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A Set of Six

by Joseph Conrad · English · Gutenberg #2305 · 492,776 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: A Set of Six

Author: Joseph Conrad


        
Release date: January 9, 2006 [eBook #2305]
                Most recently updated: September 26, 2026

Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK A SET OF SIX ***





A SET OF SIX

By Joseph Conrad



_Les petites marionnettes
Font, font, font,
Trois petits tours
Et puis s'en vont_.
--NURSERY RHYME




TO MISS M. H. M. CAPES




AUTHOR'S NOTE


THE six stories in this volume are the result of some three or four
years of occasional work. The dates of their writing are far apart,
their origins are various. None of them are connected directly with
personal experiences. In all of them the facts are inherently true, by
which I mean that they are not only possible but that they have actually
happened. For instance, the last story in the volume, the one I call
Pathetic, whose first title is Il Conde (misspelt by-the-by) is an
almost verbatim transcript of the tale told me by a very charming old
gentleman whom I met in Italy. I don't mean to say it is only that.
Anybody can see that it is something more than a verbatim report,
but where he left off and where I began must be left to the acute
discrimination of the reader who may be interested in the problem.
I don't mean to say that the problem is worth the trouble. What I am
certain of, however, is that it is not to be solved, for I am not at
all clear about it myself by this time. All I can say is that the
personality of the narrator was extremely suggestive quite apart from
the story he was telling me. I heard a few years ago that he had died
far away from his beloved Naples where that "abominable adventure" did
really happen to him.

Thus the genealogy of Il Conde is simple. It is not the case with the
other stories. Various strains contributed to their composition, and the
nature of many of those I have forgotten, not having the habit of making
notes either before or after the fact. I mean the fact of writing a
story. What I remember best about Gaspar Ruiz is that it was written, or
at any rate begun, within a month of finishing Nostromo; but apart
from the locality, and that a pretty wide one (all the South American
Continent), the novel and the story have nothing in common, neither
mood, nor intention and, certainly, not the style. The manner for the
most part is that of General Santierra, and that old warrior, I note
with satisfaction, is very true to himself all through. Looking now
dispassionately at the various ways in which this story could have been
presented I can't honestly think the General superfluous. It is he, an
old man talking of the days of his youth, who characterizes the whole
narrative and gives it an air of actuality which I doubt whether I could
have achieved without his help. In the mere writing his existence
of course was of no help at all, because the whole thing had to be
carefully kept within the frame of his simple mind. But all this is but
a laborious searching of memories. My present feeling is that the story
could not have been told otherwise. The hint for Gaspar Ruiz the man
I found in a book by Captain Basil Hall, R.N., who was for some time,
between the years 1824 and 1828, senior officer of a small British
Squadron on the West Coast of South America. His book published in the
thirties obtained a certain celebrity and I suppose is to be found still
in some libraries. The curious who may be mistrusting my imagination are
referred to that printed document, Vol. II, I forget the page, but it
is somewhere not far from the end. Another document connected with this
story is a letter of a biting and ironic kind from a friend then in
Burma, passing certain strictures upon "the gentleman with the gun on
his back" which I do not intend to make accessible to the public. Yet
the gun episode did really happen, or at least I am bound to believe it
because I remember it, described in an extremely matter-of-fact tone,
in some book I read in my boyhood; and I am not going to discard the
beliefs of my boyhood for anybody on earth.

The Brute, which is the only sea-story in the volume, is, like Il Conde,
associated with a direct narrative and based on a suggestion gathered on
warm human lips. I will not disclose the real name of the criminal ship
but the first I heard of her homicidal habits was from the late Captain
Blake, commanding a London ship in which I served in 1884 as Second
Officer. Captain Blake was, of all my commanders, the one I remember
with the greatest affection. I have sketched in his personality, without
however mentioning his name, in the first paper of The Mirror of the
Sea. In his young days he had had a personal experience of the brute and
it is perhaps for that reason that I have put the story into the mouth
of a young man and made of it what the reader will see. The existence
of the brute was a fact. The end of the brute as related in the story is
also a fact, well-known at the time though it really happened to
another ship, of great beauty of form and of blameless character, which
certainly deserved a better fate. I have unscrupulously adapted it to
the needs of my story thinking that I had there something in the nature
of poetical justice. I hope that little villainy will not cast a shadow
upon the general honesty of my proceedings as a writer of tales.

Of The Informer and An Anarchist I will say next to nothing. The
pedigree of these tales is hopelessly complicated and not worth
disentangling at this distance of time. I found them and here they are.
The discriminating reader will guess that I have found them within my
mind; but how they or their elements came in there I have forgotten for
the most part; and for the rest I really don't see why I should give
myself away more than I have done already.

It remains for me only now to mention The Duel, the longest story in the
book. That story attained the dignity of publication all by itself in a
small illustrated volume, under the title, "The Point of Honour." That
was many years ago. It has been since reinstated in its proper place,
which is the place it occupies in this volume, in all the subsequent
editions of my work. Its pedigree is extremely simple. It springs from a
ten-line paragraph in a small provincial paper published in the South of
France. That paragraph, occasioned by a duel with a fatal ending between
two well-known Parisian personalities, referred for some reason or other
to the "well-known fact" of two officers in Napoleon's Grand Army having
fought a series of duels in the midst of great wars and on some futile
pretext. The pretext was never disclosed. I had therefore to invent it;
and I think that, given the character of the two officers which I had to
invent, too, I have made it sufficiently convincing by the mere force of
its absurdity. The truth is that in my mind the story is nothing but a
serious and even earnest attempt at a bit of historical fiction. I had
heard in my boyhood a good deal of the great Napoleonic legend. I had a
genuine feeling that I would find myself at home in it, and The Duel
is the result of that feeling, or, if the reader prefers, of that
presumption. Personally I have no qualms of conscience about this piece
of work. The story might have been better told of course. All one's work
might have been better done; but this is the sort of reflection a
worker must put aside courageously if he doesn't mean every one of his
conceptions to remain for ever a private vision, an evanescent reverie.
How many of those visions have I seen vanish in my time! This one,
however, has remained, a testimony, if you like, to my courage or a
proof of my rashness. What I care to remember best is the testimony of
some French readers who volunteered the opinion that in those hundred
pages or so I had managed to render "wonderfully" the spirit of the
whole epoch. Exaggeration of kindness no doubt; but even so I hug it
still to my breast, because in truth that is exactly what I was trying
to capture in my small net: the Spirit of the Epoch--never purely
militarist in the long clash of arms, youthful, almost childlike in its
exaltation of sentiment--naively heroic in its faith.


1920. J. C.





CONTENTS


GASPAR RUIZ

THE INFORMER

THE BRUTE

AN ANARCHIST

THE DUEL

IL CONDE





A SET OF SIX




GASPAR RUIZ


I


A revolutionary war raises many strange characters out of the obscurity
which is the common lot of humble lives in an undisturbed state of
society.

Certain individualities grow into fame through their vices and their
virtues, or simply by their actions, which may have a temporary
importance; and then they become forgotten. The names of a few leaders
alone survive the end of armed strife and are further preserved in
history; so that, vanishing from men's active memories, they still exist
in books.

The name of General Santierra attained that cold paper-and-ink
immortality. He was a South American of good family, and the books
published in his lifetime numbered him amongst the liberators of that
continent from the oppressive rule of Spain.

That long contest, waged for independence on one side and for dominion
on the other, developed in the course of years and the vicissitudes of
changing fortune the fierceness and inhumanity of a struggle for
life. All feelings of pity and compassion disappeared in the growth of
political hatred. And, as is usual in war, the mass of the people,
who had the least to gain by the issue, suffered most in their obscure
persons and their humble fortunes.

General Santierra began his service as lieutenant in the patriot army
raised and commanded by the famous San Martin, afterwards conqueror of
Lima and liberator of Peru. A great battle had just been fought on the
banks of the river Bio-Bio. Amongst the prisoners made upon the routed
Royalist troops there was a soldier called Gaspar Ruiz. His powerful
build and his big head rendered him remarkable amongst his
fellow-captives. The personality of the man was unmistakable. Some
months before he had been missed from the ranks of Republican troops
after one of the many skirmishes which preceded the great battle. And
now, having been captured arms in hand amongst Royalists, he could
expect no other fate but to be shot as a deserter.

Gaspar Ruiz, however, was not a deserter; his mind was hardly active
enough to take a discriminating view of the advantages or perils
of treachery. Why should he change sides? He had really been made a
prisoner, had suffered ill-usage and many privations. Neither side
showed tenderness to its adversaries. There came a day when he was
ordered, together with some other captured rebels, to march in the front
rank of the Royal troops. A musket had been thrust into his hands.
He had taken it. He had marched. He did not want to be killed with
circumstances of peculiar atrocity for refusing to march. He did not
understand heroism but it was his intention to throw his musket away at
the first opportunity. Meantime he had gone on loading and firing, from
fear of having his brains blown out at the first sign of unwillingness,
by some non-commissioned officer of the King of Spain. He tried to set
forth these elementary considerations before the sergeant of the
guard set over him and some twenty other such deserters, who had been
condemned summarily to be shot.

It was in the quadrangle of the fort at the back of the batteries which
command the roadstead of Valparaiso. The officer who had identified him
had gone on without listening to his protestations. His doom was sealed;
his hands were tied very tightly together behind his back; his body was
sore all over from the many blows with sticks and butts of muskets which
had hurried him along on the painful road from the place of his capture
to the gate of the fort. This was the only kind of systematic attention
the prisoners had received from their escort during a four days' journey
across a scantily watered tract of country. At the crossings of rare
streams they were permitted to quench their thirst by lapping hurriedly
like dogs. In the evening a few scraps of meat were thrown amongst
them as they dropped down dead-beat upon the stony ground of the
halting-place.

As he stood in the courtyard of the castle in the early morning, after
having been driven hard all night, Gaspar Ruiz's throat was parched, and
his tongue felt very large and dry in his mouth.

And Gaspar Ruiz, besides being very thirsty, was stirred by a feeling
of sluggish anger, which he could not very well express, as though the
vigour of his spirit were by no means equal to the strength of his body.

The other prisoners in the batch of the condemned hung their heads,
looking obstinately on the ground. But Gaspar Ruiz kept on repeating:
"What should I desert for to the Royalists? Why should I desert? Tell
me, Estaban!"

He addressed himself to the sergeant, who happened to belong to the same
part of the country as himself. But the sergeant, after shrugging his
meagre shoulders once, paid no further attention to the deep murmuring
voice at his back. It was indeed strange that Gaspar Ruiz should desert.
His people were in too humble a station to feel much the disadvantages
of any form of government. There was no reason why Gaspar Ruiz should
wish to uphold in his own person the rule of the King of Spain. Neither
had he been anxious to exert himself for its subversion. He had joined
the side of Independence in an extremely reasonable and natural manner.
A band of patriots appeared one morning early, surrounding his father's
ranche, spearing the watch-dogs and ham-stringing a fat cow all in the
twinkling of an eye, to the cries of "Viva la Libertad!" Their officer
discoursed of Liberty with enthusiasm and eloquence after a long and
refreshing sleep. When they left in the evening, taking with them some
of Ruiz, the father's, best horses to replace their own lamed animals,
Gaspar Ruiz went away with them, having been invited pressingly to do so
by the eloquent officer.

Shortly afterwards a detachment of Royalist troops coming to pacify the
district, burnt the ranche, carried off the remaining horses and
cattle, and having thus deprived the old people of all their worldly
possessions, left them sitting under a bush in the enjoyment of the
inestimable boon of life.


II


Gaspar Ruiz, condemned to death as a deserter, was not thinking either
of his native place or of his parents, to whom he had been a good son on
account of the mildness of his character and the great strength of his
limbs. The practical advantage of this last was made still more
valuable to his father by his obedient disposition. Gaspar Ruiz had an
acquiescent soul.

But it was stirred now to a sort of dim revolt by his dislike to die the
death of a traitor. He was not a traitor. He said again to the sergeant:
"You know I did not desert, Estaban. You know I remained behind amongst
the trees with three others to keep the enemy back while the detachment
was running away!"

Lieutenant Santierra, little more than a boy at the time, and unused as
yet to the sanguinary imbecilities of a state of war, had lingered
near by, as if fascinated by the sight of these men who were to be shot
presently--"for an example"--as the Commandante had said.

The sergeant, without deigning to look at the prisoner, addressed
himself to the young officer with a superior smile.

"Ten men would not have been enough to make him a prisoner, mi teniente.
Moreover, the other three rejoined the detachment after dark. Why should
he, unwounded and the strongest of them all, have failed to do so?"

"My strength is as nothing against a mounted man with a lasso," Gaspar
Ruiz protested, eagerly. "He dragged me behind his horse for half a
mile."

At this excellent reason the sergeant only laughed contemptuously. The
young officer hurried away after the Commandante.

Presently the adjutant of the castle came by. He was a truculent,
raw-boned man in a ragged uniform. His spluttering voice issued out of
a flat yellow face. The sergeant learned from him that the condemned men
would not be shot till sunset. He begged then to know what he was to do
with them meantime.

The adjutant looked savagely round the courtyard and, pointing to the
door of a small dungeon-like guardroom, receiving light and air through
one heavily barred window, said: "Drive the scoundrels in there."

The sergeant, tightening his grip upon the stick he carried in virtue
of his rank, executed this order with alacrity and zeal. He hit Gaspar
Ruiz, whose movements were slow, over his head and shoulders. Gaspar
Ruiz stood still for a moment under the shower of blows, biting his
lip thoughtfully as if absorbed by a perplexing mental process--then
followed the others without haste. The door was locked, and the adjutant
carried off the key.

By noon the heat of that vaulted place crammed to suffocation had become
unbearable. The prisoners crowded towards the window, begging their
guards for a drop of water; but the soldiers remained lying in indolent
attitudes wherever there was a little shade under a wall, while the
sentry sat with his back against the door smoking a cigarette, and
raising his eyebrows philosophically from time to time. Gaspar Ruiz
had pushed his way to the window with irresistible force. His capacious
chest needed more air than the others; his big face, resting with its
chin on the ledge, pressed close to the bars, seemed to support the
other faces crowding up for breath. From moaned entreaties they had
passed to desperate cries, and the tumultuous howling of those thirsty
men obliged a young officer who was just then crossing the courtyard to
shout in order to make himself heard.

"Why don't you give some water to these prisoners?"

The sergeant, with an air of surprised innocence, excused himself by the
remark that all those men were condemned to die in a very few hours.

Lieutenant Santierra stamped his foot. "They are condemned to death, not
to torture," he shouted. "Give them some water at once."

Impressed by this appearance of anger, the soldiers bestirred
themselves, and the sentry, snatching up his musket, stood to attention.

But when a couple of buckets were found and filled from the well, it was
discovered that they could not be passed through the bars, which were
set too close. At the prospect of quenching their thirst, the shrieks of
those trampled down in the struggle to get near the opening became very
heartrending. But when the soldiers who had lifted the buckets towards
the window put them to the ground again helplessly, the yell of
disappointment was still more terrible.

The soldiers of the army of Independence were not equipped with
canteens. A small tin cup was found, but its approach to the opening
caused such a commotion, such yells of rage and pain in the vague mass
of limbs behind the straining faces at the window, that Lieutenant
Santierra cried out hurriedly, "No, no--you must open the door,
sergeant."

The sergeant, shrugging his shoulders, explained that he had no right
to open the door even if he had had the key. But he had not the key.
The adjutant of the garrison kept the key. Those men were giving much
unnecessary trouble, since they had to die at sunset in any case.
Why they had not been shot at once early in the morning he could not
understand.

Lieutenant Santierra kept his back studiously to the window. It was
at his earnest solicitations that the Commandante had delayed the
execution. This favour had been granted to him in consideration of
his distinguished family and of his father's high position amongst the
chiefs of the Republican party. Lieutenant Santierra believed that the
General commanding would visit the fort some time in the afternoon,
and he ingenuously hoped that his naive intercession would induce
that severe man to pardon some, at least, of those criminals. In the
revulsion of his feeling his interference stood revealed now as guilty
and futile meddling. It appeared to him obvious that the general would
never even consent to listen to his petition. He could never save those
men, and he had only made himself responsible for the sufferings added
to the cruelty of their fate.

"Then go at once and get the key from the adjutant," said Lieutenant
Santierra.

The sergeant shook his head with a sort of bashful smile, while his eyes
glanced sideways at Gaspar Ruiz's face, motionless and silent, staring
through the bars at the bottom of a heap of other haggard, distorted,
yelling faces.

His worship the adjutant de Plaza, the sergeant murmured, was having his
siesta; and supposing that he, the sergeant, would be allowed access to
him, the only result he expected would be to have his soul flogged out
of his body for presuming to disturb his worship's repose. He made a
deprecatory movement with his hands, and stood stock-still, looking down
modestly upon his brown toes.

Lieutenant Santierra glared with indignation, but hesitated. His
handsome oval face, as smooth as a girl's, flushed with the shame of
his perplexity. Its nature humiliated his spirit. His hairless upper lip
trembled; he seemed on the point of either bursting into a fit of rage
or into tears of dismay.

Fifty years later, General Santierra, the venerable relic of
revolutionary times, was well able to remember the feelings of the
young lieutenant. Since he had given up riding altogether, and found
it difficult to walk beyond the limits of his garden, the general's
greatest delight was to entertain in his house the officers of the
foreign men-of-war visiting the harbour. For Englishmen he had a
preference, as for old companions in arms. English naval men of all
ranks accepted his hospitality with curiosity, because he had known Lord
Cochrane and had taken part, on board the patriot squadron commanded
by that marvellous seaman, in the cutting out and blockading operations
before Callao--an episode of unalloyed glory in the wars of Independence
and of endless honour in the fighting tradition of Englishmen. He was a
fair linguist, this ancient survivor of the Liberating armies. A trick
of smoothing his long white beard whenever he was short of a word in
French or English imparted an air of leisurely dignity to the tone of
his reminiscences.


III


"Yes, my friends," he used to say to his guests, "what would you have?
A youth of seventeen summers, without worldly experience, and owing
my rank only to the glorious patriotism of my father, may God rest his
soul. I suffered immense humiliation, not so much from the disobedience
of that subordinate, who, after all, was responsible for those
prisoners; but I suffered because, like the boy I was, I myself dreaded
going to the adjutant for the key. I had felt, before, his rough and
cutting tongue. Being quite a common fellow, with no merit except his
savage valour, he made me feel his contempt and dislike from the
first day I joined my battalion in garrison at the fort. It was only
a fortnight before! I would have confronted him sword in hand, but I
shrank from the mocking brutality of his sneers.

"I don't remember having been so miserable in my life before or since.
The torment of my sensibility was so great that I wished the sergeant to
fall dead at my feet, and the stupid soldiers who stared at me to
turn into corpses; and even those wretches for whom my entreaties had
procured a reprieve I wished dead also, because I could not face them
without shame. A mephitic heat like a whiff of air from hell came out of
that dark place in which they were confined. Those at the window who had
heard what was going on jeered at me in very desperation: one of these
fellows, gone mad no doubt, kept on urging me volubly to order the
soldiers to fire through the window. His insane loquacity made my heart
turn faint. And my feet were like lead. There was no higher officer to
whom I could appeal. I had not even the firmness of spirit to simply go
away.

"Benumbed by my remorse, I stood with my back to the window. You must
not suppose that all this lasted a long time. How long could it have
been? A minute? If you measured by mental suffering it was like a
hundred years; a longer time than all my life has been since. No,
certainly, it was not so much as a minute. The hoarse screaming of those
miserable wretches died out in their dry throats, and then suddenly a
voice spoke, a deep voice muttering calmly. It called upon me to turn
round.

"That voice, senores, proceeded from the head of Gaspar Ruiz. Of his
body I could see nothing. Some of his fellow-captives had clambered upon
his back. He was holding them up. His eyes blinked without looking at
me. That and the moving of his lips was all he seemed able to manage in
his overloaded state. And when I turned round, this head, that seemed
more than human size resting on its chin under a multitude of other
heads, asked me whether I really desired to quench the thirst of the
captives.

"I said, 'Yes, yes!' eagerly, and came up quite close to the window. I
was like a child, and did not know what would happen. I was anxious to
be comforted in my helplessness and remorse.

"'Have you the authority, Senor teniente, to release my wrists from
their bonds?' Gaspar Ruiz's head asked me.

"His features expressed no anxiety, no hope; his heavy eyelids blinked
upon his eyes that looked past me straight into the courtyard.

"As if in an ugly dream, I spoke, stammering: 'What do you mean? And how
can I reach the bonds on your wrists?'

"'I will try what I can do,' he said; and then that large staring
head moved at last, and all the wild faces piled up in that window
disappeared, tumbling down. He had shaken his load off with one
movement, so strong he was.

