quarter," he announced, "which I think is very fair--very fair."
"Wonderful," said Mrs. Corcoran, frowning at her silent daughter.
"Incredible," Nare suggested. "It must be eight miles."
"I thought it incumbent upon me to ride pretty fast," continued Sir Henry,
"because a rather alarming thing has occurred."
A chorus of "Ohs!" wavered about the gratified tricyclist.
[Illustration: "A RATHER ALARMING THING HAS OCCURRED."]
"What is it?" asked Mrs. Corcoran.
"No, don't tell!" cried Mrs. Harrington; "not if it's horrid. I won't have
my picnic spoilt. Be a gem, now!"
"But, my dear madam"--Sir Henry's look was a rebuke to all trifling--"I
dare not take it upon myself to leave you all in suspense about a matter
which cannot in any event be lightly treated. When I say that a travelling
menagerie at Sutley has lost one of its wild beasts early this morning, and
that up to the time I started from Wetherwell no news of its recapture had
come to hand----"
He paused for an effect, and several ladies said: "Good heavens!" Mrs.
Corcoran added:--
"And you rode over the moor alone?"
A pleased smile was her reward.
"I could do no less--yes--some say a puma; others a bear." Sir Henry
rapidly answered a string of questions.
"Perhaps it was a llama," suggested Miss Corcoran.
"Judith!"
"They're very dangerous, mother."
"But in any case I'm very much annoyed," Mrs. Harrington announced. "Now
everybody will want to go home, I suppose, though really Sutley is fourteen
miles away, and--well, at any rate, we've all had something to eat. Sir
Henry, come and be rewarded with lobster before we start."
I think it must have been because Mrs. Harrington thought she owed her
annoyance as much to the baronet's alarmist importunity as to the
carelessness of the menagerie owners that she dealt so kindly with Nare
afterwards. For it was settled that the picnickers should disband almost
immediately instead of going home by moonlight--as Mrs. Harrington had
desired--and in the bustle that ensued, while the rector was heading a
search-party, organized by Mrs. Corcoran, to recover a shawl she was
positive she had brought with her, and the baronet was being regaled on all
the choicest delicacies that could be set out on cabbage-leaves by the more
insatiably curious ladies, Mrs. Harrington drew Nare and Miss Corcoran
aside.
"Now, Judith," she said, "we shall all be starting soon, but I want you to
be kind and show Mr. Nare the Mill on the way back."
"Oh, but----" Judith began.
"We shall catch you up in quite a short time, and Mr. Nare will protect you
against the----"
"Llama," said Nare.
"Elephant or whatever it is," said Mrs. Harrington, smiling. "I'm quite
sure he will. And you'll be doing me a favour. I've promised Mr. Nare
should see the Mill, and I'll explain to your mother."
"Very well," said Judith. "Perhaps we ought to start at once, then?"
"Yes," said Mrs. Harrington.
That is why, when, some time later, Sir Henry having replenished himself
and found all preparations made for going homeward, and having begun to
wonder where Miss Corcoran, whom he had hoped to escort, had vanished to,
Nare found himself on the moor with that young lady just drawing near to
the Mill, the sight of which he had been promised. It was just after
sundown then, pleasantly cool and hazy, with nothing but a noise of stray
bees to disturb the silence. Miss Corcoran had had her parasol furled for
several minutes, so that Nare, who was slightly behind with the picnic
basket which Mrs. Harrington had thrust upon him "in case Judith should
want a sandwich on the way, Mr. Nare"--commanded an uninterrupted and
delightful view of the curls on her neck.
"Perfect," he said, and she, fancying he referred to the weather, perhaps,
agreed.
[Illustration: "'I DON'T THINK YOU'RE WALKING VERY FAST, MR. NARE,' SHE
SAID."]
"But I don't think you're walking very fast, Mr. Nare," she said, severely.
"And when I promised Mrs. Harrington to show you the Mill, I did think
you'd walk a little quicker, even though you are a Londoner."
"Don't be unkind," said Nare. "Recollect that your foot is on your native
heath, while mine----"
"But we shall miss the others."
"We started first."
"Not more than half an hour, and we've come right off the road on to the
moor and----"
"But it's such a jolly afternoon."
"Evening."
"And it would be a sin to stampede over these attractive buttercups," Nare
pleaded.
Miss Corcoran relented with a little laugh.
"Really, you are Cockneyer than I thought. Buttercups! It's gorse."
"Same kind of yellow," said Nare.
"And there's the Mill. Now we must hurry."
Woman, it has been said, disposes, but that depends on circumstances. Nare
had no desire to hurry, but hurried he certainly would have been if it were
not for the episode that occurred at that moment. Afterwards he was
grateful for it, but for the time being he would even have preferred
hurrying. For, just as he was taking a last look at the Mill, something
shadowy, but alive, came stalking slowly away from it towards them.
Involuntarily Nare whistled. In the hazy twilight it was not easy to
distinguish shapes exactly, and the desolate moorland with the black bare
Mill frowning in its midst, only a single skeleton sail left to show for
what purpose it had been built centuries ago, and the utter silence, except
for the homing bees, no doubt tended to ghostly thoughts. But either Nare
was dreaming or----
"Whatever is that?" cried Miss Corcoran, suddenly catching sight of it. She
put a startled hand on his arm, and Nare regained his cheerfulness.
"This Cockney suggests that it's a cow--a stray cow."
"But----"
"Probably an Alderney," Nare pursued, "with pink eyes and----"
The creature was making towards them on the circumference of a circle, and
as Nare talked he walked slowly towards the Mill. There must be some kind
of shelter there.
"And crumpled horns," Nare continued.
"But this isn't our way, Mr. Nare."
The girl spoke in a protesting tone, but without giving any sign of a
desire to stop. Indeed, she went rather faster and did not look behind her.
The Alderney was a little behind them now.
"Don't you think we ought to----"
"G-r-r-r-r!" A noise, thunderous and snarling, interrupted her in the
middle of a sentence. Nare was looking back.
"How horrible!"
"Perhaps it wants to be milked"--Nare spoke without turning his head--"or
it's hungry. I think you'd better go into the Mill, please."
"You'll come?"
"Yes."
[Illustration: "MISS CORCORAN GATHERED UP HER SKIRTS AND RAN."]
And with that Miss Corcoran gathered up her skirts and ran. Nare followed
with one eye on the enemy in the rear. The beast had stopped in its
circling and was glaring after them.
"As fast as you can!"
The girl heard Nare talking to her, and felt in a dream. A second growl
rose and seemed to shake the rotten timbers of the Mill as she ran into it.
"Up the ladder!"
There was a nine-foot ladder, shaky, with rat-gnawed rungs, leading through
a trap on to the first floor of the Mill from the ground. And Miss Corcoran
went up it swiftly, with gratitude in her heart to the rats for not having
gnawed it through, since there was no door to the Mill wherewith to bolt
out undesirable company. The Mill seemed to be echoing still with that
growl as she turned at the top and, kneeling, found Nare ascending after
her through the narrow hole. She said nothing until he had got up and tried
to unfix the ladder without success. Then, as he desisted:--
"Mr. Nare," she said, "was it a--a--tiger?"
Nare put down his picnic basket with an injured air.
"If it wasn't," he said, "I don't know what it was. But I'm beginning to
think you're right, and that I don't know the country. I certainly thought
tigers were extinct. If they're not, I don't think it's fair to ask an
unfortunate Londoner out into the wilds and arm him with nothing better
than a picnic basket."
He rattled on to give the girl time to recover herself. He was a little
afraid of hysterics, which would have been pardonable but unavailing. She
seemed to suspect his fear, for she mustered a smile and said:--
"I don't think I'm going to be foolish. Tell me, please, what do you think
we ought to do?"
That was exactly what Nare did not know. Looking down through the trap, he
was conscious of a pair of fierce yellow eyes glaring up at him.
"A good deal depends on the tiger," he said. "As this is one from a
menagerie it may know how to behave itself in company, but--isn't there a
top floor to this Mill?"
There was, and another ladder leading to it. And Miss Corcoran, followed by
Nare, reached it in less time than it takes to tell. The tiger had reared
its paws on to the lower ladder and delivered itself, of another terrific
growl.
"I--I didn't know they could climb," said Miss Corcoran, faintly. "Oh!"
A scuffling noise accompanied by a groaning of wood was what they heard,
and then a soft padding of feet in the room they had just deserted.
Apparently this tiger could climb.
"The deuce!" said Nare, beneath his breath. He had never in his life been
in a more unpleasant situation--never, indeed, in anything like it. At
first the thing had seemed like some burlesque nightmare, but now the
burlesque was going out of it. What could one do to a tiger?
