“Of course; of course. He is an American; that accounts. Still, it

_was_ the Induna; but I can quite understand that the customs of our

cousins across the water differ in these particulars from ours. And do

you always stop trains in this way in the States, Mr. Sargent?”

“I should if occasion ever arose; but I’ve never had to yet. Are you

going to make an international complication of the business?”

“You need give yourself no further concern whatever in the matter. We

see that there is no likelihood of this action of yours establishing a

precedent, which was the only thing we were afraid of. Now that you

understand that we cannot reconcile our system to any sudden stoppages,

we feel quite sure that—”

“I sha’n’t be staying long enough to flag another train,” Wilton said

pensively.

“You are returning, then, to our fellow-kinsmen across the—ah—big pond,

you call it?”

“_No_, sir. The ocean—the North Atlantic Ocean. It’s three thousand

miles broad, and three miles deep in places. I wish it were ten

thousand.”

“I am not so fond of sea-travel myself; but I think it is every

Englishman’s duty once in his life to study the great branch of our

Anglo-Saxon race across the ocean,” said the lawyer.

“If ever you come over, and care to flag any train on my system,

I’ll—I’ll see you through,” said Wilton.

“Thank you—ah, thank you. You’re very kind. I’m sure I should enjoy

myself immensely.”

“We have overlooked the fact,” the doctor whispered to me, “that your

friend proposed to buy the Great Buchonian.”

“He is worth anything from twenty to thirty million dollars—four to

five million pounds,” I answered, knowing that it would be hopeless to

explain.

“Really! That is enormous wealth. But the Great Buchonian is not in the

market.”

“Perhaps he does not want to buy it now.”

“It would be impossible under any circumstances,” said the doctor.

“How characteristic!” murmured the lawyer, reviewing matters in his

mind. “I always understood from books that your countrymen were in a

hurry. And so you would have gone forty miles to town and back—before

dinner—to get a scarab? How intensely American! But you talk exactly

like an Englishman, Mr. Sargent.”

“That is a fault that can be remedied. There’s only one question I’d

like to ask you. You said it was inconceivable that any man should stop

a train on your road?”

“And so it is—absolutely inconceivable.”

“Any sane man, that is?”

“That is what I meant, of course. I mean, with excep—”

“Thank you.”

The two men departed. Wilton checked himself as he was about to fill a

pipe, took one of my cigars instead, and was silent for fifteen

minutes.

Then said he: “Have you got a list of the Southampton sailings on you?”

Far away from the greystone wings, the dark cedars, the faultless

gravel drives, and the mint-sauce lawns of Holt Hangars runs a river

called the Hudson, whose unkempt banks are covered with the palaces of

those wealthy beyond the dreams of avarice. Here, where the hoot of the

Haverstraw brick-barge-tug answers the howl of the locomotive on either

shore, you shall find, with a complete installation of electric light,

nickel-plated binnacles, and a calliope attachment to her

steam-whistle, the twelve-hundred-ton ocean-going steam-yacht

_Columbia_, lying at her private pier, to take to his office, at an

average speed of seventeen knots an hour,—and the barges can look out

for themselves,—Wilton Sargent, American.

MY SUNDAY AT HOME

If the Red Slayer think he slays,

Or if the slain think he is slain,

They know not well the subtle ways

I keep and pass and turn again.

EMERSON.

It was the unreproducible slid r, as he said this was his “fy-ist”

visit to England, that told me he was a New-Yorker from New York; and

when, in the course of our long, lazy journey westward from Waterloo,

he enlarged upon the beauties of his city, I, professing ignorance,

said no word. He had, amazed and delighted at the man’s civility, given

the London porter a shilling for carrying his bag nearly fifty yards;

he had thoroughly investigated the first-class lavatory compartment,

which the London and Southwestern sometimes supply without extra

charge; and now, half-awed, half-contemptuous, but wholly interested,

he looked out upon the ordered English landscape wrapped in its Sunday

peace, while I watched the wonder grow upon his face. Why were the cars

so short and stilted? Why had every other freight-car a tarpaulin drawn

over it? What wages would an engineer get now? Where was the swarming

population of England he had read so much about? What was the rank of

all those men on tricycles along the roads? When were we due at

Plymouth I told him all I knew, and very much that I did not. He was

going to Plymouth to assist in a consultation upon a fellow-countryman

who had retired to a place called The Hoe—was that up-town or

down-town—to recover from nervous dyspepsia. Yes, he himself was a

doctor by profession, and how any one in England could retain any

nervous disorder passed his comprehension. Never had he dreamed of an

atmosphere so soothing. Even the deep rumble of London traffic was

monastical by comparison with some cities he could name; and the

country—why, it was Paradise. A continuance of it, he confessed, would

drive him mad; but for a few months it was the most sumptuous rest-cure

in his knowledge.

“I’ll come over every year after this,” he said, in a burst of delight,

as we ran between two ten-foot hedges of pink and white may. “It’s

seeing all the things I’ve ever read about. Of course it doesn’t strike

you that way. I presume you belong here? What a finished land it is!

It’s arrived. Must have been born this way. Now, where I used to

live—Hello! what’s up?”

The train stopped in a blaze of sunshine at Framlynghame Admiral, which

is made up entirely of the name-board, two platforms, and an overhead

bridge, without even the usual siding. I had never known the slowest of

locals stop here before; but on Sunday all things are possible to the

London and Southwestern. One could hear the drone of conversation along

the carriages, and, scarcely less loud, the drone of the bumblebees in

the wallflowers up the bank. My companion thrust his head through the

window and sniffed luxuriously.

“Where are we now?” said he.

“In Wiltshire,” said I.

“Ah! A man ought to be able to write novels with his left hand in a

country like this. Well, well! And so this is about Tess’s country,

ain’t it? I feel just as if I were in a book. Say, the conduc—the guard

has something on his mind. What’s he getting at?”

The splendid badged and belted guard was striding up the platform at

the regulation official pace, and in the regulation official voice was

saying at each door:

“Has any gentleman here a bottle of medicine? A gentleman has taken a

bottle of poison (laudanum) by mistake.”

Between each five paces he looked at an official telegram in his hand,

refreshed his memory, and said his say. The dreamy look on my

companion’s face—he had gone far away with Tess—passed with the speed

of a snap-shutter. After the manner of his countrymen, he had risen to

the situation, jerked his bag down from the overhead rail, opened it,

and I heard the click of bottles. “Find out where the man is,” he said

briefly. “I’ve got something here that will fix him—if he can swallow

still.”

Swiftly I fled up the line of carriages in the wake of the guard. There

was clamour in a rear compartment—the voice of one bellowing to be let

out, and the feet of one who kicked. With the tail of my eye I saw the

New York doctor hastening thither, bearing in his hand a blue and

brimming glass from the lavatory compartment. The guard I found

scratching his head unofficially, by the engine, and murmuring: “Well,

I put a bottle of medicine off at Andover—I’m sure I did.”

“Better say it again, any’ow,” said the driver. “Orders is orders. Say

it again.”

Once more the guard paced back, I, anxious to attract his attention,

trotting at his heels.

“In a minute—in a minute, sir,” he said, waving an arm capable of

starting all the traffic on the London and Southwestern Railway at a

wave. “Has any gentleman here got a bottle of medicine? A gentleman has

taken a bottle of poison (laudanum) by mistake.”

“Where’s the man?” I gasped.

“Woking. ’Ere’s my orders.” He showed me the telegram, on which were

the words to be said. “’E must have left ’is bottle in the train, an’

took another by mistake. ’E’s been wirin’ from Woking awful, an’, now I

come to think of, it, I’m nearly sure I put a bottle of medicine off at

Andover.”

“Then the man that took the poison isn’t in the train?”

“Lord, no, sir. No one didn’t take poison _that_ way. ’E took it away

with ’im, in ’is ’ands. ’E’s wirin’ from Wokin’. My orders was to ask

everybody in the train, and I ’ave, an’ we’re four minutes late now.

Are you comin’ on, sir? No? Right be’ind!”

There is nothing, unless, perhaps, the English language, more terrible

than the workings of an English railway-line. An instant before it

seemed as though we were going to spend all eternity at Framlynghame

Admiral, and now I was watching the tail of the train disappear round

the curve of the cutting.

But I was not alone. On the one bench of the down platform sat the

largest navvy I have ever seen in my life, softened and made affable

(for he smiled generously) with liquor. In his huge hands he nursed an

empty tumbler marked “L.S.W.R.”—marked also, internally, with streaks

of blue-grey sediment. Before him, a hand on his shoulder, stood the

doctor, and as I came within ear-shot, this is what I heard him say:

“Just you hold on to your patience for a minute or two longer, and

you’ll be as right as ever you were in your life. _I’ll_ stay with you

till you’re better.”

“Lord! I’m comfortable enough,” said the navvy. “Never felt better in

my life.”

Turning to me, the doctor lowered his voice. “He might have died while

that fool conduct-guard was saying his piece. I’ve fixed him, though.

The stuff’s due in about five minutes, but there’s a heap _to_ him. I

don’t see how we can make him take exercise.”

For the moment I felt as though seven pounds of crushed ice had been

neatly applied in the form of a compress to my lower stomach.

“How—how did you manage it?” I gasped.

“I asked him if he’d have a drink. He was knocking spots out of the

car—strength of his constitution, I suppose. He said he’d go ’most

anywhere for a drink, so I lured onto the platform, and loaded him up.

Cold-blooded people, you Britishers are. That train’s gone, and no one

seemed to care a cent.”

“We’ve missed it,” I said.

He looked at me curiously.

“We’ll get another before sundown, if that’s your only trouble. Say,

porter, when’s the next train down?”

“Seven forty-five,” said the one porter, and passed out through the

wicket-gate into the landscape. It was then three-twenty of a hot and

sleepy afternoon. The station was absolutely deserted. The navvy had

closed his eyes, and now nodded.

“That’s bad,” said the doctor. “The man, I mean, not the train. We must

make him walk somehow—walk up and down.”

Swiftly as might be, I explained the delicacy of the situation, and the

doctor from New York turned a full bronze-green. Then he swore

comprehensively at the entire fabric of our glorious Constitution,

cursing the English language, root, branch, and paradigm, through its

most obscure derivatives. His coat and bag lay on the bench next to the

sleeper. Thither he edged cautiously, and I saw treachery in his eye.

What devil of delay possessed him to slip on his spring overcoat, I

cannot tell. They say a slight noise rouses a sleeper more surely than

a heavy one, and scarcely had the doctor settled himself in his sleeves

than the giant waked and seized that silk-faced collar in a hot right

hand. There was rage in his face—rage and the realisation of new

emotions.

“I’m—I’m not so comfortable as I were,” he said from the deeps of his

interior. “You’ll wait along o’ me, _you_ will.” He breathed heavily

through shut lips.

