Act V. Scene 3.

_After the Battle. The_ PRINCESS _by the Standard on the Ravelin_.

_Enter_ GOW, _with the Crown of the Kingdom_.

GOW. Here’s earnest of the Queen’s submission. This by her last herald--and in haste.

PRINCESS. ’Twas ours already. Where is the woman?

GOW. ’Fled with her horse. They broke at dawn. Noon has not struck, and you’re Queen questionless.

PRINCESS. By you--through you. How shall I honour _you_?

GOW. Me? But for what?

PRINCESS. For all--all--all-- Since the realm sunk beneath us! Hear him! “For what?” Your body ’twixt my bosom and her knife, Your lips on the cup she proffered for my death; Your one cloak over me, that night in the snows, We held the Pass at Bargi. Every hour New strengths, to this most unbelievable last. “Honour him?” I will honour--will honour you--.... ’Tis at your choice.

GOW. Child, mine was long ago.

(_Enter_ FERDINAND, _as from horse_.)

But here’s one worthy honour. Welcome, Fox!

Ferdinand. And to you, Watchdog. This day clenches all. We’ve made it and seen it.

GOW. Is the city held?

FERDINAND. Loyally. Oh, they’re drunk with loyalty yonder. A virtuous mood. Your bombards helped ’em to it.... But here’s my word for you. The Lady Frances----

PRINCESS. I left her sick in the city. No harm, I pray.

FERDINAND. Nothing that she called harm. In truth, so little That (_to_ GOW) I am bidden tell you, she’ll be here Almost as soon as I.

GOW. She says it?

FERDINAND. Writes. This. (_Gives him letter._) Yester eve. ’Twas given me by the priest-- He with her in her hour.

GOW. So? (_Reads_) So it is. She will be here. (_To_ FERDINAND) And all is safe in the city?

FERDINAND. As thy long sword and my lean wits can make it. You’ve naught to stay for. Is it the road again?

GOW. Ay. This time, not alone.... She will be here.

PRINCESS. I am here. You have not looked at me awhile.

GOW. The rest is with you, Ferdinand.... Then free.

PRINCESS. And at my service more than ever. I claim-- (Our wars have taught me)--being your Queen, now, claim You wholly mine.

GOW. Then free.... She will be here! A little while----

PRINCESS (_to_ FERDINAND). He looks beyond, not at me.

FERDINAND. Weariness. We are not so young as once was. ’Two days’ fight-- A worthy servitor--to be allowed Some freedom.

PRINCESS. I have offered him all he would.

FERDINAND. He takes what he has taken.

(_The Spirit of the_ LADY FRANCES _appears to_ GOW.)

GOW. Frances!

PRINCESS. Distraught!

FERDINAND. An old head-blow, may be. He has dealt in them.

GOW (_to the Spirit_). What can the Grave against us, O my Heart, Comfort and light and reason in all things Visible and invisible--my one God? Thou that wast I these barren unyoked years Of triflings now at end! Frances!

PRINCESS. She’s old.

FERDINAND. True. By most reckonings old. They must keep other count.

PRINCESS. He kisses his hand to the air!

FERDINAND. His ring, rather, he kisses. Yes--for sure--the ring.

GOW. Dear and most dear. And now, those very arms. (_Dies._)

PRINCESS. Oh, look! He faints. Haste, you! Unhelm him! Help!

FERDINAND. Needless. No help Avails against that poison. He is sped.

PRINCESS. By his own hand? _This_ hour? When I had offered----

FERDINAND. He had made other choice--an old, old choice, Ne’er swerved from, and now patently sealed in death.

PRINCESS. He called on--the Lady Frances was it? Wherefore?

FERDINAND. Because she was his life. Forgive, my friend-- (_covers_ GOW’S _face_). God’s uttermost beyond me in all faith, Service and passion--if I unveil at last The secret. (_To the Princess_) Thought--dreamed you, it was for _you_ He poured himself--for you resoldered the Crown? Struck here, held there, amended, broke, built up His multiplied imaginings for _you_?

PRINCESS. I thought--I thought he----

FERDINAND. Looked beyond. _Her_ wish Was the sole Law he knew. _She_ did not choose Your House should perish. Therefore he bade it stand. Enough for him when she had breathed a word: ’Twas his to make it iron, stone, or fire, Driving our flesh and blood before his ways As the wind straws. Her one face unregarded Waiting you with your mantle or your glove-- That is the God whom he is gone to worship.

(_Trumpets without. Enter the Prince’s Heralds._)

And here’s the work of Kingship begun again. These from the Prince of Bargi--to whose sword You owe such help as may, he thinks, be paid.... He’s equal in blood, in fortune more than peer, Young, most well favoured, with a heart to love-- And two States in the balance. Do you meet him?

PRINCESS. God and my Misery! I have seen Love at last. What shall content me after?

THE PROPAGATION OF KNOWLEDGE

THE BIRTHRIGHT

_The miracle of our land’s speech--so known And long received, none marvel when ’tis shown!_

We have such wealth as Rome at her most pride Had not or (having) scattered not so wide; Nor with such arrant prodigality Beneath her any pagan’s foot let lie.... Lo! Diamond that cost some half their days To find and t’other half to bring to blaze: Rubies of every heat, wherethrough we scan The fiercer and more fiery heart of man: Emerald that with the uplifted billow vies, And Sapphires evening remembered skies: Pearl perfect, as immortal tears must show, Bred, in deep waters, of a piercing woe; And tender Turkis, so with charms y-writ, Of woven gold, Time dares not bite on it. Thereafter, in all manners worked and set, Jade, coral, amber, crystal, ivories, jet,-- Showing no more than various fancies, yet, Each a Life’s token or Love’s amulet.... Which things, through timeless arrogance of use, We neither guard nor garner, but abuse; So that our scholars--nay, our children--fling In sport or jest treasure to arm a King; And the gross crowd, at feast or market, hold Traffic perforce with dust of gems and gold!

THE PROPAGATION OF KNOWLEDGE

The Army Class “English,” which included the Upper Fifth, was trying to keep awake; for “English” (Literature--Augustan epoch--eighteenth century) came at last lesson, and that, on a blazing July afternoon, meant after every one had been bathing. Even Mr. King found it hard to fight against the snore of the tide along the Pebble Ridge, and spurred himself with strong words.

Since, said he, the pearls of English Literature existed only to be wrenched from their settings and cast before young swine rooting for marks, it was his loathed business--in anticipation of the Army Preliminary Examination which, as usual, would be held at the term’s end, under the auspices of an official examiner sent down _ad hoc_--to prepare for the Form a General Knowledge test-paper, which he would give them next week. It would cover their studies up to date of the Augustans and _King Lear_, which was the selected--and strictly expurgated--Army Exam. play for that year. Now, English Literature, as he might have told them, was _not_ divided into water-tight compartments, but flowed like a river. For example, Samuel Johnson, glory of the Augustans and no mean commentator of Shakespeare, was but one in a mighty procession which----

At this point Beetle’s nodding brows came down with a grunt on the desk. He had been soaking and sunning himself in the open sea-baths built out on the rocks under the cliffs, from two-fifteen to four-forty.

The Army Class took Johnson off their minds. With any luck, Beetle would last King till the tea-bell. King rubbed his hands and began to carve him. He had gone to sleep to show his contempt (_a_) for Mr. King, who might or might not matter, and (_b_) for the Augustans, who, none the less, were not to be sneered at by one whose vast and omnivorous reading, for which such extraordinary facilities had been granted (this was because the Head had allowed Beetle the run of his library), naturally overlooked such _epigonoi_ as Johnson, Swift, Pope, Addison, and the like. Harrison Ainsworth and Marryat doubtless appealed----

Even so, Beetle, salt-encrusted all over except his spectacles and steeped in delicious languors, was sliding back to sleep again, when “Taffy” Howell, the leading light of the Form, who knew his Marryat as well as Stalky did his Surtees, began in his patent, noiseless whisper: “‘Allow me to observe--in the most delicate manner in the world--just to hint----’”

“Under pretext of studying literature, a desultory and unformed mind would naturally return, like the dog of Scripture----”

“‘You’re a damned trencher-scrapin’, napkin-carryin’, shillin’-seekin’, up-an-down-stairs &c.’” Howell breathed.

Beetle choked aloud on the sudden knowledge that King was the ancient and eternal Chucks--later Count Shucksen--of _Peter Simple_. He had not realised it before.

“Sorry, sir. I’m afraid I’ve been asleep, sir,” he sputtered.

The shout of the Army Class diverted the storm. King was grimly glad that Beetle had condescended to honour truth so far. Perhaps he would now lend his awakened ear to a summary of the externals of Dr. Johnson, as limned by Macaulay. And he read, with intention, the just historian’s outline of a grotesque figure with untied shoe-strings, that twitched and grunted, gorged its food, bit its finger-nails, and neglected its ablutions. The Form hailed it as a speaking likeness of Beetle; nor were they corrected.

Then King implored him to vouchsafe his comrades one single fact connected with Dr. Johnson which might at any time have adhered to what, for decency’s sake, must, Mr. King supposed, be called his mind.

Beetle was understood to say that the only thing he could remember was in French.

“You add, then, the Gallic tongue to your accomplishments? The information plus the accent? ’Tis well! Admirable Crichton, proceed!”

And Beetle proceeded with the text of an old Du Maurier drawing in a back-number of _Punch_:

“De tous ces défunts cockolores Le moral Fénelon, Michel Ange et Johnson (Le Docteur) sont les plus awful bores.”

To which Howell, wooingly, just above his breath:

“‘Oh, _won’t_ you come up, come up?’”

Result, as the tea-bell rang, one hundred lines, to be shown up at seven-forty-five that evening. This was meant to blast the pleasant summer interval between tea and prep. Howell, a favourite in “English” as well as Latin, got off; but the Army Class crashed in to tea with a new Limerick.

* * * * *

The imposition was a matter of book-keeping, as far as Beetle was concerned; for it was his custom of rainy afternoons to fabricate store of lines in anticipation of just these accidents. They covered such English verse as interested him at the moment, and helped to fix the stuff in his memory. After tea, he drew the required amount from his drawer in Number Five Study, thrust it into his pocket, went up to the Head’s house, and settled himself in the big Outer Library where, ever since the Head had taken him off all mathematics, he did précis-work and French translation. Here he buried himself in a close-printed, thickish volume which had been his chosen browse for some time. A hideous account of a hanging, drawing, and quartering had first attracted him to it; but later he discovered the book (_Curiosities of Literature_ was its name) full of the finest confused feeding--such as forgeries and hoaxes, Italian literary societies, religious and scholastic controversies of old when men (even that most dreary John Milton, of _Lycidas_) slanged each other, not without dust and heat, in scandalous pamphlets; personal peculiarities of the great; and a hundred other fascinating inutilities. This evening he fell on a description of wandering, mad Elizabethan beggars, known as Tom-a-Bedlams, with incidental references to Edgar who plays at being a Tom-a-Bedlam in _Lear_, but whom Beetle did not consider at all funny. Then, at the foot of a left-hand page, leaped out on him a verse--of incommunicable splendour, opening doors into inexplicable worlds--from a song which Tom-a-Bedlams were supposed to sing. It ran:

With a heart of furious fancies Whereof I am commander, With a burning spear and a horse of air, To the wilderness I wander. With a knight of ghosts and shadows I summoned am to tourney, Ten leagues beyond the wide world’s end-- Methinks it is no journey.

He sat, mouthing and staring before him, till the prep-bell rang and it was time to take his lines up to King’s study and lay them, as hot from the press, in the impot-basket appointed. He carried his dreams on to Number Five. They knew the symptoms of old.

“Readin’ again,” said Stalky, like a wife welcoming her spouse from the pot-house.

“Look here, I’ve found out something----” Beetle began. “Listen----”

“No, you don’t--till afterwards. It’s Turkey’s prep.” This meant it was a Horace Ode through which Turkey would take them for a literal translation, and all possible pitfalls. Stalky gave his businesslike attention, but Beetle’s eye was glazed and his mind adrift throughout, and he asked for things to be repeated. So, when Turkey closed the Horace, justice began to be executed.

“I’m all right,” he protested. “I swear I heard a lot what Turkey said. Shut up! Oh, shut _up_! Do shut up, you putrid asses.” Beetle was speaking from the fender, his head between Turkey’s knees, and Stalky largely over the rest of him.

“What’s the metre of the beastly thing?” McTurk waved his Horace. “Look it up, Stalky. Twelfth of the Third.”

“_Ionicum a minore_,” Stalky reported, closing his book in turn. “Don’t let him forget it”; and Turkey’s Horace marked the metre on Beetle’s skull, with special attention to elisions. It hurt.

“Miserar’ est neq’ amori dare ludum neque dulci Mala vino laver’ aut ex----”

“Got it? You liar! You’ve no ear at all! Chorus, Stalky!”

Both Horaces strove to impart the measure, which was altogether different from its accompaniment. Presently Howell dashed in from his study below.

“Look _out_! If you make this infernal din we’ll have some one up the staircase in a sec.”

“We’re teachin’ Beetle Horace. He was goin’ to burble us some muck he’d read,” the tutors explained.

“’Twasn’t muck! It was about those Tom-a-Bedlams in _Lear_.”

“Oh!” said Stalky. “Why didn’t you say so?”

“’Cause you didn’t listen. They had drinkin’-horns an’ badges, and there’s a Johnson note on Shakespeare about the meanin’ of Edgar sayin’ ‘My horn’s dry.’ But Johnson’s dead-wrong about it. Aubrey says----”

“Who’s Aubrey?” Howell demanded. “Does King know about him?”

“Dunno. Oh yes, an’ Johnson started to learn Dutch when he was seventy.”

“What the deuce for?” Stalky asked.

“For a change after his Dikker, I suppose,” Howell suggested.

“And I looked up a lot of other English stuff, too. I’m goin’ to try it all on King.”

“Showin’-off as usual,” said the acid McTurk, who, like his race, lived and loved to destroy illusions.

“No. For a draw. He’s an unjust dog! If you read, he says you’re showin’-off. If you don’t, you’re a mark-huntin’ Philistine. What does he want you to do, curse him?”

“Shut up, Beetle!” Stalky pronounced. “There’s more than draws in this. You’ve cribbed your maths off me ever since you came to Coll. You don’t know what a co-sine is, even _now_. Turkey does all your Latin.”

“I like that! Who does both your _Picciolas_?”

“French don’t count. It’s time you began to work for your giddy livin’ an’ help us. _You_ aren’t goin’ up for anythin’ that matters. Play for your side, as Heffles says, or die the death! You don’t want to die the death, again, do you? Now, let’s hear about that stinkard Johnson swottin’ Dutch. You’re sure it was Sammivel, not Binjamin? You _are_ so dam’ inaccurate!”

Beetle conducted an attentive class on the curiosities of literature for nearly a quarter of an hour. As Stalky pointed out, he promised to be useful.

* * * * *

The Horace Ode next morning ran well; and King was content. Then, in full feather, he sailed round the firmament at large, and, somehow, apropos to something or other, used the word “della Cruscan”--“if any of you have the faintest idea of its origin.” Some one hadn’t caught it correctly; which gave Beetle just time to whisper “Bran--an’ mills,” to Howell, who said promptly: “Hasn’t it somethin’ to do with mills--an’ bran, sir?” King cast himself into poses of stricken wonder. “Oddly enough,” said he, “it has.”

They were then told a great deal about some silly Italian Academy of Letters which borrowed its office furniture from the equipment of mediæval flour-mills. And: “How has our Ap-Howell come by his knowledge?” Howell, being, indeed, Welsh, thought that it might have been something he had read in the holidays. King openly purred over him.

“If that had been _me_,” Beetle observed while they were toying with sardines between lessons, “he’d ha’ dropped on me for showin’-off.”

“See what we’re savin’ you from,” Stalky answered. “I’m playin’ Johnson, ’member, this afternoon.”

That, too, came cleanly off the bat; and King was gratified by this interest in the Doctor’s studies. But Stalky hadn’t a ghost of a notion how he had come by the fact.

“Why didn’t you say your father told you?” Beetle asked at tea.

“My-y Lord! Have you ever seen the guv’nor?” Stalky collapsed shrieking among the piles of bread and butter. “Well, look here. Taffy goes in to-morrow about those drinkin’ horns an’ Tom-a-Bedlams. You cut up to the library after tea, Beetle. You know what King’s English papers are like. Look out useful stuff for answers an’ we’ll divvy at prep.”

At prep, then, Beetle, loaded with assorted curiosities, made his forecast. He argued that there were bound to be a good many “what-do-you-know-abouts” those infernal Augustans. Pope was generally a separate item; but the odds were that Swift, Addison, Steele, Johnson, and Goldsmith would be lumped under one head. Dryden was possible, too, though rather outside the Epoch.

“Dryden. Oh! ‘Glorious John!’ ’Know _that_ much, anyhow,” Stalky vaunted.

“Then lug in Claude Halcro in the _Pirate_,” Beetle advised. “He’s always sayin’ ‘Glorious John.’ King’s a hog on Scott, too.”

“No-o. I don’t read Scott. You take this Hell Crow chap, Taffy.”

“Right. What about Addison, Beetle?” Howell asked.

“’Drank like a giddy fish.”

“We all know that,” chorused the gentle children.

“He said, ‘See how a Christian can die’; an’ he hadn’t any conversation, ’cause some one or other----”

“Guessin’ again, _as_ usual,” McTurk sneered. “Who?”

“’Cynical man called Mandeville--said he was a silent parson in a tie-wig.”

“Right-ho! I’ll take the silent parson with wig and ’purtenances. Taffy can have the dyin’ Christian,” Stalky decided.

Howell nodded, and resumed: “What about Swift, Beetle?”

“’Died mad. Two girls. Saw a tree, an’ said: ‘I shall die at the top.’ Oh yes, an’ his private amusements were ‘ridiculous an’ trivial.’”

Howell shook a wary head. “Dunno what that might let me in for with King. You can have it, Stalky.”

“I’ll take that,” McTurk yawned. “King doesn’t matter a curse to me, an’ he knows it. ‘Private amusements contemptible.’” He breathed all Ireland into the last perverted word.

“Right,” Howell assented. “Bags I the dyin’ tree, then.”

“’Cheery lot, these Augustans,” Stalky sighed. “’Any more of ’em been croakin’ lately, Beetle?”

“My Hat!” the far-seeing Howell struck in. “King always gives us a stinker half-way down. What about Richardson--that ‘Clarissa’ chap, y’know?”

“I’ve found out lots about him,” said Beetle, promptly.

“He was the ‘Shakespeare of novelists.’”

“King won’t stand that. He says there’s only one Shakespeare. ’Mustn’t rot about Shakespeare to King,” Howell objected.

“An’ he was ‘always delighted with his own works,’” Beetle continued.

“Like you,” Stalky pointed out.

“Shut up. Oh yes, an’----” he consulted some hieroglyphics on a scrap of paper--“the--the impassioned Diderot (dunno who _he_ was) broke forth: ‘O Richardson, thou singular genius!’”

Howell and Stalky rose together, each clamouring that he had bagged that first.

“I _must_ have it!” Howell shouted. “King’s never seen me breakin’ forth with the impassioned Diderot. He’s _got_ to! Give me Diderot, you impassioned hound!”

“Don’t upset the table. There’s tons more. An’ his genius was ‘fertile and prodigal.’”

“All right! _I_ don’t mind bein’ ‘fertile and prodigal’ for a change,” Stalky volunteered. “King’s going to enjoy this exam. If he was the Army Prelim. chap we’d score.”

“The Prelim. questions will be pretty much like King’s stuff,” Beetle assured them.

“But it’s always a score to know what your examiner’s keen on,” Howell said, and illustrated it with an anecdote. “’Uncle of mine stayin’ with my people last holidays----”

“Your Uncle Diderot?” Stalky asked.

