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The Light That Failed

by Rudyard Kipling · English · Gutenberg #2876 · 412,279 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: The Light That Failed

Author: Rudyard Kipling


        
Release date: October 1, 2001 [eBook #2876]
                Most recently updated: January 31, 2021

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/2876

Credits: David Reed, and David Widger


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE LIGHT THAT FAILED ***

[Illustration] 




The Light that Failed

by Rudyard Kipling


Contents

 DEDICATION
 PREFACE
 CHAPTER I
 CHAPTER II
 CHAPTER III
 CHAPTER IV
 CHAPTER V
 CHAPTER VI
 CHAPTER VII
 CHAPTER VIII
 CHAPTER IX
 CHAPTER X
 CHAPTER XI
 CHAPTER XII
 CHAPTER XIII
 CHAPTER XIV
 CHAPTER XV




DEDICATION


If I were hanged on the highest hill,
    _Mother o’ mine, O mother o’ mine!_
I know whose love would follow me still,
    _Mother o’ mine, O mother o’ mine!_

If I were drowned  in the deepest sea,
    _Mother o’ mine, O mother o’ mine!_
I know whose tears would come down to me,
    _Mother o’ mine, O mother o’ mine!_

If I were damned of body and soul,
I know whose prayers would make me whole,
    _Mother o’ mine, O mother o’ mine!_




PREFACE


This is the story of _The Light that Failed_ as it was originally
conceived by the writer.

RUDYARD KIPLING




CHAPTER I


So we settled it all when the storm was done
    As comf’y as comf’y could be;
And I was to wait in the barn, my dears,
    Because I was only three;
And Teddy would run to the rainbow’s foot,
    Because he was five and a man;
And that’s how it all began, my dears,
    And that’s how it all began.

—_Big Barn Stories_.


“What do you think she’d do if she caught us? We oughtn’t to have it,
you know,” said Maisie.

“Beat me, and lock you up in your bedroom,” Dick answered, without
hesitation. “Have you got the cartridges?”

“Yes; they’re in my pocket, but they are joggling horribly. Do pin-fire
cartridges go off of their own accord?”

“Don’t know. Take the revolver, if you are afraid, and let me carry
them.”

“I’m _not_ afraid.” Maisie strode forward swiftly, a hand in her pocket
and her chin in the air. Dick followed with a small pin-fire revolver.

The children had discovered that their lives would be unendurable
without pistol-practice. After much forethought and self-denial, Dick
had saved seven shillings and sixpence, the price of a badly
constructed Belgian revolver. Maisie could only contribute half a crown
to the syndicate for the purchase of a hundred cartridges. “You can
save better than I can, Dick,” she explained; “I like nice things to
eat, and it doesn’t matter to you. Besides, boys ought to do these
things.”

Dick grumbled a little at the arrangement, but went out and made the
purchase, which the children were then on their way to test. Revolvers
did not lie in the scheme of their daily life as decreed for them by
the guardian who was incorrectly supposed to stand in the place of a
mother to these two orphans. Dick had been under her care for six
years, during which time she had made her profit of the allowances
supposed to be expended on his clothes, and, partly through
thoughtlessness, partly through a natural desire to pain,—she was a
widow of some years anxious to marry again,—had made his days
burdensome on his young shoulders.

Where he had looked for love, she gave him first aversion and then
hate.

Where he growing older had sought a little sympathy, she gave him
ridicule. The many hours that she could spare from the ordering of her
small house she devoted to what she called the home-training of Dick
Heldar. Her religion, manufactured in the main by her own intelligence
and a keen study of the Scriptures, was an aid to her in this matter.
At such times as she herself was not personally displeased with Dick,
she left him to understand that he had a heavy account to settle with
his Creator; wherefore Dick learned to loathe his God as intensely as
he loathed Mrs. Jennett; and this is not a wholesome frame of mind for
the young. Since she chose to regard him as a hopeless liar, when dread
of pain drove him to his first untruth, he naturally developed into a
liar, but an economical and self-contained one, never throwing away the
least unnecessary fib, and never hesitating at the blackest, were it
only plausible, that might make his life a little easier. The treatment
taught him at least the power of living alone,—a power that was of
service to him when he went to a public school and the boys laughed at
his clothes, which were poor in quality and much mended. In the
holidays he returned to the teachings of Mrs. Jennett, and, that the
chain of discipline might not be weakened by association with the
world, was generally beaten, on one account or another, before he had
been twelve hours under her roof.

The autumn of one year brought him a companion in bondage, a
long-haired, gray-eyed little atom, as self-contained as himself, who
moved about the house silently and for the first few weeks spoke only
to the goat that was her chiefest friend on earth and lived in the
back-garden. Mrs. Jennett objected to the goat on the grounds that he
was un-Christian,—which he certainly was. “Then,” said the atom,
choosing her words very deliberately, “I shall write to my
lawyer-peoples and tell them that you are a very bad woman. Amomma is
mine, mine, mine!” Mrs. Jennett made a movement to the hall, where
certain umbrellas and canes stood in a rack. The atom understood as
clearly as Dick what this meant. “I have been beaten before,” she said,
still in the same passionless voice; “I have been beaten worse than you
can ever beat me. If you beat me I shall write to my lawyer-peoples and
tell them that you do not give me enough to eat. I am not afraid of
you.” Mrs. Jennett did not go into the hall, and the atom, after a
pause to assure herself that all danger of war was past, went out, to
weep bitterly on Amomma’s neck.

Dick learned to know her as Maisie, and at first mistrusted her
profoundly, for he feared that she might interfere with the small
liberty of action left to him. She did not, however; and she
volunteered no friendliness until Dick had taken the first steps. Long
before the holidays were over, the stress of punishment shared in
common drove the children together, if it were only to play into each
other’s hands as they prepared lies for Mrs. Jennett’s use. When Dick
returned to school, Maisie whispered, “Now I shall be all alone to take
care of myself; but,” and she nodded her head bravely, “I can do it.
You promised to send Amomma a grass collar. Send it soon.” A week later
she asked for that collar by return of post, and was not pleased when
she learned that it took time to make. When at last Dick forwarded the
gift, she forgot to thank him for it.

Many holidays had come and gone since that day, and Dick had grown into
a lanky hobbledehoy more than ever conscious of his bad clothes. Not
for a moment had Mrs. Jennett relaxed her tender care of him, but the
average canings of a public school—Dick fell under punishment about
three times a month—filled him with contempt for her powers. “She
doesn’t hurt,” he explained to Maisie, who urged him to rebellion, “and
she is kinder to you after she has whacked me.” Dick shambled through
the days unkempt in body and savage in soul, as the smaller boys of the
school learned to know, for when the spirit moved him he would hit
them, cunningly and with science. The same spirit made him more than
once try to tease Maisie, but the girl refused to be made unhappy. “We
are both miserable as it is,” said she. “What is the use of trying to
make things worse? Let’s find things to do, and forget things.”

The pistol was the outcome of that search. It could only be used on the
muddiest foreshore of the beach, far away from the bathing-machines and
pierheads, below the grassy slopes of Fort Keeling. The tide ran out
nearly two miles on that coast, and the many-coloured mud-banks,
touched by the sun, sent up a lamentable smell of dead weed. It was
late in the afternoon when Dick and Maisie arrived on their ground,
Amomma trotting patiently behind them.

“Mf!” said Maisie, sniffing the air. “I wonder what makes the sea so
smelly? I don’t like it!”

“You never like anything that isn’t made just for you,” said Dick
bluntly. “Give me the cartridges, and I’ll try first shot. How far does
one of these little revolvers carry?”

“Oh, half a mile,” said Maisie, promptly. “At least it makes an awful
noise. Be careful with the cartridges; I don’t like those jagged
stick-up things on the rim. Dick, do be careful.”

“All right. I know how to load. I’ll fire at the breakwater out there.”

He fired, and Amomma ran away bleating. The bullet threw up a spurt of
mud to the right of the wood-wreathed piles.

“Throws high and to the right. You try, Maisie. Mind, it’s loaded all
round.”

Maisie took the pistol and stepped delicately to the verge of the mud,
her hand firmly closed on the butt, her mouth and left eye screwed up.

Dick sat down on a tuft of bank and laughed. Amomma returned very
cautiously. He was accustomed to strange experiences in his afternoon
walks, and, finding the cartridge-box unguarded, made investigations
with his nose. Maisie fired, but could not see where the bullet went.

“I think it hit the post,” she said, shading her eyes and looking out
across the sailless sea.

“I know it has gone out to the Marazion Bell-buoy,” said Dick, with a
chuckle. “Fire low and to the left; then perhaps you’ll get it. Oh,
look at Amomma!—he’s eating the cartridges!”

Maisie turned, the revolver in her hand, just in time to see Amomma
scampering away from the pebbles Dick threw after him. Nothing is
sacred to a billy-goat. Being well fed and the adored of his mistress,
Amomma had naturally swallowed two loaded pin-fire cartridges. Maisie
hurried up to assure herself that Dick had not miscounted the tale.

“Yes, he’s eaten two.”

“Horrid little beast! Then they’ll joggle about inside him and blow up,
and serve him right.... Oh, Dick! have I killed you?”

Revolvers are tricky things for young hands to deal with. Maisie could
not explain how it had happened, but a veil of reeking smoke separated
her from Dick, and she was quite certain that the pistol had gone off
in his face. Then she heard him sputter, and dropped on her knees
beside him, crying, “Dick, you aren’t hurt, are you? I didn’t mean it.”

“Of course you didn’t, said Dick, coming out of the smoke and wiping
his cheek. “But you nearly blinded me. That powder stuff stings
awfully.” A neat little splash of gray lead on a stone showed where the
bullet had gone. Maisie began to whimper.

“Don’t,” said Dick, jumping to his feet and shaking himself. “I’m not a
bit hurt.”

“No, but I might have killed you,” protested Maisie, the corners of her
mouth drooping. “What should I have done then?”

“Gone home and told Mrs. Jennett.” Dick grinned at the thought; then,
softening, “Please don’t worry about it. Besides, we are wasting time.

We’ve got to get back to tea. I’ll take the revolver for a bit.”

Maisie would have wept on the least encouragement, but Dick’s
indifference, albeit his hand was shaking as he picked up the pistol,
restrained her. She lay panting on the beach while Dick methodically
bombarded the breakwater. “Got it at last!” he exclaimed, as a lock of
weed flew from the wood.

“Let me try,” said Maisie, imperiously. “I’m all right now.”

They fired in turns till the rickety little revolver nearly shook
itself to pieces, and Amomma the outcast—because he might blow up at
any moment—browsed in the background and wondered why stones were
thrown at him. Then they found a balk of timber floating in a pool
which was commanded by the seaward slope of Fort Keeling, and they sat
down together before this new target.

“Next holidays,” said Dick, as the now thoroughly fouled revolver
kicked wildly in his hand, “we’ll get another pistol,—central
fire,—that will carry farther.”

“There won’t be any next holidays for me,” said Maisie. “I’m going
away.”

“Where to?”

“I don’t know. My lawyers have written to Mrs. Jennett, and I’ve got to
be educated somewhere,—in France, perhaps,—I don’t know where; but I
shall be glad to go away.”

“I shan’t like it a bit. I suppose I shall be left. Look here, Maisie,
is it really true you’re going? Then these holidays will be the last I
shall see anything of you; and I go back to school next week. I wish——”

The young blood turned his cheeks scarlet. Maisie was picking
grass-tufts and throwing them down the slope at a yellow sea-poppy
nodding all by itself to the illimitable levels of the mud-flats and
the milk-white sea beyond.

“I wish,” she said, after a pause, “that I could see you again
sometime.

You wish that, too?”

“Yes, but it would have been better if—if—you had—shot straight over
there—down by the breakwater.”

Maisie looked with large eyes for a moment. And this was the boy who
only ten days before had decorated Amomma’s horns with cut-paper
ham-frills and turned him out, a bearded derision, among the public
ways! Then she dropped her eyes: this was not the boy.

“Don’t be stupid,” she said reprovingly, and with swift instinct
attacked the side-issue. “How selfish you are! Just think what I should
have felt if that horrid thing had killed you! I’m quite miserable
enough already.”

“Why? Because you’re going away from Mrs. Jennett?”

“No.”

“From me, then?”

No answer for a long time. Dick dared not look at her. He felt, though
he did not know, all that the past four years had been to him, and this
the more acutely since he had no knowledge to put his feelings in
words.

“I don’t know,” she said. “I suppose it is.”

“Maisie, you must know. _I’m_ not supposing.”

“Let’s go home,” said Maisie, weakly.

But Dick was not minded to retreat.

“I can’t say things,” he pleaded, “and I’m awfully sorry for teasing
you about Amomma the other day. It’s all different now, Maisie, can’t
you see? And you might have told me that you were going, instead of
leaving me to find out.”

“You didn’t. I did tell. Oh, Dick, what’s the use of worrying?”

“There isn’t any; but we’ve been together years and years, and I didn’t
know how much I cared.”

“I don’t believe you ever did care.”

“No, I didn’t; but I do,—I care awfully now, Maisie,” he
gulped,—“Maisie, darling, say you care too, please.”

“I do, indeed I do; but it won’t be any use.”

“Why?”

“Because I am going away.”

“Yes, but if you promise before you go. Only say—will you?” A second
“darling’ came to his lips more easily than the first. There were few
endearments in Dick’s home or school life; he had to find them by
instinct. Dick caught the little hand blackened with the escaped gas of
the revolver.

“I promise,” she said solemnly; “but if I care there is no need for
promising.”

“And do you care?” For the first time in the past few minutes their
eyes met and spoke for them who had no skill in speech....

“Oh, Dick, don’t! Please don’t! It was all right when we said
good-morning; but now it’s all different!” Amomma looked on from afar.

He had seen his property quarrel frequently, but he had never seen
kisses exchanged before. The yellow sea-poppy was wiser, and nodded its
head approvingly. Considered as a kiss, that was a failure, but since
it was the first, other than those demanded by duty, in all the world
that either had ever given or taken, it opened to them new worlds, and
every one of them glorious, so that they were lifted above the
consideration of any worlds at all, especially those in which tea is
necessary, and sat still, holding each other’s hands and saying not a
word.

“You can’t forget now,” said Dick, at last. There was that on his cheek
that stung more than gunpowder.

“I shouldn’t have forgotten anyhow,” said Maisie, and they looked at
each other and saw that each was changed from the companion of an hour
ago to a wonder and a mystery they could not understand. The sun began
to set, and a night-wind thrashed along the bents of the foreshore.

“We shall be awfully late for tea,” said Maisie. “Let’s go home.”

“Let’s use the rest of the cartridges first,” said Dick; and he helped
Maisie down the slope of the fort to the sea,—a descent that she was
quite capable of covering at full speed. Equally gravely Maisie took
the grimy hand. Dick bent forward clumsily; Maisie drew the hand away,
and Dick blushed.

“It’s very pretty,” he said.

“Pooh!” said Maisie, with a little laugh of gratified vanity. She stood
close to Dick as he loaded the revolver for the last time and fired
over the sea with a vague notion at the back of his head that he was
protecting Maisie from all the evils in the world. A puddle far across
the mud caught the last rays of the sun and turned into a wrathful red
disc. The light held Dick’s attention for a moment, and as he raised
his revolver there fell upon him a renewed sense of the miraculous, in
that he was standing by Maisie who had promised to care for him for an
indefinite length of time till such date as—— A gust of the growing
wind drove the girl’s long black hair across his face as she stood with
her hand on his shoulder calling Amomma “a little beast,” and for a
moment he was in the dark,—a darkness that stung. The bullet went
singing out to the empty sea.

“Spoilt my aim,” said he, shaking his head. “There aren’t any more
cartridges; we shall have to run home.” But they did not run. They
walked very slowly, arm in arm. And it was a matter of indifference to
them whether the neglected Amomma with two pin-fire cartridges in his
inside blew up or trotted beside them; for they had come into a golden
heritage and were disposing of it with all the wisdom of all their
years.

“And I shall be——” quoth Dick, valiantly. Then he checked himself: “I
don’t know what I shall be. I don’t seem to be able to pass any exams,
but I can make awful caricatures of the masters. Ho! Ho!”

“Be an artist, then,” said Maisie. “You’re always laughing at my trying
to draw; and it will do you good.”

“I’ll never laugh at anything you do,” he answered. “I’ll be an artist,
and I’ll do things.”

“Artists always want money, don’t they?”

“I’ve got a hundred and twenty pounds a year of my own. My guardians
tell me I’m to have it when I come of age. That will be enough to begin
with.”

“Ah, I’m rich,” said Maisie. “I’ve got three hundred a year all my own
when I’m twenty-one. That’s why Mrs. Jennett is kinder to me than she
is to you. I wish, though, that I had somebody that belonged to
me,—just a father or a mother.”

“You belong to me,” said Dick, “for ever and ever.”

“Yes, we belong—for ever. It’s very nice.” She squeezed his arm. The
kindly darkness hid them both, and, emboldened because he could only
just see the profile of Maisie’s cheek with the long lashes veiling the
gray eyes, Dick at the front door delivered himself of the words he had
been boggling over for the last two hours.

“And I—love you, Maisie,” he said, in a whisper that seemed to him to
ring across the world,—the world that he would to-morrow or the next
day set out to conquer.

There was a scene, not, for the sake of discipline, to be reported,
when Mrs. Jennett would have fallen upon him, first for disgraceful
unpunctuality, and secondly for nearly killing himself with a forbidden
weapon.

“I was playing with it, and it went off by itself,” said Dick, when the
powder-pocked cheek could no longer be hidden, “but if you think you’re
going to lick me you’re wrong. You are never going to touch me again.

Sit down and give me my tea. You can’t cheat us out of that, anyhow.”

Mrs. Jennett gasped and became livid. Maisie said nothing, but
encouraged Dick with her eyes, and he behaved abominably all that
evening. Mrs. Jennett prophesied an immediate judgment of Providence
and a descent into Tophet later, but Dick walked in Paradise and would
not hear. Only when he was going to bed Mrs. Jennett recovered and
asserted herself. He had bidden Maisie good-night with down-dropped
eyes and from a distance.

“If you aren’t a gentleman you might try to behave like one,” said Mrs.

Jennett, spitefully. “You’ve been quarrelling with Maisie again.”

This meant that the usual good-night kiss had been omitted. Maisie,
white to the lips, thrust her cheek forward with a fine air of
indifference, and was duly pecked by Dick, who tramped out of the room
red as fire. That night he dreamed a wild dream. He had won all the
world and brought it to Maisie in a cartridge-box, but she turned it
over with her foot, and, instead of saying “Thank you,” cried—“Where is
the grass collar you promised for Amomma? Oh, how selfish you are!”




CHAPTER II


Then we brought the lances down, then the bugles blew,
When we went to Kandahar, ridin’ two an’ two,
    Ridin’, ridin’, ridin’, two an’ two,
        Ta-ra-ra-ra-ra-ra-ra,
All the way to Kandahar, ridin’ two an’ two.

—_Barrack-Room Ballad_.


“I’m not angry with the British public, but I wish we had a few
thousand of them scattered among these rooks. They wouldn’t be in such
a hurry to get at their morning papers then. Can’t you imagine the
regulation householder—Lover of Justice, Constant Reader,
Paterfamilias, and all that lot—frizzling on hot gravel?”

“With a blue veil over his head, and his clothes in strips. Has any man
here a needle? I’ve got a piece of sugar-sack.”

“I’ll lend you a packing-needle for six square inches of it then. Both
my knees are worn through.”

“Why not six square acres, while you’re about it? But lend me the
needle, and I’ll see what I can do with the selvage. I don’t think
there’s enough to protect my royal body from the cold blast as it is.
What are you doing with that everlasting sketch-book of yours, Dick?”

“Study of our Special Correspondent repairing his wardrobe,” said Dick,
gravely, as the other man kicked off a pair of sorely worn
riding-breeches and began to fit a square of coarse canvas over the
most obvious open space. He grunted disconsolately as the vastness of
the void developed itself.

“Sugar-bags, indeed! Hi! you pilot man there! lend me all the sails for
that whale-boat.”

A fez-crowned head bobbed up in the stern-sheets, divided itself into
exact halves with one flashing grin, and bobbed down again. The man of
the tattered breeches, clad only in a Norfolk jacket and a gray flannel
shirt, went on with his clumsy sewing, while Dick chuckled over the
sketch.

Some twenty whale-boats were nuzzling a sand-bank which was dotted with
English soldiery of half a dozen corps, bathing or washing their
clothes. A heap of boat-rollers, commissariat-boxes, sugar-bags, and
flour- and small-arm-ammunition-cases showed where one of the
whale-boats had been compelled to unload hastily; and a regimental
carpenter was swearing aloud as he tried, on a wholly insufficient
allowance of white lead, to plaster up the sun-parched gaping seams of
the boat herself.

“First the bloomin’ rudder snaps,” said he to the world in general;
“then the mast goes; an’ then, s’ “help me, when she can’t do nothin’
else, she opens ’erself out like a cock-eyes Chinese lotus.”

“Exactly the case with my breeches, whoever you are,” said the tailor,
without looking up. “Dick, I wonder when I shall see a decent shop
again.”

There was no answer, save the incessant angry murmur of the Nile as it
raced round a basalt-walled bend and foamed across a rock-ridge half a
mile upstream. It was as though the brown weight of the river would
drive the white men back to their own country. The indescribable scent
of Nile mud in the air told that the stream was falling and the next
few miles would be no light thing for the whale-boats to overpass. The
desert ran down almost to the banks, where, among gray, red, and black
hillocks, a camel-corps was encamped. No man dared even for a day lose
touch of the slow-moving boats; there had been no fighting for weeks
past, and throughout all that time the Nile had never spared them.
Rapid had followed rapid, rock rock, and island-group island-group,
till the rank and file had long since lost all count of direction and
very nearly of time. They were moving somewhere, they did not know why,
to do something, they did not know what. Before them lay the Nile, and
at the other end of it was one Gordon, fighting for the dear life, in a
town called Khartoum. There were columns of British troops in the
desert, or in one of the many deserts; there were yet more columns
waiting to embark on the river; there were fresh drafts waiting at
Assioot and Assuan; there were lies and rumours running over the face
of the hopeless land from Suakin to the Sixth Cataract, and men
supposed generally that there must be some one in authority to direct
the general scheme of the many movements. The duty of that particular
river-column was to keep the whale-boats afloat in the water, to avoid
trampling on the villagers’ crops when the gangs “tracked’ the boats
with lines thrown from midstream, to get as much sleep and food as was
possible, and, above all, to press on without delay in the teeth of the
churning Nile.