Now, if there was one thing more than another upon which the doctor had

dwelt in his conversation with me, it was upon the essential

law-abidingness, not to say gentleness, of his much-misrepresented

country. And yet (truly, it may have been no more than a button that

irked him) I saw his hand travel backwards to his right hip, clutch at

something, and come away empty.

“He won’t kill you,” I said. “He’ll probably sue you in court, if I

know my own people. Better give him some money from time to time.”

“If he keeps quiet till the stuff gets in its work,” the doctor

answered, “I’m all right. If he doesn’t... my name is Emory—Julian B.

Emory—193 ’Steenth Street, corner of Madison and—”

“I feel worse than I’ve ever felt,” said the navvy, with suddenness.

“What-did-you-give-me-the-drink-for?”

The matter seemed to be so purely personal that I withdrew to a

strategic position on the overhead bridge, and, abiding in the exact

centre, looked on from afar.

I could see the white road that ran across the shoulder of Salisbury

Plain, unshaded for mile after mile, and a dot in the middle distance,

the back of the one porter returning to Framlynghame Admiral, if such a

place existed, till seven forty-five. The bell of a church invisible

clanked softly. There was a rustle in the horse-chestnuts to the left

of the line, and the sound of sheep cropping close.

The peace of Nirvana lay upon the land, and, brooding in it, my elbow

on the warm iron girder of the footbridge (it is a forty-shilling fine

to cross by any other means), I perceived, as never before, how the

consequences of our acts run eternal through time and through space. If

we impinge never so slightly upon the life of a fellow-mortal, the

touch of our personality, like the ripple of a stone cast into a pond,

widens and widens in unending circles across the aeons, till the

far-off Gods themselves cannot say where action ceases. Also, it was I

who had silently set before the doctor the tumbler of the first-class

lavatory compartment now speeding Plymouthward. Yet I was, in spirit at

least, a million leagues removed from that unhappy man of another

nationality, who had chosen to thrust an inexpert finger into the

workings of an alien life. The machinery was dragging him up and down

the sunlit platform. The two men seemed to be learning polka-mazurkas

together, and the burden of their song, borne by one deep voice, was:

“What did you give me the drink for?”

I saw the flash of silver in the doctor’s hand. The navvy took it and

pocketed it with his left; but never for an instant did his strong

right leave the doctor’s coat-collar, and as the crisis approached,

louder and louder rose his bull-like roar: “What did you give me the

drink for?”

They drifted under the great twelve-inch pinned timbers of the

foot-bridge towards the bench, and, I gathered, the time was very near

at hand. The stuff was getting in its work. Blue, white, and blue

again, rolled over the navvy’s face in waves, till all settled to one

rich clay-bank yellow and—that fell which fell.

I thought of the blowing up of Hell Gate; of the geysers in the

Yellowstone Park; of Jonah and his whale: but the lively original, as I

watched it foreshortened from above, exceeded all these things. He

staggered to the bench, the heavy wooden seat cramped with iron cramps

into the enduring stone, and clung there with his left hand. It

quivered and shook, as a breakwater-pile quivers to the rush of

landward-racing seas; nor was there lacking when he caught his breath,

the “scream of a maddened beach dragged down by the tide.” His right

hand was upon the doctor’s collar, so that the two shook to one

paroxysm, pendulums vibrating together, while I, apart, shook with

them.

It was colossal—immense; but of certain manifestations the English

language stops short. French only, the caryatid French of Victor Hugo,

would have described it; so I mourned while I laughed, hastily

shuffling and discarding inadequate adjectives. The vehemence of the

shock spent itself, and the sufferer half fell, half knelt, across the

bench. He was calling now upon God and his wife, huskily, as the

wounded bull calls upon the unscathed herd to stay. Curiously enough,

he used no bad language: that had gone from him with the rest. The

doctor exhibited gold. It was taken and retained. So, too, was the grip

on the coat-collar.

“If I could stand,” boomed the giant, despairingly, “I’d smash you—you

an’ your drinks. I’m dyin’—dyin’—dyin’!”

“That’s what you think,” said the doctor. “You’ll find it will do you a

lot of good”; and, making a virtue of a somewhat imperative necessity,

he added: “I’ll stay by you. If you’d let go of me a minute I’d give

you something that would settle you.”

“You’ve settled me now, you damned anarchist. Takin’ the bread out of

the mouth of an English workin’man! But I’ll keep ’old of you till I’m

well or dead. I never did you no harm. S’pose _I_ were a little full.

They pumped me out once at Guy’s with a stummick-pump. I could see

_that_, but I can’t see this ’ere, an’ it’s killin’ of me by slow

degrees.”

“You’ll be all right in half-an-hour. What do you suppose I’d want to

kill you for?” said the doctor, who came of a logical breed.

“’Ow do _I_ know? Tell ’em in court. You’ll get seven years for this,

you body-snatcher. That’s what you are—a bloomin’ bodysnatcher. There’s

justice, I tell you, in England; and my Union’ll prosecute, too. We

don’t stand no tricks with people’s insides ’ere. They give a woman ten

years for a sight less than this. An’ you’ll ’ave to pay ’undreds an’

’undreds o’ pounds, besides a pension to the missus. _You_’ll see, you

physickin’ furriner. Where’s your licence to do such? _You_’ll catch

it, I tell you!”

Then I observed what I have frequently observed before, that a man who

is but reasonably afraid of an altercation with an alien has a most

poignant dread of the operations of foreign law. The doctor’s voice was

flute-like in its exquisite politeness, as he answered:

“But I’ve given you a very great deal of money—fif—three pounds, I

think.”

“An’ what’s three pound for poisonin’ the likes o’ _me?_ They told me

at Guy’s I’d fetch twenty—cold—on the slates. Ouh! It’s comin’ again.”

A second time he was cut down by the foot, as it were, and the

straining bench rocked to and fro as I averted my eyes.

It was the very point of perfection in the heart of an English May-day.

The unseen tides of the air had turned, and all nature was setting its

face with the shadows of the horse-chestnuts towards the peace of the

coming night. But there were hours yet, I knew—long, long hours of the

eternal English twilight—to the ending of the day. I was well content

to be alive—to abandon myself to the drift of Time and Fate; to absorb

great peace through my skin, and to love my country with the devotion

that three thousand miles of intervening sea bring to fullest flower.

And what a garden of Eden it was, this fatted, clipped, and washen

land! A man could camp in any open field with more sense of home and

security than the stateliest buildings of foreign cities could afford.

And the joy was that it was all mine alienably—groomed hedgerow,

spotless road, decent greystone cottage, serried spinney, tasselled

copse, apple-bellied hawthorn, and well-grown tree. A light puff of

wind—it scattered flakes of may over the gleaming rails—gave me a faint

whiff as it might have been of fresh cocoanut, and I knew that the

golden gorse was in bloom somewhere out of sight. Linnæus had thanked

God on his bended knees when he first saw a field of it; and, by the

way, the navvy was on his knees, too. But he was by no means praying.

He was purely disgustful.

The doctor was compelled to bend over him, his face towards the back of

the seat, and from what I had seen I supposed the navvy was now dead.

If that were the case it would be time for me to go; but I knew that so

long as a man trusts himself to the current of Circumstance, reaching

out for and rejecting nothing that comes his way, no harm can overtake

him. It is the contriver, the schemer, who is caught by the Law, and

never the philosopher. I knew that when the play was played, Destiny

herself would move me on from the corpse; and I felt very sorry for the

doctor.

In the far distance, presumably upon the road that led to Framlynghame

Admiral, there appeared a vehicle and a horse—the one ancient fly that

almost every village can produce at need. This thing was advancing,

unpaid by me, towards the station; would have to pass along the

deep-cut lane, below the railway-bridge, and come out on the doctor’s

side. I was in the centre of things, so all sides were alike to me.

Here, then, was my machine from the machine. When it arrived; something

would happen, or something else. For the rest, I owned my deeply

interested soul.

The doctor, by the seat, turned so far as his cramped position allowed,

his head over his left shoulder, and laid his right hand upon his lips.

I threw back my hat and elevated my eyebrows in the form of a question.

The doctor shut his eyes and nodded his head slowly twice or thrice,

beckoning me to come. I descended cautiously, and it was as the signs

had told. The navvy was asleep, empty to the lowest notch; yet his hand

clutched still the doctor’s collar, and at the lightest movement (the

doctor was really very cramped) tightened mechanically, as the hand of

a sick woman tightens on that of the watcher. He had dropped, squatting

almost upon his heels, and, falling lower, had dragged the doctor over

to the left.

The doctor thrust his right hand, which was free, into his pocket, drew

forth some keys, and shook his head. The navvy gurgled in his sleep.

Silently I dived into my pocket, took out one sovereign, and held it up

between finger and thumb. Again the doctor shook his head. Money was

not what was lacking to his peace. His bag had fallen from the seat to

the ground. He looked towards it, and opened his mouth-O-shape. The

catch was not a difficult one, and when I had mastered it, the doctor’s

right forefinger was sawing the air. With an immense caution, I

extracted from the bag such a knife as they use for cutting collops off

legs. The doctor frowned, and with his first and second fingers

imitated the action of scissors. Again I searched, and found a most

diabolical pair of cock-nosed shears, capable of vandyking the

interiors of elephants. The doctor then slowly lowered his left

shoulder till the navvy’s right wrist was supported by the bench,

pausing a moment as the spent volcano rumbled anew. Lower and lower the

doctor sank, kneeling now by the navvy’s side, till his head was on a

level with, and just in front of, the great hairy fist, and—there was

no tension on the coat-collar. Then light dawned on me.

Beginning a little to the right of the spinal column, I cut a huge

demilune out of his new spring overcoat, bringing it round as far under

his left side (which was the right side of the navvy) as I dared.

Passing thence swiftly to the back of the seat, and reaching between

the splines, I sawed through the silk-faced front on the left-hand side

of the coat till the two cuts joined.

Cautiously as the box-turtle of his native heath, the doctor drew away

sideways and to the right, with the air of a frustrated burglar coming

out from under a bed, and stood up free, one black diagonal shoulder

projecting through the grey of his ruined overcoat. I returned the

scissors to the bag, snapped the catch, and held all out to him as the

wheels of the fly rang hollow under the railway arch.

It came at a footpace past the wicket-gate of the station, and the

doctor stopped it with a whisper. It was going some five miles across

country to bring home from church some one,—I could not catch the

name,—because his own carriage-horses were lame. Its destination

happened to be the one place in all the world that the doctor was most

burningly anxious to visit, and he promised the driver untold gold to

drive to some ancient flame of his—Helen Blazes, she was called.

“Aren’t you coming, too?” he said, bundling his overcoat into his bag.

Now the fly had been so obviously sent to the doctor, and to no one

else, that I had no concern with it. Our roads, I saw, divided, and

there was, further, a need upon me to laugh.

“I shall stay here,” I said. “It’s a very pretty country.”

“My God!” he murmured, as softly as he shut the door, and I felt that

it was a prayer.

