The Times Red Cross Story Book
by Various · English · Gutenberg #51142 · 537,602 chars · public domain (US)
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Title: The Times Red Cross Story Book
Author: Various
Release date: February 7, 2016 [eBook #51142]
Most recently updated: October 22, 2024
Language: English
Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/51142
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE TIMES RED CROSS STORY BOOK ***
------------------------------------------------------------------------
[Illustration: Dimoussi. _Frontispiece._]
------------------------------------------------------------------------
=The Times’=
_RED CROSS_
_STORY BOOK_
BY
FAMOUS NOVELISTS SERVING
IN HIS MAJESTY’S FORCES
ILLUSTRATED
PUBLISHED FOR
=The Times’=
FUND FOR THE
SICK & WOUNDED
BY HODDER AND STOUGHTON
LONDON NEW YORK TORONTO
------------------------------------------------------------------------
CONTENTS
Page
DIMOUSSI AND THE PISTOL A. E. W. Mason, 3
_Manchester Regiment_
THE WOMAN A. A. Milne, 16
_Royal Warwick Regiment_
THE CHERUB Oliver Onions, _Army Service Corps_ 31
AN IMPOSSIBLE PERSON W. B. Maxwell, _Royal Fusiliers_ 37
THE VEIL OF FLYING WATER Theodore Goodridge Roberts, 51
_Canadian Expeditionary Force_
“BILL BAILEY” Ian Hay, 62
_Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders_
LIFE-LIKE Martin Swayne, 74
_Royal Army Medical Corps_
LAME DOGS Cosmo Hamilton, _Royal Naval Air 83
Service_
THE SILVER THAW R. E. Vernede, _Rifle Brigade_ 97
CARNAGE Compton Mackenzie, _Royal Navy_ 104
THE BRONZE PARROT R. Austin Freeman, 115
_Royal Army Medical Corps_
THE FORBIDDEN WOMAN Warwick Deeping, 125
_Royal Army Medical Corps_
ELIZA AND THE SPECIAL Barry Pain, 136
_Royal Naval Air Service_
THE PROBATION OF JIMMY BAKER Albert Kinross, 140
_Army Service Corps_
THE GHOST THAT FAILED Desmond Coke, 149
_Loyal North Lancashire Regiment_
THE MIRACLE Ralph Stock, _Artists’ Rifles_ 157
THE FIGHT FOR THE GARDEN Sir Arthur T. Quiller-Couch, 162
_Duke of Cornwall’s Light Infantry_
THE FACE IN THE HOP VINES Charles G. D. Roberts, 178
_King’s (Liverpool) Regiment_
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Dimoussi _and the_ Pistol
_By_ A. E. W. Mason
_Manchester Regiment_
In the maps of Morocco you will see, stretching southwards of the city
of Mequinez, a great tract of uncharted country. It is lawless and
forbidden land. Even the Sultan Mulai el Hassen, that great fighter,
omitted it from his expeditions.
But certain tribes are known to inhabit it, such as the Beni M’tir, and
certain villages can be assigned a locality, such as Agurai, which lies
one long day’s journey from the Renegade’s Gate of Mequinez.
At Agurai Dimoussi was born, and lived for the first fifteen years of
his life—Dimoussi the Englishman, as he was called, though in features
and colour he had the look of an Arab with just a strain of Negro blood.
At the age of fifteen a desire to see the world laid hold upon Dimoussi.
As far as the eye could see from any mound about the village, there
stretched on every side a rolling plain, silent and empty. Hardly a bird
sang in the air above it; and everywhere it was dark with bushes wherein
the flowers of asphodel gleamed pale and small.
Dimoussi wearied of the plain. One thin, reddish line meandered
uncertainly from north to south, a stone’s throw from the village, where
the feet of men and mules passing at rare intervals through many
centuries had beaten down a path. Along this path Dimoussi allowed his
fancies to carry him into a world of enchantment; and one spring morning
his feet carried him along it, too.
For half a dozen men of the Beni M’tir carrying almonds and walnuts into
Mequinez happened to pass Agurai at a moment when Dimoussi was watching,
and his mother was at work on a patch of tilled ground out of sight.
Dimoussi had no other parent than his mother.
He ran into the hut, with its tent roof of sacking and its sides of
rough hurdles, which was his home, searched in a corner for a big
brass-barrelled pistol which had long been the pride of the
establishment, and, hiding it under his ragged jellaba, he ran down the
track and joined himself on to the tiny caravan. The next morning he
came to Mequinez, where he parted company with the tribesmen.
Dimoussi had not so much as a copper flouss upon him, but, on the other
hand, he had a pistol and the whole world in front of him. And what
reasonable boy could want more? All that day he wandered about the
streets, gaping at the houses, at the towers of the mosques, and at the
stalls in the markets, but as the afternoon declined, hunger got hold of
him. His friends of yesterday had vanished. Somehow he must get food.
He fingered the pistol under his jellaba irresolutely. He walked along a
street which he came to know afterwards as the Sôk Kubba. In the middle
was built a square tent of stone with an open arch at each side and a
pointed roof of fluted tiles trailed over by a vine. Just beyond this
stone tent the street narrowed, and on the left-hand side a man who sold
weapons squatted upon the floor of a dark booth.
“How much?” asked Dimoussi, producing his pistol, but loth to let it go.
The shopman looked at Dimoussi, and looked at the pistol. Then he tossed
it carelessly behind him into the litter of his booth.
“It is no good. As sure as my name is Mustapha, it would not kill a
rabbit. But see! My heart is kind. I will give you three dollars.”
He counted them out. Dimoussi stolidly shook his head. “Seven,” said he.
Mustapha reached behind him for the pistol, and flung it down at
Dimoussi’s feet.
“Take it away!” said he. “I will not haggle with foolish boys who have
stolen a thing of no value, and wish to sell it at a great price. Take
it away! Yet, out of my charity, I will give you four dollars.”
“Five,” said Dimoussi.
And five he received.
He bought rice and eggs in the market, and turned under an old archway
of green tiles into the Fondak Henna. There he cooked his food at a
fire, ate, and proposed to sleep.
But Fate had laid her hand upon Dimoussi. He slept not at all that
night. He sat with his back propped against the filigree plaster of one
of the pillars, and listened to a Moor of the Sherarda tribe, who smoked
keef and talked until morning.
“Yes,” said the Sherarda man, “I have travelled far and wide. Now I go
to my own village of Sigota, on Jebel Zarhon.”
“Have you been to Fez?” asked Dimoussi eagerly.
“I have lived in Fez. I served in the army of my lord the Sultan until I
was bored with it. It is a fine town and a large one. The river flows in
a hundred streams underneath the houses. In every house there is running
water. But it is nothing to the town of Mulai Idris.”
Dimoussi clasped his hands about his knees.
“Oh, tell me! Tell me!” he cried so loudly that in the shadows of the
Fondak men stirred upon their straw and cursed him.
“I have also travelled to Rabat, a great town upon the sea, whither many
consools come in fireships. A great town draped with flowers and cactus.
But it is nothing to Mulai Idris. There are no consools in Mulai Idris.”
All through his talk the name of Mulai Idris, the sacred city on the
slope of Jebel Zarhon, came and went like a shuttle of a loom.
The Sherarda Moor thought highly of the life in Mulai Idris, since it
was possible to live there without work.
Pilgrims came to visit the shrine of the founder of the Moorish Empire,
with offerings in their hands; and the whole township lived, and lived
well, upon those offerings. Moreover, there were no Europeans, or
“consools,” as he termed them.
The Moor spoke at length, and with hatred, of the Europeans—pale,
ungainly creatures in ridiculous clothes, given over to the devil,
people with a clever knack of invention, no doubt, in the matter of
firearms and cameras and spy-glasses, but, man for man, no match for any
Moor.
“Only three cities are safe from them now in all Morocco: Sheshawan in
the north, Tafilat in the south, and Mulai Idris. But Mulai Idris is
safest. Once a party of them—Englishmen—came rising up the steep road to
the gate even there, but from the walls we stoned them back. God’s curse
on them! Let them stay at home! But they must always be pushing
somewhere.”
Dimoussi, recognising in himself a point of kinship with the “consools,”
said gravely:
“I am an Englishman.”
The Sherarda man laughed, as though he had heard an excellent joke, and
continued to discourse upon the splendours of Mulai Idris until the
sleepers waked in their corners, and the keeper flung open the door, and
the grey daylight crept into the Fondak.
“Oh, tell me!” said Dimoussi. “The city is far from here?”
“Set out now. You will be in Mulai Idris before sunset.”
Dimoussi rose to his feet.
“I will go to Mulai Idris,” said he, and he went out into the cool,
clear air. The Sherarda Moor accompanied Dimoussi to the Bordain Gate,
and there they parted company, the boy going northward, the Moor
following the eastward track towards Fez. He had done his work, though
what he had done he did not know.
At noon Dimoussi came out upon a high tableland, as empty as the plains
which stretched about his native Agurai. Far away upon his left the
dark, serrated ridge of Jebel Gerouan stood out against the sky. Nearer
to him upon his right rose the high rock of Jebel Zarhon. In some fold
of that mountain lay this fabulous city of Mulai Idris.
Dimoussi walked forward, a tiny figure in that vast solitude. There were
no villages, there were no trees anywhere. The plateau extended ahead of
him like a softly heaving sea, as far as the eye could reach. It was
covered with bushes in flower; and here and there an acre of marigolds
or a field of blue lupins decked it out, as though someone had chosen to
make a garden there.
Then suddenly upon Dimoussi’s right the hillside opened, and in the
recess he saw Mulai Idris, a city high-placed and dazzlingly white,
which tumbled down the hillside like a cascade divided at its apex by a
great white mosque.
The mosque was the tomb of Mulai Idris, the founder of the empire.
Dimoussi dropped upon his knees and bowed his forehead to the ground.
“Mulai Idris,” he whispered, in a voice of exaltation. Yesterday he had
never even heard the name of the town. To-day the mere sight of it
lifted him into a passion of fervour.
Those white walls masked a crowded city of filth and noisome smells. But
Dimoussi walked on air; and his desire to see more of the world died
away altogether.
He was in the most sacred place in all Morocco; and there he stayed.
There was no need for him to work. He had the livelong day wherein to
store away in his heart the sayings of his elders. And amongst those
sayings there was not one that he heard more frequently than this:
“There are too many Europeans in Morocco.”
Fanaticism was in the very stones of the town. Dimoussi saw it shining
sombrely in the eyes of the men who paced and rode about the streets; he
felt it behind the impassivity of their faces. It came to him as an echo
of their constant prayers. Dimoussi began to understand it.
Once or twice he saw the Europeans during that spring. For close by in
the plain a great stone arch and some broken pillars showed where the
Roman city of Volubilis had stood. And by those ruins once or twice a
party of Europeans encamped.
Dimoussi visited each encampment, begged money of the “consools,” and
watched with curiosity the queer mechanical things they carried with
them—their cameras, their weapons, their folding mirrors, their brushes
and combs. But on each visit he became more certain that there were too
many Europeans in Morocco.
“A djehad is needed,” said one of the old men sitting outside the
gate—“a holy war—to exterminate them.”
“It is not easy to start a djehad,” replied Dimoussi.
The elders stroked their beards and laughed superciliously.
“You are young and foolish, Dimoussi. A single shot from a gun, and all
Moghrebbin is in flame.”
“Yes; and he that fired the shot certain of Paradise.”
Not one of them had thought to fire the shot. They were chatterers of
vain words. But the words sank into Dimoussi’s mind; for Dimoussi was
different. He began to think, as he put it; as a matter of fact, he
began to feel.
He went up to the tomb of Mulai Idris, bribed the guardian, who sat with
a wand in the court outside the shrine, to let him pass, and for the
first time in his life stood within the sacred place. The shrine was
dark, and the ticking of the clocks in the gloom filled Dimoussi’s soul
with awe and wonderment.
For the shrine was crowded with clocks: grandfather clocks with white
faces, and gold faces, and enamelled faces, stood side by side along the
walls, marking every kind of hour. Eight-day clocks stood upon pedestals
and niches; and the whole room whirred, and ticked, and chimed; never
had Dimoussi dreamed of anything so marvellous. There were glass balls,
too, dangling from the roof on silver strings, and red baize hanging
from the tomb.
Dimoussi bowed his head and prayed for the djehad. And as he prayed in
that dark and solitary place there came to him an inspiration. It seemed
that Mulai Idris himself laid his hand upon the boy’s head. It needed
only one man, only one shot to start the djehad. He raised his head and
all the ticking clocks cried out to him: “Thou art the man.” Dimoussi
left the shrine with his head high in the air and a proudness in his
gait. For he had his mission.
Thereafter he lay in wait upon the track over the plain to Mequinez,
watching the north and the south for the coming of the traveller.
During the third week of his watching he saw advancing along the track
mules carrying the baggage of Europeans. Dimoussi crouched in the bushes
and let them pass with the muleteers. A good way behind them the
Europeans rode slowly upon horses. As they came opposite to Dimoussi,
one, a dark, thin man, stretched out his arm and, turning to his
companion, said:
“Challoner, there is Mulai Idris.”
At once Dimoussi sprang to his feet. He did not mean to be robbed of his
great privilege. He shook his head.
“Lar, lar!” he cried. “Bad men in Mulai Idris. They will stone you. You
go to Mequinez.”
The man who had already spoken laughed.
“We are not going to Mulai Idris,” he replied. He was a man named Arden
who had spent the greater part of many years in Morocco, going up and
down that country in the guise of a Moor, and so counterfeiting accent,
and tongue, and manners, that he had even prayed in their mosques and
escaped detection.
“You are English?” asked Dimoussi.
“Yes. Come on, Challoner!”
And then, to his astonishment, as his horse stepped on, Dimoussi cried
out actually in English:
“One, two, three, and away!”
Arden stopped his horse.
“Where did you learn that?” he asked; and he asked in English.
But Dimoussi had spoken the only five words of English he knew, and even
those he did not understand.
Arden repeated the question in Arabic; and Dimoussi answered with a
smile:
“I, too, am English.”
“Oh! are you?” said Arden, with a laugh; and he rode on. “These Moors
love a joke. He learned the words over there, no doubt, from the
tourists at Volubilis. Do you see those blocks of stone along the
track?”
“Yes,” answered Challoner. “How do they come there?”
“Old Mulai Ismail, the sultan, built the great palace at Mequinez two
hundred years ago from the ruins of Volubilis. These stones were dragged
down by the captives of the Salee pirates.”
“And by the English prisoners from Tangier?” said Challoner suddenly.
“Yes,” replied Arden with some surprise, for there was a certain
excitement in his companion’s voice and manner. “The English were
prisoners until the siege ended, and we gave up Tangier and they were
released. When Mulai Ismail died, all these men dragging stones just
dropped them and left them where they lay by the track. There they have
remained ever since. It’s strange, isn’t it?”
“Yes,” said Challoner thoughtfully. He was a young man with the look of
a student rather than a traveller. He rode slowly on, looking about him,
as though at each turn of the road he expected to see some Englishman in
a tattered uniform of the Tangier Foot leaning upon a block of masonry
and wiping the sweat from his brow.
“Two of my ancestors were prisoners here in Mequinez,” he said. “They
were captured together at the fall of the Henrietta Fort in 1680, and
brought up here to work on Mulai Ismail’s palace. It’s strange to think
that they dragged these stones down this very track. I don’t suppose
that the country has changed at all. They must have come up from the
coast by the same road we followed, passed the same villages, and heard
the pariah dogs bark at night just as we have done.”
Arden glanced in surprise at his companion.
“I did not know that. I suppose that is the reason why you wish to visit
Mequinez?”
Challoner’s sudden desire to travel inland to this town had been a
mystery to Arden. He knew Challoner well, and knew him for a dilettante,
an amiable amateur of the arts, a man always upon the threshold of a new
interest, but never by any chance on the other side of the door, and,
above all, a stay-at-home. Now the reason was explained.
“Yes,” Challoner admitted. “I was anxious to see Mequinez.”
“Both men came home when peace was declared, I suppose?” said Arden.
“No. Only one came home, James Challoner. The other, Luke, turned
renegade to escape the sufferings of slavery, and was never allowed to
come back. The two men were brothers.
“I discovered the story by chance. I was looking over the papers in the
library one morning, in order to classify them, and I came across a
manuscript play written by a Challoner after the Restoration. Between
the leaves of the play an old, faded letter was lying. It had been
written by James, on his return, to Luke’s wife, telling her she would
never see Luke again. I will show you the letter this evening.”
“That’s a strange story,” said Arden. “Was nothing heard of Luke
afterwards?”
“Nothing. No doubt he lived and died in Mequinez.”
Challoner looked back as he spoke. Dimoussi was still standing amongst
the bushes watching the travellers recede from him. His plan was
completely formed. There would be a djehad to-morrow, and the honour of
it would belong to Dimoussi of Agurai.
He felt in the leathern wallet which swung at his side upon a silk
orange-coloured cord. He had ten dollars in that wallet. He walked in
the rear of the travellers to Mequinez, and reached the town just before
sunset. He went at once to the great square by the Renegade’s Gate,
where the horses are brought to roll in the dust on their way to the
watering fountain.
There were many there at the moment; and the square was thick with dust
like a mist.
But, through the mist, in a corner, Dimoussi saw the tents of the
travellers, and, in front of the tents, from wall to wall, a guard of
soldiers sitting upon the ground in a semicircle.
Dimoussi was in no hurry. He loitered there until darkness followed upon
the sunset, and the stars came out.
He saw lights burning in the tents, and, through the open doorway one,
the man who had spoken to him, Arden, stretched upon a lounge-chair,
reading a paper which he held in his hand.
Dimoussi went once more to the Fondak Henna, and made up for the wakeful
night he had passed here with a Moor of the Sherarda tribe by sleeping
until morning with a particular soundness.
II
The paper which Arden was reading was the faded letter written at “Berry
Street, St. James’s” on April 14, 1684, by the James Challoner who had
returned to the wife of Luke Challoner who had turned renegade.
Arden took a literal copy of that letter; and it is printed here from
that copy:
“BERRY STREET, ST. JAMES’S,
“_April 14, 1684_.
“MY DEAR PAMELA,
“I have just now come back from Whitehall, where I was most
graciously received by his Majestie, who asked many questions about
our sufferings among the Moors, and promised rewards with so fine a
courtesy and condescension that my four years of slavery were all
forgotten. Indeed, my joy would have been rare, but I knew that the
time would come when I must go back to my lodging and write to you
news that will go near to break your heart. Why did my brother not
stay quietly at home with his wife, at whose deare side his place
was? But he must suddenlie leave his house, and come out to his
younger brother at Tangier, who was never more sorry to see any man
than I was to see Luke. For we were hard pressed: the Moors had
pushed their trenches close under our walls, and any night the city
might fall. And now I am come safely home, though there is no deare
heart to break for me, and Luke must for ever stay behind. For that
is the bitter truth. We shall see noe more of Luke, and you, my
deare, are widowed and yet no widow. Oh, why did you let him goe,
knowing how quick he is to take fire, and how quick to cool? I, too,
am to blame, for I kept him by me out of my love for him, and that
was his undoing.
“In May ... I commanded the Henrietta Fort, and Luke was a volunteer
with me. For five days we were attacked night and day, we were cut
off from the town, there was no hope that way, and all our
ammunition and water consumed, and most of us wounded or killed. So
late on the night of the 13th we were compelled to surrender upon
promise of our lives. Luke and I were carried up to Mequinez, and
there set to build a wall, which was to stretch from that town to
Morocco city, so that a blind man might travel all those many miles
safely without a guide. I will admit that our sufferings were beyond
endurance. We slept underground in close, earth dungeons, down to
which we must crawl on our hands and knees; and at day we laboured
in the sunlight, starved and thirsting, no man knowing when the whip
of the taskmaster would fall across his back, and yet sure that it
would fall. Luke was not to be blamed—to be pitied rather. He was of
a finer, more delicate nature. What was pain to us was anguish and
torture to him. One night I crept down into my earth alone, and the
next day he walked about Mequinez with the robes of a Moor. He had
turned renegade.
“I was told that the Bashaw had taken him into his service, but I
never had the opportunity of speech with him again, although I once
heard his voice. That was six months afterwards, when peace had been
re-established between his Maj. and the Emperor. Part of the terms
of the peace was that the English captives should be released and
sent down to the coast, but the renegade must stay behind. I pleaded
with the Bashaw that Luke might be set free too, but could by no
means persuade him. We departed from Mequinez one early morning, and
on the city wall stood the Bashaw’s house; and as I came opposite to
it I saw a hand wave farewell from a narrow window-slit, and heard
Luke’s voice cry, ‘Farewell!’ bravely, Pamela, bravely!
“JAMES CHALLONER.”
When Arden had finished this letter he walked out of the tent, passed
through the semicircle of sentinels, and stood in front of the
Renegade’s Gate. There Challoner joined him, and both men looked at the
great arch for a while without speaking. It rose black against a violet
and starlit sky. The pattern of its coloured tiles could not be
distinguished; but even in the darkness something of its exquisite
delicacy could be perceived.
“Luke Challoner very likely worked upon that arch,” said Arden. “Yet, as
I read that letter, it seemed so very human, very near, as though it had
been written yesterday.”
“I wonder what became of him?” said Challoner. “From some house on the
city wall he waved his hand to his brother, and cried ’Farewell!’
bravely. I wonder what became of him?”
“I will take a photograph of that gate to-morrow,” said Arden.
