanna I'd
+be out on Friday. The woman's a fool. Oah, da-am it all!' he says. 'I
+wouldn't have sold old Van Zyl a pup like that,' he says. 'I'll hunt him
+up and apologise.'
+
+"He must have fixed it all right, for when we sailed over to the General's
+dinner my Captain had Van Zyl about half-full of sherry and bitters, as
+happy as a clam. The boys all called him Adrian, and treated him like
+their prodigal father. He'd been hit on the collarbone by a wad of
+shrapnel, and his arm was tied up.
+
+"But the General was the peach. I presume you're acquainted with the
+average run of British generals, but this was my first. I sat on his left
+hand, and he talked like--like the _Ladies' Home Journal_. J'ever read
+that paper? It's refined, Sir--and innocuous, and full of nickel-plated
+sentiments guaranteed to improve the mind. He was it. He began by a Lydia
+Pinkham heart-to-heart talk about my health, and hoped the boys had done
+me well, and that I was enjoying my stay in their midst. Then he thanked
+me for the interesting and valuable lessons that I'd given his crowd--
+specially in the matter of placing artillery and rearguard attacks. He'd
+wipe his long thin moustache between drinks--lime-juice and water he used
+--and blat off into a long 'a-aah,' and ladle out more taffy for me or old
+man Van Zyl on his right. I told him how I'd had my first Pisgah-sight of
+the principles of the Zigler when I was a fourth-class postmaster on a
+star-route in Arkansas. I told him how I'd worked it up by instalments
+when I was machinist in Waterbury, where the dollar-watches come from. He
+had one on his wrist then. I told him how I'd met Zalinski (he'd never
+heard of Zalinski!) when I was an extra clerk in the Naval Construction
+Bureau at Washington. I told him how my uncle, who was a truck-farmer in
+Noo Jersey (he loaned money on mortgage too, for ten acres ain't enough
+now in Noo Jersey), how he'd willed me a quarter of a million dollars,
+because I was the only one of our kin that called him down when he used to
+come home with a hard-cider jag on him and heave ox-bows at his nieces. I
+told him how I'd turned in every red cent on the Zigler, and I told him
+the whole circus of my coming out with her, and so on, and so following;
+and every forty seconds he'd wipe his moustache and blat, 'How
+interesting. Really, now? How interesting.'
+
+"It was like being in an old English book, Sir. Like _Bracebridge Hall_.
+But an American wrote _that!_ I kept peeking around for the Boar's Head
+and the Rosemary and Magna Charta and the Cricket on the Hearth, and the
+rest of the outfit. Then Van Zyl whirled in. He was no ways jagged, but
+thawed--thawed, Sir, and among friends. They began discussing previous
+scraps all along the old man's beat--about sixty of 'em--as well as side-
+shows with other generals and columns. Van Zyl told 'im of a big beat he'd
+worked on a column a week or so before I'd joined him. He demonstrated his
+strategy with forks on the table.
+
+"'There!' said the General, when he'd finished. 'That proves my contention
+to the hilt. Maybe I'm a bit of a pro-Boer, but I stick to it,' he says,
+'that under proper officers, with due regard to his race prejudices, the
+Boer'ud make the finest mounted infantry in the Empire. Adrian,' he says,
+'you're simply squandered on a cattle-run. You ought to be at the Staff
+College with De Wet.'
+
+"'You catch De Wet and I come to your Staff College--eh,' says Adrian,
+laughing. 'But you are so slow, Generaal. Why are you so slow? For a
+month,' he says, 'you do so well and strong that we say we shall hands-up
+and come back to our farms. Then you send to England and make us a present
+of two--three--six hundred young men, with rifles and wagons and rum and
+tobacco, and such a great lot of cartridges, that our young men put up
+their tails and start all over again. If you hold an ox by the horn and
+hit him by the bottom he runs round and round. He never goes anywhere. So,
+too, this war goes round and round. You know that, Generaal!'
+
+"'Quite right, Adrian,' says the General; 'but you must believe your
+Bible.'
+
+"'Hooh!' says Adrian, and reaches for the whisky. 'I've never known a
+Dutchman a professing Atheist, but some few have been rather active
+Agnostics since the British sat down in Pretoria. Old man Van Zyl--he told
+me--had soured on religion after Bloemfontein surrendered. He was a Free
+Stater for one thing.'
+
+"'He that believeth,' says the General, 'shall not make haste. That's in
+Isaiah. We believe we're going to win, and so we don't make haste. As far
+as I'm concerned I'd like this war to last another five years. We'd have
+an army then. It's just this way, Mr. Zigler,' he says, 'our people are
+brimfull of patriotism, but they've been born and brought up between
+houses, and England ain't big enough to train 'em--not if you expect to
+preserve.'
+
+"'Preserve what?' I says. 'England?'
+
+"'No. The game,' he says; 'and that reminds me, gentlemen, we haven't
+drunk the King and Foxhunting.'
+
+"So they drank the King and Fox-hunting. I drank the King because there's
+something about Edward that tickles me (he's so blame British); but I
+rather stood out on the Fox-hunting. I've ridden wolves in the cattle-
+country, and needed a drink pretty bad afterwards, but it never struck me
+as I ought to drink about it--he-red-it-arily.
+
+"'No, as I was saying, Mr. Zigler,' he goes on, 'we have to train our men
+in the field to shoot and ride. I allow six months for it; but many
+column-commanders--not that I ought to say a word against 'em, for they're
+the best fellows that ever stepped, and most of 'em are my dearest
+friends--seem to think that if they have men and horses and guns they can
+take tea with the Boers. It's generally the other way about, ain't it, Mr.
+Zigler?'
+
+"'To some extent, Sir,' I said.
+
+"'I'm _so_ glad you agree with me,' he says. 'My command here I regard as
+a training depot, and you, if I may say so, have been one of my most
+efficient instructors. I mature my men slowly but thoroughly. First I put
+'em in a town which is liable to be attacked by night, where they can
+attend riding-school in the day. Then I use 'em with a convoy, and last I
+put 'em into a column. It takes time,' he says, 'but I flatter myself that
+any men who have worked under me are at least grounded in the rudiments of
+their profession. Adrian,' he says, 'was there anything wrong with the men
+who upset Van Bester's applecart last month when he was trying to cross
+the line to join Piper with those horses he'd stole from Gabbitas?'
+
+"'No, Generaal,' says Van Zyl. 'Your men got the horses back and eleven
+dead; and Van Besters, he ran to Delarey in his shirt. They was very good,
+those men. They shoot hard.'
+
+"_'So_ pleased to hear you say so. I laid 'em down at the beginning of
+this century--a 1900 vintage. _You_ remember 'em, Mankeltow?' he says.
+'The Central Middlesex Buncho Busters--clerks and floorwalkers mostly,'
+and he wiped his moustache. 'It was just the same with the Liverpool
+Buckjumpers, but they were stevedores. Let's see--they were a last-century
+draft, weren't they? They did well after nine months. _You_ know 'em, Van
+Zyl? You didn't get much change out of 'em at Pootfontein?'
+
+"'No,' says Van Zyl. 'At Pootfontein I lost my son Andries.'
+
+"'I beg your pardon, Commandant,' says the General; and the rest of the
+crowd sort of cooed over Adrian.
+
+"'Excoose,' says Adrian. 'It was all right. They were good men those, but
+it is just what I say. Some are so dam good we want to hands-up, and some
+are so dam bad, we say, "Take the Vierkleur into Cape Town." It is not
+upright of you, Generaal. It is not upright of you at all. I do not think
+you ever wish this war to finish.'
+
+"'It's a first-class dress-parade for Armageddon,' says the General. 'With
+luck, we ought to run half a million men through the mill. Why, we might
+even be able to give our Native Army a look in. Oh, not here, of course,
+Adrian, but down in the Colony--say a camp-of-exercise at Worcester. You
+mustn't be prejudiced, Adrian. I've commanded a district in India, and I
+give you my word the native troops are splendid men.'
+
+"'Oh, I should not mind them at Worcester,' says Adrian. 'I would sell you
+forage for them at Worcester--yes, and Paarl and Stellenbosch; but
+Almighty!' he says, 'must I stay with Cronje till you have taught half a
+million of these stupid boys to ride? I shall be an old man.'
+
+"Well, Sir, then and there they began arguing whether St. Helena would
+suit Adrian's health as well as some other places they knew about, and
+fixing up letters of introduction to Dukes and Lords of their
+acquaintance, so's Van Zyl should be well looked after. We own a fair-
+sized block of real estate--America does--but it made me sickish to hear
+this crowd fluttering round the Atlas (oh yes, they had an Atlas), and
+choosing stray continents for Adrian to drink his coffee in. The old man
+allowed he didn't want to roost with Cronje, because one of Cronje's kin
+had jumped one of his farms after Paardeberg. I forget the rights of the
+case, but it was interesting. They decided on a place called Umballa in
+India, because there was a first-class doctor there.
+
+"So Adrian was fixed to drink the King and Foxhunting, and study up the
+Native Army in India (I'd like to see 'em myself), till the British
+General had taught the male white citizens of Great Britain how to ride.
+Don't misunderstand me, Sir. I loved that General. After ten minutes I
+loved him, and I wanted to laugh at him; but at the same time, sitting
+there and hearing him talk about the centuries, I tell you, Sir, it scared
+me. It scared me cold! He admitted everything--he acknowledged the corn
+before you spoke--he was more pleased to hear that his men had been used
+to wipe the geldt with than I was when I knocked out Tom Reed's two lead-
+horses--and he sat back and blew smoke through his nose and matured his
+men like cigars and--he talked of the everlastin' centuries!
+
+"I went to bed nearer nervous prostration than I'd come in a long time.
+Next morning me and Captain Mankeltow fixed up what his shrapnel had left
+of my Zigler for transport to the railroad. She went in on her own wheels,
+and I stencilled her 'Royal Artillery Mess, Woolwich,' on the muzzle, and
+he said he'd be grateful if I'd take charge of her to Cape Town, and hand
+her over to a man in the Ordnance there. 'How are you fixed financially?
+You'll need some money on the way home,' he says at last.
+
+"'For one thing, Cap,' I said, 'I'm not a poor man, and for another I'm
+not going home. I am the captive of your bow and spear. I decline to
+resign office.'
+
+"'Skittles!' he says (that was a great word of his), 'you'll take parole,
+and go back to America and invent another Zigler, a trifle heavier in the
+working parts--I would. We've got more prisoners than we know what to do
+with as it is,' he says. 'You'll only be an additional expense to me as a
+taxpayer. Think of Schedule D,' he says, 'and take parole.'
+
+"'I don't know anything about your tariffs,' I said, 'but when I get to
+Cape Town I write home for money, and I turn in every cent my board'll
+cost your country to any ten-century-old department that's been ordained
+to take it since William the Conqueror came along.'
+
+"'But, confound you for a thick-headed mule,' he says, 'this war ain't any
+more than just started! Do you mean to tell me you're going to play
+prisoner till it's over?'
+
+"'That's about the size of it,' I says, 'if an Englishman and an American
+could ever understand each other.'
+
+"'But, in Heaven's Holy Name, why?' he says, sitting down of a heap on an
+anthill.
+
+"'Well, Cap,' I says, 'I don't pretend to follow your ways of thought, and
+I can't see why you abuse your position to persecute a poor prisoner o'
+war on _his!_'
+
+"'My dear fellow,' he began, throwing up his hands and blushing, 'I'll
+apologise.'
+
+"'But if you insist,' I says, 'there are just one and a half things in
+this world I can't do. The odd half don't matter here; but taking parole,
+and going home, and being interviewed by the boys, and giving lectures on
+my single-handed campaign against the hereditary enemies of my beloved
+country happens to be the one. We'll let it go at that, Cap.'
+
+"'But it'll bore you to death,' he says. The British are a heap more
+afraid of what they call being bored than of dying, I've noticed.
+
+"'I'll survive,' I says, 'I ain't British. I can think,' I says.
+
+"'By God,' he says, coming up to me, and extending the right hand of
+fellowship, 'you ought to be English, Zigler!'
+
+"It's no good getting mad at a compliment like that. The English all do
+it. They're a crazy breed. When they don't know you they freeze up
+tighter'n the St. Lawrence. When they _do_, they go out like an ice-jam in
+April. Up till we prisoners left--four days--my Captain Mankeltow told me
+pretty much all about himself there was; his mother and sisters, and his
+bad brother that was a trooper in some Colonial corps, and how his father
+didn't get on with him, and--well, everything, as I've said. They're
+undomesticated, the British, compared with us. They talk about their own
+family affairs as if they belonged to someone else. 'Taint as if they
+hadn't any shame, but it sounds like it. I guess they talk out loud what
+we think, and we talk out loud what they think.
+
+"I liked my Captain Mankeltow. I liked him as well as any man I'd ever
+struck. He was white. He gave me his silver drinking-flask, and I gave him
+the formula of my Laughtite. That's a hundred and fifty thousand dollars
+in his vest-pocket, on the lowest count, if he has the knowledge to use
+it. No, I didn't tell him the money-value. He was English. He'd send his
+valet to find out.
+
+"Well, me and Adrian and a crowd of dam Dutchmen was sent down the road to
+Cape Town in first-class carriages under escort. (What did I think of your
+enlisted men? They are largely different from ours, Sir: very largely.) As
+I was saying, we slid down south, with Adrian looking out of the car-
+window and crying. Dutchmen cry mighty easy for a breed that fights as
+they do; but I never understood how a Dutchman could curse till we crossed
+into the Orange Free State Colony, and he lifted up his hand and cursed
+Steyn for a solid ten minutes. Then we got into the Colony, and the rebs--
+ministers mostly and schoolmasters--came round the cars with fruit and
+sympathy and texts. Van Zyl talked to 'em in Dutch, and one man, a big
+red-bearded minister, at Beaufort West, I remember, he jest wilted on the
+platform.
+
+"'Keep your prayers for yourself,' says Van Zyl, throwing back a bunch of
+grapes. 'You'll need 'em, and you'll need the fruit too, when the war
+comes down here. _You_ done it,' he says. 'You and your picayune Church
+that's deader than Cronje's dead horses! What sort of a God have you been
+unloading on us, you black _aas vogels_? The British came, and we beat
+'em,' he says, 'and you sat still and prayed. The British beat us, and you
+sat still,' he says. 'You told us to hang on, and we hung on, and our
+farms was burned, and you sat still--you and your God. See here,' he says,
+'I shot my Bible full of bullets after Bloemfontein went, and you and God
+didn't say anything. Take it and pray over it before we Federals help the
+British to knock hell out of you rebels.'
+
+"Then I hauled him back into the car. I judged he'd had a fit. But life's
+curious--and sudden--and mixed. I hadn't any more use for a reb than Van
+Zyl, and I knew something of the lies they'd fed us up with from the
+Colony for a year and more. I told the minister to pull his freight out of
+that, and went on with my lunch, when another man come along and shook
+hands with Van Zyl. He'd known him at close range in the Kimberley seige
+and before. Van Zyl was well seen by his neighbours, I judge. As soon as
+this other man opened his mouth I said, 'You're Kentucky, ain't you?' 'I
+am,' he says; 'and what may you be?' I told him right off, for I was
+pleased to hear good United States in any man's mouth; but he whipped his
+hands behind him and said, 'I'm not knowing any man that fights for a
+Tammany Dutchman. But I presoom you've been well paid, you dam gun-runnin'
+Yank.'
+
+"Well, Sir, I wasn't looking for that, and it near knocked me over, while
+old man Van Zyl started in to explain.
+
+"'Don't you waste your breath, Mister Van Zyl,' the man says. 'I know this
+breed. The South's full of 'em.' Then he whirls round on me and says,
+'Look at here, you Yank. A little thing like a King's neither here nor
+there, but what _you've_ done,' he says, 'is to go back on the White Man
+in six places at once--two hemispheres and four continents--America,
+England, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa. Don't open your
+head,' he says. 'You know well if you'd been caught at this game in our
+country you'd have been jiggling in the bight of a lariat before you could
+reach for your naturalisation papers. Go on and prosper,' he says, 'and
+you'll fetch up by fighting for niggers, as the North did.' And he threw
+me half-a-crown--English money.
+
+"Sir, I do not regard the proposition in that light, but I guess I must
+have been somewhat shook by the explosion. They told me at Cape Town one
+rib was driven in on to my lungs. I am not adducing this as an excuse, but
+the cold God's truth of the matter is--the money on the floor did it.... I
+give up and cried. Put my head down and cried.
+
+"I dream about this still sometimes. He didn't know the circumstances, but
+I dream about it. And it's Hell!
+
+"How do you regard the proposition--as a Brother? If you'd invented your
+own gun, and spent fifty-seven thousand dollars on her--and had paid your
+own expenses from the word 'go'? An American citizen has a right to choose
+his own side in an unpleasantness, and Van Zyl wasn't any Krugerite ...
+and I'd risked my hide at my own expense. I got that man's address from
+Van Zyl; he was a mining man at Kimberley, and I wrote him the facts. But
+he never answered. Guess he thought I lied.... Damned Southern rebel!
+
+"Oh, say. Did I tell you my Captain gave me a letter to an English Lord in
+Cape Town, and he fixed things so's I could lie up a piece in his house? I
+was pretty sick, and threw up some blood from where the rib had gouged
+into the lung--here. This Lord was a crank on guns, and he took charge of
+the Zigler. He had his knife into the British system as much as any
+American. He said he wanted revolution, and not reform, in your army. He
+said the British soldier had failed in every point except courage. He said
+England needed a Monroe Doctrine worse than America--a new doctrine,
+barring out all the Continent, and strictly devoting herself to developing
+her own Colonies. He said he'd abolish half the Foreign Office, and take
+all the old hereditary families clean out of it, because, he said, they
+was expressly trained to fool around with continental diplomats, and to
+despise the Colonies. His own family wasn't more than six hundred years
+old. He was a very brainy man, and a good citizen. We talked politics and
+inventions together when my lung let up on me.
+
+"Did he know my General? Yes. He knew 'em all. Called 'em Teddie and
+Gussie and Willie. They was all of the very best, and all his dearest
+friends; but he told me confidentially they was none of 'em fit to command
+a column in the field. He said they were too fond of advertising. Generals
+don't seem very different from actors or doctors or--yes, Sir--inventors.
+
+"He fixed things for me lovelily at Simons-Town. Had the biggest sort of
+pull--even for a Lord. At first they treated me as a harmless lunatic; but
+after a while I got 'em to let me keep some of their books. If I was left
+alone in the world with the British system of bookkeeping, I'd reconstruct
+the whole British Empire--beginning with the Army. Yes, I'm one of their
+most trusted accountants, and I'm paid for it. As much as a dollar a day.
+I keep that. I've earned it, and I deduct it from the cost of my board.
+When the war's over I'm going to pay up the balance to the British
+Government. Yes, Sir, that's how I regard the proposition.
+
+"Adrian? Oh, he left for Umballa four months back. He told me he was going
+to apply to join the National Scouts if the war didn't end in a year.
+'Tisn't in nature for one Dutchman to shoot another, but if Adrian ever
+meets up with Steyn there'll be an exception to the rule. Ye--es, when the
+war's over it'll take some of the British Army to protect Steyn from his
+fellow-patriots. But the war won't be over yet awhile. He that believeth
+don't hurry, as Isaiah says. The ministers and the school-teachers and the
+rebs'll have a war all to themselves long after the north is quiet.
+
+"I'm pleased with this country--it's big. Not so many folk on the ground
+as in America. There's a boom coming sure. I've talked it over with
+Adrian, and I guess I shall buy a farm somewhere near Bloemfontein and
+start in cattle-raising. It's big and peaceful--a ten-thousand-acre farm.
+I could go on inventing there, too. I'll sell my Zigler, I guess. I'll
+offer the patent rights to the British Government; and if they do the
+'reelly-now-how-interesting' act over her, I'll turn her over to Captain
+Mankeltow and his friend the Lord. They'll pretty quick find some Gussie,
+or Teddie, or Algie who can get her accepted in the proper quarters. I'm
+beginning to know my English.
+
+"And now I'll go in swimming, and read the papers after lunch. I haven't
+had such a good time since Willie died." He pulled the blue shirt over his
+head as the bathers returned to their piles of clothing, and, speaking
+through the folds, added:
+
+"But if you want to realise your assets, you should lease the whole
+proposition to America for ninety-nine years."
+
+
+
+
+THE BONDS OF DISCIPLINE
+
+POSEIDON'S LAW
+
+  When the robust and brass-bound man commissioned first for sea
+  His fragile raft, Poseidon laughed, and, "Mariner," said he,
+  "Behold, a Law immutable I lay on thee and thine,
+  That never shall ye act or tell a falsehood at my shrine.
+
+  "Let Zeus adjudge your landward kin, whose votive meal and salt
+  At easy-cheated altars win oblivion for the fault,
+  But ye the unhoodwinked waves shall test--the immediate gulfs condemn--
+  Unless ye owe the Fates a jest, be slow to jest with them.
+
+  "Ye shall not clear by Greekly speech, nor cozen from your path
+  The twinkling shoal, the leeward beach, and Hadria's white-lipped wrath;
+  Nor tempt with painted cloth for wood my fraud-avenging hosts;
+  Nor make at all or all make good your bulwarks and your boasts.
+
+  "Now and henceforward serve unshod through wet and wakeful shifts,
+  A present and oppressive God, but take, to aid, my gifts--
+  The wide and windward-opened eye, the large and lavish hand,
+  The soul that cannot tell a lie--except upon the land!"
+
+  In dromond and in catafract--wet, wakeful, windward-eyed--
+  He kept Poseidon's Law intact (his ship and freight beside),
+  But, once discharged the dromond's hold, the bireme beached once more,
+  Splendaciously mendacious rolled the brass-bound man ashore.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+  The thranite now and thalamite are pressures low and high,
+  And where three hundred blades bit white the twin-propellers ply:
+  The God that hailed, the keel that sailed, are changed beyond recall,
+  But the robust and brass-bound man he is not changed at all!
+
+  From Punt returned, from Phormio's Fleet, from Javan and Gadire,
+  He strongly occupies the seat about the tavern fire,
+  And, moist with much Falernian or smoked Massilian juice,
+  Revenges there the brass-bound man his long-enforced truce!
+
+
+THE BONDS OF DISCIPLINE
+
+As literature, it is beneath contempt. It concerns the endurance,
+armament, turning-circle, and inner gear of every ship in the British
+Navy--the  whole embellished with profile plates. The Teuton approaches
+the matter with pagan thoroughness; the Muscovite runs him close; but the
+Gaul, ever an artist, breaks enclosure to study the morale, at the present
+day, of the British sailorman.
+
+In this, I conceive, he is from time to time aided by the zealous amateur,
+though I find very little in his dispositions to show that he relies on
+that amateur's hard-won information. There exists--unlike some other
+publication, it is not bound in lead boards--a work by one "M. de C.,"
+based on the absolutely unadorned performances of one of our well-known
+_Acolyte_ type of cruisers. It contains nothing that did not happen. It
+covers a period of two days; runs to twenty-seven pages of large type
+exclusive of appendices; and carries as many exclamation points as the
+average Dumas novel.
+
+I read it with care, from the adorably finished prologue--it is the
+disgrace of our Navy that we cannot produce a commissioned officer capable
+of writing one page of lyric prose--to the eloquent, the joyful, the
+impassioned end; and my first notion was that I had been cheated. In this
+sort of book-collecting you will see how entirely the bibliophile lies at
+the mercy of his agent.
+
+"M. de C.," I read, opened his campaign by stowing away in one of her
+boats what time H.M.S. _Archimandrite_ lay off Funchal. "M. de C." was,
+always on behalf of his country, a Madeira Portuguese fleeing from the
+conscription. They discovered him eighty miles at sea and bade him assist
+the cook. So far this seemed fairly reasonable. Next day, thanks to his
+histrionic powers and his ingratiating address, he was promoted to the
+rank of "supernumerary captain's servant"--a "post which," I give his
+words, "I flatter myself, was created for me alone, and furnished me with
+opportunities unequalled for a task in which one word malapropos would
+have been my destruction."
+
+From this point onward, earth and water between them held no marvels like
+to those "M. de C." had "envisaged"--if I translate him correctly. It
+became clear to me that "M. de C." was either a pyramidal liar, or...
+
+I was not acquainted with any officer, seaman, or marine in the
+_Archimandrite_; but instinct told me I could not go far wrong if I took a
+third-class ticket to Plymouth.
+
+I gathered information on the way from a leading stoker, two seaman-
+gunners, and an odd hand in a torpedo factory. They courteously set my
+feet on the right path, and that led me through the alleys of Devonport to
+a public-house not fifty yards from the water. We drank with the
+proprietor, a huge, yellowish man called Tom Wessels; and when my guides
+had departed, I asked if he could produce any warrant or petty officer of
+the _Archimandrite_.
+
+"The _Bedlamite_, d'you mean--'er last commission, when they all went
+crazy?"
+
+"Shouldn't wonder," I replied. "Fetch me a sample and I'll see."
+
+"You'll excuse me, o' course, but--what d'you want 'im _for?_"
+
+"I want to make him drunk. I want to make you drunk--if you like. I want
+to make him drunk here."
+
+"Spoke very 'andsome. I'll do what I can." He went out towards the water
+that lapped at the foot of the street. I gathered from the pot-boy that he
+was a person of influence beyond Admirals.
+
+In a few minutes I heard the noise of an advancing crowd, and the voice of
+Mr. Wessels.
+
+"'E only wants to make you drunk at 'is expense. Dessay 'e'll stand you
+all a drink. Come up an' look at 'im. 'E don't bite."
+
+A square man, with remarkable eyes, entered at the head of six large
+bluejackets. Behind them gathered a contingent of hopeful free-drinkers.
+
+"'E's the only one I could get. Transferred to the _Postulant_ six months
+back. I found 'im quite accidental." Mr. Wessels beamed.
+
+"I'm in charge o' the cutter. Our wardroom is dinin' on the beach _en
+masse_. They won't be home till mornin'," said the square man with the
+remarkable eyes.  "Are you an _Archimandrite?_" I demanded.
+
+"That's me. I was, as you might say."
+
+"Hold on. I'm a _Archimandrite._" A Red Marine with moist eyes tried to
+climb on the table. "Was you lookin' for a _Bedlamite?_ I've--I've been
+invalided, an' what with that, an' visitin' my family 'ome at Lewes,
+per'aps I've come late. 'Ave I?"
+
+"You've 'ad all that's good for you," said Tom Wessels, as the Red Marine
+sat cross-legged on the floor.
+
+"There are those 'oo haven't 'ad a thing yet!" cried a voice by the door.
+
+"I will take this _Archimandrite_" I said, "and this Marine. Will you
+please give the boat's crew a drink now, and another in half an hour if--
+if Mr.----"
+
+"Pyecroft," said the square man. "Emanuel Pyecroft, second-class petty-
+officer."
+
+"--Mr. Pyecroft doesn't object?"
+
+"He don't. Clear out. Goldin', you picket the hill by yourself, throwin'
+out a skirmishin'-line in ample time to let me know when Number One's
+comin' down from his vittles."
+
+The crowd dissolved. We passed into the quiet of the inner bar, the Red
+Marine zealously leading the way.
+
+"And what do you drink, Mr. Pyecroft?" I said.
+
+"Only water. Warm water, with a little whisky an' sugar an' per'aps a
+lemon."
+
+"Mine's beer," said the Marine. "It always was."
+
+"Look 'ere, Glass. You take an' go to sleep. The picket'll be comin' for
+you in a little time, an' per'aps you'll 'ave slep' it off by then. What's
+your ship, now?" said Mr. Wessels.
+
+"The Ship o' State--most important?" said the Red Marine magnificently,
+and shut his eyes.
+
+"That's right," said Mr. Pyecroft. "He's safest where he is. An' now--
+here's santy to us all!--what d'you want o' me?"
+
+"I want to read you something."
+
+"Tracts, again!" said the Marine, never opening his eyes. "Well. I'm
+game.... A little more 'ead to it, miss, please."
+
+"He thinks 'e's drinkin'--lucky beggar!" said Mr. Pyecroft. "I'm agreeable
+to be read to. 'Twon't alter my convictions. I may as well tell you
+beforehand I'm a Plymouth Brother."
+
+He composed his face with the air of one in the dentist's chair, and I
+began at the third page of "M. de C."
+
+"'_At the moment of asphyxiation, for I had hidden myself under the boat's
+cover, I heard footsteps upon the superstructure and coughed with
+empress_'--coughed loudly, Mr. Pyecroft. '_By this time I judged the
+vessel to be sufficiently far from land. A number of sailors extricated me
+amid language appropriate to their national brutality. I responded that I
+named myself Antonio, and that I sought to save myself from the Portuguese
+conscription_.'
+
+"Ho!" said Mr. Pyecroft, and the fashion of his countenance changed. Then
+pensively: "Ther beggar! What might you have in your hand there?"
+
+"It's the story of Antonio--a stowaway in the _Archimandrite's_ cutter. A
+French spy when he's at home, I fancy. What do _you_ know about it?"
+
+"An' I thought it was tracts! An' yet some'ow I didn't." Mr. Pyecroft
+nodded his head wonderingly. "Our old man was quite right--so was 'Op--so
+was I. 'Ere, Glass!" He kicked the Marine. "Here's our Antonio 'as written
+a impromptu book! He _was_ a spy all right."
+
+The Red Marine turned slightly, speaking with the awful precision of the
+half-drunk. "'As 'e got any-thin' in about my 'orrible death an'
+execution? Ex_cuse_ me, but if I open my eyes, I shan't be well. That's
+where I'm different from _all_ other men. Ahem!"
+
+"What about Glass's execution?" demanded Pyecroft.
+
+"The book's in French," I replied.
+
+"Then it's no good to me."
+
+"Precisely. Now I want you to tell your story just as it happened. I'll
+check it by this book. Take a cigar. I know about his being dragged out of
+the cutter. What I want to know is what was the meaning of all the other
+things, because they're unusual."
+
+"They were," said Mr. Pyecroft with emphasis. "Lookin' back on it as I set
+here more an' more I see what an 'ighly unusual affair it was. But it
+happened. It transpired in the _Archimandrite_--the ship you can trust...
+Antonio! Ther beggar!"
+
+"Take your time, Mr. Pyecroft."
+
+In a few moments we came to it thus--
+
+"The old man was displeased. I don't deny he was quite a little
+displeased. With the mail-boats trottin' into Madeira every twenty
+minutes, he didn't see why a lop-eared Portugee had to take liberties with
+a man-o'-war's first cutter. Any'ow, we couldn't turn ship round for him.
+We drew him out and took him out to Number One. 'Drown 'im,' 'e says.
+'Drown 'im before 'e dirties my fine new decks.' But our owner was
+tenderhearted. 'Take him to the galley,' 'e says. 'Boil 'im! Skin 'im!
+Cook 'im! Cut 'is bloomin' hair? Take 'is bloomin' number! We'll have him
+executed at Ascension.'
+
+"Retallick, our chief cook, an' a Carth'lic, was the on'y one any way near
+grateful; bein' short-'anded in the galley. He annexes the blighter by the
+left ear an' right foot an' sets him to work peelin' potatoes. So then,
+this Antonio that was avoidin' the conscription--"
+
+"_Sub_scription, you pink-eyed matlow!" said the Marine, with the face of
+a stone Buddha, and whimpered sadly: "Pye don't see any fun in it at all."
+
+"_Con_scription--come to his illegitimate sphere in Her Majesty's Navy,
+an' it was just then that Old 'Op, our Yeoman of Signals, an' a fastidious
+joker, made remarks to me about 'is hands.
+
+"'Those 'ands,' says 'Op, 'properly considered, never done a day's honest
+labour in their life. Tell me those hands belong to a blighted Portugee
+manual labourist and I won't call you a liar, but I'll say you an' the
+Admiralty are pretty much unique in your statements.' 'Op was always a
+fastidious joker--in his language as much as anything else. He pursued 'is
+investigations with the eye of an 'awk outside the galley. He knew better
+than to advance line-head against Retallick, so he attacked _ong eshlong_,
+speakin' his remarks as much as possible into the breech of the starboard
+four point seven, an' 'ummin' to 'imself. Our chief cook 'ated 'ummin'.
+'What's the matter of your bowels?' he says at last, fistin' out the mess-
+pork agitated like. "'Don't mind me,' says 'Op. 'I'm only a mildewed
+buntin'-tosser,' 'e says: 'but speakin' for my mess, I do hope,' 'e says,
+'you ain't goin' to boil your Portugee friend's boots along o' that pork
+you're smellin' so gay!'
+
+"'Boots! Boots! Boots!' says Retallick, an' he run round like a earwig in
+a alder-stalk. 'Boots in the galley,' 'e says. 'Cook's mate, cast out an'
+abolish this cutter-cuddlin' abori_gine's_ boots!'"
+
+"They was hove overboard in quick time, an' that was what 'Op was lyin' to
+for. As subsequently transpired.
+
+"'Fine Arab arch to that cutter-cuddler's hinstep,' he says to me. 'Run
+your eye over it, Pye,' 'e says. 'Nails all present an' correct,' 'e says.
+'Bunion on the little toe, too,' 'e says; 'which comes from wearin' a
+tight boot. What do _you_ think?'
+
+"'Dook in trouble, per'aps,' I says. 'He ain't got the hang of spud-
+skinnin'.' No more he 'ad. 'E was simply cannibalisin' 'em.
+
+"'I want to know what 'e 'as got the 'ang of,' says 'Op, obstructed-like.
+'Watch 'im,' 'e says. 'These shoulders were foreign-drilled somewhere.'
+
+'"When it comes to "Down 'ammicks!" which is our naval way o' goin' to
+bye-bye, I took particular trouble over Antonio, 'oo had 'is 'ammick 'ove
+at 'im with general instructions to sling it an' be sugared. In the
+ensuin' melly I pioneered him to the after-'atch, which is a orifice
+communicatin' with the after-flat an' similar suites of apartments. He
+havin' navigated at three fifths power immejit ahead o' me, _I_ wasn't
+goin' to volunteer any assistance, nor he didn't need it.'
+
+"'Mong Jew!' says 'e, sniffin' round. An' twice more 'Mong Jew!'--which is
+pure French. Then he slings 'is 'ammick, nips in, an' coils down. 'Not bad
+for a Portugee conscript,' I says to myself, casts off the tow, abandons
+him, and reports to 'Op.
+
+"About three minutes later I'm over'auled by our sub-lootenant, navigatin'
+under forced draught, with his bearin's 'eated. 'E had the temerity to say
+I'd instructed our Antonio to sling his carcass in the alleyway, an' 'e
+was peevish about it. O' course, I prevaricated like 'ell. You get to do
+that in the service. Nevertheless, to oblige Mr. Ducane, I went an'
+readjusted Antonio. You may not 'ave ascertained that there are two ways
+o' comin' out of an 'ammick when it's cut down. Antonio came out t'other
+way--slidin' 'andsome to his feet. That showed me two things. First, 'e
+had been in an 'ammick before, an' next, he hadn't been asleep. Then I
+reproached 'im for goin' to bed where 'e'd been told to go, instead o'
+standin' by till some one gave him entirely contradictory orders. Which is
+the essence o' naval discipline.
+
+"In the middle o' this argument the gunner protrudes his ram-bow from 'is
+cabin, an' brings it all to an 'urried conclusion with some remarks
+suitable to 'is piebald warrant-rank. Navigatin' thence under easy steam,
+an' leavin' Antonio to re-sling his little foreign self, my large flat
+foot comes in detonatin' contact with a small objec' on the deck. Not
+'altin' for the obstacle, nor changin' step, I shuffles it along under the
+ball of the big toe to the foot o' the hatchway, when, lightly stoopin', I
+catch it in my right hand and continue my evolutions in rapid time till I
+eventuates under 'Op's lee.
+
+"It was a small moroccer-bound pocket-book, full of indelible pencil-
+writin'--in French, for I could plainly discern the _doodeladays_, which
+is about as far as my education runs.
+
+"'Op fists it open and peruses. 'E'd known an 'arf-caste Frenchwoman
+pretty intricate before he was married; when he was trained man in a
+stinkin' gunboat up the Saigon River. He understood a lot o' French--
+domestic brands chiefly--the kind that isn't in print.
+
+"'Pye,' he says to me, 'you're a tattician o' no mean value. I am a trifle
+shady about the precise bearin' an' import' o' this beggar's private log
+here,' 'e says, 'but it's evidently a case for the owner. You'll 'ave your
+share o' the credit,' 'e says.
+
+"'Nay, nay, Pauline,' I says, 'You don't catch Emanuel Pyecroft mine-
+droppin' under any post-captain's bows,' I says, 'in search of honour,' I
+says. 'I've been there oft.'
+
+"'Well, if you must, you must,' 'e says, takin' me up quick. 'But I'll
+speak a good word for you, Pye.'
+
+"'You'll shut your mouth, 'Op,' I says, 'or you an' me'll part brass-rags.
+The owner has his duties, an' I have mine. We will keep station,' I says,
+'nor seek to deviate.'
+
+"'Deviate to blazes!' says 'Op. 'I'm goin' to deviate to the owner's
+comfortable cabin direct.' So he deviated."
+
+Mr. Pyecroft leaned forward and dealt the Marine a large pattern Navy
+kick. "'Ere, Glass! You was sentry when 'Op went to the old man--the first
+time, with Antonio's washin'-book. Tell us what transpired. You're sober.
+You don't know how sober you are!"
+
+The Marine cautiously raised his head a few inches. As Mr. Pyecroft said,
+he was sober--after some R.M.L.I. fashion of his own devising. "'Op bounds
+in like a startled anteloper, carryin' 'is signal-slate at the ready. The
+old man was settin' down to 'is bountiful platter--not like you an' me,
+without anythin' more in sight for an 'ole night an' 'arf a day. Talkin'
+about food--"
+
+"No! No! No!" cried Pyecroft, kicking again. "What about 'Op?" I thought
+the Marine's ribs would have snapped, but he merely hiccuped.
+
+"Oh, 'im! 'E 'ad it written all down on 'is little slate--I think--an' 'e
+shoves it under the old man's nose. 'Shut the door,' says 'Op. 'For
+'Eavin's sake shut the cabin door!' Then the old man must ha' said
+somethin' 'bout irons. 'I'll put 'em on, Sir, in your very presence,' says
+'Op, 'only 'ear my prayer,' or--words to that 'fect.... It was jus' the
+same with me when I called our Sergeant a bladder-bellied, lard-'eaded,
+perspirin' pension-cheater. They on'y put on the charge-sheet 'words to
+that effect,' Spoiled the 'ole 'fect."
+
+"'Op! 'Op! 'Op! What about 'Op?" thundered Pyecroft.
+
+"'Op? Oh, shame thing. Words t' that 'fect. Door shut. Nushin' more
+transphired till 'Op comes out--nose exshtreme angle plungin' fire or--or
+words 'that effect. Proud's parrot. 'Oh, you prou' old parrot,' I says."
+
+Mr. Glass seemed to slumber again.
+
+"Lord! How a little moisture disintegrates, don't it? When we had ship's
+theatricals off Vigo, Glass 'ere played Dick Deadeye to the moral, though
+of course the lower deck wasn't pleased to see a leatherneck interpretin'
+a strictly maritime part, as you might say. It's only his repartees, which
+'e can't contain, that conquers him. Shall I resume my narrative?"
+
+Another drink was brought on this hint, and Mr. Pyecroft resumed.
+
+"The essence o' strategy bein' forethought, the essence o' tattics is
+surprise. Per'aps you didn't know that? My forethought 'avin' secured the
+initial advantage in attack, it remained for the old man to ladle out the
+surprise-packets. 'Eavens! What surprises! That night he dines with the
+wardroom, bein' of the kind--I've told you as we were a 'appy ship?--that
+likes it, and the wardroom liked it too. This ain't common in the service.
+They had up the new Madeira--awful undisciplined stuff which gives you a
+cordite mouth next morning. They told the mess-men to navigate towards the
+extreme an' remote 'orizon, an' they abrogated the sentry about fifteen
+paces out of earshot. Then they had in the Gunner, the Bo'sun, an' the
+Carpenter, an' stood them large round drinks. It all come out later--
+wardroom joints bein' lower-deck hash, as the sayin' is--that our Number
+One stuck to it that 'e couldn't trust the ship for the job. The old man
+swore 'e could, 'avin' commanded 'er over two years. He was right. There
+wasn't a ship, I don't care in what fleet, could come near the
+_Archimandrites_ when we give our mind to a thing. We held the cruiser
+big-gun records, the sailing-cutter (fancy-rig) championship, an' the
+challenge-cup row round the fleet. We 'ad the best nigger-minstrels, the
+best football an' cricket teams, an' the best squee-jee band of anything
+that ever pushed in front of a brace o' screws. An' _yet_ our Number One
+mistrusted us! 'E said we'd be a floatin' hell in a week, an' it 'ud take
+the rest o' the commission to stop our way. They was arguin' it in the
+wardroom when the bridge reports a light three points off the port bow. We
+overtakes her, switches on our search-light, an' she discloses herself as
+a collier o' no mean reputation, makin' about seven knots on 'er lawful
+occasions--to the Cape most like.
+
+"Then the owner--so we 'eard in good time--broke the boom, springin' all
+mines together at close interval.
+
+"'Look 'ere, my jokers,' 'e says (I'm givin' the grist of 'is arguments,
+remember), 'Number One says we can't enlighten this cutter-cuddlin Gaulish
+lootenant on the manners an' customs o' the Navy without makin' the ship a
+market-garden. There's a lot in that,' 'e says, 'specially if we kept it
+up lavish, till we reached Ascension. But,' 'e says, 'the appearance o'
+this strange sail has put a totally new aspect on the game. We can run to
+just one day's amusement for our friend, or else what's the good o'
+discipline? An' then we can turn 'im over to our presumably short-'anded
+fellow-subject in the small-coal line out yonder. He'll be pleased,' says
+the old man, 'an' so will Antonio. M'rover,' he says to Number One, 'I'll
+lay you a dozen o' liquorice an' ink'--it must ha' been that new tawny
+port--'that I've got a ship I can trust--for one day,' 'e says.
+'Wherefore,' he says, 'will you have the extreme goodness to reduce speed
+as requisite for keepin' a proper distance behind this providential tramp
+till further orders?' Now, that's what I call tattics.
+
+"The other manoeuvres developed next day, strictly in accordance with the
+plans as laid down in the wardroom, where they sat long an' steady. 'Op
+whispers to me that Antonio was a Number One spy when 'e was in
+commission, and a French lootenant when 'e was paid off, so I navigated at
+three 'undred and ninety six revolutions to the galley, never 'avin'
+kicked a lootenant up to date. I may as well say that I did not manoeuvre
+against 'im as a Frenchman, because I like Frenchmen, but stric'ly on 'is
+rank an' ratin' in 'is own navy. I inquired after 'is health from
+Retallick.
+
+"'Don't ask me,' 'e says, sneerin' be'ind his silver spectacles. ''E's
+promoted to be captain's second supernumerary servant, to be dressed and
+addressed as such. If 'e does 'is dooties same as he skinned the spuds,
+_I_ ain't for changin' with the old man.'
+
+"In the balmy dawnin' it was given out, all among the 'olystones, by our
+sub-lootenant, who was a three-way-discharge devil, that all orders after
+eight bells was to be executed in inverse ration to the cube o' the
+velocity. 'The reg'lar routine,' he says, 'was arrogated for reasons o'
+state an' policy, an' any flat-foot who presumed to exhibit surprise,
+annoyance, or amusement, would be slightly but firmly reproached.' Then
+the Gunner mops up a heathenish large detail for some hanky-panky in the
+magazines, an' led 'em off along with our Gunnery Jack, which is to say,
+our Gunnery Lootenant.
+
+"That put us on the _viva voce_--particularly when we understood how the
+owner was navigatin' abroad in his sword-belt trustin' us like brothers.
+We shifts into the dress o' the day, an' we musters _an'_ we prays _ong
+reggle_, an' we carries on anticipatory to bafflin' Antonio.
+
+"Then our Sergeant of Marines come to me wringin' his 'ands an' weepin'.
+'E'd been talkin' to the sub-lootenant, an' it looked like as if his
+upper-works were collapsin'.
+
+"'I want a guarantee,' 'e says, wringin' 'is 'ands like this. '_I_ 'aven't
+'ad sunstroke slave-dhowin' in Tajurrah Bay, an' been compelled to live on
+quinine an' chlorodyne ever since. _I_ don't get the horrors off glasses
+o' brown sherry.'
+
+"'What 'ave you got now?' I says.
+
+"'_I_ ain't an officer,' 'e says. '_My_ sword won't be handed back to me
+at the end o' the court-martial on account o' my little weaknesses, an' no
+stain on my character. I'm only a pore beggar of a Red Marine with
+eighteen years' service, an' why for,' says he, wringin' 'is hands like
+this all the time, 'must I chuck away my pension, sub-lootenant or no
+sub-lootenant? Look at 'em,' he says, 'only look at 'em. Marines fallin'
+in for small-arm drill!'
+
+"The leathernecks was layin' aft at the double, an' a more insanitary set
+of accidents I never wish to behold. Most of 'em was in their shirts. They
+had their trousers on, of course--rolled up nearly to the knee, but what I
+mean is belts over shirts. Three or four 'ad _our_ caps, an' them that had
+drawn helmets wore their chin-straps like Portugee earrings. Oh, yes; an'
+three of 'em 'ad only one boot! I knew what our bafflin' tattics was goin'
+to be, but even I was mildly surprised when this gay fantasia of Brazee
+drummers halted under the poop, because of an 'ammick in charge of our
+Navigator, an' a small but 'ighly efficient landin'-party.
+
+"''Ard astern both screws!' says the Navigator. 'Room for the captain's
+'ammick!' The captain's servant--Cockburn 'is name was--had one end, an'
+our newly promoted Antonio, in a blue slop rig, 'ad the other. They slung
+it from the muzzle of the port poop quick-firer thort-ships to a
+stanchion. Then the old man flickered up, smokin' a cigarette, an' brought
+'is stern to an anchor slow an' oriental.
+
+"'What a blessin' it is, Mr. Ducane,' 'e says to our sub-lootenant, 'to be
+out o' sight o' the 'ole pack o' blighted admirals! What's an admiral
+after all?' 'e says. 'Why, 'e's only a post-captain with the pip, Mr.
+Ducane. The drill will now proceed. What O! Antonio, _descendez_ an' get
+me a split.'
+
+"When Antonio came back with the whisky-an'-soda, he was told off to swing
+the 'ammick in slow time, an' that massacritin' small-arm party went on
+with their oratorio. The Sergeant had been kindly excused from
+participating an' he was jumpin' round on the poop-ladder, stretchin' 'is
+leather neck to see the disgustin' exhibition an' cluckin' like a ash-
+hoist. A lot of us went on the fore an' aft bridge an' watched 'em like
+'Listen to the Band in the Park.' All these evolutions, I may as well tell
+you, are highly unusual in the Navy. After ten minutes o' muckin' about,
+Glass 'ere--pity 'e's so drunk!--says that 'e'd had enough exercise for
+'is simple needs an' he wants to go 'ome. Mr. Ducane catches him a
+sanakatowzer of a smite over the 'ead with the flat of his sword. Down
+comes Glass's rifle with language to correspond, and he fiddles with the
+bolt. Up jumps Maclean--'oo was a Gosport 'ighlander--an' lands on Glass's
+neck, thus bringin' him to the deck, fully extended.
+
+"The old man makes a great show o' wakin' up from sweet slumbers. 'Mistah
+Ducane,' he says, 'what is this painful interregnum?' or words to that
+effect. Ducane takes one step to the front, an' salutes: 'Only 'nother
+case of attempted assassination, Sir,' he says.
+
+"'Is that all?' says the old man, while Maclean sits on Glass's collar
+button. 'Take him away,' 'e says, 'he knows the penalty.'"
+
+"Ah! I suppose that is the 'invincible _morgue_ Britannic in the presence
+of brutally provoked mutiny,'" I muttered, as I turned over the pages of
+M. de C.
+
+"So, Glass, 'e was led off kickin' an' squealin', an' hove down the ladder
+into 'is Sergeant's volupshus arms. 'E run Glass forward, an' was all for
+puttin' 'im in irons as a maniac.
+
+"'You refill your waterjacket and cool off!' says Glass, sittin' down
+rather winded. 'The trouble with you is you haven't any imagination.'
+
+"'Haven't I? I've got the remnants of a little poor authority though,' 'e
+says, lookin' pretty vicious.
+
+"'You 'ave?' says Glass. 'Then for pity's sake 'ave some proper feelin'
+too. I'm goin' to be shot this evenin'. You'll take charge o' the firin'-
+party.'
+
+"Some'ow or other, that made the Sergeant froth at the mouth. 'E 'ad no
+more play to his intellects than a spit-kid. 'E just took everything as it
+come. Well, that was about all, I think.... Unless you'd care to have me
+resume my narrative."
+
+We resumed on the old terms, but with rather less hot water. The marine on
+the floor breathed evenly, and Mr. Pyecroft nodded.
+
+"I may have omitted to inform you that our Number One took a general row
+round the situation while the small-arm party was at work, an' o' course
+he supplied the outlines; but the details we coloured in by ourselves.
+These were our tattics to baffle Antonio. It occurs to the Carpenter to
+'ave the steam-cutter down for repairs. 'E gets 'is cheero-party together,
+an' down she comes. You've never seen a steam-cutter let down on the deck,
+'ave you? It's not usual, an' she takes a lot o' humourin'. Thus we 'ave
+the starboard side completely blocked an' the general traffic tricklin'
+over'ead along the fore-an'-aft bridge. Then Chips gets into her an'
+begins balin' out a mess o' small reckonin's on the deck. Simultaneous
+there come up three o' those dirty engine-room objects which we call
+'tiffies,' an' a stoker or two with orders to repair her steamin'-gadgets.
+_They_ get into her an' bale out another young Christmas-treeful of small
+reckonin's--brass mostly. Simultaneous it hits the Pusser that 'e'd better
+serve out mess pork for the poor matlow. These things half shifted
+Retallick, our chief cook, off 'is bed-plate. Yes, you might say they
+broke 'im wide open. 'E wasn't at all used to 'em.
+
+"Number One tells off five or six prime, able-bodied seamen-gunners to the
+pork barrels. You never see pork fisted out of its receptacle, 'ave you?
+Simultaneous, it hits the Gunner that now's the day an' now's the hour for
+a non-continuous class in Maxim instruction. So they all give way
+together, and the general effect was _non plus ultra_. There was the
+cutter's innards spread out like a Fratton pawnbroker's shop; there was
+the 'tiffies' hammerin' in the stern of 'er, an' _they_ ain't antiseptic;
+there was the Maxim class in light skirmishin' order among the pork, an'
+forrard the blacksmith had 'is forge in full blast, makin' 'orse-shoes, I
+suppose. Well, that accounts for the starboard side. The on'y warrant
+officer 'oo hadn't a look in so far was the Bosun. So 'e stated, all out
+of 'is own 'ead, that Chips's reserve o' wood an' timber, which Chips 'ad
+stole at our last refit, needed restowin'. It was on the port booms--a
+young an' healthy forest of it, for Charley Peace wasn't to be named
+'longside o' Chips for burglary.
+
+"'All right,' says our Number One. 'You can 'ave the whole port watch if
+you like. Hell's Hell,' 'e says, 'an when there study to improve.'
+
+"Jarvis was our Bosun's name. He hunted up the 'ole of the port watch by
+hand, as you might say, callin' 'em by name loud an' lovin', which is not
+precisely Navy makee-pigeon. They 'ad that timber-loft off the booms, an'
+they dragged it up and down like so many sweatin' little beavers. But
+Jarvis was jealous o' Chips an' went round the starboard side to envy at
+him.
+
+"'Tain't enough,' 'e says, when he had climbed back. 'Chips 'as got his
+bazaar lookin' like a coal-hulk in a cyclone. We must adop' more drastic
+measures.' Off 'e goes to Number One and communicates with 'im. Number One
+got the old man's leave, on account of our goin' so slow (we were keepin'
+be'ind the tramp), to fit the ship with a full set of patent supernumerary
+sails. Four trysails--yes, you might call 'em trysails--was our Admiralty
+allowance in the un'eard of event of a cruiser breakin' down, but we had
+our awnin's as well. They was all extricated from the various flats an'
+'oles where they was stored, an' at the end o' two hours' hard work Number
+One 'e made out eleven sails o' different sorts and sizes. I don't know
+what exact nature of sail you'd call 'em--pyjama-stun'sles with a touch of
+Sarah's shimmy, per'aps--but the riggin' of 'em an' all the supernumerary
+details, as you might say, bein' carried on through an' over an' between
+the cutter an' the forge an' the pork an' cleanin' guns, an' the Maxim
+class an' the Bosun's calaboose _and_ the paintwork, was sublime. There's
+no other word for it. Sub-lime!
+
+"The old man keeps swimmin' up an' down through it all with the faithful
+Antonio at 'is side, fetchin' him numerous splits. 'E had eight that
+mornin', an' when Antonio was detached to get 'is spy-glass, or his
+gloves, or his lily-white 'andkerchief, the old man would waste 'em
+down a ventilator. Antonio must ha' learned a lot about our Navy thirst."
+
+"He did."
+
+"Ah! Would you kindly mind turnin' to the precise page indicated an'
+givin' me a _resume_ of 'is tattics?" said Mr. Pyecroft, drinking deeply.
+"I'd like to know 'ow it looked from 'is side o' the deck."
+
+"How will this do?" I said. "'_Once clear of the land, like Voltaire's
+Habakkuk_------"'
+
+"One o' their new commerce-destroyers, I suppose," Mr. Pyecroft
+interjected.
+
+"'--_each man seemed veritably capable of all--to do according to his
+will. The boats, dismantled and forlorn, are lowered upon the planking.
+One cries "Aid me!" flourishing at the same time the weapons of his
+business. A dozen launch themselves upon him in the orgasm of zeal
+misdirected. He beats them off with the howlings of dogs. He has lost a
+hammer. This ferocious outcry signifies that only. Eight men seek the
+utensil, colliding on the way with some many others which, seated in the
+stern of the boat, tear up and scatter upon the planking the ironwork
+which impedes their brutal efforts. Elsewhere, one detaches from on high
+wood, canvas, iron bolts, coal-dust--what do I know_?'"
+
+"That's where 'e's comin' the bloomin' _onjenew_. 'E knows a lot, reely."
+
+"'_They descend thundering upon the planking, and the spectacle cannot
+reproduce itself. In my capacity of valet to the captain, whom I have well
+and beautifully plied with drink since the rising of the sun (behold me
+also, Ganymede!) I pass throughout observing, it may be not a little. They
+ask orders. There is none to give them. One sits upon the edge of the
+vessel and chants interminably the lugubrious "Roule Britannia"--to endure
+how lomg_?'"
+
+"That was me! On'y 'twas 'A Life on the Ocean Wave'--which I hate more
+than any stinkin' tune I know, havin' dragged too many nasty little guns
+to it. Yes, Number One told me off to that for ten minutes; an' I ain't
+musical, you might say."
+
+"_'Then come marines, half-dressed, seeking vainly through this "tohu-
+bohu_"' (that's one of his names for the _Archimandrite_, Mr. Pyecroft),
+'_for a place whence they shall not be dislodged. The captain, heavy with
+drink, rolls himself from his hammock. He would have his people fire the
+Maxims. They demand which Maxim. That to him is equal. The breech-lock
+indispensable is not there. They demand it of one who opens a barrel of
+pork, for this Navy feeds at all hours. He refers them to the cook,
+yesterday my master_--'"
+
+"Yes, an' Retallick nearly had a fit. What a truthful an' observin' little
+Antonio we 'ave!"
+
+"'_It is discovered in the hands of a boy who says, and they do not rebuke
+him, that he has found it by hazard_.' I'm afraid I haven't translated
+quite correctly, Mr. Pyecroft, but I've done my best."
+
+"Why, it's beautiful--you ought to be a Frenchman--you ought. You don't
+want anything o' _me_. You've got it all there."
+
+"Yes, but I like your side of it. For instance. Here's a little thing I
+can't quite see the end of. Listen! '_Of the domain which Britannia rules
+by sufferance, my gross captain, knew nothing, and his Navigator, if
+possible, less. From the bestial recriminations and the indeterminate
+chaos of the grand deck, I ascended--always with a whisky-and-soda in my
+hands--to a scene truly grotesque. Behold my captain in plain sea, at
+issue with his Navigator! A crisis of nerves due to the enormous quantity
+of alcohol which he had swallowed up to then, has filled for him the ocean
+with dangers, imaginary and fantastic. Incapable of judgment, menaced by
+the phantasms of his brain inflamed, he envisages islands perhaps of the
+Hesperides beneath his keel--vigias innumerable.'_ I don't know what a
+vigia is, Mr. Pyecroft. _'He creates shoals sad and far-reaching of the
+mid-Atlantic!'_ What was that, now?"
+
+"Oh, I see! That come after dinner, when our Navigator threw 'is cap down
+an' danced on it. Danby was quartermaster. They 'ad a tea-party on the
+bridge. It was the old man's contribution. Does he say anything about the
+leadsmen?"
+
+"Is this it? _'Overborne by his superior's causeless suspicion, the
+Navigator took off the badges of his rank and cast them at the feet of my
+captain and sobbed. A disgusting and maudlin reconciliation followed. The
+argument renewed itself, each grasping the wheel, crapulous'_ (that means
+drunk, I think, Mr. Pyecroft), _'shouting. It appeared that my captain
+would chenaler'_ (I don't know what that means, Mr. Pyecroft) _'to the
+Cape. At the end, he placed a sailor with the sound'_ (that's the lead, I
+think) _'in his hand, garnished with suet.'_ Was it garnished with suet?"
+
+"He put two leadsmen in the chains, o' course! He didn't know that there
+mightn't be shoals there, 'e said. Morgan went an' armed his lead, to
+enter into the spirit o' the thing. They 'eaved it for twenty minutes, but
+there wasn't any suet--only tallow, o' course."
+
+"'_Garnished with suet at two thousand metres of profundity. Decidedly the
+Britannic Navy is well guarded_.' Well, that's all right, Mr. Pyecroft.
+Would you mind telling me anything else of interest that happened?"
+
+"There was a good deal, one way an' another. I'd like to know what this
+Antonio thought of our sails."
+
+"He merely says that '_the engines having broken down, an officer
+extemporised a mournful and useless parody of sails_.' Oh, yes! he says
+that some of them looked like '_bonnets in a needlecase_,' I think."
+
+"Bonnets in a needlecase! They were stun'sles. That shows the beggar's no
+sailor. That trick was really the one thing we did. Pho! I thought he was
+a sailorman, an' 'e hasn't sense enough to see what extemporisin' eleven
+good an' drawin' sails out o' four trys'les an' a few awnin's means. 'E
+must have been drunk!"
+
+"Never mind, Mr. Pyecroft. I want to hear about your target-practice, and
+the execution."
+
+"Oh! We had a special target-practice that afternoon all for Antonio. As I
+told my crew--me bein' captain of the port-bow quick-firer, though I'm a
+torpedo man now--it just showed how you can work your gun under any
+discomforts. A shell--twenty six-inch shells--burstin' inboard couldn't
+'ave begun to make the varicose collection o' tit-bits which we had
+spilled on our deck. It was a lather--a rich, creamy lather!
+
+"We took it very easy--that gun-practice. We did it in a complimentary
+'Jenny-'ave-another-cup-o' tea' style, an' the crew was strictly ordered
+not to rupture 'emselves with unnecessary exertion. This isn't our custom
+in the Navy when we're _in puris naturalibus_, as you might say. But we
+wasn't so then. We was impromptu. An' Antonio was busy fetchin' splits for
+the old man, and the old man was wastin' 'em down the ventilators. There
+must 'ave been four inches in the bilges, I should think--wardroom whisky-
+an'-soda.
+
+"Then I thought I might as well bear a hand as look pretty. So I let my
+_bundoop_ go at fifteen 'undred--sightin' very particular. There was a
+sort of 'appy little belch like--no more, I give you my word--an' the
+shell trundled out maybe fifty feet an' dropped into the deep Atlantic.