Then he went out of my life, and I shaped my course for the

railway-bridge. It was necessary to pass by the bench once more, but

the wicket was between us. The departure of the fly had waked the

navvy. He crawled on to the seat, and with malignant eyes watched the

driver flog down the road.

“The man inside o’ that,” he called, “’as poisoned me. ’E’s a

body-snatcher. ’E’s comin’ back again when I’m cold. ’Ere’s my

evidence!”

He waved his share of the overcoat, and I went my way, because I was

hungry. Framlynghame Admiral village is a good two miles from the

station, and I waked the holy calm of the evening every step of that

way with shouts and yells, casting myself down in the flank of the good

green hedge when I was too weak to stand. There was an inn,—a blessed

inn with a thatched roof, and peonies in the garden,—and I ordered

myself an upper chamber in which the Foresters held their courts for

the laughter was not all out of me. A bewildered woman brought me ham

and eggs, and I leaned out of the mullioned window, and laughed between

mouthfuls. I sat long above the beer and the perfect smoke that

followed, till the lights changed in the quiet street, and I began to

think of the seven forty-five down, and all that world of the “Arabian

Nights” I had quitted.

Descending, I passed a giant in moleskins who filled the low-ceiled

tap-room. Many empty plates stood before him, and beyond them a fringe

of the Framlynghame Admiralty, to whom he was unfolding a wondrous tale

of anarchy, of body-snatching, of bribery, and the Valley of the Shadow

from the which he was but newly risen. And as he talked he ate, and as

he ate he drank, for there was much room in him; and anon he paid

royally, speaking of Justice and the Law, before whom all Englishmen

are equal, and all foreigners and anarchists vermin and slime.

On my way to the station, he passed me with great strides, his head

high among the low-flying bats, his feet firm on the packed road-metal,

his fists clinched, and his breath coming sharply. There was a

beautiful smell in the air—the smell of white dust, bruised nettles,

and smoke, that brings tears to the throat of a man who sees his

country but seldom—a smell like the echoes of the lost talk of lovers;

the infinitely suggestive odour of an immemorial civilisation. It was a

perfect walk; and, lingering on every step, I came to the station just

as the one porter lighted the last of a truckload of lamps, and set

them back in the lamp-room, while he dealt tickets to four or five of

the population who, not contented with their own peace, thought fit to

travel. It was no ticket that the navvy seemed to need. He was sitting

on a bench, wrathfully grinding a tumbler into fragments with his heel.

I abode in obscurity at the end of the platform, interested as ever,

thank Heaven, in my surroundings. There was a jar of wheels on the

road. The navvy rose as they approached, strode through the wicket, and

laid a hand upon a horse’s bridle that brought the beast up on his

hireling hind legs. It was the providential fly coming back, and for a

moment I wondered whether the doctor had been mad enough to revisit his

practice.

“Get away; you’re drunk,” said the driver.

“I’m not,” said the navvy. “I’ve been waitin’ ’ere hours and hours.

Come out, you beggar inside there!”

“Go on, driver,” said a voice I did not know—a crisp, clear, English

voice.

“All right,” said the navvy. “You wouldn’t ’ear me when I was polite.

_Now_ will you come?”

There was a chasm in the side of the fly, for he had wrenched the door

bodily off its hinges, and was feeling within purposefully. A

well-booted leg rewarded him, and there came out, not with delight,

hopping on one foot, a round and grey-haired Englishman, from whose

armpits dropped hymn-books, but from his mouth an altogether different

service of song.

“Come on, you bloomin’ body-snatcher! You thought I was dead, did you?”

roared the navvy. And the respectable gentleman came accordingly,

inarticulate with rage.

“Ere’s a man murderin’ the Squire,” the driver shouted, and fell from

his box upon the navvy’s neck.

To do them justice, the people of Framlynghame Admiral, so many as were

on the platform, rallied to the call in the best spirit of feudalism.

It was the one porter who beat the navvy on the nose with a

ticket-punch, but it was the three third-class tickets who attached

themselves to his legs and freed the captive.

“Send for a constable! lock him up!” said that man, adjusting his

collar; and unitedly they cast him into the lamp-room, and turned the

key, while the driver mourned over the wrecked fly.

Till then the navvy, whose only desire was justice, had kept his temper

nobly. Then he went Berserk before our amazed eyes. The door of the

lamp-room was generously constructed, and would not give an inch, but

the window he tore from its fastenings and hurled outwards. The one

porter counted the damage in a loud voice, and the others, arming

themselves with agricultural implements from the station garden, kept

up a ceaseless winnowing before the window, themselves backed close to

the wall, and bade the prisoner think of the gaol. He answered little

to the point, so far as they could understand; but seeing that his exit

was impeded, he took a lamp and hurled it through the wrecked sash. It

fell on the metals and went out. With inconceivable velocity, the

others, fifteen in all, followed, looking like rockets in the gloom,

and with the last (he could have had no plan) the Berserk rage left him

as the doctor’s deadly brewage waked up, under the stimulus of violent

exercise and a very full meal, to one last cataclysmal exhibition,

and—we heard the whistle of the seven forty-five down.

They were all acutely interested in as much of the wreck as they could

see, for the station smelt to Heaven of oil, and the engine skittered

over broken glass like a terrier in a cucumber-frame. The guard had to

hear of it, and the Squire had his version of the brutal assault, and

heads were out all along the carriages as I found me a seat.

“What is the row?” said a young man, as I entered. “Man drunk?”

“Well, the symptoms, so far as my observation has gone, more resemble

those of Asiatic cholera than anything else,” I answered, slowly and

judicially, that every word might carry weight in the appointed scheme

of things. Up till then, you will observe, I had taken no part in that

war.

He was an Englishman, but he collected his belongings as swiftly as had

the American, ages before, and leaped upon the platform, crying: “Can I

be of any service? I’m a doctor.”

From the lamp-room I heard a wearied voice wailing “Another bloomin’

doctor!”

And the seven forty-five carried me on, a step nearer to Eternity, by

the road that is worn and seamed and channelled with the passions, and

weaknesses, and warring interests of man who is immortal and master of

his fate.

THE BRUSHWOOD BOY

Girls and boys, come out to play

The moon is shining as bright as day!

Leave your supper and leave your sleep,

And come with your playfellows out in the street!

Up the ladder and down the wall—

A child of three sat up in his crib and screamed at the top of his

voice, his fists clinched and his eyes full of terror. At first no one

heard, for his nursery was in the west wing, and the nurse was talking

to a gardener among the laurels. Then the housekeeper passed that way,

and hurried to soothe him. He was her special pet, and she disapproved

of the nurse.

“What was it, then? What was it, then? There’s nothing to frighten him,

Georgie dear.”

“It was—it was a policeman! He was on the Down—I saw him! He came in.

Jane said he would.”

“Policemen don’t come into houses, dearie. Turn over, and take my

hand.”

“I saw him—on the Down. He came here. Where is your hand, Harper?”

The housekeeper waited till the sobs changed to the regular breathing

of sleep before she stole out.

“Jane, what nonsense have you been telling Master Georgie about

policemen?”

“I haven’t told him anything.”

“You have. He’s been dreaming about them.”

“We met Tisdall on Dowhead when we were in the donkey-cart this

morning. P’r’aps that’s what put it into his head.”

“Oh! Now you aren’t going to frighten the child into fits with your

silly tales, and the master know nothing about it. If ever I catch you

again,” etc.

A child of six was telling himself stories as he lay in bed. It was a

new power, and he kept it a secret. A month before it had occurred to

him to carry on a nursery tale left unfinished by his mother, and he

was delighted to find the tale as it came out of his own head just as

surprising as though he were listening to it “all new from the

beginning.” There was a prince in that tale, and he killed dragons, but

only for one night. Ever afterwards Georgie dubbed himself prince,

pasha, giant-killer, and all the rest (you see, he could not tell any

one, for fear of being laughed at), and his tales faded gradually into

dreamland, where adventures were so many that he could not recall the

half of them. They all began in the same way, or, as Georgie explained

to the shadows of the night-light, there was “the same starting-off

place”—a pile of brushwood stacked somewhere near a beach; and round

this pile Georgie found himself running races with little boys and

girls. These ended, ships ran high up the dry land and opened into

cardboard boxes; or gilt-and-green iron railings that surrounded

beautiful gardens turned all soft and could be walked through and

overthrown so long as he remembered it was only a dream. He could never

hold that knowledge more than a few seconds ere things became real, and

instead of pushing down houses full of grown-up people (a just

revenge), he sat miserably upon gigantic door-steps trying to sing the

multiplication-table up to four times six.

The princess of his tales was a person of wonderful beauty (she came

from the old illustrated edition of Grimm, now out of print), and as

she always applauded Georgie’s valour among the dragons and buffaloes,

he gave her the two finest names he had ever heard in his life—Annie

and Louise, pronounced “Annie_an_louise.” When the dreams swamped the

stories, she would change into one of the little girls round the

brushwood-pile, still keeping her title and crown. She saw Georgie

drown once in a dream-sea by the beach (it was the day after he had

been taken to bathe in a real sea by his nurse); and he said as he

sank: “Poor Annie_an_louise! She’ll be sorry for me now!” But

“Annie_an_louise,” walking slowly on the beach, called, “‘Ha! ha!’ said

the duck, laughing,” which to a waking mind might not seem to bear on

the situation. It consoled Georgie at once, and must have been some

kind of spell, for it raised the bottom of the deep, and he waded out

with a twelve-inch flower-pot on each foot. As he was strictly

forbidden to meddle with flower-pots in real life, he felt triumphantly

wicked.

The movements of the grown-ups, whom Georgie tolerated, but did not

pretend to understand, removed his world, when he was seven years old,

to a place called “Oxford-on-a-visit. “Here were huge buildings

surrounded by vast prairies, with streets of infinite length, and,

above all, something called the “buttery,” which Georgie was dying to

see, because he knew it must be greasy, and therefore delightful. He

perceived how correct were his judgments when his nurse led him through

a stone arch into the presence of an enormously fat man, who asked him

if he would like some, bread and cheese. Georgie was used to eat all

round the clock, so he took what “buttery” gave him, and would have

taken some brown liquid called “auditale” but that his nurse led him

away to an afternoon performance of a thing called “Pepper’s Ghost.”

This was intensely thrilling. People’s heads came off and flew all over

the stage, and skeletons danced bone by bone, while Mr. Pepper himself,

beyond question a man of the worst, waved his arms and flapped a long

gown, and in a deep bass voice (Georgie had never heard a man sing

before) told of his sorrows unspeakable. Some grown-up or other tried

to explain that the illusion was made with mirrors, and that there was

no need to be frightened. Georgie did not know what illusions were, but

he did know that a mirror was the looking-glass with the ivory handle

on his mother’s dressing-table. Therefore the “grown-up” was “just

saying things” after the distressing custom of “grown-ups,” and Georgie

cast about for amusement between scenes. Next to him sat a little girl

dressed all in black, her hair combed off her forehead exactly like the

girl in the book called “Alice in Wonderland,” which had been given him

on his last birthday. The little girl looked at Georgie, and Georgie

looked at her. There seemed to be no need of any further introduction.