III
The next morning Dimoussi came out of the Fondak Henna and walked to the
little booth in the Sôk Kubba. Mustapha was squatting upon the floor,
and with a throbbing heart Dimoussi noticed the familiar pistol shining
against the dark wall behind. It had not been sold.
“Give it to me,” he said.
Mustapha took the pistol from the nail on which it hung.
“It is worth fourteen dollars,” said he. “But, see, to every man his
chance comes. I am in a good mind to-day. My health is excellent and my
heart is light. You shall have it for twelve.”
Dimoussi took the pistol in his hand. It had a flint lock and was
mounted in polished brass, and a cover of brass was on the heel of the
butt.
“It is not worth twelve. I will give you seven for it.”
Mustapha raised his hands in a gesture of indignation.
“Seven dollars!” he cried in a shrill, angry voice. “Hear him! Seven
dollars! Look, it comes from Agadhir in the Sus country where they make
the best weapons.”
He pointed out to Dimoussi certain letters upon the plate underneath the
lock. “There it is written.”
Dimoussi could not read, but he nodded his head sagely.
“Yes. It is worth seven,” said he.
The shopman snatched it away from the boy.
“I will not be angry, for it is natural to boys to be foolish. But I
will tell you the truth. I gave eight dollars for it after much
bargaining. But it has hung in my shop for a year, and no one any more
has money. Therefore, I will sell it to you for ten.”
He felt behind his back and showed Dimoussi a tantalising glint of the
brass barrel. Dimoussi was unshaken.
“It has hung in your shop for four months,” said he.
“A year. That is why I will sell it to you at the loss of a dollar.”
“Liar, and son of a liar,” replied the boy, without any heat, “and
grandson of a liar. I sold it to you for five dollars four months ago. I
will give you eight for it to-day.”
He counted out the eight dollars one by one on the raised floor of the
booth, and the shopman could not resist.
“Very well,” he cried furiously. “Take it, and may your children starve
as mine surely will!”
“You are a pig, and the son of a pig,” replied Dimoussi calmly. “Have
you any powder?”
He changed his ninth dollar and bought some powder.
“You will need bullets, too,” said Mustapha. “I will sell you them very
cheap. Oh, you are lucky! Do you see those signs upon the barrel? The
pistol is charmed and cannot miss.”
Dimoussi looked at the signs engraved one above the other on the barrel.
There was a crown, and a strange letter, and a lion. He had long
wondered what those signs meant. He was very glad now that he
understood.
“But I will not buy lead bullets,” said Dimoussi wisely. “The pistol may
be enchanted so that it cannot miss, but there are also enchantments
against lead bullets so that they cannot hurt.”
So Dimoussi walked away, and begged a lump of rock salt from another
booth instead. He cut down the lump until it fitted roughly into the
hexagonal barrel of his pistol. Then he loaded the pistol, and hiding
the weapon in the wide sleeve of his jellaba, sauntered to the great
square before the Renegade’s Gate. There were groups of people standing
about watching the tents, and the inevitable ring of sentries. But while
Dimoussi was still loitering—he would have loitered for a fortnight if
need be, for there were no limits to Dimoussi’s patience—Arden came out
of the tent with his camera, and Challoner followed with a tripod stand.
The two consools passed the line of guards and set up the camera in
front of the Renegade’s Gate. Dimoussi was quite impartial which of the
two should be sacrificed to begin the djehad, but again an ironical fate
laid its hand upon him. It was Arden who was to work the camera. It was
Arden, therefore, who was surrounded by the idlers, and was safe.
Challoner, on the other hand, had to stand quite apart, so as to screen
the lens from the direct rays of the sun.
“A little more to the right, Challoner,” said Arden. “That’ll do.”
He put his head under the focussing cloth, and the next instant he heard
a loud report, followed by shouts and screams and the rush of feet; and
when he tore the focussing cloth away he saw Challoner lying upon the
ground, the sentries agitatedly rushing this way and that, and the
bystanders to a man in full flight.
Dimoussi had chosen his opportunity well. He stood between two men, and
rather behind them, and exactly opposite Challoner. All eyes were fixed
upon the camera, even Challoner’s. It was true that he did see the sun
glitter suddenly upon something bright, that he did turn, that he did
realise that the bright thing was the brass barrel of a big flintlock
pistol. But before he could move or shout, the pistol was fired, and a
heavy blow like a blow from a cudgel struck him full on the chest.
Challoner spoke no more than a few words afterwards. The lump of rock
salt had done the work of an explosive bullet. He was just able to
answer a question of Arden’s.
“Did you see who fired?”
“The boy who came from Mulai Idris,” whispered Challoner. “He shot me
with a brass-barrelled pistol.” That seemed to have made a most vivid
impression upon his mind, for more than once he repeated it.
But Dimoussi was by this time out of the Renegade’s Gate, and running
with all his might through the olive grove towards the open, lawless
country south of Mequinez. By the evening he was safe from capture, and
lifted up with pride.
Certainly no djehad had followed upon the murder, and that was
disappointing. But it was not Dimoussi’s fault. He had done his best
according to his lights. Meanwhile, it seemed prudent to him to settle
down quietly at Agurai. He was nearly sixteen now. Dimoussi thought that
he would settle down and marry.
Here the episode would have ended but for two circumstances. In the
first place Dimoussi carried back with him from Mequinez the
brass-barrelled pistol; and in the second place Arden, two years later,
acted upon a long-cherished desire to penetrate the unmapped country
south of Mequinez.
He travelled with a mule as a Jew pedlar, knowing that such a man, for
the sake of his wares, may go where a Moor may not. Of his troubles
during his six months’ wanderings now is not the time to speak. It is
enough that at the end of the six months he set up his canvas shelter
one evening by the village of Agurai.
The men came at once and squatted, chattering, about his shelter.
“Is there a woman in the village,” asked Arden, “who will wash some
clothes for me?”
And the sheikh of the village rose up and replied:
“Yes; the Frenchwoman. I will send her to you.”
Arden was perplexed. It seemed extraordinary that in a little village in
a remote and unusually lawless district of Morocco there should be a
French blanchisseuse. But he made no comment, and spread out his wares
upon the ground. In a few moments a woman appeared. She had the Arab
face, the Arab colour. But she stood unconcernedly before Arden, and
said in Arabic:
“I am the Frenchwoman. Give me the clothes you want washing.”
Arden reached behind him for the bundle. He addressed her in French, but
she shook her head and carried the bundle away. Her place was taken by
another, a very old, dark woman, who was accompanied by a youth carrying
a closed basket.
“Pigeons,” said the old woman. “Good, fat, live pigeons.”
Arden was fairly tired of that national food by this time, and waved her
away.
“Very well,” said she. She took the basket from the youth, placed it on
the ground, and opened the lid. Then she clapped her hands and the
pigeons flew out. As they rose into the air she laughed, and cried out
in English—“One, two, three, and away!”
Arden was fairly startled.
“What words are those?” he exclaimed.
“English,” the old woman replied in Arabic. “I am the Englishwoman.”
And the men of the village who were clustered round the shelter agreed,
as though nothing could be more natural:
“Yes, she is the Englishwoman.”
“And what do the words mean?”
The old woman shrugged her shoulders.
“My father used them just as I did,” she said. She spoke with a certain
pride in the possession of those five uncomprehended words. “He learned
them from his father. I do not know what they mean.”
It was mystifying enough to Arden that, in a country where hardly a Moor
of a foreign tribe, and certainly no Europeans, had ever been known to
penetrate, there should be a Frenchwoman who knew no French, and an
Englishwoman with five words of English she did not understand.
But there was more than this to startle Arden. He had heard those same
words spoken once before, by a Moorish boy who had declared himself to
be an Englishman, and that Moorish boy had murdered his friend
Challoner.
Arden glanced carelessly at the youth who stood by the old woman’s side.
“That is your son?” said he.
“Yes. That is Dimoussi.”
Dimoussi’s cheeks wore the shadow of a beard. He had grown.
Arden could not pretend to himself that he recognised the boy who had
sprung up from the asphodel-bushes a few miles from Mulai Idris.
He bethought himself of a way to test his suspicions. He took from his
wares an old rusty pistol and began to polish it. A firearm he knew to
be a lure to any Moor. Dimoussi drew nearer. Arden paid no attention,
but continued to polish his pistol. A keen excitement was gaining on
him, but he gave no sign. At last Dimoussi reached out his hand. Arden
placed the pistol in it. Dimoussi turned the pistol over, and gave it
back.
“It is no good.”
Arden laughed.
“There is no better pistol in Agurai,” said he contemptuously. In his
ears there was the sound of Challoner’s voice repeating and repeating:
“He shot me with a brass-barrelled pistol—a brass-barrelled pistol.”
The contempt in his tone stung Dimoussi.
“I have a better,” said he, and at that the old woman touched him
warningly on the arm. Dimoussi stopped at once, and the couple moved
away.
Arden wondered whether this was the end. There was a chance that it was
not. Dimoussi might return to compare his pistol with Arden’s, and to
establish its superiority. Arden waited all the evening in a strong
suspense; and at ten o’clock, when he was alone, Dimoussi stepped
noiselessly into the shelter, and laid his brass-barrelled pistol on the
ground in the light of the lamp.
“It is better than yours. It comes from Agadhir, in the Sus country,
where the best pistols are made. See, those letters prove it.”
Arden had no doubt that he had now Challoner’s murderer sitting at his
side. But he looked at the letters on the pistol-barrel to which
Dimoussi pointed. The letters were in English, and made up the name
“Bennett.” There was also engraved upon the brass of the barrel
“London.” The pistol was an old horse-pistol of English make. Even its
period was clear to Arden. For above the lion and the crown was the
letter C. Arden pointed to those marks.
“What do they mean?”
“They are charms to prevent it missing.”
Arden said nothing. His thoughts were busy on other matters. This pistol
was a pistol of the time of Charles II, of the time of the Tangier
siege.
“How long have you had it?” he asked.
“My father owned it before me.”
“And his father before him?”
“Very likely. I do not know.”
Arden’s excitement was increasing. He began to see dim, strange
possibilities. Suppose, he reasoned, that this pistol had travelled up
to Mequinez in the possession of an English prisoner. Suppose that by
some chance the prisoner had escaped and wandered; and suddenly he saw
something which caught his breath away. He bent down and examined the
brass covering to the heel of the butt. Upon that plate there was an
engraved crest. Yes! and the crest was Challoner’s!
Arden kept his face bent over the pistol. Questions raced through his
mind. Had that pistol belonged to Luke Challoner, who had turned
renegade two hundred years ago? Had he married in his captivity? Had his
descendants married again, until all trace of their origin was lost
except this pistol and five words of English, and the name
“Englishwoman”? Ah! but if so, who was the Frenchwoman?
It was quite intelligible to Arden why Dimoussi had slain Challoner.
Fanaticism was sufficient reason. But supposing Dimoussi were a
descendant of Luke! It was all very strange. Challoner was the last of
his family, the last of his name. Had the family name been extinguished
by a Challoner?
Arden returned to Mequinez the next day, and, making search, through the
help of the Bashaw, who was his friend, amongst documents which existed,
he at last came upon the explanation.
The renegades, who were made up not merely of English prisoners of
Tangier, but of captives of many nationalities taken by the Salee
pirates, had, about the year 1700, become numerous enough to threaten
Mequinez. Consequently the Sultan had one fine morning turned them all
out of the town through the Renegade’s Gate and bidden them go south and
found a city for themselves.
They had founded Agurai, they had been attacked by the Beni M’tir; with
diminishing numbers they had held their own; they had intermarried with
the natives; and now, two hundred years later, all that remained of them
were the Frenchwoman, Dimoussi, and his mother.
There could be no doubt that Challoner had been murdered because he was
a European, by one of his own race.
There could be no doubt that the real owner of the Challoner property,
which went to a distant relation on the female side, was a Moorish youth
living at the village of Agurai.
But Arden kept silence for a long while.
The Woman
_By_ A. A. Milne
_Royal Warwick Regiment_
I
It was April, and in his little bedroom in the Muswell Hill
boarding-house, where Mrs. Morrison (assisted, as you found out later,
by Miss Gertie Morrison) took in a few select paying guests, George
Crosby was packing. Spring came in softly through his open window; it
whispered to him tales of green hedges and misty woods and close-cropped
rolling grass. “Collars,” said George, trying to shut his ears to it,
“handkerchiefs, ties—I knew I’d forgotten something: ties.” He pulled
open a drawer. “Ties, shirts—where’s my list?—shirts, ties.” He wandered
to the window and looked out. Muswell Hill was below him, but he hardly
saw it. “Three weeks,” he murmured. “Heaven for three weeks, and it
hasn’t even begun yet.” There was the splendour of it. It hadn’t begun;
it didn’t begin till to-morrow. He went back in a dream to his packing.
“Collars,” he said, “shirts, ties—ties——”
Miss Gertie Morrison had not offered to help him this year. She had not
forgotten that she had put herself forward the year before, when George
had stammered and blushed (he found blushing very easy in the Muswell
Hill boarding-house), and Algy Traill, the humorist of the
establishment, had winked and said, “George, old boy, you’re in luck;
Gertie never packs for me.” Algy had continued the joke by smacking his
left hand with his right, and saying in an undertone, “Naughty boy, how
dare you call her Gertie?” and then in a falsetto voice: “Oh, Mr.
Crosby, I’m sure I never meant to put myself forward!” Then Mrs.
Morrison from her end of the table called out——
But I can see that I shall have to explain the Muswell Hill ménage to
you. I can do it quite easily while George is finishing his packing. He
is looking for his stockings now, and that always takes him a long time,
because he hasn’t worn them since last April, and they are probably
under the bed.
Well, Mrs. Morrison sits at one end of the table and carves. Suppose it
is Tuesday evening. “Cold beef or hash, Mr. Traill?” she asks, and Algy
probably says “Yes, please,” which makes two of the boarders laugh.
These are two pale brothers called Fossett, younger than you who read
this have ever been, and enthusiastic admirers of Algy Traill. Their
great ambition is to paint the town red one Saturday night. They have
often announced their intention of doing this, but so far they do not
seem to have left their mark on London to any extent. Very different is
it with their hero and mentor. On Boat-race night four years ago Algy
Traill was actually locked up—and dismissed next morning with a caution.
Since then he has often talked as if he were a Cambridge man; the
presence of an Emmanuel lacrosse blue in the adjoining cell having
decided him in the choice of a university.
Meanwhile his hash is getting cold. Let us follow it quickly. It is
carried by the servant to Miss Gertie Morrison at the other end of the
table, who slaps in a helping of potatoes and cabbage. “What, asparagus
_again_?” says Algy, seeing the cabbage. “We _are_ in luck.” Mrs.
Morrison throws up her eyes at Mr. Ransom on her right, as much as to
say, “Was there ever such a boy?” and Miss Gertie threatens him with the
potato spoon, and tells him not to be silly. Mr. Ransom looks
approvingly across the table at Traill. He has a feeling that the Navy,
the Empire, and the Old Country are in some way linked up with men of
the world such as Algy, or that (to put it in another way) a Radical
Nonconformist would strongly disapprove of him. It comes to the same
thing; you can’t help liking the fellow. Mr. Ransom is wearing an M.C.C.
tie; partly because the bright colours make him look younger, partly
because unless he changes _something_ for dinner he never feels quite
clean, you know. In his own house he would dress every night. He is
fifty; tall, dark, red-faced, black-moustached, growing stout; an
insurance agent. It is his great sorrow that the country is going to the
dogs, and he dislikes the setting of class against class. The proper
thing to do is to shoot them down.
Opposite him, and looking always as if he had slept in his clothes, is
Mr. Owen-Jones—called Mr. Joen-Owns by Algy. He argues politics fiercely
across Mrs. Morrison. “My dear fellow,” he cries to Ransom, “you’re
nothing but a reactionary!”—to which Ransom, who is a little doubtful
what a reactionary is, replies, “All I want is to live at peace with my
neighbours. I don’t interfere with them; why should they interfere with
me?” Whereupon Mrs. Morrison says peaceably, “Live and let live. After
all, there are two side to _every_ question—a little more hash, Mr.
Owen-Jones?”
George has just remembered that his stockings are under the bed, so I
must hurry on. As it happens, the rest of the boarders do not interest
me much. There are two German clerks and one French clerk, whose broken
English is always amusing, and somebody with a bald, dome-shaped head
who takes in _Answers_ every week. Three years ago he had sung “Annie
Laurie” after dinner one evening, and Mrs. Morrison still remembers
sometimes to say, “Won’t you sing something, Mr. ——?” whatever his name
was, but he always refuses. He says that he has the new number of
_Answers_ to read.
There you are; now you know everybody. Let us go upstairs again to
George Crosby.
Is there anything in the world jollier than packing up for a holiday? If
there is, I do not know it. It was the hour (or two hours or three
hours) of George’s life. It was more than that; for days beforehand he
had been packing to himself; sorting out his clothes, while he bent over
the figures at his desk, making and drawing up lists of things that he
really mustn’t forget. In the luncheon hour he would look in at hosiers’
windows and nearly buy a blue shirt because it went so well with his
brown knickerbocker suit. You or I would have bought it; it was only
five and sixpence. Every evening he would escape from the
drawing-room—that terrible room—and hurry upstairs to his little
bedroom, and there sit with his big brown kit-bag open before him ...
dreaming. Every evening he had meant to pack a few things just to begin
with: his tweed suit and stockings and nailed shoes, for instance; but
he was always away in the country, following the white path over the
hills, as soon as ever his bag was between his knees. How he ached to
take his body there too ... it was only three weeks to wait, two weeks,
a week, three days—to-morrow! To-morrow—he was almost frightened to
think of it lest he should wake up.
Perhaps you wonder that George Crosby hated the Muswell Hill
boarding-house; perhaps you don’t. For my part I agree with Mrs.
Morrison that it takes all sorts to make a world, and that as Mr. —— (I
forget his name: the dome-shaped gentleman) once surprised us by saying,
“There is good in everybody if only you can find it out.” At any rate
there is humour. I think if George had tried to see the humorous side of
Mrs. Morrison’s select guests he might have found life tolerable. And
yet the best joke languishes after five years.
I had hoped to have gone straight ahead with this story, but I shall
have to take you back five years; it won’t be for long. Believe me, no
writer likes this diving back into the past. He is longing to get to the
great moment when Rosamund puts her head on George’s shoulder and
says—but we shall come to that. What I must tell you now, before my pen
runs away with me, is that five years ago George was at Oxford with
plenty of money in his pocket, and a vague idea in his head that he
would earn a living somehow when he went down. Then his only near
relation, his father, died ... and George came down with no money in his
pocket, and the knowledge that he would have to earn his living at once.
He knew little of London east of the Savoy, where he had once lunched
with his father; I doubt if he even knew the Gaiety by sight. When his
father’s solicitor recommended a certain Islington boarding-house as an
establishment where a man of means could be housed and fed for as little
as thirty shillings a week, and a certain firm in Fenchurch Street as
another establishment where a man of gifts could earn as much as forty
shillings a week, George found out where Islington and Fenchurch Street
were, and fell mechanically into the routine suggested for him. That he
might have been happier alone, looking after himself, cooking his own
meals or sampling alone the cheaper restaurants, hardly occurred to him.
Life was become suddenly a horrible dream, and the boarding-house was
just a part of it.
However, three years of Islington was enough for him. He pulled himself
together ... and moved to Muswell Hill.
There, we have him back at Muswell Hill now, and I have not been long,
have I? He has been two years with Mrs. Morrison. I should like to say
that he is happy with Mrs. Morrison, but he is not. The terrible thing
is that he cannot get hardened to it. He hates Muswell Hill; he hates
Traill and the Fossetts and Ransom; he hates Miss Gertie Morrison. The
whole vulgar, familiar, shabby, sociable atmosphere of the place he
hates. Some day, perhaps, he will pull himself together and move again.
There is a boarding-house at Finsbury Park he has heard of....
II
If you had three weeks’ holiday in the year, three whole weeks in which
to amuse yourself as you liked, how would you spend it? Algy Traill went
to Brighton in August; you should have seen him on the pier. The Fossett
Brothers adorned Weymouth, the Naples of England. They did good, if
slightly obvious, work on the esplanade in fairly white flannels. This
during the day; eight-thirty in the evening found them in the Alexandra
Gardens—dressed. It is doubtful if the Weymouth boarding-house would
have stood it at dinner, so they went up directly afterwards and
changed. Mr. Ransom spent August at Folkestone, where he was understood
to have a doubtful wife. She was really his widowed mother. You would
never have suspected him of a mother, but there she was in Folkestone,
thinking of him always, and only living for the next August. It was she
who knitted him the M.C.C. tie; he had noticed the colours in a
Piccadilly window.
Miss Gertie went to Cliftonville—not Margate.
And where did George go? The conversation at dinner that evening would
have given us a clue; or perhaps it wouldn’t.
“So you’re off to-morrow,” Mrs. Morrison had said. “Well, I’m sure I
hope you’ll have a nice time. A little sea air will do you good.”
“Where are you going, Crosby?” asked Ransom, with the air of a man who
means to know.
George looked uncomfortable.
“I’m not quite sure,” he said awkwardly. “I’m going a sort of
walking-tour, you know; stopping at inns and things. I expect it—er—will
depend a bit, you know.”
“Well, if you _should_ happen to stop at Sandringham,” said Algy, “give
them all my love, old man, won’t you?”
“Then you won’t have your letters sent on?” asked Mrs. Morrison.
“Oh no, thanks. I don’t suppose I shall have any, anyhow.”
“If you going on a walking-tour,” said Owen-Jones, “why don’t you try
the Welsh mountains?”