"And he had not only shaken it off, but he got free of the crush and
vanished from my sight. For a moment there was no one at all to be seen
at the window. He had swung about, butting and shouldering, clearing
a space for himself in the only way he could do it with his hands tied
behind his back.

"Finally, backing to the opening, he pushed out to me between the bars
his wrists, lashed with many turns of rope. His hands, very swollen,
with knotted veins, looked enormous and unwieldy. I saw his bent back.
It was very broad. His voice was like the muttering of a bull.

"'Cut, Senor teniente. Cut!'

"I drew my sword, my new unblunted sword that had seen no service as
yet, and severed the many turns of the hide rope. I did this without
knowing the why and the wherefore of my action, but as it were compelled
by my faith in that man. The sergeant made as if to cry out, but
astonishment deprived him of his voice, and he remained standing with
his mouth open as if overtaken by sudden imbecility.

"I sheathed my sword and faced the soldiers. An air of awestruck
expectation had replaced their usual listless apathy. I heard the voice
of Gaspar Ruiz shouting inside, but the words I could not make out
plainly. I suppose that to see him with his arms free augmented the
influence of his strength: I mean by this, the spiritual influence that
with ignorant people attaches to an exceptional degree of bodily vigour.
In fact, he was no more to be feared than before, on account of the
numbness of his arms and hands, which lasted for some time.

"The sergeant had recovered his power of speech. 'By all the saints!'
he cried, 'we shall have to get a cavalry man with a lasso to secure him
again, if he is to be led to the place of execution. Nothing less than a
good enlazador on a good horse can subdue him. Your worship was pleased
to perform a very mad thing.'

"I had nothing to say. I was surprised myself, and I felt a childish
curiosity to see what would happen next. But the sergeant was thinking
of the difficulty of controlling Gaspar Ruiz when the time for making an
example would come.

"'Or perhaps,' the sergeant pursued, vexedly, 'we shall be obliged to
shoot him down as he dashes out when the door is opened.' He was going
to give further vent to his anxieties as to the proper carrying out
of the sentence; but he interrupted himself with a sudden exclamation,
snatched a musket from a soldier, and stood watchful with his eyes fixed
on the window."


IV


"Gaspar Ruiz had clambered up on the sill, and sat down there with his
feet against the thickness of the wall and his knees slightly bent.
The window was not quite broad enough for the length of his legs. It
appeared to my crestfallen perception that he meant to keep the window
all to himself. He seemed to be taking up a comfortable position. Nobody
inside dared to approach him now he could strike with his hands.

"'Por Dios!' I heard the sergeant muttering at my elbow, 'I shall shoot
him through the head now, and get rid of that trouble. He is a condemned
man.'

"At that I looked at him angrily. 'The general has not confirmed the
sentence,' I said--though I knew well in my heart that these were but
vain words. The sentence required no confirmation. 'You have no right to
shoot him unless he tries to escape,' I added, firmly.

"'But sangre de Dios!' the sergeant yelled out, bringing his musket up
to the shoulder, 'he is escaping now. Look!'

"But I, as if that Gaspar Ruiz had cast a spell upon me, struck the
musket upward, and the bullet flew over the roofs somewhere. The
sergeant dashed his arm to the ground and stared. He might have
commanded the soldiers to fire, but he did not. And if he had he would
not have been obeyed, I think, just then.

"With his feet against the thickness of the wall and his hairy hands
grasping the iron bar, Gaspar sat still. It was an attitude. Nothing
happened for a time. And suddenly it dawned upon us that he was
straightening his bowed back and contracting his arms. His lips were
twisted into a snarl. Next thing we perceived was that the bar of forged
iron was being bent slowly by the mightiness of his pull. The sun
was beating full upon his cramped, unquivering figure. A shower of
sweat-drops burst out of his forehead. Watching the bar grow crooked, I
saw a little blood ooze from under his finger-nails. Then he let go.
For a moment he remained all huddled up, with a hanging head, looking
drowsily into the upturned palms of his mighty hands. Indeed he seemed
to have dozed off. Suddenly he flung himself backwards on the sill, and
setting the soles of his bare feet against the other middle bar, he bent
that one, too, but in the opposite direction from the first.

"Such was his strength, which in this case relieved my painful feelings.
And the man seemed to have done nothing. Except for the change of
position in order to use his feet, which made us all start by its
swiftness, my recollection is that of immobility. But he had bent the
bars wide apart. And now he could get out if he liked; but he dropped
his legs inwards, and looking over his shoulder beckoned to the
soldiers. 'Hand up the water,' he said. 'I will give them all a drink.'

"He was obeyed. For a moment I expected man and bucket to disappear,
overwhelmed by the rush of eagerness; I thought they would pull him down
with their teeth. There was a rush, but holding the bucket on his lap he
repulsed the assault of those wretches by the mere swinging of his feet.
They flew backwards at every kick, yelling with pain; and the soldiers
laughed, gazing at the window.

"They all laughed, holding their sides, except the sergeant, who was
gloomy and morose. He was afraid the prisoners would rise and break
out--which would have been a bad example. But there was no fear of
that, and I stood myself before the window with my drawn sword. When
sufficiently tamed by the strength of Gaspar Ruiz they came up one by
one, stretching their necks and presenting their lips to the edge of the
bucket which the strong man tilted towards them from his knees with
an extraordinary air of charity, gentleness, and compassion. That
benevolent appearance was of course the effect of his care in not
spilling the water and of his attitude as he sat on the sill; for, if a
man lingered with his lips glued to the rim of the bucket after Gaspar
Ruiz had said 'You have had enough,' there would be no tenderness or
mercy in the shove of the foot which would send him groaning and doubled
up far into the interior of the prison, where he would knock down two
or three others before he fell himself. They came up to him again and
again; it looked as if they meant to drink the well dry before going to
their death; but the soldiers were so amused by Gaspar Ruiz's systematic
proceedings that they carried the water up to the window cheerfully.

"When the adjutant came out after his siesta there was some trouble over
this affair, I can assure you. And the worst of it was that the general
whom we expected never came to the castle that day."

The guests of General Santierra unanimously expressed their regret that
the man of such strength and patience had not been saved.

"He was not saved by my interference," said the General. "The prisoners
were led to execution half an hour before sunset. Gaspar Ruiz, contrary
to the sergeant's apprehensions, gave no trouble. There was no necessity
to get a cavalry man with a lasso in order to subdue him, as if he were
a wild bull of the campo. I believe he marched out with his arms free
amongst the others who were bound. I did not see. I was not there. I had
been put under arrest for interfering with the prisoner's guard. About
dusk, sitting dismally in my quarters, I heard three volleys fired, and
thought that I should never hear of Gaspar Ruiz again. He fell with the
others. But we were to hear of him nevertheless, though the sergeant
boasted that as he lay on his face expiring or dead in the heap of the
slain, he had slashed his neck with a sword. He had done this, he said,
to make sure of ridding the world of a dangerous traitor.

"I confess to you, senores, that I thought of that strong man with a
sort of gratitude, and with some admiration. He had used his strength
honourably. There dwelt, then, in his soul no fierceness corresponding
to the vigour of his body."


V


Gaspar Ruiz, who could with ease bend apart the heavy iron bars of the
prison, was led out with others to summary execution. "Every bullet has
its billet," runs the proverb. All the merit of proverbs consists in
the concise and picturesque expression. In the surprise of our minds is
found their persuasiveness. In other words, we are struck and convinced
by the shock.

What surprises us is the form, not the substance. Proverbs are
art--cheap art. As a general rule they are not true; unless indeed they
happen to be mere platitudes, as for instance the proverb, "Half a
loaf is better than no bread," or "A miss is as good as a mile." Some
proverbs are simply imbecile, others are immoral. That one evolved out
of the naive heart of the great Russian people, "Man discharges the
piece, but God carries the bullet," is piously atrocious, and at bitter
variance with the accepted conception of a compassionate God. It would
indeed be an inconsistent occupation for the Guardian of the poor, the
innocent, and the helpless, to carry the bullet, for instance, into the
heart of a father.

Gaspar Ruiz was childless, he had no wife, he had never been in love.
He had hardly ever spoken to a woman, beyond his mother and the ancient
negress of the household, whose wrinkled skin was the colour of cinders,
and whose lean body was bent double from age. If some bullets from those
muskets fired off at fifteen paces were specifically destined for
the heart of Gaspar Ruiz, they all missed their billet. One, however,
carried away a small piece of his ear, and another a fragment of flesh
from his shoulder.

A red and unclouded sun setting into a purple ocean looked with a fiery
stare upon the enormous wall of the Cordilleras, worthy witnesses of his
glorious extinction. But it is inconceivable that it should have seen
the ant-like men busy with their absurd and insignificant trials of
killing and dying for reasons that, apart from being generally childish,
were also imperfectly understood. It did light up, however, the backs
of the firing party and the faces of the condemned men. Some of them
had fallen on their knees, others remained standing, a few averted their
heads from the levelled barrels of muskets. Gaspar Ruiz, upright, the
burliest of them all, hung his big shock head. The low sun dazzled him a
little, and he counted himself a dead man already.

He fell at the first discharge. He fell because he thought he was a dead
man. He struck the ground heavily. The jar of the fall surprised him.
"I am not dead apparently," he thought to himself, when he heard the
execution platoon reloading its arms at the word of command. It was then
that the hope of escape dawned upon him for the first time. He remained
lying stretched out with rigid limbs under the weight of two bodies
collapsed crosswise upon his back.

By the time the soldiers had fired a third volley into the slightly
stirring heaps of the slain, the sun had gone out of sight, and almost
immediately with the darkening of the ocean dusk fell upon the coasts of
the young Republic. Above the gloom of the lowlands the snowy peaks
of the Cordilleras remained luminous and crimson for a long time. The
soldiers before marching back to the fort sat down to smoke.

The sergeant with a naked sword in his hand strolled away by himself
along the heap of the dead. He was a humane man, and watched for any
stir or twitch of limb in the merciful idea of plunging the point of his
blade into any body giving the slightest sign of life. But none of the
bodies afforded him an opportunity for the display of this charitable
intention. Not a muscle twitched amongst them, not even the powerful
muscles of Gaspar Ruiz, who, deluged with the blood of his neighbours
and shamming death, strove to appear more lifeless than the others.

He was lying face down. The sergeant recognized him by his stature, and
being himself a very small man, looked with envy and contempt at the
prostration of so much strength. He had always disliked that particular
soldier. Moved by an obscure animosity, he inflicted a long gash across
the neck of Gaspar Ruiz, with some vague notion of making sure of that
strong man's death, as if a powerful physique were more able to resist
the bullets. For the sergeant had no doubt that Gaspar Ruiz had been
shot through in many places. Then he passed on, and shortly afterwards
marched off with his men, leaving the bodies to the care of crows and
vultures.

Gaspar Ruiz had restrained a cry, though it had seemed to him that his
head was cut off at a blow; and when darkness came, shaking off the
dead, whose weight had oppressed him, he crawled away over the plain on
his hands and knees. After drinking deeply, like a wounded beast, at
a shallow stream, he assumed an upright posture, and staggered on
light-headed and aimless, as if lost amongst the stars of the clear
night. A small house seemed to rise out of the ground before him. He
stumbled into the porch and struck at the door with his fist. There
was not a gleam of light. Gaspar Ruiz might have thought that the
inhabitants had fled from it, as from many others in the neighbourhood,
had it not been for the shouts of abuse that answered his thumping. In
his feverish and enfeebled state the angry screaming seemed to him part
of a hallucination belonging to the weird, dreamlike feeling of his
unexpected condemnation to death, of the thirst suffered, of the volleys
fired at him within fifteen paces, of his head being cut off at a blow.
"Open the door!" he cried. "Open in the name of God!"

An infuriated voice from within jeered at him: "Come in, come in. This
house belongs to you. All this land belongs to you. Come and take it."

"For the love of God," Gaspar Ruiz murmured.

"Does not all the land belong to you patriots?" the voice on the other
side of the door screamed on. "Are you not a patriot?"

Gaspar Ruiz did not know. "I am a wounded man," he said, apathetically.

All became still inside. Gaspar Ruiz lost the hope of being admitted,
and lay down under the porch just outside the door. He was utterly
careless of what was going to happen to him. All his consciousness
seemed to be concentrated in his neck, where he felt a severe pain. His
indifference as to his fate was genuine. The day was breaking when he
awoke from a feverish doze; the door at which he had knocked in the dark
stood wide open now, and a girl, steadying herself with her outspread
arms, leaned over the threshold. Lying on his back, he stared up at her.
Her face was pale and her eyes were very dark; her hair hung down black
as ebony against her white cheeks; her lips were full and red. Beyond
her he saw another head with long grey hair, and a thin old face with a
pair of anxiously clasped hands under the chin.


VI


"I knew those people by sight," General Santierra would tell his guests
at the dining-table. "I mean the people with whom Gaspar Ruiz found
shelter. The father was an old Spaniard, a man of property ruined by the
revolution. His estates, his house in town, his money, everything he had
in the world had been confiscated by proclamation, for he was a bitter
foe of our independence. From a position of great dignity and influence
on the Viceroy's Council he became of less importance than his own negro
slaves made free by our glorious revolution. He had not even the means
to flee the country, as other Spaniards had managed to do. It may be
that, wandering ruined and houseless, and burdened with nothing but
his life, which was left to him by the clemency of the Provisional
Government, he had simply walked under that broken roof of old tiles. It
was a lonely spot. There did not seem to be even a dog belonging to the
place. But though the roof had holes, as if a cannon-ball or two had
dropped through it, the wooden shutters were thick and tight-closed all
the time.

"My way took me frequently along the path in front of that miserable
rancho. I rode from the fort to the town almost every evening, to sigh
at the window of a lady I was in love with, then. When one is young, you
understand. . . . She was a good patriot, you may believe. Caballeros,
credit me or not, political feeling ran so high in those days that I
do not believe I could have been fascinated by the charms of a woman of
Royalist opinions. . . ."

Murmurs of amused incredulity all round the table interrupted the
General; and while they lasted he stroked his white beard gravely.

"Senores," he protested, "a Royalist was a monster to our overwrought
feelings. I am telling you this in order not to be suspected of the
slightest tenderness towards that old Royalist's daughter. Moreover,
as you know, my affections were engaged elsewhere. But I could not help
noticing her on rare occasions when with the front door open she stood
in the porch.

"You must know that this old Royalist was as crazy as a man can be. His
political misfortunes, his total downfall and ruin, had disordered his
mind. To show his contempt for what we patriots could do, he affected to
laugh at his imprisonment, at the confiscation of his lands, the burning
of his houses, and at the misery to which he and his womenfolk were
reduced. This habit of laughing had grown upon him, so that he would
begin to laugh and shout directly he caught sight of any stranger. That
was the form of his madness.

"I, of course, disregarded the noise of that madman with that feeling of
superiority the success of our cause inspired in us Americans. I suppose
I really despised him because he was an old Castilian, a Spaniard born,
and a Royalist. Those were certainly no reasons to scorn a man; but for
centuries Spaniards born had shown their contempt of us Americans, men
as well descended as themselves, simply because we were what they
called colonists. We had been kept in abasement and made to feel our
inferiority in social intercourse. And now it was our turn. It was safe
for us patriots to display the same sentiments; and I being a young
patriot, son of a patriot, despised that old Spaniard, and despising
him I naturally disregarded his abuse, though it was annoying to my
feelings. Others perhaps would not have been so forbearing.

"He would begin with a great yell--'I see a patriot. Another of them!'
long before I came abreast of the house. The tone of his senseless
revilings, mingled with bursts of laughter, was sometimes piercingly
shrill and sometimes grave. It was all very mad; but I felt it incumbent
upon my dignity to check my horse to a walk without even glancing
towards the house, as if that man's abusive clamour in the porch
were less than the barking of a cur. Always I rode by preserving an
expression of haughty indifference on my face.

"It was no doubt very dignified; but I should have done better if I
had kept my eyes open. A military man in war time should never consider
himself off duty; and especially so if the war is a revolutionary war,
when the enemy is not at the door, but within your very house. At such
times the heat of passionate convictions passing into hatred, removes
the restraints of honour and humanity from many men and of delicacy and
fear from some women. These last, when once they throw off the timidity
and reserve of their sex, become by the vivacity of their intelligence
and the violence of their merciless resentment more dangerous than so
many armed giants."

The General's voice rose, but his big hand stroked his white beard twice
with an effect of venerable calmness. "Si, Senores! Women are ready to
rise to the heights of devotion unattainable by us men, or to sink into
the depths of abasement which amazes our masculine prejudices. I am
speaking now of exceptional women, you understand. . . ."

Here one of the guests observed that he had never met a woman yet who
was not capable of turning out quite exceptional under circumstances
that would engage her feelings strongly. "That sort of superiority in
recklessness they have over us," he concluded, "makes of them the more
interesting half of mankind."

The General, who bore the interruption with gravity, nodded courteous
assent. "Si. Si. Under circumstances. . . . Precisely. They can do an
infinite deal of mischief sometimes in quite unexpected ways. For who
could have imagined that a young girl, daughter of a ruined Royalist
whose life was held only by the contempt of his enemies, would have had
the power to bring death and devastation upon two flourishing provinces
and cause serious anxiety to the leaders of the revolution in the very
hour of its success!" He paused to let the wonder of it penetrate our
minds.

"Death and devastation," somebody murmured in surprise: "how shocking!"

The old General gave a glance in the direction of the murmur and went
on. "Yes. That is, war--calamity. But the means by which she obtained
the power to work this havoc on our southern frontier seem to me, who
have seen her and spoken to her, still more shocking. That particular
thing left on my mind a dreadful amazement which the further experience
of life, of more than fifty years, has done nothing to diminish." He
looked round as if to make sure of our attention, and, in a changed
voice: "I am, as you know, a republican, son of a Liberator," he
declared. "My incomparable mother, God rest her soul, was a Frenchwoman,
the daughter of an ardent republican. As a boy I fought for liberty;
I've always believed in the equality of men; and as to their
brotherhood, that, to my mind, is even more certain. Look at the fierce
animosity they display in their differences. And what in the world do
you know that is more bitterly fierce than brothers' quarrels?"

All absence of cynicism checked an inclination to smile at this view of
human brotherhood. On the contrary, there was in the tone the melancholy
natural to a man profoundly humane at heart who from duty, from
conviction, and from necessity, had played his part in scenes of
ruthless violence.

The General had seen much of fratricidal strife. "Certainly. There is no
doubt of their brotherhood," he insisted. "All men are brothers, and
as such know almost too much of each other. But"--and here in the
old patriarchal head, white as silver, the black eyes humorously
twinkled--"if we are all brothers, all the women are not our sisters."

One of the younger guests was heard murmuring his satisfaction at the
fact. But the General continued, with deliberate earnestness: "They are
so different! The tale of a king who took a beggar-maid for a partner of
his throne may be pretty enough as we men look upon ourselves and upon
love. But that a young girl, famous for her haughty beauty and, only
a short time before, the admired of all at the balls in the Viceroy's
palace, should take by the hand a guasso, a common peasant, is
intolerable to our sentiment of women and their love. It is madness.
Nevertheless it happened. But it must be said that in her case it was
the madness of hate--not of love."

After presenting this excuse in a spirit of chivalrous justice, the
General remained silent for a time. "I rode past the house every day
almost," he began again, "and this was what was going on within. But how
it was going on no mind of man can conceive. Her desperation must
have been extreme, and Gaspar Ruiz was a docile fellow. He had been an
obedient soldier. His strength was like an enormous stone lying on the
ground, ready to be hurled this way or that by the hand that picks it
up.

"It is clear that he would tell his story to the people who gave him
the shelter he needed. And he needed assistance badly. His wound was not
dangerous, but his life was forfeited. The old Royalist being wrapped up
in his laughing madness, the two women arranged a hiding-place for the
wounded man in one of the huts amongst the fruit trees at the back of
the house. That hovel, an abundance of clear water while the fever was
on him, and some words of pity were all they could give. I suppose
he had a share of what food there was. And it would be but little: a
handful of roasted corn, perhaps a dish of beans, or a piece of bread
with a few figs. To such misery were those proud and once wealthy people
reduced."


VII


General Santierra was right in his surmise. Such was the exact nature of
the assistance which Gaspar Ruiz, peasant son of peasants, received
from the Royalist family whose daughter had opened the door of their
miserable refuge to his extreme distress. Her sombre resolution ruled
the madness of her father and the trembling bewilderment of her mother.

She had asked the strange man on the doorstep, "Who wounded you?"

"The soldiers, senora," Gaspar Ruiz had answered, in a faint voice.

"Patriots?"

"Si."

"What for?"