“I’ve got a cut on my thumb,” said he. It was the first work of his

first real knife, a savage triangular hack, and he esteemed it a most

valuable possession.

“I’m tho thorry!” she lisped. “Let me look pleathe.”

“There’s a di-ack-lum plaster on, but it’s all raw under,” Georgie

answered, complying.

“Dothent it hurt?”—her grey eyes were full of pity and interest.

“Awf’ly. Perhaps it will give me lockjaw.”

“It lookth very horrid. I’m _tho_ thorry!” She put a forefinger to his

hand, and held her head sidewise for a better view.

Here the nurse turned, and shook him severely. “You mustn’t talk to

strange little girls, Master Georgie.”

“She isn’t strange. She’s very nice. I like her, an’ I’ve showed her my

new cut.”

“The idea! You change places with me.”

She moved him over, and shut out the little girl from his view, while

the grown-up behind renewed the futile explanations.

“I am _not_ afraid, truly,” said the boy, wriggling in despair; “but

why don’t you go to sleep in the afternoons, same as Provost of Oriel?”

Georgie had been introduced to a grown-up of that name, who slept in

his presence without apology. Georgie understood that he was the most

important grown-up in Oxford; hence he strove to gild his rebuke with

flatteries. This grown-up did not seem to like it, but he collapsed,

and Georgie lay back in his seat, silent and enraptured. Mr. Pepper was

singing again, and the deep, ringing voice, the red fire, and the

misty, waving gown all seemed to be mixed up with the little girl who

had been so kind about his cut. When the performance was ended she

nodded to Georgie, and Georgie nodded in return. He spoke no more than

was necessary till bedtime, but meditated on new colors and sounds and

lights and music and things as far as he understood them; the

deep-mouthed agony of Mr. Pepper mingling with the little girl’s lisp.

That night he made a new tale, from which he shamelessly removed the

Rapunzel-Rapunzel-let-down-your-hair princess, gold crown, Grimm

edition, and all, and put a new Annie_an_louise in her place. So it was

perfectly right and natural that when he came to the brushwood-pile he

should find her waiting for him, her hair combed off her forehead more

like Alice in Wonderland than ever, and the races and adventures began.

Ten years at an English public school do not encourage dreaming.

Georgie won his growth and chest measurement, and a few other things

which did not appear in the bills, under a system of cricket,

foot-ball, and paper-chases, from four to five days a week, which

provided for three lawful cuts of a ground-ash if any boy absented

himself from these entertainments. He became a rumple-collared,

dusty-hatted fag of the Lower Third, and a light half-back at Little

Side foot-ball; was pushed and prodded through the slack backwaters of

the Lower Fourth, where the raffle of a school generally accumulates;

won his “second-fifteen” cap at foot-ball, enjoyed the dignity of a

study with two companions in it, and began to look forward to office as

a sub-prefect. At last he blossomed into full glory as head of the

school, ex-officio captain of the games; head of his house, where he

and his lieutenants preserved discipline and decency among seventy boys

from twelve to seventeen; general arbiter in the quarrels that spring

up among the touchy Sixth—and intimate friend and ally of the Head

himself. When he stepped forth in the black jersey, white knickers, and

black stockings of the First Fifteen, the new match-ball under his arm,

and his old and frayed cap at the back of his head, the small fry of

the lower forms stood apart and worshipped, and the “new caps” of the

team talked to him ostentatiously, that the world might see. And so, in

summer, when he came back to the pavilion after a slow but eminently

safe game, it mattered not whether he had made nothing or, as once

happened, a hundred and three, the school shouted just the same, and

women-folk who had come to look at the match looked at Cottar—Cottar,

_major;_ “that’s Cottar!” Above all, he was responsible for that thing

called the tone of the school, and few realise with what passionate

devotion a certain type of boy throws himself into this work. Home was

a faraway country, full of ponies and fishing and shooting, and

men-visitors who interfered with one’s plans; but school was the real

world, where things of vital importance happened, and crises arose that

must be dealt with promptly and quietly. Not for nothing was it

written, “Let the Consuls look to it that the Republic takes no harm,”

and Georgie was glad to be back in authority when the holidays ended.

Behind him, but not too near, was the wise and temperate Head, now

suggesting the wisdom of the serpent, now counselling the mildness of

the dove; leading him on to see, more by half-hints than by any direct

word, how boys and men are all of a piece, and how he who can handle

the one will assuredly in time control the other.

For the rest, the school was not encouraged to dwell on its emotions,

but rather to keep in hard condition, to avoid false quantities, and to

enter the army direct, without the help of the expensive London

crammer, under whose roof young blood learns too much. Cottar, _major_,

went the way of hundreds before him. The Head gave him six months’

final polish, taught him what kind of answers best please a certain

kind of examiners, and handed him over to the properly constituted

authorities, who passed him into Sandhurst. Here he had sense enough to

see that he was in the Lower Third once more, and behaved with respect

toward his seniors, till they in turn respected him, and he was

promoted to the rank of corporal, and sat in authority over mixed

peoples with all the vices of men and boys combined. His reward was

another string of athletic cups, a good-conduct sword, and, at last,

Her Majesty’s commission as a subaltern in a first-class line regiment.

He did not know that he bore with him from school and college a

character worth much fine gold, but was pleased to find his mess so

kindly. He had plenty of money of his own; his training had set the

public school mask upon his face, and had taught him how many were the

“things no fellow can do.” By virtue of the same training he kept his

pores open and his mouth shut.

The regular working of the Empire shifted his world to India, where he

tasted utter loneliness in subaltern’s quarters,—one room and one

bullock-trunk,—and, with his mess, learned the new life from the

beginning. But there were horses in the land-ponies at reasonable

price; there was polo for such as could afford it; there were the

disreputable remnants of a pack of hounds; and Cottar worried his way

along without too much despair. It dawned on him that a regiment in

India was nearer the chance of active service than he had conceived,

and that a man might as well study his profession. A major of the new

school backed this idea with enthusiasm, and he and Cottar accumulated

a library of military works, and read and argued and disputed far into

the nights. But the adjutant said the old thing: “Get to know your men,

young un, and they’ll follow you anywhere. That’s all you want—know

your men.” Cottar thought he knew them fairly well at cricket and the

regimental sports, but he never realised the true inwardness of them

till he was sent off with a detachment of twenty to sit down in a mud

fort near a rushing river which was spanned by a bridge of boats. When

the floods came they went forth and hunted strayed pontoons along the

banks. Otherwise there was nothing to do, and the men got drunk,

gambled, and quarrelled. They were a sickly crew, for a junior

subaltern is by custom saddled with the worst men. Cottar endured their

rioting as long as he could, and then sent down-country for a dozen

pairs of boxing-gloves.

“I wouldn’t blame you for fightin’,” said he, “if you only knew how to

use your hands; but you don’t. Take these things, and I’ll show you.”

The men appreciated his efforts. Now, instead of blaspheming and

swearing at a comrade, and threatening to shoot him, they could take

him apart, and soothe themselves to exhaustion. As one explained whom

Cottar found with a shut eye and a diamond-shaped mouth spitting blood

through an embrasure: “We tried it with the gloves, sir, for twenty

minutes, and _that_ done us no good, sir. Then we took off the gloves

and tried it that way for another twenty minutes, same as you showed

us, sir, an’ that done us a world o’ good. ’T wasn’t fightin’, sir;

there was a bet on.”

Cottar dared not laugh, but he invited his men to other sports, such as

racing across country in shirt and trousers after a trail of torn

paper, and to single-stick in the evenings, till the native population,

who had a lust for sport in every form, wished to know whether the

white men understood wrestling. They sent in an ambassador, who took

the soldiers by the neck and threw them about the dust; and the entire

command were all for this new game. They spent money on learning new

falls and holds, which was better than buying other doubtful

commodities; and the peasantry grinned five deep round the tournaments.

That detachment, who had gone up in bullock-carts, returned to

headquarters at an average rate of thirty miles a day, fair

heel-and-toe; no sick, no prisoners, and no court martials pending.

They scattered themselves among their friends, singing the praises of

their lieutenant and looking for causes of offense.

“How did you do it, young un?” the adjutant asked.

“Oh, I sweated the beef off ’em, and then I sweated some muscle on to

’em. It was rather a lark.”

“If that’s your way of lookin’ at it, we can give you all the larks you

want. Young Davies isn’t feelin’ quite fit, and he’s next for

detachment duty. Care to go for him?”

“Sure he wouldn’t mind? I don’t want to shove myself forward, you

know.”

“You needn’t bother on Davies’s account. We’ll give you the sweepin’s

of the corps, and you can see what you can make of ’em.”

“All right,” said Cottar. “It’s better fun than loafin’ about

cantonments.”

“Rummy thing,” said the adjutant, after Cottar had returned to his

wilderness with twenty other devils worse than the first. “If Cottar

only knew it, half the women in the station would give their

eyes—confound ’em!—to have the young un in tow.”

“That accounts for Mrs. Elery sayin’ I was workin’ my nice new boy too

hard,” said a wing commander.

“Oh, yes; and ‘Why doesn’t he come to the bandstand in the evenings?’

and ‘Can’t I get him to make up a four at tennis with the Hammon

girls?’” the adjutant snorted. “Look at young Davies makin’ an ass of

himself over mutton-dressed-as-lamb old enough to be his mother!”

“No one can accuse young Cottar of runnin’ after women, white _or_

black,” the major replied thoughtfully. “But, then, that’s the kind

that generally goes the worst mucker in the end.”

“Not Cottar. I’ve only run across one of his muster before—a fellow

called Ingles, in South Africa. He was just the same hard trained,

athletic-sports build of animal. Always kept himself in the pink of

condition. Didn’t do him much good, though. Shot at Wesselstroom the

week before Majuba. Wonder how the young un will lick his detachment

into shape.”

Cottar turned up six weeks later, on foot, with his pupils. He never

told his experiences, but the men spoke enthusiastically, and fragments

of it leaked back to the colonel through sergeants, batmen, and the

like.

There was great jealousy between the first and second detachments, but

the men united in adoring Cottar, and their way of showing it was by

sparing him all the trouble that men know how to make for an unloved

officer. He sought popularity as little as he had sought it at school,

and therefore it came to him. He favoured no one—not even when the

company sloven pulled the company cricket-match out of the fire with an

unexpected forty-three at the last moment. There was very little

getting round him, for he seemed to know by instinct exactly when and

where to head off a malingerer; but he did not forget that the

difference between a dazed and sulky junior of the upper school and a

bewildered, browbeaten lump of a private fresh from the depot was very

small indeed. The sergeants, seeing these things, told him secrets

generally hid from young officers. His words were quoted as barrack

authority on bets in canteen and at tea; and the veriest shrew of the

corps, bursting with charges against other women who had used the

cooking-ranges out of turn, forbore to speak when Cottar, as the

regulations ordained, asked of a morning if there were “any

complaints.”

