OU 164825

A CENTURY OF
HUMOUR
 A Century of

HUMOUR

Edited by

P. G. WODEHOUSE

London :

HUTCHINSON & CO. (PUBLISHERS) LTD.

 Made and Printed in Great Britain by
.

Tbe Hxtcbinson Printing Trust Ltd. t

 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

thanks and acknowledgements of the publishers arc

JL due to the following : Mr. A. A. Milne and Messrs. William
Ileinemann for The House Warming; to the Executors of Sir
Anthony Hope Hawkins and Messrs. Methuen for An Uncounted
Hour and A Slight Mistake ; to the Executors of Messrs. George
and Weedon Grossrnith and Messrs. J. W. Arrowsmith for the
extract from The Diary of a Nobody ; to Major J. H. Beith and Messrs.
Hodder and Stoughton for A Sporting College and Youth> Youtb>
Youth I; to Mr. Arthur Morrison for By le stones from The Fiddle
O* Dreams ; to Mr. Denis Mackail for Starvation Corner and
Bradsmitb was Right and to Messrs. William Heinemann for the
latter ; to the Proprietors ot Punch for The Grey Underworld ; to
y
Messrs. Methuen for Dinner Party at Fraser s from Happy Thoughts ;
to the Proprietors of Punch for The Kefugees ; to Mr. H. Leon
Wilson and Messrs. John Lane for Chapter VI from Rugg/es of
Red Gap ; to Mr. E. F. Benson for Rqya/ Visitors and College
Sunday from Babe, B.A. ; to Mr. G. H. Lorimer and Messrs.
Methuen for Letters two and nine from Letters of a Self-Made
Merchant to bis Son ; to Mr. E. V. Lucas and Messrs. Methuen for
The Dinner Party ; to Mr. G. K. Chesterton and Messrs. Casseli
for The hlistake of the Machine ; to Mr. Eden Phillpotts and the
Proprietors of Punch for Quite out of the Common ; to Mr. Belloc
and Messrs. Methuen for On Conversations in Trains ; to the Exe-
cutors of Mr. Israel Zangwill and Messrs. Heinemann for Tb*
Red Mark ; to Mr. Inglis Allen for The Legislators, The Whole
Truth, The Maternal Instinct and Time and the Barbery to
Mr. Leacock and Messrs. John Lane for Soared in Sea-
weed from Nonsense Novels ; to Dr. Sorncrville and Martin
Ross and Messrs. Longmans Green for The Shooting of Sbinroe
from In Mr. Knox's Country ; to Mr. E. V. Knox and Messrs.
Methuen for The Murder at the Towers from This Other Eden ; to
Mr. H. F. Ellis and the Proprietors of Punch for Epbrainfs Undoing ;
to the Executors of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle for Tbt Parish Maga-
%ine ; to Mr. St. John Lucas for Expedites from Saints9 Sinners
and the Usual People ; to Mr. Morley Roberts for A Comedy in
Capricorn ; to the Executors of Mr. H. H. Munro and Messrs.
John Lane for Tobermory and A Matter of Sentiment from Tb*
 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Chronicles of Clovis ; to Mr. St. John Ervine and Messrs. Allen
and Unwin for Colleagues ; to the Executors of Oscar Wilde
for The Cantervilh Ghost \ to Mr. A. P. Herbert and Messrs.
Methuen for Family Faces ; to Mr. Townend for Interlude
in a Quiet Life ; to Mr. Michael Joseph and the Strand Magazine
for <A Splash of Publicity ; to Mr. Ben Travers and Messrs. John
Lane for The Nutcracker from The Collection of To-day ; to Mr.
Jerome K. Jerome and Messrs. J. W. Arrowsmith for the three
chapters from Three Men in a Boat ; to Messrs. Jonathan Cape for
The Treasure Hunt from Variety ; to Messrs. Methuen for all the
extracts from their LJbrary of Humour.

Every sare has been taken to discoyer the owners of all

copy-
righted stories, but if any necessary acknowledgements have been
omitted, or any stories included without due permission, we trust
the copyright-holders will accept our apologies.
 PREFACE

I clown to write the Introduction to this book, I

sit
Al may be looking modest, but I am not modest really.
I am distended with a gaseous pride. My mental attitude
is that of those ambidextrous Hollywood actors who can

pat themselves on the back with both hands, and I have such
a pronounced attack of swelled head that if at this moment
I wished to walk through the Marble Arch I should have to

pin my ears back.

And not without reason, for nobody, I think, can deny
that the swiftness with which I have become a force in English
letters is rather remarkable. It is a bare thirty-four years
since I started earningmy living as a writer, yet already I
am the author of an Omnibus Book, and now the world is
ringing with the news that Messrs. Hutchinson have asked
me to edit their Century of Humour a job which entitles
me to wear pince-nez and talk about Trends and Cycles and
the Spirit of Comedy and What Is The Difference Between
Humour and Wit.
My only trouble is that I have so little to say on
these
matters. Trends, now. Well, I suppose Trends are ail
right, if you are able to take them or leave them alone. It is
more a question of will-power than anything. And very
much the same thing applies to Cycles. (Remind me to tell
you some time how I once rode from Portsmouth to London.)
. 'With regard to the Spirit of Comedy, I will simply say
this, that in my opinion and I am told that George Meredith
used to feel much as I do Comedy is a game played to throw
reflections upon social life, and it deals with human nature
in the drawing-room of civilized men and women, where we
have no dust of the struggling outer world, no mire, no
violent crashes, to make the correctness of the representation
convincing. Credulity is not wooed through the impres-
sionable senses ; nor have we recourse to the small circular
8 PREFACE
glow of the watchmaker's eye to raise in bright relief minutest

grains of evidence for the routing of incredulity. The Comic

Spirit conceives a definite situation for a number of characters,
and rejects all accessories in the exclusive pursuit of them and
their speech. For, being a spirit, he hunts the spirit in men ;
vision and ardour constitute his merit : he has not a thought
of persuading you to believe in him.
1 think that is all I have to say about the Spirit of Comedy.
We now come to the difference between Wit and Humour,
a thing which has always perplexed my simple mind. Here
I will draw upon Mr. J. B. Morton ("Beachcomber"), who not

long ago wrote in the Spectator as follows :

"The English are very fond of humour, but they are afraid of
wit. For wit is like a sword, and humour is like a jester's
bladder. . . .
Nobody knows what Mr. Wodehouse's
philosophy of life is ; or even whether he has one. But with
Mr. Wyndham Lewis it is different. Everything he writes
fits into a fixed
philosophy."

Well, that sounds all right. "Fixed philosophy", eh?

That's the nub of the thing, is it ? Fine. Let's have a Jook
at something of Mr. Lewis's. Take this, from his weekly
column in the Daily Mail.

One was young oneself once, as Methusalem remarked

when he saw a centenarian climbing a tree, but at the same
time one cannot but deplore some of the scenes in the House
of Commons during the Speaker's enforced absence on
Thursday at Oxiord where an honorary degree was conferred
upon him.
In the absence of a firm hand one expects uproar in such an
assembly as the Commons, but one does not expect to find
things scrawled all over the walls in chalk. Hopscotch and
marbles again are harmless enough, but for M.P.'s to bully
and maltreat those of their number who are weak in the
head (especially if of Cabinet rank) is outrageous.
A woman M.P. declared yesterday "We are very glad to see
:

the Speaker back again. Many of us brought him little

tributes of wild flowers on his return. I do not see why
for doing this we should be called 'sneaks' and 'narks' and
pinched on the arm, or why some of the big back-benchers
should savagely pull our hair/* An inquiry will
probably
be held.
 PREFACE 9
No, it When I read that, I thought it was the
beats me.
funniest thing even Mr. Lewis, whose work I revere this
side of idolatry, had ever written, but I was not scared a bit.
Later in this book you will find a stark piece of writing
by Mr. Lewis on the subject of Harebells. I think Mr. Morton
over-estimates the terrifying quality of that, too. Person-
ally, I read Scene with Harebells without a tremor, and
my laughter was not just that nervous giggling you do
when you see swords all over the place. The fact of the
matter is, we English are tougher stuff than Mr. Morton
supposes.
But if there really is this between Wit and
difference
Humour, 1 can think of no of
better
way studying the subject
than by reading this book. They are all here, all the swords-
men and bladder- wielders of the last hundred years I think.
There is always the haunting fear that in a short while from
now I shall be starting out of my sleep and screaming, "Gosh 1

Why did I forget So-and-So ?" But I really feel that there
will be very few of these So-and-So's. Humour (or it may
have been Wit) has been my favourite reading for nearly
fifty years. I do not think I have missed much during that

time, and I have a retentive memory. There are things in

this book which I have not read since I was at school, but

they have lingered with me down the years and when the
call came to select up they bobbed. One never quite forgets
a story that has made one laugh.
Barry Pain's The Refugees, for instance. I have not
looked at that since it first appeared in Punch. Ore. 1900,
it was. I read it on a winter evening in my tent, the day
we overcame theNcrvii (Haileybury, 3 -nil), but 1 remembered
it without an effort.

Yes, I think this collection may be considered quite

fairly representative. And I think it may reasonably be called
a pretty good three-and-sixpence worth. It is not, of course,
for women and weaklings, who will be unable to lift it, but
if here and there throughout this realm, this England, there
is an occasional retired circus
strong man who has not let his
muscles get flabby and who has the price in his pocket and
the will to buy, 1 feel convinced that he will not regret having
planked down his three and a bender.
P. G. WODEHOUSB
 CONTENTS
^AOB
BEN TRAVERS
VTHE NUTCRACKER IJ
ARTHUR MORRISON
BYLESTONES . . . . . . .
.3!
ANTHONY HOPE
*A SLIGHT MISTAKE
**AN UNCOUNTED HOUR
......
...... 47
53
E, OBJ. SOMERVILLE AND MARTIN ROSS
THE SHOOTING OF SHINROE
THACKERAY
..... 6l

W. M.
THE PERSECUTION OF BRITISH FOOTMEN ... 79
F.

A.
E.

P.
BAILY
SPARE A PENNY
HERBERT
....... 87

FAMILY FACES . . . . . .
.107
"SASSENACH"
MY GARDENER'S GRANDMOTHER
*
. . .
.113
JEROME K. JEROME
THREE MEN IN A BOAT . . . . .117
HARRY GRAHAM
BIFFIN ON ACQUAINTANCES 153
A. A. MILNE
THE HOUSE-WARMING . . . . . .165
W. PETT RIDGE
WHAT GREAT EVENTS . . . . .187
WASHINGTON IRVING
* RIP VAN WINKLE . . . . . . .
195
CUTHBERT BEDE

E. M.
THE HOAX
DELAFIELD
,...... 207

%
MEN IN FICTION . . . . . . .217
W. W. JACOBS
\ BED CASES ........
KITCHEN COMPANY...... 231
245
X CONTENTS
FAQl
SELDON TRUSS
HUGO AND THE UNNATURAL MOTHER . . . 257
WINIFRED HOLTBY
WHY HERBERT KILLED HIS MOTHER . . * 269
PAUL SELVER
"WELL,
STACY AUMONIER
I'M SLOWED I" ...... 281

THE LANDLORD OF "THE LOVE A-DUCK* . . .

W. A. DARLINGTON
THE GOLD CUP ....... 3*7
OWEN RUTTER
THE JONAH ........ 335
H. F. ELLIS
EPHRAIM'S UNDOING ...... 347
PETER FLEMING
THE TREASURE HUNT
LOUIS GOLDING
...... 359

WIMPOLB'S WOE . . , . . .
.371
A. CONAN DOYLE
THE PARISH MAGAZINE ...... 379
WILL SCOTT
THE LIFE OF LORD COODLE ..... 391

MICHAEL JOSEPH
A SPLASH OF PUBLICITY ..... 409
FRANK R. STOCKTON
LORD EDWARD AND THE TREE -MAN . .
.42!
GEORGE AND WEEDON GROSSMJTH
THE DIARY OF A NOBODY ..... 435
BARRY PAIN
THE REFUGEES ....... 449
D. B. WYNDHAM LEWIS
.BY NUMBERS
.SCENE WITH HAREBELLS
......
..... 483
487
EDEN PHILLPOTTS
QUITE OUT OF THE COMMON ..... 493
 CONTENTS
PAGE
WILLIAM CATNE
SPANISH PRIDE .......
THE ELEGANT ETHIOPIUM
523
532
DENIS MACKAIL
STARVATION CORNER
BRADSMITH WAS RIGHT
......
.*.... 545
561

CROSBIE GARSTIN
GOLDEN SILENCE . . . . * *
.581
DERWENT MIALL
THE GREY UNDERWORLD ..... 593
FRANK SWINNERTON
THE CELEBRITY ....... 607

SELWYN JEPSON
DON SAM QUIXOTE ...... 627

F. C. BURNAND
DINNER PARTY AT ERASER'S . . . .
.645
HARRY LEON WILSON
RUGGLES OF RED GAP ...... 655

WALTER EMANUEL
THE TOY DOGS OF WAR .....
....
HOW TO GET YOURSELlr DISLIKED
667
674
ARNOLD BENNETT
THE BURGLARY . . . . . . 68 1

STEPHEN LEACOCK
SOAKED IN SEAWEED ...... 695

P. G. WODEHOUSE
ITHE EXIT OF BATTLING BIILSON .... 707

INGLIS ALLEN
THE MATERNAL INSTINCT
. .....
...... 729
THE WHOLE TRUTH
TIME AND THE BARBER
.

THE LEGISLATORS
......
.......
733
738
742

OSCAR WILDE
THE CANTERVILLE GHOST..... 747

ERIC BARKER
ALMOST A HERO ....... 777
Xiv CONTENTS
H. G. WELLS
THE TRUTH ABOUT PYECRAFT . 79*
IAN HAY
v
A SPORTING COLLEGE
YOUTH, YOUTH, YOUTH I
.,...* . . .
803
8ll

EDWARD F, BENSON
ROYAL VISITORS
A COLLEGE SUNDAY
GEORGE HORACE LORIMER
...... 817
823

LETTERS FROM A SELF-MADE MERCHAN1 TO HIS SON 831

ST. JOHN LUCAS

EXPEDITUS ..... 843
ST. JOHN

ALBERT SMITH
G.
COLLEAGUES ...,*.
ERVINE
869

DELIGHTFUL PEOPLE . 877

E. V. LUCAS
% THE DINNER-PARTY . 89!

E. V. KNOX
THE MURDER AT THE TOWERS . 899

"SAKI" (H. H. MUNRO)

TOBERMORY 9<>9
A MATTER OF SENTIMENT , . * .

ANTHONY ARMSTRONG
THE PRINCE WHO HICCUPPED .

HILAIRE BELLOC
ON CONVERSATIONS IN TRAINS -
933

CHARLES DICKENS
SENTIMENT . . * * * *
94 X

W, TOWNEND
INTERLUDE IN A QUIET LIFE . . . . *
955

G. K. CHESTERTON
* THE MISTAKE OF THE MACHINE . -
97*

ISRAEL ZANGWILL
THE RED MARK 989

MORLEY ROBERTS
A COMEDY IN CAPRICORN 1005
 BEN TRAVERS
The Nutcracker

Ben Travers the author of many novels and short

is

stories, but the field in which he has won an inter-

national reputation is in drama of the lighter kind.
He wrote those famous Aldwych plays A Cuckoo in
the Nest, Rookery Nook, and many others which have
had long runs.
 THE NUTCRACKER

a kiss we open. A clandestine affair in a summer-

WITH house on a night in June. His eyes closed her eyes
;

dreamy with delight but not heedless of the gleam of danger

from the open french-window across the lawn. We open
to your liking, I believe, ladies, who have had such kisses
of your own before now and will have more in some cases.
But alas I I must dash your naturally pleasant antici-

pations of a liaison. This was a prosaic, unmarried romance.

The kisser merely young games master at a public school ;
a
a housemaster's daughter the kissee. The menace within
the study across the lawn was only Father, who was sitting
correcting Latin exercises. A
lame Victorian theme.
Mr. Panting (i7ather and what a name, by Aristophanes I
for a public school housemaster to be cursed with ; it asked
for lampoonery and got it) sat slashing with a blue pencil
at the Latin exercises and snorting his disagreement with many
of the views expressed. Mrs. Panting a woman of walnut
was on a neighbouring sofa, with knitting needles in both
hands and her mouth. Miss Panting was officially exercising
the dog. From the boys' wing of the massive house the Babel
of day had given place to a distant studious hum of eventide.
"Martin Dicksee," said Miss Panting, releasing herself
from the embrace and astutely informing the reader of the
games master's name, "I love you. Till you came, no one
in this mouldy place has had the sense to see a perfectly good
flirtation sitting up and pining to be got on with. That'll
have to be all for to-night, but come again to-morrow."
She had received the name Flimsy not from the font,
but from the Lower Common Room. In like manner her
mother was known, and had for two generations been known,
even among masters, as "Flannel". In course of time nick-
names at public schools cease to be a matter of levity and
become one of tradition. You might hear two completely
l8 BEN TRAVERS
sedate and humourless old masters at Chappelby in conver-
sation as follows. "Call in and have a chat after dinner
to-night. I should like to exchange some further opinion
with you on the circumstances in which the side PQ will
generate the curved surface of a conical frustrum." "Many
thanks, but I have a previous engagement to dine with
Flannel Panting/'
Young Mr. Martin Dicksee, a great-limbed, blue-eyed,
rough-haired games expert, reassured Flimsy that in his case
this was no mere passing flirtation, which statement he
illustrated by crushing such portions of the young lady as

may legitimately be crushed at this stage of the proceedings.

At which she, a sparkling little vixen with mischievous
dark eyes and a boyish shingle, said, "I simply must go in,"
and resumed a semi-recumbent attitude in the summer-
house.
Unfortunately the fool of a dog strolled back alone through
the french-window into the study. Mr. Panting was busy
slashing the exercises with his blue pencil, "Hn'gh 1 Inquit
'quoth he/ Did he, indeed ? This little beast uses a crib."
Slash I
Mrs. Panting protruded her maternal proboscis. "Where's
Diana ?" she inquired of the dog, who made no reply.
"This Master Noble," said Panting, waving a beslashed
page of mistaken inkwork, "is the most beastly little ignor-
amus in the whole of my experience. If I remember rightly,
he's the boy you dislike most heartily in the house, isn't
he?"
"I suspect him of being the boy who made me look a
fool at the sports," replied Flannel Panting. "You remember
on sports day last year ?"
"No."
"Yes, you do. I was standing talking to the Headmaster
and his wife and a shower of rain came on, and I opened
my umbrella and a banana fell out. I believe Noble was the
boy."
"H'm. The little brute will spend next Saturday in extra
school, anyhow," said Panting, scoring a huge blue, trium-
phant "Extra School" over Noble's paper. "What was that
you said about Diana ?"
"She hasn't come in, that's all. I don't know why not."
Panting cocked his head like a bird in sight of food. He
 THE NUTCRACKER 19

for a moment ; then rose to his feet.

peered out at the lawn
"I wonder/' he said and exit.

In the summer-house there was some guiltily hasty

unlocking of limbs, but they
were utterly too late with it to
deceive Panting. He stood at the entrance to the summer-
house and behaved exactly as in the Middle Fourth. That
is to say, he instinctively hitched with his hands
at a gown

)hat wasn't there and made the sound of tea-tasters.

and remarked rather
Flimsy remained blandly seated,
flippantly, "Hallo, Pop."
The summer-house had presumably
about
been made to fit Panting, whose bald head came just
chest bone. So Martin
up to the level of Martin Dicksee's
stood tending a severe bump on his cranium and looking as
foolish as only a big man can.

Panting addressed his daughter.

"Go in and sit with your mother."
"Is that intended to be a punishment ?"
"Do what you're told."
"No. You're going to send me in and stay here and tick
off Mr. Dicksee. I won't have that. I asked him in here.
It's my fault. If it /> a fault."
"I'm not going to waste words over him," said Panting.
He drew himself up at Martin with fresh and elaborate tea-
noises. "If ever I catch you within the precincts of my house
or grounds again, I shall go straight to the Head and get you
removed."
The rubbing, helpless, great nice boy began to burble his
formalities.
"Mr. Panting, it'squite all right you
all know what I
mean honourable and all that sort of thing. I'm honestly
gone on Flim and I and I
your daughter,
frightfully
wish to wish to be allowed totoyou know sort
of
"
"Silence, confound you, young man, and get out of my
summer-house. You 1 You're not a master at all a games
creature. A hulking, great useless hack-about know-nothing I

Get out of my sight. And don't come into it

again."
"Cheerio, Martin.I'm on any time," said Flimsy.
She was borne into the study, was impertinent to Flannel,
and went rudely and door-slammingly to bed. Panting re-
turned, positively sweating with wrath, to his table, and fairly
sabred exercises with his blue pencil.
aO BEN TRAVERS
For years untold Panting had ruled the Middle Fourth,
A thankless task. Occasionally a promising new boy arrived
and sprinted through into the Upper Fourth in a single term.
In the Upper Fourth even the worst cases began to assume
some measure of ordered responsibility. But the Middle
Fourth remained an Inferno, in which dawdled, stagnated and
cribbed all the utterly incorrigible, all the worst blackguards
and crooks touring their dull ^Sneid through and through ;
;

capable, even after about six terms,

of "Turn plus JBneas
Sir, then the pious ^Eneas," but of no more. The scum
of the
school. Louts. Some of them even had small moustaches.
"Noble!" explained Panting, on the morning after the
summer-house affair. "Come here. No, keep your hand
out of your pocket/*
7'
"Oh, indeed he proceeded a moment later. "Silence,
I

there !Another snigger and you'll all go to extra school

for a month. As for you, Noble, you'll write out the first
"
five hundred lines of the Third ^Eneid in Latin and English
"
"Oh, ssss
"And you will take that filthy squirrel and release it on
the cricket field andcome straight back/'
"Sir/* said Noble, a red-haired ruffian with a tie askew
and hands which would have disgraced a plumber's mate,
"may I just say I've had this squirrel for some time, and if it
it would out, sir ? It's used to
got away absolutely peg
captivity and couldn't fend for itself/'
"Ah 1 So you've been keeping the beast in my house,
have you ? Brownlow, two hours'
extra school."
"Sir," said Noble, "I brought it in here not for my own
sake, but its. It's been living in a boot box, and I felt it wanted
a sort of outing. I didn't want it in form. As a matter of
fact, sir, it's been gnawing my vitals."
"I'll have you flogged in a minute," said Panting. This
concluded the argument.
At the boundary of the cricket field Noble encountered
the new games master. At the moment Noble was in diffi-
culties. He was holding the squirrel aloft, while an excited
mongrel performed acrobatics at his heels.
"Hallo," said Martin. "What's all this about ?"
"It's a squirrel, sir. I happened to have it in Mr. Panting's

form, and he told me to release it. Only this dog's here,

sir."
 THE NUTCRACKER Zl

dog Is it ?"
"
Fugg's, sir."
"Whose ?"
"The old man who goes round the place, clearing up
rubbish, sir. I don't know his real name. Anyhow, he isn't
here to look after the dog/*
"What an ass you were to take the poor beast into Mr.

Panting's form."
"I had to, sir, because
" Noble
hesitated. This great,
young, hefty sporting master rather appealed to him. He
took a chance. "Sir It's awful bad luck losing the
I
squirrel.
I had to take it with me because the boot-cad at Mr.
Panting's
house vowed he would have its blood. Sir Would you care
1

to have it, sir ?"

"And give it back to you, I suppose, against Mr. Panting's
orders ? No, you don't, you tyke. But I can't let the
dog get
it. Give it to me."

Noble handed it over and departed. The squirrel ungra-

ciously bit its rescuer's hand heartily, but Martin refrained
from responding to the still pressing negotiations of the dog.
He made for his rooms in a little house beyond the main
school buildings. The dog accompanied him down
Chap-
pleby Hill, circuiting hopefully.
From an upper window of the private wing of Panting's
Flimsy greeted him with a hail and a glad waving
of some unidentified undergarment. "What on earth are
you doing with that sq
-- ?"
Then lace curtains
intervened, shrouding her like the blackness of a film close-
up. Mrs. Panting was at home too.
But there was another observer of Martin's
progress.
From the branches of a tree in Panting's garden Notcutt
Minor, nominally on sick leave, gazed open-mouthed at the
spectacle of the games master striding towards his digs ia
the company of Noble's squirrel and
Fugg's dog.
Martin was in the act of placing the squirrel in his
fishing
basket when Emily, daughter of his
landlady, made bold
to protest. "Reely, Mr. Dicksee. It can't be kept in the
'ouse. It's
un'ealthy. 1" Whew
A squirrel is not, at the best of times, among the most
ambrosial of God's creatures. Nor does it
gain in fragrance
from a stiff blending of boot polish. There was justice in
Emily's stern judgment.
 BEN TRAVERS
said Martin. "I'm not
"It'sonly for a little while,"
going to keep it permanently.
You needn't sit with it. If
I let it go now that dog may get it."
"I wonder that even the dog fancies it," said Emily.
"Well, look here. I'm going up the
hill again. I'll

and you can release the I only

get the dog away squirrel/
want to get rid of it."
"Not me, sir. I should 'ate to touch it," said Emily.
She then retreated to the kitchen and deliberated over a tin
of disinfectant. Martin went his way. Fugg's dog
refused to accompany him. But no sooner had
definitely
Martin repassed Panting's than down from his bough slid
the sniper, Notcutt Minor. A minute afterwards he was on
Martin's doorstep.
With foresight rarely applied to his scholastic duties

Notcutt Minor grasped Fugg's dog with both hands when

Minor was small, pink
Emily came to the door. Notcutt
and cherubic. Devils, those small, cherubic boys the worst
devils of the lot.
"Good morning," said Notcutt minor. "I say.^ Didn t
Mr. Dicksee a certain squirrel here just now ?"
bring
"Why ?"
"Does he frightfully want it ?"
more don't
"No, he don't," said Emily. "And no
I."
"I say. take
egg 1" said Notcutt Minor.
I'll it
"Good
if you like."
Admirable solution. After all, Mr. Dicksee had told
her to get rid of it. Emily agreed. "Good egg," said Notcutt
Minor. "Only, would you keep Fugg's dog here for the
present while I
make good my escape ?"
the angle of Panting's on his
Presently, Noble, rounding
return from morning school, was accosted by Notcutt Minor,
whose snub nose appeared at the open window of the sick-
room. The following dialogue ensued.
"Noble 1 I say, I've got your squirrel."
"What ? You don't mean to say it had the sense to
home ?"
"Home ?"
"Yes, you fool. To home like a homing pigeon."
"No. I went and got it off Dicksee's skivvy."

"Well, hand it over, then."

I had the devil of a job to get it off the
"AH very well.
 THE NUTCRACKER 2}

skivvy. She said Dicksee prized it above a pearl of great

price/'
"Where Is it? Come on. "
"How much will you give me for it ?"
"Nothing. I haven't
any oof, anyhow. I might give
you a pot oiplum jam for it."
"Nothing in jam. I might take a jar of potted meat.
Or a large tin of sardines. But not in tomato."
"Well, come down here and I'll show you what I've got.
Come complete with squirrel."
Notcutt Minor descended. "This is what I've got,"
cried Noble and barely attacked him. "Come on, where's
the squirrel ?"
"In my bags' pocket. Let go, you swine," replied
Notcutt Minor.
Noble found the squirrel. It bit him beautifully. He
withdrew his hand. The squirrel shot into the ivy on the
house wall and set forth on a lightning tour in the direction
of the private wing.
Having arrived at a commodious niche in the ivy of the
private wing, the squirrel remained for several hours, quiver-
ing in bewildered retrospect. To be released from the
black odours of the boot box only to be leapt and gnashed
at by Fugg's dog ; to be rescued from Fugg's dog only to
endure the stuffy damnation of the bags' pocket so this
was what it meant to be a squirrel. Probably it mistook the
ivy niche for some Paradise of animal bliss following a brief
and sticky Gehenna of existence.
At four o'clock in the hot June afternoon Mrs. Panting
repaired to her bedroom to change her frock before taking
tea with the Headmaster's wife. Flimsy was already neatly
arrayed for the occasion, and was waiting below. Panting,
his class-room labours o'er,, was in his dressing-room,

removing a collar limp with the exuberance of the afternoon's

hate. Collarless, he rushed into his wife's presence, sum-
moned by screams of that shrill nature which, for some
reason, always seem particularly piercing when uttered by a
female in dtsbabillt.
"My goodness 1 Robert I Robert 1 Arc'hhch ! Kill it

or something."
"What is it ? My love 1 Tell me, for heaven's sake,
what ?"
14 BEN TRAVERS
"I don't know. Quick. Don't talk. Some-
Kill it.

thing horrible, like a monkey. Urg'chh sprrang from

I It
behind the bed. It's on top of the wardrobe. It's one of
the boys."
"One of the boys ?"
"One of the boys is
responsible. Don't argue* Do
something. Quick 1 Get up on the wardrobe and kill

it."
"Control yourself, will you ? Keep calm. How can I
possibly get on top of the wardrobe and kill a monkey ?"
But he mounted a chair and made a distant, unadventurous
survey. "Aha 1" he exclaimed. "So that's it, is it ? Oho.
Yes. I think I see."
"Don't keep on like that," said Flannel Panting, jaundiced
with fright and clutching still her disarranged garments
around her as though fearful that her matronly torso might
be observed by the monkey. "What do you see ? What
is it ? Do something."
a squirrel.
"It's It belongs to your favourite, Noble,
I told him to get rid of it, ancl this is his idea of a joke, I

suppose to put it in your bedroom. I'll have him flogged,

ifnot expelled. Fll write to his father myself."
"Well, take the beast away from here first. You needn't
think I'm going to share my bedroom indefinitely with
squirrels."
Flimsy, who had been attracted, it is to be feared, by the
sounds of her mother in distress, here appeared to the rescue ;
and by means of persuasive noises, such as are always asso-
ciated with the blandishments applied to beasts and infants,
aided further by an open parasol belonging to Flannel, which
suffered severely in the good cause, managed to secure the
squirrel. "Funny thing!" she said. "This seems to be a
very good year for squirrels. This is the second I've
seen to-day."
"If you mean there are a lot of them about, it's a bad
year for them," said her mother, proceeding heatedly with
her toilet.
"Give it to me," said Panting. Flimsy handed over the
squirrel, which tasted Panting and declined any further sus-
tenance from that source.
Half an hour later the housemaster received Mr, Noble
in his study. Panting had worked himself into a condition
 THE NUTCfcACKEft AJ
of scarlet fury which gave even that red-head to blench.
So may Judge Jeffreys have intimidated a cowering victim
in ruthless, seething rage, without waiting to worry about
the details of the accusation.
But Noble did not cower. When Panting managed to
convey some idea of what this was all about, the accused met
the charge with an expression of bland sympathy.
"But, sir, dash it all I'm sorry, sir, but really, sir I
didn't put a squirrel in Fla in Mrs. Panting's bedroom, sir.
I don't even know which is her bedroom, sir. How should I ?"

"Silence. Come on, speak up. You dare to deny that

you brought the squirrel back to the house when I told you
to let it loose ?"
"I gave it to Mr. Dicksee, sir."
"What ?"
"Yes, sir. I met him and he took It*
Even in the midst of his wrath Panting checked himself.
His eyes and mouth visibly widened. He visualized the
games Blaster, smarting beneath last night's castigation and
planning this ribald vengeance. Diana had no doubt co-
operated. Panting swung round at Noble, terrifically tea-
tasting.
"Did you tell Mr. Dicksee that it was I who had taken
a dislike to this squirrel and ordered you to throw it away ?"
"Yes, sir."
"Ah I"
"1 beg pardon, sir ?"
"Go away. You needn't think that because Pm sending
you away unpunished at present that I don't think you are a
blot on the house. Get out of rny study, will you 1" Noble,
for once, obeyed without hesitation.
* <f

Flannel and Flimsy had already gone ahead to their tea-

party. Panting now followed them. On his way across
the cricket field he observed Martin at the nets. He was
bathed in enthusiastic perspiration and putting down some
pretty testing stuff to Jobson, one of the opening First
Eleven pair. This he followed up with instructions couched
in language which Panting considered grossly out of keeping
to a boy. "Jobbers, don't flourish at your cuts. Come
down slap on the ball or leave it alone. Don't gesticulate
at the bally thing."

Panting waylaid some lounging nondescript and ordered

 z6 BEN TRAVERS
him to take a message. Mr. Dicksee was to be told that the
Headmaster required his presence in twenty minutes* time.
The still throbbing housemaster then proceeded to interrupt
the tea-party.
Flimsy quite liked the Head. He was one of those young,
recently-appointed heads of public schools who are, at least,
still human. In fact, had it not been for a languid and rather
precious wife, the Head might have preceded Martin in the
flirtation field.
In her airy and arty drawing-room, thrown open to the
afternoon zephyrs, the precious wife served tea to Flannel
and the Head hovered with a cake-stand about Flimsy.
Suddenly a domestic, infectiously flushed, announced that
Mr. Panting desired immediate audience in the study.
"Oh, but how too sweet of him to call/' said the Head's
wife. "He must not worry about schooly things on such
a rapturous afternoon. Bring him in to tea, Blue Boy,
dear/'
"He's rattled to the quick about some boy putting a
squirrel in mother's bedroom," said Flimsy. "I wouldn't
have him in here. He'd only slop his tea/'
"Diana 1" said Flannel.
"I'd better see him," said Blue Boy, and departed to the
study.
"Father gets so volcanic," said Flimsy. "Surely he could
call and get a boy swished at some reasonable hour."
"It's a
very good thing that someone upholds the discipline
of the school," said her mother.
"Oh, the boys don't mind being swished," said Flimsy.
"They pick the bits of birch out of themselves and sell them
as souvenirs. One boy, who got it very hot for cheating in
exams, last term, made one and eightpence-halfpenny."
A
few minutes later the flushed maid was summoned by
the study bell. In the study Mr. Panting occupied the hearth-
rug, his face being now of a ripe beetroot shade. The Head
looked serious, thanks to a severe effort.
"When Mr. Dicksee calk," he told the maid, "show him
straight in here."
Scarcely had the maid closed the study door when the
front-door bell rang. Outside stood a grey, dapper gentle-
man with a bowler hat perched at an angle and a broad check
suiting.
 THE NUTCRACKER 27
"Headmaster in?" he inquired. "Tell him Sir Perks
Dicksee."
The maid was no stickler for titles. She shot the visitor
Into the study and reckoned her duty done.
"You the Head ?" cried Sir Perks Dicksee heartily,
addressing Panting. "How are yer ? I'm Sir Perks Dicksee.
Popped along to see my nephew. How de do ?"
"Sir Perks Dicksee?" exclaimed Panting. "What, the
mill the ah financier ? Good heavens >
I'd no idea
young Mr. Dicksee was your nephew."
"My only one. Heir. Insisted on coming here. Teach-
ing games. Well, why not ? Dashed good idea."
"We were just discussing your nephew," said the Head.
"I fancy be along here in a minute if you'll wait. Let
he'll
me take you to the drawing-room. I should like you to
meet my wife. She'll give you some tea."
"Yer wife, certainly, pleasure. Tea? No, thank yer.
Muck," said Sir Perks.
"Just one moment, Mr. Panting, and I'll have another
word with you," said the Head, and removed Sir Perks.
"I think," he continued, slipping back into the study
later, "that we'd better dismiss the idea that young Dicksee

put the squirrel in your wife's room."

Panting blew his nose, but made no further comment.
"Moreover," said the Head, "I must say, Mr. Panting,
that you appear to have been a trifle hasty in objecting to his
attentions to your daughter. The heir to a baronetcy and a
fortune
"
"I never knew that," said Panting indignantly. "Why
wasn't I told ?"
Flimsy, in her outspoken way, put the same question
to Martin as she accompanied uncle and nephew down
Chappleby Hill half an hour later. "Fancy you being the
nephew of the man who won the Derby last year. And
never telling me. Why didn't you, you comic ?"
"Whenever I've been with you," said Martin, "there's
always been something much more important to think of
even than Uncle."
"I leave you here," said Flimsy, outside Panting's. "But
come and see me after dinner in the summer-house."
"Well ?" said Martin, as Flimsy went her nimble, hand-
kissing way. "Am I a good judge ?"
 TRAVBRS
Sir Perks adjustedan eyeglass.
"Full marks/' he replied. "Fine filly."
*

"Coming back to my rooms, Uncle ?"

"No. I'm off."
"I've got some whisky there."
"Well, don't moon about. Where are yer rooms ?"
The squirrel, on being released by Panting, had passed
the remainder of the afternoon in a neighbouring tree. It
was still there when, between the evening meal and prep., a
boy seated himself at the foot of the tree and examined the
contents of a dishevelled paper bag. The squirrel, prying
cautiously^ discerned peanuts. Then the boy suddenly
turned his head and peered aloft. The head was a red head.
The squirrel took but one fleeting glance at it and scuttled
like a streak of light into the topmost branches.
 ARTHUR MORRISON
Eylestones

Arthur Morrison is well-known as a novelist, dramatist

and writer on Oriental art. His extensive collection
of Chinese and Japanese paintings is now in the
British Museum. His stories of life in the slums of
the East End of London are particularly notable.
 BYLESTONES

than once already I have said that Snorkey Timms

MORE was not a person of any constitutional honesty, except
in an oblique and cranky way toward such of his intimates as
trusted the honour he never claimed to possess. Perhaps
his chief personal characteristic was a dislike of the parti-
cular form of violence called work ; and no
argument could
change his views.
"It ain't that I've never tried work," he said, sucking
with much enjoyment at his pipe, just filled from my pouch
his taste in tobacco was almost his only creditable charac-
teristic "you mustn't suppose that. Fve tried it right
enough, though not often, bein* only 'urnan, as you might
say. It may pay some, but I don't seem to be that sort. Born
different, I s'pose. Why, the hardest work I ever did my
word, was a drivfc, too
it 1I lost money over lost it. An*
after workin' like a 'orse two orses all night, too 1 Fair
makes me shudder when I remember it.
"Somebody had been a-preachin' about honesty to me,
I s'pose, like what you do sometimes. So I took on a job
as a bookmaker's minder you know what that is, o' course.
You just 'ang about your bloke's pitch on the course, an' if
anybody gets makin' a dispute with him, or claimin' what
your bloke don't mean to pay, or what not, why you just
give *im a push in the jore. O' course, you get it back some-
times, but that's what you're paid for. Choppy Byles was my
bloke he was a nut, and.no mistaken There wasn't no tiling
that Choppy Byles wasn't up to. He was up to such a lot
o' things that he kep' two minders reg'lar and he wanted
*em, too, I can tell ye. We could 'a' done with a few more
to 'elp us most times, could me and Jerry Stag, the other
minder. Both of us had cither one eye or the other black,
permanent, while the flat racin' season was on ; an' once we
went 'ome from Alexander's Park with about three-quarters
J* ARTHUR MORRISON
of a weskit between us an' nothing else on us but bruises.
But Choppy Byles, he was all right, and a mile away "fore
the row got into its swing ; 'e 'ad quite a payin' after-
noon.
"Chips tead Spring Meeting and Felby races is within a
few days of each other, and not more'n twenty mile apart
as o' course you know, like anybody well brought up. About
'alf-way between them two towns is a little place called
Nuthatch, and the year Fm a-speakin' of Mr. Choppy Byles
and us two, Jerry Stagg and me, we stayed at Nuthatch over
the day or two between the two meetings ; I dunno why,
unless there was somebody in London as Choppy Byles didn't
want to see afore he'd made a bit at Felby.
"Me and Jerry Stagg, we thought we was in for a nice
little day or two's holiday in the country. But Mr. Chopp}^
Byles didn't take no holidays he was out for business all
the time. He'd race two earwigs over a cabbage-leaf and
bet pennies on it with the greengrocer's boy, rather than
miss a chance. And as luck would have it, we found the
people at Nuthatch quite a sportin' lot ; in fact, we didn't
give 'em full credit till we come away ; and then we was ready
to swear they 'atched 'arder nuts at Nuthatch than any place
forty times its size.
"It was a rest-an'-be-thankful sort o' place to look at,
though, and as comfortable and cosy a pub to stay at as ever
I see. It 'ud convert any teetotaller to look at it, would the
Fox and 'Ounds. We got there in the evenin' after Chip-
stead, an' sat in the parlour a-talkin' to the Nuthatchers an*
doin' our best to astonish the natives. And all through the
conversation, whatever was said, there was our bloke, Mr.
Choppy Byles, feelin' round and hintin' to find if he couldn't
get a bet on with somebody about any ol' thing. At last
he got on to runnin', an' it turns out the Nuthatchers had got
a chkp they fancied could run a good mile.
"That was enough for Choppy Byles. He was on it.
The runnin' chap's name was Dobbin Jarge Dobbin they
called 'im an' it didn't seem to stand to reason that a chap
with a name like that could run a fast mile. What was more,
Choppy Byles's memory was wonderful, and, follerin' the
Sheffield 'andicaps reg'lar, he knew the name o' pretty well
everything on two legs that could raise a toddle, and the name
o' Jarge Dobbin wasn't one of 'em. But he always wanted
 BYLESTONES 3J

the best bargain he could make, did Choppy; so he begaa

comin' the innocent kid.
"'
'E must be a wonderful runner/ he said, 'this here
Dobbin. I s'pose 'e could run a mile in three or four minutes
quite easy ?'
" was talkin' most
'Why, no,* says the Nuthatcher as
c

chap called Gosling aobody could do that. The best as

was ever done in the world was a pretty good bit over four
minutes/
"'Was it?' says Choppy, on to be surprised.
lettin*

'Well, o* course, I dunno nothin' about them things. I only

seemed to 'ave a sort of idea that three or four minutes would
be pretty quick. I s'pose he'd do it all right in four minutes
anda'alf?'
"'No,' says Gosling; 'that's championship time, too.
Jarge Dobbin ain't a champion, not yet. But he'd run a
mile on the road in five minutes.*
" 'That seems rather slow for sich a
very fine runner,'

" Choppy. I fhink he could beat

says
'Well, that,' says Gosling ;
and the whole lot o' the others there said they was sure he
could.'
"
'Ah I' says Choppy. 'Sich a man as him ought. You
don't seem to be stickin' up for your pal half enough. I
expect you'd be glad to bet big odds he'd do it in four
minutes an' three-quarters.'
C
'"Why, yes,' says 'one chap in the crowd, I would.'
'
An* some o' the others says 'Ear, 'ear !' But Gosling, he
sat considerin*. He was a fat, jolly-lookin' feller, but very
thoughtful, with sharp little eyes.
" 'But
'I wouldn't bet very big odds,' he says, presently.

I'd give a bit of odds he'd do it say between the forty-fourth

and forty-fifth milestone along the main London road here.'
"
'What odds ?' asks Choppy, snappin' him up quick.
'Two to one ?'
"'Why, no,' says Gosling, in his slow way; 'not sich
odds as them. Five to four.'
"Choppy 'aggled a bit, but he couldn't get the odds no
longer. So it was settled and put down in writin' that Jarge
Dobbin was to run from the forty-fourth to the forty-fifth
milestone, next day, in four minutes forty-five seconds, if
he could, the stakes bein' five quid to four on his doin' it.
B
34 ARTHUR MORRISON
An* as soon as that was fixed Choppy Byles began oflferin'
side bets all round.
" 'Not in my 'ouse/ says the landlord. 'I can't 'ave no
bettin' 'ere. I've got my licence to think of. You'll 'ave
to go outside if that's your
game/
"So everybody got up an' went out. Jist as we came
tumblin' out into the lane Choppy gives me a drive in the
*
ribs and whispers, 'Ere's your chance to make a bit for
yourself. Take the odds, same as me, an' tell Jerry Stagg.'
"What his game was o' course I didn't know, but it was
pretty clear there was something up his sleeve it was the
sort o' sleeve there's alias something up, was Choppy's.
Well, I told you the Nuthatchers were a sportin' lot, but it
would ha' surprised you to see the little crowd out there under
the stars in that peaceful village a-backin' and a-layin' that
evenin'. Choppy Byles, he took every bet he could get,
givin' evens when there was no more odds to be got, an'
then odds against anything to pile it up. Jerry
offerin'

Stagg an' me, we got our little bit on soon and stopped ;
and sooner or later all the others stopped too, and went
'ome. It was the sort o' place where they go to bed in the
middle o' the evenin'.
"The back door o' the Fox and 'Ounds was left on the
latch all night for the
potman to come in in the mornin'.
Choppy found that out by tellin' the landlord he'd take a
evenin' stroll, and might be in late. So Choppy gave us the
tip and went out for his stroll; and when everybody else
was in bed we went out very quiet by the back way, and found
Choppy waitin' for us.
"
'Come along/ says he. 'Don't make no row, and don't
waste time ; there's a job o' work for you two/
"
'Work
1*9*11,
deritr in the dark.
?' says we; an' I could 'ear
Jerry
J J OO shud-
Stagg
"
*Yes/ says Choppy, 'and you'll 'ave to do it smart ii
you"want
'
to win them bets you've made/
'Ow's that ?' says I.
"
^
'Why/ says he, 'we're goin' to shove one o' them
milestones a bit farther along the road. We
might win witli
'em where they are, but it's always best to make sure/
"Quite a genius, you see, was Choppy Byles a genius
out an' out. How many 'ud 'a'
thought o' sich a move as
that ? Not one in a million.
 35
" c But
won't they spot it ?' says Jerry, a bit doubtful.
"
'Not if we do it careful/ says Choppy. *And, besides,
what odds if they do ? We ain't takin' no witnesses, and
it's down plain enough, in black an* white. Between the
forty-fourth and forty-fifth milestones, it
says, an* nothing
about 'ow far apart they're to be. Nobody can't get over
that. What's more, that chap Gosling, I believe he knows
something about them milestones. What for should he pick
on them two and no others ? And it was him as put it down
on the paper, remember not a mile, but between them
stones. It struck me mighty odd at the time.
It's a short

mile, that's what that is, an' he knows There's lots of

it.

'em like that about the country, where they put the motor
traps. So we shall only be putting the mistake right, or
thereabouts, and doin' the nation a favour, as well as takin'
it out o' that dishonest sharp, Gosling. Come along. That
won't be a short mile to-morrow mornin', whatever else it
is.'

"The village was mostly scattered about a lane leadin*

out o' the main road, you understand, so up the lane we goes.
It was a windy night and very dark just as suited us.
"When we come out on the main road we looks up an*
down in the dark for two or three minutes 'fore we spotted
there was a milestone right opposyte the end o' the lane. So
across the road we went, and began strikin' matches to read
what was on it.

"I began, but arter about fifteen matches had blown out
before I could see anything more than it was a milestone
Choppy Byles lost his temper and had a go himself. We
stood round, Jerry and me, and spread our coats while Choppy
knelt down and struck more matches, talkin' about 'em that
pretty all the while I wonder the milestone didn't catch fire
itself. It was a worn old thing and not easy to make out,
but presently Choppy persuaded a match to keep alight a bit,
and then he jumped up.
"
one of 'em/' he says ; "number forty-five.
'That's
But it's right opposite the end o' the lane and everybody'll
remember that. We must leave this where it is p'r'aps
forty-four's in a easier place. Come on it'll be this way.'
So we starts off to the right.
"We hadn't gone much more'n half-way when we come
to the church, with the graveyard round it.
36 ARTHUR MORRISON
"
'Just the place we want/ says Choppy. 'There's suref
to be a shed with spades and things in it. I was rather lookin
for a farm shed/
"So we went gropin* about round the church, and, sure
enough, we found a shed
right, with no lock on the door
all
and a whole lot o' shovels and picks and what-not in it, and
a whcelbarrer one o* them wide, flat sort as navvies use.
It looked as though Choppy Byles's usual luck was in.
"We shoved a crowbar and a couple o' shovels and picks
on the barter, and Jerry Stagg had just started wheelin' it
down the path to the gate when we got one o* the biggest
frights I ever had in my life. We very near ran into a man
standing in the gateway.
"
'Ullo 1' says the man. 'What's ail this ?'
"
'Sh T Choppy whispers to us. 'Not a word 1* and he
shoved in front.
"
'Good
evenin' 1* says he to the chap. 'We thought
you'd ha' been in bed, or we'd ha' come round. just We
wanted to borrow hire, that is the barrer and shovels for
a hour or two, to bury a a dawg/
"
'Well,' says the ch<ip, 'you've corne out a rum time
to bury a dawg.'
"
'Why, yes/ says Choppy, 'we 'ave left it a bit late ;
but we wanted to keep it very private not 'avin' a licence
for the dawg, you see. Now, what should you think might
be a fair charge for us borrowin' these things for a couple of
hours, strictly private, to bury a dawg ?'
"
'Well/ says the chap, 'it'll come a bit dear. That there
Christian wheelbarrer an' tilings out of a churchyard oughtn't
properly to be used to bury a dawg at all specially a dawg
with no licence. There's the strain on my conscience to
consider/ he says. 'Say a quid.'
"
'Bit 'igh, ain't it ?' Choppy says, with his hand in his

pocket. He was always a dreadful 'ard 'un to part, was

Choppy.
" f
'I told you it ud come a bit 'igh/ says the chap ;

"specially got to be kep' private.

if it's quid/ A
"So, seein* there was no help for it, Choppy lugged out
the money and 'anded over. 'Mind/ he says, 'this is strict
Q. T. between ourselves. We'll be careful to put the things
back again/
don't care whether you do or not/ says the chap,
 BYLESTONE1 57
f
tumln' out o the gate and chucklin' all over. 'They ain't
my things. I only took a look in as I went along I*
"I'd almost 'a* give another quid to see Choppy's face
just then, but I
could guess it. We shoved out into the
f

road, and I could hear Choppy's rage almost bustin out

the
through his ears and nose. 'If it wasn't for givin' away
show/ he said, presently as we went along the road, 'we'd
have it back out of him. Never mind I'll get it all back
to-morrow. Keep your eyes a-goin' for that milestone.*
"It wanted watcliin' for in the dark, for there was a lot
o big trees along the hedge just thereabout which made it
?

darker than ever. Pretty soon we spotted it, however, right

in against the bank, with long grass and thistles and what-not
all round it. The trees sheltered us a bit more here, so we
didn't have to waste so many matches, and there was the
44 miles' all right and plain enough. So we set to
4

work.
"Me and Jerry did the diggin' and Choppy Byles did the
lookin' out just the department he would choose. It was

a sight easier than our job, anyhow, for that ground was very
near as hard as the milestone itself. We dug pretty hard
for a bit, and then Jerry took hold o' the top o' the stone and
gave it a shove. It stood like a rock. 'My wig !' says Jerry.
'Iwonder 'ow far it goes down ?'
"We went at it again, and the more we dug the 'arder
the ground got. I never had sich work ; and I was just
slackin* off a bit for a rest when we had another startler.
"A strange voice says, all of a sudden : 'Look 'ere I'm
sharin' in that I'

"Jerry Stagg fell over his spade and I sat down whop.
Choppy Byles spun round with a jump, and there in die road
was a chap standin' watchin' us.
"
I've bin sittin' over 'Owe Chips 'atf the night workin'
out that clue,' says the chap, and now I come along and find
4

you diggin' on the very spot. I reckon I share in that

treasure.'
"This was the time when the buried-treasure rage was on,
as you'll remember. All sorts o' papers buried money ail
over the shop, and parties was a-diggin' and pokin' about
everywhere after it. We was relieved the chap wasn't up
to our game, but it was a bit awkward.
* 'What rot 1* 'We're buryin' a dawg T
says Choppy.
 58 ARTHUR MORRISON
" 'Show me your
'Dawg be blowed I'
says the chap.
dawg P
"
'Certainly not/ Choppy says, very decided. 'It's a

private dawg. You've done the clue wrong, that's what it

is. Go back and do it again, careful/
"
'I have done it careful/ says the
chap ; 'and now I'll
stop here and see if Fm wrong or not/
"
'No/ says Choppy Byles, gettin' nasty, 'you won't stop
here, not when you come to think of it you won't. When
we go out buryin' dawgs, private dawgs, we want to be let
alone, see ? We want to be let alone with our grief.
And there's three of us, with shovels. No, when
you come to think of it, this is what you'll think/ says
Choppy, speakin' more friendly, and gettin' nearer to the
chap, with his hand in his pocket again "
'this is what you'll
;

think. You'll think to yourself, 'Ere's three genelmen

buryin* a dawg, a private dawg, what they're very grieved
over. If I was right about that there treasure," you'll think,
"why, they're there first anyhow, an' there's three of 'em
with shovels and other things just as 'ard, and I'd better not
make 'em angry," you'll think. "I'd better take a friendly
quid what they offer me and go away, and write to the editor
J
of Ome Chips for a consolation prize." That's what you'll
think if you're a reasonable chap, as knows what's best and
safest/
"
'Well/ says the chap, steppin' back a bit and speakin'
milder, 'I am a-thinkin' something o' the sort, since you put
it that way. Only I'm a-thinkin' the friendly quid ought to
be two/
"Choppy was a hard partner in general, but prompt when
It paid. 'Here y'are/ he snapped out ; 'two quid take 'em
and hook it, 'fore I change my mind/
"So the chap took the two quid and went off along the
road. We listened to hear his footsteps
dyin' away, and then
Choppy grabs a pick himself.
"
'We'll get this over quick/ he says, 'before any more
'Ome Chippers comes along. Them papers is a public noos-
ance, upsettin' people's minds like this. But keep a look-out
in that there hole, in case that feller's right/
"I don't like thinkin' about the job we had. Nobody
ain't got any right to ask me to work again for the rest o* my
life after what I did that night. That milestone was like
 BYLESTONHS 39

them icebergs you read about about ten times as much down
below as up above. And the ground well, you'd ha' sworn
we'd found a* iron mine, all solid metal. Choppy dropped
his pick soon and put in all his energy stimulatin' Jerry and
me, and gropin' about in the dirt for any odd thing 'Owe
Chips might ha* put there.
"Weft, we did it at last. That is, we got the milestone
a-lollin' over sideways in a big hole, and we began sich a

fight to get it on the wheelbarrer as we'd never gone through

before not even at Alexander's Park. Jerry and me was
.iown the hole heavin' most desprit at the bottom of the stone,
and Choppy Byles was haulin' at the top to pull the thing
into the barrer, and the chorus was enough to roast the little
birds a-sleepin* on the trees overhead. Our tempers was
none the better for all this, and before we got the stone fair
on the barrer we nearly had a fight among ourselves. Fd
ha' sworn I 'eard Choppy laughin' at us, but he said it was
Terry, an' Jerry said it was us two, and we never properly
settled it. But we did get the stone on the barrer at last,
filled in the hole, and started off
along the road.
"It was a pretty straight bit o' road, with trees along the
side very much the same, so it looked as though we could
all
stretch out that mile a good bit without makin' the change
look very noticeable. So we went along lookin' for a place
as looked as much as
possible like the one we took it from,
when something else 'appened.
"I never see sich a country road as that one was that
night ; it was like the Strand, pretty near, barrin' the lights
an' the evenin' papers. We
was just steadyin' up to look
at what seemed a good place when we heard footsteps.
"
'What shall we do ?' I says.
"
'Stand still/ whispers Choppy. T'r'aps he won't
notice. Get in front o' die barrer/
"Then we heard the footsteps again, and they was all
over the road at once and the next minute the clap comes
;

in among us like a Catherine wheel, and bang over the

wheelbarrow we was tryin' to hide.
"
'Whash this ?' says the new chap, turnin' over very
unsteady on the milestone. What they leave wheelbarrers
about in public road for people tummle over for, eh ? Wheel-
barrers an' an' tombstones 1 I say, there's a tombstone
on thishyer barrer 1
D'y'ear ? Tombstone. What you want
40 ARTHUR MORRISON
tombstone on barrer middle o" night for ?' An* with that
he lifts bisself up and sits in the barrer talkin' to us
by and
large.
"
'I know what you think/ says he ; 'you think I'm drunk.
That's my legs ; they're shocking but Tm allri' sober as
judge.
"
Now, what about tombstone ?'

'It's all right, old chap/ says Choppy, tryin' to haul

him up. 'It's for a dawg we're bury in'.'
"The chap sat and wagged his head and chuckled. 'Dawg ?'
he said. 'Dawg ? You don't seem believe I'm sober. /
know what you've done. You've bin an' boned thishyer
tombstone out o' ihe churchyard 'long there, to make make
here, I say, what you goin' to make out o' that tomb-
stone ?'
"
'You get up, old feller, and come along o' me,' says
Choppy, 'and I'll tell you all about it. I got a drink for you
a little farther up the road in a flask. It's a beautiful night
for a walk come along the drink ain't very far off.'
;

"We never knew Choppy had got his flask with him, or
it 'ud been empty long before this, with what we'd gone
'a'

through. But we got the chap up somehow between us,

and him and Choppy went staggerin' off along the road the
way we'd come.
"Choppy was gone a most rabunculous long time, and me
and jerry pretty well fell asleep on the milestone waitin' for
7
him. When he came at last he was spittin and snarlin' with
rage" like an old tom-cat.
'That there drunken tyke's been and lost my flask,' he
said. 'Swigged it empty and then dropped it in the ditch
or somewhere he didn't know. I've bin gropin' all over
the road and ditch and burnt all my matches, and had to give
it
up. But he's fast asleep an' safe enough, up against a
stile. These here Nuthatch people owe me a bit more over
this ; but I'll have it all out of 'em to-morrow. We'll shove
this milestone on a bit farther still. But spread your coats
over it, in case we meet somebody else in this here busy
thoroughfare/
"So Jerry and me put our coats over it and started off
once more. We didn't go far this time about fifty or
sixty yards. We'd made it a pretty long mile by now, and
there was a sort o' place here that seemed a good deal like the
one the milestone came from, so we stopped. And here
 BYLESTONES 41

we found thefirst bit o' reasonable luck since we left the church-

yard shed ;
the ground seemed pretty soft.
"So we whanged in with the picks and shovels, and soon
had a pretty tidy hole. The boss took a hand quite serious
this time, for he was gettin' nervous. Not that he was much
good. If you get three men as ain't used to it all a-diggin'
one hole together on a dark night, you'll find they get a bit
tangled up, one way and another. Jerry and me both
resigned our appointments several times in that hole, and it
was only business considerations as prevented a fight.
"Now we was diggin' this hole just at the foot of the bank
by the roadside, and there was a hedge atop of the bank.
We'd got the hole, as we
thought, pretty near deep enough,
and was just a-stoppin' to say so, when there came a most
terrifyin' voice from over the top o' the hedge.
"
'Oo oo oo 1' says the voice. 'It's murder 1 Nothing
but murder !'
"We looked up, and there was a monstrous sort of ragged
head lookin' down at us.
"
'You've woke me up,' says the head, 'with your horrid
language. I may be obliged by circumstances to sleep agin
a hedge, but I've got my feelin's. You've got a corpse in
that there barrer, covered over with coats, and you're a-
buryin' of it. I ain't goin' to stand and see that done, not free
of charge, I ain't. I may be a tramp, but I've got my feelin's !'
"Here was another fine go. To think we should ha'
picked on the very spot where this tramp was dossin' ! But
Choppy
"
spoke up again.
'S-sh !' he said. We're very sorry we disturbed you
didn'tknow you was there. Do you read '0///<? Chips ?'
"
'Read 'what ?' says the head.
" '
'Owe Chips. The best and most 'olesome family
paper in the world. Full of excitin' but moral stories, interestin'
puzzles, and instructive articles by Aunt Eliza. One penny
weekly. We're advertisin' it.'
"
'Are you ?' says the tramp. 'Well, I'm a nervous chap
and always carry a police whistle. I'll blow it 'ard. and
advertise 'Ome Chips a little more.'
"
'No,' says Choppy, very hasty, 'don't do that. We
don't advertise that way anybody can blow a whistle/
"
'/ can,' says the tramp. 'You hear me 1' And he
shoved the whistle in his mouth.
42 ARTHUR MORRISON
" 'Stow it r says
Choppy, scramblin' up the bank. 'Don't
do a silly thing like that. You see, we're out buryin' treasure/
" 'All I don't mind
right, that/ says the chap
in the hedge.
'Bury it
quick, so's I can come an' dig it up. Or give it me
now, and save trouble/
"
'That ain't likely/ says Choppy. 'You don't seem to
understand liter'y work. We
shan't bury no treasure here
now, when you've spotted the place ; not likely, is it ? But
we'll give you five bob to go and sleep somewhere else/
"
*Why ?' asks the tramp. 'I ain't doin' no 'arm, and
it's a very nice hedge. No, I don't believe this treasure yarn,
My theory's murder. It's a habit 1 don't 'old with, is murder.
I never allow a murder under two quid ; and this whistle's
a very loud 'un. Don't you get no nearer I'm nervous/
"Choppy Byles looked up at the tramp and down at us,
helpless. Then he pulled out the money and handed it
over. The tramp was off in a jiffy and presently we could
;

hear him whistlin' a little tune a long way off. I believe he

did that to give us another scare.
"
'Two more this peaceful village owes me/
says Choppy.
'Just to-morrow/
till

"So we tumbled that milestone into the hole, holus-bolus,

and shovelled in die earth quick and stamped it down. There
was a rare lot there was no room for, but we kicked it about
among the long grass and made it pretty tidy. And then
we went home. We put the things back all right in the
churchyard shed, and we crawled very quiet into the Fox and
Hounds not very long afore the potman.
"In the mornin',after breakfast, Choppy Byles says to the
landlord, in a casual sort o' way : 'I s'pose you're goin' to
see the runnin' match this afternoon ?'
"
'Why, yes/ says the landlord. 'I did think o' goin' over
after dinner/
"
'Where Is it ?' asks Choppy, innocent as putty. 'I

don't know my way about here/

"
'Well/ the landlord says, takin' him to the window,
'you see the church right away there to the right ?'
"
'Yes/ says Choppy.
"
'Well, the forty-fourth milestone's a little way beyond
that, along the road, and the forty-fifth's farther on still/
"
'Farther on still ?' says Choppy, with a sort o' fall in
his voice. 'Farther on still ?'
 BYLESTONES 4}
"
'Why, yes, o' course/ says the landlord. 'A mile farther
on. would be, wouldn't it ?'
It

"Choppy Byles looked round at me and Jerry Stagg with

a face like a paper kite.
"
'What's this mean ?' he gasped, as soon as the landlord
was out o' the room.
"
Til go along the lane and see/ says Jerry. And we both
went with him.
"We came out at the end o' the lane, and there was the
first milestone we'd seen,
straight in front of us. We took a
look round and went across. It was the forty-third The 1

forty-third I

"The figures was worn, and not particular clear, and the
three was one o' them with the flat top and a sharp corner
instead of a curl; very much like a five on a pitch-dark night
with a match in a wind ; but a three all the same.
"The three of us stood a-blinkin' at each other over
that milestone, as it come to us that we'd gone and made
the mile a lump shorter instead of longer! And such a
lump 1

"
'Look out !' says Jerry, very sudden. 'There's Gosling
comin' up the lane with another chap. Get behind the
hedge !'
"There was a gate close by, and we nipped in like winkin*
and stooped behind the hedge. It was Gosling, sure enough,
with a pal, talkin' and laughin' like anything. He seemed
to have a lot to say, but we only heard one bit, and that was
enough.
"
'Five quid and a silver flask/ says Gosling, 'not to
mention a night's fun. But that'll be nothing to the after-
noon's !'

"Wethree just sat down behind that hedge and looked

at each other like waxworks. We
saw a whole new picture-
show of that awful night in two seconds, us workin' and them
peepin'.

"Then says Choppy Byles 'My bag's In the bedroom at

:

the Fox and 'Ounds. Cheaper to leave it there. Foller the

railway line.'
"So we did"
 ANTHONY HOPE
A Slight Mistake
An Uncounted Hour

Anthony Hope (Sir Anthony Hope Hawkins) aban-

doned the law for novel writing, and very soon
made his name by dashing romances of an imaginary
Balkan country, of which Rupert of Hcn^au and The
Prisoner of Zenda are the favourites. In a different
vein The Dolly Dialogues also achieved great popularity.
 A SLIGHT MISTAKE

"I DON'T ask you for more than a guinea/' said Mrs, Hilary,
with a parade of forbearance.
"It would be the same/* I replied politely, "if you asked me
for a thousand" ; with which I handed her half a crown.
She held it in her open hand, regarding it scornfully.
"Yes," I continued, taking a seat, "I feel that pecuniary
gifts
"Half a crown I"
"Are a poor substitute for personal service. May not I
accompany you to the ceremony ?"
"I dare say you spent as much as this on wine with your
lunch I"
"I was in a mad mood to-day/* I answered apologetically.
"What are they taught at the school ?"
"Above all, to be good girls/' said Mrs. Hilary, earnestly.
"What are you sneering at, Mr. Carter ?" %

"Nothing/' said I, hastily ; and I added with a sigh, "I

suppose it's all right,"
"I should like/' said Mrs. Hilary, meditatively, "if I had
not other duties, to dedicate my life to the service of girls."
"I should think twice about that, if I were you," said I,
shaking my head.
"By know if I've ever spoken
the way, Mr. Carter, I don't
unkindly of Lady Mickleham. I hope not."
"Hope," said I, "is not yet taxed."
"If I have, I'm very sorry. She's been most kind In
undertaking to give away the prizes to-day. There must be
some good in her."
"Oh, don't be hasty I" I implored.
"I always wanted to think well of her."
"Ah 1Now I never did."
"And Lord Mickleham is coming, too. He'll be most
useful"
47
 48 ANTHONY HOPK
"That settles it," I exclaimed. "I may not be an earl,
but I have a perfect right to be useful I'll go too."

"I wonder if you'll behave properly," said Mrs. Hilary,

doubtfully.
I held out a half-sovereign, three half-crowns, and a
shilling.
"Oh, well, you may come, since Hilary can't," said Mrs.
Hilary.
"You mean he won't," I observed.
"He has always been prevented hitherto," said she, with

dignity.
So I went, and it proved a most agreeable expedition,
There were two hundred girls in blue frocks and white
aprons (the girl three from the end of the fifth
row was
decidedly pretty) a nice lot of prize books the Micklehams
(Dolly in demure black), ourselves, and the matron. All
went well. Dolly gave away the prizes ; Mrs. Hilary and
Archie made little speeches. Then the matron came to me,
I was sitting modestly at the back of the platform, a little
distance behind the others.
"Mr. Musgrave," said the matron to me, "we're so glad
to see you here at last. Won't you say a few words ?"
"It would be a privilege," I responded cordially, "but
unhappily I have a sore throat."
The matron (who was a most respectable woman) said,
"Dear, dearl" but did not press die point. Evidently,
however, she liked me, for when we went to have a cup of
tea, she got me in a corner and began to tell rne all about
the
work. It was extremely interesting. Then the matron
observed :

"And what an angel Mrs. Musgrave is I"

"Well, I should hardly call her that," said I, with a smile.
"Oh, you mustn't depreciate her you, of all men !" cried
the matron, with a somewhat ponderous archness. "Really
I envy you her constant society."
"I assure you," said I, "I see very little of her."
"I beg your pardon ?"
"I only go to the house about once a fortnight Oh,
it's not my fault. She won't have me there oftener."
"What do you mean ? I beg your pardon. Perhaps
I've touched on a painful ?"
"Not at all, not at all," said I, suavely. "It is very natural.
 A SLIGHT MISTAKE 49
I am neither young nor handsome, Mrs. Wiggins. I am not
complaining."
The matron gazed at me,
"Only seeing her here/' I pursued, "you have no idea of
what she is at home. She has chosen to forbid me to come
"
to her house
"Her house ?"
"It happens to be more hers than mine," I explained.
"To forbid me, I say, more than once to come to her house.
5
No doubt she has her reasons/
"Nothing could justify it/' said the matron, directing a
wondering glance at Mrs. Hilary.
"Do not let us blame her," said I. "It is just an unfor-
tunate accident. She is riot as fond of me as I could wish,
Mrs. Wiggins ; and she is a great deal fonder than I could
"
wish of
I broke oF. Mrs. Hilary was walking toward us. I
think she was pleased to see me getting on so well with the
matron, for she was smiling pleasantly. The matron wore a
bewildered expression.
"I suppose," said Mrs. Hilary, "that you'll drive back
with the Mickleharns ?"
"unless you want me," said I, keeping a watchful eye on
the matron.
"Oh, I don't want you," said Mrs. Hilary, lightly.
"You won't be alone this evening ?" I asked anxiously.
Mrs. Hilary stared a little.
"Oh, no 1" she said. "We shall have our usual party."
"May I come one day next week ?" I asked humbly.
Mrs. Hilary thought for a moment.
"Fm so busy next week ; come the week after/ said she, 1

giving me her hand.

"That's very unkind," said I.
"Nonsense I" said Mrs. Hilary ; and she added "Mind :

you let me know when you're coming."

"I won't surprise you/' I assured her, with a covert
glance at the matron.
The excellent woman was quite red in the face, and could
gasp out nothing but "Good-bye", as Mrs, Hilary affectionately
pressed her hand.
At this moment Dolly came up. She was alone.
"Where's Ardtiie ?" I asked.
50 ANTHONY HOPE
"He's run away; he's got to meet somebody. I knew
you'd see me home. Mrs. Hilary didn't want you, of
course ?"
"Of course not," said I, plaintively.
"Besides, you'd rather come with me, wouldn't you ?"
pursued Dolly; and she added pleasantly to the matron,
"Mrs. Hilary's so down on him, you know."
"I'd much rather come with you," said I.
"We'll have a cosy drive all to ourselves," said Dolly,
"without husbands or wives or anything horrid. Isn't it
nice to be rid of one's husband sometimes, Mrs.
Wiggins ?"
"I have the misfortune to be a widow, Lady Mickleham,"
said Mrs. Wiggins.
Dolly's eye rested upon her with an interested expression.
I knew that she was about to ask Mrs. Wiggins whether she
liked the condition of life, and I interposed hastily, with a
:
sigh
"But you can look back on a happy marriage, Mrs.
Wiggins ?"
"I did my best to make it so," said she, stiffly.
"You're right," said I. "Even in the face of unHndness
"
we should strive
"My husband's not unkind," said Dolly.
"I didn't mean your husband," said I.
"What your poor wife would do if she cared a button for
you, I don't know," observed Dolly.
"If I had a wife who cared for me, I should be a better
man," said I, solemnly.
"But you'd probably be very dull," said Dolly. "And
you wouldn't be allowed to drive with me."
"Perhaps it's all for the best," said I, brightening up.
"Gtf^-bye, Mrs. Wiggins."
Dolly walked on. Mrs. Wiggins held my hand for a
moment.
"Young man," said she, sternly, "are you sure it's not
your own fault ?"
"I'm not at all sure, Mrs. Wiggins," said I. "But don't
be distressed about it. It's of no consequence. I don't let
it make me unhappy. Good-bye ;
so many thanks. Charm-
ing girls you have here especially that one in the fifth I

mean, charming, all of them. Good-bye."

 A SLIGHT MISTAKE 51

I hastened to the carriage. Mrs. Wiggins stood and

watched. I got in and sat down by Dolly.
"Oh, Mrs. Wiggins," said Dolly, dimpling, "don't tell
Mrs. Hilary that Archie wasn't with us, or we shall get into
trouble." And she added to me, "Are you all right ?"
"Rather !" said I, appreciatively ; and we drove off,
leaving Mrs. Wiggins on the doorstep.
A fortnight later I went to call on Mrs. Hilary. After
some conversation she remarked :

"I'm going to the school again to-morrow."

"Really !" said I.
"And Fm so delighted I've persuaded Hilary to come."
She paused, and then added :

"You really seemed interested last time."

"Oh, I was."
"Would you like to come again to-morrow ?"
"No, Ithink not, thanks," said I, carelessly.
"That's just like you I" she said severely. "You never
do any real good, because you never stick to anything."
"There are some things one can't stick to," said I.

"Oh, nonsense !" said Mrs. Hilary.

But there are and I didn't go.
 AN UNCOUNTED HOUR

were standing, Lady Mickleham and I, at a door

WE which led from the morning-room to the terrace at The
Towers. I was on a visit to that historic pile (by Banbrugh
out of the money accumulated by the third Earl Paymaster to
the Forces temp. Queen Anne). The morning-room is a large
room. Archie was somewhere in it. Lady Mickleham held
a jar containing pdti de foie gras ; from time to time she dug
a piece out with a fork and flung the morsel to a big retriever
which was sitting on the terrace. The morning was fine but
cloudy. Lady Mickleham wore blue. The dog swallowed
the pSti with greediness.
"It's so bad for him," sighed she ; "but the dear likes it
so much."
"How human the creatures are 1" said I.
"Do you know," pursued Lady Mickleham, "that the
Dowager says I'm extravagant. She thinks dogs ought not
to be fed on pdt& de fois gras"
"Your extravagance," I observed, "is probably due to

your having been brought up on a moderate income. I

have felt the effect myself."
"Of course," said Dolly, "we are hit by the agricultural
depression."
"The Carters also," I murmured, "are landed gentry."
"After all, I don't see much point in economy, do you,
Mr. Carter ?"
"Economy," I remarked, putting my hands in my pockets,
"isgoing without something you do want in case you should,
some day, want something which you probably won't want."
"Isn't that clever ?" asked Dolly, in an apprehensive tone.
"Oh, dear, no," I answered reassuringly. "Anybody
can do that if they care to try, you know."
k
Dolly tossed a piece of pate to the retriever.
"I have made a discovery lately," I observed*
55
54 ANTHONY HOPE
"What are you two talking about ?" called Archie.
"You're not meant to hear," said Dolly, without turning
round.
"Yet, if it's a discovery, he ought to hear it."
*
"He's made a good many lately/ said Dolly.
She dug out the last bit of pdtiy flung it to the dog, and
handed the empty pot to me.
"Don't be so allegorical," I implored. "Besides, it's
really not just to Archie. No doubt the dog is a nice one,
but
"
"How foolish you are this morning What's the 1

discovery ?"
"An entirely surprising one,"
"Oh, but let me hear It's nothing about Archie, is
I

it?"
"No. I've told you all Archie's sins."
"Nor Mrs. Hilary ? it was Mrs. Hilary 1"
I wish
"Shall we walk on the terrace ?" I suggested.
"Oh, yes, let's," said Dolly, stepping out, and putting on
a broad-brimmed, low-crowned hat, which she caught up
from a chair hard by. "It isn't Mrs. Hilary ?" she added,
sitting down on a garden seat.
"No," said I, leaning on a sun-dial which stood by the
seat.

"Well, what is it ?"

"It is I, "and serious.
simple," said It is not, therefore,
like you, Lady Mickleham."
"It's like Mrs. Hilary," said Dolly.
"No ; because it isn't pleasant. By the way, are you
jealous of Mrs. Hilary ?"
Dolly said nothing at all. She took off her hat, roughened
her hair a little, and assumed an effective pose. Still, it is a
fact (for what it is worth) that she doesn't care much about
Mrs. Hilary.
"The discovery," I continued, "is that I'm growing
middle-aged."
"You are middle-aged," said Dolly, spearing her hat
with its
long pin.
I was, very naturally, nettled at this.
"So will you be soon," I retorted.
"Not soon," 'said Dolly.
"Some day," I insisted.
 AN UNCOUNTED HOUR 55

After a pause of about half a minute, Dolly said : "1

suppose so."
"You become," I pursued, idly drawing patterns
will
with my finger on the sun-dial, "wrinkled, rough, fat and,
perhaps, good."
"You're very disagreeable to-day," said Dolly.
She rose and stood by me.
"What do the mottoes mean ?" she asked.
There were two : I will not say they contradicted one
another, but they looked at life from different points of
view.
"Pereunt et imputantur" I read.
"Well, what's that, Mr. Carter ?"
"A trite, but offensive, assertion," said I, lighting a

cigarette.
"But what does it mean ?" she asked, a pucker on her
forehead.
"What does it matter ?" said I. "Let's try the other."
"The other is longer."
"And better. Horas non numero nisi serenas"
"And what's that ?"
I translated literally. Dolly slapped her hands, and her
face gleamed with smiles.
"I like that one !" she cried.
"Stop I" said imperatively.
I, "You'll set it moving I"
"It's very sensible," said she.
"More freely rendered it means : *I live only when
' "
you
"By Jove remarked Archie, coming up behind us,
!"
pipe inmouth, "there was a lot of rain last night. I've just
measured it in the gauge."
"Some people measure everything," said I, with a dis-

pleased air. "It is a detestable habit."

"Archie, what does Pereunt et imputantur mean ?"
"Eh ? Oh, I see. Well, I say, Carter Oh, we, you I

know, I suppose it means you've got to pay for your fun,

doesn't it ?"
"Oh, is that all ? I was afraid it was something horrid.
Why did you frighten me, Mr. Carter ?"
"I think it is rather horrid," said I.
"Why, it isn't even true," said Dolly, scornfully.
Now when I heard this ancient and respectable legend
j6 ANTHONY HOPB
thus cavalierly challenged I fell to studying It again, and
presently I exclaimed :
"Yes, you're right If it said that, it wouldn't be true ;
!

but Archie translated wrong."

"Well, you have a shot/* suggested Archie.
"The oysters are eaten and put down in the bill/' said I.
"And you will observe, Archie, that it does not say in whose
bill/'
"Ah 1" said Dolly.
"Well, somebody's got to pay/' persisted Archie.
"Oh, yes, somebody," laughed Dolly.
"Well, I don't know," said Archie. "I suppose the chap
that has the fun
"
"It's not always a chap," observed Dolly.
"Well, then, the individual," amended Archie. "I suppose
he'd have to pay."
"It doesn't say so," Iremarked mildly. "And according
to small
"
my experience
"I'm quite sure your meaning is right, Mr. Carter," said
Dolly, in an authoritative tone.
"As for the other motto, Archie/' ssud I, "it merely
means that a woman considers all hours wasted which she
does not spend in the society of her husband."
"Oh, come, you don't gammon me," said Archie.
"It means that the sun don't shine unless it's fine, you
know."
Archie delivered this remarkable discovery in a tone of
great self-satisfaction.
"Oh, you dear old thing !" said Dolly.
"Well, it does, you know/' said he.
There was a pause. Archie kissed his wife (I am no;
complaining ; he has, of course, a perfect right to kiss his
wife) and strolled away toward the hot-houses.
I lit another cigarette. Then Dolly, pointing to the stem
of the dial, cried :
"Why, here's another inscription oh, and in English 1"
She was right. There was another carelessly scratched
on the old battered column nearly eflaced, for the characters
had been but lightly marked and yet not, as I conceited
from the tenor of the words, very old.
"What is it ?" asked Dolly, peering over my shoulder,
as I bent down to read the letters, and shading her eyes with
 AN UNCOUNTED HOUR J7
her hand. (Why didn't she put on her hat ? We touch the
Incomprehensible.)
"It is," said I,"a singularly poor, shallow, feeble, and
5
undesirable little verse/
"Read it out," said Dolly.
So I read it. The silly fellow had written :

"Life is Love, the poets tell us,

In the little books they sell us ;
But pray, ma'am what's of Life the use,
If Life be Love ? For Love's the Deuce."

Dolly began to laugh gently, digging the pin again into

her hat.
"I wonder," said she, "whether they used to come and
sit by this old dial just as we did this morning 1"
"I shouldn't be at ail surprised,'* said L "And another
point occurs to me, Lady Mickleham."
"Oh, does it ? What's that, Mr. Carter ?"
"Do you think that anybody measured the rain-gauge ?"
Dolly looked at me very gravely.
"I'm GO sorry when you do that," said she, pathetically,
I smiled.
"I really am," said Dolly. "But you don't mean it,
do you ?"
"Certainly not," said I.
Dolly smiled.
"No more than he did !" said I, pointing to the sun-dial.
And then we both smiled.
"Will this hour count, Mr. Carter ?" asked Dolly, as she
turned away.
"That would be rather strict," said I.
E. (E. SOMERVILLE and MARTIN ROSS
The Shooting of Shinroe

CEnonc Somerville and Martin Ross (the latter being

in reality her cousin Violet Martin) were born and
lived in Ireland, which is the scene of their lively and
entertaining stories, many of which deal with the
hunting field. Miss Somerville was herself an M.F.H.
for several years and is also an accomplished artist
 THE SHOOTING OF SH1NROE

TV/TR. JOSEPH FRANCIS McCABE rose stiffly from his

1VJL basket chair,
picked up the cushion on which he had
been seated, looked at it with animosity, hit it hard with his
fist, and, flinging it into the chair, replaced himself upon itf
with the single word :

"Flog !"
Iwas aware that he referred to the flock with which
the cushions in the lounge of Reardon's Hotel were stuffed.
"They have this hotel destroyed altogether with their
improvements," went on Mr. McCabe between puffs, as
he lit his pipe. "God be with the time this was the old
smoking-room, before they knocked it and the hall into
one and spoilt the two of them There were fine solid
1

x
chairs in it that time, that you'd sleep in as good as your
bed, but as for these wicker affairs, I declare the winded
whistle through them the same as a crow's nest/' He
paused, and brought his heel down heavily on the top of the
fire. "And look at that for a grate A
wellgrate they call
1

it rd say, 'Leave Well alone

Thirty years
1*
coming Fm
to Sessions here, and putting up in this house, and, in place
of old Tim telling me me own room was ready for me, there's
a whipper-snapper of a snapdragon in a glass box in the hall,
asking me me name in broken English" (it may be mentioned
that this happened before the war), "and 'Had Ta" Cook's
ticket ?' and down-facing me that I must leave my key in
what he calls the 'Bew-roV
I said I knew of a lady who always took a Cook's ticket
when she went abroad, because when she got to Paris there
would be an Englishman on the platform to meet her, or at
all events a broken Englishman.
Mr. McCabe softened to a temporary smile, but held
on to his grievance with the tenacity of his profession. (I
don't think I have mentioned that he is a Solicitor, of a type
6* E. SOMERVILLE AND MARTIN ROSS
CE.

now, unfortunately, becoming obsolete.) He had a long

grey face, and a short grey moustache ; he dyed his hair,
and his age was known to no man.
"There was one of Cook's tourists sat next me at break-
fast," he resumed, "and he asked me was I ever in Ireland
before and how long was I in it 'Wan day/ says I."
"Did he believe you ?" I asked.
"He did/' replied Mr. McCabe, with something that
approached compassion.
I have always found old McCabe a mitigating circum-
stance of Sessions at Owenford, both in Court and out of
it. He was a sportsman of the ingrained variety that grows
wild in Ireland, and, in any of the horse-coping cases that
occasionally refresh the innermost soul of Munster, it would
be safe to assume that Mr. McCabe's special gifts had ensured
his being retained, generally on the shady side. He fished
when occasion served ; he shot whether it did or not. He
did not exactly keep horses, but he always knew someone
who was prepared to "pass on" a thoroughly useful animal,
with some infirmity so insignificant that until you tried to
dispose of him you did not realise that he was yours, until the
final passing-on to the next world. He had certain shooting
privileges in the mountains behind the town of Owenford
(bestowed, as he said, by a grateful client), and it had often
been suggested by him that he and I should anticipate some
November Sessions by a day, and spend it "on the hill".
We were now in the act of carrying out the project.
"Ah, these English," McCabe began again, mixing him-
self a glass of whisky and water, "they'd believe anything
so long as it wasn't die truth. Talking politics these lads
were, and by the time they had their ham and eggs swallowed
they had the whole country arranged. 'And look/ says
they they wejre anglers, God help us 'look at all the
I

money that's going to waste for want of preserving the

rivers 1* *I beg your pardon/ says I, 'there's water-bailiffs
on the most of the rivers. I was defending a man not long
since that was cot by the water-bailiffs poaching salmon on
the Owen. "And what proot have you ?" says I to the water-
M How do
bailiff.
you know it was a salmon at all?" "Is it
how wbuld I know ?" says the bailiff. "Didn't I gaff the
fish for him meselfl"'"
"What did your anglers say to that ?" I
inquired.
 THE SHOOTING OF SHINROE 63

"Well, they didn't quite go so far as to tell me I was

a liar/' said Mr. McCabe tranquilly. "Ah, telling such as
them the truth is wasting what isn't plenty 1 Then they'll
meet some fellow that lies like a tooth-drawer, and they'll
write to the English limes on the head of him!" He
stretched forth a long and bony hand for the tumbler of whisky
and water. "And, talking of tooth-drawers," he went on,
"there's a dentist comes here once a fortnight, Jeffers his
name is, and a great sportsman too. I was with him to-day"
he passed his hand consciously over his mouth, and the
difference that I had dimly felt in his appearance suddenly
and in all senses of the word flashed upon me "and he was
telling me how one time, in the summer that's past, he'd been
out all night fishing in the Owen. He was going home
before the dawn, and he jumped down off a bank on to what
he took to be a white stone and he aimed for the stone,
mind you, because he thought the ground was wet and
what was it but a man's face 1" McCabe paused to receive
my comment. "What did he do, is it ? Ran off for his life,
roaring out, 'There's a first-rate dentist in Owenford !' The
fellow was lying asleep there, and he having bundles of
spurge with him to poison the river. He had drink taken,
I suppose."
"Was he a water-bailiff too ?" said I. "I hope the con-
servators of the river stood him a false set of teeth."
"If they did," said McCabe, with an unexpected burst
of feeling, "I pity him 1" He rose to his feet, and put his
tumbler down on the chimney-piece. "Well, we should
get away early in the morning, and it's no harm for me to go
to bed." ^
He yawned a large yawn that ended abruptly with a
-

metallic click. His eyes met mine, full of unspoken things ;

we parted in a silence that seemed to have been artificially

imposed upon Mr. McCabe.
The wind boomed intermittently in my chimney during
the night, and a far and heavy growling told of the dissatis-
faction of the sea. Yet the morning was not unfavourable.
There was a broken mist, with shimmers of sun in it, and the
carman said it would be a thing of nothing, and would go
out with the tide. The boots, a relic of the old regime, was
pessimistic, and mentioned that there were two stars squez
up agin the moon last night, and he would have no depend-
64 E* CE. SOMERVILLE AND MARTIN ROSS
cnce on the day. McCabe offered no opinion, being occupied
in bestowing in a species of dog-box beneath the well of the
car a young Irish setter, kindly lent by his friend the dentist.
The setter, who had formed at sight an unfavourable opinion
of the dog-box, had resolved itself into an invertebrate mass
of jelly and lead, and was with difficulty straightened out and
rammed home into it.

"Have we all now ?" said McCabe, slamming the door

in the dog's face. "Take care we're not like me uncle, old
Tom was going shooting, and was the whole
Duffy, that
morning slapping his pockets and saying, 'Me powder I

me shot me caps me wads !' and when he got to the bog,

I !

"
O tare an' 'ouns !' says he, 'I forgot the gun V
There are still moments when I can find some special
and not-otherwise-to-be-attained flavour in driving on an
outside car ; a sense of personal achievement in sitting, by
some method of instinctive suction, the lurches and swoops
peculiar to these vehicles. Reardon's had given us its
roomiest car and its best horse, a yellow mare, with a long
back and a slinging trot, and a mouth of iron.
"Where did Mr. Reardon get the mare, Jerry ?" asked
McCabe, as we zigzagged in successive hair-breadths through
the streets of Owenford.
"D-Dublin, sir/' replied the driver, who, with both fists
extended in front of him and both heels planted against his
narrow footboard, seemed to find utterance difficult*
"She's a goer 1" said McCabe.
"She is she killed two men," said Jerry, in two jerks;
"That's a great credit to her. What way did she dc
it?"
"P-pulled the lungs out o* them !" ejaculated Jerry,
turning the last corner and giving the mare a shade more oi
her head, as a tribute, perhaps, to her prowess.
She swung us for some six miles along the ruts of the
coast road at the same unflinching pace, after which, turning
inland and uphill, we began the climb of four miles into the
mountains. It was about eleven o'clock when we pulled up
beside a long and reedy pool, high up in the heather ; the roac
went on, illimitably it seemed, and was lost, with its attendam
telegraph posts, in cloud.
"Away with ye now, Jerry/' said McCabe ; "we'll shoot oui
way home."
 THE SHOOTING OF SHINROB 65

He opened the back of the dog-box, and summoned its

occupant. The summons was disregarded. Far back in

the box two sparks of light and a dead silence indicated the
presence of the dog. .

"How snug you are in there I" said McCabe. "Here,

Jerry, pull him out for us. What the deuce is this his name
Jeffers told me yesterday and
is ? it's gone from me/'

"I d'no would he bite me," said Jerry, taking a cautious

observation, and giving voice to the feelings of the party.
"Here, poor fellow Here, good lad 1"
1

The good lad remained immovable. The lure of a sand-

wich produced no better result.
"We can't be losing our day with the brute this way/' said
McCabe. "Tip up the car. He'll come out then, and no
thanks to him."
Asthe shafts rose heavenwards, the law of gravitation
proved too many for the setter, and he slowly slid to earth.
"If I only knew your damn' name we'd be all right now,"
said McCabe.
The carman dropped the shafts on to the mare, and
drove up the pass, with one side of the car turned up and
himself on the other. The yellow mare had, it seemed, only
begun her day's work. A prophetic instinct, of the reliable
kind that is strictly founded on fact, warned me that we
might live to regret her departure.
The dentist's setter had, at sight of the guns, realized that
things were better than he had expected, and
now preceded
us along the edge of the lake with every appearance of enthu-
siasm. He quartered the ground with professional zeal, he
splashed through the sedge, and rattled through thickets of
dry reeds, and set successively a heron, a water-hen, and
something unseen, that I believe to have been a water-rat.
After each of these efforts he rushed in upon his quarry, and we
called him by all the gun-dog names we had ever heard of,
from Don to Grouse, from Carlo to Shot, coupled with
objurgations on a rising scale. With none of
them did we
so much as vibrate a chord bosom.
in his He was a large
dog, with a blunt, stupid face, and a faculty for excitement
about nothing that impelled him to bound back to us as
often as possible, to gaze in our eyes in brilliant inquiry, and
to pant and prance before us with all the fatuity of youth.
Had he been able to speak, he would have asked idiotic
c
66 E. CE. SOMERVILLE AND MARTIN ROSS
questions, of that special breed that exact from
their victim a

reply of equal imbecility.

The lake and its environs, for the first time in McCabe's
experience, yielded nothing ; we struck up on to the mountain-
side, following the course of an angry stream that came
racing down from the heights. We worked up through
ling and furze, and skirted flocks of pale stones that lay in
the heather like petrified sheep, and the dog, ranging
deliriously, set water-wagtails and anything else that could
fly ; I believe he would have set a blue-bottle, and I said so
toMcCabe.
"Oh, give him time; he'll settle down/' said McCabe,
who had a thankfulness for small mercies born of a vast
experience of makeshifts ; "he might fill the bag for us yet."
We laboured along the flank of the mountain, climbing
in and out of small ravines,
jumping or wading streams,
sloshing through yellow sedgery bog ; always with the brown
heather running up to the misty sky-line, and always with
the same atrocious luck. Once a small pack of grouse got
up, very wild, and leagues out of range, thanks to the far-
reaching activities of the dog ; and once a hermit woodcock
exploded out of a clump of furze, and sailed away down the
slope, followed by four charges of shot and the red setter, in
equally innocuous pursuit. And this, up to luncheon time,
was the sum of the morning's sport.
We ateour sandwiches on a high ridge, under the lee of
a tumbled pile of boulders, that looked as if
they had been
about to hurl themselves into the valley, and had
thought
better of it at the last moment. Between the looming,
elephant-grey mountains the mist yielded glimpses of the
far greenness of the sea, the
only green thing in sight in this
world of grey and brown. The dog sat
opposite to me, and
willed me to share my food with him. His steady eyes were
charged with the implication that I was a glutton personally
;

I abhorred him,
yet I found it impossible to give him less
than twenty-five per cent of my sandwiches.
"I wonder did Jeffers take him for a bad debt," said McCabe
reflectively, as he lit his pipe.
I said I would rather take
my chance with the bad debt.
"He might have treated me better," McCabe grumbled
on, "seeing that I paid him seven pound ten the day before
yesterday, let alone that it was me that was the first to put
 THE SHOOTING OF SHINROK 6j
him up to this this bit of Shinroe Mountain that never
was what you might call strictly preserved. When he came
here first he didn't as much know what cartridges he'd want
for it. 'Six and eight/ says I, 'that's a lawyer's fee, so if
you
think of me you'll not forget itP And now, if ye please/'
went on Mr. Jeffers's preceptor in sport, "he's shooting the
whole country and selling all he gets I And he wouldn't so
much as ask me to go with him and the excuse he gives, he
;

wouldn't like ro have an old hand like me corinyshooring his

shots. How modest he is !"
I taunted McCabe with having been weak enough thus
to cede his rights, and McCabe, who was not at all amused,
said that after all it wasn't so much Jeffers that did the harm,
but an infernal English Syndicate that had taken the Shinroe
shooting this season, and paid old Purcell that owned it ten
rimes what it was worth.
"It might be as good for us to get off their ground now,"
continued McCabe, rising slowly to his feet, "and try the
Lackagreina Valley. The stream below is their bounds.'*
This I hasten to say, was the first I had heard of the
Syndicate, and I thought it tactless ot McCabe to have men-
tioned it, even though the wrong that we had done them was
purely technical. I said to him that I thought the sooner
we got off their ground the better, and we descended the
hill and crossed the stream, and McCabe said that he could

always shoot this next stretch of country when he liked.

With this assurance, we turned our backs on the sea and struck
inland, tramping for an hour or more through country whose
entire barrenness could only be explained on the hypothesis
that it had been turned inside out to dry. So far it had failed
to achieve even this result.
The weather got thicket, and the sport, if possible, thinner.
I had long since lost what bearings I possessed, but McCabe
said he knew of a nice patch of scrub in the next valley that
always held a cock. The next valley came at last, not without
considerable effort, but no patch of scrub was apparent.
Some small black and grey cattle stood and looked at us, and
a young bull showed an inclination to stalk the dog it seemed
;

the only sport the valley w^s likely to afford. McCabe looked
round him, and looked at his watch, and looked at the sky,
which did not seem to be more than a yard above our heads,
and said with emotion :
68 E. OS* SOMERVILLE AND MARTIN ROSS
"Did ye think of telling the lad in the glass box in the hall
that we might want some dinner
kept hot for us ? I d'no
from Adam where weVe got to ?"
There was a cattle-track along the side of the valley
which might, though not necessarily, lead somewhere. We
pursued it, and found that it led, in the first instance, to some
black-faced mountain sheep. A
cheerful interlude followed,
in which the red setter hunted the sheep and we hunted the
setter, and what McCabe said about the dentist in the intervals
of the chase was more appropriate to the occasion than to
these pages.
When justice had been satiated, and the last echo of the
last yell of the dog had trembled into silence among the hills,
we resumed the cattle-track, which had become a shade more
reliable, and, as we proceeded, began to give an impression
that it might lead somewhere. The day was dying in threaten-
ing stillness. Lethargic layers of mist bulged low, like the
roof of a marquee, and cloaked every outline that could yield
us information. The dog, unchastened by recent events,
and full of an idiot optimism, continued to range the hillside.
"I suppose I'll never get the chance to tell JefFers my
opinion of that tomfool/* said McCabe, following with an
eye of steel the perambulations of the dog ; "the best barrister
that ever wore a wig couldn't argue with a dentist I He has
his fist half-way down your throat before you can open
your mouth ; and in any case he'll tell me we couldn't expect
any dog would work when we forgot his name. What's the
brute at now ?"
The brute was high above us on the hillside, setting a
solitary furze bush with convincing determination, and casting
backward looks to see if he were being supported.
"It might be a hare," said McCabe,
cocking his gun, with
a revival of hope that was almost
pathetic, and ascending
towards the furze bush.
I neither quickened
my pace nor deviated from the cattle
track, but I must admit that I did so far yield to the theory of
the hare as to slip a cartridge into my gun.
McCabe put his gun to his shoulder, lowered it
abruptly,
and walked up to the furze bush. He stooped and picked
up something.
"He's not such a fool after all I" he called out. "Ye said
he'd set a blue-bottle, and, b'Jove, ye weren't far out !"
 THB SHOOTING OF SHINROE 69
He held up a black object that was neither bird nor
beast,
took the cartridge out of my gun as unobtrusively as
I

possible, and McCabe and the dog rejoined me with the

product of the day's sport. It was a flat-sided bottle, high
shouldered, with a short neck ; McCabe extracted the cork
and took a sniff.
"Mountain dew, no less I" (McCabe adhered faithfully
to the stock phrases of his youth). "This never paid the
King's shilling Give me the cup off your flask, Major, till
1

we what sort it is."

see
It was pretty rank, and even that seasoned vessel, old

McCabe, admitted that it might be drinkable in another

couple of years, but hardly in less ; yet as it ran, a rivulet of
fire, through my system, it seemed to me that even the water
in my boots became less chill.
"In the public interest we're bound to remove it," said
McCabe, putting the bottle into his game-bag ; "any man
that drank enough of that'd rob a church.
Well, anyway,
we're not the only people travelling this path," he continued ;
"whoever put his afternoon tea to hide there will choose a
less fashionable promenade next time. But, indeed, the poor
man could not be blamed for not knowing such a universal
genius of a dog was coming this way Didn't I tell you he'd
1

fill the
bag for us I"
He extracted from his pockets a pair of knitted gloves,
and put them on it was equivalent to putting up the shutters.
;

It was shortly after this that we regained touch with

civilization. Above
the profile of a hill a telegraph post
suddenly showed itself against the grey of the misty twilight.
We made as bee-like a line for it as the nature of the ground

permitted, and found ourselves on a narrow road, at a point

where it was in the act of making hairpin turn before plunging
a
into a valley.
"The Beacon Bay road, begad I" said McCabe. "I didn't
think we were so far out of our way. Let me see now, which
way is this we'd best go."
He stood still and looked round him, taking his bearings ;
in the solitude the telegraph posts hummed to each other,
fullof information and entirely reticent.
position was worse than I thought.
The By descending
into the valley we should, a couple or three miles farther on,
 70 B. OB. SOMERVILLE AND MARTIN ROSS
strike the coast road six miles from home ; by ascending
about
the hill and walking four miles, we should arrive at the
station of Coppeen Road, and, with luck, there intercept the
evening train for Owenford.
/And that's the best of our play, but we'll have to step
out/ concluded McCabe, shortening the strap of his game-bag,
1

and settling it on his back.

"If I were you/' I said, 'Td chuck that stuff away. Apart
from everything else, it's about half a ton extra to carry."
"There's many a thing, Major, that you might do that I
"and in the
might not do," returned McCabe with solemnity,
statement valid."
contrary sense the is equally
He faced the hill with humped shoulders, and fell with
no more words into his poacher's stride, and I followed him
with the best imitation of it that I could put up after at least
six hours of heavy going. McCabe is fifteen years older
than I am, and I hope that when I am his age I shall have
more consideration than he for those who are younger than
myself*
was now nearly half-past five o'clock, and by the time
It
we had covered a mile of puddles and broken stones it was
too dark to see which was which. I felt considerable dubiety
about catching the train at Coppeen Road, all the more that
it was a flag station, demanding an extra five minutes in hand

Probably the engine-driver had long since

abandoned any
if he even
expectation of passengers at Coppeen Road, and,
noticed the signal, would treat it as a practical joke. It was
after another quarter of an hour's trudge that a distant sound
entered into the silence that had fallen upon McCabe and
me an intermittent grating of wheels upon patches of broken
stone, a steady hammer of hoofs.
McCabe halted.
"That car'sto be going to Owenford," he said ;
bound
"I wonder could they give us a lift."
Asingle light (the economical
habit of the South of
Ireland) began to split the foggy darkness.
"Begad, that's go of Reardon's mare!" said
like the
McCabe, as the light swung down upon us.
We held the road like highwaymen, we called upon the
unseen driver to stop, and he answered to the name of Jerry.
This is not a proof of identity in a province where every third
man is dignified by the name
of Jeremiah, but as the car pulled
 THE SHOOTING OF SHINROE 71

up it was Reardon's yellow mare on which the lamplight fell,

and we knew that the fates had relented.
We should certainly not catch the train at Coppeen Road,
Jerry assured us ; "she had," he said, "a fashion of running
early on Monday nights, and, in any case, if you'd want to
catch that train, you should make like an amber-bush for
her."
We agreed that it was too late for the preparation of an
ambush.
"If the Sergeant had no objections/' continued Jerry,
that would finally be
progressing smoothly towards the tip
his, "it would be no trouble at all to oblige the gentlemen.
Sure it's the big car I have, and it's often 1 took six, yes, and
seven on it, going to the races."
I was now aware of two helmeted presences on the car, and
a decorous voice said that the gentlemen were welcome to a
side of the car if they liked.
"Is that Sergeant Leonard ?" asked McCabe, who knew
every policeman in the country. "Well, Sergeant, you've
the knack of being on the spot when you're wanted I"
"And sometimes when he's not 1" said L
There was a third and unhelmeted presence on the car, and
something of stillness and aloofness in it had led me to
diagnose a prisoner.
The suggested dispositions were accomplished. The two
policemen and the prisoner wedged themselves
on one side
of the car, McCabe and I mounted the other, and put the
dog on the cushion of the well behind us (his late quarters
in the dog-box being occupied by half a mountain sheep,
destined for the hotel larder). The yellow mare went gallantly
up to her collar, regardless of her augmented load McCabe ;

and the Sergeant leaned to each other across the back of the
car, and fell into profound and low- toned converse
I smoked, ;

and the dog, propping his wet back against mine, made
friends with the prisoner. It may be the Irish blood in me
that is responsible for the illicit sympathy with a prisoner
which sometimes incommodes me ; I certainly bestowed some
of it upon the captive, sandwiched between two stalwarts of
the R.I.C., and learning that the strong arm of the Law was
a .trifle compared with the rest of its person.
"What sport had you, Major ?" inquired Jerry, as we
slackened speed at a hill.
7* E. CE. SOMERVILLE AND MARTIN ROSS
I was sitting at the top of the car, under his elbow, and
he probably thought I wasfeeling neglected during the heart-
to-heart confidences of McCabe and the Sergeant.
"Not a feather/' said L
"Sure the birds couldn't be in it weather/' said Jerry
this

considerately ;
he had in his time condoled with many sports-
men. "I am
after talking to a man in Coppeen Road station
that was carrying the game-bag for them gentlemen that has
Mr. Purcell's shooting on Shinroe Mountain and what had
the four of them after the day only one jack-snipe I"
"They went one better than we did," I said, but, as was
intended, I felt cheered. "What day were they there ?"
"To-day, sure 1" answered Jerry, with faint surprise, "and
they hadn't their luncheon hardly ate when they met one on
the mountain that told them he seen two fellas walking it,
with guns and a dog, no more than an hour before them.
'That'll do 1' says they, and they turned about and back with
them to tell the police."
"Did they see the fellows ?" I asked lightly, after a panic-
stricken pause.
"They did not. Sure they said if they seen them, they'd
shoot them like rooks," replied Jerry, "and they would too.
It's what the man was saying if they cot them lads to-day

they'd have left them in the way they'd be given up by both

doctor and priest. Oh, they're fierce altogether !"
I received this information in a silence that was filled to

bursting with the desire to strangle McCabe.

Jerry leaned over my shoulder, and lowered his voice.
"They was saying in Coppeen Road that there was a
gentleman that came on a mothor-bike this morning early,
and he had Shinroe shot out by ten o'clock, and on with
with him then up the country and it isn't the first time he
;

was in it. It's a pity those gentlemen couldn't ketch him.

They'd mothor-bike him 1"
It was apparent that the poaching of the motor-bicycle

upon the legitimate preserves of carmen was responsible

for this remarkable sympathy with the law ; I, at all events, had
it to my credit that I had not gone poaching on a motor-bicycle.

Just here McCabe emerged from the heart-to-heart, and

nudged me in the ribs with a confederate elbow. I did not
respond, being in no mood for confederacy, certainly not
with McCabe.
 THE SHOOTING OF SHINROE 73

"The Sergeant is after telling me this prisoner he has here

Is prosecuted at the instance was telling
of that Syndicate I

you about/* he whispered hoarsely in my ear, "for hunting

Shinroe with greyhounds. He was cited to appear last week,
and he didn't turn up he'll be before you to-morrow. I
;

hope the Bench will have fellow-feeling for a fellow-creature I"

The whisper ended in a wheezy cough that was Mr.
McCabe's equivalent for a laugh. It was very close to my
ear, and it had somewhere in it the metallic click I had noticed
before.
grunted forbiddingly, and turned my back upon McCabe,
I
as far as it was possible to do so on an outside car, and we
hammered on through the darkness. Once the solitary lamp
illumined the prolonged countenance of a donkey, and once
or twice we came on a party of sheep lying on the road ; they
melted into the night at the minatory whistle that is dedicated
to sheep, and on each of these occasions the dentist's dog
was shaken by strong shudders, and made a convulsive
attempt to spring from the car in pursuit. were making We
good travelling on a long down-grade, a smell of seaweed was
in the mist, and a salt taste was on my lips. It was very cold ;
I had no overcoat, my boots had plumbed the depths of many

bog-holes, and I found myself shivering like the dog.

It was at this point that I felt McCabe fumbling at his

game-bag, that lay between us on the seat. By dint of a

sympathy that I would have died rather than betray I divined
he was going to tap that fount of contraband fire that he
owed to the dentist's dog. It was, apparently, a matter of
some difficulty ; I felt him groping and tugging at the
straps.
I said to myself, waveringly : "Old blackguard I I won't
touch it ifhe offers it to me."
McCabe went on fumbling : "Damn these woolly gloves.
I can't do a hand's turn with them."
In the dark I could not see what followed, but I felt him
raise his arm. There was a jerk, followed by a howl.
"Hold on I" roared McCabe, with a new and strange
utterance. "Thtop the horth I've dropped me teeth !"
1

The driver did his best, but with the push of the hill behind
her the mare took some stopping.
"Oh, murder Oh, murder!" wailed McCabe, lisping
1

thickly. "I pulled them out o' me head with the glove,
74 E. CB, SOMERVILLE AND MARTIN ROSS
trying to get it off I" He scrambled off the car. "Give me
>f
the lamp 1 Me lovely new teeth
I detached the lamp from its socket with all speed, and
handed it to McCabe, who hurried back on our tracks.
From motives of delicacy I remained on the car, as did also
the rest of the party. A
minute or two passed in awed
silence, while the patch of light went to and fro on the dark
road. It seemed an intrusion to offer assistance, and an

uncertainty as to whether to allude to the loss as "them" or

"it" made inquiries a difficulty.
"For goodneth'ake have none o' ye any matcheth, that
ye couldn't come and help me ?" demanded the voice of
McCabe, in indignation, blurred pathetically by his gosling-
like lisp.
I went to his assistance, and refrained, with an effort, from
suggesting the employment of that all-accomplished setter,
the dentist's dog, in the search ; it was not the moment for
pleasantry. Not yet.
We crept along,
bent double, like gorillas the long strips ;

of broken stones yielded nothing, the long puddles between

them were examined in vain.
"I'll give you half a crown this minute, McCabe," said I
brutally, "if you'll say 'Sessions' 1"
Here the Sergeant joined us, striking matches as he came.
He worked into
his
way the sphere of the car-lamp, he was
most painstaking and sympathetic, and his oblique allusions
to the object of the search were a miracle of tact.
"1 see something white beyond you, Mr. McCabe," he said
respectfully. "Might that be them 1"
McCabe swung the lamp as indicated.
"No, it
might not It's a pebble," he replied, with pardon-
able irascibility.
Silence followed, and we worked our way up the hill.

"What's that, ?" ventured the Sergeant, with some

sir

excitement, stopping again and pointing. "I think I see the

gleam of the gold."
"Ah, nonthenth, man They're vulcanite I" snapped
1

McCabe, more irascibly than ever.

The word nonsense was a disastrous effort, and I with-
drew into the darkness to enjoy it.
"What colour might vulcanite be, sir ?" murmured a
voice beside me.
 THE SHOOTING OF SHINROE 7J

Jerry had joined the search-party ; he lighted, as he spoke,

an inch of candle. On hearing my explanation, he remarked
that it was a bad chance, and at the same instant the inch of
candle slipped from his fingers and fell into a puddle.
"Divil mend ye for a candle 1 Have ye a ma*ph, sir ? I
haven't a one left I"
As happened, I had no matches, my otu^ means of
it

a
making light being a patent tinder-box.
"Have you a match there ?" I called out to the invisible
occupants of the car, which was about fifteen or twenty yards
away, advancing towards it as 1 spoke. The constable politely
jumped off and came to meet me.
As he was in the act of handing me his matchbox, the car
drove away down the hill
I state the fact with the bald simplicity that is appropriate
to great disaster. To be exact, the yellow mare sprang from
inaction into a gallop, as if she had been stung by a wasp,
and had a start of at least fifty yards before either the carman
or the constable could get under weigh. The carman,
uttering shrill and menacing whistles, led the chase, the con-
stable, though badly hampered by his greatcoat, was a good
second, and the Sergeant, making the best of a bad start,
followed them into the night.
The yellow mare's head was for home, and her load was
on its own legs on the road behind her; hysterical yelps
from the dentist's dog indicated that he also was on his
own legs, and was, in all human probability, jumping at the
mare's nose. As the rapturous beat of her hoofs died away
on the down-grade, 1 recalled the assertion that she had
pulled the lungs out of two men, and it seemed to me that
the prisoner had caught the psychological moment on the
hop.
"They'll not ketch him/' said McCabe, with the flat calm
of a broken man ; "not to-night, anyway. Nor for a week
maybe. He'll take to the mountains.'*
The silence of the hills closed in upon us, and we were
left in our original position, plus the lamp of the car, and
minus our guns, the dentist's dog, and McCabe's teeth. 4

Far, far away, from the direction of Coppeen Road, that

sinister outpost, where evil rumours were launched, and the

night trains were waylaid by the amber-bushes, a steady

tapping sound advanced towards us.
j6 E. CE. SOMERVILLE AND MARTIN ROSS
"A motor-biker* ejaculated McCabe. "Take the light
and thtop him he wouldn't know what I wath thaying if
he run over them they're done for For the love of merthy
I

tell him to keep the left thide of the road V

I took the lamp, and ran towards the bicyclist, waving it
as I ran. The star, now a moon of acetylene ferocity, slack-
ened speed, and a voice behind it said :

"What's up ?"
I stated the case with telegraphic brevity, and the motor-

bicycle slid slowly by me. Its rider had a gun slung across
his back my lamp
; revealed a crammed game-bag on the
carrier behind him.
"Sorry I can't assist you," he called back to me, keeping
carefully on the left-hand side of the road, "but I have an
appointment" Then, as an aftertho tight, "There's a first-
rate dentist in Owenfordl"
The red eye of its tail-light glowed a farewell and passed on,
like the rest, into the night.
I rejoined McCabe. He clutched my arm and shook it.

"That wath Jefierth I

Jeffertb, I tell ye 1 The dirty
poacher I And
hith bag full of our birdth 1"
It was not till the lamp went out, which it did some ten
minutes afterwards, that I drew McCabe from the scene of
his loss, gently, as one deals with the bereaved, and faced
with him the six-mile walk to Owenford.

(Prom "In Mr. Knox's Country", by kind permission of Messrs.

Green & Co.)
 W. M. THACKERAY
The Persecution of British Footmen

William Makepeace Thackeray was one of the giants of

Victorian literature, famous for his gift of character-
isation and knowledge of life. He began by con-
tributing both articles and drawings to Punch; and the
*

publication of Vanity Fair and Pendenms established

him in the front rank of novelists.
 THE PERSECUTION OF BRITISH FOOTMEN

remoke from the whirld hockupicd with the

:

LIVIN umble dooties of my perfeshun, which moacely consists

of droring hale & beer for the gence who freguent my otel,
when LOY polktlicle efairs hinterest but suldum, and I
confess that PHILIP habdigaded (the other day, as I read in
my noble & favorite Dispatch newspaper, where PUBLICOALER
is the boy for me), I cared no longer no mor than I did when
the chap hover the way went hoff without paying his rent.
No maw does my little MARY HANN. I prommis you she
has enough to do in minding the bar and the babbies, to
eed the conwulsions of hempires of the hagonies of prostrick
kings.
I ham what one of those littery chaps who uses our back
parlor a
calls poker curranty on plitticle subjix. I don't permit
*em to whex, worrit, or distubb me. My
objick is to leaf a
beer bisnis to little JEAMES, to sckewer somethink
good
comftable for my two gals, MARY HANN and HANGELINA
(wherehof the latter, who has jest my blew his and yaller air,
is a perfick little Sherrybing to behold), and in case Grimb

DETH, which may appen to the best on us, should come &
scru me down, to leaf behind a somethink for the best wife
any gentleman hever ad tied down of coarse if hever she
should marry agin.
I shoodn't have wrote at all, then, at this present juncter,
but for sugmstances which affect a noble and galliant body
of menn, of which I once was a hornmint ; I mean of the noble
perfesshn of Henglish footmen &
livry suwants, which has
been crooly pussicuted by the firoashus Paris mob. I love
my hold companions in harms, and none is more welcome,
when they ave money, than they at the Wheel of Fortune
Otel. I have a clubb of twenty for gentlemen outalivery,
which has a riunion in my front parlor ; and MR. BUCK, my
lord Duke's hown man, is to stand Godfather to the next
little PLUSH as ever was.

79
80 WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY
I the attenshn of Europ, in the most solomon and
call

impressive manner, to the hinjaries infligted upon my brutherin.

Many of them have been obleeged to boalt without receiving
their wagis ; many of them is egsiles on our shaws : an
infewriate Parishn mob
has tawn off their shoalclernots, laft
at their wenerable liveries and buttons, as they laff at every-
think sacred ; and I look upon those pore men as nayther
mor nor less than marters, and pitty and admire them with
hallmy art.
those sacred rephugs (to such in coarse as can
I hoffer to

pay esylum under the awspitible root of JEAMES

their shott) an
PLUSH of the Wheel of Fortune. Some has already come
here ; two of em occupize our front garrits ; in the back
Hattix there is room for 6 mor. Come, brave and dontless
Hemmigrants I
Come, child ring of
Kilammaty for eight-
and-six a week ; an old member of the Cor hotfers you bed
and bord !

The narratif of the ixcapes and dangers which they have

gon through, has kep me and MRS. P. hup in the bar to many
a midnike our, a-listening to them stories. My pore wife
cries her hi'sout at their nerations.
One of our borders, and a near relatif by the Grandmother's
side, of my wife's famly (though I despise buth, and don't
bragg like some foax of my ginteel kinexions), is a man
wenerated in the whole profeshn, and lookt up as one of the
fust Vips in Europe. In this country (and from his likeness
when in his Vig to our rewered prelkks of the bentch of
bishops) he was called CANTYBERRY his reel name being
THOMAS. You never sor a finer sight than CANTYBERRY
on a levy day, a-seated on his goold fringed Ammer-cloth ;
a nozegy in his busm ; his little crisp vig curling quite noble
over his jolly red phase ; his At laced hal lover like a Hadmiral ;
the white ribbings in his ands, the prarising bay osses befor
him ; and behind, his state carridge ; with MARQIIZ and
MARCHYNESS OF JONQUIL inside, and the galliant footmen
in yalla livery clinging on at the back "Hooray 1" the boys
1

used to cry hout, only to see CANTYBERRY arrive. Every

person of the extabUshment called him "Sir", his Master &
Missis inklewdid. ,He never went into the stayble, ixep to
smoke a segar; and when the state-carridge was bordered
(me and the JONQUILS live close together, the of F being W
sitiwated in a ginteal Court leading hout of the street), he sat
 THE PERSECUTION OF BRITISH FOOTMEN 8l

In my front parlor, in full phig, reading the newspaper like

a Lord, until such time as his body-suvn't called him, and
said LORD and LADY JONQUIL was ready to sit behind him.
Then he went. Not a minnit sooner : not a minnit latter ;
and being elped hup to the box by 3 men, he took the ribbings,
and drove his employers, to the ressadencies of the nibillaty,
or the pallis of the Sovring.
Times is now, R how much changed with CANTYBERRY !

Last yer, being bribed by SIR THOMAS and LADY KICKLEBURY,

but chiefly, I fear, because this old gent, being intimat with
Butlers, had equired a tayste for Bergamy, and Clarick, and
other French winds, he quitted LORD and LADY JONQUIL'S
box for that of the KICKLEBURY famly, residing Rue Rlvuljt,
at Paris. He was rispected there that CANTYBERRY is
wherehever he goes ; the King, the Hex-Kings coachmen,
were mear moughs compared to him ; and when he eard the
Kings osses were sold the other day at 50 frongs apease, he
says they was deer at the money.
Well, on the 24th of Febbywerry, being so ableegin as to
drive SIR T. and LADY KICKLEBURY to dinner with the MARKEE
D'EPINARD, in the Fobug Sang Jerwang^ CANTYBERRY, who
had been sittn all day reading Gallynanny, and playing at
cribbidge at a Marshong de Vang and kawbsquinly was quite
y

hignorant of the ewents in progrice, found hisself all of a

sudding serowndid by a set of rewd fellers with pikes and
guns, hollerun and bellerin "Veevly liberty", "Amore LEWY-
PHILIP", &c. "Git out of the way there", says CANTYBERRY,
from his box, a-vipping his osses.
The puple, as the French people call theirselves, came round
"
the carridge, rawring out "Ah Bab I* Aristocrat /
LADY KICKLEBURY looked hout. Her Par was in the
Cheese Mongering (olesale) way : and she never was called
an aristograt afor. "Your mistaken, my good people/* says
she ; "Je swee Qnglase. Wee y boco> LADY KICKLEBURY, /> vay
diner ^wMuNSEER D'EPPYNAR" ; and so she went a-jabbring
on ; but I'm blest if the Puple would let her pass that way.
They said there was a barrygade in the street, and turning
round the eds of CANTYBERRY'S osses, told him to drive down
the next street He didn't understand, but was reddy to drop
hoff his perch at the Hindignaty hoffered the British Vip.
Now they had scarce drove down the next street at a tarin
gallop, (for when aggrywated, CANTYBERRY drives
like madd,
Si WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY
when lowinbyold, they come on some more puple,
to be sure),
more pikes, more guns, the pavement hup, and a Buss spilt
on the ground, so that it was impawsable to pass.
"Git out of the carridgc," rors the puple, and a feller in a
cock at, (of the Pollypicnic School, CANTYBERRY says, though
what that is he doant No), comes up to the door, while bothers
old the osses, and says, "Miladi, il faut descendres" ; which
means, you must git out.
"Mway ne vu pas, Mot LADY KICKLEBURY," cries out my
LADY, waggling her phethers and diminds, and screaming
like a Macaw.
"// k
fo pourtong?* says the Pollypicnic scholard : very
polite, though he was ready
to bust with laffin hisself.
"We must make a barrygade of the carridge. The cavilry
is at one end of the street, the hartillary at the other ; there'll

be a fight presently, and out you must git."

LADY KICKLEBURY set up a screaming louder than hever,
and I warrant she hopped out pretty quick this time, and the
hoffiser, giving her his harm, led her into a Idmmis shop,
and give her a glas of sallyvalattaly.
Meanwild CANTYBERRY sat puffin like a grampus on his

box, his face as red as Ceilingwhacks. His osses had been led
out before his hi's, his footmen French minials, unwuthy
of a livry had fratynized with the Mobb, and THOMAS
CANTYBERRY sat aloan.
"Descends mong gros I" cries the mobb ; (which intup-
prited is "Come down, old fat un" ;) "come off your box,
we're goin to upset the carridge/'
"Never," says THOMAS, for which he knew the French ;
and dubbling his phist, he igsclaimed, "jamtny Dammy 1" He
cut the fust man who sprang hon the box, hover the fase and
i's ; he delivered on the nex feller's nob. But what was THOMAS

CANTYBERRY against a people in harms ? They pulled that

brave old man off his perch. They upset his carridge
his carridge beside a buss. When he comes to this
of his narratif, THOMAS always busts into tears and calls
pint
for a fresh glas.
He is to be herd of at my bar : and being disingaged
hoflers hisself to the Nobillaty for the enshuing seasn. His
turns is ninety Ibs. per hannum, the purchesing of the hanni-
mals and the corn, an elper for each two osses : ony to drive
the lord and kdy of the famly, no drivin at night excep to
 THE PERSECUTION OF BRITISH FOOTMEN 8j
Ofishl parties, and two vigs drest a day during the team.
He objex to the country, and won't go abrod no more. 10
a country (seaee) where I was ableeged to whonder abowt
disguised out of livery, amongst a puple who pulled my vlg
off before my face, THOMAS will never mount box agin. _
And I
eplaud him. And as long as he has enough to pay
his skaw, my house is a home for this galliant Hegsile.
 F. E. BAILY
Spare A Penny

F. E. Baily was for many years the editor of The

Royal Maga^lne^ and a versatile writer of novels, short
stories and verse, with a big public both in England
and the United States. Among his best-known books
are Golden Vanity and Supper Time
 SPARE A PENNY

r T^HE Lady Lisa Heaven, one of the most beautiful girk

JL in Society, emerged bonelessly from her stately motor
car and stood for a second on the pavement to let everything
settle back into place again. Really it was her
father's car,
but Lord Tombs, a learned recluse with the longest beard in
the House of Lords, seldom emerged from his library in
Berkeley Square, where he engaged himself in writing his
psychic masterpiece : From En- Dor Onwards.
Lisa then rang the bell of a smart house in Cumberland
Place and a footman led her to the gold drawing-room
where Meriel Houp was entertaining a choice selection of
her girl friends.
Happy cries greeted Lisa as though she had returned
from a five-year stay in darkest Africa "My dyeh I" "Lisa,
:

how divine you look !" "Darling, you're simply wonder

ful I" and Meriel Houp became at once the soul of hospitality.
"Precious, what cocktail would you like Mad Dog,
Sleeping Tiger, Naughty Girl, Hopeless Dawn, Soul's Ruin ?
Or of course there are ether and amyl nitrate for such as like
them."
"I doubt if the average engine runs well on doped fuel,*'
demurred a hard-bitten damsel who raced at Brooklands.
"Give me the good old fifty-fifty Benzole mixture half
gin and half Italian." .

"I'll have to have a Mad Dog, Meriel," the youngest

of the party said plaintively. "I promised Mummy I wouldn't
touch ether until I was eighteen."
They curved their lithe limbs into settees and arm-chairs
and lifted their glasses to scarlet lips. Then Meriel held
up a manicured paw for silence.
"Listen," she said. "I have an idea for a perfectly price-
less rag."
99
88 F. E. BAILY
"Oh, Mcriel, you too-quaint thing/'
"Well, Sulks Hethermoor really thought of it at the
Come-On Club last night you know, the place where that
priceless Cicassian girl dances with no clothes on. each We
choose from the telephone directory four men whose names
begin with the first four letters of our first Christian names,
and write to them for subscriptions for some charity. Every-
one puts two pounds in the kitty, and the one who collects
the most money from her four men scoops the kitty and
gives a party for the rest."
"Meriel, how stabbing 1"
"How wounding I"
"How too desperately homicidal !"
"I felt comparatively gouged myself when Sulks threw
up the idea. There are about twenty-five of us, and Agnello,
the manager of the Come-On, said he'd do us proud if we
gave the party there. It doesn't matter what charity you pick.
Anything that sounds likely to wring the hard hearts of
telephone subscribers will do."
*
Waking next morning when her maid brought her early
tea, Lisa pursued an idea through the fumes of last night's
cocktails and cigarettes, and the memories of certain routs
or hugging-matches in which she had taken part. She sat
up in bed, an adorable sight, and blinked pathetically at
Minchin. The hair of Lisa was like fine-spun gold, the line of
her arched plucked eyebrows as narrow as the border-line
between sin and virtue, her grey eyes were like Atlantic seas,
and no man could look at her face without wanting to kiss
her, unless, of course, he was married. And then there swam
into her bemused brain details of the
thing Meriel had told
her to do, and she wondered who could supply her with
a list of charities. The butler, she
supposed. It wasn't cook's
work or housemaid's work and one never expected such
things of outdoor servants. She raised a milk-white arm,
pointed a resolute finger at Minchin and said :

"Tell Faversham to get me a list of charities out of some

newspaper or something. And I want all the telephone
directory, every volume from one to a hundred, and a writing-
block, and one of those pencil things to write with. And
do hurry, Minchin, and don't creep about like a snail with
a bad conscience. You give me the heebie-jeebies."
Presently Minchin returned with a newspaper cutting,
 SPARE A PENNY 89
the volumes of the telephone directory, each In a case of
morocco leather, with the crest of the Tombs and their
scarlet
motto ("I get what I can") in gold, a writing-block, and six
beautifully sharpened pencils. Lisa put down her teacup,
lit a cigarette and studied the list of charities.
"
'Happy Homes for Decayed Fishmongers' sounds good
to me/' she murmured. "I adore caviare and lobster and
every fishmonger ought to have a happy home to decay in
when decay sets in. Now Fve got to pick four blighters from
the directory whose names begin with L, and I, and S, and
A '"
Glancing down the L's, she found herself attracted by
the name of Lavender, Jack. "A spot of lavender ought to
do stout work among all these decaying fishmongers/' she
reflected, and wrote him down Lavender, Jack, 19 Nairobi
:

Mansions, Maida Vale.

Among the I's, Iggins, George, riveted her attention.
She relinquished the telephone book and stared across the
room. "Nothing the matter with my eyesight/' she decided,
"and yet how can such things be ? They must have left out
the H. No one was ever called Iggins." However, she wrote
him down also: Iggins, George, Ltd., Mfr., 985 Gardenia
Street, Whitechapel. From the S's she selected, after long
thought, Snatchley, Derek Vane, 1000 Curzon Street, W.
One seemed to need a little tone after Maida Vale and White-
chapel. The A's left her in not the slightest doubt. No
girl of taste could pass by Abalab, William, 1049 Rebecca
Terrace, Balham. "Too marvellous, whether you spell
him frontwards or backwards," Lisa exclaimed with a happy
sigh, throwing the telephone books on the floor. "And
now them their letters. How stabbingJy pep-giving
to write
for the humble toilers of Whitechapel and Maida Vale when
they find the coronetted envelopes on their breakfast tables 1"
Later in the day she sent each of them the same appeal :

Dear Mr. Lavender ,

Iggins,
Snatcbley,
Abalab,
I am
writing to ask you if you would be so kind as to con-
tribute to thefund I am collecting in aid of Happy Homes for
Decayed Fishmongers. If you could see, as I have seen, our fislt-
 9O F. E. BAILY

mongers In their decay, I am sure you would realise, as I Jo, the

urgency of their case. I need hardly rewind you that without our
toil in vain, and our brave
fishmongers our brave fishermen would
fishermen, as we all know* constitute our last line of dejence ij the
Navy lets us down.
No sum is too large or too small to be received gratefully at
this address by
Yours sincerely>
Lisa Heaven.

Although Lisa pursued with good heart the murky round

of a Society beauty and spent an entire afternoon being
drilled as a bridesmaid, for the Guards have nothing on the
authorities of St. ^Ethelfrith's, Grosvenor Square, in the way
of discipline, and woe-betide the bridesmaid who fails to
keep her dressing, she began subconsciously to look forward
to the arrival of the postman. On the following day the blood
mantled her cheeks, though fortunately her make-up con-
cealed the fact, when she beheld an envelope addressed in
strange handwriting and postmarked Maida Vale. Tearing
it
open, she read :

19 Nairobi Mansions, Maida Vale.

Your Grace,
When I got Your Grace's kind letter about the fishmongers
I said to myself although times are hard, ]ack> you have got to do
the smallness of the sum
your bit so 1 enclose zs. apologising for
but times are bad just now we are showing at tht Knightsbridge
time to take a
Empire this week and if Your Grace could find
box it would give the show a push-off our own turn is a knock out.
Always yours sincerity\
Jack Lavender (Miss]
Speciality Dancer.

Lisa threw down

the letter and nearly wept with despair.
"Disqualified first round.
in the I
might just as well
have tried to enter a colt for the Oaks. But how on earth
could I know Jack Lavender was a girl ? What positively

death-dealing luck 1"

She pushed the postal order into a drawer, scribbled a
letter of thanks, and flung herself once more into the empty
round of gaiety.
 SPARE A PENNY 9!

n
The butler,entering Lisa's sitting-room where, at six-
thirty p.m. she was managing to snatch a brief rest, announced :
"There is a person by the name of Higgins asking for you,
m'lady."
Lisa turned a languid head, and then her subtle woman's
instinct sent a message to her brain. Struggling for calm,
she replied :

"You mean Tggins, not Higgins, Pavers ham/'

"The person did indeed give his name as Iggins, m'lady >
but I attributed it to a neglected education."
"What does Mr. Iggins look like, Favershan ?"
"He is well-spoken and respectably dressed, m'lady. If
I might venture to say so, m'lady, I should put him down
as either insurance orvacuum sweepers."
"I will see him, Faversham. Show him in here and if

anyone calls or rings up, I'm not at home."

"Very good, m'lady."
Meanwhile, far below in the echoing marble hall, George
Iggins, as we must call him, sat wiping his damp
hands on
his handkerchief, the prey of beautiful yet acute emotion.
For more than twelve long months he had worshipped
Lisa from afar. A growing collection of cuttings from the
gossip columns of the newspapers and the shinier
weeklies
his leisure. He knew all about her summer
occupied scanty
holiday at Juan les Pins, her prowess at winter sports, her
bedroom decorated by Lots, the celebrated neo-prirnitive
artist, and Chiswick, her Afghan wolf-hound. Once, greatly

daring, he had bought a programme from

her at a charity
ntatinte and watched in admiring silence while with adorable
absence of mind, she gave his change to somebody else.
His legs almost refused to function whed eventually a man-
servant appeared before him and said : "Her Ladyship will
see you, sir. Will you please come this way ?"
They rose in the lift to the first floor, ar^ George followed
the manservant along a stately corridor, his feet sinking
ankle-deep into the rich carpet. The manservant threw open
a door and intoned : "Mr. Iggins, m'lady," and George
tottered in. The manservant closed the door, and George
was alone with his divinity.
He saw her sitting, so slim and beautiful, on a brocaded
 Z F. E. BAILT
settee. One rounded limb was crossed over the other and a
wisp of cummer frock accentuated her lovely fragility. No
one, least of all, George, would have suspected she could
dance all night and consume beer and sausages in quantity
at four a.m. She smiled automaticallyand he heard a clear
high voice say "Good afternoon, Mr. Iggins. This is very
:

kind of you. Won't you sit down ?" A

slender hand indicated,
with a vague gesture, the other corner of the settee. Some-
how George found himself sitting beside Lisa at no more
than arm's length.
Had he but known her emotion was scarcely less acute
than his. She had expected to see a stout man in middle
lifewith a soup-strainer moustache capable of arresting even
unalterable microbes, a fancy waistcoat across which straggled
a vast gold watch-chain, and heavy breathing. Instead she
perceived a good-looking young man of perhaps twenty-
eight in a neat blue suit, wearing a wrist-watch.
"It was awf 'ly kind of you to write me that letter, Lady
Lisa/' George began, gathering poor wits together. "Of
his
course I should love to subscribe. I thought perhaps you
wouldn't mind my asking how much people are giving. One
likes to erdo the right thing as it were."
Those were his words, but his heart sang madly "I :

am sitting on a settee next to the most beautiful girl in the

world. I wouldn't swap this settee for a front seat in paradise.
George, old lad, you'll go out into the night after this all
shot to pieces, but live for the moment and hang the con-
sequences.'*
"It was awf 'ly kind of you to call," Lisa told him. Her
mind failed completely to concentrate as it should have
done on the needs of decayed fishmongers. She could only
admire the crisp directness of this attractive young man, so
different from the languid Guardsmen, diplomats and other
male nit-wits who thronged about her like moths round a
candle. No one had given her such a thrill for months. She
wished she knew the kind of sum people in Whitechapel
were in the habit of subscribing to charities. "I should give
just whatever you like," she suggested. "In these hard times
one has to think of oneself little as one may wish to." *
"What made you write to me, of all people ?" George
asked finally, little realizing that he could scarcely have asked
a more embarrassing question. Lisa reflected for a moment.
 SPARE A PENNY 95
"I had a sort of list, you see. I thought your name sounded
rather nice. And then Gardenia Street a man who lived
in a street with a name like that couldn't help having a generous
nature.
"Evidently youVe never seen Gardenia Street."
"No, Mr. Iggins," Lisa answered on a sudden impulse,
"but I should love to. Couldn't you take me there one day
and show me your factory. What sort of factory is it, by the
way ?"
"As a matter of fact we manufacture carnival novelties
balloons and paper hats and squeakers and that sort of
thing."
"How perfectly divine I simply love balloons. And
1

perhaps before now Fve worn one of the paper hats you
manufacture. Mr. Iggins, will you promise to let me see
your factory one day ?"
"I doubt if you'd really care for it, Lady Lisa. Perhaps
if you were to
go down on a Sunday when things are quiet
and inspect the neighbourhood we might decide about the
factory later on. I'm always free on Sundays."
"Then will you call for me next Sunday at eleven ? We
can go in the car. I'm so tired of the emptiness of my ordinary
existence. I want to life in the raw.
see You will have a
cocktail beforeyou go, won't you, Mr, Iggins ?" She paused,
and added tactfully "Or of course there's beer if you prefer
:

it. Some people do. A great deal of beer's being drunk

just now."
"Thanks ever so much I'd love a cocktai)."
;

"Then would you mind pressing the bell ?"

The footman brought the cocktails and Lisa and George
dallied with them in heavenly converse. It was obvious to
each of them that he or she was in love. A tender and simul-
taneous passion had bridged the ghasfly gulf which yawns
between Whitechapel and Berkeley Square. When at last
he had gone, Lisa, her palm still tingling from contact with
George's in a farewell clasp, threw herself recklessly on the
settee and faced the situation.
"I adore him," she confessed aloud. "He has the pep and
kick of a two-fisted he-man and what are social barriers to me
in a case like that ? I shall marry him and share his home
in Gardenia Street, and go out and buy the fish and chips for
our supper. I shall live where the tide of life runs fiercely
94 F. E BAILY
and when T don't behave myself George will probably give me
a thick ear/'
She felt one small, rose pink, shell-like ear tenderly,
and smiled. In imagination she could hear George roaring
for his fish and chips and cursing her with vermilion oaths
because they weren't ready.
Meanwhile George had gone forth into Berkeley Square
hurried round the corner and stepped furtively into a waiting
Rolls-Royce. The chauffeur drove him respectfully to a tall
house in a fashionable quarter of Kensington. A pretty
parlourmaid opened the door and took his hat and stick.

George went into the library and mixed himself a whisky-and-

soda from ingredients on a side table. His nerves were strung
up to a high pitch of excitement by his meeting with Lisa
and he considered the future anxiously.
"She thinks Fm poor and live in Gardenia Street/* he
reflected. "When she finds out her mistake will she despise
me for a humbug or will love triumph in spite of my
deception ? Well I must bath and change for dinner and hope
for the best/*
They served him dinner in a stately room overlooking
the garden. Hardly had coffee and brandy been taken into
the library when the telephone rang and the voice of George's
Continental agent came over the wire.
"Please fill these urgent orders/' said the voice. "Two
thousand false noses and five thousand paper hats for the
League of Nations Carnival on the 29th, to be delivered at
Geneva in a fortnight's time. A quarter of a million ditto
for the Jugo-Czechian National Fete next month, delivered
at Gstatz. Ditto for the Pan-Russian Congress at Pinsk in
three thousand hats symbolical of the Volga
July, including
boatmen. I shall confirm this in writing as a firm order/'
"O.K.," George answered, scribbling furiously on a
pad. "It means taking on another hundred hands, but Fll
arrange that in the morning. I assume the price quoted shows
the usual fifty per cent profit less ten
per cent commission ?"
"That is so. Fm hoping to land also the contract for
the All-Poland
Glee-Singing Contest. They always wind
up with a fancy dress dance. Good-bye." >

On Sunday morning after breakfast, George took a bus

as far as the Ritz Hotel and walked the
remaining distance
ro Berkeley Square, Outside No.
3000 the stately motor car
 SPARK A PENNY 95
of Lord Tombs stood waiting. The same footman admitted
George and he waited feverishly in the hall for the arrival
of Lisa. She came at last, barely a quarter of an hour late,
in a little frock of tender green. Her roseleaf hand stole
into his for a brief second and then they were in the car,
gliding towards Gardenia Street with George conning the
chauffeur, who had never been east of Temple Bar, through
the telephone. Finally they drew up before a modest building
with "George Iggins, Ltd." lettered over the entrance.
Little did Lisa know it was only the clerks' office, and that

George's great factory, covering several acres, stood but a

hundred yards farther on. Lisa gazed at the clerks* office
with bright eyes and parted lips.
"All the result of your own industry/* she murmured in
a rapt voice, "and Pve never even earned the price of a pair of
stockings. And now won't you show me where you live.
Is it that house with the lace curtains next door ?"

Fortunately George was not a captain of industry for

nothing and his brain worked swiftly.
"Fm afraid it would be a little awkward to-day, Lady
Lisa. I had to dismiss my charwoman and at the moment
Fve put up at er a local inn. As soon as I find a new
charwoman "
But Lisa's attentionwas distracted by the passage of a
clanging monster at the end of the street."
"Oh 1" she exclaimed, "that's a tram." She knew that
after she married George, trams must replace a car as her means
of transport. "Couldn't we go home in a tram ? Fve
never ridden on a tram in all my life, and they look simply
fascinating."
Cruelly marooning the outraged chauffeur in an uncharted
wilderness, Lisa and George boarded a tram. Lisa climbed
to the top deck of the vast conveyance and sat with shining
eyes while it thundered along. It seemed symbolic of her
future life, vibrant and riotous and inexpensive. They des-
cended for luncheon "I shall be calling it dinner, one day,"
Lisa reminded herself with a beating heart at one of Messrs.
Tiger's depots and consumed fish cake and stewed steak and
tomatoes and nut sundaes made ambrosial by the divine
sauce of love. Afterwards they rode on more trams to Balham,
Clapham, Brixton, Lewisham^ Peckham, Putney, Tooting,
Wimbledon and Woolwich south of the Thames ; and
96 F. E. BAILT
Camden Town, Finsbury Park, Hackney, Holloway, Islington,
Kentish Town, Stoke Newington, and Hammersmith north
of it. Finally George took Lisa home on a bus and deposited
her tired, but happy, on her doorstep.
"You must come and soon/' she insisted. "Come
see me
to tea one day and let us have a long talk," Then, realizing
with a blush that he was accustomed to a kipper or some
other relish with his tea, she added hastily "I expect that's
:

though. Come and

too for have a cocktail instead.
early you,
I'll
ring you up at Gardenia Street and fix a date."

in

Next day when, at six-thirty p.m. she was endeavouring

to snatch a brief rest from the tedious round of pleasure and
settee dreaming joyously of
lay supine on the brocaded
a
George, the butler entered Lisa's sitting-room wearing
grave expression.
"1 beg your pardon, m'latfy, but there is a Mr. Abalab
in the hall desiring to see your ladyship."
"Abalab ? Abalab ? Oh, yes, I remember. What's he
like, Faversham ?"
"He is a venerable figure, m'lady. His beard is even
longer than that of his lordship."
"Faversham, do think what you're saying. No beard
could possibly be longer than Daddy's."
"It is not my place to contradict your ladyship, but his

lordship's beard reaches to his waist. Mr. Abalab's beard

extends to within a few inches of his knees. He is in the
nature of what is known in vulgar circles as a King Beaver."
"You may send him up, Faversham, but I do hope he
won't moult over the carpet."
all

Lisa then lowered her feet to the ground and prepared to

welcome this patriarchal subscriber to Happy Homes for

Decayed Fishmongers. A moment later Mr. Abalab was

ushered in.
She realized at once that Faversham had not exaggerated.
Mr. Abalab's beard indeed reached almost to his knees,
sweeping majestically over a black frock coat.
The vast dome
of Mr. Abalab's head was bald, and piercing eyes gazed from
beneath his scraggy brows. He stood about five feet seven
in his elastic-sided boots.
 SPARE A PENNY 97
to be seated,
Requesting the human wind- vane before her
Lisa went on courteously : "It is indeed good of you to come
and see me about the subject of my letter, Mr. Abalab."
Mr. Abalab sat down and from the thick natural entangle-
ment which concealed his mouth a voice proclaimed solemnly :
"Hail, Princess 1 The sign which I have long awaited
has been vouchsafed. I and the faithful await your pleasure/*
"I beg your pardon, Mr. Abalab ?"
"I am a prophet," explained Mr. Abalab, his words
slightly muffled by the waving prairie
of beard, "the prophet
of the Osophites. It was foretold long ago that a princess
should appear to us who would bring in the millennium.
As soon as I received your letter I realized, being psychic,
that you were that princess. It is laid upon me to bring you
the royal crown which has been handed down to me from
prophet to prophet 1*'

"Where is crown ?" asked Lisa, who, like most girls,

the
was fond of jewellery, but Mr. Abalab shook his head in a
the tree-tops of the forest.
gesture recalling a breeze stirring
"I haven't it with me," he exclaimed. "Psychic as I am
I required visual confirmation of my belief. Now that I
see you I am perfectly convinced. I will bring you the crown
at this time to-morrow would suit Your Highness.
if that
We can discuss the future, for you have a great part to play
in rescuing the world from its present troubles. I see you
leading civilization out of the morass, riding on a white
horse."
Lisa knew quite well she was going to live in Gardenia
Street with George, riding upon a tram, but the idea of the
crown intrigued her and she hastened to fall in with Mr.
Abalab 's suggestion. Before he could reply, Faversham
appeared once more.
"Pardon me, m'lady, but there is a Mr. Snatchley in the
hall who desires to see you."
"What is he like, Faversham ?"
"Mr. Snatchley is a gentleman, m'lady."

''"Very well. Let him come up. I'm sure you won't mind,
Mr. Abalab. He's just someone else interested in Decayed
Fishmongers."
Directly Mr. Snatchley appeared, Lisa could see that he
belonged indeed to the effete aristocracy. His beautiful
double-breasted lounge suit obviously came straight from
D
98 F. E. BAILY
Savlle Row, and more, he worethe Old Hartonhn tie. He
greeted her with the quiet confidence of one accustomed to
mixing in good society, and then shot a piercing glance .at
Mr. Abalab.
"Perhaps I could see you privately later on, Lady Lisa ?"
he suggested with well-bred tact. "I have a certain com-
munication to make if I may.'*
At this moment Lord Tombs drifted vaguely into the
room, apparently having mistaken it for his library. He gazed
at its occupants with the absent-mindedness of a recluse,
but on perceiving Mr. Abalab his eyes flashed.
"You have a longer beard than I have," he exclaimed.
"I am an older man than you are/' replied Mr. Abalab
not without dignity.
"I consider it damned bad form, and in my own house,
too," Lord Tombs said coldly, and went out again. There-
upon Mr. Abalab rose and made his farewell."
"To-morrow at this hour," he reminded Lisa, and made
a majestic exit. Instantly a change came over Mr. Snatchley.
"You are the Lady Lisa Heaven ?" he inquired crisply.
"Yes, Mr. Snatchley."
am Detective-Inspector Snatchley, a police officer, and
"I
I am prepared to hear any explanation you may have as to
why you should not be charged with gathering alms inasmuch
as you sent me a letter dated the third instant from this
address soliciting aid on behalf of Happy Homes for Decayed
Fishmongers."
"But why not, Mr. Snatchley ? I was doing what I could
to help a good cause." M
"I communicated at once with the organization and I
have a letter signed Angek Ramsbotham, Secretary, denying
that you had any authority from them to collect money."
Lisa had figured in too many night-club raids not to
know the etiquette of the situation. "If you are a police
officer, Mr. Snatchley, of course you have your warrant
card ?" she suggested, and with a grave inclination of the
head he produced it. Thereupon Lisa realized that the only
thing to do was to come clean. Inspector Snatchley listened
patiently.
"As you were under a misapprehension," he explained,
"we need not proceed in the matter, but you laid yourself
open to a charge of gathering alms. If you did it in the
 SPARE A PENNY 99
street while playing, let us say, the bagpipes, that would be
lawful, for then you would be offering value, or for a con-
sideration to do or refrain from doing a thing, that is to go
on playing for those who could bear it and refrain for the
benefitof those who couldn't. By the way what was
that man with a beard doing here?"
"That was my father. He lives here/*
"No, no; the one with the longer beard, who wore a
frock coat/*
Half-guildly Lisa explained, and Inspector Snatcfeley
frowned.
"I ought to warn you, Lady Lfea, that he Is well known
to the police as a fence or receiver of stolen
goods. I think
Fd much better be concealed in the room when he returns
to-morrow. I could easily hide behind those curtains/*
"But how thrilling. Do stay and have a cocktail and
tell me how
you became a policeman. I mean you don't
seem like a policeman. I mean that tie
you're wearing, and
"
your address in Curzon Street
Inspector Snatchley produced a gold cigarette-case and
offered it. "You see, Lady Lisa,
things have changed in the
Force. The Council schools nowadays turn out mere bookish
idealists. They doquite well in the finger-print and lost
property departments, but for the rough stuff of police work
one needs the public schools. My
division, for instance, is
known as Harton's Own. We specialize in the West End.
We belong to all the best clubs and can keep an eye on the
drinking habits of bishops and the high stakes for which
Guards officers play Vingt-et-un and crown and anchor. I
assure you that to-day in nine cases out of ten a
policeman's
uniform is no bluer than his blood/'

IV

Putting aside her early tea tray, Lisa, a lovely figure In

diaphanous crfye de Chine pyjamas, stretched out a hand for
her bedside telephone and with a finger
trembling from
excitement, dialled Whitechapel 92756. She trembled because
it was
George's number. She wished he could see her as she
was now. Did one wear crtye de Chine pyjamas in Gardenia
street or a nightie with
long sleeves made of unbleached
 100 F. K. BAILT
calico ? A girl's cool, business-like voice answered :
"Gedrge
Iggins, Ltd/' and Lisa pulled herself together.
"Lady Lisa Heaven sneaking.
'
I want Mr. George Iggins,
"
.
please/'
The
girl with the cool, business-like voice had received
detailed instructions. She put the call through to George
in a large room furnished with all the dernier m
of office
furniture.
"Good morning, Lady Lisa. This is indeed a pleasure."
"Good morning, Mr. Iggins. How are you ? Splendid I

I wanted to ask you could

it come along for a cocktail at

six-thirty to-night. I have a little meeting of my subscribers

and I'd love you to be there. You can ? That's delightful
of you. Sorry to interrupt you. I'm sure you're dreadfully
busy. Good-bye."
Lisa leaned back against her pillows with shining eyes.
"He's in his shirt-sleeves," she whispered, "hammering
down the lids of packing-cases full of balloons and rattles,
giving a lead to his men, hammering harder and faster than
any of them. The persp no, the honest sweat drips from
his brow. How
magnificent What an inspiration 1"
I

At six-fifteen p.m. to the second, Detective-Inspector

Snatchley arrived. Lisa regretted to notice he was not in
uniform. "Are you armed ?" she asked eagerly, after the
first greetings. "He may pack a gat. One never knows in
these days."
The inspector shook a head whose hair had been cut by
the best hairdresser in London. "It'll be quite all right,

Lady Lisa. I have a couple of men outside. I'm sure he'll

go quietly. May I disappear behind the curtains ? Thank
you most frightfully. You're being simply wonderful."
At six-twenty-five a servant ushered in Mr. Abalab. He
carried anewspaper parcel which, together with his beard f
gave him altogether the appearance of Santa Glaus. He
raised a hand in salutation and his voice came solemnly
through the hirsute avalanche obscuring his features.
"Princess, you are about to behold the crown of the
hereditary ruler of the Osophites."
Struggling with the knots in the string, Mr. Abalab then
removed the newspaper from a singularly attractive gold
crown or diadem. As it flashed into view Inspector Snatchley
stepped from behind the curtains.
 SPARE A PENNY IO1

"Iam a police officer," he began, "and I arrest you fot

being in possession of what I believe to be the Babylonian
data, stolen recently from Mr. Sunbury-Skivington, the
celebrated archaeologist, of The Copse, Watling Parva, Here-
fordshire. I warn you
that anything you say will be taken
down and may be used as evidence against you/*
in writing
VA11 I can say," Mr. Abalab answered dismally, "is I
gave half a dollar for it to a man who told me he got it from
a friend who worked
for the pictures."
"No doubt," expkined Inspector Snatchley to Lisa,
"he wished to plant the tiara on you, finding it impossible
to dispose of. Then, having made a plan of the house he
would have had it
burgled, and bought the produce of the
burglary for a song. There are, of course, no such people as
the Osophites. We
have had our eyes on him for a long
time."
At this moment
a diversion occurred in the shape of
George, whom the manservant ushered into the room.
George stared at the quaint scene which met his eyes and then,
perceiving Inspector Snatchley, he held out a gkd hand.
"My dear Trousers 1" he cried joyfully, and Inspector
Snatchley answered : "Why, Stodger old boy, how are you ?
I haven't seen you since we left the old school."
He turned, beaming, to Lisa and continued :
"Fancy your knowing dear old George Catterlck. The
greatest moment in my life was when he and I carried out
our bats together in the Harton-Etchester match at Lord's
after he sneaked the winning run within fifteen seconds of

stumps being drawn. He was in the same house with me at

Harton."
And then, glancing at Lisa, George realized the hope-
lessness of his situation, and a scarlet blush overspread his
face. The voice of Mr. Abalab broke the silence. Blowing
wisps of beard to left and right he observed :

"If it's all the same to you, Inspector, I should prefer

the solitude of a dungeon to my present surroundings. They
resemble a Rotarian convention more and more every moment.
I amquite prepared to pay for a taxicab to avoid being
hauled through the streets."
Inspector Snatchley recalled himself to the business in
hand.
"Come round to the canteen presently and have a chat,
 102 F. E. BAILT
Stodger," he suggested. "The beer's good and youll see a
lot of well-known faces there. Mine's the ZX
Division.
Good-bye, Lady Lisa. YouVe been too splendid for words."
When George and Lisa were alone silence fell on the
room. She stood twisting a scrap of handkerchief nervously.
At last she said :

"So you're really George Catterick and were at Harton,

and you let me think you were George Iggins, a struggling
manufacturer in Gardenia Street. Do you think it was quite
kind of you ?"
George shrugged his shoulders helplessly, continental
though the gesture was for a son of Harton.
"The name of the firm is Iggins. I bought it when it
was going down and built it up. Naturally, when we went
off the gold standard I swept the Continent. To-day hardly
a foreigner wears anything but a British false nose. When
you wrote to me I hadn't the courage to undeceive you,
because I'd been in love with you for ages. I collected all
your photographs and Press notices. I subscribed to every
Press cutting agency in the country."
"Did you, George ?"
"Of course I did. Who wouldn't ? And Lisa, when
you said I could come up here and see you and asked me to
sit on the very settee, I felt honestly I felt just as bucked
as when I got my House colours."
"You darling," Lisa said, for no one could appreciate
better than she the splendour of this tribute.
"Lisa, Fm
afraid I'm awf 'ly rich, but could you love me
a little bit ?"
With a sigh Lisa capitulated, horse, foot, guns, and army
troops.
"I adore you, George. And if you've been deceitful
'"
I'm not much better. The reason why I wrote to you
She sketched briefly the competition designed by MeneJ
Houp. George listened with sparkling eyes.
*T11 subscribe a hundred pounds, darling," he said joy-
fully. "If that doesn't win you the kitty, I'll eat six of my
own paper hats."
Even he spoke, the door opened and Lord Tombs
as
entered the room. He glanced round furtively, appeared to
be reassured, and closed the door.
"That man with the beard longer than mine has gone/'
 SPARE A PENNY IOJ
he said contentedly. "Frankly, there is a medium In all things
and I thought him rather an outsider. After all, a sahib's a
sahib, say what you like. What I wanted to tell you last
night, Lisa, when his disgusting presence prevented me, was
that I'm ruined. The Tombs diamonds have gone and arc
replaced by paste imitations, the pictures are mortgaged, and
I'm in the hands of the money-lenders. You'd better prepare
for the great crash. I beg your pardon, sir. I didn't notice
you. Forgive these purely domestic reflections/'
"Sir," George replied, "Lisa and I are in love and I
request her hand in marriage. These temporary difficulties
of yours can be overcome quite easily, seeing I am very
"
rich.Unworthy as I feel
"Not at all, not at all," Lord Tombs answered graciously.
"Nothing would induce me to stand in the way of my daughter's
happiness. Pray remain to dinner, if you will be so good.
On this auspicious occasion I am prepared to waive the
question of evening dress."
He went out and left them together. Slowly, gently and
adorably Lisa yielded herself into George's arms. He could
scarcely believe that all her loveliness now belonged to
him.
"We'll give the party at Agnello's and announce our
engagement at the same time," she murmured, her cheek
against his. "And, George, I'm not altogether sure I'm
not rather glad I shan't have to live in Gardenia Street."
 A. P. HERBERT
Family Faces

A. P. Herbert is probably the best-known living English

humorist, and like all real humorists often has a vein
of seriousness underlying his satire. The follies and
Inconsistencies of the law are one of his favourite

targets, as in Honeybubble & Co., from which this story

is taken, and his latest novel Holy Deadlock, .
 FAMILY FACES

only card-games which it is worth while for a man

THE of sense to waste his time on are those which are not
played with cards at all, such as the game which I invented in
the smoking-room of the S.S. Coronado. It is played with
the signed wine-cards which the steward returns to you on
the last day of the voyage with the bill. The bills having
been paid, two players take their respective packs and deal
the cards out one by one, as in "Beggar My Neighbour ".
"
Whenever the word " Whisky turns up each player cries
"Snap 1" and the one crying "Snap I" first wins. But a
rum punch is joker and takes the pool always.
I played George, and George of course won. I had

perhaps more voice, but he had more whisky-cards. And an

old gentleman, in bed, sent up from C Deck to ask if the
community singing would be continued long, because if so
he would like to join us.
"Family Faces" is just such a game. George and I often
go down for the week-end to old Fothergill *s. On our last
visit we found Mr. Honeybubble there as well. Now,
Fothergill comes of a very old family and likes to talk about
it after dinner. Normally George and I have not the smallest-
objection to FothergilPs ancestors. \Ve sit snoozing com-
fortably over FothergilPs excellent cigars and brandy, while
Fothergill climbs happily higher and higher up the family
tree. He generally stops at about De Courcy Fothergill,
who was a Lord Chief Justice in the reign of Queen Anne.
But on this occasion his ascent was frequently and foully
interrupted by Honeybubble, who would keep butting in with
his own detestable forebears in Lancashire.
"
(/
and the atmo-
Fothergill is not used to this sort of thing,
sphere became uncomfortable and even subsultrj So much
,

so that George and I, roused before our time, began to have

fond memories of our own ancestors, and George mentioned
his great-uncle, who was first Bishop of Umbobo, until eaten,
very properly, by a cannibal. I then spoke of my grandfather
the Admiral, and the end of it was that George suggested that
when \ve next met we should all bring photographs or
107
IC8 A. P. HERBERT
miniatures of our respective families and see which had th
best. This meant that Fothergill had to ask Honeybubble fot
another week-end, which I don't know that he was so terribly
keen on ; but he did it, and the evening concluded in a lethal
hush, like Europe just before the Great War.
*
Well, we all met again last week-end, and after dinner on
Saturday George sent us off to fetch our families. He himself
had a packet of photographs the thickness of Who's Who.
The game of "Family Faces" you have probably played.
But you have never played it with George. Don't. George,
I think, would cheat at a Charity Spelling Bee. We sat down
at the card-table, and George explained die rules of the game,
which are that each player plays an ancestor or relation, and
the plainest relation pays five shillings, which the handsomest
receives. (Well, that is how George explained the rules.)
Honeybubble protested that the whole thing was frivolous
and not at all what he had expected but Fothergill, who has
;

always made a great point of the fine looks of his ancestors,

overruled him, and the game began.
Fothergill played first and he led his ace, the Lord Chief
;

Justice in the reign of Queen Anne. A

fine-looking old
fellow, though perhaps the tiniest bit dated by his whiskers.
I played modestly my Admiral. Honeybubble with a tremen-
dous air put down Joshua Honeybubble, J.P., and we all

gazed at Joshua.
"That is my great-great-uncle/' he said, "first Mayor of
Bootle, founded the Bootlc Fire Brigade, fought in the
Crimean War, was a friend of Richard Cobdcn, Justice of
"
the Peace
'"But that's no good, old boy," said George ; "he has a
face like on onion/*
Now, could not defend this utterance of George's in
I
a Court of Law, much less a Court of Chivalry. As a matter
of fact the face of Joshua Honeybubble bore no resemblance
whatever to an onion. It was quite a good face, and I thought
myself that it was a toss-up between Joshua and the Lord
Chief Justice for the best-looker. But the awful thing is
that I do care what outrage a man does to Honey-
^not really
bubble. So I was silent.
"An onion ?" said Honeybubble indignantly, as if it would
have been pardonable to liken Joshua to a potato or a mangel-
wurzel*
 FAMILY FACES 109
"An
onion," said George "quite definitely, an onion/'
Honeybubble made an angry sound like the end of a
soda-water syphon.
"It's your turn, George," I said,, to ease the tension, as It
were.
George then played an unmistakable photograph of Miss
Gladys Cooper.
"That my mother/' he said simply.
is

I opened my mouth, astounded (even I, who know

George). I instantly that both Fothergill and
realized
Honeybubble were of that rare kind of bat who would not
know Miss Gladys Cooper if they saw her, and indeed they were
both goggling reverently at George's mother. I was just going
to speak when George kicked me very viciously on the ankle.
It then crossed my mind that, if George was disqualified for
a foul, I should very likely have to pay Honeybubble five shil-
lings, and this I thought, was more than Joshua was worth.
So, basely, I confess, I was silent again.
We then voted. George's remark about the onion must
have prejudiced us against Joshua, for Joshua had to pay up
and George's mother won.
"
Youtoplay, Honeybubble/'said George good-humouredly.
Honeybubble then played an ancestor so appalling that I
Instantly played uncle James.
my good
"My aunt Elizabeth," said Honeybubble. "A great
woman ; she gave all her life to the poor. Married three
times, was presented to the Queen, Vice-President of the
Primrose League er
"
"But, man," shrieked George, "she's in bloomers I"
It was true. She was wearing bloomers and standing
beside a bicycle. It was awful.
"I did not understand," said Honeybubble stiffly, "that
this was to be a Beauty Competition."
"Well, it is," said George, and coolly played a rather
inferior chorus-girl as she appears in Tht Crinoline Girl.
"My grandmother," he said, "on her wedding day."
The
others loved her, and I
bided my time.
The is that George had finessed too much, for the rest
truth
of us voted for Fothergill's father, a grand-looking fellow.
Honeybubble paid, of course.
At this point, by a stupid piece of clumsiness, I knocked
George's cards on to the floor. I helped him to pick them
 110 A. P. HERBERT
up, naturally, and was fortunate enough to secure the top
dozen photographs in his pack. I put my ankles well over
towards Fothergill and the game proceeded.
Proceeded ? It became a procession. In the next round
Iplayed George's fiancee (for the time being), a lovely
" girl.
"My stepmother/* I said, "as a bridesmaid.
George spluttered but said nothing. I won Honey- ;

bubble lost with an ancestral alderman.

I then played in quick succession Miss Tallulah Bankhead,

June, Mr. Owen Nares, Miss Jean Forbes-Robertson, Lopo-

kova, Mr. Nicholas Hannen, Miss Angela Baddeley, Captain
Eden, M.P., and the Duchess of York, George had brought
a wonderful family, but his second eleven were no match for
liis first. I played one of my own relations now and then
to let Fothergill win a trick with his lawyers and big-game
hunters and make him happy. Honey bubble continued to
play aldermen and bishops and noted philanthropists and
aunts and uncles of unimpeachable virtue but unspeakable
appearance. He always paid it was monstrous. After a
;

few tricks even George began to put in a good word for

Honeybubble's ancestors, but nothing could save them. I
think in the end even Honeybubble voted against them.
And then I suppose I was tired by the constant strain of
invention I turned up Miss Edna Best, and I simply could
not think what relation she was. I had played seven aunts,
I knew, and almost as many sisters, but I could not rejnember
what other relatives I had exhibited.
"That is my mother/' I said feebly at last. "Taken at
the Boat-race/'
"I beg your pardon ?" said Fothergill suspiciously, and
George kicked me again.
"You've had one mother already, sir," said Honeybubble
rather rudely.
"Well, then/' I said, all harassed, "that is my little
daughter."
And then of course there were questions, and then there
were explanations, and then there were harsh words, and,
what with one thing and another, that week-end was quite
But I do not think that Honeybubble
difficult. will say quite
so much about his ancestors in future.

(1928)
 "SASSENACH"
Gardener's Grandmother

"Sassenach" is the name under which Major

J. B. Arbuthnot, a regular soldier who has seen much
service, writes his amusing tales of Irish life. The
story which is reprinted here is taken from his
volume Arms and the Irishman. Major Arbuthnot
was the original "Beachcomber" of the Daily Express.
 MY GARDENER'S GRANDMOTHER
proud of his grandmother, who
MY gardener is justly
thinks she is eighty-three, and threatens to marry again.
For the moment, however, she is content to feed bantams,
scour the garden for eggs, and "do" for her grandson also
she is conversationally inclined !
Now it has long been my practice to give short notice

(if any) when crossing from England, to reach Ballynaslob

about dawn, feeling far from well.
This gives me the opportunity of raising Cain over a
superfluity of weeds in flower beds over rakes, spades and
mowing machines left to rust upon the lawn, and so forth
the only way, I find, to preserve even a semblance of law and
order in the land of the Free and Easy.
It was on just such an occasion that I descended one

morning upon the garden, and went on the warpath accord-

ing to plan.
My gardener we call him "Bertie" and his official desig-
nation is Albert Edward O'Shaughnessy was, as had been
anticipated, conspicuous by his absence. He had gone to
ground in the potting shed, and was absorbed in the creation
of a rabbit hutch wherein to imprison ferrets. Moreover, he
was using my new set of carpentering tools, the case of which
I had left securely locked a fortnight before. Those under
his authority reclined on a bench before him, smoking
cigarettes.
Having said "good morning" to O'Shaughnessy, I con-
gratulated him on his ingenuity, admired the rabbit hutch,
and added that in my humble opinion the general condition
of the garden fell short of perfection. And when he had
finished making idle excuses, I inquired after his grand-
mother. "Where is she now ?" I asked. "Who lies beneath
her speU ?"
Bertie knocked ashes from his pipe, kicked long limbs
about, and grinned like a gargoyle under the church roof.
"Is ut me grandmother ? Gosh but it's a horrible woman
I

she is She would be up to mischief somewhere round about

1

as loike as may be." She was I discovered Mrs. O'Shaugh-

!

1x3
 114 SASSENACH
nessy perched upon a twenty-foot ladder, from which
altitude
she gave me the "glad eye".
"Come down out of that at once," I cried. "You know you
young to be climbing ladders I"
are far too
Mrs. O'Shaughnessy cackled, felt for the next last rung but
two, missed it, and let a yell.
"Steady, now I"
She steadied, and upraised her voice.
"May the good God spare ye," she exclaimed, with
aggressive loudness.
"Thank you very much," said I, "but do, for Heaven's
sake, be careful, Mrs. O'Shaughnessy, because you are not
insured." She descended somewhat, and addressed me further.
"An* 'tis plazed an' proud we are to have ye back on us
again, as them lads has Bert's heart broke the way they
would
be idiin' around an' him working himself to the bone for yer
honour the day long an' howlin' in his sleep o' noights along
with the cats being in dread that ye'd be springin' it on 'im
unprepared loike, an' them sparrograss beds all anyhow . ." .

"It's a fine day, is it not ?" said I.

"Foine day is ut ? 'Tis hailstones as big as ginger-ale
bottles that were after killing me dead not a Sunday ago."
"Yes, that's the worst of your Irish climate but tell me,
!

Mrs. O'Shaughnessy how are all your cocks and hens ?"
"Hins and cocks is ut ? My God me sowl is blistered wid
1

chasing after them damned bantams 1"

I expressed regret
"An' an' oh, my Lord I whutt the divil's the matter wid
ycr appearance ?"
Then remembered she had not seen me since the removal
I

of a small and colourless moustache.

Mrs. O'Shaughnessy arrived on terra firma and pierced me
with an eagle eye.
"Well ?" I asked.
"In the name of God, what compelled ye to tear out yer
whiskers ?"
"Why ; . don't you consider it an improvement ?"
'.

It was evident that she did not ; also that for once in a

way she was at a loss for a suitable reply. Then her nationality
came to the rescue.
"In the name of God, captain," she exclaimed, "ye look
thousand toimes the gintleman ye were 1"
 JEROME K. JEROME
Three Men in a Boat

J.
K. Jerome tried his hand and acting
at teaching
Before he took to journalism and established his

reputation as a humorist with Idle Thoughts of an Idle

Fellow. Of his plays the best known is The Passing of
the Third Floor Back.
 THREE MEN IN A BOAT

CHAPTER VI
Kingston.- -Instructive remarks on early English history. Instructive
observations on carved oak and lift in general. Sad case of Stiwings,
junior. Musings on I forget that I am steering.
antiquity.
Interesting result* Hampton Court Ma^e. Harris as a guide.

was a glorious morning, late spring or early summer, as

ITyou care to take it, when the dainty sheen of grass and leaf
is blushing to a deeper green ; and the year seems like a fair

young maid, trembling with strange pulses on the brink of

womanhood.
The quaint back of Kingston, where they came
streets
down to the water's edge, looked quite picturesque in the
flashing sunlight, the glinting river with its drifting barges,
the wooded towpath, the trim-kept villas on the other side,
Harris, in a red and orange blazer, grunting away at the sculls,
the distant glimpses of the grey old palace of the Tudors, all
made a sunny picture, so bright but calm, so full of life, and
yet so peaceful, that, early in the day though it was, I felt
myself being dreamily lulled off into a musing fit.
I mused on Kingston, or "Kyningestun", as it was once
called in the days when Saxon "kinges" were crowned there.
Great Oesar crossed the river there, and the Roman legions
camped upon sloping uplands. Caesar, like, in later years,
its

Elisabeth, seems to have stopped everywhere : only he was

more respectable than good Queen Bess ; he didn't put up at
the public-houses.
ohc was nuts on public-houses, was England's Virgin
Queen. There's scarcely a pub. of any attractions within ten
miles of London that she does not seem to have looked in
at, or stopped at, or slept at, some time or other, I wonder
now, supposing Harris, say, turned over a new leaf, and
became a great and good man, and got to be Prime Minister,
 Il8 JEROME K. JEROME
and died, If they would put up signs over the public-houses
that he had patronized : "Harris had a glass of bitter in this

of W
house" "Harris had two of Scotch cold here in the summer
;

"Harris was chucked from here in December, 1886."

;

No, there would be too many of them It would be the

!

houses that he had never entered that would become famous.

had
"Only house in South London that Harris never a drink
In !" The people would flock to it to see what could have
been the matter with it.

How poor weak-minded King Edwy must have hated

Kyningcstun I The coronation feast had been too much for
him, Maybe boar's head stuffed with sugar-plums did not
agree with him (it wouldn't with me, I know), and he
had had
enough of sack and mead so he slipped from the noisy revel
;

to steal a quiet moonlight hour with his beloved Elgiva.

Perhaps from the casement, standing hand-in-hand, they
were watching the calm moonlight on the river, while from
the distant halls the boisterous revelry floated in broken bursts
of faint-heard din and tumult
Then brutal Odo and St. Dunstan force their rude way
into the quiet room, and hurl coarse insults at the sweet-faced
Queen, and drag poor Edwy back to the loud clamour of the
drunken brawL
Years later, to the crash of battle-music, Saxon kings and
Saxon revelry were buried side by side, and Kingston's
greatness passed away for a time, to rise once
more when
Hampton Court became the palace of the Tudors and the
Stuarts, and the royal barges strained at their moorings on
the river's bank, and bright-cloaked gallants swaggered down
the water-steps to cry :"What Ferry, ho Gadsooks,
1

gramercy."
Many of the old houses, round about, speak very plainly
of those days when Kingston was a royal borough, and nobles
and courtiers lived there, near their King, and the long road
to the palace gates was gay all day with clanking steel and
prancing palfreys and rustling silks and velvets, and fair faces.
The large and spacious houses, with their oriel, latticed
windows, their huge fireplaces, and their gabled roofs, breathe
of the days of hose and doublet, of pearl-embroidered stom-
achers, and complicated oaths. They were upraised in the
days "when men knew how to build". ,The hard red bricks
have only grown more firmly set with time, and their oak
 THREE MEN IN A BOAT
stairs do not creak and grunt when you try to go down them
quietly.
Speaking of oak staircases reminds me that there is a
magnificent carved oak staircase in one of the houses in
Kingston* It is a shop now, in the market-place, but it was
evidently once the mansion of some great personage. A
friend of mine, who lives at Kingston, went in there to buy
a hat one day, and, in a thoughtless moment, put his hand in
his pocket and paid for it then and there.
The shopman (he knows my was
naturally a little
friend)
staggered at but, quickly recovering himself, and
first;
feeling that something ought to be done to encourage this
sort of thing, asked our hero if he would like to see some fine
old carved oak. My friend said he would, and the shopman,
thereupon, took him through the shop, and up the staircase
of the house. The balusters were a superb piece of work-
manship, and the wall all the way up was oak-panelled, with
carving that would have done credit to a palace.
From went into the drawing-room, which
the stairs they
was a large bright room, decorated with a somewhat startling
though cheerful paper of a blue ground. There was nothing,
however, remarkable about the apartment, and my friend
wondered why he had been brought there. The proprietor
went up to the paper, and tapped it. It gave forth a wooden
sound.
"Oak/* he explained. "All carved oak, right up to the
ceiling, just the same as you saw on the staircase/'
"But, great Csesar man," expostulated my friend "you
I
;

don't mean to say you have covered over carved oak with
blue wall-paper ?" , *

"Yes," was the reply : "it was expensive work. Had to

match-board over first,
it all of course. But the room looks
cheerful now. was awful gloomy before."
It
I can't say I altogether blame the man (which is doubtless
a great relief to his mind). From his point of view, which
".

would be that of the average householder, desiring to take

life as lightly as
possible, and not that of the old curiosity-
shop maniac, there is reason on his side. Carved oak is very
pleasant to look at, and to have a little of, but it is no doubt
somewhat depressing to live in, for those whose fancy does
not lie that way. It would be like living in a church.
No, what was sad in his case was that he, who didn't
120 JEROME K. JEROME
care for carved oak, should have his drawing-room panelled
with it, while people who do care for it have to pay enormous
It seems to be the rule of this world. Each
prices to get it
person has what he doesn't want, and other people have
what he does want.
Married men have wives, and don't seem to want thqm,
and young single fellows cry out that they can't get them.
Poor people who can hardly keep themselves have eight
hearty children. Rich old couples, with no one to leave their
money to, die childless.
Then there are girls with lovers. The girls that have
lovers never want them. They say they would rather be
without them, that they bother them, and why don't they go
and make love to Miss Smith and Miss Brown, who are
plain and elderly, and haven't got any lovers ? They them-
selves don't want lovers. They never mean to marry.
It does not do to dwell on these things ; it makes one
so sad.
There was a boy at our school, we used to call him
Sandford and Merton. His real name was Stiwings. He
was the most extraordinary lad I ever came across. I believe
he really liked study. He used to get into awful rows for
sitting up in bed and reading Greek ; and as for French
irregular verbs, there was simply no keeping him away from
them. He was full of weird and unnatural notions about
being a credit to his parents and an honour to the school;
and he yearned to win prizes, and grow up and be a clever
man, and had all those sorts of weak-minded ideas. I never
knew such a strange creature, yet harmless, mind you, as the
babe unborn.
Well, that boy used to get ill about twice a week, so that
he couldn't go to school. There never was such a boy to
get ill as that Sandford and Merton. If there was any known
disease going within ten miles of him, he had it, and had it
badly. He would take bronchitis in the dog-days, and have
hay-fever at Christmas. After a six weeks' period of drought,
he would be stricken down with rheumatic fever; and he
would go out in a November fog and come home with a
sunstroke.
They put him under laughing-gas one year, poor lad, and
drew all his teeth, and gave him a false set, because he suffered
so terribly with toothache ; and then it turned to neuralgia
 THREE MEN IN A BOAT 121

and ear-ache. He was never without a cold, except once for

nine weeks while he had scarlet fever; and he always had
chilblains. During the great cholera scare of 1871, our
neighbourhood was singularly free from it. There was only
one reputed case in the whole parish : that case was young
"
Stiwings.
He had to stop in bed when he was ill, and eat chicken
and custards and hot-house grapes ; and he would lie there
and sob, because they wouldn't let him do Latin exercises,
and took his German grammar away from him.
And we other boys, who would have sacrificed ten terms
of our school-life for the sake of being ill for a day, and had
no desire whatever to give our parents any excuse for being
stuck-up about us, couldn't catch so much as a stiff neck.
We fooled about in draughts, and it did us good, and freshened
us up ; and we took things to make us sick, and they made
us fat, and gave us an appetite. Nothing we could think of
seemed to make us ill until the holidays began. Then, on
the breaking-up day, we caught colds, and whooping cough,
and all kinds of disorders, which lasted till the term recom-
menced ; when, in spite of everything we could manoeuvre
to the contrary, we would get suddenly well again, and be
better than ever.
is life ; and we are but as grass that is cut down,
Such
and put into the oven and baked.
To go back to the carved-oak question, they must have
had very fair notions of the artistic and the beautiful, our
great-great-grandfathers. Why, all our art treasures of
to-day are only the dug-up commonplaces of three or four
hundred years ago. I wonder if there is any real intrinsic
beauty in the old soup-plates, beer-mugs, and candle-snuffers
that we prize so now, or if it is only the halo of age glowing
around them that gives them their charms in our eyes. The
"old blue" that we hang about our walls as ornaments were
the common everyday household utensils of a few centuries
ago ;and the pink shepherds and the yellow shepherdesses
that we hand round now for all our friends to gush over, and
pretend they understand, were the unvalued mantel-ornaments
that the mother of the eighteenth century would have given
the baby to suck when he cried.
* WiU it be the same in the future ? Will the prized
treasures of to-day always be the cheap trifles of the day
 122 JEROME K. JEROME
before ? Will rows of our willow-pattern dinner-plates be
ranged above the chimney-pieces of the great in the year
2000 and odd ? Will the white cups with the gold rim and
the beautiful gold flower inside (species unknown), that our
Sarah Janes now break in sheer light-heartedness of spirit,
be carefully mended, and stood upon a bracket, and dusted
only by the lady of the house ?
That china dog that ornaments the bedroom of my
furnished lodgings. It is a white dog. Its eyes are blue.
Its nose is a delicate red, with black spots. Its head is pain-

fully erect, and its

expression is amiability carried to the
verge of imbecility. I do not admire it
myself. Considered
as a work of art, I may say it irritates me. Thoughtless
friends jeer at it, and even my landlady herself has no admira-
tion for it, and excuses its presence by the circumstance that
her aunt gave it to her.
But in 200 years' time it is more than probable that that
dog. will be dug up from somewhere or other, minus its
legs, and with its tail broken, and will be sold for old china,
and put in a glass cabinet. And people will pass it round
and admire it. They will be struck by the wonderful depth
of the colour on the nose, and speculate as to how beautiful
the bit of the tail that is lost no doubt was.
We, in this age, do not see the beauty of that dog. We
are too familiar with it. It is like the sunset and the stars :
we are not awed by their loveliness because they are common
to our eyes. So it is with that china dog. In 2288 people
will gush over it. The making of such dogs will have
become a lost art. Our descendants will wonder how we
did it, and say how clever we were. We shall be referred to

lovingly as "those grand old artists that flourished in the

nineteenth century, and produced those china dogs".
The "sampler" that die eldest daughter did at school will
be spoken of as "tapestry of the Victorian era", and be almost
priceless. The blue-and-white mugs of the present-day
roadside inn will be hunted up, all cracked and chipped,
sold for their weight in gold, and rich people will use them
for claret cups ; and travellers from Japan will buy up all
the "Presents from Ramsgate", and "Souvenirs of Margate",
that may have escaped destruction, and take them back to
Jedo
'
as ancient English curios.
this point Harris threw away the sculls, got up and
 THREE MEN IN A BOAT 123

left his seat, and sat on and stuck his legs in the
his back,
air. Montmorency howled, and turned a somersault, and the
top hamper jumped up, and all the things came out.
I was somewhat surprised, but I did not lose my temper.
I said, pleasantly enough :

"Hulloa 1 what's that for ?"

"
"What's that for ? Why
No, on second thoughts, I will not repeat what Harris
said. I may have been to blame, I admit it; but nothing
excuses violence of language and coarseness of expression
especially in a man who has been carefully brought up, as I
know Harris has been. I was thinking of other things and
forgot, as anyone might easily understand, that I was steering
and the consequence was that we had got mixed up a good
deal with the tow-path. It was difficult to say, for the

moment, which was us and which was the Middlesex bank of

the river; but we found out after a while, and separated
ourselves.
Harris, however, said he had done enough for a bit, and
proposed that I should take a turn ; so, as we were in, I
got out and took the tow-line, and ran the boat on past
Hampton Court. What a dear old wall that is that runs
along by the river there! I never pass it without feeling
better for the sight of it. Such a mellow, bright, sweet old
wall; what a charming picture it would make, with the
lichen creeping here and the moss growing there, a shy young
vine peeping over the top at this spot, to see what is going
on upon the busy river, and the sober old ivy clustering a
little farther down There are fifty shades and tints and
1

hues in every ten yards of that old wall. If I could only

draw, and knew how to paint, I could make a lovely sketch
of that old wall, I'm sure, c Fve often thought I should like
to live at Hampton Court. It looks so peaceful and so

quiet, and it is such a dear old place to ramble round in the

early morning before many people are about.
But, there, I don't suppose I should really care for it
when it came to actual practice. It would be so ghastly dull
and depressing in the evening, when your lamp cast uncanny
shadows on the panelled walls, and the echo of distant feet
rang through the cold stone corridors, and now drew nearer,
and now died away, and all was death-like silence, save the
beating of one's own heart.
 JEROME K. JEROME
We are creatures of the sun, we men and women. We
love light and life. That is why we crowd into the towns
and and the country grows more and more deserted
cities,

every year. In the sunlight in the daytime, when Nature

is alive and busy all around us, we like the open hill-sides

and the deep woods well enough but in the night, when
:

our Mother Earth has gone to sleep, and left us waking, oh 1

the world seems so lonesome, and we get frightened, like

children in a silent house. Then we sit and sob, and long
for the gas-lit streets, and the sound of human voices, and
the answering throb of human life. We feel so helpless and
so in the great stillness,
little when the dark trees rustle in
the night-wind. There are so ghosts about, and their
many
silent sighs make us Let us gather together in
feel so sad.
the great cities, and light huge bonfires of a million gas-jets,
and shout and sing together and feel brave.
Harris asked me if I'd ever been in the maze at Hampton
Court. He said he went in once to show somebody else the
way. He had studied it up in a map, and it was so simple
that it seemed foolish hardly worth the twopence charged
for admission. Harris said he thought that map must have
been got up as a practical joke, because it wasn't a bit like
the real thing, and only misleading. It was a country cousin
that Harris took in. He said ^ :

"We'll just go in here, so that you can say you've been,

but it's very simple. It's absurd to call it a maze. You
keep on taking the first turning to the right. We'll just walk
round for ten minutes, and then go and get some lunch."
They met some people soon after they had got inside,
who said they had been there for three-quarters of an hour,
and had had about enough of it Harris told them they could
follow him if they liked ; he was just going in, and then
should turn round and come out again. They said it was
very kind of him, and fell behind, and followed.
They picked up various other people who wanted to get
Itover, as they went along, until they had absorbed all the
persons in the maze. People who had given up all hopes
of ever getting either in or out, or of ever seeing their home
and friends again, plucked up courage, at the sight of Harris
and his party, and joined the procession, blessing him. Harris
said he should judge there must have been twenty people
following him, in all; and one woman with a baby, who
 THREE MEN IN A BOAT 125

had been there all the morning, insisted on taking his arm,
for fear of losing him.
Harris kept on turning to the right, but it seemed a long
way, and his cousin said he supposed it was a very big maze.
,"Oh, one of the largest in Europe/' said Harris.
must be/' replied the cousin, "because weVe
"Yes, It
walked a good two miles already."
Harris began to think it rather strange himself, but he
held on until, at last, they passed the half of a penny bun on
the ground that Harris's cousin swore he had noticed there
seven minutes ago. Harris said: "Oh, impossible 1" but
the woman with the baby said, "Not at all," as she herself
had taken it from the child, and thrown it down there, just
before she met Harris. She also added that she wished she
never had met Harris, and expressed an opinion that he was
an impostor. That made Harris mad, and he produced his
map, and explained his theory.
"The map may be all enough," said one of the
right
party, "if you know whereabouts in it we are
now."
Harris didn't know, and suggested that the best thing to
do would be to go back to the entrance, and begin again.
For the beginning again part of it there was not much
enthusiasm ; but with regard to the advisability of going
back to the entrance there was complete unanimity, and so
they turned, and trailed after Harris again, in the opposite
direction. About ten minutes more passed, and then they
found themselves in the centre.
Harris thought at first of pretending that that was what
he had been aiming at; but the crowd looked dangerous,
and he decided to treat it as an accident
Anyhow, they had got something to start from then.
They did know where they were, and the map was once
more consulted, and the thing seemed simpler than ever, and
off they started for the third time.
And
three minutes later they were back in the centre

again.
After that they simply couldn't get anywhere else. What-
ever way they turned brought them back to the middle. It
became so regular at length, that some of the people stopped
there, and waited for the others to take a walk round, and
come back to them. Harris drew out his map again, after a
while, but the sight of it only infuriated the mob, and they
 126 JEROME K. JEROME
told him to go and curl his hair with it. Harris said that he
couldn't help feeling that, to a certain extent, he had become
unpopular.
They allgot crazy at last, and sang out for the keeper,
and the man came and climbed up the ladder outside, and
shouted out directions to them. But all their heads were,
by this time, in such a confused whirl that they were incapable
of grasping anything, and so the man told them to stop
where they were, and he would come to them. They huddled
together, and waited ; and he climbed down, and came in.
He was a young keeper, as luck would have it, and new
to the business ; and when he got in, he couldn't get to
them, and then be got lost. They caught sight of him every
now and then, rushing about the other side of the hedge,
and he would see them, and rush to get to them, and they
would wait there for about five minutes, and then he would
reappear again in exactly the same spot, and ask them where
they had been.
They had to wait until one of the old keepers came back
from his dinner before they got out.
Harris said he thought it was a very fine maze, so far as
he was a judge ; and we agreed that we would tiy to get
George to go into it, on our way back.
 CHAPTER VIII

Blackmailing. The proper course to pursue. Selfish boorhhness of

riversidelandowner. "Notice" boards. Uncbrisiianlike feelings
of Harris. How Harris sings a comic song. A
high-class party.
Shameful conduct of two abandoned young men. Some useful
information. George buys a banjo.

stopped under the willows by

WE lunched. It is

plateau, running along by

a pretty
the
spot
water's
Kempton Park, and
there
little
: a pleasant grass
edge, and overhung
by willows. We
had just commenced the third course the
bread and jam when a gentleman in shirt sleeves and a
short pipe came along, and wanted to know if we knew
that we were trespassing. We
said we hadn't given the
matter sufficient consideration as yet to enable us to arrive
at a definite conclusion on that point, but that, if he assured
us on his word as a gentleman that we were trespassing, we
would, without further hesitation, believe it.
He gave us the required assurance, and we thanked him,
but he still hung about, and seemed to be dissatisfied, so we
asked him if there was anything further that we could do for
him ; and Harris, who is of a chummy disposition, offered
him a bit of bread and jam.
I fancy he must have belonged to some society sworn to
abstain from bread and jam ; for he declined it quite gruffly,
as if he were vexed at being tempted with it, and he added
that was his duty to turn us off.
it

Harris said that if it was a duty it ought to be done, and

asked the man what was his idea with regard to the best
means for accomplishing it. Harris is what you would call
ft well-made man of about number one size, and looks hard

and bony, and the man measured him up and down, and
said he would go and consult his master, and then come
back and chuck us both into the river.
Of course, we never saw him any more, and, of course,
128 JEROME K. JEROME
all he "really wanted was a There are a certain
shilling.
number of riverside roughs who make quite an income during
the summer, by slouching about the banks and blackmailing
weak-minded noodles in this way. They represent them-
selves as sent by the proprietor. The proper course to
pursue is to offer your name and address, and leave the
owner, if he really has anything to do with the matter, to
summon you, and prove what damage you have done to his
land by sitting down on a bit of it. But the majority of
people are so intensely lazy and timid, that they prefer to
encourage the imposition by giving in to it rather than put
an end to it by the exertion of a little firmness.
Where it is really the owners that are to blame, they
ought to be shown up. The selfishness of the riparian pro-
prietor grows with every year. If these men had their way
they would close the river Thames altogether. They actually
do this along the minor tributary streams and in the back-
waters. They drive posts into the bed of the stream, and
draw chains across from bank to bank, and nail huge notice-
boards on every tree. The sight of those notice-boards
rouses every evil instinct in my nature. I feel I want to
tear each one down, and hammer it over the head of the
man who put it up, until I have killed him, and then I would
bury him, and put the board up over the grave as a tomb-
stone.
I mentioned these feelings of mine to Harris, and he said
he had them worse than that. He said he not only felt he
wanted to kill the man who caused the board to be put up f
but that he should like to slaughter the whole of his family
and all his friends and relations, and then burn down his
house. This seemed to me to be going too far, and I said
so to Harris ; but he answered :
"Not a bit of it. Serve 'em all jolly well right, and I'd
go and sing comic songs on the ruins."
I was vexed to hear Harris
go on in this blood-thirsty
strain. We never ought to allow our instincts of justice to
degenerate into mere vindictiveness. It was a long while
before I could get Harris to take a more Christian view of
the subject, but I succeeded at last, and he promised me that
he would spare the friends and relations at all events, and
would not sing comic songs on the ruins.
You have never heard Harris sing a comic song or you
 THREE MEN IN A BOAT 129
would understand the service I had rendered to mankind.
It is one of Harris's fixed ideas that he can sing a comic song ;
the fixed idea, on the contrary, among those of Harris's
friends who have heard him try, is that he can't, and never
will be ableand that he ought not to be allowed to try.
to,
When Harris is at a party, and is asked to sing, he replies :

"Well, I can only sing a comic song, you know" ; and he

says it in a tone that implies that his singing of that, however,
is a
thing that you ought to hear once, and then die.
"Oh, that is nice," says the hostess. "Do sing one, Mr.
Harris" ; and Harris gets up, and makes for the piano, with
the beaming cheeriness of a generous-minded man who is

just about to give somebody something.

"Now, silence, everybody," says the hostess,
please,
turning round ; going to sing a comic song I"
"Mr. Harris
is

"Oh, how jolly I" they murmur ; and they hurry in from
the conservatory, and come up from the stairs, and go and
fetch each other from all over the house, and crowd into the
drawing-room, and sit round, all smirking in anticipation.
Then Harris begins.
Well, you don't look for much of a voice in a comic
song. You don't expect correct phrasing or vocalization.
You don't mind if a man does find out, when in the middle
of a note, that he is too high, and comes down with a jerk.
You don't bother about time. You don't mind a man being
two bars in front of the accompaniment, and easing up in
the middle of a line to argue it out with the pianist, and then
starting the verse afresh. But you do expect the words.
You don't expect a man to never remember more than
the first three lines of the first verse, and to keep on repeating
these until it is time to begin the chorus. You don't expect
a man to break off in the middle of a line, and snigger, and
say, it's very funny, but fie's blest if he can think of the rest
of it, try and make it up for himself, and, after-
and then
wards, suddenly recollect it, when he has got to an entirely
different part of the song, and break off without a word of

warning, to go back and let you have it then and there.

You don't well, I will just give you an idea of Harris's
comic singing, and then you can judge of it for yourself.
HARRIS (standing up in front of piano and addressing the
expectant mob) "I'm afraid it's a very old thing, you know.
:

I expect you all know it, you know. But it's the only thing
130 JEROME K. JEROME
I know. It's the Judge's song out of Pinafore no, I don't
mean Pinafore T mean you know what I mean die other
thing,you know. You must all join in the chorus, you
know."

\Murmurs of delight and anxiety to join in the chorus, brilliant

performance of prelude to the judge's song in "Trial by

Jury" by nervous pianist. Moment arrives for Harris to

Join in. Harris takes no notice of it. Nervous pianist
commences prelude over again, and Harris, commencing
singing at the same time, dashes off the first two lines of the
First ^Lord's song out of "Pinafore". Nervous pianist
tries to push on with prelude, gives it up, and tries to follow
Harris with accompaniment to Judge's song out of "Trial by
Jury", finds that doesn't answer, and tries to recollect what
be is doing, and where be is> feels his mind giving way, and

stops short.]

HARRIS
(with kindly encouragement) : "It's all right. You're
doing k very well, indeed go on."
NERVOUS PIANIST : "I'm afraid there's a mistake some-
where. What are you singing ?"
HARRIS (promptly) "Why the Judge's song out of Trial
:

by Jury. Don't you know it ?"

SOME FRIEND OF HARRIS'S (from the back of the room) :

"No you're not, you chuckle-head, you're singing the

Admiral's song from Pinafore"

[Long argument between Harris and Harris's friend as to

what Harris is really singing. Friend finally suggests that
ft doesn't matter what Harris is singing so long as Harris

gets on and sings it, and Harris, with an evident sense of

injustice rankling inside him, requests pianist to begin again.
Pianist, thereupon, starts prelude to the Admiral's song,
and Harris, seizing what he considers to be a favourable
opening in the music, begins.}

HARRIS :

" "
'When I was young and called to the Bar/

[General roar of laughter, taken by Harris as a compliment.

Pianist, thinking of bis wife and family, gives up the unequal
contest and retires ; bis place being taken by a stronger*

man.]
 THREE MEN IN A BOAT 131

THE NEW PIANIST (cheerily) : "Now then, old man, you

and I'll follow.
start off, We won't bother about any prelude/*
HARRIS (upon whom the explanation of matters bos slowly
dawned laughing) "By Jove I:
beg your pardon. Of I

course I've been mixing up the two songs. It was Jenkins

who confused me, you know. Now then.

[Singfngt bis voice appearing to come from the cellar^ ana

suggesting the first low warnings oj an approaching earth-
quake.}
"
'When 1 was young I served a term
As office-boy to an attorney firm/

(Aside to pianist) : "It is too low, old man ; we'll have that
over again, if you don't mind/'

[Sings first two lines over again, in a high falsetto this time.
Great surprise on the part of the audience. Nervous old
lady near the fire begins to cry, and has to be ted out.]

HARRIS (continuing) :

" *I
swept the' windows and I swept the door,
And I

No cleaned the windows of the big front door. Arid

no, I
I polished up the floor no, dash it I beg your pardon
funny thing, I can't think of that line. And I and I Oh,
well, we'll get on to the chorus, and chance it (sings) :
"
'And I diddlc-diddle^diddle-diddJe-diddle-diddle-dc,
Till now I am ruler of the Queen's navee/

Now then, chorus it's the last two lines repeated, you
know/'
GENERAL CHORUS :

"And he diddle-diddlc-diddle^diddle-diddle-diddle-dee'd
Till now he is ruler of the Queen's navee/'

And Harris never sees what an ass he is

making of him-
self, and he how is
annoying a lot of people who never did
him any harm. He honesdy imagines that he has given
them a treat, and says he will sing another comic song after
supper.
Speaking of comic songs and parties, reminds me of *
 13* JEROME K. JEROMB
which 1 once assisted
rather curious incident at which, as
;

throws much light upon the inner mental working of

it

human nature in general, ought, I think, to be recorded in

these pages.
We were a fashionable and highly cultured party. We
had on our best clothes, and we talked pretty, and were very
happy all except two young fellows, students, just returned
from Germany, commonplace young men, who seemed rest-
less and uncomfortable, as if they found the proceedings slow.
The truth was, we were too clever for them. Our brilliant
but polished conversation, and our high-class tastes, were
beyond them. They were out of place, among us. They
never ought to have been there at all. Everybody agreed
upon that, later on.
We
played morceaux from the old German masters. We
discussed philosophy and ethics. We with graceful
flirted

dignity. We
were even humorous in a high-class way.
Somebody recited a French poem after supper, and we
said it was beautiful and then a lady sang a sentimental
;

ballad in Spanish, and it made one or two of us weep it

was so pathetic.
And then those two young men got up, and asked us if
we had ever heard Herr Slossenn Boschen (who had just
arrived, and was then down in the supper-room) sing his
great German comic song.
None of us had heard it, that we could remember.
The young men said it was the funniest song that had
ever been written, and that, if we liked, they would get Hen
Slossenn Boschen, whom they knew very well, to sing it.
They said it was so funny that, when Herr Slossenn Boschen
had sung it once before the German Emperor, he (the German
Emperor) had had to be carried off to bed.
They said nobody could sing it like Herr Slossenn Boschen;
he was so intensely serious all through it that you might
fancy he was reciting a tragedy, and that, of course, made it
all the funnier. They said he never once suggested by his
tone or manner that he was singing anything funny thai
would spoil it. It was his air of seriousness, almost of pathos,
that made so irresistibly amusing.
it

We saidyearned to hear it, that we wanted a good

we
laugh ; and they went downstairs, and fetched Herr Slossenn
Boschen.
 THREE MEN IN A BOAT 133

He appeared to be quite pleased to sing it, for he came

up at once, and sat down to the piano without another word.
"Oh, it will amuse you. You will laugh," whispered the
two young men, as they passed through the room, and took
up an unobtrusive position behind the Professor's back.
Herr Slossenn Boschen accompanied himself. The pre-
lude did not suggest a comic song exactly. It was a weird,
soulful air. It
quite made one's flesh creep but we mur- ;

mured to one another that it was the German method, and

prepared to enjoy it.
I don't understand German myself. I learned it at
school, but forgot every word of it two years after 1 had left,
and have felt much better ever since. Still, I did not want
the people there to guess my ignorance ; so upon what
I hit
I
thought to be rather a good idea. I kept my eye on the
two young students, and followed them. When they tittered,
I tittered ; when they roared, I roared ; and I also threw in
a little
snigger all by myself now and then, as if I had seen a
bit of humour that had escaped the others. I considered this
particularly artful on my part.
I noticed, as the
song progressed, that a good many other
people seemed to have their eye fixed on the two young men,
as well as myself. These other people also tittered when the
young men tittered, and roared when the young men roared ;
and as the two young men tittered and roared and exploded
with laughter pretty continuously all through the song, it

went exceedingly well.

And yet that German Professor did not seem happy. At
first, when we began to laugh the expression of his face was
one of intense surprise, as if laughter were the very last thing
he had expected to be greeted with. We thought this very
funny we said his earnest manner was half the humour.
:

The slightest hint on his part that he knew how funny he

was would have completely ruined it all. As we continued
to laugh, his surprise gave way to an air of annoyance and
indignation, and he scowled fiercely round upon us all (except
upon the two young men who, being behind him, he could
not see). * That sent us into convulsions. We told each
other that it would be the death of us, this thing. The
words alone, we said, were enough to send us into fits, but
added to his mock seriousness oh, It was too much I

In the last verse, he surpassed himself. He glowered

 JEROME K. JEROME
found upon us with a look of such concentrated ferodty that,
but for oui being forewarned as to the German method of
comic singing, we should have been nervous and he threw
;

such a wailing note of agony into the weird music that, if

we had not known it was a funny song, we might have
wept.
He finished amid a perfect shriek of laughter. We said
was the funniest thing we had ever heard in all our lives.
it

We said how strange it was that, in the face of things like

these, there should be a popular notion that the Germans
hadn't any sense of humour. And weasked the Professor
why he didn't translate the song into English, so that the
common people could understand it, and hear what a real
comic song was like.
Then Herr Slossenn Boschen got up, and went on awhil.
He swore at us in German (which I should judge to be a
singularly effective language for that purpose),
and he danced,
and shook his fists, and called us all the English he knew.
He said he had never been so insulted in all his life.
It appeared that the song was not a comic song at all.
It was about a young girl who lived in the Hartz Mountains,

and who had given up her life to save her lover's soul ; and
he died, and met her spirit in the air ; and then, in the last
verse, he jilted her spirit,
and went off with another spirit
I'm not quite sure of the details, but it was something very
sad, I know. Herr Boschen said he had sung it once before
the German Emperor, and he (the German Emperor) had
sobbed like a little child. He (Herr Boschen) said it was
of the most tragic and
generally acknowledged to be one
pathetic songs in the German language.
It was a trying situation for us very trying. There
seemed to be no answer. We looked round for the two
young men who had done this tiling, but they had left the
house in an unostentatious manner immediately after the
end of the song.
That was the end of that party. I never saw a party
break up so quietly, and with so little fuss. We never said
good night even to one another. We came downstairs one
at a time, walking softly, and keeping the shady side. We
asked the servant for our hats and coats in whispers, and
round
opened the door for ourselves, and slipped out, and got
the corner quickly, avoiding each other as much as possible.
 THREE MEN IN A BOAT 135

I have never taken much interest in German songs since

then.
We reached Sunbury Lock at half-past three. The river
is
sweetly pretty just there before you come to the gates,
and the backwater is charming ; but don't attempt to row
it.
up
I tried to do so once. I was sculling, and asked the
fellows who were steering if
they thought it could be done,
and they said, oh, yes, they thought so, if I pulled hard.
We were just under the little foot-bridge that crosses it
between the two weirs, when they said this, and I bent down
over the sculls, and set myself up, and pulled.
1 pulled splendidly. I got well into a steady rhythmical
swing. I put my arms, and my legs, and my back into it.
I set myself a good, quick, dashing stroke, and worked in

really grand style. My two friends said it was a pleasure to

watch me. At the end of five minutes, I thought we ought
to be pretty near the weir, and I looked up. We
were under
the bridge, in exactly the same spot that we were when I
began, and there were those two idiots, injuring themselves
by violent laughing. I had been grinding away like mad to
keep that boat stuck still under that bridge. I let other people
pull up backwaters against strong streams now.
We sculled up to Walton, a rather large place for a river-
side town. As with all riverside places, only the tiniest corner
of it comes down to the water, so that from the boat you might
fancy it was a village of some half-dozen houses, all told.
Windsor and Abingdon are the only towns between London
and Oxford that you can really see anything of from the
stream. All the others hide round corners, and merely peep
at the river down one street ; my thanks to them for being
so considerate, and leaving the river-banks to woods and
fields and water-works.
Even Reading, though does its best to spoil and sully
it

and make hideous as much

of the river as it can reach, is
good-natured enough to keep its ugly face a good deal out
of sight.
Gesar, of course, had a little place at Walton a camp, or
entrenchment, or something of that sort. Gesar was a
regular up-river man. Also Queen Elizabeth, she was there,
too. You can never get away from that woman, go where
you will. Cromwell and Bradshaw (not the guide man, but
136 JEROME K. JEROME
the King Charles's head man) likewise sojourned here. They
must have been quite a pleasant little party, altogether.
There is an iron "scold's bridle" in Walton Church. They
used these things in ancient days for curbing women's tongues.
They have given up the attempt now. I suppose iron was
getting scarce, and nothing else would
be strong enough.
There are also tombs of note in the church, and I was
afraid I should never get Harris past them ; but he didn't
seem to think of them, and we went on. Above the bridge
the river winds tremendously. This makes it look pic-
turesque ; but it irritates you from a towing or sculling point
of view, and causes argument between the man who is
pulling and the man who is steering.
You pass Oatlands Park on the right bank here. It is
a famous old place. Henry VIII stole it from someone or the
other, I forget whom now, and lived in it. There is a grotto
in the park which you can see for a fee, and which is supposed
to be very wonderful ; but I cannot see much in it myself.
The late Duchess of York, who lived at Oatlands, was very
fond of dogs, and kept an immense number. She had a
special graveyard made, in which
to bury them when they
died, and there they lie, about fifty of them, with a tombstone
over each, and an epitaph inscribed thereon.
Well, I dare say they deserve it quite as much as the
average Christian does.
At "Corway Stakes" the first bend above Walton Bridge
was fought a battle between Gesar and Cassivelaunus.
Cassivelaunus had prepared the river for Caesar, by planting
It full of stakes (and had, no doubt, put up a notice-board).