"Deserter," he gasped, leaning against the wall under the scrutiny of
her black eyes. "I was left for dead over there."

She led him through the house out to a small hut of clay and reeds, lost
in the long grass of the overgrown orchard. He sank on a heap of maize
straw in a corner, and sighed profoundly.

"No one will look for you here," she said, looking down at him. "Nobody
comes near us. We, too, have been left for dead--here."

He stirred uneasily on his heap of dirty straw, and the pain in his neck
made him groan deliriously.

"I shall show Estaban some day that I am alive yet," he mumbled.

He accepted her assistance in silence, and the many days of pain went
by. Her appearances in the hut brought him relief and became connected
with the feverish dreams of angels which visited his couch; for Gaspar
Ruiz was instructed in the mysteries of his religion, and had even
been taught to read and write a little by the priest of his village. He
waited for her with impatience, and saw her pass out of the dark hut and
disappear in the brilliant sunshine with poignant regret. He discovered
that, while he lay there feeling so very weak, he could, by closing his
eyes, evoke her face with considerable distinctness. And this discovered
faculty charmed the long, solitary hours of his convalescence. Later on,
when he began to regain his strength, he would creep at dusk from his
hut to the house and sit on the step of the garden door.

In one of the rooms the mad father paced to and fro, muttering to
himself with short, abrupt laughs. In the passage, sitting on a
stool, the mother sighed and moaned. The daughter, in rough threadbare
clothing, and her white haggard face half hidden by a coarse manta,
stood leaning against the side of the door. Gaspar Ruiz, with his elbows
propped on his knees and his head resting in his hands, talked to the
two women in an undertone.

The common misery of destitution would have made a bitter mockery of a
marked insistence on social differences. Gaspar Ruiz understood this in
his simplicity. From his captivity amongst the Royalists he could give
them news of people they knew. He described their appearance; and when
he related the story of the battle in which he was recaptured the two
women lamented the blow to their cause and the ruin of their secret
hopes.

He had no feeling either way. But he felt a great devotion for that
young girl. In his desire to appear worthy of her condescension, he
boasted a little of his bodily strength. He had nothing else to boast
of. Because of that quality his comrades treated him with as great a
deference, he explained, as though he had been a sergeant, both in camp
and in battle.

"I could always get as many as I wanted to follow me anywhere, senorita.
I ought to have been made an officer, because I can read and write."

Behind him the silent old lady fetched a moaning sigh from time to time;
the distracted father muttered to himself, pacing the sala; and Gaspar
Ruiz would raise his eyes now and then to look at the daughter of these
people.

He would look at her with curiosity because she was alive, and also with
that feeling of familiarity and awe with which he had contemplated
in churches the inanimate and powerful statues of the saints, whose
protection is invoked in dangers and difficulties. His difficulty was
very great.

He could not remain hiding in an orchard for ever and ever. He knew also
very well that before he had gone half a day's journey in any direction,
he would be picked up by one of the cavalry patrols scouring the
country, and brought into one or another of the camps where the patriot
army destined for the liberation of Peru was collected. There he
would in the end be recognized as Gaspar Ruiz--the deserter to the
Royalists--and no doubt shot very effectually this time. There did not
seem any place in the world for the innocent Gaspar Ruiz anywhere.
And at this thought his simple soul surrendered itself to gloom and
resentment as black as night.

They had made him a soldier forcibly. He did not mind being a soldier.
And he had been a good soldier as he had been a good son, because of his
docility and his strength. But now there was no use for either. They had
taken him from his parents, and he could no longer be a soldier--not a
good soldier at any rate. Nobody would listen to his explanations. What
injustice it was! What injustice!

And in a mournful murmur he would go over the story of his capture and
recapture for the twentieth time. Then, raising his eyes to the silent
girl in the doorway, "Si, senorita," he would say with a deep sigh,
"injustice has made this poor breath in my body quite worthless to me
and to anybody else. And I do not care who robs me of it."

One evening, as he exhaled thus the plaint of his wounded soul, she
condescended to say that, if she were a man, she would consider no life
worthless which held the possibility of revenge.

She seemed to be speaking to herself. Her voice was low. He drank in the
gentle, as if dreamy sound with a consciousness of peculiar delight of
something warming his breast like a draught of generous wine.

"True, Senorita," he said, raising his face up to hers slowly: "there is
Estaban, who must be shown that I am not dead after all."

The mutterings of the mad father had ceased long before; the sighing
mother had withdrawn somewhere into one of the empty rooms. All was
still within as well as without, in the moonlight bright as day on the
wild orchard full of inky shadows. Gaspar Ruiz saw the dark eyes of Dona
Erminia look down at him.

"Ah! The sergeant," she muttered, disdainfully.

"Why! He has wounded me with his sword," he protested, bewildered by the
contempt that seemed to shine livid on her pale face.

She crushed him with her glance. The power of her will to be understood
was so strong that it kindled in him the intelligence of unexpressed
things.

"What else did you expect me to do?" he cried, as if suddenly driven to
despair. "Have I the power to do more? Am I a general with an army at my
back?--miserable sinner that I am to be despised by you at last."


VIII


"Senores," related the General to his guests, "though my thoughts were
of love then, and therefore enchanting, the sight of that house always
affected me disagreeably, especially in the moonlight, when its close
shutters and its air of lonely neglect appeared sinister. Still I went
on using the bridle-path by the ravine, because it was a short cut.
The mad Royalist howled and laughed at me every evening to his complete
satisfaction; but after a time, as if wearied with my indifference, he
ceased to appear in the porch. How they persuaded him to leave off I do
not know. However, with Gaspar Ruiz in the house there would have been
no difficulty in restraining him by force. It was now part of their
policy in there to avoid anything which could provoke me. At least, so I
suppose.

"Notwithstanding my infatuation with the brightest pair of eyes in
Chile, I noticed the absence of the old man after a week or so. A few
more days passed. I began to think that perhaps these Royalists had gone
away somewhere else. But one evening, as I was hastening towards the
city, I saw again somebody in the porch. It was not the madman; it was
the girl. She stood holding on to one of the wooden columns, tall and
white-faced, her big eyes sunk deep with privation and sorrow. I looked
hard at her, and she met my stare with a strange, inquisitive look.
Then, as I turned my head after riding past, she seemed to gather
courage for the act, and absolutely beckoned me back.

"I obeyed, senores, almost without thinking, so great was my
astonishment. It was greater still when I heard what she had to say. She
began by thanking me for my forbearance of her father's infirmity,
so that I felt ashamed of myself. I had meant to show disdain, not
forbearance! Every word must have burnt her lips, but she never departed
from a gentle and melancholy dignity which filled me with respect
against my will. Senores, we are no match for women. But I could hardly
believe my ears when she began her tale. Providence, she concluded,
seemed to have preserved the life of that wronged soldier, who now
trusted to my honour as a caballero and to my compassion for his
sufferings.

"'Wronged man,' I observed, coldly. 'Well, I think so, too: and you have
been harbouring an enemy of your cause.'

"'He was a poor Christian crying for help at our door in the name of
God, senor,' she answered, simply.

"I began to admire her. 'Where is he now?' I asked, stiffly.

"But she would not answer that question. With extreme cunning, and an
almost fiendish delicacy, she managed to remind me of my failure in
saving the lives of the prisoners in the guardroom, without wounding
my pride. She knew, of course, the whole story. Gaspar Ruiz, she said,
entreated me to procure for him a safe-conduct from General San
Martin himself. He had an important communication to make to the
commander-in-chief.

"Por Dios, senores, she made me swallow all that, pretending to be only
the mouthpiece of that poor man. Overcome by injustice, he expected to
find, she said, as much generosity in me as had been shown to him by the
Royalist family which had given him a refuge.

"Ha! It was well and nobly said to a youngster like me. I thought her
great. Alas! she was only implacable.

"In the end I rode away very enthusiastic about the business, without
demanding even to see Gaspar Ruiz, who I was confident was in the house.

"But on calm reflection I began to see some difficulties which I had not
confidence enough in myself to encounter. It was not easy to approach a
commander-in-chief with such a story. I feared failure. At last I thought
it better to lay the matter before my general-of-division, Robles, a
friend of my family, who had appointed me his aide-de-camp lately.

"He took it out of my hands at once without any ceremony.

"'In the house! of course he is in the house,' he said contemptuously.
'You ought to have gone sword in hand inside and demanded his surrender,
instead of chatting with a Royalist girl in the porch. Those people
should have been hunted out of that long ago. Who knows how many spies
they have harboured right in the very midst of our camps? A safe-conduct
from the Commander-in-Chief! The audacity of the fellow! Ha! ha! Now
we shall catch him to-night, and then we shall find out, without any
safe-conduct, what he has got to say, that is so very important. Ha! ha!
ha!'

"General Robles, peace to his soul, was a short, thick man, with round,
staring eyes, fierce and jovial. Seeing my distress he added:

"'Come, come, chico. I promise you his life if he does not resist. And
that is not likely. We are not going to break up a good soldier if it
can be helped. I tell you what! I am curious to see your strong man.
Nothing but a general will do for the picaro--well, he shall have a
general to talk to. Ha! ha! I shall go myself to the catching, and you
are coming with me, of course.'

"And it was done that same night. Early in the evening the house and the
orchard were surrounded quietly. Later on the General and I left a ball
we were attending in town and rode out at an easy gallop. At some little
distance from the house we pulled up. A mounted orderly held our horses.
A low whistle warned the men watching all along the ravine, and we
walked up to the porch softly. The barricaded house in the moonlight
seemed empty.

"The General knocked at the door. After a time a woman's voice within
asked who was there. My chief nudged me hard. I gasped.

"'It is I, Lieutenant Santierra,' I stammered out, as if choked. 'Open
the door.'

"It came open slowly. The girl, holding a thin taper in her hand, seeing
another man with me, began to back away before us slowly, shading the
light with her hand. Her impassive white face looked ghostly. I followed
behind General Robles. Her eyes were fixed on mine. I made a gesture of
helplessness behind my chief's back, trying at the same time to give a
reassuring expression to my face. None of us three uttered a sound.

"We found ourselves in a room with bare floor and walls. There was a
rough table and a couple of stools in it, nothing else whatever. An old
woman with her grey hair hanging loose wrung her hands when we appeared.
A peal of loud laughter resounded through the empty house, very amazing
and weird. At this the old woman tried to get past us.

"'Nobody to leave the room,' said General Robles to me.

"I swung the door to, heard the latch click, and the laughter became
faint in our ears.

"Before another word could be spoken in that room I was amazed by
hearing the sound of distant thunder.

"I had carried in with me into the house a vivid impression of a
beautiful clear moonlight night, without a speck of cloud in the sky. I
could not believe my ears. Sent early abroad for my education, I was not
familiar with the most dreaded natural phenomenon of my native land.
I saw, with inexpressible astonishment, a look of terror in my chief's
eyes. Suddenly I felt giddy. The General staggered against me heavily;
the girl seemed to reel in the middle of the room, the taper fell out
of her hand and the light went out; a shrill cry of 'Misericordia!'
from the old woman pierced my ears. In the pitchy darkness I heard the
plaster off the walls falling on the floor. It is a mercy there was no
ceiling. Holding on to the latch of the door, I heard the grinding of
the roof-tiles cease above my head. The shock was over.

"'Out of the house! The door! Fly, Santierra, fly!' howled the General.
You know, senores, in our country the bravest are not ashamed of the
fear an earthquake strikes into all the senses of man. One never gets
used to it. Repeated experience only augments the mastery of that
nameless terror.

"It was my first earthquake, and I was the calmest of them all. I
understood that the crash outside was caused by the porch, with its
wooden pillars and tiled roof projection, falling down. The next
shock would destroy the house, maybe. That rumble as of thunder was
approaching again. The General was rushing round the room, to find the
door perhaps. He made a noise as though he were trying to climb the
walls, and I heard him distinctly invoke the names of several saints.
'Out, out, Santierra!' he yelled.

"The girl's voice was the only one I did not hear.

"'General,' I cried, I cannot move the door. We must be locked in.'

"I did not recognize his voice in the shout of malediction and despair
he let out. Senores, I know many men in my country, especially in the
provinces most subject to earthquakes, who will neither eat, sleep,
pray, nor even sit down to cards with closed doors. The danger is not
in the loss of time, but in this--that the movement of the walls may
prevent a door being opened at all. This was what had happened to us. We
were trapped, and we had no help to expect from anybody. There is no man
in my country who will go into a house when the earth trembles. There
never was--except one: Gaspar Ruiz.

"He had come out of whatever hole he had been hiding in outside, and
had clambered over the timbers of the destroyed porch. Above the awful
subterranean groan of coming destruction I heard a mighty voice shouting
the word 'Erminia!' with the lungs of a giant. An earthquake is a great
leveller of distinctions. I collected all my resolution against the
terror of the scene. 'She is here,' I shouted back. A roar as of a
furious wild beast answered me--while my head swam, my heart sank, and
the sweat of anguish streamed like rain off my brow.

"He had the strength to pick up one of the heavy posts of the porch.
Holding it under his armpit like a lance, but with both hands, he
charged madly the rocking house with the force of a battering-ram,
bursting open the door and rushing in, headlong, over our prostrate
bodies. I and the General picking ourselves up, bolted out together,
without looking round once till we got across the road. Then, clinging
to each other, we beheld the house change suddenly into a heap of
formless rubbish behind the back of a man, who staggered towards us
bearing the form of a woman clasped in his arms. Her long black hair
hung nearly to his feet. He laid her down reverently on the heaving
earth, and the moonlight shone on her closed eyes.

"Senores, we mounted with difficulty. Our horses getting up plunged
madly, held by the soldiers who had come running from all sides. Nobody
thought of catching Gaspar Ruiz then. The eyes of men and animals shone
with wild fear. My general approached Gaspar Ruiz, who stood motionless
as a statue above the girl. He let himself be shaken by the shoulder
without detaching his eyes from her face.

"'Que guape!' shouted the General in his ear. 'You are the bravest man
living. You have saved my life. I am General Robles. Come to my quarters
to-morrow if God gives us the grace to see another day.'

"He never stirred--as if deaf, without feeling, insensible.

"We rode away for the town, full of our relations, of our friends, of
whose fate we hardly dared to think. The soldiers ran by the side of
our horses. Everything was forgotten in the immensity of the catastrophe
overtaking a whole country."

. . . . . . .

Gaspar Ruiz saw the girl open her eyes. The raising of her eyelids
seemed to recall him from a trance. They were alone; the cries of terror
and distress from homeless people filled the plains of the coast remote
and immense, coming like a whisper into their loneliness.

She rose swiftly to her feet, darting fearful glances on all sides.
"What is it?" she cried out low, and peering into his face. "Where am
I?"

He bowed his head sadly, without a word.

". . . Who are you?"

He knelt down slowly before her, and touched the hem of her coarse black
baize skirt. "Your slave," he said.

She caught sight then of the heap of rubbish that had been the house,
all misty in the cloud of dust. "Ah!" she cried, pressing her hand to
her forehead.

"I carried you out from there," he whispered at her feet.

"And they?" she asked in a great sob.

He rose, and taking her by the arms, led her gently towards the
shapeless ruin half overwhelmed by a landslide. "Come and listen," he
said.

The serene moon saw them clambering over that heap of stones, joists and
tiles, which was a grave. They pressed their ears to the interstices,
listening for the sound of a groan, for a sigh of pain.

At last he said, "They died swiftly. You are alone."

She sat down on a piece of broken timber and put one arm across her
face. He waited--then approaching his lips to her ear: "Let us go," he
whispered.

"Never--never from here," she cried out, flinging her arms above her
head.

He stooped over her, and her raised arms fell upon his shoulders. He
lifted her up, steadied himself and began to walk, looking straight
before him.

"What are you doing?" she asked, feebly.

"I am escaping from my enemies," he said, never once glancing at his
light burden.

"With me?" she sighed, helplessly.

"Never without you," he said. "You are my strength."

He pressed her close to him. His face was grave and his footsteps
steady. The conflagrations bursting out in the ruins of destroyed
villages dotted the plain with red fires; and the sounds of distant
lamentations, the cries of Misericordia! Misericordia! made a desolate
murmur in his ears. He walked on, solemn and collected, as if carrying
something holy, fragile, and precious.

The earth rocked at times under his feet.


IX


With movements of mechanical care and an air of abstraction old General
Santierra lighted a long and thick cigar.

"It was a good many hours before we could send a party back to the
ravine," he said to his guests. "We had found one-third of the town laid
low, the rest shaken up; and the inhabitants, rich and poor, reduced to
the same state of distraction by the universal disaster. The affected
cheerfulness of some contrasted with the despair of others. In the
general confusion a number of reckless thieves, without fear of God or
man, became a danger to those who from the downfall of their homes had
managed to save some valuables. Crying 'Misericordia' louder than any at
every tremor, and beating their breast with one hand, these scoundrels
robbed the poor victims with the other, not even stopping short of
murder.

"General Robles' division was occupied entirely in guarding the
destroyed quarters of the town from the depredations of these inhuman
monsters. Taken up with my duties of orderly officer, it was only in the
morning that I could assure myself of the safety of my own family. My
mother and my sisters had escaped with their lives from that ballroom,
where I had left them early in the evening. I remember those two
beautiful young women--God rest their souls--as if I saw them this
moment, in the garden of our destroyed house, pale but active, assisting
some of our poor neighbours, in their soiled ball-dresses and with the
dust of fallen walls on their hair. As to my mother, she had a stoical
soul in her frail body. Half-covered by a costly shawl, she was lying
on a rustic seat by the side of an ornamental basin whose fountain had
ceased to play for ever on that night.

"I had hardly had time to embrace them all with transports of joy when
my chief, coming along, dispatched me to the ravine with a few soldiers,
to bring in my strong man, as he called him, and that pale girl.

"But there was no one for us to bring in. A landslide had covered the
ruins of the house; and it was like a large mound of earth with only the
ends of some timbers visible here and there--nothing more.

"Thus were the tribulations of the old Royalist couple ended. An
enormous and unconsecrated grave had swallowed them up alive, in their
unhappy obstinacy against the will of a people to be free. And their
daughter was gone.

"That Gaspar Ruiz had carried her off I understood very well. But as
the case was not foreseen, I had no instructions to pursue them. And
certainly I had no desire to do so. I had grown mistrustful of my
interference. It had never been successful, and had not even appeared
creditable. He was gone. Well, let him go. And he had carried off the
Royalist girl! Nothing better. Vaya con Dios. This was not the time
to bother about a deserter who, justly or unjustly, ought to have been
dead, and a girl for whom it would have been better to have never been
born.

"So I marched my men back to the town.

"After a few days, order having been re-established, all the principal
families, including my own, left for Santiago. We had a fine house
there. At the same time the division of Robles was moved to new
cantonments near the capital. This change suited very well the state of
my domestic and amorous feelings.

"One night, rather late, I was called to my chief. I found General
Robles in his quarters, at ease, with his uniform off, drinking neat
brandy out of a tumbler--as a precaution, he used to say, against the
sleeplessness induced by the bites of mosquitoes. He was a good soldier,
and he taught me the art and practice of war. No doubt God has been
merciful to his soul; for his motives were never other than patriotic,
if his character was irascible. As to the use of mosquito nets, he
considered it effeminate, shameful--unworthy of a soldier. I noticed at
the first glance that his face, already very red, wore an expression of
high good-humour.

"'Aha! Senor teniente,' he cried, loudly, as I saluted at the door.
'Behold! Your strong man has turned up again.'

"He extended to me a folded letter, which I saw was superscribed 'To the
Commander-in-Chief of the Republican Armies.'

"'This,' General Robles went on in his loud voice, 'was thrust by a boy
into the hand of a sentry at the Quartel General, while the fellow stood
there thinking of his girl, no doubt--for before he could gather his
wits together the boy had disappeared amongst the market people, and he
protests he could not recognize him to save his life.'

"'My chief told me further that the soldier had given the letter to the
sergeant of the guard, and that ultimately it had reached the hands of
our generalissimo. His Excellency had deigned to take cognizance of it
with his own eyes. After that he had referred the matter in confidence
to General Robles.

"The letter, senores, I cannot now recollect textually. I saw the
signature of Gaspar Ruiz. He was an audacious fellow. He had snatched a
soul for himself out of a cataclysm, remember. And now it was that
soul which had dictated the terms of his letter. Its tone was very
independent. I remember it struck me at the time as noble--dignified. It
was, no doubt, her letter. Now I shudder at the depth of its duplicity.
Gaspar Ruiz was made to complain of the injustice of which he had been
a victim. He invoked his previous record of fidelity and courage. Having
been saved from death by the miraculous interposition of Providence, he
could think of nothing but of retrieving his character. This, he wrote,
he could not hope to do in the ranks as a discredited soldier still
under suspicion. He had the means to give a striking proof of his
fidelity. He had ended by proposing to the General-in-Chief a meeting at
midnight in the middle of the Plaza before the Moneta. The signal would
be to strike fire with flint and steel three times, which was not too
conspicuous and yet distinctive enough for recognition.