“I’m full o’ complaints,” said Mrs. Corporal Morrison, “an’ I’d kill

O’Halloran’s fat sow of a wife any day, but ye know how it is. ’E puts

’is head just inside the door, an’ looks down ’is blessed nose so

bashful, an’ ’e whispers, ‘Any complaints’ Ye can’t complain after

that. _I_ want to kiss him. Some day I think I will. Heigh-ho! she’ll

be a lucky woman that gets Young Innocence. See ’im now, girls. Do ye

blame me?”

Cottar was cantering across to polo, and he looked a very satisfactory

figure of a man as he gave easily to the first excited bucks of his

pony, and slipped over a low mud wall to the practice-ground. There

were more than Mrs. Corporal Morrison who felt as she did. But Cottar

was busy for eleven hours of the day. He did not care to have his

tennis spoiled by petticoats in the court; and after one long afternoon

at a garden-party, he explained to his major that this sort of thing

was “futile piffle,” and the major laughed. Theirs was not a married

mess, except for the colonel’s wife, and Cottar stood in awe of the

good lady. She said “my regiment,” and the world knows what that means.

None the less when they wanted her to give away the prizes after a

shooting-match, and she refused because one of the prize-winners was

married to a girl who had made a jest of her behind her broad back, the

mess ordered Cottar to “tackle her,” in his best calling-kit. This he

did, simply and laboriously, and she gave way altogether.

“She only wanted to know the facts of the case,” he explained. “I just

told her, and she saw at once.”

“Ye-es,” said the adjutant. “I expect that’s what she did. Comin’ to

the Fusiliers’ dance to-night, Galahad?”

“No, thanks. I’ve got a fight on with the major.” The virtuous

apprentice sat up till midnight in the major’s quarters, with a

stop-watch and a pair of compasses, shifting little painted lead-blocks

about a four-inch map.

Then he turned in and slept the sleep of innocence, which is full of

healthy dreams. One peculiarity of his dreams he noticed at the

beginning of his second hot weather. Two or three times a month they

duplicated or ran in series. He would find himself sliding into

dreamland by the same road—a road that ran along a beach near a pile of

brushwood. To the right lay the sea, sometimes at full tide, sometimes

withdrawn to the very horizon; but he knew it for the same sea. By that

road he would travel over a swell of rising ground covered with short,

withered grass, into valleys of wonder and unreason. Beyond the ridge,

which was crowned with some sort of street-lamp, anything was possible;

but up to the lamp it seemed to him that he knew the road as well as he

knew the parade-ground. He learned to look forward to the place; for,

once there, he was sure of a good night’s rest, and Indian hot weather

can be rather trying. First, shadowy under closing eyelids, would come

the outline of the brushwood-pile; next the white sand of the

beach-road, almost overhanging the black, changeful sea; then the turn

inland and uphill to the single light. When he was unrestful for any

reason, he would tell himself how he was sure to get there—sure to get

there—if he shut his eyes and surrendered to the drift of things. But

one night after a foolishly hard hour’s polo (the thermometer was 94°

in his quarters at ten o’clock), sleep stood away from him altogether,

though he did his best to find the well-known road, the point where

true sleep began. At last he saw the brushwood-pile, and hurried along

to the ridge, for behind him he felt was the wide-awake, sultry world.

He reached the lamp in safety, tingling with drowsiness, when a

policeman—a common country policeman—sprang up before him and touched

him on the shoulder ere he could dive into the dim valley below. He was

filled with terror,—the hopeless terror of dreams,—for the policeman

said, in the awful, distinct voice of dream-people, “I am Policeman Day

coming back from the City of Sleep. You come with me.” Georgie knew it

was true—that just beyond him in the valley lay the lights of the City

of Sleep, where he would have been sheltered, and that this

Policeman-Thing had full power and authority to head him back to

miserable wakefulness. He found himself looking at the moonlight on the

wall, dripping with fright; and he never overcame that horror, though

he met the Policeman several times that hot weather, and his coming was

the forerunner of a bad night.

But other dreams—perfectly absurd ones—filled him with an

incommunicable delight. All those that he remembered began by the

brushwood-pile. For instance, he found a small clockwork steamer (he

had noticed it many nights before) lying by the sea-road, and stepped

into it, whereupon it moved with surpassing swiftness over an

absolutely level sea. This was glorious, for he felt he was exploring

great matters; and it stopped by a lily carved in stone, which, most

naturally, floated on the water. Seeing the lily was labelled

“Hong-Kong,” Georgie said: “Of course. This is precisely what I

expected Hong-Kong would be like. How magnificent!” Thousands of miles

farther on it halted at yet another stone lily, labelled “Java”; and

this, again, delighted him hugely, because he knew that now he was at

the world’s end. But the little boat ran on and on till it lay in a

deep fresh-water lock, the sides of which were carven marble, green

with moss. Lilypads lay on the water, and reeds arched above. Some one

moved among the reeds—some one whom Georgie knew he had travelled to

this world’s end to reach. Therefore everything was entirely well with

him. He was unspeakably happy, and vaulted over the ship’s side to find

this person. When his feet touched that still water, it changed, with

the rustle of unrolling maps, to nothing less than a sixth quarter of

the globe, beyond the most remote imagining of man—a place where

islands were coloured yellow and blue, their lettering strung across

their faces. They gave on unknown seas, and Georgie’s urgent desire was

to return swiftly across this floating atlas to known bearings. He told

himself repeatedly that it was no good to hurry; but still he hurried

desperately, and the islands slipped and slid under his feet; the

straits yawned and widened, till he found himself utterly lost in the

world’s fourth dimension, with no hope of return. Yet only a little

distance away he could see the old world with the rivers and

mountain-chains marked according to the Sandhurst rules of mapmaking.

Then that person for whom he had come to the Lily Lock (that was its

name) ran up across unexplored territories, and showed him away. They

fled hand in hand till they reached a road that spanned ravines, and

ran along the edge of precipices, and was tunnelled through mountains.

“This goes to our brushwood-pile,” said his companion; and all his

trouble was at an end. He took a pony, because he understood that this

was the Thirty-Mile-Ride and he must ride swiftly, and raced through

the clattering tunnels and round the curves, always downhill, till he

heard the sea to his left, and saw it raging under a full moon, against

sandy cliffs. It was heavy going, but he recognised the nature of the

country, the dark-purple downs inland, and the bents that whistled in

the wind. The road was eaten away in places, and the sea lashed at

him—black, foamless tongues of smooth and glossy rollers; but he was

sure that there was less danger from the sea than from “Them,” whoever

“They” were, inland to his right. He knew, too, that he would be safe

if he could reach the down with the lamp on it. This came as he

expected: he saw the one light a mile ahead along the beach,

dismounted, turned to the right, walked quietly over to the

brushwood-pile, found the little steamer had returned to the beach

whence he had unmoored it, and—must have fallen asleep, for he could

remember no more. “I’m gettin’ the hang of the geography of that

place,” he said to himself, as he shaved next morning. “I must have

made some sort of circle. Let’s see. The Thirty-Mile-Ride (now how the

deuce did I know it was called the Thirty-Mile-Ride?) joins the

sea-road beyond the first down where the lamp is. And that

atlas-country lies at the back of the Thirty-Mile-Ride, somewhere out

to the right beyond the hills and tunnels. Rummy things, dreams.

’Wonder what makes mine fit into each other so?”

He continued on his solid way through the recurring duties of the

seasons. The regiment was shifted to another station, and he enjoyed

road-marching for two months, with a good deal of mixed shooting thrown

in, and when they reached their new cantonments he became a member of

the local Tent Club, and chased the mighty boar on horseback with a

short stabbing-spear. There he met the _mahseer_ of the Poonch, beside

whom the tarpon is as a herring, and he who lands him can say that he

is a fisherman. This was as new and as fascinating as the big-game

shooting that fell to his portion, when he had himself photographed for

the mother’s benefit, sitting on the flank of his first tiger.

Then the adjutant was promoted, and Cottar rejoiced with him, for he

admired the adjutant greatly, and marvelled who might be big enough to

fill his place; so that he nearly collapsed when the mantle fell on his

own shoulders, and the colonel said a few sweet things that made him

blush. An adjutant’s position does not differ materially from that of

head of the school, and Cottar stood in the same relation to the

colonel as he had to his old Head in England. Only, tempers wear out in

hot weather, and things were said and done that tried him sorely, and

he made glorious blunders, from which the regimental sergeant-major

pulled him with a loyal soul and a shut mouth. Slovens and incompetents

raged against him; the weak-minded strove to lure him from the ways of

justice; the small-minded—yea, men whom Cottar believed would never do

“things no fellow can do”—imputed motives mean and circuitous to

actions that he had not spent a thought upon; and he tasted injustice,

and it made him very sick. But his consolation came on parade, when he

looked down the full companies, and reflected how few were in hospital

or cells, and wondered when the time would come to try the machine of

his love and labour.

But they needed and expected the whole of a man’s working-day, and

maybe three or four hours of the night. Curiously enough, he never

dreamed about the regiment as he was popularly supposed to. The mind,

set free from the day’s doings, generally ceased working altogether,

or, if it moved at all, carried him along the old beach-road to the

downs, the lamp-post, and, once in a while, to terrible Policeman Day.

The second time that he returned to the world’s lost continent (this

was a dream that repeated itself again and again, with variations, on

the same ground) he knew that if he only sat still the person from the

Lily Lock would help him, and he was not disappointed. Sometimes he was

trapped in mines of vast depth hollowed out of the heart of the world,

where men in torment chanted echoing songs; and he heard this person

coming along through the galleries, and everything was made safe and

delightful. They met again in low-roofed Indian railway-carriages that

halted in a garden surrounded by gilt-and-green railings, where a mob

of stony white people, all unfriendly, sat at breakfast-tables covered

with roses, and separated Georgie from his companion, while underground

voices sang deep-voiced songs. Georgie was filled with enormous despair

till they two met again. They foregathered in the middle of an endless,

hot tropic night, and crept into a huge house that stood, he knew,

somewhere north of the railway-station where the people ate among the

roses. It was surrounded with gardens, all moist and dripping; and in

one room, reached through leagues of whitewashed passages, a Sick Thing

lay in bed. Now the least noise, Georgie knew, would unchain some

waiting horror, and his companion knew it, too; but when their eyes met

across the bed, Georgie was disgusted to see that she was a child—a

little girl in strapped shoes, with her black hair combed back from her

forehead.

“What disgraceful folly!” he thought. “Now she could do nothing

whatever if Its head came off.”