But Gesar crossed in spite of this. You couldn't choke

Oesar off that river. He is the sort of man we want round
the backwaters now.
Halliford and Shepperton are both pretty little spots
where they touch the river ; but there is nothing remarkable
about either of them. There is a tomb in Shepperton church-
yard, however, with a poem on it,
and I was nervous lest
Harris should want to get out and fool round it. I saw him
longing eye on the landing-stage as we
fix a drew near it, so
I managed, by an adroit movement, to jerk his cap into the
water, and in the excitement of recovering that, and his
indignation at my clumsiness, he forgot all
about his beloved
graves.
 THREE MEN IN A BOAT 137
At Weybrldge, the Wey (a pretty little stream, navigable
up to Guildford, and one which I have always
for small boats
been making up my mind to explore, and never have), the
Bourne, and the Basingstoke Canal all enter the Thames
together ^The lock is just opposite the town, and the first
thing that we saw, when we came in view of it, was George's
blazer on one of the lock gates, closer inspection showing
that George was inside it.
Montmorency set up a furious barking, I shrieked, Harris
roared George waved his hat, and yelled back. The lock-
;

keeper rushed out with a drag, under the impression that

somebody had fallen into the lock, and appeared annoyed at
finding that no one had.
George had rather a curious oilskin-covered parcel in his
hand. It was round and flat at one end, with a long straight
handle sticking out of it.
"What's that ?" said Harris "a frying-pan ?"
"No," said George, with a strange, wild look glittering
in his eyes ; "they are all the rage this season ; everybody has
got them up the river. It's a banjo."
"I never knew you played the banjo I" cried Harris and
I, in one breath.
"Not exactly," replied George : "but it's very easy, they
tell me ; and I've got the instruction book 1"
 CHAPTER XV
Household duties. Lave of work. The old river hand, what be does and
what he fells you be has done. Scepticism of the new generation.
Early boating recollections. JLafting. George does the thing in
style. The old boatman, bis method. So calm, so full of peace.
The beginner. Punting. A
sad accident. Pleasures offriendship.
Sailing, my first experience. Possible reason why we were not
drowned.

woke
WE next morning, and, at Harris's earnest
late the
desire, partook of a plain breakfast, with "rion dainties".
Then we cleaned up, and put everything straight (a continual
labour, which was beginning to afford me a pretty clear
insight into a question that had often posed me namely,
how a woman with the work of only one house on her hands
manages to pass away her time), and, at about ten, set out
on what we had determined should be a good day's journey.
We agreed that we would pull this morning, as a change
from towing ; and Harris thought the best arrangement
would be that George and I should scull, and he steer. I
did not chime in with this idea at all ; I said I thought Harris
would have been showing a more proper spirit if he had
suggested that he and George should work, and let me rest
a bit. It seemed to me that I was doing more than my fair
share of the work on this trip, and I was beginning to feel
strongly on the subject.
It always does seem to me that I am doing more woak
than I should do. It is not that I object to the work, mind
you ; I like work it fascinates me. I can sit and look at
:

k for hours. keep it by me : the idea of getting

I love to
rid of it
nearly breaks my heart.
You cannot give me too much work; to accumulate
work has almost become a passion with me : my study is so
full of it now, that there is hardly an inch of room for any
more. I shall have to throw out a wing soon.
Aad I am careful of my work, too. Why, some of the
 THREE MEN IN A BOAT
work that I have by me now has been in my possession for
years and years, and there finger-mark on it. I take
isn't a
a great pride in my work ; I take it down now and then and
dust it No man keeps his work in a better state oi preserva-
tion than I do.
But, though I crave for work, I still like to be fair. I
do not ask for more than my proper share.
But 1 get it without asking for it at least, so it appears
to me and this worries me.
George says he does not think I need trouble myself on
the subject. He thinks it is only my over-scrupulous nature
that makes me tear I am having more than my due ; and
that, as a matter of fact, I don't have half as much as I ought.
But I expect he only says this to comfort me.
In a boat, I have always noticed that it is the fixed idea
of each member of the crew that he is doing everything.
Harris's notion was, that it was he alone who had been
working, and that both George and I had been imposing
upon him. George, on the other hand, ridiculed the idea of
Harris's having done anything more than eat and sleep, and
had a cast-iron opinion that it was he George himself
who had done all the labour worth speaking of.
He said he had never been out with such a couple ot
lazily skulks as Harris and I.

That amused Harris.

"Fancy old George talking about work !" he laughed ;

"why, about half an hour of it would kilJ him. Have you

ever seen George work ?" he added, turning to me,
I agreed with Harris that I never had most certainly
not since we had started on this trip.
"Well, 1 don't see how YOU can know much about it, one
way or the other/* George retorted on Harris ;
"for I'm
blest if you haven't been asleep half the time. Have you
ever seen Harris fully awake, except at meal-time ?" asked
George, addressing me.
Truth compelled me to support George. Harris had been
very little good in the boat, so far as helping was concerned,
from the beginning.
"Well, hang it all, I've done more than old J., anyhow/'
rejoined Harris.
"Well, you couidn't very well have done less/' added
George.
140 JEROME K. JEROME
"I suppose J. thinks he is the passenger," continued
Harris,
And that was their gratitude to me for having brought
them and their wretched old boat way up from King-
all the
ston, and for having superintended and managed everything
for them, and taken care of them, and slaved for them. It
is the way of the world.

We settled the present difficulty by arranging that Harris

and George should scull up past Reading, and that I should
tow the boat on from there. Pulling a heavy boat against
a strong stream has few attractions for me now. There was
a time, long ago, when I used to clamour for the hard work :

now give the youngsters a chance.

I like to
I notice that most of the old river hands are similarly

retiring, whenever there is any stiff pulling to be done. You

can always tell the old river hand by the way in which he
stretches himself outupon the cushions at the bottom of the
boat, and encourages the rowers by telling them anecdotes
about the marvellous feats he performed last season.
"Call what you're doing hard work I" he drawls, between
his contented whiffs, addressing the two perspiring novices,
who have been grinding away steadily up stream for the last
hour and a half; "why, Jim BifHes and Jack and I, last
season, pulled up from Marlow to Goring in one afternoon
never stopped once. Do you remember that, Jack ?"
Jack, who has made himself a bed up in the prow of all
the rugs and coats he can collect, and who has been lying
there asleep for the last two hours, partially wakes up on
being thus appealed to, and recollects all about the matter,
and also remembers that there was an unusually strong stream
againstthem all the way likewise a stiff wind.
"About thirty-four miles, I suppose, it must have been/'
adds the first speaker, reaching down another cushion to put
under his head.
"No no; don't exaggerate, Tom," murmurs Jack,
reprovingly ; "thirty-three at the outside/'
And Jack and Tom, quite exhausted by this conversational
drop
effort, off to sleep once more. And the two simple-
minded youngsters at the sculls feel quite proud of being
allowed to row such wonderful oarsmen as Jack and Tom,
and strain away harder than ever.
When I was a young man, I used to listen to these tales
 THREE MEN IN A BOAT 141
from my and take them in, and swallow them, and
elders,
digest every word of them, and then come up for more ;
but the new generation do not seem to have the simple faith
of the old times. We George, Harris, and myself took a
"raw'un" up with us once last season, and we plied him with
the customary stretchers about the wonderful things we had
done all the way up.
We gave him all the regular ones the time-honoured
lies that have done duty up the river with every
boating-man
for years past and added seven entirely original ones that
we had invented for ourselves, including a really quite likely
story, founded, to a certain extent, on an all but true episode,
which had actually happened in a modified degree some
years ago to friends of ours a story that a mere child could
have believed without injuring itself, much.
And that young man mocked at them all, and wanted us
to repeat the feat then and there, and to bet us ten to one
that we didn't.
We got to chatting about our rowing experiences this
morning, and to recounting stories of our first efforts in the
art of oarsmanship. My own earliest boating recollection is
of five of us contributing threepence each and taking out a
curiously constructed craft on the Regent's Park lake, drying
ourselves subsequently in the park-keeper's lodge.
After that, having acquired a taste for the water, I did
a good deal of rafting in various suburban brickfields an
exercise providing more and excitement than might
interest
be imagined, especially when you are in the middle of the
pond and the proprietor of the materials of which the raft
is constructed suddenly appears on the bank, with a big stick

in his hand.
Your first sensation on seeing this gentleman is that,
somehow or other, you don't feel equal to company and
conversation, and that, if you could do so without appearing
rude, you would rather avoid meeting him ; and your object
is, therefore, to get off on the opposite side of the pond to
which he and to go home quietly and quickly, pretending
is,
not to see him. He, on the contrary, is yearning to take you
by the hand, and talk to you.
It appears that he knows your father, and is Intimately

acquainted with yourself, but this does not draw you towards
Mm. He says he'll teach you to take his boards and make
 142 JEROME K. JEROMB
a raft ofthem ; but, seeing that you know how to do this
pretty well already, the offer, though doubtless kindly meant,
seems a superfluous one on his part, and you are reluctant
to put him to any trouble by accepting it.
His anxiety to meet you, however, is proof against all
your coolness, and the energetic manner in which he dodges
up and down the pond so as to be on the spot to greet you
when you land is really quite flattering.
he be of a stout and short-winded build, you can easily
If
avoid his advances ; but, when he is of the youthful and
long-legged type, a meeting Is Inevitable. The interview is,
however, extremely brief, most of the conversation being on
his part, your remarks being mostly of an exclamatory and

monosyllabic order, and as soon as you can tear yourself

away you do so.
devoted some three months to rafting, and, being then
I
as proficient as there was any need to be at that branch of
the art, I determined to go In for rowing proper, and joined
one of the Lea boating clubs.
Being out in a boat on the river Lea, especially on Satur-
day afternoons, soon makes you smart at handling a craft,
and spry at escaping being run down by roughs or swamped
by barges ; and it also affords plenty of opportunity for
acquiring the most prompt and graceful method of lying down
flat at the bottom of the boat so as to avoid
being chucked
out into the river by passing tow lines.
But it does not give you style. It was not till I came to
the Thames that got style.I
My style of rowing is very much
admired now. People say it is so quaint.
George never went near the water until he was sixteen.
Then he and eight other gentlemen of about the same age
went down in a body to Kew one Saturday, with the idea of
hiring a boat there, and pulling to Richmond and back one ;

of their number, a shock-headed youth, named joskins, who

had once or twice taken out a boat on the Serpentine, told
them it was jolly fun,
boating !

> The tide was running out pretty rapidly when they reached
the landing-stage, and there was a stiff breeze blowing across
the river, out this did not trouble them at all, and they pro-
ceeded to select their boat.
There was an eight-oared racing outrigger drawn up on
the stage ; that was the one that took their fancy. They said
 THREE MEN Itf A BOAT 143

they'd have that one, please. The boatman was away, and
only his boy was in charge. The boy tried to damp their
ardour for the outrigger and showed them two or three very
comfortable-looking boats of the family-party build, but
those would not do at all ; the outrigger was the boat they
thought they would look best in.
So the boy launched it, and they took off their coats and
prepared to take their seats. The boy suggested that George,
who, even in those days,was always the heavy man of any
party, should be number four. George said he should be
happy to be number four, and promptly stepped into bow's
place and sat down with his back to the stern. They got
him into his proper position at last, and then the others
followed.
A particularly nervous boy was appointed cox, and the
steering principle explained to him by Joskins. Joskins
himself took stroke. He told the others it was simple
enough ; all they had to do was to follow him.
They said they were ready, and the boy on the landing-
stage took a boat-hook and shoved them off.
What then followed George is unable to describe in
detail. He has a confused recollection of having, imme-
diately on starting, received a violent blow in the small of the
back from the butt-end of number five's scull, at the same
time that his own seat seemed to disappear from under him
by magic, and leaving him sitting on the boards. He also
noticed, as a curious circumstance, that number two was at
the same instant lying on his back at the bottom of the boat,
with his legs in the air, apparently in a fit.
They passed under Kew Bridge, broadside, at the rate of
eight miles an hour. Joskins being the only one who was
rowing. George, on recovering his seat, tried to help him,
but, on dipping his oar into the water, it immediately, to his

intense surprise, disappeared under the boat, and nearly took

him with it.

And the "cox" threw both rudder lines overboard and

burst into tears.
How they got back George never knew, but it took them
just forty minutes. A dense crowd watched the entertain-
ment from Kew Bridge with much interest, and everybody
shouted out to them different directions. Three times they
managed to get the boat back through the arch, and three
 144 JEROME K. JEROME
times they were carried under it again, and every time "cox"
looked up and saw the bridge above him he broke out into
renewed sobs.
George said he little thought that afternoon that he
should ever come to really like boating.
Harris is more accustomed to sea rowing than to river
work, and says that, as an exercise, he prefers it. I don't.
I remember taking a small boat out at Eastbourne last summer :

I used to do a good deal of sea rowing years ago, and I thought

I should be all right; but I found I had forgotten the art

entirely. When one scull was deep down underneath the

water, the other would be flourishing wildly about in the air.
To get a grip of the water with both at the same time I had
to stand up. The parade was crowded with the nobility and
gentry, and I had to pull past them in
this ridiculous fashion.
I landed half-way down the beach, and secured the services
of an old boatman to take me back.
watch an old boatman rowing, especially one
I like to
who has been hired by the hour. There is something so
It is so free
beautifully calm and restful about his method.
from that fretful haste, that vehement striving, that is every
day becoming more and more the bane of nineteenth-century
life. He
is not for ever straining himself to pass all the other

boats. If another boat overtakes him and passes him it does

not annoy him ; as a matter of fact, they all do overtake him
and pass him all those that are going his way. This would
trouble and irritate some people ; the sublime equanimity of
the hired boatman under the ordeal affords us a beautiful
lesson against ambition and uppishness.
Plain practical rowing of the get-the-boat-along order is
not a very difficult art to acquire, but it takes a good deal of
practice before a man feels comfortable when rowing past
girls. the
It is "time" that worries a youngster. "It's jolly

funny," he says, as for the twentieth time within five minutes

he disentangles his sculls from yours ; "I can get on all right
when I'm by myself 1"
To see two novices try to keep time with one another is
very amusing. Bow
finds it
impossible to keep pace with
stroke, because stroke rows in such an extraordinary fashion.
Stroke is intensely at this, and explains that what
indignant
he has been endeavouring to do for the last ten minutes is to
adapt his method to bow's limited capacity. Bow, in turn,
 THREE MEN IN A BOAT 145
then becomes Insulted, and requests stroke not to trouble his
head about him (bow), but to devote his mind to setting a
sensible stroke.
"Or, ?" he adds, with the evident idea
shall I take stroke
that that would
once put the whole matter right.
at

They splash along for another hundred yards with still

moderate success, and then the whole secret of their trouble
bursts upon stroke like a flash of inspiration.
"I tell you what it is you've got my sculls," he cries,
:

turning to bow ; "pass yours over."

"Well, do you know, Fve been wondering how it was
I couldn't get on with these," answers bow, quite brightening
up, and most willingly assisting in the exchange. "Now we
shallbe all right."
But they are not not even then. Stroke has to stretch
his arms nearly out of their sockets to reach his sculls now ;
while bow's pair, at each recovery, hit him a violent blow in
the chest. So they change back again, and come to the
conclusion that the man
has given them the wrong set alto-
gether ; and over their mutual abuse of this man they become
quite friendly and sympathetic.
George said he had often longed to take to punting for a
change. Punting is not as easy as it looks. As in rowing,
you soon learn how to get along and handle the craft, but it
takes long practice before you can do this with dignity and
without getting the water all up your sleeve.
One young man I knew had a very sad accident happen
to him the time he went punting. He had been getting
first
on so well that he had grown quite cheeky over the business,
and was walking up and down the punt, working his pole
with a careless grace that was quite fascinating to watch. Up
he would march to the head of the punt, plant his pole, and
then run along right to the other end, just like an old punter.
Oh ! was grand.
it

And it would all have

gone on being grand if he had not
unfortunately, while looking round to enjoy the scenery,
taken just one step more than there was any necessity for, and
walked off the puat altogether. The pole was firmly fixed in
the mud, and he was left clinging to it while the punt drifted
away. It was an undignified position for him. A rude boy
on the bank immediately yelled out to a lagging chum to
"hurry up and see a real monkey on a stick".
 146 JEROME K. JEROME
could not go to his assistance, because, as ill-luck would
I
have it, we had not taken the proper precaution to bring out
a spare pole with us. I could only sit and look at him. His
expression as the pole slowly sank with him I shall never
forget ; there was so much thought in it.
I watched him gently let down into the water, and saw
him scramble out, sad and wet. I could not help
laughing,
he looked such a ridiculous figure. I continued to chuckle
to myself about it for some time, and then it was suddenly
forced upon me that really I had got very little to laugh at when
I came to think of it. Here was I, alone in a punt, without a
pole, drifting helplessly down mid-stream possibly towards
a wur.
I began to feel very indignant with my friend for having
stepped overboard and gone off in that way. He might, at all
events, have left me the pole.
I drifted on for about a quarter of a mile, and then I came
In sight of a fishing-punt moored in mid-stream, in which sat
two old fishermen. They saw me bearing down upon them,
and they called out to me to keep out of their way.
"I can't," I shouted back.
f
*But you don't try/* they answered.
I explained the matter to them when I got nearer, and

they caught me and lent me a pole. The weir was just fifty
yards below. I am glad they happened to be there.
The first went punting was in company with three
time I
other fellows ; they were going to show me how to do it.
We could not all start together, so I said I would go down
first and get out the punt, and then I could potter about and

practise a bit until they came.

I could not get a punt out that afternoon, they were
all engaged ; so I had nothing else to do but to sit down
on the bank, watching the river, and waiting for my
friends.
I had not been sitting there long before my attention
became attracted to a man in a punt who, I noticed with some
surprise, wore a jacket and cap exactly like mine. He was
evidently a novice at punting, and his performance was most
interesting. You never knew what was going to happen
when he put the pole in ; he evidently did not know himself.
Sometimes he shot up stream and sometimes he shot down
stream, and at other times he simply spun round and came
 THREE MEN IN A BOAT 147

up the other side of the pole. And with every result he

seemed equally surprised and annoyed.
The people about the river began to get quite absorbed
in him after a while, and to make bets with one another as
to what would be the outcome of his next
push.
In the course of time my friends arrived on the opposite
bank, and they stopped and watched him too. His back was
towards them, and they only saw his jacket and cap. From
this they immediately jumped to the conclusion that it was I,
their beloved companion, who was making an exhibition of
himself, and their delight knew no bounds. They commenced
to chaff him unmercifully.
I did not
grasp their mistake at first, and I thought, "How
rude of them to go on like that, with a perfect stranger, too 1"
But before 1 could call out and reprove them, the explanation
of the matter occurred to me, and I withdrew behind a tree.
Oh, how they enjoyed themselves, ridiculing that young
man 1 For five good minutes they stood there, shouting
ribaldry at him, deriding him, mocking him, jeering at him.
They peppered him with stale jokes, they even made a few
new ones and threw at him. They hurled at him all the
private family jokes belonging to our set, and which must
have been perfectly unintelligible to him. And then, unable
to stand their brutal jibes any longer, he turned round on
them, and they saw his face 1

1 was
glad to notice that they had sufficient decency left
in them to look very foolish. They explained to him that

they had thought he was someone they knew. They said

they hoped he would not deem them capable of so insulting
anyone except a personal friend of their own.
Of course their having mistaken him tor a friend excused
it. I remember Harris telling me once of a bathing experience
he had at Boulogne. He was swimming about there near the
beach, when he felt himself suddenly seized by the neck from
behind, and forcibly plunged under water. He struggled
violently, but whoever had got hold of him seemed to be a

perfect Hercules in strength, and all his efforts to escape were

unavailing. He had given up kicking, and was trying to
turn his thoughts upon solemn things, when his captor
released him.
He regained his feet, and looked round for his would-be
murderer. The assassin was standing close by him, laughing
148 JEROME K. JEROME
heartily, but the moment he caught sight of Harris's face, as
k emerged from the water, he started back and seemed quite
concerned.
"1 really beg your pardon/' he stammered confusedly,
"but I took you for a friend of mine I"
Harris thought it was lucky for him the man had not
mistaken him for a relation, or he would probably have been
drowned outright.
is a thing that wants
Sailing knowledge and practice too
though, as a boy, 1 did not think so. I had an idea it came
natural to a body, like rounders and touch. I knew another

boy who held this view likewise, and so, one windy day, we
thought we would try the sport. We were stopping down at
Yarmouth, and we decided we would go for a trip up the
Yare. We hired a sailing boat at the yard by the bridge, and
started off.
"It's rather a rough day/' said the man to us, as we put off :

"better take in a reef and luff sharp when you get round the
bend."
We said we would make a point of it, and left him with a
cheery "Good morning", wondering to ourselves how you
"luffed", and where we were to get a "reef" from, and what
we were to do with it when we had got it.
We rowed until we were out of sight of the town, and
then, with a wide stretch of water in front of us, and the wind
blowing a perfect hurricane across it, we felt that the time had
come to commence operations.
Hector think that was his name went on pulling
I
while I unrolled the sail. It seemed a complicated job, but
I accomplished it at length, and then came the question,
which was the top end ?
By a sort of natural instinct, we, of course, eventually
decided that the bottom was the top, and set to work to fix
It
upside-down. But it was a long time before we could get
it
up, either that way or any other way. The impression on
the mind of the sail seemed to be that we were playing at
funerals, and that I was the corpse and itself was the winding
sheet.
When it found that this was not the idea, it hit me over the
head with the boom, and refused to do anything.
"Wet it,'* said Hector ; "drop it over and get it wet/'
He said people in ships always wetted the sails before they
 THREE MEN IN A BOAT 149

put them up. So I welted it; but that only made matters
worse than they were before. A dry sail clinging to your
legs and wrapping itself round your head is not pleasant, but,
when the sail is becomes quite vexing.
sopping wet, it

We did get the thing up at last, the two of us together.

We fixed it, not exactly upside-down more sideways like
and we tied it up to the mast with the painter, which we cut
off for the purpose.
That the boat did not upset I simply state as a fact. Why
itdid not upset I am unable to offer any reason. I have often

thought about the matter since, but I have never succeeded in

arriving at any satisfactory explanation of the phenomenon.
Possibly the result may have been brought about by the
natural obstinacy of all things in this world. The boat may
possibly have come to the conclusion, judging from a cursory
view of our behaviour, that we had come out for a morning's
suicide, and had thereupon determined to disappoint us.
That is the only suggestion I can offer,
By clinging like grim death to the gunwale, we just
managed to keep inside the boat, but it was exhausting work.
Hector said that pirates and other seafaring people generally
lashed the rudder to something or other, and hauled in the
main top-jib, during severe squalls, and thought we ought to
try to do something of the kind ; but I was for letting her
have her head to the wind.
As my advice was by far the easiest to follow, we ended
by adopting it, and contrived to embrace the gunwale and
give her her head.
The boat travelled up stream for about a mile at a pace I
have never sailed at since, and don't want to again. Then,
at a bend, she heeled over till half her sail was under water.
Then she righted herself by a miracle and flew for a long low
bank of soft mud.
That mud-bank saved us. The boat ploughed its way
into the middle of it, and then stuck. Finding that we were
once more able to move according to our ideas, instead of
being pitched and thrown about like peas in a bladder, we
crept forward and cut down the sail.
We had had enough of sailing. We did not want to overdo
the thing and get a surfeit of it. We had had a sail a good
all-round exciting, interesting sail and now we thought
we would have a row, just for a change like.
IJO JEROME K. JEROME
We took the sculls and push the boat ^ff the
tried to
mud, and, in doing so, we broke one of the sculls. Attet
thar we proceeded with great caution, but they were a wretched
old pair, and lett us helpless.
The mud stretched out tor about a hundred yards in front
of us, and behind us was the water. The only thing to be
done was to sit and wait until someone came by.
't was nor the sort of day to attract
people out on the
river, and it was three hours before a soul came in sight. It
was an old fisherman who, with immense difficulty, at last
rescued us, and we were towed back in an ignominious fashion
to the boatyard.
What between tipping the man who had brought us
home, and paying for the broken sculls, and tor having been
out four hours and a half, it cost us a pretty considerable
number of weeks' pocket money, that sail. But we learned
experience, and they say that is always cheap at an) price.
 HARRY GRAHAM
Biffin on Acquaintances

Harry Graham was formerly tn officer in thr Cold-

stream Guards, and since retiring from the army has
made a great name for himself as a writer of light
verse ana humorous stories, including the inimitable
fjtfkltss Rkyms. He has also written the lyrics fo*
Tbi Mmd of tk* Mountains and othec successful
 BIFFIN ON ACQUAINTANCES

WE
in
weresitting in the pavilion at Lord's cricket ground,
Reginald Biffin and I, eagerly watching a Test Match,
company with a host of other middle-aged enthusiasts. It

was a typical English summer's day. A cold north wind

swept across the ground, blowing up our legs and down our
necks, making the draughty wooden benches seem better
ventilated than ever. But though we might perhaps have been
pardoned for feeling a trifle chilled and miserable, the excite-
ment of the occasion kept us warm, and we huddled happily
together, determined to miss no single incident of a momen-
tous match upon the issue of which so much of our national
honour depended.
The game that had just begun promised to be of a more
than usually thrilling character. The two Australian bats-
men who had opened the innings were playing with the con-
fidence and caution that one has learnt to expect from first-
class cricketers. In an hour and twenty-seven minutes one
of them had succeeded in making eighteen runs, and although
his partner had not yet scored, it was evident to such experts
as Biffin and myself that within the next half-hour or so he
would be tempted to open his shoulders and punish the
bowling severely by snicking a ball past silly-point for at
least one run.
In the pavilion the excitement was intense. Many of
the older members, unable to stand the strain, had hurried
away to the ground floor bar, leaving umbrellas and match-
cards on their seats to reserve their places and act as dumb
witnesses of their passionate interest in the game. On a single
row of benches I counted no less than fourteen of these tokens,
and the distant clink of glass upon glass showed that theii
owners had not forsaken them, however temporarily, without
a cause.
Biffin was as usual deriving a considerable amount of
154 HARRY GRAHAM
innocent pleasure from pointing out to me many of the
celebrities by whom we were surrounded whom I already
knew quite well by sight. There in a far corner, with his
back to us, was a deservedly popular figure, which, if only it
could have been induced to turn round, we felt sure we
should recognize as that of a well-known playwright and
novelist. Next to him sat a man, who but for his clerical
collar and episcopal gaiters, presented all the appearance of a
famous pugilist. His eyes were half-closed, and his mouth
half-open, and it was fairly evident that the worthy prelate
was engaged in praying against rain.
All round us sat the great men of the day (or of past days)
politicians, soldiers, civil servants, statesmen an ex-Prime
Minister refilling his pipe, an ex-Lord Chancellor returning
flushed from the tea-room, a well-known Sea Lord talking to
a better-known Landlord, a distinguished Law Lord talking
to himself all the lovers of sport who have helped to make
:

England what she is to-day but upon whom so brave a respon-

sibility seemed at the moment to lie but lightly. Here and
there among them, too, crouched the lesser fry, men like
Reginald and myself, clergymen, schoolmasters, writers,
rugged men with rugged faces (and occasionally rather rugged
trousers), the best product of our public-school system, all
united in the one desire to see the best side win, but fer-
vently hoping that it would not do so unless it
happened to
be our own.
"You've heard of Sir George Tuff," said Biffin suddenly,
rather unnecessarily rousing me from a few moments' well-
earned slumber.
"No," I said, "never."
"Well, that's him over there." He pointed to a large
man in a grey billycock hat, who was sitting in a centre seat
behind the bowler's arm, secretly grappling with the crossword
in a morning paper. "A great leader of men," he explained,
"and a great follower of women."
"Oh, really," I said. "How extremely interesting."
I turned over on the other side and settle down again, but
Reginald was feeling remorselessly conversational.
"You know Colonel Barbecue ?" he asked a moment later.
"No," I said, "I'm afraid I don't. Who is he ?"
"I don't know," said Biffin, "but that's him over there,
scratching himself with a match-card."
 BIFFIN ON ACQUAINTANCES 155

"Indeed ?"
I could not help wishing I had brought my
opera-glasses
so that I could have examined the irritable colonel more
closely.
The conversation flagged for a few moments.
"Did you ever meet old Lord Gorbals ?" I asked at
length, for it was clearly my turn to speak and I was deter-
mined not to be put to shame by my friend's superior know-
ledge of the world.
"No," said Biffin. "Did you ?"
"No," I "but
said, I thought that old gentleman by the
flagstaff might be he."
"Why did you think might be him ?" he asked.
it

"I didn't. I
thought it might be he."
"Do you know him by sight ?" said Reginald.
"No."
"Then why"
"I don't know."
5

"By the way/ 1 added, "how's the Duke ?"

"Which Duke ?" said Biffin, bridling modestly.
"Any Duke,"
"Oh."
Another brief silence ensued, broken at Jast by Biffin
leaning across and whispering something unintelligible in
my ear.
"What's that ?" I asked.
"Sh-shl" he answered in a low voice. "Don't look
round 1"
"Why not ?"
"There's a fellow sitting just behind us," he replied,
"who was at school with me."
"Good Lord I" I said. "I quite understand."
One of the great disadvantages of attending a popular
cricket match at Lord's is that one is in constant danger of

meeting old acquaintances whom one had believed nay,

even hoped to be long since dead. It is almost impossible
to walk round the ground without being greeted as a long-
lost brother by boyhood's friends, whose names one had

mercifully forgotten, whom one had justifiably counted upon

never setting eyes on again. Oddly enough, too, one's
contemporaries have all become excessively old, if not
actually in their dotage, and I know few things more disturb-
 156 HARRY GRAHAM
ing than to find that the majority of men who
were at school
with one are suffering from senile decay. At Lord's this is
a constant and bitter experience which it is very difficult to
Biffin, however, has his own method
avoid. of dealing
with it.

As he and were strolling across to examine the pitch,

I
to make
during one of those numerous intervals which help
cricket so thrilling a game, we were suddenly accosted by*a
very old gentleman with a long grey beard and an
Inverness

cape, who looked as though the moth had been

at him for
some time.
"Well Well
! Well I" he exclaimed with every symp-
1

tom of genuine delight as soon as he caught sight of my

companion, "If it isn't Reginald Biffin 1"
The remark itself was a singularly inane one, for of course
if it wasn't Biffin it must have been somebody else, which it
could not possibly be. In such circumstances, however, it
seems to be a very favourite clich.
"You don't remember me, eh ?" the dotard continued,
wagging his beard in a painfully roguish fashion,
"I'm afraid not/' said Biffin rather coldly.
"We used to go caterpillar-hunting together at St.

Domino's," the stranger explained, while a moth which at

that moment flew out of his beard seemed to bear silent
witness to the truth of his assertion.
"I was never at St. Domino's," said Biffin cruelly, "and
I
particularly dislikecaterpillars." He brushed away the
moth as he spoke, for it was obviously making advances to
his hat.
"
-But
"My name isnot Biffin," said Reginald. "I am Colonel
Montmorency of the King's Own Loyal Buffs. Good
afternoon I" With that, raising his hat (in which the moth
had by this time succeeded in laying several eggs), he moved
away, leaving the oid gentleman a prey to the utmost per-
plexity and embarrassment.
"Aren't you being rather unkind, Reginald ?" 1 said, as
soon as we were out of earshot. (I belong to a society for
the prevention of cruelty to beavers, and would willingly
have subscribed to buy the old man a packet of moth-balls.)
"Nonsense," said Biffin. "Nonsense 1 Come away
quickly 1" he added, seizing me by the arm, for at that moment
 BIFFIN ON ACQUAINTANCES IJ7
a tall familiar figure could be seen bearing rapidly down
upon us, and we had both recognized another companion of
our youth from whom it was essential to escape.
Sir Pugsley Grout for it was no less distinguished a man
than he is perhaps the most popular as well as one of the
most eminent of our modern English surgeons.. In the
days when operations for appendicitis were still fashionable
there were but few members of the British aristocracy who
had not allowed Sir Pugsley to relieve them of some if not
all of those superfluous
internal^ organs
with which Nature
had so unnecessarily provided them. Many of the wealthiest
residents of Mayfair still carry about with them mementos
of his skill in the shape of various surgical appliances which
in the hurry of the moment he so often leaves behind him.
No wonder, then, that if Sir Pugsley is deservedly popular in
Society he should be even better beloved by the medical
fraternity, for whom his continual discovery of new and
possibly fatal diseases supplies scope for much interesting
experimental work of an amusing and lucrative character.
OnJy last year, you may remember, he wrote to the public
press, prognosticating the imminent arrival, long overdue, of
a particularly virulent epidemic of Russian influenza which
was to decimate society. When this prophecy was not actually
fulfilled the public mind having unfortunately been tem-
porarily diverted to the iriore absorbing subject of our lapse
from the Gold Standard when, as I say, the ravages of the
fell disease did not at all come up to
expectations, he was
clever enough to invent a hitherto unknown nervous disorder
which he named "Sciuridosis" and attributed to an obscure
infection spread among the community by squirrels. The
commonest symptoms included matudinal lassitude, a sense
of fullness after meals and a general disinclination to work,
and the ailment was chiefly confined to the wealthier classes.
You will recall the panic that ensued among all parents
whose offspring possessed tame squirrels ; how a special
Squirrel Week was instituted to deal with these otherwise
charming little creatures, and how the Board of Trade finally
forbade the importation of foreign squirrels and suggested
elaborate means of exterminating what had hitherto been
regarded as a fairly harmless type of vermin.
In Sussex alone, in less than a month, three hundred red
squirrels were shot or wounded by zealous hygienists ; the
 158 HARRY GRAHAM
head master of Eton was forced to flog three members of
Third Form for attempting to conceaJ squirrels in their otto-
mans, and the head master of Harrow issued an edict to the
effect that any boy in Lower Shell found in possession ot a

squirrel would be deprived

of his straw hat and compelled
to attend three military parades a week. Meanwhile Lord
Porpentine wrote to Tbe TwtJ to boast that
on his Berkshire
estates not a single squirrel survived, and in the fur market
the price of skunk fell to a ridiculously low figure,
It must be six months at least since Sir Pugsley has been

able to infect the public mind with any ftesh ailment of a

serious nature, but his labours are unceasing and, given the
wholehearted cooperation of his colleagues and a sufficiently
hard winter, they will doubtless bear fruit before the year
is out.

Sir Pugslev Grout minor as we then knew him had been

at a private school with Biffin and myselt. His intense love
of Nature which there expressed itself in the habit of blowing
addled birds* eggs and eviscerating the semi-decomposed
carcasses of deceased mice in the dormitory, had caused htm
to be regarded with mixed feelings by his less scientifically-
minded feiiows. As far as I was concerned a long period of
absence had in no way lessened my distaste for his society,
and Reginald obviously shared my views.
"Come away quick 1" he said, as the great surgeon hove
in sight.
Alas he had not spoken soon enough. As we looked
I

round for a loophole of escape the chances of eluding our

ancient playmate seemed excessively remote. AJ1 around us

surged a crowd of bustling spectators obeying the summons

of the first warning bell ana hurrying back to the stands.
They compassed us about on every side they compassed us
:

about, I say, on every side, while one obvious line of retreat

was cut off by half a dozen brawny groundsmen who advanced
towards us dragging the immense roller with which they had
just been levelling the pitch. The situation was indeed a
delicate and difficult one, but Biffin is a man of infinite
resource and rose gallantly to the occasion.
Sir Pugsley Grout bore ruthlessly down upon us, as I
have explained and that "bore" is the mot iust* (as M. Hugo
would say) all his friends will readily admit. Scarcely,
however, had he time to extend a welcoming hand and
 BIFFIN ON ACQUAINTANCES 159
"
exclaim before Reginald had
: "Well, well, well, if it isn't

and proceeded to push

seized his fingers with a grip of iron
him gently but implacably backwards into the track of the
oncoming roller. At the same time he accidentally allowed
the hdndle of his umbrella to become entangled round the
surgeon's left ankle.
As the result of this brilliant manoeuvre Sir Pugsley was
forced to step backwards and, in so doing, lost his balance,
slipped up and fell heavily upon the turf at our feet. The
efforts of six agonized groundsmen were alas ! insufficient to

bring the roller to a standstill before it had passed over his

prostrate form. Amid the scenes of confusion that followed,
while First Aid was being administered and ambulances sum-
moned, Reginald and I managed to slink nonchalantly back
to our seats in the pavilion, where we were soon engrossed
once more in the details of the day's play.
Owing to recent heavy rains and the consequent softness
of the ground, Sir Pugsley's accident inflicted a considerable
amount of damage upon the outfield. He himself, on the
other hand, was not nearly so seriously hurt as might have
been expected. Unfortunately, however, he had been carry-
ing in his tailcoat pocket a spare pair of forceps with which
he proposed that very evening to extract the tonsils of a lady
of title, and with the impact of the heavy roller these instru-
ments became somewhat deeply embedded in his spine. He
was consequently fated to experience much of the discomfort
from which patients of his had often suffered, and spent
nearly tw-o months in a fashionable nursing-home which had
just been opened in one of London's noisiest thoroughfares.
Here, for the sum of twenty-five guineas a week, he was
privileged to occupy a small attic bedroom on the sixth floor,
and to enjoy a bill of fare consisting chiefly of underdone
plaice and tepid tapioca pudding.
No account of the accident ever appeared in the press,
though on of our more sensational Sunday papers published
a paragraph cautiously headed : "Alleged Attempted Suicide
of Alleged West End Club Man." Sinister rumours, how-
ever, were spread in certain Australian circles hinting that an
attempt had been made to ruin the pitch and thus deprive the
Commonwealth of a hard -won victory. The head grounds-
man was luckily in a position to be able to issue a dementi, and
the amicable relations between the Motherland and her far-
 I6O HARRY GRAHAM
flung outposts were never seriously endangered.
The story
that described the grey squirrels from Regent's Park as
holding a nocturnal mass meeting
and thanksgiving service at
Lord's cannot be as credible, though it is true that
regarded
the spread and popularity of Sciuridosis waned considerably
during Sir Pugley's convalescence.
When I reproached Reginald for what I could not help
regarding as the rather callous attitude that he adopted
towards old acquaintances, he excused himself by evolving
the following theory. Friends (he said) are all very well in
their way, for to a certain extent one is able to pick and choose
one's friends, though not so easily of course as one can choose
one's enemies. Acquaintances, on the other hand, stand in a
is practically nothing to be
totally different category, and there
urged in favour of encouraging their advances. To begin
with, one has little or no say in their selection ; they
are more
often than not wished upon one by circumstances or environ-
ment, and, as a rule, may be justly said to serve no useful
to con-
purpose whatsoever. Furthermore, it is appalling
sider the waste of time involved in the revival of old acquaint-
anceships.
After a merciful interval of many years two acquaintances
are re-united, much to their mutual embarrassment.
"Hullo, old man I This is a surprise I" says one of them
with an imitation of heartiness that deceives nobody. "It's

ages since we met, eh ?"

"Ages I" agrees the other thankfully.
'
"What are you doing with yourself these days ?' asks the
first a purely rhetorical question which it would be impossible
to answer in less than half an hour.
"Oh, I don't know. What are you ?" is the recognised

reply.
Thereupon conversation reaches an impasse, each of the
two protagonists vainly searching his mind for a suitable
excuse to get away from the other as quickly as possible. At
the very bottom of cither's mind lies the profound convic-
tionthe certainty, rather that the perfectly good reason
why two persons have not met for ages is that neither of them
has ever felt the slightest inclination to meet the other, or he
would undoubtedly have done so in fact, that they had both
;

sincerely hoped that they would never meet again.

"Come, come, Reginald," I said, when he had finished
 BIFFIN ON ACQUAINTANCES l6l

propounding these very cynical views. "That won't do

at all I"

"Why not ?"

"Should old acquaintance be forgot ?" I asked, for I am a
confirmed sentimentalist at heart.
"Undoubtedly/' he replied with conviction, "and never
brought to mind 1"
"Perhaps you're right," I said, and as by this time it had
begun to snow, we left our pavilion seats and h^trned to join
the more sensible of our fellow members in the bar.
 A, A. MILNE
The

A. A. Milne was for several years assistant editor of

Punch, to wliich he contributed many humorous
sketches and articles. Since the war he has turned
his attention to the theatre, and many of his plays
have had successful runs. He is also, of course, the
creator of that celebrated character "Winnie-the-
Pooh".
 Tfffi HOUSE-WARMING

I. WORK FOR ALL

"TT TELL/' said Dahlia, "what do you think of it ?"

VV I knocked the ashes out of my after-breakfast plpe>
arranged the cushions of my deck-chair, and let my eyes
wander lazily over the house and its surroundings. After a
year of hotels and other people's houses, Dahlia and Archie
had come into their own.
"Fve no complaints," I said happily.
A vision of white and gold appeared in the doorway and
glided over the lawn toward us Myra with a jug.
"None at all/' said Simpson, sitting up eagerly.
"But Thomas isn't quite satisfied with one of the bath-
rooms, I'm afraid. I heard him saying something in the
passage about it this morning when I was inside."
"I asked if you'd gone to sleep in the bath," explained
Thomas.
"I hadn't. It is practically impossible, Thomas, to go
to sleep in a cold bath."
"Except, perhaps, for a Civil Servant," said Blair.
"Exactly. Of the practice in the Admiralty Thomas can
tell us later on. For myself I was at the window looking at
the beautiful view."
"Why can't you look at it from your own window instead
of keeping people out of the bathroom ?" grunted Thomas.
'Because the view from my room is an entirely different
one."
"There is no stint in this house," Dahlia pointed out.
"No," said Simpson, jumping up excitedly.
Myra put the jug of cider down in front of us.
"There I" she said. "Please count it, and see that I
haven't drunk any on the way."
"This is awfully nice of you, Myra. And a complete
X63
1 66 A. A. MILNE
surprise to of us except Simpson. We shall probably be
all

here again to-morrow about the same time/'

There was a long silence, broken only by the extremely
jolly sound of Liquid falling from a height.
Just as it was coming to an end Archie appeared suddenly
among us and dropped on the grass by the side of Dahlia.
Simpson looked guiltily at the empty jug, and then leant
down to his host.
*
"To-morrow I" he said in a stage whisper. "About the
same tint*"
"I doubt It," said Archie.
"I know it for a fact/'
protested Simpson.
"I'm afraid Myra and Samuel made an assignation for
this morning," said Dahlia.
"There's nothing in it, really," said Myra. "He's only
trifling with me. He doesn't mean anything."
Simpson buried his confused head in his glass, and

proceeded to change the subject

"We all like your house, Archie," he said.
"We do," I agreed, "and we think it's very nice of you
to ask us down to open it."
"It
rather," said Archie.
is

"We
are determined, therefore, to do all we can to give
the house a homey appearance. I did what I could for the

bathroom this morning. I flatter myself thai the taint of new-

ness has now been dispelled."
"I was sure was you," said Myra. "How do you get
it

the water right up the wails ?"

"Easily. Further, Archie, if you want any suggestions
as to how to improve the place, our ideas are at your disposal/'
"For instance," said Thomas, "where do we play cricket ?"
"By the way, you fellows," announced Simpson, "Ivc
given up playing cricket/'
We all looked at him in consternation.
"Do you mean you've given up bowling?" said Dahlia,
with wide-open eyes.
"Aren't you ever going to walk to the wickets again?'
asked Blair,
"Aren't you ever going to walk back to the pavilion
again ?" asked Archie.
"What will Montgomeryshire say ?" wondered Myra in
tones of awe.
 THE HOUSE-WARMING 167

"May I have your belt and your sand-shoes ?" I begged'

"It's the cider," said Thomas. "I knew he was over-
doing it."

Simpson fixed his classes firmly on his nose and looked

round at us benignly.
"Pve given it up for golf," he observed.
"Traitor," said everyone.
"And the Triangular Tournament arranged for, anJ
everything," added Myra.
"You could make a jolly little course round here," went
"
on the infatuated victim. "If you like, Archie, I'll
Archie stood up and made a speech.
"Ladies and gentlemen," he said, "at eleven-thirty to-
morrow precisely I invite you to the paddock beyond the
kitchen-garden.*'
"Myra and I have an appointment," put in Simpson
hastily.
"A
net will be erected," Archie went on, ignoring him,
"and Mr. Simpson will take his stand therein, while we all
bowl at him or, if any prefer it, at the wicket for five
minutes. He will then bowlan hour, after which
at us for
he will have another hour's smart fielding practice. If he is
still alive and still talks about golf, why, then, I won't say

but what he mightn't be allowed to plan out a little course

or, at any rate, to do a little
preliminary weeding."
"Good man," said Simpson.
"And if anybody else thinks he has given up cricket for
ludo or croquet or oranges and lemons, then he can devote
himsc If to planning out a little course for that too or any-
how to removing a few plantains in preparation for it. In
fact, ladiesand gentlemen, all I want is for you to make your-
selves as happy and as useful as you can."
"It's what you're here for," said Dahlia.

II. A GALA PERFORMANCE

The sun came into my room early next morning and woke
me up. was followed* immediately by a large blue-bottle
It

which down to play with me. We adopted the usual

settled
formation, the blue bottle keeping mostly to the back of the
court while I waned at the net for a kill. After two sets I
decided to change my tactics. I looked up at the ceiling and
1 68 Ai A. MILNE
pretended I wasn't playing. The blue-bottle settled on my
nose and walked up my forehead. "Heavens J'* 1 erica,
"Pve forgotten my tooth-brush I" This took it completely
by surprise, and I removed its corpse into the candlestick.
Then Simpson came in with a golf club in his hand.
"Great Scott," he shouted, "you're not still in bed ?'*
"1 am not. This is telepathic suggestion. You think
Pm in bed appear to be in bed ; in reality there is no bed
; I
here. Do go away I haven't had a wink of sleep yet/*

"But, man, look at the lovely morning I"

"Simpson/* I said sternly, rolling up the sleeves of my
pyjamas with great deliberation, "I have had one visitor
already to-day. His corpse is now in the candlestick. It is an
omen, Simpson/*
"I thought you*d like to come outside with me, and I'd
1
show you my swing/
"Yes, yes, I shall like to sec that, but after breakfast,
Simpson. I suppose one of the gardeners put it up for you ?
You must show me your box of soldiers and your tricycle
horse, too. But run away now, there's a good boy/*
"My golf-swing, idiot/'
I sat up in bed and stared at him in sheer amazement. For
a long time words wouldn't come to me. Simpson backed
nervously to the door.
"I saw the Coronation,** I said at last, and I dropped back
on my pillow and went to sleep.

"I feel very important/' said Archie, coming on to the

lawn where Myra and I were playing a quiet game of bowls
with the croquet balls. "I've been paying the wages/*
"Archie and I do hate it so,** said Dahlia. "I'm luckier,
because I only pay mine once a month/'
"It would be much nicer if they did It for love," said
Archie, "and just accepted a tie-pin occasionally. I never
know what to say when I hand a man eighteen-and-six."
"Here's eighteen-and-six/* I suggested, "and don't bite the
half-sovereign, because it may be bad."
"You should shake his hand,** said Myra, "and say, 'Thank
you very much for the azaleas*/*
"Or you might wrap the money up in paper and leave it
for him in one of the beds/*
 THE HOUSE-WARMING
1
"And then you'd know whether he had made it properly/
"Well, you're all very heplful," said Archie. "Thank you
extremely. Where are the others ? It's a pity that they should
be left out of this/*
"Simpson disappeared after breakfast with his golf clubs.
He is in high dudgeon which is the surname of a small fish
because no one wanted to see his swing."
"Oh, but I do V said Dahlia eagerly. "Where is he ?"
9

"We will track him down/' announced Archie. "I will go

to the stables, unchain the truffle-hounds, and show them one
of his reversible cuffs."
We found Simpson in the pigsty. The third hole, as he
was planning it out for Archie, necessitated the carrying of
the farm buildings, which he described as a natural haxard.
Unfortunately, his ball had fallen into a casual pigsty. It had
not yet been decided whether the ball could be picked out
without penalty the more immediate need being to find the
blessed thing. So Simpson was in the pigsty, searching.
"If you're looking for the old sow," I said, "there she is,
just behind you/' *>

"What's the local rule about loose pigs blown on to the

course ?" asked Archie.
"Oh, you fellows, there you are 1" said Simpson rapidly.
"I'm getting on first-rate. This is the third hole, Archie. It
will be rather good, I think ; the green is just the other side
of the pond. I can make a very sporting little course."
"We've come to see your swing, Samuel," said Myra,
"Can you do it in there, or is it too crowded ?"
"I'll come out. This ball's lost, I'm afraid."
"One of the little pigs will eat it," complained Archie, "and
we shall have india-rubber crackling."
Simpson came out and proceeded to give his display.
Fortunately the weather kept fine, the conditions indeed being
all that could be desired. The sun shone brightly, and there
was a slight breeze from the south which tempered the heat
and in no way militated against the general enjoyment. The
performance was divided into two parts. The first part con-
sisted of Mr. Simpson's swing without the ball, the second part
being devoted to Mr. Simpson's swing with the ball.
"This is my swing," said Simpson.
He settled himself ostentatiously into his stance and placed
hk club-head stiffly on the ground three feet away from him.
 A. A. MILNB
"Middle," said Archie.
Simpson frowned and began to waggle his club. He
waggled it
carefully a dozen times.
"It's a very nice swing," said Myra at the end of the ninth
movement, "but isn't it rather short ?"
Simpson said nothing, but drew his club slowly and jerkily
back, twisting his body and keeping his eye fixed on an
imaginary ball until the back of his neck hid it from sight.
"You can see it better round this side now," suggested
A 1
Archie.
"He'll split he goes on," said Thomas anxiously.
if
"Watch warned Myra. "He's going to pick a pin
this," I
out of the back of his calf with his teeth."
Then Simpson let himself go, finishing up in a very credit-
able knot indeed.
"That's quite good," said Dahlia. "Does it do as well
when there's a ball ?"
"Well, I miss it sometimes, of course."
"We all do that," said Thomas.
Thus encouraged, Simpson put down a ball and began to
address it.was apparent at once that the last address had
It
been only his telegraphic one ; this was the genuine affair.
After what seemed to be four or five minutes there was a
general feeling that some apology was necessary. Simpson
recognized this himself.
"I'm a little nervous," he said.
"Not so nervous as the pigs are," said Archie.
Simpson finished his address and got on to his swing. He
swung. He hit the ball. The ball, which seemed to have too
much left-hand side on it, whizzed off and disappeared into
the pond. It sank. . . .

Luckily the weather had held up till the last.

"Well, well," said Archie, "it's time for lunch. We have
had a riotous morning. Let's all take it easy this afternoon."

III. UNEXPECTED GUESTS

Sometimes I do a little work in the morning. Doctors are
agreed now that an occasional spell of work in the morning
doesn't do me any harm. My announcement at breakfast that
thiswas one of the mornings was greeted with a surprised
enthusiasm which was most flattering. Archie offered me his
 THE HOUSE-WARMING IJl

own room where he does his thinking ; Simpson offered me

a nib ; and Dahlia promised me a quiet time till lunch, I
thanked them all and settled down to work.
But Dahlia didn't keep her promise. My first hour was
peaceful, but after that I had inquiries by every post. Blair
looked in to know where Myra was Archie asked if Fd
;

seen Dahlia anywhere ; and when finally Thomas's head

appeared in the doorway I decided that I had had enough
of it.
"Oh, I say/* began Thomas, "will you come and but I
suppose you're busy/'
"Not too busy," I said, "to spare a word or two for an old
friend," and I picked up the dictionary to throw at him. But
he was gone before I could take aim.
"This is the end," I said to myself, and after five minutes
more decided to give up work and seek refreshment and
congenial conversation. To my surprise I found neither.
Every room seemed to be empty, the tennis lawn was deserted,
and Archie's cricket bag and Simpson's golf clubs rested
peacefully
in the hall. Something was going on. I went
work and decided
back to my to have the secret out at lunch.
"Now then," I said, when that blessed hour arrived, "tell
me about it. You've deserted me all morning, but I'm not
going to be left out."
"It'syour fault for shutting yourself up."
"Duty," I said, slapping chest
my "duty," and I knocked
my glass over with an elbow. "Oh, Dahlia, I'm horribly
sorry. May I go and stand in the corner ?"
"Let's talk very fast and pretend we didn't notice it," said
Myra, helping me to mop. "Go on, Archie."
"Well, it's like this," said Archie. "A little while ago the
Vicar called here."
"I don't see that that's any reason for keeping me in the
background. I have met clergymen before and I know what
to say to them."
"When I say a little while ago I mean about three weeks.
We'd have asked you down for the night if we'd known you
were so keen on clergymen. Well, as the result of that unfor-
tunate the school treat takes place here this afternoon,
visit,
and lorblessme if I hadn't forgotten all about it till this
morning."
"You'll have to help, please," said Dahlia.
172 A. A. MILNE
"Only don't spill anything/' said Thomas.
They have a poor sense of humour in the Admiralty.

took a baby In each hand and wandered off to look for

I
bees. Their idea, not mine.
"The best bees are round here/* I said, and I led them along
to the front of the house. On the lawn was Myra, surrounded
by about eight babies.
"Two more for your collection," I announced. "Very
fine specimens. The word with them is bees."
"Aren't they darlings ? Sit down, babies, and the pretty
gentleman will tell us all a story."
"Meaning me ?" I asked in surprise. Myra looked beseech-
ingly at me as she arranged the children all round her. I sat
down near them and tried to think.
"Once upon a time," I said, "there was a a there was
a was a a bee."
Myra nodded
approvingly. She seemed to like the story
so far. The great dearth of adventures that could
I didn't.

happen to a bee was revealed to me in a flash. I saw that I

had been hasty.
"At least," I went on, "he thought he was a bee, but as he
grew up his friends felt that he was not really a bee at all, but
a dear little His fur was too long for a bee."
rabbit.
Myra shook her head at me and frowned. My story was
getting over-subtle for the infant mind. I determined to
it out
straighten finally.
"However," I added, "the old name stuck to him, and they
all called him a bee. Now then I can get on. Where was
I?"
But at this moment my story was interrupted.
"Corne here," shouted Archie from the distance. "You're
wanted."
"Fm sorry," I said, getting up quickly. "Will you finish
the story for me ? You'd better leave out the part where he
stings the Shah of Persia. That's too exciting. Good-bye."
Ana I hurried after Archie.

"Help Simpson with some of these races," said Archie.

"He's getting himself into the dickens of a mess."
Simpson had started two races simultaneously; hence
 THE HOUSE-WARMING 173
the trouble. In one of them the bigger boys had to face to
ftsack containing their boots, rescue their own pair, put them
on, and race back to the starting-point. Good 1 In the other
the smaller boys, each armed with a paper containing a prob-
lem in arithmetic, had to run to their sisters, wait for the
problem to be solved, and than run back with the answer*
Excellent 1 Simpson at his most inventive. Unfortunately,
when the bootless boys arrived at the turning-post, they found
nothing but a small problem in arithmetic awaiting them, while
on the adjoining stretch of grass young mathematicians were
trying, with the help of their sisters, to get into two pairs of
boots at once.
"Hallo, there you are/' said Simpson. "Do help me ; I
shall be mobbed in a moment. It's the mothers. They think
the whole thing is a scheme for stealing their children's boots.
Can't you start a race for them ?"
"You never ought to go about without somebody. Where's
Thomas ?"
"He's playing rounders. He scored a rounder by himself
just now from an overthrow, but we shall hear about it at
dinner. Look here there's a game called 'Two's and Threes'.
Couldn't you start the mothers at that ? You stand in twos,
and whenever any one stands in front of the two then the
person behind the two runs away."
"Are you sure ?"
"What do you mean ?" said Simpson.
"It sounds too exciting to be true. I can't believe It."
"Go on, there's a good chap. They'll know how to pky
all right."
"Oh, very well ! Do they take their boots off first or not ?"
Twos and Threes was a great success.
I found that I had quite a flair for the game. I seemed to
take to it
naturally.
By was finished Simpson's little foot-
the time our match
wear trouble was over, and he was organizing a grand three-
legged race.
"I think they are all enjoying it," said Dahlia.
"They love it," I said; "Thomas is perfectly happy
making rounders."
"But I meant the children. Don't you think they love it
too ? The babies seem so happy with Myra. I suppose she's
telling them stories."
 174 A. A. MILNB
"I think so. good one about a bee.
She's got rather a
Oh, yes, they're happy enough with her 1"
"I hope they all had enough to eat at tea."
''Allowing for a little natural shyness I think they did well.
And I didn't spill anything. Altogether it has been rather a
success/'
Dahlia stood looking down at the children, young and
old, playing in the field beneath her, and gave a sigh of
happiness.
"Now/' she said, "I feel the house is
really warm."

f
IV. A WORD IN SEASON

"Archie," said Blair, "what's that big empty room above

the billiards-room for ?"
"That," said Archie, "is where we hide the corpses of
our guests. I sleep with the key under my pillow."
"This is rather sudden," I said. "I'm not at all sure
that I should have come if I had known that."
"Don't frighten them, dear tell them the truth."
;

"Well, the truth is," said Archie, "that there was some
idea of a little play-acting there occasionally. Hence the
curtain-rod, the emergency exit and other devices,"
"Then haven't we done any ?
why came down here We
open your house for you, and then you go and lock up
to the
most important room of all, and sleep with the key under your
pillow."
"It's too hot. But we'll do a little charade to night if you
like just to air the place."
"Hooray," said Myra, "I know a lovely word."

Myra's little two syllables and required three

word was in

performers. Archie and

were kindly included in her com-
I
immense
pany. Simpson threatened to follow with something
and archaic, and Thomas also had something rather good up
his sleeve, but I am not going to bother you with these. One
word will be enough for you.

First Scent

"Oh, good morning She had added a hat

!" said Myra.
and a sunshade to her evening frock, and was supported by
 THE HOUSE-WARMING I7J

me In a gentleman's lounge-coat and boater for Henley

wear.
"Good morning, mum, said Archie, hitching up his apron
and spreading his hands on the table in front of him.
"I just want this ribbon matched, please."
"Certainly, mum. Won't your little boy I beg pardon,
the old gentleman, take a seat too ? What colour did you
want the ribbon, ?" mum
"The same colour as this/' I said. "Idiot."
"Your grandfather is in a bit of a draught, Pm afraid,
mum. always stimulates the flow of language.
It grand- My
father was just the same. I'm afraid, mum, we haven't any
ribbon as you might say the same colour as this."
"If very near it will do."
it's

"Now what colour would you call that ?" wondered

Archie, with his head on one side. "Kind of puce-like, I
should put it at. Puce-magenta, as we say in the trade. No ;
we're right out of puce-magenta,"
"Show the lady what you have got," I said sternly.
"Well, mum, I'm right out of ribbon altogether. The
fact is I'm more of an ironmonger really. The draper's Is
just the other side of the road. You wouldn't like a garden-
roller now ? I can do you a nice garden-roller for two pound
five, and that's simply giving it away."
"Oh, shall we have a nice roller ?" said Myra eagerly*
"I'm not going to carry it home," I said.
"That's all
right, sir. My little lad will take it
up on his

bicycle. Two
pounds five, mum, and sixpence for the mouse
trap the gentleman's been sitting on. Say three pounds,"
Myra took out her purse.

Second Scene

We were back in our ordinary clothes.

"I wonder if they guessed that," said Archie.
"It was very easy," said Myra. "I should have thought
they'd have seen it at once."
"But of course they're not a very clever lot," I explained.
"
"That fellow with the spectacles *

"Simpson his name is," said Archie. "I know him well
He's a professional golfer."
 176 A. A. MILNB
"Well, he looks learned enough. I expect */ knows
all
"
right. But the others
"Do you think they knew that we were supposed to be In
a shop ?"
"Surely! Why, I should think even What's that
man s name over there ? No ;
f
that one next to the pretty
Is that Thomas, the wonderful
lady ah, yes, Thomas.
cueist, the way? Really
by Well, I should think even
1

Thomas guessed that much/'

"Why not do it over again to make sure."
"Oh, no, it was perfectly obvious. Let's get on to the
final scene."
"I'm afraid that will give it away rather/' said Myra.
"I'm afraid so/* agreed Archie*

Third Scene

We on camp-stools and looked up

sat at the ceiling with
our mouths open.
"
'E's late," said Archie.
"I don't believe Vs
coming, and I don't mind 'oo 'can
me so," said Myra. "So there I"
"sye
work," said, wiping my brow.
'Ot I

"Nar, not up there. Not 'ot. Nice and breezy like."

"But he's nearer the sun than wot we are, ain't 'e ?"
"Ah, but 'e's not 'ot. Not up there."
"'Ere, there 'e is," cried Myra, jumping up excitedly.
"Over there. 'Ow naow, it's a bird. I declare I quite thought
it was 'im. Silly of me."

There was silence for a little, and then Archie took a

sandwich out of his pocket.
"Wanner wot they'll invent next/' he said, and munched
stolidly.

"Well done," said Dahlia.

"Thomas and have been trying to guess," said Simpson,
I

"but the strain is terrific. My first idea was 'codfish', but I

suppose that's wrong. It's either 'silkworm' or 'wardrobe'.
Thomas suggests 'mangel-wurzel'. He says he never saw any-
body who had so much the whole air of a wurzel as Archie.
The indefinable tlan of the wurzel was there."
 THE HOUSE-WARMING 177

"Can't you really guess ?" said Myra eagerly. 'I don't

know whether I want to or not. Oh, no, I don't want

you
you to." '
"Then I withdraw 'mangel-wurzel'/ said Simpson
gallantly. "
"I think can guess/' said Blair. "It's
I

"Whisper it," said Simpson. "I'm never going to know/'

Blair whispered it.
"Yes," said Myra disappointedly, "that's it."

V. UNINVITED GUESTS

"Nine," said Archie, separating his latest victim from the

marmalade spoon and dropping it into the hot water. "This
is going to be a sanguinary day. With a pretty late cut into
the peach jelly Mr. A. Mannering reached double figures.
Ten. Battles are being won while Thomas still sleeps. Any
advance on ten ?"
"Does that include my wasp ?" asked Myra.
"There are only ten here/' said Archie, looking into the
basin, "and they're all mine. I remember them perfectly.
What was yours like ?"
"Well, I didn't exactly kill him. I smacked him with a
teaspoon and asked him to go away. And he went
on to your
marmalade, so I expect you thought he was yours. But it
was really mine, and I don't think it's very sporting of you to
kill another person's wasp."
"Have one of mine," I said, pushing my plate across.
"Have Bernard he's sitting on the greengage/'
"I don't really want to kill anything. I killed a rabbit once
and I wished I hadn't."

"I nearly killed a rabbit once, and I wished I had/'

"Great sportsmen at a glance," said Archie. "Tell us
about it before it goes into your reminiscences."
"It was a fierce affair while it lasted. The rabbit was sitting
down and I was standing up, so that I rather had the advantage
of him at the start. I waited till he seemed to be asleep and
then fired."
"And missed him ?"
"Y-yes. He heard the report, though. I mean, you
mustn't think he ignored me altogether. I moved him. He
got up and went away all right."
 Ij9 A. A. MILNB
*'A very lucky escape for you/' said Archie. "I once knew
a man who was gored to death by an angr) rabbit." He
slashed in the air with his napkin. "Fifteen. Dahlia, let's

have breakfast indoors to-morrow. This is very jolly but it's

just as hot, and it doesn't get Thomas up any earlier,

as we
hoped/'
All that day we
grilled in the heat. Myra and
I started a

game of croquet in the morning, but after one shot each we

agreed to abandon it as a draw slightly in my
favour,
because I had given her the chipped mallet. And in the
afternoon Thomas and Simpson made a great effort to get
up enthusiasm for lawn-tennis. Each of them returned the
other's service into the net until the score stood at eight all,
at which point
they suddenly realized that nothing but the
violent death of one of the competitors would ever end the
match. They went on to ten all to make sure, and then
retired to the lemonade and wasp jug, Simpson missing a
couple of dead bodies by inches only. And after dinner it was
hotter than ever.
"The heat in my room," announcedArchie, "breaks all
records. The thermometer says a hundred and fifty, the
barometer says very dry, we've had twenty-five hours' sun-
shine, and there's not a drop of rain recorded in the soap-dish.
Are we going to take this lying down ?"
"No," said Thomas, "let's sleep out to-night."
"What do you say, Dahlia ?"
"It's a good idea. You can all
sleep on the croquet lawn,
and Myra and I will take the tennis lawn."
"Hadn't you better have the croquet lawn ? Thomas
walks in his sleep, and we don't want to have him going
through hoops all night."
"You'll have to bring down your own mattresses," went
on Dahlia, "and you've not got to walk about the garden in
the earjy
morning, at least not until Myra and I are up, and if
you're going to fall over croquet hoops you mustn't make a
noise. That's all the rules, I think."
"I'm glad we've got the tennis lawn," said Myra ; "it's
much smoother. Do you prefer the right-hand court, dear, or
the left-hand ?"
"We shall be very close to Nature to-night," said Archie,
''Now we shall know whether it really is the nightjar, of
Simpson gargling."
 THE HOUSE-WARMING 179
We
were very close to Nature that night, but in the early
morning still closer. I was awakened by the noise of Simpson
talking, as I hoped, in his sleep. However, it appeared that
he was awake and quite conscious of the things he was saying.
1
"I can't help it/ he explained to Archie, who had given
expression to the general opinion about it ; "these bally wasps
are all over me/'
"It's your own fault," said Archie. "Why do you egg
them on ? I don't have wasps all over me."
"Conf There I've been stung."
!

"You've been what ?"

"Stung/'
"Stung. Where?"
"In the neck."
"In the neck ?" Archie turned over to me, "Simpson,"
he said, "has been stung in the necL Tel) Thomas."
I woke up Thomas. "Simpson," I said, "has been
stung
in the neck/'
"Good," said Thomas, and went to sleep again.
"We've told Thomas," said Archie. "Now, are you
satisfied ?"
"Get away, you brute," shouted Simpson suddenly, and
dived under the sheet.
Archie and I lay back, and shouted with laughter.
"It's really very silly of him," said Archie, "because

go away because everybody knows that get away, you ass

that wasps dangerous unless confound you
aren't
unless I we got up ?"
say isn't it time
I came up from under my sheet and looked at my watch.

"Four-thirty," I said, dodged a wasp, and went back aga'*n.

"We must wait five-thirty," said Archie.
till "Simpson
1

was quite right ;

he was stung, after all. Til tell him so."
He leant outof bed to tell him so, and then thought bettet
of it and retired beneath the sheets.
At five-thirty a gallant little party made its way to the
house, its mattresses over its shoulders,
"Gently," said Archie, as we came: in sight of the tennis
lawn.
We went very There were only wasps on the
gently.
tennis lawn, but one does not want to disturb the little
fellows.
 ISO A. A. MILNE

VI. A FINAL ARRANGEMENT

"
"Seeing that this is out last day together began
Archie,
"Oh, <&*'/," said Myra. "I can't bear it."
"Seeing that this is our first
day together, we might have
a little tournament of some kind, followed by a small dis-
tribution of prizes. What do you think, Dahlia ?"
I dare say I can find
"Well, something."
"Any old thing that we don't want will do; nothing
showy or expensive. Victory is its own reward."
"Yes, but if there // a pot of home-made marmalade going
with it," I said, "so much the better."
"Dahlia, earmark the marmalade for this gentleman. Now,
what's it going to be ? Golf, Simpson ?"
"Why, of course," said Myra. "Hasn't he been getting
it ready for days ?"
"That will give him an unfair advantage," I pointed out.
"He knows every single brick on the greens."
"Oh, say, there aren't any greens yet," protested Simp-
I
son. "That'll take a year or two. But Fve marked out white
circlesand you have to get inside them.' f
"I saw him doing that," said Archie. "I was afraid he

expected us to play prisoners' base with him."

The game fixed upon, we proceeded to draw for partners.
"You'll have to play with me, Archie," said Dahlia,
"because I'm no good at all."
"I shall have to play with Myra," I said, "because I'm
no good at all."
"Oh, I'm very good," said Myra.
"That looks as though I should have to play with

Thomas '*
>
sa ^ T^ omas anc Simpson together.
*

"You're all giving me a lot of trouble," said

Archie
putting his pencil back in his pocket. "I've just written your
names out neatly on little bits of paper, and now they're aU
wasted. You'll have to stick them on yourselves so that the
spectators will know who you are as you whiz past." He
handed his bits of paper round and went in for his clubs.
It was a stroke competition, and each couple went round

by itself. Myra and I started last.

 THE HOUSE-WARMING l8l

"Now weVe got to win this/' she said,"because we shan't

play together again for a long time/'
"That's a nice cheery thing to say to a person just when
^
he's driving. Now
I shall have to address the ball all over

again."
"Oh, no 1"
I addressed and
dispatched the ball. It struck a wall
about eighty yards away and dropped. When we
got there
we found to our disgust that it was nestling at the very foot,
Myra looked at it doubtfully.
"Can't you make it climb the wall ?" I asked.
"We shall have to go back, I'm afraid. We can pretend
we left our pocket-handkerchiefs behind."
She chipped it back about twenty yards, and I sent It
on again about a hundred. Unfortunately it landed in a
rut. However, Myra
got it out with great resource, and I was
lucky enough with my next to place it inside the magic circle.
"Five," "You know, I don't think you're helping
I said.
me much. All you did that hole was to
go twenty-one yards
in the wrong direction."

Myra smiled cheerfully at me and did the next hole in one.

"Well played, partner/' she said, as he put her club back in
its bag.
"Oh, at the short holes I don't deny that you're useful*
Where do we go now ?"
"Over the barn. This is the long hole."
got in an excellent drive, but unfortunately it didn't
I
aviate quick enough. While the
intrepid spectators were still
holding their breath, there was an ominous crash.
"Did you say in the barn or over the barn ?" I asked, as
we hurried onto find the damage.
"We do play an exciting game, don't we ?" said Myra.
We got into the barn and found the ball and a little glass
on the floor.
"What a very small hole it made," said Myra, pointing to
the broken pane. "What shall I do ?"
"You'll have to go back through the hole. It's an awkward
little shot."

"I don't think I could."

"No, it // rather a difficult stroke. You want to stand
well behind the ball, and however, there may be a local rult
tbout it"
 A. A. MILNE
"I don't think there is or I should have heard k. Samuel's
been telling me
everything lately."
"Then there's only one thing for it." I pointed to^the
window at the other end of the barn. "Go straight on."
Myra gave a little gurgle of delight.
"But we shall have to save up our pocket-money," she
said.
Her ball hit the wood in between two panes and bounded
back. My next shot was just above the glass. Myra took
a niblick and got the ball back into the middle of the
floor.
"It's simply sickening that we can't break a window when
we're really trying to. I should have thought that anyone

could have broken a window. Now then."

"Oh, good shot 1" cried Myra above the crash. We hurried
out and (fid the hole in nine.
At lunch, having completed eighteen holes
out of the
thirty-six, we were
seven strokes behind the leaders, Simpson
had been
and Thomas. Simpson, according to Thomas,
playing like a book. Golf Faults Analysed that book, I
should think.
"But I expect he'll go to pieces in the afternoon," said
Thomas. He turned to a servant and added, "Mr. Simpson
won't have anything more."
We started our second round brilliantly ;
continued (after
an unusual incident on the fifth tee) brilliantly ;
and ended
up brilliantly. At the last tee we had played a hundred and
thirty -seven. Myra got in a beautiful drive to within fifty
yards of the circle.
"How many ?" said the others, coming up excitedly.
"This is terrible," said Myra, putting her hand to her
heart. "A hundred and shall I tell them ? a a .

Oh, dear ahundredandthirtyeight."

"Golly," said Thomas, "youVe got one for it. We did a
hundred and forty."
"We did a hundred and forty-two," said Archie. "Close
play at the Oval"
"Oh," said Myra to me, "do be careful. Oh, but no," she
went on quickly, "I don't mind a bit really if we lose. It's
"
only a game. Besides, we
"You forget the little pot of home-made marmalade," I

said reproachfully. "Dahlia, what are the prizes ? Because

 THE HOUSE-WARMING 183
it's just possible that Myra might like the second one better
than the first. In that case I should miss this."
"Go on/' whispered Myra.
I went on. There was a moment's silence and then a
deep sigh from Myra.
"How about it ?" I said calmly.
Loud applause.
"Well/* said Dahlia, "you and Myra make a very good
couple. I suppose I must find a prize for you."
"It doesn't really matter/* said Myra breathlessly, "because
on the fifth tee we we arranged about the prizes,"
"We arranged to give each other one," 1 said, smiling at
Dahlia.
Dahlia looked very hard at us.
"You mean"
don't
Myra laughed happily.
"Oh," she said, "but that's just what *-e do/*
 W. PETT RIDGE
What Great Events

W. Pett Ridge began Ms career In the Civil Service

and did not take to journalism until he was nearly
thirty. Some of his most popular books deal with
the life of the poor in London slums, which he
describes with close observation and humuur.
 WHAT GREAT EVENTS

BARDEN, of No. 21 Begonia Road, N.W., dis-

covered, on the narrow gravelled walk of his back
garden, a snail making leisurely progress. No permission
had been given for it to enter the grounds, and Mr. Barden,
finding a superannuated clothes-peg, jerked the snail over the
wall. He went on, dismissing the trifling incident from his
mind, and smoking a cigar presented to him that day by no
less a person than one of his directors. Mr. Barden con-
gratulated himself on the peacefulness of the district. He
and Mrs. Barden, agreeing on many subjects, were especially
at one on the topic of quiet surroundings.
"Great thing is," Mrs. Barden had said, "not to know
your neighbours. Once you get acquainted with them, you
can no longer call your house your own/'
Mr. Barden had made the tour of the garden three times
when he again encountered a snail. He remarked, in humor-
ous vein, that it had better join its boon companion the ;

clothes-peg was once more used. On the next turn around

the garden something fell upon the rim of his straw hat.
Snatching off the headgear, he frowned at the snail, and it
then occurred to him all in a flash, so he described it Jater
to his wife that there was but one snail, and that the mollusc
was being forced to pay flying visits from one garden to
another. Mr. Barden hurled it over the wall, and instantly
the head of a lady appeared. He guessed her to be standing
on a wheelbarrow.
"I wish to goodness, sir," said the lady, speaking with
frank indignation, "that you would be kind enough, if you
must keep snails, to keep them to yourself."
Mr. Barden, as gentlemanly a man as you would encounter,
in office hours, from one end to the other of Moorgate Street,

City, had replaced his straw hat. He now took it off, bowed
politely, and went forward
with the intention of explaining
187
 188 W, PETT RIDGE
that his desire was not so much to keep snails as to get rid

of them. At this moment

the Jady disappeared. He found
himself hoping that the wheelbarrow had given way.
Indoors, Mrs. Barden, who had been watching the scene
from an upper window, was able to confirm this bright antici-
that the neighbour had limped her
pation, and to mention
way back to the house.
Mrs. Barden supplied the information that the lady's name
was Dunstan. The maid, it appeared, had heard it rumoured
that Miss Dunstan was either a vegetarian or a Unitarian ; the
maid was not quite sure, but it was certainly something
peculiar.
"I never dream of taking any notice of her," Mrs.
Barden went on, "when I meet her out. And after this I
shall be more distant with her than ever/*
9
"I think you're wise, my dear/
A ring came at the front door just
as Mr. Barden was

trying to remember where he

had put the key of the liqueur-
stand. The maid brought information that Mr. Dunstan
had called, and wished to see Mr. Barden for two minutes.
A hospitable invitation was sent out,
but the visitor preferred
not to come beyond the hall. From the dining-room Mrs.
Barden listened tremulously to a quick, alert duel in con-
versation.
"I don't stand on ceremony," snapped the caller. My
sister has been telling me about this snail business, it

made a sudden dash at her."

appears you lost your temper,
"It's a lie I"
"You're making it worse," declared the caller heatedly;
"My sister and I, you must understand, are not in the habit
of putting up with any nonsense. As a matter of fact, this
is much more serious than you appear to imagine.
She is
as nearly as possible engaged to someone she met at a restaurant
in St. Martin's Lane, and he's got eugenic ideas ; and if she's
that I shall have to go
crippled for life, why, it" simply means
on keeping her for
"Now look here," said Mr. Barden persuasively, I ve
no desire to know anything about your troubles and worries ;
what they are, they are, and you must put up with them. Go
>f
out of my house !

"When I'm ready," said Dunstan, with obstinacy.

the shoulder.
Whereupon Mr. Barden took him firmly by
The two struggled to the front gate, where a policeman
 WHAT GREAT EVENTS 189

happened to be waiting in the hope of offering a few cordial

words to Mrs. Barden's maid. The constable turned his
that Mr. Barden was
bull's-eye on the scene, and, noting
getting the better of the fight, said no word until Mr. Dunstan,

flung out on the asphalted pavement, ordered him to take the

other in charge. The policeman asked each for his name and
address, and, this furnished, made an exchange, and, in
handing over the documents, said it was a case for a summons,
if anything. The constable, five minutes later, was in a
to offer a toast to Mr. Barden. "Here's to your very
position
good heahh, sir, and the same to your good lady, if she will
kindly allow me to say so."
"I shan't sleep a wink," declared Mrs. Barden.
"Worse things might have happened," remarked the

policeman. "Mark my words, it'll soon blow over."

News of the wrestling match went up and down Begonia
Road early the following morning, and Mr. Barden, leaving
for the City, was regarded from the shelter of Venetian blinds
with an interest equal to that shown concerning Miss Dun-
Stan's brother when he, later, took his departure for Lincoln's
Inn Fields. It was considered a matter of genuine regret
that neither party bore signs of grievous injury, but close
observers declared the two looked ashamed of themselves.
Begonia Road said the incident was one calculated to let the
neighbourhood down in a most terrible fashion; one might
really almost as well be living in Holloway. Two ladies dis-
cussed the advisability of seeing the new vicar about it.
Mrs. Barden ordered the maid to call next door with a
polite message
of inquiry, and the answer was that Miss
Dunstan had enjoyed a night of moderate rest, and returned
thanks for kind inquiries. Following this, Mrs. Barden,
apparelled as though about
to take a considerable journey,
left No. 21 and paid a formal visit to No. 22. Miss Dunstan
herself opened the door, and the card-case had to be put
away, and friendly conversation took place, Miss Dunstan
v

said it was a pity menfolk lost their heads whenever an

excuse offered itself; admitted that the bruise sustained
through want of stability on the part of a wheelbarrow, called
upon to perform an unexpected duty, was already nearly well.
She attributed this to the circumstance that a strict form of
diet kept her in a good, healthy condition. Mrs. Barden had
heard of vegetarianism, but was not acquainted with the
190 W. PETT RIDGE
details.She came from the visit well supplied with literature
on the subject, and exhilarated by the knowledge that she
had met a difficult crisis with amiability.
Meanwhile the forces of the district were at work. The
new vicar, made acquainted with the news, consulted his
wife on the subject he often spoke of her in public as his
right hand and his never-failing adviser and she counselled
him to leave the Bardens and the Dunstans to settle the matter
among themselves. He went at once to his study and wrote
to Mr. Barden requesting him to call at the Mission House
that evening, 7.30 precisely, to discuss a topic of "enormous
import, not only to you, but to the community at large".
Mr. Barden, returning home, after an occupied day in Moor-
gate Street, and well pleased at his wife's action, assumed
that the invitation contained something in the nature of a
compliment ; guessed that he would be expected to move or
second a vote of thanks. The vicar, alone in a sparsely
furnished room, received Mr. Barden defensively ; ordered
him to sit down on a packing-case.
"I am given to understand/' said the vicar heavily, "that
you took a share, no longer ago than yesterday evening, in a
scene of some violence/*
"Rather a good scrap while it lasted," admitted Mr.
Barden.
"I regret I was not present/*
"If it happens again, vicar, you shall have a card."
"Had I been present, I should have flung myself between
the two, and commanded you both to put an end to an incident
unworthy of yourselves, and disgraceful yes, disgraceful to
the neighbourhood in which you live."
"Perhaps," said the other with spirit, "you will be good
enough to explain what all this has got to do with you ?"
"Mr. Barden," remarked the vicar, "you don't recognize
the force of character and the alertness of action which are
my distinguishing characteristics. The village in Wiltshire
of which I had charge until my removal here, a few months
ago, was, if I may say so, a model village."
"How do you account for that ?"
"I will tell I will tell It was due to
you. youfrankly.
the fact that I watched and controlled the interests and the
very actions of each one of my parishioners."
"You try that game on up here in London," threatened
 WHAT GREAT EVENTS 191

Mr. Barren warmly, "and, by Jove, we'll teach you a lesson

you won't easily forget."
So many events of a larger importance have happened
since, that you may have forgotten the newspaper discussion
that took place at about this time entitled "Why our Churches
are Empty". Mr. Barden sent in a forcible contribution to
the debate, and the vicar replied. The vicar, on the persuasion
of his Bishop, agreed, later, to go back to Wiltshire but the ;

model village, at the prospect, organized a riot, and neigh-

bouring villages joined in. For mishandling the situation
when troops were brought from Salisbury, General Widde-
combe was put upon half pay.
Begonia Road, N.W., watching events, and not altogether
displeased to find itself a small but important cog in the
machinery, felt disinclined to let the matter rest with the
departure of the vicar for a living near Birmingham. One
of the two who had first moved in the affair of the
ladies

wrestling-match induced a brother in- law, about to leave the

country for New Zealand, to write a strongly worded letter
to the Member for the constituency, calling his attention to
the inhuman treatment to which the late vicar had been
subjected by his superiors, and demanding that the Member
should put a question in the House without a moment's delay.
"If you omit to do this," said the writer, "it is probable you
will be taught a lesson when the next General Election comes
round." The communication reached the Member at a
time when he had been informed by the Prime Minister that,
whilst his services to the Government of the day were recog-
nized, it was impossible to hold out any hope that he would
be appointed to the Under-Secretaryship that had recently
become vacant.
"As a matter of fact, my dear chap," added the Prime
Minister frankly, "you wouldn't be at all the ideal man for
the job."
"May I askwhy ?"
"Certainly you may ask why," said the Prime Minister,
"but no power on earth can make me answer. I'm far too
old a bird to give reasons. Have a cigarette ?"
The letter from the intending emigrant was handed to the
Member as he stamped his way out. He perused it, went
instantly to the writing-room, and dashed off an impetuous
reply. The last act of the voyager to New Zealand was to
 192 W. PETT RIDGB
send the letter to the office of a morning journal, where the
sub-editor would have destroyed it only that he thought of
an alliterative heading, "Amazing Missive of a Member". In
the evening papers short leadefs were based upon the subject.
Was a Parliamentary representative, asked the short leaders,
entitled to address one of his constituents in terms of this
violent nature ? Was courtesy in political affairs to be reck-
oned thing
a of the past ? Did a brusqueness of manner and
a deplorable want of the ordinary considerations of good
breeding justify one in representing a London borough, and
how much longer were the people of a free country going
to put up with such treatment ? Even the newspapers on
the Member's own side of thought suggested that the ameni-
ties of political life should be respected. "No doubt the
communication was penned in a hasty moment, and the writer
will be the first, we are sure, to offer the amende honourable"
Instead, the writer took up a high position. Disregarding
the small point at issue, he announced that for some time
past he had suspected the Government was playing fast and
loose with the true interests of the country. He proposed
to put the matter to a supreme test. Changing sides, he was
returned by his constituency thanks, partly, to his presence
of mind in issuing a portrait of himself taken some fifteen
years before with a majority that ran into four figures. The
Government, alarmed by this, asked, in the course of a debate,
for a vote of confidence, and failed to obtain it. The General
Election that followed cost, in all, well over a million pounds*
"Hulio 1" said Barden to his neighbour in Begonia Road
one evening. "How's the garden getting on, laddie ?"
"First class, Bardie," replied Dunstan. "A lew snails
about, but nothing else to complain of."
"Doesn't do," agreed Barden, "to make a fuss over
trifles I"

"Just Open", by kind permission of Messrs. Dean

& Son.)
 WASHINGTON IRVING
Rip Van Winkle

Washington Irving was an American by birth, though

he lived for many years in England, where he wrote
much of his Sketchbook. This contains among other
charming pieces the immortal tale of Rip van Winkle
which is included here. Of his longer works the most
popular is The Albatubra.
 2UP VAN WINKLE

^ 1 ^HERE lived, many years since, while America was yet a

j[ province of Great Britain, a simple, good-natured fellow,
of the name of Rip Van Winkle. He was a simple, good-
natured man ; he was, moreover, a kind neighbour, and an
obedient henpecked husband.
Certain it is, that he was a great favourite among all the
good wives of the village, who, as usual with the amiable sex,
took his part in all family squabbles, and never failed, whenever
they talked those matters over in their evening gossipings, to
lay all the blame on Dame Van Winkle. The children of the
village, too, would shout with joy whenever he approached.
He assisted at their sports, made their playthings, taught them
to fly kites and shoot marbles, and told them long stories of
* Whenever he went
ghosts, witches, and Indians. dodging
about the village, he was surrounded by a troop of them,
hanging on his skirts, clambering on his back, and playing a
thousand tricks on him with impunity ; and not a dog would
bark at him throughout the neighbourhood.
The great error in Rip's composition was an insuperable
aversion to all kinds of profitable labour. It could not be
for the want of assiduity or perseverance ; for he would sit
on a wet rock, with a rod a^ long and heavy as a Tartar's lance,
and fish all day without a murmur, even though he should
not be encouraged by a single nibble. He would carry a
fowling-piece on his shoulder for hours together, trudging
through woods and swamps, and up hill and down dale, to
shoot a few squirrels or wild pigeons. He would never even
refuse to assist a neighbour in the roughest toil, and was a
foremost man at all country frolics for husking Indian corn
or building stone fences ; the women of the village, too, used
to employ him to run their errands, and to do such little odd
jobs as their less obliging husbands would not do for them
In a word, Rip was ready to attend to anybody's business fou*
196 WASHINGTON IRVING
his own ; but as to doing family duty and keeping his farm
in order, it was impossible.
In fact, it was no use to work on his farm
he declared It ;

was the most pestilent little piece of ground in the whole

county everything about it went wrong, and would go
;

wrong in spite of him. His fences were continually falling to

pieces ; his cow would
either go astray, or get among the

cabbages ; weeds were sure to grow quicker in his fields than

anywhere else ;
the rain always made a point of setting in
just as he had some outdoor work to do. So that though his
patrimonial estate had dwindled away under his management,
acre by acre, until there was little more left than a mere patch
of Indian corn and potatoes, yet it was the worst-conditioned
farm in the neighbourhood.
His children, too, were as ragged and wild as if they
belonged to nobody. His son Rip, an urchin begotten in his
own likeness, promised to inherit the habits, with the old
clothes, of his father. He was generally seen trooping like a
colt at his mother's heels, equipped in a pair of his father's
cast-off galligaskins, which he had much ado to hold up with
one hand, as a fine lady does her train in bad weather.
Rip's sole domestic adherent was his dog Wolf, who was
as much henpecked as his master; for Dame Van Winkle
regarded them as companions in idleness, and even looked
upon Wolf with an evil eye as the cause of his master's going
so often astray. True it is, in all points of spirit befitting an
honourable dog, he was as courageous an animal as ever
scoured the woods ; but what courage can withstand the
ever-during and all-besetting terrors of a woman's tongue ?
The moment Wolf entered the house, his crest fell, his tail
dropped to the ground or curled between his legs, he sneaked
about with a gallows air, casting many a sidelong glance at
Dame Van Winkle, and, at the least flourish of a broomstick
or would flee to the door with yelping precipitation.
ladle,
Times grew worse and worse with Rip Van Winkle as
years of matrimony rolled on ; a tart temper never mellows
7/ith age, and a sharp tongue is the only edge-tool that grows
keener by constant use. For a long while he used to console
himself, when driven from home, by frequenting a kind of
perpetual club of the sages, philosophers and
other idle per-
of the that held its sessions on a bench before
sonages village,
a small inn, designated by a rubicund portrait of His Majesty
 RIP VAN WINKLE 197

George TIL Here they used to sit in the shade, of a long lazy
summer's day, talk listlessly over village gossip, or tell end-
less sleepy stories about nothing. But it would have been
worth any statesman's money to have heard the profound
discussions that sometimes took place, when by chance an
old newspaper fell into their hands from some passing traveller.
How solemnly they would listen to the contents, drawled out
by Derrick Van Bummel, the schoolmaster, a dapper, learned
little man, who was not to be daunted by the most gigantic

word in the dictionary ; and how sagely they would deliberate

upon public events some months after they had taken place.
Poor Rip was at last reduced almost to despair ; and his
only alternative to escape from the labour of the
farm and
the clamour of his wife was to take gun in hand and stroll
away into the woods. Here he would sometimes seat him-
self at the foot of a tree and share the contents of his wallet
with Wolf, with whom he sympathized as a fellow-sufferef
in persecution. "Poor Wolf/' he would say, "thy mistress
leads thee a dog's life of it but never mind, my lad, whilst
;

I live thou shah never want a friend to stand by thee I" Wolf
would wag his tail, look wistfully in his master's face, and If
dogs can feel pity, I verily believe he reciprocated the senti-
ment with all his heart. In a long ramble of the kind on a
fine autumnal day, Rip had unconsciously scrambled to one
of the highest parts of the Kaatskill Mountains. He was
after his favourite sport of squirrel-shooting, and the still
solitudes had echoed and re-echoed with the reports of his
gun. Panting and fatigued, he threw himself,
late in the

afternoon, on a green knoll, covered with mountain herbage^

that crowned the brow of a precipice.
For some time Rip laymusing ; evening was gradually
advancing, the mountains began to throw their long blue
shadows over the valleys, he saw that it would be dark long
before he could reach the village, and he heaved a heavy sigh
when he thought of encountering
'
the terrors of Dame Van
Winkle.
As he was about to descend, he heard a voice from a
distance, hallooing :
"Rip Van Winkle 1
Rip Van Wiakle 1"
He looked around, but could see nothing but a crow winging
its solitary flight across the mountain. He thought his fancy
must have deceived him, and turned again to descend, when
he heard the same cry ring through the still evening air :
 198 WASHINGTON IRVING
"Rip Van Winkle Rip Van Winkle 1" -at the same rime
1

Wolf bristled up his back, and giving a low growl, skulked

to his master's side, looking fearfully down into the glen.
Rip now felt a vague apprehension stealing over him; he
looked down anxiously in the same direction, and perceived
a strange figure slowly toiling up the rocks, and bending under
the weight of something he carried on his back. He was sur-
prised to see any human being in this lonely and unfrequented
place, but supposing it to be someone of the neighbourhood
in need of his assistance, he hastened down to yield it.
On nearer approach he was still more surprised at the
singularity of the stranger's appearance* He was a short,
square-built old fellow, with thick, bushy hair and a grizzled
beard. His dress was of the antique Dutch fashion a cloth
jerkin strapped round the waist several pairs of breeches,
the outer one of ample volume, decorated with rows of buttons
down the sides and bunches at the knees. He bore on his
shoulder a stout keg, that seemed full of liquor, and made
signs for Rip to approach and assist him with the load.
Though rather shy and distrustful of this new acquaintance,
Rip complied with his usual alacrity, and, mutually relieving
each other, they clambered up a narrow gully, apparently die
dry bed of a mountain torrent. As they ascended, Rip every
now and then heard long, rolling peals, like distant thunder,
that seemed to issue out of a deep ravine, or rather cleft
between lofty rocks, toward which their rugged path conducted.
He paused for an instant, but supposing it to be the muttering
of one of those transient thunder showers which often take
place in mountain heights, he proceeded. Passing through
the ravine, they came to a hollow, like a small amphitheatre,
surrounded by perpendicular precipices, over the brinks of
which impending trees shot their branches, so that you only
caught glimpses of the azure sky and the bright evening cloud.
During the whole time, Rip and his companion had laboured
on in silence ; for though the former marvelled greatly what
could be the object of carrying a keg of liquor up this wild
mountain, yet there was something strange and incompre-
hensible about the unknown that inspired awe and checked
familiarity.
On entering the amphitheatre, new objects of wonder
presented themselves. On a level spot in the centre was a
company of odd-looking personages playing at nine-pins.
 RIP VAN WINKLB 199

They were dressed in a quaint outlandish fashion : some wore

short doublets, others jerkins, with long knives in their belts,
and most of them had enormous breeches of similar style with
those of the guide. Their visages, too, were peculiar : one
had a large head, broad face, and small piggish eyes ; the face
of another seemed to consist entirely of nose, and was sur-
mounted by a white, sugar-loaf hat, set off with a little red
cock's tail. They all had beards, of various shapes and
colours. There was one who seemed to be the commander.
He was a stout, old gentleman, with a weather-beaten coun-
tenance; he wore a laced doublet, broad belt, and hanger,
high-crowned hat and feather, red stockings and high-heeled
shoes, with roses in them. The whole group reminded Rip
of the figures in an old Flemish painting in the parlour of
Dominie Van Schaick, the village parson, and which had
been brought over from Holland at the time of the settlement.
What seemed particularly odd to Rip was, that though
these folks were evidently amusing themselves, yet they main-
tained the gravest faces, the most mysterious silence, and were,
withal, the most melancholy party of pleasure he had ever
witnessed. Nothing interrupted the stillness of the scene but
the noise of the balls, which, whenever they were rolled,
echoed along the mountains like rumbling peals of thunder.
As Rip and his companion approached them, they sud-
denly desisted from their play, and stared at him with such
fixed statue-like gaze, and such strange, uncouth, lack-lustre
countenances, that his heart turned within him, and his knees
smote together. His companion now emptied the contents
of the keg into large flagons and made signs to him to wait
upon the company. He obeyed with fear and trembling ;
they quaffed the liquor in profound silence, and then returned
to their game.
By degrees awe and apprehension subsided. He
Rip's
even ventured when no eye was fixed upon him, to taste the
beverage, which he found had much of the flavour of excellent
Hollands. He was naturally a thirsty soul, and was soon
tempted to repeat the draught. One taste provoked another,
and he reiterated his visits to the flagon so often, that at length
his senses were overpowered, his eyes swam in his head, his
head gradually declined, and he fell into a deep sleep.
On awaking he found himself on the green knoll from
whence he had first seen the old man of the glen. He rubbed
 WASHINGTON IRVING
his eyes it was a bright sunny morning. The birds were
and the and the eagle was
hopping twittering among bushes,
the mountain breeze.
wheeling aloft, and breasting pure
"Surely," thought Rip,
"1 have not slept here all night." He
recalled the occurrences before he fell asleep. The strange
man with the keg of liquor the mountain ravine the wild
retreat among the rocks the woe-begone party at nine-pins
die flagon "Oh that flagon
I that wicked flagon!"
I

I make to Dame Van

thought Rjp^-"what excuse shall
Winkle ?"
He looked round for his gun, but in place of die clean
well-oiled fowling-piece, he found an old firelock lying by him,
the barrel encrusted with rust, the lock falling off, and the
stock worm-eaten. He now
suspected that the grave rpy-
sterers of the mountain had put a trick upon him, and having
dosed him with liquor, had robbed him of his gun. Wolf,
too, had disappeared, but he might have strayed away
after

a squirrel or partridge. He whistled after him and shouted his

and
name, but all in vain ; the echoes repeated his whistle,
shout, but no dog was to be seen.
As he approached met a number of people,
the village he
but none whom he knew, which somewhat surprised him,
for he had thought himself acquainted with everyone in the
of a different fashion
country round. Their dress, too, was
from that to which he was accustomed. They all stared at
him with equal marks of surprise, and whenever they cast
their chins. The constant
eyes upon him, invariably stroked
recurrence of this gesture Induced Rip, involuntarily, to do
the same, when to his astonishment he found his beard had
grown a foot long !

He had now entered the skirts of the village. A troop

of strange children ran at his heels, hooting after him, and
not one of which
pointing at his grey beard. The dogs, too,
he recognized for an old acquaintance, barked at him as he
altered ; it was larger and more
passed. The very village was
populous. * There were rows of houses
which he had never
seen before, and those which had been his familiar haunts
had disappeared. Strange names were over the doors strange
faces at the windows everything was strange. His mind
now misgave him : he began to doubt whether both he and
the world around him were not bewitched. Surely this was
his native village, which he had left but the day before. There
 RIP VAN WINKLE 2OI

stood the Kaatskill Mountains there ran the silver Hudson

at a distance was every hill and dafle precisely as it had
there
always been Rip
; was sorely perplexed ; "That flagon last
night/' thought he, "has addled my poor head sadly I"
It was with some
difficulty that he found the way to his
own house, wliich he approached with silent awe, expecting
every moment to hear the shrill voice of Dame Van Winkle.
He found the house gone to decay the roof fallen in, the
windows shattered, and the doors off the hinges. A
half-
starved dog that looked like Wolf was skulking about it.
Rip called liirn by name, but the cur snarled, showed his teeth,
and passed on. This was an unkind cut indeed. "My very
dog/' sighed poor Rip, "has forgotten me 1**
He entered the house, which, to tell the truth, Dame Van
Winkle had always kept in neat order. It was empty, forlorn,
and apparently abandoned. This desolateness overcame all
his connubial fears he called loudly for his wife and children ;
;

the lonely chambers rung for a moment with his voice, and
then all again was silence,
He now hurried forth and hastened to his old resort, the
village inn; but it too was gone. A large rickety wooden
building stood in its place, \vith great gaping windows, some
of them broken, and mended with old hats and petticoats,
and over the door was painted "The Union Hotel, by
Jonathan Doclittle". Instead of the great tree that used to
shelter the quiet little Dutch inn of yore, there now was
reared a tall naked pole, with something on the top that
looked like a red nightcap, and from it was fluttering a flag,
on which was a singular assemblage of stars and stripes all ;

this was strange and incomprehensible. He recognized on

the sign, however, the ruby face of King George, under
which he had smoked so many a peaceful pipe but even ;

this was singularly metamorphosed. The red coat was

changed for one of blue and buff, a sword was held in the
hand instead of a sceptre, the head was decorated with a
cocked hat, and underneath was painted, in large characters,
GENERAL WASHINGTON.
The appearance of Rip, with his long grilled beard, his
rusty fowling-piece, uncouth dress, and the army of
his
women and children that had gathered at his heels, soon
attracted the attention of the tavern politicians and a short
;

but busy little fellow pulled him by the arm, and rising on
1O1 WASHINGTON IRVING
tiptoe, inquired in his ear, "whether he was Federal or Demo-
crat ?" Rip was equally at a loss to comprehend the question
when a knowing self-important old gentleman in a sharp
cocked hat, made his way through the crowd, putting them
to the right and left with his elbows as he passed, and planting
himself before Van Winkle, with one arm akimbo, the other
resting on his cane, his keen eyes and sharp hat penetrating,
as it were, into his very soul, demanded in an austere tone :
"What brought him to the election with a gun on his shoulder,
and a mob at his heels ? and whether he meant to breed a
riot in the village ?" "Alas gentlemen," cried Rip, some-
1

what dismayed, "I am a poor quiet man, a native of die place,

and a loyal subject of the king, God bless him I"
Here a general shout burst from the bystanders "A tory I

a tory I a spy a refugee

1 hustle him
I
away with him I"
1

It was with great difficulty that the self-important man in the

cocked hat restored order; and having assumed a tenfold
austerity of brow, demanded again of the unknown culprit
what he came there for, and whom he was seeking ? The
poor man humbly assured him that he meant no harm, but
merely came there in search of some of his neighbours, who
used to keep about the tavern.
"Well who are they ? Name them."
Rip bethought himself a moment, and inquired : "Where's
Nicholas Vedder ?"
There was a silence for a little while, when an old man
replied, in a thin piping voice: "Nicholas Vedder? Why
he is dead and gone these eighteen years There was a wooden
1

tombstone in the churchyard that used to tell all about him,

but that's rotted and gone too."
"Where's Brom Dutcher ?"
"Oh, he went off to the army in the beginning of the war ;
some say he was killed at the storming of Stoney-Point, others
say he was drowned in a squall at the foot of Antony's Nose.
I don't know, he never came back again/'
"Where's Van Bummel, the schoolmaster ?"
"He went off to the wars too, was a great militia general,
and is now in Congress."
Rip's heart died away at hearing of these sad changes in
his home and friends, and finding himself thus alone in the
world. Every answer puzzled him, too, by treating of such
enormous lapses of time, and of matters which he could not
 RIP VAN WINKLB 2OJ
understand : war congress Stoney-Point ; he had no
courage to ask after any more friends, but cried out in despair :

"Does nobody here know Rip Van Winkle ?"

"Oh, Rip Van Winkle 1" exclaimed two or three. "Oh,
to be sure 1 That's Rip Van Winkle yonder, leaning against
the tree."
Rip looked and beheld a precise counterpart of himself,
as he went up the mountain : apparently as lafcy, and certainly
as ragged. The poor fellow was now completely confounded.
He doubted his own identity, and whether he was himself
or another man. In the midst of his bewilderment the man
in the cocked hat demanded who he was, and what was his
name ?
"God knows I" exclaimed he, at his wit's end ; "I'm not

myself I'm somebody else ; that's me yonder no that's

somebody else got into my shoes. I was myself last night,
but I fell asleep on the mountain, and they've changed my
gun, and everything's changed, and I am changed, and I
can't tell what's name, or who I am 1"
my
The bystanders began now to look at each other, nod,
wink significantly, and tap their fingers against their foreheads.
There was a whisper also about securing the gun, and keep-
ing the old fellow from doing mischief, at the very suggestion
of which the self-important man in the cocked hat retired
with some precipitation* At this critical moment a fresh
comely woman pressed through the throng to get a peep at
the grey-bearded man. She had a chubby child in her arms,
which, frightened at his looks, began to cry. "Hush, Rip,"
cried she, "hush, you little fool, the old man won't hurt
you." The name of the child, the air of the mother, the tone
of her voice, all awakened a train of recollections in his mind
"What is your name, my good woman ?" asked he.
"Judith Gardenier."
"And your name ?"
father's
"Ah, poor man, his name was Rip Van Winkle It's ;

twenty years since he went away from home with his gun,
and never has been heard of since his dog came horn*
;

without him but whether he shot himself or was carried

;

away by the Indians, nobody can tell. I was then but a little
*

girl"
Rip had but one more question to ask; but he put il

with a faltering voice :

 04 WASHINGTON IRVING
"Where's your mother?"
"Oh, she too had died but a short time since she broke
;

a blood-vessel in a fit of passion at a New England pedlar."

There was a drop of comfort at least in this intelligence.
The honest man could contain himself no longer. He caught
his daughter and her child in his arms. "I am your father 1"
cried he. "Young Rip Van Winkle once old Rip Van Winkle
aow Does nobody know poor Rip Van Winkle ?"
1

All stood amazed, until an old woman, tottering out from

among the crowd, put her hand to her brow, and peeping
under it in his face for a moment, exclaimed "Sure enough
: !

it is
Rip Van Winkle it is himself 1 Welcome home again,
old neighbour. Why, where have you been these twenty
long years ?"
Rip's story was soon told, for the whole twenty years had
been to him but as one night.
It was determined, however, to tike the opinion of old
Peter Vanderdonk, who was seen slowly advancing up the
toad. He was a descendant of the historian of that name,
who wrote one of the earliest accounts of the province. Peter
was the most ancient inhabitant of the village, and well versed
in all the wonderful events and traditions of the neighbour-
hood. He recollected Rip at once, and corroborated his story
In the most satisfactory manner. He assured the company
that it was a fact, handed down from his ancestor the historian,
that the Kaatskill Mountains had always been haunted by
.strange beings. That it was affirmed that the great Hendrick
Hudson, the first discoverer of the river and country, kept a
kind of vigil there every twenty years, with his crew of the
Half-moon, being permitted in this way to revisit the scenes
of his enterprise, and keep a guardian eye upon the river
and the great city called by his name.
 CUTHBERT BEDE
The Hoax

Cuthbcrt Bede, whose real name was Edward Bradley,

was a prolific and popular writer of humorous stories
of university and country life, of which the most
famous is The Adventures of Mr. Verdant Green, an
entertaining chronicle of an innocent undergraduate.
 THE HOAX

morning, Mr. Verdant Green and Mr. Bouncer were

ONE
lounging the gateway of Brazenface when the
in latter's
attention was riveted by the appearance on the other side
of the street of a modest-looking young gentleman, who
appeared to be so ill at ease in his frock-coat and "stick-
up" collar as to lead to the strong presumption that he wore
those articles of manly dress for the first time.
"I'll bet you a bottle of blacking, Gig-lamps/* said little
Mr. Bouncer, "that this respected party is an intending
Freshman. Look at his customary suits of solemn black,
as Othello, or Hamlet, or some other swell says in Shakes-
peare. And, besides his black go-to-meeting bags, please
*
to observe,* continued the little gentleman, in the tone of
a waxwork showman ; "please to ^observe the pecoo-
liarity ^of the hair-chain, likewise the straps of the period.
Look he's coining this way. Gig-lamps, I vote we take
!

a rise out of the youth. Hem 1 Good morning 1 Can we

have the pleasure of assisting you in anything ?"
"Yes, sir1 Thank you, sir," replied the youthful stranger,
flushing like a girl to the roots of his curly auburn hair ;
"perhaps, sir, you can direct me to Brazenface College, sir ?"
"Well, sir, it's not at all improbable, sir, but what I could,
sir," replied Mr. Bouncer;
4
"but perhaps, sir, you'll first
favour me with your name, and your business there, sir."
"Certainly, sir!" rejoined the stranger; and, while he
fumbled at his card-case, the experienced Mr. Bouncer
whispered to our hero, "Told you he was a suckling Fresh-
man, Gig-lamps He has got a brand new card-case, and
I

says 'sir' at sight of the academicals." The card handed to

Mr. Bouncer bore the name of "Ma. JAMES PUCKER" ; and
in small characters in the corner of the card were the words,
99
"Brazen/act College, Oxford.
"I came, sir," said the blushing Mr. Pucker, "to enter
407
208 CUTHBERT BEDE
for matriculation examination, and I wished to see the
my
gentleman who will have to examine me, sir/'
"The doose you do 1" said Mr. Bouncer sternly "then, ;

young man, allow me to say that youVe regularly been and

gone and done and put your foot in it most completely/*
it,
"How-ow~ow how, sir ?" stammered the dupe.
"How ?" replied Mr. Bouncer, still more sternly ; "do
you mean to brazen out your offence by asking how ? What
could have induced you, sir, to have had printed on this card
the name of this college, when youVe not a prospect of
belonging to it it may be for years, it may be for never,
as the bard says ? YouVe committed a most grievous
offence against the University Statutes, young gentleman,
as this gentleman here Mr. Pluckem, the junior examiner
will tell you !" And with that Mr. Bouncer nudged Mr.
Verdant Green, who took his cue with astonishing aptitude,
and glared through his glasses at the trembling Mr. Pucker,
who stood blushing and bowing, and heartily repenting that
his schoolboy vanity had led him to invest four-and~six-
pence on "100 cards, and plate, engraved with name and
address".
"Put the cards in your pocket, sir, and don't let me see
them again 1" the junior examiner, quite rejoiced at
said
the opportunity afforded him of proving to his friend that
be was no longer a Freshman.
"He forgives you for the sake of your family, young
man !" said Mr. Bouncer with pathos ; "you've come to
the right shop, for this is Brazenface ; and youVe come just
at the right time, for here is the gentleman who will assist
Mr. Pluckem in examining you" ; and Mr. Bouncer pointed
to Mr. Four-in-hand Fosbrooke, who was coming up the
street on his way from the Schools, where he was making a
v-ery laudable (but, as it proved, futile) endeavour "to get
through his smalls", or, in other words, to pass his Little-go
examination. The hoax which had been suggested to the
the fact of
ingenious mind of Mr. Bouncer was based upon
Mr. Fosbrooke's being properly got-up for his sacrifice in a
white tie and a pair of very small bands the two articles
which, with the usual academicals, form the costume demanded
by Alma Mater of all her children when they take their places
in her Schools. And, as Mr. Fosbrooke was far too politic
a gentleman to irritate the Examiners by appearing in a
 THE HOAX
"loud" or sporting costume, he had carried out the idea of
clerical character, suggested by the bands and choker, by
a
suit of black, which, he had fondly hoped,
quiet, gentlemanly
would have softened his Examiners' manners, and not per-
mitted them to be brutal.
Mr. Four-in-hand Fosbrooke, therefore, to the unsophis-
ticated eye of the blushing Mr. Pucker, presented a very fine
and this impression on
specimen of the Examining Tutor ;
Mr. Pucker's mind was heightened by Mr. Fosbrooke, after
a few minutes* conversation with the two other
private
"It will be extremely
gentlemen, turning to him and saying,
inconvenient to me to examine you now but, as you probably
;

wish to return home as soon as possible, I will endeavour

to conclude the business at once this gentleman, Mr.
Pluckem," pointing to our hero, "having kindly promised
to assist me. Mr. Bouncer, will you have the goodness to
follow with the young gentleman to my rooms ?"
the great
Leaving Mr. Pucker to express his thanks for
kindness, and Mr. Bouncer to plunge him into the depths of
trepidation by telling him terrible stones
of the Examiner's
fondness for rejecting the candidates for examination, Mr.
Fosbrooke and our hero ascended to the rooms of the former,
where they hastily cleared away cigar-boxes and pipes, turned
certain French pictures with their faces to the wall, and covered
over with an outspread Times a regiment of porter and spirit
bottles which had just been smuggled in, and were drawn up
rank and file on the sofa. Having made this preparation,
and furnished the table with pens, ink, and scribbling-paper,
Mr. Bouncer and the victim were admitted.
"Take a seat, sir/' said Mr. Fosbrooke gravely; and
Mr. Pucker put his hat on the ground, and sat down at the
table in a state of blushing nervousness. "Have you been
at a public school ?"
"Yes, sir," stammered the victim ;
"a very public one,
sir ; it was a boarding-school, sir ;
I was a day-boy, sir, and
in the first class."
"First class of an uncommon slow train I" muttered Mr.
Bouncer.
"And you going back to the boarding-school 1"
are
asked Mr. Verdant Green, with the air of an assistant judge.
"No, sir/' replied Mr. Pucker, "I have just done with
ft; quite done with school, sir, this last half; and papa
is
110 CUTHBERT BEDS
going to put me to read with a clergyman until It Is time
for me to come to college/'
"Refreshing innocence I" murmured Mr. Bouncer ; while
Mr. Fosbrooke and our hero conferred together, and hastily
wrote on two sheets of the scribbling-paper.
<c
Now, sir/' said Mr. Fosbrooke to the victim, after a
paper had been completed, "let us see what your Latin
writing is like. Have the goodness to turn what I have
written into Latin ; and be very careful, sir/' added Mr.
Fosbrooke sternly,"be very carefiil that it is Cicero's Latin,
sir 1" And he handed Mr. Pucker a sheet of paper, on which
he had scribbled the following :

OF "To BE TRANSLATED INTO PROSE-Y LATIN, IN THE MANNER

CICERO'S ORATIONS AFTER DINNER.

any on your bench, my luds, or in this

"If, therefore,
assembly, should entertain an opinion that the proximate
parts of a mellifluous mind are for ever conjoined and un-
connected, I submit to you, my luds, that it will of necessity
follow that, such clandestine conduct being a mere nothing
or, in the noble language of our philosophers, bosh every
individual act of overt misunderstanding will bring intermin-
able limits to the empiricism of thought, and will redound
in the very lowest degree to the credit of the malefactor/'

"To BE TURNED INTO LATIN, AFTER THE MANNER OF

THE ANIMALS OF TACITUS.
"She went into the garden to cut a cabbage to make
an apple-pie. Just then a great she-bear, coming down
the street, poked its nose into the shop-window. 'What 1

no soap ?' So he died, and she (very imprudently) married

the barber. And there were present at the wedding the Job-
lillies, and the Piccannies, and the Gobelites, and the great

Panjandrum himself, with the little button on top. So they

all set to playingCatch-who-catch-can, till the gunpowder
ran out of the heels of their boots."

was well for the purpose of the hoaxers that Mr.

It
Pucker's trepidation prevented him from making a calm
perusal of the paper ; and he was nervously doing his best
to turn the nonsensical English, word by word, into equally
 THE HOAX til

nonsensical Latin when his limited powers 6f Latin writing

were brought to a full stop by the untranslatable word "bosh".
As he could make nothing of this, he wiped the perspiration
from his forehead, and gazed appealingly at the benignant
features of Mr. Verdant Green. The appealing gaze was
answered by our hero ordering Mr. Pucker to hand in his
paper for examination, and to endeavour to answer the ques-
tions which he and his brother examiner had been writing down
for him.
Mr. Pucker took the two papers of questions, and read
as follows :

"HISTORY
"i. Draw a historical parallel (after the manner of Plu-
tarch) between Hannibal and Annie Laurie.
"2. What internal evidence does the Odyssey afford,
that Homer sold his Trojan war-ballads at three yards an
obolus ?

"3. In what way were the shades on the banks of the

Styx supplied with spirits ?
"4. Give a brief account of the Roman Emperors who
visited the United States, and state what they did there.
"5. Show from the words 'Hoc erat in votis* (Sat. vi.,
Lib. ii.) that Horace's favourite wine was hock, and that he
meant to say *he always voted for hock'.
"6. Draw a parallel between the Children in the Wood
and Achilles in the Styx.
"7. Name the prima donnas who have appeared in the
operas of Virgil and Horace since the Virgilii Opera and
Horatii Opera were composed.

"EUCLID, ARITHMETIC, AND ALGEBRA

"i. 'The extremities of a line are points/ Prove this

by the rule of railways.

"z. Show the fallacy of defining an angel as *a worm at
one end and a fool at the other'.
"3. If one side of a triangle be produced, what is there
to prevent the other two sides from also being brought
forward ?
"4. If the gnomon of a sundial be divided into two
equal, and also into two unequal parts, what would be its
value ?
112 CUTHBERT BEDE
"5 . If seven horses eat twenty-five acres of grass In three
days, what would be their condition on the fourth day ?
Prove by practice.
"6. Reduce two academical years to their lowest terms/*

Mr. Pucker did not know what to make of such extra-

ordinary and unexpected questions. He blushed, attempted
to write, fingered his curls, tried to collect his faculties, and
then appeared to give himself over to despair ; whereupon
little Mr. Bouncer was seized with an immoderate fit of

coughing which had wellnigh brought the farce to its

denouement.
"I'm afraid, young gentleman," said Mr. Four-in-hand
Fosbrooke, as he carelessly settled his white tie and bands,
"I am afraid, Mr. Pucker, that your learning is not yet up to
the Brazenface standard. We are particularly cautious about
admitting any gentJeman whose acquirements are not of
the highest order. But we will be as lenient to you as we are
able, and give you one more chance to retrieve yourself.
We will try a little viva vote, Mr. Pucker. Perhaps, sir, you
will favour me with your opinions on the Fourth Punic War,
and will also give me a slight sketch of the constitution of
ancient Heliopolis."
Mr. Pucker waxed, if possible redder and hotter than
before ; he gasped like a fish out of water. But all was to
no purpose he was unable to frame an answer to Mr. Fos-
;

brooke's questions.
"Ah, sir," continued his tormentor, "I see that you will
not do for us yet awhile, and I am therefore under the painful
necessity of rejecting you. I should advise you, sir, to read
hard for another twelve months, and endeavour to master
those subjects in which you have now failed. For a young
man, Mr. Pucker, who knows nothing about the Fourth
Punic War, and the constitution of ancient Heliopolis is quite
unfit to be enrolled among the members of such a learned
college as Brazenface. Mr. Pluckem quite coincides with me
in this decision." (Here Mr. Verdant Green gave a Burleigh
nod.) "Wevery sorry for you, Mr. Pucker, and also
feel
for your unfortunate family ; but we recommend you to add
to your present stock of knowledge, and to keep those visit-
ing-cards for another twelvemonth." And Mr. Fosbrooke
and our hero disregarding poor Mr. Pucker's entreaties that
 THE HOAX 21}

they would consider his pa and ma, and would please to

matriculate him this once, and he would read very hard,
indeed he would turned to Mr. Bouncer and gave some
private instructions, which caused that gentleman to go and
seek out Mr. Robert Filcher.
Five minutes after, that excellent scout met the dejected
Mr. Pucker as he was crossing the quad on his way from Mr,
Fosbrooke's rooms.
"Beg your pardon, sir," said Mr. Filcher,
touching his
forehead for as Mr. Filcher, after the manner
of his tribe,
never was seen in a head-covering, he was unable to raise
his hat or cap "beg your pardon, sir, but was you a~lookin'
for the party as examines the young gents for their matricky-
lation ?"
"Eh ? No I have just come from him," replied Mr.
!

Pucker dolefully.
"Beg your pardon, sir," remarked Mr. Filcher, "but
his rooms ain't that way at all. Mr. Slowcoach, as is the
party you ought to have seed, has his rooms quite in a hoppo-
site direction, sir ; and he's the honly party as examines the

matrickylatin' gents."
"But I have been examined," observed Mr. Pucker, with
the air of a plucked man ; "and I am sorry to say that I was
"
rejected, and
"I dessay, sir," interrupted Mr. Filcher; "but I think it's

a 'oax, sir !"

"A what ?" stammered Mr. Pucker.
"A 'oax a sell 1" replied the scout confidentially. "You
see, sir, I think some of
the gents have been rnakin' a little
game of you, sir ; they often does with fresh parties like you,
sir. I dessay they've been makin' believe to examine you, sir.

They don't mean no harm, sir ; it's only their play, bless you I"
"Then," Mr. Pucker, whose face had been clearing
said
with every word the scout spoke, "then I'm not really rejected,
but have still a chance of passing my examination ?" *
"Precisely so, sir," replied Mr. Filcher, "and excuse me,
sir but if you would let me adwise you, sir, you wouldn't
go for to mention anythin' about the 'oax to Mr. Slowcoach.
If you like to go to him now, sir, I'll show you the way."
In twenty minutes after this Mr. Pucker issued from the
Examining Tutor's rooms with a joyful countenance, and
again encountered the scout.
 4 CUTHBERT BEDS
"Hope you have done the job this time, sir," said the
scout.
"Yes/* replied the radiant Mr. Pucker ;
"I shall be able
to come to college this time next year."
"Werry glad of it indeed, sir I" said Mr. Filcher, with
an eye to future perquisites; "and I suppose you didn't

say a word about the 'oax ?"

"Not a word 1"
"Then, hexcuse me, but you're a trump, sir
sir, A nd I

Mr. Fosbrooke's compliments to you, sir, and he'il be 'appy

if you'll come up into his rooms, and take a glass of wine
after the fatigues of the examination."
Need it be stated that, after this undergraduate display
of hoaxing, Mr. Verdant Green would feel offended were
he still to be called "an Oxford Freshman" ?
V
9

(from "Verdant Green '.)

 E. M. DELAFIELD
Men in Fiction

E. M. is in private life Mrs. Dashwood, but

Delafield
writes under an Anglicised version of her maiden
name of de la Pasture. She has published a number
of books noted for their quite individual blend of
humour, irony and satire, of which The Diary of a
Provincial Lady and it sequels are most amusing..
 MEN IN FICTION

PROFESSIONAL MEN

OVELISTS, although they do not much like one to say

so, are terribly conventional, especially when thev write
about men. Take professional men in fiction, for instance.
They may be all kinds of things, but there are also all kinds of
things that they mayn't be. Who, for instance, ever made his
or her hero a dentist ? The present writer does not want to be
harsh about this. Beyond a doubt, it is difficult to visualize
the scene in which a young man comes to the knowledge that
his true vocation lies in fumbling about inside the open
mouths of his fellow-creatures but there must be ways of
getting round this, and of making this very important and
necessary calling sound as interesting as it really is. Writers,
however, have as yet made no attempt to find out these ways.
Doctors, on the contrary, are numerous in fiction. Mostly,
they come out well, but not in detective fiction. In detective
fiction, the doctor is only put in because it is absolutely
necessary that, after one glance at the corpse, he should look
up and say with quiet certainty :

"The squire has been shot through the left lung, and his
head battered in by a short, blunt instrument, almost certainly
a poker like the one lying on the floor in a pool of blood
beside him. The bruise on his left side was caused by a hob-
nailed boot. Death must have occurred exactly six hours and
fifteen minutes ago, which fixes the time of the murder at

precisely quarter past eight this morning. There is nothing

to be done for him now."
After this, the doctor leaves the police in charge, and it
isn't till hours afterwards that someone or other finds out
that the old squire's injuries were all inflicted after death,
which was really due to drowning.
It is never said, in the detective story, whether the doctor's
2l8 E. M* DELAFIELD

practice suffers heavily from this professional carelessness in

failing to notice that the old squire's lungs were full of water
all the time.
Whenthe story is not a detective story, but a long novel
about a doctor's whole life, he is a very different type of
person. He is never called in to a murder case at all, and
indeed, the only cases of which much notice is taken in the
book are confinement cases. These take place usually in
distant and obscure farm-houses, in the middle of the night,
and to the accompaniment of a fearful gale, or a flood, or a
snowstorm, or any other convulsion of Nature which will
make it
additionally inconvenient for the doctor to attend
the scene.
Authors like obstetrical details, but the present writer
does not, and knows, besides, that in real life doctors ate
quite often called out in the night on account of croup, or
pleurisy, or even a bilious attack if sufficiently violent, as on
account of child-birth.
The doctor in this kind of book always has a frightful
financial struggle. He never attains to Hatley Street, or any-
where in the least like it. His wife is almost always a perfectly
lovely young creature with extravagant tastes that help to
ruin him, or else she dies young, leaving him to a house-
keeper who never puts flowers in the sitting-room. In the
latter case the doctor thinks about his wife when he comes

in, from one of his perpetual baby-cases, at three in the morn-

ing, with the prospect of the surgery before him at seven.
(Doctors in books never get more than four hours' sleep on
any night of the year, and often none at all. But they always
persist in opening the surgery at this unreasonable hour.)
One could go on for a long while about doctors in fiction,
but theirs, of course, is not the only profession dear to authors,
although certainly one of the most popular.
'-

Business men are much written about, and curiously

enough are treated in an almost exactly opposite way to
doctors, since they nearly always have helpful and endearing
wives, who would never dream of dying and leaving them to
housekeepers, and they end up highly successful, and
immensely rich, although starting from a degree of poverty
and illiteracy that would seem to make this practically
impossible.
The early parts of the book are almost entirely given up
 MEN IN FICTION 219
to the most sordid and realistic description of thek
terrifically
early surroundings, the language one word and two initials
that thek fathers and neighbours used when intoxicated, the
way in which thek elder sisters went wrong, and the diseases
that ravaged thek mothers. But by degrees, this is worked
through. The situation lightens, and the business which
started as a stall in the Warwick Road, or something like
that begins to prosper. Its owner turns his attention to
social advancement, and in the course of it marries a pretty,
innocent, but extremely practical young thing with quite a
short name, like Anne, or Sally, or Jane. They rise in the
world together. Then another woman, with a much longer
name more like Madeleine, or Rosalind and of more
exalted social standing, interferes.
The length to which the affak subsequently proceeds
depends entirely upon what the author feels about his public :
whether that's the sort of thing they want from him or
whether (Publishers are usually helpful about this,
it isn't.

although biased on the side of propriety, as a rule, because

of the circulating libraries*) Anyway, Anne, or Sally, or jane
takes him back in the long run, absolutely always.
Unlike real life, affairs of this kind, in books, never lead
to the complete wreck of the homestead, or of the business.
On the contrary. So that novels about business men have
at least the advantage of a happy ending a thing which some
readers like, though others would go miles to avoid it

LOVERS
THE well-known saying that All the world loves a lover, Is,
like so many other well-known sayings, quite inaccurate.
There are numbers of people who find lovers more annoying
than almost anything, and these include employers, doctors,
many parents and grandparents, and others too numerous to
mention. Authors of fiction, although such income as they
achieve is largely derived from the exploitation of lovers and
thek various reactions, do not really care much about them
In real life, for authors, unfortunately, are usually more than
t little egotistical by nature.
In fiction, however, there is no doubt that lovers are

popular. almost seems, sometimes judging by

In fact it

the way editors and publishers go on about what they call

1ZO E. M. DELAFIELD
the love-interest as if, but for that, fiction wouldn't ever
be read at all, in which case there would be
little point in

writing it.
:

We dwell
will not,
however, upon this improbable
and melancholy contingency. Instead, we will get started
about the men in fiction who are lovers which, of course,
most of them are. And we are bound to say that the first
thing that strikes us about nearly all of them is that they
attach much more importance to love than do the ordinary
men of everyday life.

Take the lover since authors are extra-

agricultural
ordinarily fond of writing about the passions of farm labourers,
although comparatively indifferent to those of navvies,
engine-drivers, or stokers.
The agricultural lover is seldom less than six feet tall,
and he wears his shirt open at the neck whatever the weather,
although there are many months in the year when a woollen
muffler would be a sign of greater common sense ; and if the
novel is at all a modern one, he takes about with him a smell
of soil and sweat wherever he goes. (In our experience,
brilliantine is much more noticeable, at any rate on Sundays,
but of this
nothing is said.)

Well, son of the soil is invariably fated to fall in love

tliis

with somebody too utterly unsuitable for words, either because

she lives in London, which constitutes for reasons unstated
an immense social gulf between her and the farm labourer,
or else because she is so frail and frivolous by nature that
anyone, except a lover in a book, would have seen through
her at the first glance.
In the first case, the outlook is bad, but not hopeless.
The girl from London either writes, paints, dances, or does
all three. She is probably engaged or semi-engaged, to a
talented youth of her own social standing, and they exchange
immense letters, full of quotations and similes and things,
which are very often given in full. She has, to all appearances,
never been in the country in her life before, because she always
does something amazingly unpractical, like falling down an
old mine-shaft with which authors seem to think that the
countryside is freely peppered or setting out alone to cross
the moors just when a snowstorm is coming up. Then, when
she has got herself into serious difficulties, the agricultural
lover pulls on his boots boots play an enormous part in
these idylls of the soil and takes one look at the sky and says
 MEN IN FICTION ZZl

with great confidence : "Reckon the moon should be up over

the quarry by the time the cock crows from Hangman's Hill,"
and goes off, finding his way unerringly through pitch dark-
ness, and floods of rain, and drifts of snow, and anything else
the author can think of to show how well he understands
Nature. And by the time he has found the girl and carried
her into the farm as though she were a child, the whole thing
is settled.

Though, personally, we have never thought, and never

of girl is in the least likely to make
shall think, that that sort
a suitable wife for any farm labourer.
The other kind is quite different She is a village girl,
and is referred to by those who are taken in by her artifices
as a "HP maid", and by those who aren't as "a light o* love"
or "a wanton lass". Her chief, sometimes her only, charac-
teristics are vanity and sex-appeal. In the end, after the
agricultural lover has fought somebody in a pub. for using a
Word about her, and has thrown various other fits, she usually
goes off and marries his stepbrother from the Colonies, or a
rich widower forty years older than herself; and the lover,
instead of realizing that this is all for the best, walks out into
the night. Common sense tells one that sooner or later
he will be obliged to walk out of it again, but before this
inevitable, though unromantic, point is reached, the author
usually brings the book to an end.
Lovers in books that are not agricultural are, of course,
numerous, but there is not enough space to deal with them
all in one article.

HUSBANDS

AUTHORS, beyond a doubt, go very wrong indeed when It

comes to husbands in fiction. They only seem to know
about two kinds. The first and most popular of these is quite
young, and most deadly serious. He has a simple and yet
manly sort of name, like John or Richard or Christopher.
He marries, and his wife is lovely, and he adores her. Instead
of getting accustomed to her charms with the rapidity so
noticeable in real life, and taking her comfortably for granted
by the end of the second year, he adores her more and more,
although on every page she is growing colder, more heartless,
and more extravagant * She lives, in fact, for nothing except
222 E. M. DELAFIELD
cocktails, night-clubs, clothes, and the admiration of other
men.
(The present writer, who has been married for years and
years, often wonders very much what makes authors think
that any man ever looks at a married woman when there are
unmarried girls anywhere within miles. The present writer
is not complaining only just wondering.)
To return to John :

He puts up with things that no husband outside the pages

of a book would either tolerate, or be asked to tolerate, by
even the most optimistic wife. He sits up at night over the
bills that his Claire has run up. He always does his accounts
at night, and they always take hours and hours. He never
seems to have any bills of his own, although in real life it is
usually six of one and haJf a dozen of the other.
One might suppose, after two or three of these nocturnal
bouts, that John would either put a notice in the papers dis-

claiming responsibility for his wife's debts, or have the sense

to separate from her. But neither of these courses so much
He tells her that he is overdrawn at
as presents itself to him.
the bank, and soon (and makes as much fuss about it as
though no one had ever before been in this painful, but
thoroughly familiar, quandary), and explains that he is already
working as hard as it is possible for anybody to work. And
then he goes and spoils the effect of all of it by suddenly
telling her how much he adores her.
In real life, very few English husbands ever say at all
that they adore their wives and absolutely none at die very
moment when they have been scrutinizing bills that they
cannot pay.
Sometimes John and Claire have a child, and Claire is
not at all pleased about it. As she makes no secret of this,
it is not reasonable of
John to be filled with incredulous
dismay and disappointment when she neglects it but all
the same, he is. After this, things run a rapid down-hill
course, and Claire goes off with somebody else, and John is
plunged into an abyss of despair, although it is perfectly
impossible that there shouldn't be times when it must occur
to him that he is thoroughly well, rid of her.
But if so, we are never told about them.
And the child grows up, and adores her father, and they
are perfectly happy together; and after about fifteen, year*
 MEN IN FICTION 223
Claire wants to come back again, and John has the incredible
Idiocy to let her do so, and she turns out to be dying, and he
forgives her.
And if that is the author's idea of being a successful

husband, it does not coincide with ours.

The other type of husband in fiction has really only one

noticeable characteristic, and that is a most phenomenal and
cast-iron stupidity. He is, in fact, rather out of place in this
article,because in the books where husbands are of this kind,
it is naturally the wife upon whom the author has concen-

trated. A good many pages are given up to her struggles

between Love and Honour, and in the end she decides that
the brave, straightforward, and modern thing to do is to go
to the man she loves. (This is not the husband, needless to
say.) And authors, strangely enough, very seldom tell one
what the husband about it, or what happened to him
feels
afterwards. Though after all, he has to go on living ordinary
everyday life, just like anybody else.
On the whole, husbands are not particularly well viewed
by authors. It is not, perhaps, for us to judge, but the thought
does occur to one that possibly this may be because authors
themselves very, very seldom make good husbands.

FATHERS
IN books, fathers are almost always called "Daddy", because
this is somehow more touching than just "Father". And
fathers in books are nothing if not touching. Unless they
are absolute monsters of cruelty or stupidity. We
will, how-
ever, deal with the touching ones first.
Their chief characteristic is a kind of whimsical playful-
ness, that would be quite bad enough taken on its own merits,
but is made much worse by masking a broken heart, or an
embittered spirit, or an intolerable loneliness. Fathers of
this sort, conversationally, are terribly fond of metaphors,
and talk like this :
"Life, sonny, is a wild beast. Something that' lies in
wait for you, and then springs out and tears you to pieces."
Or: v

"Grown-ups have their own games, dear, just like you

kiddies. Sometimes they pretend to be heroes, and princes,
224 B. M. DELAFIBLD
and wear glittering armour and go about looking for dragons,
and lovely princesses. But the armour has a way of falling to
pieces, and when they find the princess, somebody else has
got there first and carried her off, and there is only the dragon
left."
"And the dragon real, Daddy,
is or does he faD to
pieces, too ?" asks the obliging child, who never misses its
cues.
"Yes, little one, the dragon is real enough," says Daddy,
with a strange, far-away expression. "You'D learn that some
day. The dragon is always real, it's only the prince and
princess who are not real."
Also this is our own addition the entire conversation,
which is not real. Because a flesh-and-blood father who
went on like that would find his children quite unrespon-
sive.
"Now," they would say, "tell us something sensible,
about an aeroplane, or a cat-burglar."
But in books, the relation between the father and his
child, or children, is a good deal idealized, so that the kind
of conversation given above may take place frequently.
Also, the children ask questions. Not the sort of question
that one hears so frequently in daily life :

"Father, why can't we

get a nicer car, like the one the
Robinsons have ?" or "Do you have to brush your head now,
instead of hair ?" or even "Why aren't we allowed to stay in
the bathroom more than ten minutes and you have it for nearly
an hour ?"
But questions that give openings for every possible note
to be struck in the entire gamut of whimsical pathos of
humour :

"Has your heart ever been broken, Daddy ?" and "Why
do your eyes look so sad, even when you're smiling,
Daddy ?"
The answer to the first one is "Hearts don't break very
:

easily, girlie. Sometimes we think they're broken, but Time

has a magic wand and mends the pieces, and we go on not
quite the same as before, ever, but able to work
a little and
dream a littJe, and even laugh a little."
The answer to the second one is but there are tnany
alternatives, for it really is an admirable question, in the
amount of scope that it gives. Daddy can talk about the
 MEN IN FICTION 225

lady called Memory, who looks out of his eyes, and about the
Help that a smile is, and all that kind of thing ; or he may
be of a more virile type a clean-limbed, straight-gating
Englishman and then he just says something brief but
pregnant, about White Men who Play the Game and Keep
Straight Upper Lips and Put their Backs into It. And, in any
case, whatever he says sinks deeply into the consciousness
of his child, and returns again and again to its assistance on
strange and critical occasions, as when it violently wants
to cheat at an examination, or later in life is in danger of
sexual indiscretion.
Fathers in books are almost always either widowers, or
else unfortunately married. This leaves them free to concen-
trate on their offspring, from the page when, with clumsy,
unaccustomed fingers, they deal with unfamiliar buttons and
tapes (why unfamiliar ? their own shirts and pyjamas have
buttons, anyway) till the end, when either the daughter
marries, or the son is killed in India, and the father left alone.
They are, indeed, a lesson against putting all one's eggs into
a single basket.
The other type of father is generally either a professor, a
country clergyman, or an unspecified bookworm and always
very, very absent-minded. His children are usually daughters,
and he calls them "my dear", and everything he says, he says
"mildly" or "absently".
The daughters of real-life professors, country clergymen,
and bookworms must wish to goodness that their fathers
were more like this, instead of as they probably are the
usual quite kind, but interfering, domestically tyrannical and
fault-finding, heads-of-the-household.
Finally, and fortunately not very often, we
get the abso-
lutely brutal father. He is usually lower-middle class, and
his daughters have illegitimate babies since this is the one
thing of all others that infuriates such fathers and his sons
run into debt and then hang or shoot themselves sooner than
face the parental wrath ; and his wife dies, or goes mad, or
deserts him. Books about this kind of father are compact
of gloom, and are described by the reviewers as being
Powerful.
On the whole, fathers in fiction are a poor lot, and bring
us, by a natural transition, to the subject of the next article,
which will be Criminals in Fiction.
H
226 E. M. DKLAFIELD

CRIMINALS

WHEN It comes
to criminals, authors of fiction completely
let themselves go. They endow their heroes with qualities
that they simply wouldn't dare, for one moment, to oestow
upon any respectable, law-abiding citizen qualities like
chivalry, and tender-heartedness, and idealism. You feel
that they absolutely adore them, and admire their crimes far
more than they would anybody else's virtues. And we will
at once forestall the remark that shallow-minded readers may
feel inclined to make, by saying definitely that it is not women
writers who usually indulge in this kind of hero. On the
contrary.
Well, the things that jump to the eye about the criminal
of fiction are several. To begin with, he has no Christian
name, but is just known as Jaggles, or Ginger Mac, or Flash
Ferdinand. And he is always frightfully, frightfully quiet
Not so much when he is actually on the job because then,
after all, quietness would naturally be taken for granted
but in his manner, and appearance, and behaviour, and voice.
And this quietness merely denotes his immense reserves of
fire and fury, all of which come out later when the black-
mailer is threatening the helpless girl, or the heavily armed
householder is getting ready to shoot. But, even in his
gravest straits, or most heated moments, the criminal hero
never shouts. He just says, very, very quietly, things like :
"The game's up, I think'', or "Check-mate Colonel'*. And
he always remembers to smile a little, with the utmost non-
chalance, whilst covering his man, or, if necessary, men, with
a six-shooter, or heavy automatic, or machine-gun, or what-
ever it is that he carries about with him.
Curiously enough, the criminal of fiction is rather good
at love-maktng. He takes an interest in it This is probably
because, as a rule, he seldom has any contacts at all, except
with devoted but intellectually inferior male followers,
detectives and victims. One is never told that he has parents
or brothers and sisters, or ordinary social acquaintances. So,
naturally, he can concentrate on the one woman he ever seems
to have anything to do with.
And either she loves him and says that she will wait
(meaning until he has finished his sentence at Wormwood
 MEN IN FICTION 217

Scrubbs) or else she throws herself between him and the

detective's gun, and dies of it.

Either denouement is rather unsatisfactory.

In real life, people who serve sentences in prison very
seldom come out quite the same as they went in, and it isn't
every woman, unfortunately, who improves by waiting.
As for throwing oneself about in front of bullets, this is
not really as easy as it sounds, and might quite well end in a
mere flesh wound, and would anyhow almost certainly bring
down the most frightful curses on the person who got in the
way, for men like to settle things for themselves, unhampered
by feminine interference.
A delicate question to those whohave the interests ot
morality at heart is : Do these criminals of fiction ever
repent ? The answer is as so often in life both Yes and
No.
If the book is to have a happy ending, Ginger Mac, just
before embarking on a final enterprise, says This is the last:

rime the very last and then kills off somebody so unspeak-
!

ably bad that it is almost a

good deed to have rid, the world
of him, and then goes to find the woman he is in love with,
and says that he is utterly unworthy of her, which is probably
?ery true. And the book ends with some rather ambiguous
phrase, as it wouldn't quite do for criminality to triumph
openly. So the author just says something like :

"But as she turned away, he saw that there were tears in

her beautiful eyes."
Or:
"In a year's time/' she echoed. "In a year's time, who
knows ?"
Well the author knows, and so does Flash Ferdinand,
and so does the least experienced reader. So that's all right.
When the criminal does not repent, he dies. This rule
is never violated. To the mind of the fiction-writer, there
seems to be nothing whatever between reformation and
death. The possibility of persistence in wrong-doing does
not apparently occur to him. So Jaggles, gentleman-buccaneer
or burglar-sportsman, or whatever he may be called, either
jumps off the highest sky-scraper in New York to avoid cap-
ture, or is shot at the very last minute, and dies saying that it
was a Great Game after all.
There are. of course, other tvoes of criminals than the
*28 E. M. DELAFIELD
ones we have Indicated. There is the criminal in the detective-
novel proper, for instance but the writing of detective-novels
proper has now been brought to such a fine art that nobody
can possibly tell who the criminal is, till the last paragraph
but one. And then it turns out to be the idiot grandmother,
or the fine old white-haired magistrate, or the faithful servant.
Lastly, there the criminal in those short, powerful,
is

gloomy, sociological novels that have pages and pages without

any conversation at all, and that are so full of little dots.. . .

In these cases, there is never any doubt as to guilt. The

criminal committed the murder all right, but the guilt lies
with almost everybody else in the world the rich, Society,
the Church, politicians, the older generation, the younger
generation, the men who administer the law, and so on.
It is all very painful and realistic, and ends up with the

execution, and more dots, and then some utterly irrelevant

statement like : "Outside, a small, orange-hued dog was
" and then a final
nosing in the gutter crop of dots. . . .
 W. W. JACOBS
Red Cases
Kitchen Company

W. W. Jacobs introduced an entirely new type of

humorous story with his entertaining yarns of barge
skippers and sailormen, though he has proved by
The Monkey's Paw that he is equally at home in a macabre
atmosphere. Many Cargoes, The Skipper's Wooing and
others of his numerous books are universally popular.
 BED CASES

? I ^HE night-watchman was ill at ease, and, all ordinary

J[ positions failing to give relief, adopted several entirely
out of keeping with his age and figure. A voice from the next
wharf which wanted to know whether he was going on to the
stage, and, if so, whether he was going to wear tights, brought
him at once to a more becoming position. His voice was
broken with pain, but them asterly fashion in which he
dealt with his tormentor's ancestors and the future be-
haviour of his descendants left nothing to be desired.
Uncouth noises, lacking in variety, were the only retort.
"It took me sudden yesterday morning, just arter brek-
fuss," said the night-watchman. "The woman if you can
call 'er a woman next door but one 'ad given my missus
best part of a tin of salmon. I wondered at the time why she
gave it away now I know. I ate it all, except one mouthful
wot my missis threw in the fireplace, and in less than a
couple of hours arterwards I thought my last hour 'ad
come."
He clasped his hands at the waist-line and rocked to and
fro. Faint moans and indignant grunts attested to his
suffering.
"I've been taking things for it ever since and nothing
seems to do it any good," he resumed, in an interval. "Fust
of all I tried a couple o' pints to see wot that 'ud do ; and the
barman told me to go and die outside. He said wot I ought
to 'ave 'ad was rum, so I 'ad a quartern. Arter that 'e put
me outside me being too ill to stop 'im and an old gentle-
man wot was passing took me into a chemist's shop and stood
treat. I don't know wot it was die chemist gave me, but
a'most direckly arterwards there was a little crowd round
the door peeping in, and behaving theirselves as if I was a
Punch and Judy show. Some of 'em follered me 'ome, and
431
2jZ W. W. JACOBS
it was missis could do to stop 'em coming inside and
all my
helping to put me to bed/'
'er
He rose and, stifling a groan, took a few paces up and
down the jetty.
"Seems to be passing off a bit for the time/' he said,
resuming his seat. "It sort o' comes and goes, but it comes
longer than it
goes. It's funny 'ow soft and kind-'earted ill-
ness makes you. Three times yesterday arternoon I called
my missis upstairs to tell 'er that I couldn't pass away without
letting 'er know I'd forgiven her everything. She on'y came
the fust time, but that wasn't fault. I called 'er loud
my
enough,
"It seems to me to be the same complaint that
Ginger
Dick had a year ago on'y worse and he made a great
deal more fuss about it, being a free-spoken man and not
minding much wot he said about things he didn't
like.
"It came on in a publio-'ouse in the Commercial Road,
and was so sudden, and Ginger made such a funny noise,
it

that Sam and Peter Russet thought at fust he 'ad swallered

'is pipe.
"
'Wot's the matter ?' ses the landlord, leaning over die
bar.
"
'He's swallered 'is pipe,' ses Sam.
"
'You're a liar,' ses Ginger, groaning.
"
'Wot is it, then ?' ses the landlord.
C
"Ginger shook I don't know/ he ses in a weak
his 'ead.
voice. 'I think
the beer.'it's

"'Outside/ ses the landlord. 'D'ye 'ear me? Outside.

"Ginger went out with Sam propping 'im up on one
side and Peter the other and the landlord shoving 'im behind.
His groans was 'eart-rending and the way he talked against
beer made Sam and Peter blush for shame. They stood on
the pavement for a little while and then they
helped 'im on
to a tram-car, and two minutes arterwards the conductor and
five passengers
" helped 'im off agin.
'Wot's to be done now ?' ses Sam.
"
'Shove 'im in a puddle and leave 'im/ ses Peter, very
savage.
" 'I can't 'elp it I feel as if I'd swallered fireworks/
*es Ginger.
" 'Little touch o' stummick-ache/ ses Sam*
 BED CASES
" 'And
they keeps going off/ ses Ginger. 'Oh !
Oh,
my!'" ' c
'Ave you got any pain ?' ses Peter. 'That'll do !

That'll do Why can't you give

! a civil answer to a civil
question ?'
"He walked on, leaving Ginger 'anging on to Sam and
talking at the top of his voice. O' course, a crowd got round
and told Sam wot to do, until Ginger left off being ill for a
little while to attend to a chap as 'ad told Sam to stand 'im
on his 'ead. If it 'adn't ha' been for a cab wot 'ad stopped
to see wot the row was about, Ginger would most likely
'ave been given some medicine by the doctor at the police-
station, but, as it was, Sam pushed 'im into the cab and they
drove off. Ginger sat on Sam's lap with one arm round 'is

next and one foot sticking out of the winder, and when
Sam said they'd both be more comfortable if he sat up on
the seat like a Christian he put 'is other arm round Sam's
neck and said if he 'ad any more of 'is lip he'd choke 'im.
"It was a most uncomfortable drive especially for Sam.
When Ginger wasn't groaning he was swearing, with pain,
and saying wot 'e would like to do to Sam and Peter and the
cabmen and landlords and a boy on a bicycle wot 'ad caught
'old of his foot as he passed and tried to pull it off. By the
time they got 'ome he was raving, but he kept 'is senses, and
neither Sam or the cabman could get the money for the fare
out of 'is trowsis pocket, and Sam 'ad to pay it 'imself. Peter
Russet came in just as Sam was trying to take Ginger's boots
off without being kicked, and between 'em they got him
undressed and made 'im wot they called comfortable, but
wot *e called a lot of other things.
"
'He's gorn a nasty colour/ ses Sam to Peter Russet
"
'Like dirty putty/ ses Peter, nodding.
"
'It's like often that just afore the end/ ses Sam in wot
'e thought was a low voice.
"'Etui/ Wot end?' ses Ginger, sitting up, with his
eyes *arf starting out of his 'ead.
"
'You lay down, Ginger/ ses Sam in a kind voice 'you ;

lay down, and 'ope for the best. We're doing all we can fot
you. If you pass away it won't be our fault/
"
'Pass away /' ses Ginger, in a choking voice. *I ain't

going to pass away/

"
'No, no, o' course not/ ses
H*
Sam ;
-
'still
'
 IJ4 w w
-
JACOBS
" 'Still wot ?* ses Ginger, glaring ar *im.
" should stop using that bad kngwidge
'I if I was you/
ses Sam*
"
'In case/ ses Peter.
"Pore Ginger looked at 'em and then he wiped the per-
spiration off of 'is face with the sleeve of his shirt and laid
down very quiet. Even when Peter Russet sat on 'is foot
by mistake he didn't say anything ; but no doubt 'is thoughts
was just as bad.
"He laid quite quiet for about 'arf an hour, and then,
finding that *e was still alive, he began to pick up 'is spirits
a bit Fust of all he asked Sam if 'e didn't know better than
to smoke a filthy pipe, that ought to ha' been thrown away
years ago, in a sick mate's bedroom ; and arter that he asked
Peter if 'e would mind sitting with his back towards 'im, 'cos
he thought was better-looking that way. He went on like
as 'e
that till
they was both tired of listening to 'im, and then aU of
a sudden the pain come on agin worse than ever. He couldn't
describe it to 'em, 'cos, as soon as he started, the pain come
on and he 'ad to leave off to say other things.
"
'Try and bear it, Ginger,' ses Peter.
" 'Think of all the
pore souls wot are in worse pain than
wot you are/ ses Sam.
" 'And bear it in
silence/ ses Peter.
" 'With a brave smile on their
face/ ses Sam. 'Wot are
you"getting out of bed for, Ginger ?'

'You'll find out as soon as I get 'old of you/ ses Ginger,

*arf crying with temper.
"Sam put his 'ands up, but afore Ginger could get up
to 'im he was took bad agin and 'ad to lean up against the
mantelpiece till it was over. Then 'e crawled back to bed, and,
arter swallering 'ard three or four times, he fixed 'is eyes where
Sam wasn't and asked him, in a perlite voice, to go and fetch
'im a doctor,
" not leave it till to-morrow, Ginger ?' ses Sam.
" 'Why
*
'Cos I want 'im now/ ses Ginger, getting fierce again.
"Sam and Peter looked at each other, and then, arter saying
that it was nearly nine o'clock and they was tired and they
supposed most doctors 'ad gone to bed, and they didn't know
where* to find one, and if they did they didn't suppose he
could do Ginger any good, they put on their caps and went
out grumbling.
 BED CASES 235

"They walked along some time with their 'eads down

for
asthough they expected to see a doctor sitting on the pave-
ment waiting for them, and then Sam turned to P^ter and
asked 'im where they was going.
"
There's one in the Whitechapel Road/ ses Peter.
"
There must be one nearer than that,' ses Sam. 'Let's
go in somewhere and ask/
"They 'appened to be passing the Turk's Head as 'e spoke,
and, not wanting everybody to know their business, they
went into the private bar instead of the usual, and 'ad a couple
o' glasses o' bitter.
"There was on'y one other chap there, a tall young man
in a black tail-coat, a bowler 'at, and a collar and necktie.
He 'ad a large nose and a pair of very sharp light eyes, and he
sat there as if the place belonged to 'im, stroking 'is little
sandy moustache and tapping 'is boots with a cane. Sam
and Peter could see at once that he never went anywhere
except in private bars, and for the fust minute or two they was
talking a'most in whispers. They must ha' talked a bit louder
arter a bit, 'cos all of a sudden the gentleman emptied 'is

glass and spoke to 'em.

"
'What's that you want ?' he ses. 'A doctor ?'
"
'Yes,' ses Sam, and the gentleman sat there with a
smile on 'is face while Peter and Sam described Ginger's
illness and repeated some of 'is remarks about it.
"
Tunny you should tell me,' ses the gentleman. 'Very
funny.'
"Sam looked at 'im, and waited.
"'
'Cos I'm a doctor myself,' ses the gentleman, 'Dr. Brown/
"
'Wot a bit o' luck !' ses Peter. 'We thought we'd got to
walk no end of a way.'
"The doctor shook his 'ead.
" 'I'm afraid I'm no
" good to you/ ses he.
"
'Why not ?" ses Sam, staring.
Too expensive,' ses the doctor. 'You see,I'm a West
End man, and we're not allowed to see a patient under a
pound a visit.'
"He shook his 'ead and sat smiling at them sadlike and

listening to Sam, wot was sitting perched up on a stool making

a noise like bronchitis, with surprise.
" *
*I on'y come this way for a stroll,' he ses, 'cos I like to
see ships and sailormen.'
 Ij6 W. W. JACOBS
"
'A pound a visit ?' ses Peter. 'D'ye 'ear that,
Sam?'
"Sam looked at 'im, and arter a time he managed to nod.
"
'P'r'aps does Seem a lot/ ses the doctor, 'but it comes
it

cheaper in the end to have a good man/

"
"Not if the chap dies/ ses Peter.
"
'My patients don't die/ ses the doctor. 'It's only cheap
doctors wot loses their patients.'
"He took up 'is glass and then,
finding as there was
nothing in it, put it down agin. Sam gave a little cough, and
arter waiting a moment asked whether 'e would do 'itn the

pleasure of having a drink with 'im.

"
'Well, I've 'ad enough really/ ses the doctor. 'Still, I
don't mind 'aving a glass of port with you.'
"Peter said he'd 'ave a port, too, afore Sam could stop
'im, and him and the doctor sat and drank Sam's 'ealth, and
Peter said 'ow well he was looking and wot a fine rosy colour
he'd got. Then Sam told the doctor all about Ginger's illness
agin, and, in a off-hand sort o' way, asked 'im wot Ginger
could take for it.
"
'I couldn't say without seeing 'im/ ses the doctor ;

'it ain't allowed.'

" *
'Ow much would it be to see 'im ?' ses Sam.
"
'He ain't much to look at/ ses Peter, looking at him
'opefal-like.
"The doctor laughed, and then shook his 'ead at 'imself.

'Well, I don't know/ he says, 'but if you'll keep it a dead

secret and not let anybody know that I said I mean, that
I'm a doctor I don't mind seein' 'im for 'arf a dollar a visit.*
"
couldn't say anything agin that/ ses Peter.
" 'Ginger *
'Couldn't he ?' ses Sam. 'Owever, he'll 'ave to put up
with
"
it.
your turn, Peter ; mine's a port.'
It's
'I suppose I'd better 'ave the same/ says the doctor.
1 don't believe in mixing. Tell 'im to give us the special this
time. It's better.'
"Peter told 'im, and the landlord 'ad to tell 'im three
times 'ow much it was afore he understood. He seemed 'arf
dazed, and the noise Sam made smacking 'is lips over his wine
nearly drove 'im crazy.
"The doctor got up as soon as he 'ad finished 'is glass,
and they all went out into the street ; Sam and Peter wonder-
ing what Ginger would say when 'e saw the doctor and what
 BED CASES 237
f
e would do when he 'eard the price. They went upstairs
very quiet, as the doctor said he didn't want anybody to see
'im, and the fust thing they saw when they got into the room
was Ginger laying face downwards on the bed with Ms arms
and legs spread out, groaning.
"
'Wot 'ave you been all this time for ?' he ses, as soon
as he 'card them. 'You've been gone long enough to find
doctors !'
fifty
"
'This is a good 'un, Ginger/ ses Sam, very solemn.
'One o' the best/
"
'Charges as much as twenty ordinary doctors,* ses
Peter.
"
'WotT ses Ginger, turning over with surprise and
temper.
"The doctor smiled and, arter fust putting the chair by
the side of the bed and sitting down on it, put it back very
careful and sat down on the bed instead.
"
'Let's have a look at your tongue/ he ses.

"Ginger put it out, and then put it in again to tell Sam

thatwhen 'e wanted to 'ear his remarks about it he'd let 'im
know.
"'I've seen a worse tongue than that/ ses the doctor.
'Once.'
"
'Did 'e die ?' ses Ginger.
"
'Never mind/ ses the doctor.
" 'But I
do mind/ ses Ginger, very sharp.
"
'No/ ses the doctor ; 'I was called in at the last moment,
and, arter sitting up with 'im all night, pulled 'im through.'
"
'I told you wot he was, Ginger/ ses Peter Russet in a

whisper that you could have 'eard downstairs.

"The doctor took 'old of Ginger's wrist ; and then Sam
got into trouble agin for taking upon himself to tell 'im that
Ginger 'ad got a natural dark skin. The doctor took out 'is
watch and they all 'eld their breath while he counted Ginger's
pulse.
"
'H'm !' he ses, putting the watch back. 'It's a fortunate
thing you met me when you did. Now let's have a look at

your chest/
"Ginger unbuttoned 'is shirt, and the doctor, arter a good
look at die ship wot was tattooed there, laid his 'ead on it
amidships and listened.
"
'Say ninety-nine/ he ses, 'and go on saying it/
138 W. W. JACOBS
" ses
Ninety-nine/ Ginger, 'ninety-nine, ninety-nine,
ninety if I
get up know it/
to you, Sam, you'll
" 'You'd could
laugh yourself if you on'y see yourself,
Ginger/ ses Sam.
44
'H'sh P ses the doctor ; 'he 'asn't got much to laugh
about, poor chap.'
"He moved his 'ead a bit and told Ginger to keep quiet.
Then he sat up and, buttoning Ginger's shirt acrost 'is chest

very careful, made a sign to Sam and Peter to keep quiet, and
sat thinking.
" about two
'His 'eart has moved,' he ses at last ; 'it's

inches out of place.'

"
'Good-bye, mates/ ses pore Ginger.
" 'There's no need to say good-bye/ ses the doctor, very
sharp. 'If you'll keep quite quiet and do as I tell you, you'll
be all right agin, in time/
"He sat thinking agin for a bit, and then 'e sent Peter
downstairs for a jug of 'ot water and a tumbler, and while it
was being fetched he told Sam 'e was to be head-nurse and
told 'im all he was to do.
"
'You don't want to pay two or three pounds a week for
a nurse, I suppose ?' he ses, when Sam began to speak up for
'imself and tell 'im 'ow much he enjoyed 'is sleep.
" 'I shan't be much trouble to ses 'I can'
'im/ Ginger.
'elp myself.'
" 'You mustn't ses the doctor. 'You've got to lay
move/
quite still. Even if a on your nose you mustn't
fly settled
brush it off. You don't know 'ow bad you are. I want you
to keep per-feck-ly still. Till to-morrow, at any rate.'
"He took the 'ot water from Pater and, arter putting a
little cold to it, 'is arm round Ginger's neck and 'eld the
put
tumbler to He 'ad four tumblers, one arter the other,
'is Ups.
except for wot went down 'is chest, arid then 'e laid his 'ead
back on the piller without a word.
" ses the doctor, taking the 'arf-
'That'll do 'im good/
dollar wot Sam got out of Ginger's pocket. 'I'll look around
agin in the morning/
"
'And wot about medicine ?' ses Sam.
44
'I'll
bring some with me/ ses the doctor. 'Good-bye/
"Sam and Peter went to bed early. One thing was there
was nothing to do, and another thing was Ginger wouldn't
let 'em do it Every time they moved 'e spoke about it and
 BED CASES 239
said wot it did to 'is 'eart, and once, when Sam sneered, *e
called 'im a murderer.
"It was about two o'clock in the morning when Sam
woke up from a dream of a beautiful gal with yaller 'air and
blue eyes wot kept calling 'im by 'is Christian name. He woke
up with a smile on 'is lips and was just shutting 'is eyes to go
on dreaming if 'e could, when he 'eard it again.
"
'Sam Sam
I Sam !Sam !' !

"
'Hullo I* he ses, sitting up in bed very cross.
"
*I thought you was dead,' ses Ginger. 'I've been
calling
you for ten minutes or more. It's made my 'eart worse.'
"
'Wot d'ye want ?' ses Sam.
"
Tve a
got nasty itching feeling between my shoulders/
ses Ginger.
"
'D'you mean to say d'you mean to say you woke me
up just to tell me that ?' ses Sam, 'ardly able to speak for
temper.
"'I woke you
up to come and rub it,' ses Ginger. 'And
look sharp about it. You know I mustn't move.'
"
'Hurry up, Sam,' ses Peter Russet. 'Wot are you waiting
for ? want to get to sleep agin.'
I
"Sam got out o* bed at kst and stood rubbing Ginger's
back with 'is fist while Ginger kept telling 'im 'ow not to do
it, and reminding 'im wot a delikit skin he 'ad got.
"He woke 'im up twice arter that. Once to give 'im a
drink of water, and once to ask him 'ow old he thought the
doctor was. Wot with being woke up and being afraid of
being woke up, Sam 'ardly got a wink of sleep.
"Him and Peter Russet 'ad their brekfuss at a coffee-shop
next mornin', and they had 'ardly got back afore the doctor
come in. He seemed pleased to 'ear that the pain was better,
but 'e told Ginger that he'd 'ave to keep as still as he could
for another day or two, and, arter putting 'is face on 'is chest
agin, said that the 'eart 'ad stopped moving.
"
'I mean moving out of place,' he ses, as Ginger sat up
making a 'orrible noise and threw 'is arms round his neck.
'To-morrow I will begin to move back.'
'ope it

"He fished a bottle o' medicine out of 'is pocket which

he said would be another bob, and, arter telling Sam to 'ave
a lump o' sugar ready and pop it in quick, gave Ginger 'is
fust dose. Sam popped it in all right, but unfortunately die
medicine was so nasty that Ginger was quicker than wot 'e
240 W. W. JACOBS
was. Anybody might ha' thought he 'ad been killed the way
'c carried on.
"
TU look in aginevening/ ses the doctor as he put
this
a 'arf-dollar and a bob o' Ginger's in his pocket. 'Don't let
'im move more than can be helped and Hullo V
"
'Wot's the matter ?' ses Sam, taking 'is finger out of 'is
mouth and staring at 'im.
"The doctor didn't answer 'fm. He lifted up 'is eyelids
and looked at his eyes, and then he told Ginger to open 'is
mouth, and looked at 'is teeth. Then he looked at Sarn agin
and felt all round 'is throat.
"
"Wot ses
Sam, going^pale.
is it ?'
"'It might be blood-poisoning/ ses the doctor, 'but I

can't tell yet. His teeth are in a very bad state.'

" '
'Ow know if it is ?'
shall I ses Sam.
"
*You'll know fast enough/ ses the doctor, shaking his
*ead. 'PYaps you'd better 'ave a quiet time at 'ome to-day
and keep your friend company, and I'll 'ave a look at you
when I come
in this evening. Keep your spirits up and be
as cheerful as you can for 'is sake.'
"He left 'em all staring at each other and then Sam sat
;

down on 'is bed and told Peter Russet wot ought to be done
to Ginger before England would be fit for decent people to
live in. Peter said it was a wonder 'ow he could think of it
all, and Ginger said it was because he 'ad got
a nasty mind,
and he told 'im wot he'd do to 'im when 'e got well agin.
"They spent most of the day quarrelling, and on'y left
off to find fault with Peter when 'e came in from enjoying
'imself to see'ow they was getting on. Sam was the worst,
'cos Ginger was afraid of 'is 'eart if he got too excited, but
arter the doctor saw 'im in the evening 'e was as quiet as

Ginger was.
"He from Sam's finger down into
said the poison 'ad got
'is liver and an abscess was forming there. He showed Sam
where 'is liver was a thing he 'adn't known afore and found
out where the abscess was with 'is thumb-nail. He found it
twice, and wass just going to find it agin when Sam pulled
'is stiirt down.
"
'There's no danger/ he ses, 'if you do just wot I tell
you. If you keep quite quiet like your friend does, I'll 'ave
you up agin in a week. If you move about or 'ave any violent
shock you'll die afore you know where you are.'
 BED CASES 241
"He with 'em for a little while, and, arter
sat talking

saying that Ginger's 'eart was not going back as fast as he

could wish, 'e took 'is money and went off. Peter sat
looking
at 'em till Sam asked 'im whether he was wax-
thought they
works, and then, arter punching up their pillers and tickling
Ginger's toes, playful-like, 'e picked up 'is cap and went out
He spent most of 'is time out, and, when 'e did come in,
all he could talk about was the drinks he'd been
'aving and
'ow glad 'e was that his 'eart and liver was as sound as a
bell.
"
'I wonder
you ain't sick of bed/ he ses, arter Ginger
had 'ad four days of it.
"
'Sick of it !' ses Ginger, choking. 'Sick of itl
'
Why,
you"ugly, mutton-faced son of a
'Mind your 'eart, Ginger,' ses Sam.
"'I don't believe in doctoring and laying in bed/ ses
Peter, picking 'is teeth with a pin. 'I believe that if you and
Sam was to get up and 'ave a little dance in your shirts it 'ud
do you all the good in the world. IV 'urn to you.'
"
'Mind your 'eart, Ginger/ ses Sam, very quick.
"Ginger minded it, but they was both so disagreeable
that Peter got up and went out agin and didn't come back until
the pubs was closed. He woke 'em both up getting to bed,
but when they tried to wake *im up arterwards they might
as well 'ave tried to wake the dead. All
they did was to wake
each other up and then 'ave words about it.
"They wouldn't speak to Peter when 'e got up next
morning, and, arter giving 'em both wot 'e called a bit of 'is
mind, but wot other people would 'ave called nasty
langwidge, 'e flung Ginger's trowsis into Sam's face and went
off for the day.
"He didn't come back until six o'clock, but when 'e did
come back 'e was a
reg'lar sunbeam, smiling all over 'is face.
He 'ad a look atGinger and smiled, and then 'e went and
smiled at Sam, with his 'and over 'is mouth.
"
'He's drunk/ ses Sam, trying to sneer.
"
'Mad and drunk/ ses Ginger.
"Peter didn't say anything. He went and sat down on 'Is
bed and covered up 'is face with his 'andkerchief and the
bed shook as if there was an earthquake sitting on it.
"
'Ow W
'ow's the 'eart, Ginger ?' he ses at last
"Ginger didn't answer 'im.
242 W. W. JACOBS
"
'And Sa Sa Sam's pore old liver 1* ses Peter, going
off agin.
"He wiped 'is eyes at last, and then 'e got up arid walked
up and down the room fighting for 'is breath and saying 'ow
it hurt 'im. And when he saw them two
pore invalids laying
in bed and looking at each other 'clpless, 'c sat down and
laughed till *e cried.
"
'It's the d-d-doctor,' he ses at last 'The the landlord
told me/
'Told you wot ?' ses Ginger, grinding 'is teeth.
fT
'He he ain't a doctor,' ses Peter, wiping 'is eyes ; 'he's
a bookmaker's clerk, and you won't see 'im agin, 'cos the
police arc arter 'im.'
"You might have 'eard a pin drop, as the saying is, if it
'adn't ha' been for the choking noise in Sam's throat.
"
'You ought to 'ave 'eard the landlord laugh when I
told 'im about you and Sam,' ses Peter. *It would ha' done

you good. 'Ow much money 'as he 'ad off of you, Ginger ?'
"Ginger didn't answer 'im. He got out of bed very
slow, and put on 'is boots and 'is trowsis. Then 'e got up
and locked the door.
"
'Wot are you doing that for ?* ses Sam, wot was sitting
on the edge of 'is bed putting on 'is socks.
"
'I'm going to give Peter something else to laugh about/
ses Ginger."
 KITCHEN COMPANY

PRACTICE makes perfect, and when Mrs. Brampton, from hei

seat by the window, announced the approach of the Captain.,
Mr. Leonard Scott kissed Miss Brampton in the small hall
and made his usual dignified exit to the kitchen. To leave by
the side-entrance was the best way of avoiding trouble with
a man who was always looking out for it. Mr. Scott bestowed
a nod upon the smiling young mistress of the kitchen, and
with his hand upon the back-door waited to hear the Captain
at the front.
"One o' these days," began Clara, who loved to dwell
the gruesome, "he'll come
"
upon
She broke offand listened. "He's coming/' she said, in a
thrilling whisper. "He's coming the back way."
Mr. Scott started, hesitated, and was lost.
"Fly 1" exclaimed Clara, pointing by accident to the
ceiling.
The young man scowled at her, and before he had time
to alter his expression found himself gazing at the burly form
and inflamed visage of Captain Brampton.
"Well ?" barked the latter. "What are you doing in
my kitchen ? Eh ? What have you got to say for your-
self?"
Mr. Scott coughed and tried to collect his thoughts. In
the front room Mrs. Brampton and her daughter eyed each
other in silent consternation. Then, in response to a peremp-
tory bellow, Mrs. Brampton rose and made a trembling
passage to the kitchen.
"What does this mean ?" demanded the Captain in grating
accents.
His wife stood looking helplessly from one to the other,
and, instead of answering the question passed it on.
"What does this mean, Clara ?" she demanded.
 144 w - w JACOBS
"Eh ?" said that astonished maiden. "What does what
mean ?"
"This/* said the Captain sternly, with a jerk of his head
towards Mr. Scott. "Did you invite him here ?"
Clara started but in a lesser degree than Mr. Scott and
looked down modestly at a hole in the hearth-rug. Mrs.
Brampton and her daughter gazed at her in hushed
expectation.
"I didn't, not to say, Invite him," replied Clara, "but I
can't help him coming here/'
"H
J
ml Perhaps you didn't try," said the Captain with
unexpected mildness. "How long have you known him ?"
"Some time, sir," said Clara vaguely.
"Does he want to marry you ?"
Clara looked at her mistress for guidance, but the latter
was engaged at the moment in an eye-to-eye duel with the
fermenting Mr. Scott. Over the Captain's face stole an
expression of great and unusual benevolence.
"Well, well," he said slowly. "WeVe all been young
once. He's not much to look at, but he looks clean and
respectable. When do you think of getting married ?"
"That's for him to say, sir," said the modest Clara.
"Well, there's no hurry," said the Captain, "no hurry.
He can come round once a week for you on your evening out,
but no other time, mind."
"Thank you, sir," said Clara, who was beginning to enjoy
herself. "It's my evening out to-night, sir. He was going
to take me
to the pictures."
A exclamation came from the direction where Mr.
stifled
Scott was standing, which the Captain chose to interpret as
an expression of gratitude. With instructions to Clara to
regale her admirer with bread and cheese and one glass of
beer, he shepherded his wife and daughter from the kitchen.
Humming a light air, Clara began to set the table.
"What the devil did you want to say I was going to take
you to the pictures for ?" demanded the ungrateful Mr.
Scott.
"
'Cos I wanted to go," said his hostess calmly.
Mr. Scott regarded her coldly. "I will walk with you as
far as the corner of this road," he said with an air of finality.
"We'll go to the best seats, and I'll have a box of
chocolates," said Clara. "Do you like chocolates ?"
 KITCHEN COMPANY 245
1
"No/ said the other sternly.
"Praise bel" said the girl piously. "My other young
"
man
Mr. Scott coughed violently.
"All right/' said the girl, "don't get excited. He's away
on a job for a week or two, else I wouldn't dare to be seen
with you. When the cat's away the mice will play/' she
added.
The young man eyed her in amazement. This was a new
Clara. His lips quivered and his eyes watered. He took up
his glass of beer and nodded.

"Right-o I" he agreed.

He smoked a cigarette while the girl went upstairs to
dress, and a little later, watched by three pairs of eyes from the
front window, sailed up the street with her arm-in-arm.
"She's too good for him," said the Captain, with decision.
"Much," assented his daughter, with a smile.
"Tailor's dummy ?" soliloquized the Captain.
"Cheap tailor, too," murmured the acquiescent Miss
Brampton. "Did you notice how baggy his trousers are at
the knees?"
The Captain shot a glance at her. Twenty years' experi-
ence of a wife whose only anxiety was to please him was not
the best preparation for handling a daughter who, to say the
least of it, had other ambitions. He began to fear that she
had inherited more of his strength of character a .quality
for which some of his friends found another name than
was convenient.
"He's a softy," he growled. "He ought to have a year or
two at sea. That might make a man of him."
He got up and went into the garden, leaving mother and
daughter to discuss the possibilities of a situation which had
found them somewhat unprepared.
"It might have been worse/' said Mrs. Brampton, "if
"
your father had caught him in here
"He couldn't eat him," said her daughter rebelliously.
"There are worse things than being eaten," said Mrs.
Brampton, with some feeling.
Miss Brampton nodded. "Taking Clara to the pictures,
for instance," she remarked. "Poor Leonard I"
Her mother sniffed. "I dare say he will get over it," she
said dryly. "Unless Clara's young man gets to hear of it.
Z46 W. W. JACOBS
From what she has told me he is a very hot-tempered young
man and very strong/'
"Pity father didn't find him in the kitchen/' said the
dutiful daughter.
She sat down, and in sympathetic mood tried to share
the misery of the absent one at the cinema. A vision of
Clara's hat, perilously near Mr. Scott's shoulder, mercifully
eluded her, but, the window being open to the summer air,
she was unable to help hearing the cheerful babble of laughter
that heralded their return. It seemed to strike a wrong note ;
and the couple of noisy kisses which Clara saw fit to bestow
upon the back of her hand for the Captain's benefit were
registered on the wrong target. i

Mrs. Brampton obtained the explanation from Clara next

day, and accepted it without prejudice. Her daughter declined
to accept it at all.

"You
quite understand that he must not come to see
you again ?" she said stiffly.
"But he's got to," said the staring hand-maiden. "The
Captain says so. And if he plays fast-and-loose with me I'm
to have him up for breach of promise. Lively for me, ain't it ?
When I think of Bill and his temper I get goose-flesh all over.''
The ladies eyed each other in silent consternation.
"Your father Jkaon>s " said the elder
9 at last. "He has done
thison purpose."
"Set a trap for him," said Clara, nodding. "Looks like
it And I'm the little bit o' cheese, I suppose ?"
Mrs. Brampton stared at her.
"Father forgets that I am nineteen," said her daughter.
"Why shouldn't I ?"
"I was only fifteen when / started," murmured Clara,
"
and not big for my age, neither."
"That will do," said Mrs. Brampton.
"
"Yes'm," said the girl. "Still
"Still what ?" demanded her mistress.
"I've been dragged into it," said Clara mutinously.
"Nobody asked me or troubled about my feelings. I do the
best I can, and that's all the thanks I get for it. Suppose I
had told the Captain it was Miss Edith he was after ? Where
would you have been then ?" '

"We won't discuss it," said Mrs. Brampton with an air

of feeble dignity.
 KITCHEN COMPANY 247
She made as stately an exit as the size of the kitchen
would allow, and, carefully closing the door of the sitting-
room, made a few remarks on Clara's character, and more on
her lack of it.

"It's no good blaming Clara," said her daughter. "It's

father's doing. He wants to make Leonard look a fool first
and scare him away afterwards. He'll tell all his friends
about it"
"Mr. Hopkins, for one," said Mrs. Brampton, nodding
"
sagely. "I wonder
"I don't," said the girl, reddening.
"Your father seems to have taken a great fancy to him,"
continued Mrs. Brampton. "Now, does he come here to see
"
your father or
"Or," said her daughter bitterly. "It's just like father.
I suppose he will want to choose my tooth-powder for me
next. But he won't get any satisfaction out of me or Leonard.
I'll see to that. As for Mr. Hopkins brrb I"
She beamed, however, on that innocent man when her
father brought him in next day to see the garden, and when
the wily Captain went indoors for his pipe made no attempt
to follow him. It was a pipe that was notorious for the dis-
covery of new and unusual hiding-places, and on this occa-
sion made no attempt to belie its reputation.
Meantime, the delighted Mr. Hopkins, under the skilful
management of Miss Brampton, walked with his head in the
clouds and his feet on various choice border plants.
"Hadn't you better walk on the path ?" inquired the girl,
who had been monopolizing three-quarters of it. "It's more
comfortable."
Mr. Hopkins started. "Good heavens !" he said in an
alarmed voice, as he bent down to render first aid to a stock
with a broken neck. "Did I do that ?"
Miss Brampton nodded. "Those, too, I think," she
replied with a wave of her hand. "Don't you care for flowers ?"
Mr. Hopkins, who was fearfully endeavouring to conceal
the traces of his crime, made no reply. When the Captain
came out they were both speechless, but he was, if anything,
the redder of the two.
7
"These paths are very narrow, father/ remarked the
humane Edith.
The Captain made a noise.
248 W. W. JACOBS
"Afraid crowding Miss E lith," panted the offender.
The Captain made another noise. In the present company
all the useful words he knew were useless.
"Did you find your pipe, father ?" inquired the persever-
ing Miss Brampton.
The Captain was understood to say "Yes". At the same
time he favoured her with a glance which would have made
her mother tremble. On Miss Brampton it had a bracing
effect.
"Father's always mislaying his pipe," she said, with a
bright laugh. "I shouldn't trouble any more about those, if
I were you, Mr. Hopkins. You can't do them any good, and
you are standing on an antirrhinum."
Mr. Hopkins removed his foot hastily, and placing it
carefully in the centre of the path offered up another apology.
It was received with what the Captain fondly believed to be
a smile.
"Accidents will happen," he said hoarsely.
"In the best-regulated families," said Miss Brampton,
with a satisfied smile.
She paid a touching tribute to the excellence of the victims
after the visitor had gone, and sought for some time for an

explanation of the tragedy.

"He must have been Vool-gadiering'," she declared at
length.
"What do you mean by that ?" demanded her father.
"Absent-minded," said Edith. "He seemed manlike a

walking on air, instead of some of the best stocks in the

neighbourhood. Even Clara's young man would have more
sense than that."
"Clara's young man won't go into my garden," said the
Captain. "The kitchen is the place for him."
He stalked out into the garden, and, digging up hopeless
cases with a trowel, sought to revive the less badly injured
with a water-can.
It might have been a sign of a forgiving nature, but was
more likely due to an obstinate one, that he invited Mr.
Hopkins back tc? the scene of his footwork a day or two later.
Missing plants had been replaced by a consignment from the
florist, and rolled paths and raked flower-beds testified to the

Captain's industry. Everything was "shipshape and Bristol

fashion" as the greatly relieved visitor walked with Miss
Bramp-
 KITCHEN COMPANY 249
ton in the garden in the cool of the evening. The Captain,
after satisfying himself that Mr. Hopkins was walking almost
as carefully as a performer on the tight-rope, had disappeared
indoors.
The path was narrow, but even when Miss B ramp ton
sent electric thrills through his being by leaning against him,
Mr. Hopkins kept to it. The air was soft and the scent of the
flowers delightful. Never before had his conversation been
so appreciated. The low-voiced laughter of his companion
was a tribute to his wit as rare as it was welcome.
"You ought to write plays/' she said thoughtfully, as she
planted her foot firmly on a geranium.
"You want influence to get them accepted," said Mr.
Hopkins.
"I should try, if I were you, though/' said the girl, nearly
missing another geranium.
Mr. Hopkins purred. Miss Brampton, with downcast
eyes, trod down six flowers in succession.

"Dialogue would be your strong point/' mused the girl,

continuing her ravages. "Crisp and sparkling/'
She took the other side as they turned at the end of the
path, and in a hushed voice called his attention to some
beautiful cloud effects. Mr. Hopkins, with his head at an
acute angle, murmured his admiration.
"An evening to remember/' he said very softly.
He brought his gaze slowly to earth and started con-
vulsively.
"Giddy ?" inquired the girl, with much solicitude.
Mr. Hopkins shook his head and, speech failing him,
pointed with a trembling finger to the prostrate victims of
misdirected industry. Miss Brampton stared in her turn.
"Oh, Mr. Hopkins I" she said, in accusing tones.
"I I haven't been near them/' stammered the unfor-
tunate.
"They must have done it themselves, then," said the girl
calmly. "Perhaps they were not strong enough to stand the
breeze/'
Mr. Hopkins breathed heavily. "I
"
I really think
he began.
"Yes ?" said Miss Brampton.
"I don't know what to think," concluded the other feebly.
His companion gazed wistfully at the wreckage.
 W. W. JACOBS
"Poor father 1" she said softly. "He is so fond of his
garden. He seems to know every flower, but, of course, he
hasn't had these long enough to know them/'
Mr. Hopkins groaned and cast a fearful glance at the
house.
"It's hisone hobby," continued the girl "I have heard
him use worse language about cats than anything else, I think.
And the doctor says excitement is so bad for him."
"I can't understand it," ventured Mr. Hopkins, with an
appealing glance.
"I wonder whether father will ?" said the girl. "He is

coming out, I think."

Mr. Hopkins looked around panic-stricken. Then he
pulled out his watch.
"Good gracious 1" he murmured. "I must be going, I
think. No idea so late. Appointment"
He moved hastily in the direction of the side-gate, and,
hardly realizing the geniality of Miss Brampton's hand-clasp,
disappeared. The girl stood watching until he had turned
the corner, and then went into the house.
"Where's Hopkins ?" inquired the Captain.
"He has just gone."
"Gonel" repeated her father. "Why, I asked him to
stay to supper. Did you send him off ? Eh ?"
His daughter shook her head. "He went off in a hurry,"
she murmured. "I think he had an idea that perhaps he had
offended you."
"Rubbish !" grunted the Captain, eyeing her suspiciously.
"What should he offend me about ?"
"
"Knowing how fond you are of your flowers began
Miss Brampton.
The Captain uttered a smothered cry, and, springing from
his chair, dashed into the garden. Cries that were anything
but smothered, and words that ought to have been, brought
his wife to her daughter's side. Together they watched the
head of the house as, with fists raised to heaven, he danced a
strange and frenzied dance down the path.
"He's wonderfully supple for his age," said the admiring
daughter.
Mrs. Brampton shivered. "I don't suppose that poor
young man will dare to show his face here again," she said

slowly.
 KITCHEN COMPANY 25!
"If he does, there will be an accident to the rose trees,"
said her daughter, compressing her lips. "I've had all I can
stand of Mr, Hopkins/'
"And then there's Mr. Scott/' said her mother plaintively.
"Clara says that she thinks her young man has heard something,
"
and if he should happen to meet them one evening
"It might be bad for the young man," said the girl calmly*
"Leonard would have a better nose if he didn't box so much.
Look at father !"
Mrs. Brampton looked.
"He he seems to be examining the footmarks/' she
gasped.
"Time I changed your sensible low-heeled shoes for
something more dressy/' said her daughter, disappearing.
She was back before the Captain re-entered the house>
and cross-jeg^ed, displayed a pair of sharp-toed,
sitting
high-heeled shoes of blameless aspect, which met his ardent
gaze with a polished stare. He turned his back at last and
stood gazing blankly out at his cherished garden.
It never occurred to him to accept defeat, and his daughter
was therefore more annoyed than surprised to see Mr. Hop-
kins a nervous, chastened Mr. Hopkins back again after
a few days. On this occasion, however, the Captain lingered
in the garden, and from a deck-chair beneath the window
watched his faltering steps,
Conscious of this scrutiny, the visitor babbled incoherences
to Miss Brampton, until in self-defence she retreated to the
house on the plea of a thorn in her foot
The sound of Mr. Scott's voice in the kitchen did not add
to her comfort. A glance from her window showed her that
her father had taken her place with the visitor and was
pointing out to him the merits of the rockery. She stole down-
stairs and, opening the kitchen-door, peeped in.
"I thought you were going to the cinema," she said,
addressing Mr. Scott coldly.
"Can't," was the reply. "Clara's Bill is outside, and she's
afraid to come."
"He's waiting for him," said Clara breathlessly. "There'll
be murder done and I shall be the cause of it."
"Cheer up," said Air. Scott. "He'll only have a week or
two in a nice comfortable hospital. You'll be able to see him
on Sunday afternoons and take him grapes."
 W. W. JACOBS
"I know who'll want the grapes," said Clara miserably.
"You don't know his strength. I don't believe he knows it
himself."
"Where is he ?" demanded Miss Brampton.
"Outside the side-gate, miss," replied Clara. "Like a cat
waiting for a mouse."
"A mouse!" ejaculated the startled Mr. Scott. "Now
look here, Clara
"
"Pll go and send him away," said Miss Brampton with
decision.
She slipped into the garden and, her father's back still
being towards her, opened the side-gate and looked out. A
bullet-headed young man, standing just outside, drew up
sharply at her appearance and stood scowling at her.
"Do you want to see Clara ?" she inquired.
"I'm waiting," said Mr. Bill Jones, "waiting for a toff."
Miss Brampton stood regarding him with a puzzled air.
Then she had an inspiration that almost took her breath away.
"Do you mean the gentleman who is in the garden talking
to father ?" she inquired.
Mr. Jones's eyes glistened. He licked his lips and stood
breathing hard and short. Miss Brampton, with an encourag-
ing smile, pushed the door open.
Mr. Jones needed no further invitation. With head erect
and eyes ablaze he entered the garden and, catching sight of
the unconscious Mr. Hopkins, strode rapidly towards him.
"Here What do you want ?" demanded the astonished
I

Captain.
Mr. Jones ignored him and, continuing his progress,
Mr. Hopkins.
thrust his face into that of
"Take my gal away, will yer ?" he shouted. "Take 'er to
the pictures, will yer ? Take that !"
Mr. Hopkins took it and went down with a cry of anguish.
Through a mist of pain he heard the voice of his assailant.
"Get up Get up else I'll jump on yer."
I 1

Mr. Hopkins got up, and the appearance of Mr. Jones

was so terrible that he turned and fled, with the other in hot
pursuit.
" "Mind the flowers
"Stop !
yelled the choking Captain. I

"
Mind the fl

Mr, Hopkins paid no heed; neither to do him justice,

did Mr. Jones. Firmly convinced that his life was in danger,
 KITCHEN COMPANY 253

the former performed miracles of agility, while his opponent

pounded doggedly behind. A
bad third, owing to his keeping
to the path, the Captain followed raving in the rear.
Broken plants lay in the wake of Mr. Hopkins churned-up
;

earthmarked the progress of Mr. Jones as he endeavoured to

head him off. And at this juncture Mr. Scott appeared from
the kitchen, shedding his coat.
"What the devil do you think you're doing ?" he shouted.
Mr. Jones pulled up suddenly and favoured him with a
menacing glare.
"Look Mr. Scott severely. "You
at those flowers," cried

chump-headed, mutton-headed son of a gun I"

Mr. Jones stood irresolute. He looked longingly at Mr.
Hopkins taking cover behind the Captain ; then with a loud
roar he threw himself upon this new arrival.
Mr. Scott side-stepped neatly and smote him heavily on the
chin. Mr. Jones, turning in amazement, took three more and,
being by this time acclimatized, settled down to a steady milL
"You'd better go/' said the Captain harshly, to Mr.
Hopkins. "This isn't a sight for you."
Mr. Hopkins went, somewhat reluctantly. He was a man
of peace, but the sight of Mr. Jones's damages, seemed in
some way to afford him an odd feeling of satisfaction. The
Captain stayed to see fair play also the only fight with fists
he had seen since he left the sea. It was with almost a sigh
that he went at length to help Mr. Scott assist his adversary
to his feet. The dazed Mr. Jones, with Clara's arm about his
waist, was led indoors and his head placed under the scullery
tap. The cooling sounds of running water and the heated
comments of Mr. Jones alone broke the silence.
"Well, that's over," said Mr. Scott, tenderly dabbing his
face with his handkerchief, as Miss Brampton came out.
"I'm afraid Clara has jilted me, sir."
The Captain grunted and eyed him curiously.
"I was going to take her to the cinema, now I suppose I
"
shall have to go alone. Unless
"Well ?" barked the Captain, waiting.
i
"Unless Miss Brampton comes with me."
The Captain stood up and faced him, choking.
"Cinema 1" he roared. "Cinema I If you want to do
something to pass the evening, you can help her help me help
make the garden tidy."
 SELDON TRUSS
Hugo and the Unnatural Mother

Seldon experimented in farming when he

Truss
came home from the war, but having made an imme-
diate success with his first novel promptly abandoned
it, finding literature more profitable than the land.
He is now established as a popular writer of thrillers,

his most recent book being Murder Paves the Way.

 HUGO AND TPIE UNNATURAL MOTHER

ASKING under the sunny skies of Honolulu, Hugo Stager

received a wireless from home announcing the nuptials
of that very old, very decrepit, and extremely deaf baronet, his
uncle, Sir Nicholas Stager. With a wry face Hugo cast the
flimsy aside, ordered another hair of the particular dog that
had been biting him of late, and banished the annoying
matter from his mind. Exactly nine months later came a
letter to herald the birth pf an heir. Unwelcome tidings,
indeed, for an heir-presurnptive to scan, yet Hugo still saw
no good and valid reason for any amendment in his mode of
life.
But when the next mail brought a curt and laconic missive
from the family lawyer informing him that his allowance was
now to be decimated to the unedifying figure of 25 pel-
month, he sat up with a pained expression and took notice.
After that he took four goes of the most potent cocktail he
knew. The next thing he took was a boat for home. Twenty-
five pounds a month This, to a eupeptic young man who
!

thought nothing of disbursing such a sum on one dinner-

party or a suit of clothes, was, to say the least, paralysing.
Hugo travelled via Marseilles and Paris with the dread
spectre of work gloating over him. From Paris he telephoned
the friend of his youth, one Harry Palk, instructing that chronic
reveller in the turn of events, and calling on him to relinquish
forthwith the flat and domestic staff in Half-Moon Street ;
such premises being kept warm (very warm at times) by the
aforesaid Harry Paik during Hugo's absence. After which
Hugo crossed the Channel, and this story, more or less,
begins. /

It will be appreciated that he landed at Folkestone in a

condition of abysmal gloom ; heightened, deepened, and
inspissated by the gloom all around him. Folkestone landing-
stage at twilight on a drizzly winter's day is not calculated to
 2j8 SELDON TRUSS
elevate the spirits when youVe grown accustomed to the
sunny skies of Rio or Honolulu. Hugo decided also that the
vast majority of his fellow-beings were ugly. There is no
doubt whatever that the lad was feeling hipped.
In the train he occupied himself by sombrely patrolling
the corridors and planning drastic economies. The flat in
Half-Moon Street, of course, would have to be given up. Like-
wise his clubs, ditto the car. No
more theatres or dances or
races. Ladies of the chorus, inevitably, would cease to dis-
cover that he was "rather a dear". His tailor would send in
his bill. Life, in short, was to be joyless.

Hugo sighed heavily and fished for a cigarette as the train

rattled on, bearing him to this grim destiny. He halted in his
stride down the corridor and glanced moodily into the com-

partment next his own. There was a young woman in it, who
was wrestling despairingly with the window-strap. Opposite
the young woman sat an astoundingly ugly baby. Politely Hugo
entered the compartment and pulled up the window. The
young woman thanked him, and he discovered that she was
goddess and siren combined, which is merely stating his view
of her charming prettiness.
"Dada 1" chortled the baby, encouragingly.
Hugo grinned doubtfully. He distrusted this form
" always
of familiarity. But the girl
"Awfully good of you/* she murmured shyly. "Pd been
"
trying for ever so long She picked up the baby and sat
it on her knees. "Was ickle ookums
welly cold, then ?"
'Dada I" repeated the baby, solemnly regarding Hugo.
"Gool"
The young woman lowered her head with
apparent
demureness, incidentally concealing a wicked smile. Hugo
hung irresolute. These youthful matrons were not exactly
in "his line, but she was the one bright spot he had encountered
since landing, and he badly wanted someone to talk to.
"Dadal" gurgled the baby again, holding out its arms.
Hugo bestowed a surreptitious scowl on it. In reply it blew
an enormous bubble, that presently burst all over its face.
Hugo shuddered and began to withdraw.
"Glad to have been of use, and all that/' he murmured.
" He met
"Anything else I can do, y'know her eyes and
stopped short. By Jove, she was a peach With1 those dancing,
"
provocative eyes, the cheeky smile
 HUGO AND THE UNNATURAL MOTHER 259
Crash I

With
a fearful jar the train jerked to a standstill. violent A
impact banged his head viciously against a view of Ramsgate
that decorated the compartment, cracking the glass, and, as
it seemed, his skull in unison. He had a vision of a baby
hurtling through space ... a woman screaming . . .and
knew no more.

Voices rang in his subconscious mind. "No bones broken

. .shock
. she's all right. So's the kid
. . . ." . .

A harassed official gazed worriedly at the trio. " 'Spose

they all belong to each other ?" he queried at large.
"Goo 1" ejaculated the baby, sitting on the floor of the
compartment, its bonnet askew, but otherwise unperturbed.
The baby rolled over on all fours and crawled towards the
unconscious Hugo. "Dada 1" said the baby.
"That settles it," observed the guard, with relief. "And
its got a better constitution than its father and mother. Look

at Both knocked silly, and that baby thrives on it. Any-

'em !

one'd think it had a railway collision for supper every night"

He pulled Hugo's suit-case from the rack and perused the
label.
"H. J. L. B. Stager, 353, Half-Moon Street, London, W.
Any of you gentlemen happen to be going that way ?"
"Sure," said a nasal voice from the doorway. "Bring
them here, Colonel. Me and my auto are hitting the trail for
the old Rite right now."
little

"That's a good job, then," the guard returned, with

satisfaction. "Lend a hand, somebody . ." .

When he came to, Hugo was reclining on the deep leather

couch in his flat, painfully aware of a swimming head and
parched throat. Hovering aside woodenly stood Binks, the
domestic paragon, whilst the face of a stranger, a severe and
grim countenance, was bending over him.
"He will do now," said the face, removing itself into the
middle distance as its owner straightened his back. "Nothing
serious. Same applies to his wife.
That's a fine baby."
"Yes, sir," die domestic paragon agreed, respectfully
escorting the doctor to the door. "No alcohol, I think you
said, sir."
The doctor nodded. "Keep them both quiet. I will call

again in the morning."

l6o SELDON TRUSS
"Very good, sir/* The door closed and Binks tiptoed
back into the room.
"Binks I"
"Sir ?"
"What about a Manhattan ?"
"The doctor said no alcohol, sir."
"The doctor !" Hugo sat up suddenly. "Has it come to
J
this 1
Speaking em ?"
in the vernacular, Binks, have I got
"Oh, no, sir. Not that You and Mrs. Stager have had a
nasty shock, sir." "
"Mrs.
" "A nasty shock
Hugo collapsed weakly.
"The baby's all right, sir/'
"The baby's all right 1" babbled Hugo, with glazed eyes.
"Capital J Excellent 1 Take baby a Manhattan, Binks, with
my compliments/*
"Yes, sir/' said the man, profoundly scandalized. He had
accepted the sudden advent of a complete family with the
impassivity that comes from long training, but such callous-
ness as his young master now betrayed outraged his deepest
sense of propriety.
"The doctor will be coming again in the morning,
sir."

Hugo stared haggardly at the ceiling.

"I trust not, Binks. Decidedly I trust not. That means
the Home for Stray Inebriates. Bring me a milk and soda at
once."
"Yes, sir." The man withdrew, and presently the door
opened to admit a but perfectly collected, with a
girl, pale,
half-defiant, half-whimsical smile on her lips. In her arms she
carried a baby. With great care she set the baby on the
hearthrug, whence it stared with intense expression
at Hugo.

"I hope you feel better now, darling," said the girl, bending
forward and deliberately stroking Hugo's forehead. Cool,
soft hands that brought infinite relief to his throbbing temples.
As in a dream he caught the flash of a plain gold ring on her
left hand. His eyes travelled to her face. He knew her; it
was the girl in the train.
"You have had a terrible shock, dear," she smiled tenderly.
I am
'"Darling" murmured Hugo, "it is so. completely
off my chump. Continue the treatment, please/*
"Dacla 1" gurgled the baby.
 HUGO AND THE UNNATURAL MOTHER z6l
"And how is the little one ?" crooned
Hugo.
"Baby's all right/' the girl said shortly, knitting her brows.
"An awful nuisance, as usual."
"An awful " Hugo sat up. "What words are these,
Harriet ?"
"My name isn't Harriet. It's Monica."
"Ah, Monica. Much better. But is this a mother's
love,
Monica ? Do you spurn your offspring thus ?"
"We'd have a much better time without it," she pointed
out frankly.
Hugo surveyed her pensively.
"So we would, Monica. In different circumstances I
should escort you to the haunts of wine and song."
She looked at him calmly. "Why not in these circunv-
stances ?"
"
"Because retorted Hugo, in a firm voice, "you're
dash it all I" He glowered sombrely at the brat on the
hearthrug. "I'm surprised at you, Monica 1"
"We might farm it out," she murmured.
"Goo!" said the baby, suddenly emitting sounds like a
lawn-mower.
"Remove it 1" cried Hugo, apprehensively, "it's going to
be sick."
The girl rippled with unconcerned laughter and walked
to the mantelpiece for a cigarette, which she lit, blowing out
the smoke daintily. With a splutter the baby regained its
ventral equilibrium.

Hugo wrinkled his aching forehead and strove to think this

matter out. She was an undeniable peach, but there was also
that undeniable wedding-ring and very concrete baby. The
r61c of wrecker of homes did not appeal to Hugo Stager in
the least. And yet one last fling before life was to be utterly
drab. . . . He averted his eyes from the marbly gaze of the
baby that read his guiltiest thoughts.
"Monica !"
She raised her brows serenely.
"Got any glad rags with you ?"
She nodded. "My dressing-case is here."
"Exactly. I don't know who you are, Monica, but if you
choose to drop across my path in this distinctly provocative
manner you must take the consequences. To-night we pad
 262 SBLDON TRUSS
thehoof to Bacchanalia. In other words, Monica, you dine
with me."
She nodded again, placidly. "I had intended to."
Hugo frowned in perplexity. The door opened to admit
the manservant bearing milk and soda.
"Binks ?"
"Sir ?"
for a nice walk in the park.
"Take baby When you come
to the pond, Binks, drop baby therein and return here* Mrs.
er Stager and I are dining out."
Concealing his perturbation under a mask of granite, the
worthy man placed the tumbler at Hugo's elbow,
"The doctor said you were to be kept quiet, sir."
"Precisely, Binks. And how do you suppose I can be kept
quiet with that baby's glassy optic fixed upon me ? Remove
the little one."
The manservant shifted uneasily. The girJ puffed at her
cigarette with placid amusement.
"Better leave it to me," she suggested. "I'll dispose of it

somewhere."
"Dispose of it 1" echoed. The words had a sinister
Hugo
sound. As if in protest the baby choked and then dribbled
with lamentable freedom. Hugo shuddered.
"It ought to be put on the kerb outside a post-office," he
said, "for people to wet their stamps on."
The manservant tiptoed from the room in shocked silence.
The bubbling with laughter, began unconcernedly to put
girl
her hat on before a mirror, The baby, after a prolonged stare
of aggression, blew out its cheeks and crawled towards Hugo's
couch. Seizing his leg, it hauled itself into a position
of
insecure perpendicularity and dribbled again with studied
insult. Hugo was on the point of appealing for protection
against this attack, when his eye fell on a name-tab on the
collar of the creature's woolly jacket. Gingerly he steadied
the swaying infant whilst he read, and as he read his jaw
dropped with consternation. The name was Stager.
He looked at the girl. She was powdering her nose at the
mirror. Presently she turned, and with an expression of calm
resolve bore the baby from the room.

Across a secluded table for two at the Carlton Hugo surveyed

his companion moodily. She was, he decided, distractingly
 HUGO AND THE UNNATURAL MOTHER 263

pretty. She was also heartless, callous, and unprincipled.