With the soldiers sweated and toiled the correspondents of the
newspapers, and they were almost as ignorant as their companions. But
it was above all things necessary that England at breakfast should be
amused and thrilled and interested, whether Gordon lived or died, or
half the British army went to pieces in the sands. The Soudan campaign
was a picturesque one, and lent itself to vivid word-painting. Now and
again a “Special’ managed to get slain,—which was not altogether a
disadvantage to the paper that employed him,—and more often the
hand-to-hand nature of the fighting allowed of miraculous escapes which
were worth telegraphing home at eighteenpence the word. There were many
correspondents with many corps and columns,—from the veterans who had
followed on the heels of the cavalry that occupied Cairo in ’82, what
time Arabi Pasha called himself king, who had seen the first miserable
work round Suakin when the sentries were cut up nightly and the scrub
swarmed with spears, to youngsters jerked into the business at the end
of a telegraph-wire to take the places of their betters killed or
invalided.

Among the seniors—those who knew every shift and change in the
perplexing postal arrangements, the value of the seediest, weediest
Egyptian garron offered for sale in Cairo or Alexandria, who could talk
a telegraph-clerk into amiability and soothe the ruffled vanity of a
newly appointed staff-officer when press regulations became
burdensome—was the man in the flannel shirt, the black-browed
Torpenhow. He represented the Central Southern Syndicate in the
campaign, as he had represented it in the Egyptian war, and elsewhere.
The syndicate did not concern itself greatly with criticisms of attack
and the like. It supplied the masses, and all it demanded was
picturesqueness and abundance of detail; for there is more joy in
England over a soldier who insubordinately steps out of square to
rescue a comrade than over twenty generals slaving even to baldness at
the gross details of transport and commissariat.

He had met at Suakin a young man, sitting on the edge of a recently
abandoned redoubt about the size of a hat-box, sketching a clump of
shell-torn bodies on the gravel plain.

“What are you for?” said Torpenhow. The greeting of the correspondent
is that of the commercial traveller on the road.

“My own hand,” said the young man, without looking up. “Have you any
tobacco?”

Torpenhow waited till the sketch was finished, and when he had looked
at it said, “What’s your business here?”

“Nothing; there was a row, so I came. I’m supposed to be doing
something down at the painting-slips among the boats, or else I’m in
charge of the condenser on one of the water-ships. I’ve forgotten
which.”

“You’ve cheek enough to build a redoubt with,” said Torpenhow, and took
stock of the new acquaintance. “Do you always draw like that?”

The young man produced more sketches. “Row on a Chinese pig-boat,” said
he, sententiously, showing them one after another.—“Chief mate dirked
by a comprador.—Junk ashore off Hakodate.—Somali muleteer being
flogged.—Star-shelled bursting over camp at Berbera.—Slave-dhow being
chased round Tajurrah Bah.—Soldier lying dead in the moonlight outside
Suakin.—throat cut by Fuzzies.”

“H’m!” said Torpenhow, “can’t say I care for Verestchagin-and-water
myself, but there’s no accounting for tastes. Doing anything now, are
you?”

“No. I’m amusing myself here.”

Torpenhow looked at the aching desolation of the place. “Faith, you’ve
queer notions of amusement. Got any money?”

“Enough to go on with. Look here: do you want me to do war-work?”

“_I_ don’t. My syndicate may, though. You can draw more than a little,
and I don’t suppose you care much what you get, do you?”

“Not this time. I want my chance first.”

Torpenhow looked at the sketches again, and nodded. “Yes, you’re right
to take your first chance when you can get it.”

He rode away swiftly through the Gate of the Two War-Ships, rattled
across the causeway into the town, and wired to his syndicate, “Got man
here, picture-work. Good and cheap. Shall I arrange? Will do
letterpress with sketches.”

The man on the redoubt sat swinging his legs and murmuring, “I knew the
chance would come, sooner or later. By Gad, they’ll have to sweat for
it if I come through this business alive!”

In the evening Torpenhow was able to announce to his friend that the
Central Southern Agency was willing to take him on trial, paying
expenses for three months. “And, by the way, what’s your name?” said
Torpenhow.

“Heldar. Do they give me a free hand?”

“They’ve taken you on chance. You must justify the choice. You’d better
stick to me. I’m going up-country with a column, and I’ll do what I can
for you. Give me some of your sketches taken here, and I’ll send ’em
along.” To himself he said, “That’s the best bargain the Central
southern has ever made; and they got me cheaply enough.”

So it came to pass that, after some purchase of horse-flesh and
arrangements financial and political, Dick was made free of the New and
Honourable Fraternity of war correspondents, who all possess the
inalienable right of doing as much work as they can and getting as much
for it as Providence and their owners shall please. To these things are
added in time, if the brother be worthy, the power of glib speech that
neither man nor woman can resist when a meal or a bed is in question,
the eye of a horse-cope, the skill of a cook, the constitution of a
bullock, the digestion of an ostrich, and an infinite adaptability to
all circumstances. But many die before they attain to this degree, and
the past-masters in the craft appear for the most part in dress-clothes
when they are in England, and thus their glory is hidden from the
multitude.

Dick followed Torpenhow wherever the latter’s fancy chose to lead him,
and between the two they managed to accomplish some work that almost
satisfied themselves. It was not an easy life in any way, and under its
influence the two were drawn very closely together, for they ate from
the same dish, they shared the same water-bottle, and, most binding tie
of all, their mails went off together. It was Dick who managed to make
gloriously drunk a telegraph-clerk in a palm hut far beyond the Second
Cataract, and, while the man lay in bliss on the floor, possessed
himself of some laboriously acquired exclusive information, forwarded
by a confiding correspondent of an opposition syndicate, made a careful
duplicate of the matter, and brought the result to Torpenhow, who said
that all was fair in love or war correspondence, and built an excellent
descriptive article from his rival’s riotous waste of words. It was
Torpenhow who—but the tale of their adventures, together and apart,
from Philae to the waste wilderness of Herawi and Muella, would fill
many books. They had been penned into a square side by side, in deadly
fear of being shot by over-excited soldiers; they had fought with
baggage-camels in the chill dawn; they had jogged along in silence
under blinding sun on indefatigable little Egyptian horses; and they
had floundered on the shallows of the Nile when the whale-boat in which
they had found a berth chose to hit a hidden rock and rip out half her
bottom-planks.

Now they were sitting on the sand-bank, and the whale-boats were
bringing up the remainder of the column.

“Yes,” said Torpenhow, as he put the last rude stitches into his
over-long-neglected gear, “it has been a beautiful business.”

“The patch or the campaign?” said Dick. “Don’t think much of either,
myself.”

“You want the _Euryalus_ brought up above the Third Cataract, don’t
you? and eighty-one-ton guns at Jakdul? Now, _I’m_ quite satisfied with
my breeches.” He turned round gravely to exhibit himself, after the
manner of a clown.

“It’s very pretty. Specially the lettering on the sack. G.B.T.
Government Bullock Train. That’s a sack from India.”

“It’s my initials,—Gilbert Belling Torpenhow. I stole the cloth on
purpose.

What the mischief are the camel-corps doing yonder?” Torpenhow shaded
his eyes and looked across the scrub-strewn gravel.

A bugle blew furiously, and the men on the bank hurried to their arms
and accoutrements.

““Pisan soldiery surprised while bathing,”’ remarked Dick, calmly.

“D’you remember the picture? It’s by Michael Angelo; all beginners copy
it. That scrub’s alive with enemy.”

The camel-corps on the bank yelled to the infantry to come to them, and
a hoarse shouting down the river showed that the remainder of the
column had wind of the trouble and was hastening to take share in it.
As swiftly as a reach of still water is crisped by the wind, the
rock-strewn ridges and scrub-topped hills were troubled and alive with
armed men.

Mercifully, it occurred to these to stand far off for a time, to shout
and gesticulate joyously. One man even delivered himself of a long
story. The camel-corps did not fire. They were only too glad of a
little breathing-space, until some sort of square could be formed. The
men on the sand-bank ran to their side; and the whale-boats, as they
toiled up within shouting distance, were thrust into the nearest bank
and emptied of all save the sick and a few men to guard them. The Arab
orator ceased his outcries, and his friends howled.

“They look like the Mahdi’s men,” said Torpenhow, elbowing himself into
the crush of the square; “but what thousands of ’em there are! The
tribes hereabout aren’t against us, I know.”

“Then the Mahdi’s taken another town,” said Dick, “and set all these
yelping devils free to show us up. Lend us your glass.”

“Our scouts should have told us of this. We’ve been trapped,” said a
subaltern. “Aren’t the camel guns ever going to begin? Hurry up, you
men!”

There was no need of any order. The men flung themselves panting
against the sides of the square, for they had good reason to know that
whoso was left outside when the fighting began would very probably die
in an extremely unpleasant fashion. The little hundred-and-fifty-pound
camel-guns posted at one corner of the square opened the ball as the
square moved forward by its right to get possession of a knoll of
rising ground. All had fought in this manner many times before, and
there was no novelty in the entertainment; always the same hot and
stifling formation, the smell of dust and leather, the same boltlike
rush of the enemy, the same pressure on the weakest side, the few
minutes of hand-to-hand scuffle, and then the silence of the desert,
broken only by the yells of those whom their handful of cavalry
attempted to pursue. They had become careless. The camel-guns spoke at
intervals, and the square slouched forward amid the protesting of the
camels. Then came the attack of three thousand men who had not learned
from books that it is impossible for troops in close order to attack
against breech-loading fire.

A few dropping shots heralded their approach, and a few horsemen led,
but the bulk of the force was naked humanity, mad with rage, and armed
with the spear and the sword. The instinct of the desert, where there
is always much war, told them that the right flank of the square was
the weakest, for they swung clear of the front. The camel-guns shelled
them as they passed and opened for an instant lanes through their
midst, most like those quick-closing vistas in a Kentish hop-garden
seen when the train races by at full speed; and the infantry fire, held
till the opportune moment, dropped them in close-packing hundreds. No
civilised troops in the world could have endured the hell through which
they came, the living leaping high to avoid the dying who clutched at
their heels, the wounded cursing and staggering forward, till they
fell—a torrent black as the sliding water above a mill-dam—full on the
right flank of the square.

Then the line of the dusty troops and the faint blue desert sky
overhead went out in rolling smoke, and the little stones on the heated
ground and the tinder-dry clumps of scrub became matters of surpassing
interest, for men measured their agonised retreat and recovery by these
things, counting mechanically and hewing their way back to chosen
pebble and branch. There was no semblance of any concerted fighting.
For aught the men knew, the enemy might be attempting all four sides of
the square at once. Their business was to destroy what lay in front of
them, to bayonet in the back those who passed over them, and, dying, to
drag down the slayer till he could be knocked on the head by some
avenging gun-butt.

Dick waited with Torpenhow and a young doctor till the stress grew
unendurable. It was hopeless to attend to the wounded till the attack
was repulsed, so the three moved forward gingerly towards the weakest
side of the square. There was a rush from without, the short
_hough-hough_ of the stabbing spears, and a man on a horse, followed by
thirty or forty others, dashed through, yelling and hacking. The right
flank of the square sucked in after them, and the other sides sent
help. The wounded, who knew that they had but a few hours more to live,
caught at the enemy’s feet and brought them down, or, staggering into a
discarded rifle, fired blindly into the scuffle that raged in the
centre of the square.

Dick was conscious that somebody had cut him violently across his
helmet, that he had fired his revolver into a black, foam-flecked face
which forthwith ceased to bear any resemblance to a face, and that
Torpenhow had gone down under an Arab whom he had tried to “collar
low,” and was turning over and over with his captive, feeling for the
man’s eyes. The doctor jabbed at a venture with a bayonet, and a
helmetless soldier fired over Dick’s shoulder: the flying grains of
powder stung his cheek. It was to Torpenhow that Dick turned by
instinct. The representative of the Central Southern Syndicate had
shaken himself clear of his enemy, and rose, wiping his thumb on his
trousers. The Arab, both hands to his forehead, screamed aloud, then
snatched up his spear and rushed at Torpenhow, who was panting under
shelter of Dick’s revolver. Dick fired twice, and the man dropped
limply. His upturned face lacked one eye. The musketry-fire redoubled,
but cheers mingled with it. The rush had failed and the enemy were
flying. If the heart of the square were shambles, the ground beyond was
a butcher’s shop. Dick thrust his way forward between the maddened men.
The remnant of the enemy were retiring, as the few—the very few—English
cavalry rode down the laggards.

Beyond the lines of the dead, a broad blood-stained Arab spear cast
aside in the retreat lay across a stump of scrub, and beyond this again
the illimitable dark levels of the desert. The sun caught the steel and
turned it into a red disc. Some one behind him was saying, “Ah, get
away, you brute!” Dick raised his revolver and pointed towards the
desert. His eye was held by the red splash in the distance, and the
clamour about him seemed to die down to a very far-away whisper, like
the whisper of a level sea. There was the revolver and the red
light.... and the voice of some one scaring something away, exactly as
had fallen somewhere before,—a darkness that stung. He fired at random,
and the bullet went out across the desert as he muttered, “Spoilt my
aim. There aren’t any more cartridges. We shall have to run home.” He
put his hand to his head and brought it away covered with blood.

“Old man, you’re cut rather badly,” said Torpenhow. “I owe you
something for this business. Thanks. Stand up! I say, you can’t be ill
here.”

Throughout the night, when the troops were encamped by the whale-boats,
a black figure danced in the strong moonlight on the sand-bar and
shouted that Khartoum the accursed one was dead,—was dead,—was
dead,—that two steamers were rock-staked on the Nile outside the city,
and that of all their crews there remained not one; and Khartoum was
dead,—was dead,—was dead!

But Torpenhow took no heed. He was watching Dick, who called aloud to
the restless Nile for Maisie,—and again Maisie!

“Behold a phenomenon,” said Torpenhow, rearranging the blanket. “Here
is a man, presumably human, who mentions the name of one woman only.
And I’ve seen a good deal of delirium, too.—Dick, here’s some fizzy
drink.”

“Thank you, Maisie,” said Dick.




CHAPTER III


So he thinks he shall take to the sea again
    For one more cruise with his buccaneers,
To singe the beard of the King of Spain,
And capture another Dean of Jaen
    And sell him in Algiers.—_A Dutch Picture_.—Longfellow


The Soudan campaign and Dick’s broken head had been some months ended
and mended, and the Central Southern Syndicate had paid Dick a certain
sum on account for work done, which work they were careful to assure
him was not altogether up to their standard. Dick heaved the letter
into the Nile at Cairo, cashed the draft in the same town, and bade a
warm farewell to Torpenhow at the station.

“I am going to lie up for a while and rest,” said Torpenhow. “I don’t
know where I shall live in London, but if God brings us to meet, we
shall meet. Are you staying here on the off-chance of another row?
There will be none till the Southern Soudan is reoccupied by our
troops. Mark that. Good-bye; bless you; come back when your money’s
spent; and give me your address.”

Dick loitered in Cairo, Alexandria, Ismailia, and Port Said,—especially
Port Said. There is iniquity in many parts of the world, and vice in
all, but the concentrated essence of all the iniquities and all the
vices in all the continents finds itself at Port Said. And through the
heart of that sand-bordered hell, where the mirage flickers day long
above the Bitter Lake, move, if you will only wait, most of the men and
women you have known in this life. Dick established himself in quarters
more riotous than respectable. He spent his evenings on the quay, and
boarded many ships, and saw very many friends,—gracious Englishwomen
with whom he had talked not too wisely in the veranda of Shepherd’s
Hotel, hurrying war correspondents, skippers of the contract
troop-ships employed in the campaign, army officers by the score, and
others of less reputable trades.

He had choice of all the races of the East and West for studies, and
the advantage of seeing his subjects under the influence of strong
excitement, at the gaming-tables, saloons, dancing-hells, and
elsewhere. For recreation there was the straight vista of the Canal,
the blazing sands, the procession of shipping, and the white hospitals
where the English soldiers lay. He strove to set down in black and
white and colour all that Providence sent him, and when that supply was
ended sought about for fresh material. It was a fascinating employment,
but it ran away with his money, and he had drawn in advance the hundred
and twenty pounds to which he was entitled yearly. “Now I shall have to
work and starve!” thought he, and was addressing himself to this new
fate when a mysterious telegram arrived from Torpenhow in England,
which said, “Come back, quick; you have caught on. Come.”

A large smile overspread his face. “So soon! that’s a good hearing,”
said he to himself. “There will be an orgy to-night. I’ll stand or fall
by my luck. Faith, it’s time it came!” He deposited half of his funds
in the hands of his well-known friends Monsieur and Madame Binat, and
ordered himself a Zanzibar dance of the finest. Monsieur Binat was
shaking with drink, but Madame smiles sympathetically—“Monsieur needs a
chair, of course, and of course Monsieur will sketch; Monsieur amuses
himself strangely.”

Binat raised a blue-white face from a cot in the inner room. “I
understand,” he quavered. “We all know Monsieur. Monsieur is an artist,
as I have been.” Dick nodded. “In the end,” said Binat, with gravity,
“Monsieur will descend alive into hell, as I have descended.” And he
laughed.

“You must come to the dance, too,” said Dick; “I shall want you.”

“For my face? I knew it would be so. For my face? My God! and for my
degradation so tremendous! I will not. Take him away. He is a devil. Or
at least do thou, Celeste, demand of him more.” The excellent Binat
began to kick and scream.

“All things are for sale in Port Said,” said Madame. “If my husband
comes it will be so much more. Eh, “how you call—’alf a sovereign.”

The money was paid, and the mad dance was held at night in a walled
courtyard at the back of Madame Binat’s house. The lady herself, in
faded mauve silk always about to slide from her yellow shoulders,
played the piano, and to the tin-pot music of a Western waltz the naked
Zanzibari girls danced furiously by the light of kerosene lamps. Binat
sat upon a chair and stared with eyes that saw nothing, till the whirl
of the dance and the clang of the rattling piano stole into the drink
that took the place of blood in his veins, and his face glistened. Dick
took him by the chin brutally and turned that face to the light. Madame
Binat looked over her shoulder and smiled with many teeth. Dick leaned
against the wall and sketched for an hour, till the kerosene lamps
began to smell, and the girls threw themselves panting on the
hard-beaten ground. Then he shut his book with a snap and moved away,
Binat plucking feebly at his elbow. “Show me,” he whimpered. “I too was
once an artist, even I!” Dick showed him the rough sketch. “Am I that?”
he screamed. “Will you take that away with you and show all the world
that it is I,—Binat?” He moaned and wept.

“Monsieur has paid for all,” said Madame. “To the pleasure of seeing
Monsieur again.”

The courtyard gate shut, and Dick hurried up the sandy street to the
nearest gambling-hell, where he was well known. “If the luck holds,
it’s an omen; if I lose, I must stay here.” He placed his money
picturesquely about the board, hardly daring to look at what he did.
The luck held.

Three turns of the wheel left him richer by twenty pounds, and he went
down to the shipping to make friends with the captain of a decayed
cargo-steamer, who landed him in London with fewer pounds in his pocket
than he cared to think about.

A thin gray fog hung over the city, and the streets were very cold; for
summer was in England.

“It’s a cheerful wilderness, and it hasn’t the knack of altering much,”
Dick thought, as he tramped from the Docks westward. “Now, what must I
do?”

The packed houses gave no answer. Dick looked down the long lightless
streets and at the appalling rush of traffic. “Oh, you rabbit-hutches!”
said he, addressing a row of highly respectable semi-detached
residences. “Do you know what you’ve got to do later on? You have to
supply me with men-servants and maid-servants,”—here he smacked his
lips,—“and the peculiar treasure of kings. Meantime I’ll find clothes
and boots, and presently I will return and trample on you.” He stepped
forward energetically; he saw that one of his shoes was burst at the
side. As he stooped to make investigations, a man jostled him into the
gutter. “All right,” he said.

“That’s another nick in the score. I’ll jostle you later on.”

Good clothes and boots are not cheap, and Dick left his last shop with
the certainty that he would be respectably arrayed for a time, but with
only fifty shillings in his pocket. He returned to streets by the
Docks, and lodged himself in one room, where the sheets on the bed were
almost audibly marked in case of theft, and where nobody seemed to go
to bed at all. When his clothes arrived he sought the Central Southern
Syndicate for Torpenhow’s address, and got it, with the intimation that
there was still some money waiting for him.

“How much?” said Dick, as one who habitually dealt in millions.

“Between thirty and forty pounds. If it would be any convenience to
you, of course we could let you have it at once; but we usually settle
accounts monthly.”

“If I show that I want anything now, I’m lost,” he said to himself.
“All I need I’ll take later on.” Then, aloud, “It’s hardly worth while;
and I’m going to the country for a month, too. Wait till I come back,
and I’ll see about it.”

“But we trust, Mr. Heldar, that you do not intend to sever your
connection with us?”

Dick’s business in life was the study of faces, and he watched the
speaker keenly. “That man means something,” he said. “I’ll do no
business till I’ve seen Torpenhow. There’s a big deal coming.” So he
departed, making no promises, to his one little room by the Docks. And
that day was the seventh of the month, and that month, he reckoned with
awful distinctness, had thirty-one days in it!