"San Martin, the great Liberator, loved men of audacity and courage.
Besides, he was just and compassionate. I told him as much of the man's
story as I knew, and was ordered to accompany him on the appointed
night. The signals were duly exchanged. It was midnight, and the whole
town was dark and silent. Their two cloaked figures came together in
the centre of the vast Plaza, and, keeping discreetly at a distance,
I listened for an hour or more to the murmur of their voices. Then the
General motioned me to approach; and as I did so I heard San Martin,
who was courteous to gentle and simple alike, offer Gaspar Ruiz the
hospitality of the headquarters for the night. But the soldier refused,
saying that he would be not worthy of that honour till he had done
something.

"'You cannot have a common deserter for your guest, Excellency,' he
protested with a low laugh, and stepping backwards merged slowly into
the night.

"The Commander-in-Chief observed to me, as we turned away: 'He had
somebody with him, our friend Ruiz. I saw two figures for a moment. It
was an unobtrusive companion.'

"I, too, had observed another figure join the vanishing form of Gaspar
Ruiz. It had the appearance of a short fellow in a poncho and a big
hat. And I wondered stupidly who it could be he had dared take into
his confidence. I might have guessed it could be no one but that fatal
girl--alas!

"Where he kept her concealed I do not know. He had--it was known
afterwards--an uncle, his mother's brother, a small shopkeeper in
Santiago. Perhaps it was there that she found a roof and food. Whatever
she found, it was poor enough to exasperate her pride and keep up her
anger and hate. It is certain she did not accompany him on the feat
he undertook to accomplish first of all. It was nothing less than the
destruction of a store of war material collected secretly by the Spanish
authorities in the south, in a town called Linares. Gaspar Ruiz was
entrusted with a small party only, but they proved themselves worthy of
San Martin's confidence. The season was not propitious. They had to swim
swollen rivers. They seemed, however, to have galloped night and day
out-riding the news of their foray, and holding straight for the town,
a hundred miles into the enemy's country, till at break of day they rode
into it sword in hand, surprising the little garrison. It fled without
making a stand, leaving most of its officers in Gaspar Ruiz' hands.

"A great explosion of gunpowder ended the conflagration of the magazines
the raiders had set on fire without loss of time. In less than six
hours they were riding away at the same mad speed, without the loss of a
single man. Good as they were, such an exploit is not performed without
a still better leadership.

"I was dining at the headquarters when Gaspar Ruiz himself brought the
news of his success. And it was a great blow to the Royalist troops. For
a proof he displayed to us the garrison's flag. He took it from under
his poncho and flung it on the table. The man was transfigured; there
was something exulting and menacing in the expression of his face. He
stood behind General San Martin's chair and looked proudly at us all.
He had a round blue cap edged with silver braid on his head, and we all
could see a large white scar on the nape of his sunburnt neck.

"Somebody asked him what he had done with the captured Spanish officers.

"He shrugged his shoulders scornfully. 'What a question to ask! In
a partisan war you do not burden yourself with prisoners. I let them
go--and here are their sword-knots.'

"He flung a bunch of them on the table upon the flag. Then General
Robles, whom I was attending there, spoke up in his loud, thick voice:
'You did! Then, my brave friend, you do not know yet how a war like ours
ought to be conducted. You should have done--this.' And he passed the
edge of his hand across his own throat.

"Alas, senores! It was only too true that on both sides this contest, in
its nature so heroic, was stained by ferocity. The murmurs that arose
at General Robles' words were by no means unanimous in tone. But the
generous and brave San Martin praised the humane action, and pointed
out to Ruiz a place on his right hand. Then rising with a full glass
he proposed a toast: 'Caballeros and comrades-in-arms, let us drink the
health of Captain Gaspar Ruiz.' And when we had emptied our glasses:
'I intend,' the Commander-in-Chief continued, 'to entrust him with the
guardianship of our southern frontier, while we go afar to liberate our
brethren in Peru. He whom the enemy could not stop from striking a blow
at his very heart will know how to protect the peaceful populations we
leave behind us to pursue our sacred task.' And he embraced the silent
Gaspar Ruiz by his side.

"Later on, when we all rose from table, I approached the latest officer
of the army with my congratulations. 'And, Captain Ruiz,' I added,
'perhaps you do not mind telling a man who has always believed in
the uprightness of your character what became of Dona Erminia on that
night?'

"At this friendly question his aspect changed. He looked at me from
under his eyebrows with the heavy, dull glance of a guasso--of a
peasant. 'Senor teniente,' he said, thickly, and as if very much cast
down, 'do not ask me about the senorita, for I prefer not to think about
her at all when I am amongst you."

"He looked, with a frown, all about the room, full of smoking and
talking officers. Of course I did not insist.

"These, senores, were the last words I was to hear him utter for a long,
long time. The very next day we embarked for our arduous expedition to
Peru, and we only heard of Gaspar Ruiz' doings in the midst of battles
of our own. He had been appointed military guardian of our southern
province. He raised a partida. But his leniency to the conquered foe
displeased the Civil Governor, who was a formal, uneasy man, full of
suspicions. He forwarded reports against Gaspar Ruiz to the Supreme
Government; one of them being that he had married publicly, with great
pomp, a woman of Royalist tendencies. Quarrels were sure to arise
between these two men of very different character. At last the Civil
Governor began to complain of his inactivity and to hint at treachery,
which, he wrote, would be not surprising in a man of such antecedents.
Gaspar Ruiz heard of it. His rage flamed up, and the woman ever by his
side knew how to feed it with perfidious words. I do not know
whether really the Supreme Government ever did--as he complained
afterwards--send orders for his arrest. It seems certain that the
Civil Governor began to tamper with his officers, and that Gaspar Ruiz
discovered the fact.

"One evening, when the Governor was giving a tertullia, Gaspar Ruiz,
followed by six men he could trust, appeared riding through the town to
the door of the Government House, and entered the sala armed, his hat on
his head. As the Governor, displeased, advanced to meet him, he seized
the wretched man round the body, carried him off from the midst of the
appalled guests, as though he were a child, and flung him down the outer
steps into the street. An angry hug from Gaspar Ruiz was enough to crush
the life out of a giant; but in addition Gaspar Ruiz' horsemen fired
their pistols at the body of the Governor as it lay motionless at the
bottom of the stairs."


X


"After this--as he called it--act of justice, Ruiz crossed the Rio
Blanco, followed by the greater part of his band, and entrenched himself
upon a hill. A company of regular troops sent out foolishly against him
was surrounded, and destroyed almost to a man. Other expeditions, though
better organized, were equally unsuccessful.

"It was during these sanguinary skirmishes that his wife first began to
appear on horseback at his right hand. Rendered proud and self-confident
by his successes, Ruiz no longer charged at the head of his partida, but
presumptuously, like a general directing the movements of an army,
he remained in the rear, well mounted and motionless on an eminence,
sending out his orders. She was seen repeatedly at his side, and for
a long time was mistaken for a man. There was much talk then of a
mysterious white-faced chief, to whom the defeats of our troops were
ascribed. She rode like an Indian woman, astride, wearing a broad-rimmed
man's hat and a dark poncho. Afterwards, in the day of their greatest
prosperity, this poncho was embroidered in gold, and she wore then,
also, the sword of poor Don Antonio de Leyva. This veteran Chilian
officer, having the misfortune to be surrounded with his small force,
and running short of ammunition, found his death at the hands of the
Arauco Indians, the allies and auxiliaries of Gaspar Ruiz. This was the
fatal affair long remembered afterwards as the 'Massacre of the Island.'
The sword of the unhappy officer was presented to her by Peneleo, the
Araucanian chief; for these Indians, struck by her aspect, the deathly
pallor of her face, which no exposure to the weather seemed to affect,
and her calm indifference under fire, looked upon her as a supernatural
being, or at least as a witch. By this superstition the prestige and
authority of Gaspar Ruiz amongst these ignorant people were greatly
augmented. She must have savoured her vengeance to the full on that day
when she buckled on the sword of Don Antonio de Leyva. It never left her
side, unless she put on her woman's clothes--not that she would or
could ever use it, but she loved to feel it beating upon her thigh as
a perpetual reminder and symbol of the dishonour to the arms of the
Republic. She was insatiable. Moreover, on the path she had led Gaspar
Ruiz upon, there is no stopping. Escaped prisoners--and they were not
many--used to relate how with a few whispered words she could change the
expression of his face and revive his flagging animosity. They told how
after every skirmish, after every raid, after every successful action,
he would ride up to her and look into her face. Its haughty calm was
never relaxed. Her embrace, senores, must have been as cold as the
embrace of a statue. He tried to melt her icy heart in a stream of warm
blood. Some English naval officers who visited him at that time noticed
the strange character of his infatuation."

At the movement of surprise and curiosity in his audience General
Santierra paused for a moment.

"Yes--English naval officers," he repeated. "Ruiz had consented to
receive them to arrange for the liberation of some prisoners of your
nationality. In the territory upon which he ranged, from sea coast to
the Cordillera, there was a bay where the ships of that time, after
rounding Cape Horn, used to resort for wood and water. There, decoying
the crew on shore, he captured first the whaling brig Hersalia, and
afterwards made himself master by surprise of two more ships, one
English and one American.

"It was rumoured at the time that he dreamed of setting up a navy of his
own. But that, of course, was impossible. Still, manning the brig with
part of her own crew, and putting an officer and a good many men of his
own on board, he sent her off to the Spanish Governor of the island of
Chiloe with a report of his exploits, and a demand for assistance in the
war against the rebels. The Governor could not do much for him; but he
sent in return two light field-pieces, a letter of compliments, with a
colonel's commission in the royal forces, and a great Spanish flag. This
standard with much ceremony was hoisted over his house in the heart of
the Arauco country. Surely on that day she may have smiled on her guasso
husband with a less haughty reserve.

"The senior officer of the English squadron on our coast made
representations to our Government as to these captures. But Gaspar Ruiz
refused to treat with us. Then an English frigate proceeded to the bay,
and her captain, doctor, and two lieutenants travelled inland under a
safe-conduct. They were well received, and spent three days as guests of
the partisan chief. A sort of military barbaric state was kept up at the
residence. It was furnished with the loot of frontier towns. When first
admitted to the principal sala, they saw his wife lying down (she was
not in good health then), with Gaspar Ruiz sitting at the foot of the
couch. His hat was lying on the floor, and his hands reposed on the hilt
of his sword.

"During that first conversation he never removed his big hands from
the sword-hilt, except once, to arrange the coverings about her, with
gentle, careful touches. They noticed that whenever she spoke he would
fix his eyes upon her in a kind of expectant, breathless attention, and
seemingly forget the existence of the world and his own existence,
too. In the course of the farewell banquet, at which she was present
reclining on her couch, he burst forth into complaints of the treatment
he had received. After General San Martin's departure he had been
beset by spies, slandered by civil officials, his services ignored, his
liberty and even his life threatened by the Chilian Government. He got
up from the table, thundered execrations pacing the room wildly, then
sat down on the couch at his wife's feet, his breast heaving, his eyes
fixed on the floor. She reclined on her back, her head on the cushions,
her eyes nearly closed.

"'And now I am an honoured Spanish officer,' he added in a calm voice.

"The captain of the English frigate then took the opportunity to inform
him gently that Lima had fallen, and that by the terms of a convention
the Spaniards were withdrawing from the whole continent.

"Gaspar Ruiz raised his head, and without hesitation, speaking with
suppressed vehemence, declared that if not a single Spanish soldier were
left in the whole of South America he would persist in carrying on the
contest against Chile to the last drop of blood. When he finished that
mad tirade his wife's long white hand was raised, and she just caressed
his knee with the tips of her fingers for a fraction of a second.

"For the rest of the officers' stay, which did not extend for more than
half an hour after the banquet, that ferocious chieftain of a desperate
partida overflowed with amiability and kindness. He had been hospitable
before, but now it seemed as though he could not do enough for the
comfort and safety of his visitors' journey back to their ship.

"Nothing, I have been told, could have presented a greater contrast to
his late violence or the habitual taciturn reserve of his manner. Like a
man elated beyond measure by an unexpected happiness, he overflowed with
good-will, amiability, and attentions. He embraced the officers like
brothers, almost with tears in his eyes. The released prisoners were
presented each with a piece of gold. At the last moment, suddenly, he
declared he could do no less than restore to the masters of the merchant
vessels all their private property. This unexpected generosity caused
some delay in the departure of the party, and their first march was very
short.

"Late in the evening Gaspar Ruiz rode up with an escort, to their camp
fires, bringing along with him a mule loaded with cases of wine. He had
come, he said, to drink a stirrup cup with his English friends, whom he
would never see again. He was mellow and joyous in his temper. He told
stories of his own exploits, laughed like a boy, borrowed a guitar
from the Englishmen's chief muleteer, and sitting cross-legged on his
superfine poncho spread before the glow of the embers, sang a guasso
love-song in a tender voice. Then his head dropped on his breast, his
hands fell to the ground; the guitar rolled off his knees--and a great
hush fell over the camp after the love-song of the implacable partisan
who had made so many of our people weep for destroyed homes and for
loves cut short.

"Before anybody could make a sound he sprang up from the ground and
called for his horse.

"'Adios, my friends!' he cried. 'Go with God. I love you. And tell them
well in Santiago that between Gaspar Ruiz, colonel of the King of Spain,
and the republican carrion-crows of Chile there is war to the last
breath--war! war! war!'

"With a great yell of 'War! war! war!' which his escort took up, they
rode away, and the sound of hoofs and of voices died out in the distance
between the slopes of the hills.

"The two young English officers were convinced that Ruiz was mad. How
do you say that?--tile loose--eh? But the doctor, an observant Scotsman
with much shrewdness and philosophy in his character, told me that it
was a very curious case of possession. I met him many years afterwards,
but he remembered the experience very well. He told me, too, that in
his opinion that woman did not lead Gaspar Ruiz into the practice of
sanguinary treachery by direct persuasion, but by the subtle way of
awakening and keeping alive in his simple mind a burning sense of an
irreparable wrong. Maybe, maybe. But I would say that she poured half
of her vengeful soul into the strong clay of that man, as you may pour
intoxication, madness, poison into an empty cup.

"If he wanted war he got it in earnest when our victorious army began to
return from Peru. Systematic operations were planned against this blot
on the honour and prosperity of our hardly won independence. General
Robles commanded, with his well-known ruthless severity. Savage
reprisals were exercised on both sides and no quarter was given in the
field. Having won my promotion in the Peru campaign, I was a captain on
the staff. Gaspar Ruiz found himself hard pressed; at the same time we
heard by means of a fugitive priest who had been carried off from his
village presbytery and galloped eighty miles into the hills to perform
the christening ceremony, that a daughter was born to them. To celebrate
the event, I suppose, Ruiz executed one or two brilliant forays clear
away at the rear of our forces, and defeated the detachments sent out to
cut off his retreat. General Robles nearly had a stroke of apoplexy from
rage. He found another cause of insomnia than the bites of mosquitoes;
but against this one, senores, tumblers of raw brandy had no more effect
than so much water. He took to railing and storming at me about my
strong man. And from our impatience to end this inglorious campaign I am
afraid that all we young officers became reckless and apt to take undue
risks on service.

"Nevertheless, slowly, inch by inch as it were, our columns were closing
upon Gaspar Ruiz, though he had managed to raise all the Araucanian
nation of wild Indians against us. Then a year or more later our
Government became aware through its agents and spies that he had
actually entered into alliance with Carreras, the so-called dictator of
the so-called republic of Mendoza, on the other side of the mountains.
Whether Gaspar Ruiz had a deep political intention, or whether he wished
only to secure a safe retreat for his wife and child while he pursued
remorselessly against us his war of surprises and massacres, I cannot
tell. The alliance, however, was a fact. Defeated in his attempt to
check our advance from the sea, he retreated with his usual swiftness,
and preparing for another hard and hazardous tussle, began by sending
his wife with the little girl across the Pequena range of mountains, on
the frontier of Mendoza."


XI


"Now Carreras, under the guise of politics and liberalism, was a
scoundrel of the deepest dye, and the unhappy state of Mendoza was the
prey of thieves, robbers, traitors, and murderers, who formed his party.
He was under a noble exterior a man without heart, pity, honour, or
conscience. He aspired to nothing but tyranny, and though he would have
made use of Gaspar Ruiz for his nefarious designs, yet he soon became
aware that to propitiate the Chilian Government would answer his purpose
better. I blush to say that he made proposals to our Government to
deliver up on certain conditions the wife and child of the man who had
trusted to his honour, and that this offer was accepted.

"While on her way to Mendoza over the Pequena Pass she was betrayed by
her escort of Carreras' men, and given up to the officer in command of
a Chilian fort on the upland at the foot of the main Cordillera range.
This atrocious transaction might have cost me dear, for as a matter of
fact I was a prisoner in Gaspar Ruiz' camp when he received the news. I
had been captured during a reconnaissance, my escort of a few troopers
being speared by the Indians of his bodyguard. I was saved from the same
fate because he recognized my features just in time. No doubt my friends
thought I was dead, and I would not have given much for my life at any
time. But the strong man treated me very well, because, he said, I had
always believed in his innocence and had tried to serve him when he was
a victim of injustice.

"'And now,' was his speech to me, 'you shall see that I always speak the
truth. You are safe.'

"I did not think I was very safe when I was called up to go to him one
night. He paced up and down like a wild beast, exclaiming, 'Betrayed!
Betrayed!'

"He walked up to me clenching his fists. 'I could cut your throat.'

"'Will that give your wife back to you?' I said as quietly as I could.

"'And the child!' he yelled out, as if mad. He fell into a chair and
laughed in a frightful, boisterous manner. 'Oh, no, you are safe.'

"I assured him that his wife's life was safe, too; but I did not say
what I was convinced of--that he would never see her again. He wanted
war to the death, and the war could only end with his death.

"He gave me a strange, inexplicable look, and sat muttering blankly, 'In
their hands. In their hands.'

"I kept as still as a mouse before a cat.

"Suddenly he jumped up. 'What am I doing here?' he cried; and opening
the door, he yelled out orders to saddle and mount. 'What is it?' he
stammered, coming up to me. 'The Pequena fort; a fort of palisades!
Nothing. I would get her back if she were hidden in the very heart of
the mountain.' He amazed me by adding, with an effort: 'I carried her
off in my two arms while the earth trembled. And the child at least is
mine. She at least is mine!'

"Those were bizarre words; but I had no time for wonder.

"'You shall go with me,' he said, violently. 'I may want to parley, and
any other messenger from Ruiz, the outlaw, would have his throat cut.'

"This was true enough. Between him and the rest of incensed mankind
there could be no communication, according to the customs of honourable
warfare.

"In less than half an hour we were in the saddle, flying wildly through
the night. He had only an escort of twenty men at his quarters, but
would not wait for more. He sent, however, messengers to Peneleo, the
Indian chief then ranging in the foothills, directing him to bring
his warriors to the uplands and meet him at the lake called the Eye of
Water, near whose shores the frontier fort of Pequena was built.

"We crossed the lowlands with that untired rapidity of movement which
had made Gaspar Ruiz' raids so famous. We followed the lower valleys
up to their precipitous heads. The ride was not without its dangers.
A cornice road on a perpendicular wall of basalt wound itself around a
buttressing rock, and at last we emerged from the gloom of a deep gorge
upon the upland of Pequena.

"It was a plain of green wiry grass and thin flowering bushes; but high
above our heads patches of snow hung in the folds and crevices of the
great walls of rock. The little lake was as round as a staring eye. The
garrison of the fort were just driving in their small herd of cattle
when we appeared. Then the great wooden gates swung to, and that
four-square enclosure of broad blackened stakes pointed at the top and
barely hiding the grass roofs of the huts inside seemed deserted, empty,
without a single soul.

"But when summoned to surrender, by a man who at Gaspar Ruiz' order rode
fearlessly forward those inside answered by a volley which rolled him
and his horse over. I heard Ruiz by my side grind his teeth. 'It does
not matter,' he said. 'Now you go.'

"Torn and faded as its rags were, the vestiges of my uniform were
recognized, and I was allowed to approach within speaking distance; and
then I had to wait, because a voice clamouring through a loophole with
joy and astonishment would not allow me to place a word. It was the
voice of Major Pajol, an old friend. He, like my other comrades, had
thought me killed a long time ago.

"'Put spurs to your horse, man!' he yelled, in the greatest excitement;
'we will swing the gate open for you.'

"I let the reins fall out of my hand and shook my head. 'I am on my
honour,' I cried.