"What have you done with that baby ?" he growled.
"That's telling/' she replied brightly.
"When are you going to collect it ?"
"Never, I hope," she grimaced, daintily.
The ghastly thought assailed him. She bad made away
with it
"Monica !"

"Hugo, dear ?"

"Where's your husband ?"
She shook her head and sighed. "Goodness knows where
my husband is !"
"Goodness knows I" Hugo surveyed her with knit brows,
cursing under his breath at the glint of that plain gold ring.
"So do ir
"Really ?" She nodded placidly. "Dear boy, my cham-
is
very empty."
pagne glass
A waiter hurried forward. Hugo watched the girl sip
delicately and met the provocative gleam in her eyes. She
seemed to be laughing at him the minx.
"Monica P' He took hold of himself desperately. It was a
fearfu) effort to impart the needful solemnity to his mien in
such circumstances. "Monica, you are unmasked. All is
known. Upon the raiment of that innocent babe you have so
heartlessly abandoned is the name of Stager !"
She started and stared at him for several seconds. Then :
"So you know," she said slowly. "Funny meeting like that,
wasn't it?"
' 1

"Excrutiatingly humorous, Hugo agreed grimly ; "I

am sure my uncle would think so, too."
She met his eyes fairly,
"If you knew what my life has been, perhaps you would
not blame me. I have been so dull, Hugo."
"Serves you right !" he scowled gloomily. "He must be
seventy, if a day, and as deaf as a post."
"When I recovered after that railway collision/' she went
on, keeping her big eyes on his, "I found myself in your flat,
Hugo, and your man took me for your wife. When I realized
who you were perhaps it was devilry, perhaps because I
have never known a day's real enjoyment, but I let him think
it. Do
you blame me for having just a leetle bit of fun, Hugo ?
It will so soon be all over/'
 264 SELDOM TRUSS
The waiter brought coffee. bent himself morosely
Hugo
to the task of clipping a cigar. Intensely conscious of those
big, pleading eyes, he was cursing
Fate for allowing him to
fall in love with his aunt Ghastly thought She watched 1

him placid amusement was in the curve of her pretty mouth.

;

He fancied he detected a flicker of her right eyelid. Cheeky

little devil To think that his uncle no, it simply would not
!

bear thinking of.

Suddenly the smile vanished from her lips and he saw

her
stiffen in alarm. Following her gaze he became aware that a

waiter was declaiming the menu in stentorian tones to a very

old, very decrepit, and extremely deaf diner at a nearby table.
The diner was Sir Nicholas Stager. And in that instant he
saw them.
Seizing a pair of gold-topped ebony canes the
old man
started to tremble his way towards them. Hugo gave himself
up for lost.
"And so, madam/' snarled the old man, "I have found
you out I What are you doing here, pray ?"
The her eyes with magnificent serenity.
girl raised
"Dining with your nephew."
"So it seems Ha So it seemi I Quite so. And what
I I

have you done with the child, may one ask ?"
"Took it home/' replied Monica quite calmly, "and left it

there."
"Very good of you, madame, very good of you. If that's
all you think of the child you leave my house to-morrow."
Hugo stared aghast. Monica merely nodded and smiled
serenely.
,
"I had intended to," she said. "I've had about enough of
the shelter of your roof."
The aged baronet swayed on the verge of apoplexy. An
assiduous waiter hurried forward to render support. Hugo
leapt to his feet.
"As for you, young puppy," choked Sir Nicholas, "you
shall hear further from my lawyers about this 1"
Aided by the waiter he cluttered back to his table, and
Hugo, facing Monica, sank down again with a gasp of con-
sternation. She answered him with the softest little gurgle of
kughter.
"The least you can do," stuttered the young man indig-
nantly, "is to go and apologize to him. Do you realize that I
 HUGO AND THE UNNATURAL MOTHER 265
have been shorn of bank balance, deprived of my inherit-
my
ance, and cast upon the world with literally not a bob to my
name ! To make matters worse, you " He checked him-
self rigidly.
"And what else, Hugo ?" She leant forward, chin cradled
in hands .

Hugo bit savagely at his cigar and looked away. He

wasn't going to show this heartless flirt that he had fallen in
love with her.
"Never mind/* he growled, "We had better consider this
charming night's entertainment at an end. Shall I get you a
taxi ?"

"Hugo." She was regarding him with faint perplexity in

her brows. "He can't disinherit you the estate's entailed/'
-
;

"Exactly. In the male line, Monica. And that brat pardon

me for referring to your offspring in such terms **

Her big eyes opened very wide, and then she leant back
with a peal of helpless laughter that brought appreciative
masculine glances at her from various quarters of the room.
"Oh, Hugo

years
"Quite
1 Shall
1

so.
How
D -
funny !"
d funny
we go now, Monica ?"
I Best joke I've heard for

"But, Hugo Oh, I see it all now. You know how deaf
he is -- "
1

He gazed at her sternly. Heartless minx to laugh at an

old man's infirmities,
"He didn't hear. He wouldn't hear he wanted a boy and I

"What !" Hugo sat up electrified.

Hugo looked
dumbly, realizing after the first shock
at her
of surprise what this meant to him, and, somehow, how tittle
it meant. As if in sudden shame her glance fell.
"Thanks, Monica," he said gloomily, "it doesn't matter
so much now. But you might have left me out in your
search for distraction. The best thing you can do is to go back
to him and make it up, and in future award the little one
some of the consideration it has a right to er expect from
its mother oh, dash it alll" Hugo concluded fiercely, "I
wish I'd never met you I"
He twisted round in his chair angrily and beckoned the
waiter. In strained silence the bill was made out and paid.
Hugo pushed away the change irritably, and told the waiter
 266 SELDON TRUSS
to order a taxi. When he faced the girl again
she was holding
out her hands to him, palms up, as if in appeal. Fascinated, he
looked at those pretty white palms, and saw the glint of gold
on the third finger of the left hand. It was a signet ring, with
the seal towards him.
"Dear Hugo," said the girl softly. "Won't you forgive
me ? I am
not really as wicked as I seem." Her eyes dropped,
the lashes demurely resting on her cheeks. "Not as heartless
as I seem. . . Not as happy as I seem, Hugo."
.

am "
"Perhaps I hardly anything that I seem
"The taxi is waiting, sir," a discreet voice murmured in
the offing.
The looked at Hugo and Hugo looked at the signet-
girl
was worn with the seal inwards. The fact that this
ring that
was not a wedding-ring had definitely pierced his foggy
consciousness.
"Hugo," she went on, "have you never heard of poor
relations, forced to accept the charity of a cousin who has
made a 'good' marriage; to do menial tasks and play the
glorified nurse to that cousin's detestable baby, until one gets
driven to almost any subterfuge to steal a few hours' pleasure ?
Until one longs to kick over the traces and do something really
disreputable . . .
Hugo . . ."
"
"The taxi-driver, sir. He says
Of a sudden Hugo sat up, his own eupeptic self once more.
"Tell the taxi-driver to go to Hades," said Hugo Stager.
 WINIFRED HOLTBY
Wh) Herbert killed his Mother

Winifred Holtby was educated at Somerville College,

Oxford, and takes a keen interest in women'i> work of
all kinds. She has been a director of Time and Tide
for several years and has written a number of novels
and satires, including The Land of Green Ginger and
Mandoa.
 WHY HERBERT KILLED HIS MOTHER

upon a time there was a Model Mother who had a

ONCE Prize Baby. Nobody had ever had such a Baby before.
He was a Son, of course. All prize babies are masculine, for
should there be a flaw in their gender this might deprive
them of at least twenty-five per cent, of the marks merited by
their prize-worthiness.
The Mother's name was Mrs. Wilkins, and she had *
husband called Mr. Wilkins ; but he did not count much.
It is true that he was the Baby's father, and on the
night after
the child was born he stood Drinks All Round at the Club ;
though he was careful to see that there were only two other
members in the Bar at the time he suggested it, because
although one must be a Good Father and celebrate properly,
family responsibilities make a man remember his bank balance.
Mr. Wilkins remembered his very often, particularly when
Mrs. Wilkins bought a copy of Vogue ^ or remarked that the
Simpsons, who lived next door but one, had changed their
Austin Seven for a Bentley. The Wilkinses had not even an
old Ford ; but then the buses passed the end of their road,
and before the Prize Baby arrived, Mrs. Wilkins went to the
Stores and ordered a very fine pram.
Mrs. Wilkins had determined to be a Real Old-Fashioned
Mother. She had no use for these Modern Women who Drink
Cocktails, Smoke Cigarettes, and dash about in cars at all
hours with men who are not their husbands. She believed
in the true ideal of Real Womanliness, Feminine Charm, and
the Maternal Instinct. She won a ten-shilling prize once from
a daily paper, with a circulation of nearly two million, for saying
so, very prettily, on a postcard.
Before the Baby came she sat with her feet up every
afternoon sewing little garments. She made long clothes
with twenty tucks round the hem of each robe, and
embroidered flannels, fifty inches from hem to shoulder tape,
260
270 WINIFRED HOLTBY
and flutry oonnets, and teeny-weeny little net veils ; she draped
a bassinet with white muslin and blue ribbons, and she thought
a great deal about violets, forget-me-nots and summer seas
in order that her baby might have blue eyes. When Mrs.
Burton from "The Acacias" told her that long clothes were
unhygienic, and that drapery on the bassinet held the dust,
and that heredity had far more to do with blue eyes than
thoughts about forget-me-nots, she shook her head charm-
ingiy, and said "Ah, well. You clever women konw so much.
:

I can only go by what my darling mother told me/' Mrs.

Burton said "On the contrary. You have a lot of other
:

authorities to go by nowadays/' and she produced three

pamphlets, a book on Infant Psychology, and a programme
of lectures on "Health, Happiness and Hygiene In the
Nursery". But Mrs. Wilkins sighed, and said : "My poor
little brain won't take in all that stuff. I have only my Mother

Love to guide me." And she dropped a pearly tear on to a

flannel binder.
Mrs. Burton went home and told Mr- Burton that Mrs.
Wilkins was hopeless, and that her baby would undoubtedly
suffer from adenoids, curvature of the spine, flat feet, halitosis,
bow legs, indigestion and the (Edipus Complex. Mr. Burton
said "Quite, quite." And everyone was pleased.
The only dissentient was the Wilkins baby, who was born
without any defect whatsoever. He was a splendid boy, and
his more-than-proud parents had him christened Herbert

James Rodney Stephen Christopher, which names they both

agreed went very well with Wilkins. He wore for the cere-
mony two binders, four flannels, an embroidered robe with
seventeen handmade tucks, a woolly coat, two shawls, and all
other necessary and unnecessary garments, arid when he
stared into the Rector's face, and screamed lustily, his aunts
said "That means he'll be musical, bless him/' But his
:

mother thought "What a strong will he has

: And what
I

sympathy there is between us Perhaps1he knows already what

I think about the Rector."
As long as the monthly nurse was there, Mrs. Wilkins
and Herbert got along very nicely on Mother Love; but
directly she left trouble began.
"My baby," Mrs. Wilkins had said, "shall never be allowed
to lieawake and cry like Mrs. Burton's poor little wretch.
Babies need cuddling." So whenever Herbert cried at first
 WHY HERBERT KILLED HIS MOTHER 271
she cuddled him. She cuddled him in the early morning when
he woke up Mr. Wilkins and wanted his six o'clock bottle
at four. She cuddled him at half-past six and half-past seven
and eight. She cuddled him half-hourly for three days and
then she smacked him* It was a terrible thing to do, but she
did it. She fed him when he seemed hungry, and showed
him to all the neighbours who called, and kept him indoors
when it rained, which it did every day, and nursed him while
she had her own meals, and when she didn't gave him Nestles.
And he still flourished.
But what with the crying and the washing that hung in
the garden, the neighbours began to complain, and Mrs.
Burton said "Of course, you're killing that child."
:

Mrs. Wilkins knew that the Maternal Instinct was the

safest guide in the world ; but when her husband showed her
an advertisement in the evening paper which began "Mother,
:

does your child cry ?" she read it. She learned there that
babies cry because their food does not agree with them.
"What-not's Natural Digestive Infants' Milk solves the
Mother's problem." Mrs. Wilkins thought that no stone
should be left unturned and bought a specimen tin of What-
not's Natural Digestive Infants' Milk, and gave it to Herbert.
Herbert flourished. He grew larger and rounder and pinker,
and more dimpled than ever. But still he cried.
So Mrs. Wilkins read another advertisement in the even-
ing paper. And there she learned that when Babies cry it is
because they are not warm enough, and that all good mothers
should buy Flopsy's Fleecy Pram Covers. So, being a good
mother, she bought a Flopsy's Fleecy Pram Cover and wrapped
Herbert in it. And still Herbert flourished. And still he
*
cried.
So she continued to read the evening papers, for by this
time both she and Mr. Wilkins were nearly distracted, and
one of the neighbours threatened to complain to the land-
lord, and Mrs. Simpson kept her loud speaker going all night
and day to drown the noise, she said. And now Mrs. Wilkins
learned that the reason her baby cried was because his Elimina-
tion was inadequate so she bought him a bottle of Hebe's
Nectar for the Difficult Child, and gave him a teaspoonful
every morning. But still he cried.
Then the spring came, and the sun shone, and the bulbs
in the garden of Number Seven were finer than they had ever
 WINIFRED HOLTBY
been before, and Mrs. Wilkins put Herbert out in the
garden
in his pram, and he stopped crying.
She was such a nice woman and such a proud mother that
she wrote at once to the proprietors of What-not's Natural
Digestive Infants' Milk, and Flopsy's Fleecy Pram Covers,
and Hebe's Nectar for the Difficult Child, and told them that
she had bought their things for Herbert and that he had
stopped crying.
Two days later a sweet young woman came to the Wilkins*
house, and said that What-not's Limited had sent her to see
Herbert, and what a fine Baby he was, and how healthy, and
could she take a photograph ? And Mrs, Wilkins was
very
pleased, and thought : "Well, Herbert is the most beautiful
Baby in the world, and won't this be a sell for Mrs. Burton,"
and was only too delighted. So the young woman photo-
graphed Herbert in his best embroidered robe drinking
Natural Digestive Infants' Milk from a bottle, and went away.
The next day a kind old man came from Flopsy's Fleecy
Pram Covers Limited, and photographed Herbert lying under
a Fleecy Pram Cover. It was a hot afternoon and a
butterfly
came and settled on the pram ; but the kind old man said
that this was charming.
The next day a scientific-looking young man with horn-
rimmed spectacles came from Hebe's Nectar Limited and
photographed Herbert lying on a fur rug wearing nothing
at all. And when Mr. Wilkins read his Sunday paper, there
he saw his very own baby, with large black capitals printed
above him, saying :
"My Child is now no longer Difficult,
declares Mrs. Wilkins, of Number 9, The Grove, S.W.io."
Mrs. Burton saw it too, and said to Mr. Burton : "No
wonder, when at last they've taken a few stones of wool off
the poor little wretch."
But Mr. and Mrs. Wilkins saw it differently. They took
Herbert to a Court Photographer and had him taken dressed
and undressed, with one parent, with both parents, standing
up and sitting down ; and always he was the most beautiful
baby that the Wilkinses had ever seen.
One day they saw an announcement in a great Sunday
paper of a 10,000 prize for the loveliest baby in the world.
a
'Well, dear, this will be nice," said Mrs. Wilkins. "We shall
be able to buy a saloon car now." Because, of course, she
knew that Herbert would win the prize.
 WHY HERBERT KILLED HIS MOTHER
And so he did. He was photographed in eighteen different

poses for the first heat; then he was taken for a personal
inspection in private for the second heat ; then he was pub-
licly exhibited at the Crystal Palace for the semi-finals, and
for the Final Judgment he was set in a pale blue bassinet and
examined by three doctors, two nurses, a Child Psychologist,
a film star, and Mr. Cecil Beaton. After that he was declared
the Most Beautiful Baby in Britain.
That was only the beginning. Baby Britain had still to
face Baby France, Baby Spain, Baby Italy, and Baby America.
Signor Mussolini sent a special message to Baby Italy, which
the other national competitors thought unfair. The Free
State insisted upon sending twins, which were
disqualified.
The French President cabled inviting the entire contest to
be removed to Paris, and the Germans declared that the
girl known as Baby Poland, having been born in the Polish
Corridor, was really an East Prussian and should be registered
as such.
But it did not matter. These international complications
made no difference to Herbert. Triumphantly he overcame
all his
competitors, and was crowned as World Baby on the
eve of his first
birthday.
Then, indeed, began a spectacular period for Mr. and
Mrs. Wilkins. Mrs. Wilkins gave interviews to the Press on
'The Power of Mother Love'', "The Sweetest Thing in
the World", and "How I Run My Nursery". Mr. Wilkins
wrote some fine manly articles on "Fatherhood Faces Facts",
and "A Man's Son" or, rather, they were written for him
by a bright young woman until Mrs. Wilkins decided that
she should be present at the collaborations.
Then a firm of publishers suggested to Mr. Wilkins that
he should write a Christmas book called Herbert's Father, all
about what tender feelings fathers had, and what white,
pure
thoughts ran through their heads when they looked upon
the sleeping faces of their sons, and about how
strange and
wonderful it was to watch little images of themselves growing
daily in beauty, and how gloriously unspotted and magical
were the fairy-like actions of little children. Mr. Wilkins
thought that this was a good idea if someone would write
the book for him, and if the advance royalties were not less
than 3,000 on the date of publication ; but he would have
to ask Mrs. Wilkins. Mrs. Wilkins was a trifle hurt
Why
474 WINIFRED HOLTBT
Herbert's Father? What right had Paternity to override
Maternity ? The publisher pointed out the success of Mr.
A. A. Milne's Christopher Robin, and Mr. Lewis Hind's Julius
Casar, and of Mr. A. S. M. Hutchinson's Son Simon, to say
nothing of Sir James Barrie's Uttle White Bird. "But none
of these children was my Herbert," declared Mrs. Wilkins
which, indeed, was undeniable. So the contract was finally
signed for The Book of Herbert, by His Parents.
It was a success. Success ? It was a Triumph, a Wow,
a Scream, an Explosion. There was nothing like it. It was
The Christmas Gift. It went into the third hundredth thou-
sand before December 3rd. It was serialized simultaneously
in the Evening Standard, Home Chat, and The Nursery World.
Mr. Baldwin referred to it at a Guildhall Banquet. The Prince
used a joke from it in a Broadcast Speech on England and the
Empire. The Book Society failed to recommend it, but every
bookstall in the United Kingdom organized a display stand
in its honour, with photographs of Herbert and copies signed
with a blot "Herbert, His Mark" exquisitely arranged.
The Herbert Boom continued. Small soap Herberts
(undressed for the bath) were manufactured and sold for use
in delighted nurseries. Royalty graciously accepted an ivory
Herbert, designed as a paper-weight, from the loyal sculptor.
A Herbert Day was instituted in order to raise money for the
Children's Hospitals of England, and thirty-seven different
types of Herbert Calendars, Christmas Cards, and Penwipers
were offered for sale and sold.
Mrs. Wilkins felt herself justified in her faith. This, she
said, was what mother love could do. Mr. Wilkins demanded
10 per cent royalties on every Herbert article sold. And they
all bought a country house near Brighton, a Bentley car, six

new frocks for Mrs. Wilkins, and an electric refrigerator, and

lived happily ever after until Herbert grew up.
But Herbert grew up.
When he was four he wore curls and a Lord Fauntleroy
suit and posed for photographers. When he was fourteen
he wore jerseys and black finger-nails and collected beetles.
When he left one of England's Great Public Schools he wore
plus-fours and pimples and rode a motor-cycle and changed
his tie three times in half an hour before he called on the

young lady at the tobacconist's round the corner. He knew

what a Fella does, by Jove, and he knew what a Fella doesn't.
 WHY HERBERT KILLED HIS MOTHER 275
His main interests in life were etiquette, Edgar Wallace, and
the desire to live down his past. For on going to a preparatory
school he had carefully insisted that his name was James, His
father, who knew that boys will be boys, supported him, and
as he grew to maturity, few guessed that young James Wilkins,
whose beauty was certainly not discernible to the naked eye,
was Herbert, the Loveliest Baby in the World. Only Mrs.
Wilkins, in a locked spare bedroom, cherished a museum of
the Herbert photographs, trophies, first editions, soap images,
ivory statuettes, silver cups, and Christmas cards. The
Herbert vogue had faded, as almost all vogues do, until not
even a gag about Herbert on the music ball stage raised a
feeble smile.
But Mrs. Wilkins found the position hard to bear. It is
true that the fortunes of the family were soundly laid, that
Mr. Wilkins had invested the profits of his son's juvenile
triumphs in Trustee Stock, and that no household in South
Kensington was more respected. But Mrs. Wilkins had
tasted die sweet nectar of publicity and she thirsted for
another drink.
It happened that one day, when (Herbert) James was
twenty-three, he brought home the exciting news that he
had become engaged to Selena Courtney, the daughter of
Old Man Courtney, whose office in the city Herbert adorned
for about six hours daily.
Nothing could have been more fortunate. Mr. Wilkins
was delighted, for Courtney, of Courtney, Gilbert and Co.,
was worth nearly half a million. Herbert was delighted, for
he was enjoying the full flavour of Young Love and Satisfied
Snobbery combined, which is, as everyone knows, the perfect
fulfilment of a True Man's dreams. The Courtneys were
delighted, because they thought young Wilkins a very decent
young man, with none of this damned nonsense about him.
And Mrs. Wilkins well, her feelings were mixed. It was
she, after all, who had produced this marvel, and nobody
seemed to remember her part in the production, nor to con-
sider the product specially marvellous. Besides, she was a
little jealous, as model mothers are allowed to be, of her

prospective daughter-in-law. A *
The engagement was announced in The limes the
reporters came, rather bored, to the Kensington home of
Mrs. Wilkins. She was asked to supply any details about her
 WINIFRED HOLTBY
son's career. adventures ? Any accidents ? Has he
"Any
ever won any prizes ?" asked a reporter.
This was too much. "Come here I" said Mrs. Wilkins ;
and she led the reporters up to the locked spare bedroom.
What happened was soon known to the public.
there
When (Herbert) James, two evenings later, left the office on
his way to his future father-in-law's house in Belgrave Square,
hoping to take his fiancee after dinner to a dance given by
Lady Soxlet, be was confronted by placards announcing
"The Perfect Baby to Wed". Taking no notice he went on
to the Tube Station but there he saw yet further placards.
;

"The World's Loveliest Baby now a Man", and "Little Herbert

Engaged".
hardly conscious of the doom awaiting him, he
Still

bought an evening paper, and there he saw in black letters

across the front page "Herbert's Identity at last Discovered",
:

and underneath the fatal words "The young City man, Mr.
:

James Wilkins, whose engagement to Miss Selena Courtney,

of 299 Belgrave Square, was announced two days ago, has
been revealed by his mother, Mrs. Wilkins, to be Herbert,
the Wonder Baby," There followed descriptions of the
Perfect Childhood, stories taken from the Herbert Legend ;
rapid advertisements rushed out by What-Not's Natural
Digestive Infants' Milk, Flopsy's Fleecy Pram Covers, and
Hebe's Nectar for the Difficult Child, illustrated by photo-
graphs of the Infant Herbert. The publishers of the Book of
Herbert announced a new edition, and a famous Daily Paper,
whose circulation was guaranteed to be over 2,000,000,
deckred its intention of publishing a series of articles called
"My Herbert is a Man, by Herbert's Mother".
Herbert did not proceed to Belgrave Square. He went
to Kensington. With his own latchkey he opened the door
and went up to his mother's boudoir. He found her laughing
and crying with joy over the evening paper. She looked up
and saw her son.
"Oh, darling," she said. "I thought you were taking
Selena to a dance."
"There is no Selena," declared Herbert grimly. "There
Is no dance. Thereis
only you and me."
He should, doubtless, have said : "You and I," but among
the things a Fella does, correct grammar is not necessarily
included.
 WHY HERBERT KILLED HIS MOTHER 3177

"Oh, Herbert," cried Mrs. Wilkins, with ecstatic joy.

"My mother instinct was right. Mother always knows,
darling. You have come back to me."
"I have," said Herbert.
And he strangled her with a rope of twisted newspapers.
The judge declared it justifiable homicide, and Herbert
changed his name to William Brown and went to plant tea
or rubber or something in the Malay States, where Selena
joined him two years later and Mr. Wilkins lived to a ripe
old age at the Brighton house and looked after his dividends,
and everyone was really very happy after all.
 PAUL SELVER
"Well, I'm Blofredl"

Paul Selver is an authority on Chechoslovakian litera-

ture, and has translated into English the works of

Capek, beside publishing a volume of his ov/n verse

and a novel called Schooling.
 'WELL, I'M BLOWEDI"

BRTCGS had read stories about people who came into

money, but not until the same thing happened to him did
MR. lize how true to life the stories had been. Yes, it was
exactly the same. One day, quite unexpectedly, a letter had
arrived from a solicitor. It contained such words as "pro-
bate" and "legatee", and it had led to an interview with a
bald-headed, clean-shaven, elderly gentleman who looked
over his glasses and talked through his nose (quite a nice
fellow, all the same, thought Mr. Briggs), amid a perfect
warren of dingy offices in Bedford Row. The upshot of it
all was that at the age of forty, Mr.
Briggs, thanks to the
freakish generosity of an unknown uncle in Australia, would
be able to live in comfort for the rest of his life, without
doing a stroke of work.
Mr. Briggs was cautious and he was therefore secretive.
His was not what you would call an exuberant nature. Nor
would you be altogether exuberant if, like Mr. Briggs, you
had spent more than twenty years teaching in grubby little
private schools up and down the country. Teaching any-
thing and everything, from chemistry to physical drill, and
from algebra to religious knowledge (actually, Mr. Briggs
was very partial to religious knowledge, and could expound
with particular gusto the Plagues of Egypt and the Parable
of the Sower). Teaching, too, in return for about the same
wage as a lower -grade dustman. He had drifted into it
rather casually (as a matter of fact, it had practically been a
toss up whether he did that or acted as a sort of understudy
to an auctioneer's clerk).
It is true that, by what he couldn't help thinking, at the
time, was a great stroke of luck, he had managed, nearly
five years earlier, to escape from the hades of private schools
into the comparative purgatory of a day-school. What
happened was that Mr. Spencer Smith, the headmaster of St.
281
 PAUL SELVER
Christopher's High School for Boys, Kilburn, was obliged to
dismiss one of his assistant masters under circumstances
which had to be skilfully hushed up. Mr. Spencer Smith,
who was rather good at this manoeuvre, accordingly hushed
them up, and then informed Messrs. Wrickmanworth and
Lapwing, the scholastic agents of Sackville Street, that he
needed for the following term a good, all-round form-master,
keen on games, must be communicant, with experience, and
university graduate preferred, at a commencing salary of
130 per annum, non-resident. This really meant that Mr.
Spencer Smith needed a docile drudge who, without asking
questions, or otherwise demurring, would do any odd job
which nobody else could be amicably induced to undertake.
Messrs. Wrickmansworth and Lapwing thereupon circulated
slips of smudgy green typescript announcing
the requirements
of Mr. Spencer Smith (in the official version, of course) to all
the clients on their books (and they were many) who were
likely to jump at the chance of serving Mr. Spencer Smith.
Among these was Mr. Briggs, who was specially attracted
by the phrase "non-resident". Up till then, Mr. Briggs had
"held resident posts", a scholastic equivalent to the shop-
assistant's"living-in", and, if continued long enough, sus-
piciously similar to "dying out". That, at least, was what
Mr. Briggs thought about it. At that time he had a very

resident, a too-resident post, in a small private school in one

of the drearier regions of Essex. Now, oddly enough, the
smaller a school is, the more it needs looking after. Mr.
Briggs never seemed to be able to get away from this parti-
cular establishment with its forty-five pupils for more than
half an hour at a time. And what pupils they were, too I

Mr. Briggs, whose experience in this matter was by no means

despicable, had never before encountered so high
a per-

centage of boobies and hooligans among the young. The

headmaster, who was very deaf and more than half blind,
was not aware of this, and was under the strange impression
that his school harboured nothing but young lambs. Mr.
Briggs, on the other hand, whose faculties
were still unim-
often felt that he was not so much a schoolmaster as
paired,
a woefully inefficient superintendent of maniacs. Moreover,
he was tired of weak tea, Irish stew and golden syrup, which
formed the staple diet of the establishment. The Irish stew,
in fact, he loathed with an almost fanatical loathing.
 "WELL, I'M SLOWED!" 283
Thus came about that the application which Mr. Spencer
it

Smith received from Mr. Briggs fairly throbbed with an

eagerness to convince and persuade. It may have been these
vibrations which caused Mr. Spencer Smith to invite Mr.
Briggs to an interview. It may also have been the fact that
of all the candidates, Mr. Briggs was the nearest at hand,
which meant that his allowance for travelling expenses would
be small. At all events, invited he was, and Mr. Spencer
Smith was most affable far more affable, indeed, than he
ever was afterwards.
Seated face to face in Mr. Spencer Smith's study, they
went through his requirements seriatim. A good, all-round
forrn-master ? Well, Mr. Briggs thought that he could
fairly lay claim to the description, seeing that, at one time
and another, he had taught pretty well every subject on the
curriculum. Keen on games ? Mr. Briggs declared himself
passionately devoted to football ("soccer" he called it), while
as for cricket, the innings he had knocked up at Croodle
House School in the Masters v. Old Boys Match, on which
occasion he had carried his bat, constituted a local record.
Communicant ? Mr. Briggs smiled rather sadly, as if pained
at the mere suggestion that he could be anything else. And
so forth. Of course, Mr. Briggs had duly enumerated most
of these details in his letter of application, and he had the
impression that Mr. Spencer Smith was making sure that all
the items tallied. And at a very early stage in their acquaint-
ance, Mr. Briggs discovered that Mr. Spencer Smith was
extremely fond of seeing whether things tallied.
This time they tallied fairly well. There was a slight hitch
about Mr. Briggs 's academic qualifications. With the per-
tinacity of the spider which had conveyed so profound a
moral lesson to Robert Bruce, he had managed to pass Inter-
mediate Arts (he preferred to call it "the first B.A."). Now
Mr. Spencer Smith, it seemed, was really looking for a man
with a degree. Still, he was prepared to compromise on this
point, and in the end he proved delightfully accommodating.
Suppose, he suggested, he were to offer Mr. Briggs the post,
would Mr, Briggs be prepared to accept no per annum,
on the understanding that, if and when he obtained his
degree, he would become entitled to the stipulated 130 ?
Mr. Briggs was prepared to do so, and that was how he came
to St. Christopher's High School for Boys.
284 PAUL SELVER
Onthe occasion of that memorable interview, Mr. Briggs
had worn his best suit, and Mr. Spencer Smith had been on
his best behaviour. It was not long before the suit and the

behaviour, both being of very shoddy material, had frayed

badly, and Mr. Briggs began to wonder whether,
after all,
he was better off than before. There was no Irish stew, but
there are worse things than Irish stew, and Mr. Spencer
Smith was one of them. That, at any rate, was how Mr.
to
Briggs looked at it/ His prospects of a degree continued
recede like a mirage, until he decided that he had about as
much chance of getting one as of becoming Prime Minister.
Mr. Spencer Smith saw to that. Mr. Briggs used to arrive
home every day with a brain like a soggy sponge, and even
then there were piles of exercises for him to mark. He had
two free periods per week, but as a rule Mr Spencer Smith
c

rendered them null and void by bringing him some little

educational task, such as copying lists of boys whose tonsils
needed attention, or who had qualified as entrants for the
school swimming championship, or who were to be per-
mitted to take part in the next paper-chase. And, to make
matters worse, at odd moments, when the soul of Mr. Briggs
was sick within him, he would drop pointed hints about the
degree that was not forthcoming.
And so we come back to Mr. Briggs gloating over the
prospect of lifelong freedom from the pinpricks and tantrums
of Mr. Spencer Smith. That was perhaps only fit and proper.
What was not so fit and proper, however, was the fact that
Mr. Briggs was planning to take advantage of his good
fortune to get "a little of his own back" (such was his own
deplorable formula) from Mr. Spencer Smith. It may well
be that, subconsciously at least, Mr. Briggs was preparing to
settle accounts, not only with Mr. Spencer Smith, but also
with his several predecessors for all the snubs, set-backs, and
other forms of discomfiture which he had suffered at their
hands, ever since, at the parting of tlje ways, he had espoused
teaching and rejected auctioneering. But Mr. Spencer Smith
was the only one of these gentlemen who was now at his
mercy, and it was solely round the perky little figure of Mr.
Spencer Smith that Mr. Briggs's plan for vengeance hovered.
"Bally, bumptious, domineering little blighter" was how
Mr.
Briggs put it to himself (this was as near as he ever approached
to the Great Unprinted Adjectives and Nouns), "1*11 showim."
 "WELL, I'M BLOWED1 25
Briefly, what Mr. Briggs proposed to do was to leave Mr.
Spencer Smith professionally in the lurch for an hour or so,
and then in the wake of the disturbance which this act would
to make a farewell speech such as no headmaster
produce,
nad ever yet heard from a subordinate. He had planned this
with what he considered quite diabolical ingenuity. He had
waited until the last month of the term just before the school
began to simmer with the oncoming ferment of examinations
and reports, and he had chosen a Thursday morning for his
exploit Why Thursday ? Because he knew that nobody
had a free period during the first hour, and so Mr. Spencer
Smith himself would have to step into the breach. And the
breach was, in the particular case, Form IVb, whom Mr.
Briggs would normally be instructing in arithmetic. A
peculiarly repellent job, since Form IVb comprised a set of
juveniles whose inability to learn was equalled only by their
loutish unwillingness to be taught Mr. Briggs chuckled as
he reviewed the probable course of events. At first there
would be a low murmur in the classroom. Then, while the
rest of the school settled down to work, the murmur would
gradually swell to a hullabaloo, variegated with queer bumping
noises and hoots and cat-calls, and what the Greek dramatist,
in a different context, described as "untimely laughter". This
would bring Mr. Spencer Smith on the scene. He would
arrive from his study, where he had been perusing The Daily
Telegraph, livid with fury, but by no means speechless. He
would distribute vast impositions (no doubt among the least
Inoffensive of the revellers), and would threaten to thrash the
ringleaders of the shindy, when their identity had been estab-
lished by a kind of Star Chamber inquiry (in which Mr.
Spencer Smith excelled). Next there would be a silent inter-
lude, with Mr. Spencer Smith glaring terrifically at a very
cowed IVb.
They would be waiting on tenterhooks for him, Mr.
all

Briggs. Presently, Mr. Spencer Smith's patience, such as it

was, would come to an end, and at that juncture almost any-
thing might happen. He might even take IVb in arithmetic.
Well, if he did, Mr. Briggs wished him joy of it He experi-
enced a few highly blissful moments as he pictured to himself
Mr. Spencer Smith, his eye in a fine frenzy rolling, trying to
teach IVb how to do sums about leaky cisterns being filled
by inadequate taps. But whatever happened, there could be
 PAUL SELVER
no doubt Mr. Spencer Smith was going to get the worst
that
of it, especially when, at last, Mr. Briggs did arrive, uncon-
cerned and nonchalant, and more especially when, countering
Mr. Spencer Smith's attempts to bully him, he began to
bristle with a sublime effrontery. Mr. Briggs rehearsed a
few repartees which, he felt sure, would annoy Mr. Spencer
Smith very much indeed, and for the first time in his life he
realized what was meant by the peace which passeth all
understanding.
While he was indulging in these raptures, somebody
her countenance
tapped at the door, and his landlady popped
into the room, a countenance which was roseate in the wrong

places, and doughy

in the others.
"You'll be late for school, Mr. Briggs/' she observed in
a tone which was two-thirds severity and one-third solicitude.
"It's gorn nine."
"Thassallri, Mrs. Randall," he replied spaciously through
a mouthful of half-masticated bread and marmalade. "Quiallri."
He picked up the newspaper to indicate that this was his last
word on the subject, and Mrs. Randall's countenance with-
drew, looking perplexed and also distinctly nettled.
The newspaper headlines were promising, and diverted
Mr. Briggs's mind from his immediate preoccupations towards
the outer world where big things were happening. "GiRL
MURDERED IN EMPTY HOUSE" "MINISTER . HOWLED
. .

DOWN AT HUDDERSFIELD" "SMART SENTENCE ON CON-

. . .

FIDENCE TRICKSTER" . "CENTENARIAN'S HINTS ON DIET".

. .

Mr. Briggs was very fond of items like these. They were,
as he put it, "newsy", and he proceeded to enjoy them.
Then he began to ponder on things. Girls would continue
to be murdered, ministers would continue to be howled
down, confidence tricksters would continue to receive smart
sentences, centenarians would continue to give hints on diet
and all for his benefit. Henceforward, he would have
nothing else to do but to look on while people did things,
especially those things, the results of which were very awk-
ward for them, but highly interesting to others. And this
train of thought conveyed him gradually to a more detailed
realization of the benefits in store for him. They presented
themselves to him in negative terms :No more hurrying
over breakfast. No more prayers. No more IVb. No
more football. No more crickec No more detention duty
 '"WELL, I'M BLOWED!" 287

(Mr. Briggs reflected that men were awarded medals for

exploits far less heroic than detention duty). No more
terminal reports. And, above all, no more Spencer
Smith.
Mr. Briggs looked at his watch, and decided that it was
about time to make a move. He lit his pipe with the delibera-
tion of a man who is about to perform a ticklish job, and
went. In the passage he encountered Mrs. Randall. She
seemed to be under the impression that Mr. Briggs was not
right in his head, and had been lying in wait to see what he
would be up to next.
"Better take yer umbereller, Mr. Briggs," she counselled
him in a pointed manner which matched her owlish stare.
"It looks like rain/'
Mr. Briggs ignored this entirely. A
fat lot he cared
whether it rained or not.
Nevertheless, now that the distance between Mr. Spencer
Smith and himself had begun to diminish, he became aware
of slight qualms in the region of the midriff. It was the
kind of feeling he had had when about to face an examination
paper concerning some subject as Cicero's little tractate on
friendship, with the contents of which he knew himself to
be very imperfectly familiar. But this was only a passing
phase. Before very long, when he had got well into his
stride, and was stepping out with that somewhat flat-footed
gait which had so often caused pupil to nudge pupil with
irreverent and not always adequately concealed glee, Mr.
Briggs not only managed to overcome his misgivings, but
even went as far as to start elaborating his original scheme.
Why stop at telling Mr. Spencer Smith properly off? (this,
of course, is Mr. Briggs *s
phraseology, not mine). Why not
go the whole hog, and leave things in an unholy mess ? A
baleful glare was kindled in Mr. Briggs's lack-lustre eye, and
his long, sallow face almost lost its hang-dog expression as
he glimpsed the delicious possibilities now within his reach.
He saw himself tearing to tatters the most indispensable, the
most irreplaceable documents detention records, containing
particulars of hundreds and hundreds of punishments, mark-
books, in which the figures ran into thousands and thousands.
The activities of St Christopher's High School for Boys
would be paralysed without them. Their loss would cause
Mr. Spencer Smith to ksh himself into a titanic fury.
188 PAUL SELYER
Mr. Briggs tugged fiercely at his bedraggled moustache in a
sudden and unwonted itch for destruction. But wiser and
more gentlemanly counsels (again Mr. Briggs's phrase, not
mine) soon prevailed. Come, come ! What did the poet
say ? It
x. is something something to have a giant's strength,
but it is thingumajig to use it like a ginnt. Mr. Briggs
absorbed all the moral lesson possible from as much of this
tag as he could remember, and he felt a better man for it.
No, he was prepared to score off Mr. Spencer Smith, but to
go beyond that wouldn't be playing the game. Mr. Briggs
realized, as never before, what a nice nature he really
had.
He was still basking in the pure joy which this discovery
had caused him, when he came within sight of St. Christopher's
High School for Boys. It was not so much a stately pile as
an untidy heap, but these architectural shortcomings had
never worried Mr. Briggs, and they were not likely to do so
now. What did, however, take him aback was to be greeted
by an uncanny silence, when there ought to have been at
least a steady murmur. He had arrived nearly ten minutes
before the end of the first lesson, and at this hour anyone
approaching St. Christopher's from whatever direction would,
unless he were stone deaf, hear the tangled symphony of
education in progress, with all its undertones and overtones
and brawls and what not. But Mr. Briggs, to his bewilder-
ment and consternation, heard nothing. He reached the
gate leading to the playground, and there he beheld a few
boys, strangely abashed in their demeanour, being chivvied
along by Sergeant Shadd.
Sergeant Shadd (the "sergeant" was a courtesy title, as
he had retired from His Majesty's forces with the rank of
corporal) was the drill-instructor at St. Christopher's. He
also acted as caretaker,and performed mysterious duties in
the stokehold, together with a certain amount of scavenging
or superintendence of scavenging. He was a wiry little man
with freckles, a spiked, ginger moustache and a peak-cap,
asserting his authority largely by means of a stout bunch of
keys which he was apt to brandish, like an insignia, menacingly
in front of him, and, if need be, to apply smartly to the rumps
of transgressors;^ His voice was permanently hoarse as the
result of bellowing many martial orders and
quaffing many
alcoholic beverages.
 "WELL, I'M BLOWED!" 289
"
'Efe, come along, you boys/' he wheeled, "it's 'igh
time you 'opped it, I got something else to do besides
'anging about 'ere all day, looking after you/'
The boys slunk off, sheepishly raising their caps to Mr.
Briggs. Mr. Briggs approached the atmosphere of stale shag
which accompanied Sergeant Shadd's comings and goings.
"Got a holiday, or something ?" he inquired, assuming
an off-hand tone.
Sergeant Shadd looked thunderstruck and also rather
shocked.
"A 'oliday ? A y oliday, sir ?" he gasped with a hint of
reproof.
"Why, what's up ? Anything wrong ?"
"Wrong, sir? You don't mean to say you ain't V*rv/?"
Mr, Briggs's embarrassment became more evident.
"Well, as a matter of fact," he began hesitantly. "I over-
slept myself this morning.
Hegrinned vacantly.
"Overslep' yourself, did yer ?"
Sergeant Shadd pushed his peak-cap above his pinkish
brow and scratched his head, contemplating Mr. Briggs
quizzically, as if he were a recruit on parade who had com-
mitted some vast blunder against military etiquette. "Then
it ain't surprising you ain't 'eard."
"Heard what ?" Mr. Briggs was beginning to feel

testy.
"Well, sir," began Sergeant Shadd deliberately, as if

selecting with exquisite care the proper phraseology for

imparting his unique titbit of news. "It's like this 'ere. Mr.
Spencer Smith, sir, 'e was crossing the road this morning,
and a young chap on a motor-bike buzzed round that there
corner at a feefle rate coo, a good forty mile an hour, I
reckon it was and Mr. Spencer Smith, 'e just stepped orf
"
the kerb, and
"You don't mean to say he "
Went plunk into 'itn. 'E never 'ad a chance to dodge
or anything. Plunk into 'im," repeated Sergeant Shadd with
zest.
"Was he badly injured ?" asked Mr. Briggs, feeling that
he would get at the truth only by direct inquiry.
"Injured ? Injured ?" Sergeant Shadd uttered a noise
to express petulance at such a ridiculous question. "Why it
290 PAUL SELVER
f
was a 'opeless case. 'Opt/ess.lm orf to the
They took
'orspital, but 'e
pegged out before they got 'im there/*
"Then he's dead ?" Mr. Briggs could not associate Mr.
Spencer Smith with the idea of death. It was like hearing
that the Marble Arch had passed away.
"I should think 'e blooming well is. That's why the
school was dismissed for the day/' declared Sergeant Shadd,
with perhaps just a trifle more hearty emphasis than. the
occasion altogether demanded. "Why, sir, 'e 'ad "a ruptured
liver, and 'is stummick was all smashed, and
He lusciously enumerated further anatomical disasters,
and concluded :

"I bet that young chap won't *arf cop out. And serve
'im bally well right. These 'ere motor-bikes never ought to
be allowed, that they never. Up and down that blooming
road all day and A pack of saucy young whipper-
all night.
snappers, showing orf, with their gels 'anging on be'ind."
He mused blackly on this spectacle of decadent youth,
and then expectorated with the unpretentious neatness of the
N.C.O.
British
Mr. Briggs was only a trivial act, but it had
stared. It

symbolical significance. Never during the lifetime of Mr.

Spencer Smith would Sergeant Shadd have dared to expectorate
on the playground of St. Christopher's.
Mr. Briggs caught Sergeant Shadd's red-rimmed, watery
little eye, and they exchanged glances of mutual comprehen-

sion, although it was probable that Mr. Briggs read Sergeant

Shadd's thoughts more accurately than Sergeant Shadd read
his. But they both understood that, as Mr. Spencer Smith
was no more, they could allow themselves a greater latitude
than of old. And Mr. Briggs, matching Sergeant Shadd's
act of emancipation by an analogous freedom oi speech,
exclaimed :

"Well, I'm blowed 1"

 STACY AUMONIER
Tbt Landlord of "The Love-a-dtvk"

Stacy Aurnonler, one of the most brilliant recent

writers of short stories, was an artist of great talent,
and also a popular society entertainer, before he began
writing. Some of his best stories arc contained in the
volume Miss JbrangirdU and Others.
 THE LANDLORD OF "THE LOVE-A-DUCK"

FORGET the name of the wag In our town who first called
I him Mr. Seldom Right, but the name caught on. His proper
name was James Selden Wright, and the inference of this
obvious misnomer was too good to drop. James was
invariably wrong, but so lavishly, outrageously, magnificently
wrong that he invariably carried the thing through with
flying colours. He was a kind of Tartarin of Tibbelsford,
which was the name of the town.
Everything about Mr. Seldom Right was big, impressive,
expansive. He himself was an enormous person, with fat,
puffy cheeks with no determinate line between them and his
innumerable chins. His large grey eyes with their tiny pupils
seemed to embrace the whole universe in a glance. Upon
his pendulous front there dangled thick gold chains with
signets and seals like miniature flat-irons. His fingers were
ribbed with gold bands like curtain-rings. His wife was
big ; daughter was big ;
his the great shire horses which
worked on his adjoining farm seemed quite norma) creatures
in this Gargantuan scheme of things.
Above all, "The Love-a-duck" was big. It appeared to
dominate the town. It was built at the top of the hill, with
great rambling corridors, bars, coffee-rooms, dilapidated
ball-rooms, staircases of creaking deal, bedrooms where a
four-post bed was difficult to find, a cobbled courtyard with
a covered entrance drive where two brewer's drays could
have driven through abreast. There was no social function,,
no town council, no committee of importance that was not
driven to meet at "The Love-a-duck". But the biggest thing
in Tibbelsford was the voice of the landlord. ,At night
amidst the glittering taps and tankards he would '"preside".
By this you must understand that the word be taken liberally.
He was no ordinary potman to hand mugs of ale across the
bar to thirsty carters, or nips of gin to thin-lipped clerks. He
194 STACY AUMONIER
would not appear till the evening was well advanced, and
then he would stroll in and lean against the bar, his sleepy
eyes adjusting the various phenomena of this perspective to
a comfortable focus.
And then the old cronies and characters of Tibbelsford
would touch and say
their hats :
"
'Evening, Mr. Wright I"
And he would nod gravely, like an Emperor receiving the
fealty of his serfs. And a stranger might whisper :
"Who is old guy ?"
this fat
And would be "H'sh 1" for the eyes of Mr.
the answer
Seldom Right missed nothing. Bumptious strangers were
treated with complete indiffererjce. If they addressed him,
he looked right through them, and breathed heavily. But for
the cronies and characters there was a finely -adjusted scale of
treatment, a subtle under-current of masonry. To get into
favour with Mr. Seldom Right one had to work one's way
up, and any bad mistake would land one back among the
strangers. In which case one would be served fairly and
squarely, but there the matter would end. For it should be
stated at this point that everything about "The Love-a-duck"
was good in quality, and lavish in quantity, and the rooms,
in spite of their great size, were always spotlessly clean.

Having carefully considered the relative values of this

human panorama, the landlord would single out some indi-
vidual fortunate enough to catch his momentary favour, and
m a voice which seemed to make the glasses tremble and the
little Chelsea figures on the high mantelshelf gasp with
surprise, he would exclaim :

"Well, Mr. Topsmith, and how are we ? Right on the

top o* life ? Full of beans, bone, blood and benevolence,
eh? Ha, ha, ha!"
And the laugh would clatter among the tankards, twist
the gas-bracket, go roiling down the corridor and make
the dogs bark in the kennels beyond the stabfes. And Mr.
Topsmith would naturally blush, and spill his beer, and say :
"Oh, thank you, sir, nothin* to grumble about; pretty
good goin* altogether."
"That's right that RIGHT 1"
1

There were plenty of waitresses and attendants at "The

Love-a-duck", but however busy the bars ought be, the
landlord himself always dined with his wife and daughter,
 "THE LOVE-A-DUCK" 295
at seven-thirty precisely, in the oblong parlour at the back
of the saloon bar. And
they dined simply and prodigiously.
A mutton would be carried in, and in
large steaming leg of
twenty minutes' time would return a forlorn white fragment
of bone. Great dishes of fried potatoes, cabbages, and
marrow, would all vanish. A stikon cheese would come
back like an over-explored ruin of some ancient Assyrian
town. And Mine Host would mellow these simple delicacies
with three or four tankards of old ale. Occasionally some
of the cronies and characters were invited to join the repast,
but whoever was there, the shouts and laughter of the land-
lord rang out above everything, only seconded by the breezy
giggles of Mrs. Wright, whose voice would be constantly
heard exclaiming :

"Oh, Jim, you are a fule 1"

Itwas when the dinner was finished that the landlord
emerged into the president. He produced a long church-
warden and ambled hither and thither, with a pompous,
benevolent, consciously proprietary air. The somewhat
stilted formality of his appearance expanded into a genia)
first
but autocratic courtliness. He was an Edwardian of Edwar-
dians. He could be surprisingly gracious, tactful and charm-
ing, and he also had that Hanoverian faculty of seeing right
through one a perfectly crushing mannerism.
By slow degrees he would gently shepherd his favourite
flock around the fire in the large bar parlour, decorated with
stags' heads, pewter and old Chelsea. Then he would settle
himself in the corner of the inglenook by the right side of the
fire. Perhaps at this time I may be allowed to enumerate a
few of the unbreakable rules which the novice had to learn
by degrees. They were as follows :

You must always address the landlord as "sir".

You must never interrupt him in the course of a story.
You must never appear to disbelieve him.
You must never tell a bigger lie than he has just told.
If he offers you a drink you must accept it.
You must never, under any circumstances, offer to stand
him a drink in return.
You may ask his opinion about anything, but never any
question about his personal affairs.
You may disagree with him, but you must not let him
think that you're not taking him seriously.
296 STACY AUMONIER
You must not get drunk.
These were the broad, abstract rules. There were other
of
by-laws and covenants allowing for variable degrees
interpretation. That, for instance, which governed the
improper story. A story could be suggestive but must
never be flagrantly vulgar or profane. Also one might have
had enough to drink to make one garrulous, but not enough
to be boisterous, or maudlin, or even over-familiar.
I have stated that the quality of fare supplied at "The
Love-a-duck" was excellent ; and so it was. Beyond that,
however, our landlord had his own special reserves. There
was a little closet just off the central bar where on occasions
he would suddenly disappear, and when in the humour
produce some special bottle of old port or liqueur. He
would come toddling with it back to his seat and exclaim :

"Gentlemen, this is the birthday of Her Imperial High-

ness the Princess Eulalie of Spain. I must ask you to drink

her good health and prosperity 1"

And the bar, who had never heard of the Princess Eulalie
of Spain, would naturally do so with acclamation.
Over the little glasses he would tell most impressive and
Incredible stories. He had hunted lions with the King of
Abyssinia. He had dined with the Czar of Russia. He had
been a drummer-boy during the North and South war in
America. He had travelled all over Africa,
Spain, India,
China and Japan. There was no crowned head in either of
the hemispheres with whom he was not familiar. He knew
everything there was to know about diamonds, oil, finance,
horses, politics, Eastern religions, ratting, dogs, geology,
women, political economy, tobacco, corn, or rubber. He
was a prolific talker, but he did not object to listening, and
he enjoyed an argument. In every way he was a difficult
man to place. Perhaps in thinking of him one was apt not
to make due allowance for the rather drab background against
which his personality stood out so vividly. One must first
visualize the company of "The Love-a-duck".
There was old Hargreaves, the local estate agent : a
snuffy, gingery, pinched old ruffian,
with a pretty bar-side
manner, an infinite capacity for listening politely;
one whose
nature had been completely bowdlerized by years of showing
likely tenants over empty houses, and keeping cheerful in

draughty passages. There was Mr. Bean, the corn-merchant,

 "THE LOVE-A-DUCK" 297
with a polished red-blue face and no voice. He would sit
leaning forward on a thin gold-knobbed cane, and as the
evening advanced he seemed to melt into one vast ingratiating
smile. One dreaded every moment that the- stick would
give way and that he would fall forward on his face. There
was an argumentative chemist, whose name I have forgotten ;
he was a keen-faced man, and he wore gold-rimmed spectacles
which made him look much cleverer than he really was.
There was old Phene Sparfitt. Nobody knew how he lived.
He was very old, much too old to be allowed out at night,
but quite the most regular and persistent customer. He
drank quantities of gin-and-water, his lower lip was always
moist, and he professed an intimate knowledge of the life
of birds. Dick Toom, the owner of the local livery-stables,
was a spasmodic visitor. He generally came accompanied
by several horsey-looking gentlemen. He always talked
breezily about some distressing illness he was suffering from,
and would want to make a bet with anyone present about
some quite ridiculous proposition : for instance, that the
distance from the cross-roads to the stone wall by Jenkins's
black-pig farm was greater than the distance from the fountain
in the middle of Piccadilly Circus to the tube station in Dover
Street. A great number of these bets took place in the bar,
and the fact that the landlord always lost was one of the
reasons of his nickname.
It cannot be said that the general standard of intelligence
reached a very high level, and against it it was difficult to
tell
quite how intelligent the landlord was. If he were not
a well-educated man he certainly had more than a veneer of
education. In an argument he was seldom extended. Some-
times he talked brilliantly for a moment, and then seemed
to talk out of his hat. He had an extravagant, theatrical way
of suddenly declaiming a statement, and then sinking his
voice and repeating it. Sometimes he would be moodish
and not talk at all. But at his best he was very good com-
pany.
It would be idle to pretend that the
frequenters of the
bar believed the landlord's stories. On the contrary, Fm
afraid we were a very sceptical lot. Most of us had never
been farther than London or the seaside, and our imagination
shied at episodes in Rajahs* palaces and receptions in Spanish
courts. It became a byword in the town : "Have you heard

K*
 98 STACY AUMONIER
old Seldom Right's latest ?" Nevertheless he was extremely
popular. At the time of which I write the landlord must
have been well over sixty years of age, and his wife was
possibly forty-five. They appeared to be an extremely
happy and united family.
And then Septimus Stourway appeared on the scene.
He was an acid, angular, middle-aged man, with sharp
features, a heavy black moustache, and eyes too close together.
He was a chartered accountant, and he came to the town to
audit the books of a large brewery near by, and one or two
other concerns. He brought his wife and his son, who was
eleven years old. He was a man whom everybody disliked
from the very beginning. He was probably clever at his
job, quick-dunking, self-opinionated, precise, argumentative,
aggressively assertive, and altogether objectionable.
The very first occasion on which he visited "The Love-
a-duck" he broke every rule of the masonic ring except the
one which concerned getting drunk. The company was in
session under its president, and he bounced into the circle
and joined in the conversation. He interrupted the landlord
in the middle of a story, and plainly hinted that he didn't
believe him. He called him "old chap", and offered to stand
him a drink. He then told a long, boring story about some
obscure episode in his own life. The effect of this intrusion
was that the landlord, who never replied to him at all, rose
heavily from his seat and disappeared. The rest of the com-
pany tried to show by their chilling unresponsiveness that

they disapproved of him. But Mr. Stourway was not the

kind of person to be sensitive to this. He rattled on, occa-
sionally taking tiny sips of his brandy-and-water. He even
had the audacity to ask old Hargreaves who the fat disagree-
able old buffer was And poor old Hargreaves was so
!

upset that he nearly cried. He could only murmur

feebly :

"He's the landlord."

"H'm a nice sort of landlord
1 I Now, I know a landlord

The company gradually melted away and

left the stranger

to sip his brandy-and-water alone.

Everybody hoped, of course, that this first visit would

also be the last. But oh, no The next evening, at the
1

same time, in bounced Mr. Septimus Stourway, quite

 "THE LOVE-A-DUCK" 299
uncrushed. Again the landlord disappeared, and the company
melted away. The third night some of them tried snubbing
him and being rude, but it had no effect at all At every
attempt of this sort he merely laughed in his empty way, and
exclaimed :

"
"My dear fellow, just listen to me
Before a week was out Mr. Septimus Stourway began to
get on the nerves of the town. He swaggered about the
streets as though he was doing us a great honour by being
there at all. His wife and son were also seen. His wife
was a vinegary looking woman in a semi-fashionable^
tall,

semi-sporting get-up. She wore a monocle and a short

skirt, and carried a cane. The boy was a spectacled, round-
shouldered, unattractive-looking youth, more like the mother
than the father in appearance. He never seemed to leave his
mother's side for an instant.
It appeared that his name was Nick, and that he was the
most remarkable boy for his age who had ever lived. He
knew Latin, and Greek, and French, and history, and mathe-
matics, and philosophy, and science. Also he had a beautiful
nature. Mr. Stourway spent hours boring anyone he could
get to listen, with the narration of his son's marvellous
attributes. It the habitues of "The Love~a-duck" tired of
Mr. Stourway, they became thoroughly fed up with his
son.
It was on the following Wednesday evening that the
dramatic incident happened in the bar-parlour of the famous
inn. The landlord had continued his attitude of utter indiffer-
ence to the interloper. He had been just as cheerful and
entertaining, only when Mr. Stourway entered the bar he
simply dried up. But during the last two days he appeared
to be thinking abstractedly about something. He was
annoyed.
C3n this Wednesday evening the usual company had
again assembled, and the landlord appeared anxious to
resume his former position of genial host, when in came
Mr. Septimus Stourway again. He had not been in the
previous evening, and everyone was hoping that at last he
had realized chat he was not wanted. Up rose the landlord
at once, and went away. There was an almost uncontrolled
groan from die rest. Mr Stourway took his seat, and began
to talk affably.
 30O STACY AUMONIER
was then observed that the landlord, Instead of going
It

right away, was hovering about behind the bar. I don't

know how the conversation got round to poetry, but after a
time Mr. Stourway started talking about his son's marvellous
memory for poetry.
"That boy of mine, you know," he said, "he would
simply astound you. He remembers everything. The
poetry he's learnt off by heart Miles and miles of it
I I 1

don't suppose there's another boy of his age in the country

who could quote half as much."
*
It was then that the bomb-shell fell. The landlord was
leaning across the bar, and suddenly his enormous voice
rang out :

bet you five pounds to one that I know a little boy

"I'll
of five who could quote twice as much poetry as you
son !"
There was a dead silence, and everybody looked from
the landlord to Mr. Stourway. That gentleman grinned
superciliously, then he rubbed his hands together and
said :

"Well, well, that's interesting. I can't believe it. My

son's eleven. A
boy of five ? Ha, ha I'd like to get a 1

wager like that I"

The landlord's voice, louder than ever, exclaimed :

"I'll bet you a hundred pounds to five 1"

Mr. Stourway looked slightly alarmed, but his eyes
glittered.
"A hundred pounds to five 1 I'm not a betting man, but,
by God I'll take that"
I

"Is your son shy ?"

"Oh, no, he enjoys reciting poetry.
"Would he come here and have an open competition ?"
"H'm. Well, well, I don't know. He might. I should
have to ask his mother. Who is this wonderful boy you
speak of?"
"My nephew over at Chagham. They could drive him
over in the dog-cart."
It need hardly be said that the members of "The Love-a-
duck" fraternity were worked up to a great state of excite-
ment over this sudden challenge. What did it all mean ?
No one knew that old Seldom Right had any relatives in
the country. But then he was always such a secretive old
 "THE LOVE-A-DUCK" 501

boy about his own affairs. Could a little boy of five possibly
remember and repeat more poetry twice as much 1 than
this phenomenal Nick Stourway ? How was it all to be
arranged ?
It became evident, however, that the landlord was very
much in earnest He had apparently thought out all the
details. It should be an open competition. It could take

place in the ball-room of the hotel. The two boys should

stand on the platform with their parents, and should recite
poems or blank verse in turn. A small committee of judges
should count the lines. When one had exhausted his com-
the other, of course, would have won ; but
plete repertoire
It would be
necessary for Stephen that was the name of
old Wright's nephew to go on for double the number
of lines that Nick had spoken to win the wager for his
uncle.
When it was first put to him Mr. Stourway looked startled,
but on going into the details he soon became eager. It
was the easiest way of making a hundred pounds he had
ever encountered. Of course the little boy might be clever
and have a good memory, but that he could possibly recite
twice as much as the wonderful Nick was unthinkable. More-
over his back was up, and he hated the landlord. He knew
that he snubbed him on every occasion, and this would be
an opportunity to score. There was just the mild risk of
losing a fiver, and his wife to be talked over, but he thought
he could persuade her. The rumour of the competition
spread like wildfire all over the town.
It was not only the chief
topic of conversation at "The
Love-a-duck" but at all places where men met and talked.
It cannot be denied that a considerable number of bets were
made. Mr. Seldom Right's tremendous optimism found
him many supporters, but the great odds and the fact that he
invariably lost in wagers of this sort drove many into the
opposing camp of backers.
A committee of ways and means was appointed the follow-
ing night after Mrs. Septimus Stourway had given her consent
and Nick had signified his willingness to display his histrionic
abilities to a crowd of admirers.
Old Hargreaves, Mr. Bean, and a schoolmaster named
McFarlane were appointed the judges. The ball-room was
to be open to anyone, and there was to be no charge for
30* STACY AUMONIER
admission. The
date of the competition was fixed for the
following Saturday afternoon, at five o'clock.
I must now apologize for
intruding my own personality
Into this narrative. I would rather not do so, but it is inevit-
able. It is true my part in the
proceedings was only that of
a spectator, but from your point of view and from mine
it was an
exceedingly important part I must begin with the
obvious confession that I had visited "The Love-a-duck"
on occasions, and that is the kind of adventure that one
naturally doesn't make too much of. Nevertheless I can say
with a clear conscience that I was not one of the inner ring.
I had so far only made the most tentative efforts to
get into
the good graces of the landlord. But everyone in Tibbels-
ford was talking of the forthcoming remarkable competition,
and I naturally made a point of turning up in good time.
I managed to get a seat in the fourth row, and I was very
fortunate, for the ball-room was packed, and a more remark-
able competition I have never attended. The three judges
sat in the front row, facing the platform. The Stourway
party occupied the right side of the platform and the Wrights
the left. The landlord sat with his party, but in the centre,
so that he could act as a kind of chairman. He appeared to
be in high good-humour, and he came on first and made a
few facetious remarks before the performance began. In
the first he apologized for the lighting. It was cer-
place,
tainly very bad. There originally had been footlights, but
it was so long since they had been used that they were out of
repair. The large room was only lighted by a gas chandelier
in the centre, so that the stage was somewhat dim, but, as
he explained, this would only help to obscure the blushes of
the performers when they received the plaudits of such a
distinguished gathering.
The Stourway party entered first. They came In from a
door atthe back of the platform, Mr. Stourway noisily
nonchalant, talking to everyone at random, in a tail-coat,
with grey spats ; his wife in a sports skirt and a small hat,
looking rather bored and disgusted ; and the boy in an Eton
jacket and collar with a bunchy tie, and bis hair neatly
brushed.
He looked very much at home and
confident. Numerous
prize-distributions at which he had played
a conspicuous

part had evidently inured him to such an ordeal.

And then the other party entered, and the proceedings
 "THE LOVE-A-DUCK" 503
seemed likely to end before they had begun. Mrs. Wright
came on first, followed by a lady dressed in black, leading a
most diminutive boy. They only reached the door when
apparently the sight of the large audience frightened the
small person, and he began to cry. The landlord and his
wife rushed up and with the mother tried to encourage him,
and after afew minutes they succeeded in doing so. The
lady in black, however who was presumably the widowed
mother picked him up and carried him in and sat him on
her knee.
The audience became keenly excited, and everyone was
laughing and discussing whether the affair would materialize
or not. At length they seemed to be arranged, and the
landlord came forward and said :
"Ladies and gentlemen, allow me to introduce you to
the competitors Master Nick Stourway, Master Stephen
Wright, Good gracious It sounds as though I were
1

announcing the competitors in a prize-ring. But this is to

be a very peaceful competition at least, I hope so I I

think you all know the particulars. We're simply going to

enjoy ourselves, aren't we, Nick ? Aren't we, Stephen ?"
Nick smiled indulgently and said, "Yes, sir."
Stephen glanced up at him for a second, and then buried
his face in his mother's lap.
"Well, well/' said the landlord, "I will now call on Master
Nick to open the ball/*
Master Nick was nothing loth. He stood up and bowed,
and holding his right arm stiff, and twiddling a button of his
waistcoat with his left, he declaimed in ringing tomes :

"Itwas the schooner Hesperus

That sailed the wintry sea ;

And the skipper had taken his little (laughter

To bear him company."

There were twenty-two verses of this, of four lines each,

and the audience were somewhat impatient, because they
had not come there to hear Master Nick recite. They had
come for the competition, and it was still an open question
whether there would be any competition. They were
anxiously watching Master Stephen. He spent most of the
period of his rival's recitation of this long poem with his
504 STACY AUMONIER
face buried in his mother's kp, in the dark corner of the
platform. His mother stroked his hair and kept on whisper-

ing a word to him, and occasionally he would peer round at

Nick and watch him for a few seconds ; then he glanced at
the audience, and immediately ducked out of sight again.
When Nick had finished, he bowed and sat down, and
there was a mild round of applause. The judges consulted,
and agreed that he had scored 88 lines,
"
Now, what was going to happen ?
The small boy seemed to be shaking his head and stamp-
ing his feet, and his mother was talking to him. The land-
lord coughed. He was obviously a little nervous. He
went over to the group and said in a cheerful voice :

"Now, Stephen, tell us a

poem 1"
A piping voice said, "No 1" and there were all the
little

wriggles and shakes of the recalcitrant youngster. Murmurs

ran round the room, and a lot of people were laughing.
The Stourway party was extremely amused. At length the
landlord took a chair near him, and produced a long stick
of barley-sugar.
"Now, Stephen," he said, "if you won't talk to these
naughty people, me a poem. Tell me that beautiful
tell

'Hymn you told me last winter."

to Apollo' that
The little boy looked up at him and grinned; then he
looked at his mother. Her widow's veil covered the upper
part of her face. She kissed him, and said :

"Go on, dear ; tell Uncle Jim."

There was a pause ; the small boy looked up and down,
and then, fixing his eyes solemnly on the landlord's face, he
suddenly began in a queer little
lisping voice :

God of the golden bow,

And of the golden lyre,
And of the golden hair,
And of the golden fire ;

Charioteer
Round the patient year,
Where where slept thine ire ?

It was a short poem, but its rendering was received with

vociferous appkuse. There was going to be a competition,
after all! People who had money at stake were laughing
and slapping their legs, and people who hadn't were doing
 "THE LOVE-A-DUCK" 305
the same. Everyone was on the best of terms with each other.
There was a certain amount of trouble with the judges, as
they didn't know the poem, and they didn't grasp the length
of the lines. Fortunately the schoolmaster had come armed
with books, and after some discussion the poem was found
to have been written by Keats, and Master
Stephen was
awarded thirty-six lines. He was cheered, clapped and
kissed by the landlord, and his aunt, and his mother.
Master Nick's reply to this was to recite "The Pied Piper
of Hamelin", a performance which bored everyone to tears,
especially as he would persist in gesticulating and doing it
In a manner as though he
thought that the people had simply
come to hear his performance. "The Pied Piper of Hamelin'*
is 195 lines. This made his score 283.
The small boy was still very shy, and seemed disinclined
to continue, but the landlord said :

"Now, come on, Stephen I'm sure you remember some

;

more beautiful poetry."

At last, to everyone's surprise, he began to lisp :

"
"Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more

Itwas screamingly funny. He went right through the

speech, and when he got to :

"
"Cry 'God for Harry, England, and Saint George 1'

the applause was deafening. People were calling out, and

some of the barrackers had to be rebuked by the landlord.
King Henry's speech was only 35 lines, so Master Stephen's
total was 71. Nick then retaliated with an appalling poem,
which commenced :

She stood at the bar of Justice,

A creature wan and wild,
In form too small for a woman,
In feature too old for a child.

Fortunately, was not quite as long as the other two,

it

and only brought him 60 lines, making a total of 543.

Stephen, who seemed to be gaining a little more confi-
dence and entering into the spirit of the thing, replied with
 STACY AUMONIER
Robert Herrick's "Ode to a Daffodil", a charming little effort,
although it only brought in 20 lines.
Master Nick now broke into Shakespeare, and let himsel
go on:

"Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears."

He only did twenty-three lines, however, before he broke

down and forgot The committee had arranged for this.
It was agreed that in the event of either competitor breaking
down, he should still score the lines up to where he broke
down, and at the end he should be allowed to quote odd lines,
provided there were more than one.
At this point there was a very amusing incident. Master
Stephen hesitated for some time, and then he began "Friends,
Romans, countrymen/' etc., and he went right through the
same speech without a slip ! It was the first distinct score
for the landlord's party, and Master Stephen was credited
with 128 lines. The scores, however, were still 366 to 219
in Nick's favour, and he proceeded to pile on the agony by

reciting "Beth Gelert". However, at the end of the twelfth

verse he again forgot, and only amassed 48 lines.
Balanced against his mother's knee, and looking un-
utterably solemn as far as one could see in the dim light-
and only occasionally glancing at the audience, Stephen then
recited a charming poem by William Blake called "Night",
which also contained 48 lines.
Nick then collected 40 lines with "Somebody's Darling",
and as a contrast to this sentimental twaddle Stephen attempted
Wordsworth's "Ode on Intimations of Immortality". Unfor-
tunately it was his turn to break down, but not till he had
notched 92 lines. It was quite a feature of the afternoon
that whereas Nick's contributions for the most part were the
utmost trash, Stephen only did good things.
It would perhaps be tedious to chronicle the full details
of the poems attempted and the exact number of lines scored,
although, as a matter of fact, at the time I did keep a careful
record. But on that afternoon it did not appear tedious,
except when Nick let himself go rather freely over some
quite commonplace verse. Even then there was always the
excitement as to whether he would break down. The audience
indeed found it thrilling, and it became more and more
 "THE LOVE-A-DUCK" 307

exciting as went on, for it became apparent that both boys

It

were getting to the end of their tether. They both began

to forget, and the judges were kept very busy, and the
parents
were as occupied as seconds in a prize-ring. It must have
been nearly half-past six when Master Nick eventually gave
out. He started odds and ends, and forgot, and his parents
were pulled up for prompting. He collected a few odd lines,
and amassed a total of 822, a very considerable amount for
a boy of his age.
At this point he was leading by 106 lines. So for Stephen
to win the wager for the landlord he would not only have
to score that odd 106, but he would have to remember an
additional 822 lines I And
he already gave evidence of
forgetting There was a fresh burst of betting in odd parts
1

of the hall, and Dick Toom was offering 10 to i against the

landlord's protegt and not getting many takers. The great
thing in his favour was that he seemed to have quite lost his
nervousness. He was keen on the job, and he seemed to
realize that it was a competition, and that he had got to do
his utmost. The landlord's party were allowed to talk to
him and to make suggestions, but not to prompt if he forgot.
There was a short interval, in which milk and other drinks
were handed round. The landlord had one of the other
drinks, and then he said :

"Ladies and gentlemen, I'm going to ask your indulgence

to be as quiet as possible. My small nephew has to recall 928
lines to win the competition, and he is going to try to do it."
The announcement was received with cheers. And then
Stephen started again. He began excellently with Keats's
"Ode to a Nightingale", and scored 80 lines, and without
any pause went on to Milton's "I/ Allegro", of which he
delivered 126 lines before breaking down. He paused a
little, and then did odds and ends of verses, some complete,
and some not. Thomas Hood's "Departure of Summer"
(14 lines), Shelley's "To-Night" (35) and a song by Shelley
commencing :

Rarely, rarely comest thou

Spirit of Delight I
(48 lines)

I will not enumerate all these poems, but he amassed

altogether 378 lines in this way. Then he had another brief

rest, and reverted once more to Shakespeare. In his little
)08 STACY AUMONIER*
sing-song voice, without any attempt at dramatic expression,
he reeled off 160 lines of the Balcony Scene from Romeo and
lines of the scene between Hamlet and the Queen ;
Juliet ; 96
44 lines of the Brutus and Cassius quarrel; 51 of Jaques's
speech on "All the world's a stage"* It need hardly be said
that by this time the good burghers of Tibbelsford were in a
state of the wildest excitement.
The schoolmaster announced that Master Stephen had
now scored 689 of the requite 928, so that he only wanted
240 more to win. Mr. Stourway was biting his nails and
looking green. Mrs. Stourway looked as though she was
disgusted with her husband for having brought her among
these common people. Nick sneered superciliously.
But, in the meantime, there was no question but that
Master Stephen himself was getting distressed. His small
voice was getting huskier and huskier, and tears seemed not
far off. I heard Mrs. Rusbridger, sitting behind me, remark t
"Poor little mite
I I calls it a shime 1"
It was also evident that he was getting
seriously to the
end of his quoting repertoire. He had no other long speeches.
The landlord's party gathered round him and whispered. He
tried again, short stanzas and odd verses, sometimes un-
finished. He kept the schoolmaster very busy ; but he
blundered on. By these uncertain stages he managed to
add another 127 lines j and then he suddenly brought off a
veritable tour de force. It was quite uncanny. He quoted
109 lines of Spenser's Faerie Queene \ The matter was quite
unintelligible to the audience, and they were whispering to
each other and asking what it was. When he broke down,
the schoolmaster announced that it was quite in order, and
that Master Stephen's total lines quoted now amounted to
1640, and therefore he only required four lines to win I

Even then the battle was apparently not over. Every-

one was cheering and making such a noise that the small
boy could not understand it, and he began crying. A lot
of people in the audience were calling out "Shame \" and
there was all the appearance of a disturbance. The landlord's
party were very occupied. It was several minutes before
order was restored, and then the landlord rapped on the
table and called out "Order Order 1"
1

He drank a glass of water, and there was dead silence.

Stephen's mother held the little boy very tight, and smiled
 "THE LOVE-A-DUCK" 309
at him. At last, raising his voice for this last despairing
effort, he declaimed quite loudly :

Why, the Saints and Sages who discuss'd

all
Of the two Worlds so wisely they are thrust
Like foolish Prophets forth ; their Words to Scorn
Are scattered, and their Mouths are stopt with Dust.

The cheers which greeted this triumphant climax were

split by various disturbances, the most distressing coming
from Stephen himself, for almost as he uttered the last word
he gave a yell, and burst into sobs. And he sobbed, and
sobbed, and sobbed. And his mother picked him up and
rocked him, and the landlord and his wife did what they
could. But it was quite hopeless. Stephen was finished.
His mother picked him up and hurried out of the door at
the back with him. The Stourway party melted away.
There were no more speeches, but people crowded on to the
platform, and a lot of the women waited to just kiss Stephen
before he went away ; but Mrs. Wright came back and said
the poor child was very upset. She was afraid they ought
not to have let him do it. His mother was putting him to
bed in one of the rooms, and they were giving him some
sal volatile. He would be all right soon. Of course it was
a tremendous effort such a tiny person, too 1

Someone offered to go for the doctor, but Mrs. Wright

said they would see how he was, and if he wasn't better in
half an hour's time they'd send over to Dr. Winch.
Everyone was congratulating the landlord, and he was
clasping hands and saying :

"A marvellous boy a marvellous boy1 1 I knew he

would do it!"
Theparty gradually broke up.
I must now again revert to myself. I was enormously

Impressed by what I had seen and heard, and for the rest of
the evening I could think of nothing else. After dinner I
went out for a stroll. was
early March, and unseasonably
It
cold. When I got down to the bridge, over which the higb-
road funs across the open country to Tisehurst, large snow-
flakes were falling. I stood there for some time, looking
at our dim little river, and thinking of the landlord and

Stephen. And as I gazed around me I began to wonder

what it was about the snow-flakes which seemed to dovetail
JTO STACY AUMONIER
with certain subconscious movements going on within me.
And suddenly a phrase leapt into my mind. It was :

"Rotten cotton gloves I"

Rotten cotton gloves What was the connection ?
!

The snow, the mood, something about Stephen's voice

quoting "The Faerie Queene". Very slowly the thing
began to unfold itself. And when I began to realize it all,
I saidto myself, "Yes, my friend, it was the Faerie
Queene which gave the show away. The rest might have
been possible. You were getting rather hard put to it!"
The snow was falling heavily. It was Christmas-time good
Lord I did not like to think how long ago.
1
Thirty years ?
Forty years ? My sister and I at Drury Lane pantomime,
"Rotten cotton gloves !" Yes, that was it I could remember
1

nothing at all of die performance. But who was that great

man they spoke of ? The star attraction ? Some name
like "The Great Borodin", the world's most famous humorist
and ventriloquist. We were very excited, Phyllis and I,

very small people then, not, surely, much older than Stephen
himself. I could not remember the great Borodin, but I
remembered that one phrase* There was a small lay figure
which said most amusing things. It was called No, I
have forgotten. It was dressed in an Eton suit and it wore
rather dilapidated-looking white cotton gloves. And every
now and then, in the middle of a dialogue or discourse, it
broke off, looked at its hands, and muttered :

"Rotten cotton gloves I"

Itbecame a sort of catch-phrase in London in those days.
On buses and trains people would murmur "Rotten cotton
gloves I" A
certain vague something about the way that

Stephen recited Spenser's Faerie Queene. .

. Was it possible ?
.

And then certain very definite aspects of the competition

presented themselves to my mind's eye. It had all been very
cleverly stage-managed. It must be observed that
Stephen
neither walked on nor walked off. He did not even stand.
He hardly looked at the audience. And then the lighting
was inexcusably bad. Even some of the lights in the central
chandelier had unaccountably failed. And the landlord's
party had chosen the darkest side of the stage. No one had
spoken
" to the boy. No one had seen him arrive, and imrae-
tely after the competition he had gone straight to bed*
I tried to probe my memory for knowledge of "The
 "THE LOVE-A-DUCK" 511
Great Borodin", but at eight or nine one does not take great
interest in these details. I know there was something. . . .
I remember hearing my parents talking about it some
great scandal soon after I had seen him. He was disgraced,
I am sure. I have a vague idea he was in some way well-
connected. He was to marry a great lady, and then perhaps
he eloped with a young barmaid ? I cannot be certain. It
was something like that. I know he disappeared from
public life, for in after years, when people had been to similar
performances I had heard our parents say :

"Ah, but you should have seen 'The Great Borodin'."

These memories, the peculiar thrill of the competition,
the cold air, the lazy snow-flakes drifting hither and thither,
all excited me. I walked on farther and farther into the

country trying to piece it all together. I liked the landlord,

and I shared die popular dislike of Mr. Stourway.
After a time I returned, and making my way towards the
north of "The Love-a-duck". If I hurried I should be there
ten minutes or so before closing-time.
When I entered the large bar-parlour the place was very
crowded. I met old Hargreaves by the door. I'm afraid
a good many of the rules of the society had been broken that
evening. Old Hargreaves was not the only one who had
had quite enough liquid refreshment. Everybody was in
high spirits, and they were still all talking about the competi-
tion. I met Mr. Bean near the fireplace, and I said :

"Well, Mr. Bean, and have you heard how the boy is ?"
"Oh, ay," he replied. "He soon got all right. Mrs;
Wright says he were just a bit upset. He went off home
not an hour since."
"Did you see him ?"
"Eh? Oh, no, I didn't see'm. Mrs. Wright says he
looked quite hisself."
The landlord was moving ponderously up and down
behind the bar. I thought he looked tired, and there were
dark rims round his eyes. I moved up towards die bar,
and he did not notice me. The noise of talking was so loud
that one could speak in a normal voice without being heard.
Everything had apparently gone off quite successfully. Mr.
Stourway had sent along his cheque for five pounds and it
was not reckoned that he would ever show his face in "The
Love-a-duck" again. I waited.
 312 STACY AUMONIER
At noticed that the landlord was quite alone. He
last I
was leaning against the serving-hatch, flicking some crumbs
from his waistcoat, as though waiting for the moment of
release. I took my glass and sidled up to him. I leant
forward as though to speak. He glanced at me, and inclined
his head with a bored movement. When his ear was within
a reasonable distance, I said quietly :

"Rotten cotton gloves 1"

I shall never forget the expression on the face of the
landlord as he slowly raised his head. I was conscious of
being a pinpoint in a vast perspective. His large, rather
colourless eyes appeared to sweep the whole room. They
were moreover charged with a perfectly uncontrolled expres-
sion of surprise, and a kind of uncontrolled lustre of ironic
humour* I had a feeling that if he laughed it would be the
end of all things. He did not laugh ; he looked lugubriously
right through my face, and breathed heavily. Then he
swayed slightly from side to side, and looking at my hat,
said :

"IVe got some cherry-brandy here you'd like. You must

"
have a glass, Mr.
Now, I do
not wish to appear to you either as a prig, a
traitor, or a profiteer. I am indeed a very ordinary, perhaps
over-human member of Tibbelsford society* If I have taken
certain advantages of the landlord, you must at any rate
give me the credit of being the only member of a large audi-
ence who had the right intuitions at the right moment. In
all other respects you must acknowledge that I have treated
him rather well.
In any case, I became prominent in the inner circle with-
out undergoing the tortuous novitiateship of the casual
stranger.
The landlord and I are the best of friends to-day, although
we exchange no confidences. I can break all the rules of
the masonic understanding without getting into trouble.
Some of the others are amazed at the liberties I take.
Andin these days, when licensing restrictions are so
severe, when certain things are not to be got (officially),
and when I see my friends stealing home to a bone-dry supper,
I only have to creep into the bar of "The Love-a~duck" and

whisper "Rotten cotton gloves I" and lo 1 all these forbidden

luxuries are placed at my disposal I Can you blame me ?
 "THE Lo VE- A -DUG K" 315
I have said that we exchange no confidences, and indeed
would be going too far, taking too great an
I feel that that

advantage of my position. There is only one small point

I wouJd love to clear up, and I dare not ask. Presuming my

theory to be right about "The Great Borodin" which was

he?
The landlord ? Or the widow ?
 W. A. DARLINGTON
The Gold Cup

W, A. Darlington was schoolmaster, soldier and civil

servant before he began journalism and authorships
He is well known as a dramatic critic and authority
on thedrama, and he has written a number of humorous
books, including AlJ ** button.
 THE GOLD CUP

GEOFFREY DE TOURS, that noble knight famed

SIR for skill and strength of arm shown in a thousand tour-
neys, suddenly reined in Boiredeleau (his no less famous
charger).
"Stephen I" he called in anguished tones, "I've got a
stiff neck,"
Stephen the who was
Silent, his esquire, not famous at
all so far, came out of his day-dream about the Lady Lynette
with a jerk.
"A neck ?" he repeated in horror.
stiff
"Yes. This confounded helmet must let in a draught
somewhere. Here, help me down, and take the beastly thing
off! Gently, now 1"
With infinite care Stephen assisted the afflicted knight-
errant to alight, and removed the offending headpiece. Sir
Geoffrey sat down on
a fallen log with his head poked forward
at a most uncomfortable angle and caressed his neck. Stephen

began to rub it.

"That's a bit better," said Sir Geoffrey gloomily. "These
things come on so suddenly. I just raised my left arm like
this and ow 1"
Stephen knew better than to speak during the sulphurous
silence that followed. He massaged hopefully, and by degrees
his employer regained the power of articulate speech.
"This is your fault, my lad," he said irritably, at last. "I
must have got hot in that little affair with the Red Knight of
the Forest this morning, and you forgot to rub me down
afterwards."
Stephen went on rubbing. He thought it best not to
remind Sir Geoffrey that he had offered nay, begged to
rub his master down, and had met with a scornful refusal
The fact was that Sir Geoffrey was getting elderly. He was
3*7
Jl8 W. A. DARLINGTON
one of the finest professional knights-errant In the country ;
still

indeed, he had already won the All-England Gold Cup

(presented by the Duke of the Land of Sagesse) nine times,
and was generally expected to win it again in a fortnight's time,
and so make it his own property. Sdll, the fact remained that
he was beginning to find a long day in armour rather trying.
But he hated to be reminded of his age; so Stephen
sighed and rubbed and said nothing.
hunched himself up miserably. "Why is
Sir Geoffrey
he asked, "that a little thing like a crick in the neck makes
it/*
you long for death ? Ow . 1." .

He became unprintable once more as the crick caught him.

"One thing is certain/' he announced when he was
calmer. "I must knock off for a day or two. I can't afford
to take {isks with the Championship so near. Must be fit

when we get to Sagesse eh, Stephen ?"

"Yes, indeed, Sir Knight"
Stephen's fervour was not all, or even chiefly, due to
loyalty to his master. At the Castle of Sagesse dwelt the Lady
Lynette, the Duke's beautiful daughter, whom Stephen had
long worshipped from afar. During the Championship
meeting it would be possible for a humble squire to gaze on
her loveliness and dream of the time when he should himself
be a knight, able to break a lance in her honour. For this,
if all went well, he would not have long to wait. Sir Geoffrey
had once promised him, in an expansive moment, that on the
day the old veteran won the Cup for the tenth time, Stephen
should receive his knighthood.
He saw himself setting forth into the world with Lynette's
favour worn proudly in his helm, and Lynette's white hand
waving him farewell. True, he had never yet dared to speak
to the lady, and had little reason to suppose that she even
knew of his existence. But
"Are you deaf ?" The exasperated voice of Sir Geoffrey
dispersed his thoughts. "My engagement-book many 1 How
more times must 1 ask ?"

Stephen hastily produced a parchment and unrolled it.

"Nothing important, thank goodness I" said Sir Geoffrey
thankfully, reading over Stephen's shoulder and breathing
heavily down the back of his neck. "What's that youVe got
down against Tuesday ? 'Y. the B/ it looks like. Is that a
 THE GOLD CUP 315
"Yolande the Beautiful, Sir Knight," translated Stephen
In thehushed voice of one standing on holy ground. He was
an idealist where women were concerned.
Sir Geoffrey was not.
"Another of those confounded females in trouble I" he
said disgustedly.
Stephen looked pained. His adoration of woman was
only equalled by his hero-worship for the misogynist^ old
knight. To have to listen while one of his idols blasphemed
was a trying experience.
against the other
"What's Yolande's little bother, anyhow ?" asked Sir

Geoffrey. "I forget/'

Stephen's ingenuous countenance assumed a shocked
expression. Yolande and her adventure were on the lips of
every bard the latest society sensation, in fact But Sir
Geoffrey always composed himself for slumber when a bard
began to tune his harp.
"The King of the Marshlands carried her off as she walked
in the forest," explained Stephen. "But she repulsed his
advances."
"More fool she," commented Sir Geoffrey.
"But," said Stephen earnestly, "the King of the Marsh-
lands has three eyes, and is reputed to be a wizard."

Sir Geoffrey was unimpressed.

"If she wasn't prepared to take her chance," he insisted,
"she ought not to have gone into the forest at all. There
ought to be a law against it. Every chit of a girl who wants
a husband nowadays simply walks out into the forest looking
for trouble, and then grumbles when she gets it. I call the
whole tiling unmaidenly, and it ought to be stopped. And
owing to the absurd laws of chivalry, a knight can't refuse
when he's called upon to rescue them except for reasons of
health," he added, as a twinge in his shoulder-blade warned
him that excitement was bad for him just at present.
"Well," he came back with suddenness to the matter in
hand. "What did His Majesty do ?"
"The fair maiden," said Stephen, "is to be thrown to the
Seven-Headed Bull, unless she promises to marry the King,
or a champion appears to rescue her."
"That's where / was to have come in, I suppose ? Humph I

Fm well out of that. This freak-animal fighting is apt to be

tnessy. Give me a straightforward two-some every time.
320 W. A. DARLINGTON
Just send a varlet to Miss Yolande
with a note, will you,
"
regretting that circumstances over which
"But the maiden 1" gasped Stephen.
"Oh, she'll get somebody. Plenty of enthusiastic young
idiots about And if she doesn't, she'll just have to marry
the man. Serve her right too."
"Would 7 were a knight," muttered Stephen.
Sir Geoffrey eyed him keenly.
"A good thing you're not," he said. "You're quite a
promising fighter, my lad, and I will say you make a first-rate
bulls take experience.
sparring-partner; but seven-headed
You'll be a knight quite soon enough for your own good
if I win the Cup."

As
night wore on, Sir Geoffrey's crick remained so pain-
ful that he could not continue his journey. There was no
inn at hand, so Stephen unpacked the old campaigner's patent
portable pavilion, and pitched it in the forest. Then, having
strewn a bed of rushes for his master, he went off to try and
find a pharmeceutical wizard with a balsam guaranteed to
cure cricks. His search took him far afield, and he was gone
till morning.
With the dawn Sir Geoffrey awoke from
a fitful sleep.
He had found it impossible to sleep at all except by tucking
his head under his armpit like a bkd
His temper was worse
than ever.
"Stephen," he called.
"Good morning, Sir Geoffrey," replied a strange voice
In an ingratiating tone.
Sir Geoffrey turned over in bed. In the doorway of his
domicile stood a tall and rather weedy youth flamboyantly
dressed in scarlet velvet and yellow satin. In his cap was a
long, curling feather. On his back was a harp.
"I," volunteered the new-comer, "am Bertram the Bard.
You know the name, perhaps ?"
"I do not," replied Sir Geoffrey, turning over again and
closing his eyes,
of bards in general. He consid-
Sir Geoffrey disapproved
ered poetry unmanly, though he would have admitted, if
taxed, that bardism had been a respectable profession once.
In the old days, when bards had confined themselves to wander-
 THE GOLD CUP JZ1
V*
ing from castle to castle singing songs of derring-do, they
had been glad enough to receive in return the shelter of a
roof, a humble place at the table, and an occasional suit of
old clothes. But now the profession was becoming com-
mercialized. The modern race of bards had realized their
importance as news-distributing medium of the
the only
country. They had begun to dress well, and to demand a
place at table above the salt. For instance, here was this
Bertram smirking at him like an equal.
Sir Geoffrey disapproved of him exactly as his modern

counterpart, sitting in his club with the Morning Post on his

knees, disapproves of other dailies,
"Go away !" he said forgetting his disability and sitting
up suddenly. "Ow I" he shrieked, remembering it.
"What's the matter ?" asked Bertram, all solicitude,
"Crick," Sir Geoffrey replied shortly.
"Let me rub it for you."
Sir Geoffrey tried to protest, but Bertram seemed to
notice nothing. And then, as the pain began to abate under
his soothing touch, Sir Geoffrey began to feel less disagreeable.
"Is there any news ?" he asked.
"News ?" Bertram's face lighted up at once. "I should
think there is In fact I came here especially to interview
1

you about it." He unstrapped his harp from his back as he

spoke. "You haven't heard the Gold Cup sensation yet, I
suppose ?"
Sir Geoffrey actually looked interested.
"No. What is it ? Let's have it."
Bertram struck a chord on his harp, and began in a throaty
tenor.
"A thousand knights are hastening up
To battle for the Golden Cup
"
To fight for honour

"Excuse me," interrupted the knight impatiently, "But

need you sing it ?"
Bertram's hand paused in mid-air, in the very act of
striking a chord. He seemed surprised and relieved.
"As a matter of fact, I much prefer not to, only most people
insist. It's a fearful strain putting everything in rhyme."
"What has happened, then ?"
"I'll tell you," said Bertram. "The Lady Lynette, daughter
3*1 W. A. DARLINGTON
of the Duke of Sagesse, is now of marriageable age ;
and the
duke has decided that whoever wins the Cup this year shall
win the lady too/'
"WHAT I"
Sir Geoffrey, eyes and mouth wide open with horror, did
not notice that his ejaculation was echoed with even deeper
horror from the door of the tent, where Stephen had just
entered.
"Andthought/' concluded Bertram, "that you, being
I
the favourite according to the latest betting, might care to
give me your views on the innovation/
5

He produced an ink-horn, a quill, and an ivory cablet

and prepared to take notes.
"Views ?" shouted Sir Geoffrey. "It's a scandal 1"

"When bold Sir Geoff, the news received/'

murmured Bertram to 4iimself, writing busily,

"He was particularly peeved/'

His pen paused.

"A crying scandal," went on the knight. "I believe it's
a put- up job to palm off this girl on me. The hussy's after
my money."
There was an indignant sound from Stephen, still frozen
with horror in the doorway.
Bertram's pen was once more moving rapidly. The
interview was taking shape.

"His bearings grew extremely hot.

'Gadzooks/ quoth he, 'this is a plot* 1"

he read quietly. But not quietly enough.

"Confound you, sir," Sir Geoffrey roared. "Will you
take yourself off, or I'll dust your new coat with my mace,
stiffneck or no stiff neck."
Bertram went. He had got all he wanted.
"Stephen," said Sir Geoffrey, "I've half a mind to with-
draw my entry ; only I cannot lose my chance of the Cup for
any fortune-hunting chit of a girl. But if I win her, she'd
better look out for herself, that's all. She needs a lesson.
She shall have it"
 THE GOLD CUP 313
At these dreadful words Stephen's whole soul revolted.
He drew himself up to his full height.
He held out a small package.
"Your balsam, Sir Knight," he said formally. "And
to-day I must leave your service/'
Sir Geoffrey stared at him.
"Leave ?" he said stupidly. "Leave now, and me with a
stiff neck ? But why ?"
"Urgent private affairs," said Stephen. And without
another word he turned and left the pavilion.

ii

A fortnight later on Monday, July zznd, to be quite

exact the great Castle of Sagesse was all a-bustle with life.
Entrants for the Gold in from every side ;
Cup were pouring
for the Duke was fabulously wealthy and the Lady Lynette
was his only child. On the morrow the preliminary elimin-
ating rounds were to begin.
The throng of knights was far greater than could be
accommodated even in the Duke's enormous dwelling-place.
Every scrap of house-room that could be spared had been
requisitioned as a temporary sleeping chamber. One late-
comer had even been given a dungeon that did not happen
to be in use at the moment, where he slept rather uneasily
on the rack. Later comers still had perforce to pitch their
pavilions in the great courtyard or the adjacent meadows,
and to come to the Castle only for meals and entertainment.
At this moment the voice of Bertram the Bard could be
heard in the hall, relating (with harp obbligato) his last tit-bit
of stirring adventure the rescue of Yolande the Beautiful
from her seven-headed bull by a mysterious knight in black
armour. Every day Bertram's excellent service of couriers
brought him news of some fresh deed of prowess by the Black
Knight; but none knew who he was. His doings and (of
course) the praise of the beauty of the Lady Lynette kept
Bertram going for three performances (or editions) a

day.
From an upper window of the Castle, a little later in the
afternoon, the Lady Lynette herself surveyed the crowded
courtyard with an expression of excitement shadowed with
doubt.
 3*4 W. A. DARLINGTON
Belowin the foreshortened courtyard she could see

nothing but knights, knights, and yet more knights. It was

rather wonderful to think that he who of all this great gather-
ing showed himself to be bravest and strongest would, in
the Cup final three weeks from to-day, win for himself the
right to be her husband. But it would be terrible if the
winner turned out to be not the dashing young knight of her
dreams but a hard-bitten old woman-hater like Sir Geoffrey 1

She put the thought resolutely aside. Sir Geoffrey must

not win. His esquire now that nice, shy boy who stared
at her so if he were only a knight, and could tilt in her
honour. . She put that thought aside too.
. .

After all, if the worst came to the worst, she could bob her
hair and go out into the forest, disguised as a page. She had
a suit all It was only this consideration that had
^eady.
induced her to agree to her father's old-fashioned way of
choosing a husband.
As she gazed out of the window, she half hoped that Sir
Geoffrey would win after all. She rather fancied herself as
a boy.
Suddenly her eye was caught by a spot of bright colour,
standing out against the background of steel in the court-
yard. A lady had arrived at the great gate, and was now
riding up to the Castle escorted by a tall knight all in black
armour.
Lynette slipped down from the window, a puzzled
expression on her face ; and a few minutes later Marianne,
her maid, threw open the door and announced "The Lady :

Yolande the Beautiful."

dear/' said Lynette, running across the room and
"My
clasping her visitor in her arms. "How lovely to see you I"
They made excellent foils for each other, these two a
fact which possibly explains why they had been inseparable
friends at school. Lynette was all life and colour, Yolande
was slim and pale and dark and statuesque.
"We've been hearing of all your adventures," went on
the hostess gaily. "Are you going to marry the Black Knight ?
And what's he like ? I think it's all frightfully romantic I"
"Romantic!" repeated Yolande, sinking down upon a
couch. "Good heavens !"
Lynette noticed suddenly that her friend seemed tired
and out of temper.
 THE GOLD CUP 325

"Why ?" she asked innocently. "The Black Knight

don't you love him ? And who is he ?"
Yolande laughed bitterly.
"For the last week/' she said, "I've been forced to follow
that man about while he fought his absurd duels getting
himself fit, he said and all that time I've never even seen
his face. He never takes his helmet off I might as well
fall in love with a saucepan. Besides, he's cracked about
you I"
"Me I"
"Yes.He's got a picture of you from somewhere which
he worships. And you're the only subject he'll talk about
and his one idea is to win this silly Cup and you ... I

I tell you, my dear, I'm so sick of about that I

hearing you
can hardly bear to look at you now."
Lynette got up.
"Come and see your room," she suggested tactfully.
Yolande followed her dispiritedly.
"I think I won't appear again," she said. "I need a rest.
You won't mind ?"
"Not at all. You sleep the clock round, and you'll feel
better."
Yolande sat down on the bed.
"What a fool I was not to marry the King of the Marsh-
lands," she mused aloud. "He's quite an old dear, really,
though he's not a beauty and his castle is damp. And it was
nice of him to carry me off."
"Why didn't you ?"
"Oh, the usual thing. ... I thought it would be thril-

ling to be rescued, and there

was always Marshlands to fall
back on if nobody turned up. I wonder, if I went back
now. .
Oh, well
. . Good night, Lynette dear. You're
1

a good sort."

Lynette, speeding back to her own apartments, was thank-

ful that she had not Yolande to entertain. She had other
things to do.
"Marianne 1" she called excitedly. "Get me out my
pageV, suit."

Half an hour later a slim page carrying a lantern paused

outside the Black Knight's pavilion and read a notice inscribed
on parchment at the entrance.
 W. A. DARLINGTON
THE BLACK KNIGHT

it said. Underneath was another, which read :

ANYBODY who enters here without

permission will be forthwith SLAIN. B.K.

A was burning inside the pavilion. Lynette was not

light
a duke's daughter for nothing. She slipped very quietly
through the flap. The Black Knight still in armour except
for his helmet had his back to her, and all she could see of
him was a mass of yellow hair. He was gazing with adoration
at something which she recognized, with a throb, as a minia-
ture portrait of herself.
She must have made some small sound, for suddenly he
sprang up and faced round with his mace upraised to strike.
Then both fell back a step in sheer surprise.
"You 1" they both said.
The Black Knight was Stephen.
The mace dropped from his right hand. He tried involun-
tarily to conceal the miniature in his left. His face went pink
and he began to perspire.
"
"I er you er I he stammered.
She gave him no help whatever. Here was a man who
had bored poor Yolande to death for days with his talk of
herself; and now that she stood before him he went dumb.
He did not even pretend to be taken in by her disguise either.
She waited. He came a step nearer.
"
"We er you cr that is He tried again, taking
another step forward. She did not move.
Suddenly she held out her hands, and he realized that
words were not necessary. He covered the intervening space
which remained in one large stride, and left the sympathetic but
tactful author no alternative but to put a row of stars.

"For heaven's sake/'said Lynette, a little later, "take

off that breastplate. like hugging a cooking-stove,"
It's like
she went on, conscious that the metaphor owed something
to Yolande's remark about loving a saucepan.
He obeyed.
"I think this is too perfectly splendid," she went on, when
 THE GOLD CUP 317

they were once again comfortably settled. "How nice of old

Sir Geoffrey to dub you knight in time for the tourna-
ment/'
He blushed and hesitated. Then he decided to make a
clean breast of it.

"I'm not one," he confessed.

She gazed at him, horror-struck.
"But but if they find out, you'll be disgraced for ever.
You know how strict the council are about people who enter
on false pretences/'
"I know. That's why I'm the Black Knight."
She gazed at him anxiously.
"You oughtn't to have done it."
"I had to/' he answered simply. He told her of Sir Geof-
frey's ungentlemanly threats concerning herself. "After that
I had to have a shot at beating him. If I win, darling, we shall
have to run away and get married before they find out who
I am/'
"Rather !" Her voice was enthusiastic. "But can you
beat Sir Geoffrey ?"
"Only by a fluke," he answered, with honesty.
She shook her head.
"There must be no fluke about it," she said firmly. "Not
now She pressed a button on
1" a talisman, which hung by
a chain from her neck.

Stephen sighed.
"But what can we do ?" he began.
"You leave this to me 1" she said. "There's an old witch
who arranges tilings for me sometimes. She'll be here in a
minute."
A moment later the flap was thrown aside, and an aged
crone appeared, carrying the broomstick upon which she had
presumably made her journey.
"Good evening," she said briskly, to Lynctte, taking not
the slightest notice of Stephen. "You sent for me."
"Yes. This is Sir Stephen. I want him to win the Gold
Cup. Can you help me ?" "
"Nothing easier. An enchanted spear
"Oh," broke in Stephen, "but enchanted weapons are
against the rules."
"As I was saying," resumed the witch in a disagreeable
tone. "An enchanted spear would be against the rales, but
 3*8 W. A. DARLINGTON
there'd be nothing to forbid an enchanted shield, against
which all
weapons would break/' "
"Oh/* said Stephen slowly, "but would that be
"You can't say a shield's a weapon," said the old woman
cantankerously.
"
"No, but
Lynette put her hand on his arm.
"For my sake/' she pleaded, "I must have you safe and
sound."
"
"Oh, well he said, with a gesture of consent.
"Give me your
shield/' said the witch. She sat herself
down cross-legged in a corner and began to coat Stephen's
shield with a queer butter-coloured varnish from a bottle,
muttering incantations all the while.
In the distance a cock crew suddenly, and Lynette began
hastily to bundle her hair back under her jaunty feathered
cap.
"I must go/' she whispered, "or I shall be discovered.
To-morrow we shall meet again as strangers, but, remember,
I love you."

Stephen made a strange noise in his throat, and took her

once more in his arms. She nodded towards the witch.
"Be sure to reward the old lady well," she whispered.
"She's a mercenary old wretch."
The slim page flitted back to the Castle, leaving Stephen
aghast. "Reward the old lady well !" It was easy for Lynette,
a rich man's spoilt daughter, to speak of money in this airy
way. Stephen was as poor as a rat. Even his second-hand
armour and his pavilion were hired by the week, and all he
possessed, after paying the merchant the deposit he demanded,
was a crown and a few odd groats.
"There," said the witch. "A neat job. So long as you
can catch the blows on your shield, young man, you'll be
safe."
She picked up her broom. "A neat job," she repeated,
with intention.
There was nothing else for it. Stephen produced his
crown.
"I'm I'm sorry," he mumbled. "All 1 have. Very
"
sorry er
She took the coin in silence, but departed with a nasty
look in her eye. Stephen felt decidedly uncomfortable.
 THE GOLD CUP 329
He would have felt even less easy had he followed her.
She went up to a sentry.
"Young man/' she said, "who is the favourite in this
tournament ?"
"Sir Geoffrey de Tours/'
"And where does he lodge ?"
"In the chief guest-room of the Castle/'
She went in at a postern-gate, muttering to herself. "A
crown ?" she said. "A crown ? Some people seem to prize
the Gold Cup altogether too cheap."

The preliminary rounds of that year's tournament excited

public interest. No well-known champions were engaged
little

until the first round proper. But the Black Knight (who, it
was noticed, was using a curious butter-coloured shield) came
through these eliminating trialsin such style that his price
shortened daily. Sir Geoffrey was still easily favourite, and
it was remarked that he was looking extremely well and
confident. When the proper draw was published, Lynette
scanned it with anxious eyes. Sir Geoffrey's name was in
the top half of the list, Stephen's in the bottom half, so that
if these two redoubtable
champions were destined to meet,
it must be in the final round. So far, so good. But it was
a shock to her to discover when Sir Geoffrey first took the
field, that his shield also was of a familiar buttery hue.
There is no need for long description. Bertram the Bard
did, it is true, run to thousands of lines every evening in
describing the day's battles.
But then Bertram did not know what we know about
Stephen, nor did he suspect what we must suspect about Sir
Geoffrey. Suffice it to say that while the very flower of chivalry
had entered their names for this tournament, no one could
stand against the onslaught of Sir Geoffrey or of the Black
Knight. Every spear, as it touched the yellow shield of either
of these two, shivered into fragments and left its owner
weaponless and unhorsed.
Each day the excitement grew. What would happen when
these two invincible champions met in the final ? The public
asked this question, the bookmakers asked it with special
anxiety. But nobody asked it with more complete bewilder-
J3O W. A. DARLINGTON
ment than the three, people most concerned the two con-
testants and the Queen of Beauty.
According to Bertram, the crowd on the day of the final
round broke all records. Every stand was full to suffocation,
and even standing-room among the varletry commanded
unheard-of prices. All the nobility and gentry were present
except the Lady Yolande, who (it was understood) had departed
on a visit to the King of the Marshlands the previous day.
The Lady Lynettc was looking pale and anxious, and
beneath her gorgeous robes as Queen of Beauty, she had
donned her page's suit. She could hardly bear to look
as the Duke, her father, gave the signal for battle to be joined.
The two champions charged. There was a sound as of a
thousand zinc pails rolling down stone steps, and when
Lynette opened her eyes she saw both antagonists safe in the
saddle, and both spears shivered to fragments. Each rode
back for a new spear. Once more the champions charged.
More zinc pails crashed down more steps, and as the dust
cleared away but why labour the point ? That first encounter
repeated itself ninety-five times, till the ground was littered
with broken spears, and a rowdy element in the cheap stands
began to "barrack". The Duke, who had been getting
increasingly restless for some time, went over to his daughter.
"I say, Linnie," he said, "we can't have this. They're
using enchanted shields, I believe/'
"Well," she said, "why not ?"
He stared.
"It's hardly the thing, is it ?"
"Shields aren't weapons."
"Nor they are." This seemed to be a new idea to him.
He went back to the judge's box, pondering it. Meanwhile
the champions continued to meet and the riff-raff to barrack.
After the hundred and nineteenth impact the two combatants
were seen to be reeling in their saddles from sheer weariness.
The Duke could stand it no longer. Aherald was sent out
into the lists, bearing two ordinary shields, which after a
brief colloquy he gave in exchange for the two butter
coloured monstrosities. The barracking died down. Every-
body understood that the climax of this strange duel was at
hand at last. Wearily, for the hundred and twentieth time,
the champions charged. And this time the force of the
impact rolled both from their horses* They rose unsteadily,
 THE GOLD CUP
drew their swords, and went at it
hammer-and-tongs 00
foot.
Here at last was the which everybody had been
thrill for
hoping. Mad cheering burst forth on every side the Duke ;

leant forward with parted lips. And in her box the Queen
of Beauty sat white-faced, with her hands gripping the rail
before her.
It was no longer a contest of skill, but of sheer endurance.
The champions hewed and hacked at one another. Both
felt their strength failing after their strenuous and unusual
morning. Both approaching the breaking point, Sir Geoffrey,
the older man, reached it first. All of a sudden his blade
flew up, striking Stephen on his second-hand helmet as it
did so, and tearing away the visor, so that his face was visible.
The sword described an arc in the air, and as it reached the
ground Stephen put his foot upon it and called his adversary
to yield.
But Sir Geoffrey, afterone astonished glance at his rival's
face, was hobbling towards the judge's box.
"Sir Duke/' he said loudly, "I claim the victory. This
Black Knight is no knight after all, but my runaway squire,
Stephen. .1 claim the Cup."
Pandemonium seemed to break loose. The bookmakers,
who were just preparing to pay out over Stephen, paused
irresolute. Everybody else swarmed into the lists and began

talking at once. In the middle of the vast crowd was a little

group, consisting of the Duke, Sir Geoffrey, Stephen, and
Lynette. She had her arm through her lover's, and was
facing them defiantly.
"Is this true ?" asked the Duke severely.
Stephen nodded a shamed head.
"But why did you do it ?" asked Sir Geoffrey, in puzzled
tones. "You must be mad."
Stephen's eyes flashed. He squeezed Lynette's hand.
"You said you'd teach her a lesson," he said. "And I
loved her."
"And I love him," put in Lynette. "And I won't marry
Sir Geoffrey for anything, or anybody but Stephen, so there/'
Sir Geoffrey turned and looked at her in surprise.
"If I have done you an injustice," he said slowly, "I
apologize."
She tossed her head and turned away*
33* W. A. DARLINGTON
The Duke, whom events seemed to be moving alto-
for
gether too fast, took his head in his hands.
"One thing's clear," he said to Sir Geoffrey. "You've
won the Cup. It's yours for keeps/*
He handed over the trophy amid the shouts of such of
the populace as had backed the favourite they turned as one
;

man and stampeded in the direction of die disgruntled

bookmakers.
"But what am I to do about the girl ? She can't marry a
fellow who breaks the laws of chivalry like this, you know.
It isn't done. Some fathers would brick her up in a high
tower for less."
He surveyed his daughter gloomily. She moved defiantly
closer to Stephen.
"Come, come/' said Sir Geoffrey, who now that he had
attained his heart's desire had grown genial. "The lad's
a good lad. I see a way out. Kneel down, Stephen."
Stephen knelt. It was all very well to dub him knight
now ; but the mischief was done, that he as a mere esquire
had dared to compete with (and incidentally vanquish) his
betters.
He felt the tap of a sword on his shoulder.
"I dub thee knight," said Sir Geoffrey's voice, "with
seniorityfrom July zisf. Rise, Sir
Stephen !"
There was a moment's stunned silence while they all took
it in. Then the Lady Lynette went up to Sir Geoffrey.
"You're an old darling/' she said softly. "And if you
won't think I've got designs on you, I should like to be
allowed to kiss you."
 OWEN RUTTER
The Jonah

Owen Rutter served for some years as a magistrate

in British North Borneo and has travelled extensively
in Europe, America and the far East, which is the
scene of several of his books. If Crab No Walk a
travel diary of the West Indies, is one of his most

interesting and succesful works.

 THE JONAH

was nothing In Mr. Ernest Pudd water's appearance

THEREto suggest that his only diversion was horse- racing. He
did not wear gaiters or go about with a flat- rimmed bowler hat
crammed upon bis head. He did not talk racing jargon,
although he was familiar with it. While he knew how a
stake was divided in the event of a dead-heat and could
calculate the revenue that might accrue from a bet of five
shillings each way at 13 to 8, he had never been astride a
horse in his life and could not have told a hock from a pastern.
Even had you expected him to prove knowledgeable on the
subject of horses' teeth he would probably have told you,
with a certain dignity, that he was a dentist, not a veterinary
surgeon.
Now dentistry an exact science. It does not allow a
is
man to take risks. Moreover, although it is certainly not a
sedentary occupation it does keep one indoors. Ernest
Puddwater found both fresh air and exercise upon a race-
course, and betting was his relaxation from the exactitude of
professional life. For him Life assumed heightened values
the moment he heard the tumult of the bookies or watched
the horses going to the post. The colours of the jockeys
were to him more satisfying than flowers in a garden ; the
sudden murmur of "They're off!" stirred him like music;
and his field-glasses were windows that opened on romance :
as he raised them to watch the race, dental engines and decay-
ing molars were forgotten and nothing else in the world
existed for him but the flurry of the shining colours and the
flying hoofs.
So Mr. Puddwater went racing every Saturday and although
he rarely gambled off the course, when he was on one it was
his habit to have a bet on every race. But he never let himself

get carried away. He was a prim little man, with the precision
336 OWEN RUTTER
of a robin, and although well-to-do, his rule was never to
stake more than a pound each way. His normal wager was
five shillings to win.
Now a dentist, like a barber, is in a position to "hear"
things. It is perfectly true that a barber's customers are in
a better position to talk, nevertheless Mr. Puddwater's patients,
during the intervals between the excavations and reclamations
that were being executed in their mouths, would occasionally
find an opportunity to proffer dps.
Sometimes Mr. Puddwater would follow these. Some-
times he would accept the forecasts of the prophets of the
Press. Or he might elect to follow a system, such as backing
second favourites throughout a meeting, or taking the horse
nearest to 3 to i, or starting with a low stake and doubling
up on first favourites. He never tried a system without first
testing it and it was a perennial mystery to him why,
in theory,
when produced
it so handsome a return on paper, in practice
it should invariably lose.

Naturally, he would have preferred to win, but besides

being a dentist he was a philosopher. He lost his money
with composure. This was a swell, for whereas most punters,
even the most unlucky, sometimes win, Mr. Puddwater never
did. It was literally true that no horse he had ever backed
had won a race not even at an odds-on price. There had
been a great moment once when Bitter Sweet, carrying ten
shillings of Mr. Puddwater's money,
had finished first past
the post in the Tufton Selling Plate only to be disqualified
for bumping and boring. On another occasion Shooting
Star (also well backed by Mr. Puddwater) had won a three
mile military steeplechase at Hawthorn Hill, but the jockey,
a young officer who had never ridden a winner before, had
dismounted before reaching the winners' enclosure, so that
both he and his backers had been robbed of victory. Apart
from these two, no horse fancied by Mr. Puddwater had
ever looked like winning.
Most people who back horses prate about their wins and
keep mum about their losses. But Mr. Puddwater, having
no wins to brag about, made no bones about his ill-luck. He-
admitted it freely. Even cheerfully. People liked him for
that. It was why they so often tried to put him in die way
of a good thing.
 THE JONAH 337
/

He was standing one April afternoon in the paddock at

Sandown, watching the numbers go up for the first race and
ticking off the starters on his card, when he felt a hand on
his arm and looked up to see Sir Giles Mallaby, one of his
clients.
him away from the crowd in front of the
Sir Giles led
number board, then bent his head until his mouth was level
with Mr. Puddwater's left ear.
"Just thought Pd tell you Skyscraper's right for the
Tudor Stakes/' he said, in the conspiratorial tone in which
one racing man conveys information to another.
"Oh, thanks very much," said Mr. Puddwater.
"You know I don't say much about my own horses as
a rule/* continued Sir Giles. "But you've been havin' a
bad patch lately, haven't you ? And this time you can help
yourself."
Mr. Puddwater regarded him with a wan smile.
"I'm grateful, Sir Giles," he said. "But you're taking a*

big risk with Skyscraper's chances."

"What d'you mean ?"
"No horse ever wins if I back it."
Sir Giles guffawed.

"My dear feller, even your luck can't stop It. It's right.

Nicely handicapped, good going, Prikett up. Nothing to

stop it. Don't mind tellin' you the stable are all on it. Keep it
to yourself, though. We*don't want to bring the price down."
"Well, then, I'll have a modest pound on."
"Good feller. Like to see you win."
As Sir Giles went off to join his party, a man who had
been standing near approached Mr. Puddwater.
"My name's Dyer/' he said by way of introduction.
"The trainer ?" asked Mr. Puddwater.
Dyer nodded.
"You train for Sir Giles, don't you ?"
"That's right." Dyer hesitated a moment. Then he
went on "Look here, sir, I heard what you said. Are you
:

*
really going to have that bet ?"
"Oh, I think I may as well," replied Mr. Puddwater.
Hope, long dead, had been resurrected in his heart. "I've
never known Sir Giles so sure."
"That's it. It is right. That's why we don't want to
take any risks."
Jj8 OWEN RUTTER
"How d'you mean ?"
"Well, you told Sir Giles the truth, didn't you ?"
sir,
"About my bad luck ?"
1
"Yes. I know you well by sight, sir. I've heatc about
you, too. Don't often win ?"
"Very seldom."
"Might say never ?"
"Well, not up to now."
"I know. People talk about it. Almost uncanny, It
Is."
"It certainly is odd," agreed Mr, Puddwater. "But.
one's luck is bound to turn, you know. It may turn to-day.
"
By all the laws of probability
"Any horse you back has a funny way of losing. We
both know that. Now
look here, supposing you lay me the
odds to a pound about Skyscraper ?"
"But if my luck's still out it'll win."
"That's what we want it to do."
"Then where do I come in ?"
"You'll be no worse off. You'll lose either way. Why
you bet at all, / can't think."
"I like it," replied Mr. Puddwater simply.
"Well, I tell you what I'll do with you, sir. You were
going to have a pound investment. The horse ougat to start
at fives. I'll pay you a fiver not to back it."
"I couldn't think of such a thing," said Mr. Puddwater
in a scandalized tone.
"As a favour," persisted Dyer. "The stable's got a big
interest. You can call me superstitious if you like. I am,
where horses are concerned. Some of us can't help it. And
you back Skyscraper you'll upset his chance.
I believe that if
So why not be a sport and take my offer ?"
"
"Oh, well, if you put it like that
"Thank you, sir. A fiver then, win or lose. On the
understanding that you leave it alone."
"You have my word," said Mr. Puddwater.

Skyscraper won by
ten lengths from a field of twelve,
Mr. Puddwater, having no money on the race, missed his
usual thrill, but it certainly was agreeable to take in five pounds.
He had a bet in each of the remaining races and lost them all
 THE JONAH 5J9
Bat for the first time since he had gone racing he reached
his home with more money than he had left it.
From that day life changed for him. Dyer insisted on
regarding him as a kind of inverted mascot Whenever the
stable was running a horse that was fancied he would pay
Mr. Puddwater the starting price odds to a pound not to back
it. Mr. Puddwater, who had a generous nature, did offer to
refrain from betting on Dyer's horses without honorarium,
but Dyer would not hear of this. To his superstitious mind
Mr. Pudd water's bets must be bought off, just as the bet on
Skyscraper had been. And just as the first experiment had
been successful, so were the others. The Dyer stable had an
extraordinary run of luck. The racing journalists called it
phenomenal, having in vain racked their memories (and their
reference books) to find so long a winning sequence.
Tipsters began to find that they could "nap" Dyer's
horses with perfect confidence. But while they preened
themselves on their perspicacity next day the betting public
had no need of their assistance, since it came to follow the
stable blindly, even when there was nothing in the form of a
horse to justify confidence nothing but Dyer's luck, which,
however, appeared to be a more invariable factor than the
steadiest form.
As the season wore on, rumours got about, as rumours
wilL Mr. Puddwater was approached on behalf of another
stable. He was a fair-minded man and he referred the matter
to Dyer, who at once agreed in future to lay him the odds
to 10. Mr. Puddwater found this more profitable (and more

agreeable) than stopping or extracting teeth. On days when

there was racing within a couple of hours of London he took
to working only from 9.30 to 12. In vain did patients tele-
phone for appointments in the afternoons. Awell-trained
Mr. Puddwater's engagements were
secretary regretted that
becoming unusually heavy as indeed they were. Had Mr.
Puddwater desired to increase his practice, he could have
found no better way. Theatre managers do not display the
legend "Standing Room Only" to deter the public from
trying to get a seat next day.
The flat-racing season drew to a close. Dyer carried off
the Autumn double and paid Mr. Puddwater a bonus of
500. The jumping season began. The stable's success
continued. Meanwhile Mr. Puddwater still had his modest
 340 OWEN RUTTER
bets on horses other than Dyer's. He never won. As he
were a sort of extra insurance for
said playfully, these bets
the stable. It was this remark that gave Dyer his great
idea*
"In the ordinary way I'm out to win for my owner/' he
said one day to Mr. Puddwater, in the paddock at Hurst Park.
"A tenner on the horse, if I fancy it, that's enough for me.
But with this a man 'ud be a fool not to make what he can
while the going's good. But with the public and the pro-
fessional backers following the stable like they are we never
get a price. The best you can get is 7 to 4. More often it's
evens or odds-on. We've got two horses running in the
Reading Chase Newbury on Thursday. Cinderella and
at

Water-Kelpie. I'm going to win with Cinderella. The

trouble is the price'll open short and get shorter as soon as
we start backing her, and Water-Kelpie' 11 be fours or longer."
"I don't see that the price matters, so long as the bet's
safe," said Mr. Puddwater.
"One won't be able to get enough on. I want to make
a packet this time. This luck can't last for ever. I've got a

feeling it won't last into the New Year. Newbury's the

last meeting of the year and I want to pull off something big
and then nail what I've got to the wall."
"Well, it'll be the usual arrangement about Cinderella,
I suppose ?"
"Yeah. But as well as that I've got a scheme that'll
shorten Water-Kelpie's price and push Cinderella's out."
"How ?"
"I want you to back Water-Kelpie for the stable up to
a thousand."
Mr. Puddwater whistled.
"That's a lot of money."
"Don't you worry. It'll be worth it. First of all, if you
put all that on it's a sort of double insurance. It makes
Cinderella a cinch. And nothing less will bring the price
down at Newbury. You may have There's
to go to 1,500.
a big market there. Needn't worry about the Tote, Fix
the bookies. Begin at the top by the stand and work down.
You'll hear the price shortening as you go."
"And Cinderella's price lengthening ?"
"That's the idea. The Ring'll think I'm going to win
with Water-Kelpie."
 THE JONAH 341

"Is it
quite cricket ?" asked Mr. Puddwater dubiously.
"This isn't cricket, it's racing," Dyer told him. "And
if we can
push Cinderella out to sixes from evens it'll be
worth it."
"But when you plank your packet on you'll keep the
price of Cinderella down," objected Mr. Puddwater.
"Don't you worry. I've made my arrangements." Dyer
smiled grimly. "We'll get busy with the wires. A lot of
wires, there'll be. The money won't get back to the course,
so the starting price won't be affected, see ?"
"Very well, then."
"Good. I'll have a couple of monkeys ready for you."
"Right," agreed Mr. Puddwater. "And if any more is
necessary I can do it on the nod. Even though I don't bet
big the Ring know who I am."
"That'll be O.K. by me," said Dyer. "Keep an account
and I'll pay you the difference. Plus a bonus when we see
Prickett first past the post on Cinderella."

The usual biting wind was blustering across the Members'

Enclosure at Newbury as Mr. Puddwater, his coat collar
about his ears, made for the bookmakers, his mind braced to
a great resolve.
It was still
Betting on the race had scarcely started,
early.
but already raucous voices were shouting. "Even money on
the field I" "I'll lay four to one bar one 1" "I'll lay any 'oss 1"
"Six to one Water-Kelpie." "Fours The Ambassador." And
again"Even money on the field."
"What are they making favourite ?" asked Mr. Puddwater
of the bookmaker whose pitch was nearest the steps of the
Members' stand.
*' ''
Cinderella. Evens .

"What price is Water-Kelpie ?"

"Sixes."
"I'll take six hundred to a hundred, then."
He handed over the notes, made an entry in his betting
book, and passed on, making a similar bet a little lower down
the line. A
moment later his heart beat quicker with excite-
ment as he heard them offering. "Five to one, Water-Kelpie."
The price had shortened a point already.
At that moment Mr. Puddwater went mad. That morning
as he lay drowsily in the no man's land between dreaming and
 OWEN RUTTEB.
awaking ft had seemed that a little piping voice had told him
Water-Kelpie was going to win. He had tried to shut his
ears to it, but it would not be denied. He had told himself
that he was a fool ; that he had had a "feeling" about a horse
often enough before and had always been let down. Never-
theless, as the morning wore on he had kept hearing the little
voice, and now his feeling developed into a conviction. The
voice kept shouting "Water-Kelpie Back Water-Kelpie
1 1

Put every spare bob you've got on Water-Kelpie 1" For the
first time he realized how bitterly he had always resented

Dyer's treatment of him. He had been played with, made use

of, bought off with fivers and tenners Now that he came to
!

think of it, he had been right for weeks, though Dyer had
never let him back his fancy. Why, he might have made
thousands ! But this time he would show them. No paltry
bets of a pound each way for him. He had 600 on deposit
at the bank awaiting prudent investment. He would plunk
every penny of it on Water-Kelpie and do Dyer's commissions
for him as well. It would suit Dyer. It would make Water-
Kelpie's price shorter than ever, but he and Dyer would
average the price.
He continued his progress, making his bets as he went :

another hundred ; then fifty here, a pony there, sometimes in

cash, sometimes on the nod. The price dropped to 5 to 2.
That meant Water-Kelpie was favourite. Cinderella was
being shouted at $
to i. He went through the gate from the
enclosure into TattersalTs, betting with the smaller bookies
fivers and tenners now until has calculations showed him
that he had invested 1,800. That was Dyer's thousand and
eight hundred of his own. Two hundred more than he had
intended, but what did it matter ? Water-Kelpie was going to
win 1It was good enough. Water-Kelpie was now 2 to i f
while Cinderella stood at sixes. The S.P. would probably be
7 to i. Dyer would be satisfied.
He glanced at the clock above the stand. It was three
minutes to two. The horses were going down. There was
no need to see Dyer. Dyer would know that he had done
his bit. He felt tremendously excited. He was more excited
than ever in his life before. He decided to go over to the
start. That would give one something to do. There would
just be time.
The Reading Steeple Chase is two miles and fifty yards
 THE JONAH 343
and the starring post is close to the stand. Mr. Puddwater
reached it just in time to see Cinderella (No. 2) and Water-
Kelpie (No. 7) get nicely away in a field of nine. They took
the first fence together, well in hand. He watched them over
the water-jump and then bolted across the course to the Open
Ditch, knowing that if any trouble came to Cinderella it
would be there. But she sailed over, landed half a length in
front of Water-Kelpie and went pelting after The Ambassador,
who was leading the field.
Mr. Puddwater ran back with the crowd towards the last
jump, halting now and then to read the race hastily through his
glasses. At the last turn the field was strung out. He saw
Cinderella and Water-Kelpie going up until they passed the
leaders. He reached the last fence, breathless, heart pounding,

just as Cinderella rose to it, strongly and surely like a wave,

and now a clear length ahead of Water-Kelpie. As he watched
her, his lowered glasses clutched tight between both hands,
the hopes that had kindled in his breast suddenly went out
There was no doubt now. The race was Cinderella's. Once
safely over nothing could pass her on the run in. Dyer would
make his packet, after all.

Mr. Puddwater thought of his own 800 all gone, yet

that didn't matter so much, for Dyer would be generous, he
knew that. But a bitter feeling of utter disillusion moved
him more than he had ever been moved before. The voice
that had shouted Water-Kelpie's name had been bogus. His
belief in his impending good fortune had been as futile as
ever. His ill-luck seemed as inescapable as death. He was to
be a Jonah to the end of the chapter. He turned hot, then
cold. A shiver went over him. He clenched the rail in front
of him. Horses, turf, sky became a blur and to his shame and
consternation, he felt that he was going to be sick.
Then he heard a great oob of surprise go up from the crowd,
just as Water-Kelpie took the jump, going hard. The Ambas-
sador, a length behind. He looked at Cinderella. She had
faltered at the landing, but had not fallen. She was still
leading, but apparently distressed. Water-Kelpie's jockey
thrust his mount past her, trying to throw The Ambassador
off To his amazement Mr. Puddwater saw Prikett pull
Cinderella up. He waited to see no more, but dashed after
the two leaders. The Ambassador was challenging, fighting to
get on terms. The crowd was yelling now. Then a great
 344 OWEN RUTTER
shout went up and died away, showing that the race was
over,
From where he stood it had been impossible to be certain
of the winner. Some said one, some the other. Then a
number shot up on the board. He clapped his glasses to his

eyes. Number 7 Water-Kelpie had done

1 it For the first
!

time in his life Mr. Puddwater had backed a winner.

He encountered Dyer in the paddock.
"What happened to Cinderella ?" he asked. "It was
extraordinary."
"Lived up to her blinking name/' replied Dyer bitterly.
"Twisted one of her perishing plates at the last fence."
"And went lame as she landed ?"
"That's it. Well, the coups failed, but we've saved on
Water-Kelpie. You did your best."
"I did indeed," agreed Mr. Puddwater, his eyes still
large
with excitement. "Besides what I put on for you I backed
Water-Kelpie very heavily myself. Very heavily."
"Then you've won ?" gasped Dyer.
Mr. Puddwater nodded.
"Much ?"
"Averaging the price, something like two thousand."
"Well ... Pm ... jiggered," said Dyer. "So you've
done it at last." For a moment resentment struggled with
generosity. Then sporting instincts won. He grasped Mr.
Puddwater by the hand. "You deserve it," he said admiringly.
My God, what a risk to take."
"I knew my luck was bound to turn some day."
"Yeah. And it has. So our arrangement's off. You've
done us well in the past, Mr. Puddwater, but now you've won
the Lord only knows which way you'll jump. And I don't
suppose he'll split."

Ernest Puddwater's increased practice does not give him

much leisure these days, but on a Saturday afternoon you
may sometimes see him in the Members' Enclosure at Sandown,
Newbury, or Hurst Park. His interest in racing is now
purely
academic. He does not bet, not even on Dyer's selected, for
he has adopted the course that trainer had hoped to follow
tnd has nailed his winnings to the wall.
 H. F. ELLIS
Rphraim's Undoing

H, F. another of the band of typically English

Ellis is
humorous writerswhose work first gained recognition
in the pages of Punch^ to which he has contributed for
a number of years. The entertaining skit on the
agricultural school of novelists which is included here,
is an excellent example of his deft satire.
 EPHRAIM'S UNDOING
CHAPTER I

AT THE "BULL AND SCISSORS"

^HE little harnlet of Clodbury lay basking in the warm sun

light of a bright May morning. Butterflies flitted from
flower to flower in the colourful cottage-gardens, rooks cawed
in the distant elm-trees, and by the trim white-painted bridge a

gentle gurgling showed Ebenezer Truelove was taking

that
his midday beer. The
village street wore a deserted air and
the old man, seeing little chance of getting any more, drank
slowly as he listened with grave politeness to the girl who sat
beside him at the door of the "Bull and Scissors". A stranger
approaching more closely (for no one who knew Ebenezer
would do such a foolhardy thing) would have seen at a
glance that here, if anywhere, was the heroine of the kind of
story upon which we are now embarked. The roses in her
cheeks and also (I regret to say) in her hair, the freckles on her
nose, and the dimple at the side of her enormous mulberry-
coloured mouth all marked her out
as the best type of simple
English girlhood. Beneath her simple muslin frock but I
am forgetting this is not a war-book. Beneath her simple
;

muslin hat two eyes of cornflower-blue looked out with frank

directness, and in their limpid depths one might see reflected
not only Ebenezer's mug of beer but the purity and sweet
simplicity of her beautiful character. Wherever she went she
seemed to carry with her the scent of new-mown hay. A very
child of Nature, men called her though she was, as a matter
;

of fact, the daughter of Simon Earwhacker, one of the hardest-

bitten farmers in all the countryside and the kind of father
that only a girl like Prudence could possibly be saddled with.
She was speaking of him at this very moment to Ebenezer.
"Father is determined to engineer a matrimonial alliance
between myself and Ephraim Mathers, and threatens to
 348 H. F. ELLIS
excoriate my name from the Family Bible if I oppose his
wishes/' she said, speaking with the quaint adorable
accent
of the B.B.C
slubberdegullion !" said Ebenezer, who
"Owd had no
wireless-set. "And doan't 'ee loike Ephraim then, Miss
Prue ?"
"I detest him, the gurt great toad but father is such a
!

cruel hard man, and says he is the wealthiest farmer in the

whole and worth fifty Mr. Williamses, And, oh, Mr.
district

Truelove, I do love Mr. Williams so !"

"Be that the poet-chap from Lunnon town yew du mean ?"
asked Ebenezer, more for the convenience of the reader than
because he was in any real doubt about the matter. "Gentle-
man-born 'e be ah, an' wunnerful clever tu, so I've 'eerd
tell; though not so big and strong as Ephraim, no, not be a
hubbock* or more. But 'twill arl cum right i' the end, so
doan't 'ee fret theeself, lass/'
"It cannot, cannot 1" cried the unhappy girl, and great
it

tear-drops splashed on the gravel path as she told

of the
unfair test by which her father had decided to select her
mate.
"If yon numskull/' he had said, alluding to Aubrey
Williams in his rough unkindly way, "be a better man than
Ephraim here, an' kin beat him at ploughing an' milking ah,
an' win t' prize for t' best beetroot at t' Flower-Show into t'

bargain ye shall have him an' welcome." And then and

there he had drawn up the rules for the triple contest, which
was to begin without delay.
"But my Aubrey has never even seen a plough, Mr. True-
love, and cows offend his sense of artistic values, so whatever
shall I do ? It du seem as I mun wed Ephraim I mean, it

looks as if I shall have to marry Ephraim Mathers after all."

"It be main late for ploughin' sartinly." Ebenezer's
answer was a little vague. He was wondering whether an
ofler of a hundred to one against Williams for the triple event
would find any takers.
A few moments later he entered the tap-room to make
sure, and Prudence, gathering up her basket of eggs, and
tucking a cauliflower under her arm, strode sadly home to
lunch.

*A kind of three-handled trowel, now obsolete.

 EPHRAIM'S UNDOING 349

CHAPTER II

THE MILKING CONTEST

THE day of the opening contest dawned bright and clear,

with just enough wind to make conditions ideal, and a goodly
crowd assembled at Earwhacker Farm to see the sport. Con-
spicuous among them all was Simon Earwhacker himself as
he moved from place to place setting everything to rights,
now whispering to the judges, now ordering the lines of cows,
and ever and anon turning to glance with lowered brows at
the corner by the pig-sties where Prudence, her fair head close
to Aubrey's, read him hurried extracts from The Dairyman's
Guide. To tell the truth, Simon was uneasy.
Already his
gigantic watch pointed to minutes to the hour, and by the
six
rules of the competition either competitor failing to appear by
ten o'clock was automatically disqualified. Yet Ephraim
Mathers was nowhere to be seen. Minute by minute his agita-
tion grew, until at last a fast-driven gig was reported approach-
ing rapidly from Middle Hutchley. On the very stroke of ten
it drew
up with a clatter before the gate, and a foul green hat
came skimming over the heads of die people into the byre,
to be followed a moment later by Ephraim himself, looking fit
and well in purple corduroys.
"Ephraim Ephraim I" shouted the onlookers in a frenzy
I

of excitement, some of them even taking the straws out of

their mouths in their enthusiasm, for public sympathy was on
the side of the local champion. Outside the milking-shed the
rivals met, and a great silence fell upon all as Aubrey spun a

bright new
sixpence (borrowed from Prudence) high into the
air. It fell on
a pig, and a mighty roar greeted the announce-
ment that Ephraim had won the toss and would go in first.
Ephraim Mathers came of a long line of skilful milkers,
but on this occasion at least he surpassed them all. He was
brilliant. Experienced cowherds in the company said that
never had they seen a man milk as Ephraim Mathers milked
that day. A brindled shorthorn of proved capacity accom-
panied him to the stool, but in less than two minutes he was
calling for another cow. And so it went on, until at the end
of the allotted half-hour seventeen empties stood lowing in
the yard and as many brimming pails were ranged against the
350 H. F ELLIS
wall. "A phenomenal display/' as Prudence observed with
grudging admiration.
And now was Aubrey's turn. A man of extreme delicacy,
it

his whole being shrank from contact with an animal with four
stomachs ; but, reminding himself that it was for Miss Ear-
whacker's sake, he shook back his long dark curls and plunged
boldly into the shed.
Half an hour later, when the officials entered the building,
they found him sketching on the back of an old envelope.
"Where be t' milk ?" asked Simon roughly.
"What milk ?" said Aubrey.
"Why, t* milk as was to help thee win my darter's hand."
"Dear me I must have forgotten.
1 I have been doing a
little still-life work. But I will begin at once."
"
Tis too late, lad/' said Simon triumphantly ; and so
indeed it was. Already the judges had begun their announce-
ment : "We hereby proclaim Ephraim Mathers the winner
"
by seventeen clear
"Hold I" cried a voice in bell-like tones, and Prudence,
leaping upon a wheelbarrow, waved aloft the envelope which
she had snatched from Aubrey's unresisting hand. "By the
rules of the contest the winner was to be he who in the space
of thirty minutes drew the greater amount of milk. Ephraim
Mathers has drawn seventeen pails. Now let these be counted/'
and with a gesture of defiance she hurled the paper at the feet
of the judges.
Aubrey Williams had drawn twenty-three !

In an instant all was confusion. Men shouted, dogs

barked and horses swooned. Two Buff Orpingtons were so
affected that they never laid again ; and amid the tumult

Aubrey, with his head in the clouds and his feet in a bucket
of pig- wash, clasped the radiant Prudence to his breast.
"Prue I" he whispered.
"Aubrey 1" she murmured.
"Dang it 1" said Simon Earwhacker.

CHAPTER III

THE PLOUGHING-MATCH
THE milking contest had ended in an unexpected and glorious
victory, but the heart of Prudence Earwhacker grew heavy
 EPHRAIM'S UNDOING 551

within her as the date of the ploughing-match drew near.

Every evening she took Aubrey down to the Five-Acre to
practise, but, do what she would, she could not keep
him on
his course. Sometimes he would be straight for forty, fifty,
sixty yards, and then that old dreamy look would come back
and away he would go in great sweeping curves, carolling
blithely as he went.
"Itthe creative spirit/' he would say when she chided
is

him, and would point out to her the nobility and grace of
his twining furrows.
Once, when his whirling share had marked out a pattern
of almost unearthly beauty a thing of curves and loops and
complex involutions, he turned to her and, falling on his
knees before her in an ecstasy of love, cried, "It is yours,
Prue all yours I dedicate this work to you 1"
! And she,
poor though her heart was breaking, only reproved him
girl,
gently, saying, "Oh, Aubrey, you have made the horses giddy I"
and then, turning away to hide her heaving cheeks, went
lumbering home to supper.
She was a difficult girl at times, thought Aubrey sadly.

The tale ot the match itself a single-furrow affair over

Simon's Ten-acre issoon told. Ephraim, ploughing with
less than his usual care, developed a nasty kink two furlongs
from home which marred an otherwise tidy furrow ; but
even so no one, not even loyal little Prudence, could doubt
that the effort was good enough to beat so unworldly a plough-
man as Aubrey. Indeed, for all her courage the girPs hopes
had sunk to zero, and as she knelt to tie the string below her
sweetheart's knees unbidden tears fell thick and fast upon the
big boots he had borrowed from Ebenezer.
"Remember what it says in How to Plough^ beloved," she
faltered as she rose and for answer he pressed into her hand
;

some verses on the Infinite, then, without word or glance,

sprang lightly to the plough-handles. Next instant he had
burst into song.
Old men in Clodbury still speak with reverence of the
sight they saw that day. Forward at a tremendous pace
dashed the two great horses, spurred by the sweet sad music,
and behind them, running easily over the clods, went Aubrey
Williams, the light of genius in his eyes. And when it was
 JJ2 H. F. ELLIS
all over and the three of them stood sweating at the farther
end, a great shout of wonder arose from the spectators. It
was the straightest furrow ever seen in Clodbury 1

"Good lad I
good lad I" said Squire Aitchbone heartily,
wringing our hero's hand.
Simon and Ephraim were biting their nails.
"What about they boots ?" said Ebenezer.
Prudence had fainted with joy.
But Aubrey, who had read Sneebohl on The Beauty of the
Straight Line the night before, cared for none of these things.
He was seeking a rhyme for "tilth".

CHAPTER IV
A HOPELESS DAWN

MAY passed into June and June into July the corn ripened>
;

hollyhocks burst into bloom, and Ephraim Mathers grew

steadily hotter and hotter under his ill-fitting'collar. Twice he
had been baulked of victory, and now, on the eve of the
Flower-Show, he brooded darkly on the fateful issues of the
morrow. Prudence was his; he loved her madly, fiercely.
The very thought of her in another's keeping set his teeth on
edge and sent the dark blood surging into his ears. At all
costs Aubrey Williams must not win the Beetroot Cup, and
he, Ephraim, could alone prevent it Not a man save himself
1

was willing to oppose him, so completely had the debonair

young poet, dang him won all hearts by his gallant bearing
1

at the ploughing-match. Once more it was a straight fight

between them, but this time, by gubber the result should be
!

different. With the fearful oath on his lips Ephraim went out
to look at his beet.
Night found him standing among the roots, turning
still

over in his mind the details of a monstrous plan. He had

some lovely beet, but what if Aubrey had some lovelier ?
He must take no risks must make sure in time. . . .

Half an hour later he was on his way to Aubrey's garden,

a tape-measure clasped firmly in his huge right hand. To
such lengths will the evil passion of jealousy drive its frenzied
victims.
 EPHRAIM'S UNDOING ? 5 3

9
Aubrey said in
"I give you day, Miss Prudence/
good
his courtly way at five o'clock the following morning. The
back from somewhere or other, and he
girl was on her way
hailed her as she passed his gate.
"Good morning, Aubrey/' she flashed back at him, her
face shining from the effects of too much soap and water.
"May I come in ?"
the kitchen-
Together they walked in silence through
for about the fifth
garden, and Prue's heart sank within her
time since the beginning of May as she surveyed die
bedraggled beetroot. She could not conceal
from herself the
fact that it was wretched stuff, unfit even for the basest cow ;
but her lover was smiling happily and she said no word.
Outside the tool-shed he took her in his arms. "Prudence/*
he said, "I have been keeping something from you all these
months. Inside this shed lies the Queen of the West, thirty-
"
three inches round the waist, and the finest, handsomest
"Beast Rou
! Deceiver I" she cried, the tears starting
!

to her eyes as she flung herself in a frenzy of despair on to

an onion-bed. "That you of all men should treat me so 1"
Aubrey was puzzled. He had meant to surprise her, but
not to this extent. "Come, come/' he said sternly "the shock
has been too much for you. I should have broken it more
gently. But what, after all, is a beetroot? In the great
"
harmony of the universe
"A beetroot ?" she gasped, looking positively hideous in
her relief.

"Certainly a champion beetroot."

"Oh, Aubrey and I doubted you Forgive me." 1

"With all my heart."

"Will you show it to me, dearest ?" She was all leaf-
mould and contrition.
Proudly he threw open the door of the tool-shed Look 1"
he cried and gave a shuddering gasp of dismay*
The Queen of the West had gone 1

CHAPTER V
THE FLOWER-SHOW

THE grounds of Biggeley Manor, the old-world residence of

Colonel Harry ("Squire") Aitchbone, were ablaze with life
 }54 H. F. ELLIS
and colour. Onthe spacious lawns some of the best people
in the neighbourhood strolled to and fro, halting now and
again to exchange a greeting or to watch the finish of the
Mothers' Sack-race. Admiral Fluke was there in full-dress
uniform ; Lord Isinglass had brought his stupid daughters ;
in the refreshment tent Lady Ipswich was cracking jokes with
the Duchess of Havant and Hook. From the distance came the
haunting strains of a roundabout. Clodbury's Annual Fete
and Flower-Show was at its height.
There were many lovely faces and expensive frocks to be
seen that afternoon, but none looked sweeter than Prudence
in her simple white organdie with the crimson sash, and more
than one baronet turned to glance at her as she made her way
towards the vegetable tent on Aubrey's arm.
"Dashed pretty girl, that what ?" said Sir Archibald
Crawshay, M.F.H., cracking his whip to emphasize the words.
"You're right, by gad 1" It was the Vicar of Minchin-
under-Tapley who so readily expressed his agreement with
his companion's views.
Meanwhile, Prudence, unconscious of the interest she was
exciting, had passed with her escort beneath the flap of the
giant marquee, and now stood gazing with lack-lustre eyes at
a highly-commended carrot. The judging was over, but the

disappointed lovers had little or no interest in the results.

The mysterious disappearance of the Queen of the West had
been a crushing blow, and, though Aubrey had sent in the
best beetroot left in the garden, it was without hope that he
did so. Probably it would not even be commended.
A surprise awaited them when they came at last, via the
cauliflowers and sea-kale, to the beetroot stall. There were
only two, and the second prize, in the absence of any other
entries, had gone to Aubrey Upon the winning exhibit, a
I

veritable monster, were pinned two cards a red one which

said:
FIRST PRIZE
and a white one on which was written :

SPECIAL PRIZE
For the Best Vegetable in the Show.

Prudence regarded its great empurpled sides with awe.

 EPHRAIM'S UNDOING 355

"Oh, Aubrey," she asked wistfully, "was the Queen of the

West as big as that ?"
"That is the Queen of the West/' he said fairly quietly.
"There has been dirty work/'
"But who ?"
Their eyes met.
"You must denounce him, Aubrey. You must you shall!"
"Leave this to me/' he said with a compelling gesture that

brought half-a-hund red weight of potatoes about their ears.

"I go to find a hammer."

We will not attempt to describe in any detail the emotions

that racked poor Prudence's bosom as she sat beside her father
at the prize-giving some two hours later. The situation seemed
indeed a desperate one. What could Aubrey do, even if he
found a hammer, to prove the guilt of Ephraim Mathers ?
Mere violence would not suffice. To add to her misery Ephraim
was trying to hold her hand. Would Aubrey never
come ?
Ephraim himself was at the top of his form. He had
certainly stolen the beetroot which now reposed in a place of
honour on the judges' table, but who would believe the charge
if it were made ? Nary a one. It was his hour of triumph,
"We come now," Squire Aitchbone was saying, "to the
award of the Beetroot Cup, which goes this year, very
deservedly in my opinion, to Well, well, my boy, what
is it ?"
^

A slim figure had pushed its way through the throng

and now stood in a graceful attitude before him.
"I wish to show you something," said Aubrey, and, taking
a hammer from his pocket caught the Queen of the West a
savage wallop in the middle.
She burst into a thousand fragments.
"What is the meaning of this ?" roared the Squire.
"Plaster-of-Paris, I fancy," said Aubrey, and there were
tears in his eyes as he spoke. After all, she had been one of
his noblest creations.
In the silence that followed all eyes were turned upon
Ephraim, who sat as though thunderstruck in his seat. How
could he reveal the real author of this false fruit without
356 H. F. ELLIS
admitting his own guilty deed ? Twice he rose to speak and
twice thought better of it. And then :

"I claim the Beetroot Cup/' said Aubrey Williams.

The honeymoon will be spent at Uggely Parva.

 PETER FLEMING
The Treasure Hunt

Peter Fleming is one of the most brilliant of the

younger generation of writers. He made an immediate
success with his first book Brazilian Adventure, des-
cribing his experience with an expedition despatched
in search of Colonel Fawcett, the explorer who
vanished in the jungles of South America some years
ago.
 THE TREASURE HUNT

morning, everybody!" cried Lady Leather head,

shutting the door with that arch benignity which char-
acterized most of her actions. "I'm afraid I was wrong
about the weather/'
"As usual/' said her son, loudly, emphatically, and truth-
fully. Harold was too supercilious to be amusingly rude.
The guests made
perfunctory, deprecating noises through
their kedgeree. You
gathered that, although Lady Leather-
head had actually been wrong, she had come within an ace
of being right and that anyhow such phenomenal mis-
;

behaviour on the part of the climate should really be left

out of account as something altogether beyond the bounds
of either prophecy or good taste.
Rain lashed the windows. The tall but sturdy yew hedge
at the bottom of the garden quivered with an irritation which
had its roots in alarm. On the hill opposite the house a
fieldof standing corn stood no longer, but lay in damp,
untidy swathes. The potting-shed had lost its chimney. It
was the last week in July.
"Will you put it off?" asked Major Tiler, greatly daring.
He was an old friend of the family.
"Put it off?" repeated Lady Leatherhead incredulously,
ringing for more hot milk, "But this is just the weather for
a Treasure Hunt 1" Her voice had that formidable cooing
note so dreaded by friend and enemy alike.
"Ratber /" cried Miss Buxter. She had always been known
for a jolly girl, and though her girlhood was on the wane,
she was as full of fun as ever ; rather fuller, if anything.
"I should just say it was 1" agreed Mr. Rusk, in the kind
of modulated shout in which all his enthusiasms were
expressed. He beamed gaily at the streaming window panes.
It was the first time he had been asked to the house, and it
359
 560 PETER FLEMING
was the opinion of his fellow-guests that he would be lucky
if he was asked again ; he tried too hard.

Lady Leatherhead sat down at the head of the table and

began to spread gooseberry jam on one of those pock-
marked wafers known as Swedish Bread, which combine
with the plays of Ibsen to produce in the mind of the
average Englishman so cheerless an impression of Scandinavian
home-life.
"We start eleven," she announced, sweeping the
at
well-
assembly with a glance reminiscent of a temporarily
disposed basilisk.

Eleven o'clock found the house-party rallied in the hall

Their mackintoshes rustled nervously. They grumbled to
each other in whispers. Even the hardiest were wishing they
had brought thicker shoes ;
the less resolute weighed the
respective advantages of a head, which might be alleged
to
ache then and there, and an ankle, which might be supposedly
twisted as soon as the hunt began. One and all felt intoler-
ably put upon, and looked extremely unhappy.
com-
Lady Leatherhead appeared on the staircase, a
there was one. She came to them
manding figure if ever
fresh and fiery from an argument with Harold. Harold was
as he knew very
writing a novel about middle-class life;
Little about life, and nothing at all about the middle classes,
it did not look like being an outstandingly good novel.
But
experience had taught him that the Muse makes an admirable
guardian angel and entitles you to use the word "fritter"
when speaking of organized amusements in which you have
no wish to take part.
*
"Where do you suppose Chaucer would have been/ he
asked his mother, "if he'd spent half his time Treasure-
hunting ?"
blame her ?) could find
Lady Leatherhead (and who shall
no answer to this difficult but interesting question. She
contented herself with pointing out to her son that he
was
not Chaucer. Harold looked hurt by this remark (of whose
truth, however, he must have long
been aware) and his
mother left the room with a slight advantage.
She now confronted her guests with an assurance rather
more like a lion-tamer who enters the
aggressive than usual,
over the cat.
cage immediately after tripping
 THE TREASURE HUNT 361

"Just a minute," she said, in that deceptively fluted voice,

"while I explain the rules/'
Whether their owners wished it or not, the faces in the
hall automatically assumed an air of eager but intelligent

expectation, such as is worn by schoolboys,

before the lights
go out, at a lantern lecture.
"First of all/' announced Lady Leatherhead, "the clues
are all written on cards like this." (She held one up.) "Now
these cards are numbered" she went on, somehow managing
to suggest that this made them immensely valuable, "and the
clues are arranged in sequence first No. i, then No. 2, then

3, 4, 6, 7, and so on.
5, Do you all understand that ?" she
asked doubtfully, as if it was practically impossible to
understand.
"Yes, Lady Leatherhead," they cried.
"There are twelve clues in all/' she continued, "and the
twelfth directs you to the treasure. Now no one must on
any account take a short cut. If you find a clue bearing a
number which isn't the number directly following the number
of the clue you found last you must just put it back where
you found it and go on looking for the clue you were looking
for before!" Lady Leatherhead paused dramatically, as if
she had suggested the most fantastic and unheard-of expedient.
"Now you will do that, won't you ?" she begged, in her most
suavely menacing voice.
"Of course, Lady Leatherhead/' they cried.
"Very well, then/' she said, "here is the first clue." She
cleared her throat, and the mackintoshes rustled uneasily.
Zero hour was on them.
"Clocks tell the time (chanted their hotess)
In rain or shine :
But I am done
If there's no sun."
What Milton has described as "a dismal universal hiss"
made heard in the hall ; everyone was whispering to
itself
his neighbour "the sun-dial". It was an awkward moment.
Their blood was not yet up ; whatever zest they might hope
to acquire for this compulsory chase had so far had no chance
of infecting them. Where all should have sprung forward,
nobody moved. They felt a keen reluctance, now that the
crucial moment had come, to behave like children. The
spirit of competition was strangled at birth.
361 PETfiR FLEMING
Lady Leatherhead saw how it was with them. "Off you
go I" she trumpeted. "It's in the garden, I warn you. Off
you go !"
And off Miss Buxter went, with a laugh of ineffable jollity
and a cry (for which none of those present forgave her) of
"Come on, chaps I" They followed her, buttoning their
collars about their chins, out of the front door and across
the lawn, where the wind beat them about and blew Mr.
Rusk's hat into a bird-bath.
"Oh, Hell !" groaned Virginia Gollstone, who, as a gently
nurtured and socially successful debutante might fairly be
said (as far as country life was concerned) to be done if there
was no sun "this is ghastly/'
;

It was, rather. To Harold, who observed them from his

window, the scene as they stood round the sun-dial was
irresistibly suggestive of a burial at sea, though he had never
actually witnessed one of those melancholy ceremonies. The
strenuously crackling mackintoshes, the heads bowed (though
not so much in reverence as in a desire to keep the rain off
their faces), a general air of griefs unvoiced and murmured

prayers, of helplessness in the face of the elements all these

things struck Harold as so vividly analogous that he made a

note of the conceit, hoping to work it in somewhere in his
portrayal of middle-class life.
Miss Buxter was reading out the second clue from the
steps of the sun -dial. A large hank of clay -coloured hair,
escaping from the confines of a hat which can most charitably
be described as "sensible", was flattened across her broad
face by the wind and got in her mouth a good deal, interfering
with her vowel-sounds. Luckily it was a very short clue ;

"Bird thou never wert ."

. .

9
"I love Swinburne, don't you V shrieked Virginia Goll-
stone to Henry Taint above the raging of the storm. Henry
Taint was a young M.P. for ten years people had kept on
;

saying he was promising, but he had yet to perform. Virginia

wanted it clearly understood that this out-of-door stuff was
not her line at all. "Don't you love Swinburne ?" she
repeated, seeing that he had not heard.
"Not in this weather 1" he shouted ;
he had understood
"swimming" and was surprised when she laughed
her to say
as atsome witty retort. "Silly girl !" he decided "giggles :

when you answer a question sensibly."

 THE TREASURE HUNT 363
Meanwhile an of painful indecision hung over the
air
treasure-seekers. "Bird thou never wert ." ? There
. .

were so many things of which that could be said. Somebody

suggested Lady Leatherhead's parrot a loathsome bird, and
a martyr to ringworm; it was a promising solution, but
finally rejected, because, however you chose to define the
walk of life to which God had now called the creature there
was little or no doubt that it had once been a bird. far A
more acceptable interpretation was "The Swan" an inn not
far from the drive gates and thither the company moved off,
in a straggling procession noticeably headed by the men.

Hugo Rolluck, a cricket Blue and a man with very strong

views on how the second half of every morning should be
spent, reached the inn first. The clue was pinned to the door
of the public bar ; but the door of the public bar was locked.
There was half an hour to go before they opened. Rolluck,
a quick thinker and a gentleman, tore down the card, climbed
on to and dropped the too accessible paste-board
a bench,
through the exiguous crack of open window which was
considered sufficient to ventilate the public bar during the
summer months. The vanguard of the hunt swung round
the corner as he stepped down, dusting his enormous hands
on his enormous trousers.
"Is it there ?" cried some. But more cried : "Are they
open ?
Theclue, explained this admirable youth, in whom
athletic

prowess was so happily united to a keen practical intelligence,

was not actually visible from the outside of the inn, but he
had very little doubt that it would be found inside. They
had but to wait till the landlord threw open his hospitable
doors, and it would then be no difficult matter to search the
more commonly frequented premises of the building, in some
conspicuous part of which their considerate hostess had, he
was prepared to wager, deposited the clue.
The men looked avidly at their watches, the women
curiously at Rolluck, whose
histrionic powers, to tell the
truth,were scarcely adequate to the role he had so nobly
assumed It would, have been hard to imagine a
in fact,
more thoughtfully executed portrayal of a guilty man if the ;

unfortunate Rolluck had committed the foulest of murders

by the clumsiest of methods a second or two before their
arrival he could hardly have shifted more frequently from one
 64 PETER FLEMING
leg to the other, or more appealingly eyed those of the patty
whom he accounted his friends, or more convulsively and
unconvincingly burst out with snatches of irrelevant con-
versation. Guilt was writ large on his well-developed
features; perspiration bedewed them. The women smelt
a rat.
It was Miss Buxter who
disinterred it. Peering through
the window of the
bar she descried the object of their search
lying, as iH-luck would have it, face upwards and the right
way round on the broad sill inside, plain to be read by all.
She gave an exultant yelp.
"Here it is," she cried ; "you can see it from here !"
At that moment there was not a man present who would
not, cheerfully and without compunction, have shot Miss
Buxter, or killed her with some blunt instrument, or pushed
her over Niagara Falls. But no opportunity for doing any
of these things presented itself; Miss Buxter continued to
live, and breathe, and have her insufferable being. The
treasure-seekers surged round the window in a
damp press.
Major Tiler read out the clue.
"Oh
for the wings of a dove 1" he announced ; and you
could see that he meant it.
^'Another of these quotations/' said Hugo Rolluck, in the
voice of a man speaking intelligently ; he was not yet
quite
sure how he stood with public
opinion.
The clue could hardly be called a baffling one. It referred,
obviously, to the old dove-cote under the eaves of the stables.
They trooped off, with all the alacrity of prisoners detailed for
Siberia in a Russian film. Major Tiler stayed behind in the
porch; apparently he was trying to light his pipe.
Aquarter of an hour later the bedraggled posse stood in
a long, low loft at the farther end of which
pigeon-holes
punctured the obscurity in a little pyramid. There was a
strong, almost an overwhelming smell of horses, decom-
position, and old mice. It was, to all intents and purposes,
pitch dark.
With a cheerful click Mr. Rusk lit his gold cigarette-
lighter. showed
It them little beyond their own shiny and
disgruntled faces and a number of horribly indefinable shapes
which might have been anything from ectoplasm to bales of
jute. With an eerie cry Miss Gollstone announced that a rat
had passed over her foot.
 THE TREASURE HUNT 365

"Poor thing/' said Miss Baxter ambiguously* "I'm

going ahead."
She went ahead, and the hue and cry followed her, shuffling
along in a gingerly way, like young men dancing with their
aunts. Their feet ploughed through a layer of nameless
debris ; they cursed Lady Leatherhead in their hearts.
Suddenly there was a rending crash and, from somewhere
below them, a sound which had more in it of the wallop than
the thud. The party stood rooted to the spot. A
large,
ragged hole gaped in the worm-eaten boards before them,
and through it filtered up the voice of Miss Baxter, swearing
like a debutante.
"Are you all right ?" they called down to her. You
could not, from the way they asked the question, have deduced
whether they expected the answer "Yes" or "No" ; but it
was gather which would have pleased them best.
less difficult to
It appeared, however, that she was all right, comparatively

speaking. She had landed on a pile of hay in a loose-box,

and was suffering from nothing more than slight nervous
shock. They, who were suffering from as much themselves,
made haste to descend. They found Miss Baxter in her
loose-box, but the reunion was not, from her point of view,
a wholly satisfactory one, since the door was locked and it
was quite impossible to climb out. As they moved off in
search of help one and all were surprised to find how apt,
how vivid, was the analogy which each had unconsciously
half-formulated between Miss Buxter and a horse. To see
her now you would have thought that she had lived all her
life in a loose-box. It seemed really almost a pity to detach
her from so perfect a setting. . . *

Shortly before all this happened Harold laid down his

fountain pen. His novel of middle-class life was the bigger,
if not the better, by some seventy words.
They described
the heroine's anguish of mind as she prepared a high tea for
her drunken father and his friends. Her father had begun
the book as an upholsterer, but someone had told Harold
that the members of this profession were recraited largely
from the lower, not the middle, classes ; so the heroine's
father was promoted, with the minimum of erasion, to
"master-upholsterer", which sounded at once more dignified
and more brutal.
 j66 PETER FLEMING
At the moment Harold was having difficulty with the
Licensing Laws. you had your high tea at six, did that
If

give the master-upholsterer and his cronies a fair chance of

getting partially intoxicated on the way home ? He made a
note "Ask Major Tiler about pubs/'
: It paid to be thorough,
even in 1/terature.
He re-read his morning's work ; substituted "anti-
macassar" for "aspidistra" in one of the local colour bits ;
yawned and wandered downstairs. His mother found him,
;

as ill-luck would have it, reading The Tatler in the drawing-

room. Lady Leatherhead was in a very domineering mood.
Unable, in the circumstances, even to pretend that he was
looking for "copy", Harold was driven out to join and super-
intend the treasure-hunters. Most bitter blow of all, he had
his own gambit played on him with conspicuous success.
"Do you suppose," bayed his mother, "that Tolstoi sat about
reading The Tatler all day ?"
Harold stumbled blindly away In search of his Aqua-
scutum, to all intents and purposes a broken man. But even
as he twitched it irritably from its peg inspiration came to
him. He remembered that he knew where the treasure was
hidden. The sweets of revenge were as good* as his. . . .

The next ten minutes he spent at a writing-table. Then

he went out to face the elements and his mother's guests,
blithely, with head erect
The pack, when he came up with it, could hardly be
described as in full cry, though Virginia Gollstone was not
far from tears, having sustained contusions from a bradawl
in the potting-shed. Major Tiler, reappearing from the
direction of "The Swan", alone seemed cheerful, and insisted
on singing the Marseillaise. Henry Taint took Harold aside.
"Look here," he said, in a voice which strong rncn use
when asking their best friend to save a bullet for the woman,
"can't you get this over a bit quicker ? We're only at the
seventh clue,"
"Leave it to me," said Harold, an elfin gleam flickering
in his salient eyeballs.

"
'Mark over's* the cry
And August's the season.
If you want to know why,
Ask sportsmen the reason/'
 THE TREASURE HUNT 367
It was Clue No. 12 Lady Leather-head's swan-song as a
poetess.
"I know I" cried Miss Baxter. "The stuffed grouse in
the billiards-room !"
Their goal in sight, her fellow-seekers felt the spirit of
competition stir within them for the first time. They began
to shamble off with a kind of furtive alacrity.
But "Hey 1" roared a voice, and they stopped. It was
Rolluck, lodging a sportsman's protest. "I say" (he said),
"look here ; I mean, they aren't grouse, you know. They're
ptarmigan/' But no one else was in a mood to split ornitho-
logical straws. In this crisis one lagppus was as good as
another. They resumed their surge towards the billiards-
room.
Harold saw to it that he was there first. The two stuffed
ptarmigan watched each other intently, like duellists, over a
tuft of blasted heather. Moths had long since eaten the
better part of their plumage, but by one of those accidents
so common in old-fashioned taxidermy the one looked
immutably quizzical, the other perpetually indignant. There
was drama in their eternal vigil.
The treasure a large parcel containing Kinglake's History
of the CrimeanWar and two pots of home-made jam Harold
had already removed and hidden. The hunt arrived panting,
to find him with nothing but an envelope in his hands.
"Money," thought most, and were conscious of a renewed
interest.
"Tickets for a charity ball,** thought Hugo Rolluck, who
had been stung that way before.
"More ruddy verse," prophesied Major Tiler, not quite
under his very noticeable breath.
Gravely and in silence Harold opened the envelope;
gravely and in silence read the single sheet of notepaper it
contained. Then he looked up and passed his hand across
his brow in a dazed way.
"This is a very strange thing," he said in a hollow voice,
"but I am compelled to read it out, for die treasure is to be
shared by all who sought it."
He "Oh, do go on," urged someone.
cleared his throat.
"The treasure" (Harold's voice was a little shaky to begin
with) "is Self-Knowledge." Here he broke off and looked
round him in a sorrowful, deprecating way. "I ought to,
$68 FETER FLEMING
to have
explain/' he went on, "that the whole thing appears
been written under the stress of some violent emotion, and
is in parts legible only with difficulty. But I must admit
that the first word, which is followed by three unmistakable
exclamation marks, looks to me very much like 'Parasites'.
The second is certainly 'Numskulls' ; and (here he looked
full at his audience) the third is Tests', It goes on : 'Be
off with you, scum I Why do you come clambering over
each other after my food, cluttering my house with your
over-dressed little bodies, drooling out your insufferable small-
talk at my table ? Why do you submit to the infantile and
degrading pastimes which I devise for you ? You are
like
so many performing fleas, only far less sagacious ; I only
wish you were the same size as they are, so that I could crush
you all with a sharp downward blow of my hand. Run
away, horrible little things Know yourselves for what you
1

"
are, and run away while you can.'
Harold paused. "There is a good deal more/' he said,
"but I would rather not read it, if you don't mind. My
mother has these moods. . . ."
An awful silence hung over the billiard-room. The very
hackles on the bearskin rug seemed to rise in horror. On
the wall Landseer's creations, down to the humblest fawn,
grew liquid-eyed with panic. A pair of boar's tusks made as
if to chatter in alarm. The clock, egg-bound these twenty-
seven years, began to tick nervously.
"Shall I order the cars ?" asked Harold in a low voice.
"Your luggage can be sent on."
They nodded in silence and in silence left the room.
;

"Heigh ho!" sighed Miss Buxter, bloody but unbowed;

"better luck next time." She was that sort of woman.
 LOUIS GOLDING
Wimports Woe

Louis Golding, novelist, essayist and lecturer, spends

the greater part of his time in tramping along the remoter
shores of the Mediterranean, and seems able to write
brilliantly under conditions of discomfort that few
authors would endure. Of his many novels Magnolia
Street, a powerful study of Jewish life, is the most
remarkable.
 WIMPOLE'S WOE

A T.BERT
cerning
WTMPOLE was the sort of little man con-
whom women nudge each other in omnibuses
and say, "What a nice kind face he's got I" He was too kind
to be a success as a business man, too industrious to be a
success as a bricklayer, too tiny to make a good thing out
of odd jobs in Co vent Garden. So he became, because
even editors could not resist his nice kind face, a literary
critic.
He became the nicest and kindest literary critic in London.
He found something of novelty in the most laboriously
stereotyped novel, a certain lightness of touch in the most
thunderous of sermons. Even about minor poetry he could
not bring himself to be unkind. As he wrote his criticism
he had a feeling that the author he was treating stood by his
elbow with clasped hands and beseeching eyes. He could
no more bring himself to say an unkind word about the
book before him than he could have pushed its author into
a vat of hot oil.
So he went on from season to season, finding somehow,
somewhere, a little extenuation for the jejune, the lewd, the
preposterous. A split infinitive might perhaps earn a gentle
rebuke, but he would promptly apologize for his temerity by
drawing attention to the author's delicacy or profundity. A
nice kind critic.
And then one morning a volume appeared on Wimpole's
table entitled Gangrene and Lilies the author being Mr. Eustace
^

Chasuble. I want to insist on this Wimpole had not, as the

saying is, got out of bed the wrong side that morning. His
landlady had not scorched the bacon. He suffered occasion-
ally from gumboils, but he was free at that time from that
minor but unpleasing affliction. Yet the fact remains that
even as he unwrapped the book from the parcel, he felt that
Gangrent and Lilies gave off an offensive odour. It stank.
371 LOUIS GOLD1NO
t

It was a volume of an astonishing amalgam of the

verses,
jejune, the lewd, the preposterous. No book had ever
affected Wimpole in this desperate fashion before. It made
him blink, his ears burned with shame, his gorge rose. And
he sat down and wrote about it All the ferocity he had
suppressed for years blazed into one tempest of denunciation.
(Is not the nicest and kindest little man in the world funda-
mentally a shrieking ape from the primordial jungles ?)
Whatever in the past he might have said about all the authors
he had been nice and kind to, he now heaped upon Eustace
Chasuble. And lots more. The sheets of paper flew from
his pen like sparks from a knife-grinder's wheel. Wimpole
grunted. Wimpole sweated. Then he sent his landlady's
small daughter to the post with the completed jeremiad, and
ky back on and wept.
his chair
I assure you it was not the last time that Eustace Chasuble
dissolved little Wimpole into a pool of tears. It was not
the last time that Chasuble's large-eyed phantom came
reproachfully into the room and stood beside Wimpole and
wrung its hands and moaned. Poor little Wimpole He !

could not have felt a more consummate blackguard if he had

murdered his grandmother. Waves of repentance surged
over him and drowned him. Not a single word he had
ever written could have so much as troubled a fly's wing.
And now . . And now
. He beat his bosom.
. . .

He sometimes wondered whether his review had caused

Eustace Chasuble to commit suicide. He paraded various
methods of suicide in grisly pageantry before him. Chasuble
hanging from a beam, his lips and tongue purple . . Chasuble .

contorted in the unspeakable anguish of strychnine . . . Cha-

suble a dismembered corpse in the wake of the great North
express. But always the original picture asserted itself in
the end, the large-eyed phantom that came reproachfully
into the room and stood beside him and wrung its hands
and moaned.
He
developed in his mind an extraordinary precise picture
of Eustace Chasuble, He was about five feet four inches in
height, his head was pear-shaped and rather too big for his
body. The hair was long and jet black, the lips a vivid
scarlet a sallow face. The finger-nails were long and
upon
(if the truth were told) a little dirty. He was knock-kneed.
He had a fluting, high pitched voice. But his eyes, his
 WIMPOLE'S WOB 573
reproachful, melancholy eyes . . .
Wimpole lay back in his
chair aad sobbed.

Many years passed. Never again did Wimpole utter a

word of criticism which was not in the last degree nice and
kind. But he could not ever exorcise the phantom of Eustace
Chasuble the knock-kneed, long-haired, sad-eyed
phantom
of little Eustace Chasuble.
Behold him at this moment in the tiny market town of
Bugmarsh, where he has a couple of hours to idle away before
catching his connection for Town. He has been spending his
annual fortnight's holiday in the heart of the But
country.
now the call of duty has gone forth and he must return to
his labours. It is dusk. He is rather short-sighted. He is

peering at the posters pasted up outside the parish hall of

Bugmarsh. He learns that there is to be an auction sale of
farm implements and effects next Tuesday, that to-morrow
night an illustrious pianist from the Metropolis is actually
going to honour Bugmarsh with his presence, that to-night
that to-night O Heavens No ! !

Wimpole's scalp froze. His hairs stood on end. As if

to make it quite, quite certain that there could not be two
Eustace Chasubles in the world, you were informed in chaste
lettering under his name that he was the "author of Gangrene
and LJ/ies". Mr. Eustace Chasuble was to lecture that night,
that very night, in the His theme
parish hall of Bugmarsh.
was to be how blunt, how direct it was "Pigs". No
more than that "Pigs". The lecture had started at seven
o'clock. It was now Even if Eustace
half-past seven.
Chasuble continued for another hour there would be ample
time to catch his train. Could he repudiate this opportunity,
after so many years, to make amends ? His heart filled with
pity. Once
^
more the phantom of little Chasuble stretched
out its hands, stared mournfully and
reproachfully upon
him. Perhaps it was his own vitriolic review that had driven
little Chasuble from the rivers of
poetry (even though he had
made them smell like sewers) and caused him to abandon
liliesfor mangel-wurzels, gazelles for
pigs.
No, he must express his regrets for his intolerable unkind-
ness. At last, at last, the chance he had not dared to hope
for had been granted him. True that Chasuble had not
thrown himself before a train or tossed off a flask of strych-
$74 LOUIS GOLDINO
nine. But what if he bore with him to the grave a crushed,
a broken heart ?

"Pigs" ... a curious theme. . . .

Wimpole pushed way through the door and across a

his
vestibule. He heard a voice, assured and resonant. The
chairman had obviously not finished his introductory remarks.
Wimpole pushed open another door. It squeaked frightfully.
A hundred large faces turned towards him, large as a harvest
moon and red as an apple ninety-eight in the hall, two
upon the platform. A hundred pairs of eyes concentrated
upon Wimpole. A
wild instinct of flight seized him. All
these healthy faces, these breeches and gaiters and leggings
and side-whiskers . . . There was one empty chair in
the middle of the room. The chairman pointed at it with a
peremptory gesture. It must have been the lecturer he had
interrupted, not the chairman. The chairman sat in the centre
of the table before a bell and a flask. The lecturer held a
bundle of notes in his hands and resumed his interrupted
flow.
He roared, he bellowed, like the bull of Bashan. Not
because he was angry with anything or anybody, but because
that was his natural mode of utterance. He was a genial
gentleman and hearty. He must have stood six foot and one
or two inches in his stockinged feet. But he looked smaller
because of the enormous bulk of his shoulders. He had
huge red hands. His knees were like the nobbly ends of
lopped branches on the trunk of an oak.
There was an especial species of pig, one gathered, that
had won Mr. Eustace Chasuble's affections. It was entitled
the "Large Black
Pig".
He recommended its virtues to his audience. His audience
shook their heads in slow and weighty approbation, and
tapped with their gnarled sticks on the ground. "No breed/'
proclaimed Mr. Chasuble, "could achieve such popularity
without genuine merit, in the production both of pork and
bacon : in the production of those cuts known as Medium',
Tat', or 'Lean Sizeable' . . ."
Slowly a sweat of terror gathered upon Wimpole's brow.
He tried to rise from his chair. The chair grated on the
floor. He stumbled over somebody's stick. A hundred
pairs of eyes concentrated upon him once more. The chair-
man touched the bell. Wimpole relapsed upon his chair.
 WIMPOLE'S WOB 375
T T i<5
Yieart tolled a muffled dirge within him. Mr. Chasuble
returned to the Large Black Pig.
"The great weight to which the Large Black Pi^ was bred
formerly has now given way to greater quality, and at an
early age it yields a long, deep-sided carcass of 160 Ib. to
190 Ib.dead weight, light in the shoulder, jowl, and offal . .** .

''They can't stop me," thought Wimpole, "slinking away

when it's all over. God help me !"
But the lecture drew to an end and questions followed,
and votes of thanks followed those, and the farmers ambled
out of the hall. But little Wimpole still sat upon his chair
like one hypnotized, his pale grey eyes staring from his head.
"Now's your chance to escape I" said Wimpole to him-
self. But his limbs would not obey him. A palsy, a terror
had descended upon him. He was aware that Eustace
Chasuble came striding like a tree over to him. Chasuble
opened his mouth and spoke.
"If it's some more advice about the Large Black Pig
you're wanting, sir . . ."
Then suddenly Wimpole found words, or words found
Wimpole. He must now and for ever deliver himself from
this phantom, even though the phantom had taken to itself
so strange and terrible a shape.
"Your book of poems/' he cried, "called Gangrene and
lollies. It was me. I wrote the review.^ My name's Wim-

pole Sir, 1!assure you ." . .

"You I" exclaimed the other. "So you're Wimpole !"

Wimpole saw his vast arm shoot through the air towards
him like Jove's thunderbolt. He ducked. He found his
tiny fingers crushed in a gigantic hand.
"I've been wanting to meet you for years, Mr. Wimpole !"
the vast voice boomed. "The only critic who took any
notice of my book. Thank you, Mr. Wimpole, thank you 1

I can't say how grateful I am I Come round to the Pig and

Whistle and let me try and tell you 1 No ? Mr. Wimpole,
no ! I'll take no refusals 1"
Mr. Wimpole blinked.
 A. CONAN DOYLE
The Parish Magazine

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle practised as a doctor for some

years before he decided to devote himself to literature.
Besides the immortal Sherlock Holmes stories he
wrote a large number of romances and plays, and in
later life took a keen interest in spiritualism.
 THE PARISH MAGAZINE
was on a winter evening. Mr. Pomeroy, the
six o'clock
IT printer, was on the point of leaving his office, which was his
back room, for his home, which was his front room, when
young Murphy entered. Murphy was an imperturbable youth
with a fat face and sleepy eyes, who had the rare quality of
always doing without question whatever he was told. It is
usually a great virtue but there are exceptions.
"There are two folk to see you," said Murphy, laying two
cards upon the table.
Mr. Pomeroy glanced at them.
"Mr. Robert Anderson. Miss Julia Duncan. I don't
know the names. Well, show them in."
A long, sad-faced youth entered, accompanied by a
mournful young lady, clad in black. Their appearance was
respectable, but depressing.
"I dare say you know this/' said the youth, holding up a
small, grey-covered volume, the outer cover of which was
ornamented with the picture of a church. "It's the St. Olivia's
Church Magazine. What I mean, it's the Parish Magazine.
This lady and I are what you might call the editors. It has
been printed by "
"Elliot and Dark, in the City," said the lady, as her com-
panion seemed to stumble. "But they have suddenly closed
down their works. We have the month's issue all ready, but
we want to add to it."
"A Supplement, if you get my meaning," said the youth.
"That's the word supplement. The tiling has become too
dam' "
"What he is trying to say," cried the girl, "is that the
magazine wants lighting up on the social side."
"That's it," said the youth. "Just a bit of ginger, so to
speak. So we arranged a Supplement. Wewill put it in as a
loose leaf, if you follow my meaning. It's all typewritten and
clear" here he drew a folded paper from his pocket "and
 580 A. CONAN DOYLE
it needs no reading or correcting. Just rush it through five
hundred copies, as quickly as you can do it"
"The issue is overdue/' said the lady. "We must have it
out by midday to-morrow. They tell me Ferguson and Co.
could easily have it ready in the time, and if you won't guaran-
tee it, we must take it to them/'
"Absolutely," said the youth.
Mr. Pomeroy picked up the typed copy and glanced at it.

His eyes fell upon the words, "Our beloved Vicar, Mr.
Ffolliott-Sharp, B.A," There was some allusion to a bishopric.
Pomeroy threw the paper across to his assistant. "Get on
with it !" he said.
"We should like to pay at once," said Miss Duncan,
opening her bag. "Here is a five-pound note, and you can
account for it afterwards. Of course, you don't know us, and
might not trust us." "
"Well, if one did not trust the Parish Magazine said

Pomeroy, smiling.
"Absolutely," cried the youth. "But what I mean is
that we want to pay now. You'll send the stuff round to me
at 1 6 Colgrove Road. Got it ? Not later than twelve. Rush it

through. What?"
"It shall be there," saidPomeroy.
The pair were leaving the room when the girl turned
back.
"Put your name bottom," she said. "It's
as printer at the
the law. Besides, you may get the printing of the Magazine
in the future."
"Certainly. We always print our name."
The in the
couple passed out, and hugged each other
passage.
"I think we put across," said he.
it

"Marvellous I" said she.

"That fiver was my idea."
"Incredible I" she cried. "We've got him."
out into the
"Absolutely 1" said he, and they passed
night.
The stolid Murphy wrought long and hard, and the
Pomeroy Press was working till unconscionable hours.
The
found the matter less dull than most which he handled,
assistant
and a smile spread itself occasionally over his fat face. Surely
some of this was rather unusual stuff. He had never read
 THE PARISH MAGAZINE 381

anything quite like it. However, "his not to reason why".

He had been well drilled to do exactly what he was told. The
packet was ready next morning, and before twelve o'clock it
had been duly dispatched to the house mentioned. Murphy
carried it himself and was surpri^d to find their client waiting
for it at the garden gate. It took some energy, apparently, to
be the editor of a Parish Magazine.
It was twenty-four hours before the bomb burst, which
blew Mr. Pomeroy and his household into fragments. The
first intimation of trouble was the following letter :

"J/r,
"We can hardly imagine that you have read the contents of the
so-called to the Parish Magazine which has been dis-
Supplement
tributed to the members of the congregation of St. Olivia's Church.
Ifyou had you would hardly have dared to make yourself responsible
are likely to hear
by putting your name to it. I need not say that you
a good deal more of the matter. As to my teeth y may say that they
I
are remarkably sound, and that I have never been to a dentist in my

life.

"JAMES WILSON
"(Major)."

There was a second letter upon the breakfast table. The

dazed printer picked it
up. It was in a feminine hand, and read
thus:

"Sir,
"With
regard to the infamous paragraph in the
new issue of the
Parish Magazine / may say that if I have boiight a new car it is no
',

business of anyone else, and the remarks about my private affairs are
most unkind and uncalledfor. I understand that as you are the printer

vox are legally responsible. You will hear in the course of a few
days from my legal advisers.
"Yours faithfully,
"JANE PEDDIGREW.
"14, FJton Square"

"What the devil does it mean ?" cried Pomeroy, staring

wildly at his wife and daughter. "Murphy 1
Murphy I"
His assistant entered from the office.
"Have you a copy of that Supplement, which you printed
for the Parish Magazine ?"
 A. CONAN DOYLK
"Yes, sir. I delivered five hundred, but there are a few in
the office."
"Bring it in Bring it in
I
Quick !" I

Then Mr. Pomeroy began to read aloud, and apoplexy

grew nearer and nearer. The document was head Social
Notes, and began with several dates and allusions to services
wliich might give confidence to the superficial and rapid
reader. Then it opened out in this way :

" 'Our beloved Vicar (Mr. Ffolliott-Sharp, B.A.) is still

busy trying ro wangle a bishopric. This time he says in his
breezy way that it is 'a perfect sitter', but we have our doubts.
It is notorious that he has pulled strings in the past, and that
the said strings broke. However, he has a cousin in the Lord
Chance] lor's office, so there is always hope/
"Gracious 1" cried Pomeroy. "In the Parish Magazine,
too !"
" 'In the last
fortnight sixteen hymn books have dis-
appeared from the church. There is no need for public scandal,
so if Mr. James Bagshaw, Junior, of 113 Lower Cheltenham
Place, will call upon the Churchwardens, all will be arranged.'
"That's the son of old Bagshaw, of the bank/' cried
Pomeroy. "What can they have been dreaming of?
" c
The Vicar (the Rev. Ffolliott-Sharp, B.A.) would take
this opportunity to beg the younger Miss Ormerod to desist
from her present tactics. Delicacy forbids the Vicar from
saying what those tactics are. It is not necessary for a young
lady to attend every service, and to push herself into the
front pew, which is already owned (though not paid for) by
the Dawson-Braggs family. The Vicar has asked us to send
marked copies of this paragraph to Mrs. Delmar, Miss
"
Featherstone, and Miss Poppy Crewe.'

Pomeroy wiped his forehead. "This is

pretty awful 1" said
he. Then :
"
'Some of these Sundays Major Wilson's false teeth will
drop into the collecting bag. Let him either get a new set, or
else take off that smile when he walks round with the
bag.
With lips firmly compressed there is no reason why the present
set may not lastfor years.'
"That's where the answer comes in," said Pomeroy,
glancing at the open letter upon his table. "I expect he'll be
round with a stick presently. What's this ?
 THE PARISH MAGAZINE 583
"
don't know if Miss Cissy Dufour and Captain
'We
Copperley are secretly married or not. If not, they should be.
He could then enter Laburnum Villa instead of wearing out
the garden gate by leaning on it 1*

"Good heavens, one

listen to this"Mr. Malceby, the
!

grocer, is back from Hythe. But why the bag of sand among
his luggage ? Surely sugar gives a sufficient profit at its present
price. As we are on the subject, we cannot but remark upon
the increased water rate paid last quarter by the Siivcrside
Dairy Company. What do they do with all this water ?
The public has a right to know/
"Good Lord, listen to this 'It is
very wrong to say that
1

our popular member, Sir James Tonder, was drunk at the

garden party of the Mayor. It is true that he tripped over his
own leg when he tried to dance the tango, but that can fairly
be attributed to his own obvious physical disabilities. As a
matter of fact, several guests who only drank one glass of the
Mayors champagne (natural 1928) were very ill in conse-
qjience, so that it is most unfair to put so uncharitable an
9

interpretation upon our member's faux pas.

"That's worth a thousand pounds in any Court," groaned
Pomeroy. "My dear, Rothschild couldn't stand the actions
that this paper will bring on us."
The ladies of the family had shown a regrettable inclination
to laugh, but his words made them properly solemn. He
continued his reading.
"
'Mrs. Pedcligrew has started a six-cylinder which is
listed at seven hundred and fifty pounds. How she does it
nobody knows. Her late husband was a little rat of a man
who did odd jobs down in the City. He could not have left
so much. This matter wants looking into/
"Why, he was the vice-chairman of the Baltic," said
Pomeroy. "These people are stark, staring mad. Listen to
this.
"
'Evensong will be at six- thirty. Yes, Mrs. Mould, at
six-thirty sharp. And Mr. King will be on the left-hand seat
well within view. We can count on your attendance. If you
are not a pillar of the church, you are generally sneaking
behind one V Oh, Lord, here's another.
"
Mr. Goldbury, of 7 Cheesrnan Place, will call at the
'If

Vicarage he will receive back the trouser-button which he put

in the bag last Sunday. It is useless to the Vicar, whereas in
 A. CONAN DOYLB
its right placemight be most important to Mr. Goldbury T
it

There's no use laughing, you two. You won't

laugh when you
see the lawyer's letters.Listen to this.
"
"Prithee
why so pale, fond lover ? Prithee why so
pale?" The question is addressed to William Briggs, our
dentist friend of Hope Street. Has the
lady in pink chiffon
turned you down, or is it merely that you are behind with
your rent, as usual ? Cheer up, William. You have our best
wishes/
"Good gracious 1
They grow worse and worse. Just
listen to this.
"
'If any motorists
get into trouble, my advice to them is
private room at the Town
to see Chief Constable Walton in his
Hall. Cheques of course, not be received. But surely
will,
it isfar better to pay a small sum across the table in ready
cash asking for no receipt than to have the trouble and
expense of proceedings in the Court/
"My word, we shall have some proceedings in the Court
'before we are through.Here is a tit-bit which will keep the
lawyers busy 'The
:
Voyd-Merriman wedding was a most
interesting affair and we wish the young couple every happi-
ness. We say "young" out of
courtesy, for it is an open secret
that the bride will never see thirty-five again. The groom also
is, we should say, getting rather long in the tooth. By the
way, why did he start and look over his shoulder when the
clergyman spoke of "any just cause or impediment" ? No
doubt it was perfectly harmless, but it gave rise to some
ill-natured gossip. We had pleasure in attending the reception
afterwards. There was a detective to guard the presents.
We really think that his services could have been dispensed
with, for they would never have been in danger. Major
Wilson's two brass napkin rings were the pick of the bunch.
There was a cheque in an envelope from the bride's father.
We have heard what the exact figure was, and we quite
appreciate the need for an envelope. However, it will pay for
the cab to the station. It is understood that the happy couple
will get as far as Margate for their honeymoon, and if the

money holds out they may extend their travels to Ramsgate.

Address :the Red Cow public house, near the Station/
''Why, these are the richest people in Rotherheath/' said
Pomeroy, wiping his forehead.
"There is a lot more, but that is enough to settle our hash.
 THE PARISH MAGAZINE 385
I think we had best sell up for what we can get and clear out
of the town. My gosh, those two folk must have got out of
an asylum. Anyhow, my first job must be to sec them. Maybe
they are millionaires who can afford to pay for their little
jokes."
His mission proved, however, to be fruitless. On inquiry
at the address given he found that it was an empty house.
The caretaker from next door knew, nothing of the matter.
It was clear now why the young man had waited at the gate
for his parcel. What was Pomeroy to do next ? Apparently
he could only sit and wait for the arrival of the writs. How-
ever, it was a very different document which was handed in
at his door two evenings later, It was headed

"R.S.B.Y.P."
and ran thus :

"A special meeting of the R.S.B.Y.P. mil be held at 16

Stanmore Terrace, in the billiards-room of John Anderson, J.P.,
to-night at 9 p.m. The presence of Mr. James Pomeroy, printer,
is urgently needed. The matter under discussion is his
liability for
certain scandalous statements recently printed in the Parish

It may well be imagined that Mr. Pomeroy was punctual at

the appointment.
"Mr. Anderson is not at home himself," said the footman,
"but young Mr. Robert Anderson and his friends are
receiving." There was a humorous twinkle in the footman's
eyes.
The printer was shown into a small waiting-room, where
two men, one a postman and the other apparently a small
tradesman, were seated. He could not help observing that
they were both as harassed and miserable as he was himself.
They looked at him with dull, lack-lustre eyes, but were too
dispirited to talk, nor did he feel sufficient energy to break
the silence. Presently one of them and then the other was
called out. Finally the footman came for him, and threw wide
a door.
"Mr. James Pomeroy," cried the footman.
At the end of a large music-room, which was further
adorned by a billiards-table, was sitting a semicircle of young
M
386 A. CONAN DOYLE
people, very serious, and all with writing materials before
all
them. None was above twenty-one years of age, and they were
about equally divided as to sex. Among them were the two
customers who had lured him to his doom. They both smiled
at him most affectionately, in spite of his angry stare.

"Pray sit down, Mr. Pomeroy," said a very young man in

evening dress, who acted as Chairman. "There are one or
two questions which, as President of the R.S.B.Y.P., it is my
duty to put to you. I believe that you have been somewhat
alarmed by this incident of the Parish Magazine ?"
"Of course I have," said Pomeroy, in a surly voice.
"May I ask if your sleep has been affected ?"
"I have not closed my eyes since it happened."
There was a subdued murmur of applause, and several
members leaned across to shake hands with Mr. Robert
Anderson.
"Did it affect your future plans ?"
"I had thought of leaving the town."
"Excellent I I think, fellow-members, that there is no
doubt that the monthly gold medal should be awarded to Mr.
Anderson and Miss Duncan for their very meritorious per-
formance, which has been well conceived and cleverly carried
out. To relieve your natural anxiety, we must tell you at
once, Mr. Pomeroy, that you have been the victim of a joke."
"It's likely to be a pretty costly one," said the printer.
"Not at all. No harm has been done. No leaflets have been
sent out. The letters which have reached you emanate from
ourselves. We are, Mr. Pomeroy, the Rotherheath Society of
Bright Young People, who endeavour to make the world a
merrier and more lively place by the exercise of our wit
Upon this occasion a prize was offered for whichever member
or members could most effectually put the wind up some
resident in this suburb. There have been several candidates,
but on the whole the prize must be awarded as already said."
"But but it's unjustifiable !" stammered Pomeroy.
"Entirely," said the Chairman, cheerfully. "I think that
all our
proceedings may come under that head. On the other
hand, we remind our victims that they have unselfishly
sacrificed themselves for the general hilarity of the com-

munity. A special silver medal, which I will now affix to your

coat, will be your souvenir of the occasion."
"And I'll speak to my father when he comes back," said
 THE PARISH MAGAZINE 387
Anderson. "What I mean is, there is printing and what not
to be done for the firm."
"And my father really edits the Parish Magazine. That's
what put it into our heads/' said Miss Duncan. "Maybe we
can get you the printing after all."
"And there is whisky-and-soda on the sideboard, and a
good cigar/' said the President.
So Mr. Pomeroy eventually went out into the night,
be served, and it would be a
thinking that after all youth will
dull world without it.
 WILL SCOTT
The Life of Lord Coodh

Will Scott started as a cartoonist and black-and-white artist,

but began writing in 1920 and sold his first story to a magazine
which had already rejected it twice. Since then he has written
over one thousand short stories, which is probably a record,
as well as four novels and the plays Queer Fish and The
Limping Man.
 THE LIFE OF LORD COODLE

In which a banana skin causes almost as

much worry and trouble as the proverbial apple

are the facts.

THESE Lord Goodie, on the dark night of February
when walking along
lyfh, 1927,
the ducal towing-path, slipped on a
banana skin and fell into the Wimbledon Canal. Mark the
date. The
night of February iyth, 1927. Lord Goodie was
almost drowned. He was as near as matters to becoming the
late Lord Goodie, of Jermyn Mansions and Goodie Park,
that pleasant buffer state to the south-west of London town,
But for the presence and the presence of mind of Mr.
Herbert Fawcit, the life of Lord Goodie, from that moment
on, would have been history.
Mr. Herbert Fawcit saved the life of Lord Goodie.
"
'Ello 1" exclaimed Mr. Herbert Fawcit, pulling up on
the ducal towing-path and staring at the blob in the water.
4

"What's this?"
"Help I" cried Lord Goodie.
"Hang on, old man I" responded Mr. Herbert Fawcit ;

and tearing off his coat which happened to be not his only
but liis best coat he promptly leapt into the murky waters
of the Wimbledon Canal and got Lord Goodie by the hair.
"This way, old man/' he said swiftly. "Kick out The !

devil IDon't kick me Kick out 'Ere

! Can't yer swirn ?"
1 I

Lord Goodie merely guggling at this, Mr. Fawcit got a

tighter grip on the noble hair.
"If yer won't make such a devil of a fuss Til have yer out
in two ticks," he promised. "Look 'ere put yer hands on
that stay. Stay The devil
! That lump of wood on top
I

of the towing-path. That's right. Now I"

The Wimbledon Canal is at its deepest at that particular
spot, and the slimey wooden banking to the towing-path is
nowhere steeper. If you couldn't swim, and you happened
391
39* WILL SCOTT
to have one or two aboard (Lord Goodie very often happened
to have one or two aboard), you had precisely a dog's chance
in the Wimbledon Canal. Lord Goodie realized very clearly
that he owed his life to Mr. Herbert Fawcit.
He realized the fact very clearly before Mr. Fawcit had
got him on the bank ; and when Mr. Fawcit had got him on
the bank he attempted to say so.
"Do you know," he said, "dash me if I wasn't next best
thing to a goner when you got me by the scalp.
you Do
know, you saved my life I"
"You must have had a devil of a load on," observed Mr.
Fawcit.
"I beg your pardon ?" said Lord Goodie.
"Stewed," said Mr. Fawcit.
Lord Goodie said nothing to this, but began to grope
about on the towing-path.
"I say, have you seen my monocle ?" he asked presently.
"Do you know, I believe Fve lost the dashed tiling."
"Shouldn't worry about a bit of a thing like a monocle,"
said Mr. Fawcit shaking the water out of his boots. "You've
got a devil of a lot more to worry about than a bit of a thing
like that, old man. You're absolutely soaked."
"I amwet, you know," Lord Goodie agreed. "I think
I ought to be getting along. I shall be taking a chill."
"A devil of a chill, old man," said Mr. Fawcit.
"It will always be a puzzle to me how I came to be in the
canal," Lord Goodie went on slackly. "I was walking along,
as right as anything, and then, do you know, out went my
legs and I was was walking along, as right as anything,
in. I
when out went my legs and splash I was in."
!

"Devil of a mess 1" said the sympathetic Mr. Fawcit,

"Must have slipped on something, old man."
"But, I say, what could I have slipped on ?"

And now, Mr. Fawcit, in his turn, began to grope about

on the towing-path.
"I've got it I" he announced at length.
"Have you found my monocle ?" asked Lord Goodie.
"Good man !"
"To the devil with your monocle !" said Mr. Fawcit with
a grin. "It's a banana skin. This is what you slipped on,
old chap."
 THE LIFE OF LORD COODLE 393
"Now isn't that extraordinary 1" Lord Goodie exclaimed.
"A little thing like that causing all this trouble ! There was
I one moment walking along as right as anything, and then,
do you know, out went my legs and splash I was in the I

canal. A most extraordinary thing. Right in the water.

Do you know, I'm frightfully chilly."
"If I was you, old man," said Mr. Fawcit, "I'd nip along
home and get into bed. You'll be catching a dose o' what-
for if you don't take care. And a dose o' what-for," Mr.
Fawcit concluded gravely, "is the very devil 1"
"I say, I believe you're right," said Lord Goodie. "Do
you know, I think I'll go home."
"Know your way ?" inquired Mr. Fawcit.
"Oh, yes," said Lord Goodie. "Oh, yes, rather. I live
just along here. No distance at all. In fact, I was just taking
the dog out for its stroll when I slipped on that infernal
little
banana skin and fell in the canal."
"Where's the little dorg ?" asked Mr. Fawcit.
Lord Goodie peered about him in the gloom.
"Do you know," he said, "it's a most remarkable thing,
but I believe I forgot to bring the little dog out."
"Well, never mind about the little dorg, old man," said
Mr. Fawcit. "You go home at a devil of a lick and get between
the blankets. A dose of hot whisky '11 soon put you to rights."
"I say, no 1" exclaimed Lord Goodie as he staggered damply
to his feet and took Mr. Fawcit by the arm.
"No ?" said Mr. Fawcit.
"Matter of fact," explained Lord Goodie, "if I hadn't had
quite so much already to-night, possibly just possibly I'd
have seen that banana skin. Ha ! ha !"
"Devil of a joke 1" commented Mr. Fawcit. "Where do
you live ?"
"Just along," said Lord Goodie. "I go this way."
"So do I," said Mr. Fawcit.
"Then, you what," said Lord Goodie, "we'll go
I tell

along together. Do
you know, I don't know your name."
"Fawcit," said Mr. Fawcit promptly. "Mr. Herbert
Fawcit."
"Mr. Herbert Fawcit," Lord Goodie echoed gravely.
"Ah ! Do you know, old man, I don't know you I"
"That's all right, old man," said Mr. Fawcit.
"No, but I mean it's rather remarkable, what ? I mean
N*
394 WILL SCOTT
to say, dammit, youVe just saved my life 1 And Idon't know
you. Do you know, I think that's dashed odd. By the way1

Stop I"
"I'm as wet as the devil, and taking cold, old man,"
Mr. Fawcit protested.
"Doesn't matter, dear fellow," said Lord Goodie. "Listen
to me listen to this. Now, what is it ? How does it go ?
Um, toodle, oodle, um um, toodle, oodle, um how does
it
go, nowThanks
? for the buggy ride, thanks for the buggy
ride, I've had a wonderful time. My girl's got ginger hair,
my girl's got That's not it. How does it go, dear old boy ?"
"Blowed if I know," said Mr. Fawcit. "Sounds a devil
of a mess to me. Now you come along, old man. You'll
be takin' a fever if you stop here singing devilish silly songs
like that all night."
"I believe you're right," said Lord Goodie. "You are
right IDashed odd You're always right
1 !"
And then he pulled up suddenly and let out an enormous
piercing whistle.
"What the devil's the matter now, old man ?" Mr. Fawcit
demanded.
"Dog," Lord Goodie.
said
"You home," said Mr. Fawcit.
left it at
"Did I ?" said Lord Goodie, very surprised. "Then
what was I doing on the towing-path, dear boy ?"
"You," said Mr. Fawcit plainly, "had had a devil of a
binge, old man, and didn't know you were on the towing-path."
"How you do manage to think of things," said Lord
Goodie brightly. "You're a most convenient chap Do you 1

know, I'd have been drowned if it hadn't been for you."