He sat cross-legged over the trap, reflecting and listening to the pad, pad
below. If only there were a cover to the trap, but there was none. His
companion was looking out of a sort of small slit in the side of the Mill
that had been made to serve the purpose of a window once, hiding her tears,
Nare fancied. It was too narrow to get through, and in any case there would
be a drop of twenty or thirty feet. Half unconsciously Nare began to unpack
the picnic basket which he had carried along from room to room. He had some
vague idea of throwing the tiger sandwiches as a sop. "Buns, cucumber
sandwiches, a packet of salt. Do you see anything, Sister Anne?" He broke
off enumerating the contents of the basket, seeing that Miss Corcoran had
started.
"I--no----"
"A chocolate cake--tea--pepper--pepper----"
"Yes, I do," Miss Corcoran suddenly burst out. "There's someone
coming--this way. He's--he's on a--it's Sir Henry."
In spite of the presence of the tiger and the diversion likely to be caused
by the arrival of the baronet, Nare felt a trifle jealous. If the diversion
were caused it would be to the baronet's credit, that was certain, and he
sat over the trap, aimlessly untying the packet marked pepper, while he
listened to the parley that Miss Corcoran began from the slit in the Mill
wall.
A bicycle bell rung in a dignified manner announced the baronet's approach.
"Sir Henry!"
Nare could hear the brake applied before the baronet's thin, piping voice
called back:--
"Who is there?"
"It's I--Judith Corcoran--and Mr. Nare. We're in the Mill--and----"
"Indeed!"
Suspicion was plain in the baronet's "Indeed!" Nare lost the next few words
in trying to catch a sound of the padding feet below.
"And the animal that escaped that you told us of--is here--it's a tiger!"
An unpleasant, high-pitched laugh greeted Miss Corcoran's explanation--a
laugh that showed Sir Henry in about as incredulous a frame of mind as a
jealous man might be.
"Ah!" he sniggered. "What charming company! Two--and a tiger!"
"G-r-r-r-r!"
Nare had just risen in a fury of indignation to throw something--anything
that could be got through the window--at the baronet's head, when that
tremendous growl came, followed by the creaking and groaning of wood. The
tiger was ascending to their last retreat. In a whirling fashion Nare was
conscious of this, and of Miss Corcoran's pale face, as he stood once more
over the trap. From outside came a sound of frantic pedalling, as though
Sir Henry had forgotten his scepticism and was wheeling round in order to
be off. Otherwise the stillness was intolerable; and in the middle of it
Nare, his fingers tearing idly at the white-papered packet in his hands,
suddenly found himself looking into those great yellow eyes, not three feet
away. And at that, his fingers relaxing, the packet and its contents fell
plump into the tiger's face.
[Illustration: "NARE SUDDENLY FOUND HIMSELF LOOKING INTO THOSE GREAT YELLOW
EYES."]
"By Jove!"
A swishing, sneezing noise, as of a score of cats under a hose, a heavy
thud, a downward galloping, pad and patter, and the tiger was gone. It had
found an ounce of pepper in its eyes and nostrils as unpleasant as it was
unexpected.
"Pepper's the thing," said Nare, devoutly, discovering a moment later that
he was supporting Miss Corcoran in his arms.
"Yes," said Judith, faintly; "I'm so glad----"
Of what she did not say, but irrelevancy did not seem to matter.
"Look!" cried Nare.
Through the uncasemented window they could see in the fast-gathering dusk
the long white path over the moor. It looked even whiter for the shadows
all about, so that, visible at a distance of some quarter of a mile, was
the bent figure of a tricyclist, all among the wheels, pedalling away for
dear life. After him, and as if in pursuit, cantered a shadowy, four-legged
thing, that tossed its head uneasily as it went and seemed to have no tail.
"Tail's between its legs," said Nare. "So's Sir Henry's."
"I hope it won't catch him," said Miss Judith, kindly, but without the
intonation of extreme solicitude. After all, Sir Henry had a good start.
"He is going fast," she added, critically, as he vanished over a distant
ridge. "There goes the tiger."
"We may as well be off too," said Nare, "before it comes back. Sir Henry by
himself won't make much of a meal. Awfully jolly walk it's been."
They went on, not too fast, in the opposite direction from that taken by
the tiger.
_The Best Comic Pictures._
THE OPINION OF HUMOROUS ARTISTS.
Humour is such an elusive quality, depending so much upon individual
temperament, that it is difficult to say in what consists its absolute
perfection. We know what makes us laugh most; but do we know what will make
another laugh most? Yet after all this is true of every art. Why should we
not have _chefs d'oevure_ of pictorial comedy?
Suppose any reader of THE STRAND MAGAZINE with a normal sense of humour
were asked, "What is the funniest picture you remember ever to have seen?"
Would he not ransack his memory--would he not turn to the files of _Punch_,
to the comic almanacs, to such examples of foreign pictorial humour as had
chanced to come in his way--and end by declaring that it was impossible to
make any selection at all in such a wilderness of mirth-provoking designs,
or, having hit upon one, to find it, upon re-inspection, to be no longer as
funny as he thought it at the time--years ago?
But in quite a different case is another small class in the community.
These are the authors and manufacturers of humorous pictures themselves.
They, not only from having a special gift of comedy, but from having
presumably studied, or been interested in, the work of other draughtsmen,
might confidently be expected to know their own minds. And so to them the
writer addressed the question, What was the funniest picture they had ever
seen? What had a right to be considered a masterpiece of pictorial comedy?
At the outset the writer must not forget to mention that a few years ago,
in a confidential chat he had with the late Mr. Phil May, he was
pleasurably surprised to learn the high esteem in which that gifted
humorist held one of the earliest and greatest masters of pictorial comedy,
James Gillray.
[Illustration: "COMPANY SHOCKED AT A LADY GETTING UP TO RING THE BELL."--BY
GILLRAY.
SELECTED BY THE LATE MR. PHIL MAY AS THE BEST COMIC PICTURE].
"There is nobody to-day to touch him," were May's words. "Look at his sweep
of line and his astonishing mastery over the grotesque and ridiculous.
There are pictures so extraordinarily funny that you can't laugh--'too
funny for words,' if you catch what I mean." As he spoke he turned to a
folio containing several specimens of Gillray's drawings. One in particular
was, if too funny for words, not too funny to be laughed at, for May's
smile broadened enormously as he held it up for inspection--"Company
Shocked at a Lady Getting Up to Ring the Bell." "Now, I call that funny,"
he said, "and it was, perhaps, a hundred times funnier a hundred years ago,
when the characters were well-known people. There's nothing 'dates' so much
as the average comic picture, especially a social caricature, but the fun
of this is pretty fresh still." On the whole, most of Gillray's and
Rowlandson's best work is a little too highly flavoured--too broad--for the
taste of to-day.
Passing along a half-century we come to John Leech, and thenceforward to a
succession of great masters of pictorial fun--Wilhelm Buesch, Charles Keene,
Du Maurier, Sambourne, Oberlander, Caran d'Ache, Phil May, Frederick Opper,
Zimmerman, and Raven-Hill. To these names many--fully as
distinguished--might be added, such as Forain, Gibson, and Graetz, but for
pure fun those we have mentioned may be called the masters. Amongst their
numerous productions ought to be found some sketch which deserves to be
called the very funniest picture or set of pictures delineating a single
humorous idea. Each artist has his own followers. We have seen Phil May
singling out a drawing by Gillray as appealing to his sense of humour. The
draughtsmen of to-day in this line of work in England doubtless count no
cleverer men than Raven-Hill, Tom Browne, John Hassall, Leslie Willson,
William Parkinson, Louis Wain, and Charles Harrison.
Wilhelm Buesch was for years the chief comic draughtsman of the celebrated
_Fliegende Blaetter_--the German _Punch_. Not all his best work, however,
was done for this paper, as Buesch illustrated and occasionally wrote
numerous humorous brochures, which enjoyed a wide sale, and in his own
opinion--according to one of his intimate friends whom we have
consulted--he never achieved anything funnier than the pictures which
accompanied a little book called "The Fools' Paradise," and the funniest
drawings in that book are those which appear on this page.
[Illustration: "A PIANOFORTE PERFORMANCE."--BY WILHELM BUeSCH.
SELECTED BY MR. LINLEY SAMBOURNE.]
But now let us hear what Mr. Linley Sambourne has to say about the work of
this artist:--
"To attempt to even indicate the birthplace of the world's masterpiece of
pictorial humour is beyond the capacity of a single individual. So very few
can see humour with the same eyes or appreciation. What you seek has
probably perished in past ages, together with its contemporaneous
companions in a higher branch. To me, personally, some of the designs of
the late Wilhelm Buesch, of Munich, seem to have more humour, if by that is
meant fun, than anything I can remember having seen."
[Illustration: UNDER HER BREATH.--MRS. CONLAN: "Whisht, Pat!"
Pat: "Whisht, Dalia!"
Mrs. Conlan: "Aise yure face. It's an upright we're havin' took."
FROM THE NEW YORK "JUDGE."