“No, you ass! Captain of Engineers. He told me he was up for a Staff exam. to an old Colonel-bird who believed that the English were the lost Tribes of Israel, or something like that. He’d written tons o’ books about it.”

“All Sappers are mad,” said Stalky. “That’s one of the things the guv’nor _did_ tell me.”

“Well, ne’er mind. My uncle played up, o’ course. ’Said he’d always believed it, too. And _so_ he got nearly top-marks for field-fortification. ’Didn’t know a thing about it, either, he said.”

“Good biznai!” said Stalky. “Well, go on, Beetle. What about Steele?”

“Can’t I keep anything for myself?”

“Not _much_! King’ll ask you where you got it from, and you’d show off, an’ he’d find out. This ain’t your silly English Literature, you ass. It’s our marks. Can’t you see that?”

Beetle very soon saw it was exactly as Stalky had said.

* * * * *

Some days later a happy, and therefore not too likeable, King was explaining to the Reverend John in his own study how effort, zeal, scholarship, the humanities, and perhaps a little natural genius for teaching, could inspire even the mark-hunting minds of the young. His text was the result of his General Knowledge paper on the Augustans and _King Lear_.

“Howell,” he said, “I was not surprised at. He _has_ intelligence. But, frankly, I did not expect young Corkran to burgeon. Almost one might believe he occasionally read a book.”

“And McTurk too?”

“Yes. He had somehow arrived at a rather just estimate of Swift’s lighter literary diversions. They _are_ contemptible. And in the ‘Lear’ questions--they were all attracted by Edgar’s character--Stalky had dug up something about Aubrey on Tom-a-Bedlams from some unknown source. Aubrey, of all people! I’m sure I only alluded to him once or twice.”

“Stalky among the prophets of ‘English’! And he didn’t remember where he’d got it either?”

“No. Boys are amazingly purblind and limited. But if they keep this up at the Army Prelim., it is conceivable the Class may not do itself discredit. I told them so.”

“I congratulate you. Ours is the hardest calling in the world, with the least reward. By the way, who are they likely to send down to examine us?”

“It rests between two, I fancy. Martlett--with me at Balliol--and Hume. _They_ wisely chose the Civil Service. Martlett has published a brochure on Minor Elizabethan Verse--journeyman work, of course--enthusiasms, but no grounding. Hume I heard of lately as having infected himself in Germany with some Transatlantic abominations about Shakespeare and Bacon. He was Sutton.” (The Head, by the way, was a Sutton man.)

King returned to his examination-papers and read extracts from them, as mothers repeat the clever sayings of their babes.

“Here’s old Taffy Howell, for instance--apropos to Diderot’s eulogy of Richardson. ‘The impassioned Diderot broke forth: “Richardson, thou singular genius!”’”

It was the Reverend John who stopped himself, just in time, from breaking forth. He recalled that, some days ago, he had heard Stalky on the stairs of Number Five, hurling the boots of many fags at Howell’s door and bidding the “impassioned Diderot” within “break forth” at his peril.

“Odd,” said he, gravely, when his pipe drew again. “Where did Diderot say that?”

“I’ve forgotten for the moment. Taffy told me he’d picked it up in the course of holiday reading.”

“Possibly. One never knows what heifers the young are ploughing with. Oh! How did Beetle do?”

“The necessary dates and his handwriting defeated him, I’m glad to say. I cannot accuse myself of having missed any opportunity to castigate that boy’s inordinate and intolerable conceit. But I’m afraid it’s hopeless. I think I touched him somewhat, though, when I read Macaulay’s stock piece on Johnson. The others saw it at once.”

“Yes, you told me about that at the time,” said the Reverend John, hurriedly.

“And our esteemed Head having taken him off maths for this précis-writing--whatever that means!--has turned him into a most objectionable free-lance. He was without any sense of reverence before, and promiscuous cheap fiction--which is all that his type of reading means--aggravates his worst points. When it came to a trial he was simply nowhere.”

“Ah, well! Ours is a hard calling--specially if one’s sensitive. Luckily, I’m too fat.” The Reverend John went out to bathe off the Pebble Ridge, girt with a fair linen towel whose red fringe signalled from half a mile away.

* * * * *

There lurked on summer afternoons, round the fives-court or the gym, certain watchful outcasts who had exhausted their weekly ration of three baths, and who were too well known to Cory the bathman to outface him by swearing that they hadn’t. These came in like sycophantic pups at walk, and when the Reverend John climbed the Pebble Ridge, more than a dozen of them were at his heels, with never a towel among them. One could only bathe off the Ridge with a House Master, but by custom, a dozen details above a certain age, no matter whence recruited, made a “House” for bathing, if any kindly Master chose so to regard them. Beetle led the low, growing reminder: “House! House, sir? We’ve got a House now, Padre.”

“Let it be law as it is desired,” boomed the Reverend John. On which word they broke forward, hirpling over the unstable pebbles and stripping as they ran, till, when they touched the sands, they were as naked as God had made them, and as happy as He intended them to be.

It was half-flood--dead-smooth, except for the triple line of combers, a mile from wing to wing, that broke evenly with a sound of ripping canvas, while their sleek rear-guards formed up behind. One swam forth, trying to copy the roll, rise, and dig-out of the Reverend John’s side-stroke, and manœuvred to meet them so that they should crash on one’s head, when for an instant one glanced down arched perspectives of beryl, before all broke in fizzy, electric diamonds and the pulse of the main surge slung one towards the beach. From a good comber’s crest one was hove up almost to see Lundy on the horizon. In its long cream-streaked trough, when the top had turned over and gone on, one might be alone in mid-Atlantic. Either way it was divine. Then one capered on the sands till one dried off; retrieved scattered flannels, gave thanks in chorus to the Reverend John, and lazily trailed up to five-o’clock call-over, taken on the lower cricket field.

“Eight this week,” said Beetle, and thanked Heaven aloud.

“Bathing seems to have sapped your mind,” the Reverend John remarked. “Why did you do so vilely with the Augustans?”

“They _are_ vile, Padre. So’s _Lear_.”

“The other two did all right, though.”

“I expect they’ve been swottin’,” Beetle grinned.

“I’ve expected that, too, in my time. But I want to hear about the ‘impassioned Diderot,’ please.”

“Oh, that was Howell, Padre. You mean when Diderot broke forth: ‘Richardson, thou singular genius’? He’d read it in the holidays somewhere.”

“I _beg_ your pardon. Naturally, Taffy would read Diderot in the holidays. Well, I’m sorry I can’t lick you for this; but if any one ever finds out anything about it, you’ve only yourself to thank.”

Beetle went up to College and to the Outer Library, where he had on tap the last of a book called _Elsie Venner_, by a man called Oliver Wendell Holmes--all about a girl who was interestingly allied to rattlesnakes. He finished what was left of her, and cast about for more from the same hand, which he found on the same shelf, with the trifling difference that the writer’s Christian name was now Nathaniel, and he did not deal in snakes. The authorship of Shakespeare was his theme--not that Shakespeare with whom King oppressed the Army Class, but a low-born, poaching, ignorant, immoral village lout who could not have written one line of any play ascribed to him. (Beetle wondered what King would say to Nathaniel if ever they met.) The real author was Francis Bacon, of Bacon’s Essays, which did not strike Beetle as any improvement. He had “done” the essays last term. But evidently Nathaniel’s views annoyed people, for the margins of his book--it was second-hand, and the old label of a public library still adhered--flamed with ribald, abusive, and contemptuous comments by various hands. They ranged from “Rot!” “Rubbish!” and such like to crisp counter-arguments. And several times some one had written: “This beats Delia.” One copious annotator dissented, saying: “Delia is supreme in this line,” “Delia beats this hollow.” “See Delia’s Philosophy, page so and so.” Beetle grieved he could not find anything about Delia (he had often heard King’s views on lady-writers as a class) beyond a statement by Nathaniel, with pencilled exclamation-points rocketting all round it that “Delia Bacon discovered in Francis Bacon a good deal more than Macaulay.” Taking it by and large, with the kind help of the marginal notes, it appeared that Delia and Nathaniel between them had perpetrated every conceivable outrage against the Head-God of King’s idolatry: and King was particular about his idols. Without pronouncing on the merits of the controversy, it occurred to Beetle that a well-mixed dose of Nathaniel ought to work on King like a seidlitz powder. At this point a pencil and a half sheet of impot-paper came into action, and he went down to tea so swelled with Baconian heresies and blasphemies that he could only stutter between mouthfuls. He returned to his labours after the meal, and was visibly worse at prep.

“I say,” he began, “have you ever heard that Shakespeare never wrote his own beastly plays?”

“’Fat lot of good to us!” said Stalky. “We’ve got to swot ’em up just the same. Look here! This is for English parsin’ to-morrow. It’s _your_ biznai.” He read swiftly from the school _Lear_ (Act II., Sc. 2) thus:

Steward: “Never any: It pleased the King his master, very late, To strike at me, upon his misconstruction; When he, conjunct, an’ flatterin’ his displeasure, Tripped me behind: bein’ down, insulted, railed, And put upon him such a deal of man, That worthy’d him, got praises of the King For him attemptin’ who was self-subdued; And, in the fleshment of this dread exploit, Drew me on here.”

“Now then, my impassioned bard, _construez_! That’s Shakespeare.”

“’Give it up! He’s drunk,” Beetle declared at the end of a blank half minute.

“No, he isn’t,” said Turkey. “He’s a steward--on the estate--chattin’ to his employers.”

“Well--look here, Turkey. You ask King if Shakespeare ever wrote his own plays, an’ he won’t give a dam’ what the steward said.”

“I’ve not come here to play with ushers,” was McTurk’s view of the case.

“I’d do it,” Beetle protested, “only he’d slay _me_! He don’t love me when I ask about things. I can give you the stuff to draw him--tons of it!” He broke forth into a précis, interspersed with praises, of Nathaniel Holmes and his commentators--especially the latter. He also mentioned Delia, with sorrow that he had not read her. He spoke through nearly the whole of prep; and the upshot of it was that McTurk relented and promised to approach King next “English” on the authenticity of Shakespeare’s plays.

* * * * *

The time and tone chosen were admirable. While King was warming himself by a preliminary canter round the Form’s literary deficiencies, Turkey coughed in a style which suggested a reminder to a slack _employé_ that it was time to stop chattering and get to work. As King began to bristle, Turkey inquired: “I’d be glad to know, sir, if it’s true that Shakespeare did not write his own plays at all?”

“Good God!” said King most distinctly. Turkey coughed again piously. “They all say so in Ireland, sir.”

“Ireland--Ireland--Ireland!” King overran Ireland with one blast of flame that should have been written in letters of brass for instruction to-day. At the end, Turkey coughed once more, and the cough said: “It is Shakespeare, and not my country, that you are hired to interpret to me.” He put it directly, too: “An’ is it true at all about the alleged plays, sir?”

“It is not,” Mr. King whispered, and began to explain, on lines that might, perhaps, have been too freely expressed for the parents of those young (though it gave their offspring delight), but with a passion, force, and wealth of imagery which would have crowned his discourse at any university. By the time he drew towards his peroration the Form was almost openly applauding. Howell noiselessly drummed the cadence of “Bonnie Dundee” on his desk; Paddy Vernon framed a dumb: “Played! Oh, _well_ played, sir!” at intervals; Stalky kept tally of the brighter gems of invective; and Beetle sat aghast but exulting among the spirits he had called up. For though their works had never been mentioned, and though Mr. King said he had merely glanced at the obscene publications, he seemed to know a tremendous amount about Nathaniel and Delia--especially Delia.

“I told you so!” said Beetle, proudly, at the end.

“What? _Him!_ I wasn’t botherin’ myself to listen to him an’ his Delia,” McTurk replied.

Afterwards King fought his battle over again with the Reverend John in the Common Room.

“Had I been that triple ass Hume, I might have risen to the bait. As it is, I flatter myself I left them under no delusions as to Shakespeare’s authenticity. Yes, a small drink, please. Virtue has gone out of me indeed. But _where_ did they get it from?”

“The devil! The young devil,” the Reverend John muttered, half aloud.

“I could have excused devilry. It was ignorance. Sheer, crass, insolent provincial ignorance! I tell you, Gillett, if the Romans had dealt faithfully with the Celt, _ab initio_, this--this would never have happened.”

“Quite so. I should like to have heard your remarks.”

“I’ve told ’em to tell me what they remember of them, with their own conclusions, in essay form next week.”

Since he had loosed the whirlwind, the fair-minded Beetle offered to do Turkey’s essay for him. On Turkey’s behalf, then, he dealt with Shakespeare’s lack of education, his butchering, poaching, drinking, horse-holding, and errand-running as Nathaniel had described them; lifted from the same source pleasant names, such as “rustic” and “sorry poetaster,” on which last special hopes were built; and expressed surprise that one so ignorant could have done “what he was attributed to.” His own essay contained no novelties. Indeed, he withheld one or two promising “subsequently transpireds” for fear of distracting King.

* * * * *

But, when the essays were read, Mr. King confined himself wholly to Turkey’s pitiful, puerile, jejune, exploded, unbaked, half-bottomed thesis. He touched, too, on the “lie in the soul,” which was, fundamentally, vulgarity--the negation of Reverence and the Decencies. He broke forth into an impassioned defence of “mere atheism,” which he said was often no more than mental flatulence--transitory and curable by knowledge of life--in no way comparable, for essential enormity, with the debasing pagan abominations to which Turkey had delivered himself. He ended with a shocking story about one Jowett, who seemed to have held some post of authority where King came from, and who had told an atheistical undergraduate that if he could not believe in a Personal God by five that afternoon he would be expelled--as, with tears of rage in his eyes, King regretted that he could not expel McTurk. And Turkey blew his nose in the middle of it.

But the aim of education being to develop individual judgment, King could not well kill him for his honest doubts about Shakespeare. And he himself had several times quoted, in respect to other poets: “There lives more faith in honest doubt, Believe me, than in half the creeds.” So he treated Turkey in Form like a coiled puff-adder; and there was a tense peace among the Augustans. The only ripple was the day before the Army Examiner came, when Beetle inquired if he “need take this exam., sir, as I’m not goin’ up for anything.” Mr. King said there was great need--for many reasons, none of them flattering to vanity.

As far as the Army Class could judge, the Examiner was not worse than his breed, and the written “English” paper ran closely on the lines of King’s mid-term General Knowledge test. Howell played his “impassioned Diderot” to the Richardson lead; Stalky his parson in the wig; McTurk his contemptible Swift; Beetle, Steele’s affectionate notes out of the spunging-house to “Dearest Prue,” all in due order. There were, however, one or two leading questions about Shakespeare. A boy’s hand shot up from a back bench.

“In answering Number Seven--reasons for Shakespeare’s dramatic supremacy”--he said, “are we to take it Shakespeare _did_ write the plays he is supposed to have written, sir?”

The Examiner hesitated an instant. “It is generally assumed that he did.” But there was no reproof in his words. Beetle began to sit down slowly.

Another hand and another voice: “Have we got to say we believe he did, sir? Even if we do not?”

“You are not called upon to state your beliefs. But we can go into that at _viva voce_ this afternoon--if it interests you.”

“Thank you, sir.”

“What did you do that for?” Paddy Vernon demanded at dinner.

“It’s the lost tribes of Israel game, you ass,” said Howell.

“To make sure,” Stalky amplified. “If he was like King, he’d have shut up Beetle an’ Turkey at the start, but he’d have thought King gave us the Bacon notion. Well, he didn’t shut ’em up; so they’re playin’ it again this afternoon. If he stands it then, he’ll be sure King gave us the notion. Either way, it’s dead-safe for us--_an’_ King.”

At the afternoon’s _viva voce_, before they sat down to the Augustans, the Examiner wished to hear, “with no bearing on the examination, of course,” from those two candidates who had asked him about Question Seven. Which were they?

“Take off your gigs, you owl,” said Stalky between his teeth. Beetle pocketed them and looked into blurred vacancy with a voice coming out of it that asked: “Who--what gave you that idea about Shakespeare?” From Stalky’s kick he knew the question was for him.

“Some people say, sir, there’s a good deal of doubt about it nowadays, sir.”

“Ye-es, that’s true, but----”

“It’s his knowin’ so much about legal phrases,” Turkey was in support--a lone gun barking somewhere to his right.

“That is a crux, I admit. Of course, whatever one may think privately, officially Shakespeare _is_ Shakespeare. But how have _you_ been taught to look at the question?”

“Well, Holmes says it’s impossible he could----”

“On the legal phraseology alone, sir,” McTurk chimed in.

“Ah, but the theory is that Shakespeare’s experiences in the society of that day brought him in contact with all the leading intellects.” The Examiner’s voice was quite colloquial now.

“But they didn’t think much of actors then, sir, did they?” This was Howell cooing like a cushat dove. “I mean----”

The Examiner explained the status of the Elizabethan actor in some detail, ending: “And that makes it the more curious, doesn’t it?”

“And this Shakespeare was supposed to be writin’ plays and actin’ in ’em _all_ the time?” McTurk asked, with sinister meaning.

“Exactly what I--what lots of people have pointed out. Where did he get the time to acquire all his special knowledge?”

“Then it looks as if there was something in it, doesn’t it, sir?”

“That,” said the Examiner, squaring his elbows at ease on the desk, “is a very large question which----”

“Yes, sir!”--in half-a-dozen eagerly attentive keys....

For decency’s sake a few Augustan questions were crammed in conscience-strickenly, about the last ten minutes. Howell took them since they involved dates, but the answers, though highly marked, were scarcely heeded. When the clock showed six-thirty the Examiner addressed them as “Gentlemen”; and said he would have particular pleasure in speaking well of this Army Class, which had evinced such a genuine and unusual interest in English Literature, and which reflected the greatest credit on their instructors. He passed out: the Form upstanding, as custom was.

“He’s goin’ to congratulate King,” said Howell. “Don’t make a row! ‘Don’t--make--a--noise--Or else you’ll wake the Baby!’”...

* * * * *

Mr. King of Balliol, after Mr. Hume of Sutton had complimented him, as was only just, before all his colleagues in Common Room, was kindly taken by the Reverend John to his study, where he exploded on the hearth-rug.

“He--he thought _I_ had loosed this--this rancid Baconian rot among them. He complimented me on my breadth of mind--my being abreast of the times! You heard him? That’s how they think at Sutton. It’s an open stye! A lair of bestial! They have a chapel there, Gillett, and they pray for their souls--their _souls_!”

“His particular weakness apart, Hume was perfectly sincere about what you’d done for the Army Class. He’ll report in that sense, too. That’s a feather in your cap, and a deserved one. He said their interest in Literature was unusual. That is _all_ your work, King.”

“But I bowed down in the House of Rimmon while he Baconised all over me!--poor devil of an usher that I am! You heard it! I ought to have spat in his eye! Heaven knows I’m as conscious of my own infirmities as my worst enemy can be; but what have I done to deserve this? What _have_ I done?”

“That’s just what I was wondering,” the Reverend John replied. “Have you, perchance, done anything?”

“Where? How?”

“In the Army Class, for example.”

“Assuredly not! My Army Class? I couldn’t wish for a better--keen, interested enough to read outside their allotted task--intelligent, receptive! They’re head and shoulders above last year’s. The idea that I, forsooth, should, even by inference, have perverted their minds with this imbecile and unspeakable girls’-school tripe that Hume professes! _You_ at least know that I have my standards; and in Literature and in the Classics, I hold _maxima debetur pueris reverentia_.”[4]

“It’s singular, not plural, isn’t it?” said the Reverend John. “But you’re absolutely right as to the principle!... Ours is a deadly calling, King--specially if one happens to be sensitive.”

[4] The greatest respect is due to young persons.