“I always wonder you don’t run across to Paris,” said the dome-shaped
gentleman suddenly. “It only takes——” He knew all the facts, and was
prepared to give them, but Algy interrupted him with a knowing whistle.
“Paris, George, aha! Place me among the demoiselles, what ho! I don’t
think. Naughty boy!”
Crosby’s first impulse (he had had it before) was to throw his glass of
beer at Algy’s face. The impulse died down, and his resolve hardened to
write about the Finsbury Park boarding-house at once. He had made that
resolution before, too. Then his heart jumped as he remembered that he
was going away on the morrow. He forgot Traill and Finsbury Park, and
went off into his dreams. The other boarders discussed walking-tours and
holiday resorts with animation.
Gertie Morrison was silent. She was often silent when Crosby was there,
and always when Crosby’s affairs were being discussed. She knew he hated
her, and she hated him for it. I don’t think she knew why he hated her.
It was because she lowered his opinion of women.
He had known very few women in his life, and he dreamed dreams about
them. They were wonderful creatures, a little higher than the angels,
and beauty and mystery and holiness hung over them. Some day he would
meet the long-desired one, and (miracle) she would love him, and they
would live happy ever afterwards at—— He wondered sometimes whether an
angel _would_ live happy ever afterwards at Bedford Park. Bedford Park
seemed to strip the mystery and the holiness and the wonder from his
dream. And yet he had seen just the silly little house at Bedford Park
that would suit them; and even angels, if they come to earth, must live
somewhere. She would walk to the gate every morning, and wave him
good-bye from under the flowering laburnum—for I need not say that it
was always spring in his dream. That was why he had his holiday in
April, for it must be spring when he found her, and he would only find
her in the country.... Another reason was that in August Miss Morrison
went to Cliftonville (not Margate), and so he had a fortnight in Muswell
Hill without Miss Morrison.
For it was difficult to believe in the dreams when Gertie Morrison was
daily before his eyes. There was a sort of hard prettiness there, which
might have been beauty, but where were the mystery and the wonder and
the holiness? None of that about the Gertie who was treated so
familiarly by the Fossetts and the Traills and their kind, and answered
them back so smartly. “You can’t get any change out of Gertie,” Traill
often said on these occasions. Almost Crosby wished you could. He would
have had her awkward, bewildered, indignant, overcome with shame; it
distressed him that she was so lamentably well-equipped for the battle.
At first he pitied her, then he hated her. She was betraying her sex.
What he really meant was that she was trying to topple over the
beautiful image he had built.
I know what you are going to say. What about the girl at the A B C shop
who spilt his coffee over his poached egg every day at one thirty-five
precisely? Hadn’t she given his image a little push too? I think not. He
hardly saw her as a woman at all. She was a worker, like himself;
sexless. In the evenings perhaps she became a woman ... wonderful,
mysterious, holy ... I don’t know; at any rate he didn’t see her then.
But Miss Morrison he saw at home; she was pretty and graceful and
feminine; she might have been, not _the_ woman—that would have been
presumption on his part—but a woman ... and then she went and called
Algy Traill “a silly boy,” and smacked him playfully with a teaspoon!
Traill, the cad-about-town, the ogler of women! No wonder the image
rocked.
[Illustration: “Let’s sit down,” he said. “I thought you always went to
Mar—to Cliftonville for your holiday?” (page 27).]
Well, he would be away from the Traills and the Morrisons and the
Fossetts for three weeks. It was April, the best month of the year. He
was right in saying that he was not quite sure where he was going, but
he could have told Mrs. Morrison the direction. He would start down the
line with his knapsack and his well-filled kit-bag. By-and-by he would
get out—the name of the station might attract him, or the primroses on
the banks—leave his bag, and, knapsack on shoulder, follow the road.
Sooner or later he would come to a village; he would find an inn that
could put him up; on the morrow the landlord could drive in for his
bag.... And then three weeks in which to search for the woman.
III
A south wind was blowing little baby clouds along a blue sky; lower
down, the rooks were talking busily to each other in the tall elms which
lined the church; and, lower down still, the foxhound puppy sat himself
outside the blacksmith’s and waited for company. If nothing happened in
the next twenty seconds he would have to go and look for somebody.
But somebody was coming. From the door of “The Dog and Duck” opposite, a
tall, lean, brown gentleman stepped briskly, in his hand a pair of
shoes. The foxhound puppy got up and came across the road sideways to
him. “Welcome, welcome,” he said effusively, and went round the tall,
lean, brown gentleman several times.
“Hallo, Duster,” said the brown gentleman; “coming with me to-day?”
“Come along,” said the foxhound puppy excitedly. “Going with you? I
should just think I am! Which way shall we go?”
“Wait a moment. I want to leave these shoes here.”
Duster followed him into the blacksmith’s shop. The blacksmith thought
he could put some nails in; gentlemen’s shoes and horses’ shoes, he
explained, weren’t quite the same thing. The brown gentleman admitted
the difference, but felt sure that the blacksmith could make a job of
anything he tried his hand at. He mentioned, which the blacksmith knew,
that he was staying at “The Dog and Duck” opposite, and gave his name as
Carfax.
“Come along,” said Duster impatiently.
“Good morning,” said the brown gentleman to the blacksmith. “Lovely day,
isn’t it?... Come along, old boy.”
He strode out into the blue fresh morning, Duster all round him. But
when they got to the church—fifty yards, no more—the foxhound puppy
changed his mind. He had had an inspiration, the same inspiration which
came to him every day at this spot. He stopped.
“Let’s go back,” he said.
“Not coming to-day?” laughed the brown gentleman. “Well, good-bye.”
“You see, I think I’d better wait here, after all,” said the foxhound
puppy apologetically. “Something might happen. Are you really going on?
Well—you’ll excuse me, won’t you?”
He ambled back to his place outside the blacksmith’s shop. The tall,
lean, brown gentleman, who called himself Carfax, walked on briskly with
spring in his heart. Above him the rooks talked and talked; the hedges
were green; and there were little baby clouds in the blue sky.
Shall I try to deceive you for a page or two longer, or shall we have
the truth out at once? Better have the truth. Well, then—the gentleman
who called himself Carfax was really George Crosby. You guessed? Of
course you did. But if you scent a mystery you are wrong.
It was five years ago that Crosby took his first holiday. He came to
this very inn, “The Dog and Duck,” and when they asked him his name he
replied “Geoffrey Carfax.” It had been an inspiration in the train. To
be Geoffrey Carfax for three weeks seemed to cut him off more definitely
from the Fenchurch Street office and the Islington boarding-house.
George Crosby was in prison, working a life sentence; Geoffrey Carfax
was a free man in search of the woman. Romance might come to Geoffrey,
but it could never come to George. They were two different persons; then
let them be two different persons. Besides, glamour hung over the mere
act of giving a false name. George had delightful thrills when he
remembered his deceit; and there was one heavenly moment of panic, on
the last day of his first holiday, when (to avoid detection) he shaved
off his moustache. He was not certain what the punishment was for
calling yourself Geoffrey Carfax when your real name was George Crosby,
but he felt that with a clean-shaven face he could laugh at Scotland
Yard. The downward path, however, is notoriously an easy one. In
subsequent years he let himself go still farther. Even the one false
name wouldn’t satisfy him now; and if he only looked in at a
neighbouring inn for a glass of beer, he would manage to let it fall
into his conversation that he was Guy Colehurst or Gervase Crane or—he
had a noble range of names to choose from, only limited by the fact that
“G.C.” was on his cigarette-case and his kit-bag. (His linen was
studiously unmarked, save with the hieroglyphic of his washerwoman—a
foolish observation in red cotton which might mean anything.)
The tall, lean, brown gentleman, then, taking the morning air was George
Crosby. Between ourselves we may continue to call him George. It is not
a name I like; he hated it too; but George he was undoubtedly. Yet
already he was a different George from the one you met at Muswell Hill.
He had had two weeks of life, and they had made him brown and clear-eyed
and confident. I think I said he blushed readily in Mrs. Morrison’s
boarding-house; the fact was he felt always uneasy in London, awkward,
uncomfortable. In the open air he was at home, ready for he knew not
what dashing adventure.
It was a day of spring to stir the heart with longings and memories.
Memories, half-forgotten, of all the Aprils of the past touched him for
a moment, and then, as he tried to grasp them, fluttered out of reach,
so that he wondered whether he was recalling real adventures which had
happened, or whether he was but dreaming over again the dreams which
were always with him. One memory remained. It was on such a day as this,
five years ago, and almost in this very place, that he had met the
woman.
Yes, I shall have to go back again to tell you of her. Five years ago he
had been staying at this same inn; it was his first holiday after his
sentence to prison. He was not so resigned to his lot five years ago; he
thought of it as a bitter injustice; and the wonderful woman for whom he
came into the country to search was to be his deliverer. So that, I am
afraid, she would have to have been, not only wonderful, mysterious, and
holy, but also rich. For it was to the contented ease of his early days
that he was looking for release; the little haven in Bedford Park had
not come into his dreams. Indeed, I don’t suppose he had even heard of
Bedford Park at that time. It was Islington or The Manor House; anything
in between was Islington. But, of course, he never confessed to himself
that she would need to be rich.
And he found her. He came over the hills on a gentle April morning and
saw her beneath him. She was caught, it seemed, in a hedge. How
gallantly George bore down to the rescue!
“Can I be of any assistance?” he said in his best manner, and that, I
think, is always the pleasantest way to begin. Between “Can I be of any
assistance?” and “With all my worldly goods I thee endow” one has not
far to travel.
“I’m caught,” she said. “If you could——” Observe George spiking himself
fearlessly.
“I say, you really _are_! Wait a moment.”
“It’s very kind of you.”
There—he has done it.
“Thank you so much,” she said, with a pretty smile. “Oh, you’ve hurt
yourself!”
The sweet look of pain on her face!
“It’s nothing,” said George nobly. And it really was nothing. One can
get a delightful amount of blood and sympathy from the most
insignificant scratch.
They hesitated a moment. She looked on the ground; he looked at her.
Then his eyes wandered round the beautiful day, and came back to her
just as she looked up.
“It is a wonderful day, isn’t it?” he said suddenly.
“Yes,” she breathed.
It seemed absurd to separate on such a day when they were both
wandering, and Heaven had brought them together.
“I say, dash it,” said George suddenly: “what are you going to do? Are
you going anywhere particular?”
“Not very particular.”
“Neither am I. Can’t we go there together?”
“I was just going to have lunch.”
“So was I. Well, there you are. It would be silly if you sat here and
ate—what _are_ yours, by the way?”
“Only mutton, I’m afraid.”
“Ah, mine are beef. Well, if you sat here and ate mutton sandwiches and
I sat a hundred yards farther on and ate beef ones, we _should_ look
ridiculous, shouldn’t we?”
“It _would_ be rather silly,” she smiled.
So they sat down and had their sandwiches together.
“My name is Carfax,” he said, “Geoffrey Carfax.” Oh, George! And to a
woman! However, she wouldn’t tell him hers.
They spent an hour over lunch. They wandered together for another hour.
Need I tell you all the things they said? But they didn’t talk of
London.
“Oh, I must be going,” she said suddenly. “I didn’t know it was so late.
No, I know my way. Don’t come with me. Good-bye.”
“It can’t be good-bye,” said George in dismay. “I’ve only just found
you. Where do you live? Who are you?”
“Don’t let’s spoil it,” she smiled. “It’s been a wonderful day—a
wonderful little piece of a day. We’ll always remember it. I don’t think
it’s meant to go on; it stops just here.”
“I _must_ see you again,” said George firmly. “Will you be there
to-morrow, at the same time—at the place where we met?”
“I might.” She sighed. “And I mightn’t.”
But George knew she would.
“Then good-bye,” he said, holding out his hand.
“My name is Rosamund,” she whispered, and fled.
He watched her out of sight, marvelling how bravely she walked. Then he
started for home, his head full of strange fancies....
He found a road an hour later; the road went on and on, it turned and
branched and doubled—he scarcely noticed it. The church clock was
striking seven as he came into the village.
It was a wonderful lunch he took with him next day. Chicken and tongue
and cake and chocolate and hard-boiled eggs. He ate it alone (by the
corner of a wood, five miles from the hedge which captured her) at
half-past three. That day was a nightmare. He never found the place
again, though he tried all through the week remaining to him. He had no
hopes after that day of seeing her, but only to have found the hedge
would have been some satisfaction. At least he could sit there and
sigh—and curse himself for a fool.
He went back to Islington knowing that he had had his chance and missed
it. By next April he had forgotten her. He was convinced that she was
not the woman. _The_ woman had still to be found. He went to another
part of the country and looked for her.
And now he was back at “The Dog and Duck” again. Surely he would find
her to-day. It was the time; it must be almost the place. Would the
loved one be there? He was not sure whether he wanted her to be the
woman of five years ago or not. Whoever she was, she would be the one he
sought. He had walked some miles; funny if he stumbled upon the very
place suddenly.
Memories of five years ago were flooding his mind. Had he really been
here, or had he only dreamed of it? Surely that was the hill down which
he had come; surely that clump of trees on the right had been there
before. And—could that be the very hedge?
It was.
And there was a woman caught in it.
IV
George ran down the hill, his heart thumping heavily at his ribs.... She
had her back towards him.
“Can I be of any assistance?” he said in his best manner. But she didn’t
need to be rich now; there was that little house at Bedford Park.
She turned round.
It was Gertie Morrison!
Silly of him; of course, it wasn’t Miss Morrison; but it was
extraordinarily like her. Prettier, though.
“Why, Mr. Crosby!” she said.
It _was_ Gertie Morrison.
“You!” he said angrily.
He was furious that such a trick should have been played upon him at
this moment; furious to be reminded suddenly that he was George Crosby
of Muswell Hill. Muswell Hill, the boarding-house—Good Lord! Gertie
Morrison! Algy Traill’s Gertie.
“Yes, it’s me,” she said, shrinking from him. She saw he was angry with
her; she vaguely understood why.
Then George laughed. After all, she hadn’t deliberately put herself in
his way. She could hardly be expected to avoid the whole of England
(outside Muswell Hill) until she knew exactly where George Crosby
proposed to take his walk. What a child he was to be angry with her.
When he laughed, she laughed too—a little nervously.
“Let me help,” he said. He scratched his fingers fearlessly on her
behalf. What should he do afterwards? he wondered. His day was spoilt
anyhow. He could hardly leave her.
“Oh, you’ve hurt yourself!” she said. She said it very sweetly, in a
voice that only faintly reminded him of the Gertie of Muswell Hill.
“It’s nothing,” he answered, as he had answered five years ago.
They stood looking at each other. George was puzzled.
“You are Miss Morrison, aren’t you?” he said. “Somehow you seem
different.”
“You’re different from the Mr. Crosby I know.”
“Am I? How?”
“It’s dreadful to see you at the boarding-house.” She looked at him
timidly. “You don’t mind my mentioning the boarding-house, do you?”
“Mind? Why should I?” (After all, he still had another week.)
“Well, you want to forget about it when you’re on your holiday.”
Fancy her knowing that.
“And are you on your holiday too?”
She gave a long deep sigh of content.
“Yes,” she said.
He looked at her with more interest. There was colour in her face; her
eyes were bright; in her tweed skirt she looked more of a country girl
than he would have expected.
“Let’s sit down,” he said. “I thought you always went to Mar—to
Cliftonville for your holiday?”
“I always go to my aunt’s there in the summer. It isn’t really a
holiday; it’s more to help her; she has a boarding-house too. And it
really is Cliftonville—only, of course, it’s silly of mother to mind
having it called Margate. Cliftonville’s much worse than Margate really.
I hate it.”
(This can’t be Gertie Morrison, thought George. It’s a dream.)
“When did you come here?”
“I’ve been here about ten days. A girl friend of mine lives near here.
She asked me suddenly just after you’d gone—I mean about a fortnight
ago. Mother thought I wasn’t looking well and ought to go. I’ve been
before once or twice. I love it.”
“And do you have to wander about the country by yourself? I mean,
doesn’t your friend—I say, I’m asking you an awful lot of questions. I’m
sorry.”
“That’s all right. But, of course, I love to go about alone,
particularly at this time of year. _You_ understand that.”
Of course he understood it. That was not the amazing thing. The amazing
thing was that she understood it.
He took his sandwiches from his pocket.
“Let’s have lunch,” he said. “I’m afraid mine are only beef.”
“Mine are worse,” she smiled. “They’re only mutton.”
A sudden longing to tell her of his great adventure of five years ago
came to George. (If you had suggested it to him in March!)
“It’s rather funny,” he said, as he untied his sandwiches—“I was down
here five years ago——”
“I know,” she said quietly.
George sat up suddenly and stared at her.
“It was you!” he cried.
“Yes.”
“You. Good Lord!... But your name—you said your name was—wait a
moment—that’s it! Rosamund!”
“It is. Gertrude Rosamund. I call myself Rosamund in the country. I like
to pretend I’m not the”—she twisted a piece of grass in her hands, and
looked away from him over the hill—“the horrible girl of the
boarding-house.”
George got on to his knees and leant excitedly over her.
“Tell me, do you hate and loathe and detest Traill and the Fossetts and
Ransom as much as I do?”
She hesitated.
“Mr. Ransom has a mother in Folkestone he’s very good to. He’s not
really bad, you know.”
“Sorry. Wash out Ransom. Traill and the Fossetts?”
“Yes. Oh yes. Oh yes, yes, yes.” Her cheeks flamed as she cried it, and
she clenched her hands.
George was on his knees already, and he had no hat to take off, but he
was very humble.
“Will you forgive me?” he said. “I think I’ve misjudged you. I mean,” he
stammered—“I mean, I don’t mean—of course, it’s none of my business to
judge you—I’m speaking like a prig, I—oh, you know what I mean. I’ve
been a brute to you. Will you forgive me?”
She held out her hand, and he shook it. This had struck him, when he had
seen it on the stage, as an absurdly dramatic way of making friends, but
it seemed quite natural now.
“Let’s have lunch,” she said.
They began to eat in great content.
“Same old sandwiches,” smiled George. “I say, I suppose I needn’t
explain why I called myself Geoffrey Carfax.” He blushed a little as he
said the name. “I mean, you seem to understand.”
She nodded. “You wanted to get away from George Crosby; _I_ know.”
And then he had a sudden horrible recollection.
“I say, you must have thought me a beast. I brought a terrific lunch out
with me the next day, and then I went and lost the place. Did you wait
for me?”
Gertie would have pretended she hadn’t turned up herself, but Rosamund
said, “Yes, I waited for you. I thought perhaps you had lost the place.”
“I say,” said George, “what lots I’ve got to say to you. When did you
recognise me again? Fancy my not knowing you.”
“It was three years, and you’d shaved your moustache.”
“So I had. But I could recognise people just as easily without it.”
She laughed happily. It was the first joke she had heard him make since
that day five years ago.
“Besides, we’re both different in the country. I knew you as soon as I
heard your voice just now. Never at all at Muswell Hill.”
“By Jove!” said George, “just fancy.” He grinned at her happily.
After lunch they wandered. It was a golden afternoon, the very afternoon
they had had five years ago. Once when she was crossing a little stream
in front of him, and her foot slipped on a stone, he called out, “Take
care, Rosamund,” and thrilled at the words. She let them pass unnoticed;
but later on, when they crossed the stream again lower down, he took her
hand and she said, “Thank you, Geoffrey.”
They came to an inn for tea. How pretty she looked pouring out the tea
for him—not for him, for them; the two of them. She and he! His thoughts
became absurd....
Towards the end of the meal something happened. She didn’t know what it
was, but it was this. He wanted more jam; she said he’d had enough.
Well, then, he wasn’t to have much, and she would help him herself.
He was delighted with her.
She helped him ... and something in that action brought back swiftly and
horribly the Gertie Morrison of Muswell Hill, the Gertie who sat next to
Algy and helped him to cabbage. He finished his meal in silence.
She was miserable, not knowing what had happened.
He paid the bill and they went outside. In the open air she was Rosamund
again, but Rosamund with a difference. He couldn’t bear things like
this. As soon as they were well away from the inn he stopped. They leant
against a gate and looked down into the valley at the golden sun.
“Tell me,” he said, “I want to know everything. Why are you—what you
are, in London?”
And she told him. Her mother had not always kept a boarding-house. While
her father was alive they were fairly well off; she lived a happy life
in the country as a young girl. Then they came to London. She hated it,
but it was necessary for her father’s business. Then her father died,
and left nothing.
“So did my father,” said George under his breath.
She touched his hand in sympathy.
“I was afraid that was it.... Well, mother tried keeping a
boarding-house. She couldn’t do it by herself. I had to help. That was
just before I met you here.... Oh, if you could know how I hated it. The
horrible people. It started with two boarders. Then there was
one—because I smacked the other one’s face. Mother said that wouldn’t
do. Well, of course, it wouldn’t. I tried taking no notice of them.
Well, that wouldn’t do either. I had to put up with it; that was my
life.... I used to pretend I was on the stage and playing the part of a
landlady’s vulgar daughter. You know what I mean; you often see it on
the stage. That made it easier—it was really rather fun sometimes. I
suppose I overplayed the part—made it more common than it need have
been—it’s easy to do that. By-and-by it began to come natural; perhaps I
am like that really. We weren’t anybody particular even when father was
alive. Then you came—I saw you were different from the rest. I knew you
despised me—quite right too. But you really seemed to hate me, I never
quite knew why. I hadn’t done you any harm. It made me hate you too....