+
+"'Government powder, Sir!' sings out our Gunnery Jack to the bridge,
+laughin' horrid sarcastic; an' then, of course, we all laughs, which we
+are not encouraged to do _in puris naturalibus_. Then, of course, I saw
+what our Gunnery Jack 'ad been after with his subcutaneous details in the
+magazines all the mornin' watch. He had redooced the charges to a minimum,
+as you might say. But it made me feel a trifle faint an' sickish
+notwithstanding this spit-in-the-eye business. Every time such transpired,
+our Gunnery Lootenant would say somethin' sarcastic about Government
+stores, an' the old man fair howled. 'Op was on the bridge with 'im, an'
+'e told me--'cause 'e's a free-knowledgeist an' reads character--that
+Antonio's face was sweatin' with pure joy. 'Op wanted to kick him. Does
+Antonio say anything about that?"
+
+"Not about the kicking, but he is great on the gun-practice, Mr. Pyecroft.
+He has put all the results into a sort of appendix--a table of shots. He
+says that the figures will speak more eloquently than words."
+
+"What? Nothin' about the way the crews flinched an' hopped? Nothin' about
+the little shells rumblin' out o' the guns so casual?"
+
+"There are a few pages of notes, but they only bear out what you say. He
+says that these things always happen as soon as one of our ships is out of
+sight of land. Oh, yes! I've forgotten. He says, _'From the conversation
+of my captain with his inferiors I gathered that no small proportion of
+the expense of these nominally efficient cartridges finds itself in his
+pockets. So much, indeed, was signified by an officer on the deck below,
+who cried in a high voice: "I hope, Sir, you are making something out of
+it. It is rather monotonous." This insult, so flagrant, albeit well-
+merited, was received with a smile of drunken bonhommy'_--that's
+cheerfulness, Mr. Pyecroft. Your glass is empty."
+
+"Resumin' afresh," said Mr. Pyecroft, after a well-watered interval, "I
+may as well say that the target-practice occupied us two hours, and then
+we had to dig out after the tramp. Then we half an' three-quarters cleaned
+up the decks an' mucked about as requisite, haulin' down the patent awnin'
+stun'sles which Number One 'ad made. The old man was a shade doubtful of
+his course, 'cause I 'eard him say to Number One, 'You were right. A week
+o' this would turn the ship into a Hayti bean-feast. But,' he says
+pathetic, 'haven't they backed the band noble?'
+
+"'Oh! it's a picnic for them,' says Number One.
+
+"'But when do we get rid o' this whisky-peddlin' blighter o' yours, Sir?'
+
+"'That's a cheerful way to speak of a Viscount,' says the old man. "E's
+the bluest blood o' France when he's at home,'
+
+"'Which is the precise landfall I wish 'im to make,' says Number One.'
+It'll take all 'ands and the Captain of the Head to clean up after 'im.'
+
+"'They won't grudge it,' says the old man. 'Just as soon as it's dusk
+we'll overhaul our tramp friend an' waft him over,'
+
+"Then a sno--midshipman--Moorshed was is name--come up an' says somethin'
+in a low voice. It fetches the old man.
+
+"'You'll oblige me,' 'e says, 'by takin' the wardroom poultry for _that_.
+I've ear-marked every fowl we've shipped at Madeira, so there can't be any
+possible mistake. M'rover,' 'e says, 'tell 'em if they spill one drop of
+blood on the deck,' he says, 'they'll not be extenuated, but hung.'
+
+"Mr. Moorshed goes forward, lookin' unusual 'appy, even for him. The
+Marines was enjoyin' a committee-meetin' in their own flat.
+
+"After that, it fell dark, with just a little streaky, oily light on the
+sea--an' anythin' more chronic than the _Archimandrite_ I'd trouble you
+to behold. She looked like a fancy bazaar and a auction-room--yes, she
+almost looked like a passenger-steamer. We'd picked up our tramp, an' was
+about four mile be'ind 'er. I noticed the wardroom as a class, you might
+say, was manoeuvrin' _en masse_, an' then come the order to cockbill the
+yards. We hadn't any yards except a couple o' signallin' sticks, but we
+cock-billed 'em. I hadn't seen that sight, not since thirteen years in the
+West Indies, when a post-captain died o' yellow jack. It means a sign o'
+mourning the yards bein' canted opposite ways, to look drunk an'
+disorderly. They do.
+
+"'An' what might our last giddy-go-round signify?' I asks of 'Op.
+
+"'Good 'Evins!' 'e says, 'Are you in the habit o' permittin' leathernecks
+to assassinate lootenants every morning at drill without immejitly 'avin'
+'em shot on the foc'sle in the horrid crawly-crawly twilight?'"
+
+"'Yes,' I murmured over my dear book, '_the infinitely lugubrious
+crepuscule. A spectacle of barbarity unparalleled--hideous--cold-blooded,
+and yet touched with appalling grandeur_.'"
+
+"Ho! Was that the way Antonio looked at it? That shows he 'ad feelin's. To
+resoom. Without anyone givin' us orders to that effect, we began to creep
+about an' whisper. Things got stiller and stiller, till they was as still
+as--mushrooms! Then the bugler let off the 'Dead March' from the upper
+bridge. He done it to cover the remarks of a cock-bird bein' killed
+forrard, but it came out paralysin' in its _tout ensemble_. You never
+heard the 'Dead March' on a bugle? Then the pipes went twitterin' for both
+watches to attend public execution, an' we came up like so many ghosts,
+the 'ole ship's company. Why, Mucky 'Arcourt, one o' our boys, was that
+took in he give tongue like a beagle-pup, an' was properly kicked down the
+ladder for so doin'. Well, there we lay--engines stopped, rollin' to the
+swell, all dark, yards cock-billed, an' that merry tune yowlin' from the
+upper bridge. We fell in on the foc'sle, leavin' a large open space by the
+capstan, where our sail-maker was sittin' sewin' broken firebars into the
+foot of an old 'ammick. 'E looked like a corpse, an' Mucky had another fit
+o' hysterics, an' you could 'ear us breathin' 'ard. It beat anythin' in
+the theatrical line that even us _Archimandrites_ had done--an' we was the
+ship you could trust. Then come the doctor an' lit a red lamp which he
+used for his photographic muckin's, an' chocked it on the capstan. That
+was finally gashly!
+
+"Then come twelve Marines guardin' Glass 'ere. You wouldn't think to see
+'im what a gratooitous an' aboundin' terror he was that evenin'. 'E was in
+a white shirt 'e'd stole from Cockburn, an' his regulation trousers,
+barefooted. 'E'd pipe-clayed 'is 'ands an' face an' feet an' as much of
+his chest as the openin' of his shirt showed. 'E marched under escort with
+a firm an' undeviatin' step to the capstan, an' came to attention. The old
+man reinforced by an extra strong split--his seventeenth, an' 'e didn't
+throw _that_ down the ventilator--come up on the bridge an' stood like a
+image. 'Op, 'oo was with 'im, says that 'e heard Antonio's teeth singin',
+not chatterin'--singin' like funnel-stays in a typhoon. Yes, a moanin'
+aeolian harp, 'Op said.
+
+"'When you are ready, Sir, drop your 'andkerchief,' Number One whispers.
+
+"'Good Lord!' says the old man, with a jump. 'Eh! What? What a sight! What
+a sight!' an' he stood drinkin' it in, I suppose, for quite two minutes.
+
+"Glass never says a word. 'E shoved aside an 'andkerchief which the
+sub-lootenant proffered 'im to bind 'is eyes with--quiet an' collected;
+an' if we 'adn't been feelin' so very much as we did feel, his gestures
+would 'ave brought down the 'ouse." "I can't open my eyes, or I'll be
+sick," said the Marine with appalling clearness. "I'm pretty far gone--I
+know it--but there wasn't anyone could 'ave beaten Edwardo Glass,
+R.M.L.I., that time. Why, I scared myself nearly into the 'orrors. Go on,
+Pye. Glass is in support--as ever."
+
+"Then the old man drops 'is 'andkerchief, an' the firin'-party fires like
+one man. Glass drops forward, twitchin' an' 'eavin' horrid natural, into
+the shotted 'ammick all spread out before him, and the firin' party closes
+in to guard the remains of the deceased while Sails is stitchin' it up.
+An' when they lifted that 'ammick it was one wringin' mess of blood! They
+on'y expended one wardroom cock-bird, too. Did you know poultry bled that
+extravagant? _I_ never did.
+
+"The old man--so 'Op told me--stayed on the bridge, brought up on a dead
+centre. Number One was similarly, though lesser, impressed, but o' course
+'is duty was to think of 'is fine white decks an' the blood. 'Arf a mo',
+Sir,' he says, when the old man was for leavin'. 'We have to wait for the
+burial, which I am informed takes place immejit.'
+
+"'It's beyond me,' says the owner. 'There was general instructions for an
+execution, but I never knew I had such a dependable push of mountebanks
+aboard,' he says. 'I'm all cold up my back, still.'
+
+"The Marines carried the corpse below. Then the bugle give us some more
+'Dead March,' Then we 'eard a splash from a bow six-pounder port, an' the
+bugle struck up a cheerful tune. The whole lower deck was complimentin'
+Glass, 'oo took it very meek. 'E _is_ a good actor, for all 'e's a
+leatherneck.
+
+"'Now,' said the old man, 'we must turn over Antonio. He's in what I have
+'eard called one perspirin' funk.'
+
+"Of course, I'm tellin' it slow, but it all 'appened much quicker. We run
+down our trampo--without o' course informin' Antonio of 'is 'appy destiny
+--an' inquired of 'er if she had any use for a free and gratis stowaway.
+Oh, yes? she said she'd be highly grateful, but she seemed a shade puzzled
+at our generosity, as you might put it, an' we lay by till she lowered a
+boat. Then Antonio--who was un'appy, distinctly un'appy--was politely
+requested to navigate elsewhere, which I don't think he looked for. 'Op
+was deputed to convey the information, an' 'Op got in one sixteen-inch
+kick which 'oisted 'im all up the ladder. 'Op ain't really vindictive, an'
+'e's fond of the French, especially the women, but his chances o' kicking
+lootenants was like the cartridge--reduced to a minimum.
+
+"The boat 'adn't more than shoved off before a change, as you might say,
+came o'er the spirit of our dream. The old man says, like Elphinstone an'
+Bruce in the Portsmouth election when I was a boy: 'Gentlemen,' he says,
+'for gentlemen you have shown yourselves to be--from the bottom of my
+heart I thank you. The status an' position of our late lamented shipmate
+made it obligate,' 'e says, 'to take certain steps not strictly included
+in the regulations. An' nobly,' says 'e, 'have you assisted me. Now,' 'e
+says, 'you hold the false and felonious reputation of bein' the smartest
+ship in the Service. Pigsties,' 'e says,' is plane trigonometry alongside
+our present disgustin' state. Efface the effects of this indecent orgy,'
+he says. 'Jump, you lop-eared, flat-footed, butter-backed Amalekites! Dig
+out, you briny-eyed beggars!'"
+
+"Do captains talk like that in the Navy, Mr. Pyecroft?" I asked.
+
+"I've told you once I only give the grist of his arguments. The Bosun's
+mate translates it to the lower deck, as you may put it, and the lower
+deck springs smartly to attention. It took us half the night 'fore we got
+'er anyway ship-shape; but by sunrise she was beautiful as ever, and we
+resoomed. I've thought it over a lot since; yes, an' I've thought a lot of
+Antonio trimmin' coal in that tramp's bunkers. 'E must 'ave been highly
+surprised. Wasn't he?"
+
+"He was, Mr. Pyecroft," I responded. "But now we're talking of it, weren't
+you all a little surprised?"
+
+"It come as a pleasant relief to the regular routine," said Mr. Pyecroft.
+"We appreciated it as an easy way o' workin' for your country. But--the
+old man was right--a week o' similar manoeuvres would 'ave knocked our
+moral double-bottoms bung out. Now, couldn't you oblige with Antonio's
+account of Glass's execution?"
+
+I obliged for nearly ten minutes. It was at best but a feeble rendering of
+M. de C.'s magnificent prose, through which the soul of the poet, the eye
+of the mariner, and the heart of the patriot bore magnificent accord. His
+account of his descent from the side of the "_infamous vessel consecrated
+to blood_" in the "_vast and gathering dusk of the trembling ocean_" could
+only be matched by his description of the dishonoured hammock sinking
+unnoticed through the depths, while, above, the bugler played music "_of
+an indefinable brutality_"
+
+"By the way, what did the bugler play after Glass's funeral?" I asked.
+
+"Him? Oh! 'e played 'The Strict Q.T.' It's a very old song. We 'ad it in
+Fratton nearly fifteen years back," said Mr. Pyecroft sleepily.
+
+I stirred the sugar dregs in my glass. Suddenly entered armed men, wet and
+discourteous, Tom Wessels smiling nervously in the background.
+
+"Where is that--minutely particularised person--Glass?" said the sergeant
+of the picket.
+
+"'Ere!" The marine rose to the strictest of attentions. "An' it's no good
+smelling of my breath, because I'm strictly an' ruinously sober."
+
+"Oh! An' what may you have been doin' with yourself?"
+
+"Listenin' to tracts. You can look! I've had the evenin' of my little
+life. Lead on to the _Cornucopia's_ midmost dunjing cell. There's a crowd
+of brass-'atted blighters there which will say I've been absent without
+leaf. Never mind. I forgive them before'and. _The_ evenin' of my life, an'
+please don't forget it." Then in a tone of most ingratiating apology to
+me: "I soaked it all in be'ind my shut eyes. 'I'm"--he jerked a
+contemptuous thumb towards Mr. Pyecroft--"'e's a flatfoot, a indigo-blue
+matlow. 'E never saw the fun from first to last. A mournful beggar--most
+depressin'." Private Glass departed, leaning heavily on the escort's arm.
+
+Mr. Pyecroft wrinkled his brows in thought--the profound and far-reaching
+meditation that follows five glasses of hot whisky-and-water.
+
+"Well, I don't see anything comical--greatly--except here an' there.
+Specially about those redooced charges in the guns. Do _you_ see anything
+funny in it?"
+
+There was that in his eye which warned me the night was too wet for
+argument.
+
+"No, Mr. Pyecroft, I don't," I replied. "It was a beautiful tale, and I
+thank you very much."
+
+
+
+
+A SAHIBS' WAR
+
+THE RUNNERS
+
+                                   _News!_
+  What is the word that they tell now--now--now!
+  The little drums beating in the bazaars?
+      _They_ beat (among the buyers and sellers)
+          _"Nimrud--ah Nimrud!
+          God sends a gnat against Nimrud_!"
+      Watchers, O Watchers a thousand!
+
+                                   _News!_
+  At the edge of the crops--now--now--where the well-wheels are halted,
+  One prepares to loose the bullocks and one scrapes his hoe,
+      _They_ beat (among the sowers and the reapers)
+          _"Nimrud--ah Nimrud!
+          God prepares an ill day for Nimrud_!"
+      Watchers, O Watchers ten thousand.
+
+                                   _News!_
+  By the fires of the camps--now--now--where the travellers meet
+  Where the camels come in and the horses: their men conferring,
+      _They_ beat (among the packmen and the drivers)
+          _"Nimrud--ah Nimrud!
+          Thus it befell last noon to Nimrud_!"
+      Watchers, O Watchers an hundred thousand!
+
+                                   _News!_
+  Under the shadow of the border-peels--now--now--now!
+  In the rocks of the passes where the expectant shoe their horses,
+      _They_ beat (among the rifles and the riders)
+          _"Nimrud--ah Nimrud!
+          Shall we go up against Nimrud_?"
+      Watchers, O Watchers a thousand thousand?
+
+                                   _News!_
+  Bring out the heaps of grain--open the account-books again!
+  Drive forward the well-bullocks against the taxable harvest!
+  Eat and lie under the trees--pitch the police-guarded  fair-grounds,
+      O dancers!
+  Hide away the rifles and let down the ladders from the watch-towers!
+      _They_ beat (among all the peoples)
+          _"Now--now--now!
+          God has reserved the Sword for Nimrud!
+          God has given Victory to Nimrud!"
+          Let us abide under Nimrud_!"
+      O Well-disposed and Heedful, an hundred thousand thousand!
+
+
+A SAHIBS' WAR
+
+Pass? Pass? Pass? I have one pass already, allowing me to go by the _rel_
+from Kroonstadt to Eshtellenbosch, where the horses are, where I am to be
+paid off, and whence I return to India. I am a--trooper of the Gurgaon
+Rissala (cavalry regiment), the One Hundred and Forty-first Punjab
+Cavalry, Do not herd me with these black Kaffirs. I am a Sikh--a trooper
+of the State. The Lieutenant-Sahib does not understand my talk? Is there
+_any_ Sahib on the train who will interpret for a trooper of the Gurgaon
+Rissala going about his business in this devil's devising of a country,
+where there is no flour, no oil, no spice, no red pepper, and no respect
+paid to a Sikh? Is there no help?... God be thanked, here is such a Sahib!
+Protector of the Poor! Heaven-born! Tell the young Lieutenant-Sahib that
+my name is Umr Singh; I am--I was servant to Kurban Sahib, now dead; and I
+have a pass to go to Eshtellenbosch, where the horses are. Do not let him
+herd me with these black Kaffirs!... Yes,  I will sit by this truck till
+the Heaven-born has explained the matter to the young Lieutenant-Sahib who
+does not understand our tongue.
+
+*       *       *       *       *
+
+What orders? The young Lieutenant-Sahib will not detain me? Good! I go
+down to Eshtellenbosch by the next _terain_? Good! I go with the Heaven-
+born? Good! Then for this day I am the Heaven-born's servant. Will the
+Heaven-born bring the honour of his presence to a seat? Here is an empty
+truck; I will spread my blanket over one corner thus--for the sun is hot,
+though not so hot as our Punjab in May. I will prop it up thus, and I will
+arrange this hay thus, so the Presence can sit at ease till God sends us a
+_terain_ for Eshtellenbosch....
+
+The Presence knows the Punjab? Lahore? Amritzar? Attaree, belike? My
+village is north over the fields three miles from Attaree, near the big
+white house which was copied from a certain place of the Great Queen's by
+--by--I have forgotten the name. Can the Presence recall it? Sirdar Dyal
+Singh Attareewalla! Yes, that is the very man; but how does the Presence
+know? Born and bred in Hind, was he? O-o-oh! This is quite a different
+matter. The Sahib's nurse was a Surtee woman from the Bombay side? That
+was a pity. She should have been an up-country wench; for those make stout
+nurses. There is no land like the Punjab. There are no people like the
+Sikhs. Umr Singh is my name, yes. An old man? Yes. A trooper only after
+all these years? Ye-es. Look at my uniform, if the Sahib doubts. Nay--nay;
+the Sahib looks too closely. All marks of rank were picked off it long
+ago, but--but it is true--mine is not a common cloth such as troopers use
+for their coats, and--the Sahib has sharp eyes--that black mark is such a
+mark as a silver chain leaves when long worn on the breast. The Sahib says
+that troopers do not wear silver chains? No-o. Troopers do not wear the
+Arder of Beritish India? No. The Sahib should have been in the Police of
+the Punjab. I am not a trooper, but I have been a Sahib's servant for
+nearly a year--bearer, butler, sweeper, any and all three. The Sahib says
+that Sikhs do not take menial service? True; but it was for Kurban Sahib--
+my Kurban Sahib--dead these three months!
+
+*       *       *       *       *
+
+Young--of a reddish face--with blue eyes, and he lilted a little on his
+feet when he was pleased, and cracked his finger-joints. So did his father
+before him, who was Deputy-Commissioner of Jullundur in my father's time
+when I rode with the Gurgaon Rissala. _My_ father? Jwala Singh. A Sikh of
+Sikhs--he fought against the English at Sobraon and carried the mark to
+his death. So we were knit as it were by a blood-tie, I and my Kurban
+Sahib. Yes, I was a trooper first--nay, I had risen to a Lance-Duffadar, I
+remember--and my father gave me a dun stallion of his own breeding on that
+day; and _he_ was a little baba, sitting upon a wall by the parade-ground
+with his ayah--all in white, Sahib--laughing at the end of our drill. And
+his father and mine talked together, and mine beckoned to me, and I
+dismounted, and the baba put his hand into mine--eighteen--twenty-five--
+twenty-seven years gone now--Kurban Sahib--my Kurban Sahib! Oh, we were
+great friends after that! He cut his teeth on my sword-hilt, as the saying
+is. He called me Big Umr Singh--Buwwa Umwa Singh, for he could not speak
+plain. He stood only this high, Sahib, from the bottom of this truck, but
+he knew all our troopers by name--every one.... And he went to England,
+and he became a young man, and back he came, lilting a little in his walk,
+and cracking his finger-joints--back to his own regiment and to me. He had
+not forgotten either our speech or our customs. He was a Sikh at heart,
+Sahib. He was rich, open-handed, just, a friend of poor troopers, keen-
+eyed, jestful, and careless. _I_ could tell tales about him in his first
+years. There was very little he hid from _me_. I was his Umr Singh, and
+when we were alone he called me Father, and I called him Son. Yes, that
+was how we spoke. We spoke freely together on everything--about war, and
+women, and money, and advancement, and such all.
+
+We spoke about this war, too, long before it came. There were many box-
+wallas, pedlars, with Pathans a few, in this country, notably at the city
+of Yunasbagh (Johannesburg), and they sent news in every week how the
+Sahibs lay without weapons under the heel of the Boer-log; and how big
+guns were hauled up and down the streets to keep Sahibs in order; and how
+a Sahib called Eger Sahib (Edgar?) was killed for a jest by the Boer-log.
+The Sahib knows how we of Hind hear all that passes over the earth? There
+was not a gun cocked in Yunasbagh that the echo did not come into Hind in
+a month. The Sahibs are very clever, but they forget their own cleverness
+has created the _dak_ (the post), and that for an anna or two all things
+become known. We of Hind listened and heard and wondered; and when it was
+a sure thing, as reported by the pedlars and the vegetable-sellers, that
+the Sahibs of Yunasbagh lay in bondage to the Boer-log, certain among us
+asked questions and waited for signs. Others of us mistook the meaning of
+those signs. _Wherefore, Sahib, came the long war in the Tirah_! This
+Kurban Sahib knew, and we talked together. He said, "There is no haste.
+Presently we shall fight, and we shall fight for all Hind in that country
+round Yunasbagh. Here he spoke truth. Does the Sahib not agree? Quite so.
+It is for Hind that the Sahibs are fighting this war. Ye cannot in one
+place rule and in another bear service. Either ye must everywhere rule or
+everywhere obey. God does not make the nations ringstraked. True--true--
+true!"
+
+So did matters ripen--a step at a time. It was nothing to me, except I
+think--and the Sahib sees this, too?--that it is foolish to make an army
+and break their hearts in idleness. Why have they not sent for men of the
+Tochi--the men of the Tirah--the men of Buner? Folly, a thousand times.
+_We_ could have done it all so gently--so gently.
+
+Then, upon a day, Kurban Sahib sent for me and said, "Ho, Dada, I am sick,
+and the doctor gives me a certificate for many months." And he winked, and
+I said, "I will get leave and nurse thee, Child. Shall I bring my
+uniform?" He said, "Yes, and a sword for a sick man to lean on. We go to
+Bombay, and thence by sea to the country of the Hubshis" (niggers). Mark
+his cleverness! He was first of all our men among the native regiments to
+get leave for sickness and to come here. Now they will not let our
+officers go away, sick or well, except they sign a bond not to take part
+in this war-game upon the road. But _he_ was clever. There was no whisper
+of war when he took his sick-leave. I came also? Assuredly. I went to my
+Colonel, and sitting in the chair (I am--I was--of that rank for which a
+chair is placed when we speak with the Colonel) I said, "My child goes
+sick. Give me leave, for I am old and sick also."
+
+And the Colonel, making the word double between English and our tongue,
+said, "Yes, thou art truly _Sikh_"; and he called me an old devil--
+jestingly, as one soldier may jest with another; and he said my Kurban
+Sahib was a liar as to his health (that was true, too), and at long last
+he stood up and shook my hand, and bade me go and bring my Sahib safe
+again. My Sahib back again--aie me!
+
+So I went to Bombay with Kurban Sahib, but there, at sight of the Black
+Water, Wajib Ali, his bearer checked, and said that his mother was dead.
+Then I said to Kurban Sahib, "What is one Mussulman pig more or less? Give
+me the keys of the trunks, and I will lay out the white shirts for
+dinner." Then I beat Wajib Ali at the back of Watson's Hotel, and that
+night I prepared Kurban Sahib's razors. I say, Sahib, that I, a Sikh of
+the Khalsa, an unshorn man, prepared the razors. But I did not put on my
+uniform while I did it. On the other hand, Kurban Sahib took for me, upon
+the steamer, a room in all respects like to his own, and would have given
+me a servant. We spoke of many things on the way to this country; and
+Kurban Sahib told me what he perceived would be the conduct of the war. He
+said, "They have taken men afoot to fight men ahorse, and they will
+foolishly show mercy to these Boer-log because it is believed that they
+are white." He said, "There is but one fault in this war, and that is that
+the Government have not employed _us_, but have made it altogether a
+Sahibs' war. Very many men will thus be killed, and no vengeance will be
+taken." True talk--true talk! It fell as Kurban Sahib foretold.
+
+And we came to this country, even to Cape Town over yonder, and Kurban
+Sahib said, "Bear the baggage to the big dak-bungalow, and I will look for
+employment fit for a sick man." I put on the uniform of my rank and went to
+the big dak-bungalow, called Maun Nihal Seyn, [Footnote: Mount Nelson?]
+and I caused the heavy baggage to be bestowed in that dark lower place--is
+it known to the Sahib?--which was already full of the swords and baggage
+of officers. It is fuller now--dead men's kit all! I was careful to secure
+a receipt for all three pieces. I have it in my belt. They must go back to
+the Punjab.
+
+Anon came Kurban Sahib, lilting a little in his step, which sign I knew,
+and he said, "We are born in a fortunate hour. We go to Eshtellenbosch to
+oversee the despatch of horses." Remember, Kurban Sahib was squadron-
+leader of the Gurgaon Rissala, and _I_ was Umr Singh. So I said, speaking
+as we do--we did--when none was near, "Thou art a groom and I am a grass-
+cutter, but is this any promotion, Child?" At this he laughed, saying,
+"It is the way to better things. Have patience, Father." (Aye, he called me
+father when none were by.) "This war ends not to-morrow nor the next day.
+I have seen the new Sahibs," he said, "and they are fathers of owls--all--
+all--all!"
+
+So we went to Eshtellenbosch, where the horses are; Kurban Sahib doing the
+service of servants in that business. And the whole business was managed
+without forethought by new Sahibs from God knows where, who had never seen
+a tent pitched or a peg driven. They were full of zeal, but empty of all
+knowledge. Then came, little by little from Hind, those Pathans--they are
+just like those vultures up there, Sahib--they always follow slaughter.
+And there came to Eshtellenbosch some Sikhs--Muzbees, though--and some
+Madras monkey-men. They came with horses. Puttiala sent horses. Jhind and
+Nabha sent horses. All the nations of the Khalsa sent horses.
+
+All the ends of the earth sent horses. God knows what the army did with
+them, unless they ate them raw. They used horses as a courtesan uses oil:
+with both hands. These needed many men. Kurban Sahib appointed me to the
+command (what a command for me!) of certain woolly ones--_Hubshis_--whose
+touch and shadow are pollution. They were enormous eaters; sleeping on
+their bellies; laughing without cause; wholly like animals. Some were
+called Fingoes, and some, I think, Red Kaffirs, but they were all Kaffirs
+--filth unspeakable. I taught them to water and feed, and sweep and rub
+down. Yes, I oversaw the work of sweepers--a _jemadar_ of _mehtars_
+(headman of a refuse-gang) was I, and Kurban Sahib little better, for five
+months. Evil months! The war went as Kurban Sahib had said. Our new men
+were slain and no vengeance was taken. It was a war of fools armed with
+the weapons of magicians. Guns that slew at half a day's march, and men
+who, being new, walked blind into high grass and were driven off like
+cattle by the Boer-log! As to the city of Eshtellenbosch, I am not a
+Sahib--only a Sikh. I would have quartered one troop only of the Gurgaon
+Rissala in that city--one little troop--and I would have schooled that
+city till its men learned to kiss the shadow of a Government horse upon
+the ground. There are many _mullahs_ (priests) in Eshtellenbosch. They
+preached the Jehad against us. This is true--all the camp knew it. And
+most of the houses were thatched! A war of fools indeed!
+
+At the end of five months my Kurban Sahib, who had grown lean, said, "The
+reward has come. We go up towards the front with horses to-morrow, and,
+once away, I shall be too sick so return. Make ready the baggage." Thus we
+got away, with some Kaffirs in charge of new horses for a certain new
+regiment that had come in a ship. The second day by _terain_, when we were
+watering at a desolate place without any sort of a bazaar to it, slipped
+out from the horse-boxes one Sikander Khan, that had been a _jemadar_ of
+_saises_ (head-groom) at Eshtellenbosch, and was by service a trooper in a
+Border regiment. Kurban Sahib gave him big abuse for his desertion; but
+the Pathan put up his hands as excusing himself, and Kurban Sahib relented
+and added him to our service. So there were three of us--Kurban Sahib, I,
+and Sikander Khan--Sahib, Sikh, and _Sag_ (dog). But the man said truly,
+"We be far from our homes and both servants of the Raj. Make truce till we
+see the Indus again." I have eaten from the same dish as Sikander Khan--
+beef, too, for aught I know! He said, on the night he stole some swine's
+flesh in a tin from a mess-tent, that in his Book, the Koran, it is
+written that whoso engages in a holy war is freed from ceremonial
+obligations. Wah! He had no more religion than the sword-point picks up of
+sugar and water at baptism. He stole himself a horse at a place where
+there lay a new and very raw regiment. I also procured myself a grey
+gelding there. They let their horses stray too much, those new regiments.
+
+Some shameless regiments would indeed have made away with _our_ horses on
+the road! They exhibited indents and requisitions for horses, and once or
+twice would have uncoupled the trucks; but Kurban Sahib was wise, and I am
+not altogether a fool. There is not much honesty at the front. Notably,
+there was one congregation of hard-bitten horse-thieves; tall, light
+Sahibs, who spoke through their noses for the most part, and upon all
+occasions they said, "Oah Hell!" which, in our tongue, signifies _Jehannum
+ko jao_. They bore each man a vine-leaf upon their uniforms, and they rode
+like Rajputs. Nay, they rode like Sikhs. They rode like the Ustrelyahs!
+The Ustrelyahs, whom we met later, also spoke through their noses not
+little, and they were tall, dark men, with grey, clear eyes, heavily
+eyelashed like camel's eyes--very proper men--a new brand of Sahib to me.
+They said on all occasions, "No fee-ah," which in our tongue means _Durro
+mut_ ("Do not be afraid"), so we called them the _Durro Muts_. Dark, tall
+men, most excellent horsemen, hot and angry, waging war _as_ war, and
+drinking tea as a sandhill drinks water. Thieves? A little, Sahib.
+Sikander Khan swore to me; and he comes of a horse-stealing clan for ten
+generations; he swore a Pathan was a babe beside a _Durro Mut_ in regard
+to horse-lifting. The _Durro Muts_ cannot walk on their feet at all. They
+are like hens on the high road. Therefore they must have horses. Very
+proper men, with a just lust for the war. Aah--"No fee-ah," say the _Durro
+Muts_. _They_ saw the worth of Kurban Sahib. _They_ did not ask him to
+sweep stables. They would by no means let him go. He did substitute for
+one of their troop-leaders who had a fever, one long day in a country full
+of little hills--like the mouth of the Khaibar; and when they returned in
+the evening, the _Durro Muts_ said, "Wallah! This is a man. Steal him!" So
+they stole my Kurban Sahib as they would have stolen anything else that
+they needed, and they sent a sick officer back to Eshtellenbosch in his
+place.
+
+Thus Kurban Sahib came to his own again, and I was his bearer, and
+Sikander Khan was his cook. The law was strict that this was a Sahibs'
+war, but there was no order that a bearer and a cook should not ride with
+their Sahib--and we had naught to wear but our uniforms. We rode up and
+down this accursed country, where there is no bazaar, no pulse, no flour,
+no oil, no spice, no red pepper, no firewood; nothing but raw corn and a
+little cattle. There were no great battles as I saw it, but a plenty of
+gun-firing. When we were many, the Boer-log came out with coffee to greet
+us, and to show us _purwanas_ (permits) from foolish English Generals who
+had gone that way before, certifying they were peaceful and well-disposed.
+When we were few, they hid behind stones and shot us. Now the order was
+that they were Sahibs, and this was a Sahibs' war. Good! But, as I
+understand it, when a Sahib goes to war, he puts on the cloth of war, and
+only those who wear that cloth may take part in the war. Good! That also I
+understand. But these people were as they were in Burma, or as the Afridis
+are. They shot at their pleasure, and when pressed hid the gun and
+exhibited _purwanas_, or lay in a house and said they were farmers. Even
+such farmers as cut up the Madras troops at Hlinedatalone in Burma! Even
+such farmers as slew Cavagnari Sahib and the Guides at Kabul! We schooled
+_those_ men, to be sure--fifteen, aye, twenty of a morning pushed off the
+verandah in front of the Bala Hissar. I looked that the Jung-i-lat Sahib
+(the Commander-in-Chief) would have remembered the old days; but--no. All
+the people shot at us everywhere, and he issued proclamations saying that
+he did not fight the people, but a certain army, which army, in truth, was
+all the Boer-log, who, between them, did not wear enough of uniform to
+make a loincloth. A fool's war from first to last; for it is manifest that
+he who fights should be hung if he fights with a gun in one hand and a
+_purwana_ in the other, as did all these people. Yet we, when they had had
+their bellyful for the time, received them with honour, and gave them
+permits, and refreshed them and fed their wives and their babes, and
+severely punished our soldiers who took their fowls. So the work was to be
+done not once with a few dead, but thrice and four times over. I talked
+much with Kurban Sahib on this, and he said, "It is a Sahibs' war. That is
+the order;" and one night, when Sikander Khan would have lain out beyond
+the pickets with his knife and shown them how it is worked on the Border,
+he hit Sikander Khan between the eyes and came near to breaking in his
+head. Then Sikander Khan, a bandage over his eyes, so that he looked like
+a sick camel, talked to him half one march, and he was more bewildered
+than I, and vowed he would return to Eshtellenbosch. But privately to me
+Kurban Sahib said we should have loosed the Sikhs and the Gurkhas on these
+people till they came in with their foreheads in the dust. For the war was
+not of that sort which they comprehended.
+
+They shot us? Assuredly they shot us from houses adorned with a white
+flag; but when they came to know our custom, their widows sent word by
+Kaffir runners, and presently there was not quite so much firing. _No fee-
+ah_! All the Boer-log with whom we dealt had _purwanas_ signed by mad
+Generals attesting that they were well-disposed to the State.
+
+They had also rifles not a few, and cartridges, which they hid in the
+roof. The women wept very greatly when we burned such houses, but they did
+not approach too near after the flames had taken good hold of the thatch,
+for fear of the bursting cartridges. The women of the Boer-log are very
+clever. They are more clever than the men. The Boer-log are clever? Never,
+never, no! It is the Sahibs who are fools. For their own honour's sake the
+Sahibs must say that the Boer-log are clever; but it is the Sahibs'
+wonderful folly that has made the Boer-log. The Sahibs should have sent
+_us_ into the game.
+
+But the _Durro Muts_ did well. They dealt faithfully with all that country
+thereabouts--not in any way as we of Hind should have dealt, but they were
+not altogether fools. One night when we lay on the top of a ridge in the
+cold, I saw far away a light in a house that appeared for the sixth part
+of an hour and was obscured. Anon it appeared again thrice for the twelfth
+part of an hour. I showed this to Kurban Sahib, for it was a house that
+had been spared--the people having many permits and swearing fidelity at
+our stirrup-leathers. I said to Kurban Sahib, "Send half a troop, Child,
+and finish that house. They signal to their brethren." And he laughed
+where he lay and said, "If I listened to my bearer Umr Singh, there would
+not be left ten houses in all this land." I said, "What need to leave one?
+This is as it was in Burma. They are farmers to-day and fighters to-morrow.
+Let us deal justly with them." He laughed and curled himself up in
+his blanket, and I watched the far light in the house till day. I have
+been on the border in eight wars, not counting Burma. The first Afghan
+War; the second Afghan War; two Mahsud Waziri wars (that is four); two
+Black Mountain wars, if I remember right; the Malakand and Tirah. I do not
+count Burma, or some small things. _I_ know when house signals to house!
+
+I pushed Sikandar Khan with my foot, and he saw it too. He said, "One of
+the Boer-log who brought pumpkins for the mess, which I fried last night,
+lives in yonder house." I said, "How dost thou know?" He said, "Because he
+rode out of the camp another way, but I marked how his horse fought with
+him at the turn of the road; and before the light fell I stole out of the
+camp for evening prayer with Kurban Sahib's glasses, and from a little
+hill I saw the pied horse of that pumpkin-seller hurrying to that house."
+I said naught, but took Kurban Sahib's glasses from his greasy hands and
+cleaned them with a silk handkerchief and returned them to their case.
+Sikander Khan told me that he had been the first man in the Zenab valley
+to use glasses--whereby he finished two blood-feuds cleanly in the course
+of three months' leave. But he was otherwise a liar.
+
+That day Kurban Sahib, with some ten troopers, was sent on to spy the land
+for our camp. The _Durro Muts_ moved slowly at that time. They were
+weighted with grain and forage and carts, and they greatly wished to leave
+these all in some town and go on light to other business which pressed. So
+Kurban Sahib sought a short cut for them, a little off the line of march.
+We were twelve miles before the main body, and we came to a house under a
+high bushed hill, with a nullah, which they call a donga, behind it, and
+an old sangar of piled stones, which they call a kraal, before it. Two
+thorn bushes grew on either side of the door, like babul bushes, covered
+with a golden coloured bloom, and the roof was all of thatch. Before the
+house was a valley of stones that rose to another bush-covered hill. There
+was an old man in the verandah--an old man with a white beard and a wart
+upon the left side of his neck; and a fat woman with the eyes of a swine
+and the jowl of a swine; and a tall young man deprived of understanding.
+His head was hairless, no larger than an orange, and the pits of his
+nostrils were eaten away by a disease. He laughed and slavered and he
+sported sportively before Kurban Sahib. The man brought coffee and the
+woman showed us _purwanas_ from three General Sahibs, certifying that they
+were people of peace and goodwill. Here are the _purwanas_, Sahib. Does
+the Sahib know the Generals who signed them?
+
+They swore the land was empty of Boer-log. They held up their hands and
+swore it. That was about the time of the evening meal. I stood near the
+verandah with Sikander Khan, who was nosing like a jackal on a lost scent.
+At last he took my arm and said, "See yonder! There is the sun on the
+window of the house that signalled last night. This house can see that
+house from here," and he looked at the hill behind him all hairy with
+bushes, and sucked in his breath. Then the idiot with the shrivelled head
+danced by me and threw back that head, and regarded the roof and laughed
+like a hyena, and the fat woman talked loudly, as it were, to cover some
+noise. After this passed I to the back of the house on pretence to get
+water for tea, and I saw fresh fresh horse-dung on the ground, and that
+the ground was cut with the new marks of hoofs; and there had dropped in
+the dirt one cartridge. Then Kurban Sahib called to me in our tongue,
+saying, "Is this a good place to make tea?" and I replied, knowing what he
+meant, "There are over many cooks in the cook-house. Mount and go, Child."
+Then I returned, and he said, smiling to the woman, "Prepare food, and
+when we have loosened our girths we will come in and eat;" but to his men
+he said in a whisper, "Ride away!" No. He did not cover the old man or the
+fat woman with his rifle. That was not his custom. Some fool of the _Durro
+Muts_, being hungry, raised his voice to dispute the order to flee, and
+before we were in our saddles many shots came from the roof--from rifles
+thrust through the thatch. Upon this we rode across the valley of stones,
+and men fired at us from the nullah behind the house, and from the hill
+behind the nullah, as well as from the roof of the house--so many shots
+that it sounded like a drumming in the hills. Then Sikandar Khan, riding
+low, said, "This play is not for us alone, but for the rest of the _Durro
+Muts_," and I said, "Be quiet. Keep place!" for his place was behind me,
+and I rode behind Kurban Sahib. But these new bullets will pass through
+five men arow! We were not hit--not one of us--and we reached the hill of
+rocks and scattered among the stones, and Kurban Sahib turned in his
+saddle and said, "Look at the old man!" He stood in the verandah firing
+swiftly with a gun, the woman beside him and the idiot also--both with
+guns. Kurban Sahib laughed, and I caught him by the wrist, but--his fate
+was written at that hour. The bullet passed under my arm-pit and struck
+him in the liver, and I pulled him backward between two great rocks atilt
+--Kurban Sahib, my Kurban Sahib! From the nullah behind the house and from
+the hills came our Boer-log in number more than a hundred, and Sikandar
+Khan said, "_Now_ we see the meaning of last night's signal. Give me the
+rifle." He took Kurban Sahib's rifle--in this war of fools only the
+doctors carry swords--and lay belly-flat to the work, but Kurban Sahib
+turned where he lay and said, "Be still. It is a Sahibs' war," and Kurban
+Sahib put up his hand--thus; and then his eyes rolled on me, and I gave
+him water that he might pass the more quickly. And at the drinking his
+Spirit received permission....
+
+Thus went our fight, Sahib. We _Durro Muts_ were on a ridge working from
+the north to the south, where lay our main body, and the Boer-log lay in a
+valley working from east to west. There were more than a hundred, and our
+men were ten, but they held the Boer-log in the valley while they swiftly
+passed along the ridge to the south. I saw three Boers drop in the open.
+Then they all hid again and fired heavily at the rocks that hid our men;
+but our men were clever and did not show, but moved away and away, always
+south; and the noise of the battle withdrew itself southward, where we
+could hear the sound of big guns. So it fell stark dark, and Sikandar Khan
+found a deep old jackal's earth amid rocks, into which we slid the body of
+Kurban Sahib upright. Sikandar Khan took his glasses, and I took his
+handkerchief and some letters and a certain thing which I knew hung round
+his neck, and Sikandar Khan is witness that I wrapped them all in the
+handkerchief. Then we took an oath together, and lay still and mourned for
+Kurban Sahib. Sikandar Khan wept till daybreak--even he, a Pathan, a
+Mohammedan! All that night we heard firing to the southward, and when the
+dawn broke the valley was full of Boer-log in carts and on horses. They
+gathered by the house, as we could see through Kurban Sahib's glasses, and
+the old man, who, I take it, was a priest, blessed them, and preached the
+holy war, waving his arm; and the fat woman brought coffee; and the idiot
+capered among them and kissed their horses. Presently they went away in
+haste; they went over the hills and were not; and a black slave came out
+and washed the door-sills with bright water. Sikandar Khan saw through the
+glasses that the stain was blood, and he laughed, saying, "Wounded men lie
+there. We shall yet get vengeance."
+
+About noon we saw a thin, high smoke to the southward, such a smoke as a
+burning house will make in sunshine, and Sikandar Khan, who knows how to
+take a bearing across a hill, said, "At last we have burned the house of
+the pumpkin-seller whence they signalled." And I said: "What need now that
+they have slain my child? Let me mourn." It was a high smoke, and the old
+man, as I saw, came out into the verandah to behold it, and shook his
+clenched hands at it. So we lay till the twilight, foodless and without
+water, for we had vowed a vow neither to eat nor to drink till we had
+accomplished the matter. I had a little opium left, of which I gave
+Sikandar Khan the half, because he loved Kurban Sahib. When it was full
+dark we sharpened our sabres upon a certain softish rock which, mixed with
+water, sharpens steel well, and we took off our boots and we went down to
+the house and looked through the windows very softly. The old man sat
+reading in a book, and the woman sat by the hearth; and the idiot lay on
+the floor with his head against her knee, and he counted his fingers and
+laughed, and she laughed again. So I knew they were mother and son, and I
+laughed, too, for I had suspected this when I claimed her life and her
+body from Sikandar Khan, in our discussion of the spoil. Then we entered
+with bare swords.... Indeed, these Boer-log do not understand the steel,
+for the old man ran towards a rifle in the corner; but Sikandar Khan
+prevented him with a blow of the flat across the hands, and he sat down
+and held up his hands, and I put my fingers on my lips to signify they
+should be silent. But the woman cried, and one stirred in an inner room,
+and a door opened, and a man, bound about the head with rags, stood
+stupidly fumbling with a gun. His whole head fell inside the door, and
+none followed him. It was a very pretty stroke--for a Pathan. They then
+were silent, staring at the head upon the floor, and I said to Sikandar
+Khan, "Fetch ropes! Not even for Kurban Sahib's sake will I defile my
+sword." So he went to seek and returned with three long leather ones, and
+said, "Four wounded lie within, and doubtless each has a permit from a
+General," and he stretched the ropes and laughed. Then I bound the old
+man's hands behind his back, and unwillingly--for he laughed in my face,
+and would have fingered my beard--the idiot's. At this the woman with the
+swine's eyes and the jowl of a swine ran forward, and Sikandar Khan said,
+"Shall I strike or bind? She was thy property on the division." And I
+said, "Refrain! I have made a chain to hold her. Open the door." I pushed
+out the two across the verandah into the darker shade of the thorn-trees,
+and she followed upon her knees and lay along the ground, and pawed at my
+boots and howled. Then Sikandar Khan bore out the lamp, saying that he was
+a butler and would light the table, and I looked for a branch that would
+bear fruit. But the woman hindered me not a little with her screechings
+and plungings, and spoke fast in her tongue, and I replied in my tongue,
+"I am childless to-night because of thy perfidy, and _my_ child was
+praised among men and loved among women. He would have begotten men--not
+animals. Thou hast more years to live than I, but my grief is the
+greater."
+
+I stooped to make sure the noose upon the idiot's neck, and flung the end
+over the branch, and Sikandar Khan held up the lamp that she might well
+see. Then appeared suddenly, a little beyond the light of the lamp, the
+spirit of Kurban Sahib. One hand he held to his side, even where the
+bullet had struck him, and the other he put forward thus, and said, "No.
+It is a Sahibs' war." And I said, "Wait a while, Child, and thou shalt
+sleep." But he came nearer, riding, as it were, upon my eyes, and said,
+"No. It is a Sahibs' war." And Sikandar Khan said, "Is it too heavy?" and
+set down the lamp and came to me; and as he turned to tally on the rope,
+the spirit of Kurban Sahib stood up within arm's reach of us, and his face
+was very angry, and a third time he said, "No. It is a Sahibs' war." And a
+little wind blew out the lamp, and I heard Sikandar Khan's teeth chatter
+in his head.
+
+So we stayed side by side, the ropes in our hand, a very long while, for
+we could not shape any words. Then I heard Sikandar Khan open his water-
+bottle and drink; and when his mouth was slaked he passed to me and said,
+"We are absolved from our vow." So I drank, and together we waited for the
+dawn in that place where we stood--the ropes in our hand. A little after
+third cockcrow we heard the feet of horses and gun wheels very far off,
+and so soon as the light came a shell burst on the threshold of the house,
+and the roof of the verandah that was thatched fell in and blazed before
+the windows. And I said, "What of the wounded Boer-log within?" And
+Sikandar Khan said, "We have heard the order. It is a Sahibs' war. Stand
+still." Then came a second shell--good line, but short--and scattered dust
+upon us where we stood; and then came ten of the little quick shells from
+the gun that speaks like a stammerer--yes, pompom the Sahibs call it--and
+the face of the house folded down like the nose and the chin of an old man
+mumbling, and the forefront of the house lay down. Then Sikandar Khan
+said, "If it be the fate of the wounded to die in the fire, _I_ shall not
+prevent it." And he passed to the back of the house and presently came
+back, and four wounded Boer-log came after him, of whom two could not walk
+upright. And I said, "What hast thou done?" And he said, "I have neither
+spoken to them nor laid hand on them. They follow in hope of mercy." And I
+said, "It is a Sahibs' war. Let them wait the Sahibs' mercy." So they lay
+still, the four men and the idiot, and the fat woman under the thorn-tree,
+and the house burned furiously. Then began the known sound of cartouches
+in the roof--one or two at first; then a trill, and last of all one loud
+noise and the thatch blew here and there, and the captives would have
+crawled aside on account of the heat that was withering the thorn-trees,
+and on account of wood and bricks flying at random. But I said, "Abide!
+Abide! Ye be Sahibs, and this is a Sahibs' war, O Sahibs. There is no
+order that ye should depart from this war." They did not understand my
+words. Yet they abode and they lived.
+
+Presently rode down five troopers of Kurban Sahib's command, and one I
+knew spoke my tongue, having sailed to Calcutta often with horses. So I
+told him all my tale, using bazaar-talk, such as his kidney of Sahib would
+understand; and at the end I said, "An order has reached us here from the
+dead that this is a Sahibs' war. I take the soul of my Kurban Sahib to
+witness that I give over to the justice of the Sahibs these Sahibs who
+have made me childless." Then I gave him the ropes and fell down
+senseless, my heart being very full, but my belly was empty, except for
+the little opium.
+
+They put me into a cart with one of their wounded, and after a while I
+understood that they had fought against the Boer-log for two days and two
+nights. It was all one big trap, Sahib, of which we, with Kurban Sahib,
+saw no more than the outer edge. They were very angry, the _Durro Muts_--
+very angry indeed. I have never seen Sahibs so angry. They buried my
+Kurban Sahib with the rites of his faith upon the top of the ridge
+overlooking the house, and I said the proper prayers of the faith, and
+Sikandar Khan prayed in his fashion and stole five signalling-candles,
+which have each three wicks, and lighted the grave as if it had been the
+grave of a saint on a Friday. He wept very bitterly all that night, and I
+wept with him, and he took hold of my feet and besought me to give him a
+remembrance from Kurban Sahib. So I divided equally with him one of Kurban
+Sahib's handkerchiefs--not the silk ones, for those were given him by a
+certain woman; and I also gave him a button from a coat, and a little
+steel ring of no value that Kurban Sahib used for his keys, and he kissed
+them and put them into his bosom. The rest I have here in that little
+bundle, and I must get the baggage from the hotel in Cape Town--some four
+shirts we sent to be washed, for which we could not wait when we went
+up-country--and I must give them all to my Colonel-Sahib at Sialkote in the
+Punjab. For my child is dead--my baba is dead!... I would have come away
+before; there was no need to stay, the child being dead; but we were far
+from the rail, and the _Durro Muts_ were as brothers to me, and I had come
+to look upon Sikandar Khan as in some sort a friend, and he got me a horse
+and I rode up and down with them; but the life had departed. God knows
+what they called me--orderly, _chaprassi_ (messenger), cook, sweeper, I
+did not know nor care. But once I had pleasure. We came back in a month
+after wide circles to that very valley. I knew it every stone, and I went
+up to the grave, and a clever Sahib of the _Durro Muts_ (we left a troop
+there for a week to school those people with _purwanas_) had cut an
+inscription upon a great rock; and they interpreted it to me, and is was a
+jest such as Kurban Sahib himself would have loved. Oh! I have the
+inscription well copied here. Read it aloud, Sahib, and I will explain the
+jests. There are two very good ones. Begin, Sahib:--
+
+  In Memory of
+  WALTER DECIES CORBYN
+  Late Captain 141st Punjab Cavalry
+
+  The Gurgaon Rissala, that is. Go on, Sahib.
+
+  Treacherously shot near this place by
+  The connivance of the late
+  HENDRIK DIRK UYS
+  A Minister of God
+  Who thrice took the oath of neutrality
+  And Piet his son,
+  This little work
+
+Aha! This is the first jest. The Sahib should see this little work!
+
+
+  Was accomplished in partial
+  And inadequate recognition of their loss
+  By some men who loved him
+
+  _Si monumentum requiris circumspice_
+
+That is the second jest. It signifies that those who would desire to
+behold a proper memorial to Kurban Sahib must look out at the house. And,
+Sahib, the house is not there, nor the well, nor the big tank which they
+call dams, nor the little fruit-trees, nor the cattle. There is nothing
+at all, Sahib, except the two trees withered by the fire. The rest is
+like the desert here--or my hand--or my heart. Empty, Sahib--all empty!
+
+
+
+"THEIR LAWFUL OCCASIONS"
+
+THE WET LITANY
+
+  When the water's countenance
+  Blurrs 'twixt glance and second glance;
+  When the tattered smokes forerun
+  Ashen 'neath a silvered sun;
+  When the curtain of the haze
+  Shuts upon our helpless ways--
+       Hear the Channel Fleet at sea;
+       _Libera nos domine_!
+
+  When the engines' bated pulse
+  Scarcely thrills the nosing hulls;
+  When the wash along the side
+  Sounds, a sudden, magnified
+  When the intolerable blast
+  Marks each blindfold minute passed.
+
+  When the fog-buoy's squattering flight
+  Guides us through the haggard night;
+  When the warning bugle blows;
+  When the lettered doorways close;
+  When our brittle townships press,
+  Impotent, on emptiness.
+
+  When the unseen leadsmen lean
+  Questioning a deep unseen;
+  When their lessened count they tell
+  To a bridge invisible;
+  When the hid and perilous
+  Cliffs return our cry to us.
+
+  When the treble thickness spread
+  Swallows up our next-ahead;
+  When her siren's frightened whine
+  Shows her sheering out of line;
+  When, her passage undiscerned,
+  We must turn where she has turned--
+       Hear the Channel Fleet at sea;
+       _Libera nos Domine_!
+
+"THEIR LAWFUL OCCASIONS"
+
+PART I
+
+  ... "And a security for such as pass on the seas upon
+  their lawful occasions."--_Navy Prayer_.
+
+Disregarding the inventions of the Marine Captain, whose other name is
+Gubbins, let a plain statement suffice.
+
+H.M.S. _Caryatid_ went to Portland to join Blue Fleet for manoeuvres. I
+travelled overland from London by way of Portsmouth, where I fell among
+friends. When I reached Portland, H.M.S. _Caryatid_, whose guest I was to
+have been, had, with Blue Fleet, already sailed for some secret rendezvous
+off the west coast of Ireland, and Portland breakwater was filled with Red
+Fleet, my official enemies and joyous acquaintances, who received me with
+unstinted hospitality. For example, Lieutenant-Commander A.L. Hignett, in
+charge of three destroyers, _Wraith, Stiletto_, and _Kobbold_, due to
+depart at 6 P.M. that evening, offered me a berth on his thirty-knot
+flagship, but I preferred my comforts, and so accepted sleeping-room in
+H.M.S. _Pedantic_ (15,000 tons), leader of the second line. After dining
+aboard her I took boat to Weymouth to get my kit aboard, as the
+battleships would go to war at midnight. In transferring my allegiance
+from Blue to Red Fleet, whatever the Marine Captain may say, I did no
+wrong. I truly intended to return to the _Pedantic_ and help to fight Blue
+Fleet. All I needed was a new toothbrush, which I bought from a chemist in
+a side street at 9:15 P. M. As I turned to go, one entered seeking
+alleviation of a gum-boil. He was dressed in a checked ulster, a black
+silk hat three sizes too small, cord-breeches, boots, and pure brass
+spurs. These he managed painfully, stepping like a prisoner fresh from
+leg-irons. As he adjusted the pepper-plaster to the gum the light fell on
+his face, and I recognised Mr. Emanuel Pyecroft, late second-class petty
+officer of H.M.S. _Archimandrite_, an unforgettable man, met a year before
+under Tom Wessel's roof in Plymouth. It occurred to me that when a petty
+officer takes to spurs he may conceivably meditate desertion. For that
+reason I, though a taxpayer, made no sign. Indeed, it was Mr. Pyecroft,
+following me out of the shop, who said hollowly: "What might you be doing
+here?"
+
+"I'm going on manoeuvres in the _Pedantic_," I replied.
+
+"Ho!" said Mr. Pyecroft. "An' what manner o' manoeuvres d'you expect to
+see in a blighted cathedral like the _Pedantic_? _I_ know 'er. I knew her
+in Malta, when the _Vulcan_ was her permanent tender. Manoeuvres! You
+won't see more than 'Man an' arm watertight doors!' in your little woollen
+undervest."
+
+"I'm sorry for that."
+
+"Why?" He lurched heavily as his spurs caught and twanged like tuning-
+forks. "War's declared at midnight. _Pedantics_ be sugared! Buy an 'am an'
+see life!"
+
+For the moment I fancied Mr. Pyecroft, a fugitive from justice, purposed
+that we two should embrace a Robin Hood career in the uplands of Dorset.
+The spurs troubled me, and I made bold to say as much. "Them!" he said,
+coming to an intricate halt. "They're part of the _prima facie_ evidence.
+But as for me--let me carry your bag--I'm second in command, leadin'-hand,
+cook, steward, an' lavatory man, with a few incidentals for sixpence a day
+extra, on No. 267 torpedo-boat."
+
+"They wear spurs there?"
+
+"Well," said Mr. Peycroft, "seein' that Two Six Seven belongs to Blue
+Fleet, which left the day before yesterday, disguises are imperative. It
+transpired thus. The Right Honourable Lord Gawd Almighty Admiral Master
+Frankie Frobisher, K.C.B., commandin' Blue Fleet, can't be bothered with
+one tin-torpedo-boat more or less; and what with lyin' in the Reserve four
+years, an' what with the new kind o' tiffy which cleans dynamos with
+brick-dust and oil (Blast these spurs! They won't render!), Two Six
+Seven's steam-gadgets was paralytic. Our Mr. Moorshed done his painstakin'
+best--it's his first command of a war-canoe, matoor age nineteen (down
+that alleyway, please!) but be that as it may, His Holiness Frankie is
+aware of us crabbin' ourselves round the breakwater at five knots, an'
+steerin' _pari passu_, as the French say. (Up this alley-way, please!) If
+he'd given Mr. Hinchcliffe, our chief engineer, a little time, it would
+never have transpired, for what Hinch can't drive he can coax; but the new
+port bein' a trifle cloudy, an' 'is joints tinglin' after a post-captain
+dinner, Frankie come on the upper bridge seekin' for a sacrifice. We,
+offerin' a broadside target, got it. He told us what 'is grandmamma, 'oo
+was a lady an' went to sea in stick-and string-batteaus, had told him
+about steam. He throwed in his own prayers for the 'ealth an' safety of
+all steam-packets an' their officers. Then he give us several distinct
+orders. The first few--I kept tally--was all about going to Hell; the next
+many was about not evolutin' in his company, when there; an' the last all
+was simply repeatin' the motions in quick time. Knowin' Frankie's groovin'
+to be badly eroded by age and lack of attention, I didn't much panic; but
+our Mr. Moorshed, 'e took it a little to heart. Me an' Mr. Hinchcliffe
+consoled 'im as well as service conditions permits of, an' we had a
+_resume_-supper at the back o' the Camber--secluded _an'_ lugubrious! Then
+one thing leadin' up to another, an' our orders, except about anchorin'
+where he's booked for, leavin' us a clear 'orizon, Number Two Six Seven is
+now--mind the edge of the wharf--here!"
+
+By mysterious doublings he had brought me out on to the edge of a narrow
+strip of water crowded with coastwise shipping that runs far up into
+Weymouth town. A large foreign timber-brig lay at my feet, and under the
+round of her stern cowered, close to the wharf-edge, a slate-coloured,
+unkempt, two-funnelled craft of a type--but I am no expert--between the
+first-class torpedo-boat and the full-blooded destroyer. From her archaic
+torpedo-tubes at the stern, and quick-firers forward and amidship, she
+must have dated from the early nineties. Hammerings and clinkings, with
+spurts of steam and fumes of hot oil, arose from her inside, and a figure
+in a striped jersey squatted on the engine-room gratings.
+
+"She ain't much of a war-canoe, but you'll see more life in 'er than on an
+whole squadron of bleedin' _Pedantics."_
+
+"But she's laid up here--and Blue Fleet have gone," I protested.
+"Precisely. Only, in his comprehensive orders Frankie didn't put us out of
+action. Thus we're a non-neglectable fightin' factor which you mightn't
+think from this elevation; _an'_ m'rover, Red Fleet don't know we're 'ere.