Then the Thing coughed, and the ceiling shattered down in plaster on

the mosquito-netting, and “They” rushed in from all quarters. He

dragged the child through the stifling garden, voices chanting behind

them, and they rode the Thirty-Mile-Ride under whip and spur along the

sandy beach by the booming sea, till they came to the downs, the

lamp-post, and the brushwood-pile, which was safety. Very often dreams

would break up about them in this fashion, and they would be separated,

to endure awful adventures alone. But the most amusing times were when

he and she had a clear understanding that it was all make-believe, and

walked through mile-wide roaring rivers without even taking off their

shoes, or set light to populous cities to see how they would burn, and

were rude as any children to the vague shadows met in their rambles.

Later in the night they were sure to suffer for this, either at the

hands of the Railway People eating among the roses, or in the tropic

uplands at the far end of the Thirty-Mile-Ride. Together, this did no

much affright them; but often Georgie would hear her shrill cry of

“Boy! Boy!” half a world away, and hurry to her rescue before “They”

maltreated her.

He and she explored the dark-purple downs as far inland from the

brushwood-pile as they dared, but that was always a dangerous matter.

The interior was filled with “Them,” and “They” went about singing in

the hollows, and Georgie and she felt safer on or near the seaboard. So

thoroughly had he come to know the place of his dreams that even waking

he accepted it as a real country, and made a rough sketch of it. He

kept his own counsel, of course; but the permanence of the land puzzled

him. His ordinary dreams were as formless and as fleeting as any

healthy dreams could be, but once at the brushwood-pile he moved within

known limits and could see where he was going. There were months at a

time when nothing notable crossed his sleep. Then the dreams would come

in a batch of five or six, and next morning the map that he kept in his

writing case would be written up to date, for Georgie was a most

methodical person. There was, indeed, a danger—his seniors said so—of

his developing into a regular “Auntie Fuss” of an adjutant, and when an

officer once takes to old-maidism there is more hope for the virgin of

seventy than for him.

But fate sent the change that was needed, in the shape of a little

winter campaign on the Border, which, after the manner of little

campaigns, flashed out into a very ugly war; and Cottar’s regiment was

chosen among the first.

“Now,” said a major, “this’ll shake the cobwebs out of us

all—especially you, Galahad; and we can see what your

hen-with-one-chick attitude has done for the regiment.”

Cottar nearly wept with joy as the campaign went forward. They were

fit—physically fit beyond the other troops; they were good children in

camp, wet or dry, fed or unfed; and they followed their officers with

the quick suppleness and trained obedience of a first-class foot-ball

fifteen. They were cut off from their apology for a base, and

cheerfully cut their way back to it again; they crowned and cleaned out

hills full of the enemy with the precision of well-broken dogs of

chase; and in the hour of retreat, when, hampered with the sick and

wounded of the column, they were persecuted down eleven miles of

waterless valley, they, serving as rearguard, covered themselves with a

great glory in the eyes of fellow-professionals. Any regiment can

advance, but few know how to retreat with a sting in the tail. Then

they turned to made roads, most often under fire, and dismantled some

inconvenient mud redoubts. They were the last corps to be withdrawn

when the rubbish of the campaign was all swept up; and after a month in

standing camp, which tries morals severely, they departed to their own

place in column of fours, singing:

“’E’s goin’ to do without ’em—

Don’t want ’em any more;

’E’s goin’ to do without ’em,

As ’e’s often done before.

’E’s goin’ to be a martyr

On a ’ighly novel plan,

An’ all the boys and girls will say,

’Ow! what a nice young man-man-man!

Ow! what a nice young man!’”

There came out a _Gazette_ in which Cottar found that he had been

behaving with “courage and coolness and discretion” in all his

capacities; that he had assisted the wounded under fire, and blown in a

gate, also under fire. Net result, his captaincy and a brevet majority,

coupled with the Distinguished Service Order.

As to his wounded, he explained that they were both heavy men, whom he

could lift more easily than any one else. “Otherwise, of course, I

should have sent out one of my men; and, of course, about that gate

business, we were safe the minute we were well under the walls.” But

this did not prevent his men from cheering him furiously whenever they

saw him, or the mess from giving him a dinner on the eve of his

departure to England. (A year’s leave was among the things he had

“snaffled out of the campaign,” to use his own words.) The doctor, who

had taken quite as much as was good for him, quoted poetry about “a

good blade carving the casques of men,” and so on, and everybody told

Cottar that he was an excellent person; but when he rose to make his

maiden speech they shouted so that he was understood to say, “It isn’t

any use tryin’ to speak with you chaps rottin’ me like this. Let’s have

some pool.”

It is not unpleasant to spend eight-and-twenty days in an easy-going

steamer on warm waters, in the company of a woman who lets you see that

you are head and shoulders superior to the rest of the world, even

though that woman may be, and most often is, ten counted years your

senior. P.O. boats are not lighted with the disgustful particularity of

Atlantic liners. There is more phosphorescence at the bows, and greater

silence and darkness by the hand-steering gear aft.

Awful things might have happened to Georgie but for the little fact

that he had never studied the first principles of the game he was

expected to play. So when Mrs. Zuleika, at Aden, told him how motherly

an interest she felt in his welfare, medals, brevet, and all, Georgie

took her at the foot of the letter, and promptly talked of his own

mother, three hundred miles nearer each day, of his home, and so forth,

all the way up the Red Sea. It was much easier than he had supposed to

converse with a woman for an hour at a time. Then Mrs. Zuleika, turning

from parental affection, spoke of love in the abstract as a thing not

unworthy of study, and in discreet twilights after dinner demanded

confidences. Georgie would have been delighted to supply them, but he

had none, and did not know it was his duty to manufacture them. Mrs.

Zuleika expressed surprise and unbelief, and asked—those questions

which deep asks of deep. She learned all that was necessary to

conviction, and, being very much a woman, resumed (Georgie never knew

that she had abandoned) the motherly attitude.

“Do you know,” she said, somewhere in the Mediterranean, “I think

you’re the very dearest boy I have ever met in my life, and I’d like

you to remember me a little. You will when you are older, but I want

you to remember me now. You’ll make some girl very happy.”

“Oh! Hope so,” said Georgie, gravely; “but there’s heaps of time for

marryin’ an’ all that sort of thing, ain’t there?”

“That depends. Here are your bean-bags for the Ladies’ Competition. I

think I’m growing too old to care for these _tamashas_.”

They were getting up sports, and Georgie was on the committee. He never

noticed how perfectly the bags were sewn, but another woman did, and

smiled—once. He liked Mrs. Zuleika greatly. She was a bit old, of

course, but uncommonly nice. There was no nonsense about her.

A few nights after they passed Gibraltar his dream returned to him. She

who waited by the brushwood-pile was no longer a little girl, but a

woman with black hair that grew into a “widow’s peak,” combed back from

her forehead. He knew her for the child in black, the companion of the

last six years, and, as it had been in the time of the meetings on the

Lost Continent, he was filled with delight unspeakable. “They,” for

some dreamland reason, were friendly or had gone away that night, and

the two flitted together over all their country, from the

brushwood-pile up the Thirty-Mile-Ride, till they saw the House of the

Sick Thing, a pin-point in the distance to the left; stamped through

the Railway Waiting-room where the roses lay on the spread

breakfast-tables; and returned, by the ford and the city they had once

burned for sport, to the great swells of the downs under the lamp-post.

Wherever they moved a strong singing followed them underground, but

this night there was no panic. All the land was empty except for

themselves, and at the last (they were sitting by the lamp-post hand in

hand) she turned and kissed him. He woke with a start, staring at the

waving curtain of the cabin door; he could almost have sworn that the

kiss was real.

Next morning the ship was rolling in a Biscay sea, and people were not

happy; but as Georgie came to breakfast, shaven, tubbed, and smelling

of soap, several turned to look at him because of the light in his eyes

and the splendour of his countenance.

“Well, you look beastly fit,” snapped a neighbour. “Any one left you a

legacy in the middle of the Bay?”

Georgie reached for the curry, with a seraphic grin. “I suppose it’s

the gettin’ so near home, and all that. I do feel rather festive this

mornin. ’Rolls a bit, doesn’t she?”

Mrs. Zuleika stayed in her cabin till the end of the voyage, when she

left without bidding him farewell, and wept passionately on the

dock-head for pure joy of meeting her children, who, she had often

said, were so like their father.

Georgie headed for his own country, wild with delight of his first long

furlough after the lean seasons. Nothing was changed in that orderly

life, from the coachman who met him at the station to the white peacock

that stormed at the carriage from the stone wall above the shaven

lawns. The house took toll of him with due regard to precedence—first

the mother; then the father; then the housekeeper, who wept and praised

God; then the butler, and so on down to the under-keeper, who had been

dogboy in Georgie’s youth, and called him “Master Georgie,” and was

reproved by the groom who had taught Georgie to ride.

“Not a thing changed,” he sighed contentedly, when the three of them

sat down to dinner in the late sunlight, while the rabbits crept out

upon the lawn below the cedars, and the big trout in the ponds by the

home paddock rose for their evening meal.

“_Our_ changes are all over, dear,” cooed the mother; “and now I am

getting used to your size and your tan (you’re very brown, Georgie), I

see you haven’t changed in the least. You’re exactly like the pater.”

The father beamed on this man after his own heart,—“youngest major in

the army, and should have had the V.C., sir,”—and the butler listened

with his professional mask off when Master Georgie spoke of war as it

is waged to-day, and his father cross-questioned.

They went out on the terrace to smoke among the roses, and the shadow

of the old house lay long across the wonderful English foliage, which

is the only living green in the world.

“Perfect! By Jove, it’s perfect!” Georgie was looking at the

round-bosomed woods beyond the home paddock, where the white pheasant

boxes were ranged; and the golden air was full of a hundred sacred

scents and sounds. Georgie felt his father’s arm tighten in his.

“It’s not half bad—but _hodie mihi, cras tibi_, isn’t it? I suppose

you’ll be turning up some fine day with a girl under your arm, if you

haven’t one now, eh?”

“You can make your mind easy, sir. I haven’t one.”

“Not in all these years?” said the mother.

“I hadn’t time, mummy. They keep a man pretty busy, these days, in the

service, and most of our mess are unmarried, too.”

“But you must have met hundreds in society—at balls, and so on?”

“I’m like the Tenth, mummy: I don’t dance.”

“Don’t dance! What have you been doing with yourself, then—backing

other men’s bills?” said the father.

“Oh, yes; I’ve done a little of that too; but you see, as things are

now, a man has all his work cut out for him to keep abreast of his

profession, and my days were always too full to let me lark about half

the night.”

“Hmm!”—suspiciously.

“It’s never too late to learn. We ought to give some kind of

housewarming for the people about, now you’ve come back. Unless you

want to go straight up to town, dear?”

“No. I don’t want anything better than this. Let’s sit still and enjoy

ourselves. I suppose there will be something for me to ride if I look

for it?”

“Seeing I’ve been kept down to the old brown pair for the last six

weeks because all the others were being got ready for Master Georgie, I

should say there might be,” the father chuckled. “They’re reminding me

in a hundred ways that I must take the second place now.”

“Brutes!”

