← catalogue

The Moon Endureth: Tales and Fancies

by John Buchan · English · Gutenberg #715 · 390,846 chars · public domain (US)

The Project Gutenberg eBook of The Moon Endureth: Tales and Fancies
    
This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and
most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms
of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online
at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States,
you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located
before using this eBook.

Title: The Moon Endureth: Tales and Fancies

Author: John Buchan


        
Release date: November 1, 1996 [eBook #715]
                Most recently updated: January 1, 2021

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/715


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE MOON ENDURETH: TALES AND FANCIES ***









The Moon Endureth

Tales and Fancies

by

John Buchan




Contents

From the Pentlands looking North and South


    I The Company of the Marjolaine
      Avignon 1759

   II A Lucid Interval
      The Shorter Catechism (revised version)

  III The Lemnian
      Atta's song

   IV Space
      Stocks and stones

    V Streams of water in the South
      The Gipsy's song to the lady Cassilis

   VI The grove of Ashtaroth
      Wood magic

  VII The riding of Ninemileburn
      Plain Folk

 VIII The Kings of Orion
      Babylon

   IX The green glen
      The wise years
      [Updater's note: Chapter 9 missing from etext]

    X The rime of True Thomas




FROM THE PENTLANDS LOOKING NORTH AND SOUTH

  Around my feet the clouds are drawn
  In the cold mystery of the dawn;
  No breezes cheer, no guests intrude
  My mossy, mist-clad solitude;
  When sudden down the steeps of sky
  Flames a long, lightening wind.  On high
  The steel-blue arch shines clear, and far,
  In the low lands where cattle are,
  Towns smoke.  And swift, a haze, a gleam,--
  The Firth lies like a frozen stream,
  Reddening with morn.  Tall spires of ships,
  Like thorns about the harbour's lips,
  Now shake faint canvas, now, asleep,
  Their salt, uneasy slumbers keep;
  While golden-grey, o'er kirk and wall,
  Day wakes in the ancient capital.

  Before me lie the lists of strife,
  The caravanserai of life,
  Whence from the gates the merchants go
  On the world's highways; to and fro
  Sail laiden ships; and in the street
  The lone foot-traveller shakes his feet,
  And in some corner by the fire
  Tells the old tale of heart's desire.
  Thither from alien seas and skies
  Comes the far-questioned merchandise:--
  Wrought silks of Broussa, Mocha's ware
  Brown-tinted, fragrant, and the rare
  Thin perfumes that the rose's breath
  Has sought, immortal in her death:
  Gold, gems, and spice, and haply still
  The red rough largess of the hill
  Which takes the sun and bears the vines
  Among the haunted Apennines.
  And he who treads the cobbled street
  To-day in the cold North may meet,
  Come month, come year, the dusky East,
  And share the Caliph's secret feast;
  Or in the toil of wind and sun
  Bear pilgrim-staff, forlorn, fordone,
  Till o'er the steppe, athwart the sand
  Gleam the far gates of Samarkand.
  The ringing quay, the weathered face
  Fair skies, dusk hands, the ocean race
  The palm-girt isle, the frosty shore,
  Gales and hot suns the wide world o'er
  Grey North, red South, and burnished West
  The goals of the old tireless quest,
  Leap in the smoke, immortal, free,
  Where shines yon morning fringe of sea
  I turn, and lo! the moorlands high
  Lie still and frigid to the sky.
  The film of morn is silver-grey
  On the young heather, and away,
  Dim, distant, set in ribs of hill,
  Green glens are shining, stream and mill,
  Clachan and kirk and garden-ground,
  All silent in the hush profound
  Which haunts alone the hills' recess,
  The antique home of quietness.
  Nor to the folk can piper play
  The tune of "Hills and Far Away,"
  For they are with them.  Morn can fire
  No peaks of weary heart's desire,
  Nor the red sunset flame behind
  Some ancient ridge of longing mind.
  For Arcady is here, around,
  In lilt of stream, in the clear sound
  Of lark and moorbird, in the bold
  Gay glamour of the evening gold,
  And so the wheel of seasons moves
  To kirk and market, to mild loves
  And modest hates, and still the sight
  Of brown kind faces, and when night
  Draws dark around with age and fear
  Theirs is the simple hope to cheer.--
  A land of peace where lost romance
  And ghostly shine of helm and lance
  Still dwell by castled scarp and lea,
  And the last homes of chivalry,
  And the good fairy folk, my dear,
  Who speak for cunning souls to hear,
  In crook of glen and bower of hill
  Sing of the Happy Ages still.


  O Thou to whom man's heart is known,
  Grant me my morning orison.
  Grant me the rover's path--to see
  The dawn arise, the daylight flee,
  In the far wastes of sand and sun!
  Grant me with venturous heart to run
  On the old highway, where in pain
  And ecstasy man strives amain,
  Conquers his fellows, or, too weak,
  Finds the great rest that wanderers seek!
  Grant me the joy of wind and brine,
  The zest of food, the taste of wine,
  The fighter's strength, the echoing strife
  The high tumultuous lists of life--
  May I ne'er lag, nor hapless fall,
  Nor weary at the battle-call!...
  But when the even brings surcease,
  Grant me the happy moorland peace;
  That in my heart's depth ever lie
  That ancient land of heath and sky,
  Where the old rhymes and stories fall
  In kindly, soothing pastoral.
  There in the hills grave silence lies,
  And Death himself wears friendly guise
  There be my lot, my twilight stage,
  Dear city of my pilgrimage.




I

THE COMPANY OF THE MARJOLAINE

  "Qu'est-c'qui passe ici si tard,
   Compagnons de la Marjolaine,"
      --CHANSONS DE FRANCE


...I came down from the mountain and into the pleasing valley of the
Adige in as pelting a heat as ever mortal suffered under.  The way
underfoot was parched and white; I had newly come out of a wilderness
of white limestone crags, and a sun of Italy blazed blindingly in an
azure Italian sky.  You are to suppose, my dear aunt, that I had had
enough and something more of my craze for foot-marching.  A fortnight
ago I had gone to Belluno in a post-chaise, dismissed my fellow to
carry my baggage by way of Verona, and with  no more than a valise on
my back plunged into the fastnesses of those mountains.  I had a fancy
to see the little sculptured hills which made backgrounds for
Gianbellini, and there were rumours of great mountains built wholly of
marble which shone like the battlements.

...1 This extract from the unpublished papers of the Manorwater family
has seemed to the Editor worth printing for its historical interest.
The famous Lady Molly Carteron became Countess of Manorwater by her
second marriage.  She was a wit and a friend of wits, and her nephew,
the Honourable Charles Hervey-Townshend (afterwards our Ambassador at
The Hague), addressed to her a series of amusing letters while making,
after the fashion of his contemporaries, the Grand Tour of Europe.
Three letters, written at various places in the Eastern Alps and
despatched from Venice, contain the following short narrative....

of the Celestial City.  So at any rate reported young Mr. Wyndham, who
had travelled with me from Milan to Venice.  I lay the first night at
Pieve, where Titian had the fortune to be born, and the landlord at the
inn displayed a set of villainous daubs which he swore were the early
works of that master.  Thence up a toilsome valley I journeyed to the
Ampezzan country, valley where indeed I saw my white mountains, but,
alas!  no longer Celestial.  For it rained like Westmorland for five
endless days, while I kicked my heels in an inn and turned a canto of
Aristo into halting English couplets.  By-and-by it cleared, and I
headed westward towards Bozen, among the tangle of rocks where the
Dwarf King had once his rose-garden.  The first night I had no inn but
slept in the vile cabin of a forester, who spoke a tongue half Latin,
half Dutch, which I failed to master.  The next day was a blaze of
heat, the mountain-paths lay thick with dust, and I had no wine from
sunrise to sunset.  Can you wonder that, when the following noon I saw
Santa Chiara sleeping in its green circlet of meadows, my thought was
only of a deep draught and a cool chamber?  I protest that I am a great
lover of natural beauty, of rock and cascade, and all the properties of
the poet: but the enthusiasm of Rousseau himself would sink from the
stars to earth if he had marched since breakfast in a cloud of dust
with a throat like the nether millstone.

Yet I had not entered the place before Romance revived.  The little
town--a mere wayside halting-place on the great mountain-road to the
North--had the air of mystery which foretells adventure.  Why is it
that a dwelling or a countenance catches the fancy with the promise of
some strange destiny?  I have houses in my mind which I know will some
day and somehow be intertwined oddly with my life; and I have faces in
memory of which I know nothing--save that I shall undoubtedly cast eyes
again upon them. My first glimpses of Santa Chiara gave me this earnest
of romance.  It was walled and fortified, the streets were narrow pits
of shade, old tenements with bent fronts swayed to meet each other.
Melons lay drying on flat roofs, and yet now and then would come a
high-pitched northern gable.  Latin and Teuton met and mingled in the
place, and, as Mr. Gibbon has taught us, the offspring of this
admixture is something fantastic and unpredictable.  I forgot my
grievous thirst and my tired feet in admiration and a certain vague
expectation of wonders.  Here, ran my thought, it is fated, maybe, that
romance and I shall at last compass a meeting.  Perchance some princess
is in need of my arm, or some affair of high policy is afoot in this
jumble of old masonry.  You will laugh at my  folly, but I had an
excuse for it.  A fortnight in strange mountains disposes a man to look
for something at his next encounter with his kind, and the sight of
Santa Chiara would have fired the imagination of a judge in Chancery.

I strode happily into the courtyard of the Tre Croci, and presently had
my expectation confirmed for I found my fellow,--a faithful rogue I got
in Rome on a Cardinal's recommendation,--hot in dispute with a lady's
maid. The woman was old, harsh-featured--no Italian clearly, though she
spoke fluently in the tongue.  She rated my man like a pickpocket, and
the dispute was over a room.

"The signor will bear me out," said Gianbattista.  "Was not I sent to
Verona with his baggage, and thence to this place of ill manners?  Was
I not bidden engage for him a suite of apartments?  Did I not duly
choose these fronting on the gallery, and dispose therein the signor's
baggage?  And lo! an hour ago I found it all turned into the yard and
this woman installed in its place.  It is monstrous, unbearable!  Is
this an inn for travellers, or haply the private mansion of these
Magnificences?"

"My servant speaks truly," I said firmly yet with courtesy, having no
mind to spoil adventure by urging rights.  "He had orders to take these
rooms for me, and I know not what higher power can countermand me."

The woman had been staring at me scornfully, for no doubt in my dusty
habit I was a figure of small count; but at the sound of my voice she
started, and cried out, "You are English, signor?"

I bowed an admission.  "Then my mistress shall speak with you," she
said, and dived into the inn like an elderly rabbit.

Gianbattista was for sending for the landlord and making a riot in that
hostelry; but I stayed him, and bidding him fetch me a flask of white
wine, three lemons, and a glass of eau de vie, I sat down peaceably at
one of the little tables in the courtyard and prepared for the
quenching of my thirst.  Presently, as I sat drinking that excellent
compound of my own invention, my shoulder was touched, and I turned to
find the maid and her mistress.  Alas for my hopes of a glorious being,
young and lissom and bright with the warm riches of the south!  I saw a
short, stout little lady, well on the wrong side of thirty. She had
plump red cheeks, and fair hair dressed indifferently in the Roman
fashion.  Two candid blue eyes redeemed her plainness, and a certain
grave and gentle dignity.  She was notably a gentlewoman, so I got up,
doffed my hat, and awaited her commands.

She spoke in Italian.  "Your pardon, signor, but I fear my good
Cristine has done you unwittingly a wrong."

Cristine snorted at this premature plea of guilty, while I hastened to
assure the fair apologist that any rooms I might have taken were freely
at her service.

I spoke unconsciously in English, and she replied in a halting parody
of that tongue.  "I understand him," she said, "but I do not speak him
happily. I will discourse, if the signor pleases, in our first speech."

She and her father, it appeared, had come over the Brenner, and arrived
that morning at the Tre Croci, where they purposed to lie for some
days.  He was an old man, very feeble, and much depending upon her
constant care.  Wherefore it was necessary that the rooms of all the
party should adjoin, and there was no suite of the size in the inn save
that which I had taken.  Would I therefore consent to forgo my right,
and place her under an eternal debt?

I agreed most readily, being at all times careless where I sleep, so
the bed be clean, or where I eat, so the meal be good.  I bade my
servant see the landlord and have my belongings carried to other rooms.
Madame thanked me sweetly, and would have gone, when a thought detained
her.

"It is but courteous," she said, "that you should know the names of
those whom you have befriended.  My father is called the Count
d'Albani, and I am his only daughter.  We travel to Florence, where we
have a villa in the environs."

"My name," said I, "is Hervey-Townshend, an Englishman travelling
abroad for his entertainment."

"Hervey?" she repeated.  "Are you one of the family of Miladi Hervey?"

"My worthy aunt," I replied, with a tender recollection of that
preposterous woman.

Madame turned to Cristine, and spoke rapidly in a whisper.

"My father, sir," she said, addressing me, "is an old frail man, little
used to the company of strangers; but in former days he has had
kindness from members of your house, and it would be a satisfaction to
him, I think, to have the privilege of your acquaintance."

She spoke with the air of a vizier who promises a traveller a sight of
the Grand Turk.  I murmured my gratitude, and hastened after
Gianbattista.  In an hour I had bathed, rid myself of my beard, and
arrayed myself in decent clothing.  Then I strolled out to inspect the
little city, admired an altar-piece, chaffered with a Jew for a cameo,
purchased some small necessaries, and returned early in the afternoon
with a noble appetite for dinner.

The Tre Croci had been in happier days a Bishop's lodging, and
possessed a dining-hall ceiled with black oak and adorned with frescos.
It was used as a general salle a manger for all dwellers in the inn,
and there accordingly I sat down to my long-deferred meal.  At first
there were no other diners, and I had two maids, as well as
Gianbattista, to attend on my wants.  Presently Madame d'Albani
entered, escorted by Cristine and by a tall gaunt serving-man, who
seemed no part of the hostelry.  The landlord followed, bowing civilly,
and the two women seated themselves at the little table at the farther
end.  "Il Signor Conte dines in his room," said Madame to the host, who
withdrew to see to that gentleman's needs.

I found my eyes straying often to the little party in the cool twilight
of that refectory.  The man-servant was so old and battered, and of
such a dignity, that he lent a touch of intrigue to the thing. He stood
stiffly behind Madame's chair, handing dishes with an air of great
reverence--the lackey of a great noble, if I had ever seen the type.
Madame never glanced toward me, but conversed sparingly with Cristine,
while she pecked delicately at her food.  Her name ran in my head with
a tantalizing flavour of the familiar.  Albani!  D'Albani!  It was a
name not uncommon in the Roman States, but I had never heard it linked
to a noble family. And yet I had somehow, somewhere; and in the vain
effort at recollection I had almost forgotten my hunger.  There was
nothing bourgeois in the little lady.  The austere servants, the high
manner of condescension, spake of a stock used to deference, though,
maybe, pitifully decayed in its fortunes.  There was a mystery in
these quiet folk which tickled my curiosity.  Romance after all was not
destined to fail me at Santa Chiara.

My doings of the afternoon were of interest to me alone.  Suffice it to
say that when at nightfall I found Gianbattista the trustee of a
letter.  It was from Madame, written in a fine thin hand on a delicate
paper, and it invited me to wait upon the signor her father, that
evening at eight o'clock.  What caught my eye was a coronet stamped in
a corner.  A coronet, I say, but in truth it was a crown, the same as
surmounts the Arms Royal of England on the sign-board of a Court
tradesman.  I marvelled at the ways of foreign heraldry.  Either this
family of d'Albani had higher pretensions than I had given it credit
for, or it employed an unlearned and imaginative stationer.  I
scribbled a line of acceptance and went to dress.

The hour of eight found me knocking at the Count's door.  The grim
serving-man admitted me to the pleasant chamber which should have been
mine own.  A dozen wax candles burned  in sconces, and on the table
among fruits and the remains of supper stood a handsome candelabra of
silver.  A small fire of logs had been lit on the hearth, and before it
in an armchair sat a strange figure of a man.  He seemed not so much
old as aged.  I should have put him at sixty, but the marks he bore
were clearly less those of time than of life.  There sprawled before me
the relics of noble looks.  The fleshy nose, the pendulous cheek, the
drooping mouth, had once been cast in looks of manly beauty.  Heavy
eyebrows above and heavy bags beneath spoiled the effect of a choleric
blue eye, which age had not dimmed.  The man was gross and yet haggard;
it was not the padding of good living which clothed his bones, but a
heaviness as of some dropsical malady.  I could picture him in health a
gaunt loose-limbed being, high-featured and swift and eager.  He was
dressed wholly in black velvet, with fresh ruffles and wristbands, and
he wore heeled shoes with antique silver buckles.  It was a figure of
an older age which rose to greet me, in one hand a snuff-box and a
purple handkerchief, and in the other a book with finger marking place.
He made me a great bow as Madame uttered my name, and held out a hand
with a kindly smile.

"Mr. Hervey-Townshend," he said, "we will speak English, if you please.
I am fain to hear it again, for 'tis a tongue I love.  I make you
welcome, sir, for your own sake and for the sake of your kin.  How is
her honourable ladyship, your aunt?   A week ago she sent me a letter."

I answered that she did famously, and wondered what cause of
correspondence my worthy aunt could have with wandering nobles of Italy.

He motioned me to a chair between Madame and himself, while a servant
set a candle on a shelf behind him.  Then he proceeded to catechise me
in excellent English, with now and then a phrase of French, as to the
doings in my own land.  Admirably informed this Italian gentleman
proved himself.  I defy you to find in Almack's more intelligent
gossip.  He inquired as to the chances of my Lord North and the mind of
my Lord Rockingham.  He had my Lord Shelburne's foibles at his fingers'
ends.  The habits of the Prince, the aims of the their ladyships of
Dorset and Buckingham, the extravagance of this noble Duke and that
right honourable gentleman were not hid from him.  I answered
discreetly yet frankly, for there was no ill-breeding in his curiosity.
Rather it seemed like the inquiries of some fine lady, now buried deep
in the country, as to the doings of a forsaken Mayfair.  There was
humour in it and something of pathos.

"My aunt must be a voluminous correspondent, sir," I said.

He laughed, "I have many friends in England who write to me, but I have
seen none of them for long, and I doubt I may never see them again.
Also in my youth I have been in England."  And he sighed as at
sorrowful recollection.

Then he showed the book in his hand.  "See," he said, "here is one of
your English writings, the greatest book I have ever happened on."  It
was a volume of Mr. Fielding.  For a little he talked of books and
poets.  He admired Mr. Fielding profoundly, Dr. Smollet somewhat less,
Mr. Richardson not at all.  But he was clear that England had a
monopoly of good writers, saving only my friend M. Rousseau, whom he
valued, yet with reservations.  Of the Italians he had no opinion.  I
instanced against him the plays of Signor Alfieri.  He groaned, shook
his head, and grew moody.

"Know you Scotland?" he asked suddenly.

I replied that I had visited Scotch cousins, but had no great
estimation for the country.  "It is too poor and jagged," I said, "for
the taste of one who loves colour and sunshine and suave outlines."  He
sighed.  "It is indeed a bleak land, but a kindly.  When the sun shines
at all he shines on the truest hearts in the world. I love its
bleakness too.  There is a spirit in the misty hills and the harsh
sea-wind which inspires men to great deeds.  Poverty and courage go
often together, and my Scots, if they are poor, are as untamable as
their mountains."

"You know the land, sir?" I asked.

"I have seen it, and I have known many Scots.  You will find them in
Paris and Avignon and Rome, with never a plack in their pockets.  I
have a feeling for exiles, sir, and I have pitied these poor people.
They gave their all for the cause they followed."

Clearly the Count shared my aunt's views of history--those views which
have made such sport for us often at Carteron.  Stalwart Whig as I am,
there was something in the tone of the old gentleman which made me feel
a certain majesty in the lost cause.

"I am Whig in blood and Whig in principle," I said,--"but I have never
denied that those Scots who followed the Chevalier were too good to
waste on so trumpery a leader."

I had no sooner spoken the words than I felt that somehow I had been
guilty of a betise.

"It may be so," said the Count.  "I did not bid you here, sir, to argue
on politics, on which I am assured we should differ.  But I will ask
you one question.  The King of England is a stout upholder of the right
of kings.  How does he face the defection of his American possessions?"

"The nation takes it well enough, and as for his Majesty's feelings,
there is small inclination to inquire into them.  I conceive of the
whole war as a blunder out of which we have come as we deserved.  The
day is gone by for the assertion of monarchic rights against the will
of a people."

"May be.  But take note that the King of England is suffering to-day
as--how do you call him?--the Chevalier suffered forty years ago. 'The
wheel has come full circle,' as your Shakespeare says.  Time has
wrought his revenge."

He was staring into a fire, which burned small and smokily.

"You think the day for kings is ended.  I read it differently.  The
world will ever have need of kings.  If a nation cast out one it will
have to find another.  And mark you, those later kings, created by the
people, will bear a harsher hand than the old race who ruled as of
right.  Some day the world will regret having destroyed the kindly and
legitimate line of monarchs and put in their place tyrants who govern
by the sword or by flattering an idle mob."

This belated dogma would at other times have set me laughing, but the
strange figure before me gave no impulse to merriment.  I glanced at
Madame, and saw her face grave and perplexed, and I thought I read a
warning gleam in her eye.  There was a mystery about the party which
irritated me, but good breeding forbade me to seek a clue.