It made me want to be specially vulgar and common when you were there,
just to show you I didn’t mind what you thought about me.... You were so
superior.
“I got away in the country sometimes. I just loved that. I think I was
really living for it all the time.... I always called myself Rosamund in
the country.... I hate men—why are they such beasts to us always?”
“They _are_ beasts,” said George, giving his sex away cheerfully. But he
was not thinking of Traill and the Fossetts; he was thinking of himself.
“It’s very strange,” he went on; “all the time I thought that the others
were just what they seemed to be, and that I alone had a private life of
my own which I hid from everybody. And all the time _you_.... Perhaps
Traill is really somebody else sometimes. Even Ransom has his secret—his
mother.... What a horrible prig I’ve been!”
“No, no! Oh, but you were!”
“And a coward. I never even tried.... I might have made things much
easier for you.”
“You’re not a coward.”
“Yes, I am. I’ve just funked life. It’s too much for me, I’ve said, and
I’ve crept into my shell and let it pass over my head.... And I’m still
a coward. I can’t face it by myself. Rosamund, will you marry me and
help me to be braver?”
“No, no, no,” she cried, and pushed him away and laid her head on her
arms and wept.
Saved, George, saved! Now’s your chance. You’ve been rash and impetuous,
but she has refused you, and you can withdraw like a gentleman. Just say
“I beg your pardon,” and move to Finsbury Park next month ... and go on
dreaming about the woman. Not a landlady’s vulgar little daughter, but——
George, George, what are you doing?
He has taken the girl in his arms! He is kissing her eyes and her mouth
and her wet cheeks! He is telling her....
I wash my hands of him.
V
John Lobey, landlord of “The Dog and Duck,” is on the track of a
mystery. Something to do with they anarchists and such-like. The chief
clue lies in the extraordinary fact that on three Sundays in succession
Parson has called “George Crosby, bachelor, of this parish,” when
everybody knows that there isn’t a Crosby in the parish, and that the
gentleman from London, who stayed at his inn for three weeks and comes
down Saturdays—for which purpose he leaves his bag and keeps on his
room—this gentleman from London, I tell you, is Mr. Geoffrey Carfax.
Leastways it was the name he gave.
John Lobey need not puzzle his head over it. Geoffrey Carfax is George
Crosby, and he is to be married next Saturday at a neighbouring village
church, in which “Gertrude Rosamund Morrison, spinster, of this parish,”
has also been called three times. Mr. and Mrs. Crosby will then go up to
London and break the news to Mrs. Morrison.
“Not until you are my wife,” said George firmly, “do you go into that
boarding-house again.” He was afraid to see her there.
“You dear,” said Rosamund; and she wrote to her mother that the weather
was so beautiful, and she was getting so much stronger, and her friend
so much wanted her to stay, that ... and so on. It is easy to think of
things like that when you are in love.
On the Sunday before the wedding George told her that he had practically
arranged about the little house in Bedford Park.
“And I’m getting on at the office rippingly. It’s really quite
interesting after all. I shall get another rise in no time.”
“You dear,” said Rosamund again. She pressed his hand tight and....
But really, you know, I think we might leave them now. They have both
much to learn; they have many quarrels to go through, many bitter
misunderstandings to break down; but they are alive at last. And so we
may say good-bye.
The Cherub
_By_ Oliver Onions
_Army Service Corps_
It was provided in the roster of Garrison Duties, Section “Guards and
Picquets,” that a sentry should march and return along that portion of
the grey wall that lay between the Sowgate Steps and the Tower of the
ancient South Bar, a hundred yards away; but fate alone had determined
that that sentry should be Private Hey. And, since Private Hey was
barely tall enough to look forth from the grey embrasures of the outer
wall to the pleasant Maychester Plain where the placid river wound, the
same fate had further decreed that his gaze should be directed inwards,
over the tall trees below him, to the row of Georgian houses of mellow
plum-like brick that stood beyond the narrow back gardens, and past
these again to other trees and other houses, to where the minster towers
arose in the heart of the ancient city. Only occasionally did a
fleeting, pathetic wonder cross Private Key’s mind whether there was an
irony in this.
A lithograph of uniforms outside the post office (guards, artillery, and
militia, all in one frame) had turned his thoughts to the Army seven
years before, and the recruiting-sergeant had clinched the matter. Until
then he had been a builder’s clerk. He was just five-and-twenty. He had
a pink, round face, wide-open blue eyes, the slightest of blond
moustaches, and his soft, slack mouth seemed only to be held closed by
his chin-strap. He always looked hot and on the point of perspiration.
Knowing something of the building trade, it had been his amusement,
while on his lofty beat, to work out in his mind the interiors of the
Georgian houses of which he saw only the outsides. With the
chimney-stacks thus and thus, the fireplaces were probably distributed
after such and such a fashion; white-sashed windows irregularly placed
among the ivy doubtless gave on landings; waste and cistern-pipes were
traceable to sources here and there; and Private Hey had his opinion on
each of the chimney-cowls that turned this way and that with the wind.
He knew the habits, too, of the folk on whose back gardens he looked
down. The nurse in native robes reminded him of his five years in India;
the old lady in black merino who fed the birds was familiar; and he
liked to see the children who spread white cloths on the grass beneath
the pear and cherry trees and held their small tea-parties. Sometimes he
wondered whether, to them, so far above them, he did not look like one
of the scarlet geraniums of their own window-boxes.
It had been during the previous spring that the incoming of a new tenant
to the end house of the row had interested him mildly. He had watched
the white-jacketed house-painters at work, and had reflected that the
small window they were covering with a coloured transparency was
probably that of a bathroom. Then the new tenants had moved in, and one
day a small, plump woman’s figure had appeared shaking a table-cloth at
the top of the narrow garden. The sentry had stopped suddenly in his
beat, and broken into the sweat he always seemed on the point of. Even
at that distance he had recognised her; and when, after some minutes, he
had begun to think again, the only idea that had come to him was, why,
during the seven years in which he had not ceased to think of Mollie
Westwood, had he never once pictured her in a blue gown?
But she was Mollie Hullah now; he knew that. And he knew Hullah, too,
architect and surveyor. Hullah had been the foreman of Peterson’s
building yard in the days when he, Tom Hey, civilian, had been
Peterson’s junior clerk. He remembered him as an ambitious sort of chap,
who (while Tom Hey had “flown his kite,” as he put it) had bought
himself a case of instruments and a reel-tape, and studied, and made
himself an architect. Tom Hey’s duties had been confined to the
day-book; Hullah and Peterson between them contained the true account of
the Peterson business; and Hey had not guessed the reason for this
until, in India, he had received the newspaper that contained the
account of Peterson’s bankruptcy. Then he had “tumbled.” The examination
showed Peterson’s books to have been ill-kept with a sagacity and
foresight that had drawn forth ironical compliments from the registrar
himself. “Your chief witness abroad, too; excellent!” the registrar had
commented.... No; Hullah was not the fellow to tell all he knew about
contractors and palm-oil and peculating clerks-of-works. Hullah was the
kind of man who got on.
Since Hullah had come to live in the end house, Private Hey, eyes-right
when he turned at the South Bar, and eyes-left when he turned again at
the Sowgate Steps, had counted the days when Mollie had appeared at the
windows or shaken the table-cloth in the narrow garden. His amusement
was no longer with chimney-pots and bath-rooms; it was, to tell over to
himself the dissolute life he had led since Mollie had turned her back
on him. Somehow, it seemed to exalt her.
It was not that he had ever lied, or stolen, or left a friend in
trouble. To the pink-faced private these things were not merely wicked;
they were “dead off”—a much worse thing. He drew the line at things that
were “off.” But he had committed a monotonous routine of other sins,
beginning usually at the canteen, continuing at the “regulation” inns or
at the Cobourg Music-hall, and ending on the defaulter-sheet with a C.B.
And one day his colonel had said to him: “Hey, you remind me of a cherub
who kicks about in the mud and glories to think himself an imp.” That
had puzzled and troubled Hey, for he liked the fine old colonel.
[Illustration: “He forgot everything except little Mollie Westwood”
(page 35).]
For he had ranked himself with the magnificently wicked. In amours,
short of anything that was “off,” was he not a Juan? In the matter of
inebriety, and for brawling in the streets, why, his officers might make
war with ceremony and all that, but (the cherub flattered himself) he
was an item of the reckless, heroic, glorious stuff they had to do it
with. And since Mollie, by refusing him, had driven him to all this, the
sight of her ought surely to have inspired him in his courses; it
troubled him that it did not do so. On the contrary, he never felt less
inclination to fuddle himself or to click his heels over the
gallery-rail of the Cobourg than when he had seen her. When he did not
see her, these things were less difficult, and that again was wrong. To
regulate his conduct at all by the sight of another man’s wife was, of
all dead-off things, the deadest.
Now Hullah, as the sentry knew, had no family; but when, the following
spring, the apple trees put forth their pink, and the white clouds
sailed high over Maychester, and the note of the cuckoo floated on the
air, the cherub became moody and bashful and changed colour ten times in
an hour. Thrushes and blackbirds flew back and forth from their nests;
and Mollie, too, her figure dwarfed by his point of vantage, sunned
herself in the garden. Sometimes the cherub blushed red as his tunic. He
ought to have gone to the Cobourg and played the very deuce; instead,
off duty, he wandered unhappily alone. Then one day he missed her, and
his eyes scanned the house and her windows timorously.
Six weeks passed. Then one morning he saw that the white blinds were
drawn. His face became white as wax.
The next day he saw the tail of a coach beyond the end of the house. He
exceeded his beat, descended the Sowgate Steps, and stood, trembling and
watching. Then he gave a great sob of relief. The coach had turned; the
horse wore white conical peaks of linen on its ears—the mark of a
child’s funeral. The small procession passed, and the cherub resumed his
beat.
That evening the colonel stopped him as he crossed the barrack yard.
“Ah, Hey!... I’m glad you’ve given us so little trouble lately. I’d try
to keep it up if I were you.”
“Yes, sir,” said the cherub, saluting; and the colonel nodded kindly and
passed on.
* * * * *
The July sun beat fiercely down on the grey walls, and the sentry’s
tunic was of a glaring bull’s red. Not a breath moved the trees below,
and the click of his heels sounded monotonously.
Within the shadow of the South Bar, where the steps wound down to the
street, a frock-coated, square-built man of forty, with clipped whiskers
and crafty eyes, watched the sentry approach. For the second time he
cleared his throat and said “Tom!”
This time the sentry turned. “I ain’t allowed to talk on duty,” he said.
The man within the shadow waited.
He waited for half an hour, and then the clatter of the relief was heard
ascending the turret. Presently Private Hey passed him without looking
at him. He descended after him, and in the street spoke again.
“I ain’t off duty yet; you can come to the Buttercup,” said Private Hey.
The bar of the Buttercup was below the level of the street, and a
gas-jet burned all day over its zinc-covered counter. In the back
parlour behind it Hullah awaited Private Hey.
The cherub’s voice was heard shouting an order, and he entered the snug.
The uncoated barman followed him with the liquor, and retired.
“Did you want to speak to me?” the cherub demanded.
“I did, Tom, I did. How—how are you getting on?”
“Spit it out.”
Hullah murmured smoothly: “Ah, the same blunt-spoken, honest Tom that
was at Peterson’s! You remember Peterson’s and the old days, Tom?”
“I’d let the old days drop if I was you. I thought you had done.”
“So did I, Tom, so did I; but every breast has its troubles. You’ve
heard the expression, Tom, that there is no cupboard without its
skeleton?”
“Keep your cupboards and skeletons to yourself.... Does the new bathroom
answer all right?”
“Nicely, Tom, I thank you.... Did you know Peterson was back in
Maychester?”
“Ho, is he? I expect he wants to talk over the old days with his friend
Hullah, same as you with me. Well, you was a precious pair o’
rascals—though for myself, mark you, I like to see honour among such.”
“Hush, Tom!... He’s back, and seeking you. He’d better be careful; it’s
twenty years, is that. But what I wanted to say, Tom, is that it would
save a lot of trouble—a lot of trouble—if you weren’t to see him.”
“Ho!... Hullah, my man.”
“Yes, Tom.”
“Do you know what I think you are?”
Hullah stammered. It was so hard to get a start in business—the
competition—he’d gone straight except for that once.
“I think you’re the blackguardest, off-est scamp in the trade, and I
wouldn’t be found dead in a ditch with you. That’s juicy, coming from
me. _I’m_ no saint, but just a common-or-garden Tommy, with a defaulter
sheet it’s a sin to read; and _I_ say you’re a blackguard, and
dead-off.”
Hullah cringed. He’d gone straight since—Peterson had already pushed him
for twice what he’d had out of it—it was hard to be persecuted like
this, hard. The cherub revolved in his mind phrases of elaborate and
over-done irony.
Suddenly Hullah mentioned his wife, and the pink of the cherub’s face
deepened.
“Come into the yard,” he said.
Hullah followed him into a dusty plot, where hens scratched and cases
and barrels lay scattered everywhere.
“What did you say?” the soldier demanded.
The architect’s face was of an unwholesome white, and Hey spat. He saw
that Hullah feared he was going to strike him.
“She’s been ill, Tom, and must be got away to the Mediterranean.
Peterson’s sucking me dry; he thinks I’m afraid of him. You used to be
fond of her, Tom.”
All at once Private Hey’s wrath gave place to utter wretchedness, and he
began to stride up and down the yard. Tears rose into his eyes, and
presently rolled unchecked down his cheeks. He approached Hullah, and
said in a quavering voice: “A fortnight ago—was that?”
“A boy,” Hullah murmured.
“It’s a mercy he’s dead, if he’d ha’ been like you,” the cherub sobbed.
And then he forgot all about Hullah. He forgot everything except that
little Mollie Westwood had been through an agony, was ill, must be got
away, and that he might help her. An ineffable, soft thrill stirred at
his heart; he, wicked Tom Hey, might help her. And presently he stood
before Hullah again, looking wistfully at him.
“You ain’t lying, Hullah?”
“Oh, Tom!”
“And suppose—suppose I was to think Peterson’s as big a thief as you,
and treat him as such—treat him as such, if he dares to speak to me; you
understand, Hullah?”
“Don’t put it that way, Tom ... then I may take it, Tom——?”
“Oh, go, go! I want to me by myself!” the poor cherub moaned; and
Hullah, turning once to dart a hateful glance at him over his shoulder,
passed through the public-house.
* * * * *
“It’s Siberia for you this time, Tom,” the guard whispered, adjusting
his pipe-clayed belt; “what in thunder made you go and do it?”
The cherub’s tunic was unbelted, and the colour had fled from his simple
face. He made no reply.
“Was you drunk? Barker says you hadn’t been in the canteen. Anyway, the
chap’s in ’orspital. A blooming civilian, too!”
He saluted stiffly; the major had passed on his way to the outbuilding
that had been furnished for a court-martial; and the barrack clock
struck eleven.
Half a dozen officers in full uniform sat about a long trestle-table,
and the sunlight that came through the tall windows lay across the pens
and ink and pink blotting-paper that were spread before the Court. The
colonel, at the head of the table, talked to Warren, the regimental
surgeon.
“I’m absurdly upset, Warren. It’s ridiculous, the faith I have in the
fellow. Moreover, I have reason to know that he hasn’t touched drink for
weeks.”
“He’s been in the habit, and in such cases a sudden discontinuance
sometimes.... But the point isn’t whether he was drunk or not; it’s an
unprovoked attack on this fellow Peterson, or whatever his name is.”
The colonel sighed. “Ah, well, I can’t overlook this. Are you ready,
gentlemen?”
An orderly opened the door, and the prisoner was brought in between two
armed guards. He saluted the Court, and then stood at attention. The
guards fell back. Two or three witnesses sat on a bench within the door.
The colonel did not once look at Private Hey, and the charge was read.
The principal witness lay in hospital, but sufficient evidence of the
fact of the assault would be produced, and the president desired the
prisoner to plead. The plea was scarcely audible, but it was understood
to be “Not guilty,” and the first witness was called.
The cherub knew not in what queer way it hurt him that his colonel
refused to look at him. He didn’t much care what happened, but he would
have liked the colonel to think well of him. A witness was telling how
the prisoner had reeled, spoken thickly, offered his bayonet, and
finally flung the man down the steps of the turret of the South Bar.
Would the witness consider the prisoner to have been drunk? the Court
asked, and the witness replied that he should. The steps were old and
worn; might not the man have slipped? the Court suggested, and the
witness reminded the Court that the prisoner had staggered and offered
his bayonet. Had the injured man spoken to the prisoner? The witness
thought not; he had seemed to be on the point of speaking, but the
prisoner had cut him short, exclaiming: “I don’t want to talk to
dead-off’s—like you!”
Asked if he had anything to say, the prisoner shook his head. “I wasn’t
drunk, sir,” he said.
Other witnesses were called; the case went drowsily forward, and the
major yawned. The colonel was whispering to the doctor again, and then
for the first time he looked at the prisoner.
“Do you know this Peterson?”
“I worked for him when I was a civilian, sir,” the prisoner answered.
“Have you any grudge against him?”
“I didn’t want to talk to him, sir.”
“But suppose he should speak to you again?”
A brief gleam of satisfaction crossed the cherub’s mild blue eyes. “I
frightened him too bad for that, sir,” he said; and then, as the
colonel’s grave eyes did not cease to regard him, there came a quick
little break in his voice.
“I wasn’t drunk, sir. I wouldn’t tell you a lie, sir, nor do nothing
that’s off—there’s marks against me a many, but not for things that’s
off; I ask you to believe I wasn’t drunk, sir——”
“Clear the Court,” said the colonel.
The guard, the prisoner, and the witnesses filed out and the door
closed, and the colonel leaned forward in his chair. He seemed
disproportionately moved.
“Gentlemen,” he said, “if the prisoner is to be seriously punished, I
ask you to remember it’s dismissal and imprisonment. Let me make a
suggestion. It was a very hot day—he’s been in India—possibly an old
sunstroke——”
“A bit discredited, that,” observed the doctor.
“He would be punished, of course, but more leniently. It’s all I can put
forward. It rests with the Court.”
He leaned back again, troubled. In the hum of consultation he heard
Warren’s slightly sarcastic laugh, and thought he heard the major say:
“Oh, let it go at that; Neville seems to want it.”
“Very well, sir,” said the major by and by; “we are agreed.”
And as the cherub, returning with the guard, received the milder
sentence, he looked humbly and gratefully at his colonel. He recognised
that there are things that a commanding officer cannot overlook, but
that a private gentleman, on occasion, may.
An Impossible Person
_By_ W. B. Maxwell
_Royal Fusiliers_
Using the cant phrase, people often said that General Sir John Beckford
was a quite impossible person. A brave soldier, a true gentleman, a
splendid creature physically—just so, but rendering himself absurd and
futile by notions so old-fashioned that they had been universally
exploded before he was born. A man who obstinately refused to move with
the times, who in manner, costume, and every idea belonged, and seemed
proud to belong, to the past.
Even his own relatives admitted the impossibility of him when, at the
age of sixty, he gave effect to the most old-fashioned of all
conceivable notions by marrying for love. If an elderly widower with a
little son of nine wants somebody to make a home and help to rear the
child, he should invite some middle-aged female cousin to come to his
assistance; but if he wants a charming, attractive girl to renounce the
joys and hopes of youth in order to soothe and gladden his dull remnant
of years—well, he _oughtn’t_ to want it, and really it is not quite nice
when he does.
Lady Jane Armitage, an ancient aunt, put this thought into very plain
words and forced Sir John to listen to them. A mistake—not even a fair
bargain. What is Cynthia to get, on her side? A seat in a carriage, a
liberal dress allowance, perhaps a few more loose sovereigns than she
has been accustomed to carry in that silly little gold purse of hers!
“The idea of money,” said Sir John gruffly, “has never entered Cynthia’s
head.”
“Perhaps not. But what else can you offer her? To hold your landing-net
while you do your stupid fishing; to perform the duties of a
nursery-governess for Jack; to enjoy the privilege of playing hostess
when you entertain half a dozen other generals and their frumpish
wives.”
Sir John echoed his aunt’s last adjective ironically.
“Yes,” said Lady Jane, “but I’m different. I _know_ I’m a frump, and
your friends aren’t aware of their misfortune. No, John, I tell you
frankly, it isn’t a fair bargain.”
Sir John bit his grey moustache, ran a strong hand through his shock of
grey hair, contracted his heavy brows, and then laughed and shrugged his
shoulders.
“Inexplicable to you, eh, Aunt Jane? Well, let’s leave it at that. But
be kind to Cynthia all the same, won’t you? Save her from the _other_
frumps,” and, ceasing to laugh, he stared at Lady Jane almost fiercely.
He was one of those men who consider it beneath their dignity to betray
tender emotion, and who perhaps look sternest and most forbidding when
they are feeling unusually soft and gentle. At any rate, he would not
explain to his aunt that he believed the marriage to be an eminently
fair bargain—an old-fashioned exchange—love for love—as much love on the
girl’s side as on his.
Lady Jane made no promise, but she proved very kind indeed to her new
niece; endeavouring to find innocent amusement for pretty Cynthia,
acting as her chaperon, watching over her, and growing fonder and fonder
of her. She said that the young Lady Beckford was a model wife and a
pattern stepmother. No one could have been more devoted to or wiser in
her training of Master Jack.