“The pater doesn’t mean it, dear; but every one has been trying to make

your home-coming a success; and you _do_ like it, don’t you?”

“Perfect! Perfect! There’s no place like England—when you ’ve done your

work.”

“That’s the proper way to look at it, my son.”

And so up and down the flagged walk till their shadows grew long in the

moonlight, and the mother went indoors and played such songs as a small

boy once clamoured for, and the squat silver candlesticks were brought

in, and Georgie climbed to the two rooms in the west wing that had been

his nursery and his playroom in the beginning. Then who should come to

tuck him up for the night but the mother? And she sat down on the bed,

and they talked for a long hour, as mother and son should, if there is

to be any future for the Empire. With a simple woman’s deep guile she

asked questions and suggested answers that should have waked some sign

in the face on the pillow, and there was neither quiver of eyelid nor

quickening of breath, neither evasion nor delay in reply. So she

blessed him and kissed him on the mouth, which is not always a mother’s

property, and said something to her husband later, at which he laughed

profane and incredulous laughs.

All the establishment waited on Georgie next morning, from the tallest

six-year-old, “with a mouth like a kid glove, Master Georgie,” to the

under-keeper strolling carelessly along the horizon, Georgie’s pet rod

in his hand, and “There’s a four-pounder risin’ below the lasher. You

don’t ’ave ’em in Injia, Mast-Major Georgie.” It was all beautiful

beyond telling, even though the mother insisted on taking him out in

the landau (the leather had the hot Sunday smell of his youth) and

showing him off to her friends at all the houses for six miles round;

and the pater bore him up to town and a lunch at the club, where he

introduced him, quite carelessly, to not less than thirty ancient

warriors whose sons were not the youngest majors in the army and had

not the D.S.O. After that it was Georgie’s turn; and remembering his

friends, he filled up the house with that kind of officer who live in

cheap lodgings at Southsea or Montpelier Square, Brompton—good men all,

but not well off. The mother perceived that they needed girls to play

with; and as there was no scarcity of girls, the house hummed like a

dovecote in spring. They tore up the place for amateur theatricals;

they disappeared in the gardens when they ought to have been

rehearsing; they swept off every available horse and vehicle,

especially the governess-cart and the fat pony; they fell into the

trout-ponds; they picnicked and they tennised; and they sat on gates in

the twilight, two by two, and Georgie found that he was not in the

least necessary to their entertainment.

“My word!” said he, when he saw the last of their dear backs. “They

told me they’ve enjoyed ’emselves, but they haven’t done half the

things they said they would.”

“I know they’ve enjoyed themselves—immensely,” said the mother. “You’re

a public benefactor, dear.”

“Now we can be quiet again, can’t we?”

“Oh, quite. I’ve a very dear friend of mine that I want you to know.

She couldn’t come with the house so full, because she’s an invalid, and

she was away when you first came. She’s a Mrs. Lacy.”

“Lacy! I don’t remember the name about here.”

“No; they came after you went to India—from Oxford. Her husband died

there, and she lost some money, I believe. They bought The Firs on the

Bassett Road. She’s a very sweet woman, and we’re very fond of them

both.”

“She’s a widow, didn’t you say?”

“She has a daughter. Surely I said so, dear?”

“Does she fall into trout-ponds, and gas and giggle, and ‘Oh, Major

Cottah!’ and all that sort of thing?”

“No, indeed. She’s a very quiet girl, and very musical. She always came

over here with her music-books—composing, you know; and she generally

works all day, so you won’t—”

“’Talking about Miriam?” said the pater, coming up. The mother edged

toward him within elbow-reach. There was no finesse about Georgie’s

father. “Oh, Miriam’s a dear girl. Plays beautifully. Rides

beautifully, too. She’s a regular pet of the household. Used to call

me—” The elbow went home, and ignorant but obedient always, the pater

shut himself off.

“What used she to call you, sir?”

“All sorts of pet names. I’m very fond of Miriam.”

“Sounds Jewish—Miriam.”

“Jew! You’ll be calling yourself a Jew next. She’s one of the

Herefordshire Lacys. When her aunt dies—” Again the elbow.

“Oh, you won’t see anything of her, Georgie. She’s busy with her music

or her mother all day. Besides, you’re going up to town tomorrow,

aren’t you? I thought you said something about an Institute meeting?”

The mother spoke.

“Go up to town _now!_ What nonsense!” Once more the pater was shut off.

“I had some idea of it, but I’m not quite sure,” said the son of the

house. Why did the mother try to get him away because a musical girl

and her invalid parent were expected? He did not approve of unknown

females calling his father pet names. He would observe these pushing

persons who had been only seven years in the county.

All of which the delighted mother read in his countenance, herself

keeping an air of sweet disinterestedness.

“They’ll be here this evening for dinner. I’m sending the carriage over

for them, and they won’t stay more than a week.”

“Perhaps I shall go up to town. I don’t quite know yet.” Georgie moved

away irresolutely. There was a lecture at the United Services Institute

on the supply of ammunition in the field, and the one man whose

theories most irritated Major Cottar would deliver it. A heated

discussion was sure to follow, and perhaps he might find himself moved

to speak. He took his rod that afternoon and went down to thrash it out

among the trout.

“Good sport, dear!” said the mother, from the terrace.

“’Fraid it won’t be, mummy. All those men from town, and the girls

particularly, have put every trout off his feed for weeks. There isn’t

one of ’em that cares for fishin’—really. Fancy stampin’ and shoutin’

on the bank, and tellin’ every fish for half a mile exactly what you’re

goin’ to do, and then chuckin’ a brute of a fly at him! By Jove, it

would scare _me_ if I was a trout!”

But things were not as bad as he had expected. The black gnat was on

the water, and the water was strictly preserved. A

three-quarter-pounder at the second cast set him for the campaign, and

he worked down-stream, crouching behind the reed and meadowsweet;

creeping between a hornbeam hedge and a foot-wide strip of bank, where

he could see the trout, but where they could not distinguish him from

the background; lying almost on his stomach to switch the blue-upright

sidewise through the checkered shadows of a gravelly ripple under

overarching trees. But he had known every inch of the water since he

was four feet high. The aged and astute between sunk roots, with the

large and fat that lay in the frothy scum below some strong rush of

water, sucking as lazily as carp, came to trouble in their turn, at the

hand that imitated so delicately the flicker and wimple of an

egg-dropping fly. Consequently, Georgie found himself five miles from

home when he ought to have been dressing for dinner. The housekeeper

had taken good care that her boy should not go empty, and before he

changed to the white moth he sat down to excellent claret with

sandwiches of potted egg and things that adoring women make and men

never notice. Then back, to surprise the otter grubbing for fresh-water

mussels, the rabbits on the edge of the beechwoods foraging in the

clover, and the policeman-like white owl stooping to the little

fieldmice, till the moon was strong, and he took his rod apart, and

went home through well-remembered gaps in the hedges. He fetched a

compass round the house, for, though he might have broken every law of

the establishment every hour, the law of his boyhood was unbreakable:

after fishing you went in by the south garden back-door, cleaned up in

the outer scullery, and did not present yourself to your elders and

your betters till you had washed and changed.

“Half-past ten, by Jove! Well, we’ll make the sport an excuse. They

wouldn’t want to see me the first evening, at any rate. Gone to bed,

probably.” He skirted by the open French windows of the drawing-room.

“No, they haven’t. They look very comfy in there.”

He could see his father in his own particular chair, the mother in

hers, and the back of a girl at the piano by the big potpourri-jar. The

gardens looked half divine in the moonlight, and he turned down through

the roses to finish his pipe.

A prelude ended, and there floated out a voice of the kind that in his

childhood he used to call “creamy” a full, true contralto; and this is

the song that he heard, every syllable of it:

Over the edge of the purple down,

Where the single lamplight gleams,

Know ye the road to the Merciful Town

That is hard by the Sea of Dreams—

Where the poor may lay their wrongs away,

And the sick may forget to weep?

But we—pity us!Oh, pity us!

We wakeful; ah, pity us!—

We must go back with Policeman Day—

Back from the City of Sleep!

Weary they turn from the scroll and crown,

Fetter and prayer and plough

They that go up to the Merciful Town,

For her gates are closing now.

It is their right in the Baths of Night

Body and soul to steep

But we—pity us! ah, pity us!

We wakeful; oh, pity us!—

We must go back with Policeman Day—

Back from the City of Sleep!

Over the edge of the purple down,

Ere the tender dreams begin,

Look—we may look—at the Merciful Town,

But we may not enter in!

Outcasts all, from her guarded wall

Back to our watch we creep:

We—pity us! ah, pity us!

We wakeful; oh, pity us!—

We that go back with Policeman Day—

Back from the City of Sleep

At the last echo he was aware that his mouth was dry and unknown pulses

were beating in the roof of it. The housekeeper, who would have it that

he must have fallen in and caught a chill, was waiting to catch him on

the stairs, and, since he neither saw nor answered her, carried a wild

tale abroad that brought his mother knocking at the door.

“Anything happened, dear? Harper said she thought you weren’t—”

“No; it’s nothing. I’m all right, mummy. _Please_ don’t bother.”

He did not recognise his own voice, but that was a small matter beside

what he was considering. Obviously, most obviously, the whole

coincidence was crazy lunacy. He proved it to the satisfaction of Major

George Cottar, who was going up to town to-morrow to hear a lecture on

the supply of ammunition in the field; and having so proved it, the

soul and brain and heart and body of Georgie cried joyously: “That’s

the Lily Lock girl—the Lost Continent girl—the Thirty-Mile-Ride

girl—the Brushwood girl! _I_ know her!”

He waked, stiff and cramped in his chair, to reconsider the situation

by sunlight, when it did not appear normal. But a man must eat, and he

went to breakfast, his heart between his teeth, holding himself

severely in hand.

“Late, as usual,” said the mother. “My boy, Miriam.”

A tall girl in black raised her eyes to his, and Georgie’s life

training deserted him—just as soon as he realised that she did not

know. He stared coolly and critically. There was the abundant black

hair, growing in a widow’s peak, turned back from the forehead, with

that peculiar ripple over the right ear; there were the grey eyes set a

little close together; the short upper lip, resolute chin, and the

known poise of the head. There was also the small well-cut mouth that

had kissed him.

“Georgie—_dear!_” said the mother, amazedly, for Miriam was flushing

under the stare.

“I—I beg your pardon!” he gulped. “I don’t know whether the mother has

told you, but I’m rather an idiot at times, specially before I’ve had

my breakfast. It’s—it’s a family failing.” He turned to explore among

the hot-water dishes on the sideboard, rejoicing that she did not

know—she did not know.

His conversation for the rest of the meal was mildly insane, though the

mother thought she had never seen her boy look half so handsome. How

could any girl, least of all one of Miriam’s discernment, forbear to

fall down and worship? But deeply Miriam was displeased. She had never

been stared at in that fashion before, and promptly retired into her

shell when Georgie announced that he had changed his mind about going

to town, and would stay to play with Miss Lacy if she had nothing

better to do.