"Well, you can forget about that, old man," said Mr.
Fawcit.
"I never will forget about it," declared Lord Goodie
"
stoutly. "Day of my death
They stopped under the ornamental lamps at the gates of
Goodie Park.
"What the devil's on your mind now ?" Mr. Fawcit
wanted to know.
"Live here," said Lord Goodie.
"Go to the devil," said Mr. Fawcit grinning.
"Fact !" said Lord Goodie. "Look here, dear fellow, you
saved my life, and I've got to do something 'bout it. Can't
 THE LIFE OF LORD COODLE 395

let itgo at that. Got to do something. Look here now,

what's your name ?"
"Well, Fmblowed 1" exclaimed Mr. Fawcit. "Ain't you
the blinkin* limit, old man ? My name's Fawcit Herbert
Fawcit. Mr. Herbert Fawcit."
"Dashed odd I" muttered Lord Goodie. "Do you know,
I've never heard of you, old chap."
"You're devilish stewed, my lad," said Mr. Fawcit sternly.
"Best thing you can do is nip in home and get in the sheets.
Otherwise," he added, "you goin' to have a devil of a 'flu."
"I'll do as you say," said Lord Goodie. "You always
seem to be right, somehow. Remarkable thing I say, dear1

fellow, I'll tefi you what to do. To-morrow you come in

here and see me. You Corne in here and see
understand ?
me. Ask for me. If you told me your name I should only
forget it, and if you gave me your address I should only lose
the darn thing so you hear what I say pop in and see me
:

to-morrow. See ?"

"What the devil's your name, old man ?" Mr. Fawcit
asked.
"Name? Ah I Of course. Naturally. Goodie," said
the worthy peer.
"Goodie ?"
"Precisely, Goodie."
"Devil of a name 1" remarked Mr. Fawcit.
"Well, good-bye, dear fellow," said Lord Goodie, grip-
ping Mr. Fawcit by the lapels. "And a thousand thanks.
You saved my life. I don't know what your name is, but I
owe everything to you. I'll never forget it never Drop 1

in and see me to-morrow. Goodie 1 Good-bye, dear fellow

good-bye I"
Lord Goodie gaily waved his hand, spun round and
tottered up the drive of Goodie Park.
And a moment later Mr. Herbert Fawcit was proceeding
to his own humble home, three wet miles away to the west.
"As binged as the devil 1" he kept saying to himself, over
and over again. "Goodie Must be a species of valet or
!

something. Oh, well. Decent chap. I'll look him up."

When he reached home he told his wife about it.

Goodie Park is not the place it used to be. The Goodies

had had to do things to keep going. Doings things had mostly
396 WILL SCOTT
consisted of selling slices of Goodie Park to vulgar builders.
So that Goodie Park at the time of this chronicle, was bordered
on one side entirely by a kind of cheap garden suburb, wherein
you could purchase a villa for a hundred pounds down and
harassment for the rest of your life. To the north-east it was
bordered by the fag-ends of London, and to the south-west
by the fag-ends of Surrey. On the remaining side it was
bordered by the railway and the canal.
But whatever might happen to Goodie Park, Goodie Hall
remained the same gay gem it had been for the last two
hundred and fifty years. It was certainly the finest affair that
Mr. Herbert Fawcit had ever set eyes on ; and he admitted
as much when, on the morning following immersion, he
climbed the wide stone steps and rang the ancient bell.
A kind of ambassador, a gilded being from the higher
spheres, responded to the summons, and for a second took
the breath out of Mr, Fawcit's body.
"Morning, sir/' he said at last. "Want to see Mr. Goodie."
"Mr. Goodie I" the butler sniffed.
"Don't he live here?" asked the doubting Mr.
Fawcit.
"Lord Goodie lives here," returned the beautiful one,
staring blankly.
"Go honl" Mr. Fawcit grinned.
"What is your business ?" the butler demanded.
"Oh, it ain't business, sir," said Mr. Fawcit. "I sort o'
just dropped in to see him."
"Indeed 1 I am afraid
"
"He asked me to, yer see."
How the duet might have ended can only be guessed at ;
but at that moment, luckily for Mr. Fawcit, Lord Goodie
himself crossed the hall and chanced to glance in Mr. Fawcit's
direction.
"Hello old man," Mr. Fawcit shouted. "Coo-ee 1"
!

Lord Goodie tottered forward and stared.

Seen in the light of day, he was at least thirty-eight, minus
chin and plus a long, inquisitive nose. Apparently he had a
fund of monocles on which to draw, for one now reposed
languidly in front of his right eye, and through it he blankly
surveyed the unprepossessing form and features of Mr.
Herbert Fawcit.
"How goes it, old man ?" Mr. Fawcit inquired. "Thought
 THE LIFE OF LORD COODLE 397
Fd just pop in an' see how you was gettin' on. Devilish
weather, ain't it ?"
"Do I ah do I know you ?" drawled Lord Goodie
uneasily.
"Well, I'll
go to the devil 1" exclaimed Mr. Fawcit.
"I ah I know your face/' said Lord Goodie, not
trying very hard. "Yes, I suppose I know your face/'
The butler was the uneasiest of the trio. He stroked his
nose and looked away.
"What about last night in the canal ?" said Mr. Fawcit.
"Why, goodness gracious me, yes !'* cried Lord Goodie,
blushing crimson as far as his collar, and possibly beyond.

"Why, yes, of course The canal.I . Yes. . . ." He. .

pulled at his tie and tittered. "Er do you know, you'd

better come in,"
Mr. Fawcit came in, and the butler retired, much intrigued
by the suggestion about the canal and the night before. He
had been making rough guesses at the reason for the con-
dition of Lord Goodie's clothes all the morning, but this was
beyond his wildest hopes. Lord Goodie in the canal ! He
carried the spicy tit-bit to the servants' hall.

Meantime Mr. Fawcit was sitting in the poshest chair in

the world,* in front of the Lord Goodie's librarv.
fire in *

"Dashed odd, you know, my man," Lord Goodie was

saying. "I woke up on the front steps at three o'clock this
morning. Goodness knows how I've come to miss a cold.
Sound constitution, I suppose. I say, I suppose I was a bit
on last night, what ?"
"A bit on ? The devil old man," said Mr. Fawcit.
!

"Look here, now I fell in the canal and was drowning,

or some stupid thing, and you trekked up and saved my
life. Wasn't that about it ?" said Lord Goodie.
"Oh, well, you can forget about that, old chap," said Mr.
Fawcit.
"But that's just it, you see I can't possibly forget about
it," insisted Lord Goodie. "Do you know, if it hadn't been
for you, I'd not be here now. No. I insist on doing something
for you."
"But there's nothing I want, old man," said Mr.
Fawcit.
"Surely there is," said Lord Goodie.
398 WILL SCOTT
"The devil 1 I ought to know."
Mr. Fawcit reached out and tapped Lord Goodie on the
knee.
"
'Ere/' he said, "who the devil would have thought
you was a lord ? Why, you're just like me or the next bloke,
ain't yer, old man ? Now
that johnny out there, what popped
out when I rung the belJ, I don't mind admittin' he fairly put
the wind up me. Who is he ? Archbishop of Canterbury ?"
"Oh," said Lord Goodie, "he's the butler."
"Well, I'll go to the devil 1" said Mr. Fawcit.
"Now, look here," said Lord Goodie, with near-firmness.
"You must let me get this thing settled right away. You
"
saved my life, and I
"Tell yer what yer can do," said Mr. Fawcit. "I seen
some Ai grapes in yer greenhouse as I was comin' up the
drive here. I got a couple o' nippers at home what would
give anything for to have some grapes growed an' cut by a
real, live lord. What about nippin' out and cuttin' a couple
of bunches ? Then we'll call it quits."
"Well, I'll certainly do that, but you must see it is not
"
enough, and if
"Listen to me, old man. got my business, an' it pays
I
me all right. I run a
greengrocery over by Cheam, an'
little

it
pays me very well. When I'm startin' out savin* lives as
a going concern, I'll let yer know, see, old man ?"
"This is most extraordinary 1" sighed Lord Goodie.
"Now what about them grapes, old man ?"
Lord Goodie stroked his pale hair and blinked.
"Ah, yes," he said.
They went out to the greenhouse. Most of the staff saw
them go. The word went round. The butcher's boy was
delivering meat as Lord Goodie and Mr. Fawcit entered the
greenhouse. He saw, he asked, he listened, he went away and
talked. The word went farther round.
Grapes in hand, Mr. Fawcit stood at the door of Goodie
Hall, chatting amiably to the bewildered Lord Goodie.
9
"Wife's brother," Mr. Fawcit burst out, "name o Joe
Perks, is one o' these red-hot Reds. 'To the devil with lords !'
says he. He wants to have yer all boiled in frying fat. Well,
I reckon I can tell him a thing or two. 'You go to the devil/
I shall say to him. 'A pal o' mine is a lord, see ? An' he's
a devil of a fine feller No side an' nonsense about him.
1
 THE LIFE OF LORD COODLE 399
Lord Goodie/ I shall say. And if he says 'You go to the :

devil, what do you know about Lord Goodie ?' I shall say :

'Well, I ought. I once fished him out of the canal when he

was lit up.' Har bar Ihar I 1

"Fd like yer to meet Joe Perks/' Mr. Fawcit concluded.

"It'd do him a devil of a lot o' good/'
A carriage rolled up the drive and a very grand personage
of the pretty fair sex alighted and came up the steps. This
was none other than the Countess Goodie, Lord Goodie's
aunt, who helped him rule Goodie Hall until such time as
,

some hopeless woman made up her mind to marry him. The

Countess Goodie arched her eyebrows at her fluttered nephew
and frowned at Mr. Fawcit., who, however, merely grinned
pleasantly in return.
"Mornin'," said Mr. Fawcit. "Stinkin' weather, ain't
it?"
The Countess Goodie said nothing. She swept on and
through the portals of Goodie Hall and waited, boiling, in
the hall.
"Well, so long, old man," said Mr. Fawcit, taking Lord
Goodie's fishy hand in his. "Be seein' yer again. Your old
woman's waiting for yer in there."
"My ah my aunt," said Lord Goodie weakly.
"My mistake. Well, ta-ta I Be seein' yer again."
Mr. Fawcit went down the steps. Lord Goodie went up
the steps. At the bottom of the steps Mr. Fawcit paused and
turned round.
"Coo-ee Oi 1" he called.
!

Wincing, Lord Goodie turned.

"Thanks fer the grapes 1" shouted Mr. Fawcit.
He went off whistling. When he got home he told his
wife about it.

Meantime the Countess Goodie was telling Lord Goodie

about it.

"Reggie," she demanded, "tell me at once who was

that perfectly impossible person ?"
"The ah the fact of the matter is, you see, dear old

thing," said Lord Goodie limply, "I was a bit on last night
and I slipped on a banana skin and fell in the canal. He
fished me The fact of the matter is, he saved my life.
out.
I can't very well tick the perisher off. He's a perfectly perish-

ing perisher, I know, but hang it 1 he saved my life. It's a

400 WILL SCOTT
bit of an infernal mess, I know, but I can't very well snub
him, what? He even wouldn't take any reward. Hanged
if I know what to do."

"Well, so long as we see no more of him/' said the

Countess Goodie.
"Fact of the matter is, you see, old thing," said Lord
Goodie, "the perisher seems to have taken a sort of fancy
to me. He talks about coming again, you know. The fact
of the matter is he talks about bringing his brother-in-law,
or his wife's brother, or whatever he is. Jqe Perks, you know,
old thing. The er the Socialist."
"Good Heavens 1" cried the Countess Goodie.

The next day was Sunday. The Countess Goodie and

Lord Goodie (by permission of the Countess) were enter-
taining at Goodie Hall the First Lord of the Inactivity, Sir
William and Lady Nodd, and the Secretary for White Lines.
In the afternoon they walked on the terrace to take the air.
Corning up the steps, but not for the purpose of taking
the air, were two of the dirtiest children the Countess Goodie
had ever seen. One of them carried a little wooden box,
at the sight of which Lord Goodie wilted.
"
'Ello !" said the boy child, beaming. "Please which is
Lord Goodie?"
None of the others admitting to it, in the circumstances,
Lord Goodie had to step forward.
"Ah I am Lord Goodie," he whispered.
"Please, farver's sent yer box back," said the boy child.
"The one wot yer give 'im the gripes in.
"An' please can me sister look at yer?" added the boy
child daringly.
"Ah I ah that is ... here I am," faltered Lord
Goodie.
"I want ter see the lord wot me farver fished out o' the
canal," said the girl child. "I want to see the lord wot me
farver fished out o' the can-a-a-al I I want to see the lord
wot me farver fished out o' the can-a-a-al 1"
"Very peculiar 1" remarked Sir William Nodd.
"The fact of the matter is, old man," Lord Goodie explained,
"I fell in the canal the other night, and this ah this ah
child's father ah fished me out, you see, old man."
"Saved your life ?" snapped Sir William Nodd.
 THE LIFE OF LORD COODLE 401
"The fact of the matter is, old man, he did," confessed
Lord Goodie.
"You was ti-i-ightl" shouted the two dirty children.
"Farver says you was ti-i-ight !"
Lord Goodie hastily dragged a florin out of his pocket
and threw it at the children. By the simple process of treading
on his sister's hand the boy child contrived to secure it. They
then ran away down the steps and pulled up ten yards along
the drive. Here they stood and waved.
"Oo-oo I Lord Goodie Oo-oo 1" they cried.
I

They ran another ten yards and pulled up again.

"Oo-oo Lord Goodie
I Oo-oo 1" they cried once more.
I

This time they ran as far as the gates, where they climbed
up to the top of the rails and settled as if for ever.
"Oo-oo Lord Goodie Oo-oo Lord Goodie Oo-oo
1 1 I ! I

Oo-oo 1"
"Remarkably odd I" remarked the Secretary for White
Lines.
"Good gracious 1" exclaimed the Countess Goodie,
leading the way into Goodie Hall.

A chronicle has its limits, particularly its time limits. We

must pass over in the very briefest manner the minor haunt-
ings of Lord Goodie by the man who fished him out of the
canal. The occasion on which Mr. Herbert Fawcit discovered
Lord Goodie at the local horticultural show, took him by
the arm and spent an hour with him, must be recounted in
detail elsewhere. The Press, for example, contains a very
full report. And there was that time when an enterprising
Press photographer, having got hold of part of the story of
Mr. Fawcit's plucky rescue, took Mr. Fawcit by the arm, led
liim to Goodie Hall, and photographed them together. The
day on which the photograph appeared in the Daily Snap was
BlackMonday at Goodie Hall.
One week-end Lord Goodie had been entertaining the
Hon. Vera Highgate Goodie Hall (still by permission of the
at
Countess Goodie), and it looked very much as if the Hon.
Vera was to be the prime fool for whom Lord Goodie had so
long waited. On the Monday morning he commanded his
chauffeur to get out the Rolls-Royce and drive the Hon. Vera
and himself into town. This the chauffeur did.
But when they were in the High Street, half a mile or so
402 WILL SCOTT
from the gates of Goodie Park, a fatal figure leapt out from
the kerb and threw up an arm. The chauffeur banged on the
brakes and brought the big car to a standstill. The door
opened. Mr. Herbert Fawcit got in.
"Hallo, old man I" he said gaily. "Sorry to interrupt
yer, but yer might drop me orf at Putney. I got some sprouts
here that's a special order, an' hang me if I ain't missed the
bus. Yer don't mind, old man ?"
"Er er quite," said Lord Goodie, turning crimson.
"Then that's all right, old man," said Mr. Fawcit. "Knew
Icould depend on you, eh ? There'd ha' been no end of a
row if Mrs. Thingummy hadn't had these 'ere sprouts in time.
Oh, well, it's all right now."
His eye settled definitely on the Hon. Vera for the first
time.
"Mornin', miss," he said pleasantly. "Havin* some
rotten weather, eh ?"
The Hon. Vera sniffed. And having sniffed, she sniffed
again.
"Eucalyptus, miss," said Mr. Fawcit, "is what you
want/'
He tapped Lord Goodie's knee.
"I 'ear my kids was up to see you the other day, old
man," he said.
"Er ah the fact of the matter is, they were," said the
now purple Lord Goodie.
"Give any sauce ?"
Lord Goodie fumbled with his necktie.
"Saucy little devils, you know," Mr. Fawcit confided.
"Yer know what kids are, miss," he appealed to the Hon
Vera. And then once more to Lord Goodie "If they start :

givin' you any sauce, don't stand for it, old man. Clout their
heads and put 'em out. 'Swat I allus do."
They came to Putney and Mr. Fawcit tapped wildly on
the window to attract the chauffeur's attention.
"Oi ! You Owen Nares 1 Pull up 1"
1

He alighted.
"Well, thanks for the buggy ride, old man. Be seein'
you again. Good mornin', miss. Pleez tuv mecha. On
away, Owen Nares Let 'er 'ave it !"
!

He was gone. But one sprout remained.

Gone, too, were Lord Goodie's chances with the Hon, Vera.
 THE LIFE OF LORD COODLE 403
It was no use explaining that once upon a time that
fellow had saved Lord Goodie's life. Lord Goodie tried

explaining for an hour. Then he gave it

up.

That evening he explained again at even greater length

to his aunt, the Countess Goodie.
"Good Heavens !" exclaimed the Countess. "This is the
last straw This is just as far as we can permit it to go
! !

This is the end 1"

"Do you know, I think so too," said the agitated Lord
Goodie. "But I mean to say, what can a chappie do ? After
all, if ithadn't been for him, I'd not be here. He did save my
life. A
chappie can't perishing well snub him. Dammit !"
"1 am asking you to do nothing," said the Countess
Goodie. "You're not firm enough to do anything. You
haven't the spine Leave the doing to me."
!

"So long as you don't snub the perisher," wailed Lord

Goodie.
"Snub him Good Heavens !" cried the Countess.
!

She wrote a letter and drew a cheque for five hundred

pounds. And the next night Lord Goodie had the misfortune
to meet Mr. Herbert Fawcit in the High Street.
"Coo-ee Oi !" cried Mr. Fawcit, ploughing his way
!

"
through the crowds. 'Arf a tic-tac, old man. I want to
have a word with you. 'Ere 1 Will yer come an' have one ?"
"Do you know," said Lord Goodie, "the fact of the matter
is, no."
"All righto We can talk just as well 'ere. Now, then,
I

I got a letter from the old hen up at your place, to-day

Countess Wossername."
"Ah my aunt," sighed Lord Goodie.
"Same bird," said Mr. Fawcit. "She enclosed five hundred
quid. Now, I been thin kin' it over, and I've decided to keep
that five 'undred quid."
"Quite right," said Lord Goodie. "Exactly. Proper
thing to do. Can't insult a lady, you know."
"'Tain't that I want to talk about," said Mr. Fawcit.
"She says in her letter thatjw don't want to see me no more !"
"Oh ah er well," faltered Lord Goodie, "I meant to
"
say, my dear chap
"Now, what have I ever done to 'er ?" Mr. Fawcit insisted.
"Do you know," said Lord Goodie timidly, "nothing !"
 404 WILL SCOTT
"Well, thenAn' wot have I done for you ?"
I

"Ah I" Lord Goodie.

said
"Wouldn't you have been in Jericho, if I hadn't toddled
along that night you was stewed an' fell in the canal ?"
"Ah I" said Lord Goodie stupidly.
"Well then is this any way to treat a pal wot saved
yerlife? Eh?"
Mr* Fawcit was shouting. People were stopping to listen.
Lord Goodie was hot and red all over.
"Saved yer life I" bawled Mr. Fawcit. "An' then this
sort o' thing Hell-fire
1 An' I thought we was friends/'
I

Something had to be done.

"The fact of the matter is, my dear fellow," said Lord
Goodie "you know what women are !"
"Ah!" Mr. Fawcit appeared to leap for joy. "Just
what my old woman said. She said it was none o' your
doin'. She said a fine gentleman like you, old man, wouldn't
do the dirty on the likes o' me like that. And so you'd nothin'
whatever to do with that letter ?"
"Nothing whatever, my dear fellow, I assure you," said
Lord Goodie, wiping his brow.
"Then I'm sorry I spoke, old man," said Mr. Fawcit
"And now come an' have one."
"Really I er . . ."
"Cone and have one I" insisted Mr. Fawcit.
And Lord Goodie, just in order to get away from the
crowd, went and had one. People point out the pub to this
day.

For a whole week Lord Goodie stayed indoors, moping.

His aunt and he were not on speaking terms for six out of the
seven clays. She showed her contempt for him by ignoring
his presence. On the seventh day they had words and he
barged out of the house and went for a walk down the drive
to cool off. Presently he came to the gates. And presently
he heard a joyous yell from over the way.
"Oo-oo! Lord Coo-oo-dle Oo-oo ! Oo-oo I"
I

He raised his weary eyes and saw them, the two dirty
brats of Mr. Herbert Fawcit, leaning over the gate of the
nearest villa of the garden suburb, opposite the gates of Goodie
Park. And then he saw Mr. Fawcit himself come out of the
house and cuff the brats on the ears and send them indoors.
 THE LIFE OF LORD COODLE 405
And then he was aware of Mr* Fawcit himself standing by
his side.
"Remember that five hundred quid ?" said Mr. Fawcit
merrily. "I just bought this little kip with it. Bang opposite
your gates, old man. Nice little place, too. I tell yer wot
come in an' have a look round. YouVe never met the wife,
have you ? She'll be as bucked as the devil to meet a real
live lord/'
"The fact of the matter is, my dear fellow," said Lord
Goodie, "some other time."
He took a sinister delight in informing the Countess of
the results of her handiwork.
"You've now got 'em, dear old thing," he said, "bang
on the doorstep. I may be a perfectly perishin* fool and all
that, but I mean to say Bang on the jolly old dashed door-
!

step, old tiling and all through your perishin' butting-in.

This is the last straw, this is I"
"Good Heavens !" exclaimed the Countess.

These are the facts.

On the dark night of June 23rd, 1927, a policeman dis-
covered a beautiful tall hat by the side of the Wimbledon Canal,
five hundred yards from the gates of Goodie Park. By the
side of the hat was a dog.
Five minutes later, from out the canal, the policeman was
dragging Lord Goodie, of Jermyn Mansions and Goodie
Park, in the county of Surrey, three-quarters drowned.
And there was no banana slcln on the towing-path.
 MICHAEL JOSEPH
A Splash of Publicity

Michael Joseph is a director of a well-known literary agency and

has written a number of books on the art of writing. But his
teal interest in life, and his only recreation, according to Who** Wbo t

is the study of the manners and morals of cats.

 A SPLASH OF PUBLICITY

there anything more depressing than being an unsuccessful

IS artist ? If you happen to know one, ask him and see what he
says. His studio is probably full of the mute evidences of his
failure. He
hasn't the courage to destroy his unappreciated
efforts. And
as a rule he lacks the means to escape from their

depressing influence by renting another studio.

Whatever Charlie Potts may have been, he certainly was
unsuccessful. Of course, his name told against him. In vain
the bold signature CHARLES POTTS adorned painting after
painting. No one wanted to buy them. In fact, no one liked
them, with one exception who deserves the next paragraph
all to herself. His friends insisted on calling him Charlie,
treating his pictures with familiar disrespect, and preferring
to talk instead about racing, food, and other more important
matters.
Only one person believed in Charles. That was Marigold.
Marigold was his wife, and a very pretty, delightful wife she
was. Charles has always said she was much too good for him,
and as a friend of Charles I am inclined to agree with him.
There was nothing especially noticeable about Marigold, except
that she was attractive in a slim, graceful fashion, which some-
how suggested initiative and determination. She didn't really
look at all masterful, but you were conscious that if she had
set her heart on something she would get that something in
the end.
So that it was just as well for dear, easy-going Charlie
that Marigold had made up her mind that he must succeed.
Charlie had the relic of awar pension, luckily, but Marigold
knew that something would have to be done soon, for three
people cannot live on the fag end of a pension. Two could,
and manage, with the aid of lots of laughter and youthful
did,
philosophy. But Petal would need more than that, reflected
Marigold. She hoped it would be a girl, did Marigold, as she
409
410 MICHAEL JOSEPH
had made up her mind to call her Petal. Marigold was like
that.
One morning, when the warm September sun filtered
fine

pleasantly through the trees, Marigold tackled the unsuccessful

artist in earnest.
"Charles dear, you must listen," she said.
Charles obediently took the pipe out of his mouth and
assumed the expression of an obedient but quite virtuous
house dog.
"If you don't sell pictures soon," she said, "we
some
shall be broke. Something's got to be done. Ever since
the War you've been painting and you haven't sold a single,
solitary picture."
"1 know," said Charles, gloomily. "Don't rub it in."
"But, darling" patiently heaps and"
"other people sell

loyally "their work isn't a third as good as yours."

Charles brightened momentarily, then relapsed into
melancholy.
"They get publicity," he said. "Sell anything with publicity
nowadays."
Hepuffed away at his battered pipe, satisfied to have
uttered such a profound truth. For a few moments Marigold
watched the sun dancing on the waters of the river beneath.
Then she thoughtfully tidied her cushions.
"
"Publicity," she said ; "publicity
"You're going to have an idea," said Charles, from
experience. "Let's hope it's nothing strenuous."
"It is, Charles, dear. You must have publicity ; we must
invent a stunt"
"A stunt ?" echoed Charles, genuinely alarmed. He knew
Marigold.
"Yes, dear," said Marigold, patiently. "Let me think."
And Marigold sat down determinedly and thought, while
Charles strenuously puffed away at his pipe, hoping for the best.
"I can bear the suspense no longer," he said, with an
attempt at cheerfulness. "From the light in your eye I can
see I am in for it. What is it this time ?"
Marigold held up her hand.
"You are going to be drowned," she announced.
"What ?"
"Drowned. At least, rescued from drowning."
"I'm not," said Charles, firmly.
 A SPLASH OF PUBLICITY 411

Marigold surveyed him with affectionate toleration.

"For my sake, Charles dear, you will. It's really a brilliant
idea. You will fall into the river and I will shriek for help.
Someone's bound to jump in after you, and when you're
rescued
"

"Supposing I'm not rescued ?" interrupted Charles.

"You will be. Everybody always is. You're a splendid
swimmer, so there's no danger. And when you're pulled out
of the water, there will of course be crowds of newspaper
reporters. I will deal with them. Think of the headlines,
Charles 'Artist Rescued from the Thames.'
! 'Beautiful
"
Young Wife's Story.'
"And how," said Charles, "is that going to help us ?"
"Publicity," said Marigold triumphantly. "Publicity.
You said so yourself. And you must wear your oldest suit of
clothes," she added as an afterthought.
Charles groaned. He knew objections would be futile.
They always were with Marigold. He most certainly was in
for it.

And so, some days later, dutifully dressed in his most ancient
suit, which was, as he pointed out to Marigold, exactly the
same as his third best, Charles Potts fell into the river. The
bridge they chose shall be nameless, for this is a story about
publicity, and the Thames bridges have had quite enough
publicity recently.
It was a warm day Charles had insisted on that, at least.
;

They had carefully rehearsed everything in the studio. Any-

one passing who had troubled to look at them standing against
the parapet would have seen a young man in a shabby suit
with a quite realistically worried expression and an attractive
girl looking, now it had come to the point, decidedly pale.
However, as it happened, no one took the slightest notice of
them. The agitated conversation which they had planned
reduced itself to brief but pointed observations on the part of
Charles.
"It's a long drop," he said, casting an anxious eye over
the parapet.
"You're not going to back out of it now, Charles ?" said
Marigold, half hoping he would.
"No." He looked round, taking his bearings. "Well,
here goes, old thing 1"
412 MICHAEL JOSEPH
And, as our old-fashioned novelists love to put it, in less
time than it tell, Charles vaulted on to thef parapet and
takes to
jumped headlong into the river.
Marigold's scream was perfectly genuine. For a brief
second she heartily wished they hadn't undertaken such a
crazy adventure. But the sight of Charles's head bobbing on
the surface of the water beneath somehow reassured her. If
he had not seemed so very far away, she could have sworn he
flashed a grin up at her before submerging in accordance with
their plan.
This suddenly recalled her own prearranged role. Without
further ado she clung to the parapet in a tolerable imitation of
a half-fainting condition and began to shriek hoarsely for
help.
There was really no need to shriek, for, attracted by her
scream and the resounding splash Charles had made on enter-
ing the water, a fair-sized crowd had already collected around
her and was increasing with extraordinary rapidity.
Out of the corner of her eye, at which she was dabbing
furiously with an absurdly small pocket-handkerchief, Mari-
gold observed with dismay that the interest displayed by the
spectators was, to say the least of it, casual.
One elderly female stood by her side, peering morbidly
at the river.
"Poor feller I" she said, with obvious relish. "Never see
'im no more."
Others struggled eagerly for favourable observation posts.
But with a sinking heart it dawned on Marigold that no one
was going to make any attempt at a rescue.
Supposing Charles had been unable to swim, and had
really fallen in I
Marigold suddenly flamed into passion at
the thought.
She swung round and faced the crowd.
"Isn't there a man among you ?" she cried. "Won't
someone go in after him ?"
"It's no good, miss," said the voice of the disreputable
female at her elbow. "Talk about men a shockin'
" They're
1

lot nowadays. Now if I was a man

Someone in the crowd laughed. Marigold burst into tears
real tears this time. She felt ashamed. A hundred thoughts
raced through her mind at once. What would Charles say ?
He wouldn't care, anyhow, if their scheme failed. He would
 A SPLASH OF PUBLICITY 413

just change his clothes, grin, and light his pipe. That would be
much worse than reproaches, she thought bitterly. Arid this
borrible crowd of people. How she longed to get away 1
Then she caught sight of a policeman's helmet and the rem-
nants of her courage vanished. What would happen now ?
Quite suddenly an inquiring voice, a strong, compelling
voice, pierced through the murmur. It was followed an
instant later by a tall, athletic man vigorously elbowing a
passage through the crowd. He reached Marigold's side just
as Charles was patiently reappearing on the 'surface of the
water, to all appearances a drowning man.

The stranger took in the situation at a glance, and, to the

accompaniment of vociferous cheers from the small boys and
half-hearted applause from the others, stepped on to the
parapet, glanced swiftly downwards, and, ignoring Marigold's
outstretched hand, dived to the rescue.
Marigold's mind subconsciously registered the fact that
he was well dressed and extremely good-looking. It suddenly
struck her that his clothes would be completely ruined, and
she felt horribly mean. But she could not disguise her relief
that something had turned up to save the situation.
"Exactly like one of them Orstralians, ain't he ?" the old
woman said, admiringly. "What I call a proper gentleman.
"
Now if
Her wheezy voice was drowned by the clamour of the
crowd as it was seen that the stranger had seked the struggling
figure in the water below and was steadily propelling him
towards the shore.
"My ! Ain't 'e a fine swimmer ?" cried one of the small
boys, shrilly, "And wiv 'is clothes on an' all 1"
As the figure in the water drew in closer, the crowd began
to make hastily for the steps which led down to the river's
bank, and Marigold hurried in the same direction.
Somebody cried : "Make wayyoung lidy I" And
for the
Marigold was was in the act of being
thrust forward as Charles
unceremoniously hauled up on to the river's bank. There was
now no lack of willing helpers, and the crowd surged round
the two dripping figures as if determined to miss none of the
excitement.
"Stand back there/' ordered the stranger, a dignified figure
in spite of his soaked garments. Even the two policemen who
414 MICHAEL JOSEPH
now pushed their way forward seemed to acknow-
officiously
ledge the ring of authority in his voice and began to push
the crowd back. The stranger proceeded to run an expert eye
over the recumbent Charles, who was loyally doing his best
to simulate complete exhaustion.
Marigold bent hastily over Charles. A glance satisfied her
that all was well. So far, she thought triumphantly, everything
had gone according to plan.
But where were the newspaper reporters ? Anxiously
she made a rapid survey of the seedy onlookers. Not one
looked in the least like a reporter. Once more panic seized
her.
Her hopes revived at a movement on the outskirts of the
crowd. The newcomer, a clean-shaven man in horn-rimmed
glasses,proved to be a doctor.
Marigold was getting desperate. She was just giving up
hope altogether when suddenly two men emerged from the
crowd and one produced a note-book from his hip-pocket.
The elder of the two men put out a restraining hand.
"Put it away, son/' he said. "There isn't a story here. It's
only another darn fool attempt at suicide. Let's get on."
Marigold nearly collapsed. Fate was against her. It really
was too bad.
The tall stranger, who had divested himself of his coat
and was methodically wringing water out of it, nodded to the
doctor and began to speak to her. He had a pleasant voice,
with a slightly American accent. She only dimly realized that
he was trying to assure her that Charles would be all right if
he were taken straight home, rubbed down with a dry towel,
and put to bed. She failed altogether to notice his puzzled
smile and his quick glanCe in the direction of her wedding-
ring.
Then, amazingly, the young man with the note-book
pointed suddenly in the direction of the group and whispered
something excitedly to his companion.
For a second the other looked incredulous. Then his
expression underwent a complete change. He strode hastily
forward.
"Excuse me, Mr. Brigadayne," he said, pleasantly.
The stranger swung round on his heel.
" he
"What the began. Then he laughed as if there
was something funny about it after all.
 A SPLASH OF PUBLICITY 415
Her absorbed by this strange development,
attention
Marigold became aware just in time that the doctor and
policemen between them were removing the faintly protest-
ing Charles in the direction of the road. Someone shouted
distantly for a taxi.
This would never do. She turned to the newspaper men.
"They're taking him" away," she cried. "I'm his wife.
Aren't you going to
Her voice died away. The two reporters, one on each side
of "Mr. Brigadayne", were scribbling away furiously, no longer
aware of her existence. Tears of mortification came into her
eyes.
It flashed upon her. Of course Mr. Brigadayne the
!

famous Hubert Brigadayne, known to millions of film "fans"

the whole world over as the hero of a thousand daring exploits
on the screen.
In that moment she hated Mr. Hubert Brigadayne with
an awful intensity. Why couldn't he have stayed in Cali-
fornia, or wherever it was that film stars performed, instead
of coming to spoil her carefully-laid plans like this ? As if
Hubert Brigadayne hadn't had enough publicity already It
!

was a disgusting trick to play on her. She determined to make

one last effort.
"Don't interrupt, miss, please," said one of the news-
paper men without looking up.
"Stop !" broke in the voice of Hubert Brigadayne, firmly.
"I won't answer any more questions. I want to talk to this
young lady. And I'm cold and wet, and want to be left alone."
The two journalists stepped back to avoid the sweep of his
wet-sleeved arm. Hubert Brigadayne seized Marigold by the
shoulder and hurried her forward in the direction of the
retreating crowd.

Before Marigold could recover from her surprise the cele-

brated film actor had steered her rapidly past the onlookers,
bundled her into a taxi which had drawn up beside the kerb,
dismissed the doctor and the policemen, asked her address,
given rapid instructions to the driver, got in beside her, and
slammed the door.
The sudden jerk of the starting taxicab precipitated Charles
on the floor. He sat up and regarded Marigold and the new-
comer with a whimsical smile.
 416 MICHAEL JOSEPH
"I'm infernally cold," he said. "Of all the ghastly
"
frosts He
broke off abruptly. "I mean, it was very
decent of you to jump in after me."
There was a long pause. Charles and his rescuer simul-
taneously began to shiver. The celebrated film actor stared
hard at Charles.
Marigold broke the silence.
"My husband, Charles," she said absently. "Mr. Hubert
Brigadayne."
"I guess we're going to have a nice long talk," said Mr.
Brigadayne, pleasantly. "But some dry clothes are indicated
first."
Half an hour later, Charles, in spite of vigorous protests,
was put to bed. Marigold and Brigadayne were sitting in front
of a cheerful fire in the studio, Brigadayne looking like an over-
grown schoolboy in an old tweed jacket and flannel trousers
belonging to Charles.
"A hot drink makes a whale of a difference, doesn't it ?"
smiled the film star, putting down his teacup. "It's given me
courage to ask you a question. Why did your husband fall
in the river ?"
Marigold hesitated and was lost. In a few breathless
sentences she told the truth.
Hubert Brigadayne, who had listened in sympathetic
silence, waved aside her contrite apology.
"I was glad to get back to my job," he said, with a stray
smile which indicated that his thoughts were elsewhere. "Now,
publicity's just a fine idea. You leave it to me. Before I go
I'd like to look over some of these pictures, if I may."
In the few minutes before his departure, Marigold, feeling,
as she told Charles afterwards, a very poor body of troops, did
her best to make the sincerity of her apologies evident. But
Hubert Brigadayne insisted on treating the whole thing as a
joke. He admired Charles's pictures, told her, with a twinkle
in his eye, to give the invalid hot bread and milk and keep him
between two blankets for twenty-four hours, and finally
departed, wearing Charles's incongruous garments, in a
still

hastily-summoned taxi.
"And that's that," said Marigold, ruefully.
But it wasn't.
Arrived safely at his hotel, which he discreetly entered by
the ba<;k way, Hubert Brigadayne hurriedly divested himself
 A SPLASH OF PUBLICITY 417
of his unfamiliar clothing, put on a flowered-silk dressing-
gown, and devoted energetic attention to the telephone
receiver in his bedroom. He put down the receiver with a
chuckle.
"I'm sorry, Maisie," he said enigmatically, to no one in
particular, "but I guess it's got to be done."

The following morning the fun began. When she first saw
the headlines Marigold whooped with j oy. Then for a moment
she thought it was a huge practical joke. Even Charles, look-
ing over Marigold's shoulder, dropped his pipe in astonish-
ment.
In large black type these were the headlines that met their
astounded eyes :

FAMOUS FILM STAR RESCUES YOUNG ARTIST

HUBERT BRIGADAYNE IN ENGLAND
SENSATIONAL DIVE INTO THAMES

Beneath, punctuating a long column of type, appeared

photographs of Hubert
" Brigadayne and Charles I
"Well, I'm began Charles.
"That photograph Marigold in the same instant.
!" cried
"He must have taken while
got the taxi,"
it I
But the real surprise was yet to come. They read eagerly
what the newspaper had to say about it all. After a graphic
description of the rescue and a brief reference to Hubert
Brigadayne's famous career, there followed an interview with
Hubert Brigadayne at his hotel :

". . . but the distinguished film actor refused to talk about

himself.
"
have always been keenly interested in art/ he declared.
'I

'This young artist is a discovery, and I claim the credit for it. I
have already bought three of his pictures and am confident that
true connoisseurs of art will follow suit. In fact, I am so impressed
by his work that I am losing no time in arranging for an exhibition
of his pictures, which will be held in the very near future.* "

"Holy smoke I" said Charles, eloquently.

The newspaper from Marigold's fingers.
slid She felt
that shewanted to put her head on Charles's shoulder and
laugh and cry together.
 418 MICHAEL JOSEPH
A sudden ring at the studio bell brought them sharply
back to earth.
Marigold opened the door. Two men ("I knew they were
reporters 1" declared Marigold, triumphantly, afterwards) and
a special messenger boy, carrying a bulky parcel, stood on the
doorstep.
She signed for the parcel and, while the two newspaper
men fired questions at Charles, opened it.
It contained Charles's trousers and tweed jacket, and a
letter.Marigold slit it open, and a cheque fell out.
"I hope you will forgive me/' she read, "but I really do
admire your husband's work, and these are the three pictures
I want, to begin with ." . .

There was only one sentence Marigold couldn't under-

stand. In fact, neither she nor Charles who is now so pros-
perous that Marigold is always scolding him about his pipe
has ever been able to understand it. This was the sentence :
"It's an ill wind that blows no one any good,"

But I think you ought to know what Hubert Brigadayne

meant.

Before sending his Thames-soaked suit to be cleaned for

Hubert Brigadayne, unlike some film stars, was a sensible
fellow he turned out the pockets. From one of them he drew
a letter, addressed to Mrs. Hubert Brigadayne, somewhere in
California, sealed and stamped, and ready to be posted.
But alas The muddy Thames had done its work.
!

He opened it slowly and re-read what he had written the

morning before. Most of it concerns nobody but Mrs. and
Mr. Hubert Brigadayne, but on the third page he had written :

"... and not a soul knows I am in London. I can't tell

you how delightful it is to be for once out of the lime-
light you know I detest so much. It's a real holiday, no
interviews, no publicity ." . .

"The joke's on me," he murmured, as he tore up the

letter and threw it into the fire.
 FRANK R. STOCKTON
Lord Edward and the Tree-man

Frank R. Stockton was one of the most popular American humorous

writers in the closing years of the last century, and there is a

pleasant mingling of fancy and sentiment in many of his tales.

Besides fodder Grange, from which the story that follows is taken,
his most successful work was The Lady and the Tiger.
 LORD EDWARD AND THE TREE-MAN
was winter at Rudder Grange. The season was the
IT same at other places, but that fact did not particularly
interest Euphemia and myself. It was winter with us, and we
were ready for it. That was the great point, and it made us
proud to think that we had not been taken unawares, notwith-
standing the many things that were to be thought of on a little
farm like ours.
It is true that we had always been prepared for winter,
wherever we had lived ; but this was a different case. In
other days it did not matter much whether we were ready or
not ; but our house, our cow, our poultry, and, indeed, our-
selves might have suffered there is no way of finding out
exactly how much if we had not made all possible prepara-
tions for the coming of cold weather.
But there was yet a great deal to be thought of and planned
out, although we were ready for winter. The next thing to
think of was spring.
We laid out the farm. We decided where we would have
wheat, corn, potatoes and oats. We would have a man by the
day to sow and reap. The intermediate processes I thought
I could attend to myself.
Everything was talked over, ciphered over, and freely
discussed by my wife and myself, except one matter, which I
planned and worked out alone, doing most of the necessary
calculations at the office, so as not to excite Euphemia's
curiosity.
I had determined to buy a horse. This would be one of the
most important events of our married life, and it demanded a
great deal of thought, which I gave it.
The horse was chosen for me by a friend. He was an excel-
lent beast (the horse), excelling, as my friend told me, in muscle
and wit. Nothing better than this could be said about a horse.
He was a sorrel animal, quite handsome, gentle enough for
Euphemia to drive, and not too high-minded to do a little
farm work if necessary. He was exactly the animal I needed.
421
422 FRANK R. STOCKTON
The carriage was not quite such a success. The horse
having cost a good deal more than I expected to pay, I found
that I could only afford a second-hand carriage. I bought a
good, serviceable vehicle, which would hold four persons if
necessary, and there was room enough to pack all sorts of
parcels and baskets. It was with great satisfaction that I

contemplated this feature of the carriage, which was a rather

rusty looking affair, although sound and strong enough.
The harness was new, and set off the horse admirably.
On the afternoon when my purchases were completed, I
did not come home by the train. I drove home in my own
carriage, drawn by my own horse The ten-miles' drive was
!

over a smooth road, and the sorrel travelled splendidly. If

I had been a line of kings a mile long, all in their chariots of

state, with gold and silver, and outriders, and music, and ban-
ners waving in the wind, I could not have been prouder than
when I drew up in front of my house.
There was a waggon-gate at one side of the front fence
which had never been used except by the man who brought
coal, and I got out and opened this, very quietly, so as not to
attract the attention of Euphemia. It was earlier than I usually
returned, and she would not be expecting me. I was then
about to lead the horse up a somewhat grass-grown carriage-
way to the front door, but I reflected that Euphemia might
be looking out of some of the windows and I had better drive
up. So I got in and drove very slowly to the door.
However, she heard the unaccustomed noise of wheels, and
looked out of the parlour window. She did not see me, but
immediately came around to the door. I hurried out of the
carriage so quickly that, not being familiar with the steps, I
barely escaped tripping.
When she opened the front door she was surprised to see
me the horse.
" standing by
Have you hired a carriage ? " she cried. " Are we going
"
to ride ?
" "
My dear," said I, as I took her by the hand, we are going
to ride. But I have not hired a carriage. I have bought one.
Do you see this horse ? He is ours our own horse " 1

If you could have seen the face that was turned up to me

all you other men in the world
you would have torn your hair
in despair.
Afterward she went around and around that horse : she
 LORD EDWARD AND THE TREE-MAN 423

patted his smooth sides ; she looked with admiration at his

strong, well-formed legs ; she stroked his head ; she smoothed
his mane; she was brimful of joy.
When I had brought the horse some water in a bucket
and what a pleasure it was to water one's own horse !

Euphemia rushed into the house and got her hat and cloak, and
we took a little drive.
I doubt any horse ever drew two happier people.
if

Euphemia little about the

said but carriage. That was a
necessary adjunct, and it was good enough for the present.
But the horse How nobly and with what vigour he pulled
!

us up the hills, and how carefully and strongly he held the

carriage back as we went down How easily he trotted over
!

the level road, caring nothing for the ten miles he had gone
that afternoon What a sensation of power it gave us to think
1

that all that strength and speed and endurance was ours, that
it would go where we wished, that it would wait for us as
long as we chose, that it was at our service day and night, that
it was a horse, and we owned it !

When we returned, Pomona saw us drive in she had not

known of our ride and when she heard the news she was as
wild with proud delight as anybody. She wanted to unharness
him, but this I could not allow. We did not wish to be selfish,
but after she had seen and heard what we thought was enough
for her, we were obliged to send her back to the kitchen for
the sake of the dinner.
Then we unharnessed him. I say we, for Euphemia stood
by, and I explained everything, for some day, she said, she
might want to do it herself. Then I led him into the stable.
How nobly he trod and how finely his hoofs sounded on the
1

stable floor I

There was hay in the mow, and I had brought a bag of oats
under the seat of the carriage.
" "
Isn't it just delightful/' said Euphemia, that we haven't
any man ? If we had a man, he would take the horse at the door,
and we should be deprived of all this. It wouldn't be half like
owning a horse."
In the morning I drove down to the station, Euphemia by

my She
side.drove back, and old John came up and attended
to the horse. This he was to do, for the present, for a small
stipend. In the afternoon Euphemia came down after me.
How I enjoyed those rides Before this I had thought it ever
I
424 FRANK R . STOCKTON
so much more pleasant and healthful to walk to and from the
station than to ride, but then I did not own a horse. At night
I attended to everything, Euphemia generally following me
about the stable with a lantern. When the days gfew longer
we would have delightful rides after dinner, and even now we
planned to have early breakfasts, and go to the station by the
longest possible way.
One day in the following spring, I was riding home from the
station with Euphemia we seldom took pleas ure-drives now,
we were so busy on the place and as we reached the house I
heard the dog barking savagely. He was loose in the little
orchard by the side of the house. As I drove in, Pomona
came running to the carriage.
"
Man up the tree " she shouted.
I

I helped Euphemia out, left the horse standing by the

door, and ran to the dog, followed by my wife and Pomona.
Sure enough, there was a man up the tree, and Lord Edward
was doing his best to get at him, springing wildly at the tree
and fairly shaking with rage. I looked up at the man. He was
a thoroughbred tramp, burly, dirty, generally unkempt ;
but, unlike most tramps, he looked very much frightened.
His position on a high crotch of an apple-tree was not alto-
gether comfortable, and although, for the present, it was safe,
the fellow seemed to have a wavering faith in the strength of
apple-tree branches, and the moment he saw me he earnestly
besought me to take that dog away and let him down.
I made no answer, but, turning to Pomona, I asked her what
this all meant.
" "
Why, sir, you I was in the kitchen bakin*
see/' said she,
pies, and must
this fellowhave got over the fence at the side
of the house, for the dog didn't see him, and the first thing I
know'd he was stickin' his head in the window, and he asked
me to give to eat. And when I said I'd see in
him somethin'
'
a minute if there was anything for him, he says to me : Gim-
me a piece of one of them pies * pies I'd just baked and was
c *
settin' to cool on the kitchen table No, sir/ says I, I'm
!

not goin' to cut one of them pies for you, or anyone like you/
* '
I'll come in and help myself/ He must
*
All right I says he.
have known there was no man about, and, comin' the way he
did, he hadn't seen the dog. So he came round to the kitchen
door, but I shot out before he got there and unchained Lord
Edward. I guess he saw the dog when he got to the door, and
 LORD EDWARD AND THE TREE-MAN 425
ai any rate he heard the chain clanking and he didn't go in,
but just put for the gate. But Lord Edward was after him so
quick that he hadn't no time to go to no gates. It was all he
could do to scoot up this tree, and if he'd been a millionth
part
of a minute later he'd a' been in another world by this time."
The man, who had not attempted to interrupt Pomona's
speech, now began again to implore me to let him down, while
Euphemia looked pitifully at him, and was about, I think, to
intercede with me in his favour, but my attention was drawn
off from her by the strange conduct of the
dog. Believing, I
suppose, that he might leave the tramp for a moment, now that
I had arrived, he had dashed
away to another tree, where he
was barking furiously, standing on his hind legs, and clawing
at the trunk I

" "
What's the matter over there ? I asked.
" " He's
Oh, that's the other fellow," said Pomona. no
harm." And then, as the tramp made a movement as if he
would try to come down and make a rush for safety during
the absence of the dog, she called out : "
" Here, boy ! here,
boy 1 and in an instant Lord Edward was again raging at his
post at the foot of the apple-tree, followed, as before, by
Euphemia and Pomona.
" " "
This one," said the latter, is a tree-man
"
I should think so," said I, as I
caught sight of a person
in grey trousers standing among the branches of a
cherry-
tree not very far from the kitchen door. The tree was not a

large one, and the branches were not strong enough to allow
him to sit down on them, although they supported him well
enough, as he stood close to the trunk, just out of reach of Lord
Edward.
"
This a very unpleasant position, sir," said he, when I
is
"I
reached the tree. simply came into your yard, on a matter
of business, and finding that raging beast attacking a person
in a tree, I had barely time to get up into this tree myself before
he dashed at me. Luckily I was out of his reach ; but I very
much fear I have lost some of my property."
"
No, he Pomona. " It was a big book he
hasn't," said
dropped. I picked it up and took it into the house. It's full
of pictures of pears and peaches and flowers. I've been
lookin' at it. That's how I knew what he was. And there was
no call for his gettin' up a tree. Lord Edward never would have
gone after him if he hadn't run as if he had guilt on his soul."
n*
426 FRANK R. STOCKTON
C
I suppose, then/' said I, addressing the individual in the
"
cherry-tree, that you came here to sell me some trees/'
" "
Yes, sir," said he quickly. Trees, shrubs, vines, ever-
greens everything suitable for a gentleman's country villa.
I can sell you something quite remarkable, sir, in the way of

cherry-trees French ones, just imported ; bear fruit three

times the size of anything that could be produced on a tree
like this. And pears fruit of the finest flavour and enormous
"
size
" "
I seen them in the book.
Yes," said Pomona. But
they must grow on a ground-vine. No tree couldn't hold
such pears as them."
Here Euphemia reproved Pomona's forwardness, and 1
invited the tree agent to get down out of the tree.
"
Thank you/' said he, " but not while that dog is loose.
If you will kindly chain him up, my
I will get book and show
you specimens of some of the finest small fruits in the world,
all
imported from the first nurseries
"
of Europe the Redgold
Amber Muscat grape the
" "
Oh, please let him down said Euphemia, her eyes
1

beginning to sparkle.
I slowly walked towards the tramp-tree, revolving various
matters in my mind. Wehad not spent much money on the
place during the winter, and we now had a small sum which
we intended to use for the advantage of the farm, but had not
yet decided what to do with it. It behoved me to be careful.
I told to run and get me the dog-chain, and I stood
Pomona
under the tree, listening as well as I could to the tree agent
talking to Euphemia, and paying no attention to the impas-
sioned entreaties of the tramp in the crotch above me. When
the chain was brought, I hooked one end of it in Lord Edward's
collar, and then I took a firm grasp of the other. Telling
Pomona to bring the tree agent's book from the house, I
called to that individual to get down from his tree. He
promptly obeyed, and taking the book from Pomona, began to
show the pictures to Euphemia.
You had better hurry, sir," I called out. " I can't hold this
"

dog very long." And, indeed, Lord Edward had made a run
toward the agent which jerked me very forcibly in his direction.
But a movement by the tramp had quickly brought the dog
back to his more-desired victim.
" If "
you will just tie up that dog, sir," said the agent, and
 LORD EDWARD AND THE TREE-MAN 427
come this way, I would like to show you the Meltinagua pear
dissolves in the mouth like snow, sir; trees will bear next
year/'
" "
Oh, come, look at the
Royal Sparkling Ruby grape 1
" "
cried Euphernia. It glows in the sun like a
" " gem 1

Yes," said the agent, and fills the air with fragrance
"
during the whole month of September .

" "
I tell you/' I shouted, I can't hold this dog another
minute The chain is cutting the skin off my hands. Run, sir,
!

"
run I'm to let go
" Run going "
I !

run cried Pomona.

" "
! 1
Fly for your life I

The agent now began to be frightened, and shut up his book.

" "
If you only could see the plates, sir, I'm sure
" "I
Are you ready ? cried, as the dog, excited by Pomona's
wild shouts, made
a bolt in his direction.
" "
Good
day, must if I said the agent, as he hurried
to the gate ; but there he stopped.
" "
There is nothing, sir/' he said, that would so improve
your place as a row of the Spitzenberg Sweet-scented Balsam
"
fir along this fence.
"
I'll sell
you three-year-old trees
"
He's loose I shouted, as I dropped the chain.
!

In a second the agent was on the other side of the gate.

Lord Edward made a dash towards him ; Dut, stopping
suddenly, flew back to the tree of the tramp.
"
If you should conclude, sir," said the tree agent, looking
" "
over the fence, to have a row of those firs along here
" "
My good sir," said I, there is no row of firs there now,
and the fence is not very high. My dog, as you see, is very
much excited, and I cannot answer for the consequences if he
takes it into his head to jump over/'
The tree agent turned and walked slowly away.
"
Now, look-a-here," cried the from the tree, in the
" tramp
voice of a very ill-used person, ain't you goin' to fasten up
"
that dog and let rne get down ?
I walked up close to the tree and addressed him.
" "
No," said I, I am not. When a man comes to my place,
bullies a young girl who was about to relieve his hunger, and
then boldly determines to enter my house and help himself
to my property, I don't propose to fasten up any dog that may
happen to be after him. If I had another dog, I'd let him loose
and give this faithful beast a rest. You can do as you please.
You can come down and have it out with the dog, or you can
428 FRANK R. STOCKTON
stay there until I have had my dinner. Then I will drive
up
down to the village and bring up the constable, and deliver
you into his hands. We
want no such fellows as you about."
With that, I unhooked the chain from Lord Edward and
walked off to put up the horse. The man shouted after me,
but I paid no attention. I did not feel in a good humour with
him.
Euphemia was much disturbed by the various occurrences
of the afternoon. She was sorry for the man in the tree ; she
was sorry that the agent for the Royal Ruby grape had been
obliged to go away ; and I had a good deal of trouble during
dinner to make her see things in the proper light. But I
succeeded at last.
I did not hurry through dinner, and when we had finished
I went to my work at the barn. Tramps are not generally
pressed for time, and Pomona had been told to give our
captive something to eat.
I was just locking the door of the carriage house when
Pomona came running to me to tell me that the tramp wanted
to see me about something very important just a minute, he
said. I put the key in my pocket and walked over to the tree.
It was now almost dark, but I could see that the dog, the tramp,
and the tree still kept their respective places.
" "
Look-a-here," said the individual in the crotch, you
don't know how dreadful oneasy these limbs gits after you've
been settin', up here as long as I have. And I don't want to
have nut-Kin* to do with no constables. I'll tell you what I'll
do : if you'll chain up that dog and let me go, I'll fix things so
that you'll not be troubled no more by no tramps."
"
How will you do that ? " I asked.
" "
Oh, never you mind," said he. I'll
give you my word
of honour I'll do it. There's a reg'lar understandin' among us
fellers, you know."
I considered the matter. The word of honour of a fellow
such as he was could not be worth much, but the merest chance
of getting rid of tramps should not be neglected. I went in
to talk to Euphemia about it, although I knew what she would
say. reasoned with myself as much as with her.
I
"
If we
put this one fellow in prison for a few weeks," I
"
said, the benefit is not very great. If we are freed from all
tramps for the season, the benefit is very great. Shall we try
"
for the greatest good ?
 LORD EDWARD AND THE TREE-MAN 429
" "
Certainly/' said Euphemia ; and his legs must be
dreadfully stiff/'
So I went out, and after a struggle of some minutes, I
chained Lord Edward to a post at a little distance from the
apple-tree. Whenhe was secure, the tramp descended nimbly
from his perch, notwithstanding his stiff legs, and hurried out
of the gate. He stopped to make no remarks over the fence.
With a wild howl of disappointed ambition, Lord Edward
threw himself after him. But the chain held.
A lane of moderate length led from our house to the main
road, and the next day, as we were riding home, I noticed on
the trunk of a large tree, which stood at the corner of the lane
and road, a curious mark. I drew up to see what it was, but
we could not make it out. It was a very rude device, cut
deeply into the tree, and somewhat resembled a square, a
circle, a triangle, and a cross, with some smaller marks beneath
it. I felt sure that our tramp had cut it, and that it had some

significance, which would be understood by the members of

his fraternity.
And it must have had, for no tramps came near us all that
summer. We were visited by a needy person now and then,
but by no member of the regular army of tramps.
One afternoon, that fall, I walked home, and at the corner
of the lane I saw a tramp looking up at the mark on the tree,
which was still quite distinct.
" "
What does that mean ? I said, stepping up to him.
"
How do I know ? " said the
man,
"
and what do you
want to know fur ? "
" "
Just out of curiosity," I said ; I have often noticed it.
I think you can tell me what it means, and if you will do so,
I'll
" give
you a dollar."
And keep mum about it ? " said the man.
"
Yes," I replied, taking out the dollar.
" All " "
right said the tramp.
I That sign means that the
man that lives up this lane is a mean, stingy cuss, with a wicked
dog, and it's no good to go there."
I handed him the dollar, and went away perfectly satisfied
with my reputation.
I wish here to make some mention of Euphemia's methods of
work in her chicken-yard. She kept a book, which she at first
called her "Fowl Record," but she afterwards changed the name
"
to Poultry Pegister." I never could thoroughly understand
430 FRANK R. STOCKTON
this book, although she has often explained every part of
itto me. She had pages for registering the age, description,
time of purchase or of birth, and subsequent performances of
every fowl in her yard. She had divisions of the book for
expenses, profits, probable losses, and positive losses ; she
noted the number of eggs put under each setting hen ; the
number of eggs cracked per day, the number spoiled, and
finally, number hatched. Each chick, on emerging from
the
its shell,was registered, and an account kept of its subsequent
life and adventures. There were frequent calculations regard-
ing the advantages of various methods of treatment, and there
were statements of the results of a great many experiments
"
something like this : Set Toppy and her sister Pinky,
2nd April, 187- ; Toppy with twelve eggs three Brahma, four
common, and five Leghorn ; Pinky with thirteen eggs (as
she weighs four ounces more than her sister), of which three
were Leghorn, five common, and five Brahma. During the
twenty-second and twenty-third of April (same year) Toppy
hatched out four Brahmas, two commons, and three Leghorns,
while her sister, on these days and the morning of the day
following, hatched two Leghorns, six commons, and only
one Brahma. Now, could Toppy, who had only three
Brahma eggs, and hatched out four of that breed, have ex-
changed eggs with her sister, thus making it possible for her
to hatch out six common chickens, when she only had five
eggs of that kind ? Or, did the eggs get mixed up in some
way before going into the possession of the hens. Look
into probabilities."
These probabilities must have puzzled Euphemia a great
deal, but they never disturbed her equanimity. She was
always as tranquil and good-humoured about her poultry-
yard as if every hen laid an egg every day, and a hen-chick was
hatched out of every egg.
For it may be remembered that the principle underlying
Euphemia's management of her poultry was what might be
" 5

designated as the cumulative hatch/ That is, she wished

every chicken hatched in her year to become the mother of a
brood of her own during the year, and every one of this
brood to raise another brood the next year, and so on, in a
kind of geometrical progression. The plan called for a great
many mother-fowls, and so Euphemia based her highest
hopes on a great annual preponderance of hens.
 LORD EDWARD AND THE TREE-MAN 431
We ate a good many young roosters that fall, for Euphemia
would not allow all the products of her yard to go to market,
and also a great many eggs and fowls were sold. She had not
contented herself with her original stock of poultry, but had
bought fowls during the winter, and she certainly had extra-
ordinary good luck, or else her extraordinary system worked
extraordinarily well.
 GEORGE AND WEEDON GROSSMITH
The Diary of a Nobody

The name of Grossmith is best known in its association with the

theatre, but the two brothers George and Weedon, the most

popular entertainers of their day, also collaborated in a number

of humorous books and stories, of which the Diary of a Nobody
was one of the most successful.
 THE DIARY OF A NOBODY

AFTER THE MANSION HOUSE BALL. CARRIE OFFENDED. GOWINO

ALSO OFFENDED. A PLEASANT PARTY AT THE GUMMING S*.
MR. FRANCHING, OF PECKHAM, VISITS US
8. I woke up with a most terrible headache.
MAY could scarcely see, and the back of my neck was as if
I
I had given it a crick. I thought first of sending for a doctor ;
but I did not think it necessary. When up, I felt faint, and
went to Brownish's, the chemist, who gave me a draught.
So bad at the office, had to get leave to come home. Went to
another chemist in the City, and I got a draught. Brownish's
dose seems to have made me worse ; have eaten nothing all
day. To make matters worse, Carrie, every time I spoke to
her, answered me sharply that is, when she answered at all
In the evening I felt very much worse again and said to her :

"
I do believe Fve been poisoned by the lobster mayonnaise at
" she
the Mansion House last night without
" simply replied,
;

taking her eyes from her sewing Champagne

: never did
"
agree with you." I felt irritated, and said What nonsense
:

you talk I had a and you know as well

and a
"only
; glass half,
as I do Before I could complete the sentence she bounced
out of the room. I sat over an hour waiting for her to return ;

but as she did not, I determined I would go to bed. I dis-

"
covered Carrie had gone to bed without even saying good
" me
night ; leaving to bar the scullery door and feed the cat,
1 shall certainly speak to her about this in the morning.

MAY 9. Still shaky, with black specks.

a little The
Blackfriars Bi-weekly News contains a long list of the guests
at the Mansion House Ball. Disappointed to find our names
omitted, though Farmerson's is in
plainly enough with M.L.L.
after it, whatever that may mean. More than vexed, because
we had ordered a dozen copies to send to our friends. Wrote
to the Blackfriars Bi-weekly News, pointing out their omission.
435
436 GEORGE AND WEE DON GROSSMITH
Carrie had commenced her breakfast when I entered the
parlour. I helped myself to a cup of tea, and I said, perfectly
"
calmly and quietly Carrie, I wish a little explanation of your
:

conduct last night."

" and I desire something more than
She replied, Indeed I

a little explanation of your conduct the night before."

"
I said, coolly Really, I don't understand you."
:
"
Carrie said sneeringly Probably not ; you were scarcely
:

in a condition to understand anything."

I was astounded at this insinuation and simply ejaculated :

" "
Caroline !

"
She said : Don't be theatrical, it has no effect on me.
Reserve that tone for your new friend, Mister Farmerson, the
ironmonger."
I was about to speak, when Carrie, in a temper such as I
have never seen her in before, told me to hold my tongue.
"
She said : Now Ym going to say something After profess- 1

ing to snub Mr. Farmerson, you permit him to snub you, in

my presence, and then accept his invitation to take a glass of
champagne with you, and you don't limit yourself to one glass.
You then offer this vulgar man, who made a bungle of repairing
our scraper, a seat in our cab on the way home. I say nothing
about his tearing my dress in getting in the cab, nor of treading
on Mrs. James's expensive fan, which you knocked out of
my hand, and for which he never even apologised ; but you
smoked all the way home without having the decency to ask
my permission. That is not all At the end of the journey,
1

although he did not offer you a farthing towards his share of

the cab, you asked him in. Fortunately, he was sober enough
to detect, from my manner, that his company was not desir-
able."
Goodness knows I felt humiliated enough at this ; but, to
make matters worse, Gowing entered the room, without
knocking, with two hats on his head and holding the garden
rake in his hand, with Carrie's fur tippet (which he had taken
off the downstairs hall-peg) round his neck, and announced
himself in a loud, coarse voice
"
His Royal Highness, the
:

Lord Mayor " He marched twice round the room like a

1

"
buffoon, and finding we took" no notice, said Hulloh : 1

what's up ? Lovers' quarrel, eh ?

"
There was silence for a moment, so I said quietly : " My
dear Gowing, I'm not very well, and not quite in the humour
 THE DIARY OF A NOBODY 437
for joking; especially when you enter the room without
knocking, an act which I fail to see the fun of."
" I'm
Gowing said :
very sorry, but I called for my stick,
which I thought you would have sent round." I handed him
his stick, which I remembered I had painted black with the
enamel paint, thinking to improve it. He looked at it for a
minute with a dazed expression and said " Who did this ? "
:
" "
I said :
Eh, did what ?
He said "
Did what ? Why, destroyed my stick
: It !

belonged to my poor uncle, and I value it more than anything

I have in the world I'll know who did it."
!

"
I said : I'm very sorry. I dare say it will come off. I
did it for the best."
"
Gowing Then all I can say is, it's a confounded
said :

liberty ; andwould add, you're a bigger fool than you look,

I

only thafs absolutely impossible."

MAY 12. Got a single copy of the Blackfriars

News. There was a short list of several names they had
omitted ; but the stupid people had mentioned our names as
"
Mr. and Mrs. C. Porter." Most annoying Wrote again !

and I took particular care to write our name in capital letters,

FOOTER, so that there should be no possible mistake this
time.

MAY Absolutely disgusted on opening the Blackfriars

1 6.

Bi-weekly Neivs of to-day, to find the following paragraph :

"
We have received two letters from Mr. and Mrs. Charles
Pewter, requesting us to announce the important fact that they
were at the Mansion House Ball." I tore up the paper and
threw it in the waste-paper basket. My time is far too valuable
to bother about such trifles.

MAY 21, The last week or ten days terribly dull, Carrie
being away Mrs. James's, at Sutton. Cummings also away.
at

Gowing, I presume, is still offended with me for black-

enamelling his stick without asking him.

MAY 22. Purchased a new stick mounted with silver,

which cost seven-and-sixpence (shall tell Carrie five shillings),
and sent it round with nice note to Gowing.
438 GEORGE AND WEEDON GROSSMITH
MAY 23. Received strange note from Gowing ; he said :
"
Offended ? not a bit^ tny boy. I thought you were offended
with me for losing my temper. Besides, I found, after all, it
was not my poor old uncle's stick you painted. It was only
bought at a tobacconist's. However, I am
a shilling thing I
much obliged to you for your handsome present all same."

MAY 24. Carrie back. Hoorah ! She looks wonderfully

well, except that the sun has caught her nose.

MAY 25. Carrie brought down some of my shirts and

advised me to take them to Trillip's round the corner. She
"
said : The fronts and cuffs are much frayed." I said without
"
a moment's hesitation : Ym frayed they are." Lori how we
roared. thought we should never stop laughing. As I
I

happened to be sitting next the driver going to town on the

" "
'bus, I told him my joke about the frayed shirts. I thought
he would have rolled off his seat. They laughed at the office
a good bit too over it.

MAY 26. Left the shirts to be repaired at Trillip's. I said

him " I'm He said, without a
to :
*fraid they are frayed"
"
smile : They're bound to do that, sir." Some people seem
to be quite destitute of a sense of humour.

JUNE i. The last week has been like old times, Carrie
being back, and Gowing and Curnmings calling every evening
nearly. Twice we sat out in the garden quite late. This
evening we were like a pack of children, and played " conse-
quences." It is a good game.
" "
JUNE 2.
Consequences again this evening. Not quite
so successful as last night; Gowing having several times
overstepped the limits of good taste.

JUNE 4. In the evening Carrie and I went round to Mr.

and Mrs. Cummings' to spend a quiet evening with them.
Gowing was there, also Mr. Stillbrook. It was" quiet but
pleasant. Mrs. Cummings sang five or six songs, No, Sir,"
"
and The Garden of Sleep," being best in my humble judg-
ment ; but what pleased me most was the duet she sang with
"
Carrie classical duet, too. I think it is called, I would
 THE DIARY OF A NOBODY 439
" was
that my love 1 It beautiful. If Carrie had been in better
voice, I don't think professionals could have sung it better.
After supper we made them sing it again. I never liked
Mr. Stillbrook since the walk that Sunday to the " Cow and
Hedge/' but I must say he sings comic-songs well. His song :

"
We don't Want the old men now," made us shriek with
laughter, especially the verse referring to Mr. Gladstone ;
but there was one verse I think he might have omitted, and I
said so, but Gowing thought it was the best of the lot.

JUNE 6. Trillip brought round the shirts and, to dis- my

gust, his charge for repairing was more than I gave for them
when new. I told him so, and he impertinently replied :
"
Well, they are better now than when they were new." I
"
paid him, and said it was a robbery. He said : If you wanted
your shirt-fronts made out of pauper-linen, such as is"used for
packing and book-binding, why didn't you say so ?

JUNE 7. A dreadful annoyance. Met Mr. Franching, who

lives at Peckham, and who a great swell in his way.
is I
ventured to ask him to come home to meat-tea, and take pot-
luck. I did not think he would accept such a humble invita-
tion ; but he did, saying, in a most friendly way, he would
" " "
rather peck with us than by himself. I said :

"
We had
better get into this blue 'bus." He replied : No blue-
bussing for me. I have had enough of the blues lately. I lost
* 9
a cool thou over the Copper Scare. Step in here."
We drove up home in style, in a hansom-cab, and I knocked
three times at the front door without getting an answer. I
saw Carrie, through the panels of ground-glass (with stars),
rushing upstairs. I told Mr. Franching to wait at the door
while I went round to the side. There I saw the grocer's boy
actually picking off the painton the door, which had formed
into blisters. No time to reprove him ; so went round and
effected an entrance through the kitchen window. I let in
Mr. Franching, and showed him into the drawing-room. I
went upstairs to Carrie, who was changing her dress, and told
her I had persuaded Mr. Franching to come home. She
"
replied : How can you do such a thing ? You know it's

Sarah's holiday, and there's not a thing in the house, the

cold mutton having turned with the hot weather."
Eventually Carrie, like a good creature as she is, slipped
440 GEORGE AND WEEDON GROSSMITH
down, washed up tke teacups, and laid the cloth, and I gave

Franching our views of Japan to look at while I ran round to

the butcher's to get three chops.

JULY 30. The miserable cold weather is either upsetting

me or Carrie, or both. We seem to break out into an argument
about absolutely nothing, and this unpleasant state of things

usually occurs at meal-times.

This morning, for some unaccountable reason, we were
talking about balloons, and we were as merry as possible ;
but the conversation drifted into family matters, during which
Carrie, without the slightest reason, referred in the most
uncomplimentary manner to my poor father's pecuniary
"
trouble. I retortedby saying that Pa, at all events, was a
gentleman/' whereupon Carrie burst out crying. I positively
could not eat any breakfast.
At the office I was sent for by Mr. Perkupp, who said he was
very sorry, but I should have to take my annual holidays from
next Saturday. Franching called at office and asked me to
dine at his club, "The Constitutional." Fearing disagree-
" "
ables at home after the tiff morning, I sent a telegram
this
to Carrie, telling her I was going out to dine and she was not
to sit up. Bought a little silver bangle for Carrie.

JULY 31. Carrie was very pleased with the bangle, which I
leftwith an affectionate note on her dressing-table last night
before going to bed. I told Carrie we should have to start
for our holiday next Saturday. She replied quite happily
that she did not mind, except that the weather was so bad, and
she feared that Miss Jibbons would not be able to get her a
seaside dress in time. I told Carrie that I thought the drab
one with pink bows looked quite good enough ; and Carrie
said she should not think of wearing it. I was about to discuss
the matter, when, remembering the argument yesterday,
resolved to hold my tongue.
I said to Carrie :
" I don't think we can do better than
*
Good old Broadstairs.' " Carrie not only, to my astonish-
ment, raised an objection to Broadstairs, for the first time ; but
"
begged me not to use the expression, Good old," but to
leave it to Mr. Stillbrook and other gentlemen of his type.
Hearing my 'bus pass the window, I was obliged to rush out
of the house without kissing Carrie as usual ; and I shouted
 THE DIARY OF A NOBODY 441
"
I leave it to you to decide." On returning in the
to her :

evening, Carrie said she thought as the time was so short she
had decided on Broadstairs, and had written to Mrs. Beck,
Harbour View Terrace, for apartments.

AUGUST i. Ordered a new pair of trousers at Edwards's,

and told them not to cut them so loose over the boot the ;

last pair being so loose and also tight at the knee, looked like a
sailor's, and I heard Pitt, that objectionable youth at the
" "
office, call out Hornpipe as I passed his desk. Carrie has
ordered of Miss Jibbons a pink Garibaldi and blue-serge skirt,
which I always think looks so pretty at the seaside. In the
evening she trimmed herself a little sailor-hat, while I read to
her the Exchange and Mart. We
had a good laugh over my
trying on the hat when she had finished it ; Carrie
saying it
looked so funny with my beard, and how the people would
have roared if I went on the stage like it.

AUGUST Mrs. Beck wrote to say we could have our

2.
usual rooms That's off our mind. Bought a
at Broadstairs.
coloured shirt and a pair of tan-coloured boots, which I see
many of the swell clerks wearing in the City, and hear are all
"
the go."

AUGUST 3. A
beautiful day. Looking forward to to-
morrow. Carrie bought a parasol about five feet long. I
"
told her it was ridiculous. She said : Mrs. James, of Sutton,
"
has one twice as long ; so the matter dropped. I bought a

capital hat for hot weather at the seaside. I don't know what
it is called, but it is the
shape of the helmet worn in India,
only made of straw. Got three new ties, two coloured hand-
kerchiefs, and a pair of navy-blue socks at Pope Brothers.

Spent the evening packing. Carrie told me not to forget to

borrow Mr. Higgsworth's telescope, Which he always lends
me, knowing I know how to take care of it. Sent Sarah out
for While everything was seeming so bright, the last post
it.
"
brought us a letter from Mrs. Beck, saying I have just let:

all my house to one party, and am sorry I must take back my

words, and am sorry you must find other apartments ; but

Mrs. Womming, next door, will be pleased to accommodate
you, but she cannot take you before Monday, as her rooms afe
engaged Bank Holiday week/*
442 GEORGE AND WEEDON GROSSMITH

II

THE UNEXPECTED ARRIVAL HOME OF OUR SON,

WILLIE LUPIN POOTER

AUGUST 4. The
post brought a nice letter from our
first

dear son Willie, acknowledging a trifling present which

Carrie sent him, the day before yesterday being his twentieth
birthday. To our utter amazement he turned up himself in
the afternoon, having journeyed all the way from Oldham.
He said he had got leave from the bank, and as Monday was a
holiday he thought he would give us a little surprise.

AUGUST 5, SUNDAY. We have not seen Willie since last

Christmas, and are pleased to notice what a fine young man he
has grown. One would scarcely believe he was Carrie's son.
He looks more like a younger brother. I rather disapprove
of his wearing a check suit on a Sunday, and I think he ought
to have gone to church this morning ; but he said he was tired
after yesterday's journey, so I refrained from any remark on the

subject. We had a bottle of port for dinner, and drank dear

Willie's health.
He said : " Oh, by-the-by, did I tell you I've cut my first
* * '
name, William,' and taken the second name Lupin ? In
fact, I'm only known at Oldham as Lupin Footer/ If you were
tf

*
to
c
Willie me there, they wouldn't know what you meant."
Of Lupin being a purely family name, Carrie was
course,
delighted, and began by giving a long history of the Lupins.
I ventured to say that I thought William a nice simple name,
and reminded him he was christened after his Uncle William,
who was much respected in the City. Willie, in a manner
which I did not much care for, said sneeringly " Oh, I know :

all about that Good old Bill " and helped himself to a third
!

glass of port.
"
Carrie objected strongly to my saying Good old," but she
made no remark when Willie used the double adjective. I
said nothing, but looked at her, which meant more. I said :
"
Mydear Willie, I hope you are happy with your colleagues
"
at theBank." He replied : Lupin, if you please ; and with
respect to the Bank, there's not a clerk who is a gentleman,
and the * boss ' is a cad." I felt so shocked, I could say
nothing, and my instinct told me there was something wrong.
 THE DIARY OF A NOBODY 443
AUGUST 6, BANK HOLIDAY. As there was no sign of Lupin
moving at nine o'clock, I knocked at his door, and said we
usually breakfasted at half-past eight, and asked how long
would he be ? Lupin replied that he had had a lively time of it,
first with the train
shaking the house all night, and then with
the sun streaming in through the window in his eyes, and
giving him a cracking headache. Carrie came up and asked
if he would like some breakfast sent up, and he said he
could do with a cup of tea, and didn't want anything to
eat.

Lupin not having come down, I went up" again at half-past

one, and said we dined at two he said he would be there/'
;

He never came down till a quarter to three. I said " We :

have not seen much of you, and you will have to return by the
5.30 train ; therefore you will have to leave in an hour, unless
"
you go by the midnight mail." He said Look here,
:

Guv'nor, it's no use beating about the bush. Fve tendered my

resignation at the Bank."
For a moment I could not speak. When my speech came
"
again, I said How dare you, sir ? How dare you take such
:

a serious step without consulting me ? Don't answer me, sir 1

you will sit down immediately, and write a note at my

dictation, withdrawing your resignation and amply apologising
for your thoughtlessness."
when he replied with a loud guffaw
" Imagine my dismay
:

It's no use. If you want the good old truth, I've got the
"
chuck !

AUGUST Mr. Perkupp has given me leave to postpone

7.
my holiday week, as we could not get the room. This will
a
give us an opportunity of trying to find an appointment for
Willie before we go. The ambition of my life would be to
get him into Mr. Perkupp's firm.

AUGUST ii. Although it is a serious matter having our boy

Lupin on our hands, still it is satisfactory to know he was asked
to resign from the Bank simply because "he took no interest
in his work, and always arrived an hour (sometimes two hours)
late." We can all start off on Monday to Broadstairs with a

light heart. This will take my mind off the worry of the last
few days, which have been wasted over a useless correspon-
dence with the manager of the Bank at Oldham.
444 GEORGE AND WE ED ON GROSSMITH
AUGUST 13. Hurrah! at Broadstairs. Very nice apart-
ments near the station. On the cliffs they would have been
double the price. The landlady had a nice five-o'clock dinner
and tea ready, which we all enjoyed, though Lupin seemed
fastidious because there happened to be a fly in the butter.
It was very wet in the evening, for which I was thankful, as
it was a
good excuse for going to bed early. Lupin said he
would sit up and read a bit.

AUGUST 14. I was a little annoyed to find Lupin, instead

of reading last night, had gone to a common sort of enter-
tainment, given at the Assembly Rooms. I expressed my
opinion that such performances were unworthy of respectable
" '
patronage ; but he replied Oh, it was only for one night
:

only/ I had a fit of the blues come on, and thought I would
go to see Polly Presswell, England's Particular Spark." I
told him I was proud to say I had never heard of her. Carrie
"
said :Do let the boy alone. He's quite old enough to take
care of himself,and won't forget he's a gentleman. Remem-
ber, you were young once yourself." Rained all day hard, but
Lupin would go out.
AUGUST Cleared up a bit, so we all took the train to
15.
Margate," and the first person we met on the jetty was Go wing.
I said Hulloh I thought you had gone to Barmouth with
: I

"
your Birmingham friends ? He said " Yes, but young
:

Peter Lawrence was so ill, they postponed their visit, so I

came down here. You know the Cummings* are here too ? "
"
Carrie said : Oh, that will be delightful 1 We
must have
some evenings together and have games."
"
I introduced Lupin, saying You will be pleased to find
:

" "
we have our dear boy at home Gowing said"
1 How's:

that ? You don't mean to say he's left the Bank ?

I changed the subject quickly, and thereby avoided any of
those awkward questions which Gowing always has a knack
of asking.

AUGUST 1 6. Lupin positively refused to walk down the

Parade with me because I was wearing my new straw helmet
with my frock-coat. I don't know what the boy is coming to.

AUGUST 17. Lupin not falling in with our views, Carrie

and I went for a sail. It was a relief to be with her alone ; for
 THE DIARY OF A NOBODY 445
when Lupin irritates me, she always sides with him. On our
" c
return, he said Oh,
:
youVe been on the Shilling Emetic,*
have you? You'll come to six-pennorth on the * Liver
'
Jerker next." I presume he meant a tricycle, but I affected
not to understand him.

AUGUST 1 8. Go wing and Cummings walked over to

arrange an evening atIt being wet, Gowing asked
Margate.
Cummings to
accompany him to the hotel and have a game of
billiards, knowing I never play, and in fact disapprove of the
game. Cummings said he must hasten back to Margate ;
"
whereupon Lupin, to my horror, said I'll
give you a game,
:

Gowing a hundred up. A walk round the cloth will give me

"
an appetite for dinner/' I said Perhaps Mister Gowing
:

does not care to play with boys." Gowing surprised me by

"
saying : Oh yes, I do, if they play well/' and they walked off
together.

AUGUST SUNDAY. I was about to read Lupin a sermon

19,
on smoking (which he indulges in violently) and billiards, but
he put on his hat and walked out. Carrie then read me a long
sermon on the palpable inadvisability of treating Lupin as if
he were a mere child. I felt she was somewhat right, so in the
evening I offered him a He seemed pleased, but, after
" cigar. a
a few whiffs, said This is:
good old tup'ny try one of
mine," and he handed me a cigar as long as it was strong,
which is saying a good deal.

AUGUST 20. I am glad our last day at the seaside was fine,

though clouded overhead. We went over to Cummings' (at

Margate) in the evening, and as it was cold, we stayed in and
played games ; Gowing, as usual, overstepping the mark.
He suggested we should play " Cutlets," a game we never
heard of. He sat on a chair, and asked Carrie to sit on his lap,
an invitation which dear Carrie rightly declined.
After some species of wrangling, I sat on Gowing's knees
and Carrie sat on the edge of mine. Lupin sat on the edge of
Carrie's lap, then Cummings on Lupin's, and Mrs. Cummings
on her husband's. We looked very ridiculous, and laughed
a good deal.

Gowing then said: "Are you a believer in the Great

Mogul ?
"
We had to answer all together " Yes : oh, yes 1"
446 GEORGE AND WEEDON GROSSMITH
"
(three times). Gowing said : So am I," and suddenly got
up. The result of this stupid joke was that we all fell on the
ground, and poor Carrie banged her head against the corner
of the fender. Mrs. Cummings put some vinegar on ; but
through this we missed the last train, and had to drive back
to Broadstairs, which cost me seven-and-sixpence.
 BARRY PAIN
The Refugees

Barry Pain started his journalistic career at Cambridge, where he

was one of the best-known contributors to The Granta. In later
years hewrote a great many humorous books and stories, of which
and Mrs. Murphy are particularly notable for their shrewd
observation of cockney character.
 THE REFUGEES

the eastern border of Herne Bay, standing some way

ON
story a
back from the
small
sea, there is
red-brick detached
or was at the period of this
house, with the name
St. Andrew's painted on the gate. Here Miss Bird, formerly a

governess, but preferring to reign over three sets of furnished

apartments rather than to serve in splendour and be snubbed
by the butler, did very well for herself. She never took in
families where there were babies ; she kept two servants in
the winter, and added a boy for boots and knives during the
season ; she objected to vulgarity, and she charged high. Her
lodgers saw her but once a day, in the morning, when she
appeared, rather well modelled on a lady housekeeper that she
had known in her last situation, received the programme for
" " "
the day, arid never said Sir or Ma'am." The rest of the
day she worked in dim, remote regions ; there she looked a
little like a cook, and which was more important cooked
like one. The house was plainly and very comfortably furn-
ished, and free from the vice of over-decoration so common in
the worst sea-side lodging-houses and the better London
"
drawing-rooms. Not in one of the sitting-rooms did
"
The
Soul's Awakening," or An English Merry-making in the
Olden Time," exercise its familiar influence ; not in one of the
bedrooms did a minatory text shout at you from above the
washstand. It was a decent house, where the silver and the
glass were bright, and the linen was good and clean. It had
an excellent bathroom, and no sea- view at all.
As a rule, in the winter Miss Bird came up to the surface
and breathed. She would live a life of cultured leisure, occupy-
ing the ground-floor set herself, reading the best of
"
the novels
from Tupper's Library, occasionally strolling on the front,"
if the weather permitted. She loved to sit in the chief seats
at any entertainment that might be given at the Town Hall.
She even had a few discreet friendships, though she drew the
449 P
45O BARRY PAIN
line,very properly, at anyone who kept lodgings. But she
never touched the cottage piano in her drawing-room set ; in
her governess days she had taught the piano. When spring
came, and brought visitors with it, like a black satin mermaid
who had seen enough of the upper world, she sank gracefully
into the basement again.
This year, for reasons which will shortly appear, Miss Bird
subsided early in February. At ten in the morning a young
man in blue serge stood in the ground-floor sitting-room, with
his back to the fire, watching the tall and severe maid remove
the breakfast tilings while he rolled his cigarette. The critics
said he had a beautiful soul ; he also had a misfit face, good in
parts, and dark hair, and his name was Julius Poynt. At the
moment, he seemed a little out of temper.
"
I heard the footstep above, of course/* he was saying,
"
but I never dreamed that the drawing-room floor could be
let. I supposed the rooms were being cleaned, or aired, or

something of that kind. At Herne Bay, in February, I did

think I could have the place to myself. What else did I come
"
for'? Is it an old lady ?
"
"
No, sir. Very young ; she has her maid with her."
Sings, of course."
"
Sometimes, sir."
"
Well, there'sno help for it. The set at the top is not
"
comfortable, but must change. I must ask Miss Bird
I
"
The austere maid nearly smiled. I fear, sir," she said,
" that the other has been let since
set is also let Christmas.
Miss Bird has never known such a thing in her experience
before."
" "
Another lady ?
"
No, sir ; a gentleman has them, a Mr. Hercwood."
" "
Well," said Julius Poynt in despair, I must speak to Miss
Bird about it."
Miss Bird, usually a women of resource, could only say she
was sorry. If Mr. Poynt had told her, when he wired to
engage the rooms, that he did not want them if the rest of the
house was occupied, she would have informed him. It was
very unusual for any visitors to be at Herne Bay at that time
of the year. Probably all the other lodgings in the place were
vacant, if Mr. Poynt would like But Mr. Poynt did not
like ; he supposed he must make the best of it He only
hoped he would see nothing of the other lodgers.
 THE REFUGEES 451
He acquiesced so readily, from an appreciation of the hope-
lessness of trying to make his desire for complete withdrawal
from his kind in any way intelligible to an ex-governeSs mind,
which is for the ordinary purposes of life the most common-

place mind in the world after that of a minor poet. Besides,

he had some regard for his own comfort, and if he left Miss
Bird he knew that he might search long before he found a
landlady to suit him so well.
On the afternoon before^ on his arrival, he had made a
survey of Herne Bay and had found it just what he wanted.
He had gone out towards the Reculvers, along the cliffs. A
succession of heavy rains, snow, hard frost, thaw, and frost
again, had made the scene almost romantic in its desolation.
Down the brown crumbling cliffs were frozen cascades, rigid
and greenish-yellow. Amid the bushes at the base were ice-
bound pools ; and yet never had one boy with one brick come
to profane the solitude and test the skating prospects. The
whole scene vividly recalled the Swiss Alps to one who, like
Julius Poynt, had never been there. Behind him a deserted
bungalow complained from many frantic notice-boards to
deaf and bitter winds. Julius turned and walked back along
the sea-front, and still he found everywhere the same note.
The white bathing-machines huddled together as if for warmth.
Here the shutterless restaurant of Signor Chiantino made no
secret that it was closed until ttie season. Julius put up his
single eye-glass (every Julius wears a single eye-glass), and
looked through into the interior. There were the glass jars
for sweetmeats, empty now ; in the middle of the shop, where
once the festive holiday-maker took his lemon-water ice, the
cbonized, cane-seated chairs were piled together symmetrically.
Chiantino had gone to the sunny south ; he would return with
the swallows maybe ; in a restaurant-keeper that would not be
inappropriate. One or two of the better hotels made a brave
show of spread tables near the ground-floor windows, but
no one sat there. The mitre-folded napkins and ruby wine-
glasses seemed almost pathetic to Julius in their useless
declaration of what it was impossible to believe ;
it was like

some poor devil shamming a competence to avoid charity, A

sportsman on the beach, lonely and local, was missing the sea-
birds, and then sending an annoyed and perplexed retriever
into the water to fetch them out. The new pier was open,
and there was no one on it. Further west, the old and ruined
452 BARRY PAIN
pier was being slowly eaten by the icy sea, under a grey snow-
laden sky.
The whole scene had been just what Julius Poynt wanted ;
he had congratulated himself on having chosen this place for
his escape. This atmosphere of death-in-life was peculiarly
suited to his needs. He was flying from something that has
been the ruin of many even of the greatest, something of which
he was afraid. He wished to cut himself off from the sight and
hearing of all old friends, or even acquaintances, for a while ;
he was afraid to talk to any of them. He had been placed in a
position where he no longer trusted himself; he was going
through an ordeal that for many men that he knew had proved
too hard. The atmosphere of Herne Bay helped him. You
will understand that, as soon as you know what the ordeal
was. And if he did fail in some small respect, there would be
no witnesses of it. People in Herne Bay either did not read that
part of their daily paper, or would consider the name a coinci-
dence. Poynt was not an outrageously uncommon name, and
he had suppressed the Julius ; Miss Bird only had the initial.
And now there were people staying in the house who
might be thrown in his way. He could dodge the girl all right,
but there was nothing to stop that fool of a man from thinking
it a friendly act to
scrape acquaintance with him. Poynt
could almost imagine him saying that it seemed absurd that
they should both sit in solitude every night, seeing that they
lived in the same house. Then, sooner or later, would come
"
the question : I wonder, by the way, if you are related to the
"
Julius Poynt who It would be hateful.

Many persons of a nervous temperament find, when an-

noyed, a great difficulty in keeping still in one place. Poynt
had a nervous temperament. He put on his hat and went out.
Once more he walked towards the Reculvers, but this time he
went along the beach. The tide was far out. I wish pow that
I had not said that, because you may expect that tide to come
in and cut him off ; and it did not do that.
It was necessary for him to get control over his own
thoughts.
There was one subject that haunted him ; and that subject he
was not to think about. Laboriously he turned his mind to
some work that he had planned for the future, meditating and
recasting. At that moment a tam-o'-shanter hit him in the
face.
 THE REFUGEES 453

II

LOOKING upward, he saw on the edge of the cliff a young

lady without a hat. The tam-o'-shanter had a feather in
it; there was a strong wind blowing. He made deductions,
and the young girl proved them to be correct by calling to
him.
"
I'm so sorry. That's mine ; the wind blew it off. Would
you mind keeping it a moment while I climb down ? "
" "
Don't come down," he called. I'll
bring it up to you."
The cliff was low, and presented no difficulties. In a minute
he was standing by her side, and wishing that he dared put
up his eye-glass in order to see her better. She did not seem
to be more than twenty ; she had an air of vitality and great
self-confidence ; she was pretty, and the cold wind had obliged
her with a most charming colour.
"
Thank you so much. I am sorry to have given you the
trouble. And indeed, that is not the only apology I owe
you."
" It was no trouble at all. I'm afraid I don't understand the
second apology."
"
Only that I'm sorry that my rooms are over yours, Mr.
Poynt, since that annoys you so much. But it's not all my
fault ; I came first."
" "
How on earth he began.
"
She smiled wistfully. It's quite simple. You talked to
Anna, Miss Bird's servant ; Anna talked to my maid, Waters ;
Waters talked to me. And But I need not say that now."
" I'm distressed that what I said was
repeated to you. Give
me at least a chance to explain. May I walk a few steps with
you ? It is too cold for standing still. All that I said reflected
not on you, but me. I do not wish to bore you with more
of my private affairs than I can help, but at present I am well
distrusting my own weakness in the circumstances in which
I am placed. Frankly, I wanted to hide myself until I felt I
had recovered my nerve and rny sense of proportion. Other
men have gone through what I am going through, and made
no fuss at all. I despise my weakness, but at least I recognise
it. I don't know if you understand."
"
Not in the least. It would be less interesting if I did.
But of course you were bound to be interesting,"
454 BARRY PAIN
" You don't know who I am ?
"
he asked with sudden
terror.
"
No ; I only know your name, and that you have come to
Herne Bay in the depth of winter. the latter reason
It is for
that I know you must be interesting not in yourself, by
if
virtue of your circumstances. It could not possibly happen
otherwise ; it is impossible to come here in the winter, when
the town is dead and the sea is cold, for a commonplace
reason."
" He
"Then you paused.
"
Certainly ; was no commonplace reason that brought
it

and keeps me here. Nor is it so with Mr. Herewood, the man

whose rooms you wanted so as not to hear me singing over-
head. But I must riot keep you ; you want to go and hide."
"
I shall not believe you understand and forgive, Miss ah,
I don't know your name."
"
You may read it it's not pretty enough to say." She
;

gave him her card. It bore the name Miss Jane Smith. He
put up his eye-glass to read the card, and did not drop it again.
Yes, she was most abominably beautiful, and he felt more than
ever anxious to be forgiven.
"
I shall not believe you understand," he resumed, and she

interrupted him.
"
But I don't understand, and have said so. It does not
matter, because you may explain, perhaps, later. At least Mr.
Herewood did, and I don't suppose that your motives for
secrecy can be as strong as his. You may come a little farther, if
that's what you were going to ask. Shall I tell you about Mr.
Herewood ? "
"
Do, please," said Julius, who so far had taken no interest
in the second-floor man, and now was beginning to dislike
him.
"
He is very tall, and has a very broad chest, and looks like
a Viking. You ought to see him ; but we shan't this morning,
because I have shut him up in his rooms."
" "
Shut him up ?
"
Yes, that's what it comes to. I left my little terrier Vixen
asleep on the mat outside my door, and he dare not come past
her. Much less dare he ring and ask to have her moved for
him. So we shan't see him. The reason which brings him
here is magnificent, and I wish I could tell you it. Can you
"
keep a secret ?
 THE REFUGEES 455
"
Certainly/'
" Are "
" you a man with many prejudices ?
few."
" Singularly
Then I will tell you. Mr. Herewood's a criminal steeped
in crime. You can have no conception of the things he's done.
If the police knew he was here, they would be down on him in
"
a moment ; and he says it would be a lifer. Isn't it nice ?
"
Nice ? It's perfectly appalling Really, Miss Smith, ought
I

"
you to
"
Oh, it's all right. He's not here on business now. He's
resting. Besides, he's a very educated man ; he says that
they have to be in his profession nowadays. His conversation
is perfectly enthralling ; he has so many stories to tell of
dark deeds in which he has been the leader. He likes burglary
best, and says that the revolver is the burglar's best friend.
But he can make counterfeit coin as well."
" "
I'll remember that," said in case he looks in and
Poynt,
asks me to oblige him with change."
"
You would be quite safe," said Miss Smith. " When he's
resting he never does anything professional. The other day we
went into Canterbury by omnibus, and he pointed out to me a
big old house, where he knows there is any amount of silver
plate. He said it was only a one-man job, and that he could
clear it all out any night ; but that he did not dream of touching
it while he was
resting."
" "
should
It's queer," said Julius, that a desperado
like that
be nervous with dogs."
"
With cows too ; he gets over a gate until they are past
when he meets them in the road. Oh, yes And he wouldn't
1

climb up the cliff, as you did ; I had to go down to him. I

"
thought
She broke off abruptly, walked a little quicker, and looked
annoyed with herself. At the same time, there was a flicker of
checked humour in her eye. There was a moment's silence,
and then Julius asked drily :

" And when was it that Mr. Herewood wouldn't climb the
cliff?"
"
Never mind. Well, it was the other time that my tam-o'-
shanter blew off."
" "
Oh 1

Again a short silence, and then Miss Smith spoke with some
"
impetuosity. I know what you think, of course. You think
456 BARRY PAIN
two things, one right and one wrong. You are right in believ*
ing that I took the only way to make his acquaintance and
yours intentionally. But you are wrong as to my motive. I can
only tell you and it is perfectly true that I should have been
just as eager to make
the acquaintance if you had both been
women. I wish you had, for then I should not have had to
throw myself open to a misconstruction that would never have
occurred to the mind of a woman if she had been a man. It is
not for nothing that one takes lodgings in Herne Bay in Feb-
ruary ; it means romance somewhere. I have been wearied
with commonplace all my days, but when I tell you that I
thirst for romance, I do not want you to think that I am hunting
a vulgar flirtation like a shop-girl on her Sunday out. I loathe
any conventional unconventionality."
Julius Poynt assured her that he had not thought any of the
things that, as a matter of fact, he had thought. He could
hardly have done less.
" "
I may add," she said, that I was glad to gather from your
rather enigmatic explanations, that you are here seeking refuge
from some affair of the heart, and that, therefore, you will be
as little disposed as I am to to stupidity. I like to talk to

people who out of the groove ; that's the

are even a little

whole explanation. As for your story, I don't want to be

curious. Whether you tell it to me or not will depend
"
entirely She broke off suddenly.
"
Entirely on myself," said Julius, finishing the sentence for
her.
"
Not at all. It will entirely depend on me. I thought I

ought to warn you of that. Thanks for saving my tam-o'-

shanter ; I am not rich, and could not have afforded to lose it.
Good-bye."
She turned away, and went skimming down the slope of the
cliff. Julius wondered whether he, or she, or Herewood, or all

of them, were mad. He was particularly perplexed by her

astonishing and needless allusion to her poverty in her last
sentence. And he did not believe in the poverty either.

Ill

ON the following morning, after breakfast, Miss Bird entered

the sitting-room occupied by Miss Jane Smith, and discussed
the question of luncheon and dinner with her, Miss Bird
 THE REFUGEES 457
providing the knowledge and Miss Smith the enthusiasm.
When that was arranged, Miss Smith said :
"I
should be gkd if you would sit down for a moment, Miss
Bird. I want to ask your advice/'
Miss Bird seemed surprised, and sat down.
" I want to ask "
you/' Miss Smith continued, if there would
be any impropriety in my asking Mr. Herewood and Mr.
Poynt
to take tea with me here this afternoon."
Miss Bird did not hesitate. " To my mind there would be
the appearance of.it. You perhaps think me too strict ? "
" Not in the
least. I only ask you, since I believe
you to be
a lady of great tact. If you will help me to devise some means
by which I can have this little tea-party without that appear-
ance. There must be conditions which, if
they were strictly
observed, would put things all right/'
If you wish to please a man, let him believe that
you think
him unusually courageous ; if you wish to please a woman, say
that she has tact ; if you want to flatter a schoolmaster, tell
him he isvery sarcastic, which will probably be untrue.
It pleased Miss Bird to be accused of tact. She at once took
an interest in the projected festivity. After thought, she
pro-
duced the following conditions :

1. That the tea shall

begin at five and conclude at six
precisely.
2. That atno time shall Miss Smith be in the room alone
with either of the two gentlemen, Waters
being instructed
so to regulate her presence in the sitting-room as to avoid
this.

3. That no round games of any kind shall be played. (Miss

Bird was particularly strong on this condition, and
apparently
had reminiscences ; she seemed rather surprised that no
opposition was offered.)
4. That Miss Bird's maid, Anna, shall be instructed to enter
the room three times during the hour without knocking, and
at irregular intervals ; and that, to prevent the
appearance of
espionage, she shall, on the first occasion, ask if
anything more
is required, and on the second make the and on the
up fire,
third bring in a letter.
Under those conditions Miss Bird held that the tea could be
given with her entire approval, and without the least risk of
compromise.
Downstairs Julius sat back in his easy chair, with the
458 BARRY PAIN
morning paper unread upon his knee, smoking a cigarette, and
deep in thought. He was thinking about Miss Smith. He had
been thinking a good deal about Miss Smith ; so much so that
he noted with pleasure that his thoughts no longer ran on the
subject which he had come to Herne Bay to escape. Even the
out-of-season air of depression had not done as much to bring
his mind to the state in which he would have it as his meeting
with this pretty girl, who had such strange ways. And that she
should ever touch in conversation on what he wished to forget
was impossible ; for she had said plainly thai she did not know
who he was. Her guess that it was some disappointment in
love which had brought him there was utterly wrong. He was
unpleasantly conscious that he had not shown to advantage in
talking to her ; she had taken him by surprise, and he had been
awkward enough to take her up in the wrong light and let her
think that he had a bad opinion of her. He meant to redeem
himself, if he had a chance.
At that moment Waters knocked and entered. She handed
him a note. " From Miss Smith/' she said. " I was to wait for
an answer."
The note ran as follows :

"DEAR MR. POYNT,

"
I am anxious that you and Mr. Herewood should
meet. I am asking you both to take tea with me to-day at five
o'clock. It would be land of you if you can spare an hour.
"
Very truly yours,
"
JANE SMITH."

Julius Poynt accepted. He would have much preferred not

to meet Herewood, but he did wish to meet Jane Smith again,
and see her from a new point of view in her own rooms.
At five o'clock punctually, he entered Miss Smith's sitting-
room. Waters was arranging cups on a little table at the side ;
a terrier barked at him tentatively, but gave it up on finding
that Poynt liked dogs. Miss Smith rose from her chair by the
fire, and welcomed him. She looked very young to be a hostess,
and she seemed grave. The room was full of flowers ; Poynt
had noticed the boxes of the Mentone florist in the hall that
morning. He also noticed that the cottage piano, by the
maker whose name is seen only in lodging-houses, had given
place to a short Grand by a maker who does not require my
 THE REFUGEES 459
advertisement. He recalled that Miss Smith had told him that
the loss of a tam-o'-shanter, price eighteenpence in die shops,
would be a serious matter to her.
"I won't come down for half an hour,"
hope Mr. Herewood
"I
he was saying, want all that time for apologies. I have
never more wanted to behave nicely, and I have been rude.
I should have been delighted to appear sympathetic and quick
to understand, and I have been stupid. No, stupidity is not
half as bad as the mean acuteness that I was vulgar enough to
show the other afternoon. To think that I stood there with
my mouth shut and let you justify yourself, which was as
much as to say that you required justification 1 I don't deserve
any" tea, nor cake, nor anything."
"
Not
justification," she said meditatively. Call it
explana-
tion if you like."
" But neither did
you need explanation. You are you. That
is enough gloriously enough."
Considering that this was only the second time that he had
met Miss Smith, and that Waters was arranging cups in the
room at the time, I consider that he spoke extravagantly. I
hope Miss Smith thought so too ; I am sure Waters did.
" You must
forget all that I said about singing," he went on.
" "
Why should I ?
" Because
you have turned out Miss Bird's box of jingle
and have got that. Because I swear you are a musician. Because
you sing folk-songs, and"I adore them."
Miss Smith laughed. I had not meant to give up singing

altogether, but only to arrange so as not to disturb you. What

folk-songs ? How
did you know ? I do, of course. That is a
volume of them on the piano desk now. Tell me."
" The charm of all
folk-songs is alike, whatever their
nationality. Scratch the civilised, and you find the barbarian
in his primitiveness. We
are all barbarian at heart, though
we are wise enough to keep the rules and regulations of the
civilised. In the folk-song we sing what we would love to do
or feel, if we had not learned the indiscretion of it. Sometimes
it is a girl who sings that her brown boy has stolen a horse ;

and she does not go on to whimper about the shame he has

brought on his family, or the terrors of the police court. Or
it is a man who has lost money and love and everything ; what

does it matter, for his country has suffered a shameful defeat ?

Or the girl, again, has
stolen out to meet her lover while her
460 BARRY PAIN
mother sleeps ; you can smell the pine-woods and see the full
moon rise :
Why, I cannot hear a
the gipsy will master her.
folk-song inLondon without wanting to dash my silk hat on
the ground and trample on it."
" "
Well," said Miss Smith gravely, so long as it is your
own hat, you know."
" "
Hats," he said with meaning, are expensive."
"I Miss
"
that I hear Mr. Herewood on
think," said Smith,
thestairs. You can take the dog out, Waters."
The step on the stairs was a heavy one, and when Mr.
Herewood entered Poynt could see that this was a big man.
He was six feet three, broad and erect. His hair was longer
than should have been, and he wore a fair beard. He had a
it

scarlet tie and the pattern of his tweed suit was aggressive.
His voice was a rich deep bass. But his eye was timid, and
he had come with a biscuit in one hand to propitiate the dog.
He looked .like a Viking, but a Viking with a conscience. He
looked like a nervous lion.
When he had greeted Miss Smith and had been introduced
to Poynt, he settled himself massively in a comfortable chair
and turned to Poynt again.
" "
I understand," said the deep voice, from Miss Smith,
that she has told you what career I follow, and why I am at

present in retirement. That, I am sure, equivalent to saying

is

that I can rely on your discretion absolutely."

Poynt gave the assurance.
" "
I am
greatly obliged to you," said Herewood, My pro-
fession has been one into which I have been driven by the
absolute colourlessness of modern life, rather than by necessity.
Probably give away more
I than I gain by it. But that makes
no difference in the eyes of the law. If you take a purse from
the pocket of some wealthy lady and give the contents to
some poor woman who is in need of bread, you are still guilty
in the eyes of the law,"
"
That is so, I believe," said Poynt drily.
? "
At this moment I am wanted for what is considered a
serious offence by prejudiced people. If I am captured, that is
the end. I shall never be allowed to regain my liberty again.
But if by remaining quietly here out the patience
I can tire
of the police, it is my intention to give up burglary altogether,
and seek a commission in the Spanish Army. You speak
"
Spanish perhaps ?
 THE REFUGEES 461
"
No," said Poynt shortly.
"
Nor I," added Miss Smith.
" It is a beautiful
language," said Herewood thoughtfully.
"
I have not wanted to make any weak apology for my way of
life ; but there are so many sorts of burglar, and misunder-

standings so easily arise."

" I am "
sure," said Miss Smith, if I may speak for Mr.

Poynt as well as myself, that we quite see that in your burg-

laries there is something of the old chivalry. It is the easier
for us to understand, because we have both felt that colour-
lessness to which you allude. Only just now Mr. Poynt
was saying something of the same kind. And now, Mr. Here-
wood, it would be kind of you if you would give us some
account of the exploit which has brought you here in
hiding."
"
With pleasure," said Herewood, putting down his cup.

IV
THE door had just opened softly, but Herewood did not
notice it. He began in his fruity bass :

" "
In the whole course of a life spent in crime
Here he stopped short because Anna, who had just entered,
interrupted him by asking Miss Smith if she required anything
further, as per contract with Miss Bird, He then began again :

" In the whole course of a life

spent in crime, I can remember
nothing to compare with this last incident in my career. The
marvel is that I am here to tell the story. It was a burglary
at Fulham, and as the swag promised to be rich, and the whole

operation was one of extreme delicacy, I undertook it single-

handed. Had it been a simpler matter, I should have probably
sent a couple of my men with instructions, and not troubled to
do the rough work myself."
"
When you send men like that, what do they get ? " asked
Miss Smith.
" Ten
per cent on the net takings is the usual thing. They
are content with that. The house in this instance was an old-
fashioned house, standing in the very middle of about a third
of an acre of garden, at a corner where two streets crossed.
The garden was square, and surrounded by high walls. The
two walls which formed the angle bordered by the two streets
462 BARRY PAIN
were patrolled perpetually from dusk till dawn by a policeman
in the employ of Mansford, the owner, who lived there. The
other two walls could not be approached without going
through a vast number of other gardens and backyards.
Mansford was a curious old fellow ; he had been a great travel-
ler, and had made a speciality of pearls. In fact, he had spent the

great part of a considerable fortune on pearls, and was said

to have the finest black pearl in Europe. It was also said
that his precautions against burglary were something extra-
ordinary. I tried to get further information ; I particularly
wanted to know where the pearls were kept at night. I sent
two of my cleverest men down for that purpose. One of them
tried to work the servants ; but they were all dead honest, and
wouldn't talk at all. The other went about among the trades-
people in the district, and the only piece of information that he
could bring me back nearly made me give up the whole thing ;
he had heard that Mansford kept some kind of a wild beast.
Nobody seemed to know what it was exactly, but one man had
complained of the noise it made at night when the moon was
bright, and had said that he would have made a row about it
but that Mansford was such a good customer. However,
nothing venture nothing have. I made out my plan of cam-
paign.
"
I determined to make approach from the street. If I
my
had tried from the other side I should have had to go through,
or over, a dozen different private premises ; that would have
meant a dozen different chances of being caught. As it was,
I had only to fear the policeman guarding the walls next to
the street ; and I soon found a way by which I could easily get
over the walls, without a chance of the policeman discovering
me. There was a row of elms in the garden against the walls.
They had been pollarded, but not very closely, and had
sprouted again well ; they overhung the pavement. I had also
noticed that two evenings in the week loaded hay-carts came in
from the country, and passed down one of those streets. I had
only to put on my equipment, and wait for the cart on one of
those nights."
"
What was your equipment ? " asked Miss Smith.
"
I had a machine for safes my own
invention in my
breast-pocket, with a pair of wire nippers, a box of silent
matches, and a piece of curved wire with which I could give an
account of most locks that were ever made. In another pocket
 THE REFUGEES 463
I had a small bottle of treacle and a sheet of brown paper.
Finally, in my
hip-pocket I had a loaded revolver, the burglar's
best friend."
" No extra cartridges ? " asked Poynt.
" No use," said Herewood, with an indulgent smile. "
When
it reaches the point that revolvers become necessary, the
burglar never gets a chance to re-load."
"
I see," said Poynt humbly.
" Isn't it horrible and nice 1
"
said Miss Smith.
Anna entered, made up the fire, and withdrew
Just then
again. Herewood resumed :

"
Well, one night about nine I swung myself up on to the
tail of the hay-cart unseen, climbed up the trusses, and waited
we approached the house. Then I got into one of the trees,
till

which I could now easily reach. The policeman was imme-

diately underneath me, but he noticed nothing. People will
look in front of them, or down, or left, or right, without any
special motive. But ninety-nine people in a hundred never
look up, unless for some particular purpose. You may have
remarked that. As soon as the policeman had turned the
corner, I let myself down from the tree into the garden. I had
no intention of beginning until the house was quiet for the
night, but I thought I had better look round to see if I could
get any useful information. I got a good deal ; the whole place
was a mass of traps, alarms, and spring-guns. As no one was
about I moved round, snipping wires and taking care to keep
on the grass, for a step on gravel makes as decided a sound as
a gun. By the time all the lights in the house had been out
half an hour I was ready to start. I found a likely window,
spread the treacle over the brown paper, put that on one pane,
and then smashed it with my fist. Of course, as the broken
glass stuck to the paper there was no sound. That enabled me
to get my arm through and cut the alarm wires ; there were no
less than three of these. I had expected it, as the window was
not shuttered or barred. I soon slipped in through the window,
went to the dining-room and started work on the safe. It was
a poor safe, and I had it open inside five minutes ; it contained
a few pounds in gold, and nothing else. I was sorry for this,
because it meant that the old man took the pearls up to bed
with him at night ; and that meant there would be trouble
before I should be able to get away. I knew he would not let
them go without making a fight for it ; and I felt pretty sure
464 BARRY PAIN
he would have some dodge up there by which he could com-
municate with the police outside. However, I had started and
I had to go on. I struck a match that would burn for two
minutes, and crossed the hall to the front staircase. I didn't
like the look of the first step ; I bent down, and tried it gently
with one finger. It was so arranged that if I had trodden on
it, it would have swung round and struck a gong concealed
beneath it. It was a nice little trick, and I was glad to see it
because it showed me that Iwas on the right track for the
pearls. I found the and
fifth sixth stairs provided with a
similar dodge ; the rest were solid. After that I went very
carefully. At the top of the stairs I entered a long and narrow
passage ; as I was going along this, I suddenly saw that the
floor was up just in front of my foot. A deep pit yawned
before me. I sprang back just in time, but in doing so I made
a good deal of noise ; I heard Mansford moving in his room,
and I thought I was done for. In a moment he was out in the
passage, in his dressing-gown and slippers, with a skull cap on,
grinning like a monkey. He held his candle high. I had my
revolver in my hand now, but I never shoot until I must.
* *
Say your prayers/ the old ruffian said, for you will be
*
dead in a minute. Here, Lena !

"
Out from another room slunk a full-grown tigress. The
old man just pointed at me, and the brute began to slink
towards me, rubbing against one wall of the passage. There
was I with this pit before me, of no great breadth but terribly
deep, and beyond that a tigress coming nearer and nearer,
getting ready to spring, urged on by its master. The time had
come ; I was too near the pearls to go back. I fired at the brute
and missed. It slunk back growling, then came on again,
and twice more I missed the old man was waving his candle
;

about to spoil my aim. But the fourth time I wounded her, and
immediately she sprang for me. As she sprang, I fired once
more and she dropped like a stone down the pit. Mans-
ford rushed back to his room, as I guessed, to get his revolver.
I jumped across the pit, and went after him ; I could hear
servants moving, and I knew the police might be expected any
moment now, but I meant to have my pearls. I found an
electric-light switch just inside the door, and switched the light
on. Now I could see better what I was doing.
"
The old man had got his revolver pointed at me ; but
before he could do any damage I shot him in the hand, and he
 THE REFUGEES 465

dropped it. He then rushed towards the head of the bed ; that
gave me my clue. He kept the pearls under his pillow, then. It
was all I could do to keep him away from that bed without
actually killing him. However, with a couple of shots I
managed to hold him off while I thrust one hand under the
pillow and drew out a canvas bag. By that time the stairs and
passage were full of servants and police, and I knew it was
hopeless to try to get back that way. I flung up the window,
let myself down by one hand, and then took my chance and

dropped. I dropped right in the arms of a policeman standing

in the street under the window."
Here Anna entered with a letter for Miss Smith as per
contract. Miss Smith seemed impatient at the interruption.
" "
Pray go on/' she said. This letter is nothing of impor-
tance/'
"
There was a short struggle/* Herewood went on, " and
then I managed to free myself. I had thrown him to the
ground but he was up in a minute, blew his whistle, and came
;

after me. There are as plucky men in that division as you will
find anywhere in the Force. I fired twice over his head I did
;

not want to touch him, but only to keep him back. But he still
came on, and now he had two more coming up behind him. I
had no choice ; I had to drop him, and I did. I only trust that
the wound was not serious, for he was a brave man. The
rest of the story is soon told. I hid between two piles
of woodblocks where the road was up, until the pursuit
had gone by. And then, worn out, I went home to sleep.
On the following morning I took the first train to Herne
Bay."
"
Thank you so much," said Miss Smith, with ecstatic eyes.
"
How wonderful it all is And how insipid ordinary life must
1

seem to you after that adventure Tell me, what did you do
I
"
with the pearls ?
"
The less important specimens will be sold gradually. I
have an agent who does that sort of thing. The best specimens
will go, after mydeath, to the British Museum."
The little clock on the mantelpiece here gave the preliminary
grunt which signified that in another minute it would strike the
hour. Miss Smith rose from her chair.
On the last stroke of six the two men found themselves out-
side her door. Poynt touched Herewood on the shoulder, and
Herewood jumped ; he was certainly a nervous man. " Come
466 B A R R r PAIN
"
and have a smoke downstairs, won't you ? said Poynt
genially.
Herewood thanked him, and assented, Poynt put up his eye-

glass, and there was a flash of triumph in it. He had his

"
excitement well under control. Here we are," he said,
opening the door of his sitting-room.

V
" "
WHAT kind of revolver do you use in these expeditions ?
asked Poynt casually, as he unfastened the wire on a soda-
water bottle.
" An
ordinary six-chambered revolver. Mine's quite an old
one ; but it shoots straight, and that's the great point. It
belonged to Charles Peace of famous memory, and I got it from
a friend of his." Herewood lay back in his chair, diligently
sucking a cigarette, and appeared happy and pleased with him-
"
self. This is really quite exceptional for me," he said, as he
raised his glass to his lips.
"
Poynt took the chair on the other side of the fire. Not
many old houses with gardens all round them left in Fulham
now," he said meditatively.
"
few, very few," the deep bass voice assented.
" Very
Mr. Herewood," said Poynt, his eye-glass "
flashing, you
fired five times at the tigress, three times at Mansford, and
three times at the policeman. Eleven shots with six cartridges
is
good. Also, while I am on the subject, there was a garden
allround the house. But when you dropped from the first-floor
window you dropped not into the garden, but into the street.
That is even better. I might mention other points, but these
"
are enough. Have you any explanation ?
Herewood took a long drink and cleared his throat. He then
" If
said, not without dignity :
you were not deceived, I cannot
see what you have to grumble at."
"
I might tell you that I have good cause to resent an attempt
to deceive me, whether it was successful or not. But I prefer
to remind you that I was not the only person present, and that
the other person was most distinctly deceived. Take another
cigarette."
"
Thanks, I will. Has Miss Smith given you any right to
"
speak on her behalf?
 THE REFUGEES 467
"
That has nothing to do with it. If you see anybody being
swindled, you do not want any special authority from them to
warn them of it."
"
Good heavens You don't mean that you would tell Miss
1

Smith?"
"
Why not ? You come swaggering here, making yourself
out to be so much worse than anybody else, and the whole
thing is a fraud. Why do you pretend to vices which you do
not possess ? It's hypocritical ; and it's done to make a noble-
hearted girl think better of you. You with a tigress You I

with a bag of pearls 1 You attitudinising with a halo of crime

on your head How dare you call yourself a criminal ? How
!

dare you say that the police are after you ? I accuse you of
absolute innocence. That's what's the matter with you. And
I'll
prove my words ; I know a house in Herne Bay where the
morning's milk is left on the doorstep in a can at seven every
day. If you are what you pretend to be, go and sneak that
milk. Will you ? Yes, or no."
"
I should prefer not to," said the abashed Viking.
"
Come along. You may take your patent revolver and one
cartridge with you; that will be enough to kill a peck -of
policemen and any tigresses that there may happen to be about.
You can get your agent to sell the can, and send the milk to
the British Museum after your death."
"
Do not be bitter. It is true that I have been very eager to
win the respect and admiration of Miss Smith, and that for
that reason I have been led into some inaccuracies. But
further than that I can never go. Suppose I were her accepted
suitor, sooner or later the truth would come out that I was
not the blackguard I had pretended to be. She would never
forgive me. You have nothing to fear from my rivalry. Let
me remain here, and do not tell Miss Smith. If you only knew
my story, you would make allowances for me ; I am sure of
it."
" Your allusion to
rivalry would seem to show that you mis-
understand my attitude in this matter altogether. If I interfere,
it is because I know the mischief that an imitation criminal

may do to a girl who, like Miss Smith, is devoted to folk-

songs. If you tell me your story, how am I to believe
it?"
" be able to check from
Many of the facts you will in-

dependent sources."
468 BARRY PAIN
"
Proceed then, but be more brief than you were when
recounting your burglariousness."
"
Briefly, then, I am not what I seem. I am a Clerk in Holy
Orders, and Curate of an Evangelical Church in a northern
manufacturing town. My name is Ralph Herewood, and I am
a B.A. of Oxford. I am compelled to take my holiday at the
time most convenient to my vicar, and this year he directed me
to take it in February. For two years before that I had no
holiday at all."
"
"
Well ?
"
I own that when you accused me of being innocent, there
was some slight truth in the charge. Think what it means to
be a good example for a little over two years without one
holiday. I was not allowed to dance a pastime of which I
am fond. I was not allowed to play whist a game that I
enjoy and understand. I was not allowed to drink one glass
of wine a beverage to which, in moderation, I am partial.
Every little action was watched and criticised. The fierce
light which beats on a throne is a glow-worm to the illumina-
tion which a provincial parish of some enthusiasm throws on
the doings of the curate. When at last my holiday came, I
said to myself, I must have change, and change of manner of
life more than of scene, if I am to preserve my health and

sanity."
"
Reasonable enough," said Poynt.
"
I have a brother in Australia, whose figure is the same as
mine. When he wants clothes I order them here, try them
on, and sent them out to him. In this way I was able to procure
lay clothes for myself without exciting the least suspicion in
the parish. It was my plan to come to London, and live a life

which, though not characterised by excess, would be as differ-

ent as possible from that which, for so long, the narrowness of
my" parishioners had forced on me."
"
Then why the devil didn't you ?
"
Many of my parishioners are men of business, and are
compelled to be frequently in London. Suppose they saw
me in these clothes 1 Worse yet, suppose they saw me coming
out of a theatre 1 There was too much risk. But who ever
"
comes to Herne Bay in February ?
"
At the same time," said Poynt, " it hardly seems to me to
be the place for a man who wanted to be a bit of a dog for a
change."
 THE REFUGEES
" after all, a question of proportion* I can
Being a dog is,
assure you that I read novels as much as I like, smoke when I
like, have had some pleasant conversations with Miss -Smith
(whom you must admit to be a lady of great attractions), and
have had my half-bottle of claret every day and no heel-taps*"
"
I have no objection to your being a dog on those lines, or
even on somewhat broader lines. But why did you deceive
Miss Smith ? Why did you become that much more objection-
"
able animal, a sheep in wolf's clothing ?
"I "
hardly know/' said the wretched Viking. Her tam-
o'-shanter blew off, and I rescued it. She was very grateful.
It appears that she is not wealthy, and has to limit her expendi-
ture on clothes severely. We got into conversation, and she
said something about the romance of crime, showing that she
could appreciate it. I dropped a hint or two designed to give
myself a little interest for her. She took up the hints quicker
than I should have expected, said' that she knew that one did
not come to Herne Bay in the winter for nothing, and made
guesses as to what I was. I allowed her to think that the
guesses were correct. You may think I v/as wrong, but if you
could only have seen the look of pleasure on her face I think
you would have forgiven me. She has few pleasures, I fear."
" Have "
you anything more to say ?
"I think not."
Julius Poynt finished his whisky and soda, and paced the
room in thought and in silence.
" "
Well," he said at it was my intention to call Miss
last,
Smith's attention to the fact that you fired eleven shots with a
six-chambered revolver without reloading, and that the garden
of that house obliged you by moving away and making room
for the street
; I should then have left her to take any action
which she thought proper."
" "
Oh, not that not that pleaded Herewood.
!

" It is more from

pity than anything else that, to some
extent, I alter my decision. I will say nothing to her at all,

provided that you yourself will inform her in any way you
like that you have no claim to the reputation that you have
usurped, a reputation that many worse men than yourself
have given time and suffering to obtain. You must dare to
say frankly that you never thieved at all."
"
>

May I say that I confined myself to the manufacture of

"
counterfeit coin ?
470 BARRY PAIN
"
No, no. You must wrestle with your pride, and give up
the whole tiling."
" "
It "shall be done. Is there any other condition ?
" You must
leave Herne Bay by the first train to-morrow
morning,"
" I should have done so in
any case ; after the humiliating
confession that you force from me, I could not wish to stay."
"Go to London," said Poynt, not unkindly. "The
chances are a million to one that you would not be recognised,
even if any of your parishioners met you. Clothes make a
great difference."
" London for a broken man, one whose
What is there in
virtues have found him out, who has lost a proud position
"
and, for all you know, something dearer still ?
"
In any case, you said yourself, you could not have married
Miss Smith, Do you wish to remain here and break her
"
heart ?
" "
That," said Herewood, is well put."
"
And I can give you a pass to the stalls at the Empress's
Theatre for to-morrow night."
"
Now you're talking. You should have said that before.
I will go to London."
"
Hand that card in at the box-office, and they will look
after you. Good-bye."
Herewood rose and walked to the door. Here with one
hand on the handle, he turned, making an impressive figure.
He cleared his throat, and said with considerable dignity :

"
You are hard and cold. It is your turn to exult now, but
who knows whether my turn may not come next ? There is a
weak spot in your armour why is it that you are at Herne
;

Bay in the winter ? I may yet be able to answer that question.

You have shown little mercy expect little. I shall never
:

marry Miss Smith ; my own senseless folly, your power over

me in consequence, and the fact that I happen to be engaged to
another girl, alike combine to prevent it. But do not think
that you are sure to succeed where Ralph Herewood has
failed. Good-bye."
He swept from the room, but returned again almost
immediately.
" "
I say," he said, they have left that brute of a terrier
on the landing again. Would you mind holding him while I
"
get past ?
 THE REFUGEES 471
"
Withpleasure/' said Poynt.
When Poynt returned to his room, he remained for some
time deep in thought. He had done a rash thing in bestowing
that pass on Herewood. It might be, of course, that Herewood
would never notice that the serious comedy, Irene, was by
Julius Poynt. Though all London was ringing with nothing
else, though allusions to Irene and the author were certainly
to be found in every periodical issued, though its reception
had been the most astonishing scene of wild enthusiasm that
had been witnessed in a London theatre for the last twenty
years, it was possible that the provincial might succeed in
not knowing what everybody else knew. Even if he did
find out, gorgeous in a rough way though his imagination
was, it might never occur to him that here was the motive for
Poynt's visit to Herne Bay.
To take a success gracefully requires a great deal of practice,
and Poynt had had none. He dreaded that a foolish smile
under congratulation might stamp him as weak he dreaded
;

that a more reserved manner might be accounted as evidence

of a swelled head. He dreaded that success might lead him
into extravagance in living or carelessness in his work. His
nerves were upset by success ; he had suffered more than he
had enjoyed from it he had the instinct of decent people at
;

times of emotion to hide themselves. Herne Bay had promised

a salutary depression.
But Miss Smith had banished the thing from his mind
altogether.

VI
THE departure of the Rev. Ralph Herewood for London took
place early on the following morning. He left behind him a
letter for Miss Smith. Miss Bird was annoyed with him.
Anna was so disgusted with what she had overheard of his
story that she could not bring herself to thank him for the
five shillings that he slipped into her hand. It was raining.
The cab-horse was lame in its off foreleg. Everything seemed
to be against him. Can it be wondered at that his thoughts
turned to revenge ?
Later in the morning Julius Poynt, sitting at his table and
writing, heard a burst of music from the piano upstairs. He
recognised it as the symphony of a well-known folk-song, a
47* BARRY PAIN
folk-song so surcharged with primitive instinct that if it haii
not been a folk-song, it would have been almost improper.
Then came a pause, a modulation into a different key, and an
exercise intended to give flexibility to the voice rather than
pleasure to the hearer.
What (he asked himself) did this mean ? Had she forgotten
for a moment that his room was underneath ? Or had she
meant to please him by singing the folk-song, and then been
driven by coyness to deviate into the exercise ? He was in-
clined to the latter view until that and other exercises had
gone on for thirty minutes ; then he did not feel so sure
about it.

The rain ceased and the sun shone

; the wind blew gently
from the west. The change in
the temperature had been great
the last twenty-four hours. Presently Miss Smith passed his
windows ; she held two circulating library books in her hand.
Julius gave her a timed four-minutes' start by his watch, and
then put on his cap and went in the same direction. He felt
that every minute was wasted until she was assured of his
adoration. In the bright lexicon of Julius Poynt there was no
such word as prematurity. A
little later, at the door of the

circulating library, he was asking Miss Smith if he might carry

her books home for her.
" "I
Thanks very much," she said. wish you would. I
was going the other way myself."
To his experienced eye it looked as if she were trying to get
" "
rid of him. Let me," he pleaded, come with you. I have
something to say."
Her air of confidence and independence had gone ; she
"
smiled nervously. I am afraid of you," she said.
"
Afraid of me? Why?"
"
You have already guessed one secret ; I had a note from
Mr. Herewood this morning. He could not fly from his past.
The conscientious curacy that he thought lay safely buried in a
northern manufacturing town has risen up against him. Why
did I ever seek romance, and forsake the steady security of the
commonplace ? Why did I come to Herne Bay in the winter
that hotbed of Machiavellian intrigue, in which I already feel
myself too weak to hold my own ? But the other day I thought
that I had guessed your secret, or that I had but to wait to
learn it to-day
; how wrong my estimate of you was, and
I see

iny principal terror is that you may learn my secret too."

 THE REFUGEES 473
"
Even if I have learnt it
already, you have nothing to fear.
"
Shall we take this path ?
" "
Yes, yes. You know it already ?
" "
Miss Smith," he said quietly, you "are an heiress."
She turned her head away from him. Oh, you are hard
"
you are brutal she murmured.
!

"
No. I call a plain thing by a plain name ; that is all."
" "
It is true," she said. My poor mother was like it before
me. It is in the blood."
"
I say again that you have nothing to fear from me. When
I stripped the disguise of dashing brigandage from Herewood,
and left him shivering in the white surplice of a stainless life ;
when I took, so to speak, the gilt off his gingerbread, then I
was actuated by far other motives than those which move me
now."
"
If knew my story," she said.
" you only
Tell to me ; I long to hear it."
it
"
I aman orphan, but not as other orphans. Before I was
twelve years old I had read enough story books for the young
to realise that. Other orphans wept continually ; I wept
seldom, if ever. It is impossible to feel poignantly the loss of

people whom you have never known, and I had no sort of

recollection of my parents. Other orphans were habitually
ill-treated by their guardians, especially by the jealous wife of
the guardian who favoured her own children and had no love
for the little stranger who had been thrust on her. Other
orphans looked in the glass and wept because they were not
beautiful, though they generally picked up the trick of it later
on. Other orphans spent whole days in the old library, and
learned Latin and Greek without a tutor. What pathos, what
romance, seemed to cling to every other orphan that had ever
lived except myself I was not at all like that. My uncle and
1

guardian, the Archdeacon of Bunchester, and his wife, were

uniformly kind to me, perhaps even excessively indulgent ;
they had no children of their own. Beauty is no sort of a treat
to one who, like myself, has always been beautiful ; I once
"
thought of cutting off my eyelashes
"
Don't say that, even in jest," Poynt interrupted her, breath-
less with emotion.
"
It is true. I did not do it, but I thought about it, in order
that I might be able to enjoy them when they grew again. I
did not do it, because I was not certain if they would grow
474 BARRY PAIN
again, and if they had not I should have been annoyed. I
never frequented the old library. The Archdeacon was
generally there, and if I went there I had to keep quiet ; and
I was rather a rowdy child. I never learned anything without
a tutor, and very little with tutors, except music, which I take
seriously. I had everything in reason that I wanted ; and
nowhere in my life was there a touch of pathos or one breath
of romance. Action, colour, warmth, thrill all that the
novels that I read had made dear to me never came within
my own experience. One day was like another, ancl all were
uneventful. Then, but a few months ago, I was told I was an
heiress. That blow prostrated me. However well I sang, I
should always be sneered at as an amateur. If in days far on
ahead someone fell in love with me, and wished to marry
me, he would learn that I was wealthy ; and thinking that
though he was poor, he might yet act with nobility, he would
go away to India and leave me. People who are really noble
are generally poor, and their nobility prevents them from
marrying anybody who is any richer. The wealthy woman is

a pariah and an outcast nowadays ; the ignoble would marry

her but only for her money ; the noble will not marry her
because of her money. When I have control of my fortune,
I think I shall throw it into a hospital."
"
Better do that than cut off your eye-lashes. Then you
"
came here because
" "
I came here," said Miss Smith, because in the first
place I wanted to get into contact with the romance of life.
There might not be another visitor in Herne Bay, but I knew
that if there were that visitor would be there for some romantic
reason. There was the possibility that I might stand on the
edge and look on ; as it happens, I have been dragged into
the whirlpool. I wanted to taste the joys of independence.
At home everything was done for me, including the thinking.
I was the ordinary well-bred, milk-fed, ill-read English girl ;

but vaguely conscious that I had a mind of my own, and

rather anxious to pull it out and look at it. Then again I was
eager for awhile to live as the poor live."
" "
I ? said Poynt.
" beg your pardon
As the poor live. Yes, I know that it has not been squalor
exactly, but it has been far simpler and plainer than the life
to which I am accustomed. The Archdeacon is rather fond of
pomp and circumstance. I was already making plans to get it
 THE REFUGEES 47J
more you cannot pick up a new manner of
like the real thing
;

life all moment.

in a Before the blow fell, and I -became
irreparably rich, I wanted to taste some of the romance of
poverty. Yes, I fled from wealth just as Mr. Herewood fled
from goodness. I wonder what it is that you are escaping.
When I saw you walking on the beach, I thought that you
looked terribly melancholy ; I could have imagined you
heart-broken."
" "
I was not," said Julius. It rests with you whether I
shall be."
"
What do you mean ? "
"
Listen ; there is man in the world who
probably not one
hates wealth as I do, despises who
much as I do. The it as
^hole question of money is so unspeakably disgusting to me
that I never let it enter my head at all. Had I fallen in love with
a pauper, the question would have never arisen why should ;

I allow it to arise if it happens that I love an heiress ? If I

*
think of it at all, it is with a kind of pity. This wealth/ I
would say, * weighs hard on you. You are conscious that
you have done nothing whatever to deserve it. You have
my sympathy ; we all suffer from some hereditary curse or
other. We must not let it make us morbid. It is not as if
you had earned the money/ That is the way we must look
at it."
" "
You seem to be saying, or implying
" too great and new to be sullied
My love for you is far
with the words or phrases that other lovers have used. I
cannot say or imply. I am proud of the absolute uselessness
of language."
" "
This is what I expected," said Miss Smith, and also what
I feared.That is my ordinary form of refusal."
" "
Pardon me," he said ; but we are practically strangers.
We have met but three times at the most. Do you think you
know me well enough to refuse me altogether ? "
"
personally, do not come into the question at all. I
You,
am glad that you take so kind a view of my misfortune ; I
like talking to you. I am quite willing that you should go on
adoring me ; but when it comes to the question of marriage, I
must tell you that there my views were settled long ago. I
made up my mind that if I married at all, it would be to a man
of one of two kinds to ;
the best of my belief, you are not of
either kind."
476 BARRY PAIN
"
That may be, or may not be. Remember, thatyou do not
yet know my secret. Remember, too, that though you may
invest your money on a theory you can hardly give your heart
in that way. Remember, that your views are changing and
have been changing ever since we met."
"
You may speak of this again to-morrow ; it is true that
my views are changing. It is true, too, that I do not yet
know your secret. It is unlikely that it would make any
difference, but it
might. Good-bye."
"
Good-bye," he said regretfully.
But he did not go away. They went on walking and talking
together for another hour and a half. They were both late for
luncheon. Poynt had left the novels from the circulating
library on a seat where they had rested for a minute.
And that afternoon (by request) she sang a folk-song which
he could hear in the room below. It was to the effect that she
had lost her favourite white goat. If it had strayed into the
fold of one shepherd she would take it and bring it back, or
if another shepherd had it she would bring it back. But if it
was a third shepherd, a devil of a man, a brigand with white
teeth, she would leave it with him ; for he had her heart also.
I believe we could turn out verses of a similar sweetness and

consistency from our own home factories at about fifteen

shillings the dozen ; but unless they are foreign and have the
word folk-song woven into every half-yard at the back they
do not amount to anything.
That night Herewood witnessed the performance of Poynt's
remarkably successful comedy Irene, at the Empress's
Theatre. At least, he witnessed as much as he could see of it
from a seat behind a pillar at the back of the dress circle. He
was disappointed with the seat ; but the house was packed,
and for some time it had been a question whether they could
give him a seat at all. He had already found out about the
authorship. In fact, he had made a little collection of news-
paper cuttings that day connected with it. The question which
agitated him was if the authorship had been the reason that
had brought Poynt to Herne Bay ; it seemed to him unlikely.
If it was so, could he use his knowledge for the purposes of

revenge ? That also seemed to him to be unlikely. But he

decided that it was worth while to go to Hetne Bay himself
again the following morning, to see if he could do anything
unpleasant.
 THE REFUGEES 477

VII

ON the following day Herne Bay gave its imitation of the

Riviera to a small audience. It was a glorious morning,

something on account from the summer to follow. Herewood

arrived early, breakfasted at an hotel, and then made his way
up the East Cliff. His plans were not matured ; he had the
knowledge, which Miss Smith had not, that Julius was the
author of a very successful comedy, and was much talked of
in London, but he had not hit on any plan by which this would
work his oppressor's downfall. He felt that his materials were
not strong, but he was determined to do the best he could with
them. He was, indeed, the more irritated that Poynt had
written a play when he might have been guilty of cruelty to
children ; it looked as if he had intentionally thrown obstacles
in his way.
Presently, from a seat high up on the cliff, Herewood saw a
man come slowly up the asphalt path. A portion of this man's
face twinkled like a diamond in the sun. Instantly, Herewood
formed the conclusion that the twinkling portion was an eye-
glass. A moment later he recognised that the rest of the
figure was Julius Poynt. Poynt turned down off the path to a
shelter facing the sea, near to a diminutive band-stand, without

seeing Herewood. He took a seat in the shelter facing the sea.

The important point to Herewood's mind was that he was not
smoking a cigarette it prepared Herewood for what was to
;

follow. Ten minutes later Miss Smith appeared, and also

went to the shelter ; Poynt saluted her, and then they both sat
down together.
Herewood's conviction was that his next action was brilliant ;
others than he have done their lowest on record with a similar
idea. He stole softly down the cliff and seated himself in the
same shelter, but on the other side of the screen, where, with-
out being seen, he could hear every word that was said. He
did not arrive in time to catch the first words of the conversa-
tion. When he took up his position Poynt was saying that he
would be only too glad. Herewood's facial expression was
unworthy of a curate. Then Miss Smith spoke :

"
I must tell you then that the idea I had was, that if ever I
married it should be either to a leader or a creator. I would
have married a great general, or a chief of brigands who was
478 BARRY PAIN
adored by his men. Or I would have married a great artist, or
a poet, or a dramatic author the latter of the three for
"
preference. How foolish it was I

" I don't think " At

that/' said Poynt, least, not entirely."
" "
murmured Herewood, under his breath.
" Blackguard
1

"
Yes, entirely wrong," Miss Smith continued. Woman's
place is not to marry the strong, to shine with a reflected glory
alone, to have the whole of her own individuality swamped in
another stronger than her own. It is her place rather to com-
fort and sympathise, to marry the absolute failure, or at least,
the man who has not yet succeeded. The more I think of
it, the stronger is my repulsion to marrying anyone who has
succeeded in any of the careers that I have mentioned. I do
not want the full-blown flower ; I could take no interest in it.
I would rather see the bud open, and feel that my tender care
had something to do with its development. I could find, too,
a melancholy charm in faded petals. But I will have nothing
to do with success."
"
Good 1 " whispered Herewood, on the other side of the
shelter.
" "
makes men braggarts ; it makes
Success," she went on,
them give up taking trouble ; it makes them independent of
a woman's love. It spoils them utterly."
Herewood felt that his moment had come. He sprang to
his feet, swept round to the other side of the shelter, slipped
on the short grass and fell over. Then he rose, brushed his
clothes with his hand, and said with severity :
"I have heard all I"
" "
Then," said Miss Smith, you ought to be ashamed of
yourself."
" "
You ought to be in
Surprised at you," said Poynt.
London. Go back at once, and don't give me all this trouble."
"
At the Empresses Theatre last night I saw a comedy in
which a man hides behind a screen, and is thought rather highly
of for it."
" "
We've nothing for you," said Miss Smith. Do go
away,
" please."
Yes, I will go ; but first hear what I have to say, for it
concerns you nearly. Your sentiments as to success are
admirable, and I share them myself. But were you aware that
the very man to whom you were speaking is himself a success,
and of a most marked and notorious kind ? Do you know
 THE REFUGEES 479
what he has done ? He has brought the scent of the hay-field
across the footlights, that's what he has done. It was he who
wrote the blatantly successful comedy that I witnessed last
night. There was not a vacant seat in the house, nor a dry
eye,nor any of the usual things. And this is the man who has
attempted to take advantage of your ignorance of his past 1

He is a common object of conversation ; he is in all the news-

*
papers. Listen 1

Herewood pulled a packet of newspaper cuttings from his

"
pocket. Here is one extract, saying that he is at present in
the Italian Riviera. Here is another, saying that his favourite
pastime is lawn-mowing. Here is a third, saying that he has
been offered twenty thousand for his next piece, and that he
has never been out of London in his life, for romantic reasons
which are known to the writer but which he cannot divulge.
He is the talk of the clubs. I heard a man in the hotel where I
was stopping ask how the name Poynt was spelt. Doubtless
he has concealed this from you, but I was watching your inter-
ests. I tell him to his face that he is a black-hearted success ;
he is full-blown ; he is a braggart. There will never be any
privacy in his life, either for himself or his wife ; personal
paragraphs will dog his steps wherever he goes. And that
is the man who but I will return to the subject later if I
have an opportunity."
This somewhat hurried conclusion was due to the fact
that Miss Smith's little terrier Vixen, having escaped from
confinement, has just appeared on the path above in quest of
her mistress. On sighting Herewood, Vixen came towards
him with every sign that she wished to eat him, and he left
with rapidity.
"
What he has told you," said Poynt, " is partly true. You
know you would have heard it later from me if that insuffer-
able idiot had not interfered. I have produced a comedy which
has had some success. But the next that I do may be a failure ;
these things are largely a matter of luck. Do not let one success
spoil my whole fife. Again, all that you said about the
successful is true, as a general rule ; but it was precisely
because I knew it to be true that I ran away from compliments
and flattery, to hide myself in Herne Bay. With your help, I
think I might escape the curse of the successful. Do not fear
the personal paragraphs that he showed you ; if ever they say
one word which is true, I promise that I will write and deny
480 BARR7 PAIN
it at once. Come ; you are an heiress, but I have forgiven and
forgotten it. Will you not be equally generous to me ? I
adore you."
"
I seem to have changed
<c
my mind a good deal," said Miss
Smith, shyly.
"
Can't I if you don't mind leave all this
to you ?
He said
something to the effect that she could.
They were both very late for luncheon again that day.
In consideration of very ample apologies, coupled with a
pair of silver-backed hat-brushes, all in the best possible taste,
Herewood was forgiven ; he assisted the Archdeacon in
performing the wedding ceremony.
 D. B. WYNDHAM LEWIS
Bj Numbers
Scene with Harebells

D. B. Wyndham Lewis is known to millions of

newspaper readers
as the writer of a humorous column of pungent comment on
full

modern life, but they may not have suspected that he is also a
scholar with a deep knowledge of medieval literature, particularly
that of France, where he now lives.
 BY NUMBERS
such a day as this, my little ones a burning blue
ON
ing in
August day, with the golden cornfields hardly whisper-
the stillness of noon and a drowsy sound of bees in the
air on such a day it is pleasant to lie on some thyrny sun-
kissed hill in Sussex and meditate on the undoubted fact that
only a few leagues av/ay, over the Hampshire border, Mr.
Sidney Webb, President of the Board of Trade and author of
1

Industrial Democracy\ Problems of Modern Industry, lELnglish

Poor-Law Polity, History of Liquor Licensing, and other works of
passion and ecstasy, is also solacing himself from the cares of
State with a country holiday. Bring Nymphs, fresh Blue-
books And you, sunburnt rustic deities, prepare new statis-
!

tics1 But let us have no drunkenness and no revelry, but only

that which is done neatly and in strict order, while on the
grass the well-clothed Fauns trip to a Fabian song.
Musing a long time (not without tears) on this and endea-
vouring to evoke within my quaking mind the spectacle of Mr.
Sidney Webb crowned with rose leaves at some country
festival, I naturally began next to think of that rural feast which
Grandgousier gave on the day when the great Gargantua was
born. To this feast (as you know) all the burghers of Sainnais
were invited, as well as those of Suill6, of Roche-Clermaud, of
Vaugaudray, of Coudray, of Montpensier, and of Gue-de-
Vede ; and after feasting they went pell-mell to the Grove of
Willows, where on the green grass they danced to the sound
of merry flageolets and sweet bagpipes, so joyously (says the
misguided Rabelais) that it was a heavenly pleasure to see
"
them frolic so c'estoit passe-temps celeste les voir ainsi soy

rigoller"
Alas I How unproductive ! How economically wasteful I

How far removed from the glorious ideals of the Industrial

State ! We (Mr. Webb and myself) would not have deprived
these citizens of reasonable recreation ; but how much better,

1
Not now. Alas 1
484 E>. B, WYNDHAM LEWIS
my friends, to have had them, each labelled and clothed in a
neat combination suit of official grey, capering in unison at
the direction of a State Controller of Joy It makes us sick to
I

think of those careless, wasteful ages before Manchester

became what she is to-day a glory to mankind.
:

I mentioned this yesterday to Professor Dogbody, one of

the most earnest Fabians I know the famous Dogbody who
was thrown out of the Folies-Berg&re for shouting in a loud
" " He
voice Is this Co-Operation ? told me that in Spain,
in Italy, in France, and evenin some parts of England, this

passion on the part of the producing and consuming classes

alike for uncontrolled revelry (especially in agricultural
districts) still exists.
"
Tck, tck," I said sympathetically.
"
Happily," said the Professor, producing a sheaf of blue
"
papers, I have had some opportunity of putting into practice
in the village of Hogsnorton, where I have been living for that
purpose, the principles so admirably set forth in Euphemia
Folk's Need Joy be Unconfined? A. flea for National Amusement
in the Co-Operative Commonwealth. The inhabitants at first,
indeed, stubbornly refused to evince Joy on the days I set
apart for that purpose, but I was determined that these days
should be observed. With the aid of a capable Committee,
including Mrs. Struggles, Professor Bodger, Miss Volumnia
Bibb, Mrs. Martha Dillson Dudbody, of Athens, Pa., and
Canon Boom, we examined and assessed every inhabitant
of the village individually, afterwards classifying them as
follows :

"
CLASS A
(Joy-value 40 per cent). Fit for general joy-

making, including such specified occupation as laughing,

dancing, and any other approved by the Committee's Con-
troller.
"
CLASS B
(Joy-value 30 per cent). Fit for moderate joy-
tnaking, including the specified occupations in Class A.
"
CLASS C (Joy-value 20 per cent). Fit for light or sedent-
ary joy, such as songs in the Co-Operative Commonwealth
Official
" Song Book, to be sung at the Controller's discretion.
CLASS D
(Joy-value .5 per cent) Totally incapacitated for
any kind of organised joy whatsoever.
"Among this last class," continued Professor Dogbody,
"
trumpeting through his nose, were, I regret to say, several
aged and hairy men of agricultural occupation who not only
 BY NUMBERS 485
refused point-blank to be gay when requested peremptorily
to do so by my Committee, but added mutinously that they
would be gormed if they did. Canon Boom at once replied
by having them drawn up in a line and ordering them to sing
in chorus the Laughing Song (No. 98 A) from the Official
Song Book, which goes :

We are so merry and gay, tra la,

We laugh and dance and sing :

Controlled in every way, tra la,

And drilled in everything.
All non-productive gladness we
Unanimously spurn ;
Our breasts with mass hilarity
Co-operatively burn I

CHORUS, TO BE SUNG WHILE DANCING SEE CHART

pp. 87-89, SEC. 23 (A) (I).

Tra la tra la tra la tra la I

Hooray hooray hooray !

Huzza huzza huzza huzza !

Three cheers for Sidney Webb I

"
And on their again refusing (this time with rural oaths)
to evince gaiety and move their limbs in the dance in the
manner prescribed,we had them at once expelled from the
village. It is now
a pleasure to a serious and well-nourished
"
mind/' said the Professor with strong emotion, to observe
our weekly festival. One-two. One-two. Should any
inhabitant neglect to smile on
these occasions he (or she) is at
once placed in solitary confinement with all the recent Blue-
books pertaining to Local Government and the Factory Acts,
and on a second offence soundly beaten. Here, indeed, is the
"
Ideal State !

"
Indeed, indeed yes/' I said fervently.
There was a pause.
" You
spoke just now
"
of Rabelais," said Professor Dogbody,
coughing slightly. You may be interested to know pos-
sibly the public might be interested to know that I have been
"
asked by Mr. Eustace Smiles
We both raised our hats reverently.
"
to bring out a new Vegetarian Edition of Rabelais.
486 D. B. WYNDHAM LEWIS
It isour belief that the substitution of nut-dishes and various
proteid-containing foods (such as tapioca, Meggo, and Gloxo)
for the various rich meat and flesh foods which form the
extensive banquets over which this writer gloats to such a great
extent in his works would not only improve their tone but
make them a definite power for Good. At the same time we
feel that his extravagant praise of wine (such as the wine
called Chinon Grille), if directed so as to praise instead the
virtues of Milko, or some such beverage rich in vitamines,
would materially assist our Movement ; for a nut diet does not
heat the blood or minister to the baser passions."
So saying, Professor Dogbody, after performing a few
deep-breathing exercises, grasped his umbrella firmly and
went away.
But I remained for some time revolving many things,
observing the disorderly arrangement of the trees, the untidy-
luxury of the hedgerows, the uneven skyline of the great
Downs above me, the ragged flight of the rooks going home
with such hoarse and unco-ordinated cries, the imperfect
alignment, far away through a gap in the hills, of the long
waves which rolled and broke on the shingle. Such things are
distressing to a trained and tidy mind. I contemplated Nature
for a little time very coldly and unfavourably through an eye-
glass, with pursed mouth, just like a Fabian who might be,
by some mischance, caught suddenly up to Paradise ; and then
I went home to tea.
 SCENE WITH HAREBELLS
High Court of Justice, King's Bench Division.

MR. JUSTICE CHEESE and a special jury the

BEFORE
hearing was begun of the action Mulberry v. Home
Secretary.
MR, RORING, K.C., said My Lord, this is an action in
:

which we ask for merely nominal damages for wrongful

imprisonment. The facts pertaining may be stated very
briefly. Miss Diana Mulberry is a maiden lady living in South
Kensington and justly celebrated as a writer of dainty whim-
sical stories and playlets. On the
MR. JUSTICE CHEESE Has anybody got a pin ?
:

A JUROR A ordinary pin or a safety-pin, my Lord ?

:

MR. JUSTICE CHEESE Never mind, I can draw things

:

instead. Well, Mr. Roring ?

MR. RORING On the night of the third of April, my Lord,
:

towards half-past ten o'clock, Miss Mulberry was returning

in a taxicab from a dinner-party in Hampstead. The night
was clear and mild and there was a full moon. As her cab
skirted the Heath Miss Mulberry perceived in a little distant
dell a clump of harebells nodding in the breeze, and the

sight suddenly caused her, in her own words, to

c
come all
over whimsy *. She therefore leaned out and stopped the
taxicab, alighted, and, seizing the driver, Jas. Tomlinson,
by the hand, ran swiftly towards the harebell clump. On
arriving there she blew the harebells a kiss and ran tiptoe
<c "
behind a tree, crying to Jas. Tomlinson : Let's pretend I
She then peeped from behind the tree, ran out, and kneel-
ing down by the harebells pretended to telephone to Jas.
"
Tomlinson, saying :
Hullo, Prince Wonderful, this is
"
9908 Fairyland speaking I

MR. JUSTICE CHEESE And was it ?

:

MR. RORING Er no, my Lord. After further indulgence

:

in whimsiness, which the evidence will disclose, Miss Mul-

berry again took Jas. Tomlinson by the hand and danced
487
 D. B. WYNDHAM LEWIS
with him on tiptoe round the harebells, shouting with elfish

glee. was at this point that Police-Constable Bumpton

It
arrived and took Miss Mulberry, after a slight struggle,
into custody.
MR. JUSTICE CHEESE : It's odd I can never draw necks
properly.
MR. RORING As y'Ludsh'p pleases.
:

MR. JUSTICE CHEESE Ears, yes. Necks, : no.

Miss Mulberry then gave evidence bearing out counsel's
opening.
MR. RORING Harebells have a decided effect on you,
:

Miss Mulberry ? Yes. They make me feel dancey I !

always think the fairies use them for telephones 1

MR. RORING Bluebells have this effect also

: ? Certainly.
MR. JUSTICE CHEESE And dumb-bells ? : I beg your
pardon ?
'
MR. JUSTICE CHEESE When I said dumb-bells/ that was
:

just a little whimsy crack of my own. Proceed, Mr. Roring.

Tomlinson, taxicab-driver, of Little Padge Street,
Jas.
Bermondsey, described the dance by moonlight among the
harebells.
MR. RORING : You enjoyed the dance, Mr. Tomlinson ?
Not so bad.
You ran after Miss Mulberry on tiptoe and blew her a kiss ?
Not to the lady I didn't. I never blew kisses to no lady.
I got my licence to think of.
Did you blow a kiss to the policeman when he appeared ?
Well, I can't rightly say. The lady was telephoning to 'im,
like. "'Ullo," she says, "is that Prince Winkipop? The
"
darling 'arebells 'ave missed you, Prince 1
MR. JUSTICE CHEESE : And had they ? I couldn't rightly

say, melud.
P.C. Reginald Bumpton, YYyo9, said that Miss Mulberry
was dancing on tiptoe hand in hand with Tomlinson. He
requested them to move away. The complainant then said :

"
'Oo knows but we are all enchanted 'ere to-night, in the
"
moonlight, among the 'arebells ?
MR. RORING You cautioned her ? I cautioned 'er,
:

"
and she replied 'Ush The fairies are ringing us up "
: I !

"
I cautioned 'er further, and she replied Tinkle, tinkle. :

Princess 'Oneylocks speaking." She then 'opped up and

down on 'er toes, very excited.
 SCENE WITH HAREBELLS 489
What was the taxicab-driver doing ? 'E was larfing.
MR. JUSTICE CHEESE (to Miss Mulberry) Were yon :

laughing ? Oh, no. It was all so beautiful The hare- 1

were chiming a little cosy cuddly song and a little breeze

bells
came dancing in, curtseying to the trees, and
MR. JUSTICE CHEESE Can you draw horses' legs ?
:

No.
MR. JUSTICE CHEESE Nor can I. :

Miss MULBERRY I should like to add

: that a tiny, wee,
winsome baby rabbit peeped out at us !

MR. JUSTICE CHEESE : Can you draw a rabbit ? Oh,

no. One
doesn't draiv rabbits, one thinks them Lovely 1

warm tender furry rabbity tricksy thoughts peeping in and

out of one's dreams One thinks harebells, too. Slim,
I

dancey, pale-blue thoughts Every time a fairy trips over a

!

rainbow a new harebell is born.

MR. JUSTICE CHEESE (to P.C. Bump ton) Is that true ? :

I can't say, my Lord.

MR. JUSTICE CHEESE : Is anybody here from the Royal
Botanical Society ?
MR. BOOMER, K.C. (for the Home Secretary) The Chief :

Conservator of Kew will be called, my Lord. He will tell

the Court that the complainant's theory with regard to hare-
bells is extremely doubtful.
MR. JUSTICE CHEESE The Home Secretary is being called
:

also ?

MR. BOOMER, K.C. Yes, m'lud. Our case is that the

:

whimsy conduct with which the complainant was charged

took place after eight P.M.
MR. JUSTICE CHEESE Oh, Auntie : !

The Court adjourned for luncheon.

 EDEN PHILLPOTTS
Quite Out of the Common

for literature in the nineties,

Eden Phillpotts abandoned insurance
and since then has been a prolific writer of novels, poems, stories
and of which, in particular The Farmer's Wife, have
plays, several
which is the
enjoyed very long runs. He lives on Dartmoor,
his books.
setting of many of
 QUITE OUT OF THE COMMON

WASN'T even thinking of the fool. It is enough to be in

I the same market on "Change with Norton Bellamy, and out-
side my office or the House I like to forget him.
But long ago he joined the City of London Club, to my
regret, and now, in the smoking-room after lunch, during my
cup of coffee, cigar, and game of dominoes, he will too often
hurl himself uninvited into a conversation that he is neither
asked to join nor desired to enlighten.
Upon a day in January last, my friend, Arthur Mathers, had
a chill on the liver and was suffering under sustained profes-
sional ill-fortune. From his standpoint, therefore, in the Kaffir
Market, he looked out at the world and agreed with Carlyle's
unreasonable estimate of mankind. As a jobber in a large way
he came to this conclusion ; while I, who am a broker and a
member of the Committee, could by no means agree with
him.
" The
spirit of con^mon sense must be reckoned with," I
" This nation stands where it does
explained to Mathers.
by right of that virtue. Take the giving and receiving of
advice. You may draw a line through that. There is a rare
a notable gdriius for giving advice in this country. The war
illustrates my point. You will find every journal full of advice
given by civilians to soldiers, by soldiers to civilians, by the
man in the street to the man in the Cabinet, and by the man
in the Cabinet to the man in the street. We think for our-
selves develop abnormal common sense, and, as a conse-
quence, I maintain that much more good advice is given than
bad."
But Mathers, what with his chilled liver and business
depression, was unreasonable. He derided my contention.
He flouted it. He raised his voice in hard, simulated laughter,
and attracted other men from their coffee and cigars. When he

493
494 EDEN PHIL L POTTS
had won their attention, he tried to crush me publicly. He
said :

"
out of your own mouth I will confute you.
My dear chap,
If more good advice is given than bad, every man will get more

good than harm by following advice. That's logical : but

you won't
" pretend
to maintain such a ridiculous position,
surely ?
I like a war of words after luncheon. It sharpens the wits
and assists digestion. So, without being particularly in earnest,
I supported
"
my contention.
"
Assuredly," I said. We don't take enough advice, in my
opinion just as we don't take enough exercise, or wholesome
food. It is too much the fashion to ask advice and not take it.
But if we modelled our lives on the disinterested opinion of
other people, and availed ourselves of the combined judgment
of our fellows, the world would be both happier and wiser in
many directions. And if men knew, when they were invited to
an it was no mere conventional
express opinion, that piece of
civility or empty compliment which prompted us to ask their
criticism, consider how they would put their best powers
forward Yes, one who consistently followed the advice of
!

his fellow-creatures would be paying a compliment to humanity

" "
Qualifying himself for a lunatic asylum 1
Here burst in the blatant Bellamy from his seat by the fire.
He put down a financial journal ; and then turned to me. " If
there's more good advice flying about than bad, old man, why
" "
don't you take some ? he said. I could give you plenty of
excellent advice at this moment, Honeybun. For instance, I
could tell you to play the fool only in your own house ; but you
wouldn't thank me. You'd say it was uncalled for and imper-
tinent you know you would."
Bellamy is man who has any power to annoy me
the only
after my lunch. And knowing it, he exercises that power. He
can shake me at a word, can reach my nerve-centres quicker
than a tin-tack. Yet, seen superficially, he appears to be the
mere common stockbroker ; but his voice it is that makes him
so hated his voice, and his manners, and his sense of humour.
I turned upon him and did a foolish
thing as one often does
foolish things when suddenly maddened into them by some
bigger fool than oneself. I answered :
"
There's bad advice idiotic advice given as well as good.
 QUITE OUT OF THE COMMON 495
When and want your opinion, my dear
I've exhausted creation
Bellamy, trouble
I'll
you for it. And as to playing the fool,
why, nemo mortalium omnibus horis sapit not even Norton
"
Bellamy. You'll admit that !

Bellamy has no education, and nothing irritates him quicker

than a quotation in a foreign language, though any other quota-
tion he's mote than a match for. He scowled and meant mis-
chief from the moment the laugh went with me. He ignored
the Latin, but stuck to the English of my remark.
"
Bad as well as good," he answered. " Just what I say.
c *

Only you assert more good than bad,' and I declare more
bad than good,' which means that the more advice I refuse the
better for me in the long run."
"
You judge human nature from an intimate knowledge of
your own lack of judgment, my dear fellow," I said in a banter-
ing voice.
I'll back my
Well,
" judgment all the same," he answered,
hotly, which is a good deal more than you will. You talk of
common sense, and lay down vague, riot to say inane rules for
other people to follow, and pose as a sort of Book of Wisdom
thrown open to the public every afternoon in this smoking-
room ;but anybody can talk. Now, I'll bet you a thousand
pounds that you'll not take the advice of your fellow-man for
twelve consecutive hours. And, what is more, I'll bet you
another thousand that I'll do the other thing and go distinctly
contrary to every request, suggestion, or scrap of advice offered
me in the same space of time. And then we'll see about your
knowledge of human nature, and who looks the biggest fool at
the end of the day."
I repeat it was after luncheon, and no man unfamiliar with
Norton Bellamy can have any idea of the studied insolence, the
offence, the diabolic sneer with which he accompanied this
preposterous suggestion. I was, however, silent for the space
of three seconds ; then he made another remark to Mathers,
and that settled it.
"
Some of us are like the chap who took his dying oath the
cat was grey. Then they asked him to bet a halfpenny that it
"
was, and he wouldn't. So bang goes another wind-bag 1

He was marching out with all the honours when I lost my

temper and took the brute at his word.
" "
Done 1 I said.
Think of it ! A man of five-and-fifty, with some reputation
 EDEN PHILLPOTTS
for general mental stability, and a member of the Committee of
the Stock Exchange !
" "
You'll take me ? he asked, and there was an evil light
in the man's hard blue eyes, while his red whiskers actually
bristled as he spoke.
"
You'll back yourself to follow every
scrap of advice given you throughout one whole day for a
"
thousand pounds ?
In my madness I answered, only intent upon arranging
miseries for him.
"
Yes, if you'll back yourself to act in an exactly contrary
manner."
il
Most certainly. It's my ordinary rule of life," he replied.
"
I never do take advice. I'm not a congenital idiot. Let us

say to-morrow."
Now upon the Stock Exchange we have a universal system
by which honour stands for security. In our peculiar business
relations this principle is absolutely necessary. And it seldom
fails. There is a simple, pathetic trust amongst us unknown in

other walks of life. It can only be compared to that universal

spirit said to have existed
in King Alfred's days, when we are
invited to believe that people left their jewellery about on the
hedges with impunity, and crime practically ceased out of the
land. So when Bellamy and I made this fatuous bet, we
trusted each the other. I knew that, with all his faults, the
man was absolutely straightforward and honest ; and I felt that,
having once taken his wager, I should either win it at
personal inconvenience impossible to estimate before the
event or lose and frankly pay.
" "
To-morrow," said Bellamy. Let us say to-morrow. You
don't want a thing like this hanging over you. We'll meet
here and lunch and compare notes if you're free to do so,
which is doubtful, for I see a holy chaos opening out before
you."
" " "
To-morrow ! I said. And, be that as it
may, I would
"
not change my position for yours 1

I went home that night under a gathering weight of care.

To my wife and daughters I said nothing, though they noticed
and commented upon my unusual taciturnity. In truth, the
more I thought of the programme in store for me, the less
I liked while Bellamy, on the contrary, so far as I could
it ;

see, despite my big words at parting from him, had only to be

 QUITE OUT OF THE COMMON 497

slightly more brutal and aggressive than usual to come well

out of his ordeal. I slept ill and woke depressed. The weather
was ominous in itself. I looked out of my dressing-room
window and quoted from the classics :

"
She not rosy-fingered, but swoll'n black ;
is

Her faceis like a water turned to blood,

And her sick head is bound about with clouds,
As if she threatened night ere noon of day " I

which shows, by the by, that Ben Jonson knew a London fog
when he saw it, though chemists pretend that the vile pheno-
menon wasn't familiar to the Elizabethans.
My breakfast" proved a farce, and having wished my dear
ones a dreary Good morning/' I crept out into a bilious,
fuliginous atmosphere, through which black smuts fell in
legions upon the numbed desolation of South Kensington.
Only the urban cat stalked here and there, rejoicing, as it
seemed, in prolonged night. My chronic cough began at the
first gulp of this atrocious atmosphere, and, changing my mind
about walking to the District Railway Station, I turned, sought
my cab- whistle, and summoned a hansom. It came presently,
clinking and tinkling out of nothingness a chariot with
watery eyes of flame a goblin coach to carry me away through
the mask of the fog, from home, from wife and children, into
the vast unknown of man's advice.
The cabman began it a surly, grasping brute who, upon
taking my shilling, commented and added something about the
weather.
"
Your fare, and you know it very well," I answered ;

whereupon he replied :

"
Oh, all right. Wish I could give you the cab an' the 'oss
in. Don't you chuck away your money that's all. You're a
blimecl sight too big-'earted that's what's the matter with
you."
Here was practical advice given by a mere
I felt cheered.
toilerfrom the ranks. I promised the man that I would not
waste my money I reciprocated his caution, beamed upon him,
;

ignored his satire, and went downstairs to the trains. A news-

paper boy offered me Punch. I bought it, and with rising spirits
lighted a cigar and got into a city train. It happened to come
from Haling, and contained, amongst other people, my dear old
friend Tracy Mainwaring cheeriest, brightest, and best of
498 EDEN PHILLPOTTS
men. The fog deepened, and somewhere about the Temple a
violent fit of
coughing caused me to fling away my cigar and
double up in considerable physical discomfort. Mainwaring,
with his universal sympathy, was instantly much concerned
for me.
"
My dear Honeybun, you'll kill yourself you will indeed.
It's suicide for you to come to town on days like this. How
often have I expostulated And nobody will pity you, because
I

you need not do it. Why don't you

go to the South of France ?
You ought to go for all our sakes."
" "
Mainwaring," I said, you're right. You always are.
Here's the Temple. I'll return home at once and start as soon
as I conveniently can to-morrow at latest/*
The amazement which burst forth upon the face of every
man in that carriage was a striking commentary on my original
assertion that advice not taken habitually in this country.
is

As forMainwaring himself, I could perceive that he was

seriously alarmed. He followed me out of the train and his
face was white, his voice much shaken as he took my arm.
" "
Old chap," he said, I've annoyed you : I've bored you
with my irresponsible chatter. You're trying to escape from
me. You mustn't let a friend influence you against your better
"
judgment. Of course, I only thought of your good, but
" "
My dear fellow," I answered, nobody ever gave me
better advice,and unless circumstances conspire against it, I
mean to do as you suggest."
"
Yes, yes capital," he said, with the voice we assume when
trying to soothe an intoxicated acquaintance or a lunatic.
"
You shall go, dear old fellow ; and I'll sec you home."
Now here the effect of taking advice upon the man who
is

gives it Mainwaring is a genial, uncalculating, kindly soul

1

who is always tendering counsel and exhortation to everybody,

from his shoeblack upwards, yet here, in a moment, I had him
reduced to a mere bundle of vibrating nerves, simply because I
had undertaken to follow one of his suggestions. Of course I
knew the thought in his mind ; he believed that I had gone out
of mine. So I said :

"
Yes, old fellow, I see what you think ; but, consider ; if
I was a lunatic to take
" your advice, what must you be to h^tve
given it ?
This conundrum, if possible, increased his uneasiness. He
fussed anxiously around me and begged to be allowed to see
 QUITE OUT OF THE COMMON 499
me home ; whereupon, being weary of his cowardice, I waved
Mainwaring off, left the station to be free of him, and hastily
ascended Arundel Street.
My object was now an omnibus which should convey me
almost to my own door ; and my heart grew fairly light again,
for if by the terms of the wager, I could legitimately get back
under my own roof, the worst might be well over. I pictured
myself packing quietly all day for the Continent. Then, when
morning should come, I had merely to change my mind again
and the matter would terminate. Any natural disappointment
of my wife and the girls when they heard of my intention to
stop in London after all might be relieved with judicious gifts
purchased out of Norton Bellamy's thousand pounds.
At a corner in the Strand I waited, and others with me, while
the fog increased noisome veil upon veil and the lurid street
seemed full of dim ghosts wandering in a sulphur hell. My
omnibus was long in coming, and just as it did so, I pressed
forward with the rest, and had the misfortune to tread upon
the foot of a threadbare and foul-mouthed person who had
been waiting beside me. Standing there the sorry creature had
used the vilest language for fifteen minutes, had scattered his
complicated imprecations on the ears of all ; but especially, I
think, for the benefit of his wretched wife. She a lank and
hungry creature had flashed back looks at him once or twice,
but no more. Occasionally, as his coarse words lashed her,
she had shivered and glanced at the faces about her, to see
whether any champion of women stood there waiting for the
South Kensington omnibus. Apparently none did, though, for
my part, at another time, I had certainly taken it upon me to
reprove the wretch, or even call a constable. But upon this
day, and moving as it were for that occasion only under a
curse, I held silence the better course and maintained the
same while much pitying this down-trodden woman. Now,
however, Fate chose me for a sort of Nemesis against my will,
and leaping forward to the omnibus, I descended with all my
fourteen stone upon the foot of the bully. He hopped in agony,
lifted up his voice, and added a darkness to the fog. His

profanity intensified the ambient gloom, and out of it, I saw

the white face of his wife, and her teeth gleamed in a savage
smile as he hopped in the gutter, like some evil fowl. People
laughed at his discomfort, and a vocabulary naturally rich was
lifted above itself into absolute opulence. He loosed upon me
JOO EDEN PHILLPOTTS
a chaos of sacred and profane expletives, uttered in the accent
of south-west London. His words tumbled about my ears like
a nest of angered hornets. The man refused to listen to any
apology, and, from natural regret, my mood changed to active
annoyance, because he insisted upon hopping between me and
the omnibus, and a crowd began to collect.
Then his bitter-hearted wife spoke up and bid me take
action, little dreaming of the position in which I stood with
respect to all advice.
"
Don't let the swine cheek you like that," she cried.
"
He's all gas that's what he is a carwardly 'ound as only
bullies women and You're bigger than him
children. I Hit
him over the jaw with your rumberella. Hit him hard then
you'll see."
It will not, I trust, be necessary for me to say that never
before that moment did I strike a fellow-creature either in
the heat of anger or with calculated intention. Indeed, even
a thousand pounds would seem a small price to expend, if for
that outlay one might escape such a crime ; yet now, dazed by
the noise, by the fog, by emotions beyond analysis, by the
grinning teeth and eyes of the crowd, shining wolfish out of
the gloom around me, by the woman's weird, tigerish face
almost thrust into mine, and by the fact that the man had
asked me why the blank, blank I didn't let my blank self out
at so much a blank hour for a blank steam-roller, I let go.
If Bellamy could have seen me then My umbrella whistled
!

through the fog and appeared to strike the man almost exactly
where his wife had suggested. He was gone like a flower,
and everybody seemed pleased. There were yells and cat-calls
and wild London sounds in my ears somebody rose out of the
;

pandemonium and patted me on the back, and told me to hook

it before the bloke got up again ; somebody else whispered
earnestly in my had done the community a good
ear that I
turn ; the omnibus proceeded without me, for I was now
separated from it by a crowd ; the fog thickened, lurid lights
flashed in it ; my head whirled ; the man who had whispered
congratulations in my ear endeavoured to take my watch and ;

I was just going to cry for the police, when my recumbent

victim, assisted, to my amazement, by the tigerish woman,

arose, clothed in fury and mud as with a garment, and advanced
upon me.
There are times and seasons when argument and even frank
 QUITE OUT OF THE COMMON 501

apology is useless ; there are very rare occasions when coin

of the realm itself is vain to heal a misunderstanding or soothe
a wounded spirit. I felt that theman now drawn up in battle
array before me was reduced for the moment to a mere pre-
Adamite person or cave-dweller first cousin to, and but
slightly removed from, the unreasoning and ferocious dinosaur
or vindictive megatherium. This poor, bruised, muddy
Londoner, now dancing with clenched fists and uttering a sort
of language which rendered him almost incandescent, obviously
thirsted to do me physical hurt. No mere wounding of my
tenderest feelings, no shaming of me, no touching of my pride
or my pocket would suffice for him. Indeed, he explained
openly that he was going to break every bone in my body and
stamp my remains into London mud, even if it spoilt his boots.
Hearing which prophecy, one of those inspirations that repay
a studious man for his study came in the nick of time, and I
remembered a happy saying of the judicious Hooker, how that
many perils can best be conquered by flying from them. I
had not run for thirty years, but I ran then, and dashing past a
church, a cheap book shop and the Globe Theatre, darted into
the friendly shelter of a populous neighbourhood that extends
beyond. So sudden was my action and so dense the fog that
I escaped without loss and, within three minutes from that
moment, all sorrow past, sat in a hansom, had the window
lowered, and drove off with joy and thankfulness for my home.
So far I had done or set about doing everything my fellow-
man or woman deemed well for me ; as it was now past eleven
o'clock, I felt that the day would soon slip away and all might
yet be well.
Then the Father of Fog, who is one with the Prince of this
world, took arms against me ; there was a crash, a smash, loud
words, a breath of cold air, a tingle of broken glass, a stinging
lash across my face, an alteration abrupt and painful in my
position. My horse had collided with another and come
down heavily ; the window was broken ; and my face had
a nasty cut across the cheekbone within a fractional distance of
my right eye.
Thedriver was one of that chicken-hearted sort of cabmen
rare in London, but common in provincial towns. He had
fallenfrom his box-seat, it is true, and had undoubtedly hurt
himself here and there on the outside, yet I doubt if any
serious injury had overtaken him ; but now he stood at the
502 EDEN PHILLPOTTS
horse's head, and pulled at its muzzle or some such apparatus,
arid gasped and gurgled and explained how a railway van had
run into him, knocked over his horse and then darted off into
the fog, I told the man not to cry, and people began collecting
as usual like evil gnomes out of the gloom. The air soon
hummed with advice, and personally, knowing myself to be
worse than useless where a horse in difficulties is concerned,
I acted upon the earliest suggestion that called for departure
from the scene. Ignoring directions about harness, cutting of
straps, backing the vehicle and sitting on the horse's head, I
fell in with one thoughtful individual who gave it as his

opinion that the beast was dying, and hurried away at my

best speed to seek a veterinary surgeon. My face was much
injured, my nerves were shaken and I had a violent stitch in
my side and a buzzing in the head ; but I did my duty, and
finding a small corner hostelry that threw beams of red and
yellow light across the fog, I entered, gave myself a few
moments to recover breath, then asked the young woman
behind the bar whether she knew where I might most quickly
find a horse doctor.
" There has been an "
accident," I explained, and a man on
the spot gives it as his opinion that the horse is seriously
unwell and should be seen to at once. Personally, I suspect
itcould get up if it liked, but I am not an expert and may be
mistaken/'
"
'Fraid you've hurted yourself too, sir," answered the girl.
"
I am sorry. Sit down and have something to drink, sir.
I'm sure you want it."
I sat sighed, wiped my face and ordered a little
down,
brandy. This she prepared with kindly solicitude, then
advised a second glass, and I, feeling the opinion practical
enough, obeyed her gladly.
She knew nothing of a veterinary surgeon, but there chanced
to be a person in the bar who said that he did. He evidently
felt tempted to proclaim himself such a man, for I could see the
idea in his shifty eyes ; but he thought better of this, and
admitted that he was only a dog-fancier himself, though he
knew a colleague in the next street who had wide experience
of horses.
Now my idea of a dog-fancier is one who habitually fancies
somebody else's dog. I told the man this while I finished
my brandy and water, and he admitted that it was a general
 QUITE OUT OF THE COMMON 503
weakness in the profession, but explained that he had, so
far, fought successfully against it. Then we started to find the
veterinary surgeon and soon passed into a region that I
suspected to be Seven Dials.
" "
'Ullo, Jaggers
1 Who's your friend ? said a man in a
doorway.
"
Gent wants a vet," answered my companion.
"
Gent wants a new fice, more like "1

I asked the meaning of this phrase, suspecting that some

fragment of homely and perhaps valuable advice lay beneath

it, but Jaggers thought not,
" "
Only Barny Bosher's sauce," he said. He's a fightin'
man pick of the basket at nine stone five so he thinks he
can say what he likes but he's got a good 'eart."
;

We pushed on until a small shop appeared, framed in

birdcages. Spiritless tropical fowls of different sorts and
colours sat and drooped in them parrots, cockatoos, and
other foreigners of a sort unfamiliar to me.
"
Come in," said Jaggers. " This is Muggridge's shop.
And what he don't know about 'osses, an' all Hvin' things for
that matter, ain't worth knowin'."
Mr. Muggridge was at his counter busy with a large wooden
crate bored with many holes. From these proceeded strange
squeaks and grunts.
" "
'Alfa mo," he said. It's a consignment of
prize guinea-
pigs, and they wants attention partickler urgent, for they've
been on the What-you-may-call-it Railway in a luggage train
pretty near since last Christmas by all accounts, and a luggage
train on that line gives you a fair general idea of Eternity
I'm told."
Mr. Muggridge was a little, bright, cheerful person who
appeared to frame his life on the philosophy of his own canaries.
The shop was warm, even stuffy, perhaps still warm. So I
said one or two kind things about the beasts and birds, then
took a chair and looked at my watch.
"
I can wait," I told him.
"
Can the 'oss ? That's the question," asked Jaggers ; and
he began to murmur something about being kept away from
his work and hard times ; so I gave him a shilling, and he
thanked me, though not warmly, and instantly vanished into
the fog go on dog-fancying, no doubt.
to
Mr. Muggridge complimented me on my love for animals.
504 EDEN PHILLPOTTS
He then began to pull strange, rough bundles of white and
black and yellow fur from his wooden crate. The things
looked like a sort of animated blend between a pen-wiper and
a Japanese chrysanthemum. Indeed, I told him so, and he
retorted by strongly advising me to take a couple home for
my family.
With a sign, I agreed to do so, and Mr. Muggridge, evidently
surprised at my ready acquiescence, grew excited,
and sug-
gested two more.
"
You try a pair o* them Hangoras, and a pair o' them
"
tortoiseshells," he said, an' before you can look round you'll
be breedin' guinea-pigs as'll take prizes all over Europe.
"
Pedigree pigs pigs with a European reputation
"
!

"
Very well, two pairs," I answered, since you wish it."
And then I observed that Muggridge was thinking very
hard. I fancy he realised that the opportunity of a lifetime
lay before him,
"
Yes," he said suddenly, answering his own reflections,
"to a gen'leman like you, I will part with it, though it's
dead against the grain. But you ought to have it my kst
mongoose a lady's pet a little hangel in the 'ouse Five !

guineas."
"There's a large brown horse fallen down in the next
street. That's what I'm here for," I cried aloud, ignoring the

mongoose.
"
Ah, they will go down
and I've got a lion-monkey, and
;

while you arebuying animals, I strongly advise you to have it.

Not another in England to my knowledge. Peaceful as a
lamb. I wish I could send them, but I'm run off my legs just
now. Never remember such a rush or such competition.
So if you'll let me suggest, I'd take your little lot right away
with you. cages are specially commended at the Crystal
My
Palace and elsewhere, and I have a few left by me still. I
suppose you couldn't do with a water-snake or two ? Yes ? "
Here, Sam 1 Come down here. A krge border 1

He shouted to a boy, who

appeared, and began putting
strange beasts and reptiles into cages with lightning rapidity ;
while I stood and watched, as a man gripped, tranced, turned
to stone by the deadly incubus of a dream. All the time Mr.
Muggridge chattered, like the lid of a kettle on the boil, put
up canaries and parrots in cages, fastened a string to a poodle,
and incarcerated various other specimens of obscure and
 QUITE OUT OF THE COMMON 505

unattractive fauna that hewanted to be rid of. Then he made

out an account, pressed it into my hand, rushed to the door
and whistled for a four-wheeler.
" You're a
ready-money gen'leman, like me. Seen it in your
eye
"
the minutes you come into my shop," said Mr. Muggridge.
Twenty guineas and my book, on the Insect Pests of Household
Pets, thrown in."
I rallied myself here ; in the last ditch, so to speak, I made
my effort, and while the horrible boy was converting a four-
wheeler into a menagerie of screaming, snapping curiosities,
I explained to Muggridge that I only had five pounds upon
me. He put out his hand and said something about a cheque
for the balance, but, seeing my advantage, I declared that I
had ordered nothing beyond the four guinea-pigs, needed
nothing else, and should pay for nothing else.
Then he asserted that I might have the lot for ten pounds,
as it was a pity to take them out of the cab again.
Still I refused, and he tried to get sentiment into the argu-
ment.
He said :

"
a reg'lar 'appy fam'ly. I should most call
It's it
cruelty
to animals to separate them things again."
Still I was firm, and he became desperate. He said :

"
Gimme the fiver, then, and clear out. robbery that's
It's
what it is, won't do you no good. But
an' I'm sure the beasts
gimme the money an' I'll fling in a tortoise, to show there's
no ill-feeling, if you'll go at once."
I said :

" I do not want your tortoise. I'm a married

Listen to me.
man with two grown-up daughters. We all detest animals of
every sort especially tortoises. I shall send your guinea-
pigs to a children's hospital, where they may or may not be
welcomed. For the rest of these features, I have no earthly
use, and I refuse to take them."
"
That's not good enough for me," declared Mr. Muggridge.
" "
I've wasted a whole morning upon you I'd been in the
"
shop a bare quarter of an hour and time is money, if birds
and animals ain't. Besides, you bordered 'em."
He advanced threateningly, and I stepped forward with no
less indignation ; but as I did so, my arm knocked over a cage

containing two long, black, red-beaked birds, which turned out

to be Cornish choughs. These now uttered wild, West-country
506 EDEN PHILLPOTTS
exclamations, flapped and fluttered and screamed, knocked
over other cages in their downfall, and angered a badger or
some kindred beast that dwelt in a box covered with corrugated
iron wire.
Then, while I gathered myself from the ruins, ill-luck cast
me against a bowl of goldfish, a sea- water aquarium, the guinea-
pigs, and a consignment of large green lizards that suddenly
appeared without visible reason in the full possession of their
liberty. These things fell in an avalanche, and Muggridge's
shop instantly resembled the dark scene that preludes a panto-
mime. It is not strange, therefore, when you consider what I
had already been through, that I was among the first of the
intelligent animals present to lose my nerve and my temper.
Frankly, I aimed a blow at Muggridge in an un-Christian
spirit ; but missed him and fetched down a green parrot.
Suspecting the emporium to be on fire, chance passers-by
always ready to thrust themselves into the misfortunes of
other people now rushed amongst us. A
policeman entered
also, and Mr. Muggridge, evidently disappointed to find his
plans thus shattered and his scheme foiled, endeavoured to
give me in charge. I explained the true position, however,
or attempted to do so ; but my self-respect deserted me ; I
raised my voice as Muggridge raised his ; I even used language
that will always be a sorrow to me in moments of retrospection.
We raved each at the other and danced round the policeman,
while goldfish flapped about our feet and green lizards tried
to ascend our trouser-legs. The constable himself turned
round and round, licking a pencil and trying to make notes in
a little book. Presently I think he began to grow giddy and
faint-hearted. At any rate, he realised the futility of working

up an effective case. He shut his book, showed anger, and

took certain definite measures.
First he swept a few promiscuous spectators out of the shop ;
then he thrust the infuriated Muggridge back behind his
counter and finally turned to me.
"
I'll have no more of this
tommy-rot, or the "pair of you'll
have to come along to the station/' he said. As for you,
Muggridge, it's your old game, plantin* your rubbishy,
stinkin' varmints on unoffendin' characters before they can
"
open their mouths Fm up to your hanky-panky ;
and you
now he "
addressed me if you're not old enough to know
better than come buyin* these 'ere mangy hanimals, an'
 QUITE OUT OF THE COMMON 507
loadin' a cab with 'em, just because this man asks you to, you
ought to be shut up. If you take my tip, you'll go and *ang
yourself about the best thing you can do. Anyway,
that's

you must clear out of this 'ere."

I was deeply agitated, hysterical, not master of my words or
actions ; I had reached a physical and mental condition upon
which the policeman's words fell as a fitting climax.
"
Thank you " I said " I've had some unequal advice to-
1
;

day good, bad, indifferent. E^ut there's no doubt that yours

is the best, the soundest, the most suited to my case that I'm

likely to get anywhere. I will go and hang myself. Nothing

shall become my life like the leaving of it. Shake hands,
constable ; you, at least, have counselled well."
I pressed his palm and was gone. I forgot wife, children,

business, honour, and heaven in that awful moment. I, a

member of the Committee of the Stock Exchange, passed
through the streets of London like a mere escaped lunatic.
My shattered, lacerated nerve-centres cried for peace and
oblivion ; I longed to be dead and out of it all. My self-
respect was already dead, and what is life without that ? I
thought of the future after this nightmare-day, and felt* that
there could be no future for me. So I vanished into the fog
a palpitating pariah with one frantic, overmastering resolution
to hang myself, and that at once.

II

BUT a man cannot forget the training of his youth, the practice
of his adult years, and the support of his middle age, in one
demonian hour. As I passed wildly through dim, bilious
abysses of filth-laden atmosphere, though my body was soon
lost, and hopelessly lost, in the fog, my mind became a trifle
clearer, and steadfast principles of a lifetime reasserted them-
selves. I determined to go on with my shattered existence ;

indeed, felt tolerably sure that my fellow-man, who had kept

I
me thus busily employed, would presently prevent me from
carrying my purpose to its bitter1 grew a little calmer,
end.
recollected the terms of my wager, and so proceeded with the
directions delivered by the police constable, doubting nothing
but that my next meeting with a human being would divert the
catastrophe, and once more set me forward upon a new road.
508 EDEN PHILLPOTTS
Presently a little shop loomed alongside me, and I perceived
that here might be procured an essential in the matter of
destruction by hanging. A
mean and humble establishment
it was, lighted by one paraffin lamp. The stock-in-trade
apparently consisted of ropes and door-pegs in fact, the
complete equipment proper to my undertaking. Time and
place agreed ; it was, indeed, just such a gloomy, lonesome,
and sequestered hole as a suicide might select to make his
final purchases. From a door, behind the counter there came
to me a bald and mournful little man with weak eyes, a subdued
manner, and the facial inanity of the rabbit. Hints of a fish
dinner followed him from his dwelling-room, and through the
door I could catch a glimpse of his family, four in number,
partaking of that meal.
" "
What might you want ? he asked, but in a despondent
tone, implying, to my ear, that it was rarely his good fortune
to have anything in stock a would-be customer desired to
purchase.
"
I want a rope to hang a man," I answered, and waited with
some interest to see the result.
The small shopkeeper's eyes grew round, a mixture of admir-
ation and creeping fear lighted them.
"
My gracious 1 You're him> then 1 To think as ever I
"
should
Here he broke off, and, in a frenzy of excitement, opened the
door behind him and spoke to his wife. I overheard, though
not intended to do so, but he could not subdue his voice. I
think he felt confronted by the supreme event of his life.
"
Jane, Jane Creep in the shop quiet and look at this
1

here man By
1 'Eaven it's the
!
public executioner To think
I

"
as everI should sell a to him
rope ! Hush !

He turned and while he addressed me with dreadful humility,

the woman, Jane, crept into the shop and stared morbidly
upon my harrowed countenance.
Then she whispered to her husband :

"
That's not him, for I seed his picture in the Police News
"
last week. It's a new one, or else his assistant 1

Meantime I was being served, and it seemed that the little

man suddenly awakened to the dignity of his calling before
my sensational order. He began handling a wilderness of
rope-ends and discoursing upon them with the air of an expert
as he rose to this great occasion.
 QUITE OUT OF THE COMMON 509
" A nice twisted cordage you'll be wanting, and if you'll
leave the choice to me, nobody shall be none the worse. I've
been in rope since I was seventeen. Now Manila hemp won't
do too stiff and woody, too lacking in suppleness. That's
what you want suppleness. The sisal hemps, from South
:

America, are very pretty things, and the New Zealand hemp
is hard to beat; but there's another still more beautiful
cordage. Only it's very rarely used because it comes rather
expensive. Still, when a fellow-creature's life's at stake, I

suppose you won't count the cost. Besides, the Government

pays, don't it ? That's a Jubbulpore hemp best of all or
bowstring hemp, as I'm told they use in the harems of the
East, though what for I couldn't say. I've got a very nice
piece ten foot long and supple as silk. Just try it ; and any
strain up to two hundred pound. Hand-spun, of course a
lovely thing, though I say so. But it's a terrible thought.
Jute's cheaper, only I won't guarantee it ; I won't, indeed,
You want a reliable article, if only for your own reputation,
and one more tiling I suppose there's no objection to my
:

using this as an advertisement? People in these parts is all

so fond of horrors ; and as it's Government I ought to be
"
allowed the lion and unicorn, perhaps ?
I bought the Jubbulpore hemp as the man advised. It
cost thirty shillings, and the vendor wrestled between pleasure
at the success of his extortion and horror at the future. But I
told him he must neither advertise the circumstance, nor dare
to assume the lion and unicorn on the strength of it. This
discouraged him, and he lost heart and took a gloomy view
of the matter.
"
A hawful
" may say so without offence," he
tride, if I
ventured. Would be the Peckham Rye murderer as
it

you're buying this rope for, or that poor soul who lost his
"
temper with his wife's mother down Forest Hill wye ?
" "
Neither," I answered. It is a man called Honeyburu"
" Ah A ugly, crool nime What's he done ? "
" Honeybun ! 1 1

Made a fool of himself."

"
Lord If we was hung for that, there wouldn't be much
1

more talk of over-population eh ? Well, well, I s'pose he'll

be as 'appy with you and that bit of Jubbulpore as we can
hope for him. A iron nerve it must want. Yet Mr. Ketch
was quite the Christian at 'ome, I b'lieve. Not your first case,
of course?"
510 EDENPHILLPOTTS
I the rope and prepared to depart*
" picked up
" My very
first I said.
"experience/*
Pore soul 1 exclaimed the feeling tradesman, but he
referred to the criminal, not to me.
" "
For Cord's sake don't bungle it were the last husky
1

words I heard from him ; and then I set forth to hang Arthur
Honeybun, who deserved hanging if ever a man did. I told
myself this, and made a quotation which I forget.
And now arose one of the most sinister concatenations
easily to be conceived in the life of a respectable citizen. Here
was I on the brink of self-destruction I only waited for some
;

fellow-creature to restrain me. But nobody attempted to do so I

My folly in disguising the truth from the little rope-merchant
now appeared. Had he known, he had doubtless shown me
my dreadful error in time ; now it was too late, for the world
pursued own business wholly regardless of me and my
its
black secret andmy hidden rope. Apparently there was really
nothing for me to do but to lose my wager or hang myself an
alternative which I well knew would represent for my family a
total pecuniary loss considerably greater than the sum involved.
I wandered down a lonely court and found an archway at
the bottom. One sickly gas lamp gleamed above this spot,
and the silence of death reigned within it. Had I been in
sober earnest, no nook hidden away under the huge pail of
the fog could have suited me better. Some evil fiend had
apparently taken charge of my volition and designed to see
the matter through, for I pursued this business of hanging
with a callous deliberation that amazed me. I even smiled as
1 climbed up the arch and made the rope fast upon the lamp
above it. Not a soul came to interrupt. The lamp blinked
lazily ; the fog crowded closer to see the sight ; the fiend
busied himself with my Jubbulpore rope, and arranged all
preliminaries, while I sat and grinned over the sooty desola-
tion. * I felt my pulse calmly, critically ; I indulged in mental

analysis ; endeavoured to estimate my frame of mind ; and

wondered if I could throw the experience into literary form
for a scientific journal. I remember being particularly sur-
prised that the attitude of my intellect towards this perform-
ance was untinctured by any religious feeling whatsoever.
Then came a psychological moment when the fiend had
done everything that he possibly could for me. My task was
merely to tie the loose end of the Jubbulpore masterpiece
 QUITE OUT OF THE COMMON 511
round my neck and cast forth into the void. How strange a
thing is memory For some extraordinary reason Dr. John-
I

son's definition of fishing flashed into my mind. I could not

recall it exactly at that terrible moment, but I remembered how
it had to do with a fool at one end of a
piece of string.
Stillnot a footstep only the rumble and roar of all selfish
London some twenty yards off never a hand to save me from
a coward's doom. I grew much annoyed with London ; I
reminded London of the chief incidents in my own career ;
I asked myself if this was justice ; I also asked myself why I
had been weak enough to turn into a blind alley evidently
an unpopular, undesirable spot, habitually ignored. And then
I grew melancholy, even maudlin. I saw my faults staring at
me negligences and ignorances ; and chiefly my crass
my
idiotcy in not undertaking this matter at Piccadilly Circus, or
some main junction of our metropolitan system where such
enterprises are not tolerated. It is, of course, a free country,
and the rights of the subject are fairly sacred, speaking gener-
ally ; but we draw the line here and there, and I knew that
any attempt to annihilate myself upon some lamp-post amid
the busy hum of men must have resulted as I desired. Inter-
ference would have prevented complete suspension there ;
but here the seclusion was absolute, and simply invited crime.
The fog had now reached its crowning triumph, and threatened
to deprive my trusty Jubbulpore hemp of its prey, for I was
suffocating, and asphyxia threatened to overwhelm me at any
moment.
" "
Wherethe deuce are the police ? I asked myself at this
eleventh hour. It was a policeman who had placed me in my
present pitiable fix, and blessed inspiration 1 why should not
another of the tribe extricate me from it ? When in danger or
imminent peril it is our custom to shout for the help of the
law, and surely if ever a poor, overwrought soul stood in
personal need of the State's assistance, it was Arthur Honey-
bun at that moment. So, with nerves strung to concert pitch,
I lifted up my voice, and called for a policeman. In these
cases, however, one does not specify or limit, so my summons
was couched generally to the force at large.
There followed no immediate response; then three boys
assembled under my arch, and they formed a nucleus or focus
about which a small crowd of the roughest possible persons,
male and female, collected. Last of all a policeman came also.
512 EDEN PHILLPOTTS
" " " "
Now then ! he said, then ?
what's all this,

The miserable boys took entire credit to themselves for dis-

covering me perched aloft. They pointed me out and called
attention to the Jubbulpore rope dangling from the lamp, and
elaborated their own theories.

Very properly the constable paid no attention to them, but

addressed all his remarks to me.
"
You up there," he asked, " what d'you think you're plyin'
"
at ?
There was no sympathy in his voice. He appeared to be a
tall, harsh officer a mere machine, with none of the milk of
human kindness in him. Or perhaps a beat in Seven Dials had
long since turned it sour. Moreover, he felt that the crowd
was on his side a circumstance that always renders a constable
over-confident and aggressive.
I felt unstrung, as I say distracted, and more or less hysteri-
cal, or I should have approached the situation differently ; but
I was not my own master ; I sat there, a mere parcel of throb-

bing nerves escaped from a hideous death. So, instead of being

lucid, which is a vital necessity in all communion with the
police, 1 uttered obscure sayings, went out of my way to
be cryptical and even spoke in spasmodic parables, but of
course there exists no member of the body politic upon whom
a parable is wasted more utterly than your constable.
<
You are surprised, and naturally so, to see me here," I said.
"
There are, however, more things in heaven and earth, police-
man, than are dreamt of in your philosophy. I am the creature
of circumstances in fact, of a series of circumstances probably
unparalleled. A colleague of your own it
may be a personal
friend responsible for my position on this arch. Yonder
is

wretched boy has not erred ; I had seriously thought to

destroy myself. I was driven to the very threshold of that
rash act. A
fronte pracipitium, a tergo lupi, policeman. I am
here perched between the devil and the deep sea a precipice in
front, a pack of wolves in the immediate rear. Now, be frank
with me. I place myself entirely in your hands. I desire your
honest and dispassionate advice."
But this is not the way to talk to a policeman ; perhaps it is
not the way to talk to anybody.
The deplorable boy had another theory.
He said :

" "
The blighter's off his onion I
 QUITE OUT OF THE COMMON
Then somebody else, dimly conscious that I had used a
foreign language, suspected that I might be an anarchist. The
policeman merely told me to come down, and I obeyed without
hesitation, and gave myself up to him. I felt that situated
thus, at least I was safe enough, if he would only do his duty ;
but he appeared to believe in the opinion that I was a foreigner.
" "
Where d'you come from ? he asked ; " if you're not
English, it's a case for your bloomin' Consul."
" "
I come from South Kensington," I answered, and I am
English to the backbone, and it's
your duty to convey me to
the police-station, which I'll thank you to do."
Here again I made a mistake. No man likes being told his
duty whether owing to a natural aversion from thinking of it
or doing it, or for other reasons connected with pride I know
not ; but the constable, upon this speech of mine, displayed
annoyance, and even some idea of leaving me to my own
devices. Seeing that he showed an inclination to let me escape
into the fog without a word of advice, and desiring no such
thing, I spurred him to his office. I said :

"If you do not arrest me, I shall persuade some other

member of the force to do so, and, as I have already made a
note of your number, it will be the worse for you."

Upon this he started as if a serpent had stung him ; the

crowd cheered me, and my object was attained. He felt his
popularity was slipping away and so set about regaining it.
" "
All right, all right, my bold 'ero he said. Then he blew
!

a whistle and summoned two colleagues.

"
" Dangerous lunatic wants to be took up," he explained.
Clean off his chump. Tryin' to 'ang 'imself."
Then he turned to me, and adopted a conciliatory tone.
"
Now, then, uncle, come along quiet," he said.
I suggested a cab, and offered to pay for it, but the constable
held such a thing unnecessary extravagance.
" "
Won't hurt you to walk," he said. And we'll go quicker
than a four-wheeler in this fog."
So, with a large accompaniment of those who win entertain-
ment from the misfortunes of their betters, I started to some
sheltering haven where it was my hope that the remainder of
the day might be spent in security and seclusion, behind bolts
and bars. In this desire lurked no taste of shame or humilia-
tion. I was far past anything of that kind. My sole desire,
my unuttered prayer, was to be saved from all further human
514 EDEN PHILLPOTTS
counsel whatsoever* If an angel from heaven had fluttered
down beside me and uttered celestial opinions to brighten that
dark hour, I should have rejected his advice very likely with
rudeness.
I thought of the cynical sagacity of Norton Bellamy. How
wise he had been And what a fool was I. I pictured his face
!

when my story came to be told. I heard his horrid laughter,

and my self-respect oozed away, and I almost wished I was
back with the Jubbulpore hemp upon the arch.
Then in the moment of my self-abasement, at the supreme
climax of my downfall, I looked out through a yellow rift in
the accursed fog, and saw Norton Bellamy himself !

At first indeed I did not credit this. The fog had lifted
somewhat ; livid patches and streaks of daylight relieved the
gloom, and a dingy metropolis peeped and blinked through it,
fungus-coloured and foul ; but suddenly, painted upon the
murky air, there took shape and substance a moving concourse
of figures of heads under helmets and 1, remembering the
spectre of the Brocken, for a moment suspected that what I
saw was but the shadow of myself, my policemen and my
crowd projected over against us upon the dusky atmosphere.
Yet as that other company approached, the splendid truth
burst upon me. Vagrants, policemen and rioting boys mainly
composed it, but in the place of chief dishonour walked Norton
Bellamy He, too, it would seem, had violated the laws of this
!

country ; he, too, by devious and probably painful ways, had

drifted into Seven Dials and there lost his freedom ; an even-
handed Nemesis, whose operations yet remained hidden from
me, had clearly punished Bellamy for rejecting the advice of his
fellow-man, even as she had chastened me for accepting it.
And from cursory appearances it looked as though Bellamy
had endured even more varied torments than my own. One
might have thought that attempts had been made to clean the
highway with him. He was dripping with mud ; he lacked a
hat; his white waistcoat awoke even a passing pity in my
heart. And yet the large placidity, the awful calm of a fallen

spirit sat on Bellamy. He had doubtless exploded, detonated,

boiled over, fumed, foamed, fretted and thundered to his ut-
most limit. His bolt was shot ; his venom was gone ; he stood
before me reduced to the potency of a mere empty cartridge-
case.
We met each other's glance simultaneously, and a sort of
 QUITE OUT OF THE COMMON 515

savage and foggy beam of joy flitted across his muddy face ;
while for my part I doubt not that some passing expression of
pleasure, which tact and humanity instantly extinguished, also
illuminated my features. Our retinues mingled and for a
moment we had speech together.
Needless to say the discovery that we were friends proved
a source of much gratification to the crowd.
"
Great Scott You " gasped out Bellamy. " What have
! !