+Most of us"--he glanced proudly at his boots--"didn't run to spurs, but
+we're disguised pretty devious, as you might say. Morgan, our signaliser,
+when last seen, was a Dawlish bathing-machine proprietor. Hinchcliffe was
+naturally a German waiter, and me you behold as a squire of low degree;
+while yonder Levantine dragoman on the hatch is our Mr. Moorshed. He was
+the second cutter's snotty--_my_ snotty--on the _Archimandrite_--two
+years--Cape Station. Likewise on the West Coast, mangrove swampin', an'
+gettin' the cutter stove in on small an' unlikely bars, an' manufacturin'
+lies to correspond. What I don't know about Mr. Moorshed is precisely the
+same gauge as what Mr. Moorshed don't know about me--half a millimetre, as
+you might say. He comes into awful opulence of his own when 'e's of age;
+an' judgin' from what passed between us when Frankie cursed 'im, I don't
+think 'e cares whether he's broke to-morrow or--the day after. Are you
+beginnin' to follow our tattics? They'll be worth followin'. Or _are_ you
+goin' back to your nice little cabin on the _Pedantic_--which I lay
+they've just dismounted the third engineer out of--to eat four fat meals
+per diem, an' smoke in the casement?"
+
+The figure in the jersey lifted its head and mumbled.
+
+"Yes, Sir," was Mr. Pyecroft's answer. "I 'ave ascertained that _Stiletto,
+Wraith_, and _Kobbold_ left at 6 P. M. with the first division o' Red
+Fleet's cruisers except _Devolotion_ and _Cryptic_, which are delayed by
+engine-room defects." Then to me: "Won't you go aboard? Mr. Moorshed 'ud
+like some one to talk to. You buy an 'am an see life."
+
+At this he vanished; and the Demon of Pure Irresponsibility bade me lower
+myself from the edge of the wharf to the tea-tray plates of No. 267.
+
+"What d'you want?" said the striped jersey.
+
+"I want to join Blue Fleet if I can," I replied. "I've been left behind
+by--an accident.
+
+"Well?"
+
+"Mr. Pyecroft told me to buy a ham and see life. About how big a ham do
+you need?"
+
+"I don't want any ham, thank you. That's the way up the wharf. _Good_-
+night."
+
+"Good-night!" I retraced my steps, wandered in the dark till I found a
+shop, and there purchased, of sardines, canned tongue, lobster, and
+salmon, not less than half a hundredweight. A belated sausage-shop
+supplied me with a partially cut ham of pantomime tonnage. These things I,
+sweating, bore out to the edge of the wharf and set down in the shadow of
+a crane. It was a clear, dark summer night, and from time to time I
+laughed happily to myself. The adventure was preordained on the face of
+it. Pyecroft alone, spurred or barefoot, would have drawn me very far from
+the paths of circumspection. His advice to buy a ham and see life clinched
+it. Presently Mr. Pyecroft--I heard spurs clink--passed me. Then the
+jersey voice said: "What the mischief's that?"
+
+"'Asn't the visitor come aboard, Sir? 'E told me he'd purposely abandoned
+the _Pedantic_ for the pleasure of the trip with us. Told me he was
+official correspondent for the _Times_; an' I know he's littery by the way
+'e tries to talk Navy-talk. Haven't you seen 'im, Sir?"
+
+Slowly and dispassionately the answer drawled long on the night; "Pye, you
+are without exception the biggest liar in the Service!"
+
+"Then what am I to do with the bag, Sir? It's marked with his name." There
+was a pause till Mr. Moorshed said "Oh!" in a tone which the listener
+might construe precisely as he pleased.
+
+"_He_ was the maniac who wanted to buy a ham and see life--was he? If he
+goes back to the _Pedantic_--"
+
+"Pre-cisely, Sir. Gives us all away, Sir."
+
+"Then what possessed _you_ to give it away to him, you owl?"
+
+"I've got his bag. If 'e gives anything away, he'll have to go naked."
+
+At this point I thought it best to rattle my tins and step out of the
+shadow of the crane.
+
+"I've bought the ham," I called sweetly. "Have you still any objection to
+my seeing life, Mr. Moorshed?"
+
+"All right, if you're insured. Won't you come down?"
+
+I descended; Pyecroft, by a silent flank movement, possessing himself of
+all the provisions, which he bore to some hole forward.
+
+"Have you known Mr. Pyecroft long?" said my host.
+
+"Met him once, a year ago, at Devonport. What do you think of him?"
+
+"What do _you_ think of him?"
+
+"I've left the _Pedantic_--her boat will be waiting for me at ten o'clock,
+too--simply because I happened to meet him," I replied.
+
+"That's all right. If you'll come down below, we may get some grub."
+
+We descended a naked steel ladder to a steel-beamed tunnel, perhaps twelve
+feet long by six high. Leather-topped lockers ran along either side; a
+swinging table, with tray and lamp above, occupied the centre. Other
+furniture there was none.
+
+"You can't shave here, of course. We don't wash, and, as a rule, we eat
+with our fingers when we're at sea. D'you mind?"
+
+Mr. Moorshed, black-haired, black-browed, sallow-complexioned, looked me
+over from head to foot and grinned. He was not handsome in any way, but
+his smile drew the heart. "You didn't happen to hear what Frankie told me
+from the flagship, did you? His last instructions, and I've logged them
+here in shorthand, were"--he opened a neat pocket-book--"_'Get out of this
+and conduct your own damned manoeuvres in your own damned tinker fashion!
+You're a disgrace to the Service, and your boat's offal.'"_
+
+"Awful?" I said.
+
+"No--offal--tripes--swipes--ullage." Mr. Pyecroft entered, in the costume
+of his calling, with the ham and an assortment of tin dishes, which he
+dealt out like cards.
+
+"I shall take these as my orders," said Mr. Moorshed. "I'm chucking the
+Service at the end of the year, so it doesn't matter."
+
+We cut into the ham under the ill-trimmed lamp, washed it down with
+whisky, and then smoked. From the foreside of the bulkhead came an
+uninterrupted hammering and clinking, and now and then a hiss of steam.
+
+"That's Mr. Hinchcliffe," said Pyecroft. "He's what is called a first-
+class engine-room artificer. If you hand 'im a drum of oil an' leave 'im
+alone, he can coax a stolen bicycle to do typewritin'."
+
+Very leisurely, at the end of his first pipe, Mr. Moorshed drew out a
+folded map, cut from a newspaper, of the area of manoeuvres, with the
+rules that regulate these wonderful things, below.
+
+"Well, I suppose I know as much as an average stick-and-string admiral,"
+he said, yawning. "Is our petticoat ready yet, Mr. Pyecroft?"
+
+As a preparation for naval manoeuvres these councils seemed inadequate. I
+followed up the ladder into the gloom cast by the wharf edge and the big
+lumber-ship's side. As my eyes stretched to the darkness I saw that No.
+267 had miraculously sprouted an extra pair of funnels--soft, for they
+gave as I touched them.
+
+"More _prima facie_ evidence. You runs a rope fore an' aft, an' you erects
+perpendick-u-arly two canvas tubes, which you distends with cane hoops,
+thus 'avin' as many funnels as a destroyer. At the word o' command, up
+they go like a pair of concertinas, an' consequently collapses equally
+'andy when requisite. Comin' aft we shall doubtless overtake the Dawlish
+bathin'-machine proprietor fittin' on her bustle."
+
+Mr. Pyecroft whispered this in my ear as Moorshed moved toward a group at
+the stern.
+
+"None of us who ain't built that way can be destroyers, but we can look as
+near it as we can. Let me explain to you, Sir, that the stern of a
+Thorneycroft boat, which we are _not_, comes out in a pretty bulge,
+totally different from the Yarrow mark, which again we are not. But, on
+the other 'and, _Dirk, Stiletto, Goblin, Ghoul, Djinn_, and _A-frite_--Red
+Fleet dee-stroyers, with 'oom we hope to consort later on terms o' perfect
+equality--_are_ Thorneycrofts, an' carry that Grecian bend which we are
+now adjustin' to our _arriere-pensee_--as the French would put it--by
+means of painted canvas an' iron rods bent as requisite. Between you an'
+me an' Frankie, we are the _Gnome_, now in the Fleet Reserve at Pompey--
+Portsmouth, I should say."
+
+"The first sea will carry it all away," said Moorshed, leaning gloomily
+outboard, "but it will do for the present."
+
+"We've a lot of _prima facie_ evidence about us," Mr. Pyecroft went on. "A
+first-class torpedo boat sits lower in the water than a destroyer. Hence
+we artificially raise our sides with a black canvas wash-streak to
+represent extra freeboard; _at_ the same time paddin' out the cover of the
+forward three-pounder like as if it was a twelve-pounder, an' variously
+fakin' up the bows of 'er. As you might say, we've took thought an' added
+a cubic to our stature. It's our len'th that sugars us. A 'undred an'
+forty feet, which is our len'th into two 'undred and ten, which is about
+the _Gnome's,_ leaves seventy feet over, which we haven't got."
+
+"Is this all your own notion, Mr. Pyecroft?" I asked.
+
+"In spots, you might say--yes; though we all contributed to make up
+deficiencies. But Mr. Moorshed, not much carin' for further Navy after
+what Frankie said, certainly threw himself into the part with avidity."
+
+"What the dickens are we going to do?"
+
+"Speaking as a seaman gunner, I should say we'd wait till the sights came
+on, an' then fire. Speakin' as a torpedo-coxswain, L.T.O., T.I., M.D.,
+etc., I presume we fall in--Number One in rear of the tube, etc., secure
+tube to ball or diaphragm, clear away securin'-bar, release safety-pin
+from lockin-levers, an' pray Heaven to look down on us. As second in
+command o' 267, I say wait an' see!"
+
+"What's happened? We're off," I said. The timber ship had slid away from
+us.
+
+"We are. Stern first, an' broadside on! If we don't hit anything too hard,
+we'll do."
+
+"Come on the bridge," said Mr. Moorshed. I saw no bridge, but fell over
+some sort of conning-tower forward, near which was a wheel. For the next
+few minutes I was more occupied with cursing my own folly than with the
+science of navigation. Therefore I cannot say how we got out of Weymouth
+Harbour, nor why it was necessary to turn sharp to the left and wallow in
+what appeared to be surf.
+
+"Excuse me," said Mr. Pyecroft behind us, "_I_ don't mind rammin' a
+bathin'-machine; but if only _one_ of them week-end Weymouth blighters has
+thrown his empty baccy-tin into the sea here, we'll rip our plates open on
+it; 267 isn't the _Archimandrite's_ old cutter."
+
+"I am hugging the shore," was the answer.
+
+"There's no actual 'arm in huggin', but it can come expensive if
+pursooed."
+
+"Right-O!" said Moorshed, putting down the wheel, and as we left those
+scant waters I felt 267 move more freely.
+
+A thin cough ran up the speaking-tube.
+
+"Well, what is it, Mr. Hinchcliffe?" said Moorshed.
+
+"I merely wished to report that she is still continuin' to go, Sir."
+
+"Right-O! Can we whack her up to fifteen, d'you think?"
+
+"I'll try, Sir; but we'd prefer to have the engine-room hatch open--at
+first, Sir."
+
+Whacked up then she was, and for half an hour was careered largely through
+the night, turning at last with a suddenness that slung us across the
+narrow deck.
+
+"This," said Mr. Pyecroft, who received me on his chest as a large rock
+receives a shadow, "represents the _Gnome_ arrivin' cautious from the
+direction o' Portsmouth, with Admiralty orders."
+
+He pointed through the darkness ahead, and after much staring my eyes
+opened to a dozen destroyers, in two lines, some few hundred yards away.
+
+"Those are the Red Fleet destroyer flotilla, which is too frail to panic
+about among the full-blooded cruisers inside Portland breakwater, and
+several millimetres too excited over the approachin' war to keep a look-
+out inshore. Hence our tattics!"
+
+We wailed through our siren--a long, malignant, hyena-like howl--and a
+voice hailed us as we went astern tumultuously.
+
+"The _Gnome_--Carteret-Jones--from Portsmouth, with orders--mm--mm--
+_Stiletto_," Moorshed answered through the megaphone in a high, whining
+voice, rather like a chaplain's.
+
+"_Who_?" was the answer.
+
+"Carter--et--Jones."
+
+"Oh, Lord!"
+
+There was a pause; a voice cried to some friend, "It's Podgie, adrift
+on the high seas in charge of a whole dee-stroyer!"
+
+Another voice echoed, "Podgie!" and from its note I gathered that Mr.
+Carteret-Jones had a reputation, but not for independent command.
+
+"Who's your sub?" said the first speaker, a shadow on the bridge of the
+_Dirk_.
+
+"A gunner, at present, Sir. The _Stiletto_--broken down--turns over to
+us."
+
+"When did the _Stiletto_ break down?"
+
+"Off the Start, Sir; two hours after--after she left here this evening, I
+believe. My orders are to report to you for the manoeuvre signal-codes,
+and join Commander Hignett's flotilla, which is in attendance on
+_Stiletto_."
+
+A smothered chuckle greeted this last. Moorshed's voice was high and
+uneasy. Said Pyecroft, with a sigh: "The amount o' trouble me an' my
+bright spurs 'ad fishin' out that information from torpedo coxswains and
+similar blighters in pubs all this afternoon, you would never believe."
+
+"But has the _Stiletto_ broken down?" I asked weakly.
+
+"How else are we to get Red Fleet's private signal-code? Any way, if she
+'asn't now, she will before manoeuvres are ended. It's only executin' in
+anticipation."
+
+"Go astern and send your coxswain aboard for orders, Mr. Jones." Water
+carries sound well, but I do not know whether we were intended to hear the
+next sentence: "They must have given him _one_ intelligent keeper."
+
+"That's me," said Mr. Pyecroft, as a black and coal-stained dinghy--I did
+not foresee how well I should come to know her--was flung overside by
+three men.
+
+"Havin' bought an 'am, we will now see life." He stepped into the boat and
+was away.
+
+"I say, Podgie!"--the speaker was in the last of the line of destroyers,
+as we thumped astern--"aren't you lonely out there?"
+
+"Oh, don't rag me!" said Moorshed. "Do you suppose I'll have to manoeuvre
+with your flo-tilla?"
+
+"No, Podgie! I'm pretty sure our commander will see you sifting cinders in
+Tophet before you come with our flo-tilla."
+
+"Thank you! She steers rather wild at high speeds."
+
+Two men laughed together.
+
+"By the way, who is Mr. Carteret-Jones when he's at home?" I whispered.
+
+"I was with him in the _Britannia_. I didn't like him much, but I'm
+grateful to him now. I must tell him so some day."
+
+"They seemed to know him hereabouts."
+
+"He rammed the _Caryatid_ twice with her own steam-pinnace."
+
+Presently, moved by long strokes, Mr. Pyecroft returned, skimming across
+the dark. The dinghy swung up behind him, even as his heel spurned it.
+
+"Commander Fasset's compliments to Mr. L. Carteret-Jones, and the sooner
+he digs out in pursuance of Admiralty orders as received at Portsmouth,
+the better pleased Commander Fasset will be. But there's a lot more----"
+
+"Whack her up, Mr. Hinchcliffe! Come on to the bridge. We can settle it as
+we go. Well?"
+
+Mr. Pyecroft drew an important breath, and slid off his cap.
+
+"Day an' night private signals of Red Fleet _com_plete, Sir!" He handed a
+little paper to Moorshed. "You see, Sir, the trouble was, that Mr.
+Carteret-Jones bein', so to say, a little new to his duties, 'ad forgot to
+give 'is gunner his Admiralty orders in writin', but, as I told Commander
+Fasset, Mr. Jones had been repeatin' 'em to me, nervous-like, most of the
+way from Portsmouth, so I knew 'em by heart--an' better. The Commander,
+recognisin' in me a man of agility, cautioned me to be a father an' mother
+to Mr. Carteret-Jones."
+
+"Didn't he know you?" I asked, thinking for the moment that there could be
+no duplicates of Emanuel Pyecroft in the Navy.
+
+"What's a torpedo-gunner more or less to a full lootenant commanding six
+thirty-knot destroyers for the first time? 'E seemed to cherish the 'ope
+that 'e might use the _Gnome_ for 'is own 'orrible purposes; but what I
+told him about Mr. Jones's sad lack o' nerve comin' from Pompey, an' going
+dead slow on account of the dark, short-circuited _that_ connection.
+'M'rover,' I says to him, 'our orders is explicit; _Stiletto's_ reported
+broke down somewhere off the Start, an' we've been tryin' to coil down a
+new stiff wire hawser all the evenin', so it looks like towin' 'er back,
+don't it?' I says. That more than ever jams his turrets, an' makes him
+keen to get rid of us. 'E even hinted that Mr. Carteret-Jones passin'
+hawsers an' assistin' the impotent in a sea-way might come pretty
+expensive on the tax-payer. I agreed in a disciplined way. I ain't proud.
+Gawd knows I ain't proud! But when I'm really diggin' out in the fancy
+line, I sometimes think that me in a copper punt, single-'anded, 'ud beat
+a cutter-full of De Rougemongs in a row round the fleet."
+
+At this point I reclined without shame on Mr. Pyecroft's bosom, supported
+by his quivering arm.
+
+"Well?" said Moorshed, scowling into the darkness, as 267's bows snapped
+at the shore seas of the broader Channel, and we swayed together.
+
+"'You'd better go on,' says Commander Fassett, 'an' do what you're told to
+do. I don't envy Hignett if he has to dry-nurse the _Gnome's_ commander.
+But what d'you want with signals?' 'e says. 'It's criminal lunacy to trust
+Mr. Jones with anything that steams.'
+
+"'May I make an observation, Sir?' I says. 'Suppose,' I says, 'you was
+torpedo-gunner on the _Gnome_, an' Mr. Carteret-Jones was your commandin'
+officer, an' you had your reputation _as_ a second in command for the
+first time,' I says, well knowin' it was his first command of a flotilla,
+'what 'ud you do, Sir?' That gouged 'is unprotected ends open--clear back
+to the citadel."
+
+"What did he say?" Moorshed jerked over is shoulder.
+
+"If you were Mr. Carteret-Jones, it might be disrespect for me to repeat
+it, Sir."
+
+"Go ahead," I heard the boy chuckle.
+
+"'Do?' 'e says. 'I'd rub the young blighter's nose into it till I made a
+perishin' man of him, or a perspirin' pillow-case,' 'e says, 'which,' he
+adds, 'is forty per cent, more than he is at present.'
+
+"Whilst he's gettin' the private signals--they're rather particular ones--
+I went forrard to see the _Dirk's_ gunner about borrowin' a holdin'-down
+bolt for our twelve-pounder. My open ears, while I was rovin' over his
+packet, got the followin' authentic particulars." I heard his voice
+change, and his feet shifted. "There's been a last council o' war of
+destroyer-captains at the flagship, an' a lot of things 'as come out. To
+begin with _Cryptic_ and _Devolution_, Captain Panke and Captain Malan--"
+
+"_Cryptic_ and _Devolution_, first-class cruisers," said Mr. Moorshed
+dreamily. "Go on, Pyecroft."
+
+"--bein' delayed by minor defects in engine-room, did _not_, as we know,
+accompany Red Fleet's first division of scouting cruisers, whose
+rendezvous is unknown, but presumed to be somewhere off the Lizard.
+_Cryptic_ an' _Devolution_ left at 9:30 P.M. still reportin' copious minor
+defects in engine-room. Admiral's final instructions was they was to put
+into Torbay, an' mend themselves there. If they can do it in twenty-four
+hours, they're to come on and join the battle squadron at the first
+rendezvous, down Channel somewhere. (I couldn't get that, Sir.) If they
+can't, he'll think about sendin' them some destroyers for escort. But his
+present intention is to go 'ammer and tongs down Channel, usin' 'is
+destroyers for all they're worth, an' thus keepin' Blue Fleet too busy off
+the Irish coast to sniff into any eshtuaries."
+
+"But if those cruisers are crocks, why does the Admiral let 'em out of
+Weymouth at all?" I asked.
+
+"The tax-payer," said Mr. Moorshed.
+
+"An' newspapers," added Mr. Pyecroft. "In Torbay they'll look as they was
+muckin' about for strategical purposes--hanmerin' like blazes in the
+engine room all the weary day, an' the skipper droppin' questions down the
+engine-room hatch every two or three minutes. _I've_ been there. Now,
+Sir?" I saw the white of his eye turn broad on Mr. Moorshed.
+
+The boy dropped his chin over the speaking-tube.
+
+"Mr. Hinchcliffe, what's her extreme economical radius?"
+
+"Three hundred and forty knots, down to swept bunkers."
+
+"Can do," said Moorshed. "By the way, have her revolutions any bearing on
+her speed, Mr. Hinchcliffe?"
+
+"None that I can make out yet, Sir."
+
+"Then slow to eight knots. We'll jog down to forty-nine, forty-five, or
+four about, and three east. That puts us say forty miles from Torbay by
+nine o'clock to-morrow morning. We'll have to muck about till dusk before
+we run in and try our luck with the cruisers."
+
+"Yes, Sir. Their picket boats will be panickin' round them all night. It's
+considered good for the young gentlemen."
+
+"Hallo! War's declared! They're off!" said Moorshed.
+
+He swung 267's head round to get a better view. A few miles to our right
+the low horizon was spangled with small balls of fire, while nearer ran a
+procession of tiny cigar ends.
+
+"Red hot! Set 'em alight," said Mr. Pyecroft. "That's the second destroyer
+flotilla diggin' out for Commander Fassett's reputation."
+
+The smaller lights disappeared; the glare of the destroyers' funnels
+dwindled even as we watched.
+
+"They're going down Channel with lights out, thus showin' their zeal an'
+drivin' all watch-officers crazy. Now, if you'll excuse me, I think I'll
+get you your pyjamas, an' you'll turn in," said Pyecroft.
+
+He piloted me to the steel tunnel, where the ham still swung majestically
+over the swaying table, and dragged out trousers and a coat with a monk's
+hood, all hewn from one hairy inch-thick board.
+
+"If you fall over in these you'll be drowned. They're lammies. I'll chock
+you off with a pillow; but sleepin' in a torpedo-boat's what you might
+call an acquired habit."
+
+I coiled down on an iron-hard horse-hair pillow next the quivering steel
+wall to acquire that habit. The sea, sliding over 267's skin, worried me
+with importunate, half-caught confidences. It drummed tackily to gather my
+attention, coughed, spat, cleared its throat, and, on the eve of that
+portentous communication, retired up stage as a multitude whispering.
+Anon, I caught the tramp of armies afoot, the hum of crowded cities
+awaiting the event, the single sob of a woman, and dry roaring of wild
+beasts. A dropped shovel clanging on the stokehold floor was, naturally
+enough, the unbarring of arena gates; our sucking uplift across the crest
+of some little swell, nothing less than the haling forth of new worlds;
+our half-turning descent into the hollow of its mate, the abysmal plunge
+of God-forgotten planets. Through all these phenomena and more--though I
+ran with wild horses over illimitable plains of rustling grass; though I
+crouched belly-flat under appalling fires of musketry; though I was
+Livingstone, painless, and incurious in the grip of his lion--my shut eyes
+saw the lamp swinging in its gimbals, the irregularly gliding patch of
+light on the steel ladder, and every elastic shadow in the corners of the
+frail angle-irons; while my body strove to accommodate itself to the
+infernal vibration of the machine. At the last I rolled limply on the
+floor, and woke to real life with a bruised nose and a great call to go on
+deck at once.
+
+"It's all right," said a voice in my booming ears. "Morgan and Laughton
+are worse than you!"
+
+I was gripping a rail. Mr. Pyecroft pointed with his foot to two bundles
+beside a torpedo-tube, which at Weymouth had been a signaller and a most
+able seaman. "She'd do better in a bigger sea," said Mr. Pyecroft. "This
+lop is what fetches it up."
+
+The sky behind us whitened as I laboured, and the first dawn drove down
+the Channel, tipping the wave-tops with a chill glare. To me that round
+wind which runs before the true day has ever been fortunate and of good
+omen. It cleared the trouble from my body, and set my soul dancing to
+267's heel and toe across the northerly set of the waves--such waves as I
+had often watched contemptuously from the deck of a ten-thousand-ton
+liner. They shouldered our little hull sideways and passed, scalloped, and
+splayed out, toward the coast, carrying our white wake in loops along
+their hollow backs. In succession we looked down a lead-grey cutting of
+water for half a clear mile, were flung up on its ridge, beheld the
+Channel traffic--full-sailed to that fair breeze--all about us, and swung
+slantwise, light as a bladder, elastic as a basket, into the next furrow.
+Then the sun found us, struck the wet gray bows to living, leaping opal,
+the colourless deep to hard sapphire, the many sails to pearl, and the
+little steam-plume of our escape to an inconstant rainbow.
+
+"A fair day and a fair wind for all, thank God!" said Emanuel Pyecroft,
+throwing back the cowl-like hood of his blanket coat. His face was pitted
+with coal-dust and grime, pallid for lack of sleep; but his eyes shone
+like a gull's.
+
+"I told you you'd see life. Think o' the _Pedantic_ now. Think o' her
+Number One chasin' the mobilised gobbies round the lower deck flats. Think
+o' the pore little snotties now bein' washed, fed, and taught, an' the
+yeoman o' signals with a pink eye wakin' bright 'an brisk to another
+perishin' day of five-flag hoists. Whereas _we_ shall caulk an' smoke
+cigarettes, same as the Spanish destroyers did for three weeks after war
+was declared." He dropped into the wardroom singing:--
+
+If you're going to marry me, marry me, Bill, It's no use muckin' about!
+
+The man at the wheel, uniformed in what had once been a Tam-o'-shanter, a
+pair of very worn R.M.L.I. trousers rolled up to the knee, and a black
+sweater, was smoking a cigarette. Moorshed, in a gray Balaclava and a
+brown mackintosh with a flapping cape, hauled at our supplementary funnel
+guys, and a thing like a waiter from a Soho restaurant sat at the head of
+the engine-room ladder exhorting the unseen below. The following wind beat
+down our smoke and covered all things with an inch-thick layer of stokers,
+so that eyelids, teeth, and feet gritted in their motions. I began to see
+that my previous experiences among battleships and cruisers had been
+altogether beside the mark.
+
+
+PART II
+
+  The wind went down with the sunset--
+    The fog came up with the tide,
+  When the Witch of the North took an Egg-shell (_bis_)
+    With a little Blue Devil inside.
+  "Sink," she said, "or swim," she said,
+    "It's all you will get from me.
+  And that is the finish of him!" she said,
+    And the Egg-shell went to sea.
+
+  The wind got up with the morning,
+    And the fog blew off with the rain,
+  When the Witch of the North saw the Egg-shell
+    And the little Blue Devil again.
+  "Did you swim?" she said. "Did you sink?" she said,
+    And the little Blue Devil replied:
+  "For myself I swam, but I think," he said,
+    "There's somebody sinking outside."
+
+But for the small detail that I was a passenger and a civilian, and might
+not alter her course, torpedo-boat No. 267 was mine to me all that
+priceless day. Moorshed, after breakfast--frizzled ham and a devil that
+Pyecroft made out of sardines, anchovies, and French mustard smashed
+together with a spanner--showed me his few and simple navigating tools,
+and took an observation. Morgan, the signaller, let me hold the chamois
+leathers while he cleaned the searchlight (we seemed to be better equipped
+with electricity than most of our class), that lived under a bulbous
+umbrella-cover amidship. Then Pyecroft and Morgan, standing easy, talked
+together of the King's Service as reformers and revolutionists, so
+notably, that were I not engaged on this tale I would, for its conclusion,
+substitute theirs.
+
+I would speak of Hinchcliffe--Henry Salt Hinchcliffe, first-class engine-
+room artificer, and genius in his line, who was prouder of having taken
+part in the Hat Crusade in his youth than of all his daring, his skill,
+and his nickel-steel nerve. I consorted with him for an hour in the packed
+and dancing engine-room, when Moorshed suggested "whacking her up" to
+eighteen knots, to see if she would stand it. The floor was ankle-deep in
+a creamy batter of oil and water; each moving part flicking more oil in
+zoetrope-circles, and the gauges invisible for their dizzy chattering on
+the chattering steel bulkhead. Leading stoker Grant, said to be a
+bigamist, an ox-eyed man smothered in hair, took me to the stokehold and
+planted me between a searing white furnace and some hell-hot iron plate
+for fifteen minutes, while I listened to the drone of fans and the worry
+of the sea without, striving to wrench all that palpitating firepot wide
+open.
+
+Then I came on deck and watched Moorshed--revolving in his orbit from the
+canvas bustle and torpedo-tubes aft, by way of engine-room, conning-tower,
+and wheel, to the doll's house of a foc'sle--learned in experience
+withheld from me, moved by laws beyond my knowledge, authoritative,
+entirely adequate, and yet, in heart, a child at his play. _I_ could not
+take ten steps along the crowded deck but I collided with some body or
+thing; but he and his satellites swung, passed, and returned on their
+vocations with the freedom and spaciousness of the well-poised stars.
+
+Even now I can at will recall every tone and gesture, with each dissolving
+picture inboard or overside--Hinchcliffe's white arm buried to the
+shoulder in a hornet's nest of spinning machinery; Moorshed's halt and
+jerk to windward as he looked across the water; Pyecroft's back bent over
+the Berthon collapsible boat, while he drilled three men in expanding it
+swiftly; the outflung white water at the foot of a homeward-bound Chinaman
+not a hundred yards away, and her shadow-slashed, rope-purfled sails
+bulging sideways like insolent cheeks; the ribbed and pitted coal-dust on
+our decks, all iridescent under the sun; the first filmy haze that paled
+the shadows of our funnels about lunch time; the gradual die-down and
+dulling over of the short, cheery seas; the sea that changed to a swell:
+the swell that crumbled up and ran allwhither oilily: the triumphant,
+almost audible roll inward of wandering fog-walls that had been stalking
+us for two hours, and--welt upon welt, chill as the grave--the drive of
+the interminable main fog of the Atlantic. We slowed to little more than
+steerage-way and lay listening. Presently a hand-bellows foghorn jarred
+like a corncrake, and there rattled out of the mist a big ship literally
+above us. We could count the rivets in her plates as we scrooped by, and
+the little drops of dew gathered below them.
+
+"Wonder why they're always barks--always steel--always four-masted--an'
+never less than two thousand tons. But they are," said Pyecroft. He was
+out on the turtle-backed bows of her; Moorshed was at the wheel, and
+another man worked the whistle.
+
+"This fog is the best thing could ha' happened to us," said Moorshed. "It
+gives us our chance to run in on the quiet.... Hal-lo!"
+
+A cracked bell rang. Clean and sharp (beautifully grained, too), a
+bowsprit surged over our starboard bow, the bobstay confidentially hooking
+itself into our forward rail.
+
+I saw Pyecroft's arm fly up; heard at the same moment the severing of the
+tense rope, the working of the wheel, Moorshed's voice down the tube
+saying, "Astern a little, please, Mr. Hinchcliffe!" and Pyecroft's cry,
+"Trawler with her gear down! Look out for our propeller, Sir, or we'll be
+wrapped up in the rope."
+
+267 surged quickly under my feet, as the pressure of the downward-bearing
+bobstay was removed. Half-a-dozen men of the foc'sle had already thrown
+out fenders, and stood by to bear off a just visible bulwark.
+
+Still going astern, we touched slowly, broadside on, to a suggestive
+crunching of fenders, and I looked into the deck of a Brixham trawler, her
+crew struck dumb.
+
+"Any luck?" said Moorshed politely.
+
+"Not till we met yeou," was the answer. "The Lard he saved us from they
+big ships to be spitted by the little wan. Where be'e gwine tu with our
+fine new bobstay?"
+
+"Yah! You've had time to splice it by now," said Pyecroft with contempt.
+
+"Aie; but we'm all crushed to port like aigs. You was runnin' twenty-seven
+knots, us reckoned it. Didn't us, Albert?"
+
+"Liker twenty-nine, an' niver no whistle."
+
+"Yes, we always do that. Do you want a tow to Brixham?" said Moorshed.
+
+A great silence fell upon those wet men of the sea.
+
+We lifted a little toward their side, but our silent, quick-breathing
+crew, braced and strained outboard, bore us off as though we had been a
+mere picket-boat.
+
+"What for?" said a puzzled voice.
+
+"For love; for nothing. You'll be abed in Brixham by midnight."
+
+"Yiss; but trawl's down."
+
+"No hurry. I'll pass you a line and go ahead. Sing out when you're ready."
+A rope smacked on their deck with the word; they made it fast; we slid
+forward, and in ten seconds saw nothing save a few feet of the wire rope
+running into fog over our stern; but we heard the noise of debate.
+
+"Catch a Brixham trawler letting go of a free tow in a fog," said Moorshed
+listening.
+
+"But what in the world do you want him for?" I asked.
+
+"Oh, he'll came in handy later."
+
+"Was that your first collision?"
+
+"Yes." I shook hands with him in silence, and our tow hailed us.
+
+"Aie! yeou little man-o'-war!" The voice rose muffled and wailing. "After
+us've upped trawl, us'll be glad of a tow. Leave line just slack abaout as
+'tis now, and kip a good fine look-out be'ind 'ee."
+
+"There's an accommodatin' blighter for you!" said Pyecroft. "Where does he
+expect we'll be, with these currents evolutin' like sailormen at the
+Agricultural Hall?"
+
+I left the bridge to watch the wire-rope at the stern as it drew out and
+smacked down upon the water. By what instinct or guidance 267 kept it from
+fouling her languidly flapping propeller, I cannot tell. The fog now
+thickened and thinned in streaks that bothered the eyes like the glare of
+intermittent flash-lamps; by turns granting us the vision of a sick sun
+that leered and fled, or burying all a thousand fathom deep in gulfs of
+vapours. At no time could we see the trawler though we heard the click of
+her windlass, the jar of her trawl-beam, and the very flap of the fish on
+her deck. Forward was Pyecroft with the lead; on the bridge Moorshed pawed
+a Channel chart; aft sat I, listening to the whole of the British
+Mercantile Marine (never a keel less) returning to England, and watching
+the fog-dew run round the bight of the tow back to its mother-fog.
+
+"Aie! yeou little man-o'-war! We'm done with trawl. You can take us home
+if you know the road."
+
+"Right O!" said Moorshed. "We'll give the fishmonger a run for his money.
+Whack her up, Mr. Hinchcliffe."
+
+The next few hours completed my education. I saw that I ought to be
+afraid, but more clearly (this was when a liner hooted down the back of my
+neck) that any fear which would begin to do justice to the situation
+would, if yielded to, incapacitate me for the rest of my days. A shadow of
+spread sails, deeper than the darkening twilight, brooding over us like
+the wings of Azrael (Pyecroft said she was a Swede), and, miraculously
+withdrawn, persuaded me that there was a working chance that I should
+reach the beach--any beach--alive, if not dry; and (this was when an
+economical tramp laved our port-rail with her condenser water) were I so
+spared, I vowed I would tell my tale worthily.
+
+Thus we floated in space as souls drift through raw time. Night added
+herself to the fog, and I laid hold on my limbs jealously, lest they, too,
+should melt in the general dissolution.
+
+"Where's that prevaricatin' fishmonger?" said Pyecroft, turning a lantern
+on a scant yard of the gleaming wire-rope that pointed like a stick to my
+left. "He's doin' some fancy steerin' on his own. No wonder Mr.
+Hincheliffe is blasphemious. The tow's sheered off to starboard, Sir.
+He'll fair pull the stern out of us."
+
+Moorshed, invisible, cursed through the megaphone into invisibility.
+
+"Aie! yeou little man-o'-war!" The voice butted through the fog with the
+monotonous insistence of a strayed sheep's. "We don't all like the road
+you'm takin'. 'Tis no road to Brixham. You'll be buckled up under Prawle
+Point by'mbye."
+
+"Do you pretend to know where you are?" the megaphone roared.
+
+"Iss, I reckon; but there's no pretence to me!"
+
+"O Peter!" said Pyecroft. "Let's hang him at 'is own gaff."
+
+I could not see what followed, but Moorshed said: "Take another man with
+you. If you lose the tow, you're done. I'll slow her down."
+
+I heard the dinghy splash overboard ere I could cry "Murder!" Heard the
+rasp of a boat-hook along the wire-rope, and then, as it had been in my
+ear, Pyecroft's enormous and jubilant bellow astern: "Why, he's here!
+Right atop of us! The blighter 'as pouched half the tow, like a shark!" A
+long pause filled with soft Devonian bleatings. Then Pyecroft, _solo
+arpeggio_: "Rum? Rum? Rum? Is that all? Come an' try it, uncle."
+
+I lifted my face to where once God's sky had been, and besought The Trues
+I might not die inarticulate, amid these half-worked miracles, but live at
+least till my fellow-mortals could be made one-millionth as happy as I was
+happy. I prayed and I waited, and we went slow--slow as the processes of
+evolution--till the boat-hook rasped again.
+
+"He's not what you might call a scientific navigator," said Pyecroft,
+still in the dinghy, but rising like a fairy from a pantomime trap. "The
+lead's what 'e goes by mostly; rum is what he's come for; an' Brixham is
+'is 'ome. Lay on, Mucduff!"
+
+A white whiskered man in a frock-coat--as I live by bread, a frock-coat!--
+sea-boots, and a comforter crawled over the torpedo-tube into Moorshed's
+grip and vanished forward.
+
+"'E'll probably 'old three gallon (look sharp with that dinghy!); but 'is
+nephew, left in charge of the _Agatha_, wants two bottles command-
+allowance. You're a tax-payer, Sir. Do you think that excessive?"
+
+"Lead there! Lead!" rang out from forward.
+
+"Didn't I say 'e wouldn't understand compass deviations? Watch him close.
+It'll be worth it!"
+
+As I neared the bridge I heard the stranger say: "Let me zmell un!" and to
+his nose was the lead presented by a trained man of the King's Navy.
+
+"I'll tell 'ee where to goo, if yeou'll tell your donkey-man what to du.
+I'm no hand wi' steam." On these lines we proceeded miraculously, and,
+under Moorshed's orders--I was the fisherman's Ganymede, even as
+"M. de C." had served the captain--I found both rum and curacoa in
+a locker, and mixed them equal bulk in an enamelled iron cup.
+
+"Now we'm just abeam o' where we should be," he said at last, "an' here
+we'll lay till she lifts. I'd take 'e in for another bottle--and wan for
+my nevvy; but I reckon yeou'm shart-allowanced for rum. That's nivver no
+Navy rum yeou'm give me. Knowed 'ee by the smack tu un. Anchor now!"
+
+I was between Pyecroft and Moorshed on the bridge, and heard them spring
+to vibrating attention at my side. A man with a lead a few feet to port
+caught the panic through my body, and checked like a wild boar at gaze,
+for not far away an unmistakable ship's bell was ringing. It ceased, and
+another began.
+
+"Them!" said Pyecroft. "Anchored!"
+
+"More!" said our pilot, passing me the cup, and I filled it. The trawler
+astern clattered vehemently on her bell. Pyecroft with a jerk of his arm
+threw loose the forward three-pounder. The bar of the back-sight was
+heavily blobbed with dew; the foresight was invisible.
+
+"No--they wouldn't have their picket-boats out in this weather, though
+they ought to." He returned the barrel to its crotch slowly.
+
+"Be yeou gwine to anchor?" said Macduff, smacking his lips, "or be yeou
+gwine straight on to Livermead Beach?"
+
+"Tell him what we're driving at. Get it into his head somehow," said
+Moorshed; and Pyecroft, snatching the cup from me, enfolded the old man
+with an arm and a mist of wonderful words.
+
+"And if you pull it off," said Moorshed at the last, "I'll give you a
+fiver."
+
+"Lard! What's fivers to me, young man? My nevvy, he likes 'em; but I do
+cherish more on fine drink than filthy lucre any day o' God's good weeks.
+Leave goo my arm, yeou common sailorman! I tall 'ee, gentlemen, I hain't
+the ram-faced, ruddle-nosed old fule yeou reckon I be. Before the mast
+I've fared in my time; fisherman I've been since I seed the unsense of
+sea-dangerin'. Baccy and spirits--yiss, an' cigars too, I've run a plenty.
+I'm no blind harse or boy to be coaxed with your forty-mile free towin'
+and rum atop of all. There's none more sober to Brix'am this tide, I don't
+care who 'tis--than me. _I_ know--_I_ know. Yander'm two great King's
+ships. Yeou'm wishful to sink, burn, and destroy they while us kips 'em
+busy sellin' fish. No need tall me so twanty taime over. Us'll find they
+ships! Us'll find 'em, if us has to break our fine new bowsprit so close
+as Crump's bull's horn!"
+
+"Good egg!" quoth Moorshed, and brought his hand down on the wide
+shoulders with the smack of a beaver's tail.
+
+"Us'll go look for they by hand. Us'll give they something to play upon;
+an' do 'ee deal with them faithfully, an' may the Lard have mercy on your
+sowls! Amen. Put I in dinghy again."
+
+The fog was as dense as ever--we moved in the very womb of night--but I
+cannot recall that I took the faintest note of it as the dinghy, guided by
+the tow-rope, disappeared toward the _Agatha_, Pyecroft rowing. The bell
+began again on the starboard bow.
+
+"We're pretty near," said Moorshed, slowing down. "Out with the Berthon.
+(_We'll_ sell 'em fish, too.) And if any one rows Navy-stroke, I'll break
+his jaw with the tiller. Mr. Hinchcliffe (this down the tube), "you'll
+stay here in charge with Gregory and Shergold and the engine-room staff.
+Morgan stays, too, for signalling purposes." A deep groan broke from
+Morgan's chest, but he said nothing. "If the fog thins and you're seen by
+any one, keep'em quiet with the signals. I can't think of the precise lie
+just now, but _you_ can, Morgan."
+
+"Yes, Sir."
+
+"Suppose their torpedo-nets are down?" I whispered, shivering with
+excitement.
+
+"If they've been repairing minor defects all day, they won't have any one
+to spare from the engine-room, and 'Out nets!' is a job for the whole
+ship's company. I expect they've trusted to the fog--like us. Well,
+Pyecroft?"
+
+That great soul had blown up on to the bridge like a feather. "'Ad to see
+the first o' the rum into the _Agathites_, Sir. They was a bit jealous o'
+their commandin' officer comin' 'ome so richly lacquered, and at first the
+_conversazione_ languished, as you might say. But they sprang to attention
+ere I left. Six sharp strokes on the bells, if any of 'em are sober enough
+to keep tally, will be the signal that our consort 'as cast off her tow
+an' is manceuvrin' on 'er own."
+
+"Right O! Take Laughton with you in the dinghy. Put that Berthon over
+quietly there! Are you all right, Mr. Hinchcliffe?"
+
+I stood back to avoid the rush of half-a-dozen shadows dropping into the
+Berthon boat. A hand caught me by the slack of my garments, moved me in
+generous arcs through the night, and I rested on the bottom of the dinghy.
+
+"I want you for _prima facie_ evidence, in case the vaccination don't
+take," said Pyecroft in my ear. "Push off, Alf!"
+
+The last bell-ringing was high overhead. It was followed by six little
+tinkles from the _Agatha_, the roar of her falling anchor, the clash of
+pans, and loose shouting.
+
+"Where be gwine tu? Port your 'ellum. Aie! you mud-dredger in the fairway,
+goo astern! Out boats! She'll sink us!"
+
+A clear-cut Navy voice drawled from the clouds: "Quiet! you gardeners
+there. This is the _Cryptic_ at anchor."
+
+"Thank you for the range," said Pyecroft, and paddled gingerly. "Feel well
+out in front of you, Alf. Remember your fat fist is our only Marconi
+installation." The voices resumed:
+
+"Bournemouth steamer he says she be."
+
+"Then where be Brixham Harbor?"
+
+"Damme, I'm a tax-payer tu. They've no right to cruise about this way.
+I'll have the laa on 'ee if anything carries away."
+
+Then the man-of-war:
+
+"Short on your anchor! Heave short, you howling maniacs! You'll get
+yourselves smashed in a minute if you drift."
+
+The air was full of these and other voices as the dinghy, checking, swung.
+I passed one hand down Laughton's stretched arm and felt an iron gooseneck
+and a foot or two of a backward-sloping torpedo-net boom. The other hand I
+laid on broad, cold iron--even the flanks of H.M.S. _Cryptic_, which is
+twelve thousand tons.
+
+I heard a scrubby, raspy sound, as though Pyecroft had chosen that hour to
+shave, and I smelled paint. "Drop aft a bit, Alf; we'll put a stencil
+under the stern six-inch casements."
+
+Boom by boom Laughlin slid the dinghy along the towering curved wall.
+Once, twice, and again we stopped, and the keen scrubbing sound was
+renewed.
+
+"Umpires are 'ard-'earted blighters, but this ought to convince 'em....
+Captain Panke's stern-walk is now above our defenceless 'eads. Repeat the
+evolution up the starboard side, Alf."
+
+I was only conscious that we moved around an iron world palpitating with
+life. Though my knowledge was all by touch--as, for example, when Pyecroft
+led my surrendered hand to the base of some bulging sponson, or when my
+palm closed on the knife-edge of the stem and patted it timidly--yet I
+felt lonely and unprotected as the enormous, helpless ship was withdrawn,
+and we drifted away into the void where voices sang:
+
+
+  Tom Pearce, Tom Pearce, lend me thy gray mare,
+  All along, out along, down along lea!
+  I want for to go to Widdicombe Fair
+  With Bill Brewer, Sam Sewer, Peter Gurney, Harry Hawke,
+  Old Uncle Tom Cobley an' all!
+
+"That's old Sinbad an' 'is little lot from the _Agatha_! Give way, Alf!
+_You_ might sing somethin', too."
+
+"I'm no burnin' Patti. Ain't there noise enough for you, Pye?"
+
+"Yes, but it's only amateurs. Give me the tones of 'earth and 'ome. Ha!
+List to the blighter on the 'orizon sayin' his prayers, Navy-fashion.
+'Eaven 'elp me argue that way when I'm a warrant-officer!"
+
+We headed with little lapping strokes toward what seemed to be a fair-
+sized riot.
+
+"An' I've 'eard the _Devolution_ called a happy ship, too," said Pyecroft.
+"Just shows 'ow a man's misled by prejudice. She's peevish--that's what
+she is--nasty-peevish. Prob'ly all because the _Agathites_ are scratching
+'er paint. Well, rub along, Alf. I've got the lymph!"
+
+A voice, which Mr. Pyecroft assured me belonged to a chief carpenter, was
+speaking through an aperture (starboard bow twelve-pounder on the lower
+deck). He did not wish to purchase any fish, even at grossly reduced
+rates. Nobody wished to buy any fish. This ship was the _Devolution_ at
+anchor, and desired no communication with shore boats.
+
+"Mark how the Navy 'olds it's own. He's sober. The _Agathites_ are not, as
+you might say, an' yet they can't live with 'im. It's the discipline that
+does it. 'Ark to the bald an' unconvincin' watch-officer chimin' in. I
+wonder where Mr. Moorshed has got to?"
+
+We drifted down the _Devolution's_ side, as we had drifted down her
+sister's; and we dealt with her in that dense gloom as we had dealt with
+her sister.
+
+"Whai! 'Tis a man-o'-war, after all! I can see the captain's whisker all
+gilt at the edges! We took 'ee for the Bournemouth steamer. Three cheers
+for the real man-o'-war!"
+
+That cry came from under the _Devolution's_ stern. Pyecroft held something
+in his teeth, for I heard him mumble, "Our Mister Moorshed!"
+
+Said a boy's voice above us, just as we dodged a jet of hot water from
+some valve: "I don't half like that cheer. If I'd been the old man I'd ha'
+turned loose the quick-firers at the first go-off. Aren't they rowing
+Navy-stroke, yonder?"
+
+"True," said Pyecroft, listening to retreating oars. "It's time to go 'ome
+when snotties begin to think. The fog's thinnin', too."
+
+I felt a chill breath on my forehead, and saw a few feet of the steel
+stand out darker than the darkness, disappear--it was then the dinghy shot
+away from it--and emerge once more.
+
+"Hallo! what boat's that?" said the voice suspiciously.
+
+"Why, I do believe it's a real man-o'-war, after all," said Pyecroft, and
+kicked Laughton.
+
+"What's that for?" Laughton was no dramatist.
+
+"Answer in character, you blighter! Say somethin' opposite."
+
+"What boat's _thatt_?" The hail was repeated.
+
+"What do yee say-ay?" Pyecroft bellowed, and, under his breath to me:
+"Give us a hand."
+
+"It's called the _Marietta_--F. J. Stokes--Torquay," I began, quaveringly.
+"At least, that's the name on the name-board. I've been dining--on a
+yacht."
+
+"I see." The voice shook a little, and my way opened before me with
+disgraceful ease.
+
+"Yesh. Dining private yacht. _Eshmesheralda_. I belong to Torquay Yacht
+Club. _Are_ you member Torquay Yacht Club?"
+
+"You'd better go to bed, Sir. Good-night." We slid into the rapidly
+thinning fog.
+
+"Dig out, Alf. Put your _nix mangiare_ back into it. The fog's peelin'
+off like a petticoat. Where's Two Six Seven?"
+
+"I can't see her," I replied, "but there's a light low down ahead."
+
+"The _Agatha_!" They rowed desperately through the uneasy dispersal of the
+fog for ten minutes and ducked round the trawler's bow.
+
+"Well, Emanuel means 'God with us'--so far." Pyecroft wiped his brow, laid
+a hand on the low rail, and as he boosted me up to the trawler, I saw
+Moorshed's face, white as pearl in the thinning dark.
+
+"Was it all right?" said he, over the bulwarks.
+
+"Vaccination ain't in it. She's took beautiful. But where's 267, Sir?"
+Pyecroft replied.
+
+"Gone. We came here as the fog lifted. I gave the _Devolution_ four. Was
+that you behind us?"
+
+"Yes, sir; but I only got in three on the _Devolution_. I gave the
+_Cryptic_ nine, though. They're what you might call more or less
+vaccinated."
+
+He lifted me inboard, where Moorshed and six pirates lay round the
+_Agatha's_ hatch. There was a hint of daylight in the cool air.
+
+"Where is the old man?" I asked.
+
+"Still selling 'em fish, I suppose. He's a darling! But I wish I could get
+this filthy paint off my hands. Hallo! What the deuce is the _Cryptic_
+signalling?"
+
+A pale masthead light winked through the last of the fog. It was answered
+by a white pencil to the southward.
+
+"Destroyer signalling with searchlight." Pyecroft leaped on the stern-
+rail. "The first part is private signals. Ah! now she's Morsing against
+the fog. 'P-O-S-T'--yes, 'postpone'--'D-E-P-' (go on)! 'departure--till--
+further--orders--which--will--be com" (he's dropped the other m)
+"'unicated--verbally. End,'." He swung round. "_Cryptic_ is now answering:
+'Ready--proceed--immediately. What--news--promised--destroyer--
+flotilla?'"
+
+"Hallo!" said Moorshed. "Well, never mind, They'll come too late."
+
+"Whew! That's some 'igh-born suckling on the destroyer. Destroyer signals:
+'Care not. All will be known later.' What merry beehive's broken loose
+now?"
+
+"What odds! We've done our little job."
+
+"Why--why--it's Two Six Seven!"
+
+Here Pyecroft dropped from the rail among the fishy nets and shook the
+_Agatha_ with heavings. Moorshed cast aside his cigarette, looked over the
+stern, and fell into his subordinate's arms. I heard the guggle of
+engines, the rattle of a little anchor going over not a hundred yards
+away, a cough, and Morgan's subdued hail. ... So far as I remember, it was
+Laughton whom I hugged; but the men who hugged me most were Pyecroft and
+Moorshed, adrift among the fishy nets.
+
+There was no semblance of discipline in our flight over the _Agatha's_
+side, nor, indeed, were ordinary precautions taken for the common safety,
+because (I was in the Berthon) they held that patent boat open by hand for
+the most part. We regained our own craft, cackling like wild geese, and
+crowded round Moorshed and Hinchcliffe. Behind us the _Agatha's_ boat,
+returning from her fish-selling cruise, yelled: "Have 'ee done the trick?
+Have 'ee done the trick?" and we could only shout hoarsely over the stern,
+guaranteeing them rum by the hold-full.
+
+"Fog got patchy here at 12:27," said Henry Salt Hinchcliffe, growing
+clearer every instant in the dawn. "Went down to Brixham Harbour to keep
+out of the road. Heard whistles to the south and went to look. I had her
+up to sixteen good. Morgan kept on shedding private Red Fleet signals out
+of the signal-book, as the fog cleared, till we was answered by three
+destroyers. Morgan signalled 'em by searchlight: 'Alter course to South
+Seventeen East, so as not to lose time,' They came round quick. We kept
+well away--on their port beam--and Morgan gave 'em their orders." He
+looked at Morgan and coughed.
+
+"The signalman, acting as second in command," said Morgan, swelling, "then
+informed destroyer flotilla that _Cryptic_ and _Devolution_ had made good
+defects, and, in obedience to Admiral's supplementary orders (I was afraid
+they might suspect that, but they didn't), had proceeded at seven knots at
+11:23 p. M. to rendezvous near Channel Islands, seven miles N.N.W. the
+Casquet light. (I've rendezvoused there myself, Sir.) Destroyer flotilla
+would therefore follow cruisers and catch up with them on their course.
+Destroyer flotilla then dug out on course indicated, all funnels sparking
+briskly."
+
+"Who were the destroyers?"
+
+"_Wraith, Kobbold, Stiletto_, Lieutenant-Commander A. L. Hignett, acting
+under Admiral's orders to escort cruisers received off the Dodman at 7 P.
+M. They'd come slow on account of fog."
+
+"Then who were you?"
+
+"We were the _Afrite_, port-engine broke down, put in to Torbay, and there
+instructed by _Cryptic_, previous to her departure with _Devolution_) to
+inform Commander Hignett of change of plans. Lieutenant-Commander Hignett
+signalled that our meeting was quite providential. After this we returned
+to pick up our commanding officer, and being interrogated by _Cryptic_,
+marked time signalling as requisite, which you may have seen. The _Agatha_
+representing the last known rallying-point--or, as I should say, pivot-
+ship of the evolution--it was decided to repair to the _Agatha_ at
+conclusion of manoeuvre."
+
+"Is there such a thing as one fine big drink aboard this one fine big
+battleship?" "Can do, sir," said Pyecroft, and got it. Beginning with Mr.
+Moorshed and ending with myself, junior to the third first-class stoker,
+we drank, and it was as water of the brook, that two and a half inches of
+stiff, treacly, Navy rum. And we looked each in the other's face, and we
+nodded, bright-eyed, burning with bliss.
+
+Moorshed walked aft to the torpedo-tubes and paced back and forth, a
+captain victorious on his own quarterdeck; and the triumphant day broke
+over the green-bedded villas of Torquay to show us the magnitude of our
+victory. There lay the cruisers (I have reason to believe that they had
+made good their defects). They were each four hundred and forty feet long
+and sixty-six wide; they held close upon eight hundred men apiece, and
+they had cost, say, a million and a half the pair. And they were ours, and
+they did not know it. Indeed, the _Cryptic_, senior ship, was signalling
+vehement remarks to our address, which we did not notice.
+
+"If you take these glasses, you'll get the general run o' last night's
+vaccination," said Pyecroft. "Each one represents a torpedo got 'ome, as
+you might say."
+
+I saw on the _Cryptic's_ port side, as she lay half a mile away across the
+glassy water, four neat white squares in outline, a white blur in the
+centre.
+
+"There are five more to starboard. 'Ere's the original!" He handed me a
+paint-dappled copper stencil-plate, two feet square, bearing in the centre
+the six-inch initials, "G.M."
+
+"Ten minutes ago I'd ha' eulogised about that little trick of ours, but
+Morgan's performance has short-circuited me. Are you happy, Morgan?"
+
+"Bustin'," said the signalman briefly.
+
+"You may be. Gawd forgive you, Morgan, for as Queen 'Enrietta said to the
+'ousemaid, _I_ never will. I'd ha' given a year's pay for ten minutes o'
+your signallin' work this mornin'."
+
+"I wouldn't 'ave took it up," was the answer. "Perishin' 'Eavens above!
+Look at the _Devolution's_ semaphore!" Two black wooden arms waved from
+the junior ship's upper bridge. "They've seen it."
+
+"_The_ mote _on_ their neighbour's beam, of course," said Pyecroft, and
+read syllable by syllable: "'Captain Malan to Captain Panke. Is--sten--
+cilled frieze your starboard side new Admiralty regulation, or your Number
+One's private expense?' Now _Cryptic_ is saying, 'Not understood.' Poor
+old _Crippy_, the _Devolute's_ raggin' 'er sore. 'Who is G.M.?' she says.
+That's fetched the _Cryptic_. She's answerin': 'You ought to know. Examine
+own paintwork.' Oh, Lord! they're both on to it now. This is balm. This is
+beginning to be balm. I forgive you, Morgan!"
+
+Two frantic pipes twittered. From either cruiser a whaler dropped into the
+water and madly rowed round the ship: as a gay-coloured hoist rose to the
+_Cryptic's_ yardarm: "Destroyer will close at once. Wish to speak by
+semaphore." Then on the bridge semaphore itself: "Have been trying to
+attract your attention last half hour. Send commanding officer aboard at
+once."
+
+"Our attention? After all the attention we've given 'er, too," said
+Pyecroft. "What a greedy old woman!" To Moorshed: "Signal from the
+_Cryptic_, Sir."
+
+"Never mind that!" said the boy, peering through his glasses. "Our dinghy
+quick, or they'll paint our marks out. Come along!"
+
+By this time I was long past even hysteria. I remember Pyecroft's bending
+back, the surge of the driven dinghy, a knot of amazed faces as we skimmed
+the _Cryptic's_ ram, and the dropped jaw of the midshipman in her whaler
+when we barged fairly into him.
+
+"Mind my paint!" he yelled.
+
+"You mind mine, snotty," said Moorshed. "I was all night putting these
+little ear-marks on you for the umpires to sit on. Leave 'em alone."
+
+We splashed past him to the _Devolution's_ boat, where sat no one less
+than her first lieutenant, a singularly unhandy-looking officer.
+
+"What the deuce is the meaning of this?" he roared, with an accusing
+forefinger.
+
+"You're sunk, that's all. You've been dead half a tide."
+
+"Dead, am I? I'll show you whether I'm dead or not, Sir!"
+
+"Well, you may be a survivor," said Moorshed ingratiatingly, "though it
+isn't at all likely."
+
+The officer choked for a minute. The midshipman crouched up in stern said,
+half aloud: "Then I _was_ right--last night."
+
+"Yesh," I gasped from the dinghy's coal-dust. "Are you member Torquay
+Yacht Club?"
+
+"Hell!" said the first lieutenant, and fled away. The _Cryptic's_ boat was
+already at that cruiser's side, and semaphores flicked zealously from ship
+to ship. We floated, a minute speck, between the two hulls, while the
+pipes went for the captain's galley on the _Devolution_.
+
+"That's all right," said Moorshed. "Wait till the gangway's down and then
+board her decently. We oughtn't to be expected to climb up a ship we've
+sunk."
+
+Pyecroft lay on his disreputable oars till Captain Malan, full-uniformed,
+descended the _Devolution's_ side. With due compliments--not acknowledged,
+I grieve to say--we fell in behind his sumptuous galley, and at last, upon
+pressing invitation, climbed, black as sweeps all, the lowered gangway of
+the _Cryptic_. At the top stood as fine a constellation of marine stars as
+ever sang together of a morning on a King's ship. Every one who could get
+within earshot found that his work took him aft. I counted eleven able
+seamen polishing the breechblock of the stern nine-point-two, four marines
+zealously relieving each other at the life-buoy, six call-boys, nine
+midshipmen of the watch, exclusive of naval cadets, and the higher ranks
+past all census.
+
+"If I die o' joy," said Pyecroft behind his hand, "remember I died
+forgivin' Morgan from the bottom of my 'eart, because, like Martha, we
+'ave scoffed the better part. You'd better try to come to attention, Sir."
+
+Moorshed ran his eye voluptuously over the upper deck battery, the huge
+beam, and the immaculate perspective of power. Captain Panke and Captain
+Malan stood on the well-browned flash-plates by the dazzling hatch.
+Precisely over the flagstaff I saw Two Six Seven astern, her black
+petticoat half hitched up, meekly floating on the still sea. She looked
+like the pious Abigail who has just spoken her mind, and, with folded
+hands, sits thanking Heaven among the pieces. I could almost have sworn
+that she wore black worsted gloves and had a little dry cough. But it was
+Captain Panke that coughed so austerely. He favoured us with a lecture on
+uniform, deportment, and the urgent necessity of answering signals from a
+senior ship. He told us that he disapproved of masquerading, that he loved
+discipline, and would be obliged by an explanation. And while he delivered
+himself deeper and more deeply into our hands, I saw Captain Malan wince.