A FRIEND OF THE FAMILY

A LEGEND OF TRUTH

Once on a time, the ancient legends tell, Truth, rising from the bottom of her well, Looked on the world, but, hearing how it lied, Returned to her seclusion horrified. There she abode, so conscious of her worth, Not even Pilate’s Question called her forth, Nor Galileo, kneeling to deny The Laws that hold our Planet ’neath the sky. Meantime, her kindlier sister, whom men call Fiction, did all her work and more than all, With so much zeal, devotion, tact, and care, That no one noticed Truth was otherwhere.

Then came a War when, bombed and gassed and mined, Truth rose once more, perforce, to meet mankind, And through the dust and glare and wreck of things, Beheld a phantom on unbalanced wings, Reeling and groping, dazed, dishevelled, dumb, But semaphoring direr deeds to come. Truth hailed and bade her stand; the quavering shade, Clung to her knees and babbled, “Sister, aid! I am--I was--thy Deputy, and men Besought me for my useful tongue or pen To gloss their gentle deeds, and I complied, And they, and thy demands, were satisfied. But this--” she pointed o’er the blistered plain, Where men as Gods and devils wrought amain-- “This is beyond me! Take thy work again.”

Tablets and pen transferred, she fled afar, And Truth assumed the record of the War.... She saw, she heard, she read, she tried to tell Facts beyond precedent and parallel-- Unfit to hint or breathe, much less to write, But happening every minute, day and night. She called for proof. It came. The dossiers grew. She marked them, first, “Return. This can’t be true.” Then, underneath the cold official word: “This is not really half of what occurred.”

She faced herself at last, the story runs, And telegraphed her sister: “Come at once. Facts out of hand. Unable overtake Without your aid. Come back for Truth’s own sake! Co-equal rank and powers if you agree. _They need us both, but you far more than me!_”

A FRIEND OF THE FAMILY

There had been rather a long sitting at Lodge “Faith and Works,” 5837 E. C., that warm April night. Three initiations and two raisings, each conducted with the spaciousness and particularity that our Lodge prides itself upon, made the Brethren a little silent and the strains of certain music had not yet lifted from them.

“There are two pieces that ought to be barred for ever,” said a Brother as we were sitting down to the “banquet.” “‘Last Post’ is the other.”

“I can just stand ‘Last Post.’ It’s ‘Tipperary’ breaks me,” another replied. “But I expect every one carries his own firing-irons inside him.”

I turned to look. It was a sponsor for one of our newly raised Brethren--a fat man with a fish-like and vacant face, but evidently prosperous. We introduced ourselves as we took our places. His name was Bevin, and he had a chicken farm near Chalfont-St.-Giles, whence he supplied, on yearly contract, two or three high-class London hotels. He was also, he said, on the edge of launching out into herb-growing.

“There’s a demand for herbs,” said he; “but it all depends upon your connections with the wholesale dealers. _We_ ain’t systematic enough. The French do it much better, especially in those mountains on the Swiss an’ Italian sides. They use more herbal remedies than we do. Our patent-medicine business has killed that with us. But there’s a demand still, if your connections are sound. I’m going in for it.”

A large, well-groomed Brother across the table (his name was Pole, and he seemed some sort of professional man) struck in with a detailed account of a hollow behind a destroyed village near Thiepval, where, for no ascertainable reason, a certain rather scarce herb had sprung up by the acre, he said, out of the overturned earth.

“Only you’ve got to poke among the weeds to find it, and there’s any quantity of bombs an’ stuff knockin’ about there still. They haven’t cleaned it up yet.”

“Last time _I_ saw the place,” said Bevin, “I thought it ’ud be that way till Judgment Day. You know how it lay in that dip under that beet-factory. I saw it bombed up level in two days--into brick-dust mainly. They were huntin’ for St. Firmin Dump.” He took a sandwich and munched slowly, wiping his face, for the night was close.

“Ye-es,” said Pole. “The trouble is there hasn’t been any judgment taken or executed. That’s why the world is where it is now. We didn’t need anything but justice--afterwards. Not gettin’ that, the bottom fell out of things, naturally.”

“That’s how I look at it too,” Bevin replied. “We didn’t want all that talk afterwards--we only wanted justice. What _I_ say is, there _must_ be a right and a wrong to things. It can’t all be kiss-an’-make-friends, no matter what you do.”

A thin, dark brother on my left, who had been attending to a cold pork pie (there are no pork pies to equal ours, which are home-made), suddenly lifted his long head, in which a pale blue glass eye swivelled insanely.

“Well,” he said slowly. “_My_ motto is ‘Never again.’ Ne-ver again for me.”

“Same here--till next time,” said Pole, across the table. “You’re from Sidney, ain’t you?”

“How d’you know!” was the short answer.

“You spoke.” The other smiled. So did Bevin, who added: “_I_ know how your push talk, well enough. Have you started that Republic of yours down under yet?”

“No. But we’re goin’ to. _Then_ you’ll see.”

“Carry on. No one’s hindering,” Bevin pursued.

The Australian scowled. “No. We know they ain’t. And--and--that’s what makes us all so crazy angry with you.” He threw back his head and laughed the spleen out of him. “What _can_ you do with an Empire that--that don’t care what you do?”

“I’ve heard that before,” Bevin laughed, and his fat sides shook. “Oh, I know _your_ push inside-out.”

“When did you come across us? My name’s Orton--no relation to the Tichborne one.”

“Gallip’li--dead mostly. My battalion began there. We only lost half.”

“Lucky! They gambled _us_ away in two days. ’Member the hospital on the beach?” asked Orton.

“Yes. An’ the man without the face--preaching,” said Bevin, sitting up a little.

“Till he died,” said the Australian, his voice lowered.

“_And_ afterwards,” Bevin added, lower still.

“Christ! Were you there that night?”

Bevin nodded. The Australian choked off something he was going to say, as a brother on his left claimed him. I heard them talk horses, while Bevin developed his herb-growing projects with the well-groomed brother opposite.

At the end of the banquet, when pipes were drawn, the Australian addressed himself to Bevin, across me, and as the company re-arranged itself, we three came to anchor in the big ante-room where the best prints are hung. Here our brother across the table joined us, and moored alongside.

The Australian was full of racial grievances, as must be in a young country; alternating between complaints that his people had not been appreciated enough in England, or too fulsomely complimented by an hysterical Press.

“No-o,” Pole drawled, after awhile. “You’re altogether wrong. We hadn’t time to notice anything--we were all too busy fightin’ for our lives. What _your_ crowd down under are suffering from is growing-pains. You’ll get over ’em in three hundred years or so--if you’re allowed to last so long.”

“Who’s going to stoush us?” Orton asked fiercely.

This turned the talk again to larger issues and possibilities--delivered on both sides straight from the shoulder without malice or heat, between bursts of song from round the piano at the far end. Bevin and I sat out, watching.

“Well, _I_ don’t understand these matters,” said Bevin at last. “But I’d hate to have one of your crowd have it in for me for anything.”

“Would you? Why?” Orton pierced him with his pale, artificial eye.

“Well, you’re a trifle--what’s the word?--vindictive?--spiteful? At least, that’s what _I_’ve found. I expect it comes from drinking stewed tea with your meat four times a day,” said Bevin. “No! I’d hate to have an Australian after me for anything in particular.”

Out of this came his tale--somewhat in this shape:

It opened with an Australian of the name of Hickmot or Hickmer--Bevin called him both--who, finding his battalion completely expended at Gallipoli, had joined up with what stood of Bevin’s battalion, and had there remained, unrebuked and unnoticed. The point that Bevin laboured was that his man had never seen a table-cloth, a china plate, or a dozen white people together till, in his thirtieth year, he had walked for two months to Brisbane to join up. Pole found this hard to believe.

“But it’s true,” Bevin insisted. “This chap was born an’ bred among the black fellers, as they call ’em, two hundred miles from the nearest town, four hundred miles from a railway, an’ ten thousand from the grace o’ God--out in Queensland near some desert.”

“Why, of course. We come out of everywhere,” said Orton. “What’s wrong with that?”

“Yes--but----Look here! From the time that this man Hickmot was twelve years old he’d ridden, driven--what’s the word?--conducted sheep for his father for thousands of miles on end, an’ months at a time, alone with these black fellers that you daren’t show the back of your neck to--else they knock your head in. That was all that he’d ever done till he joined up. He--he--didn’t _belong_ to anything in the world, you understand. And he didn’t strike other men as being a--a human being.”

“Why? He was a Queensland drover. They’re all right,” Orton explained.

“I dare say; but--well, a man notices another man, don’t he? You’d notice if there was a man standing or sitting or lyin’ near you, wouldn’t you? So’d any one. But you’d never notice Hickmot. His bein’ anywhere about wouldn’t stay in your mind. He just didn’t draw attention any more than anything else that happened to be about. Have you got it?”

“Wasn’t he any use at his job?” Pole inquired.

“I’ve nothing against him that way, an’ I’m--I was his platoon sergeant. He wouldn’t volunteer specially for any doings, but he’d slip out with the party and he’d slip back with what was left of ’em. No one noticed him, and he never opened his mouth about any doings. You’d think a man who had lived the way he’d lived among black fellers an’ sheep would be noticeable enough in an English battalion, wouldn’t you?”

“It teaches ’em to lie close; but _you_ seem to have noticed him,” Orton interposed, with a little suspicion.

“Not at the time--but afterwards. If he was noticeable it was on account of his _un_noticeability--same way you’d notice there not being an extra step at the bottom of the staircase when you thought there was.”

“Ye-es,” Pole said suddenly. “It’s the eternal mystery of personality. ‘God before Whom ever lie bare----’ Some people can occlude their personality like turning off a tap. I beg your pardon. Carry on!”

“Granted,” said Bevin. “I think I catch your drift. I used to think I was a student of human nature before I joined up.”

“What was your job--before?” Orton asked.

“Oh, I was _the_ young blood of the village. Goal-keeper in our soccer team, secretary of the local cricket and rifle--oh, lor’!--clubs. Yes, an’ village theatricals. My father was the chemist in the village. _How_ I did talk! _What_ I did know!” He beamed upon us all.

“_I_ don’t mind hearing you talk,” said Orton, lying back in his chair. “You’re a little different from some of ’em. What happened to this dam’ drover of yours?”

“He was with our push for the rest of the war--an’ I don’t think he ever sprung a dozen words at one time. With his upbringing, you see, there wasn’t any subject that any man knew about he _could_ open up on. He kept quiet, and mixed with his backgrounds. If there was a lump of dirt, or a hole in the ground, or what was--was left after anythin’ had happened, it would be Hickmot. That was all he wanted to be.”

“A camouflager?” Orton suggested.

“You have it! He was the complete camouflager all through. That’s him to a dot. Look here! He hadn’t even a nickname in his platoon! And then a friend of mine from our village, of the name of Vigors, came out with a draft. Bert Vigors. As a matter of fact, I was engaged to his sister. And Bert hadn’t been with us a week before they called him ‘The Grief.’ His father was an oldish man, a market-gardener--high-class vegetables, bit o’ glass, an’--an’ all the rest of it. Do you know anything about that particular business?”

“Not much, I’m afraid,” said Pole, “except that glass is expensive, and one’s man always sells the cut flowers.”

“Then you _do_ know something about it. It is. Bert was the old man’s only son, an’--_I_ don’t blame him--he’d done his damnedest to get exempted--for the sake of the business, you understand. But he caught it all right. The tribunal wasn’t takin’ any the day he went up. Bert was for it, with a few remarks from the patriotic old was-sers on the bench. Our county paper had ’em all.”

“That’s the thing that made one really want the Hun in England for a week or two,” said Pole.

“_Mwor osee!_ The same tribunal, havin’ copped Bert, gave unconditional exemption to the opposition shop--a man called Margetts, in the market-garden business, which he’d established _since_ the war, with his two sons who, every one in the village knew, had been pushed into the business to save their damned hides. But Margetts had a good lawyer to advise him. The whole case was frank and above-board to a degree--our county paper had it all in too. Agricultural produce--vital necessity; the plough mightier than the sword; an’ those ducks on the bench, who had turned down Bert, noddin’ and smilin’ at Margetts all full of his cabbage and green peas. What happened? The usual. Vigors’ business--he’s sixty-eight, with asthma--goes smash, and Margetts and Co. double theirs. So, then, that was Bert’s grievance, an’ he joined us full of it. That’s why they called him ‘The Grief.’ Knowing the facts, I was with him; but being his sergeant, I had to check him, because grievances are catchin’, and three or four men with ’em make Companies--er--sticky. Luckily Bert wasn’t handy with his pen. He had to cork up his grievance mostly till he came across Hickmot, an’ Gord in Heaven knows what brought those two together. No! _As_ y’were. I’m wrong about God! I always am. It was Sheep. Bert knew’s much about sheep as I do--an’ that’s Canterbury lamb--but he’d let Hickmot talk about ’em for hours, in return for Hickmot listenin’ to his grievance. Hickmot ’ud talk sheep--the one created thing he’d ever open up on--an’ Bert ’ud talk his grievance while they was waiting to go over the top. I’ve heard ’em again an’ again, and, of course, I encouraged ’em. Now, look here! Hickmot hadn’t seen an English house or a field or a road or--or anything any civ’lised man is used to in all his life! Sheep an’ blacks! Market-gardens an’ glass an’ exemption-tribunals! An’ the men’s teeth chatterin’ behind their masks between rum-issue an’ zero. Oh, there was fun in Hell those days, wasn’t there, boys?”

“Sure! Oh, sure!” Orton chuckled, and Pole echoed him.

“Look here! When we were lying up somewhere among those forsaken chicken-camps back o’ Doullens, I found Hickmot making mud-pies in a farmyard an’ Bert lookin’ on. He’d made a model of our village according to Bert’s description of it. He’d preserved it in his head through all those weeks an’ weeks o’ Bert’s yap; an’ he’d coughed it all up--Margetts’ house and gardens, old Mr. Vigors’ ditto; both pubs; my father’s shop, everything that he’d been told by Bert done out to scale in mud, with bits o’ brick and stick. Haig ought to have seen it; but as his sergeant I had to check him for misusin’ his winkle-pin on dirt. ’Come to think of it, a man who runs about uninhabited countries, with sheep, for a livin’ must have gifts for mappin’ and scalin’ things somehow or other, or he’d be dead. _I_ never saw anything like it--_all_ out o’ what Bert had told him by word of mouth. An’ the next time we went up the line Hickmot copped it in the leg just in front of me.”

“Finish?” I asked.

“Oh, no. Only beginnin’. That was in December, somethin’ or other, ’16. In Jan’ry Vigors copped it for keeps. I buried him--snowin’ blind it was--an’ before we’d got him under the whole show was crumped. I wanted to bury him again just to spite ’em (I’m a spiteful man by nature), but the party wasn’t takin’ any more--even if they could have found it. But, you see, we had buried him all right, which is what they want at home, and I wrote the usual trimmin’s about the chaplain an’ the full service, an’ what his captain had said about Bert bein’ recommended for a pip, an’ the irreparable loss an’ so on. That was in Jan’ry ’17. In Feb’ry some time or other I got saved. My speciality had come to be bombin’s and night-doings. Very pleasant for a young free man, but--there’s a limit to what you can stand. It takes all men differently. Noise was what started me, at last. I’d got just up to the edge--wonderin’ when I’d crack an’ how many of our men I’d do in if it came on me while we were busy. I had that nice taste in the mouth and the nice temperature they call trench-fever, an’--I had to feel inside my head for the meanin’ of every order I gave or was responsible for executin’. _You_ know!”

“We do. Go on!” said Pole in a tone that made Orton look at him.

“So, you see, the bettin’ was even on my drawin’ a V. C. or getting Number Umpty rest-camp or--a firing party before breakfast. But Gord saved me. (I made friends with Him the last two years of the war. The others went off too quick.) They wanted a bombin’-instructor for the training-battalion at home, an’ He put it into their silly hearts to indent for me. It took ’em five minutes to make me understand I was saved. Then I vomited, an’ then I cried. _You_ know!” The fat face of Bevin had changed and grown drawn, even as he spoke; and his hands tugged as though to tighten an imaginary belt.

“I was never keen on bombin’ myself,” said Pole. “But bombin’-instruction’s murder!”

“I don’t deny it’s a shade risky, specially when they take the pin out an’ start shakin’ it, same as the Chinks used to do in the woods at Beauty, when they were cuttin’ ’em down. But you live like a home defence Brigadier, besides week-end leaf. As a matter o’ fact, I married Bert’s sister soon’s I could after I got the billet, an’ I used to lie in our bed thinkin’ of the old crowd on the Somme an’--feelin’ what a swine I was. Of course, I earned two V. C.’s a week behind the traverse in the exercise of my ord’nary duties, but that isn’t the same thing. An’ yet I’d only joined up because--because I couldn’t dam’ well help it.”

“An’ what about your Queenslander?” the Australian asked.

“_Too de sweet! Pronto!_ We got a letter in May from a Brighton hospital matron, sayin’ that one of the name of Hickmer was anxious for news o’ me, previous to proceedin’ to Roehampton for initiation into his new leg. Of course, we applied for him by return. Bert had written about him to his sister--my missus--every time he wrote at all; an’ any pal o’ Bert’s--well, _you_ know what the ladies are like. I warned her about his peculiarities. She wouldn’t believe till she saw him. He was just the same. You’d ha’ thought he’d show up in England like a fresh stiff on snow--but you never noticed him. You never heard him; and if he didn’t want to be seen he wasn’t there. He just joined up with his background. I knew he could do that with men; but how in Hell, seein’ how curious women are, he could camouflage with the ladies--my wife an’ my mother to wit--beats _me_! He’d feed the chickens for us; he’d stand on his one leg--it was off above the knee--and saw wood for us. He’d run--I mean he’d hop--errands for Mrs. B. or mother; our dog worshipped him from the start, though I never saw him throw a word to him; and--_yet_ he didn’t take any place anywhere. You’ve seen a rabbit--you’ve seen a pheasant--hidin’ in a ditch? ’Put your hand on it sometimes before it moved, haven’t you? Well, that was Hickmot--with two women in the house crazy to find out--find out--anything about him that made him human. _You_ know what women are! He stayed with us a fortnight. He left us on a Sat’day to go to Roehampton to try his leg. On Friday he came over to the bombin’ ground--not sayin’ anything, _as_ usual--to watch me instruct my Suicide Club, which was only half an hour’s run by rail from our village. He had his overcoat on, an’ as soon as he reached the place it was _mafeesh_ with him, as usual. Rabbit-trick again! You never noticed him. He sat in the bomb-proof behind the pit where the duds accumulate till it’s time to explode ’em. Naturally, that’s strictly forbidden to the public. So he went there, an’ no one noticed him. When he’d had enough of watchin’, he hopped off home to feed our chickens for the last time.”

“Then how did _you_ know all about it?” Orton said.

“Because I saw him come into the place just as I was goin’ down into the trench. Then he slipped my memory till my train went back. But it would have made no difference what our arrangements were. If Hickmer didn’t choose to be noticed, he _wasn’t_ noticed. Just for curiosity’s sake I asked some o’ the Staff Sergeants whether they’d seen him on the ground. Not one--not one single one had--or could tell me what he was like. An’ Sat’day noon he went off to Roehampton. We saw him into the train ourselves, with the lunch Mrs. B. had put up for him--a one-legged man an’ his crutch, in regulation blue, khaki warm an’ kit-bag. Takin’ everything together, per’aps he’d spoken as many as twenty times in the thirteen days he’d been with us. I’m givin’ it you straight as it happened. An’ now--look here!--this is what _did_ happen.

“Between two and three that Sunday morning--dark an’ blowin’ from the north--I was woke up by an explosion an’ people shoutin’ ‘Raid!’ The first bang fetched ’em out like worms after rain. There was another some minutes afterwards, an’ me an’ a Sergeant in the Shropshires on leaf told ’em all to take cover. They did. There was a devil of a long wait an’ there was a third pop. Everybody, includin’ me, heard aeroplanes. I didn’t notice till afterwards that----”

Bevin paused.