"You will permit me to retire, sir,"  I said. "I have but this morning
come down from a long march among the mountains east of this valley.
Sleeping in wayside huts and tramping those sultry paths make a man
think pleasantly of bed."

The Count seemed to brighten at my words.  "You are a marcher, sir, and
love the mountains!  Once I would gladly have joined you, for in my
youth I was a great walker in hilly places.  Tell me, now, how many
miles will you cover in a day?"

I told him thirty at a stretch.

"Ah," he said, "I have done fifty, without food, over the roughest and
mossiest mountains.  I lived on what I shot, and for drink I had
spring-water.  Nay, I am forgetting.  There was another beverage, which
I wager you have never tasted.  Heard you ever, sir, of that eau de vie
which the Scots call usquebagh?  It will comfort a traveller as no thin
Italian wine will comfort him.  By my soul, you shall taste it.
Charlotte, my dear, bid Oliphant fetch glasses and hot water and
lemons.  I will give Mr. Hervey-Townshend a sample of the brew.  You
English are all tetes-de-fer, sir, and are worthy of it."

The old man's face had lighted up, and for the moment his air had the
jollity of youth.  I would have accepted the entertainment had I not
again caught Madame's eye.  It said, unmistakably and with serious
pleading, "Decline."  I therefore made my excuses, urged fatigue,
drowsiness, and a delicate stomach, bade my host good-night, and in
deep mystification left the room.

Enlightenment came upon me as the door closed.  There in the threshold
stood the manservant whom they called Oliphant, erect as a sentry on
guard.  The sight reminded me of what I had once seen at Basle when by
chance a Rhenish Grand Duke had shared the inn with me.  Of a sudden a
dozen clues linked together--the crowned notepaper, Scotland, my aunt
Hervey's politics, the tale of old wanderings.

"Tell me,"  I said in a whisper, "who is the Count d'Albani, your
master?" and I whistled softly a bar of "Charlie is my darling."

"Ay," said the man, without relaxing a muscle of his grim face.  "It is
the King of England--my king and yours."




II

In the small hours of the next morning I was awoke by a most unearthly
sound.  It was as if all the cats on all the roofs of Santa Chiara were
sharpening their claws and wailing their battle-cries.  Presently out
of the noise came a kind of music--very slow, solemn, and melancholy.
The notes ran up in great flights of ecstasy, and sunk anon to the
tragic deeps.  In spite of my sleepiness I was held spellbound and the
musician had concluded with certain barbaric grunts before I had the
curiosity to rise.  It came from somewhere in the gallery of the inn,
and as I stuck my head out of my door I had a glimpse of Oliphant,
nightcap on head and a great bagpipe below his arm, stalking down the
corridor.

The incident, for all the gravity of the music, seemed to give a touch
of farce to my interview of the past evening.  I had gone to bed with
my mind full of sad stories of the deaths of kings.  Magnificence in
tatters has always affected my pity more deeply than tatters with no
such antecedent, and a monarch out at elbows stood for me as the last
irony of our mortal life.  Here was a king whose misfortunes could find
no parallel.  He had been in his youth the hero of a high adventure,
and his middle age had been spent in fleeting among the courts of
Europe, and waiting as pensioner on the whims of his foolish but
regnant brethren.  I had heard tales of a growing sottishness, a
decline in spirit, a squalid taste in pleasures.  Small blame, I had
always thought, to so ill-fated a princeling.  And now I had chanced
upon the gentleman in his dotage, travelling with a barren effort at
mystery, attended by a sad-faced daughter and two ancient domestics.
It was a lesson in the vanity of human wishes which the shallowest
moralist would have noted.  Nay, I felt more than the moral.  Something
human and kindly in the old fellow had caught my fancy.  The decadence
was too tragic to prose about, the decadent too human to moralise on.
I had left the chamber of the--shall I say de jure King of England?--a
sentimental adherent of the cause.  But this business of the bagpipes
touched the comic.  To harry an old valet out of bed and set him
droning on pipes in the small hours smacked of a theatrical taste, or
at least of an undignified fancy.  Kings in exile, if they wish to keep
the tragic air, should not indulge in such fantastic serenades.

My mind changed again when after breakfast I fell in with Madame on the
stair. She drew aside to let me pass, and then made as if she would
speak to me.  I gave her good-morning, and, my mind being full of her
story, addressed her as "Excellency."

"I see, sir," she said, "That you know the truth.  I have to ask your
forbearance for the concealment I practised yesterday.  It was a poor
requital for your generosity, but is it one of the shifts of our sad
fortune. An uncrowned king must go in disguise or risk the laughter of
every stable-boy. Besides, we are too poor to travel in state, even if
we desired it."

Honestly, I knew not what to say. I was not asked to sympathise, having
already revealed my politics, and yet the case cried out for sympathy.
You remember, my dear aunt, the good Lady Culham, who was our
Dorsetshire neighbour, and tried hard to mend my ways at Carteron?
This poor Duchess--for so she called herself--was just such another.  A
woman made for comfort, housewifery, and motherhood, and by no means
for racing about Europe in charge of a disreputable parent.  I could
picture her settled equably on a garden seat with a lapdog and
needlework, blinking happily over green lawns and mildly rating an
errant gardener.  I could fancy her sitting in a summer parlour, very
orderly and dainty, writing lengthy epistles to a tribe of nieces.  I
could see her marshalling a household in the family pew, or riding
serenely in the family coach behind fat bay horses.  But here, on an
inn staircase, with a false name and a sad air of mystery, she was
woefully out of place.  I noted little wrinkles forming in the corners
of her eyes, and the ravages of care beginning in the plump rosiness of
her face.  Be sure there was nothing appealing in her mien. She spoke
with the air of a great lady, to whom the world is matter only for an
afterthought.  It was the facts that appealed and grew poignant from
her courage.

"There is another claim upon your good nature," she said.  "Doubtless
you were awoke last night by Oliphant's playing upon the pipes.  I
rebuked the landlord for his insolence in protesting, but to you, a
gentleman and a friend, an explanation is due.  My father sleeps ill,
and your conversation seems to have cast him into a train of sad
memories.  It has been his habit on such occasions to have the pipes
played to him, since they remind him of friends and happier days.  It
is a small privilege for an old man, and he does not claim it often."

I declared that the music had only pleased, and that I would welcome
its repetition. Where upon she left me with a little bow and an
invitation to join them that day at dinner, while I departed into the
town on my own errands.  I returned before midday, and was seated at an
arbour in the garden, busy with letters, when there hove in sight the
gaunt figure of Oliphant.  He hovered around me, if such a figure can
be said to hover, with the obvious intention of addressing me.  The
fellow had caught my fancy, and I was willing to see more of him.  His
face might have been hacked out of grey granite, his clothes hung
loosely on his spare bones, and his stockined shanks would have done no
discredit to Don Quixote.  There was no dignity in his air, only a
steady and enduring sadness.  Here, thought I, is the one of the
establishment who most commonly meets the shock of the world's buffets.
I called him by name and asked him his desires.

It appeared that he took me for a Jacobite, for he began a rigmarole
about loyalty and hard fortune.  I hastened to correct him, and he took
the correction with the same patient despair with which he took all
things. 'Twas but another of the blows of Fate.

"At any rate," he said in a broad Scotch accent, "ye come of kin that
has helpit my maister afore this.  I've many times heard tell o'
Herveys and Townshends in England, and a' folk said they were on the
richt side.  Ye're maybe no a freend, but ye're a freend's freend, or I
wadna be speirin' at ye."

I was amused at the prologue, and waited on the tale.  It soon came.
Oliphant, it appeared, was the purse-bearer of the household, and
woeful straits that poor purse-bearer must have been often put to.  I
questioned him as to his master's revenues, but could get no clear
answer. There were payments due next month in Florence which would
solve the difficulties for the winter, but in the meantime expenditure
had beaten income.  Travelling had cost much, and the Count must have
his small comforts.  The result in plain words was that Oliphant had
not the wherewithal to frank the company to Florence; indeed, I doubted
if he could have paid the reckoning in Santa Chiara.  A loan was
therefore sought from a friend's friend, meaning myself.

I was very really embarrassed.  Not that I would not have given
willingly, for I had ample resources at the moment and was mightily
concerned about the sad household.  But I knew that the little Duchess
would take Oliphant's ears from his head if she guessed that he had
dared to borrow from me, and that, if I lent, her back would for ever
be turned against me.  And yet, what would follow on my refusal?  In a
day of two there would be a pitiful scene with mine host, and as like
as not some of their baggage detained as security for payment.  I did
not love the task of conspiring behind the lady's back, but if it could
be contrived 'twas indubitably the kindest course.  I glared sternly at
Oliphant, who met me with his pathetic, dog-like eyes.

"You know that your mistress would never consent to the request you
have made of me?"

"I ken," he said humbly.  "But payin' is my job, and I simply havena
the siller.  It's no the first time it has happened, and it's a sair
trial for them both to be flung out o' doors by a foreign hostler
because they canna meet his charges.  But, sir, if ye can lend to me,
ye may be certain that her leddyship will never, hear a word o't.  Puir
thing, she takes nae thocht o' where the siller comes frae, ony mair
than the lilies o' the field."

I became a conspirator.  "You swear, Oliphant, by all you hold sacred,
to breathe nothing of this to your mistress, and if she should suspect,
to lie like a Privy Councillor?"

A flicker of a smile crossed his face.  "I'll lee like a Scotch
packman, and the Father o' lees could do nae mair.  You need have no
fear for your siller, sir.  I've aye repaid when I borrowed, though you
may have to wait a bittock."  And the strange fellow strolled off.

At dinner no Duchess appeared till long after the appointed hour, nor
was there any sign of Oliphant.  When she came at last with Cristine,
her eyes looked as if she had been crying, and she greeted me with
remote courtesy.  My first thought was that Oliphant had revealed the
matter of the loan, but presently I found that the lady's trouble was
far different.  Her father, it seemed, was ill again with his old
complaint.  What that was I did not ask, nor did the Duchess reveal it.

We spoke in French, for I had discovered that this was her favourite
speech.  There was no Oliphant to wait on us, and the inn servants were
always about, so it was well to have a tongue they did not comprehend.
The lady was distracted and sad.  When I inquired feelingly as to the
general condition of her father's health she parried the question, and
when I offered my services she disregarded my words.  It was in truth a
doleful meal, while the faded Cristine sat like a sphinx staring into
vacancy.  I spoke of England and of her friends, of Paris and
Versailles, of Avignon where she had spent some years, and of the
amenities of Florence, which she considered her home.  But it was like
talking to a nunnery door.  I got nothing but "It is indeed true, sir,"
or "Do you say so, sir!"  till my energy began to sink.  Madame
perceived my discomfort, and, as she rose, murmured an apology.  "Pray
forgive my distraction, but I am poor company when my father is ill.  I
have a foolish mind, easily frightened.  Nay, nay!" she went on when I
again offered help, "the illness is trifling. It will pass off by
to-morrow, or at the latest the next day.  Only I had looked forward to
some ease at Santa Chiara, and the promise is belied."

As it chanced that evening, returning to the inn, I passed by the north
side where the windows of the Count's room looked over a little
flower-garden abutting on the courtyard.  The dusk was falling, and a
lamp had been lit which gave a glimpse into the interior.  The sick man
was standing by the window, his figure flung into relief by the
lamplight.  If he was sick, his sickness was of a curious type.  His
face was ruddy, his eye wild, and, his wig being off, his scanty hair
stood up oddly round his head.  He seemed to be singing, but I could
not catch the sound through the shut casement.  Another figure in the
room, probably Oliphant, laid a hand on the Count's shoulder, drew him
from the window, and closed the shutter.

It needed only the recollection of stories which were the property of
all Europe to reach a conclusion on the gentleman's illness.  The
legitimate King of England was very drunk.

As I went to my room that night I passed the Count's door. There stood
Oliphant as sentry, more grim and haggard than ever, and I thought that
his eye met mine with a certain intelligence.  From inside the room
came a great racket.  There was the sound of glasses falling, then a
string of oaths, English, French, and for all I know, Irish, rapped out
in a loud drunken voice.  A pause, and then came the sound of maudlin
singing.  It pursued me along the gallery, an old childish song,
delivered as if 'twere a pot-house catch--

  "Qu'est-ce qui passe ici si tard,
  Compagnons de la Marjolaine--"

One of the late-going company of the Marjolaine hastened to bed.  This
king in exile, with his melancholy daughter, was becoming too much for
him.




III

It was just before noon next day that the travellers arrived.  I was
sitting in the shady loggia of the inn, reading a volume of De Thou,
when there drove up to the door two coaches.  Out of the first
descended very slowly and stiffly four gentlemen; out of the second
four servants and a quantity of baggage.  As it chanced there was no
one about, the courtyard slept its sunny noontide sleep, and the only
movement was a lizard on the wall and a buzz of flies by the fountain.
Seeing no sign of the landlord, one of the travellers approached me
with a grave inclination.

"This is the inn called the Tre Croci, sir?" he asked.

I said it was, and shouted on my own account for the host.  Presently
that personage arrived with a red face and a short wind, having
ascended rapidly from his own cellar.  He was awed by the dignity of
the travellers, and made none of his usual protests of incapacity.  The
servants filed off solemnly with the baggage, and the four gentlemen
set themselves down beside me in the loggia and ordered each a modest
flask of wine.

At first I took them for our countrymen, but as I watched them the
conviction vanished.  All four were tall and lean beyond the average of
mankind.  They wore suits of black, with antique starched frills to
their shirts; their hair was their own and unpowdered.  Massive buckles
of an ancient pattern adorned their square-toed shoes, and the canes
they carried were like the yards of a small vessel.  They were four
merchants, I had guessed, of Scotland, maybe, or of Newcastle, but
their voices were not Scotch, and their air had no touch of commerce.
Take the heavy-browed preoccupation of a Secretary of State, add the
dignity of a bishop, the sunburn of a fox-hunter, and something of the
disciplined erectness of a soldier, and you may perceive the manner of
these four gentlemen.  By the side of them my assurance vanished.
Compared with their Olympian serenity my Person seemed fussy and
servile.  Even so, I mused, must Mr. Franklin have looked when baited
in Parliament by the Tory pack.  The reflection gave me the cue.
Presently I caught from their conversation the word "Washington,"  and
the truth flashed upon me.  I was in the presence of four of Mr.
Franklin's countrymen.  Having never seen an American in the flesh, I
rejoiced at the chance of enlarging my acquaintance.

They brought me into the circle by a polite question as to the length
of road to Verona.  Soon introductions followed.  My name intrigued
them, and they were eager to learn of my kinship to Uncle Charles.  The
eldest of the four, it appeared, was Mr. Galloway out of Maryland.
Then came two brothers, Sylvester by name, of Pennsylvania, and last
Mr. Fish, a lawyer of New York.  All four had campaigned in the late
war, and all four were members of the Convention, or whatever they call
their rough-and-ready parliament.  They were modest in their behaviour,
much disinclined to speak of their past, as great men might be whose
reputation was world-wide.  Somehow the names stuck in my memory.  I
was certain that I had heard them linked with some stalwart fight or
some moving civil deed or some defiant manifesto.  The making of
history was in their steadfast eye and the grave lines of the mouth.
Our friendship flourished mightily in a brief hour, and brought me the
invitation, willingly accepted, to sit with them at dinner.

There was no sign of the Duchess or Cristine or Oliphant.  Whatever had
happened, that household to-day required all hands on deck, and I was
left alone with the Americans.  In my day I have supped with the
Macaronies, I have held up my head at the Cocoa Tree, I have avoided
the floor at hunt dinners, I have drunk glass to glass with Tom
Carteron.  But never before have I seen such noble consumers of good
liquor as those four gentlemen from beyond the Atlantic.  They drank
the strong red Cyprus as if it had been spring-water.  "The dust of
your Italian roads takes some cleansing, Mr. Townshend," was their only
excuse, but in truth none was needed.  The wine seemed only to thaw
their iron decorum.  Without any surcease of dignity they grew
communicative, and passed from lands to peoples and from peoples to
constitutions.  Before we knew it we were embarked upon high politics.

Naturally we did not differ on the war.  Like me, they held it to have
been a grievous necessity.  They had no bitterness against England,
only regrets for her blunders.  Of his Majesty they spoke with respect,
of his Majesty's advisers with dignified condemnation.  They thought
highly of our troops in America; less highly of our generals.

"Look you, sir," said Mr. Galloway, "in a war such as we have witnessed
the Almighty is the only strategist. You fight against the forces of
Nature, and a newcomer little knows that the success or failure of
every operation he can conceive depends not upon generalship, but upon
the confirmation of a vast country.  Our generals, with this in mind
and with fewer men, could make all your schemes miscarry.  Had the
English soldiers not been of such stubborn stuff, we should have been
victors from the first.  Our leader was not General Washington but
General America, and his brigadiers were forests, swamps, lakes,
rivers, and high mountains."

"And now,"  I said, "having won, you have the greatest of human
experiments before you.  Your business is to show that the Saxon stock
is adaptable to a republic."

It seemed to me that they exchanged glances.

"We are not pedants," said Mr. Fish, "and have no desire to dispute
about the form of a constitution.  A people may be as free under a king
as under a senate.  Liberty is not the lackey of any type of government."

These were strange words from a member of a race whom I had thought
wedded to the republicanism of Helvidius Priscus.

"As a loyal subject of a monarchy,"  I said, "I must agree with you.
But your hands are tied, for I cannot picture the establishment of a
House of Washington and--if not, where are you to turn for your
sovereign?"

Again a smile seemed to pass among the four.

"We are experimenters, as you say, sir, and must go slowly.  In the
meantime, we have an authority which keeps peace and property safe.  We
are at leisure to cast our eyes round and meditate on the future."

"Then, gentlemen," said I, "you take an excellent way of meditation in
visiting this museum of old sovereignties.  Here you have the relics of
any government you please--a dozen republics, tyrannies, theocracies,
merchant confederations, kingdoms, and more than one empire.  You have
your choice.  I am tolerably familiar with the land, and if I can
assist you I am at your service."

They thanked me gravely "We have letters," said Mr. Galloway; "one in
especial is to a gentleman whom we hope to meet in this place.  Have
you heard in your travels of the Count of Albany?"

"He has arrived," said I, "two days ago.  Even now he is in the chamber
above us at dinner."

The news interested them hugely.

"You have seen him?" they cried.  "What is he like?"

"An elderly gentleman in poor health, a man who has travelled much,
and, I judge, has suffered something from fortune.  He has a fondness
for the English, so you will be welcome, sirs; but he was indisposed
yesterday, and may still be unable to receive you.  His daughter
travels with him and tends his old age."

"And you--you have spoken with him?"

"The night before last I was in his company.  We talked of many things,
including the late war.  He is somewhat of your opinion on matters of
government."

The four looked at each other, and then Mr. Galloway rose.

"I ask your permission, Mr. Townshend, to consult for a moment with my
friends.  The matter is of some importance, and I would beg you to
await us."  So saying, he led the others out of doors, and I heard them
withdraw to a corner of the loggia.  Now, thought I, there is something
afoot, and my long-sought romance approaches fruition.  The company of
the Marjolaine, whom the Count had sung of, have arrived at last.

Presently they returned and seated themselves at the table.

"You can be of great assistance to us, Mr. Townshend, and we would fain
take you into our confidence.  Are you aware who is this Count of
Albany?"

I nodded.  "It is a thin disguise to one familiar with history."

"Have you reached any estimate of his character or capabilities?  You
speak to friends, and, let me tell you, it is a matter which deeply
concerns the Count's interests."

"I think him a kindly and pathetic old gentleman.  He naturally bears
the mark of forty years' sojourn in the wilderness."

Mr. Galloway took snuff.

"We have business with him, but it is business which stands in need of
an agent.  There is no one in the Count's suite with whom we could
discuss affairs?"

"There is his daughter."

"Ah, but she would scarcely suit the case. Is there no man--a friend,
and yet not a member of the family who can treat with us?"

I replied that I thought that I was the only being in Santa Chiara who
answered the description.

"If you will accept the task, Mr. Townshend, you are amply qualified.
We will be frank with you and reveal our business.  We are on no less
an errand than to offer the Count of Albany a crown."

I suppose I must have had some suspicion of their purpose, and yet the
revelation of it fell on me like a thunderclap.  I could only stare
owlishly at my four grave gentlemen.

Mr. Galloway went on unperturbed.  "I have told you that in America we
are not yet republicans.  There are those among us who favour a
republic, but they are by no means a majority.  We have got rid of a
king who misgoverned us, but we have no wish to get rid of kingship.
We want a king of our own choosing, and we would get with him all the
ancient sanctions of monarchy.  The Count of Albany is of the most
illustrious royal stock in Europe--he is, if legitimacy goes for
anything, the rightful King of Britain.  Now, if the republican party
among us is to be worsted, we must come before the nation with a
powerful candidate for their favour. You perceive my drift?  What more
potent appeal to American pride than to say: 'We have got rid of King
George; we choose of our own free will the older line and King
Charles'?"

I said foolishly that I thought monarchy had had its day, and that
'twas idle to revive it.

"That is a sentiment well enough under a monarchical government; but
we, with a clean page to write upon, do not share it.  You know your
ancient historians.  Has not the repository of the chief power always
been the rock on which republicanism has shipwrecked?  If that power is
given to the chief citizen, the way is prepared for the tyrant.  If it
abides peacefully in a royal house, it abides with cyphers who dignify,
without obstructing, a popular constitution.  Do not mistake me, Mr.
Townshend.  This is no whim of a sentimental girl, but the reasoned
conclusion of the men who achieved our liberty.  There is every reason
to believe that General Washington shares our views, and Mr. Hamilton,
whose name you may know, is the inspirer of our mission."