Now, after five years, the boy was ready to go to a public school, and
during these long summer days a holiday tutor had been giving him final
preparation, ultimate crammed knowledge, and topmost polish of tone and
manners. August had been spent at the Beckfords’ country house in
Devonshire, and the early weeks of September at their flat in Victoria
Street. Lady Jane approved of everything that concerned these
arrangements, except one thing. She approved of the public school, of
the engaging of a holiday tutor, of all the care, devotion, and
forethought with which the little man was being launched from the home
circle; but she did not approve of the fact that Sir John had thrown the
whole burden on Cynthia’s slender shoulders, while he did his stupid
salmon-fishing four hundred miles away in Scotland.
Not quite fair to Cynthia—leaving her all alone with a schoolboy and his
tutor. Lady Jane, at considerable inconvenience, ran down to Devonshire
to cheer and enliven her. Came back to London and at worse inconvenience
stayed there, so as to be handy to act as companion, chaperon, advisory
ally, whenever Cynthia wanted her.
But Cynthia wanted her scarcely at all, and allowed poor Lady Jane to
perceive at last that uninvited companions are sometimes a tedium rather
than a solace.
* * * * *
It was the last night of the holidays. To-morrow Master Jack and his
tutor would disappear from Victoria Street.
Dinner had been ordered at an early hour, and Jack was scampering
through his meal with excited swiftness. One last treat had been
arranged for him. He was to be dispatched to a theatre presently in
charge of George, the footman.
“I wish you were coming,” said Jack, and as he turned to Mr. Ridsdale
his eyes expressed eloquently enough the hero-worship that is so easy to
kindle in young and ingenuous hearts.
“It would be scarcely polite,” said Mr. Ridsdale, “for both of us to
desert Lady Beckford.”
“No,” said Jack; “but I wish she’d come with us,” and he turned to his
stepmother. “Won’t you change your mind?”
“I really don’t feel up to it, Jack. I’m tired—I’ve had a headache since
the day before yesterday.”
“It might drive the headache away,” said Jack, eagerly. “They say it’s a
tip-top piece.”
His stepmother and his tutor both smiled as they looked at his bright
and animated face. Lady Beckford’s smile was simply affectionate; Mr.
Ridsdale’s was indulgent and patronising.
“A rousing melodrama, Jack! All noise and stamping.”
“Yes,” cried Jack, enthusiastically. “Murder and sudden death—just what
I like.”
“But not,” said Mr. Ridsdale, “exactly indicated as a cure for a
headache.”
“Well, if I can’t persuade you——” and Jack turned to Yates, the butler.
“Has George changed his things?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Then I’ll be off.” Jack pushed his plate away with a gesture that
elegant Mr. Ridsdale could not approve of. It was too childish for a boy
of fourteen—a little more polish required, in spite of so much
polishing. “Good night,” and Jack kissed Lady Beckford. “I shan’t say
good night to you, Mr. Ridsdale, because you won’t have turned in before
I get back, will you?”
“No; I’ll sit up for you,” and Mr. Ridsdale, smiling, spoke with rather
strained facetiousness. “I’ll be waiting to hear how the heroine was
extricated from her misfortunes, how the villain got scored off by the
funny man, and how virtue triumphed all round in the end. There! Cut
along. Your escort is waiting for you.”
Master Jack hurried gaily from the dining-room, and his boyish voice
sounded for a few moments as he prattled to the footman. Then the hall
door of the flat opened and shut, and the two elders were left alone to
finish their dinner at leisure.
“Ah!” Mr. Ridsdale drew in his breath with a little sigh, and, looking
at his hostess, spoke quietly and meditatively. “I know you often read
people’s thoughts, but I wonder if you could guess what I’m thinking
now?”
“I’ll try, if you like. You were thinking that perhaps, after all, Jack
is too young still for the rough-and-tumble life of a big school.”
“Oh, no,” said Mr. Ridsdale, carelessly. “Jack’ll do all right. They’ll
soon lick him into shape. No”—and his tone softened and deepened, though
he was speaking almost in a whisper—“no; I was thinking this is the last
night of my—my holidays; possibly the last time I shall ever sit in this
pleasant room, or see you wearing that beautiful dress, or hear you
playing classical music, that I don’t understand, but love to listen
to.”
Truly it seemed a pleasant room, a remarkably pleasant room for a London
flat. The evening was just cold enough to justify a fire, and small logs
of wood in a basket grate sent dancing flames to light up the oak panels
of the walls; electric lamps flashed brightly on silver and glass; a
golden basket of peaches and another of grapes made the table appear a
symbolised announcement of ease, luxury, even of sumptuousness; the
butler, moving to and fro so promptly and yet so sedately, offered one
delicate food and stimulating wine. It was all very, very pleasant.
Pretty things wherever one glanced—a mirror in a sculptured frame, some
blue and white china on a long shelf, and, seen faintly, with the
electric light just indicating their existence, rows of handsomely bound
books behind latticed glass; altogether what would be described in stage
language as a charming interior.
Any tutor, accustomed to the hard seats and coarse fare of a school
hall, might feel regret at leaving such a room irrevocably, and might
long afterwards yearn to see again the pretty things that it contained.
But just now Mr. Ridsdale was looking only at his hostess, and he
repeated the compliment about her dress.
“I admire you in that more than in any of the others,” he said, softly,
and rather sorrowfully.
“Because it is black, I suppose. It’s quite old. But men always like
black dresses. My husband does.”
The dress was made of velvet, with some silver decoration across the
front of the bodice, and it certainly appeared becoming. In it Cynthia
Beckford looked very slim and young; fair-haired, but dark-eyed,
naturally pale, but with a rapid flicker of colour; a person of frank,
kind outlook, a simple and truthful sort of person, and yet with
underlying depths of character or sensibility that proved astoundingly
interesting to the few people who had studied her closely. Frenchmen
would describe her beauty, such as it was, as belonging to the order
that slowly troubles rather than quickly fascinates.
“But I’m not like the General,” said Mr. Ridsdale. “I admire _that_
black dress, not _any_ black dress.”
He said it with a perceptible insistence, quietly but obstinately; as if
conscious of subtle values in his own taste, and unwilling that it
should be confounded with the ordinary likes and dislikes of another
person—even though that person were as worthy and respectable as his
temporary employer.
Mr. Ridsdale was a good-looking man of thirty, tall and thin, of easy
carriage and elegant manners. Boys, big and small, among whom he had
passed the better part of his life, always looked up to him, and
sometimes adored him, as a perfect type of school-trained manhood; and
girls, too, were frequently subjugated by his charms. He was the sort of
man who is not as a rule dreaded by other men as likely to prove a
dangerous rival; and yet one might well suppose that in certain
circumstances he would be dangerous—for instance, if paying slow and
unhindered court to a foolish and otherwise neglected woman. The dark
eyes, the smooth, silky voice, the insidious flattery of its softening
tones, might all be effective in a protracted attack on feminine
foolishness of a certain age.
“To-morrow,” he said, dreamily; “to-morrow—almost to-day,” and he sighed
as he took a peach from the gold basket.
Yates, the butler, had put cigarettes and matches on the table, and was
about to leave the room, when the outer bell rang shrilly and sharply.
“Who can that be?” said Ridsdale, looking up. “A visitor! Oh, do tell
him to say you’re not at home.”
The butler paused, waiting for instructions.
“It can’t be a visitor,” said Cynthia Beckford. “Some tradesman’s
messenger!”
“It may be old Lady Jane.”
“She wouldn’t come so late as this.”
“I don’t know,” said Ridsdale, eagerly. “She comes at all hours. With
your headache she would bore you to death.” He leaned forward in his
chair and spoke very softly. “And, remember, my last evening! You—you
promised that you would play to me.”
Cynthia Beckford hesitated a moment, and then told the butler that she
was not at home.
“Yes, my lady. Not at home to anybody?”
“No.”
The flicker of colour showed in her pale cheeks as she added
explanatorily to Ridsdale, “It can’t be anybody of importance.”
Mr. Ridsdale sat listening. Then he got up, and spoke with an impatience
that he did not attempt to conceal.
“That fool has let some one in—a man!”
Yes, a man’s heavy footstep in the hall, and a man’s voice—loud and
assured, not making polite inquiries, but issuing curt directions.
“I have left my tackle and luggage at Euston. Get a cab presently and go
and fetch it. Take this ticket.”
“Yes, Sir John. Her ladyship is in the dining-room.”
“Open the door, then.”
Cynthia Beckford ran across the room to meet her husband; but,
encumbered with a hand-bag and a travelling-rug, he was not able at once
to accept her welcoming embrace.
“Well, Cynthia, my dear! Ridsdale, my dear fellow, how are you? But
where’s Jack?”
General Beckford put his hand-bag on a chair by the sideboard, dropped
his rug upon the floor, and, coming to the table, took Master Jack’s
vacated seat.
“We have sent him to a theatre,” said Cynthia, “with George. I’d no idea
that you were coming home, of course.”
“Oh, I see. Gone to the play—with George?”
“We were all three going,” said Mr. Ridsdale, “but Lady Beckford had a
headache, so I strongly advised her to stay at home,” and he smiled.
“Rather fortunate—or you would have had a double disappointment.”
“It would have been my own fault,” and the General smiled too. “I ought
to have sent you a telegram, Cynthia.”
“What has brought you back so unexpectedly?”
“Impulse.”
“Fish not rising?” asked Ridsdale.
“No. Wretchedly poor sport. So this morning I suddenly made up my mind
that I’d had enough of it, and that home, sweet home, was the place for
me. Well, well, what about the home news?”
Cynthia Beckford was instructing Yates as to her husband’s dinner, but
the General declared that he had eaten all he wanted in the train.
“I can’t call it dinner,” and he laughed good-humouredly. “But nothing
more, thank you—unless perhaps a biscuit and a whisky-and-soda. Now, sit
ye down. Don’t let me disturb you. Go on with your dessert, Ridsdale—and
then I’ll join you in a cigarette, if my lady permits us,” and he bowed
to his wife with the antiquated air of courtesy that always seems so odd
in these free-and-easy times.
They sat together, talking of Jack’s health, his progress, his future
career; and Mr. Ridsdale was able to speak most favourably of his
pupil’s prospects.
“Capital,” said the General. “I’m enormously indebted to you, Ridsdale.
You seem to have done wonders. But I knew you would; I knew the boy was
in good hands—— Seen much of Aunt Jane?” he asked his wife, abruptly.
“Yes.” Cynthia was looking at the painted decoration on her
dessert-plate, and she answered slowly. “Yes; Aunt Jane was with us at
Lynton for a fortnight—quite a fortnight.”
“I know; but I mean after that. She is in London, isn’t she?”
Then Cynthia smilingly confessed that the long fortnight in Devonshire
had exhausted the attraction of Lady Jane’s society, and that she had
lately avoided it.
“She is too kind for words, but”—Cynthia looked at her husband
deprecatingly—“dear Aunt Jane can be rather boring.”
The General laughed tolerantly.
“Ah, no companion for _you_. She belongs to another generation.” His
bushy eyebrows contracted and his voice became grave. “_My_ generation.
We old folk are poor companions.”
“She doesn’t belong to your generation.” Cynthia flushed, and her lips
trembled. She put out her hand and laid it on her husband’s arm. “You
are the best of companions—a companion that I have missed dreadfully.”
“There!” General Beckford laughed gaily. “Did you hear that, Ridsdale?
That’s the sort of thing we old chaps like—even if we aren’t vain enough
to think we deserve it. Leave that where it is, Yates.”
Yates was about to remove the hand-bag and take it to his master’s room.
“Very good, Sir John.”
“And you can go to Euston now—no hurry. Take a bus.”
“Yes, Sir John.”
“Smoking permitted?” And the General bowed again to his wife. “Light
your cigarette, Ridsdale. No, I mustn’t have any coffee on top of whisky
and soda.”
The little group at the table sat comfortably enough and talked lightly
and easily. But somehow the presence of General Beckford had destroyed
the graceful charm of the room.
He looked too big, too rough and shaggy for his delicately pretty
surroundings. His grey hair was rumpled and unbrushed after the journey;
his coarse grey suit suggested wild moorlands and brawling streams; his
whole aspect was savagely picturesque rather than neatly refined.
No contrast could have been greater than that offered by the smooth,
well-brushed, nicely polished young man who sat opposite to him on the
other side of the small round table. The electric light shone upon Mr.
Ridsdale’s black cloth and black silk, his stiff white shirt and soft
white waistcoat, his jewelled buttons, his pearl studs, his butterfly
tie, his white hand fingering a cigarette-tube, his smooth forehead, and
his sleek hair plastered and brushed back with studious art and infinite
care. He seemed elegant, shapely, even beautiful, when you compared him
with his travel-stained, unkempt host.
All the charm had been banished by the new-comer. It was another room
now. And the ugly hand-bag on the distant chair seemed like an
aggressive symbol of proprietorship. It seemed to be saying that,
although one might wish the General at the deuce, one could not ask him
to go there, because in sober fact the room belonged to him.
Yet, to an understanding eye, there was something noble and knightlike
about the man; the ruggedness seemed blended with a certain fine
simplicity, and even the old-fashioned tricks of manner and speech, by
removing him from the commonplace mode of the hour, served to stimulate
an effort to get at the man’s real character. Certainly no _poseur_—a
direct, straightforward creature. On reflection one might perhaps guess
that a young romantic girl, whose imagination had been fired by the
splendour of his fighting life, his deeds of daring, and so forth, could
quite conceivably be cajoled into giving her untried heart to him.
“One more question, Cynthia.” The conversation had languished while the
General puffed at his second cigarette. “How’s the music? Have you been
assiduous in your practice?”
“Yes; I’ve played nearly every evening.”
Mr. Ridsdale was conscious of an irksome constraint. Two are company and
three are none. Deciding to leave the husband and wife together, he
pushed back his chair and got up.
But the General would not let him go.
“No, no,” he said. “Sit ye down, my dear fellow.” Then to his wife: “If
the headache isn’t too bad, play something this evening. Run over your
latest studies. Ridsdale and I will follow you directly.”
Cynthia Beckford rose obediently and turned towards the drawing-room
door. Her husband reached the door before Mr. Ridsdale could get to it,
and he held it open for her, bowing low as she passed out.
“There!” He had switched on the light in the other room, and he stood in
the doorway watching her. “Now delight our ears with your deft touch.”
Lady Beckford seated herself at the piano and began to play a plaintive
and dreamy prelude by Bach.
“Beautiful! Your hand has not lost its cunning. Now go on playing—and
don’t think me ungallant if for a few minutes I close the door. A word
or two with Ridsdale—on business. But we shall hear you, even through
the door.” Then he gently, and as if regretfully, shut the drawing-room
door and came back to the table.
“Ridsdale”—and there was an apologetic tone in the General’s lowered
voice—“that wasn’t quite honest of me. A ruse! I asked her to play the
piano because I didn’t want her to disturb us—and I didn’t want her to
hear what we were saying.”
“Oh, really?” Ridsdale smiled, and glanced at the closed door.
“A confidence! I may trust you, mayn’t I?”
“Of course.”
“Implicitly, eh? But that goes without saying. I _have_ trusted you so
greatly already, haven’t I? The boy to consign him to your guidance.
Well, you know what he is to me. I couldn’t have better shown the faith
I had in you——”
“You’re very kind, General. I—I’ve done my best with him.”
“Exactly. But—well, this isn’t about the boy. It’s about myself. I am in
trouble.”
“Really?”
“I wasn’t honest, either, in my explanation of why I came hurrying home.
No, Ridsdale, it wasn’t a sudden caprice. I had serious reasons for
coming.”
“Oh, had you?”
“Yes. I am in great trouble.” And the General looked at Ridsdale keenly,
as if seeking in his impassive face some expression of sympathy or
encouragement; then he dropped his eyes and paused before he continued
speaking. “I wonder if I ought to tell you? Yes, I will. You are one of
ourselves. We have _made_ you one of ourselves—something more than an
acquaintance—a _friend_, eh? Yes, I’ll tell you the whole thing.”
“I am all attention.”
“Thank you.”
From the other room came the sound of Cynthia’s plaintive melody, and,
half-consciously listening to it, the General seemed to have transferred
its wistful cadence to his own voice. His manner had changed completely.
He looked preternaturally grave and sad, as he sat frowning at the
tablecloth and tracing a small circle of its pattern with a strong brown
finger, while he murmured his story.
“No, Ridsdale, what brought me home was a letter—a warning letter—about
my wife.”
“Before you tell me any more, may I say this? As a schoolmaster I often
have to deal with anonymous letters, and my experience has convinced me
that the only thing to do with them is just to chuck them into the——”
“Just so. But this wasn’t an anonymous letter.”
“No?”
“No. The writer is a tried friend—a person of my own blood. I have the
letter in my pocket here, but I won’t bother you to read it. The warning
conveyed was simple enough. It amounted to this: I was to guard my wife
carefully if I did not want to risk losing her—because a man was
attacking my peace and honour.”
“Oh, I say”—Mr. Ridsdale spoke indignantly—“it would be an insult to
Lady Beckford not to treat such a communication with the absolute
contempt and——”
“But, my dear Ridsdale,” said the General, sombrely, “it is the
communication that I have always prepared myself to receive, that I have
been expecting to receive at any hour in the last few years.”
“Nothing,” said Mr. Ridsdale, firmly, “would persuade me to suspect Lady
Beckford of——”
“No, no, of course not. Please leave her out of it. I’m not thinking of
her. I’m thinking only of myself—the attempted blow to _me_.”
“You shouldn’t for one moment believe——”
“Why not?” said the General, sadly. “One is vain, but there are limits
to one’s vanity. One hopes just at first, perhaps—but later one begins
to think and to understand. You know, with Cynthia and me, it was a
convenient marriage—although it wasn’t a marriage of convenience.”
“Indeed, no—I know that well.”
“Regard—and more than regard—entered into it. But there was the
difference of years. At my age one has not the adaptability of youth;
one cannot change one’s ways, even if one wishes to. So I foresaw that
with marriages of that sort a crisis sooner or later comes. Well, our
crisis has come.”
“I—I am sure you are mistaken.”
“You heard what she said about Lady Jane boring her. Well, _I_ bore her.
Recently she has shown it plainly. In fact, that is why I went away—not
to give myself, but to give her, a holiday.”
“My good sir,” said Mr. Ridsdale, earnestly, almost irritably, “I can
assure you she has spoken of you every day in the most affectionate
terms—regretting your absence, saying how she missed you, and so on.”
“Has she?” said the General, with a sigh. “That may have been from a
sense of duty—contrition—remorse. Pity for the old fogey whose presence
could but weary her.”
He got up, went to the drawing-room door, and opened it.
“Thank you, Cynthia. Charming! Don’t stop playing. Please go on,” and he
shut the door again.
Ridsdale, rising from the table also, had gone to the fireplace. He
pulled out a cambric handkerchief, and rubbed the palms of his hands
with it. Then he put his hands in his pockets, and, standing with his
back to the fire, turned towards the General, politely attentive to, if
not cordially sympathetic with, the General’s doubts and fears.
“Now, look here, Ridsdale, that’s all about it. I’ve given you the
facts, and I ask you to help me.”
“Delighted. But how could I possibly——”
“Help me to find the man.”
“Why, I don’t believe he exists.”
“Oh, yes, he does.”
“Did your friend give you no hints—of any kind?”
“None whatever.”
“Ah, just what I thought! Believe me, it’s some ridiculous
misapprehension.”
“No; my informant is not a fool, or a person who supposes that I am
lightly to be trifled with.”
The General’s manner had changed again. The sadness had gone from his
eyes and the wistfulness from his voice. Pride was the note that sounded
now in the carefully suppressed voice. He squared his big shoulders,
threw back his massive head, and, indeed, looked somebody who would be
extremely unlikely to be trifled with, either by chance acquaintances or
old friends.
“I am a soldier, and I think as soldiers used to think in the bygone
days, when we were taught that we ought to harden our thoughts until
they become as undeviating as instincts. If I’m called upon to guard and
defend something placed in my charge, the thought of what to do _is_ an
instinct—to go out and meet the danger half-way. The safest method of
defence is to deal promptly with the enemy that threatens. Now, where is
the enemy? Help me if you can. His name has been withheld from me—for
obvious reasons”—and the General snorted scornfully. “I am advised to be
moderate, to avoid a scandal. It was a woman who wrote to me. It was
Lady Jane”—and he gave another snort. “She didn’t want to make
mischief—as she calls it—and she implores me not to be old-fashioned.
But I _am_ old-fashioned—I’m not ashamed of it either—so old-fashioned
that when I have found my man I shall force him to give me
satisfaction.”
“A duel?”
“Yes.”
Mr. Ridsdale laughed deprecatingly.
“That’s all very well; but, really, Sir John, you can’t put back the
clock quite so far as that. This is 1912, not 1812, you know.”
“I don’t care whether it is or it isn’t.”
Though he did not raise his voice, the General spoke with so much
intensity that Ridsdale started.
“That may be; but—ah—Sir John, you won’t easily get—ah—other people to
share your opinions.”
“I’ll get _him_ to share them, and that’ll be enough for me. Ridsdale,
you’re not a woman—_you_ needn’t take your cue from Lady Jane and urge
moderation. At least you can guess at what I’m feeling.”
“Yes; but I think without cause—quite without cause.”
“This century or the last, it must be the same code when things dearer
than life are at stake. That’s how I feel. So you may guess if I’ll
follow the mode of 1912, and seek aid from a private detective office,
or ask for reparation in a court of law.”
“No, I’d never suggest that you should. What I beg you—what your best
friend of either sex would beg you—is not to do anything rash, not to
excite yourself needlessly.”