“What?” said Orton.

“Oh, I noticed a heap of things afterwards. What we noticed first--the Shropshire Sergeant an’ me--was a rick well alight back o’ Margetts’ house, an’, with that north wind, blowin’ straight on to another rick o’ Margetts’. It went up all of a whoosh. The next thing we saw by the light of it was Margetts’ house with a bomb-hole in the roof and the rafters leanin’ sideways like--like they always lean on such occasions. So we ran there, and the first thing we met was Margetts in his split-tailed nightie callin’ on his mother an’ damnin’ his wife. A man always does that when he’s cross. Have you noticed? Mrs. Margetts was in her nightie too, remindin’ Margetts that he hadn’t completed his rick insurance. An’ that’s a woman’s lovin’ care all over. Behind them was their eldest son, in trousers an’ slippers, nursin’ his arm an’ callin’ for the doctor. They went through us howlin’ like _flammenwerfer_ casualties--right up the street to the surgery.

“Well, there wasn’t anything to do except let the show burn out. We hadn’t any means of extinguishing conflagrations. Some of ’em fiddled with buckets, an’ some of ’em tried to get out some o’ Margetts’ sticks, but his younger son kept shoutin’, ‘Don’t! Don’t! It’ll be stole! It’ll be stole!’ So it burned instead, till the roof came down top of all--a little, cheap, dirty villa. In _reel_ life one whizbang would have shifted it; but in our civil village it looked that damned important and particular you wouldn’t believe. We couldn’t get round to Margetts’ stable because of the two ricks alight, but we found some one had opened the door early an’ the horses was in Margetts’ new vegetable piece down the hill which he’d hired off old Vigors to extend his business with. I love the way a horse always looks after his own belly--same as a Gunner. They went to grazin’ down the carrots and onions till young Margetts ran to turn ’em out, an’ then they got in among the glass frames an’ cut themselves. Oh, we had a regular Russian night of it, everybody givin’ advice an’ fallin’ over each other. When it got light we saw the damage. House, two ricks an’ stable _mafeesh_; the big glasshouse with every pane smashed and the furnace-end of it blown clean out. All the horses an’ about fifteen head o’ cattle--butcher’s stores from the next field--feeding in the new vegetable piece. It was a fair clean-up from end to end--house, furniture, fittin’s, plant, an’ all the early crops.”

“Was there any other damage in the village?” I asked.

“I’m coming to it--the curious part--but I wouldn’t call it damage. I was renting a field then for my chickens off the Merecroft Estate. It’s accommodation-land, an’ there was a wet ditch at the bottom that I had wanted for ever so long to dam up to make a swim-hole for Mrs. Bevin’s ducks.”

“Ah!” said Orton, half turning in his chair, all in one piece.

“S’pose I was allowed? Not me. Their Agent came down on me for tamperin’ with the Estate’s drainage arrangements. An’ all I wanted was to bring the bank down where the ditch narrows--a couple of cartloads of dirt would have held the water back for half a dozen yards--not more than that, an’ I could have made a little spillway over the top with three boards--same as in trenches. Well, the first bomb--the one that woke me up--had done my work for me better than I could. It had dropped just under the hollow of the bank an’ brought it all down in a fair landslide. I’d got my swim-hole for Mrs. Bevin’s ducks, an’ I didn’t see how the Estate could kick at the Act o’ God, d’you?”

“And Hickmot?” said Orton, grinning.

“Hold on! There was a Parish Council meetin’ to demand reprisals, of course, an’ there was the policeman an’ me pokin’ about among the ruins till the Explosives Expert came down in his motor car at three P.M. Monday, an’ he meets all the Margetts off their rockers, howlin’ in the surgery, an’ he sees my swim-hole fillin’ up to the brim.”

“What did he say?” Pole inquired.

“He sized it up at once. (He had to get back to dine in town that evening.) He said all the evidence proved that it was a lucky shot on the part of one isolated Hun ’plane goin’ home, an’ we weren’t to take it to heart. I don’t know that anybody but the Margetts did. He said they must have used incendiary bombs of a new type--which he’d suspected for a long time. I don’t think the man was any worse than God intended him to be. I don’t _reelly_. But the Shropshire Sergeant said----”

“And what did _you_ think?” I interrupted.

“I didn’t think. I knew by then. I’m not a Sherlock Holmes; but havin’ chucked ’em an’ chucked ’em back and kicked ’em out of the light an’ slept with ’em for two years, an’ makin’ my livin’ out of them at that time, I could recognise the fuse of a Mills bomb when I found it. I found all three of ’em. ’Curious about that second in Margetts’ glasshouse. Hickmot mus’ have raked the ashes out of the furnace, popped it in, an’ shut the furnace door. It operated all right. Not one livin’ pane left in the putty, and all the brickwork spread round the yard in streaks. Just like that St. Firmin village we were talking about.”

“But how d’you account for young what’s-his-name gettin’ his arm broken?” said Pole.

“Crutch!” said Bevin. “If you or me had taken on that night’s doin’s, with one leg, we’d have hopped and sweated from one flank to another an’ been caught half-way between. Hickmot didn’t. I’m as sure as I’m sittin’ here that he did his doings quiet and comfortable at his full height--he was over six feet--and no one noticed him. This is the way _I_ see it. He fixed the swim-hole for Mrs. Bevin’s ducks first. We used to talk over our own affairs in front of him, of course, and he knew just what she wanted in the way of a pond. So he went and made it at his leisure. Then he prob’ly went over to Margetts’ and lit the first rick, knowin’ that the wind ’ud do the rest. When young Margetts saw the light of it an’ came out to look, Hickmot would have taken post at the back-door an’ dropped the young swine with his crutch, same as we used to drop Huns comin’ out of a dug-out. _You_ know how they blink at the light? Then he must have walked off an’ opened Margetts’ stable door to save the horses. They’d be more to him than any man’s life. Then he prob’ly chucked one bomb on top o’ Margetts’ roof, havin’ seen that the first rick had caught the second and that the whole house was bound to go. D’you get me?”

“Then why did he waste his bomb on the house?” said Orton. His glass eye seemed as triumphant as his real one.

“For camouflage, of course. He was camouflagin’ an air-raid. When the Margetts piled out of their place into the street, he prob’ly attended to the glasshouse, because that would be Margetts’ chief means o’ business. After that--I think so, because otherwise I don’t see where all those extra cattle came from that we found in the vegetable piece--he must have walked off an’ rounded up all the butcher’s beasts in the next medder, an’ driven ’em there to help the horses. And when he’d finished everything he’d set out to do, I’ll lay my life an’ kit he curled up like a bloomin’ wombat not fifty yards away from the whole flamin’ show--an’ let us run round him. An’ when he’d had his sleep out, he went up to Roehampton Monday mornin’ by some train that he’d decided upon in his own mind weeks an’ weeks before.”

“Did he know all the trains then?” said Pole.

“Ask me another. I only know that if he wanted to get from any place to another without bein’ noticed, he did it.”

“And the bombs? He got ’em from you, of course,” Pole went on.

“What do _you_ think? He was an hour in the park watchin’ me instruct, sittin’, as I remember, in the bomb-proof by the dud-hole, in his overcoat. He got ’em all right. He took neither more nor less than he wanted; an’ I’ve told you what he did with ’em--one--two--_an’_ three.”

“’Ever see him afterwards?” said Orton.

“Yes. ’Saw him at Brighton when I went down there with the missus, not a month after he’d been broken in to his Roehampton leg. You know how the boys used to sit all along Brighton front in their blues, an’ jump every time the coal was bein’ delivered to the hotels behind them? I barged into him opposite the Old Ship, an’ I told him about our air-raid. I told him how Margetts had gone off his rocker an’ walked about starin’ at the sky an’ holdin’ reprisal-meetin’s all by himself; an’ how old Mr. Vigors had bought in what he’d left--tho’ of course I said what _was_ left--o’ Margetts’ business; an’ how well my swim-hole for the ducks was doin’. It didn’t interest him. He didn’t want to come over to stay with us any more, either. We were a long, long way back in his past. You could see that. He wanted to get back with his new leg, to his own God-forsaken sheep-walk an’ his black fellers in Queensland. I expect he’s done it now, an’ no one has noticed him. But, by Gord! He _did_ leak a little at the end. He did that much! When we was waitin’ for the tram to the station, I said how grateful I was to Fritz for moppin’ up Margetts an’ makin’ our swim-hole all in one night. Mrs. B. seconded the motion. We couldn’t have done less. Well, then Hickmot said, speakin’ in his queer way, as if English words were all new to him: ‘Ah, go on an’ bail up in Hell,’ he says. ‘Bert was my friend.’ That was all. I’ve given it you just as it happened, word for word. _I_’d hate to have an Australian have it in for _me_ for anything I’d done to _his_ friend. Mark _you_, I don’t say there’s anything _wrong_ with you Australians, Brother Orton. I only say they ain’t like us or any one else that I know.”

“Well, do you want us to be?” said Orton.

“No, no. It takes all sorts to make a world, as the sayin’ is. And now”--Bevin pulled out his gold watch--“if I don’t make a move of it I’ll miss my last train.”

“Let her go,” said Orton serenely. “You’ve done some lorry-hoppin’ in your time, haven’t you--Sergeant?”

“When I was two an’ a half stone lighter, Digger,” Bevin smiled in reply.

“Well, I’ll run you out home before sun-up. I’m a haulage-contractor now--London and Oxford. There’s an empty of mine ordered to Oxford. We can go round by your place as easy as not. She’s lyin’ out Vauxhall-way.”

“My Gord! An’ see the sun rise again! ’Haven’t seen him since I can’t remember when,” said Bevin, chuckling. “Oh, there was fun sometimes in Hell, wasn’t there, Australia?”; and again his hands went down to tighten the belt that was missing.

WE AND THEY

Father, Mother, and Me Sister and Auntie say All the people like us are We, And every one else is They. And They live over the sea, While We live over the way, But--would you believe it?--They look upon We As only a sort of They!

We eat pork and beef With cow-horn-handled knives. They who gobble Their rice off a leaf, Are horrified out of Their lives; And They who live up a tree, And feast on grubs and clay, (Isn’t it scandalous?) look upon We As a simply disgusting They!

We shoot birds with a gun. They stick lions with spears. Their full-dress is un--. We dress up to Our ears. They like Their friends for tea. We like Our friends to stay; And, after all that, They look upon We As an utterly ignorant They!

We eat kitcheny food. We have doors that latch. They drink milk or blood, Under an open thatch. We have Doctors to fee. They have Wizards to pay. And (impudent heathen!) They look upon We As a quite impossible They!

All good people agree, And all good people say, All nice people, like Us, are We And every one else is They: But if you cross over the sea, Instead of over the way, You may end by (think of it!) looking on We As only a sort of They!

ON THE GATE

A Tale of ’16

ON THE GATE

A Tale of ’16

If the Order Above be but the reflection of the Order Below (as that Ancient affirms, who had some knowledge of the Order) it is not outside the Order of Things that there should have been confusion also in the Department of Death. The world’s steadily falling death-rate, the rising proportion of scientifically prolonged fatal illnesses, which allowed months of warning to all concerned, had weakened initiative throughout the Necrological Departments. When the War came, these were as unprepared as civilised mankind; and, like mankind, they improvised and recriminated in the face of Heaven.

As Death himself observed to St. Peter who had just come off The Gate for a rest: “One does the best one can with the means at one’s disposal but----”

“_I_ know,” said the good Saint sympathetically. “Even with what help I can muster, I’m on The Gate twenty-two hours out of the twenty-four.”

“Do you find your volunteer staff any real use?” Death went on. “Isn’t it easier to do the work oneself than----”

“One must guard against that point of view,” St. Peter returned, “but I know what you mean. Office officialises the best of us.... What is it _now_?” He turned to a prim-lipped Seraph who had followed him with an expulsion-form for signature. St. Peter glanced it over. “Private R. M. Buckland,” he read, “on the charge of saying that there is no God. ’That all?”

“He says he is prepared to prove it, sir, and--according to the Rules----”

“If you will make yourself acquainted with the Rules, you’ll find they lay down that ‘the fool says in his heart, there is no God.’ That decides it; probably shell-shock. Have you tested his reflexes?”

“No, sir. He kept _on_ saying that there----”

“Pass him in at once! Tell off some one to argue with him and give him the best of the argument till St. Luke’s free. Anything else?”

“A hospital-nurse’s record, sir. She has been nursing for two years.”

“A long while,” St. Peter spoke severely. “She may very well have grown careless.”

“It’s her civilian record, sir. I judged best to refer it to you.” The Seraph handed him a vivid scarlet docket.

“The next time,” said St. Peter folding it down and writing on one corner, “that you get one of these--er--tinted forms, mark it Q.M.A. and pass bearer at once. Don’t worry over trifles.” The Seraph flashed off and returned to the clamorous Gate.

“Which Department is Q.M.A.?” said Death. St. Peter chuckled.

“It’s not a department. It’s a Ruling. ‘_Quia multum amavit._’ A most useful Ruling. I’ve stretched it to.... Now, I wonder what that child actually did die of.”

“I’ll ask,” said Death, and moved to a public telephone near by. “Give me War Check and Audit: English side: non-combatant,” he began. “Latest returns.... Surely you’ve got them posted up to date by now!... Yes! Hospital Nurse in France.... No! _Not_ ‘nature and aliases.’ I said--what--was--nature--of--illness?... Thanks.” He turned to St. Peter. “Quite normal,” he said. “Heart-failure after neglected pleurisy following overwork.”

“Good!” St. Peter rubbed his hands. “That brings her under the higher allowance--G.L.H. scale--‘Greater love hath no man--’ But _my_ people ought to have known that from the first.”

“Who is that clerk of yours?” asked Death. “He seems rather a stickler for the proprieties.”

“The usual type nowadays,” St. Peter returned. “A young Power in charge of some half-baked Universe. Never having dealt with life yet, he’s somewhat nebulous.”

Death sighed. “It’s the same with my old Departmental Heads. Nothing on earth will make my fossils on the Normal Civil Side realise that we are dying in a new age. Come and look at them. They might interest you.”

“Thanks, I will, but----Excuse me a minute! Here’s my zealous young assistant on the wing once more.”

The Seraph had returned to report the arrival of overwhelmingly heavy convoys at The Gate, and to ask what the Saint advised.

“I’m just off on an inter-departmental inspection which will take me some time,” said St. Peter. “You _must_ learn to act on your own initiative. So I shall leave you to yourself for the next hour or two, merely suggesting (I don’t wish in any way to sway your judgment) that you invite St. Paul, St. Ignatius (Loyola, I mean) and--er--St. Christopher to assist as Supervising Assessors on the Board of Admission. Ignatius is one of the subtlest intellects we have, and an officer and a gentleman to boot. I assure you,” the Saint turned towards Death, “he revels in dialectics. If he’s allowed to prove his case, he’s quite capable of letting off the offender. St. Christopher, of course, will pass anything that looks wet and muddy.”

“They are nearly all that now, sir,” said the Seraph.

“So much the better; and--as I was going to say--St. Paul is an embarrass--a distinctly strong colleague. Still--we all have our weaknesses. Perhaps a well-timed reference to his seamanship in the Mediterranean--by the way, look up the name of his ship, will you? Alexandria register, I think--might be useful in some of those sudden maritime cases that crop up. I needn’t tell _you_ to be firm, of course. That’s your besetting--er--I mean--reprimand ’em severely and publicly, but--” the Saint’s voice broke--“oh, my child, _you_ don’t know what it is to need forgiveness. Be gentle with ’em--be very gentle with ’em!”

Swiftly as a falling shaft of light the Seraph kissed the sandalled feet and was away.

“Aha!” said St. Peter. “He can’t go far wrong with that Board of Admission as I’ve--er--arranged it.”

They walked towards the great central office of Normal Civil Death, which, buried to the knees in a flood of temporary structures, resembled a closed cribbage-board among spilt dominoes.

They entered an area of avenues and cross-avenues, flanked by long, low buildings, each packed with seraphs working wing to folded wing.

“Our temporary buildings,” Death explained. “’Always being added to. This is the War-side. You’ll find nothing changed on the Normal Civil Side. They are more human than mankind.”

“It doesn’t lie in _my_ mouth to blame them,” said St. Peter.

“No, I’ve yet to meet the soul you wouldn’t find excuse for,” said Death tenderly; “but then _I_ don’t--er--arrange my Boards of Admission.”

“If one doesn’t help one’s Staff, one’s Staff will never help itself,” St. Peter laughed, as the shadow of the main porch of the Normal Civil Death Offices darkened above them.

“This façade rather recalls the Vatican, doesn’t it?” said the Saint.

“They’re quite as conservative. ’Notice how they still keep the old Holbein uniforms? ’Morning, Sergeant Fell. How goes it?” said Death as he swung the dusty doors and nodded at a Commissionaire, clad in the grim livery of Death, even as Hans Holbein has designed it.

“Sadly. Very sadly indeed, sir,” the Commissionaire replied. “So many pore ladies and gentlemen, sir, ’oo might well ’ave lived another few years, goin’ off as you might say, in every direction with no time for the proper obsequities.”

“Too bad,” said Death sympathetically. “Well, we’re none of us as young as we were, Sergeant.”

They climbed a carved staircase, behung with the whole millinery of undertaking at large. Death halted on a dark Aberdeen granite landing and beckoned a messenger.

“We’re rather busy to-day, sir,” the messenger whispered, “but I think His Majesty will see _you_.”

“Who _is_ the Head of this Department if it isn’t you?” St. Peter whispered in turn.

“You may well ask,” his companion replied. “I’m only--” he checked himself and went on. “The fact is, our Normal Civil Death side is controlled by a Being who considers himself all that I am and more. He’s Death as men have made him--in their own image.” He pointed to a brazen plate, by the side of a black-curtained door, which read: “Normal Civil Death, K.G., K.T., K.P., P.C., etc.” “He’s as human as mankind.”

“I guessed as much from those letters. What do they mean?”

“Titles conferred on him from time to time. King of Ghosts; King of Terrors; King of Phantoms; Pallid Conqueror, and so forth. There’s no denying he’s earned every one of them. A first-class mind, but just a leetle bit of a sn----”

“His Majesty is at liberty,” said the messenger.

Civil Death did not belie his name. No monarch on earth could have welcomed them more graciously; or, in St. Peter’s case, with more of that particularity of remembrance which is the gift of good kings. But when Death asked him how his office was working, he became at once the Departmental Head with a grievance.

“Thanks to this abominable War,” he began testily, “my N.C.D. has to spend all its time fighting for mere existence. Your new War-side seems to think that nothing matters _except_ the war. I’ve been asked to give up two-thirds of my Archives Basement (E. 7--E. 64) to the Polish Civilian Casualty Check and Audit. Preposterous! Where am I to move my Archives? And they’ve just been cross-indexed, too!”

“As I understood it,” said Death, “our War-side merely applied for desk-room in your basement. They were prepared to leave your Archives _in situ_.”

“Impossible! We may need to refer to them at any moment. There’s a case now which is interesting Us all--a Mrs. Ollerby. Worcestershire by extraction--dying of an internal hereditary complaint. At any moment, We may wish to refer to her dossier, and how _can_ We if Our basement is given up to people over whom We exercise no departmental control? This war has been made excuse for slackness in every direction.”

“Indeed!” said Death. “You surprise me. I thought nothing made any difference to the N.C.D.”

“A few years ago I should have concurred,” Civil Death replied. “But since this--this recent outbreak of unregulated mortality there has been a distinct lack of respect towards certain aspects of Our administration. The attitude is bound to reflect itself in the office. The official is, in a large measure, what the public makes him. Of course, it is only temporary reaction, but the merest outsider would notice what I mean. Perhaps _you_ would like to see for yourself?” Civil Death bowed towards St. Peter, who feared that he might be taking up his time.