SELECTED BY MR. RAVEN-HILL.]
Mr. Sambourne's clever colleague, Mr. Leonard Raven-Hill, finds "the very
funniest picture" amongst the work of the American artist, Zimmerman.
"For absolute comic humour," he writes, "no one has equalled Zimmerman, of
the New York _Judge_, in my opinion. Charles Keene is, of course, miles
ahead of any other man in quiet humour; but I can't think of any particular
examples."
Of Zimmerman's drawings Mr. Raven-Hill selects three, of which we herewith
present what strikes us as the most comical.
[Illustration: WIFE (to lion-tamer, who has been out late): "You coward!"
FROM "PHIL MAY'S ANNUAL."
SELECTED BY MR. TOM BROWNE.]
Few comic artists are at once so prolific and so amusing as Mr. Tom Browne,
who, in selecting the picture reproduced below, writes to us as follows:--
"I have no hesitation in ascribing to the late Phil May some of the most
delightful specimens of illustrated humour that have ever graced the
British or any other Press; but to positively indicate what I consider to
be that master's choicest joke or drawing is a difficult matter. Phil May
had a very keen sense of humour; moreover, he was a master of line. He knew
what a line would do better than any man ever did before him. He could
seize on the essentials of a subject and adequately represent it in the
fewest lines anyone had ever employed before. Yet nothing was lacking. And
the lines and the forms they represented were always accurate. There was a
lot of humour in the sketch of the lion-tamer which appeared in one of the
winter annuals. The tamer of lions had been staying out late, and to avoid
the furious attentions of his wrathful spouse had taken refuge in the
lions' den. The aforesaid wrathful spouse was shaking her fist in front of
the bars and crying out, 'You coward!'
[Illustration: "A HAIR-RAISING STORY."--BY CARAN D'ACHE.
FROM THE CARAN D'ACHE ALBUM, BY PERMISSION OF MM. PLON NOURRIT & CO.
SELECTED BY MR. LESLIE WILLSON.]
"Quite a little masterpiece in its way was the sketch of the very tipsy
newsman, who had the contents-bill of the special edition he was selling
stuck on a sandwich board that covered his chest. In large letters on the
contents-bill was printed, 'Result of the Cup.'
"And there are others, scores of them, all good because they were Phil
May's. In cold type they sound nothing. Phil May's pen made masterpieces of
them all."
An English black-and-white draughtsman, with an almost unique experience of
pictorial comedy in Germany, America, and this country, is Mr. Leslie
Willson, for years one of the chief artists of the New York _Judge_, and
latterly art editor of _Pick-Me-Up_. Mr. Willson, with his wide experience
of comic achievements, says:--
"The very funniest pictures I ever saw were by that astonishingly clever
Franco-Russian, Emmanuel Poire, otherwise 'Caran d'Ache.' The particular
set I have in mind depicted a scene in a barber's shop, where the
customer's hair, standing on end from horror, defies all the barber's
attempts to curl it. There are other funny things from Caran d'Ache's
pencil, but this, I think, is the funniest." These are the drawings
reproduced on the opposite page.
[Illustration: PARROT: "Here he comes again. If he pulls another feather
out I'll fly away!"
BY H. GRATTAN IN THE "PELICAN."
SELECTED BY MR. JOHN HASSALL.]
Mr. John Hassall, whose work is familiar to all, writes to say:--
"The most humorous drawing I have ever seen was in the Christmas number of
the _Pelican_, some few years back, of a parrot with one feather sticking
out of its tail--the rest bare--sitting on its perch, and a pot-boy in the
background. Below was the inscription: 'Here he comes again. If he pulls
another feather out I'll fly away!' It was by an actor, I fancy. For the
most humorous artist I should plump for Zim. Zimmerman, who draws for New
York _Judge_. About ten years ago his work was, to my mind, always
exceedingly humorous."
[Illustration: "AN INCIDENT IN THE MIDDLE AGES."--BY LINLEY SAMBOURNE IN
"PUNCH."
SELECTED BY MR. WILLIAM PARKINSON.]
A draughtsman with a keen sense of humour is Mr. William Parkinson. He
writes:--
"For real funniness, I think A. B. Frost, the American, is very hard to
beat; especially in some of his picture-stories in the last pages of
_Scribner_ or the _Century_. I should call his book of drawings, 'The
Good-Natured Man and the Bull Calf,' a masterpiece of humour. Linley
Sambourne also is a master and an artist too, and some of his drawings for
_Punch's_ Almanacks are real masterpieces. 'An Incident in the Middle
Ages,' where a poor knight in armour is tormented under his mail shirt by a
persistent----Well, the fancy is tickled as much as was the poor knight."
[Illustration: An ensign who thought he would wake up another ensign for a
lark--But he mistook the tent.
FROM THE "GRAPHIC."--BY A. C. CORBOULD.
SELECTED BY MR. LOUIS WAIN.]
There are not many pictorial comedians with a larger following than Mr.
Louis Wain, who tells us:--
"I like one of Corbould's drawings best which appeared in the _Graphic_ of
some eighteen years back. A subaltern with a broom over his head was
hitting out at a military tent with it where there appeared to be a
protuberance. A second picture showed a fat general sitting up in bed
rubbing his head and looking furiously mad. (He had had the broom on it.)
This drawing has kept me happy through many a gloomy period, and set my own
work going again."
[Illustration: THE MOUSTACHE MOVEMENT.--OLD MR. WHAT'S-HIS-NAME: "Egad, I
don't wonder at moustaches coming into fashion; for--eh? What? By Jove, it
does improve one's appearance."
BY JOHN LEECH IN "PUNCH'S ALMANACK," 1857.
SELECTED BY MR. CHARLES HARRISON.]
"With a pretty extensive knowledge of all the Continental and American
artists," writes Mr. Charles Harrison, one of the regular contributors to
_Punch_, "I think I have derived more amusement from John Leech than anyone
else. In certain things he is, and so will ever remain, absolutely
unapproachable, and I enclose what I consider one of his funniest efforts.
At least, there is no effort in it, which is one of the charms in all
Leech's work."
_The Country of the Blind._
BY H. G. WELLS.
Three hundred miles and more from Chimborazo, one hundred from the snows of
Cotopaxi, in the wildest wastes of Ecuador's Andes, there lies that
mysterious mountain valley, cut off from all the world of men, the Country
of the Blind. Long years ago that valley lay so far open to the world that
men might come at last through frightful gorges and over an icy pass into
its equable meadows, and thither indeed men came, a family or so of
Peruvian half-breeds fleeing from the lust and tyranny of an evil Spanish
ruler. Then came the stupendous outbreak of Mindobamba, when it was night
in Quito for seventeen days, and the water was boiling at Yaguachi and all
the fish floating dying even as far as Guayaquil; everywhere along the
Pacific slopes there were landslips and swift thawings and sudden floods,
and one whole side of the old Arauca crest slipped and came down in
thunder, and cut off the Country of the Blind for ever from the exploring
feet of men. But one of these early settlers had chanced to be on the
hither side of the gorges when the world had so terribly shaken itself, and
he perforce had to forget his wife and his child and all the friends and
possessions he had left up there, and start life over again in the lower
world. He started it again but ill, blindness overtook him, and he died of
punishment in the mines; but the story he told begot a legend that lingers
along the length of the Cordilleras of the Andes to this day.
He told of his reason for venturing back from that fastness, into which he
had first been carried lashed to a llama, beside a vast bale of gear, when
he was a child. The valley, he said, had in it all that the heart of man
could desire--sweet water, pasture, an even climate, slopes of rich brown
soil with tangles of a shrub that bore an excellent fruit, and on one side
great hanging forests of pine that held the avalanches high. Far overhead,
on three sides, vast cliffs of grey-green rock were capped by cliffs of
ice; but the glacier stream came not to them, but flowed away by the
farther slopes, and only now and then huge ice masses fell on the valley
side. In this valley it neither rained nor snowed, but the abundant springs
gave a rich green pasture, that irrigation would spread over all the valley
space. The settlers did well indeed there. Their beasts did well and
multiplied, and but one thing marred their happiness. Yet it was enough to
mar it greatly. A strange disease had come upon them and had made all the
children born to them there--and, indeed, several older children
also--blind. It was to seek some charm or antidote against this plague of
blindness that he had with fatigue and danger and difficulty returned down
the gorge. In those days, in such cases, men did not think of germs and
infections, but of sins, and it seemed to him that the reason of this
affliction must lie in the negligence of these priestless immigrants to set
up a shrine so soon as they entered the valley. He wanted a shrine--a
handsome, cheap, effectual shrine--to be erected in the valley; he wanted
relics and such-like potent things of faith, blessed objects and mysterious
medals and prayers. In his wallet he had a bar of native silver for which
he would not account; he insisted there was none in the valley with
something of the insistence of an inexpert liar. They had all clubbed their
money and ornaments together, having little need for such treasure up
there, he said, to buy them holy help against their ill. I figure this
dim-eyed young mountaineer, sunburnt, gaunt, and anxious, hat brim clutched
feverishly, a man all unused to the ways of the lower world, telling this
story to some keen-eyed, attentive priest before the great convulsion; I
can picture him presently seeking to return with pious and infallible
remedies against that trouble, and the infinite dismay with which he must
have faced the tumbled vastness where the gorge had once come out. But the
rest of his story of mischances is lost to me, save that I know of his evil
death after several years. Poor stray from that remoteness! The stream that
had once made the gorge now bursts from the mouth of a rocky cave, and the
legend his poor, ill-told story set going developed into the legend of a
race of blind men somewhere "over there" one may still hear to-day.