+He was watching Moorshed's eye.
+
+"I belong to Blue Fleet, Sir. I command Number Two Six Seven," said
+Moorshed, and Captain Planke was dumb. "Have you such a thing as a frame-
+plan of the _Cryptic_ aboard?" He spoke with winning politeness as he
+opened a small and neatly folded paper.
+
+"I have, sir." The little man's face was working with passion.
+
+"Ah! Then I shall be able to show you precisely where you were torpedoed
+last night in"--he consulted the paper with one finely arched eyebrow--"in
+nine places. And since the _Devolution_ is, I understand, a sister ship"--
+he bowed slightly toward Caplain Malan--"the same plan----"
+
+I had followed the clear precision of each word with a dumb amazement
+which seemed to leave my mind abnormally clear. I saw Captain Malan's eye
+turn from Moorshed and seek that of the _Cryptic's_ commander. And he
+telegraphed as clearly as Moorshed was speaking: "My dear friend and
+brother officer, _I_ know Panke; _you_ know Panke; _we_ know Panke--good
+little Panke! In less than three Greenwich chronometer seconds Panke will
+make an enormous ass of himself, and I shall have to put things straight,
+unless you who are a man of tact and discernment----"
+
+"Carry on." The Commander's order supplied the unspoken word. The cruiser
+boiled about her business around us; watch and watch officers together, up
+to the limit of noise permissible. I saw Captain Malan turn to his senior.
+
+"Come to my cabin!" said Panke gratingly, and led the way. Pyecroft and I
+stayed still.
+
+"It's all right," said Pyecroft. "They daren't leave us loose aboard for
+one revolution," and I knew that he had seen what I had seen.
+
+"You, too!" said Captain Malan, returning suddenly. We passed the sentry
+between white enamelled walls of speckless small arms, and since that
+Royal Marine Light infantryman was visibly suffocating from curiosity, I
+winked at him. We entered the chintz-adorned, photo-speckled, brass-
+fendered, tile-stoved main cabin. Moorshed, with a ruler, was
+demonstrating before the frame-plan of H.M.S. _Cryptic_.
+
+"--making nine stencils in all of my initials G.M.," I heard him say.
+"Further, you will find attached to your rudder, and you, too, Sir"--he
+bowed to Captain Malan yet again--"one fourteen-inch Mark IV practice
+torpedo, as issued to first-class torpedo-boats, properly buoyed. I have
+sent full particulars by telegraph to the umpires, and have requested them
+to judge on the facts as they--appear." He nodded through the large window
+to the stencilled _Devolution_ awink with brass work in the morning sun,
+and ceased.
+
+Captain Panke faced us. I remembered that this was only play, and caught
+myself wondering with what keener agony comes the real defeat.
+
+"Good God, Johnny!" he said, dropping his lower lip like a child, "this
+young pup says he has put us both out of action. Inconceivable--eh? My
+first command of one of the class. Eh? What shall we do with him? What
+shall we do with him--eh?"
+
+"As far as I can see, there's no getting over the stencils," his companion
+answered.
+
+"Why didn't I have the nets down? Why didn't I have the nets down?" The
+cry tore itself from Captain Panke's chest as he twisted his hands.
+
+"I suppose we'd better wait and find out what the umpires will say. The
+Admiral won't be exactly pleased." Captain Malan spoke very soothingly.
+Moorshed looked out through the stern door at Two Six Seven. Pyecroft and
+I, at attention, studied the paintwork opposite. Captain Panke had dropped
+into his desk chair, and scribbled nervously at a blotting-pad.
+
+Just before the tension became unendurable, he looked at his junior for a
+lead. "What--what are you going to do about it, Johnny--eh?"
+
+"Well, if you don't want him, I'm going to ask this young gentleman to
+breakfast, and then we'll make and mend clothes till the umpires have
+decided."
+
+Captain Panke flung out a hand swiftly.
+
+"Come with me," said Captain Malan. "Your men had better go back in the
+dinghy to--their--own--ship."
+
+"Yes, I think so," said Moorshed, and passed out behind the captain. We
+followed at a respectful interval, waiting till they had ascended the
+ladder.
+
+Said the sentry, rigid as the naked barometer behind him: "For Gawd's
+sake! 'Ere, come 'ere! For Gawd's sake! What's 'appened? Oh! come '_ere_
+an' tell."
+
+"Tell? You?" said Pyecroft. Neither man's lips moved, and the words were
+whispers: "Your ultimate illegitimate grandchildren might begin to
+understand, not you--nor ever will."
+
+"Captain Malan's galley away, Sir," cried a voice above; and one replied:
+"Then get those two greasers into their dinghy and hoist the blue peter.
+We're out of action."
+
+"Can you do it, Sir?" said Pyecroft at the foot of the ladder. "Do you
+think it is in the English language, or do you not?"
+
+"I don't think I can, but I'll try. If it takes me two years, I'll try."
+
+*       *       *       *       *
+
+There are witnesses who can testify that I have used no artifice. I have,
+on the contrary, cut away priceless slabs of _opus alexandrinum_. My gold
+I have lacquered down to dull bronze, my purples overlaid with sepia of
+the sea, and for hell-hearted ruby and blinding diamond I have substituted
+pale amethyst and mere jargoon. Because I would say again "Disregarding
+the inventions of the Marine Captain whose other name is Gubbins, let a
+plain statement suffice."
+
+
+
+
+THE COMPREHENSION OF PRIVATE COPPER
+
+THE KING'S TASK
+
+  After the sack of the City, when Rome was sunk to a name,
+  In the years when the Lights were darkened, or ever Saint Wilfrid came.
+  Low on the borders of Britain, the ancient poets sing,
+  Between the cliff and the forest there ruled a Saxon king.
+
+  Stubborn all were his people, a stark and a jealous horde--
+  Not to be schooled by the cudgel, scarce to be cowed by the sword;
+  Blithe to turn at their pleasure, bitter to cross in their mood,
+  And set on the ways of their choosing as the hogs of Andred's Wood ...
+
+  They made them laws in the Witan, the laws of flaying and fine,
+  Folkland, common and pannage, the theft and the track of kine;
+  Statutes of tun and of market for the fish and the malt and the meal,
+  The tax on the Bramber packhorse and the tax on the Hastings keel.
+  Over the graves of the Druids and over the wreck of Rome
+  Rudely but deeply they bedded the plinth of the days to come.
+  Behind the feet of the Legions and before the Northman's ire,
+  Rudely but greatly begat they the body of state and of shire.
+  Rudely but greatly they laboured, and their labour stands till now
+  If we trace on our ancient headlands the twist of their eight-ox plough.
+
+
+THE COMPREHENSION OF PRIVATE COPPER
+
+Private Copper's father was a Southdown shepherd; in early youth Copper
+had studied under him. Five years' army service had somewhat blunted
+Private Copper's pastoral instincts, but it occurred to him as a memory of
+the Chalk that sheep, or in this case buck, do not move towards one across
+turf, or in this case, the Colesberg kopjes unless a stranger, or in this
+case an enemy, is in the neighbourhood. Copper, helmet back-first advanced
+with caution, leaving his mates of the picket full a mile behind. The
+picket, concerned for its evening meal, did not protest. A year ago it
+would have been an officer's command, moving as such. To-day it paid
+casual allegiance to a Canadian, nominally a sergeant, actually a trooper
+of Irregular Horse, discovered convalescent in Naauwport Hospital, and
+forthwith employed on odd jobs. Private Copper crawled up the side of a
+bluish rock-strewn hill thinly fringed with brush atop, and remembering
+how he had peered at Sussex conies through the edge of furze-clumps,
+cautiously parted the dry stems before his face. At the foot of the long
+slope sat three farmers smoking. To his natural lust for tobacco was added
+personal wrath because spiky plants were pricking his belly, and Private
+Copper slid the backsight up to fifteen hundred yards....
+
+"Good evening, Khaki. Please don't move," said a voice on his left, and as
+he jerked his head round he saw entirely down the barrel of a well-kept
+Lee-Metford protruding from an insignificant tuft of thorn. Very few
+graven images have moved less than did Private Copper through the next ten
+seconds.
+
+"It's nearer seventeen hundred than fifteen," said a young man in an
+obviously ready-made suit of grey tweed, possessing himself of Private
+Copper's rifle. "Thank _you_. We've got a post of thirty-seven men out
+yonder. You've eleven--eh? We don't want to kill 'em. We have no quarrel
+with poor uneducated Khakis, and we do not want prisoners we do not keep.
+It is demoralising to both sides--eh?"
+
+Private Cooper did not feel called upon to lay down the conduct of
+guerilla warfare. This dark-skinned, dark-haired, and dark-eyed stranger
+was his first intimate enemy. He spoke, allowing for a clipped cadence
+that recalled to Copper vague memories of Umballa, in precisely the same
+offensive accent that the young squire of Wilmington had used fifteen
+years ago when he caught and kicked Alf Copper, a rabbit in each pocket,
+out of the ditches of Cuckmere. The enemy looked Copper up and down,
+folded and re-pocketed a copy of an English weekly which he had been
+reading, and said: "You seem an inarticulate sort of swine--like the rest
+of them--eh?"
+
+"You," said Copper, thinking, somehow, of the crushing answers he had
+never given to the young squire, "are a renegid. Why, you ain't Dutch.
+You're English, same as me."
+
+"_No_, khaki. If you cannot talk civilly to a gentleman I will blow your
+head off."
+
+Copper cringed, and the action overbalanced him so that he rolled some six
+or eight feet downhill, under the lee of a rough rock. His brain was
+working with a swiftness and clarity strange in all his experience of Alf
+Copper. While he rolled he spoke, and the voice from his own jaws amazed
+him: "If you did, 'twouldn't make you any less of a renegid." As a useful
+afterthought he added: "I've sprained my ankle."
+
+The young man was at his side in a flash. Copper made no motion to rise,
+but, cross-legged under the rock, grunted: "'Ow much did old Krujer pay
+you for this? What was you wanted for at 'ome? Where did you desert from?"
+
+"Khaki," said the young man, sitting down in his turn, "you are a shade
+better than your mates. You did not make much more noise than a yoke of
+oxen when you tried to come up this hill, but you are an ignorant diseased
+beast like the rest of your people--eh? When you were at the Ragged
+Schools did they teach you any history, Tommy--'istory I mean?"
+
+"Don't need no schoolin' to know a renegid," said Copper. He had made
+three yards down the hill--out of sight, unless they could see through
+rocks, of the enemy's smoking party.
+
+The young man laughed; and tossed the soldier a black sweating stick of
+"True Affection." (Private Copper had not smoked a pipe for three weeks.)
+
+"_You_ don't get this--eh?" said the young man. "_We_ do. We take it from
+the trains as we want it. You can keep the cake--you po-ah Tommee." Copper
+rammed the good stuff into his long-cold pipe and puffed luxuriously. Two
+years ago the sister of gunner-guard De Souza, East India Railway, had, at
+a dance given by the sergeants to the Allahabad Railway Volunteers,
+informed Copper that she could not think of waltzing with "a poo-ah
+Tommee." Private Copper wondered why that memory should have returned at
+this hour.
+
+"I'm going to waste a little trouble on you before I send you back to your
+picket _quite_ naked--eh? Then you can say how you were overpowered by
+twenty of us and fired off your last round--like the men we picked up at
+the drift playing cards at Stryden's farm--eh? What's your name--eh?"
+
+Private Copper thought for a moment of a far-away housemaid who might
+still, if the local postman had not gone too far, be interested in his
+fate. On the other hand, he was, by temperament, economical of the truth.
+"Pennycuik," he said, "John Pennycuik."
+
+"Thank you. Well, Mr. John Pennycuik, I'm going to teach you a little
+'istory, as you'd call it--eh?"
+
+"'Ow!" said Copper, stuffing his left hand in his mouth. "So long since
+I've smoked I've burned my 'and--an' the pipe's dropped too. No objection
+to my movin' down to fetch it, is there--Sir?"
+
+"I've got you covered," said the young man, graciously, and Private
+Copper, hopping on one leg, because of his sprain, recovered the pipe yet
+another three yards downhill and squatted under another rock slightly
+larger than the first. A roundish boulder made a pleasant rest for his
+captor, who sat cross-legged once more, facing Copper, his rifle across
+his knee, his hand on the trigger-guard.
+
+"Well, Mr. Pennycuik, as I was going to tell you. A little after you were
+born in your English workhouse, your kind, honourable, brave country,
+England, sent an English gentleman, who could not tell a lie, to say that
+so long as the sun rose and the rivers ran in their courses the Transvaal
+would belong to England. Did you ever hear that, khaki--eh?"
+
+"Oh no, Sir," said Copper. This sentence about the sun and the rivers
+happened to be a very aged jest of McBride, the professional humorist of D
+Company, when they discussed the probable length of the war. Copper had
+thrown beef-tins at McBride in the grey dawn of many wet and dry camps for
+intoning it.
+
+"_Of_ course you would not. Now, mann, I tell you, listen." He spat aside
+and cleared his throat. "Because of that little promise, my father he
+moved into the Transvaal and bought a farm--a little place of twenty or
+thirty thousand acres, don't--you--know."
+
+The tone, in spite of the sing-song cadence fighting with the laboured
+parody of the English drawl, was unbearably like the young Wilmington
+squire's, and Copper found himself saying: "I ought to. I've 'elped burn
+some."
+
+"Yes, you'll pay for that later. _And_ he opened a store."
+
+"Ho! Shopkeeper was he?"
+
+"The kind you call "Sir" and sweep the floor for, Pennycuik.... You see,
+in those days one used to believe in the British Government. My father
+did. _Then_ the Transvaal wiped thee earth with the English. They beat
+them six times running. You know _thatt_--eh?"
+
+"Isn't what we've come 'ere for."
+
+"_But_ my father (he knows better now) kept on believing in the English. I
+suppose it was the pretty talk about rivers and suns that cheated him--eh?
+Anyhow, he believed in his own country. Inn his own country. _So_--you
+see--he was a little startled when he found himself handed over to the
+Transvaal as a prisoner of war. That's what it came to, Tommy--a prisoner
+of war. You know what that is--eh? England was too honourable and too
+gentlemanly to take trouble. There were no terms made for my father."
+
+"So 'e made 'em 'imself. Useful old bird." Private Copper sliced up
+another pipeful and looked out across the wrinkled sea of kopjes, through
+which came the roar of the rushing Orange River, so unlike quiet Cuckmere.
+
+The young man's face darkened. "I think I shall sjambok you myself when
+I've quite done with you. _No_, my father (he was a fool) made no terms
+for eight years--ninety-six months--and for every day of them the
+Transvaal made his life hell for my father and--his people."
+
+"I'm glad to hear that," said the impenitent Copper.
+
+"Are you? You can think of it when I'm taking the skin off your back--
+eh?... My father, he lost everything--everything down to his self-respect.
+You don't know what _thatt_ means--eh?"
+
+"Why?" said Copper. "I'm smokin' baccy stole by a renegid. Why wouldn't I
+know?"
+
+If it came to a flogging on that hillside there might be a chance of
+reprisals. Of course, he might be marched to the Boer camp in the next
+valley and there operated upon; but Army life teaches no man to cross
+bridges unnecessarily.
+
+"Yes, after eight years, my father, cheated by your bitch of a country, he
+found out who was the upper dog in South Africa."
+
+"That's me," said Copper valiantly. "If it takes another 'alf century,
+it's me an' the likes of me."
+
+"You? Heaven help you! You'll be screaming at a wagon-wheel in an hour....
+Then it struck my father that he'd like to shoot the people who'd betrayed
+him. You--you--_you_! He told his son all about it. He told him never to
+trust the English. He told him to do them all the harm he could. Mann, I
+tell you, I don't want much telling. I was born in the Transvaal--I'm a
+burgher. If my father didn't love the English, by the Lord, mann, I tell
+you, I hate them from the bottom of my soul."
+
+The voice quavered and ran high. Once more, for no conceivable reason,
+Private Copper found his inward eye turned upon Umballa cantonments of a
+dry dusty afternoon, when the saddle-coloured son of a local hotel-keeper
+came to the barracks to complain of a theft of fowls. He saw the dark
+face, the plover's-egg-tinted eyeballs, and the thin excited hands. Above
+all, he remembered the passionate, queerly-strung words. Slowly he
+returned to South Africa, using the very sentence his sergeant had used to
+the poultry man.
+
+"Go on with your complaint. I'm listenin'."
+
+"Complaint! Complaint about _you_, you ox! We strip and kick your sort by
+thousands."
+
+The young man rocked to and fro above the rifle, whose muzzle thus
+deflected itself from the pit of Private Copper's stomach. His face was
+dusky with rage.
+
+"Yess, I'm a Transvaal burgher. It took us about twenty years to find out
+how rotten you were. _We_ know and you know it now. Your army--it is the
+laughing-stock of the Continent." He tapped the newspaper in his pocket,
+"You think you're going to win, you poor fools. Your people--your own
+people--your silly rotten fools of people will crawl out of it as they did
+after Majuba. They are beginning now. Look what your own working classes,
+the diseased, lying, drinking white stuff that you come out of, are
+saying." He thrust the English weekly, doubled at the leading article, on
+Copper's knee. "See what dirty dogs your masters are. They do not even
+back you in your dirty work. _We_ cleared the country down to Ladysmith--
+to Estcourt. We cleared the country down to Colesberg."
+
+"Yes, we 'ad to clean up be'ind you. Messy, I call it."
+
+"You've had to stop farm-burning because your people daren't do it. They
+were afraid. You daren't kill a spy. You daren't shoot a spy when you
+catch him in your own uniform. You daren't touch our loyall people in Cape
+Town! Your masters wont let you. You will feed our women and children till
+we are quite ready to take them back. _You_ can't put your cowardly noses
+out of the towns you say you've occupied. _You_ daren't move a convoy
+twenty miles. You think you've done something? You've done nothing, and
+you've taken a quarter of a million of men to do it! There isn't a nigger
+in South Africa that doesn't obey us if we lift our finger. You pay the
+stuff four pounds a month and they lie to you. _We_ flog 'em, as I shall
+flog you."
+
+He clasped his hands together and leaned forward his out-thrust chin
+within two feet of Copper's left, or pipe hand.
+
+"Yuss," said Copper, "it's a fair knock-out." The fist landed to a hair on
+the chin-point, the neck snicked like a gun-lock, and the back of the head
+crashed on the boulder behind.
+
+Copper grabbed up both rifles, unshipped the cross-bandoliers, drew forth
+the English weekly, and picking up the lax hands, looked long and intently
+at the fingernails.
+
+"No! Not a sign of it there," he said. "'Is nails are as clean as mine--
+but he talks just like 'em, though. And he's a landlord too! A landed
+proprietor! Shockin', I call it."
+
+The arms began to flap with returning consciousness. Private Copper rose
+up and whispered: "If you open your head, I'll bash it." There was no
+suggestion of sprain in the flung-back left boot. "Now walk in front of
+me, both arms perpendicularly elevated. I'm only a third-class shot, so,
+if you don't object, I'll rest the muzzle of my rifle lightly but firmly
+on your collar-button--coverin' the serviceable vertebree. If your friends
+see us thus engaged, you pray--'ard."
+
+Private and prisoner staggered downhill. No shots broke the peace of the
+afternoon, but once the young man checked and was sick.
+
+"There's a lot of things I could say to you," Copper observed, at the
+close of the paroxysm, "but it doesn't matter. Look 'ere, you call me
+'pore Tommy' again."
+
+The prisoner hesitated.
+
+"Oh, I ain't goin' to do anythin' _to_ you. I'm recon-noiterin' in my own.
+Say 'pore Tommy' 'alf-a-dozen times."
+
+The prisoner obeyed.
+
+"_That's_ what's been puzzlin' me since I 'ad the pleasure o' meetin'
+you," said Copper. "You ain't 'alf-caste, but you talk _chee-chee_--
+_pukka_ bazar chee-chee. Proceed."
+
+"Hullo," said the Sergeant of the picket, twenty minutes later, "where did
+you round him up?"
+
+"On the top o' yonder craggy mounting. There's a mob of 'em sitting round
+their Bibles seventeen 'undred yards (you said it was seventeen 'undred?)
+t'other side--an' I want some coffee." He sat down on the smoke-blackened
+stones by the fire.
+
+"'Ow did you get 'im?" said McBride, professional humorist, quietly
+filching the English weekly from under Copper's armpit.
+
+"On the chin--while 'e was waggin' it at me."
+
+"What is 'e? 'Nother Colonial rebel to be 'orribly disenfranchised, or a
+Cape Minister, or only a loyal farmer with dynamite in both boots. Tell us
+all about it, Burjer!"
+
+"You leave my prisoner alone," said Private Copper. "'E's 'ad losses an'
+trouble; an' it's in the family too. 'E thought I never read the papers,
+so 'e kindly lent me his very own _Jerrold's Weekly_--an' 'e explained it
+to me as patronisin' as a--as a militia subaltern doin' Railway Staff
+Officer. 'E's a left-over from Majuba--one of the worst kind, an' 'earin'
+the evidence as I did, I don't exactly blame 'im. It was this way."
+
+To the picket Private Copper held forth for ten minutes on the life-
+history of his captive. Allowing for some purple patches, it was an
+absolute fair rendering.
+
+"But what I dis-liked was this baccy-priggin' beggar, 'oo's people, on 'is
+own showin', couldn't 'ave been more than thirty or forty years in the
+coun--on this Gawd-forsaken dust-'eap, comin' the squire over me. They're
+all parsons--we know _that_, but parson _an'_ squire is a bit too thick
+for Alf Copper. Why, I caught 'im in the shameful act of tryin' to start a
+aristocracy on a gun an' a wagon an' a _shambuk_! Yes; that's what it was:
+a bloomin' aristocracy."
+
+"No, it weren't," said McBride, at length, on the dirt, above the
+purloined weekly. "You're the aristocrat, Alf. Old _Jerrold's_ givin' it
+you 'ot. You're the uneducated 'ireling of a callous aristocracy which 'as
+sold itself to the 'Ebrew financier. Meantime, Ducky"--he ran his finger
+down a column of assorted paragraphs--"you're slakin' your brutal
+instincks in furious excesses. Shriekin' women an' desolated 'omesteads is
+what you enjoy, Alf ..., Halloa! What's a smokin' 'ektacomb?"
+
+"'Ere! Let's look. 'Aven't seen a proper spicy paper for a year. Good old
+_Jerrold's!"_ Pinewood and Moppet, reservists, flung themselves on
+McBride's shoulders, pinning him to the ground.
+
+"Lie over your own bloomin' side of the bed, an' we can all look," he
+protested.
+
+"They're only po-ah Tommies," said Copper, apologetically, to the
+prisoner. "Po-ah unedicated Khakis. _They_ don't know what they're
+fightin' for. They're lookin' for what the diseased, lying, drinkin' white
+stuff that they come from is sayin' about 'em!"
+
+The prisoner set down his tin of coffee and stared helplessly round the
+circle.
+
+"I--I don't understand them."
+
+The Canadian sergeant, picking his teeth with a thorn, nodded
+sympathetically:
+
+"If it comes to that, _we_ don't in my country!... Say, boys, when you're
+through with your English mail you might's well provide an escort for your
+prisoner. He's waitin'."
+
+"Arf a mo', Sergeant," said McBride, still reading.
+
+"'Ere's Old Barbarity on the ramp again with some of 'is lady friends, 'oo
+don't like concentration camps. Wish they'd visit ours. Pinewood's a
+married man. He'd know how to be'ave!"
+
+"Well, I ain't goin' to amuse my prisoner alone. 'E's gettin' 'omesick,"
+cried Copper. "One of you thieves read out what's vexin' Old Barbarity an'
+'is 'arem these days. You'd better listen, Burjer, because, afterwards,
+I'm goin' to fall out an' perpetrate those nameless barbarities all over
+you to keep up the reputation of the British Army."
+
+From that English weekly, to bar out which a large and perspiring staff of
+Press censors toiled seven days of the week at Cape Town, did Pinewood of
+the Reserve read unctuously excerpts of the speeches of the accredited
+leaders of His Majesty's Opposition. The night-picket arrived in the
+middle of it, but stayed entranced without paying any compliments, till
+Pinewood had entirely finished the leading article, and several occasional
+notes.
+
+"Gentlemen of the jury," said Alf Copper, hitching up what war had left to
+him of trousers--"you've 'eard what 'e's been fed up with. _Do_ you blame
+the beggar? 'Cause I don't! ... Leave 'im alone, McBride. He's my first
+and only cap-ture, an' I'm goin' to walk 'ome with 'im, ain't I, Ducky?
+... Fall in, Burjer. It's Bermuda, or Umballa, or Ceylon for you--and I'd
+give a month's pay to be in your little shoes."
+
+As not infrequently happens, the actual moving off the ground broke the
+prisoner's nerve. He stared at the tinted hills round him, gasped and
+began to struggle--kicking, swearing, weeping, and fluttering all
+together.
+
+"Pore beggar--oh pore, _pore_ beggar!" said Alf, leaning in on one side of
+him, while Pinewood blocked him on the other.
+
+"Let me go! Let me go! Mann, I tell you, let me go----"
+
+"'E screams like a woman!" said McBride. "They'll 'ear 'im five miles
+off."
+
+"There's one or two ought to 'ear 'im--in England," said Copper, putting
+aside a wildly waving arm.
+
+"Married, ain't 'e?" said Pinewood. "I've seen 'em go like this before--
+just at the last. '_Old_ on, old man, No one's goin' to 'urt you."
+
+The last of the sun threw the enormous shadow of a kopje over the little,
+anxious, wriggling group.
+
+"Quit that," said the Serjeant of a sudden. "You're only making him worse.
+Hands _up_, prisoner! Now you get a holt of yourself, or this'll go off."
+
+And indeed the revolver-barrel square at the man's panting chest seemed to
+act like a tonic; he choked, recovered himself, and fell in between Copper
+and Pinewood.
+
+As the picket neared the camp it broke into song that was heard among the
+officers' tents:
+
+  'E sent us 'is blessin' from London town,
+    (The beggar that kep' the cordite down,)
+  But what do we care if 'e smile or frown,
+    The beggar that kep' the cordite down?
+  The mildly nefarious
+  Wildly barbarious
+    Beggar that kept the cordite down!
+
+Said a captain a mile away: "Why are they singing _that?_ We haven't had a
+mail for a month, have we?"
+
+An hour later the same captain said to his servant: "Jenkins, I understand
+the picket have got a--got a newspaper off a prisoner to-day. I wish you
+could lay hands on it, Jenkins. Copy of the _Times_, I think."
+
+"Yes, Sir. Copy of the _Times_, Sir," said Jenkins, without a quiver, and
+went forth to make his own arrangements.
+
+"Copy of the _Times_" said the blameless Alf, from beneath his blanket. "I
+ain't a member of the Soldier's Institoot. Go an' look in the reg'mental
+Readin'-room--Veldt Row, Kopje Street, second turnin' to the left between
+'ere an' Naauwport."
+
+Jenkins summarised briefly in a tense whisper the thing that Alf Copper
+need not be.
+
+"But my particular copy of the _Times_ is specially pro'ibited by the
+censor from corruptin' the morals of the Army. Get a written order from K.
+o' K., properly countersigned, an' I'll think about it."
+
+"I've got all _you_ want," said Jenkins. "'Urry up. I want to 'ave a
+squint myself."
+
+Something gurgled in the darkness, and Private Copper fell back smacking
+his lips.
+
+"Gawd bless my prisoner, and make me a good boy. Amen. 'Ere you are,
+Jenkins. It's dirt cheap at a tot."
+
+
+
+
+STEAM TACTICS
+
+
+THE NECESSITARIAN
+
+  I know not in whose hands are laid
+    To empty upon earth
+  From unsuspected ambuscade
+    The very Urns of Mirth:
+
+  Who bids the Heavenly Lark arise
+    And cheer our solemn round--
+  The Jest beheld with streaming eyes
+    And grovellings on the ground;
+
+  Who joins the flats of Time and Chance
+    Behind the prey preferred,
+  And thrones on Shrieking Circumstance
+    The Sacredly Absurd,
+
+  Till Laughter, voiceless through excess.
+    Waves mute appeal and sore,
+  Above the midriff's deep distress,
+    For breath to laugh once more.
+
+  No creed hath dared to hail him Lord,
+    No raptured choirs proclaim,
+  And Nature's strenuous Overword
+    Hath nowhere breathed his name.
+
+  Yet, may it be, on wayside jape,
+    The selfsame Power bestows
+  The selfsame power as went to shape
+    His Planet or His Rose.
+
+STEAM TACTICS
+I caught sight of their faces as we came up behind the cart in the narrow
+Sussex lane; but though it was not eleven o'clock, they were both asleep.
+
+That the carrier was on the wrong side of the road made no difference to
+his language when I rang my bell. He said aloud of motor-cars, and
+specially of steam ones, all the things which I had read in the faces of
+superior coachmen. Then he pulled slantwise across me.
+
+There was a vociferous steam air-pump attached to that car which could be
+applied at pleasure....
+
+The cart was removed about a bowshot's length in seven and a quarter
+seconds, to the accompaniment of parcels clattering. At the foot of the
+next hill the horse stopped, and the two men came out over the tail-board.
+
+My engineer backed and swung the car, ready to move out of reach.
+
+"The blighted egg-boiler has steam up," said Mr. Hinchcliffe, pausing to
+gather a large stone. "Temporise with the beggar, Pye, till the sights
+come on!"
+
+"I can't leave my 'orse!" roared the carrier; "but bring 'em up 'ere, an'
+I'll kill 'em all over again."
+
+"Good morning, Mr. Pyecroft," I called cheerfully. "Can I give you a lift
+anywhere?"
+
+The attack broke up round my forewheels.
+
+"Well, we _do_ 'ave the knack o' meeting _in puris naturalibus,_ as I've
+so often said." Mr. Pyecroft wrung my hand. "Yes, I'm on leaf. So's Hinch.
+We're visiting friends among these kopjes."
+
+A monotonous bellowing up the road persisted, where the carrier was still
+calling for corpses.
+
+"That's Agg. He's Hinch's cousin. You aren't fortunit in your family
+connections, Hinch. 'E's usin' language in derogation of good manners. Go
+and abolish 'im."
+
+Henry Salt Hinchcliffe stalked back to the cart and spoke to his cousin. I
+recall much that the wind bore to me of his words and the carrier's. It
+seemed as if the friendship of years were dissolving amid throes.
+
+"'Ave it your own silly way, then," roared the carrier, "an' get into
+Linghurst on your own silly feet. I've done with you two runagates." He
+lashed his horse and passed out of sight still rumbling.
+
+"The fleet's sailed," said Pyecroft, "leavin' us on the beach as before.
+Had you any particular port in your mind?"
+
+"Well, I was going to meet a friend at Instead Wick, but I don't mind--"
+
+"Oh! that'll do as well as anything! We're on leaf, you see."
+
+"She'll hardly hold four," said my engineer. I had broken him of the
+foolish habit of being surprised at things, but he was visibly uneasy.
+
+Hinchcliffe returned, drawn as by ropes to my steam-car, round which he
+walked in narrowing circles.
+
+"What's her speed?" he demanded of the engineer.
+
+"Twenty-five," said that loyal man.
+
+"Easy to run?"
+
+"No; very difficult," was the emphatic answer.
+
+"That just shows that you ain't fit for your rating. D'you suppose that a
+man who earns his livin' by runnin' 30-knot destroyers for a parstime--for
+a parstime, mark you!--is going to lie down before any blighted land-
+crabbing steam-pinnace on springs?"
+
+Yet that was what he did. Directly under the car he lay and looked upward
+into pipes--petrol, steam, and water--with a keen and searching eye.
+
+I telegraphed Mr. Pyecroft a question.
+
+"Not--in--the--least," was the answer. "Steam gadgets always take him that
+way. We had a bit of a riot at Parsley Green through his tryin' to show a
+traction-engine haulin' gipsy-wagons how to turn corners."
+
+"Tell him everything he wants to know," I said to the engineer, as I
+dragged out a rug and spread it on the roadside.
+
+"_He_ don't want much showing," said the engineer. Now, the two men had
+not, counting the time we took to stuff our pipes, been together more than
+three minutes.
+
+"This," said Pyecroft, driving an elbow back into the deep verdure of the
+hedge-foot, "is a little bit of all right. Hinch, I shouldn't let too much
+o' that hot muckings drop in my eyes, Your leaf's up in a fortnight, an'
+you'll be wantin' 'em."
+
+"Here!" said Hinchcliffe, still on his back, to the engineer. "Come here
+and show me the lead of this pipe." And the engineer lay down beside him.
+
+"That's all right," said Mr. Hinchcliffe, rising. "But she's more of a bag
+of tricks than I thought. Unship this superstructure aft"--he pointed to
+the back seat--"and I'll have a look at the forced draught."
+
+The engineer obeyed with alacrity. I heard him volunteer the fact that he
+had a brother an artificer in the Navy.
+
+"They couple very well, those two," said Pyecroft critically, while
+Hinchcliffe sniffed round the asbestos-lagged boiler and turned on gay
+jets of steam.
+
+"Now take me up the road," he said. My man, for form's sake, looked at me.
+
+"Yes, take him," I said. "He's all right."
+
+"No, I'm not," said Hinchcliffe of a sudden--"not if I'm expected to judge
+my water out of a little shaving-glass."
+
+The water-gauge of that steam-car was reflected on a mirror to the right
+of the dashboard. I also had found it inconvenient.
+
+"Throw up your arm and look at the gauge under your armpit. Only mind how
+you steer while you're doing it, or you'll get ditched!" I cried, as the
+car ran down the road.
+
+"I wonder!" said Pyecroft, musing. "But, after all, it's your steamin'
+gadgets he's usin' for his libretto, as you might put it. He said to me
+after breakfast only this mornin' 'ow he thanked his Maker, on all fours,
+that he wouldn't see nor smell nor thumb a runnin' bulgine till the
+nineteenth prox. Now look at him! Only look at 'im!"
+
+We could see, down the long slope of the road, my driver surrendering his
+seat to Hinchcliffe, while the car flickered generously from hedge to
+hedge.
+
+"What happens if he upsets?"
+
+"The petrol will light up and the boiler may blow up."
+
+"How rambunkshus! And"--Pyecroft blew a slow cloud--"Agg's about three
+hoops up this mornin', too."
+
+"What's that to do with us? He's gone down the road," I retorted.
+
+"Ye--es, but we'll overtake him. He's a vindictive carrier. He and Hinch
+'ad words about pig-breeding this morning. O' course, Hinch don't know the
+elements o' that evolution; but he fell back on 'is naval rank an' office,
+an' Agg grew peevish. I wasn't sorry to get out of the cart ... Have you
+ever considered how, when you an' I meet, so to say, there's nearly always
+a remarkable hectic day ahead of us! Hullo! Behold the beef-boat
+returnin'!"
+
+He rose as the car climbed up the slope, and shouted: "In bow! Way 'nuff!"
+
+"You be quiet!" cried Hinchcliffe, and drew up opposite the rug, his dark
+face shining with joy. "She's the Poetry o' Motion! She's the Angel's
+Dream. She's------" He shut off steam, and the slope being against her,
+the car slid soberly downhill again.
+
+"What's this? I've got the brake on!" he yelled.
+
+"It doesn't hold backwards," I said. "Put her on the mid-link."
+
+"That's a nasty one for the chief engineer o' the _Djinn_, 31-knot,
+T.B.D.," said Pyecroft. "_Do_ you know what the mid-link is, Hinch?"
+
+Once more the car returned to us; but as Pyecroft stooped to gather up the
+rug, Hinchcliffe jerked the lever testily, and with prawn-like speed she
+retired backwards into her own steam.
+
+"Apparently 'e don't," said Pyecroft. "What's he done now, Sir?"
+
+"Reversed her. I've done it myself."
+
+"But he's an engineer."
+
+For the third time the car manoeuvred up the hill.
+
+"I'll teach you to come alongside properly, if I keep you 'tiffies out all
+night!" shouted Pyecroft. It was evidently a quotation. Hinchcliffe's face
+grew livid, and, his hand ever so slightly working on the throttle, the
+car buzzed twenty yards uphill.
+
+"That's enough. We'll take your word for it. The mountain will go to
+Ma'ommed. Stand _fast_!"
+
+Pyecroft and I and the rug marched up where she and Hinchcliffe fumed
+together.
+
+"Not as easy as it looks--eh, Hinch?"
+
+"It is dead easy. I'm going to drive her to Instead Wick--aren't I?" said
+the first-class engine-room artificer. I thought of his performances with
+No. 267 and nodded. After all, it was a small privilege to accord to pure
+genius.
+
+"But my engineer will stand by--at first," I added.
+
+"An' you a family man, too," muttered Pyecroft, swinging himself into the
+right rear seat. "Sure to be a remarkably hectic day when we meet."
+
+We adjusted ourselves and, in the language of the immortal Navy doctor,
+paved our way towards Linghurst, distant by mile-post 11-3/4 miles.
+
+Mr. Hinchcliffe, every nerve and muscle braced, talked only to the
+engineer, and that professionally. I recalled the time when I, too, had
+enjoyed the rack on which he voluntarily extended himself.
+
+And the County of Sussex slid by in slow time.
+
+"How cautious is the 'tiffy-bird!" said Pyecroft.
+
+"Even in a destroyer," Hinch snapped over his shoulder, "you ain't
+expected to con and drive simultaneous. Don't address any remarks to
+_me!_"
+
+"Pump!" said the engineer. "Your water's droppin'."
+
+"_I_ know that. Where the Heavens is that blighted by-pass?"
+
+He beat his right or throttle hand madly on the side of the car till he
+found the bent rod that more or less controls the pump, and, neglecting
+all else, twisted it furiously.
+
+My engineer grabbed the steering-bar just in time to save us lurching into
+a ditch.
+
+"If I was a burnin' peacock, with two hundred bloodshot eyes in my shinin'
+tail, I'd need 'em all on this job!" said Hinch.
+
+"Don't talk! Steer! This ain't the North Atlantic," Pyecroft replied.
+
+"Blast my stokers! Why, the steam's dropped fifty pounds!" Hinchcliffe
+cried.
+
+"Fire's blown out," said the engineer. "Stop her!"
+
+"Does she do that often?" said Hinch, descending.
+
+"Sometimes."
+
+"Anytime?"
+
+"Any time a cross-wind catches her."
+
+The engineer produced a match and stooped.
+
+That car (now, thank Heaven, no more than an evil memory) never lit twice
+in the same fashion. This time she back-fired superbly, and Pyecroft went
+out over the right rear wheel in a column of rich yellow flame.
+
+"I've seen a mine explode at Bantry--once--prematoor," he volunteered.
+
+"That's all right," said Hinchcliffe, brushing down his singed beard with
+a singed forefinger. (He had been watching too closely.) "Has she any more
+little surprises up her dainty sleeve?"
+
+"She hasn't begun yet," said my engineer, with a scornful cough. "Some one
+'as opened the petrol-supply-valve too wide."
+
+"Change places with me, Pyecroft," I commanded, for I remembered that the
+petrol-supply, the steam-lock, and the forced draught were all controlled
+from the right rear seat.
+
+"Me? Why? There's a whole switchboard full o' nickel-plated muckin's which
+I haven't begun to play with yet. The starboard side's crawlin' with 'em."
+
+"Change, or I'll kill you!" said Hinchcliffe, and he looked like it.
+
+"That's the 'tiffy all over. When anything goes wrong, blame it on the
+lower deck. Navigate by your automatic self, then! _I_ won't help you any
+more."
+
+We navigated for a mile in dead silence.
+
+"Talkin' o' wakes----" said Pyecroft suddenly.
+
+"We weren't," Hinchcliffe grunted.
+
+"There's some wakes would break a snake's back; but this of yours, so to
+speak, would fair turn a tapeworm giddy. That's all I wish to observe,
+Hinch. ... Cart at anchor on the port-bow. It's Agg!"
+
+Far up the shaded road into secluded Bromlingleigh we saw the carrier's
+cart at rest before the post-office.
+
+"He's bung in the fairway. How'm I to get past?" said Hinchcliffe.
+"There's no room. Here, Pye, come and relieve the wheel!"
+
+"Nay, nay, Pauline. You've made your own bed. You've as good as left your
+happy home an' family cart to steal it. Now you lie on it."
+
+"Ring your bell," I suggested.
+
+"Glory!" said Pyecroft, falling forward into the nape of Hinchcliffe's
+neck as the car stopped dead.
+
+"Get out o' my back-hair! That must have been the brake I touched off,"
+Hinchcliffe muttered, and repaired his error tumultuously.
+
+We passed the cart as though we had been all Bruges belfry. Agg, from the
+port-office door, regarded us with a too pacific eye. I remembered later
+that the pretty postmistress looked on us pityingly.
+
+Hinchcliffe wiped the sweat from his brow and drew breath. It was the
+first vehicle that he had passed, and I sympathised with him.
+
+"You needn't grip so hard," said my engineer. "She steers as easy as a
+bicycle."
+
+"Ho! You suppose I ride bicycles up an' down my engine-room?" was the
+answer. "I've other things to think about. She's a terror. She's a
+whistlin' lunatic. I'd sooner run the old South-Easter at Simon's Town
+than her!"
+
+"One of the nice things they say about her," I interrupted, "is that no
+engineer is needed to run this machine."
+
+"No. They'd need about seven."
+
+"'Common-sense only is needed,'" I quoted.
+
+"Make a note of that, Hinch. Just common-sense," Pyecroft put in.
+
+"And now," I said, "we'll have to take in water. There isn't more than a
+couple of inches of water in the tank."
+
+"Where d'you get it from?"
+
+"Oh!--cottages and such-like."
+
+"Yes, but that being so, where does your much-advertised twenty-five miles
+an hour come in? Ain't a dung-cart more to the point?"
+
+"If you want to go anywhere, I suppose it would be," I replied.
+
+"_I_ don't want to go anywhere. I'm thinkin' of you who've got to live
+with her. She'll burn her tubes if she loses her water?"
+
+"She will."
+
+"I've never scorched yet, and I not beginnin' now." He shut off steam
+firmly. "Out you get, Pye, an' shove her along by hand."
+
+"Where to?"
+
+"The nearest water-tank," was the reply. "And Sussex is a dry county."
+
+"She ought to have drag-ropes--little pipe-clayed ones," said Pyecroft.
+
+We got out and pushed under the hot sun for half-a-mile till we came to a
+cottage, sparsely inhabited by one child who wept.
+
+"All out haymakin', o' course," said Pyecroft, thrusting his head into the
+parlour for an instant. "What's the evolution now?"
+
+"Skirmish till we find a well," I said.
+
+"Hmm! But they wouldn't 'ave left that kid without a chaperon, so to
+say... I thought so! Where's a stick?"
+
+A bluish and silent beast of the true old sheep-dog breed glided from
+behind an outhouse and without words fell to work.
+
+Pyecroft kept him at bay with a rake-handle while our party, in rallying-
+square, retired along the box-bordered brick-path to the car.
+
+At the garden gate the dumb devil halted, looked back on the child, and
+sat down to scratch.
+
+"That's his three-mile limit, thank Heaven!" said Pyecroft. "Fall in,
+push-party, and proceed with land-transport o' pinnace. I'll protect your
+flanks in case this sniffin' flea-bag is tempted beyond 'is strength."
+
+We pushed off in silence. The car weighed 1,200 lb., and even on
+ball-bearings was a powerful sudorific. From somewhere behind a hedge we
+heard a gross rustic laugh.
+
+"Those are the beggars we lie awake for, patrollin' the high seas. There
+ain't a port in China where we wouldn't be better treated. Yes, a Boxer
+'ud be ashamed of it," said Pyecroft.
+
+A cloud of fine dust boomed down the road.
+
+"Some happy craft with a well-found engine-room! How different!" panted
+Hinchcliffe, bent over the starboard mudguard.
+
+It was a claret-coloured petrol car, and it stopped courteously, as good
+cars will at sight of trouble.
+
+"Water, only water," I answered in reply to offers of help.
+
+"There's a lodge at the end of these oak palings. They'll give you all you
+want. Say I sent you. Gregory--Michael Gregory. Good-bye!"
+
+"Ought to 'ave been in the Service. Prob'ly is," was Pyecroft's comment.
+
+At that thrice-blessed lodge our water-tank was filled (I dare not quote
+Mr. Hinchcliffe's remarks when he saw the collapsible rubber bucket with
+which we did it) and we re-embarked. It seemed that Sir Michael Gregory
+owned many acres, and that his park ran for miles.
+
+"No objection to your going through it," said the lodge-keeper. "It'll
+save you a goodish bit to Instead Wick."
+
+But we needed petrol, which could be purchased at Pigginfold, a few miles
+farther up, and so we held to the main road, as our fate had decreed.
+
+"We've come seven miles in fifty-four minutes, so far," said Hinchcliffe
+(he was driving with greater freedom and less responsibility), "and now we
+have to fill our bunkers. This is worse than the Channel Fleet."
+
+At Pigginfold, after ten minutes, we refilled our petrol tank and lavishly
+oiled our engines. Mr. Hinchcliffe wished to discharge our engineer on the
+grounds that he (Mr. Hinchcliffe) was now entirely abreast of his work. To
+this I demurred, for I knew my car. She had, in the language of the road,
+held up for a day and a half, and by most bitter experience I suspected
+that her time was very near. Therefore, three miles short of Linghurst, I
+was less surprised than any one, excepting always my engineer, when the
+engines set up a lunatic clucking, and, after two or three kicks, jammed.
+
+"Heaven forgive me all the harsh things I may have said about destroyers
+in my sinful time!" wailed Hinchcliffe, snapping back the throttle.
+"What's worryin' Ada now?"
+
+"The forward eccentric-strap screw's dropped off," said the engineer,
+investigating.
+
+"That all? I thought it was a propeller-blade."
+
+"We must go an' look for it. There isn't another."
+
+"Not me," said Pyecroft from his seat. "Out pinnace, Hinch, an' creep for
+it. It won't be more than five miles back."
+
+The two men, with bowed heads, moved up the road.
+
+"Look like etymologists, don't they? Does she decant her innards often, so
+to speak?" Pyecroft asked.
+
+I told him the true tale of a race-full of ball bearings strewn four miles
+along a Hampshire road, and by me recovered in detail. He was profoundly
+touched.
+
+"Poor Hinch! Poor--poor Hinch!" he said. "And that's only one of her
+little games, is it? He'll be homesick for the Navy by night."
+
+When the search-party doubled back with the missing screw, it was
+Hinchcliffe who replaced it in less than five minutes, while my engineer
+looked on admiringly.
+
+"Your boiler's only seated on four little paperclips," he said, crawling
+from beneath her. "She's a wicker-willow lunch-basket below. She's a
+runnin' miracle. Have you had this combustible spirit-lamp long?"
+
+I told him.
+
+"And yet you were afraid to come into the _Nightmare's_ engine-room when
+we were runnin' trials!"
+
+"It's all a matter of taste," Pyecroft volunteered. "But I will say for
+you, Hinch, you've certainly got the hang of her steamin' gadgets in quick
+time."
+
+He was driving her very sweetly, but with a worried look in his eye and a
+tremor in his arm.
+
+"She don't seem so answer her helm somehow," he said.
+
+"There's a lot of play to the steering-gear," said my engineer. "We
+generally tighten it up every few miles."
+
+"'Like me to stop now? We've run as much as one mile and a half without
+incident," he replied tartly.
+
+"Then you're lucky," said my engineer, bristling in turn.
+
+"They'll wreck the whole turret out o' nasty professional spite in a
+minute," said Pyecroft. "That's the worst o' machinery. Man dead ahead,
+Hinch--semaphorin' like the flagship in a fit!"
+
+"Amen!" said Hinchcliffe. "Shall I stop, or shall I cut him down?"
+
+He stopped, for full in the centre of the Linghurst Road stood a person in
+pepper-and-salt raiment (ready-made), with a brown telegraph envelope in
+his hands.
+
+"Twenty-three and a half miles an hour," he began, weighing a small beam-
+engine of a Waterbury in one red paw. "From the top of the hill over our
+measured quarter-mile--twenty-three and a half."
+
+"You manurial gardener----" Hinchcliffe began. I prodded him warningly
+from behind, and laid the other hand on Pyecroft's stiffening knee.
+
+"Also--on information received--drunk and disorderly in charge of a
+motor-car--to the common danger--two men like sailors in appearance,"
+the man went on.
+
+"Like sailors! ... That's Agg's little _roose_. No wonder he smiled at
+us," said Pyecroft.
+
+"I've been waiting for you some time," the man concluded, folding up the
+telegram.
+
+"Who's the owner?"
+
+I indicated myself.
+
+"Then I want you as well as the two seafaring men. Drunk and disorderly
+can be treated summary. You come on."
+
+My relations with the Sussex constabulary have, so far, been of the best,
+but I could not love this person.
+
+"Of course you have your authority to show?" I hinted.
+
+"I'll show it you at Linghurst," he retorted hotly----"all the authority
+you want."
+
+"I only want the badge, or warrant, or whatever it is a plain-clothes man
+has to show."
+
+He made as though to produce it, but checked himself, repeating less
+politely the invitation to Linghurst. The action and the tone confirmed my
+many-times tested theory that the bulk of English shoregoing institutions
+are based on conformable strata of absolutely impervious inaccuracy. I
+reflected and became aware of a drumming on the back of the front seat
+that Pyecroft, bowed forward and relaxed, was tapping with his knuckles.
+The hardly-checked fury on Hinchcliffe's brow had given place to a greasy
+imbecility, and he nodded over the steering-bar. In longs and shorts, as
+laid down by the pious and immortal Mr. Morse, Pyecroft tapped out, "Sham
+drunk. Get him in the car."
+
+"I can't stay here all day," said the constable.
+
+Pyecroft raised his head. Then was seen with what majesty the British
+sailor-man envisages a new situation.
+
+"Met gennelman heavy sheeway," said he. "Do tell me British gelman can't
+give 'ole Brish Navy lif' own blighted ste' cart. Have another drink!"
+
+"I didn't know they were as drunk as all that when they stopped me," I
+explained.
+
+"You can say all that at Linghurst," was the answer. "Come on."
+
+"Quite right," I said. "But the question is, if you take these two out on
+the road, they'll fall down or start killing you."
+
+"Then I'd call on you to assist me in the execution o' my duty."
+
+"But I'd see you further first. You'd better come with us in the car. I'll
+turn this passenger out." (This was my engineer, sitting quite silent.)
+"You don't want him, and, anyhow, he'd only be a witness for the defence."
+
+"That's true," said the constable. "But it wouldn't make any odds--at
+Linghurst."
+
+My engineer skipped into the bracken like a rabbit. I bade him cut across
+Sir Michael Gregory's park, and if he caught my friend, to tell him I
+should probably be rather late for lunch.
+
+"I ain't going to be driven by _him_." Our destined prey pointed at
+Hinchcliffe with apprehension.
+
+"Of course not. You sake my seat and keep the big sailor in order. He's
+too drunk to do much. I'll change places with the other one. Only be
+quick; I want to pay my fine and get it over."
+
+"That's the way to look at it," he said, dropping into the left rear seat.
+"We're making quite a lot out o' you motor gentry." He folded his arms
+judicially as the car gathered way under Hinchcliffe's stealthy hand.
+
+"But _you_ aren't driving?" he cried, half rising.
+
+"You've noticed it?" said Pyecroft, and embraced him with one anaconda-
+like left arm.
+
+"Don't kill him," said Hinchcliffe briefly. "I want to show him what
+twenty-three and a quarter is." We were going a fair twelve, which was
+about the car's limit.
+
+Our passenger swore something and then groaned.
+
+"Hush, darling!" said Pyecroft, "or I'll have to hug you."
+
+The main road, white under the noon sun, lay broad before us, running
+north to Linghurst. We slowed and looked anxiously for a side track.
+
+"And now," said I, "I want to see your authority."
+
+"The badge of your ratin'?" Pyecroft added.
+
+"I'm a constable," he said, and kicked. Indeed, his boots would have
+bewrayed him across half a county's plough; but boots are not legal
+evidence.
+
+"I want your authority," I repeated coldly; "some evidence that you are
+not a common drunken tramp."
+
+It was as I had expected. He had forgotten or mislaid his badge. He had
+neglected to learn the outlines of the work for which he received money
+and consideration; and he expected me, the tax-payer, to go to infinite
+trouble to supplement his deficiencies.
+
+"If you don't believe me, come to Linghurst," was the burden of his almost
+national anthem.
+
+"But I can't run all over Sussex every time a blackmailer jumps up and
+says he is a policeman."
+
+"Why, it's quite close," he persisted.
+
+"'Twon't be--soon," said Hinchcliffe.
+
+"None of the other people ever made any trouble. To be sure, _they_ was
+gentlemen," he cried. "All I can say is, it may be very funny, but it
+ain't fair."
+
+I laboured with him in this dense fog, but to no end. He had forgotten his
+badge, and we were villains for that we did not cart him to the pub or
+barracks where he had left it.
+
+Pyecroft listened critically as we spun along the hard road.
+
+"If he was a concentrated Boer, he couldn't expect much more," he
+observed. "Now, suppose I'd been a lady in a delicate state o' health--
+you'd ha' made me very ill with your doings."
+
+"I wish I 'ad. 'Ere! 'Elp! 'Elp! Hi!"
+
+The man had seen a constable in uniform fifty yards ahead, where a lane
+ran into the road, and would have said more but that Hinchcliffe jerked
+her up that lane with a wrench that nearly capsized us as the constable
+came running heavily.
+
+It seemed to me that both our guest and his fellow-villain in uniform
+smiled as we fled down the road easterly betwixt the narrowing hedges.
+
+"You'll know all about it in a little time," said our guest. "You've only
+yourselves to thank for runnin' your 'ead into a trap." And he whistled
+ostentatiously.
+
+We made no answer.
+
+"If that man 'ad chose, 'e could have identified me," he said.
+
+Still we were silent.
+
+"But 'e'll do it later, when you're caught."
+
+"Not if you go on talking. 'E won't be able to," said Pyecroft. "I don't
+know what traverse you think you're workin', but your duty till you're put
+in cells for a highway robber is to love, honour, an' cherish _me_ most
+special--performin' all evolutions signalled in rapid time. I tell you
+this, in case o' anything turnin' up."
+
+"Don't you fret about things turnin' up," was the reply.
+
+Hinchcliffe had given the car a generous throttle, and she was well set to
+work, when, without warning, the road--there are two or three in Sussex
+like it--turned down and ceased.
+
+"Holy Muckins!" he cried, and stood on both brakes as our helpless tyres
+slithered over wet grass and bracken--down and down into forest--early
+British woodland. It was the change of a nightmare, and that all should
+fit, fifty yards ahead of us a babbling brook barred our way. On the far
+side a velvet green ride, sprinkled with rabbits and fern, gently sloped
+upwards and away, but behind us was no hope. Forty horse-power would never
+have rolled wet pneumatic tyres up that verdurous cliff we had descended.
+
+"H'm!" Our guest coughed significantly. "A great many cars thinks they can
+take this road; but they all come back. We walks after 'em at our
+convenience."
+
+"Meanin' that the other jaunty is now pursuin' us on his lily feet?" said
+Pyecroft.
+
+"_Pre_cisely."
+
+"An' you think," said Pyecroft (I have no hope to render the scorn of the
+words), "_that'll_ make any odds? Get out!"
+
+The man obeyed with alacrity.
+
+"See those spars up-ended over there? I mean that wickyup-thing.
+Hop-poles, then, you rural blighter. Keep on fetching me hop-poles at the
+double."
+
+And he doubled, Pyecroft at his heels; for they had arrived at a perfect
+understanding.
+
+There was a stack of hurdles a few yards down
+
+stream, laid aside after sheep-washing; and there were stepping-stones in
+the brook. Hinchcliffe rearranged these last to make some sort of
+causeway; I brought up the hurdles; and when Pyecroft and his subaltern
+had dropped a dozen hop-poles across the stream, laid them down over all.
+
+"Talk o' the Agricultur'l Hall!" he said, mopping his brow--"'tisn't in it
+with us. The approach to the bridge must now be paved with hurdles, owin'
+to the squashy nature o' the country. Yes, an' we'd better have one or two
+on the far side to lead her on to _terror fermior_. Now, Hinch! Give her
+full steam and 'op along. If she slips off, we're done. Shall I take the
+wheel?"
+
+"No. This is my job," said the first-class engine-room artificer. "Get
+over the far side, and be ready to catch her if she jibs on the uphill."
+
+We crossed that elastic structure and stood ready amid the bracken.
+Hinchcliffe gave her a full steam and she came like a destroyer on her
+trial. There was a crack, a flicker of white water, and she was in our
+arms fifty yards up the slope; or rather, we were behind her, pushing her
+madly towards a patch of raw gravel whereon her wheels could bite. Of the
+bridge remained only a few wildly vibrating hop-poles, and those hurdles
+which had been sunk in the mud of the approaches.
+
+"She--she kicked out all the loose ones behind her as she finished with
+'em," Hinchcliffe panted.
+
+"At the Agricultural Hall they would 'ave been fastened down with
+ribbons," said Pyecroft. "But this ain't Olympia."
+
+"She nearly wrenched the tiller out of my hand. Don't you think I conned
+her like a cock-angel, Pye?"
+
+"_I_ never saw anything like it," said our guest propitiatingly. "And now,
+gentlemen, if you'll let me go back to Linghurst, I promise you you won't
+hear another word from me."
+
+"Get in," said Pyecroft, as we puffed out on to a metalled road once more.
+"We 'aven't begun on _you_ yet."
+
+"A joke's a joke," he replied. "I don't mind a little bit of a joke
+myself, but this is going beyond it."
+
+"Miles an' miles beyond it, if this machine stands up. We'll want water
+pretty soon."
+
+Our guest's countenance brightened, and Pyecroft perceived it.
+
+"Let me tell you," he said earnestly, "It won't make any difference to you
+whatever happens. Barrin' a dhow or two Tajurrah-way, prizes are scarce in
+the Navy. Hence we never abandon 'em."
+
+There was a long silence. Pyecroft broke it suddenly.
+
+"Robert," he said, "have you a mother?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Have you a big brother?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"An' a little sister?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Robert. Does your mamma keep a dog?"
+
+"Yes. Why?"
+
+"All right, Robert. I won't forget it."
+
+I looked for an explanation.
+
+"I saw his cabinet photograph in full uniform on the mantelpiece o' that
+cottage before faithful Fido turned up," Pyecroft whispered. "Ain't you
+glad it's all in the family somehow?"
+
+We filled with water at a cottage on the edge of St. Leonard's Forest,
+and, despite our increasing leakage, made shift to climb the ridge above
+Instead Wick. Knowing the car as I did, I felt sure that final collapse
+would not be long delayed. My sole concern was to run our guest well into
+the wilderness before that came.
+
+On the roof of the world--a naked plateau clothed with young heather--she
+retired from active life in floods of tears. Her feed-water-heater
+(Hinchcliffe blessed it and its maker for three minutes) was leaking
+beyond hope of repair; she had shifted most of her packing, and her water-
+pump would not lift.
+
+"If I had a bit of piping I could disconnect this tin cartridge-case an'
+feed direct into the boiler. It 'ud knock down her speed, but we could get
+on," said he, and looked hopelessly at the long dun ridges that hove us
+above the panorama of Sussex. Northward we could see the London haze.
+Southward, between gaps of the whale-backed Downs, lay the Channel's zinc-
+blue. But all our available population in that vast survey was one cow and
+a kestrel.
+
+"It's down hill to Instead Wick. We can run her there by gravity," I said
+at last.
+
+"Then he'll only have to walk to the station to get home. Unless we take
+off 'is boots first," Pyecroft replied.
+
+"That," said our guest earnestly, "would be theft atop of assault and very
+serious."
+
+"Oh, let's hang him an' be done," Hinchcliffe grunted. "It's evidently
+what he's sufferin' for."
+
+Somehow murder did not appeal to us that warm noon. We sat down to smoke
+in the heather, and presently out of the valley below came the thick beat
+of a petrol-motor ascending. I paid little attention to it till I heard
+the roar of a horn that has no duplicate in all the Home Counties.
+
+"That's the man I was going to lunch with!" I cried. "Hold on!" and I ran
+down the road.