“Not in the least. If I am not the servant of the public, what am I?” Civil Death said, and preceded them to the landing. “Now, this--” he ushered them into an immense but badly lighted office--“is our International Mortuary Department--the I.M.D. as we call it. It works with the Check and Audit. I should be sorry to say offhand how many billion sterling it represents, invested in the funeral ceremonies of all the races of mankind.” He stopped behind a very bald-headed clerk at a desk. “And yet We take cognizance of the minutest detail, do not We?” he went on. “What have We here, for example?”

“Funeral expenses of the late Mr. John Shenks Tanner,” the clerk stepped aside from the red-ruled book. “Cut down by the executors on account of the War from £173:19:1 to £47:18:4. A sad falling off, if I may say so, Your Majesty.”

“And what was the attitude of the survivors?” Civil Death asked.

“Very casual. It was a motor-hearse funeral.”

“A pernicious example, spreading, I fear, even in the lowest classes,” his superior muttered. “Haste, lack of respect for the Dread Summons, carelessness in the Subsequent Disposition of the Corpse and----”

“But as regards people’s real feelings?” St. Peter demanded of the clerk.

“That isn’t within the terms of our reference, Sir,” was the answer. “But we _do_ know that as often as not, they don’t even buy black-edged announcement-cards nowadays.”

“Good Heavens!” said Civil Death swellingly. “No cards! I must look into this myself. Forgive me, St. Peter, but we Servants of Humanity, as you know, are not our own masters. No cards, indeed!” He waved them off with an official hand, and immersed himself in the ledger.

“Oh, come along,” Death whispered to St. Peter. “This is a blessed relief!”

They two walked on till they reached the far end of the vast dim office. The clerks at the desks here scarcely pretended to work. A messenger entered and slapped down a small autophonic reel.

“Here you are!” he cried. “Mister Wilbraham Lattimer’s last dying speech and record. He made a shockin’ end of it.”

“Good for Lattimer!” a young voice called from a desk. “Chuck it over!”

“Yes,” the messenger went on. “Lattimer said to his brother: ‘Bert, I haven’t time to worry about a little thing like dying these days, and what’s more important, _you_ haven’t either. You go back to your Somme doin’s, and I’ll put it through with Aunt Maria. It’ll amuse her and it won’t hinder you.’ That’s nice stuff for your boss!” The messenger whistled and departed. A clerk groaned as he snatched up the reel.

“How the deuce am I to knock this into official shape?” he began. “Pass us the edifying Gantry Tubnell. I’ll have to crib from him again, I suppose.”

“Be careful!” a companion whispered, and shuffled a typewritten form along the desk. “I’ve used Tubby twice this morning already.”

The late Mr. Gantry Tubnell must have demised on approved departmental lines, for his record was much thumbed. Death and St. Peter watched the editing with interest.

“I can’t bring in Aunt Maria _any_ way,” the clerk broke out at last. “Listen here, every one! She has heart-disease. She dies just as she’s lifted the dropsical Lattimer to change his sheets. She says: ‘Sorry, Willy! I’d make a dam’ pore ’ospital nurse!’ Then she sits down and croaks. Now _I_ call that good! I’ve a great mind to take it round to the War-side as an indirect casualty and get a breath of fresh air.”

“Then you’ll be hauled over the coals,” a neighbour suggested.

“I’m used to that, too,” the clerk sniggered.

“Are you?” said Death, stepping forward suddenly from behind a high map-stand. “Who are you?” The clerk cowered in his skeleton jacket.

“I’m not on the Regular Establishment, Sir,” he stammered. “I’m a--Volunteer. I--I wanted to see how people behaved when they were in trouble.”

“Did you? Well, take the late Mr. Wilbraham Lattimer’s and Miss Maria Lattimer’s papers to the War-side General Reference Office. When they have been passed upon, tell the Attendance Clerk that you are to serve as probationer in--let’s see--in the Domestic Induced Casualty Side--7 G.S.”

The clerk collected himself a little and spoke through dry lips.

“But--but I’m--I slipped in from the Lower Establishment, Sir,” he breathed.

There was no need to explain. He shook from head to foot as with the palsy; and under all Heaven none tremble save those who come from that class which “also believe and tremble.”

“Do you tell Me this officially, or as one created being to another?” Death asked after a pause.

“Oh, non-officially, Sir. Strictly non-officially, so long as you know all about it.”

His awe-stricken fellow-workers could not restrain a smile at Death having to be told about anything. Even Death bit his lips.

“I don’t think you will find the War-side will raise any objection,” said he. “By the way, they don’t wear that uniform over there.”

Almost before Death ceased speaking, it was ripped off and flung on the floor, and that which had been a sober clerk of Normal Civil Death stood up an unmistakable, curly-haired, bat-winged, faun-eared Imp of the Pit. But where his wings joined his shoulders there was a patch of delicate dove-coloured feathering that gave promise to spread all up the pinion. St. Peter saw it and smiled, for it was a known sign of grace.

“Thank Goodness!” the ex-clerk gasped as he snatched up the Lattimer records and sheered sideways through the skylight.

“Amen!” said Death and St. Peter together, and walked through the door.

“Weren’t you hinting something to me a little while ago about _my_ lax methods?” St. Peter demanded, innocently.

“Well, if one doesn’t help one’s Staff, one’s Staff will never help itself,” Death retorted. “Now, I shall have to pitch in a stiff demi-official asking how that young fiend came to be taken on in the N.C.D. without examination. And I must do it before the N.C.D. complain that I’ve been interfering with their departmental transfers. _Aren’t_ they human? If you want to go back to The Gate I think our shortest way will be through here and across the War-Sheds.”

They came out of a side-door into Heaven’s full light. A phalanx of Shining Ones swung across a great square singing:

“To Him Who made the Heavens abide, yet cease not from their motion, To Him Who drives the cleansing tide twice a day round ocean-- Let His Name be magnified in all poor folk’s devotion!”

Death halted their leader, and asked a question.

“We’re Volunteer Aid Serving Powers,” the Seraph explained, “reporting for duty in the Domestic Induced Casualty Department--told off to help relatives, where we can.”

The shift trooped on--such an array of Powers, Honours, Glories, Toils, Patiences, Services, Faiths and Loves as no man may conceive even by favour of dreams. Death and St. Peter followed them into a D.I.C.D. Shed on the English side, where, for the moment, work had slackened. Suddenly a name flashed on the telephone-indicator. “Mrs. Arthur Bedott, 317, Portsmouth Avenue, Brondesbury. Husband badly wounded. One child.” Her special weakness was appended.

A Seraph on the raised dais that overlooked the Volunteer Aids waiting at the entrance, nodded and crooked a finger. One of the new shift--a temporary Acting Glory--hurled himself from his place and vanished earthward.

“You may take it,” Death whispered to St. Peter, “there will be a sustaining epic built up round Private Bedott’s wound for his wife and Baby Bedott to cling to. And here--” they heard wings that flapped wearily--“here, I suspect, comes one of our failures.”

A Seraph entered and dropped, panting, on a form. His plumage was ragged, his sword splintered to the hilt; and his face still worked with the passions of the world he had left, as his soiled vesture reeked of alcohol.

“Defeat,” he reported hoarsely, when he had given in a woman’s name. “Utter defeat! Look!” He held up the stump of his sword. “I broke this on her gin-bottle.”

“So? We try again,” said the impassive Chief Seraph. Again he beckoned, and there stepped forward that very Imp whom Death had transferred from the N.C.D.

“Go _you_!” said the Seraph. “We must deal with a fool according to her folly. Have you pride enough?”

There was no need to ask. The messenger’s face glowed and his nostrils quivered with it. Scarcely pausing to salute, he poised and dived, and the papers on the desks spun beneath the draught of his furious vans.

St. Peter nodded high approval. “_I_ see!” he said. “He’ll work on her pride to steady her. By all means--‘if by all means,’ as my good Paul used to say. Only it ought to read ‘by any manner of possible means.’ Excellent!”

“It’s difficult, though,” a soft-eyed Patience whispered. “I fail again and again. I’m only fit for an old-maid’s tea-party.”

Once more the record flashed--a multiple-urgent appeal on behalf of a few thousand men, worn-out body and soul. The Patience was detailed.

“Oh, me!” she sighed, with a comic little shrug of despair, and took the void softly as a summer breeze at dawning.

“But how does this come under the head of Domestic Casualties? Those men were in the trenches. I heard the mud squelch,” said St. Peter.

“Something wrong with the installation--as usual. Waves are always jamming here,” the Seraph replied.

“So it seems,” said St. Peter as a wireless cut in with the muffled note of some one singing (sorely out of tune), to an accompaniment of desultory poppings:

“Unless you can love as the Angels love With the breadth of Heaven be----”

“_Twickt!_” It broke off. The record showed a name. The waiting Seraphs stiffened to attention with a click of tense quills.

“As you were!” said the Chief Seraph. “He’s met her.”

“Who is she?” said St. Peter.

“His mother. You never get over your weakness for romance,” Death answered, and a covert smile spread through the Office.

“Thank Heaven, I don’t. But I really ought to be going----”

“Wait one minute. Here’s trouble coming through, I think,” Death interposed.

A recorder had sparked furiously in a broken run of S.O.S.’s that allowed no time for inquiry.

“Name! Name!” an impatient young Faith panted at last. “It _can’t_ be blotted out.” No name came up. Only the reiterated appeal.

“False alarm!” said a hard-featured Toil, well used to mankind. “Some fool has found out that he owns a soul. ’Wants work. _I_’d cure him!...”

“Hush!” said a Love in Armour, stamping his mailed foot. The office listened.

“’Bad case?” Death demanded at last.

“Rank bad, Sir. They are holding back the name,” said the Chief Seraph. The S.O.S. signals grew more desperate, and then ceased with an emphatic thump. The Love in Armour winced.

“Firing-party,” he whispered to St. Peter. “’Can’t mistake that noise!”

“What is it?” St. Peter cried nervously.

“Deserter; spy; murderer,” was the Chief Seraph’s weighed answer. “It’s out of my department--now. No--hold the line! The name’s up at last.”

It showed for an instant, broken and faint as sparks on charred wadding, but in that instant a dozen pens had it written. St. Peter with never a word gathered his robes about him and bundled through the door, headlong for The Gate.

“No hurry,” said Death at his elbow. “With the present rush your man won’t come up for ever so long.”

“’Never can be sure these days. Anyhow, the Lower Establishment will be after him like sharks. He’s the very type they’d want for propaganda. Deserter--traitor--murderer. Out of my way, please, babies!”

A group of children round a red-headed man who was telling them stories, scattered laughing. The man turned to St. Peter.

“Deserter, traitor, murderer,” he repeated. “Can _I_ be of service?”

“You can!” St. Peter gasped. “Double on ahead to The Gate and tell them to hold up all expulsions till I come. Then,” he shouted as the man sped off at a long hound-like trot, “go and picket the outskirts of the Convoys. Don’t let any one break away on any account. Quick!”

But Death was right. They need not have hurried. The crowd at The Gate was far beyond the capacities of the Examining Board even though, as St. Peter’s Deputy informed him, it had been enlarged twice in his absence.

“We’re doing our best,” the Seraph explained, “but delay is inevitable, Sir. The Lower Establishment are taking advantage of it, as usual, at the tail of the Convoys. I’ve doubled all pickets there, and I’m sending more. Here’s the extra list, Sir--Arc J., Bradlaugh C., Bunyan J., Calvin J. Iscariot J. reported to me just now, as under your orders, and took ’em with him. Also Shakespeare W. and----”

“Never mind the rest,” said St. Peter. “I’m going there myself. Meantime, carry on with the passes--don’t fiddle over ’em--and give me a blank or two.” He caught up a thick block of Free Passes, nodded to a group in khaki at a passport table, initialled their Commanding Officer’s personal pass as for “Officer and Party,” and left the numbers to be filled in by a quite competent-looking Quarter-master-Sergeant. Then, Death beside him, he breasted his way out of The Gate against the incoming multitude of all races, tongues, and creeds that stretched far across the plain.

An old lady, firmly clutching a mottle-nosed, middle-aged Major by the belt, pushed across a procession of keen-faced _poilus_, and blocked his path, her captive held in that terrible mother-grip no Power has yet been able to unlock.

“I found him! I’ve got him! Pass him!” she ordered.

St. Peter’s jaw fell. Death politely looked elsewhere.

“There are a few formalities,” the Saint began.

“With Jerry in this state? Nonsense! How like a man! My boy never gave me a moment’s anxiety in----”

“Don’t, dear--don’t!” The Major looked almost as uncomfortable as St. Peter.

“Well, nothing compared with what he _would_ give me if he weren’t passed.”

“Didn’t I hear you singing just now?” Death asked, seeing that his companion needed a breathing-space.

“Of course you did,” the mother intervened. “He sings beautifully. And that’s _another_ reason! You’re bass, aren’t you now, darling?”

St. Peter glanced at the agonised Major and hastily initialled him a pass. Without a word of thanks the Mother hauled him away.

“Now, under what conceivable Ruling do you justify that?” said Death.

“I.W.--the Importunate Widow. It’s scandalous!” St. Peter groaned. Then his face darkened as he looked across the great plain beyond The Gate. “I don’t like this,” he said. “The Lower Establishment is out in full force to-night. I hope our pickets are strong enough----”

The crowd here had thinned to a disorderly queue flanked on both sides by a multitude of busy, discreet emissaries from the Lower Establishment who continually edged in to do business with them, only to be edged off again by a line of watchful pickets. Thanks to the khaki everywhere, the scene was not unlike that which one might have seen on earth any evening of the old days outside the refreshment-room by the Arch at Victoria Station, when the Army trains started. St. Peter’s appearance was greeted by the usual outburst of cock-crowing from the Lower Establishment.

“Dirty work at the cross-roads,” said Death dryly.

“I deserve it!” St. Peter grunted, “but think what it must mean for Judas.”

He shouldered into the thick of the confusion where the pickets coaxed, threatened, implored, and in extreme cases bodily shoved the wearied men and women past the voluble and insinuating spirits who strove to draw them aside.

A Shropshire Yeoman had just accepted, together with a forged pass, the assurance of a genial runner of the Lower Establishment that Heaven lay round the corner, and was being stealthily steered thither, when a large hand jerked him back, another took the runner in the chest, and some one thundered: “Get out, you crimp!” The situation was then vividly explained to the soldier in the language of the barrack-room.

“Don’t blame _me_, Guv’nor,” the man expostulated. “I ’aven’t seen a woman, let alone angels, for umpteen months. I’m from Joppa. Where ’you from?”

“Northampton,” was the answer. “Rein back and keep by me.”

“What? You ain’t ever Charley B. that my dad used to tell about? I thought you always said----”

“I shall say a deal more soon. Your Sergeant’s talking to that woman in red. Fetch him in--quick!”

Meantime, a sunken-eyed Scots officer, utterly lost to the riot around, was being buttonholed by a person of reverend aspect who explained to him, that, by the logic of his own ancestral creed, not only was the Highlander irrevocably damned, but that his damnation had been predetermined before Earth was made.

“It’s unanswerable--just unanswerable,” said the young man sorrowfully. “I’ll be with ye.” He was moving off, when a smallish figure interposed, not without dignity.

“Monsieur,” it said, “would it be of any comfort to you to know that _I_ am--I was--John Calvin?” At this the reverend one cursed and swore like the lost Soul he was, while the Highlander turned to discuss with Calvin, pacing towards The Gate, some alterations in the fabric of a work of fiction called the _Institutio_.

Others were not so easily held. A certain Woman, with loosened hair, bare arms, flashing eyes and dancing feet, shepherded her knot of waverers, hoarse and exhausted. When the taunt broke out against her from the opposing line: “Tell ’em what you were! Tell ’em if you dare!” she answered unflinchingly, as did Judas who, worming through the crowd like an Armenian carpet-vendor, peddled his shame aloud that it might give strength to others.

“Yes,” he would cry, “I am everything they say, but if _I_’m here it must be a moral cert for _you_, gents. This way, please. Many mansions, gentlemen! Go-ood billets! Don’t you notice these low people, Sar. _Plees_ keep hope, gentlemen!”

When there were cases that cried to him from the ground--poor souls who could not stick it but had found their way out with a rifle and a boot-lace, he would tell them of his own end, till he made them contemptuous enough to rise up and curse him. Here St. Luke’s imperturbable bedside manner backed and strengthened the other’s almost too oriental flux of words.

In this fashion and step by step, all the day’s Convoy were piloted past that danger-point where the Lower Establishment are, for reasons not given us, allowed to ply their trade. The pickets dropped to the rear, relaxed, and compared notes.

“What always impresses me most,” said Death to St. Peter, “is the sheeplike simplicity of the intellectual mind.” He had been watching one of the pickets apparently overwhelmed by the arguments of an advanced atheist who--so hot in his argument that he was deaf to the offers of the Lower Establishment to make him a god--had stalked, talking hard--while the picket always gave ground before him--straight past the Broad Road.

“He was plaiting of long-tagged epigrams,” the sober-faced picket smiled. “Give that sort only an ear and they’ll follow ye gobbling like turkeys.”

“And John held his peace through it all,” a full fresh voice broke in. “‘It may be so,’ says John. ‘Doubtless, in your belief, it _is_ so,’ says John. ‘Your words move me mightily,’ says John, and gorges his own beliefs like a pike going backwards. And that young fool, so busy spinning words--words--words--that he trips past Hell Mouth without seeing it!... Who’s yonder, Joan?”

“One of your English. ’Always late. Look!” A young girl with short-cropped hair pointed with her sword across the plain towards a single faltering figure which made at first as though to overtake the Convoy, but then turned left towards the Lower Establishment, who were enthusiastically cheering him as a leader of enterprise.

“That’s my traitor,” said St. Peter. “He has no business to report to the Lower Establishment before reporting to Convoy.”

The figure’s pace slackened as he neared the applauding line. He looked over his shoulder once or twice, and then fairly turned tail and fled again towards the still Convoy.

“Nobody ever gave me credit for anything I did,” he began, sobbing and gesticulating. “They were all against me from the first. I only wanted a little encouragement. It was a regular conspiracy, but _I_ showed ’em what I could do! _I_ showed ’em! And--and--” he halted again. “Oh, God! What are you going to do with _me_?”

No one offered any suggestion. He ranged sideways like a doubtful dog, while across the plain the Lower Establishment murmured seductively. All eyes turned to St. Peter.

“At this moment,” the Saint said half to himself, “I can’t recall any precise ruling under which----”

“My own case?” the ever-ready Judas suggested.

“No-o! That’s making too much of it. And yet----”

“Oh, hurry up and get it over,” the man wailed, and told them all that he had done, ending with the cry that none had ever recognised his merits; neither his own narrow-minded people, his inefficient employers, nor the snobbish jumped-up officers of his battalion.

“You see,” said St. Peter at the end. “It’s sheer vanity. It isn’t even as if we had a woman to fall back upon.”

“Yet there was a woman or I’m mistaken,” said the picket with the pleasing voice who had praised John.

“Eh--what? When?” St. Peter turned swiftly on the speaker. “Who was the woman?”

“The wise woman of Tekoah,” came the smooth answer. “I remember, because that verse was the private heart of my plays--some of ’em.”

But the Saint was not listening. “You have it!” he cried. “Samuel Two, Double Fourteen. To think that _I_ should have forgotten! ‘For we must needs die and are as water spilled on the ground which cannot be gathered up again. Neither doth God respect any person, _yet_--’ Here you! Listen to this!”

The man stepped forward and stood to attention. Some one took his cap as Judas and the picket John closed up beside him.

“‘_Yet doth He devise means_ (d’you understand that?) _devise means that His banished be not expelled from Him!_’ This covers your case. I don’t know what the means will be. That’s for you to find out. They’ll tell you yonder.” He nodded towards the now silent Lower Establishment as he scribbled on a pass. “Take this paper over to them and report for duty there. You’ll have a thin time of it; but they won’t keep you a day longer than I’ve put down. Escort!”