And amidst the little population of that now isolated and forgotten valley
the disease ran its course. The old became groping and purblind, the young
saw but dimly, and the children that were born to them saw never at all.
But life was very easy in that snow-rimmed basin, lost to all the world,
with neither thorns nor briers, with no evil insects nor any beasts save
the gentle breed of llamas they had lugged and thrust and followed up the
beds of the shrunken rivers in the gorges up which they had come. The
seeing had become purblind so gradually that they scarcely noted their
loss. They guided the sightless youngsters hither and thither until they
knew the whole valley marvellously, and when at last sight died out among
them the race lived on. They had even time to adapt themselves to the blind
control of fire, which they made carefully in stoves of stone. They were a
simple strain of people at the first, unlettered, only slightly touched
with the Spanish civilization, but with something of a tradition of the
arts of old Peru and of its lost philosophy. Generation followed
generation. They forgot many things; they devised many things. Their
tradition of the greater world they came from became mythical in colour and
uncertain. In all things save sight they were strong and able, and
presently chance sent one who had an original mind and who could talk and
persuade among them, and then afterwards another. These two passed, leaving
their effects, and the little community grew in numbers and in
understanding, and met and settled social and economic problems that arose.
Generation followed generation. Generation followed generation. There came
a time when a child was born who was fifteen generations from that ancestor
who went out of the valley with a bar of silver to seek God's aid, and who
never returned. Thereabout it chanced that a man came into this community
from the outer world. And this is the story of that man.
He was a mountaineer from the country near Quito, a man who had been down
to the sea and had seen the world, a reader of books in an original way, an
acute and enterprising man, and he was taken on by a party of Englishmen
who had come out to Ecuador to climb mountains, to replace one of their
three Swiss guides who had fallen ill. He climbed here and he climbed
there, and then came the attempt on Parascotopetl, the Matterhorn of the
Andes, in which he was lost to the outer world. The story of that accident
has been written a dozen times. Pointer's narrative is the best. He tells
how the little party worked their difficult and almost vertical way up to
the very foot of the last and greatest precipice, and how they built a
night shelter amidst the snow upon a little shelf of rock, and, with a
touch of real dramatic power, how presently they found Nunez had gone from
them. They shouted, and there was no reply; shouted and whistled, and for
the rest of that night they slept no more.
[Illustration: "THEY FOUND NUNEZ HAD GONE FROM THEM."]
As the morning broke they saw the traces of his fall. It seems impossible
he could have uttered a sound. He had slipped eastward towards the unknown
side of the mountain; far below he had struck a steep slope of snow, and
ploughed his way down it in the midst of a snow avalanche. His track went
straight to the edge of a frightful precipice, and beyond that everything
was hidden. Far, far below, and hazy with distance, they could see trees
rising out of a narrow, shut-in valley--the lost Country of the Blind. But
they did not know it was the lost Country of the Blind, nor distinguish it
in any way from any other narrow streak of upland valley. Unnerved by this
disaster, they abandoned their attempt in the afternoon, and Pointer was
called away to the war before he could make another attack. To this day
Parascotopetl lifts an unconquered crest, and Pointer's shelter crumbles
unvisited amidst the snows.
And the man who fell survived.
At the end of the slope he fell a thousand feet, and came down in the midst
of a cloud of snow upon a snow-slope even steeper than the one above. Down
this he was whirled, stunned and insensible, but without a bone broken in
his body; and then at last came to gentler slopes, and at last rolled out
and lay still, buried amidst a softening heap of the white masses that had
accompanied and saved him. He came to himself with a dim fancy that he was
ill in bed; then realized his position with a mountaineer's intelligence
and worked himself loose and, after a rest or so, out until he saw the
stars. He rested flat upon his chest for a space, wondering where he was
and what had happened to him. He explored his limbs, and discovered that
several of his buttons were gone and his coat turned over his head. His
knife had gone from his pocket and his hat was lost, though he had tied it
under his chin. He recalled that he had been looking for loose stones to
raise his piece of the shelter wall. His ice-axe had disappeared.
He decided he must have fallen, and looked up to see, exaggerated by the
ghastly light of the rising moon, the tremendous flight he had taken. For a
while he lay, gazing blankly at that vast, pale cliff towering above,
rising moment by moment out of a subsiding tide of darkness. Its
phantasmal, mysterious beauty held him for a space, and then he was seized
with a paroxysm of sobbing laughter....
After a great interval of time he became aware that he was near the lower
edge of the snow. Below, down what was now a moon-lit and practicable
slope, he saw the dark and broken appearance of rock-strewn turf. He
struggled to his feet, aching in every joint and limb, got down painfully
from the heaped loose snow about him, went downward until he was on the
turf, and there dropped rather than lay beside a boulder, drank deep from
the flask in his inner pocket, and instantly fell asleep....
He was awakened by the singing of birds in the trees far below.
He sat up and perceived he was on a little alp at the foot of a vast
precipice that sloped only a little in the gully down which he and his snow
had come. Over against him another wall of rock reared itself against the
sky. The gorge between these precipices ran east and west and was full of
the morning sunlight, which lit to the westward the mass of fallen mountain
that closed the descending gorge. Below him it seemed there was a precipice
equally steep, but behind the snow in the gully he found a sort of
chimney-cleft dripping with snow-water, down which a desperate man might
venture. He found it easier than it seemed, and came at last to another
desolate alp, and then after a rock climb of no particular difficulty to a
steep slope of trees. He took his bearings and turned his face up the
gorge, for he saw it opened out above upon green meadows, among which he
now glimpsed quite distinctly a cluster of stone huts of unfamiliar
fashion. At times his progress was like clambering along the face of a
wall, and after a time the rising sun ceased to strike along the gorge, the
voices of the singing birds died away, and the air grew cold and dark about
him. But the distant valley with its houses was all the brighter for that.
He came presently to talus, and among the rocks he noted--for he was an
observant man--an unfamiliar fern that seemed to clutch out of the crevices
with intense green hands. He picked a frond or so and gnawed its stalk, and
found it helpful.
About midday he came at last out of the throat of the gorge into the plain
and the sunlight. He was stiff and weary; he sat down in the shadow of a
rock, filled up his flask with water from a spring and drank it down, and
remained for a time, resting before he went on to the houses.
They were very strange to his eyes, and indeed the whole aspect of that
valley became, as he regarded it, queerer and more unfamiliar. The greater
part of its surface was lush green meadow, starred with many beautiful
flowers, irrigated with extraordinary care, and bearing evidence of
systematic cropping piece by piece. High up and ringing the valley about
was a wall, and what appeared to be a circumferential water channel, from
which the little trickles of water that fed the meadow plants came, and on
the higher slopes above this flocks of llamas cropped the scanty herbage.
Sheds, apparently shelters or feeding-places for the llamas, stood against
the boundary wall here and there. The irrigation streams ran together into
a main channel down the centre of the valley, and this was enclosed on
either side by a wall breast high. This gave a singularly urban quality to
this secluded place, a quality that was greatly enhanced by the fact that a
number of paths paved with black and white stones, and each with a curious
little kerb at the side, ran hither and thither in an orderly manner. The
houses of the central village were quite unlike the casual and
higgledy-piggledy agglomeration of the mountain villages he knew; they
stood in a continuous row on either side of a central street of astonishing
cleanness, here and there their parti-coloured facade was pierced by a
door, and not a solitary window broke their even frontage. They were
parti-coloured with extraordinary irregularity, smeared with a sort of
plaster that was sometimes grey, sometimes drab, sometimes slate-coloured
or dark brown; and it was the sight of this wild plastering first brought
the word "blind" into the thoughts of the explorer. "The good man who did
that," he thought, "must have been as blind as a bat."