"
you done ?
" "
Practically nothing," I answered ; but what I have suf-
fered no tongue can tell and no human being will ever know.
It is sufficient to say that I am
here because I was deliberately
advised by a fellow-creature to go and hang myself."
" "
They told you to do that ? he asked with keen but sup-
pressed excitement.
"
They did."
He was silent for an instant, pondering this thing, while
joy and sorrow mingled on his muddy countenance. Then he
answered me.
"
I'll write your cheque the first moment I get back to the
office. You were right. There is more good advice given than
bad. Fve proved it too. If Fd done half what I was told to-day,
j
Here our respective guardians separated us, and we marched
to our destination in silence ; but about five or six minutes
laterwe sat side by side in a police-station and were permitted
to renew our conversation.
"
You've had a stirring day, no doubt," Bellamy began,
"
while he scraped mud off himself. Tell me your yarn, then
I'll tell you mine. But how is it, if somebody advised you to

go and hang yourself, that you are here now ? You'll have to
explain that first as a matter of honour."
I explained, and it must be confessed that my words sounded
weak. It is certain, at any rate, that they did not convince
Bellamy.
"
withdraw the promise to write a cheque," he said shortly.
I
"
On your own showing you dallied and dawdled and fooled
about upon the top of that arch. You temporised. If you had
followed that advice with promptitude and like a man, you
wouldn't be here now. This is paltry and dishonest. I cer-
tainly sha'n't pay you a farthing."
I told him that I felt no desire to take his money, and he
516 EDENPHILLPOTTS
was going into the question of how far he might be said to
have won mine, when we were summoned before the Magis-
trate. Here Fate at last befriended me, for the Justice proved
to be Master of my Lodge of Freemasons and an old personal
friend. Finding that no high crime was laid at the door of
Bellamy, and, very properly, refusing to believe that I had
been arrested in an attempt on my own life, he rebuked my
policeman and restored to us our liberty. Whereupon we
departed in a hansom cab, after putting two guineas apiece
into the poor-box.This I need hardly say was my idea.
Then, as we drove to a hatter's at the wish of Norton
Bellamy, he threw some light on the sort of morning he
himself had spent. The man was reserved and laconic to a
ridiculous degree under the circumstances, therefore I shall
never know all that he endured ; but I gathered enough to
guess at the rest and feel more resigned in the contemplation
of my own experiences. He hated to utter his confession, yet
the experiences of that day rankled so deep within him that
he had not the heart to make light of them.
"
A "
foretaste of the hereafter," began Bellamy ; that's
what my day has been ; and if such a fiendish morning isn't
enough to drive a man to good works and a better way of life,
I'd like to see what is. You say your trouble began in the
railway carriage coming to town. So did mine. But whereas
your part was passive, and, by the mere putty-like and plastic
virtue of ready obedience to everybody you finally found your-
self face to face with death, I reached the same position

through a more active and terrible sort of way."

" "
Nevertheless," said I, taking into consideration the
difference between my character and yours remembering
that by nature you are aggressive, I retiring nothing you
can say will make me believe that you have suffered more than
I. but not mentally."
" Physically perhaps,
Don't interrupt ; I've heard you ; now listen to me," said
Bellamy. "It began, as I say, in the train. An
infernal
inspector desired to see my
season-ticket. Of course he was
within his right, and I had a whole carriage load of fools down
on me because I refused to show it. This day has taught
me one thing : there's not a man, woman or child in the
country who minds their own business for choice if a chance
offers of poking their vile noses into any other
body's. The
people who have interested themselves in me this morning I
 QUITE OUT OF THE COMMON 517

Well, that railway chap was nasty, of course, and took my

address ; but nothing more worth mentioning happened, except
a row with a shoeblack, until I got to my office. There the real
trouble began. You know Gideon ? Who doesn't, for that
matter ? I had the luck to do him a turn a week ago, and he
came in this morning with a tip actually went out of his way
to cross Lombard Street and get out of his cab and look in.
" *
He said, Good morning. Buy Diamond Jubilees all
you can get/ And I didn't look up from my letters, but
thought it was Jones, who's always dropping in to play the
fool, and remembered our loathsome bet. So I merely said,
' 9
Sha'n't ! Clear out 1 Then I lifted my head just in time to
see Gideon departing about as angry as a big man can be
with a little one and my clerks all looking as though they'd
suddenly heard the last trump.
"I
tore after him, but too late ; of course he'd gone. Then
I dashed to his place of business, but he'd got an appointment
somewhere else and didn't turn up till after twelve, by which
time the tip was useless. And he showed me pretty plainly
that I may regard myself as nothing to him henceforward.
After that I was too sick to work, so went West to see a man
and get some new clothes. Like a fool I never remembered
that with this bet on me I couldn't lie too low. It was all right
at the hairdresser's, as you may imagine ; but I'm accustomed
to let my tailor advise me a good deal, and you can see the holy
fix I was in after he'd measured me. I got out of that by

saying that I'd drop in again and see his stuffs and his pictures
by daylight ; then I had a glass of port at Long's, and, remem-
bering my youngsters, went to find a shop where I could get
masks and wigs and nonsense for them, because they are
proposing to do some charades or something to wind up their
holidays before they go back to school. Then, in the fog, I
got muddled up and lost myself about a quarter of a mile from
where we met. First I had a row with a brute from Covent
Garden Market, who ran into me with a barrow of brussels
sprouts. '
We
exchanged sentiments for a while and then '
the
coster said, I don't arsk of you to pick 'em up, do I ?
"
Well, of course, as he didn't ask me to pick them up, I
immediately began to do it. And the man was so astonished
that he stopped swearing and called several of his friends to
make an audience. So that was all right as far as it went ; but
just then
a bobby appeared out of the din and clatter of the
518 EDEN PHILLPOTTS
street, and ordered me to move on. Of course I wouldn't, and
while I was arguing with him, and asking for his reason, a
fire-engine dashed out of the bowels of the fog and knocked
me down in a heap before I knew who'd hit me.
"
Everybody thought Iwas jolly well killed, and I could just
see the air thick with blackguard faces, getting their first bit
of real fun for the day, when I suppose I must have become
unconscious from shock for the time being. Anyway, on
regaining my senses, I found myself in a bed of mud and rotten
oranges, with three policemen and about fifty busybodies, all
arguing cheerfully over me, as if I was a lost child. Most of
them hoped I was dead, and showed
their disappointment
openly when recovered again. Two doctors so they said
I

they were had also turned up from somewhere, and taken a

general survey of me while I was in no condition to prevent
them. After that I need hardly tell you I've lost my watch.
"
The question appeared to be my destination, and now the
policeman who had told me to move on explained, at great
length, that depended entirely on whether I was physically
shattered or still intact. If I was all right save for the loss of
my hat and the gain of an extra coat or two of mud, the man
had arranged to take me to a police-station for interfering
with a fire-engine in the execution of its duty, or some rot of
that sort ; but if, on the other hand, I was broken up and
perhaps mortally injured, then it struck him as a case for a
stretcherand a hospital.
"
They were still arguing about this when I came to. Upon
which the constable invited my opinion, and explained the
two courses open to him. He seemed indifferent and practically
left it to me ; so, as I felt the police-station would probably
represent the simplest and shortest ordeal ; and as, moreover,
so far as I could judge at the time, I was little the worse in
body for the downfall, I decided in that direction. I told him
I was all right and had mercifully escaped. Whereupon he
congratulated me in a friendly spirit and took me to the
police-station."
Thus Bellamy and when the man had finished we spoke
;

further for the space of about two minutes and a half, then
parted, by
"
mutual understanding," to meet no more.
I'm sorry for you," I said. We were both wrong and
both right. The truth is that there's a golden mean in the
matter of advice, as in most things. Probably the proportions
 QUITE OUT OF THE COMMON 519
of good and bad are about equal, though I am not prepared to
allow that our experiments can be regarded as in any sense
conclusive/'
" "
And as to the bet, I suppose we may say it's asked
off?
"
Norton Bellamy. I imagine you've had enough of this
unique tomfoolery, and I know I have. I'm a mass of bruises
and may be smashed internally for all I know, not to mention

my" watch."
"
Yes," I replied, the wager must be regarded as no
longer existing. We have both suffered sufficiently, and if we
proceeded with it, quod avertat Deusy some enduring tribulation
would probably overtake one or both of us. And a final
word, Bellamy. As you know, we have never been friends ;
our natures and idiosyncrasies always prevented any mutual
regard ; and this tragedy of to-day must be said to banish even
mutual respect."
" "
It has," said Norton Bellamy. I won't disguise it. I
feel an all-round contempt for you, Honeybun, that is barely

equalled by the contempt I feel for myself, I can't possibly

put" it more strongly than that." "
Exactly my own case," I answered. Therefore in future
it will be better that we cease even to be
acquaintances."
"
My own idea," said Bellamy, " only I felt a delicacy about
advancing it, which you evidently didn't. But I am quite of
your opinion all the same. And, of course, this day's awful
work is buried in our own breasts. Consider if it got upon the
Stock Exchange ! We should be ruined men. Absolute silence
must be maintained."
" "
So be it," I replied. Henceforth we only meet on the
neutral ground of Brighton A's. Indeed, even there, it is not
necessary, I think, that we should have any personal inter-
"
course. And one final word : if you will take my advice
He had now alighted, but turned upon this utterance and
gave me a look of such concentrated bitterness, malice, and
detestation that I felt the whole horror of the day was reflected
in his eyes.
"
YOUR advice Holy angels and Hanwell "
1 !

Those were the last words of Norton Bellamy. He felt

this to be the final straw ; he turned his back upon me ; he
tottered away into his hatter's ; and, with a characteristic
financial pettiness, raised no question about paying for his
share of our cab.
 WILLIAM CAINE
Spanish Pride
The Ulegant Hthiopium

After leaving Oxford William Caine studied for the Bar, but soon
forsook the law for journalism and literature. His work was
distinguished for its versatility and warm human sympathy, and he
was at his best in a light vein. He was an enthusiastic fisherman
and a comic artist of no little skill.

R*
 SPANISH PRIDE

poet is said to be born, not made. I have my doubts

THE about this ; but whatever the truth of it may be, it can-
not be said of the artist. He, it is true, has also to be born ;
but he has very much to be made, and the process is generally
an unpleasant one for him.
While Luiz Mendoza was still a-making and was still under
twenty years of age, one day he tried to find a short cut be-
tween central Paris and the garret which he then inhabited in
Montmartre, lost his direction and came suddenly into a tiny
quiet square which he had never seen before. The little place
charmed him, and being hot and thirsty, he sat down at a table
outside a small cafe and ordered a beer, for which he paid with
his last two coins. Then he opened the portfolio which he
carried. In it were ten of those sketches which in those days he
used to peddle about for a few francs among the offices of the
comic newspapers. Taking out a blank sheet of paper, he began
to sketch the square. If to-day you could find one of those same
drawings that Mendoza used to carry all over Paris, you would
think yourself a lucky man for, first, you would be possessed
;

of a very exquisite work of art, and, secondly, you would be

worth a great many more pounds than you had been a minute
earlier. But those early Mendozas are not easy to get hold of,
because all that escaped the waste-paper basket and the
caloriferes of that period lie nowadays in the drawers of the
richer collectors, and whenever they come into the market
there is much active competition.
Mendoza's morning had been a thoroughly bad one. He
had set out from his garret with ten sketches in his portfolio
and twenty centimes in his pocket and one slice of bread in his
stomach, and he was now returning with ten sketches in his
portfolio, while the twenty centimes that had been in his
pocket were spent, and as for the bread, it had long ago ceased
to make its presence felt. He had walked six miles, climbed
many hundreds of steps, and been told to go to the devil by at
least five busy and unsympathetic men. But to-night he would

523
5 24 WILLIAMCAINE
do a lot more drawings, and to-morrow he would sell
one or two of them ; he was sure of it. Till that happened,
however, there would be nothing to eat and drink save a
loaf's end in the cupboard at home and such water, unlimited,
to be sure, in quantity, as he might please to draw from the tap
In the passage outside his room. Well, so much the more
reason for enjoying the beer.
As he sketched he became aware of a stout old gentleman
who took a chair at a neighbouring table. This old gentleman
wore a big cape, though the day was scorching, and a broad-
brimmed hat, and his white hair hung down nearly to his
shoulders. In his buttonhole was a decoration that Mendoza
knew for a high one. But he knew all about this old gentle-
man.
" Caramba " "
I he said to himself. The Pre Doyau ! A
mystery of Paris is solved. So this is where he takes his
apiritijy the crafty old one No1chance of having to stand treat
to anybody here." Monsieur Boyau's parsimony was as
notorious in his own world as his pictures were famous both
there and elsewhere. A
marvellous artist, rolling in money,
as stingy as an empty cask, but otherwise an amiable old thing
that was the P6re Boyau.
Mendoza raised his hat in homage to Monsieur Boyau's art,
and Monsieur Boyau raised his in recognition of the compli-
ment. He gave an order to the cafe's only waiter, and, having
lit a
cigarette, leaned upon his stick, and regarded Mendoza
benevolently. Presently he got up and stood behind Mendoza,
Then he said :

" But it
is admirable, Monsieur. For so young a man you
have a very considerable talent. But," and he took a stick
"
of charcoal from his pocket, if I might suggest, the lines of
the kiosk might be strengthened with advantage to the whole
composition. May I indicate my meaning ? Your rubber
can obliterate what you do not wholly approve."
"
I shall be honoured, Monsieur," said Mendoza, who was
no
by " means above taking a free lesson from Theophile Boyau.
So," said Monsieur Boyau, as he leaned over and made a
few marks upon the paper, " and thus. Am I right ? "
" "
It is not," said Mendoza, for me to pass judgment upon
the work of a Boyau. This sketch is finished." He took a
small bottle of fixative out of his pocket, sprayed the drawing,
and put it away in his portfolio. "I am now," he said,
 SP ANIS H PRIDE 525
"
possessed of twenty strokes by Theophile Boyau. My
morning has turned out a lucky one, after all."
Monsieur Boyau laughed gaily and pinched Mendoza's cheek.
" Little flatterer 1 " he said.
Then, motioning to the waiter
to bring him his aptritif, he sat down beside Mendoza. The
boy had his beer and, despite that hint of bad luck, Monsieur
Boyau felt there was no danger. Besides, he was in a mood
to be companionable.
Atthis very moment they became aware of a poor woman,
who stood in front of them, holding out beseechingly a few
bunches of wilted flowers. In her other hand was that of a
child about six years old, an adorable little girl. Both were
thin and very pale.
Monsieur Boyau frowned.
"
Thank you ; no," he said, and his voice was not kindly
any more.
The woman sighed and began to move away but, even as ;

she moved, she staggered, and caught at the back of a chair to

steady herself. Then she sat down suddenly.
At that, with great swiftness, Mendoza jumped up.
" "
Madame," he said, take courage. I will see what I can
do," and he darted into the caf<.
It was empty save for the waiter, a canary, and a woman
of opulent figure who sat at the cash-desk making a piece of
embroidery. Mendoza approached her, hat in hand, and
opened his portfolio.
"
Madame," he said in his courtly Spanish "voice and his
perfect, but rather rough-sounding French, I sell these

drawings to editors for five francs apiece. Will you take one
or all of them in return for coffee, bread, meat and a bowl of
warm milk ? There are a woman and child out there who look
as if they might die." "
"
No," said the woman ; I do not care for pictures. But
you are a Spaniard, are you not ? Yes ? My mother was a
Spaniard. You shall have the victuals for your friends, my
fellow." And she gave an order to the waiter.
little
"
Decidedly," said Mendoza to himself as, having over-
whelmed the woman with thanks, he went out of doors again
"
"
decidedly this is my lucky morning."
"
Madame," he said, addressing the poor woman, refresh-
ment is on the way. Courage And for the little one there
!

"
will be milk. Is all that as it should be ?
526 WILLIAM CAINE
She smiled wanly at him.
" "
Monsieur is an angel," she said. I was finished ; but
I shall be able to get home now."
Monsieur Boyau, who had hitherto looked very severe, now
began again to illuminate his neighbourhood with smiles.
"
"Heaven," he said piously, will undoubtedly reward
monsieur for his kindness," and he looked with interest, not
unmingled with pity, at this shabby youth who flung his money
about so recklessly. But that was youth. Appearances were
certainly deceptive. He would never have supposed that the
boy had the price of a meal for himself, let alone for two
others.
Mendoza drew the child up to She came willingly
his knee.
and at once snuggled down against him, with his arm round
her.
"Mademoiselle's milk," said Mendoza, "will be here
directly. Meanwhile let us offer mademoiselle such other poor
entertainment as is in our power." He opened his portfolio,
" The
took out a sheet of paper, and began to draw. Jardin
"
des Plantes," he said, is
popular with the very young, but
it is far from where we sit. Still, many wonderful things are
in the power of the draftsman. Behold, Mademoiselle, I
transport us to the Jardon des Plantes. What is this that is
"
coming into view ? I swear, it is an elephant 1

As he spoke, a magnificent and most comical elephant

appeared upon the paper. The child clapped her hands.
"
Maman" she cried, " the gentleman
See, has made an
"
elephant. And it is droll. Oh but it is droll I 1

"
Mademoiselle would perhaps enjoy a promenade upon
"
the creature's back," said Mendoza. Let her not be afraid.
My elephants are very tame. But, that there may be no hesi-
tation on mademoiselle's part, I shall make her very large, so
that she will be able to control the animal's movements at her
"
pleasure And behold seated upon the elephant appeared
I !

a colossal little
girl exactly like mademoiselle.
The portrait was undeniable. Mademoiselle screamed with
pleasure. Her mother laughed to see. Monsieur Boyau,
sipping from his glass, chuckled his appreciation of the per-
formance. The waiter, who had just brought out the pro-
visions, called upon his Maker to witness that the likeness was
extraordinary.
" "
A
lion," cried the child, draw 'Toinette a lion."
 SPANISHPRIDE 527
"
When Mademoiselle has drunk her milk," said Mendoza,
"
a lion shall be produced, and a terrible one, if Mademoiselle
pleases/'
" "
Oh, yes/' she said, be very terrible. 'Toinette
let it
is not afraid of Monsieur's beasts. She is so enormous now."
With admirable docility she began to consume her milk. Her
mother fell greedily upon the ham, bread and coffee that the
waiter had set before her. Mendoza lit his last cigarette and
drank beer.
When the milk was finished, the child pushed the bowl
away and asked for 'Toinette's lion.
Mendoza obliged. Then he drew a tiger, a rhinoceros, a
boa constrictor, a giraffe and all these creatures were so
;

funny that the child and her mother and the waiter, who could
not tear himself away, and Monsieur Boyau were convulsed
with merriment. At last Madame, the proprietress of the
cafe, made curious by the laughter outside, joined the admiring
throng. Although she did not care for pictures, she was so
much delighted with Mendoza's beasts (and perhaps with his
Spanish voice) that she ordered more meat and bread and
coffee to be brought out ; yes, and a pot of confiture for
Mademoiselle.
At Mendoza, who had been observing old Boyau
last

craftily out of the corner of his eye, stopped drawing and said :

"
But who am I to be spoiling paper in the presence of a
Boyau ? Know, Mademoiselle, that this old gentleman is
France's greatest living painter. Ask him to draw something
for you. Then you will see beasts indeed."
" "
Ah, bah 1 Monsieur Boyau, prodigiously pleased,
said
"
nevertheless. Who am I to compete with such a magician ?
However, if Mademoiselle permits, I will do my humble best
to satisfy her." Ever since the drawing had begun, his
fingers had been itching to be at work, and his artist's soul had
been hungering to taste the unalloyed flattery of the child's
ecstatic appreciation.
Almost before he had finished speaking, one of Mendoza's
blank sheets was before him.
" " It
Not in said Mendoza in his ear.
charcoal, Master,"
istoo broad for the child's eye. Take this pencil. It is an
excellent one."
The oldman obeyed. He was very much disposed to be
good. This wasn't going to cost him a penny, yet he was
528 WILLIAM CAINE
about to do a kindly thing. And he liked to be kind, so long
as he didn't have to pay.
" Let me
think," he said, as he arranged the paper for his
"
hand. Monsieur has suggested more beasts for Mademoi-
selle, but I cannot draw beasts that will compare with those
of Monsieur. Suppose suppose suppose I make a pro-
cession of gladiators."
"
What," asked Mademoiselle, "are gladiators ? I think I
would rather have more beasts."
" Not
so," said Mendoza, pressing her with his arm per-
"
suasively. There is nothing more beautiful than gladiators,
Mademoiselle will see."
Monsieur Boyau bent himself to his task, and very soon the
intention of his design became apparent.
The spectator, Gesar for the moment, stared down upon
the sand of the circus, which in the background towered, tier
on tier to meet its vast, striped awning. And there stood the
gladiators, their arms raised, shouting, saluting the emperor,
under whose eyes they were about to die. What Monsieur
Boyau didn't know about gladiators, as about many other
things, wasn't worth knowing, and he had placed his know-
ledge unreservedly at the service of his design. It was a very
astonishing crowd of villains when it was done.
" "
So he said at last, leaning back and finishing his drink.
I

"
And what does Mademoiselle think of it ? "
" But
where," asked Mademoiselle, obviously disappointed,
"
are the gladiators ? I see nothing but a lot of ugly men,
shouting."
Monsieur Boyau kughed genially and got up.
'

" "
My young friend," he said to Mendoza, I was foolish
to compete with you. I have failed. My compliments. You
have defeated Theophile Boyau."
He rose, picked up his sketch, and was about to tear it
across but Mendoza's hand shot out.
;
" "
No," he said eagerly ; no, Monsieur, that is mine. That
is my prize for defeating Theophile Boyau."
" " " You
That thing ? said Monsieur Boyau. Ah, bah I

deserve something better than that."

" "
It is a memento," said Mendoza, of a meeting that I
99
shall not forget. I may keep it ?
"
" Surely, if you value it."
"
And you will sign it ?
 SPANISH PRIDE 529
" " "
Why not ? asked Monsieur Boyau, smiling. Where I

give, I sign." And he signed the sketch. " Between you,

you have " made me late for my luncheon," he said with mock
severity. The digestion of Theophile Boyau is not lightly
to be tampered with. I hope you will appreciate the enormity
of your crime. And so good day to you all, Monsieur,
Madame, Mademoiselle."
He raised his hat three times and waddled away.
"
And now," said Mendoza, " I will go and interview a
gentleman that I know of. Do you, Madame and Mademoi-
selle, stay here. I will be back within the hour, and I hope to
news. "
bring you good Waiter, my nearest road to the Opera ?
The waiter gave directions.
Mendoza placed Monsieur Boyau's drawing carefully
between the covers of his portfolio and ran off.
Twenty minutes later he arrived, still running, at Lemaitre's.
He went straight in.
" "
Monsieur Lemaitre ? he panted to the person who
appeared to be in charge of the gallery.
"
Monsieur Lemaitre does not see everybody," he was
told.
"
He will see me," Mendoza. " I have here " and he
said
"
tapped his portfolio an authentic Boyau, a pencil sketch of
gladiators." He hastily drew out the sketch.
" "
Yes," said the other, it is possible that Monsieur

Lemaitre would be interested to see that. Follow me, if you

please."
Mendoza was shown into Lemaitre's private room.
"
Yes," said Lemaitre, who had carried the drawing to the
"
window, it is a charming little thing. You wish to sell it
to me Yes ? I will give you fifty francs for it."
"
Monsieur Le Cocq of the Rue Royale would give me a
"
hundred," said Mendoza, but I am in a hurry, and you may
have it for eighty."
" "
Seventy ? said Lemaitre.
Mendoza put the sketch back into his portfolio and took up
his hat.
" "
Well, well," laughed Lemaitre, eighty it is." And he
gave the money to Mendoza.
Mendoza reopened the portfolio, took out the sketch, and
handed it to Lemaitre. Then his fingers slipped, for he was
still
panting, and not in perfect command of his muscles, and
530 WILLIAM CAINE
the portfolio to the ground. The carpet was littered with
fell
his own
drawings.
Lemaitre was a dealer and a hard one, but he was a gentle-
man. He began to help Mendoza to pick up the drawings.
Suddenly he made a little exclamation.
" "
But," he said, this is not without merit. Let me see the
others, if I may/'
" "
I am in a hurry," said but you have been more
Mendoza,
generous than I had expected. Look at them, by all means,
but please be quick. I have an appointment with two
ladies."
"
Two," said Lemaitre as he ran his eye over Mendoza's
"
work. For one so young you are fortunate.
" By whom arc
these sketches ?
"
Mendoza," said Mendoza.
" By
And who is Mendoza ? "
"
I am Mendoza," said Mendoza.
"
You are, are you," said Lemaitre. " Well, Monsieui
Mendoza, I think I like your work. Suppose you leave these
things here and come back to-morrow with some more. It
is only a suggestion, of course, and I
promise nothing ; but
it may be worth while."
your "
"
Very good," said Mendoza. Then I may go ? "
"
You may, Monsieur Mendoza ; but don't forget to come
back. Tell those two ladies whom you are hastening to meet
that Lemaitre will be grateful to them if they will spare you to
him to-morrow for half an hour."
"I "
shall be careful," said Mendoza, to tell them so." He
ran out of the gallery, jumped into a cab, and was driven back
" "
to the cafe. Decidedly," he said to the boulevard de-
cidedly thisis my lucky day."

Arrived at the cafe, he descended hastily, changed a ten-

franc piece with the waiter, paid the cab, and hurried to the
side of Madame and Mademoiselle, who were still seated at
their table.
" "
Madame," he said, I told you I
might bring you good
news. I do. have sold the picture with which Mademoiselle
I
was pleased to be dissatisfied for eighty francs. Here are
seventy-eight of them. The missing two are charged to
travelling expenses. Madame, I wish you good-day. Madem-
"
oiselle and he kissed the child gallantly on the cheek " I
"
wish you a handsome husband. And so, farewell He !
 SPANISH PRIDE 53!

swept off his hat and departed, running, deaf to the cries which
followed him.
When he was safe from pursuit he fell into a walk, and at the
same pace made his way to his lodging.
"
Thank Heaven " he said as he let himself in, " I have that
!

loaf's end in the cupboard. These exercises have made me

peckish."
 THE ELEGANT ETHIOPIUM
King of Qusaco was the most elegant monarch
THE and he was justly proud of the distinction.
alive
One day he had a bad influenza and began to fear that he
might not last much longer.
He summoned his Prime Minister to his bedside and
"
said
"
: We must find a husband for my daughter."
Certainly, sire," said the Prime Minister, who always
tried to agree with the King.
"I am
getting on in life," said the " King as he snuffed
dismally at a bottle of Alkaram. I may go any day."'
"
Your Majesty will live for a hundred thousand years,"
observed the Prime Minister.
"Don't be an idiot," said the King, "and stick to the
"
point.
"
Whom shall we have for the Princess's husband ?
"
Why," said the Prime Minister, there is Prince Matteo
of Oustquegay to whom she is betrothed."
" "
Yes," replied the King, and a nice lad too. But stop
"
a bit. Are we sure that he is the best man ?
"
The Princess is," observed the Prime Minister.
" That is "
not the question," said the King. tell Now
what most for a to
"
me, is it necessary king possess ?
" Brains ? "
suggested the Prime Minister.
" "
Fiddle," said the King, have I any brains ? You know
that you and the Parliament make all the laws. Try again."
" "
is one of your
Courage," said the Prime Minister,
Majesty's strong points."
" "
Skittles," said the King. I am a coward. But I have
no need of courage, because my generals do all my fighting.
"
What else ?
"
Wit?" said the Prime Minister.
" Footle" "
You know I have only to
said the King.
wink and the whole court will expire of laughter if I were to
"
say Bring me my boots. No," he went on, you have not
guessed right. I will tell you. A king nowadays must be
elegant or he is lost. Once a year he has to appear before
532
 THE ELEGANT ETHIOPIUM 533
his to open Parliament,
subjects If he looks imposing,
head proudly and walks in a stately manner every-
carries his
one thinks he is somebody quite different from themselves.
But if he were to shamble along and hang his head they
would see he was just an ordinary man and they would
go home and reflect; and the next thing we should see
would be a revolution. Now I may be a fool, but I am
elegant."
"True," said thePrime Minister absent-mindedly. "I
"
should say/' he added hurriedly, that your Majesty's thoughts
are golden and his words are pearls."
"
You do say the silliest things," said the King, " but let
it pass. Now the question is this Is Prince Matteo elegant ? "
:

"
Vastly elegant," said the Prime Minister.
" "
Yes, but is he the most elegant man we can find ?
" "
Ah," said the Prime Minister profoundly. That is
another matter." He thought himself very much more
elegant than Prince Matteo.
" "
Let us," said the King, hold a competition of elegance
and let the prize be the Princess's hand and the succession to
the throne."
"
Hah " shouted the Prime Minister, who immediately
!

began to hope that he would win.

Now we must leave them for the moment.
Far away in the middle of Africa grow the india-rubber trees
and in the middle of the india-rubber trees lived an Ethiopium
named Zerubbabel. He was six feet eight inches high and as
black as your boots (the patent leathers, not the going away
tans). He had curly-close hair, large rolling eyes and a smile
that went twice round his head, it was so very expansive.
He lived entirely on india-rubber (the black gluey kind, not
the red soft delicious kind) because nothing else grew in
his country. This made him wonderfully agile and elastic.
One day he got terribly tired of india-rubbei; and set out
to see the world.
By and by he came to a large town. Just outside it he
found a fellow who was standing firmly on one foot while
he held the other above his head. He was counting aloud
at top speed, while the tears streamed down his face.
" "
" Why yo' do dat ? said Zerubbabel.
94> 95 I am practising for the competition," said the
" "
other. 96, 97
534 WILLIAM CAINE
* "
Which completition ? asked Zerubbabel.
" "
98 Don't speak to me," said the young man. 99 I'm
" "
busy. ico 1 he shouted, and instantly raising his other
foot above his head, began counting once more.
" " "
said Zerubbabel, which completition ?
" Say, though," "
i, 2, 3, 4 Please go away," said the young man. 5, 6,
o
7, o ...
"
Dis am a curious business," thought Zerubbabel, and as
the young man really seemed to want him to go, he went.
Soon he came to a whole lot of other young men. They
were all lying face downwards on the ground and raising
their bodies up and down by straightening and bending their
arms. A teacher stood on a platform and played a concertina
and it was in time to this instrument that they all moved.
" "
What dey doin' dar ? asked Zerubbabel.
"
They are in for the competition," said the teacher, working
away at his concertina like mad.
"
Sure," said Zerubbabel, "but which completition am
dat ?
"
" "
Youcarry yourself well," said the teacher. Let me
enroll you in my class."
"
Take a walk, won't you," cried Zerubbabel, by which
" "
he meant I do not care to entertain your proposition.
" "
Well, there is no harm," said the teacher, in taking my
booklet, How to be graceful/ The scale of fees is on the
*

last page." And he offered Zerubbabel a small paper with a

picture of himself performing a pirouette on the cover.
Now Zerubbabel was unable to read, being very ill-brought
up, and he declined it, at which the teacher lost all interest in
him and changed the tune on his concertina, whereupon all
the young men turned over on their backs, elevated their legs
in the air and began to kick out vigorously in time to the
music.
Zerubbabol went a little further, and wherever he went he
saw nothing but people cutting capers and contorting their
bodies into every kind of uncomfortable position. They
were all, it appeared, in for the Competition, but none of them
seemed to have time to tell him what the Competition was
about.
At last he came upon a very old man who was seated
gloomily on a stone. "
"Ain't yo* in fer dish yere completition ? asked Zerubbabel.
 THE E^TSGAISTT ETHIOPIUM 535
" rc
Alas no," said the old man.
1 I am out of the running.
I cannot even walk without this stick. But if this only had
happened eighty years ago when I was in my prime, I'd have
shown them."
" "
Den/' said Zerubbabel, will yo' 'blige me and just say
what de competition am for ? "
"
Is it possible you don't know ?
"
cried the old man.
"
Then you must know that " and he told him that the
Competition was a Competition of Elegance, that the prize
was the Princess's hand and the succession to the throne,
and that all the world was in for it, not only the naturally
elegant men, but everyone who could walk on two legs.
Those who had never done a hand's turn of work in their
lives now spent their entire days practising Swedish exercises
and dancing steps like mad to limber up their muscles and
acquire something like grace. And the town was full of dancing
masters, teachers of deportment, shampooers, exponents of
the Del Sarte method, saltimbanques, sellers of embrocations,
trainers, professors of gymnastics, professors of calisthenics,
Japanese (who taught jiu-jitsu) German acrobats, Greek
wrestlers, Hindoo contortionists, dancing dervishes, Spaniards
(to impart the malaguena and the habanera), Frenchmen (to
teach the carmagnole), Russians, (for the big boot dance) and
several Italian premiere danseuses.
" " "
What," asked Zerubbabel, am de name ob dis place ?
"
Quesaco," said the old man.
Zerubbabel went off into a quiet spot and studied up the
situation.
" "
Guess dis chile'll hab a go hisself," he thought. Dis
chile am tol'ble spry on hees legs. Guess it am fine ting to
marry one ob dese yer Princessesses an' dere am no entrance
feeses." And he-went and put down his name as a competitor.
Next day the Competition began. It was to last three days.
The first day all those whose names began with any of the
letters from A to M
were to exhibit their elegance against
each other, the second day those whose names began with
any of the letters from N
to Z were to do the same thing, and
on the third day the two winners were to fight it out in the
final. ^

The public square was glorious with flags and Venetian

masts. The sun shone brightly. The people of Quesaco
thronged the pavements and every window, where enormous
 536 WILLIAM CAINE
sums were paid for the seats, was full of heads. It cost as much
as eightpence to stand on a soap box. Four brass bands, one
at each corner of the square, played different pieces of
inspiring music, every boy had a squirt and every girl a pea-
cock's feather. Gaiety reigned supreme. There were all
sorts of side-shows to be seen but nobody had the least use
for them. The shooting galleries and the Ma%e of Mirrors
might as well have remained shut up, and the Boxing Kangaroo
and the Fat Lady were like to starve. At the top end of the
square the King and
the Princess sat in their private box,
which was decorated with scarlet cloth, white paper roses
and two large gilt lions.
The trumpets sounded and the procession of competitors
entered the public square from beneath a large triumphal
arch, which had been built at the private expense of the Mayor,
a manufacturer of embrocation, who had used as his building
material nothing but bottles of his own product. All round
the arch ran the words "None but the lithe deserve the
"
Fair and on top was a big banner bearing the legend
"
Use Anti-Stiffand Win."
As Prince Matteo passed the royal box the Princess threw
him a white paper rose. He kissed it and placed it in his
buttonhole, for he was polite as well as elegant.
The procession marched three times round the square,
that everybody might be seen, and then the Competition began.
Prince Matteo's turn did not come till just at the end because
he began so far down the alphabet, but the moment he began
to move there was no doubt in any single person's mind
that he must win. His elegance was extraordinary, his grace
supreme and his ease miraculous. His " dancing
was described
"
next day in all the morning papers as the poetry of motion.
He was declared the winner of the first day and everybody said
that the Princess was as good as his own. There could not
possibly, they declared, be anybody in the N to Z division
who could come near him.
Prince Matteo called on the Princess in the evening to
receive her congratulations. He found her in the kitchen
garden, where she had a little bit of ground all her own, in
which she grew nasturtiums, stocks, lettuces and other hardy
plants. The pride of this little garden of hers was at the
moment a fine water-melon, now almost ripe. The Princess had
watched it
grow day by day and was immensely proud of it.
 THE ELEGANT ETHIOPIUM 537
She had called it Paul, which is a capital name for a water-
melon.
"
See/' she said, when she had congratulated the Prince,
"
see how splendidly Paul is coming on. I am sure he will be
"
ripe for our wedding feast ; for they were both quite certain
that Matteo was going to win the Competition.
Matteo stroked Paul lovingly and told him how well he
was looking, but Paul made no reply for he was a very taciturn
water-melon and attended to nothing but the task of growing
large and sweet. It was this attention to business which had
made him so huge. I think the Princess loved him, next to
Matteo and her father, better than anything in the world, and
she could never think of cutting him open without a pang.
Matteo only stayed a short time as he had to be in bed
early, being in strict training.
The Princess slept happily all night.
So general was the belief that Matteo was already the winner
that the attendance at the second day's competition was much
smaller and you could get two soap boxes, one for each foot,
for as much as a penny. As the day wore on and nobody
showed the approach to the performance of Prince
slightest
Matteo of the day before the populace lost all interest in the
affair and drifted away to other amusements. The shooting
galleries and the Maze of Mirrors did a roaring business, while
the Boxing Kangaroo and the Fat Lady were nearly suffocated
by the crowds of people who thronged their tents. As for the
men with soap boxes, they could not get a customer for love
or money.
There was hardly anybody in the square when the last
competitor began his exhibition. This was Zerubbabel, the
Ethiopium. He wore, for the occasion, the national costume
of Ethiopia ; that is to say, a high crowned white felt hat
with a flat brim, a big stick up collar, a shirt with an immense
frill and large cuffs, a white dress waistcoat, a blue, brass-

buttoned, swallow-tail coat and white duck trousers stripped

with scarlet. He had painted one eye white and he carried a
pair of bones in either hand.
But the moment he began the people came crowding back
into the square in thousands, for the news ran through the
side-shows like wildfire that there was something really worth
seeing at last. You never saw such movements as he made.
First he curled his right leg three times round his left knee
538 WILLIAM CAINE
and uncurled suddenly, standing at the same time on his
it

left big toe. This caused him to spin round violently like a
top while his right leg flew out straight into the air to the
level of his nose. Then he brought his right foot to the
ground and did the same with his left leg. In this manner
he advanced some twenty paces. Then he leaned his body
back from his hips parallel to the ground keeping his necik
and head erect and throwing out his feet like a park hack and
walked in this manner back to his starting place, with his
thumbs in his waistcoat and his elbows moving up and down
like wings. Then he sunk his head on his chest, raised his
shoulders as high as he could, extended his arms out sideways
in a bow, and, bending his right leg till the knee nearly touched
the ground and putting out his left leg perfectly straight till
the heel rested on the earth, he raised his body until it was
directly over his left foot, and in this manner made seventeen
steps sideways.
"
While he did this he cried four times Hyah Heeyah !

"
Hyah Heeyah !

Then he did the same in the opposite direction, uttering as

he did so the sound of a crowing cock. Then springing back-
wards into the air he whirled his right leg round so that the
foot first touched his ear fourteen times before it came to
the ground. He looked like a pin wheel. This he did with
his left leg, andthirty-three changes brought him backwards
just underneath the King's seat.
Then he threw out his left foot about ten yards and came
down with his legs perfectly straight along the ground in
opposite directions. He dug the toes of his right foot into
the earth and pushed hard and lo Ihe rose from the earth to
the full extent of his left leg. In this way he covered the whole
length of the " public square." Having
finished, he cried in a
loud voice, Haow's dat ? grinned horribly and rolled his
eyes till it made everybody giddy to look at him.
Then he began to dance.
He did the double shuffle, the treble shuffle, and all the
shuffles there are and many that had never been seen before
and have never been seen since, the pas de basque, the pas de
Calais the pas de tout, the pas si mal and all the French dancing
y

steps, the cross cuts, the vine leaf, the jerboa dance, the June
bug, the sweet step, the Boston dip, the sky-scraper, the green-
ginger flick, the Hominy cellar-flap, the Everglades, the
 THE ELEGANT ETHIOPIUM 539

Memphis mystery, the Edna wallow, the de Funiak spring,

the Cape Hatteras slide, Carthage Rags and most of the best-
known American examples, the bolero, the fandango, the
malaguena, the habanera, and was just beginning the tarantella
when the people cried with one voice " Zerubbabel wins.
Zerubbabel wins," and the King was obliged to give him the
prize of the second day.
Will you try to imagine the King's fury, the Princess's
grief and Prince Matteo's despair. He called on the Princess
to comfort her and assure her that he would beat the Ethio-
pium on the morrow or die in the attempt.
He found her again in the garden looking sadly at Paul and
pinching him cautiously to see if he was in good condition
for eating.
" "
To-morrow/' she said, Paul will be perfectly ripe. Oh,
Matteo, you must beat that fearful Ethiopium or else you will
not eat Paul at my wedding feast."
You see it was " my " now, not " our " wedding feast.
Even the Princess had lost confidence in Matteo. And 'so
would you if you had seen the elegance of Zerubbabel in the
public square.
Poor Matteo choked down a sob and said as bravely as he
could that all would be well, but he knew that he could never
be as elegant as Zerubbabel. He was dreadfully low in his
mind. After a time he went sadly away, for the Princess would
do nothing but groan and Matteo could not bear it.
The Princess wept when he had gone. " Oh," she cried,
"
to-morrow I shall be married to that horrible negro, I know
"
I shall. Whatever am I to do ? And she shed tears all over
Paul the water-melon, and then she noticed that he was begin-
" "
ning to grow bigger. Oh," she sobbed, Paul is growing
bigger, and to think that my poor Matteo will not eat him."
And she wept afresh, and the more she wept the bigger and
fatter and riper and more enormous grew Paul until he was
about as large as a wardrobe and no one had ever seen such a
water-melon. Until at last he positively burst with ripeness
and from the opening in his skin came a little soft voice which
"
said, Offer me as second prize."
" "
Oh," sobbed the Princess, even Paul knows that my
poor dear Matteo is going to be beaten and he wants to console
him. But I'm afraid that not even Paul can do that. But he
can do it better than anything else so I will take his advice."
540 WILLIAM CAINE
The next day the crowd in the public square was simply
terrifying. The shooting galleries and the Maze of Mirrors
were obliged to shut up for lack of custom, and as for the
Boxing Kangaroo and the Fat Lady they were out with the rest
pushing and staring to see the elegance of the Ethiopium of
which they had heard so much. Soap boxes were let out in
halves at half a crown
a time.
The King and Princess came into their box, the trumpets
"
blew a blast and the four bands struck up Bill Bailey,"
" "
Stars and Stripes for ever," The overture from Tann-
" "
hauser" and the Blue Danube Waltz simultaneously. It
was a moment.
thrilling
Prince Matteo and the elegant Ethiopium stepped out from
opposite sides of the square, met in the middle, shook hands
and walked together up to the royal box tot salaam before the
King. All eyes were, of course, riveted on the two heroes,
and it was not until they arrived at the box that everyone
noticed that an enormous water-melon, bearing a ticket marked
" "
Second Prize had been lifted up on the parapet of the box
by the Princess. "
Matteo of course recognised Paul and thought, How kind
of my dear Princess. She knows that I shall not win her and
she offers, to console me, that superb vegetable in which we
have both taken such interest and pride. Well, I will not eat
a morsel of it without thinking first of her."
But Zerubbabel's great eyes rolled nearly out of his head
with excitement.
" "
My sakes," he cried, dat am a bully water-million.
"
Say, honey," he went on addressing the Princess, yo gwine "
give dishyere sure-enough water-million fer de secon' prize ?
The Princess nodded. She would not speak.
"
Golly," said Zerubbabel, but his mouth watered so
extravagantly at the sight of Paul that he could say no more.
The King gave the signal and Matteo began to exhibit his
elegance. Now you must not think that because he was down
in the mouth about his chance that he did not mean to do his
very best. Not at all. Matteo had plenty of determination
and he had made up his mind that he wasn't going to be beaten
by an indiarubber Ethiopium without putting up a good fight.
So he danced his very finest for an hour and a half while the
people applauded and the Princess's eyes shone like stars to
see his graceful ease, to say nothing of his easy grace.
 THE ELEGANT ETHIOPIUM 541
But Zcrubbabel could do nothing but look at the water-
melon.
And
the longer he looked the larger Paul seemed to be and
the softer and the riper. Little cracks appeared in him and
from every one exuded a delicious pink juice, till at last
Zerubbabel would have given his right hand for a bite.
Matteo stopped dancing and everyone cheered themselves
hoarse, partly in compliment to Matteo and partly because,
now that he had done they knew that the Elegant Ethiopium
would begin. And they had chiefly come to sec him.
But when Zerubbabel stepped out into the middle of the
square he was thinking of the water-melon, and when he
raised his left foot for his first step he was thinking of the
water-melon, and before he could make a single movement he
"
thought, If I beat the Prince I get the Princess, but I love the
water-melon."
And at this awful thought the spring all went out of him
and he began to dance worse than a bear on the end of a string.
He jumped clumsily around for a few minutes and then
stopped.
" "
That/' said the people, nudging each other, was only
his fun. That is to show us how the competitors danced.
Now he will begin." And they applauded him to the echo.
It was easy to see that he was the popular favourite.
But Zerubbabel made his bow, smiled and said :

"
Haow's dat ? " And all the time he was ogling the water-
melon.
" " "
How's that ? roared the populace. Rotten I Is that
"
all he's going to do ?
"
Yass," said Zerubbabel.
"
Down with him/' howled some of the populace. " Duck
him in the pond. Lynch him. Tear him to pieces."
"
Give us back our money/' yelled the rest, quite forgetting
that the whole thing was free.
" "
Prince Matteo is the winner," said the King hastily, and
Zerubbabel takes the second prize." With these words he
handed the Princess to Matteo with one hand and the water-
melon to Zerubbabel with the other.
But as he clutched it Zerubbabel saw the populace rushing
upon him from all sides armed with clubs. Even the Fat
Lady was trying to get at him and the Boxing Kangaroo was
taking off its gloves in a very threatening manner.
54* WILLIAM CAINE
" "
Iguess/' he thought, it's time Zerubbabel vamoosed

de ranche," which is Ethiopium for escaping.

Then he clutched Paul, the water-melon, to his bosom with
one arm and, describing a dozen rapid circles in the air with the
other to give himself impetus, he bent his knees and with one
tremendous leap sprang completely out of sight.
Everybody stood gaping and wondering where he had gone
except the Prince and Princess, who were locked in one
another's arms and didn't care if it snowed pink.
 DENIS MACKAIL
Starvation Comer
Bradsmith was Right

Denis Mackail comes of an artistic and literary family, being the

son of a former Professor of Poetry at Oxford and grandson of
Burne-Jones. His books are noted for their amusing and lifelike
delineation of character, and the most popular of them are probably
Bi// the Bachelor* The Flower Show* and Greenen Street.
 STARVATION CORNER

that the news of Mrs. Gilchrist's remarriage

TO say
staggered her immense circle of friends and acquaintances
would be exaggerating slightly, because although that circle is
always ready to throw up its hands and9 eyes and to exclaim,
"My dear How absolutely astounding V it is, as a matter of
1

fact, actually astounded by little or nothing ; being, to speak

the plain truth, a circle which has for years so cheapened the
art of astonishment that the spectacle of a blue buffalo
riding
a bicycle down Bond Street would find its vocabulary already
exhausted, and its emotions largely atrophied by the number
of previous occasions on which they have been simulated in
the cause of mere social civility.
Nevertheless and no one hopes more than we do that
we'll never write such a long sentence as that last one again it
was undoubtedly unexpected and unquestionably surprising.
For though Mrs. Gilchrist was both rich and hospitable, she
was neither young nor exactly beautiful. And though she was
good-natured and good-tempered, no one had ever suspected
her of being passionate or romantic. And though she was
certainly a slight snob and so are the rest of us, when we're
not howling ones this very fact, you'd have thought, must
have precluded all possibility of the man's title having any-
thing to do with it.
Any rich woman, after all, may be excused for marrying an
English duke or an English earl. But surely no one can
have known better than Mrs. Gilchrist that a foreign noble-
man is, if anything, something more to be ashamed of than
to be regarded as the very meanest kind of prize. Why, even
Americans, in these days, have learnt better than to indulge in
such pointless extravagance.
So the circle was reduced to saying that Baron Bollheim
who was known to be hard up, and was patently plain, dull and
middle-aged had married Mrs. Gilchrist for her money.
545 S
5 46 DENISMACKAIL
Yet several of them had tried to perform this feat themselves
and they'd failed, and it wasn't very flattering to feel that they'd
failed where a foreigner had succeeded. But of course, they
said, this had been his object, and Sir John Peppercorn, who
had tried three times, said mark his words the thing was
bound to come to a smash.
though. Or at any rate it hasn't, up to the
It didn't,
moment of going to press. The Baron and Baroness are still
living together in the greatest comfort and happiness, either
in the large house in London or the still larger house in the
country. They still entertain lavishly, under the direction and
with the assistance of Birkin, Mrs. Gilchrist's incomparable
butler. Sixteen or eighteen to dinner are still nothing in
either of those sumptuous establishments, while, when the
Stockbury Race Week comes round, these numbers are still
nearly doubled in that immense Palladian mansion with its
two thousand acres of park.
The Baron is certainly stouter than he was, the Baroness is
to be quite frank about it no thinner. But she's still a
perfect hostess, and her husband is a most amiable and unobtru-
sive host. Say, if you like, that he's fallen on his feet the ;

fact remains that their marriage is a success, that they seem

to suit each other, and that even if it was a misunderstanding
which first brought them together, and a further misunder-
standing which led to the linking of their lives, they still have
something so essential in common that nothing now looks
like driving them apart.
What's more, we happen to know what it is. What's
still more, we happen to be in a position to
give you a full
account of both these misunderstandings. Shall we give
it you, then ? Well, of course. We've practically promised
it
you already, and at this stage you'd hardly have us start a
story about
somebody else.
The opening scene took place in Mrs. Gilchrist's London
drawing-room some three or four years ago and some five or
six days before the Stockbury Races. Mrs. Gilchrist, who kept
and still keeps a secretary, has always taken a close personal
interest in the less sordid details of household management
she likes, for instance, to glance at the luncheon and dinner
menus shortly after breakfast, and frequently suggests little
additions to them and this morning, as usual, she was work-
ing away at her satinwood writing-bureau, with Miss
 STARVATION CORNER 547
Barnforth, her devoted subaltern, hovering in the background,
when a slight cough by the doorway caused her to turn her
head, and she beheld Birkin, her incomparable butler.
"Yes, Birkin ?" she said, turning back again. "Did you
want to speak to me ?"
"If," said the butler, "you could possibly spare a moment,
madam ?"
"Go on," said Mrs. Gilchrist, scratching away with her
pen. "What is it ?"
"I'm madam," said Birkin, "I have rather bad news
afraid,
for you. I'm very sorry to tell you, madam, that I shall have
to leaveyou for a few days."
"What 1" said Mrs. Gilchrist, spinning right round this
time. "But you can't, Birkin 1 What on earth are you
talking about ?"
It was then
that she noticed that her perfect butler was not
only pale green in the face, but was actually clinging to the
back of a genuine Chippendale chair.
"Birkin !" she cried. "What's happened ? Are you ill ?"
"I'm afraid so, madam. I appreciate the inconvenience,
madam, but I've just been to see my doctor, madam, and he's
ordered rne to go into hospital at once. It appears, madam,
that I am
suffering from acute
appendicitis. He
informs me,
madam, that it will be necessary to operate immediately."
"Dear, dear !" said Mrs. Gilchrist. "This is too tiresome,
Birkin. Quite right to tell me, of course, and, of course, it's
"
not your fault
"Thank you, madam."
". . . but there's this big house-party for the races next
week, and really, Birkin, I don't see how I'm going to manage
without you. What on earth am I to do ?"
"Well, madam," said the butler, writhing slightly in spite
of himself, "I've thought of that, naturally, madam. I think
if Alfred were to take my place temporarily, and if my nephew,
whom I can thoroughly recommend, were to come in as an
extra footman, then there need be very little disorganization,
"
madam, during my absence. In fact, madam
"Oh, dear Yes, I suppose you're right, Birkin. I sup-
1

pose that's the only thing we can do. Can you make the
necessary arrangements before leaving ?"
"I was about to add, madam, "that I've taken the liberty of
making them just now. My nephew will be here in time for
548 DENIS MACKAIL
luncheon to-day, madam. So if you could excuse me,
"
madam
"What ? Well, it's very annoying, Birkin, but, of course,
it be helped. I shall miss you very much, but I quite
can't
see your little difficulty. I suppose I can count on your being
back in about a fortnight ?"
"I trust so, madam. Thank you very much, madam.
I'm very much obliged to you, madam, indeed."
And the peerless Birkin released his grip on the Chippendale
chair-back, and lurched towards the doorway and vanished
from sight ; while to spare you any possible anxiety on his
behalf, we may add that his operation was completely success-
ful, that he made a swift recovery, that he returned to his
dudes in the stipulated period, and that to the best of our
knowledge he has never been near any kind of doctor since.
But of course Mrs. Gilchrist was upset, and of course she
was a little flustered and flurried who wouldn't be, with
nearly thirty guests arriving to stay next week ? and of course
she felt it was just her luck that at this moment Miss Barnforth
should return from the telephone to inform her that one of
them had failed.
"Really," she protested, almost petulantly for anyone so
good-natured, "it almost seems that Fate's against me to-day.
And a man, too I don't know what I've done to deserve
!

this, dear Miss Barnforth, but I can't really remember when

I've had so much trouble all at once. Now, whom shall we
ask ? Where's my address book ?"
And Miss Barnforth ran to get it, and Mrs. Gilchrist
began relieving her feelings by making hay of all the papers on
her satinwood writing-bureau. And, whether Fate were
against her or for her, the fact remains that in doing so she
came on Baron Boris Bollheim's visiting-card, and she won-
dered who he was and how it had got there. And she asked
Miss Barnforth, who had again returned, and Miss Barnforth
who hadn't the faintest idea, but was extremely desirous of
soothing her kind employer, said :
"Oh, I think someone
brought him to your musical party last week. I suppose he
called afterwards."
"Verypolite of him," said Mrs. Gilchrist. "People are
getting very slack nowadays, Miss Barnforth. Just give me
that book."
But though she began searching for possible names in it,
 STARVATION CORNER 549
her mind still lingered on the civility of this very punctilious
Baron. An attention like that, and in these days, she felt,
certainly deserved something in return. She looked at the
card again, and saw that the pencilled address was of a street
that she'd never heard of. But then, there must be lots of
streets that she'd never heard of, and if he were a stranger,
and only here for a short time, one oughtn't to judge him
by* that. After all, he'd been a guest under her roof, and
nobody would bring anyone here who wasn't quite all right.
"I'll ask Birkin," she
thought. And then she thought :

"Bother I can't ask him." And then she thought : "I shall
1

wear myself out if I worry any more. After all, he must be a

gentleman, and it was particularly polite of him to call like
that. I'll
try him, anyhow. After all, there aren't any
foreigners coming, and I always think that an odd one goes
rather well."
So she closed the address book, and she informed Miss
Barnforth of her decision, and she picked up her pen again and
issued the invitation there and then. And Miss Barnforth
stamped it. And Percy, the third footman, took it out and
posted it. And it reached West
Kensington at six o'clock that
very afternoon.
To the great surprise of Baron Bollheim, in his bed-sitting-
room, because he had now been in England nearly six weeks,
and he had called at a quantity of large houses during that
period, and once or twice he'd got as far as the hall before
they'd turned him out again; but in the case of Mrs. Gilchrist
whose name and address he remembered distinctly the
butler had not only said "Not to-day, thank you," but had
practically slammed the door in his face.
To which act the incomparable Birkin had been prompted,
first by having previously observed the Baron ringing a num-
ber of other door-bells (a spectacle easily visible from his
pantry), and, secondly, by the cardboard box under the Baron's
left arm. "I'll teach them to come here a-touting and a-hawk-

ing," the incomparable Birkin had muttered. And in a spasm

of annoyance, considerably exacerbated by a twinge from his
appendix, he'd hurried to the door in place of Alfred, and
we've told you what happened there.
A further twinge must have accounted for his overlooking
the card which had simultaneously fallen from the visitor's
palsied hand, had subsequently been found, and had eventu-
550 DENIS MACKAIL
ally reached the satinwood writing-bureau. But if anyone
thinks that the experienced Birkin had erred in his diagnosis
of the visitor's intentions, then we can only assure them that
they are in grave error themselves.
For the Baron, in common with the rest of his vast family,
had lost all his money in a succession of political and financial
disturbances, and had been virtually penniless now for quite a
number of years. He'd come to England partly because of a
legend as yet lingering in his own part of Europe that it was
still and still welcomed distressed and destitute foreigners,
rich
and partly with the hope of talcing a few orders for the very
ugly embroidery emanating from the region of his former
family estates.
All of which goes to show that while his heart may con-
ceivably have been pure gold, his head was nothing whatso-
ever to write home about. Because you know, and we know,
that England isn't at all like that, and, as Baron Bollheim
could hardly fail to discover, it seems capable of producing all
the ugly embroidery that it requires at home.
So that the soles of his shoes wore thinner and thinner,
and the meals in his bed-sitting-room became smaller and
fewer, and the hopes with which he had landed grew feebler
and fainter ; and altogether, if he hadn't been the victim of
several centuries of in-breeding and slow thinking, he must
have realized that this wasn't the way to restore his fortunes,
and must have cut his losses, and already have pawned the
remains of his wardrobe so as to return whence he came.
But if you knew how many months it had taken him to
plan this disastrous campaign, you might understand some of
the mental obstacles in the way of abandoning it. And now,
when this surprising invitation reached him, it didn't really
strike him
that anything at all inexplicable had occurred. The
English, he had always heard, were phlegmatic on the surface,
but warm-hearted below. Perhaps this Mrs. Gilchrist had met
some of his relations in the days of their former glory. Or
perhaps she was merely a lover of his beloved but unhappy
country. Possibly, again, she had been a witness of his
expulsion and now wished to apologise in the most gracious
and tactful manner. If so, she might be assured that he would
never refer to the affair. As for the butler, a Bollheim would
never dream of avenging himself on a character like that.
So of course he'd accept, and he did accept in the third
 STARVATION CORNER 5JI

person, in rather poor English, and on exceedingly cheap note

paper. And Miss Barnforth opened his letter and noted its
contents and informed Mrs. Gilchrist, who nodded and looked
relieved. On the following Monday the Baron packed his
shabby suitcase, and put a new bit of string round his card-
board box, and proceeded first by omnibus to St. Pancras
and then in a third-class carriage to Great Waddington, and
alighted ; and as he was the only guest who hadn't come in
liis or her own car, was then wafted in one of Mrs. Gilchrist's

three limousines through some very rich-looking country and

presently through an even richer-looking park.
And his soul expanded, and he forgot the chauffeur's look
of amazement when he'd said that this was all his luggage and
that he hadn't brought a man, and he bounced luxuriantly on
the upholstery and sniffed upthe air which was so very different
from that of West Kensington, and never gave a thought to
the butler and, of course, wasn't reminded of him on his
arrival, because, of course, Alfred, the first footman, had
temporarily taken his place.
"This way, sir," said Alfred, who was actually far more
nervous than the guest. And he led him over some very thick
carpets and up a couple of very shallow steps, and bent to ask
his name, and then bellowed it at a vast hall full of men and
women in exceedingly costly tweeds.
>
"Baron Bollheim 1" bawled Alfred. And some of the
men and women looked round, and one or two of them started
without looking round, and the majority of them went on
talking. But as a stoutish lady on a sofa near the fireplace
appeared to be making considerable efforts to rise to her
feet and was already waving a fat arm at him, the Baron had
little doubt that here was his hostess. He approached her
rapidly, he clicked his heels, he bowed from the waist, he
brushed the back of her hand with his bristly little moustache.
"Zo 'appy," said Baron Bollheim. "It ees most kind.
Very nais. Zo glad 1"
And Mrs. Gilchrist couldn't actually remember having seen
him at her musical party, but still had no doubt and she
regarded herself as a bit of an authority on this subject that he
was a gentleman. And of course, she thought, foreigners
went to queer tailors (for the Baron's suit was certainly a good
deal too large for him) and had different ideas about what one
wore in the country (for apart from his green and yellow tie
55* DENIS MACKAIL
one would have said that he was in mourning). But, on the
other hand, she had obviously made no mistake about his
manners, and she had quite taken to him already, and she
didn't the least regret having invited him, and she only hoped
he'd enjoy himself.
"I'm delighted," she said, "that you could manage it at
such short notice. And I'm so sorry I was out when you
called the other day. You're having a good time in England,
I hope?"
The Baron bowed again, and made a kind of buzzing
sound. Three sentences at once had been a little too much
for him, but again there was no question that he meant to
be polite.
"Well," said Mrs. Gilchrist, "now I must introduce you to
the rest of the party, dear Baron Bollheim." And she began
doing and the Baron kept on clicking and bowing and
this,
buzzing, and received a quantity of off-hand nods and phleg-
matic glances, but hadn't really expected anything else in Great
Britain, and was a long way from feeling any umbrage or
pique. No, the only thing that distressed him at all was the
sight of a number of footmen removing the tea-things for
he'd had the lightest of continental breakfasts and hardly any
lunch, while it had never crossed his mind to make use of the
restaurant car on the train.
But of course Mrs. Gilchrist didn't know this, and though
even at this late hour Birkin would certainly have appeared
with a fresh kettle and more scones, Alfred was too much pre-
occupied with his new responsibilities at a really big dinner
to give anything else more than a passing thought.
So tea was cleared away, and the Baron was extremely
hungry. And when presently he learnt that they weren't
dining until half-past eight, his pangs became nearly insupport-
able, and he almost jumped at his hostess's suggestion that he
should be shown his room, because he had a wild hope that
there might be a jar of biscuits by his bedside.
But there wasn't. There were six towels in the adjoining
bathroom, there were fourteen coat-hangers in the wardrobe,
there were flowers, books, bath-salts, railway-guides, sticks of
sealing-wax, bags of lavender, and even a bootjack. But with
none of these could he possibly allay his hunger, while to add
embarrassment to his other sufferings, someone had undone
his cardboard box and had laid the samples of embroidery
 STARVATION CORNER 553

beside his dress-clothes on the bed as if they formed part of

some peculiar regalia.
He folded themup and put them away again, because,
although he still hoped to produce them at the right moment,
he was pretty certain that this would be later on and not to-
night. He had a bath to kill time, and wished he hadn't
because for some reason it seemed to have aggravated his
symptoms. He dressed, he heard a gong booming, he rushed
downstairs and nearly fell over Birkin's nephew bearing an
armful of logs.
"That was only the dressing-bell, sir," said Birkin's
nephew, a little stiffly. Baron Bollheim hurried quickly up-
stairs again, and alternately marched round his bedroom and

lay exhausted on a chaise-longue, until at last the gong

boomed again. But if he'd thought this meant food, he still
wasn't familiar with the customs of the English upper classes.
He spent ten minutes quite alone in the yellow drawing-room
before he was joined by one shy girl who seemed to regard
him with suspicion and horror. During the next ten minutes
hardly more than a handful of guests came to join them.
And it wasn't until practically nine o'clock that Mrs. Gil-
christ herself descended, and Alfred opened the folding
doors and a delicious smell came out and the large house-
party trooped in.
The dinner-table, asyou may imagine, was a fine sight
with all its
cutlery and napery and flowers and silver. And
the customary confusion took place while the guests searched
for their names on bits of gilt-edged pasteboard, and dodged
each other at the corners, and hustled to and fro, and so gradu-
ally sorted themselves into the pattern which Miss Barnforth
had so skilfully devised.
But at last they were seated, and at last Baron Bollheim
could draw in his chair, unfurl his napkin, and prepare for the
first time since reaching England, and never had he needed it
more to cram himself with first-class food. On his left was
Lady Doldrum, on his right was one of the Trundle twins,
and he had certainly spared a moment to bow once more to
them both. But it was the elaborate and lengthy menu in
front of him that really riveted his attention.
His eyes glittered as they took in course after course.
Almost, he thought, this instant had been worth the Spartan
hours and weeks which had preceded it. At last that which
s*
554 DENIS MACKAIL
had been nothing but a dream during all those nightmare
years of poverty was about to come true.
Judge, then, of the shock to his soul when, after some de-
lay, a soup-plate was placed in front of
him containing possibly
one fluid ounce of soup. A plate which was definitely damp,
but from which it was impossible, with the means at his dis-
posal, to extract more than a fraction of even that which was
there.
Was England, he asked himself? He glanced at his
this

neighbours, and saw them both sluicing down spoonful after

spoonful. He looked across the table, and saw everyone
gulping and gurgitating. It seemed incredible that this slight
should have been intentional, but it was none the less painful
nay, it was agonising to sit here, faint with hunger, while
these well-fed guests aU dipped and lapped.
His so-called soup was removed, and a warm, flat, virgin
plate was substituted. The menu announced Truite au B/eu,
and, with an eager, sidelong glance, he saw the great dish
approaching from the right. Nearer and nearer it came, and
more and more anxiously he watched it. It reached the
Trundle twin. There was one fish left on it. She helped her-
self. She helped herself to the accompanying sauce. Baron
Bollheim was offered nothing at all, and when he turned again
to see how Lady Doldrum was getting on, you may judge once
more of his unspeakable emotion as he observed that she was
munching and swallowing with gusto.
And so, it seemed, was everyone else wherever he looked.
The system, as he gathered after being offered little more
than a few drops of gravy in place of the entree was that
duplicate dishes set off in a clockwise direction from two given
points, until everyone, in theory, had been served. And one
of these points appeared to be his left-hand neighbour, who
thus got first pick every time, while the other immediately
opposite her seemed to originate with his hostess herself.
He looked curiously to see if there were a corresponding
victim on Mrs. Gilchrist's right, but either there must have
been more in one set of dishes than the other, or else there were
some particularly voracious guests in his own half-circle, for
the gentleman occupying that favoured position was obviously
gorging with the rest and the best.
And of course the unfortunate Baron didn't realize (as
Birkin would have realized) that one must always allow extra
 STARVATION CORNER 555

for any section containing Lord Pudsey. And of course he

didn't reali2e (as Birkin would have realized) that it was a
solecism on Alfred's part to be starting either section with the
hostess. He assumed, as, to do her justice, Mrs. Gilchrist
was also assuming, that the service in a house like this would
be conducted in accordance with the traditions of the country.
Neither of them had any idea how Alfred's heart was twittering
behind his unaccustomed uniform, or of the terrible strain
produced by his unexpected promotion,
Mrs. Gilchrist, in short, was talking gaily, getting plenty
to eat, and thoroughly enjoying herself. Baron Bollheim, on
the other hand, suffering from the torments of Tantalus,
found his few words of English rapidly deserting him, and
made but a poorcompanion for either of his more fortunate
neighbours.
"Hullo I" said Imogen Trundle, helping herself to the last
of the Bowbe Surprise. "Starvation corner again. Bad luck,
Baron 1"
In attempting to laugh at this sally, which he hadn't alto-
gether appreciated or understood, the Baron attracted Lady
Doldrum's attention, and she repeated the curious phrase.
"Well, you are in starvation corner 1" she said, ladling up
some more chocolate sauce. "Never mind, Baron. Make up
for it another time, eh ? Ha, ha 1"
"Ha, ha 1" said Baron Bollheim faintly. Then it was a
British joke, he supposed ; one of those inexplicable national
habits with which these people amused themselves in their
terrible climate. Courtesy demanded that he should pretend
to join in the fun, but if they thought they were going to catch
him the same way again well, he was on to it now, and he'd
marked down the safest and best place at the whole table, and
he might be a foreigner but he wasn't a fool, and he mightn't
be asked again, but he knew good cooking when he saw it,
and if he survived till to-morrow he knew just what he was
going to do. Starvation corner, indeed What a country to
I

have invented a game and a phrase like that Well, someone

!

else was going to sit in it after to-night. He, Baron Boilheim

was going to plant himself right next the hostess who had
permitted this abominable outrage.
And not on the risky side*, either. On the side whr/e the
dishes would be full.
Well, it's just possible that some of this boldness was the
556 DENIS MACKAIL
courage of despair, or that some of it may at the moment have
been due to the amount of champagne which he had poured
into an otherwise eriipty stomach. Yet if the Baron were dull
and nobody has ever denied it he was also stubborn and
determined. When he went to bed that night the fumes had
left him and he was also a little exasperated to find that his
embroidery had again been unpacked and put out with
his pyjamas but he was still quite resolute and fixed in
his decision.
Atbreakfast there was, of course, every opportunity for
stuffing himself silly, but there were no grounds that he could
see for altering the healthy habits of a lifetime, and rolls,
butter and coffee were all that passed his lips. Being no great
believer in exercise apart from shooting at trapped pigeons,
of which he knew there was no chance in this sad island he
spent the morning huddled over the fire in the smoking-room,
leaving it to the other guests to face the abominably cold wind
outside.
But lunch time he roused himself and was ready. As
at
the party once more streamed into the dining-room, he leapt
in front of Lord Pudsey who had been expressly invited to
sit on the hostess's left seized the back of the chair, and held
it at such an angle that his lordship was compelled to find

accommodation elsewhere. There were no gilt-edged cards

at luncheon, you see, and his action was so swift and unex-

pected that even Mrs. Gilchrist didn't realise what had hap-
pened until she turned from helping herself to the caviare, and
found him ensconced.
"Oh 1" taken aback. "Good morning
she said, just a trifle

Baron. I
hope you slept well ?"
"It ees most kind," said the Baron. "Very nais, thank
you, please. Ach 1" he added, as an arm offered him the
jar on its bed of cracked ice. "Ze pale Astrachan.
Goot I"
"I'm so glad you like it," said Mrs. Gilchrist, warming
immediately to this appreciation of her special shipment. "I
have it
imported direct, you know."
"Goot !" said the Baron. "I laike it 20. It ees deleeshus,

yess 1"
Well, there they were, and this was the bond that we
mentioned at the outset, and Lord Pudsey might puff and snort
in the offing : might terrifv Mrs. Wallabv on his left and the
 STARVATION CORNER 557
other Trundle twin on his right with his baffled and bloodshot
appearance; but his hostess, it seemed, had forgotten all
about him. She was telling Baron Bollheim a most sym-
pathetic listener of the difficulty she'd had in getting
asparagus from the South of France. And the Baron was
throwing a lot of interesting light on the subject of
paprika.
And time flew, and luncheon was over, and the house-
party all setoff for the races, and the Baron found it a little
bleak in the Members' Enclosure, and retired to one of the
limousines and slept in it until they all returned for an ex-
tremely hearty tea. And at about eight o'clock Miss Barnforth
again went round the big dining-room distributing those gilt-
edged cards. And twenty minutes later Baron Bollheim
entered the same apartment, with a furtive but inflexible air,
and examined her handiwork, and made what he considered
a very necessary and desirable alteration.
So that again he was on the hostess's and Major
left,
Hobstock was away between two debutantes, and Mrs.
Gilchrist thought : "I must really speak to dear Miss
Barnforth about this," and yet again found a strange
stimulus in a conversation which never once left the topic
of food.
"I must say," she thought, "that the dear Baron's most
delightfully easy." And she compared him in her mind with
some of her other guests, and thought how nice it was to find
a man who was really interested in cooking, and yet was so
simple and unaffected, and must obviously rather like her,
otherwise why should he have ousted dear Lord Pudsey at
luncheon ?
She'd have been suspicious if he'd paid her any personal
compliments ; or if, again, he'd been arch or flirtatious like
poor, dear Sir John Peppercorn. She'd had plenty of guests
like that, and she'd seen through them quickly enough, and

they were after her money that was all and they weren't
going to get it.
"I've had enough of marriage," thought Mrs. Gilchrist,
paying a passing tribute to her late husband, who'd cost her so
much and of whom otherwise the less said the better. "And
yet," thought Mrs. Gilchrist, "if someone really cared for
me ... Well, I'm getting a little silly, perhaps. But, you
know, I haven't met anyone like this for years."
 558 DENIS MACKAIL
She was surprised to find her heart distinctly throbbing
and not, for once, from that tiresome indigestion when
the Baron again rushed to the same place at luncheon next
day. Again his manner was staid and respectful, and his
conversation confined entirely to victuals and drink ;
yet surely she was beginning to guess his secret. Surely
it was more than mere
politeness which had caused him
almost to thrust dear Admiral Buzzard out of the
way.
She wondered. She wondered all afternoon at the races.
She was still wondering in her bedroom before dinner, when
there was a soft knock at the door, and Miss Barnforth entered
looking a little pink.
"Yes, dear Miss Barnforth ?" said Mrs. Gilchrist.
"
"If I could speak to you a moment
"Certainly/' said Mrs. Gilchrist. She waved her maid,
Dawlish, into the background. "Yes ?" she said.
"Oh, Mrs. Gilchrist I really think I ought to tell you. I
went into the dining-room just now I thought I'd left a
"
pencil there when I was arranging the places and and
"Why, what is it, dear Miss Barnforth? Don't try and
alarm me 1"

"Oh, Mrs. Gilchrist, Baron Bollheim was in there, and he

"
was changing the cards, and
"And why not ?" asked Mrs. Gilchrist majestically. "Do
you think I employ you to spy on my guests ? Do you sup-
pose that continental customs are always the same as ours ?
Why, I never heard such a ridiculous fuss about a mere
trifle I"
Miss Barnforth slunk away. Mrs. Gilchrist came down
looking almost radiant for one of her age and weight. Yes,
the Baron was next her again, and if people chose to talk
well, let them 1 One can't deny that the hostess was a little
arch herself that evening. No change was apparent in the
Baron, but, of course, she thought, she only admired him the
more for bis iron self-control.
And so the rest of the Race Week went by, and the Baron put
on nearly seven pounds, and Mrs. Gilchrist actually lost five
ounces as the comedy continued and the denouement was still
delayed. Naturally, she must attend to her other guests
between meals and between meals she sometimes found her-
self wondering whether she mightn't be mistaken after all.
 STARVATION CORNER 559
But at luncheon and dinner her doubts left her why, on
Thursday night she'd actually crept down to see him changing
the cards herself and surely before he left he must speak,
and surely when he spoke she would find peace and content-
ment at last.
Yet was Saturday morning now, and the guests were
it

leaving preparatory to a fresh influx for the week-end and

still he'd said nothing, and Mrs. Gilchrist was for once
paler
than her powder as suspense gnawed at her deeply buried
vitals.
"I must have air/' she thought ; and she was just on the
point of ringing for Alfred to send someone to open the
blue boudoir window, when suddenly Baron Bollheim himself
appeared on the threshold, bearing a somewhat battered
cardboard box.
"Baron 1" she cried. "You were looking for me ?"
"Excuse it, pleez," said her noble guest. "Somezing I haf
here for you important in zis box."
"For mel" cried Mrs. Gilchrist. "Not really ? Oh,
Baron Bollheim I"
"Zese embroidery," said the Baron imperturbably. "I do
not veesh to trouble you too soon, but I hope you shall like
him. I bring him from my dear country where ze peasants
"
fabricate him, and it ees my great hope
"Oh, Baron, you want me to have it !
What, all these
beautiful pieces ? Oh, Baron, you mustn't really be so gener-
ous 1"
"It ees not generosity, pleez. Pleez do not misonder-
standt. It ees all I haf ; but your so great kindness
*
encourage
me
"Oh, Baron 1" murmured Mrs. Gilchrist. "I do under-
stand. I guessed,you see. I couldn't help guessing, when
all this week I've felt you trying not to tell me. And don't
speak of 'all you have' like that, I live simply enough, as you
see, but I've enough for both of us, and I think Fate sent you
to me, and oh, Boris you won't leave me, will you?
You'll stay and look after me, won't you ? Oh, Boris give
me just one little, tiny kiss 1"
Well, the Baron may have been dull, but he knew which
side his bread was buttered, and he was fifty-four and Mrs.
Gilchrist admitted to forty-nine, and romance mightn't be
quite in his line, but comfort and good cooking were right up
560 DENIS MACK AIL
his street. He accepted the situation, and both he and the
Baroness as we told you a long time ago have been
extremely happy ever since.
Of course, Birkin was a bit surprised when he came back
from the hospital. But Birkin remained incomparable, and
he's still in a very good situation, too;
 BRADSMITH WAS RIGHT
who a successful author and therefore a
is

BRADSMITH,
law to himself, had swept across my orbit as I was
weighing the risks of crossing Waterloo Place, and, as is his
successful and autonomous way, he had made his presence
known by slapping me violently on the back thereby all
but precipitating me into the gutter.
" "
Haven't seen you for ages," he shouted. Which way
"
are you going ?
I had just been dining alone at the Club, and was thinking
of going home ; but somehow or other one can never tell
Bradsmith that one is going home. His vitality makes this
impossible.
I hesitated.
"
Well, walk up with me to the Corona/' he went on,
taking
" my elbow and urging me forward "
into the traffic.
And tell me all your news. How's
Here he broke off to nod at a man who was crossing the
road from the other side.
" "
Hullo, Tommy 1 he sang out.
"
'lo, Braddy, old boy," replied the stranger.
An omnibus then came thundering down on us. The
stranger ran for his life, and Bradsmith dragged me forward
on to the pavement.
"
That was Tommy Trent," he informed me. " Used to
play in my shows in America. Glad he didn't stop."
I have noticed before that successful authors are always

glad when actors who have played in their shows do not

stop. I have often wondered why this is, but it was no use
asking Bradsmith at the moment because well, I couldn't
very well interrupt him.
"
Yes," he was saying, as we swung up the hill together,
"
I've been meaning to look you up for weeks, but you
know what it is. Work. Rehearsals. Running around
and seeing fellows. I tell you Oh, hullo, Wally How's
1

?
"
yourself
561
562 DENIS MAC KAIL
A second stranger had suddenly sprung up in our path.
A gaunt man, with a very wide-brimmed hat worn slightly
on one side.
" "I "
'lo, Braddy, old man," he replied. say
" Can't
stop/' shouted Bradsmith, while I panted by his
"
side. Come and have lunch one day. What ? Yes. I'll
call you up."
The gaunt man fell back no one who hadn't got Brad-
smith's arm through theirs could possibly have kept pace with
him and was swallowed up in the night.
" "
Walter Daventry," my companion informed me. Played
lead in one of my tours. Glad we gave him the slip."
And on we went.
Crossing Piccadilly Circus we met Arthur Golden who
had played in the film version of one of Braclsmith's books
and a few yards up Shaftesbury Avenue we fell in with Johnnie
Pender who had done well, so Bradsmith advised me, with
one of his plays in Australia. Both these gentlemen, however,
as well as a fifth mummer whom we met at the corner of Dean
Street, but whose name I have forgotten, were dealt with as
summarily
"
as their predecessors. They all called Bradsmith
Braddy," and he was no less punctilious in using their
Christian names ; but having effected this exchange, his one
idea seemed to be to shake them off. And this object he
invariably achieved.
"
Of course," he confided to me, " one can't offend these
fellows. Touchy devils, you know. But if I were to stop
"
and listen to all their stories
He sighed. And for perhaps as much as a tenth of a
second I felt that being a successful author wasn't all jam
even if it were more fun than being a partially successful
actor.

"
"Yes," said Bradsmith, as though reading my thoughts,
it's a ghastly profession. I sometimes wonder.. ." And
.

then he must have remembered his royalties, for quite suddenly

he cheered up.
"I'm sorry we've had so many interruptions," he said,
" "
but I do want to hear all you've been doing. Look here
"
an idea seemed to strike him I've got to go and see Corbett
something about a new show for one of his theatres but
if only you could wait. . . ." He frowned, as though con-
" " he
sidering where he could park me. I've got it 1
 BRADSMITH WAS RIGHT 565
"
exclaimed. Come along and see Freddie BarfiekL He'll
keep you amused/'
Fred Barfield it was thus that he was billed outside the
Corona Theatre, where we were now standing has spent
the last twenty years in keeping people amused, in return for
a steadily increasing salary, and I had often laughed at him
myself from the front of the house. I had no doubt, either,
that if he wanted, he could also keep me amused in his dressing-
room, while Bradsmith wrestled with his manager upstairs.
But why should he be put to this trouble, when he didn't
know me from Adam ? It hardly seemed fair.
I put this point of view to my friend.
"
But Barfield won't want a stranger in his room," I said.
"
Hadn't we better have our talk another night ? I mean,
"
perhaps you could dine with me ?
This hint of opposition brought all Bradsmith's uncon-
querable spirit bubbling to the surface.
" "
No, no," he said. Freddie'll be tickled to death to have
you. And, besides, then I shall know you're all right while
Fm busy in the office. Come along, old man. I'll take you
right in."
If I were conscious, as I was, that the matter had now

degenerated into a contest between our wills, quite uncon-

"
nected with Bradsmith's alleged desire to hear all my news,"
it made no difference to the upshot. If Bradsmith wants
a thing, he generally gets it. I heard myself giving way.
" " "
Oh, well," I said, if you're quite sure
" "
Of course I'm sure," he interrupted. Why, Freddie'd
do anything for me."
The thing might have been put more graciously, but this,
again, did not affect the issue. Bradsmith caught me once
more by the elbow and propelled me down the dark alley
in which the patrons of the Corona Pit spend so much of their
patient lives. It was not so dark, though, that I could not see
Bradsmith's name staring out at me (in company with those of
Reginald Gooch, the lyric-writer, and Otto Klinck, the com-
poser) from the huge posters which advertised Oh, Angelim !
At the far end of the alley furtive and seductive was the
Stage Door.

Nothing communicates itself more unmistakably to the

atmosphere of a theatre than the achievement of a really

564 DENIS MACKAIL
big success. You feel it in the air as soon as you approach
the building, it
grips you by the throat, it tickles
your nostrils ;
if you are at even
all sensitive, it draw
willridiculous tears
from your eyes. I needed no press-agent to tell me, as Brad-
smith flung his body against the swing-doors, that Oh,
Angelina ! was playing to capacity, or that the advance booking
was steady for three months ahead. These facts announced
themselves as clearly as though Mr. Corbett had been standing
there and shouting them out. And, besides, had Bradsmith
ever been associated with a failure ?
The commissionaire in the door-keeper's den saluted my
guide in a congratulatory manner, and offered him a sheaf
of about fifty letters.
"
Thanks," said Bradsmith, stuffing them immediately
into his pocket. He took a deep breath savouring once
more the success of which no man can really tire and then
he turned back to me.
"
Come on/' he added. " I'll take you up."
He began mounting the wooden stairs every sixth step
marking a right-angled turn and at the third turn we were
suddenly overwhelmed by a bevy of highly-coloured beauties,
with print wrappers over their stage dresses, all rushing down
for their next contribution to the audience's delight.
" "
Oh, Mithter Bradthmith they squealed.I But Brad-
smith passed through them like quicksilver.
" "
Can't stop, children," he called back.
Now, hurry up,
or you'll be late."
This fatherly form of address took all offence from his
brusquerie. But as the chorus-ladies melted, with another
squeal, round the corner, he added in an explanatory murmur :

"
Those girls always want something."
Then he knocked loudly on a wooden door.
A little, rat-faced man put his head out, recognised my
companion, and withdrew it again.
" It's
Mr. Bradsmith, sir," I heard him reporting.
There was a hoarse yell from inside.
"
Braddy, old boy Come and have a drink "
I !

The door was flung open, and revealed Fred Barfield him-
self. In order the more convincingly to assume the role of a
prince in exile for it was thus that he was nightly enchanting
his admirers he had attired himself in a pair of very loud
check trousers, a pair of elastic-sided boots with white socks.
 BRADSMITH WAS RIGHT 565

a bright blue coat with exaggerated flounces round the hips, a

canary-coloured waistcoat, and a collar and tie such as no
human being has ever worn or will ever wear except on the
musical comedy stage. His face was painted the colour of a
ripe cornfield, with strange dashes of blue and red in unex-
pected places, and he wore the celebrated Barfield wig a
mass of tight curls, descending in a peak over his forehead.
He looked extremely hot.
I had always heard, and it is, indeed, almost a canon of
fiction, that clowns and comedians are except when actually
at work the saddest men on earth. Moody, intellectual
creatures, they are commonly supposed to spend their off-
hours in studying Schopenhauer or tending the sick-beds of
their nearest and Mr. Barfield, however, was clearly
dearest.

tending no sick-bed, nor was it possible to associate him with

Schopenhauer. In his own way he was as full of vitality as
Bradsmith himself, and he seemed in extraordinarily good
spirits.
"
Get the glasses, Harry," he called to the rat-faced dresser ;
and then he seized Bradsmith by the opening of his waistcoat.
" "
Now, look here, Braddy, old man," he said ; I've got
an absolute knock-out for my second entrance, if only you'll
speak to Daisy about it and tell her not to be so up-stage
Mind you," he added, as Bradsmith tried to interrupt, " I'm
the last fellow to do anything that hurts her part, but it isn't all
her show. If I'm to get a big laugh there, she must feed me."
His rolling eye made an attempt at this point to attach me
as a party to his cause, but compelling and appealing as it
was, I hadn't the slightest idea what he was talking about.
His technicalities were sheer Greek where I was concerned.
"
Plot-stuff's all very well," he continued again cutting
"
Bradsmith short, but the audience don't give a hoot for the
"
plot as long as you make 'em laugh. Now, this is my idea
Here, in order to illustrate his idea, he incautiously let go of
Bradsmith's waistcoat, and with this freedom the author's
vitality suddenly came out on top.
" "
We'll have a talk about it, Freddie," he said. But I've
got" a date with the Boss. I'm late as it is."
"
Yes, but
" "
And I want to look after
you friend
my here a paren-
"
thetical introduction was shot at us until I'm through.
"
You don't mind, do you ?
566 DENIS MACKAIL
Hesitating there in the doorway, I felt quite as uncom-
fortable as Ihad feared that I should. How
would / like it,
if a complete stranger were thrust into my keeping in this
unceremonious way, during my few moments of relaxation
from an arduous, if highly-paid, job ? But I had reckoned
without Mr. Barfield's quite exceptional good nature.
" Come
along "in/* he shouted, darting forward and wring-
ing my hand. What'll you have ? Now, then, Harry ;
where are those glasses ? "
I had some notion of excusing myself from this branch
of his hospitality, for I had only just finished my dinner.
But it was quite useless. A powerful whisky and soda was
forced into my hand, and I let it remain there.
" " said Mr.
? Barfield.
" Cigarette "
Oh, thanks, but
He had already struck a match, though. It would be
churlish to make a fuss about a cigarette. I leant forward
to meet the flame, and simultaneously Mr. Barfield jerked it
away.
" " "
Oh, Braddy," he cried. Just a moment, old man
But Bradsmith had slipped off to his appointment. Fred
Barfield turned back to me with a really delightful smile.
" "
These authors ! he said.

Contempt inherited through centuries of tradition was

summed up in those two words. But there was another
note that I seemed also to detect ; an amused pity for a class
of being which might be pardoned its notorious weaknesses
for the sake of its regretted indispensability in the theatre.
In a better world, no doubt, the theatre would do without
authors. Meanwhile, if it pleased them to give themselves
airs, there was no great harm done. Poor mutts, they could
scarcely be blamed for swallowing some of .the flattery which
their friends flung at them in the newspapers.
These, as I read them, were the thoughts of an actor in a
long and successful engagement. But I wondered if the great
Fred Barfield had ever waylaid an earlier Bradsmith, as the
present Bradsmith had been waylaid on his passage through
the West End streets to-night. . . .

I can hardly have put this speculation into words, for I

am certainly not as tactless as all that. Perhaps, then, it was
telepathy which caused Mr. Barfield to entertain me during
 BRADSMITH WAS RIGHT 5 67

my tenancy of one end of his sofa with a selection of anecdotes

from his own past. Or perhaps, again, this was his customary
habit with strangers.
Mind you, he didn't give me the feeling that he was con-
ceited. Conceit implies something objectionable, and there
was nothing objectionable about Fred Barfield. As Brad-
smith had foretold, I liked him and he amused me. He took,
it was clear, a
passionate interest in himself and every detail
connected with this subject, but then which of us doesn't ?
And which of us could reveal this interest with the charm and
simplicity, the utter freedom from pose, which characterised
my host at the Corona Theatre ? Besides, if a comedian mayn't
talk about himself in his own dressing-room, then where may
he conduct so necessary a part of his existence ?
The stories were liable to frequent interruptions, when
the united efforts of the rat-faced dresser and the call-boy
drew Mr. Barfield down to his work on the stage. It seemed a
point of honour with him and I have noticed this with other
stars, too to run every entrance as fine as he possibly could ;
and to counteract this tendency, the call-boy and dresser would
begin their attempts with a considerable margin of time.
First there would be a double-knock on the door, to which
Mr. Barfield paid not the faintest attention. Then a knock
and a shout. Then a frenzied shout and a head thrust in
through the crack. Then the dresser would begin shuffling
his feet. Then the call-boy would come right into the room.
Then the dresser would add his vocal entreaties. And finally
a mad rush would take place, in which call-boy, dresser and
comedian all left the room like a whirlwind, the second of these
characters adding finishing touches to his employer's costume
as they all three swept down the stairs.
was a manner of transacting one's business which must,
It

you would have thought, have led almost immediately to a

nervous breakdown but nothing could have been calmer
;

than the great comedian as he returned each time to my

presence. A short, reminiscent chuckle, as he noted in his
\

mind the success of his last scene, and at once he would take
up the story that he had been telling me exactly where he had
left off.It was the last kind of mental concentration which
one would have expected from a man like Fred Barfield, but
it came so
naturally to him, that I was forced to explain it by
regarding him as a kind of Jekyll and Hyde. The individual
j68 DENIS MAC KAIL
who was making that huge, unseen audience split its sides was
one person, and the man who was playing host to me during
Bradsmith's absence was another. For neither of them did
the intervals of his other incarnation exist.
You will understand, therefore, that an accurate repro-
duction of the talk which I am going to pass on to you would
include an almost constant series of startling and violent
interruptions. But as I have more consideration for your
nerves than Mr. Barfield had either for his own or for mine I
prefer to telescope the whole thing into a more or less con-
tinuous narrative. More realistic treatment would not be
without interest, but it would hardly be worth the strain on
us both.

Somehow or other, then, Fred Barfield was telling me about

his first engagement.
" "
It was a panto/' he said, at the old Britannia up in
Sheffield The Babes in the Wood. We
rehearsed four weeks
and played for three twice daily, of course and by the time
I'd paid for my digs, and the agent's fees, and the fines they'd
think nothing of fining you in those days and, of course,
being a beginner, I was always doing something I shouldn't
by the time I'd done all that, I say, I was exactly three and six-
pence out on the wrong side. Still, it was all experience, you
know. And, after all, one thing leads to another. . . ."
Here Mr. Barfield gazed round on his comfortable, if con-
stricted, quarters, and immediately resumed.
" "
I wouldn't like to tell you," he said, what my part had
got to do with the story, and they changed the name of the
character so often that I never really knew what I was called.
But I dressed with the two robbers Clark and Jackman,
regular old-style comics and it wasn't their fault that I came
it all alive.
through
"I don't know why
they'd got such a down on me.
Honestly But
I don't. they'd got it into their heads right
at the beginning that I was giving myself airs you know
how easy it is to make people think that when you're shy
and when they found I was in the same dressing-room, they
must have thought the Lord had delivered me into their
hands.
"
They used to hide my clothes, and pinch my make-up,
and imitate the way I talked, and not answer when I spoke
 BRADSMITH WAS RIGHT 569
to them yes, and they borrowed money from me, too,
though we all knew I'd never see it again. Oh, they gave me
hell all right during those Christmas holidays, and they knew
I didn't dare complain, because they were bill-toppers
provincial, of course, but still bill-toppers and I was a
miserable beginner without a friend in the company.
"
So I stuck it, though I could have murdered the pair of
them with pleasure. The first week I tried to please them,
the second week I just sulked, and the third week if anyone
had said a kind word to me I'd have burst into tears. Well,
they're dead now both of them and I dare say they were
only putting me through what they'd been given themselves
when they started. They were a tough lot up North in those
days, I can tell you.
"
But ragging in the dressing-rooms is one tiling, and
ragging on the stage is another. And that's where I find it a
bit hard to forgive and forget. Of course most of their stuff
was the same cross-talk they did on
the halls during the rest
of the year and pretty wheezy old stuff it was too. But
every now and then they had to remember they were robbers
just in case people should forget it was a pantomime and
it was then that I was fetched in to sort of link 'em on to the

rest of the plot.

"
I rather think by this time I was called Little Jack Horner

though it may be news to you that he'd anything to do with

the Babes in the Wood. But anyway I was always bobbing up
to ask stupid questions, so that somebody else should answer
them, and the audience would know how the story was getting
along. Then they'd hustle me off, and some other character
would give a band-cue, and the story would go west for the
next three scenes.
"
When we started rehearsing, I had a sort of love-affair
only on the stage, I mean with Little Red Ridinghood. Oh,
yes, she came into it too. But they cut so much of this that I
never knew after we'd opened whether I was supposed to be
in love with her or not. And as she didn't know either, you
can guess what a puzzle it must have been to the people in
front. She was a nice old lady, though. I believe she'd have
taken my side if she'd dared, but Clark and Jackman were top
dogs in that company, and I couldn't blame her for keeping
out of their way.
"
But I was telling you about my actual scenes with the old
570 DENIS MACKAIL
brutes. I'd only got two, thank heaven one in each half
but they got me so rattled that I used to come off dripping
all over and hanging on to the scenery so I shouldn't fall
down. They never dreamt of giving me a proper cue, or if
one of them ever did, then the other would jump in before I
could open my mouth. And yet I had to get those words out
somehow. There was the stage-manager standing there in the
corner with the book, and if I came off without saying every
one of my lines, it meant another fine. Clark and Jackman
knew it, and that was half the sport to them. Of course the
book was nothing in their lives. They were sent on to gag,
and as a matter of fact Jackman couldn't even read/'
I must have murmured my sympathy here, for Mr. Barfield

gave a short laugh.

" "
Oh, well," he said, I guess it all
taught me something.
And even if it taught me nothing else, it left me so IVe never
cut in on another fellow's lines from that day to this. No,
sir. I've had good parts and bad parts, I've had laughs I've
earned and laughs the other fellow's earned by my feeding
him, but I've always played the game, and I hope I always
shall."
Mr. Barfield's eyes glistened as he gave utterance to this
noble sentiment, and if I hadn't been alone with him, I might
very easily have burst into applause. It was true that the
" "
game to which he referred was trivial compared with others
that I had heard of. Still, on a matter of principle he had taken
a stand which reflected nothing but honour on him. He,
Fred Barfield, was top dog now ; and yet he held by the lesson
which Messrs. Clark and Jackman had unwittingly taught him
all those years ago.
"
It does you credit," I said ; and so infectious is the atmo-

sphere of a star's dressing-room, that I heard my voice shaking

with what sounded very like emotion.
Fred Barfield, however, waved this suggestion aside.
" It's all "
in the artist's point of view," he said. Now,
"
what do the public come to this theatre to see ?
A very short while ago I should instantly and conscientiously
" "
have answered, You that is, provided that Bradsmith
were still out of the room ; but somehow this didn't seem to
fit the comedian's
present attitude. I hesitated, and Mr.
Barfield supplied me with the solution.
"
They come *o see the show," he added.
 BRADSMITH WAS RIGHT 57!

Well, of course they did. I tried hard to read some meaning

into these words which could justify the earnest solemnity
of the comedian's expression, but the task was beyond me.
He might have been arguing a point of advanced politics or
economics not that I should have understood that any better
but for the life of me I couldn't see that his statement was
anything but a platitude, and a very obvious one at
H
that.

Still, I did my best.

"
The show/' I repeated, frowning slightly.
" " And that's
Yes," said Fred Barfield. why an actor
should always consider the show before he considers himself.
"
That," he added, staring me right in the eyes, is what I have
always done."
One simply had to believe him. It didn't matter that I had
seen him in a score of plays, every one of which had been
twisted out of all semblance of proportion by his own over-
powering self. It didn't matter that at the beginning of this
very interview I had heard him complaining to the author that
the leading lady didn't efface herself at one of his entrances.
Truth shone from his slightly glossy countenance.
" "
Quite," I said. Oh, absolutely."
" You "
I've known what it is to have
see," he went on,
other fellows killing my laughs. I've been through it, and I
haven't forgotten."
We were back from the general to the particular, but I
was still hypnotized by his tone and manner. And, besides,
how could I possibly judge from the front of the house
whether a comedian were being funny in a selfish or an altruistic
way ? These things were known in the profession, but it
was enough for me if a comedian were being funny at all. Oh,
yes, I entirely believed him.

And at the nextresumption of our dialogue, we returned to

the history of Messrs. Clark and Jackman.
"
Yes," said Fred Barfield, thoughtfully powdering his
"
face, I remember
that first engagement as thoughit was
yesterday. I wasn't brought up to the stage, you know ;

my people had a business of their own, and they'd always

meant me to go into it. I was at a good school, too won
a lot of prizes, what's more and it was a shock to me when I
saw some of the lines in my part. The rhymed stuff, I mean,
that these old-fashioned pantos were full of. You needed a
572 DENIS MACKAIL
ram some of those verses into any
pretty strong constitution to
kind of metre, and they thought nothing of rhyming words
* * * * ' *
like bath and laugh/ or scheme and Fairy Queen/ I
had one couplet that went :

" * It's dark and fearsome here in this wood alone ;

Fm sure I wish I'd never left home/

" "
There's poetry for you. Eh ?
I joined in Mr. Barfield's laughter, but he cut short me
with that well-known movement of one hand that he uses
for the same purpose in his professional work. On the
it always means that a still better joke is just
stage coming,
but here it marked a return to the account of his early
days.
But of course," he resumed, " there was no poetry when
"
the comics were on. There never is. And it was in the second
of those scenes I was telling you about with Clark and
Jackman, I mean that the authors had accidentally given me
one good line. I don't say it was new, even then, but it was a
sure-fire laugh, and as a matter of fact Bradsmith has used

practically the same thing in his third act here. That'll show
you there wasn't much wrong with it. You can trust old
Braddy there.
"
It went like this, you see. We were talking about my
brother not that he'd got anything to do with the play,
but they had to plant the line somehow and Clark had
* '
to say to me, Is your brother a truthful man ? and I had
to say, Yes/ And then Jackman had to say, How do you
c

know your brother's a truthful man ? ' and I had to say :

Because he stood for Parliament and didn't get in/ That was
a big laugh."
Here Mr. Barfield stopped, and seemed to be waiting for
me to say something.
"
But do you mean that the audience laughed ?
" I
asked.
It seemed inexplicable, but then I had never actually been in
Sheffield.
" "
course they did," said Fred Barfield.
Why, of And
what's more, they'll laugh at it again in the third act here
* 9
to-night. Of course, Braddy's changed it to uncle instead
*
of brother/ because it comes into a bit of plot. But when
Archie Floyd he's a nice boy ; he'll do well one day when
he comes out with it, why, I tell you they fairly yell."
 BRADSMITH WAS RIGHT 573
" "
You mean the audience yell ? I wanted to get it quite
clear.
" "
Lord, yes," said Fred Barfield. They simply scream."
" "
With laughter, you mean ?
"
Rather. Even at matinees."
There could be no hope that I had misunderstood him.
"I " Go on."
see," I said.
" "
Well," continued my host, at the dress rehearsal of the
Babes I got that line over so slick that even the band laughed.
And I thought to myself, * This may be a dud show, and I
may have been given the world's9
worst part, but at least I'm
going to get away with that. It carried me right through the
evening yes, even when Jackman put the spirit-gum in my
shoes and I'm not sure I didn't dream of it when I got back
to my
" digs.
And
the next day, walking round all those dirty streets,
I tried to think if I couldn't get it over better still. Not altering
the words, you know, because I didn't dare do that ; but
saying it faster, or slower, or changing the emphasis, or putting
it across with a different kind of wink. You'd be
surprised, I
dare say, if you realised what a lot there can be in these little
details."
Mr. Barfield's manner was now so impressive that I found
myself revising that first, shallow judgment which had dis-
sociated him from philosophical research. At this moment he
might but for his costume and make-up have been
easily
delivering a lecture on Bergson.
" " And
Oh, I'm sure of it," I murmured. er did you
"
find a better way of saying the line ?
The calm vanished abruptly from the lecturer's face, and
a look of passion appeared in its stead.
" A
fat lot of use it would have been if I had," he answered
"
fiercely. Because do you know what happened on the first
night yes, and at every show right through that three weeks'
run?"
I
"
shook my head. Of course I didn't know. "
I'll tell you, then," said the comedian.* Clark used to
*

say to me,
'
Is your brother a truthful man ? and I said, Yes,'
and Jackman said, How do you know your brother's a truth-
*

'
ful man ? and then, if you please, and before I could make a
*
sound, Clark yes, Clark would yell out Because he :

stood for Parliament and didn't get in.' Do you understand ?

574 DENIS MACKAIL
He pinched the whole speech. He took my one and only laugh
right out of my mouth, and I had to stand
"
there and listen to the
audience's guffaws. Can you beat it ?
It was
impossible to beat it. Though the tragedy had
occurred when I myself was still at school, and long before
the European War, the horror and injustice of it filled me with
indignation and disgust. I might, if I had not been under
the direct influence of that compelling personality, have found
several facts to console me. I might have reminded myself
that Clark and Jackman had both passed away, unhonoured
and unsung, and that their victim was now permanently estab-
lished in a West End theatre, the idol of the masses and the test
by which all would-bewere appraised. I might have
rivals
reflected that in the long run Heaven had not let the outrage
pass unavenged. But at the moment I considered none of these
things. The whole force of an individuality which thought
nothing of filling the vast auditorium of the Corona was con-
centrated on me in a room measuring perhaps ten feet by
twelve. I went down before it like a ninepin. I had no earthly
chance of doing anything else.
"
You don't mean it " I gasped ; and for the first time I
1

took a pull at that staggering whisky and soda now warm

"
and flat from its long sojourn in my hand. It's it's in-
"
credible !

Mr. Barfield looked at me in gloomy appreciation of my

sympathy.
44
It's true/' he said.
" p ut " "
couldn't you do anything ? I asked. Wasn't
"
there anyone to take your side ?
The great comedian suddenly smiled.
"
You bet there was nobody to take my side," he said.
"
There never is, when you're up against bill-toppers like
that.And yet well, I did have one shot at getting my own
back. One shot ." . .

And he smiled again.

Iscented the happy ending for which the story positively
shrieked, and hastened to draw it from him.
" " " "
What was it ? I asked. What did you do ?
" "
It was on the last night,'* said Fred Barfield. I knew

nothing could make Clark and Jackman hate me more than

they did, and I knew the management weren't going to engage
me again or if they were, well, next Christmas seemed a very
 BRADSMITH WAS RIGHT 575

long way off. Perhaps that sounds as if I'd thought it out before
hand ; but I hadn't. Not consciously, anyhow. No, it came to
me on the spur of the moment like some of rny best gags do
"
still. And
There was an agonising interruption here, while a young
man I gathered that he was the nice boy, Archie Floyd, of
whom I had already heard put his head in at the door, and
discussed something so highly technical that I could get no
meaning out of it at all. For a musical comedy actor he struck
me as a trifle subdued ; but then anyone might seem subdued
who burnt their little candle in the great blaze of Fred Bar-
field's sun. I waited patiently, and presently, with a brief
"
Thanks awfully, Freddie," he withdrew.
I turned back to my host.
"
You were telling me," I reminded him, " about the way
you back at Clark and Jackman."
" got "
Eh ? said the comedian vaguely.
"
At the last performance of the Babes in the Wood"
"
Oh, yes." He picked up the thread this time, and went
"
on. Well, you see, it all came to me in a flash. If they
could jump in on me, then for once, anyhow, I'd jolly well
jump in on them. And so I made up my mind we'd started
'
the scene by then that when Clark said, Is your brother a
'
truthful man ?
'
I'd go right to the laugh, and say Yes. :

Because he stood for Parliament, and didn't get in.' It wasn't

nearly so good, of course, but if it got as much as a snigger,
the snigger would be all mine. It would do Clark out of his
laugh, anyway."
To me there seemed little to choose between the alternative
versions from the point of view of imbecility ; but I waited
anxiously for the comedian's next words.
" "
Well ? I encouraged him.
He shook his head sadly. The happy ending seemed
suddenly to fade into the distance and expire.
"
Do you mean," I asked, " that you never said it ? "
He shook his head again.
" "
But I never finished.
I started in to say it," he answered.
I tell you, old man, you couldn't get past real old-fashioned
c
comics like them. Clark said, Is your brother a truthful
man ? * and I took a deep breath and said, * Yes '
And
that was just as far as I got.
"
It was Jackman, the fellow who couldn't read, who sav*d
576 DENIS MAC KAIL
the team. He must have guessed what I was up to from the
way I looked at them, and before you could say knife/ he'd
jumped right in again.
"'Oh, is heP he said. 'Then he can't be your
1
brother.
"
Clark was mad, and so was I. But if you'll believe me, it

got the biggest laugh of the whole run/'

At this moment, as I was still feeling a little disappoint-

ment with both the climax and the point of the story, we
were again set on by the call-boy and the rat-faced dresser,
and the great Fred Barfield was again hustled down on to
the stage. A few seconds later my old friend Bradsmith
put" his head "cautiously round
"
the door.
Alone ? he asked. Well, come along quickly. I don't
want Freddie to catch me."
I felt slightly discourteous towards my absent host, but I
realised that I must do as I was told. As Bradsmith preceded
me along the mysterious corridors, I heard him humming in
a jaunty manner which betokened or so I imagined a
successful issue to his interview with Mr. Corbett. And then,
at a dirty iron door, he suddenly stopped.
"
I just want to watch a bit of the show from the front,"
he said.
"
You don't mind, do you ? "
"
Of course not," I said inevitably.
So Bradsmith pushed the door open, and we emerged into
a more luxurious corridor.
"
This way," he whispered, bounding up a flight of carpeted
stairs. I hurried after him, and we found ourselves at the back
of the dress-circle. The
big stage, set for the eternal third-act
supper scene, was flooded with light, and among those present
on it were Fred Barfield and Archie Floyd.
" "
Sh I said Bradsmith warningly, though I hadn't made
a sound. We
stood there side by side, leaning on the wooden
partition behind the last row of seats. The house was abso-
lutely packed.
Archie Floyd was talking to a gentleman in a species of
uniform, and Fred Barfield, his back turned to us for the
moment, was industriously engaged in one of those silent
conversations with six chorus-ladies which the drama so
often requires. It was too late to catch on to the plot, but I
listened as attentively as I could.
 BRADSMITH WAS RIGHT 577
" said the man in uniform, in a very loud voice.
Oh,"
" You from "
"
learnt that your uncle, did you ?
Yes," said Archie Floyd, while I wondered if my tailor
could ever turn me out like that, and how I should feel if he
"
did. From my uncle."
" "
Oh," said "the man in uniform. And is your uncle a
truthful man ?
"
Certainly," said Archie Floyd.
"How do you know," demanded the man in uniform,
" that "
your uncle's a truthful man ?
I saw Archie Floyd draw breath for his reply, but before
he could utter a sound, Fred Barfield the great Fred
turned suddenly round, and had taken the centre of the stage.
"
How does he know ? " he asked, leering at us all. " Why,
because he stood for Parliament and didn't get in."
The laughter converged in a wild roar from every part of
the house. But in the darkness by my side I heard Brad-
smith the successful Bradsmith grinding his teeth.
"
Gosh " he said, thumping the wooden partition in his
I

" "
baffled rage. He pinched
's that line ! again
Then he crushed his hat over his eyes, and fled from the
theatre and me like a man possessed.
"
Ihave not seen him since, and he has still not heard all

my news." He is a busy man, of course, and it was only a

couple of days later that I read in my newspaper that he had
sailed for America. But one saying of his still lurks in my
memory, even after all the turmoil and confusion of that
extraordinary evening.
"
It's a ghastly profession," was what Bradsmith had
said. And it occurs to me that Bradsmith was right.
 CROSBIE GARSTIN
Golden Silence

After an adventurous life as a horsebreaker on Western ranches^

sawyer and miner in British Columbia and ranger in Matabeleland,

Crosbie Garstin returned to England at the outbreak of the Great
War, and soon afterwards began to contribute to Punch. He was
the author of Coasts of Romance and a number of other books.
 GOLDEN SILENCE
METHepplethwaite two miles west of the river drift.
I He was homeward bound to his store at Mokala, sitting
on waggon, nursing large square box on his knees as if it
a a
were his only child and uninsured at that.
We passed the time of day, agreed that veld was scarce, and
water scarcer.
"
Said I Wouldn't you find it less warm if you could
:

persuade that packing-case to get off your lap and sit somewhere
"
else ?
"
'Fraid of breaking it, it's a gramophone."
"
Where did you get it ? "
"
Took it over from the railway gauger, Kreige, in part
payment for some sheep/'
" "
Any records
?
"
four, but I'll get some more up from Cape Town.
Only
I'm rather glad I've got it now ; a fellow gets fed up with the
everlasting silence out in the bush and the sound of his own
"
voice talking to nobody, don't he ?
"
He do," I agreed.
"
This'll be a bit of variety drop out my way some day
and we'll let her rip off a tune or two."
I accepted the invitation and we parted. I didn't envy
him his seventy-mile tramp to Mokala cuddling that cornery
crate all the way; still, music hath charms, and one has to
make some sacrifices. I was out near Mokala buying goats
a fortnight later, so I called in on Hepplethwaite. We had
supper and sat outside his hut afterwards, smoking our pipes
and watching the moon rise over the bush.
He asked if I would care to hear the gramophone, and I said
I should.
He bawled to his cook-boy who cranked up the engine and
let it get a record off its chest.
"
I've taught Mackintyre to work the thing," Hepple-
"
thwaite explained, it saves me
having to jump up every
581
582 CROSBIE GARSTIN
minute or two to put on the brakes and reload, etc. ; he's tickled
*
to death with it, calls it the Fairy in the box/
"
" Home Sweet Home " finished and "
Annie Laurie "
commenced.
"
Great invention, when you come to think of it," Hepple-
"
thwaite observed. Great invention, the gramophone. Have
your potted Caruso after coffee ; tired of him, open a tin of
Melba ; weary of Melba, uncork a jar of Lauder ; and so.
Great idea."
" "
Annie Laurie wailed to a close and the versatile machine
"
rang a chime on the Blue Bells of Scotland."
"
Great idea, when you come to think of it. Nowadays you
don't have to dedicate half your life to sawing at a fiddle or
plunking a piano, don't have to let your hair grow and all that
to get a respectable noise when you want it, you just sell an
ox, buy a gramophone, and have the whole boiling lot at
your nod marvellous business, when you come to
consider it."
" Half a
moment," said I, interrupting his unsolicited
testimonial. "That boy of yours is putting on * Annie
'
Laurie again ; we've just had her."
"I
know, can't be helped. I only have three records now.
The fourth, * Mary of Argyle,' fell off a table into a scrap
* '
between my bull-terrier and Bob St. John's mastiff. Mary
got" the worst of it."
You're going to get some more records though, aren't
you?"
" Rather. I've sent down
to the coast for a catalogue.
I'll
get some Gilbert andSullivan, I think. Yeomen of the
'
Guard,' Dorothy,' and so forth, also some Gaiety pieces and
some rag-time ; there are great possibilities in gramophones.
You must drop out some day when they arrive, and we'll
have a blooming Queen's Hall concert."
He turned and shouted again to Mackintyre, the cook-boy,
who obediently slipped the engine into the low gear.
"
Told him to play them over again, slowly this time, by
way of variety."
Later on in the evening we had the three pieces over again
at full speed this time by way of more variety. By permuta-
tions and combinations Hepplethwaite had worked out how
many varieties there were to be got out of those three
pieces.
 GOLDEN SILENCE 583

reader, may work it out for yourself, if you are

You, gentle
given to combination and permutations ; anyway, there are
quite a lot, and we had them all that night before we turned
in.
At breakfast next morning Mackintyre, who gloried in his
new accomplishment, served us up " Annie Laurie " with
the porridge,
"
Home Sweet Home " with the goat ribs, and
"
The Blue Bells of Scotland " with the marmalade. I rode
away after that.
If anybody had asked me to sing (which they never do) any
of these three songs backwards, forwards, sideways, or upside
down during the next month I could have done so, yea, even
in my sleep. Sometime later I got a letter from Hepplethwaite.
He had sundry heifers for sale, would I come out and look at
them?
I reached Mokala in the late afternoon ; Hepplethwaite was
in the store, so also was Jopie Ziervogel. Jopie Ziervogcl,

along with his vrouw, a lady built on very much the same lines
as a Baltic galliot , inhabits a wattle and dab hut in Chaka's
l

Stadt, where he repairs the native ploughs and waggons in

return for stock and fair promises.
" " that
Hello," said Hepplethwaite, you ? Sit down and
make yourself at home, heifers will be in at sundown.
Cup of
"
tea ? Jopie, acup of tea ?

Jopie squirmed about in his chair, shuffled his velschoen (in

which he sleeps) over the floor-boards, coughed, smiled, and
"
said he didn't mind if he did. S'cuse me a moment," said
" "
Hepplethwaite. Lo batlau ?
The two native girls addressed produced black cones of
Makalaka tobacco, which they exchanged after much haggling
for some beads, brass wire and the inevitable barsella, or tip,
of two cotton reels.

Mackintyre brought in three cups of tea, grinned a white

grin that looked like dawn breaking through pitchy night, and
went cook the evening's meal.
off to
Jopie squirmed about in his chair, blushed and stammered
out an opinion that the weather was hot but that he thought
we'd have more rain.
A nude native entered bearing two mangy fowls upside
down by the legs, which he sold for some kaffir corn and a
barsellaof a handful of sweets. Jopie laid down his empty cup,
shuffled his velschoen violently, squirmed on his chair in a
584 CROSBIEGARSTIN
paroxysm of embarrassment, went scarlet in the face, and
gasped out :
"
Mis-ter 'Epplethwaite, could I year a chune on the gram-
"
y-phone, please, Mis-ter 'Epplethwaite, please ?
Hepplethwaite put down his pen and looked at Jopie as if
that gentleman's sudden and immediate demise would make a
happy man of him. He picked up a heavy ebony ruler and
grasped it, bludgeon-wise in a tense fist ; then his hand relaxed
"
and he sighed. Mackintyre, bring the gramophone," he
shouted wearily, and strode out of the store to bargain for an
ox that a spindle-shanked ancient had for sale.
To be a successful Kaffir storekeeper one must be equally at
home among ploughs, patent medicines, and peppermint
drops, beads, blankets and bovines, one must combine the
patience of a Job with the commercial acumen of a Scotch
Jew of Yankee extraction, one must be all this and then some.
Mackintyre the music-maker, wound it up
" appeared bearing "
and set the Blue Bells of Scotland ringing the old familiar
tune.
Jope sat back in his chair, his ears wide open, a smile of
aesthetic ecstasy nearly splitting him in half.
" " "
We" had Home Sweet Home and the Blue
after that,
"
Bells again after that, after that we had Home Sweet
Home." I went out to where Hepplethwaite and the ancient
were endeavouring to bluff each other under.
" ' " '
Where's Annie Laurie ? I asked.
"
Bust. Bob St. John felt suddenly tired here one night and
sat on her."
" "
Inside the store Jopie had got the Blue Bells at it again.
Hepplethwaite shivered and jerked his head towards the noise.
"
He comes here about once a week and sits playing those
two darn tunes over and over, back and forth the whole
blessed afternoon, until I'm nearly off my blooming head."
" "
Why do you let him ?
"
Oh, well, he's a customer, you know. Buys a tin of coffee
and a pound of sugar once in a way, and a packet of sweets on
Christmas Days and blue moons. Got to oblige customers,
you know."
At this point the ancient teetered up and said that seeing it
was his old college chum Hepplethwaite, he'd take three
pounds fifteen shilling for the ox he had demanded eight
pounds earlier in the afternoon. Hepplethwaite burst into
 GOLDEN SILENCE 585
cackles of well-simulated mirth I forgot to say that to be a
successful Kaffir storekeeper one has also to be an actor of no
trifling ability.
"
Ha, ha three pounds fifteen for that ox ! Why, it was so
I

old it would probably die a natural death before nightfall, and

so thin it would do nicely as a hat rack, wheeled into the front
hall." Another cackle of well-simulated mirth.
"
" Ha, ha !
"
M'purru "(M'purru being the ancient) must be cracking a
"
joke at his (Hepplethwaite's) expense, a humorist, a funny
man, what Three pounds fifteen, ha, ha, very amusing "
? !

The ancient said there was no joke intended, and in that

case he and the ox must go home.
"
Go " said Hepplethwaite, winking at me, and the
!

ancient drove the ox off round the corner of the store. Inside
"
the tin building the gramophone was singing Home Sweet
" "
Home to the entranced Jopie. Hepplethwaite groaned, It
isn't only Jope but Bob St. John and his crowd from the
* *
Eland ; they stop here on their way back and forth from the
mine, tumble whooping off their Cape cart, haul out the gramo-
phone, and keep it grinding away until the last survivor drops
flat somewhere in the thin hours of morning it's the limit,

believe rne."
" "
"
Why do you stand for it ? Are they customers, too" ?
Yes, pretty good customers, too, confound 'em !

"
Where are those new records you were talking about
' * "
Dorothy,' the Yeomen of "
the Guard,' and all ?
Hepplethwaite snorted. My confounded transport nigger
drank his back teeth awash on Kaffir beer in at the siding,
pulled out at midnight with the case of records on top of a load
of grain and lashed the span lickety split down into the Bon-
gola River in flood being hopelessly drunk he was about the
only thing saved."
The ancient poked his corrugated face round the store
corner,
"
I am going, Baas."
"
All right."
" **
Three pound and a half, Baas ?
"
Three pound, I told you."
"
"
Good-bye, Baas."
"
Good-bye, M'purru." The face withdrew slowly.
So you're still harping along with Home Sweet Home
' *

c ' "
and the Blue Bells eh ?
586 CROSBIE GARSTIN
"
"
No, Fm not, Bob. Jopie, Mackintyre
"
& Co. are though."
to try again ?
" Going
Sure enough. I've sent for another case, it should be up
next week."
" "
Jopie, having played the Blue Bells of Scotland to a
lingering finish, rolled out of the store, insisted on shaking
hands with both of us, took off his hat, mounted a rusty yellow
mare, and tripped off home to his vrouw.
We turned back to the store, at the door of which we dis-
covered the ancient, squatting on his lean hams.
"
Three pound five shillings, Baas," said he.
"
Qciami" Hepplethwaite graciously agreed, and paid him
in goods at the retail value of three pounds five and the whole-
sale value of one pound ten. There is something in commercial
life that
appeals to me.
That after supper Mackintyre attempted to give us
" Home night
Sweet Home," but we choked the machine at the first
whoop, and kicked the impresario swiftly in the direction
of his hut. Time passed on, and one day I was in Knox's store
at the siding buying myself some tea to mix with a little water
I had home.
at
Knox was reading a letter that a native runner had just
brought in; it seemed to annoy Knox, he mumbled sourly
from time to time.
" "
What's rowelling you ? I asked.
"Hepplethwaite, I do his forwarding from the railway,
y'know, also for Hergesheimer, up at Nyoriliwe. One's case
marks are H.M., Mother's H.N. In the dark the other night
I made a mistake and sent some of Heppy's stuff up to Herges-
heimer Heppy's got snotty about it," he wagged that
"
merchant's letter ; don't see why, perfectly reasonable
mistake."
" "
Let me
see," said I, Nyoriliwe is about six hundred
miles away, isn't it, across the desert? When will Herges-
"
heimer's waggon be back ?
"
In about ten weeks if his spans are fit and he bustles 'em
back immediately, which he won't still, I don't see why
Heppy should rear up and paw the air like that, it was only
some footling gramophone records, anyhow."

records what are

"
Gramophone " you laughing at ?
Nothing," said I. Gimme my tea and lemme go.
 GOLDEN SILENCE 587

Hepplethwaite was in his little fenced-off patch of a garden

when I rode up, drenching his budding
pumpkins with his
morning's bath water one learns the economics in our
country.
"
Dumela" said he, jerking the last soapy dregs over
up
"
aspiring lettuce, you've come just in time for scoff; hang an
your horse and walk right into the kya"
Supper over, we dragged our deck-chairs
"
out of doors and
"
sat our and beef on the heel as ever.
"smoking pipes talking
"
Like to hear the gramophone ? he asked.
" "
Well, if you've got any new records
Hepplethwaite chuckled grimly.
"
No, I haven't got any new records, half my new records
are floating downstream towards the Indian Ocean and t'other
half must be getting pretty near the German West African
border by now. Moreover, I haven't got any gramophone ;
you've come just two hours too late, my son."
" "
What's happened ?
"
A whole lot of things ; one of them was that I got fed up
to busting point with gramophones. The gramophone is a
noble invention, but I've been unlucky and determined to
get" rid of mine." "
Did you sell it to Jope ?
" I tried to he rose to it like a trout at first but
; afterwards
he thought he'd better talk it over with his vrouw. They were
closeted in solemn conclave for about a month ; at the end he
rode over and said he was afraid they couldn't afford it just
then, but if the Chief Chaka paid up for the shortening of four
waggon tyres, and Intaemer broke his iron plough beam which
was already cracked and paid Jopie for welding it, if I would
take half a bag of seed oats and some fowls in part payment,
and if the old spotted cow had a heifer calf at Christmas
then they would go into conclave again and let me know the
result sometime about Easter.
" The ' Eland '

Cape Cart, homeward bound, rolled up

just after Jopie had gone ; Bob St. John was abroad with two
*
miners and a case of Dop/ They stayed up most of the
night. Bob St. John teaching one miner the Argentine Tango
to the strains of Home Sweet Home,' lugging the poor,
'

half-strangled blighter round and round the hut, smashing

into the furniture, while the other miner beat time with two
tin plates, kept the engine running and accompanied it with
588 CROSBIE GARSTIN
song and hiccoughs. A kind of tired feeling began to steal
over me about dawn.
" When
they departed next day, the gramophone was lashed
to the cart's rack unbeknown to them.
"
they want Bluebells and Home
* ' *
Now, thought I, if
Sweet Home
'
all night and day they can have it to their
c '
souls' content out on the Eland without troubling me.
*
I don't know the fellow who said Silence is golden/ but
he spoke the word that time all right ; it is not only golden,
but strung with pearls, festooned with diamonds and plastered
with mitres; anyway, that's how I felt the night after the
Cape Cart left."
" So that ended the
I laughed. gramophone."
"
No it didn't, wait a bit this afternoon I went out to see
if I could hit a buck, and coming home I saw the spoor of a

Cape Cart and six mules ; there is only one in this district and
that's the Elands.' When I got to the store I found they had
not stopped, but gone on ; they meant to camp at the Eongola
water-holes to-night, my boy said, they had left a parcel for
me, however.
"
Yes, was the gramophone, of course, sitting on my
it

table, wrapped up in sacking, come back like a cat, like a

bad ha'penny, like a ruddy boomerang. There was also a
note thanking me for the loan of my instrument which they
herewith returned along with one record,
*
Home Sweet
*
Home having unfortunately committed suicide by hurling
itself from a shelf.
" "
What did you do then ?
"
What did I do, what did I do ? I took the whole box
c
of tricks and thrust them into Mackintyre's arms. Take
*
'em,' I said, miles away from here, miles and miles ; take
'em to some desolate corner of the world and smash 'em into
little, tiny, small smithereens, smash 'em into powder, into
"
nothing at all.'
"
Finish," said I.

"Finish," echoed Hepplethwaite, lounging contentedly

back in his chair and puffing lazy smoke-rings towards the
tropic stars.
"
golden silence cometh to her own again."
And
Hepplethwaite nodded.
Suddenly I jerked upright in my chair both ears pricking,
from somewhere out in the dark bush came a faint whirr, a
 GOLDEN SILENCE 589
tinkle and the distant nasal intoning of a familiar, a very
familiar tune, the indomitable Bluebells of invincible Scotland.
" I
"
Mackinfyre
Hepplethwaite bounced from his seat, poised rigid for the
moment like a pointer pointing, whirled on his heel and
dashed into the hut.
Another second and he raced past me, brandishing a native
battle-axe that ornamented his walls, and the darkness engulfed
him.
A minute later a nigger's startled yell pierced the night air,
olio wed by a metallic crash and a whirring as if all the clock-
springs on earth were tearing out.
Then silence, golden silence. I lay back in my chair and
laughed and laughed which is a silly way I have*
 DERWENT MIALL
The Grey Underworld

Derwent Miall will be remembered as a contributor to Punch who

combined a graceful wit with real powers of observation and
character-drawing. The four little sketches which follow have an
unexpected twist that is reminiscent of the work of O. Henry.
 THE GREY UNDERWORLD

WILLIAM'S OLD DOG

name is not yet among those of the elect in
PONKER'S
the pages of Who's Who, but it will be shortly, because
he is collecting material for a really big book a series of
"
human documents " dealing with what he is pleased to call
"
"
The Grey Underworld " of London. The Grey Under-
world/' so far as I can gather, consists of rather saddening
residential streets, where people subsist, if brass plates are
anything to go by, chiefly by persuading one another to take
out life and fire policies, and where commerce, represented
by the oilman, is restricted to corner sites. Ponker says that
such places are full of unexploited drama, and I dare say he is
right ; but the difficulty is to get at it. His methods of re-
search, however, are various and enterprising, but I don't
think they are always quite kind to the underworldlings
themselves.
There was the case of William B., for example. first We
knew of William B. through an advertisement in an evening
paper.
"
Fine dog genuine Sussex very old what offers ? Or
; ; ;

would exchange for treadle fret-saw. Apply William B./' etc.

Ponker worried all one evening about William B.'s very old
sheep-dog. There was a story and a sad one, he said, behind
this advertisement.
Isuggested that perhaps the dog had bitten a postman ;
but Ponker would not be put off with anything so probable
as that. And, over the last pipe, he told me the story of
William B. as it
shaped itself in his own mind.
William's father, it appeared, had fallen a victim to agri-
cultural depression. (No, I don't know if even Tariff Reform
could have saved him. Perhaps he was a bad farmer. Ponker
didn't say.)
After the sale was over, William B. made a manly vow to
593
594 DERWENT MIALL
go to London, work in an office, and, as a natural sequel,
save enough to buy back the old homestead and pay the
creditors in full.

So one fine afternoon he shook hands with the station-

master, also with an aged retainer of his father's who had come
to see him off, and disappeared into the Maelstrom of London ;
while the aged retainer hobbled sadly back to the village,
" t'
telling all he met that yoong measter be a-goan to Lunnon,
"
he be, sewerloi for Ponker, I must remark, like many
novelists and all playwrights, is fully convinced that that is

how people in the country talk.

So a new life began for William B.
You will guess, as easily as I did, that there was a scratching
at the his lodgings a few days later. The old sheep-
door of
dog, the faithful friend of his childhood, had followed him
to London. (How ? Ah, well ! We know these things do
happen. Surely you read The Spectator sometimes ?).
Of course William B. vowed he would share his last crust
with the dog ; but it had not come to that as yet, for he had
chops for supper, and the dog had the bones ; and on Sundays
he would take the fine old fellow to suburban commons,
where it barked at the swans on the ponds, and was the terror
of all pugs.
But then the story shifted into a minor key. The Maelstrom
was too much for William. He lost his job, and one by one
his possessions had to go to buy food for him and the dog.
At last there was only one hope left. William B., always clever
with his hands, thought to earn a pittance by making pipe-
racks and things. But how to procure the necessary imple-
ments ? His eyes fell on the dog, stretched by the fireless
hearth . . .
"
Grand old dog 1 " said Ponker huskily at this point.
"
Fine old fellow 1 To-morrow I shall go and offer William
B. my fret-saw."
" "
But have you got one ? I asked.
"
Heavens !No " said Ponker drowsily.
I

"
And where will you keep the dog ? "
" '*
I shan't have the dog. But there's copy to be made out
of William B.," explained Ponker.
He went the following day ; but it was some time before I
could persuade him to reveal what had passed between him-
self and William B.
 THE GREY UNDERWORLD 595
He found, he eventually told me, a young man at the given
address playing a pianola. He thought this looked like beastly
extravagance on William B.'s part, until he reflected that the
pianola might, after all, belong to the rooms. William B.
was a grave, square-headed, spectacled young man the sort
of young man who would be fond of fret-work and he rose
and eyed Ponker attentively as he entered.
" "
I think/' said Ponker, you want a fret-saw a really
good one ; ball-bearings and all that sort of thing."
"
Oh, yes," said William B. with ill-concealed " eagerness.
"
Well, now, about the dog," said Ponker ; have you had
"
it
long ?
William B. replied that it had been in his family for hundreds
of years ; but Ponker supposed that was only his nonsense
the jest of an aching heart.
"
I should like to see it before I decide anything," continued

Ponker, making a careful study of William B.'s face. He

thought William B. was masking his emotions bravely.
William B., whatever his emotions may have been, merely
pointed to the fender.
Of course, as I had guessed during Ponker's recital of the
young man's story, it was a fire dog, but a printer's error had
" "
made a fine dog of it.

Ponker says that he gaped at the beastly thing, and, mutter-

ing something about writing in the morning, hurried away.
I am afraid William B. is still waiting to hear about that
"
fret-saw. Ponker says, Let him wait. William B. is a
ghastly fraud." And it is certain that he will never
figure
among Ponker's human documents of The Grey Underworld.

II

THE WOMAN WHO HAD DONE WITH SMILES

HER name was Mrs. Crumby, and she lived opposite a pickle
factory, and had a bed-sitting room to let. Ponker had been
" "
trying to improve his acquaintance with the underworld of
London by going about and beguiling harmless landladies
into the belief that he wanted lodgings, tempting them, in this
way, to gossip about themselves and their lodgers in a manner
thatwould furnish copy for the all-important book. He liked
Mrs. Grumby's face at once, because she looked as though the
596 DERWENT MIALL
iron had entered into her soul ; and he particularly wished
to study someone whose soul had been entered by the
iron.
" "
Mrs. Grumby showed Ponker her bed-sit (as I believe
the newspaper advertisements have it), and Ponker looked
" "
from the bed-sit to her, and felt more certain than ever
that the iron had entered into her soul. But of that she said
nothing, merely asking him if he would want hot dishes for
breakfast, because, if so, that would be an extra ; but most of
her gentlemen had been content with sardines.
Not wishing to make life seem darker for one in her melan-
choly state,Ponker said that he too always ate sardines for
breakfast ;he was, in fact, a whale for sardines.
Of course, he doesn't generally permit himself to make
jokes of this elementary character ; it was simply intended as
a test ; and Mrs. Grumby passed the test triumphantly,
"
emerging, in Ponker 's estimation, as the Woman who had
Done with Smiles." After that, Ponker sat down in the
" bed-sit's " easiest Mrs. Grumby might
chair, to talk.
possibly be worth a chapter all to herself.

Ponker admitted to me later that she was not very com-

municative, and he had to fill in a good deal of her story
himself. Her face told him more than her lips, he said. It
must have been a very speaking face, indeed, because it told
him, amongst other things, how she had once been a light-
hearted girl in the West Country, breaking the hearts of all
the young farmers in her neighbourhood, until handsome
Jack Grumby had come a- wooing Grumby, the smart com-
mercial who put up at the " King's Head/' (How could her
face give such positive information as to the name of the inn ?
Frankly, I don't know. You must ask Ponker.) She had made
a runaway match of it with Jack, without her father's blessing,
and before she realised that Jack Grumby 's heart was very much
at the service of any pretty, come-by-chance acquaintance.
Ah 1 she knew that later, when he fled to America with " the
other woman/' leaving her stranded opposite a pickle factory,
to do the best she could for herself and her child. No wonder
she had forgotten how to smile I
When Mrs. Grumby's face had got thus far with her story,
Ponker rose, and said that he would write in the morning ;
which meant, of course, that the room wouldn't suit him.
He was about half-way down the stairs, preceding Mrs.
 THE GREY UNDERWORLD 5 97

Grumby, when he heard, he tells me, a sound behind him, as

if Mrs. Grumby had tried to speak, but had been choked by
sudden mirth.
He looked round sharply, but her face was in shadow.
"
I beg your pardon. Did you speak ? " he asked.
Mrs. Grumby made no reply, and, thinking it was not
laughter but tears that checked her utterance perhaps some-
thing about his back had suddenly reminded her of Jack
Grumby he delicately hastened from the house as soon,
at least, as he had mastered the very complicated front-door
latch.
But that stiffled sound that he had heard on the staircase
haunted him. Had Mrs. Grumby, in spite of all her face had
told him, laughed? If so, the mystery of it was great. What
was there, for example, to laugh at ?
He had not walked very far from the house when a perfect
frenzy of curiosity impelled him to return to its doorstep. It
would be easy to make some excuse for seeing Mrs. Grumby
again, and then perhaps he might be able to deduce from her
manner why she had snorted on the staircase whether in
sorrow or in mirth.
As he raised the knocker he heard a muffled sound of laugh-
ter within. It rose it increased in volume it was a duet I

The raised knocker fell from his nerveless hand, and instantly
there was silence. After the lapse of a minute the door was
opened, not by Mrs. Grumby, but by her daughter. She was
a presentable girl so far as Ponker could judge, but she had a
handkerchief pressed tightly against her mouth, hiding half
her face.
"Iforgot to ask your mother," said "Ponker severely,
"
whether you have a bath hot and cold ?
She swayed, like standing corn in tempest ; and then she
made three attempts to answer him :

"
Oh yes, we have
"
We
have a We
have a
ba-ha-ha-ha-hath !

Ponker left the door sadly. He had lost an illusion. No

"
Woman who had Done with Smiles " could have had a
daughter like that.
After reaching home in a cab, he detached from the back
buttons of his coat, to which it had affixed itself as he sat in
Mrs. Grumby's chair, an antimacassar of such revolting
hideousness that he stared at it aghast a thing compact of
 598 DERWENTMIALL
crochet-work oyster-shells, and with the hues of some por-
tentous sunset. (Some day, when the church at the end of the
street has a sale of work, Ponker is going to send it in as his
contribution ; and then, he says, the churchwardens or other
responsible authorities will bitterly repent of having rung
the bells whenever he sat down to write.)
As for Mrs. Grumby, Ponker says he is beginning to wonder
" "
if the people of the Grey Underworld differ very much
from the shallowest of the Smart Set in their notions of what
constitutes a joke. At all events Mrs. Grumby has shown
herself unworthy of a place in the book of human documents.

Ill

SETH LATIMER'S WIFE

PONKER tells me that quite a lot of people in theGrey Under-
world nice,
intellectual-looking people spend hours and
hours about in public gardens doing nothing (7 think
sitting
they are composing answers to acrostics ; but that by the way),
and it occurred to him that if he could get some of them to
tell their life histories it
might help them to pass the leaden
hours, and would, incidentally, greatly benefit his book.
So he took to haunting disused burial-grounds and other
pleasaunces, but found that most of the people there preferred
to pass the leaden hours in silent meditation, with occasional
intervals for light refreshment ; and he was getting very much
discouraged when Seth Latimer filled him with hopes of
"
copy."
Ponker came across Seth in the garden belonging to a dingy
square. This garden, he tells me, is governed by a prison
warder administering a code of 149 by-laws. (Well, perhaps
not a prison warder really ; but a bad-tempered person with
postman's trousers.) It is hemmed in by vicious-looking

spears, and contains a fountain basin too shallow to serve

the turn of the dejected people whom it fills with thoughts of
suicide and a statue of an alderman by some anonymous
miscreant.
Into this elysium stepped Seth Latimer one afternoon as
the clock over the mausoleum on the north side of the square
(a church, I suspect, though Ponker thinks not) struck the
hour of one. He came out of a house in the square, carrying
 THE GREY UNDERWORLD 599
a black hand-bag, and he walked with an air of angry determin-
ation to a seat beside the fountain basin, opened the bag, and
ate about a pound of ham sandwiches. Then he went back to
the house again.
Ponker was only mildly interested at first. He thought it a
pity that class feeling should be strong enough, even in such a
dingy square, to prevent people from inviting the piano-
tuner to share their midday meal with them especially as
Seth, who was a refined-looking old fellow, seemed to take
it to heart so much.

But when Seth Latimer (of course the name was merely
coined for him by Ponker) when Seth Latimer (Ponker says
the name fitted him to a T) repeated the same performance at
one next day, it became evident that he lived in the square,
and was not a piano-tuner at all. Of course, thought Ponker,
it
might be some new kind of open-air cure ; but the chances
were against it, because fads are generally confined to the idle
rich.
It was not until a little later, when Ponker was contemplating
the goldfish in the basin, that the explanation of it flashed across
his mind, and he saw that Seth Latimer was the hero of a
delightfully sordid little domestic drama.
His shiny frock-coat was sufficient evidence that life had not
gone too well with him, and things had, perhaps, been at their
very worst when his wife came unexpectedly into a little money.
Being a woman of coarse fibre she had taunted him from that
time forth with his dependence upon herself, till at last his
proud, sensitive nature was goaded beyond"
endurance, and
he cried out in his bitterness of spirit :
Woman, never more
will I take bite or sup beneath your roof/'
Ponker was so pleased with his discovery that he began
prodding at the goldfish, in an absent-minded way, with
the point of his umbrella; and the prison warder came
and told him that he had made himself liable, under By-law
119, to forty shillings or a month. (I'm not quite sure, but
I rather think there was even some hint of
corporal punish-
ment.)
" "
But Ponker was not going to be put off the trail of copy
by a man in postman's trousers ; and on the third day he
found himself sitting side by side with Seth Latimer, on a seat
upon which they were both forbidden to carve their names
under a penalty of j. (This, however, was no hardship, as
 598 DERWENT MIALL
crochet-work oyster-shells, and with the hues of some por-
tentous sunset. (Some day, when the church at the end of the
street has a sale of work, Ponker is going to send it in as his
contribution ; and then, he says, the churchwardens or other
responsible authorities will bitterly repent of having rung
the bells whenever he sat down to write.)
As for Mrs. Grumby, Ponker says he is beginning to wonder
" "
if the people of the Grey Underworld differ very much
from the shallowest of the Smart Set in their notions of what
constitutes a joke. At all events Mrs. Grumby has shown
herself unworthy of a place in the book of human documents.

Ill

SETH LATIMER'S WIFE

PONKER tells me that quite a lot of people in the Grey Under-
world nice,
intellectual-looking people spend hours and
hours sitting about in public gardens doing nothing (I think
they are composing answers to acrostics ; but that by the way),
and it occurred to him that if he could get some of them to
tell their life histories it
might help them to pass the leaden
hours, and would, incidentally, greatly benefit his book.
So he took to haunting disused burial-grounds and other
pleasaunces, but found that most of the people there preferred
to pass the leaden hours in silent meditation, with occasional
intervals for light refreshment ; and he was getting very much
discouraged when Seth Latimer filled him with hopes of
"
copy."
Ponker came across Seth in the garden belonging to a dingy
square. This garden, he tells me, is governed by a prison
warder administering a code of 149 by-laws. (Well, perhaps
not a prison warder really ; but a bad-tempered person with
postman's trousers.) It is hemmed in by vicious-looking
spears, and contains a fountain basin too shallow to serve
the turn of the dejected people whom it fills with
thoughts of
suicide and a statue of an alderman by some anonymous
miscreant.
Into this elysium stepped Seth Latimer one afternoon as
the clock over the mausoleum on the north side of the square
(a church, I suspect, though Ponker thinks not) struck the
hour of one. He came out of a house in the square, carrying
 THE GREY UNDERWORLD 599
a black hand-bag, and he walked with an air of angry determin-
ation to a seat beside the fountain basin, opened the bag, and
ate about a pound of ham sandwiches. Then he went back to
the house again.
Ponker was only mildly interested at first. He thought it a
pity that class feeling should be strong enough, even in such a
dingy square, to prevent people from inviting the piano-
tuner to share their midday meal with them especially as
Seth, who was a refined-looking old fellow, seemed to take
it to heart so much.

But when Seth Latimer (of course the name was merely
coined for him by Ponker) when Seth Latimer (Ponker says
the name fitted him to a T) repeated the same performance at
one next day, it became evident that he lived in the square,
and was not a piano-tuner at all. Of course, thought Ponker,
it
might be some new kind of open-air cure ; but the chances
were against it, because fads are generally confined to the idle
rich.
It was not until a little later, when Ponker was contemplating
the goldfish in the basin, that the explanation of it flashed across
his mind, and he saw that Seth Latimer was the hero of a
delightfully sordid little domestic drama.
His shiny frock-coat was sufficient evidence that life had not
gone too well with him, and things had, perhaps, been at their
very worst when his wife came unexpectedly into a little money.
Being a woman of coarse fibre she had taunted him from that
time forth with his dependence upon herself, till at last his
proud, sensitive nature was goaded beyond"
endurance, and
he cried out in his bitterness of spirit :
Woman, never more
will I take bite or sup beneath your roof."
Ponker was so pleased with his discovery that he began
prodding at the goldfish, in an absent-minded way, with
the point of his umbrella; and the prison warder came
and told him that he had made himself liable, under By-law
119, to forty shillings or a month. (I'm not quite sure, but
I rather think there was even some hint of corporal punish-

ment.)
" "
But Ponker was not going to be put off the trail of copy
by a man in postman's trousers ; and on the third day he
found himself sitting side by side with Seth Latimer, on a seat
upon which they were both forbidden to carve their names
under a penalty of 5. (This, however, was no hardship, as
6OO DBRWENT MIALL
Ponfcer designed to send his name and Seth's down to posterity
in a far more enduring fashion. The whole world should
weep over that attenuated figure with the pathetic black
bag.)
Seth opened his bag wearily, ate a mouthful of sandwich,
and then and then such a look of dumb agony came over
his face that Ponker's heart ached for him. Suddenly it must
have been borne in upon Seth that, though he might eat in the
garden, his food was none the less of his wife's providing.
(Why hadn't he thought of this before? I don't know;
one can't think of everything, I suppose.)
He could not eat it. It choked him. With deft aim he
flung the ham sandwiches of dependence in among the gold-
fish,infringing I know not how many by-laws.
Then his eye met Ponker's.
" "
Young man," he if ever you marry, you put your
said,
foot down, and don't you allow any spring-cleaning. There's
my house now, so poisoned with the smell of varnish that I
can't eat in it. But when it comes to putting French polish on
"
ham sandwiches !

Ponker expressed his sympathy, and I know he would do

it in a nice and gentlemanlike way ; but he was a little low

that evening. Why, oh, why would not people rise to that
pitch of misery which home and foreign realists had taught
him to believe was the common inheritance of dwellers in
mean streets ?

IV
THE PLANTS OF ASIA
WE had been reading in a superior weekly how a certain young
novelist, after being dined by the "New Reclame Club, had
gone forth alone into the slums, to toil and sorrow and
suffer with the people," for six mortal weeks by way of
preparation, of course, for his autumn novel.
This made Ponker jealous, for he wanted to do something
"
equally great for English literature. Then why don't you
toil and sorrow and suffer with the people you want to make
* ' "
copy out of? suggested Ponker's best adviser.
Ponker said he was quite sure that they wouldn't let him do
anything of the kind. One of the most tragic things about the 1

Grey Underworld of London was the fact that you might ive
 THE GREY UNDERWORLD 6oi

all your next-door to a man, and never even learn his name
life
until the black-plumed horses came for him when the char-
lady would tell you it.

Andthen the same patient adviser had a masterly idea.

Why shouldn't Ponker go from door to door all through the
Grey Underworld disguised as a book-canvasser, and so compel
these retiring folk to their doorsteps ? They might not be
very chatty, but Ponker would at any rate see a little way into
their houses, and intuidon would do the rest.
Ponker brightened at the suggestion ; and a few days later
a monumental work in forty parts, entitled The Plants of Asia,
was made, by arrangement with a friendly publisher, his
justification for a house-to-house visit.
No photographic weekly told of his exploit ; no club
ftted him as the guest of the evening. He simply had an egg
for breakfast, and set out one morning, dressed in a rusty
morning coat that he thought proper to his part, and heavily
weighted with copies of the monumental work. And in the
evening he came home footsore and weary, and said that the
whole plan was rotten. He had only learnt that some people
had mutton for dinner, and some had fish ; some people kept
more umbrellas in their hall than any Christian family could
possibly have come by honestly, and some people had no
umbrellas at all ; and there were dark moments, so he told me,
when he felt inclined to pitch The Plants of Asia into some
yawning area, and come home in a hansom.
Nevertheless the next day he set out again but only to
return an hour later, with no Plants under his arm, and
possessed by a mysterious fit of silence.
It was not until the genial hour of after-dinner that the
secret came out.

appeared that he had selected that morning the dullest,

It

greyest street he could possibly find Mafeking Street, S.E.

a street in which, he felt sure, nobody could ever be happy by
any effort whatever and had knocked at the door of the first
of an endless row of brick boxes, all exactly alike. After wait-
ing for a minute or two he thought he might as well knock
again, to find out whether all the inmates of the house had
made away with themselves in a fit of depression.
Well, one hadn't ; she came to the door jingling a little
bunch of keys, rather breathless, and wearing a kind of large
"
pink pinafore over her dress. (" Pretty ? said Ponker's
602 DERWENT MIALL
" " "
audience, in parenthesis. Yes," said Ponker, awfully ;
and smoked in silence for two minutes and a half.)
The door being opened, it seemed that Ponker had given
The Plants of Asia a slap, cleared his throat, and enlarged upon
the advantages of Art in the home.
"
"
Oh yes," she said, " I should like to see
So Ponker showed her the first coloured plate a pine-
apple in bloom, or something of the sort. (Pine-apples do
burst into flower sometimes, don't they ? In the spring, you
know.) She looked at it with evident admiration, and Ponker
took the opportunity of explaning that it was done in fourteen
colours by a new process, and was simply being given away
at a loss to everyone concerned the purchaser.
" It's " except
"
beautiful," she said. Only sevenpence for each
part ? Then, with a little flutter of self-consequence, she
"
produced a new purse and took out some money. Charl
I mean, my husband, is so fond of flowers," she explained
rather shyly.
Now Ponker, relying upon the idea that no one would give
him an order for the preposterous work, and having found
that carrying a dead weight was no joke the previous day, had
only brought out with him one number of the thing ; and this
recklessly extravagant young person proposed to clear out
his whole stock-in-trade at once, and upset his plans for the
day. He felt he couldn't spare the copy.
"I "
say, have you thought that it goes on for forty months ?
" "
he said anxiously nearly for ever ?
"
But that will be delightful," she observed, looking
actually happy at the idea. (The absurd creature. Forty
pleasant surprises for Charley I What ?)
The Ponker seems to have fallen away from his role alto-

gether. "Delightful? Do you mean it?" he said. "It

would bore me awfully, do you know, to have a thing like
that happen every month."
She smiled (I should think a cat would have laughed at
Ponker's notion of doing business) she smiled ; and Ponker
gave up The Plants of Asia at once, ungrudgingly.
" I'm
sure Charl 1 mean, your husband, will be pleased,"
"
he said.Good-bye."
"
Good-bye," she nodded ; and the door closed, but the
glamour remained.
As Ponker's occupation was gone, he turned homewards for
 THE GREY UNDERWORLD 603
more copies of the monumental work. But when he got home
he changed his mind and stayed there.
And there is a sequel to this. Yesterday, I saw on Ponker's
" "
desk a sheet of paper headed
" Chap. L," and Chap. I."
opened like this :
Although, Heaven wots, my fingers are
apter with the sword-haft than with the goose-quill, yet I am
minded, now while the matter is fresh in my memory, to set
down what wondrous chances have befallen me since I rode
from the field of Worcester fight with the rowels of my spurs
all blooded
"
 FRANK SWINNERTON
The Celebrity

Frank Swinnerton is well-known on both sides of the Atlantic

as a versatileman of letters and a very able critic. His knowledge
of the literary world is clearly revealed in the amusing story of a
" "
best-selling novelist which follows.
 THE CELEBRITY

rTHHE Windleshams lived in one of those staring seaside

JL towns which are the popular resorts of English holiday-
makers. Their house was of red brick, with a slate roof,
surmounted with cockscomb tiles and red chimney pots ;
and it had a square of lawn behind a privet hedge, and in the
middle of the lawn a diamond-shaped flower bed. From the
wooden gate in the hedge, which always banged when any-
body used it (as did all the gates in this select road, so that
a postman's progress resembled a miniature bombardment
or the London air defences in time of war), there was a pathway
in small black and white lozenge tiles. The house had
oyster-coloured casement curtains, and the pot in the centre
of the drawing-room window contained a magnificent as-
pidistra.
The house which lay behind this fa$ade was very simply
furnished, and a good deal of the furniture was old. It had
all been renovated, however, with spruce loose-coverings
and a great deal of polish. Antediluvian treasures greatly
loved by Mrs. Windlesham had long been banished to the
dustbin ;and with electric light and a kind of neatness the
whole house seemed warm and comfortable. Warm and
comfortable, too, was the household. Mr. Windlesham had
"
retired." He was still a youngish man, and he had been
fortunate. But he was not a rich man. He had been richer
before the war and now he was comparatively poor. He wore
his clothes for years, was very tall and thin and rather round-
shouldered, and had lost a good deal of his hair ; but he was
not despondent. The life of complete leisure suited him.
He read a great deal, walked or sat by the sea on warm
days (except during the months of July and August, when
the house was let to summer visitors), and altogether led a
harmless and inoffensive life.
Mrs. Windlesham was equally pleasant. She was a quiet
607
608 FRANK SWINNERTON
woman with a puzzled expression, which made her seem to be
always wondering where she had left her spectacles. She
had a plump and fresh-looking face and a slow smile which
came and went amid her bewilderment, and showed that her
mind was generally elsewhere. She was a most efficient
housewife. It was upon household affairs that her wandering
thoughts were always concentrated.
The children, Dot and Wilfred, were in the late teens.
Dot was older than Wilfred, but was never sure (according
to her behaviour) what the exact distance between them was.
Sometimes she was a woman and Wilfred was a mere child ;

sometimes Wilfred was a mature creature and Dot was un-

imaginably juvenile. Dot would be a tomboy, a rake, a
sober and careworn matron, a shy flower, a bustling tyrant
or an acid satirist. Wilfred was always Wilfred. In fact
Dot was nearly nineteen, and Wilfred was just turned seven-
teen. Both were well-grown children, and Dot was pretty.
She had several of Wilfred's friends upon her hands, and
already was almost experienced in dealing with callow young
men. Almost, but not quite for Dot was an extremely
;

modest and kind girl who hated to hurt the feelings of others,
and who was therefore described by young ladies of smaller
attractiveness as a flirt. Wilfred was not a flirt. He set
high value upon himself, and accordingly (through shyness)
was generally very short with any girl who struck him as
being prettier than usual. He would look down at such
a girl with a supercilious expression, leaning against his
motor-bicycle and shifting his large feet ; and would then
swing his leg across the saddle and make off with loud
explosions and a great smelly outburst of smoke from the
exhaust pipe. Upon such occasions his face had a constrained
expression, and he felt rather pleased with himself until he
was out of sight, when doubt would arise in his mind and
despairwould congeal upon his heart.
This was the family that received sudden glory in a most
unexpected manner.

II

Mr. Windlesham it was who broke the news. He broke it

the instant he received it himself. He was sitting at the

breakfast table reading his morning paper the children
 THE CELEBRITY 609
being late for the meal when he suddenly gave an ex-
clamation.
" "
God bless my soul ! cried Mr. Windlesham.
" "
Father !
protested his wife,
looking in plump horror
from behind the breakfast coffee pot and milk jug.
Mr. Windlesham leapt from his seat, carrying his
paper,
and took it to his wife's side. Arrived there, he indicated
a paragraph with his forefinger, and Mrs. Windlesham sol-
emnly read the paragraph through, as if she were all the time
listening for Wilfred's thunderous descent of the stairs.
" " "
Well 1exclaimed Mrs. Windlesham.
Extraordinary.
I shouldn't have I should never have "
thought it Well ! !

Mr. Windlesham rose to his feet, went to the bookshelves

which filled a recess to the right side of the fireplace, and
approached his face close to the shelves. Three of these shelves
were filled with modern novels in various cheap editions or
second-hand and re-bound styles. There were books by
Joseph Conrad, Rudyard Kipling, H. G. Wells, Arnold
Bennett, W. J. Locke, W. W. Jacobs, and others. And among
these were six or seven very well-worn volumes in a uniform
binding. The name of the author in each case was the same.
Mr. Windlesham read The Trembling Leaf, by Amos
:
Judd ;
Splendour, by Amos Judd ; Castaways y by Amos Judd ; Sweet
Cargo, by Amos Judd A
Roundabout Marriage, by Amos
;

Judd. ...
And when Mr. Windlesham had arrived at this point the
opening of the dining-room door caused him to turn round.
Dot stood within the room a tall slim girl, with short brown
hair, brown eyes, brown dress, and a brown face ; also with
an extremely mischievous smile. She looked from her
mother to her father, still peering at the bookshelves.
" "
Oh, father. Are you looking for Defiance ? she asked.
"
I've lent it to Daphne Swenn. She's a Judd fan like we all
are ; and she'd only read it twice before."
Mr. Windlesham groaned.
" " "
Oh, dear he said.
! What would your Aunt say.
* "
Like we all are/ My dear child !

"
Aunt ? Why Aunt Polly says it herself " expostulated 1
"
Dot. I've heard her 1"
"
Not that Aunt," murmured Mrs. Windlesham, rousing
herself from a stupor of preoccupation. "
Another one.
\'our father's sister. . . ."

u
6lO FRANK SWINNERTON
" "
Father's ?There was amazement in Dot's voice. She
looked round the cheerful room, with its books and its
" "
burning fire and shining breakfast table. I never knew
Then she caught sight of the newspaper in her mother's
hand. was It instantly in her own, and she read the paragraph
which had so agitated her father and mother. The paragraph
was not a large one ; but there was a big flare heading across
the page :

SENSATIONAL LITERARY REVELATION

Below, was another heading, which read :

FAMOUS AUTHOR'S IDENTITY DISCLOSED

The paragraph itself followed :

" It will come

as a surprise to our readers to learn that
Amos Judd, one of the most popular novelists of the day,
the sale of whose books in this country alone already total
'
over half a million copies, is a woman. Although Amos
'
Judd has been a familiar 'name to novel-readers for the last
'
ten years, and although his books are loved by many
thousands of devoted admirers, nobody until this moment
has been aware that the retiring novelist belongs to what is
sometimes erroneously termed the weaker sex/ We are
*

* '
able to announce exclusively to-day that Mr. Judd is in
private life Miss Lucy Windlesham. Miss Windlesham resides
in Hampstead, where she has for some years occupied the
house known as No. 17 Lemon-tree Walk. Inquiries at the
house yesterday elicited the fact that Miss Windlesham was
away, and the maid interrogated refused to give our repre-
sentative any information regarding Miss Windlesham's
' '
movements. At the offices of the publishers of Amos Judd's
books (Messrs. Raggett and Edge) where Mr. Raggett, the
benevolent senior partner in the firm, remained blandly
cryptic, we learnt that the new Judd novel The Sackcloth Coat
will appear towards the end of the month. ." . .

And so on.
" "
Father cried Dot, as soon as she had grasped the
I facts.
" * " *

D'you mean that Amos Judd is your sister ?

Mr. Windlesham nodded. His face was puckered in a frown
that combined displeasure with a struggling complacency.
"
Yes. My sister Lucy/' he mumbled.
 THE CELEBRITY 6ll
" How How gorgeous ! But . but . . ."
! . .
thrilling
"
Hush, dear/' said Mrs. Windlesham, smoothing her dress
rather sedately.
Mr. Windlesham cleared his throat.

in
An hour later, the wooden gate in the hedge was pushed
open ; a girl darted up the pathway to the house, #nd the gate
banged heavily behind her. She was so excited that she could
not wait for Ada, the maidservant, to make her leisurely
journey from the kitchen, but pressed her face against the
glass door and rang a second time. A
pretty girl, of twenty,
dressed in blue muslin, with bobbed golden hair and pink
cheeks. Her eyes were of a surprised blue. She fled past the
smiling but puzzled Ada, and into the sitting-room. Long
acquaintance with the family gave her such a privilege. She
found Mr. and Mrs. Windlesham with their two children, in
the thick of strenuous argument.
"
Dot " cried Daphne Swenn, impetuously, " isn't it too
!

"
I
thrilling
Mr. Windlesham frowned, but there were strange com-
placent tucks round the corner of his mouth.
"
What I've been trying to say for some time," he remarked,
in an extremely grand manner,
" y
is that if mind, I say if
there is no mistake in this .
paper, I think your aunt
. .

should have told us,"

"
Oh, father, you have said that," Wilfred assured him,
"
not less than seven times."
" " "
He's so pertinacious cried Dot.
I
Daph. This is !

"
nice of you !

"
I want to know all about it. Tell me at once. Is it true ?
"
Mother's just crazy. Everybody will be. It's so fascinating !
There was another ring at the door bell. Ada answered it,
and ushered into the room Mrs. Wedge, of next door.
" " "
I had to dash in 1 she said. Is it true ? How
"
remarkable !

Mrs. Wedge was a thin kdy of fifty-five who had no chil-

dren, and who read much in order to keep in check a sourness
of temper of which she was herself well aware. She dressed
in black, and had smooth hair and sharp black eyes. With
these eyes she surveyed the company. It was she who noticed
012 FRANK SWINNERTON
first that Daphne Swenn's stockings did not match, so great
had been the haste with which Daphne, in her excitement, had
"
dressed. Tell me all about commanded Mrs.
her," Wedge.
"
She's father's sister," vouchsafed Dot, perhaps a little
rudely.
"I ... ... There's ah.
." . .

Another ring. The neighbourhood was breaking all bounds

of decorum. Only, of course, friends of the Windleshams
no none of those who frigidly left cards in
stranger, as yet
;
" "
the ordinary way. But the sitting-room at Beaconsfield
became crowded. There was a buzz of excited talk. Amos
Judd might have been called the favourite novelist of Framp-
ton-on-Sea. All Amos Judd's books were in free circulation
at the lending libraries and in cheap editions ; and within
four hours of breakfast there was no single Judd work left
in the bookshops or libraries, while the clerk at the bookstall
had telephoned to London for fresh supplies. This happened
later, of course. But at the moment all those who by any
stretch of courtesy could regard themselves as intimate friends
of the Windleshams were collected in the sitting-room. All
were waiting for Mr. Windlesham to begin.
"
I . . .
very little," said Mr. Windle-
ah. . . . There is
"
sham. I ... of course, she was always a remarkable
"
child He seemed to recollect one or two things, and a
!

"
strained smile passed across his face. Yes, a remarkable
"
child," he repeated, thoughtfully. Not at all not at all as
"
we are. . . ." He smiled again, more easily. She and I
"
were great pals," he proceeded. We were inseparable,
though I was older than she. Dear me, I remember that she
"
used to call me Snodge.' In those days
c
here he smiled
"
broadly, and his audience smiled in sympathy we thought
she was a bit of a liar." There was a good deal of laughter at
"
this. She was always very original. ." . .

"I suppose there's no doubt about this being true, Mr.

Windlesham," said the sharp voice of Mrs. Wedge.
" " "
Oh, none cried Mr. Windlesham.
I None whatever."
" "
It's wonderful An ugly and emotional little spinster
1

"
wiped away a tear of agitation as she spoke. Just to think
we've been coming and going. ..."
"
At any rate, you've got several of her books. ." . .
" "
I suppose you knew, Mr. Windlesham ?
" "
Well," said Mr. Windlesham, smiling broadly. Well . ; ."
 THE CELEBRITY 613

They all
laughed.
" " There was an
Fancy keeping a secret like that 1

admiring murmur.
" "
Yes, but what's she like, Father ? demanded Dot,
impatiently.
" "
Like ? wavered Mr. Windlesham, who had not seen
"
his sister for a quarter of a century. Well, I expect she's
"
changed a good deal since I
Ada was in the room again.
"
A
lady to see you, sir/'
All brows were raised.
"
Me ? " "
ejaculated Mr. Windlesham. You mean not a
"
friend ?
"
She won't give no name, sir. Wishes to see you private."
"
It's her" whispered everybody. A solemn hush fell upon
the party. Dot, being nearest the door, peeped out into the
hall. And as her father hastily disappeared, Dot raised one
hand high in the air in sign of measurement from the ground,
and swept it circumferentially about her middle.
"
TLnormous" she whispered.
There was a general ejaculation.

IV
The stranger was taken into the dining-room, and that door
was closed. Dot, scouting, could learn nothing more. She
gave a compact description.
"
Six feet, and so much round. Twenty-stone, I should
think."
"
Hush, Dot," protested Mrs. Windlesham.
They all sat silent, as if trembling. All were creeping
with curiosity, and, apart from an occasional spasmodic
remark or a nervous laugh, remained tense. Thus they sat
for fully ten minutes. It seemed a lifetime. The hands of the
clock stole on. At last Daphne Swenn, who had been the first
to arrive, jumped to her feet. She could bear it no longer.
" "
I'm going," she cried. It isn't fair to stick here. And
I've got odd stockings on." (All except Wilfred looked at
"
her stockings.) And besides, mother will want me. But,
oh, Mrs. Windlesham," she said appealingly, in a lower voice,
"
as she passed, if she does stay, do ask me to tea one day. * . .

"
I'd never forget it !
614 FRANK SWINNERTON
She moved to the door. Wilfred, as if instinctively,
followed her. They stood together by the door.
"
We'd all belter go," murmured the ugly and emotional
little spinster. And with that she also rose, and prepared to
leave. Mrs. Wedge, Mrs. Trumble, Mrs. Harrold, Mrs.
Texon, and Mrs. Samuel, were all forced to rise. Their eye-
lids were wide apart, and their ears were alert. They crowded
into the passage upon tiptoe, watching the door of the all

dining-room. Mrs. Harrold, who was white-haired, made a

gesture implying that she almost irresistibly wished to invade
the dining-room, at which everybody tittered.
And as they reached the front door, and as somebody in
the general smother opened it, and they all stepped outside
into the garden path, a little fierce man with a bristling white
moustache and rosy bronzed face and a hard felt hat banged
the gate after him and advanced fearlessly, clearing his throat.
He stopped dead in front of the bevy.
" "
Mrs. Windlesham's house ?
Is this he demanded, his
white moustache twitching.
There was an affirmative chorus.
"
I am Mrs. Windlesham," said that lady, in plump help-
lessness. Her eye wandered, as if her attention was elsewhere.
She was thinking of lunch, with something that bordered upon
despair.
The little fierce man cleared his throat again.
" "
Ah . . ." he said. Can you tell me if Miss Windlesham
ishere?"
The others hung back, waiting for what was to follow.
They all stared at Mrs. Windlesham, who flushed and looked
more vacant than before. There seemed to be a trembling
in the air.
"
I . . . we ... we hardly know," stammered Mrs.
Windlesham.
" "
D'you mean me ? asked Dot, impudently.
The little fierce man stared at her.
" "
Certainly not I he exclaimed, brusquely. His face
"
flushed darkly, until seemed to be purple. The Miss
it
"
Windlesham," he brisked more ferociously than ever. Surely
"
you know if she's here or not ?
And then, to the amazement of his family and all
their visitors, Mr. Windlesham appeared in the front
doorway.
 THE CELEBRITY 6lJ
"
Mr. Windlesham, aggressively,
"
No, sir/' said she is not
here/'
" "
But I've followed her here cried the little man,
!

"
You're mistaken/' said Mr. Windlesham, with equal
"
fierceness. Please go away."
And with that, ignoring his wife and children, he went back
again into the house, slamming the front door in an extremely
peremptory manner.

But the little fierce man was not so easily to be dismissed.

He stood his ground. And although the ladies were all very
inquisitive they were at the same time very much afraid of
being involved in a painful scene ; so they bade farewell
hastily and almost ran away down the road, leaving Mrs.
Windlesham and her children confronting the stranger.
" "
Was that your husband, madame ? asked the little fierce
man.
Mrs. Windlesham agreed.
"
And my father," added Wilfred, significantly. He was
twice the little man's size.
"
Quite," said the little man, looking up at Wilfred. And
before the calm gaze of those two greenish-grey eyes, sunburnt
and fearless, Wilfred felt his heart beat more quickly, and the
strength of his legs evaporate. He looked down at the little
man, with an altered regard. Instinctively he knew that, he had
met a master. Not bis master, alone, but a master of men.
"
I'm sorry," murmured Mrs. Windlesham, who had not
been so far away from this momentary scene and its implica-
tions as might have been supposed.
"
Not at all, madame. There is only a misunderstanding.
I should like to speak to you alone, if I may."
"
My husband has shut us out," said Mrs. Windlesham,
laughing.
"
No doubt, very excusably," said the little man, also
smiling.
"
Come along, Dot," Wilfred took his sister's arm. " Back
to lunch, Mother. Good morning, sir."
"
Good morning, my boy," replied the little man ; and
actually raised his hard felt hat to Dot as she was led away in a
state of bewilderment.
 6l6 FRANK SWINNERTON
And now, madame," said the stranger, with a look of
interrogation at Mrs. Windlesham.
"
"
We certainly can't stay here/' said Mrs. Windlesham.
It's so public. And I expect everybody's looking out of their
"
front windows." She hesitated a moment. Then : We'd
better go down the side path into the back-garden," she said.
"
And we can sit in the summer house."
"
That will do excellently," said the little man, following
"
her. It's just what I should have wished. Thank you."

VI
time to return to Mr. Windlesham and his sister. It
It is
will be remembered that Dot, marking the lady's entry, had
ascertained her height, circumference, and weight in one
single piercing glance. Dot, quite unconsciously, had exag-
gerated all three. Miss Windlesham was wearing a heavy
ulster, quite unsuited to the summery weather which Framp-
ton-on-Sea was enjoying at the end of May and this con- ;

siderably augmented her natural girth. With the ulster

removed, she was seen to be a reasonably tall, reasonably
substantial, spinster of forty-five. She looked very vigorous.
Her hair was black, and she had sparkling black eyes and a
double row of superb teeth. Every movement showed her
to be muscular. Ten years younger, she would have been a
very beautiful woman. Beside Mr. Windlesham, she appeared
to be an Amazon. Mr. Windlesham shrank a little, both
inwardly and outwardly, in the presence of his visitor. He
was a very tall, lean man with a baldish head and some teeth
which were not his own. His shoulders stooped a little,
through long work at a desk and long concentration upon
newspapers and books since his retirement. The clothes he
wore were shabby. Before this splendid creature, in her plain
grey costume, with her raven hair, her healthily coloured
cheeks, her clear eyes, and her expanding smile, he felt very
much as a crushed male clerk may feel towards an opulent
woman employer. He glanced into her face, let his eyes fall,
and allowed Miss Windlesham to grasp a limp hand.
" "
Bless the man Aren't you going to give me a kiss
I ?
She hugged him.
" "
Well, Lucy," panted Mr. Windlesham. You're . . . er
"
. . .
looking fine and well. We've just been reading
 THE CELEBRITY 6lJ
" " "
Oh, that I cried Miss Windlesham, breezily. Makes
me sick. Of course, you know why it is. You know who's
done that. ." She shrugged her shoulders. "
. . It's like
him. It's like him. The time I've had. The time my
"
goodness, it's been a purgatory 1

* "
I ... I don't understand," murmured Mr. Windlesham.
" "
No," said his sister, rather brutally. You never could."
"
Have you come to Frampton to say that ? " asked Mr.
" After
Windlesham, with dignity. twenty-five years."
"
Pathetic. You're pathetic, Snodge. I'll tell you. Now,
" "
where shall I begin She gave a deep sigh.! I knew you
were here, because I saw your name in a paper. You're a
*
well-known resident,' it seems. Not too well known I hope.
You're no good to me if you're too well known. Well, you
must know that I met him two years ago, in Egypt. He was
he saved my life, I'm afraid. That's the devil of it. Gave
him a kind of claim, d'you see. He's not the man to neglect
a claim. Indeed, no. He's a very different sort of man." She
laughed in a tone of bravado.
"
He ? " questioned Mr. Windlesham.
"
" Pongo." " Mr.
Pongo ? Windlesham thought that was a monkey's
name, or an elephant's. He looked uneasily over his shoulder.
" Sir Robert William Brentwood-Powys."
" Pongo." cried Mr.
Him !
Windlesham, distraught.
" "
Why not ?
"
But he's a great man. He's a great General. A
great ..."
"
know. That's the trouble. He's shot too much big-
I

game. It makes him bloodthirsty."

Mr. Windlesham had never seen Sir Robert ; but he knew
that he was famous as a big-game hunter, that half South
Kensington Museum was filled with specimens brought home
by "Sir Robert,"that half the Zoological Gardens ." . .
" "
"
Whew he 1whistled.
!

" Pongo !

Yes, Pongo. This man

" "
This man ?
" I admit he helped me out of a nasty hole.
Listen. He I
"
admit it. He couldn't have done less
"Intrepid. . . ."
"
Oh, yes. All that. As plucky as you like. Well, I wanted
some stuff about India some material for a novel, I'd
6l8 FRANK SWINNERTON
travelled a bit in India, but not enough. I asked him to help
me. He jumped at it. We
got very pally. But he was
It's my belief that all men are more or less
*

inquisitive/
inquisitive ; but he's most. He somehow wormed out of me
about my writing."
"
Then it is true ? " eagerly demanded Mr. Windlesham. *

"
What ? "
"
Amos Judd. What the paper says."
" "
Yes ! Miss Windlesham almost bellowed at her
brother. "And that's the point. Where did they get that
stuff from ? Why, from him."
"
We're most proud. We have all your books," said Mr.
"
Windlesham. Or nearly all. ." . .

"
He's gone to the papers. He's blown the gaff let the
cat out of the bag. And why ? So that I shall have my life
made a misery to me. So that wherever I go he'll be able to
"
find me. D'you see ? You're my only refuge !

" "
Dear me cried Mr. Windlesham, greatly concerned.
1

" "
Is it blackmail ?
" "
Blackmail ? It's worse than blackmail. It's persecution !

"
Tut, tut, tut." Mr. Windlesham's tongue clucked against
the roof of his mouth. He was greatly distressed.
" "
I say, what's that ? suddenly cried the angry visitor.
" "
What's that row ?
Mr. Windlesham listened. He heard a soft swishing sound,
such as might be made by a small flock of sheep in the hall
outside. For a moment he was perplexed. Then he under-
stood, gave a short laugh, and turned again to his agitated
sister.
"
To tell the truth," he said, and laughed again, as if he had
a slight asthmatic cough.
"
Come on " urged Miss Windlesham, impatiently.
!

"As you know, the news about you was in the Daily
Mercury this morning. The Daily Mercury is much read in
Frampton. Our friends have come to felicitate us.
"
." . ,

Even here " groaned

! the visitor. Oh, Lord
"
I must !

"
go. It's not safe. If it's all over the place She raised her
!

hands to her head, and strode to the dining-room window,

which in the Windlesham house looked out upon the front
garden, the diamond-shaped flower bed, the hedge, and
incidentally, the path by which the callers must all leave. So
Miss Windlesham saw all that crowd of ladies which were
 THE CELEBRITY 619

being shepherded out of the house by her sister-in-

law.
"
What sheep Lord, what sheep My readers, I suppose/'
I !

"
She gave a mirthless laugh. The one without the hat is your
wife, I take it. I like her. She's no fool. Oh, no. She's no
fool. I'd like to talk to her."
"
You Mr. Windlesham, almost gallantly.
shall," agreed
"
Yes. But why you ? " The tone was abrupt.
"
Her choice was circumscribed," explained Mr. Windle-
sham blandly. His sister looked sharply at him.
"
Oh, yes. And you're not such a jolly old fool as you
pretend to be," she vouchsafed. She looked at him again.
"
Except that you shamble.
"
little A
discipline exercise a
little of
Pongo's
She broke off. A
scream escaped her. She turned wildly
to Mr. Windlesham.
" "
What ? For goodness' sake 1 he cried.
His sister was quite white. She trembled.
"
Send him away," she shouted in a hoarse voice, as
"
a sleeper in fear, who cannot cry out, might have done. Send
him away. I won't see him. I can't see him now. Tell
"
him
Mr. Windlesham followed her hysterical gaze out of the
window, and saw coming up the pathway from the gate
a little fierce man with a white bristling moustache, a bronzed
face, and a hard felt hat.
" "
Him ? he asked, breathlessly.
"Quick. Away!"
Andwith that Mr. Windlesham ran hastily out and
addressed himself to the stranger in the manner we have seen.

VII
"
And now," said the fierce little man to Mrs. Windlesham,
"
as they sat in the summer house, I must first of all say how
much obliged I am how deeply grateful for your kind-
ness."
"Well, I'm puzzled," said Mrs. Windlesham. "And
when I'm puzzled I'm always polite. I don't know who you
are, or who or anything about anything.
she is, But I should
like to know," she hastened to add.
"
About me ? " asked the little fierce man.
620 FRANK SWINNBRTON
" "
Yes. About everything. Why are you so fierce ?
"
I ? Fierce ? Why, I wouldn't hurt a mouse."
"I
know unless you wanted him for dinner," said Mrs.
Windlesham innocently.
"
name is Powys, madame Brentwood-Powys."
" IMy
think I've heard that name," mused Mrs. Windlesham.
"
It is possible. Now, two years ago I had the pleasure
of meeting Miss Windlesham not your charming daughter,
but, I presume, your sister-in-law. ..."
Mrs. Windlesham sighed.
"
Whom we've not seen for twenty-five years " she mur- 1

mured.
"
Indeed. We became very friendly. I helped her to some
slight extent ; but I wanted to help her more. She is a very
able woman, Mrs. Windlesham, but, like so many able un-
married women, she is a perfect fool. The way that woman
goes on is absurd. She takes no care of herself. . . ."
" ' "
Mr. ... Are you Mr.' ? gently asked Mrs. Windle-
sham.
"
Sir Robert," murmured the General.
"
was going to say she's not a child."
I
"
She is forty-five years old, and a perfect fool, madame.
Damn it, I ought to know. ." . .

Mrs. Windlesham smiled. She had no need to do more

than smile ; for Sir Robert was immediately upon his feet.
"
Of course, you're right " he exclaimed. " I am fierce.
!

"
Perhaps Ifrighten her !

Mrs. Windlesham smiled again, and shook her head.

"
Not if she's a fool," she said. " Only if she's a wise
woman."
There was a little glance between them. They understood
each other completely. They had no need to say anything
more.
" "
You'll help me ? asked the General.
Ah It was one thing to understand quite another to
I

help. Mrs. Windlesham temporised.

"
What to do ? " she asked bluntly.
"
To see her."
" "
Haven't you already seen her ?
"
Not since yesterday. Not since she ran away."
"
Ran ? From you ? " He nodded. " Oh, dear, that was
naughty of her. And I expect you're angry with her."
 THE CELEBRITY 6zi
"
I'm in deadly fear of her/* said the General.
"
You too ? " exclaimed Mrs. Windlesham.
"
You see, I love her/'
"
Oh, I knew that? said Mrs. Windlesham.
"
You did ? " His fierceness was all gone. He was pleading
now ; was anxious. " D'you know anything else ? "
"
Only that she ran away from you/' smiled his com-
panion.
"Well?"
"
don't think you need despair. She wouldn't have run
I

away she hadn't been frightened of giving in. I wonder

if
"
if she's still in the house ?
Both rose.
"
You're splendid," cried the General, with a little bow.
"
You've given me new life."
" If I
can, I'll send her out to you," promised Mrs. Windle-
sham ; and as she left him she whispered something in his
ear.

VIII

Mrs. Windlesham found her husband and his sister still

in the dining-room. Miss Windlesham, looking now large
and helpless and tired, was sitting down as her sister-in-law
entered. She was evidently thinking hard.
" " "
Has he gone ? she demanded. What did he say ? "
"
Not far/' replied Mrs. Windlesham. She ignored the
second question.
Miss Windleshan looked almost relieved. She turned
that matter over in her mind.
"
I don't know what to say to him," she wailed, and the
colour came and went in her cheeks. "He's as obstinate
as fifteen pigs. I'm terrified of him. Look here, Snodge,
you haven't introduced me to your wife."
"
How d'you do ? " said Mrs. Windlesham.
When the introduction had taken place, Miss Windle-
sham took Mrs. Windlesham's hand and looked straight down
into that pleasant face with the abstracted expression.
" "
Look here," she cried. I've never felt like this before
in my life. I'm helpless. I'm frightened. And that blessed
man .... He'll kill me as soon as look at me. He's merciless.
He thinks I'm big-game. He stalks me aU the time. Damn
him!"
 622 FRANK SWINNERTON
She looked appealingly at her sister-in-law.
"
The fool wants to marry me," she said in a whisper
"
which her brother did not hear. And I know he'll do it.
The thing's absurd. I don't know what to do. It's ridiculous
to marry at my age. The mere notion of it makes me feel
goosey. I want your help, I want your sympathy. Your
advice, too;'*
"
My help and sympathy certainly," said Mrs. Windle-
sham.
" Not "
your advice ? '

They exchanged glances. They exchanged smiles. It

seemed as though, for that day, there could be nothing but
understanding here.
"
My advice is to go and sit quietly in the summer house
for half an hour, until luncheon," said Mrs. Windlesham.
"
You'll hear the bell."

IX

Luncheon was It was partaken of by

rather late that day.
six people. Among them was Miss Windlesham, the writer,
"
celebrated under the pseudonym of Amos Judd." Another
was General Sir Robert William Brentwood-Powys. The
little fierce man and the eminent novelist sat opposite to

each other. Both looked astonishingly cheerful. The whole

party seemed cheerful.
"
We've never had such distinguished company before,"
said Mrs, Windlesham.
"
You'll often have it
again," replied the General, with a
fierce wink.
"
Big-game," remarked Miss Windlesham to herself, in a
low voice, and groaned.
" "
Do you like writing, Aunt Lucy ? demanded Dot, not
understanding the " allusions.
"
Heavens, no ? cried her aunt.
"
There's a friend of mine who's dying to meet you."
Dot fixed mournful eyes upon Miss Windlesham senior.
"
There's hundreds in this town alone," added Wilfred.
"
I've escaped it for years. I've gone everywhere as Miss
Windlesham, and had even my proofs sent to my "agent.
Signed all my agreements Amos Judd. And now Aunt
"
Lucy groaned. It's
awful"
 THE CELEBRITY 623
"
There's no escape/' her brother said, almost with a sort
"
of pleasurable gloating. No escape now. The Daily
Mercury spread the news to-day. All the other papers, all
over the world, will have it to-morrow. Everybody who has
ever read one of your books, everybody who has heard of
you, will know this week and for ever that you are Lucy
Windlesham."
"
All the more reason for making haste," grumbled the
General.
" "
Haste ? Mr. Windlesham had rather lost the thread of
the conversation.
"For making haste to change her name," explained the
"
General, patiently. While everybody's looking for Lucy
Windlesham, they're bound to miss Lady Brent wood-Powys.
See?"
"
"Ooh!" ejaculated Mr. Windlesham. So that's the
idea."
" "
Yes," chorused all the others. That's the idea."
At which they all laughed ; and Wilfred toasted the
bride-elect in lemonade. Outside, unknown to the lunchers,
a small crowd, headed by several men with cameras, was
already gathering. the newly-engaged folk ate
Blissfully,
and chaffed. They did not know that next day a further
instalment of the great Amos Judd romance would be upon
every breakfast table in the kingdom. They did not know.
It was mercifully hidden from them. The cat once out
of the bag, no power upon earth can scramble it in again.
Once a celebrity, always a celebrity, until the news value of
the celebrity's doings has evaporated.
 SELWYN JEPSON
" Don Sam n
Quixote

Selwyn Jepson lost no time in following the footsteps of his

father, the well-known novelist, Edgar
Jepson. His first book
was published at the age of
twenty-one, and since then he has
quickly built up a reputation for thrillers and for his humorous
short stories.
 "
DON SAM QUIXOTE "
CAISTER was sun eating peaches,
sitting in the
SUSANhersleek, black head against
the ancient lichenous
wall, when she was disturbed by the sight of Pamela and
Mr. G. Banks. They came out of the rose pergola with
entwined arms and rapt faces. At least, Pamela's was rapt.
It was difficult to tell about Gilbert's because of his beard, a

yellowish beard which needed trimming,

In Susan's view, if you must wear a beard at thirty-two, at
any rate keep it pruned. But Gilbert was too irritating
altogether even to begin adding up the things that were
wrong about him. Besides, nobody was interested. Pamela,
of course, flew into a rage if you critised him at all. He was
perfect ; Pamela was becoming daily more idiotic about him.
Susan, finishing a peach, wondered vaguely if all elder,
grown-up were idiotic about young men. As for herself,
sisters

being some way from grown-up, possibly it was presumptuous

"
of her to have opinions about this thing called love," but
she could not believe that it required any experience at all
to see that Mr. G. Banks, of Rosetown Garden City, was
the sort of person to whom a sensible-minded girl would
"
say : If you were the last men left in the world, Gilbert,
I wouldn't marry you."
But of course Pamela was not a sensible-minded girl;
never had been, never would be. And were all the inhabitants
of Rosetown Garden City cranks ? It looked it. Otherwise,
surely someone would have noticed Gilbert's beard and
urged him to do away with it ; would have noticed Gilbert,
in fact, and for his own sake explained to him what a dreadful
ass he was. But obviously nobody had.

Things looked black against Rosetown Garden City.

She flicked the peach-stone into a dahlia bush, and crouching
lower, hoped that the couple crossing the space of lawn ia
front of her would relax somewhat their lover-like attitudes
with thought to spare the feelings of possible spectators.
They might have stayed in the pergola, out of sight. She put
627
6a8 SELWYN JEPSON
the next peach to her delicate nose, and inhaled its sweetness.
Gilbert had been staying at Caister Hall a whole fortnight now,
fourteen blessed days, ever since Pamela had met him at a
Chelsea party.
And instead of getting sick to death of him within twenty-
four hours, as one might have reasonably expected, she had
become more and more fixed on him. It seemed to be a
great deal more serious than a mere flirtation.
Susan bit into the peach with angry white teeth, and juice
trickled from the corners of her finely chiselled mouth. She
bent forward that it might not reach her frock, and when she
looked up again it was at the precise moment that Gilbert
impressed an elaborate kiss upon Pamela's maiden lips.
Susan swallowed a fragment of peach at a gulp, which was
almost painful, and let forth a long, wailing, lupine howl
which echoed dismally across the tranquil gardens. The
couple sprang apart and looked this way and that without
tracing the sound to its source. Gilbert put a lily-white
hand to his noble brow and appeared to have been rudely
shaken by the incident. His nerves, likewise his soul, were
sensitive. Susan could not hear what he said, but Pamela
put a consoling hand on his arm and led him into the Dutch
garden.
"
Gosh " said Susan, and because her appetite for peaches
1

had somehow evaporated, she wrapped the remainder in the

cool cabbage leaf in which she carried them from the hot-
house (at a moment when Angus had been at the far end of the
kitchen garden), cached the little bundle in a convenient
dahlia root, and betook herself for a stroll in the Home Wood
in a mood of considerable but helpless dissatisfaction.
It was all very well for Pamela, but what about herself?
She did not see the slightest reason why she should be landed
with a brother-in-law like Mr. G. Banks. It wasn't as though
Pamela would take him away for good, once she had married
him ; she wouldn't. Mr. G. Banks wouldn't let her. He
would clutter up Caister Hall for the rest of his useless life.
After Rosetown Garden City it was the height of luxury ;
and comfort was necessary to the blossoming of his tender
spirit if it was to find its full expression. He had said so quite
often with an air of modest pride.
Susan always felt that the Home Wood, for all that it lay
within half a mile of the house, was as remote as the forest
 "DON SAM QUIXOTE" 629
of a fairy tale. Thebirds were always hushed in its twilit
depths, and flitted silently ; the occasional rocketing flight
of a pheasant disturbed the quiet like a stone flung in some
sacred pool. Elves and fauns and similar creatures dwelt
secretly and invisibly there, and when she walked under
the high trees they watched her pass. They were friendly,
although she never saw them, and they invariably helped her
to put the tiresome world of human beings in its proper
perspective when she was made unhappy or perplexed by it.
The wood was at the same time a sanctuary and a land of
adventure ; it sheltered her, and continually and mysteriously
promised astonishing discoveries, which lost nothing of their
excitement because she never made them. It was an elusive
wood.
Into it that fine morning she took her disgust with Mr.
G. Banks, and her disappointment with Pamela, who ought
to have known better, but didn't. Even poor brother Bill
was not as blind, with all his romantic ideas about chorus
ladies, and so on ; even Bill had shuddered at breakfast
yesterday when Gilbert had passionately denounced kidneys
and bacon as evidence of man's barbarism, crying :
"
The meat of slaughtered animals Pah Bring me the
I I

"
nuts of far Brazil and lettuce. Green lettuce !

Bill left for an indefinite visit to Town after that. Gilbert,

apparently, was mote than he could stand.

Something had got to be done to put an end to such a
state of affairs, and it was while she was resolutely facing
the fact, that she came quietly down the path to Dobble's Dell,
in the very middle of the wood, and saw that it was occupied

by something which was not an elf and certainly not a faun.

She stopped, and watched the man.
Assuredly, he had no right to be there, in one of her father's
most private and preserved woods. No conceivable right.
She did not, of course, immediately condemn him on this
score, for although she was descended from a long line of
land-owning she could never feel the fury of
aristocrats,
possession which seemed to animate so many of that class.
She had a sneaking feeling that the earth belonged to man
and not to particular and selected individuals.
She did not, therefore, retire and fetch a bailiff or a
gamekeeper, but examined the trespasser with a tolerant
and unbiased interest. His appearance puzzled her, although
630 SELWYN JEPSON
his occupation at the abundantly clear. He was
moment was
somewhere between thirty and forty years of age, and dressed
in a grey suit which displayed none of the over-worn aspects
usually to be noticed in the clothes of those gentlemen of the
road who occasionally wandered from the distant highway into
Sir Robert Caister's sacred woods, to rest and recuperate
after the rigours of the last workhouse. It was not a new

grey suit,
certainly, but with a little pressing by a valet-
service and so forth, it
might have become fit to wear in any
drawing-room. The hat which lay by his side was of the
soft felt kind, and belonged to the same category as the suit.
His collar, as best as she could determine at the distance, was
clean.
Although these things interested her, she was more en-
gaged by his occupation, which was that of eating. He sat
on his heels by a small fire, and with a pocket-knife and fork
fed with a certain delicacy, considering the inconvenience of
having no table and nothing more than a piece of paper for a
pkte; he fed, then, from the carcass of a freshly-grilled
partridge. One of Sir Robert's very precious partridges. Its
feathers, from its recent plucking, lay in a little heap on the
other side of the floor.
The sight of this poaching, this enjoyment of the spoil, did
not arouse in Susan any great anger ; the partridge was not
hers, and if her father was too busy at Westminster, and his
gamekeepers too lazy to patrol the woods, then the par-
tridges must preserve themselves. This one, it seemed, had
failed. It was nothing to do with her.
The man looked up from his feast, and saw her standing
motionless above him, on the lip of the dell. A
ray of sun-
shine illuminated her, and the wood was dark behind. Her
face was long, and her eyes seemed alight with green fire.
" " " "
A witch Ihe cried. I might have expected it !

His voice, Susan realised without surprise, was as cultured

as his table-manners. His face, she observed, was very
intelligent, with a certain wariness of expression.
"
Fm not a witch," she said, although the thought pleased
her. She walked down into the dell.
"
You are," he contradicted, " but naturally, having
enchanted the wood, you cannot very well admit your real
status in it. You couldn't, even in these dreadfully frank and

outspoken days."
 "DON SAM QUIXOTE" 631
He shook his head, and stood up. He was tall, and his
eyes, which were blue, danced continuously, as though he
enjoyed some eternal, but secret joke.
"
Have you come to lunch ? " he asked casually. " There
"
is somebird He mentioned it as though she might
not have noticed the partridge. Manifestly, no conscience
troubled him.
" "I
I'm afraid," she said gravely, have to go back to my
"
cave for lunch. Spider stew It occurred to her suddenly
that she had not felt for a moment nervous of him. For such
a lawless, trespassing man he had an innocuous air.
" "
Nobody stopped you, coming into the woods ? she
asked.
"
Why should they ? The world is free to every man."
" "
Is it ?
"
No. But
always like to assume that it is, until someone
I

proves So far they haven't to-day. Tell me, are there

it isn't.

ogres besides witches in this forest ? And shall I find a Sleeping

"
Beauty ?
"
There are four ogres," said Susan gravely. " Two of
them are Scotch, and all four wear velveteen and gaiters.
"
Are you really looking for a Sleeping Beauty ?
"
I forsook the over-crowded world many years ago that
I might find her. I seek her in charming wildernesses. ." . .

He
indicated Sir Robert Caister's carefully preserved woods
with a gesture of his hand, and ignored the reference to
velveteen and gaiters. He continued :

"
I admit I do not answer to the traditional description
of Prince Charming, and that my name, for short, is Sam,
but these things are purely superficial. Traditionally speaking,
"
however
He paused to place the unfinished partridge near the fire
to keep hot.
"
however, in the good old days of yore, when there
were no bathrooms, and chivalry was the virtue of the day,
it was
possible to ride about the wicked world if you felt
about things as I do in a golden armour a-horse a snow-
white palfrey and, in a general sort of way, to slay dragons,
lift
spells, and rescue beautiful maidens from giants, ogres,
and other noxious creatures, without being too severely
criticised by so-called thinking men and women. And police-
men. Things ii? fact, are not what they were. In those days
 632 SELWYN JEPSON
we were vastly respected, madam We were
! entertained in
noble castles, and served with honour wherever we went.
The occasions were rare indeed when we had to skulk in
bushes, and prepare our own poultry for lunch. No, madam,
we did not/'
"* "
Other noxious creatures/ murmured Susan in a dis-
tant, thoughtful tone, and turned to this Don Quixote in
Modern Dress with an abruptness of movement and an
intensity of air which told of sudden inspiration.
"
Youthink it possible, then, that there are still beautiful
* ' "
maidens to be rescued from noxious creatures ?
" "
I'll stake my life on it cried Sam with fervour.
1

Susan nodded with satisfaction.

" " You
Well, there's Pamela," she said. might do worse
than begin on her. You wouldn't have to marry her,
necessarily, although I believe it was one time expected
of Prince Charming."
Sam seemed a trifle startled by this sudden descent to the
practical.
" "
Pamela ? he inquired gingerly.
"
Of course," continued Susan quickly, warming to de-
" I'll
cision, have to find some luggage for you some more
clothes dinner-jacket, shoes, socks and shirts. Pamela is
one of those girls who go a terrible lot by appearances. My
"
hat ! But we'll settle this Banks business !

" " "

Banks ? said Sam. I've seen them about. They keep
"
money in them, don't they ?
He licked
anticipatory lips.
" "
Ever been in Rosetown Garden City ? asked Susan.
" "
Heaven forbid I

"
Then you haven't seen this Banks. It's not exactly an
ogre and certainly isn't a giant. I think it's what you would
it

call a noxious creature. I would, anyway. Its first name is

Gilbert, and it's hanging round Pamela's neck, strangling her

soul, and what-not. Pamela is my elder sister."
Sam blinked, but to his credit he kept pace.
"
Some fellow," he said, " borrowed my sword and forgot
to return it. Can you get hold of one with the ah luggage ?
"
Instead of an umbrella, as it were ?
" "
Swords are out of date," said Susan regretfully. Words
* *
are what you will have to use. Honeyed words, I believe
they're called. Pamela loves them. Good Heavens You'll 1
 "DON SAM QUIXOTE" 633

sweep the ground with Gilbert He's a nut-eater, a poor

1

filleted nut-eater Pamela

! won't look at him again, once
"
you've got going 1

A joyous and triumphant light shone in her eyes, and she

gazed happily at Sam. Not only would she drive Gilbert
back to Rosetown Garden City, but she would also gratify
Sam's taste for the good and comfortable things of life ; give
him a chance to enjoy them after the fashion to which he was
accustomed by birth and breeding ; enable him to eat unstolen
partridges at a proper table in a house which, if it was not a
castle, was nothing if it was not noble.
" "
You'll try ? she asked, and held his eyes by the eagerness
of her own. He stroked his chin.
" "
I have lived about forty years," he said, and I've learnt
better than to thwart a witch in her own wood."
Susan sprang up the path, and paused at the top of the dell.
"
Wait here. I shan't be long."
Sam Quixote stared for a moment at the place where she
disappeared, and rubbed his eyes as though doubting their
evidence.
" "
Remarkable," he said finally. Indeed, remarkable, and
a turn of Fortune's Wheel, if I mistake it not."
He resumed his lunch in a cheerful mood, and he had
scarcely finished when the young witch returned to him. She
staggered into the dell with a fair-sized suit-case, and dropped
it at his feet. She was breathless but satisfied.
"
That's the most difficult part done with," she said, perhaps
a little optimistically.
Sam eyed the suit-case, and judged it to be full. He was a
man of imagination, if not of parts, and the luck had been dead
out for months.
Sir Robert Caister motored to his country place that same
afternoon, arriving at Caister Hall at tea-time after a trying
morning Foreign Office, to find that Gilbert Banks was
at the
stillstaying with him ; that his son had gone to Town, and
that Susan had brought a stranger home to tea, a Mr. Samuel
Meltravers, who was tall and sunburnt, with good-humoured
blue eyes.
He had, seemed, just arrived in England from Central
it

Africa, which he had been exploring, and had come to Bidd-

lington to stay with Colonel Petersen, whose death everybody
except Mr. Meltravers knew to have occurred early in
634 SELWYN J EPS ON
the spring. The explorer had been very upset and perplexed,
and it was in this state that Susan had met him and asked him
to tea. Any friend of the Colonel's * . .
etc., etc.
This was what Sir Robert deduced from the few words
dropped to him across the tea-table by Susan when she said
casually :

"
Mr, Meltravers hadn't heard about poor Colonel Petersen.
But Central Africa is a long way off, isn't it ? And exploring
does take you out of the beaten track/'
"
Yes/' agreed Mr. Meltravers, and drank some tea,
"I am glad Susan came to the rescue," said Sir Robert
politely, and began to talk about Africa somewhat to Susan's
alarm. But Mr. Meltravers seemed to be resourceful, and knew
all about Africa.
She was pleased, also, to observe the immediate interest
which Pamela took in him unnoticed by Mr. Banks who, as
usual, was occupied more with himself than anything else.
At the end of tea Susan said :
"
I think it would be an awful shame if we let Mr, Mel-
travers go back to Town. He expected to stay at least a week,
so there's nothing to drag him back. And he has got a bag
with him, and everything/'
If Sir Robert had wanted to withhold an invitation to stay,
he might have found it difficult after that. Actually, however,
he saw in Meltravers some relief from Gilbert Banks at meal-
times (the only occasions when he had to see him), and he
said without hesitation :

"
Susan, Mr. Meltravers, is young and enthusiastic, so you
must not take any notice of her. But I hope that if you feel
you can spare a few days you will permit us to entertain
you. Colonel Petersen was our neighbour for many
years/'
Mr. Samuel Meltravers, who had never heard of Colonel
Petersen until half an hour ago, adopted a brazenness of which
Susan heartily, if perforce secretly, approved.
" "
The Colonel/* he said, must be a sad loss to us all. I
shall be charmed to stay a few days, Sir Robert, indeed
charmed/'
Sir Robert smiled amiably, and added :
"
You will forgive me, I know, if I am rather busy for a day
or so, and I am sorry that William my son is away at the
moment. He would have been very glad to take steps to save
 " DON SAM QUIXOTE** 635

you from boredom. There are my daughters, however;

Susan and Pamela who must look after you."
Mr. Meltravers turned upon Pamela a glance of remarkable
quality. It seemed to possess within its brief and fleeting
moment a complete and slavish admiration ; an overflowing
and inexpressible gratitude. He said :

"
This is nearer Paradise than anything I have experienced
for a long time."
His hearers, with the exception of the startled Pamela,
assumed that he was contrasting the environment in which he
now found himself with the equatorial wilderness he had
recently left. Pamela could not help but understand it as an
extension of that surprising glance. She flushed gently, con-
sidered him for a moment, and then favoured him with a smile
which was both friendly and provocative if not coy.
Gilbert noticed it. He frowned petulantly, and tried to
look the brutish fellow straightly in the eye, but the explorer
continued to disregard his very existence in a fashion which
would have galled the self-esteem of a tree-stump.
Susan also noticed the smile, and although its principle
sickened her, she took it as a good sign. When Pamela looked
at a man like that it meant something ; in fact, if he did not
run immediately, and run fast, she caught him sooner or later.
Sam had thrust his head into the lion's mouth. Sam was a
brick.
The smoothness with which Pamela's rescue proceeded
from that moment was a source of gratification to Susan, and
she found that she was required to do little to further it. It
was pleasant to discover that the Sam she had come upon in
Dobble's Dell, with his talk of knights-errant, was no less
impressive and effective in action, with a maiden. there to
rescue. He fairly flung himself into the fray, and by the time
Gilbert Banks had gasped once or twice and realised that he
actually had a rival, the initial stages of Pamela's infatuation
for the explorer were successfully passed.
After dinner that night, when Sir Robert
had gone to his
study, Mr. Meltravers kept everybody, even Susan, spell-
bound with his of dangerous situations happily escaped
stories
and dealt with in those fetid jungles.Pamela' forgot about
Higher Thought, Vegetarianism, Karma, and Rosetown
Mysticism while she followed him breathlessly, with shining
eyes, from adventure to adventure.
636 SELWYN JEPSON
" said every now and again, and
Oh, how marvellous I "she
when Gilbert managed to find an opening in which to whisper :
"
The moon will not wait for us, Pamela mia. And you
"
promised, didn't you She shook her head impatiently,
. . . ?
"
and turned again to the explorer with a little fluting cry : Oh,
please go on 1 Please. . . ."
Such an appeal, Mr. Meltravers' eyes assured her, he was
powerless to resist, although he loathed to talk about himself
so much.
Susan, watching him, accorded him full marks for fascina-
tion. In evening clothes he was tremendously distinguished ;

by the side of him, both in physical bulk and in sheer per-

sonality, Mr. Banks was a gnat, a sulky gnat.
The following day produced an unmistakable reluctance in
Pamela to allow the new guest to leave her side, even to please
Gilbert, who made no effort to hide his irritation. His voice
was far less melodious than usual, and his long black hair
seemed more dishevelled. Susan, keeping an eye on him,
likened him to the spoilt child who has to watch another eat a
slice of cake.