"'To him!' he shouted, with infinite disgust.

"'He promises you your life.'

"'Our life is our own. And do you, Santierra, advise us to surrender to
that rastrero?'

"'No!' I shouted. 'But he wants his wife and child, and he can cut you
off from water.'

"'Then she would be the first to suffer. You may tell him that. Look
here--this is all nonsense: we shall dash out and capture you.'

"'You shall not catch me alive,' I said, firmly.

"'Imbecile!'

"'For God's sake,' I continued, hastily, 'do not open the gate.' And I
pointed at the multitude of Peneleo's Indians who covered the shores of
the lake.

"I had never seen so many of these savages together. Their lances
seemed as numerous as stalks of grass. Their hoarse voices made a vast,
inarticulate sound like the murmur of the sea.

"My friend Pajol was swearing to himself. 'Well, then--go to the devil!'
he shouted, exasperated. But as I swung round he repented, for I heard
him say hurriedly, 'Shoot the fool's horse before he gets away.'

"He had good marksmen. Two shots rang out, and in the very act
of turning my horse staggered, fell and lay still as if struck by
lightning. I had my feet out of the stirrups and rolled clear of him;
but I did not attempt to rise. Neither dared they rush out to drag me
in.

"The masses of Indians had begun to move upon the fort. They rode up
in squadrons, trailing their long chusos; then dismounted out of
musket-shot, and, throwing off their fur mantles, advanced naked to the
attack, stamping their feet and shouting in cadence. A sheet of flame
ran three times along the face of the fort without checking their steady
march. They crowded right up to the very stakes, flourishing their broad
knives. But this palisade was not fastened together with hide lashings
in the usual way, but with long iron nails, which they could not cut.
Dismayed at the failure of their usual method of forcing an entrance,
the heathen, who had marched so steadily against the musketry fire,
broke and fled under the volleys of the besieged.

"Directly they had passed me on their advance I got up and rejoined
Gaspar Ruiz on a low ridge which jutted out upon the plain. The musketry
of his own men had covered the attack, but now at a sign from him a
trumpet sounded the 'Cease fire.' Together we looked in silence at the
hopeless rout of the savages.

"'It must be a siege, then,' he muttered. And I detected him wringing
his hands stealthily.

"But what sort of siege could it be? Without any need for me to repeat
my friend Pajol's message, he dared not cut the water off from the
besieged. They had plenty of meat. And, indeed, if they had been short
he would have been too anxious to send food into the stockade had he
been able. But, as a matter of fact, it was we on the plain who were
beginning to feel the pinch of hunger.

"Peneleo, the Indian chief, sat by our fire folded in his ample mantle
of guanaco skins. He was an athletic savage, with an enormous square
shock head of hair resembling a straw beehive in shape and size,
and with grave, surly, much-lined features. In his broken Spanish he
repeated, growling like a bad-tempered wild beast, that if an opening
ever so small were made in the stockade his men would march in and get
the senora--not otherwise.

"Gaspar Ruiz, sitting opposite him, kept his eyes fixed on the fort
night and day as it were, in awful silence and immobility. Meantime, by
runners from the lowlands that arrived nearly every day, we heard of the
defeat of one of his lieutenants in the Maipu valley. Scouts sent afar
brought news of a column of infantry advancing through distant passes to
the relief of the fort. They were slow, but we could trace their toilful
progress up the lower valleys. I wondered why Ruiz did not march to
attack and destroy this threatening force, in some wild gorge fit for an
ambuscade, in accordance with his genius for guerilla warfare. But his
genius seemed to have abandoned him to his despair.

"It was obvious to me that he could not tear himself away from the sight
of the fort. I protest to you, senores, that I was moved almost to
pity by the sight of this powerless strong man sitting on the ridge,
indifferent to sun, to rain, to cold, to wind; with his hands
clasped round his legs and his chin resting on his knees,
gazing--gazing--gazing.

"And the fort he kept his eyes fastened on was as still and silent as
himself. The garrison gave no sign of life. They did not even answer the
desultory fire directed at the loopholes.

"One night, as I strolled past him, he, without changing his attitude,
spoke to me unexpectedly. 'I have sent for a gun,' he said. 'I shall
have time to get her back and retreat before your Robles manages to
crawl up here.'

"He had sent for a gun to the plains.

"It was long in coming, but at last it came. It was a seven-pounder
field gun. Dismounted and lashed crosswise to two long poles, it had
been carried up the narrow paths between two mules with ease. His wild
cry of exultation at daybreak when he saw the gun escort emerge from the
valley rings in my ears now.

"But, senores, I have no words to depict his amazement, his fury, his
despair and distraction, when he heard that the animal loaded with the
gun-carriage had, during the last night march, somehow or other tumbled
down a precipice. He broke into menaces of death and torture against the
escort. I kept out of his way all that day, lying behind some bushes,
and wondering what he would do now. Retreat was left for him, but he
could not retreat.

"I saw below me his artillerist, Jorge, an old Spanish soldier, building
up a sort of structure with heaped-up saddles. The gun, ready loaded,
was lifted on to that, but in the act of firing the whole thing
collapsed and the shot flew high above the stockade.

"Nothing more was attempted. One of the ammunition mules had been lost,
too, and they had no more than six shots to fire; ample enough to batter
down the gate providing the gun was well laid. This was impossible
without it being properly mounted. There was no time nor means to
construct a carriage. Already every moment I expected to hear Robles'
bugle-calls echo amongst the crags.

"Peneleo, wandering about uneasily, draped in his skins, sat down for a
moment near me growling his usual tale.

"'Make an entrada--a hole. If make a hole, bueno. If not make a hole,
then vamos--we must go away.'

"After sunset I observed with surprise the Indians making preparations
as if for another assault. Their lines stood ranged in the shadows of
the mountains. On the plain in front of the fort gate I saw a group of
men swaying about in the same place.

"I walked down the ridge disregarded. The moonlight in the clear air
of the uplands was bright as day, but the intense shadows confused my
sight, and I could not make out what they were doing. I heard the voice
of Jorge, the artillerist, say in a queer, doubtful tone, 'It is loaded,
senor.'

"Then another voice in that group pronounced firmly the words, 'Bring
the riata here.' It was the voice of Gaspar Ruiz.

"A silence fell, in which the popping shots of the besieged garrison
rang out sharply. They, too, had observed the group. But the distance
was too great and in the spatter of spent musket-balls cutting up the
ground, the group opened, closed, swayed, giving me a glimpse of busy
stooping figures in its midst. I drew nearer, doubting whether this was
a weird vision, a suggestive and insensate dream.

"A strangely stifled voice commanded, 'Haul the hitches tighter.'

"'Si, senor,' several other voices answered in tones of awed alacrity.

"Then the stifled voice said: 'Like this. I must be free to breathe.'

"Then there was a concerned noise of many men together. 'Help him up,
hombres. Steady! Under the other arm.'

"That deadened voice ordered: 'Bueno! Stand away from me, men.'

"I pushed my way through the recoiling circle, and heard once more that
same oppressed voice saying earnestly: 'Forget that I am a living man,
Jorge. Forget me altogether, and think of what you have to do.'

"'Be without fear, senor. You are nothing to me but a gun-carriage, and
I shall not waste a shot.'

"I heard the spluttering of a port-fire, and smelt the saltpetre of the
match. I saw suddenly before me a nondescript shape on all fours like
a beast, but with a man's head drooping below a tubular projection over
the nape of the neck, and the gleam of a rounded mass of bronze on its
back.

"In front of a silent semicircle of men it squatted alone, with Jorge
behind it and a trumpeter motionless, his trumpet in his hand, by its
side.

"Jorge, bent double, muttered, port-fire in hand: 'An inch to the left,
senor. Too much. So. Now, if you let yourself down a little by letting
your elbows bend, I will . . .'

"He leaped aside, lowering his port-fire, and a burst of flame darted
out of the muzzle of the gun lashed on the man's back.

"Then Gaspar Ruiz lowered himself slowly. 'Good shot?' he asked.

"'Full on, senor.'

"'Then load again.'

"He lay there before me on his breast under the darkly glittering bronze
of his monstrous burden, such as no love or strength of man had ever
had to bear in the lamentable history of the world. His arms were spread
out, and he resembled a prostrate penitent on the moonlit ground.

"Again I saw him raised to his hands and knees and the men stand away
from him, and old Jorge stoop glancing along the gun.

"'Left a little. Right an inch. Por Dios, senor, stop this trembling.
Where is your strength?'

"The old gunner's voice was cracked with emotion. He stepped aside, and
quick as lightning brought the spark to the touch-hole.

"'Excellent!' he cried, tearfully; but Gaspar Ruiz lay for a long time
silent, flattened on the ground.

"'I am tired,' he murmured at last. 'Will another shot do it?'

"'Without doubt,' said Jorge, bending down to his ear.

"'Then--load,' I heard him utter distinctly. 'Trumpeter!'

"'I am here, senor, ready for your word.'

"'Blow a blast at this word that shall be heard from one end of Chile to
the other,' he said, in an extraordinarily strong voice. 'And you others
stand ready to cut this accursed riata, for then will be the time for me
to lead you in your rush. Now raise me up, and you, Jorge--be quick with
your aim.'

"The rattle of musketry from the fort nearly drowned his voice. The
palisade was wreathed in smoke and flame.

"'Exert your force forward against the recoil, mi amo,' said the old
gunner, shakily. 'Dig your fingers into the ground. So. Now!'

"A cry of exultation escaped him after the shot. The trumpeter raised
his trumpet nearly to his lips and waited. But no word came from the
prostrate man. I fell on one knee, and heard all he had to say then.

"'Something broken,' he whispered, lifting his head a little, and
turning his eyes towards me in his hopelessly crushed attitude.

"'The gate hangs only by the splinters,' yelled Jorge.

"Gaspar Ruiz tried to speak, but his voice died out in his throat, and I
helped to roll the gun off his broken back. He was insensible.

"I kept my lips shut, of course. The signal for the Indians to attack
was never given. Instead, the bugle-calls of the relieving force for
which my ears had thirsted so long, burst out, terrifying like the call
of the Last Day to our surprised enemies.

"A tornado, senores, a real hurricane of stampeded men, wild horses,
mounted Indians, swept over me as I cowered on the ground by the side
of Gaspar Ruiz, still stretched out on his face in the shape of a
cross. Peneleo, galloping for life, jabbed at me with his long chuso in
passing--for the sake of old acquaintance, I suppose. How I escaped the
flying lead is more difficult to explain. Venturing to rise on my knees
too soon some soldiers of the 17th Taltal regiment, in their hurry to
get at something alive, nearly bayoneted me on the spot. They looked
very disappointed, too, when, some officers galloping up drove them away
with the flat of their swords.

"It was General Robles with his staff. He wanted badly to make some
prisoners. He, too, seemed disappointed for a moment. 'What! Is it you?'
he cried. But he dismounted at once to embrace me, for he was an old
friend of my family. I pointed to the body at our feet, and said only
these two words:

"'Gaspar Ruiz.'

"He threw his arms up in astonishment.

"'Aha! Your strong man! Always to the last with your strong man. No
matter. He saved our lives when the earth trembled enough to make the
bravest faint with fear. I was frightened out of my wits. But he--no!
Que guape! Where's the hero who got the best of him? ha! ha! ha! What
killed him, chico?'

"'His own strength, General,' I answered."


XII


"But Gaspar Ruiz breathed yet. I had him carried in his poncho under the
shelter of some bushes on the very ridge from which he had been gazing
so fixedly at the fort while unseen death was hovering already over his
head.

"Our troops had bivouacked round the fort. Towards daybreak I was not
surprised to hear that I was designated to command the escort of a
prisoner who was to be sent down at once to Santiago. Of course the
prisoner was Gaspar Ruiz' wife.

"'I have named you out of regard for your feelings,' General Robles
remarked. 'Though the woman really ought to be shot for all the harm she
has done to the Republic.'

"And as I made a movement of shocked protest, he continued:

"'Now he is as well as dead, she is of no importance. Nobody will know
what to do with her. However, the Government wants her.' He shrugged his
shoulders. 'I suppose he must have buried large quantities of his loot
in places that she alone knows of.'

"At dawn I saw her coming up the ridge, guarded by two soldiers, and
carrying her child on her arm.

"I walked to meet her.

"'Is he living yet?' she asked, confronting me with that white,
impassive face he used to look at in an adoring way.

"I bent my head, and led her round a clump of bushes without a word. His
eyes were open. He breathed with difficulty, and uttered her name with a
great effort.

"'Erminia!'

"She knelt at his head. The little girl, unconscious of him, and with
her big eyes looking about, began to chatter suddenly, in a joyous, thin
voice. She pointed a tiny finger at the rosy glow of sunrise behind the
black shapes of the peaks. And while that child-talk, incomprehensible
and sweet to the ear, lasted, those two, the dying man and the kneeling
woman, remained silent, looking into each other's eyes, listening to the
frail sound. Then the prattle stopped. The child laid its head against
its mother's breast and was still.

"'It was for you,' he began. 'Forgive.' His voice failed him. Presently
I heard a mutter and caught the pitiful words: 'Not strong enough.'

"She looked at him with an extraordinary intensity. He tried to smile,
and in a humble tone, 'Forgive me,' he repeated. 'Leaving you . . .'

"She bent down, dry-eyed and in a steady voice: 'On all the earth I have
loved nothing but you, Gaspar,' she said.

"His head made a movement. His eyes revived. 'At last!' he sighed out.
Then, anxiously, 'But is this true . . . is this true?'

"'As true as that there is no mercy and justice in this world,' she
answered him, passionately. She stooped over his face. He tried to raise
his head, but it fell back, and when she kissed his lips he was already
dead. His glazed eyes stared at the sky, on which pink clouds floated
very high. But I noticed the eyelids of the child, pressed to its
mother's breast, droop and close slowly. She had gone to sleep.

"The widow of Gaspar Ruiz, the strong man, allowed me to lead her away
without shedding a tear.

"For travelling we had arranged for her a sidesaddle very much like a
chair, with a board swung beneath to rest her feet on. And the first day
she rode without uttering a word, and hardly for one moment turning her
eyes away from the little girl, whom she held on her knees. At our first
camp I saw her during the night walking about, rocking the child in
her arms and gazing down at it by the light of the moon. After we had
started on our second day's march she asked me how soon we should come
to the first village of the inhabited country.

"I said we should be there about noon.

"'And will there be women there?' she inquired.

"I told her that it was a large village. 'There will be men and women
there, senora,' I said, 'whose hearts shall be made glad by the news
that all the unrest and war is over now.'

"'Yes, it is all over now,' she repeated. Then, after a time: 'Senor
officer, what will your Government do with me?'

"'I do not know, senora,' I said. 'They will treat you well, no doubt.
We republicans are not savages and take no vengeance on women.'

"She gave me a look at the word 'republicans' which I imagined full of
undying hate. But an hour or so afterwards, as we drew up to let the
baggage mules go first along a narrow path skirting a precipice, she
looked at me with such a white, troubled face that I felt a great pity
for her.

"'Senor officer,' she said, 'I am weak, I tremble. It is an insensate
fear.' And indeed her lips did tremble while she tried to smile,
glancing at the beginning of the narrow path which was not so dangerous
after all. 'I am afraid I shall drop the child. Gaspar saved your life,
you remember. . . . Take her from me.'

"I took the child out of her extended arms. 'Shut your eyes, senora, and
trust to your mule,' I recommended.

"She did so, and with her pallor and her wasted, thin face she looked
deathlike. At a turn of the path where a great crag of purple porphyry
closes the view of the lowlands, I saw her open her eyes. I rode just
behind her holding the little girl with my right arm. 'The child is all
right,' I cried encouragingly.

"'Yes,' she answered, faintly; and then, to my intense terror, I saw her
stand up on the foot-rest, staring horribly, and throw herself forward
into the chasm on our right.

"I cannot describe to you the sudden and abject fear that came over me
at that dreadful sight. It was a dread of the abyss, the dread of the
crags which seemed to nod upon me. My head swam. I pressed the child to
my side and sat my horse as still as a statue. I was speechless and cold
all over. Her mule staggered, sidling close to the rock, and then went
on. My horse only pricked up his ears with a slight snort. My heart
stood still, and from the depths of the precipice the stones rattling in
the bed of the furious stream made me almost insane with their sound.

"Next moment we were round the turn and on a broad and grassy slope. And
then I yelled. My men came running back to me in great alarm. It seems
that at first I did nothing but shout, 'She has given the child into my
hands! She has given the child into my hands!' The escort thought I had
gone mad."

General Santierra ceased and got up from the table. "And that is all,
senores," he concluded, with a courteous glance at his rising guests.

"But what became of the child. General?" we asked.

"Ah, the child, the child."

He walked to one of the windows opening on his beautiful garden, the
refuge of his old days. Its fame was great in the land. Keeping us back
with a raised arm, he called out, "Erminia, Erminia!" and waited. Then
his cautioning arm dropped, and we crowded to the windows.

From a clump of trees a woman had come upon the broad walk bordered
with flowers. We could hear the rustle of her starched petticoats and
observed the ample spread of her old-fashioned black silk skirt. She
looked up, and seeing all these eyes staring at her stopped, frowned,
smiled, shook her finger at the General, who was laughing boisterously,
and drawing the black lace on her head so as to partly conceal her
haughty profile, passed out of our sight, walking with stiff dignity.

"You have beheld the guardian angel of the old man--and her to whom
you owe all that is seemly and comfortable in my hospitality. Somehow,
senores, though the flame of love has been kindled early in my breast, I
have never married. And because of that perhaps the sparks of the sacred
fire are not yet extinct here." He struck his broad chest. "Still alive,
still alive," he said, with serio-comic emphasis. "But I shall not marry
now. She is General Santierra's adopted daughter and heiress."

One of our fellow-guests, a young naval officer, described her
afterwards as a "short, stout, old girl of forty or thereabouts." We had
all noticed that her hair was turning grey, and that she had very fine
black eyes.

"And," General Santierra continued, "neither would she ever hear of
marrying any one. A real calamity! Good, patient, devoted to the old
man. A simple soul. But I would not advise any of you to ask for her
hand, for if she took yours into hers it would be only to crush your
bones. Ah! she does not jest on that subject. And she is the own
daughter of her father, the strong man who perished through his own
strength: the strength of his body, of his simplicity--of his love!"




AN IRONIC TALE




THE INFORMER


Mr. X came to me, preceded by a letter of introduction from a good
friend of mine in Paris, specifically to see my collection of Chinese
bronzes and porcelain.

"My friend in Paris is a collector, too. He collects neither porcelain,
nor bronzes, nor pictures, nor medals, nor stamps, nor anything that
could be profitably dispersed under an auctioneer's hammer. He would
reject, with genuine surprise, the name of a collector. Nevertheless,
that's what he is by temperament. He collects acquaintances. It
is delicate work. He brings to it the patience, the passion, the
determination of a true collector of curiosities. His collection does
not contain any royal personages. I don't think he considers them
sufficiently rare and interesting; but, with that exception, he has met
with and talked to everyone worth knowing on any conceivable ground. He
observes them, listens to them, penetrates them, measures them, and puts
the memory away in the galleries of his mind. He has schemed, plotted,
and travelled all over Europe in order to add to his collection of
distinguished personal acquaintances.

"As he is wealthy, well connected, and unprejudiced, his collection is
pretty complete, including objects (or should I say subjects?) whose
value is unappreciated by the vulgar, and often unknown to popular fame.
Of trevolte of modern times. The world knows him as a revolutionary
writer whose savage irony has laid bare the rottenness of the most
respectable institutions. He has scalped every venerated head, and
has mangled at the stake of his wit every received opinion and every
recognized principle of conduct and policy. Who does not remember his
flaming red revolutionary pamphlets? Their sudden swarmings used to
overwhelm the powers of every Continental police like a plague of
crimson gadflies. But this extreme writer has been also the active
inspirer of secret societies, the mysterious unknown Number One of
desperate conspiracies suspected and unsuspected, matured or baffled.
And the world at large has never had an inkling of that fact! This
accounts for him going about amongst us to this day, a veteran of many
subterranean campaigns, standing aside now, safe within his reputation
of merely the greatest destructive publicist that ever lived."

Thus wrote my friend, adding that Mr. X was an enlightened connoisseur
of bronzes and china, and asking me to show him my collection.

X turned up in due course. My treasures are disposed in three large
rooms without carpets and curtains. There is no other furniture than the
etagres and the glass cases whose contents shall be worth a fortune to
my heirs. I allow no fires to be lighted, for fear of accidents, and a
fire-proof door separates them from the rest of the house.