“Does--does that mean there’s any hope?” the man stammered.

“Yes--I’ll show you the way,” Judas whispered. “I’ve lived there--a very long time!”

“I’ll bear you company a piece,” said John, on his left flank. “There’ll be Despair to deal with. Heart up, Mr. Littlesoul!”

The three wheeled off, and the Convoy watched them grow smaller and smaller across the plain.

St. Peter smiled benignantly and rubbed his hands.

“And now we’re rested,” said he, “I think we might make a push for billets this evening, gentlemen, eh?”

The pickets fell in, guardians no longer but friends and companions all down the line. There was a little burst of cheering and the whole Convoy strode away towards the not so distant Gate.

The Saint and Death stayed behind to rest awhile. It was a heavenly evening. They could hear the whistle of the low-flighting Cherubim, clear and sharp, under the diviner note of some released Seraph’s wings, where, his errand accomplished, he plunged three or four stars deep into the cool Baths of Hercules; the steady dynamo-like hum of the nearer planets on their axes; and, as the hush deepened, the surprised little sigh of some new-born sun a universe of universes away. But their minds were with the Convoy that their eyes followed.

Said St. Peter proudly at last: “If those people of mine had seen that fellow stripped of all hope in front of ’em, I doubt if they could have marched another yard to-night. Watch ’em stepping out now, though! Aren’t they human?”

“To whom do you say it?” Death answered with something of a tired smile. “I’m more than human. _I_’ve got to die some time or other. But all other created Beings--afterwards....”

“_I_ know,” said St. Peter softly. “And that is why I love you, O Azrael!”

For now they were alone Death had, of course, returned to his true majestic shape--that only One of all created beings who is doomed to perish utterly, and knows it.

“Well, that’s _that_--for me!” Death concluded as he rose. “And yet--” he glanced towards the empty plain where the Lower Establishment had withdrawn with their prisoner. “‘Yet doth He devise means.’”

THE SUPPORTS

(_Song of the Waiting Seraphs._)

_Full Chorus._

_To Him Who bade the Heavens abide yet cease not from their motion, To Him Who tames the moonstruck tide twice a day round Ocean---- Let His Names be magnified in all poor folks’ devotion!_

_Powers and Gifts._

Not for Prophecies or Powers, Visions, Gifts, or Graces, But the unregardful hours that grind us in our places With the burden on our backs, the weather in our faces.

_Toils._

Not for any Miracle of easy Loaves and Fishes, But for doing, ’gainst our will, work against our wishes-- Such as finding food to fill daily-emptied dishes.

_Glories._

Not for Voices, Harps or Wings or rapt illumination, But the grosser Self that springs of use and occupation, Unto which the Spirit clings as her last salvation.

_Powers, Glories, Toils, and Gifts._

_(He Who launched our Ship of Fools many anchors gave us, Lest one gale should start them all--one collision stave us. Praise Him for the petty creeds That prescribe in paltry needs, Solemn rites to trivial deeds and, by small things, save us!)_

_Services and Loves._

Heart may fail, and Strength outwear, and Purpose turn to Loathing, But the everyday affair of business, meals, and clothing, Builds a bulkhead ’twixt Despair and the Edge of Nothing.

_Patiences._

_(Praise Him, then, Who orders it that, though Earth be flaring And the crazy skies are lit By the searchlights of the Pit, Man should not depart a whit from his wonted bearing.)_

_Hopes._

He Who bids the wild-swans’ host still maintain their flight on Air-roads over islands lost-- Ages since ’neath Ocean lost-- Beaches of some sunken coast their fathers would alight on--

_Faiths._

_He shall guide us through this dark, not by new-blown glories, But by every ancient mark our fathers used before us, Till our children ground their ark where the proper shore is._

_Services, Patiences, Faiths, Hopes, and Loves._

He Who used the clay that clings on our boots to make us, Shall not suffer earthly things to remove or shake us: But, when Man denies His Lord, Habit without Fleet or Sword (Custom without threat or word) Sees the ancient fanes restored--the timeless rites o’ertake us.

_Full Chorus._

_For He Who makes the Mountains smoke and rives the Hills asunder, And, to-morrow, leads the grass-- Mere unconquerable grass-- Where the fuming crater was, to heal and hide it under, He shall not--He shall not-- Shall not lay on us the yoke of too long Fear and Wonder!_

THE EYE OF ALLAH

UNTIMELY

Nothing in life has been made by man for man’s using But it was shown long since to man in ages Lost as the name of the maker of it,

Who received oppression and scorn for his wages-- Hate, avoidance, and scorn in his daily dealings-- Until he perished, wholly confounded.

More to be pitied than he are the wise Souls which foresaw the evil of loosing Knowledge or Art before time, and aborted Noble devices and deep-wrought healings, Lest offence should arise.

Heaven delivers on earth the Hour that cannot be thwarted, Neither advanced, at the price of a world or a soul, and its Prophet Comes through the blood of the vanguards who dreamed --too soon--it had sounded.

THE EYE OF ALLAH

The Cantor of St. Illod’s being far too enthusiastic a musician to concern himself with its Library, the Sub-Cantor, who idolised every detail of the work, was tidying up, after two hours’ writing and dictation in the Scriptorium. The copying-monks handed him in their sheets--it was a plain Four Gospels ordered by an Abbot at Evesham--and filed out to vespers. John Otho, better known as John of Burgos, took no heed. He was burnishing a tiny boss of gold in his miniature of the Annunciation for his Gospel of St. Luke, which it was hoped that Cardinal Falcodi, the Papal Legate, might later be pleased to accept.

“Break off, John,” said the Sub-Cantor in an undertone.

“Eh? Gone, have they? I never heard. Hold a minute, Clement.”

The Sub-Cantor waited patiently. He had known John more than a dozen years, coming and going at St. Illod’s, to which monastery John, when abroad, always said he belonged. The claim was gladly allowed for, more even than other Fitz Otho’s, he seemed to carry all the Arts under his hand, and most of their practical receipts under his hood.

The Sub-Cantor looked over his shoulder at the pinned-down sheet where the first words of the Magnificat were built up in gold washed with red-lac for a background to the Virgin’s hardly yet fired halo. She was shown, hands joined in wonder, at a lattice of infinitely intricate arabesque, round the edges of which sprays of orange-bloom seemed to load the blue hot air that carried back over the minute parched landscape in the middle distance.

“You’ve made her all Jewess,” said the Sub-Cantor, studying the olive-flushed cheek and the eyes charged with foreknowledge.

“What else was Our Lady?” John slipped out the pins. “Listen, Clement. If I do not come back, this goes into my Great Luke, whoever finishes it.” He slid the drawing between its guard-papers.

“Then you’re for Burgos again--as I heard?”

“In two days. The new Cathedral yonder--but they’re slower than the Wrath of God, those masons--is good for the soul.”

“_Thy_ soul?” The Sub-Cantor seemed doubtful.

“Even mine, by your permission. And down south--on the edge of the Conquered Countries--Granada way--there’s some Moorish diaper-work that’s wholesome. It allays vain thought and draws it toward the picture--as you felt, just now, in my Annunciation.”

“She--it was very beautiful. No wonder you go. But you’ll not forget your absolution, John?”

“Surely.” This was a precaution John no more omitted on the eve of his travels than he did the recutting of the tonsure which he had provided himself with in his youth, somewhere near Ghent. The mark gave him privilege of clergy at a pinch, and a certain consideration on the road always.

“You’ll not forget, either, what we need in the Scriptorium. There’s no more true ultramarine in this world now. They mix it with that German blue. And as for vermilion----”

“I’ll do my best always.”

“And Brother Thomas (this was the Infirmarian in charge of the monastery hospital) he needs----”

“He’ll do his own asking. I’ll go over his side now, and get me re-tonsured.”

John went down the stairs to the lane that divides the hospital and cook-house from the back-cloisters. While he was being barbered, Brother Thomas (St. Illod’s meek but deadly persistent Infirmarian) gave him a list of drugs that he was to bring back from Spain by hook, crook, or lawful purchase. Here they were surprised by the lame, dark Abbot Stephen, in his fur-lined night-boots. Not that Stephen de Sautré was any spy; but as a young man he had shared an unlucky Crusade, which had ended, after a battle at Mansura, in two years’ captivity among the Saracens at Cairo where men learn to walk softly. A fair huntsman and hawker, a reasonable disciplinarian but a man of science above all, and a Doctor of Medicine under one Ranulphus, Canon of St. Paul’s, his heart was more in the monastery’s hospital work than its religious. He checked their list interestedly, adding items of his own. After the Infirmarian had withdrawn he gave John generous absolution, to cover lapses by the way; for he did not hold with chance-bought Indulgences.

“And what seek you _this_ journey?” he demanded, sitting on the bench beside the mortar and scales in the little warm cell for stored drugs.

“Devils, mostly,” said John, grinning.

“In Spain? Are not Abana and Pharphar----?”

John, to whom men were but matter for drawings, and well-born to boot (since he was a de Sanford on his mother’s side), looked the Abbot full in the face and--“Did _you_ find it so?” said he.

“No. They were in Cairo too. But what’s your special need of ’em?”

“For my Great Luke. He’s the master-hand of all Four when it comes to devils.”

“No wonder. He was a physician. You’re not.”

“Heaven forbid! But I’m weary of our Church-pattern devils. They’re only apes and goats and poultry conjoined. ’Good enough for plain red-and-black Hells and Judgment Days--but not for me.”

“What makes you so choice in them?”

“Because it stands to reason and Art that there are all musters of devils in Hell’s dealings. Those Seven, for example, that were haled out of the Magdalene. They’d be she-devils--no kin at all to the beaked and horned and bearded devils-general.”

The Abbot laughed.

“And see again! The devil that came out of the dumb man. What use is snout or bill to _him_? He’d be faceless as a leper. Above all--God send I live to do it!--the devils that entered the Gadarene swine. They’d be--they’d be--I know not yet what they’d be, but they’d be surpassing devils. I’d have ’em diverse as the Saints themselves. But now, they’re all one pattern, for wall, window, or picture-work.”

“Go on, John. You’re deeper in this mystery than I.”

“Heaven forbid! But I say there’s respect due to devils, damned tho’ they be.”

“Dangerous doctrine.”

“My meaning is that if the shape of anything be worth man’s thought to picture to man, it’s worth his best thought.”

“That’s safer. But I’m glad I’ve given you Absolution.”

“There’s less risk for a craftsman who deals with the outside shapes of things--for Mother Church’s glory.”

“Maybe so, but John”--the Abbot’s hand almost touched John’s sleeve--“tell me, now, is--is she Moorish or--or Hebrew?”

“She’s mine,” John returned.

“Is that enough?”

“I have found it so.”

“Well--ah well! It’s out of my jurisdiction but--how do they look at it down yonder?”

“Oh, they drive nothing to a head in Spain--neither Church nor King, bless them! There’s too many Moors and Jews to kill them all, and if they chased ’em away there’d be no trade nor farming. Trust me, in the Conquered Countries, from Seville to Granada, we live lovingly enough together--Spaniard, Moor, and Jew. Ye see, _we_ ask no questions.”

“Yes--yes,” Stephen sighed. “And always there’s the hope, she may be converted.”

“Oh yes, there’s always hope.”

The Abbot went on into the hospital. It was an easy age before Rome tightened the screw as to clerical connections. If the lady were not too forward, or the son too much his father’s beneficiary in ecclesiastical preferments and levies, a good deal was overlooked. But, as the Abbot had reason to recall, unions between Christian and Infidel led to sorrow. None the less, when John with mule, mails, and man, clattered off down the lane for Southampton and the sea, Stephen envied him.

* * * * *

He was back, twenty months later, in good hard case, and loaded down with fairings. A lump of richest lazuli, a bar of orange-hearted vermilion, and a small packet of dried beetles which make most glorious scarlet, for the Sub-Cantor. Besides that, a few cubes of milky marble, with yet a pink flush in them, which could be slaked and ground down to incomparable background-stuff. There were quite half the drugs that the Abbot and Thomas had demanded, and there was a long deep-red cornelian necklace for the Abbot’s Lady--Anne of Norton. She received it graciously, and asked where John had come by it.

“Near Granada,” he said.

“You left all well there?” Anne asked. (Maybe the Abbot had told her something of John’s confession.)

“I left all in the hands of God.”

“Ah me! How long since?”

“Four months less eleven days.”

“Were you--with her?”

“In my arms. Childbed.”

“And?”

“The boy too. There is nothing now.”

Anne of Norton caught her breath.

“I think you’ll be glad of that,” she said after a while.

“Give me time, and maybe I’ll compass it. But not now.”

“You have your handwork and your art and--John--remember there’s no jealousy in the grave.”

“Ye-es! I have my Art, and Heaven knows I’m jealous of none.”

“Thank God for that at least,” said Anne of Norton, the always ailing woman who followed the Abbot with her sunk eyes. “And be sure I shall treasure this,” she touched the beads, “as long as I shall live.”

“I brought--trusted--it to you for that,” he replied, and took leave. When she told the Abbot how she had come by it, he said nothing, but as he and Thomas were storing the drugs that John handed over in the cell which backs on to the hospital kitchen-chimney, he observed, of a cake of dried poppy-juice: “This has power to cut off all pain from a man’s body.”

“I have seen it,” said John.

“But for pain of the soul there is, outside God’s Grace, but one drug; and that is a man’s craft, learning, or other helpful motion of his own mind.”

“That is coming to me, too,” was the answer.

John spent the next fair May day out in the woods with the monastery swineherd and all the porkers; and returned loaded with flowers and sprays of spring, to his own carefully kept place in the north bay of the Scriptorium. There with his travelling sketch-books under his left elbow, he sunk himself past all recollections in his Great Luke.

Brother Martin, Senior Copyist (who spoke about once a fortnight) ventured to ask, later, how the work was going.

“All here!” John tapped his forehead with his pencil. “It has been only waiting these months to--ah God!--be born. Are ye free of your plain-copying, Martin?”

Brother Martin nodded. It was his pride that John of Burgos turned to him, in spite of his seventy years, for really good page-work.

“Then see!” John laid out a new vellum--thin but flawless. “There’s no better than this sheet from here to Paris. Yes! Smell it if you choose. Wherefore--give me the compasses and I’ll set it out for you--if ye make one letter lighter or darker than its next, I’ll stick ye like a pig.”

“Never, John!” the old man beamed happily.

“But I will! Now, follow! Here and here, as I prick, and in script of just this height to the hair’s-breadth, ye’ll scribe the thirty-first and thirty-second verses of Eighth Luke.”

“Yes, the Gadarene Swine! ‘_And they besought him that he would not command them to go out into the abyss. And there was a herd of many swine_’”----Brother Martin naturally knew all the Gospels by heart.

“Just so! Down to ‘_and he suffered them_.’ Take your time to it. My Magdalene has to come off my heart first.”

Brother Martin achieved the work so perfectly that John stole some soft sweetmeats from the Abbot’s kitchen for his reward. The old man ate them; then repented; then confessed and insisted on penance. At which the Abbot, knowing there was but one way to reach the real sinner, set him a book called _De Virtutibus Herbarum_ to fair-copy. St. Illod’s had borrowed it from the gloomy Cistercians, who do not hold with pretty things, and the crabbed text kept Martin busy just when John wanted him for some rather specially spaced letterings.

“See now,” said the Sub-Cantor reprovingly. “You should not do such things, John. Here’s Brother Martin on penance for your sake----”

“No--for my Great Luke. But I’ve paid the Abbot’s cook. I’ve drawn him till his own scullions cannot keep straight-faced. _He_’ll not tell again.”

“Unkindly done! And you’re out of favour with the Abbot too. He’s made no sign to you since you came back--never asked you to high table.”

“I’ve been busy. Having eyes in his head, Stephen knew it. Clement, there’s no Librarian from Durham to Torre fit to clean up after you.”

The Sub-Cantor stood on guard; he knew where John’s compliments generally ended.

“But outside the Scriptorium----”

“Where I never go.” The Sub-Cantor had been excused even digging in the garden, lest it should mar his wonderful book-binding hands.

“In all things outside the Scriptorium you are the master-fool of Christendie. Take it from me, Clement. I’ve met many.”

“I take everything from you,” Clement smiled benignly. “You use me worse than a singing-boy.”

They could hear one of that suffering breed in the cloister below, squalling as the Cantor pulled his hair.

“God love you! So I do! But have you ever thought how I lie and steal daily on my travels--yes, and for aught you know, murder--to fetch you colours and earths?”

“True,” said just and conscience-stricken Clement. “I have often thought that were I in the world--which God forbid!--I might be a strong thief in some matters.”

Even Brother Martin, bent above his loathed _De Virtutibus_, laughed.

* * * * *

But about mid-summer, Thomas the Infirmarian conveyed to John the Abbot’s invitation to supper in his house that night, with the request that he would bring with him anything that he had done for his Great Luke.

“What’s toward?” said John, who had been wholly shut up in his work.

“Only one of his ‘wisdom’ dinners. You’ve sat at a few since you were a man.”

“True: and mostly good. How would Stephen have us----?”

“Gown and hood over all. There will be a doctor from Salerno--one Roger, an Italian. Wise and famous with the knife on the body. He’s been in the Infirmary some ten days, helping me--even me!”

“’Never heard the name. But our Stephen’s _physicus_ before _sacerdos_, always.”

“And his Lady has a sickness of some time. Roger came hither in chief because of her.”

“Did he? Now I think of it, I have not seen the Lady Anne for a while.”

“Ye’ve seen nothing for a long while. She has been housed near a month--they have to carry her abroad now.”

“So bad as that, then?”

“Roger of Salerno will not yet say what he thinks. But----”

“God pity Stephen!... Who else at table, beside thee?”

“An Oxford friar. Roger is his name also. A learned and famous philosopher. And he holds his liquor too, valiantly.”

“Three doctors--counting Stephen. I’ve always found that means two atheists.”

Thomas looked uneasily down his nose. “That’s a wicked proverb,” he stammered. “You should not use it.”

“Hoh! Never come you the monk over me, Thomas! You’ve been Infirmarian at St. Illod’s eleven years--and a lay-brother still. Why have you never taken orders, all this while?”

“I--I am not worthy.”

“Ten times worthier than that new fat swine--Henry Who’s-his-name--that takes the Infirmary Masses. He bullocks in with the Viaticum, under your nose, when a sick man’s only faint from being bled. So the man dies--of pure fear. Ye know it! I’ve watched your face at such times. Take Orders, Didymus. You’ll have a little more medicine and a little less Mass with your sick then; and they’ll live longer.”

“I am unworthy--unworthy,” Thomas repeated pitifully.

“Not you--but--to your own master you stand or fall. And now that my work releases me for a while, I’ll drink with any philosopher out of any school. And Thomas,” he coaxed, “a hot bath for me in the Infirmary before vespers.”

* * * * *

When the Abbot’s perfectly cooked and served meal had ended, and the deep-fringed naperies were removed, and the Prior had sent in the keys with word that all was fast in the Monastery, and the keys had been duly returned with the word: “Make it so till Prime,” the Abbot and his guests went out to cool themselves in an upper cloister that took them, by way of the leads, to the South Choir side of the Triforium. The summer sun was still strong, for it was barely six o’clock, but the Abbey Church, of course, lay in her wonted darkness. Lights were being lit for choir-practice thirty feet below.

“Our Cantor gives them no rest,” the Abbot whispered. “Stand by this pillar and we’ll hear what he’s driving them at now.”

“Remember all!” the Cantor’s hard voice came up. “This is the soul of Bernard himself, attacking our evil world. Take it quicker than yesterday, and throw all your words clean-bitten from you. In the loft there! Begin!”