"But the Count is an old man,"  I urged; for I knew not where to begin
in my exposition of the hopelessness of their errand.

"By so much the better.  We do not wish a young king who may be
fractious.  An old man tempered by misfortune is what our purpose
demands."

"He has also his failings. A man cannot lead his life for forty years
and retain all the virtues."

At that one of the Sylvesters spoke sharply.  "I have heard such
gossip, but I do not credit it.  I have not forgotten Preston and
Derby."

I made my last objection.  "He has no posterity--legitimate
posterity--to carry on his line."

The four gentlemen smiled.  "That happens to be his chiefest
recommendation," said Mr. Galloway.  "It enables us to take the House
of Stuart on trial.  We need a breathing-space and leisure to look
around; but unless we establish the principle of monarchy at once the
republicans will forestall us.  Let us get our king at all costs, and
during the remaining years of his life we shall have time to settle the
succession problem.

"We have no wish to saddle ourselves for good with a race who might
prove burdensome.  If King Charles fails he has no son, and we can look
elsewhere for a better monarch.  You perceive the reason of my view?"

I did, and I also perceived the colossal absurdity of the whole
business. But I could not convince them of it, for they met my
objections with excellent arguments.  Nothing save a sight of the Count
would, I feared, disillusion them.

"You wish me to make this proposal on your behalf?"  I asked.

"We shall make the proposal ourselves, but we desire you to prepare the
way for us.  He is an elderly man, and should first be informed of our
purpose."

"There is one person whom I beg leave to consult--the Duchess, his
daughter.  It may be that the present is an ill moment for approaching
the Count, and the affair requires her sanction."

They agreed, and with a very perplexed mind I went forth to seek the
lady.  The irony of the thing was too cruel, and my heart ached for
her.  In the gallery I found Oliphant packing some very shabby trunks,
and when I questioned him he told me that the family were to leave
Santa Chiara on the morrow.  Perchance the Duchess had awakened to the
true state of their exchequer, or perchance she thought it well to get
her father on the road again as a cure for his ailment.

I discovered Cristine, and begged for an interview with her mistress on
an urgent matter.  She led me to the Duchess's room, and there the
evidence of poverty greeted me openly.  All the little luxuries of the
menage had gone to the Count.  The poor lady's room was no better than
a servant's garret, and the lady herself sat stitching a rent in a
travelling cloak.  She rose to greet me with alarm in her eyes.

As briefly as I could I set out the facts of my amazing mission.  At
first she seemed scarcely to hear me.  "What do they want with him?"
she asked.  "He can give them nothing.  He is no friend to the
Americans or to any people who have deposed their sovereign."  Then, as
she grasped my meaning, her face flushed.

"It is a heartless trick, Mr. Townshend.  I would fain think you no
party to it."

"Believe me, dear madame, it is no trick.  The men below are in sober
earnest.  You have but to see their faces to know that theirs is no
wild adventure.  I believe sincerely that they have the power to
implement their promise."

"But it is madness.  He is old and worn and sick.  His day is long past
for winning a crown."

"All this I have said, but it does not move them."   And I told her
rapidly Mr. Galloway's argument.  She fell into a muse.  "At the
eleventh hour!  Nay, too late, too late.  Had he been twenty years
younger, what a stroke of fortune!  Fate bears too hard on us, too
hard!"

Then she turned to me fiercely.  "You have no doubt heard, sir, the
gossip about my father, which is on the lips of every fool in Europe.
Let us have done with this pitiful make-believe.  My father is a sot.
Nay, I do not blame him.  I blame his enemies and his miserable
destiny.  But there is the fact.  Were he not old, he would still be
unfit to grasp a crown and rule over a turbulent people.  He flees from
one city to another, but he cannot flee from himself.  That is his
illness on which you condoled with me yesterday."

The lady's control was at breaking-point.  Another moment and I
expected a torrent of tears.  But they did not come.  With a great
effort she regained her composure.

"Well, the gentlemen must have an answer.  You will tell them that the
Count, my father--nay--give him his true title if you care--is vastly
obliged to them for the honour they have done him, but would decline on
account of his age and infirmities. You know how to phrase a decent
refusal."

"Pardon me,"  said I, "but I might give them that answer till doomsday
and never content them. They have not travelled many thousand miles to
be put off by hearsay evidence.  Nothing will satisfy them but an
interview with your father himself.

"It is impossible," she said sharply.

"Then we must expect the renewed attentions of our American friends.
They will wait till they see him."

She rose and paced the room.

"They must go," she repeated many times.  "If they see him sober he
will accept with joy, and we shall be the laughing-stock of the world.
I tell you it cannot be.  I alone know how immense is the
impossibility.  He cannot afford to lose the last rags of his dignity,
the last dregs of his ease.  They must not see him.  I will speak with
them myself."

"They will be honoured, madame, but I do not think they will be
convinced.  They are what we call in my land 'men of business.' They
will not be content till they get the Count's reply from his own lips."

A new Duchess seemed to have arisen, a woman of quick action and sharp
words.

"So be it.  They shall see him.  Oh, I am sick to death of fine
sentiments and high loyalty and all the vapouring stuff I have lived
among for years.  All I ask for myself and my father is a little peace,
and, by Heaven! I shall secure it.  If nothing will kill your
gentlemen's folly but truth, why, truth they shall have.  They shall
see my father, and this very minute.  Bring them up, Mr. Townshend, and
usher them into the presence of the rightful King of England.  You will
find him alone."  She stopped her walk and looked out of the window.

I went back in a hurry to the Americans.  "I am bidden to bring you to
the Count's chamber.  He is alone and will see you.  These are the
commands of madame his daughter."

"Good!" said Mr. Galloway, and all four, grave gentlemen as they were,
seemed to brace themselves to a special dignity as befitted ambassadors
to a king.  I led them upstairs, tapped at the Count's door, and,
getting no answer, opened it and admitted them.

And this was what we saw. The furniture was in disorder, and on a couch
lay an old man sleeping a heavy drunken sleep.  His mouth was open and
his breath came stertorously.  The face was purple, and large purple
veins stood out on the mottled forehead.  His scanty white hair was
draggled over his cheek.  On the floor was a broken glass, wet stains
still lay on the boards, and the place reeked of spirits.  The four
looked for a second--I do not think longer at him whom they would have
made their king.  They did not look at each other.  With one accord
they moved out, and Mr. Fish, who was last, closed the door very gently
behind him.

In the hall below Mr. Galloway turned to me.  "Our mission is ended,
Mr. Townshend. I have to thank you for your courtesy." Then to the
others, "If we order the coaches now, we may get well on the way to
Verona ere sundown."


An hour later two coaches rolled out of the courtyard of the Tre Croci.
As they passed, a window was half-opened on the upper floor, and a head
looked out.  A line of a song came down, a song sung in a strange
quavering voice.  It was the catch I had heard the night before:

  "Qu'est-ce qui passe ici si tard,
  Compagnons de la Marjolaine--e!"

It was true. The company came late indeed--too late by forty
years. . . .




AVIGNON

1759

  Hearts to break but nane to sell,
    Gear to tine but nane to hain;--
  We maun dree a weary spell
    Ere our lad comes back again.

  I walk abroad on winter days,
    When storms have stripped the wide champaign,
  For northern winds have norland ways,
    And scents of Badenoch haunt the rain.
  And by the lipping river path,
    When in the fog the Rhone runs grey,
  I see the heather of the Strath,
    And watch the salmon leap in Spey.

  The hills are feathered with young trees,
    I set them for my children's boys.
  I made a garden deep in ease,
    A pleasance for my lady's joys.
  Strangers have heired them. Long ago
    She died,--kind fortune thus to die;
  And my one son by Beauly flow
    Gave up the soul that could not lie.

  Old, elbow-worn, and pinched I bide
    The final toll the gods may take.
  The laggard years have quenched my pride;
    They cannot kill the ache, the ache.

  Weep not the dead, for they have sleep
    Who lie at home: but ah, for me
  In the deep grave my heart will weep
    With longing for my lost countrie.

          Hearts to break but nane to sell,
           Gear to tine but nane to hain;--
          We maun dree a weary spell
           Ere our lad comes back again.




II

A LUCID INTERVAL

To adopt the opening words of a more famous tale,  "The truth of this
strange matter is what the world has long been looking for."  The
events which I propose to chronicle were known to perhaps a hundred
people in London whose fate brings them into contact with politics.
The consequences were apparent to all the world, and for one hectic
fortnight tinged the soberest newspapers with saffron, drove more than
one worthy election agent to an asylum, and sent whole batches of
legislators to Continental cures.  "But no reasonable explanation of
the mystery has been forthcoming until now, when a series of chances
gave the key into my hands."

Lady Caerlaverock is my aunt, and I was present at the two remarkable
dinner-parties which form the main events in this tale.  I was also
taken into her confidence during the terrible fortnight which
intervened between them.  Like everybody else, I was hopelessly in the
dark, and could only accept what happened as a divine interposition.
My first clue came when James, the Caerlaverocks' second footman,
entered my service as valet, and being a cheerful youth chose to gossip
while he shaved me.  I checked him, but he babbled on, and I could not
choose but learn something about the disposition of the Caerlaverock
household below stairs.  I learned--what I knew before--that his
lordship had an inordinate love for curries, a taste acquired during
some troubled years as Indian Viceroy.  I had often eaten that
admirable dish at his table, and had heard him boast of the skill of
the Indian cook who prepared it.  James, it appeared, did not hold with
the Orient in the kitchen.  He described the said Indian gentleman as a
"nigger," and expressed profound distrust of his ways.  He referred
darkly to the events of the year before, which in some distorted way
had reached the servants' ears.  "We always thought as 'ow it was them
niggers as done it," he declared; and when I questioned him on his use
of the plural, admitted that at the time in question "there 'ad been
more nor one nigger 'anging about the kitchen."

Pondering on these sayings, I asked myself if it were not possible that
the behaviour of certain eminent statesmen was due to some strange
devilry of the East, and I made a vow to abstain in future from the
Caerlaverock curries.  But last month my brother returned from India,
and I got the whole truth.  He was staying with me in Scotland, and in
the smoking-room the talk turned on occultism in the East.  I declared
myself a sceptic, and George was stirred.  He asked me rudely what I
knew about it, and proceeded to make a startling confession of faith.
He was cross-examined by the others, and retorted with some of his
experiences.  Finding an incredulous audience, his tales became more
defiant, until he capped them all with one monstrous yarn.  He
maintained that in a Hindu family of his acquaintance there had been
transmitted the secret of a drug, capable of altering a man's whole
temperament until the antidote was administered.  It would turn a
coward into a bravo, a miser into a spendthrift, a rake into a fakir.
Then, having delivered his manifesto he got up abruptly and went to bed.

I followed him to his room, for something in the story had revived a
memory.  By dint of much persuasion I dragged from the somnolent George
various details.  The family in question were Beharis, large
landholders dwelling near the Nepal border.  He had known old Ram Singh
for years, and had seen him twice since his return from England.  He
got the story from him under no promise of secrecy, for the family drug
was as well known in the neighbourhood as the nine incarnations of
Krishna.  He had no doubt about the truth of it, for he had positive
proof.  "And others besides me," said George.  "Do you remember when
Vennard had a lucid interval a couple of years ago and talked sense for
once?  That was old Ram Singh's doing, for he told me about it."

Three years ago it seems the Government of India saw fit to appoint a
commission to inquire into land tenure on the Nepal border.  Some of
the feudal Rajahs had been "birsing yont," like the Breadalbanes, and
the smaller zemindars were gravely disquieted.  The result of the
commission was that Ram Singh had his boundaries rectified, and lost a
mile or two of country which his hard-fisted fathers had won.

I know nothing of the rights of the matter, but there can be no doubt
about Ram Singh's dissatisfaction.  He appealed to the law courts, but
failed to upset the commission's finding, and the Privy Council upheld
the Indian judgment.  Thereupon in a flowery and eloquent document he
laid his case before the Viceroy, and was told that the matter was
closed.  Now Ram Singh came of a fighting stock, so he straightway took
ship to England to petition the Crown.  He petitioned Parliament, but
his petition went into the bag behind the Speaker's chair, from which
there is no return.  He petitioned the King, but was courteously
informed that he must approach the Department concerned.  He tried the
Secretary of State for India, and had an interview with Abinger
Vennard, who was very rude to him, and succeeded in mortally insulting
the feudal aristocrat.  He appealed to the Prime Minister, and was
warned off by a harassed private secretary.  The handful of members of
Parliament who make Indian grievances their stock-in-trade fought shy
of him, for indeed Ram Singh's case had no sort of platform appeal in
it, and his arguments were flagrantly undemocratic.  But they sent him
to Lord Caerlaverock, for the ex-viceroy loved to be treated as a kind
of consul-general for India.  But this Protector of the Poor proved a
broken reed.  He told Ram Singh flatly that he was a belated feudalist,
which was true; and implied that he was a land-grabber, which was not
true, Ram Singh having only enjoyed the fruits of his fore-bears'
enterprise.  Deeply incensed, the appellant shook the dust of
Caerlaverock House from his feet, and sat down to plan a revenge upon
the Government which had wronged him.  And in his wrath he thought of
the heirloom of his house, the drug which could change men's souls.

It happened that Lord Caerlaverock cook's came from the same
neighbourhood as Ram Singh.  This cook, Lal Muhammad by name, was one
of a large poor family, hangers-on of Ram Singh's house.  The aggrieved
landowner summoned him, and demanded as of right his humble services.
Lal Muhammad, who found his berth to his liking, hesitated, quibbled,
but was finally overborne.  He suggested a fee for his services, but
hastily withdrew when Ram Singh sketched a few of the steps he proposed
to take on his return by way of punishing Lal Muhammad's insolence on
Lal Muhammad's household.  Then he got to business.  There was a great
dinner next week--so he had learned from Jephson, the butler--and more
than one member of the Government would honour Caerlaverock House by
his presence.  With deference he suggested this as a fitting occasion
for the experiment, and Ram Singh was pleased to assent.

I can picture these two holding their meetings in the South Kensington
lodgings where Ram Singh dwelt.  We know from James, the second
footman, that they met also at Caerlaverock House, no doubt that Ram
Singh might make certain that his orders were duly obeyed.  I can see
the little packet of clear grains--I picture them like small granulated
sugar--added to the condiments, and soon dissolved out of sight.  The
deed was done; the cook returned to Bloomsbury and Ram Singh to
Gloucester Road, to await with the patient certainty of the East the
consummation of a great vengeance.



II

My wife was at Kissengen, and I was dining with the Caerlaverocks en
garcon.  When I have not to wait upon the adornment of the female
person I am a man of punctual habits, and I reached the house as the
hall clock chimed the quarter-past.  My poor friend, Tommy Deloraine,
arrived along with me, and we ascended the staircase together.  I call
him "my poor friend," for at the moment Tommy was under the weather.
He had the misfortune to be a marquis, and a very rich one, and at the
same time to be in love with Claudia Barriton.  Neither circumstance
was in itself an evil, but the combination made for tragedy.  For
Tommy's twenty-five years of healthy manhood, his cleanly-made
up-standing figure, his fresh countenance and cheerful laugh, were of
no avail in the lady's eyes when set against the fact that he was an
idle peer.  Miss Claudia was a charming girl, with a notable bee in her
bonnet.  She was burdened with the cares of the State, and had no
patience with any one who took them lightly.  To her mind the social
fabric was rotten beyond repair, and her purpose was frankly
destructive.  I remember some of her phrases:  "A bold and generous
policy of social amelioration"; "The development of a civic
conscience"; "A strong hand to lop off decaying branches from the trunk
of the State."  I have no fault to find with her creed, but I objected
to its practical working when it took the shape of an inhuman hostility
to that devout lover, Tommy Deloraine.  She had refused him, I believe,
three times, with every circumstance of scorn.  The first time she had
analysed his character, and described him as a bundle of attractive
weaknesses.  "The only forces I recognise are those of intellect and
conscience," she had said, "and you have neither." The second time--it
was after he had been to Canada on the staff--she spoke of the
irreconcilability of their political ideals.  "You are an Imperialist,"
she said, "and believe in an empire of conquest for the benefit of the
few.  I want a little island with a rich life for all."  Tommy declared
that he would become a Doukhobor to please her, but she said something
about the inability of Ethiopians to change their skin.  The third time
she hinted vaguely that there was "another."  The star of Abinger
Vennard was now blazing in the firmament, and she had conceived a
platonic admiration for him.  The truth is that Miss Claudia, with all
her cleverness, was very young and--dare I say it?--rather silly.

Caerlaverock was stroking his beard, his legs astraddle on the
hearthrug, with something appallingly viceregal in his air, when Mr.
and Mrs. Alexander Cargill were announced.  The Home Secretary was a
joy to behold.  He had the face of an elderly and pious bookmaker, and
a voice in which lurked the indescribable Scotch quality of "unction."
When he was talking you had only to shut your eyes to imagine yourself
in some lowland kirk on a hot Sabbath morning.  He had been a
distinguished advocate before he left the law for politics, and had
swayed juries of his countrymen at his will.  The man was
extraordinarily efficient on a platform.  There were unplumbed depths
of emotion in his eye, a juicy sentiment in his voice, an overpowering
tenderness in his manner, which gave to politics the glamour of a
revival meeting.  He wallowed in obvious pathos, and his hearers, often
unwillingly, wallowed with him.  I have never listened to any orator at
once so offensive and so horribly effective.  There was no appeal too
base for him, and none too august:  by some subtle alchemy he blended
the arts of the prophet and the fishwife.  He had discovered a new kind
of language.  Instead of "the hungry millions," or "the toilers," or
any of the numerous synonyms for our masters, he invented the phrase,
"Goad's people."  "I shall never rest," so ran his great declaration,
"till Goad's green fields and Goad's clear waters are free to Goad's
people."  I remember how on this occasion he pressed my hand with his
famous cordiality, looked gravely and earnestly into my face, and then
gazed sternly into vacancy.  It was a fine picture of genius descending
for a moment from its hill-top to show how close it was to poor
humanity.

Then came Lord Mulross, a respectable troglodytic peer, who represented
the one sluggish element in a swiftly progressing Government.  He was
an oldish man with bushy whiskers and a reputed mastery of the French
tongue.  A Whig, who had never changed his creed one iota, he was
highly valued by the country as a sober element in the nation's
councils, and endured by the Cabinet as necessary ballast.  He did not
conceal his dislike for certain of his colleagues, notably Mr. Vennard
and Mr. Cargill.

When Miss Barriton arrived with her stepmother the party was almost
complete.  She entered with an air of apologising for her prettiness.
Her manner with old men was delightful, and I watched with interest the
unbending of Caerlaverock and the simplifying of Mr. Cargill in her
presence.  Deloraine, who was talking feverishly to Mrs. Cargill,
started as if to go and greet her, thought better of it, and continued
his conversation.  The lady swept the room with her eye, but did not
acknowledge his presence.  She floated off with Mr. Cargill to a
window-corner, and metaphorically sat at his feet.  I saw Deloraine
saying things behind his moustache, while he listened to Mrs. Cargill's
new cure for dyspepsia.

Last of all, twenty minutes late, came Abinger Vennard.  He made a fine
stage entrance, walking swiftly with a lowering brow to his hostess,
and then glaring fiercely round the room as if to challenge criticism.
I have heard Deloraine, in a moment of irritation, describe him as a
"Pre-Raphaelite attorney,"  but there could be no denying his good
looks.  He had a bad, loose figure, and a quantity of studiously
neglected hair, but his face was the face of a young Greek.  A certain
kind of political success gives a man the manners of an actor, and both
Vennard and Cargill bristled with self-consciousness.  You could see it
in the way they patted their hair, squared their shoulders, and shifted
their feet to positions loved by sculptors.

"Well, Vennard, what's the news from the House?" Caerlaverock asked.

"Simpson is talking," said Vennard wearily.  "He attacks me, of course.
He says he has lived forty years in India--as if that mattered!  When
will people recognise that the truths of democratic policy are
independent of time and space?  Liberalism is a category, an eternal
mode of thought, which cannot be overthrown by any trivial happenings.
I am sick of the word 'facts.'  I long for truths."

Miss Barriton's eyes brightened, and Cargill said, "Excellent." Lord
Mulross, who was a little deaf, and in any case did not understand the
language, said loudly to my aunt that he wished there was a close time
for legislation.

"The open season for grouse should be the close season for politicians."

And then we went down to dinner.

Miss Barriton sat on my left hand, between Deloraine and me, and it was
clear she was discontented with her position.  Her eyes wandered down
the table to Vennard, who had taken in an American duchess, and seemed
to be amused at her prattle.  She looked with disfavour at Deloraine,
and turned to me as the lesser of two evils.

I was tactless enough to say that I thought there was a good deal in
Lord Mulross's view.  "Oh, how can you?"  she cried.  "Is there a close
season for the wants of the people?  It sounds to me perfectly horrible
the way you talk of government, as if it were a game for idle men of
the upper classes.  I want professional politicians, men who give their
whole heart and soul to the service of the State.  I know the kind of
member you and Lord Deloraine like--a rich young man who eats and
drinks too much, and thinks the real business of life is killing little
birds.  He travels abroad and shoots some big game, and then comes home
and vapours about the Empire.  He knows nothing about realities, and
will go down before the men who take the world seriously."