It was a bitter cold day. We kept on our overcoats and hats.
Middle-sized and spare, his eyes alert in a long, Roman-nosed
countenance, X walked on his neat little feet, with short steps,
and looked at my collection intelligently. I hope I looked at him
intelligently, too. A snow-white moustache and imperial made his
nutbrown complexion appear darker than it really was. In his fur coat
and shiny tall hat that terrible man looked fashionable. I believe he
belonged to a noble family, and could have called himself Vicomte X de
la Z if he chose. We talked nothing but bronzes and porcelain. He was
remarkably appreciative. We parted on cordial terms.

Where he was staying I don't know. I imagine he must have been a lonely
man. Anarchists, I suppose, have no families--not, at any rate, as we
understand that social relation. Organization into families may answer
to a need of human nature, but in the last instance it is based on law,
and therefore must be something odious and impossible to an anarchist.
But, indeed, I don't understand anarchists. Does a man of that--of
that--persuasion still remain an anarchist when alone, quite alone and
going to bed, for instance? Does he lay his head on the pillow, pull
his bedclothes over him, and go to sleep with the necessity of the
chambardement general, as the French slang has it, of the general
blow-up, always present to his mind? And if so how can he? I am sure
that if such a faith (or such a fanaticism) once mastered my thoughts
I would never be able to compose myself sufficiently to sleep or eat or
perform any of the routine acts of daily life. I would want no wife, no
children; I could have no friends, it seems to me; and as to collecting
bronzes or china, that, I should say, would be quite out of the
question. But I don't know. All I know is that Mr. X took his meals in a
very good restaurant which I frequented also.

With his head uncovered, the silver top-knot of his brushed-up hair
completed the character of his physiognomy, all bony ridges and sunken
hollows, clothed in a perfect impassiveness of expression. His meagre
brown hands emerging from large white cuffs came and went breaking
bread, pouring wine, and so on, with quiet mechanical precision.
His head and body above the tablecloth had a rigid immobility. This
firebrand, this great agitator, exhibited the least possible amount of
warmth and animation. His voice was rasping, cold, and monotonous in a
low key. He could not be called a talkative personality; but with his
detached calm manner he appeared as ready to keep the conversation going
as to drop it at any moment.

And his conversation was by no means commonplace. To me, I own, there
was some excitement in talking quietly across a dinner-table with a
man whose venomous pen-stabs had sapped the vitality of at least one
monarchy. That much was a matter of public knowledge. But I knew more. I
knew of him--from my friend--as a certainty what the guardians of social
order in Europe had at most only suspected, or dimly guessed at.

He had had what I may call his underground life. And as I sat, evening
after evening, facing him at dinner, a curiosity in that direction
would naturally arise in my mind. I am a quiet and peaceable product of
civilization, and know no passion other than the passion for collecting
things which are rare, and must remain exquisite even if approaching to
the monstrous. Some Chinese bronzes are monstrously precious. And here
(out of my friend's collection), here I had before me a kind of rare
monster. It is true that this monster was polished and in a sense even
exquisite. His beautiful unruffled manner was that. But then he was
not of bronze. He was not even Chinese, which would have enabled one
to contemplate him calmly across the gulf of racial difference. He was
alive and European; he had the manner of good society, wore a coat and
hat like mine, and had pretty near the same taste in cooking. It was too
frightful to think of.

One evening he remarked, casually, in the course of conversation,
"There's no amendment to be got out of mankind except by terror and
violence."

You can imagine the effect of such a phrase out of such a man's mouth
upon a person like myself, whose whole scheme of life had been based
upon a suave and delicate discrimination of social and artistic values.
Just imagine! Upon me, to whom all sorts and forms of violence appeared
as unreal as the giants, ogres, and seven-headed hydras whose activities
affect, fantastically, the course of legends and fairy-tales!

I seemed suddenly to hear above the festive bustle and clatter of the
brilliant restaurant the mutter of a hungry and seditious multitude.

I suppose I am impressionable and imaginative. I had a disturbing
vision of darkness, full of lean jaws and wild eyes, amongst the hundred
electric lights of the place. But somehow this vision made me angry,
too. The sight of that man, so calm, breaking bits of white bread,
exasperated me. And I had the audacity to ask him how it was that the
starving proletariat of Europe to whom he had been preaching revolt and
violence had not been made indignant by his openly luxurious life. "At
all this," I said, pointedly, with a glance round the room and at the
bottle of champagne we generally shared between us at dinner.

He remained unmoved.

"Do I feed on their toil and their heart's blood? Am I a speculator or a
capitalist? Did I steal my fortune from a starving people? No! They
know this very well. And they envy me nothing. The miserable mass of the
people is generous to its leaders. What I have acquired has come to
me through my writings; not from the millions of pamphlets distributed
gratis to the hungry and the oppressed, but from the hundreds of
thousands of copies sold to the well-fed bourgeoisie. You know that my
writings were at one time the rage, the fashion--the thing to read with
wonder and horror, to turn your eyes up at my pathos . . . or else, to
laugh in ecstasies at my wit."

"Yes," I admitted. "I remember, of course; and I confess frankly that I
could never understand that infatuation."

"Don't you know yet," he said, "that an idle and selfish class loves to
see mischief being made, even if it is made at its own expense? Its own
life being all a matter of pose and gesture, it is unable to realize the
power and the danger of a real movement and of words that have no sham
meaning. It is all fun and sentiment. It is sufficient, for instance,
to point out the attitude of the old French aristocracy towards the
philosophers whose words were preparing the Great Revolution. Even in
England, where you have some common-sense, a demagogue has only to shout
loud enough and long enough to find some backing in the very class he
is shouting at. You, too, like to see mischief being made. The demagogue
carries the amateurs of emotion with him. Amateurism in this, that, and
the other thing is a delightfully easy way of killing time, and feeding
one's own vanity--the silly vanity of being abreast with the ideas of
the day after to-morrow. Just as good and otherwise harmless people will
join you in ecstasies over your collection without having the slightest
notion in what its marvellousness really consists."

I hung my head. It was a crushing illustration of the sad truth he
advanced. The world is full of such people. And that instance of the
French aristocracy before the Revolution was extremely telling, too.
I could not traverse his statement, though its cynicism--always a
distasteful trait--took off much of its value to my mind. However, I
admit I was impressed. I felt the need to say something which would not
be in the nature of assent and yet would not invite discussion.

"You don't mean to say," I observed, airily, "that extreme
revolutionists have ever been actively assisted by the infatuation of
such people?"

"I did not mean exactly that by what I said just now. I generalized.
But since you ask me, I may tell you that such help has been given
to revolutionary activities, more or less consciously, in various
countries. And even in this country."

"Impossible!" I protested with firmness. "We don't play with fire to
that extent."

"And yet you can better afford it than others, perhaps. But let me
observe that most women, if not always ready to play with fire, are
generally eager to play with a loose spark or so."

"Is this a joke?" I asked, smiling.

"If it is, I am not aware of it," he said, woodenly. "I was thinking of
an instance. Oh! mild enough in a way . . ."

I became all expectation at this. I had tried many times to approach him
on his underground side, so to speak. The very word had been pronounced
between us. But he had always met me with his impenetrable calm.

"And at the same time," Mr. X continued, "it will give you a notion
of the difficulties that may arise in what you are pleased to call
underground work. It is sometimes difficult to deal with them. Of course
there is no hierarchy amongst the affiliated. No rigid system."

My surprise was great, but short-lived. Clearly, amongst extreme
anarchists there could be no hierarchy; nothing in the nature of a
law of precedence. The idea of anarchy ruling among anarchists was
comforting, too. It could not possibly make for efficiency.

Mr. X startled me by asking, abruptly, "You know Hermione Street?"

I nodded doubtful assent. Hermione Street has been, within the last
three years, improved out of any man's knowledge. The name exists still,
but not one brick or stone of the old Hermione Street is left now. It
was the old street he meant, for he said:

"There was a row of two-storied brick houses on the left, with their
backs against the wing of a great public building--you remember. Would
it surprise you very much to hear that one of these houses was for
a time the centre of anarchist propaganda and of what you would call
underground action?"

"Not at all," I declared. Hermione Street had never been particularly
respectable, as I remembered it.

"The house was the property of a distinguished government official," he
added, sipping his champagne.

"Oh, indeed!" I said, this time not believing a word of it.

"Of course he was not living there," Mr. X continued. "But from ten till
four he sat next door to it, the dear man, in his well-appointed private
room in the wing of the public building I've mentioned. To be strictly
accurate, I must explain that the house in Hermione Street did not
really belong to him. It belonged to his grown-up children--a daughter
and a son. The girl, a fine figure, was by no means vulgarly pretty.
To more personal charm than mere youth could account for, she added
the seductive appearance of enthusiasm, of independence, of courageous
thought. I suppose she put on these appearances as she put on her
picturesque dresses and for the same reason: to assert her individuality
at any cost. You know, women would go to any length almost for such
a purpose. She went to a great length. She had acquired all the
appropriate gestures of revolutionary convictions--the gestures of pity,
of anger, of indignation against the anti-humanitarian vices of the
social class to which she belonged herself. All this sat on her striking
personality as well as her slightly original costumes. Very slightly
original; just enough to mark a protest against the philistinism of the
overfed taskmasters of the poor. Just enough, and no more. It would not
have done to go too far in that direction--you understand. But she was
of age, and nothing stood in the way of her offering her house to the
revolutionary workers."

"You don't mean it!" I cried.

"I assure you," he affirmed, "that she made that very practical gesture.
How else could they have got hold of it? The cause is not rich.
And, moreover, there would have been difficulties with any ordinary
house-agent, who would have wanted references and so on. The group she
came in contact with while exploring the poor quarters of the town
(you know the gesture of charity and personal service which was so
fashionable some years ago) accepted with gratitude. The first advantage
was that Hermione Street is, as you know, well away from the suspect
part of the town, specially watched by the police.

"The ground floor consisted of a little Italian restaurant, of the
flyblown sort. There was no difficulty in buying the proprietor out. A
woman and a man belonging to the group took it on. The man had been a
cook. The comrades could get their meals there, unnoticed amongst
the other customers. This was another advantage. The first floor was
occupied by a shabby Variety Artists' Agency--an agency for performers
in inferior music-halls, you know. A fellow called Bomm, I remember. He
was not disturbed. It was rather favourable than otherwise to have a lot
of foreign-looking people, jugglers, acrobats, singers of both sexes,
and so on, going in and out all day long. The police paid no attention
to new faces, you see. The top floor happened, most conveniently, to
stand empty then."

X interrupted himself to attack impassively, with measured movements,
a bombe glacee which the waiter had just set down on the table. He
swallowed carefully a few spoonfuls of the iced sweet, and asked me,
"Did you ever hear of Stone's Dried Soup?"

"Hear of what?"

"It was," X pursued, evenly, "a comestible article once rather
prominently advertised in the dailies, but which never, somehow, gained
the favour of the public. The enterprise fizzled out, as you say here.
Parcels of their stock could be picked up at auctions at considerably
less than a penny a pound. The group bought some of it, and an agency
for Stone's Dried Soup was started on the top floor. A perfectly
respectable business. The stuff, a yellow powder of extremely
unappetizing aspect, was put up in large square tins, of which six went
to a case. If anybody ever came to give an order, it was, of course,
executed. But the advantage of the powder was this, that things could be
concealed in it very conveniently. Now and then a special case got put
on a van and sent off to be exported abroad under the very nose of the
policeman on duty at the corner. You understand?"

"I think I do," I said, with an expressive nod at the remnants of the
bombe melting slowly in the dish.

"Exactly. But the cases were useful in another way, too. In the
basement, or in the cellar at the back, rather, two printing-presses
were established. A lot of revolutionary literature of the most
inflammatory kind was got away from the house in Stone's Dried Soup
cases. The brother of our anarchist young lady found some occupation
there. He wrote articles, helped to set up type and pull off the sheets,
and generally assisted the man in charge, a very able young fellow
called Sevrin.

"The guiding spirit of that group was a fanatic of social revolution. He
is dead now. He was an engraver and etcher of genius. You must have seen
his work. It is much sought after by certain amateurs now. He began by
being revolutionary in his art, and ended by becoming a revolutionist,
after his wife and child had died in want and misery. He used to say
that the bourgeoisie, the smug, overfed lot, had killed them. That was
his real belief. He still worked at his art and led a double life. He
was tall, gaunt, and swarthy, with a long, brown beard and deep-set
eyes. You must have seen him. His name was Horne."

At this I was really startled. Of course years ago I used to meet Horne
about. He looked like a powerful, rough gipsy, in an old top hat, with a
red muffler round his throat and buttoned up in a long, shabby overcoat.
He talked of his art with exaltation, and gave one the impression of
being strung up to the verge of insanity. A small group of connoisseurs
appreciated his work. Who would have thought that this man. . . .
Amazing! And yet it was not, after all, so difficult to believe.

"As you see," X went on, "this group was in a position to pursue
its work of propaganda, and the other kind of work, too, under very
advantageous conditions. They were all resolute, experienced men of
a superior stamp. And yet we became struck at length by the fact that
plans prepared in Hermione Street almost invariably failed."

"Who were 'we'?" I asked, pointedly.

"Some of us in Brussels--at the centre," he said, hastily. "Whatever
vigorous action originated in Hermione Street seemed doomed to failure.
Something always happened to baffle the best planned manifestations in
every part of Europe. It was a time of general activity. You must not
imagine that all our failures are of a loud sort, with arrests and
trials. That is not so. Often the police work quietly, almost secretly,
defeating our combinations by clever counter-plotting. No arrests, no
noise, no alarming of the public mind and inflaming the passions. It
is a wise procedure. But at that time the police were too uniformly
successful from the Mediterranean to the Baltic. It was annoying and
began to look dangerous. At last we came to the conclusion that there
must be some untrustworthy elements amongst the London groups. And I
came over to see what could be done quietly.

"My first step was to call upon our young Lady Amateur of anarchism at
her private house. She received me in a flattering way. I judged that
she knew nothing of the chemical and other operations going on at
the top of the house in Hermione Street. The printing of anarchist
literature was the only 'activity' she seemed to be aware of there. She
was displaying very strikingly the usual signs of severe enthusiasm,
and had already written many sentimental articles with ferocious
conclusions. I could see she was enjoying herself hugely, with all the
gestures and grimaces of deadly earnestness. They suited her big-eyed,
broad-browed face and the good carriage of her shapely head, crowned by
a magnificent lot of brown hair done in an unusual and becoming style.
Her brother was in the room, too, a serious youth, with arched eyebrows
and wearing a red necktie, who struck me as being absolutely in the dark
about everything in the world, including himself. By and by a tall young
man came in. He was clean-shaved with a strong bluish jaw and something
of the air of a taciturn actor or of a fanatical priest: the type with
thick black eyebrows--you know. But he was very presentable indeed. He
shook hands at once vigorously with each of us. The young lady came up
to me and murmured sweetly, 'Comrade Sevrin.'

"I had never seen him before. He had little to say to us, but sat
down by the side of the girl, and they fell at once into earnest
conversation. She leaned forward in her deep armchair, and took her
nicely rounded chin in her beautiful white hand. He looked attentively
into her eyes. It was the attitude of love-making, serious, intense, as
if on the brink of the grave. I suppose she felt it necessary to
round and complete her assumption of advanced ideas, of revolutionary
lawlessness, by making believe to be in love with an anarchist. And this
one, I repeat, was extremely presentable, notwithstanding his fanatical
black-browed aspect. After a few stolen glances in their direction, I
had no doubt that he was in earnest. As to the lady, her gestures
were unapproachable, better than the very thing itself in the blended
suggestion of dignity, sweetness, condescension, fascination, surrender,
and reserve. She interpreted her conception of what that precise sort
of love-making should be with consummate art. And so far, she, too, no
doubt, was in earnest. Gestures--but so perfect!

"After I had been left alone with our Lady Amateur I informed her
guardedly of the object of my visit. I hinted at our suspicions. I
wanted to hear what she would have to say, and half expected some
perhaps unconscious revelation. All she said was, 'That's serious,'
looking delightfully concerned and grave. But there was a sparkle in her
eyes which meant plainly, 'How exciting!' After all, she knew little
of anything except of words. Still, she undertook to put me in
communication with Horne, who was not easy to find unless in Hermione
Street, where I did not wish to show myself just then.

"I met Horne. This was another kind of a fanatic altogether. I exposed
to him the conclusion we in Brussels had arrived at, and pointed out
the significant series of failures. To this he answered with irrelevant
exaltation:

"'I have something in hand that shall strike terror into the heart of
these gorged brutes.'

"And then I learned that, by excavating in one of the cellars of the
house, he and some companions had made their way into the vaults under
the great public building I have mentioned before. The blowing up of a
whole wing was a certainty as soon as the materials were ready.

"I was not so appalled at the stupidity of that move as I might have
been had not the usefulness of our centre in Hermione Street become
already very problematical. In fact, in my opinion it was much more of a
police trap by this time than anything else.

"What was necessary now was to discover what, or rather who, was wrong,
and I managed at last to get that idea into Horne's head. He glared,
perplexed, his nostrils working as if he were sniffing treachery in the
air.

"And here comes a piece of work which will no doubt strike you as a sort
of theatrical expedient. And yet what else could have been done? The
problem was to find out the untrustworthy member of the group. But no
suspicion could be fastened on one more than another. To set a watch
upon them all was not very practicable. Besides, that proceeding often
fails. In any case, it takes time, and the danger was pressing. I felt
certain that the premises in Hermione Street would be ultimately raided,
though the police had evidently such confidence in the informer that the
house, for the time being, was not even watched. Horne was positive
on that point. Under the circumstances it was an unfavourable symptom.
Something had to be done quickly.

"I decided to organize a raid myself upon the group. Do you understand?
A raid of other trusty comrades personating the police. A conspiracy
within a conspiracy. You see the object of it, of course. When
apparently about to be arrested I hoped the informer would betray
himself in some way or other; either by some unguarded act or simply by
his unconcerned demeanour, for instance. Of coarse there was the risk
of complete failure and the no lesser risk of some fatal accident in the
course of resistance, perhaps, or in the efforts at escape. For, as
you will easily see, the Hermione Street group had to be actually and
completely taken unawares, as I was sure they would be by the real
police before very long. The informer was amongst them, and Horne alone
could be let into the secret of my plan.

"I will not enter into the detail of my preparations. It was not very
easy to arrange, but it was done very well, with a really convincing
effect. The sham police invaded the restaurant, whose shutters were
immediately put up. The surprise was perfect. Most of the Hermione
Street party were found in the second cellar, enlarging the hole
communicating with the vaults of the great public building. At the first
alarm, several comrades bolted through impulsively into the aforesaid
vault, where, of course, had this been a genuine raid, they would have
been hopelessly trapped. We did not bother about them for the moment.
They were harmless enough. The top floor caused considerable anxiety
to Horne and myself. There, surrounded by tins of Stone's Dried Soup,
a comrade, nick-named the Professor (he was an ex-science student)
was engaged in perfecting some new detonators. He was an abstracted,
self-confident, sallow little man, armed with large round spectacles,
and we were afraid that under a mistaken impression he would blow
himself up and wreck the house about our ears. I rushed upstairs and
found him already at the door, on the alert, listening, as he said, to
'suspicious noises down below.' Before I had quite finished explaining
to him what was going on he shrugged his shoulders disdainfully and
turned away to his balances and test-tubes. His was the true spirit
of an extreme revolutionist. Explosives were his faith, his hope, his
weapon, and his shield. He perished a couple of years afterwards in a
secret laboratory through the premature explosion of one of his improved
detonators.

"Hurrying down again, I found an impressive scene in the gloom of the
big cellar. The man who personated the inspector (he was no stranger
to the part) was speaking harshly, and giving bogus orders to his
bogus subordinates for the removal of his prisoners. Evidently nothing
enlightening had happened so far. Horne, saturnine and swarthy, waited
with folded arms, and his patient, moody expectation had an air of
stoicism well in keeping with the situation. I detected in the shadows
one of the Hermione Street group surreptitiously chewing up and
swallowing a small piece of paper. Some compromising scrap, I suppose;
perhaps just a note of a few names and addresses. He was a true and
faithful 'companion.' But the fund of secret malice which lurks at the
bottom of our sympathies caused me to feel amused at that perfectly
uncalled-for performance.

"In every other respect the risky experiment, the theatrical coup, if you
like to call it so, seemed to have failed. The deception could not
be kept up much longer; the explanation would bring about a very
embarrassing and even grave situation. The man who had eaten the paper
would be furious. The fellows who had bolted away would be angry, too.

"To add to my vexation, the door communicating with the other cellar,
where the printing-presses were, flew open, and our young lady
revolutionist appeared, a black silhouette in a close-fitting dress and
a large hat, with the blaze of gas flaring in there at her back. Over
her shoulder I perceived the arched eyebrows and the red necktie of her
brother.