The organ broke out for an instant, alone and raging. Then the voices crashed together into that first fierce line of the “_De Contemptu Mundi_.”[5]

“_Hora novissima_--_tempora pessima_”--a dead pause till, the assenting _sunt_ broke, like a sob, out of the darkness, and one boy’s voice, clearer than silver trumpets, returned the long-drawn _vigilemus_.

“_Ecce minaciter, imminet Arbiter_” (organ and voices were leashed together in terror and warning, breaking away liquidly to the “_ille supremus_”). Then the tone-colours shifted for the prelude to--“_Imminet, imminet, ut mala terminet_----”

“Stop! Again!” cried the Cantor; and gave his reasons a little more roundly than was natural at choir-practice.

“Ah! Pity o’ man’s vanity! He’s guessed we are here. Come away!” said the Abbot. Anne of Norton, in her carried chair, had been listening too, further along the dark Triforium, with Roger of Salerno. John heard her sob. On the way back, he asked Thomas how her health stood. Before Thomas could reply the sharp-featured Italian doctor pushed between them. “Following on our talk together, I judged it best to tell her,” said he to Thomas.

“What?” John asked simply enough.

“What she knew already.” Roger of Salerno launched into a Greek quotation to the effect that every woman knows all about everything.

“I have no Greek,” said John stiffly. Roger of Salerno had been giving them a good deal of it, at dinner.

“Then I’ll come to you in Latin. Ovid hath it neatly. ‘_Utque malum late solet immedicabile cancer_----’ but doubtless you know the rest, worthy Sir.”

“Alas! My school-Latin’s but what I’ve gathered by the way from fools professing to heal sick women. ‘_Hocus-pocus_----’ but doubtless you know the rest, worthy Sir.”

Roger of Salerno was quite quiet till they regained the dining-room, where the fire had been comforted and the dates, raisins, ginger, figs, and cinnamon-scented sweetmeats set out, with the choicer wines, on the after-table. The Abbot seated himself, drew off his ring, dropped it, that all might hear the tinkle, into an empty silver cup, stretched his feet towards the hearth, and looked at the great gilt and carved rose in the barrel-roof. The silence that keeps from Compline to Matins had closed on their world. The bull-necked Friar watched a ray of sunlight split itself into colours on the rim of a crystal salt-cellar; Roger of Salerno had re-opened some discussion with Brother Thomas on a type of spotted fever that was baffling them both in England and abroad; John took note of the keen profile, and--it might serve as a note for the Great Luke--his hand moved to his bosom. The Abbot saw, and nodded permission. John whipped out silver-point and sketch-book.

“Nay--modesty is good enough--but deliver your own opinion,” the Italian was urging the Infirmarian. Out of courtesy to the foreigner nearly all the talk was in table-Latin; more formal and more copious than monk’s patter. Thomas began with his meek stammer.

“I confess myself at a loss for the cause of the fever unless--as Varro saith in his _De Re Rustica_--certain small animals which the eye cannot follow enter the body by the nose and mouth, and set up grave diseases. On the other hand, this is not in Scripture.”

Roger of Salerno hunched head and shoulders like an angry cat. “Always _that_!” he said, and John snatched down the twist of the thin lips.

“Never at rest, John,” the Abbot smiled at the artist. “You should break off every two hours for prayers, as we do. St. Benedict was no fool. Two hours is all that a man can carry the edge of his eye or hand.”

“For copyists--yes. Brother Martin is not sure after one hour. But when a man’s work takes him, he must go on till it lets him go.”

“Yes, that is the Demon of Socrates,” the Friar from Oxford rumbled above his cup.

“The doctrine leans toward presumption,” said the Abbot. “Remember, ‘Shall mortal man be more just than his Maker?’”

“There is no danger of justice”; the Friar spoke bitterly. “But at least Man might be suffered to go forward in his Art or his thought. Yet if Mother Church sees or hears him move anyward, what says she? ‘No!’ Always ‘No.’”

“But if the little animals of Varro be invisible”--this was Roger of Salerno to Thomas--“how are we any nearer to a cure?”

“By experiment”--the Friar wheeled round on them suddenly. “By reason and experiment. The one is useless without the other. But Mother Church----”

“Ay!” Roger de Salerno dashed at the fresh bait like a pike. “Listen, Sirs. Her bishops--our Princes--strew our roads in Italy with carcasses that they make for their pleasure or wrath. Beautiful corpses! Yet if I--if we doctors--so much as raise the skin of one of them to look at God’s fabric beneath, what says Mother Church? ‘Sacrilege! Stick to your pigs and dogs, or you burn!’”

“And not Mother Church only!” the Friar chimed in. “_Every_ way we are barred--barred by the words of some man, dead a thousand years, which are held final. Who is any son of Adam that his one say-so should close a door towards truth? I would not except even Peter Peregrinus, my own great teacher.”

“Nor I Paul of Aegina,” Roger of Salerno cried. “Listen Sirs! Here is a case to the very point. Apuleius affirmeth, if a man eat fasting of the juice of the cut-leaved buttercup--_sceleratus_ we call it, which means ‘rascally’”--this with a condescending nod towards John--“his soul will leave his body laughing. Now this is the lie more dangerous than truth, since truth of a sort is in it.”

“He’s away!” whispered the Abbot despairingly.

“For the juice of that herb, I know by experiment, burns, blisters, and wries the mouth. I know also the _rictus_, or pseudo-laughter on the face of such as have perished by the strong poisons of herbs allied to this ranunculus. Certainly that spasm resembles laughter. It seems then, in my judgment, that Apuleius, having seen the body of one thus poisoned, went off at score and wrote that the man died laughing.”

“Neither staying to observe, nor to confirm observation by experiment,” added the Friar, frowning.

Stephen the Abbot cocked an eyebrow toward John.

“How think _you_?” said he.

“I’m no doctor,” John returned, “but I’d say Apuleius in all these years might have been betrayed by his copyists. They take shortcuts to save ’emselves trouble. Put case that Apuleius wrote the soul _seems to_ leave the body laughing, after this poison. There’s not three copyists in five (_my_ judgment) would not leave out the ‘seems to.’ For who’d question Apuleius? If it seemed so to him, so it must be. Otherwise any child knows cut-leaved buttercup.”

“Have you knowledge of herbs?” Roger of Salerno asked curtly.

“Only, that when I was a boy in convent, I’ve made tetters round my mouth and on my neck with buttercup-juice, to save going to prayer o’ cold nights.”

“Ah!” said Roger. “I profess no knowledge of tricks.” He turned aside, stiffly.

“No matter! Now for your own tricks, John,” the tactful Abbot broke in. “You shall show the doctors your Magdalene and your Gadarene Swine and the devils.”

“Devils? Devils? _I_ have produced devils by means of drugs; and have abolished them by the same means. Whether devils be external to mankind or immanent, I have not yet pronounced.” Roger of Salerno was still angry.

“Ye dare not,” snapped the Friar from Oxford. “Mother Church makes Her own devils.”

“Not wholly! Our John has come back from Spain with brand-new ones.” Abbot Stephen took the vellum handed to him, and laid it tenderly on the table. They gathered to look. The Magdalene was drawn in palest, almost transparent, grisaille, against a raging, swaying background of woman-faced devils, each broke to and by her special sin, and each, one could see, frenziedly straining against the Power that compelled her.

“I’ve never seen the like of this grey shadow-work,” said the Abbot. “How came you by it?”

“_Non nobis!_ It came to me,” said John, not knowing he was a generation or so ahead of his time in the use of that medium.

“Why is she so pale?” the Friar demanded.

“Evil has all come out of her--she’d take any colour now.”

“Ay, like light through glass. _I_ see.”

Roger of Salerno was looking in silence--his nose nearer and nearer the page. “It is so,” he pronounced finally. “Thus it is in epilepsy--mouth, eyes, and forehead--even to the droop of her wrist there. Every sign of it! She will need restoratives, that woman, and, afterwards, sleep natural. No poppy-juice, or she will vomit on her waking. And thereafter--but I am not in my Schools.” He drew himself up. “Sir,” said he, “you should be of Our calling. For, by the Snakes of Aesculapius, you _see_!”

The two struck hands as equals.

“And how think you of the Seven Devils?” the Abbot went on.

These melted into convoluted flower- or flame-like bodies, ranging in colour from phosphorescent green to the black purple of outworn iniquity, whose hearts could be traced beating through their substance. But, for sign of hope and the sane workings of life, to be regained, the deep border was of conventionalised spring flowers and birds, all crowned by a kingfisher in haste, atilt through a clump of yellow iris.

Roger of Salerno identified the herbs and spoke largely of their virtues.

“And now, the Gadarene Swine,” said Stephen. John laid the picture on the table.

Here were devils dishoused, in dread of being abolished to the Void, huddling and hurtling together to force lodgment by every opening into the brute bodies offered. Some of the swine fought the invasion, foaming and jerking; some were surrendering to it, sleepily, as to a luxurious back-scratching; others, wholly possessed, whirled off in bucking droves for the lake beneath. In one corner the freed man stretched out his limbs all restored to his control, and Our Lord, seated, looked at him as questioning what he would make of his deliverance.

“Devils indeed!” was the Friar’s comment. “But wholly a new sort.”

Some devils were mere lumps, with lobes and protuberances--a hint of a fiend’s face peering through jelly-like walls. And there was a family of impatient, globular devillings who had burst open the belly of their smirking parent, and were revolving desperately towards their prey. Others patterned themselves into rods, chains and ladders, single or conjoined, round the throat and jaws of a shrieking sow, from whose ear emerged the lashing, glassy tail of a devil that had made good his refuge. And there were granulated and conglomerate devils, mixed up with the foam and slaver where the attack was fiercest. Thence the eye carried on to the insanely active backs of the downward-racing swine, the swineherd’s aghast face, and his dog’s terror.

Said Roger of Salerno, “I pronounce that these were begotten of drugs. They stand outside the rational mind.”

“Not these,” said Thomas the Infirmarian, who as a servant of the Monastery should have asked his Abbot’s leave to speak. “Not _these_--look!--in the bordure.”

The border to the picture was a diaper of irregular but balanced compartments or cellules, where sat, swam, or weltered, devils in blank, so to say--things as yet uninspired by Evil--indifferent, but lawlessly outside imagination. Their shapes resembled, again, ladders, chains, scourges, diamonds, aborted buds, or gravid phosphorescent globes--some well-nigh star-like.

Roger of Salerno compared them to the obsessions of a Churchman’s mind.

“Malignant?” the Friar from Oxford questioned.

“‘Count everything unknown for horrible,’” Roger quoted with scorn.

“Not I. But they are marvellous--marvellous. I think----”

The Friar drew back. Thomas edged in to see better, and half opened his mouth.

“Speak,” said Stephen, who had been watching him. “We are all in a sort doctors here.”

“I would say then”--Thomas rushed at it as one putting out his life’s belief at the stake--“that these lower shapes in the bordure may not be so much hellish and malignant as models and patterns upon which John has tricked out and embellished his proper devils among the swine above there!”

“And that would signify?” said Roger of Salerno sharply.

“In my poor judgment, that he may have seen such shapes--without help of drugs.”

“Now who--_who_”--said John of Burgos, after a round and unregarded oath--“has made thee so wise of a sudden, my Doubter?”

“I wise? God forbid! Only John, remember--one winter six years ago--the snowflakes melting on your sleeve at the cookhouse-door. You showed me them through a little crystal, that made small things larger.”

“Yes. The Moors call such a glass the Eye of Allah,” John confirmed.

“You showed me them melting--six-sided. You called them, then, your patterns.”

“True. Snow-flakes melt six-sided. I have used them for diaper-work often.”

“Melting snow-flakes as seen through a glass? By art optical?” the Friar asked.

“Art optical? _I_ have never heard!” Roger of Salerno cried.

“John,” said the Abbot of St. Illod’s commandingly, “was it--is it so?”

“In some sort,” John replied, “Thomas has the right of it. Those shapes in the bordure were my workshop-patterns for the devils above. In _my_ craft, Salerno, we dare not drug. It kills hand and eye. My shapes are to be seen honestly, in nature.”

The Abbot drew a bowl of rose-water towards him. “When I was prisoner with--with the Saracens after Mansura,” he began, turning up the fold of his long sleeve, “there were certain magicians--physicians--who could show--” he dipped his third finger delicately in the water--“all the firmament of Hell, as it were, in--” he shook off one drop from his polished nail on to the polished table--“even such a supernaculum as this.”

“But it must be foul water--not clean,” said John.

“Show us then--all--all,” said Stephen. “I would make sure--once more.” The Abbot’s voice was official.

John drew from his bosom a stamped leather box, some six or eight inches long, wherein, bedded on faded velvet, lay what looked like silver-bound compasses of old box-wood, with a screw at the head which opened or closed the legs to minute fractions. The legs terminated, not in points, but spoon-shapedly, one spatula pierced with a metal-lined hole less than a quarter of an inch across, the other with a half-inch hole. Into this latter John, after carefully wiping with a silk rag, slipped a metal cylinder that carried glass or crystal, it seemed, at each end.

“Ah! Art optic!” said the Friar. “But what is that beneath it?”

It was a small swivelling sheet of polished silver no bigger than a florin, which caught the light and concentrated it on the lesser hole. John adjusted it without the Friar’s proffered help.

“And now to find a drop of water,” said he, picking up a small brush.

“Come to my upper cloister. The sun is on the leads still,” said the Abbot, rising.

They followed him there. Half way along, a drip from a gutter had made a greenish puddle in a worn stone. Very carefully, John dropped a drop of it into the smaller hole of the compass-leg, and, steadying the apparatus on a coping, worked the screw in the compass-joint, screwed the cylinder, and swung the swivel of the mirror till he was satisfied.

“Good!” He peered through the thing. “My Shapes are all here. Now look, Father! If they do not meet your eye at first, turn this nicked edge here, left or right-handed.”

“I have not forgotten,” said the Abbot, taking his place. “Yes! They are here--as they were in my time--my time past. There is no end to them, I was told.... There _is_ no end!”

“The light will go. Oh, let me look! Suffer me to see, also!” the Friar pleaded, almost shouldering Stephen from the eye-piece. The Abbot gave way. His eyes were on time past. But the Friar, instead of looking, turned the apparatus in his capable hands.

“Nay, nay,” John interrupted, for the man was already fiddling at the screws. “Let the Doctor see.”

Roger of Salerno looked, minute after minute. John saw his blue-veined cheek-bones turn white. He stepped back at last, as though stricken.

“It is a new world--a new world and--Oh, God Unjust!--I am old!”

“And now Thomas,” Stephen ordered.

John manipulated the tube for the Infirmarian, whose hands shook, and he too looked long. “It is Life,” he said presently in a breaking voice. “No Hell! Life created and rejoicing--the work of the Creator. They live, even as I have dreamed. Then it was no sin for me to dream. No sin--O God--no sin!”

He flung himself on his knees and began hysterically the _Benedicite omnia Opera_.

“And now I will see how it is actuated,” said the Friar from Oxford, thrusting forward again.

“Bring it within. The place is all eyes and ears,” said Stephen.

They walked quietly back along the leads, three English counties laid out in evening sunshine around them; church upon church, monastery upon monastery, cell after cell, and the bulk of a vast cathedral moored on the edge of the banked shoals of sunset.

When they were at the after-table once more they sat down, all except the Friar who went to the window and huddled bat-like over the thing. “I see! I see!” he was repeating to himself.

“He’ll not hurt it,” said John. But the Abbot, staring in front of him, like Roger of Salerno, did not hear. The Infirmarian’s head was on the table between his shaking arms.

John reached for a cup of wine.

“It was shown to me,” the Abbot was speaking to himself, “in Cairo, that man stands ever between two Infinities--of greatness and littleness. Therefore, there is no end--either to life--or----”

“And _I_ stand on the edge of the grave,” snarled Roger of Salerno. “Who pities _me_?”

“Hush!” said Thomas the Infirmarian. “The little creatures shall be sanctified--sanctified to the service of His sick.”

“What need?” John of Burgos wiped his lips. “It shows no more than the shapes of things. It gives good pictures. I had it at Granada. It was brought from the East, they told me.”

Roger of Salerno laughed with an old man’s malice. “What of Mother Church? Most Holy Mother Church? If it comes to Her ears that we have spied into Her Hell without Her leave, where do we stand?”

“At the stake,” said the Abbot of St. Illod’s, and, raising his voice a trifle. “You hear that? Roger Bacon, heard you that?”

The Friar turned from the window, clutching the compasses tighter.

“No, no!” he appealed. “Not with Falcodi--not with our English-hearted Foulkes made Pope. He’s wise--he’s learned. He reads what I have put forth. Foulkes would never suffer it.”

“‘Holy Pope is one thing, Holy Church another,’” Roger quoted.

“But I--_I_ can bear witness it is no Art Magic,” the Friar went on. “Nothing is it, except Art optical--wisdom after trial and experiment, mark you. I can prove it, and--my name weighs with men who dare think.”

“Find them!” croaked Roger of Salerno. “Five or six in all the world. That makes less than fifty pounds by weight of ashes at the stake. I have watched such men--reduced.”

“I will not give this up!” The Friar’s voice cracked in passion and despair. “It would be to sin against the Light.”

“No, no! Let us--let us sanctify the little animals of Varro,” said Thomas.

Stephen leaned forward, fished his ring out of the cup, and slipped it on his finger. “My sons,” said he, “we have seen what we have seen.”

“That it is no magic but simple Art,” the Friar persisted.

“’Avails nothing. In the eyes of Mother Church we have seen more than is permitted to man.”

“But it was Life--created and rejoicing,” said Thomas.

“To look into Hell as we shall be judged--as we shall be proved--to have looked, is for priests only.”

“Or green-sick virgins on the road to sainthood who, for cause any mid-wife could give you----”

The Abbot’s half-lifted hand checked Roger of Salerno’s outpouring.

“Nor may even priests see more in Hell than Church knows to be there. John, there is respect due to Church as well as to Devils.”

“My trade’s the outside of things,” said John quietly. “I have my patterns.”

“But you may need to look again for more,” the Friar said.

“In my craft, a thing done is done with. We go on to new shapes after that.”

“And if we trespass beyond bounds, even in thought, we lie open to the judgment of the Church,” the Abbot continued.

“But thou knowest--_knowest_!” Roger of Salerno had returned to the attack. “Here’s all the world in darkness concerning the causes of things--from the fever across the lane to thy Lady’s--thine own Lady’s--eating malady. Think!”

“I have thought upon it, Salerno! I have thought indeed.”

Thomas the Infirmarian lifted his head again; and this time he did not stammer at all. “As in the water, so in the blood must they rage and war with each other! I have dreamed these ten years--I thought it was a sin--but my dreams and Varro’s are true! Think on it again! Here’s the Light under our very hand!”

“Quench it! You’d no more stand to roasting than--any other. I’ll give you the case as Church--as I myself--would frame it. Our John here returns from the Moors, and shows us a hell of devils contending in the compass of one drop of water. Magic past clearance! You can hear the faggots crackle.”

“But thou knowest! Thou hast seen it all before! For man’s poor sake! For old friendship’s sake--Stephen!” The Friar was trying to stuff the compasses into his bosom as he appealed.

“What Stephen de Sautré knows, you his friends know also. I would have you, now, obey the Abbot of St. Illod’s. Give to me!” He held out his ringed hand.

“May I--may John here--not even make a drawing of one--one screw?” said the broken Friar, in spite of himself.

“Nowise!” Stephen took it over. “Your dagger, John. Sheathed will serve.”

He unscrewed the metal cylinder, laid it on the table, and with the dagger’s hilt smashed some crystal to sparkling dust which he swept into a scooped hand and cast behind the hearth.