It is not easy for a man of catholic tastes and healthy appetites to
exist for twenty-four days on fifty shillings. Nor is it cheering to
begin the experiment alone in all the loneliness of London. Dick paid
seven shillings a week for his lodging, which left him rather less than
a shilling a day for food and drink. Naturally, his first purchase was
of the materials of his craft; he had been without them too long. Half
a day’s investigations and comparison brought him to the conclusion
that sausages and mashed potatoes, twopence a plate, were the best
food. Now, sausages once or twice a week for breakfast are not
unpleasant. As lunch, even, with mashed potatoes, they become
monotonous. At dinner they are impertinent. At the end of three days
Dick loathed sausages, and, going forth, pawned his watch to revel on
sheep’s head, which is not as cheap as it looks, owing to the bones and
the gravy. Then he returned to sausages and mashed potatoes. Then he
confined himself entirely to mashed potatoes for a day, and was unhappy
because of pain in his inside. Then he pawned his waistcoat and his
tie, and thought regretfully of money thrown away in times past. There
are few things more edifying unto Art than the actual belly-pinch of
hunger, and Dick in his few walks abroad,—he did not care for exercise;
it raised desires that could not be satisfied—found himself dividing
mankind into two classes,—those who looked as if they might give him
something to eat, and those who looked otherwise. “I never knew what I
had to learn about the human face before,” he thought; and, as a reward
for his humility, Providence caused a cab-driver at a sausage-shop
where Dick fed that night to leave half eaten a great chunk of bread.
Dick took it,—would have fought all the world for its possession,—and
it cheered him.

The month dragged through at last, and, nearly prancing with
impatience, he went to draw his money. Then he hastened to Torpenhow’s
address and smelt the smell of cooking meats all along the corridors of
the chambers. Torpenhow was on the top floor, and Dick burst into his
room, to be received with a hug which nearly cracked his ribs, as
Torpenhow dragged him to the light and spoke of twenty different things
in the same breath.

“But you’re looking tucked up,” he concluded.

“Got anything to eat?” said Dick, his eye roaming round the room.

“I shall be having breakfast in a minute. What do you say to sausages?”

“No, anything but sausages! Torp, I’ve been starving on that accursed
horse-flesh for thirty days and thirty nights.”

“Now, what lunacy has been your latest?”

Dick spoke of the last few weeks with unbridled speech. Then he opened
his coat; there was no waistcoat below. “I ran it fine, awfully fine,
but I’ve just scraped through.”

“You haven’t much sense, but you’ve got a backbone, anyhow. Eat, and
talk afterwards.” Dick fell upon eggs and bacon and gorged till he
could gorge no more. Torpenhow handed him a filled pipe, and he smoked
as men smoke who for three weeks have been deprived of good tobacco.

“Ouf!” said he. “That’s heavenly! Well?”

“Why in the world didn’t you come to me?”

“Couldn’t; I owe you too much already, old man. Besides I had a sort of
superstition that this temporary starvation—that’s what it was, and it
hurt—would bring me luck later. It’s over and done with now, and none
of the syndicate know how hard up I was. Fire away. What’s the exact
state of affairs as regards myself?”

“You had my wire? You’ve caught on here. People like your work
immensely. I don’t know why, but they do. They say you have a fresh
touch and a new way of drawing things. And, because they’re chiefly
home-bred English, they say you have insight. You’re wanted by half a
dozen papers; you’re wanted to illustrate books.”

Dick grunted scornfully.

“You’re wanted to work up your smaller sketches and sell them to the
dealers. They seem to think the money sunk in you is a good investment.

Good Lord! who can account for the fathomless folly of the public?”

“They’re a remarkably sensible people.”

“They are subject to fits, if that’s what you mean; and you happen to
be the object of the latest fit among those who are interested in what
they call Art. Just now you’re a fashion, a phenomenon, or whatever you
please. I appeared to be the only person who knew anything about you
here, and I have been showing the most useful men a few of the sketches
you gave me from time to time. Those coming after your work on the
Central Southern Syndicate appear to have done your business. You’re in
luck.”

“Huh! call it luck! Do call it luck, when a man has been kicking about
the world like a dog, waiting for it to come! I’ll luck ’em later on. I
want a place to work first.”

“Come here,” said Torpenhow, crossing the landing. “This place is a big
box room really, but it will do for you. There’s your skylight, or your
north light, or whatever window you call it, and plenty of room to
thrash about in, and a bedroom beyond. What more do you need?”

“Good enough,” said Dick, looking round the large room that took up a
third of a top story in the rickety chambers overlooking the Thames. A
pale yellow sun shone through the skylight and showed the much dirt of
the place. Three steps led from the door to the landing, and three more
to Torpenhow’s room. The well of the staircase disappeared into
darkness, pricked by tiny gas-jets, and there were sounds of men
talking and doors slamming seven flights below, in the warm gloom.

“Do they give you a free hand here?” said Dick, cautiously. He was
Ishmael enough to know the value of liberty.

“Anything you like; latch-keys and license unlimited. We are permanent
tenants for the most part here. ’Tisn’t a place I would recommend for a
Young Men’s Christian Association, but it will serve. I took these
rooms for you when I wired.”

“You’re a great deal too kind, old man.”

“You didn’t suppose you were going away from me, did you?” Torpenhow
put his hand on Dick’s shoulder, and the two walked up and down the
room, henceforward to be called the studio, in sweet and silent
communion. They heard rapping at Torpenhow’s door. “That’s some ruffian
come up for a drink,” said Torpenhow; and he raised his voice cheerily.
There entered no one more ruffianly than a portly middle-aged gentleman
in a satin-faced frockcoat. His lips were parted and pale, and there
were deep pouches under the eyes.

“Weak heart,” said Dick to himself, and, as he shook hands, “very weak
heart. His pulse is shaking his fingers.”

The man introduced himself as the head of the Central Southern
Syndicate and “one of the most ardent admirers of your work, Mr.
Heldar. I assure you, in the name of the syndicate, that we are
immensely indebted to you; and I trust, Mr. Heldar, you won’t forget
that we were largely instrumental in bringing you before the public.”
He panted because of the seven flights of stairs.

Dick glanced at Torpenhow, whose left eyelid lay for a moment dead on
his cheek.

“I shan’t forget,” said Dick, every instinct of defence roused in him.

“You’ve paid me so well that I couldn’t, you know. By the way, when I
am settled in this place I should like to send and get my sketches.
There must be nearly a hundred and fifty of them with you.”

“That is er—is what I came to speak about. I fear we can’t allow it
exactly, Mr. Heldar. In the absence of any specified agreement, the
sketches are our property, of course.”

“Do you mean to say that you are going to keep them?”

“Yes; and we hope to have your help, on your own terms, Mr. Heldar, to
assist us in arranging a little exhibition, which, backed by our name
and the influence we naturally command among the press, should be of
material service to you. Sketches such as yours——”

“Belong to me. You engaged me by wire, you paid me the lowest rates you
dared. You can’t mean to keep them! Good God alive, man, they’re all
I’ve got in the world!”

Torpenhow watched Dick’s face and whistled.

Dick walked up and down, thinking. He saw the whole of his little stock
in trade, the first weapon of his equipment, annexed at the outset of
his campaign by an elderly gentleman whose name Dick had not caught
aright, who said that he represented a syndicate, which was a thing for
which Dick had not the least reverence. The injustice of the
proceedings did not much move him; he had seen the strong hand prevail
too often in other places to be squeamish over the moral aspects of
right and wrong.

But he ardently desired the blood of the gentleman in the frockcoat,
and when he spoke again, and when he spoke again it was with a strained
sweetness that Torpenhow knew well for the beginning of strife.

“Forgive me, sir, but you have no—no younger man who can arrange this
business with me?”

“I speak for the syndicate. I see no reason for a third party to——”

“You will in a minute. Be good enough to give back my sketches.”

The man stared blankly at Dick, and then at Torpenhow, who was leaning
against the wall. He was not used to ex-employees who ordered him to be
good enough to do things.

“Yes, it is rather a cold-blooded steal,” said Torpenhow, critically;
“but I’m afraid, I am very much afraid, you’ve struck the wrong man. Be
careful, Dick; remember, this isn’t the Soudan.”

“Considering what services the syndicate have done you in putting your
name before the world——”

This was not a fortunate remark; it reminded Dick of certain vagrant
years lived out in loneliness and strife and unsatisfied desires. The
memory did not contrast well with the prosperous gentleman who proposed
to enjoy the fruit of those years.

“I don’t know quite what to do with you,” began Dick, meditatively. “Of
course you’re a thief, and you ought to be half killed, but in your
case you’d probably die. I don’t want you dead on this floor, and,
besides, it’s unlucky just as one’s moving in. Don’t hit, sir; you’ll
only excite yourself.”

He put one hand on the man’s forearm and ran the other down the plump
body beneath the coat. “My goodness!” said he to Torpenhow, “and this
gray oaf dares to be a thief! I have seen an Esneh camel-driver have
the black hide taken off his body in strips for stealing half a pound
of wet dates, and _he_ was as tough as whipcord. This things’ soft all
over—like a woman.”

There are few things more poignantly humiliating than being handled by
a man who does not intend to strike. The head of the syndicate began to
breathe heavily. Dick walked round him, pawing him, as a cat paws a
soft hearth-rug. Then he traced with his forefinger the leaden pouches
underneath the eyes, and shook his head. “You were going to steal my
things,—mine, mine, mine!—you, who don’t know when you may die. Write a
note to your office,—you say you’re the head of it,—and order them to
give Torpenhow my sketches,—every one of them. Wait a minute: your
hand’s shaking. Now!” He thrust a pocket-book before him. The note was
written. Torpenhow took it and departed without a word, while Dick
walked round and round the spellbound captive, giving him such advice
as he conceived best for the welfare of his soul. When Torpenhow
returned with a gigantic portfolio, he heard Dick say, almost
soothingly, “Now, I hope this will be a lesson to you; and if you worry
me when I have settled down to work with any nonsense about actions for
assault, believe me, I’ll catch you and manhandle you, and you’ll die.
You haven’t very long to live, anyhow. Go! _Imshi, Vootsak_,—get out!”
The man departed, staggering and dazed. Dick drew a long breath: “Phew!
what a lawless lot these people are! The first thing a poor orphan
meets is gang robbery, organised burglary! Think of the hideous
blackness of that man’s mind! Are my sketches all right, Torp?”

“Yes; one hundred and forty-seven of them. Well, I _must_ say, Dick,
you’ve begun well.”

“He was interfering with me. It only meant a few pounds to him, but it
was everything to me. I don’t think he’ll bring an action. I gave him
some medical advice gratis about the state of his body. It was cheap at
the little flurry it cost him. Now, let’s look at my things.”

Two minutes later Dick had thrown himself down on the floor and was
deep in the portfolio, chuckling lovingly as he turned the drawings
over and thought of the price at which they had been bought.

The afternoon was well advanced when Torpenhow came to the door and saw
Dick dancing a wild saraband under the skylight.

“I builded better than I knew, Torp,” he said, without stopping the
dance.

“They’re good! They’re damned good! They’ll go like flame! I shall have
an exhibition of them on my own brazen hook. And that man would have
cheated me out of it! Do you know that I’m sorry now that I didn’t
actually hit him?”

“Go out,” said Torpenhow,—“go out and pray to be delivered from the sin
of arrogance, which you never will be. Bring your things up from
whatever place you’re staying in, and we’ll try to make this barn a
little more shipshape.”

“And then—oh, then,” said Dick, still capering, “we will spoil the
Egyptians!”




CHAPTER IV


The wolf-cub at even lay hid in the corn,
    When the smoke of the cooking hung gray:
He knew where the doe made a couch for her fawn,
    And he looked to his strength for his prey.
    But the moon swept the smoke-wreaths away.
And he turned from his meal in the villager’s close,
And he bayed to the moon as she rose.

—_In Seonee_.


“Well, and how does success taste?” said Torpenhow, some three months
later. He had just returned to chambers after a holiday in the country.

“Good,” said Dick, as he sat licking his lips before the easel in the
studio.

“I want more,—heaps more. The lean years have passed, and I approve of
these fat ones.”

“Be careful, old man. That way lies bad work.”

Torpenhow was sprawling in a long chair with a small fox-terrier asleep
on his chest, while Dick was preparing a canvas. A dais, a background,
and a lay-figure were the only fixed objects in the place. They rose
from a wreck of oddments that began with felt-covered water-bottles,
belts, and regimental badges, and ended with a small bale of
second-hand uniforms and a stand of mixed arms. The mark of muddy feet
on the dais showed that a military model had just gone away. The watery
autumn sunlight was falling, and shadows sat in the corners of the
studio.

“Yes,” said Dick, deliberately, “I like the power; I like the fun; I
like the fuss; and above all I like the money. I almost like the people
who make the fuss and pay the money. Almost. But they’re a queer
gang,—an amazingly queer gang!”

“They have been good enough to you, at any rate. That tin-pot
exhibition of your sketches must have paid. Did you see that the papers
called it the ‘Wild Work Show’?”

“Never mind. I sold every shred of canvas I wanted to; and, on my word,
I believe it was because they believed I was a self-taught flagstone
artist.

I should have got better prices if I worked my things on wool or
scratched them on camel-bone instead of using mere black and white and
colour. Verily, they are a queer gang, these people. Limited isn’t the
word to describe ’em. I met a fellow the other day who told me that it
was impossible that shadows on white sand should be
blue,—ultramarine,—as they are. I found out, later, that the man had
been as far as Brighton beach; but he knew all about Art, confound him.
He gave me a lecture on it, and recommended me to go to school to learn
technique. I wonder what old Kami would have said to that.”

“When were you under Kami, man of extraordinary beginnings?”

“I studied with him for two years in Paris. He taught by personal
magnetism. All he ever said was, ‘_Continuez, mes enfants_,’ and you
had to make the best you could of that. He had a divine touch, and he
knew something about colour. Kami used to dream colour; I swear he
could never have seen the genuine article; but he evolved it; and it
was good.”

“Recollect some of those views in the Soudan?” said Torpenhow, with a
provoking drawl.

Dick squirmed in his place. “Don’t! It makes me want to get out there
again. What colour that was! Opal and umber and amber and claret and
brick-red and sulphur—cockatoo-crest—sulphur—against brown, with a
nigger-black rock sticking up in the middle of it all, and a decorative
frieze of camels festooning in front of a pure pale turquoise sky.” He
began to walk up and down. “And yet, you know, if you try to give these
people the thing as God gave it, keyed down to their comprehension and
according to the powers He has given you——”

“Modest man! Go on.”

“Half a dozen epicene young pagans who haven’t even been to Algiers
will tell you, first, that your notion is borrowed, and, secondly, that
it isn’t Art.

“’This comes of my leaving town for a month. Dickie, you’ve been
promenading among the toy-shops and hearing people talk.”

“I couldn’t help it,” said Dick, penitently. “You weren’t here, and it
was lonely these long evenings. A man can’t work for ever.”

“A man might have gone to a pub, and got decently drunk.”

“I wish I had; but I forgathered with some men of sorts. They said they
were artists, and I knew some of them could draw,—but they wouldn’t
draw. They gave me tea,—tea at five in the afternoon!—and talked about
Art and the state of their souls. As if their souls mattered. I’ve
heard more about Art and seen less of her in the last six months than
in the whole of my life. Do you remember Cassavetti, who worked for
some continental syndicate, out with the desert column? He was a
regular Christmas-tree of contraptions when he took the field in full
fig, with his water-bottle, lanyard, revolver, writing-case, housewife,
gig-lamps, and the Lord knows what all. He used to fiddle about with
’em and show us how they worked; but he never seemed to do much except
fudge his reports from the Nilghai. See?”

“Dear old Nilghai! He’s in town, fatter than ever. He ought to be up
here this evening. I see the comparison perfectly. You should have kept
clear of all that man-millinery. Serves you right; and I hope it will
unsettle your mind.”

“It won’t. It has taught me what Art—holy sacred Art—means.”

“You’ve learnt something while I’ve been away. What is Art?”

“Give ’em what they know, and when you’ve done it once do it again.”

Dick dragged forward a canvas laid face to the wall. “Here’s a sample
of real Art. It’s going to be a facsimile reproduction for a weekly. I
called it “His Last Shot.” It’s worked up from the little water-colour
I made outside El Maghrib. Well, I lured my model, a beautiful
rifleman, up here with drink; I drored him, and I redrored him, and I
redrored him, and I made him a flushed, dishevelled, bedevilled
scallawag, with his helmet at the back of his head, and the living fear
of death in his eye, and the blood oozing out of a cut over his
ankle-bone. He wasn’t pretty, but he was all soldier and very much
man.”

“Once more, modest child!”

Dick laughed. “Well, it’s only to you I’m talking. I did him just as
well as I knew how, making allowance for the slickness of oils. Then
the art-manager of that abandoned paper said that his subscribers
wouldn’t like it. It was brutal and coarse and violent,—man being
naturally gentle when he’s fighting for his life. They wanted something
more restful, with a little more colour. I could have said a good deal,
but you might as well talk to a sheep as an art-manager. I took my
“Last Shot” back. Behold the result! I put him into a lovely red coat
without a speck on it. That is Art. I polished his boots,—observe the
high light on the toe. That is Art. I cleaned his rifle,—rifles are
always clean on service,—because that is Art.

I pipeclayed his helmet,—pipeclay is always used on active service, and
is indispensable to Art. I shaved his chin, I washed his hands, and
gave him an air of fatted peace. Result, military tailor’s
pattern-plate. Price, thank Heaven, twice as much as for the first
sketch, which was moderately decent.”

“And do you suppose you’re going to give that thing out as your work?”

“Why not? I did it. Alone I did it, in the interests of sacred,
home-bred Art and _Dickenson’s Weekly_.”

Torpenhow smoked in silence for a while. Then came the verdict,
delivered from rolling clouds: “If you were only a mass of blathering
vanity, Dick, I wouldn’t mind,—I’d let you go to the deuce on your own
mahl-stick; but when I consider what you are to me, and when I find
that to vanity you add the twopenny-halfpenny pique of a
twelve-year-old girl, then I bestir myself in your behalf. Thus!”

The canvas ripped as Torpenhow’s booted foot shot through it, and the
terrier jumped down, thinking rats were about.

“If you have any bad language to use, use it. You have not. I continue.

You are an idiot, because no man born of woman is strong enough to take
liberties with his public, even though they be—which they ain’t—all you
say they are.”

“But they don’t know any better. What can you expect from creatures
born and bred in this light?” Dick pointed to the yellow fog. “If they
want furniture-polish, let them have furniture-polish, so long as they
pay for it.

They are only men and women. You talk as if they were gods.”

“That sounds very fine, but it has nothing to do with the case. They
are the people you have to do work for, whether you like it or not.
They are your masters. Don’t be deceived, Dickie, you aren’t strong
enough to trifle with them,—or with yourself, which is more important.

Moreover,—Come back, Binkie: that red daub isn’t going anywhere,—unless
you take precious good care, you will fall under the damnation of the
check-book, and that’s worse than death. You will get drunk—you’re half
drunk already—on easily acquired money. For that money and your own
infernal vanity you are willing to deliberately turn out bad work.
You’ll do quite enough bad work without knowing it. And, Dickie, as I
love you and as I know you love me, I am not going to let you cut off
your nose to spite your face for all the gold in England. That’s
settled. Now swear.”

“Don’t know, said Dick. “I’ve been trying to make myself angry, but I
can’t, you’re so abominably reasonable. There will be a row on
_Dickenson’s Weekly_, I fancy.”

“Why the Dickenson do you want to work on a weekly paper? It’s slow
bleeding of power.”

“It brings in the very desirable dollars,” said Dick, his hands in his
pockets.

Torpenhow watched him with large contempt. “Why, I thought it was a
man!” said he. “It’s a child.”

“No, it isn’t,” said Dick, wheeling quickly. “You’ve no notion what the
certainty of cash means to a man who has always wanted it badly.

Nothing will pay me for some of my life’s joys; on that Chinese
pig-boat, for instance, when we ate bread and jam for every meal,
because Ho-Wang wouldn’t allow us anything better, and it all tasted of
pig,—Chinese pig. I’ve worked for this, I’ve sweated and I’ve starved
for this, line on line and month after month. And now I’ve got it I am
going to make the most of it while it lasts. Let them pay—they’ve no
knowledge.”

“What does Your Majesty please to want? You can’t smoke more than you
do; you won’t drink; you’re a gross feeder; and you dress in the dark,
by the look of you. You wouldn’t keep a horse the other day when I
suggested, because, you said, it might fall lame, and whenever you
cross the street you take a hansom. Even you are not foolish enough to
suppose that theatres and all the live things you can buy thereabouts
mean Life.

What earthly need have you for money?”

“It’s there, bless its golden heart,” said Dick. “It’s there all the
time.

Providence has sent me nuts while I have teeth to crack ’em with. I
haven’t yet found the nut I wish to crack, but I’m keeping my teeth
filed.

Perhaps some day you and I will go for a walk round the wide earth.”

“With no work to do, nobody to worry us, and nobody to compete with?
You would be unfit to speak to in a week. Besides, I shouldn’t go. I
don’t care to profit by the price of a man’s soul,—for that’s what it
would mean.

Dick, it’s no use arguing. You’re a fool.”

“Don’t see it. When I was on that Chinese pig-boat, our captain got
credit for saving about twenty-five thousand very seasick little pigs,
when our old tramp of a steamer fell foul of a timber-junk. Now, taking
those pigs as a parallel——”

“Oh, confound your parallels! Whenever I try to improve your soul, you
always drag in some anecdote from your very shady past. Pigs aren’t the
British public; and self-respect is self-respect the world over. Go out
for a walk and try to catch some self-respect. And, I say, if the
Nilghai comes up this evening can I show him your diggings?”

“Surely. You’ll be asking whether you must knock at my door, next.” And
Dick departed, to take counsel with himself in the rapidly gathering
London fog.

Half an hour after he had left, the Nilghai laboured up the staircase.
He was the chiefest, as he was the youngest, of the war correspondents,
and his experiences dated from the birth of the needle-gun. Saving only
his ally, Keneu the Great War Eagle, there was no man higher in the
craft than he, and he always opened his conversation with the news that
there would be trouble in the Balkans in the spring. Torpenhow laughed
as he entered.

“Never mind the trouble in the Balkans. Those little states are always
screeching. You’ve heard about Dick’s luck?”

“Yes; he has been called up to notoriety, hasn’t he? I hope you keep
him properly humble. He wants suppressing from time to time.”

“He does. He’s beginning to take liberties with what he thinks is his
reputation.”

“Already! By Jove, he _has_ cheek! I don’t know about his reputation,
but he’ll come a cropper if he tries that sort of thing.”

“So I told him. I don’t think he believes it.”

“They never do when they first start off. What’s that wreck on the
ground there?”

“Specimen of his latest impertinence.” Torpenhow thrust the torn edges
of the canvas together and showed the well-groomed picture to the
Nilghai, who looked at it for a moment and whistled.