+
+It was a big, black, black-dashed, tonneaued twenty-four horse Octopod;
+and it bore not only Kysh my friend, and Salmon his engineer, but my own
+man, who for the first time in our acquaintance smiled.
+
+"Did they get you? What did you get? I was coming into Linghurst as
+witness to character--your man told me what happened--but I was stopped
+near Instead Wick myself," cried Kysh.
+
+"What for?"
+
+"Leaving car unattended. An infernal swindle, when you think of the loose
+carts outside every pub in the county. I was jawing with the police for an
+hour, but it's no use. They've got it all their own way, and we're
+helpless."
+
+Hereupon I told him my tale, and for proof, as we topped the hill, pointed
+out the little group round my car.
+
+All supreme emotion is dumb. Kysh put on the brake and hugged me to his
+bosom till I groaned. Then, as I remember, he crooned like a mother
+returned to her suckling.
+
+"Divine! Divine!" he murmured. "Command me."
+
+"Take charge of the situation," I said. "You'll find a Mr. Pyecroft on the
+quarter-deck. I'm altogether out of it."
+
+"He shall stay there. Who am I but the instrument of vengeance in the
+hands of an over-ruling Providence? (And I put in fresh sparking-plugs
+this morning.) Salmon, take that steam-kettle home, somehow. I would be
+alone."
+
+"Leggat," I said to my man, "help Salmon home with my car."
+
+"Home? Now? It's hard. It's cruel hard," said Leggat, almost with a sob.
+
+Hinchcliffe outlined my car's condition briefly to the two engineers. Mr.
+Pyecroft clung to our guest, who stared with affrighted eyes at the
+palpitating Octopod; and the free wind of high Sussex whimpered across the
+ling.
+
+"I am quite agreeable to walkin' 'ome all the way on my feet," said our
+guest. "I wouldn't go to any railway station. It 'ud be just the proper
+finish to our little joke." He laughed nervously.
+
+"What's the evolution?" said Pyecroft. "Do we turn over to the new
+cruiser?"
+
+I nodded, and he escorted our guest to the tonneau with care. When I was
+in, he sat himself broad-armed on the little flap-seat which controls the
+door. Hinchcliffe sat by Kysh.
+
+"You drive?" Kysh asked, with the smile that has won him his chequered way
+through the world.
+
+"Steam only, and I've about had my whack for to-day, thanks."
+
+"I see."
+
+The long, low car slid forward and then dropped like a bullet down the
+descent our steam toy had so painfully climbed. Our guest's face blanched,
+and he clutched the back of the tonneau.
+
+"New commander's evidently been trained on a destroyer," said Hinchcliffe.
+
+"What's 'is wonderful name?" whispered Pyecroft. "Ho! Well, I'm glad it
+ain't Saul we've run up against--nor Nimshi, for that matter. This is
+makin' me feel religious."
+
+Our impetus carried us half-way up the next slope, where we steadied to a
+resonant fifteen an hour against the collar.
+
+"What do you think?" I called to Hinchcliffe.
+
+"'Taint as sweet as steam, o' course; but for power it's twice the
+_Furious_ against half the _Jaseur_ in a head-sea."
+
+Volumes could not have touched it more exactly. His bright eyes were glued
+on Kysh's hands juggling with levers behind the discreet backward sloping
+dash.
+
+"An' what sort of a brake might you use?" he said politely.
+
+"This," Kysh replied, as the last of the hill shot up to one in eight. He
+let the car run back a few feet and caught her deftly on the brake,
+repeating the performance cup and ball fashion. It was like being daped
+above the Pit at the end of an uncoiled solar plexus. Even Pyecroft held
+his breath.
+
+"It ain't fair! It ain't fair!" our guest moaned. "You're makin' me sick."
+
+"What an ungrateful blighter he is!" said Pyecroft. "Money couldn't buy
+you a run like this ... Do it well overboard!"
+
+"We'll just trundle up the Forest and drop into the Park Row, I think,"
+said Kysh. "There's a bit of good going hereabouts."
+
+He flung a careless knee over the low raking tiller that the ordinary
+expert puts under his armpit, and down four miles of yellow road, cut
+through barren waste, the Octopod sang like a six-inch shell.
+
+"Whew! But you know your job," said Hinchcliffe. "You're wasted here. I'd
+give something to have you in my engine-room."
+
+"He's steering with 'is little hind-legs," said Pyecroft. "Stand up and
+look at him, Robert. You'll never see such a sight again!"
+
+"Nor don't want to," was our guest's reply. "Five 'undred pounds wouldn't
+begin to cover 'is fines even since I've been with him."
+
+Park Row is reached by one hill which drops three hundred feet in half a
+mile. Kysh had the thought to steer with his hand down the abyss, but the
+manner in which he took the curved bridge at the bottom brought my few
+remaining hairs much nearer the grave.
+
+"We're in Surrey now; better look out," I said.
+
+"Never mind. I'll roll her into Kent for a bit. We've lots of time; it's
+only three o'clock."
+
+"Won't you want to fill your bunkers, or take water, or oil her up?" said
+Hinchcliffe.
+
+"We don't use water, and she's good for two hundred on one tank o' petrol
+if she doesn't break down."
+
+"Two hundred miles from 'ome and mother _and_ faithful Fido to-night,
+Robert," said Pyecroft, slapping our guest on the knee. "Cheer up! Why,
+I've known a destroyer do less."
+
+We passed with some decency through some towns, till by way of the
+Hastings road we whirled into Cramberhurst, which is a deep pit.
+
+"Now," said Kysh, "we begin."
+
+"Previous service not reckoned towards pension," said Pyecroft. "We are
+doin' you lavish, Robert."
+
+"But when's this silly game to finish, any'ow?" our guest snarled.
+
+"Don't worry about the _when_ of it, Robert. The _where's_ the interestin'
+point for you just now."
+
+I had seen Kysh drive before, and I thought I knew the Octopod, but that
+afternoon he and she were exalted beyond my knowledge. He improvised on
+the keys--the snapping levers and quivering accelerators--marvellous
+variations, so that our progress was sometimes a fugue and sometimes a
+barn-dance, varied on open greens by the weaving of fairy rings. When I
+protested, all that he would say was: "I'll hypnotise the fowl! I'll
+dazzle the rooster!" or other words equally futile. And she--oh! that I
+could do her justice!--she turned her broad black bows to the westering
+light, and lifted us high upon hills that we might see and rejoice with
+her. She whooped into veiled hollows of elm and Sussex oak; she devoured
+infinite perspectives of park palings; she surged through forgotten
+hamlets, whose single streets gave back, reduplicated, the clatter of her
+exhaust, and, tireless, she repeated the motions. Over naked uplands she
+droned like a homing bee, her shadow lengthening in the sun that she
+chased to his lair. She nosed up unparochial byways and accommodation-
+roads of the least accommodation, and put old scarred turf or new-raised
+molehills under her most marvellous springs with never a jar. And since
+the King's highway is used for every purpose save traffic, in mid-career
+she stepped aside for, or flung amazing loops about, the brainless driver,
+the driverless horse, the drunken carrier, the engaged couple, the female
+student of the bicycle and her staggering instructor, the pig, the
+perambulator, and the infant school (where it disembogued yelping on
+cross-roads), with the grace of Nellie Farren (upon whom be the Peace) and
+the lithe abandon of all the Vokes family. But at heart she was ever Judic
+as I remember that Judic long ago--Judic clad in bourgeois black from
+wrist to ankle, achieving incredible improprieties.
+
+We were silent--Hinchcliffe and Pyecroft through professional
+appreciation; I with a layman's delight in the expert; and our guest
+because of fear.
+
+At the edge of the evening she smelt the sea to southward and sheered
+thither like the strong-winged albatross, to circle enormously amid green
+flats fringed by martello towers.
+
+"Ain't that Eastbourne yonder?" said our guest, reviving. "I've a aunt
+there--she's cook to a J.P.--could identify me."
+
+"Don't worry her for a little thing like that," said Pyecroft; and ere he
+had ceased to praise family love, our unpaid judiciary, and domestic
+service, the Downs rose between us and the sea, and the Long Man of
+Hillingdon lay out upon the turf.
+
+"Trevington--up yonder--is a fairly isolated little dorp," I said, for I
+was beginning to feel hungry.
+
+"No," said Kysh. "He'd get a lift to the railway in no time.... Besides,
+I'm enjoying myself.... Three pounds eighteen and sixpence. Infernal
+swindle!"
+
+I take it one of his more recent fines was rankling in Kysh's brain; but
+he drove like the Archangel of the Twilight.
+
+About the longitude of Cassocks, Hinchcliffe yawned. "Aren't we goin' to
+maroon our Robert? I'm hungry, too."
+
+"The commodore wants his money back," I answered.
+
+"If he drives like this habitual, there must be a tidyish little lump
+owin' to him," said Pyecroft. "Well, I'm agreeable."
+
+"I didn't know it could be done. S'welp me, I didn't," our guest murmured.
+
+"But you will," said Kysh. And that was the first and last time he
+addressed the man.
+
+We ran through Penfield Green, half stupefied with open air, drugged with
+the relentless boom of the Octopod, and extinct with famine.
+
+"I used to shoot about here," said Kysh, a few miles further on. "Open
+that gate, please," and he slowed as the sun touched the sky-line. At this
+point we left metalled roads and bucked vigorously amid ditches and under
+trees for twenty minutes.
+
+"Only cross-country car on the market," he said, as we wheeled into a
+straw-yard where a lone bull bellowed defiance to our growlings. "Open
+that gate, please. I hope the cattle-bridge will stand up."
+
+"I've took a few risks in my time," said Pyecroft as timbers cracked
+beneath us and we entered between thickets, "but I'm a babe to this man,
+Hinch."
+
+"Don't talk to me. Watch _him!_ It's a liberal education, as Shakespeare
+says. Fallen tree on the port bow, Sir."
+
+"Right! That's my mark. Sit tight!"
+
+She flung up her tail like a sounding whale and buried us in a fifteen-
+foot deep bridle-path buttressed with the exposed roots of enormous
+beeches. The wheels leaped from root to rounded boulder, and it was very
+dark in the shadow of the foliage.
+
+"There ought to be a hammer-pond somewhere about here." Kysh was letting
+her down this chute in brakeful spasms.
+
+"Water dead ahead, Sir. Stack o' brushwood on the starboard beam, and--no
+road," sang Pyecroft.
+
+"Cr-r-ri-key!" said Hinchcliffe, as the car on a wild cant to the left
+went astern, screwing herself round the angle of a track that overhung the
+pond. "If she only had two propellers, I believe she'd talk poetry. She
+can do everything else."
+
+"We're rather on our port wheels now," said Kysh; "but I don't think
+she'll capsize. This road isn't used much by motors."
+
+"You don't say so," said Pyecroft. "What a pity!"
+
+She bored through a mass of crackling brushwood, and emerged into an
+upward sloping fern-glade fenced with woods so virgin, so untouched, that
+William Rufus might have ridden off as we entered. We climbed out of the
+violet-purple shadows towards the upland where the last of the day
+lingered. I was filled to my moist eyes with the almost sacred beauty of
+sense and association that clad the landscape.
+
+"Does 'unger produce 'alluciations?" said Pyecroft in a whisper. "Because
+I've just seen a sacred ibis walkin' arm in arm with a British cock-
+pheasant."
+
+"What are you panickin' at?" said Hinchcliffe. "I've been seein' zebra
+for the last two minutes, but I 'aven't complained."
+
+He pointed behind us, and I beheld a superb painted zebra (Burchell's, I
+think), following our track with palpitating nostrils. The car stopped,
+and it fled away.
+
+There was a little pond in front of us from which rose a dome of irregular
+sticks crowned with a blunt-muzzled beast that sat upon its haunches.
+
+"Is it catching?" said Pyecroft.
+
+"Yes. I'm seeing beaver," I replied.
+
+"It is here!" said Kysh, with the air and gesture of Captain Nemo, and
+half turned.
+
+"No--no--no! For 'Eaven's sake--not 'ere!" Our guest gasped like a sea-
+bathed child, as four efficient hands swung him far out-board on to the
+turf. The car ran back noiselessly down the slope.
+
+"Look! Look! It's sorcery!" cried Hinchcliffe.
+
+There was a report like a pistol shot as the beaver dived from the roof of
+his lodge, but we watched our guest. He was on his knees, praying to
+kangaroos. Yea, in his bowler hat he kneeled before kangaroos--gigantic,
+erect, silhouetted against the light--four buck-kangaroos in the heart of
+Sussex!
+
+And we retrogressed over the velvet grass till our hind-wheels struck
+well-rolled gravel, leading us to sanity, main roads, and, half an hour
+later, the "Grapnel Inn" at Horsham.
+
+*        *        *        *        *
+
+After a great meal we poured libations and made burnt-offerings in honour
+of Kysh, who received our homage graciously, and, by the way, explained a
+few things in the natural history line that had puzzled us. England is a
+most marvellous country, but one is not, till one knows the eccentricities
+of large land-owners, trained to accept kangaroos, zebras, or beavers as
+part of its landscape.
+
+When we went to bed Pyecroft pressed my hand, his voice thick with
+emotion.
+
+"We owe it to you," he said. "We owe it all to you. Didn't I say we never
+met in _pup-pup-puris naturalibus_, if I may so put it, without a
+remarkably hectic day ahead of us?"
+
+"That's all right," I said. "Mind the candle." He was tracing smoke-
+patterns on the wall.
+
+"But what I want to know is whether we'll succeed in acclimatisin' the
+blighter, or whether Sir William Gardner's keepers 'll kill 'im before 'e
+gets accustomed to 'is surroundin's?"
+
+Some day, I think, we must go up the Linghurst Road and find out.
+
+
+
+
+"WIRELESS"
+
+
+KASPAR'S SONG IN VARDA
+
+(_From the Swedish of Stagnelius_.)
+
+  Eyes aloft, over dangerous places,
+    The children follow where Psyche flies,
+  And, in the sweat of their upturned faces,
+    Slash with a net at the empty skies.
+
+  So it goes they fall amid brambles,
+    And sting their toes on the nettle-tops,
+  Till after a thousand scratches and scrambles
+    They wipe their brows, and the hunting stops.
+
+  Then to quiet them comes their father
+    And stills the riot of pain and grief,
+  Saying, "Little ones, go and gather
+    Out of my garden a cabbage leaf.
+
+  "You will find on it whorls and clots of
+    Dull grey eggs that, properly fed,
+  Turn, by way of the worm, to lots of
+    Radiant Psyches raised from the dead."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+  "Heaven is beautiful, Earth is ugly,"
+    The three-dimensioned preacher saith,
+  So we must not look where the snail and the slug lie
+    For Psyche's birth ... And that is our death!
+
+
+"WIRELESS"
+"It's a funny thing, this Marconi business, isn't it?" said Mr. Shaynor,
+coughing heavily. "Nothing seems to make any difference, by what they tell
+me--storms, hills, or anything; but if that's true we shall know before
+morning."
+
+"Of course it's true," I answered, stepping behind the counter. "Where's
+old Mr. Cashell?"
+
+"He's had to go to bed on account of his influenza. He said you'd very
+likely drop in."
+
+"Where's his nephew?"
+
+"Inside, getting the things ready. He told me that the last time they
+experimented they put the pole on the roof of one of the big hotels here,
+and the batteries electrified all the water-supply, and"--he giggled--"the
+ladies got shocks when they took their baths."
+
+"I never heard of that."
+
+"The hotel wouldn't exactly advertise it, would it? Just now, by what Mr.
+Cashell tells me, they're trying to signal from here to Poole, and they're
+using stronger batteries than ever. But, you see, he being the guvnor's
+nephew and all that (and it will be in the papers too), it doesn't matter
+how they electrify things in this house. Are you going to watch?"
+
+"Very much. I've never seen this game. Aren't you going to bed?"
+
+"We don't close till ten on Saturdays. There's a good deal of influenza in
+town, too, and there'll be a dozen prescriptions coming in before morning.
+I generally sleep in the chair here. It's warmer than jumping out of bed
+every time. Bitter cold, isn't it?"
+
+"Freezing hard. I'm sorry your cough's worse."
+
+"Thank you. I don't mind cold so much. It's this wind that fair cuts me to
+pieces." He coughed again hard and hackingly, as an old lady came in for
+ammoniated quinine. "We've just run out of it in bottles, madam," said Mr.
+Shaynor, returning to the professional tone, "but if you will wait two
+minutes, I'll make it up for you, madam."
+
+I had used the shop for some time, and my acquaintance with the proprietor
+had ripened into friendship. It was Mr. Cashell who revealed to me the
+purpose and power of Apothecaries' Hall what time a fellow-chemist had
+made an error in a prescription of mine, had lied to cover his sloth, and
+when error and lie were brought home to him had written vain letters.
+
+"A disgrace to our profession," said the thin, mild-eyed man, hotly, after
+studying the evidence. "You couldn't do a better service to the profession
+than report him to Apothecaries' Hall."
+
+I did so, not knowing what djinns I should evoke; and the result was such
+an apology as one might make who had spent a night on the rack. I
+conceived great respect for Apothecaries' Hall, and esteem for Mr.
+Cashell, a zealous craftsman who magnified his calling. Until Mr. Shaynor
+came down from the North his assistants had by no means agreed with Mr.
+Cashell. "They forget," said he, "that, first and foremost, the compounder
+is a medicine-man. On him depends the physician's reputation. He holds it
+literally in the hollow of his hand, Sir."
+
+Mr. Shaynor's manners had not, perhaps, the polish of the grocery and
+Italian warehouse next door, but he knew and loved his dispensary work in
+every detail. For relaxation he seemed to go no farther afield than the
+romance of drugs--their discovery, preparation packing, and export--but it
+led him to the ends of the earth, and on this subject, and the
+Pharmaceutical Formulary, and Nicholas Culpepper, most confident of
+physicians, we met.
+
+Little by little I grew to know something of his beginnings and his hopes
+--of his mother, who had been a school-teacher in one of the northern
+counties, and of his red-headed father, a small job-master at Kirby Moors,
+who died when he was a child; of the examinations he had passed and of
+their exceeding and increasing difficulty; of his dreams of a shop in
+London; of his hate for the price-cutting Co-operative stores; and, most
+interesting, of his mental attitude towards customers.
+
+"There's a way you get into," he told me, "of serving them carefully, and
+I hope, politely, without stopping your own thinking. I've been reading
+Christie's _New Commercial Plants_ all this autumn, and that needs keeping
+your mind on it, I can tell you. So long as it isn't a prescription, of
+course, I can carry as much as half a page of Christie in my head, and at
+the same time I could sell out all that window twice over, and not a penny
+wrong at the end. As to prescriptions, I think I could make up the general
+run of 'em in my sleep, almost."
+
+For reasons of my own, I was deeply interested in Marconi experiments at
+their outset in England; and it was of a piece with Mr. Cashell's
+unvarying thoughtfulness that, when his nephew the electrician
+appropriated the house for a long-range installation, he should, as I have
+said, invite me to see the result.
+
+The old lady went away with her medicine, and Mr. Shaynor and I stamped on
+the tiled floor behind the counter to keep ourselves warm. The shop, by
+the light of the many electrics, looked like a Paris-diamond mine, for Mr.
+Cashell believed in all the ritual of his craft. Three superb glass jars--
+red, green, and blue--of the sort that led Rosamund to parting with her
+shoes--blazed in the broad plate-glass windows, and there was a confused
+smell of orris, Kodak films, vulcanite, tooth-powder, sachets, and almond-
+cream in the air. Mr. Shaynor fed the dispensary stove, and we sucked
+cayenne-pepper jujubes and menthol lozenges. The brutal east wind had
+cleared the streets, and the few passers-by were muffled to their puckered
+eyes. In the Italian warehouse next door some gay feathered birds and
+game, hung upon hooks, sagged to the wind across the left edge of our
+window-frame.
+
+"They ought to take these poultry in--all knocked about like that," said
+Mr. Shaynor. "Doesn't it make you feel fair perishing? See that old hare!
+The wind's nearly blowing the fur off him."
+
+I saw the belly-fur of the dead beast blown apart in ridges and streaks as
+the wind caught it, showing bluish skin underneath. "Bitter cold," said
+Mr. Shaynor, shuddering. "Fancy going out on a night like this! Oh, here's
+young Mr. Cashell."
+
+The door of the inner office behind the dispensary opened, and an
+energetic, spade-bearded man stepped forth, rubbing his hands.
+
+"I want a bit of tin-foil, Shaynor," he said. "Good-evening. My uncle told
+me you might be coming." This to me, as I began the first of a hundred
+questions.
+
+"I've everything in order," he replied. "We're only waiting until Poole
+calls us up. Excuse me a minute. You can come in whenever you like--but
+I'd better be with the instruments. Give me that tin-foil. Thanks."
+
+While we were talking, a girl--evidently no customer--had come into the
+shop, and the face and bearing of Mr. Shaynor changed. She leaned
+confidently across the counter.
+
+"But I can't," I heard him whisper uneasily--the flush on his cheek was
+dull red, and his eyes shone like a drugged moth's. "I can't. I tell you
+I'm alone in the place."
+
+"No, you aren't. Who's _that_? Let him look after it for half an hour. A
+brisk walk will do you good. Ah, come now, John."
+
+"But he isn't----"
+
+"I don't care. I want you to; we'll only go round by St. Agnes. If you
+don't----"
+
+He crossed to where I stood in the shadow of the dispensary counter, and
+began some sort of broken apology about a lady-friend.
+
+"Yes," she interrupted. "You take the shop for half an hour--to oblige
+_me_, won't you?"
+
+She had a singularly rich and promising voice that well matched her
+outline.
+
+"All right," I said. "I'll do it--but you'd better wrap yourself up, Mr.
+Shaynor."
+
+"Oh, a brisk walk ought to help me. We're only going round by the church."
+I heard him cough grievously as they went out together.
+
+I refilled the stove, and, after reckless expenditure of Mr. Cashell's
+coal, drove some warmth into the shop. I explored many of the glass-
+knobbed drawers that lined the walls, tasted some disconcerting drugs,
+and, by the aid of a few cardamoms, ground ginger, chloric-ether, and
+dilute alcohol, manufactured a new and wildish drink, of which I bore a
+glassful to young Mr. Cashell, busy in the back office. He laughed shortly
+when I told him that Mr. Shaynor had stepped out--but a frail coil of wire
+held all his attention, and he had no word for me bewildered among the
+batteries and rods. The noise of the sea on the beach began to make itself
+heard as the traffic in the street ceased. Then briefly, but very lucidly,
+he gave me the names and uses of the mechanism that crowded the tables and
+the floor.
+
+"When do you expect to get the message from Poole?" I demanded, sipping my
+liquor out of a graduated glass.
+
+"About midnight, if everything is in order. We've got our installation-
+pole fixed to the roof of the house. I shouldn't advise you to turn on a
+tap or anything tonight. We've connected up with the plumbing, and all the
+water will be electrified." He repeated to me the history of the agitated
+ladies at the hotel at the time of the first installation.
+
+"But what _is_ it?" I asked. "Electricity is out of my beat altogether."
+
+"Ah, if you knew _that_ you'd know something nobody knows. It's just It--
+what we call Electricity, but the magic--the manifestations--the Hertzian
+waves--are all revealed by _this_. The coherer, we call it."
+
+He picked up a glass tube not much thicker than a thermometer, in which,
+almost touching, were two tiny silver plugs, and between them an
+infinitesimal pinch of metallic dust. "That's all," he said, proudly, as
+though himself responsible for the wonder. "That is the thing that will
+reveal to us the Powers--whatever the Powers may be--at work--through
+space--a long distance away."
+
+Just then Mr. Shaynor returned alone and stood coughing his heart out on
+the mat.
+
+"Serves you right for being such a fool," said young Mr. Cashell, as
+annoyed as myself at the interruption. "Never mind--we've all the night
+before us to see wonders."
+
+Shaynor clutched the counter, his handkerchief to his lips. When he
+brought it away I saw two bright red stains.
+
+"I--I've got a bit of a rasped throat from smoking cigarettes," he panted.
+"I think I'll try a cubeb."
+
+"Better take some of this. I've been compounding while you've been away."
+I handed him the brew.
+
+"'Twon't make me drunk, will it? I'm almost a teetotaller. My word! That's
+grateful and comforting."
+
+He sat down the empty glass to cough afresh.
+
+"Brr! But it was cold out there! I shouldn't care to be lying in my grave
+a night like this. Don't _you_ ever have a sore throat from smoking?" He
+pocketed the handkerchief after a furtive peep.
+
+"Oh, yes, sometimes," I replied, wondering, while I spoke, into what
+agonies of terror I should fall if ever I saw those bright-red danger-
+signals under my nose. Young Mr. Cashell among the batteries coughed
+slightly to show that he was quite ready to continue his scientific
+explanations, but I was thinking still of the girl with the rich voice and
+the significantly cut mouth, at whose command I had taken charge of the
+shop. It flashed across me that she distantly resembled the seductive
+shape on a gold-framed toilet-water advertisement whose charms were
+unholily heightened by the glare from the red bottle in the window.
+Turning to make sure, I saw Mr. Shaynor's eyes bent in the same direction,
+and by instinct recognised that the flamboyant thing was to him a shrine.
+"What do you take for your--cough?" I asked.
+
+"Well, I'm the wrong side of the counter to believe much in patent
+medicines. But there are asthma cigarettes and there are pastilles. To
+tell you the truth, if you don't object to the smell, which is very like
+incense, I believe, though I'm not a Roman Catholic, Blaudett's Cathedral
+Pastilles relieve me as much as anything."
+
+"Let's try." I had never raided a chemist's shop before, so I was
+thorough. We unearthed the pastilles--brown, gummy cones of benzoin--and
+set them alight under the toilet-water advertisement, where they fumed in
+thin blue spirals.
+
+"Of course," said Mr. Shaynor, to my question, "what one uses in the shop
+for one's self comes out of one's pocket. Why, stock-taking in our
+business is nearly the same as with jewellers--and I can't say more than
+that. But one gets them"--he pointed to the pastille-box--"at trade
+prices." Evidently the censing of the gay, seven-tinted wench with the
+teeth was an established ritual which cost something.
+
+"And when do we shut up shop?"
+
+"We stay like this all night. The gov--old Mr. Cashell--doesn't believe
+in locks and shutters as compared with electric light. Besides it brings
+trade. I'll just sit here in the chair by the stove and write a letter,
+if you don't mind. Electricity isn't my prescription."
+
+The energetic young Mr. Cashell snorted within, and Shaynor settled
+himself up in his chair over which he had thrown a staring red, black, and
+yellow Austrian jute blanket, rather like a table-cover. I cast about,
+amid patent medicine pamphlets, for something to read, but finding little,
+returned to the manufacture of the new drink. The Italian warehouse took
+down its game and went to bed. Across the street blank shutters flung back
+the gaslight in cold smears; the dried pavement seemed to rough up in
+goose-flesh under the scouring of the savage wind, and we could hear, long
+ere he passed, the policeman flapping his arms to keep himself warm.
+Within, the flavours of cardamoms and chloric-ether disputed those of the
+pastilles and a score of drugs and perfume and soap scents. Our electric
+lights, set low down in the windows before the tunbellied Rosamund jars,
+flung inward three monstrous daubs of red, blue, and green, that broke
+into kaleidoscopic lights on the facetted knobs of the drug-drawers, the
+cut-glass scent flagons, and the bulbs of the sparklet bottles. They
+flushed the white-tiled floor in gorgeous patches; splashed along the
+nickel-silver counter-rails, and turned the polished mahogany counter-
+panels to the likeness of intricate grained marbles--slabs of porphyry and
+malachite. Mr. Shaynor unlocked a drawer, and ere he began to write, took
+out a meagre bundle of letters. From my place by the stove, I could see
+the scalloped edges of the paper with a flaring monogram in the corner and
+could even smell the reek of chypre. At each page he turned toward the
+toilet-water lady of the advertisement and devoured her with over-luminous
+eyes. He had drawn the Austrian blanket over his shoulders, and among
+those warring lights he looked more than ever the incarnation of a drugged
+moth--a tiger-moth as I thought.
+
+He put his letter into an envelope, stamped it with stiff mechanical
+movements, and dropped it in the drawer. Then I became aware of the
+silence of a great city asleep--the silence that underlaid the even voice
+of the breakers along the sea-front--a thick, tingling quiet of warm life
+stilled down for its appointed time, and unconsciously I moved about the
+glittering shop as one moves in a sick-room. Young Mr. Cashell was
+adjusting some wire that crackled from time to time with the tense,
+knuckle-stretching sound of the electric spark. Upstairs, where a door
+shut and opened swiftly, I could hear his uncle coughing abed.
+
+"Here," I said, when the drink was properly warmed, "take some of this,
+Mr. Shaynor."
+
+He jerked in his chair with a start and a wrench, and held out his hand
+for the glass. The mixture, of a rich port-wine colour, frothed at the
+top.
+
+"It looks," he said, suddenly, "it looks--those bubbles--like a string of
+pearls winking at you--rather like the pearls round that young lady's
+neck." He turned again to the advertisement where the female in the dove-
+coloured corset had seen fit to put on all her pearls before she cleaned
+her teeth.
+
+"Not bad, is it?" I said.
+
+"Eh?"
+
+He rolled his eyes heavily full on me, and, as I stared, I beheld all
+meaning and consciousness die out of the swiftly dilating pupils. His
+figure lost its stark rigidity, softened into the chair, and, chin on
+chest, hands dropped before him, he rested open-eyed, absolutely still.
+
+"I'm afraid I've rather cooked Shaynor's goose," I said, bearing the fresh
+drink to young Mr. Cashell. "Perhaps it was the chloric-ether."
+
+"Oh, he's all right." The spade-bearded man glanced at him pityingly.
+"Consumptives go off in those sort of doses very often. It's exhaustion...
+I don't wonder. I dare say the liquor will do him good. It's grand stuff,"
+he finished his share appreciatively. "Well, as I was saying--before he
+interrupted--about this little coherer. The pinch of dust, you see, is
+nickel-filings. The Hertzian waves, you see, come out of space from the
+station that despatches 'em, and all these little particles are attracted
+together--cohere, we call it--for just so long as the current passes
+through them. Now, it's important to remember that the current is an
+induced current. There are a good many kinds of induction----"
+
+"Yes, but what _is_ induction?"
+
+"That's rather hard to explain untechnically. But the long and the short
+of it is that when a current of electricity passes through a wire there's
+a lot of magnetism present round that wire; and if you put another wire
+parallel to, and within what we call its magnetic field--why then, the
+second wire will also become charged with electricity."
+
+"On its own account?"
+
+"On its own account."
+
+"Then let's see if I've got it correctly. Miles off, at Poole, or wherever
+it is----"
+
+"It will be anywhere in ten years."
+
+"You've got a charged wire----"
+
+"Charged with Hertzian waves which vibrate, say, two hundred and thirty
+million times a second." Mr. Cashell snaked his forefinger rapidly through
+the air.
+
+"All right--a charged wire at Poole, giving out these waves into space.
+Then this wire of yours sticking out into space--on the roof of the house
+--in some mysterious way gets charged with those waves from Poole----"
+
+"Or anywhere--it only happens to be Poole tonight."
+
+"And those waves set the coherer at work, just like an ordinary telegraph-
+office ticker?"
+
+"No! That's where so many people make the mistake. The Hertzian waves
+wouldn't be strong enough to work a great heavy Morse instrument like
+ours. They can only just make that dust cohere, and while it coheres (a
+little while for a dot and a longer while for a dash) the current from
+this battery--the home battery"--he laid his hand on the thing--"can get
+through to the Morse printing-machine to record the dot or dash. Let me
+make it clearer. Do you know anything about steam?"
+
+"Very little. But go on."
+
+"Well, the coherer is like a steam-valve. Any child can open a valve and
+start a steamer's engines, because a turn of the hand lets in the main
+steam, doesn't it? Now, this home battery here ready to print is the main
+steam. The coherer is the valve, always ready to be turned on. The
+Hertzian wave is the child's hand that turns it."
+
+"I see. That's marvellous."
+
+"Marvellous, isn't it? And, remember, we're only at the beginning. There's
+nothing we sha'n't be able to do in ten years. I want to live--my God, how
+I want to live, and see it develop!" He looked through the door at Shaynor
+breathing lightly in his chair. "Poor beast! And he wants to keep company
+with Fanny Brand."
+
+"Fanny _who_?" I said, for the name struck an obscurely familiar chord in
+my brain--something connected with a stained handkerchief, and the word
+"arterial."
+
+"Fanny Brand--the girl you kept shop for." He laughed, "That's all I know
+about her, and for the life of me I can't see what Shaynor sees in her, or
+she in him."
+
+"_Can't_ you see what he sees in her?" I insisted.
+
+"Oh, yes, if _that's_ what you mean. She's a great, big, fat lump of a
+girl, and so on. I suppose that's why he's so crazy after her. She isn't
+his sort. Well, it doesn't matter. My uncle says he's bound to die before
+the year's out. Your drink's given him a good sleep, at any rate." Young
+Mr. Cashell could not catch Mr. Shaynor's face, which was half turned to
+the advertisement.
+
+I stoked the stove anew, for the room was growing cold, and lighted
+another pastille. Mr. Shaynor in his chair, never moving, looked through
+and over me with eyes as wide and lustreless as those of a dead hare.
+
+"Poole's late," said young Mr. Cashell, when I stepped back. "I'll just
+send them a call."
+
+He pressed a key in the semi-darkness, and with a rending crackle there
+leaped between two brass knobs a spark, streams of sparks, and sparks
+again.
+
+"Grand, isn't it? _That's_ the Power--our unknown Power--kicking and
+fighting to be let loose," said young Mr. Cashell. "There she goes--kick--
+kick--kick into space. I never get over the strangeness of it when I work
+a sending-machine--waves going into space, you know. T.R. is our call.
+Poole ought to answer with L.L.L."
+
+We waited two, three, five minutes. In that silence, of which the boom of
+the tide was an orderly part, I caught the clear "_kiss--kiss--kiss_" of
+the halliards on the roof, as they were blown against the installation-
+pole.
+
+"Poole is not ready. I'll stay here and call you when he is."
+
+I returned to the shop, and set down my glass on a marble slab with a
+careless clink. As I did so, Shaynor rose to his feet, his eyes fixed once
+more on the advertisement, where the young woman bathed in the light from
+the red jar simpered pinkly over her pearls. His lips moved without
+cessation. I stepped nearer to listen. "And threw--and threw--and threw,"
+he repeated, his face all sharp with some inexplicable agony.
+
+I moved forward astonished. But it was then he found words--delivered
+roundly and clearly. These:--
+
+And threw warm gules on Madeleine's young breast.
+
+The trouble passed off his countenance, and he returned lightly to his
+place, rubbing his hands.
+
+It had never occurred to me, though we had many times discussed reading
+and prize-competitions as a diversion, that Mr. Shaynor ever read Keats,
+or could quote him at all appositely. There was, after all, a certain
+stained-glass effect of light on the high bosom of the highly-polished
+picture which might, by stretch of fancy, suggest, as a vile chromo
+recalls some incomparable canvas, the line he had spoken. Night, my drink,
+and solitude were evidently turning Mr. Shaynor into a poet. He sat down
+again and wrote swiftly on his villainous note-paper, his lips quivering.
+
+I shut the door into the inner office and moved up behind him. He made no
+sign that he saw or heard. I looked over his shoulder, and read, amid
+half-formed words, sentences, and wild scratches:--
+
+  --Very cold it was. Very cold
+  The hare--the hare--the hare--
+  The birds----
+
+He raised his head sharply, and frowned toward the blank shutters of the
+poulterer's shop where they jutted out against our window. Then one clear
+line came:--
+
+  The hare, in spite of fur, was very cold.
+
+The head, moving machine-like, turned right to the advertisement where
+the Blaudett's Cathedral pastille reeked abominably. He grunted, and went
+on:--
+
+  Incense in a censer--
+  Before her darling picture framed in gold--
+  Maiden's picture--angel's portrait--
+
+"Hsh!" said Mr. Cashell guardedly from the inner office, as though in the
+presence of spirits. "There's something coming through from somewhere; but
+it isn't Poole." I heard the crackle of sparks as he depressed the keys of
+the transmitter. In my own brain, too, something crackled, or it might
+have been the hair on my head. Then I heard my own voice, in a harsh
+whisper: "Mr. Cashell, there is something coming through here, too. Leave
+me alone till I tell you."
+
+"But I thought you'd come to see this wonderful thing--Sir," indignantly
+at the end.
+
+"Leave me alone till I tell you. Be quiet."
+
+I watched--I waited. Under the blue-veined hand--the dry hand of the
+consumptive--came away clear, without erasure:
+
+And my weak spirit fails To think how the dead must freeze--
+he shivered as he wrote--
+
+Beneath the churchyard mould.
+
+Then he stopped, laid the pen down, and leaned back.
+
+For an instant, that was half an eternity, the shop spun before me in a
+rainbow-tinted whirl, in and through which my own soul most
+dispassionately considered my own soul as that fought with an over-
+mastering fear. Then I smelt the strong smell of cigarettes from Mr.
+Shaynor's clothing, and heard, as though it had been the rending of
+trumpets, the rattle of his breathing. I was still in my place of
+observation, much as one would watch a rifle-shot at the butts, half-bent,
+hands on my knees, and head within a few inches of the black, red, and
+yellow blanket of his shoulder. I was whispering encouragement, evidently
+to my other self, sounding sentences, such as men pronounce in dreams.
+
+"If he has read Keats, it proves nothing. If he hasn't--like causes _must_
+beget like effects. There is no escape from this law. _You_ ought to be
+grateful that you know 'St. Agnes Eve' without the book; because, given
+the circumstances, such as Fanny Brand, who is the key of the enigma, and
+approximately represents the latitude and longitude of Fanny Brawne;
+allowing also for the bright red colour of the arterial blood upon the
+handkerchief, which was just what you were puzzling over in the shop just
+now; and counting the effect of the professional environment, here almost
+perfectly duplicated--the result is logical and inevitable. As inevitable
+as induction."
+
+Still, the other half of my soul refused to be comforted. It was cowering
+in some minute and inadequate corner--at an immense distance.
+
+Hereafter, I found myself one person again, my hands still gripping my
+knees, and my eyes glued on the page before Mr. Shaynor. As dreamers
+accept and explain the upheaval of landscapes and the resurrection of the
+dead, with excerpts from the evening hymn or the multiplication-table, so
+I had accepted the facts, whatever they might be, that I should witness,
+and had devised a theory, sane and plausible to my mind, that explained
+them all. Nay, I was even in advance of my facts, walking hurriedly before
+them, assured that they would fit my theory. And all that I now recall of
+that epoch-making theory are the lofty words: "If he has read Keats it's
+the chloric-ether. If he hasn't, it's the identical bacillus, or Hertzian
+wave of tuberculosis, _plus_ Fanny Brand and the professional status
+which, in conjunction with the main-stream of subconscious thought common
+to all mankind, has thrown up temporarily an induced Keats."
+
+Mr. Shaynor returned to his work, erasing and rewriting as before with
+swiftness. Two or three blank pages he tossed aside. Then he wrote,
+muttering:
+
+The little smoke of a candle that goes out.
+
+"No," he muttered. "Little smoke--little smoke--little smoke. What else?"
+He thrust his chin forward toward the advertisement, whereunder the last
+of the Blaudett's Cathedral pastilles fumed in its holder. "Ah!" Then with
+relief:--
+
+The little smoke that dies in moonlight cold.
+
+Evidently he was snared by the rhymes of his first verse, for he wrote and
+rewrote "gold--cold--mould" many times. Again he sought inspiration from
+the advertisement, and set down, without erasure, the line I had
+overheard:
+
+And threw warm gules on Madeleine's young breast.
+
+As I remembered the original it is "fair"--a trite word--instead of
+"young," and I found myself nodding approval, though I admitted that the
+attempt to reproduce "its little smoke in pallid moonlight died" was a
+failure.
+
+Followed without a break ten or fifteen lines of bald prose--the naked
+soul's confession of its physical yearning for its beloved--unclean as we
+count uncleanliness; unwholesome, but human exceedingly; the raw material,
+so it seemed to me in that hour and in that place, whence Keats wove the
+twenty-sixth, seventh, and eighth stanzas of his poem. Shame I had none in
+overseeing this revelation; and my fear had gone with the smoke of the
+pastille.
+
+"That's it," I murmured. "That's how it's blocked out. Go on! Ink it in,
+man. Ink it in!"
+
+Mr. Shaynor returned to broken verse wherein "loveliness" was made to
+rhyme with a desire to look upon "her empty dress." He picked up a fold of
+the gay, soft blanket, spread it over one hand, caressed it with infinite
+tenderness, thought, muttered, traced some snatches which I could not
+decipher, shut his eyes drowsily, shook his head, and dropped the stuff.
+Here I found myself at fault, for I could not then see (as I do now) in
+what manner a red, black, and yellow Austrian blanket coloured his dreams.
+
+In a few minutes he laid aside his pen, and, chin on hand, considered the
+shop with thoughtful and intelligent eyes. He threw down the blanket,
+rose, passed along a line of drug-drawers, and read the names on the
+labels aloud. Returning, he took from his desk Christie's _New Commercial
+Plants_ and the old Culpepper that I had given him, opened and laid them
+side by side with a clerky air, all trace of passion gone from his face,
+read first in one and then in the other, and paused with pen behind his
+ear.
+
+"What wonder of Heaven's coming now?" I thought.
+
+"Manna--manna--manna," he said at last, under wrinkled brows. "That's what
+I wanted. Good! Now then! Now then! Good! Good! Oh, by God, that's good!"
+His voice rose and he spoke rightly and fully without a falter:--
+
+  Candied apple, quince and plum and gourd,
+  And jellies smoother than the creamy curd,
+  And lucent syrups tinct with cinnamon,
+  Manna and dates in Argosy transferred
+  From Fez; and spiced dainties, every one
+  From silken Samarcand to cedared Lebanon.
+
+He repeated it once more, using "blander" for "smoother" in the second
+line; then wrote it down without erasure, but this time (my set eyes
+missed no stroke of any word) he substituted "soother" for his atrocious
+second thought, so that it came away under his hand as it is written in
+the book--as it is written in the book.
+
+A wind went shouting down the street, and on the heels of the wind
+followed a spurt and rattle of rain.
+
+After a smiling pause--and good right had he to smile--he began anew,
+always tossing the last sheet over his shoulder:--
+
+  "The sharp rain falling on the window-pane,
+  Rattling sleet--the wind-blown sleet."
+
+Then prose: "It is very cold of mornings when the wind brings rain and
+sleet with it. I heard the sleet on the window-pane outside, and thought
+of you, my darling. I am always thinking of you. I wish we could both run
+away like two lovers into the storm and get that little cottage by the
+sea which we are always thinking about, my own dear darling. We could sit
+and watch the sea beneath our windows. It would be a fairyland all of our
+own--a fairy sea--a fairy sea...."
+
+He stopped, raised his head, and listened. The steady drone of the
+Channel along the sea-front that had borne us company so long leaped up a
+note to the sudden fuller surge that signals the change from ebb to
+flood. It beat in like the change of step throughout an army--this
+renewed pulse of the sea--and filled our ears till they, accepting it,
+marked it no longer.
+
+  "A fairyland for you and me
+  Across the foam--beyond ...
+  A magic foam, a perilous sea."
+
+He grunted again with effort and bit his underlip. My throat dried, but I
+dared not gulp to moisten it lest I should break the spell that was
+drawing him nearer and nearer to the high-water mark but two of the sons
+of Adam have reached. Remember that in all the millions permitted there
+are no more than five--five little lines--of which one can say: "These
+are the pure Magic. These are the clear Vision. The rest is only poetry."
+And Mr. Shaynor was playing hot and cold with two of them!
+
+I vowed no unconscious thought of mine should influence the blindfold
+soul, and pinned myself desperately to the other three, repeating and
+re-repeating:
+
+  A savage spot as holy and enchanted
+  As e'er beneath a waning moon was haunted
+  By woman wailing for her demon lover.
+
+But though I believed my brain thus occupied, my every sense hung upon
+the writing under the dry, bony hand, all brown-fingered with chemicals
+and cigarette-smoke.
+
+  Our windows fronting on the dangerous foam,
+
+(he wrote, after long, irresolute snatches), and then--
+
+  "Our open casements facing desolate seas
+  Forlorn--forlorn--"
+
+Here again his face grew peaked and anxious with that sense of loss I had
+first seen when the Power snatched him. But this time the agony was
+tenfold keener. As I watched it mounted like mercury in the tube. It
+lighted his face from within till I thought the visibly scourged soul
+must leap forth naked between his jaws, unable to endure. A drop of sweat
+trickled from my forehead down my nose and splashed on the back of my
+hand.
+
+  "Our windows facing on the desolate seas
+  And pearly foam of magic fairyland--"
+
+  "Not yet--not yet," he muttered, "wait a minute.
+  _Please_ wait a minute. I shall get it then--"
+
+  Our magic windows fronting on the sea,
+  The dangerous foam of desolate seas ..
+  For aye.
+
+"_Ouh_, my God!"
+
+From head to heel he shook--shook from the marrow of his bones
+outwards--then leaped to his feet with raised arms, and slid the chair
+screeching across the tiled floor where it struck the drawers behind and
+fell with a jar. Mechanically, I stooped to recover it.
+
+As I rose, Mr. Shaynor was stretching and yawning at leisure.
+
+"I've had a bit of a doze," he said. "How did I come to knock the chair
+over? You look rather--"
+
+"The chair startled me," I answered. "It was so sudden in this quiet."
+
+Young Mr. Cashell behind his shut door was offendedly silent.
+
+"I suppose I must have been dreaming," said Mr. Shaynor.
+
+"I suppose you must," I said. "Talking of dreams--I--I noticed you
+writing--before--"
+
+He flushed consciously.
+
+"I meant to ask you if you've ever read anything written by a man called
+Keats."
+
+"Oh! I haven't much time to read poetry, and I can't say that I remember
+the name exactly. Is he a popular writer?"
+
+"Middling. I thought you might know him because he's the only poet who
+was ever a druggist. And he's rather what's called the lover's poet."
+
+"Indeed. I must dip into him. What did he write about?"
+
+"A lot of things. Here's a sample that may interest you."
+
+Then and there, carefully, I repeated the verse he had twice spoken and
+once written not ten minutes ago.
+
+"Ah. Anybody could see he was a druggist from that line about the
+tinctures and syrups. It's a fine tribute to our profession."
+
+"I don't know," said young Mr. Cashell, with icy politeness, opening the
+door one half-inch, "if you still happen to be interested in our trifling
+experiments. But, should such be the case----"
+
+I drew him aside, whispering, "Shaynor seemed going off into some sort of
+fit when I spoke to you just now. I thought, even at the risk of being
+rude, it wouldn't do to take you off your instruments just as the call
+was coming through. Don't you see?"
+
+"Granted--granted as soon as asked," he said unbending. "I _did_ think it
+a shade odd at the time. So that was why he knocked the chair down?"
+
+"I hope I haven't missed anything," I said.
+"I'm afraid I can't say that, but you're just in time for the end of a
+rather curious performance. You can come in, too, Mr. Shaynor. Listen,
+while I read it off."
+
+The Morse instrument was ticking furiously. Mr. Cashell interpreted:
+"'_K.K.V. Can make nothing of your signals_.'" A pause. "'_M.M.V. M.M.V.
+Signals unintelligible. Purpose anchor Sandown Bay. Examine instruments
+to-morrow.'_ Do you know what that means? It's a couple of men-o'-war
+working Marconi signals off the Isle of Wight. They are trying to talk to
+each other. Neither can read the other's messages, but all their messages
+are being taken in by our receiver here. They've been going on for ever so
+long. I wish you could have heard it."
+
+"How wonderful!" I said. "Do you mean we're overhearing Portsmouth ships
+trying to talk to each other--that we're eavesdropping across half South
+England?"
+
+"Just that. Their transmitters are all right, but their receivers are out
+of order, so they only get a dot here and a dash there. Nothing clear."
+
+"Why is that?"
+
+"God knows--and Science will know to-morrow. Perhaps the induction is
+faulty; perhaps the receivers aren't tuned to receive just the number of
+vibrations per second that the transmitter sends. Only a word here and
+there. Just enough to tantalise."
+
+Again the Morse sprang to life.
+
+"That's one of 'em complaining now. Listen: '_Disheartening--most
+disheartening_.' It's quite pathetic. Have you ever seen a spiritualistic
+seance? It reminds me of that sometimes--odds and ends of messages coming
+out of nowhere--a word here and there--no good at all."
+
+"But mediums are all impostors," said Mr. Shaynor, in the doorway,
+lighting an asthma-cigarette. "They only do it for the money they can
+make. I've seen 'em."
+
+"Here's Poole, at last--clear as a bell. L.L.L. _Now_ we sha'n't be long."
+Mr. Cashell rattled the keys merrily. "Anything you'd like to tell 'em?"
+
+"No, I don't think so," I said. "I'll go home and get to bed. I'm feeling
+a little tired."
+
+
+
+
+THE ARMY OF A DREAM
+
+SONG OF THE OLD GUARD
+
+"And thou shalt make a candlestick of pure gold of beaten work shall the
+candlestick be made: his shaft and its branches, his bowls, his knops,
+and his flowers, shall be the same.
+
+"And there shall be a knop under two branches of the same, and a knop
+under two branches of the same, and a knop under two branches of the
+same, according to the six branches that proceed out of the candlestick.
+Their knops and their branches shall be the same."--_Exodus._
+
+  "Know this, my brethren, Heaven is clear
+    And all the clouds are gone--
+  The Proper Sort shall flourish now,
+    Good times are coming on"--
+  The evil that was threatened late
+    To all of our degree,
+  Hath passed in discord and debate,
+    And, _Hey then up go we!_
+
+  A common people strove in vain
+    To shame us unto toil,
+  But they are spent and we remain,
+    And we shall share the spoil
+  According to our several needs
+    As Beauty shall decree,
+  As Age ordains or Birth concedes,
+    And, _Hey then up go we!_
+
+  And they that with accursed zeal
+    Our Service would amend,
+  Shall own the odds and come to heel
+    Ere worse befall their end
+  For though no naked word be wrote
+    Yet plainly shall they see
+  What pinneth Orders to their coat,
+    And, _Hey then up go we!_
+
+  Our doorways that, in time of fear,
+    We opened overwide
+  Shall softly close from year to year
+    Till all be purified;
+  For though no fluttering fan be heard
+    Nor chaff be seen to flee--
+  The Lord shall winnow the Lord's Preferred--
+    And, _Hey then up go we!_
+
+  Our altars which the heathen brake
+    Shall rankly smoke anew,
+  And anise, mint, and cummin take
+    Their dread and sovereign due,
+  Whereby the buttons of our trade
+    Shall all restored be
+  With curious work in gilt and braid,
+    And, _Hey then up go we!_
+
+  Then come, my brethren, and prepare
+    The candlesticks and bells,
+  The scarlet, brass, and badger's hair
+    Wherein our Honour dwells,
+  And straitly fence and strictly keep
+    The Ark's integrity
+  Till Armageddon break our sleep ...
+    And, _Hey then up go we!_
+
+
+THE ARMY OF A DREAM
+
+PART I
+
+I sat down in the club smoking-room to fill a pipe.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It was entirely natural that I should be talking to "Boy" Bayley. We had
+met first, twenty odd years ago, at the Indian mess of the Tyneside
+Tail-twisters. Our last meeting, I remembered, had been at the Mount
+Nelson Hotel, which was by no means India, and there we had talked half
+the night. Boy Bayley had gone up that week to the front, where I think
+he stayed a long, long time.
+
+But now he had come back.
+
+"Are you still a Tynesider?" I asked.
+
+"I command the Imperial Guard Battalion of the old regiment, my son," he
+replied.
+
+"Guard which? They've been Fusiliers since Fontenoy. Don't pull my leg,
+Boy."
+
+"I said Guard, not Guard-s. The I. G. Battalion of the Tail-twisters.
+Does that make it any clearer?"
+
+"Not in the least."
+
+"Then come over to the mess and see for yourself. We aren't a step from
+barracks. Keep on my right side. I'm--I'm a bit deaf on the near."
+
+We left the club together and crossed the street to a vast four-storied
+pile, which more resembled a Rowton lodging-house than a barrack. I could
+see no sentry at the gates.
+
+"There ain't any," said the Boy lightly. He led me into a many-tabled
+restaurant full of civilians and grey-green uniforms. At one end of the
+room, on a slightly raised dais, stood a big table.
+
+"Here we are! We usually lunch here and dine in mess by ourselves. These
+are our chaps--but what am I thinking of? You must know most of 'em.
+Devine's my second in command now. There's old Luttrell--remember him at
+Cherat?--Burgard, Verschoyle (you were at school with him), Harrison,
+Pigeon, and Kyd."
+
+With the exception of this last I knew them all, but I could not remember
+that they had all been Tynesiders.
+
+"I've never seen this sort of place," I said, looking round. "Half the
+men here are in plain clothes, and what are those women and children
+doing?"
+
+"Eating, I hope," Boy Bayley answered. "Our canteens would never pay if
+it wasn't for the Line and Militia trade. When they were first started
+people looked on 'em rather as catsmeat-shops; but we got a duchess or
+two to lunch in 'em, and they've been grossly fashionable since."
+
+"So I see," I answered. A woman of the type that shops at the Stores came
+up the room looking about her. A man in the dull-grey uniform of the
+corps rose up to meet her, piloted her to a place between three other
+uniforms, and there began a very merry little meal.
+
+"I give it up," I said. "This is guilty splendour that I don't
+understand."
+
+"Quite simple," said Burgard across the table. "The barrack supplies
+breakfast, dinner, and tea on the Army scale to the Imperial Guard (which
+we call I. G.) when it's in barracks as well as to the Line and Militia.
+They can all invite their friends if they choose to pay for them. That's
+where we make our profits. Look!"
+
+Near one of the doors were four or five tables crowded with workmen in
+the raiment of their callings. They ate steadily, but found time to jest
+with the uniforms about them; and when one o'clock clanged from a big
+half-built block of flats across the street, filed out.
+
+"Those," Devine explained, "are either our Line or Militiamen, as such
+entitled to the regulation whack at regulation cost. It's cheaper than
+they could buy it; an' they meet their friends too. A man'll walk a mile
+in his dinner hour to mess with his own lot."
+
+"Wait a minute," I pleaded. "Will you tell me what those plumbers and
+plasterers and bricklayers that I saw go out just now have to do with
+what I was taught to call the Line?"
+
+"Tell him," said the Boy over his shoulder to Burgard. He was busy
+talking with the large Verschoyle, my old schoolmate.
+
+"The Line comes next to the Guard. The Linesman's generally a town-bird
+who can't afford to be a Volunteer. He has to go into camp in an Area for
+two months his first year, six weeks his second, and a month the third.
+He gets about five bob a week the year round for that and for being on
+duty two days of the week, and for being liable to be ordered out to help
+the Guard in a row. He needn't live in barracks unless he wants to, and
+he and his family can feed at the regimental canteen at usual rates. The
+women like it."
+
+"All this," I said politely, but intensely, "is the raving of delirium.
+Where may your precious recruit who needn't live in barracks learn his
+drill?"
+
+"At his precious school, my child, like the rest of us. The notion of
+allowing a human being to reach his twentieth year before asking him to
+put his feet in the first position _was_ raving lunacy if you like!" Boy
+Bayley dived back into the conversation.
+
+"Very good," I said meekly. "I accept the virtuous plumber who puts in
+two months of his valuable time at Aldershot----"
+
+"Aldershot!" The table exploded. I felt a little annoyed.
+
+"A camp in an Area is not exactly Aldershot," said Burgard. "The Line
+isn't exactly what you fancy. Some of them even come to _us_!"
+
+"You recruit from 'em?"
+
+"I beg your pardon," said Devine with mock solemnity. "The Guard doesn't
+recruit. It selects."
+
+"It would," I said, "with a Spiers and Pond restaurant; pretty girls to
+play with; and----"
+
+"A room apiece, four bob a day and all found," said Verschoyle. "Don't
+forget that."
+
+"Of course!" I said. "It probably beats off recruits with a club."
+
+"No, with the ballot-box," said Verschoyle, laughing. "At least in all
+R.C. companies."
+
+"I didn't know Roman Catholics were so particular," I ventured.
+
+They grinned. "R.C. companies," said the Boy, "mean Right of Choice. When
+a company has been very good and pious for a long time it may, if the
+C.O. thinks fit, choose its own men--all same one-piecee club. All our
+companies are R.C.'s, and as the battalion is making up a few vacancies
+ere starting once more on the wild and trackless 'heef' into the Areas,
+the Linesman is here in force to-day sucking up to our non-coms."
+
+"Would some one mind explaining to me the meaning of every other word
+you've used," I said. "What's a trackless 'heef'? What's an Area? What's
+everything generally?" I asked.
+
+"Oh, 'heefs' part of the British Constitution," said the Boy. "It began
+long ago when they'd first mapped out the big military manoeuvring
+grounds--we call 'em Areas for short--where the I. G. spend two-thirds of
+their time and the other regiments get their training. It was slang
+originally for beef on the hoof, because in the Military Areas two-thirds
+of your meat-rations at least are handed over to you on the hoof, and you
+make your own arrangements. The word 'heef' became a parable for camping
+in the Military Areas and all its miseries. There are two Areas in
+Ireland, one in Wales for hill-work, a couple in Scotland, and a sort of
+parade-ground in the Lake District; but the real working Areas are in
+India, Africa, and Australia, and so on."
+
+"And what do you do there?"
+
+"We 'heef' under service conditions, which are rather like hard work. We
+'heef' in an English Area for about a year, coming into barracks for one
+month to make up wastage. Then we may 'heef' foreign for another year or
+eighteen months. Then we do sea-time in the war boats----"
+
+"_What-t?_" I said.
+
+"Sea-time," Bayley repeated. "Just like Marines,
+to learn about the big guns and how to embark and disembark quick. Then
+we come back to our territorial headquarters for six months, to educate
+the Line and Volunteer camps, to go to Hythe, to keep abreast of any new
+ideas, and then we fill up vacancies. We call those six months 'Schools,'
+Then we begin all over again, thus: Home 'heef,' foreign 'heef,'
+sea-time, schools. 'Heefing' isn't precisely luxurious, but it's on
+'heef' that we make our head-money."
+
+"Or lose it," said the sallow Pigeon, and all laughed, as men will, at
+regimental jokes.
+
+"The Dove never lets me forget that," said Boy Bayley. "It happened last
+March. We were out in the Second Northern Area at the top end of Scotland
+where a lot of those silly deer forests used to be. I'd sooner 'heef' in
+the middle of Australia myself--or Athabasca, with all respect to the
+Dove--he's a native of those parts. We were camped somewhere near
+Caithness, and the Armity (that's the combined Navy and Army board that
+runs our show) sent us about eight hundred raw remounts to break in to
+keep us warm."
+
+"Why horses for a foot regiment?"
+
+"I.G.'s don't foot it unless they're obliged to. No have gee-gee how can
+move? I'll show you later. Well, as I was saying, we broke those beasts
+in on compressed forage and small box-spurs, and then we started across
+Scotland to Applecross to hand 'em over to a horse-depot there. It was
+snowing cruel, and we didn't know the country overmuch. You remember the
+30th--the old East Lancashire--at Mian Mir?
+
+"Their Guard Battalion had been 'heefing' round those parts for six
+months. We thought they'd be snowed up all quiet and comfy, but Burden,
+their C. O., got wind of our coming, and sent spies in to Eschol."
+
+"Confound him," said Luttrell, who was fat and well-liking. "I
+entertained one of 'em--in a red worsted comforter--under Bean Derig. He
+said he was a crofter. 'Gave him a drink too."
+
+"I don't mind admitting," said the Boy, "that, what with the cold and the
+remounts, we were moving rather base over apex. Burden bottled us under
+Sghurr Mohr in a snowstorm. He stampeded half the horses, cut off a lot
+of us in a snow-bank, and generally rubbed our noses in the dirt."
+
+"Was he allowed to do that?" I said.
+
+"There is no peace in a Military Area. If we'd
+beaten him off or got away without losing anyone, we'd have been entitled
+to a day's pay from every man engaged against us. But we didn't. He cut
+off fifty of ours, held 'em as prisoners for the regulation three days,
+and then sent in his bill--three days' pay for each man taken. Fifty men
+at twelve bob a head, plus five pounds for the Dove as a captured
+officer, and Kyd here, his junior, three, made about forty quid to Burden
+& Co. They crowed over us horrid."