He descended a steep place, and so came to the wall and channel that ran
about the valley, near where the latter spouted out its surplus contents
into the deeps of the gorge in a thin and wavering thread of cascade. He
could now see a number of men and women resting on piled heaps of grass, as
if taking a siesta, in the remoter part of the meadow, and nearer the
village a number of recumbent children, and then nearer at hand three men
carrying pails on yokes along a little path that ran from the encircling
wall towards the houses. These latter were clad in garments of llama cloth
and boots and belts of leather, and they wore caps of cloth with back and
ear flaps. They followed one another in single file, walking slowly and
yawning as they walked, like men who have been up all night. There was
something so reassuringly prosperous and respectable in their bearing that
after a moment's hesitation Nunez stood forward as conspicuously as
possible upon his rock, and gave vent to a mighty shout that echoed round
the valley.
[Illustration: "NUNEZ STOOD FORWARD AS CONSPICUOUSLY AS POSSIBLE UPON HIS
ROCK."]
The three men stopped, and moved their heads as though they were looking
about them. They turned their faces this way and that, and Nunez
gesticulated with freedom. But they did not appear to see him for all his
gestures, and after a time, directing themselves towards the mountains far
away to the right, they shouted as if in answer. Nunez bawled again, and
then once more, and as he gestured ineffectually the word "blind" came up
to the top of his thoughts. "The fools must be blind," he said.
When at last, after much shouting and wrath, Nunez crossed the stream by a
little bridge, came through a gate in the wall, and approached them, he was
sure that they were blind. He was sure that this was the Country of the
Blind of which the legends told. Conviction had sprung upon him, and a
sense of great and rather enviable adventure. The three stood side by side,
not looking at him, but with their ears directed towards him, judging him
by his unfamiliar steps. They stood close together like men a little
afraid, and he could see their eyelids closed and sunken, as though the
very balls beneath had shrunk away. There was an expression near awe on
their faces.
"A man," one said, in hardly recognisable Spanish. "A man it is--a man or a
spirit--coming down from the rocks."
But Nunez advanced with the confident steps of a youth who enters upon
life. All the old stories of the lost valley and the Country of the Blind
had come back to his mind, and through his thoughts ran this old proverb,
as if it were a refrain:--
"In the Country of the Blind the One-Eyed Man is King."
"In the Country of the Blind the One-Eyed Man is King."
And very civilly he gave them greeting. He talked to them and used his
eyes.
"Where does he come from, brother Pedro?" asked one.
"Down out of the rocks."
"Over the mountains I come," said Nunez, "out of the country beyond
there--where men can see. From near Bogota--where there are a hundred
thousands of people, and where the city passes out of sight."
"Sight?" muttered Pedro. "Sight?"
"He comes," said the second blind man, "out of the rocks."
The cloth of their coats Nunez saw was curiously fashioned, each with a
different sort of stitching.
They startled him by a simultaneous movement towards him, each with a hand
outstretched. He stepped back from the advance of these spread fingers.
"Come hither," said the third blind man, following his motion and clutching
him neatly.
And they held Nunez and felt him over, saying no word further until they
had done so.
"Carefully," he cried, with a finger in his eye, and found they thought
that organ, with its fluttering lids, a queer thing in him. They went over
it again.
"A strange creature, Correa," said the one called Pedro. "Feel the
coarseness of his hair. Like a llama's hair."
"Rough he is as the rocks that begot him," said Correa, investigating
Nunez's unshaven chin with a soft and slightly moist hand. "Perhaps he will
grow finer."
Nunez struggled a little under their examination, but they gripped him
firm.
"Carefully," he said again.
"He speaks," said the third man. "Certainly he is a man."
"Ugh!" said Pedro, at the roughness of his coat.
"And you have come into the world?" asked Pedro.
"_Out_ of the world. Over mountains and glaciers; right over above there,
half-way to the sun. Out of the great, big world that goes down, twelve
days' journey to the sea."
They scarcely seemed to heed him. "Our fathers have told us men may be made
by the forces of Nature," said Correa. "It is the warmth of things, and
moisture, and rottenness--rottenness."
"Let us lead him to the elders," said Pedro.
"Shout first," said Correa, "lest the children be afraid. This is a
marvellous occasion."
So they shouted, and Pedro went first and took Nunez by the hand to lead
him to the houses.
He drew his hand away. "I can see," he said.
"See?" said Correa.
"Yes; see," said Nunez, turning towards him, and stumbled against Pedro's
pail.
"His senses are still imperfect," said the third blind man. "He stumbles,
and talks unmeaning words. Lead him by the hand."
"As you will," said Nunez, and was led along, laughing.
It seemed they knew nothing of sight.
Well, all in good time he would teach them.
He heard people shouting, and saw a number of figures gathering together
in the middle roadway of the village.
[Illustration: "'CAREFULLY,' HE CRIED, WITH A FINGER IN HIS EYE."]
He found it tax his nerve and patience more than he had anticipated, that
first encounter with the population of the Country of the Blind. The place
seemed larger as he drew near to it, and the smeared plasterings queerer,
and a crowd of children and men and women (the women and girls he was
pleased to note had, some of them, quite sweet faces, for all that their
eyes were shut and sunken) came about him, holding on to him, touching him
with soft, sensitive hands, smelling at him, and listening at every word he
spoke. Some of the maidens and children, however, kept aloof as if afraid,
and indeed his voice seemed coarse and rude beside their softer notes. They
mobbed him. His three guides kept close to him with an effect of
proprietorship, and said again and again, "A wild man out of the rocks."
"Bogota," he said. "Bogota. Over the mountain crests."
"A wild man--using wild words," said Pedro. "Did you hear that--_Bogota_?
His mind has hardly formed yet. He has only the beginnings of speech."
A little boy nipped his hand. "Bogota!" he said, mockingly.
"Aye! A city to your village. I come from the great world--where men have
eyes and see."
"His name's Bogota," they said.
"He stumbled," said Correa--"stumbled twice as we came hither."
"Bring him in to the elders."
And they thrust him suddenly through a doorway into a room as black as
pitch, save at the end there faintly glowed a fire. The crowd closed in
behind him and shut out all but the faintest glimmer of day, and before he
could arrest himself he had fallen headlong over the feet of a seated man.
His arm, out-flung, struck the face of someone else as he went down; he
felt the soft impact of features and heard a cry of anger, and for a moment
he struggled against a number of hands that clutched him. It was a
one-sided fight. An inkling of the situation came to him and he lay quiet.
"I fell down," he said; "I couldn't see in this pitchy darkness."
There was a pause as if the unseen persons about him tried to understand
his words. Then the voice of Correa said: "He is but newly formed. He
stumbles as he walks and mingles words that mean nothing with his speech."
Others also said things about him that he heard or understood imperfectly.
"May I sit up?" he asked, in a pause. "I will not struggle against you
again."
They consulted and let him rise.
The voice of an older man began to question him, and Nunez found himself
trying to explain the great world out of which he had fallen, and the sky
and mountains and sight and such-like marvels, to these elders who sat in
darkness in the Country of the Blind. And they would believe and understand
nothing whatever that he told them, a thing quite outside his expectation.
They would not even understand many of his words. For fourteen generations
these people had been blind and cut off from all the seeing world; the
names for all the things of sight had faded and changed; the story of the
outer world was faded and changed to a child's story; and they had ceased
to concern themselves with anything beyond the rocky slopes above their
circling wall. Blind men of genius had arisen among them and questioned the
shreds of belief and tradition they had brought with them from their seeing
days, and had dismissed all these things as idle fancies and replaced them
with new and saner explanations. Much of their imagination had shrivelled
with their eyes, and they had made for themselves new imaginations with
their ever more sensitive ears and fingertips. Slowly Nunez realized this:
that his expectation of wonder and reverence at his origin and his gifts
was not to be borne out; and after his poor attempt to explain sight to
them had been set aside as the confused version of a new-made being
describing the marvels of his incoherent sensations, he subsided, a little
dashed, into listening to their instruction. And the eldest of the blind
men explained to him life and philosophy and religion, how that the world
(meaning their valley) had been first an empty hollow in the rocks, and
then had come first inanimate things without the gift of touch, and llamas
and a few other creatures that had little sense, and then men, and at last
angels, whom one could hear singing and making fluttering sounds, but whom
no one could touch at all, which puzzled Nunez greatly until he thought of
the birds.
He went on to tell Nunez how this time had been divided into the warm and
the cold, which are the blind equivalents of day and night, and how it was
good to sleep in the warm and work during the cold, so that now, but for
his advent, the whole town of the blind would have been asleep. He said
Nunez must have been specially created to learn and serve the wisdom they
had acquired, and that for all his mental incoherency and stumbling
behaviour he must have courage and do his best to learn, and at that all
the people in the doorway murmured encouragingly. He said the night--for
the blind call their day night--was now far gone, and it behoved everyone
to go back to sleep. He asked Nunez if he knew how to sleep, and Nunez said
he did, but that before sleep he wanted food. They brought him food,
llama's milk in a bowl and rough salted bread, and led him into a lonely
place to eat out of their hearing, and afterwards to slumber until the
chill of the mountain evening roused them to begin their day again. But
Nunez slumbered not at all.