I am afraid I laughed, but Deloraine, who had been listening, was in no
mood to be amused.

"I don't think you are quite fair to us, Miss Claudia," he said slowly.
"We take things seriously enough, the things we know about.  We can't
be expected to know about everything, and the misfortune is that the
things I care about don't interest you.  But they are important enough
for all that."

"Hush," said the lady rudely.  "I want to hear what Mr. Vennard is
saying."

Mr. Vennard was addressing the dinner-table as if it were a large
public meeting.  It was a habit he had, for he had no mind to confine
the pearls of his wisdom to his immediate neighbours.  His words were
directed to Caerlaverock at the far end.

"In my opinion this craze for the scientific stand-point is not merely
overdone--it is radically vicious.  Human destinies cannot be treated
as if they were inert objects under the microscope.  The cold-blooded
logical way of treating a problem is in almost every case the wrong
way.  Heart and imagination to me are more vital than intellect.  I
have the courage to be illogical, to defy facts for the sake of an
ideal, in the certainty that in time facts will fall into conformity.
My Creed may be put in the words of Newman's favourite quotation:  Non
in dialectica complacuit Deo salvum facere populum suum--Not in cold
logic is it God's will that His people should find salvation."

"It is profoundly true," sighed Mr. Cargill, and Miss Claudia's beaming
eyes proved her assent.  The moment of destiny, though I did not know
it, had arrived.  The entree course had begun, and of the two entrees
one was the famous Caerlaverock curry.  Now on a hot July evening in
London there are more attractive foods than curry seven times heated,
MORE INDICO.  I doubt if any guest would have touched it, had not our
host in his viceregal voice called the attention of the three ministers
to its merits, while explaining that under doctor's orders he was
compelled to refrain for a season.  The result was that Mulross,
Cargill, and Vennard alone of the men partook of it.  Miss Claudia,
alone of the women, followed suit in the fervour of her hero-worship.
She ate a mouthful, and then drank rapidly two glasses of water.

My narrative of the events which followed is based rather on what I
should have seen than on what I saw.  I had not the key, and missed
much which otherwise would have been plain to me.  For example, if I
had known the secret, I must have seen Miss Claudia's gaze cease to
rest upon Vennard and the adoration die out of her eyes.  I must have
noticed her face soften to the unhappy Deloraine.  As it was, I did not
remark her behaviour, till I heard her say to her neighbour--

"Can't you get hold of Mr. Vennard and forcibly cut his hair?"

Deloraine looked round with a start.  Miss Barriton's tone was intimate
and her face friendly.

"Some people think it picturesque," he said in serious bewilderment.

"Oh, yes, picturesque--like a hair-dresser's young man!" she shrugged
her shoulders.  "He looks as if he had never been out of doors in his
life."

Now, whatever the faults of Tommy's appearance, he had a wholesome
sunburnt face, and he knew it.  This speech of Miss Barriton's cheered
him enormously, for he argued that if she had fallen out of love with
Vennard's looks she might fall in love with his own.  Being a
philosopher in his way, he was content to take what the gods gave, and
ask for no explanations.

I do not know how their conversation prospered, for my attention was
distracted by the extraordinary behaviour of the Home Secretary.  Mr.
Cargill had made himself notorious by his treatment of "political"
prisoners.  It was sufficient in his eyes for a criminal to confess to
political convictions to secure the most lenient treatment and a speedy
release.  The Irish patriot who cracked skulls in the Scotland Division
of Liverpool, the Suffragist who broke windows and the noses of the
police, the Social Democrat whose antipathy to the Tsar revealed itself
in assaults upon the Russian Embassy, the "hunger-marchers" who had
designs on the British Museum,--all were sure of respectful and tender
handling.  He had announced more than once, amid tumultuous cheering,
that he would never be the means of branding earnestness, however
mistaken, with the badge of the felon.

He was talking I recall, to Lady Lavinia Dobson, renowned in two
hemispheres for her advocacy of women's rights.  And this was what I
heard him say.  His face had grown suddenly flushed and his eye bright,
so that he looked liker than ever to a bookmaker who had had a good
meeting.  "No, no, my dear lady, I have been a lawyer, and it is my
duty in office to see that the law, the palladium of British liberties
is kept sacrosanct.  The law is no respecter of persons, and I intend
that it shall be no respecter of creeds.  If men or women break the
laws, to jail they shall go, though their intentions were those of the
Apostle Paul.  We don't punish them for being Socialists or
Suffragists, but for breaking the peace.  Why, goodness me, if we
didn't, we should have every malefactor in Britain claiming
preferential treatment because he was a Christian Scientist or a
Pentecostal Dancer."

"Mr. Cargill, do you realise what you are saying?" said Lady Lavinia
with a scared face.

"Of course I do.  I am a lawyer, and may be presumed to know the law.
If any other doctrine were admitted, the Empire would burst up in a
fortnight."

"That I should live to hear you name that accursed name!" cried the
outraged lady.  "You are denying your gods, Mr. Cargill.  You are
forgetting the principles of a lifetime."

Mr. Cargill was becoming excited, and exchanging his ordinary
Edinburgh-English for a broader and more effective dialect.

"Tut, tut, my good wumman, I may be allowed to know my own principles
best.  I tell ye I've always maintained these views from the day when I
first walked the floor of the Parliament House.  Besides, even if I
hadn't, I'm surely at liberty to change if I get more light.  Whoever
makes a fetish of consistency is a trumpery body and little use to God
or man.  What ails ye at the Empire, too?  Is it not better to have a
big country than a kailyard, or a house in Grosvenor Square than a
but-and-ben in Balham?"

Lady Lavinia folded her hands.  "We slaughter our black
fellow-citizens, we fill South Africa with yellow slaves, we crowd the
Indian prisons with the noblest and most enlightened of the Indian
race, and we call it Empire building!"

"No, we don't," said Mr. Cargill stoutly, "we call it common-sense.
That is the penal and repressive side of any great activity.  D'ye mean
to tell me that you never give your maid a good hearing?  But would you
like it to be said that you spent the whole of your days swearing at
the wumman?"

"I never swore in my life," said Lady Lavinia.

"I spoke metaphorically," said Mr. Cargill.  "If ye cannot understand a
simple metaphor, ye cannot understand the rudiments of politics."

Picture to yourself a prophet who suddenly discovers that his God is
laughing at him, a devotee whose saint winks and tells him that the
devotion of years has been a farce, and you will get some idea of Lady
Lavinia's frame of mind.  Her sallow face flushed, her lip trembled,
and she slewed round as far as her chair would permit her.  Meanwhile
Mr. Cargill, redder than before, went on contentedly with his dinner.

I was glad when my aunt gave the signal to rise.  The atmosphere was
electric, and all were conscious of it save the three Ministers,
Deloraine, and Miss Claudia.  Vennard seemed to be behaving very badly.
He was arguing with Caerlaverock down the table, and the ex-Viceroy's
face was slowly getting purple.  When the ladies had gone, we remained
oblivious to wine and cigarettes, listening to this heated controversy
which threatened any minute to end in a quarrel.

The subject was India, and Vennard was discussing on the follies of all
Viceroys.

"Take this idiot we've got now," he declared.  "He expects me to be a
sort of wet-nurse to the Government of India and do all their dirty
work for them.  They know local conditions, and they have ample powers
if they would only use them, but they won't take an atom of
responsibility.  How the deuce am I to decide for them, when in the
nature of things I can't be half as well informed about the facts!"

"Do you maintain," said Caerlaverock, stuttering in his wrath, "that
the British Government should divest itself of responsibility for the
governement of our great Indian Dependency?"

"Not a bit," said Vennard impatiently; "of course we are responsible,
but that is all the more reason why the fellows who know the business
at first hand should do their duty.  If I am the head of a bank I am
responsible for its policy, but that doesn't mean that every local
bank-manager should consult me about the solvency of clients I never
heard of.  Faversham keeps bleating to me that the state of India is
dangerous.  Well, for God's sake let him suppress every native paper,
shut up the schools, and send every agitator to the Andamans.  I'll
back him up all right.  But don't let him ask me what to do, for I
don't know."

"You think such a course would be popular?" asked a large, grave man, a
newspaper editor.

"Of course it would," said Vennard cheerily.  "The British public hates
the idea of letting India get out of hand.  But they want a lead.  They
can't be expected to start the show any more than I can."

Lord Caerlaverock rose to join the ladies with an air of outraged
dignity.  Vennard pulled out his watch and announced that he must go
back to the House.

"Do you know what I am going to do?" he asked.  "I am going down to
tell Simpson what I think of him.  He gets up and prates of having been
forty years in India.  Well, I am going to tell him that it is to him
and his forty-year lot that all this muddle is due.  Oh, I assure you,
there's going to be a row," said Vennard, as he struggled into his coat.

Mulross had been sitting next me, and I asked him if he was leaving
town.  "I wish I could," he said, "but I fear I must stick on over the
Twelth.  I don't like the way that fellow Von Kladow has been talking.
He's up to no good, and he's going to get a flea in his ear before he
is very much older."

Cheerfully, almost hilariously the three Ministers departed, Vennard
and Cargill in a hansom and Mulross on foot.  I can only describe the
condition of those left behind as nervous prostration.  We looked
furtively at each other, each afraid to hint his suspicions, but all
convinced that a surprising judgment had befallen at least two members
of his Majesty's Government.  For myself I put the number at three, for
I did not like to hear a respected Whig Foreign Secretary talk about
giving the Chancellor of a friendly but jealous Power a flea in his ear.

The only unperplexed face was Deloraine's.  He whispered to me that
Miss Barriton was going on to the Alvanleys' ball, and had warned him
to be there.  "She hasn't been to a dance for months, you know," he
said.  "I really think things are beginning to go a little better, old
man."



III

When I opened my paper next morning I read two startling pieces of
news.  Lord Mulross had been knocked down by a taxi-cab on his way home
the night before, and was now in bed suffering from a bad shock and a
bruised ankle.  There was no cause for anxiety, said the report, but
his lordship must keep his room for a week or two.

The second item, which filled leading articles and overflowed into
"Political Notes," was Mr. Vennard's speech.  The Secretary for India
had gone down about eleven o'clock to the House, where an Indian debate
was dragging out its slow length.  He sat himself on the Treasury Bench
and took notes, and the House soon filled in anticipation of his reply.
His "tail"--progressive young men like himself--were there in full
strength, ready to cheer every syllable which fell from their idol.
Somewhere about half-past twelve he rose to wind up the debate, and the
House was treated to an unparalleled sensation.  He began with his
critics, notably the unfortunate Simpson, and, pretty much in
Westbury's language to the herald, called them silly old men who did
not understand their silly old business.  But it was the reasons he
gave for this abuse which left his followers aghast.  He attacked his
critics not for being satraps and reactionaries, but because they had
dared to talk second-rate Western politics in connection with India.

"Have you lived for forty years with your eyes shut," he cried, "that
you cannot see the difference between a Bengali, married at fifteen and
worshipping a pantheon of savage gods, and the university-extension
Young Radical at home?  There is a thousand years between them, and you
dream of annihilating the centuries with a little dubious popular
science!"  Then he turned to the other critics of Indian
administration--his quondam supporters.  He analysed the character of
these "members for India" with a vigour and acumen which deprived them
of speech.  The East, he said, had had its revenge upon the West by
making certain Englishmen babus.  His honourable friends had the same
slipshod minds, and they talked the same pigeon-English, as the
patriots of Bengal.  Then his mood changed, and he delivered a solemn
warning against what he called "the treason begotten of restless vanity
and proved incompetence."  He sat down, leaving a House deeply
impressed and horribly mystified.

The Times did not know what to make of it at all.  In a weighty leader
it welcomed Mr. Vennard's conversion, but hinted that with a convert's
zeal he had slightly overstated his case.  The Daily Chronicle talked
of "nervous breakdown,"  and suggested "kindly forgetfulness" as the
best treatment.  The Daily News, in a spirited article called "The
Great Betrayal," washed its hands of Mr. Vennard unless he donned the
white sheet of the penitent.  Later in the day I got The Westminster
Gazette, and found an ingenious leader which proved that the speech in
no way conflicted with Liberal principles, and was capable of a quite
ordinary explanation.  Then I went to see Lady Caerlaverock.

I found my aunt almost in tears.

"What has happened?" she cried.  "What have we done that we should be
punished in this awful way?  And to think that the blow fell in this
house? Caerlaverock--we all--thought Mr. Vennard so strange last night,
and Lady Lavinia told me that Mr. Cargill was perfectly horrible.  I
suppose it must be the heat and the strain of the session.  And that
poor Lord Mulross, who was always so wise, should be stricken down at
this crisis!"

I did not say that I thought Mulross's accident a merciful
dispensation.  I was far more afraid of him than of all the others, for
if with his reputation for sanity he chose to run amok, he would be
taken seriously.  He was better in bed than affixing a flea to Von
Kladow's ear.

"Caerlaverock was with the Prime Minister this morning," my aunt went
on.  "He is going to make a statement in the Lords tomorrow to try to
cover Mr. Vennard's folly.  They are very anxious about what Mr.
Cargill will do today.  He is addressing the National Convention of
Young Liberals at Oldham this afternoon, and though they have sent him
a dozen telegrams they can get no answer.  Caerlaverock went to Downing
Street an hour ago to get news."

There was the sound of an electric brougham stopping in the square
below, and we both listened with a premonition of disaster.  A minute
later Caerlaverock entered the room, and with him the Prime Minister.
The cheerful, eupeptic countenance of the latter was clouded with care.
He shook hands dismally with my aunt, nodded to me, and flung himself
down on a sofa.

"The worst has happened," Caerlaverock boomed solemnly.  "Cargill has
been incredibly and infamously silly."  He tossed me an evening paper.

One glance convinced me that the Convention of Young Liberals had had a
waking-up.  Cargill had addressed them on what he called the true view
of citizenship.  He had dismissed manhood suffrage as an obsolete
folly.  The franchise, he maintained, should be narrowed and given only
to citizens, and his definition of citizenship was military training
combined with a fairly high standard of rates and taxes.  I do not know
how the Young Liberals received his creed, but it had no sort of
success with the Prime Minister.

"We must disavow him," said Caerlaverock.

"He is too valuable a man to lose," said the Prime Minister.  "We must
hope that it is only a temporary aberration.  I simply cannot spare him
in the House."

"But this is flat treason."

"I know, I know.  It is all too horrible, and utterly unexpected.  But
the situation wants delicate handling, my dear Caerlaverock.  I see
nothing for it but to give out that he was ill."

"Or drunk?"  I suggested.

The Prime Minister shook his head sadly.  "I fear it will be the same
thing.  What we call illness the ordinary man will interpret as
intoxication.  It is a most regrettable necessity, but we must face it."

The harassed leader rose, seized the evening paper, and departed as
swiftly as he had come.  "Remember, illness," were his parting words.
"An old heart trouble, which is apt to affect his brain.  His friends
have always known about it."

I walked home, and looked in at the Club on my way.  There I found
Deloraine devouring a hearty tea and looking the picture of virtuous
happiness.

"Well, this is tremendous news,"  I said, as I sat down beside him.

"What news?" he asked with a start.

"This row about Vennard and Cargill."

"Oh, that!  I haven't seen the papers to-day.  What's it all about?"
His tone was devoid of interest.

Then I knew that something of great private moment had happened to
Tommy.

"I hope I may congratulate you,"  I said.

Deloraine beamed on me affectionately.  "Thanks very much, old man.
Things came all right, quite suddenly, you know.  We spent most of the
time at the Alvanleys together, and this morning in the Park she
accepted me.  It will be in the papers next week, but we mean to keep
it quiet for a day or two.  However, it was your right to be told--and,
besides, you guessed."

I remember wondering, as I finished my walk home, whether there could
not be some connection between the stroke of Providence which had
driven three Cabinet Ministers demented and that gentler touch which
had restored Miss Claudia Barriton to good sense and a reasonable
marriage.



IV

The next week was an epoch in my life.  I seemed to live in the centre
of a Mad Tea-party, where every one was convinced of the madness, and
yet resolutely protested that nothing had happened.  The public events
of those days were simple enough.  While Lord Mulross's ankle
approached convalescence, the hives of politics were humming with
rumours.  Vennard's speech had dissolved his party into its parent
elements, and the Opposition, as nonplussed as the Government, did not
dare as yet to claim the recruit.  Consequently he was left alone till
he should see fit to take a further step.  He refused to be
interviewed, using blasphemous language about our free Press; and
mercifully he showed no desire to make speeches.  He went down to golf
at Littlestone, and rarely showed himself in the House.  The earnest
young reformer seemed to have adopted not only the creed but the habits
of his enemies.

Mr. Cargill's was a hard case.  He returned from Oldham, delighted with
himself and full of fight, to find awaiting him an urgent message from
the Prime Minister.  His chief was sympathetic and kindly.  He had long
noticed that the Home Secretary looked fagged and ill.  There was no
Home Office Bill very pressing, and his assistance in general debate
could be dispensed with for a little.  Let him take a fortnight's
holiday--fish, golf, yacht--the Prime Minister was airily suggestive.
In vain Mr. Cargill declared he was perfectly well.  His chief gently
but firmly overbore him, and insisted on sending him his own doctor.
That eminent specialist, having been well coached, was vaguely
alarming, and insisted on a change.  Then Mr. Cargill began to suspect,
and asked the Prime Minister point-blank if he objected to his Oldham
speech.  He was told that there was no objection--a little strong meat,
perhaps, for Young Liberals, a little daring, but full of Mr. Cargill's
old intellectual power.  Mollified and reassured, the Home Secretary
agreed to a week's absence, and departed for a little salmon-fishing in
Scotland.  His wife had meantime been taken into the affair, and
privately assured by the Prime Minister that she would greatly ease the
mind of the Cabinet if she could induce her husband to take a longer
holiday--say three weeks.  She promised to do her best and to keep her
instructions secret, and the Cargills duly departed for the North.  "In
a fortnight," said the Prime Minister to my aunt, "he will have
forgotten all this nonsense; but of course we shall have to watch him
very carefully in the future."

The Press was given its cue, and announced that Mr. Cargill had spoken
at Oldham while suffering from severe nervous breakdown, and that the
remarkable doctrines of that speech need not be taken seriously.  As I
had expected, the public put its own interpretation upon this tale.
Men took each other aside in clubs, women gossiped in drawing-rooms,
and in a week the Cargill scandal had assumed amazing proportions.  The
popular version was that the Home Secretary had got very drunk at
Caerlaverock House, and still under the influence of liquor had
addressed the Young Liberals at Oldham.  He was now in an Inebriates'
Home, and would not return to the House that session.  I confess I
trembled when I heard this story, for it was altogether too libellous
to pass unnoticed.  I believed that soon it would reach the ear of
Cargill, fishing quietly at Tomandhoul, and that then there would be
the deuce to pay.

Nor was I wrong.  A few days later I went to see my aunt to find out
how the land lay.  She was very bitter, I remember, about Claudia
Barriton.  "I expected sympathy and help from her, and she never comes
near me.  I can understand her being absorbed in her engagement, but I
cannot understand the frivolous way she spoke when I saw her yesterday.
She had the audacity to say that both Mr. Vennard and Mr. Cargill had
gone up in her estimation.  Young people can be so heartless."

I would have defended Miss Barriton, but at this moment an astonishing
figure was announced.  It was Mrs. Cargill in travelling dress, with a
purple bonnet and a green motor-veil.  Her face was scarlet, whether
from excitement or the winds of Tomandhoul, and she charged down on us
like a young bull.

"We have come back," she said, "to meet our accusers."

"Accusers!" cried my aunt.

"Yes, accusers!" said the lady.  "The abominable rumour about Alexander
has reached our ears.  At this moment he is with the Prime Minister,
demanding an official denial.  I have come to you, because it was here,
at your table, that Alexander is said to have fallen."

"I really don't know what you mean, Mrs. Cargill."

"I mean that Alexander is said to have become drunk while dining here,
to have been drunk when he spoke at Oldham, and to be now in a
Drunkard's Home."  The poor lady broke down, "Alexander," she cried,
"who has been a teetotaller from his youth, and for thirty years an
elder in the U.P. Church!  No form of intoxicant has ever been
permitted at our table.  Even in illness the thing has never passed our
lips."

My aunt by this time had pulled herself together.  "If this outrageous
story is current, Mrs. Cargill, there was nothing for it but to come
back.  Your friends know that it is a gross libel.  The only denial
necessary is for Mr. Cargill to resume his work.  I trust his health is
better."

"He is well, but heartbroken.  His is a sensitive nature, Lady
Caerlaverock, and he feels a stain like a wound."

"There is no stain," said my aunt briskly.  "Every public man is a
target for scandals, but no one but a fool believes them.  They will
die a natural death when he returns to work.  An official denial would
make everybody look ridiculous, and encourage the ordinary person to
think that there may have been something in them.  Believe me, dear
Mrs. Cargill, there is nothing to be anxious about now that you are
back in London again."

On the contrary, I thought, there was more cause for anxiety than ever.
Cargill was back in the House and the illness game could not be played
a second time.  I went home that night acutely sympathetic towards the
worries of the Prime Minister.  Mulross would be abroad in a day or
two, and Vennard and Cargill were volcanoes in eruption.  The
Government was in a parlous state, with three demented Ministers on the
loose.