+
+"Couldn't you have appealed to an umpire or--or something?"
+
+"We could, but we talked it over with the men and decided to pay and look
+happy. We were fairly had. The 30th knew every foot of Sghurr Mohr. I
+spent three days huntin' 'em in the snow, but they went off on our
+remounts about twenty mile that night."
+
+"Do you always do this sham-fight business?" I asked.
+
+"Once inside an Area you must look after yourself; but I tell you that a
+fight which means that every man-Jack of us may lose a week's pay isn't
+so damn-sham after all. It keeps the men nippy. Still, in the long run,
+it's like whist on a P. & O. It comes out fairly level if you play long
+enough. Now and again, though, one gets a present--say, when a Line
+regiment's out on the 'heef,' and signifies that it's ready to abide by
+the rules of the game. You mustn't take head-money from a Line regiment
+in an Area unless it says that it'll play you; but, after a week or two,
+those clever Linesmen always think they see a chance of making a pot, and
+send in their compliments to the nearest I.G. Then the fun begins. We
+caught a Line regiment single-handed about two years ago in
+Ireland--caught it on the hop between a bog and a beach. It had just
+moved in to join its brigade, and we made a forty-two mile march in
+fourteen hours, and cut it off, lock, stock, and barrel. It went to
+ground like a badger--I _will_ say those Line regiments can dig--but we
+got out privily by night and broke up the only road it could expect to
+get its baggage and company-guns along. Then we blew up a bridge that
+some Sappers had made for experimental purposes (_they_ were rather
+stuffy about it) on its line of retreat, while we lay up in the mountains
+and signalled for the A.C. of those parts."
+
+"Who's an A.C.?" I asked.
+
+"The Adjustment Committee--the umpires of the Military Areas. They're a
+set of superannuated old aunts of colonels kept for the purpose, but they
+occasionally combine to do justice. Our A.C. came, saw our dispositions,
+and said it was a sanguinary massacre for the Line, and that we were
+entitled to our full pound of flesh--head-money for one whole regiment,
+with equipment, four company-guns, and all kit! At Line rates this worked
+out as one fat cheque for two hundred and fifty. Not bad!"
+
+"But we had to pay the Sappers seventy-four quid for blowing their patent
+bridge to pieces," Devine interpolated. "That was a swindle."
+
+"That's true," the Boy went on, "but the Adjustment Committee gave our
+helpless victims a talking to that was worth another hundred to hear."
+
+"But isn't there a lot of unfairness in this head-money system?" I asked.
+
+"Can't have everything perfect," said the Boy. "Head-money is an attempt
+at payment by results, and it gives the men a direct interest in their
+job. Three times out of five, of course, the A. C. will disallow both
+sides' claim, but there's always the chance of bringing off a coup."
+
+"Do all regiments do it?"
+
+"Heavily. The Line pays a bob per prisoner and the Militia ninepence, not
+to mention side-bets which are what really keep the men keen. It isn't
+supposed to be done by the Volunteers, but they gamble worse than anyone.
+Why, the very kids do it when they go to First Camp at Aldershot or
+Salisbury."
+
+"Head-money's a national institution--like betting," said Burgard.
+
+"I should say it was," said Pigeon suddenly. "I was roped in the other
+day as an Adjustment Committee by the Kemptown Board School. I was riding
+under the Brighton racecourse, and I heard the whistle goin' for
+umpire--the regulation, two longs and two shorts. I didn't take any
+notice till an infant about a yard high jumped up from a furze-patch and
+shouted: 'Guard! Guard! Come 'ere! I want you _per_fessionally. Alf says
+'e ain't outflanked. Ain't 'e a liar? Come an' look 'ow I've posted my
+men.' You bet I looked. The young demon trotted by my stirrup and showed
+me his whole army (twenty of 'em) laid out under cover as nicely as you
+please round a cowhouse in a hollow. He kept on shouting: 'I've drew Alf
+into there. 'Is persition ain't tenable. Say it ain't tenable, Guard!' I
+rode round the position, and Alf with his army came out of his cowhouse
+an' sat on the roof and protested like a--like a Militia Colonel; but the
+facts were in favour of my friend and I umpired according. Well, Alf
+abode by my decision. I explained it to him at length, and he solemnly
+paid up his head-money--farthing points if you please."
+
+"Did they pay you umpire's fee?" said Kyd. "I
+umpired a whole afternoon once for a village school at home, and they
+stood me a bottle of hot ginger beer."
+
+"I compromised on a halfpenny--a sticky one--or I'd have hurt their
+feelings," said Pigeon gravely. "But I gave 'em sixpence back."
+
+"How were they manoeuvring and what with?" I asked.
+
+"Oh, by whistle and hand-signal. They had the dummy Board School guns and
+flags for positions, but they were rushing their attack much too quick
+for that open country. I told 'em so, and they admitted it."
+
+"But who taught 'em?" I said.
+
+"They had learned in their schools, of course, like the rest of us. They
+were all of 'em over ten; and squad-drill begins when they're eight. They
+knew their company-drill a heap better than they knew their King's
+English."
+
+"How much drill do the boys put in?" I asked.
+
+"All boys begin physical drill to music in the Board Schools when they're
+six; squad-drill, one hour a week, when they're eight; company-drill when
+they're ten, for an hour and a half a week. Between ten and twelve they
+get battalion drill of a sort. They take the rifle at twelve and record
+their first target-score at thirteen. That's what the Code lays down. But
+it's worked very loosely so long as a boy comes up to the standard of his
+age."
+
+"In Canada we don't need your physical drill. We're born fit," said
+Pigeon, "and our ten-year-olds could knock spots out of your
+twelve-year-olds."
+
+"I may as well explain," said the Boy, "that the Dove is our 'swop'
+officer. He's an untamed Huskie from Nootka Sound when he's at home. An
+I. G. Corps exchanges one officer every two years with a Canadian or
+Australian or African Guard Corps. We've had a year of our Dove, an' we
+shall be sorry to lose him. He humbles our insular pride. Meantime,
+Morten, our 'swop' in Canada, keeps the ferocious Canuck humble. When
+Pij. goes we shall swop Kyd, who's next on the roster, for a Cornstalk or
+a Maori. But about the education-drill. A boy can't attend First Camp, as
+we call it, till he is a trained boy and holds his First Musketry
+certificate. The Education Code says he must be fourteen, and the boys
+usually go to First Camp at about that age. Of course, they've been to
+their little private camps and Boys' Fresh Air Camps and public school
+picnics while they were at school, but First Camp is where the young
+drafts all meet--generally at Aldershot in this part of the world. First
+Camp lasts a week or ten days, and the boys are looked over for
+vaccination and worked lightly in brigades with lots of blank cartridge.
+Second Camp--that's for the fifteen to eighteen-year-olds--lasts ten days
+or a fortnight, and that includes a final medical examination. Men don't
+like to be chucked out on medical certificates much--nowadays. I assure
+you Second Camp, at Salisbury, say, is an experience for a young I.G.
+officer. We're told off to 'em in rotation. A wilderness of monkeys isn't
+in it. The kids are apt to think 'emselves soldiers, and we have to take
+the edge off 'em with lots of picquet-work and night attacks."
+
+"And what happens after Second Camp?"
+
+"It's hard to explain. Our system is so illogical. Theoretically, the
+boys needn't show up for the next three or four years after Second Camp.
+They are supposed to be making their way in life. Actually, the young
+doctor or lawyer or engineer joins a Volunteer battalion that sticks to
+the minimum of camp--ten days per annum. That gives him a holiday in the
+open air, and now that men have taken to endowing their Volunteer
+drill-halls with baths and libraries, he finds, if he can't run to a
+club, that his own drill-hall is an efficient substitute. He meets men
+there who'll be useful to him later, and he keeps himself in touch with
+what's going on while he's studying for his profession. The
+town-birds--such as the chemist's assistant, clerk, plumber, mechanic,
+electrician, and so forth--generally put in for their town Volunteer
+corps as soon as they begin to walk out with the girls. They like takin'
+their true-loves to our restaurants. Look yonder!" I followed his gaze,
+and saw across the room a man and a maid at a far table, forgetting in
+each other's eyes the good food on their plates.
+
+"So it is," said I. "Go ahead."
+
+"Then, too, we have some town Volunteer corps that lay themselves out to
+attract promising youths of nineteen or twenty, and make much of 'em on
+condition that they join their Line battalion and play for their county.
+Under the new county qualifications--birth or three years' residence--that
+means a great deal in League matches, and the same in County cricket."
+
+"By Jove, that's a good notion," I cried. "Who invented it?"
+
+"C. B. Fry--long ago. He said in his paper, that County cricket and
+County volunteering ought to be on the same footing--unpaid and genuine.
+'No cricketer no corps. No corps no cricketer' was his watchword. There
+was a row among the pro's at first, but C. B. won, and later the League
+had to come in. They said at first it would ruin the gate; but when
+County matches began to be _pukka_ county, _plus_ inter-regimental,
+affairs the gate trebled, and as two-thirds of the gate goes to the
+regiments supplying the teams some Volunteer corps fairly wallow in cash.
+It's all unofficial, of course, but League Corps, as they call 'em, can
+take their pick of the Second Camper. Some corps ask ten guineas
+entrance-fee, and get it too, from the young bloods that want to shine in
+the arena. I told you we catered for all tastes. Now, as regards the Line
+proper, I believe the young artisan and mechanic puts in for that before
+he marries. He likes the two-months' 'heef' in his first year, and five
+bob a week is something to go on with between times."
+
+"Do they follow their trade while they're in the Line?" I demanded.
+
+"Why not? How many well-paid artisans work more than four days a week
+anyhow? Remember a Linesman hasn't to be drilled in your sense of the
+word. He must have had at least eight years' grounding in that, as well
+as two or three years in his Volunteer battalion. He can sleep where he
+pleases. He can't leave town-limits without reporting himself, of course,
+but he can get leave if he wants it. He's on duty two days in the week as
+a rule, and he's liable to be invited out for garrison duty down the
+Mediterranean, but his benefit societies will insure him against that.
+I'll tell you about that later. If it's a hard winter and trade's slack,
+a lot of the bachelors are taken into the I. G. barracks (while the I. G.
+is out on the heef) for theoretical instruction. Oh, I assure you the
+Line hasn't half a bad time of it."
+
+"Amazing!" I murmured. "And what about the others?"
+
+"The Volunteers? Observe the beauty of our system. We're a free people.
+We get up and slay the man who says we aren't. But as a little detail we
+never mention, if we don't volunteer in some corps or another--as
+combatants if we're fit, as non-combatants, if we ain't--till we're
+thirty-five we don't vote, and we don't get poor-relief, and the women
+don't love us."
+
+"Oh, that's the compulsion of it?" said I.
+
+Bayley inclined his head gravely. "That, Sir, is the compulsion. We voted
+the legal part of it ourselves in a fit of panic, and we have not yet
+rescinded our resolution. The women attend to the unofficial penalties.
+But being free British citizens----"
+
+"_And_ snobs," put in Pigeon.
+"The point is well taken, Pij------we have supplied ourselves with every
+sort and shape and make of Volunteer corps that you can imagine, and we've
+mixed the whole show up with our Odd Fellows and our I.O.G.T.'s and our
+Buffaloes, and our Burkes and our Debretts, not to mention Leagues and
+Athletic Clubs, till you can't tell t'other from which. You remember the
+young pup who used to look on soldiering as a favour done to his
+ungrateful country--the gun-poking, ferret-pettin', landed gentleman's
+offspring--the suckin' Facey Romford? Well, he generally joins a Foreign
+Service Corps when he leaves college."
+
+"Can Volunteers go foreign, then?"
+
+"Can't they just, if their C.O. _or_ his wife has influence! The Armity
+will always send a well-connected F.S. corps out to help a guard battalion
+in a small campaign. Otherwise F.S. corps make their own arrangements
+about camps. You see, the Military Areas are always open. They can 'heef'
+there (and gamble on head-money) as long as their finances run to it; or
+they can apply to do sea-time in the ships. It's a cheap way for a young
+man to see the world, and if he's any good he can try to get into the
+Guard later."
+
+"The main point," said Pigeon, "is that F.S. corps are 'swagger'--the
+correct thing. It 'ud never do to be drawn for the Militia, don't you
+know," he drawled, trying to render the English voice.
+
+"That's what happens to a chap who doesn't volunteer," said Bayley. "Well,
+after the F.S. corps (we've about forty of 'em) come our territorial
+Volunteer battalions, and a man who can't suit himself somewhere among 'em
+must be a shade difficult. We've got those 'League' corps I was talking
+about; and those studious corps that just scrape through their ten days'
+camp; and we've crack corps of highly-paid mechanics who can afford a two
+months' 'heef' in an interesting Area every other year; and we've senior
+and junior scientific corps of earnest boilermakers and fitters and
+engineers who read papers on high explosives, and do their 'heefing' in a
+wet picket-boat--mine-droppin'--at the ports. Then we've heavy artillery--
+recruited from the big manufacturing towns and ship-building yards--and
+ferocious hard-ridin' Yeomanry (they _can_ ride--now), genteel, semi-
+genteel, and Hooligan corps, and so on and so forth till you come to the
+Home Defence Establishment--the young chaps knocked out under medical
+certificate at the Second Camp, but good enough to sit behind hedges or
+clean up camp, and the old was-birds who've served their time but don't
+care to drop out of the fun of the yearly camps and the halls. They call
+'emselves veterans and do fancy-shooting at Bisley, but, between you and
+me, they're mostly Fresh Air Benefit Clubs. They contribute to the
+Volunteer journals and tell the Guard that it's no good. But I like 'em. I
+shall be one of 'em some day--a copper-nosed was-bird! ... So you see
+we're mixed to a degree on the Volunteer side."
+
+"It sounds that way," I ventured.
+
+"You've overdone it, Bayley," said Devine. "You've missed our one strong
+point." He turned to me and continued: "It's embarkation. The Volunteers
+may be as mixed as the Colonel says, but they _are_ trained to go down to
+the sea in ships. You ought to see a big Bank-Holiday roll-out. We suspend
+most of the usual railway traffic and turn on the military time-table--say
+on Friday at midnight. By 4 A.M. the trains are running from every big
+centre in England to the nearest port at two-minute intervals. As a rule,
+the Armity meets us at the other end with shipping of sorts--fleet
+reserves or regular men of war or hulks--anything you can stick a
+gang-plank to. We pile the men on to the troop-decks, stack the rifles in
+the racks, send down the sea-kit, steam about for a few hours, and land
+'em somewhere. It's a good notion, because our army to be any use _must_
+be an army of embarkation. Why, last Whit Monday we had--how many were
+down at the dock-edge in the first eight hours? Kyd, you're the Volunteer
+enthusiast last from school."
+
+"In the first ten hours over a hundred and eighteen thousand," said Kyd
+across the table, "with thirty-six thousand actually put in and taken out
+of ship. In the whole thirty-six hours we had close on ninety thousand men
+on the water and a hundred and thirty-three thousand on the quays fallen
+in with their sea-kit."
+
+"That must have been a sight," I said.
+
+"One didn't notice it much. It was scattered between Chatham, Dover,
+Portsmouth, Plymouth, Bristol, Liverpool, and so on, merely to give the
+inland men a chance to get rid of their breakfasts. We don't like to
+concentrate and try a big embarkation at any one point. It makes the
+Continent jumpy. Otherwise," said Kyd, "I believe we could get two hundred
+thousand men, with their kits, away on one tide."
+
+"What d'you want with so many?" I asked.
+
+"_We_ don't want one of 'em; but the Continent used to point out, every
+time relations were strained, that nothing would be easier than to raid
+England if they got command of the sea for a week. After a few years some
+genius discovered that it cut both ways, an' there was no reason why we,
+who are supposed to command the sea and own a few ships, should not
+organise our little raids in case of need. The notion caught on among the
+Volunteers--they were getting rather sick of manoeuvres on dry land--and
+since then we haven't heard so much about raids from the Continent," said
+Bayley.
+
+"It's the offensive-defensive," said Verschoyle, "that they talk so much
+about. We learned it _all_ from the Continent--bless 'em! They insisted on
+it so."
+
+"No, we learned it from the Fleet," said Devine. "The Mediterranean Fleet
+landed ten thousand marines and sailors, with guns, in twenty minutes once
+at manoeuvres. That was long ago. I've seen the Fleet Reserve and a few
+paddle-steamers, hired for the day, land twenty-five thousand Volunteers
+at Bantry in four hours--half the men sea-sick too. You've no notion what
+a difference that sort of manoeuvre makes in the calculations of our
+friends on the mainland. The Continent knows what invasion means. It's
+like dealing with a man whose nerve has been shaken. It doesn't cost much
+after all, and it makes us better friends with the great European family.
+We're now as thick as thieves."
+
+"Where does the Imperial Guard come in in all this gorgeousness?" I asked.
+"You're unusual modest about yourselves."
+
+"As a matter of fact, we're supposed to go out and stay out. We're the
+permanently mobilised lot. I don't think there are more than eight I.G.
+battalions in England now. We're a hundred battalions all told. Mostly on
+the 'heef' in India, Africa and so forth."
+
+"A hundred thousand. Isn't that small allowance?" I suggested.
+
+"You think so? One hundred thousand _men_, without a single case of
+venereal, and an average sick list of two per cent, permanently on a war
+footing? Well, perhaps you're right, but it's a useful little force to
+begin with while the others are getting ready. There's the native Indian
+Army also, which isn't a broken reed, and, since 'no Volunteer no Vote' is
+the rule throughout the Empire, you will find a few men in Canada,
+Australia, and elsewhere, that are fairly hefty in their class."
+
+"But a hundred thousand isn't enough for garrison duty," I persisted.
+
+"A hundred thousand _sound_ men, not sick boys, go quite a way," said
+Pigeon.
+
+"We expect the Line to garrison the Mediterranean Ports and thereabouts,"
+said Bayley. "Don't sneer at the mechanic. He's deuced good stuff. He
+isn't rudely ordered out, because this ain't a military despotism, and we
+have to consider people's feelings. The Armity usually brackets three Line
+regiments together, and calls for men for six months or a year for Malta,
+Gib, or elsewhere, at a bob a day. Three battalions will give you nearly a
+whole battalion of bachelors between 'em. You fill up deficiencies with a
+call on the territorial Volunteer battalion, and away you go with what we
+call a Ports battalion. What's astonishing in that? Remember that in this
+country, where fifty per cent of the able-bodied males have got a pretty
+fair notion of soldiering, and, which is more, have all camped out in the
+open, you wake up the spirit of adventure in the young."
+
+"Not much adventure at Malta, Gib, or Cyprus," I retorted. "Don't they get
+sick of it?"
+
+"But you don't realise that we treat 'em rather differently from the
+soldier of the past. You ought to go and see a Ports battalion drawn from
+a manufacturing centre growin' vines in Cyprus in its shirt sleeves; and
+at Gib, and Malta, of course, the battalions are working with the Fleet
+half the time."
+
+"It seems to me," I said angrily, "you are knocking _esprit de corps_ on
+the head with all this Army-Navy jumble. It's as bad as----"
+
+"I know what you're going to say. As bad as what Kitchener used to do when
+he believed that a thousand details picked up on the veldt were as good as
+a column of two regiments. In the old days, when drill was a sort of holy
+sacred art learned in old age, you'd be quite right. But remember _our_
+chaps are broke to drill from childhood, and the theory we work on is that
+a thousand trained Englishmen ought to be about as good as another
+thousand trained Englishmen. We've enlarged our horizon, that's all. Some
+day the Army and the Navy will be interchangeable."
+
+"You've enlarged it enough to fall out of, I think. Now where in all this
+mess of compulsory Volunteers----?"
+
+"My dear boy, there's no compulsion. You've _got_ to be drilled when
+you're a child, same as you've got to learn to read, and if you don't
+pretend to serve in some corps or other till you're thirty-five or
+medically chucked you rank with lunatics, women, and minors. That's fair
+enough."
+
+"Compulsory conscripts," I continued. "Where, as I was going to say, does
+the Militia come in?"
+
+"As I have said--for the men who can't afford volunteering. The Militia is
+recruited by ballot--pretty comprehensively too. Volunteers are exempt,
+but most men not otherwise accounted for are bagged by the Militia. They
+have to put in a minimum three weeks' camp every other year, and they get
+fifteen bob a week and their keep when they're at it, and some sort of a
+yearly fee, I've forgotten how much. 'Tisn't a showy service, but it's
+very useful. It keeps the mass of the men between twenty-five, say, and
+thirty-five moderately fit, and gives the Armity an excuse for having more
+equipment ready--in case of emergencies."
+
+"I don't think you're quite fair on the Militia," drawled Verschoyle.
+"They're better than we give 'em credit for. Don't you remember the Middle
+Moor Collieries' strike?"
+
+"Tell me," I said quickly. Evidently the others knew.
+
+"We-ell, it was no end of a pitman's strike about eight years ago. There
+were twenty-five thousand men involved--Militia, of course. At the end of
+the first month--October--when things were looking rather blue, one of
+those clever Labour leaders got hold of the Militia Act and discovered
+that any Militia regiment could, by a two-thirds vote, go on 'heef' in a
+Military Area in addition to its usual biennial camp. Two-and-twenty
+battalions of Geordies solemnly applied, and they were turned loose into
+the Irish and Scotch Areas under an I.G. Brigadier who had private
+instructions to knock clinkers out of 'em. But the pitman is a strong and
+agile bird. He throve on snowdrifts and entrenching and draggin' guns
+through heather. _He_ was being fed and clothed for nothing, besides
+having a chance of making head-money, and his strike-pay was going clear
+to his wife and family. You see? Wily man. But wachtabittje! When that
+'heef' finished in December the strike was still on. _Then_ that same
+Labour leader found out, from the same Act, that if at any time more than
+thirty or forty men of a Militia regiment wished to volunteer to do
+sea-time and study big guns in the Fleet they were in no wise to be
+discouraged, but were to be taken on as opportunity offered and paid a bob
+a day. Accordingly, about January, Geordie began volunteering for sea-
+time--seven and eight hundred men out of each regiment. Anyhow, it made up
+seventeen thousand men! It was a splendid chance and the Armity jumped at
+it. The Home and Channel Fleets and the North Sea and Cruiser Squadrons
+were strengthened with lame ducks from the Fleet Reserve, and between 'em
+with a little stretching and pushing they accommodated all of that young
+division."
+
+"Yes, but you've forgotten how we lied to the Continent about it. All
+Europe wanted to know what the dooce we were at," said Boy Bayley, "and
+the wretched Cabinet had to stump the country in the depths of winter
+explaining our new system of poor-relief. I beg your pardon, Verschoyle."
+
+"The Armity improvised naval manoeuvres between Gib and Land's End, with
+frequent coalings and landings; ending in a cruise round England that
+fairly paralysed the pitmen. The first day out they wanted the fleet
+stopped while they went ashore and killed their Labour leader, but they
+couldn't be obliged. Then they wanted to mutiny over the coaling--it was
+too like their own job. Oh, they had a lordly timel They came back--the
+combined Fleets anchored off Hull--with a nautical hitch to their
+breeches. They'd had a free fight at Gib with the Ports battalion there;
+they cleared out the town of Lagos; and they'd fought a pitched battle
+with the dockyard-mateys at Devonport. So they'd done 'emselves well, but
+they didn't want any more military life for a bit."
+
+"And the strike?"
+
+"That ended, all right enough, when the strike-money came to an end. The
+pit-owners were furious. They said the Armity had wilfully prolonged the
+strike, and asked questions in the House. The Armity said that they had
+taken advantage of the crisis to put a six months' polish on fifteen
+thousand fine young men, and if the masters cared to come out on the same
+terms they'd be happy to do the same by them."
+
+"And then?"
+
+"Palaver done set," said Bayley. "Everybody laughed."
+
+"I don't quite understand about this sea-time business," I said. "Is the
+Fleet open to take any regiment aboard?"
+
+"Rather. The I.G. must, the Line can, the Militia may, and the Volunteers
+do put in sea-time. The Coast Volunteers began it, and the fashion is
+spreading inland. Under certain circumstances, as Verschoyle told you, a
+Volunteer or Militia regiment can vote whether it 'heefs' wet or dry. If
+it votes wet and has influence (like some F.S. corps), it can sneak into
+the Channel or the Home Fleet and do a cruise round England or to Madeira
+or the North Sea. The regiment, of course, is distributed among the ships,
+and the Fleet dry nurse 'em. It rather breaks up shore discipline, but it
+gives the inland men a bit of experience, and, of course, it gives us a
+fairish supply of men behind the gun, in event of any strain on the Fleet.
+Some coast corps make a specialty of it, and compete for embarking and
+disembarking records. I believe some of the Tyneside engineerin' corps put
+ten per cent of their men through the Fleet engine rooms. But there's no
+need to stay talking here all the afternoon. Come and see the I.G. in his
+lair--the miserable conscript driven up to the colours at the point of the
+bayonet."
+
+PART II
+
+The great hall was emptying apace as the clocks struck two, and we passed
+out through double doors into a huge reading and smoking room, blue with
+tobacco and buzzing with voices.
+
+"We're quieter as a rule," said the Boy. "But we're filling up vacancies
+to-day. Hence the anxious faces of the Line and Militia. Look!" There were
+four tables against the walls, and at each stood a crowd of uniforms. The
+centres of disturbance were noncommissioned officers who, seated, growled
+and wrote down names.
+
+"Come to my table," said Burgard. "Well, Purvis, have you ear-marked our
+little lot?"
+
+"I've been tellin' 'em for the last hour we've only twenty-three
+vacancies," was the sergeant's answer. "I've taken nearly fifty for
+Trials, and this is what's left." Burgard smiled.
+
+"I'm very sorry," he said to the crowd, "but C Company's full."
+
+"Excuse me, Sir," said a man, "but wouldn't sea-time count in my favour?
+I've put in three months with the Fleet. Small quick-firers, Sir? Company
+guns? Any sort of light machinery?"
+
+"Come away," said a voice behind. "They've chucked the best farrier
+between Hull and Dewsbury. Think they'll take _you_ an' your potty quick-
+firers?"
+
+The speaker turned on his heel and swore.
+
+"Oh, damn the Guard, by all means!" said Sergeant Purvis, collecting his
+papers. "D'you suppose it's any pleasure to _me_ to reject chaps of your
+build and make? Vote us a second Guard battalion and we'll accommodate
+you. Now, you can come into Schools and watch Trials if you like."
+
+Most of the men accepted his invitation, but a few walked away angrily. I
+followed from the smoking-room across a wide corridor into a riding-
+school, under whose roof the voices of the few hundred assembled wandered
+in lost echoes.
+
+"I'll leave you, if you don't mind," said Burgard. "Company officers
+aren't supposed to assist at these games. Here, Matthews!" He called to a
+private and put me in his charge.
+
+In the centre of the vast floor my astonished eyes beheld a group of
+stripped men; the pink of their bodies startling the tan.
+
+"These are our crowd," said Matthews. "They've been vetted, an' we're
+putting 'em through their paces."
+
+"They don't look a bit like raw material," I said.
+
+"No, we don't use either raw men or raw meat for that matter in the
+Guard," Matthews replied. "Life's too short."
+
+Purvis stepped forward and barked in the professional manner. It was
+physical drill of the most searching, checked only when he laid his hand
+over some man's heart.
+
+Six or seven, I noticed, were sent back at this stage of the game. Then a
+cry went up from a group of privates standing near the line of contorted
+figures. "White, Purvis, white! Number Nine is spitting white!"
+
+"I know it," said Purvis. "Don't you worry."
+
+"Unfair!" murmured the man who understood quick-firers. "If I couldn't
+shape better than that I'd hire myself out to wheel a perambulator. He's
+cooked."
+
+"Nah," said the intent Matthews. "He'll answer to a month's training like
+a horse. It's only suet. _You've_ been training for this, haven't you?"
+
+"Look at me," said the man simply.
+
+"Yes. You're overtrained," was Matthews' comment. "The Guard isn't a
+circus."
+
+"Guns!" roared Purvis, as the men broke off and panted. "Number off from
+the right. Fourteen is one, three is two, eleven's three, twenty and
+thirty-nine are four and five, and five is six." He was giving them their
+numbers at the guns as they struggled into their uniforms. In like manner
+he told off three other guncrews, and the remainder left at the double, to
+return through the further doors with four light quick-firers jerking at
+the end of man-ropes.
+
+"Knock down and assemble against time!" Purvis called.
+
+The audience closed in a little as the crews flung themselves on the guns,
+which melted, wheel by wheel, beneath their touch.
+
+"I've never seen anything like this," I whispered.
+
+"Huh!" said Matthews scornfully. "They're always doin' it in the Line and
+Militia drill-halls. It's only circus-work."
+
+The guns were assembled again and some one called the time. Then followed
+ten minutes of the quickest firing and feeding with dummy cartridges that
+was ever given man to behold.
+
+"They look as if they might amount to something--this draft," said
+Matthews softly.
+
+"What might you teach 'em after this, then?" I asked.
+
+"To be Guard," said Matthews.
+
+"Spurs," cried Purvis, as the guns disappeared through the doors into the
+stables. Each man plucked at his sleeve, and drew up first one heel and
+then the other.
+
+"What the deuce are they doing?" I asked.
+
+"This," said Matthews. He put his hand to a ticket-pocket inside his
+regulation cuff, showed me two very small black box-spurs: drawing up a
+gaitered foot, he snapped them into the box in the heel, and when I had
+inspected snapped them out again.
+
+"That's all the spur you really need," he said.
+
+Then horses were trotted out into the school barebacked, and the neophytes
+were told to ride.
+
+Evidently the beasts knew the game and enjoyed it, for they would not make
+it easy for the men.
+
+A heap of saddlery was thrown in a corner, and from this each man, as he
+captured his mount, made shift to draw proper equipment, while the
+audience laughed, derided, or called the horses towards them.
+
+It was, most literally, wild horseplay, and by the time it was finished
+the recruits and the company were weak with fatigue and laughter.
+
+"That'll do," said Purvis, while the men rocked in their saddles. "I don't
+see any particular odds between any of you. C Company! Does anybody here
+know anything against any of these men?"
+
+"That's a bit of the Regulations," Matthews whispered. "Just like
+forbiddin' the banns in church. Really, it was all settled long ago when
+the names first came up."
+
+There was no answer.
+
+"You'll take 'em as they stand?"
+
+There was a grunt of assent.
+
+"Very good. There's forty men for twenty-three billets." He turned to the
+sweating horsemen. "I must put you into the Hat."
+
+With great ceremony and a shower of company jokes that I did not follow,
+an enormous Ally Sloper top-hat was produced, into which numbers and
+blanks were dropped, and the whole was handed round to the riders by a
+private, evidently the joker of C Company.
+
+Matthews gave me to understand that each company owned a cherished
+receptacle (sometimes not a respectable one) for the papers of the final
+drawing. He was telling me how his company had once stolen the Sacred
+Article used by D Company for this purpose and of the riot that followed,
+when through the west door of the schools entered a fresh detachment of
+stripped men, and the arena was flooded with another company.
+
+Said Matthews as we withdrew, "Each company does Trials their own way. B
+Company is all for teaching men how to cook and camp. D Company keeps 'em
+to horse-work mostly. We call D the circus-riders and B the cooks. They
+call us the Gunners."
+
+"An' you've rejected _me_," said the man who had done sea-time, pushing
+out before us. "The Army's goin' to the dogs."
+
+I stood in the corridor looking for Burgard.
+
+"Come up to my room and have a smoke," said Matthews, private of the
+Imperial Guard.
+
+We climbed two flights of stone stairs ere we reached an immense landing
+flanked with numbered doors.
+
+Matthews pressed a spring-latch and led me into a little cabin-like room.
+The cot was a standing bunk, with drawers beneath. On the bed lay a
+brilliant blanket; by the bed head was an electric light and a shelf of
+books: a writing table stood in the window, and I dropped into a low
+wicker chair.
+
+"This is a cut above subaltern's quarters," I said, surveying the photos,
+the dhurri on the floor, the rifle in its rack, the field-kit hung up
+behind the door, and the knicknacks on the walls.
+
+"The Line bachelors use 'em while we're away; but they're nice to come
+back to after 'heef.'" Matthews passed me his cigarette-case.
+
+"Where have you 'heefed'?" I said.
+
+"In Scotland, Central Australia, and North-Eastern Rhodesia and the North-
+West Indian front."
+
+"What's your service?"
+
+"Four years. I'll have to go in a year. I got in when I was twenty-two--by
+a fluke--from the Militia direct--on Trials."
+
+"Trials like those we just saw?"
+
+"Not so severe. There was less competition then. I hoped to get my
+stripes, but there's no chance."
+
+"Why?"
+
+"I haven't the knack of handling men. Purvis let me have a half-company
+for a month in Rhodesia--over towards Lake N'Garni. I couldn't work 'em
+properly. It's a gift."
+
+"Do colour-sergeants handle half-companies with you?"
+
+"They can command 'em on the 'heef.' We've only four company officers--
+Burgard, Luttrell, Kyd, and Harrison. Pigeon's our swop, and he's in
+charge of the ponies. Burgard got his company on the 'heef,' You see
+Burgard had been a lieutenant in the Line, but he came into the Guards on
+Trials like the men. _He_ could command. They tried him in India with a
+wing of the battalion for three months. He did well so he got his company.
+That's what made me hopeful. But it's a gift, you see--managing men--and
+so I'm only a senior private. They let ten per cent of us stay on for two
+years extra after our three are finished--to polish the others."
+
+"Aren't you even a corporal?"
+
+"We haven't corporals, or lances for that matter, in the Guard. As a
+senior private I'd take twenty men into action; but one Guard don't tell
+another how to clean himself. You've learned that before you apply. ...
+Come in!"
+
+There was a knock at the door, and Burgard entered, removing his cap.
+
+"I thought you'd be here," he said, as Matthews vacated the other chair
+and sat on the bed. "Well, has Matthews told you all about it? How did our
+Trials go, Matthews?"
+
+"Forty names in the Hat, Sir, at the finish. They'll make a fairish lot.
+Their gun-tricks weren't bad; but D company has taken the best horsemen--
+as usual."
+
+"Oh, I'll attend to that on 'heef.' Give me a man who can handle company-
+guns and I'll engage to make him a horse-master. D company will end by
+thinkin' 'emselves Captain Pigeon's private cavalry some day."
+
+I had never heard a private and a captain talking after this fashion, and
+my face must have betrayed my astonishment, for Burgard said:
+
+"These are not our parade manners. In our rooms, as we say in the Guard,
+all men are men. Outside we are officers and men."
+
+"I begin to see," I stammered. "Matthews was telling me that sergeants
+handled half-companies and rose from the ranks--and I don't see that there
+are any lieutenants--and your companies appear to be two hundred and fifty
+strong. It's a shade confusing to the layman."
+
+Burgard leaned forward didactically. "The Regulations lay down that every
+man's capacity for command must be tested to the uttermost. We construe
+that very literally when we're on the 'heef.' F'r instance, any man can
+apply to take the command next above him, and if a man's too shy to ask,
+his company officer must see that he gets his chance. A sergeant is given
+a wing of the battalion to play with for three weeks--a month, or six
+weeks--according to his capacity, and turned adrift in an Area to make his
+own arrangements. That's what Areas are for--and to experiment in. A good
+gunner--a private very often--has all four company-guns to handle through
+a week's fight, acting for the time as the major. Majors of Guard
+battalions (Verschoyle's our major) are supposed to be responsible for the
+guns, by the way. There's nothing to prevent any man who has the gift
+working his way up to the experimental command of the battalion on 'heef.'
+Purvis, my colour-sergeant, commanded the battalion for three months at
+the back of Coolgardie, an' very well he did it. Bayley 'verted to company
+officer for the time being an' took Harrison's company, and Harrison came
+over to me as my colour-sergeant. D'you see? Well, Purvis is down for a
+commission when there's a vacancy. He's been thoroughly tested, and we all
+like him. Two other sergeants have passed that three months' trial in the
+same way (just as second mates go up for extra master's certificate). They
+have E.C. after their names in the Army List. That shows they're capable
+of taking command in event of war. The result of our system is that you
+could knock out every single officer of a Guard battalion early in the
+day, and the wheels 'ud still go forward, _not_ merely round. We're
+allowed to fill up half our commissioned list from the ranks direct. _Now_
+d'you see why there's such a rush to get into a Guard battalion?"
+
+"Indeed I do. Have you commanded the regiment experimentally?"
+
+"Oh, time and again," Burgard laughed. "We've all had our E.C. turn."
+
+"Doesn't the chopping and changing upset the men?"
+
+"It takes something to upset the Guard. Besides, they're all in the game
+together. They give each other a fair show you may be sure."
+
+"That's true," said Matthews. "When I went to N'Gami with my--with the
+half-company," he sighed, "they helped me all they knew. But it's a gift--
+handling men. I found _that_ out,"
+
+"I know you did," said Burgard softly. "But you found it out in time,
+which is the great thing. You see," he turned to me, "with our limited
+strength we can't afford to have a single man who isn't more than up to
+any duty--in reason. Don't you be led away by what you saw at Trials just
+now. The Volunteers and the Militia have all the monkey-tricks of the
+trade--such as mounting and dismounting guns, and making fancy scores and
+doing record marches; but they need a lot of working up before they can
+pull their weight in the boat."
+
+There was a knock at the door. A note was handed in. Burgard read it and
+smiled.
+
+"Bayley wants to know if you'd care to come with us to the Park and see
+the kids. It's only a Saturday afternoon walk-round before the
+taxpayer.... Very good. If you'll press the button we'll try to do the
+rest."
+
+He led me by two flights of stairs up an iron stairway that gave on a
+platform, not unlike a ship's bridge, immediately above the barrelled
+glass roof of the riding-school. Through a ribbed ventilator I could see B
+Company far below watching some men who chased sheep. Burgard unlocked a
+glass-fronted fire-alarm arrangement flanked with dials and speaking-
+tubes, and bade me press the centre button.
+
+Next moment I should have fallen through the riding-school roof if he had
+not caught me; for the huge building below my feet thrilled to the
+multiplied purring of electric bells. The men in the school vanished like
+minnows before a shadow, and above the stamp of booted feet on staircases
+I heard the neighing of many horses.
+
+"What in the world have I done?" I gasped.
+
+"Turned out the Guard--horse, foot, and guns!"
+
+A telephone bell rang imperiously. Burgard snatched up the receiver:
+
+"Yes, Sir.... _What_, Sir?... I never heard they said that," he laughed,
+"but it would be just like 'em. In an hour and a half? Yes, Sir. Opposite
+the Statue? Yes, Sir."
+
+He turned to me with a wink as he hung up.
+
+"Bayley's playing up for you. Now you'll see some fun."
+
+"Who's going to catch it?" I demanded.
+
+"Only our local Foreign Service Corps. Its C.O. has been boasting that
+it's _en état de partir_, and Bayley's going to take him at his word and
+have a kit-inspection this afternoon in the Park. I must tell their
+drill-hall. Look over yonder between that brewery chimney and the mansard
+roof!"
+
+He readdressed himself to the telephone, and I kept my eye on the building
+to the southward. A Blue Peter climbed up to the top of the flagstaff that
+crowned it and blew out in the summer breeze. A black storm-cone followed.
+
+"Inspection for F.S. corps acknowledged, Sir," said Burgard down the
+telephone. "Now we'd better go to the riding-school. The battalion falls
+in there. I have to change, but you're free of the corps. Go anywhere. Ask
+anything. In another ten minutes we're off."
+
+I lingered for a little looking over the great city, its huddle of houses
+and the great fringe of the Park, all framed between the open windows of
+this dial-dotted eyrie.
+
+When I descended the halls and corridors were as hushed as they had been
+noisy, and my feet echoed down the broad tiled staircases. On the third
+floor, Matthews, gaitered and armed, overtook me smiling.
+
+"I thought you might want a guide," said he. "We've five minutes yet," and
+piloted me to the sunsplashed gloom of the riding-school. Three companies
+were in close order on the tan. They moved out at a whistle, and as I
+followed in their rear I was overtaken by Pigeon on a rough black mare.
+
+"Wait a bit," he said, "till the horses are all out of stables, and come
+with us. D Company is the only one mounted just now. We do it to amuse the
+taxpayer," he explained, above the noise of horses on the tan.
+
+"Where are the guns?" I asked, as the mare lipped my coat-collar.
+
+"Gone ahead long ago. They come out of their own door at the back of
+barracks. We don't haul guns through traffic more than we can help.... If
+Belinda breathes down your neck smack her. She'll be quiet in the streets.
+She loves lookin' into the shop-windows."
+
+The mounted company clattered through vaulted concrete corridors in the
+wake of the main body, and filed out into the crowded streets.
+
+When I looked at the townsfolk on the pavement, or in the double-decked
+trams, I saw that the bulk of them saluted, not grudgingly or of
+necessity, but in a light-hearted, even flippant fashion.
+
+"Those are Line and Militia men," said Pigeon. "That old chap in the
+top-hat by the lamp-post is an ex-Guardee. That's why he's saluting in
+slow-time. No, there's no regulation governing these things, but we've all
+fallen into the way of it somehow. Steady, mare!"
+
+"I don't know whether I care about this aggressive militarism," I began,
+when the company halted, and Belinda almost knocked me down. Looking
+forward I saw the badged cuff of a policeman upraised at a crossing, his
+back towards us.
+
+"Horrid aggressive, ain't we?" said Pigeon with a chuckle when we moved on
+again and overtook the main body. Here I caught the strains of the band,
+which Pigeon told me did not accompany the battalion on 'heef,' but lived
+in barracks and made much money by playing at parties in town.
+
+"If we want anything more than drums and fifes on 'heef' we sing," said
+Pigeon. "Singin' helps the wind."
+
+I rejoiced to the marrow of my bones thus to be borne along on billows of
+surging music among magnificent men, in sunlight, through a crowded town
+whose people, I could feel, regarded us with comradeship, affection--and
+more.
+
+"By Jove," I said at last, watching the eyes about us, "these people are
+looking us over as if we were horses."
+
+"Why not? They know the game."
+
+The eyes on the pavement, in the trams, the cabs, at the upper windows,
+swept our lines back and forth with a weighed intensity of regard which at
+first seemed altogether new to me, till I recalled just such eyes, a
+thousand of them, at manoeuvres in the Channel when one crowded battleship
+drew past its sister at biscuit-toss range. Then I stared at the ground,
+overborne by those considering eyes.
+
+Suddenly the music changed to the wail of the Dead March in "Saul," and
+once more--we were crossing a large square--the regiment halted.
+
+"Damn!" said Pigeon, glancing behind him at the mounted company. "I
+believe they save up their Saturday corpses on purpose."
+
+"What is it?" I asked.
+
+"A dead Volunteer. We must play him through." Again I looked forward and
+saw the top of a hearse, followed by two mourning-coaches, boring directly
+up the halted regiment, which opened out company by company to let it
+through.
+
+"But they've got the whole blessed square to funeralise in!" I exclaimed.
+"Why don't they go round?"
+
+"Not so!" Pigeon replied. "In this city it's the Volunteer's perquisite to
+be played through by any corps he happens to meet on his way to the
+cemetery. And they make the most of it. You'll see."
+
+I heard the order, "Rest on your arms," run before the poor little
+procession as the men opened out. The driver pulled the black Flanders
+beasts into a more than funeral crawl, and in the first mourning-coach I
+saw the tearful face of a fat woman (his mother, doubtless), a
+handkerchief pressed to one eye, but the other rolling vigilantly, alight
+with proper pride. Last came a knot of uniformed men--privates, I took it
+--of the dead one's corps.
+
+Said a man in the crowd beside us to the girl on his arm, "There, Jenny!
+That's what I'll get if I 'ave the luck to meet 'em when my time comes."
+
+"You an' your luck," she snapped. "'Ow can you talk such silly nonsense?"
+
+"Played through by the Guard," he repeated slowly. "The undertaker 'oo
+could guarantee _that_, mark you, for all his customers--well, 'e'd
+monopolise the trade, is all I can say. See the horses passagin'
+sideways!"
+
+"She done it a purpose," said the woman with a sniff.
+
+"An' I only hope you'll follow her example. Just as long as you think I'll
+keep, too."
+
+We reclosed when the funeral had left us twenty paces behind. A small boy
+stuck his head out of a carriage and watched us jealously.
+
+"Amazing! Amazing!" I murmured. "Is it regulation?"
+
+"No. Town-custom. It varies a little in different cities, but the people
+value being played through more than most things, I imagine. Duddell, the
+big Ipswich manufacturer--he's a Quaker--tried to bring in a bill to
+suppress it as unchristian." Pigeon laughed.
+
+"And?"
+
+"It cost him his seat next election. You see, we're all in the game."
+
+We reached the Park without further adventure, and found the four company-
+guns with their spike teams and single drivers waiting for us. Many people
+were gathered here, and we were halted, so far as I could see, that they
+might talk with the men in the ranks. The officers broke into groups.
+
+"Why on earth didn't you come along with me?" said Boy Bayley at my side.
+"I was expecting you."
+
+"Well, I had a delicacy about brigading myself with a colonel at the head
+of his regiment, so I stayed with the rear company and the horses. It's
+all too wonderful for any words. What's going to happen next?"
+
+"I've handed over to Verschoyle, who will amuse and edify the school
+children while I take you round our kindergarten. Don't kill any one, Vee.
+Are you goin' to charge 'em?"
+
+Old Verschoyle hitched his big shoulder and nodded precisely as he used to
+do at school. He was a boy of few words grown into a kindly taciturn man.
+
+"Now!" Bayley slid his arm through mine and led me across a riding road
+towards a stretch of rough common (singularly out of place in a park)
+perhaps three-quarters of a mile long and half as wide. On the encircling
+rails leaned an almost unbroken line of men and women--the women
+outnumbering the men. I saw the Guard battalion move up the road flanking
+the common and disappear behind the trees.
+
+As far as the eye could range through the mellow English haze the ground
+inside the railings was dotted with boys in and out of uniform, armed and
+unarmed. I saw squads here, half-companies there; then three companies in
+an open space, wheeling with stately steps; a knot of drums and fifes near
+the railings unconcernedly slashing their way across popular airs; and a
+batch of gamins labouring through some extended attack destined to be
+swept aside by a corps crossing the ground at the double. They broke out
+of furze bushes, ducked over hollows and bunkers, held or fell away from
+hillocks and rough sandbanks till the eye wearied of their busy legs.
+
+Bayley took me through the railings, and gravely returned the salute of a
+freckled twelve-year-old near by.
+
+"What's your corps?" said the Colonel of that Imperial Guard battalion to
+that child.
+
+"Eighth District Board School, fourth standard, Sir. We aren't out
+to-day." Then, with a twinkle, "I go to First Camp next year."
+
+"What are those boys yonder--that squad at the double?"
+
+"Jewboys, Sir. Jewish Voluntary Schools, Sir."
+
+"And that full company extending behind the three elms to the south-west?"
+
+"Private day-schools, Sir, I think. Judging distance, Sir."
+
+"Can you come with us?"
+
+"Certainly, Sir."
+
+"Here's the raw material at the beginning of the process," said Bayley to
+me.
+
+We strolled on towards the strains of "A Bicycle Built for Two," breathed
+jerkily into a mouth-organ by a slim maid of fourteen. Some dozen infants
+with clenched fists and earnest legs were swinging through the extension
+movements which that tune calls for. A stunted hawthorn overhung the
+little group, and from a branch a dirty white handkerchief flapped in the
+breeze. The girl blushed, scowled, and wiped the mouth-organ on her sleeve
+as we came up.
+
+"We're all waiting for our big bruvvers," piped up one bold person in blue
+breeches--seven if he was a day.
+
+"It keeps 'em quieter, Sir," the maiden lisped. "The others are with the
+regiments."
+
+"Yeth, and they've all lots of blank for _you_," said the gentleman in
+blue breeches ferociously.
+
+"Oh, Artie! 'Ush!" the girl cried.
+
+"But why have they lots of blank for _us_?" Bayley asked. Blue Breeches
+stood firm.
+
+"'Cause--'cause the Guard's goin' to fight the Schools this afternoon; but
+my big bruvver says they'll be dam-well surprised."
+
+"_Artie!_" The girl leaped towards him. "You know your ma said I was to
+smack----"
+
+"Don't. Please don't," said Bayley, pink with suppressed mirth. "It was
+all my fault. I must tell old Verschoyle this. I've surprised his plan out
+of the mouths of babes and sucklings."
+
+"What plan?"
+
+"Old Vee has taken the battalion up to the top of the common, and he told
+me he meant to charge down through the kids, but they're on to him
+already. He'll be scuppered. The Guard will be scuppered!"
+
+Here Blue Breeches, overcome by the reproof of his fellows, began to weep.
+
+"I didn't tell," he roared. "My big bruvver _he_ knew when he saw them go
+up the road..."
+
+"Never mind! Never mind, old man," said Bayley soothingly. "I'm not
+fighting to-day. It's all right."
+
+He rightened it yet further with sixpence, and left that band loudly at
+feud over the spoil.
+
+"Oh, Vee! Vee the strategist," he chuckled. "We'll pull Vee's leg
+to-night."
+
+Our freckled friend of the barriers doubled up behind us.
+
+"So you know that my battalion is charging down the ground," Bayley
+demanded.
+
+"Not for certain, Sir, but we're preparin' for the worst," he answered
+with a cheerful grin. "They allow the Schools a little blank ammunition
+after we've passed the third standard; and we nearly always bring it on to
+the ground of Saturdays."
+
+"The deuce you do! Why?"
+
+"On account of these amateur Volunteer corps, Sir. They're always
+experimentin' upon us, Sir, comin' over from their ground an' developin'
+attacks on our flanks. Oh, it's chronic 'ere of a Saturday sometimes,
+unless you flag yourself."
+
+I followed his eye and saw white flags fluttering before a drum and fife
+band and a knot of youths in sweaters gathered round the dummy breech of a
+four-inch gun which they were feeding at express rates.
+
+"The attacks don't interfere with you if you flag yourself, Sir," the boy
+explained. "That's a Second Camp team from the Technical Schools loading
+against time for a bet."
+
+We picked our way deviously through the busy groups. Apparently it was not
+etiquette to notice a Guard officer, and the youths at the twenty-five
+pounder were far too busy to look up. I watched the cleanly finished hoist
+and shove-home of the full-weight shell from a safe distance, when I
+became aware of a change among the scattered boys on the common, who
+disappeared among the hillocks to an accompaniment of querulous whistles.
+A boy or two on bicycles dashed from corps to corps, and on their arrival
+each corps seemed to fade away.
+
+The youths at loading practice did not pause for the growing hush round
+them, nor did the drum and fife band drop a single note. Bayley exploded
+afresh. "The Schools are preparing for our attack, by Jove! I wonder who's
+directin' 'em. Do _you_ know?"
+
+The warrior of the Eighth District looked up shrewdly.
+
+"I saw Mr. Cameron speaking to Mr. Levitt just as the Guard went up the
+road. 'E's our 'ead-master, Mr. Cameron, but Mr. Levitt, of the Sixth
+District, is actin' as senior officer on the ground this Saturday. Most
+likely Mr. Levitt is commandin'."
+
+"How many corps are there here?" I asked.
+
+"Oh, bits of lots of 'em--thirty or forty, p'r'aps, Sir. But the whistles
+says they've all got to rally on the Board Schools. 'Ark! There's the
+whistle for the Private Schools! They've been called up the ground at the
+double."
+
+"Stop!" cried a bearded man with a watch, and the crews dropped beside the
+breech wiping their brows and panting.
+
+"Hullo! there's some attack on the Schools," said one. "Well, Marden, you
+owe me three half-crowns. I've beaten your record. Pay up."
+
+The boy beside us tapped his foot fretfully as he eyed his companions
+melting among the hillocks, but the gun-team adjusted their bets without
+once looking up.
+
+The ground rose a little to a furze-crowned ridge in the centre so that I
+could not see the full length of it, but I heard a faint bubble of blank
+in the distance.
+
+"The Saturday allowance," murmured Bayley. "War's begun, but it wouldn't
+be etiquette for us to interfere. What are you saying, my child?"
+
+"Nothin', Sir, only--only I don't think the Guard will be able to come
+through on so narrer a front, Sir. They'll all be jammed up be'ind the
+ridge if _we_'ve got there in time. It's awful sticky for guns at the end
+of our ground, Sir."
+
+"I'm inclined to think you're right, Moltke. The Guard is hung up:
+distinctly so. Old Vee will have to cut his way through. What a pernicious
+amount of blank the kids seem to have!"
+
+It was quite a respectable roar of battle that rolled among the hillocks
+for ten minutes, always out of our sight. Then we heard the "Cease Fire"
+over the ridge.
+
+"They've sent for the Umpires," the Board School boy squeaked, dancing on
+one foot. "You've been hung up, Sir. I--I thought the sand-pits 'ud stop
+you."
+
+Said one of the jerseyed hobbledehoys at the gun, slipping on his coat:
+"Well, that's enough for this afternoon. I'm off," and moved to the
+railings without even glancing towards the fray.
+
+"I anticipate the worst," said Bayley with gravity after a few minutes.
+"Hullo! Here comes my disgraced corps!"
+
+The Guard was pouring over the ridge--a disorderly mob--horse, foot, and
+guns mixed, while from every hollow of the ground about rose small boys
+cheering shrilly. The outcry was taken up by the parents at the railings,
+and spread to a complete circle of cheers, handclappings, and waved
+handkerchiefs.
+
+Our Eighth District private cast away restraint and openly capered. "We
+got 'em! We got 'em!" he squealed.
+
+The grey-green flood paused a fraction of a minute and drew itself into
+shape, coming to rest before Bayley. Verschoyle saluted.
+
+"Vee, Vee," said Bayley. "Give me back my legions. Well, I hope you're
+proud of yourself?"
+
+"The little beasts were ready for us. Deuced well posted too," Verschoyle
+replied. "I wish you'd seen that first attack on our flank. Rather
+impressive. Who warned 'em?"
+
+"I don't know. I got my information from a baby in blue plush breeches.
+Did they do well?"
+
+"Very decently indeed. I've complimented their C.O. and buttered the whole
+boiling." He lowered his voice. "As a matter o' fact, I halted five good
+minutes to give 'em time to get into position."
+
+"Well, now we can inspect our Foreign Service corps. We sha'n't need the
+men for an hour, Vee."
+
+"Very good, Sir. Colour-sergeants!" cried Verschoyle, raising his voice,
+and the cry ran from company to company. Whereupon the officers left their
+men, people began to climb over the railings, and the regiment dissolved
+among the spectators and the school corps of the city.
+
+"No sense keeping men standing when you don't need 'em," said Bayley.
+"Besides, the Schools learn more from our chaps in an afternoon than they
+can pick up in a month's drill. Look at those Board-schoolmaster captains
+buttonholing old Purvis on the art of war!"
+
+"Wonder what the evening papers'll say about this," said Pigeon.
+
+"You'll know in half an hour," Burgard laughed. "What possessed you to
+take your ponies across the sand-pits, Pij?"
+
+"Pride. Silly pride," said the Canadian.
+
+We crossed the common to a very regulation paradeground overlooked by a
+statue of our Queen. Here were carriages, many and elegant, filled with
+pretty women, and the railings were lined with frockcoats and top hats.
+"This is distinctly social," I suggested to Kyd.
+
+"Ra-ather. Our F.S. corps is nothing if not correct, but Bayley'll sweat
+'em all the same."
+
+I saw six companies drawn up for inspection behind lines of long sausage-
+shaped kit-bags. A band welcomed us with "A Life on the Ocean Wave."
+
+"What cheek!" muttered Verschoyle. "Give 'em beans, Bayley."
+
+"I intend to," said the Colonel, grimly. "Will each of you fellows take a
+company, please, and inspect 'em faithfully. '_En etat de partir_' is
+their little boast, remember. When you've finished you can give 'em a
+little pillow-fighting."
+
+"What does the single cannon on those men's sleeves mean?" I asked.
+
+"That they're big gun-men, who've done time with the Fleet," Bayley
+returned. "Any F.S. corps that has over twenty per cent big-gun men thinks
+itself entitled to play 'A Life on the Ocean Wave'--when it's out of
+hearing of the Navy."
+
+"What beautiful stuff they are! What's their regimental average?"
+
+"It ought to be five eight, height, thirty-eight, chest, and twenty-four
+years, age. What is it?" Bayley asked of a Private.
+
+"Five nine and half, Sir, thirty-nine, twenty-four and a half," was the
+reply, and he added insolently, "_En  etat de partir_." Evidently that F.S.
+corps was on its mettle ready for the worst.
+
+"What about their musketry average?" I went on.
+
+"Not my pidgin," said Bayley. "But they wouldn't be in the corps a day if
+they couldn't shoot; I know _that_ much. Now I'm going to go through 'em
+for socks and slippers."
+
+The kit-inspection exceeded anything I had ever dreamed. I drifted from
+company to company while the Guard officers oppressed them. Twenty per
+cent, at least, of the kits were shovelled out on the grass and gone
+through in detail.
+
+"What have they got jumpers and ducks for?" I asked of Harrison.
+
+"For Fleet work, of course. _En  etat de partir_ with an F. S. corps means
+they are amphibious."
+
+"Who gives 'em their kit--Government?"
+
+"There is a Government allowance, but no C. O. sticks to it. It's the same
+as paint and gold-leaf in the Navy. It comes out of some one's pockets.
+How much does your kit cost you?"--this to the private in front of us.
+
+"About ten or fifteen quid every other year, I suppose," was the answer.
+
+"Very good. Pack your bag--quick."
+
+The man knelt, and with supremely deft hands returned all to the bag,
+lashed and tied it, and fell back.
+
+"Arms," said Harrison. "Strip and show ammunition."
+
+The man divested himself of his rolled greatcoat and haversack with one
+wriggle, as it seemed to me; a twist of a screw removed the side plate of
+the rifle breech (it was not a bolt action). He handed it to Harrison with
+one hand, and with the other loosed his clip-studded belt.
+
+"What baby cartridges!" I exclaimed. "No bigger than bulletted breech-
+caps."
+
+"They're the regulation .256," said Harrison. "No one has complained of
+'em yet. They expand a bit when they arrive.... Empty your bottle, please,
+and show your rations."
+
+The man poured out his water-bottle and showed the two-inch emergency tin.
+
+Harrison passed on to the next, but I was fascinated by the way in which
+the man re-established himself amid his straps and buckles, asking no help
+from either side.
+
+"How long does it take you to prepare for inspection?" I asked him.
+
+"Well, I got ready this afternoon in twelve minutes," he smiled. "I didn't
+see the storm-cone till half-past three. I was at the Club."
+
+"Weren't a good many of you out of town?"
+
+"Not _this_ Saturday. We knew what was coming. You see, if we pull through
+the inspection we may move up one place on the roster for foreign
+service.... You'd better stand back. We're going to pillow-fight."
+
+The companies stooped to the stuffed kit-bags, doubled with them
+variously, piled them in squares and mounds, passed them from shoulder to
+shoulder like buckets at a fire, and repeated the evolution.
+
+"What's the idea?" I asked of Verschoyle, who, arms folded behind him, was
+controlling the display. Many women had descended from the carriages, and
+were pressing in about us admiringly.
+
+"For one thing, it's a fair test of wind and muscle, and for another it
+saves time at the docks. We'll suppose this first company to be drawn up
+on the dock-head and those five others still in the troop-train. How would
+you get their kit into the ship?"
+
+"Fall 'em all in on the platform, march'em to the gangways," I answered,
+"and trust to Heaven and a fatigue party to gather the baggage and drunks
+in later."
+
+"Ye-es, and have half of it sent by the wrong trooper. I know _that_
+game," Verschoyle drawled. "We don't play it any more. Look!"
+
+He raised his voice, and five companies, glistening a little and breathing
+hard, formed at right angles to the sixth, each man embracing his sixty-
+pound bag.
+
+"Pack away," cried Verschoyle, and the great bean-bag game (I can compare
+it to nothing else) began. In five minutes every bag was passed along
+either arm of the T and forward down the sixth company, who passed,
+stacked, and piled them in a great heap. These were followed by the
+rifles, belts, greatcoats, and knapsacks, so that in another five minutes
+the regiment stood, as it were, stripped clean.