In truth, General Beckford was exciting himself. His voice vibrated
harshly; one could see the immense effort required to keep it at its low
pitch. He stared and glared, shook his shaggy hair, and looked
altogether like some grey old lion who had been brought to bay in a
cruel hunt, and was ready to spring upon his closest tormentors.
“All right, Ridsdale. But help me, don’t preach to me. There, I swear
I’ll do nothing without thought. I _have_ thought. I have thought it all
out. Bring me face to face with my enemy. I answer for the rest. Now,
who is he? We don’t know so many people, she and I. Help me to run over
their names, or, better still, use your brains on my behalf. She has
been more or less under your observation lately. You must have seen her
comings and goings—the people she was in touch with. Have you observed
anything suspicious?”
“No; nothing whatever.”
“Some too attentive visitor?”
“No.”
“It doesn’t matter.” The General shook his grey mane and paced to and
fro. “I’ll find him unassisted,” and he stopped abruptly. “Ridsdale, so
surely as I stand here, I’ll find that man, and compel him to satisfy
me.”
Ridsdale drew out the cambric handkerchief and passed it across his
forehead. Then he laughed lightly. “General, please forgive me for
laughing. But really when any one is so carried away by excitement—well,
you yourself will laugh to-morrow when you remember the wild things you
have said in your excitement.”
“You think that the fellow perhaps isn’t a gentleman, and that he may
try to refuse?”
“I think that, whether he is a gentleman or not, he will certainly
refuse to break the law of the land at your bidding.”
“Yes; but I’m prepared.” And the General smiled grimly, and spoke with a
kind of sly triumph. “I shall ignore his refusal. I shall put a pistol
into his hand and _make_ him fight.”
“I doubt it.”
“An unloaded revolver! Ridsdale, don’t you see? I’ll give him an
unloaded revolver, with six cartridges. I’ll have the same myself—and
I’ll begin to load. When he sees me load he’ll know that he must do
something if he means to save his skin. When he sees me load my weapon,
_he’ll load his weapon too_. I shall watch him as a cat watches a mouse.
If he raises his arm, up goes mine. If he fires, I fire. We bang at each
other at the same moment.”
“Impossible.”
“Why impossible? If I get him alone he can’t help himself.”
“He’d treat you as a madman—give you in charge to the nearest
policeman.”
“Oh, no, he wouldn’t. I’d get between him and the door.”
“Apart from the fact that it would be murder if you succeeded, you
wouldn’t succeed.”
“I should. You don’t know how the pressure of immediate peril quickens
people’s movements. Point by point I’d press him down the line I meant
him to take. It’s so simple—not a weak spot in the infallible logic of
the thing. The clock would be put back as rapidly as if destiny moved
its hands.”
Ridsdale laughed again, very lightly.
“Look here,” said the General, eagerly, “try it. You don’t understand
what I mean. Let me show you what I mean. Act it with me.”
“Act it? I—I don’t follow.”
“Rehearse it. Let me show you how it works. We’ll go through it point by
point—and if you can show me a weak spot, I’ll thank you with all my
heart.”
As he spoke, eagerly and enthusiastically, but still almost in a
whisper, the General had hurried across to the chair that held his ugly
leather bag.
“See here!” He had opened his bag, and the electric light flashed upon
the bright metal of a pistol. “Here—another one,” and the light flashed
again. “A revolver for him and for me. Now help me to rehearse the
trick. Here. Take your weapon. You see it’s open at the breech.”
He had come to the fireplace and was offering one of the two revolvers.
Mr. Ridsdale hesitated about taking it. “Really, you know, General, I
doubt if I ought to encourage you in——”
“Catch hold. You’re not afraid of firearms, are you?” And the General
smiled.
“No, of course not.”
Mr. Ridsdale took the pistol, and the General hurried across the room to
the door that led into the hall.
“Watch me carefully,” he whispered. “I am locking this door.”
For the second time the aspect of the pleasant, comfortable room had
altered; the prettiest things in it looked ungraceful, grim, forbidding;
its atmosphere—even the air one breathed—was different. What was
happening in the room seemed dream-like, grotesque, quite unreal; and
this sense of unreality involved one’s perception of the material,
unaltered world outside the room. The sounds of music floated towards
one as if from an immeasurable distance.
But probably the queer notion of unsubstantiality in surrounding objects
was directly caused by the strangeness and oddness of the General’s
antics. He was no longer himself; he was a person acting a part—as it
would be acted on a brilliantly lighted stage.
“See!” he whispered, as he came creeping back towards the leather bag.
“I have manœuvred you into the worst possible position. I have cut you
off from escape. That door is locked. This door I guard.”
One could hear one’s heart beating above the far-off ripple of the
music.
“Watch me,” said the General. “Never take your eyes off my hands. See!
Here are six cartridges—and I put them down, so—on your side of the
table.” He stepped back swiftly and cautiously. “See! Here are six
cartridges for me—on my side of the table.” And he sprang away, to his
old post in front of the drawing-room door. “It is all fair play. I give
as good a chance as I take myself. We stand at equal lengths from our
ammunition. You follow it all, don’t you? You catch my meaning?”
Mr. Ridsdale, staring at his empty revolver, nodded.
“Very well. Now, if you value your life, prepare to defend it. See! I am
going to load.”
The General’s acting was rather good. Deriving stimulus from his natural
emotions, he achieved some fine artistic effects. His flushed face, his
bent brows, his fierce attitude and swift movements, indicated the
determination of implacable wrath.
[Illustration: “‘The coward!’ she wailed. ‘The miserable coward!’”
(page 49).]
And Ridsdale, too, represented his assumed character well enough. His
cheeks were livid, his breath came gaspingly, the hand that carried the
revolver shook perceptibly—altogether an excellent simulation of
surprise, apprehensive doubts, if not of craven fear.
“One!”
The General had crept to the table, taken a cartridge, and was slipping
it into the chamber.
“There!” he whispered. “Automatically you have done it too. I told you
so. Wait! Lift your hand at your peril. My turn. Two!”
Ridsdale, copying the General’s slightest movement, was loading as the
General loaded.
“Three! That’s it. Three left. When you take the last, step back. I’ll
not raise my arm till you are back on the hearth. I swear it. Four!”
The music had ceased, but neither of them noticed. In a silence broken
only by the sound of panting respirations, they loaded the fifth and
sixth cartridges, and simultaneously sprang away from the table.
“Now!” The General had been the quicker. His arm was up. “Now answer
me.” The ferocity in the hissing words was terrible to hear. “Are you
the man?”
“I—I—— Upon my word, I—don’t understand such folly.”
“You blackguard! This is not acting.” The concentrated passion behind
the words seemed to send forth waves that struck one’s beating heart
with flame and ice. “Now answer me, or—so help me, God!—I’ll shoot you.”
Then the drawing-room door opened. The General, instinctively dropping
his arm and turning, shouted at his wife:
“Go back! Go back, I tell you!”
There was a blaze as if all the electric lamps had exploded, and a crash
that seemed to shake the walls. Then again came the flash and the roar.
Mr. Ridsdale had fired twice.
For a moment the room was full of smoke. Then the dusty cloud rose, grew
thin. The lamplight, shining unimpeded, showed General Beckford still
upon his feet, standing square and erect, with Cynthia desperately
clinging to his breast.
“What’s this?” said the General, loudly and sternly. “Has the smoke
blinded you, Cynthia? Why have you come to me? Your place is not here.
Go to your lover’s arms.”
But she clung to him closer. She was stretching her slender figure to
its fullest height, trying to cover his limbs with her limbs, his face
with her face, madly straining to make a shield of trembling flesh large
enough to protect him from danger.
“The coward!” she wailed. “The miserable coward! He shot at you when you
weren’t looking. He tried to kill you!”
“Then get out of the way,” said the General, “and let him try again.
Can’t you see how you’re hampering him? This is his chance and yours.
Don’t spoil it. Let him set you free.”
But Cynthia only trembled, sobbed, and clung.
“Very well,” and the General laughed harshly. “We have been interrupted,
and my opponent must kindly understand that his chance is gone. Cynthia,
do you hear? He won’t shoot again. Now, stop whimpering, and answer me.”
“Yes, I want to tell you everything.”
“Is this man your lover?”
“No—no.”
“But he has endeavoured to be?”
“Yes.”
“Then why has he remained here?”
“I was afraid to send him away.”
“Why? What were you afraid of?”
“You. I thought if you knew you’d do something dreadful.”
It was curious, but it seemed as if suddenly these two—the husband and
the wife—were quite alone. If the man they spoke of had been swept a
thousand miles from the room, they could not have disregarded him more
completely than they did now. Cynthia had linked her hands round the
General’s neck; she was looking up into his stern, unflinching eyes, her
voice was strong and clear as she answered each question.
“When did he first insult you?”
“Two days ago.”
“But you knew what he meant before that?”
“No, I didn’t. I knew he admired me—and I thought it rather amusing; but
I never dreamed he would dare. And then, when he did dare, I thought if
you heard or guessed it would be too dreadful. I blamed myself—yes, I
blamed myself. But I thought it was only two days, and then he’d be gone
for ever—with no fuss and no scandal. My darling, don’t you believe me?”
“Is there nothing else to tell?”
The General was glaring down into his wife’s eyes.
“Before God, that is all. Oh, don’t you believe me?”
“Before God, I do.”
Very gently Sir John released himself from the clinging hands, held one
of them for a moment; then, bowing ceremoniously, kissed it.
“Mr. Ridsdale!” His manner was perfectly calm as he turned to the
ignored guest, and he spoke quietly but heavily, with an old-fashioned
style of humour that was too pompous to be quite successful. “My wife
called you a coward just now; but, honestly, I could not apologise if
she had called you a fool as well. Those are blank cartridges that we
have been playing with. Oh, yes, it would have been dangerous otherwise.
But I’m always careful. In fact, when I have to deal with gentlemen of
your kidney, I’m almost as afraid of firearms as you are yourself. And,
à propos, the hall door is open I didn’t really lock it.”
Mr. Ridsdale silently crossed the room.
“Then good night to you. Yates will be back directly, and when he has
packed your things, where shall he take them?”
“Ah—er—say, the St. Pancras Hotel.”
“And I may send your cheque to that address? Thank you. Good night!”
_The_ Veil _of_ Flying Water
_By_ Theodore Goodridge Roberts
_1st Canadian Expeditionary Force_
I
In those days an active man could not keep on friendly terms with
everybody. If he acted honestly by his own clan, or his own village, he
was sure to be in bad odour with some other clan or tribe. So it was
with Walking Moose, a young chief of that clan of the Maliseets that had
a white salmon for its totem.
This Walking Moose was chief of a sub-tribe that had its habitation and
hunting-grounds far to the west, within twenty miles of the source of
old Woolastook. Here the great river, beloved of Gluskap and his
children, which advances seaward so placidly throughout the latter half
of its course, dashes between walls of rock and gloomy curtains of
spruce-trees that cling with brown, exposed roots that suggest the
gripping fingers of giants. Rapids of twisting green and writhing white
clang and shout in its narrow valley. Here and there are amber pools and
green-black eddies; here and there a length of shallows that flashes
silver and gold at noon; and here is that roaring place where the river
leaps a sheer fall of thirty feet in one unbroken white curve—the Veil
of Flying Water.
This is a rough country, full of shaggy forests and broken hills alive
with game, and swift water alive with fish; and in the days of Walking
Moose the Mohawks had their black lodges of undressed hides close to its
western borders. The Mohawks were the age-old enemies of the Maliseets.
Before Walking Moose grew to manhood and power, the peace-loving
Maliseets had been content to flee down river and seek the protection of
the larger villages whenever word came to them that the Mohawks
contemplated a raid. Walking Moose was not content to flee periodically
from his good hunting-grounds, however, and so the enmity of the raiders
became bitter against him. Walking Moose hemmed three sides of his
village with a tangle of fallen trees—the river kept the fourth
side—lopped the upper and outer branches of these prostrate trees to
within three or four feet of the trunks, and sharpened the ends and
hardened them with fire. Also, he dug pits and covered them with brush,
and set up many sharp posts in unexpected places. These things were
good, but Walking Moose was not satisfied. He brought twenty families
from one of the more sheltered villages, built lodges for them within
his defences, and gave them equal rights of hunting with the older
villagers. During that summer the Mohawks came three times, and three
times they went away without so much as a scalp or a back-load of smoked
salmon. During the winter Walking Moose’s men were busy at making
shields and weapons; and late in March, when the depths of snow were
covered with a tough crust, a war party of the people of the White
Salmon went swiftly to the westward and fell upon and destroyed a
village of the Mohawks. But the only men who died at the hands of the
victors were those who fell fighting. No prisoners were made on that
occasion. The women and children were not harmed, the lodges and
storehouses were spared. Only the weapons of the warriors were taken.
“We do not want your food and furs,” said Walking Moose, “for we have
plenty of our own. We do not want your women, for we have better women
of our own.”
Then he returned to his own country, with the victorious warriors at his
heels. Some of these warriors had to be drawn on toboggans; a few
remained behind, their spirits sped to even finer hunting-grounds than
those of their nativity.
Walking Moose’s first raid into the land of the Mohawks made a deep
impression on that warlike people. History contained no record of any
previous outrage of the kind. In the old, old days Gluskap had smitten
the Mohawks on more than one occasion, so tradition said, but to be
smitten with magic by a god and victoriously invaded by Maliseets were
misfortunes of a very different nature. The warriors were furious, and
the insulting fact that Walking Moose had left their lodges standing,
their storehouses full, and their families beside them added to their
fury. They bandaged their wounds, put their dead away, and sent the only
uninjured man of the village to carry the outrageous news westward and
raise a war-party. But worse than this was planned. Hawk-in-the-Tree,
the daughter of the chief of the defeated village, brooded darkly over
the scornful words of Walking Moose. His gaze had been upon her face
when he had said, “We do not want your women, for we have better women
of our own.” Yes, his gaze had been fair upon the face of
Hawk-in-the-Tree, and she was the woman whom three great chiefs wanted
in marriage, many warriors had fought for, and Long Tongue had made
songs about. She sat in her father’s lodge and thought of the words of
the young Maliseet and recalled the look in his eyes. Her slim hands
were clasped tightly in her lap, her small, sleek head was bowed
demurely, and her beautiful eyes were upon the beaded hem of her skirt
of dressed moosehide. A tender pink shone in her dusky cheeks, her red
lips were parted in a faint smile, but there was no mirth in her vain
and angry heart.
[Illustration: “He saw a girl’s face looking timidly out, and a pair of
dark eyes gazing shyly down upon him” (page 54).]
Walking Moose was unmarried. All his thoughts were given to the pursuit
of power—of power for himself and his tribe. He was great in the chase,
and greater on the warpath. His mind and hand were at once subtle and
daring. Though he forgot the words he had said about the women of the
Mohawk village, he remembered everything else that he had said and done
on that expedition; and so he suspected that the enemy would strike back
before long, with all their strength and cunning. He sent swift runners
down river with word of his raid and victory. These returned after five
days with a band of daring young braves from the more sheltered villages
of the tribe—adventurous spirits who were attracted by the promise of
warfare against the Mohawks under a successful leader. Walking Moose
welcomed these reinforcements cordially.
It was not until all the snow was gone from the hills and the ice from
the river that the Mohawks returned Walking Moose’s call. They had
planned their arrival for the dark hours between midnight and dawn, but
the sentries brought word of their approach to Walking Moose, and so it
happened that instead of their finding him in his own lodge, he found
them in a little valley two miles distant from the village. By dawn all
the invaders had vanished save those who had lost command of their legs.
And the Maliseets had vanished from the little valley also, on the trail
of the retreating Mohawks. They followed that trail all day and half the
night, and at last overtook and made an end to that war party. One young
man escaped, one whose lungs were stronger than his heart. He carried
word of the disaster throughout the Mohawk country.
Spring passed and summer came. The village of which Walking Moose was
chief enjoyed quiet and security. The warriors of the White Salmon
carried on their fishing in all the swift brooks and rivers, but they
kept their shields and war clubs beside them, and far-sighted runners
were on guard in the hills, day and night.
In the Mohawk country quiet reigned also. But it was a sinister,
brooding quiet. Big chiefs met and parted, only to meet again. Rage
gnawed them, but they were afraid to strike openly at the strong village
of the Maliseets. About this time, Hawk-in-the-Tree spoke to her father,
standing modestly before him with her glance cast down at her beaded
moccasins.
“The strength of that village is all in the head and heart of Walking
Moose,” she said.
“It is so,” replied the chief.
“Then if death should find him——”
“What death?” returned her father, testily. “The medicine-men have been
questioned in this matter. You are but a squaw, my child, and cannot see
the truth of these things.”
“True, I am but a squaw,” returned Hawk-in-the-Tree, modestly. “But will
not my father tell me the words of the medicine-men?”
So the chief told her what the wise ones of the nation had said about
Walking Moose. He did not know that, as usual, their wise words were
nothing more than a clever fiction to mystify the warriors and retain
the awe of the laity for the dark arts. To soothe the injured pride of
the chiefs they had said that the prowess of Walking Moose was due to
magic; that he could not be killed in battle, or by the spilling of
blood, or by fire; that starvation only could kill him, and that within
bowshot of his own village. It was a clever invention. No wonder the
chiefs and warriors were puzzled and impressed.
“To be starved within bowshot of his own village?” repeated
Hawk-in-the-Tree, reflectively. “Then he must first be caught and
bound—then hidden in a place where his warriors cannot find him.”
“It is so,” replied the chief.
Hawk-in-the-Tree drew him into the lodge. The scornful words and
heedless glance of the Maliseet were hot and clear in her memory. She
talked to her father for a long time. He smiled sneeringly at first, but
after a while he began to nod his head.
II
Walking Moose did not devote all his time in the summer months to the
catching and smoking of salmon and trout. He wandered about the country,
in seeming idleness, but in reality his brain was busy with ambitious
plans. And always his eyes were open and his ears alert. He did not
expect another attack from the Mohawks before the time of the hunter’s
moon, but he continued to place his outposts far and near, and to visit
them at unexpected moments. Though his village had doubled in size
within the year, and leapt into fame, he was not satisfied. He wanted to
drive the Mohawks far to the westward and break them so that they would
never again venture into the fringes of the Maliseet country, and he
dreamed of the day when all the scattered clans and villages of the
Maliseets would name him for their head chief.
One morning in July he followed the edge of Woolastook’s rocky valley
for a distance of about five miles above the village, then clambered
down the bank and crossed the brawling stream—for at this point old
Woolastook, the father of Maliseet rivers, was no more than a lively
brook. Beneath the farther bank was a flat rock and an amber pool. He
laid aside his shield and bow, and reclined on the rock to dream his
ambitious dreams. So he lay for an hour, and the sunlight slanted in
upon him and gilded his dreams.
Suddenly Walking Moose sprang to his feet and turned, his shield on his
left arm and his bow in his right hand. His glance flashed to the
overhanging fringe of spruce branches above his head. He saw a girl’s
face looking timidly out, and a pair of dark eyes gazing shyly down upon
him. He did not know the face. It was not that of any girl of his own
village.
“What do you want?” he asked, watchful for some sight or sound to betray
the presence of some hidden menace.
Hawk-in-the-Tree answered him in his own tongue, for she had learned it
from a prisoner when she was a child. Until recently, the Mohawks had
never lacked opportunity of acquiring the Maliseet language.
“I sometimes fish in that pool, chief. But I will go away and fish
somewhere else,” she replied, modestly.
“Do not go,” he said. “Come down and fish here if you want to. The pools
of the river are free to all honest Maliseets.”
Without more ado, the girl crawled forward, turned, and slid down to the
flat rock beside Walking Moose. In her left hand she held a short coil
of transparent fish-line made from the intestines of some animal. Her
small face was flushed. She stood beside Walking Moose with downcast
eyes. The young man gazed at her with frank interest.
“You are a stranger,” he said. “You do not belong to my village.”
She met his glance for a second.
“Have you ever seen me before, chief?” she asked.
“I am not sure,” he replied, puckering his brows in reflection. “But I
know that you do not live in my village. You do not look like those
young women.”
“They are more pleasant of appearance, perhaps?”
He smiled at that.
“Perhaps you say the truth, but I think your cheeks are pinker and your
eyes brighter than the young women I know.”
The girl turned her face away from him.
“I must fish,” she said, “else my poor old grandfather will go hungry.”
Walking Moose, feeling an interest that was new to him, and prompted by
a little devil that had never troubled him before, dropped his bow and
put out his hand and took the coiled fish-line from the girl. Their
fingers touched—and he was astonished at the thrill which he felt.
“You must tell me who you are, and where you come from,” he said, and
his voice had a foolish little break in it. This vocal tremor was not
lost on the girl.
“I belong to a small village on the great river, three days’ journey
from here,” she said. “My old grandfather is my only friend. His name is
Never Sleep. Because of his sharp tongue he became disliked by the
people of the village, and so we journeyed to this place, and built a
little hidden lodge. Never Sleep is very old, and spends all his days in
brewing healing liquors from roots and barks. It is my work to keep the
pot boiling.”
Walking Moose was impressed.
“You are a good girl to take such care of your old grandfather,” he
said. “But why have you not brought him into my village to dwell?”
“The noises of a village disturb him,” she replied. “And though his
heart is kind, his tongue is bitter. He fears no one when he is angered,
and rushes out of his lodge and calls people terrible names. He fears a
great chief no more than a giggling papoose.”
The young man smiled.
“Then it is well that he should continue to live in quiet,” he said.
“But you have not told me your name,” he added.
She glanced at him swiftly, and as swiftly away again, and the glow
deepened in her cheeks.