Coming down the stairs to lunch, she heard his tones

raised in protest. He had got Pamela alone for a moment.
" " "
I am desolate, desolate, Pamela he said. Have
!

you no pity? It is a thousand years since I had you to

myself!"
"
Poor Gilbert. . . ."
Susan frowned.
" "
Listen," he went on. Let us steal away this afternoon ;

I have so much to say to you. So many dreams meet . . .

me in the pavilion in the cypress grove at three. Let no one

"
know .
just you and I, dear one.
. . Promise ? . . .

Pamela hesitated, and promised. The pavilion, then, at

three.

By time Susan had reached the bottom of the stairs.

this
It wasn't her fault if Gilbert liked to shout his love-trysts all
over the house. Pamela was disgusting. It had happened
before. She was going to twang two strings on her bow,
one against the other, as it were. Matters would drift on for
ever, and Gilbert would never be driven away.
And he had got to be.
She sought out Mr. Meltravers immediately after lunch and
consulted him.
 "DON SAM QUIXOTE " 637
He said :
"
It would beeasier for Prince Charming if the Princess

recognised the noxious creature as a noxious creature. At

present I don't think she realises she needs rescuing. Awk-
ward, and quite contrary to the best precedents. This brown
"
suit fits me quite well, don't you think ?
"
Yes," agreed Susan, and knit her intelligent brows.
"
By the way, are there any more shirts ? There were
only two in that suit-case, and I always wear two at once. A
whim, you understand."
" I'll
put them in your room. How can I make Pamela
"
see h* is noxious ?
" Thanks.
I dare say it would help if you could make her
see what a joke Gilbert is. Make her laugh at him. At him,
not with him/' said Mr. Meltravers, and added sagely if
" Humour reduces
mysteriously :
everything to a common
denominator. Get her to laugh at him and it'll break his nerve
his conceit. He won't hit her ; he'll run away."
" "
I see," said Susan. I nearly forgot ; he's meeting her
in the pavilion it's at the end of the at three
cypress grove
o'clock."
"
I'll be around," said Mr. Meltravers
dutifully, and fetched
himself another cigar from the humidor in the library. He
was fond of cigars.
Make her laugh at Gilbert ? Susan thought she saw what
Sam meant. But Pamela was difficult when it came to a joke ;
she either had a different sense of humour from other people,
or more likely still, none at all. You could never tell what she
was going to think was funny. Broadly speaking, she only
laughed at the heel-on-the-banana-skin sort of humour.
Make Gilbert ridiculous somehow ?
Susan cudgelled her brains. He was already about as ridicu-
lous as he could be, and Pamela hadn't noticed it.
Well, one could always try.
At a quarter to three she strolled nonchalantly through the
marble colonnade of the Greek pavilion (which a classical-
minded but rather exotic ancestor had built in the eighteenth
century) and, as she had expected, came upon the waiting
Gilbert there, his aching heart having driven him early to the
trysting-place. At the sight of her he ground his teeth.
" I am
composing a sonnet," he said coldly, with the distant
air of a man who resents a disturbance of his peace.
638 SELWYN JEPSON
Susan, however, did not notice. She swung her sun-
bonnet by its ribbon and peered intently into the woods
beyond with an amused smile. It became cynical.
"
She'll never run fast enough to escape him," she remarked
" The
casually.
" primordial chase
"
. .".

Who what what's

that ? demanded Gilbert sharply ;

for he could think of nothing save Pamela, and came

"
quickly to where Susan stood. Who is it ? " he asked
anxiously.
"
Guess," suggested Susan ironically.
" "
Pamela, and that clodhopper !he cried with a con-
viction she would have been rude to contradict, and ^
ran
out of the pavilion to glower at the regiment of trees. He
could perceive no movement in them, but in his anguished
imagination he saw Pamela in flight, pursued by a satyr, an
African satyr, in the form of Samuel Meltravers. Pamela,
waylaid on her way to the pavilion.
" "
Which way did they go ? he urged of Susan, and was
enraged by her composure.
She shrugged her shoulders. All this fuss about a couple
of rabbits if indeed she had not imagined them gambolling
under the trees. They certainly weren't there now.
"
I'm afraid I can't tell you," she said accurately.
He groaned, hesitated, and then rushed toward the wood,
Susan sighed with gentle triumph and ran after him. She
caught him up at the edge of the trees.
"
I've got better eyesight than you," she stated, and with-
out waiting for him to accept her leadership she set off into
the wood, four or five paces ahead of him. There was only
one path at that point, and he followed her down it, although
he did not use her hop, skip and jump method of progress,
which saved her from the brambles which encroached upon
her path.
He was less active, and unaccustomed to exercise ; in con-
sequence his legs and trousers suffered somewhat. But his
outraged spirit urged him to Pamela's side without regard for
wounds and thorns. It irked him to have to trust to her
younger eyesight, but she knew the woods. When he
asked her if she could see them, she told him to lower his
voice ; that she always relied on her ears as well as her
eyes.
He blundered after her.
 "DON SAM QUIXOTE '*
639
Itwould have been happier for him, however, if he had
employed greater caution, or even the hop, skip and jump
method. If he had emulated Susan's example, for instance,
in leaping in his run the patch of luscious green moss which
lay across the rough track along which she led him a few
moments later.
However, he did not leap it, but ran on to it before he
realised that lacked the solidity of its appearance. By that
it

time, of course, it was too late. His feet, ankles, shins, knees
and thighs slid downward into a soft, slimy ooze of bog. In a
moment the path he should have been travelling was level
with his waist.
He gave a cry of horror and dismay. Mud gurgled and a
smell assailed his nose. A black smell. . . .

Susan stopped, turned and hurried back.

" " "
Idiot she said angrily.
! Can't you look where you're
"
?
going
" "
I'm sinking !

"
You're not. You've gone in as far as you'll go," she said,
perhaps a little unsympathetically.
He summoned his failing courage and began to struggle
to firmer ground. He slipped forward twice and all but dis-
appeared in slime before he reached the edge. He squirmed
and scrambled out and lay for a moment, murmuring un-
happily. He
stood up and dripped black mud from every
inch of his body. He tried to wipe his face and added more
mud to that which already clung to it. Susan surveyed him
critically.
He whimpered. He had forgotten about Pamela, about the
satyr, about everything except his enormous misery and dis-
comfort. Susan put her forefinger and thumb to the end of
her nose and pressed her nostrils shut.
"
You smell," she said. " Ozone, it's called. You'd bedder
ged back to the house as sood as you can, and do something
aboud a bath or three baths."
From a distance often yards or more, she led him squelching
out of the wood, reaching its edge opposite the pavilion, at
the same place where they had entered.
Gilbert was well in the middle of the open space before he
realised that Pamela and Meltravers were sitting on the third
step of the pavilion, staring at him ; then Pamela rose to her
feet.
640 SELWYN JEPSON
" "
What who she asked.
is it ?
" "
Gilbert/' said Susan. He has been for a run in the
woods."
Pamela's expression of concern and alarm vanished, and
another took its place.
She began to laugh. She laughed for nearly a minute.
Then she stopped to put a small lace handkerchief to her
nostrils.
Susan nodded.
"
I told him he smelt/' she said.
Mr. Meltravers gazed at her with every appearance of
unstinted admiration.
Suddenly Gilbert burst into tears, and set off at a totter
down the grove toward the house, and Pamela began to laugh
again heartlessly. Nobody would have denied, however,
that he made a remarkably amusing figure.
Susan was about to follow him, that she might miss nothing
of the excitement should he meet anyone on his way to the
house, when she observed a strange look on the face of Sam.
Sam was staring down the grove, and his lower jaw seemed to
have lost its firmness ; it had all but dropped.
Down the middle of the grove there came the somewhat
incongruous shape of Sergeant Rogers, the silver spike on his
policeman's helmet catching the rays of the westering sun.
He was a stout and upstanding man, and his walk was the
relentless if flat-footed march of the Law. He did not, per-
haps, exactly harmonise with the cypresses and the Greek
pavilion to which they led, but he was not without an
imposing air.
The of him upon Mr. Meltravers, once he had
effect
realised that his eyes were not playing him tricks, was both
instantaneous and remarkable.
He leapt to his feet, and bolted at a sharp trot the kind of
trot which a man who is in training can keep up for hours
into the shelter of the wood, and therein vanished.
Susan's mind leapt to but one conclusion, and because she
was grateful to him for his efforts on Pamela's behalf, she
hoped from the bottom of her soul that Sergeant Rogers had
not seen him go.
In this there was some chance of fulfilment, for at approxi-
mately the same moment, the Sergeant and Mr. Banks passed
one another, and the Sergeant, however polite, would never
 "DON SAM QUIXOTE" 641
have resisted a second, if not, indeed, a third glance at that
queer mud-distorted travesty of a man.
" "
Whatever's the matter with Mr. Meltravers ? inquired
"
Pamela in a puzzled voice. Has he forgotten something ? "
"
Or remembered something . . ." murmured Susan, and
watched the nearing policeman with cold if anxious eyes.
Sergeant Rogers, however, had not seen Sam's exit from
the social sphere. He lumbered to a standstill in front of
Pamela, and saluted her.
"
If you'll excuse me, Miss Caister, and beggin' your pardon
for intruding but Simmons, he told me you wouldn't mind,
seein' that I wanted to speak to you personally ." . .

"
.Pamela was gracious.
. ."
" Certainly, Sergeant.
Well, it's this police orphanage sworrey on Saturday
we'd be very grateful, Miss, if you'd sing for us the same as
you did last year. . . ."
He paused because Susan sprang so suddenly into move-
ment ; it was enough to make anyone jump. She turned and
dashed into the wood on the other side of the pavilion at an
extraordinary speed, and disappeared, the mystified Pamela
noticed, at the same place where the trees had taken Mr.
Meltravers.
" "
I think everybody has gone mad
Really," said Pamela,
"
this afternoon first one thing and then another
"
Just a game, I dessay, Miss," suggested Sergeant Rogers
soothingly, and went on to inquire if she would favour the
"
soiree with her much-liked rendering of My Little Grey
Home in the West."
Pamela graciously consented. The sergeant thanked her
with ardour, and she made her way to the house to find that
Gilbert was quite firm through the bathroom door that
he wanted a car to take him to the station to catch the six-five.
He was almost rude to her.
But Susan never caught up with Sam to reassure him about
Sergeant Rogers.
like a hare for miles. The Road must
Sam must have run
have called, and called loudly when he saw Sergeant Rogers.
. .That was all right, and his affair. He knew better than
.

she did why he had been so scared by the sight of that large
blue figure.
But he had answered the call of the Road in one of Brother
Bill's favourite suits.
x
64* SELWYN J EPS ON
And as soon as Brother Bill heard that Mr. Banks had
returned to Rosetown Garden City, he would come back
from London and raise the very dickens of a noise about that
brown suit,
Susan sighed, and ate a very poor tea.
Perhaps Brother Bill would be reasonable, seeing that
Gilbert no longer cluttered up the place.
Thereafter Susan made a habit of visiting Dobble's Dell
nearly every day, but Sam Quixote never came to it again.
She had liked Sam ; it was a pity about his nervousness of
policemen.
 F. C. BURNAND
Dinner Party at Eraser's

Sir Francis Burnand was one of the most celebrated editors of

Punch, and a playwright of no little ability. His early

burlesque,
Black-eyed Susan, made a great hit, and he followed it up with a large
number of successful farces and comedies.
 DINNER PARTY AT ERASER'S
dinner. In consequence of having to listen to several
AT whispered observations on the company present from
Mrs. Plyte Fraser, who tells me who every one is, and how
clever they all are, I find myself left alone, eating fish. I make
three picks at my fish and finish. The butler and footman are
both in the room, but neither will catch my eye, and I can't
get my plate removed. The coachman, who comes in to
wait occasionally, and is very hot and uncomfortable all the
time, does catch my eye, and sees me pointing to my plate. He
looks in a frightened manner at me, as though begging me not
to ask him to do anything on his own account. He is evidently
debating within himself whether he oughtn't to tell the butler
that I'm making signs. I should say that this coachman is
snubbed by the others. His rule for waiting appears to be,
when in doubt play the lobster sauce ; which he hands with
everything.
Mrs. Fraser whispers to me to draw the American General
"
out. He was in the war," she says, behind her fan. I say,
" "
Oh, indeed 1 and commence the process of drawing out.
It's a difficult art. The first question is everything. I ask him,
" "
diffidently, How he liked the war ? Before he can reply,
Mrs. Fraser informs the company, as if she were exhibiting the
"
military hero, Ah 1 General Duncammon was in all the
"
great engagements The General shuts his eyes and
"
nods towards a salt-cellar. He knew," she continues, still
" "
exhibiting him, all the leading men there The General
looks round the table cautiously to see, perhaps, if anybody
"
else did and he was in the very centre of the battle, where
"
he received a dreadful sabre wound, at at She looks
for assistance to the General, who seems rather more staggered
than he probably did in the battle, and Plyte Fraser, from the
" " Bull's
top of the table, supplies, Bull's Run." Run,"
repeats Mrs. Fraser to the General, as if challenging him to
"
contradict it if he dared. General Duncammon's property,"
she goes on, still lecturing on him as a kind of mechanical
645
646 F . C . BURNAND
waxwork figure, " was all all all dear me, what's the
word I want ? " She turns to me abruptly. I don't know.
The General doesn't know. Perhaps he never had any
"
property. Everybody being appealed to, has
" " separately,
the word on the tip of his tongue I You," says Mrs.
"
Fraser to me, of course have quite a storehouse of words. I
never can imagine an author without a perfect magazine of
words. It must be so delightful always to be able to say what
you want, you know. Now what is the word I'm waiting for ?
You know when a man
has all his property taken by Govern-
* * "
ment taken away not compromised no dear me
All eyes are upon me. Of course I know. Boldly, but with
"
a nervous feeling that I'm not quite right yet, I say, seques-
tered," and lean back in my chair, somewhat hot.

Happy Thought. Sequestered.

"
Mrs. Fraser adopts it. Sequestered by Government."
Miss Harding goes into a fit of laughing. I see the mistake,
so does Mrs. Fraser, so does every one. Every one laughs.
They all think it's my joke, and Mrs. Fraser taps me on the
"
hand with her fan, and explains to the General sequestered,
you know, for sequestrated." Every one laughs again, except
Miss Harding, who, Mrs. Fraser keeps whispering to me, is
"
such a clever girl, so well read. Draw her out." She won't
be drawn out any more than the General. The party, I
subsequently find, has been asked expressly to meet m> and
the Frasers do their best to give everything a literary turn.
Odd ; I don't feel a bit brilliant this evening. Very disappoint-
ing this must be to the guests. I can't even talk to Miss
Harding. In consequence of what is expected of me, I" can't
stoop to talk about the weather, or what any one's been
doing to-day." After the haunch of venison I am going to
"
begin to Miss Harding about the Human Mind in its several
"
aspects," when she says, I thought you authors were full of
conversation and sparkling wit." It's rather rude of her, but
Mrs. Fraser shouldn't lead her to expect so much. I can only
say,
"
Did you ? " As an afterthought I ask " Why ? "
She replies, " Well, one reads of the meetings of such men
as Sheridan, Burke, Grattan, Dr. Johnson, and they seem to
have said witty things every moment." I feel that I am called
upon to defend "
the literary character for esprit in the present
"
day. I reply, Well you see," deliberately, it's so different
 DINNER PARTY AT F R A S E R
'
S 647
"
now, it's in fact more I am interrupted by a gentleman
on the other side, in a white waistcoat and iron-grey whiskers,
"
No wits nowadays," he says ; " why, I recollect Coleridge,
Count D'Orsay, Scott, Southey, and Tommy Moore, with old
Maginn, sir, at one table. Then, sir, there was poor Hook, and
Mathews, and Yates. I'm talking of a time before you were
"
born or thought of He says this as if he'd done some-
thing clever in being born when he was, and as if I'd made an
entire mistake in choosing my time for existence. Every one
is attending to the gentleman in the white waistcoat, who
defies contradiction, because all his stories are of a time before
"
any one at the table was born or thought of." It is very
annoying that there should ever have been such a period.

Happythought. In Chap. X, Book IX of Typical Develop-

"
wentSy The Vanity of Existence." From literature he gets to
the drama. He seems to remember every actor. According to
him, no one ever did anything in literature or art, without
asking his advice. His name is Brounton, and he speaks of
himself in the third person as Harry. I try to speak to Miss
Harding, but she is listening to a story from Brounton about
"
Old Mathews." " You didn't know old Mathews," he
cc
says to Fraser, who humbly admits he didn't. Ah, I recollect,
before he ever thought of giving his entertainment, his coming
' '
to me and saying, Harry, my boy he always called me
* *
Harry Harry, my boy,' says he, hundred pounds
I'd give a
*
to be able to sing and speak like you.' I wish I could lend
it
you, Matty,' I said to him I used to call him Matty c but
' "

Harry Brounton wouldn't part with his musical ear for

Here a diversion is created by the entrance of the children.
I see the one who made faces at me from the window. Ugly
boy. The child who would bother me when I was dressing is
between Mrs. Fraser and myself. I give him grapes and fruit,
to propitiate him :
great point to make friends with juveniles.
He whispers to me presently, " You don't know what me and
"
Conny's done." I say, cheerfully, No, I can't guess." He
"
whispers, We've been playing at going out of town with
your box." I should like to pinch him. He continues,
"
whispering, I say, it's in your room, you know : we got
such a lot of things in it." I don't like to tell Mrs. Fraser,
who says, " There, Dolly, don't be troublesome." I am
distracted. The boy on the side of Mrs. Fraser (he was the
648 F. C. BURNAND
"
nuisance in the croquet ground), says, pointing at me, Oh,
he's got such a funny hat," and is immediately silenced. I
should like to hear more about this hat. I ask Dolly, who
" the nurse took it
whispers, away from him, 'cos she said
he'd hurt himself." The little Frasers have evidently been
The ladies rise, and the children go with
smashing " my gibus.
them. You won't stop long," says Mrs. Fraser, persuasively.
"No, no," answered Fraser. "Because I've allowed the
children to sit up on purpose," continues Mrs. Fraser, looking
" "
we'll just have one
at me. All right," returns Fraser ;
glass of wine and then we'll come into the drawing-room,
" "
smiling upon me
*
and he'll give us The Little Pig
Jumped,' with the squeak and all."
I find that all the guests have been asked expressly to hear
me sing this I also find that there are a great many people
:

coming in the evening for the same special purpose. I haven't

done it for years. Fraser seems to think that any man who
writes is merely a buffoon. I only wonder that he doesn't ask
me to dance a saraband for the amusement of his friends. I
am astonished at Mrs. Fraser. I tell Fraser I've forgotten the
"
song. He won't hear of it he says,
: You'll remember it as
you go on." I say, I can't get on without a good accompani-
ment. He returns that the elder Miss Symperson plays admir-
"
ably. Every one says, Oh, you must sing." The American
"
General, who speaks for the first time, now says, He's
"
come ten miles to hear it." Brounton supposes I don't
" 1
recollect Old Mathews at Home ? don't, and he has me at a
disadvantage.
He goes on to ask me if I accompany myself ? No, I don't.
" " "
Ah !
says he, Theodore
I recollect Hook sitting down to
the piano and dashing off a song and an accompaniment
"
inpromptu. You don't improvise ? he asks me. I am obliged
to own frankly that I do not, but in the tone of one who could
" "
if he liked. Ah," he goes on, you should hear the Italian
"
Improvisator! Ever been to Italy ?
I No, I haven't : he
" "
has, and I am at a Ah he exclaims,
" that is again disadvantage. !

something like improvisation :such fire and humour

more than in the French. Of course you know all Branger's
"
songs by heart ? " Before I have time to say that I know a few,
he is off again. Ah the French comic songs are so light
I

and sparkling. No English comic song can touch them

"
and then, where are your singers ? I wish to goodness he'd
 DINNER PARTY AT FRA
649 S ER
'
S

not been asked to hear

" The Little Big." Going out of the
"
dining-joom, Fraser says to me, Capital fellow, Brounton,
isn't he so ajnusing." If I don't admit it Fraser will think
:

me envious and ill-natured ; so I say heartily, " Brounton 1

very amusing fellow- great fun/' and we are in the drawing-

room.
Here I find all the people who have been invited in the
evening. I"should like to be taken ill. The children are at me
at once. Ma says you're to sing." Little brutes 1 The
elder Miss Symperson, who will be happy to play for me, is
seated near the piano. She is half a head taller than I am, and
peculiarly elegant and lady-like. My last chance is
trying to
frighten her out of accompanying me. I tell her the tune is
difficult to catch. Will I hum it to her ? I hum it to her. In
"
humming it is to choose
difficult any words but rum turn
turn," and very difficult to convey a right notion of the tune.
Two children standing by the piano give their version of it.
" "
I say, hush to them, and lose the tune. Miss Symperson
does catch it, and chooses a key for me. Fraser, thinking the
"
song is Silence," and interrupts Brounton
beginning, says, "
in a loud story about his remembering Old Mathews singing
"
a song about a pig he was inimitable, Mathews was when
I have to explain that we're not ready to begin yet. The
conversation is resumed Mrs. Fraser seats herself on an
:

ottoman with her two very youngest children, who are

fidgety, near the piano ; the two others insist on standing just
in front of me by the piano. Miss Harding takes a small chair
quite close to me ; by her sits a Captain Someone, who has
come in the evening with his sister. I feel that she despises
buffoonery, but the Pig-song is to be anything at all, it must
if
be done with a good deal of facial expression. The Captain
is evidently joking with her at my expense. Don't know him,
but hate him because it's very ungentlemanly and unfair to
:

laugh at you, just when you're going to sing a comic song. I

tell Fraser, apologetically, that I really am afraid I shall break
"
down. Brounton says, Never mind improvise." Miss
" " "
Symperson says, Shall I begin ? I answer, If you please,"
and she plays what she thinks is the air. I am obliged to stop
her, and say that it's not quite correct. This makes a hitch to
begin with. Brounton says something about a tuning-fork, and
every one laughs except the Captain, who is talking in a low
tone to Miss Harding. Mrs. Fraser's youngest child on her
x*
650 F. C, BURNAND
" T>
lap says, Ma, why doo de Hush 1 Miss Symper-
son, in not a particularly good temper, plays it
again. More
like a march than a comic song, but I don't like to tell her
so. I begin :

A little pig lived on the best of straw,

Straw hee-haw and Shandiddlelaw.

And the idea flashes across my mind what an ass I'm making
"
of myself. At the hee-haw/' the pianist has to do six notes
up and down, like a donkey braying. This is one of the points
of the song. Miss Symperson doesn't do it. I hear, after-
wards, that she thought it vulgar, and omitted it purposely.
I go on :

Lillibullero, lillibullero, lillibullero,

Shandiddlelan,
My daddy's a bonnie wee man.
I feel it is idiotic. Miss Symperson plays a bar too much.
She didn't know I finished there. I Beg she won't apologise.
Next verse :

This little pig's mother she was the old sow,

Ow, ow, ow, and Shandiddleow.

I feel it's more

than ever. Here I see Miss Harding
idiotic

exchanging gknces with the Captain, and Mrs. Eraser with

several ladies ; they raise their eyebrows and look grim. I

suddenly recollect I've got some rather broad verses coming.

The idea also occurs to me for the first.time that when Fraser
did hear me sing it, years ago, it was amongst a party of
bachelors after supper. I go on with lillibullero, and have
half amind to give it up altogether :

The
farmer's wife went out for a walk,
Walk, ork, ork, and shandiddle lork.
" "
I fancy," says she, a slice of good pork."

This used to do, I remember, with a wink and making a

I
face like a clown. I risk it. I feel I don't do it with spirit,
and nobody laughs, I see Brounton whisper behind his hand
"
American General, and I am sure that he's
to the seen old
Mathews do this very thing," or something of that sort.
Getting desperate, I make more hideous faces in the lillibullero
chorus. Miss Harding looks down; the ladies regard one
 DINNER PARTY AT FRASER*S 651
another curiously I believe they think Fve had too much
wine ; the ugly boy, by the piano, begins to imitate my faces,
and the youngest in arms bursts into a violent fit of tears. Miss
Symperson stops. The child won't "be comforted. Mrs.
Eraser tells the wretched little brat that the gentleman won't
make any more ugly faces, he won't/' And turning to me,
"
asks me to sing without the grimaces They can't," she
:

" "
argues, be a necessity ; and Fraser reminds me, reprov-
ingly, that when I sang it before, I didn't make those faces.

I have half a mind to ask him (being rather nettled) what

faces I did make ? The however, to set the two boys
result is,
off making faces at their little sisters, for which they are very
nearly being ordered off to bed instantly. Miss Symperson
" " "
asks me, Shall I go on I say, despondently,
I
Yes, if
you please, we may as well."

The farmer's wife was fond of a freak,

Eak, eak, eak, and shandiddleleak,
And she made the little pig squeak, squeak, squeak.

Here used to follow the imitation. I think it better not to do

it now, and am proceeding with the next verse, when Fraser
"
says, Hallo I say, do the squeak."
! I tell him I can't, I
"
don't feel up to it. He says, Oh, do try." I hear Miss Harding
"
say, Oh, do try." The Captain, too, remarks (I see his eye),
he hopes I'll try, and Brounton hopes the same thing, and
then tells something about Hook (probably) behind his hand
"
to the General. I say, Very well," and yield. I begin
squeaking I shut my eyes and squeak
: I open them and
:

squeak. I try it four times, but am obliged to own publicly

" that there is no fun in it unless you're in cue for it." No one
seems in cue for it. The children begin squeaking, and are
packed off to bed. People begin to resume the conversation.
I say to Fraser I don't think there's any use in going on with
"
the song ? He answers, Oh, yes, do do by all means." But
as he not by any means enthusiastic about it, I thank Miss
is

Symperson, who acknowledges it very stiffly and coldly, and

cuts me for the remainder of the evening. Broughton comes
"
up and tells me loudly, That he remembers old Mathews
doing that song, or something exactly like it, years ago ; it

was admirable." Miss Florelly asks me quietly, if I'd written

many songs. I disown the authorship of the pig. The Captain
"
sings a sentimental ballad about Meet me where the Flow'ret
652 F. C. BURN AND
Droops/' to Miss Harding's accompaniment, and every one is

charmed.

Happy Thought. Bed-time. I'll never sing again as long as

I live.

In my ROOM. My combs, ties, opera-hat,

shirts, brushes,
fire-irons, boots, collars, sponges, and everything, have been
thrown anyhow into my portmanteau. Who the
Oh, I recollect this is what that horrid little wretch meant,
:

when he told me at dessert, that he and his sister had been

playing at packing-up in my room.
I wish I was back at Boodels*. I dare say they're dragging
the pond, and enjoying themselves. I don't think I shall stop
here any longer.
 HARRY LEON WILSON
Rugg/es of Red Gap

Harry Leon Wilson is one of the most popular short story writers
in America, and a former editor of the well-known humorous

periodical Puck. The entertaining character "Ruggles" which

he created appears in several of his books in which the scene is
"
laid in Red Gap."
 RUGGLES OF RED GAP
are times when all Nature seems to smile, yet
THERE when to the sensitive mind it will be faintly brought
that the possibilities are quite tremendously otherwise if one
will consider them pro and con. I mean to say, one often

suspects things may happen when it doesn't look so.

The succeeding three days passed with so ordered a calm
that little would any but a profound thinker have fancied
tragedy to lurk so near their placid surface. Mrs. Effie and
Mrs. Belknap-Jackson continued to plan the approaching
social campaign at Red Gap. Cousin Egbert and the Mixer
continued their card game for the trifling stake of a shilling a
" 5

game, or two bits/ as it is known in the American monetary

system. And our host continued his recreation.
Each morning I turned him out in the smartest of fishing
costumes and each evening I assisted him to change. It is
true I was now compelled to observe at these times a certain
lofty irritability in his character, yet I more than half fancied
this to be queerly assumed in order to inform me that he was
not unaccustomed to services such as I rendered him. There
was that about him. I mean to say, when he sharply rebuked
me for clumsiness or cried out " Stupid " it had a perfunctory
1

languor, as if meant to show me he could address a servant in

what he believed to be the grand manner. In this, to be sure,
he was so oddly wrong that the pathos of it quite drowned
what I might otherwise have felt of resentment.
But I next observed that he was sharp in the same manner
with the hairy backwoods person who took him to fish each
day, using words to him which I, for one, would have
employed, had I thought them merited, only after the gravest
hesitation. I have before remarked that I did not like the gleam
in this petson's eyes: he was very apparently a not quite nice
person. Also I more than once observed him to wink at
Cousin Egbert in an evil manner.
As I have so truly said, how close may tragedy be to us when
life seems most correct 1 It was Belknap-Jackson's custom to

655
656 HARRY LEON WILSON
raise a view-hallo each evening when he returned down the
lake, so that we might gather at the dock to oversee his land*
ing. I must admit that he disembarked with somewhat the
manner of a visiting royalty, demanding much attention and
assistance with his impedimenta. Undoubtedly he liked to be
looked at. This was what one rather felt. And I can fancy
that this very human trait of his had in a manner worn upon
the probably undisciplined nerves of the backwoods josser
"
had, in fact, deprived him of his goat," as the native people
have it.

Be may, we gathered at the dock on the afternoon

this as it
of the third day of our stay to assist at the return. As the
native log craft neared the dock our host daringly arose to a
graceful kneeling posture in the bow and saluted us charm-
ingly, the woods person in the stern wielding his single oar
in gloomy silence. At the moment a most poetic image
occurred to me that he was grim figure of Fate
like a dull
that fetches us low at the moment of our highest seeming.
I mean to say, it was a silly thought, perhaps, yet I afterwards
recalled it most vividly.
Holding our host hailed us :
his creel aloft
"
Full to-day, thanks to going where I wished and paying
no attention to silly guides' talk." He beamed upon us in an
unquestionably superior manner, and again from the moody
figure at the stern I intercepted the flash of a wink to Cousin
Egbert. Then as the frail craft had all but touched the dock
and our host had half risen, there was a sharp dipping of the
thing and he was ejected into the chilling waters, where he
almost instantly sank. There were loud cries of alarm from
all, including, the woodsman himself, who had kept the craft

upright, and in these Mr. Belknap-Jackson heartily joined

the moment his head appeared above the surface, calling
" "
Help 1in the quite loudest of tones, which was thoughtless
enough, as we were close at hand and could easily have heard
his ordinary speaking voice.
The woods person now stepped to the dock, and firmly
grasping the collar of the drowning man hauled him out
with but little effort, at the same time becoming voluble with
apologies and sympathy. The rescued man, however, was
quite off his head with rage and bluntly berated the fellow for
having tried to assassinate him. Indeed he put forth rather
a torrent of execration, but to all of this the fellow merely
 RUGGLES OF RED GAP 657

repeated his crude protestations of regret and astonishment,

seeming to be sincerely grieved that his intentions should
have been doubted.
From his friends about him the unfortunate man was
receiving the most urgent advice to seek dry garments lest he
perish of chill, whereupon he turned abruptly to me and cried :
"
Well, Stupid, don't you see the state that fellow has put me
"
in ? What are you doing ? Have you lost your wits ?
Now I had suffered a very proper alarm and solicitude for

him, but the injustice of this got a bit on me. I mean to say, I
suddenly felt a bit of temper myself, though to be sure
retaining
" my control.
"
Yes, sirquite so, sir/' I replied smoothly.
; Til have
you right as rain in no time at all, sir," and started to conduct
him off the dock. But now, having gone a little distance he
began to utter the most violent threats against the woods per-
son, declaring, in fact, he would pull the fellow's nose. How-
ever, I restrained him from rushing back, as I subtly felt I
was wished to do, and he at length consented again to be led
toward his hut.
But now the woods person called out " You're forgetting
:
"
all your pretties By which I saw him to mean the fishing
!

impedimenta he had placed on the dock. And most unreason-

ably at this Mr. Belknap-Jackson again turned upon me,
wishing anew to be told if I had lost my wits and directing me
to fetch the stuff. Again I was conscious of that within me
which no gentleman's man should confess to. I mean to say,
I felt like shaking him. But I hastened back to fetch the rod,
the creel, the luncheon hamper, the midge ointment, the
camera, and other articles which the woods fellow handed me.
With these somewhat awkwardly carried, I returned to our
still turbulent host. More like a volcano he was than a man
who has had a narrow squeak from drowning, and before we
had gone a dozen feet more he again turned and declared he
"
would go back and thrash the unspeakable cad within an
inch of his Their relative sizes rendering an attempt of
life."
this sort quite too unwise, I was conscious of renewed irrita-
"
tion toward him ; indeed, the vulgar words, Oh, stow that
"
piffle I
swiftly formed in the back of my mind, but again I
controlled myself, as the chap was now sneezing violently.
" "
Best hurry on, sir," I said with exemplary tact. One
might contract a severe head-cold from such a wetting,"
 HARRY LEON WILSON
and further endeavoured to soothe him while I started ahead
to lead him away from the fellow. Then there happened
that which fulfilled my direst premonitions. Looking back
from a moment of calm, the psychology of the crisis is of
rudimentary simplicity.
Enraged beyond measure at the woods person, Mr. Belknap-
Jackson yet retained a fine native caution which counselled
him to attempt no violence upon that offender ; but his mental
tension was such that it could be relieved only by his attacking
some one ; preferably someone forbidden to retaliate. I
walked there temptingly but a pace ahead of him, after my
well-meant word of advice.
I make no defence of my own course. I am aware there can
be none. I can only plead that I had already been vexed not
a little by his unjust accusations of stupidity, and dismiss with
as few words as possible an incident that will ever seem quite
too indecently criminal. Briefly, then, with my well-intended
"
Best not lower yourself, sir," Mr. Belknap-Jackson forgot
himself, and I forgot myself. It will be recalled that I was in
front of him, but I turned rather quickly. (His belongings I
had carried were widely disseminated.)
Instantly there were wild outcries fron the others, who had
started toward the main, or living house.
" " I
He's killed Charles heard
I Mrs. Belknap- Jackson
scream ; then came the deep-chested rumble of the Mixer,
" "
Jackson kicked him first They ran for us. They had
I

reached us while our host was down, even while my fist

was still clenched. Now again the unfortunate man cried
" "
Help ! as his wife assisted him to his feet.
" "
Send for an officer cried she.
1

"
The man's an anarchist " shouted her husband.
!

"
"
Nonsense 1 boomed the Mixer. " Jackson got what
"
he was looking for. Do it myself if he kicked me !

" "
Oh, Maw Oh, Mater
! cried her daughter tearfully.
!

"
"
Gee He done it in one punch
1 I heard Cousin
1
Egbert
say with what I was aghast to suspect was admiration.
Mrs. Effie, trembling, could but gkre at me and gasp.
Mercifully she was beyond speech for the moment.
Mr. Belknap-Jackson was now painfully rubbing his
right eye, which was not what he should have done, and I
said as much.
"
Beg pardon, sir, but one does better with a bit of raw beef/*
 RUGGLES OF RED GAP 659
" How dare you, you great hulking brute " cried his 1

wife, and made as if to shield her husband from another

attack from me, which I submit was unjust.
"
"Bill's right/' said Cousin Egbert casually. Put a
"
piece of raw steak on it. Gee with one wallop! And 1

then, quite strangely, for a moment we all amiably dis-

cussed whether cold compresses might not be better.
Presently our host was led off by his wife. Mrs. Effie followed
" "
them, moaning : Oh, oh, oh ! in the keenest distress.
At this I took to my own room in dire confusion, making
no doubt I would
presently be given in charge and left to
languish in gaol, perhaps given six months hard.
Cousin Egbert came to me in a little while and laughed
heartily at my fear that anything legal would be done. He
also made some compliments on the neatness of
ill-timed
the blow I hadMr. Belknap-Jackson, but these I found
dealt
in wretched taste and was begging him to desist, when the
Mixer entered and began to speak much in the same strain.
"
Don't you ever dare do a thing like that again," she
"
warned me, unless I got a ringside seat," to which I
remained severely silent, for I felt my offence should not
be made light of.
" "
Three rousing cheers exclaimed Cousin Egbert,
1

whereat the two most unfeelingly went through a vivid

pantomime of cheering.
Our host, I understood, had his dinner in bed that night,
and throughout the evening, as I sat solitary in remorse
came the mocking strains of another of their American
folksongs with the refrain :

" You made me what I am

" to-day,
I hope you're satisfied !

I conceived to be the Mixer and Cousin Egbert who

it

did this, and considering the plight of our host, I thought

it in the worst possible taste. I had raised my hand against
the one American I had met who was at all times vogue.
And not only this : For now I recalled a certain phrase I
had flung out as I had stood over him, ranting indeed no
better than an anarchist, a phrase which showed my poor
culture to be the flimsiest veneer.
Late in the night, as I lay looking back on the frightful
scene, I recalled with wonder a swift picture of Cousin Egbert
660 HARRY LEON WILSON
caught as I once looked back to the dock. He had most
amazingly shaken the woods person by the hand, quickly
but with marked cordiality. And yet I am quite certain he
had never been presented to the fellow.
Promptly the next morning came the dreaded summons to
meet Mrs. Effie. I was of course prepared to accept instant
dismissal without a character, if indeed I were not to be given
in charge, I found her wearing an expression of the utmost
sternness, erect and formidable by the now silent phonograph.
Cousin Egbert, who was present, also wore an expression of
sternness, though I perceived him to wink at me.
"
I really don't know what we're to do with you, Ruggles,"

began the stricken woman, and so done out she plainly was
that I at once felt the warmest sympathy for her as she con-
"
tinued : First you lead poor Cousin Egbert into a drunken
"
debauch
Cousin Egbert here coughed nervously and eyed me with
strong condemnation.
"
then you behave like a murderer. What have you
"
to say for yourself ?
At this I saw there was little could say, except that I
I

had coarsely given way to the brute in me, and yet I knew
I should try to explain.
"I
dare say, Madam, it may have been because Mr. Belknap-
Jackson was quite sober at the unfortunate moment."
"
Of course Charles was sober. The idea What of it ? "
!

"
I was remembering an occasion at Chaynes-Wotten
when Lord Ivor Cradleigh behaved toward me somewhat
as Mr. Belknap- Jackson did last night and when my own

deportment was quite all that could be wished. It occurs

to me now that it was because his lordship was, how shall I
say ? quite far gone in liquor at the time, so that I could
without loss of dignity pass it off as a mere prank. Indeed,
he regarded it as such himself, performing the act with a
good nature that I found quite irresistible, and I am certain
that neither his lordship nor I have ever thought the less of
each other because of it. I revert to this merely to show
that I have not always acted in a ruffianly manner under
these circumstances. It seems rather to depend upon how the
thing is done the mood of the performer his mental state.
Had Mr. Belknap-Jackson been pardon me quite drunk,
I feel that the outcome would have been happier for us all.
 RUGGLES OF RED GAP 66l

So have thought along these lines, it seems to me that

far as I
if one is
to be kicked at all, one must be kicked good-naturedly.
I mean to say, with a certain camaraderie, a
lightness, a gaiety,
a genuine good-will that for the moment expresses itself
uncouthly an element, I regret to say, that was conspicu-
ously lacking from the brief activities of Mr. Belknap-
Jackson."
"
I never heard such crazy talk,"
" responded Mrs. Effie,
and really I never saw such a man as you are for wanting
people to become disgustingly drunk. You made poor Cousin
Egbert and Tuttle act like beasts, and now nothing will
Jeff"

satisfy you but that Charles "should roll in the gutter. Such
dissipated talk I never did hear, and poor Charles rarely taking
anything but a single glass of wine, it upsets him so ; even our
"
reception punch he finds too stimulating I

I mean to say, the woman had cleanly missed my point,

for never have I advocated the use of fermented liquors to
excess ; but I saw it was no good trying to tell her this.
"
And the worst of it/' she went rapidly on, " Cousin
Egbert here is acting stranger than I ever knew him
to act.
He swears if he can't keep you
he'll never have another man,
and you know yourself what that means in his case
and Mrs. Pettingill saying she means to employ you herself if
we let you go. Heaven knows what the poor woman can be
thinking of! Oh, it's awful and everything was going so
beautifully. Of course, Charles would simply never be
"
brought to accept an apology
" I am
only too anxious to make one," I submitted.
" Here's the
poor fellow now," said Cousin Egbert almost
gleefully, and
our host entered. He carried a patch over his
right eye and was not attired for sport on the lake, but in a
dark morning suit of quietly beautiful lines that I thought
showed a fine sense of the situation. He shot me one superior
glance from his left eye, turned to Mrs. Effie.
" "
I see you still harbour the ruffian ?
"
I've just given him a call-down," said Mrs. Effie, plainly
"
ill at ease, and he says it was all because you were sober ;
that if you'd been in the state Lord Ivor Cradleigh was the time
it happened at Chaynes-Wotten he wouldn't have done any-

thing to you, probably."

"
What's this, what's this ? Lord Ivor Cradleigh Chaynes-
Wotten?" The man seemed to be curiously interested by
 662 HARRY LEON WILSON
"
the mere names, in spite of himself. His lordship was at
"
Chaynes-Wotten for the shooting, I suppose ? This, most
amazingly, to me.
"
A house party at Whitsuntide, sir/' I explained
"
"
Ah 1 And you say his lordship was
"
Oh, quite, quite in his cups, sir. If I might explain, it
was that, sir itsbeing done under circumstances and in a
certain entirely genial spirit of irritation to which I could take
no offence, sir. His lordship is a very decent sort, sir. I've
known him intimately for years/'
" " "
Dear, dear 1 he replied. Too bad, too bad 1 And I
dare say you thought me out of temper last night ? Nothing
of the sort. You should have taken it in quite the same spirit
as you did from Lord Ivor Cradleigh."
" "
It seemed different, sir," I said firmly. If I may take the
liberty of putting it so, I felt quite offended by your manner.
I missed from it at the most critical moment, as one might

say, a certain urbanity that I found in his lordship, sir."

"
Well, well, well too bad, really. I'm quite aware
1 It's
that I show a sort of brusqueness at times, but mind you, it's
all on the surface. Had you known me as long as you've
known his lordship, I dare say you'd have noticed the same
rought urbanity in me as well. I rather fancy some of us over
here don't do those things so very differently. A few of us, at
least."
"
I'm glad, indeed, to hear it, sir. It's only necessary to
understand that there is a certain mood in which one really
cannot permit one's self to be you perceive, I trust."
" "
Perfectly, perfectly," said he, and I can only express my
regret that you should have mistaken my own mood, which,
I am confident, was exactly the thing his lordship might have
felt."
" "
I gladly accept returned quickly, as
your apology, sir," I
I should have accepted his lordship's had his manner permitted

any misapprehension on my part. And in return I wish to

apologise most contritely for the phrase I applied to you just
after it happened, sir. I rarely use strong language, but
"
"
I remember hearing none/' said he.
"I regret to say, sir* that I called you a blighted little
"
mug
"
You needn't have mentioned it," he replied with just a
" "
trace of sharpness, and I trust that in future
 RUGGLES OF RED GAP 663
" I am that in future you will give me no occasion
sure, sir,
to misunderstand your intentions no more than would his
lordship," I added as he raised his brows.
Thus in a manner wholly unexpected was a frightful situa-
tion eased off.
"
I'm so glad it's settled ! " cried Mrs. Effie, who had
listened almost breathlessly to our exchange.
" I fancy
"
I settled it as Cradleigh would have eh,
Ruggles ? And the man actually smiled at me.
"
so, sir," said I.
" Entirelyit "
If only doesn't get out," said Mrs. Effie now.
"
We
shouldn't want it known in Red Gap. Think of the talk !

" "
Certainly," rejoined Mr. Belknap-Jackson jauntily, we
are all here above gossip about an affair of that sort. I am
"
sure He broke off and looked uneasily at Cousin
Egbert, who coughed into his hand and looked out over the
lake before he spoke.
"
What would I want to tell a thing like that for ? " he
demanded indignantly, as if an accusation had been made
against him. But I saw his eyes glitter with an evil light.
An hour later I chanced to be with him in our detached hut,
when the Mixer entered.
"
What happened ? " she demanded.
"
What do you reckon happened ? " returned Cousin
cc
Egbert. They get to talking about Lord Ivy Craddies, or
some guy, and before we know it Mr. Belknap Hyphen
Jackson is apologising to Bill here."
" "
No ? bellowed the Mixer.
" "
affirmed Cousin Egbert.
Sure did he !

Here they grasped each other's arms and did a rude native
dance about the room, nor did they desist when I sought to
explain that the name was not at all Ivy Craddies.
 WALTER EMANUEL
The Toy Dogs of War
How to get
Yourself Disliked

Walter Emanuel was well-known as a member of the famous

Punch round table, and for
" "
years contributed
many Charivaria
to that paper. Good examples of his work are the satire on the
old volunteers and the amusing hints to practical jokers which
are included here.
 THE TOY DOGS OF WAR
BEING THREE EPISODES IN THE MILITARY CAREER OF COLONEL
BREWER, LATE OF THE VOLUNTEER FORCE

the War who were

Office decided that officers
WHEN as broad were long could only be retained as
as they

regimental pets, the Volunteer Service it was before the days

of the Territorials lost little Colonel Brewer (late of the
Prince of Wales's Small Bore Rifles). But the Colonel is fond
of fighting his battles over again.
Half a dozen of us were dining with him the other evening,
and the talk turned on eatables. Suddenly our host jumped up
and raised his hand.
"I " "
won't hear a word against buns he cried, a railway
I

bun once saved my life/' and he ordered his man to bring in

the silver-mounted paper-weight from the library.
"
That's it," he said, drawing our attention to a small
indentation in the middle.
" "
Fire away 1 we cried.
" "
Well, it was like this," said the Colonel. It was in '88.
I was only a captain then. We were out for the Easter
Manoeuvres. We had just detrained at Brighton, when I
received orders to hurry forward at once, with my men, to the
Downs. Now, I was an old campaigner this was my third
year and I knew that these manoeuvres were not always
child's play. Only the year before, on one occasion, we were
two hours without food. So, profiting by experience, I rushed
into the refreshment room and bought a bun, and thrust it
into my breast-pocket. Then we started for the battlefield.
When we got there, we found a scene of unparalleled con-
fusion. An enormous bull, attracted, no doubt, by the red
coats, had escaped from a neighbouring field, and was bellow-
ing horribly (* Horrida bella? suggested someone), and charg-
ing wildly right and left, and putting our men to rout. All,
officers and men, seemed to have lost their heads : a complete
rot had set in it happens at times, gentlemen: you will
667
668 WALTER EMANUEL
remember Majuba. The Royal Wide Rangers had shot their
colonel, and poor Jenkins, of the Princess Mary's Lambs,
was down, and Lieut.-Colonel Bulphy had dropped dead, like a
stone. (The Coroner said it was fatty degeneration
*
of the heart :
we described it on his monument as a stout heart/) Many of
the mounted officers, too, were to be seen keeping their horses'
necks warm, while several had fallen off, and my friend Major
Belcher was rolled upon, and had his shape altered. And that
reminds me of a remarkable instance of animal sagacity.
Captain Goldberg of the Queen's now the King's ist

Whitechapellers was among those who were unhorsed. His

beast at once picked him up in its mouth, and carried him back
unhurt to the livery stables. Meanwhile no fewer than six of
the London English had been tossed by the bull. One had
fallen on a Paddington Green private and killed him. (Never
mind, he had a military funeral afterwards, which we don't all
get.) Finally, my own men began to show signs of being in-
fected by the general panic, so I faced them, and, to reassure
them, explained that artillery had been sent for, and was to be
brought to bear on the brute. I was begging them to keep
calm, when sudcjpnly I saw a bullet advancing straight at me.
(The Devil knows how bullets came to be used that day.)
I tried to dodge it, but without success. It hit me, but,

by a miracle of Providence (I am a Churchwarden, gentle-

men), on the bun. The bullet flattened and fell to the
ground, and I escaped with nothing worse than a faint. . . .

Gentlemen, don't speak against buns, please and pass the

wine."
We passed the wine.

"
Yes, that was an ugly incident,"
the Colonel,
said
"
when he put his glass down again ; but I don't know
that it was altogether so unpleasant as the King Street
affair."
"
Tell us about it," we cried.
"
That happened," said the Colonel, " at the outset of my
career as a Volunteer Officer, and if I had not had influence,
my career might have been wrecked. Thank Heaven, I have
lived it down, but no more Lord Mayor's Shows for
me 1

"
The Lord Mayor for the year was a business friend of
mine we did a lot with him at that time and it was his
 THE TOY DOGS OF WAR 669
suggestion that I and my men should form his Guard of
Honour at the Guildhall. I have never been one to care much
for tomfoolery of that sort : still, I took it as a compliment.
I was a young feller then.
"
The morning was foggy and wet, and the day opened for
me with a chapter of accidents. Nothing seemed to go right.
To start with, I gave myself a couple of ugly gashes, while
shaving, which made me look like a page of Comic Cuts.
Then I dropped a stud, and, in stooping to pick it up, my
confounded braces burst. This, coming on top of the other
annoyance, threw me into a paroxysm of rage, which really
weakened me. It left me with no appetite for my breakfast
indeed, I had no time for it and I had to run for my train.
Fortunately, when I was half-way to the station, I found a boy
to carry my sword for it is difficult to run with a sword.
Why they don't shorten the dem'd things, like they've shor-
tened the rifles, I don't know. The train, owing to the fog,
reached London Bridge quite half an hour late. This meant
that I had scarcely been able to glance through my letters at the
office when I had to jump into a four-wheeler I could never
stand hansoms they're dangerous things
: and drive to the
rondyvoo. While in the cab, a miserable sinking feeling came
over me the result of taking no breakfast so I got out at the
nearest Bodega, and had to take a couple of stiff whiskeys before
I felt myself again. Capital cure, gentlemen The fog had now
1

lifted, and the rain had stopped, but it was beastly wet under-
foot. I found my men cheerful in spite of it, and looking very

gay in their new scarlet uniforms. There were more of 'em than
I expected. And now, to show you how misfortune dogged
me that day, I must needs have trouble with the cabman.
When I I only had a shilling and a five-
got out, I fouhd that
pound note. The
driver refused to take the shilling, and I
objected to giving him the five-pound note. I told the man
that if he liked to call at my office on the following day, he
would receive another sixpence, at which the fellow became
truculent, and, getting down from his box, offered to fight
me and my whole regiment. He was a great hulking brute, and
things were looking ugly, when fortunately one of the men
came forward and volunteered to pay. The scoundrel accepted
half a crown and then drove off. (I made a note of his number,
and denounced him to Scotland Yard next day.) It was now,
of course, very late, but I took my men at a fine swinging
670 WALTER EMANUEL
pace from the Bank through the Poultry, and I think
we were admired. You see, City people very seldom see
soldiers.
"It was when we got to the end of Poultry, just past
Benetfink's as it was then that the Incident occurred. Now,
it's a curious thing about me, gentlemen, but ever since I was
a child I have had trouble with my right and left hand. I
it don't come instinc-
always have to think which is which :

tively. Well, now, I had to get my men down King Street.

Of course, I should have thought before I spoke, but I decided
to risk remember it all as well as if it only happened yester-
it. I

day. The windows of the houses on either side were bright

*
I cried (for we were
*
with ladies. Left-wheel at the double 1

late), and, to my horror, I saw the fellers trotting down Queen

*
Street, which is on the other side of the road. No, no, right
*
wheel ! I cried, perceiving mistake. The faithful beggars
my
obeyed me, just as a ship answers to her rudder but, somehow
or other, they must have got a bit out of the straight for my
order sent 'em trooping into the Atlas Insurance Company's
( *
No, no,' I shouted. Yer don't understand me
*
Office. I
was getting a bit flustered now
'
About turn ' and this !

' '
took 'em into a picture-shop across the street. Halt I cried. 1

Phew The perspiration was streaming down my face. I took

1

off my helmet, and thought, What should I do to get them

right ? I had half a mind to march them down to Stoneham's

book-shop, and there get a drill-book which would give me
some hints. The deuce of it was that the crowd was pretty
thick just here, and was becoming impertinent. Foolish sug-
gestions were made to me. I was told afterwards that I drew
my sword on a butcher boy, but I don't believe it. No, I'
decided that I would extricate my men unaided. 'Tenshun !

I cried. 'Right wheel right wheel

left wheel
no, right
about turn OH DEMMIT ALL, GO DOWN KING STREET To
'
1

judge by the yell of ghoulish kughter which here arose from

the unwashed, their sense of humour was no clearer than their
complexions. Why is it that a crowd always set itself against

authority ? Anyhow, I got my men to the Guildhall and,

when I arrived there, I collapsed, I am told. * A surfeit of liquid
on an insufficiently nourished stomach/ was the doctor's
diagnosis.
"
But, mind you, the of this regrettable affair was not
fault
so much mine, as the men's. I told 'em so afterwards, in a
 THE TOY DOGS OF WAR 671
lecture on the Higher Tactics. The dullards had not the sense
to see that I was ill, and that this was just one of the occasions
when they would have been justified in disobeying ordersj
Some officers, as I told 'em, would have sacked 'em
for it. ... Would you have the kindness to pass me the
"
champagne ?
We had the kindness.
The Colonel drank long and deep.
" "
And
did I ever tell you about the Dover affair ? asked
the Colonel.
"
Never," we answered.
"
Ah, that was a terrible business, if you like, gentlemen, a
really terrible business. In fact, it's what broke my nerve,
and made me
send in my papers. You young men are apt
to sneer at the manoeuvres of former days, but listen to
this.
"
was during the autumn manoeuvres. It was the last day
It
of 'em. It was an exceptionally hot morning the heat was :

really terrific. The previous afternoon had been bad enough,

and there had been a number of casualties. Two young officers
of the Scilly Buffs, while resting outside an inn, had been stung
by a wasp, and I myself had been cruelly punished by gnats,
while it was reported that some men of Bryant and May's
Fusiliers, who were taking cover behind some furze bushes,
actually caught fire. But the following day was worse still.
Old Sol was blazing away like a battery of hundred-ton guns,
and a rumour got abroad that the Parade would not take place.
The Duke, it was said, always considerate, had countermanded
it. As a
consequence, discipline was relaxed, and the men were
all over the shop. Then, suddenly the intimation came on us
like a bomb-shell it was announced that, after all, the Review

was to be held. Bugles sounded on all sides, orderlies rushed

about here, there and everywhere, and indescribable confusion
reigned, for we were to be on the review-ground within half
an hour. I myself had countermanded my horse at the stables,
and it was out with a fly, and I couldn't get another. Well,
as many men as possible were hurriedly collected, and some

strange sights were seen, gentlemen. Some of our brave fellows

were paddling many were having a swim and not a few
:

of these were rushed up in bathing costumes. A number of the

Bermondsey Irresistibles ( The Girl's Own ') were found
c
 WALTER EMANUEL
dallying with females on the beach, and some of them had
changed hats. There never was such a queer parade, I suppose.
And there was a discreditable scene with the 2ist South
Londoners, who were watching the Niggers. Their rich
Southern blood got the better of 'em, and they mutinied.
When my dear friend Colonel Pye-Jones (of Jones, Smith &
Jones, St. Paul's Churchyard), who was in command, galloped
down to the seashore, and ordered them to fall in, by Jove I the
and poor Pye- Jones rode off in a huff to
cattle flatly refused,
fetch the Police. However, he had the bad luck to be thrown
on the Esplanade. I was fortunate enough to get most of my
fellows together the bulk of 'em were from my works, and
that gives you the whip-hand and I was put in charge, not
only of them, but of a composite lot, consisting of the Shep-
herd's Bush Rangers, the Orpington Buffs, the Crouch End
Lions, the Roaring Forties, the Penny Royals, and Remington's
Typewriters. I wasn't proud of 'em. Their language was
awful, and I had to reprimand 'em more than once. I sent
my own men to the rear, so as to keep the others up to the
mark. Then, suddenly, the order was given to advance at the
double, and I placed myself at the head of the motley crew.
"
Well, gentlemen, as I have told you, the 'eat here the
"
Colonel looked round, and deliberately picked it up the
"
^eat, gentlemen," (we cheered him for this) was terrific, and
it had fairly bowled* me over that is the worst of us full-
bodied men and, as soon as I started running, I began to
wonder whether I should be able to keep it up. You see, I
was used to a horse. My legs seemed curiously weak. Twice
I stumbled once it was a rabbit-hole, and the second time my
accursed sword but recovered myself. Still, every moment
I found myself getting more and more distressed, and gradually
I felt my men overtaking me. They were like thunder behind me.
It then became a race officer v. men. I made desperate efforts to
outdistance them, but to no effect. Each moment the avalanche
threatened to overwhelm me. I tried to run outside the line, but
* *
the line was too long. Stop, my men, for 'Eaven's sake, stop I
I cried, but my voice, I suppose, was too weak to carry. On
on they came, with irresistible momentum I felt the hot
breath of the Orpington Buffs on my neck I made one
final spurt I chucked my sword away but it was no good
another damned rabbit hole did it once more I stumbled,
and
 THE TOY DOGS OF WAR 673
Here the Colonel stopped and held out his glass. We
refilled it, and he re-emptied it.
" "
Well, and what happened then, Colonel ? we asked.
The Colonel put his hand to his forehead and meditated.
"
Why, if I remember rightly, I wash killed," he said*
And then kind hands helped the Colonel to bed.
 HOW TO GET YOURSELF DISLIKED
SOME HINTS
S the world grows older, it does not get better tempered,
and the Practical Joker in this practical age becomes more
and more unpopular. In fact, there is little doubt that he will
" Kicked to
soon be extinct : death/* according to the
Coroner's verdict. Still, it is sometimes difficult to know how
to pass an evening. I propose, therefore, to set forth here some
few of the best ways of getting yourself disliked.
Try this. Buy yourself a little box of golden initials gummed
at the back. You can procure them of any reputable hatter.
One night you will have a convivial meeting at your home.
Then, while the guests are busy at cards, sneak into the hall.
There, on the rack, you will find a number of hats ; into
each of those poor dumb hats stick some of those initials, and,
when the company comes to depart, I will guarantee you a
" 1
scene of the prettiest confusion. Hello/ someone will say,
"I but it seems to belong to some
thought this was my hat, * " "
beggar with the initials B.F.' 1
Now, that's a curious
" but I can't find
thing/' another will sing out, my tile ; I
know I brought one." " Well, I'm jiggered," cries a third ;
" it's "
my initialsh, but "I'll swear it'sh not my tosh 1 And a
"
fourth will ejaculate, 1 And so on.
I have even known a man come round to me the next day and
" Look
say, pointing to his own hat, here, old fellow, in the
hurry yesterday evening I took this hat by mistake. It has the
initialsO.W.L.' in it. I wouldn't have minded, of course,
only mine was a better one." Of a truth, the prophet was right :

it is a wise man knows his own hat.

that
Again. Sometimes a young man will pay you a visit which
you do not wish repeated. Your object will, perhaps, be best
effected in this way. When he leaves, accompany him to the
front door and hold him in conversation till a pretty girl passes.
Then when he begins to ogle that pretty girl, cry out, " No, sir,
I will not give you another penny Leave my house this
I
"
instant 1and slam the door on him.
674
 HOW TO GET YOURSELF DISLIKED 675
We of us, I suppose, have our little foibles, and one of
all
the things I dislike intensely is to have someone come and see
tne off when I start on a railway journey. Yet an officious friend
will sometimes insist on it. But the same friend never does it
a second time. The principal reason is this : Just as the train
"
is
beginning to move I say, Well, good-bye, old fellow,"
and extend my hand. He then holds out his, and I grasp it
with a grip of iron, and I don't let go. The friend that way gets
one of the sharpest runs he has ever had ; for the speed of the
train increases each moment, and I do not relax my hold until
the end of the platform is reached.
Once a great big strong fellow, in the foolishness of his
heart, resisted ; he did not run with the train, but tried to
hold his ground. He imagined, perhaps, that would stop the
train. I need not say it did not. He succeeded, however, in

giving me a nasty shock, from which it took me some minutes

to recover, for I suddenly fell back on the floor of the carriage
with his arm in my hand. I have not met this person since.
And I have just perfected a capital new game to be played in
omnibuses. It goes best, perhaps, in cold weather, as it tends
to promote the circulation. The game is really a variation of
"
our dear old friend Musical Chairs/' It is necessary that all
the seats on one side of the 'bus should be occupied, and all
but one on the other. There is thus only one left free. There
then enters an ill-tempered man. He makes his way to the
vacant space. Then, when he has just begun to let himself
down, at a given signal the person seated next to that space
shifts up, and the space is filled. The ill-tempered man will
then rush to the new space, and the individual next to that goes
through same tactics as those I have just de-
identically the
scribed ; no sooner has the ill-tempered man let himself go
than he discovers that this seat also is taken. He is thus chivied
from place to place until his temper, bad to begin with, gets
vile. This game can be carried on for as long as an hour at a
time, and I have never known it fail to cause the utmost amuse-
ment and hilarity to all except the ill-tempered man.
In the month of November, moreover, it is possible for a
dull railway journey to be enlivened by your entering a non-
smoking carriage with an unlighted cigar in your mouth.
I tried this one foggy day with complete success. At first when
I got in the travellers all scowled at me, and seemed dis-
inclined to shift themselves so as to make room for me, but, by
676 WALTER EMANUEL
sheer weight, I forced themOnce seated, I puffed forth a
to.

huge volume of breath, which, in the fog, hanging on the air,

looked exactly like smoke. At first, I was afraid there was no
one present with sufficient public spirit to champion the rights
of the non-smokers ; but at the second puff, a gentleman in the
opposite corner, who wore black shjny leggings, "
and had a
gold locket hanging from his chain, said : This is not a
" You
smoking carriage, sir." are very right," I answered,
"
at the same time emitting another puff of breath. I said this
"
was not a smoking carriage," he repeated. I
Ah, thought
" You are no
that was what you said," I replied. gentleman,
sir," whined a thin, sour-looking lady next to him apparently
"
his wife. No more are you, madam," I retorted. Then a
"
female on the other side began to cough. Oh, dear oh, dear
I

that horrid smoke it always brings on my cough," she

moaned. I continued to breathe heavily. Then a gentleman

with spectacles, who looked as if he knew lots about finance,
took up the cudgels. "Ve vill haf him turn out de nex*
station," he said. To which I replied that I did not understand
German.
The next station was duly reached, and then the foreign
gentleman and two others called for the guard. He came up.
"
What is it ? " " This person insists on smoking." " Morn-
"
ing, guard," I said, kindly examine this cigar, and tell me if
it has been lighted." The guard looked at it, returned it with a
"
No, sir," and slammed the door, and someone muttered
something about its being a silly monkey's trick.
Snobs, you will find, often collect autographs to show to
their friends. In a case like this forge a letter to your man
from some notorious scamp, couched in the most friendly of
terms, and surreptitiously slip it into his book. Then the next
"
person to whom the book is shown, as One or two nice
letters from people I have met," will read something of this
"
sort : My dear Jim, Your part of the swindling was done
grandly as it always is. The police are after the wrong man
once more. What a sly dog you are I
Keep up the church-
going it pays. Please let me have a cheque for my half as
soon as possible. Ever thine, CHARLES PEACE."
Many vain men again particularly those engaged in
politics are for ever on the look-out for references to their
important selves in the newspapers. There is only one thing
to do to this kind of individual. It is to drop him a card, saying,
 HOW TO GETYOURSELF DISLIKED 677
" am
I sending you a Birmingham Daily Post. It contains
something that will interest you." At the same time you
dispatch a copy of that paper unmarked. The important
man who receives it will then be driven wellnigh crazy in his
hunt to find a reference to himself. He will ultimately be forced
to read every single word in the paper and that, perhaps, more
than once. Well, it always does me a power of good to think
of the time that will thus be squandered, and the temper that
will be lost, for I need scarcely say there is not a line in that
paper that refers to the important man. I would strongly advise
that it be the Birmingham Daily Post, as that is the largest paper
I know.
To annoy a policeman successfully is quite one of the
"
little arts. Try this. Go up to Bobby and say, Pleeze can
"
you direct me " to such-and-such an address ? To which
Bobby answers, Go straight down there, take the first turning
to the right, the second to the left, and the first to the right
again." You are stupid ; you do not comprehend." Bobby
complies with your request to repeat it. Thanks. Then,
"
to start with, I go straight down in that direction ? (This
"
with an air of respectful, trembling humility.) Yessir." Then
walk off bang in the other direction.
Finally, let me conclude with a piece of advice a warning.
Without doubt, the person best adapted for the profession of a
Practical Joker is a champion of the racing track. The man
who lacks the necessary fleetness of foot, and yet wishes to
practical- joke, should wear at least treble-seated trousers.
 ARNOLD BENNETT
The Burglary

Like many other well-known authors Arnold Bennett abandoned

a legal career to devote himself to literature. His early novels
" "
dealing with The Five Towns soon established his reputation
as a brilliant delineator of life and character, with a great sense of
humour and a keen eye for dramatic values.
 THE BURGLARY

"
DAIN said :
Jee, if that portrait stays there
EiDY
much longer, you'll just have to take me off to Pirehill
one of these fine
mornings/'
of the great local hospital ; but it is also
Pirehill is the seat
the seat of the great local lunatic asylum ; and when the
"
inhabitants of the Five Towns say merely Pirehill/' they
mean the asylum.
" do declare I can't fancy
I
" my "food nowadays," said Lady
Dain, and it's all that portrait 1 She stared plaintively up
at the immenseoil-painting which faced her as she sat at the
breakfast-table in her spacious and opulent dining-room.
Sir Jehoshaphat made no remark.
Despite Lady Dain's animadversions upon it, despite the
undoubted fact that it was generally disliked in the Five Towns,
the portrait had cost a thousand pounds (some said guineas),
and, though not yet two years old, it was probably worth at
least fifteen hundred in the picture market. For it was a
Cressage it was one of the finest Cressages in existence.
It marked the summit of Sir Jehoshaphat's career. Sir
Jehoshaphat's career was, perhaps, the most successful and
brilliant in the entire social history of the Five Towns. This
famous man was the principal partner in Dain Brothers. His
brother was dead, but two of Sir Jee's sons were in the firm.
Dain Brothers were the largest manufacturers of cheap earthen-
ware in the district, catering chiefly for the American and
Colonial buyer. They had an extremely bad reputation for
cutting prices. They were hated by every other firm in the
Five Towns, and, to hear rival manufacturers talk, one would
gather the impression that. Sir Jee had acquired a tremendous
fortune by systematically selling goods under cost. They
were hated also by between eighteen and nineteen hundred
employees. But such hatred, however virulent, had not
marred the progress of Sir Jee's career.
681 Y*
68* ARNOLD BENNETT
He had meant to make a name, and he had made it. The
Five Towns might laugh at his vulgar snobbishness. The Five
Towns might sneer at his calculated philanthropy. But
he was, nevertheless, the best-known man in the Five Towns,
and it was precisely his snobbishness and his philanthropy
which had carried him to the top. Moreover, he had been the
first man in the Five Towns to gain a knighthood. The
public
Five Towns could not deny that it was very proud indeed of
this knighthood. The means by which he had won this
distinction were neither here nor there he had won it. And
was he not the father of his native borough ? Had he not been
three times mayor of his native borough ? Was not the whole
northern half of the county dotted and spangled by his bene-
factions, his institutions, his endowments ?
And it could not be denied that he sometimes tickled the
Five Towns as the Five Towns likes being tickled. There was,
for example, the notorious Sneyd incident. Sneyd Hall,
belonging to the Earl of Chell, lies a few miles south of the
Five Towns, and from it the pretty Countess of Chell exer-
cises thatcondescending meddlesomeness which so frequently
exasperates the Five Towns. Sir Jee had got his title by the
"
aid of the Countess Interfering Iris," as she is locally
dubbed. Shortly afterwards he had contrived to quarrel with
the Countess ; and the quarrel was conducted by Sir Jee as a
quarrel between equals, which delighted the district. Sir

Jee's final word in it had been to buy a

single tract of land
near Sneyd village, just off the Sneyd estate, and to erect
thereon a mansion quite as imposing as Sneyd Hall, and far
more up to date, and to call the mansion Sneyd Castle. A
mighty stroke I Iris was furious ; the Earl speechless with

fury. But they could do nothing. Naturally the Five Towns

was tickled.
It was apropos of the housewarming of Sneyd Castle, also
of the completion of his third mayoralty, and of the inaugura-
tion of the Dain Technical Institute, that the movement had
been started (primarily by a few toadies) for tendering to Sir
Jee a popular gift worthy to express the profound esteem in
which he was officially held in the Five Towns. It having
been generally felt that the gift should take the form of a
portrait, a Ideal dilettante had suggested Cressage, and when
the Five Towns had enquired into Cressage, and discovered
that that genius from the United States was celebrated
through-
 THE BURGLARY 683
out the civilised world, and regarded as the equal of Velasquez
(whoever Velazquez might be), and that he had painted half the
aristocracy, and that his income was regal, the suggestion was
accepted and Cressage was approached.
Cressage haughtily consented to paint Sir Jee's portrait
on his usual conditions ; namely, that the sitter should go
to the little village in Bedfordshire where Cressage had his
principal studio, and that the painting should be exhibited at
the Royal Academy before being shown anywhere else.
(Cressage was an R.A., but no one thought of putting R.A.
after his name. He was so big that, instead of the Royal
Academy conferring distinction on him, he conferred distinc-
tion on the Royal Academy.)
Sir Jee went to Bedfordshire and was rapidly painted, and
he came back gloomy. The Presentation Committee went to
Bedfordshire later to inspect the portrait, and they, too, came
back gloomy.
Then the Academy Exhibition opened, and the portrait,
showing Sir Jee in his robe and chain and in a chair, was
instantly hailed as possibly the most glorious masterpiece of
modern times. All the critics were of one accord. The
Committee and Sir Jee were reassured, but only partially,
and Sir Jee rather less so than the Committee. For there was
something in the enthusiastic criticism which gravely disturbed
them. An enlightened generation, thoroughly familiar with
the dazzling yearly succession of Cressage portraits, need not
be told what this something was. One critic wrote that Cres-
"
sage had displayed even more than his customary astounding
insight into character. . . ." Another critic wrote that
Cressage's observation was, as usual, "calmly and coldly
"
hostile." Another referred to the typical provincial mayor,
immortalised for the diversion of future ages.
Inhabitants of the Five Towns went to London to see the
work for which they had subscribed, and they saw a mean,
little, old man, with thin lips and a straggling grey beard and
shifty eyes, and pushful snob written all over him ; ridiculous
in his gewgaws of office. When you looked at the picture
close to, it was a meaningless mass of coloured smudges, but
when you stood fifteen feet away from it the portrait was
absolutely lifelike, amazing, miraculous. It was so wondrously
lifelike that some of the inhabitants of the Five Towns burst
out laughing. Many people felt sorry not for Sir Jee, but
684 ARNOLD BENNETT
for Lady Dain. Lady Dain was beloved and genuinely
respected. She was a simple, homely, sincere woman, her one
weakness being that she had never been able to see through
Sir Jee.
Of course, at the presentation ceremony the portrait had
been ecstatically referred to as a possession precious for ever,
and the recipient and his wife pretended to be overflowing
with pure joy in the ownership of it.
It had been hanging in the dining-room of Sneyd Castle
about sixteen months when Lady Dain told her husband
that would ultimately drive her into the lunatic asylum.
it
" "I
Don't be silly, wife/' said Sir Jee. wouldn't part with
that portrait for ten times what it cost."
This was, to speak bluntly, a downright lie. Sir Jee secretly
hated the portrait more than anyone hated it. He would have
been almost ready to burn down Sneyd Castle in order to get
rid of the thing. But it happened that on the previous evening,
in conversation with the magistrates' clerk, his receptive brain
had been visited by a less expensive scheme than burning down
the castle.
Lady Dain sighed.
" "
Are you going to town early ? she enquired.
" he said.
"
I'm on the rota
Yes," to-day."
He was chairman of the borough Bench of Magistrates.
As he drove into town he revolved his scheme, and thought it
wild and dangerous, but still feasible.

n
On the Bench that morning Sir Jee shocked Mr. Sheratt,
the magistrates' clerk, and he utterly disgusted Mr. Bourne,
superintendent of the borough police. (I do not intend to
name the name of the borough whether Bursley, Henbridge,
Knype, Longshaw, or Turnhill. The inhabitants of the Five
Towns will know without being told ; the rest of the world
lias no right to know.) There had recently occurred a some-
what thrilling series of burglaries in the district, and the
burglars (a gang of them was presumed) had escaped the
solicitous attentions of the police. But on the previous after-
noon an underling of Mr. Bourne's had caught a man who was
generally believed to be wholly or partly responsible for the
burglaries. The Five Towns breathed with relief, and con-
 THE BURGLARY 685

gratulated Mr. Bourne; and Mr. Bourne was well pleased

with himself. The Staffordshire Signal headed the item of news,
" Smart
Capture of a Supposed Burglar." The supposed
burglar gave his name as William Smith, and otherwise
behaved in an extremely suspicious manner.
Now, Sir Jee, sitting as chief magistrate in the police-
court, actually dismissed the charge against the man Over-
1

ruling his sole colleague on the Bench that morning, Alderman

Easton, he dismissed the charge against William Smith,
holding that the evidence for the prosecution was insufficient
to justify even a remand. No wonder that that pillar of the
law, Mr. Sheratt, was pained and shocked. At the conclusion
of the case Sir Jehoshaphat said that he would be glad to
speak with William Smith afterwards in the magistrates*
room, indicating that he sympathised with William Smith
and wished to exercise upon William Smith his renowned
philanthropy.
And so, about noon, when the Court majestically rose,
Sir Jee retired to the magistrates* room, where the humble
Alderman Easton was discreet enough not to follow -him,
and awaited William Smith. And William Smith came, guided
thither by a policeman, to whom, in parting from him, he
made a rude, surreptitious gesture.
Sir Jee, seated in the arrn-chair which dominates the other
chairs round the elm table in the magistrates* room, emitted a
preliminary
" cough.
Smith," he said sternly, leaning his elbows on the table,
"
you were very fortunate this morning, you know."
And he gazed at Smith.
Smith stood near the door, cap in hand. He did not re-
semble a burglar, who surely ought to be big, muscular, and
masterful. He resembled an undersized clerk who has been
out of work for a long time, but who has nevertheless found
the means to eat and drink rather plenteously. He was clothed
in a very shabby navy-blue suit, frayed at the wrists and ankles,
and greasy in front. His linen collar was brown with dirt
his fingers were dirty, his hair was unkempt and long, and -,

young and lusty black beard was sprouting on his chin. His
boots were not at all pleasant.
"
Yes, governor," Smith replied lightly, with Manchester
" "
accent. And what's your game ?
Sir Jee was taken aback. He, the chairman of the borough
686 ARNOLD BENNETT
Bench, and the leading philanthropist in the county, to be so
spoken to But what could he do ? He himself had legally
!

established Smith's innocence. Smith was free as air, and had

a perfect right to adopt any tone he chose to any man he chose.
And Sir Jee desired a service from William Smith.
"I
was hoping I might be of use to you/' said Sir Jehosha-
phat
" diplomatically. "
Well," said Smith, that's all right, that is. But none of

your philanthropic dodges, you know. I don't want to turn

over a new leaf, and I don't want a helpin' hand, nor none o*
those things. And what's more, I don't want a situation.
I've got all the situation as I need. But I never refuse money,
nor beer neither. Never did, and I'm forty years old next
month."
" "
I suppose burgling doesn't pay very well, does it ?

Sir Jee boldly ventured.

William Smith laughed coarsely.
" " But I
It pays right enough," said he. don't put my
money on my back, governor ;
I put it into a bit of
public-
house property when I get the chance."
" "
It may pay," said Sir Jee. But it is wrong. It is very
anti-social."
"
indeed
"
Smith returned drily.
"
Is it, !
Anti-social, is
it ? Well, I've heard it called plenty o' things in my time, but
never that. Now, I should have called it quite sociable-like
sort of making free with strangers, and so on. However," he
"I
added, came across a cove once as told me crime was
nothing but a disease, and ought to be treated as such. I asked
him for a dozen of port, but he never sent it."
"
Ever been caught before ? " Sir Jee enquired.
"
Not much " Smith exclaimed. " And this'll be a lesson
!

to me, I can tell you. Now, what are you getting at, governor ?
Because my time's money, my time is."
Sir Jee coughed once more.
"
Sir down," said Sir Jee.
And William Smith sat down opposite to him at the table,
and put his shiny elbows on the table precisely in the manner
of Sir Jee's elbows.
" "
Well he cheerfully encouraged Sir Jee.
?
"
How should you like to commit a burglary that was not a
"
crime ? said Sir Jee, his shifty eyes wandering round the
" "
room. A perfectly lawful burglary ?
 THE BURGLARY 687
" "
What an you getting at ? William Smith was genuinely
astonished.
"
At myresidence, Sneyd Castle/' Sir Jee proceeded,
"
there's a large portrait of myself in the dining-room that
"
I want to have stolen. You understand ?
" "
Stolen ?
" Yes. I want to
get rid of it. And I want er people
to think that it has been stolen."
"
Well, why don't you stop up one night and steal it your-
"
self, and then burn it ? William Smith suggested.
" "I
That would be deceitful," said Sir Jee gravely. could
not tell my friends that the portrait had been stolen if it had
not been stolen. The burglary must be entirely genuine."
" "
What's the figure ? said Smith curtly.
" "
?
" Figureare "
"
What you going to give me"
for the job ?
Give you for doing the job ? Sir Jee repeated, Ms secret
"
and ineradicable meanness aroused. Give you ? Why, I'm
giving you the opportunity to honestly steal a picture that's
worth two thousand pounds I daresay it would be worth
two thousand pounds in America and you want to be paid
into the bargain Do you know, my man, that people come
1

all the way from Manchester, and even London, to see that
"
portrait ? He told Smith about the painting.
"
Then why are you in such a stew to be rid of it ? " queried
the burglar.
" "
That's my afiair," said Sir Jee. I don't like it.
Lady
Dain doesn't like it. But it's a presentation portrait, and so I
"
can't you see, Mr. Smith ?
" "
And how am I going to dispose of when
I've got it ?
it
"
Smith demanded. You can't melt a portrait down as if
it

was silver. By what you say, governor, it's known all over the
blessed world. Seems to me I might just as well try to sell tHe
Nelson Column."
" " "
Oh, nonsense said Sir Jee.
1 Nonsense i You'll
sell it in America quite easily. It'll be a fortune to you.
Keep
it for a year first, and then send it to New York."

William Smith shook his head and drummed his fingers on

the table ; and then, quite suddenly, he brightened and said :
"
All right* governor. I'll take it
j,ust to oblige you."
on,
" "
When can you do it ? asked Sir Jee, hardly concealing
his joy. "To-night?"
688 ARNOLD BENNETT
" "
No/* said Smith mysteriously. I*m engaged to-night/*
" **
Well, to-morrow night ?
" Nor
to-morrow. I'm engaged to-morrow too.**
" You
seem to be very much engaged, my man/* Sir Jee
observed.
" ** "
What do you expect ? Smith retorted. Business is
business. I could do it the night after to-morrow.'*
" But that's Christmas
Eve/* Sir Jee protested.
"
What if it is Christmas Eve ? ** said Smith coldly. " Would
you prefer Christmas Day ? I'm engaged on Boxing Day,
#nd\he day after."
" Not in the Five I trust ?
**
Sir Jee remarked.
Towns,
" "
No/*said Smith shortly. The Five Towns is about
sucked dry.** The affair was arranged for Christmas Eve.
" "
Now," Sir Jee suggested, shall I draw you a plan of the
**
castle, so that you can
" Do
William Smith's face expressed terriffic scorn. you
"
suppose/' he said, as I haven't had plans o' your castle ever
since it was built ? What do you take me for ? I'm not a
blooming excursionist, I'm not. I'm a business man that's
what I am."
Sir Jee was snubbed, and he agreed submissively to all
William Smith's arrangements for the innocent burglary. He
perceived that in William Smith he had stumbled on a pro-
fessional of the highest class, and this good fortune pleased
him.
" There's
only one thing that riles me/* said Smith in
" and that is that you'll go and say that after you'd
parting,
done everything you could for me I went and burgled your
castle. And you'll talk of the ingratitude of the lower classes.
"
I know you, governor I

ill

On the afternoon of the 24th of December, Sir Jehoshaphat

drove home to Sneyd Castle from the principal of the three
Dain manufactories, and found Lady Dain superintending the
work of packing up trunks. He and she were to quit the castle
that afternoon in order to spend Christmas on the other side
of the Five Towns, under the roof of their eldest son, John,
who had a new house, a new wife, and a new baby (male).
John was a domineering person, and, being rather proud of his
 THE BURGLARY 689
house and all that was his, he had obstinately decided to have
hisown Christmas at his own hearth. Grandpapa and Grand-
mamma, drawn by the irresistible attraction of that novelty,
a grandson (though Mrs. John had declined to have the little
thing named Jehoshaphat), had yielded to John's solicitations,
and the family gathering, for the first time in history, was not to
occur round Sir Jee's mahogany.
Sir Jee, very characteristically, said nothing to Lady Dain

immediately. He allowed her to proceed with the packing of

the trunks, and then tea was served, and the time was approach-
ing for the carriage to come round to take them to the station
when at last he suddenly remarked :
"
I shan't be able to go with you to John's this afternoon/'
" " "
Oh, Jee she exclaimed. are tiresome.
" Really, you
1

Why couldn't you tell me before ?

"
I will come over to-morrow morning perhaps in time
for church," he proceeded, ignoring her demand for an
explanation.
He always did ignore her demand for an explanation.
Indeed, she only asked for explanations in a mechanical
and perfunctory manner she had long since ceased to expect
them. Sir Jee had been born like that devious, mysterious,
incalculable. And Lady Dain accepted him as he was. She
was somewhat surprised, therefore, when he went on :
"
I have some minutes of committee meetings that I really
must go carefully through and send off to-night, and you
know as well as I do that there'll be no chance of doing that at
John's. I've telegraphed to John."
He was obviously nervous and self-conscious.
" "
There's no food in the house," sighed Lady Dain. And
the servants are all going away except Callear, and he can't
cook your dinner to-night. I think I'd better stay myself and
look after you."
" "
You'll do no such thing," said Sir Jee decisively. As
for my dinner, anything will do for that. The servants have
been promised their holiday, to start from this evening, and
they must have it. I can manage."
Here spoke the philanthropist, with his unshakable sense of
justice.
So Lady Dain departed, anxious and worried, having pre-
viously arranged something cold for Sir Jee in the dining-
room, and instructed Callear about boiling the water for Sir
690 ARNOLD BENNETT
Jee's tea on Christmas morning. Callcar was the under-
coachman and a useful odd man. He it was who would drive
Sir Jee to the station on Christmas morning, and then guard
the castle and the stables thereof during the absence of the
family and the other servants. Callcar slept over the stables.
And after Sir Jee had consumed his cold repast in the dining-
room the other servants went, and Sir Jee was alone in the
castle, facing the portrait.
He had managed the affair fairly well, he thought* Indeed,
he had a talent for chicanc > and none knew it better than
himself. would have been dangerous if the servants had
It
been left in the castle. They might have suffered from in-
somnia, and heard William Smith, and interfered with the
operations of William Smith. On the other hand, Sir Jee had
no intention of leaving the castle, uninhabited, to the mercies
of William Smith. He felt that he himself must be on the spot
to see that everything went right and that nothing went wrong.
Thus the previously arranged scheme for the servants' holiday
fitted perfectly into his plans, and all that he had had to do
was to refuse to leave the castle till the morrow. It was ideal.
Nevertheless, he was a little afraid of what he had done, and
of what he was going to permit William Smith to do. It was
certainly dangerous certainly rather a wild scheme. How-
ever, the die was cast. And within twelve hours he would be
relieved of the intolerable incubus of the portrait.
And when he thought of the humiliations which that
portrait had caused him, when he remembered the remarks of
his sons concerning it, especially Johns remarks ; when he
recalled phrases about it in London newspapers, he squirmed >
and told himself that no scheme for getting rid of it could be
too wild and perilous. And, after all, the burglary dodge was
the only dodge, absoutely the only conceivable practical
method of disposing of the portrait except burning down the
castle. And surely it was preferable to a conflagration, to
arson Moreover, in case of fire at the castle some blundering
1

"
fool would be sure to cry : The portrait The portrait
1

"
must be saved I And the portrait would be saved.
He ga^ed at the repulsive, hateful thing. In the centre of
the lower part of the massive gold frame was the legend :
"
Presented to Sir Jehoshaphat Dain, Knight, as a mark of
public esteem and gratitude," etc. He wondered if William
Smith would steal the frame. It was to be hoped that he would
 THE BURGLARY 69!
not steal the frame. In fact, William Smith would find it very
difficultto steal that frame unless he had an accomplice or so.
" This " said
is the last time I shall see j>0# / Sir Jee to the
portrait.
Then he unfastened the catch of one of the windows in the
dining-room (as per contract with William Smith), turned
out the electric light, and went to bed in the deserted castle.
He went to bed, but not to sleep. It was no part of Sir
Jee's programme to sleep. He intended to listen, and he did
listen.
And about two o'clock, precisely the hour which William
Smith had indicated, he fancied he heard muffled and discreet
noises. Then he was sure that he heard them. William Smith
had kept his word. Then the noises ceased for a period, and
they recommenced. Sir Jee restrained his curiosity as long
as he could, and, when he could restrain it no more, he rose
and silently opened his bedroom window and put his head out
into the nipping night air of Christmas. And by good fortune
he saw the vast oblong of the picture, carefully enveloped in
sheets, being passed by a couple of dark figures through the
dining-room window to the garden outside. William Smith
had a colleague, then, and he was taking the frame as well as
the canvas. Sir Jee watched the men disappear down the
avenue, and they did not reappear. Sir Jee returned to bed.
Yes, he felt himself equal to facing it out with his family and
friends. He felt himself equal to pretending that he had no
knowledge of the burglary.
Having slept a few hours, he got up early and, half-dressed,
descended to the dining-room just to see what sort of a mess
William Smith had made.
The canvas of the portrait lay flat on the hearthrug, with
"
the following words written on it in chalk : This is no use
to me." It was the massive gold frame that had gone.
Further, as was soon discovered, all the silver had gone.
Not a spoon was left in the castle.
 STEPHEN LEACOCK
Soaked in Seaweed

In his serious moments Stephen Leacock is a professor of Political

Economy at McGill University, Montreal, but he is far better
known to the world as a parodist and writer of delightful
humorous sketches. Of these he has published Uterary Lapses,
Nonsense Novels and many other volumes.
 SOAKED IN SEAWEED
OR
UPSET IN THE OCEAN

(A.n Old-fashioned Sea-story)

was in August in 1867 that I stepped on board the

IT deck of the Saucy Sally; lying in dock at Gravesend, to fill
the berth of second mate.
Let me first say a word about myself.
I was a tall, handsome young fellow, squarely and powerfully
built, bronzed by the sun and the moon (and even copper-
coloured in spots from the effect of the stars), and with a face
in which honesty, intelligence, and exceptional brain-power
were combined with Christianity, simplicity, and modesty.
As I stepped on the deck, I could not help a slight feeling
of triumph as I caught sight of my sailor-like features reflected
in a tar-barrel that stood beside the mast, while a little later I
could scarcely repress a sense of gratification as I noticed them
reflected again in abucket of bilge-water.
"
Welcome on board, Mr. Blowhard," called out Cap-
tain Bilge, stepping out of the binnacle and shaking hands
across the taflfrail.

I saw before me a fine, sailor-like man from thirty to sixty,

clean-shaven except for an enormous pair of whiskers, a
heavy beard, and a thick moustache, powerful in build, and
carrying his beam well aft, in a pair of broad duck trousers,
across the back of which there would have been room to write
a history of the British Navy.
Beside him were the first and third mates, both of them
being quiet men of poor stature, who looked at Captain Bilge
with what seemed to me an apprehensive expression in their
eyes.
The vessel was on the eve of departure. Her deck presented
that scene of bustle and alacrity dear to the sailor's heart. Men
were busy nailing up the masts, hanging the bowsprit over the
695
696 STEPHEN LEACOCK
side, varnishing the lee-scuppers, and pouring hot tar down
the companion-way.
Captain Bilge, with a megaphone to his lips, kept calling out
to the men in his rough sailor fashion :
"Now, then, don't over-exert yourselves, gentlemen.
Remember, please, that we have plenty of time. Keep out of
the sun as much as you can. Step carefully in the rigging there,
Jones ; I fear it's a little high for you. Tut, tut, Williams, don't
get yourself so dirty with that tar ; you won't look fit to be
seen."
I stood leaning over the gaff of the mainsail and thinking

yes, thinking, dear reader, of my mother. I hope that you will

think none the less of me for that. Whenever things look dark,
I lean up against something and think of mother. If they

get positively black, I stand on one leg and think of father.

After that I can face anything.
Did I think, too, of another, younger than mother and
"
fairer than father ? Yes, I did. Bear up, darling," I had
whispered, as she nestled her head beneath my oilskins and
kicked out backward with one heel in the agony of her girlish
"
grief; in five years the voyage will be over, and, after three
more like it, I shall come back with money enough to buy a
second-hand fishing-net and settle down on shore."
Meantime the ship's preparations were complete. The masts
were all in position, the sails nailed up, and men with axes
were busy chopping away the gangway.
" "
All ready ? called the Captain.
"
Aye, aye, sir."
"
Then hoist the anchor on board and send a man down
with the key to open the bar."
Opening the bar The last rite of departure. How often in
!

my voyages have I seen it ; the little group of men, soon

to be exiled from their home, standing about with saddened
faces, waiting to see the man with the key open the bar held
there by some strange fascination.

Next morning, with a fair wind astern, we had buzzed

around the corner of England and were running down the
Channel.
I know no finer sight, for those who have never seen it,
than the English Channel. It is the highway of the world,
 SOAKED IN SEAWEED 697
Ships of all nations are passing up and down, Dutch, Scotch,
Venezuelan, and even American.
Chinese junks rush to and fro. Warships, motor-yachts,
icebergs, and lumber-rafts are everywhere. If I add to this
fact that so thick a fog hangs over it that it is entirely hidden
from sight, my readers can form some idea of the majesty of the
scene.

We had now been three days at sea. My first seasickness

was wearing off and I thought less of father.
On the third morning Captain Bilge descended to my
cabin.
" "
Mr. Blowhard," he said, I must ask you to stand double
watches."
"
What is the matter ? " I enquired.
"
The two other mates have fallen overboard," he said
and avoiding my eye.
uneasily,
"
I contented myself with saying, Very good, sir," but I
could not help thinking it a trifle odd that both the mates
should have fallen overboard in the same night.
Surely there was some mystery in this.
Two mornings later the
Captain appeared at the breakfast-
table with the same shifting and uneasy look in his eyes.
" sir ?
"
I asked,
" Anything wrong,
Yes," he answered, trying to appear at ease, and twisting
a fried egg to and fro between his fingers with such nervous
"
force as almost to break it in two, I regret to say we have
lost the bo'sun."
"
The bo'sun ? " I cried.
" "
Yes," said Captain Bilge more quietly, he is overboard.
I blame myself for it, partly. It was early this morning.
I was holding him up in my arms to look at an iceberg, and

quite accidentally, I assure you I dropped him overboard."

" "
Captain Bilge," I asked, have you taken any steps to
"
recover him ?
"
Not he
as yet," replied uneasily.
I looked at him fixedly, but said nothing.
Ten days passed.
The mystery thickened. On Thursday two men of the
starboard watch were reported missing. On Friday the
carpenter's assistant disappeared. On the night of Saturday a
698 STEPHEN LEACOC K

circumstance occurred which, slight as it was, gave me some

clue as to what was happening,
As I stood at the wheel about midnight, I saw the Captain
approach in the darkness, carrying the cabin-boy by the hind
leg. The lad was a bright little fellow, whose merry disposition
had already endeared him to me, and I watched with some
interest to see what the Captain would do to him. Arrived at
the stern of the vessel, Captain Bilge looked cautiously around
for a moment and then dropped the boy into the sea. For a
brief moment the lad's head appeared in the phosphorus of the
waves. The Captain threw a boot at him, sighed deeply, and
went below.
Here, then, was the key to the mystery The Captain was
1

throwing the crew overboard. Next morning we met at break-

fast as usual.
"Poor little William has fallen overboard," said. the Cap-
tain, seizing a strip of ship's bacon and tearing at it with his
teeth as if he almost meant to eat it.
"
Captain/' I said, greatly excited, and stabbing at a ship's
loaf in my agitation with such ferocity as almost to drive my
" "
knife into it, you threw that boy overboard !
"I did," said Captain Bilge, grown suddenly quiet. "I
threw them all over, and intend to throw the rest. Listen,
Blowhard ; you are young, ambitious, and trustworthy. I will
confide in you."
Perfectly calm now, he stepped to a locker, rummaged in it
a moment, and drew out a piece of faded yellow parchment,
which he spread on the table. It was a map or chart. In the
centre of it was a circle. In the middle of the circle was a small
dot and the letter T, while at one side of the map was a letter
N, and against it on the other side a letter S.
" "
What is this ? I asked.
"
Can you not guess ? " queried Captain Bilge. " It is a
desert island."
"
Ah " I rejoined, with a sudden flash of intuition, " and
!

N is for north, and S is for south."

"
Blowhard," said the Captain, striking the table with such
force as to cause a loaf of ship's bread to bounce up and down
"
three or four times, you've struck it. That part of it had not
yet occurred to me."
"
And the letter ? " I asked.
T
"
The treasure the buried treasure," said the Captain,
 SOAKED IN SEAWEED 699
"
turning the map over, he read from the back of it : The point
T indicates the spot where the treasure is buried under the
sand ; it consists of half a million Spanish dollars, and is
buried in a brown leather dress-suit case."
" "
And where is the island ? I enquired, mad with excite-
ment.
" "
That I do not know," said the Captain. I intend to sail

up"and down the parallels of latitude till I find it."

And meantime ? "

"
Meantime, the first thing to do is to reduce the numbers
of the crew, so as to have fewer hands to divide among.
Come, come," he added, in a burst of frankness, which made
"
me love the man in of his
spite shortcomings, will you join
me in this ? We'll throw them over, keeping the cook to the
all

last, dig up the treasure, and be rich for the rest of our lives."
Reader, do you blame me if I said yes ? I was young, ardent,
ambitious, full of bright hopes and boyish enthusiasm.
" "
Captain Bilge," I said, putting my hand in his, I am

yours."
" "
Good," he said. Now go forward to the forecastle and
get an idea what the men are thinking."
I went forward to the men's quarters a plain room in the
front of the ship, with only a rough carpet on the floor, a few
simple arm-chairs, writing-desks, spittoons of a plain pattern,
and small brass beds with blue-and-green screens. It was Sun-
day morning, and the men were mostly sitting about in their
dressing-gowns.
They rose as I entered, and curtseyed.
" "
Sir," said Tompkins, the bo'sun's mate, I think it my
duty to tell you there is a great deal of dissatisfaction among the
men."
Several of the men nodded.
"
They don't like the way the men keep going overboard,"
he continued, his voice rising to a tone of uncontrolled passion.
"
It is positively absurd, sir, and, if you will allow me to say so,
the men are far from pleased."
" "
Tompkins," I said sternly, you must understand that
my position will not allow me to listen to mutinous language of
this sort."
"
I returned to the Captain. I think the men mean mutiny,"
I said.
"
Good," returned Captain Bilge, rubbing his hands ;
7OO STEPHEN LEACOCK
" and of course/' he added
that will get rid of a lot of them,
musingly, looking out of the broad, old-fashioned porthole
at the stern of the cabin, at the heaving waves of the South
"I am expecting pirates at any time, and that will take
Atlantic,
off quite a few of them. However" and here he pressed the
"
bell for a cabin-boy kindly ask Mr. Tompkins to step this
way."
" said the Captain, as the bo'sun's mate
Tompkins,"
"
entered, be good enough to stand on the locker and stick
your head through the stern porthole and tell me what you
think of the weather."
Tompkins stood on the locker and put his head and
shoulders out of the port.
Taking a leg each, we pushed him through. We heard him
plump into the sea.
" "
Tompkins was easy," said Captain Bilge. Excuse me
as I enter his death in the log."
" " it
Yes," he continued presently, will be a great help
if they mutiny. I suppose they will, sooner or later. It's cus-

tomary to do so. But I shall take no step to precipitate it until

we have in with pirates. I am expecting them in
first fallen
these latitudes at any time. Meanwhile, Mr. Blowhard," he
"
said, rising,if you can continue to drop overboard one or
two more each week, I shall feel extremely grateful."
Three days later we rounded the Cape of Good Hope and
entered upon the inky waters of the Indian Ocean. Our course
lay now in zigzags, and, the weather being favourable, we
sailed up and down at a furious rate over a sea as calm as glass.
On the fourth day a pirate ship appeared. Reader, I do not
know if you have ever seen a pirate ship. The sight was one to
appal the stoutest heart. The entire ship was painted black,
a black flag hung at the masthead, the sails were black, and
on the deck people dressed all in black walked up and down
" "
arm-in-arm. The words Pirate Ship were painted in white
letters on the bow. At the sight of it our crew were visibly
cowed. It was a spectacle that would have cowed a dog.
The two ships were brought side by side. They were then
lashed tightly together with bag string and binder twine, and
a gang-plank laid between them. In a moment the pirates
swarmed upon our deck, rolling their eyes, gnashing their
teeth, and filing their nails.
Then the fight began. It lasted two hours with fifteen
 SOAKED IN SEAWEED
minutes off for lunch. It was awful. The men grappled with
1

one another, kicked one another from behind, slapped one

another across the face and in many cases completely lost their
temper and tried to bite one another. I noticed one gigantic
fellow brandishing a knotted towel, and striking right and left
among our men, until Captain Bilge rushed at him and struck
him flat across the mouth with a banana skin.
At the end of two hours, by mutual consent, the fight was
declared a draw, the points standing at sixty-one and a half
against sixty-two.
The ships were unlashed, and, with three cheers from each
crew, were headed on their way.
" "
Now, then," said the Captain to me, aside, let us see
how many of the crew are sufficiently exhausted to be thrown
overboard."
He went below. In a few minutes he reappeared, his face
deadly pale.
" "
Blowhard," he said, the ship is sinking. One of the
pirates (sheer accident, of course ; I blame no one) has kicked
a hole in the side. Let us sound the well."
We put our ear to the ship's well. It sounded like water.
The men were put to the pumps, and worked with the
frenzied effort which only those who have been drowned in a
sinking ship can understand.
At 6 p.m. the well marked one half an inch of water, at
nightfall three-quarters of an inch, and at daybreak, after a
night of unremitting toil, seven-eighths of an inch.
By noon of the next day the water had risen to fifteen-
sixteenths of an inch, and on the next night the sounding
showed thirty-one thirty-seconds of an inch of water in the
hold. The situation was desperate. At this rate of increase
few, if any, could tell where it would rise to in a few days.
That night the Captain called me to his cabin. He had a
book of mathematical tables in front of him, and great sheets
of vulgar fractions littered the floor on all sides.
" "
The ship is bound to sink," he said ; in fact, Blowhard,
she is sinking. I can prove it. It may be six months or it may
take years, but if she goes on like this, sink she must. There is
nothing for it but to abandon her."
That night, in the dead of darkness, while the crew were
busy at the pumps, the Captain and I built a raft.
Unobserved, we cut down the masts, chopped them into
702 STEPHEN LEACOCK
suitable lengths, kid them crosswise in a pile, and lashed
them tightly together with bootlaces.
Hastily we threw on board a couple of boxes of food and
bottles of drinking fluid, a sextant, a chronometer, a gas-meter,
a bicycle pump, and a few other scientific instruments. Then,
taking advantage of a roll in the motion of the ship, we
launched the raft, lowered ourselves upon a line, and, under
cover of the heavy dark of a tropical night, we paddled away
from the doomed vessel.
The break of day found us a tiny speck on the Indian Ocean.
We looked about as big as this (.).
In the morning, after dressing and shaving as best we could,
we opened our boxes of food and drink.
Then came the awful horror of our situation.
One by one the Captain took from the box the square blue
tins of canned beef which it contained. We counted fifty-two
in all. Anxiously and with drawn faces we watched until
the last can was lifted from the box. Asingle thought was in
our minds. When the end came the Captain stood up on the
raft, with wild eyes staring at the sky.
"
The can-opener 1 " he shrieked. " Just heaven, the can-
"
opener I He fell prostrate.
Meantime, with trembling hands, I opened the box Of
bottles. It contained lager-beer bottles, each with a patent tin

top. One by one I took them out. There were fifty-two in all.
As I withdrew the last one and saw the empty box before me,
"
I shroke out, The thing 1 The thing 1 Oh, merciful heaven I
The thing you open them with " I

I fell prostrate upon the Captain.

We awoke to find ourselves still a mere speck upon the
ocean. We felt even smaller than before.
Over us was the burnished copper sky of the tropics. The
heavy, leaden sea lapped the sides of the raft. All about us
was a litter of corned-beef cans and lager-beer bottles. Our
sufferings in the ensuing days were indescribable. We
beat
and thumped on the cans with our fists. Even at the risk of
spoiling the tins for ever we hammered them fiercely against the
raft. Westamped on them, bit at them, and swore at them.
We pulled and clawed at the bottles with our hands, and
chipped and knocked them against the cans, regardless even of
breaking the glass and ruining the bottles.
It was futile.
 SOAKED IN SEAWEED 703
Then day after day we sat in moody silence, gnawed with

hunger, with nothing to read, nothing to smoke, and practically

nothing to talk about.
On the tenth day the Captain broke silence.
"
Get ready the lots, Blowhard," he said. " It's got to come
to that."
" "
Yes/' I answered drearily, we're getting thinner every
day."
Then, with the awful prospect of cannibalism before us, we
drew lots.
I prepared the lots and held them to the Captain. He
drew the longer one.
" "
Which does that mean ? he asked, trembling between
"
hope and despair. Do I win ? "
" "
No, Bilge," I said sadly, you lose."

But on the days that followed the long,

I mustn't dwell

quiet days of lazy dreaming on the raft, during which I slowly

built up my strength, which had been shattered by privation.
They were days, dear reader, of deep and quiet peace, and yet
I cannot recall them without shedding a tear for the brave man
who made them what they were.
It was thefifth day after, that I was awakened from a sound

sleep by the bumping of the raft against the shore. I had

eaten perhaps over-heartily, and had not observed the vicinity
of land.
Before me was an
island, the circular shape of which, with
its low, sandy shore, recalled at once its identity.
"
The treasure island I " I cried. " At last I
am rewarded
for my
all heroism."
In a fever of haste I rushed to the centre of the island.
What was the sight that confronted me ? A
great hollow
scooped in the sand, an empty dress-suit case lying beside it,
and, on a ship's plank driven deep into the sand, the legend,
"Saucy Sal/j, October 1867." Sol the miscreants had made
good the vessel, headed it for the island of whose existence
they must have learned from the chart we so carelessly left
upon the cabin table, and had plundered poor Bilge and me of
our well-earned treasure !

Sick with the sense of human ingratitude, I sank upon the

sand.
704 STEPHEN LEACOCK
The island became my home.
There I eked out a miserable existence, feeding myself on
sand and gravel, and dressing myself in cactus plants. Years
passed. Eating sand and mud slowly undermined my robust
constitution. I fell I died. I buried myself.
ill.

Would that others who write sea-stories would do as much.

 P. G. WODEHOUSE
The Exit of Battling Billson

The creator of Psmith, Ukridge and above all the inimitable

Jeeves needs no. introduction. The name of P. G. Wodehouse
spells loud and prolonged laughter throughout the English-
speaking world. Here is one of the most irresistible tales from
the great Ukridge saga.
2
 THE EXIT OF BATTLING BILLSON
.Theatre Royal, Llunindnno, is in the middle of the
THE principal thoroughfare of that repellent town, and
immediately opposite its grubby main entrance there is a
lamp-post. Under this lamp-post, as I approached, a man was
standing. He was a large man, and his air was that of one who
had recently passed through some trying experience. There was
dust on his person, and he had lost his hat. At the sound of
my footsteps he turned, and the rays of the lamp -revealed the
familiar features of my old friend Stanley Featherstonhaugh
Ukridge.
" " "
Great Scott I I ejaculated. What are you doing
"
here ?
There was no possibility of hallucination. It was the
man himself in the flesh. And what Ukridge, a free agent,
could be doing in Llunindnno was more than I could imagine.
Situated, as its name implies, in Wales, it is a dark, dingy,
dishevelled spot, inhabited by tough and sinister men with
suspicious eyes and three-day beards ; and to me, after a mere
forty minutes* sojourn in the place, it was incredible that
anyone should be there except on compulsion.
Ukridge gaped at me
incredulously.
" "
Corky,old horse," he said, this is, upon my Sam,
without exception the most amazing event in the world's
history. The last bloke I expected to see."
" "
Same here. Is anything the matter ? I asked, eyeing his
bedraggled
" appearance. "
Matter ? I should say something was the matter I

snorted Ukridge, astonishment giving way to righteous

" "
indignation. They chucked me out !

"
Chucked you out. Who ? Where from ? "
"This infernal theatre, laddie. After taking my good
money, dash it At least, I got in on my face, but that has
1

nothing to do with the principle of the thing. Corky, my boy,

don't you ever go about this world seeking for justice, because
there's no such thing under the broad vault of heaven. I had

707
yo8 P. G. WODEHOUSE
just gone out for a breather after the first act, and when I came
back I found some fiend had pinched my seat. And, just be-
cause I tried to lift the fellow out by the ears, a dozen hired
assassins swooped down and shot me out. Me, I'll trouble you !

The injured party Upon my Sam," he said heatedly, with a

1

"
longing look at the closed door, I've a dashed good mind

"I shouldn't," I said soothingly. "After all, what does

it matter ? It's just one of those things that are bound to

happen from time to time. The man of affairs passes them

off with a light laugh."
" "
Yes, but
"
Come and have a drink."
The suggestion made him waver. The light of battle died
down in his eyes. He stood for a moment in thought.
"
You wouldn't bung a brick through the window ? "
he queried doubtfully.
" "
No, no !

"
Perhaps you're right."
He linked his arm in mine, and we crossed the road to
where the lights of a public house shone like heartening
beacons. The crisis was over.
"
Corky," said Ukridge, warily laying down his mug of
beer on the counter a few minutes later, lest emotion should
"
cause himto spill any of its precious contents, I can't get
over I simply cannot get over the astounding fact of your
being in this blighted town."
I explained my position. presence in Llunindnno was
My
due to the fact that the paper which occasionally made use of
my services as a special writer had sent me to compose a fuller
and more scholarly report than its local correspondent seemed

capable of concocting of the activities of one Evan Jones, the

latest of those revivalists who periodically convulse the emo-
tions of the Welsh mining population. His last and biggest
meeting was to take place next morning at eleven o'clock.
" "
But what are you doing here ? I asked.
"
What am I doing here ? said Ukridge. " Who, me ?
"

Why, where else would you expect me to be ? Haven't you

"
heard ?
"Heard what?"
" "
Haven't you seen the posters ?
"
What posters ? I only arrived an hour ago."
 THE EXIT OF BATTLING BILLSON 709
"
dear old horse I Then naturally you aren't abreast
My
of local He drained his mug, breathed contentedly,
affairs."
and led me out into the street.
"
Look 1 "
He was pointing to a poster, boldly lettered in red and black,
which decorated the side-wall of the Bon Ton Millinery
Emporium. The street-lighting system of Llunindnno is

defective, but I was able to read what it said :

ODDFELLOWS' HALL
Special Ten-Round Contest
LLOYD THOMAS
(Llunindnno)
v.

BATTLING BILLSON
(Bermondsey)
"
Comes off to-morrow night," said Ukridge. And I
don't mind telling you, laddie, that I expect to make a
colossal fortune."
" "
Are you still managing the Battler ? I said, surprised
at this dogged perseverance. "I should have thought that
after your two last experiences you would have had about

enough of it."
"
Oh, he means business this time ! I've been talking to
him like a father."
" "
How much does he get ?
"
Twenty quid."
"Twenty quid? Well, where does the colossal fortune
come in ? Your share will only be a tenner."
"
No, my boy. You haven't got on to my devilish shrewd-
ness. I'm not in on the purse at all this time. I'm the manage-
ment."
" "
, The management ?
"
Well, part of
it. You remember Isaac O'Brien,
the bookie
I was partner with chump
till Loonie
that Coote smashed the
business ? Izzy Previn is his real name. We've gone shares in
this thing. Izzy came down a week ago, hired the hall, and
looked after the advertising and so on ; and I arrived with
good old Billson this afternoon. We're giving him twenty
quid, and the other fellow's getting another twenty ; and all
the rest of the cash Izzy and I split on a fifty-fifty basis.
Affluence, laddie That's what it means. Affluence beyond
!

the dreams of a Monte Cristo. Owing to this Jones fellow the

710 P. G. WODEHOUSE
place is crowded, and every sportsman for miles around will be
there to-morrow at five bob a head, cheaper seats two-and-
six, and standing room one shilling. Add lemonade and fried
fish privileges, and you have a proposition almost without

parallel in die annals of commerce. I wouldn't be more on the

velvet if they gave me a sack and a shovel and let me loose in
die Mint."
I congratulated him in suitable terms,
" "
How is the Battler ? I asked.
"
Trained to an ounce. Come and see him to-morrow
morning."
"
I can't come in the morning. I've got to go to this Jones
meeting."
"
Oh, yes. Well, make it early in the afternoon, then.
Don't come later than three, because he will be resting.
We're at No. 7, Caerleon Street. Ask for the Cap and
'
Feathers public house, and turn sharp to the left."
I was in a curiously uplifted mood on the following after-
noon as I set out to pay my respects to Mr. Billson. This
was the first time I had had occasion to attend one of these
revival meetings, and the effect it had had on me was to make
me feel as if I had been imbibing large quantities of cham-
pagne to the accompaniment of a very large orchestra. Even
before the revivalist rose to speak the proceedings had had
an effervescent quality singularly unsettling to the sober
mind, for the vast gathering had begun to sing hymns directly
they took their seats and, while the opinion I had formed
;

of the inhabitants of Llunindnno was not high, there was no

denying their vocal powers. There is something about a
Welsh voice when raised in song that no other voice seems to
possess a creepy, heart-searching quality that gets right into
a man's inner consciousness and stirs it up with a pole. And
on top of this had come Evan Jones's address.
It did not take me long to understand why this man had

gone through the countryside like a flame. He had magnetism,

intense earnestness, and the voice of a prophet crying in the
wilderness. His fiery eyes seemed to single out each individual
in the hall, and, every time he paused, sighings and wailings
went up like the smoke of a furnace. And then, after speaking
for what I discovered with amazement, on consulting my
watch, was considerably over an hour, he stopped. And I
blinked like an aroused somnambulist, shook myself to make
 THE EXIT OF BATTLING B I LL S O i* 711
sure I was still there, and came away. And now, as I walked
"
in search of the Cap and Feathers/' I was, as I say, oddly
exhilarated ; and I was strolling along in a sort of trance
when a sudden uproar jerked me from thoughts. I looked
" "
about me, and saw the sign of the Cap and Feathers
suspended over a building across the street.
It was a dubious-looking hostelry in a dubious neighbour-
hood ; and the sounds proceeding from its interior were not
reassuring to a peace-loving pedestrian. There was a good
deal of shouting going on, and much smashing of glass ; and,
as I stood there, the door flew open and a familiar figure

emerged rather hastily. A moment later there appeared in

the doorway a woman.
She was a small woman, but she carried the largest and
most intimidating mop I had ever seen. It dripped dirty
water as she brandished it ; and the man$ glancing appre-
hensively over his shoulder, proceeded rapidly on his way.
" "
Hullo, Mr. Billson I said, as he shot by me.
1

It was not, perhaps, the best-chosen moment for endea-

vouring to engage him in light conversation. He showed no

disposition whatever to linger. He vanished round the
corner, and the woman, with a few winged words, gave her
mop a victorious flourish and re-entered the public house. I
walked on, and a little later a huge figure stepped cautiously
out of an alley-way and fell into step at my side.
"
Didn't recognise you, mister," said Mr. Billson
apologetically.
"
You seemed in rather a hurry," I agreed.
" "
R I said Mr.Billson, and a thoughtful silence descended
upon him for a space.
" "
Who," I asked, tactlessly perhaps, was your lady
friend?"
Mr. Billson looked a trifle sheepish. Unnecessarily, in
my opinion. Even heroes may legitimately quail before a
mop wielded by an angry woman.
"
She come out of a back room," he said, with embar-
"
rassment. Started makin' a fuss when she saw what I'd
done. So I come away. You can't dot a woman," argued
Mr. Billson chivalrously.
" " "
not," I agreed. But what was the trouble ?
" ICertainly
been doin* good," said Mr. Billson virtuously.
" "
Doing good ?
712 P. G. WODEHOUSE
their beers/'
" Spillin'
Whose beers ?
"
" All of their beers. went in, and there was a lot of sinful
I
fellers drinkin' beers. So I spilled 'em. All of 'em. Walked
round and spilled all of them beers, one after the other. Not
'arf surprised, them pore sinners wasn't/' said Mr. Billson,
with what sounded to me not unlike a worldly chuckle.
"
I can readily imagine it."
"
Huh ? "
"I I bet they were.'*
" say
R " said Mr. Billson. He frowned. " Beer," he pro-
1

" ain't
ceeded, with cold austerity, right. Sinful, that's what
beer is. It stingeth like a serpent and biteth like a ruddy
adder."
My mouth watered a little. Beer like that was what I had
been scouring the country for for years. I thought it impru-
dent, however, to say so. For some reason which I could not
fathom, my companion, once as fond of his half-pint as the
next man, seemed to have conceived a puritanical hostility
to the beverage. I decided to change the subject.
" I'm
looking forward to seeing you fight to-night," I said;
He eyed me woodenly.
" "
Me ?
"
Yes, at the Oddfellows' Hall, you know."
He shook his head.
"I ain't fighting at no Oddfellows' Hall," he replied.
"
Not at no Oddfellows' Hall nor nowhere else I'm not
fighting, not to-morrow nor no night." He pondered stolidly,
and then, as if coming to the conclusion that his last sentence
could be improved by the addition of a negative, added
" "
No 1

And, having he suddenly stopped and stiffened

said this,
like a pointing dog ; and, looking up to see what interesting
object by the wayside had attracted his notice, I perceived
that we were standing beneath another public house sign
"
that of the Blue Boar." Its windows were hospitably open,
and through them came a musical clinking of glasses. Mr.
Billson licked his lips with a quiet relish.
"
'Scuse me, mister," he said, and left me abruptly.
My one thought now was to reach Ukridge as quickly as
possible, in order to acquaint him with these sinister develop-
ments. For I was startled. More, I was alarmed and uneasy.
 THE EXIT OF BATTLING BILLSON 713
In one of the star performers at a special ten-round contest,
scheduled to take place that evening, Mr. Ellison's attitude
seemed to me peculiar, not to say disquieting. So, even though
a sudden crash and uproar from the interior of the
"
Blue
"
Boar called invitingly to me to linger, I hurried on, and
neither stopped, looked, nor listened until I stood on the steps
of No. 7, Caerleon Street.
And eventually, after my prolonged ringing and knocking
had finally induced a female of advanced years to come up
and answer the door, I found Ukridge lying on a horsehair
sofa in the far corner of the sitting-room.
Iunloaded my grave news. It was wasting time to try to
break it gently.
"
Fve just seen Billson," I said, " and he seems to be in
rather a strange mood. In fact, I'm sorry to say, old man, he
"
rather gave me the impression
" "
That he wasn't going to fight to-night ? said Ukridge,
"
with a strange calm. Quite correct. He isn't. He's just
been in here to tell me so. What I like about the man is his
consideration for all concerned. He doesn't want to upset
anybody's arrangements."
"
But what's the trouble ? Is he kicking about only getting
"
twenty pounds ?
" "
No. He thinks fighting's sinful !

"What?"
"
Nothing more or less, boy. Like chumps,
Corky, my
we took our eyes off him for half a second this morning, and
he sneaked off to that revival meeting. Went out shortly after
a light and wholesome breakfast for what he called a bit of a
mooch round, and came in half an hour ago a changed man.
Full of loving-kindness, curse him Nasty shifty gleam in his
1

eye. Told us he thought fighting sinful and it was all off,

and then buzzed out to spread the Word."
I was shaken to the core. Wilberforce Billson, the peerless
but temperamental Battler, had never been an ideal pugilist
to manage, but hitherto he had drawn the line at anything like
this. Other problems which he might have brought up
little
for his manager to solve might have been overcome by
patience and tact ; but not this one. The psychology of Mr.
Billson was as an open book to me. He possessed one of
those single-track minds, capable of accommodating but one
idea at a time, and he had the tenacity of the simple soul.
 714 * G. WODEHOUSE
Argument would leave him unshaken. On that bone-like
head Reason would beat in vain. And, these things being so,
I was at a loss to account for Ukridge's extraordinary calm.
His fortitude in the hour of ruin amazed me.
His next remark, however, offered an explanation.
"
We're putting on a substitute/' he said.
I was relieved.
"
Oh, you've got a substitute ? That's a bit of luck. Where
did you find him ? ",
"
As a matter of fact, laddie, I've decided to go on myself."
"What! You"
"
Only way out, my boy. No other solution."
the man. Years of the closest acquaintance with
I stared at
S. F. Ukridge had rendered me almost surprise-proof at any-
thing he might do, but this was too much.
"
Do you mean to tell me that you seriously intend to go
"
out there to-night and appear in the ring ? I cried.
"
Perfectly straightforward, business-like proposition, old
"
man," said Ukridge stoutly. I'm in excellent shape. I
"
sparred with Billson every day while he was training.
" "
Yes, but
"The fact is, laddie, you don't realise my
potentialities.
Recently, it's true, I've allowed myself to become slack, and
what you might call damme, when I was on
enervated, but,
that trip in that tramp-steamer, scarcely a week used to go by
without my having a good earnest scrap with somebody.
Nothing barred," said Ukridge, musing lovingly on the care-
"
free past, except biting and bottles."
"
Yes, but, hang it a professional pugilist."
Well, to be absolutely accurate, laddie/' said Ukridge,
suddenly .dropping the heroic manner and becoming con-
"
fidential, the thing's going to be fixed. Izzy Previn has seen
the bloke Thomas's manager, and has arranged a gentleman's
agreement. The manager, a Class A
blood-sucker, insists on
us giving his man another twenty pounds after the fight, but
that can't be helped. In return, the Thomas bloke consents to
play light for three rounds, at the end of which period, laddie,
he will tap me on the side of the head and I shall go down and
out, a popular loser. What's more, I'm allowed to hit him
hard once just so long as it isn't on the nose. So, you see,
a little tact, a little diplomacy, and the whole thing fixed up as
satisfactorily as anyone could wish."
 THE EXIT OF BATTLING BILLSON 715
" But
suppose the audience demands its money back when
"
they find they're going to see a substitute ?

"My dear old horse," protested Ukridge, "surely you

don't imagine that a man with a business head like mine
overlooked that ? Naturally I'm going to fight as Battling
Billson. Nobody knows him in this town. I'm a good big
chap, just as much a heavy-weight as he is. No, laddie, pick
how you will, you can't pick a flaw in this."
" "
hit him on the nose ?
" Why mayn't you
I don't know. People have these strange whims. And
now, Corky, my boy, I think you had better leave me. I
ought to relax."
The Oddfellows' Hall was certainly filling up nicely when
I arrived that night. Indeed, it seemed as though Llunindnno's
devotees of sport would cram it to the roof. I took my place
in the line before the pay-window, and, having completed the
business end of the transaction, went in and enquired my way
to the dressing-rooms. And presently, after wandering
through divers passages, I came upon Ukridge, clad for the
ring and swathed in his familiar yellow mackintosh.
" "
You're going to have a wonderful house," I said. The
populace is rolling up in shoals."
He received the information with a strange lack of enthusi-
asm. I looked at him in concern, and was disquieted by his
forlorn appearance. That face which had beamed so triumph-
antly at our last meeting was pale and set. Those eyes, which
normally shone with the light of an unquenchable optimism,
seemed dull and careworn. And even as I looked at him he
seemed to rouse himself from a stupor and, reaching out for
his shirt, which hung on a near-by peg, proceeded to pull it

over his head.

" "
What's the matter ? I asked.
His head popped out of the shirt, and he eyed me wanly.
" I'm
off," he announced briefly.
" Off? How do "
you mean, off ? I tried to soothe what
"
I took to be an eleventh-hour attack of stage-fright. You'll
be all right."
Ukridge laughed hollowly.
"
Once the gong goes, you'll forget the crowd."
"
It isn't the crowd," said Ukridge, in a pale voice, climbing
"
Into his trousers. Corky, old man," he went on earnestly,
if ever you feel your angry passions rising to the point where
716 P. G. WODEHOUSE
you want to swat a stranger in a public place, restrain yourself.
There's nothing in Thomas was in here a
it. This bloke
moment ago with manager tohis
settle the final details. He's
"
the fellow I had the trouble with at the theatre last night I
" "
The man you pulled out of the seat by his ears ? I
gasped.
" Ukridge nodded.
Recognised me at once, confound him, and it was all his
manager, a thoroughly decent cove whom I liked, could do
to prevent him getting at me there and then."
" Good Lord " I
said, aghast at this grim development,
I

yet thinking how thoroughly characteristic it was of Ukridge,

when he had a whole townful of people to quarrel with, to
pick the one professional pugilist. At this moment, when
Ukridge was lacing his left shoe, the door opened and a man
came in.
The newcomer was stout, dark, and beady-eyed, and from
his manner of easy comradeship, and the fact that when he
spoke he supplemented words with the language of the
waving palm, I deduced that this must be Mr. Izzy Previn,
recently trading as Isaac O'Brien. He was cheeriness itself.
" he
"
Veil," with ill-timed
said, how'th the exuberance,
"
boy ? The boy cast a sour look athim.
"
The house," proceeded Mr. Previn, with an almost
"
lyrical is
enthusiasm, full. Crammed, jammed,
abtholutely
and packed. They're hanging from the roof by their eyelids.
It'th goin' to be a knock-out."
The expression, considering the circumstances, could hardly
have been less happily chosen. Ukridge winced painfully ;
then spoke in no uncertain voice.
" I'm not "
going to fight !

Mr. Previn's exuberance fell from him like a garment. His

cigar dropped from his mouth, and his beady eyes glittered
with sudden consternation.
"
What do mean ? "
" Rather anyou
unfortunate thing has happened," I explained.
"It seems that this man Thomas is a fellow Ukridge had
trouble with at the theatre last night."
"
What do you mean Ukridge ? " broke in Mr. Previn.
" This is Battling Billson."
"I've told Corky all about it," said Ukridge over his
"
shoulder as he laced his right shoe. Old pal of mine."
" " "
Oh I said Mr. Previn, relieved. Of course, if Mr.
 THE EXIT OF BATTLING,BILLSON 717

Corky a friend of yours, and quite understands that all this

is

is quite private among ourselves and don't want talking about

outside, all right. But what were you thaying ? I can't make
head or tail of it. How
do you mean you are not goin' to
fight ? Of course you're goin' to fight."
"
Thomas was in here just now/' I said. " Ukridge and
he had a row at the theatre last night, and naturally Ukridge
is he will go back on the agreement."
afraid
"
Nonthense," said Mr. Previn, and his manner was that
"
of one soothing a refractory child. He won't go back on
the agreement. He promised he'd play light, and he will play
light. Gave me his word as a gentleman."
"
He isn't a gentleman," Ukridge pointed out moodily.
" "
But lithen 1

I'm going to get out of here as quick as I dashed well

can."
" "
Conthider 1
pleaded Mr. Previn, clawing great chunks
out of the air.
Ukridge began to button his collar.
"
Reflect
"
moaned Mr. Previn. " There's that lovely
1

audience all sitting out there, jammed like thardincs, waiting

for the thing to start. Do you expect me to go and tell 'em
there ain't goin' to be no fight ? I'm thurprised at you," said
Mr. Previn, trying an appeal to his pride. " Where's your manly
spirit ? A
big, husky feller like you, that's
"
done all sorts of
scrappin' in your time
" "
Not," Ukridge pointed out coldly, with any damned
professional pugilists who've got a grievance against me."
"
He won't hurt you."
"
He won't get the chance."
"
You'll be as safe and cosy in that ring with him as if you
was playing ball with your little thister."
Ukridge said he hadn't got a little sister.
" "
But think implored Mr. Previn, flapping like a seal.
1

" Think of the

money "Do you realise we'll have to return
!

it all, every
penny of it ?
A spasm of pain passed over Ukridge's face, but he con-
tinued buttoning his collar.
"
And not only that," said Mr. Previn, " but, if you ask me,
they'll be so mad when they hear there ain't goin' to be no
fight, they'll lynch me."
Ukridge seemed to regard this possibility with calm.
yi8 P. G. WODEHOUSE
<c
And you, too/' added Mr. Previn.
Ukridge started. It was a plausible theory, and one that had
not occurred to him before. He paused irresolutely. And at
this moment a man came hurrying in.
"What's the matter?" he demanded fussily. "Thomas
"
has been in the ring for five minutes. Isn't your man ready ?
" In one half
tick," said Mr. Previn. He turned meaningly
"
to Ukridge. That is right, ain't it ? You'll be ready in
half a tick?"
Ukridge nodded wanly. In silence he shed shirt, trousers,
shoes, and collar, parting from them as if they were old friends
whom he never expected to see again. One wistful glance he
cast at his mackintosh, lying forlornly across a chair; and
then, with more than a suggestion of a funeral procession, we
started down the corridor that led to the main hall. The hum
of many voices came to us ; there was a sudden blaze of
light, and we were there,
I must say, for the sport-loving citizens of Llunindnno,
that they appeared to be fair-minded men. Stranger in their
midst though he was, they gave Ukridge an excellent reception
as he climbed into the ring ; and for a moment, such is the
tonic effect of applause on a large scale, his depression seemed
to lift. A faint, gratified smile played about his drawn mouth,
and I think it would have developed into a bashful grin had he
not at this instant caught sight of the redoubtable Mr. Thomas
towering massively across the way. I saw him blink, as one
who, thinking absently of this and that, walks suddenly into
a lamp-post ; and his look of unhappiness returned.
My heart bled for him. If the offer of my little savings
in the bank could have transported him then and there to the
safety of his London lodgings, I would have made it un-
reservedly. Mr. Previn had disappeared, leaving me standing
at the ring-side, and, as nobody seemed to object, I remained
there, thus getting an excellent view of the mass of bone and
sinew that made up Lloyd Thomas. And there was certainly
plenty of him to see.
Mr. Thomas was, I should imagine, one of those men who.
do not look their most formidable in mufti for otherwise I
could not conceive how even the fact that he had stolen his
seat could have led Ukridge to lay the hand of violence upon
him. In the exiguous costume of the ring he looked the sort
from whom a sensible man would suffer almost any affront
 THE EXIT OF BATTLING BILLSON 719
with meekness. He was about six foot in height, and where-
ever a man could bulge with muscle he bulged. For a moment
my anxiety for Ukridge was tinged with a wistful regret that
I should nevef see this sinewy citizen in action with
Mr. Billson. It would, I mused, have been a battle worth
coming even to Llunindnno to see.
The referee, meanwhile, had been introducing the principals
in the curt, impressive fashion of referees. He now retired,
and with a strange foreboding note a gong sounded on the
farther side of the ring. The seconds scuttled under the ropes.
The man Thomas, struggling it seemed to me with
powerful emotions, came ponderously out of his corner.
In these reminiscences of a vivid and varied career, it is
as a profound thinker that I have for the most part had occasion
to portray Stanley Featherstonhaugh Ukridge. I was now to
be reminded that he also had it in him to be a doer. Even as
Mr. Thomas shuffled towards him, his left fist shot out and
thudded against the other's ribs. In short, in a delicate and
difficult situation, Ukridge was comporting himself with an

adequacy that surprised me. However great might have been

his reluctance to embark on this contest, once in, he was doing
well.
And then, half-way through the first round, the truth
dawned upon me.
Injured though Mr. Thomas had been, the gentleman's
agreement still held. The word of a Thomas was as good as
his bond. Poignant though his dislike of Ukridge might be,
nevertheless, having pledged himself to mildness and self-
restraint for the first three rounds, he meant to abide by the
contract. Probably, in the interval between his visit to
Ukridge's dressing-room and his appearance in the ring, his
manager had been talking earnestly to him. At any rate,
whether it was managerial authority or his own sheer nobility
of character that influenced him, the fact remains that he
treated Ukridge with a quite remarkable forbearance, and the
latter reached his corner at the end of round one practically
intact.
And it was this that undid him. No sooner had the gong
sounded for round two than out he pranced from his corner,
thoroughly above himself. He bounded at Mr. Thomas like
a dervish.
I could read his thoughts as if he had spoken themj Nothing
720 P. G. WODEHOUSE
could be clearer than that he had altogether failed to grasp
the true position of affairs. Instead of recognising his adver
sary's forbearance for what it was, and being decently grateful
for it, he was filled with a sinful pride. Here, he told himself,
was a man who had a solid grievance against him and, dash
it, the fellow couldn't hurt him a bit. What the whole thing
boiled down to, he felt, was that he, Ukridge, was better than
he had suspected, a man to be reckoned with, and one who
could show a distinguished gathering of patrons of sport
something worth looking at. The consequence was that,
where any sensible person would have grasped the situation
at once and endeavoured to show his appreciation by toying
with Mr. Thomas in a gingerly fashion, whispering soothing
compliments into his ear during the clinches, and generally
trying to lay the foundations of a beautiful friendship against
the moment when the gentleman's agreement should lapse,
Ukridge committed the one unforgivable act. There was a
brief moment of fiddling and feinting in the centre of the
ring, then a sharp smacking sound, a startled yelp, and Mr.
Thomas, with gradually reddening eye, leaning against the
ropes and muttering to himself in Welsh.
Ukridge had hit him on the nose !

Once more I must pay a tribute to the fair-mindedness of

the sportsmen of Llunindnno. The stricken man was one of
them possibly Llunindnno's favourite son yet nothing
could have exceeded the heartiness with which they greeted
the visitor's achievement. A shout went up as if Ukridge had
done each individual present a personal favour. It continued
as he advanced buoyantly upon his antagonist, and to show
how entirely Llunindnno audiences render themselves im-
partial and free from any personal bias it became redoubled

as Mr. Thomas, swinging a fist like a ham, knocked Ukridge

flat on his back. Whatever happened, so long as it was
sufficiently violent, seemed to be all right with that broad-
minded audience.
Ukridge heaved himself laboriously to one knee. His
sensibilities had been ruffled by this unexpected blow, about
fifteen times as hard as the others he had received since the

beginning of the affray, but he was a man of mettle and

determination. However humbly he might quail before a
threatening landlady, or however nimbly he might glide down
a side street at the sight of an approaching creditor, there was
 THE EXIT OF BATTLING BILLSON 721

nothing wrong with his fighting heart when it came to a

straight issue between man and man, untinged by the finan-
cial element. He struggled painfully to his feet, while Mr.
Thomas, now definitely abandoning the gentleman's agree-
ment, hovered about him with ready fists, only restrained by
the fact that one of Ukridge's gloves still touched the floor.
It was at this tensest of moments that a voice spoke in my
" "
ear. 'Alf a mo', mister 1

A hand pushed me gently aside. Something large obscured

the lights. And Wilberforce Billson, squeezing under the
ropes, clambered into the ring.
For the purposes of the historian it was a good thing that
for the first few moments after this astounding occurrence a
dazed silence held the audience in its grip. Otherwise it might
have been difficult to probe motives and explain underlying
causes. I think the spectators were either too surprised to
shout, or else they entertained for a few brief seconds the idea
that Mr. Billson was the forerunner of a posse of plain-clothes
police about to raid the place. At any rate, for a space they
were silent, and he was enabled to say his say.
" " "
Fightin'," bellowed Mr. Billson, ain't right I

There was an uneasy rustle in the audience. The voice of

"
the referee came thinly, saying, Here Hi " I I

"
Sinful," explained Mr. Billson, in a voice like a fog-horn.
His oration was interrupted by Mr. Thomas, who was
endeavouring to get round him and attack Ukridge. The
Battler
" pushed him ge/itly
"
back.
Gents," he roared, I, too, have been a man of voylence 1

I 'ave struck men in anger. R, yes But I 'ave seen the light.
!

"
Oh, my brothers
The rest of his remarks were lost.. With a startling sudden-
ness the frozen silence melted. In every part of the hall
indignant seatholders were rising to state their views.
But it is doubtful whether, even if he had been granted
a continuance of their attention, Mr. Billson would have spoken
to much greater length ; for at this moment Lloyd Thomas,
who had been gnawing at the strings of his gloves with the
air of a man who is able to stand just so much and whose
limit has been exceeded, now suddenly shed those obstacles
to the freer expression of self, and, advancing barehanded,
smote Mr. Billson violently on the jaw.
Mr. Billson turned. He was pained, one could see that, but
722 P. G. WODEHOUSE
more spiritually For a moment he seemed
than physically.
uncertain how to proceed.Then he turned the other cheek.
The fermenting Mr. Thomas smote that, too.
There was no vacillation or uncertainty now about Wilber-
forcc Billson. He plainly considered that he had done all that
could reasonably be expected of any pacifist. A man has only
two cheeks. He flung up a mast-like arm to block a third blow,
countered with an accuracy and spirit which sent his aggressor
reeling to the ropes ; and then, swiftly removing his coat,
went into action with the unregenerated zeal that had made
him the petted hero of a hundred water-fronts. And I,
tenderly scooping Ukridge up as he dropped from the ring,
hurried him away along the corridor to his dressing-room.
I would have given much to remain and witness a mix-up
which, if the police did not interfere, promised to be the battle
of the ages, but the claims of friendship are paramount.
Ten minutes later, however, when Ukridge, washed,
clothed, and restored as near to the normal as a man may be
who has received the full weight of a Lloyd Thomas on a vital
spot, was reaching for his mackintosh, there filtered through
the intervening doors and passage-ways a sudden roar so
compelling that my sporting spirit declined to ignore it.
"
Back in a minute, old man/' I said.
And, urged by that ever-swelling roar, I cantered back to
the hall.
In the interval during which I had been ministering to my
stricken friend a certain decorum seemed to have been restored
to the proceedings. The conflict had lost its riotous abandon.
Upholders of the decencies of debate had induced Mr. Thomas
to resume his gloves, and a pair had also been thrust upon the
Battler. Moreover, it was apparent that the etiquette of the
tourney now governed the conflict, for rounds had been
introduced, and one had just finished as I came in view of the
ring. Mr. Billson was leaning back in a chair in one corner
undergoing treatment by his seconds, and in the opposite
corner loomed Mr. Thomas ; and one sight of the two men
was enough to tell me what had caused that sudden tremendous
outburst of enthusiasm among the patriots of Llunindnno.
In the last stages of the round which had just concluded, the
native son must have forged ahead in no uncertain manner.
Perhaps some chance blow had found its way through the
Battler's guard, laying him open and defenceless to the final
 THE EXIT OF BATTLING BILLSON 723
attack. For this attitude, as he sagged in his corner, was that
of one whose moments are numbered. His eyes were dosed,
his mouth hung open, and exhaustion was writ large upon
him. Mr. Thomas, on the contrary, leaned forward with
hands on knees, wearing an impatient look, as if this formality
of a rest between the rounds irked his imperious spirit.
The gong sounded, and he sprang from his seat.
" "
Laddie breathed an anguished voice, and
1 a hand
clutched my arm.
I was dimly aware of Ukridge standing beside me. I
shook him off. This was no moment for conversation. My
whole attention was concentrated on what was happening in
the ring.
" "
I say, laddie !

Matters in there had reached that tense stage when audiences

lose their self-control when strong men stand on seats and
weak men cry " Siddown " The air was full of that electrical
!

thrill that precedes the knock-out.

And the next moment it came. But it was not Lloyd
Thomas who delivered it. From some mysterious reservoir
of vitality Wilberforce Billson, the pride of Bermondsey, who
an instant before had been reeling under his antagonist's
blows like a stricken hulk before a hurricane, produced that
one last punch that wins battles. Up it came, whizzing
straight to its mark, a stupendous, miraculous upper-cut which
caught Mr. Thomas on the angle of the jaw just as he lurched
forward to complete his task. It was the last word. Any-
thing milder Llunindnno's favourite son might have borne
with fortitude, for his was a teak-like frame, impervious to
most things short of dynamite ; but this was final. It left no
avenue for argument or evasion. Lloyd Thomas spun round
once in a complete circle, dropped his hands, and sank slowly
to the ground.
There was one wild shout from the audience, and then a
solemn hush fell. And in this hush Ukridge's voice spoke
once more in my ear :

"
with
I say, laddie, that blighter Previn has bolted every
penny of the receipts."

The little sitting-room of No. 7 Caerleon Street was very

quiet, and gave the impression of being dark. This was

because there was so much of Ukridge, and he takes Fate's
724 P. G. WODEHOUSE
blows so hardly that, when anything goes wrong, his gloom
seems to fill the room like a fog. For some minutes after our
return from the Oddfellows' Hall a gruesome silence had
prevailed. Ukridge had exhausted his vocabulary on the
subject of Mr. Previn ; and, as for me, the disaster seemed so
tremendous as to render words of sympathy a mere mockery.
"
And there's another thing Fve just remembered/' said
Ukridge hollowly, stirring on his sofa.
" "
What's that ? I enquired in a bedside voice.
"
The bloke Thomas. He was to have got another twenty
pounds."
" He'll "
hardly claim surely ?
it,
" "
He'll claim it all right," said Ukridge moodily. Except,
by he went on, a sudden note of optimism in his voice,
" Jove,"
that he doesn't know where I am. I was forgetting that.
Lucky we legged it away from the hall before he could grab
me."
"
You when he was making the
don't think that Previn,
arrangements with Thomas's
" manager, may have mentioned
where you were staying ?
"
Not !
Why should he ? What reason would he
" likely
have ?
"
Gentleman to see you, sir," crooned the aged female at
the door.
The gentleman walked in. It was the man who had come
to the dressing-room to announce that Thomas was in the
ring ; and though on that occasion we had not been formally
introduced, I did not need Ukridge's faint groan to tell me
who he was.
" "
Mr. Previn ? he said. He was a brisk man, direct in
manner and speech.
"
He's not here," said Ukridge.
"
You'll do. You're his partner. I've come for that
twenty pounds." There was a painful silence.
"
It's gone," said Ukridge.
" "
What's gone ?
"
The money, dash it. And Previn, too. He's bolted."
A hard look came into the other's eyes. Dim as the light
was, it was strong enough tQ show his expression, and that
expression was not an agreeable one.
"
That won't do," he said, in a metallic voice.
"
Now, my dear old hors
 THE EXIT OF BATTLING BILLSON 725
"It's no good
trying anything like that on me. I want
"
my" money, or I'm going to call a policeman. then ! Now
But, laddie, be reasonable."
"
Made a mistake in not getting it in advance. But now'll
do. Out with it."
But I keep telling you Previn's bolted "
"
1

"
He certainly bolted," I put in, trying to be helpful.
" "I
That's right, mister," said a voice at the door. met
'im sneakin' away."
It was Wilberforce Billson. He stood in the doorway
diffidently, as one not sure of his welcome. His whole
bearing was apologetic. He had a nasty bruise on his left
cheek, and one of his eyes was closed, but he bore no other
signs of his recent conflict.

Ukridge was gazing upon him with bulging eyes.

"
You met him " he moaned. " You actually met him ? "
!

" "
R," said Mr. Billson. When I was comin' to the 'all.
I seen 'im puttin' all that money into a liddle bag, and then 'e
'urried off."
"
Good Lord " 1 I cried.
"
Didn't you suspect what he was
"
up" to ?
R " <e
!
agreed Mr. Billson. I always knew 'e was a
wrong 'un."
"
Then why, you poor wooden-headed fish," bellowed
" "
Ukridge, exploding,
"
why on earth didn't you stop him ?
I never thought of that," admitted Mr. Billson apolo-
getically.
Ukridge
" laughed a hideous laugh.
I just pushed 'im in the face," proceeded Mr. Billson,
"
and took the liddle bag away from 'im."
He placed on the table a small, weather-worn suit-case, that
jingled musically as he moved it ; then, with the air of one
who dismisses some triviality from his mind, moved to the
door.
"
'Scuse me, gents," said Battling Billson deprecatingly.
" Can't
stop. I've got to go and spread the light."
 INGLIS ALLEN
" "
The Maternal Instinct
" "
The Whole Truth
Time and the Barber
The Legislators

Since his Oxford days Inglis Allen has been a prolific writer of
stories, sketches and verse in a light vein. He is a regular con-
tributor to Punch and many other leading periodicals, and is the
author of several successful comedies.
 "THE MATERNAL INSTINCT*!

some reason or other not that it need be regarded

FOR as unnatural people seem to be in a hurry to leave
Islington to-night, for the King's Cross trams are filling up
almost as fast as they arrive* I am forced to take a seat inside.
There is a thin-legged young man opposite in a collar like a
cuff, and exceedingly narrow trousers, and I notice that he is
having some difficulty in repelling the advances of his neigh-
bour, an elderly female bearing a strong resemblance to Mr.
Dan Leno. He has three times turned a deaf ear to her
attempted confidences, and is now rejecting with a somewhat
self-conscious hauteur her proffered bribe of peppermints.
The tram, which appears to be full inside as well as out, is
about to start, when the conductor earns the resentment of
half the inside passengers by informing somebody in the road
that there is room for one on the left. Forthwith the entrance
is darkened by a stout lady in a lop-sided bonnet, unescorted,
and joyfully warbling the following
" We'll all be merry,
Drinkin' whisky, wine an' sherry ;

We'll all be merry

On Coronyetion Dye."

I should hitherto have thought that to execute a step-dance

inside a crowded tram was a wellnigh impossible feat. The
stout lady, however, performs it with confidence, repeats her
chorus, and sits down heavily next to me. It is borne to my
senses that, whatever may be the stout lady's proposed menu
for Coronation Day, her choice has, for this evening at any
rate, fallen upon gin. The occupants of the tram have been
for the most part scandalised at the newcomer ; in particular
the thin-legged young man opposite is staring at her in
astonishment. She returns his gaze.
" All "
right, Bertie," she remarks defiantly, yer needn't
look at me so old-fashioned."
The young man, scared at the sudden publicity thus thrown
729
730 INGLIS ALLEN
upon him, reddens and looks away. But the elderly female
next to him champions him immediately.
"And why shouldn't *e look old-fashioned," she returns
" "
sturdily, if 'e is old-fashioned ?
This is a startler for the stout lady. The urbanity of her
expression vanishes immediately, and she directs a cold stare
at the elderly female.
"
I wasn't speakin' to you at all," she observes, with
"
dignity, I was speakin' to that gentleman."
"An' I answered for 'im," returns the elderly female
"
cheerfully, because I'm 'is mother."
There is something of a sensation in the tram. Two navvies
by the door show a disposition to applaud. As for the young
man, he gasps and turns an indignant look upon his neighbour.
" J
I answered for im," repeats the elderly female imperturb-
"
ably, because 'e's my son."
The stout lady becomes infinitely scornful.
" *Im n "
? she says, with feeling. 'E ain't no son o*

yours."
To endorse this the young man, who has become the
cynosure of all eyes, attempts to assume as unfilial an expression
as possible, only succeeding in conveying an impression of
acute dyspepsia.
" ?
Yes e is," declares the elderly female good-humouredly
" "
sonny ?
ain't yer,
The young man, very flushed, affects to be interested in an
advertisement. The stout lady looks towards him compas-
sionately.
" "
Don't you worry, Bertie," she says ; she don't tike me
in. She ain't the mother o' the likes o' you."
"
"
'E's my son, 'e is," maintains the elderly female, cheerily.
'E wouldn't dlisown 'is ole mother what nursed 'im in 'er
arms."
"
Chuck it," responds the stout lady with superb contempt ;
"
'e ain't no son o' yours."
The occupants of the tram are patently splitting up into
factions. The larger side, dominated by the two navvies by
the door, are apparently shocked and disgusted that the young
man should deny his own mother because she is poorly dressed
and looks like Dan Leno. The other faction, probably drawn
towards the stout lady out of sympathy with her Coronation
projects, become the confidants of her further arguments.
 "THE MATERNAL INSTINCT" 73 1
" 'Er son " she "
1 She wouldn't never *ave a son
snorts.
to look like that, not if she lived to be ninety. Look at 'is
gole watch-chine. 'E's a nob, 'e is. Shave an' a clean collar
ev'ry dye ? Not 'arf. One o' the toffs."
The elderly female for her part repeats her declaration to
her own sympathisers, at the same time looking with astonish-

ing good-humour on the young man's not very flattering

agony. From addressing their respective supporters the two
ladies return to each other, and the liveliest of debates ensues
over the person of the young man, still reading advertisements
with a face the colour of beetroot. Gradually the circle of
controversy widens. The stout lady is just engaged in
elaborating a statement of her course of action in the con-
tingency of ever possessing a face like that of her opponent
(who maintains the utmost cheerfulness throughout), when
there is an interruption.
"
Fez, pliz."
The conductor has begun his round. In due course he
arrives at the thin-legged young man, who fumbles in his
pocket for some time, and at last produces a sovereign and a
halfpenny. He tenders the sovereign for a penny fare. The
conductor eyes him with weary disgust.
" "
'Aven't yer got nothing smaller ? he queries.
The young, man has not.
The conductor remarks sourly that he will have to wait
King's Cross.
till Does the young man take him for Baring
Rosschild ?
But the stout lady has a word to say here. She plucks the
conductor's sleeve.
" "
That's all right, young man," she says ; 'is mother'll

pye for 'im."

A flutter of triumph pervades the stout lady's faction. But

they have under-estimated the amount of spirit in the elderly

female. She hands the conductor sixpence.
" "
Two," she observes genially ; me an' my son."
Jubilation of the elderly female's faction, confusion of
their opponents, and scarlet protest on the part of the young
man.
" "
Two," repeats the elderly female to Clerkenwell."
;

The conductor lowers his bundle of tickets.

"
Where d' yer wanter go to ? " he demands stolidly.
"
Me an' my boy to Clerkenwell," beams the elderly female.
732 INGLIS ALLEN
The conductor forces the coin back into her hand, strides
down to the door and jerks the bell.
"
Come on/' he calls wearily " you're ; goin' away from
Clerkenwell."
Jubilation of the stout lady and her faction. The elderly
female leaves the car in the best of spirits, after an unsuccessful
attempt to kiss the thin-legged young man. The conductor
stands with his hand on the bell-cord.
" "
Are yer goin' on he calls impatiently to the young
1

man.
"
in the face.

Ting!
"
Of course I'm
"
" -
What are you waiting for ? snaps the latter, very red

Thestout lady exults loudly. She is interrupted soon by

the conductor ringing the bell.
" "
Gumming Street," he announces impolitely ; come
on!"
"Don't you worry, Bertie," she observes protectively.
"
She never kidded me."
"
Come on, if yer comin' " calls the conductor.
I

The stout lady makes her way to the door, resuming her
monarchical ode on die step :
" On
Coronyetion Dye,
On Coronyetion Dye,
'
we'll -
We'll 'avc a spree an' a jubilee,
"

Ting Clink, clank, clinker, danker. . . .

!

The tram moves on. Gradually the thin-legged young

man's countenance resumes its natural pastiness. Party spirit
dissolves in the absence of leaders. There is peace, save for
the clink, clank of the tram, as it
forges on down the slope
towards King's Cross.
 "THE WHOLE TRUTH"

A SQUALID street of dingy, straggling houses, each

fronted by a row of stunted palings, enclosing an oblong
asphalt plot, for the existence of which I can find no reason,
aesthetic or utilitarian, save, perhaps, that a number of dirty
infants can make themselves still dirtier by lying on it. In
the doorway of each tenement stands a bareheaded woman of
careless coiffure, who has in each case rolled up her sleeves in
order to maintain a desultory conversation with the lady next
door. For the rest, a dozen or so of knowing-looking cats
prowl suspiciously about at various altitudes.
At the far end of the street a crowd of loungers, plentifully
interspersed with policemen, has gathered outside a massive
building of dirty granite. I make my way towards it, and
find the centre of interest to be a stout policeman who, standing
at the top of the steps leading into the building, is reading
from a blue paper a list of names, and ticking them off with a
fat pencil as their owners, an unsavoury crew, answer to them
from various points in the crowd, and mount the steps to the
entrance. I inquire of a policeman what is going on.
"
Answering to bail," he replies laconically, and I become
aware that I am outside the Police Court. It is noticeable that
the crowd regard the whole affair as a form of light and
amusing entertainment.
" " calls the
Victoria Stott 1 stout policeman, and a
bedraggled woman in limp ostrich feathers makes her way
towards the steps.
"
O-uh g-urls " cry the crowd in high good -humour,
I

and a man in his shirt-sleeves expresses a wish to be chased

and tickled.
"
Less o* the noise there," observes the stout policeman.
"
Come along, ducky, come along. Douglas Alexander
Tubbs " I

A roar of laughter goes up from the crowd, and all eyes

are turned upon a little white-bearded man in a battered top-
hat on the other side of the road. Mr. Tubbs seems to be
734 INGLIS ALLEN
somewhat of a celebrity, and obviously knows it, for he waits
for the noise to subside, then cocks his hat over one eye,
" "
observes That's me i and executes a somewhat intricate
step-dance across the road and up the stairs.
"That's enough of it," observes the stout policeman,
tolerantly rapping Mr. Tubbs on the back of the head with the
"
fat pencil. George Spinks ! Come on there, can't wait
all night for yer. That'll do, no lip. Elizabeth Shand I
Come "
along, you beauty 1
Soon the list is finished, and the prisoners have all dis-
appeared within. The stout policeman folds up his list,
replaces it with the
pencil in the breast of his tunic, and looks
down on the crowd jocosely.
" And a nice " he
lot they are, too observes ; then with-
!

draws within the building.

After some silent contemplation of the exterior, I ascend
the steps and enter a blank little vestibule. Standing by a
small shuttered window like that of a station booking-office,
I find the stout policeman in familiar converse with an

excessively jocund grey-haired female in a plaid shawl. The

lady, in sheer exuberance of spirits, has just administered a
nudge to the softest part of his tunic, accompanying it by the
intimation that he is a giddy young kipper. I inquire of the
policeman whether there is any room inside.
" " he
You're not a witness or anything ? queries.
I assure him that on this occasion at least I am neither a
"
witness, nor (I am pleased to say) anything."
" " he assents with
Just want to see what's going on, sir ?
"
indulgence, then leans towards me confidentially. You
leave it to me, sir, an' I'll try an' get you in. You just wait a
minute. I'll do my best to manage it for you/*
He brushes out of the way the jocund female, engaged in
a squatting position in looking through the keyhole into
the Court, and taps mysteriously at the shuttered window.
Nothing
" happens.
I'll
manage it for
you all right, sir," he says protectively ;
<c
you just stay close to me. That'll do, Polly."
The jocund female is pulling him by the skirts of his tunic.
" "
When'll they want me, Dickie ? she inquires.
"
They won't want you at all, I should think," returns the
"
policeman jocosely. You're a nice sorter witness, you are."
" "
Go hon I cries the jocund female, digging him in the
 "THE WHOLE TRUTH" 735
"
ribs in sheer delight. What d'yer think of 'im, young
man ain't *e a 'andsome figger of a man ? 'Ave I got time
"
fer a drink, Dickie ?
At this moment therea shuffling noise inside the Court.
is

"Now then, sir," whispers the policeman hurriedly;

"
opening the door ; just squeeze in after me. That's it.
I thought Fd manage it for you."
I really do not know what it is that he has managed for

me, beyond opening the door and allowing me to pass into

the public part of the Court, where a number of onlookers
in various stages of
dirt are already gathered. Being weak,
however, I gave him sixpence, and he retires on tip-toe with
a vast deal of noise, confidently assured, I suppose, of my
perfect idiocy.
A constable with a black eye is in the box giving evidence
of the assault committed upon him by the muscular lady in
the dock, on his arresting her for maliciously wounding the
prosecutor with a beer-glass.
The prosecutor next enters the box with a bandaged head,
and gives a clear account of the affair, which is corroborated
by four more witnesses, the only person who is not absolutely
agreed as to the facts being the prisoner, who, while admitting
that she was drunk, emphatically denies that she was incapable
(which, needless to say, no one has suggested), and hints at
perjury from the constable and the prosecutor with regard
to the black eye and the beer-glass, both assaults having been
committed by accomplices of their own while she was saying
that she was innocent and would go quietly. Furthermore
she has a husband and five children, is unaccountable for her
actions when drunk indeed she never remembers anything
afterwards, and hopes the magistrate will deal leniently with
her. Moreover, the prosecutor is a dirty 'ahnd, and only got
what he deserved.
" "
Have you any witness to call ? inquires the magistrate.
The policeman by the dock repeats the magistrate's question
"
with a nudge, and the prisoner suggests Pollerbunce."
"
Who ? " demands the"magistrate.
The prisoner repeats PollerbunCe," and the policeman
"
interprets to the magistrate as Polly Buttons."
"
Polly Buttons, then," says the magistrate wearily with a
sideways movement of the head.
"
Polly Buttons," says the usher in a loud voice.
736 INGLIS ALLEN
" " shouts the
Polly Buttons 1
policeman by the door, and
the mystic word, passing from mouth to mouth, reverberates
through the passages, and is heard faintly outside
"
in the street.
After a pause the phrase Hurry up there 1 is heard in the
street, then in the passage and then at the door, and a grey-
haired matron in a shawl enters the Court and takes her place
in the box. I recognise her at once as the jocund female whom
I have already seen in the vestibule. But the jocund expression
has vanished, and she turns to the magistrate a sad, worn face,
with a suggestion in it of honest toil and years of trouble.
"
It was abaht a quarter past eleven, yer worship/' she
"
begins immediately, I went aht to get a bit o' fish fer
"
supper
"
The book/' interrupts the usher.
The witness kisses the book perfunctorily and begins
again. "
"
Itwas abaht a quarter past eleven
" "
What is your name ? repeats the clerk in a louder
voice.
" " "
Pearce," returns the witness. It was abaht
" Mary " "
Who ? here inquires the magistrate, is Polly-er-
"
Buttons ?
Discursive etymology from the witness with regard to
Polly, with anecdotal disquisition on the origin of Buttons.
She is cut short, and returns once more to the fish expedition,
where she shows a disposition to discuss the relative merits
of haddocks and kippers, and is at once whisked through
space by the unsympathetic clerk to the first meeting with
the prisoner. Yes, she saw Vilit at 'alf past eleven. Yes, the
prisoner is Vilit, an' a steadier, soberer, 'arder-workin' she
knows it was 'alf past eleven because she saw the clock at the
Crown through the winder. Through the winder only,
because she'd only been out to get a bit o' fish and Yes, she
saw the prisoner speaking to Ted 'Argreaves outside the
Crown. Yes, the prosecutor. 'E was molestin' of 'er. Some-
think crool."
" How did he molest her ? "
inquires the magistrate.
" " She
Askin' of 'er t'ave a drink," returns the witness.
* '
sez, No, Mr. 'Argreaves/ she sez, I don't drink an' I won't
"
drink.' An' she don't neither. A steadier, soberer
The clerk, more unsympathetic than ever, presses the
magistrate's question.
 "THE WHOLE TRUTH " 737
<c
She sez to 'im," continues the witness, " e

* ' "
No, Mr.
'Argreaves,' she sez, I don't drink an' I
" "
How- did the prosecutor molest her ? breaks in the
magistrate harshly.
The witness ponders.
"
Caught 'old of the sleeve of 'er body," she replies cheer-
"
fully the same body what's on 'er now. There it is.
The very body 'e caught 'old of."
The witness seems elated at the conclusiveness of this proof.
The clerk asks if she saw the prisoner throw the glass at the
prosecutor.
" "
She never threw no glass," declares the witness ; she
dropped the glass out of 'er 'and like, an' 'e slipped an' fell
on it an' cut 'is 'ead. She sez to i'm "
"
I think the witness can step down now," remarks the

magistrate. The witness seems reluctant to leave the box.

"
I shouldn't never 'ave seen it, yer worship," she exclaims,
" "
only I 'appened to go aht fer a bit o' fish fer supper
Here, still loudly addressing the Court, she is hustled out
of the box by the attendant policeman. The magistrate turns
to the prisoner.
" A " Four
particularly brutal assault," he observes.
months' hard labour."
The muscular lady looks round the Court with amusement.
"
Four months without a drink " she exclaims. " Oh,
!
"
chase me 1

Then, leaving the dock, she accompanies a constable

through a door on the left with considerable good humour.
Polly Buttons, giving the plaid shawl a hitch, leaves the
Court with an unclouded brow, the jocund female once more.
I turn and follow. In the vestibule I pass her, rallying
" "
Dickie on the subject of his figure. He salutes me with a
protective and indulgent air.
I pass out into the squalid street once more, the voice of the
late witness from the steps behind recommending Dickie to
have a piece let in at the back of his toonic.
 TIME AND THE BARBER
my
a hand
to chin I pass through a swinging glass
WITH
me
door and
man
is an elderly
climb the staircase. Ascending in front of
in a straw hat, while a few steps above
him I notice a white-haired gentleman of a military carriage.
Not without annoyance, I recognise that I may have to wait
some time before being attended to. It is afternoon, and I
know from experience that the dinner of my barber and most of
his assistants lasts from 12 a.m. until 3 p.m., and their tea
from 3.30 until 7.Indeed, as a class, they would seem to over-
eat themselves more than any other members of the com-
munity, and I wonder that a medical commission has not been
appointed to look into the matter.
As the military gentleman reaches the top of the steps, the
elderly man behind him suddenly quickens his pace almost to a
run, and, pushing past, enters the shop in front of him. I
follow the military gentleman inside and find him gazing
indignantly at his adversary, emitting at the same time a series
of angry snorts.
It is as I surmised.There is but one assistant in the shop,
at present engaged in enlarging on the merits of a pink hair-
tonic to a defenceless customer with a profusely lathered head.
He has suspended operations at this stage, while, bottle in
hand, he gives his victim a prolix resum< of die strides made of
"
late in the art of capillary nutrition/' Two customers are
seated on an uncomfortable bench, sulkily glaring at illustrated
papers.
The assistant glances round.
"
Five minutes, sir/' he observes.
The military gentleman transfers an angry stare from the
elderly man to the assistant.
" What "
" d'you mean by five minutes ? he snaps testily.
How can you be ready in five minutes, when there are several
"
gentlemen
" waiting already ?
I'm expecting the other men back every minute/' explains
the assistant.
"
They've gone to dinner."
738
 TIME AND THE BARBER 739
Here the elderly gentleman puts in his word.
" "
Aren't there any papers ? he asks disagreeably, as he
hangs his hat on a peg, disclosing a head with no tresses what-
soever on top, and a computable number round the sides.
The military gentleman, remembering his grievance, darts an
angry glance at him just in time to see him
capture the sole
remaining newspaper. With another snort he seats himself
beside him on the bench, and finding nothing to read, glares
irritably at the slow but voluble progress of the assistant.
In due course the occupant of the chair rises from the hands
of the barber a finished article, suggesting an injudicious blend
of foreign waiter and cockatoo.
" 1*11 do "
you up a bottle of the Vivifier, shall I, sir ?
queries
the assistant.
"
Er I don't know whether I shall want any just at
present," says the customer weakly.
The assistant plies him reproachfully with a clothes-brush.
" You're
surely not going to lose it all, sir, just for want of
"
taking it in time ?
The customer looks wildly towards his hat.
"
Make you up a small five-and-sixpenny size, if you like,
sir," suggests the assistant, capturing the hat and brushing it
assiduously.
"
Umph 1 Yes, I daresay I shall have "some later on,"
mumbles the customer with a hunted look. Er I'm going
away for a day or two. Perhaps, when I come back. . . ."
"
Send it anywhere you like for you," returns the assistant
implacably.
The customer holds out an imploring hand for his hat.
" "
Yes, yes, I see," he says humbly but but ; I don't
know yet what my address will be. Perhaps I'll
drop you a
line if er if I find I want it."
The grudgingly surrenders him his hat, and he
assistant
slinks out, a consciously contemptible object.
" Next
gentleman, please," remarks the barber mechanically,
as he turns back to the chair. The next gentleman has already
seated himself, and is frowning impatiently at the looking-
glass. Hereupon the military gentleman, who has been fuming
throughout the whole dialogue, breaks out fiercely.
"
Get on with your work, sah," he growls to the man.
"
There is the next gentleman. How much longer do you
"
expect to keep us heah 1
740 INGLIS ALLEN
Ten long minutes elapse while the two next gentlemen are
shaved. Either they are regular customers or the barber
has been overawed by our military friend, for no more time
is expended on the Vivifier. All this time not a sign of any
of the other assistants. The condition of the military gentle-
man is me
grave apprehension ; his exterior is every
causing
minute becoming more fiery, a symptom accompanied at
frequent intervals by the sound of ominous internal rumblings.
At last the chair is vacated. The elderlyman and the
military gentleman rise simultaneously and move towards it.
The elderly man reaches it first, and seats himself heavily ; the
other snorts, opens his mouth wide, thinks better of it, and
sits down on the bench again. The internal rumblings
become nothing short of alarming.
" "
Shave ? suggests the assistant with confidence, bustling
up to the chair.
The elderly man darts a suspicious look at him in the glass.
"
Hair cut/' he snaps.
The military gentleman is evidently past appreciating the
value of this opportunity. At the same time a step is heard
on the stairs. He rumbling, and prepares to occupy
rises, still
the other chair. Straightway another customer enters.
The assistant turns round from his occupation of lining the
elderly man's neck with cotton-wool.
"
Ready in a minute, sir," he remarks cheerfully.
The man sits erect.
" elderly
A minute " hesuddenly "
What do you "
1
gasps indignantly.
But his voice is swallowed up in a greater explosion. The
military gentleman has suddenly burst forth into eruption.
"
What the devil do you mean, sah ? " he explodes.
"
<c
How can you be ready in a minute when waiting ? Fm
(t "
In a minute repeats the elderly man, bristling with
!

indignation.
The explains with nervous suavity that he
assistant is

expecting the other men back every minute.

" "
Minute I mutters the elderly man resentfully.
The military gentleman is still in full eruption.
" "
Disgraceful mismanagement ! he cries, furiously,
"
attempting to put on my hat. I've been waiting here for
"
hours. I shall go somewhere else 1
Which, when he has got his own hat, he does precipitately,
stillin a state of volcanic discharge.
 TIME AND THE BARBER 741
The elderly man in the chair is
glaring at his own sullen
reflection. The assistant, piteously crushed, selects a pair of
scissors. At this point another assistant enters, brushing
crumbs from a symmetrical moustache.
" "
Here/' says the elderly man sourly, send this man
away. I want my hair cut."
The newcomer hesitates, glances at his colleague, then goes
to the chair.
" Hair
cut, sir ; yes, sir." I take the other place, and the
original assistant lathers my chin with a silence that is far more
pathetic than words. The man at the next chair (after one
unfortunate attempt to introduce the topic of the Vivifier) has
also relapsed into peace.
There is silence in the barber's shop save for the snip and
scrape of scissors and razor.
 THE LEGISLATORS
have just entered the compartment at Westminster
Bridge, and a hush of awe falls upon us all as we sud-
denly realise that we are in the presence of public men
legislators in the flesh. The foremost of the three (unmis-
takably in the flesh) disposes his ample proportions upon the
cushions, crosses his short legs, and touches the member
opposite him on the knee.
" " he remarks
You see my point ? resumptively.
"
Yes, yes your point, exactly," echoes the other, a bearded
man with a colourless eye.
" " is this :
My point/' continues Short Legs volubly,
Any sitting member I don't care who he is can fill a hall.
If he can't, there's something radically wrong with him."
"
Radically," murmurs the bearded man, quite innocent, I
am sure, of any sinister meaning.
" Short Legs rather
Any sitting member," repeats
" looking"
like a plump fowl himself any sitting member (Short
Legs is so pleased with this"phrase that he repeats it, rolling it
voluptuously in his mouth) can fill a hall at any time. Unless,
as I say, there's something wrong with him, unless he is an
absolutely unpopular man unpopular for some really good
reason."
The bearded man is of the same opinion. It is noticeable
member a
that the third lean, cadaverous-looking man who
has seated himself in the corner next to Short Legs takes no
part in the conversation.
" I do not
care," observes Short Legs, obviously conscious
" whether
of the attention of the rest of the carriage, his
constituency be a town one or a sparsely populated country
district ; he can always fill a hall."
Short Legs looks towards the third member for corrobora-
tion, but, receiving none, pretends to have been glancing at
the ventilator.
" " am
Now, he resumes with some pomp,
I," I fifteen
miles broad and twenty long/'
742
 THELEGISLATORS 743
Sensation among the passengers, who seem
regard to this
as an The bearded man murmurs " Exactly."
" exaggeration. "
When I speak/' declares Short Legs, I always find the
be desired."
hall as full as can
cannot help thinking that in respect of filling any place,
I
whether it be a hall or a railway carriage, our friend starts
with a personal advantage.
" " that a
I know," he continues, good many men get a
distinguished man down to
speak, and fill their halls that way.
But my point is that that is not necessary."

Short Legs again glances at the third member with the same
effect. The third member does not seem to be in a conver-
sational mood.
"
My own experience of the distinguished man," observes
"
is that the more
Short Legs oracularly, distinguished he is
the less interesting I have found him."
This, at any rate, cannot be said of our friend, who is in no
way distinguished except by the girth of his waistcoat.
"
My
" point,"
resumes Short Legs (who at any rate is faithful
to it), is, as I have said, that any sitting member can fill a hall
unless he's some unpopular sort of cad. Now you, I am
certain, can fill a hall."
The bearded man seems disposed to admit bis capacity for
serving his country in this way.
"
Not that that affects the question," adds Short Legs with
patronage.
"
You, I am certain I know nothing about you, but I am
certain are a popular man."
"
I don't know I'm sure," smiles the bearded man.
"I am youcertain are," declares Short Legs, throwing
away his cigarette and laying his hand on the other's knee
"
A good speaker too, I have no doubt. I know nothing
about you, but I am certain you are a good speaker."
It would seem to me that the bearded man is more of a good
listener than anything else. He accepts the tribute.
" "
Well, well, I don't know, I'm sure," he smiles. Have a
"
cigar ?
Short Legs accepts the remuneration with a consciousness of
its justice.
" " does not
But that," he affect the question.
explains, My
point that
isa sitting member who cannot fill a hall, you will

be certain to find, is an unpopular man not even ordinarily

744 INGLIS ALLEN
unpopular, but a real, right, low-down cad, with something
really er fishy about him an intolerable blackguard, in
short/'
The train is entering Sloane Square Station. The lean,
cadaverous member has risen, and is taking his hat from the
rack. Short Legs turns to him.
"
You agree with my point, sir ? " he queries.
The third member glares at him.
" At "
my last meeting/' he observes savagely, I had
twenty-three people/'
Collapse of Short Legs. The third member folds his paper
determinedly. " "
" murmurs Short Legs.
Umph-ah-umph 1
Oh, ah
"
small constituency, I suppose, sir ?
"
Nineteen by twenty-two/' says the third member shortly.
Further collapse of Short Legs. Again he emerges from the
ruins.
" "
Oh ah scattered constituency villages ? he ventures.
" of the kind/' returns the third member, pushing
Nothing "
past him and opening the door. East Spoofshire."
Departure of the lean, cadaverous member, and total col-
lapse of Short Legs. The train moves on again. He recovers
somewhat and relights his cigar.
"
That doesn't really affect the question/' he observes.
"
"My point is

With pathetic fidelity he remains impaled upon his point

until Gloucester Road, where he and the bearded man depart,

leaving us once more to the outer darkness of private life.

 OSCAR WILDE
The Canterville Ghost

Oscar Wilde, the dramatist and essayist, was Irish by birth, but
first became prominent as the founder of an aesthetic cult at Oxford,

which is parodied in Gilbert and Sullivan's 'Patience. In spite of

his affectations he had a real literary gift, his best work being
done in the field of light comedy, the most popular of his plays
being The Importance of Being Earnest.
iA*
 THE CANTERVILLE GHOST
A HYLO-IDEALISTIC ROMANCE

Mr. Hiram B. Otis, the American Minister,

WHEN bought Canterville Chase, every one told him he was
doing a very foolish thing, as there was no doubt at all that the
place was haunted. Indeed, Lord Canterville himself, who
was a man of the most punctilious honour, had felt it his duty
to mention the fact to Mr. Otis, when they came to discuss
terms.
"
We have not cared to live in the place ourselves," said
"
Lord Canterville, since my grand-aunt, the Dowager Duchess
of Bolton, was frightened into a fit, from which she never
really recovered, by two skeleton hands being placed on her
shoulders as she was dressing for dinner, and I feel bound to
tell you, Mr. Otis, that the ghost has been seen by several

living members of my family, as well as by the rector of the

parish, the Rev. Augustus Dampier, who is a fellow of King's
College, Cambridge. After the unfortunate accident to the
Duchess, none of our younger servants would stay with us,
and Lady Canterville often got very little sleep at night, in
consequence of the mysterious noises that came from the
corridor and the library."
" "
My Lord," answered the Minister, I will take the
furniture and the ghost at a valuation. I come from a modern
country, where we have everything that money can buy ;
and with all our spry young fellows painting the Old World
red, and carrying off your best actresses and pritna-donnas, I
reckon that if there were such a thing as a ghost in Europe,
we'd have it at home in a very short time in one of our public
museums, or on the road as a show."
" I fear that the
cc
ghost exists," said Lord Canterville, smiling,
it may have resisted the overtures of your enter-
thought
prising impresarios. It has been well known for three cen-
turies, since 1584 in fact, and always makes its appearance
before the death of any member of our family."
747
748 OSCAR WILDE
"
Well, so does the family doctor for that matter, Lord
Canterville. But there is no such tiling, sir, as a ghost, and I
guess the laws of nature are not going to be suspended for the
British aristocracy."
"
You are certainly very natural in America," answered
Lord Canterville, who did not quite understand Mr. Otis's
"
last observation, and if you don't mind a ghost in the house,
it is all Only you must remember I warned you."
right.
A few weeks after this, the purchase was completed, and at
the close of the season the Minister and his family went down
to Canterville Chase. Mrs. Otis, who, as Miss Lucretia R.
Tappan, of West 53rd Street, had been a celebrated New York
belle, was now a very handsome middle-aged woman, with
fine eyes, and a superb profile. Many American ladies on
leaving their native land adopt an appearance of chronic ill-
health, under the impression that it is a form of European
refinement, but Mrs. Otis had never fallen into this error. She
had a magnificent constitution, and a really wonderful amount
of animal spirits. Indeed, in many respects, she was quite
English/and was an excellent example of the fact that we have
really everything in common with America nowadays, except,
of course, language. Her eldest son, christened Washington
by his parents in a moment of patriotism, which he never
ceased to regret, was a fair-haired, rather good-looking young
man, who had qualified himself for American diplomacy by
leading the German at the Newport Casino for three successive

seasons, and even in London was well known as an excellent

dancer. Gardenias and the peerage were his only weaknesses.
Otherwise he was extremely sensible. Miss Virginia E. Otis
was a little girl of fifteen, lithe and lovely as a fawn, and with a
fine freedom in her large blue eyes. She was a wonderful
amazon, and had once raced old Lord Bilton on her pony
twice round the park, winning by a length and a half, just in
front of Achilles statue, to the huge delight of the young
Duke of Cheshire, who proposed for her on the spot, and was
sent back to Eton that very night by his guardians in floods of
tears. After Virginia came the twins, who were usually called
"
The Stars and Stripes " as they were always getting swished.
They were delightful boys, and with the exception of the
worthy Minister the only true republicans of the family.
As Canterville Chase is seven miles from Ascot, the nearest
railway station, Mr. Otis had telegraphed for a waggonette to
 THE CANTERVILLE GHOST 749
meet them, and they started on their drive in high spirits.
Itwas a lovely July evening, and the air was delicate with the
scent of the pinewoods. Now and then they heard a wood
pigeon brooding over its own sweet voice, or saw, deep in
the rustling fern, the burnished breast of the pheasant. Little
squirrels peered at them from the beech-trees as they went by,
and the rabbits scudded away through the brushwood and
over the mossy knolls, with their white tails in the air. As
they entered the avenue of Canterville Chase, however, the
sky became suddenly overcast with clouds, a curious stillness
seemed to hold the atmosphere, a great flight of rooks passed
silently over their heads, and, before they reached the house,
some bigs drops of rain had fallen.
Standing on the steps to receive them was an old woman,
neatly dressed in black silk, with a white cap and apron. This
was Mrs. Umney, the housekeeper, whom Mrs. Otis, at Lady
Canterville's earnest request, had consented to keep on in her
former position. She made them each a low curtsey as they
"
alighted, and said in a quaint, old-fashioned manner, I bid

you welcome to Canterville Chase," Following her, they

passed through the fine Tudor hall into the library, a long,
low room, panelled in black oak, at the end of which was a
large stained-glass window. Here they found tea laid out for
them, and, after taking off their wraps, they sat down and began
to look round, while Mrs. Umney waited on them.
Suddenly Mrs. Otis caught sight of a dull red stain on the
floor just by the fireplace and, quite unconscious of what it
"
really signified, said to Mrs. Umney, I am afraid something
has been spilt there."
"
Yes, replied the old housekeeper in a
madam," low voice,
"
blood has been spilt on that spot."
" "
How
horrid," cried Mrs. Otis ; I don't at all care for
blood-stains in a sitting-room. It must be removed at
once."
The old woman smiled, and answered in the same low,
"
mysterious voice, It isthe blood of Lady Eleanore de Canter-
ville, who was murdered on that very spot by her own hus-
band, Sir Simon de Canterville, in 1575. Sir Simon survived
her nine years, and disappeared suddenly under very mysterious
circumstances. His body has never been discovered, but his
guilty spirit still haunts the Chase. The blood-stain has been
much admired by tourists and others, and cannot be removed."
750 OSCAR WILDE
" "
That nonsense/' cried Washington Otis ;
is all Pinker-
ton's Champion Stain Remover and Paragon Detergent will
clean it up in no time," and before the terrified housekeeper
could interfere he had fallen upon his knees, and was rapidly
scouring the floor with a small stick of what looked like a black
cosmetic. In a few moments no trace of the blood-stain
could be seen.
"
I knew Pinkerton would do it," he exclaimed trium-

phantly, as he looked round at his admiring family ; but no

sooner had he said these words than a terrible flash of lightning
lit
up the sombre room, a fearful peal of thunder made them all
start to their feet, and Mrs. Umney fainted.
" "
What a monstrous climate ! said the American Minister
"
calmly, as he lit a
long cheroot. I guess the old country is
so overpopulated that they have not enough decent weather
for everybody. I have always been of opinion that emigration
is the only thing for England."
" "
My dear Hiram,""cried Mrs. Otis, what can we do with a
woman who faints ?
" to her like breakages," answered the Minister ;
it
Charge "
she won't faint after that ; and in a few moments Mrs.
Umney certainly came to. There was no doubt, however, that
she was extremely upset, and she sternly warned Mr. Otis to
beware of some trouble coming to the house.
" "
I have seen things with my own eyes, sir," she said, that
would make any Christian's hair stand on end, and many and
many a night I have not closed my eyes in sleep for the awful
things that are done here." Mr. Otis, however, and his wife
warmly assured the honest soul that they were not afraid of
ghosts, and, after invoking the blessings of Providence on her
new master and mistress, and making arrangements for an
increase of salary, the old housekeeper tottered off to her own
room.

II

THE storm raged but nothing of par-

fiercely all that night,
ticular note occurred. The next morning, however, when they
came down to breakfast, they found the terrible stain of blood
"
once again on the floor. I don't think it can be the fault of
"
the Paragon Detergent," said Washington, for I have tried
it with
everything. It must be the ghost." He accordingly
rubbed out the stain a second time, but the second morning
 THE CANTERVILLE GHOST 751
it
appeared again. The third morning also it was there, though
the library had been locked up at night by Mr. Otis himself,
and the key carried upstairs. The whole family were now
quite interested ; Mr. Otis began to suspect that he had been
too dogmatic in his denial of the existence of ghosts, Mrs.
Otis expressed her intention of joining the Psychical Society,
and Washington prepared a long letter to Messrs. Myers and
Podmore on the subject of the Permanence of Sanguineous
Stains when connected with crime. That night all doubts
about the objective existence of phantasmata were removed
for ever.
The day had been warm and sunny ; and, in the cool of
the evening, the whole family went out for a drive. They
did not return home till nine o'clock, when they had a light
supper. The conversation in no way turned upon ghosts,
so there were not even those primary conditions of receptive
expectation which so often precede the presentation of
psychical phenomena. The subjects discussed, as I have since
learned from Mr. Otis, were merely such as form the ordinary
conversation of cultured Americans of the better class, such
as the immense superiority of Miss Fanny Davenport over
Sarah Bernhardt as an actress ; the difficulty of obtaining green
corn, buckwheat cakes, and hominy, even in the best English
houses ; the importance of Boston in the development of the
world-soul ; the advantages of the baggage check system in
railway travelling ; and the sweetness of the New York accent
as compared to the London drawl. No mention at all was made
of the supernatural, nor was Sir Simon de Canterville alluded
to in any way. At eleven o'clock the family retired, and by
half-past all the lights were out. Some time after, Mr. Otis
was awakened by a curious nose in the corridor, outside his
room. It sounded like the clank of metal, and seemed to be
coming nearer every moment. He got up at once, struck a
match, and looked at the time. It was exactly one o'clock.
He was quite calm, and felt his pulse, which was not at all
feverish. The strange noise still continued, and with it he
heard distinctly the sound of footsteps. He put on his slippers,
took a small oblong phial out of his dressing-case, and
opened the door. Right in front of him he saw, in the wan
moonlight, an old man of terrible aspect. His eyes were as
red as burning coals ; long grey hair fell over his shoulders
in matted coils ; his garments, which were of antique cut,
75* OSCAR WILDE
were soiled and ragged, and from his wrists and ankles hung
heavy manacles and rusty gyves.
" "
My dear sir," said Mr. Otis, I really must insist on your
oiling those chains, and have brought you for that purpose a
small bottle of the Tammany Rising Sun Lubricator. It is
said to be completely efficacious upon one application, and
there are several testimonials to that effect on the wrapper from
some of our most eminent native divines. I shall leave it
here for you by the bedroom candles, and will be happy to
supply you with more should you require it." With these-
words the United States Minister laid the bottle down on, a
marble table, and, closing his door, retired to rest.
For a moment the Canterville ghost stood quite motionless
in natural indignation ; then, dashing the bottle violently upon
the polished floor, he fled down the corridor, uttering hollow
groans, and emitting a ghastly green light. Just, however, as
he reached the top of the great oak staircase, a door was flung
open, two little white-robed figures appeared, and a large
pillow whizzed past his head There was evidently no time
1

to be lost, so, hastily adopting the Fourth Dimension of

Space as a means of escape, he vanished through the wains-
coting, and the house became quite quiet.
On reaching a small secret chamber in the left wing, he
leaned up against a moonbeam to recover his breath, and began
to try and realise his position. Never, in a brilliant and
uninterrupted career of three hundred years, had he been so
grossly insulted. He thought of the Dowager Duchess, whom
he had frightened into a fit as she stood before the glass in her
lace and diamonds ; of the four housemaids, who had gone
off into hysterics when he merely grinned at them through the
curtains of one of the spare bedrooms ; of the rector of the
parish, whose candle he had blown out as he was coming late
one night from the library, and who had been under the care
of Sir William Gull ever since, a perfect martyr to nervous
disorders ; and of old Madame de Tremouillac, who, having
wakened up one morning early and seen a skeleton seated in
an arm-chair by the fire reading her diary, had been confined
to her bed for six weeks with an attack of brain fever, and, on
her recovery, had become reconciled to the Church, and had
broken off her connection with that notorious sceptic Mon-
sieur de Voltaire. He remembered the terrible night when the
wicked Lord Canterville was found choking in his dressing-
 THE CANTERVILLB GHOST 753

room, with the knave of diamonds half-way down his throat,

and confessed, just before he died, that he had cheated Charles
James Fox out of 50,000 at Crockford's by means of that
very card, and swore that the ghost had made him swallow
it. All his great achievements came back to him again, from
the butler who had shot himself in the pantry because he had
seen a green hand tapping at the window pane, to the beautiful
Lady Stutfield, who was always obliged to wear a black velvet
band round her throat to hide the mark of five fingers burnt
upon her white skin, and who drowned herself at last in the
carp-pond at the end of the King's Walk. With the enthu-
siastic egotism of the true artist he went over his most cele-
brated performances, and smiled bitterly to himself as he
"
recalled to mind his last appearance as Red Ruben, or the
" Gaunt
Strangled Babe," his dibut as Gibeon, the Blood-
sucker of Bexley Moor," and the furore he had excited one
lovely June evening by merely playing ninepins with his own
bones upon the lawn-tennis ground. And after all this, some
wretched modern Americans were to come and offer him the
Rising Sun Lubricator, and throw pillows at his head It I

was quite unbearable. Besides, no ghosts in history had ever

been treated in this manner. Accordingly, he determined to
have vengeance, and remained till daylight in an attitude of
deep thought.
ra
THE next morning when the Otis family met at breakfast,
they discussed the ghost at some length. The United States
Minister was naturally a little annoyed to find that his present
"
I have no wish/' he said,
" to do the
had not been accepted.
ghost any personal injury, and I must say that, considering
the length of time he has been in the house, I don't think it is
"
at all polite to throw pillows at him a very just remark, at
which, I am sorry to say, the twins burst into shouts of laughter.
" "
Upon the other hand," he continued, if he really declines
to use the Rising Sun Lubricator, we shall have to take his
chains from him. It would be quite impossible to sleep, with
such a noise going on outside die bedrooms."
For the rest of the week, however, they were undisturbed,
the only thing that excited any attention being the continual
renewal of the blood-stain on the library floor. This certainly
was very strange, as the door was always locked at night by
754 OSCAR WILDE
Mr. Otis, and the windows kept closely barred. The
chameleon-like colour, also, of the stain excited a good deal of
comment. Some mornings it was a dull (almost Indian) red,
then it would be vermilion, then a rich purple, and once when
they came down for family prayers, according to the simple
rites of the Free American Reformed Episcopalian Church,

they found it a bright emerald-green. These kaleido-

scopic changes naturally amused the party very much, and bets
on the subject were freely made every evening. The only
person who did not enter into the joke was little Virginia,
who, for some unexplained reason, was always a good deal
distressed at the sight of the blood-stain, and very nearly
cried the morning it was emerald-green.
The second appearance of the ghost was on Sunday night.
Shortly after they had gone to bed they were suddenly alarmed
by a fearful crash in the hall. Rushing downstairs, they found
that a krge suit of old armour had become detached from its
stand, and had fallen on the stone floor, while, seated in a
high-backed chair, was the Canterville ghost, rubbing his
knees with an expression of acute agony on his face. The
twins, having brought their peashooters with them, at once
discharged two pellets on him, with that accuracy of aim
which can only be attained by long and careful practice on a

writing-master, while the United States Minister covered

him with his revolver, and called upon him, in accordance
with Californian etiquette, to hold up his hands 1 The ghost
started up with a wild shriek of rage, and swept through them
like a mist, extinguishing Washington Otis's candle as he

passed, and so leaving them all in total darkness. On reaching

the top of the staircase he recovered himself, and determined to
give his celebrated peal of demoniac laughter. This he had
on more than one occasion found extremely useful. It was
said to have turned Lord Raker's wig grey in a single night,
and had certainly madethree of Lady Canterville's French
governesses give warning before their month was up. He
accordingly laughed his most horrible laugh, till the old
vaulted roof rang and rang again, but hardly had the fearful
echo died away when a door opened, and Mrs. Otis came out
"
in a light blue dressing-gown. I am afraid you are far from
"
well/' she said, and have brought you a bottle of Dr. DobelFs
tincture. If it is indigestion, you will find it a most excellent
remedy." The ghost glared at her in fury, and began at
 THE CANTERVILLE GHOST 755
once to make preparations for turning himself into a large
black dog, an accomplishment for which he was justly
renowned, and to which the family doctor always attributed
the permanent idiocy of Lord Canterville's uncle, the Hon.
Thomas Horton. The sound of approaching footsteps, how-
ever, made him hesitate in his fell purpose, so he contented
himself with becoming faintly phosphorescent, and vanished
with a deep church-yard groan, just as the twins had come up
to him.
On reaching his room he entirely broke down, and became
a prey to the most violent agitation. The vulgarity of the
twins, and the gross materialism of Mrs. Otis, were naturally
extremely annoying, but what really distressed him most was,
that he had been unable to wear the suit of mail. He had hoped
that even modern Americans would be thrilled by the sight of a
Spectre In Armour, if for no more sensible reason, at least
out of respect for their national poet Longfellow, over whose
graceful and attractive poetry he himself had whiled away
many a weary hour when the CanterviJles were up in town.
Besides, it was his own suit. He had worn it with success at
the Kenilworth tournament, and had been highly compli-
mented on it by no less a person than the Virgin Queen her-
self. Yet when he had put it on, he had been completely
overpowered by the weight of the huge breastplate and steel
casque, and had fallen heavily on the stone pavement, barking
both his knees severely, and bruising the knuckles of his right
hand.
For some days he was extremely ill, and hardly
after this
stirred out of his room all, except to keep the blood-stain
at
in proper repair. However, by taking great care of himself,
he recovered, and resolved to make a third attempt to frighten
the United States Minister and his family. He selected Friday,
the iyth of August, for his appearance, and spent most of
that day in looking over his wardrobe, ultimately deciding
in favour of a large slouched hat with a red feather, a winding-
sheet frilled at the wrists and neck, and a rusty dagger.
Towards evening a violent storm of rain came on, and the wind
was so high that all the windows and doors in the old house
shook and rattled. In fact, it was just such weather as he loved.
His plan of action was this. He was to make his way quietly
to Washington Otis's room, gibber at him from the foot
of the bed, and stab himself three times in the throat to the
756 OSCAR WILDE
sound of slow music. He bore Washington a special grudge,
being quite aware that it was he who
was in the habit of
removing the famous Canterville blood-stain, by means of
Pinkerton's Paragon Detergent. Having reduced the reckless
and foolhardy youth to a condition of abject terror, he was
then to proceed to the room occupied by the United States
Minister and his wife, and there to place a clammy hand on
Mrs. Otis's forehead, while he hissed into her trembling hus-
band's ear the awful secrets of the charnel-house. With
regard to little Virginia,
he had not quite made up his mind.
She had never insulted him in any way, and was pretty and
gentle. A few hollow groans from the wardrobe, he thought,
would be more than sufficient, or, if that failed to wake her,
he might grabble at the counterpane with palsy-twitching
fingers. As for the twins,
he was quite determined to teach
them a lesson. The first thing to be done was, of course, to
sit upon their chests, so as to produce the stifling sensation of

nightmare. Then, as their beds were quite close to each other,

to stand between them in the form of a green, icy-cold corpse,
till they became paralysed with fear, and finally, to throw off

the winding-sheet, and crawl round the room, with white

bleached bones and one rolling eyeball, in the character of
"
Dumb Daniel, or the Suicide's Skeleton/' a role in which
he had on more than one occasion produced a great effect, and
which he considered quite equal to his famous part of" Martin
the Maniac, or the Masked Mystery."
At half-past ten he heard the family going to bed. For
some time he was disturbed by wild shrieks of laughter from
the twins, who, with the light-hearted gaiety of schoolboys,
were evidently amusing themselves before they retired to rest,
but at a quarter past eleven all was still, and, as midnight
sounded, he sallied forth. The owl beat against the window
panes, the raven croacked from
the old yew-tree, and the wind
wandered moaning round the house like a lost soul ; but the
Otis family slept unconscious of their doom, and high above
the rain and storm he could hear the steady snoring of the
Minister for the United States. He stepped stealthily out of
the wainscoting, with an evil smile on his cruel, wrinkled
mouth, and the moon hid her face in a cloud as he stole past
the great oriel window, where his own arms and those of his
murdered wife were blazoned in azure and gold. On and on
he glided, like an evil shadow, the very darkness seeming to
 THE CANTERVILLE GHOST 757
loathe him as he passed. Once he thought he heard something
call, and stopped ; but it was only the baying of a dog from
the Red Farm, and he went on, muttering strange sixteenth-
century curses, and ever and anon brandishing the rusty
dagger in the midnight air. Finally he reached a corner of
the passage that led to luckless Washington's room. For a
moment he paused there, the wind blowing his long grey locks
about his head, and twisting into grotesque and fantastic folds
the nameless horror of the dead man's shroud. Then the
clock struck the quarter, and he felt the time was come. He
chuckled to himself, and turned the corner ; but no sooner
had he done so, than, with a piteous wail of terror, he fell
back, and hid his blanched face in his long, bony hands.
Right in front of him was standing a horrible spectre, motion-
less as a carven image, and monstrous as a madman's dream I

Its head was bald and burnished ; its face round, and fat, and
white ; and hideous laughter seemed to have writhed its
features into an eternal grin. From the eyes streamed rays of
scarlet light, the mouth was a wide well of fire, and a hideous

garment, like to his own, swathed with its silent snows the
Titan form. On its breast was a placard with strange writing
in antique characters, some scroll of shame it seemed, some
record of wild sins, some awful calendar of crime, and, with
its right hand,bore aloft a falchion of gleaming steel.
it

Never having seen a ghost before, he naturally was terribly

frightened, and, after a second hasty glance at the awful
phantom, he fled back to his room, tripping up in his long
winding-sheet as he sped down the corridor, and finally
dropping the rusty dagger into the Minister's jack-boots,
where it was found in the morning by the butler. Once in
the privacy of his own apartment, he flung himself down on a
small pallet-bed, and hid his face under the clothes. After a
time, however, the brave old Canterville spirit asserted itself,
and he determined to go and speak to the other ghost as soon
as it was daylight. Accordingly, just as the dawn was touch-

ing the hills with silver, he returned towards the spot where
he had first laid eyes on the grisly phantom, feeling that, after
all, two ghosts were better than one, and that, by the aid of
his new friend, he might safely grapple with the twins. On

reaching the spot, however, a terrible sight met his gaze.

Something had evidently happened to the spectre, for the
light had entirely faded from its hollow eyes, the gleaming
758 OSCAR WILDE
falchion had from its hand, and it was leaning up against
fallen
the wall in a strained and uncomfortable attitude. He rushed
forward and seized it in his arms, when, to his horror, the head
slipped off and rolled on the floor, the body assumed a recum-
bent- posture, and he found himself clasping a white dimity
bed-curtain, with a sweeping-brush, a kitchen cleaver, and a
hollow turnip lying at his feet Unable to understand this
!

curious transformation, he clutched the placard with feverish

haste, and there, in the grey morning light, he read these
fearful words :

nlte Sritc aitti rhjmak

of f)e Imitatttfttts*

0t!)cs art (Emmterfrit*

The whole thing flashed across him. He had been tricked,

foiled, and outwitted The old Canterville look came into
!

his eyes ; he ground his toothless gums together ; and,

raising his withered hands high above his head, swore,

according to the picturesque phraseology of the antique
school, that when Canticleer had sounded twice his merry
horn, deeds of blood would be wrought, and Murder walk
abroad with silent feet.
Hardly had he finished this awful oath when, from the red-
tiled roof of a distant homestead, a cock crew. He laughed a

long, low, bitter laugh, and waited. Hour after hour he waited,
but the cock, for some strange reason, did not crow again.
Finally, at half-past seven, the arrival of the housemaids made
him give up his fearful vigil, and he stalked back to his room,
thinking of his vain hope and baffled purpose. There he con-
sulted several books of ancient chivalry, of which he was
exceedingly fond, and found that, on every occasion on which
his oath had been used, Chanticleer had always crowed a
"
second time. Perdition seize the naughty fowl," he mut-
tered, "I have seen the day when, with my stout speai, I
would have run him through the gorge, and made him crow
"
for me an 'twere in death He then retired to a comfortable
!

lead coffin, and stayed there till

evening.
 THE CANTERVILLE GHOST 759

IV
THE next day the ghost was very weak and tired. The
terrible excitement of the last four weeks was
beginning to
have its effect. His nerves were completely shattered, and
he started at the slightest noise. For five days he kept his
room, and at last made up his mind to give up the point of
the blood-stain on the library floor. If the Otis family did not
want it, they clearly did not deserve it. They were evidently
people on a low, material plane of existence, and quite
incapable of appreciating the symbolic value of sensuous
phenomena. The question of phantasmic apparitions, and the
development of astral bodies, was of course quite a different
matter, and really not under his control. It was his solemn
duty to appear in the corridor once a week, and to gibber
from the large oriel window on the first and third Wednesday
in every month, and he did not see how he could honourably
escape from his obligations. It is quite true that his life had
been very evil, but, upon the other hand, he was most con-
scientious in all things connected with the supernatural. For
the next three Saturdays, accordingly, he traversed the corridor
as usual between midnight and three o'clock, taking every
possible precaution against being either heard or seen. He
removed his boots, trod as lightly as possible on the old worm-
eaten boards, wore a large black velevet cloak, and was
careful to use the Rising Sun Lubricator for oiling his chains.
I am bound to acknowledge that it was with a good deal of

difficulty that he brought himself to adopt this last mode of

protection. However, one night, while the family were at
dinner, he slipped into Mr. Otis's bedroom and carried off the
bottle. He felt a little humiliated at first, but afterwards was
sensible enough to see that there was a great deal to be said
for the invention, and, to a certain degree, it served his pur-
pose. Still, in spite of everything, he was not left unmolested.
Strings were continually being stretched across the corridor,
over which he tripped in the dark, and on one occasion, while
" Black
dressed for the part of Isaac, or the Huntsman of
Hogley Woods," he met with a severe fall, through treading
on a butter-slide, which the twins had constructed from the
entrance of the Tapestry Chamber to the top of the oak stair-
case. This last insult so enraged him, that he resolved to
make one final effort to assert his dignity and social position,
760 OSCAR WILDE
and determined to visit the insolent Etonians the next
"young
night in his celebrated character of Reckless Rupert, or the
Headless Earl/'
He had not appeared in this disguise for more than seventy
years ; in fact, not since he had so frightened pretty Lady
Barbara Modish by means of it, that she suddenly broke off
her engagement with the present Lord Canterville's grand-
father, and ran away to Gretna Green with handsome Jack
Castleton, declaring that nothing in the world would induce
her to marry into a family that allowed such a horrible phan-
tom to walk up and down the terrace at twilight. Poor Jack
was afterwards shot in a duel by Lord Canterville on Wands-
worth Common, and Lady Barbara died of a broken heart at
Tunbridge Wells before the year was out, so, in every way, it
had been a great success. It was, however, an extremely
"
difficult make-up," if I may use such a theatrical expression
in connection with one of the greatest mysteries of the
supernatural, or, to employ a more scientific term, the higher-
natural world, and it took him fully three hours to make his
preparations. At everything was ready, and he was very
last

pleased with his appearance. The big leather riding-boots

that went with the dress were just a little too large for him,
and he could only find one of the two horse-pistols, but, on
the whole, he was quite satisfied, and at a quarter past one he
glided out of the wainscoting and crept down the corridor.
On reaching the room occupied by the twins, which I should
mention was called the Blue Bed Chamber, on account of the
colour of its hangings, he found the door just ajar. Wishing
to make an effective entrance, he flung it wide open, when a
heavy jug of water fell right down on him, wetting him to the
skin, and just missing his left shoulder by a couple of inches.
At the same moment he heard stifled shrieks of laughter pro-
ceeding from the four-post bed. The shock to his nervous
system was so great that he fled back to his room as hard as he
could go, and the next day he was laid up with a severe cold.
The only thing that at all consoled him in the whole affair
was the fact that he had not brought his head with him, for,
had he done so, the consequences might have been very
serious.
He now gave up all hope of ever frightening this rude
American family, and contented himself, as a rule, with
creeping about the passages in list slippers, with a thick red
 THE CANTERVILLE GHOST 761
muffler round his throat for fear of draughts, and a small
arquebuse, in case he should be attacked by the twins. The
final blow he received occurred on the
i9th of September.
He had gone downstairs to the great entrance-hall, feeling
sure that there, at any rate, he would be quite
unmolested,
and was amusing himself by making satirical remarks on the
large Saroni photographs of the United States Minister and
his wife, which had now taken the place of the Canterville
family pictures. He was simply but neatly clad in a long
shroud, spotted with churchyard mould, had tied up his jaw
with a strip of yellow linen, and carried a small lantern and a
sexton's spade. In fact, he was dressed for the character of
"
Jonas the Graveless, or the Corpse-Snatcher of Chertsey
Barn/' one of his most remarkable impersonations, and one
which the Cantervilles had every reason to remember, as it
was the real origin of their quarrel with their neighbour, Lord
It was about a quarter
Rufford. past two o'clock in the
morning, and, as far as he could ascertain, no one was stirring.
As he was strolling towards the library, however, to see if
there were any traces left of the blood-stain,
suddenly there
leaped out on him from a dark corner two figures, who waved
their arms wildly above their heads, and shrieked out " Boo " 1

in his ear.
Seized with a panic, which, under the cirumstances, was
only natural, he rushed for the staircase, but found Washing-
ton Otis waiting for him there with the big
garden-syringe ;
and being thus hemmed in by his enemies on every side, and
driven almost to bay, he vanished into the great iron stove,
which, fortunately for him, was not lit, and had to make his
way home through the flues and chimneys, arriving at his own
room in a terrible state of dirt, disorder, and despair.
After this he was not seen again on any nocturnal expedition.
The twins lay in wait for him on several occasions, and strewed
the passages with nutshells every night to the great annoyance
of their parents and the servants, but it was of no avail. It
was quite evident that his feelings were so wounded that he
would not appear. Mr. Otis consequently resumed his great
work on the history of the Democratic Party, on which he
had been engaged for some years ; Mrs. Otis organised a
wonderful clambake, which amazed the whole county ;
the boys took to lacrosse, euchre, poker, and other American
national games ;
and Virginia rode about the lanes on her
762 OSCAR WILDE
pony, accompanied by the young Duke of Cheshire, who had
come to spend the last week of his holidays at Canterville
Chase. It was generally assumed that the ghost had gone
away, and, in fact, Mr. Otis wrote a letter to that effect to Lord
Canterville, who, in reply, expressed his great pleasure at the
news, and sent his best congratulations to the Minister's
worthy wife.
The Otises, however, were deceived, for the ghost was still
in the house, and though now almost an invalid, was by no
means ready to let matters rest, particularly as he heard that
among the guests was the young Duke of Cheshire, whose
grand-uncle, Lord Francis Stilton, had once bet a hundred
guineas with Colonel Carbury that he would play dice with the
Canterville ghost, and was found the next morning lying on
the floor of the card-room in such a helpless paralytic state,
that though he lived on to a great age, he was never able to
" Double Sixes/'
say anything again but The story was well
known at the time, though, of course, out of respect to the
feelings of the two noble families, every attempt was made to
hush it up ; and a full account of all the circumstances con-
nected with it will be found in the third volume of Lord
Tattle's ^collections of the Prince Regent and his Friends. The
ghost, then, was naturally very anxious to show that he had
not lost his influence over the Stiltons, with whom, indeed,
he was distantly connected, his own first cousin having been
married en secondes noces to the Sieur de Bulkeley, from whom,
as every one knows, the Dukes of Cheshire are lineally
descended. Accordingly, he made arrangements for appearing
to Virginia's little lover in his celebrated impersonation of
"
The Vampire Monk, or, the Bloodless Benedictine," a per-
formance so horrible that when old Lady Startup saw it, which
she did on one fatal New Year's Eve, in the year 1764, she
went off into the most piercing shrieks, which culminated in
violent apoplexy, and died in three days, after disinheriting
the Cantervilles, who were her nearest relations, and leaving
all her money to her London apothecary. At the last moment,

however, his terror of the twins prevented his leaving his

room, and the little Duke slept in peace under the great
feathered canopy in the Royal Bedchamber, and dreamed of
Virginia.
 THE CANTERVILLE GHOST 763

A FEW days after this, Virginia and her curly-haired cavalier

went out riding on Brockley meadows, where she tore her
habit so badly in getting through a hedge, that, on her return
home, she made up her mind to go up by the back staircase
so as not to be seen. As she was running past the Tapestry
Chamber, the door of which happened to be open, she fancied
she saw some one inside, and thinking it was her mother's
maid, who sometimes used to bring her work there, looked in
to ask her to mend her habit. To her immense surprise,
however, it was the Canterville Ghost himself! He was
sitting by the window, watching the ruined gold of the
yellow trees fly through the air, and the red leaves dancing
madly down the long avenue. His head was leaning on his
hand, and his whole attitude was one of extreme depression.
Indeed, so forlorn, and so much out of repair did he look,
that little Virginia, whose first idea had been to run away
and lock herself in her room, was filled with pity, and deter-
mined to try and comfort him. So light was her footfall,
and so deep his melancholy, that he was not aware of her
presence till she spoke to him.
"I am sorry for you," she said, "but my brothers are
going back to Eton to-morrow, and then, if you behave
yourself, no one will annoy you."
"
It is absurd asking me to behave myself," he answered,

looking round in astonishment" at the pretty little girl who

had ventured to address him, quite absurd. I must rattle
my chains, and groan through keyholes, and walk about at
night, if that is what you mean. It is my only reason for
existing."
"
It is no reason at all for existing, and you know you
have been very wicked. Mrs. Umney told us, the first day
we arrived here, that you had killed your wife."
" "
Well, I quite admit
it," said the Ghost petulantly, but
it was a purely family matter and concerned no one else."
"
It is very wrong to kill anyone," said Virginia, who at
times had a sweet Puritan gravity, caught from some old
New England ancestor.
"
Oh, I hate the cheap severity of abstract ethics My !

wife was very plain, never had my ruffs properly starched,

and knew nothing about cookery. Why, there was a buck
764 OSCAR WILDE
I had shot in Hogley Woods, a magnificent pricket, and do
you know how she had it sent up to table ? However, it is
no matter now, for it is all over, and I don't think it was
very nice of her brothers to starve me to death, though
I did kill her/'
"
Starve you to death ? Oh, Mr. Ghost, I mean Sir Simon,
are you hungry ? I have a sandwich in my case. Would you
like it?"
"No, thankyou, I never eat anything now; but it is
very kind of you, all the same, and you are much nicer
than the rest of your horrid, rude, vulgar, dishonest
family/'
" " "
Stop cried Virginia, stamping her foot,
I it is you

who are rude, and horrid, and vulgar ; and as for dishonesty,
you know you stole the paints out of my box to try and
furbish up that ridiculous blood-stain in the library. First
you took all my reds, including the vermilion, and I couldn't
do any more sunsets, then you took the emerald-green and
the chrome-yellow, and finally I had nothing left but indigo
and Chinese white, and could only do moonlight scenes,
which are always depressing to look at, and not at all easy
to paint. I never told on you, though I was very much

annoyed, and it was most ridiculous, the whole thing ; for

"
who ever heard of emerald-green blood ?
"Well, really," said the Ghost, rather meekly, "what
was I to do ? It is a very difficult thing to get real blood
nowadays, and, as your brother began it all with his Paragon
Detergent, I certainly saw no reason why I should not have
your paints. As for colour, that is always a matter of taste :

the Cantervilles have blue blood, for instance, the very bluest
in England ; but I know you Americans don't care for things
of this kind."
"
You know nothing about it, and the best thing you can
do is and improve your mind. My father will
to emigrate
be only too happy to give you a free passage, and though
there is a heavy duty on spirits of every kind, there will be
no difficulty about the Custom House, as the officers are all
Democrats. Once in New York, you are sure to be a great
success. I know lots of people there who would give a
hundred thousand dollars to have a grandfather, and much
more than that to have a family Ghost."
"
T don't think I should like America."
 THE CANTERVILLE GHOST 765
" I
suppose
because we have no ruins and no curiosities,"
said Virginia satirically.
" " "
Noruins 1 no curiosities I answered the Ghost ; you
have your navy and your manners."
"
Good evening ; I will go and ask papa to get the twins
an extra week's holiday."
" " I am
Please don't go, Miss Virginia," he cried ; so
lonely and so unhappy, and I really don't know what to do.
I want to go to sleep and I cannot."
"
That's quite absurd You have merely to go to bed and
1

blow out the candle. It is very difficult sometimes to keep

awake, especially at church, but there is no difficulty at all
about sleeping. Why, even babies know how to do that,
and they are not very clever."
"
I have not slept for three hundred years," he said sadly,
and Virginia's beautiful blue eyes opened in wonder ; " for
three hundred years I have not slept, and I am so tired."
Virginia grew quite grave, and her little lips trembled
like rose-leaves. She came towards him, and kneeling down
at his side, looked up into his old withered face.
" "
Poor, poor Ghost," she murmured : have you no place
"
where you can sleep ?
"
Far away beyond the pine-woods," he answered, in a low
"
dreamy voice, there is a little garden. There the grass
grows long and deep, there are the great white stars of the
hemlock flower, there the nightingale sings all night long.
All night long he sings, and the cold, crystal moon looks
down, and the yew-tree spreads out its giant arms over
the sleepers."
Virginia's eyes grew dim with tears, and she hid her face
in her hands.
"
You mean the Garden of Death," she whispered.
"
Yes, Death. Death must be so beautiful. To lie in
the soft brown earth with the grasses waving above one's
head, and listen to silence. To have no yesterday, and no
to-morrow. To forget time, to forgive life, to be at peace.
You can help me. You can open for me the portals of Death's
house, for Love is always with you, and Love is stronger
than Death is."