The same night I first heard the story of The Bill.  Vennard had done
more than play golf at Littlestone.  His active mind--for his bitterest
enemies never denied his intellectual energy--had been busy on a great
scheme.  At that time, it will be remembered, a serious shrinkage of
unskilled labour existed not only in the Transvaal, but in the new
copper fields of East Africa.  Simultaneously a famine was scourging
Behar, and Vennard, to do him justice, had made manful efforts to cope
with it.  He had gone fully into the question, and had been slowly
coming to the conclusion that Behar was hopelessly overcrowded.  In his
new frame of mind--unswervingly logical, utterly unemotional, and
wholly unbound by tradition--he had come to connect the African and
Indian troubles, and to see in one the relief of the other.  The first
fruit of his meditations was a letter to The Times.  In it he laid down
a new theory of emigration.  The peoples of the Empire, he said, must
be mobile, shifting about to suit economic conditions.  But if this was
true of the white man, it was equally true for the dark races under our
tutelage.  He referred to the famine and argued that the recurrence of
such disasters was inevitable, unless we assisted the poverty-stricken
ryot to emigrate and sell his labour to advantage.  He proposed
indentures and terminable contracts, for he declared he had no wish to
transplant for good.  All that was needed was a short season of
wage-earning abroad, that the labourer might return home with savings
which would set him for the future on a higher economic plane. The
letter was temperate and academic in phrasing, the speculation of a
publicist rather than the declaration of a Minister.  But in Liberals,
who remembered the pandemonium raised over the Chinese in South Africa,
it stirred up the gloomiest forebodings.

Then, whispered from mouth to mouth, came the news of the Great Bill.
Vennard, it was said, intended to bring in a measure at the earliest
possible date to authorise a scheme of enforced and State-aided
emigration to the African mines.  It would apply at first only to the
famine districts, but power would be given to extend its working by
proclamation to other areas.  Such was the rumour, and I need not say
it was soon magnified.  Questions were asked in the House which the
Speaker ruled out of order.  Furious articles, inviting denial,
appeared in the Liberal Press; but Vennard took not the slightest
notice.  He spent his time between his office in Whitehall and the
links at Littlestone, dropping into the House once or twice for half an
hour's slumber while a colleague was speaking.  His Under Secretary in
the Lords--a young gentleman who had joined the party for a bet, and to
his immense disgust had been immediately rewarded with office--lost his
temper under cross-examination and swore audibly at the Opposition.  In
a day or two the story universally believed was that the Secretary for
India was about to transfer the bulk of the Indian people to work as
indentured labourers for South African Jews.

It was this popular version, I fancy, which reached the ears of Ram
Singh, and the news came on him like a thunderclap.  He thought that
what Vennard proposed Vennard could do.  He saw his native province
stripped of its people, his fields left unploughed, and his cattle
untended; nay, it was possible, his own worthy and honourable self sent
to a far country to dig in a hole.  It was a grievous and intolerable
prospect.  He walked home to Gloucester Road in heavy preoccupation,
and the first thing he did was to get out the mysterious brass box in
which he kept his valuables.  From a pocket-book he took a small silk
packet, opened it, and spilled a few clear grains on his hand.  It was
the antidote.

He waited two days, while on all sides the rumour of the Bill grew
stronger and its provisions more stringent.  Then he hesitated no
longer, but sent for Lord Caerlaverock's cook.



V

I conceive that the drug did not create new opinions, but elicited
those which had hitherto lain dormant.  Every man has a creed, but in
his soul he knows that that creed has another side, possibly not less
logical, which it does not suit him to produce.  Our most honest
convictions are not the children of pure reason, but of temperament,
environment, necessity, and interest.  Most of us take sides in life
and forget the one we reject.  But our conscience tells us it is there,
and we can on occasion state it with a fairness and fulness which
proves that it is not wholly repellent to our reason.  During the
crisis I write of, the attitude of Cargill and Vennard was not that of
roysterers out for irresponsible mischief.  They were eminently
reasonable and wonderfully logical, and in private conversation they
gave their opponents a very bad time.  Cargill, who had hitherto been
the hope of the extreme Free-traders, wrote an article for the
Quarterly on Tariff Reform.  It was set up, but long before it could be
used it was cancelled and the type scattered.  I have seen a proof of
it, however, and I confess I have never read a more brilliant defence
of a doctrine which the author had hitherto described as a childish
heresy.  Which proves my contention--that Cargill all along knew that
there was a case against Free Trade, but naturally did not choose to
admit it, his allegiance being vowed elsewhere.  The drug altered
temperament, and with it the creed which is based mainly on
temperament.  It scattered current convictions, roused dormant
speculations, and without damaging the reason switched it on to a new
track.

I can see all this now, but at the time I saw only stark madness and
the horrible ingenuity of the lunatic.  While Vennard was ruminating on
his Bill, Cargill was going about London arguing like a Scotch
undergraduate.  The Prime Minister had seen from the start that the
Home Secretary was the worse danger.  Vennard might talk of his
preposterous Bill, but the Cabinet would have something to say to it
before its introduction, and he was mercifully disinclined to go near
St. Stephen's.  But Cargill was assiduous in his attendance at the
House, and at any moment might blow the Government sky-high.  His
colleagues were detailed in relays to watch him.  One would hale him to
luncheon, and keep him till question time was over.  Another would
insist on taking him for a motor ride, which would end in a break-down
about Brentford.  Invitations to dinner were showered upon him, and
Cargill, who had been unknown in society, found the whole social
machinery of his party set at work to make him a lion.  The result was
that he was prevented from speaking in public, but given far too much
encouragement to talk in private.  He talked incessantly, before, at,
and after dinner, and he did enormous harm.  He was horribly clever,
too, and usually got the best of an argument, so that various eminent
private Liberals had their tempers ruined by his dialectic.  In his
rich and unabashed accent--he had long discarded his
Edinburgh-English--he dissected their arguments and ridiculed their
character.  He had once been famous for his soapy manners:  now he was
as rough as a Highland stot.

Things could not go on in this fashion:  the risk was too great.  It
was just a fortnight, I think, after the Caerlaverock dinner-party,
when the Prime Minister resolved to bring matters to a head.  He could
not afford to wait for ever on a return of sanity.  He consulted
Caerlaverock, and it was agreed that Vennard and Cargill should be
asked, or rather commanded to dine on the following evening at
Caerlaverock House.  Mulross, whose sanity was not suspected, and whose
ankle was now well again, was also invited, as were three other members
of the Cabinet and myself as amicus curiae.  It was understood that
after dinner there would be a settling-up with the two rebels.  Either
they should recant and come to heel, or they should depart from the
fold to swell the wolf-pack of the Opposition.  The Prime Minister did
not conceal the loss which his party would suffer, but he argued very
sensibly that anything was better than a brace of vipers in its bosom.

I have never attended a more lugubrious function.  When I arrived I
found Caerlaverock, the Prime Minister, and the three other members of
the Cabinet standing round a small fire in attitudes of nervous
dejection.  I remember it was a raw wet evening, but the gloom out of
doors was sunshine compared to the gloom within.  Caerlaverock's
viceregal air had sadly altered.  The Prime Minister, once famous for
his genial manners, was pallid and preoccupied.  We exchanged remarks
about the weather and the duration of the session.  Then we fell silent
till Mulross arrived.

He did not look as if he had come from a sickbed.  He came in as jaunty
as a boy, limping just a little from his accident.  He was greeted by
his colleagues with tender solicitude,--solicitude, I fear, completely
wasted on him.

"Devilish silly thing to do to get run over," he said.  "I was in a
brown study when a cab came round a corner.  But I don't regret it, you
know.  During the last fortnight I have had leisure to go into this
Bosnian Succession business, and I see now that Von Kladow has been
playing one big game of bluff.  Very well; it has got to stop.  I am
going to prick the bubble before I am many days older."

The Prime Minister looked anxious.  "Our policy towards Bosnia has been
one of non-interference.  It is not for us, I should have thought, to
read Germany a lesson."

"Oh, come now," Mulross said, slapping--yes, actually slapping--his
leader on the back; "we may drop that nonsense when we are alone.  You
know very well that there are limits to our game of non-interference.
If we don't read Germany a lesson, she will read us one--and a damned
long unpleasant one too.  The sooner we give up all this milk-blooded,
blue-spectacled, pacificist talk the better.  However, you will see
what I have got to say to-morrow in the House."

The Prime Minister's face lengthened.  Mulross was not the pillar he
had thought him, but a splintering reed.  I saw that he agreed with me
that this was the most dangerous of the lot.

Then Cargill and Vennard came in together.  Both looking uncommonly
fit, younger, trimmer, cleaner.  Vennard, instead of his sloppy clothes
and shaggy hair, was groomed like a Guardsman; had a large
pearl-and-diamond solitaire in his shirt, and a white waistcoat with
jewelled buttons.  He had lost all his self-consciousness, grinned
cheerfully at the others, warmed his hands at the fire, and cursed the
weather.  Cargill, too, had lost his sanctimonious look.  There was a
bloom of rustic health on his cheek, and a sparkle in his eye, so that
he had the appearance of some rosy Scotch laird of Raeburn's painting.
Both men wore an air of purpose and contentment.

Vennard turned at once on the Prime Minister.  "Did you get my letter?"
he asked.  "No?  Well, you'll find it waiting when you get home.  We're
all friends here, so I can tell you its contents.  We must get rid of
this ridiculous Radical 'tail.' They think they have the whip-hand of
us; well, we have got to prove that we can do very well without them.
They are a collection of confounded, treacherous, complacent prigs, but
they have no grit in them, and will come to heel if we tackle them
firmly.  I respect an honest fanatic, but I do not respect those
sentiment-mongers.  They have the impudence to say that the country is
with them.  I tell you it is rank nonsense.  If you take a strong hand
with them, you'll double your popularity, and we'll come back  next
year with an increased majority.  Cargill agrees with me."

The Prime Minister looked grave.  "I am not prepared to discuss any
policy of ostracism.  What you call our 'tail' is a vital section of
our party.  Their creed may be one-sided, but it is none the less part
of our mandate from the people."

"I want a leader who governs as well as reigns," said Vennard. "I
believe in discipline, and you know as well as I do that the Rump is
infernally out of hand."

"They are not the only members who fail in discipline."

Vennard grinned.  "I suppose you mean Cargill and myself.  But we are
following the central lines of British policy.  We are on your side,
and we want to make your task easier."

Cargill suddenly began to laugh.  "I don't want any ostracism.  Leave
them alone, and Vennard and I will undertake to give them such a time
in the House that they will wish they had never been born.  We'll make
them resign in batches."

Dinner was announced, and, laughing uproariously, the two rebels went
arm-in-arm into the dining-room.

Cargill was in tremendous form. He began to tell Scotch stories,
memories of his old Parliament House days. He told them admirably, with
a raciness of idiom which I had thought beyond him. They were long
tales, and some were as broad as they were long, but Mr. Cargill
disarmed criticism.  His audience, rather scandalised at the start,
were soon captured, and political troubles were forgotten in
old-fashioned laughter. Even the Prime Minister's anxious face relaxed.

This lasted till the entree, the famous Caerlaverock curry.

As I have said, I was not in the secret, and did not detect the
transition.  As I partook of the dish I remember feeling a sudden
giddiness and a slight nausea.  The antidote, to those who had not
taken the drug, must have been, I suppose, in the nature of a mild
emetic.  A mist seemed to obscure the faces of my fellow-guests, and
slowly the tide of conversation ebbed away.  First Vennard, then
Cargill, became silent.  I was feeling rather sick, and I noticed with
some satisfaction that all our faces were a little green. I wondered
casually if I had been poisoned.

The sensation passed, but the party had changed. More especially I was
soon conscious that something had happened to the three Ministers.  I
noticed Mulross particularly, for he was my neighbour.  The look of
keenness and vitality had died out of him, and suddenly he seemed a
rather old, rather tired man, very weary about the eyes.

I asked him if he felt seedy.

"No, not specially," he replied, "but that accident gave me a nasty
shock."

"You should go off for a change,"  I said.

"I almost think I will," was the answer.  "I had not meant to leave
town till just before the Twelth but I think I had better get away to
Marienbad for a fortnight.  There is nothing doing in the House, and
work at the Office is at a standstill.  Yes, I fancy I'll go abroad
before the end of the week."

I caught the Prime Minister's eye and saw that he had forgotten the
purpose of the dinner, being dimly conscious that that purpose was now
idle.  Cargill and Vennard had ceased to talk like rebels.  The Home
Secretary had subsided into his old, suave, phrasing self.  The humour
had gone out of his eye, and the looseness had returned to his lips.
He was an older and more commonplace man, but harmless, quite harmless.
Vennard, too, wore a new air, or rather had recaptured his old one. He
was saying little, but his voice had lost its crispness and recovered
its half-plaintive unction; his shoulders had a droop in them; once
more he bristled with self-consciousness.

We others were still shaky from that detestable curry, and were so
puzzled as to be acutely uncomfortable.  Relief would come later, no
doubt; for the present we were uneasy at this weird transformation.  I
saw the Prime Minister examining the two faces intently, and the result
seemed to satisfy him.  He sighed and looked at Caerlaverock, who
smiled and nodded.

"What about that Bill of yours, Vennard?" he asked.  "There have been a
lot of stupid rumours."

"Bill?"  Vennard said.  "I know of no Bill.  Now that my departmental
work is over, I can give my whole soul to Cargill's Small Holdings.  Do
you mean that?"

"Yes, of course.  There was some confusion in the popular mind, but the
old arrangement holds.  You and Cargill will put it through between
you."

They began to talk about those weariful small holdings, and I ceased to
listen.  We left the dining-room and drifted to the library, where a
fire tried to dispel the gloom of the weather.  There was a feeling of
deadly depression abroad, so that, for all its awkwardness, I would
really have preferred the former Caerlaverock dinner.  The Prime
Minister was whispering to his host.  I heard him say something about
there being "the devil of a lot of explaining" before him.

Vennard and Cargill came last to the library, arm-in-arm as before.

"I should count it a greater honour," Vennard was saying, "to sweeten
the lot of one toiler in England than to add a million miles to our
territory.  While one English household falls below the minimum scale
of civic wellbeing, all talk of Empire is sin and folly." "Excellent!"
said Mr. Cargill.  Then I knew for certain that at last peace had
descended upon the vexed tents of Israel.




THE SHORTER CATECHISM

(Revised Version)

  When I was young and herdit sheep
  I read auld tales o' Wallace wight;
  My heid was fou o' sangs and threip
  O' folk that feared nae mortal might.
  But noo I'm auld, and weel I ken
  We're made alike o' gowd and mire;
  There's saft bits in the stievest men,
  The bairnliest's got a spunk o' fire.

  Sae hearken to me, lads,
  It's truth that I tell:
  There's nae man a' courage--
  I ken by mysel'.

  I've been an elder forty year:
  I've tried to keep the narrow way:
  I've walked afore the Lord in fear:
  I've never missed the kirk a day.
  I've read the Bible in and oot,
  (I ken the feck o't clean by hert).
  But, still and on, I sair misdoot
  I'm better noo than at the stert.

  Sae hearken to me, lads,
  It's truth I maintain:
  Man's works are but rags, for
  I ken by my ain.

  I hae a name for decent trade:
  I'll wager a' the countryside
  Wad sweer nae trustier man was made,
  The ford to soom, the bent to bide.
  But when it comes to coupin' horse,
  I'm just like a' that e'er was born;
  I fling my heels and tak' my course;
  I'd sell the minister the morn.

  Sae hearken to me, lads,
  It's truth that I tell:
  There's nae man deid honest--
  I ken by mysel'.




III

THE LEMNIAN

He pushed the matted locks from his brow as he peered into the mist.
His hair was thick with salt, and his eyes smarted from the greenwood
fire on the poop.  The four slaves who crouched beside the
thwarts-Carians with thin birdlike faces-were in a pitiable case, their
hands blue with oar-weals and the lash marks on their shoulders
beginning to gape from sun and sea.  The Lemnian himself bore marks of
ill usage.  His cloak was still sopping, his eyes heavy with watching,
and his lips black and cracked with thirst.  Two days before the storm
had caught him and swept his little craft into mid-Aegean.  He was a
sailor, come of sailor stock, and he had fought the gale manfully and
well.  But the sea had burst his waterjars, and the torments of drought
had been added to his toil.  He had been driven south almost to Scyros,
but had found no harbour.  Then a weary day with the oars had brought
him close to the Euboean shore, when a freshet of storm drove him
seaward again.  Now at last in this northerly creek of Sciathos he had
found shelter and a spring.  But it was a perilous place, for there
were robbers in the bushy hills--mainland men who loved above all things
to rob an islander: and out at sea, as he looked towards Pelion, there
seemed something adoing which boded little good.  There was deep water
beneath a ledge of cliff, half covered by a tangle of wildwood.  So
Atta lay in the bows, looking through the trails of vine at the racing
tides now reddening in the dawn.

The storm had hit others besides him it seemed.  The channel was full
of ships, aimless ships that tossed between tide and wind.  Looking
closer, he saw that they were all wreckage.  There had been tremendous
doings in the north, and a navy of some sort had come to grief.  Atta
was a prudent man, and knew that a broken fleet might be dangerous.
There might be men lurking in the maimed galleys who would make short
work of the owner of a battered but navigable craft.  At first he
thought that the ships were those of the Hellenes.  The troublesome
fellows were everywhere in the islands, stirring up strife and robbing
the old lords.  But the tides running strongly from the east were
bringing some of the wreckage in an eddy into the bay.  He lay closer
and watched the spars and splintered poops as they neared him.  These
were no galleys of the Hellenes.  Then came a drowned man, swollen and
horrible:  then another-swarthy, hooknosed fellows, all yellow with the
sea.  Atta was puzzled.  They must be the men from the East about whom
he had been hearing.  Long ere he left Lemnos there had been news about
the Persians.  They were coming like locusts out of the dawn, swarming
over Ionia and Thrace, men and ships numerous beyond telling.  They
meant no ill to honest islanders:  a little earth and water were enough
to win their friendship.  But they meant death to the hubris of the
Hellenes.  Atta was on the side of the invaders; he wished them well in
their war with his ancient foes.  They would eat them up, Athenians,
Lacedaemonians, Corinthians, Aeginetans, men of Argos and Elis, and
none would be left to trouble him.  But in the meantime something had
gone wrong.  Clearly there had been no battle.  As the bodies butted
against the side of the galley he hooked up one or two and found no
trace of a wound.  Poseidon had grown cranky, and had claimed victims.
The god would be appeased by this time, and all would go well.

Danger being past, he bade the men get ashore and fill the water-skins.
"God's curse on all Hellenes," he said, as he soaked up the cold water
from the spring in the thicket.

About noon he set sail again.  The wind sat in the north-east, but the
wall of Pelion turned it into a light stern breeze which carried him
swiftly westward.  The four slaves, still leg-weary and arm-weary, lay
like logs beside the thwarts.  Two slept; one munched some salty figs;
the fourth, the headman, stared wearily forward, with ever and again a
glance back at his master.  But the Lemnian never looked his way.  His
head was on his breast, as he steered, and he brooded on the sins of
the Hellenes.  He was of the old Pelasgian stock, the first lords of
the land, who had come out of the soil at the call of God.  The
pillaging northmen had crushed his folk out of the mainlands and most
of the islands, but in Lemnos they had met their match.  It was a
family story how every grown male had been slain, and how the women
long after had slaughtered their conquerors in the night.  "Lemnian
deeds," said the Hellenes, when they wished to speak of some shameful
thing:  but to Atta the shame was a glory to be cherished for ever.  He
and his kind were the ancient people, and the gods loved old things, as
those new folk would find.  Very especially he hated the men of Athens.
Had not one of their captains, Militades, beaten the Lemnians and
brought the island under Athenian sway?  True, it was a rule only in
name, for any Athenian who came alone to Lemnos would soon be cleaving
the air from the highest cliff-top.  But the thought irked his pride,
and he gloated over the Persians' coming.  The Great King from beyond
the deserts would smite those outrageous upstarts.  Atta would
willingly give earth and water.  It was the whim of a fantastic
barbarian, and would be well repaid if the bastard Hellenes were
destroyed.  They spoke his own tongue, and worshipped his own gods, and
yet did evil.  Let the nemesis of Zeus devour them!

The wreckage pursued him everywhere.  Dead men shouldered the sides of
the galley, and the straits were stuck full of things like monstrous
buoys, where tall ships had foundered.  At Artemision he thought he saw
signs of an anchored fleet with the low poops of the Hellenes, and
sheered off to the northern shores.  There, looking towards Oeta and
the Malian Gulf, he found an anchorage at sunset.  The waters were ugly
and the times ill, and he had come on an enterprise bigger than he had
dreamed.  The Lemnian was a stout fellow, but he had no love for
needless danger.  He laughed mirthlessly as he thought of his errand,
for he was going to Hellas, to the shrine of the Hellenes.