“My name is poor and unknown,” she said. “It is for mighty chieftains
such as Walking Moose to give names to their people.”
At this Walking Moose, who planned greatness and fought battles without
disturbing a line of his thin face, looked delighted and slightly
confused.
“Sit down,” he said, “while I catch some fish for you and your
grandfather; and while I am fishing I may think of a name for you.”
The girl sat down, smiling demurely. Walking Moose uncoiled the
transparent line, placed a fat grasshopper on the hook, and cast it
lightly upon the surface of the pool. He stepped close to the edge of
the rock and, with his right hand advanced, flicked the kicking bait
artfully. The sun was in front of him, so his shadow did not fall upon
the pool. Suddenly there was a movement in the amber depths as swift as
light, and next instant the grasshopper vanished in a swirl of bubbling
water. The line, held taut, cut the surface of the pool in a half-circle
like a hissing knife-blade. The line was strong, and in those days men
fished for the pot and gave little thought to the sport. So Walking
Moose pulled strongly, to judge the resistance, then took a lower hold
with his right hand and gave a quick and mighty jerk on the line. The
big trout came up like a bird, described a graceful curve in the
sunlight, and descended smack upon the rock. He was dispatched in a
moment by a blow at the base of the head.
“There is a fine trout for your cooking-pot,” said Walking Moose,
boyishly delighted with his success. “Now I’ll see if there is another
in the pool.”
“But you have not made a name for me yet,” said the girl.
“True,” replied the young man. “Catching fish is easier.” He looked
shyly at the girl, then very steadily at the gleaming dead trout. “You
are like a trout,” he said, with hesitation. “You are bright—and
slender—and the beads on your skirt are red and blue like the spots
along the trout’s sides. I might name you Beautiful Trout, or Little
Trout—but your eyes——” He paused and glanced at her uncertainly.
She did not return his glance, but sat with her head bent and her hands
clasped loosely in her beaded lap. Her hair, in two dusky braids, was
drawn in front of her slender shoulders, and hung down her breast.
“They are not like a trout’s,” he said. “No, they are not at all like
the eyes of a fish.”
“What are they like?” she asked, her voice small and shy.
Walking Moose fiddled with the line in his fingers and shuffled his feet
uneasily. “How should I know? I cannot see them.”
“But you have seen them. Can’t you remember?”
“I remember. They are like—like things that have never been seen by any
man alive, for they are like black stars.”
The girl laughed, and the sound was like the music of thin water
flittering over small pebbles.
“Is Walking Moose a poet as well as the conqueror of the Mohawks, that
he makes a fool of a poor young woman with talk of black stars?” she
asked, turning her gaze full upon him for a moment with a look of tender
mockery.
His heart expanded, then twitched with a pang of doubt. This mention of
the Mohawks was grateful to his vanity, but it was disturbing too. Here
he had been talking to a girl and catching a trout, when his mind should
have been intent on plans against the enemy. He felt ashamed of himself.
What would be the end of his good fighting and great dreams if he spent
any more time in such foolishness?
“I am not a poet,” he said. “A man who pushes his shield between the
lodges of the Mohawks has no time for the making of songs.”
Already his air was preoccupied. Hawk-in-the-Tree noticed this.
“Or for the making of names, chief,” she said. “I do not wonder that
your mind is uneasy and that fear tingles in your heart, for the Mohawks
are mighty enemies.”
Walking Moose stared at her, then smiled.
“Yes, they are mighty against those who run away,” he said. “The hare
that jumps from the fern strikes as much terror in my heart as all the
Mohawks who stand in moccasins.” He laughed softly, gazing down at the
amber water of the pool. “But I have a name for you,” he added. “Shining
Star is your name in my country.”
Then he put the line into her hand, took up his bow and shield, and
crossed the stream. He climbed the short, steep ascent and forced his
way through the tangled branches. So he advanced for about ten yards,
making a good deal of stir. Then he halted, turned, and crawled
noiselessly back to the edge of the bank. He lay motionless for several
minutes, peering out between the drooping spruces. He had no suspicion
of the girl, but it was a part of his creed to look twice and carefully
at everything that was new to him. He watched her bait the hook and cast
it on the pool. She skipped it here and there across the calm surface;
and presently a fish rose and took it, and was deftly landed upon the
rock for his trouble. Walking Moose was satisfied that the girl had no
intentions against anything but the trout. He crawled noiselessly back
through the brush, then got to his feet, and returned to the bank
without any effort at concealment. She looked up as he appeared above
the stream.
“I have come back,” he said, “to accompany you to your lodge. I must see
your grandfather, Never Sleep. It is my duty as chief to know all my
people and the whereabouts of every lodge.”
The girl coiled the wet line and took up the two trout. Her head was
bowed, so the young man did not see the smile on her red lips. It was in
her thoughts that something more than a poor fish had risen to her hook;
but Walking Moose really thought that he was but doing his duty as chief
of the clan of the White Salmon. As this couple had come to his country
from the lower river, it was clearly his place to know something of
their position so that he might protect them in time of need.
Walking Moose climbed the steep bank first and then reached down a
helping hand to the girl whom he had named Shining Star. This was an
unusual attention from a brave to a squaw. On reaching the top the girl
took the lead. She walked swiftly and gracefully, and the twigs and
branches that sprang into place behind her switched the warrior; but so
intent was he in following this Shining Star that he paid no attention
to the switchings. She led straight to the south, over hummocks, and
across open places and tangled valleys. So for about a mile; and then
she halted and turned a glowing face to her follower.
“I must let Never Sleep know that I am bringing a stranger,” she said,
“or he will be in a terrible rage. He is not agreeable when he is angry.
If I whistle twice, he will know that I am not alone.”
“He must be an unpleasant old man to live with,” said Walking Moose; and
because of the foolishness that was brewing in his heart he felt no
suspicion. He stood inert, gazing down at Shining Star’s glossy head,
while she gave vent to two long, shrill whistles.
“That will let him know that a visitor is coming,” she said. “It will
give him time to get a pleasant smile on his face.”
This appeared to Walking Moose as the most excellent wit. Again they
advanced, and soon they came to a little lodge of birchbark set in a
grove of young firs. A faint haze of smoke crawled up from the hole in
the roof. The door-flap of hide was fastened open, showing a shadowy
interior and the glow of a fallen fire. The girl laid her fish on the
moss beside the door, and peered into the lodge.
“Walking Moose, the mighty chief, has come to see you,” she said.
“Walking Moose is welcome to my poor lodge,” returned a feeble voice.
“Let him enter and speak face to face with old Never Sleep.”
The girl drew back and nodded brightly to the chief.
“You go first,” said he, his native caution flickering up for a moment.
“The lodge is so dark, that I am afraid that I might step upon the old
man.”
She read the reason for his hesitation, and the blood tingled in her
cheeks, but she entered without a word. He paused at the door for long
enough to accustom his eyes to the dark within. He could see no one but
Shining Star, and a robed, stooped figure seated on the ground. He
stepped inside.
“The thong of my moccasin became unfastened,” he said, by way of
explaining his hesitation at the door.
A dry chuckle came from the robed figure.
“He is a wise man who halts and sets his feet and eyes to rights at the
threshold of a strange lodge,” said the feeble voice of Never Sleep.
Walking Moose felt absurdly young and transparent. He stood beside the
fire and stared over it at the old man. He could see little but the
living gleam of the face and a hint of two watchful eyes.
“What do you want of me, great chief?” asked Never Sleep.
“I met your granddaughter at the river, where she was fishing,” replied
the warrior. “She told me her story, and so I came home with her to mark
the position of your lodge. All who dwell in my country are in my care.
It is well for me to know where to find every one of my people, in case
of need.”
“You will find me of small use to you in time of need,” returned the
other, “for I am old and weak, and my fighting days are over. Only in
one way can I serve you, chief. I brew potent liquors for the cure of
all bodily ills.”
“It is well,” said Walking Moose, with a full recovery of his usual
manner. “But you twist the truth of my words. I do not ask for your
help, old man; but you and your granddaughter may need mine, some time.
Brew your liquor in peace—and in danger send word to Walking Moose.”
With that he turned on his heel and left the lodge.
Next morning found the chief of the people of the White Salmon again
reclined on the flat rock above the amber pool; and again his dreams of
ambition and plans of warfare were disturbed by the girl whom he had
named Shining Star. Again she slid down to the rock, with the coiled
fish-line in her hand. Again he took the line from her and caught a
trout for her dinner. So it happened for six days, and by that time the
dreams of Walking Moose were all of Shining Star instead of ambition. He
even made a song, and it seemed to please Shining Star. But of these
strangers he said nothing in the village. It would be time to speak of
them when he had won the prize.
On the seventh morning the chief waited on the rock above the amber pool
for an hour. After that he spent another hour in walking up and down the
bed of the stream for a distance of several hundred yards each way. He
flushed hot and cold with anxiety.
“Has something happened to her?” he asked of the lonely stream. “Or have
they both gone away as quietly as they came?”
Unable to stand the torment of anxiety any longer, he ascended the bank
above the pool, and set off swiftly towards Never Sleep’s lodge. He
found the old man crouched before the door.
“The girl has a fever,” said the old man. “But I have given her a potent
liquor that will drive it out of her blood.”
Such fear gripped the young chief’s heart at these words as he had never
felt before. His staring face showed it to the sharp eyes of Never
Sleep.
“She rests quietly now,” said the old man. “She must not be disturbed.
In the morning she will be well, I think. But, in the meantime, the pot
is empty.”
So Walking Moose went into the forest to hunt for flesh for Never
Sleep’s cooking-pot. He walked slowly, for his feet felt as heavy as
stones when turned away from the lodge where Shining Star lay sick. His
eyes were dim, and the sunlight on the trees and the azure sky above
looked desolate and terrible to him. He stumbled as he walked. He
wandered aimlessly for more than an hour before the thought returned to
him that Never Sleep’s pot was empty, and that his mission was to fill
it. But the thought flashed away again as swiftly as it had returned,
and so he continued his aimless wanderings.
“I love that girl—that Shining Star!” he murmured. “I must tell her of
it soon, in plain words—to-morrow, when the fever is gone from her.”
It was close upon sunset when Walking Moose at last got back to the
lodge of Never Sleep. He carried two young ducks at his belt. The old
man came to the door of the lodge.
“Has the fever gone?” whispered the chief.
“She still sleeps,” replied the other. “The fever is passing. But you
are weary, my son. Drink this draught to refresh your sinews and lighten
your spirit. Then sleep, and when you awake you will find that the fever
has passed away from the girl.”
Walking Moose took the stone cup in a trembling hand and swallowed the
bitter-sweet liquid it contained. Then he lay down on the warm moss
beside the lodge. How light his body felt! What beautiful, faint music
breathed in his ears! His lids slid down, but he raised them with an
effort.
“I must sleep—for—a—little——” His voice trailed away to silence. Again
his lids fluttered down.
Never Sleep stooped above him, but the face was no longer that of a
feeble old man, but of the Mohawk chief—the father of Hawk-in-the-Tree.
“The liquor has done its work,” he said.
Then the girl to whom Walking Moose had given the name of Shining Star
came out of the lodge.
III
Walking Moose slept a deep and dreamless sleep. The Mohawk bound him at
ankles and wrists, and then lifted him to his massive shoulders.
“Lead the way!” he commanded.
The girl took up her father’s weapons and a long, tough rope of twisted
leather, and entered the forest behind the lodge. The big warrior, with
his limp burden, followed close upon her heels. They moved silently,
through deep coverts and shadowed valleys, by an unmarked, twisting way.
The sun slid down behind the western spruces and twilight deepened over
the wilderness.
“For such a mighty chief he was wonderfully simple,” remarked the
Mohawk.
Hawk-in-the-Tree did not reply.
At last they came to the river above the fall that was called the Veil
of Flying Water. The twilight had thickened to darkness by now; but
these two required only a little light, for they had studied this part
of the river and the bellowing fall night after night. The man laid
Walking Moose on the ground and drew a small canoe from under a blanket
of moss and bushes. He made one end of the raw-hide rope fast to the
bars and gunnels of the canoe. He tied the other end strongly to a tree
at the edge of the bank. He felt no uncertainty as to the strength and
exact length of the rope. Everything had been tested; the whole amazing
deed had been done before, as far as that had been possible without the
presence of Walking Moose.
Now the Mohawk placed the canoe at the very edge of the water and lifted
the drugged chief into it. He fastened one end of a shorter line around
his victim’s body just below the shoulders and under the arms. Then he
cut the thongs that bound wrists and ankles.
“He will die of hunger within bowshot of his own village,” he muttered.
With the slack of the long rope in his hand he edged the canoe into the
racing current, stepped aboard, and let it ease slowly down towards the
top of the sheer, out-leaping fury of white water. At the very brow of
the screaming slope the canoe hung for more than a minute. Then it came
slowly back to where the girl waited on the shore. The big Mohawk
stepped out of it, grinning broadly. Walking Moose had vanished.
The Mohawk unfastened the rope and coiled it over his arm. With the
girl’s help he returned the canoe to the little hollow and covered it
with moss. Hawk-in-the-Tree stood behind him, trembling. This was her
father; but the young man who now lay with death above and below and on
every side—what of him? She had hated him at one time. But now——
[Illustration: “At 1.5 Andy announced that there was one infallible way
to start a refractory car” (page 64).]
She held the shorter of the two ropes of leather in her hands. She made
a noose of it. Her father stooped before, spreading the moss over the
canoe. She crouched suddenly, gripped his ankles, and jerked his feet
backwards, from under him. He pitched headfirst into the hollow with
stunning force.
IV
Cold spray flying over his face aroused Walking Moose at last from his
drugged sleep. For a little while he lay still, too shocked and
bewildered by the quaking of the wet rock on which he lay and the roar
and thunder in his ears, to think or move. He saw something pale, wide,
and alive close in front and curving above him. He put out his right
hand and felt cold, dripping rock behind him. He put out his left hand.
Here was more wet rock—and there the sharp edge of it—and space—within a
few inches of his side. He sat upright, and as he gazed he remembered
the liquor he had taken from the hands of Never Sleep.
“This is the work of that old man!” he exclaimed. He stood up on the
narrow ledge and raised his hand to the dim-lit, flying arc. It was
struck down, and his face was dashed with bubbling water. Then horror
seized him, and he leaned weakly against the dripping rock—for he
realised that he was behind the Veil of Flying Water, hemmed in—in a
deathtrap.
Walking Moose soon regained his usual composure. He stood with his back
to the dripping rock, his feet firmly set on the quaking ledge, and
gazed calmly at the roof and wall of thin, hissing water. He thought of
the girl to whom he had given the name of Shining Star; but in a second
he put that hateful vision from him. The spray came up from the boiling
cauldron under the ledge and drenched him. He stared with dull interest
at the arching water, and at last decided that the pale radiance that
lit it was that of the moon. So the time must be early night. Suddenly
he was aware of something foreign on the luminous front of his prison.
It was a slender line of blackness, sharply curved, that struck the
veil, vanished, and struck again on a level with his eyes. Spray flew
when it touched. He leaned forward and put out his right hand. The thing
was of twisted leather.
He shot out his hand and gripped the line firmly. He pulled it towards
him. It came half-way, seeming to be slack only at one end; then it
began to straighten and draw strongly outward and upward. He advanced to
the very edge of the rocky shelf, still gripping the rope with his right
hand. He stood on tiptoe. Then he grasped the rope with both hands and
sprang through the roof of falling water.
When Walking Moose felt the solid rocks under his feet he loosed the
grip of his fingers and fell forward, exhausted. Then the girl whom he
had named Shining Star knelt beside him and raised his head against her
shoulder.
The Mohawk chief, recovered from his fall, looked out upon them from the
bushes. Then he turned and went back to his own country, cursing a magic
that had not been foretold by the medicine-men.
“Bill Bailey”
_By_ Ian Hay
_Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders_
I
THE COMING OF “BILL BAILEY”
_FOR SALE.—A superb 3-seated Diablement-Odorant Touring Car, 12-15
h.-p., 1907 model, with Cape-cart hood, speedometer, spare wheel,
fanfare horn, and lamps complete. Body French-grey picked out with
red. Cost £350. Will take——_
The sum which the vendor was prepared to take was so startling, that to
mention it would entirely spoil the symmetry of the foregoing paragraph.
It is therefore deleted. The advertisement concluded by remarking that
the car was as good as new, and added darkly that the owner was going
abroad.
Such was the official title and description of the car. After making its
acquaintance we devised for ourselves other and shorter terms of
designation. I used to refer to it as My Bargain. Mr. Gootch, our local
cycle-agent and petrol-merchant, dismissed it gloomily as “one of them
owe-seven Oderongs.” My daughter (hereinafter termed The Gruffin)
christened it “Bill Bailey,” because it usually declined to come home;
and the title was adopted with singular enthusiasm and unanimity by
subsequent passengers.
I may preface this narrative by stating that until I purchased Bill
Bailey my experience of motor mechanics had been limited to a
motor-bicycle of antique design, which had been sold me by a distant
relative of my wife’s. This stately but inanimate vehicle I rode
assiduously for something like two months, buoyed up by the not
unreasonable hope that one day, provided I pedalled long enough and hard
enough, the engine would start. I was doomed to disappointment; and
after removing the driving-belt and riding the thing for another month
or so as an ordinary bicycle, mortifying my flesh and enlarging my heart
in the process, I bartered my unresponsive steed—it turned the scale at
about two hundredweight—to Mr. Gootch, in exchange for a set of new
wheels for the perambulator. Teresa—we called it Teresa after our first
cook, who on receiving notice invariably declined to go—was immediately
put into working order by Mr. Gootch, who, I believe, still wins prizes
with her at reliability trials.
To return to Bill Bailey. I had been coquetting with the idea of
purchasing a car for something like three months, and my wife had
definitely made up her mind upon the subject for something like three
years, when the advertisement already quoted caught my eye on the back
of an evening paper. The car was duly inspected by the family _en bloc_,
in its temporary abiding-place at a garage in distant Surbiton. What
chiefly attracted me was the price. My wife’s fancy was taken by the
French-grey body picked out with red, and the favourable consideration
of The Gruffin was secured by the idea of a speedometer reeling off its
mile per minute. The baby’s interest was chiefly centred in the fanfare
horn.
My young friend, Andy Finch—one of those fortunate people who feel
competent to give advice upon any subject under the sun—obligingly
offered to overhaul the engine and bearings and report upon their
condition. His report was entirely favourable, and the bargain was
concluded.
Next day, on returning home from the City, I found the new purchase
awaiting me in the coach-house. It was a two-seated affair, with a
precarious-looking arrangement like an iron camp-stool—known, I believe,
as a spider-seat—clamped on behind. A general survey of the car assured
me that the lamps, speedometer, spare wheel, and other extra fittings
had not been abstracted for the benefit of the gentleman who had gone
abroad; and I decided there and then to take a holiday next day and
indulge the family with an excursion.
II
THE PROVING OF “BILL BAILEY”
Where I made my initial error was in permitting Andy Finch to come round
next morning. Weakly deciding that I might possibly be able to extract a
grain or two of helpful information from the avalanche of advice which
would descend upon me, I agreed to his proposal that he should come and
assist me to “start her up.”
Andy arrived in due course, and proceeded to run over the car’s points
in a manner which at first rather impressed me. Hitherto I had contented
myself with opening a sort of oven door in the dish-cover arrangement
which concealed the creature’s works from view, and peering in with an
air of intense wisdom, much as a diffident amateur inspects a horse’s
mouth. After that I usually felt the tyres, in search of spavins and
curbs. Andy began by removing the dish-cover bodily—I learned for the
first time that it was called the bonnet,—and then proceeded to tear up
the boards on the floor of the car. This done, a number of curious and
mysterious objects were exposed to view for the first time, with the
functions and shortcomings of each of which I was fated to become
severally and monotonously familiar.
Having completed his observations, Andy suggested a run along the road.
I did not know then, as I know now, that his knowledge of automobilism
was about on a par with my own; otherwise I would not have listened with
such respect or permitted him to take any further liberties with the
mechanism. However, I knew no better, and this is what happened.
I had better describe the results in tabular form:—
12.15. Andy performs a feat which he describes as “tickling the
carburetter.”
12.16-12.20. Andy turns the handle in front.
12.20-12.25. I turn the handle in front.
12.25-12.30. Andy turns the handle in front.
12.30-12.45. Adjournment to the dining-room sideboard.
12.45-12.50. Andy turns the handle in front.
12.50-12.55. I turn the handle in front.
12.55-1. Andy turns the handle in front and I tickle the carburetter.
1-1.5. I turn the handle in front and Andy tickles the carburetter.
At 1.5 Andy announced that there was one infallible way to start a
refractory car, and that was to let it run down hill under its own
momentum, and then suddenly let the clutch in. I need hardly say that my
residence lies in a hollow. However, with the assistance of The Gruffin,
we manfully trundled our superb 1907 Diablement-Odorant out of the
coach-house, and pushed it up the hill without mishap, if I except two
large dents in the back of the body, caused by the ignorance of my
daughter that what looks like solid timber may after all be only hollow
aluminium.
We then turned the car, climbed on board, and proceeded to descend the
hill by the force of gravity. Bill Bailey I must say travelled
beautifully, despite my self-appointed chauffeur’s efforts to interfere
with his movements by stamping on pedals and manipulating levers.
Absorbed with these exercises, Andy failed to observe the imminence of
our destination, and we reached the foot of the hill at a good
twenty-five miles an hour, the back wheels locked fast by a belated but
whole-hearted application of the hand-brake. However, the collision with
the confines of my estate was comparatively gentle, and we soon
disentangled the head-light from the garden hedge.