Virginia trembled, a cold shudder ran through her, and for

a few moments there was silence. She felt as if she was in a
terrible dream.
j66 OSCAR WILDE
Then the Ghost spoke again, and his voice sounded like
the sighing of the wind.
"
Have you ever read the old prophecy on the library
"
window ?
" "I know
Oh, often/' cried the little girl, looking up ; it

quite well. It is painted in curious black letters, and it is

difficult to read. There are only six lines :

tSEljen a 0cli)en #trl ran hrin

|)ra|jer from rmt ibe lips 0f sin,
Wiljtn ibe barren almond bears.
Jlnir a little 0ibes atoatj its tears,
rljilfc

sljall all the bouse be still

peare rmtte ta Canterbille*

But I don't know what they mean."

" "
They mean/' he you must weep for me
said sadly, that
for my sins, because I have no tears, and pray with me for
my soul, because I have no faith, and then, if you have always
been sweet, and good, and gentle, the Angel of Death will
have mercy on me. You will see fearful shapes in darkness,
and wicked voices will whisper in your ear, but they will not
harm you, for against the purity of a little child the powers
of Hell cannot prevail."
Virginia made no answer, and the Ghost wrung his hands
in wild despair as he looked down at her bowed golden head,
Suddenly she "stood up, very pale, and with a strange
" light
in her eyes. I am not afraid," she said firmly, and I will
ask the Angel to have mercy on you."
He rose from his seat with a faint cry of joy, and taking her
hand bent over it with old-fashioned grace and kissed it.
His fingers were as cold as ice, and his lips burned like fire,
but Virginia did not falter, as he led her across the dusky
room. On the faded green tapestry were broidered little
huntsmen. They blew their tasselled horns and with their
"
tiny hands waved to her to go" back. Go back little !

"
Virginia," they cried, go back but the Ghost clutched her
1

hand more tightly, and she shut her eyes against them.
Horrible animals with lizard tails, and goggle eyes, blinked
at her from the carven chimney-piece, and murmured
"
Beware little Virginia, beware
! we may never see you
1

again," but the Ghost glided on more swiftly, and Virginia

 THE CANTERVILLE GHOST 767
did not listen. When
they reached the end of the room he
stopped, and muttered some words she could not understand.
She opened her eyes, and saw the wall slowly fading away
like a mist, and a great black cavern in front of her. A bitter
cold wind swept round them, and she felt something pulling
" "
at her dress. Quick, quick," cried the Ghost, or it will
be too late," and, in a moment, the wainscoting had closed
behind them, and the Tapestry Chamber was empty.

VI
ABOUT ten minutes later, the bell rang for tea, and, as Virginia
did not come down, Mrs. Otis sent up one of the footmen to
tell her. After a time he returned and said that he
little
could not find Miss Virginia anywhere. As she was in the
habit of going out to the garden every evening to get flowers
for the dinner-table, Mrs. Otis was not at all alarmed at first,
but when six o'clock struck, and Virginia did not appear, she
became really agitated, and sent the boys out to look for her,
while she herself and Mr. Otis searched every room in the
house. At half-past six the tjoys came back and said that
they could find no trace of their sister anywhere. They were
all now in the greatest state of excitement, and did not know
what to do, when Mr. Otis suddenly remembered that, some
few days before, he had given a band of gypsies permission
to camp in the park. He
accordingly at once set off for
Blackfell Hollow, where he knew they were, accompanied by
his eldest son and two of the farm-servants. The little Duke
of Cheshire, who was perfectly frantic with anxiety, begged
hard to be allowed to go too, but Mr. Otis would not allow
him, as he was afraid there might be a scuffle. On arriving at
the spot, however, he found that the gypsies had gone, and
it was evident that their
departure had been rather sudden,
as the fire was still burning, and some plates were lying on
the grass. Having sent off Washington and the two men to
scour the district, he ran home, and despatched telegrams to
all the
police inspectors in the country, telling them to look
out for a little girl who had been kidnapped by tramps or
gypsies. He then ordered his horse to be brought round, and,
after insisting on his wife and the three boys sitting down to
dinner, rode off down the Ascot Road with a groom. He had
hardly, however, gone a couple of miles when he heard
768 OSCAR WILDE
somebody galloping after him, and, looking round, saw the
little Duke coming up on his pony, with his face very flushed
" I'm
and no hat. awfully sorry, Mr. Otis," gasped out the
" dinner as
boy, but I can't eatany as
long is lost.
Virginia
Please, don't be angry with me ; if you had letus be engaged
last year, therewould never have been all this trouble. You
"
won't send me back, will you ? I can't go I won't go
1 1

The Minister could not help smiling at the handsome

young scapegrace, and was a good deal touched at his devotion
to Virginia, so leaning down from his horse, he patted him
"
kindly on the shoulders, and said, Well, Cecil, if you won't
go back I suppose you must come with me, but I must get
you a hat at Ascot."
" "
Oh, bother my hat I want Virginia
1 cried the little
!

Duke, laughing, and they galloped on to the railway station.

There Mr. Otis inquired of the station-master if any one
answering the description of Virginia had been seen on the
platform, but could get no news of her. The station-master,
however, wired up and down the line, and assured him that
a strict watch would be kept for her, and, after having bought
a hat for the little Duke from a linen-draper, who was just
putting up his shutters, Mr. Otis rode off to Bexley, a village
about four miles away, which he was told was a well-known
haunt of the gypsies, as there was a large common next to
it. Here they roused up the rural policeman, but could get
no information from him, and, after riding all over the
common, they turned their horses' heads homewards, and
reached the Chase about eleven o'clock, dead-tired and almost
heart-broken. They found Washington and the twins
waiting for them at the gate-house with lanterns, as the avenue
was very dark. Not the slightest trace of Virginia had been
discovered. The gypsies had been caught on Broxley meadows,
but she was not with them, and they had explained their
sudden departure by saying that they had mistaken the date
of Chorton Fair, and had gone off in a hurry for fear they
might be late. Indeed, they had been quite distressed at
hearing of Virginia's disappearance, as they were very grateful
to Mr. Otis for having allowed them to camp in his park,
and four of their number had stayed behind to help in the
search. The carp-pond had been dragged, and the whole
Chase thoroughly gone over, but without any result. It
was evident that, for that night at any rate, Virginia was lost
 THE CANTERVILLE GHOST 769
to them and it was in a state of the deepest depression that
;

Mr. Otis and the boys walked up to the house, the groom
following behind with the two horses and the pony. In the
hall they found a group of frightened servants, and lying on
a sofa in the library was poor Mrs. Otis, almost out of her
mind with terror and anxiety, and having her forehead
bathed with eau-de-cologne by the old housekeeper. Mr.
Otis at once insisted on her having something to eat, and
ordered up supper for the whole party. It was a melancholy
meal, as hardly anyone "spoke, and even the twins were awe-
struck and subdued, as they were very fond of their sister.
When they had finished, Mr. Otis, in spite of the entreaties
of the little Duke, ordered them all to bed, saying that nothing
more could be done that night, and that he would telegraph
in the morning to Scotland Yard for some detectives to be
sent down immediately. Just as they were passing out of
the dining-room, midnight began to boom from the clock
tower, and when the last stroke sounded they heard a crash
and a sudden shrill cry ; a dreadful peal of thunder shook
the house, a strain of unearthly music floated through the
air, a panel at the top of the staircase flew back with a loud
noise, and out on the landing, looking very pale and white,
with a casket in her hand, stepped Virginia. In a
little

moment they had all rushed up to her. Mrs. Otis clasped

her passionately in her arms, the Duke smothered her with
violent kisses, and the twins executed a wild war-dance round
the group.
"Good heavens I where have you been ?" said
child,
Mr. Otis, rather angrily, thinking that she had been playing
some foolish trick on them. "Cecil and I have been riding
all over the country looking for you, and your mother has
been frightened to death. You must never play these practical
jokes any more/'
"Except on the Ghost except on the Ghost 1" shrieked
I

the twins, as they capered about.

"My own darling, thank God you are found ; you must
never leave my side again," murmured Mrs. Otis, as she
kissed the trembling child, and smoothed the tangled gold
of her hair.

"Papa/' said Virginia quietly, "I have been with the

Ghost. He is dead, and you must come and see him. He
had been very wicked, but he was really sorry for all that he
2B
770 OSCAR WILDE
had done, and he gave me this box of beautiful jewels before
he died."
The whole family gazed at her in mute amazement, but she
was quite grave and serious
-:
and, turning round, she led
;

them through the opening in the wainscoting down a narrow

secret corridor, Washington following with a lighted candle,
which he had caught up from the table. Finally, they came
to a great oak door, studded with rusty nails. When Virginia
touched it, it swung back on its heavy hinges, and they found
themselves in a little low room, with a vaulted ceiling, and
one tiny grated window. Imbedded in the wall was a huge
iron ring, and chained to it was a gaunt skeleton, that was
stretched out at full length on the stone floor, and seemed to
be trying to grasp with its long, fleshless fingers an old-
fashioned trencher and ewer that were placed just out of its
reach. The jug had evidently been once filled with water,
as it was covered inside with green mould. There was nothing
on the trencher but a of dust. Virginia knelt down beside
pile
the skeleton, and, folding her little hands together, began to
pray silently, while the rest of the party looked on in wonder
at the terrible tragedy whose secret was now disclosed to
them.
9
"Hallo V suddenly exclaimed one of the twins, who had
been looking out of the window to try to discover in what
wing of the house the room was situated. "Hallo the old 1

withered almond-tree has blossomed. I can see the flowers

quite plainly in the moonlight."
"God has forgiven him/' said Virginia gravely, as she rose
to her feet, and a beautiful light seemed to illumine her face.
"What an angel you are !" cried the young Duke, and he
put his arm round her neck and kissed her.

vn
FOUR days after these curious incidents a funeral started from
Canterville Chase at about eleven o'clock at night. The
hearse was drawn by eight black horses, each of which carried
on its head a great tuft of nodding ostrich-plumes, and the
leaden coffin was covered by a rich purple pall, on which was
embroidered in gold the Canterville coat-of-arms. By the
side of the hearse and the coaches walked the servants with
lighted torches, and the whole procession was wonderfully
 THE CANTERVILLE GHOST 771

impressive. Lord Canterville was the chief mourner, having

come up specially from Wales to attend the funeral, and sat
in the first carriage along with little Virginia. Then came the
United States Minister and his wife, then Washington and
the three boys, and in the last carriage was Mrs. Umney. It
was generally felt that, as she had been frightened by the ghost
for more than fifty years of her life, she had a right to see the
last of him. A deep grave had been dug in the corner of the
churchyard, just under the old yew-tree, and the service was
read in the most impressive manner by the Rev. Augustus
Dampier. When the ceremony was over, the servants,
according to an old custom observed in the Canterville family,
extinguished their torches, and, as the coffin was being lowered
into the grave, Virginia stepped forward and laid on it a large
cross made of white and pink almond-blossoms. As she did
so, the moon came out from behind a cloud, and flooded
with its silent silver the little churchyard, and from a distant
copse a nightingale began to sing. She thought of the ghost's
description of the Garden of Death, her eyes became dim with
tears, and she hardly spoke a word during the drive home.
The next morning, before Lord Canterville went up to
town, Mr. Otis had an interview with him on the subject of
the jewels the ghost had given to Virginia. They were
perfectly magnificent, especially a certain ruby necklace with
old Venetian setting, which was really a superb specimen of
sixteenth-century work, and their value was so great that Mr.
Otis felt considerable scruples about allowing his daughter to
accept them.
"My Lord," he said, "I know that in this country mort-
main is held to apply to trinkets as well as to land, and it is
quite clear to me that these jewels are, or should be, heirlooms
in your family. I must beg you, accordingly, to take them to
London with you, and to regard them simply as a portion of
your property which has been restored to you under certain
strange conditions. As for my daughter, she is merely a
child and has as yet, I am glad to say, but little interest in
such appurtenances of idle luxury. I am also informed by
Mrs. Otis, who, I may say, is no mean authority upon Art
having had the privilege of spending several winters in Boston
when she was a girl that these gems are of great monetary
worth, and if offered for sale would fetch a tall price.Under
these circumstances, Lord Canterville, I feel sure that you
77* OSCAR WILDE
will recognise how impossible it would be for me to allow
them to remain in the possession of any member of my
family ; and, indeed, all such vain gauds and toys, however
suitable or necessary to the dignity of the British aristocracy,
would be completely out of place among those who have
been brought up on the severe, and I believe immortal,
principles of republican simplicity. Perhaps I should mention
that Virginia is very anxious that you should allow her to
retain the box as a memento of your unfortunate but mis-

guided ancestor. As it is extremely old, and consequently

a good deal out of repair, you may perhaps think fit to comply
with her request. For my own part, I confess I am a good
deal surprised to find a child of mine expressing sympathy
with medievalism in any form, and can only account for it
by the fact that Virginia was born in one of your London
suburbs shortly after Mrs. Otis had returned from a trip to
Athens."
Lord CanterviUe very gravely to the worthy
listened
Minister's speech, pulling his grey moustache now and then
to hide an involuntary smile, and when Mr. Otis had ended,
he shook him cordially by the hand, and said, "My dear sir,
your charming little daughter rendered my unlucky ancestor,
Sir Simon, a very important service, and I and my family are
much indebted to her for her marvellous courage and pluck.
The jewels are clearly hers, and, egad, I believe that if I were
heartless enough to take them from her, the wicked old
fellow would be out of his grave in a fortnight, leading me
the devil of a life. As for their being heirlooms, nothing is
an heirloom that is not so mentioned in a will or legal docu-
ment, and the existence of these jewels has been quite unknown.
I assure you I have no more claim on them than your butler,
and when Miss Virginia grows up I dare say she will be
pleased to have pretty things to wear. Besides, you forget,
Mr. Otis, that you took the furniture and the ghost at a
valuation, and anything that belonged to the ghost passed at
once into your possession, as, whatever activity Sir Simon
may have shown in the corridor at night, in point of law he
was really dead, and you acquired his property by purchase."
Mr. Otis was a good deal distressed at Lord Canterville's
refusal, and begged him to reconsider his decision, but the
good-natured peer was quite firm, and finally induced the
Minister to allow his daughter to retain the present
 THE CANTERVILLE GHOST 773
the ghost had given her, and when, in the spring of 1890,
the young Duchess of Cheshire was presented at the Queen's
first drawing-room on the occasion of her marriage, her

jewels were the universal theme of admiration. For Virginia

received the coronet, which is the reward of all good little
American girls, and was married to her boy-lover as soon as
he came of age. They were both so charming, and they
love deach other so much, that everyone was delighted at
the match, except the old Marchioness of Dumbleton, who
had tried to catch the Duke for one of her seven unmarried
daughters, and had given no less than three expensive dinner-
parties for that purpose, and strange to say, Mr. Otis himself.
Mr. Otis was extremely fond of the young Duke personally,
but, theoretically, he objected to titles, and, to use his own
words, "was not without apprehension lest, amid the enerva-
ting influences of a pleasure-loving aristocracy, the true
principles of republican simplicity should be forgotten."
His objections, however, were completely overruled, and I
believe that when he walked up the aisle of St. George's,
Hanover Square, with his daughter leaning on his arm, there
was not a prouder man in the whole length and breadth of
England.
The Duke and Duchess, after thehoneymoon was over,
went down to Canterville Chase, and on the day after their
arrival they walked over in the afternoon to the lonely church-
yard by the pine- woods. There had been a great deal of
difficulty at first about the inscription on Sir Simon's tomb-
stone, but finally it had been decided to engrave on it simply
the initials of the old gentleman's name, and the verse from
the library window. The Duchess had brought with her
some lovely roses, which she strewed upon the grave, and
after they had stood by it for some time they strolled into the
ruined chapel of the old abbey. There the Duchess sat down
on a fallen pillar, while her husband lay at her feet smoking
a cigarette and looking up at her beautiful eyes. Suddenly
he threw his cigarette away, took hold of her hand, and said
to her, "Virginia, a wife should have no secrets from her
husband/'
"Dear Cecilhave no secrets from you."
I I
"Yes, you have," he answered, smiling, "you have never
told me what happened to you when you were locked up
with the Ghost."
774 OSCAR WILDE
"I have never told anyone, Cecil," said Virginia gravely,
"I know that, but you might tell me/'
"Please don't ask me, Cecil, I cannot tell you. Poor Sir
Simon ! I owe him a great deal. Yes, don't laugh, Cecil,
I really do. He made me see what Life is, and what Death
signifies, and why Love is stronger than both,"
The Duke rose and kissed his wife lovingly.
"You can have your secret as long as I have your heart,"
he murmured.
"You have always had that, Cecil."
"And you will tell our children some day, won't you ?"
Virginia blushed.
 ERIC BARKER

Almost a Hero

Eric Barker is a clever

young novelist of whom more
willbe heard. His first book, Sea Breezes, published
under the name of Christopher Bentley, showed that he
has a real talent for humorous writing, though his
recentDay Gone By is in more serious vein. He has
had considerable experience on the stage and as a
wireless entertainer.
 ALMOST A HERO

finally selected the camel. Not one of the alternative

HE methods had escaped him. He had considered each
with that zeal and concentration that is possible only to a really
great lover . .the deck-rail in the moon, Naples at sunset
.

when looks like a vulgar birthday card, a lonely tea in the

it

Casino at Nice, a donkey-ride up the Rock, the swimming-

pool before breakfast. He had renounced all these, wisely,
he thought, in favour of the camel.
There was something about the desert. A
pith helmet
alone added fifty per cent to a man's self-esteem, and Henry
Viscount Brodick could do with a little more of that, the Lord
knew. He fancied his chances were about even, being a
somewhat unreasonable optimist.
He shrewdly bided his time until they were jogging along
side by side under the deep shade of a palm grove. His
father, his sister, and Eddie Wiggins were a good hundred
yards in the rear ; the Cheops Pyramid a mile, maybe more,
directly ahead, rearing its hulk into the harsh turquoise sky,
alike a symbol of, and fingerpost to, courage. Henry cleared
his throat twice and got the half-nelson on his larynx.
"Will you marry me, Brenda ?" he asked. It was the first
time he had used her Christian name, save to himself.
"Don't be so silly 1" said Brenda. "Of course I won't
marry you !"
The conversation ended here because the Earl (of Dever-
sham), his father, his sister Winifred, and Eddie Wiggins,
her fianc, and even the guide, came literally charging up on
their camels to see what all the amusement was about.
"What's the joke?" he caught from his father, also an
arch chuckle.
"Oh, nothing," he heard Brenda gurgle in reply. "Only
Henry I"
"Oh, Henry I"
777 ZB *
 778 E R IJC BARKER
"Old Henry 1"
"Ha! Ha! Hal"
Henry dropped deliberately behind, his emotions, all of
them, seething like
pent-up volcanic lava. Only old Henry !

It was always only Henry funny old Henry He-he-he 1 !

How he loved her 1 She was, perhaps in these queer times

when a figure like a length of gas-piping is the insignia of the
Woman Beautiful, a trifle on the generous side She , . .

was six feet two, and not quite as broad . . . and he was five
feet four,and thinner by a good deal. . . . But what did that
matter ? Love was the only thing.
She had entered his life at Port Said. He and his father
and Winifred and Eddie were on a pleasure cruise, and there
she had boarded the boat for home, having just traversed the
Dark Continent from Cape Town on a motor-scooter.
He was not surprised to hear she was an explorer. Short
of a goddess, with her lovely bronze limbs and ivory teeth,
he could not see what else she could possibly be. And she
thought him, Henry, silly !

A more than a month later, the unwitting cause of

little

this tragedy was sitting out on the terrace of Deversham Hall,

sipping afternoon tea with one Captain the Hon. "Snappy"

Lowndes, late of the Royal Inniskilling Dragoons.
Captain the Hon. Snappy Lowndes was a staggering and
unusual personality. On the one hand he was fair game for
the weekly illustrated flashlights and the daily gossip writers,
who time and again let it be known that the unconventional
snapshot herewith was that of the popular, witty, and brilliant
Captain Snappy Lowndes, without whom no cocktail party was
complete ; and then, on the other hand, he was a big-game
hunter of such prowess that, wherever he landed, the news
seemed to penetrate into almost the innermost jungle, so that
when he finally set out witji his train of porters and newly
primed rifles there was no big game to be found.
This excellent combination of qualities had appealed
strangely to Brenda Durain. To her, men had belonged
always to one of two species. They were either, flatly,
"weeds", or else rough diamonds, "tough eggs". She had
never even hoped to come across an easy blend of both ; and
 ALMOST A HERO 779
now she had found one. The idea of a perfectly manicured
hand, which in a twinkling could become a fist of iron, charmed
and fascinated her.
Recently they had decided to link forces for a new expedi-
tion .that of being the first to attain the summit of Fuji-
. .

yama on push bicycles, one of the few unplumbed possibilities

in this direction now left.

"Of course, there is just one small point," the Captain was
saying. clear, far-seeing brain would not permit him to
His
ride slap-dash over these punctilios. "And that is, whether,
when all is said and done, it would not really be simpler if we

leftthe bicycles out of it After all

! ." . .

Brenda Durain smiled wearily.

"Naturally it would be easier," she conceded. "What-
ever happens, we shall have to carry them most of the way,
but is this to deter us from creating a record which has yet not
been even attempted^ let alone challenged ?"
"True," mumbled Captain Lowndes, a little shamefacedly.
"Very true. I didn't look at it that way, I must confess."
Every word, every point settled and added to the pre-
paration for the caravanserai was as so much gall to Henry,
intently eavesdropping below the terrace from the privacy of a
rhododendron bush. Every day he scurrilously came here
to listen to their arrangements. Every day his suit pined a
little more
in its hope.
When she parted from Captain Lowndes, it was her wont to
stroll down to the lake for a little sculling before dinner, to

keep her muscles in.

This afternoon Henry summoned up the courage to follow
her. He had proposed matrimony in all sixteen times since
that ill-fated kick-off at Cairo, a marked decrease in en-
couragement ensuing upon each attempt.
She was in the skiff and out on the water, travelling strongly
in the direction of the swan island in the centre., almost before
he had reached the edge.
He launched the only other craft, a cumbersome Indian
canoe, and paddled off towards the other side of the island
to intercept her as she came round.
"Hi 1" he bellowed.
It would be idle to pretend that the expression on the

strongly chiselled features of Brenda Durain was anything

but amusement, tempered with an unveiled weariness.
780 ERIC BARKER
"What do you want ?" she muttered resignedly. She was
about fifteen feet away, the oars trailing motionless from their
rowlocks.
"Don't you know ?" bleated poor Henry. His face
changed piteously as she made a swift grab at the oars. "No,
please, don't go away If you would only just give me a
I

"
chance to say
"You can say what you like/* said Brenda Durain firmly.
"But, if you talk for a year without stopping, I will never,
never marry you. Now, let's get this quite clear, Henry.
Never ! You understand ? And now I should be very
grateful if you would never refer to the subject again."
Henry dragged his fingers slowly through the still, green
water.
"There's just one small thing," he said quietly. "If you
mean what you say that there isn't a chance I think it's
almost my right yes, it is to ask one final question."
"Well ?"
"Will you m no, sorry I mean, why won't you marry
me?"
Brenda Durain sighed.
"There are two reasons, Henry. One, I love somebody
else."
"Ah, Lowndes 1" gulped Henry, with a nod. "Yes ?"
"I won't tell you the other."
"Go on," urged Henry manfully. "Be a sport."
She blurted it out before she meant to :

"Well, you're such a rabbit /"

Henry took up his paddle, and, fixing his eyes on the
house as though the sun (which was behind him and a cloud-
bank) was too strong for them, he mooched slowly off shore-
wards with all the dignity he could muster.
There was a dance that night to which hied the flower of
the country. Hand in hand, man and woman (it seemed to
Henry that the entire species, with the exception of himself,
went in couples), they frolicked, laughed, loved, lived, and
were happy.
And Henry looked on with a sneer in his heart. He knew
what paste and clay it all was. Then, once more from the
seclusion of the rhododendron bush, he received the crown of
his sorrow. He heard his love cheerfully, wilfully hand over
her heart to the perpetual keeping of Captain Snappy
 ALMOSTAHERO 781
Lowndes. Moreover, the compact was sealed with a pro-
longed, glutinous kiss that made his blood run cold, and
doubtless many more which he did not wait to hear.
He groped his way blindly through a phalanx of lovers,
with kisses popping like champagne corks on every side, back
to the house.
From his bedroom window he looked down with a strange
calm upon the lawn below, the shirt-fronts that gleamed from
the darkness, the subtler hints of white arms and shoulders.
Still, it was not for long. A mirthless laugh escaped him
as, quietly closing the casement, and pulling the curtains, he
tried to visualize what she would say when he was found.

Newspaper reporters and police inspectors would question

her . . . How would she like that ?
DEATH WHILE THE MUSIC PLAYS
YOUNG PEER TAKES His LIFE AT THE HEIGHT OF THE DANCE
UNREQUITED LOVE SUSPECTED AS THE CAUSE

From the drawer in hiswardrobe he took the bottle of

veronal tablets with which he was accustomed to induce
when refractory.
sleep,
One was sufficient for
roughly eight hours' healthy snoring.
Twelve ought to make a pretty good job of it. He unscrewed
the top and counted them out carefully on the palm of his
hand. He put the bottle back in the drawer. Well . this
. .

was the end.

And of this narrative also, it might have been, but for the
timely action of one Chief Warder Smith, at the Hawsley
Criminal Lunatic Asylum some four miles away. At the
exact instant thatHenry raised his hand to his mouth, Chief
Warder Smith of the Hawsley Asylum placed his thumb
on the control button of the steam siren, and kept it there for
four minutes.
Lest there be any doubt that he was an official and not an
inmate, it should be mentioned that Chief Warder Smith did
this to warn the citizenry that "Big" Jem Blake, their most
valuable prisoner, had just succeeded in scaling the outer wall
unperceived and was now at large ; and since "Big" Jem Blake
had the regrettable bee in his bonnet that he was not "Big"
Jem Blake at all, but Attila the Hun, and that at one period of
782 ERIC BARKER
his career had killed his wife and his wife's parents with a meat
hatchet ; his father, his grandmother on his mother's side, and
his father's aunt, with a corkscrew ; and his cousin Ada with
his bare hands, Chief Warder Smith deemed it only prudent
to blow the siren for twice as long as the regulation two
minutes.
Let us now return to ... but this is not the Henry we left
only a paragraph ago ! It cannot be. Why, he was on the point
of Mata Kari This person is beaming, and has the laughing
1

twinkle of life in his eyes.

And what is the other fellow doing here what is his
name Eddie Wiggins ? And why are they whispering
together like Balkan anarchists ? Can it be that Chief Warder
Smith has in some way unbeknown succeeded in imparting
one of those twists in the tail of life that alter its complexion
entirely ?
"But look here, dashit," Eddie Wiggins was protesting
valiantly. "We can't do that sort of thing, you know, I
mean !"
"We can," insisted Henry, holding him firmly down in his
seat by the lapels, "and you know it. What is more, I mean
that we shall. It is my only chance, your name is a by- word
in amateur dramatic circles upon my word, Eddie, I can't
understand you jibbing like this at doing an old friend a good
turn I"
"It isn't that, old boy, exactly. You know, there's nothing
I'd rather do, in the ordinary way. But supposing I get laid
out or or something dammit ?"
"Nonsense," said Henry gently. "Now you toddle up to
the Rectory like a good chap, and you'll find all the gear
there. Tell the old boy what it's all about if you like. He's
a fine old sport. And remember don't be afraid of over-
acting. And don*t forget about the knuckle-duster and old
Snappy 1
Everything depends on it 1"
Five minutes later he was waltzing, with Brenda cradled
in his arms (figuratively). Conversation was sparing. She
was rather upset by the way in which he had received the news
of her engagement.
She had broken it to him as gently and considerately as
she could. His answer had been a cackle of mirth and a shower
of perfunctory congratulations into which, being of normal
intelligence, she could not but fit the meaning that, after all,
 ALMOST A HERO 783
one had to have one's Captain Lowndes, or the world would
not go round, as the saying is* This, so soon after sixteen
passionate proposals, struck her as odd in the extreme.
"I suppose you heard that siren just now from Hawsley ?"
saidHenry chattily. "It means a lunatic has escaped when it
keeps on like that."
"Yes. Your father just rang up to make sure, too."
The initial scream was supplied some ten minutes later by
Henry's sister Winifred, who was standing by the door. It
was promptly taken up by every female throat in the hall, with
the exception of Brenda Durain's. However, Henry was
overjoyed to perceive that she went pale.
The men contributed their share to the uproar with a
cacophony of grunts, hollow roars, and croaks, not unlike
Aristophane's frog chorus. And every living soul, with the
solitary exception of Henry, who held his ground, stampeded
frenziedly to the sanctuary of the stairs, thence to the gallery
above that ran along one side of the hall.
Upon Eddie Wiggins, who was standing stockstill on the
threshold of the french doors, Henry turned an eye of the
deepest respect. He had certainly been pretty slick changing.
His face, what one could see of it beneath a tweed cap
pulled well down over his eyes, was a bluey colour and criss-
crossed with scars he had padded his shoulders out until
;

they were almost gorilla-like ; he had blacked out some of his

teeth and found a reddish wig, whose hair hung over his ears
and eyes in festoons.
An awed hush had fallen on the guests. Those who were
of the screaming calibre had screamed their scream ; those who
favoured the swoon had swooned, and were occupied in
coming round. Brenda Durain's voice rang out clearly :

"My rifles are in the

gun-room, curse it ! Give me a pair
of scissors, Winifred darling, will you ?"
"No," said Captain Snappy Lowndes, whom one could
not but admire despite his size and somewhat understandable
ashiness about the lips, "leave this to me Stay where you are,
1

Brenda 1"
As casually as though he were strolling into his club, he
began to cross the floor towards Eddie Wiggins. Chuckling
quietly to himself, but inscrutable of countenance, Henry
followed.
"Keep out of this, Brodick 1" muttered Captain Lowndes
784 ERIC BARKER
somewhere at the back of his throat, his eyes never leaving
Eddie Wiggins.
Henry strolled on. The arrangement was that Eddie, who
was to wear a knuckle-duster, was to knock the Snappy Captain
out (assuming, of course, the latter was a participant in the
fray), and then, after a tussle with Henry in which he was to be
almost vanquished, to run, hotly pursued, out into the garden,
and so make his getaway back to the Rectory.
Much to Henry's surprise and admiration, the first part of
the programme went off without a hitch, though the blithering
fool had gone and forgotten the knuckle-duster. However,
he hit the Captain once on the tip of the jaw, after which the
Captain measured his length and stayed where he was.
"Good old Eddie I" breathed Henry, under cover of a
scream from Brenda as her betrothed went down. "Now
mel"
To Henry's dismay, Eddie, instead of turning his attention
to him, drew one of his huge boots back, and, with a bellow
suggestive of a wounded jaguar, kicked the Captain with all
his weight in the ribs. Henry rushed up to him.
"Steady on, old boy," he murmured reprovingly. "Don't
kill the chap 1 That's enough for him. It's my turn now."
Eddie showed that he had not forgotten Henry. Still
roaring, he spun round, seized Henry by the throat with both
hands, lifted him bodily in the air and hove him. Henry's
head hit the floor about five feet away with a sickening crack,
and pale-blue stars twinkled momentarily before his eyes.
He tottered shakily to his feet.
"Let me hit you once," he panted, "and then you can biff
off."
But the second half of the programme seemed to have taken
complete leave of Eddie's mind. Instigated doubtless by
his overwhelming success with Captain the Hon. Snappy
Lowndes, he had lost his head and was behaving like a berserk.
Silly fool! He was standing quite still, his chest heaving,
while he slowly tautened the muscles in his massive arms.
Despite his aching head, Henry could not prevent a grunt
of mirth escaping him.
"Not too much, Eddie, old top I"
This was what he was on the point of saying, but he did not
get as far, for at that instant Eddie made a fresh charge at him.
Fortunately he slipped on the shiny floor at the outset, robbing
 ALMOST A HERO 785
the onslaught of much of its potential ferocity but as it was,
;

he succeeded in knocking Henry flying again, this time so that

the back of his skull hit the wall instead of the floor. The point
of contact so far as his skull was concerned, however, was
precisely the same.
It was at this juncture that the onlookers reached the

height of enthusiasm, for it was evident to all that at last their

man saw red, when aught is possible. They did not err.
Henry saw red.
A joke is one thing; but when a fellow starts behaving like
a tipsy lout and messing everything up, it is quite another.
With a veritable thunder of encouragement resounding in his
righteously burning ears, he advanced, and by instinct dodging
Eddie's fists it gave the illusion of the polish of a professional
rushed in and dealt him a shrewd, unmanning left-arm jab
in the pit of the stomach.
It concluded the programme. For a brief moment
Eddie clutched the maltreated organ with both hands, the
while emitting a noise vaguely reminiscent of water running
down a choked plug. The next second he was off like a streak,
across the terrace, down the steps and over the lawns towards
the lake, with the guests in pursuit like a pack of hell-hounds.
Henry stood where he was like one in a dream ; and of the
crowd, Brenda alone remained. She fingered the tumulus
on the back of his skull with a touch that was almost tender.
"Henry," she said huskily, "are you all right ?"
"All right ?" hissed Henry, who was far from his normal
self.
Things had still a tendency to be roseate. "I'll kill
him !"
"No, Henry 1" She had to hold him back forcibly. "You've
done your share. It was magnificent! magnificent! I had
no idea ..." Her eyes were shining.
A low moaning close at hand caused them both to spin
round like tops, startled. Everyone had forgotten Captain
the Hon. Snappy Lowndes. He was sitting up now, holding
his side, with the light in his eyes of one who has seen the
Valley of the Shadow. Brenda Durain turned her brawny
back on him with an irritable shrug.
"He'll be all right," she said callously. "But are you sure
you are, Henry ?"
Henry whistled a bar of Bela Bartok.
"You had better look after your fianc6," he said quietly.
786 ERIC BARKER
"But I had no idea ."
. .

"How do you expect him to

ride a bicycle all that way if
you don't ?"
She flushed beneath her tan. Henry was strolling out on
the terrace, still whistling Bela Bartok. She followed in
spurts and starts.

"Henry 1" she pleaded. "Henry 1

Henry 1"
He His faintly protruding eyes perceived the
turned.
phenomenon of a silver tear in the corner of each of her cold
sophisticated ones.
"Henry," she said "tell me, Henry
; Were you have !

you has the joke been on me the whole time ?"

Arching an eyebrow like Owen Nares in a limousine,
Henryflipped his fingers at life in general. He yawned.
"Come here, woman," said he, "if you
want to be kissed 1"
For him the next dawn was heralded by an anxious-eyed
Eddie Wiggins in a shell-pink dressing-gown with beige
spots. He sat up in bed amazed. Eddie Wiggins lost no
time in tackling the point.
"Henry, old boy, my dear old boy," he said apologetically,
"I had to come in and say I mean, I couldn't get at you last
night when I got back, and all that sort of thing how how
"
frightfully sorry I am about last night. I mean
"Eddie," said Henry, making a popular traffic signal,
"that is all forgiven, forgotten. We won't refer to it again.
I was pretty sore with you at the time, I don't mind telling you :

but now, I am pleased to be able to say, things have taken a

turn that quite compensates me for any physical inconvenience
"
of which you may have been the cause. I am engaged
"You see, old prune," explained Eddie, "the gear simply
wasn't there /"
Henry nodded automatically then gave a sudden start.
;

"What was that ?" he gasped.

Eddie repeated his saw, Henry half scrambled, half
tumbled out of bed.
"Henry /" croaked Eddie Wiggins in horror, for his old
friend's lathy legs were bowed like calipers, and he was
tottering as quietly as a silent film comedian hit on the head
with a brick-bat.
"What is the matter ?"
Henry composed himself with a masterful effort. "Noth-
ing," he said. "Nothing 1" He took his dressing-gown
 ALMOST A HERO 787
down off theback of the door. "Nothing at all, Eddie, my
lad. Poor old Eddie !" He patted him sympathetically
on the arm and sallied forth.
Outside -he met his father, also in his dressing-gown, a
black woollen one with a kind of red flannel collar.
"Henry, my boy/' said his father, "they've caught him.
Half an hour ago behind the boat-house But there's some
!

rather serious news."

"Oh ?"
"Lowndes has four ribs broken."
"I amnot surprised," said Henry.
Brenda, in a pair of white shorts and an open shirt, was
slapping on the terrace.
"Henry !" She lowered the rope.
"Come here, Brenda !"
She did humbly as she was bidden. Reaching out his arms,
he wrapped them round her neck, and, drawing her face down
until it was level with his own, kissed her seventeen times.
"There's just one small point about this cycle expedition
up Fujiyama !"
"Yes ?" sighed Brenda.
Was it going to be the same old story, after all ? He might
be able to combat with homicidal maniacs, but when it came
to the point of real adventure, was he going to suggest leaving
the bicycles behind ?

"What is it, Henry ?" she demanded fearfully.

Henry yawned.
"I've decided we'll make it Everest," he said.
 H, G. WELLS
The Truth about
Pjeiraft

II.G. Wells completed his education at the Royal College

of Science and soon afterwards began writing the clever
and often humorous stories with a scientific background
which made his name. Only less famous than his novels
are the Outline of History and his ingenious prophecy of
the future entitled The Shape of Things to Come.
 THE TRUTH ABOUT PYECRAFT

not a dozen yards away. If I glance over my

sits

HE shoulder I can see him. And if I catch his eye and

usually I catch his eye it meets me with an expression
It is mainly an imploring look and yet with suspicion
in it.

Confound his suspicion ! If I wanted to tell on him I

should have told long ago. I don't tell and I don't tell, and
he ought to feel at his ease. As if anything so gross and fat
as he could feel at ease Who would believe me if I did tell ?
!

Poor old Pyecraft Great, uneasy jelly of substance

! 1

The fattest clubman in London.

He sits at one of the
club tables in the huge bay by the
little

fire, stuffing. What is he stuffing ? I glance judiciously and

catch him biting at a round of hot buttered teacake, with his
eyes on me. Confound him ! with his eyes on me 1

That settles it, Pyecraft ! Since you will be abject, since

you mil behave as though I was not a man of honour, here,
right under your embedded eyes, I write the thing down
the plain truth about Pyecraft. The man I helped, the man I
shielded, and who has requited me by making my club un-
endurable, absolutely unendurable, with his liquid appeal,
with the perpetual "don't tell" of his looks.
And, besides, why does he keep on eternally eating ?
Well, here goes for the truth, the whole truth, and nothing
but the truth 1

Pyecraft I made the acquaintance of Pyecraft in this very

smoking-room. I was a young, nervous new member, and he
saw it. I was sitting all alone, wishing I knew more of the
members, and suddenly he came, a great rolling front of chins
and abdomina, towards me, and grunted and sat down in a
chair close by me and wheezed
for a space, and scraped for
a space with a match and lit a cigar, and then addressed me.
I
forgot what he said something about the matches not
lighting properly, and afterwards as he talked he kept stopping
791
79* H . G . WELLS
the waiters one by one as they went by, and telling them about
the matches in that thin, fluty voice he has. But, anyhow, it
was some such way we began our talking.
in
He talked about various things and came round to games.
And thence to figure and complexion. "You
my ought to be
a good cricketer/' he said. I suppose I am slender, slender to
what some people would call lean, and I suppose I am rather
dark, still I am not ashamed of having a Hindu great-grand-
mother, but, for all that, I don't want casual strangers to see
through me at a glance to her. So that I was set against
Pyecraft from the beginning.
But he only talked about me in order to get to himself.
"I expect," he said, "you take no more exercise than I do,
and probably you eat no less." (Like all excessively obese
people he fancied he ate nothing.) "Yet" and he smiled
an oblique smile "we differ."
And then he began to talk about his fatness and his fatness ;

all he did for his fatness and all he was going to do for his
fatness ; what people had advised him to do for his fatness
and what he had heard of people doing for fatness similar to
his. "A priori" he said, "one would think a question of
nutrition could be answered by dietary and a question of
assimilation by drugs," It was stifling. It was dumpling
talk. It made me hear him.
feel swelled to
One stands that sort of thing once in a way at a club, but a
time came when I fancied I was standing too much. He took
to me altogether too conspicuously, I could never go in
the smoking-room but he would come wallowing towards me,
and sometimes he came and gormandised round and about me
while I had my lunch. He seemed at times almost to be cling-
ing to me. He was a bore, but not so fearful a bore as to be
limited to me and from the first there was something in his
;

manner almost as though he knew, almost as though he

penetrated to the fact that I might that there was a remote,
exceptional chance in me that no one else presented.
"I'd give anything to get it down," he would say
"anything," and peer at me over his vast cheeks and pant.
Poor old Pyecraft He has just gonged, no doubt to order
!

another buttered teacake 1

He came to the actual thing one day. "Our Pharmacopeia,"

he said, "our Western Pharmacopoeia, is anything but the last
"
word of medical science. In the East, I've been told
 THE TRUTH ABOUT PYEG'RAFT 793
He stopped and stared at me. It was like being at an
aquarium.
I was quite suddenly angry with him. "Look here," I said,
"who told you about my great-grandmother's recipes ?"
"Well," he fenced.
"
"Every time we've met for a week," I said and we've
met pretty often you've given me a broad hint or so about
that little secret of mine."
"Well," he said, "now the cat's out of the bag, I'll admit,
"
yes, it is so. I had it

"From Pattison ?"

99
"Indirectly," he said, which I believe was lying, "yes 'CS
99'
"Pattison," said, "took
I that stuff at his own risk.
He pursed his mouth and bowed.
"My great-grandmother's recipes," I said, "are queer
"
things to handle. My father was near making me promise
"He didn't ?"
"No. But he warned me. He himself used one once."
"Ah ... But do you think
1 ? Suppose suppose
"
there did happen to be one
"The things are curious documents," I said. "Even the
smell of 'em. . . . No 1"
But after going so far Pyecraft was resolved I should go
farther. I was always a little afraid that if I tried his patience
too much he would fall on me suddenly and smother me. I
own I was weak. But I was also annoyed with Pyecraft. I
had got to that state of feeling for him that disposed me to
say :
"Well, take the risk !" The little affair of Pattison to
which I have alluded was a different matter altogether. What
it was doesn't concern us now, but I knew, anyhow, that the

particular recipe I used then was safe. The rest I didn't know
so much about, and, on the whole, I was inclined to' doubt
their safety pretty completely.
Yet even if Pyecraft got poisoned
I must confess the poisoning of Pyecraft struck me as an
immense undertaking.
That evening I took that queer odd-scented sandal-wood
box out of my safe and turned the rustling skins over. The
gentleman who
wrote the recipes for my great-grandmother
evidently had a weakness for skins of a miscellaneous origin,
and his handwriting was cramped to the last degree. Some of
the things are quite unreadable to me though my family, with
794 H G WELLS
itsIndian Civil Service associations, has kept up a knowledge
of Hindustani from generation to generation and none are
absolutely plain sailing. But I found the one that I knew was
there soon enough, and sat on the floor by my safe for some
time looking at it.

"Look here," said I to Pyecraft next day, and snatched the

slip away from his eager grasp.
"So far as I can make it out, this is a recipe for Loss of
Weight." ("Ah 1" said Pyecraft.) "I'm not absolutely sure, but
I think it's that. And if you take my advice you'll leave it alone.
Because, you know I blacken my blood in your interest,
Pyecraft my ancestors on that side were, so far as I can gather,
a jolly queer lot. See ?"
"Let me try it," said Pyecraft.
I back in my chair. My imagination made one
leant
mighty effort and fell flat within me. "What in Heaven's
name, Pyecraft," I asked, "do you think you'll look like when
you get thin ?"
He was impervious to reason. I made him promise never
to say a word to me about his disgusting fatness again whatever
happened never, and then I handed him that little piece of
skin.
."It's nasty stuff," I said.
"No matter," he said, and took it.
"
He goggled at it. "But but he said.
He had just discovered that it wasn't English.
"To the best of my ability," I said, "I will do you a trans-
lation."
I did my best. After that we didn't speak for a fortnight.
Whenever he approached me frowned and motioned him
I

away, and he respected our compact, but at the end of the

fortnight he was as fat as ever. And then he got a word in.
"I must speak," he said. "It isn't fair. There's something
wrong. It's done me no good. You're not doing your great-
grandmother justice."
"Where's the recipe?"
He produced it gingerly from his pocket-book.
I ranmy eye over the items. "Was the egg addled ?" I asked.
"No. Ought it to have been ?"
"That," I said, "goes without saying in all my poor dear
great-grandmother's recipes. When condition or quality is
not specified you must get the worst. She was drastic or
 THE TRUTH ABOUT PYECRAFT 795

nothing. . . . And there's one or two possible alternatives to

some of these other things. You gotfresh rattlesnake venom ?"
"
"I got a rattlesnake from Jamrach's. It cost it cost
"
"That's your affair, anyhow. This last item
"
"I know a man who
"Yes. H'm. Well, I write the alternatives down. So far
as I know the language, the spelling of this recipe is particularly
atrocious. By the by, dog here probably means pariah dog."
For a month after that I saw Pyecraft constantly at the club,
and as fat and anxious as ever. He kept our treaty, but at times
he broke the spirit of it by shaking his head despondently.
Then one day in the cloakroom he said "Your great- :

"
grandmother
"Not a word against her," I said ; and he held his peace.
could have fancied he had desisted, and I saw him one day
I

talking to three new members about his fatness as though he

was in search of other recipes. And then, quite unexpectedly
his telegram came.
"Mr. Formalyn I" bawled a page-boy under my nose, and
I took the telegram and opened it at once.
"F0r Heaven's sake come. Pyecraft"
"H'm," said I, and to tell the truth I was so pleased at the
rehabilitation of my great-grandmother's reputation this

evidently promised that I made a most excellent lunch.

Igot Pyecraft's address from the hall porter. Pyecraft
inhabited the upper half of a house in Bloomsbury, and I went
there as soon as I had done my coffee and Trappistine. I did
not wait to finish my cigar.
"Mr. Pyecraft ?" said I, at the front door.

They believed he was ill ;

he hadn't been out for two days.
"He expects me," said I, and they sent me up.
rang the bell at the lattice-door upon the landing.
I
"He shouldn't have tried it, anyhow," I said to myself.
"A man who eats like a pig ought to look like a pig."
An obviously worthy woman, with an anxious face and a
carelessly placed cap, came and surveyed me through the
lattice.
I gave my name and she opened his door for me in a dubious
fashion.
"Well?" said I, as we stood together inside Pyecraft's
piece of the landing.
"
'E said you was to come in if you came," she said, and
796 H . G . WELLS
regarded me, making no " motion to show me anywhere.
And then, confidentially 'E's locked in, sir/'
:

"Locked in ?"
"Locked himself in yesterday morning and 'asn't let any-
one in since, sir. And ever and again swearing. Oh, my !

I stared at the door she indicated by her gldnces. "In

there ?" I said.
"Yes, sir."
"What's up ?"
"
She shook her head sadly. 'E keeps on calling for
vittles, sir.'Eaty vitties 'e I get 'im what I can.
wants.
Pork 'e's 'ad, sooit puddin', sossiges, noo bread. Everythink
like that. Left outside, if you please, and me go away. 'E's
eatin', sir, somethink awful"
There came a piping bawl from inside the door "That :

Formalyn ?"
"That you, Pyecraft?" I shouted, and went and banged
the door.
"Tell her to go away."
I did.
Then I could hear a curious pattering upon the door, almost
like someone feeling for the handle in the dark, and Pyecraft's
familiar grunts.
"It's all right," I said, "she's gone."
But for a long time the door didn't open.
I heard the key turn. Then Pyecraft's voice said : "Come
in."
I turned the handle and opened the door. Naturally I
expected to see Pyecraft.
Well, you know, he wasn't there 1

I never had such a shock in my life. There was his sitting-

room in a state of untidy disorder, plates and dishes among the
books and writing things, and several chairs overturned, but
Pyecraft
"It's all right, o' man ; shut the door," he said, and then I
discovered him.
There he was right up close to the cornice in the corner by
the door, as though someone had glued him to the ceiling.
His face was anxious and angry. He panted and gesticulated.
"Shut the door," he said. "If that woman gets hold of it "
I shut the door, and went and stood away from him and
stored*
 THE TRUTH ABOUT PYECRAFT 797
"If anything gives away and you tumble down/* I said,
"you'll break your neck, Pyecraft."
"I wish I could," he wheezed.
"A man of your age and weight getting up to kiddish
"
gymnastics
"Don't," he said, and looked agonised. "Your damned
"
great-grandmother
"Be careful," I warned him.
"
"I'll tell you he said, and gesticulated.
"How the deuce," said I, "are you holding on up there ?"
And then abruptly I realised that he was not holding on at
all, that he was floating up there just as a gas-filled bladder
might have same position. He began to struggle
floated in the
to thrust himself away from the ceiling, and to clamber down
the wall to me. "It's that prescription," he panted, as he did
"
so. "Your great-gran
"No /" I cried.
He took hold of a framed engraving rather carelessly as he
spoke and gave way, and he flew back to the ceiling again,
it

while the picture smashed on to the sofa. Bump he went

against the ceiling, and I knew then why he was all over white
on the more salient curves and angles of his person. He tried
again more carefully, coming down by way of the mantel.
It was really a most extraordinary spectacle, that great, fat,

apoplectic-looking man upside down and trying to get from

the ceiling to the floor. "That prescription," he said. "Too
successful."
"How ?"
"Loss of weight almost complete."
And then, of course, I understood.
"By Jove, Pyecraft," said I, "what you wanted was a cure
for fatness ! But you always called it
weight. You would call
it
weight."
Somehow I was extremely delighted.
Pye- I quite liked
craft for the time. "Let
help you me and took his
1" I said,
hand and pulled him down. He kicked about, trying to get
foothold somewhere. It was very like holding a flag on a
windy day.
"That table," he said, pointing, "is solid mahogany and
"
very heavy. If you can put me under that
I did, and there he wallowed about like a captive balloon,
while I stood on his hearthrug and talked to him.
798 H . G . WELLS
Ilit a
cigar. "Tell me," I said, "what happened/'
"I took it," he said.
"How did it taste?"
"Oh, beastly I"
I should fancy they all did. Whether one regards the in-
gredients or the probable compound or the possible results,
almost all my great-grandmother's remedies appear to me at
least to be extraordinarily uninviting. For my own part
"I took a little sip first."
"Yes ?"
"And as I felt lighter and better after an hour, I decided to
take the draught."
"MydearPyecraft!"
"I held my nose," he explained. "And then I kept on
getting lighter and lighter and helpless, you know."
He gave way suddenly to a burst of passion. "What the
goodness am I to do ?" he said.
"There's one thing pretty evident," I said, "that you
mustn't do. If you go out of doors you'll go up and up."
I waved an arm upward. "They'd have to send Santos-
Dumont after you to bring you down again."
"I suppose itwill wear off ?"
I shook my head. "I don't think you can count on that,"
I said.
And then there was another burst of passion, and he kicked
out at adjacent chairs and banged the floor. He behaved just
as I should have expected a great, fat, self-indulgent man to
behave under trying circumstances that is to say, very badly.
He spoke of me and of my great-grandmother with an utter
want of discretion.
"I never asked you to take the stuff," I said.
And generously disregarding the insults he was putting
upon me, I sat down in his armchair and began to talk to him
in a sober, friendly fashion.
I pointed out to him that this
was a trouble he had brought
upon himself, and that it had almost an air of poetical justice.
He had eaten too much. This he disputed, and for a time we
argued the point.
He became noisy and violent, so I desisted from this aspect
of his lesson. "And then," said I, "you committed the sin
of euphuism. You call it, not Fat, which is
just and in-
"
glorious, but Weight. You
 THE TRUTH ABOUT PYECRAFT 799
He interrupted to say that he recognised all that. What was
he to do ?
Isuggested he should adapt himself to his new conditions.
So we came to the really sensible part of the business. I
suggested that it would not be difficult for him to learn to
walk about on the ceiling with his hands
"I can't sleep," he said.
But that was no great difficulty. It was quite possible, I

pointed out, to make a shake-up under a wire mattress, fasten

the under things on with tapes, and have a blanket, sheet,
and coverlet to button at the side. He would have to confide
in his housekeeper, I said and after some squabbling he
;

agreed to that. (Afterwards it was quite delightful to see the

beautiful matter-of-fact way with which the good lady took
all these
amazing inversions.) He could have a library
ladder in his room, and all his meals could be laid on the top
of his bookcase. We also hit on an ingenious device by which
he could get to the floor whenever he wanted, which was
simply to put the British Encyclopedia (tenth edition) on the
top of his open shelves. He just pulled out a couple of volumes
and held on, and down he came. And we agreed there must
be iron staples along the skirting, so that he could cling to
those whenever he wanted to get about the room on the lower
level.
As we got on with the thing I found myself almost keenly
interested. was I who called in the housekeeper and broke
It
matters to her, and it was I chiefly who fixed up the inverted
bed. In fact, I spent two whole days at his flat. I am a handy,
interfering sort of man with a screwdriver, and I made all
sorts of ingenious adaptations for him ran a wire to bring
his bells within reach, turned all his electric lights up instead
of down, and so on. The whole affair was extremely curious
and interesting to me, and it was delightful to think of Pyecraft
like some great, fat blowfly, crawling about on his ceiling
and clambering round the lintel of his doors from one room
to another, and never, never, never coming to the club any
more. . . .

Then, you know, my fatal ingenuity got the better of me.

I was
sitting by his fire drinking his whisky, and he was up
in his favourite corner by the cornice, tacking a Turkey carpet
to the ceiling, when the idea struck me. "By Jove, Pyecraft 1"
I said, "all this is totally unnecessary."
SCO H . G * WELLS
And before I could calculate the complete consequences
of my notion I blurted it out. "Lead underclothing," said
I, and the mischief was done.

Pyecraft received the thing almost in tears. "To be right

"
ways up again he said.
I gave him the whole secret before I saw where it would
take me. "Buy sheet lead," I said, "stamp it into discs.
Sew 'em all over your underclothes until you have enough.
Have lead-soled boots, carry a bag of solid lead, and the thing
is done 1Instead of being a prisoner here you may go abroad
"
again, Pyecraft you may travel
;

A still happier idea came to me. "You need never fear a

shipwreck. All you need do is just slip off some or all of
your clothes, take the necessary amount of luggage in your
"
hand, and float up in the air
In his emotion he dropped the tack-hammer within an ace
of my head. "By Jove 1" he said, "I shall be able to come
back to the club again."
The thing pulled me up short. "By Jove 1" I said faintly.
"Yes. Of course you will."
He did. He does. There he sits behind me now, stuffing
as I live a third go of buttered tea-cake. And no one in the
!

whole world knows except his housekeeper and me that

he weighs practically nothing ; that he is a mere boring mass
of assimilatory matter, mere clouds in clothing, niente^ nefas,
the most inconsiderable of men. There he sits watching until
I have done this writing. Then, if he can, he will waylay me.
He will come billowing up to me. . . .

He will tell me over again all about it, how it feels, how it
doesn't feel, how he sometimes hopes it is passing off a little.
And always somewhere in that abundant discourse he
fat,
will say : "The If anyone knew of
secret's keeping,
? eh
it I should be so ashamed. Makes a fellow look such a
. . .

fool, you know. Crawling about on a ceiling and all that. ." . .

And now to elude Pyecraft, occupying, as he does, an

admirable strategic position between me and the door.
 IAN HAY
A Sporting College
Youth, Youth, Youth !

Ian Hay the pen-name by which Major J. H. Beith,

is

is known to a very
M.C., C.B.E., large reading and
theatre-going public. Since the success of his first
novel more than twenty-five years ago, he has written
many books and plays, of which The Middle Watch
and The Midshipwaid are among the most popular.
2C
 A SPORTING COLLEGE

ASAPH'S was one of the minor colleges of Cambridge.

ST.Its name was unfamiliar to the Man in the Street, and the
modest nature of its academic achievements was only equalled
by the lowly position of its boat on the river. But its members
atoned for the collective shortcomings of their foundation by
an individual brilliancy which made the name of St. Asaph's
esteemed throughout the University. They were not a large
college, they said, but they were a sporting one. They might
not be clever, but thank heaven they were not good either.
Consequently, when I one day received a deputation from
St. Asaph's, requesting that I would be good enough to coach
their College Boat during the ensuing term, I felt that no
light compliment had been paid me. It was the first occasion
on which I had been asked to coach the crew of another
college, and I accepted the charge with an enthusiasm not to be
damped by the knowledge that the St. Asaph's boat was the
lowest on the river.
I commenced my duties forthwith, and, mounted upon the
tallest horse I have ever seen (provided by the St. Asaph's

Boat-club), took my crew out that very day. My steed, I

soon discovered, laboured under the disadvantage of possess-
ing only one eye, an infirmity which rendered him Gable to
fall into the river whenever I rode him too near the edge of
the towpath. On the other hand, he enjoyed the consolation,
denied to his rider, of being unable to see the St. Asaph's crew.
They were the worst collection of oarsmen that I had ever set
eyes on, and 1 told them so, at frequent intervals and in differ-
ent ways, throughout the afternoon. I was particularly direct
in my references to the gentleman who was rowing Five. He
seemed older than his colleagues, possessed a bald head, and
was evidently one having authority. He was not the captain,
for that highly inefficient officer was rowing Stroke ; but this
did not prevent: him from shouting out directions as to time,
803
804 IAN HAY
length, and swing to sundry members of the crew whenever
it occurred to him to do so, which was usually at the moment
which I had selected fordoing the same thing. He seemed
to resent my comments on his own style, and answered
back more than once an unpardonable sin in any galley-
slave.
At the end of the day's work I told my crew that they
were showing improvement already (which was not true), and
that all they wanted was plenty of hard work and practice
(which was approximately correct). Before I left the boat-
house the apologetic captain led me aside, and asked me as a
personal favour to be more polite to Five.
"Why?" I asked. "He is easily the worst man in. the
crew."
"Yes, I know, but he was captain three years ago, and he
likes to have his own way."
"I wonder he doesn't stroke the boat," I remarked
acidly.
"He would," said the captain simply, "only he weighs
nearly fifteen stone ; so he rows Five.He says he can manage
the crew quite as well from there. He sets the stroke, and I
have just to look round over my shoulder, every now and then,
to see if Fm
keeping time with him."
In grateful consideration of the fact that I had now acquired
a story which would bear repetition in rowing circles for years
to come, I swallowed my smiles and answered :

"But, my dear man, this is

simply think the best
idiotic. I

plan would be to fire him out of the boat altogether, at once.

Fll tell him, if you don't like to."
This altruistic offer caused the captain to turn quite pale ;

and after a certain amount of natural hesitation he confided to

me the fearful tidings that the crew as it stood represented the
whole available strength of St. Asaph's College ; the only
possible substitute, if I "carted" Five, being one of the Dons.
"And he's got gout in both legs," added the captain,
I accepted the situation, and Five.
I may as well describe my crew in detail. Nature has
framed strange fellows in her time, but it is improbable that
such a unique collection of oddities will ever again be seen at
once.
Bow was a chubby and diminutive youth with a friendly
smile. He was the stylist of the crew, swinging and recovering
 A SPORTING COLLEGE 805

with an elegance that was pleasant to behold. Since, how-

ever, he rarely if ever put his oar into the water, contenting
himself for the most part with mysterious passes over its sur-
face with the blade, he could hardly be regarded as anything
more than a neat figurehead.
Two had the longest legs and the shortest body I have evei
seen. No ordinary stretcher could contain him, and he only
succeeded in flattening his knees when, in excess of zeal, he
pushed himself over the back of his sliding seat. The valuable
work done on these occasions by Bow in restoring his colleague
to his rightful position only goes to illustrate the great truth
that the meanest creatures have their uses.
Three's presence in the crew was entirely due to the fact
that St. Asaph's College only possessed eight undergraduates,
Ineed say no more.
Four was a Scholar of the college, and, as he once informed
me in a burst of confidence, had taken up rowing for his
stomach's sake. I trust that organ benefited by his exertions :

after all, it's an ill wind

blows nobody any good.
that
Five, as I have already mentioned, was a man of com-
manding presence. He was not intended by nature for an
oarsman, but would have made an excellent chairman at a
parish meeting. He regarded me with undisguised hostility,
and received my strictures upon his performances in a purely
personal spirit.
Six would have performed with considerably more com-
fort and credit as Two, or possibly as cox. He occupied his
place, as far as I could gather, ex officio^ by virtue of his office
as captain of the St. Asaph's Cricket Club. He suffered much
from the handle of Five's oar, which lodged constantly in the
small of his back, owing to the fact that his swing back usually
coincided with Five's swing forward.
Seven, incredible as it may appear, was a very fair oar.
He was not popular with the rest of the crew, who, from a
cause which I could never fathom probably the instinct
which prompts the true-born Briton to call a man who likes
hard and regular work a "blackleg" considered him "no
sportsman". It was chiefly owing to his unremitting efforts
that the boat, overcoming the languid resistance of the Cam,
and the more strenuous opposition of Five, was enabled to
move at all.
Stroke was handicapped from the outset by having to row
806 IAN HAY
with his chin glued to his left shoulder in an impossible effort
to take the time from Five. He was the possessor, at the best
of times, of a singularly distorted and ungainly style, and a
month spent in endeavouring to stroke the boat with his eyes
fixed upon a man sitting three places behind him rapidly
developed him into something only witnessed as a rule after
a supper of hot lobsters and toasted cheese.
Of Cox it is sufficient to say that he was a Burmese gentle-
man, exceedingly small, with a knowledge of the English
knguage limited apparently to a few expletives of the most
blood-curdling type, such as could only have been acquired
from a sailor's parrot. These he lavished on his crew in
monotonous rotation, evidently under the impression that
they were rowing maxims of the utmost value. He did not
know his right hand from his left, which is an awkward defect
in a cox, and he always addressed me as "Mr. Coachman".
Our was distinguished from those
daily journey to Baitsbite
of countless equally bad boats by a certain old-time stateliness
and courtesy. No one ever arrived in time, and it was not
considered good form on the part of the coach to make his
crew paddle for more than about two hundred yards without
an "easy". Also, three clear days' notice was required in the
event of my desiring to send them over the full course.
The day's proceedings always ended with a sort of informal
vote of thanks to Five, proposed by the captain, in tones that
conveyed a mute appeal (invariably ignored) to me to second
the motion, and carried with feverish acclamation by the rest
of the crew. Five usually replied that he very much doubted
if he could stand the company of such a set of rotters any

longer ; but he always turned out with unfailing regularity

next afternoon, and took the chair as usual.
The boat made fluctuating progress. Sometimes it went
badly, sometimes indifferently, sometimes unspeakably. More
than once I found myself wondering whether, after all, a Don
with gout in both legs would not be of more use than all my
present crew put together. Still, a crew has to be very bad
to be the worst on the Cam, and St. Asaph's were confident
that the end of the races would see them several places higher
on the river than before. Beyond possessing the unique ad-
vantage of occupying a position unassailable from the rear, I
could see little cause for such hopes ; but I mechanically
repeated to them the mendacious assurances usual on these
 A SPORTING COLLEGE 807

occasions, until presently I found myself sharing the enthusiasm

of my crew ; and when, the Saturday before the races, they
rowed over to the Railway Bridge, accompanied by a
whooping octogenarian on horseback, whom I first took to
be Five's grandfather, but who ultimately proved to be the
college tutor, in 7 min. 40 sec., itwas felt that the doom of
the boats in front was sealed.
Then came the races.
For the benefit of those who have never made a study of
that refinement of torture known as a "bumping" race, it
may be explained that at Oxford and Cambridge the college
crews, owing to the narrowness of the river, race not abreast
but in a long string, each boat being separated from its pursuer
and pursued by an equal space. Every crew which succeeds
in rowing over the course without being touched(or "bumped")
by the boat behind, is said to have "kept its place", and starts
in the same position for the next day's racing. But if it con-
trives to touch the boat in front, it is said to have made a
"bump", and both bumper and bumped get under the bank
with all speed and allow the rest of the procession to race past.
Next day, bumper and bumped change places, and the victors
of the day before endeavour to catch the next boat in front of
them. The crew at the Head of the River of course have
nothing to catch, and can accordingly devote their attention
to keeping away from Number Two, which is usually in close
attendance owing to the pressing attentions of Number
Three. And so on.
The races take place on four successive evenings. It is
thus possible for a crew by making a bump each evening to
ascend four places. This was the modest programme which
St. Asaph's had mapped out for themselves, the alternative
of a corresponding descent being mercifully precluded by their
geographical position on the river.
Though their actual performance did not quite reach the
high standard they had set themselves, it cannot be denied
that they had a stirring time of it.
For this they had to thank the Burmese cox, who in four
crowded and glorious days made his unpronounceable name
a household word in Cambridge.
On the first evening of the races, by dexterously crossing
his rudder-lines at the start, he pointed the boat's head in such
a direction that the racing for that day terminated, so far as
808 IAN HAY
St. Asaph's were concerned, with considerable violence at a
point about fifteen yards from the starting-point, the entire
crew having to disembark in order to assist in the extraction
of the nose of their vessel from the mass of turf in which it
had embedded itself. By the time that this task had been
all the other boats were out of sight, and it was
accomplished
decided to walk home a precaution which the coxswain was
discovered to have taken already.
On the next evening St. Asaph's, full of hope and vigour,
once more took their places at the end of the long line of boats,
determined to bump St. Bridget's this time, or perish in the
attempt. Cox's rudder-lines had been carefully sorted for him ;
but in some inexplicable manner he became hopelessly entangled
with the starting-chain, the end of which the coxswain is sup-
posed to hold in his hand until the starting-gun fires, in order
to keep the boat from drifting. Consequently, when the signal
was given, that last link with the land still adhered to several
points of his person. Now, when it comes to a tug-of-war
between a snuff-and-butter miscreant, weighing seven stone,
and terra firma* the result may be anticipated without much
difficulty. Next moment the St. Asaph's crew, swinging out
like giants to their task, were horrified to observe their pocket
Palinurus, with a terrified grin frozen upon his dusky features
and his objurgatory vocabulary dead within him, slide rapidly
over the stern of the boat and disappear beneath the turgid
waters of the Cam.
Pity and horror, however, turned to rage and indignation
when the victim, on rising to the surface, paddled cheerfully
to the bank, scrambled out, and started off, with an air of pleased
relief, to walk home again. He was sternly ordered to return,
the boat was backed into the bank, and, with the dripping
Oriental once more at the helm, the St. Asaph's crew com-
menced a rather belated effort to overtake a boat which had
already disappeared round Post Corner. They finished, how-
ever, only about a hundred yards behind St. Bridget's, who
had encountered numerous obstacles, including Grassy
Corner, en route.
Next day St. Asaph's made their bump. The fact in itself
is so tremendous that any attempt to describe it would of

necessity form an anticlimax. Sufficient to say that both

boats got safely off, and that St. Asaph's overlapped "Bridget"
in the Plough Reach. The actual bump did not take place till
 A SPORTING COLLEGE 809
some time after, as the coxswain, in spite of prodigious mental
efforts, could not remember which string to pull ; but when
the bow of the St. Asaph's boat ran over the blade of the St.
Bridget's Stroke's oar, the enemy decided that honour was
satisfied, and unanimously stopped rowing. Not so St.
Asaph's. Having made his bump, the coxswain decided to
make the most of it ; and the crew, the majority of whom
were rowing with their mouths open and eyes shut, backed
him up nobly. It was not until Bow found himself sitting
amid the St. Bridget's crew, directly over Number Four's
rigger and Seven, surprised by a sudden resistance to his blade,
;

opened his eyes to discover that he was belabouring the Stroke

of that unhappy band of pilgrims in the small of the back,
that the men of St. Asaph's realized that they had really made
a bump, and desisted from their efforts.
Now comes the tragic part of my story.
If St. Asaph's had been content to let well alone, and to
row over the course on the last day of the races at a comfort-
able distance in front of St. Bridget's, all would have been welL
But, drunk with victory, they decided to bump the next boat
I think one of lower Trinity crews and so achieve immortality
on two successive occasions.
For the last time I sent them off, with many injunctions to
eschew crabs and the bank. Surprising as it may seem, they
made an excellent start, and were soon in full cry up Post
Reach after the Trinity crew, with St. Bridget's toiling help-
lessly behind them. So fast did they travel that their followers
on the bank, including myself (gingerly grasping an ancient
horse pistol that I had been instructed to fire as soon as they
should get within a length of their opponents), began to fall
behind. The boat swung out of sight into the Gut fifty yards
in front of us ; and to my undying regret I missed the earlier
stages of the catastrophe which must have occurred almost
immediately afterwards.
On rounding the corner and coming in sight of Grassy,
we observed a considerable commotion on the towpath side
of the bend. The centre of the disturbance of course proved
to be the St. Asaph's boat, the greater part of which had in
some inexplicable manner contrived to mount upon the
towpath, together with its crew, who were still sitting gaping
vacantly on the delirious mob around them.
The stern end of the boat was resting on the waters of the
2C*
8lO IAN HAY
Cam, and Stroke, assisted by Five, who had left his seat for the
purpose, was making a savage and successful effort to force
the resisting form of the Burmese coxswain beneath them.
The reason for this drastic procedure was hurriedly explained
to us by anhysterical chorus of eyewitnesses. The "Jewel
of Asia", as someone had aptly christened that submerged
hero, seeing the stern of the Trinity boat dangling temptingly
before him as it
swung round
the sharp Grassy Corner, and
impulsively deciding that the time had now arrived for another
bump, had abandoned his previous intention of circumnavi-
gating Grassy himself and gone straight for the elusive tail
of the retreating boat, in a brilliant but misguided attempt to
cut off a corner. He had missed by not less than three yards
and had immediately afterwards piled up his vessel upon the
towpath. Hence the highly justifiable efforts of Stroke and
Five to terminate his miserable existence.
To crown all, at this moment the St. Bridget's boat,
remote, unfriended, melancholy, slow, accompanied by a
coloured gentleman ringing a dinner bell, and a solitary Don
who trotted beside them making encouraging noises, came
creaking round the corner. Their coxswain, suddenly behold-
ing his victorious foes of yesterday lying at his mercy, with one
wild shriek of joy headed his ship in our direction. Next
moment the devastating prow of the St. Bridget's boat skittered
gracefully over the half-submerged stern of the helpless
wreck that protruded from the bank, just as Stroke and Five
of the St. Asaph's crew succeeded in getting their coxswain
under for the third time.
How nobody was killed nobody knew. There were no
casualties ; of course coxes do not count. St. Bridget's
claimed their bump, which was allowed, and St. Asaph's re-
turned to their rightful position at the foot of the river.
Fortunately they had had their Bump Supper the night before.
Eheu That was nearly twenty-five years ago. I wonder
!

if such things happen in University rowing to-day. I hope so.

 YOUTH, YOUTH, YOUTH I

WILKINSON has called, sir/'

AMR. Club servants are notoriously imperturbable, but the
fact remains that when Christopher, our impeccable night

porter, presented himself at my bedside at the unusual hour of

5.30 a.m. in order to make the announcement recorded above,
he was visibly rattled. I distinctly saw an eyebrow twitch.
I blinked at the electric light.
"What time is it ?" I inquired mechanically.
Christopher told me, in a very distinct voice.
"What did you say the name was ?"
"A Mr. Wilkinson, sir/'
I pondered sleepily.
"Did he say what he wanted ?"
"Yes, sir," replied Christopher woodenly, "he did. The
English Cup, sir."
I remembered now an invitation rashly given and for-
gotten for weeks.
"Tell him," I said, "to go away and come back a little later";

and resumed my slumbers forthwith.

But, prompted by an instinct of resigned hospitality, I was
dressed and downstairs by a quarter to eight. A charwoman
was washing the tiles of the hall floor, and Christopher, within
fifteen minutes of the end of his nightly vigil, was nodding in
his box. On the bench by the door sat a small, dirty, unkempt,
but entirely alert youth of fourteen or so. On the lapel of his
coat he wore an enormous blue-and- white rosette.
"Hallo," he said. "Up at last ?"
I ignored the ingratitude of the remark, and asked him
where he had come from. He explained that he had travelled
up from his home in the north of England through the night
in an excursion train.
"It was bung-full," he added. "There were twelve in our
carriage, not including a chap under the seat without ticket.
He had the nerve to pass his hat round just before Willesden."
8xx
8l2 IAN HAY
"How much did he get ?"
"Oh most of his hat back. How you ?"
are
"Pretty well, thanks. What time did you arrive ?"
1
"About four o'clock this morning, I think/
"You must be hungry/' I said.
"I am a bit/' replied Dicky Wilkinson wistfully.
My heart smote me, for I was his host, and I had once been
young myself. Still, there would be little breakfast available
at the club at this hour. We
must go further afield.
"Come along," I said, and told Christopher to call a cab.
.

Propped against the railings outside the club I found a

second youth. His matted hair hung down upon his forehead,
and he looked as if he had slept in a dustbin for a week. With
a sinking heart I noticed that he, too, wore a blue-and-white
rosette. At our approach he raised his head and regarded me
with what I can only call a wolfish eye.
"Come on, Crump/' said Dicky. "This," he explained
to me in a luminous aside, "is old Crump."
Mr. Crump, who was evidently far too famished to speak,
greeted me with a perfunctory smile, and immediately hurled
himself into a cab. Dick followed him with a hungry roar,
and I, feeling rather like the prophet Daniel on an historic
occasion, clambered in after them.
. . .

I have always regarded a fixed charge of four-and-sixpence

for an hotel breakfast as a gross imposition but on this
;

occasion I kugh was on my side.

think the
My two guests, on being confronted with the bill of fare
an elaborate and comprehensive document read it through,
smacked their lips in horrible enjoyment, but said nothing.
The waiter hovered expectantly over them.
"What are you going to have ?" I inquired.
Dicky regarded me with a slightly surprised air.
"Have ?" he said. "We're going to have the first thing on
the list. We aren't going to miss anything out, you know !"
I said no more. The joke, after all, was on the hotel.
After an bors-d'auvre of porridge and cream, my friends con-
sumed a salmon steak apiece, followed by fillets of sole. Hav-
ing by this operation exhausted the fish course, they proceeded
to kidneys and bacon. Dicky, noticing that one or two items,
 YOUTH, YOUTH, YOUTH! 813*

such as mutton chops and savoury omelettes, required fifteen

minutes* notice, prudently avoided the twin vexations of dis-
appointment and delay by ordering these trifles in advance, and
then set to work upon bacon and eggs.
Interrogated as to their choice of beverages, both my
friends selected chocolate with whipped cream. Mr. Crump,
I may mention, uttered no word. He ate everything that was
offered to him and left any ordering that had to be done to his
colleague. But the wolfish light was dying out of his eyes,
and I began to feel
comparatively secure.
I consumed my own breakfast as slowly as possible, and
devoted my energies to directing the conversation into
congenial and appropriate channels. Old Crump remained
utterly unresponsive, but Dicky chattered ceaselessly, without
for one moment relaxing the severity of his attack upon the
dishes around him. He was madly enthusiastic about the
chances of his local team I need hardly say that they wore
blue shorts and white shirts who had come up to London for
the first time in their mud-stained history to do battle for the
Cup. He gave me the pet name, age and fighting weight of
each gladiator. I think he said that old Crump had once
shaken hands with one of them, but the hero of this achieve-
ment exhibited no symptom of corroboration. Probably he
did not hear us, though we could hear him.
Once more the waiter presented the menu. By this time
he had thoroughly entered into the spirit of the game.
"What will you try now, sir ?" he asked respectfully.
Dicky ran his finger down the list to his last stopping-
place. A slightly puzzled expression appeared upon his face,
but he replied without hesitation :

"We'll have some Cold Viands, please/'

The waiter departed, and Dicky said to me :

"I say, what are Viands ?"

I replied, quoting the slogan of the Liberal Party of a decade

ago. Two minutes later the pair were resolutely devour-

ing liberal helpings of cold beef underdone.
.

Symptoms of languor set in after the marmalade course, and

we adjourned to the lounge. Here I extracted the information
that Dicky's father had supplied them with stand tickets for
the match, and that the excursion train returned at midnight.
Their plans for the rest of the day were extremely vague.
814 TAN HAY
My own happened to be numerous and complicated ; sd,
having advised them to make an early start for the ground,
and presenting them with tickets for the evening performance
at the most respectable place of entertainment I could think of,
I made my excuses and departed. Neither gentleman made
any attempt to see me off the premises they reclined in arm-
;

chairs, following my receding form with glazed eyes. As I

passed out through the revolving door I looked back. Old
Crump had just produced a packet of honeysuckle cigarettes.

"A Mr. Wilkinson has called, sir/'

Once more the words crashed through my slumbers like
a stone through a window. This time it was half past five in
the afternoon, and I was snatching a brief respite from an
arduous day in an armchair in the smoking-room. I sighed
resignedly, and went out into the hall. There they stood,
more disreputable than ever, but radiant.
"We just looked in to say good-bye," said Dicky. "We've
had a ripping day."
I shook hands with them warmly. Under the stress of
parting, Mr. Crump was moved to break the silence (so far
as I was concerned) of a lifetime.
"Thanks awfully," he said, and, catching his heel in the
mat, lurched heavily backwards through the glass door and
was no more seen.
"Did you enjoy the match ?" I inquired of Dicky as I
grasped his grubby paw for the last time. "I hope your side
won."
"I don't know who won," said Dicky. "Wegot to the
place early as you told us about twelve, I should say ; but
it turned out to be the
wrong place. Of course it wasn't your
fault, but we went to the Crystal Palace. They told us there
that they don't play the Cup Final on that ground any more.
However, we had quite a good time ; we went out in a boat
on the lake for a bit. I think we must have gone to sleep, for
we didn't wake up till about an hour ago. But they'll tell us
the result in the train. So long And thanks most awfully
I

for the theatre-tickets. We're off to find the place now. By

Jove, this is a day and a half I"
Altogether an apt summary of the occasion. Ah, me I

Heaven lies about us in our infancy, Dicky.

 EDWARD F. BENSON
Royal Visitors
A College Sunday

E, F, Benson, youngest of the three brilliant sons

of the former Archbishop of Canterbury, scandalized
Victorian society by his first novel, Dodo. In the
forty years since its publication he has been one of
the most prolific authors, writing novels, plays,
stories, and memoirs with equal success.
 ROYAL VISITORS

'R. STEWART, as has been indicated before, had a weak-

__ ness, and that was an amiable and harmless one. His
weakness was for the aristocracy. Compared with this, his
feeling for royalty which was of the same order, but vastly
intensified, might also be called a total failure of power, a sort of
mental general paralysis. So when one day towards the middle
of August, the wife of the Heir Apparent of a certain European
country caused a telegram to be sent to him, to the effect that
her Royal Highness wished to visit Cambridge before leaving
the country, and would be graciously pleased to take her
luncheon with him, Mr. Stewart was naturally a proud man.
He bought a long strip of brilliant red carpet, he ordered a
lunch from the kitchen that set the mouth of the cook watering,
"and altogether/' as the Babe very profanely and improperly
said, "made as much fuss as if the Virgin Mary had been

'
expected." He also sent printed cards, "to have the honour
of," to the Vice-chancellor, the heads of four colleges and their
wives, and also to another Fellow of his college, who only a
term before had entertained at tea a regular royal queen, and
had asked him to meet her. And remembering that he had
once met the Prince of Wales at a dance in London given by
the Babe's mother, he also asked the Babe.
At the last moment, however, the Princess sent a telegram
saying that she was going to bring her husband with her, which
would mean two more places, one for him, and one for his
gentleman-in-waiting, and Mr. Stewart, whose table would
not hold any more than fifteen conveniently, sent a hurried
message and apology to the Babe, saying that all this was very
upsetting, and unexpected, and uncomfortable, and incon-
venient, but that he was sure the Babe would see his difficulty.
He would, however, be delighted and charmed if the Babe
would come in afterwards, and at least take a cup of coffee, and
a cigarette (for the Princess did not mind smoking, and indeed
817
8l8 EDWARD F, BENSON
once at Aix-les-Bains he had seen her, etc., etc.), and sun him-
self in the smile of royalty.
The Babe received this message at half past one ; he had
refused an invitation to lunch at King's on the strength of the
previous engagement, and he was rather cross. It was too
late to go to King's now, but after a few moments' thought
his face suddenly cleared and he sent a note to Reggie saying
that he would come round about half past two, adding that he
had "got an idea", which they would work out together. He
then ordered some lunch from the kitchen, which there was
little chance of his receiving for some time, for all the cooks
and kitchen boys who were not engaged in serving up Mr.
Stewart's lunch were busy making little excursions into the
court, where they stood about with trays on their heads, to
give the impression that they were going to or from some
other rooms, in order to catch a sight of Mr. Stewart's illustri-
ous guests as they crossed the court. However, the Babe
went to the kitchen himself as it did not come, and said bitter
things to the head cook, who was a Frenchman and asked him
whether he had already forgotten about Alsace and Lorraine.
He lunched alone, and half-way through he nearly choked
himself with laughing suddenly, apparently at nothing at all,
and when he had he went round to King's. He and
finished
Reggie talked together for about an hour, and then went out
shopping.
Later in the day Mr. Stewart called on the Babe, to express
his regret at what had happened, but his regret was largely
tempered with sober and loyal exultation at the success of his
party. Their Royal Highnesses had been the embodiment of
royal graciousness and amiability ; they had written their names
in his birthday book, and promised to send their photographs.
The conversation, it appeared, had been carried on chiefly in
French, a language with which Mr. Stewart was perfectly
acquainted, and which he spoke not only elegantly,
but what is better, intelligibly. The Princess was the
most beautiful and delightful of women, the Prince the
handsomest and most charming of men. Mr. Stewart, in
fact,had quite lost his heart to them both, and he had promised
to look them up when he next happened to be travelling in
their country, which, thought the cynical Babe, would probably
be soon. Best of all, Mr. Medingway, the entertainer of queens,
could not talk French, though he was the first Arabic scholar
 ROYAL VISITORS 819
in Europe, a language, however, in which it was not possible
for a mixed company to converse, and he had necessarily been
quite thrown into the shade.
The Babe received this all with the utmost interest and
sympathy. He regretted that he had not been able to come
in afterwards, but he hoped Mr. Stewart could come to break-
fast next day at nine. Mr. Stewart both could and would, and
as soon as he had gone, the Babe danced the pas-de-quatre
twice round the room.
That evening Reggie and the Babe went to call on Jack
Marsden who had come up for a week. Jack was very short,
barely five feet high, but he made up for that by being very
stout. The Babe also got a fine nib, and employed half an
hour copying something very carefully on to the back of a
in

plain black-edged envelope.

He was up in good time next morning, and he had three
letters by the post. One of these was black-edged, and had
on the back of the envelope a Royal Crown and Windsor
Castle. He opened them all, and left this last face down-
wards on the table.
Mr. Stewart came in, still in the best of spirits, and walked
about the room, expatiating on the superiority of royal
families, while the Babe made tea.
"It makes a difference," said Stewart, "it must make a
difference, if one's fathers and forefathers have been kings.
One would have the habit and the right of command. I
"
don't know ever told you
if I
His eye caught sight of the Royal Crown and Windsor
Castle, and he paused a moment.
"I don't know if I ever told you of that very pleasant day
I once spent at Sandringham."

"Yes, you told me about it yesterday," said the Babe

brutally.
"I suppose they are all up in Scotland now," said Stewart.
"No, the Queen is at Windsor for a day or two," said the
Babe. "She goes up early next week. Will you have a sole ?"
"Thanks not a whole one. I asked because I saw you
had a letter here from Windsor."
The Babe looked up quickly and just changed colour
he could do it
quite naturally and picked up his letters.
"Yes, it's from my cousin," he said. "She's in waiting,
just now,"
820 EDWARD F. BENSON
"Lady Julia ?"
"Yes. are not going straight up/'
Apparendy they
The subject dropped, but a few minutes later the Babe
said suddenly and in an absent-minded way.
"I don't think she's ever been to Cambridge before."
"Lady Julia ?"
Again die Babe started.
"Yes, Lady Julia. She thinking of coming up to to
is

see me on Monday. Is there anything in the papers ?"

"I only read the Morning Post" said Mr. Stewart. "There
is of course a short account of the Prince's visit here, but I saw

nothing else."
For the next day or two the Babe was very busy, too busy
to do much work. He went more than once with Reggie and
Jack to the A.D.C. where they looked up several dresses, and
he had a long interview with the proprietor of the Bull. He
took a slip of paper to the printer's, with certain elaborate
directions, and on Monday morning there arrived at Trinity a
Bath chair. Then he went to Mr. Stewart, who was his tutor,
and had a short talk, with the result that at a quarter to two
Mr. Stewart was pacing agitatedly up and down his room,
stopping always in front of the window, from which fa could
see the staircase on which were the Babe's rooms, and on which
now appeared a long strip of crimson carpet. As luck would
have it, Mr. Medingway selected this time for going to Mr.
Stewart's rooms to borrow a book and die two looked out of
thewindow together.
The Trinity clock had just struck two, when a smart carriage
and pair hired from the Bull stopped at the gate, and the Babe's
gyp, who had been waiting at the porter's lodge, wheeled the
Bath chair up to it. Out of it stepped first the Babe, next a
short stout old lady dressed in black, and last a very tall young
woman elegantiy dressed. She was quite as tall as the Babe,
and seemed the type of the Englishwoman of the upper class,
who plays lawn-tennis and rides bicycles. The gyp bowed
low as he helped the old lady into the chair, and the Babe hat
in hand until the old kdy told him to put it on and the tall
girl walked one on each side of it. The porter, who was just
going into the lodge, stopped dead as they passed, and also
took off his hat, and the Bath chair passed down an inclined
plane of boards which had been arranged over the steps into
the court.
 ROYAL VISITORS 821

Mr. Stewart, standing with Medingway at his bow window,

saw them enter, and in a voice trembling with suppressed
excitement said to his companion, "Here they are," and
though benedictions were not frequent on his lips, added
3
:

"God bless her/

He pressed Medingway to stop for lunch, and the two sat
down together.
"Was in the papers this morning ?" asked the latter.
it

Mr. Stewart took the Morning Post from the sofa.

"It only announced that the Court will leave Windsor
is

to-day. They are expected at Balmoral on Wednesday, not

Tuesday, you see. It does not give their movements for
to-day."
Mr, Medingway was looking out of the window.
"They have got to the staircase," he said. "And she is
getting out. Are we is anyone going in afterwards ?"
"I believe not. It is to be absolutely quiet, and strictly
incognito. leave again by the four thirty-five."
They
"An interesting, a unique occasion," said Medingway.
"Yes ;
the Babe takes it all so easily. I wish I had been
able to have him to lunch last week."
Mr. Medingway smiled, and helped himself to a slice of
galantine.
"They "wouldn't perhaps take a cup of tea before
going
"Certainly not," said Mr. Stewart, who, if he was not
playing the beau rd/e to-day, at any rate had been in the confi-
dence of him who was. "The Babe was most urgent that I
should not let it get about. Indeed, I have committed a breach
of confidence in telling you. Of course I know it will go
no further."
Meantime, the Babe having successfully conveyed his
party across the court, and having taken the precaution of
sporting his door, was having lunch. Opposite to him sat
Jack Marsden, dressed in a black silk gown ; on his fight
Reggie, attired in the height of fashion. He wore a blue dress
with very foil sleeves, and a large picture hat. He was taking
a long draught of Jager beer.
'
"Stewart and Medingway both saw, he said, "and they
are both at Stewart's window now."
"It was complete," said the Babe solemnly, "wonderfully
complete, and the bogus copy of the Morning Post, which I
822 EDWARD F. BENSON
substituted for his, was completer still. It will also puzzle
them to know how you got away, for they are sure to wait
there on the chance of seeing you again. I shouldn't wonder
if Stewart went to the station. And now if you've finished,
you can change in my bedroom, and we'll go round and get a
fourth to play tennis. Stewart must confess that I have gone
one better than either him or Medingway."
 A COLLEGE SUNDAY

and Baling had moved into a set of rooms in

REGGIE
Fellows' Buildings, which they shared together. The set
consisted of three rooms, two inner and smaller ones, and one
large room looking out on to the front court of King's. The
two smaller rooms they used as bedrooms ; but as they each had
folding Eton beds, by half past nine or so every morning, pro-
vided that they got up in reasonable time, they were converted
for the day into sitting-rooms. The outer room was fur-
nished more with regard to what furniture they had, than what
furniture it required. Thus there were two pianos, tuned
about a quarter of a tone apart from each other, two grand-
father's clocks, and a most deficient supply of chairs. "How-
ever," as Reggie said, "one can always sit on the piano."
Ealing's powers of execution on the piano were limited.
He could play hymn-tunes, or other compositions, where the
next chord to the one he was engaged on followed as a corollary
from it ; and anything in the world which went so slowly as to
enable him to glance from the music to his hands between
each chord, however complicated it was, provided it did not
contain a double sharp, which he always played wrong. He
could also, by dint of long practice, play "Father O'Flynn"
and the first verse of "Off to Philadelphia in the Morning" ;

and there seemed to be no reason why, with industry, he

should not be able to acquire the power of playing the other
verses, in which he considered the chords to be most irregular
and unexpected, deserting the air at the most crucial points.
Reggie, however, was far more accomplished. He had got
past hymn-tunes. The Intermezzo in Cavalleria Rusticana
even the palpitating part was from force of repetition mere
child's play to him, and he aspired to the slow movements
out of Beethoven's Sonatas.
The hours in which each might practise, therefore, de-
manded careful arrangements. College regulations forbade the
824 EDWARD F . BENSON
use of the pianos altogether between nine in the morning and
two in the afternoon, since it was popularly supposed by the
authorities who framed this rule and who shall say them nay ?
that undergraduates worked between these hours, and
all
that the sound of a piano would disturb them. Consequently,
Baling was allowed to play between eight a.m. and nine a.m.
every morning, a privilege which he used intermittently during
breakfast, and by which he drove Reggie, daily, to the verge
of insanity and Reggie between two p.m. and three p.m.
;

Baling again might play between three and five, and Reggie
from five to seven. During these hours the temporary cap-
tain of the pianos, even if he did not wish to play himself,

might stop the other from playing except with the soft pedal
down. It had been found impossible to regulate the hours
after dinner, and they often played simultaneously on their
several pianos and produced thereby very curious and inter-
esting effects, which sounded Wagnerian at a sufficient dis-
tance. Finally, the use of the piano was totally prohibited
by common consent between two a.m. and eight a.m.
The Babe, like mournful OEnone, "hither came at noon"
one Sunday morning. Chapel at King's was at half past ten,
and that English habit of mind which weds indissolubly
together Sunday morning and lying in bed was responsible
for the fact that on Sunday Reggie and Baling always break-
fasted after chapel. But the Babe, unlike that young lady,
was in the best of spirits, and as Baling and Reggie were not
yet back from chapel, made tea and began breakfast without
them. They came in a few minutes later, both rather cross.
"When there is going to be a sermon," said Reggie severely,
taking Dff his surplice, "I consider that I have a right to be told.
Morning, Babe."
"Oh, have you had a sermon ?" said the Babe sweetly.
"Who preached ?"
"The Dean. He preached for half an hour."
"More than half an hour," said Baling. "Totally in-
audible, of course, but lengthy to make up for that."
"Pour me out some tea, Babe, if you've had the sense to
make it."
"Sermons are trying if one hasn't breakfasted," said the
Babe. "They are sermons in stones when one asks for
bread."
"What do you mean ?"
 A COLLEGE SUNDAY 825
"I haven't the slightest idea. I hoped that perhaps one
of you would know. Why should I know what I mean ?
It'sother people's business to find out. And they for the
most part neglect it shamefully,"
"Shut up, Babe," growled Reggie. "I wish you wouldn't
talk when I'm eating."
"Can't you hear yourself eat ?" asked the Babe sympa-
thetically.
"Wild horses shall not drag me to chapel this afternoon,"
said Baling. "We'll go for a walk, Reggie."
"I dare say at present I can't think of anything but food.
:

Babe, you greedy hog, give me some fish."

"And very good fish it is," said the Babe genially. "By
the way, Sykes is far from well this morning."
"What's the matter with him ?"
"He partook too freely of the anchovies of the Chitchat
last night. You will find that in French conversation books."
"I saw him indulging as I thought unwisely," said Baling.
"Then it was surely imprudent of him to drink Moselle
cup."
"He wished to drown only gave him a stomach-
care, but it

ache. Stewart impressed him so with the fact that we were

all Atlases with the burden of the world on our shoulders,
that he had recourse to the cup."
"And the burden of us all was on Stewart."
"Yes. Don't you remember he said that he felt personally
responsible for every undergraduate whom he had ever
spoken to ? His idea is that each don ought to have an
unlimited influence, and that the whole future of England in
the next generation lay on each of them, particularly himself.
No wonder his eyelids were a little weary, as Mr. Pater says.
But after you went he took the other side, and said that the
undergraduates were the raison d'etre of the University, and that
the dons existed only by their sufferance."
"Did Longridge stop ?"
"Yes. He was a little less coherent than usual. I know
he took the case of a man at Oxford who threw stones at the
deer in Magdalen, though what conclusion he drew from it I
can't say."
"Probably that the deer were really responsible for the
undergraduates."
The Babe sighed.
826 EDWARD F . BENSON
"I have to read a paper next week. I think it shall be on
some aspects of Longridge. That is sure to give rise to a
discussion if he is there. Give me a cigarette, Reggie/'
The Babe established himself in a big chair by the fireplace,
while the others finished breakfast.
"I am going to found a club/' he said, "called the S.C.D.,
or Society for the Cultivation of Dons. Stewart says he will
be vice-president, as he doesn't consider himself a don. We
are going to call on obscure dons every afternoon and speak to
them of the loveliness of life, for as Stewart says, the majority
of them have no conception of it. Their lives are bounded
by narrow horizons, and the only glimpse they catch of the
great world is their bedmaker as she carries out their slop-
pail from their bedrooms. They live like the Niebelungs in
dark holes and eat roots, and though they are merely animals,
they have no animal spirits. He says he knew a don once who
by a sort of process of spontaneous combustion became a
dictionary ; but all the interesting words/ the sort of words one
looks out in a Bible dictionary, you know, were missing. So
they used him to light fires with, for which he was admirably
adapted, being very dry, and in the manner of King Alexander,
who, as Stewart asserted, became the bung in a wine cork,
other dons now warm themselves at him. Stewart was very
entertaining last night, and rather improper. He said that
a Don Juan or two was wanted among the dons, by way of
compensation, and he enlarged on the subject/'
"Give us his enlargements."
"I can't. He enlarged in a way that belongs to the hour
after midnight on Saturday, when you know that when you
wake up it will be Sunday. He was very Saturday-night.
He called it working off the arrears of the week, and com-
plained that he hadn't heard a mouth-filling oath for more than
a month. He never swears himself, but he likes to hear other
people do it ; for he says he is in a morbid terror of the
millennium beginning without his knowing it. He skipped
about in short-skirted epigrams, and pink-tight phrases. At
least that was his account of his own conversation when we

parted. Oh yes, and he said he didn't mind saying these

things to me because I was a man of the world."
"He knows your weak points, Babe," said Reggie.
"Not at all. He referred to that as my strong point."
"Good old Clytemnestra ! I'm better now, thank you,
 A COLLEGE SUNDAY 827
after my breakfast, and it's The Sorrows of Death' this after-
noon. I shall go to chapel again."
Reggie lit a pipe, and picked out the first few bars on the
piano.
"The watchman was a tiresome sort of man to have about,"
he said. "When they asked him if it was nearly morning, he
only said, 'Though the morning will come, the night will
come also.' Of course they knew that already, and besides
it wasn't the
question. I should have dismissed him on the
spot. So the soprano has to tell them, which he does on the
top A mainly."
"When I was a child I could sing the upper upper Z," said
the Babe fatuously. "Then my voice broke, and the moral is
'Deeper and deeper yet'. Don't rag I apologize."
:

Baling finished breakfast last, and strolled across to the

window.
"It's a heavenly morning," he said. "Let's go out. We
needn't go far."
"I will walk no further than the King's field," said the
Babe.
"Very well, and we can sit outside the pavilion. I'm lunch-
ing out at half past one,"
"Meals do run together so on Sunday, Sunday is really
one long attack of confluent mastication," said the Babe,
"It's a pity one can't take them simultaneously."

Though November had already begun, the air was deliciously

warm and mild, and had it not been for the fast yellowing trees,
one would have guessed it to be May. But there was a shout-
ing wind overhead, which stripped off the leaves by hundreds
and blew the rooks about the sky. Already the tops of the
trees were bare, and the nests of last spring swung empty and
half ruined high up among the forks of the branches. During
the last week a good deal of rain had fallen, and the Cam was
swirling down, yellow and turbid. The willow by the river
was already quite bare, and its thin feathery branches lashed
themselves against the stone coping of the bridge.
They went through the Fellows' gardens, for Reggie by
some means had got hold of a key ; there a few bushes of
draggled Michaelmas daisies were making pretence that the
summer was not quite dead yet, but they only succeeded in
calling attention to the long, desolate beds. The grass was
growing rank and matted under the autumn rains, and little
8l8 EDWARD F. BENSON
eddies of leaves had drifted up against the wires of the disused
croquet-hoops. But the day itself seemed stolen from off
the lap of spring, and two thrushes were singing in the bushes
after an excellent breakfast of succulent worms.
"We play you to-morrow at Rugger/' remarked the Babe
as they walked across the field, "and we play on this ground.
It's sticky enough, and I shall vex the soul of the half opposite

me, because I like a sticky ground, and he is certain not to.

In fact/' said he confidently, "I purpose to get two tries off
my own bat, and generally to sit on this royal and ancient
foundation/'
"The Babe has never yet been called modest," said Baling.
"If I have, I am not aware of it," said the Babe.
"We've got three blues," remarked Reggie.
"I am delighted to hear it," said the Babe. "You will
need them all. And you may tell our mutual friend Hargreave
that if he attempts to collar me round the ankles again, I shall
make no efforts whatever to avoid kicking him in the face.
He did it last time we played you, and I spoke to him about it
more sorrow than in anger."
in
"Upon which the referee warned you for using sorrowful
language."
"He did take that liberty," conceded the Babe. "Let's
sit down outside the pavilion. I wish we could kick about.
The Sabbath is made for man and so is Sunday, and so are
footballs."
"But on Sunday the pavilion is locked up by man, and the
footballs put inside."
"It appears so. English people take Sunday too seriously,
just as they take everything else, except me."
"Anyhow, Stewart says you are a man of the world," said
Baling.
"He does, and who are we to contradict him ? Good
Lord, there's one o'clock striking. I must go home. There's
somebody coming to lunch at half past. Reggie, get me a
ticket for King's this afternoon, will you ?"
 GEORGE HORACE LORIMER
Letters from a Self-Made Merchant to his Son

G. H. Lorimer has been editor of the Saturday Evening

Post for more than thirty-five years, and under his
control it has grown from insignificance to' its present
remarkable position, with the largest circulation of
any magazine in the world. Besides Letters from a
Self-made Merchant he has written Old Gorgon Graham
and other books.
LETTERS FROM A SELF-MADE MERCHANT TO
HIS SON

Chicago,
May 4, 18

PIERREPONT,
DEAR The
account
cashier
for the
has just handed me your expense
and it fairly makes a fellow
month,
hump-shouldered to look it over. When I told you that I
wished you to get a liberal education, I didn't mean that I
wanted to buy Cambridge. Of course, the bills won't break
me, but they will break you unless you are very, very careful.
I have noticed for the last two years that your accounts
have been growing heavier every month, but I haven't seen
any signs of your taking honours to justify the increased
operating expenses ; and that is bad business a good deal
like feeding his weight in corn to a scalawag steer that won't
fat up.
I haven't saidanything about this before, as I trusted a good
deal to your native common sense to keep you from making
a fool of yourself in the way that some of these young fellows
who haven't had to work for it do. But because I have sat
tight, I don't want you to get it into your head that the old
man's rich, and that he can stand it, because he won't stand it
after you leave college. The sooner you adjust your spending
to what your earning capacity will be, the easier they will find
it to live together.
The only sure way that a man can get rich quick is to have
it
given to him or to inherit it. You are not going to get rich
that way at least, not until after you have proved your
ability to hold a pretty important position with the firm;
and, of course, there is just one place from which a man can

start for that position with Graham &

Co. It doesn't make any
difference whether he is the son of the old man or of the cellar
boss that place is the bottom. And the bpttom in the office
83*
832 GEORGE HORACE LORIMER
end of this business is a seat at the mailing-desk, with eight
dollars every Saturday night.
I can't hand out any ready-made success to you. It would
do you no good, and would do the house harm. There is
it

plenty of room at the top here, but there is no elevator in the

building. Starting, as you do, with a good education, you
should be able to climb quicker than the fellow who hasn't got
it ; but there's
going to be a time when you begin at the factory
when you won't be able to lick stamps as fast as the other boys
at the desk. Yet the man who
hasn't licked stamps isn't fit
to write letters. Naturally, that is the time when knowing
whether the pie comes before the ice-cream, and how to run
an automobile, isn't going to be of any real use to you.
I simply mention these things because I am afraid your ideas
as to the basis on which you arecoming with the house have
swelled up a little in the East. I can give you a start, but after
that you will have to dynamite your way to the front by
yourself. It is all with the man. If you gave some fellows a
talent wrapped in a napkin to start with in business, they would

swap the talent for a gold brick and lose the napkin ; and there
are others that you could start out with just a napkin, who
would set up with it in the dry-goods business in a small way,
and then coax the other fellow's talent into it.
I have pride enough to believe that you have the right sort
of stuff in you, but I want to see some of it come out. You
will never make a good merchant of yourself by reversing the
order in which the Lord decreed that we should proceed
learning the spending before the earning end of business.
Pay-day is always a month off for the spendthrift, and he is
never able to realize more than sixty cents on any dollar that
comes to him. But a dollar is worth one hundred and six
cents to a good business man, and he never spends the dollar.
It's the man who keeps saving up and expenses down that

buys an interest in the concern. That is where you are going

to find yourself weak if your expense accounts don't lie and ;

they generally don't lie in that particular way, though Baron

Munchausen was the first travelling man, and my drummers'
bills still show his influence.
I know that when a lot of young men get off by themselves,
some of thern think that recklessness with money brands them
as good fellows, and that carefulness is meanness. That is
the one end of a college education which is pure cussedness ;
 A SELF-MADE MERCHANT'S LETTERS 833
and that is the one thing which makes nine business men out
of ten hesitate to send their boys off to school. But on the
other hand, that is the spot where a young man has the chance
to show that he is not a lightweight. I know that a good
many people say I am a pretty close proposition that I make;

every hog which goes through my packing-house give up more

lard than theLord gave him gross weight that I have im-
;

proved on Nature to the extent of getting four hams out of

an animal which began life with two ; but you have lived with
me long enough to know that my hand is usually in my
pocket at the right time.
Now I want to say right here that the meanest man alive
is the one who is generous with money that he has not had to
sweat for, and that the boy who is a good fellow at someone
else's expense would not work up into first-class fertilizer.
That same ambition to be known as a good fellow has crowded
my office with second-rate clerks, .and they always will be
second-rate clerks. If you have it, hold it down until you have
worked for a year. Then, if your ambition runs to hunching
up all week over a desk, to earn eight dollars to blow on a few
rounds of drinks for the boys on Saturday night, there is no
objection to your gratifying it ; for I will know that the Lord
didn't intend you to be your own boss.
You know how I began I was started off with a kick, but
that a
proved kick-up, and in the end every one since has lifted
me a little bit higher. I got two dollars a week, and slept under
the counter, and you can bet I knew just how many pennies
there were in each of those dollars, and how hard the floor was.
That what you have got to learn.
is
I remember when I was on the Lakes, our schooner was

passing out through the draw at Buffalo when I saw little Bill
Riggs, the butcher, standing up above me on the end of the
bridge with a big roast of beef in his basket. They were a
little short in the galley on that trip, so I called up to Bill and he
threw the roast down to me. I asked him how much, and he
yelled back, "About a dollar 1" That was mighty good beef,
and when we struck Buffalo again on the return trip, I thought
I would like a little more of it. So I went up to Bill's shop and
asked him for a piece of the same. But this time he gave me
a little roast, not near so big as the other, and it was pretty tough
and stringy. But when I asked him how much, he answered,
"About a dollar/* He simply didn't have any sense of values,
ZD
 834 GEORGE HORACE LORIMER
and that's the business man's sixth sense. Bill has always
been a big, healthy, hard-working man, but to-day he is very,
very poor.
The Bills ain't all in the butcher business. I've got some
of them right now in my office, but they will never climb over
the railing that separates the clerks from the executives. Yet
if they would put in half the time thinking for the house that

they give up to hatching out reasons why they ought to be

allowed to overdraw their salary accounts, I couldn't keep them
out of our private offices with a poleaxe, and I wouldn't want
to ; for they could double their salaries and my profits in a
year. But I
always lay it down as a safe proposition that the
fellow who has to break open the baby's bank toward the last
of the week for car-fare isn't going to be any Russell Sage when
it comes to trading with the old man's money. He'd punch
my bank account as full of holes as a carload of wild Texans
would a fool stockman that they'd got in a corner.
Now I know you'll say that I don't understand how it is ;
that you've got to do as the other fellows do ; and that things
have changed since I was a boy. There's nothing in it.
Adam invented all the different ways in which a young man can
make a fool of himself, and the college yell at the end of them
is just a frill that doesn't change essentials. The boy who does
anything just because the other fellows do it is
apt to scratch
a poor man's back all his life. He's the chap that's buying
wheat at ninety-seven cents the day before the market breaks.
They call him "the country" in the market reports, but the
city's full of him. It's the fellow who has the spunk to think
and act for himself, and sells short when prices hit the high
C and the house is standing on its hind legs yelling for more,
that sits in the directors' meetings when he gets on toward
forty.
We've got an old steer out at the packing-house that stands
around of the runway leading up to the killing-pens,
at the foot
for all the world like one of the village fathers
looking sitting
on the cracker box before the grocery sort of sad-eyed,dreamy
old cuss always has two or three straws from his cud sucking
out of the corner of his mouth. You never saw a steer that
looked as if he took less interest in things. But by and by
the boys drive a bunch of steers toward him, or cows maybe,
if we're canning, and then you'll see Old Abe move off up that

runway>sort of beckoning die bunch after him with that wicked

 A SELF-MADE MERCHANT'S LETTERS 835
old stump of a tail of his, as if there was something
mighty
interesting to steers at the top and something that every Texan
and Colorado, raw from the prairies, ought to have a look at
to put a metropolitan finish on him. Those steers just natur-
ally follow along up that runway and into the killing-pens.
But just as they get to the top, Old Abe, someways, gets lost
in the crowd, and he isn't among those present when the gates
are closed and the real trouble begins for his new friends.
I never saw a dozen boys together that there wasn't an
Old Abe among them. If you find your crowd following
him, keep away from it. There are times when it's safest to
be lonesome. Use a little common sense, caution and con-
science. You can stock a store with those three commodities,
when you get enough of them. But you've got to begin
getting them young. They ain't catching after you toughen
up a bit.
You needn't write me if you feel yourself getting them.
The symptoms will show in your expense account. Good-
bye ; life's too short to write letters, and New York's calling
me on the wire.
Your affectionate father,
JOHN GRAHAM.

Hot Springs,
January 30, 189

Dear Pierrepont
right off that I had made a mistake when
I knew
I
opened the enclosed and saw that it was a bill for fifty-
two dollars, "for roses sent, as per orders, to Miss Mabel
Dashkam". I don't just place Miss Dashkam, but if she's
the daughter of old Job Dashkam, on the open Board, I should
say, on general principles, that she was a fine girl to let some
other fellow marry. The last time I saw her, she inventoried
about $10,000 as she stood allowing that her diamonds
would scratch glass and that's more capital than any woman
836 GEORGE HORACE LORIMER
has a tight to tie up on her back, I don't care
rich her how
father is. And
Job's fortune is one of that brand which foots
up to a million in the newspapers and leaves the heirs in debt
to the lawyers who settle the estate.
Of course, I've never had any real experience in this sparking
business, except with your ; Ma
but I've watched from the
other side of the fence while a heap of fellows were getting
it, and I should say that marrying a woman like Mabel Dash-
kam would be the first step toward becoming a grass widower.
I'll bet her you're making twelve a week and ain't
if you'll tell

going to get any more till you earn it, you'll find that you
can't push within a mile of her even on a Soo ice-breaker.
She's one of those women with a heart like a stock-ticker
it doesn't beat over anything except money.

Of course, you're in no position yet to think of being

engaged even, and that's why I'm a little afraid that you may
be planning to get married. But a twelve-dollar clerk, who
owes fifty-two dollars for roses, needs a keeper more than a
wife. I want to say right here that there always comes a
time to the fellow who blows fifty-two dollars at a lick on roses
when he thinks how many
staple groceries he could have
bought with the money. After all, there's no fool like a
young fool, bfecause in the nature of things he's got a long time
to live.
I suppose I'm fanning the air when I ask you to be guided
by my judgment in this matter, because, while a young fellow
will consult his father about buying a horse, he's cocksure of
himself when it comes to picking a wife. Marriages may be
made in Heaven, but most engagements are made in the back
parlour with the gas so low that a fellow doesn't really get a
square look at what he's taking. While a man doesn't see
much of a girl's family when he's courting, he's apt to see a
good deal of it when he's housekeeping ; and while he doesn't
marry his wife's father, there's nothing in the marriage vow
to prevent the old man from borrowing money from him, and
you can bet if he's old Job Dashkam he'll do it, man A
can't pick his own mother, but he can pick his son's mother,
and when he chooses a father-in-law who plays the bucket
shops, he needn't be surprised if his own son plays the races.
Never marry a poor girl who's been raised like a rich one.
She's simply traded the virtues of the poor for the vices of the
rich without going long on their good points, To marry for
 A SELF-MADE MERCHANT'S LETTERS 837

money or to marry without money is a crime. There's no

real objection to marrying a woman with a fortune, but there
is to
marrying a fortune with a woman. Money makes the
mare go, and it makes her cut uj> too, unless she's used to it
and you drive her with a snaffle-bit.
While you are at it, there's nothing like picking out a
good-looking wife, because even the handsomest woman looks
homely sometimes, and so you get a little variety ; but a homely
one can only look worse than usuaL Beauty is only skin
deep, but that's deep enough to satisfy any reasonable man.
(I want to say right here that to get any sense out of a proverb
I usually find that I have to turn it wrong side out.) Then,
too, if a fellow's bound to a
marry fool, and a lot of men have
I > if they're
going to hitch up into a well-matched team, there's
nothing like picking a good-looking one.
I simply mention these things in a general way, because it
seems to me, from the gait at which you're starting off, that
you'll likely find yourself roped and branded any day, without
quite knowing how it
happened, and I want you to under-
stand that the girl who marries you for my money is
getting
a package of green goods in more ways than one. I think,

though, if you really understood what marrying on twelve

a week meant, you would have bought a bedroom set instead
of roses with that fifty-two you owe.
Speaking of marrying the old man's money by proxy
naturally takes me back to my old town in Missouri and the
case of Chauncey Witherspoon Hoskins. Chauncey's father
was the whole village, barring the railway station and the
saloon, and, of course, Chauncey thought that he was some-
thing of a pup himself. So he was, but not just the kind that
Chauncey thought he was. He stood about five foot three
in his pumps, had a nice pinky complexion, pretty wavy hair,
and a curly moustache. All he needed was a blue ribbon
around his neck to make you call, "Here, Fido," when he
came into the room.
Still, I believe he must have been pretty popular with the

ladies, because I can't think of him to this day without wanting

to punch his head. At the church sociables he used to hop
around among them, chipping and chirping like a dicky-bird
picking up s6ed ; and he was a great hand to play the piano,
and sing saddish, sweetish songs to them. Always said the
smooth thing and said it easy. Never had to choke and
838 GEORGE HORACE LARIMER
swallow to fetch it up. Never stepped through his partner's
dress when he began to dance, or got flustered when he
brought her refreshments and poured the coffee in her lap to
cool instead of in the saucer. We boys who couldn't walk
across the floor without feeling that our pants had hiked up
till
they showed our feet to the knees, and that we were
carrying a couple of canvased hams where our hands ought
to be, didn't like him; but the girls did. You can trust a
woman's taste in everything except men; and it's mighty
lucky that she slips up there or we'd pretty nigh all be
bachelors. I might add that you can't trust a man's taste in
women, either, and that's pretty lucky too, because there are
a good many old maids in the world as it is.
One time or another Chauncey lolled in the best room of
every house in our town, and we used to wonder how he
managed to browse up and down the streets that way without
getting into the pound. I never found out till after I married
your Ma, and she told me Chauncey 's heart secrets. It really
wasn't violating any confidence, because he'd told them to
every girl in town.
Seems he used to get terribly sad as soon as he was left
alone with a girl, and began to hint about a tragedy in his past
something that had blighted his whole life and left him
without the power to love again and lots more slop from the
same pail.
Of course, every girl in that town had known Chauncey
since he wore short pants, and ought to have known that the
nearest to a tragedy he had ever been was when he sat in the
top gallery of a Chicago theatre and saw a lot of barnstormers
play Othello. But some people, and especially very young
people, don't think anything's worth believing unless it's
hard to believe.
Chauncey worked along these lines until he was twenty-
four, and then he made a mistake. Most of the girls that he
had growii up with had married off, and while he was waiting
for a new lot to come along, he began to shine up to the widow
Sharpless, a powerful, well-preserved woman of forty or
thereabouts, who had been born with her eye-teeth cut. He
found her uncommon sympathetic. And when Chauncey
finally came out of his trance he was the stepfather of the
widow's four children.
She was very kind to Chauncey, and treated him like one
 A SELF-MADE MERCHANT'S LETTERS 839
of her own sons ; There was no
but she was very, very firm.
gallivanting off alone, and when they went out in double
harness strangers used to annoy him considerable by patting
him on the head and saying to his wife "What a bright-
:

looking chap your son is, Mrs. Hoskins !"

She was almost seventy when Chauncey buried her a while
back, and they say that he began to take notice again on the
way home from the funeral. Anyway, he crowded his
mourning into sixty days and I reckon there was plenty of
room in them to hold all his grief without stretching and his
courting into another sixty. And four months after date he
presented his matrimonial papers for acceptance. Said he was
tired of this mother-and-son foolishness, and wasn't going
to leave any room for doubt this time. Didn't propose to
have people sizing his wife up for one of his ancestors any
more. So he married Lulu Littlebrown, who was just turned
eighteen. Chauncey was over fifty then, and wizened up
like a late pippin that has been out overnight in an early frost.
He took Lu to Chicago for the honeymoon, and Mose
Greenebaum, who happened to be going up to town for his
autumn goods, got into the parlour car with them. By and
by the porter came around and stopped beside Chauncey.
"Wouldn't your daughter like a pillow under her head ?"
says he.
Chauncey just groaned. Then "Git, you Senegambian
son of darkness 1" And the porter just naturally got.
Mose had been taking it all in, and now he went back to
the smoking-room and passed the word along to the drummers
there. Every little while one of them would lounge up the
aisle to Chauncey and ask if he couldn't lend his daughter a

magazine, or give her an orange, or bring her a drink. And

the language that he gave back in return for these courtesies
wasn't at all fitting in a bridegroom. Then Mose had another
happy thought, and dropped off at a way station and wired
the clerk at the Palmer House.
When they got to the hotel the clerk was on the look-
out for them, and Chauncey hadn't more than signed his name
before he reached out over his diamond and said "Ah, Mr.
:

Hoskins, would you like to have your daughter near you ?"
I simply mention Chauncey in passing as an example of the
foolishness of thinking you can take any chances with a woman
who has really decided that she wants to marry, or that you can
840 GEORGE HORACE LORIMER
average up matrimonial mistakes. And I want you to re-
member that marrying the wrong girl is the one mistake that
youVe got to live with all your life. I think, though, that if
you tell Mabel what your assets are, she'll decide she won't
be your particular mistake.
Your affectionate father,
JOHN GRAHAM.
 ST. JOHN LUCAS
Expedites

St. John Lucas is a barrister

by profession, but his
chief interests have always been literary. During
the war he was attached to the staff of the British
Military Mission to Italy, a country which he knows
well and which provides the setting for this enter-
taining tale of an abbess and a saint.
ZD*
 EXPEDITUS

the fatness of abbesses ecclesiastical history

CONCERNING
has much to tell us,and legend has been busy with the same
theme. Tertullian, in his melancholy treatise De Jejuniis, has a
terrible description of the anguish endured by a saintJy female
of Philadelphia, whose girth was too great to permit her to
pass the door of heaven until St. Peter roiled back his sleeves
and tugged her in as he would have hauled an overweighted
net at Galilee ; the learned and severe Aldhelm devotes a
page ot his De L^<u&bus Virginitath to the peculiar temptations
that beset or are caused by plump persons, with examples that
are unquotable ; and the strange case of the prioress of the
Tor de' Specchi oblates, who flew into a passion and stamped
on the floor, which straightway opened (either by act of God
or because she was of prodigious bulk) and admitted her with
great rapidity to the cellar, is well known to the wise.
That her fall was broken and her death averted by the body
of the cellarer, who had observed the feast of St. Martin of
Tours by eating the greater part of a goose and drinking much
crude wine, has afforded argument to many jolly schoolmen
and sophisticated topers, from the grand Rabelais to the long-
winded Redi and it is rumoured that the curious and erudite
:

aurhor of The Path to Rome has written a monograph on the

affair. It were, indeed, a nice theme for the speculative,
whether fatness in woman has not some eternal co-relation
with holiness.
Instances to the contrary are not lacking, such as the wives
of Some Methodists and Calvinistic men, who are commonly
gaunt and bleak, and a certain notable fat nun of Caen, who
of pure malice and devilry did immure the present writer for
the space of two hours in a nasty and filthy subterranean cell,
whither he had descended to gaze on an antique sarcophagus.
43
844 ST -
JOHN LUCAS
And it is true that no one can think of St. Agnes or the Beatrice
of Dante as gross in body, and that to the early painters lantern-
jaws and attenuated shanks
were the very symbols of virtue.
Yet the holy women of Raphael were of a type that in middle
and the
age attains to an honourable and matronly plumpness,
were no bare-bones.
prophets and saints of Michelangelo
But these latter, being for the most part men, are outside the
are the bishops and
argument, and so for the same reason
certain other officers of the Church of England, whose costume
is designed to cover that part whereof ample men
are most

ashamed, namely, the belly, and to display that part wherein

the calf of the leg.
they most find glory, namely,

II

Now of all fat women who

ever brought honour to a
abbess of Saint-Ernoul
Holy Church and to a profane sex, the
was the most enormous. She moved with the gestures of a
hobbled elephant, and her nose and eyes were almost lost
behind two vast and rosy cheeks. Yet she was an active
woman, observant, and fond of snuff, and she worked with
the poor. She was greatly
vigour and success amongst
beloved by the orthodox and also by many amiable sinners.
Of the former, the Archbishop of P presented her with a
snuff-box, and of the latter, the Bishop of C
sent her snuff,
and Madame la Vicomtesse de N kept her supplied with
perfumed essence for the bath,
which essence all found its
way into the house of Master Peter the woodcutter, who
had
never washed himself in his life.
and the
Pope Leo XIII sent her an extraordinary blessing,
atheistical and disputatious folk regarded her as a too, too
solid pillar of the Church. She had great celebrity. Therefore
when the crash came, and all the poor little nuns were driven
out of their homes by order of a beneficent and progressive
Government, the abbess of Saint-Ernoul was marked down
as one of the first victims. She was denounced as a danger-
of ancient ideas, a wily
ously influential woman, a supporter
schemer who could extract large sums of money from the rich
by methods and for purposes best
known to herself. All of
which was perfectly true. She had immense influence, for her
smile was more persuasive than fifty sermons ; she supported
ideas of gentleness and cheerfijl self-sacrifice, which, as
 EXPEDITUS 845
all the world knows, are terribly rococo she was always
;

scheming to make new and nourishing bouillons for the sick,

and she was a merciless plunderer of the rich for the sake of
the poor.

in

There was a large town near her convent with a lace industry.
The mayor of this town called himself an advanced free-
thinker, but he was really a very ignorant and vulgar person
who was suffering from a surfeit of the ideas of certain people
cleverer than himself. He was a meagre man with a double
chin (this is always a dangerous combination), and he hated
the good abbess with all the capacity of his stupid soul. He
accused her before various high officials of obtaining an
influence over the girls in the lace factories, and of persuading
some of them to enter the convent as lay sisters, and to continue
their work within its walls ; which was true. He also accused
her of selling the lace which they made to certain establish-
ments in Paris which supplied the less virtuous Parisians with
extremely ornamental underclothing, and of thus encouraging
immorality and the lusts of the flesh ; which was a lie, as he
knew right well.
He succeeded in obtaining a writ of ejectment, or some
such document, from the Minister of the Interior, and he made
a speech in the city which alluded to the rights of man, to
liberty, and to several other abstract affairs, concluding it with
an impassioned demand that all pure-minded reformers and
moral progressivists should help him in the noble task of
turning a colony of dangerous women neck and crop out of
their lair. The pure-minded reformers obeyed him to a man.
There were about three dozen of them. The mayor put on
his tricolour scarf, added a few policemen to the band of

disciples, and set off for the convent, amid the consternation
of the honest market-women and the satirical ululations of
many small boys.
When the procession reached the convent gate it found
the abbess waiting to receive it. The mayor struck a majestic
attitude, inflated his chest, read the lucid prose of the Minister
of the Interior, and wound up with some original remarks of a
triumphant and hectoring nature. To this the abbess, whose
blood was up to a height most dangerous for anyone of her
846 ST. JOHN LUCAS
habit of body, replied that he was a miserable liar, and that she
intended to stay in the convent for as long as she chose to
do so. The mayor indicated the policemen (who looked
remarkably sheepish, for the abbess had known them all ever
since they were born), and regretted that he should be com-
pelled to use force.
The abbess, with a magnificent gesture, invited him to do
his worst. At the same moment the under-gardener, a poor,
fond peasant who cared nothing for the dignity of mayors but
worshipped the abbess, directed a powerful jet of water from
the convent fire-hose full against the mayor's tricolour scarf.
The mayor collapsed abruptly, and lay struggling in the flood
like a stranded Leviathan, and when the police advanced to
arrest the under-gardener he bowled them over like ninepins,
shouting joyously as he performed this horrid act. Pie then
turned his attention to the thirty-odd pure-minded reformers,
who withdrew in disorder. Meanwhile the abbess, with an
agility that was certainly lent her by Heaven, waded gallantly
forth, snatched up the document, which had fallen with the
mayor, tore it in half, and sent the fragments sailing down the
wind that blew coldly on the saturated moralists. Then she
returned to the convent, and the gardener remained on the
watch with his hose at the window.

IV

The infuriated and sodden mayor went back to the city

and lay in bed for two days. During this period he was
visited by the commandant of the garrison, and when he had
recovered from his cold he set out for the convent accompanied
by twenty soldiers, half a dozen engineers, and a machine-gun.
In justice to the mayor, we must add that the last dreadful item
of the expedition was intended for the under-gardener. The
soldiers were pelted by little boys with various missiles, both
vegetable and mineral, and cheered by a vagrant imbecile,
who was arrested. They approached the convent in good
order, but when they had prepared the machine-gun for action
they discovered that the front door was open and the abbess
and nuns had disappeared, taking with them everything of any
value. The soldiers smoked cigarettes in the chapel (by
request of the mayor), broke a few windows with their
bayonets, and marched back to barracks. In this way, after
 EXPEDITUS 847
five hundred years of error, the foundation of Saint-Ernoul was
finally abolished by the intrepid pioneers of a new age.
The abbess, knowing well that she would be forcibly
driven from the convent after her defiance of the mayor, had
contrived to place most of her nuns in various communities
which had not yet been dispersed by the Government. She
herself was the last to leave the convent, but when she had seen
all its few valuable
possessions safely packed and sent to a
great ecclesiastic in Paris who was an old friend, she departed
late one afternoon, accompanied by three sisters whose names
were three sweet symphonies. She did not forget the under-
gardener, but obtained employment for him in a place that
was sufficiently distant from the revengeful mayor. Finally,
she drove with her three handmaidens to a small station about
two miles distant from the convent, and took a slow train to
the capital.
The three handmaidens were called Ursula, Margaret, and
Veronica. Ursula was plump and cheerful, with pink cheeks
and large blue eyes ; Margaret was dark, with a pensive and
gentle face, although she was really extremely practical and
could do book-keeping by double entry. Veronica was the
eldest ; she was about forty-five, with sandy hair and a small
moustache. She was sensible and faithful and slightly sar-
castic. They were all intensely devoted to the abbess, and
wept copiously when they left the convent. The abbess did
not weep, but there was a nervous tremor in her third chin.
It was late in the evening when they reached the capital.
The younger nuns were bewildered by the noise of the station,
but the abbess remained calm and majestic. When she became
engaged in an altercation with a profane cabman who alleged
her bulk as the reason for his refusing her offer of employment,
she spoke with such dignity and point that the cabman re-
moved his hat and demanded her blessing. It is true that he
adhered to his refusal. At length a driver who had an adven-
turous soul was discovered. The abbess, after a sharp struggle,
entered his cab, taking Sister Veronica with her, whilst Ursula
and Margaret followed in another vehicle. The latter pair
were greatly alarmed by the brilliant streets, the crowds, and
the strange exhortations of the driver to his horse ; but the
abbess waved a reassuring hand to them at every street corner.
Eventually they were desposited at the garden-gate of a large
orphanage on the outskirts of the city, where they received a
848 ST. JOHN LUCAS
most welcome from the Mother Superior and the
affectionate
sisters in charge. The three nuns were tired and rather
frightened, but the abbess had recovered her good spirits >
talked and laughed incessantly, and simulated a keen anxiety
as to whether she would be the largest orphan of the com-
munity. She was the krgest orphan.

The orphanage some reason escaped the attention of

for
the Minister of the Interior, so that the four good women
abode there in peace for several weeks. The abbess had
many visitors ; she was a member of an old aristocratic family,
and had several relatives in the capital. Amongst them was
a certain Monsignor B an old gentleman with beautiful
,

silver hair and a thin face that was always puckered into a
humorous smile. He was a great admirer of the abbess,
who was his first cousin, and never missed an opportunity of
coming to see her. Like the abbess, he had the fatal quality,
so sanely detested by Ministers of Interiors, of inspiring affec-
tion wherever he went, and all the orphans adored him. He
was a monomaniac obsessed continually with a wish to make
everyone that he met as happy as possible, and he succeeded
frequently. The anti-clerical papers denounced him every
week as a dangerous intriguer ; he subscribed secretly to all
of them, and read the denunciations with immense delight to
the abbess in the orphanage garden.
It did not take this excellent Monsignor B very long
to discover that the abbess, although she seemed to be in good
spirits and was always making bad jokes, was really pining
for the convent which she had been compelled to leave. She
liked the orphanage, but of course she was only a guest within
its walls, and therefore her capacity for wise government was

rusting unused. He discovered also that she had a burning

ambition an ambition which she had flung aside whilst
she was in her convent, but one which had returned with
greater intensity now that she had leisure. She longed to see
Rome. She admitted it herself in the course of their many
conversations, and she stated frankly that the yearning had its
profane side. "Oh, of course Fm dying to sec the Holy
Father and St Peter's and the house of the Blessed Cecilia
and the Tre Fontane," she explained to him. "I've a map and
 EXJ>J5DITUS 849
a Murray, and I know all the churches as well as if Fd knelt
in every one of them. But Fm
not going to pretend that I
should pass by all those terrible, beautiful pagan things with
my nose in the air, I should climb to the top of the
Colosseum" (Monsignor B looked ghastly), "and sit in
Hadrian's Villa and poke about those wonderful tombs in the
Campagna.for all the world as if my name was Washington
and I came from Chicago. Fd go first to St. Peter's, and then
to the Scala Santa and the Ara Coeli and San Clemente and the
Catacombs, but Fd keep a whole day for the Palatine, and no
one should come with me,"
Monsignor B shook his head and smiled.
"You would shock them all dreadfully," he said. "You
know what the attitude of the Holy Church has been for
centuries with regard to all those very interesting relics of the
pagans."
"If it had only been an attitude I wouldn't have minded,"
said the abbess with vigour. "Heaven forgive me I find it
!

hard to forgive some of us for the things we did. The Holy

Fathers, too Urban the Fifth selling stones from the
I

Colosseum, and the Farnese ruining the Arch of Titus, and

Urban the Eighth melting down the Pantheon roof. Don't
shake your head ; he did 1"
"Quod nonfecerunt barbari fecere
ftarberini" quoted Monsignor
B "It is perfectly true.
. Also he issued a bull excom-
municating those who took snuff in the churches of Seville."
"Ah In church that becomes serious," said the abbess.
!

Monsignor B took a pinch from her box. "How

would you like," he said, very quietly, "how would you like to
go to Rome this year ?"
The abbess glowed visibly at the suggestion.
"How would I like it ?" she repeated with rapture, and
then she descended to reality. "My dear good man," she
said, "it's about as likely as a flight to the moon."
"You have leisure this year for the first time in your life,"
said her friend.
She shook her head. "I have leisure but I am not free."
she answered. "I have received my orders ; I must remain
here."
"Hum," remarked Monsignor B , and he began to
talk botany. He
took leave of her shortly afterwards. She
spent the afternoon making linseed poultices, but in spite of
 850 ST. JOHN LUCAS
the engrossing nature of this self-inflicted penance she could
not get the thought of Rome out of her head, and this made
her almost angry with Monsignor B ,

VI

He came to see her three days later, and, as usual, they

walked together in the garden. The intelligent face of
Monsignor B wore a mysterious expression, and he
smiled frequently at nothing in particular. He seemed pre-
occupied, too, for when they met one of the orphans he
offered her, instead of his usual pat on the head, a pinch of
snuff from the abbess's box, which he happened to be holding.
The poor childwas terribly scandalized, and retired to report
the matter to the Mother Superior. Even the tolerant abbess
was surprised, and demanded why he was so oddly absent-
minded.
He did not answer, but after a moment he turned to her
and asked an extraordinary question.
"Did you ever," he said, "when you were young, think of
becoming an ambassadress ?"
"Do you mean did I ever contemplate marriage with an
ambassador ? Certainly not I" replied the abbess with asperity.
Monsignor B smiled. "That was not quite what I
meant," he explained. "Did you never feel that it might be
your task your duty to run on errands for the Holy
Church ?"
The abbess still stared at him.
"I was taught to make myself generally useful," she
answered, "but I must confess that I never could run. At
least, not since I was twenty-five. It was then that I ran
after the burglar who broke into the refectory. But I didn't
overtake him. That was the last time I tried, and I hope you
don't want me to try now."
Monsignor B chuckled. "I don't want you to try,
but the Holy Church does," he said.
"The Holy Church !" echoed the abbess.
He nodded slowly. "The Holy Church knows that you
are one of the best of her servants, and she doesn't like to see
you pining for some good work to do. So she has arranged
for you to run on a little errand. The little errand is the
organization of a new convent for countrywomen of ours."
 EXPEDTTUS 8jl

"Mercy 1" cried the abbess, with an unmistakable thrill of

joy in her voice. "And where is it ?"
Monsignor B held out his hand for the snuff-box, took
a large pinch for each nostril, inhaled them slowly, and with
equal deliberation wiped away the superfluous grains with a
huge red cotton handkerchief. At last he spoke.
"It is let me see to the best of my belief if my memory
is not deceiving me, it is in what's the name of the place ?
5
somewhere in Italy Rome. Yes, decidedly, it is in Rome/
The abbess stared at him keenly for at least half a minute,
and then she threw up her hands and stood in an attitude of
ecstasy, murmuring something which he could not hear.
Afterwards she beamed at him like a tropic sunset
"Oh, you delicious man 1" she said.
"You'll go ?" asked Monsignor B with a wicked
intonation of astonishment.
"Won't I !" said the abbess. Her voice was the voice of a
girl of twenty, but there were tears in her eyes as she spoke.

VII

Nowof the doings of the great and holy abbess in the great
and holy city of Rome, the diary kept by Sister Veronica
contains the chronicle. For Sister Veronica was chosen to
accompany her, being the senior of the three handmaidens,
and a wise and practical woman who was not afraid of
foreigners and tourists and all such trash.

Arrived (says the first entry in the diary) June the ist.
It isvery warm. A long journey ; the train went up and down
mountains. The R.M. [Reverend Mother] pleased with the
milk of Switzerland, and with two English children who
conversed with her in her own language. Mary, Mother ^
of Heaven, have pity on all heretics. >J< Drove in a carriage
through streets to a hill called Aventine. The smell of Rome is
strange. The new convent large and very dirty. The garden
full of roses and little beasts> with a view over the city that
is beautiful.

June 2. There are little beasts in my bed,

Very sunny.
but not the worst kind. The R.M. at work all day with
arrangements for the new convent. She regrets that she is
ignorant of the Italian language, but it is of no consequence
852 ST. JOHN LUCAS
since all who come
here speak our own. His Eminence
the Cardinal R visited the R.M. He laughs much.
Bought six scrubbing-brushes from a man with a cart full of
ironware and crockery. Twenty-five beggars slept in the
cloister. Fed them in the morning ; they had bad manners.
June 3. ^
Went with the R.M. to receive the Holy Father's
Blessing. ^
Almost too nervous to open my eyes. The Holy
Father spoke much to the R.M. It is regrettable that on no
occasion can she refrain from laughter. ^
Mary, Mother of
Heaven, implant the spirit of charity in my breast, so that,
remembering my own weakness, I may not be censorious of
the defects of others. >J< All the bristles came out of all the
scrubbing-brushes.
June 4. The convent now cleaned and ready. Paid the
cleaners, who afterwards made a riot in the cloister. Visit
from the Papal Secretary, Cardinal M
He laughs like a
.

boy when the R.M. talks. His suggestions were practical,

and I told him of the drains. The garden is shady, but the
flies are a trouble to the R.M. The gardener, when pai<^,
joined the riot in the cloister.

June 5 Visited St. Peter's and most of the other churches

.

in Rome. Very tired. The R.M. not tired. Two sisters

arrived from Brittany.
June 6. >J< Sunday. ^
June 7. Visited more churches.
June 8. More churches. Two sisters from Chambry.
June 9. Churches.
June 10.
June 11. Extremely hot. The R.M. visited churches
alone. Rebuked by R.M. for curiosity when I asked their
names.
June 12. Sister Sophia has jaundice. R.M. visiting churches
alone.

And so on. There is a gap in the diary between the izth

and 6th of June, when Veronica was probably nursing
1

Sister Sophia. The entries after the latter date are for the most
part very brief :

June 17. Sophia able to sit in garden, but complained of

flies, and afraid of little beasts. Drove with R.M. to the Tre
 EXPEDITUS 85}
Fontane. ^ SS. Paul, Bernard, Vincent, and Anastasius, orate
pronobis. >J<
June 1 8. Much beset by beggars in the streets. R.M. told
me to say avanti to them, which means "go away, avaunt".
When I say it, they march in procession in front of me. Has
R.M. mistaken the word ?
June 19. Mother Superior arrived. Italian, but speaks
our language. R.M. explained everything to her. Seems
sensible, but rolls her eyes. Cardinal R brought his
sister, the Princess V , to see the convent. A scented
woman. Sophia sick again in the evening.
June 20. A
Sunday. >J< High Mass in St. John Lateran.
Our last Sunday in Rome. R.M. in low spirits.
June 21. Very Sophia very sick all day. R.M.
hot.
visited churches. came in the evening from the
Letter
Princess V offering R.M. the use of her villa on the hills
for a fortnight. R.M. consulted with me whether it would be
good for Sophia to have a change.
June 22, Sophia very weak. R.M. accepted the offer of
Princess V .

June 23. Intensely hot. R.M. out all day. Returned

exhausted.
June 24. Left Rome with R.M. and Sophia,

At this point, unfortunately, the diary ceases, but the

sojourn made by the three holy women at the Princess *s V
villa is a matter of ecclesiastical history,

VIII

The villa, which stood on the slopes of the Alban Hills,

between Frascati and Marino, was a square white edifice which
had no particular pretensions to beauty. It possessed, how-
ever, a delightful garden with a fine view of the Campagna
and of Rome. The custodian, who lived in a tiny lodge near
the gates, was a cheerful personage called Marcantonio Beffi.
He wore a red shirt and had princely manners. His wife,
Gina, who equalled him in amiability though she was less

picturesque, looked after the domestic economy of the villa

and cooked simple and excellent meals for the nuns. Both
Marcantonio and Gina had learnt French from the Princess's
maid. The air of the hills proved beneficial almost instantly
854 ST. JOHN LUCAS
to the suffering Sophia ; and the abbess, whom immense
excursions into antiquity had greatly exhausted, became
exuberant with energy. Veronica wrangled incessantly with
Gina, whose culinary methods, though they were immensely
successful in the result, were startling in process,
It was a pleasant existence, but after about a week Sophia
had recovered completely, and therefore the abbess and
Veronica had nothing to do, and found their time began to
pass very slowly. The abbess gazed wistfully at Rome, and
thought of all the interesting relics of the past which she had
omitted to see ; Veronica's temper became uncertain, and she
made sarcastic allusions to Sophia, who displayed the hearty
appetite of convalescence.
One morning, however, something happened which gave
a new direction to their activity. The abbess, who by this
time knew some Italian, was in the garden talking to Marcan-
tonio when a small and ragged urchin entered. He wore a
huge wideawake hat which completely hid his face from the
sight of anyone taller than himself, and he carried a flask of
wine which was presumably destined for Marcantonio's
luncheon.
The abbess spoke to the urchin, and the urchin took off his
ridiculous hat with a flourish. At the sight of his tace the
abbess started ; it was scarlet, vividly inflamed, and covered
with small protuberances. She examined him closely and
found that her first suspicions were correct. The urchin was
suffering from a hearty attack of measles. He admitted that
his head was aching violently, and that, when he walked, the

landscape and all its details danced a mad tarantella in front

of him. Then he sat on a flower-pot and wept many self-

pitying whereat the ruthless Marcantonio grinned.

tears,
"He can walk he is not so ill as he believes," he said,
;

standing well to windward of the boy, however. "Down

there, around Marino, they have all caught it the rosolia
and some of the people have died even those of mature age.
But what can you expect, blessed lady ? They herd together
like pigs in the slush." And he threw a self-satisfied glance
towards his own neat abode, whence the voice of Gina arose
in an outburst of unmelodious song.
The abbess looked thoughtfully at the sufferer for a
moment ; then she took his hand, led him into the villa, and
put him to bed. That afternoon she walked with Veronica
 KXPEDITUS 855
to the village whence he had come, and found that Marcantonio
had scarcely exaggerated the state of affairs. An epidemic of
measles was raging, and also, there was a dangerous low fever
which attacked the victims just when they seemed to be
convalescent. The two plagues were not confined to the
village, but had spread all through the district that lies about
the lake of Albano. The inhabitants of this district were
for the most part extremely poor, and had notions of hygiene
which were worse than rudimentary. Sister Veronica made
the acquaintance of several other species of little beasts. The
good abbess, undaunted by such drawbacks and by her own
scanty knowledge of Italian, at once set to work alleviating
the condition of those who were sick, and teaching those who
were well to take the obvious precautions against infection.
Sometimes she made Marcantonio come with her as inter-
preter Marcantonio hated the office, but nevertheless obeyed.
;

Veronica became active and contented, and Sophia sulked

because she was not allowed to share in the work, but might
only nurse the small boy at the villa.
"We have only a week/' said the abbess ; "but miracles
may happen in a week/*
Aday or two later something happened which, if not a
miracle, seemed at any rate an intervening of Providence on
behalf of the good work. A letter came from the Mother
Superior of the orphanage where the abbess and nuns had
taken shelter after they had left Saint-Ernoul, bringing the
news that the Minister of the Interior had swooped upon her
domain, and that therefore she was unable to offer any further
hospitality to the abbess. The letter was forwarded to
Cardinal R and by return of post a note came from his
,

sisterbegging the abbess to regard the villa as her own for so

long as she wished,
The abbess rejoiced, and pushed on her work with renewed
vigour. The Princess Vsent her doctor a brilliant
young man, who dressed very smartly and had no par-
ticular love for religious orders or squalid peasants. But
he promptly fell in love with the abbess, and it is rumoured
that he neglected all kinds of rich and fashionable neurotics
in Rome In spite of this combination of energy
for her sake.
and genius, the epidemic increased there were more deaths,
;

and the poor people grew despondent and gave themselves up

for lost as soon as they felt slightly unwell. The abbess
 ST. JOHN LUCAS
toiled and toiled until she grew perceptibly thinner, curtailing
her sleep and tramping from cottage to cottage with food ana
medicine; Veronica was possessed by a devouring devil of
eftergy, and the young doctor soiled innumerable specimens of
exquisite linen in the dirt of plague-stricken hovels. But
though the measles abated, the fever assumed a more severe
form as the heat increased. At last, one evening when three
children and an old woman had died, the doctor, who was in
consultation with the abbess at the villa, admitted that he began
to share the general despondency.
"We should have an army of workers, Madame/* he said,
"though, certainly, you have an army in yourself. The poor
people are becoming panic-stricken ; they believe that the
Madonna delle Grazie of Marino has frowned upon them.
They are strangely superstitious I demand pardon easily
depressed. The procession of the Holy Picture has so far
failed to reassure them/'
"We must send for more quinine/' said the abbess.
"All the quinine in the world can't save people who are
certain that they are on the brink of death/' said the doctor,
"and imagine that their patron saints have forsaken them.
Apropos, there is one thing that they are always demanding/*
"What is it ?" asked the abbess.
The doctor laughed quickly and glanced at her with a tiny
glint of malice in the full, intensely black eyes. He brushed
the sleeve of his smart flannel suit with the back of his hand
and twisted his wiry moustache.
"A relic of some holy person/' he answered. "Or, better
still, several relics. It appears that there are few in the district,
and that these have not proved very efficacious." He smiled
at the abbess, who looked solemn and nodded thoughtfully.
"As you know, dear Madame," he said, "I know nothing
of such things. I am concerned only with the practical
side of the healer's art." And he bowed half-ironically
to her.
The abbess regarded him sternly, and then her face puckered
into a reluctant smile.
"You may be an infidel," she said gruffly, "but at any rate
you're a very kind infidel. I've seen you at work." And
when she had spoken the young doctor suddenly lost all his
perkiness and ironical swagger and looked like an em-
barrassed boy.
 EXPEDITUS 8J7
"I beg your pardon," he said after a moment, "and I
advise you to obtain some relics from Rome."
"I shall go there to-morrow," said the abbess.
And on the next day she went. Before departing she
warned Veronica to expect a box containing relics and to make
inquiries at the post-office if it did not arrive within forty-eight
hours. For she had determined to pass two days in Rome in
order to enlist the sympathy of certain influential persons on
behalf of her poor people.
When she reached the city she drove at once to the Vatican
and explained the whole affair to Cardinal R . His
Eminence was extremely sympathetic, and despatched a
messenger to some address which the abbess did not overhear.
Whilst they were awaiting his return the Princess V was
announced. This scented but kindly woman was delighted
to see the abbess, asked all sorts of questions about the poor
contadini, and insisted that the holy woman was to sleep for
two nights in her palace. The abbess had intended to stay
at the convent, but eventually she accepted the princess's
invitation. Then the messenger returned, bearing a large
wooden box which contained many holy bones, fragments of
hair, and something which proved to be a toe-nail.
in a bottle
The Cardinal expatiated on the origin and the merit of the
relics, and even whilst he did so the abbess nailed up the box,
corded it, sealed it, and addressed it to Sister Veronica. She
intended to send explanations and instructions that evening.
The messenger took the box to the post-office, and the abbess
departed on her round of visits. She had only paid three when
a remarkable event happened. The day was very hot, the
abbess was overwrought with nursing and late hours. As
she was descending the steps of the Trinita de* Monti she
fainted. She recovered consciousness immediately, and was
assisted into a carriage by some sympathetic passers-by. But
when she reached the palace of Princess V she was too ill
to do anything but go to bed, and far too ill to write to
Veronica.

DC

At Grottaferrata, half-way between Frascati and Marino,

dwelt an aged and very surly man named Angelo Grazioli.
He was a professional beggar, and earned a decent income by
858 ST. JOHN LUCAS
making himself a nuisance to all the tourists who visited the
district. This venerable rogue existed in extreme squalor,
but it was believed by his neighbours that he had a comfortable
sum invested in Government securities. He lived with his
daughter, a grim lady of some forty-five years ; they quarrelled
incessantly.
Shortly before the arrival of the abbess, Angelo Grazioli
fell sick of a fever, and took to his bed, where he alternately
bemoaned imminent demise and reviled his daughter, who
his
did not believe that he was really ill, and called him a lazy
old fool. He became rapidly worse, and when the abbess and
the doctor visited him, they had scarcely the faintest hope of
his recovery. Marcantonio shared their forebodings, but was
resigned. "The old Angelo has orders to march/' he informed
everyone whom he met. "He doesn't like it, but it is the will
of God, and certainly he was a very great rogue/'
On the day after the abbess went to Rome, it seemed that
Angelo was about to obey the orders mentioned by Marcan-
tonio. Sister Veronica sat by his bedside all the morning,
and his daughter, scared at last, wept copiously in the back-
ground. About four o'clock in the afternoon, however, he
rallied slightly, and when she had done everything that was
possible, Veronica seized the opportunity of returning to the
villa forsome medicine. When she arrived, she found Sister
Sophia drooping in ecstatic contemplation over a large
box.
"Dear Veronica," said Sophia, "the holy relicshave come.
I recognize the handwriting of the Reverend Mother, and

already a heavenly fragrance has spread through the house."

Veronica inspected the box. She, too, recognized the
handwriting of the abbess on the label. At the other end of
the box was another label, and on it was printed in large
letters the one word SPEDITO. Veronica's experience of
Italian parcels was small. She stared at the word and won-
dered what it meant.
"We had better open it," she said. They took off the lid.
Inside they found the holy bones and the bottle containing a
toe-nail. Kneeling, they touched the relics reverently. But
though they searched in every corner of the box, they found
nothing to tell them the names of the original owner or owners
of these glorious fragments. Veronica was much perplexed ;

she was convinced that the abbess would not have forgotten
 EXPEDITUS 859
such an important matter. Sophia was nearly sure that the
object in the bottle belonged to a certain holy man of the
fourth century who was famous for allowing his finger-nails
and toe-nails to grow exceedingly long. But Veronica was
scornful of her theories, and became, indeed, quite cross.
"It's impossible to go down to the sick people and tell
them that these bones belong to so-and-so when really they
belong to someone quite different," she said, "and if we say
that we don't know whose bones any of them are, they won't
have any faith in them. They'll think they belong to some
saint who no interest in the district."
takes
"Then we must wait until the Reverend Mother returns/'
said Sophia.
"I don't want to wait," said Veronica. "I want to take
them to
Angelo Grazioli this very evening. There is a fine
chance of a miracle. Oh, there must be a name somewhere 1"
She turned over the lid of the box. Then she uttered an
exclamation of surprise and joy. "Look !" she cried.
She was pointing to the large label.
"How blind we were !" she said. "That is the name of the
saint."
Sophia peered at the label. "Spedito," she spelled slowly.
"Is that really the name ?"
"No, of course it's not, foolish one," retorted Veronica.
"S stands for saint. Pedito is his name. Saint Pedito. It's
clear enough."
"I don't seem to remember him," murmured Sophia.
"You are very ignorant young woman, and I am a very
ignorant old one," said Veronica. "Who are we that we
should presume to remember all the glorious names in the
calendar ? And Pedito is without doubt the Italian way of
pronouncing the name of some saint whom we know well
iinder another titlepossibly the blessed Saint Peter himself."
"Ah I I understand," said Sophia, looking hopelessly
befogged.
"Whoever he continued Veronica triumphantly, "he
is,"
was very holy, or the Reverend Mother would never have sent
his portions. And the wax is sealed with the seal of an
Eminence you can see the hat above the shield. And now
pack up the box for Marcantonio to carry. I am going to the
dispensary to make medicine for the old Angelo."
Sophia obeyed, and as soon as the medicine was prepared
86O ST. JOHN LUCAS
they summoned Marcantonio. He entered with his hat in
his hand, grinning cheerfully.
"The holy relics have arrived," said Veronica.
Marcantonio dropped on one knee and crossed himself.
Then he rose and gazed with great reverence at the box.
"Ah 1" he said. "And what may be the name of the
glorious defunct?"
"Saint Pedito," answered Veronica.
Marcantonio repeated the words thoughtfully. "I cannot
recall the name, but I am only a poor ignorant sinner," he
confessed. "No doubt Gina will know it. Gina is very wise
concerning saints, and is always rebuking me for a fool in
such matters." He went to the window, made a trumpet of
his hands, and shouted "Gina 1" There was an answering cry
from the garden, and in another moment Gina appeared. Her
bare arms smelt powerfully of onions.
"What do you desire, blessed ladies ?" she asked.
"Gina, my beloved one," said Marcantonio, "do you know
a saint called Saint Pedito ?"
Gina surveyed him scornfully.
"Saint Pedito I" she cried. "If I know him Only a1

fool would be ignorant of so holy a man ; a healer, a prophet,

a martyr, a worker of miracles Was he not the patron saint
!

of my paternal aunt and of my mother's mother Know him,

!

indeed !"
Marcantonio beamed with pride.
"You she knows him. She knows them
see, blessed ladies,
all. There not a saint in the Calendar of whom she is
is

ignorant. In that box, my Gina," he continued, "you see

the bones of the blessed and glorious Saint Pedito. For whom
be praise in sacula s&culorum> Amen." Gina crossed herself
and contemplated the relics.
"You spoke of him as a healer, Gina," said Veronica ;
"do you know what diseases he was especially fond of
healing?"
"Mumps, measles, toothache, malaria, typhoid, boils,
rheumatism, colic, and the
itch," answered Gina, enumerating,
without a second's hesitation, the ailments with which she was
most familiar. Veronica and Sophia rejoiced greatly, and
intimated to Marcantonio that they were ready to start.
Marcantonio picked up the box, balanced it on his shoulder,
and strode out. The liar went back to her onions.
 EXPEDITUS
As they walked towards Grottaferrata, Veronicpa noticed
that a cool and healthful wind was blowing across the
Campagna, and, later, that the air in the village seemed fresher
than she had ever known it.

When they reached the hovel of Angelo Grazioli the

daughter met them at the door, and with much wailing
informed them that the old man was already in extremis. They
found him sitting up in bed, gasping for breath and rolling his
eyes terribly* Sister Sophia sank to her knees and began to
recite the prayers for the dying, but Marcantonio took a less

despondent view, addressing the old man cheerfully, and

indeed gaily.
"Let us have no more of that groaning, you old rascal/* he
said, "for here is a blessed saint come on purpose to give you
one more chance of mending your ways and living in decency.
Behold the relics of the ever-blessed and glorious San Pedito,
prophet and martyr/'
The old man's gasps ceased. "I never heard of him," he
said sullenly, glaring at the relics.
"Which only shows/' said the irrepressible Marcantonio,
"what a besotted old ignoramus you are. Any person of
ordinary education and piety knows that he was the patron
saint of all holy women ; that he was not only a prophet and
martyr but a healer, a worker of miracles, when called on to
intervene in bad cases of mumps, measles, malaria, toothache,
typhoid, boils, colic, and the itch. AmI not right, blessed
ladies ? So touch the relics and try to repent your long career
of roguery."
And after this eloquent exordium Sister Veronica brought
the relics one by one to the bedside.
Now whether the bones and the hair and the toe-nail which
were attributed to the late Saint Pedito had really belonged
to some person of extraordinary and contagious virtue, or
whether the cool wind that blew across the Campagna broughta
healing influence on this vexed question it is not the province
of the present historian to decide. The abbess had her opinion
and the doctor had his, and they did not agree. It is sufficient
to chronicle the hard fact that as soon as Angelo had touched
the relics his condition began to improve. He slept, he was
862 ST. JOHN LUCAS
able to take nourishment, he ceased to anticipate death, and
he swore more heartily than ever at his daughter. On the
next day the doctor pronounced him out of danger, and in a
week he was once more annoying travellers on the Appian
Way.
He displayed no very marked symptoms of gratitude for
the miracle that had been accomplished by the relics ; but his
daughter, who was pious though cantankerous, conceived a
fervent admiration for Saint Pedito, and at once spread the
news of his virtues throughout the district. During the three
days when the abbess lay ill in the palace of Princess V the
relics were borne by Veronica and Sophia to every sick-bed
that it was possible for them to reach, and in every case,
whether it was one of fever or measles or any other of the un-
pleasant diseases enumerated by Gina, the patient was soon
on the mend. The tame of Saint Pedito spread far and wide
over the Campagna ; processions of the devout came from
Tivoli, Palestrina, Subiaco, and Segni ; a lame beggar who
dwelt on the sea coast was brought on a litter, and subsequently
walked ali the way back to Ostia, singing and rejoicing. The
drivers of oil-carts and wine-carts were voluble in praise of
the saint and carried his fame to Rome, and very soon the
priests in the churches of Trastevere were harassed with
inquiries as to why there were no altars dedicated to so holy a
martyr and healer. When the story reached the Vatican is
unknown, but the abbess heard in forty-eight hours after the
miracle of old Angelo, on the very day when she was pack-
ing her carpet bag to return to the villa. She uttered a
brief but emphatic exclamation and took the first train to
Frascatl
Veronica met her at the gatesof the garden. One glance
at her was enough to the abbess that she was in a state of
tell

religious ecstasy that bordered on delirium. The abbess

assumed her sternest expression.
"Veronica/' she said, "you have done a dreadful thing/'
Veronica stared at her.
"I, Reverend Mother?" she cried in amazement. Then
her voice became inspired, rhapsodical. "I have done a
wonderful, wonderful thing/' she chanted, "a thing that shall
never be forgotten, a deed of glory. I have brought back a
saint to the earth, and he has healed the sick and caused the lame
to walk. And I did it, I, poor Veronica ! Not unto me be
 EXPEDITUS 863
the glory," She gathered breath for a new outburst, but the
abbess cut her short.
"Calm yourself," she said, "don't be hysterical. You know
perfectly well that there is no such saint as Saint Pedito. He is
an invention, a forgery. You made him up. What on
earth possessed you ?"
Veronica's face became ghastly. "No such saint 1" she
cried. "Is that true, Reverend Mother ?"
"Perfectly true," said the abbess, taking snuff. "And you
know it. I'm afraid that you are mad. What made you
invent that particular name ? Why didn't you call the relics
by the name of a real saint ?"
"I call Heaven and Sister Sophia to witness that the name
is the name written by you on the box !" cried Veronica. "We

could find nothing inside to tell us whom the holy relics

belonged to, but at last we remembered the cover. Ah,
Reverend Mother, don't look at me with such eyes What has
1

happened ? What have I done ?"

The abbess sat down on a garden seat. Her face was
seamed with wonderful lines. For a long while she could not
speak. "You have done nothing, my dear Veronica, nothing,"
she said, "except that you have created an active, miraculous
saint out of a a luggage-label." And then she laughed so
convulsively that Veronica thought she was about to die.
Veronica did not laugh. She was pallid with dismay.
"Then whose were the bones ?" she cried.
The abbess conquered her laughter and wiped her eyes.
"They were nobody's in particular," she said, "They
came from the catacombs, and certainly belonged to some
very holy person. Oh dear, oh dear And now let us think
1

of what has to be done."

It was a difficult question, for even

as they sat there the
fame of Saint Pedito was spreading like wildfire and the good
people of Marino and Grattaferrata were planning a jollification
in his honour. There was a crowd of rejoicing peasants at
the villa gate that evening, and Marcantonio, to its huge
delight, fired salvos to the glory of the saint from the small
brass cannon on the terrace. To explain to all these happy
people that Pedito was a fraud that he had never had any
864 ST. JOHN LUCAS
bones, never existed seemed impossible ; either they would
refuse to believe the explanation or there would be a grand riot
and the Holy Church would be discredited. The abbess
hesitated for several days, during which Saint Pedito accom-
plished miracles of the utmost splendour not limiting his
attentions to human beings, but including oxen and horses in
the fold of his beneficent influence. Votive offerings to him
were hung all about the exterior walls of the villa garden, and
the local poet composed strambotti in his honour which every-
one sang. Meanwhile the healthful wind continued to blow
and was acclaimed as the venticelh di San Pedito a title which
it bears to this day.

At last the abbess could no longer bear the strain of

conscious duplicity and went to Rome, where she poured the
whole story into the astonished ears of Cardinal R He .

listened gravely to her, and when she had ceased to speak he

remained lost in thought for some moments. Then he looked
up at her.
"What do you propose to do, my sister ?" he asked.
The abbess made eloquent gestures with her fat hands.
"I came to your Eminence for advice/* she said. "I'm at

my wits' end. If we take away their saint we shall take away

their faith in the holy relics ; yet we can't let him go on. He's
not a real saint, and all the honour that the real saints ought
to have is bestowed on him. I give it up ; I feel beaten. It's
the first time in my life."
The Cardinal was again deep in thought.
"After all," he murmured, "why shouldn't we let him go
on as you phrase it, my sister ?"
The abbess looked scandalized.
"Eminence 1" she cried.
He held up a long thin hand.
"Wak a moment," he said. "Saint Pedito has worked
miracles ; how do we know that the invention of his name
was not a miracle ; that perhaps there really was some saint of
that name or something very like it whose existence has
unfortunately been forgotten? Eh, there used to be so
many good persons in this bad world, my sister !"
The abbess stared at him.
"Your Eminence really thinks it possible ...?'* she said.
The Cardinal smiled brilliantly. "The whole affiur is
veify wonderful and mysterious," he said. "If there is no
 EXPEDITUS 865
saint of that name there certainly ought to be. At any rate,
it be worth while to make inquiries. I will give instruc-
will
tions ; meanwhile . .." He paused.
"Meanwhile ?" echoed the abbess.
"Meanwhile, say nothing," said the Cardinal. "The whole
affair wears too divine an aspect to admit of human interference
for the present/'
So the abbess said nothing.
But how the Cardinal set a scholar to work in various
libraries, and how a scholar discovered that a certain Roman
soldier called Expeditus, who lived in the third century of our
era, became a Christian and died a martyr in the Colosseum,
being slain of lions, and how an expert osteologist recognized
the marks of lions' teeth on the bones which have accomplished
so many miracles are not these things written in the official
account of the saint's canonization ?
He was established on such a definitely historical basis that
even the abbess ceased to have any doubt that Veronica's
misreading of the label was divinely prompted, and Veronica is
quite convinced that mystic fire burnt all about the word when
she first beheld it. She gives herself tremendous airs over the
whole business. But if the abbess had not been a very fat
woman, and therefore, as we proved at the outset of this
history, extremely holy and given to charitable works, who
shall say if the contadini would have ever conquered their

epidemic, if the noses of the other saints would have been put
so sadly out of joint, or if Saint Pedito or Spedito would have
ever been rescued from the limbo of forgotten virtue in order to
send prayers to Heaven so expeditiously that they overtook
others which had started long before? Palmam qui mtruit
ftrat.
 ST. JOHN G. ERVINE

Colleagues

St. John Ervine isan Ulsterman by birth, and many

of with the humours of his^ native
his best stories deal
land. In addition to six novels, he has written a

large number of plays, and he is well known

as a dramatic critic and authority on the theatre.
 COLLEAGUES

JUSTICE McBURNIE stepped quickly into the

MR. shelter of the little passage, and collided with the man
who had already taken refuge there.
"I beg your pardon/' he murmured. "It's very dark. ." . .

"That's all right, sir," the stranger replied in a cheery

voice. "Bit awkward comin' in 'ere out of the light, ain't
it ? Sudden, I mean."
"Yes," replied the judge, turning to look at the rain-
drenched street. "A very heavy shower," he added.
"Yes, an' come on so sudden, too. Funny sort of
weather we bin 'avin' lately, ain't we ? One minute sun
shinirf', an' the next you get soaked through. No certainty
about it. I suppose it's bein' so near the sea, an' the 'ills, an'
one thing an' another."
"I suppose so," said Mr. Justice McBurnie in the tone
of one who is indifferent to the conversation of his companion.
He looked for a moment at him, and saw a small man, seem-
ingly of mild manners, with an odd way of smiling when he
spoke, as though beneath his most commonplace phrase there
lurked some inscrutably comic meaning known only to him.
"You're a native of this town ?" asked the judge.
"Oh, yes. Born an' bred 'ere. I got a shop, you know."
"Indeed !"
"Yes. I do a bit of travellin' now an' again. Nothink
to speak of. ... Gummy, ain't it comin' down, eh ?"
The storm had grown in severity while they stood in the
passage, and the rain came down in sheets.
"Most unfortunate," murmured Mr. Justice McBurnie*
"I've come quite a long way from my hotel without an
umbrella or a mackintosh. I hope it won't last much longer."
The little man smiled in his odd, superior, knowing way.
"You never know," he said, "now the Assizes is on 1"
"The Assizes!"
869
870 ST. JOHN G . ERVINE
"Yes. Some people say there's bound to be bad weather
when the Assizes is on. 'Specially when there's a murder
case. Funny the things people do say about Assizes, ain't
it?"
The judge did not reply.
"Now, there's my ole mother. She would 'ave it that it
was against the law for a butcher to serve on a jury tryin' a
man for 'is life. She wouldn't believe it wasn't true. Of
course, it ain't true. I ast a gentleman once 'e was a lawyer,

you know an' 'e said 'e'd never 'eard of such a thing."
"What a curious thing for your mother to believe 1" said
Mr. Justice McBurnie, turning to the garrulous little
man.
"Yes, was, wasn't it ? Of course, she don't believe it
it

now, sir. She's dead."

"Oh, indeed !"
"Yes. She was a good ole soul. Seventy-two she was,
an' 'ad 'er senses to the last. But she wouldn't believe it
wasn't true about butchers, sir, not if the queen 'erself 'ad
swore it on the Bible. She said it stood to reason butchers
wouldn't be allowed to try a man for his life. 'Killin' animals
all day,' she said, 'made 'em callous, an' they'd 'ang you as
"
soon as look at you 1'
Mr. JusticeMcBurnie laughed. "Oh," he said, "was that
why she objected to butchers on juries ?"
"Yes, sir, an' you couldn't shake 'er out of it. Of course,
butchers is a bit 'ard. No doubt about it. Stan's to reason,
as she said. You can't go on takin' life like they do an' not
get a bit 'ardened, can you ? On'y wot I used to say to 'er
was, it ain't the law. It may be common sense, ses I, but it
ain't the law. But she would 'ave it that it was. Stubborn,
sir!
Seventy -two, she was, but that stubborn !"
The judge advanced towards the end of the passage and
gazed up at the dark sky, and then up and down the street.
"It doesn't seem to get any better," he said.
"No," said the stranger, "it won't now, I shouldn't
think."
"I wonder if I could get a cab or some sort of vehicle ?"
The little man thought it was probable that he might.
"I'll go up to the 'ead of the street," he said, "when the rain's
over a bit, an' see if I can get one for you."
"You're very kind . ."
.
 COLLEAGUES 871

"Oh, no, sir, not at all IYou're a stranger 'ere, an' if

we can't do a thing like that for a stranger, wot's the good
of us?"
They stood in silence for a few moments, and then the
man began to speak again.
little

"You know, 'e must feel a bit queer to-night, I should

think."
"I beg your pardon," exclaimed Mr. Justice McBurnie.
"The chap wot's goin' to be tried to-morrow. Young
fella, 'e is. Killed a girl 'e was walkin' out with."
"Oh, yes! Yes, yes!"
"I suppose you 'eard about it. Jealousy !"
The judge nodded his head.
"Now, there's a thing I can't understand, you know. If
I was walkin' out with a girl, an' she got up to any tricks,
runnin' after other fellas, I wouldn't go an' kill 'er or nothink.
I'd simply tell 'er to go to 'ell, or somethink of that sort.
Silly to go an' get 'ung for her ! Some people's funny-
natured, ain't they ?"
"That's true."
"We ain't all alike, of course. Wouldn't do if we was.
But I mean to say I can't understand a chap goin' an' killin'
a girl for a thing like that, I mean to say, there don't seem no
sense in it, some'ow."
"There isn't."
"No. An' yet they go an' do it. I've knowed case
after case like that. Decent enough young fellas, you know,
on'y they go an' do a thing like that. It seems
a pity, some'ow."
"Yes ..."
"Of course, you 'ave to be firm about it. It wouldn't
do to go lettin' 'em off or anythink, on'y some'ow . . .

Well, there was that young chap Smith now, 'e wasn't a
bad chap, 'e wasn't. A bit 'ot-'eaded. 'E done the same's
this chap, an' 'e got 'ung same's this one will ..."
"How do you know this one will be hanged ?"
"Oh, 'e'll be 'ung all right !The judge can't 'elp 'isself.
Clear case. Clear as anythink. I dessay the judge won't like
doin' it. No one would. On'y it's got to be done. You've
got to 'ave judges, an' if people goes about killin' other
people, the judges 'ave got to sentence them to death. Can't
help theirselves. That's 'ow I look at it."
 ST. JOHN G. ERVINE
"I dare say you are right I think the tain is going off.
I believe it'll
stop soon."
"Can't help theirselves. It's got to be done, an' if it's
got to be done, someone's got to do it* That's wot I told
my ole mother about butchers. No good cursin' 'em, an'
callin' 'em 'ard-'earted an' all that, if you eat meat. You
can't 'ave meat unless there's butchers. I don't s'pose they
do it for the fun of the thing I"
"No, I dare say not," said Mr. Justice McBurnie. "Do you
think you could do what you so kindly suggested a few
moments ago get a cab for me ? I'm sorry to trouble
:

you. . . ."
"No trouble at all, sir." The little man walked to the
entrance to the passage and stood there for a moment or two
while he turned up the collar of his coat. "You know,"
he said, turning to the judge, "they'll 'ang 'im all right. Can't
help theirselves !"
"Well, well," said the judge impatiently.
"You know," continued the little man, "it's the first case
in this town. We got a new gaol 'ere. I'm a bit interested
in the case."
"Naturally."
"I knoo 'im well, sir. Often an' often 'e'd come into my
shop to 'ave a shave. Very partickler 'e was about bein'
shaved. Very partickler. Couldn't bear to 'ave it done up.
Very tender skin 'e 'ad."
"If you wouldn't mind ..."
"Don't mind a bit, sir. Not
never thought 'e
a bit. I
would come to this. Come
my shop reg'lar 'e would.
into
1 never felt about anyone the way I do about 'im. ..."

Mr. Jistice McBurnie came to the little man's side and

peered up the street. "I believe I can hear wheels," he said.
"So you can, sir. I'll just run up and fetch the cab, sir.
Shan't be 'alf a sec!"
In a little while the cab came down the street and the
judge stepped out of the passage.
"Won't you let me drive you home?" he said to the

stranger.
"It's very kind of you, I'm sure, sir. I ain't got far to
go . . ."
"YouVe been so very obliging,*' continued the judge.
"I should like to."
 COLLEAGUES 873
"Well, thank you, sir."
They stepped into the cab and the judge told the stranger
the name of the hotel at which he was stopping.
"You'd better tell him to drive to your home first, and then
he can take me to the hotel."
"Yes, sir." He called the name of his street to the cab-
man. "That's the name of the 'otel where the judge is
stoppin'," he said, as they drove off.
Mr. Justice McBurnie leant back in his seat and smiled.
"Yes," he said, "I am the judge."
The stranger sat up and regarded him with curiosity.
"Are you, now he said.
1" "You know, that's strange,
that is 1 You an* me's in the same line of business, so to
speak."
"Indeed 1"
"Yes. Funny coincidence, I call it, you an* me talkin*
the way we was about '/'#/."
"About whom ?"
" 'Im as
killed the girl. 'E'd be surprised to 'ear about
this, 'e would."
"I'm afraid I don't understand," said Mr. Justice McBurnie.
"Well, it's simple enough, sir. You're the judge an'
I'm the 'angman."
Mr. Justice McBurnie sat up in his seat, and the smile
disappeared from his lips. He tried to speak, but the words
clung to his teeth and would not be uttered.
"Sort of in the same business, you an' me," said the little
man. "You begin it, and I end it. Funny coincidence, I
call it. Fancy me tellin' you about 'im, an' you the judge
and me the 'angman ! Used to come into my shop reg'lar
'e did, an' 'ave a shave. Very partickler, 'e was. . . Wot
did you say, sir ?"
Mr. Justice McBurnie did not speak.
"I expec' you're tired, sir. Up too late. I get out 'ere.
You know, when you come to think of it, it's a funny
coincidence. . . * Goo* night, sir 1 Goo' night !"
 ALBERT SMITH
Delightful People

Albert Smith was trained as a doctor, but soon turned

his powers of humorous observation to good use
as a contributor to Punch, and as a writer of plays
and pantomimes. He published a ]arge number of
books, including The Physiology of London Evening Parties,
from which this sketch is taken. He was the originator
of the form of entertainment now known as the
"travelogue".
 DELIGHTFUL PEOPLE

A ^HERE are two sets of people in society the amusers and

JL the amused, who are both equally useful in their way
although widely different in their attributes. A reunion, to go
off well, should contain a proper share of either class ; because
notwithstanding the inability of the latter to contribute much to
the festivity of the meeting, they make an excellent and patient
audience, without which the powers of the amusers are
cramped, and they feel they are not sufficiently appreciated.
Why all people, enjoying the same level of intellect,
should not be equally sought after in society, we do not
pretend to decide ; but we will endeavour to account for
it
by falling back upon our theatrical analogies. If you
study the playbills, you see, year after year, the same
names amongst the companies who keep at the same
humble standard ; whilst others, whom you recollect as
their inferiors, ultimately arrive at big letters and benefits
in fact, that chance, tact, forte, and opportunity come
spontaneously to the latter, whilst the former are content
to remain servants and peasants. They have been known
to embody guests and mobs, and have sometimes arrived
at first citizens ; but this is by no means a common occur-
rence. The same union of circumstances that divides a
theatrical commonwealth into stars and supernumeraries
produces in our own circles delightful people and nobodies
for so are the listeners and admirers generally and
uncourteously termed.
But there are various kinds of delightful people beyond
the mere entertainers. If there is a family rather higher
in life than yourselves, or moving in a sphere you think
more of than your own, notwithstanding they may have
formerly snubbed you, it is astonishing, when you get intro-
duced to them and at last asked to their house, what delightful
people you find them. If you know two young persons
878 ALBERT SMITH
who have tumbled into an engagement with each other
under tolerably favourable circumstances, and visit each
other's friends for the first time, you will be enchanted with
the accounts of what "delightful people" they are ; how
very friendly the mother was, and how well the sisters played,
and made coloured-paper dust-collectors. Persons who
have large houses, give dinners, and keep carriages and
private boxes gentlemen who have been all along the coast
of the Mediterranean, and tell most extraordinary anecdotes
until they themselves really believe that their adventures
have happened authors who have written a book which
has proved a hit by chance, to the astonishment of every-
body, and no one more than the writers acquaintances
who have the happy knack of cordially agreeing with you
upon every subject, and applauding everything you do, think-
ing quite differently all the while worn-out "bits of quality
tumbled into decay", as Miss Lucretia M'Tab says, who
honour families of questionable caste with their acquaintance,
and join all their parties by the tenor of relating stories of by-
gone greatness, and random recollections of defunct high
circles ; all these, and many more, had we time to enumerate

them, are "delightful people". But we proceed to consider

the class it is our wish to place more especially under the
inspection of the reader.
We called one day upon a lady of our acquaintance, who
was about to give a large evening party; and upon being
ushered into the drawing-room, found the whole family in
high glee at the contents of a note they had just received.
Our intimacy prompted us to inquire the purport of the
oblong billet that had so much delighted them.
"Oh," said the eldest daughter, "the Lawsons
Ellen,
have accepted of them are coming 1"
all
"And who are the Lawsons ?" we ventured to ask.
"My goodness, Albert 1" exclaimed everybody at once,
with an excitement which nearly caused us, being of a ner-
vous temperament, to tilt backwards off the apology
for a chair on which we were seated one of those slim
rickety specimens of upholstery which inspire stout gentle-
men with such nervous dread when one is handed to them.
"Is it
possibleyou don't know the Lawsons ?"
We confessed with shame our ignorance of the parties
in question.
 DELIGHTFUL PEOPLE 879

"They are such delightful people" continued the second

female olive-branch, Margaret. "We were so afraid they
would not come, because they are almost always engaged ;
so we sent their invitation nearly a month ago/*
"And you have only just received their reply?" we sub-
joined. "It looks as if they had waited for something else
that didn't come."
"Oh, no," said Ellen, almost offended. "Mrs. Lawson
is always so charmed with everything at our house, and
says
our parties are always so pleasant, and that we manage things
so well"
"And she told me, the last time she was here," added
Margaret, "that she could not have believed the whole of
the supper was made at home, if she had not been told. And
I am sure she liked it, because she ate so much."
"And what does this family do to make them so delight-
ful ?" we inquired.
"Oh, almost everything," said Ellen. "Mr. Lawson
plays an admirable rubber, and Mrs. Lawson knows nearly
all the great people of the day, and can tell a great deal of
their private histories. Bessy is a perfect Mrs. Anderson on
"
the piano, and Cynthia
"Who ?" we interrupted, somewhat rudely.
"Cynthia isn't it a pretty name
She is such a delightful
?

girl sings better than anyone you ever heard in private."

"Then, Tom is such an oddity and such a nice fellow,"
continued Margaret. "He imitates Macready and Buck-
stone so that you would not know the difference, and sings
the drollest songs He can whistle just like a bird, play tunes
!

a
upon stick, and conjure with rout-cakes at supper."
"And you should hear him do the two cats, where he
makes you believe that they talk real words !" chimed in
Ellen.
"And what is this wonder ?" we asked.
"He's a lawyer," said Ellen ; "but I don't think he much
likes his profession."
Wethought so too. No man who did the two cats, or
imitated Macready and Buckstone, ever did like his profession,
unless he was an actor at once.
"You will see them here on Friday," said Margaret,
"and then you can form your own opinions but I am certain
;

you will like them. Hark, there's a double knock at the door 1"
88O ALBERT SMITH
"Don't peep at the
window, Margaret; they will see
you/* said Ellen to her sister, who was endeavouring to
discover who the visitors were by taking a covert observation
through the bars of a birdcage.
"It's those horrid Wiltons 1" exclaimed Margaret "Do
ring again, Ellen. What a singular thing it is servants are
never in the way when a double knock comes at the door."
The newcomers entered the room, and at the same time
we left; not, however, before our fair young friends had
told"those horrid Wiltons" how angry they were with
them for not calling more frequently, and how delighted
they felt now they had come at last. We were sorry to find
their pretty lips could let out such little falsehoods, atid with
such excellent grace.
Friday evening arrived, as in the common course of
things every Friday evening must do if you wait for it ; and
about ten o'clock, after a shilling's-worth of shake, rattle,
and altercation, we alighted from a cab at our friends' house,
and tripped into the library, where tea and coffee was going
on, with a lightness that only dress boots and white kids can
inspire.
Several visitors were there before us, as well as one of
Margaret's brothers, who said in a low voice as we
entered :

"My dear friend, let me introduce you to some delight-

ful people. Mrs. Lawson, allow me to present to you,
"
Mr.
"Will you take tea or coffee, sir?" said the maid at the
same time.
We were so overcome with being thus suddenly con-
fronted with the stars that we think we bowed to the maid,
and said we were happy to make her acquaintance ; and merely
exclaimed, "Coffee, if you please," as Mrs. Lawson inclined
her head to ourselves.
We went upstairs and entered the ballroom, where our
friends had just received intelligence that "the Lawsons had
arrived I"
The first portion of a party is always the same. And
it was not until the
evening was somewhat advanced, and
they had made sure that everybody was arrived, that the
powers of the Lawsons came into full play at least, as
regarded the vounir fceotJe : for the governor had been at
 DELIGHTFUL PEOPLE 88l

whist since he first arrived, and Mrs. Lawson's

ever
feathers were ubiquitously perceptible, waving and bending
apparently in every part of the room at once talking to
;

all the old ladies in turn, fishing for compliments for her
own daughters by admiring theirs, and smiling, with angelic
benignity, upon every young man concerning whose expec-
tations she had been agreeably informed.
The junior exhibition commenced by Bessy delighting the
company with a rondo by Herz, in the most approved sky-
rocket style of that great master ; being a Parisian com-
position, introducing variations upon the popular airs, "R/V//,
mes bons enfants, alle*^ toujours'\ "La Pierre de Newgate", and "Jo/i
Ne%" from
y the opera oJacque Sheppard. As it was not above
twenty pages in length, everyone was quite charmed indeed,
they could almost have heard it again ; and the manner in
which Miss Lawson sprang at the keys, and darted up and
down the flats and sharps, and twitched her shoulders, and
tickled the piano into convulsions, and jerked about upon the
music-stool was really astonishing, and thunderstruck every-
body ; except the young lady and gentleman who were
flirting at the end of the room after a waltz, and actually
appeared more engaged with their own conversation than they
did with the fair Bessy's performance, which at last concluded
amidst universal applause.
There was another quadrille, and then we were informed
that Miss Cynthia Lawson was going to sing. The young
lady was dressed in plain white robes, with her hair smoothed
very flat round her head a la Grisi, whom she thought she
resembled both in style of singing and features, and conse-
quently studied all her attitudes from the clever Italian's
impersonation of Norma.
Of course, was the usual delay attendant upon
there
such displays. The musicians had to be cleared away from the
piano, in which process their wine-bottle was knocked over ;
then the music was in a portfolio in the room downstairs
which nobody could find ; when found, it was all placed on
the music-rest topsy-turvy; and many other annoyances.
At last the lady began a bravura, upon such a high note, and
so powerful, that some impudent fellows in the square, who
were passing at the time, sang out, "Vari-e-ty I" in reply.
Presently a young gentleman, who was standing at her
side, chanced to turn over too soon, whereupon she gave him
882 ALBERT SMITH
swb a look that, if he had entertained any thoughts of pro-
posing, would effectually have stopped any such rash proceed-
ing ;but her equanimity was soon restored, and she went
through the aria in most dashing style until she came to the
last note, whose appearance she heralded with a roulade of
wonderful execution.
"Now don't get up," said the ladv of the house, in a
most persuasive and winning manner, to Miss Cynthia,
when she had really concluded. "Do favour us with one
more, if you are not too fatigued. Or perhaps you would
like a glass of wine first a very, very little glass."
The young lady declined any refreshment, and imme-
diately commenced a duet with her brother, whose voice,
however, she entirely drowned; nevertheless, the audience
were equally delighted, and as soon as she had regularly
concluded, and the murmur of approbation had ceased,
six young men rushed up to Ellen with the request that
they might be introduced to Miss Lawson for the next waltz.
But, unfortunately, Miss Lawson did not waltz, or, rather,
she did not choose to do so. She was aware of her liability
to be called upon to sing after every dance, and she had no
notion of sitting down to the instrument with a red face and
flustered ensemble,
"Delightful people, those Lawsons !" wheezed out a
fat old gentleman in pumps and a white neckcloth, who
was leaning against the wall and looking as if he wanted a
glass of ale.
"Do you know them, sir ?" we asked,
"Never had the pleasure of meeting them before ;but
they are a charming family. Mother a delightful person,
sir woman of the world appears to have been thrown
early into good society and profited by it. Clever fellow
that young Lawson ha Iha ! look at him !" And the
old gentleman chuckled until he was almost choked.
We turned to gaze at the cause of his mirth, and saw
Tom doing Pastorale in a most ballet-like style, jumping
up and coming down upon one toe, turning round without
touching the ground, and making everybody afraid of coming
within a yard of him.
There are many worse periods in our existence than the
twenty minutes consumed at supper at an evening party.
The reserve which prevailed at the commencement of the
 DELIGHTFUL PEOPLE 883
evening begins to wear off you gain courage to make engage-
:

ments for the first quadrille after supper, and think what a
pity it is that the flight of Time cannot be delayed by pleasure,
with permission to make up his lost moments by hurrying
doubly quick over periods of sorrow or ennui. Alas, the hoary
old mower generally takes it into his head to act in precisely an
opposite manner 1

We went down to supper with a pretty specimen of

feminine mortality in white poplin on our arm, and
assisted her to a cubic inch of blancmange and an

homoeopathic quantity of Moselle, which she affirmed was

quite sufficient ; as well as took the precaution to push the
tongue to the Qther side of the table, opposite a man who
had taken off his gloves to eat, and who was imme-
diately "troubled for a slice" fifteen times in rapid succession.
By the way, talking of taking off your gloves what is the
reason that, whenever you go out and wish your hands to
look more than ordinarily white, they generally resemble raw
beefsteaks ?
Our being for the time accomplished, we looked
devoirs
round the room, and the first object that caught our eye
between the lines of wax candles and trifle-dishes was
Mrs. Lawson's turban, with herself attached to it, bobbing
about at the head of the table in most graceful affability
to everybody. Miss Lawson was flirting with a slim young
man at the sideboard, where she preferred to sup, on the
pretence of being not able to find a seat ; and Miss Cynthia,
no doubt much fatigued by her vocal exertions, was con-
cluding the second patty and thinking what she should send
her cavalier servente for next. Tom was in the centre of the
table, in high glee, chirping at a sugar-plum bird in a barley-
sugar cage, jerking bonbons into his mouth by slapping his
hand, making little men out of raisons and preserved ginger
and sending them to different young ladies with his compli-
ments ; playing the cornet--piston upon a wafer-cake, "and
many other performances too numerous to mention", as they
say outside shows.
"My dear Mrs. Howard," said Mrs. Lawson to the
hostess, "how
delicious everything is ! You always do have
such very fine lobsters where do you contrive to get them ?"
"I am very happy you admire them," returned the lady ;
"but I really don't know." Which affirmation was the more
 ALBERT SMITH
singular, as she had ordered them herself from a shop in
Wigmore Street.

"Lady Mary Abbeville and yourself are the only two

of my friends who contrive to get large lobsters/* continued
Mrs. Lawson. "Lady Mary is a charming creature do you
know her ?"
"I have not that pleasure/' replied our friend ; "and yet I
have heard the name somewhere."
"Between Boulogne and Paris/' cried Tom as he exploded
a cracker bonbon. "The diligence dines there/*
"Now, my dear Tom, do not be so foolish/' said Mrs.
Lawson, in a tone of admiring reproach. "How can a diligence
dine?"
"Well, I've seen it break-fast* however, when it has been
going down a hill overloaded/* replied the "talented" son.
"A glass of wine, sir ?" he continued, pitching upon someone
opposite by chance, to make his wit appear offhand.
The challenged individual was an overgrown young
gentleman with a very high shirt-collar. He stammered
out, "With much pleasure I" and then filling up his half-
glass of sherry from the nearest decanter at hand, which
contained port, he made a nervous bow and swallowed the
wine as if it had been physic.
"Here's you and I, sir, and two more ; but we won't
tell their names," exclaimed Tom, winking to the young

gentleman, whose blushes increased to a fearful pitch of

intensity.
The ladies had been gradually leaving the room for the
last ten minutes, andwhen they had all departed we sat down
to our own supper. Tom never once flagged in his drolleries.
He laughed, took wine with all the old gentlemen, did the two
cats, imitated Macready and Buckstone in fact, opened all
his stores of facetiousness. He accompanied us upstairs, and
after the ladies had finished the long quadrille they were

having with themselves, he sang a song about "Warted" or

something, but we do not exactly recollect what, being our-
selves engaged in talking delightful absurdities to the belle in
the white poplin, and endeavouring to reason down the
antediluvian idea she had formed that it was improper to
waltz with anyone eke but her brother ; in which argument
we finally succeeded.However, the song was eminently
successful, and threw everybody who witnessed the odd
 DELIGHTFUL PEOPLE 885

grimaces with which Tom accompanied it into delirious

convulsions of laughter.
The "delightful people" left about half past two Mrs. ;

Lawson declaring her girls went out so much that their

health began to suffer from late hours. Tom saw them
into their carriage, and then came back, pressing every
other young man in the room to come to some tavern
where there was a capital comic singer; but finding no
one so inclined, he also took his leave. We waited until
we saw the man who played the piano hammering away
with his eyes shut, and gradually going to sleep over the
keys, when we thought it time to depart ourselves and
;

in all the happiness of a latchkey in our pocket, and the same

good hat we left in the hall upon our head, we bent our steps
homeward.
Two or three weeks passed away, when one morning
we received an application from a young medical friend,
to use our interest in obtaining for him some votes for the
situation of surgeon to a dispensary in the neighbourhood,
accompanied by a list of the governors. We obtained two
or three promises, and at last determined to solicit Mr. Lawson,
whose name we saw in the list. At the same time, we must
confess that we were not a little anxious to see the "delightful
people" at home to track these lions to their own lair, and
watch their natural instincts. We according sallied forth one
fine day, in all the pride of unexceptionable boots and faultless

gloves, and arriving at the family mansion, knocked at the

door. A footman in his shirt-sleeves ran out into the area,
and having looked at us, ran back again ; appearing the next
minute at the door with one arm still forcing its way down the
sleeve of his coat.
We found the Lawsons were at home, and were shown
into the drawing-room, with the assurance from the servant
that his mistress would be there directly. After looking over
the card-basket to see whom they knew (which is one of our
favourite employments when we are left to ourselves in a
strange house), we turned over the leaves of some albums that
were lying about in company with some theological works,
which, being an enemy to religious display, we thought far
better suited for the closet than the drawing-room table ; and
in which occupation we were interrupted by the sound of
Voices in angry dialogue below. This was suddenly cut
886 ALBERT SMITH
short by the slamming of a door, and immediately after-
wards Mrs. Lawson entered the room, looking a little red
and excited, but all smiles and condescension ; begging
we would be seated, and telling us how very happy she was
that we had upon her.
called
After a few commonplace observations and inquiries
about the weather the health of the family, the party we
had lately met, and suchlike exciting topics of conversation,
Mrs. Lawson informed us her family were at luncheon, and
begged we would join them. A strong smell of toast
mutton greeted us as we descended to the dining-room, and
tempted us to think that it was an early dinner. We expected
to have been kept in a state of unceasing laughter throughout
the whole meaL but were verv much mistaken. We had not
anticipated any immense fun from the papa Lawson, who was
quietly enough discussing some bread and cheese ; but as the
facetious Tom was there, and his gifted sisters, we calculated
upon a repetition, in a certain degree, of their previous amusing
powers. There was, however, nothing of the kind the ;

whole party was as flat as the jug of beer that has been left out
for supper, covered with a cheese-plate, on returning from the

Bessy had evidently been quarrelling with her sister ;

Cynthia contradicted her mother on every point of affirmation

that Mrs. Lawson uttered ; Tom sat back in his chair with his
hands in his pockets and his legs stretched out straight under
the table ; and the good lady herself kept up such an alter-
nation of smiles to us and black looks to the young people
that her command of countenance was perfectly marvellous.
At first we thought it
probable that they were all recovering
from influenza, but they looked so very healthy that we soon
relinquished that opinion. They were, however, so very
quiet that when they retired, and we had mentioned the object
of our visit to Mr. Lawson, who was a sensible man (if the
others had let him alone), we summoned up courage to say
that we feared we had intruded during some family discussion.
"My dear sir/' he replied, "we never have anything
else but family discussions here. I dare say that you are
surprised to see them so very different from what they are
in company ; but the more they show off when they are out, the
more cross they always are at home the next day."
In these few words was contained the whole history of
 DELIGHTFUL PEOPLE 887

"delightful people" the melancholy truth, that those who in

society carry all before them by their spirits and acquirements
are, at home, the most uncomfortable beings upon the face of
the earth, because they cannot there find the very excitement
which is almost necessary to their existence.
We have met the Lawsons several times since, and we
have begun to find that their attractions sadly want variety*
Mrs. Lawson the same anecdotes, Bessy plays the same
tells

fantasias, Cynthia warbles the identical arias we last heard,

and Tom has a certain routine of tricks and absurdities which
he plays off in regular order during the evening. We begin
to weary of these lions ; although, at every reunion where it
is our lot to meet them, there are the same number of guests

charmed at their talents, who never hesitate to pronounce

them most "delightful people".
 E. V. LUCAS
The Dinner-Party

E. V. Lucas is one of the most prolific and delightful

essayists of the day, writing with some of the ease,
whimsicality and humour of Charles Lamb, whose
works he has edited. He is a regular contributor of
verse and sketches to Punch, and has published many
novels.
 THE DINNER-PARTY
[The dinner-party was Mr. Wynne's, the father of Naomi
at
whom Kent Falconer, the
y
narrator of Over J*>emerton s y marries.
Mr. Dabney was a Radical editor. Lionel is a county
cricketer.]

the evening arrived, it looked as

though Grand-
WHEN mamma
fectly, and I
and Mr. Dabney were going to hit it off per-
began to feel quite happy about my introduction
of this firebrand into the
household.
"I hear that you are a writer/' Grandmamma began, very
graciously. "I always like literary company. Years ago
Imet both Mr. Dickens and Mr. Thackeray."
I saw the lid of Lionel's left eye droop as he glanced at
Naomi. Mrs. Wynne, I gathered, was employing a favourite
opening.
Mr. Dabney expressed interest.
"There are no books like theirs now," Grandmamma
continued. "I don't know what kind of books you write,
but there are no books like those of Mr. Dickens and Mr.
Thackeray."
Mr. Dabney began to say something.
"Personally," Grandmamma hurried on, "I prefer those
of Mr. Dickens, but that perhaps is because me dear fawther
used to read them to us aloud. He was a beautiful reader.
There is no reading aloud to-day, Mr. Dabney ; and, I fear,
very little home life."
Here Grandmamma made a false move and
her com- let

panion in, for he could never resist a comparison of the

present and the past, to the detriment of the present.
"No," he said, "you are quite right." And such was
the tension that Grandmamma's remarks had caused that the
whole room was silent for him. "We are losing our hold,
on all that is most precious. Take London at this moment
891
892 E . V . LUCAS
look at the scores and scores of attractions to induce people
to leave home in the evenings and break up the family circle
Look
restaurants, concert rooms, entertainments, theatres.
at the music-halls. you Do
know how many music-halls
there are in London and Greater London at this moment ?"
"No," said Grandmamma sternly, "I have no notion.
I have never entered one."
Lionel shot a glance at me which distinctly said, in his
own deplorable idiom, "What price Alf Pinto ?"
Mr. Dabney, I regret to say, intercepted the tail of it,
and suddenly realized that he was straying from the wiser
path of the passive listener. So he remarked, "Of course
not," and brought the conversation back to Boz.
"Mr. Dickens," said Grandmamma, "did me the honour
to converse with me in Manchester in the 'sixties. I was
there with me dear husband on business, and we stayed in
the same hotel as Mr. Dickens, and breakfasted at the same
table. The toast was not good, and Mr. Dickens, I remember,

compared it in his inimitable way to sawdust. It was a perfect

simile. He was very droll. What particularly struck me
about him was his eye so bright and restless and his quick
ways. He seemed all nerves. In the course of our con-
versation I told him I had met Mr. Thackeray, but he was
not interested. I remember another thing he said. In paying
his bill he gave the waiter a very generous tip, which was the

slang word with which me dear husband always used to

describe a douceur. 'There/ Mr. Dickens said, as he gave it
to the waiter, 'that's
9
very stupid How
I have for- !

gotten what he said, but it was full of wit. 'There/ he

said . Dear me I"
. .