“It’s a chromo,” said he,—“a chromo-litholeomargarine fake! What
possessed him to do it? And yet how thoroughly he has caught the note
that catches a public who think with their boots and read with their
elbows! The cold-blooded insolence of the work almost saves it; but he
mustn’t go on with this. Hasn’t he been praised and cockered up too
much? You know these people here have no sense of proportion. They’ll
call him a second Detaille and a third-hand Meissonier while his
fashion lasts. It’s windy diet for a colt.”

“I don’t think it affects Dick much. You might as well call a young
wolf a lion and expect him to take the compliment in exchange for a
shin-bone.

Dick’s soul is in the bank. He’s working for cash.”

“Now he has thrown up war work, I suppose he doesn’t see that the
obligations of the service are just the same, only the proprietors are
changed.”

“How should he know? He thinks he is his own master.”

“Does he? I could undeceive him for his good, if there’s any virtue in
print. He wants the whiplash.”

“Lay it on with science, then. I’d flay him myself, but I like him too
much.”

“I’ve no scruples. He had the audacity to try to cut me out with a
woman at Cairo once. I forgot that, but I remember now.”

“_Did_ he cut you out?”

“You’ll see when I have dealt with him. But, after all, what’s the
good? Leave him alone and he’ll come home, if he has any stuff in him,
dragging or wagging his tail behind him. There’s more in a week of life
than in a lively weekly. None the less I’ll slate him. I’ll slate him
ponderously in the _Cataclysm_.”

“Good luck to you; but I fancy nothing short of a crowbar would make
Dick wince. His soul seems to have been fired before we came across
him.

He’s intensely suspicious and utterly lawless.”

“Matter of temper,” said the Nilghai. “It’s the same with horses. Some
you wallop and they work, some you wallop and they jib, and some you
wallop and they go out for a walk with their hands in their pockets.”

“That’s exactly what Dick has done,” said Torpenhow. “Wait till he
comes back. In the meantime, you can begin your slating here. I’ll show
you some of his last and worst work in his studio.”

Dick had instinctively sought running water for a comfort to his mood
of mind. He was leaning over the Embankment wall, watching the rush of
the Thames through the arches of Westminster Bridge. He began by
thinking of Torpenhow’s advice, but, as of custom, lost himself in the
study of the faces flocking past. Some had death written on their
features, and Dick marvelled that they could laugh. Others, clumsy and
coarse-built for the most part, were alight with love; others were
merely drawn and lined with work; but there was something, Dick knew,
to be made out of them all. The poor at least should suffer that he
might learn, and the rich should pay for the output of his learning.
Thus his credit in the world and his cash balance at the bank would be
increased. So much the better for him. He had suffered. Now he would
take toll of the ills of others.

The fog was driven apart for a moment, and the sun shone, a blood-red
wafer, on the water. Dick watched the spot till he heard the voice of
the tide between the piers die down like the wash of the sea at low
tide. A girl hard pressed by her lover shouted shamelessly, “Ah, get
away, you beast!” and a shift of the same wind that had opened the fog
drove across Dick’s face the black smoke of a river-steamer at her
berth below the wall. He was blinded for the moment, then spun round
and found himself face to face with—Maisie.

There was no mistaking. The years had turned the child to a woman, but
they had not altered the dark-gray eyes, the thin scarlet lips, or the
firmly modelled mouth and chin; and, that all should be as it was of
old, she wore a closely fitting gray dress.

Since the human soul is finite and not in the least under its own
command, Dick, advancing, said “Halloo!” after the manner of
schoolboys, and Maisie answered, “Oh, Dick, is that you?” Then, against
his will, and before the brain newly released from considerations of
the cash balance had time to dictate to the nerves, every pulse of
Dick’s body throbbed furiously and his palate dried in his mouth. The
fog shut down again, and Maisie’s face was pearl-white through it. No
word was spoken, but Dick fell into step at her side, and the two paced
the Embankment together, keeping the step as perfectly as in their
afternoon excursions to the mud-flats. Then Dick, a little
hoarsely—“What has happened to Amomma?”

“He died, Dick. Not cartridges; over-eating. He was always greedy.
Isn’t it funny?”

“Yes. No. Do you mean Amomma?”

“Ye—es. No. This. Where have you come from?”

“Over there,” He pointed eastward through the fog. “And you?”

“Oh, I’m in the north,—the black north, across all the Park. I am very
busy.”

“What do you do?”

“I paint a great deal. That’s all I have to do.”

“Why, what’s happened? You had three hundred a year.”

“I have that still. I am painting; that’s all.”

“Are you alone, then?”

“There’s a girl living with me. Don’t walk so fast, Dick; you’re out of
step.”

“Then you noticed it too?”

“Of course I did. You’re always out of step.”

“So I am. I’m sorry. You went on with the painting?”

“Of course. I said I should. I was at the Slade, then at Merton’s
in_St. John’s Wood_, the big studio, then I pepper-potted,—I mean I
went to the National,—and now I’m working under Kami.”

“But Kami is in Paris surely?”

“No; he has his teaching studio in Vitry-sur-Marne. I work with him in
the summer, and I live in London in the winter. I’m a householder.”

“Do you sell much?”

“Now and again, but not often. There is my “bus. I must take it or lose
half an hour. Good-bye, Dick.”

“Good-bye, Maisie. Won’t you tell me where you live? I must see you
again; and perhaps I could help you. I—I paint a little myself.”

“I may be in the Park to-morrow, if there is no working light. I walk
from the Marble Arch down and back again; that is my little excursion.
But of course I shall see you again.” She stepped into the omnibus and
was swallowed up by the fog.

“Well—I—am—damned!” exclaimed Dick, and returned to the chambers.

Torpenhow and the Nilghai found him sitting on the steps to the studio
door, repeating the phrase with an awful gravity.

“You’ll be more damned when I’m done with you,” said the Nilghai,
upheaving his bulk from behind Torpenhow’s shoulder and waving a sheaf
of half-dry manuscript. “Dick, it is of common report that you are
suffering from swelled head.”

“Halloo, Nilghai. Back again? How are the Balkans and all the little
Balkans? One side of your face is out of drawing, as usual.”

“Never mind that. I am commissioned to smite you in print. Torpenhow
refuses from false delicacy. I’ve been overhauling the pot-boilers in
your studio. They are simply disgraceful.”

“Oho! that’s it, is it? If you think you can slate me, you’re wrong.
You can only describe, and you need as much room to turn in, on paper,
as a P. and O. cargo-boat. But continue, and be swift. I’m going to
bed.”

“H’m! h’m! h’m! The first part only deals with your pictures. Here’s
the peroration: “For work done without conviction, for power wasted on
trivialities, for labour expended with levity for the deliberate
purpose of winning the easy applause of a fashion-driven public——”
“That’s “His Last Shot,” second edition. Go on.”

“——“public, there remains but one end,—the oblivion that is preceded by
toleration and cenotaphed with contempt. From that fate Mr. Heldar has
yet to prove himself out of danger.”’

“_Wow—wow—wow—wow—wow!_” said Dick, profanely. “It’s a clumsy ending
and vile journalese, but it’s quite true. And yet,”—he sprang to his
feet and snatched at the manuscript,—“you scarred, deboshed, battered
old gladiator! you’re sent out when a war begins, to minister to the
blind, brutal, British public’s bestial thirst for blood. They have no
arenas now, but they must have special correspondents. You’re a fat
gladiator who comes up through a trap-door and talks of what he’s seen.
You stand on precisely the same level as an energetic bishop, an
affable actress, a devastating cyclone, or—mine own sweet self. And you
presume to lecture me about my work! Nilghai, if it were worth while
I’d caricature you in four papers!”

The Nilghai winced. He had not thought of this.

“As it is, I shall take this stuff and tear it small—so!” The
manuscript fluttered in slips down the dark well of the staircase. “Go
home, Nilghai,” said Dick; “go home to your lonely little bed, and
leave me in peace. I am about to turn in till to-morrow.”

“Why, it isn’t seven yet!” said Torpenhow, with amazement.

“It shall be two in the morning, if I choose,” said Dick, backing to
the studio door. “I go to grapple with a serious crisis, and I shan’t
want any dinner.”

The door shut and was locked.

“What can you do with a man like that?” said the Nilghai.

“Leave him alone. He’s as mad as a hatter.”

At eleven there was a kicking on the studio door. “Is the Nilghai with
you still?” said a voice from within. “Then tell him he might have
condensed the whole of his lumbering nonsense into an epigram: “Only
the free are bond, and only the bond are free.” Tell him he’s an idiot,
Torp, and tell him I’m another.”

“All right. Come out and have supper. You’re smoking on an empty
stomach.”

There was no answer.




CHAPTER V


“I have a thousand men,” said he,
    “To wait upon my will,
And towers nine upon the Tyne,
    And three upon the Till.”

“And what care I for you men,” said she,
    “Or towers from Tyne to Till,
Sith you must go with me,” she said,
    “To wait upon my will?”

_Sir Hoggie and the Fairies_


Next morning Torpenhow found Dick sunk in deepest repose of tobacco.

“Well, madman, how d’you feel?”

“I don’t know. I’m trying to find out.”

“You had much better do some work.”

“Maybe; but I’m in no hurry. I’ve made a discovery. Torp, there’s too
much Ego in my Cosmos.”

“Not really! Is this revelation due to my lectures, or the Nilghai’s?”

“It came to me suddenly, all on my own account. Much too much Ego; and
now I’m going to work.”

He turned over a few half-finished sketches, drummed on a new canvas,
cleaned three brushes, set Binkie to bite the toes of the lay figure,
rattled through his collection of arms and accoutrements, and then went
out abruptly, declaring that he had done enough for the day.

“This is positively indecent,” said Torpenhow, “and the first time that
Dick has ever broken up a light morning. Perhaps he has found out that
he has a soul, or an artistic temperament, or something equally
valuable.

That comes of leaving him alone for a month. Perhaps he has been going
out of evenings. I must look to this.” He rang for the bald-headed old
housekeeper, whom nothing could astonish or annoy.

“Beeton, did Mr. Heldar dine out at all while I was out of town?”

“Never laid ’is dress-clothes out once, sir, all the time. Mostly ’e
dined in; but ’e brought some most remarkable young gentlemen up ’ere
after theatres once or twice. Remarkable fancy they was. You gentlemen
on the top floor does very much as you likes, but it do seem to me,
sir, droppin’ a walkin’-stick down five flights o’ stairs an’ then
goin’ down four abreast to pick it up again at half-past two in the
mornin’, singin’, ‘Bring back the whiskey, Willie darlin’,’—not once or
twice, but scores o’ times,—isn’t charity to the other tenants. What I
say is, ‘Do as you would be done by.’ That’s my motto.”

“Of course! of course! I’m afraid the top floor isn’t the quietest in
the house.”

“I make no complaints, sir. I have spoke to Mr. Heldar friendly, an’ he
laughed, an’ did me a picture of the missis that is as good as a
coloured print. It ’asn’t the ’igh shine of a photograph, but what I
say is, ‘Never look a gift-horse in the mouth.’ Mr. Heldar’s
dress-clothes ’aven’t been on him for weeks.”

“Then it’s all right,” said Torpenhow to himself. “Orgies are healthy,
and Dick has a head of his own, but when it comes to women making eyes
I’m not so certain,—Binkie, never you be a man, little dorglums.
They’re contrary brutes, and they do things without any reason.”

Dick had turned northward across the Park, but he was walking in the
spirit on the mud-flats with Maisie. He laughed aloud as he remembered
the day when he had decked Amomma’s horns with the ham-frills, and
Maisie, white with rage, had cuffed him. How long those four years
seemed in review, and how closely Maisie was connected with every hour
of them! Storm across the sea, and Maisie in a gray dress on the beach,
sweeping her drenched hair out of her eyes and laughing at the homeward
race of the fishing-smacks; hot sunshine on the mud-flats, and Maisie
sniffing scornfully, with her chin in the air; Maisie flying before the
wind that threshed the foreshore and drove the sand like small shot
about her ears; Maisie, very composed and independent, telling lies to
Mrs. Jennett while Dick supported her with coarser perjuries; Maisie
picking her way delicately from stone to stone, a pistol in her hand
and her teeth firm-set; and Maisie in a gray dress sitting on the grass
between the mouth of a cannon and a nodding yellow sea-poppy. The
pictures passed before him one by one, and the last stayed the longest.

Dick was perfectly happy with a quiet peace that was as new to his mind
as it was foreign to his experiences. It never occurred to him that
there might be other calls upon his time than loafing across the Park
in the forenoon.

“There’s a good working light now,” he said, watching his shadow
placidly. “Some poor devil ought to be grateful for this. And there’s
Maisie.”

She was walking towards him from the Marble Arch, and he saw that no
mannerism of her gait had been changed. It was good to find her still
Maisie, and, so to speak, his next-door neighbour. No greeting passed
between them, because there had been none in the old days.

“What are you doing out of your studio at this hour?” said Dick, as one
who was entitled to ask.

“Idling. Just idling. I got angry with a chin and scraped it out. Then
I left it in a little heap of paint-chips and came away.”

“I know what palette-knifing means. What was the piccy?”

“A fancy head that wouldn’t come right,—horrid thing!”

“I don’t like working over scraped paint when I’m doing flesh. The
grain comes up woolly as the paint dries.”

“Not if you scrape properly.” Maisie waved her hand to illustrate her
methods. There was a dab of paint on the white cuff. Dick laughed.

“You’re as untidy as ever.”

“That comes well from you. Look at your own cuff.”

“By Jove, yes! It’s worse than yours. I don’t think we’ve much altered
in anything. Let’s see, though.” He looked at Maisie critically. The
pale blue haze of an autumn day crept between the tree-trunks of the
Park and made a background for the gray dress, the black velvet toque
above the black hair, and the resolute profile.

“No, there’s nothing changed. How good it is! D’you remember when I
fastened your hair into the snap of a hand-bag?”

Maisie nodded, with a twinkle in her eyes, and turned her full face to
Dick.

“Wait a minute,” said he. “That mouth is down at the corners a little.

Who’s been worrying you, Maisie?”

“No one but myself. I never seem to get on with my work, and yet I try
hard enough, and Kami says——”

“‘_Continuez, mesdemoiselles. Continuez toujours, mes enfants_.’ Kami
is depressing. I beg your pardon.”

“Yes, that’s what he says. He told me last summer that I was doing
better and he’d let me exhibit this year.”

“Not in this place, surely?”

“Of course not. The Salon.”

“You fly high.”

“I’ve been beating my wings long enough. Where do you exhibit, Dick?”

“I don’t exhibit. I sell.”

“What is your line, then?”

“Haven’t you heard?” Dick’s eyes opened. Was this thing possible? He
cast about for some means of conviction. They were not far from the
Marble Arch. “Come up Oxford Street a little and I’ll show you.”

A small knot of people stood round a print-shop that Dick knew well.

“Some reproduction of my work inside,” he said, with suppressed
triumph. Never before had success tasted so sweet upon the tongue. “You
see the sort of things I paint. D’you like it?”

Maisie looked at the wild whirling rush of a field-battery going into
action under fire. Two artillery-men stood behind her in the crowd.

“They’ve chucked the off lead-’orse’ said one to the other. “’E’s tore
up awful, but they’re makin’ good time with the others. That
lead-driver drives better nor you, Tom. See ’ow cunnin’ ’e’s nursin’
’is ’orse.”

“Number Three’ll be off the limber, next jolt,” was the answer.

“No, ’e won’t. See ’ow ’is foot’s braced against the iron? ’E’s all
right.”

Dick watched Maisie’s face and swelled with joy—fine, rank, vulgar
triumph. She was more interested in the little crowd than in the
picture.

That was something that she could understand.

“And I wanted it so! Oh, I did want it so!” she said at last, under her
breath.

“Me,—all me!” said Dick, placidly. “Look at their faces. It hits ’em.
They don’t know what makes their eyes and mouths open; but I know. And
I know my work’s right.”

“Yes. I see. Oh, what a thing to have come to one!”

“Come to one, indeed! I had to go out and look for it. What do you
think?”

“I call it success. Tell me how you got it.”

They returned to the Park, and Dick delivered himself of the saga of
his own doings, with all the arrogance of a young man speaking to a
woman.

From the beginning he told the tale, the I—I—I’s flashing through the
records as telegraph-poles fly past the traveller. Maisie listened and
nodded her head. The histories of strife and privation did not move her
a hair’s-breadth. At the end of each canto he would conclude, “And that
gave me some notion of handling colour,” or light, or whatever it might
be that he had set out to pursue and understand. He led her breathless
across half the world, speaking as he had never spoken in his life
before.

And in the flood-tide of his exaltation there came upon him a great
desire to pick up this maiden who nodded her head and said, “I
understand. Go on,”—to pick her up and carry her away with him, because
she was Maisie, and because she understood, and because she was his
right, and a woman to be desired above all women.

Then he checked himself abruptly. “And so I took all I wanted,” he
said, “and I had to fight for it. Now you tell.”

Maisie’s tale was almost as gray as her dress. It covered years of
patient toil backed by savage pride that would not be broken though
dealers laughed, and fogs delayed work, and Kami was unkind and even
sarcastic, and girls in other studios were painfully polite. It had a
few bright spots, in pictures accepted at provincial exhibitions, but
it wound up with the oft repeated wail, “And so you see, Dick, I had no
success, though I worked so hard.”

Then pity filled Dick. Even thus had Maisie spoken when she could not
hit the breakwater, half an hour before she had kissed him. And that
had happened yesterday.

“Never mind,” he said. “I’ll tell you something, if you’ll believe it.”
The words were shaping themselves of their own accord. “The whole
thing, lock, stock, and barrel, isn’t worth one big yellow sea-poppy
below Fort Keeling.”

Maisie flushed a little. “It’s all very well for you to talk, but
you’ve had the success and I haven’t.”

“Let me talk, then. I know you’ll understand. Maisie, dear, it sounds a
bit absurd, but those ten years never existed, and I’ve come back
again. It really is just the same. Can’t you see? You’re alone now and
I’m alone.

What’s the use of worrying? Come to me instead, darling.”

Maisie poked the gravel with her parasol. They were sitting on a bench.

“I understand,” she said slowly. “But I’ve got my work to do, and I
must do it.”

“Do it with me, then, dear. I won’t interrupt.”

“No, I couldn’t. It’s my work,—mine,—mine,—mine! I’ve been alone all my
life in myself, and I’m not going to belong to anybody except myself. I
remember things as well as you do, but that doesn’t count. We were
babies then, and we didn’t know what was before us. Dick, don’t be
selfish. I think I see my way to a little success next year. Don’t take
it away from me.”

“I beg your pardon, darling. It’s my fault for speaking stupidly. I
can’t expect you to throw up all your life just because I’m back. I’ll
go to my own place and wait a little.”

“But, Dick, I don’t want you to—go—out of—my life, now you’ve just come
back.”

“I’m at your orders; forgive me.” Dick devoured the troubled little
face with his eyes. There was triumph in them, because he could not
conceive that Maisie should refuse sooner or later to love him, since
he loved her.

“It’s wrong of me,” said Maisie, more slowly than before; “it’s wrong
and selfish; but, oh, I’ve been so lonely! No, you misunderstand. Now
I’ve seen you again,—it’s absurd, but I want to keep you in my life.”

“Naturally. We belong.”

“We don’t; but you always understood me, and there is so much in my
work that you could help me in. You know things and the ways of doing
things. You must.”

“I do, I fancy, or else I don’t know myself. Then you won’t care to
lose sight of me altogether, and—you want me to help you in your work?”

“Yes; but remember, Dick, nothing will ever come of it. That’s why I
feel so selfish. Can’t things stay as they are? I do want your help.”

“You shall have it. But let’s consider. I must see your pics first, and
overhaul your sketches, and find out about your tendencies. You should
see what the papers say about my tendencies! Then I’ll give you good
advice, and you shall paint according. Isn’t that it, Maisie?”

Again there was triumph in Dick’s eye.

“It’s too good of you,—much too good. Because you are consoling
yourself with what will never happen, and I know that, and yet I want
to keep you. Don’t blame me later, please.”

“I’m going into the matter with my eyes open. Moreover the Queen can do
no wrong. It isn’t your selfishness that impresses me. It’s your
audacity in proposing to make use of me.”

“Pooh! You’re only Dick,—and a print-shop.”

“Very good: that’s all I am. But, Maisie, you believe, don’t you, that
I love you? I don’t want you to have any false notions about brothers
and sisters.”

Maisie looked up for a moment and dropped her eyes.

“It’s absurd, but—I believe. I wish I could send you away before you
get angry with me. But—but the girl that lives with me is red-haired,
and an impressionist, and all our notions clash.”

“So do ours, I think. Never mind. Three months from to-day we shall be
laughing at this together.”

Maisie shook her head mournfully. “I knew you wouldn’t understand, and
it will only hurt you more when you find out. Look at my face, Dick,
and tell me what you see.”

They stood up and faced each other for a moment. The fog was gathering,
and it stifled the roar of the traffic of London beyond the railings.
Dick brought all his painfully acquired knowledge of faces to bear on
the eyes, mouth, and chin underneath the black velvet toque.

“It’s the same Maisie, and it’s the same me,” he said. “We’ve both nice
little wills of our own, and one or other of us has to be broken. Now
about the future. I must come and see your pictures some day,—I suppose
when the red-haired girl is on the premises.”

“Sundays are my best times. You must come on Sundays. There are such
heaps of things I want to talk about and ask your advice about. Now I
must get back to work.”

“Try to find out before next Sunday what I am,” said Dick. “Don’t take
my word for anything I’ve told you. Good-bye, darling, and bless you.”

Maisie stole away like a little gray mouse. Dick watched her till she
was out of sight, but he did not hear her say to herself, very soberly,
“I’m a wretch,—a horrid, selfish wretch. But it’s Dick, and Dick will
understand.”

No one has yet explained what actually happens when an irresistible
force meets the immovable post, though many have thought deeply, even
as Dick thought. He tried to assure himself that Maisie would be led in
a few weeks by his mere presence and discourse to a better way of
thinking. Then he remembered much too distinctly her face and all that
was written on it.