The engine still failed to exhibit any signs of life.
At this point my wife, who had been patiently sitting in the hall
wearing a new motor-bonnet for the best part of two hours, came out and
suggested that we should proclaim a temporary truce and have lunch.
At 2.30 we returned to the scene of operations. Having once more tickled
the now thoroughly depressed carburetter to the requisite pitch of
hilarity, Andy was on the point of resuming operations with the
starting-handle, when I drew his attention to a small stud-like affair
sliding across a groove in the dash-board.
“I think,” I remarked, “that that is the only thing on the car which you
haven’t fiddled with as yet. Supposing I push it across?”
Andy, I was pleased to observe, betrayed distinct signs of confusion.
Recovering quickly, he protested that the condemned thing was of no
particular use, but I could push it across if I liked.
I did so. Next moment, after three deafening but encouraging backfires,
Bill Bailey’s engine came to life with a roar, and the car proceeded
rapidly backwards down the road, Andy, threaded through the spare wheel
like a camel in a needle’s eye, slapping down pedals with one hand and
clutching at the steering-gear with the other.
“Who left the reverse in?” he panted, when the car had at length been
brought to a standstill and the engine stopped.
No explanation was forthcoming, but I observed the scared and flushed
countenance of my daughter peering apprehensively round the coach-house
door, and drew my own conclusions.
Since Bill Bailey was obviously prepared to atone for past inertia by
frenzied activity, our trial trip now came within the sphere of
possibility. My wife had by this time removed her bonnet, and flatly
declined to accompany us, alleging somewhat unkindly that she was
expecting friends to tennis at the end of the week. The Gruffin,
however, would not be parted from us, and presently Bill Bailey, with an
enthusiastic but incompetent chauffeur at the wheel, an apprehensive
proprietor holding on beside him, and a touzled long-legged hoyden of
twelve clinging grimly to the spider-seat behind, clanked majestically
out of the garden gate and breasted the slope leading to the main road.
Victory at last! This was life! This was joy! I leaned back and took a
full breath. The Gruffin, protruding her unkempt head between mine and
Andy’s, shrieked out a hope that we might encounter a load of hay _en
route_. It was so lucky, she said. She was not disappointed.
From the outset it was obvious that the money expended upon the fanfare
horn had been thrown away. No fanfare could have advertised Bill
Bailey’s approach more efficaciously than Bill himself. He was his own
trumpeter. Whenever we passed a roadside cottage we found frantic
mothers garnering stray children into doorways, what time the fauna of
the district hastily took refuge in ditches or behind hedges.
Still, all went well, as they say in reporting railway disasters, until
we had travelled about four miles, when the near-side front wheel
settled down with a gentle sigh upon its rim, and the tyre assumed a
plane instead of a cylindrical surface. Ten minutes’ strenuous work with
a pump restored it to its former rotundity, and off we went again at
what can only be described as a rattling pace.
After another mile or so I decided to take the helm myself, not because
I thought I could drive the car well, but because I could not conceive
how any one could drive it worse than Andy.
I was wrong.
Still, loads of hay are proverbially soft; and since the driver of this
one continued to slumber stertorously upon its summit even after the
shock of impact, we decided not to summon a fellow-creature from
dreamland for the express purpose of distressing him with unpleasant
tidings on the subject of the paint on his tail-board. So, cutting loose
from the wreck, we silently stole away, if the reader will pardon the
expression.
It must have been about twenty minutes later, I fancy, that the gear-box
fell off. Personally I should never have noticed our bereavement, for
the din indigenous to Bill Bailey’s ordinary progress was quite
sufficient to allow a margin for such extra items of disturbance as the
sudden exposure of the gear-wheels. A few jets of a black and glutinous
compound, which I afterwards learned to recognise as gear-oil, began to
spout up through cracks in the flooring, but that was all. It was The
Gruffin who, from her retrospective coign of vantage in the spider-seat,
raised the alarm of a heavy metallic body overboard. We stopped the car,
and the gear-box was discovered in a disintegrated condition a few
hundred yards back; but as none of us was capable of restoring it to its
original position, and as Bill Bailey appeared perfectly prepared to do
without it altogether, we decided to go on _in statu quo_.
The journey, I rejoice to say, was destined not to conclude without
witnessing the final humiliation and exposure of Andy Finch. We had
pumped up the leaky tyre three times in about seven miles, when Andy,
struck by a brilliant idea, exclaimed:
“What mugs we are! What is the good of a Stepney wheel if you don’t use
it?”
A trifle ashamed of our want of resource, we laboriously detached the
Stepney from its moorings and trundled it round to the proper side of
the car. I leaned it up against its future partner and then stepped back
and waited. So did Andy. The Gruffin, anxious to learn, edged up and did
the same.
There was a long pause.
“Go ahead,” I said encouragingly, as my young friend merely continued to
regard the wheel with a mixture of embarrassment and malevolence. “I
want to see how these things are put on.”
“It’s quite easy,” said Andy desperately. “You just hold it up against
the wheel and clamp it on.”
“Then do it,” said I.
“Yes, do it!” said my loyal daughter ferociously. With me she was
determined not to spare the malefactor.
A quarter of an hour later we brought out the pump, and I once more
inflated the leaky tyre, while Andy endeavoured to replace the Stepney
wheel in its original resting-place beside the driver’s seat. Even now
the tale of his incompetence was not complete.
“This blamed Stepney won’t go back into its place,” he said plaintively.
“I fancy one of the clip things must have dropped off. It’s rather an
old-fashioned pattern, this of yours. I think we had better carry it
back loose. After all,” he added almost tearfully, evading my daughter’s
stony eye, “it doesn’t matter _how_ you carry the thing, so long——”
He withered and collapsed. Ultimately we drove home with The Gruffin
wearing the Stepney wheel round her waist, lifebuoy fashion. On reaching
home I sent for Mr. Gootch to come and take Bill Bailey away and put him
into a state of efficiency. Then I explained to Andy, during a most
consoling ten minutes, exactly what I thought of him as a mechanic, a
chauffeur, and a fellow-creature.
III
THE PASSING OF “BILL BAILEY”
It is a favourite maxim of my wife’s that _any_ woman can manage _any_
man, provided she takes the trouble to thoroughly _understand_ him. (The
italics and split infinitive are hers.) This formula, I soon found, is
capable of extension to the relations existing between a motor-car and
its owners. Bill Bailey and I soon got to understand one another
thoroughly. He was possessed of what can only be described as an impish
temperament. He seemed to know by instinct what particular idiosyncrasy
of his would prove most exasperating at a given moment, and he varied
his _répertoire_ accordingly. On the other hand, he never wasted his
energies upon an unprofitable occasion. For instance, he soon discovered
that I had not the slightest objection to his back-firing in a quiet
country road. Consequently he reserved that stunning performance for a
crowded street full of nervous horses. He nearly always broke down when
I took critical or expert friends for an outing; and the only occasions
which ever roused him to high speed were those upon which I was driving
alone, having dispatched the rest of the family by train to ensure their
safe arrival.
Gradually I acquired a familiarity with most of the complaints from
which Bill Bailey suffered—and their name was legion, for they were
many—together with the symptoms which heralded their respective
recurrences. In this connection I should like to set down, for the
benefit of those who may at any time find themselves in a similar
position, a few of the commonest causes of cessation of activity in a
motor-car, gradual or instantaneous, temporary or permanent:—
_A._ Breakdowns on the part of the engine. These may be due to—
(1) Absence of petrol. (Usually discovered after the
entire car has been dismantled.)
(2) Presence of a foreign body. _E.g._, a Teddy Bear in
the water-pump. (How it got there I cannot imagine. The animal
was a present from the superstitious Gruffin, and in the _rôle_
of Mascot adorned the summit of the radiator. It must have felt
dusty or thirsty, and dropped in one day when the cap was off.)
(3) Things in their wrong places. _E.g._, water in the
petrol-tank and petrol in the water-tank. This occurred on the
solitary occasion upon which I entrusted The Gruffin with the
preparation of the car for an afternoon’s run.
(4) Loss of some essential portion of the mechanism.
(_E.g._, the carburetter.) A minute examination of the road for
a few hundred yards back will usually restore it.
_B._ Intermediate troubles.
By this I mean troubles connected with the complicated apparatus which
harnesses the engine to the car—the clutch, the gears, the
driving-shaft, etc. Of these it is sufficient to speak briefly.
(1) The Clutch. This may either refuse to go in or
refuse to come out. In the first case the car cannot be started,
and in the second it cannot be stopped. The former contingency
is humiliating, the latter expensive.
(2) The Gears. These have a habit of becoming
entangled with one another. Persons in search of a novel
sensation are recommended to try getting the live axle
connected simultaneously with the top speed forward and the
reverse.
(3) The Driving-Shaft. The front end of this is
comparatively intelligible, but the tail is shrouded in mystery.
It merges into a thing called the Differential. I have no idea
what this is. It is kept securely concealed in a sort of
Bluebeard’s chamber attached to the back-axle. Inquiries of mine
as to its nature and purpose were always greeted by Mr. Gootch
with amused contempt or genuine alarm, according as I merely
displayed curiosity on the subject, or expressed a desire to
have the axle laid bare.
_C._ Trouble with the car. (With which is incorporated trouble
with the brakes and steering apparatus.)
It must not be imagined that the car will necessarily go because the
engine is running. One of the wheels may refuse to go round, possibly
because—
(1) You have omitted to take the brake off.
(2) Something has gone wrong with the differential. (I
have no further comment to offer on this head.)
(3) It has just dropped off. (_N.B._ This only happened
once.)
After a time, then, I was able not merely to foretell the coming of one
of Bill Bailey’s periods of rest from labour, but to diagnose the cause
and make up a prescription.
If the car came to a standstill for no outwardly perceptible reason, I
removed the bonnet and took a rapid inventory of Bill’s most vital
organs, sending The Gruffin back along the road at the same time, with
instructions to retrieve anything of a metallic nature which she might
discover there.
When Bill Bailey without previous warning suddenly charged a hedge or
passing pedestrian, or otherwise exhibited a preference for the footpath
as opposed to the roadway, I gathered that the steering-gear had gone
wrong again. The Gruffin, who had developed an aptness for applied
mechanics most unusual in her sex, immediately produced from beneath the
seat a suit of blue overalls of her own construction, of which she was
inordinately proud—I hope I shall be able to dress her as cheaply in ten
years’ time—and proceeded to squirm beneath the car. Here, happy as a
queen, she lay upon her back on the dusty road, with oil and petrol
dripping in about equal proportions into her wide grey eyes and open
mouth, adjusting a bit of chronically refractory worm-and-wheel gear
which I, from reasons of _embonpoint_ and advancing years, found myself
unable to reach.
Finally, if my nose was assailed by a mingled odour of blistering paint,
melted indiarubber, and frizzling metal, I deduced that the cooling
apparatus had gone wrong, and that the cylinders were red-hot. The
petrol tap was hurriedly turned off, and The Gruffin and I retired
gracefully, but without undue waste of time, to a distance of about
fifty yards, where we sat down behind the highest and thickest wall
available, and waited for a fall of temperature, a conflagration, or an
explosion, as the case might be.
* * * * *
Bill Bailey remained in my possession for nearly two years. During that
time he covered three thousand miles, consumed more petrol and oil than
I should have thought possible, ran through two sets of tyres, and cost
a sum of money in repairs which would have purchased a small steam
yacht.
There were moments when I loved him like a brother; others, more
frequent, when he was an offence to my vision. The Gruffin, on the other
hand, having fallen in love with him on sight, worshipped him with
increasing ardour and true feminine perversity the dingier and more
repulsive he grew.
Not that we had not our great days. Once we overtook and inadvertently
ran over a hen—an achievement which, while it revolted my humanitarian
instincts and filled the radiator with feathers, struck me as dirt cheap
at half a crown. Again, there was the occasion upon which we were caught
in a police-trap. Never had I felt so proud of Bill Bailey as when I
stood in the dock listening to a policeman’s Homeric description of our
flight, over a measured quarter of a mile. At the end of the recital,
despite my certain knowledge that Bill’s limit was about twenty-three
miles an hour, I felt that I must in common fairness enter him at
Brooklands next season. The Gruffin, who came to see me through,
afterwards assured her mother that I thanked the Magistrate who fined me
and handed my accusing angel five shillings.
But there was another side to the canvas. Many were the excursions upon
which we embarked, only to tramp home in the rain at the end of the day,
leaving word at Mr. Gootch’s to send out and tow Bill Bailey home. Many
a time, too, have Bill and I formed the nucleus of an interested crowd
in a village street, Bill inert and unresponsive, while I, perspiring
vigorously and studiously ignoring inquiries as to whether I could play
“The Merry Widow Waltz,” desolately turned the starting-handle, to evoke
nothing more than an inferior hurdy-gurdy melody syncopated by
explosions at irregular intervals. Once, too, when in a fit of
overweening presumption I essayed to drive across London, we broke down
finally and completely exactly opposite “The Angel” at Islington, where
Bill Bailey, with his back wheels locked fast in some new and
incomprehensible manner,—another vagary of the differential, I
suppose,—despite the urgent appeals of seven policemen, innumerable
errand-boys, and the drivers, conductors, and passengers of an
increasing line of London County Council electric tramcars, stood his
ground in the fairway for nearly a quarter of an hour. Finally, he was
lifted up and carried bodily, by a self-appointed Committee of Public
Safety, to the side of the road, to be conveyed home in a trolley.
But all flesh is as grass. Bill Bailey’s days drew to an end. The
French-grey in his complexion was becoming indistinguishable from the
red; his joints rattled like dry bones; his fanfare horn was growing
asthmatic. Old age was upon him, and I, with the ingratitude of man to
the faithful servant who has outlived his period of usefulness, sold him
to Mr. Gootch for fifteen sovereigns and a small lady’s bicycle.
Only The Gruffin mourned his passing. She said little, but accepted the
bicycle (which I had purchased for her consolation) with becoming
meekness.
At ten o’clock on the night before Bill Bailey’s departure—he was to be
sent for early in the morning—the nurse announced with some concern that
Miss Alethea (The Gruffin) was not in her bed. She was ultimately
discovered in the coach-house, attired in a pink dressing-gown and bath
slippers. She was kneeling with her arms round as much of Bill Bailey as
they could encompass; her long hair flowed and rippled over his
scratched and dinted bonnet; and she was crying as if her very heart
would break.
IV
“BILL BAILEY” COMES AGAIN
A year later I bought a new car. It possessed four cylinders and an
innumerable quantity of claims to perfection. The engine would start at
the pressure of a button; the foot-brake and accelerator never became
involved in an unholy alliance; it could climb any hill; and outlying
portions of its anatomy adhered faithfully to the parent body.
Pedestrians and domestic animals no longer took refuge in ditches at our
approach. On the contrary, we charmed them like Orpheus with his lute;
for the sound of our engine never rose above a sleek and comfortable
purr, while the note of the horn suggested the first three bars of
“Onward, Christian Soldiers!”
My wife christened the new arrival The Greyhound, but The Gruffin,
faithful to the memory of the late lamented Bill Bailey, never referred
to it as anything but The Egg-Boiler. This scornful denotation found
some justification in the car’s ornate nickel-plated radiator, whose
curving sides and domed top made up a far-away resemblance to the
heavily patented and highly explosive contrivance which daily terrorised
our breakfast-table.
Of Bill Bailey’s fate we knew little, but since Mr. Gootch once informed
us with some bitterness that he had had to sell him to a Scotchman, we
gathered that, for once in his life, our esteemed friend had “bitten off
more than he could chew.”
The Greyhound, though a sheer delight as a vehicle, was endowed with
somewhat complicated internal mechanism, and I was compelled in
consequence to retain the services of a skilled chauffeur, a Mr.
Richards, who very properly limited my dealings with the car to ordering
it round when I thought I should be likely to get it. Consequently my
connection with practical mechanics came to an end, and henceforth I
travelled with my friends in the back seat, The Gruffin keeping Mr.
Richards company in front, and goading that exclusive and haughty menial
to visible annoyance by her supercilious attitude towards the new car.
Finally we decided on a motor trip to Scotland. There was a
luggage-carrier on the back of the car which was quite competent to
contain my wife’s trunk and my own suit-case. The Gruffin, who was not
yet of an age to trouble about her appearance, carried her _batterie de
toilette_ in a receptacle of her own, which shared the front seat with
its owner, and served the additional purpose of keeping The Gruffin’s
slim person more securely wedged therein.
We joined the car at Carlisle, and drove the first day to Stirling. On
the second the weather broke down, and we ploughed our way through Perth
and the Pass of Killiecrankie to Inverness in a blinding Scotch mist.
The Greyhound behaved magnificently, and negotiated the Spittal of
Glenshee and other notorious nightmares of the bad hill-climber in a
manner which caused me to refer slightingly to what might have happened
had we entrusted our fortunes to Bill Bailey. The Gruffin tossed back to
me over her shoulder a recommendation to touch wood.
Next day broke fine and clear, and we rose early, for we intended to run
right across Scotland. I ate a hearty breakfast, inwardly congratulating
myself upon not having to accelerate its assimilation by performing
calisthenic exercises upon a starting-handle directly afterwards. At ten
o’clock The Greyhound slid round to the hotel door, and we embarked upon
our journey. Infatuated by long immunity from disaster, I dispatched a
telegram to an hotel fifty miles away, ordering luncheon at a
meticulously definite hour, and another to our destination—a hospitable
shooting-box on the west coast—mentioning the exact moment at which we
might be expected.
Certainly we were “asking for it,” as my Cassandra-like offspring did
not fail to remark. But for a while Fate answered us according to our
folly. We arrived at our luncheon hotel ten minutes before my advertised
time, an achievement which pleased me so much that I wasted some time in
exhibiting the engine to the courtly and venerable brigand who owned the
hotel, with the result that we got away half an hour late. But what was
half an hour to The Greyhound?
Blithely we sped across the endless moor beneath the September sun. The
road, straight and undulating, ran ahead of us like a white tape laid
upon the heather. The engine purred contentedly, and Mr. Richards,
lolling back in his seat, took a patronising survey of the surrounding
landscape. Evidently he rejoiced, in his benign and lofty fashion, to
think how this glittering vision was brightening the dull lives of the
grouse and sheep. Certainly the appearance of The Greyhound did him
credit. Not a speck of mud defiled its body; soot and oil were nowhere
obtrusive. Bill Bailey had been wont, during periods of rest outside
friends’ front doors, to deposit a small puddle of some black and greasy
liquid upon the gravel. The Greyhound was guilty of no such untidiness.
Mr. Richards, to quote his own respectfully satirical words, preferred
using his oil to oil the car instead of gentlemen’s front drives. Under
his administration my expenditure on lubricants alone had shrunk to half
of what it had been in Bill Bailey’s time.
But economy can be pushed to excess. Even as I dozed in the back seat,
sleepily observing The Gruffin’s flying mane and wondering whether we
ought not shortly to get out the Thermos containing our tea, there came
a grating, crackling sound. The Greyhound gave a swerve which nearly
deposited its occupants in a peat-hag; and after one or two zigzag and
epileptic gambols came to a full stop.
“Steering-gear gone wrong, Richards?” I inquired.
“I don’t think so, sir,” replied Mr. Richards easily. “Seems to me it
was a kind of a side sl—— Get out, sir! Get out, mum! The dam thing’s
afire!”
We cooled the fervid glowing of the back-axle with a patent
fire-extinguisher, and sat down gloomily to survey the wreck. Economy is
the foundation of riches, but you must discriminate in your choice of
economies. Axle-grease should not be included in the list. Mr. Richards,
whether owing to a saving disposition or an æsthetic desire to avoid
untidy drippings, had omitted—so we afterwards discovered—to lubricate
the back-axle or differential for several weeks, with the result that
the bearings of the off-side back wheel had “seized,” and most of the
appurtenances thereof had fused into a solid immovable mass.
We sat in the declining rays of the sun and regarded The Greyhound. The
brass-work still shone, and the engine was in beautiful running order;
but the incontrovertible and humiliating fact remained that we were ten
miles from the nearest dwelling and The Greyhound’s career as a medium
of transport was temporarily closed. Even the biting reminder of The
Gruffin that we could still employ it to boil eggs in failed to cheer
us.
Restraining an impulse to give Mr. Richards a month’s warning on the
spot, I conferred with my wife and daughter. We might possibly be picked
up by a passing car, but the road was a lonely one and the contingency
unlikely. We must walk. Accordingly we sat down to a hasty tea, prepared
directly afterwards to tramp on towards our destination.
The wind had dropped completely, and the silence that lay upon the
sleepy, sunny moor was almost uncanny. Imbued with a gentle melancholy,
my wife and I partook of refreshment in chastened silence. Suddenly, as
The Gruffin (considerably more cheerful than I had seen her for some
days) was passing up her cup for the third time, a faint and irregular
sound came pulsing and vibrating across the moor. It might have been the
roar of a battle far away. One could almost hear the popping of rifles,
the clash of steel, and the shrieks of the wounded. Presently the noise
increased in intensity and volume. It appeared to come from beyond a
steep rise in the long straight road behind us. We pricked up our ears.
I became conscious of a vague sense of familiarity with the phenomenon.
The air seemed charged with some sympathetic influence.
“What is that noise, Richards?” I said.
“I rather _think_, sir,” replied Mr. Richards, peering down the road,
“that it might be some kind of a——”
Suddenly I was aware of a distinct rise of temperature
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