"Never mind, Grandmamma," said Naomi, "you will

think of it presently."
"But it was so droll and clever," said the old lady. "Surely,
Alderley dear, I have told you of it ?"
"Oh, Mother, many times," said Alderley; "but I
yes,
can't for the of me think of it at the moment. Strange,
life
isn't it/' he remarked to us all at large, "how often the loss of

memory in one person seems to infect others ? one forgets

and all forget. We had a case in Chambers the other day."
Their father's stories having no particular sting in them,
his children abandoned him to their mother, who listens
devotedly, and we again fell into couples.
 THE DINNER-PARTY 895
But it was useless to attempt disregard of old Mrs. Wynne.
There was a feeling in the air that trouble lay ahead, and we
all reserved one ear for her.
"And Mr. Thackeray ?" Mr. Dabney asked, with an
appearance of the deepest interest.
"Mr. Thackeray," said Grandmamma, "I had met in
London some years before. It was at a conversazione at the
Royal Society's. Mr. Wynne and I were leaving at the same
time as the great man and however you may consider his
writings he was great physically and there was a little
confusion about the cab. Mr. Thackeray thought it was
his, and we thought it was ours. Me dear husband, who
was the soul of courtesy, pressed him to take it ; but Mr.
Thackeray gave way, with the most charming bow, to me.
It was raining. A very tall man with a broad and kindly
face although capable of showing satire and gold spec-
tacles. He gave me a charming bow, and said, There will
*

be another one for me directly.' I hope there was, for it

was raining. Those were, however, his exact words 'There :
"
will be another one for me directly.'
Mr. Dabney expressed himself in suitable terms, and cast
a swift glance at his hostess on his other side, as if
seeking
for relief. She was talking, as it happened, about a novel
of the day, in which little but the marital relation is discussed,
and Mr. Dabney, on being drawn into the discussion, re-
marked sententiously, "The trouble with marriage is that
while every woman is at heart a mother, every man is at
heart a bachelor."
"What was that ?" said Grandmamma, who not really
is

deaf, but when in a tight place likes to gain time by this

harmless imposition. "What did Mr. Dabney say?" she
repeated, appealing to Naomi.
Poor Mr. Dabney turned scarlet. To a mind of almost
mischievous fearlessness is allied a shrinking sensitiveness
knd distaste for prominence of any kind, especially among
people whom he does not know well.
"Oh, it was nothing, nothing/' he said. "Merely a chance
remark."
"I don't agree with you," replied Grandmamma severely,
thus giving away her little ruse. "There is no trouble with
marriage. It is very distressing to me to find this new attitude
with regard to that state. When I was a girl we neither
894 E V . LUCAS
talked about incompatibility and temperament and all the
rest of it, nor thought about them. married. I have had We
to give up my Library subscription entirely because they send
me nothing nowadays but nauseous novels about husbands
and wives who cannot get on together. I hope," she added,
turning swiftly to Mr. Dabney, "that those are not the kind
of books that you write/'
"Oh, no/' said Mr. Dabney "I don't write books at all"
;

"Not write books at all ?" said Grandmamma. "I under-

stood you were an author."
"No, dear," said Naomi, "not an author. Mr. Dabney
is an editor. He edits a very interesting weekly paper, The
Balance. He stimulates others *x> write."
"I never heard of the paper," said Grandmamma, who
is too old to have any pity.
"I must show it to you," said Naomi. "Frank writes
for it."
"Very well," Grandmamma. "But I am disappointed.
said
I Mr. Dabney wrote boons. The papers are
thought that
growing steadily worse, and more and more unfit for general
reading, especially in August. I hope," she said, turning to
Mr. Dabney again, "you don't write any of those terrible
letters in August about home life ?"
Mr. Dabney said that he didn't, and Grandmamma began
to soften. "I am very fond of literary society," she said.
"It is one of my great griefs that there is so little literary society
in Ludlow. You are too young, of course, Mr. Dabney, but
I am sure it will interest you to know that I knew personally
both Mr. Dickens and Mr. Thackeray."
Here a shudder ran round the table, and Lionel practically
disappeared into his plate. I stole a glance at Mr. Dabney's
face. Drops of perspiration were beginning to break out on
his forehead.
"Mr. Dickens," the old lady continued remorselessly, and
all unconscious of the devastation she was causing, even at
the sideboard, usually a stronghold of discreet impassivity,
"Mr. Dickens I met at an hotel in Manchester in the 'sixties.
I was there with me dear husband on business, and we break-
fasted at the same table. Mr. Dickens was all nerves and
fun. The toast was not good, and I remember he compared
it in his inimitable way to sawdust."
Mr. Dabney ate feverishly.
 TH E D INNER-PARTY 895
"I remember also that he made a capital joke as he was
giving the waiter a tip, as me dear
"
husband always used to
call a douceur. 'There/ he said
Mr. Dabney twisted a silver fork into the shape of a hair-
pin.
was, of course, Naomi who came to the rescue. "Grand-
It
mamma," she said, "we have a great surprise for you the
first dish of strawberries."
"So early !" said the old lady. "How very extravagant
of you, but how very pleasant." She took one and ate it
slowly, while Mr. Dabney laid the ruined fork aside and
assumed the expression of a reprieved assassin.
" "
'Doubtless'," Grandmamma quoted, "God could have
made a better berry, but doubtless He never did/ Do you
know," she asked Mr. Dabney, "who said that ? It was a
favourite quotation of me fawther's."
"Oh, Mr. Dabney, who had been cutting it out
yes," said
of every June for years, "it was Bishop Butler."
articles
The situation was saved, for Grandmamma talked exclu-
sively of fruit for the rest of the meal. Ludlow, it seems,
has some very beautiful gardens, especially Dr. Sworder's,
which famous for its figs. A southern aspect.
is

At one moment, however, we all went cold again, for

Lionel, who is merciless, suddenly asked in a silence, "Didn't
you once meet Thackeray, Grandmamma ?"
Naomi, however, was too quick for him, and before the
old lady could begin she had signalled to her mother to lead
the way to the drawing-room.
 E. V, KNOX
The Murder at The Towers

E. V. Knox is the eldest son of the former Bishop of

Manchester, and one of the most accomplished writers
of light verse and humorous sketches of the day.
For many years his work under the pen-name of
"Evoe" has been familiar to readers of Punch, which
he now edits.
2F
 THE MURDER AT THE TOWERS
THE MOST MARVELLOUS MYSTERY STORY IN THE WORLD

(Begin Now, so as to Finish Sooner /)

PONDERBY-WILKINS was a man so rich,

MR. so ugly, so cross, and so old, that even the studipcst
reader could not expect him to survive any longer than
Chapter I. Vulpine in his secretiveness, he was porcine in
his habits, saturnine in his appearance, and ovine in his
unconsciousness of doom. He was the kind of man who
might easily perish as early as paragraph two.
Little surprise, therefore, was shown by Police-Inspector
Blowhard of Nettleby Parva when a message reached him
on the telephone :

"You are wanted immediately at The Towers. Mr. Pon-

derby-Wilkins has been found dead."
The inspector was met at the gate by the deceased's
secretary, whom he knew and suspected on the spot.
"Where did it happen, Mr. Porlock ?" he asked. "The
lake, the pigeon-loft, or the shrubbery ?"
"The shrubbery," answered Porlock quietly, and led
the way to the scene.
Mr. Ponderby-Wilkins was suspended by means of an
enormous woollen muffler to the bough of a tree, which the
police-officer's swift eye noticed at once to be a sycamore.
"How long has that sycamore tree been in the shrubbery ?"
he inquired suspiciously.
"I don't know," answered Porlock, "and I don't care."
"Tell me precisely what happened," went on the inspector.
"Four of us were playing tennis, when a ball was hit out
into the bushes. On going to look for it at the end of the
899
900 E. V. KNO X,

set, I found Mr. Wilkins as you see him, and called the
attention of the other players to the circumstances at once.
Here they all are."
And pushing aside the boughs of a laurel, he showed the
police-officer two young women and a young man. They
were standing quietly in the middle of the tennis-court,
holding their tennis-racquets soberly in their hands.
"Do you corroborate Mr. Porlock's account of the affair ?"
inquired Blowhard.
"We do," they answered quietly in one breath.
"Hum 1" mused the inspector, stroking his chin. "By
the way," he continued, "I wonder whether life is extinct ?"
He went and looked at the body. It was.
"A glance showed us that life was extinct when we found
it," said the four, speaking together, "and we thought it
better to go on playing tennis as reverently as possible until
you arrived."
"Quite right," said Blowhard. "I shall now examine the
whole household viva vote. Kindly summon them to the
drawing-room."
They went together into the large, white-fronted mansion,
and soon the notes of a gong, reverberating through the
house and all over the grounds, had summoned the whole
house-party, including the servants, to the Louis-Seize salon
overlooking the tennis lawn. The gathering consisted, as
the inspector had foreseen, of the usual types involved in a
country-house murder, namely, a frightened stepsister of
the deceased, a young and beautiful niece, a major, a doctor,
a chaperon, a friend, Mr. Porlock himself, an old butler with
a beard, a middle-aged gardener with whiskers, an Irish
cook, and two servants who had only come to the place the
week before. Every one of them had a bitter grudge against
the deceased. He had been about to dismiss his secretary,
had threatened to disinherit his niece, sworn repeatedly at
his stepsister, thrown a port decanter at the butler's head,
insulted the guests by leaving Bradshaws in their bedrooms,
pulled up the gardener's antirrhinums, called the cook a
good-for-nothing, and terrified the housemaids by making
noises at them on the stairs. In addition, he had twice informed
the major that his regiment had run away at Balaclava, and
had put a toad in the doctor's bed.
Blowhard felt instinctively that this was a case for Bletherby
 THE MURDER AT THE TOWERS 901

Marge, the famous amateur, and sent him a telegram at once.

Then he ordered the body to be removed, walked round
the grounds, ate a few strawberries, and went home.

11

Bletherby Marge was a man of wide culture and sympathy.

In appearance he was fat, red-faced, smiling, and had untidy
hair. He looked stupid, and wore spats. In fact, whatever
the inexperienced reader supposes to be the ordinary ap-
pearance of a detective, to look like that was the very reverse
of Bletherby Marge. He was sometimes mistaken for a
business man, more often for a billiard-marker or a baboon.
But whenever Scotland Yard was unable to deal with a murder
case that is whenever a murder case happened at a
to say,
country house Bletherby Marge was called in. The death
of an old, rich, and disagreeable man was like a clarion call
to him. He packed his pyjamas, his tooth-brush, and a volume
of Who's Who and took the earliest train.
y

As soon as he had seen the familiar newsbill :

HOST OF COUNTRY-HOUSE PARTY

INEXPLICABLY SLAIN

he had expected his summons to The Towers. Telegraphing

to the coroner's jury to return an open verdict at Nettleby
Parva, he finished off the case of the Duke of St. Neots,
fragments of whom
had mysteriously been discovered in
a chaff-cutting machine, and made all haste to the scene of
the new affair. It was his fiftieth mystery, and in every

previous affair he had triumphantly slain his man. A small

silver gallows had been presented to him by Scotland Yard
as a token of esteem.
"Weare in deep waters, Blowhard very deep/' he said,
as he closely scrutinized the comforter which had been
wrapped round Mr. Ponderby-Wilkins's throat. "Just teU
me once more about these alibis/'
"Every one of them is perfect," answered the police
inspector, "so far as I can see. The butler, the cook, and the
two housemaids were all together playing poker in the
pantry. Miss Brown, the deceased's stepsister, was giving
902 E. V. KNOX
instructions to the gardener, and the doctor was with her,
carrying her trowel and her pruning scissors. The chaperon
and the friend were playing tennis with Mr. Porlock and the
major, and the niece was rowing herself about on the lake,
picking water-lilies/'
A gleam came into Bletherby Marge's eyes.
"Alone ?" he queried.
"Alone. But you forget that the lake is in full view of
the tennis-court. It almost seems as if it must have been
constructed that way on purpose/' added the inspector rather
crossly. "This girl was seen the whole time during which
the murder must have occurred, either by one pair of players
or the other."
"Tut, tut," said Bletherby Marge. "Now take me to the
scene of the crime."
Arrived at the sycamore tree, he studied the bark with a
microscope, and the ground underneath. This was covered
with dead leaves. There was no sign of a struggle.
"Show me exactly how the body was hanging/' he said
to Blowhard.
Police-Inspector Blowhard tied the two ends of the com-
forter to the bough and wrapped the loop several times
round Bletherby Marge's neck, supporting him, as he did
so, by the feet.
"Don't let go," said Bletherby Marge.
"I won't," said Blowhard, who was used to the great
detective's methods in reconstructing a crime.
"Have you photographed the tree from every angle ?"
went on Bletherby.
"Yes."
"Were there any finger-prints on it ?"
"No," replied Blowhard. "Nothing but leaves."
Then together they wandered round the grounds, eating
fruit and discussing possible motives for the murder. No will
had been discovered.
From time to time one or other of the house-party would
flit
by them, humming a song, intent on a game of tennis,
or a bathe in the lake. Now and then a face would look
haggard and strained, at other times the same face would be
merry and wreathed with smiles.
"Do you feel baffled ?" asked Blowhard.
Bletherby Marge made no reply.
 THE MURDER AT THE TOWERS 903

III

The house-party were having a motor picnic at Dead Man's

Wood, ten miles from The Towers. The festivity had been
proposed by Bletherby Marge, who was more and more
endearing himself, by his jokes and wide knowledge of the
world, to his fellow-guests. Many of them had already begun
to feel that a house-party without a detective in it must be
regarded as a literary failure.
"Bless my soul 1" said Marge suddenly, when the revelry
was Blowhard, who was out of breath,
at its height, turning to
for he had been carrying the champagne across a ploughed
field. "I ask you all to excuse me for a moment. I have
forgotten my pipe."
They saw him disappear in a two-seater towards The
Towers. In little more than an hour he reappeared again
and delighted the company by singing one or two popular
revue songs in a fruity baritone. But, as the line of cars
went homeward in the dusk, Bletherby Marge said to Blow-
hard, seated beside him, "I want to see you again in the
shrubbery to-morrow at ten-thirty prompt. Don't begin
playing clock-golf."
Inspector Blowhard made a note of the time in his pocket-
book.

IV

"Perhaps you wonder why I went away in the middle of

our little outing ?" questioned Marge, as they stood together
under fhe fatal sycamore tree.
"I suspected," answered Blowhard, without moving
a muscle of his face, except the ones he used for speaking,
"that it was a ruse."
"It was," replied Marge.
Without another word he took a small folding broom
from his pocket and brushed aside the dead leaves which
strewed the ground of the shrubbery.
The dark mould was covered with foot-prints, large and
small.
904 E. V. KNOX
"What do you deduce from this ?" cried Blowhard, his
eyes bulging from his head.
"When I returned from the picnic," explained the great
detective, "I first swept the ground clear as you see it now.
I then hastily collected all the outdoor shoes in the house."
"All ?"
"Every one. I brought them to the shrubbery on a wheel-
barrow. I locked the servants, as though by accident, in the
kitchen and the gardener in the tool-shed. I then compared
the shoes with these imprints, and found that every one
of them was a fit."
"Which means ?"
"That every one of them was here when the murder took
place. I have reconstructed the scene exactly. The marks
of the shoes stretch in a long line, as you will observe, from
a point close to the tree almost to the edge of the tennis-
lawn. The heels are very deeply imprinted ; the mark of
the toes is very light indeed."
He paused and looked at Blowhard.
"I suppose you see now how the murder was done ?"
he barked loudly.
"No," mewed the inspector quietly.
"Ponderby-Wilkins," saidMarge, "had the comforter
twisted once round his neck, and one end was tied to the tree.
Then at a signal, I imagine the whole house-party, including
the servants, pulled together on the other end of the comforter
until he expired. You see here the imprints of the butler's
feet. As the heaviest man, he was at the end of the rope.
Porlock was in front, with the second housemaid immediately
behind him. Porlock, I fancy, gave the word to pull. After-
wards they tied him up to the tree as you found him when you
arrived."
"But the alibis ?"
"All false. They were allsworn to by members of the
household, by servants or by guests. That was what put me
on the scent."
"But how is it there were no finger-prints ?"
"The whole party," answered Bletherby, "wore gloves.
I collected all the gloves in the house and examined them

carefully. Many of them had hairs from the comforter still

adhering to them. Having concluded my investigations,
I rapidly replaced the boots and gloves, put the leaves back
 THE MURDER AT THE TOWERS 905
in their original position,unlocked the kitchen and the tool-
house, and came back to the picnic again."
"And sang comic songs 1" said Blowhard.
"Yes," replied Marge. "A great load had been taken off
my mind by the discovery of the truth. And I felt it neces-
sary to put the murderers off their guard."
"Wonderful !" exclaimed Blowhard, examining the foot-
prints minutely. "There is now only one difficulty, Mr.
Marge, so far as I can see."
"And that is ?"
"How am I going to convey all these people to the police-
station ?"
"How many pairs of manacles
have you about you ?"
"Only two," confessed Blowhard, feeling in his pocket.
"You had better telephone," said Bletherby, "for a motor-
omnibus."

The simultaneoustrial of twelve

prisoners on a capital
charge, followed by their joint condemnation and execution,
thrilled Englandno sensation had thrilled it since the
as
death of William II. The Sunday papers were never tired
of discussing the psychology of the murderers and publishing
details of their early life and school careers. Never before,
itseemed, had a secretary, a stepsister, a niece, an eminent
K.C., a major, a chaperon, a friend, a cook, a butler, two
housemaids, and a gardener gone to the gallows on the
same day for the murder of a disagreeable old man.
On the morning not long after the excitement had died
away, Bletherby Marge and a house-agent went together
to The Towers, which for some reason or other was still
"To Let". As they looked at the library, Bletherby Marge
tapped a panel in the mantelpiece,
"It sounds hollow," he said.

Finding the spring, he pressed it. The wood shot back

and revealed a small cavity. From this he drew a dusty
bundle of papers, tied together with a small dog-collar.
It was Ponderby-Wilkins's will. On the first
page was
written :
906 E. V. KNOX
I am the most unpopular man
in England, and I am
about to
commit suicide
by hanging myself in the shrubbery. If Bletherby
Marge can make it a murder I bequeath him all my possessions in
honour of his fiftieth success.

"Extraordinary !" ejaculated the house-agent.

Mr. Bletherby Marge smiled.
 'SAKT (H. H. MUNRO)
Tobermory
A Matter of Sentiment

Hector Munro was a prolific contributor to many

papers of humorous sketches under the signature
of "Saki", and his brilliant work, according to one
critic, contained elements of "the child, the buffoon,
the satirist, the eclectic, the aristocrat and the elegant
man of the world". Here are two of his cleverest tales.
 TOBERMORY

was a rain-washed afternoon of a late August

chill,
IT day, that indefinite season when partridges are still in
security or cold storage, and there is nothing to hunt unless
one is bounded on the north by the Bristol Channel, in which
case one may lawfully gallop after fat red stags. Lady Blem-
ley's house-party was not bounded on the north by the
Bristol Channel, hence there was a full gathering of her guests
round the tea-table on this particular afternoon. And, in
spite of the blankness of the season and the triteness of the
occasion, there was no trace in the company of that fatigued
restlessness which means a dread of the pianola and a sub-
dued hankering for auction bridge. The undisguised, open-
mouthed attention of the entire party was fixed on the homely
negative personality of Mr. Cornelius Appin. Of all her
guests, he was the one who had come to Lady Blemley with
the vaguest reputation. Someone had said he was "clever",
and he had got his invitation in the moderate expectation,
on the part of his hostess, that some portion at least of his
cleverness would be contributed to the general entertainment.
Until tea-time that day she had been unable to discover in
what direction, if any, his cleverness lay. He was neither a
wit nor a croquet champion, a hypnotic force nor a begetter
of amateur theatricals. Neither did his exterior suggest the
sort of man in whom women are willing to pardon a generous
measure of mental deficiency. He had subsided into mere
Mr. Appin, and the Cornelius seemed a piece of transparent
baptismal bluff. And now he was claiming to have launched
on the world a discovery beside which the invention of gun-
powder, of the printing-press, and of steam locomotion were
inconsiderable trifles. Science had made bewildering strides
in many directions during recent decades, but this thing
seemed to belong to the domain of miracle rather than to
scientific achievement
909
 " "
910 S A K I (H. H. M U N R O)
"And do you really ask us to believe," Sir Wilfrid was
saying, "that you have discovered a means for instructing
animals in the art of human speech, and that dear old Tober-
mory has proved your first successful pupil ?"
"It is a problem at which I have worked for the last
seventeen years/' said Mr. Appin, "but only during the last
eight or nine months have I been rewarded with glimmerings
of success. Of course, I have experimented with thousands
of animals, but latterly only with cats, those wonderful
creatures which have assimilated themselves so marvellously
with our civilization while retaining all their highly-developed
feral instincts. Here and there among cats one comes across
an outstanding superior intellect, just as one does among
the ruck of human beings, and when I made the acquaintance
of Tobermory a week ago I saw at once that I was in contact
with a 'Beyond-cat' of extraordinary intelligence. I had

gone far along the road to success in recent experiments ;

with Tobermory, as you call him, I have reached the goal/'

Mr. Appin concluded his remarkable statement in a voice
which he strove to divest of a triumphant inflexion. No
one said "Rats", though Clovis's lips moved in a monosyl-
labic contortion which probably invoked those rodents of
disbelief.
"And do you mean to say," asked Miss Resker, after a
slight pause, "that you have taught Tobermory to say and
understand easy sentences of one syllable ?"
"My dear Miss Resker," said the wonder-worker patiently,
"one teaches little children and savages and backward adults
in that piecemeal fashion ; when one has once solved the
problem of making a beginning with an animal of highly
developed intelligence one has no need for those halting
methods. Tobermory can speak our language with perfect
correctness."
This time Clovis distinctly said, "Beyond-rats I"
very
Sir Wilfrid was more polite, but equally sceptical.
"Hadn't we better have the cat in and judge for ourselves ?"
suggested Lady Blemley.
Sir Wilfrid went in search of the animal, and the company
settled themselves down to the languid expectation of wit-

nessing some more or less adroit drawing-room ventriloquism.

In a minute Sir Wilfrid was back in the room, his face
white beneath its tan and his eyes dilated with excitement.
 TOBERMORY 9!!
9

"By Gad, it's true V

His agitation was unmistakably genuine, and his hearers
started forward in a thrill of awakened interest.
Collapsing into an armchair, he continued breathlessly :

"I found him dozing in the smoking-room, and called out to

him to come for his tea. He blinked at me in his usual way,
and I said, 'Come on, Toby don't keep us waiting'
; and, ;

by Gad he drawled out in a most horribly natural voice that

!

he'd come when he dashed well pleased I nearly jumped!

out of my skin 1"

Appin had preached to absolutely incredulous hearers ;
Sir Wilfrid's statement carried instant conviction. A babel-
like chorus of startled exclamation arose, amid which the
scientist sat mutely enjoying the first-fruit of his stupendous
discovery.
In the midst of the clamour Tobermory entered the room
and made his way with velvet tread and studied unconcern
round the tea-table.
across to the group seated
A sudden hush of awkwardness and constraint fell on
the company. Somehow, there seemed an element of em-
barrassment in addressing on equal terms a domestic cat
of acknowledged mental ability.
"Will you have some milk, Tobermory ?" asked Lady
Blemley in a rather strained voice.
"I don't mind if I do," was the response, couched in a
tone of even indifference. A shiver of suppressed excitement
went through the listeners, and Lady Blemley might be ex-
cused for pouring out the saucerful of milk rather unsteadily.
"I'm afraid I've spilt a good deal of it," she said apolo-
getically.
"After all, it's not my Axminster," .was Tobermory's
rejoinder.
Another silence fell on the group, and then Miss Resker,
in her best district-visitor human language
manner, asked if the
had been difficult to learn.
Tobermory looked squarely at
her for a moment and then fixed his gaze serenely on the
middle distance. It was obvious that boring questions lay
outside his scheme of life.
"What do you think of human intelligence ?" asked Mavis
Pellington lamely.
"Of whose intelligence in particular ?" asked Tobermory
coldly.
912 "SAKl" (H. H. MUNRO)
1
"Oh, well, mine, for instance/ said Mavis, with a feeble

laugh.
"You put me in an embarrassing position," said Tober-
mory, whose tone and attitude certainly did not suggest a
shred of embarrassment. "When your inclusion in this
house-party was suggested, Sir Wilfrid protested that you were
the most brainless woman of his acquaintance, and that there
was a wide distinction between hospitality and the care of the
feeble-minded. Lady Blemley replied that your lack of brain-
power was the precise quality which had earned you your
invitation, as you were the only person she could think of who
might be idiotic enough to buy their old car. You know, the
one they call 'The Envy of Sisyphus', because it goes quite
nicely up-hill if you push it."

Lady Blemley's protestations would have had greater

she had not casually suggested to Mavis only. that
effect if

morning that the car in question would be just the thing for her
down at her Devonshire home.
Major plunged in heavily to effect a diversion.
Barfield
"How about your carryings-on with the tortoiseshell puss
up at the stables, eh ?"
The moment he had said it everyone realized the blunder.
"One does not usually discuss these matters in public,"
said Tobermory frigidly. "From a slight observation of your
ways since youVe been in this house I should imagine you'd
find it inconvenient if I were to shift the conversation on to
your own little affairs,"

The panic which ensued was not confined to the Major.

"Would you like to go and see if cook has got your dinner
ready ?" suggested Lady Blemley hurriedly, affecting to ignore
the fact that it wanted at least two hours to Tobermory's
dinner-time.
"Thanks," said Tobermory, "not quite so soon after my
tea. I don't want to die of indigestion."
"Cats have nine lives, you know," said Sir Wilfrid heartily.
"Possibly," answered Tobermory "but only one liver."
;

"Adelaide 1" said Mrs. Cornett, "do you mean to encourage

that cat togo out and gossip about us in the servants' hall ?"
The panic had indeed become general. A narrow orna-
mental balustrade ran in front of most of the bedroom windows
at The Towers, and it was recalled with dismay that this had
fotiped a favourite promenade for Tobermory at all hours,
 TOBERMORY 913
whence he could watch the pigeons and heaven knew what
else besides. If he intended to become reminiscent in his
present outspoken strain, the effect would be something
more than disconcerting. Mrs. Cornett, who spent much
time at her toilet-table, and whose complexion was reputed
to be of a nomadic though punctual disposition, looked as ill
at ease as the Major. Miss Scrawen, who wrote fiercely
sensuous poetry and led a blameless life, merely displayed
irritation ; if you are methodical and virtuous in private you
don't necessarily want everyone to know it. Bertie van Tahn,
who was so depraved at seventeen that he had long ago given
up trying to be any worse, turned a dull shade of gardenia
white, but he did not commit the error of dashing out of the
room like Odo Finsberry,a young gentleman who was
understood to be reading for the Church and who was
possibly disturbed at the thought of scandals he might hear
concerning other people. Clovis had the presence of mind to
maintain a composed exterior ; privately he was calculating
how long it would take to procure a box of fancy mice through
the agency of the "Exchange and Mart as a species of hush-
money.
Even in a delicate situation like the present, Agnes Resker
could not endure to remain too long in the background.
"Why did I ever come down here ?" she asked dramatically.
Tobermory immediately accepted the opening.
"Judging by what you said to Mrs. Cornett on the croquet-
lawn yesterday, you were out for food. You described the
Blemleys as the dullest people to stay with that you knew,
but said they were clever enough to employ a first-rate cook ;

otherwise they'd find it difficult to get anyone to come down

a second time/'
"There's not a word of truth in it II appeal to Mrs.
"
Cornett exclaimed the discomfited Agnes.
"Mrs. Cornett repeated your remark afterwards to Bertie
van Tahn," continued Tobermory, "and said, 'That woman is
a regular Hunger Marcher; she'd go anywhere for four
"
square meals a day,' and Bertie van Tahn said
At this point the chronicle mercifully ceased. Tober-
mory had caught a glimpse of the big yellow Tom from the
Rectory working his way through the shrubbery towards the
stable wing. In a flash he had vanished through the open
french window.
 CC
914 SAKI" (H. H. MUNRO)
With the disappearance of his too brilliant pupil, Cornelius
Appin found himself beset by a hurricane of bitter upbraid-
ing, anxious inquiry, and frightened entreaty. The respon-
sibility for the situation lay with him, and he must prevent
matters from becoming worse. Could Tobermory impart
his dangerous gift to other cats ? was the first question he had
to answer. It was possible, he replied, that he might have
initiated his intimate friend the stable puss into his new ac-
complishment, but it was unlikely that his teaching could have
taken a wider range as yet.
"Then," said Mrs. Cornett, "Tobermory may be a valuable
cat and a great pet ; but I'm sure you'll agree, Adelaide, that
both he and the stable cat must be done away with without
delay."
"You don't suppose I've enjoyed the last quarter of an hour,
do you ?" Lady Blemley bitterly. "My husband and I
said
are very fond of Tobermory at least, we were before this
horrible accomplishment was infused into him but now, of
;

course, the only thing is to have him destroyed as soon as

possible."
"We can put some strychnine in the scraps he always gets
at dinner-time," said Sir Wilfrid, "and I will go and drown the
stable cat myself. The coachman will be very sore at losing
his pet, but I'll say a very catching form of mange has broken
out in both cats and we're afraid of it spreading to the kennels."
"But my great discovery !" expostulated Mr. Appin.
"
"After all my years of research and experiment
"You can go and experiment on the shorthorns at the
farm, who are under proper control," said Mrs. Cornett, "or
the elephants at the Zoological Gardens. They're said to be
highly intelligent, and they have this recommendation, that
they don't come creeping about our bedrooms and under
chairs, and so forth."
An archangel ecstatically proclaiming the Millennium,
and then finding that it clashed unpardonably with Henley
and would have to be indefinitely postponed, could hardly
have felt more crestfallen than Cornelius Appin at the reception
of his wonderful achievement. Public opinion, however, was
against him in fact, had the general voice been consulted on
the subject, it is probable that a strong minority vote would
have been in favour of including him in the strychnine diet.
Defective train arrangements and a nervous desire to see
 TOBERMORY 915
matters brought to a finish prevented an immediate dispersal
of the party, but dinner that evening was not a social success.
Sir Wilfrid had had rather a trying time with the stable cat
and subsequently with the coachman. Agnes Resker osten-
tatiously limited her repast to a morsel of dry toast, which
she bit as though it were a personal enemy while Mavis
;

Pellington maintained a vindictive silence throughout the

meal. Lady Blemley kept up a flow of what she hoped was
conversation, but her attention was fixed on the doorway.
A plateful of carefully dosed fish scraps was in readiness on the
sideboard, but sweets and savoury and dessert went their way,
and no Tobermory appeared either in the dining-room or
kitchen.
The sepulchral dinner was cheerful compared with the
subsequent vigil in the smoking-room. Eating and drinking
had at least supplied a distraction and cloak to the prevailing
embarrassment. Bridge was out of the question in the general
tension of nerves and tempers, and after Odo Finsberry had
given a lugubrious rendering of "Melisande in the Wood" to a
frigid audience, music was tacitly avoided. At eleven the
servants went to bed, announcing that the small window in the
pantry had been left open as usual for Tobermory's private use.
The guests read steadily through the current batch of magazines
and fell back gradually on the "Badminton Library" and bound
volumes of Punch. Lady Blemley made periodic visits to the
pantry, returning each time with an expression of listless
depression which forestalled questioning.
At two o'clock Clovis broke the dominating silence.
"He won't turn up to-night. He's probably in the local
newspaper office at the present moment, dictating the first
instalment of his reminiscences. Lady What's-Her-Name's
book won't be in it. It will be the event of the day."

Having made this contribution to the general cheerfulness,

Clovis went to bed. At long intervals the various members
of the house-party followed his example.
The servants taking round the early tea made a uniform
announcement in reply to a uniform question. Tobermory
had not returned.
Breakfast was, if anything, a more unpleasant function
than dinner had been, but before its conclusion the situation
was Tobermory's corpse was brought in from the
relieved.
shrubbery, where a gardener had just discovered it. From the
916 "SAKI** (H. H. MUNRO)
bites on his throat and the yellow fur which coated his claws,
it was evident that he had fallen in unequal combat with the

big Tom from the Rectory.

By midday most of the guests had quitted The Towers,
and after lunch Lady Blemley had sufficiently recovered her
spirits to write an extremely nasty letter to the Rectory about
the loss of her valuable pet.
Tobermory had been Appin's one successful pupil, and he
was destined to have no successor. A few weeks later an
elephant in the Dresden Zoological Garden, which. had shown
no previous signs of irritability, broke loose and killed an
Englishman who had apparently been teasing it. The
victim's name was variously reported in the papers as Oppin
and Eppelin, but his front name was faithfully rendered
Cornelius.
"If he was trying German irregular verbs on the poor
beast/' said Clovis, "he deserved all he got."
 A MATTER OF SENTIMENT

was the eve of the great race, and scarcely a member

IT of Lady Susan's house-party had as yet a single bet on.
It was one of those unsatisfactory years when one horse held
a commanding jtnarket position, not by reason of any general
belief in its crushing superiority, but because it was extremely
on any other candidate to whom to pin one's
difficult to pitch
faith. Peradventure II was the favourite, not in the sense of
being a popular fancy, but by virtue of a lack of confidence
in any one of his rather undistinguished rivals. The brains
of clubland were much exercised in seeking out possible
merit where none was very obvious to the naked intelligence,
and the house-party at Lady Susan's was possessed by the same
uncertainty and irresolution that infected wider circles.
"It is just the time for bringing off a good coup/' said
Bertie van Tahn.
"Undoubtedly. But with what ?" demanded Clovis for the
twentieth time.
The women of
'

the party were just as keenly interested in

the matter, and just as helplessly perplexed ; even the mother
of Clovis, who usually got good racing information from her
dressmaker, confessed herself fancy free on this occasion.
Colonel Drake, who was professor of military history at a
minor cramming establishment, was the only person who had a
definite selection for the event, but as his choice varied every
three hours he was worse than useless as an inspired guide.
The crowning difficulty of the problem was that it could only
be fitfully and furtively discussed. Lady Susan disapproved
of racing. She disapproved of many things ; some people
went of most things.
as far as to say that she disapproved
Disapproval was to her what neuralgia and fancy needlework
are to many other women. She disapproved of early morning
tea and auction bridge, of ski-ing and the two-step, of the
Russian ballet and the Chelsea Arts Club ball, of the French
918 '*SAKl" (H. H. MUNRO)
policy in Morocco and the British policy everywhere. It was
not that she was particularly strict or narrow in her views of
life, but she had been the eldest sister of a large family of self-

indulgent clpildren, and her particular form of indulgence had

consisted in openly disapproving of the foibles of the others.
Unfortunately, the hobby had grown up with her. As she was
rich, influential, and very, very kind, most people were content
to count their early tea as well lost on her behalf. Still, the

necessity for hurriedly dropping the discussion of an en-

thralling topic, and suppressing all mention of it during her
presence on the scene, was an affliction at a moment like the
present, when time was slipping away and indecision was the
prevailing note.
After a lunch-time of rather strangled and uneasy con-
versation, Clovis managed to get most of the party together
at the further end of the kitchen gardens, on the pretext of

admiring the Himalayan pheasants. He had made an important

discovery. Motkin, the butler, who (as Clovis expressed it)
had grown prematurely grey in Lady Susan's service, added to
his other excellent qualities an intelligent interest in matters
connected with the Turf. On the subject of the forthcoming
race he was not illuminating, except in so far that he shared the
prevaling unwillingness to see a winner in Peradventure II,
But where he outshone all the members of the house-party
was in the fact that he had a second cousin who was head
stable-lad at a neighbouring racing establishment, and usually
gifted with much inside information as to private form and
possibilities. Only the fact of her ladyship having taken it
into her head to invite a house-party for the last week of May
had prevented Mr. Motkin from paying a visit of consultation
to his relative with respect to the big race ; there was still
time to cycle over if he could get leave of absence for the
afternoon on some specious excuse.
"Let's jolly well hope he does," said Bertie van Tahn ;
"under the circumstances, a second cousin is almost as useful
as second sight."
"That stable ought to know something, if knowledge is
to be found anywhere," said Mrs. Packletide hopefully.
"I expect you'll find he'll echo my fancy for Motorboat,"
said Colonel Drake.
At this moment the subject had to be hastily dropped.
Lady Susan bore down upon them, leaning on the arm of
 A MATTER OF SENTIMENT 919
Clovis's mother, to whom
she was confiding the fact that she
disapproved of the craze for Pekingese spaniels. It was the
third thing she had found time to disapprove of since lunch,
without counting her silent and permanent disapproval of the
way Clovis's mother did her hair.
"We have been admiring the Himalayan pheasants/' said
Mrs. Packletide suavely.
"They went off to a bird-show at Nottingham early this
morning/' said Lady Susan, with the air of one who dis-
approves of hasty and ill-considered lying.
"Their house, I mean ; such perfect roosting arrangements,
and all so clean/' resumed Mrs. Packletide, with an increased
glow of enthusiasm. The odious Bertie van Tahn was
murmuring audible prayers for Mrs. Packletide's ultimate
estrangement from the paths of falsehood.
"I hope you don't mind dinner being a quarter of an hour
late to-night," said Lady Susan ; "Motkin has had an urgent
summons to go and see a sick relative this afternoon. He
wanted to bicycle there, but I am sending him in the motor."
"How very kind of you ! Of course, we don't mind dinner
being put off." The assurances came with unanimous and
hearty sincerity.
At the dinner-table that night an undercurrent of furtive
curiosity directed itself towards Motkin's impassive counten-
ance. One or two of the guests almost expected to find a slip
of paper concealed in their napkins, bearing the name of the
second cousin's selection. They had not long to wait. As the
butler went round with the murmured question, "Sherry ?"
he added in an even lower tone the cryptic words, "Better not."
Mrs. Packletide gave a start of alarm and refused the sherry ;
there seemed some sinister suggestion in the butler's warning,
as though the hostess had suddenly become addicted to the

Borgia habit. A
moment later the explanation flashed on her
that "Better Not" was the name of one of the runners in the
big race. Clovis was already pencilling it on his cuff, and
Colonel Drake, in his turn, was signalling to everyone in
hoarse whispers and dumb-show the fact that he had all along
fancied "B.N."
Early next morning a sheaf of telegrams went Townward,
representing the market commands of the house-party and
servants' hall.
It was a wet afternoon, and most of Lady Susan's guests
 (H. H
* c * *
S AK I .
MUNRO)
hung about the hall, waiting apparently for the appearance of
tea, though was scarcely yet due. The advent of a telegram
it

quickened everyone into a flutter of expectancy ; the page

who brought the telegram to Clovis waited with unusual
alertness to know if there might be an answer.
Clovis read the message and gave an exclamation of annoy-
ance.
"Not bad news, I hope/* said Lady Susan, Everyone else
knew that the news was not good.
"It's only the result of the Derby," he blurted out;
"Sadowa won ; an utter outsider."
"Sadowa," exclaimed Lady Susan ; "you don't say so !

How remarkable It's the first time Fve ever backed a

!

horse ; in feet, I disapprove of horse-racing, but just for once

in a way I put money on this horse, and it's gone and won."
"May I ask," said Mrs. Packletide, amid the general
silence, "why you put your money on this particular horse ?
None of the sporting prophets mentioned it as having an out-
side chance."
"Well," said Lady Susan, "you may laugh at me, but it
was the name that attracted me. You see, I was always mixed
up with the Franco-German war I was married on the day
;

that the war was declared, and my eldest child was born the
day that peace was signed, so anything connected with the
war has always interested me. And when I saw there was
a horse running in the Derby called after one of the battles in
the Franco-German war, I said, I must put some money on it,
for once in a way, though I disapprove of racing. And it's
won."
actually
There was a general groan. No one groaned more deeply
than the professor of military history.
 ANTHONY ARMSTRONG
The Prince who Hiccupped

Anthony Armstrong (the pen-name of Captain A. A.

to Punch
Willis, R.E.) was a regular contributor
for several years,
and has written five historical

romances, a number of humorous novels, and a

series of thrillers. His play Ten Minute Alibi was
recently produced with striking
success.
 THE PRINCE WHO HICCUPPED

upona time there was a King named Gummelik

ONCE who annoyed a fairy. In those days this was a pretty
hazardous thing to do ; indeed, one of the neighbouring
kingdoms was already being governed by a very contrite
five-toed horse, and another by a thoroughly scared Prince
Regent on behalf of an unexpected oak tree growing in
the second-best Throne-room. King Gummelik, however,
luckily possessed a fairy godmother, and so had not felt any
immediate effects from the subsequent violent spell beyond a
slight rash on the small of the back. The angry fairy had
therefore revengefully bided her time ; till one day the Queen
gave birth to a son, whom, by the way, she hopefully named
Handsome.
At the christening all the local fairies turned up and
gave the young Prince presents, and were just sitting round
criticizing the catering arrangements and so on, when suddenly
there was a flash, and the angry fairy, who naturally had not
been invited, materialized in a burst of smoke and an ugly
temper.
"Well? Why wasn't I asked?" she began, and while
the King was feebly muttering something about having mis-
laid her address, strode over to the cradle.
5
"Fve got a gift for your baby, too/ she announced in
ominous tones.
"Oh, look here, steady on !" began the poor King, very
and took a great draught of wine to steady his nerves
flurried,
though he had done himself pretty well at the buffet already.
"A gift," the fairy continued, "that will ensure your not
forgetting my existence again,"
The King preserved a worried silence and took more wine.
Privately he was wondering apprehensively how best to break
it to his wife, upstairs, that her offspring had become perhaps
a ginger-whiskered rabbit, or even a five-toed foal, or an
9*4 ANTHONY ARMSTRONG
acorn. He knew just what she would say : "How like a man !

Can't be trusted for a moment to look after a baby without

letting it catch a spell I"
"What's its name ?" asked the fairy testily, staring at the
infant*
"It's not an a 'he'," objected the King, having
'it'. It's
drawn a little courage from the beaker. Moreover, he had
already had this well rubbed into him, both by the baby's
mother and by all the Royal nurses in turn.
"What's his name, then ?" repeated the fairy even more
testily.
"Well, we thought er-~- that is, my wife is calling him
'Handsome'."
"Why ?" asked the fairy.
The King hadn't thought of that one. "Why ?" he asked
the Royal Head Nurse in a hurried whisper.
The Royal Head Nurse curtseyed. "Because he's such a

pretty darling !"

The fairy snorted incredulously.
"He /f," retorted the Royal Head Nurse, who wasn't
going to let anyone not even a fairy disparage her charge,
"Wasn't urns a pretty-pretty ?" she added to the baby. "It
was the sweety-weety-a^test ickle wassums."
The fairy looked slightly sick. The King had his
beaker refilled.

"Blessums, then, Mannie's own uvey-dovey 1" continued

"
the Nurse, getting into her stride. "Wassums uzzy
"Stop !" cried the fairy, quite revolted. There was an
awed silence of nearly a minute, at the end of which time the
King hiccupped.
"What did you say ?" asked the fairy ominously.
"Beg pardon, I'm sure," said the King with hasty
politeness ;and hiccupped again.
It seemed to give the fairy an idea. She looked maliciously
athim, then waved her hand. "Here's my gift," she cried.
"The young Prince shall hiccup all his life !"
Then round she vanished.
after a spiteful glance

During the ensuing commotion an aged fairy the King's

godmother stepped forward from the guests.
"I alone have not yet given my gift," she quavered
traditionally ; for one fairy always holds back on these occasion
to try to set right any little hitch. "And though I'm afraid
 THE PRINCE WHO HICCUPPED 925
I cannot remove that very vulgar spell, I can alter it. The
Prince shall only hiccup till, by some act of his after he comes
to manhood, he shall win the thanks of every person in the
kingdom/*
She retired into the throng, had a glass of wine, and
was patted on the back by the other fairies.
"
"Gug hie gug began the baby, trying to say
"Goo 1" The spell was already at work.
Taking it all round, the Christening Party had not been
a success.

Itsoon became apparent that there was no shoddy work-

manship about the wicked fairy's gift, and poor King Gum-
melik, constrained to wait till the Prince came of age and he
could do something about his godmother's modification,
tried everything in the meantime to minimize its evil effects.
But the Prince's hiccups were devastating, and as they invari-
ably commenced every time he opened his mouth to speak,
his conversation was severely handicapped, if not brought to
a standstill altogether.
When the boy was twelve, criers were sent round the
kingdom proclaiming that whoever could cure the Prince
of the stammers (as the proclamation politely put it) should
receive half the kingdom, but though several people answered
mostly professors of elocution the Prince's hiccupping
persisted. The professors merely went away with acquired
hiccupping stammers themselves, and began to sue for com-
pensation. And when finally a deaf old horse-doctor from an
outlying village appeared and attempted to apply hot fomen-
tations, owing, it transpired, to his having misunderstood the
herald to say the Prince was suffering from the staggers^ the
King first issued a peevish proclamation reading, "Ref. my
R.P. 2/41 of tenth ult., for 'stammers' read 'hiccups' ", and
when that had no effect, cancelled the whole thing. After that
it became the custom to pretend that nothing was
wrong,
and courtiers just waited carelessly, humming a tune, while
the Prince struggled with his sentences. In this way and
with a good deal of wasted time in Court affairs, the Prince
approached his eighteenth birthday.
The King and Queen, quite excited now about the fairy
godmother's prophecy, began to consider plans by which
926 AN T H O NY ARMSTRONG
the Prince could perform some act to win the thanks of every
person in the Kingdom. A
Council of State daily discussed
the problem, but there always seemed some hitch in every
proposal, and some people who would not be grateful. The
obvious way seemed to be a of largesse by the
free distribution
Prince, but since no single person could be missed out for fear
of subsequent complaint, the first rough estimate was enough
to rule this plan out. Moreover, whatever thanks it might
win from the populace it certainly would never enlist the
gratitude of the harassed Court Treasurer.
Meanwhile, a fresh turn had been given to Court affairs
by the Prince's discovery, in common with those afflicted
by stuttering of all kinds, that he could sing without hiccupping
at all.

The Court Poet's department was instantly expanded

to cope with this demand for topical lyrics, and many extra
verse-makers (not particularly good ones) were taken on on
piece-work. This, of course, cut out much wasted time.
Instead of arriving at breakfast with a lengthy "Gughic
Gughic Gughic ." which, while originally intended for
. .

"Gughic Gughic good morning, all", generallywas changed

at the fiftieth
"gugyfoV" to a fretful "Gughic
geto#withit", the Prince now entered merrily trilling :

"Good morning, Pa !

Good morning, Ma I

Good morning, all,

Both great and small I

Hie 1"

and no one's bacon got cold.

Or when Council giving his opinion on the motion
at a
before the House, instead of everybody at once laying off
to write up their notes, while Prince Handsome went "bub&V
bub^/V bub/^/V ." winding up possibly to say "bub/6/V
. .

bub^/? bosh !" he now merely got up, fished out his
music, tried his voice with four high notes and three low tones,
and sang :

"The Proposer of that motion

Hasn't got a single notion
With which I can
agree ;
Hicl
 THE PRINCE WHO HICCUPPED 927
"And so it seems to me
That, as far as I can see,
It'll be
just what's expected
If the motion is rejected.
Hie!
So my vote, all must know,
Is nun hie nun hie No I"

As I said, the assistant poets were by no means top-notch

men. Anyway, it saved time.
The reallyannoying part, however, was that the Prince
frankly could not sing a note. His voice was like a lost
corncrake in a large field some said two lost corncrakes
in a small field, and the Royal Director of Music put it as high
as five in a paddock. It soon caused far more annoyance
than the hiccups themselves, and the courtiers were hard put
to it to conceal their dismay when it was observed that the
Prince was clearing his throat to sing a casual remark about the
weather.
On his son's eighteenth birthday the King made his first
real effort at removing the spell. He organized a birthday
feast for everyone in his kingdom, and ordered that wine
should flow free in every fountain in the country. He then
proposed to send heralds round and collect a testimony of
grateful thanks from every single one of his subjects.
Unfortunately, being his first effort, it was quite un-
successful. He hadn't properly realized what he was up
against ; nor had the wicked fairy forgotten her rival's
emendation of the spell. Before the King had even time to
send out the heralds, he received various deputations bearing
complaints :

(a) About the Disorganization of their Service, from the

Water Supply Company.
(/>)
the Small Number of Fountains in Farming
About
Areas, from the Agricultural Labourers' Union.
(c) About the Quality of Wine supplied, from the Society
of Gourmets and Topers.
(d) About the Quantity of Wine supplied, from the
Cripples' Federation.
(e) About there being Wine at all, from five different

Temperance Associations.
This sank the plan completely, and at the end of the
9*8 ANTHONY ARMSTRONG
week, when the excitement had died down and the hopeful
groups round the fountains were reluctantly dispersing to
their homes, the King held another Council, at which the
Vizier propounded a new plan.
This was drastic enough. It was that the King should
import a fierce dragon there was one going cheap in a
neighbouring kingdom and should let it ravage his domains.
At the end of a month, when presumably everyone would be
heartily sickof it, for a dragon does not distinguish, when
ravaging, between cornland, rose gardens, allotments, or
house-property, the Prince should go forth and sky it, thus
earning universal thanks.
There was a silence after this suggestion; but gradually
everyone realized that would have to be made
sacrifices
if they wanted to stop the Prince hiccupping and singing
particularly singing all over the palace for the rest of their
lives. The proposal was then carried with only one dis-
sentient. This dissentient, however, was the Prince himself,
which caused a deadlock. At last, however, he gave in, on
being reassured by everyone (who, as the Prince's stock of
Verses Suitable for All Occasions increased became more and
more anxious for him to be cured) that the dragon was very
old and could be killed quite easily.
So the dragon was purchased and had the time of its life,

ravaging about unmolested, except by amateurs, peasants

with pitchforks, farmers, and market-gardeners. Not a
single Knight in Armour turned out ; for the word had gone
round dragon was being preserved for royalty. The
that the

dragon thought the millennium must have come.

itself
After a month die Prince rode out and killed it. He sang
a short song of battle, and then cut its head off. Several
people suggested unkindly that the sword-blow was un-
necessary, and that the dragon had died on the high note in
the last verse.
Then the King sent out messengers, wisely saying this time
that he should assume that everyone joined in an expression of
gratitude if he had not received any contrary statement by the
end of the week.
Two days later for the wicked fairy still kept a vigilant
eye on her spell a man turned up whose wife's mother had
been inadvertently trodden on by the dragon during a night
ravage, and who adamantly refused ever to be grateful even to
 THE PRINCE WHO HICCUPPED 919
a hiccupping Prince for killing it. This upset everything.
The Court went into mourning for a fortnight. The Prince
composed a triumphal Ode to a Slain Dragon. The Court
thereupon stayed in mourning for a further fortnight.
Then the Vizier had another idea, but refused to divulge
it till he had
explained meaningly to the King that it was
his daughter who had suggested both this and the former one,
and he had reason to believe she was er interested in the
Prince, The King, after privately consulting the Vizier's
pedigree and family tree, graciously made "a note of her name,
just", as he put it, "in case". Whereupon the Vizier expounded
his plan.
The was to pay for the dragon's ravages by a heavy
idea
tax on and poor alike. The Court Treasurer instantly
rich
seconded the motion, but the King asked where the Prince
came in. The Vizier explained craftily that the King would
(after, of course, the business had shown a good profit)
accede reluctantly to the request of his son and abolish the
tax. Upon which his son's popularity would become terrific.
"But supposing," said the King a little densely, "he doesn't
request me ?" Several Councillors (who were musical by
nature) promised at once that they would see to that point,
and at last he got the idea of it.
The tax was imposed and everyone was vastly annoyed,
even to the extent of a small revolt in which one of the tax-
collectors was quite spoilt. Then the Prince, having learnt
up some verses, publicly implored his father in twelve
cantos The King graciously agreed in a
to abolish the tax.
prose speech of one monosyllable. Once more a proclamation
was issued, stating that any person who inconceivably did not
wish to join in a testimonial to the Prince should come to the
Palace,
"But supposing someone does ?" said the King. "Re-
member last time. We shall probably have a chap along
saying he adores taxes."
"I have," whispered the Vizier, "men with swords on all
the doors."
"Ah I" said the King,
"But," pursued the Vizier with a little cough, "I'm positive
no one will try to turn up. Quite positive."
"Why ?"
"Tell you afterwards," replied the Vizier archly.
2G
93O ANTHONY ARMSTRONG
The whole Court waited anxiously for the allotted period.
But time not a single complainant appeared.
this
The King decreed a universal vote of thanks, and the
Prince, rising to reply with some prepared verses, was able,
to everyone's delight, to tear them up and speak fluently, and
without a single hiccup. The applause was simple terrific.
"But why that fairy didn't induce someone to demur," said
the delighted King to the Vizier afterwards over a glass of
madeira, "I can't think. Why were you so positive ?"
"Well," began the Vizier delicately, "it's like this. Begging
your Majesty's pardon and so on but my daughter . ."
.

"Oh, your daughter again," said the King.

"Yes. Now your er future daughter-in-law, that
is," he explained firmly. "She er being interested, took
the liberty of adding above your signature a further short
paragraph to the proclamation."
The King was first annoyed and then curious. "We
forgive her," he said graciously. "What did she put ?"
"She simply added 'In the event of any complainant
:

coming, His Royal Highness will, at a personal interview,

sing his full reasons for his action in specially written verses.'
And so er no one came. Mind you," added the Vizier
tactfully, "myself, I always thought the Prince sang very
nicely."
 HILAIRE BELLOC
On Conversations in Trains

Hilaire Belloc is charm and enormous

a writer of great
versatility, his works ranging from the Bad* Child's
Book of Beasts to The Strategy of the Duke of Marlborough,
and including novels, satires, essays, travel books
and military history. The following story is a good
example of his lighter mood.
 ON CONVERSATIONS IN TRAINS

MIGHT have added in this list I have just made of the

I advantages of railways, that railways let one mix with
one's fellow-men and hear their continual conversation. Now,
if you will think of it, railways are the only institutions that

give us that advantage. In other places we avoid all save

those who resemble us, and many men become in middle-age
like cabinet ministers, quite ignorant of their fellow-citizens.
But in trains, if one travels much, one hears every kind of
man talking to every other, and one perceives all England.
on this account that I have always been at pains to note
It is
what I heard in this way, especially the least expected, most
startling, and therefore most revealing dialogues, and as soon
as I could to write them down, for in this way one can grow
to know men.
Thus I have somewhere preserved a hot discussion among
some miners in Derbyshire (voters, good people, voters,
remember) whether the United States were bound to us as a
colony "like Egypt". And I once heard also a debate as to
whether the word were Horizon or Horizon ; this ended in
a fight, and the Horizon man pushed the Horizon man out at
Skipton, and wouldn't let him get into the carriage again.
Then, again, I once heard two frightfully rich men near
Birmingham arguing why England was the richest and the
Happiest Country in the world. Neither of these men was a
gentleman, but they argued politely though firmly, for they
differed profoundly. One of them, who was almost too rich
to walk, said was because we minded our own affairs, and
it

respected property and were law-abiding. This (he said) was

the cause of our prosperity and of the futile envy with which
foreigners regarded the homes of our working men. Not so
the other Ae thought that it was the Plain English sense of
:

Duty that did the trick;

he showed how this was ingrained
in us and appeared in our Schoolboys and our Police he
:

933
934 'HILAIRE BELLOC
contrasted it with Ireland, and he asked what else had made our
Criminal Trials the model of the world ? All this also I
wrote down.
Then also once on a long ride (yes, "ride". Why not?)
through Lincolnshire I heard two men of the smaller com-
mercial or salaried kind at issue. The first, who had a rather
peevish face, was looking gloomily out of the window and was
saying, "Denmark Greece has it why shouldn't we
has it :

have it ? Eh ? America has it and so has Germany why

shouldn't we have it ?" Then, after a pause, he added, "Even
France has it why haven't we got it ?" He spoke as though
he wouldn't stand it much longer, and as though France were
the last straw.
The other man was excitable and had an enormous news-
"
paper in his hand, and he answered in a high voice, 'Cause
we're too sensible, that's why 'Cause we know what we're
!

about we do."
The other man said, "Ho Do we ?" !

The second man answered, "Yes ; we do. What made

England ?"
"Gord," said the first man.
This brought the second man up all standing and nearly
carried away answered slowly
his fore-bob-stay. He :

"Well . .
yes ... in a manner of speaking. But what
.

I meant to say was like this, that what made England was
Free Tra<8fe !" Here he slapped one hand on to the other with
a noise like that of a pistol, and added heavily, "And what's
more, I can prove it."
The first man, who was now entrenched in his position,
said again, "Ho Can you ?" and sneered.
!

The second man then proved it, getting more and more
excited. When he had done, all the first man did was to say,
"You talk foolishness."
Then there was a long silence very strained. At last the
:

Free Trader pulled out a pipe and filled it at leisure, with a

light sort of womanish tobacco, and just as he struck a match
the Protectionist shouted out, "No you don't This ain't a !

smoking compartment, I
object !" The Free Trader said,
"Oh, that's how it is, is it ?" The Protectionist answered in
a lower voice and surly, "Yes, that's how."
They sat avoiding each other's eyes till we got to Grantham.
I had no idea that feeling could run so high, yet neither
 ON CONVERSATIONS IN TRAINS 935
of them had a real grip on the Theory of International Ex-
change.

But by far the most extraordinary conversation, and perhaps

the most illuminating I ever heard, was in a train going to the
West Country and stopping first at Swindon.
It passed between two men who sat in corners
facing each
other.
The one was stout, tall, and dressed in a tweed suit. He
had a gold watch-chain with a little ornament on it represent-
ing a pair of compasses and a square. His beard was brown and
soft. His eyes were very sodden. When he got in he first
wrapped a rug round and round his legs, then he took off his
top-hat and put on a cloth cap, then he sat down.
The other also wore a tweed suit and was also stout, but
he was not so tall. His watch-chain also was of gold (but of
a different pattern, paler, and with no ornament hung on it).
His eyes also were sodden. He had no rug. He also took
off his hat, but put no cap upon his head. I noticed that he was
rather bald, and in the middle of his baldness was a kind of
little knob. For the purposes of this record, therefore, I
shall give him the name "Bald", while I shall call the other
man "Cap".
have forgotten, by the way, to tell you that Bald had a very
I

large nose, at the end of which a great number of little veins

had congested and turned quite blue.
CAP (shuts up Levy's paper > "The Daily Telegraph", and opens
Harmsworth's "Daily Mail". Shuts that up and looks fixedly at
BALD) I ask your pardon
: but isn't your name Binder ?
. . .

BALD (his eyes still quite sodden) That is my name. Binder's

:

my name. (He coughs to show breeding?) Why (his eyes getting

a trifle less sodden), if you aren't Mr. Mowle Well, Mr. Mowle,
!

sir, how are

you?"
CAP (with some dignity) Very well, thank you, Mr. Binder.
:

How's Mrs. Binder and the kids ? All blooming ?

BALD Why, yes, thank you, Mr. Mowle, but Mrs. Binder
:

still has those attacks

(shaking his head). Abdominal (continuing
to shake his head). Gastric. Something cruel.
CAP :
They do suffer cruel, as you say, do women, Mr.
Binder (shaking his head too but more slightly). This indi-
gestion ah !
9J6 HILAIRE BEL LOG
BALD (mere brightly) : Not married Mr. Mowle ?
yet,
CAP (contentedly and rather stolidly) No,:Mr. Binder, Nor
not inclined to neither. (Draws g*eat breath.} I'm a single
a
man, Mr. Binder, and intend so to adhere. (A pause to think.}
That's what I call (a further pause to get the right phrase) "single
blessedness". Yes (another deep breath), I nd life worth living,
Mr. Binder.
BALD (with great cunning) That depends upon the liver. :

(Roars with laughter.}

CAP (laughing a good deal too, but not so much as BALD) Ar : !

That was young Cobbler's joke in times gone by.

BALD (politely) Ever see young Cobbler now, Mr. Mowle ?
:

CAP (with importance} Why, yes, Mr. Binder ; I met him

:

at the Thersites' Lodge down Brixham way only the other

day. Wonderful brilliant he was well, there .
(his . . . . .

tone changes} he was sitting next to me (thoughtfully) as might

be here (putting Harmsworth's paper down to represent Young
Cobbler) and here like, would be Lord Haltingtowres.
BALD (his manner suddenly becoming very serious} : He's a fine
man, he is 1 One of those men I respect.
CAP (with still greater seriousness} : You may say that, Mr.
Binder. No respecter of persons talks to me or you or any
of them just the same.
BALD (vaguely) Yes, they're a fine lot.
:
(Suddenly) : So's
Charlie Beresford !

CAP (with more enthusiasm than he had yet shown) 1 say ditto :

to that, Mr. Binder a

(Thinking for few1 moments of the charac-
teristics of Lord Charles Beresford} It's pluck that's what
it is regular British pluck. (Grimly): That's the kind of
man no favouritism.
BALD: Ar! It's a case of "Well done, Condor 1"
CAP Ar You're right there, Mr. Binder.
: I

BALD (suddenly pulling a large flask out of his pocket and speaking
very rapidly) Well, here's yours, Mr. Mowle. (He drinks out
:

ofit a quantity of neat whisky, and having drunk it, rubs the top of
bis flask with his sleeve and hands it over politely to CAP.)
CAP (having drunk a lot of neat whisky, also rubbed his sleeve
over it, screwed on the little top and giving that long gasp which the
occasion demands} Yes, you're right there "Well done,
:

Condor"
At this point the train began to go slowly, and just as it

stopped at the station I heard CAP begin again, asking BALD

 ON CONVERSATIONS IN TRAINS 937
on what occasion and for what services Lord Charles Beres-
ford had been given his title*
Full of the marvels of this conversation, I got out, went into
the waiting-room and wrote it all down. I think I have it
accurately word for word.
But there happened to me what always happens after all
literary effort ; the enthusiasm vanished, the common day was
before me. I went out to do my work in the place and to meet
quite ordinary people and .to forget, perhaps (so strong is
Time), the fantastic beings in the train. In a word, to quote
Mr. Binyon's admirable lines :

The world whose wrong

Mocks holy beauty and our desire returned*
 CHARLES DICKENS
Sentiment

The fame of Charles Dickens as a creator of humorous

character began with the publication of Sketches
by Bo%, from which the amusing little tale which
follows is taken, and was firmly established by the
appearance of the Pickwick Papers. Though fashions
in literature change the appeal of Dickens seems to be
immortal.
 SENTIMENT

Miss Crumptons, or to quote the authority of the

THE on
inscription
Hammersmith, "The
the garden gate of Minerva House,
Misses Crumpton", were two unusually
tall, particularly thin, and exceedingly skinny personages :

very upright, and very yellow. Miss Amelia Crumpton owned

to thirty-eight, and Miss Maria Crumpton admitted she was
forty ;
an admission which was rendered perfectly unneces-
sary by the self-evident fact of her being at least fifty. They
dressed in the most interesting manner like twins 1and
looked as happy and comfortable as a couple of marigolds
run to seed. They were very precise, had the strictest possible
ideas of propriety, wore false hair, and always smelt very
strongly of lavender.
Minerva House, conducted under the auspices of the
two sisters, was a "finishing establishment for young ladies",
where some twenty girls, of the ages of from thirteen to
nineteen inclusive, acquired a smattering of everything, and
a knowledge of nothing ; instruction in French and Italian,
dancing lessons twice a week ; and other necessaries of life.
The house was a white one, a little removed from the road-
side, with close palings in front. The bedroom windows
were always left partly open, to afford a bird's-eye view of
numerous little bedsteads with very white dimity furniture,
and thereby impress the passer-by with a due sense of the
luxuries of the establishment; and there was a front parlour
hung round with highly varnished maps which nobody
ever looked at, and filled with books which no one ever
read, appropriated exclusively to the reception of parents,
who, whenever they called, could not fail to be struck with
the very deep appearance of the place.
"Amelia, my dear," said Miss Maria Crumpton, entering
the schoolroom one morning, with her false hair in papers :

as she occasionally did, in order to impress the young ladies

941
94* CHARLES DICKENS
with a conviction of its reality. "Amelia, my dear, here is a
most gratifying note I have just received. You needn't mind
reading it aloud."
Miss Amelia, thus advised, proceeded to read the following
note with an air of great triumph :

Cornelius .Brook Esq., M.P., presents his compli-

Dingwall,
ments to Miss Crumpton, and mil feel much obliged by Miss Crump-
ton's calling on him, if she conveniently can, to-morrow morning at
one o'clock, as Cornelius Brook Dingwall, Esq., M.P., is anxious
to see Miss Crumpton on the subject of placing Miss Brook Dingwall
under her charge.
Adelphi.
Monday morning.

"A Member of Parliament's daughter !" ejaculated Amelia,

in an ecstatic tone,
"A Member of Parliament's daughter !" repeated Miss
Maria, with a smile of delight, which, of course, elicited a
concurrent titter of pleasure from all the young ladies.
"It's exceedingly delightful 1" said Miss Amelia ; where-

upon all the young ladies murmured their admiration again.

Courtiers are but schoolboys, and court-ladies schoolgirls.
So important an announcement at once superseded the
business of the day. A holiday was declared, in commemora-
tion of the great event ; the Miss Crumptons retired to their
private apartment to talk it over the smaller girls discussed
;

the probable manners and customs of the daughter of a

Member of Parliament and the young ladies verging on
;

eighteen wondered whether she was engaged, whether she

was pretty, whether she wore much bustle, and many other
whetbers of equal importance.
The two Miss Crumptons proceeded to the Adelphi at
the appointed time next day, dressed, of course, in their
best style, and looking as amiable as they possibly could
which, by the by, is not saying much for them. Having
sent in their cards, through the medium of a red-hot-looking
footman in bright livery, they were ushered into the august
presence of the profound Dingwall.
Cornelius Brook Dingwall, Esq., M.P., was very haughty,
solemn, and portentous. He had, naturally, a somewhat
 SENTIMENT 943

spasmodic expression of countenance, which was not ren-

dered the less remarkable by his wearing an extremely stiff
cravat. He was wonderfully proud of the M.P. attached to
his name, and never lost an opportunity of reminding people
of his dignity. He had a great idea of his own abilities, which
must have been a great comfort to him, as no one else had ;
and in diplomacy, on a small scale, in his own family arrange-
ments, he considered himself unrivalled. He was a county
magistrate, and discharged the duties of his station with
all due justice and impartiality ; frequently committing
poachers, and occasionally committing himself. Miss Brook
Dingwall was one of the numerous class of young ladies who,
like adverbs, may be known by their answering to a common-

place question, and doing nothing else.

On the present occasion, this talented individual was
seated in a small library at a table covered with papers, doing
nothing, but trying to look busy, playing at shop. Acts of
Parliament and "Cornelius Brook Dingwall,
letters directed to

Esq., M.P.", were ostentatiously scattered over the table,

at a little distance from which Mrs. Brook Dingwall was
seated at work. One of those public nuisances, a spoilt
child, was playing about the room, dressed after the most
approved fashion in a blue tunic with a black belt a quarter
of a yard wide, fastened with an immense buckle looking
like a robber in a melodrama seen through a diminishing

glass.
After a little pleasantry from the sweet child, who amused
himself by running away with Miss Maria Crumpton's chair
as fast as it was placed for her, the visitors were seated, and
Cornelius Brook Dingwall, Esq., opened the conversation.
He had sent for Miss Crumpton, he said, in consequence
of the high character he had received of her establishment
from his friend, Sir Alfred Muggs.
Miss Crumpton murmured her acknowledgments to
him (Muggs), and Cornelius proceeded.
"One of my principal reasons, Miss Crumpton, for part-
ing with my daughter is that she has lately acquired some
sentimental ideas which it is most desirable to eradicate
from her young mind." (Here the little innocent before
noticed fell out of an armchair with an awful crash.)
"Naughty boy 1" said his mamma, who appeared more
surprised at his taking the liberty of falling down than at
944 CHARLES DICKENS
anything else ; "Fll ring the bell for James to take him
away."
"Pray don't check him, my love/* said the diplomatist,
as soon as he could make himself heard amidst the unearthly
howling consequent upon the threat and the tumble. "It
all arises from his great flow of spirits." This last explanation

was addressed to Miss Crumpton.

"Certainly, sir/* replied the antique Maria; not exactly
seeing, however, the connection between a flow of animal
spirits and a fall from an armchair.
Silence was restored, and the M.P. resumed "Now, 1
:

know nothing so likely to effect this object, Miss Crumpton,

as her mixing constantly in the society of girls of her own
age ; and, as I know that in your establishment she will meet
such as are not likely to contaminate her young mind, I
propose to send her to you/*
The younger Miss Crumpton expressed the acknowledg-
ments of the establishment generally. Maria was rendered
speechless by bodily pain. The dear little
fellow, having
recovered his animal spirits, was standing upon her most
tender foot, by way of getting his face (which looked like
a capital O
in a red-lettered play-bill) on a level with the
writing-table.
"Of course, Lavinia will be a parlour boarder," continued
the enviable father ; "and on one point I wish my directions
to be strictly observed. The fact is that some ridiculous love
affairwith a person much her inferior in life has been the
cause of her present state of mind. Knowing that, of course,
under your care, she can have no opportunity of meeting
this person, I do not object to indeed, I should rather
prefer her mixing with such society as you see yourself."
This important statement was again interrupted by the
high-spirited little creature, in the excess of his joyousness,
breaking a pane of glass, and nearly precipitating himself
into an adjacent area. James was rung for ; considerable
qonfusion and screaming succeeded : two little blue legs
were seen to kick violently in the air as the man left the
room, and the child was gone.
"Mr. Brook Dingwall would like Miss Brook Dingwall
to learn everything," said Mrs. Brook Dingwall, who hardly
ever said anything at all.

"Certainly/* said both the Miss Crumptons together.

 SENTIMENT 945
"And I trust the plan I have devised will be effectual in
weaning my daughter from this absurd idea, Miss Crumpton,"
continued the legislator. "I hope you will have the goodness
to comply, in all respects, with any request I may forward
to you/'
The promise was, of course, made and after a lengthened
;

discussion, conducted on behalf of the Dingwalls with the

most becoming diplomatic gravity, and on that of the Crump-
tons with profound respect, it was finally arranged that
Miss Lavinia should be forwarded to Hammersmith on the
next day but one, on which occasion the half-yearly ball
given at the establishment was to take place. It might divert
the dear girl's mind. This, by the way, was another bit of
diplomacy.
Miss Lavinia was introduced to her future governess,
and both the Miss Crumptons pronounced her "a most
charming ; an opinion which, by a singular coincidence,
girl"
they always entertained of any new pupil.
Courtesies were exchanged, acknowledgments expressed,
condescension exhibited, and the interview terminated.
Preparations, to make use of a theatrical phraseology,
"on a scale of magnitude never before attempted", were
incessantly made at Minerva House to give effect to the
forthcoming ball. The largest room in the house was pleas-
ingly ornamented with blue calico roses, plaid tulips, and
other equally natural-looking artificial flowers, the work
of the young ladies themselves. The carpet was taken up,
the folding-doors were taken down, the furniture was taken
out, and were
rout-seatstaken in. The linen-drapers of
Hammersmith were astounded at the sudden demand for
blue sarsenet ribbon and long white gloves. Dozens of
geraniums were purchased for bouquets, and a harp and
two violins were bespoke from town in addition to the
grand piano already on the premises. The young ladies
who were selected to show off on the occasion, and do credit
to the establishment, practised incessantly, much to their
own satisfaction, and greatly to the annoyance of the lame
old gentleman over the way ; and a constant correspondence
was kept up between the Misses Crumpton and the Hammer-
smith pastrycook.
The evening came ; and then there was such a lacing of
stays, and tying of sandals, and dressing of hair, as neve*
946 CHARLES DICKENS
can take place with a proper degree of bustle out of a boarding-
school. The smaller girls managed to be in everybody's
way, and were pushed about accordingly; and the elder
ones dressed, and tied, and flattered, and envied one another,
as earnestlyand sincerely as if they had actually come out.
"How do I look, dear?" inquired Miss Emily Smithers,
the belle of the house, of Miss Caroline Wilson, who was
her bosom friend, because she was the ugliest girl in Hammer-
smith, or out of it.

"Oh, charming, dear. How do I ?"

"Delightful ! You
never looked so handsome/' returned
the belle, adjusting her own dress and not bestowing a
glance on her poor companion.
"I hope young Hilton will come early," said another
young lady to Miss somebody else, in a fever of expectation.
"I'm sure he'd be highly flattered if he knew it," returned
the other, who waspractising I'ett.
"Oh, he's so handsome !" said the
first.

"Such a charming person !" added a second,

"Such a distinguk air 1" said a third.
"Oh, what do you think ?" said another girl, running into
the room. "Miss Crumpton says her cousin's coming."
"What ! Theodosius Butler ?" said everybody in raptures.
"Is he handsome ?" inquired a novice.
"No, not particularly handsome," was the general reply ;
"but, oh, so clever."
Mr. Theodosius Butler was one of those immortal geniuses
who are to be met with in almost every circle. They have,
usually, very deep, monotonous voices. They always per-
suade themselves that they are wonderful persons, and that
they ought to be very miserable, though they don't precisely
know why. They are very conceited, and usually possess
half an idea but, with enthusiastic young ladies, and silly
;

young gentlemen, they are very wonderful persons. The

individual in question, Mr. Theodosius, had written a pam-
phlet containing some very weighty considerations on the
expediency of doing something or other ; and as every sen-
tence contained a good many words of four syllables, his
admirers took it for granted that he meant a good deal.
"Perhaps he," exclaimed several young ladies, as
that's
the first pull of the evening threatened destruction to the
bell of the gate.
 SENTIMENT 947
An awful pause ensued. Some boxes arrived and a young
lady Miss Brook Dingwall, in full ball costume, with an
immense gold chain round her neck, and her dress looped
up with a single rose ; an ivory fan in her hand, and a most
interesting expression of despair in her face.
The Miss Crumptons inquired after the family, with the
most excruciating anxiety, and Miss Brook Dingwall was
formally introduced to her future companions. The Miss
Crumptons conversed with the young ladies in the most
mellifluous tones, in order that Miss Brook Dingwall
might be properly impressed with their amiable treat-
ment.
Another pull at the bell. Mr. Dadson, the writing-master,
and his wife. The wife in green silk, with shoes and cap-
trimmings to correspond the writing-master in a white
:

waistcoat, black knee-shorts, and ditto silk stockings, dis-

playing a leg large enough for two writing-masters. The
young ladies whispered to one another, and the writing-master
and his wife flattered the Miss Crumptons, who were dressed
in amber, with long sashes like dolls.
Repeated pulls at the bell, and arrivals too numerous to
particularize papas and mammas and aunts and uncles, the
:

owners and guardians of the 'different pupils the singing-

;

master, Signer Lobskini, in a black the pianoforte

wig ;

player and the violins ; the harp, in a state of intoxication ;

and some twenty young men, who stood near the door, and
talked to one another, occasionally bursting into a giggle.
A general hum of conversation. Coffee handed round, and
plentifully partaken of by fat mammas, who looked like the
stout people who come on in pantomimes for the sole purpose
of being knocked down.
The popular Mr. Hilton was the next arrival and he,;

having, at the request of the Miss Crumptons, undertaken

the office of Master of the Ceremonies, the quadrilles com-
menced with considerable spirit. The young men by the
door gradually advanced into the middle of the rbom, and in
time became sufficiently at ease to consent to be introduced
to partners. The writing-master danced every set, springing
about with the most fearful agility, and his wife played a
rubber in the back-parlour a little room with five book-
shelves, dignified by the name of the study. Setting her
down to whist was a half-yearly piece of generalship on
 CHARLES DICKENS
the part of the Miss it was necessary to hide her
Crumptons ;

somewhere, on account of her being a fright.

The interesting Lavinia Brook Dingwall was the only
who appeared to take no interest in the proceed-
girl present
ings of the evening. In vain was she solicited to dance ; in
vain was the universal homage paid to her as the daughter of
a Member of Parliament. She was equally unmoved by the
splendid tenor of the inimitable Lobskini, and the brilliant
execution of Miss Laetitia Parsons, whose performance of
"The Recollections of Ireland" was universally declared to
be almost equal to that of Moscheles himself. Not even
the announcement of the arrival of Mr. Theodosius Butler
could induce her to leave the corner of the back drawing-
room in which she was seated.
"Now, Theodosius," said Miss Maria Crumpton, after
that enlightened pamphleteer had nearly run the gauntlet
of the whole company, "I must introduce you to our new
pupil."
Theodosius looked as if he cared for nothing earthly.
"She's the daughter of a Member of Parliament," said
Maria.
Theodosius started.
"
"And her name is he inquired.
"Miss Brook Dingwall."
"Great Heaven !" poetically exclaimed Theodosius, in a
low tone.
Miss Crumpton commenced the introduction in due
form. Miss Brook Dingwall languidly raised her head.
"Edward I" she exclaimed, with a half-shriek, on seeing
the well-known nankeen legs.
Fortunately, as Miss Maria Crumpton possessed no remark-
able share of penetration, and as it was one of the diplo-
matic arrangements that no attention was to be paid to
Miss Lavinia's incoherent exclamations, she was perfectly
unconscious of the mutual agitation of the parties ; and
therefore, sefeing that the offer of his hand for the next quadrille
was accepted, she left him by the side of Miss Brook Ding-
wall.
"Oh, Edward !" exclaimed that most romantic of all
romantic young ladies, as the light of science seated himself
beside her, "Oh, Edward, is it you ?"
Mr. Theodosius assured the dear creature, in the most
 fS E NT IM ENT 949

impassioned manner, that he was not conscious of being

anybody but himself.
"Then why why this disguise ? Oh 1 Edward M'Nev-
illeWalter, what have on your account ?"
I not suffered

"Lavinia, hear me," replied the hero, in his most poetic

strain. "Do not condemn me unheard. If anything that
emanates from the soul of such a wretch as I can occupy a
place in your recollection if any being, so vile, deserve
your notice you may remember that I once published a
pamphlet (and paid for its publication) entitled 'Considera-
tions on the Policy of Removing the Duty on Beeswax'."
"I do I do 1" sobbed Lavinia.
"That," continued the lover, "was a subject to which
your father was devoted, heart and soul."
"He was he was I" reiterated the sentimentalist.
"I knew it," continued Theodosius tragically; "I knew
it I forwarded him a copy. He wished to know me. Could

my real name ? Never No, I assumed that name

I disclose I

which you have so often pronounced in tones of endearment.

As M'Neville Walter, I devoted myself to the stirring cause ;
as M'Neville Walter, I gained your heart ; in the same
character I was ejected from your house by your father's
domestics and in no character at all have I since been enabled
;

to see you. We now meet again, and I proudly own that

I am Theodosius Butler."
The young lady appeared perfectly satisfied with this
argumentative address, and bestowed a look of the most
ardent affection on the immortal advocate of beeswax.
"May I hope," said he, "that the promise your father's
violent behaviour interrupted may be renewed ?"
"Let us join this set," replied Lavinia coquettishly for
girls of nineteen can coquette.
"No," ejaculated he of the nankeens "I stir not from this
;

spot, writhing under this torture of suspense. May I may I

hope ?"
"You may."
"The promise is renewed ?"
"It is."
"I have your permission ?"
"You have."
"To the fullest extent ?"
"You know it," returned the blushing Lavinia. The
95O CHARLES DICKENS
contortions of the interesting Butler's visage expressed his
raptures.
We would dilate upon the occurrences that ensued. How
Mr* Theodosius and Miss Lavinia danced, and talked, and
sighed for the remainder of the evening how the Miss
Crumptons were delighted thereat. How
the writing-master
continued to frisk about with one-horse power, and how
his wife, from some unaccountable freak, left the whist table
in the little back-parlour, and persisted in displaying her green
headdress in the most conspicuous part of the drawing-room.
How the supper consisted of small triangular sandwiches in
trays, and a tart here and there by way of variety ; and how
the visitors consumed warm water disguised with lemon, and
dotted with nutmeg, under the denomination of negus. These,
and other matters of as much interest, however, we pass over,
for the purpose of describing a scene of even more im-
portance.
A fortnight after the date of the ball, Cornelius Brook
Dingwall, Esq., M.P., was seated at the same library table, and
in the same room, as we have before described. He was
alone, and his face bore an expression of deep thought and
solemn gravity he was drawing up "A Bill for the Better
Observance of Easter Monday".
The footman tapped at the door the legislator started
from his reverie, and "Miss Crumpton" was announced.
Permission was given for Miss Crumpton to enter the sanctum ;
Maria came sliding in, and, having taken her seat with a
due proportion of affectation, the footman retired, and the
governess was left alone with the M.P. Oh, how she longed
for the presence of a third party Even the facetious young
!

gentleman would have been a relief.

Miss Crumpton began the duet. She hoped Mrs. Brook

Dingwall and the handsome little boy were in good health.
They were. Mrs. Brook Dingwall and little Frederick
were at Brighton.
"Much obliged to you, Miss Crumpton," said Cornelius
in his most dignified manner, "for your attention in calling
this morning. I should have driven down to Hammersmith
to sec Lavinia, but your account was so very satisfactory,
and my duties in the House occupy me so much, that I
determined to postpone it for a week. How has she gone
on?"
 SENTIMENT 951

"Very well indeed, sir/* returned Maria, dreading to

inform the father that she had gone off.
"Ah, I thought the plan on which I proceeded would
be a match for her."
Here was a favourable opportunity to say that somebody
elsehad been a match for her. But the unfortunate governess
was unequal to the task.
"You have persevered strictly in the line of conduct I
prescribed, Miss Crumpton ?"
"Strictly, sir."
"You tell me in your note that her spirits gradually im-
proved."
"Very much indeed, sir."
"To be sure. I was convinced they would."
"But I fear, sir," said Miss Crumpton, with visible emotion,
"I fear the plan has not succeeded quite so well as we could
have wished."
"No exclaimed the prophet. "Bless me Miss Crumpton,
1" !

you look alarmed. What has happened

"
?"
"Miss Brook Dingwall, sir
"Yes, ma'am ?"
"Has gone, sir" said Maria, exhibiting a strong inclination
to faint.
"Gone I"

"Eloped, sir."

"Eloped Who with when where how ?" almost

1

shrieked the agitated diplomatist.

The natural yellow of the unfortunate Maria's face changed
to all the hues of the rainbow, as she laid a small packet on
the Member's table.
He hurriedly opened it. A letter from his daughter, and
another from Theodosius. He glanced over their contents
Ere Ms reaches you, far distant appeal to feelings love to dis-
traction beeswax slavery y etc., etc. He dashed his hand to
his forehead, and paced the room with fearfully long strides,
to the great alarm of the precise Maria.
"Now mind from this time forward," said Mr. Brook
;

Dingwall, suddenly stopping at the table, and beating time

upon it with his hand "from this time forward, I never will,
;

under any circumstances whatever, permit a man who writes

pamphlets to enter any other room of this house but the
kitchen. Fll allow my daughter and her husband one hundred
95 * CHARLES DICKENS
and fifty pounds ayear, and never see their faces again ; and,
damme, ma'am, Pll bring in a bill for the abolition of finish-
ing-schools !"
Some time has elapsed since this passionate declaration.
Mr. and Mrs. Butler are at present rusticating in a small
cottage at Ball's Pond, pleasantly situated in the immediate
vicinity of a brick-field. They have no family. Mr. Theo-
dosius looks very important, and writes incessantly ; but,
in consequence of a gross combination on the part of pub-
lishers, none of his productions appear in print. His young
wife begins to think that ideal misery is preferable to real
unhappiness ; and that a marriage contracted in haste, and
repented at leisure, is the cause of more substantial wretched-
ness than she ever anticipated.
On cool reflection, Cornelius Brook Dingwall, Esq.,
M.P., was. reluctantly compelled to admit that the untoward
result of his admirable arrangements was attributable, not
to the Miss Crumptons, but his own diplomacy. He however
consoles himself, like some other small diplomatists, by
satisfactorily proving that if his plans did not suceed, they
ought to have done Minerva House is in statu quo, and
so.
"The Misses Crumpton" remain in the peaceable and un-
disturbed enjoyment of all the advantages resulting from
their finishing-school.
 W. TOWNEND
Interlude in a Quiet Ltfe

W. Townend is the author of several successful novels

and a number of short stories and sketches, many of
which deal with sailors and the life of the sea in a vein
of realistic humour. His ready pen and keen eye for
character make his work popular with readers of all

tastes*
 INTERLUDE IN A QUIET LIFE

'
I ^HERE were villas on either side of the road and green
JL lawns and well-kept gardens. In the middle distance was
a stretch of waste land, gay with wild flowers and estate agents'
notice-boards, and farther off were woods and the rolling
hills, spread out under the blue, unclouded sky.

Captain Crupper of the s.s. Arpella, home from China,

gathered that his passion for exploration had led him to the
uttermost limits of suburban London in fhis direction at
least. He did not know where he was exactly, having lost
his way, but he was on new territory and he was happy.
Soon lie would be alone with Nature, the trees, the grass,
butterflies, and singing birds and squirrels, and the worries of
a shipmaster could be cast aside for a time and be forgotten.
Ahead of him was a stout blonde lady in pink, carrying
parcels and a shopping-basket, dragged slowly along.
Captain Crupper observed her, not without interest.
Perhaps she was tired. No wonder, with those high heels I

He put her down as a slave to fashion and pitied her. Her

skirt was too short by inches. All women, he reflected, were

crazy. Again he pitied her. Perhaps she was feeling the heat.
It was possible, from the way she walked.
When she reached a big red-brick house with blue-and-
white sunblinds and a deep veranda overgrown with wistaria,
she halted. If she was home, thought Captain Crupper,
why didn't she go indoors ? Very slowly she pushed open
the iron gate which was ajar. Very deliberately she climbed
the step that led to the front path. She hesitated, as though
doubtful, then suddenly she let her shopping basket and her
parcels fall, raised her hands to her head, and collapsed into a
sitting position on to the lawn.
Captain Crupper was a man of action. He knew that the
stout blonde lady had been overcome by the heat and he must
get her into the house as soon as he could.
035
 W. TOWNENli
He hurried towards her.
"Is anything wrong, ma'am ?" he asked, bending over hef .

She dropped her hands and stared at him. Her plump

face was flushed ; in her large, child-like blue eyes there was an
appealing, troubled look ; she panted for breath ; her fair
hair was lank under the small, close-fitting straw hat. She
seemed the essence of good nature and helplessness and
resignation.
"I'm not sitting here for fun 1" she said faintly.
Captain Crupper, efficient always, took charge.
"Ma'am," he said, "you must trust yourself to me 1" He
prided himself on saying the right thing. "I'm a family man
with daughters of my own I'll look after you I"
! Tact-
fully he adjusted her skirt.
"Thank you," she said. "The sun was getting so hot
I just couldn't see where I was at Never known it affect
!

me like this before, ever 1"

Though short in stature a sore point and thin, Captain

Crupper was strong. Time and again deck hands, led astray
by his mild and clerical-like appearance, had had cause to
regret their error. The stout lady in pink was heavy, but
not so heavy that he could not haul her to her feet and, with
one arm about her waist, support her towards her home.
"My parcels !" she said.
"I've got 'em," he said. "Lean your weight on me,
ma'am I"
The stout lady took him at his word. It was with difficulty
that he managed to steer her up the steps on to the wide
veranda. The front door was open, and they staggered into a
cool lounge hall,furnished with chairs and a couch, and a
round table on which was a china bowl filled with red roses.
The walls were decorated with pictures in gilt frames. On
the polished parquet floor was a thick Persian rug. A
flight
of stairs led to the upper storey.
"Is anyone in ?" called Captain Crupper.
There was no reply, yet above his head he could hear foot-
steps. Someone was walking to and fro in an upstairs room.
Captain Crupper diagnosed agitation of mind and petulance,
if not
temper, from the sound.
The stout lady's eyes were once more closed. She breathed
with an effort. Afraid that she might faint, Captain Crupper
guided her towards the couch, turned her about, and released
 INTERLUDE IN A QUIET LIFE 957
her. She swayed towards him. He laid one hand flat on
her chest and pushed firmly. She uttered a little scream
and sank back limply on to the cushions.
The tramp of footsteps had ceased. A girl's voice said
:
distinctly
"It won't ! I won't ! I tell you I won't ! I don't care if

you have to beg in the street 1 So there !"

Captain Crupper waited for the stout lady to explain what
was happening. Her face had lost its pinkness. Possibly
she had fainted !

In a panic, he opened a door and found himself in a dining-

room where there was on the sideboard a jug of water.
As he returned to the hall, carrying a glass of water, a
high-heeled, white satin slipper came hurtling past his head
from upstairs, crashed against the wall, and fell to the floor,
together with a picture and pieces of broken glass.
Startled, Captain Crupper looked up, but saw no one.
The girl's voice said :

"Will you get out ? Do you hear me, you old idiot ?"
Captain Crupper glanced inquiringly at the stout lady,
who gazed back at him with a thoughtful expression but
said nothing.
He gave her the glass of water and*she drank thirstily.
"Thank you," she said. "I'm a lot better already ; my
feet don't belong to me, quite, all the same."
A door slammed with violence and an elderly gentleman
in his shirt-sleeves hurried downstairs.
He was stout and bald ; his face was clean-shaven and
plump and pale ; he wore spectacles with tortoiseshell rims and
thick lenses that made his round eyes appear rounder and
larger than they really ; were and he showed not the least
astonishment at seeing Captain Crupper.
"I've done all I can," he said, "and she just won't listen to
reason."
Captain Crupper, after a cautious side-glance at the stout
blonde lady in pink, said :

"Won't she ? Oh !"

bad of her ?" said the stout lady. She sighed
"Isn't that too
and rubbed her ankles with her heels, and Captain Crupper
saw that she had discarded her shoes. "You don't mind
do you ?" she said.
"Of course not !" said Captain Crupper.
958 W. TOWNEND
The bald-headed man nodded.
"That's right, too. Why not? I told Mrs. Hennah. I
Sarah, don't you go and leave me with that Sheila
c
said : I

She ain't responsible, the state of mind she's in, no more'n a

wet hen!'"
"You don't mean to say 1" said the stout lady.
A door upstairs creaked and the bald-headed man held up
a finger.
"She's listening !" he said.
"Am I ?" said the girl's voice. "Am I ?"
Another white satin slipper hit the stout bald man on the
side of the head. He yelped sharply and collapsed into an
armchair.
"A wild-cat I" he said. "Yes, sir, she's a wild-cat, that
girl I'd rather tackle a tigress, single-handed, any day
I !

That's what I told Mrs. Hennah !"

The stout blonde lady shrieked as a white satin frock
fluttered down from over the banisters and hung limp and
forlorn from the alabaster bowl of the electric light suspended
from the ceiling above. A
white lace veil, white silk stockings,
and garters followed.
"There 1" said the bald man. "What'd I tell you ? Beyond
all reason 1" He removed his spectacles and wiped his eyes
with a silk handkerchief. "She'll kill herself, that's what
she'll do She will. Changes her mind at a minute's notice
! !

That's Sheila I warned 'em, but they wouldn't listen

I I

I know what the girl is, if they don't 1 You can't trust
her !She promised, they said What's a promise to
!

her?"
Upstairs, the girl Sheila was once more tramping to and
fro. There was a sudden crash, as of something heavy falling
to the floor, and then silence.
The stout bald man, who was half-way to his feet, sank
back into his chair again.
"I knew it And when Mr. Cargo comes, and come he
!

will, and Mrs. Hennah, maybe, they'll never forgive me I"

He turned towards Captain Crupper. "Friend, go upstairs and
see if she's hurt. I daren't go near her myself, not after the
last time!"

Captain Crupper looked at the stout lady in pink for

guidance. He would take instructions from her or no
OQC.
 INTERLUDE IN A QUIET LIFE 959
"You'd better/' she said. "That girl's apt to go off the
deep end, if she's not spoken to !"

Captain Crupper, amazed at her placidity in such a crisis,

hurried up the stairs.
A door opened a few inches and a slim hand beckoned.
"Who's that ?" said a low voice. "You got a message
from Jack ?"
The hand clasped his wrist and drew him towards the door,
which opened wide and revealed a girl with pink cheeks and
black bobbed hair and excited brown eyes.
"Did Jack send you ?" she asked in a whisper.
He shook his head, and the excitement died out of her face.
Captain Crupper studied her in silence. She was pretty and
very young eighteen, he supposed, or nineteen, not more ;
:

she was dressed in a rather crumpled frock of a pretty shade of

blue that showed signs of having been hastily put on. Her
legs were bare. Her feet were thrust into soft velvet slippers.
She frowned, and her small white teeth closed down over her
lower lip.
"Well 1" said Captain Crupper.
"Are you a friend of old Cargo's, or Mrs. Hennah's ?"
"No," he said, "I'm not."
"What are you doing her, then ?" she asked. "Listen I

You've got to get me out of the house somehow. I'm not a

slave, I keep telling 'em. And if Uncle Herman comes up
here again, preaching at me, I'll brain him I"
There came to Captain Crupper's ears the sound of a
motor-car travelling at high speed approaching the
house.
A look of determination was visible in the girl's face.
"That'll be Percy 1" she said. "Percy the Prune !
Keep
him away from me, or there'll be murder done, and it won't
be me that'll be the corpse 1"
The door closed and Captain Crupper turned and descended
the stairs.
The stout lady, still in her stockinged feet, had removed
her hat and was patting her fair hair and gazing at her reflec-
tion in a small mirror propped on her lap. Uncle Herman,
the pale stout man in the tortoiseshell-rimmed spectacles
and his shirt-sleeves, watching her, round-eyed.
He looked at Captain Crupper as he reached the foot of
the stairs.
960 W. TOWNBND
"Did you get her to see reason ?" he asked. "She'd mebbe
obey you where she wouldn't obey me."
"What makes you say that ?" said Captain Crupper. "Listen !

What's this?"
Someone was running up the pathway towards the house.
A thick-set, pasty-faced young man flung himself in through
the open door, checked his rush, stared wildly at Captain
Crupper and the stout blonde in pink, and then pointed his
forefinger in the direction of Uncle Herman, who seemed to
have shrunk two or three sizes smaller into his chair.
"Where is she ?" he shouted. "Why the devil didn't you
bring her along, you old goat ?"
"Now, Percy 1" said Uncle Herman in a weak voice.
"That's no way to speak to a relative."
"Why didn't you put her into the car and bring her ?"
"She wouldn't come," said Uncle Herman.
"Wouldn't come My godfather 1"
\

Captain Crupper studied him in amazement. Never before

had he beheld anyone quite so magnificent in his apparel.
This Percy, the young man with the pasty face and the goggling
eyes and the fish-like mouth, might well have stepped straight
out of a shop window in the Strand, minus the price-ticket.
He was the complete gent, from his glossy top-hat set well on
the back of his sleek head to his black patent shoes and white
spats. Nothing was missing, not even the white rosebud
in his buttonhole or the diamond pin in the grey silk tie
knotted so carefully under the wings of his tall white linen
collar, or the silver-mounted ebony cane, or the grey suede
gloves. His black morning coat and white waistcoat and
grey striped trousers made Captain Crupper, who prided
himself on his appearance, feel shabby and soiled and in-
significant.
"Why wouldn't she come ?" said Percy in a high, frightened
voice. "Tell me. Why wouldn't she come ?"
"She just wouldn't," said Uncle Herman. "She said
she'd be be . .". He glanced apologetically through his
great glasses at the stout lady in pink. "She said she'd be
damned begging your pardon, ma'am."
"Granted," said the stout lady, and powdered her nose.
"Bah I" said Percy. "She won't try any games with me I"
Captain Crupper stood on the third step up.
"Stop where you are !" he said.
 INTERLUDE IN A QUIET LIFE 961
"What's that ?" said the pasty young man.
"You're not going upstairs !"
"Aren't I ? Watch me and see I"
He placed his gloves and the silver-mounted c#ne on the
round table and advanced on Captain Crupper, who, being a
kind-hearted little man, had no wish to hurt him, and retreated
two steps higher.
"Mister," he said, "let you and me talk things over/*
The young man's response was to rush furiously up the
stairs and throw his arms around him.

"Leggo !" saidCaptain Crupper.

He placed the palm of his right hand against the young
man's face and shoved, at the same time with his left hand
trying to break the grip on his body, the result being that the
young man was forced backward and Captain Crupper himself
lost his balance and pitched forward on top of him.

They rolled down the stairs, crashed against the round

table, which was overturned, and wrestled furiously on the
polished floor in the midst of broken china and red roses and
a pool of water and white satin slippers and white silk stockings.
Captain Crupper freed himself and struggled to his knees.
The pasty young man, seated with his back to the broken
table, promptly hit him on the chin.
Captain Crupper, aghast, sat backward on to his heels.
"Oh 1" he said grimly. "Now you're asking for it !"
That he, a hard-case Western Ocean skipper, should
have been hit by the pasty young man shook him to the very
depths of his being. He was disgraced and humiliated.
The young man struck out again and missed.
Without rising to his feet, Captain Crupper caught hold
of him by the shoulders and shook him.
"You play any more tricks with me," he said, "and I'll
slap you, you dressed-up poodle 1"
To use his fists was out of the question.
He heard someone say, "I'll help you," and saw out of
the corner of his eye the stout blonde whose furniture they
had damaged towering over them, the silver-mounted cane
in her hand, raised to hit.
She hit.
Captain Crupper released his hold on the young man,
dazed by the blow, dazzled by blinding flashes of light.
"Gosh 1" he said.
2H
962 W. TO WNEND
9
"For heaven's sake V said the stout lady. "I meant to
hit that Percy Honest
! ! Have I hurt you ?"
Captain Crupper stood up.
"It's quite all right, ma'am/' he said.
Thepasty young man sat in the pool of water from the
broken china bowl. At his feet lay the wreck of a once-
immaculate top-hat. He thrust thumb and forefinger into
his mouth and said thickly :

"You've broken one of my crowns."

"Pleased with yourself?" said Captain Crupper.
The young man reached forward and picked up the hat.
Never again would lie know happiness !

"What did you want to interfere between me and my sister

for ?" he asked.
The girl called down from upstairs.
"Percy, you leave me out of it 1"
"Didn't I tell you that girl was a wild-cat?" said Uncle
Herman. "I did, I bet !"
"go and tell that old
"Percy," said the girl, thief Cargo
I've changed my mind I"
The pasty young man sprang to his feet.
"Sheila 1" he shouted. "You can't You're crazy Do
I !

you want to ruin the lot of us ? You can't change your

mind. So there 1"
"Can't I just! Prove it 1"
"Haven't you got your duty to'rds your family, Sheila ?"
said Uncle Herman.
"I don't give a damn if the family starves I've got my !

own life to live, the same as anyone else. If you're such mugs
you couldn't see what kind of a crook Cargo was, that's your
fault, not mine."
"Think of all that money he loaned
us !" said Percy.
"You give me shooting pains through the head !" said
the sister.

Captain Crupper chuckled.

"And what's it to do with you, eh ?" said Percy.
"Young man," said Captain Crupper, "you keep a civil
tongue in your head, or maybe PU be tempted to teach you
manners."
The stout lady in pink, once more seated on the couch,
nodded her approval. She seemed, in spite of the wreckage
in her hall, to be enjoying herself thoroughly.
 INTERLUDE IN A QUIET LIFE 963
"That's right, Blister," she said. "That's the way to talk
to him. You're doing fine 1"
But Captain Crupper was worried. It was all very well
being landed into a family feud, but where was it going to end ?
And what did it mean ? He ought to be told.
"Ma'am," he said, "maybe you think I'm dull-witted,
"
but this business all this trouble
Uncle Herman lifted a podgy hand.
"Listen!" he said. "Listen, it's Mr. Cargo. Percy"
he levered himself stiffly up out of his chair "you've got to
do something, and pretty quick."
"What can / do ?" said Percy. "Tell me."
A stoutish middle-aged man of perhaps forty-five appeared
in the front doorway.
"Where is Sheila ?" he said in a guttural tone of voice.
"Tell me, what is der meaning ? Why could I not get through
on der 'phone ? Why am I kept waiting ?"
And then, it seemed, he became aware of the broken table,
the broken china bowl, the scattered roses, the pool of water,
the Persian rug lying rucked up at the foot of the stairs, the
broken glass and the picture, the stockings and shoes and the
veil, and the battered top-hat.
"Gott /" he said.
He had a black waxed moustache and prominent dark
eyes and thick lips and a rapacious nose. He was dressed
in the same kind of clothes as the pasty young man, even
to the white spats and the top-hat.
"Percy," he said, "are you gone out of your mind ? Look
at yourself in a glass. And where is Sheila ?" He uttered
a stifled exclamation and pointed to the white satin frock
suspended from the lamp hanging above their heads. "Her
dress what I did buy And der stockings
1 !Gott ! Explain,
one of you dummies, I insist !"
"Mr. Cargo," said the pasty young man, "don't be angry,
but I've got to tell you Sheila won't come !"
:

"Won't come !" said Mr. Cargo. "Won't come 1"

Captain Crupper, standing once more on the stairs, ready
to beat back any possible attack, saw two thin elderly ladies
in black, a tall, melancholy man with a dark beard, a smart-

looking young woman in a short-skirted frock of pale lilac,

and a small girl in white with bobbed golden hair and a shrewd
little face, all crowding in through the open door.
 964 W. TOWNEND
"What's all about?** said the young woman in
the fuss
lilac. "Lord! What's been happening ?"
"Rhoda," said the tall man with the beard, "hold your
tongue I"
"Did anyone have a fall ?" asked the thinner of the two
ladies in black.
"Such a waste 1" said the other.
"Sheik won't come I" said Mr. Cargo. Suddenly he
burst out furiously "She won't, won't she ? Oh
: And I !

do nothing. Oh, do I? At der last moment, der guests

waiting, der refreshments on der table, der wine, der waiters,
der orchestra, everything, and Sheila, if you please, she change
her mind 1
Very good ! I go see der young lady mineself 1"
"You won't 1** Captain Crupper, "You may say
said
what you like from here in reason, of course but you're
not going upstairs !" He looked in the direction of the stout
blonde lady in pink. "Is he ?"
"He certainly isn't !" said the stout lady, beaming. "You
keep them vultures from that poor girl, mister You've got !

the law on your side, I know."

"Do you hear !" said Captain Crupper,
"Who are you to say, 'Do you hear' ?" said Mr. Cargo,
bristling. "I intend to see Sheila !"
"Well, Sheila doesn't intend to see you," said the girl
from upstairs. "Here, catch !"
There came from the upper floor a shower of cardboard
boxes, frocks, silk stockings, shoes, sunshades, hat-boxes
and hats, a pearl necklace, two gold bangles, a fur coat,
and innumerable little leather cases that looked as though
they might contain jewellery.
Mr. Cargo put his gloved hands to his forehead and groaned.
A large bouquet of white lilies, flung with precision,, knocked
his top-hat off his head and revealed pink baldness. He shouted,
"All that I have bought her !" and made a rush for the
stairs.

Captain Crupper kid a hand on his shoulder.

"Friend," he said, "don't spoil a pleasant day !"
"Go fetch a policeman I" said Mr. Cargo. "Go fetch a
jtoliceman !"
The little
girl in white with the fair bobbed hair was
bundled out on to the veranda, protesting.
*1 won't go Make Rhoda go I"
!
 INTERLUDE IN A QUIET LIFE 965
"Go call a policeman, Clarice," said the melancholy man
with the beard, "and be quick about it 1"
"That kid's the limit I" said Rhoda.
"Make haste, precious 1" said the thinner of the two elderly
ladies.
"Then you can come straight back and see !" said the
other.
Captain Crupper smiled. They might call fifty policemen :

he had, as the stout blonde lady in pink had said, the law on
It was at her request that he was
his side. guarding the girl
called Sheila.
Mr. Cargo, red in the face, argued with Uncle Herman
and Percy, the pasty young man, and the man with the beard.
He shook his fist and stamped his foot. Uncle Herman
patted him on the back and he shouted "Don't paw me,
*
:

Herman You hear what I say I"

!

The stout blonde lady in pink, Captain Crupper noticed,

took no part in the discussion. She seemed curiously aloof.
Mr. Cargo whirled about and gesticulated with both
hands in Captain Crupper's direction.
"You, what business is it of yours to come between me and
der young lady I intend to marry ?"
"The point is," said Captain Crupper, "the young lady
doesn't intend to marry you."
"What's more," said the stout blonde lady firmly, "you
oughta be ashamed of yourself, a man of your age, thinking of
marrying for the third time !"
"What 1" said Mr. Cargo.
"And with two grown-up daughters, too 1" said the stout
lady.
"What you talking about ?" said Mr. Cargo. "Two
are
grown-up daughters Marrying for der third time
! Are I

you crazy ?"

The stout lady rose to her feet and laid a hand on his arm.
He slapped at her plump wrist. She drew a long breath,
closed her eyes, and wailed :

"Oh, he hit me He hit me Maybe he's got a wife

1 !

living already !"

It was at this moment that the small girl arrived with the
policeman.
"There 1" she said. "I fetched him 1"
"What's the trouble?" said the policeman. He gazed
966 W. TOWNEND
about him at the wreckage on the floor and whistled. "Fight-
ing I" he said.
"This man hit me 1" said the stout lady. "Hit me 1"
"I didn't 1" said Mr. Cargo. His face was damp. "I'm
"
going to be married, officer, and this man here
"That's a lie 1" said Captain Crupper. "You're not going
to be married, and you know it !"
"She won't have him," said the stout blonde lady.
"She's given him back his presents," said Captain Crupper,
"Threw them at him !"
The little girl with the fair bobbed hair squealed and was
shaken by the thin elderly ladies in black, and at once broke
into hysterical sobbing.
"Lena," said Mr. Cargo fiercely, "put that* child out of
here this instant !"
"I won't go 1" screamed the child. "I won't, I won't 1"
"Isn't that kid awful ?" said Rhoda.
"I can just see it all in to-morrow's papers," said Captain
"
Crupper. 'Young bride jilts elderly bridegroom and throws
presents at him over banisters' !"
Rhoda began to giggle.
"We'll our pictures on the front page
have Mrs, 1

Hennah's, too !"

Percy rounded on her savagely.

"Rhoda, you cut that out about Mrs. Hennah this minute I

Or else go on home and

stay there !"
"Fancy yourself, don't you ?" said Rhoda. "Here, take
your ring back I've done with you
! You jelly-fish !"
!

"I've not understood one word in ten !" said the policeman.
"What am I goin' to do ? Why did you send out an' fetch
me, eh ? What for ?"
"It's an outrage !" said Mr. Cargo. "An outrage !"
Uncle Herman stood in the front doorway.
"Sheila 1" he gasped. "Sheila !"
"What is it now ?" said Percy. "Out with it !"
"Let me hear what he's got to say 1" said Mr. Cargo.
"What's got you, Herman ?"
"Sheik's climbed down from her window and run away.
I saw her crossing the lawn. That Jack Hosken's got his
car in front of the house Quick !" !

There followed a wild stampede for the door, headed by

Mr. Cargo.
 INTERLUDE IN A QUIET LIFE 967

Captain Crupper and the stout blonde lady in pink stared

at each other blankly across the debris of broken glass and
china and cardboard boxes and hats and silk stockings.
"Well \" said Captain Crupper. "Well I"
"Crazy, the lot of 'em 1" said the stout lady.
"That Mr. Cargo, I take it, was bent on marrying without
letting his daughters know 1"
The stout lady grinned frankly.
"I didn't even know he had any daughters !"
"You said so, didn't you ?" said Captain Crupper.
"Sure I did You helped me, I wanted to help you 1"
!

"Tell me, then who were all those people in here ?"
:

"I was just going to ask you the very same question !"
"Me 1" said Captain Crupper. "How should I know ?
It'syour house, anyway !"

"Myhouse !" said the stout lady. "Of course it's not 1

I thought it was yours We've lived out here only a couple

!

of days, and what with the sun and not knowing my way
I got into the wrong street That's how it was. ! You
did the rest."
Both glanced hastily towards the door.
"They must have thought we were guests invited to that
wedding," said the stout lady. "Friends of that Sheila."
"Listen !" said Captain Crupper. "In one minute that
bunch of lunatics will be coming back Let's try if there's a !

way out at the back of the house. Are you rested enough ?"
"Sure," said the stout lady. "Me feet's swelled on me
something fierce and I'll have to carry me shoes, but I ain't
stopping here to face that Cargo ;
not if I know it !"

They tiptoed through the kitchen into the back garden.

As Captain Crupper helped the stout lady to climb the
fence she gave way to gurgles of laughter.
"I dunno what in the world my husband would say if
he seen me now I forgot my hat, too !"
!

When she reached the ground on the other side, she said :

"Mister, Idunno your name, and maybe we're not going

to meet again, but I want to tell you I've never enjoyed any-
thing so much in all my life as this afternoon !"
 G. K. CHESTERTON
The Mistake of the Machine

G, K. Chesterton is an essayist and novelist of varied

and original talents with a long list of books to his
credit, of which the best known are probably The

Napoleon of Notting H/7/, The Flying Im % and the series

of unusual stories in which "Father Brown" displays
his detective talents.
2H*
 THE MISTAKE OF THE MACHINE

and his friend the priest were sitting in the

FLAMBEAU
Temple Gardens about sunset and their neighbourhood
;

or some such accidental influence had turned their talk to

matters of legal process. From the problem of the licence in
cross-examination, their talk strayed to Roman and medieval
torture, to the examining magistrate in France and the Third
Degree in America.
"I've been reading/' said Flambeau, "of this new
psycho-
metric method they talk about so much, in America.
especially
You know what I mean they put a pulsometer on a man's
;

wrist and judge by how his heart goes at the

pronunciation
of certain words. What do you think of it ?"
"I think
it
very interesting/' replied Father Brown; "it
reminds me of that interesting idea in the Dark Ages that
blood would flow from a corpse if the murderer touched
it."
"Do you really mean," demanded his friend, "that you
think the two methods equally valuable ?"
"I think them equally valueless/' replied Brown. "Blood
flows, fast or slow, in dead folk or living, for so many more
million reasons than we can ever know. Blood will have to
flow very funnily ; blood will have to flow up the Matterhorn
before I will take it as a sign that I am to shed it."
"The method," remarked the other, "has been guaranteed
by some of the greatest American men of science."
"What men of science
sentimentalists are !" exclaimed
Father Brown. "And how much more sentimental must
American men of science be Who but a Yankee would
!

think of proving anything from heart-throbs ?

Why, they
must be as sentimental as a man who thinks a woman is in
love with him if she blushes. That's a test from the circulation
of the blood, discovered by the immortal
Harvey; and a
jolly rotten test too,"
97J
97* G. K. CHESTERTON
"But surely," insisted Flambeau, "it might point pretty
straight at something or other."
"There's a disadvantage in a stick pointing straight,"
answered the other. "What is it? Why, the other end of
the stick always points the opposite way. It depends whether
you get hold of the stick by the right end. I saw the thing
done once and I've never believed in it since." And he
proceeded to tell the story of his disillusionment.

It happened nearly twenty years before, when he was

chaplain to his co-religionists in a prison in Chicago where
the Irish population displayed a capacity both for crime and
penitence which kept him tolerably busy. The official second-
in-command under the Governor was an ex-detective named
Greywood Usher, cadaverous, careful-spoken Yankee
a
philosopher, occasionally varying a very rigid visage with
an odd apologetic grimace. He liked Father Brown in a
slightly patronizing way ; and Father Brown liked him, though
he heartily disliked his theories. His theories were extremely
complicated and were held with extreme simplicity.
One evening he had sent for the priest, who, according
to his custom, took a seat in silence at a table piled and littered
with papers, and waited. The official selected from the
papers a scrap of newspaper cutting, which he handed across
to the cleric, who read it gravely. It appeared to be an
extract from one of the pinkest of American Society papers,
and ran as follows :

Society's brightest widower is once more on the Freak Dinner

stunt. All our exclusive citizens will recall the Perambulator
Parade Dinner, in which Last-Trick Todd, at his palatial home at
Pilgrim's Pond, caused so many of our prominent debutantes
to
look even younger than their years. Equally elegant and more
miscellaneous and large-hearted in social outlook was Last-Trick's
show the year previous the popular Cannibal Crush Lunch, at
which the confections handed round were sarcastically moulded
in the forms of human arms and legs, and during which more
than one of our gayest mental gymnasts was heard offering to
eat his partner. The witticism which will inspire this evening is
as yet in Mr. Todd's pretty reticent intellect, or locked in the
jewelled bosoms of our city's gayest leaders ; but there is talk
of a pretty parody of the simple manners and customs at the
other end of Society's scale. Tnis would be all the more telling,
 THE MISTAKE OF THE MACHINE 973
as hospitable Todd is entertaining in Lord Falconroy, the famous
traveller, a true-blooded aristocrat fresh from England's oak-
groves* Lord Falconroy's travels began before his ancient feudal
title was resurrected
; he was in the Republic in his youth, and
fashion murmursa sly reason for his return. Miss Etta Todd is
one of our deep-souled New Yorkers and comes into an income
of nearly twelve hundred million dollars.

"Well," asked Usher, "does that interest you ?"

"Why, words rather fail me," answered Father Brown.
"I cannot think at this moment of anything in this world that
would interest me less. And, unless the just anger of the
Republic is at last going to electrocute journalists for writing
like that, I don't quite see why it should interest you either."
"Ah !" said Mr. Usher dryly, and handing across another
scrap of newspaper. "Well, does that interest you ?"
The paragraph was headed "Savage Murder of a Warder.
Convict Escapes", and ran :

Just before dawn this morning a shout for help was heard
in the Convict Settlement at Sequah in this State. The authorities,
hurrying in the direction of the cry, found the corpse of the warder
who patrols the top of the north wall of the prison, the steepest
and, most difficult exit, for which one man has always been found
sufficient. The unfortunate officer had, however, been hurled
from the high wall, his brains beaten out as with a club ; and his
gun was missing. Further inquiries showed that one of the cells
was empty ; it had been occupied by a rather sullen ruffian giving
hisname as Oscar Rian. He was only temporarily detained for
some comparatively trivial assault but he gave everyone
; the
impression of a man with a black past and a dangerous future.
Finally, when daylight had fully revealed the scene of murder,
it was found that he had written on the wall above the
body a
fragmentary sentence, apparently with a finger dipped in blood ;
"This was self-defence and he had the gun. I meant no harm to
him or any man but one. I am keeping the bullet for Pilgrim's
Pond. O.R." A man must have used most fiendish treachery
or most savage and amazing bodily daring to have stormed such
a wall in spite of an armed man.

"Well, the literary style is somewhat improved," admitted

the priest cheerfully, "but still I don't see what I can do for
you, I should cut a poor figure, with my short legs,/unning
about this State after an athletic assassin of that sort. I doubt
whether anybody could find him. The convict settlement
974 G - K - CHESTERTON
at Sequah is thirty miles from here ; the country between
iswild and tangled enough, and the country beyond, where
he will surely have the sense to go, is a perfect no-man's
land tumbling away to the prairies. He may be in any hole
or up any tree."
"He isn't in any hole/' said the governor, "he isn't up
any tree."
"Why, how do you know ?" asked Father Brown, blinking.
"Would you like to speak to him ?" inquired Usher.
Father Brown opened his innocent eyes wide. "He is
here ?" he exclaimed. "Why, how did your men get hold
of him?"
"I got hold of him myself," drawled the American, rising
and lazily stretching his lanky legs before the fire. "I got
hold of him with the crooked end of a walking-stick. Don't
look so surprised. I really did. You know I sometimes take
a turn in the country lanes outside this dismal place ; well,
I was walking early this evening up a steep lane with dark

hedges and grey-looking ploughed fields on both sides ;

and a young moon was up and silvering the road. By the
light of it I saw a man running across the field towards the
road ; running with his body bent and at a good mile-race
trot. He appeared to be much exhausted but when he came
;

to the thick black hedge he went through it as if it were

made of spiders' webs or, rather (for I heard the strong
;

branches breaking and snapping like bayonets), as if he himself

were made of stone. In the instant in which he appeared
up against the moon, crossing the road, I slung my hooked
cane at his legs, tripping him and bringing him down. Then
I blew my whistle long and loud, and our fellows came

running up to secure him."

"It would have been rather awkward," remarked Brown,
"if you had found he was a popular athlete practising a mile
race."
"He was not," said Usher grimly. "We soon found out
who he was but I had guessed it with the first glint of the
;

moon on him."
"You thought it was the runaway convict," observed the
priest simply, "because you had read in the newspaper cutting
that morning that a convict had run away."
"I had somewhat better grounds," replied the governor
coolly. "I pass over the first as too simple to be emphasised
 THE MISTAKE OF THE MACHINE 975
I mean that fashionable athletics do not run across ploughed
fieldsor scratch their eyes out in bramble hedges. Nor do
they run all doubled up like a
crouching dog. There were
more decisive details to a fairly well-trained eye. The man
was clad in coarse and ragged clothes, but they were something
more than merely coarse and ragged. They were so ill-fitting
as to be quite grotesque even as he appeared in black outline
;

against the moonrise, the coat-collar in which his head was

buried made him look like a hunchback, and the long loose
sleeves looked as if he had no hands. It at once occurred to
me that he had somehow managed to change his convict
clothes for some confederate's clothes which did not fit
him. Second, there was a pretty stiff wind against which
he was running so that I must have seen the streaky look
;

of blowing hair if the hair had not been very short. Then
I remembered that beyond these ploughed fields he was

crossing lay Pilgrim's Pond, for which, you will remember,

the convict was keeping his bullet ; and I sent my walking-
stick flying/'
"A brilliant piece of rapid deduction/' said Father Brown,
"but had he got a gun ?"
As Usher stopped abruptly in his walk the priest added
apologetically : "I've been told a bullet is not half so useful
without it."
"He had no gun," said the other gravely, "but that was
doubtless due to some very
natural mischance or change of
plans. Probably the same policy that made him change the
clothes made him drop the gun ; he began to repent the coat
he had left behind him in the blood of his victim."
"Well, that possible enough," answered the priest.
is

"And it's hardly worth speculating on," said Usher, turning

to some other papers, "for we know it's the man by this
time."
His clerical friend asked faintly."But how ?" And Grey-
wood Usher threw down the newspapers and took up the
two press-cuttings again.
"Well, since you are so obstinate," he said, "let's begin
at the beginning. You will notice that these two cuttings
have only one thing in common, which is the mention of
Pilgrim's Pond the estate, as you know, of the millionaire
Ireton Todd. You also know that he is a remarkable
"
character ; one of those that rose on stepping-stones
 976 G. K. CHESTERTON
"Of our dead selves to higher things/' assented his com-
panion. "Yes, I know that.
Petroleum, I think/'

"Anyhow," said Todd counts for

Usher, "Last-Trick
a great deal in this rum affair/'
He stretched himself once more before the fire and con-
tinued talking in his expansive, radiantly explanatory style.
"To begin with, on the face of it there is no mystery
here at all. It is not mysterious, it is not even odd, that a
jailbird should take his gun to Pilgrim's Pond. Our people
aren't like the English, who all forgive a man for being rich
if he throws away money on hospitals or horses. Last-Trick
Todd has made himself big by his own considerable abilities ;
and there's no doubt that many of those on whom he has
shown his abilities would like to show theirs on him with a
shot-gun. Todd might easily get dropped by some man
he'd never even heard of ; some labourer he'd locked out, or
some clerk in a business he'd busted. Last-Trick is a man
of mental endowments and a high public character ; but in
this country the relations of employers and employed are

considerably strained.
"That's how the whole thing looks supposing this Rian
made for Pilgrim's Pond to kill Todd. So it looked to me
till another little discovery woke
up what I have of the
detective in me. When I had my prisoner safe, I picked up
my cane again and strolled down the two or three turns
of country road that brought me to one of the side entrances
of Todd's grounds, the one nearest to the pool or lake after
which the place is named. It was some two hours ago, about
seven by this time; the moonlight was more luminous,
and I could see the long white streaks of it lying on the
mysterious mere with its grey, greasy half-liquid shores
in which they say our fathers used to make witches walk until
they sank. I've forgotten the exact tale ; but you know the
place I mean ; it lies north of Todd's house towards the
wilderness, and has two queer wrinkled trees, so dismal
that they look more like huge fungoids than decent foliage.
As I stood peering at this misty pool, I fancied I saw the
faint figure of a man moving from the house towards it,
but it was all too dim and distant for one to be certain of the
fact, and still less of the details. Besides, my attention was
very sharply arrested by something much closer. I crouched
behind the fence, which ran not more than two hundred
 THE MISTAKE OF THE MACHINE 977

yards from one wing of the great mansion, and which was
fortunately split in places, as if specially for the application
of a cautious eye. A
door had opened in the dark bulk of
the left wing ; and a figure appeared black against the
illuminated interior a muffled figure bending forward,
evidently peering out into the night. Tt closed the door
behind it, and I saw
was carrying a lantern, which threw
it

a patch of imperfect light on the dress and figure of the

wearer. It seemed to be the figure of a woman, wrapped up
in a ragged cloak and evidently disguised to avoid notice ;

there was something very strange both about the rags and
the furtiveness in a person coming out of those rooms lined
with gold. She took cautiously the curved garden path
which brought her within half a hundred yards of me then ;

she stood up for an instant on the terrace of turf that looks

towards the slimy lake, and holding her flaming lantern above
her head she deliberately swung it three times to and fro as
for a signal. As she swung it the second time a flicker of its
fell for a moment on her own face, a face that I knew.
light
She was unnaturally pale, and her head was bundled in her
borrowed plebeian shawl but I am certain it was Etta Todd,
;

the millionaire's daughter.

"She retraced her steps in equal secrecy and the door
closed behind her again. I was about to climb the fence and
follow, when I realized that the detective fever that had lured
me into the adventure was rather undignified ; and that in
a more authoritative capacity I already held all the cards in
my hand. I was just turning away, when a new noise broke
on the night. A window was thrown upone of the upper
in
floors, but just round the corner of the house so that I could
not see it and a voice of terrible distinctness was heard
;

shouting across the dark garden to know where Lord Falconroy

was, for he was missing from every room in the house. There
was no mistaking that voice. I have heard it on many a
it was Ireton
political platform or meeting of directors ;

Todd himself. Some of the others seemed to have gone to

the lower windows or on to the steps, and were calling up
to him that Falconroy had gone for a stroll down to the
Pilgrim's Pond an hour before, and could not be traced
since. Then Todd cried, 'Mighty murder P and shut down
the window violently ; and I could hear him plunging down
the stairs inside. Repossessing myself of my former and
978 G. K. CHESTERTON
wiser purpose, I whipped out of the way of the general search
that must follow, and returned here not much later than
eight o'clock.
"I now ask you to recall that little Society paragraph
which seemed to you so painfully lacking in interest. If the
convict was not keeping the shot for Todd, as he evidently
wasn't, it is most likely that he was keeping it for Lord
Falconry; and it if he had delivered the goods.
looks as
No more handy place to shoot a man than in the curious
geological surroundings of that pool, where a body thrown
down would sink through thick slime to a depth practically
unknown. Let us suppose, then, that our friend with the
cropped hair came to kill Falconroy, and not Todd. But,
as I have pointed out, there are many reasons why many

people in America might want to kill Todd. There is no

reason why anybody in America should want to kill an
English lord newly landed, except for the one reason men-
tioned in the pink paper that the lord is paying his attentions
to the millionaire's daughter. Our crop-haired friend, despite
must be an avSpiring lover.
his ill-fitting clothes,
"I know the notion will seem to you jarring and even
comic ; but that's because you are English. It sounds to
you like saying the Archbishop of Canterbury's daughter will
be married in St. George's, Hanover Square, to a crossing-
sweeper on ticket-of-leave. You don't do justice to the climb-
ing and aspiring power of our more remarkable citizens.
You see a good-looking grey-haired man in evening dress
with a sort of authority about him, you know he is a pillar
of the State, and you fancy he had a father. You are in error.
You do not realize that a comparatively few years ago he may
have been in a tenement or (quite likely) in a jail. You don't
follow all our national buoyancy and uplift. Many of our
most influential citizens have not only risen recently, but risen
comparatively late in life. Todd's daughter was fully
eighteen when her father first made his pile ; so there isn't
really anything impossible in her having a hanger-on in low
life ; or even in her hanging on to him, as I think she must be

doing, to judge by the lantern business. If so, the hand that

held the lantern may not be unconnected with the hand that
held the gun. This case, sir, will make a noise."
"Well," said the priest patiently, "and what did you do
next?"
 THE MISTAKE OF THE MACHINE 979
"I reckon you'll be shocked/' replied Greywood Usher,
"as I know you don't cotton to the march of science in these
matters. I am given a good deal of discretion here, and
per-
haps take a little more than I'm given ; and I thought it was an
excellent opportunity to test that psychometric machine I
told you about. Now, in opinion that machine can't
my
lie/'
"No machine can lie," said Father Brown, "nor can it tell

the truth."
"It did in this case, as I'll show you," went on Usher

positively. "I sat the man in the ill-fitting clothes in a com-

fortable chair, and simply wrote words on a blackboard ; and
the machine simply recorded the variations of his pulse ; and
I simply observed his manner. The trick is to introduce some
word connected with the supposed crime in a list of words
connected with something quite different, yet a list in which it
occurs quite naturally. Thus I wrote 'heron' and 'eagle' and
c
owl', and when I wrotehe was tremendously agitated
'falcon' ;

and when I began to make an r at the end of the word, that

machine just bounded. Who else in this republic has any
reason to jump at the name of a newly arrived Englishman
like Falconroy except the man who's shot him ? Isn't that
better evidence than a lot of gabble from witnesses the ;

evidence of a reliable machine."

"You always forget," observed his companion, "that the
reliable machine always has to be worked by an unreliable
machine."
"Why, what do you mean ?" asked the detective.
"I mean Man," Brown, "the most unreliable
said Father
machine I know don't want to be rude ; and I don't
of. I
think you will consider Man to be an offensive or inaccurate
description of yourself. You say you observed his manner ;
but how do you know you observed it right ? You say the
words have to come in a natural way ; but how do you know
that you did it naturally ? How
do you know, if you come to
that, that he did not observe your manner ? Who is to prove
that you were not tremendously agitated ? There was no
machine tied on to your pulse."
"I tell you," cried the American in the utmost excitement,
"I was as cool as a cucumber."
"Criminals also can be as cool as cucumbers," said Brown,
with a smile. "And almost as cool as you."
980 G. K. CHESTERTON
"Well, this one wasn't," said Usher, throwing the papers
about "Oh, you make me tired 1"
"I'm sorry/' said the other. "I only point out what
seems a reasonable possibility. If you could tell by his manner
when the word that might hang him had come, why shouldn't
he tell from your manner that the word that might hang him
was coming ? I should ask for more than words myself
before I hanged anybody."
Usher smote the table and rose in a sort of angry
triumph.
"And that," he cried, "is just what I'm going to give you.
I triedthe machine first just in order to test the thing in other
ways afterwards ; and the machine, sir, is right."
He paused a moment and resumed with less excitement.
"I rather want to insist, if it comes to that, that so far I had
very little to go on except the scientific experiment. There
was really nothing against the man at all. His clothes were
ill-fitting, as were rather better, if anything,
I've said, but they
than those of the submerged class to which he evidently
belonged. Moreover, under all the stains of his plunging
through ploughed fields or bursting through dusty hedges,
the man was comparatively clean. This might mean, of course,
that he had only just broken prison but it reminded me more
;

of the desperate decency of the comparatively respectable

poor. His demeanour was, I am bound to confess, quite in
accordance with theirs. He was silent and dignified as they
are he seemed to have a big, but buried, grievance, as they do.
;

He professed total ignorance of the crime and the whole

question; and showed nothing but a sullen impatience for
something sensible that might come to take him out of his
meaningless scrape. He asked me more than once if he
could telephone for a lawyer who had helped him a long time
ago in a trade dispute, and in every sense acted as you would
expect an innocent man to act. There was nothing against
him in the world except that little finger on the dial that
pointed to the change of his pulse.
"Then, sir, the machine was on its trial ; and the machine
was right. By the time I came with him out of the private
room into the vestibule where all sorts of other people were
awaiting examination, I think he had already more or less
made up his mind to clear things up by something like a con-
fession. He turned to me, and began to say in a low voice :
 THE MISTAKE OF THE MACHINE 981

"Oh, I can't stick this any more. If you must know all about
me-
"At the same instant one of the poor women sitting on the
long bench stood up, screaming aloud and pointing at him
witn her finger. I have never in my life heard anything more
demoniacally distinct. Her lean finger seemed to pick him
out as if it were a pea-shooter. Though the words were a
mere howl, every syllable was as clear as a separate stroke on
the clock.
"
'Drugger Davis 1' she shouted. 'They've got Drugger
Davis !'
Among the wretched women, mostly thieves and street-
walkers, twenty faces were turned, gaping with glee and hate,
If I had never heard the words, I should have known by the
very shock upon his features that the so-called Oscar Rian had
heard his real name. But I'm not quite so ignorant, you may
be surprised to hear. Drugger Davis was one of the most
terrible and depraved criminals that ever baffled our police.
It is certain he had done murder more than once long before
his last exploit with the warder. But he was never entirely
fixed for it, curiously enough, because he did it in the same
manner as those milder or meaner crimes for which he was
fixed pretty often. He was a handsome, well-bred-looking
brute, as he still is, to some extent ; and he used mostly to go
about with barmaids or shop-girls and do them out of their
money. Very often, though, he went a good deal farther,
and they were found drugged with cigarettes or chocolates,
and their whole property missing. Then came one case where
the girl was found dead but deliberation could not quite be
;

proved, and, what was more practical still, the criminal could
not be found. I heard a rumour of his having reappeared
somewhere in the opposite character this time, lending money
instead of borrowing it ;
to such poor widows as he
but still

might personally fascinate, and still with the same bad results
for them. Well, there is your innocent man, and there is his
innocent record. Even since four criminals and three warders
have identified him and confirmed the story. Now what have
you got to say to my poor little machine after that ? Hasn't
the machine done for him ? Or do you prefer to say that the
woman and I have done for him ?"
"As to what you've done for him," replied Father Brown,
rising and shaking himself in a floppy way, "you've saved him
982 G. K. CHESTERTON
from the electrical chair. I don't think they can kill Drugger
Davis on that old vague story of the poison and as for the
;

convict who killed the warder, I suppose it's obvious that you
haven't got him. Mr. Davis is innocent of that crime, at any
rate."
"What do you mean ?" demanded the other. "Why should
he be innocent of that crime ?"
"Why, bless us all," cried the small man in one of his
rare moments of animation, "why, because he's guilty of the
other crimes I don't know what you people are made
! of.
You seem to think that all sins are kept together in a bag.
You talk as if a miser on Monday were always a spendthrift
on Tuesday. You tell me this man you have here spent
weeks and months wheedling needy women out of small sums
of money that he used a drug at the best, and a poison at the
;

worst that he turned up afterwards as the lowest kind of

;

moneylender, and cheated more poor people in the same

patient and pacific style. Let it be granted let us admit,
for the sake of argument, that he did all this. If that is so, I
will tell you what he didn't do. He didn't storm a spiked wall
against a man with a loaded gun. He didn't write on the wall
with his own hand, to say he had done it. He didn't stop to
was self-defence. He didn't explain
state that his justification
that he had no quarrel with the poor warder. He didn't name
the house of the rich man to which he was going with the gun.
He didn't write his own initials in a man's blood. Saints
alive I Can't you see the whole character is different, in good
and evil ? Why, you don't seem to be like I am a bit. One
would think you'd never had any vices of your own."
The amazed American had already parted his lips in pro-
test when the door of his private and official room was
hammered and rattled in an unceremonious way to which he
was totally unaccustomed.
The door flew open. The moment before Greywood
Usher had been coming to the conclusion that Father Brown
might possibly be mad. The moment after he began to think
he was mad himself. There burst and fell into his private
room a man in the filthiest rags, with a greasy squash hat still

askew on his head, and a shabby green shade showed up from

one of his eyes, both of which were glaring like a tiger's.
The rest of his face was almost undiscoverable, being masked
with a matted beard and whiskers through which the nose
 THE MISTAKE OF THE MACHINE 983
could barely thrust itself, and further buried in a squalid red
scarf or handkerchief. Mr. Usher prided himself on having
seen most of the roughest specimens in the State, but he
thought he had never seen such a baboon dressed as a scare-
crow as this. But above all, he had never in all his placid
scientific existence heard a man like that speak to him first.
"See here, old man Usher," shouted the being in the red
handkerchief, "I'm getting tired. Don't you try any of your
hide-and-seek on me ;
I don't get fooled any. Leave go of
rny guests, and I'll let up on the fancy clockwork. Keep him
here for a split instant and you'll feel pretty mean. I reckon
I'm not a man with no pull."
The eminent Usher was regarding the bellowing monster
with an amazement which had dried up all other sentiments.
The mere shock to his eyes had rendered his ears almost use-
less. At last he rang a bell with a hand of violence. While
the bell was still strong and pealing, the voice of Father
Brown felt soft but distinct.
"I have a suggestion to make," he said, "but it seems a
little confusing. I don't know this gentleman- but but I
think I know him. Now, you know him you know him
quite well but you don't know him ; naturally. Sounds
paradoxical, I know."
"I reckon the Cosmos is cracked," said Usher, and fell

asprawl in his round office chair.

"Now, see here," vociferated the stranger, striking the

table, but speaking in a voice that was ail the more mysterious
because was comparatively mild and rational though still
it
"
resounding, "I won't let you in. I want
"Who the hell are you ?" yelled Usher, suddenly sitting up
straight.
"I think the gentleman's name is Todd," said the priest.
Then he picked up the pink slip of newspaper.
"I fear you don't read the Society papers properly," he
said, and began to read out in a monotonous voice, 'Or locked
in the jewelled bosoms of our city's gayest leaders ; but there
is talk of a
pretty parody of the manners and customs of the
other end of Society's scale.' There's been a big Slum Dinner
up at Pilgrim's Pond to-night ; and a man, one of the guests,
disappeared. Mr. Ireton Todd is a good host, and has tracked
him here, without even waiting to take off his fancy dress."
"What man do you mean ?"
984 G. K. CHESTERTON
"I jnean the man with the comically ill-fitting clothes you
saw running across the ploughed field. Hadn't you better go
and investigate him ? He will be rather impatient to get back
to his champagne, from which he ran away in such a hurry
when the convict with the gun hove in sight/'
"
"Do you seriously mean began the official.
"Why, look here, Mr. Usher," said Father Brown quietly,
"you said the machine couldn't make a mistake ; and in one
sense it didn't. But the other machine did the machine that
worked it. You assumed that the man in rags jumped at the
name of Lord Falconroy because he was Lord Falconroy's
murderer. He jumped at the name of Lord Falconroy because
he is Lord Falconroy."
"Then why the blazes didn't he say so ?" demanded the
staring Usher.
"He felt his and recent panic were hardly patrician,"
plight
replied the priest," so he tried to keep the name back at first.
But he was just going to tell it you, when" and Father Brown
looked down at his boots "when a woman found another
name for him."
"But you can't be so mad as to say," said Greywood
Usher, very white, "that Lord Falconroy was Drugger Davis."
The priest looked at him very earnestly but with a baffling
and an undecipherable face.
"I amnot saying anything about it," he said ; "I leave all
the rest to you. Your pink paper says that the title was
recently revived for him but those papers are very unreliable.
;

It says he was in the States in youth ; but the whole story

seems very strange. Davis and Falconroy are both pretty
considerable cowards, but so are lots of other men. I would
not hang a dog on my own opinion about this. But I think,"
he went on softly and reflectively, "I think you Americans are
too modest. I think you idealize the English aristocracy
even in assuming it to be so aristocratic. You see a good-
looking Englishman in evening dress ; you know he's in the
House of Lords ; and you fancy he has a father. You don't
allow for our national buoyancy and uplift. Many of our
most influential noblemen have not only risen recently,
"
but
"Oh, stop it !" cried Greywood Usher, wringing one lean
hand in impatience against a shade of irony in the other's
face.
 THE MISTAKE OF THE MACHINE 985
"Don't stay talking to this lunatic 1" cried Todd brutally.
"Take me to my friend."
Next morning Father Brown appeared with the same de-
mure expression, carrying yet another piece of pink newspaper.
"I'm afraid you neglect the fashionable* press rather/' he
said, "but this cutting may interest you."
Usher's read the headlines, "Last-Trick's Strayed Revellers :

Mirthful Incident near Pilgrim's Pond." The paragraph

went on :

A laughable occurrence took place outside Wilkinson's Motor

Garage last night. A
policeman on duty had drawn
his attention
by larrikins to a man in prison dress who was stepping with
considerable coolness into the steering-seat of a pretty high-toned
Panhard ; he was accompanied by a girl wrapped in a ragged
shawl. On the police interfering, the young woman threw back
the shawl, and all recognized Millionaire Todd's daughter, who
had just come from the Slum Freak Dinner at the Pond, where
all the choicest guests were in a similar deshabille. She and the
gentleman who had donned prison uniform were going for the
customary joy-ride.

Under the pink slip Mr. Usher found a strip of a later paper,
headed, "Astounding Escape of Millionaire's Daughter
with Convict. She Had Arranged Freak Dinner. Now safe
"
in
Mr, Greywood Usher lifted his eyes, but Father Brown was
gone.
 ISRAEL ZANGWILL
The Red Mark

IsraelZangwill was "born within the sound of Bow

bells",and the life of the Jewish community in the
East End of London forms the subject of several of his
books and plays. The Children of the Ghetto ^ from
which this tale is taken, is a real contribution to social

history as well as a work of humour.

 THE RED MARK

curious episode in the London Ghetto the other

THE winter, while the epidemic of smallpox was raging,
escaped the attention of the reporters, though in the world
of the Board-schools it is a vivid memory. But even the
teachers and the committees, the inspectors and the Board
members, have remained ignorant of the part little Bloomah
Beckenstein played in it.
To explain how she came to be outside the school-gates
instead of inside them, we must go back a little and explain
her situation both outside and inside her school.
Bloomah was probably "B/t/we", which is German for a
flower, but she had always been spelt "Bloomah" in the school
register, for even Board-school teachers
are not necessarily
familiar with foreign languages.
They might have been forgiven for not connecting Bloomah
with blooms, for she was a sad-faced child, and even in her
tenth year showed deep, dark circles round her eyes. But they
were beautiful eyes large, brown, and soft, shining with love
and obedience.
Mrs. Beckenstein, however, found neither of these qualities
in her youngest-born, who seemed to her entirely sucked up
by the school.
"In my days," she would grumble, "it used to be God
Almighty first, your parents next, and school last. Now it's
all a red mark first, your
parents and God Almighty nowhere."
The red mark was the symbol of punctuality set opposite
the child's name in the register. To gain it, she must be in
her place at nine o'clock to the stroke. A
moment after nine,
and only the black mark was attainable. Twenty to ten, and
the duck's egg of the absent was sorrowfully inscribed by the
Recording Angel, who in Bloomah's case was a pale pupil-
teacher with eyeglasses.
But it was the Banner which loomed largest on the school
989
990 I S,R AEL 2ANGWILL
horizon, intensifying Bloomah's anxiety and her mother's
grievance.
"I don't see nothing/' Mrs. Beckenstein iterated; "no
prize, no medal nothing but a red mark and a banner."
The Banner was indeed a novelty. It had not unfurled
itself in Mrs. Beckenstein's young days, nor even in the young

days of Bloomah's married brothers and sisters.

As the worthy matron would say: "There's been Jack
Beckenstein, there's been Joey Beckenstein, there's been
Briny Beckenstein, there's been Benjy Beckenstein, there's
been Ada Beckenstein, there's been Becky Beckenstein, God
bless their hearts And they all grew up scholards and prize-
!

winners and a credit to their Queen and. their religion without

this meshuggas [madness] of a Babner."
Vaguely Mrs. Beckenstein connected the degenerate
innovation with the invasion of the school by "furriners"
all these hordes of Russian, Polish, and Roumanian Jews flying
from persecution who were sweeping away the good old
English families, of which she considered the Beckensteins
a shining example. What did English people want with
banners and suck-like gewgaws ?
The Banner was a class trophy of regularity and punctuality.
It might be said metaphorically to be made of red marks ;

and, indeed, ground-hue was purple.

its

The had scored the highest weekly average of

class that
red marks enjoyed its emblazoned splendours for the next
week. It hung by a cord on the classroom wall, amid the
dull, drab maps a glorious sight with its oaken frame and its
rich-coloured design in silk. Life moved to a chivalrous
music, lessons went more easily, in presence of its proud
pomp ; 'twas like marching to a band instead of painfully
plodding.
And the desire to keep it became a passion to the winners ;
the little girls strained every nerve never to be late or absent ;
but, alas, some mischance would occur to one or other, and
it
passed, in its purple and gold, to some strenuous and luckier
class in another section of the building, turning to a funeral-
banner as it disappeared dismally through the door of the cold
and empty room.
Woe to the late-comer who imperilled the Banner. The
black mark on the register was a snowflake compared with the
Black frown on all those childish foreheads. As for the
 THE RED MARK 991

absentee, the scowls that would meet her return not improb-
ably operated to prolong her absence.
Only once had Bloomah's class won the trophy, and that
was largely through a yellow fog which hit the other classes
worse.
For Bloomah was the black sheep that spoilt the chances
of the fold the black sheep with the black marks. Perhaps
those great rings round her eyes were the black marks in-
carnate, so morbidly did the poor child grieve over her sins of
omission.
Yet these sins of omission were virtues of commission
elsewhere ; for if Bloomah's desk was vacant, it was only be-
cause Bloomah was slaving at something that her mother
considered more important.
"The Beckenstein family first, the workshop second, and
school nowhere/' Bloomah might have retorted to her
mother.
At home she was the girl-of-all-work. In the living-rooms
she did cooking and washing and sweeping in the shop above, ;

whenever a hand fell sick or work fell heavy, she was utilized
to make buttonholes, school hours or no school hours.
Bloomah was likewise the errand -girl of the establishment,
and the portress of goods to and from S. Cohn's Emporium in
Holloway, and the watch-dog when Mrs. Beckenstein went
shopping or pleasuring.
"Lock up the house !" the latter would when Bloomah
cry,
tearfully pleaded for that course. "My things are much too
valuable to be locked up. But I know you'd rather lose my
jewellery than your precious Banner."
When Mrs. Beckenstein had new grandchildren and they
came frequently Bloomah would be summoned in hot haste
to the new scene of service. Curt post-cards came on these
occasions, thus conceived :

Dear Mother,
A son. Send Bloomah.
Briny.

Sometimes these messages were mournfully inverted;

Dear Mother,
Poor little Racbie is
gone. Send Bloomah to your heartbroken

Becky.
99* ISRAEL ZANGWILL
Occasionally the post-card went the other way :

Dear Becky,
Send back Eloomab.
Your loving mother.

The care of her elder brother Daniel was also part of

Bloomah's burden ; and in the evenings she had to keep an
eye on his street sports and comrades, for since he had shocked
his parents by dumping down a new pair of boots on the table,
he could not be trusted without supervision.
Not that he had stolen the boots far worse Beguilded by a
!

card cunningly printed in Hebrew, he had attended the evening

classes of the Me$hummodim> those converted Jews who try
to bribe their brethren from the faith, and who are the bugbear
and execration of the Ghetto.
Daniel was thereafter looked upon at home as a lamb who
had escaped from the lions' den, and must be the object of their
vengeful pursuit, while on Bloomah devolved the duties of
shepherd and sheepdog.
It was in the midst of all these diverse duties that Bloomah
tried to go to school by day and do her home lessons by night.
She did not murmur against her mother, though she often
pleaded. She recognized that the poor woman was similarly
distracted between domestic duties and turns at the machines
upstairs.
Only itwas hard for the child to dovetail the two halves of
her life. At night she must sit up as late as her elders, poring
over her school books, and in the morning it was a fierce rush
to get through her share of the housework in time for the red
mark. In Mrs. Beckenstein's language : "Don't eat, don't
sleep, boil nor bake, stew nor roast, nor fry, nor nothing."
Her case was even worse than her mother imagined, for
sometimes it was ten minutes to nine before Bloomah could sit
down to her own breakfast, and then the steaming cup of tea
served by her mother was a terrible hindrance and if that good
;

woman's head was turned, Bloomah would sneak towards the

improvised sink which consisted of two dirty buckets, the
one holding the clean water being recognisable by the tin pot
standing on its covering-board where she would pour half her
tea into the one bucket and fill up from the other.
When this stratagem was impossible, she almost scalded
 THE RED MARK 993
herself in her gulpy haste. Then how she snatched up her
satchel and ran through rain, or snow, or fog, or scorching
sunshine Yet often she lost her breath without gaining her
1

mark, and as she cowered tearfully under the angry eyes of the
ckssroom, a stab at her heart was added to the stitch in her
side.
It made her
classmates only the angrier that, despite all her
unpunctuality, she kept a high position in the class, even if she
could never quite attain prize-rank.
But there came a week when Bloomah' s family remained
astonishingly quiet and self-sufficient, and it looked as if the
Banner might once again adorn the dry, scholastic room and
throw a halo of romance round the blackboard.
Then a curious calamity befell. A
girl who had left
the school for another at the end of the previous week
returned on the Thursday, explaining that her parents had
decided to keep her in the old school. An indignant heart-
cry broke through all the discipline :

"Teacher, don't have her 1"

From Bloomah burst the peremptory command "Go back, :

Sarah 1"
For the unlucky children felt that her interval would now
be reckoned one of absence. And they were right. Sarah
reduced the gross attendance by six, and the Banner was
lost.
Yet to have been so near incited them to a fresh spurt.
Again the tantalizing Thursday was reached before their hopes
were dashed. This time the breakdown was even crueller,
for every pinafored pupil, not excluding Bloomah, was in her
place, red-marked.
Upon this saintly company burst suddenly Bloomah's
mother, who, ignoring the teacher, and pointing her finger
dramatically at her daughter, cried :

"Bloomah Beckenstein, go home !"

Bloomah's face became one large red mark, at which all the
other girls' eyes were directed. Tears of humiliation and
distress dripped down her cheeks over the dark rings. If she
were thus haled off ere she had received two hours of secular
instruction, her attendance would be cancelled.
The class was all in confusion. "Fold arms 1" cried the
teacher sharply, and the girls sat up rigidly. Bloomah obeyed
instinctively with the rest*
21
994 ISRAEL 2 A NG W 1 1, L

"Bloomah Beckenstein, do you want me to pull you out by

your plait ?"
"Mrs. Beckenstein, really you mustn't come here like that 1"
said the teacher in her most ladylike accents,
"Tell Bloomah that," answered Mrs. Beckenstein, un-
impressed. "She's come here by runnin' away from home.
There's nobody but her to see to things, for we are all broken
in our bones from dancin' at a weddin' last night, and comin'
home at four in the morning and pourin' cats and dogs. If
you go to our house, please, teacher, you'll see my Benjy
in bed he's given up his day's work
; he must have his
;

sleep ;
he earns three pounds a week as head cutter at S.
Cohn's he can afford to be in bed, thank God So now, !

then, Bloomah Beckenstein Don't

1
they teach you here
'Honour thy father and thy mother' ?"
Poor Bloomah rose, feeling vaguely that fathers and mothers
should not dishonour their children. With hanging head she
moved to the door, and burst into a passion of tears as soon as
she got outside.
After, if not in consequence of, this behaviour, Mrs.
Beckenstein broke her leg, and lay for weeks with the limb
cased in plaster-of-paris. That finished the chances of the
Banner for a long time. Between nursing and house
management Bloomah could scarcely ever put in an atten
dance.
So heavily did her twin troubles weigh upon the sensitive
child day and night that she walked almost with a limp, and
dreamed of her name in the register with ominous rows of
black ciphers they stretched on and on to infinity in vain
;

did she turn page after page in the hope of a red mark ; the
little black eggs became larger and larger, till at last horrid

horned insects began to creep from them and scramble all

over her, and she woke with creeping flesh. Sometimes she
lay swathed and choking in the coils of a Black Banner.
And, to add to these worries, the School Board officer
hovered and buzzed around, threatening summonses.
But at last she was able to escape to her beloved school.
The expected scowl of the room was changed to a sigh of
relief; extremes meet, and her absence had been so pro-
longed that reproach was turned to welcome.
Bloomah remorsefully redoubled her exertions. The
hope of the Banner flamed anew in every breast. But the
 THE RED MARK 995
other classes were no less keen ; a fifth standard, in particular,
kept the Banner for a full month, grimly holding it against
all comers, came they ever so regularly and punctually.

Suddenly a new and melancholy factor entered into the

competition. An epidemic of smallpox broke out in the
East End, with its haphazard effects upon the varying classes.
Red marks, and black marks, medals and prizes, all was luck an
lottery. The pride of the fifth standard was laid low one of its
;

girls was attacked, two others were kept at home through

parental panic. A
disturbing insecurity as of an earthquake
vibrated through the school. In Bloomah's class alone as if
inspired by her martial determination the ranks stood firm,
unwavering.
The epidemic spread. The Ghetto began to talk of special
psalms in the little synagogues.
In this crisis which the epidemic produced the Banner
seemed drifting steadily towards Bloomah and her mates.
They started Monday morning with all hands on deck, so to
speak ; they sailed round Tuesday and Wednesday without a
black mark The Thursday on which they
in the school-log.
had so often split was passed under full canvas, and if they
could only get through Friday the trophy was theirs.
And Friday was the easiest day of all, inasmuch as, in view
of the incoming Sabbath, it finished earlier. School did not
break up between the two attendances there was a mere
;

dinner-interval in the playground at midday. Nobody could

get away, and whoever scored the first mark was sure of the
second.
Bloomah was up before dawn on the fateful winter morn-
ing she could run no risks of being late. She polished off
;

all her house-work, wondering anxiously if any of her class-

mates would oversleep herself, yet at heart confident that all
were as eager as she. Still, there was always that troublesome
smallpox ! She breathed a prayer that God would keep
all the little
girls and send them the Banner.
As she sat at breakfast the postman brought a post-card
for her mother. Bloomah's heart was in her mouth when Mrs.
Beckenstein clucked her tongue in reading it. She felt sure
that the epidemic had invaded one of those numerous family
hearths.
Her mother handed her the card silently.
 ISRAEL ZANGWILL
Dear Mother,
I am rakked with neuraljia* Send Bloomah to fry the fish.

l&ecky.

Bloomah turned white this was scarcely

; less tragic.
"Poor Becky !" said her heedless parent.
"There's time after school/' she faltered.
"What !" shrieked Mrs. Beckenstein. "And not give the
fish time to get cold It's that red mark again
I sooner than
lose it you'd see your own sister eat hot fish. Be off at once
to her, you unnatural brat, or I'll bang the frying-pan about
your head. That'll give you a red mark yes, and a black
mark too My poor Becky never persecuted me with Banners
!

and she's twice the scholard you are."

"Why, she can't spell 'neuralgia'/' said Bloomah resent-
fully.
"And who wants to spell a thing like that ? It's bad
enough to feel it. Wait till you have babies and neuralgy of
your own, and you'll see how you'll spell."
"She can't spell 'racked' either/' put in Daniel.
His mother turned on him witheringly. "She didn't go
to school with the Meshumniodim"
Bloomah suddenly picked up her satchel.
"What's your books for ? You don't fry fish with books."
Mrs. Beckenstein wrested it away from her, and dashed it on
the floor. The pencil-case rolled one way, the thimble
another.
"But I can get to school for the afternoon attendance."
"Madness With your sister in agony ? Have you no
!

feelings? Don't let me see your brazen face before the

Sabbath I"
Bloomah crept out broken-hearted. On the way to
Bcckey's her feet turned of themselves by long habit down the
miry street in which the red-brick school-building rose in
dreary importance. The sight of the great iron gate and the
hurrying children caused her a throb of guilt. For a moment
she stood wrestling with the temptation to enter.
It was but for the moment. She might rise to the heresy
of hot fried fish in lieu of cold, but Becky's Sabbath altogether
devoid of fried fish was a thought too sacrilegious for her
childish brain.
From her earliest babyhood chunks of cold fried fish had
 THE RED MARK 997
been part of her conception of the Day of Rest. Visions and
odours of her mother frying plaice and soles at worst, cod,
or mackerel were inwoven with her most sacred memories
of the coming Sabbath ; it is probable she thought Friday was
short for frying-day.
With a sob she turned back, hurrying as if to escape the tug
of temptation.
"Bloomah ! Where are you off to ?"
It was the alarmed cry of a classmate. Bloomah took to her
heels, her face a fiery mass of shame and grief,
Towards midday Becky's fish, nicely browned and sprigged
with parsley, stood cooling on the great blue willow-pattern
dish, and Becky's neuralgia abated, perhaps from the mental
relief of the spectacle.
When the clock struck twelve, Bloomah was allowed to
scamper off to school in the desperate hope of saving the
afternoon attendance.
The London sky was of lead, and the London pavement of
mud, but her heart was aglow with hope. As she reached the
familiar street a certain strangeness in its
aspect struck her.
People stood at thedoors gossiping and excited, as though no
Sabbath pots were a-cooking ;straggling groups possessed
the roadway, impeding her advance, and as she got nearer to
the school the crowd thickened, the roadway became im-
passable, a gesticulating mob blocked the iron gate.
Poor Bloomah paused in her breathless career ready to
cry at this malicious fate fighting against her, arid for the first
time allowing herself time to speculate on what was up. All
around her she became aware of weeping and wailing and
shrieking and wringing of hands.
The throng was composed of Russian and Roumanian
chiefly
women of the latest immigration, as she could tell by the
pious wigs hiding their tresses. Those in the front were
pressed against the bars of the locked gate, shrieking through
them, shaking them with passion.
Although Bloomah's knowledge of Yiddish was slight
as became a scion of an old English family she could make out
their elemental ejaculations.
"You murderers 1"
"Give me my Rachel 1"

"They are destroying our daughters as Pharaoh destroyed

our sons."
998 ISRAEL 2 AN G WILL
"Give me back my children, and I'll go back to Russia."
"They are worse than the Russians, the poisoners !"
"O God of Abraham, how shall I live without my Leah ?"
On the other side of the bars the children released for the
dinner-interval were clamouring equally, shouting, weeping,
trying to get to their mothers. Some howled, with their
sleeves rolled up, to exhibit the upper arm.
"See," the women cried, "the red marks Oh, the !

prisoners !"
A light began to break upon Bloomah's brain. Evidently
the School Board had suddenly sent down compulsory
vaccinators.
"I won't die," moaned a plump golden-haired girl. "I'm
too young to die yet."
"My little lamb is dying 1" A woman near Bloomah, with
auburn wisps showing under her black wig, wrung her hands.
"I hear her talk always, always about the red mark. Now
they have given it her. She is poisoned my little apple."
"Your little carrot is all right," said Bloomah testily.
"They've only vaccinated her."
The woman caught at the only word she understood.
"Vaccinate, vaccinate 1" she repeated. Then, relapsing into
jargon and raising her hands heavenward "A sudden death :

upon them all !"

Bloomah turned despairingly in search of a wigless woman.
One stood at her elbow.
"Can't you explain to her that the doctors mean no harm ?"
Bloomah asked.
"Oh, don't they, indeed ? Just you read this 1" She
flourished a handbill, English on one side, Yiddish on the
other.
Bloomah read the English version, not without agitation :

Mothers, look after your little ones I The School Tyrants

are plotting to inject filthy vaccine into their innocent veins.
Keep them away rather than let them be poisoned to enrich the
doctors.

There followed to appal even Bloomah.

statistics What
wonder if the refugees from lands of persecution lands in
which anything might happen believed they had fallen from
the frying-pan into the fire ; if the rumour that executioners
 THE RED MARK 999
with instruments had entered the school-buildings had run
like wildfire through the quarter, enflaming Oriental imagina-
tion to semi-madness ?
While Bloomah was reading, a head-shawled woman fainted
and the din and frenzy grew.
"But I was vaccinated when a baby, and I'm all right,"
murmured Bloomah, half to reassure herself.
"My arm I'm poisoned 1" And another pupil flew
!

frantically towards the gate.

The women outside replied with a dull roar of rage, and
hurled themselves furiously against the lock.
A
window looking on the playground was raised with a
sharp snap, and the head-mistress appeared, shouting alternately
at the children and the parents ; but she was neither heard nor
understood, and a Polish crone shook an answering fist,
"You old maid childless, pitiless !"
Shrill whistles sounded and resounded from every side,
and soon a posse of eight policemen were battling with the
besiegers, trying to push themselves between them and the
gate. A fat and genial officer worked his way past Bloomah,
his truncheon ready for action.
"Don't hurt the poor women," Bloomah pleaded. "They
think their children are being poisoned."
"I know, missie. What can you do with such green-
horns ? Why don't they stop in their own country ? I've
just been vaccinated myself, and it's no joke to get my arm
knocked about like this !"
"Then show them the red marks, and that will quiet them."
The policeman laughed. A sleeveless policeman It
1

would destroy all the dignity and prestige of the force.

"Then Til show them mine," said Bloomah resolutely.
"Mine are old and not very showy, but perhaps they'll do.
Lift me up, please I mean on your unvaccinated arm."
Overcome by her earnestness, the policeman hoisted her
on his burly shoulder. The apparent arrest made a diversion ;

all eyes turned towards her.

"You Narronium /" (fools), she shrieked, desperately
mustering her scraps of Yiddish. "Your children are safe.
Ich bin vaccinated. Look !" She rolled up her sleeve.
"Der policeman ist vaccinated. Look if I tap him he
winces. See !"
"Hold on, missie T' The policeman grimaced.
1000 ISRAEL ZANGWILL
"The King ist vaccinated," went on Bloomah, "and the

Queen, and the Prince of Wales, yes, even the Teachers them-
selves* There are no devils inside there. This paper"
she held up the bill "is lies and falsehood." She tore it into
fragments.
"No ;
it is true as the Law of Moses," retorted a man in the
mob.
"As the Law of Moses 1" echoed the women hoarsely.
Bloomah had an inspiration. "The Law of Moses Pooh 1 !

Don't you know this is written by the Meshw?jmodim ?"

The crowd looked blank, fell silent. If, indeed, the hand-
bill was written by apostates, what could it hold but Satan's
lies?
Bloomah profited by her moment of triumph. "Go home,
you Narromm !" she cried pityingly from her perch. And then,
veering round towards the children behind the bars "Shut :

up, you squalling sillies I" she cried. "As for you, Golda
Benjamin, Fm
ashamed of you a girl of your age Put 1

!"
your sleeve down, cry-baby
Bloomah would have carried the day had not her harangue
distracted the police from observing another party of rioters
women, by husbands hastily summoned from stall and
assisted
barrow, who were battering at a side gate. And at this very
instant they burst it open, and with a great cry poured into the
playground, screaming and searching for their progeny.
The police darted round to the new battlefield, expecting
an attack upon doors and windows, and Bloomah was hastily
set down in the seething throng and carried with it in the wake
of the police, who could not prevent it flooding through the
broken side gate.
The large playground became a pandemonium of parents,
children, police, and teachers all shouting and gesticulating.
But there was no riot. The law could not prevent mothers
and fathers from snatching their offspring to their bosoms and
making off overjoyed. The children who had not the luck to be
kidnapped escaped of themselves, some panic-stricken, some
merely mischievous, and in a few minutes the school was
empty.

The School Management Committee sat formally to con-

sider this unprecedented episode. It was decided to cancel
 THE RED MARK IOOI

the attendance for^the day. Red marks, black marks all fell
into equality ; the very ciphers were^ reduced to their native
nothingness. The school-week was made to end on the
Thursday.
Next Monday morning saw Bloomah at her desk, happiest
of a radiant sisterhood. On the wall shone the Banner.
 MORLEY ROBERTS
A Comedy in
Capricorn

Morley Roberts has had a varied and adventurous

career as a sailor before the mast, as a cattle hand and
lumberman all over the United States, and as a traveller
in other parts of the world. His wanderings
many
have provided material for many books, of which his sea
stories have been particularly popular.
 A COMEDY IN CAPRICORN
For reasons 'which will be obvious to readers
of her letters, this
littlestory is inscribed to the charming memory of Elizabeth
Montague, Queen of the B/ue- Stockings.

was in her aunt's box at the Opera that Gwendolen

ITOakhurst first met Lord Barnpton. They were playing
something revolutionary by Stravinsky, but to Gwen the
music was but a prelude to her own romance.
"He's certainly handsome," said Gwen pensively, as she
looked across the theatre.
"And wishes to meet you, my dear," said old Lady Mary
Warrington. "With a reserved nature like Harry's, that
speaks whole encyclopaedias."
"Tell me about him," said Gwen. "I really think I shall
like him, Auntie."
"Like him ? You will love him, my dear," said Lady
Mary. "He has looks, brains, immense wealth, and is of the
kindliest disposition. With such advantages, one expects
to find a failure somewhere, perhaps in manners. His are
perfect. He possesses the magnificent calm which was held
in my youth to distinguish the well bred."
"Has he no faults whatever ?" asked her niece.
"If he has one, it a virtue," replied Lady Mary, "and
is
one which should be an additional attraction to you. He
adores animals to a degree beyond reason. He even breeds
wild horses in his park, and he asks to be introduced to you !

Do you want an archangel ?"

"With wings ?" asked Gwen. "Not with my passion
for china !"
"I have none on my visiting list," said Lady Mary.
On one whose heart was also warm, who adored animals
and was herself a notably sweet example of the type best
represented by Gainsborough in his most successful portraits,
1005
I006 MORLEY ROBERTS
such representations could not fail to have an instant effect,
although Lady Mary's collocation of wild-horse breeding
and a desire for an introduction was somewhat startling.
When representation was replaced by adoring reality,
the
result was all that Lady Mary hoped for. It came about with
such amazing rapidity that in less than a week there would
have been news concerning his daughter to be imparted to
Colonel Oakhurst had not Gwen begged her lover to give
her time to break it. She owned that her father was con-
servative to an extreme degree, and that any change whatsoever
was apt to disturb him, and possibly the neighbourhood,
since long employment in India had given him the high
military complexion and habit which betoken irascibility.
"As long as our marriage is not delayed/' said Lord
Bampton amiably, "I do not mind postponing the news of
our engagement. I will, then, call early next week and ask
for permission to pay you my addresses, dearest/'
"They will be well received," said Gwen, smiling.
"And if your dear, ferocious, white-haired father not is

amenable, I shall, of course, run away with you," said her

lover, as he kissed her hand.
"With your wild horses, Harry ?" asked Gwendolen.
"They would symbolize my feeling," said Lord Bampton.
"But I am
very happy."
And so was Gwen, though she was a little nervous when
her lover called at Warrington Grange a few days later.
Even Mrs. Oakhurst did not know how far matters had
really advanced, but the colonel showed
no irascibility wr hcn
she hinted, not vaguely, that his daughter had made a more
than notable conquest. It is true that he searched his mind
for objections in order to relieve his conservative conscience,
but he owned presently that he had heard nothing against
his would-be son-in-law save that he was, perhaps, somewhat
eccentric in his devotion to the animal kingdom.
"Still, that's nothing, and if he don't shoot or hunt it
can't be helped. It's his loss, not mine," said the colonel.
"I don't care a a Continental He may come here with his
!

wild horses if he likes, or with a chimpanzee Didn't I hear!

he keeps 'em ?"

"Will he really bring one with him ?" asked Mrs. Oakhurst
anxiously. "I don't think quite I should care for a chimpanzee
to come here. The animal might break something."
 A COMEDY IN CAPRICORN IOOy
"Let him bring a gorilla if he likes and break up the
house/' said the colonel, chuckling. "I'll tell Benson that if
Lord Bampton turns up with a polar bear or a Bengal tiger
it's to come into the drawing-room. For I'll say this much :

that, on thinking it over, my dear, there's not a man in

England I'd prefer for a son-in-law. I remember Dicky
Brown, who knows everyone on earth, sayin' Bampton had
the manners of Lord Chesterfield and the morals of the
Archbishop of Canterbury, while as for property he owns
half this county and a coal-mine in Yorkshire. If he brings
the Zoo, you'll see me take it like a lamb By the Lord !

Harry, like a lamb 1"

Long years in India had made the colonel look like

anything but a lamb. And when he gave orders they were
not neglected. He feared no one but his wife and his Scotch
gardener ; and Benson, the butler, in spite of his imposing
appearance, was but as clay in his hands.
"Look here, Benson," said the colonel, "Lord Bampton
will call this afternoon about four."
"Yes, sir," said the butler.
"If everything isn't spick and span and as bright as blazes
there will be appointments vacant in this infernal neighbour-
hood," cried the colonel fiercely. "And if that damned
Thompson drops the tea-tray again I'll drag him out into
the garden and cut his throat from ear to ear."
"I will attend to everything myself, sir," said Benson.
"And another thing," said the colonel ; "his lordship is
fond of pets."
"Yes, sir ?" said the butler.
"And I understand he takes them about with him," said
the colonel. "So if he brings a chimpanzee or a gorilla with
him it's to come into the drawing-room ; right in, by all

that's holy 1"

"How shall I know if it's a chimpanzee or a gorilla, sir ?"
asked the butler.
"By its of course," repied the colonel. "But when
bite,
I
say a chimpanzee or a gorilla, I mean any livin' thing, a
polar bear or a Bengal tiger or billy-goat. Do you understand
clearly quite clearly ?"
"Quite clearly, sir," said the butler, who by now was
prepared to usher into the drawing-room any animal whatso-
ever, even if it were an elephant or a crocodile.
IOCS MORLEY ROBERTS
*Tm to know it by its bite, am I ?" he said bitterly. "At
times there's no knowin* what to make of the colonel. He's
the most harbitrary gent in the county/'
It was about a quarter to four when his lordship's car,
driven unostentatiously by himself, stayed outside the imposing
front entrance of Warrington Grange, By one of those
highly remarkable coincidences which seem to happen in
order to bring the pure, logical sequence of the universe into
contempt, a handsome young billy-goat, about three parts
grown, and that very day imported into the village by the
blacksmith, had broken loose from its tether and wandered
into the colonel's grounds. Finding rich feed there, he had
satiated his appetite, and was now resolved to satisfy the

curiosity which seems inherent in the species. Having been

brought up by hand, he was of an amiable and kindly disposi-
tion, and well disposed towards humanity. It may be, of

course, that Lord Bampton's fondness for pets of all kinds

was by some mysterious means communicated to the goat,
for the lively animal rushed from behind the car as
just
Lord Bampton alighted. The genial creature, pleased to be
with company after a period of solitude, uttered a friendly
baa as he mounted the steps side by side with the expected
and honoured guest. At that very moment Benson appeared
at the door, and Lord Bampton was ushered into the drawing-
room with the goat following him. The butler, being much
relieved to find that he was under no necessity to recognize
the species of this unlikely pet by its bite, considered himself
peculiarly fortunate in finding it not only gentle but tractable,
and so much attached to its master that it entered the room
without being coerced or chased into doing so.
Colonel Oakhurst was alone in the drawing-room when
the curious pair entered. Mrs, Oakhurst considered it
advisable to leave them alone for a while in order that Lord
Bampton might be at full liberty to speak to Gwendolen's
father. She and Gwen therefore waited a while in the library.
"I am delighted to meet you, Lord Bampton," said
Colonel Oakhurst, "and as my wife and daughter are for the
moment not here, you must allow me to introduce myself."
It seemed obvious to Lord Bampton that he and Colonel
Oakhurst would be friends. For in order to please his guest
the colonel patted the goat, even while he wondered at his
choice of pets, and the visitor was obviously touched by the
 A COMEDY IN CAPRICORN 1009
affection displayed by its owner for this highly engaging
animal. As the goat wandered round the room with afi
the curiosity owned to be characteristic of the race, host and
guest alike expatiated upon its merits. It ate part of a cushion
tassel, and though the colonel cursed it in his heart he smiled
with what seemed ferocious tenderness.
"It's a very fine goat," said Lord Bampton. "Very fine
indeed."
"Yes, asplendid animal splendid. I I love goats,"
sputtered the colonel. "It's well bred, too dashed well bred."
The splendid well-bred goat sampled another sofa-cushion,
and Lord Bampton could not help wondering at the splendid
well-bred calm of his host. For, judging merely by his
complexion and his fierce white moustache, he would have
thought him rather more explosive than dynamite. It was
odd that Gwen had not mentioned her father's passion for pets.
"I understand you have an uncommon love for animals,"
said the colonel.
"I grieve that it is uncommon," said Lord Bampton,
fervently following the line of agreement indicated, "I adore
them, as you do 1"
"You don't draw the line anywhere ?" asked the colonel,
as the goat climbed the sofa and eyed a shining bureau which
stood close by.
"Absolutely nowhere," said Lord Bampton, wondering
if his host did.
"Have you many pets of this kind ?"
"Oh, yes ; I have a most delightful pet lamb."
"Is it at all mischievous ?" asked the colonel.
"At times," said Lord Bampton ; "but, like you, I love
to see animals happy and active."
The happy and active goat made a wonderful spring and
landed safely on the bureau.
"How beautifully he jumps 1" cried the colonel, wishing
he could boil the animal in a brass pan.
"Magnificently," said Lord Bampton, thinking his host
must be mad to allow a goat in such a beautiful room. "But
won't he break something ?"
"It doesn't matter if he does," said the colonel, looking
at the goat as if he were hypnotized. "I I rather want
something broken."
"You do ? Isn't that china good ?"
1010 MO R LEY ROBERTS
"Not if the goat likes to break it," said the colonel. This
room has been just the same for the last hundred years, and
I'm tired of fairly wearied
it out by it."
The goat, after balancing himself in the most beautiful
manner, jumped from the bureau upon a table, and only
dislodged an old punch-bowl.
"He jumps very skilfully," said Lord Bampton.
certainly
"I thought he might bring everything down. How he does
enjoy himself!"
"True 1" said the colonel. the deepest,
"It affords me
the most enchanting pleasure to see animals enjoy themselves.
Some don't Some men hate to
! I absolutely know men
!

who would cut that goat's throat, or boil it or fry it !"

"Do you really ?" asked Lord Bampton, with surprise.
"There is no end to human cruelty. I have rarely seen a
goat who could jump better. You don't mind him chewing
that curtain ?"
"Not in the Colonel Oakhurst. "It's old
least," said
brocade very old, too old Let him do as he likes."
I

"You almost excel me in your love of animals," said Lord

Bampton warmly ; "but there is, I maintain, no sign of an
amiable nature so certain. I try all my friends by that test.
This particular goat is really a most remarkable animal, and
seems to have immense intellectual curiosity."
"It looks like it," growled the colonel. "Now just you
watch him He's going to jump on that table."
I

"It looks a highly polished and very slippery table,"

said his guest ; "will he be able to keep his footing ? I am
curious to see."
The goat made a spring and, landing on the table, slid
with all four feet together, and only brought up on the edge.
"He seems to have scratched the polished surface," said
Lord Bampton. "Do you mind his scratching it ?"
"Oh, no, not in the least," said the colonel, with power
fully concentrated calm. "The table belonged to my great-
grandfather, and it's
high time it was scratched. Till now
on it."
there wasn't a scratch
"Does Mrs. Oakhurst like goats ?" asked Lord Bampton.
The colonel chewed at his lips and made curious sounds.
"Oh, yes, she has a perfect passion for them But being, I

as most women are, a trifle uncertain in her temper, she is

apt to take a dislike to a particular goat/'

 A COMEDY IN CAPRICORN IOII

"Surely not to this very delightful animal?" asked the

courteous guest, with an air of warm, interested surprise at
the bare possibility.
"What, dislike a goat like that ?" roared the colonel.
"Such an active, inquiring animal Oh, no 1
Why, if it was
!

a simple, dull, inactive goat she would sell it and buy another
just like that !"
The goat immediately demonstrated that it was not dull
or inactive by springing from the hitherto unscratched table
that had belonged to the colonel's great grandfather to one
which had belonged to his grandmother, and brought a
large silver bowl with a crash to the ground, as he and the
table cover and the bowl slid off together. With beautiful
agility, the goat avoided damage to himself and, making a
pleasing little buck, began to eat some flowers from the
bowl and drink a little of the water as it meandered over
the parquet floor.
"And Miss Oakhurst ?" asked Lord Bampton, wondering
what he should do when they were married if wen introducedG
goats into the drawing-room of Woodhurst.
"She also likes 'em, adores 'em 1" gasped the colonel,
wondering if a rich and noble son-in-law were worth the
price he was paying.
"Does she feel towards them as you do ?"
"Oh, no !" said the colonel. "Oh, no I absolutely defy
;

her to come up to the feelings with which I regard this goat !

She couldn't couldn't do it My feelings with regard to

!

this goat are indescribable perfectly indescribable !"

"They do you honour," said Lord Bampton.
The goat now inspected an old Venetian mirror, and,
discovering a rival in it, after a few preliminary bucks, rose
up and charged the other goat which so obviously intended
to charge him. There was a fearful crash, and after a moment's
surprise at his sudden victory, the successful warrior sought
other fields.
"I'm afraid he's broken that mirror," said Lord
Bampton.
"It's time was broken full time," said the colonel
it

it's only an old Venetian

desperately. "It's thing an ancestor
of mine brought to England. I'll order a nice new one from
Tottenham Court Road."
It was certainly remarkable that such a man should speak
IOI2 MORLEY ROBERTA
like that of an old Venetian mirror ; but as Lord Bamptoti
knew those who owned goats became mad so far as goats
were concerned, a verycommon observation among those
who kept other animals and went insane in other ways, he
felt he could say nothing. The colonel also felt for the
moment that he could say nothing. Adetermination of
blood to the head seemed to threaten him with apoplexy, and
he was perfectly aware that his complexion was that of a
ripe prize tomato as his hands shook with the madly repressed
desire to strangle Lord Bampton's goat without delay. To
save his own life and that of this accursed animal it was
necessary for him to quit the room at all costs. He choked
as he said he must leave his guest for a moment.
"I'll see if my wife and daughter have got back," he
sputtered. "You don't mind if I leave you and the goat for
a minute ?"
"Not at all/' said Lord Bampton; "we shall no doubt
enjoy ourselves while you are away."
And even as the colonel hastened blindly to the door,
the goat obviously took a fancy to something upon the
mantelpiece. It was perhaps a piece of old Chelsea, or the
photograph of the colonel in a silver frame. The animal
was not at all awed by the difficult approach to his desire, and
Lord Bampton watched him with great curiosity, being
firmly convinced it was not the first time the animal had been
up there. By a very skilful use of a sofa, an occasional table,
and the back of an easy chair, Billy achieved his desire, and
stood with all four feet together on the summit of his Matter-
horn, having done nothing more in the way of damage than
upsetting the little table and knocking a leg off it, and
capsizing a brass tray into the fender.
"Bravo, Billy 1" said his lordship, and Billy baaed.
And so did the colonel in the passage for he ran against
his wife and Gwendolen.
"How how do you like him ?" they asked eagerly.
It was then that the colonel baaed and made strange and

peculiar noises.
Mrs. Oakhurst and Gwendolen took him by the arms.
He seemed in the first throes of an epileptic fit.
"What is it ? Oh, what is it ?" they cried in chorus.
"That that accursed Bampton 1" said the colonel.
"He's wreckin* the house fairly wreckin* it 1"
 A COMEDY -IN CAPRICORN
"Oh, father," said Gwen, "what can you mean ? Do do
be calm I"
"Ain't I calm?" roared the colonel, as he tugged at his
collar. "Fm so calm it's killin' me. The goat, the goat I"
"Tom, what goat are you speaking of?" asked his wife.
"Tell us do tell us I"
"Lord Bampton's goat, his pet goat, that he brought with
him," gasped the colonel. "He says it's a splendid, well-bred
goat with amazin' intellectual curiosity, and, by the Holy
Poker, if you want real cold-blooded calmness go in and see
his infernal well-bred lordship fairly eggin' on the animal
to do more damage. I think he must be mad, for there's

nothing left nothing !The room's a wreck and so am I,

and every time it smashed something he smiled and said it
was a well-bred goat, or a fine goat, or that it jumped
beautifully, and I what did I do ? why, I said, curse me, that
it was a damned well-bred
goat, when the infernal beast was
wrecking my house, and that it was a
very, very fine goat,
oh, Lord, and that it jumped, oh, so beautifully ! Go in and
see for yourselves. There, listen !"
And what they heard was the fall of the brass tray.
"Why, the infe nal thing must be on the mantelpiece,
or perhaps his mad master is," gurgled the colonel. "Look
here, Mary, I can't stand this I can't 1"
And the unhappy old gentleman took several short runs
up and down the passage. "
"There must be some mistake began his wife.
"Go in, go in and see 1" sputtered the colonel. "Let me
stay here. I'll
put my head under the tap in the bathroom and
come back presently."
And he took a longer run for the bathroom.
"What shall we do ?" asked Gwendolen's mother. "You
said he was everything a man should be."
"And so he is," said Gwen firmly. "I don't care if he does
keep goats. I'll cure him of that later. Whatever happens,
you must keep calm. Come in, or I'll go by myself."
Thus encouraged, Mrs. Oakhurst entered the drawing-
room, and nothing but the sense of noblesse oblige kept her
from uttering wild yells worthy of an East End lady when
the cat breaks ornaments in the parlour. For upon the
mantelpiece, the lambrequin of which she had embroidered
with her own hands, the goat was now disporting himself.
IOI4 MORLEY ROBERTS
At every came into the fender, and at every
step something
crash the goat was more and more pleased with himself.
It seemed also that he pleased Lord Bampton, who did not
observe the ladies come in.
"Bravo, Billy !" said his lordship.
"Baa," said Billy,
"You're simply magnificent, Billy/' said his lordship,
"and the most remarkable goat I ever saw."
By this time Mrs. Oakhurst had recovered herself. The
damage was done and could not be undone. But the possible
match remained. That his lordship had desired to meet
Gwendolen was much, but Lord Bampton, whose manners,
if eccentric in points, were irreproachable, was said never to

forgive want of manners in others. It suddenly occurred

to her that it might even be that he had determined to put
the Oakhursts to a severe test the very severest he could
devise. If that was so, she and Gwen, to whom she whispered
her conclusions as Billy upset the other brass tray, would
not fail to meet the occasion, whatever stress was put upon
them.
"Good afternoon, Lord Bampton," said Mrs. Oakhurst.
And when his lordship turned and saw not only Gwendolen,
but her mother as well, taking matters so sweetly, he was
doubly impressed, once by the fact of their high-bred calm
and again by the certainty that nothing but a series of similar
dramas conducted on many other occasions by Colonel
Oakhurst could possibly account for it.
"As my husband is detained for a moment, my daughter
must introduce us," said Mrs. Oakhurst.
The beautiful calm courtesy and deep interest shown by
Lord Bampton as he was made aquainted personally with
Gwendolen's mother assured them that his manners were
perfect, while this fact was confirmed by his total indifference
to the noise made by his curious pet.
As was only natural, the conversation turned cheerfully
and lightly upon goats in general, and particularly upon the
goat in the room.
"The goat really seems to be enjoying himself to-day,"
said Mrs. Oakhurst, settling herself in a settee from which
she had an admirable view of the Matterhorn and the goat
upon dangerous traverse.
its
"Colonel Oakhurst made the very same remark," said
 A COMEDY IN CAPRICORN 1015

Lord Bampton. "It is

delightful to find you are all so fond
of animals."
"I told you I adored them/' said Gwendolen, smiling.
"Do you like goats as much as your father does ?" asked
his lordship.
"Even more," said Gwendolen truthfully.
Lord Bampton allowed himself the trifling relaxation
of a look of mild wonder.
"Dear me, you don't say so," he remarked. "Still, they
have a peculiar elegance of their own, and it does not really
surprise me. I can forgive anyone anything who is fond of
animals. I think, by the way, that the one on the mantelpiece
is
measuring with his eye the distance from his perch to your
settee, Mrs. Oakhurst."
But before he or Mrs. Oakhurst could move, the goat
launched himself into the air and, missing her head by some
inches, landed on the bare barquet floor and slid for ten feet,
thus well displaying the peculiar elegance for which his
lordship commended the goat family. Mrs. Oakhurst, although
it was the first time in her life that a
goat had jumped over
her from a mantelpiece, once more displayed the high-bred
calm which had pleased their guest. It now led him on to
the further reflection that, if her mother was thus attuned
to the peculiar harmonies of the colonel's mind, and preserved
the Horatian precept of keeping cool when in difficulties,
her daughter was likely to make an equally good wife. Thus
every action of the goat and Mrs. Oakhurst and Gwendolen
riveted the fetters of love upon Lord Bampton. He naturally
assumed that their passion for the animal would make them
interested in a light zoological sketch of the Capra hticus or
Domestic Goat, and of the Capra aegagrus^ the wild goat or
paseng of the Persians.
"The paseng ranges from the Himalayas to the Caucasus,"
he told them, and they well believed it, for the goat, having
left the Himalayas of the
mantelpiece, discovered Caucasus
in the grand piano, and, perhaps imagining that a pile of
modern music represented Elburz, leapt upon the piano
lightly. The sound that proceeded from it seemed to excite
his curiosity, for he stamped as though trying the instrument's

general resonance, and then climbed on the peak of music.

"You don't mind him being on the piano, I trust ?" said
Lord Bampton, breaking off in his description of the reasons
I0l6 MO R LET ROBERTS
why the sacrifice of the goat to Athena was forbidden on the
Acropolis, just at the point that Mrs. Oakhurst longed for
him to give a practical example in the art of sacrifice to the
goddess of domestic order.
"Certainly not," said Gwen, "if it pleases the goat."
"He seems to take great interest in the music/ 5 said Lord
Bampton.
"He may eat a great deal of Debussy without getting
much further," said Gwen, as she saw the animal devouring
"L'AprSs-midi d'un Faune".
And while the goat browsed a destructive critic
like

among modern music, the incipient lovers and Mrs. Oakhurst

discussed Stravinsky, Tcherepnine, and Strauss. The con-
versation was, however, interrupted by the goat discovering
that the keyboard suggested to his native instincts a snowy
and rocky mountain path. He leapt upon it, and was so
greatly surprised by the result that he left it with a wild buck
and landed with a clatter among the fire-irons.
"That last simple chord that he struck distinctly reminded
me of a theme of Moussorgsky's," said Lord Bampton. "But,
see His interest in the instrument is by no means exhausted."
1

Certainly the goat had both courage and curiosity, for

after refreshing himself with a bite of Tschaikowsky and a
taste of Brahms he returned to the instrument and walked

up and down the keyboard with the greatest delight. His

lordship pointed out how evident it was that the goat was
pleased with the simple wood-notes which he evoked, and
from this built up a pleasing theory as to the origin of much
modern music. Gwendolen argued the point eagerly, for
she adored the moderns, and Lord Bampton at last admitted
that it was only his fun to decry them.
"One cannot deny that there is a simple wildness in the
goat's performance which is distinctly pleasing. He has, as
the critics say, an idiom of his own, not remotely like the
Russian idiom."
"I think it would please my husband," said Mrs. Oakhurst
thoughtfully.
"Then he likes music ?" asked Lord Bampton eagerly.
"No, I cannot say that. What he likes is the simpler noises
of the popular song," replied Mrs. Oakhurst. "But I wonder
what detains him. Gwendolen, please see if your father is

still manipulating that cold-water tap in the bathroom."

 A COMEDY IN CAPRICORN IOIJ

"Yes, mother," said Gwendolen.

"Has the water supply gone wrong ?" asked Lord Bampton
as the door closed.
"Oh, no," replied his hostess ;
"but when he gets excited
about anything my husband puts hishead under the tap, and
he is apt to leave the water running."
"Has he been at all excited this morning ?" asked his
lordship. "Has anything occurred to
disturb him ?"
Once more the goat played an accompaniment to the
conversation, but, with no more than a casual glance at the
performer, Mrs. Oakhurst replied that the colonel was
not
disturbed but excited by the surprising activity of the goat.
"Then I gather that you have never had a goat in here
before ?" asked Lord Bampton.
"Not that I remember," said Mrs. Oakhurst ; "but you
must not for a moment, one single moment, imagine that I
object. I adore all animals,
and so does Gwendolen."
What Lord Bampton said then was a proof of his real
feared it was
passion, for, during one terrible moment, he
obscuring his discretion. The behaviour of Colonel Oakhurst
in allowing valuable and beautiful things to be destroyed by
a goat, so distinctly out of place in a drawing-room, could
possibly be understood. A wild military experience might
account for much. But when Mrs. Oakhurst, and Gwendolen
as well, displayed neither distress nor anxiety, even when
the animal became musical, it opened to the lover the awful
alike afflicted. And
possibility of the whole household being
yet it could not be In town, Gwen had spoken as if her
!

father was capable on occasions of going directly contrary

to all dictates of reason. And was this not common in fathers,
to say nothing of men generally ? Lord Bampton accord-
ingly put hesitation aside and s'eized the happy moment.
"You may have heard it stated that I am somewhat
"
eccentric
"Oh, no," said Mrs. Oakhurst. "I cannot credit that !"
"I have known it
said," declared Lord Bampton. "But
I am only simple and direct. I shall be so now. I wish to
be allowed to pay my addresses to your daughter. One
moment, I beg! In London I admired her beauty and the
eager interest she shared with me in music, but since observing
in her whole family such a delightful sympathy with the animal

kingdom, I own I am entirely conquered. May I reckon

I0l8 MORLEY ROBERTS
upon your assistance and that of Colonel Oakhurst in the
achievement of my dearest wishes ?"
And while Mrs. Oakhurst was expressing her sincere
pleasure at the prospect, Gwendolen was arguing with her
outraged father.
"By God, the man's mad !" said the colonel, as he rubbed his
head with a rough towel. "Mad, mad as ten thousand hatters !"
"No, dad, he is only a little eccentric," urged his daughter.
"And mother says she thinks he has done it to try us."
"
"To try us !" roared the colonel. "What the devil
"To find out if we really love animals," said Gwen eagerly.
"You go in and tell him I don't," piped the colonel
furiously. "Tell him I loathe 'em, and that the only use I
have for a pet is to boil it. If I thought but no, it's im-
possible,impossible By I the the the I'd murder him
if Ithought so To try us !
Oh, Lord, to try us I"
1

Gwen caught him by the arm.

"Do, do be patient, dearest. He's really such a dear.
See how sweetly calm he is through it all."
The colonel grasped Gwen by her arm in his turn and
spoke with deadly earnestness and great rapidity.
"Look here, I'm your poor old father, and I like to behave
decently, but if you talk like that you'll you'll drive me mad.
D'ye want me to have apoplexy ? Calm through it all 1

My Venetian mirror My great grandfather's table and a

!

goat 1Tell him I won't stand it I won't Don't you see !

I can't ? Calm, is he ? Would he be calm if I visited his house

with an unbroken jackass ?"
"Oh, father, but this is only a sweet little goat," urged
Gwen. "He is really a duck."
"No," said the colonel. "I may be mad, and Lord
Bampton may be madder, but I'm not so mad as to think a
goat is a duck. You ain't thinkin' of marryin' him aftet
this, Gwen ?"
"Oh, yes, I am," said Gwen,
"Don't," said her father, "don't ! I beg you not to. I
knew a man who liked animals so that he used to take a
bag of rats into his wife's bedroom, and with 'em three
terriers, and said he'd divorce her because she didn't like it.

A man that will bring a goat into an inoffensive stranger's

house would put rattlesnakes into a baby's cradle. What's
your mother doin' ?"
 A COMEDY IN CAPRICORN 1019
"She's so calm, so sweet," said Gwen. "Do, do be patient,
father dear, and it will all come right. Please come back
now. If you don't, he'll think you didn't like him Oh, !

even when the goat jumped over mother's head she never
turned a hair She she was quite majestic !"
!

"Was she now ?" asked the colonel, as he threw the

towel into the corner. "She was majestic And am I to be 1

majestic too ?"

"Yes," said Gwen "do, do try !"
;

"Very well," said her father, in sudden gloom. "Come

in and see me tryin'. But if this infernal nobleman tries it

again with any other animal, a bull-calf or an orang-utan,

I'll shoot it in the
drawing-room. Yes, by all that's sacred,
I'll blow its bleatin' head off But? come! I want to look !

at your mother being majestic. Majestic Oh, Lord 1"

!

They were just in time to see Mrs. Oakhurst trying to be

majestic and making very little of it.
Although she sustained
the conversation with serious sweetness during the absence
of her husband and daughter, it was, as she owned later, a
very considrable strain on her not to turn round when the
goat broke the three lower glass doors of an eighteenth-
century bookcase while she discoursed to Lord Bampton
about Gwen and the pictures in the room. It seemed that
he had a true connoisseur's appreciation of Bonington and
Cotman, and found the examples of these artists' work in
the colonel's possession of the highest merit. But when
Mrs. Oakhurst left her seat to point out a drawing attributed
to Turner, the goat, having finished his work among the
books, made three successive bucks and charged the mistress
of the house from behind.
"Majestic !" said the colonel. "That's your word, Gwen !"
"Oh 1" cried Mrs. Oakhurst. "Oh !"
"I trust most sincerely you were not hurt," said Lord
Bampton, saving her from a fall.
"No, not in the least," said Mrs. Oakhurst, gasping, but
recovering herself with great rapidity. "I don't suppose
the dear creature meant any harm. It's it's only his
play."
"That's it," said the colonel thickly. "By all that's holy,
he has been playing with my bookcase The whole room
!

looks majestic."
"Does it ?" asked Lord Bampton. "Does it ? Ah, I see
You mean it looks like a ruin."
1020 MORLEY ROBERTS
"That's it," said the colonel, throwing himself into a chair.
"I've never seen a room like this since I was in an earth-
quake in Chile. It wasn't any common earthquake, I tell

you."
"Earthquakes are very interesting phenomena," said
<4
Lord Bampton. I too was in one once."
"But it didn't disturb you, I'm sure/' said the colonel.
"I'll bet the unwrecked part of this house you were as cool
as a ton of cucumbers."
"I was not disturbed in the least," replied Lord Bampton.
"I took notes and sketches."
"Have you a notebook about you now ?" asked the owner
of the scene of desolation.
It seemed that Lord Bampton had none, and any further
suggestion on the part of the colonel as to a sketch was stayed
by the goat assaulting the window.
"He seemed to wish to go into the garden," said the
guest. "Perhaps it might be as well to let him out."
"It's a very fine garden," said the colonel, "and in perfect
order, quite perfect. That's my beastly gardener's fault. I
hate order myself. What I like is ruins complete, majestic
ruins But my gardener doesn't.
! He's a very arbitrary
gardener; there's no making him see reason. That goat
will be a dead goat if you let him out."
"Do I gather you would rather the goat remained here ?"
said Lord Bampton.
"I I don't know," said the colonel "he seems cramped
;

here. Would you like him to look at the rest of the house ?"
"That is as you please, of course," said the guest. "Do
you usually let goats go everywhere, or do you keep them
to this particular room ?"
"I don't keep 'em anywhere," asid the colonel, choking.
"They only come in as visitors just as visitors."
"Yes, only as welcome visitors," said Mrs. Oakhurst,
eyeing her husband anxiously.
"Just as occasional visitors," said Gwendolen sweetly.
"Do you allow them all over your house, Lord Bampton ?"
"I beg your pardon," said Lord Bampton. "Do I allow
goats all over my house ? Oh, no, never, never I don't !

in the least mind what they do elsewhere, but I draw the

line there."
The colonel jumped to his feet.
 A COMEDY IN CAPRICORN IO21

"Father I" said his daughter.

"I can't be majestic any more," roared the colonel. "I
must speak I must What's more, I will. Do you mean
I

to say, Lord Bampton, that you never allow your goat to

enter your house ? Do you mean to tell us that you are so
damnably unkind to a precious pet like a half-grown billy-
goat as never to let him wreck a room full of valuable furniture,
never to climb upon the mantelpiece, never to smash a few
ancient mirrors, and, most of all, never to butt a visitor from
behind ?"
"Certainly not," said Lord Bampton warmly. "I am, I
may say, notoriously fond of animals, but though it affords
me no inconsiderable pleasure to see others even more
attached and devoted to them, the very last thing I myself
should allow is a goat, however well bred, to be in any
of my own rooms. What goats, or other pet animals, do
in other houses is, of course, a matter of perfect indifference
to me."
"Stop !" said Colonel Oakhurst. "Stop before I break a
blood-vessel. Perfect indifference hat !"1
My
The colonel's agitation was now so obvious that it would
have been ill-breeding on the part of the calmest nobleman
in the kingdom not to notice it. Lord Bampton did notice it.
"Did I say anything particularly remarkable ?" he asked,
with perhaps a tinge of rebuke in his voice.
"Oh, no," said the colonel. "After all that's happened,
what you said in the way of not carin' a Continental if I had
a house over my head or not seemed like a long drink on a
hot day. But, by this goat and all the goats that ever reared
over-end in a cabbage-garden, there's nothing more to be
said.It's no go. It can't be done. I won't allow it. I'd rather
die first"
"Than do what, dad ?" asked Gwen.
The colonel gasped and again tugged at his collar.
"You you know ! You
marry Lord Bampton
can't

you can't I won't have it. He's mad, mad, quite mad !"
!

Mrs. Oakhurst rose in haste. Gwen made a step towards

her lover, who looked the picture of well-bred amazement.
After his own apparently sound doubts of the colonel's entire
sanity it was strange to discover that for some peculiar reason
his own was doubted.
"Oh, father 1" said Gwen.
 1022 MORLEY ROBERTS
"Oh, Tom 1" said his wife.
"Don't Tom me," roared the colonel savagely. "I forbid .

it all of it. I won't have it. Mad, mad as a hatter I"

Lord Bampton now perceived that he was in an awkward
situation. He therefore sought to temporize with the colonel
knowing that to contradict a maniac in the acute stage was,
by those best acquainted with the insane, considered both
useless and dangerous. It seemed possible to the guest that
he had unwittingly shown disapproval of the goat being in
the drawing-room. He hastened to remove this impression.
"Perhaps I was wrong in saying something which seemed
to imply a lack of feeling for this delightful animal," he said
very earnestly. "I assure you, Colonel Oakhurst, that when
I said that what it did here was a matter of indifference to me,
I by no means meant that I was not charmed and interested

by it. I trust you will not think me inconsiderate to animals."

Colonel Oakhurst went the colour of an oak tree in autumn.
"Look here !" he said, and then stopped to catch his
breath.
"Pray continue," said Lord Bampton.
"Take your damned goat out of my house," roared the
colonel, "or by the Holy Poker I'll get a gun and shoot it !"
"Take whose goat ?" asked Lord Bampton.
"Whose goat ? Whose goat ?" asked the colonel.
"Yes, whose?"
"Yours, yours !" said the colonel.
And Lord Bampton, for the first time losing the calm
which became him so well, sat down in the nearest chair with
a positive thump. The goat came up to him, and his lordship
absolutely glared at it.
"My my goat?"
"Yes ! Take it
away take it away quick, before I explode,"
said the colonel. "Or else I'll do your cursed pet a mischief."
And Lord Bampton fairly collapsed.
"It's not my goat," he said feebly. "Oh, no, it's not mine !

I never saw the awful animal before."

"Oh 1" said Mrs. Oakhurst.
"Oh Gwendolen, and once more the colonel did
1" said
one of those peculiar little runs up and down the room
which betokened a really disturbed state of mind.
"You never, never saw it before ?" he asked at last in a
curious choked whisper.
 A COMEDY IN CAPRICORN TOZ?
7'

"Never, never I said his lordship. "Why, naturally

enough, I thought it was yours !"
It was the colonel's turn to sit down. He did so, and
opened his mouth three times before he could speak.
"Oh, you thought it mine, did you ?" he asked. "May
I may I ask if you thought I was twice as mad as a March
hare ?"
"The possibility never entered my head," said Lord Bamp-
ton earnestly. "I merely thought that your choice of a
household pet was uncommon and the latitude you gave
it surprising."
The colonel mopped his face.
"But but it came in with you ?" he urged. "I saw it

myself."
"So did your butler," replied Lord Bampton "but that
;

doesn't make him wy butler. If I had come in with a tiger

after me, would that have made him my tiger ? Of course
I thought it was your goat."
"Then then whose goat is it ?" asked the colonel fiercely.
"If Benson can*t tell me, he'll be no one's butler in two shakes
of a lamb's tail. Let me get at him !"
And then Gwen, who had been speechless, burst into
laughter and interrupted her father at the door.
"Dad, didn't you tell poor Benson that Lord Bampton
loved pets, and that if he brought one it was to come into
this room ?" she asked.
"You did, Tom/' said Mrs. Oakhurst ; "yes, you did !"
"So I did," said the colonel, "so I did But I never, never,
!

never reckoned on a goat !Look at the fiend now He's!

eating my old Persian rug. Let him, what's it matter ?"

But it did matter, for the goat was disappointed with
green worsted and eyed the whole party with malignancy.
"I apologize, Lord Bampton," said the colonel, "1 apologize
"
humbly and more than humbly. I I
"Don't mention it," said Lord Bampton. "I have a con-
fession to make."
The colonel started.
"Look here, you ain't by any chance goin' to say it's your
goat after all, are you ? I tell you I couldn't, couldn't bear
it I"

"No, Colonel Oakhurst," said Lord Bampton. "But you

seem to know that I came here to ask permission to pay my
1024 MORLEY ROBERTS
addresses to Miss Oakhurst. I confess such a question would
have been disingenuous since I have her permission to ask
for her hand/*
"My my hat !" said the colonel. "You don't say so I"
"I do say so/* replied Lord Bampton firmly.
"Speak, Tom, speak 1" said Mrs. Oakhurst.
But the colonel couldn't speak. He looked round and,
catching Gwen's beaming eye, saw the only thing to do. He
took her hand and made a step towards Lord Bampton. But
he didn't deliver the goods. The goat did that.
,