“Oh, but don’t let me throw you out. I’m at work. I’ve things to do all

the morning.”

“What possessed Georgie to behave so oddly?” the mother sighed to

herself. “Miriam’s a bundle of feelings—like her mother.”

“You compose—don’t you? Must be a fine thing to be able to do that.

[‘Pig—oh, pig!’ thought Miriam.] I think I heard you singin’ when I

came in last night after fishin’. All about a Sea of Dreams, wasn’t it?

[Miriam shuddered to the core of the soul that afflicted her.] Awfully

pretty song. How d’ you think of such things?”

“You only composed the music, dear, didn’t you?”

“The words too. I’m sure of it,” said Georgie, with a sparkling eye.

No; she did not know.

“Yeth; I wrote the words too.” Miriam spoke slowly, for she knew she

lisped when she was nervous.

“Now how _could_ you tell, Georgie?” said the mother, as delighted as

though the youngest major in the army were ten years old, showing off

before company.

“I was sure of it, somehow. Oh, there are heaps of things about me,

mummy, that you don’t understand. Looks as if it were goin’ to be a hot

day—for England. Would you care for a ride this afternoon, Miss Lacy?

We can start out after tea, if you’d like it.”

Miriam could not in decency refuse, but any woman might see she was not

filled with delight.

“That will be very nice, if you take the Bassett Road. It will save me

sending Martin down to the village,” said the mother, filling in gaps.

Like all good managers, the mother had her one weakness—a mania for

little strategies that should economise horses and vehicles. Her

men-folk complained that she turned them into common carriers, and

there was a legend in the family that she had once said to the pater on

the morning of a meet: “If you _should_ kill near Bassett, dear, and if

it isn’t too late, would you mind just popping over and matching me

this?”

“I knew that was coming. You’d never miss a chance, mother. If it’s a

fish or a trunk I won’t.” Georgie laughed.

“It’s only a duck. They can do it up very neatly at Mallett’s,” said

the mother, simply. “You won’t mind, will you? We’ll have a scratch

dinner at nine, because it’s so hot.”

The long summer day dragged itself out for centuries; but at last there

was tea on the lawn, and Miriam appeared.

She was in the saddle before he could offer to help, with the clean

spring of the child who mounted the pony for the Thirty-Mile-Ride. The

day held mercilessly, though Georgie got down thrice to look for

imaginary stones in Rufus’s foot. One cannot say even simple things in

broad light, and this that Georgie meditated was not simple. So he

spoke seldom, and Miriam was divided between relief and scorn. It

annoyed her that the great hulking thing should know she had written

the words of the song overnight; for though a maiden may sing her most

secret fancies aloud, she does not care to have them trampled over by

the male Philistine. They rode into the little red-brick street of

Bassett, and Georgie made untold fuss over the disposition of that

duck. It must go in just such a package, and be fastened to the saddle

in just such a manner, though eight o’clock had struck and they were

miles from dinner.

“We must be quick!” said Miriam, bored and angry.

“There’s no great hurry; but we can cut over Dowhead Down, and let ’em

out on the grass. That will save us half an hour.”

The horses capered on the short, sweet-smelling turf, and the delaying

shadows gathered in the valley as they cantered over the great dun down

that overhangs Bassett and the Western coaching-road. Insensibly the

pace quickened without thought of mole-hills; Rufus, gentleman that he

was, waiting on Miriam’s Dandy till they should have cleared the rise.

Then down the two-mile slope they raced together, the wind whistling in

their ears, to the steady throb of eight hoofs and the light

click-click of the shifting bits.

“Oh, that was glorious!” Miriam cried, reining in. “Dandy and I are old

friends, but I don’t think we’ve ever gone better together.”

“No; but you’ve gone quicker, once or twice.”

“Really? When?”

Georgie moistened his lips. “Don’t you remember the

Thirty-Mile-Ride—with me—when ‘They’ were after us—on the beach-road,

with the sea to the left—going toward the lamp-post on the downs?”

The girl gasped. “What—what do you mean?” she said hysterically.

“The Thirty-Mile-Ride, and—and all the rest of it.”

“You mean—? I didn’t sing anything about the Thirty-Mile-Ride. I know I

didn’t. I have never told a living soul.’”

“You told about Policeman Day, and the lamp at the top of the downs,

and the City of Sleep. It all joins on, you know—it’s the same

country—and it was easy enough to see where you had been.”

“Good God!—It joins on—of course it does; but—I have been—you have

been—Oh, let’s walk, please, or I shall fall off!”

Georgie ranged alongside, and laid a hand that shook below her

bridle-hand, pulling Dandy into a walk. Miriam was sobbing as he had

seen a man sob under the touch of the bullet.

“It’s all right—it’s all right,” he whispered feebly. “Only—only it’s

true, you know.”

“True! Am I mad?”

“Not unless I’m mad as well. _Do_ try to think a minute quietly. How

could any one conceivably know anything about the Thirty-Mile-Ride

having anything to do with you, unless he had been there?”

“But where? But _where?_ Tell me!”

“There—wherever it may be—in our country, I suppose. Do you remember

the first time you rode it—the Thirty-Mile-Ride, I mean? You must.”

“It was all dreams—all dreams!”

“Yes, but tell, please; because I know.”

“Let me think. I—we were on no account to make any noise—on no account

to make any noise.” She was staring between Dandy’s ears, with eyes

that did not see, and a suffocating heart.

“Because ‘It’ was dying in the big house?” Georgie went on, reining in

again.

“There was a garden with green-and-gilt railings—all hot. Do _you_

remember?”

“I ought to. I was sitting on the other side of the bed before ‘It’

coughed and ‘They’ came in.”

“You!”—the deep voice was unnaturally full and strong, and the girl’s

wide-opened eyes burned in the dusk as she stared him through and

through. “Then you’re the Boy—my Brushwood Boy, and I’ve known you all

my life!”

She fell forward on Dandy’s neck. Georgie forced himself out of the

weakness that was overmastering his limbs, and slid an arm round her

waist. The head dropped on his shoulder, and he found himself with

parched lips saying things that up till then he believed existed only

in printed works of fiction. Mercifully the horses were quiet. She made

no attempt to draw herself away when she recovered, but lay still,

whispering, “Of course you’re the Boy, and I didn’t know—I didn’t

know.”

“I knew last night; and when I saw you at breakfast—”

“Oh, _that_ was why! I wondered at the time. You would, of course.”

“I couldn’t speak before this. Keep your head where it is, dear. It’s

all right now—all right now, isn’t it?”

“But how was it _I_ didn’t know—after all these years and years? I

remember—oh, what lots of things I remember!”

“Tell me some. I’ll look after the horses.”

“I remember waiting for you when the steamer came in. Do you?”

“At the Lily Lock, beyond Hong-Kong and Java?”

“Do _you_ call it that, too?”

“You told me it was when I was lost in the continent. That was you that

showed me the way through the mountains?”

“When the islands slid? It must have been, because you’re the only one

I remember. All the others were ‘Them.’

“Awful brutes they were, too.”

“I remember showing you the Thirty-Mile-Ride the first time. You ride

just as you used to—then. You _are_ you!”

“That’s odd. I thought that of you this afternoon. Isn’t it wonderful?”

“What does it all mean? Why should you and I of the millions of people

in the world have this—this thing between us? What does it mean? I’m

frightened.”

“This!” said Georgie. The horses quickened their pace. They thought

they had heard an order. “Perhaps when we die we may find out more, but

it means this now.”

There was no answer. What could she say? As the world went, they had

known each other rather less than eight and a half hours, but the

matter was one that did not concern the world. There was a very long

silence, while the breath in their nostrils drew cold and sharp as it

might have been a fume of ether.

“That’s the second,” Georgie whispered. “You remember, don’t you?”

“It’s not!”—furiously. “It’s not!”

“On the downs the other night—months ago. You were just as you are now,

and we went over the country for miles and miles.”

“It was all empty, too. They had gone away. Nobody frightened us. I

wonder why, Boy?”

“Oh, if you remember _that_, you must remember the rest. Confess!”

“I remember lots of things, but I _know_ I didn’t. I never have—till

just now.”

“You _did_, dear.”

“I know I didn’t, because—oh, it’s no use keeping anything back!

because I truthfully meant to.”

“And truthfully did.”

“No; meant to; but some one else came by.”

“There wasn’t any one else. There never has been.”

“There was—there always is. It was another woman—out there—on the sea.

I saw her. It was the 26th of May. I’ve got it written down somewhere.”

“Oh, _you_’ve kept a record of your dreams, too? That’s odd about the

other woman, because I happened to be on the sea just then.”

“I was right. How do I know what you’ve done when you were awake—and I

thought it was only _you!_”

“You never were more wrong in your life. What a little temper you’ve

got! Listen to me a minute, dear.” And Georgie, though he knew it not,

committed black perjury. “It—it isn’t the kind of thing one says to any

one, because they’d laugh; but on my word and honour, darling, I’ve

never been kissed by a living soul outside my own people in all my

life. Don’t laugh, dear. I wouldn’t tell any one but you, but it’s the

solemn truth.”

“I knew! You are you. Oh, I _knew_ you’d come some day; but I didn’t

know you were you in the least till you spoke.”

“Then give me another.”

“And you never cared or looked anywhere? Why, all the round world must

have loved you from the very minute they saw you, Boy.”

“They kept it to themselves if they did. No; I never cared.”

“And we shall be late for dinner—horribly late. Oh, how can I look at

you in the light before your mother—and mine!”

“We’ll play you’re Miss Lacy till the proper time comes. What’s the

shortest limit for people to get engaged? S’pose we have got to go

through all the fuss of an engagement, haven’t we?”

“Oh, I don’t want to talk about that. It’s so commonplace. I’ve thought

of something that you don’t know. I’m sure of it. What’s my name?”

“Miri—no, it isn’t, by Jove! Wait half a second, and it’ll come back to

me. You aren’t—you can’t? Why, _those_ old tales—before I went to

school! I’ve never thought of ’em from that day to this. Are you the

original, only Annie_an_louise?”

“It was what you always called me ever since the beginning. Oh! We’ve

turned into the avenue, and we must be an hour late.”

“What does it matter? The chain goes as far back as those days? It

must, of course—of course it must. I’ve got to ride round with this

pestilent old bird—confound him!”

“‘Ha! ha!’ said the duck, laughing—do you remember _that?_”

“Yes, I do—flower-pots on my feet, and all. We’ve been together all

this while; and I’ve got to say good bye to you till dinner. _Sure_

I’ll see you at dinner-time? _Sure_ you won’t sneak up to your room,

darling, and leave me all the evening? Good-bye, dear—good-bye.”

“Good-bye, Boy, good-bye. Mind the arch! Don’t let Rufus bolt into his

stables. Good-bye. Yes, I’ll come down to dinner; but—what shall I do

when I see you in the light!”