It was a woman's doing, like most crazy enterprises.  Three years ago
his wife had laboured hard in childbirth, and had had the whims of
labouring women.  Up in the keep of Larisa, on the windy hillside,
there had been heart-searching and talk about the gods.  The little
olive-wood Hermes, the very private and particular god of Atta's folk,
was good enough in simple things like a lambing or a harvest, but he
was scarcely fit for heavy tasks.  Atta's wife declared that her lord
lacked piety.  There were mainland gods who repaid worship, but his
scorn of all Hellenes made him blind to the merits of those potent
divinities.  At first Atta resisted.  There was Attic blood in his
wife, and he strove to argue with her unorthodox craving.  But the
woman persisted, and a Lemnian wife, as she is beyond other wives in
virtue and comeliness, excels them in stubbornness of temper.  A second
time she was with child, and nothing would content her but that Atta
should make his prayers to the stronger gods.  Dodona was far away, and
long ere he reached it his throat would be cut in the hills.  But
Delphi was but two days' journey from the Malian coast, and the god of
Delphi, the Far-Darter had surprising gifts, if one were to credit
travellers' tales.  Atta yielded with an ill grace, and out of his
wealth devised an offering to Apollo.  So on this July day he found
himself looking across the gulf to Kallidromos bound for a Hellenic
shrine, but hating all Hellenes in his soul.  A verse of Homer consoled
him--the words which Phocion spoke to Achilles.  "Verily even the gods
may be turned, they whose excellence and honour and strength are
greater than thine; yet even these do men, when they pray, turn from
their purpose with offerings of incense and pleasant vows."   The
Far-Darter must hate the hubris  of those Hellenes, and be the more
ready to avenge it since they dared to claim his countenance.  "No race
has ownership in the gods," a Lemnian song-maker had said when Atta had
been questioning the ways of Poseidon.

The following dawn found him coasting past the north end of Euboea in
the thin fog of a windless summer morn.  He steered by the peak of
Othrys and a spur of Oeta, as he had learnt from a slave who had
travelled the road.  Presently he was in the muddy Malian waters, and
the sun was scattering the mist on the landward side.  And then he
became aware of a greater commotion than Poseidon's play with the ships
off Pelion.  A murmur like a winter's storm came seawards.  He lowered
the sail, which he had set to catch a chance breeze, and bade the men
rest on their oars.  An earthquake seemed to be tearing at the roots of
the hills.

The mist rolled up, and his hawk eyes saw a strange sight.  The water
was green and still around him, but shoreward it changed its colour.
It was a dirty red, and things bobbed about in it like the Persians in
the creek of Sciathos.  On the strip of shore, below the sheer wall of
Kallidromos, men were fighting-myriads of men, for away towards Locris
they stretched in ranks and banners and tents till the eye lost them in
the haze.  There was no sail on the queer, muddy-red-edged sea; there
was no man on the hills:  but on that one flat ribbon of sand all the
nations of the earth were warring.  He remembered about the place:
Thermopylae they called it, the Gate of the Hot Springs.  The Hellenes
were fighting the Persians in the pass for their Fatherland.

Atta was prudent and loved not other men's quarrels.  He gave the word
to the rowers to row seaward.  In twenty strokes they were in the mist
again...

Atta was prudent, but he was also stubborn.  He spent the day in a
creek on the northern shore of the gulf, listening to the weird hum
which came over the waters out of the haze.  He cursed the delay.  Up
on Kallidromos would be clear dry air and the path to Delphi among the
oak woods.  The Hellenes could not be fighting everywhere at once.  He
might find some spot on the shore, far in their rear, where he could
land and gain the hills.  There was danger indeed, but once on the
ridge he would be safe; and by the time he came back the Great King
would have swept the defenders into the sea, and be well on the road
for Athens.  He asked himself if it were fitting that a Lemnian should
be stayed in his holy task by the struggles of Hellene and Barbarian.
His thoughts flew to his steading at Larisa, and the dark-eyed wife who
was awaiting his homecoming.  He could not return without Apollo's
favour:  his manhood and the memory of his lady's eyes forbade it.  So
late in the afternoon he pushed off again and steered his galley for
the south.

About sunset the mist cleared from the sea; but the dark falls swiftly
in the shadow of the high hills, and Atta had no fear.  With the night
the hum sank to a whisper; it seemed that the invaders were drawing off
to camp, for the sound receded to the west.  At the last light the
Lemnian touched a rock-point well to the rear of the defence.  He
noticed that the spume at the tide's edge was reddish and stuck to his
hands like gum.  Of a surety much blood was flowing on that coast.

He bade his slaves return to the north shore and lie hidden to await
him.  When he came back he would light a signal fire on the topmost
bluff of Kallidromos.  Let them watch for it and come to take him off.
Then he seized his bow and quiver, and his short hunting-spear, buckled
his cloak about him, saw that the gift to Apollo was safe in the folds
of it, and marched sturdily up the hillside.

The moon was in her first quarter, a slim horn which at her rise showed
only the faint outline of the hill.  Atta plodded steadfastly on, but
he found the way hard.  This was not like the crisp sea-turf of Lemnos,
where among the barrows of the ancient dead, sheep and kine could find
sweet fodder.  Kallidromos ran up as steep as the roof of a barn.
Cytisus and thyme and juniper grew rank, but above all the place was
strewn with rocks, leg-twisting boulders, and great cliffs where eagles
dwelt.  Being a seaman, Atta had his bearings.  The path to Delphi left
the shore road near the Hot Springs, and went south by a rift of the
mountain.  If he went up the slope in a beeline he must strike it in
time and find better going.  Still it was an eerie place to be tramping
after dark.  The Hellenes had strange gods of the thicket and hillside,
and he had no wish to intrude upon their sanctuaries.  He told himself
that next to the Hellenes he hated this country of theirs, where a man
sweltered in hot jungles or tripped among hidden crags.  He sighed for
the cool beaches below Larisa, where the surf was white as the snows of
Samothrace, and the fisherboys sang round their smoking broth-pots.

Presently he found a path.  It was not the mule road, worn by many
feet, that he had looked for, but a little track which twined among the
boulders.  Still it eased his feet, so he cleared the thorns from his
sandals, strapped his belt tighter, and stepped out more confidently.
Up and up he went, making odd detours among the crags.  Once he came to
a promontory, and, looking down, saw lights twinkling from the Hot
Springs.  He had thought the course lay more southerly, but consoled
himself by remembering that a mountain path must have many windings.
The great matter was that he was ascending, for he knew that he must
cross the ridge of Oeta before he struck the Locrian glens that led to
the Far-Darter's shrine.

At what seemed the summit of the first ridge he halted for breath, and,
prone on the thyme, looked back to sea.  The Hot Springs were hidden,
but across the gulf a single light shone from the far shore.  He
guessed that by this time his galley had been beached and his slaves
were cooking supper.  The thought made him homesick.  He had beaten and
cursed these slaves of his times without number, but now in this
strange land he felt them kinsfolk, men of his own household.  Then he
told himself he was no better than a woman.  Had he not gone sailing to
Chalcedon and distant Pontus, many months' journey from home while this
was but a trip of days?  In a week he would be welcomed by a smiling
wife, with a friendly god behind him.

The track still bore west, though Delphi lay in the south.  Moreover,
he had come to a broader road running through a little tableland.  The
highest peaks of Oeta were dark against the sky, and around him was a
flat glade where oaks whispered in the night breezes.  By this time he
judged from the stars that midnight had passed, and he began to
consider whether, now that he was beyond the fighting, he should not
sleep and wait for dawn.  He made up his mind to find a shelter, and,
in the aimless way of the night traveller, pushed on and on in the
quest of it.  The truth is his mind was on Lemnos, and a dark-eyed,
white-armed dame spinning in the evening by the threshold.  His eyes
roamed among the oaktrees, but vacantly and idly, and many a mossy
corner was passed unheeded.  He forgot his ill temper, and hummed
cheerfully the song his reapers sang in the barley-fields below his
orchard.  It was a song of seamen turned husbandmen, for the gods it
called on were the gods of the sea....

Suddenly he found himself crouching among the young oaks, peering and
listening.  There was something coming from the west.  It was like the
first mutterings of a storm in a narrow harbour, a steady rustling and
whispering.  It was not wind; he knew winds too well to be deceived.
It was the tramp of light-shod feet among the twigs--many feet, for the
sound remained steady, while the noise of a few men will rise and fall.
They were coming fast and coming silently.  The war had reached far up
Kallidromos.

Atta had played this game often in the little island wars.  Very
swiftly he ran back and away from the path up the slope which he knew
to be the first ridge of Kallidromos.  The army, whatever it might be,
was on the Delphian road.  Were the Hellenes about to turn the flank of
the Great King?

A moment later he laughed at his folly.  For the men began to appear,
and they were crossing to meet him, coming from the west.  Lying close
in the brushwood he could see them clearly.  It was well he had left
the road, for they stuck to it, following every winding-crouching, too,
like hunters after deer.  The first man he saw was a Hellene, but the
ranks behind were no Hellenes.  There was no glint of bronze or gleam
of fair skin.  They were dark, long-haired fellows, with spears like
his own, and round Eastern caps, and egg-shaped bucklers.  Then Atta
rejoiced.  It was the Great King who was turning the flank of the
Hellenes.  They guarded the gate, the fools, while the enemy slipped
through the roof.

He did not rejoice long.  The van of the army was narrow and kept to
the path, but the men behind were straggling all over the hillside.
Another minute and he would be discovered. The thought was cheerless.
It was true that he was an islander and friendly to the Persian, but up
on the heights who would listen to his tale?  He would be taken for a
spy, and one of those thirsty spears would drink his blood.  It must be
farewell to Delphi for the moment, he thought, or farewell to Lemnos
for ever.  Crouching low, he ran back and away from the path to the
crest of the sea-ridge of Kallidromos.

The men came no nearer him.  They were keeping roughly to the line of
the path, and drifted through the oak wood before him, an army without
end.  He had scarcely thought there were so many fighting men in the
world.  He resolved to lie there on the crest, in the hope that ere the
first light they would be gone.  Then he would push on to Delphi,
leaving them to settle their quarrels behind him.  These were the hard
times for a pious pilgrim.

But another noise caught his ear from the right.  The army had flanking
squadrons, and men were coming along the ridge.  Very bitter anger rose
in Atta's heart.  He had cursed the Hellenes, and now he cursed the
Barbarians no less.  Nay, he cursed all war, that spoiled the errands
of peaceful folk.  And then, seeking safety, he dropped over the crest
on to the steep shoreward face of the mountain.

In an instant his breath had gone from him.  He slid down a long slope
of screes, and then with a gasp found himself falling sheer into space.
Another second and he was caught in a tangle of bush, and then dropped
once more upon screes, where he clutched desperately for handhold.
Breathless and bleeding he came to anchor on a shelf of greensward and
found himself blinking up at the crest which seemed to tower a thousand
feet above.  There were men on the crest now.  He heard them speak and
felt that they were looking down.

The shock kept him still till the men had passed.  Then the terror of
the place gripped him, and he tried feverishly to retrace his steps.  A
dweller all his days among gentle downs, he grew dizzy with the sense
of being hung in space.  But the only fruit of his efforts was to set
him slipping again.  This time he pulled up at the root of gnarled oak,
which overhung the sheerest cliff on Kallidromos.  The danger brought
his wits back.  He sullenly reviewed his case, and found it desperate.

He could not go back, and, even if he did, he would meet the Persians.
If he went on he would break his neck, or at the best fall into the
Hellenes' hands.  Oddly enough he feared his old enemies less than his
friends.  He did not think that the Hellenes would butcher him.  Again,
he might sit perched in his eyrie till they settled their quarrel, or
he fell off.  He rejected this last way.  Fall off he should for
certain, unless he kept moving.  Already he was retching with the
vertigo of the heights.  It was growing lighter.  Suddenly he was
looking not into a black world, but to a pearl-grey floor far beneath
him.  It was the sea, the thing he knew and loved.  The sight screwed
up his courage.  He remembered that he was Lemnian and a seafarer.  He
would be conquered neither by rock, nor by Hellene, nor by the Great
King.  Least of all by the last, who was a barbarian.  Slowly, with
clenched teeth and narrowed eyes, he began to clamber down a ridge
which flanked the great cliffs of Kallidromos.  His plan was to reach
the shore and take the road to the east before the Persians completed
their circuit.  Some instinct told him that a great army would not take
the track he had mounted by.  There must be some longer and easier way
debouching farther down the coast.  He might yet have the good luck to
slip between them and the sea.

The two hours which followed tried his courage hard.  Thrice he fell,
and only a juniper-root stood between him and death.  His hands grew
ragged, and his nails were worn to the quick.  He had long ago lost his
weapons; his cloak was in shreds, all save the breast-fold which held
the gift to Apollo.  The heavens brightened, but he dared not look
around.  He knew he was traversing awesome places, where a goat could
scarcely tread.  Many times he gave up hope of life.  His head was
swimming, and he was so deadly sick that often he had to lie gasping on
some shoulder of rock less steep than the rest.  But his anger kept him
to his purpose.  He was filled with fury at the Hellenes.  It was they
and their folly that had brought him these mischances.  Some day ....

He found himself sitting blinking on the shore of the sea.  A furlong
off the water was lapping on the reefs.  A man, larger than human in
the morning mist, was standing above him.

"Greeting, stranger," said the voice.  "By Hermes, you choose the
difficult roads to travel."

Atta felt for broken bones, and, reassured, struggled to his feet.

"God's curse upon all mountains," he said.  He staggered to the edge of
the tide and laved his brow.  The savour of salt revived him.  He
turned to find the tall man at his elbow, and noted how worn and ragged
he was, and yet how upright.  "When a pigeon is flushed from the rocks,
there is a hawk near," said the voice.

Atta was angry.  "A hawk!"  he cried.  "Nay, an army of eagles.  There
will be some rare flushing of Hellenes before evening."

"What frightened you, Islander?"  the stranger asked.  "Did a wolf bark
up on the hillside?"

"Ay, a wolf.  The wolf from the East with a multitude of wolflings.
There will be fine eating soon in the pass."

The man's face grew dark.  He put his hand to his mouth and called.
Half a dozen sentries ran to join him.  He spoke to them in the harsh
Lacedaemonian speech which made Atta sick to hear.  They talked with
the back of the throat and there was not an "s" in their words.

"There is mischief in the hills," the first man said.  "This islander
has been frightened down over the rocks.  The Persian is stealing a
march on us."

The sentries laughed.  One quoted a proverb about island courage.
Atta's wrath flared and he forgot himself.  He had no wish to warn the
Hellenes, but it irked his pride to be thought a liar.  He began to
tell his story hastily, angrily, confusedly; and the men still laughed.

Then he turned eastward and saw the proof before him.  The light had
grown and the sun was coming up over Pelion.  The first beam fell on
the eastern ridge of Kallidromos, and there, clear on the sky-line, was
the proof.  The Persian was making a wide circuit, but moving
shoreward.  In a little he would be at the coast, and by noon at the
Hellenes' rear.

His hearers doubted no more.  Atta was hurried forward through the
lines of the Greeks to the narrow throat of the pass, where behind a
rough rampart of stones lay the Lacedaemonian headquarters.  He was
still giddy from the heights, and it was in a giddy dream that he
traversed the misty shingles of the beach amid ranks of sleeping
warriors.  It was a grim place, for there were dead and dying in it,
and blood on every stone.  But in the lee of the wall little fires were
burning and slaves were cooking breakfast.  The smell of roasting flesh
came pleasantly to his nostrils, and he remembered that he had had no
meal since he crossed the gulf.

Then he found himself the centre of a group who had the air of kings.
They looked as if they had been years in war.  Never had he seen faces
so worn and so terribly scarred.  The hollows in their cheeks gave them
the air of smiling, and yet they were grave.  Their scarlet vests were
torn and muddled, and the armour which lay near was dinted like the
scrap-iron before a smithy door.  But what caught his attention were
the eyes of the men.  They glittered as no eyes he had ever seen before
glittered.  The sight cleared his bewilderment and took the pride out
of his heart.  He could not pretend to despise a folk who looked like
Ares fresh from the wars of the Immortals.

They spoke among themselves in quiet voices.  Scouts came and went, and
once or twice one of the men, taller than the rest, asked Atta a
question.  The Lemnian sat in the heart of the group, sniffing the
smell of cooking, and looking at the rents in his cloak and the long
scratches on his legs.  Something was pressing on his breast, and he
found that it was Apollo's gift.  He had forgotten all about it.
Delphi seemed beyond the moon, and his errand a child's dream.

Then the King, for so he thought of the tall man, spoke--

"You have done us a service, Islander.  The Persian is at our back and
front, and there will be no escape for those who stay.  Our allies are
going home, for they do not share our vows.  We of Lacedaemon wait in
the pass.  If you go with the men of Corinth you will find a place of
safety before noon.  No doubt in the Euripus there is some boat to take
you to your own land."

He spoke courteously, not in the rude Athenian way; and somehow the
quietness of his voice and his glittering eyes roused wild longings in
Atta's heart.  His island pride was face to face with a greater-greater
than he had ever dreamed of.

"Bid yon cooks give me some broth," he said gruffly.  "I am faint.
After I have eaten I will speak with you."

He was given food, and as he ate he thought.  He was on trial before
these men of Lacedaemon.  More, the old faith of the islands, the pride
of the first masters, was at stake in his hands.  He had boasted that
he and his kind were the last of the men; now these Hellenes of
Lacedaemon were preparing a great deed, and they deemed him unworthy to
share in it.  They offered him safety.  Could he brook the insult?  He
had forgotten that the cause of the Persian was his; that the Hellenes
were the foes of his race.  He saw only that the last test of manhood
was preparing and the manhood in him rose to greet the trial.  An odd
wild ecstasy surged in his veins.  It was not the lust of battle, for
he had no love of slaying, or hate for the Persian, for he was his
friend.  It was the sheer joy of proving that the Lemnian stock had a
starker pride than these men of Lacedamon.  They would die for their
fatherland, and their vows; but he, for a whim, a scruple, a delicacy
of honour.  His mind was so clear that no other course occurred to him.
There was only one way for a man.  He, too, would be dying for his
fatherland, for through him the island race would be ennobled in the
eyes of gods and men.

Troops were filing fast to the east--Thebans, Corinthians.  "Time
flies, Islander," said the King's voice.  "The hours of safety are
slipping past."  Atta looked up carelessly.  "I will stay," he said.
"God's curse on all Hellenes!  Little I care for your quarrels.  It is
nothing to me if your Hellas is under the heels of the East.  But I
care much for brave men.  It shall never be said that a man of Lemnos,
a son of the old race, fell back when Death threatened.  I stay with
you, men of Lacedaemon."

The King's eyes glittered; they seemed to peer into his heart.

"It appears they breed men in the islands," he said.  "But you err.
Death does not threaten.  Death awaits us.

"It is all one," said Atta.  "But I crave a boon.  Let me fight my last
fight by your side.  I am of older stock than you, and a king in my own
country.  I would strike my last blow among kings."

There was an hour of respite before battle was joined, and Atta spent
it by the edge of the sea.  He had been given arms, and in girding
himself for the fight he had found Apollo's offering in his breastfold.
He was done with the gods of the Hellenes.  His offering should go to
the gods of his own people.  So, calling upon Poseidon, he flung the
little gold cup far out to sea.  It flashed in the sunlight, and then
sank in the soft green tides so noiselessly that it seemed as if the
hand of the Sea-god had been stretched to take it.  "Hail, Poseidon!"
the Lemnian cried. "I am bound this day for the Ferryman.  To you only
I make prayer, and to the little Hermes of Larisa.  Be kind to my kin
when they travel the sea, and keep them islanders and seafarers for
ever.  Hail and farewell, God of my own folk!"

Then, while the little waves lapped on the white sand, Atta made a
song.  He was thinking of the homestead far up in the green downs,
looking over to the snows of Samothrace.  At this hour in the morning
there would be a tinkle of sheep-bells as the flocks went down to the
low pastures.  Cool wind would be blowing, and the noise of the surf
below the cliffs would come faint to the ear.  In the hall the maids
mould be spinning, while their dark-haired mistress would be casting
swift glances to the doorway, lest it might be filled any moment by the
form of her returning lord.  Outside in the chequered sunlight of the
orchard the child would be playing with his nurse, crooning in childish
syllables the chanty his father had taught him.  And at the thought of
his home a great passion welled up in Atta's heart.  It was not regret,
but joy and pride and aching love.  In his antique island creed the
death he was awaiting was not other than a bridal.  He was dying for
the things he loved, and by his death they would be blessed eternally.
He would not have long to wait before bright eyes came to greet him in
the House of Shadows.

So Atta made the Song of Atta, and sang it then, and later in the press
of battle.  It was a simple song, like the lays of seafarers.  It put
into rough verse the thought which cheers the heart of all
adventurers--nay, which makes adventure possible for those who have
much to leave.  It spoke of the shining pathway of the sea which is the
Great Uniter.  A man may lie dead in Pontus or beyond the Pillars of
Herakles, but if he dies on the shore there is nothing between him and
his fatherland.  It spoke of a battle all the long dark night in a
strange place--a place of marshes and black cliffs and shadowy terrors.

"In the dawn the sweet light comes," said the song, "and the salt winds
and the tides will bear me home..."

When in the evening the Persians took toll of the dead, they found one
man who puzzled them.  He lay among the tall Lacedaemonians on the very
lip of the sea, and around him were swathes of their countrymen.  It
looked as if he had been fighting his way to the water, and had been
overtaken by death as his feet reached the edge.  Nowhere in the pass
did the dead lie so thick, and yet he was no Hellene.  He was torn like
a deer that the dogs have worried, but the little left of his garments
and his features spoke of Eastern race.  The survivors could tell
nothing except that he had fought like a god and had been singing all
the while.