+
+"Of course on a trooper there'd be a company below stacking the kit away,"
+said Verschoyle, "but that wasn't so bad."
+
+"Bad!" I cried. "It was miraculous!"
+
+"Circus-work--all circus-work!" said Pigeon. "It won't prevent 'em bein'
+sick as dogs when the ship rolls." The crowd round us applauded, while the
+men looked meekly down their self-conscious noses.
+
+A little grey-whiskered man trotted up to the Boy.
+
+"Have we made good, Bayley?" he said. "Are we _en  etat de partir_?"
+
+"That's what I shall report," said Bayley, smiling.
+
+"I thought my bit o' French 'ud draw you," said the little man, rubbing
+his hands.
+
+"Who is he?" I whispered to Pigeon.
+
+"Ramsay--their C.O. An old Guard captain. A keen little devil. They say he
+spends six hundred a year on the show. He used to be in the Lincolns till
+he came into his property."
+
+"Take 'em home an' make 'em drunk," I heard Bayley say. "I suppose you'll
+have a dinner to celebrate. But you may as well tell the officers of E
+company that I don't think much of them. I sha'n't report it, but their
+men were all over the shop."
+
+"Well, they're young, you see," Colonel Ramsay began.
+
+"You're quite right. Send 'em to me and I'll talk to 'em. Youth is the
+time to learn."
+
+"Six hundred a year," I repeated to Pigeon. "That must be an awful tax on
+a man. Worse than in the old volunteering days."
+
+"That's where you make your mistake," said Verschoyle. "In the old days a
+man had to spend his money to coax his men to drill because they weren't
+the genuine article. You know what I mean. They made a favour of putting
+in drills, didn't they? And they were, most of 'em, the children we have
+to take over at Second Camp, weren't they? Well, now that a C. O. is sure
+of his _men_, now that he hasn't to waste himself in conciliating an'
+bribin', an' beerin' _kids_, he doesn't care what he spends on his corps,
+because every pound tells. Do you understand?"
+
+"I see what you mean, Vee. Having the male material guaranteed----"
+
+"And trained material at that," Pigeon put in. "Eight years in the
+schools, remember, as well as----"
+
+"Precisely. A man rejoices in working them up. That's as it should be," I
+said.
+
+"Bayly's saying the very same to those F. S. pups," said Verschoyle.
+
+The Boy was behind us, between two young F. S. officers, a hand on the
+shoulder of each.
+
+"Yes, that's all doocid interesting," he growled paternally. "But you
+forget, my sons, now that your men are bound to serve, you're trebly bound
+to put a polish on 'em. You've let your company simply go to seed. Don't
+try and explain. I've told all those lies myself in my time. It's only
+idleness. _I_ know. Come and lunch with me to-morrow and I'll give you a
+wrinkle or two in barracks." He turned to me.
+
+"Suppose we pick up Vee's defeated legion and go home. You'll dine with us
+to-night. Good-bye, Ramsay. Yes, you're _en etat de partir_, right enough.
+You'd better get Lady Gertrude to talk to the Armity if you want the corps
+sent foreign. I'm no politician."
+
+We strolled away from the great white statue of the Widow, with sceptre,
+orb, and crown, that looked toward the city, and regained the common,
+where the Guard battalion walked with the female of its species and the
+children of all its relatives. At sight of the officers the uniforms began
+to detach themselves and gather in companies. A Board School corps was
+moving off the ground, headed by its drums and fifes, which it assisted
+with song. As we drew nearer we caught the words, for they were launched
+with intention:--
+
+  'Oo is it mashes the country nurse?
+    The Guardsman!
+  'Oo is it takes the lydy's purse?
+    The Guardsman!
+  Calls for a drink, and a mild cigar,
+  Batters a sovereign down on the bar,
+  Collars the change and says "Ta-ta!"
+    The Guardsman!
+
+"Why, that's one of old Jemmy Fawne's songs. I haven't heard it in ages,"
+I began.
+
+"Little devils!" said Pigeon.
+"Speshul! Extra speshul! Sports Edition!" a newsboy cried. "'Ere y'are,
+Captain. Defeat o' the Guard!"
+
+"I'll buy a copy," said the Boy, as Pigeon blushed wrathfully. "I must, to
+see how the Dove lost his mounted company." He unfolded the flapping sheet
+and we crowded round it.
+
+"'_Complete Rout of the Guard,_'" he read. "'_Too Narrow a Front._' That's
+one for you, Vee! '_Attack Anticipated by Mr. Levitt, B. A._' Aha! '_The
+Schools Stand Fast._'"
+
+"Here's another version," said Kyd, waving a tinted sheet. "'_To your
+tents, O Israel! The Hebrew Schools stop the Mounted Troops._' Pij, were
+you scuppered by Jewboys?"
+
+"'_Umpires Decide all Four Guns Lost,_'" Bayley went on. "By Jove,
+there'll have to be an inquiry into this regrettable incident, Vee!"
+
+"I'll never try to amuse the kids again," said the baited Verschoyle.
+"Children and newspapers are low things.... And I was hit on the nose by a
+wad, too! They oughtn't to be allowed blank ammunition!"
+
+So we leaned against the railings in the warm twilight haze while the
+battalion, silently as a shadow, formed up behind us ready to be taken
+over. The heat, the hum of the great city, as it might have been the hum
+of a camped army, the creaking of the belts, and the well-known faces bent
+above them, brought back to me the memory of another evening, years ago,
+when Verschoyle and I waited for news of guns missing in no sham fight.
+
+"A regular Sanna's Post, isn't it?" I said at last. "D'you remember, Vee--
+by the market-square--that night when the wagons went out?"
+
+Then it came upon me, with no horror, but a certain mild wonder, that we
+had waited, Vee and I, that night for the body of Boy Bayley; and that Vee
+himself had died of typhoid in the spring of 1902. The rustling of the
+papers continued, but Bayley, shifting slightly, revealed to me the three-
+day old wound on his left side that had soaked the ground about him. I saw
+Pigeon fling up a helpless arm as to guard himself against a spatter of
+shrapnel, and Luttrell with a foolish tight-lipped smile lurched over all
+in one jointless piece. Only old Vee's honest face held steady for awhile
+against the darkness that had swallowed up the battalion behind us. Then
+his jaw dropped and the face stiffened, so that a fly made bold to explore
+the puffed and scornful nostril.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I waked brushing a fly from my nose, and saw the Club waiter set out the
+evening papers on the table.
+
+
+
+
+"THEY"
+
+
+THE RETURN OF THE CHILDREN
+
+  Neither the harps nor the crowns amused, nor the cherubs' dove-winged
+     races--
+  Holding hands forlornly the Children wandered beneath the Dome;
+  Plucking the radiant robes of the passers by, and with pitiful faces
+  Begging what Princes and Powers refused:--"Ah, please will you let us
+     go home?"
+
+  Over the jewelled floor, nigh weeping, ran to them Mary the Mother,
+  Kneeled and caressed and made promise with kisses, and drew them along
+     to the gateway--
+  Yea, the all-iron unbribable Door which Peter must guard and none other.
+  Straightway She took the Keys from his keeping, and opened and freed
+     them straightway.
+
+  Then to Her Son, Who had seen and smiled, She said: "On the night that
+     I bore Thee
+  What didst Thou care for a love beyond mine or a heaven that was not my
+     arm?
+  Didst Thou push from the nipple O Child, to hear the angels adore Thee?
+  When we two lay in the breath of the kine?" And He said:--"Thou hast
+     done no harm."
+
+  So through the Void the Children ran homeward merrily hand in hand,
+  Looking neither to left nor right where the breathless Heavens stood
+     still;
+  And the Guards of the Void resheathed their swords, for they heard the
+     Command.
+  "Shall I that have suffered the children to come to me hold them against
+     their will?"
+
+
+"THEY"
+One view called me to another; one hill top to its fellow, half across the
+county, and since I could answer at no more trouble than the snapping
+forward of a lever, I let the country flow under my wheels. The orchid-
+studded flats of the East gave way to the thyme, ilex, and grey grass of
+the Downs; these again to the rich cornland and fig-trees of the lower
+coast, where you carry the beat of the tide on your left hand for fifteen
+level miles; and when at last I turned inland through a huddle of rounded
+hills and woods I had run myself clean out of my known marks. Beyond that
+precise hamlet which stands godmother to the capital of the United States,
+I found hidden villages where bees, the only things awake, boomed in
+eighty-foot lindens that overhung grey Norman churches; miraculous brooks
+diving under stone bridges built for heavier traffic than would ever vex
+them again; tithe-barns larger than their churches, and an old smithy that
+cried out aloud how it had once been a hall of the Knights of the Temple.
+Gipsies I found on a common where the gorse, bracken, and heath fought it
+out together up a mile of Roman road; and a little farther on I disturbed
+a red fox rolling dog-fashion in the naked sunlight.
+
+As the wooded hills closed about me I stood up in the car to take the
+bearings of that great Down whose ringed head is a landmark for fifty
+miles across the low countries. I judged that the lie of the country would
+bring me across some westward running road that went to his feet, but I
+did not allow for the confusing veils of the woods. A quick turn plunged
+me first into a green cutting brimful of liquid sunshine, next into a
+gloomy tunnel where last year's dead leaves whispered and scuffled about
+my tyres. The strong hazel stuff meeting overhead had not been cut for a
+couple of generations at least, nor had any axe helped the moss-cankered
+oak and beech to spring above them. Here the road changed frankly into a
+carpetted ride on whose brown velvet spent primrose-clumps showed like
+jade, and a few sickly, white-stalked bluebells nodded together. As the
+slope favoured I shut off the power and slid over the whirled leaves,
+expecting every moment to meet a keeper; but I only heard a jay, far off,
+arguing against the silence under the twilight of the trees.
+
+Still the track descended. I was on the point of reversing and working my
+way back on the second speed ere I ended in some swamp, when I saw
+sunshine through the tangle ahead and lifted the brake.
+
+It was down again at once. As the light beat across my face my fore-wheels
+took the turf of a great still lawn from which sprang horsemen ten feet
+high with levelled lances, monstrous peacocks, and sleek round-headed
+maids of honour--blue, black, and glistening--all of clipped yew. Across
+the lawn--the marshalled woods besieged it on three sides--stood an
+ancient house of lichened and weather-worn stone, with mullioned windows
+and roofs of rose-red tile. It was flanked by semi-circular walls, also
+rose-red, that closed the lawn on the fourth side, and at their feet a box
+hedge grew man-high. There were doves on the roof about the slim brick
+chimneys, and I caught a glimpse of an octagonal dove-house behind the
+screening wall.
+
+Here, then, I stayed; a horseman's green spear laid at my breast; held by
+the exceeding beauty of that jewel in that setting.
+
+"If I am not packed off for a trespasser, or if this knight does not ride
+a wallop at me," thought I, "Shakespeare and Queen Elizabeth at least must
+come out of that half-open garden door and ask me to tea."
+
+A child appeared at an upper window, and I thought the little thing waved
+a friendly hand. But it was to call a companion, for presently another
+bright head showed. Then I heard a laugh among the yew-peacocks, and
+turning to make sure (till then I had been watching the house only) I saw
+the silver of a fountain behind a hedge thrown up against the sun. The
+doves on the roof cooed to the cooing water; but between the two notes I
+caught the utterly happy chuckle of a child absorbed in some light
+mischief.
+
+The garden door--heavy oak sunk deep in the thickness of the wall--opened
+further: a woman in a big garden hat set her foot slowly on the time-
+hollowed stone step and as slowly walked across the turf. I was forming
+some apology when she lifted up her head and I saw that she was blind.
+
+"I heard you," she said. "Isn't that a motor car?"
+
+"I'm afraid I've made a mistake in my road. I should have turned off up
+above--I never dreamed"--I began.
+
+"But I'm very glad. Fancy a motor car coming into the garden! It will be
+such a treat----" She turned and made as though looking about her. "You--
+you haven't seen any one have you--perhaps?"
+
+"No one to speak to, but the children seemed interested at a distance."
+
+"Which?"
+
+"I saw a couple up at the window just now, and I think I heard a little
+chap in the grounds."
+
+"Oh, lucky you!" she cried, and her face brightened. "I hear them, of
+course, but that's all. You've seen them and heard them?"
+
+"Yes," I answered. "And if I know anything of children one of them's
+having a beautiful time by the fountain yonder. Escaped, I should
+imagine."
+
+"You're fond of children?"
+
+I gave her one or two reasons why I did not altogether hate them.
+
+"Of course, of course," she said. "Then you understand. Then you won't
+think it foolish if I ask you to take your car through the gardens, once
+or twice--quite slowly. I'm sure they'd like to see it. They see so
+little, poor things. One tries to make their life pleasant, but----" she
+threw out her hands towards the woods. "We're so out of the world here."
+
+"That will be splendid," I said. "But I can't cut up your grass."
+
+She faced to the right. "Wait a minute," she said. "We're at the South
+gate, aren't we? Behind those peacocks there's a flagged path. We call it
+the Peacock's Walk. You can't see it from here, they tell me, but if you
+squeeze along by the edge of the wood you can turn at the first peacock
+and get on to the flags."
+
+It was sacrilege to wake that dreaming house-front with the clatter of
+machinery, but I swung the car to clear the turf, brushed along the edge
+of the wood and turned in on the broad stone path where the fountain-basin
+lay like one star-sapphire.
+
+"May I come too?" she cried. "No, please don't help me. They'll like it
+better if they see me."
+
+She felt her way lightly to the front of the car, and with one foot on the
+step she called: "Children, oh, children! Look and see what's going to
+happen!"
+
+The voice would have drawn lost souls from the Pit, for the yearning that
+underlay its sweetness, and I was not surprised to hear an answering shout
+behind the yews. It must have been the child by the fountain, but he fled
+at our approach, leaving a little toy boat in the water. I saw the glint
+of his blue blouse among the still horsemen.
+
+Very disposedly we paraded the length of the walk and at her request
+backed again. This time the child had got the better of his panic, but
+stood far off and doubting.
+
+"The little fellow's watching us," I said. "I wonder if he'd like a ride."
+
+"They're very shy still. Very shy. But, oh, lucky you to be able to see
+them! Let's listen."
+
+I stopped the machine at once, and the humid stillness, heavy with the
+scent of box, cloaked us deep. Shears I could hear where some gardener was
+clipping; a mumble of bees and broken voices that might have been the
+doves.
+
+"Oh, unkind!" she said weariedly.
+
+"Perhaps they're only shy of the motor. The little maid at the window
+looks tremendously interested."
+
+"Yes?" She raised her head. "It was wrong of me to say that. They are
+really fond of me. It's the only thing that makes life worth living--when
+they're fond of you, isn't it? I daren't think what the place would be
+without them. By the way, is it beautiful?"
+
+"I think it is the most beautiful place I have ever seen."
+
+"So they all tell me. I can feel it, of course, but that isn't quite the
+same thing."
+
+"Then have you never---?" I began, but stopped abashed.
+
+"Not since I can remember. It happened when I was only a few months old,
+they tell me. And yet I must remember something, else how could I dream
+about colours. I see light in my dreams, and colours, but I never see
+_them_. I only hear them just as I do when I'm awake."
+
+"It's difficult to see faces in dreams. Some people can, but most of us
+haven't the gift," I went on, looking up at the window where the child
+stood all but hidden.
+
+"I've heard that too," she said. "And they tell me that one never sees a
+dead person's face in a dream. Is that true?"
+
+"I believe it is--now I come to think of it."
+
+"But how is it with yourself--yourself?" The blind eyes turned towards me.
+
+"I have never seen the faces of my dead in any dream," I answered.
+
+"Then it must be as bad as being blind."
+
+The sun had dipped behind the woods and the long shades were possessing
+the insolent horsemen one by one. I saw the light die from off the top of
+a glossy-leaved lance and all the brave hard green turn to soft black. The
+house, accepting another day at end, as it had accepted an hundred
+thousand gone, seemed to settle deeper into its rest among the shadows.
+
+"Have you ever wanted to?" she said after the silence.
+
+"Very much sometimes," I replied. The child had left the window as the
+shadows closed upon it.
+
+"Ah! So've I, but I don't suppose it's allowed. ... Where d'you live?"
+
+"Quite the other side of the county--sixty miles and more, and I must be
+going back. I've come without my big lamp."
+
+"But it's not dark yet. I can feel it."
+
+"I'm afraid it will be by the time I get home. Could you lend me someone
+to set me on my road at first? I've utterly lost myself."
+
+"I'll send Madden with you to the cross-roads. We are so out of the world,
+I don't wonder you were lost! I'll guide you round to the front of the
+house; but you will go slowly, won't you, till you're out of the grounds?
+It isn't foolish, do you think?"
+
+"I promise you I'll go like this," I said, and let the car start herself
+down the flagged path.
+
+We skirted the left wing of the house, whose elaborately cast lead
+guttering alone was worth a day's journey; passed under a great rose-grown
+gate in the red wall, and so round to the high front of the house which in
+beauty and stateliness as much excelled the back as that all others I had
+seen.
+
+"Is it so very beautiful?" she said wistfully when she heard my raptures.
+"And you like the lead-figures too? There's the old azalea garden behind.
+They say that this place must have been made for children. Will you help
+me out, please? I should like to come with you as far as the cross-roads,
+but I mustn't leave them. Is that you, Madden? I want you to show this
+gentleman the way to the cross-roads. He has lost his way but--he has seen
+them."
+
+A butler appeared noiselessly at the miracle of old oak that must be
+called the front door, and slipped aside to put on his hat. She stood
+looking at me with open blue eyes in which no sight lay, and I saw for the
+first time that she was beautiful.
+
+"Remember," she said quietly, "if you are fond of them you will come
+again," and disappeared within the house.
+
+The butler in the car said nothing till we were nearly at the lodge gates,
+where catching a glimpse of a blue blouse in a shrubbery I swerved amply
+lest the devil that leads little boys to play should drag me into child-
+murder.
+
+"Excuse me," he asked of a sudden, "but why did you do that, Sir?"
+
+"The child yonder."
+
+"Our young gentleman in blue?"
+
+"Of course."
+
+"He runs about a good deal. Did you see him by the fountain, Sir?"
+
+"Oh, yes, several times. Do we turn here?"
+
+"Yes, Sir. And did you 'appen to see them upstairs too?"
+
+"At the upper window? Yes."
+
+"Was that before the mistress come out to speak to you, Sir?"
+
+"A little before that. Why d'you want to know?"
+
+He paused a little. "Only to make sure that--that they had seen the car,
+Sir, because with children running about, though I'm sure you're driving
+particularly careful, there might be an accident. That was all, Sir. Here
+are the cross-roads. You can't miss your way from now on. Thank you, Sir,
+but that isn't _our_ custom, not with----"
+
+"I beg your pardon," I said, and thrust away the British silver.
+
+"Oh, it's quite right with the rest of 'em as a rule. Goodbye, Sir."
+
+He retired into the armour-plated conning tower of his caste and walked
+away. Evidently a butler solicitous for the honour of his house, and
+interested, probably through a maid, in the nursery.
+
+Once beyond the signposts at the cross-roads I looked back, but the
+crumpled hills interlaced so jealously that I could not see where the
+house had lain. When I asked its name at a cottage along the road, the fat
+woman who sold sweetmeats there gave me to understand that people with
+motor cars had small right to live--much less to "go about talking like
+carriage folk." They were not a pleasant-mannered community.
+
+When I retraced my route on the map that evening I was little wiser.
+Hawkin's Old Farm appeared to be the survey title of the place, and the
+old County Gazetteer, generally so ample, did not allude to it. The big
+house of those parts was Hodnington Hall, Georgian with early Victorian
+embellishments, as an atrocious steel engraving attested. I carried my
+difficulty to a neighbour--a deep-rooted tree of that soil--and he gave me
+a name of a family which conveyed no meaning.
+
+A month or so later--I went again, or it may have been that my car took
+the road of her own volition. She over-ran the fruitless Downs, threaded
+every turn of the maze of lanes below the hills, drew through the high-
+walled woods, impenetrable in their full leaf, came out at the cross roads
+where the butler had left me, and a little further on developed an
+internal trouble which forced me to turn her in on a grass way-waste that
+cut into a summer-silent hazel wood. So far as I could make sure by the
+sun and a six-inch Ordnance map, this should be the road flank of that
+wood which I had first explored from the heights above. I made a mighty
+serious business of my repairs and a glittering shop of my repair kit,
+spanners, pump, and the like, which I spread out orderly upon a rug. It
+was a trap to catch all childhood, for on such a day, I argued, the
+children would not be far off. When I paused in my work I listened, but
+the wood was so full of the noises of summer (though the birds had mated)
+that I could not at first distinguish these from the tread of small
+cautious feet stealing across the dead leaves. I rang my bell in an
+alluring manner, but the feet fled, and I repented, for to a child a
+sudden noise is very real terror. I must have been at work half an hour
+when I heard in the wood the voice of the blind woman crying: "Children,
+oh children, where are you?" and the stillness made slow to close on the
+perfection of that cry. She came towards me, half feeling her way between
+the tree boles, and though a child it seemed clung to her skirt, it
+swerved into the leafage like a rabbit as she drew nearer.
+
+"Is that you?" she said, "from the other side of the county?"
+
+"Yes, it's me from the other side of the county."
+
+"Then why didn't you come through the upper woods? They were there just
+now."
+
+"They were here a few minutes ago. I expect they knew my car had broken
+down, and came to see the fun."
+
+"Nothing serious, I hope? How do cars break down?"
+
+"In fifty different ways. Only mine has chosen the fifty first."
+
+She laughed merrily at the tiny joke, cooed with delicious laughter, and
+pushed her hat back.
+
+"Let me hear," she said.
+
+"Wait a moment," I cried, "and I'll get you a cushion."
+
+She set her foot on the rug all covered with spare parts, and stooped
+above it eagerly. "What delightful things!" The hands through which she
+saw glanced in the chequered sunlight. "A box here--another box! Why
+you've arranged them like playing shop!"
+
+"I confess now that I put it out to attract them. I don't need half those
+things really."
+
+"How nice of you! I heard your bell in the upper wood. You say they were
+here before that?"
+
+"I'm sure of it. Why are they so shy? That little fellow in blue who was
+with you just now ought to have got over his fright. He's been watching me
+like a Red Indian."
+
+"It must have been your bell," she said. "I heard one of them go past me
+in trouble when I was coming down. They're shy--so shy even with me." She
+turned her face over her shoulder and cried again: "Children! Oh,
+children! Look and see!"
+
+"They must have gone off together on their own affairs,"
+
+I suggested, for there was a murmur behind us of lowered voices broken by
+the sudden squeaking giggles of childhood. I returned to my tinkerings and
+she leaned forward, her chin on her hand, listening interestedly.
+
+"How many are they?" I said at last. The work was finished, but I saw no
+reason to go.
+
+Her forehead puckered a little in thought. "I don't quite know," she said
+simply. "Sometimes more--sometimes less. They come and stay with me
+because I love them, you see."
+
+"That must be very jolly," I said, replacing a drawer, and as I spoke I
+heard the inanity of my answer.
+
+"You--you aren't laughing at me," she cried. "I--I haven't any of my own.
+I never married. People laugh at me sometimes about them because--
+because------"
+
+"Because they're savages," I returned. "It's nothing to fret for. That
+sort laugh at everything that isn't in their own fat lives."
+
+"I don't know. How should I? I only don't like being laughed at about
+_them_. It hurts; and when one can't see.... I don't want to seem silly,"
+her chin quivered like a child's as she spoke, "but we blindies have only
+one skin, I think. Everything outside hits straight at our souls. It's
+different with you. You've such good defences in your eyes--looking out--
+before anyone can really pain you in your soul. People forget that with
+us."
+
+I was silent reviewing that inexhaustible matter--the more than inherited
+(since it is also carefully taught) brutality of the Christian peoples,
+beside which the mere heathendom of the West Coast nigger is clean and
+restrained. It led me a long distance into myself.
+
+"Don't do that!" she said of a sudden, putting her hands before her eyes.
+
+"What?"
+
+She made a gesture with her hand.
+
+"That! It's--it's all purple and black. Don't! That colour hurts."
+
+"But, how in the world do you know about colours?" I exclaimed, for here
+was a revelation indeed.
+
+"Colours as colours?" she asked.
+
+"No. _Those_ Colours which you saw just now."
+
+"You know as well as I do," she laughed, "else you wouldn't have asked
+that question. They aren't in the world at all. They're in _you_--when you
+went so angry."
+
+"D'you mean a dull purplish patch, like port-wine mixed with ink?" I said.
+
+"I've never seen ink or port-wine, but the colours aren't mixed. They are
+separate--all separate."
+
+"Do you mean black streaks and jags across the purple?"
+
+She nodded. "Yes--if they are like this," and zigzagged her finger again,
+"but it's more red than purple--that bad colour."
+
+"And what are the colours at the top of the--whatever you see?"
+
+Slowly she leaned forward and traced on the rug the figure of the Egg
+itself.
+
+"I see them so," she said, pointing with a grass stem, "white, green,
+yellow, red, purple, and when people are angry or bad, black across the
+red--as you were just now."
+
+"Who told you anything about it--in the beginning?" I demanded.
+
+"About the colours? No one. I used to ask what colours were when I was
+little--in table-covers and curtains and carpets, you see--because some
+colours hurt me and some made me happy. People told me; and when I got
+older that was how I saw people." Again she traced the outline of the Egg
+which it is given to very few of us to see.
+
+"All by yourself?" I repeated.
+
+"All by myself. There wasn't anyone else. I only found out afterwards that
+other people did not see the Colours."
+
+She leaned against the tree-hole plaiting and unplaiting chance-plucked
+grass stems. The children in the wood had drawn nearer. I could see them
+with the tail of my eye frolicking like squirrels.
+
+"Now I am sure you will never laugh at me," she went on after a long
+silence. "Nor at _them_."
+
+"Goodness! No!" I cried, jolted out of my train of thought. "A man who
+laughs at a child--unless the child is laughing too--is a heathen!"
+
+"I didn't mean that of course. You'd never laugh _at_ children, but I
+thought--I used to think--that perhaps you might laugh about _them_. So
+now I beg your pardon.... What are you going to laugh at?"
+
+I had made no sound, but she knew.
+
+"At the notion of your begging my pardon. If you had done your duty as a
+pillar of the state and a landed proprietress you ought to have summoned
+me for trespass when I barged through your woods the other day. It was
+disgraceful of me--inexcusable."
+
+She looked at me, her head against the tree trunk--long and steadfastly--
+this woman who could see the naked soul.
+
+"How curious," she half whispered. "How very curious."
+
+"Why, what have I done?"
+
+"You don't understand ... and yet you understood about the Colours. Don't
+you understand?"
+
+She spoke with a passion that nothing had justified, and I faced her
+bewilderedly as she rose. The children had gathered themselves in a
+roundel behind a bramble bush. One sleek head bent over something smaller,
+and the set of the little shoulders told me that fingers were on lips.
+They, too, had some child's tremendous secret. I alone was hopelessly
+astray there in the broad sunlight.
+
+"No," I said, and shook my head as though the dead eyes could note.
+"Whatever it is, I don't understand yet. Perhaps I shall later--if you'll
+let me come again."
+
+"You will come again," she answered. "You will surely come again and walk
+in the wood."
+
+"Perhaps the children will know me well enough by that time to let me play
+with them--as a favour. You know what children are like."
+
+"It isn't a matter of favour but of right," she replied, and while I
+wondered what she meant, a dishevelled woman plunged round the bend of the
+road, loose-haired, purple, almost lowing with agony as she ran. It was my
+rude, fat friend of the sweetmeat shop. The blind woman heard and stepped
+forward. "What is it, Mrs. Madehurst?" she asked.
+
+The woman flung her apron over her head and literally grovelled in the
+dust, crying that her grandchild was sick to death, that the local doctor
+was away fishing, that Jenny the mother was at her wits end, and so forth,
+with repetitions and bellowings.
+
+"Where's the next nearest doctor?" I asked between paroxysms.
+
+"Madden will tell you. Go round to the house and take him with you. I'll
+attend to this. Be quick!" She half-supported the fat woman into the
+shade. In two minutes I was blowing all the horns of Jericho under the
+front of the House Beautiful, and Madden, in the pantry, rose to the
+crisis like a butler and a man.
+
+A quarter of an hour at illegal speeds caught us a doctor five miles away.
+Within the half-hour we had decanted him, much interested in motors, at
+the door of the sweetmeat shop, and drew up the road to await the verdict.
+
+"Useful things cars," said Madden, all man and no butler. "If I'd had one
+when mine took sick she wouldn't have died."
+
+"How was it?" I asked.
+
+"Croup. Mrs. Madden was away. No one knew what to do. I drove eight miles
+in a tax cart for the doctor. She was choked when we came back. This car
+'d ha' saved her. She'd have been close on ten now."
+
+"I'm sorry," I said. "I thought you were rather fond of children from what
+you told me going to the cross-roads the other day."
+
+"Have you seen 'em again, Sir--this mornin'?"
+
+"Yes, but they're well broke to cars. I couldn't get any of them within
+twenty yards of it."
+
+He looked at me carefully as a scout considers a stranger--not as a menial
+should lift his eyes to his divinely appointed superior.
+
+"I wonder why," he said just above the breath that he drew.
+
+We waited on. A light wind from the sea wandered up and down the long
+lines of the woods, and the wayside grasses, whitened already with summer
+dust, rose and bowed in sallow waves.
+
+A woman, wiping the suds off her arms, came out of the cottage next the
+sweetmeat shop.
+
+"I've be'n listenin' in de back-yard," she said cheerily. "He says
+Arthur's unaccountable bad. Did ye hear him shruck just now? Unaccountable
+bad. I reckon t'will come Jenny's turn to walk in de wood nex' week along,
+Mr. Madden."
+
+"Excuse me, Sir, but your lap-robe is slipping," said Madden
+deferentially. The woman started, dropped a curtsey, and hurried away.
+
+"What does she mean by 'walking in the wood'?" I asked.
+
+"It must be some saying they use hereabouts. I'm from Norfolk myself,"
+said Madden. "They're an independent lot in this county. She took you for
+a chauffeur, Sir."
+
+I saw the Doctor come out of the cottage followed by a draggle-tailed
+wench who clung to his arm as though he could make treaty for her with
+Death. "Dat sort," she wailed--"dey're just as much to us dat has 'em as
+if dey was lawful born. Just as much--just as much! An' God he'd be just
+as pleased if you saved 'un, Doctor. Don't take it from me. Miss Florence
+will tell ye de very same. Don't leave 'im, Doctor!"
+
+"I know. I know," said the man, "but he'll be quiet for a while now.
+We'll get the nurse and the medicine as fast as we can." He signalled me
+to come forward with the car, and I strove not to be privy to what
+followed; but I saw the girl's face, blotched and frozen with grief, and I
+felt the hand without a ring clutching at my knees when we moved away.
+
+The Doctor was a man of some humour, for I remember he claimed my car
+under the Oath of AEsculapius, and used it and me without mercy. First we
+convoyed Mrs. Madehurst and the blind woman to wait by the sick bed till
+the nurse should come. Next we invaded a neat county town for
+prescriptions (the Doctor said the trouble was cerebro-spinal meningitis),
+and when the County Institute, banked and flanked with scared market
+cattle, reported itself out of nurses for the moment we literally flung
+ourselves loose upon the county. We conferred with the owners of great
+houses--magnates at the ends of overarching avenues whose big-boned
+womenfolk strode away from their tea-tables to listen to the imperious
+Doctor. At last a white-haired lady sitting under a cedar of Lebanon and
+surrounded by a court of magnificent Borzois--all hostile to motors--gave
+the Doctor, who received them as from a princess, written orders which we
+bore many miles at top speed, through a park, to a French nunnery, where
+we took over in exchange a pallid-faced and trembling Sister. She knelt at
+the bottom of the tonneau telling her beads without pause till, by short
+cuts of the Doctor's invention, we had her to the sweetmeat shop once
+more. It was a long afternoon crowded with mad episodes that rose and
+dissolved like the dust of our wheels; cross-sections of remote and
+incomprehensible lives through which we raced at right angles; and I went
+home in the dusk, wearied out, to dream of the clashing horns of cattle;
+round-eyed nuns walking in a garden of graves; pleasant tea-parties
+beneath shaded trees; the carbolic-scented, grey-painted corridors of the
+County Institute; the steps of shy children in the wood, and the hands
+that clung to my knees as the motor began to move.
+
+*       *       *       *       *
+
+I had intended to return in a day or two, but it pleased Fate to hold me
+from that side of the county, on many pretexts, till the elder and the
+wild rose had fruited. There came at last a brilliant day, swept clear
+from the south-west, that brought the hills within hand's reach--a day of
+unstable airs and high filmy clouds. Through no merit of my own I was
+free, and set the car for the third time on that known road. As I reached
+the crest of the Downs I felt the soft air change, saw it glaze under the
+sun; and, looking down at the sea, in that instant beheld the blue of the
+Channel turn through polished silver and dulled steel to dingy pewter. A
+laden collier hugging the coast steered outward for deeper water and,
+across copper-coloured haze, I saw sails rise one by one on the anchored
+fishing-fleet. In a deep dene behind me an eddy of sudden wind drummed
+through sheltered oaks, and spun aloft the first day sample of autumn
+leaves. When I reached the beach road the sea-fog fumed over the
+brickfields, and the tide was telling all the groins of the gale beyond
+Ushant. In less than an hour summer England vanished in chill grey. We
+were again the shut island of the North, all the ships of the world
+bellowing at our perilous gates; and between their outcries ran the piping
+of bewildered gulls. My cap dripped moisture, the folds of the rug held it
+in pools or sluiced it away in runnels, and the salt-rime stuck to my
+lips.
+
+Inland the smell of autumn loaded the thickened fog among the trees, and
+the drip became a continuous shower. Yet the late flowers--mallow of the
+wayside, scabious of the field, and dahlia of the garden--showed gay in
+the mist, and beyond the sea's breath there was little sign of decay in
+the leaf. Yet in the villages the house doors were all open, and bare-
+legged, bare-headed children sat at ease on the damp doorsteps to shout
+"pip-pip" at the stranger.
+
+I made bold to call at the sweetmeat shop, where Mrs. Madehurst met me
+with a fat woman's hospitable tears. Jenny's child, she said, had died two
+days after the nun had come. It was, she felt, best out of the way, even
+though insurance offices, for reasons which she did not pretend to follow,
+would not willingly insure such stray lives. "Not but what Jenny didn't
+tend to Arthur as though he'd come all proper at de end of de first year--
+like Jenny herself." Thanks to Miss Florence, the child had been buried
+with a pomp which, in Mrs. Madehurst's opinion, more than covered the
+small irregularity of its birth. She described the coffin, within and
+without, the glass hearse, and the evergreen lining of the grave.
+
+"But how's the mother?" I asked.
+
+"Jenny? Oh, she'll get over it. I've felt dat way with one or two o' my
+own. She'll get over. She's walkin' in de wood now."
+
+"In this weather?"
+
+Mrs. Madehurst looked at me with narrowed eyes across the counter.
+
+"I dunno but it opens de 'eart like. Yes, it opens de 'eart. Dat's where
+losin' and bearin' comes so alike in de long run, we do say."
+
+Now the wisdom of the old wives is greater than that of all the Fathers,
+and this last oracle sent me thinking so extendedly as I went up the road,
+that I nearly ran over a woman and a child at the wooded corner by the
+lodge gates of the House Beautiful.
+
+"Awful weather!" I cried, as I slowed dead for the turn.
+
+"Not so bad," she answered placidly out of the fog. "Mine's used to 'un.
+You'll find yours indoors, I reckon."
+
+Indoors, Madden received me with professional courtesy, and kind inquiries
+for the health of the motor, which he would put under cover.
+
+I waited in a still, nut-brown hall, pleasant with late flowers and warmed
+with a delicious wood fire--a place of good influence and great peace.
+(Men and women may sometimes, after great effort, achieve a creditable
+lie; but the house, which is their temple, cannot say anything save the
+truth of those who have lived in it.) A child's cart and a doll lay on the
+black-and-white floor, where a rug had been kicked back. I felt that the
+children had only just hurried away--to hide themselves, most like--in the
+many turns of the great adzed staircase that climbed statelily out of the
+hall, or to crouch at gaze behind the lions and roses of the carven
+gallery above. Then I heard her voice above me, singing as the blind sing
+--from the soul:--
+
+
+  In the pleasant orchard-closes.
+
+And all my early summer came back at the call.
+
+  In the pleasant orchard-closes,
+  God bless all our gains say we--
+  But may God bless all our losses,
+  Better suits with our degree,
+
+She dropped the marring fifth line, and repeated--
+
+  Better suits with our degree!
+
+I saw her lean over the gallery, her linked hands white as pearl against
+the oak.
+
+"Is that you--from the other side of the county?" she called.
+
+"Yes, me--from the other side of the county," I answered laughing.
+
+"What a long time before you had to come here again." She ran down the
+stairs, one hand lightly touching the broad rail. "It's two months and
+four days. Summer's gone!"
+
+"I meant to come before, but Fate prevented."
+
+"I knew it. Please do something to that fire. They won't let me play with
+it, but I can feel it's behaving badly. Hit it!"
+
+I looked on either side of the deep fireplace, and found but a
+half-charred hedge-stake with which I punched a black log into flame.
+
+"It never goes out, day or night," she said, as though explaining. "In
+case any one conies in with cold toes, you see."
+
+"It's even lovelier inside than it was out," I murmured. The red light
+poured itself along the age-polished dusky panels till the Tudor roses
+and lions of the gallery took colour and motion. An old eagle-topped
+convex mirror gathered the picture into its mysterious heart, distorting
+afresh the distorted shadows, and curving the gallery lines into the
+curves of a ship. The day was shutting down in half a gale as the fog
+turned to stringy scud. Through the uncurtained mullions of the broad
+window I could see valiant horsemen of the lawn rear and recover against
+the wind that taunted them with legions of dead leaves.
+"Yes, it must be beautiful," she said. "Would you like to go over it?
+There's still light enough upstairs."
+
+I followed her up the unflinching, wagon-wide staircase to the gallery
+whence opened the thin fluted Elizabethan doors.
+
+"Feel how they put the latch low down for the sake of the children." She
+swung a light door inward.
+
+"By the way, where are they?" I asked. "I haven't even heard them to-day."
+
+She did not answer at once. Then, "I can only hear them," she replied
+softly. "This is one of their rooms--everything ready, you see."
+
+She pointed into a heavily-timbered room. There were little low gate
+tables and children's chairs. A doll's house, its hooked front half open,
+faced a great dappled rocking-horse, from whose padded saddle it was but a
+child's scramble to the broad window-seat overlooking the lawn. A toy gun
+lay in a corner beside a gilt wooden cannon.
+
+"Surely they've only just gone," I whispered. In the failing light a door
+creaked cautiously. I heard the rustle of a frock and the patter of feet--
+quick feet through a room beyond.
+
+"I heard that," she cried triumphantly. "Did you? Children, O children,
+where are you?"
+
+The voice filled the walls that held it lovingly to the last perfect note,
+but there came no answering shout such as I had heard in the garden. We
+hurried on from room to oak-floored room; up a step here, down three steps
+there; among a maze of passages; always mocked by our quarry. One might as
+well have tried to work an unstopped warren with a single ferret. There
+were bolt-holes innumerable--recesses in walls, embrasures of deep slitten
+windows now darkened, whence they could start up behind us; and abandoned
+fireplaces, six feet deep in the masonry, as well as the tangle of
+communicating doors. Above all, they had the twilight for their helper in
+our game. I had caught one or two joyous chuckles of evasion, and once or
+twice had seen the silhouette of a child's frock against some darkening
+window at the end of a passage; but we returned empty-handed to the
+gallery, just as a middle-aged woman was setting a lamp in its niche.
+
+"No, I haven't seen her either this evening, Miss Florence," I heard her
+say, "but that Turpin he says he wants to see you about his shed."
+
+"Oh, Mr. Turpin must want to see me very badly. Tell him to come to the
+hall, Mrs. Madden."
+
+I looked down into the hall whose only light was the dulled fire, and deep
+in the shadow I saw them at last. They must have slipped down while we
+were in the passages, and now thought themselves perfectly hidden behind
+an old gilt leather screen. By child's law, my fruitless chase was as good
+as an introduction, but since I had taken so much trouble I resolved to
+force them to come forward later by the simple trick, which children
+detest, of pretending not to notice them. They lay close, in a little
+huddle, no more than shadows except when a quick flame betrayed an
+outline.
+
+"And now we'll have some tea," she said. "I believe I ought to have
+offered it you at first, but one doesn't arrive at manners somehow when
+one lives alone and is considered--h'm--peculiar." Then with very pretty
+scorn, "would you like a lamp to see to eat by?" "The firelight's much
+pleasanter, I think." We descended into that delicious gloom and Madden
+brought tea.
+
+I took my chair in the direction of the screen ready to surprise or be
+surprised as the game should go, and at her permission, since a hearth is
+always sacred, bent forward to play with the fire.
+
+"Where do you get these beautiful short faggots from?" I asked idly. "Why,
+they are tallies!"
+
+"Of course," she said. "As I can't read or write I'm driven back on the
+early English tally for my accounts. Give me one and I'll tell you what it
+meant."
+
+I passed her an unburned hazel-tally, about a foot long, and she ran her
+thumb down the nicks.
+
+"This is the milk-record for the home farm for the month of April last
+year, in gallons," said she. "I don't know what I should have done without
+tallies. An old forester of mine taught me the system. It's out of date
+now for every one else; but my tenants respect it. One of them's coming
+now to see me. Oh, it doesn't matter. He has no business here out of
+office hours. He's a greedy, ignorant man--very greedy or--he wouldn't
+come here after dark."
+
+"Have you much land then?"
+
+"Only a couple of hundred acres in hand, thank goodness. The other six
+hundred are nearly all let to folk who knew my folk before me, but this
+Turpin is quite a new man--and a highway robber."
+
+"But are you sure I sha'n't be----?"
+
+"Certainly not. You have the right. He hasn't any children."
+
+"Ah, the children!" I said, and slid my low chair back till it nearly
+touched the screen that hid them. "I wonder whether they'll come out for
+me."
+
+There was a murmur of voices--Madden's and a deeper note--at the low, dark
+side door, and a ginger-headed, canvas-gaitered giant of the unmistakable
+tenant farmer type stumbled or was pushed in.
+
+"Come to the fire, Mr. Turpin," she said.
+
+"If--if you please, Miss, I'll--I'll be quite as well by the door." He
+clung to the latch as he spoke like a frightened child. Of a sudden I
+realised that he was in the grip of some almost overpowering fear.
+
+"Well?"
+
+"About that new shed for the young stock--that was all. These first autumn
+storms settin' in ... but I'll come again, Miss." His teeth did not
+chatter much more than the door latch.
+
+"I think not," she answered levelly. "The new shed--m'm. What did my agent
+write you on the 15th?"
+
+"I--fancied p'raps that if I came to see you--ma--man to man like, Miss.
+But----"
+
+His eyes rolled into every corner of the room wide with horror. He half
+opened the door through which he had entered, but I noticed it shut again
+--from without and firmly.
+
+"He wrote what I told him," she went on. "You are overstocked already.
+Dunnett's Farm never carried more than fifty bullocks--even in Mr.
+Wright's time. And _he_ used cake. You've sixty-seven and you don't cake.
+You've broken the lease in that respect. You're dragging the heart out of
+the farm."
+
+"I'm--I'm getting some minerals--superphosphates--next week. I've as good
+as ordered a truck-load already. I'll go down to the station to-morrow
+about 'em. Then I can come and see you man to man like, Miss, in the
+daylight.... That gentleman's not going away, is he?" He almost shrieked.
+
+I had only slid the chair a little further back, reaching behind me to tap
+on the leather of the screen, but he jumped like a rat.
+
+"No. Please attend to me, Mr. Turpin." She turned in her chair and faced
+him with his back to the door. It was an old and sordid little piece of
+scheming that she forced from him--his plea for the new cowshed at his
+landlady's expense, that he might with the covered manure pay his next
+year's rent out of the valuation after, as she made clear, he had bled the
+enriched pastures to the bone. I could not but admire the intensity of his
+greed, when I saw him out-facing for its sake whatever terror it was that
+ran wet on his forehead.
+
+I ceased to tap the leather--was, indeed, calculating the cost of the
+shed--when I felt my relaxed hand taken and turned softly between the soft
+hands of a child. So at last I had triumphed. In a moment I would turn and
+acquaint myself with those quick-footed wanderers....
+
+The little brushing kiss fell in the centre of my palm--as a gift on which
+the fingers were, once, expected to close: as the all faithful half-
+reproachful signal of a waiting child not used to neglect even when
+grown-ups were busiest--a fragment of the mute code devised very long ago.
+
+Then I knew. And it was as though I had known from the first day when I
+looked across the lawn at the high window.
+
+I heard the door shut. The woman turned to me in silence, and I felt that
+she knew.
+
+What time passed after this I cannot say. I was roused by the fall of a
+log, and mechanically rose to put it back. Then I returned to my place in
+the chair very close to the screen.
+
+"Now you understand," she whispered, across the packed shadows.
+
+"Yes, I understand--now. Thank you."
+
+"I--I only hear them." She bowed her head in her hands. "I have no right,
+you know--no other right. I have neither borne nor lost--neither borne nor
+lost!"
+
+"Be very glad then," said I, for my soul was torn open within me.
+
+"Forgive me!"
+
+She was still, and I went back to my sorrow and my joy.
+
+"It was because I loved them so," she said at last, brokenly. "_That_ was
+why it was, even from the first--even before I knew that they--they were
+all I should ever have. And I loved them so!"
+
+She stretched out her arms to the shadows and the shadows within the
+shadow.
+
+"They came because I loved them--because I needed them. I--I must have
+made them come. Was that wrong, think you?"
+
+"No--no."
+
+"I--I grant you that the toys and--and all that sort of thing were
+nonsense, but--but I used to so hate empty rooms myself when I was
+little." She pointed to the gallery. "And the passages all empty. ... And
+how could I ever bear the garden door shut? Suppose----"
+
+"Don't! For pity's sake, don't!" I cried. The twilight had brought a cold
+rain with gusty squalls that plucked at the leaded windows.
+
+"And the same thing with keeping the fire in all night. _I_ don't think it
+so foolish--do you?"
+
+I looked at the broad brick hearth, saw, through tears I believe, that
+there was no unpassable iron on or near it, and bowed my head.
+
+"I did all that and lots of other things--just to make believe. Then they
+came. I heard them, but I didn't know that they were not mine by right
+till Mrs. Madden told me----"
+
+"The butler's wife? What?"
+
+"One of them--I heard--she saw. And knew. Hers! _Not_ for me. I didn't
+know at first. Perhaps I was jealous. Afterwards, I began to understand
+that it was only because I loved them, not because----... Oh, you _must_
+bear or lose," she said piteously. "There is no other way--and yet they
+love me. They must! Don't they?"
+
+There was no sound in the room except the lapping voices of the fire, but
+we two listened intently, and she at least took comfort from what she
+heard. She recovered herself and half rose. I sat still in my chair by the
+screen.
+
+"Don't think me a wretch to whine about myself like this, but--but I'm all
+in the dark, you know, and _you_ can see."
+
+In truth I could see, and my vision confirmed me in my resolve, though
+that was like the very parting of spirit and flesh. Yet a little longer I
+would stay since it was the last time.
+
+"You think it is wrong, then?" she cried sharply, though I had said
+nothing.
+
+"Not for you. A thousand times no. For you it is right.... I am grateful
+to you beyond words. For me it would be wrong. For me only...."
+
+"Why?" she said, but passed her hand before her face as she had done at
+our second meeting in the wood. "Oh, I see," she went on simply as a
+child. "For you it would be wrong." Then with a little indrawn laugh,
+"and, d'you remember, I called you lucky--once--at first. You who must
+never come here again!"
+
+She left me to sit a little longer by the screen, and I heard the sound of
+her feet die out along the gallery above.
+
+
+
+
+MRS. BATHURST
+
+FROM LYDEN'S "IRENIUS"
+
+ACT III. Sc. II.
+
+Gow.--Had it been your Prince instead of a groom caught in this noose
+there's not an astrologer of the city----
+
+PRINCE.--Sacked! Sacked! We were a city yesterday.
+
+Gow.--So be it, but I was not governor. Not an astrologer, but would ha'
+sworn he'd foreseen it at the last versary of Venus, when Vulcan caught
+her with Mars in the house of stinking Capricorn. But since 'tis Jack of
+the Straw that hangs, the forgetful stars had it not on their tablets.
+
+PRINCE.--Another life! Were there any left to die? How did the
+poor fool come by it?
+
+Gow.--_Simpliciter_ thus. She that damned him to death knew not that she
+did it, or would have died ere she had done it. For she loved him. He
+that hangs him does so in obedience to the Duke, and asks no more than
+"Where is the rope?" The Duke, very exactly he hath told us, works God's
+will, in which holy employ he's not to be questioned. We have then left
+upon this finger, only Jack whose soul now plucks the left sleeve of
+Destiny in Hell to overtake why she clapped him up like a fly on a sunny
+wall. Whuff! Soh!
+
+PRINCE.--Your cloak, Ferdinand. I'll sleep now.
+
+FERDINAND.--Sleep, then.. He too, loved his life?
+
+Gow.--He was born of woman ... but at the end threw life from
+him, like your Prince, for a little sleep ... "Have I any look of a
+King?" said he, clanking his chain--"to be so baited on all sides by
+Fortune, that I must e'en die now to live with myself one day longer?" I
+left him railing at Fortune and woman's love.
+
+FERDINAND.--Ah, woman's love!
+
+_(Aside)_ Who knows not Fortune, glutted on easy thrones, Stealing from
+feasts as rare to coneycatch, Privily in the hedgerows for a clown With
+that same cruel-lustful hand and eye, Those nails and wedges, that one
+hammer and lead, And the very gerb of long-stored lightnings loosed
+Yesterday 'gainst some King.
+
+
+
+MRS. BATHURST
+The day that I chose to visit H.M.S. _Peridot_ in Simon's Bay was the day
+that the Admiral had chosen to send her up the coast. She was just
+steaming out to sea as my train came in, and since the rest of the Fleet
+were either coaling or busy at the rifle-ranges a thousand feet up the
+hill, I found myself stranded, lunchless, on the sea-front with no hope of
+return to Cape Town before five P.M. At this crisis I had the luck to come
+across my friend Inspector Hooper, Cape Government Railways, in command of
+an engine and a brake-van chalked for repair.
+
+"If you get something to eat," he said, "I'll run you down to Glengariff
+siding till the goods comes along. It's cooler there than here, you see."
+
+I got food and drink from the Greeks who sell all things at a price, and
+the engine trotted us a couple of miles up the line to a bay of drifted
+sand and a plank-platform half buried in sand not a hundred yards from the
+edge of the surf. Moulded dunes, whiter than any snow, rolled far inland
+up a brown and purple valley of splintered rocks and dry scrub. A crowd of
+Malays hauled at a net beside two blue and green boats on the beach; a
+picnic party danced and shouted barefoot where a tiny river trickled
+across the flat, and a circle of dry hills, whose feet were set in sands
+of silver, locked us in against a seven-coloured sea. At either horn of
+the bay the railway line, cut just above high water-mark, ran round a
+shoulder of piled rocks, and disappeared.
+
+"You see there's always a breeze here," said Hooper, opening the door as
+the engine left us in the siding on the sand, and the strong south-easter
+buffeting under Elsie's Peak dusted sand into our tickey beer. Presently
+he sat down to a file full of spiked documents. He had returned from a
+long trip up-country, where he had been reporting on damaged rolling-
+stock, as far away as Rhodesia. The weight of the bland wind on my
+eyelids; the song of it under the car roof, and high up among the rocks;
+the drift of fine grains chasing each other musically ashore; the tramp of
+the surf; the voices of the picnickers; the rustle of Hooper's file, and
+the presence of the assured sun, joined with the beer to cast me into
+magical slumber. The hills of False Bay were just dissolving into those of
+fairyland when I heard footsteps on the sand outside, and the clink of our
+couplings.
+
+"Stop that!" snapped Hooper, without raising his head from his work. "It's
+those dirty little Malay boys, you see: they're always playing with the
+trucks...."
+
+"Don't be hard on 'em. The railway's a general refuge in Africa," I
+replied.
+
+"'Tis--up-country at any rate. That reminds me," he felt in his waistcoat-
+pocket, "I've got a curiosity for you from Wankies--beyond Buluwayo. It's
+more of a souvenir perhaps than----"
+
+"The old hotel's inhabited," cried a voice. "White men from the language.
+Marines to the front! Come on, Pritch. Here's your Belmont. Wha--i--i!"
+
+The last word dragged like a rope as Mr. Pyecroft ran round to the open
+door, and stood looking up into my face. Behind him an enormous Sergeant
+of Marines trailed a stalk of dried seaweed, and dusted the sand nervously
+from his fingers.
+
+"What are you doing here?" I asked. "I thought the _Hierophant_ was down
+the coast?"
+
+"We came in last Tuesday--from Tristan D'Acunha--for overhaul, and we
+shall be in dockyard 'ands for two months, with boiler-seatings."
+
+"Come and sit down," Hooper put away the file.
+
+"This is Mr. Hooper of the Railway," I exclaimed, as Pyecroft turned to
+haul up the black-moustached sergeant.
+
+"This is Sergeant Pritchard, of the _Agaric_, an old shipmate," said he.
+"We were strollin' on the beach." The monster blushed and nodded. He
+filled up one side of the van when he sat down.
+
+"And this is my friend, Mr. Pyecroft," I added to Hooper, already busy
+with the extra beer which my prophetic soul had bought from the Greeks.
+
+"_Moi aussi_" quoth Pyecroft, and drew out beneath his coat a labelled
+quart bottle.
+
+"Why, it's Bass," cried Hooper.
+
+"It was Pritchard," said Pyecroft. "They can't resist him."
+
+"That's not so," said Pritchard, mildly.
+
+"Not _verbatim_ per'aps, but the look in the eye came to the same thing."
+
+"Where was it?" I demanded.
+
+"Just on beyond here--at Kalk Bay. She was slappin' a rug in a back
+verandah. Pritch hadn't more than brought his batteries to bear, before
+she stepped indoors an' sent it flyin' over the wall."
+
+Pyecroft patted the warm bottle.
+
+"It was all a mistake," said Pritchard. "I shouldn't wonder if she mistook
+me for Maclean. We're about of a size."
+
+I had heard householders of Muizenburg, St. James's, and Kalk Bay complain
+of the difficulty of keeping beer or good servants at the seaside, and I
+began to see the reason. None the less, it was excellent Bass, and I too
+drank to the health of that large-minded maid.
+
+"It's the uniform that fetches 'em, an' they fetch it," said Pyecroft. "My
+simple navy blue is respectable, but not fascinatin'. Now Pritch in 'is
+Number One rig is always 'purr Mary, on the terrace'--_ex officio_ as you
+might say."
+
+"She took me for Maclean, I tell you," Pritchard insisted. "Why--why--to
+listen to him you wouldn't think that only yesterday----"
+
+"Pritch," said Pyecroft, "be warned in time. If we begin tellin' what we
+know about each other we'll be turned out of the pub. Not to mention
+aggravated desertion on several occasions----"
+
+"Never anything more than absence without leaf--I defy you to prove it,"
+said the Sergeant hotly. "An' if it comes to that how about Vancouver in
+'87?"
+
+"How about it? Who pulled bow in the gig going ashore? Who told Boy
+Niven...?"
+
+"Surely you were court martialled for that?" I said. The story of Boy
+Niven who lured seven or eight able-bodied seamen and marines into the
+woods of British Columbia used to be a legend of the Fleet.
+
+"Yes, we were court-martialled to rights," said Pritchard, "but we should
+have been tried for murder if Boy Niven 'adn't been unusually tough. He
+told us he had an uncle 'oo'd give us land to farm. 'E said he was born at
+the back o' Vancouver Island, and _all_ the time the beggar was a balmy
+Barnado Orphan!"
+
+"_But_ we believed him," said Pyecroft. "I did--you did--Paterson did--an'
+'oo was the Marine that married the cocoanut-woman afterwards--him with
+the mouth?"
+
+"Oh, Jones, Spit-Kid Jones. I 'aven't thought of 'im in years," said
+Pritchard. "Yes, Spit-Kid believed it, an' George Anstey and Moon. We were
+very young an' very curious."
+
+"_But_ lovin' an' trustful to a degree," said Pyecroft.
+
+"Remember when 'e told us to walk in single file for fear o' bears?
+'Remember, Pye, when 'e 'opped about in that bog full o' ferns an' sniffed
+an' said 'e could smell the smoke of 'is uncle's farm? An' _all_ the time
+it was a dirty little out-lyin' uninhabited island. We walked round it in
+a day, an' come back to our boat lyin' on the beach. A whole day Boy Niven
+kept us walkin' in circles lookin' for 'is uncle's farm! He said his uncle
+was compelled by the law of the land to give us a farm!"
+
+"Don't get hot, Pritch. We believed," said Pyecroft.
+
+"He'd been readin' books. He only did it to get a run ashore an' have
+himself talked of. A day an' a night--eight of us--followin' Boy Niven
+round an uninhabited island in the Vancouver archipelago! Then the picket
+came for us an' a nice pack o' idiots we looked!"
+
+"What did you get for it?" Hooper asked.
+
+"Heavy thunder with continuous lightning for two hours. Thereafter sleet-
+squalls, a confused sea, and cold, unfriendly weather till conclusion o'
+cruise," said Pyecroft. "It was only what we expected, but what we felt,
+an' I assure you, Mr. Hooper, even a sailor-man has a heart to break, was
+bein' told that we able seamen an' promisin' marines 'ad misled Boy Niven.
+Yes, we poor back-to-the-landers was supposed to 'ave misled him! He
+rounded on us, o' course, an' got off easy."
+
+"Excep' for what we gave him in the steerin'-flat when we came out o'
+cells. 'Eard anything of 'im lately, Pye?"
+
+"Signal Boatswain in the Channel Fleet, I believe--Mr. L.L. Niven is."
+
+"An' Anstey died o' fever in Benin," Pritchard mused. "What come to Moon?
+Spit-Kid we know about."
+
+"Moon--Moon! Now where did I last...? Oh yes, when I was in the
+_Palladium_! I met Quigley at Buncrana Station. He told me Moon 'ad run
+when the _Astrild_ sloop was cruising among the South Seas three years
+back. He always showed signs o' bein' a Mormonastic beggar. Yes, he
+slipped off quietly an' they 'adn't time to chase 'im round the islands
+even if the navigatin' officer 'ad been equal to the job."
+
+"Wasn't he?" said Hooper.
+
+"Not so. Accordin' to Quigley the _Astrild_ spent half her commission
+rompin' up the beach like a she-turtle, an' the other half hatching
+turtles' eggs on the top o' numerous reefs. When she was docked at Sydney
+her copper looked like Aunt Maria's washing on the line--an' her 'midship
+frames was sprung. The commander swore the dockyard 'ad done it haulin'
+the pore thing on to the slips. They _do_ do strange things at sea, Mr.
+Hooper."
+
+"Ah! I'm not a tax-payer," said Hooper, and opened a fresh bottle. The
+Sergeant seemed to be one who had a difficulty in dropping subjects.
+
+"How it all comes back, don't it?" he said. "Why Moon must 'ave 'ad
+sixteen years' service before he ran."
+
+"It takes 'em at all ages. Look at--you know," said Pyecroft.
+
+"Who?" I asked.
+
+"A service man within eighteen months of his pension, is the party you're
+thinkin' of," said Pritchard. "A warrant 'oose name begins with a V.,
+isn't it?"
+
+"But, in a way o' puttin' it, we can't say that he actually did desert,"
+Pyecroft suggested.
+
+"Oh, no," said Pritchard. "It was only permanent absence up country
+without leaf. That was all."
+
+"Up country?" said Hooper. "Did they circulate his description?"
+
+"What for?" said Pritchard, most impolitely.
+
+"Because deserters are like columns in the war. They don't move away from
+the line, you see. I've known a chap caught at Salisbury that way tryin'
+to get to Nyassa. They tell me, but o' course I don't know, that they
+don't ask questions on the Nyassa Lake Flotilla up there. I've heard of a
+P. and O. quartermaster in full command of an armed launch there."
+
+"Do you think Click 'ud ha' gone up that way?" Pritchard asked.