Instead, he sat up in the place where they had left him, resting his limbs
and turning the unanticipated circumstances of his arrival over and over in
his mind.
Every now and then he laughed, sometimes with amusement and sometimes with
indignation.
"Unformed mind!" he said. "Got no senses yet! They little know they've been
insulting their Heaven-sent King and master....
"I see I must bring them to reason.
"Let me think.
"Let me think."
He was still thinking when the sun set.
Nunez had an eye for all beautiful things, and it seemed to him that the
glow upon the snow-fields and glaciers that rose about the valley on every
side was the most beautiful thing he had ever seen. His eyes went from that
inaccessible glory to the village and irrigated fields, fast sinking into
the twilight, and suddenly a wave of emotion took him, and he thanked God
from the bottom of his heart that the power of sight had been given him.
He heard a voice calling to him from out of the village.
"Yaho there, Bogota! Come hither!"
At that he stood up, smiling. He would show these people once and for all
what sight would do for a man. They would seek him, but not find him.
"You move not, Bogota," said the voice.
He laughed noiselessly and made two stealthy steps aside from the path.
"Trample not on the grass, Bogota; that is not allowed."
Nunez had scarcely heard the sound he made himself. He stopped, amazed.
The owner of the voice came running up the piebald path towards him.
He stepped back into the pathway. "Here I am," he said.
"Why did you not come when I called you?" said the blind man. "Must you be
led like a child? Cannot you hear the path as you walk?"
Nunez laughed. "I can see it," he said.
"There is no such word as _see_," said the blind man, after a pause. "Cease
this folly and follow the sound of my feet."
Nunez followed, a little annoyed.
"My time will come," he said.
"You'll learn," the blind man answered. "There is much to learn in the
world."
"Has no one told you, 'In the Country of the Blind the One-Eyed Man is
King'?"
"What is blind?" asked the blind man, carelessly, over his shoulder.
Four days passed and the fifth found the King of the Blind still incognito,
as a clumsy and useless stranger among his subjects.
It was, he found, much more difficult to proclaim himself than he had
supposed, and in the meantime, while he meditated his _coup d'etat_, he did
what he was told and learnt the manners and customs of the Country of the
Blind. He found working and going about at night a particularly irksome
thing, and he decided that that should be the first thing he would change.
They led a simple, laborious life, these people, with all the elements of
virtue and happiness as these things can be understood by men. They toiled,
but not oppressively; they had food and clothing sufficient for their
needs; they had days and seasons of rest; they made much of music and
singing, and there was love among them and little children. It was
marvellous with what confidence and precision they went about their ordered
world. Everything, you see, had been made to fit their needs; each of the
radiating paths of the valley area had a constant angle to the others, and
was distinguished by a special notch upon its kerbing; all obstacles and
irregularities of path or meadow had long since been cleared away; all
their methods and procedure arose naturally from their special needs. Their
senses had become marvellously acute; they could hear and judge the
slightest gesture of a man a dozen paces away--could hear the very beating
of his heart. Intonation had long replaced expression with them, and
touches gesture, and their work with hoe and spade and fork was as free and
confident as garden work can be. Their sense of smell was extraordinarily
fine; they could distinguish individual differences as readily as a dog
can, and they went about the tending of llamas, who lived among the rocks
above and came to the wall for food and shelter, with ease and confidence.
It was only when at last Nunez sought to assert himself that he found how
easy and confident their movements could be.
He rebelled only after he had tried persuasion.
[Illustration: "THE GLOW UPON THE SNOW-FIELDS AND GLACIERS WAS THE MOST
BEAUTIFUL THING HE HAD EVER SEEN."]
He tried at first on several occasions to tell them of sight. "Look you
here, you people," he said. "There are things you do not understand in me."
Once or twice one or two of them attended to him; they sat with faces
downcast and ears turned intelligently towards him, and he did his best to
tell them what it was to see. Among his hearers was a girl, with eyelids
less red and sunken than the others, so that one could almost fancy she was
hiding eyes, whom especially he hoped to persuade. He spoke of the beauties
of sight, of watching the mountains, of the sky and the sunrise, and they
heard him with amused incredulity that presently became condemnatory. They
told him there were indeed no mountains at all, but that the end of the
rocks where the llamas grazed was indeed the end of the world; thence
sprang a cavernous roof of the universe, from which the dew and the
avalanches fell; and when he maintained stoutly the world had neither end
nor roof such as they supposed, they said his thoughts were wicked. So far
as he could describe sky and clouds and stars to them it seemed to them a
hideous void, a terrible blankness in the place of the smooth roof to
things in which they believed--it was an article of faith with them that
the cavern roof was exquisitely smooth to the touch. He saw that in some
manner he shocked them, and gave up that aspect of the matter altogether,
and tried to show them the practical value of sight. One morning he saw
Pedro in the path called Seventeen and coming towards the central houses,
but still too far off for hearing or scent, and he told them as much. "In a
little while," he prophesied, "Pedro will be here." An old man remarked
that Pedro had no business on path Seventeen, and then, as if in
confirmation, that individual as he drew near turned and went transversely
into path Ten, and so back with nimble paces towards the outer wall. They
mocked Nunez when Pedro did not arrive, and afterwards, when he asked Pedro
questions to clear his character, Pedro denied and outfaced him, and was
afterwards hostile to him.
Then he induced them to let him go a long way up the sloping meadows
towards the wall with one complaisant individual, and to him he promised to
describe all that happened among the houses. He noted certain goings and
comings, but the things that really seemed to signify to these people
happened inside of or behind the windowless houses--the only things they
took note of to test him by--and of those he could see or tell nothing; and
it was after the failure of this attempt, and the ridicule they could not
repress, that he resorted to force. He thought of seizing a spade and
suddenly smiting one or two of them to earth, and so in fair combat showing
the advantage of eyes. He went so far with that resolution as to seize his
spade, and then he discovered a new thing about himself, and that was that
it was impossible for him to hit a blind man in cold blood.
He hesitated, and found them all aware that he had snatched up the spade.
They stood all alert, with their heads on one side, and bent ears towards
him for what he would do next.
"Put that spade down," said one, and he felt a sort of helpless horror. He
came near obedience.
Then he had thrust one backwards against a house wall, and fled past him
and out of the village.
He went athwart one of their meadows, leaving a track of trampled grass
behind his feet, and presently sat down by the side of one of their ways.
He felt something of the buoyancy that comes to all men in the beginning of
a fight, but more perplexity. He began to realize that you cannot even
fight happily with creatures who stand upon a different mental basis to
yourself. Far away he saw a number of men carrying spades and sticks come
out of the street of houses and advance in a spreading line along the
several paths towards him. They advanced slowly, speaking frequently to one
another, and ever and again the whole cordon would halt and sniff the air
and listen.
The first time they did this Nunez laughed. But afterwards he did not
laugh.
One struck his trail in the meadow grass and came stooping and feeling his
way along it.
For five minutes he watched the slow extension of the cordon, and then his
vague disposition to do something forthwith became frantic. He stood up,
went a pace or so towards the circumferential wall, turned, and went back a
little way. There they all stood in a crescent, still and listening.
He also stood still, gripping his spade very tightly in both hands. Should
he charge them?
The pulse in his ears ran into the rhythm of "In the Country of the Blind
the One-Eyed Man is King!"
Should he charge them?
He looked back at the high and unclimbable wall behind--unclimbable because
of its smooth plastering, but withal pierced with many little doors, and at
the approaching line of seekers. Behind these others were now coming out of
the street of houses.
Should he charge them?
"Bogota!" called one. "Bogota! where are you?"
He gripped his spade still tighter and advanced down the meadows towards
the place of habitations, and directly he moved they converged upon him.
"I'll hit them if they touch me," he swore; "by Heaven, I will. I'll hit."
He called aloud, "Look here, I'm going to do what I like in this valley! Do
you hear? I'm going to do what I like and go where I like."
[Illustration: "THEY WERE MOVING IN UPON HIM QUICKLY."]
They were moving in upon him quickly, groping, yet moving rapidly. It was
like playing blind man's buff with everyone blind-folded except one. "Get
hold of him!" cried one. He found himself in the arc of a loose curve of
pursuers. He felt suddenly he must be active and resolute.
"You don't understand," he cried, in a voice that was meant to be great and
resolute, and which broke. "You are blind and I can see. Leave me alone!"
"Bogota! Put down that spade and come off the grass!"
The last order, grotesque in its urban familiarity, produced a gust of
anger. "I'll hurt you," he said, sobbing with emotion. "By Heaven, I'll
hurt you! Leave me alone!"
He began to run--not knowing clearly where to run. He ran from the nearest
blind man, because it was a horror to hit him. He stopped, and then made a
dash to escape from their closing ranks. He made for where a gap was wide,
and the men on either side, with a quick perception of the approach of his
paces, rushed in on one another. He sprang forward, and then saw he must be
caught, and _swish!_ the spade had struck. He felt the soft thud of hand
and arm, and the man was down with a yell of pain, and he was through.