“If I know anything of heads,” he said, “there’s everything in that
face but love. I shall have to put that in myself; and that chin and
mouth won’t be won for nothing. But she’s right. She knows what she
wants, and she’s going to get it. What insolence! Me! Of all the people
in the wide world, to use me! But then she’s Maisie. There’s no getting
over that fact; and it’s good to see her again. This business must have
been simmering at the back of my head for years.... She’ll use me as I
used Binat at Port Said.

She’s quite right. It will hurt a little. I shall have to see her every
Sunday,—like a young man courting a housemaid. She’s sure to come
around; and yet—that mouth isn’t a yielding mouth. I shall be wanting
to kiss her all the time, and I shall have to look at her pictures,—I
don’t even know what sort of work she does yet,—and I shall have to
talk about Art,—Woman’s Art! Therefore, particularly and perpetually,
damn all varieties of Art. It did me a good turn once, and now it’s in
my way. I’ll go home and do some Art.”

Half-way to the studio, Dick was smitten with a terrible thought. The
figure of a solitary woman in the fog suggested it.

“She’s all alone in London, with a red-haired impressionist girl, who
probably has the digestion of an ostrich. Most red-haired people have.

Maisie’s a bilious little body. They’ll eat like lone women,—meals at
all hours, and tea with all meals. I remember how the students in Paris
used to pig along. She may fall ill at any minute, and I shan’t be able
to help.

Whew! this is ten times worse than owning a wife.”

Torpenhow entered the studio at dusk, and looked at Dick with eyes full
of the austere love that springs up between men who have tugged at the
same oar together and are yoked by custom and use and the intimacies of
toil. This is a good love, and, since it allows, and even encourages,
strife, recrimination, and brutal sincerity, does not die, but grows,
and is proof against any absence and evil conduct.

Dick was silent after he handed Torpenhow the filled pipe of council.
He thought of Maisie and her possible needs. It was a new thing to
think of anybody but Torpenhow, who could think for himself. Here at
last was an outlet for that cash balance. He could adorn Maisie
barbarically with jewelry,—a thick gold necklace round that little
neck, bracelets upon the rounded arms, and rings of price upon her
hands,—the cool, temperate, ringless hands that he had taken between
his own. It was an absurd thought, for Maisie would not even allow him
to put one ring on one finger, and she would laugh at golden trappings.
It would be better to sit with her quietly in the dusk, his arm around
her neck and her face on his shoulder, as befitted husband and wife.
Torpenhow’s boots creaked that night, and his strong voice jarred.
Dick’s brows contracted and he murmured an evil word because he had
taken all his success as a right and part payment for past discomfort,
and now he was checked in his stride by a woman who admitted all the
success and did not instantly care for him.

“I say, old man,” said Torpenhow, who had made one or two vain attempts
at conversation, “I haven’t put your back up by anything I’ve said
lately, have I?”

“You! No. How could you?”

“Liver out of order?”

“The truly healthy man doesn’t know he has a liver. I’m only a bit
worried about things in general. I suppose it’s my soul.”

“The truly healthy man doesn’t know he has a soul. What business have
you with luxuries of that kind?”

“It came of itself. Who’s the man that says that we’re all islands
shouting lies to each other across seas of misunderstanding?”

“He’s right, whoever he is,—except about the misunderstanding. I don’t
think we could misunderstand each other.”

The blue smoke curled back from the ceiling in clouds. Then Torpenhow,
insinuatingly—“Dick, is it a woman?”

“Be hanged if it’s anything remotely resembling a woman; and if you
begin to talk like that, I’ll hire a red-brick studio with white paint
trimmings, and begonias and petunias and blue Hungarias to play among
three-and-sixpenny pot-palms, and I’ll mount all my pics in aniline-dye
plush plasters, and I’ll invite every woman who maunders over what her
guide-books tell her is Art, and you shall receive ’em, Torp,—in a
snuff-brown velvet coat with yellow trousers and an orange tie. You’ll
like that?”

“Too thin, Dick. A better man than you once denied with cursing and
swearing. You’ve overdone it, just as he did. It’s no business of mine,
of course, but it’s comforting to think that somewhere under the stars
there’s saving up for you a tremendous thrashing. Whether it’ll come
from heaven or earth, I don’t know, but it’s bound to come and break
you up a little. You want hammering.”

Dick shivered. “All right,” said he. “When this island is
disintegrated, it will call for you.”

“I shall come round the corner and help to disintegrate it some more.

We’re talking nonsense. Come along to a theatre.”




CHAPTER VI


“And you may lead a thousand men,
    Nor ever draw the rein,
But ere ye lead the Faery Queen
    ’Twill burst your heart in twain.”

He has slipped his foot from the stirrup-bar,
    The bridle from his hand,
And he is bound by hand and foot
    To the Queen o’ Faery-land.

_Sir Hoggie and the Fairies_.


Some weeks later, on a very foggy Sunday, Dick was returning across the
Park to his studio. “This,” he said, “is evidently the thrashing that
Torp meant. It hurts more than I expected; but the Queen can do no
wrong; and she certainly has some notion of drawing.”

He had just finished a Sunday visit to Maisie,—always under the green
eyes of the red-haired impressionist girl, whom he learned to hate at
sight,—and was tingling with a keen sense of shame. Sunday after
Sunday, putting on his best clothes, he had walked over to the untidy
house north of the Park, first to see Maisie’s pictures, and then to
criticise and advise upon them as he realised that they were
productions on which advice would not be wasted. Sunday after Sunday,
and his love grew with each visit, he had been compelled to cram his
heart back from between his lips when it prompted him to kiss Maisie
several times and very much indeed. Sunday after Sunday, the head above
the heart had warned him that Maisie was not yet attainable, and that
it would be better to talk as connectedly as possible upon the
mysteries of the craft that was all in all to her. Therefore it was his
fate to endure weekly torture in the studio built out over the clammy
back garden of a frail stuffy little villa where nothing was ever in
its right place and nobody every called,—to endure and to watch Maisie
moving to and fro with the teacups. He abhorred tea, but, since it gave
him a little longer time in her presence, he drank it devoutly, and the
red-haired girl sat in an untidy heap and eyed him without speaking.
She was always watching him.

Once, and only once, when she had left the studio, Maisie showed him an
album that held a few poor cuttings from provincial papers,—the
briefest of hurried notes on some of her pictures sent to outlying
exhibitions. Dick stooped and kissed the paint-smudged thumb on the
open page. “Oh, my love, my love,” he muttered, “do you value these
things? Chuck ’em into the waste-paper basket!”

“Not till I get something better,” said Maisie, shutting the book.

Then Dick, moved by no respect for his public and a very deep regard
for the maiden, did deliberately propose, in order to secure more of
these coveted cuttings, that he should paint a picture which Maisie
should sign.

“That’s childish,” said Maisie, “and I didn’t think it of you. It must
be my work. Mine,—mine,—mine!”

“Go and design decorative medallions for rich brewers’ houses. You are
thoroughly good at that.” Dick was sick and savage.

“Better things than medallions, Dick,” was the answer, in tones that
recalled a gray-eyed atom’s fearless speech to Mrs. Jennett. Dick would
have abased himself utterly, but that other girl trailed in.

Next Sunday he laid at Maisie’s feet small gifts of pencils that could
almost draw of themselves and colours in whose permanence he believed,
and he was ostentatiously attentive to the work in hand. It demanded,
among other things, an exposition of the faith that was in him.

Torpenhow’s hair would have stood on end had he heard the fluency with
which Dick preached his own gospel of Art.

A month before, Dick would have been equally astonished; but it was
Maisie’s will and pleasure, and he dragged his words together to make
plain to her comprehension all that had been hidden to himself of the
whys and wherefores of work. There is not the least difficulty in doing
a thing if you only know how to do it; the trouble is to explain your
method.

“I could put this right if I had a brush in my hand,” said Dick,
despairingly, over the modelling of a chin that Maisie complained would
not “look flesh,”—it was the same chin that she had scraped out with
the palette knife,—“but I find it almost impossible to teach you.
There’s a queer grim, Dutch touch about your painting that I like; but
I’ve a notion that you’re weak in drawing. You foreshorten as though
you never used the model, and you’ve caught Kami’s pasty way of dealing
with flesh in shadow. Then, again, though you don’t know it yourself,
you shirk hard work. Suppose you spend some of your time on line alone.
Line doesn’t allow of shirking. Oils do, and three square inches of
flashy, tricky stuff in the corner of a pic sometimes carry a bad thing
off,—as I know. That’s immoral. Do line-work for a little while, and
then I can tell more about your powers, as old Kami used to say.”

Maisie protested; she did not care for the pure line.

“I know,” said Dick. “You want to do your fancy heads with a bunch of
flowers at the base of the neck to hide bad modelling.” The red-haired
girl laughed a little. “You want to do landscapes with cattle knee-deep
in grass to hide bad drawing. You want to do a great deal more than you
can do. You have sense of colour, but you want form. Colour’s a
gift,—put it aside and think no more about it,—but form you can be
drilled into.

Now, all your fancy heads—and some of them are very good—will keep you
exactly where you are. With line you must go forward or backward, and
it will show up all your weaknesses.”

“But other people——” began Maisie.

“You mustn’t mind what other people do. If their souls were your soul,
it would be different. You stand and fall by your own work, remember,
and it’s waste of time to think of any one else in this battle.”

Dick paused, and the longing that had been so resolutely put away came
back into his eyes. He looked at Maisie, and the look asked as plainly
as words, Was it not time to leave all this barren wilderness of canvas
and counsel and join hands with Life and Love?

Maisie assented to the new programme of schooling so adorably that Dick
could hardly restrain himself from picking her up then and there and
carrying her off to the nearest registrar’s office. It was the implicit
obedience to the spoken word and the blank indifference to the unspoken
desire that baffled and buffeted his soul. He held authority in that
house,—authority limited, indeed, to one-half of one afternoon in
seven, but very real while it lasted. Maisie had learned to appeal to
him on many subjects, from the proper packing of pictures to the
condition of a smoky chimney. The red-haired girl never consulted him
about anything.

On the other hand, she accepted his appearances without protest, and
watched him always. He discovered that the meals of the establishment
were irregular and fragmentary. They depended chiefly on tea, pickles,
and biscuit, as he had suspected from the beginning. The girls were
supposed to market week and week about, but they lived, with the help
of a charwoman, as casually as the young ravens. Maisie spent most of
her income on models, and the other girl revelled in apparatus as
refined as her work was rough. Armed with knowledge, dear-bought from
the Docks, Dick warned Maisie that the end of semi-starvation meant the
crippling of power to work, which was considerably worse than death.

Maisie took the warning, and gave more thought to what she ate and
drank. When his trouble returned upon him, as it generally did in the
long winter twilights, the remembrance of that little act of domestic
authority and his coercion with a hearth-brush of the smoky
drawing-room chimney stung Dick like a whip-lash.

He conceived that this memory would be the extreme of his sufferings,
till one Sunday, the red-haired girl announced that she would make a
study of Dick’s head, and that he would be good enough to sit still,
and—quite as an afterthought—look at Maisie. He sat, because he could
not well refuse, and for the space of half an hour he reflected on all
the people in the past whom he had laid open for the purposes of his
own craft. He remembered Binat most distinctly,—that Binat who had once
been an artist and talked about degradation.

It was the merest monochrome roughing in of a head, but it presented
the dumb waiting, the longing, and, above all, the hopeless enslavement
of the man, in a spirit of bitter mockery.

“I’ll buy it,” said Dick, promptly, “at your own price.”

“My price is too high, but I dare say you’ll be as grateful if——” The
wet sketch, fluttered from the girl’s hand and fell into the ashes of
the studio stove. When she picked it up it was hopelessly smudged.

“Oh, it’s all spoiled!” said Maisie. “And I never saw it. Was it like?”

“Thank you,” said Dick under his breath to the red-haired girl, and he
removed himself swiftly.

“How that man hates me!” said the girl. “And how he loves you, Maisie!”

“What nonsense? I knew Dick’s very fond of me, but he had his work to
do, and I have mine.”

“Yes, he is fond of you, and I think he knows there is something in
impressionism, after all. Maisie, can’t you see?”

“See? See what?”

“Nothing; only, I know that if I could get any man to look at me as
that man looks at you, I’d—I don’t know what I’d do. But he hates me.
Oh, how he hates me!”

She was not altogether correct. Dick’s hatred was tempered with
gratitude for a few moments, and then he forgot the girl entirely. Only
the sense of shame remained, and he was nursing it across the Park in
the fog. “There’ll be an explosion one of these days,” he said
wrathfully. “But it isn’t Maisie’s fault; she’s right, quite right, as
far as she knows, and I can’t blame her. This business has been going
on for three months nearly.

Three months!—and it cost me ten years’ knocking about to get at the
notion, the merest raw notion, of my work. That’s true; but then I
didn’t have pins, drawing-pins, and palette-knives, stuck into me every
Sunday.

Oh, my little darling, if ever I break you, somebody will have a very
bad time of it. No, she won’t. I’d be as big a fool about her as I am
now. I’ll poison that red-haired girl on my wedding-day,—she’s
unwholesome,—and now I’ll pass on these present bad times to Torp.”

Torpenhow had been moved to lecture Dick more than once lately on the
sin of levity, and Dick had listened and replied not a word. In the
weeks between the first few Sundays of his discipline he had flung
himself savagely into his work, resolved that Maisie should at least
know the full stretch of his powers. Then he had taught Maisie that she
must not pay the least attention to any work outside her own, and
Maisie had obeyed him all too well. She took his counsels, but was not
interested in his pictures.

“Your things smell of tobacco and blood,” she said once. “Can’t you do
anything except soldiers?”

“I could do a head of you that would startle you,” thought Dick,—this
was before the red-haired girl had brought him under the
guillotine,—but he only said, “I am very sorry,” and harrowed
Torpenhow’s soul that evening with blasphemies against Art. Later,
insensibly and to a large extent against his own will, he ceased to
interest himself in his own work.

For Maisie’s sake, and to soothe the self-respect that it seemed to him
he lost each Sunday, he would not consciously turn out bad stuff, but,
since Maisie did not care even for his best, it were better not to do
anything at all save wait and mark time between Sunday and Sunday.
Torpenhow was disgusted as the weeks went by fruitless, and then
attacked him one Sunday evening when Dick felt utterly exhausted after
three hours’ biting self-restraint in Maisie’s presence. There was
Language, and Torpenhow withdrew to consult the Nilghai, who had come
in to talk continental politics.

“Bone-idle, is he? Careless, and touched in the temper?” said the
Nilghai.

“It isn’t worth worrying over. Dick is probably playing the fool with a
woman.”

“Isn’t that bad enough?”

“No. She may throw him out of gear and knock his work to pieces for a
while. She may even turn up here some day and make a scene on the
staircase: one never knows. But until Dick speaks of his own accord you
had better not touch him. He is no easy-tempered man to handle.”

“No; I wish he were. He is such an aggressive, cocksure, you-be-damned
fellow.”

“He’ll get that knocked out of him in time. He must learn that he can’t
storm up and down the world with a box of moist tubes and a slick
brush.

You’re fond of him?”

“I’d take any punishment that’s in store for him if I could; but the
worst of it is, no man can save his brother.”

“No, and the worser of it is, there is no discharge in this war. Dick
must learn his lesson like the rest of us. Talking of war, there’ll be
trouble in the Balkans in the spring.”

“That trouble is long coming. I wonder if we could drag Dick out there
when it comes off?”

Dick entered the room soon afterwards, and the question was put to him.

“Not good enough,” he said shortly. “I’m too comf’y where I am.”

“Surely you aren’t taking all the stuff in the papers seriously?” said
the Nilghai. “Your vogue will be ended in less than six months,—the
public will know your touch and go on to something new,—and where will
you be then?”

“Here, in England.”

“When you might be doing decent work among us out there? Nonsense! I
shall go, the Keneu will be there, Torp will be there, Cassavetti will
be there, and the whole lot of us will be there, and we shall have as
much as ever we can do, with unlimited fighting and the chance for you
of seeing things that would make the reputation of three
Verestchagins.”

“Um!” said Dick, pulling at his pipe.

“You prefer to stay here and imagine that all the world is gaping at
your pictures? Just think how full an average man’s life is of his own
pursuits and pleasures. When twenty thousand of him find time to look
up between mouthfuls and grunt something about something they aren’t
the least interested in, the net result is called fame, reputation, or
notoriety, according to the taste and fancy of the speller my lord.”

“I know that as well as you do. Give me credit for a little gumption.”

“Be hanged if I do!”

“_Be_ hanged, then; you probably will be,—for a spy, by excited Turks.
Heigh-ho! I’m weary, dead weary, and virtue has gone out of me.” Dick
dropped into a chair, and was fast asleep in a minute.

“That’s a bad sign,” said the Nilghai, in an undertone.

Torpenhow picked the pipe from the waistcoat where it was beginning to
burn, and put a pillow behind the head. “We can’t help; we can’t help,”
he said. “It’s a good ugly sort of old cocoanut, and I’m fond of it.
There’s the scar of the wipe he got when he was cut over in the
square.”

“Shouldn’t wonder if that has made him a trifle mad.”

“I should. He’s a most businesslike madman.”

Then Dick began to snore furiously.

“Oh, here, no affection can stand this sort of thing. Wake up, Dick,
and go and sleep somewhere else, if you intend to make a noise about
it.”

“When a cat has been out on the tiles all night,” said the Nilghai, in
his beard, “I notice that she usually sleeps all day. This is natural
history.”

Dick staggered away rubbing his eyes and yawning. In the night-watches
he was overtaken with an idea, so simple and so luminous that he
wondered he had never conceived it before. It was full of craft. He
would seek Maisie on a week-day,—would suggest an excursion, and would
take her by train to Fort Keeling, over the very ground that they two
had trodden together ten years ago.

“As a general rule,” he explained to his chin-lathered reflection in
the morning, “it isn’t safe to cross an old trail twice. Things remind
one of things, and a cold wind gets up, and you feel sad; but this is
an exception to every rule that ever was. I’ll go to Maisie at once.”

Fortunately, the red-haired girl was out shopping when he arrived, and
Maisie in a paint-spattered blouse was warring with her canvas. She was
not pleased to see him; for week-day visits were a stretch of the bond;
and it needed all his courage to explain his errand.

“I know you’ve been working too hard,” he concluded, with an air of
authority. “If you do that, you’ll break down. You had much better
come.”

“Where?” said Maisie, wearily. She had been standing before her easel
too long, and was very tired.

“Anywhere you please. We’ll take a train to-morrow and see where it
stops. We’ll have lunch somewhere, and I’ll bring you back in the
evening.”

“If there’s a good working light to-morrow, I lose a day.” Maisie
balanced the heavy white chestnut palette irresolutely.

Dick bit back an oath that was hurrying to his lips. He had not yet
learned patience with the maiden to whom her work was all in all.

“You’ll lose ever so many more, dear, if you use every hour of working
light. Overwork’s only murderous idleness. Don’t be unreasonable. I’ll
call for you to-morrow after breakfast early.”

“But surely you are going to ask——”

“No, I am not. I want you and nobody else. Besides, she hates me as
much as I hate her. She won’t care to come. To-morrow, then; and pray
that we get sunshine.”

Dick went away delighted, and by consequence did no work whatever.

He strangled a wild desire to order a special train, but bought a great
gray kangaroo cloak lined with glossy black marten, and then retired
into himself to consider things.

“I’m going out for the day to-morrow with Dick,” said Maisie to the
red-haired girl when the latter returned, tired, from marketing in the
Edgware road.

“He deserves it. I shall have the studio floor thoroughly scrubbed
while you’re away. It’s very dirty.”

Maisie had enjoyed no sort of holiday for months and looked forward to
the little excitement, but not without misgivings.

“There’s nobody nicer than Dick when he talks sensibly, she thought,
but I’m sure he’ll be silly and worry me, and I’m sure I can’t tell him
anything he’d like to hear. If he’d only be sensible, I should like him
so much better.”

Dick’s eyes were full of joy when he made his appearance next morning
and saw Maisie, gray-ulstered and black-velvet-hatted, standing in the
hallway. Palaces of marble, and not sordid imitation of grained wood,
were surely the fittest background for such a divinity. The red-haired
girl drew her into the studio for a moment and kissed her hurriedly.

Maisie’s eyebrows climbed to the top of her forehead; she was
altogether unused to these demonstrations. “Mind my hat,” she said,
hurrying away, and ran down the steps to Dick waiting by the hansom.

“Are you quite warm enough! Are you sure you wouldn’t like some more
breakfast? Put the cloak over you knees.”

“I’m quite comf’y, thanks. Where are we going, Dick? Oh, do stop
singing like that. People will think we’re mad.”

“Let ’em think,—if the exertion doesn’t kill them. They don’t know who
we are, and I’m sure I don’t care who they are. My faith, Maisie,
you’re looking lovely!”

Maisie stared directly in front of her and did not reply. The wind of a
keen clear winter morning had put colour into her cheeks. Overhead, the
creamy-yellow smoke-clouds were thinning away one by one against a
pale-blue sky, and the improvident sparrows broke off from water-spout
committees and cab-rank cabals to clamour of the coming of spring.

“It will be lovely weather in the country,” said Dick.

“But where are we going?”

“Wait and see.”

They stopped at Victoria, and Dick sought tickets. For less than half
the fraction of an instant it occurred to Maisie, comfortably settled
by the waiting-room fire, that it was much more pleasant to send a man
to the booking-office than to elbow one’s own way through the crowd.
Dick put her into a Pullman,—solely on account of the warmth there; and
she regarded the extravagance with grave scandalised eyes as the train
moved out into the country.

“I wish I knew where we are going,” she repeated for the twentieth
time.

The name of a well-remembered station flashed by, towards the end of
the run, and Maisie was delighted.

“Oh, Dick, you villain!”

“Well, I thought you might like to see the place again. You haven’t
been here since the old times, have you?”

“No. I never cared to see Mrs. Jennett again; and she was all that was
ever there.”

“Not quite. Look out a minute. There’s the windmill above the
potato-fields; they haven’t built villas there yet; d’you remember when
I shut you up in it?”

“Yes. How she beat you for it! I never told it was you.”

“She guessed. I jammed a stick under the door and told you that I was
burying Amomma alive in the potatoes, and you believed me. You had a
trusting nature in those days.”