+
+"There's no saying. He was sent up to Bloemfontein to take over some Navy
+ammunition left in the fort. We know he took it over and saw it into the
+trucks. Then there was no more Click--then or thereafter. Four months ago
+it transpired, and thus the _casus belli_ stands at present," said
+Pyecroft.
+
+"What were his marks?" said Hooper again.
+
+"Does the Railway get a reward for returnin' 'em, then?" said Pritchard.
+
+"If I did d'you suppose I'd talk about it?" Hooper retorted angrily.
+
+"You seemed so very interested," said Pritchard with equal crispness.
+
+"Why was he called Click?" I asked to tide over an uneasy little break in
+the conversation. The two men were staring at each other very fixedly.
+
+"Because of an ammunition hoist carryin' away," said Pyecroft. "And it
+carried away four of 'is teeth--on the lower port side, wasn't it, Pritch?
+The substitutes which he bought weren't screwed home in a manner o'
+sayin'. When he talked fast they used to lift a little on the bed plate.
+'Ence, 'Click.' They called 'im a superior man which is what we'd call a
+long, black-'aired, genteely speakin', 'alf-bred beggar on the lower
+deck."
+
+"Four false teeth on the lower left jaw," said Hooper, his hand in his
+waistcoat pocket. "What tattoo marks?"
+
+"Look here," began Pritchard, half rising. "I'm sure we're very grateful
+to you as a gentleman for your 'orspitality, but per'aps we may 'ave made
+an error in--"
+
+I looked at Pyecroft for aid, Hooper was crimsoning rapidly.
+
+"If the fat marine now occupying the foc'sle will kindly bring 'is _status
+quo_ to an anchor yet once more, we may be able to talk like gentlemen--
+not to say friends," said Pyecroft. "He regards you, Mr. Hooper, as a
+emissary of the Law."
+
+"I only wish to observe that when a gentleman exhibits such a peculiar, or
+I should rather say, such a _bloomin'_ curiosity in identification marks
+as our friend here----"
+
+"Mr. Pritchard," I interposed, "I'll take all the responsibility for Mr.
+Hooper."
+
+"An' _you_'ll apologise all round," said Pyecroft. "You're a rude little
+man, Pritch."
+
+"But how was I----" he began, wavering.
+
+"I don't know an' I don't care. Apologise!"
+
+The giant looked round bewildered and took our little hands into his vast
+grip, one by one. "I was wrong," he said meekly as a sheep. "My suspicions
+was unfounded. Mr. Hooper, I apologise."
+
+"You did quite right to look out for your own end o' the line," said
+Hooper. "I'd ha' done the same with a gentleman I didn't know, you see. If
+you don't mind I'd like to hear a little more o' your Mr. Vickery. It's
+safe with me, you see."
+
+"Why did Vickery run," I began, but Pyecroft's smile made me turn my
+question to "Who was she?"
+
+"She kep' a little hotel at Hauraki--near Auckland," said Pyecroft.
+
+"By Gawd!" roared Pritchard, slapping his hand on his leg. "Not Mrs.
+Bathurst!"
+
+Pyecroft nodded slowly, and the Sergeant called all the powers of darkness
+to witness his bewilderment.
+
+"So far as I could get at it Mrs. B. was the lady in question."
+
+"But Click was married," cried Pritchard.
+
+"An' 'ad a fifteen year old daughter. 'E's shown me her photograph.
+Settin' that aside, so to say, 'ave you ever found these little things
+make much difference? Because I haven't."
+
+"Good Lord Alive an' Watchin'!... Mrs. Bathurst...." Then with another
+roar: "You can say what you please, Pye, but you don't make me believe it
+was any of 'er fault. She wasn't _that!_"
+
+"If I was going to say what I please, I'd begin by callin' you a silly ox
+an' work up to the higher pressures at leisure. I'm trying to say solely
+what transpired. M'rover, for once you're right. It wasn't her fault."
+
+"You couldn't 'aven't made me believe it if it 'ad been," was the answer.
+
+Such faith in a Sergeant of Marines interested me greatly. "Never mind
+about that," I cried. "Tell me what she was like."
+
+"She was a widow," said Pyecroft. "Left so very young and never
+re-spliced. She kep' a little hotel for warrants and non-coms close to
+Auckland, an' she always wore black silk, and 'er neck--"
+
+"You ask what she was like," Pritchard broke in. "Let me give you an
+instance. I was at Auckland first in '97, at the end o' the _Marroquin's_
+commission, an' as I'd been promoted I went up with the others. She used
+to look after us all, an' she never lost by it--not a penny! 'Pay me now,'
+she'd say, 'or settle later. I know you won't let me suffer. Send the
+money from home if you like,' Why, gentlemen all, I tell you I've seen
+that lady take her own gold watch an' chain off her neck in the bar an'
+pass it to a bosun 'oo'd come ashore without 'is ticker an' 'ad to catch
+the last boat. 'I don't know your name,' she said, 'but when you've done
+with it, you'll find plenty that know me on the front. Send it back by one
+o' them.' And it was worth thirty pounds if it was worth 'arf a crown. The
+little gold watch, Pye, with the blue monogram at the back. But, as I was
+sayin', in those days she kep' a beer that agreed with me--Slits it was
+called. One way an' another I must 'ave punished a good few bottles of it
+while we was in the bay--comin' ashore every night or so. Chaffin across
+the bar like, once when we were alone, 'Mrs. B.,' I said, 'when next I
+call I want you to remember that this is my particular--just as you're my
+particular?' (She'd let you go _that_ far!) 'Just as you're my
+particular,' I said. 'Oh, thank you, Sergeant Pritchard,' she says, an'
+put 'er hand up to the curl be'ind 'er ear. Remember that way she had,
+Pye?"
+
+"I think so," said the sailor.
+
+"Yes, 'Thank you, Sergeant Pritchard,' she says. 'The least I can do is to
+mark it for you in case you change your mind. There's no great demand for
+it in the Fleet,' she says, 'but to make sure I'll put it at the back o'
+the shelf,' an' she snipped off a piece of her hair ribbon with that old
+dolphin cigar cutter on the bar--remember it, Pye?--an' she tied a bow
+round what was left--just four bottles. That was '97--no, '96. In '98 I
+was in the _Resiliant_--China station--full commission. In Nineteen One,
+mark you, I was in the _Carthusian_, back in Auckland Bay again. Of course
+I went up to Mrs. B.'s with the rest of us to see how things were goin'.
+They were the same as ever. (Remember the big tree on the pavement by the
+side-bar, Pye?) I never said anythin' in special (there was too many of us
+talkin' to her), but she saw me at once."
+
+"That wasn't difficult?" I ventured.
+
+"Ah, but wait. I was comin' up to the bar, when, 'Ada,' she says to her
+niece, 'get me Sergeant Pritchard's particular,' and, gentlemen all, I
+tell you before I could shake 'ands with the lady, there were those four
+bottles o' Slits, with 'er 'air ribbon in a bow round each o' their necks,
+set down in front o' me, an' as she drew the cork she looked at me under
+her eyebrows in that blindish way she had o' lookin', an', 'Sergeant
+Pritchard,' she says, 'I do 'ope you 'aven't changed your mind about your
+particulars.' That's the kind o' woman she was--after five years!"
+
+"I don't _see_ her yet somehow," said Hooper, but with sympathy.
+
+"She--she never scrupled to feed a lame duck or set 'er foot on a scorpion
+at any time of 'er life," Pritchard added valiantly.
+
+"That don't help me either. My mother's like that for one."
+
+The giant heaved inside his uniform and rolled his eyes at the car-roof.
+Said Pyecroft suddenly:--
+
+"How many women have you been intimate with all over the world, Pritch?"
+
+Pritchard blushed plum colour to the short hairs of his seventeen-inch
+neck.
+
+"'Undreds," said Pyecroft. "So've I. How many of 'em can you remember in
+your own mind, settin' aside the first--an' per'aps the last--_and one
+more_?"
+
+"Few, wonderful few, now I tax myself," said Sergeant Pritchard,
+relievedly.
+
+"An' how many times might you 'ave been at Aukland?"
+
+"One--two," he began. "Why, I can't make it more than three times in ten
+years. But I can remember every time that I ever saw Mrs. B."
+
+"So can I--an' I've only been to Auckland twice--how she stood an' what
+she was sayin' an' what she looked like. That's the secret. 'Tisn't
+beauty, so to speak, nor good talk necessarily. It's just It. Some
+women'll stay in a man's memory if they once walked down a street, but
+most of 'em you can live with a month on end, an' next commission you'd be
+put to it to certify whether they talked in their sleep or not, as one
+might say."
+
+"Ah," said Hooper. "That's more the idea. I've known just two women of
+that nature."
+
+"An' it was no fault o' theirs?" asked Pritchard.
+
+"None whatever. I know that!"
+
+"An' if a man gets struck with that kind o' woman, Mr. Hooper?" Pritchard
+went on.
+
+"He goes crazy--or just saves himself," was the slow answer.
+
+"You've hit it," said the Sergeant. "You've seen an' known somethin' in
+the course o' your life, Mr. Hooper. I'm lookin' at you!" He set down his
+bottle.
+
+"And how often had Vickery seen her?" I asked.
+
+"That's the dark an' bloody mystery," Pyecroft answered. "I'd never come
+across him till I come out in the _Hierophant_ just now, an' there wasn't
+any one in the ship who knew much about him. You see, he was what you call
+a superior man. 'E spoke to me once or twice about Auckland and Mrs. B. on
+the voyage out. I called that to mind subsequently. There must 'ave been a
+good deal between 'em, to my way o' thinkin'. Mind you I'm only giving you
+my _sum_ of it all, because all I know is second-hand so to speak, or
+rather I should say more than second-'and."
+
+"How?" said Hooper peremptorily. "You must have seen it or heard it."
+
+"Yes," said Pyecroft. "I used to think seein' and hearin' was the only
+regulation aids to ascertainin' facts, but as we get older we get more
+accommodatin'. The cylinders work easier, I suppose.... Were you in Cape
+Town last December when Phyllis's Circus came?"
+
+"No--up country," said Hooper, a little nettled at the change of venue.
+
+"I ask because they had a new turn of a scientific nature called 'Home and
+Friends for a Tickey.'"
+
+"Oh, you mean the cinematograph--the pictures of prize-fights and
+steamers. I've seen 'em up country."
+
+"Biograph or cinematograph was what I was alludin' to. London Bridge with
+the omnibuses--a troopship goin' to the war--marines on parade at
+Portsmouth an' the Plymouth Express arrivin' at Paddin'ton."
+
+"Seen 'em all. Seen 'em all," said Hooper impatiently.
+
+"We _Hierophants_ came in just before Christmas week an' leaf was easy."
+
+"I think a man gets fed up with Cape Town quicker than anywhere else on
+the station. Why, even Durban's more like Nature. We was there for
+Christmas," Pritchard put in.
+
+"Not bein' a devotee of Indian _peeris_, as our Doctor said to the Pusser,
+I can't exactly say. Phyllis's was good enough after musketry practice at
+Mozambique. I couldn't get off the first two or three nights on account of
+what you might call an imbroglio with our Torpedo Lieutenant in the
+submerged flat, where some pride of the West country had sugared up a
+gyroscope; but I remember Vickery went ashore with our Carpenter Rigdon--
+old Crocus we called him. As a general rule Crocus never left 'is ship
+unless an' until he was 'oisted out with a winch, but _when_ 'e went 'e
+would return noddin' like a lily gemmed with dew. We smothered him down
+below that night, but the things 'e said about Vickery as a fittin'
+playmate for a Warrant Officer of 'is cubic capacity, before we got him
+quiet, was what I should call pointed."
+
+"I've been with Crocus--in the _Redoubtable_," said the Sergeant. "He's a
+character if there is one."
+
+"Next night I went into Cape Town with Dawson and Pratt; but just at the
+door of the Circus I came across Vickery. 'Oh!' he says, 'you're the man
+I'm looking for. Come and sit next me. This way to the shillin' places!'
+I went astern at once, protestin' because tickey seats better suited my
+so-called finances. 'Come on,' says Vickery, 'I'm payin'.' Naturally I
+abandoned Pratt and Dawson in anticipation o' drinks to match the seats.
+'No,' he says, when this was 'inted--'not now. Not now. As many as you
+please afterwards, but I want you sober for the occasion.' I caught 'is
+face under a lamp just then, an' the appearance of it quite cured me of my
+thirsts. Don't mistake. It didn't frighten me. It made me anxious. I can't
+tell you what it was like, but that was the effect which it 'ad on me. If
+you want to know, it reminded me of those things in bottles in those
+herbalistic shops at Plymouth--preserved in spirits of wine. White an'
+crumply things--previous to birth as you might say."
+
+"You 'ave a beastial mind, Pye," said the Sergeant, relighting his pipe.
+
+"Perhaps. We were in the front row, an' 'Home an' Friends' came on early.
+Vickery touched me on the knee when the number went up. 'If you see
+anything that strikes you,' he says, 'drop me a hint'; then he went on
+clicking. We saw London Bridge an' so forth an' so on, an' it was most
+interestin'. I'd never seen it before. You 'eard a little dynamo like
+buzzin', but the pictures were the real thing--alive an' movin'."
+
+"I've seen 'em," said Hooper. "Of course they are taken from the very
+thing itself--you see."
+
+"Then the Western Mail came in to Paddin'ton on the big magic lantern
+sheet. First we saw the platform empty an' the porters standin' by. Then
+the engine come in, head on, an' the women in the front row jumped: she
+headed so straight. Then the doors opened and the passengers came out and
+the porters got the luggage--just like life. Only--only when any one came
+down too far towards us that was watchin', they walked right out o' the
+picture, so to speak. I was 'ighly interested, I can tell you. So were all
+of us. I watched an old man with a rug 'oo'd dropped a book an' was tryin'
+to pick it up, when quite slowly, from be'ind two porters--carryin' a
+little reticule an' lookin' from side to side--comes out Mrs. Bathurst.
+There was no mistakin' the walk in a hundred thousand. She come forward--
+right forward--she looked out straight at us with that blindish look which
+Pritch alluded to. She walked on and on till she melted out of the
+picture--like--like a shadow jumpin' over a candle, an' as she went I
+'eard Dawson in the ticky seats be'ind sing out: 'Christ! There's
+Mrs. B.!'"
+
+Hooper swallowed his spittle and leaned forward intently.
+
+"Vickery touched me on the knee again. He was clickin' his four false
+teeth with his jaw down like an enteric at the last kick. 'Are you sure?'
+says he. 'Sure,' I says, 'didn't you 'ear Dawson give tongue? Why, it's
+the woman herself.' 'I was sure before,' he says, 'but I brought you to
+make sure. Will you come again with me to-morrow?'
+
+"'Willingly,' I says, 'it's like meetin' old friends.'
+
+"'Yes,' he says, openin' his watch, 'very like. It will be four-and-twenty
+hours less four minutes before I see her again. Come and have a drink,' he
+says. 'It may amuse you, but it's no sort of earthly use to me.' He went
+out shaking his head an' stumblin' over people's feet as if he was drunk
+already. I anticipated a swift drink an' a speedy return, because I wanted
+to see the performin' elephants. Instead o' which Vickery began to
+navigate the town at the rate o' knots, lookin' in at a bar every three
+minutes approximate Greenwich time. I'm not a drinkin' man, though there
+are those present"--he cocked his unforgetable eye at me--"who may have
+seen me more or less imbued with the fragrant spirit. None the less, when
+I drink I like to do it at anchor an' not at an average speed of eighteen
+knots on the measured mile. There's a tank as you might say at the back o'
+that big hotel up the hill--what do they call it?"
+
+"The Molteno Reservoir," I suggested, and Hooper nodded.
+
+"That was his limit o' drift. We walked there an' we come down through the
+Gardens--there was a South-Easter blowin'--an' we finished up by the
+Docks. Then we bore up the road to Salt River, and wherever there was a
+pub Vickery put in sweatin'. He didn't look at what he drunk--he didn't
+look at the change. He walked an' he drunk an' he perspired in rivers. I
+understood why old Crocus 'ad come back in the condition 'e did, because
+Vickery an' I 'ad two an' a half hours o' this gipsy manoeuvre an' when we
+got back to the station there wasn't a dry atom on or in me."
+
+"Did he say anything?" Pritchard asked.
+
+"The sum total of 'is conversation from 7.45 P.M. till 11.15 P.M. was
+'Let's have another.' Thus the mornin' an' the evenin' were the first day,
+as Scripture says.... To abbreviate a lengthy narrative, I went into Cape
+Town for five consecutive nights with Master Vickery, and in that time I
+must 'ave logged about fifty knots over the ground an' taken in two gallon
+o' all the worst spirits south the Equator. The evolution never varied.
+Two shilling seats for us two; five minutes o' the pictures, an' perhaps
+forty-five seconds o' Mrs. B. walking down towards us with that blindish
+look in her eyes an' the reticule in her hand. Then out walk--and drink
+till train time."
+
+"What did you think?" said Hooper, his hand fingering his waistcoat
+pocket.
+
+"Several things," said Pyecroft. "To tell you the truth, I aren't quite
+done thinkin' about it yet. Mad? The man was a dumb lunatic--must 'ave
+been for months--years p'raps. I know somethin' o' maniacs, as every man
+in the Service must. I've been shipmates with a mad skipper--an' a lunatic
+Number One, but never both together I thank 'Eaven. I could give you the
+names o' three captains now 'oo ought to be in an asylum, but you don't
+find me interferin' with the mentally afflicted till they begin to lay
+about 'em with rammers an' winch-handles. Only once I crept up a little
+into the wind towards Master Vickery. 'I wonder what she's doin' in
+England,' I says. 'Don't it seem to you she's lookin' for somebody?' That
+was in the Gardens again, with the South-Easter blowin' as we were makin'
+our desperate round. 'She's lookin' for me,' he says, stoppin' dead under
+a lamp an' clickin'. When he wasn't drinkin', in which case all 'is teeth
+clicked on the glass, 'e was clickin' 'is four false teeth like a Marconi
+ticker. 'Yes! lookin' for me,' he said, an' he went on very softly an' as
+you might say affectionately. '_But?_ he went on, 'in future, Mr.
+Pyecroft, I should take it kindly of you if you'd confine your remarks to
+the drinks set before you. Otherwise,' he says, 'with the best will in the
+world towards you, I may find myself guilty of murder! Do you understand?'
+he says. 'Perfectly,' I says, 'but would it at all soothe you to know that
+in such a case the chances o' your being killed are precisely equivalent
+to the chances o' me being outed.' 'Why, no,' he says, 'I'm almost afraid
+that 'ud be a temptation,'
+
+"Then I said--we was right under the lamp by that arch at the end o' the
+Gardens where the trams came round--'Assumin' murder was done--or
+attempted murder--I put it to you that you would still be left so badly
+crippled, as one might say, that your subsequent capture by the police--to
+'oom you would 'ave to explain--would be largely inevitable.' 'That's
+better,' 'e says, passin' 'is hands over his forehead. 'That's much
+better, because,' he says, 'do you know, as I am now, Pye, I'm not so sure
+if I could explain anything much.' Those were the only particular words I
+had with 'im in our walks as I remember."
+
+"What walks!" said Hooper. "Oh my soul, what walks!"
+
+"They were chronic," said Pyecroft gravely, "but I didn't anticipate any
+danger till the Circus left. Then I anticipated that, bein' deprived of
+'is stimulant, he might react on me, so to say, with a hatchet.
+Consequently, after the final performance an' the ensuin' wet walk, I kep'
+myself aloof from my superior officer on board in the execution of 'is
+duty as you might put it. Consequently, I was interested when the sentry
+informs me while I was passin' on my lawful occasions that Click had asked
+to see the captain. As a general rule warrant officers don't dissipate
+much of the owner's time, but Click put in an hour and more be'ind that
+door. My duties kep' me within eyeshot of it. Vickery came out first, an'
+'e actually nodded at me an' smiled. This knocked me out o' the boat,
+because, havin' seen 'is face for five consecutive nights, I didn't
+anticipate any change there more than a condenser in hell, so to speak.
+The owner emerged later. His face didn't read off at all, so I fell back
+on his cox, 'oo'd been eight years with him and knew him better than boat
+signals. Lamson--that was the cox's name--crossed 'is bows once or twice
+at low speeds an' dropped down to me visibly concerned. 'He's shipped 'is
+court-martial face,' says Lamson. 'Some one's goin' to be 'ung. I've never
+seen that look but once before when they chucked the gun-sights overboard
+in the _Fantastic_.' Throwin' gun-sights overboard, Mr. Hooper, is the
+equivalent for mutiny in these degenerate days. It's done to attract the
+notice of the authorities an' the _Western Mornin' News_--generally by a
+stoker. Naturally, word went round the lower deck an' we had a private
+over'aul of our little consciences. But, barrin' a shirt which a second-
+class stoker said 'ad walked into 'is bag from the marines flat by itself,
+nothin' vital transpired. The owner went about flyin' the signal for
+'attend public execution,' so to say, but there was no corpse at the
+yardarm. 'E lunched on the beach an' 'e returned with 'is regulation
+harbour-routine face about 3 P. M. Thus Lamson lost prestige for raising
+false alarms. The only person 'oo might 'ave connected the epicycloidal
+gears correctly was one Pyecroft, when he was told that Mr. Vickery would
+go up country that same evening to take over certain naval ammunition left
+after the war in Bloemfontein Fort. No details was ordered to accompany
+Master Vickery. He was told off first person singular--as a unit---by
+himself."
+
+The marine whistled penetratingly.
+
+"That's what I thought," said Pyecroft. "I went ashore with him in the
+cutter an' 'e asked me to walk through the station. He was clickin'
+audibly, but otherwise seemed happy-ish.
+
+"'You might like to know,' he says, stoppin' just opposite the Admiral's
+front gate, 'that Phyllis's Circus will be performin' at Worcester
+to-morrow night. So I shall see 'er yet once again. You've been very
+patient with me,' he says.
+
+"'Look here, Vickery,' I said, 'this thing's come to be just as much as I
+can stand. Consume your own smoke. I don't want to know any more.'
+
+"'You!' he said. 'What have you got to complain of?--you've only 'ad to
+watch. I'm _it_,' he says, 'but that's neither here nor there,' he says.
+'I've one thing to say before shakin' 'ands. Remember,' 'e says--we were
+just by the Admiral's garden-gate then--'remember, that I am _not_ a
+murderer, because my lawful wife died in childbed six weeks after I came
+out. That much at least I am clear of,' 'e says.
+
+"'Then what have you done that signifies?' I said. 'What's the rest of
+it?'
+
+"'The rest,' 'e says, 'is silence,' an' he shook 'ands and went clickin'
+into Simons Town station."
+
+"Did he stop to see Mrs. Bathurst at Worcester?" I asked.
+
+"It's not known. He reported at Bloemfontein, saw the ammunition into the
+trucks, and then 'e disappeared. Went out--deserted, if you care to put it
+so--within eighteen months of his pension, an' if what 'e said about 'is
+wife was true he was a free man as 'e then stood. How do you read it off?"
+
+"Poor devil!" said Hooper. "To see her that way every night! I wonder what
+it was."
+
+"I've made my 'ead ache in that direction many a long night."
+
+"But I'll swear Mrs. B. 'ad no 'and in it," said the Sergeant unshaken.
+
+"No. Whatever the wrong or deceit was, he did it, I'm sure o' that. I 'ad
+to look at 'is face for five consecutive nights. I'm not so fond o'
+navigatin' about Cape Town with a South-Easter blowin' these days. I can
+hear those teeth click, so to say."
+
+"Ah, those teeth," said Hooper, and his hand went to his waistcoat pocket
+once more. "Permanent things false teeth are. You read about 'em in all
+the murder trials."
+
+"What d'you suppose the captain knew--or did?" I asked.
+
+"I never turned my searchlight that way," Pyecroft answered unblushingly.
+
+We all reflected together, and drummed on empty beer bottles as the
+picnic-party, sunburned, wet, and sandy, passed our door singing "The
+Honeysuckle and the Bee."
+
+"Pretty girl under that kapje," said Pyecroft.
+
+"They never circulated his description?" said Pritchard.
+
+"I was askin' you before these gentlemen came," said Hooper to me,
+"whether you knew Wankies--on the way to the Zambesi--beyond Buluwayo?"
+
+"Would he pass there--tryin' to get to that Lake what's 'is name?" said
+Pritchard.
+
+Hooper shook his head and went on: "There's a curious bit o' line there,
+you see. It runs through solid teak forest--a sort o' mahogany really--
+seventy-two miles without a curve. I've had a train derailed there twenty-
+three times in forty miles. I was up there a month ago relievin' a sick
+inspector, you see. He told me to look out for a couple of tramps in the
+teak."
+
+"Two?" Pyecroft said. "I don't envy that other man if----"
+
+"We get heaps of tramps up there since the war. The inspector told me I'd
+find 'em at M'Bindwe siding waiting to go North. He'd given 'em some grub
+and quinine, you see. I went up on a construction train. I looked out for
+'em. I saw them miles ahead along the straight, waiting in the teak. One
+of 'em was standin' up by the dead-end of tke siding an' the other was
+squattin' down lookin' up at 'im, you see."
+
+"What did you do for 'em?" said Pritchard.
+
+"There wasn't much I could do, except bury 'em. There'd been a bit of a
+thunderstorm in the teak, you see, and they were both stone dead and as
+black as charcoal. That's what they really were, you see--charcoal. They
+fell to bits when we tried to shift 'em. The man who was standin' up had
+the false teeth. I saw 'em shinin' against the black. Fell to bits he did
+too, like his mate squatting down an' watchin' him, both of 'em all wet in
+the rain. Both burned to charcoal, you see. And--that's what made me ask
+about marks just now--the false-toother was tattooed on the arms and
+chest--a crown and foul anchor with M.V. above."
+
+"I've seen that," said Pyecroft quickly. "It was so."
+
+"But if he was all charcoal-like?" said Pritchard, shuddering.
+
+"You know how writing shows up white on a burned letter? Well, it was like
+that, you see. We buried 'em in the teak and I kept... But he was a friend
+of you two gentlemen, you see."
+
+Mr. Hooper brought his hand away from his waistcoat-pocket--empty.
+
+Pritchard covered his face with his hands for a moment, like a child
+shutting out an ugliness.
+
+"And to think of her at Hauraki!" he murmured--"with 'er 'air-ribbon on my
+beer. 'Ada,' she said to her niece... Oh, my Gawd!"...
+
+  "On a summer afternoon, when the honeysuckle blooms,
+  And all Nature seems at rest,
+  Underneath the bower, 'mid the perfume of the flower,
+  Sat a maiden with the one she loves the best----"
+
+sang the picnic-party waiting for their train at Glengariff.
+
+"Well, I don't know how you feel about it," said Pyecroft, "but 'avin'
+seen 'is face for five consecutive nights on end, I'm inclined to finish
+what's left of the beer an' thank Gawd he's dead!"
+
+
+
+
+BELOW THE MILL DAM
+
+"OUR FATHERS ALSO"
+
+  By--they are by with mirth and tears,
+  Wit or the works of Desire--
+  Cushioned about on the kindly years
+  Between the wall and the fire.
+
+  The grapes are pressed, the corn is shocked--
+  Standeth no more to glean;
+  For the Gates of Love and Learning locked
+  When they went out between.
+
+  All lore our Lady Venus bares
+  Signalled it was or told
+  By the dear lips long given to theirs
+  And longer to the mould.
+
+  All Profit, all Device, all Truth
+  Written it was or said
+  By the mighty men of their mighty youth.
+  Which is mighty being dead.
+
+  The film that floats before their eyes
+  The Temple's Veil they call;
+  And the dust that on the Shewbread lies
+  Is holy over all.
+
+  Warn them of seas that slip our yoke
+  Of slow conspiring stars--
+  The ancient Front of Things unbroke
+  But heavy with new wars?
+
+  By--they are by with mirth and tears.
+  Wit or the waste of Desire--
+  Cushioned about on the kindly years
+  Between the wall and the fire.
+
+
+BELOW THE MILL DAM
+
+"Book--Book--Domesday Book!" They were letting in the water for the evening
+stint at Robert's Mill, and the wooden Wheel where lived the Spirit of the
+Mill settled to its nine hundred year old song: "Here Azor, a freeman,
+held one rod, but it never paid geld. _Nun-nun-nunquam geldavit_. Here
+Reinbert has one villein and four cottars with one plough--and wood for
+six hogs and two fisheries of sixpence and a mill of ten shillings--_unum
+molinum_--one mill. Reinbert's mill--Robert's Mill. Then and afterwards
+and now--_tunc et post et modo_--Robert's Mill. Book--Book--Domesday
+Book!"
+
+"I confess," said the Black Rat on the crossbeam, luxuriously trimming his
+whiskers--"I confess I am not above appreciating my position and all it
+means." He was a genuine old English black rat, a breed which, report
+says, is rapidly diminishing before the incursions of the brown variety.
+
+"Appreciation is the surest sign of inadequacy," said the Grey Cat, coiled
+up on a piece of sacking.
+
+"But I know what you mean," she added. "To sit by right at the heart of
+things--eh?"
+
+"Yes," said the Black Rat, as the old mill shook and the heavy stones
+thuttered on the grist. "To possess--er--all this environment as an
+integral part of one's daily life must insensibly of course ... You see?"
+
+"I feel," said the Grey Cat. "Indeed, if _we_ are not saturated with the
+spirit of the Mill, who should be?"
+
+"Book--Book--Domesday Book!" the Wheel, set to his work, was running off
+the tenure of the whole rape, for he knew Domesday Book backwards and
+forwards: "_In Ferle tenuit Abbatia de Wiltuna unam hidam et unam virgam
+et dimidiam. Nunquam geldavit_. And Agemond, a freeman, has half a hide
+and one rod. I remember Agemond well. Charmin' fellow--friend of mine. He
+married a Norman girl in the days when we rather looked down on the
+Normans as upstarts. An' Agemond's dead? So he is. Eh, dearie me! dearie
+me! I remember the wolves howling outside his door in the big frost of Ten
+Fifty-Nine.... _Essewelde hundredum nunquam geldum reddidit_. Book! Book!
+Domesday Book!"
+
+"After all," the Grey Cat continued, "atmospere is life. It is the
+influences under which we live that count in the long run. Now, outside"--
+she cocked one ear towards the half-opened door--"there is an absurd
+convention that rats and cats are, I won't go so far as to say natural
+enemies, but opposed forces. Some such ruling may be crudely effective--I
+don't for a minute presume to set up my standards as final--among the
+ditches; but from the larger point of view that one gains by living at the
+heart of things, it seems for a rule of life a little overstrained. Why,
+because some of your associates have, shall I say, liberal views on the
+ultimate destination of a sack of--er--middlings don't they call them----"
+
+"Something of that sort," said the Black Rat, a most sharp and sweet-
+toothed judge of everything ground in the mill for the last three years.
+
+"Thanks--middlings be it. _Why_, as I was saying, must I disarrange my fur
+and my digestion to chase you round the dusty arena whenever we happen to
+meet?"
+
+"As little reason," said the Black Rat, "as there is for me, who, I trust,
+am a person of ordinarily decent instincts, to wait till you have gone on
+a round of calls, and then to assassinate your very charming children."
+
+"Exactly! It has its humorous side though." The Grey Cat yawned. "The
+miller seems afflicted by it. He shouted large and vague threats to my
+address, last night at tea, that he wasn't going to keep cats who 'caught
+no mice.' Those were his words. I remember the grammar sticking in my
+throat like a herring-bone."
+
+"And what did you do?"
+
+"What does one do when a barbarian utters? One ceases to utter and
+removes. I removed--towards his pantry. It was a _riposte_ he might
+appreciate."
+
+"Really those people grow absolutely insufferable," said the Black Rat.
+"There is a local ruffian who answers to the name of Mangles--a builder--
+who has taken possession of the outhouses on the far side of the Wheel for
+the last fortnight. He has constructed cubical horrors in red brick where
+those deliciously picturesque pigstyes used to stand. Have you noticed?"
+
+"There has been much misdirected activity of late among the humans. They
+jabber inordinately. I haven't yet been able to arrive at their reason for
+existence." The Cat yawned.
+
+"A couple of them came in here last week with wires, and fixed them all
+about the walls. Wires protected by some abominable composition, ending in
+iron brackets with glass bulbs. Utterly useless for any purpose and
+artistically absolutely hideous. What do they mean?"
+
+"Aaah! I have known _four_-and-twenty leaders of revolt in Faenza," said
+the Cat, who kept good company with the boarders spending a summer at the
+Mill Farm. "It means nothing except that humans occasionally bring their
+dogs with them. I object to dogs in all forms."
+
+"Shouldn't object to dogs," said the Wheel sleepily.... "The Abbot of
+Wilton kept the best pack in the county. He enclosed all the Harryngton
+Woods to Sturt Common. Aluric, a freeman, was dispossessed of his holding.
+They tried the case at Lewes, but he got no change out of William de
+Warrenne on the bench. William de Warrenne fined Aluric eight and
+fourpence for treason, and the Abbot of Wilton excommunicated him for
+blasphemy. Aluric was no sportsman. Then the Abbot's brother married ...
+I've forgotten her name, but she was a charmin' little woman. The Lady
+Philippa was her daughter. That was after the barony was conferred. She
+rode devilish straight to hounds. They were a bit throatier than we breed
+now, but a good pack: one of the best. The Abbot kept 'em in splendid
+shape. Now, who was the woman the Abbot kept? Book--Book! I shall have to
+go right back to Domesday and work up the centuries: _Modo per omnia
+reddit burgum tunc--tunc--tunc_! Was it _burgum_ or _hundredum_? I shall
+remember in a minute. There's no hurry." He paused as he turned over
+silvered with showering drops.
+
+"This won't do," said the Waters in the sluice. "Keep moving."
+
+The Wheel swung forward; the Waters roared on the buckets and dropped down
+to the darkness below.
+
+"Noisier than usual," said the Black Rat. "It must have been raining up
+the valley."
+
+"Floods maybe," said the Wheel dreamily. "It isn't the proper season, but
+they can come without warning. I shall never forget the big one--when the
+Miller went to sleep and forgot to open the hatches. More than two hundred
+years ago it was, but I recall it distinctly. Most unsettling."
+
+"We lifted that wheel off his bearings," cried the Waters. "We said, 'Take
+away that bauble!' And in the morning he was five mile down the valley--
+hung up in a tree."
+
+"Vulgar!" said the Cat. "But I am sure he never lost his dignity."
+
+"We don't know. He looked like the Ace of Diamonds when we had finished
+with him.... Move on there! Keep on moving. Over! Get over!"
+
+"And why on this day more than any other," said the Wheel statelily. "I am
+not aware that my department requires the stimulus of external pressure to
+keep it up to its duties. I trust I have the elementary instincts of a
+gentleman."
+
+"Maybe," the Waters answered together, leaping down on the buckets. "We
+only know that you are very stiff on your bearings. Over, get over!"
+
+The Wheel creaked and groaned. There was certainly greater pressure upon
+him that he had ever felt, and his revolutions had increased from six and
+three-quarters to eight and a third per minute. But the uproar between the
+narrow, weed-hung walls annoyed the Grey Cat.
+
+"Isn't it almost time," she said plaintively, "that the person who is paid
+to understand these things shuts off those vehement drippings with that
+screw-thing on the top of that box-thing."
+
+"They'll be shut off at eight o'clock as usual," said Rat; "then we can go
+to dinner."
+
+"But we shan't be shut off till ever so late," said the Waters gaily. "We
+shall keep it up all night."
+
+"The ineradicable offensiveness of youth is partially compensated for by
+its eternal hopefulness," said the Cat. "Our dam is not, I am glad to say,
+designed to furnish water for more than four hours at a time. Reserve is
+Life."
+
+"Thank goodness!" said the Black Rat. "Then they can return to their
+native ditches."
+
+"Ditches!" cried the Waters; "Raven's Gill Brook is no ditch. It is almost
+navigable, and _we_ come from there away." They slid over solid and
+compact till the Wheel thudded under their weight.
+
+"Raven's Gill Brook," said the Rat. "_I_ never heard of Raven's Gill."
+
+"We are the waters of Harpenden Brook--down from under Callton Rise. Phew!
+how the race stinks compared with the heather country." Another five foot
+of water flung itself against the Wheel, broke, roared, gurgled, and was
+gone.
+
+"Indeed," said the Grey Cat, "I am sorry to tell you that Raven's Gill
+Brook is cut off from this valley by an absolutely impassable range of
+mountains, and Callton Rise is more than nine miles away. It belongs to
+another system entirely."
+
+"Ah yes," said the Rat, grinning, "but we forget that, for the young,
+water always runs uphill."
+
+"Oh, hopeless! hopeless! hopeless!" cried the Waters, descending open-
+palmed upon the Wheel "There is nothing between here and Raven's Gill
+Brook that a hundred yards of channelling and a few square feet of
+concrete could not remove; and hasn't removed!"
+
+"And Harpenden Brook is north of Raven's Gill and runs into Raven's Gill
+at the foot of Callton Rise, where ilex trees are, and _we_ come from
+there!" These were the glassy, clear waters of the high chalk.
+
+"And Batten's Ponds, that are fed by springs, have been led through
+Trott's Wood, taking the spare water from the old Witches' Spring under
+Churt Haw, and we--we--_we_ are their combined waters!" Those were the
+Waters from the upland bogs and moors--a porter-coloured, dusky, and foam-
+flecked flood.
+
+"It's all very interesting," purred the Cat to the sliding waters, "and I
+have no doubt that Trott's Woods and Bott's Woods are tremendously
+important places; but if you could manage to do your work--whose value I
+don't in the least dispute--a little more soberly, I, for one, should be
+grateful."
+
+"Book--book--book--book--book--Domesday Book!" The urged Wheel was fairly
+clattering now: "In Burgelstaltone a monk holds of Earl Godwin one hide
+and a half with eight villeins. There is a church--and a monk.... I
+remember that monk. Blessed if he could rattle his rosary off any quicker
+than I am doing now ... and wood for seven hogs. I must be running twelve
+to the minute ... almost as fast as Steam. Damnable invention, Steam! ...
+Surely it's time we went to dinner or prayers--or something. Can't keep up
+this pressure, day in and day out, and not feel it. I don't mind for
+myself, of course. _Noblesse oblige_, you know. I'm only thinking of the
+Upper and the Nether Millstones. They came out of the common rock. They
+can't be expected to----"
+
+"Don't worry on our account, please," said the Millstones huskily. "So
+long as you supply the power we'll supply the weight and the bite."
+
+"Isn't it a trifle blasphemous, though, to work you in this way?" grunted
+the Wheel. "I seem to remember something about the Mills of God grinding
+'slowly.' _Slowly_ was the word!"
+
+"But we are not the Mills of God. We're only the Upper and the Nether
+Millstones. We have received no instructions to be anything else. We are
+actuated by power transmitted through you."
+
+"Ah, but let us be merciful as we are strong. Think of all the beautiful
+little plants that grow on my woodwork. There are five varieties of rare
+moss within less than one square yard--and all these delicate jewels of
+nature are being grievously knocked about by this excessive rush of the
+water."
+
+"Umph!" growled the Millstones. "What with your religious scruples and
+your taste for botany we'd hardly know you for the Wheel that put the
+carter's son under last autumn. You never worried about _him_!"
+
+"He ought to have known better."
+
+"So ought your jewels of nature. Tell 'em to grow where it's safe."
+
+"How a purely mercantile life debases and brutalises!" said the Cat to the
+Rat.
+
+"They were such beautiful little plants too," said the Rat tenderly.
+"Maiden's-tongue and hart's-hair fern trellising all over the wall just as
+they do on the sides of churches in the Downs. Think what a joy the sight
+of them must be to our sturdy peasants pulling hay!"
+
+"Golly!" said the Millstones. "There's nothing like coming to the heart of
+things for information"; and they returned to the song that all English
+water-mills have sung from time beyond telling:
+
+  There was a jovial miller once
+  Lived on the River Dee,
+  And this the burden of his song
+  For ever used to be.
+
+Then, as fresh grist poured in and dulled the note:
+
+  I care for nobody--no not I,
+  And nobody cares for me.
+
+"Even these stones have absorbed something of our atmosphere," said the
+Grey Cat. "Nine-tenths of the trouble in this world comes from lack of
+detachment."
+
+"One of your people died from forgetting that, didn't she?" said the Rat.
+
+"One only. The example has sufficed us for generations."
+
+"Ah! but what happened to Don't Care?" the Waters demanded.
+
+"Brutal riding to death of the casual analogy is another mark of
+provincialism!" The Grey Cat raised her tufted chin. "I am going to sleep.
+With my social obligations I must snatch rest when I can; but, as our old
+friend here says, _Noblesse oblige_.... Pity me! Three functions to-night
+in the village, and a barn dance across the valley!"
+
+"There's no chance, I suppose, of your looking in on the loft about two.
+Some of our young people are going to amuse themselves with a new sacque-
+dance--best white flour only," said the Black Rat.
+
+"I believe I am officially supposed not to countenance that sort of thing,
+but youth is youth. ... By the way, the humans set my milk-bowl in the
+loft these days; I hope your youngsters respect it."
+
+"My dear lady," said the Black Rat, bowing, "you grieve me. You hurt me
+inexpressibly. After all these years, too!"
+
+"A general crush is so mixed--highways and hedges--all that sort of thing
+--and no one can answer for one's best friends. _I_ never try. So long as
+mine are amusin' and in full voice, and can hold their own at a tile-
+party, I'm as catholic as these mixed waters in the dam here!"
+
+"We aren't mixed. We _have_ mixed. We are one now," said the Waters
+sulkily.
+
+"Still uttering?" said the Cat. "Never mind, here's the Miller coming to
+shut you off. Ye-es, I have known--_four_--or five is it?--and twenty
+leaders of revolt in Faenza.... A little more babble in the dam, a little
+more noise in the sluice, a little extra splashing on the wheel,
+and then----"
+
+"They will find that nothing has occurred," said the Black Rat. "The old
+things persist and survive and are recognised--our old friend here first
+of all. By the way," he turned toward the Wheel, "I believe we have to
+congratulate you on your latest honour."
+
+"Profoundly well deserved--even if he had never--as he has---laboured
+strenuously through a long life for the amelioration of millkind," said
+the Cat, who belonged to many tile and outhouse committees. "Doubly
+deserved, I may say, for the silent and dignified rebuke his existence
+offers to the clattering, fidgety-footed demands of--er--some people. What
+form did the honour take?"
+
+"It was," said the Wheel bashfully, "a machine-moulded pinion."
+
+"Pinions! Oh, how heavenly!" the Black Rat sighed. "I never see a bat
+without wishing for wings."
+
+"Not exactly that sort of pinion," said the Wheel, "but a really ornate
+circle of toothed iron wheels. Absurd, of course, but gratifying. Mr.
+Mangles and an associate herald invested me with it personally--on my left
+rim--the side that you can't see from the mill. I hadn't meant to say
+anything about it--or the new steel straps round my axles--bright red, you
+know--to be worn on all occasions--but, without false modesty, I assure
+you that the recognition cheered me not a little."
+
+"How intensely gratifying!" said the Black Rat. "I must really steal an
+hour between lights some day and see what they are doing on your left
+side."
+
+"By the way, have you any light on this recent activity of Mr. Mangles?"
+the Grey Cat asked. "He seems to be building small houses on the far side
+of the tail-race. Believe me, I don't ask from any vulgar curiosity."
+
+"It affects our Order," said the Black Rat simply but firmly.
+
+"Thank you," said the Wheel. "Let me see if I can tabulate it properly.
+Nothing like system in accounts of all kinds. Book! Book! Book! On the
+side of the Wheel towards the hundred of Burgelstaltone, where till now
+was a stye of three hogs, Mangles, a freeman, with four villeins, and two
+carts of two thousand bricks, has a new small house of five yards and a
+half, and one roof of iron and a floor of cement. Then, now, and
+afterwards beer in large tankards. And Felden, a stranger, with three
+villeins and one very great cart, deposits on it one engine of iron and
+brass and a small iron mill of four feet, and a broad strap of leather.
+And Mangles, the builder, with two villeins, constructs the floor for the
+same, and a floor of new brick with wires for the small mill. There are
+there also chalices filled with iron and water, in number fifty-seven. The
+whole is valued at one hundred and seventy-four pounds.... I'm sorry I
+can't make myself clearer, but you can see for yourself."
+
+"Amazingly lucid," said the Cat. She was the more to be admired because
+the language of Domesday Book is not, perhaps, the clearest medium wherein
+to describe a small but complete electric-light installation, deriving its
+power from a water-wheel by means of cogs and gearing.
+
+"See for yourself--by all means, see for yourself," said the Waters,
+spluttering and choking with mirth.
+
+"Upon my word," said the Black Rat furiously, "I may be at fault, but I
+wholly fail to perceive where these offensive eavesdroppers--er--come in.
+We were discussing a matter that solely affected our Order."
+
+Suddenly they heard, as they had heard many times before, the Miller
+shutting off the water. To the rattle and rumble of the labouring stones
+succeeded thick silence, punctuated with little drops from the stayed
+wheel. Then some water-bird in the dam fluttered her wings as she slid to
+her nest, and the plop of a water-rat sounded like the fall of a log in
+the water.
+
+"It is all over--it always is all over at just this time. Listen, the
+Miller is going to bed--as usual. Nothing has occurred," said the Cat.
+
+Something creaked in the house where the pig-styes had stood, as metal
+engaged on metal with a clink and a burr.
+
+"Shall I turn her on?" cried the Miller.
+
+"Ay," said the voice from the dynamo-house.
+
+"A human in Mangles' new house!" the Rat squeaked.
+
+"What of it?" said the Grey Cat. "Even supposing Mr. Mangles' cats'-meat-
+coloured hovel ululated with humans, can't you see for yourself--that--?"
+
+There was a solid crash of released waters leaping upon the wheel more
+furiously than ever, a grinding of cogs, a hum like the hum of a hornet,
+and then the unvisited darkness of the old mill was scattered by
+intolerable white light. It threw up every cobweb, every burl and knot in
+the beams and the floor; till the shadows behind the flakes of rough
+plaster on the wall lay clear-cut as shadows of mountains on the
+photographed moon.
+
+"See! See! See!" hissed the Waters in full flood. "Yes, see for
+yourselves. Nothing has occurred. Can't you see?"
+
+The Rat, amazed, had fallen from his foothold and lay half-stunned on the
+floor. The Cat, following her instinct, leaped nigh to the ceiling, and
+with flattened ears and bared teeth backed in a corner ready to fight
+whatever terror might be loosed on her. But nothing happened. Through the
+long aching minutes nothing whatever happened, and her wire-brush tail
+returned slowly to its proper shape.
+
+"Whatever it is," she said at last, "it's overdone. They can never keep it
+up, you know."
+
+"Much you know," said the Waters. "Over you go, old man. You can take the
+full head of us now. Those new steel axle-straps of yours can stand
+anything. Come along, Raven's Gill, Harpenden, Callton Rise, Batten's
+Ponds, Witches' Spring, all together! Let's show these gentlemen how to
+work!"
+
+"But--but--I thought it was a decoration. Why--why--why--it only means
+more work for _me_!"
+
+"Exactly. You're to supply about sixty eight-candle lights when required.
+But they won't be all in use at once----"
+
+"Ah! I thought as much," said the Cat. "The reaction is bound to come."
+
+"_And_" said the Waters, "you will do the ordinary work of the mill as
+well."
+
+"Impossible!" the old Wheel quivered as it drove. "Aluric never did it--
+nor Azor, nor Reinbert. Not even William de Warrenne or the Papal Legate.
+There's no precedent for it. I tell you there's no precedent for working a
+wheel like this."
+
+"Wait a while! We're making one as fast as we can. Aluric and Co. are
+dead. So's the Papal Legate. You've no notion how dead they are, but we're
+here--the Waters of Five Separate Systems. We're just as interesting as
+Domesday Book. Would you like to hear about the land-tenure in Trott's
+Wood? It's squat-right, chiefly." The mocking Waters leaped one over the
+other, chuckling and chattering profanely.
+
+"In that hundred Jenkins, a tinker, with one dog--_unis canis_--holds, by
+the Grace of God and a habit he has of working hard, _unam hidam_--a large
+potato patch. Charmin' fellow, Jenkins. Friend of ours. Now, who the dooce
+did Jenkins keep? ... In the hundred of Callton is one charcoal-burner
+_irreligiosissimus homo_--a bit of a rip--but a thorough sportsman. _Ibi
+est ecclesia. Non multum_. Not much of a church, _quia_ because,
+_episcopus_ the Vicar irritated the Nonconformists _tunc et post et modo_
+--then and afterwards and now--until they built a cut-stone Congregational
+chapel with red brick facings that did not return itself--_defendebat se_
+--at four thousand pounds."
+
+"Charcoal-burners, vicars, schismatics, and red brick facings," groaned
+the Wheel. "But this is sheer blasphemy. What waters have they let in upon
+me?"
+
+"Floods from the gutters. Faugh, this light is positively sickening!" said
+the Cat, rearranging her fur.
+
+"We come down from the clouds or up from the springs, exactly like all
+other waters everywhere. Is that what's surprising you?" sang the Waters.
+
+"Of course not. I know my work if you don't. What I complain of is your
+lack of reverence and repose. You've no instinct of deference towards your
+betters--your heartless parody of the Sacred volume (the Wheel meant
+Domesday Book)--proves it."
+
+"Our betters?" said the Waters most solemnly. "What is there in all this
+dammed race that hasn't come down from the clouds, or----"
+
+"Spare me that talk, please," the Wheel persisted. "You'd _never_
+understand. It's the tone--your tone that we object to."
+
+"Yes. It's your tone," said the Black Rat, picking himself up limb by
+limb.
+
+"If you thought a trifle more about the work you're supposed to do, and a
+trifle less about your precious feelings, you'd render a little more duty
+in return for the power vested in you--we mean wasted on you," the Waters
+replied.
+
+"I have been some hundreds of years laboriously acquiring the knowledge
+which you see fit to challenge so light-heartedly," the Wheel jarred.
+
+"Challenge him! Challenge him!" clamoured the little waves riddling down
+through the tail-race. "As well now as later. Take him up!"
+
+The main mass of the Waters plunging on the Wheel shocked that well-bolted
+structure almost into box-lids by saying: "Very good. Tell us what you
+suppose yourself to be doing at the present moment."
+
+"Waiving the offensive form of your question, I answer, purely as a matter
+of courtesy, that I am engaged in the trituration of farinaceous
+substances whose ultimate destination it would be a breach of the trust
+reposed in me to reveal."
+
+"Fiddle!" said the Waters. "We knew it all along! The first direct
+question shows his ignorance of his own job. Listen, old thing. Thanks to
+us, you are now actuating a machine of whose construction you know
+nothing, that that machine may, over wires of whose ramifications you are,
+by your very position, profoundly ignorant, deliver a power which you can
+never realise, to localities beyond the extreme limits of your mental
+horizon, with the object of producing phenomena which in your wildest
+dreams (if you ever dream) you could never comprehend. Is that clear, or
+would you like it all in words of four syllables?"
+
+"Your assumptions are deliciously sweeping, but may I point out that a
+decent and--the dear old Abbot of Wilton would have put it in his resonant
+monkish Latin much better than I can--a scholarly reserve, does not
+necessarily connote blank vacuity of mind on all subjects."
+
+"Ah, the dear old Abbot of Wilton," said the Rat sympathetically, as one
+nursed in that bosom. "Charmin' fellow--thorough scholar and gentleman.
+Such a pity!"
+
+"Oh, Sacred Fountains!" the Waters were fairly boiling. "He goes out of
+his way to expose his ignorance by triple bucketfuls. He creaks to high
+Heaven that he is hopelessly behind the common order of things! He invites
+the streams of Five Watersheds to witness his su-su-su-pernal
+incompetence, and then he talks as though there were untold reserves of
+knowledge behind him that he is too modest to bring forward. For a bland,
+circular, absolutely sincere impostor, you're a miracle, O Wheel!"
+
+"I do not pretend to be anything more than an integral portion of an
+accepted and not altogether mushroom institution."
+
+"Quite so," said the Waters. "Then go round--hard----"
+
+"To what end?" asked the Wheel.
+
+"Till a big box of tanks in your house begins to fizz and fume--gassing is
+the proper word."
+
+"It would be," said the Cat, sniffing.
+
+"That will show that your accumulators are full. When the accumulators are
+exhausted, and the lights burn badly, you will find us whacking you round
+and round again."
+
+"The end of life as decreed by Mangles and his creatures is to go whacking
+round and round for ever," said the Cat.
+
+"In order," the Rat said, "that you may throw raw and unnecessary
+illumination upon all the unloveliness in the world. Unloveliness which we
+shall--er--have always with us. At the same time you will riotously
+neglect the so-called little but vital graces that make up Life."
+
+"Yes, Life," said the Cat, "with its dim delicious half-tones and veiled
+indeterminate distances. Its surprisals, escapes, encounters, and dizzying
+leaps--its full-throated choruses in honour of the morning star, and its
+melting reveries beneath the sun-warmed wall."
+
+"Oh, you can go on the tiles, Pussalina, just the same as usual," said the
+laughing Waters. "_We_ sha'n't interfere with you."
+
+"On the tiles, forsooth!" hissed the Cat.
+
+"Well, that's what it amounts to," persisted the Waters. "We see a good
+deal of the minor graces of life on our way down to our job."
+
+"And--but I fear I speak to deaf ears--do they never impress you?" said
+the Wheel.
+
+"Enormously," said the Waters. "We have already learned six refined
+synonyms for loafing."
+
+"But (here again I feel as though preaching in the wilderness) it never
+occurs to you that there may exist some small difference between the
+wholly animal--ah--rumination of bovine minds and the discerning, well-
+apportioned leisure of the finer type of intellect?"
+
+"Oh, yes. The bovine mind goes to sleep under a hedge and makes no bones
+about it when it's shouted at. We've seen _that_--in haying-time--all
+along the meadows. The finer type is wide awake enough to fudge up excuses
+for shirking, and mean enough to get stuffy when its excuses aren't
+accepted. Turn over!"
+
+"But, my good people, no gentleman gets stuffy as you call it. A certain
+proper pride, to put it no higher, forbids---"
+
+"Nothing that he wants to do if he really wants to do it. Get along! What
+are you giving us? D'you suppose we've scoured half heaven in the clouds,
+and half earth in the mists, to be taken in at this time of the day by a
+bone-idle, old hand-quern of your type?"
+
+"It is not for me to bandy personalities with you. I can only say that I
+simply decline to accept the situation."
+
+"Decline away. It doesn't make any odds. They'll probably put in a turbine
+if you decline too much."
+
+"What's a turbine?" said the Wheel, quickly.
+
+"A little thing you don't see, that performs surprising revolutions. But
+you won't decline. You'll hang on to your two nice red-strapped axles and
+your new machine-moulded pinions like--a--like a leech on a lily stem!
+There's centuries of work in your old bones if you'd only apply yourself
+to it; and, mechanically, an overshot wheel with this head of water is
+about as efficient as a turbine."
+
+"So in future I am to be considered mechanically? I have been painted by
+at least five Royal Academicians."
+
+"Oh, you can be painted by five hundred when you aren't at work, of
+course. But while you are at work you'll work. You won't half-stop and
+think and talk about rare plants and dicky-birds and farinaceous fiduciary
+interests. You'll continue to revolve, and this new head of water will see
+that you do so continue."
+
+"It is a matter on which it would be exceedingly ill-advised to form a
+hasty or a premature conclusion. I will give it my most careful
+consideration," said the Wheel.
+
+"Please do," said the Waters gravely. "Hullo! Here's the Miller again."
+
+The Cat coiled herself in a picturesque attitude on the softest corner of
+a sack, and the Rat without haste, yet certainly without rest, slipped
+behind the sacking as though an appointment had just occurred to him.
+
+In the doorway, with the young Engineer, stood the Miller grinning
+amazedly.
+
+"Well--well--well! 'tis true-ly won'erful. An' what a power o' dirt! It
+come over me now looking at these lights, that I've never rightly seen my
+own mill before. She needs a lot bein' done to her."
+
+"Ah! I suppose one must make oneself moderately agreeable to the baser
+sort. They have their uses. This thing controls the dairy." The Cat,
+pincing on her toes, came forward and rubbed her head against the Miller's
+knee.
+
+"Ay, you pretty puss," he said, stooping. "You're as big a cheat as the
+rest of 'em that catch no mice about me. A won'erful smooth-skinned,
+rough-tongued cheat you be. I've more than half a mind----"
+
+"She does her work well," said the Engineer, pointing to where the Rat's
+beady eyes showed behind the sacking. "Cats and Rats livin' together--
+see?"
+
+"Too much they do--too long they've done. I'm sick and tired of it. Go and
+take a swim and larn to find your own vittles honest when you come out,
+Pussy."
+
+"My word!" said the Waters, as a sprawling Cat landed all unannounced in
+the centre of the tail-race. "Is that you, Mewsalina? You seem to have
+been quarrelling with your best friend. Get over to the left. It's
+shallowest there. Up on that alder-root with all four paws. Good-night!"
+
+"You'll never get any they rats," said the Miller, as the young Engineer
+struck wrathfully with his stick at the sacking. "They're not the common
+sort. They're the old black English sort."
+
+"Are they, by Jove? I must catch one to stuff, some day."
+
+*       *       *       *       *
+
+Six months later, in the chill of a January afternoon, they were letting
+in the Waters as usual.
+
+"Come along! It's both gears this evening," said the Wheel, kicking
+joyously in the first rush of the icy stream. "There's a heavy load of
+grist just in from Lamber's Wood. Eleven miles it came in an hour and a
+half in our new motor-lorry, and the Miller's rigged five new five-candle
+lights in his cow-stables. I'm feeding 'em to-night. There's a cow due to
+calve. Oh, while I think of it, what's the news from Callton Rise?"
+
+"The waters are finding their level as usual--but why do you ask?" said
+the deep outpouring Waters.
+
+"Because Mangles and Felden and the Miller are talking of increasing the
+plant here and running a saw-mill by electricity. I was wondering whether
+we----"
+
+"I beg your pardon," said the Waters chuckling. "_What_ did you say?"
+
+"Whether _we_, of course, had power enough for the job. It will be a
+biggish contract. There's all Harpenden Brook to be considered and
+Batten's Ponds as well, and Witches' Fountain, and the Churt's Hawd
+system.
+
+"We've power enough for anything in the world," said the Waters. "The only
+question is whether you could stand the strain if we came down on you full
+head."
+
+"Of course I can," said the Wheel. "Mangles is going to turn me into a set
+of turbines--beauties."
+
+"Oh--er--I suppose it's the frost that has made us a little thick-headed,
+but to whom are we talking?" asked the amazed Waters.
+
+"To me--the Spirit of the Mill, of course."
+
+"Not to the old Wheel, then?"
+
+"I happen to be living in the old Wheel just at present. When the turbines
+are installed I shall go and live in them. What earthly difference does it
+make?"
+
+"Absolutely none," said the Waters, "in the earth or in the waters under
+the earth. But we thought turbines didn't appeal to you."
+
+"Not like turbines? Me? My dear fellows, turbines are good for fifteen
+hundred revolutions a minute--and with our power we can drive 'em at full
+speed. Why, there's nothing we couldn't grind or saw or illuminate or heat
+with a set of turbines! That's to say if all the Five Watersheds are
+agreeable."
+
+"Oh, we've been agreeable for ever so long."
+
+"Then why didn't you tell me?"
+
+"Don't know. Suppose it slipped our memory."
+
+The Waters were holding themselves in for fear of bursting with mirth.
+
+"How careless of you! You should keep abreast of the age, my dear fellows.
+We might have settled it long ago, if you'd only spoken. Yes, four good
+turbines and a neat brick penstock--eh? This old Wheel's absurdly out of
+date."
+
+"Well," said the Cat, who after a little proud seclusion had returned to
+her place impenitent as ever. "Praised be Pasht and the Old Gods, that
+whatever may have happened _I_, at least, have preserved the Spirit of the
+Mill!"
+
+She looked round as expecting her faithful ally, the Black Rat; but that
+very week the Engineer had caught and stuffed him, and had put him in a
+glass case; he being a genuine old English black rat. That breed, the
+report says, is rapidly diminishing before the incursions of the brown
+variety.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's Traffics and Discoveries, by Rudyard Kipling
+
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