The matter came to the ear of the Great King who was sore enough at the
issue of the day.  That one of his men had performed feats of valeur
beyond the Hellenes was a pleasant tale to tell.  And so his captains
reported it.  Accordingly when the fleet from Artemision arrived next
morning, and all but a few score Persians were shovelled into holes,
that the Hellenes might seem to have been conquered by a lesser force,
Atta's body was laid out with pomp in the midst of the Lacedaemonians.
And the seamen rubbed their eyes and thanked their strange gods that
one man of the East had been found to match those terrible warriors
whose name was a nightmare.  Further, the Great King gave orders that
the body of Atta should be embalmed and carried with the army, and that
his name and kin should be sought out and duly honoured.  This latter
was a task too hard for the staff, and no more was heard of it till
months later, when the King, in full flight after Salamis, bethought
him of the one man who had not played him false.  Finding that his
lieutenants had nothing to tell him, he eased five of them of their
heads.

As it happened, the deed was not quite forgotten.  An islander, a
Lesbian and a cautious man, had fought at Thermopylae in the Persian
ranks, and had heard Atta's singing and seen how he fell.  Long
afterwards some errand took this man to Lemnos, and in the evening,
speaking with the Elders, he told his tale and repeated something of
the song.  There was that in the words which gave the Lemnians a clue,
the mention, I think, of the olive-wood Hermes and the snows of
Samothrace.  So Atta came to great honour among his own people, and his
memory and his words were handed down to the generations.  The song
became a favourite island lay, and for centuries throughout the Aegean
seafaring men sang it when they turned their prows to wild seas.  Nay,
it travelled farther, for you will find part of it stolen by Euripides
and put in a chorus of the Andromache.  There are echoes of it in some
of the epigrams of the Anthology; and, though the old days have gone,
the simple fisher-folk still sing snatches in their barbarous dialect.
The Klephts used to make a catch of it at night round their fires in
the hills, and only the other day I met a man in Scyros who had
collected a dozen variants, and was publishing them in a dull book on
island folklore.

In the centuries which followed the great fight, the sea fell away from
the roots of the cliffs and left a mile of marshland.  About fifty
years ago a peasant, digging in a rice-field, found the cup which Atta
bad given to Poseidon. There was much talk about the discovery, and
scholars debated hotly about its origin.  To-day it is in the Berlin
Museum, and according to the new fashion in archaeology it is labelled
"Minoan," and kept in the Cretan Section.  But any one who looks
carefully will see behind the rim a neat little carving of a dolphin;
and I happen to know that that was the private badge of Atta's house.




ATTA'S SONG

(Roughly translated.)

  I will sing of thee, Great Sea-Mother,
  Whose white arms gather
  Thy sons in the ending:
  And draw them homeward
  From far sad marches--
  Wild lands in the sunset,
  Bitter shores of the morning--
  Soothe them and guide them
  By shining pathways
  Homeward to thee.

  All day I have striven in dark glens
  With parched throat and dim eyes,
  Where the red crags choke the stream
  And dank thickets hide the spear.
  I have spilled the blood of my foes
  And their wolves have torn my flanks.
  I am faint, O Mother,
  Faint and aweary.
  I have longed for thy cool winds
  And thy kind grey eyes
  And thy lover's arms.

  At the even I came
  To a land of terrors,
  Of hot swamps where the feet mired
  And waters that flowerd red with blood
  There I strove with thousands,
  Wild-eyed and lost,
  As a lion among serpents.
  --But sudden before me
  I saw the flash
  Of the sweet wide waters
  That wash my homeland
  And mirror the stars of home.
  Then sang I for joy,
  For I knew the Preserver,
  Thee, the Uniter,
  The great Sea-Mother.
  Soon will the sweet light come,
  And the salt winds and the tides
  Will bear me home.

  Far in the sunrise,
  Nestled in thy bosom,
  Lies my own green isle.
  Thither wilt thou bear me.
  To where, above the sea-cliffs,
  Stretch mild meadows, flower-decked, thyme-scented,
  Crisp with sea breezes.
  There my flocks feed
  On sunny uplands,
  Looking over thy waters
  To where the mount Saos
  Raises purl snows to God.

  Hermes, guide of souls,
  I made thee a shrine in my orchard,
  And round thy olive-wood limbs
  The maidens twined Spring blossoms--
  Violet and helichryse
  And the pale wind flowers.
  Keep thou watch for me,
  For I am coming.
  Tell to my lady
  And to all my kinsfolk
  That I who have gone from them
  Tarry not long, but come swift o'er the sea-path,
  My feet light with joy,
  My eyes bright with longing.
  For little it matters
  Where a man may fall,
  If he fall by the sea-shore;
  The kind waters await him,
  The white arms are around him,
  And the wise Mother of Men
  Will carry him home.

  I who sing
  Wait joyfully on the morning.
  Ten thousand beset me
  And their spears ache for my heart.
  They will crush me and grind me to mire,
  So that none will know the man that once was me.
  But at the first light I shall be gone,
  Singing, flitting, o'er the grey waters,
  Outward, homeward,
  To thee, the Preserver,
  Thee, the Uniter,
  Mother the Sea.




IV

SPACE

  "Est impossibile? Certum est."
    --TERTULLIAN.


Leithen told me this story one evening in early September as we sat
beside the pony track which gropes its way from Glenvalin up the Correi
na Sidhe.  I had arrived that afternoon from the south, while he had
been taking an off-day from a week's stalking, so we had walked up the
glen together after tea to get the news of the forest.  A rifle was out
on the Correi na Sidhe beat, and a thin spire of smoke had risen from
the top of Sgurr Dearg to show that a stag had been killed at the
burnhead.  The lumpish hill pony with its deer-saddle had gone up the
Correi in a gillie's charge while we followed at leisure, picking our
way among the loose granite rocks and the patches of wet bogland.  The
track climbed high on one of the ridges of Sgurr Dearg, till it hung
over a caldron of green glen with the Alt-na-Sidhe churning in its linn
a thousand feet below.  It was a breathless evening, I remember, with a
pale-blue sky just clearing from the haze of the day.  West-wind
weather may make the North, even in September, no bad imitation of the
Tropics, and I sincerely pitied the man who all these stifling hours
had been toiling on the screes of Sgurr Dearg.  By-and-by we sat down
on a bank of heather, and idly watched the trough swimming at our feet.
The clatter of the pony's hoofs grew fainter, the drone of bees had
gone, even the midges seemed to have forgotten their calling.  No place
on earth can be so deathly still as a deer-forest early in the season
before the stags have begun roaring, for there are no sheep with their
homely noises, and only the rare croak of a raven breaks the silence.
The hillside was far from sheer-one could have walked down with a
little care-but something in the shape of the hollow and the remote
gleam of white water gave it an extraordinary depth and space.  There
was a shimmer left from the day's heat, which invested bracken and rock
and scree with a curious airy unreality.  One could almost have
believed that the eye had tricked the mind, that all was mirage, that
five yards from the path the solid earth fell away into nothingness.  I
have a bad head, and instinctively I drew farther back into the
heather.  Leithen's eyes were looking vacantly before him.

"Did you ever know Hollond?" he asked.

Then he laughed shortly.  "I don't know why I asked that, but somehow
this place reminded me of Hollond.  That glimmering hollow looks as if
it were the beginning of eternity.  It must be eerie to live with the
feeling always on one."

Leithen seemed disinclined for further exercise.  He lit a pipe and
smoked quietly for a little.  "Odd that you didn't know Hollond.  You
must have heard his name.  I thought you amused yourself with
metaphysics."

Then I remembered.  There had been an erratic genius who had written
some articles in Mind on that dreary subject, the mathematical
conception of infinity.  Men had praised them to me, but I confess I
never quite understood their argument.  "Wasn't he some sort of
mathematical professor?"  I asked.

"He was, and, in his own way, a tremendous swell.  He wrote a book on
Number which has translations in every European language.  He is dead
now, and the Royal Society founded a medal in his honour.  But I wasn't
thinking of that side of him."

It was the time and place for a story, for the pony would not be back
for an hour.  So I asked Leithen about the other side of Hollond which
was recalled to him by Correi na Sidhe.  He seemed a little unwilling
to speak...

"I wonder if you will understand it.  You ought to, of course, better
than me, for you know something of philosophy.  But it took me a long
time to get the hang of it, and I can't give you any kind of
explanation.  He was my fag at Eton, and when I began to get on at the
Bar I was able to advise him on one or two private matters, so that he
rather fancied my legal ability.  He came to me with his story because
he had to tell someone, and he wouldn't trust a colleague.  He said he
didn't want a scientist to know, for scientists were either pledged to
their own theories and wouldn't understand, or, if they understood,
would get ahead of him in his researches.  He wanted a lawyer, he said,
who was accustomed to weighing evidence.  That was good sense, for
evidence must always be judged by the same laws, and I suppose in the
long-run the most abstruse business comes down to a fairly simple
deduction from certain data.  Anyhow, that was the way he used to talk,
and I listened to him, for I liked the man, and had an enormous respect
for his brains.  At Eton he sluiced down all the mathematics they could
give him, and he was an astonishing swell at Cambridge.  He was a
simple fellow, too, and talked no more jargon than he could help.  I
used to climb with him in the Alps now and then, and you would never
have guessed that he had any thoughts beyond getting up steep rocks.

"It was at Chamonix, I remember, that I first got a hint of the matter
that was filling his mind.  We had been taking an off-day, and were
sitting in the hotel garden, watching the Aiguilles getting purple in
the twilight.  Chamonix always makes me choke a little-it is so crushed
in by those great snow masses.  I said something about it--said I liked
the open spaces like the Gornegrat or the Bel Alp better.  He asked me
why:  if it was the difference of the air, or merely the wider horizon?
I said it was the sense of not being crowded, of living in an empty
world.  He repeated the word 'empty' and laughed.

"'By "empty" you mean,' he said, 'where things don't knock up against
you?'

I told him No.  I mean just empty, void, nothing but blank aether.

"You don't knock up against things here, and the air is as good as you
want.  It can't be the lack of ordinary emptiness you feel."

"I agreed that the word needed explaining.  'I suppose it is mental
restlessness,' I said.  'I like to feel that for a tremendous distance
there is nothing round me.  Why, I don't know.  Some men are built the
other way and have a terror of space.'

"He said that that was better.  'It is a personal fancy, and depends on
your KNOWING that there is nothing between you and the top of the Dent
Blanche.  And you know because your eyes tell you there is nothing.
Even if you were blind, you might have a sort of sense about adjacent
matter.  Blind men often have it.  But in any case, whether got from
instinct or sight, the KNOWLEDGE is what matters.'

"Hollond was embarking on a Socratic dialogue in which I could see
little point.  I told him so, and he laughed. "'I am not sure that I am
very clear myself.  But yes--there IS a point.  Supposing you knew-not
by sight or by instinct, but by sheer intellectual knowledge, as I know
the truth of a mathematical proposition--that what we call empty space
was full, crammed.  Not with lumps of what we call matter like hills
and houses, but with things as real--as real to the mind.  Would you
still feel crowded?'

"'No,' I said, 'I don't think so.  It is only what we call matter that
signifies.  It would be just as well not to feel crowded by the other
thing, for there would be no escape from it.  But what are you getting
at?  Do you mean atoms or electric currents or what?'

"He said he wasn't thinking about that sort of thing, and began to talk
of another subject.

"Next night, when we were pigging it at the Geant cabane, he started
again on the same tack.  He asked me how I accounted for the fact that
animals could find their way back over great tracts of unknown country.
I said I supposed it was the homing instinct.

"'Rubbish, man,' he said.  'That's only another name for the puzzle,
not an explanation.  There must be some reason for it.  They must KNOW
something that we cannot understand.  Tie a cat in a bag and take it
fifty miles by train and it will make its way home.  That cat has some
clue that we haven't.'

"I was tired and sleepy, and told him that I did not care a rush about
the psychology of cats.  But he was not to be snubbed, and went on
talking.

"'How if Space is really full of things we cannot see and as yet do not
know?  How if all animals and some savages have a cell in their brain
or a nerve which responds to the invisible world?  How if all Space be
full of these landmarks, not material in our sense, but quite real?  A
dog barks at nothing, a wild beast makes an aimless circuit.  Why?
Perhaps because Space is made up of corridors and alleys, ways to
travel and things to shun?  For all we know, to a greater intelligence
than ours the top of Mont Blanc may be as crowded as Piccadilly Circus.'

"But at that point I fell asleep and left Hollond to repeat his
questions to a guide who knew no English and a snoring porter.

"Six months later, one foggy January afternoon, Hollond rang me up at
the Temple and proposed to come to see me that night after dinner.  I
thought he wanted to talk Alpine shop, but he turned up in Duke Street
about nine with a kit-bag full of papers.  He was an odd fellow to look
at--a yellowish face with the skin stretched tight on the cheek-bones,
clean-shaven, a sharp chin which he kept poking forward, and deep-set,
greyish eyes.  He was a hard fellow, too, always in pretty good
condition, which was remarkable considering how he slaved for nine
months out of the twelve.  He had a quiet, slow-spoken manner, but that
night I saw that he was considerably excited.

"He said that he had come to me because we were old friends.  He
proposed to tell me a tremendous secret.  'I must get another mind to
work on it or I'll go crazy.  I don't want a scientist.  I want a plain
man.'

"Then he fixed me with a look like a tragic actor's.  'Do you remember
that talk we had in August at Chamonix--about Space?  I daresay you
thought I was playing the fool.  So I was in a sense, but I was feeling
my way towards something which has been in my mind for ten years.  Now
I have got it, and you must hear about it.  You may take my word that
it's a pretty startling discovery.'

"I lit a pipe and told him to go ahead, warning him that I knew about
as much science as the dustman.

"I am bound to say that it took me a long time to understand what he
meant.  He began by saying that everybody thought of Space as an 'empty
homogeneous medium.'  'Never mind at present what the ultimate
constituents of that medium are.  We take it as a finished product, and
we think of it as mere extension, something without any quality at all.
That is the view of civilised man.  You will find all the philosophers
taking it for granted.  Yes, but every living thing does not take that
view.  An animal, for instance.  It feels a kind of quality in Space.
It can find its way over new country, because it perceives certain
landmarks, not necessarily material, but perceptible, or if you like
intelligible.  Take an Australian savage.  He has the same power, and,
I believe, for the same reason.  He is conscious of intelligible
landmarks.'

"'You mean what people call a sense of direction,' I put in.

"'Yes, but what in Heaven's name is a sense of direction?  The phrase
explains nothing.  However incoherent the mind of the animal or the
savage may be, it is there somewhere, working on some data.  I've been
all through the psychological and anthropological side of the business,
and after you eliminate the clues from sight and hearing and smell and
half-conscious memory there remains a solid lump of the inexplicable.'

"Hollond's eye had kindled, and he sat doubled up in his chair,
dominating me with a finger.

"'Here, then is a power which man is civilising himself out of.  Call
it anything you like, but you must admit that it is a power.  Don't you
see that it is a perception of another kind of reality that we are
leaving behind us?... Well, you know the way nature works.  The wheel
comes full circle, and what we think we have lost we regain in a higher
form.  So for a long time I have been wondering whether the civilised
mind could not recreate for itself this lost gift, the gift of seeing
the quality of Space.  I mean that I wondered whether the scientific
modern brain could not get to the stage of realising that Space is not
an empty homogeneous medium, but full of intricate differences,
intelligible and real, though not with our common reality.'

"I found all this very puzzling and he had to repeat it several times
before I got a glimpse of what he was talking about.

"'I've wondered for a long time he went on 'but now quite suddenly, I
have begun to know.' He stopped and asked me abruptly if I knew much
about mathematics.

"'It's a pity,' he said,'but the main point is not technical, though I
wish you could appreciate the beauty of some of my proofs.  Then he
began to tell me about his last six months' work.  I should have
mentioned that he was a brilliant physicist besides other things.  All
Hollond's tastes were on the borderlands of sciences, where mathematics
fades into metaphysics and physics merges in the abstrusest kind of
mathematics.  Well, it seems he had been working for years at the
ultimate problem of matter, and especially of that rarefied matter we
call aether or space.  I forget what his view was--atoms or molecules or
electric waves.  If he ever told me I have forgotten, but I'm not
certain that I ever knew.  However, the point was that these ultimate
constituents were dynamic and mobile, not a mere passive medium but a
medium in constant movement and change.  He claimed to have
discovered--by ordinary inductive experiment--that the constituents of
aether possessed certain functions, and moved in certain figures
obedient to certain mathematical laws.  Space, I gathered, was
perpetually 'forming fours' in some fancy way.

"Here he left his physics and became the mathematician.  Among his
mathematical discoveries had been certain curves or figures or
something whose behaviour involved a new dimension.  I gathered that
this wasn't the ordinary Fourth Dimension that people talk of, but that
fourth-dimensional inwardness or involution was part of it.  The
explanation lay in the pile of manuscripts he left with me, but though
I tried honestly I couldn't get the hang of it.  My mathematics stopped
with desperate finality just as he got into his subject.

"His point was that the constituents of Space moved according to these
new mathematical figures of his.  They were always changing, but the
principles of their change were as fixed as the law of gravitation.
Therefore, if you once grasped these principles you knew the contents
of the void.  What do you make of that?"

I said that it seemed to me a reasonable enough argument, but that it
got one very little way forward. "A man,"  I said, "might know the
contents of Space and the laws of their arrangement and yet be unable
to see anything more than his fellows.  It is a purely academic
knowledge.  His mind knows it as the result of many deductions, but his
senses perceive nothing."

Leithen laughed.  "Just what I said to Hollond.  He asked the opinion
of my legal mind.  I said I could not pronounce on his argument but
that I could point out that he had established no trait d'union between
the intellect which understood and the senses which perceived.  It was
like a blind man with immense knowledge but no eyes, and therefore no
peg to hang his knowledge on and make it useful.  He had not explained
his savage or his cat.  'Hang it, man,' I said, 'before you can
appreciate the existence of your Spacial forms you have to go through
elaborate experiments and deductions.  You can't be doing that every
minute.  Therefore you don't get any nearer to the USE of the sense you
say that man once possessed, though you can explain it a bit.'"

"What did he say?" I asked.

"The funny thing was that he never seemed to see my difficulty.  When I
kept bringing him back to it he shied off with a new wild theory of
perception.  He argued that the mind can live in a world of realities
without any sensuous stimulus to connect them with the world of our
ordinary life.  Of course that wasn't my point.  I supposed that this
world of Space was real enough to him, but I wanted to know how he got
there.  He never answered me.  He was the typical Cambridge man, you
know--dogmatic about uncertainties, but curiously diffident about the
obvious.  He laboured to get me to understand the notion of his
mathematical forms, which I was quite willing to take on trust from
him.  Some queer things he said, too.  He took our feeling about Left
and Right as an example of our instinct for the quality of Space.  But
when I objected that Left and Right varied with each object, and only
existed in connection with some definite material thing, he said that
that was exactly what he meant.  It was an example of the mobility of
the Spacial forms.  Do you see any sense in that?"

I shook my head.  It seemed to me pure craziness.

"And then he tried to show me what he called the 'involution of Space,'
by taking two points on a piece of paper.  The points were a foot away
when the paper was flat, they coincided when it was doubled up.  He
said that there were no gaps between the figures, for the medium was
continuous, and he took as an illustration the loops on a cord.  You
are to think of a cord always looping and unlooping itself according to
certain mathematical laws.  Oh, I tell you, I gave up trying to follow
him.  And he was so desperately in earnest all the time.  By his
account Space was a sort of mathematical pandemonium."

Leithen stopped to refill his pipe, and I mused upon the ironic fate
which had compelled a mathematical genius to make his sole confidant of
a philistine lawyer, and induced that lawyer to repeat it confusedly to
an ignoramus at twilight on a Scotch hill.  As told by Leithen it was a
very halting tale.

"But there was one thing I could see very clearly," Leithen went on,
"and that was Hollond's own case.  This crowded world of Space was
perfectly real to him.  How he had got to it I do not know.  Perhaps
his mind, dwelling constantly on the problem, had unsealed some
atrophied cell and restored the old instinct.  Anyhow, he was living
his daily life with a foot in each world.

"He often came to see me, and after the first hectic discussions he
didn't talk much.  There was no noticeable change in him--a little more
abstracted perhaps.  He would walk in the street or come into a room
with a quick look round him, and sometimes for no earthly reason he
would swerve.  Did you ever watch a cat crossing a room?  It sidles
along by the furniture and walks over an open space of carpet as if it
were picking its way among obstacles.  Well, Hollond behaved like that,
but he had always been counted a little odd, and nobody noticed it but
me.

"I knew better than to chaff him, and had stopped argument, so there
wasn't much to be said.  But sometimes he would give me news about his
experiences.  The whole thing was perfectly clear and scientific and
above board, and nothing creepy about it.  You know how I hate the
washy supernatural stuff they give us nowadays.  Hollond was well and
fit, with an appetite like a hunter.  But as he talked,
sometimes--well, you know I haven't much in the way of nerves or
imagination--but I used to get a little eerie.  Used to feel the solid
earth dissolving round me.  It was the opposite of vertigo, if you
understand me--a sense of airy realities crowding in on you-crowding
the mind, that is, not the body.

"I gathered from Hollond that he was always conscious of corridors and
halls and alleys in Space, shifting, but shifting according to
inexorable laws.  I never could get quite clear as to what this
consciousness was like.  When I asked he used to look puzzled and
worried and helpless.  I made out from him that one landmark involved a
sequence, and once given a bearing from an object you could keep the
direction without a mistake.  He told me he could easily, if he wanted,
go in a dirigible from the top of Mont Blanc to the top of Snowdon in
the thickest fog and without a compass, if he were given the proper
angle to start from.  I confess I didn't follow that myself.  Material
objects had nothing to do with the Spacial forms, for a table or a bed
in our world might be placed across a corridor of Space.  The forms
played their game independent of our kind of reality.  But the worst of
it was, that if you kept your mind too much in one world you were apt
to forget about the other and Hollond was always barking his shins on
stones and chairs and things.