They laughed and leaned to look out, identifying ancient landmarks with
many reminiscences. Dick fixed his weather eye on the curve of Maisie’s
cheek, very near his own, and watched the blood rise under the clear
skin. He congratulated himself upon his cunning, and looked that the
evening would bring him a great reward.

When the train stopped they went out to look at an old town with new
eyes. First, but from a distance, they regarded the house of Mrs.
Jennett.

“Suppose she should come out now, what would you do?” said Dick, with
mock terror.

“I should make a face.”

“Show, then,” said Dick, dropping into the speech of childhood.

Maisie made that face in the direction of the mean little villa, and
Dick laughed.

““This is disgraceful,”’ said Maisie, mimicking Mrs. Jennett’s tone.

““Maisie, you run in at once, and learn the collect, gospel, and
epistle for the next three Sundays. After all I’ve taught you, too, and
three helps every Sunday at dinner! Dick’s always leading you into
mischief. If you aren’t a gentleman, Dick, you might at least—“’

The sentence ended abruptly. Maisie remembered when it had last been
used.

““Try to behave like one,”’ said Dick, promptly. “Quite right. Now
we’ll get some lunch and go on to Fort Keeling,—unless you’d rather
drive there?”

“We must walk, out of respect to the place. How little changed it all
is!”

They turned in the direction of the sea through unaltered streets, and
the influence of old things lay upon them. Presently they passed a
confectioner’s shop much considered in the days when their joint
pocket-money amounted to a shilling a week.

“Dick, have you any pennies?” said Maisie, half to herself.

“Only three; and if you think you’re going to have two of ’em to buy
peppermints with, you’re wrong. She says peppermints aren’t ladylike.”

Again they laughed, and again the colour came into Maisie’s cheeks as
the blood boiled through Dick’s heart. After a large lunch they went
down to the beach and to Fort Keeling across the waste, wind-bitten
land that no builder had thought it worth his while to defile. The
winter breeze came in from the sea and sang about their ears.

“Maisie,” said Dick, “your nose is getting a crude Prussian blue at the
tip.

I’ll race you as far as you please for as much as you please.”

She looked round cautiously, and with a laugh set off, swiftly as the
ulster allowed, till she was out of breath.

“We used to run miles,” she panted. “It’s absurd that we can’t run
now.”

“Old age, dear. This it is to get fat and sleek in town. When I wished
to pull your hair you generally ran for three miles, shrieking at the
top of your voice. I ought to know, because those shrieks of yours were
meant to call up Mrs. Jennett with a cane and——”

“Dick, I never got you a beating on purpose in my life.”

“No, of course you never did. Good heavens! look at the sea.”

“Why, it’s the same as ever!” said Maisie.

Torpenhow had gathered from Mr. Beeton that Dick, properly dressed and
shaved, had left the house at half-past eight in the morning with a
travelling-rug over his arm. The Nilghai rolled in at mid-day for chess
and polite conversation.

“It’s worse than anything I imagined,” said Torpenhow.

“Oh, the everlasting Dick, I suppose! You fuss over him like a hen with
one chick. Let him run riot if he thinks it’ll amuse him. You can whip
a young pup off feather, but you can’t whip a young man.”

“It isn’t a woman. It’s one woman; and it’s a girl.”

“Where’s your proof?”

“He got up and went out at eight this morning,—got up in the middle of
the night, by Jove! a thing he never does except when he’s on service.

Even then, remember, we had to kick him out of his blankets before the
fight began at El-Maghrib. It’s disgusting.”

“It looks odd; but maybe he’s decided to buy a horse at last. He might
get up for that, mightn’t he?”

“Buy a blazing wheelbarrow! He’d have told us if there was a horse in
the wind. It’s a girl.”

“Don’t be certain. Perhaps it’s only a married woman.”

“Dick has some sense of humour, if you haven’t. Who gets up in the gray
dawn to call on another man’s wife? It’s a girl.”

“Let it be a girl, then. She may teach him that there’s somebody else
in the world besides himself.”

“She’ll spoil his hand. She’ll waste his time, and she’ll marry him,
and ruin his work for ever. He’ll be a respectable married man before
we can stop him, and—he’ll never go on the long trail again.”

“All quite possible, but the earth won’t spin the other way when that
happens.... No! ho! I’d give something to see Dick “go wooing with the
boys.” Don’t worry about it. These things be with Allah, and we can
only look on. Get the chessmen.”

The red-haired girl was lying down in her own room, staring at the
ceiling. The footsteps of people on the pavement sounded, as they grew
indistinct in the distance, like a many-times-repeated kiss that was
all one long kiss. Her hands were by her side, and they opened and shut
savagely from time to time.

The charwoman in charge of the scrubbing of the studio knocked at her
door: “Beg y’ pardon, miss, but in cleanin’ of a floor there’s two, not
to say three, kind of soap, which is yaller, an’ mottled, an’
disinfectink.

Now, jist before I took my pail into the passage I though it would be
pre’aps jest as well if I was to come up ’ere an’ ask you what sort of
soap you was wishful that I should use on them boards. The yaller soap,
miss——”

There was nothing in the speech to have caused the paroxysm of fury
that drove the red-haired girl into the middle of the room, almost
shouting—

“Do you suppose _I_ care what you use? Any kind will do!—_any_ kind!”

The woman fled, and the red-haired girl looked at her own reflection in
the glass for an instant and covered her face with her hands. It was as
though she had shouted some shameless secret aloud.




CHAPTER VII


Roses red and roses white
Plucked I for my love’s delight.
She would none of all my posies,—
Bade me gather her blue roses.

Half the world I wandered through,
Seeking where such flowers grew;
Half the world unto my quest
Answered but with laugh and jest.

It may be beyond the grave
She shall find what she would have.
Mine was but an idle quest,—
Roses white and red are best!—_Blue Roses_.


The sea had not changed. Its waters were low on the mud-banks, and the
Marazion Bell-buoy clanked and swung in the tide-way. On the white
beach-sand dried stumps of sea-poppy shivered and chattered.

“I don’t see the old breakwater,” said Maisie, under her breath.

“Let’s be thankful that we have as much as we have. I don’t believe
they’ve mounted a single new gun on the fort since we were here. Come
and look.”

They came to the glacis of Fort Keeling, and sat down in a nook
sheltered from the wind under the tarred throat of a forty-pounder
cannon.

“Now, if Ammoma were only here!” said Maisie.

For a long time both were silent. Then Dick took Maisie’s hand and
called her by her name.

She shook her head and looked out to sea.

“Maisie, darling, doesn’t it make any difference?”

“No!” between clenched teeth. “I’d—I’d tell you if it did; but it
doesn’t, Oh, Dick, please be sensible.”

“Don’t you think that it ever will?”

“No, I’m sure it won’t.”

“Why?”

Maisie rested her chin on her hand, and, still regarding the sea, spoke
hurriedly—“I know what you want perfectly well, but I can’t give it to
you, Dick. It isn’t my fault; indeed, it isn’t. If I felt that I could
care for any one——But I don’t feel that I care. I simply don’t
understand what the feeling means.”

“Is that true, dear?”

“You’ve been very good to me, Dickie; and the only way I can pay you
back is by speaking the truth. I daren’t tell a fib. I despise myself
quite enough as it is.”

“What in the world for?”

“Because—because I take everything that you give me and I give you
nothing in return. It’s mean and selfish of me, and whenever I think of
it it worries me.”

“Understand once for all, then, that I can manage my own affairs, and
if I choose to do anything you aren’t to blame. You haven’t a single
thing to reproach yourself with, darling.”

“Yes, I have, and talking only makes it worse.”

“Then don’t talk about it.”

“How can I help myself? If you find me alone for a minute you are
always talking about it; and when you aren’t you look it. You don’t
know how I despise myself sometimes.”

“Great goodness!” said Dick, nearly jumping to his feet. “Speak the
truth now, Maisie, if you never speak it again! Do I—does this worrying
bore you?”

“No. It does not.”

“You’d tell me if it did?”

“I should let you know, I think.”

“Thank you. The other thing is fatal. But you must learn to forgive a
man when he’s in love. He’s always a nuisance. You must have known
that?”

Maisie did not consider the last question worth answering, and Dick was
forced to repeat it.

“There were other men, of course. They always worried just when I was
in the middle of my work, and wanted me to listen to them.”

“Did you listen?”

“At first; and they couldn’t understand why I didn’t care. And they
used to praise my pictures; and I thought they meant it. I used to be
proud of the praise, and tell Kami, and—I shall never forget—once Kami
laughed at me.”

“You don’t like being laughed at, Maisie, do you?”

“I hate it. I never laugh at other people unless—unless they do bad
work.

Dick, tell me honestly what you think of my pictures generally,—of
everything of mine that you’ve seen.”

““Honest, honest, and honest over!”’ quoted Dick from a catchword of
long ago. “Tell me what Kami always says.”

Maisie hesitated. “He—he says that there is feeling in them.”

“How dare you tell me a fib like that? Remember, I was under Kami for
two years. I know exactly what he says.”

“It isn’t a fib.”

“It’s worse; it’s a half-truth. Kami says, when he puts his head on one
side,—so,—‘_Il y a du sentiment, mais il n’y a pas de parti pris_.’” He
rolled the _r_ threateningly, as Kami used to do.

“Yes, that is what he says; and I’m beginning to think that he is
right.”

“Certainly he is.” Dick admitted that two people in the world could do
and say no wrong. Kami was the man.

“And now you say the same thing. It’s so disheartening.”

“I’m sorry, but you asked me to speak the truth. Besides, I love you
too much to pretend about your work. It’s strong, it’s patient
sometimes,—not always,—and sometimes there’s power in it, but there’s
no special reason why it should be done at all. At least, that’s how it
strikes me.”

“There’s no special reason why anything in the world should ever be
done. You know that as well as I do. I only want success.”

“You’re going the wrong way to get it, then. Hasn’t Kami ever told you
so?”

“Don’t quote Kami to me. I want to know what you think. My work’s bad,
to begin with.”

“I didn’t say that, and I don’t think it.”

“It’s amateurish, then.”

“That it most certainly is not. You’re a work-woman, darling, to your
boot-heels, and I respect you for that.”

“You don’t laugh at me behind my back?”

“No, dear. You see, you are more to me than any one else. Put this
cloak thing round you, or you’ll get chilled.”

Maisie wrapped herself in the soft marten skins, turning the gray
kangaroo fur to the outside.

“This is delicious,” she said, rubbing her chin thoughtfully along the
fur.

“Well? Why am I wrong in trying to get a little success?”

“Just because you try. Don’t you understand, darling? Good work has
nothing to do with—doesn’t belong to—the person who does it. It’s put
into him or her from outside.”

“But how does that affect——”

“Wait a minute. All we can do is to learn how to do our work, to be
masters of our materials instead of servants, and never to be afraid of
anything.”

“I understand that.”

“Everything else comes from outside ourselves. Very good. If we sit
down quietly to work out notions that are sent to us, we may or we may
not do something that isn’t bad. A great deal depends on being master
of the bricks and mortar of the trade. But the instant we begin to
think about success and the effect of our work—to play with one eye on
the gallery—we lose power and touch and everything else. At least
that’s how I have found it. Instead of being quiet and giving every
power you possess to your work, you’re fretting over something which
you can neither help no hinder by a minute. See?”

“It’s so easy for you to talk in that way. People like what you do.
Don’t you ever think about the gallery?”

“Much too often; but I’m always punished for it by loss of power. It’s
as simple as the Rule of Three. If we make light of our work by using
it for our own ends, our work will make light of us, and, as we’re the
weaker, we shall suffer.”

“I don’t treat my work lightly. You know that it’s everything to me.”

“Of course; but, whether you realise it or not, you give two strokes
for yourself to one for your work. It isn’t your fault, darling. I do
exactly the same thing, and know that I’m doing it. Most of the French
schools, and all the schools here, drive the students to work for their
own credit, and for the sake of their pride. I was told that all the
world was interested in my work, and everybody at Kami’s talked
turpentine, and I honestly believed that the world needed elevating and
influencing, and all manner of impertinences, by my brushes. By Jove, I
actually believed that! When my little head was bursting with a notion
that I couldn’t handle because I hadn’t sufficient knowledge of my
craft, I used to run about wondering at my own magnificence and getting
ready to astonish the world.”

“But surely one can do that sometimes?”

“Very seldom with malice aforethought, darling. And when it’s done it’s
such a tiny thing, and the world’s so big, and all but a millionth part
of it doesn’t care. Maisie, come with me and I’ll show you something of
the size of the world. One can no more avoid working than eating,—that
goes on by itself,—but try to see what you are working for. I know such
little heavens that I could take you to,—islands tucked away under the
Line.

You sight them after weeks of crashing through water as black as black
marble because it’s so deep, and you sit in the fore-chains day after
day and see the sun rise almost afraid because the sea’s so lonely.”

“Who is afraid?—you, or the sun?”

“The sun, of course. And there are noises under the sea, and sounds
overhead in a clear sky. Then you find your island alive with hot moist
orchids that make mouths at you and can do everything except talk.

There’s a waterfall in it three hundred feet high, just like a sliver
of green jade laced with silver; and millions of wild bees live up in
the rocks; and you can hear the fat cocoanuts falling from the palms;
and you order an ivory-white servant to sling you a long yellow hammock
with tassels on it like ripe maize, and you put up your feet and hear
the bees hum and the water fall till you go to sleep.”

“Can one work there?”

“Certainly. One must do something always. You hang your canvas up in a
palm tree and let the parrots criticise. When they scuffle you heave a
ripe custard-apple at them, and it bursts in a lather of cream. There
are hundreds of places. Come and see them.”

“I don’t quite like that place. It sounds lazy. Tell me another.”

“What do you think of a big, red, dead city built of red sandstone,
with raw green aloes growing between the stones, lying out neglected on
honey-coloured sands? There are forty dead kings there, Maisie, each in
a gorgeous tomb finer than all the others. You look at the palaces and
streets and shops and tanks, and think that men must live there, till
you find a wee gray squirrel rubbing its nose all alone in the
market-place, and a jewelled peacock struts out of a carved doorway and
spreads its tail against a marble screen as fine pierced as point-lace.
Then a monkey—a little black monkey—walks through the main square to
get a drink from a tank forty feet deep. He slides down the creepers to
the water’s edge, and a friend holds him by the tail, in case he should
fall in.”

“Is that all true?”

“I have been there and seen. Then evening comes, and the lights change
till it’s just as though you stood in the heart of a king-opal. A
little before sundown, as punctually as clockwork, a big bristly wild
boar, with all his family following, trots through the city gate,
churning the foam on his tusks. You climb on the shoulder of a blind
black stone god and watch that pig choose himself a palace for the
night and stump in wagging his tail. Then the night-wind gets up, and
the sands move, and you hear the desert outside the city singing, “Now
I lay me down to sleep,” and everything is dark till the moon rises.
Maisie, darling, come with me and see what the world is really like.
It’s very lovely, and it’s very horrible,—but I won’t let you see
anything horrid,—and it doesn’t care your life or mine for pictures or
anything else except doing its own work and making love. Come, and I’ll
show you how to brew sangaree, and sling a hammock, and—oh, thousands
of things, and you’ll see for yourself what colour means, and we’ll
find out together what love means, and then, maybe, we shall be allowed
to do some good work. Come away!”

“Why?” said Maisie.

“How can you do anything until you have seen everything, or as much as
you can? And besides, darling, I love you. Come along with me. You have
no business here; you don’t belong to this place; you’re half a
gipsy,—your face tells that; and I—even the smell of open water makes
me restless. Come across the sea and be happy!”

He had risen to his feet, and stood in the shadow of the gun, looking
down at the girl. The very short winter afternoon had worn away, and,
before they knew, the winter moon was walking the untroubled sea. Long
ruled lines of silver showed where a ripple of the rising tide was
turning over the mud-banks. The wind had dropped, and in the intense
stillness they could hear a donkey cropping the frosty grass many yards
away. A faint beating, like that of a muffled drum, came out of the
moon-haze.

“What’s that?” said Maisie, quickly. “It sounds like a heart beating.
Where is it?”

Dick was so angry at this sudden wrench to his pleadings that he could
not trust himself to speak, and in this silence caught the sound.
Maisie from her seat under the gun watched him with a certain amount of
fear. She wished so much that he would be sensible and cease to worry
her with over-sea emotion that she both could and could not understand.
She was not prepared, however, for the change in his face as he
listened.

“It’s a steamer,” he said,—“a twin-screw steamer, by the beat. I can’t
make her out, but she must be standing very close in-shore. Ah!” as the
red of a rocket streaked the haze, “she’s standing in to signal before
she clears the Channel.”

“Is it a wreck?” said Maisie, to whom these words were as Greek.

Dick’s eyes were turned to the sea. “Wreck! What nonsense! She’s only
reporting herself. Red rocket forward—there’s a green light aft now,
and two red rockets from the bridge.”

“What does that mean?”

“It’s the signal of the Cross Keys Line running to Australia. I wonder
which steamer it is.” The note of his voice had changed; he seemed to
be talking to himself, and Maisie did not approve of it. The moonlight
broke the haze for a moment, touching the black sides of a long steamer
working down Channel. “Four masts and three funnels—she’s in deep
draught, too. That must be the _Barralong_, or the _Bhutia_. No, the
_Bhutia_ has a clopper bow. It’s the _Barralong_, to Australia. She’ll
lift the Southern Cross in a week,—lucky old tub!—oh, lucky old tub!”

He stared intently, and moved up the slope of the fort to get a better
view, but the mist on the sea thickened again, and the beating of the
screws grew fainter. Maisie called to him a little angrily, and he
returned, still keeping his eyes to seaward. “Have you ever seen the
Southern Cross blazing right over your head?” he asked. “It’s superb!”

“No,” she said shortly, “and I don’t want to. If you think it’s so
lovely, why don’t you go and see it yourself?”

She raised her face from the soft blackness of the marten skins about
her throat, and her eyes shone like diamonds. The moonlight on the gray
kangaroo fur turned it to frosted silver of the coldest.

“By Jove, Maisie, you look like a little heathen idol tucked up there.”
The eyes showed that they did not appreciate the compliment. “I’m
sorry,” he continued. “The Southern Cross isn’t worth looking at unless
someone helps you to see. That steamer’s out of hearing.”

“Dick,” she said quietly, “suppose I were to come to you now,—be quiet
a minute,—just as I am, and caring for you just as much as I do.”

“Not as a brother, though? You said you didn’t—in the Park.”

“I never had a brother. Suppose I said, “Take me to those places, and
in time, perhaps, I might really care for you,” what would you do?”

“Send you straight back to where you came from, in a cab. No, I
wouldn’t; I’d let you walk. But you couldn’t do it, dear. And I
wouldn’t run the risk. You’re worth waiting for till you can come
without reservation.”

“Do you honestly believe that?”

“I have a hazy sort of idea that I do. Has it never struck you in that
light?”

“Ye—es. I feel so wicked about it.”

“Wickeder than usual?”

“You don’t know all I think. It’s almost too awful to tell.”

“Never mind. You promised to tell me the truth—at least.”

“It’s so ungrateful of me, but—but, though I know you care for me, and
I like to have you with me, I’d—I’d even sacrifice you, if that would
bring me what I want.”

“My poor little darling! I know that state of mind. It doesn’t lead to
good work.”

“You aren’t angry? Remember, I do despise myself.”

“I’m not exactly flattered,—I had guessed as much before,—but I’m not
angry. I’m sorry for you. Surely you ought to have left a littleness
like that behind you, years ago.”

“You’ve no right to patronise me! I only want what I have worked for so
long. It came to you without any trouble, and—and I don’t think it’s
fair.”

“What can I do? I’d give ten years of my life to get you what you want.

But I can’t help you; even I can’t help.”

A murmur of dissent from Maisie. He went on—“And I know by what you
have just said that you’re on the wrong road to success. It isn’t got
at by sacrificing other people,—I’ve had that much knocked into me; you
must sacrifice yourself, and live under orders, and never think for
yourself, and never have real satisfaction in your work except just at
the beginning, when you’re reaching out after a notion.”

“How can you believe all that?”

“There’s no question of belief or disbelief. That’s the law, and you
take it or refuse it as you please. I try to obey, but I can’t, and
then my work turns bad on my hands. Under any circumstances, remember,
four-fifths of everybody’s work must be bad. But the remnant is worth
the trouble for it’s own sake.”

“Isn’t it nice to get credit even for bad work?”

“It’s much too nice. But—— May I tell you something? It isn’t a pretty
tale, but you’re so like a man that I forget when I’m talking to you.”

“Tell me.”

“Once when I was out in the Soudan I went over some ground that we had
been fighting on for three days. There were twelve hundred dead; and we
hadn’t time to bury them.”

“How ghastly!”

“I had been at work on a big double-sheet sketch, and I was wondering
what people would think of it at home. The sight of that field taught
me a good deal. It looked just like a bed of horrible toadstools in all
colours, and—I’d never seen men in bulk go back to their beginnings
before. So I began to understand that men and women were only material
to work with, and that what they said or did was of no consequence.
See? Strictly speaking, you might just as well put your ear down to the
palette to catch what your colours are saying.”

“Dick, that’s disgraceful!”

“Wait a minute. I said, strictly speaking. Unfortunately, everybody
must be either a man or a woman.”

“I’m glad you allow that much.”

“In your case I don’t. You aren’t a woman. But ordinary people, Maisie,
must behave and work as such. That’s what makes me so savage.” He
hurled a pebble towards the sea as he spoke. “I know that it is outside
my business to care what people say; I can see that it spoils my output
if I listen to ’em; and yet, confound it all,”—another pebble flew
seaward,—“I can’t help purring when I’m rubbed the right way. Even when
I can see on a man’s forehead that he is lying his way through a clump
of pretty speeches, those lies make me happy and play the mischief with
my hand.”

“And when he doesn’t say pretty things?”

“Then, belovedest,”—Dick grinned,—“I forget that I am the steward of
these gifts, and I want to make that man love and appreciate my work
with a thick stick. It’s too humiliating altogether; but I suppose even
if one were an angel and painted humans altogether from outside, one
would lose in touch what one gained in grip.”

Maisie laughed at the idea of Dick as an angel.

“But you seem to think,” she said, “that everything nice spoils your
hand.”

“I don’t think. It’s the law,—just the same as it was at Mrs.
Jennett’s.