"The last people in the world I wanted to see then! They had gone that
evening to some amateur concert for the delectation of the poor people,
you know; but she had insisted on leaving early, on purpose to call in
Hermione Street on the way home, under the pretext of having some work
to do. Her usual task was to correct the proofs of the Italian and
French editions of the Alarm Bell and the Firebrand." . . .

"Heavens!" I murmured. I had been shown once a few copies of these
publications. Nothing, in my opinion, could have been less fit for the
eyes of a young lady. They were the most advanced things of the sort;
advanced, I mean, beyond all bounds of reason and decency. One of them
preached the dissolution of all social and domestic ties; the other
advocated systematic murder. To think of a young girl calmly tracking
printers' errors all along the sort of abominable sentences I remembered
was intolerable to my sentiment of womanhood. Mr. X, after giving me a
glance, pursued steadily.

"I think, however, that she came mostly to exercise her fascinations
upon Sevrin, and to receive his homage in her queenly and condescending
way. She was aware of both--her power and his homage--and enjoyed them
with, I dare say, complete innocence. We have no ground in expediency
or morals to quarrel with her on that account. Charm in woman and
exceptional intelligence in man are a law unto themselves. Is it not
so?"

I refrained from expressing my abhorrence of that licentious doctrine
because of my curiosity.

"But what happened then?" I hastened to ask.

X went on crumbling slowly a small piece of bread with a careless left
hand.

"What happened, in effect," he confessed, "is that she saved the
situation."

"She gave you an opportunity to end your rather sinister farce," I
suggested.

"Yes," he said, preserving his impassive bearing. "The farce was bound
to end soon. And it ended in a very few minutes. And it ended well. Had
she not come in, it might have ended badly. Her brother, of course, did
not count. They had slipped into the house quietly some time before. The
printing-cellar had an entrance of its own. Not finding any one there,
she sat down to her proofs, expecting Sevrin to return to his work at
any moment. He did not do so. She grew impatient, heard through the door
the sounds of a disturbance in the other cellar and naturally came in to
see what was the matter.

"Sevrin had been with us. At first he had seemed to me the most amazed
of the whole raided lot. He appeared for an instant as if paralyzed
with astonishment. He stood rooted to the spot. He never moved a limb. A
solitary gas-jet flared near his head; all the other lights had been put
out at the first alarm. And presently, from my dark corner, I observed
on his shaven actor's face an expression of puzzled, vexed watchfulness.
He knitted his heavy eyebrows. The corners of his mouth dropped
scornfully. He was angry. Most likely he had seen through the game,
and I regretted I had not taken him from the first into my complete
confidence.

"But with the appearance of the girl he became obviously alarmed. It was
plain. I could see it grow. The change of his expression was swift and
startling. And I did not know why. The reason never occurred to me. I
was merely astonished at the extreme alteration of the man's face. Of
course he had not been aware of her presence in the other cellar; but
that did not explain the shock her advent had given him. For a moment he
seemed to have been reduced to imbecility. He opened his mouth as if to
shout, or perhaps only to gasp. At any rate, it was somebody else who
shouted. This somebody else was the heroic comrade whom I had detected
swallowing a piece of paper. With laudable presence of mind he let out a
warning yell.

"'It's the police! Back! Back! Run back, and bolt the door behind you.'

"It was an excellent hint; but instead of retreating the girl continued
to advance, followed by her long-faced brother in his knickerbocker suit,
in which he had been singing comic songs for the entertainment of
a joyless proletariat. She advanced not as if she had failed to
understand--the word 'police' has an unmistakable sound--but rather as
if she could not help herself. She did not advance with the free gait
and expanding presence of a distinguished amateur anarchist amongst
poor, struggling professionals, but with slightly raised shoulders,
and her elbows pressed close to her body, as if trying to shrink within
herself. Her eyes were fixed immovably upon Sevrin. Sevrin the man, I
fancy; not Sevrin the anarchist. But she advanced. And that was natural.
For all their assumption of independence, girls of that class are used
to the feeling of being specially protected, as, in fact, they are. This
feeling accounts for nine tenths of their audacious gestures. Her face
had gone completely colourless. Ghastly. Fancy having it brought home to
her so brutally that she was the sort of person who must run away from
the police! I believe she was pale with indignation, mostly, though
there was, of course, also the concern for her intact personality, a
vague dread of some sort of rudeness. And, naturally, she turned to a
man, to the man on whom she had a claim of fascination and homage--the
man who could not conceivably fail her at any juncture."

"But," I cried, amazed at this analysis, "if it had been serious, real,
I mean--as she thought it was--what could she expect him to do for her?"

X never moved a muscle of his face.

"Goodness knows. I imagine that this charming, generous, and independent
creature had never known in her life a single genuine thought; I mean a
single thought detached from small human vanities, or whose source was
not in some conventional perception. All I know is that after advancing
a few steps she extended her hand towards the motionless Sevrin. And
that at least was no gesture. It was a natural movement. As to what
she expected him to do, who can tell? The impossible. But whatever she
expected, it could not have come up, I am safe to say, to what he had
made up his mind to do, even before that entreating hand had appealed to
him so directly. It had not been necessary. From the moment he had seen
her enter that cellar, he had made up his mind to sacrifice his future
usefulness, to throw off the impenetrable, solidly fastened mask it had
been his pride to wear--"

"What do you mean?" I interrupted, puzzled. "Was it Sevrin, then, who
was--"

"He was. The most persistent, the most dangerous, the craftiest, the
most systematic of informers. A genius amongst betrayers. Fortunately
for us, he was unique. The man was a fanatic, I have told you.
Fortunately, again, for us, he had fallen in love with the accomplished
and innocent gestures of that girl. An actor in desperate earnest
himself, he must have believed in the absolute value of conventional
signs. As to the grossness of the trap into which he fell, the
explanation must be that two sentiments of such absorbing magnitude
cannot exist simultaneously in one heart. The danger of that other and
unconscious comedian robbed him of his vision, of his perspicacity, of
his judgment. Indeed, it did at first rob him of his self-possession.
But he regained that through the necessity--as it appeared to him
imperiously--to do something at once. To do what? Why, to get her out of
the house as quickly as possible. He was desperately anxious to do that.
I have told you he was terrified. It could not be about himself. He had
been surprised and annoyed at a move quite unforeseen and premature. I
may even say he had been furious. He was accustomed to arrange the
last scene of his betrayals with a deep, subtle art which left his
revolutionist reputation untouched. But it seems clear to me that at
the same time he had resolved to make the best of it, to keep his mask
resolutely on. It was only with the discovery of her being in the house
that everything--the forced calm, the restraint of his fanaticism, the
mask--all came off together in a kind of panic. Why panic, do you ask?
The answer is very simple. He remembered--or, I dare say, he had never
forgotten--the Professor alone at the top of the house, pursuing his
researches, surrounded by tins upon tins of Stone's Dried Soup. There
was enough in some few of them to bury us all where we stood under
a heap of bricks. Sevrin, of course, was aware of that. And we must
believe, also, that he knew the exact character of the man. He had
gauged so many such characters! Or perhaps he only gave the Professor
credit for what he himself was capable of. But, in any case, the effect
was produced. And suddenly he raised his voice in authority.

"'Get the lady away at once.'

"It turned out that he was as hoarse as a crow; result, no doubt, of
the intense emotion. It passed off in a moment. But these fateful words
issued forth from his contracted throat in a discordant, ridiculous
croak. They required no answer. The thing was done. However, the man
personating the inspector judged it expedient to say roughly:

"'She shall go soon enough, together with the rest of you.'

"These were the last words belonging to the comedy part of this affair.

"Oblivious of everything and everybody, Sevrin strode towards him and
seized the lapels of his coat. Under his thin bluish cheeks one could
see his jaws working with passion.

"'You have men posted outside. Get the lady taken home at once. Do you
hear? Now. Before you try to get hold of the man upstairs.'

"'Oh! There is a man upstairs,' scoffed the other, openly. 'Well, he
shall be brought down in time to see the end of this.'

"But Sevrin, beside himself, took no heed of the tone.

"'Who's the imbecile meddler who sent you blundering here? Didn't you
understand your instructions? Don't you know anything? It's incredible.
Here--'

"He dropped the lapels of the coat and, plunging his hand into his
breast, jerked feverishly at something under his shirt. At last he
produced a small square pocket of soft leather, which must have been
hanging like a scapulary from his neck by the tape whose broken ends
dangled from his fist.

"'Look inside,' he spluttered, flinging it in the other's face. And
instantly he turned round towards the girl. She stood just behind him,
perfectly still and silent. Her set, white face gave an illusion of
placidity. Only her staring eyes seemed bigger and darker.

"He spoke rapidly, with nervous assurance. I heard him distinctly
promise her to make everything as clear as daylight presently. But that
was all I caught. He stood close to her, never attempting to touch her
even with the tip of his little finger--and she stared at him stupidly.
For a moment, however, her eyelids descended slowly, pathetically,
and then, with the long black eyelashes lying on her white cheeks, she
looked ready to fall down in a swoon. But she never even swayed where
she stood. He urged her loudly to follow him at once, and walked towards
the door at the bottom of the cellar stairs without looking behind him.
And, as a matter of fact, she did move after him a pace or two. But,
of course, he was not allowed to reach the door. There were angry
exclamations, a short, fierce scuffle. Flung away violently, he came
flying backwards upon her, and fell. She threw out her arms in a gesture
of dismay and stepped aside, just clear of his head, which struck the
ground heavily near her shoe.

"He grunted with the shock. By the time he had picked himself up,
slowly, dazedly, he was awake to the reality of things. The man into
whose hands he had thrust the leather case had extracted therefrom a
narrow strip of bluish paper. He held it up above his head, and, as
after the scuffle an expectant uneasy stillness reigned once more, he
threw it down disdainfully with the words, 'I think, comrades, that this
proof was hardly necessary.'

"Quick as thought, the girl stooped after the fluttering slip. Holding
it spread out in both hands, she looked at it; then, without raising her
eyes, opened her fingers slowly and let it fall.

"I examined that curious document afterwards. It was signed by a very
high personage, and stamped and countersigned by other high officials
in various countries of Europe. In his trade--or shall I say, in his
mission?--that sort of talisman might have been necessary, no doubt.
Even to the police itself--all but the heads--he had been known only as
Sevrin the noted anarchist.

"He hung his head, biting his lower lip. A change had come over him,
a sort of thoughtful, absorbed calmness. Nevertheless, he panted. His
sides worked visibly, and his nostrils expanded and collapsed in weird
contrast with his sombre aspect of a fanatical monk in a meditative
attitude, but with something, too, in his face of an actor intent upon
the terrible exigencies of his part. Before him Horne declaimed, haggard
and bearded, like an inspired denunciatory prophet from a wilderness.
Two fanatics. They were made to understand each other. Does this
surprise you? I suppose you think that such people would be foaming at
the mouth and snarling at each other?"

I protested hastily that I was not surprised in the least; that I
thought nothing of the kind; that anarchists in general were simply
inconceivable to me mentally, morally, logically, sentimentally, and
even physically. X received this declaration with his usual woodenness
and went on.

"Horne had burst out into eloquence. While pouring out scornful
invective, he let tears escape from his eyes and roll down his black
beard unheeded. Sevrin panted quicker and quicker. When he opened his
mouth to speak, everyone hung on his words.

"'Don't be a fool, Horne,' he began. 'You know very well that I have
done this for none of the reasons you are throwing at me.' And in a
moment he became outwardly as steady as a rock under the other's lurid
stare. 'I have been thwarting, deceiving, and betraying you--from
conviction.'

"He turned his back on Horne, and addressing the girl, repeated the
words: 'From conviction.'

"It's extraordinary how cold she looked. I suppose she could not think
of any appropriate gesture. There can have been few precedents indeed
for such a situation.

"'Clear as daylight,' he added. 'Do you understand what that means? From
conviction.'

"And still she did not stir. She did not know what to do. But the
luckless wretch was about to give her the opportunity for a beautiful
and correct gesture.

"'I have felt in me the power to make you share this conviction,' he
protested, ardently. He had forgotten himself; he made a step towards
her--perhaps he stumbled. To me he seemed to be stooping low as if to
touch the hem of her garment. And then the appropriate gesture came. She
snatched her skirt away from his polluting contact and averted her
head with an upward tilt. It was magnificently done, this gesture of
conventionally unstained honour, of an unblemished high-minded amateur.

"Nothing could have been better. And he seemed to think so, too, for
once more he turned away. But this time he faced no one. He was again
panting frightfully, while he fumbled hurriedly in his waistcoat pocket,
and then raised his hand to his lips. There was something furtive in
this movement, but directly afterwards his bearing changed. His laboured
breathing gave him a resemblance to a man who had just run a desperate
race; but a curious air of detachment, of sudden and profound
indifference, replaced the strain of the striving effort. The race was
over. I did not want to see what would happen next. I was only too well
aware. I tucked the young lady's arm under mine without a word, and made
my way with her to the stairs.

"Her brother walked behind us. Half-way up the short flight she seemed
unable to lift her feet high enough for the steps, and we had to pull
and push to get her to the top. In the passage she dragged herself
along, hanging on my arm, helplessly bent like an old woman. We issued
into an empty street through a half-open door, staggering like besotted
revellers. At the corner we stopped a four-wheeler, and the ancient
driver looked round from his box with morose scorn at our efforts to get
her in. Twice during the drive I felt her collapse on my shoulder in a
half faint. Facing us, the youth in knickerbockers remained as mute as a
fish, and, till he jumped out with the latch-key, sat more still than I
would have believed it possible.

"At the door of their drawing-room she left my arm and walked in first,
catching at the chairs and tables. She unpinned her hat, then, exhausted
with the effort, her cloak still hanging from her shoulders, flung
herself into a deep armchair, sideways, her face half buried in a
cushion. The good brother appeared silently before her with a glass of
water. She motioned it away. He drank it himself and walked off to a
distant corner--behind the grand piano, somewhere. All was still in this
room where I had seen, for the first time, Sevrin, the anti-anarchist,
captivated and spellbound by the consummate and hereditary grimaces that
in a certain sphere of life take the place of feelings with an excellent
effect. I suppose her thoughts were busy with the same memory. Her
shoulders shook violently. A pure attack of nerves. When it quieted down
she affected firmness, 'What is done to a man of that sort? What will
they do to him?'

"'Nothing. They can do nothing to him,' I assured her, with perfect
truth. I was pretty certain he had died in less than twenty minutes
from the moment his hand had gone to his lips. For if his fanatical
anti-anarchism went even as far as carrying poison in his pocket, only to
rob his adversaries of legitimate vengeance, I knew he would take care
to provide something that would not fail him when required.

"She drew an angry breath. There were red spots on her cheeks and a
feverish brilliance in her eyes.

"'Has ever any one been exposed to such a terrible experience? To think
that he had held my hand! That man!' Her face twitched, she gulped down
a pathetic sob. 'If I ever felt sure of anything, it was of Sevrin's
high-minded motives.'

"Then she began to weep quietly, which was good for her. Then through
her flood of tears, half resentful, 'What was it he said to me?--"From
conviction!" It seemed a vile mockery. What could he mean by it?'

"'That, my dear young lady,' I said, gently, 'is more than I or anybody
else can ever explain to you.'"

Mr. X flicked a crumb off the front of his coat.

"And that was strictly true as to her. Though Horne, for instance,
understood very well; and so did I, especially after we had been to
Sevrin's lodging in a dismal back street of an intensely respectable
quarter. Horne was known there as a friend, and we had no difficulty in
being admitted, the slatternly maid merely remarking, as she let us in,
that 'Mr Sevrin had not been home that night.' We forced open a couple
of drawers in the way of duty, and found a little useful information.
The most interesting part was his diary; for this man, engaged in such
deadly work, had the weakness to keep a record of the most damnatory
kind. There were his acts and also his thoughts laid bare to us. But the
dead don't mind that. They don't mind anything.

"'From conviction.' Yes. A vague but ardent humanitarianism had urged
him in his first youth into the bitterest extremity of negation and
revolt. Afterwards his optimism flinched. He doubted and became lost.
You have heard of converted atheists. These turn often into dangerous
fanatics, but the soul remains the same. After he had got acquainted
with the girl, there are to be met in that diary of his very queer
politico-amorous rhapsodies. He took her sovereign grimaces with deadly
seriousness. He longed to convert her. But all this cannot interest you.
For the rest, I don't know if you remember--it is a good many years ago
now--the journalistic sensation of the 'Hermione Street Mystery'; the
finding of a man's body in the cellar of an empty house; the inquest;
some arrests; many surmises--then silence--the usual end for many
obscure martyrs and confessors. The fact is, he was not enough of an
optimist. You must be a savage, tyrannical, pitiless, thick-and-thin
optimist, like Horne, for instance, to make a good social rebel of the
extreme type.

"He rose from the table. A waiter hurried up with his overcoat; another
held his hat in readiness.

"But what became of the young lady?" I asked.

"Do you really want to know?" he said, buttoning himself in his fur coat
carefully. "I confess to the small malice of sending her Sevrin's diary.
She went into retirement; then she went to Florence; then she went into
retreat in a convent. I can't tell where she will go next. What does it
matter? Gestures! Gestures! Mere gestures of her class."

"He fitted on his glossy high hat with extreme precision, and casting
a rapid glance round the room, full of well-dressed people, innocently
dining, muttered between his teeth:

"And nothing else! That is why their kind is fated to perish."

I never met Mr. X again after that evening. I took to dining at my club.
On my next visit to Paris I found my friend all impatience to hear of
the effect produced on me by this rare item of his collection. I
told him all the story, and he beamed on me with the pride of his
distinguished specimen.

"Isn't X well worth knowing?" he bubbled over in great delight. "He's
unique, amazing, absolutely terrific."

His enthusiasm grated upon my finer feelings. I told him curtly that the
man's cynicism was simply abominable.

"Oh, abominable! abominable!" assented my friend, effusively. "And then,
you know, he likes to have his little joke sometimes," he added in a
confidential tone.

I fail to understand the connection of this last remark. I have been
utterly unable to discover where in all this the joke comes in.




AN INDIGNANT TALE


THE BRUTE


Dodging in from the rain-swept street, I exchanged a smile and a
glance with Miss Blank in the bar of the Three Crows. This exchange was
effected with extreme propriety. It is a shock to think that, if still
alive, Miss Blank must be something over sixty now. How time passes!

Noticing my gaze directed inquiringly at the partition of glass and
varnished wood, Miss Blank was good enough to say, encouragingly:

"Only Mr. Jermyn and Mr. Stonor in the parlour with another gentleman
I've never seen before."

I moved towards the parlour door. A voice discoursing on the other side
(it was but a matchboard partition), rose so loudly that the concluding
words became quite plain in all their atrocity.

"That fellow Wilmot fairly dashed her brains out, and a good job, too!"

This inhuman sentiment, since there was nothing profane or improper
in it, failed to do as much as to check the slight yawn Miss Blank
was achieving behind her hand. And she remained gazing fixedly at the
window-panes, which streamed with rain.

As I opened the parlour door the same voice went on in the same cruel
strain:

"I was glad when I heard she got the knock from somebody at last. Sorry
enough for poor Wilmot, though. That man and I used to be chums at one
time. Of course that was the end of him. A clear case if there ever was
one. No way out of it. None at all."

The voice belonged to the gentleman Miss Blank had never seen before. He
straddled his long legs on the hearthrug. Jermyn, leaning forward,
held his pocket-handkerchief spread out before the grate. He looked back
dismally over his shoulder, and as I slipped behind one of the
little wooden tables, I nodded to him. On the other side of the fire,
imposingly calm and large, sat Mr. Stonor, jammed tight into a capacious
Windsor armchair. There was nothing small about him but his short, white
side-whiskers. Yards and yards of extra superfine blue cloth (made up
into an overcoat) reposed on a chair by his side. And he must just have
brought some liner from sea, because another chair was smothered under
his black waterproof, ample as a pall, and made of three-fold oiled
silk, double-stitched throughout. A man's hand-bag of the usual size
looked like a child's toy on the floor near his feet.

I did not nod to him. He was too big to be nodded to in that parlour.
He was a senior Trinity pilot and condescended to take his turn in the
cutter only during the summer months. He had been many times in charge
of royal yachts in and out of Port Victoria. Besides, it's no use
nodding to a monument. And he was like one. He didn't speak, he didn't
budge. He just sat there, holding his handsome old head up, immovable,
and almost bigger than life. It was extremely fine. Mr. Stonor's
presence reduced poor old Jermyn to a mere shabby wisp of a man, and
made the talkative stranger in tweeds on the hearthrug look absurdly
boyish. The latter must have been a few years over thirty, and was
certainly not the sort of individual that gets abashed at the sound
of his own voice, because gathering me in, as it were, by a friendly
glance, he kept it going without a check.