“It would seem,” said he, “the choice lies between two sins. To deny the world a Light which is under our hand, or to enlighten the world before her time. What you have seen, I saw long since among the physicians at Cairo. And I know what doctrine they drew from it. Hast _thou_ dreamed, Thomas? I also--with fuller knowledge. But this birth, my sons, is untimely. It will be but the mother of more death, more torture, more division, and greater darkness in this dark age. Therefore I, who know both my world and the Church, take this Choice on my conscience. Go! It is finished.”

He thrust the wooden part of the compasses deep among the beech logs till all was burned.

[5] Hymn No. 226, A. and M., “The world is very evil.”

THE LAST ODE

(_Nov. 27_, B.C. 8.)

Horace, Ode 31, Bk. V.

As watchers couched beneath a Bantine oak, Hearing the dawn-wind stir, Know that the present strength of night is broke Though no dawn threaten her Till dawn’s appointed hour--so Virgil died, Aware of change at hand, and prophesied

Change upon all the Eternal Gods had made And on the Gods alike-- Fated as dawn but, as the dawn, delayed Till the just hour should strike--

A Star new-risen above the living and dead; And the lost shades that were our loves restored As lovers, and for ever. So he said; Having received the word....

Maecenas waits me on the Esquiline: Thither to-night go I.... And shall this dawn restore us, Virgil mine, To dawn? Beneath what sky?

THE GARDENER

THE GARDENER

One grave to me was given, One watch till Judgment Day; And God looked down from Heaven And rolled the stone away.

_One day in all the years, One hour in that one day, His Angel saw my tears, And rolled the stone away!_

Every one in the village knew that Helen Turrell did her duty by all her world, and by none more honourably than by her only brother’s unfortunate child. The village knew, too, that George Turrell had tried his family severely since early youth, and were not surprised to be told that, after many fresh starts given and thrown away, he, an Inspector of Indian Police, had entangled himself with the daughter of a retired non-commissioned officer, and had died of a fall from a horse a few weeks before his child was born. Mercifully, George’s father and mother were both dead, and though Helen, thirty-five and independent, might well have washed her hands of the whole disgraceful affair, she most nobly took charge, though she was, at the time, under threat of lung trouble which had driven her to the South of France. She arranged for the passage of the child and a nurse from Bombay, met them at Marseilles, nursed the baby through an attack of infantile dysentery due to the carelessness of the nurse, whom she had had to dismiss, and at last, thin and worn but triumphant, brought the boy late in the autumn, wholly restored, to her Hampshire home.

All these details were public property, for Helen was as open as the day, and held that scandals are only increased by hushing them up. She admitted that George had always been rather a black sheep, but things might have been much worse if the mother had insisted on her right to keep the boy. Luckily, it seemed that people of that class would do almost anything for money, and, as George had always turned to her in his scrapes, she felt herself justified--her friends agreed with her--in cutting the whole non-commissioned officer connection, and giving the child every advantage. A christening, by the Rector, under the name of Michael, was the first step. So far as she knew herself, she was not, she said, a child-lover, but, for all his faults, she had been very fond of George, and she pointed out that little Michael had his father’s mouth to a line; which made something to build upon.

As a matter of fact, it was the Turrell forehead, broad, low, and well-shaped, with the widely-spaced eyes beneath it, that Michael had most faithfully reproduced. His mouth was somewhat better cut than the family type. But Helen, who would concede nothing good to his mother’s side, vowed he was a Turrell all over, and, there being no one to contradict, the likeness was established.

In a few years Michael took his place, as accepted as Helen had always been--fearless, philosophical, and fairly good-looking. At six, he wished to know why he could not call her “Mummy,” as other boys called their mothers. She explained that she was only his auntie, and that aunties were not quite the same as mummies, but that, if it gave him pleasure, he might call her “Mummy” at bedtime, for a pet-name between themselves.

Michael kept his secret most loyally, but Helen, as usual, explained the fact to her friends; which when Michael heard, he raged.

“Why did you tell? _Why_ did you tell?” came at the end of the storm.

“Because it’s always best to tell the truth,” Helen answered, her arm round him as he shook in his cot.

“All right, but when the troof’s ugly I don’t think it’s nice.”

“Don’t you, dear?”

“No, I don’t, and”--she felt the small body stiffen--“now you’ve told, I won’t call you ‘Mummy’ any more--not even at bedtimes.”

“But isn’t that rather unkind?” said Helen, softly.

“I don’t care! I don’t care! You’ve hurted me in my insides and I’ll hurt you back. I’ll hurt you as long as I live!”

“Don’t, oh, don’t talk like that, dear! You don’t know what----”

“I will! And when I’m dead I’ll hurt you worse!”

“Thank goodness, I shall be dead long before you, darling.”

“Huh! Emma says, ‘’Never know your luck.’” (Michael had been talking to Helen’s elderly, flat-faced maid.) “Lots of little boys die quite soon. So’ll I. _Then_ you’ll see!”

Helen caught her breath and moved towards the door, but the wail of “Mummy! Mummy!” drew her back again, and the two wept together.

* * * * *

At ten years old, after two terms at a prep. school, something or somebody gave him the idea that his civil status was not quite regular. He attacked Helen on the subject, breaking down her stammered defences with the family directness.

“’Don’t believe a word of it,” he said, cheerily, at the end. “People wouldn’t have talked like they did if my people had been married. But don’t you bother, Auntie. I’ve found out all about my sort in English Hist’ry and the Shakespeare bits. There was William the Conqueror to begin with, and--oh, heaps more, and they all got on first-rate. ’Twon’t make any difference to you, my being _that_--will it?”

“As if anything could----” she began.

“All right. We won’t talk about it any more if it makes you cry.” He never mentioned the thing again of his own will, but when, two years later, he skilfully managed to have measles in the holidays, as his temperature went up to the appointed one hundred and four he muttered of nothing else, till Helen’s voice, piercing at last his delirium, reached him with assurance that nothing on earth or beyond could make any difference between them.

The terms at his public school and the wonderful Christmas, Easter, and Summer holidays followed each other, variegated and glorious as jewels on a string; and as jewels Helen treasured them. In due time Michael developed his own interests, which ran their courses and gave way to others; but his interest in Helen was constant and increasing throughout. She repaid it with all that she had of affection or could command of counsel and money; and since Michael was no fool, the War took him just before what was like to have been a most promising career.

He was to have gone up to Oxford, with a scholarship, in October. At the end of August he was on the edge of joining the first holocaust of public-school boys who threw themselves into the Line; but the captain of his O.T.C., where he had been sergeant for nearly a year, headed him off and steered him directly to a commission in a battalion so new that half of it still wore the old Army red, and the other half was breeding meningitis through living over-crowdedly in damp tents. Helen had been shocked at the idea of direct enlistment.

“But it’s in the family,” Michael laughed.

“You don’t mean to tell me that you believed that old story all this time?” said Helen. (Emma, her maid, had been dead now several years.) “I gave you my word of honour--and I give it again--that--that it’s all right. It is indeed.”

“Oh, _that_ doesn’t worry me. It never did,” he replied valiantly. “What I meant was, I should have got into the show earlier if I’d enlisted--like my grandfather.”

“Don’t talk like that! Are you afraid of it’s ending so soon, then?”

“No such luck. You know what K. says.”

“Yes. But my banker told me last Monday it couldn’t _possibly_ last beyond Christmas--for financial reasons.”

“’Hope he’s right, but our Colonel--and he’s a Regular--says it’s going to be a long job.”

Michael’s battalion was fortunate in that, by some chance which meant several “leaves,” it was used for coast-defence among shallow trenches on the Norfolk coast; thence sent north to watch the mouth of a Scotch estuary, and, lastly, held for weeks on a baseless rumour of distant service. But, the very day that Michael was to have met Helen for four whole hours at a railway-junction up the line, it was hurled out, to help make good the wastage of Loos, and he had only just time to send her a wire of farewell.

In France luck again helped the battalion. It was put down near the Salient, where it led a meritorious and unexacting life, while the Somme was being manufactured; and enjoyed the peace of the Armentières and Laventie sectors when that battle began. Finding that it had sound views on protecting its own flanks and could dig, a prudent Commander stole it out of its own Division, under pretence of helping to lay telegraphs, and used it round Ypres at large.

A month later, and just after Michael had written Helen that there was nothing special doing and therefore no need to worry, a shell-splinter dropping out of a wet dawn killed him at once. The next shell uprooted and laid down over the body what had been the foundation of a barn wall, so neatly that none but an expert would have guessed that anything unpleasant had happened.

* * * * *

By this time the village was old in experience of war, and, English fashion, had evolved a ritual to meet it. When the postmistress handed her seven-year-old daughter the official telegram to take to Miss Turrell, she observed to the Rector’s gardener: “It’s Miss Helen’s turn now.” He replied, thinking of his own son: “Well, he’s lasted longer than some.” The child herself came to the front-door weeping aloud, because Master Michael had often given her sweets. Helen, presently, found herself pulling down the house-blinds one after one with great care, and saying earnestly to each: “Missing _always_ means dead.” Then she took her place in the dreary procession that was impelled to go through an inevitable series of unprofitable emotions. The Rector, of course, preached hope and prophesied word, very soon, from a prison camp. Several friends, too, told her perfectly truthful tales, but always about other women, to whom, after months and months of silence, their missing had been miraculously restored. Other people urged her to communicate with infallible Secretaries of organisations who could communicate with benevolent neutrals, who could extract accurate information from the most secretive of Hun prison commandants. Helen did and wrote and signed everything that was suggested or put before her.

Once, on one of Michael’s leaves, he had taken her over a munition factory, where she saw the progress of a shell from blank-iron to the all but finished article. It struck her at the time that the wretched thing was never left alone for a single second; and “I’m being manufactured into a bereaved next-of-kin,” she told herself, as she prepared her documents.

In due course, when all the organisations had deeply or sincerely regretted their inability to trace, etc., something gave way within her and all sensation--save of thankfulness for the release--came to an end in blessed passivity. Michael had died and her world had stood still and she had been one with the full shock of that arrest. Now she was standing still and the world was going forward, but it did not concern her--in no way or relation did it touch her. She knew this by the ease with which she could slip Michael’s name into talk and incline her head to the proper angle, at the proper murmur of sympathy.

In the blessed realisation of that relief, the Armistice with all its bells broke over her and passed unheeded. At the end of another year she had overcome her physical loathing of the living and returned young, so that she could take them by the hand and almost sincerely wish them well. She had no interest in any aftermath, national or personal, of the War, but, moving at an immense distance, she sat on various relief committees and held strong views--she heard herself delivering them--about the site of the proposed village War Memorial.

Then there came to her, as next of kin, an official intimation, backed by a page of a letter to her in indelible pencil, a silver identity-disc, and a watch, to the effect that the body of Lieutenant Michael Turrell had been found, identified, and re-interred in Hagenzeele Third Military Cemetery--the letter of the row and the grave’s number in that row duly given.

So Helen found herself moved on to another process of the manufacture--to a world full of exultant or broken relatives, now strong in the certainty that there was an altar upon earth where they might lay their love. These soon told her, and by means of time-tables made clear, how easy it was and how little it interfered with life’s affairs to go and see one’s grave.

“_So_ different,” as the Rector’s wife said, “if he’d been killed in Mesopotamia, or even Gallipoli.”

The agony of being waked up to some sort of second life drove Helen across the Channel, where, in a new world of abbreviated titles, she learnt that Hagenzeele Third could be comfortably reached by an afternoon train which fitted in with the morning boat, and that there was a comfortable little hotel not three kilometres from Hagenzeele itself, where one could spend quite a comfortable night and see one’s grave next morning. All this she had from a Central Authority who lived in a board and tar-paper shed on the skirts of a razed city full of whirling lime-dust and blown papers.

“By the way,” said he, “you know your grave, of course?”

“Yes, thank you,” said Helen, and showed its row and number typed on Michael’s own little typewriter. The officer would have checked it, out of one of his many books; but a large Lancashire woman thrust between them and bade him tell her where she might find her son, who had been corporal in the A.S.C. His proper name, she sobbed, was Anderson, but, coming of respectable folk, he had of course enlisted under the name of Smith; and had been killed at Dickiebush, in early ’Fifteen. She had not his number nor did she know which of his two Christian names he might have used with his alias; but her Cook’s tourist ticket expired at the end of Easter week, and if by then she could not find her child she should go mad. Whereupon she fell forward on Helen’s breast; but the officer’s wife came out quickly from a little bedroom behind the office, and the three of them lifted the woman on to the cot.

“They are often like this,” said the officer’s wife, loosening the tight bonnet-strings. “Yesterday she said he’d been killed at Hooge. Are you sure you know your grave? It makes such a difference.”

“Yes, thank you,” said Helen, and hurried out before the woman on the bed should begin to lament again.

* * * * *

Tea in a crowded mauve and blue striped wooden structure, with a false front, carried her still further into the nightmare. She paid her bill beside a stolid, plain-featured Englishwoman, who, hearing her inquire about the train to Hagenzeele, volunteered to come with her.

“I’m going to Hagenzeele myself,” she explained. “Not to Hagenzeele Third; mine is Sugar Factory, but they call it La Rosière now. It’s just south of Hagenzeele Three. Have you got your room at the hotel there?”

“Oh yes, thank you. I’ve wired.”

“That’s better. Sometimes the place is quite full, and at others there’s hardly a soul. But they’ve put bathrooms into the old Lion d’Or--that’s the hotel on the west side of Sugar Factory--and it draws off a lot of people, luckily.”

“It’s all new to me. This is the first time I’ve been over.”

“Indeed! This is my ninth time since the Armistice. Not on my own account. _I_ haven’t lost any one, thank God--but, like every one else, I’ve a lot of friends at home who have. Coming over as often as I do, I find it helps them to have some one just look at the--the place and tell them about it afterwards. And one can take photos for them, too. I get quite a list of commissions to execute.” She laughed nervously and tapped her slung Kodak. “There are two or three to see at Sugar Factory this time, and plenty of others in the cemeteries all about. My system is to save them up, and arrange them, you know. And when I’ve got enough commissions for one area to make it worth while, I pop over and execute them. It _does_ comfort people.”

“I suppose so,” Helen answered, shivering as they entered the little train.

“Of course it does. (Isn’t it lucky we’ve got window-seats?) It must do or they wouldn’t ask one to do it, would they? I’ve a list of quite twelve or fifteen commissions here”--she tapped the Kodak again--“I must sort them out to-night. Oh, I forgot to ask you. What’s yours?”

“My nephew,” said Helen. “But I was very fond of him.”

“Ah yes! I sometimes wonder whether _they_ know after death? What do you think?”

“Oh, I don’t--I haven’t dared to think much about that sort of thing,” said Helen, almost lifting her hands to keep her off.

“Perhaps that’s better,” the woman answered. “The sense of loss must be enough, I expect. Well, I won’t worry you any more.”

Helen was grateful, but when they reached the hotel Mrs. Scarsworth (they had exchanged names) insisted on dining at the same table with her, and after the meal, in the little, hideous salon full of low-voiced relatives, took Helen through her “commissions” with biographies of the dead, where she happened to know them, and sketches of their next of kin. Helen endured till nearly half-past nine, ere she fled to her room.

Almost at once there was a knock at her door and Mrs. Scarsworth entered; her hands, holding the dreadful list, clasped before her.

“Yes--yes--_I_ know,” she began. “You’re sick of me, but I want to tell you something. You--you aren’t married are you? Then perhaps you won’t.... But it doesn’t matter. I’ve _got_ to tell some one. I can’t go on any longer like this.”

“But please----” Mrs. Scarsworth had backed against the shut door, and her mouth worked dryly.

“In a minute,” she said. “You--you know about these graves of mine I was telling you about downstairs, just now? They really _are_ commissions. At least several of them are.” Her eye wandered round the room. “What extraordinary wall-papers they have in Belgium, don’t you think?... Yes. I swear they are commissions. But there’s _one_, d’you see, and--and he was more to me than anything else in the world. Do you understand?”

Helen nodded.

“More than any one else. And, of course, he oughtn’t to have been. He ought to have been nothing to me. But he _was_. He _is_. That’s why I do the commissions, you see. That’s all.”

“But why do you tell me?” Helen asked desperately.

“Because I’m _so_ tired of lying. Tired of lying--always lying--year in and year out. When I don’t tell lies I’ve got to act ’em and I’ve got to think ’em, always. _You_ don’t know what that means. He was everything to me that he oughtn’t to have been--the one real thing--the only thing that ever happened to me in all my life; and I’ve had to pretend he wasn’t. I’ve had to watch every word I said, and think out what lie I’d tell next, for years and years!”

“How many years?” Helen asked.

“Six years and four months before, and two and three-quarters after. I’ve gone to him eight times, since. To-morrow’ll make the ninth, and--and I can’t--I _can’t_ go to him again with nobody in the world knowing. I want to be honest with some one before I go. Do you understand? It doesn’t matter about _me_. I was never truthful, even as a girl. But it isn’t worthy of _him_. So--so I--I had to tell you. I can’t keep it up any longer. Oh, I can’t!”

She lifted her joined hands almost to the level of her mouth, and brought them down sharply, still joined, to full arms’ length below her waist. Helen reached forward, caught them, bowed her head over them, and murmured: “Oh, my dear! My dear!” Mrs. Scarsworth stepped back, her face all mottled.

“My God!” said she. “Is _that_ how you take it?”

Helen could not speak, the woman went out; but it was a long while before Helen was able to sleep.

* * * * *

Next morning Mrs. Scarsworth left early on her round of commissions, and Helen walked alone to Hagenzeele Third. The place was still in the making, and stood some five or six feet above the metalled road, which it flanked for hundreds of yards. Culverts across a deep ditch served for entrances through the unfinished boundary wall. She climbed a few wooden-faced earthen steps and then met the entire crowded level of the thing in one held breath. She did not know that Hagenzeele Third counted twenty-one thousand dead already. All she saw was a merciless sea of black crosses, bearing little strips of stamped tin at all angles across their faces. She could distinguish no order or arrangement in their mass; nothing but a waist-high wilderness as of weeds stricken dead, rushing at her. She went forward, moved to the left and the right hopelessly, wondering by what guidance she should ever come to her own. A great distance away there was a line of whiteness. It proved to be a block of some two or three hundred graves whose headstones had already been set, whose flowers were planted out, and whose new-sown grass showed green. Here she could see clear-cut letters at the ends of the rows, and, referring to her slip, realised that it was not here she must look.

A man knelt behind a line of headstones--evidently a gardener, for he was firming a young plant in the soft earth. She went towards him, her paper in her hand. He rose at her approach and without prelude or salutation asked: “Who are you looking for?”

“Lieutenant Michael Turrell--my nephew,” said Helen slowly and word for word, as she had many thousands of times in her life.

The man lifted his eyes and looked at her with infinite compassion before he turned from the fresh-sown grass towards the naked black crosses.

“Come with me,” he said, “and I will show you where your son lies.”

* * * * *

When Helen left the Cemetery she turned for a last look. In the distance she saw the man bending over his young plants; and she went away, supposing him to be the gardener.

THE BURDEN

One grief on me is laid Each day of every year, Wherein no soul can aid, Whereof no soul can hear: Whereto no end is seen Except to grieve again-- Ah, Mary Magdalene, Where is there greater pain?

To dream on dear disgrace Each hour of every day-- To bring no honest face To aught I do or say: To lie from morn till e’en-- To know my lies are vain-- Ah, Mary Magdalene, Where can be greater pain?

To watch my steadfast fear Attend my every way Each day of every year-- Each hour of every day: To burn, and chill between-- To quake and rage again-- Ah, Mary Magdalene, Where shall be greater pain?

_One grave to me was given-- To guard till Judgment Day-- But God looked down from Heaven And rolled the Stone away! One day of all my years-- One hour of that one day-- His Angel saw my tears And rolled the Stone away!_

THE END

Transcriber’s Notes

A number of typographical errors were corrected silently.

New original cover art included with this eBook is granted to the public domain.