Everything that is nice does spoil your hand. I’m glad you see so
clearly.”

“I don’t like the view.”

“Nor I. But—have got orders: what can do? Are you strong enough to face
it alone?”

“I suppose I must.”

“Let me help, darling. We can hold each other very tight and try to
walk straight. We shall blunder horribly, but it will be better than
stumbling apart. Maisie, can’t you see reason?”

“I don’t think we should get on together. We should be two of a trade,
so we should never agree.”

“How I should like to meet the man who made that proverb! He lived in a
cave and ate raw bear, I fancy. I’d make him chew his own arrow-heads.

Well?”

“I should be only half married to you. I should worry and fuss about my
work, as I do now. Four days out of the seven I’m not fit to speak to.”

“You talk as if no one else in the world had ever used a brush. D’you
suppose that I don’t know the feeling of worry and bother and
can’t-get-at-ness? You’re lucky if you only have it four days out of
the seven. What difference would that make?”

“A great deal—if you had it too.”

“Yes, but I could respect it. Another man might not. He might laugh at
you. But there’s no use talking about it. If you can think in that way
you can’t care for me—yet.”

The tide had nearly covered the mud-banks and twenty little ripples
broke on the beach before Maisie chose to speak.

“Dick,” she said slowly, “I believe very much that you are better than
I am.”

“This doesn’t seem to bear on the argument—but in what way?”

“I don’t quite know, but in what you said about work and things; and
then you’re so patient. Yes, you’re better than I am.”

Dick considered rapidly the murkiness of an average man’s life. There
was nothing in the review to fill him with a sense of virtue. He lifted
the hem of the cloak to his lips.

“Why,” said Maisie, making as though she had not noticed, “can you see
things that I can’t? I don’t believe what you believe; but you’re
right, I believe.”

“If I’ve seen anything, God knows I couldn’t have seen it but for you,
and I know that I couldn’t have said it except to you. You seemed to
make everything clear for a minute; but I don’t practice what I preach.
You would help me.... There are only us two in the world for all
purposes, and—and you like to have me with you?”

“Of course I do. I wonder if you can realise how utterly lonely I am!”

“Darling, I think I can.”

“Two years ago, when I first took the little house, I used to walk up
and down the back-garden trying to cry. I never can cry. Can you?”

“It’s some time since I tried. What was the trouble? Overwork?”

“I don’t know; but I used to dream that I had broken down, and had no
money, and was starving in London. I thought about it all day, and it
frightened me—oh, how it frightened me!”

“I know that fear. It’s the most terrible of all. It wakes me up in the
night sometimes. You oughtn’t to know anything about it.”

“How do _you_ know?”

“Never mind. Is your three hundred a year safe?”

“It’s in Consols.”

“Very well. If any one comes to you and recommends a better
investment,—even if I should come to you,—don’t you listen. Never shift
the money for a minute, and never lend a penny of it,—even to the
red-haired girl.”

“Don’t scold me so! I’m not likely to be foolish.”

“The earth is full of men who’d sell their souls for three hundred a
year; and women come and talk, and borrow a five-pound note here and a
ten-pound note there; and a woman has no conscience in a money debt.
Stick to your money, Maisie, for there’s nothing more ghastly in the
world than poverty in London. It’s scared me. By Jove, it put the fear
into _me!_ And one oughtn’t to be afraid of anything.”

To each man is appointed his particular dread,—the terror that, if he
does not fight against it, must cow him even to the loss of his
manhood. Dick’s experience of the sordid misery of want had entered
into the deeps of him, and, lest he might find virtue too easy, that
memory stood behind him, tempting to shame, when dealers came to buy
his wares. As the Nilghai quaked against his will at the still green
water of a lake or a mill-dam, as Torpenhow flinched before any white
arm that could cut or stab and loathed himself for flinching, Dick
feared the poverty he had once tasted half in jest. His burden was
heavier than the burdens of his companions.

Maisie watched the face working in the moonlight.

“You’ve plenty of pennies now,” she said soothingly.

“I shall never have enough,” he began, with vicious emphasis. Then,
laughing, “I shall always be three-pence short in my accounts.”

“Why threepence?”

“I carried a man’s bag once from Liverpool Street Station to
Blackfriar’s Bridge. It was a sixpenny job,—you needn’t laugh; indeed
it was,—and I wanted the money desperately. He only gave me threepence;
and he hadn’t even the decency to pay in silver. Whatever money I make,
I shall never get that odd threepence out of the world.”

This was not language befitting the man who had preached of the
sanctity of work. It jarred on Maisie, who preferred her payment in
applause, which, since all men desire it, must be of her right. She
hunted for her little purse and gravely took out a threepenny bit.

“There it is,” she said. “I’ll pay you, Dickie; and don’t worry any
more; it isn’t worth while. Are you paid?”

“I am,” said the very human apostle of fair craft, taking the coin.
“I’m paid a thousand times, and we’ll close that account. It shall live
on my watch-chain; and you’re an angel, Maisie.”

“I’m very cramped, and I’m feeling a little cold. Good gracious! the
cloak is all white, and so is your moustache! I never knew it was so
chilly.”

A light frost lay white on the shoulder of Dick’s ulster. He, too, had
forgotten the state of the weather. They laughed together, and with
that laugh ended all serious discourse.

They ran inland across the waste to warm themselves, then turned to
look at the glory of the full tide under the moonlight and the intense
black shadows of the furze bushes. It was an additional joy to Dick
that Maisie could see colour even as he saw it,—could see the blue in
the white of the mist, the violet that is in gray palings, and all
things else as they are,—not of one hue, but a thousand. And the
moonlight came into Maisie’s soul, so that she, usually reserved,
chattered of herself and of the things she took interest in,—of Kami,
wisest of teachers, and of the girls in the studio,—of the Poles, who
will kill themselves with overwork if they are not checked; of the
French, who talk at great length of much more than they will ever
accomplish; of the slovenly English, who toil hopelessly and cannot
understand that inclination does not imply power; of the Americans,
whose rasping voices in the hush of a hot afternoon strain tense-drawn
nerves to breaking-point, and whose suppers lead to indigestion; of
tempestuous Russians, neither to hold nor to bind, who tell the girls
ghost-stories till the girls shriek; of stolid Germans, who come to
learn one thing, and, having mastered that much, stolidly go away and
copy pictures for evermore. Dick listened enraptured because it was
Maisie who spoke. He knew the old life.

“It hasn’t changed much,” he said. “Do they still steal colours at
lunch-time?”

“Not steal. Attract is the word. Of course they do. I’m good—I only
attract ultramarine; but there are students who’d attract flake-white.”

“I’ve done it myself. You can’t help it when the palettes are hung up.

Every colour is common property once it runs down,—even though you do
start it with a drop of oil. It teaches people not to waste their
tubes.”

“I should like to attract some of your colours, Dick. Perhaps I might
catch your success with them.”

“I mustn’t say a bad word, but I should like to. What in the world,
which you’ve just missed a lovely chance of seeing, does success or
want of success, or a three-storied success, matter compared with—— No,
I won’t open that question again. It’s time to go back to town.”

“I’m sorry, Dick, but——”

“You’re much more interested in that than you are in me.”

“I don’t know, I don’t think I am.”

“What will you give me if I tell you a sure short-cut to everything you
want,—the trouble and the fuss and the tangle and all the rest? Will
you promise to obey me?”

“Of course.”

“In the first place, you must never forget a meal because you happen to
be at work. You forgot your lunch twice last week,” said Dick, at a
venture, for he knew with whom he was dealing.”

“No, no,—only once, really.”

“That’s bad enough. And you mustn’t take a cup of tea and a biscuit in
place of a regular dinner, because dinner happens to be a trouble.”

“You’re making fun of me!”

“I never was more in earnest in my life. Oh, my love, my love, hasn’t
it dawned on you yet what you are to me? Here’s the whole earth in a
conspiracy to give you a chill, or run over you, or drench you to the
skin, or cheat you out of your money, or let you die of overwork and
underfeeding, and I haven’t the mere right to look after you. Why, I
don’t even know if you have sense enough to put on warm things when the
weather’s cold.”

“Dick, you’re the most awful boy to talk to—really! How do you suppose
I managed when you were away?”

“I wasn’t here, and I didn’t know. But now I’m back I’d give everything
I have for the right of telling you to come in out of the rain.”

“Your success too?”

This time it cost Dick a severe struggle to refrain from bad words.

“As Mrs. Jennett used to say, you’re a trial, Maisie! You’ve been
cooped up in the schools too long, and you think every one is looking
at you.

There aren’t twelve hundred people in the world who understand
pictures. The others pretend and don’t care. Remember, I’ve seen twelve
hundred men dead in toadstool-beds. It’s only the voice of the tiniest
little fraction of people that makes success. The real world doesn’t
care a tinker’s—doesn’t care a bit. For aught you or I know, every man
in the world may be arguing with a Maisie of his own.”

“Poor Maisie!”

“Poor Dick, I think. Do you believe while he’s fighting for what’s
dearer than his life he wants to look at a picture? And even if he did,
and if all the world did, and a thousand million people rose up and
shouted hymns to my honour and glory, would that make up to me for the
knowledge that you were out shopping in the Edgware Road on a rainy day
without an umbrella? Now we’ll go to the station.”

“But you said on the beach——” persisted Maisie, with a certain fear.

Dick groaned aloud: “Yes, I know what I said. My work is everything I
have, or am, or hope to be, to me, and I believe I’ve learnt the law
that governs it; but I’ve some lingering sense of fun left,—though
you’ve nearly knocked it out of me. I can just see that it isn’t
everything to all the world. Do what I say, and not what I do.”

Maisie was careful not to reopen debatable matters, and they returned
to London joyously. The terminus stopped Dick in the midst of an
eloquent harangue on the beauties of exercise. He would buy Maisie a
horse,—such a horse as never yet bowed head to bit,—would stable it,
with a companion, some twenty miles from London, and Maisie, solely for
her health’s sake should ride with him twice or thrice a week.

“That’s absurd,” said she. “It wouldn’t be proper.”

“Now, who in all London to-night would have sufficient interest or
audacity to call us two to account for anything we chose to do?”

Maisie looked at the lamps, the fog, and the hideous turmoil. Dick was
right; but horseflesh did not make for Art as she understood it.

“You’re very nice sometimes, but you’re very foolish more times. I’m
not going to let you give me horses, or take you out of your way
to-night. I’ll go home by myself. Only I want you to promise me
something. You won’t think any more about that extra threepence, will
you? Remember, you’ve been paid; and I won’t allow you to be spiteful
and do bad work for a little thing like that. You can be so big that
you mustn’t be tiny.”

This was turning the tables with a vengeance. There remained only to
put Maisie into her hansom.

“Good-bye,” she said simply. “You’ll come on Sunday. It has been a
beautiful day, Dick. Why can’t it be like this always?”

“Because love’s like line-work: you must go forward or backward; you
can’t stand still. By the way, go on with your line-work. Good-night,
and, for my—for my sake, take care of yourself.”

He turned to walk home, meditating. The day had brought him nothing
that he hoped for, but—surely this was worth many days—it had brought
him nearer to Maisie. The end was only a question of time now, and the
prize well worth the waiting. By instinct, once more, he turned to the
river.

“And she understood at once,” he said, looking at the water. “She found
out my pet besetting sin on the spot, and paid it off. My God, how she
understood! And she said I was better than she was! Better than she
was!” He laughed at the absurdity of the notion. “I wonder if girls
guess at one-half a man’s life. They can’t, or—they wouldn’t marry us.”
He took her gift out of his pocket, and considered it in the light of a
miracle and a pledge of the comprehension that, one day, would lead to
perfect happiness. Meantime, Maisie was alone in London, with none to
save her from danger. And the packed wilderness was very full of
danger.

Dick made his prayer to Fate disjointedly after the manner of the
heathen as he threw the piece of silver into the river. If any evil
were to befal, let him bear the burden and let Maisie go unscathed,
since the threepenny piece was dearest to him of all his possessions.
It was a small coin in itself, but Maisie had given it, and the Thames
held it, and surely the Fates would be bribed for this once.

The drowning of the coin seemed to cut him free from thought of Maisie
for the moment. He took himself off the bridge and went whistling to
his chambers with a strong yearning for some man-talk and tobacco after
his first experience of an entire day spent in the society of a woman.
There was a stronger desire at his heart when there rose before him an
unsolicited vision of the _Barralong_ dipping deep and sailing free for
the Southern Cross.




CHAPTER VIII


And these two, as I have told you,
Were the friends of Hiawatha,
Chibiabos, the musician,
And the very strong man, Kwasind.

—_Hiawatha_.


Torpenhow was paging the last sheets of some manuscript, while the
Nilghai, who had come for chess and remained to talk tactics, was
reading through the first part, commenting scornfully the while.

“It’s picturesque enough and it’s sketchy,” said he; “but as a serious
consideration of affairs in Eastern Europe, it’s not worth much.”

“It’s off my hands at any rate.... Thirty-seven, thirty-eight,
thirty-nine slips altogether, aren’t there? That should make between
eleven and twelve pages of valuable misinformation. Heigho!” Torpenhow
shuffled the writing together and hummed—

Young lambs to sell, young lambs to sell,
If I’d as much money as I could tell,
I never would cry, Young lambs to sell!


Dick entered, self-conscious and a little defiant, but in the best of
tempers with all the world.

“Back at last?” said Torpenhow.

“More or less. What have you been doing?”

“Work. Dickie, you behave as though the Bank of England were behind
you. Here’s Sunday, Monday, and Tuesday gone and you haven’t done a
line. It’s scandalous.”

“The notions come and go, my children—they come and go like our
“baccy,” he answered, filling his pipe. “Moreover,” he stooped to
thrust a spill into the grate, “Apollo does not always stretch his——
Oh, confound your clumsy jests, Nilghai!”

“This is not the place to preach the theory of direct inspiration,”
said the Nilghai, returning Torpenhow’s large and workmanlike bellows
to their nail on the wall. “We believe in cobblers’ wax. _La!_—where
you sit down.”

“If you weren’t so big and fat,” said Dick, looking round for a weapon,
“I’d——”

“No skylarking in my rooms. You two smashed half my furniture last time
you threw the cushions about. You might have the decency to say How
d’you do? to Binkie. Look at him.”

Binkie had jumped down from the sofa and was fawning round Dick’s knee,
and scratching at his boots.

“Dear man!” said Dick, snatching him up, and kissing him on the black
patch above his right eye. “Did ums was, Binks? Did that ugly Nilghai
turn you off the sofa? Bite him, Mr. Binkie.” He pitched him on the
Nilghai’s stomach, as the big man lay at ease, and Binkie pretended to
destroy the Nilghai inch by inch, till a sofa cushion extinguished him,
and panting he stuck out his tongue at the company.

“The Binkie-boy went for a walk this morning before you were up, Torp.

I saw him making love to the butcher at the corner when the shutters
were being taken down—just as if he hadn’t enough to eat in his own
proper house,” said Dick.

“Binks, is that a true bill?” said Torpenhow, severely. The little dog
retreated under the sofa cushion, and showed by the fat white back of
him that he really had no further interest in the discussion.

“Strikes me that another disreputable dog went for a walk, too,” said
the Nilghai. “What made you get up so early? Torp said you might be
buying a horse.”

“He knows it would need three of us for a serious business like that.
No, I felt lonesome and unhappy, so I went out to look at the sea, and
watch the pretty ships go by.”

“Where did you go?”

“Somewhere on the Channel. Progly or Snigly, or some watering-place was
its name; I’ve forgotten; but it was only two hours’ run from London
and the ships went by.”

“Did you see anything you knew?”

“Only the _Barralong_ outwards to Australia, and an Odessa grain-boat
loaded down by the head. It was a thick day, but the sea smelt good.”

“Wherefore put on one’s best trousers to see the _Barralong?_” said
Torpenhow, pointing.

“Because I’ve nothing except these things and my painting duds.
Besides, I wanted to do honour to the sea.”

“Did She make you feel restless?” asked the Nilghai, keenly.

“Crazy. Don’t speak of it. I’m sorry I went.”

Torpenhow and the Nilghai exchanged a look as Dick, stooping, busied
himself among the former’s boots and trees.

“These will do,” he said at last; “I can’t say I think much of your
taste in slippers, but the fit’s the thing.” He slipped his feet into a
pair of sock-like sambhur-skin foot coverings, found a long chair, and
lay at length.

“They’re my own pet pair,” Torpenhow said. “I was just going to put
them on myself.”

“All your reprehensible selfishness. Just because you see me happy for
a minute, you want to worry me and stir me up. Find another pair.”

“Good for you that Dick can’t wear your clothes, Torp. You two live
communistically,” said the Nilghai.

“Dick never has anything that I can wear. He’s only useful to sponge
upon.”

“Confound you, have you been rummaging round among my clothes, then?”
said Dick. “I put a sovereign in the tobacco-jar yesterday. How do you
expect a man to keep his accounts properly if you——”

Here the Nilghai began to laugh, and Torpenhow joined him.

“Hid a sovereign yesterday! You’re no sort of financier. You lent me a
fiver about a month back. Do you remember?” Torpenhow said.

“Yes, of course.”

“Do you remember that I paid it you ten days later, and you put it at
the bottom of the tobacco?”

“By Jove, did I? I thought it was in one of my colour-boxes.”

“You thought! About a week ago I went into your studio to get some
“baccy and found it.”

“What did you do with it?”

“Took the Nilghai to a theatre and fed him.”

“You couldn’t feed the Nilghai under twice the money—not though you
gave him Army beef. Well, I suppose I should have found it out sooner
or later. What is there to laugh at?”

“You’re a most amazing cuckoo in many directions,” said the Nilghai,
still chuckling over the thought of the dinner. “Never mind. We had
both been working very hard, and it was your unearned increment we
spent, and as you’re only a loafer it didn’t matter.”

“That’s pleasant—from the man who is bursting with my meat, too. I’ll
get that dinner back one of these days. Suppose we go to a theatre
now.”

“Put our boots on,—and dress,—_and_ wash?” The Nilghai spoke very
lazily.

“I withdraw the motion.”

“Suppose, just for a change—as a startling variety, you know—we, that
is to say _we_, get our charcoal and our canvas and go on with our
work.”

Torpenhow spoke pointedly, but Dick only wriggled his toes inside the
soft leather moccasins.

“What a one-ideaed clucker that is! If I had any unfinished figures on
hand, I haven’t any model; if I had my model, I haven’t any spray, and
I never leave charcoal unfixed overnight; and if I had my spray and
twenty photographs of backgrounds, I couldn’t do anything to-night. I
don’t feel that way.”

“Binkie-dog, he’s a lazy hog, isn’t he?” said the Nilghai.

“Very good, I _will_ do some work,” said Dick, rising swiftly. “I’ll
fetch the Nungapunga Book, and we’ll add another picture to the Nilghai
Saga.”

“Aren’t you worrying him a little too much?” asked the Nilghai, when
Dick had left the room.

“Perhaps, but I know what he can turn out if he likes. It makes me
savage to hear him praised for past work when I know what he ought to
do. You and I are arranged for——”

“By Kismet and our own powers, more’s the pity. I have dreamed of a
good deal.”

“So have I, but we know our limitations now. I’m dashed if I know what
Dick’s may be when he gives himself to his work. That’s what makes me
so keen about him.”

“And when all’s said and done, you will be put aside—quite rightly—for
a female girl.”

“I wonder... Where do you think he has been to-day?”

“To the sea. Didn’t you see the look in his eyes when he talked about
her? He’s as restless as a swallow in autumn.”

“Yes; but did he go alone?”

“I don’t know, and I don’t care, but he has the beginnings of the
go-fever upon him. He wants to up-stakes and move out. There’s no
mistaking the signs. Whatever he may have said before, he has the call
upon him now.”

“It might be his salvation,” Torpenhow said.

“Perhaps—if you care to take the responsibility of being a saviour.”

Dick returned with the big clasped sketch-book that the Nilghai knew
well and did not love too much. In it Dick had drawn all manner of
moving incidents, experienced by himself or related to him by the
others, of all the four corners of the earth. But the wider range of
the Nilghai’s body and life attracted him most. When truth failed he
fell back on fiction of the wildest, and represented incidents in the
Nilghai’s career that were unseemly,—his marriages with many African
princesses, his shameless betrayal, for Arab wives, of an army corps to
the Mahdi, his tattooment by skilled operators in Burmah, his interview
(and his fears) with the yellow headsman in the blood-stained
execution-ground of Canton, and finally, the passings of his spirit
into the bodies of whales, elephants, and toucans. Torpenhow from time
to time had added rhymed descriptions, and the whole was a curious
piece of art, because Dick decided, having regard to the name of the
book which being interpreted means “naked,” that it would be wrong to
draw the Nilghai with any clothes on, under any circumstances.
Consequently the last sketch, representing that much-enduring man
calling on the War Office to press his claims to the Egyptian medal,
was hardly delicate. He settled himself comfortably on Torpenhow’s
table and turned over the pages.

“What a fortune you would have been to Blake, Nilghai!” he said.
“There’s a succulent pinkness about some of these sketches that’s more
than life-like. “The Nilghai surrounded while bathing by the
Mahdieh”—that was founded on fact, eh?”

“It was very nearly my last bath, you irreverent dauber. Has Binkie
come into the Saga yet?”

“No; the Binkie-boy hasn’t done anything except eat and kill cats.
Let’s see. Here you are as a stained-glass saint in a church. Deuced
decorative lines about your anatomy; you ought to be grateful for being
handed down to posterity in this way. Fifty years hence you’ll exist in
rare and curious facsimiles at ten guineas each. What shall I try this
time? The domestic life of the Nilghai?”

“Hasn’t got any.”

“The undomestic life of the Nilghai, then. Of course. Mass-meeting of
his wives in Trafalgar Square. That’s it. They came from the ends of
the earth to attend Nilghai’s wedding to an English bride. This shall
be an epic. It’s a sweet material to work with.”

“It’s a scandalous waste of time,” said Torpenhow.

“Don’t worry; it keeps one’s hand in—specially when you begin without
the pencil.” He set to work rapidly. “That’s Nelson’s Column. Presently
the Nilghai will appear shinning up it.”

“Give him some clothes this time.”

“Certainly—a veil and an orange-wreath, because he’s been married.”