"He told me all this quite simply and frankly.  Remember his mind and
no other part of him lived in his new world.  He said it gave him an
odd sense of detachment to sit in a room among people, and to know that
nothing there but himself had any relation at all to the infinite
strange world of Space that flowed around them.  He would listen, he
said, to a great man talking, with one eye on the cat on the rug,
thinking to himself how much more the cat knew than the man."

"How long was it before he went mad?"  I asked.

It was a foolish question, and made Leithen cross.  "He never went mad
in your sense.  My dear fellow, you're very much wrong if you think
there was anything pathological about him--then.  The man was
brilliantly sane.  His mind was as keen is a keen sword.  I couldn't
understand him, but I could judge of his sanity right enough."

I asked if it made him happy or miserable.

"At first I think it made him uncomfortable.  He was restless because
he knew too much and too little.  The unknown pressed in on his mind as
bad air weighs on the lungs.  Then it lightened and he accepted the new
world in the same sober practical way that he took other things.  I
think that the free exercise of his mind in a pure medium gave him a
feeling of extraordinary power and ease.  His eyes used to sparkle when
he talked.  And another odd thing he told me.  He was a keen
rockclimber, but, curiously enough, he had never a very good head.
Dizzy heights always worried him, though he managed to keep hold on
himself.  But now all that had gone.  The sense of the fulness of Space
made him as happy--happier I believe--with his legs dangling into
eternity, as sitting before his own study fire.

"I remember saying that it was all rather like the mediaeval wizards
who made their spells by means of numbers and figures.

"He caught me up at once.  'Not numbers,' he said.  "Number has no
place in Nature.  It is an invention of the human mind to atone for a
bad memory.  But figures are a different matter.  All the mysteries of
the world are in them, and the old magicians knew that at least, if
they knew no more.'

"He had only one grievance.  He complained that it was terribly lonely.
'It is the Desolation,' he would quote, 'spoken of by Daniel the
prophet.' He would spend hours travelling those eerie shifting
corridors of Space with no hint of another human soul.  How could there
be?  It was a world of pure reason, where human personality had no
place. What puzzled me was why he should feel the absence of this.  One
wouldn't you know, in an intricate problem of geometry or a game of
chess.  I asked him, but he didn't understand the question.  I puzzled
over it a good deal, for it seemed to me that if Hollond felt lonely,
there must be more in this world of his than we imagined.  I began to
wonder if there was any truth in fads like psychical research.  Also, I
was not so sure that he was as normal as I had thought:  it looked as
if his nerves might be going bad.

"Oddly enough, Hollond was getting on the same track himself.  He had
discovered, so he said, that in sleep everybody now and then lived in
this new world of his.  You know how one dreams of triangular railway
platforms with trains running simultaneously down all three sides and
not colliding.  Well, this sort of cantrip was 'common form,' as we say
at the Bar, in Hollond's Space, and he was very curious about the why
and wherefore of Sleep.  He began to haunt psychological laboratories,
where they experiment with the charwoman and the odd man, and he used
to go up to Cambridge for seances.  It was a foreign atmosphere to him,
and I don't think he was very happy in it.  He found so many charlatans
that he used to get angry, and declare he would be better employed at
Mother's Meetings!"

From far up the Glen came the sound of the pony's hoofs.  The stag had
been loaded up and the gillies were returning.  Leithen looked at his
watch.  "We'd better wait and see the beast," he said.

"... Well, nothing happened for more than a year.  Then one evening in
May he burst into my rooms in high excitement.  You understand quite
clearly that there was no suspicion of horror or fright or anything
unpleasant about this world he had discovered.  It was simply a series
of interesting and difficult problems.  All this time Hollond had been
rather extra well and cheery.  But when he came in I thought I noticed
a different look in his eyes, something puzzled and diffident and
apprehensive.

"'There's a queer performance going on in the other world,' he said.
'It's unbelievable.  I never dreamed of such a thing.  I--I don't
quite know how to put it, and I don't know how to explain it, but--but
I am becoming aware that there are other beings--other minds--moving
in Space besides mine.'

"I suppose I ought to have realised then that things were beginning to
go wrong.  But it was very difficult, he was so rational and anxious to
make it all clear.  I asked him how he knew.  'There could, of course,
on his own showing be no CHANGE in that world, for the forms of Space
moved and existed under inexorable laws.  He said he found his own mind
failing him at points.  There would come over him a sense of
fear--intellectual fear--and weakness, a sense of something else, quite
alien to Space, thwarting him.  Of course he could only describe his
impressions very lamely, for they were purely of the mind, and he had
no material peg to hang them on, so that I could realise them.  But the
gist of it was that he had been gradually becoming conscious of what he
called 'Presences' in his world.  They had no effect on Space--did not
leave footprints in its corridors, for instance--but they affected his
mind.  There was some mysterious contact established between him and
them.  I asked him if the affection was unpleasant and he said 'No, not
exactly.' But I could see a hint of fear in his eyes.

"Think of it.  Try to realise what intellectual fear is.  I can't, but
it is conceivable.  To you and me fear implies pain to ourselves or
some other, and such pain is always in the last resort pain of the
flesh.  Consider it carefully and you will see that it is so.  But
imagine fear so sublimated and transmuted as to be the tension of pure
spirit.  I can't realise it, but I think it possible.  I don't pretend
to understand how Hollond got to know about these Presences.  But there
was no doubt about the fact.  He was positive, and he wasn't in the
least mad--not in our sense.  In that very month he published his book
on Number, and gave a German professor who attacked it a most
tremendous public trouncing.

"I know what you are going to say,--that the fancy was a weakening of
the mind from within.  I admit I should have thought of that but he
looked so confoundedly sane and able that it seemed ridiculous.  He
kept asking me my opinion, as a lawyer, on the facts he offered.  It
was the oddest case ever put before me, but I did my best for him.  I
dropped all my own views of sense and nonsense.  I told him that,
taking all that he had told me as fact, the Presences might be either
ordinary minds traversing Space in sleep; or minds such as his which
had independently captured the sense of Space's quality; or, finally,
the spirits of just men made perfect, behaving as psychical researchers
think they do.  It was a ridiculous task to set a prosaic man, and I
wasn't quite serious.  But Holland was serious enough.

"He admitted that all three explanations were conceivable, but he was
very doubtful about the first.  The projection of the spirit into Space
during sleep, he thought, was a faint and feeble thing, and these were
powerful Presences.  With the second and the third he was rather
impressed.  I suppose I should have seen what was happening and tried
to stop it; at least, looking back that seems to have been my duty.
But it was difficult to think that anything was wrong with Hollond;
indeed the odd thing is that all this time the idea of madness never
entered my head.  I rather backed him up.  Somehow the thing took my
fancy, though I thought it moonshine at the bottom of my heart.  I
enlarged on the pioneering before him.  'Think,' I told him, 'what may
be waiting for you.  You may discover the meaning of Spirit.  You may
open up a new world, as rich as the old one, but imperishable.  You may
prove to mankind their immortality and deliver them for ever from the
fear of death.  Why, man, you are picking at the lock of all the
world's mysteries.'

"But Hollond did not cheer up.  He seemed strangely languid and
dispirited.  'That is all true enough,' he said,'if you are right, if
your alternatives are exhaustive.  But suppose they are something else,
something .... What that 'something' might be he had apparently no
idea, and very soon he went away.

"He said another thing before he left.  We asked me if I ever read
poetry, and I said, not often.  Nor did he:  but he had picked up a
little book somewhere and found a man who knew about the Presences.  I
think his name was Traherne, one of the seventeenth-century fellows.
He quoted a verse which stuck to my fly-paper memory.  It ran something
like

  'Within the region of the air,
  Compassed about with Heavens fair,
  Great tracts of lands there may be found,
  Where many numerous hosts,
  In those far distant coasts,
  For other great and glorious ends
  Inhabit, my yet unknown friends.'

Hollond was positive he did not mean angels or anything of the sort.  I
told him that Traherne evidently took a cheerful view of them.  He
admitted that, but added: 'He had religion, you see.  He believed that
everything was for the best.  I am not a man of faith, and can only
take comfort from what I understand.  I'm in the dark, I tell you...'

"Next week I was busy with the Chilian Arbitration case, and saw nobody
for a couple of months.  Then one evening I ran against Hollond on the
Embankment, and thought him looking horribly ill.  He walked back with
me to my rooms, and hardly uttered one word all the way.  I gave him a
stiff whisky-and-soda, which he gulped down absent-mindedly.  There was
that strained, hunted look in his eyes that you see in a frightened
animal's.  He was always lean, but now he had fallen away to skin and
bone.

"'I can't stay long,' he told me, 'for I'm off to the Alps to-morrow
and I have a lot to do.'  Before then he used to plunge readily into
his story, but now he seemed shy about beginning.  Indeed I had to ask
him a question.

"'Things are difficult,' he said hesitatingly, and rather distressing.
Do you know, Leithen, I think you were wrong about--about what I spoke
to you of.  You said there must be one of three explanations.  I am
beginning to think that there is a fourth.

"He stopped for a second or two, then suddenly leaned forward and
gripped my knee so fiercely that I cried out.  'That world is the
Desolation,' he said in a choking voice, 'and perhaps I am getting near
the Abomination of the Desolation that the old prophet spoke of.  I
tell you, man, I am on the edge of a terror, a terror,' he almost
screamed, 'that no mortal can think of and live.'

You can imagine that I was considerably startled.  It was lightning out
of a clear sky.  How the devil could one associate horror with
mathematics?  I don't see it yet...  At any rate, I--You may be sure I
cursed my folly for ever pretending to take him seriously.  The only
way would have been to have laughed him out of it at the start.  And
yet I couldn't, you know--it was too real and reasonable.  Anyhow, I
tried a firm tone now, and told him the whole thing was arrant raving
bosh.  I bade him be a man and pull himself together.  I made him dine
with me, and took him home, and got him into a better state of mind
before he went to bed.  Next morning I saw him off at Charing Cross,
very haggard still, but better. He promised to write to me pretty
often....


The pony, with a great eleven-pointer lurching athwart its back, was
abreast of us, and from the autumn mist came the sound of soft Highland
voices.  Leithen and I got up to go, when we heard that the rifle had
made direct for the Lodge by a short cut past the Sanctuary.  In the
wake of the gillies we descended the Correi road into a glen all
swimming with dim purple shadows.  The pony minced and boggled; the
stag's antlers stood out sharp on the rise against a patch of sky,
looking like a skeleton tree.  Then we dropped into a covert of birches
and emerged on the white glen highway.

Leithen's story had bored and puzzled me at the start, but now it had
somehow gripped my fancy.  Space a domain of endless corridors and
Presences moving in them!  The world was not quite the same as an hour
ago.  It was the hour, as the French say, "between dog and wolf," when
the mind is disposed to marvels.  I thought of my stalking on the
morrow, and was miserably conscious that I would miss my stag.  Those
airy forms would get in the way.  Confound Leithen and his yarns!

"I want to hear the end of your story,"  I told him, as the lights of
the Lodge showed half a mile distant.

"The end was a tragedy," he said slowly.  "I don't much care to talk
about it.  But how was I to know?  I couldn't see the nerve going.  You
see I couldn't believe it was all nonsense.  If I could I might have
seen.  But I still think there was something in it--up to a point.  Oh,
I agree he went mad in the end.  It is the only explanation.  Something
must have snapped in that fine brain, and he saw the little bit more
which we call madness.  Thank God, you and I are prosaic fellows...

"I was going out to Chamonix myself a week later.  But before I started
I got a post-card from Hollond, the only word from him.  He had printed
my name and address, and on the other side had scribbled six words--'I
know at last--God's mercy.--H.G.H'  The handwriting was like a sick man
of ninety.  I knew that things must be pretty bad with my friend.

"I got to Chamonix in time for his funeral.  An ordinary climbing
accident--you probably read about it in the papers. The Press talked
about the toll which the Alps took from intellectuals--the usual rot.
There was an inquiry, but the facts were quite simple.  The body was
only recognised by the clothes.  He had fallen several thousand feet.

"It seems that he had climbed for a few days with one of the Kronigs
and Dupont, and they had done some hair-raising things on the
Aiguilles.  Dupont told me that they had found a new route up the
Montanvert side of the Charmoz.  He said that Hollond climbed like a
'diable fou' and if you know Dupont's standard of madness you will see
that the pace must have been pretty hot. 'But monsieur was sick,' he
added; 'his eyes were not good.  And I and Franz, we were grieved for
him and a little afraid.  We were glad when he left us.'

"He dismissed the guides two days before his death.  The next day he
spent in the hotel, getting his affairs straight.  He left everything
in perfect order, but not a line to a soul, not even to his sister.
The following day he set out alone about three in the morning for the
Grepon.  He took the road up the Nantillons glacier to the Col, and
then he must have climbed the Mummery crack by himself.  After that he
left the ordinary route and tried a new traverse across the Mer de
Glace face.  Somewhere near the top he fell, and next day a party going
to the Dent du Requin found him on the rocks thousands of feet below.

"He had slipped in attempting the most foolhardy course on earth, and
there was a lot of talk about the dangers of guideless climbing.  But I
guessed the truth, and I am sure Dupont knew, though he held his
tongue...."

We were now on the gravel of the drive, and I was feeling better.  The
thought of dinner warmed my heart and drove out the eeriness of the
twilight glen.  The hour between dog and wolf was passing.  After all,
there was a gross and jolly earth at hand for wise men who had a mind
to comfort.

Leithen, I saw, did not share my mood.  He looked glum and puzzled, as
if his tale had aroused grim memories.  He finished it at the Lodge
door.

"... For, of course, he had gone out that day to die.  He had seen the
something more, the little bit too much, which plucks a man from his
moorings.  He had gone so far into the land of pure spirit that he must
needs go further and shed the fleshly envelope that cumbered him.  God
send that he found rest!  I believe that he chose the steepest cliff in
the Alps for a purpose.  He wanted to be unrecognisable.  He was a
brave man and a good citizen.  I think he hoped that those who found
him might not see the look in his eyes."




STOCKS AND STONES

[The Chief Topaiwari replieth to Sir Walter Raleigh who upbraideth him
for idol worship]


  My gods, you say, are idols dumb,
  Which men have wrought from wood or clay,
  Carven with chisel, shaped with thumb,
  A morning's task, an evening's play.
  You bid me turn my face on high
  Where the blue heaven the sun enthrones,
  And serve a viewless deity,
  Nor make my bow to stocks and stones.

  My lord, I am not skilled in wit
  Nor wise in priestcraft, but I know
  That fear to man is spur and bit
  To jog and curb his fancies' flow.
  He fears and loves, for love and awe
  In mortal souls may well unite
  To fashion forth the perfect law
  Where Duty takes to wife Delight.

  But on each man one Fear awaits
  And chills his marrow like the dead.--
  He cannot worship what he hates
  Or make a god of naked Dread.
  The homeless winds that twist and race,
  The heights of cloud that veer and roll,
  The unplumb'd Abyss, the drift of Space--
  These are the fears that drain the soul.

  Ye dauntless ones from out the sea
  Fear nought. Perchance your gods are strong
  To rule the air where grim things be,
  And quell the deeps with all their throng.
  For me, I dread not fire nor steel,
  Nor aught that walks in open light,
  But fend me from the endless Wheel,
  The voids of Space, the gulfs of Night.

  Wherefore my brittle gods I make
  Of friendly clay and kindly stone,--
  Wrought with my hands, to serve or break,
  From crown to toe my work, my own.
  My eyes can see, my nose can smell,
  My fingers touch their painted face,
  They weave their little homely spell
  To warm me from the cold of Space.

  My gods are wrought of common stuff
  For human joys and mortal tears;
  Weakly, perchance, yet staunch enough
  To build a barrier 'gainst my fears,
  Where, lowly but secure, I wait
  And hear without the strange winds blow.--
  I cannot worship what I hate,
  Or serve a god I dare not know.




V

STREAMS OF WATER IN THE SOUTH

  "As streams of water in the south, Our bondage, Lord, recall."
    --PSALM cxxvi.  (Scots Metrical Version).


It was at the ford of the Clachlands Water in a tempestuous August,
that I, an idle boy, first learned the hardships of the Lammas droving.
The shepherd of the Redswirehead, my very good friend, and his three
shaggy dogs, were working for their lives in an angry water.  The path
behind was thronged with scores of sheep bound for the Gledsmuir
market, and beyond it was possible to discern through the mist the few
dripping dozen which had made the passage.  Between raged yards of
brown foam coming down from murky hills, and the air echoed with the
yelp of dogs and the perplexed cursing of men.

Before I knew I was helping in the task, with water lipping round my
waist and my arms filled with a terrified sheep.  It was no light task,
for though the water was no more than three feet deep it was swift and
strong, and a kicking hogg is a sore burden.  But this was the only
road; the stream might rise higher at any moment; and somehow or other
those bleating flocks had to be transferred to their fellows beyond.
There were six men at the labour, six men and myself and all were
cross and wearied and heavy with water.

I made my passages side by side with my friend the shepherd, and
thereby felt much elated.  This was a man who had dwelt all his days in
the wilds and was familiar with torrents as with his own doorstep.  Now
and then a swimming dog would bark feebly as he was washed against us,
and flatter his fool's heart that he was aiding the work.  And so we
wrought on, till by midday I was dead-beat, and could scarce stagger
through the surf, while all the men had the same gasping faces.  I saw
the shepherd look with longing eye up the long green valley, and mutter
disconsolately in his beard.

"Is the water rising?"  I asked.

"It's no rising," said he, "but I likena the look o' yon big black clud
upon Cairncraw.  I doubt there's been a shoor up the muirs, and a shoor
there means twae mair feet o' water in the Clachlands.  God help Sandy
Jamieson's lambs, if there is."

"How many are left?"  I asked.

"Three, fower,--no abune a score and a half," said he, running his eye
over the lessened flocks.  "I maun try to tak twae at a time."  So for
ten minutes he struggled with a double burden, and panted painfully at
each return.  Then with a sudden swift look up-stream he broke off and
stood up.  "Get ower the water, every yin o' ye, and leave the sheep,"
he said, and to my wonder every man of the five obeyed his word.

And then I saw the reason of his command, for with a sudden swift leap
forward the Clachlands rose, and flooded up to where I stood an instant
before high and dry.

"It's come," said the shepherd in a tone of fate, "and there's fifteen
no ower yet, and Lord kens how they'll dae't.  They'll hae to gang
roond by Gledsmuir Brig, and that's twenty mile o' a differ.  'Deed,
it's no like that Sandy Jamieson will get a guid price the morn for sic
sair forfochen beasts."

Then with firmly gripped staff he marched stoutly into the tide till it
ran hissing below his armpits.  "I could dae't alone," he cried, "but
no wi' a burden.  For, losh, if ye slippit, ye'd be in the Manor Pool
afore ye could draw breath."

And so we waited with the great white droves and five angry men beyond,
and the path blocked by a surging flood.  For half an hour we waited,
holding anxious consultation across the stream, when to us thus busied
there entered a newcomer, a helper from the ends of the earth.

He was a man of something over middle size, but with a stoop forward
that shortened him to something beneath it.  His dress was ragged
homespun, the cast-off clothes of some sportsman, and in his arms he
bore a bundle of sticks and heather-roots which marked his calling.  I
knew him for a tramp who long had wandered in the place, but I could
not account for the whole-voiced shout of greeting which met him as he
stalked down the path.  He lifted his eyes and looked solemnly and long
at the scene.  Then something of delight came into his eye, his face
relaxed, and flinging down his burden he stripped his coat and came
toward us.

"Come on, Yeddie, ye're sair needed," said the shepherd, and I watched
with amazement this grizzled, crooked man seize a sheep by the fleece
and drag it to the water.  Then he was in the midst, stepping warily,
now up, now down the channel, but always nearing the farther bank.  At
last with a final struggle he landed his charge, and turned to journey
back.  Fifteen times did he cross that water, and at the end his mean
figure had wholly changed.  For now he was straighter and stronger, his
eye flashed, and his voice, as he cried out to the drovers, had in it a
tone of command.  I marvelled at the transformation; and when at length
he had donned once more his ragged coat and shouldered his bundle, I
asked the shepherd his name.

"They ca' him Adam Logan," said my friend, his face still bright with
excitement, "but maist folk ca' him 'Streams o' Water.'"

"Ay," said I, "and why 'Streams of Water'?"

"Juist for the reason ye see," said he.

Now I knew the shepherd's way, and I held my peace, for it was clear
that his mind was revolving other matters, concerned most probably with
the high subject of the morrow's prices.  But in a little, as we
crossed the moor toward his dwelling, his thoughts relaxed and he
remembered my question.  So he answered me thus:

"Oh, ay; as ye were sayin', he's a queer man Yeddie-aye been; guid kens
whaur he cam frae first, for he's been trampin' the countryside since
ever I mind, and that's no yesterday.  He maun be sixty year, and yet
he's as fresh as ever.  If onything, he's a thocht dafter in his
ongaein's, mair silent-like.  But ye'll hae heard tell o' him afore?"
I owned ignorance.

"Tut," said he, "ye ken nocht.  But Yeddie had aye a queer crakin' for
waters.  He never gangs on the road.  Wi' him it's juist up yae glen
and doon anither and aye keepin' by the burn-side.  He kens every water
i' the

Showing first 200,000 characters. Full text: gutenberg.org/ebooks/715