"I was glad of it," he repeated, emphatically. "You may be surprised at
it, but then you haven't gone through the experience I've had of her.
I can tell you, it was something to remember. Of course, I got off scot
free myself--as you can see. She did her best to break up my pluck for
me tho'. She jolly near drove as fine a fellow as ever lived into a
madhouse. What do you say to that--eh?"

Not an eyelid twitched in Mr. Stonor's enormous face. Monumental! The
speaker looked straight into my eyes.

"It used to make me sick to think of her going about the world murdering
people."

Jermyn approached the handkerchief a little nearer to the grate and
groaned. It was simply a habit he had.

"I've seen her once," he declared, with mournful indifference. "She had
a house--"

The stranger in tweeds turned to stare down at him, surprised.

"She had three houses," he corrected, authoritatively. But Jermyn was
not to be contradicted.

"She had a house, I say," he repeated, with dismal obstinacy. "A great,
big, ugly, white thing. You could see it from miles away--sticking up."

"So you could," assented the other readily. "It was old Colchester's
notion, though he was always threatening to give her up. He couldn't
stand her racket any more, he declared; it was too much of a good
thing for him; he would wash his hands of her, if he never got hold of
another--and so on. I daresay he would have chucked her, only--it may
surprise you--his missus wouldn't hear of it. Funny, eh? But with women,
you never know how they will take a thing, and Mrs. Colchester, with her
moustaches and big eyebrows, set up for being as strong-minded as they
make them. She used to walk about in a brown silk dress, with a great
gold cable flopping about her bosom. You should have heard her snapping
out: 'Rubbish!' or 'Stuff and nonsense!' I daresay she knew when she was
well off. They had no children, and had never set up a home anywhere.
When in England she just made shift to hang out anyhow in some cheap
hotel or boarding-house. I daresay she liked to get back to the comforts
she was used to. She knew very well she couldn't gain by any change.
And, moreover, Colchester, though a first-rate man, was not what you
may call in his first youth, and, perhaps, she may have thought that he
wouldn't be able to get hold of another (as he used to say) so easily.
Anyhow, for one reason or another, it was 'Rubbish' and 'Stuff and
nonsense' for the good lady. I overheard once young Mr. Apse himself say
to her confidentially: 'I assure you, Mrs. Colchester, I am beginning to
feel quite unhappy about the name she's getting for herself.' 'Oh,' says
she, with her deep little hoarse laugh, 'if one took notice of all the
silly talk,' and she showed Apse all her ugly false teeth at once. 'It
would take more than that to make me lose my confidence in her, I assure
you,' says she."

At this point, without any change of facial expression, Mr. Stonor
emitted a short, sardonic laugh. It was very impressive, but I didn't
see the fun. I looked from one to another. The stranger on the hearthrug
had an ugly smile.

"And Mr. Apse shook both Mrs. Colchester's hands, he was so pleased to
hear a good word said for their favourite. All these Apses, young
and old you know, were perfectly infatuated with that abominable,
dangerous--"

"I beg your pardon," I interrupted, for he seemed to be addressing
himself exclusively to me; "but who on earth are you talking about?"

"I am talking of the Apse family," he answered, courteously.

I nearly let out a damn at this. But just then the respected Miss Blank
put her head in, and said that the cab was at the door, if Mr. Stonor
wanted to catch the eleven three up.

At once the senior pilot arose in his mighty bulk and began to struggle
into his coat, with awe-inspiring upheavals. The stranger and I hurried
impulsively to his assistance, and directly we laid our hands on him he
became perfectly quiescent. We had to raise our arms very high, and
to make efforts. It was like caparisoning a docile elephant. With a
"Thanks, gentlemen," he dived under and squeezed himself through the
door in a great hurry.

We smiled at each other in a friendly way.

"I wonder how he manages to hoist himself up a ship's side-ladder,"
said the man in tweeds; and poor Jermyn, who was a mere North Sea
pilot, without official status or recognition of any sort, pilot only by
courtesy, groaned.

"He makes eight hundred a year."

"Are you a sailor?" I asked the stranger, who had gone back to his
position on the rug.

"I used to be till a couple of years ago, when I got married," answered
this communicative individual. "I even went to sea first in that very
ship we were speaking of when you came in."

"What ship?" I asked, puzzled. "I never heard you mention a ship."

"I've just told you her name, my dear sir," he replied. "The Apse
Family. Surely you've heard of the great firm of Apse & Sons,
shipowners. They had a pretty big fleet. There was the Lucy Apse, and
the Harold Apse, and Anne, John, Malcolm, Clara, Juliet, and so
on--no end of Apses. Every brother, sister, aunt, cousin, wife--and
grandmother, too, for all I know--of the firm had a ship named after
them. Good, solid, old-fashioned craft they were, too, built to carry
and to last. None of your new-fangled, labour-saving appliances in
them, but plenty of men and plenty of good salt beef and hard tack put
aboard--and off you go to fight your way out and home again."

The miserable Jermyn made a sound of approval, which sounded like a
groan of pain. Those were the ships for him. He pointed out in doleful
tones that you couldn't say to labour-saving appliances: "Jump lively
now, my hearties." No labour-saving appliance would go aloft on a dirty
night with the sands under your lee.

"No," assented the stranger, with a wink at me. "The Apses didn't
believe in them either, apparently. They treated their people well--as
people don't get treated nowadays, and they were awfully proud of their
ships. Nothing ever happened to them. This last one, the Apse Family,
was to be like the others, only she was to be still stronger, still
safer, still more roomy and comfortable. I believe they meant her
to last for ever. They had her built composite--iron, teak-wood, and
greenheart, and her scantling was something fabulous. If ever an order
was given for a ship in a spirit of pride this one was. Everything of
the best. The commodore captain of the employ was to command her, and
they planned the accommodation for him like a house on shore under
a big, tall poop that went nearly to the mainmast. No wonder Mrs.
Colchester wouldn't let the old man give her up. Why, it was the best
home she ever had in all her married days. She had a nerve, that woman.

"The fuss that was made while that ship was building! Let's have this a
little stronger, and that a little heavier; and hadn't that other thing
better be changed for something a little thicker. The builders entered
into the spirit of the game, and there she was, growing into the
clumsiest, heaviest ship of her size right before all their eyes,
without anybody becoming aware of it somehow. She was to be 2,000
tons register, or a little over; no less on any account. But see what
happens. When they came to measure her she turned out 1,999 tons and
a fraction. General consternation! And they say old Mr. Apse was so
annoyed when they told him that he took to his bed and died. The old
gentleman had retired from the firm twenty-five years before, and
was ninety-six years old if a day, so his death wasn't, perhaps, so
surprising. Still Mr. Lucian Apse was convinced that his father would
have lived to a hundred. So we may put him at the head of the list. Next
comes the poor devil of a shipwright that brute caught and squashed as
she went off the ways. They called it the launch of a ship, but I've
heard people say that, from the wailing and yelling and scrambling out
of the way, it was more like letting a devil loose upon the river.
She snapped all her checks like pack-thread, and went for the tugs in
attendance like a fury. Before anybody could see what she was up to she
sent one of them to the bottom, and laid up another for three months'
repairs. One of her cables parted, and then, suddenly--you couldn't tell
why--she let herself be brought up with the other as quiet as a lamb.

"That's how she was. You could never be sure what she would be up to
next. There are ships difficult to handle, but generally you can depend
on them behaving rationally. With that ship, whatever you did with her
you never knew how it would end. She was a wicked beast. Or, perhaps,
she was only just insane."

He uttered this supposition in so earnest a tone that I could not
refrain from smiling. He left off biting his lower lip to apostrophize
me.

"Eh! Why not? Why couldn't there be something in her build, in her lines
corresponding to--What's madness? Only something just a tiny bit wrong
in the make of your brain. Why shouldn't there be a mad ship--I mean mad
in a ship-like way, so that under no circumstances could you be sure she
would do what any other sensible ship would naturally do for you. There
are ships that steer wildly, and ships that can't be quite trusted
always to stay; others want careful watching when running in a gale;
and, again, there may be a ship that will make heavy weather of it in
every little blow. But then you expect her to be always so. You take it
as part of her character, as a ship, just as you take account of a
man's peculiarities of temper when you deal with him. But with her you
couldn't. She was unaccountable. If she wasn't mad, then she was the
most evil-minded, underhand, savage brute that ever went afloat. I've
seen her run in a heavy gale beautifully for two days, and on the third
broach to twice in the same afternoon. The first time she flung the
helmsman clean over the wheel, but as she didn't quite manage to kill
him she had another try about three hours afterwards. She swamped
herself fore and aft, burst all the canvas we had set, scared all hands
into a panic, and even frightened Mrs. Colchester down there in these
beautiful stern cabins that she was so proud of. When we mustered the
crew there was one man missing. Swept overboard, of course, without
being either seen or heard, poor devil! and I only wonder more of us
didn't go.

"Always something like that. Always. I heard an old mate tell Captain
Colchester once that it had come to this with him, that he was afraid to
open his mouth to give any sort of order. She was as much of a terror
in harbour as at sea. You could never be certain what would hold her. On
the slightest provocation she would start snapping ropes, cables, wire
hawsers, like carrots. She was heavy, clumsy, unhandy--but that does not
quite explain that power for mischief she had. You know, somehow, when I
think of her I can't help remembering what we hear of incurable lunatics
breaking loose now and then."

He looked at me inquisitively. But, of course, I couldn't admit that a
ship could be mad.

"In the ports where she was known," he went on,' "they dreaded the sight
of her. She thought nothing of knocking away twenty feet or so of solid
stone facing off a quay or wiping off the end of a wooden wharf. She
must have lost miles of chain and hundreds of tons of anchors in her
time. When she fell aboard some poor unoffending ship it was the
very devil of a job to haul her off again. And she never got hurt
herself--just a few scratches or so, perhaps. They had wanted to have
her strong. And so she was. Strong enough to ram Polar ice with. And as
she began so she went on. From the day she was launched she never let
a year pass without murdering somebody. I think the owners got very
worried about it. But they were a stiff-necked generation all these
Apses; they wouldn't admit there could be anything wrong with the Apse
Family. They wouldn't even change her name. 'Stuff and nonsense,' as
Mrs. Colchester used to say. They ought at least to have shut her up
for life in some dry dock or other, away up the river, and never let her
smell salt water again. I assure you, my dear sir, that she invariably
did kill someone every voyage she made. It was perfectly well-known. She
got a name for it, far and wide."

I expressed my surprise that a ship with such a deadly reputation could
ever get a crew.

"Then, you don't know what sailors are, my dear sir. Let me just show
you by an instance. One day in dock at home, while loafing on the
forecastle head, I noticed two respectable salts come along, one a
middle-aged, competent, steady man, evidently, the other a smart,
youngish chap. They read the name on the bows and stopped to look at
her. Says the elder man: 'Apse Family. That's the sanguinary female dog'
(I'm putting it in that way) 'of a ship, Jack, that kills a man every
voyage. I wouldn't sign in her--not for Joe, I wouldn't.' And the other
says: 'If she were mine, I'd have her towed on the mud and set on fire,
blame if I wouldn't.' Then the first man chimes in: 'Much do they care!
Men are cheap, God knows.' The younger one spat in the water alongside.
'They won't have me--not for double wages.'

"They hung about for some time and then walked up the dock. Half an
hour later I saw them both on our deck looking about for the mate, and
apparently very anxious to be taken on. And they were."

"How do you account for this?" I asked.

"What would you say?" he retorted. "Recklessness! The vanity of
boasting in the evening to all their chums: 'We've just shipped in
that there Apse Family. Blow her. She ain't going to scare us.' Sheer
sailorlike perversity! A sort of curiosity. Well--a little of all that,
no doubt. I put the question to them in the course of the voyage. The
answer of the elderly chap was:

"'A man can die but once.' The younger assured me in a mocking tone that
he wanted to see 'how she would do it this time.' But I tell you what;
there was a sort of fascination about the brute."

Jermyn, who seemed to have seen every ship in the world, broke in
sulkily:

"I saw her once out of this very window towing up the river; a great
black ugly thing, going along like a big hearse."

"Something sinister about her looks, wasn't there?" said the man in
tweeds, looking down at old Jermyn with a friendly eye. "I always had
a sort of horror of her. She gave me a beastly shock when I was no more
than fourteen, the very first day--nay, hour--I joined her. Father came
up to see me off, and was to go down to Gravesend with us. I was his
second boy to go to sea. My big brother was already an officer then. We.
got on board about eleven in the morning, and found the ship ready to
drop out of the basin, stern first. She had not moved three times her
own length when, at a little pluck the tug gave her to enter the dock
gates, she made one of her rampaging starts, and put such a weight on
the check rope--a new six-inch hawser--that forward there they had no
chance to ease it round in time, and it parted. I saw the broken end fly
up high in the air, and the next moment that brute brought her quarter
against the pier-head with a jar that staggered everybody about her
decks. She didn't hurt herself. Not she! But one of the boys the
mate had sent aloft on the mizzen to do something, came down on the
poop-deck--thump--right in front of me. He was not much older than
myself. We had been grinning at each other only a few minutes before. He
must have been handling himself carelessly, not expecting to get such a
jerk. I heard his startled cry--Oh!--in a high treble as he felt himself
going, and looked up in time to see him go limp all over as he fell.
Ough! Poor father was remarkably white about the gills when we shook
hands in Gravesend. 'Are you all right?' he says, looking hard at me.
'Yes, father.' 'Quite sure?' 'Yes, father.' 'Well, then good-bye, my
boy.' He told me afterwards that for half a word he would have carried
me off home with him there and then. I am the baby of the family--you
know," added the man in tweeds, stroking his moustache with an ingenuous
smile.

I acknowledged this interesting communication by a sympathetic murmur.
He waved his hand carelessly.

"This might have utterly spoiled a chap's nerve for going aloft, you
know--utterly. He fell within two feet of me, cracking his head on a
mooring-bitt. Never moved. Stone dead. Nice looking little fellow, he
was. I had just been thinking we would be great chums. However, that
wasn't yet the worst that brute of a ship could do. I served in her
three years of my time, and then I got transferred to the Lucy Apse, for
a year. The sailmaker we had in the Apse Family turned up there, too,
and I remember him saying to me one evening, after we had been a week at
sea: Isn't she a meek little ship?' No wonder we thought the Lucy Apse
a dear, meek, little ship after getting clear of that big, rampaging
savage brute. It was like heaven. Her officers seemed to me the
restfullest lot of men on earth. To me who had known no ship but the
Apse Family, the Lucy was like a sort of magic craft that did what you
wanted her to do of her own accord. One evening we got caught aback
pretty sharply from right ahead. In about ten minutes we had her full
again, sheets aft, tacks down, decks cleared, and the officer of the
watch leaning against the weather rail peacefully. It seemed simply
marvellous to me. The other would have stuck for half-an-hour in irons,
rolling her decks full of water, knocking the men about--spars cracking,
braces snapping, yards taking charge, and a confounded scare going on
aft because of her beastly rudder, which she had a way of flapping about
fit to raise your hair on end. I couldn't get over my wonder for days.

"Well, I finished my last year of apprenticeship in that jolly little
ship--she wasn't so little either, but after that other heavy devil she
seemed but a plaything to handle. I finished my time and passed; and
then just as I was thinking of having three weeks of real good time on
shore I got at breakfast a letter asking me the earliest day I could
be ready to join the Apse Family as third mate. I gave my plate a shove
that shot it into the middle of the table; dad looked up over his paper;
mother raised her hands in astonishment, and I went out bare-headed into
our bit of garden, where I walked round and round for an hour.

"When I came in again mother was out of the dining-room, and dad
had shifted berth into his big armchair. The letter was lying on the
mantelpiece.

"'It's very creditable to you to get the offer, and very kind of them to
make it,' he said. 'And I see also that Charles has been appointed chief
mate of that ship for one voyage.'

"There was, over leaf, a P.S. to that effect in Mr. Apse's own
handwriting, which I had overlooked. Charley was my big brother.

"I don't like very much to have two of my boys together in one ship,'
father goes on, in his deliberate, solemn way. 'And I may tell you that
I would not mind writing Mr. Apse a letter to that effect.'

"Dear old dad! He was a wonderful father. What would you have done? The
mere notion of going back (and as an officer, too), to be worried and
bothered, and kept on the jump night and day by that brute, made me feel
sick. But she wasn't a ship you could afford to fight shy of. Besides,
the most genuine excuse could not be given without mortally offending
Apse & Sons. The firm, and I believe the whole family down to the old
unmarried aunts in Lancashire, had grown desperately touchy about that
accursed ship's character. This was the case for answering 'Ready now'
from your very death-bed if you wished to die in their good graces. And
that's precisely what I did answer--by wire, to have it over and done
with at once.

"The prospect of being shipmates with my big brother cheered me up
considerably, though it made me a bit anxious, too. Ever since I
remember myself as a little chap he had been very good to me, and I
looked upon him as the finest fellow in the world. And so he was. No
better officer ever walked the deck of a merchant ship. And that's a
fact. He was a fine, strong, upstanding, sun-tanned, young fellow, with
his brown hair curling a little, and an eye like a hawk. He was just
splendid. We hadn't seen each other for many years, and even this time,
though he had been in England three weeks already, he hadn't showed up
at home yet, but had spent his spare time in Surrey somewhere making
up to Maggie Colchester, old Captain Colchester's niece. Her father, a
great friend of dad's, was in the sugar-broking business, and Charley
made a sort of second home of their house. I wondered what my big
brother would think of me. There was a sort of sternness about Charley's
face which never left it, not even when he was larking in his rather
wild fashion.

"He received me with a great shout of laughter. He seemed to think
my joining as an officer the greatest joke in the world. There was a
difference of ten years between us, and I suppose he remembered me
best in pinafores. I was a kid of four when he first went to sea. It
surprised me to find how boisterous he could be.

"'Now we shall see what you are made of,' he cried. And he held me off
by the shoulders, and punched my ribs, and hustled me into his berth.
'Sit down, Ned. I am glad of the chance of having you with me. I'll put
the finishing touch to you, my young officer, providing you're worth the
trouble. And, first of all, get it well into your head that we are
not going to let this brute kill anybody this voyage. We'll stop her
racket.'

"I perceived he was in dead earnest about it. He talked grimly of the
ship, and how we must be careful and never allow this ugly beast to
catch us napping with any of her damned tricks.

"He gave me a regular lecture on special seamanship for the use of the
Apse Family; then changing his tone, he began to talk at large, rattling
off the wildest, funniest nonsense, till my sides ached with laughing.
I could see very well he was a bit above himself with high spirits. It
couldn't be because of my coming. Not to that extent. But, of course,
I wouldn't have dreamt of asking what was the matter. I had a proper
respect for my big brother, I can tell you. But it was all made plain
enough a day or two afterwards, when I heard that Miss Maggie Colchester
was coming for the voyage. Uncle was giving her a sea-trip for the
benefit of her health.

"I don't know what could have been wrong with her health. She had a
beautiful colour, and a deuce of a lot of fair hair. She didn't care a
rap for wind, or rain, or spray, or sun, or green seas, or anything.
She was a blue-eyed, jolly girl of the very best sort, but the way she
cheeked my big brother used to frighten me. I always expected it to end
in an awful row. However, nothing decisive happened till after we had
been in Sydney for a week. One day, in the men's dinner hour, Charley
sticks his head into my cabin. I was stretched out on my back on the
settee, smoking in peace.

"'Come ashore with me, Ned,' he says, in his curt way.

"I jumped up, of course, and away after him down the gangway and
up George Street. He strode along like a giant, and I at his elbow,
panting. It was confoundedly hot. 'Where on earth are you rushing me to,
Charley?' I made bold to ask.

"'Here,' he says.

"'Here' was a jeweller's shop. I couldn't imagine what he could want
there. It seemed a sort of mad freak. He thrusts under my nose three
rings, which looked very tiny on his big, brown palm, growling out--

"'For Maggie! Which?'

"I got a kind of scare at this. I couldn't make a sound, but I pointed
at the one that sparkled white and blue. He put it in his waistcoat
pocket, paid for it with a lot of sovereigns, and bolted out. When
we got on board I was quite out of breath. 'Shake hands, old chap,' I
gasped out. He gave me a thump on the back. 'Give what orders you like
to the boatswain when the hands turn-to,' says he; 'I am off duty this
afternoon.'

"Then he vanished from the deck for a while, but presently he came out
of the cabin with Maggie, and these two went over the gangway publicly,
before all hands, going for a walk together on that awful, blazing hot
day, with clouds of dust flying about. They came back after a few hours
looking very staid, but didn't seem to have the slightest idea where
they had been. Anyway, that's th

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