Through! And then he was close to the street of houses again, and blind
men, whirling spades and stakes, were running with a sort of reasoned
swiftness hither and thither.
He heard steps behind him just in time, and found a tall man rushing
forward and swiping at the sound of him. He lost his nerve, hurled his
spade a yard wide at this antagonist, and whirled about and fled, fairly
yelling as he dodged another.
He was panic-stricken. He ran furiously to and fro, dodging when there was
no need to dodge, and, in his anxiety to see on every side of him at once,
stumbling. For a moment he was down and they heard his fall. Far away in
the circumferential wall a little doorway looked like Heaven, and he set
off in a wild rush for it. He did not even look round at his pursuers until
it was gained, and he had stumbled across the bridge, clambered a little
way among the rocks, to the surprise and dismay of a young llama, who went
leaping out of sight, and lay down sobbing for breath.
And so his _coup d'etat_ came to an end.
He stayed outside the wall of the valley of the blind for two nights and
days without food or shelter, and meditated upon the Unexpected. During
these meditations he repeated very frequently and always with a profounder
note of derision the exploded proverb: "In the Country of the Blind the
One-Eyed Man is King." He thought chiefly of ways of fighting and
conquering these people, and it grew clear that for him no practicable way
was possible. He had no weapons, and now it would be hard to get one.
The canker of civilization had got to him even in Bogota, and he could not
find it in himself to go down and assassinate a blind man. Of course, if he
did that, he might then dictate terms on the threat of assassinating them
all. But----Sooner or later he must sleep!...
He tried also to find food among the pine trees, to be comfortable under
pine boughs while the frost fell at night, and--with less confidence--to
catch a llama by artifice in order to try to kill it--perhaps by hammering
it with a stone--and so finally, perhaps, to eat some of it. But the llamas
had a doubt of him and regarded him with distrustful brown eyes and spat
when he drew near. Fear came on him the second day and fits of shivering.
Finally he crawled down to the wall of the Country of the Blind and tried
to make his terms. He crawled along by the stream, shouting, until two
blind men came out to the gate and talked to him.
"I was mad," he said. "But I was only newly made."
They said that was better.
He told them he was wiser now, and repented of all he had done.
Then he wept without intention, for he was very weak and ill now, and they
took that as a favourable sign.
They asked him if he still thought he could "_see_."
"No," he said. "That was folly. The word means nothing. Less than nothing!"
They asked him what was overhead.
"About ten times ten the height of a man there is a roof above the
world--of rock--and very, very smooth. So smooth--so beautifully
smooth...." He burst again into hysterical tears. "Before you ask me any
more, give me some food or I shall die!"
He expected dire punishments, but these blind people were capable of
toleration. They regarded his rebellion as but one more proof of his
general idiocy and inferiority, and after they had whipped him they
appointed him to do the simplest and heaviest work they had for anyone to
do, and he, seeing no other way of living, did submissively what he was
told.
He was ill for some days and they nursed him kindly. That refined his
submission. But they insisted on his lying in the dark, and that was a
great misery. And blind philosophers came and talked to him of the wicked
levity of his mind, and reproved him so impressively for his doubts about
the lid of rock that covered their cosmic _casserole_ that he almost
doubted whether indeed he was not the victim of hallucination in not seeing
it overhead.
So Nunez became a citizen of the Country of the Blind, and these people
ceased to be a generalized people and became individualities to him, and
familiar to him, while the world beyond the mountains became more and more
remote and unreal. There was Yacob, his master, a kindly man when not
annoyed; there was Pedro, Yacob's nephew; and there was Medina-sarote, who
was the youngest daughter of Yacob. She was little esteemed in the world of
the blind, because she had a clear-cut face and lacked that satisfying,
glossy smoothness that is the blind man's ideal of feminine beauty, but
Nunez thought her beautiful at first, and presently the most beautiful
thing in the whole creation. Her closed eyelids were not sunken and red
after the common way of the valley, but lay as though they might open again
at any moment; and she had long eyelashes, which were considered a grave
disfigurement. And her voice was weak and did not satisfy the acute hearing
of the valley swains. So that she had no lover.
There came a time when Nunez thought that, could he win her, he would be
resigned to live in the valley for all the rest of his days.
He watched her; he sought opportunities of doing her little services, and
presently he found that she observed him. Once at a rest-day gathering they
sat side by side in the dim starlight, and the music was sweet. His hand
came upon hers and he dared to clasp it. Then very tenderly she returned
his pressure. And one day, as they were at their meal in the darkness, he
felt her hand very softly seeking him, and as it chanced the fire leapt
then, and he saw the tenderness of her face.
He sought to speak to her.
He went to her one day when she was sitting in the summer moonlight
spinning. The light made her a thing of silver and mystery. He sat down at
her feet and told her he loved her, and told her how beautiful she seemed
to him. He had a lover's voice, he spoke with a tender reverence that came
near to awe, and she had never before been touched by adoration. She made
him no definite answer, but it was clear his words pleased her.
[Illustration: "HE SAT DOWN AT HER FEET."]
After that he talked to her whenever he could take an opportunity. The
valley became the world for him, and the world beyond the mountains where
men lived by day seemed no more than a fairy tale he would some day pour
into her ears. Very tentatively and timidly he spoke to her of sight.
Sight seemed to her the most poetical of fancies, and she listened to his
description of the stars and the mountains and her own sweet white-lit
beauty as though it was a guilty indulgence. She did not believe, she could
only half understand, but she was mysteriously delighted, and it seemed to
him that she completely understood.
His love lost its awe and took courage. Presently he was for demanding her
of Yacob and the elders in marriage, but she became fearful and delayed.
And it was one of her elder sisters who first told Yacob that Medina-sarote
and Nunez were in love.
There was from the first very great opposition to the marriage of Nunez and
Medina-sarote; not so much because they valued her as because they held him
as a being apart, an idiot, incompetent thing below the permissible level
of a man. Her sisters opposed it bitterly as bringing discredit on them
all; and old Yacob, though he had formed a sort of liking for his clumsy,
obedient serf, shook his head and said the thing could not be. The young
men were all angry at the idea of corrupting the race, and one went so far
as to revile and strike Nunez. He struck back. Then for the first time he
found an advantage in seeing, even by twilight, and after that fight was
over no one was disposed to raise a hand against him. But they still found
his marriage impossible.
Old Yacob had a tenderness for his last little daughter, and was grieved to
have her weep upon his shoulder.
"You see, my dear, he's an idiot. He has delusions; he can't do anything
right."
"I know," wept Medina-sarote. "But he's better than he was. He's getting
better. And he's strong, dear father, and kind--stronger and kinder than
any other man in the world. And he loves me--and, father, I love him."
Old Yacob was greatly distressed to find her inconsolable, and,
besides--what made it more distressing--he liked Nunez for many things. So
he went and sat in the windowless council-chamber with the other elders and
watched the trend of the talk, and said, at the proper time, "He's better
than he was. Very likely, some day, we shall find him as sane as
ourselves."
Then afterwards one of the elders, who thought deeply, had an idea. He was
the great doctor among these people, their medicine-man, and he had a very
philosophical and inventive mind, and the idea of curing Nunez of his
peculiarities appealed to him. One day when Yacob was present he returned
to the topic of Nunez. "I have examined Nunez," he said, "and the case is
clearer to me. I think very probably he might be cured."
"That is what I have always hoped," said old Yacob.
"His brain is affected," said the blind doctor.
The elders murmured assent.
[Illustration: "'HIS BRAIN IS AFFECTED,' SAID THE BLIND DOCTOR."]
"Now, _what_ affects it?"
"Ah!" said old Yacob.
"_This_," said the doctor, answering his own question. "Those queer things
that are called the eyes, and which exist to make an agreeable depression
in the face, are diseased, in the case of Nunez, in such a way as to affect
his brain. They are greatly distended, he has eyelashes, and his eyelids
move, and consequently his brain is in a state of constant irritation and
distraction."
"Yes?" said old Yacob. "Yes?"
"And I think I may say with reasonable certainty that, in order to cure him
completely, all that we need to do is a simple and easy surgical
operation--namely, to remove these irritant bodies."
"And then he will be sane?"
"Then he will be perfectly sane, and a quite admirable citizen."
"Thank Heaven for science!" said old Yacob, and went forth at once to tell
Nunez of his happy hopes.
But Nunez's manner of receiving the good news struck him as being cold and
disappointing.
"One might think," he said, "from the tone you take that you did not care
for my daughter."
It was Medina-sarote who persuaded Nunez to face the blind surgeons.
"_You_ do not want me," he said, "to lose my gift of sight?"
She shook her head.
"My world is sight."
Her head drooped lower.