“Gad, that’s clever enough!” said Torpenhow over his shoulder, as Dick
brought out of the paper with three twirls of the brush a very fat back
and labouring shoulder pressed against stone.

“Just imagine,” Dick continued, “if we could publish a few of these
dear little things every time the Nilghai subsidises a man who can
write, to give the public an honest opinion of my pictures.”

“Well, you’ll admit I always tell you when I have done anything of that
kind. I know I can’t hammer you as you ought to be hammered, so I give
the job to another. Young Maclagan, for instance——”

“No-o—one half-minute, old man; stick your hand out against the dark of
the wall-paper—you only burble and call me names. That left shoulder’s
out of drawing. I must literally throw a veil over that. Where’s my
pen-knife? Well, what about Maclagan?”

“I only gave him his riding-orders to—to lambast you on general
principles for not producing work that will last.”

“Whereupon that young fool,”—Dick threw back his head and shut one eye
as he shifted the page under his hand,—“being left alone with an
ink-pot and what he conceived were his own notions, went and spilt them
both over me in the papers. You might have engaged a grown man for the
business, Nilghai. How do you think the bridal veil looks now, Torp?”

“How the deuce do three dabs and two scratches make the stuff stand
away from the body as it does?” said Torpenhow, to whom Dick’s methods
were always new.

“It just depends on where you put ’em. If Maclagan had known that much
about his business he might have done better.”

“Why don’t you put the damned dabs into something that will stay,
then?” insisted the Nilghai, who had really taken considerable trouble
in hiring for Dick’s benefit the pen of a young gentleman who devoted
most of his waking hours to an anxious consideration of the aims and
ends of Art, which, he wrote, was one and indivisible.

“Wait a minute till I see how I am going to manage my procession of
wives. You seem to have married extensively, and I must rough ’em in
with the pencil—Medes, Parthians, Edomites.... Now, setting aside the
weakness and the wickedness and—and the fat-headedness of deliberately
trying to do work that will live, as they call it, I’m content with the
knowledge that I’ve done my best up to date, and I shan’t do anything
like it again for some hours at least—probably years. Most probably
never.”

“What! any stuff you have in stock your best work?” said Torpenhow.

“Anything you’ve sold?” said the Nilghai.

“Oh no. It isn’t here and it isn’t sold. Better than that, it can’t be
sold, and I don’t think any one knows where it is. I’m sure I don’t....
And yet more and more wives, on the north side of the square. Observe
the virtuous horror of the lions!”

“You may as well explain,” said Torpenhow, and Dick lifted his head
from the paper.

“The sea reminded me of it,” he said slowly. “I wish it hadn’t. It
weighs some few thousand tons—unless you cut it out with a cold
chisel.”

“Don’t be an idiot. You can’t pose with us here,” said the Nilghai.

“There’s no pose in the matter at all. It’s a fact. I was loafing from
Lima to Auckland in a big, old, condemned passenger-ship turned into a
cargo-boat and owned by a second-hand Italian firm. She was a crazy
basket. We were cut down to fifteen ton of coal a day, and we thought
ourselves lucky when we kicked seven knots an hour out of her. Then we
used to stop and let the bearings cool down, and wonder whether the
crack in the shaft was spreading.”

“Were you a steward or a stoker in those days?”

“I was flush for the time being, so I was a passenger, or else I should
have been a steward, I think,” said Dick, with perfect gravity,
returning to the procession of angry wives. “I was the only other
passenger from Lima, and the ship was half empty, and full of rats and
cockroaches and scorpions.”

“But what has this to do with the picture?”

“Wait a minute. She had been in the China passenger trade and her lower
decks had bunks for two thousand pigtails. Those were all taken down,
and she was empty up to her nose, and the lights came through the port
holes—most annoying lights to work in till you got used to them. I
hadn’t anything to do for weeks. The ship’s charts were in pieces and
our skipper daren’t run south for fear of catching a storm. So he did
his best to knock all the Society Islands out of the water one by one,
and I went into the lower deck, and did my picture on the port side as
far forward in her as I could go. There was some brown paint and some
green paint that they used for the boats, and some black paint for
ironwork, and that was all I had.”

“The passengers must have thought you mad.”

“There was only one, and it was a woman; but it gave me the notion of
my picture.”

“What was she like?” said Torpenhow.

“She was a sort of Negroid-Jewess-Cuban; with morals to match. She
couldn’t read or write, and she didn’t want to, but she used to come
down and watch me paint, and the skipper didn’t like it, because he was
paying her passage and had to be on the bridge occasionally.”

“I see. That must have been cheerful.”

“It was the best time I ever had. To begin with, we didn’t know whether
we should go up or go down any minute when there was a sea on; and when
it was calm it was paradise; and the woman used to mix the paints and
talk broken English, and the skipper used to steal down every few
minutes to the lower deck, because he said he was afraid of fire. So,
you see, we could never tell when we might be caught, and I had a
splendid notion to work out in only three keys of colour.”

“What was the notion?”

“Two lines in Poe—

Neither the angels in Heaven above nor the demons down under the sea,
Can ever dissever my soul from the soul of the beautiful Annabel Lee.


It came out of the sea—all by itself. I drew that fight, fought out in
green water over the naked, choking soul, and the woman served as the
model for the devils and the angels both—sea-devils and sea-angels, and
the soul half drowned between them. It doesn’t sound much, but when
there was a good light on the lower deck it looked very fine and
creepy. It was seven by fourteen feet, all done in shifting light for
shifting light.”

“Did the woman inspire you much?” said Torpenhow.

“She and the sea between them—immensely. There was a heap of bad
drawing in that picture. I remember I went out of my way to foreshorten
for sheer delight of doing it, and I foreshortened damnably, but for
all that it’s the best thing I’ve ever done; and now I suppose the
ship’s broken up or gone down. Whew! What a time that was!”

“What happened after all?”

“It all ended. They were loading her with wool when I left the ship,
but even the stevedores kept the picture clear to the last. The eyes of
the demons scared them, I honestly believe.”

“And the woman?”

“She was scared too when it was finished. She used to cross herself
before she went down to look at it. Just three colours and no chance of
getting any more, and the sea outside and unlimited love-making inside,
and the fear of death atop of everything else, O Lord!” He had ceased
to look at the sketch, but was staring straight in front of him across
the room.

“Why don’t you try something of the same kind now?” said the Nilghai.

“Because those things come not by fasting and prayer. When I find a
cargo-boat and a Jewess-Cuban and another notion and the same old life,
I may.”

“You won’t find them here,” said the Nilghai.

“No, I shall not.” Dick shut the sketch-book with a bang. “This room’s
as hot as an oven. Open the window, some one.”

He leaned into the darkness, watching the greater darkness of London
below him. The chambers stood much higher than the other houses,
commanding a hundred chimneys—crooked cowls that looked like sitting
cats as they swung round, and other uncouth brick and zinc mysteries
supported by iron stanchions and clamped by 8-pieces. Northward the
lights of Piccadilly Circus and Leicester Square threw a
copper-coloured glare above the black roofs, and southward by all the
orderly lights of the Thames. A train rolled out across one of the
railway bridges, and its thunder drowned for a minute the dull roar of
the streets. The Nilghai looked at his watch and said shortly, “That’s
the Paris night-mail. You can book from here to St. Petersburg if you
choose.”

Dick crammed head and shoulders out of the window and looked across the
river. Torpenhow came to his side, while the Nilghai passed over
quietly to the piano and opened it. Binkie, making himself as large as
possible, spread out upon the sofa with the air of one who is not to be
lightly disturbed.

“Well,” said the Nilghai to the two pairs of shoulders, “have you never
seen this place before?”

A steam-tug on the river hooted as she towed her barges to wharf. Then
the boom of the traffic came into the room. Torpenhow nudged Dick.

“Good place to bank in—bad place to bunk in, Dickie, isn’t it?”

Dick’s chin was in his hand as he answered, in the words of a general
not without fame, still looking out on the darkness—“‘My God, what a
city to loot!’”

Binkie found the night air tickling his whiskers and sneezed
plaintively.

“We shall give the Binkie-dog a cold,” said Torpenhow. “Come in,” and
they withdrew their heads. “You’ll be buried in Kensal Green, Dick, one
of these days, if it isn’t closed by the time you want to go
there—buried within two feet of some one else, his wife and his
family.”

“Allah forbid! I shall get away before that time comes. Give a man room
to stretch his legs, Mr. Binkie.” Dick flung himself down on the sofa
and tweaked Binkie’s velvet ears, yawning heavily the while.

“You’ll find that wardrobe-case very much out of tune,” Torpenhow said
to the Nilghai. “It’s never touched except by you.”

“A piece of gross extravagance,” Dick grunted. “The Nilghai only comes
when I’m out.”

“That’s because you’re always out. Howl, Nilghai, and let him hear.”

“The life of the Nilghai is fraud and slaughter,
His writings are watered Dickens and water;
But the voice of the Nilghai raised on high
Makes even the Mahdieh glad to die!”


Dick quoted from Torpenhow’s letterpress in the Nungapunga Book.

“How do they call moose in Canada, Nilghai?”

The man laughed. Singing was his one polite accomplishment, as many
Press-tents in far-off lands had known.

“What shall I sing?” said he, turning in the chair.

““Moll Roe in the Morning,”’ said Torpenhow, at a venture.

“No,” said Dick, sharply, and the Nilghai opened his eyes. The old
chanty whereof he, among a very few, possessed all the words was not a
pretty one, but Dick had heard it many times before without wincing.
Without prelude he launched into that stately tune that calls together
and troubles the hearts of the gipsies of the sea—

“Farewell and adieu to you, Spanish ladies,
Farewell and adieu to you, ladies of Spain.”


Dick turned uneasily on the sofa, for he could hear the bows of the
Barralong crashing into the green seas on her way to the Southern
Cross.

Then came the chorus—

“We’ll rant and we’ll roar like true British sailors,
We’ll rant and we’ll roar across the salt seas,
Until we take soundings in the Channel of Old England
From Ushant to Scilly ’tis forty-five leagues.”


“Thirty-five-thirty-five,” said Dick, petulantly. “Don’t tamper with
Holy Writ. Go on, Nilghai.”

“The first land we made it was called the Deadman,”


and they sang to the end very vigourously.

“That would be a better song if her head were turned the other way—to
the Ushant light, for instance,” said the Nilghai.

“Flinging his arms about like a mad windmill,” said Torpenhow. “Give us
something else, Nilghai. You’re in fine fog-horn form tonight.”

“Give us the “Ganges Pilot”; you sang that in the square the night
before El-Maghrib. By the way, I wonder how many of the chorus are
alive to-night,” said Dick.

Torpenhow considered for a minute. “By Jove! I believe only you and I.

Raynor, Vicery, and Deenes—all dead; Vincent caught smallpox in Cairo,
carried it here and died of it. Yes, only you and I and the Nilghai.”

“Umph! And yet the men here who’ve done their work in a well-warmed
studio all their lives, with a policeman at each corner, say that I
charge too much for my pictures.”

“They are buying your work, not your insurance policies, dear child,”
said the Nilghai.

“I gambled with one to get at the other. Don’t preach. Go on with the
“Pilot.” Where in the world did you get that song?”

“On a tombstone,” said the Nilghai. “On a tombstone in a distant land.
I made it an accompaniment with heaps of base chords.”

“Oh, Vanity! Begin.” And the Nilghai began—

“I have slipped my cable, messmates, I’m drifting down with the tide,
I have my sailing orders, while yet an anchor ride.
And never on fair June morning have I put out to sea
With clearer conscience or better hope, or a heart more light and free.

“Shoulder to shoulder, Joe, my boy, into the crowd like a wedge
Strike with the hangers, messmates, but do not cut with the edge.
Cries Charnock, “Scatter the faggots, double that Brahmin in two,
The tall pale widow for me, Joe, the little brown girl for you!”

“Young Joe (you’re nearing sixty), why is your hide so dark?
Katie has soft fair blue eyes, who blackened yours?—Why, hark!”


They were all singing now, Dick with the roar of the wind of the open
sea about his ears as the deep bass voice let itself go.

“The morning gun—Ho, steady! the arquebuses to me!
I ha’ sounded the Dutch High Admiral’s heart as my lead doth sound the
sea.
“Sounding, sounding the Ganges, floating down with the tide,
Moore me close to Charnock, next to my nut-brown bride.
My blessing to Kate at Fairlight—Holwell, my thanks to you;
Steady! We steer for heaven, through sand-drifts cold and blue.”


“Now what is there in that nonsense to make a man restless?” said Dick,
hauling Binkie from his feet to his chest.

“It depends on the man,” said Torpenhow.

“The man who has been down to look at the sea,” said the Nilghai.

“I didn’t know she was going to upset me in this fashion.”

“That’s what men say when they go to say good-bye to a woman. It’s more
easy though to get rid of three women than a piece of one’s life and
surroundings.”

“But a woman can be——” began Dick, unguardedly.

“A piece of one’s life,” continued Torpenhow. “No, she can’t. His face
darkened for a moment. “She says she wants to sympathise with you and
help you in your work, and everything else that clearly a man must do
for himself. Then she sends round five notes a day to ask why the
dickens you haven’t been wasting your time with her.”

“Don’t generalise,” said the Nilghai. “By the time you arrive at five
notes a day you must have gone through a good deal and behaved
accordingly.

Shouldn’t begin these things, my son.”

“I shouldn’t have gone down to the sea,” said Dick, just a little
anxious to change the conversation. “And you shouldn’t have sung.”

“The sea isn’t sending you five notes a day,” said the Nilghai.

“No, but I’m fatally compromised. She’s an enduring old hag, and I’m
sorry I ever met her. Why wasn’t I born and bred and dead in a
three-pair back?”

“Hear him blaspheming his first love! Why in the world shouldn’t you
listen to her?” said Torpenhow.

Before Dick could reply the Nilghai lifted up his voice with a shout
that shook the windows, in “The Men of the Sea,” that begins, as all
know, “The sea is a wicked old woman,” and after rading through eight
lines whose imagery is truthful, ends in a refrain, slow as the
clacking of a capstan when the boat comes unwillingly up to the bars
where the men sweat and tramp in the shingle.

“‘Ye that bore us, O restore us!
She is kinder than ye;
For the call is on our heart-strings!’
Said The Men of the Sea.”


The Nilghai sang that verse twice, with simple cunning, intending that
Dick should hear. But Dick was waiting for the farewell of the men to
their wives.

“‘Ye that love us, can ye move us?
She is dearer than ye;
And your sleep will be the sweeter,’
Said The Men of the Sea.”


The rough words beat like the blows of the waves on the bows of the
rickety boat from Lima in the days when Dick was mixing paints, making
love, drawing devils and angels in the half dark, and wondering whether
the next minute would put the Italian captain’s knife between his
shoulder-blades. And the go-fever which is more real than many doctors’
diseases, waked and raged, urging him who loved Maisie beyond anything
in the world, to go away and taste the old hot, unregenerate life
again,—to scuffle, swear, gamble, and love light loves with his
fellows; to take ship and know the sea once more, and by her beget
pictures; to talk to Binat among the sands of Port Said while Yellow
“Tina mixed the drinks; to hear the crackle of musketry, and see the
smoke roll outward, thin and thicken again till the shining black faces
came through, and in that hell every man was strictly responsible for
his own head, and his own alone, and struck with an unfettered arm. It
was impossible, utterly impossible, but—

“‘Oh, our fathers in the churchyard,
She is older than ye,
And our graves will be the greener,’
Said The Men of the Sea.”


“What _is_ there to hinder?” said Torpenhow, in the long hush that
followed the song.

“You said a little time since that you wouldn’t come for a walk round
the world, Torp.”

“That was months ago, and I only objected to your making money for
travelling expenses. You’ve shot your bolt here and it has gone home.
Go away and do some work, and see some things.”

“Get some of the fat off you; you’re disgracefully out of condition,”
said the Nilghai, making a plunge from the chair and grasping a handful
of Dick generally over the right ribs. “Soft as putty—pure tallow born
of over-feeding. Train it off, Dickie.”

“We’re all equally gross, Nilghai. Next time you have to take the field
you’ll sit down, wink your eyes, gasp, and die in a fit.”

“Never mind. You go away on a ship. Go to Lima again, or to Brazil.

There’s always trouble in South America.”

“Do you suppose I want to be told where to go? Great Heavens, the only
difficulty is to know where I’m to stop. But I shall stay here, as I
told you before.”

“Then you’ll be buried in Kensal Green and turn into adipocere with the
others,” said Torpenhow. “Are you thinking of commissions in hand? Pay
forfeit and go. You’ve money enough to travel as a king if you please.”

“You’ve the grisliest notions of amusement, Torp. I think I see myself
shipping first class on a six-thousand-ton hotel, and asking the third
engineer what makes the engines go round, and whether it isn’t very
warm in the stokehold. Ho! ho! I should ship as a loafer if ever I
shipped at all, which I’m not going to do. I shall compromise, and go
for a small trip to begin with.”

“That’s something at any rate. Where will you go?” said Torpenhow. “It
would do you all the good in the world, old man.”

The Nilghai saw the twinkle in Dick’s eye, and refrained from speech.

“I shall go in the first place to Rathray’s stable, where I shall hire
one horse, and take him very carefully as far as Richmond Hill. Then I
shall walk him back again, in case he should accidentally burst into a
lather and make Rathray angry. I shall do that to-morrow, for the sake
of air and exercise.”

“Bah!” Dick had barely time to throw up his arm and ward off the
cushion that the disgusted Torpenhow heaved at his head.

“Air and exercise indeed,” said the Nilghai, sitting down heavily on
Dick.

“Let’s give him a little of both. Get the bellows, Torp.”

At this point the conference broke up in disorder, because Dick would
not open his mouth till the Nilghai held his nose fast, and there was
some trouble in forcing the nozzle of the bellows between his teeth;
and even when it was there he weakly tried to puff against the force of
the blast, and his cheeks blew up with a great explosion; and the enemy
becoming helpless with laughter he so beat them over the head with a
soft sofa cushion that that became unsewn and distributed its feathers,
and Binkie, interfering in Torpenhow’s interests, was bundled into the
half-empty bag and advised to scratch his way out, which he did after a
while, travelling rapidly up and down the floor in the shape of an
agitated green haggis, and when he came out looking for satisfaction,
the three pillars of his world were picking feathers out of their hair.

“A prophet has no honour in his own country,” said Dick, ruefully,
dusting his knees. “This filthy fluff will never brush off my legs.”

“It was all for your own good,” said the Nilghai. “Nothing like air and
exercise.”

“All for your good,” said Torpenhow, not in the least with reference to
past clowning. “It would let you focus things at their proper worth and
prevent your becoming slack in this hothouse of a town. Indeed it
would, old man. I shouldn’t have spoken if I hadn’t thought so. Only,
you make a joke of everything.”

“Before God I do no such thing,” said Dick, quickly and earnestly. “You
don’t know me if you think that.”

_I_ don’t think it,” said the Nilghai.

“How can fellows like ourselves, who know what life and death really
mean, dare to make a joke of anything? I know we pretend it, to save
ourselves from breaking down or going to the other extreme. Can’t I
see, old man, how you’re always anxious about me, and try to advise me
to make my work better? Do you suppose I don’t think about that myself?
But you can’t help me—you can’t help me—not even you. I must play my
own hand alone in my own way.”

“Hear, hear,” from the Nilghai.

“What’s the one thing in the Nilghai Saga that I’ve never drawn in the
Nungapunga Book?” Dick continued to Torpenhow, who was a little
astonished at the outburst.

Now there was one blank page in the book given over to the sketch that
Dick had not drawn of the crowning exploit in the Nilghai’s life; when
that man, being young and forgetting that his body and bones belonged
to the paper that employed him, had ridden over sunburned slippery
grass in the rear of Bredow’s brigade on the day that the troopers
flung themselves at Caurobert’s artillery, and for aught they knew
twenty battalions in front, to save the battered 24th German Infantry,
to give time to decide the fate of Vionville, and to learn ere their
remnant came back to Flavigay that cavalry can attack and crumple and
break unshaken infantry. Whenever he was inclined to think over a life
that might have been better, an income that might have been larger, and
a soul that might have been considerably cleaner, the Nilghai would
comfort himself with the thought, “I rode with Bredow’s brigade at
Vionville,” and take heart for any lesser battle the next day might
bring.

“I know,” he said very gravely. “I was always glad that you left it
out.”

“I left it out because Nilghai taught me what the Germany army learned
then, and what Schmidt taught their cavalry. I don’t know German.

What is it? “Take care of the time and the dressing will take care of
itself.” I must ride my own line to my own beat, old man.”

“_Tempo ist richtung_. You’ve learned your lesson well,” said the
Nilghai.

“He must go alone. He speaks truth, Torp.”

“Maybe I’m as wrong as I can be—hideously wrong. I must find that out
for myself, as I have to think things out for myself, but I daren’t
turn my head to dress by the next man. It hurts me a great deal more
than you know not to be able to go, but I cannot, that’s all. I must do
my own work and live my own life in my own way, because I’m responsible
for both.

Only don’t think I frivol about it, Torp. I have my own matches and
sulphur, and I’ll make my own hell, thanks.”

There was an uncomfortable pause. Then Torpenhow said blandly, “What
did the Governor of North Carolina say to the Governor of South
Carolina?”

“Excellent notion. It is a long time between drinks. There are the
makings of a very fine prig in you, Dick,” said the Nilghai.

“I’ve liberated my mind, estimable Binkie, with the feathers in his
mouth.” Dick picked up the still indignant one and shook him tenderly.

“You’re tied up in a sack and made to run about blind, Binkie-wee,
without any reason, and it has hurt your little feelings. Never mind.
_Sic volo, sic jubeo, stet pro ratione voluntas_, and don’t sneeze in
my eye because I talk Latin. Good-night.”

He went out of the room.

“That’s distinctly one for you,” said the Nilghai. “I told you it was
hopeless to meddle with him. He’s not pleased.”

“He’d swear at me if he weren’t. I can’t make it out. He has the
go-fever upon him and he won’t go. I only hope that he mayn’t have to
go some day when he doesn’t want to,” said Torpenhow.


In his own room Dick was settling a question with himself—and the
question was whether all the world, and all that was therein, and a
burning des

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