"There are the beautiful things, the beautiful little things--the flowers,
the lichens amidst the rocks, the light and softness on a piece of fur, the
far sky with its drifting down of clouds, the sunsets and the stars. And
there is _you_. For you alone it is good to have sight, to see your sweet,
serene face, your kindly lips, your dear, beautiful hands folded
together.... It is these eyes of mine you won, these eyes that hold me to
you, that these idiots seek. Instead, I must touch you, hear you, and never
see you again. I must come under that roof of rock and stone and darkness,
that horrible roof under which your imaginations stoop.... _No_; _you_
would not have me do that?"
A disagreeable doubt had arisen in him. He stopped and left the thing a
question.
"I wish," she said, "sometimes----" She paused.
"Yes?" said he, a little apprehensively.
"I wish sometimes--you would not talk like that."
"Like what?"
[Illustration: "HE HAD A FEW MINUTES WITH MEDINA-SAROTE BEFORE SHE WENT
APART TO SLEEP."]
"I know it's pretty--it's your imagination. I love it, but _now_----"
He felt cold. "_Now?_" he said, faintly.
She sat quite still.
"You mean--you think--I should be better, better perhaps----"
He was realizing things very swiftly. He felt anger perhaps, anger at the
dull course of fate, but also sympathy for her lack of understanding--a
sympathy near akin to pity. "_Dear_," he said, and he could see by her
whiteness how tensely her spirit pressed against the things she could not
say. He put his arms about her, he kissed her ear, and they sat for a time
in silence.
"If I were to consent to this?" he said at last, in a voice that was very
gentle.
She flung her arms about him, weeping wildly. "Oh, if you would," she
sobbed, "if only you would!"
* * * * *
For a week before the operation that was to raise him from his servitude
and inferiority to the level of a blind citizen Nunez knew nothing of
sleep, and all through the warm, sunlit hours, while the others slumbered
happily, he sat brooding or wandered aimlessly, trying to bring his mind to
bear on his dilemma. He had given his answer, he had given his consent, and
still he was not sure. And at last work-time was over, the sun rose in
splendour over the golden crests, and his last day of vision began for him.
He had a few minutes with Medina-sarote before she went apart to sleep.
"To-morrow," he said, "I shall see no more."
"Dear heart!" she answered, and pressed his hands with all her strength.
"They will hurt you but little," she said; "and you are going through this
pain, you are going through it, dear lover, for _me_.... Dear, if a woman's
heart and life can do it, I will repay you. My dearest one, my dearest with
the tender voice, I will repay."
He was drenched in pity for himself and her.
He held her in his arms, and pressed his lips to hers and looked on her
sweet face for the last time. "Good-bye!" he whispered to that dear sight,
"good-bye!"
And then in silence he turned away from her.
She could hear his slow retreating footsteps, and something in the rhythm
of them threw her into a passion of weeping.
He walked away.
He had fully meant to go to a lonely place where the meadows were beautiful
with white narcissus, and there remain until the hour of his sacrifice
should come, but as he walked he lifted up his eyes and saw the morning,
the morning like an angel in golden armour, marching down the steeps....
It seemed to him that before this splendour he and this blind world in the
valley, and his love and all, were no more than a pit of sin.
He did not turn aside as he had meant to do, but went on and passed through
the wall of the circumference and out upon the rocks, and his eyes were
always upon the sunlit ice and snow.
He saw their infinite beauty, and his imagination soared over them to the
things beyond he was now to resign for ever!
He thought of that great free world that he was parted from, the world that
was his own, and he had a vision of those further slopes, distance beyond
distance, with Bogota, a place of multitudinous stirring beauty, a glory by
day, a luminous mystery by night, a place of palaces and fountains and
statues and white houses, lying beautifully in the middle distance. He
thought how for a day or so one might come down through passes drawing ever
nearer and nearer to its busy streets and ways. He thought of the river
journey, day by day, from great Bogota to the still vaster world beyond,
through towns and villages, forest and desert places, the rushing river day
by day, until its banks receded and the big steamers came splashing by and
one had reached the sea--the limitless sea, with its thousand islands, its
thousands of islands, and its ships seen dimly far away in their incessant
journeyings round and about that greater world. And there, unpent by
mountains, one saw the sky--the sky, not such a disc as one saw it here,
but an arch of immeasurable blue, a deep of deeps in which the circling
stars were floating....
His eyes began to scrutinize the great curtain of the mountains with a
keener inquiry.
For example: if one went so, up that gully and to that chimney there, then
one might come out high among those stunted pines that ran round in a sort
of shelf and rose still higher and higher as it passed above the gorge. And
then? That talus might be managed. Thence perhaps a climb might be found to
take him up to the precipice that came below the snow; and if that chimney
failed, then another farther to the east might serve his purpose better.
And then? Then one would be out upon the amber-lit snow there, and half-way
up to the crest of those beautiful desolations. And suppose one had good
fortune!
He glanced back at the village, then turned right round and regarded it
with folded arms.
He thought of Medina-sarote, and she had become small and remote.
He turned again towards the mountain wall down which the day had come to
him.
Then, very circumspectly he began his climb.
* * * * *
When sunset came he was no longer climbing, but he was far and high. His
clothes were torn, his limbs were blood-stained, he was bruised in many
places, but he lay as if he were at his ease, and there was a smile on his
face.
From where he rested the valley seemed as if it were in a pit and nearly a
mile below. Already it was dim with haze and shadow, though the mountain
summits around him were things of light and fire. The mountain summits
around him were things of light and fire, and the little things in the
rocks near at hand were drenched with light and beauty, a vein of green
mineral piercing the grey, a flash of small crystal here and there, a
minute, minutely-beautiful orange lichen close beside his face. There were
deep, mysterious shadows in the gorge, blue deepening into purple, and
purple into a luminous darkness, and overhead was the illimitable vastness
of the sky. But he heeded these things no longer, but lay quite still
there, smiling as if he were content now merely to have escaped from the
valley of the Blind, in which he had thought to be King. And the glow of
the sunset passed, and the night came, and still he lay there, under the
cold, clear stars.
_Off the Track in London._
BY GEORGE R. SIMS.
I. IN ALIEN-LAND.
It is many a long year since I first began to find delight in wandering
through the least-known districts of the capital, in visiting strange
quarters inhabited by strange people, in penetrating dim, mysterious
regions where thousands of our fellow-citizens live, cut off from the rest
of the populace by a network of streets and slums into which it is nobody's
business but the inhabitants' to enter, and where a visitor from beyond is
rarely seen.
At first my travels were undertaken solely to gratify my own curiosity.
Later on, when there came to me an opportunity of exploring with a less
selfish end in view, many circumstances combined to give me an insight into
the life of the people which I could never have gained as a mere onlooker.
So it has come about that to-day I can not only survey the streets of the
strange lands in the capital of King Edward, but I can enter the houses and
take my notes from the cellar to the roof. I am privileged to sit around
the coke fire in lodging-houses where an ordinary stranger would meet with
scant courtesy; and the mysteries of "How the Poor Live" are freely
unveiled to me. In the vilest of the native quarters, in the queerest of
the foreign quarters, I am permitted to spend days and nights, not peeping
furtively at the human comedies and tragedies in which the strange men and
women are players, but made way for as one entitled to a front place in the
local audience.
Of some of the things that I have seen I have written from time to time,
but I have always longed for the pencil of the artist to enable the reader
to realize what some of the scenes actually mean. And now my wish has been
gratified. I have been able to wander off the track in London accompanied
by an artist _confrere_, and to provide him with opportunities for making
sketches on the spot.
* * * * *
It is four o'clock on Sunday afternoon as we come out of Aldgate Station
and in a few minutes turn into Middlesex Street, littered with paper and
straw and rubbish, the remains of the great Sunday morning market, which is
at its highest at noon and gradually disappears as the afternoon wears on.
The scene is known to most Londoners, for the fame of Petticoat Lane, as
the street was formerly called, has spread through the length and breadth
of the land.
But we must pass through it to get off the track in the Ghetto, which has
burst its old boundaries and now extends over a large area which until
lately was a Christian quarter.
It is not till we come to Wentworth Street that the strangeness of the
Sunday scene reveals itself. Here all the shops are open and the narrow
thoroughfare is packed with the stalls of Jewish hawkers. We hear a little
English at the top of Wentworth Street, but as we push our way through the
seething crowd and get nearer to Brick Lane the English words become rarer
and rarer, and presently only the German Hebrew jargon known as "Yiddish"
reaches our ears.
We are in the heart of the old Ghetto. The alien immigrants, many of them
fresh from the Pale of Settlement in Russia and the persecutions of
Roumania, are chaffering and bargaining with their co-religionists who have
been in London long enough to stock a barrow or a stall and start on the
path of financial progress, which may lead their sons, if not themselves,
_via_ Dalston, Canonbury, Maida Vale, and Bayswater, to Kensington, and
perhaps Park Lane.